128 (May/Jun 2022)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

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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 Pamela Wong ASSISTANT EDITOR Nicole M. Nepomuceno EDITORIAL INTERN Maggie Yip CHINESE TRANSLATORS Peter C
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Contributors
Ruba Al-Sweel is a a writer, critic, and researcher of art from, about, and around the Middle East. Her writing has appeared in The Seen journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Vogue Arabia, and Arab News. She also oversees the communications department at the n
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Being Together
Almost every culture has its own word for hanging out. In Indonesia, it is known as nongkrong. This simple but universally understood activity propelled the establishment and practices of many of the country’s collectives in the 2000s after the fall
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James Clar on Pierre Huyghe
I met Pierre Huyghe in 2004 while I was doing a residency with Eyebeam Atelier in New York. A fresh 20-something graduate with my master’s from New York University (NYU)’s Interactive Telecommunications program, I was still trying to understand how t
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Almaty
New Year’s Eve is an important event in the lives of Kazakh people. As part of the festivities, people make plans, list their achievements, and burn pieces of paper with their wishes scribbled on them. A Soviet Union tradition, the celebration signal
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Awards
Multimedia artist Atong Atem won the first La Prairie Art Award for Australian women artists. Her winning photography series, A yellow dress, a bouquet (2022), features herself dressed in vibrant colors and celebrates a “decidedly African, postcoloni
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Obituaries
On March 18, Chinese-Indonesian industrialist and art collector Budi Tek (1957–2022) died from pancreatic cancer. Tek began collecting art in 2004 and founded the Yuz Foundation in 2007, first opening a museum in Jakarta in 2008. In 2014, he launched
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readWorld
Russian War Against Ukraine Impacts Major Exhibitions
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24 and has killed an estimated 20,000 civilians, displaced more than one quarter of the population, and sent global food prices soaring, has also upended international festivals and exhibitions. J
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Confidence Boost
Christie’s 20th/21st Century: Shanghai Evening Sale (March 1) marked the auction house’s return to the Chinese city after a two-year hiatus. Inaugurating Christie’s new Bund One galleries and livestreamed across sales rooms in London, Hong Kong, and
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Tokens Of The Future
After a four-year hiatus, the biennial Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) (February 17–20) returned to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, luring 14,500 visitors and achieving USD 7.8 million in artwork sales from 63 galleries. For this edition, MA
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A Tale of Many Covids
The latest, most contagious Covid metamorphosis, Omicron, made a fashionably late entrance to Asia, and, as a result, the first few months of 2022 felt like reliving 2020 all over again. In Hong Kong, most cultural events came to a standstill, especi
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Documenta Fifteen
What would the contemporary world of art look like if it were not globalized through the commercial marketplace, and instead connected internationally through shared concerns and practices? Between June 18 and September 25, visitors to documenta fift
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Everyday Poetry
In India, kite-flying is a spiritual activity that connects humans with the divine. This longing for the sky and the origin of the universe is captured in Han Mengyun’s multimedia installation Logic of the Ether (2021), which comprises a threemeter-t
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Bad Students, Gudskuls
From Germany’s Bauhaus, which placed equal value on craft, industrial design, and fine arts, to India’s Santiniketan, where an anticolonial, transnational perspective was promulgated, the radical art schools of the early 20th century catalyzed the mo
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Tsubasa Kato
“Ichi, Ni! Ichi, Ni!” A rhythmic voice chanting “one, two! one, two!” is heard across the open space in a park. The voice is Tsubasa Kato’s, who was leading a group of people pulling ropes to topple a two-tothree-meter-tall structure of wooden crates
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Solidarity In Public Space
One day this spring, I joined the Wayang Kardus Workshop organized by the artist collective Taring Padi at Framer Framed art space in Amsterdam. Aside from making shadow puppets (wayang) with cardboard (kardus), the workshop entailed hanging out for
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Sustaining Resilience
It’s a situation that sounds farcical until it quickly becomes clear how real it is: Jumana Manna’s new film Foragers (2022) dramatizes the perennial struggles of Palestinians gathering the wild herb za’atar, the artichoke-like akkoub (gundelia), and
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Shubigi Rao
