125 (Sep/Oct 2021)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
Friday, July 16 2021 Yoyogi Tokyo ma sa yu me
Suddenly, a face floats up into the Tokyo sky. This was a dream a 14-year-old girl had. It is the face of an existing individual, selected from among the faces collected in Tokyo and from across the world via the internet, regardless of age, gender,
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EDITOR & PUBLISHER Elaine W. Ng DEPUTY EDITOR & DEPUTY PUBLISHER HG Masters MANAGING EDITOR Chloe Chu SENIOR EDITOR Don J. Cohn ASSOCIATE EDITOR Ophelia Lai ASSISTANT EDITOR Pamela Wong EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Cassie Liu EDITORIAL INTERNS Victoria Chan,
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Contributors
Yi Cao is a curator, writer, and art administrator based in Chicago and Beijing. She is director of curatorial administration for the Arts of Asia collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her curatorial projects include “Liu Wei: Invisible Cities”
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Listening To The Past
How can we communicate, and commune, with our ancestors whose lives and cultures are long lost to time and geography? And what can we learn from the way they survived, and thrived, as communities? At a moment when the Earth and its peoples are facing
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Mark Salvatus on Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
I was still studying advertising in college in the early 2000s when, one fateful evening, I decided to go to the opening of an art exhibition with my classmates. The show was for a painting competition in Manila and the award ceremony was that night.
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Seattle
Recently in Seattle “normal life” has become a thing again. After losing its unspoken authority and drifting into the realm of signification, it is now something urgent to remember and authentically re-enact. The city’s commercial life resembles itse
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Obituaries
On July 16, Filipino artist, critic, and educator Leonilo “Neil” Doloricon (1957–2021) died from an undisclosed cause. Known as “the people’s artist,” he revealed systemic oppression as the root of everyday problems through his creative work. Hung Li
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Awards
On June 25, Lausanne’s Musée de l’Elysée conferred the fourth Prix Elysée to photographer Kurt Tong for his semi-fictional book project Dear Franklin (2018–). Choreographer Ming-Hwa Yeh clinched the 19th Taishin Arts Award Grand Prize on July 10, rec
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Swapping Sides
Broken railings, disconnected stairways, mismatched tiles—these subtle details lure viewers into Sun Pei-Mao’s There is No Sign for the Direction of the Park (2018). The Escherian fourpart painting resembles a thermographic, foldable travel map of a
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Screensavers For The Future
In a cruel irony, just ten days after I visited the opening of a virtual exhibition out of Myanmar that was curated around the state of dreaming and speculations about the future, the country’s military staged a coup d’etat on February 1. With their
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Maximum RPM XPER.XR
There was a sleeping tabby cat at the entrance of Xper.Xr’s exhibition at Empty Gallery. Ignoring visitors, it purred away in blissful repose despite the bass guitar riffs and wild screaming echoing from the next room. All seemed well in the cat’s wo
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Now You See It NABUQI
In a tenebrous gallery, a curtained cube frame encloses an illumined space filled with artificial palms and potted plants. Their shadows overlap and distort on the thin white fabric, which flutters in the breeze of wall-mounted electric fans. Intermi
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Hand-Body Connection KANG SEUNG LEE
Kang Seung Lee’s practice could be considered the artistic equivalent of alchemy. While all artists conjure ideas, feelings, and perceptions in works of art, Lee’s attempts at recreating historical photographs, artworks, and personal traces of predom
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Shuruq Harb
“Humans have a way of ascribing meaning to the landscapes they see,” a computerized voice says, after reminding us that the images halfway into Shuruq Harb’s ten-minute film The Jump (2020) are of the Dead Sea. The words resonate in two ways througho
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PINAR ÖĞRENCi
Resembling manga characters with sparkling, oversize eyes and kawaii smiles, the protagonists in Liu Yin’s paintings are often avatars for public figures, national leaders, and magazine models. Madeleine, the star of Liu’s newly crafted story, told t
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Liu Yin
Photo by South Ho. Courtesy the artist and Mine Project, Hong Kong. ■
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41 Thinker Of The Present
INSIDE BURGER COLLECTION In December 2018, I was in Kamakura, Japan, visiting Lee Ufan. The radiant winter sun warmed the ground of the quiet city, while running water glistened alongside the streets. The artist’s studio was flooded with light. The t
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The Message Of The New Coronavirus
The history of civilization is mostly an account of war, but it cannot be told without stories of fights against plagues. To read scientific reports on viruses makes one realize what perplexing, mysterious beings they are. They appear to be two-sided
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Itinerary
Georgette Chen: At Home in the World National Gallery Singapore Singapore Extended Figure: The Art and Inspiration of Lalan Asia Society Hong Kong Simon Fujiwara: Who the Bær Fondazione Prada Milan Taloi Havini: The Soul Expanding Ocean #1 Ocean Spac
ArtAsiaPacific10 min read
Art Directory 125
www.nyuad-artgallery.org nyuad.artgallery@nyu.edu New York University Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi T +971 2 628 8000 Mon–Sat 12am–8pm An academic museum-gallery presenting exhibitions by internationally-established artists, curators, and sch
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Something New Must Turn Up: Six Singaporean Artists After 1965
The titular adjective of the National Gallery Singapore’s exhibition “Something New Must Turn Up: Six Singaporean Artists After 1965” is a doubleedged sword. Deployed art historically, the idea of the “new” is here premised on the view, per the curat
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Richard Bell You Can Go Now
The words “YOU CAN GO NOW!” blazed in orange as audiences entered Richard Bell’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. This demand, painted on a monochromatic map of Australia, epitomizes Bell’s signature wit and political critique,
