ArtAsiaPacific

Covid-19 is radically upending how we live, think, and see. The pandemic has forced us to acknowledge aspects of the world’s existing social, economic, scientific, and cultural systems that we often overlook—from how we ship masks around the globe to

California’s Bay Area is rife with contradictions. The region’s reputation as the land of opportunity harks back to the Gold Rush, when San Francisco grew from a small settlement of about 200 residents in 1846 to a boomtown of around 36,000 by 1852.

In 2020, the Point examines how our cultural and sociopolitical systems are implicated in climate change, and what actions the arts industry can take. Below, Nadia Christidi discusses what artistic imaginaries can contribute to climate-change solutio

As countries scramble to contain the spread of Covid-19, they are also grappling with the economic fallout from the pandemic. With shuttered museums and canceled fairs and auctions, the arts sector is among many to take a serious hit. A number of gov

Untitled (Placebo) (1991) was the first work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres that I saw as a photograph when I was a sculpture student at the University of the Philippines. Five hundred kilos of silver-wrapped candies were laid out like a carpet on the floo

Padmini Mohini Shankhini c. 1969, oil on canvas, 64.7 × 124.4 cm. Courtesy Sotheby’s New York. With cultural capitals such as New York and London becoming national epicenters of the Covid-19 pandemic, the art world’s auction calendar has been reshuff

Days before the opening of Art Fair Philippines (AFP), the country’s largest art event, the inaugural ALT Philippines (February 14–16), co-organized by ten galleries that broke away from AFP, opened at the SMX Convention Center. A popular attraction

Ruth Buchanan’s works pertain to the Berlin-based artist’s interests in how power bears down on and prestructures our perception of the world around us. In particular, she hijacks the visual languages of museums and galleries to trouble our experienc

Having lived in Chiang Mai off and on over the past four years, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Eric Booth repeatedly at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, which he founded in collaboration with his stepfather, Jean Michel Beurdeley, back in 2016, shor

Well before the coronavirus ravaged tourism in early 2020, a quiet transformation had been under way in Macau. Attempting to shed its dominant identity as a rough-and-tumble gaming center for Chinese gamblers, this former Portuguese entrepot is aimin

Since 2015, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe has been producing art under the banner of Yawnghwe Office in Exile, a fictive museum he founded while searching for alternatives to the histories propagated by state institutions. Focused on unravelling suppressed t

When visitors to the 2019 Singapore Biennale stepped through the doorway of Gallery A at the National Gallery Singapore, they immediately encountered a portal of another sort. A felt trilby hat was propped on a metal stand, flanked by two rows of bla

The colonizers of the Americas, Africa, and Australasia often invoked the principle of terra nullius: that the land belonged to no one and was therefore ripe for the taking. Indigenous peoples who had lived there for thousands of years were cast as p

Jodi Throckmorton is curator of contemporary art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. She recently organized Rina Banerjee’s midcareer retrospective, which debuted at PAFA, and is currently showing at the Fowler Museum

Brie Ruais’s 2020 solo exhibition, “Movement at the Edge of the Land,” evokes a powerful encounter with the elements. Her large-scale ceramic sculptures interact with each other, forming an organic-like entity. Pieces of clay seemingly thrown onto a

Martha Tuttle is an artist based in Brooklyn. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, “Consume me.”—Virginia Woolf, The Waves In her studio I asked Brie if a person can be healed by the land. We spoke of this quietly

South Korea’s modern art history largely unfolded at a remove from Western art movements, forestalling the possibility of contemporaneity with the international avantgarde. The development of Korean video art, however, was subject to a relatively sho

Staged in dialogue with a survey of the Italian Arte Povera movement at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, the Patrick D. Flores-curated exhibition “Cue From Life Itself: Filipino Artists Transform the Everyday” took as its starting point artist and

The past decade of veteran ceramicist Liu Jianhua’s practice has seen a gradual turn away from works laden with references to sociocultural contexts, refocusing instead on abstraction and the materiality of his chosen medium. Liu’s “no meaning, no co

At the tangled heart of “Railtrack Songmaps Roosting Post 2” were birdsongs and stories from Tanglin Halt, one of many old neighborhoods in Singapore slated for en-bloc redevelopment in recent years. Among the earliest public housing estates, Tanglin

One might be forgiven for mistaking the large black metal bin outside the entrance of Das Weisse Haus as nothing more than another on-street clothing donation bin. However, its lettering betrays a more subversive purpose: “Worried about your Nazi gra

Books hold a special place in Liu Ye’s heart. During China’s Cultural Revolution, the Beijing artist’s father, an author of children’s books, stashed away copies of banned Western fairytales; their illustrations made a lasting impression on the young

Hiroki Tsukuda’s second solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery, “They Live,” was named after John Carpenter’s 1988 cult movie, in which the protagonist sees the rich as hideous aliens whenever he wears his sunglasses. Like its namesake, “They Live” unveil

Contemporary art frequently expresses the zeitgeist, with artists taking on the role of truth-teller or even diviner. Chinese-American artist Tishan Hsu began making work that approximated present-day screen culture back in the 1980s—decades before s

By Hamja Ahsan Published by Book Works, London, third edition, 2019 One of the things that Covid-19-impelled social distancing has surfaced is how impoverished our inner lives are. Why the proliferation of guides to at-home activities? Do people not

Lu Yang’s professional life unfolds almost exclusively in the digital realm, where, for over a decade, he has been creating vivid animations and computer games. Populating these cyberspaces are eccentric characters influenced by Japanese anime, Hindu

In Mai-Thu Perret’s fictional text The Crystal Frontier (1999–), a group of women renounce the capitalist and patriarchal conventions of Western neoliberal society and set up a commune in the desert of southwest New Mexico. Their utopic experiment, N

American artist Brie Ruais creates abstract ceramic sculptures from clay equal to her own weight, which she spreads out dynamically, allowing the material itself to guide her in terms of its final shape and size. On the occasion of the artist’s first