126 (Nov/Dec 2021)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

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ArtAsiaPacific-
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 EDITORS Nicole Nepomuceno, Pamela Wong EDITORIAL INTERNS Victoria Chan, Suining Sim
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Contributors
Barrak Alzaid is a writer whose current project, Fabulous, is a memoir that relates his queer coming of age in Kuwait. His work has been published in anthologies including The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Tales from Many Muslim Worlds (2019) and Ne
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Fire In The Heart
In Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s video The Boat People (2020), a band of children explore old ruins and ritual sites, recreating the objects they find there in wood, which they then burn on the beach in their own newly invented ceremonies. Nguyen’s young char
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Monira Al Qadiri on Yukio Mishima
As a Japan-obsessed teen growing up in 1990s Kuwait, I was hooked on Yukio Mishima’s novels, which I continuously read and re-read at every waking moment. There was something about the hyper-masculine yet homoerotic and deeply sensitive yet gruesomel
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Networked China
Contemporary art, at least that on the radar of the Chinese capital’s oligarchy, is in a marketing crisis. The art is rarely good; the optics are worse. In June, after public, mostly feminist, outrage on Chinese social media, OCAT Shanghai took down
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Awards
Conceptual artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke was announced winner of the 4th Ithra Art Prize on August 30. She will receive USD 100,000 to realize a pandemic-inspired installation. Isfahan-born sculptor Nairy Baghramian, who was named winner of the USD 100,00
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Obituaries
New Zealand artist Billy Apple (1935–2021), born Barrie George Bates, passed away on September 5. A pioneer of conceptual and pop art, his works reflect on commercial culture and poke fun at elitism. Independent critic, art historian, and curator Pam
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M+ Museum of Visual Culture Opens in Hong Kong
After a decade in the making, M+ will open to the public on November 12. The building, designed by Herzog and de Meuron, is seated within Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, overlooking Victoria Harbour. Measuring 65,000 square meters, it is
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Learning From Lichens
Where are virtual worlds created? Pangyo Techno Valley, the self-proclaimed “Silicon Valley of South Korea,” is home to numerous tech platforms, conglomerates, and start-ups. Pangyo, the city where this technological nexus is located, is composed of
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Booster Season
Autumn in the northern hemisphere ushered in an exciting new injection of inperson art happenings, recalling the full body highs and head spins of pre-Covid-19 days. In Seoul, the art community rejoiced as flagship art fair KIAF returned to a cheek-t
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Rare Goods
Christie’s annual live sale of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art in New York (September 22) moved 74 lots for a USD 7.83 million haul, with multiple new-to-auction pieces far outstripping their estimates. Among them, Jehangir Sabavala’s USD 1.5
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Reawakenings
The second edition of Unscheduled (September 2–6) took place in a vacated two-story retail space in Hong Kong’s Central district. Though the location sees heavy foot traffic, the former clothing store posed other challenges for exhibitors, with decor
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Regions Of Focus
NOV 27–FEB 27, 2022 CENTRE FOR HERITAGE, ARTS AND TEXTILE (CHAT), HONG KONG Co-curators Sunnie Chan and Wang Weiwei adopt the lens of textile and design to interpret, revisit, and reimagine the notion of “East Asia” in CHAT’s upcoming group show. The
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Bobby Yu Shuk Pui
I nearly stumbled over the silicone replicas of breasts on the floor as I walked into the group exhibition “Yummy Gummy” at Hong Kong’s Tomorrow Maybe in 2019. Titled You’re so SMALL, so CHINESE (2015), the work was multimedia artist Bobby Yu Shuk Pu
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Kyra Mancktelow
Two monoprints, each depicting a child’s uniform, were hung on a wall at Sydney’s N. Smith gallery. A dilly bag bounces against the skirt of the high-collared dress, and the longsleeve shirt next to it is tucked into a pair of shorts. It is the absen
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Yao Cong
A fine brush gently sweeps across an eyelid, blending violet and coral eye shadow and rendering an exquisite feminine persona who draws viewers into Yao Cong’s 2015 short video Under Blue. Yet this sequence does not last long. A sapphire pigment fall
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What Alternative?