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Chung Sang Hwa
Despite Chung Sang Hwa’s (1932–) market recognition in South Korea as a blue-chip Dansaekhwa artist, there has been scant academic scrutiny of his six-decade practice compared to that of his contemporaries, such as Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo. The Natio
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Another Energy: Power to Continue Challenging – 16 Women Artists from around the World
In recent years the art world has taken steps to address inequalities in the representation of artists along gender, racial, ethnic, or geographical lines. In this context, many pioneering women artists who began their careers between the 1950s and ’
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Cao Yu Passing Through the Human World
Cao Yu’s “Passing Through the Human World” at Galerie Urs Meile touched on different relations: between men and women; human and nature; material and supernatural; and perhaps most of all, between the two sides of herself, as subject and object. The
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Zhao Yang Godlike Rage
Zhao Yang’s earlier paintings tend to be populated by mysterious figures, alone or in couples, symmetrically arranged and portrayed as though viewed from afar. The subjects are mostly human, although sometimes mermaids and angels appear. Whatever the
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Joebau Throw Hide & Twist
Conceptual artist Joe “Joebau” Bautista’s “Throw Hide & Twist,” hosted by MO_Space in Taguig, Metro Manila, explored the manifold ways that prompts and action can create associations between artist, artwork, and audience. Spanning mixed-media paintin
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Extended Figure: The Art and Inspiration of Lalan
Despite being an important member of the group of 20th-century Franco-Chinese artists who left their homes to pursue their careers in Paris, Lalan remains less familiar to the public than many of her contemporaries, such as Sanyu, Lin Fengmian, and h
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Simon Fujiwara Who the Bær
“Who the Bær,” Simon Fujiwara’s exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan, brought his new cartoon character to life. During lockdown, Fujiwara began collaging his drawings with cut-outs of news articles and pictures sourced from the web. This body of
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Bagyi Aung Soe
At the heart of Bagyi Aung Soe’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou hung a colorful self-portrait. The painting exemplifies the late artist’s knowledge of the postimpressionist aesthetic: the face is delineated in thick white lines, traced against an
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Yu Ji Wasted Mud
A single property on the row of Victorian terrace houses that leads to Chisenhale Gallery has been painted a stark concrete gray. A deliberate line bisects it from the rich golden brick of its attached neighbor, and the dark paint engulfs the buildin
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An-My Lê đô-mi-nô
Part of the baggage we bring to photography, compared to other media like painting or sculpture, derives from the fact that photography seems to occupy a higher moral register than other representational media in its putative ability to objectively “
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Models For The Future
By Tam Wai Ping Published by Brownie Publishing, Hong Kong, 2019 From 2005 to 2019, photographer Tam Wai Ping captured people walking in Colombo, Taipei, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and cities in mainland China. Selected photos from the series are carefully co
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Leelee Chan
Built on reclaimed tracts, the Hong Kong neighborhood of Kwai Chung is home to one of the world’s busiest commercial ports, a sprawl of Lego-like shipping containers clogging the shores of Rambler Channel. Just a few kilometers from the cargo termina
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Tuan Andrew Nguyen
During the Second Indochina War (1955–75), the United States dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Decades later, unexploded ordnance (UXO), buried in fields and forests, continues to claim civilian lives and lim
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Missing Artworks Raise Accountability Issues at Japanese Museum
Arts Maebashi, a public museum in Japan’s Gunma prefecture, is struggling to rehabilitate its reputation after its misplacement of six borrowed artworks—including four woodblock prints and two calligraphy works—and its former director’s delays in rep
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What History Calls For an Interview With Gala Porras-kim
Driven by a fascination with ancient knowledge, Bogota-born, Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim pursues her interests through a range of approaches, from conversations with living communities and institutions to shamanic communions with the dea
ArtAsiaPacific11 min read
An Interview With Zadie Xa
Halfway into my conversation with Zadie Xa, raucous caws emanated from her end of the video chat. It turns out there was a nest of seagull chicks right outside the window of her London studio. “They’re celebrating. Apparently, they get excited becaus
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Subversive Play
In the installation Overgrowth (2004), Ceal Floyer plays with the scale of a bonsai tree projection by manipulating the slide projector’s distance from the wall. Similarly toying with physical space, Gülşah Mursaloğlu’s Merging Fields, Splitting Ends
ArtAsiaPacific4 min readCrime & Violence
A Proposed Artist’s Contract for NFTs
The USD 69 million sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021) at Christie’s in March catapulted the digital art community into the public eye and the mainstream art market. The basic concept behind NFT (non-fungible token) art is straight
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Lucrative Collaborations
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced the art world’s jetsetters to largely forgo foreign travel. Nevertheless, auction houses have been deploying new strategies and partnerships to foster cross-border buying, striving to keep sales both safe and profitab
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Relooking For Relevance
In 2021, the Point asks writers to imagine post-pandemic futures. Below, Art Institute of Chicago curator Yi Cao discusses the refashioning of museums in the wake of social movements calling for decolonization and racial equality. Since the Corcoran

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