Arising from the context of the United States and the artist-run initiatives that developed in New York in the 1970s, the definition of “alternative art space” is commonly a venue, other than a commercial establishment, shaped by artists for the publ
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When Archive Becomes Form
In April 2010, the digital art collective Pad.ma released a manifesto titled 10 Theses on the Archive. Its publication captured the anarcho-technological spirit undergirding the group’s construction of an open-source video-sharing platform, beginning
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Legacies of Dissent LESLIE DE CHAVEZ
“Considering the long history of these seemingly chronic conditions that we are in, it is of utmost importance that we create art that exemplifies sensitivity to the struggles, heartaches, aspiration, and dreams of our fellowmen.” Conversations like
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Dancing between Domains CHOY KA FAI
Choy Ka Fai’s recent research into the ritualistic movements of shamans has earned him the moniker “supernatural dance explorer.” In his January showcase with the Singapore Art Museum and August presentation at Berlin’s Kindl Centre for Contemporary
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A Voice From The Silence
Your moving-image works give voice to mythical figures, spirits, and even objects as a means of elucidating their settings’ histories and generating new ways of talking about past and future. What is the significance of the voice to you? I think of v
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Disciple of Nature
As an artist, teacher, and organizer of influential avant-garde exhibitions, Park Seo-Bo is one of the preeminent figures in Korean art of the postwar period. Park’s retrospective “The Untiring Endeavorer,” appropriately titled after his infamously h
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Bani Abidi
If we weren’t certain that the sun will rise and set again tomorrow, we would probably spend our days in radically different ways. Likewise, if we didn’t believe that investments will pay off, economic growth would grind to a halt, just as a lack of
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Yao Qingmei
In her latest work, Yao Qingmei parallels the underground fortress in Franz Kafka’s short story The Burrow (1931), built by a grotesque, paranoid creature desperate to protect itself against imagined enemies, with a middle-class leisure haven and res
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Lee Kai Chung
Commissioned for “Liquid Ground,” an exhibition curated by Alvin Li and Junyuan Feng, Lee Kai Chung’s installation Sea-sand Home (2021) lays bare the tensions between people, nation-states, and the environment. At its core are research materials from
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Made Men
When I first encountered Steven Shearer’s work in 2004, one could have made the case that it was the matter of manhood that was at the heart of his iconographic concerns. A little more than a decade and a half later, it seems safer to say that it is
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Itinerary
MAY 5–JAN 1, 2022 Trust and Confusion Tai Kwun Contemporary Hong Kong AUG 5–JAN 2, 2022 Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping Walker Art Center Minneapolis AUG 13–JAN 3, 2022 Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision San Francisco Art Institute San
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Art Directory
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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Errata
It’s easy enough to rush through MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum’s first room, filled with artifacts from the founder’s family that detail their historical role in Thailand’s ruling class. I wasn’t here to linger in antiquities, but to view “Errata,”
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Camille Henrot Is Today Tomorrow
French-born artist Camille Henrot’s keen interest in anthropology and subversive sense of humor was center stage in her first Australian survey, “Is Today Tomorrow,” at NGV International. Perhaps the most amusing and crowd-pleasing works were the art
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11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale: “One Escape at a Time”
Airing for nine seasons from 1975 to 1984, the original CBS sitcom One Day at a Time was lauded as one of the first mainstream TV “dramedies,” which balanced difficult themes with comical situations in order to convey the complexities of contemporary
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Yee I-Lann Until We Hug Again
“Colonization begins and ends in the mind. Colonized mind—deepest level of enslavement.” These notes, jotted down in Yee I-Lann’s sketchbook, summarize the Kota Kinabalu-based artist’s long-standing concerns regarding the impacts of colonialism on th
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I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih Shards of My Dreams That Remain in My Consciousness
An easy trap to fall into when it comes to single-artist retrospective exhibitions is reducing interpretation of the artworks to a reflection of the artist’s biography. However, biography is unavoidable in the case of the late Balinese artist I Gusti
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Once Upon a Time Inconceivable
Art enables us to comprehend the passage of time in visual and auditory terms, to track the physical marks that it imprints on ourselves and the world. To celebrate its tenth anniversary, Protocinema brought together nine artists for the exhibition “
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So Long, Thanks Again For The Fish
“So long, thanks again for the fish,” curated by Yeewan Koon for the Helsinki International Artist Programme, featured new commissions by five Hong Kong-based artists—Luke Ching, Christopher K. Ho, Lam Tung Pang, Cedric Maridet, and Angela Su—who eac
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Norrtälje
Jitish Kallat Epicycles Reena Saini Kallat Deep Rivers Run Quiet There’s been a shift in the Scandinavian art scene in the last decade. Small and mid-size institutions are the brave ones, pushing rather than following the discourse. Because it is now
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Ho Rui An The Ends of a Long Boom
There was a certain layered irony to Ho Rui An’s first solo European show, “The Ends of a Long Boom,” being held in Vienna, the intellectual birthplace of economist Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian School, and the all-pervading ideological malady of neo
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Nairy Baghramian Misfits
An arresting photograph of a sulky little girl greeted visitors in the hall of Galleria d’Arte Moderna (GAM) in Milan for “Misfits,” Nairy Baghramian’s solo institutional debut in Italy. Shown in profile over an ultramarine background, the unruly-loo
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Taysir Batniji Quelques Bribes Arrachées Au Vide Qui Se Creuse
When Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji’s first museum retrospective in France opened in June at the Musee d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, his native Gaza was being bombarded by the Israel Defense Forces, while residents of the East Jerusalem neig
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Geofictions: Work In Progress
By Zara Arshad and Yaloo Published independently, 2021 Instead of presenting research outcomes, design historian Zara Arshad and artist Yaloo’s Geofictions: Work in Progress reflects on the methods available for accruing knowledge, and highlights the
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Sawangwongse Yawnghwe Cappuccino in Exile
Hanging across the entrance to Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s solo show at Jane Lombard Gallery on a clothesline were patterned antique silks redolent of long skirts called longyis, which are commonly worn in Myanmar. In Burmese lore, walking under longyis
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The Extreme Self
By Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz Konig, Cologne, 2021 We are living through a collapse of grand narratives. The accelerating failures of politics, global unrest, and an e
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Minor China: Method, Materialisms, And The Aesthetic
By Hentyle Yapp Published by Duke University Press, Durham, 2021 State censorship has been both the bane of Chinese art at home and its enabler abroad, allowing a narrative of alterity to propel artists onto the world stage since the 1990s. In Minor
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Chila Kumari Singh Burman
Chila Kumari Singh Burman has been making art around the clock for over 40 years. Her lifelong work of multimedia storytelling recasts our understanding of feminine power and British-Punjabi identity in a way that is intensely personal yet audaciousl
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Re- / De- / Un- / Co- Learning
In our time of political polarization and rapid ecological deterioration, it is more urgent than ever to interrogate inherited models of education and move away from ideas and structures that no longer serve us. With the Jakarta initiative Gudskul pl

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