Why do some people abet authoritarianism? What ideas might be repressed in democracies? How much of ourselves do we really know? These questions don’t have singular resolutions, but for Shubigi Rao, hints can be found in the voices that books contain
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Yang Yongliang
For more than a decade, Yang Yongliang constructed cityscapes in his contemporary ink-like collages and video-paintings. These digital shanshui-style compositions are assemblages of real-world imagery, featuring “mountain ranges” made of apartment bu
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Leung mee Ping
How does one process loss? At “Poetic Heritage,” one of the last exhibitions visitors could catch at Tai Kwun Contemporary before Hong Kong’s fifth wave of Covid-19, Leung Mee Ping’s installation Sound of Silence (2021) provided a poignant foreshadow
ArtAsiaPacific2 min readInternational Relations
Tammy Nguyen
What is the legacy of 20th-century utopian aspirations today? The dream of perfectly planned cities has obsessed governments since the postwar era and lives on in today’s neoliberal visions of tax-free, “green” cities and freeports—infrastructural sp
ArtAsiaPacific9 min read
Vaginal’s Veil
In the year 33 AD, on the Via Dolorosa to be exact, Veronica meets Jesus carrying his cross to Golgotha. She offers him a cloth to wipe the blood off his face. Jesus returns the sudarium with the imprint of his face on it. Lo and behold, the blood-st
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23rd Biennale Of Sydney: Rīvus
The Biennale of Sydney opened on March 12 after weeks of heavy rain along the east coast of Australia. Catastrophic floods had affected several regions. Emergency relief lagged, and grassroots organizations scrambled to help their communities themsel
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Chua Mia Tee Directing the Real
The National Gallery Singapore (NGS)’s latest survey on Chua Mia Tee, “Directing the Real,” and its 2020–21 Georgette Chen retrospective, “At Home in the World,” form a pair of counterpoints. The two exhibitions, of mid-20thcentury figures who loom l
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Vivienne Binns On and Through the Surface
Eminent Australian artist Vivienne Binns is a master of many crafts, from enameling to painting, teaching to feminist activism. Presented at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in Melbourne, “On and Through the Surface” surveyed six decades of
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Seeun Kim Pit Stop
Painterly abstraction serves as a means of exploring the physical experience of cities in Seeun Kim’s works, which activate sensory impressions of liminal urban infrastructure like tunnels, overpasses, and embankments. These spaces primarily exist in
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William Kentridge Weigh All Tears
The heaviest things we carry are often weightless. Informed by South Africa’s sociopolitical strife, William Kentridge’s five-decade-long practice imbues material heft to the intangible weight of history, while critiquing notions of certainty and ref
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Atul Dodiya Walking With The Waves
Turning the corner after entering New Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, visitors encountered a painting of St. Francis standing his ground as the elements press against him in a dynamic swath of ochre and brown. Symbolizing strength, the image is on
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Anicka Yi Metaspore
“Metaspore” at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca was Italy’s first major exhibition dedicated to Korean-American artist Anicka Yi. Drawing from the cellular world—spores are selfreproductive cells that travel long distances—the show’s title underlined the trans
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CAMP Passages through Passages
When I think of a transmission, I picture a stream of digital signals passing from one point to another in fiber-optic cable networks, accompanied by the glitching and high-pitched screech of dial-up internet. In Sharjah Art Foundation’s “Passages th
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Revolusi! Indonesia Independent
Curated by writer Amir Sidharta and historians Bonnie Triyana, Harm Stevens, and Marion Anker, “Revolusi! Indonesia Independent” centered people and their stories during the Indonesian War of Independence (1945–49). The Revolusi, as the war is known
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Ali Kazim Suspended in Time
Ali Kazim’s fascinating exhibition “Suspended in Time,” with its excellent catalogue, marks a significant shift in the evolution of one of Britain’s oldest museums from being a Eurocentrically funneled repository of the world’s antiquities and art wo
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Baseera Khan I Am an Archive
Artists and thinkers—notably Michel Foucault with his 1969 publication The Archaeology of Knowledge—have been problematizing the concept of the archive for decades, particularly its reification of power. Perhaps the Foucauldian idea of the archive as
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Itinerary
Chua Mia Tee: Directing the Real National Gallery Singapore Singapore The Rearview Landscape, or a Trip of Ownership UCCA Dune Beidaihe Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin Nalini Malan
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Chronicles For The Future
NAHMA: A GULF POLYPHONY Edited by Olivier Duport, Alan Marzo, and Carl Åhnebrink, with contributions by 14 authors Published by Flee, Paris, 2021 Prior to the discovery of oil in the Gulf in the 1930s, fleets of pearling vessels embarked on months-lo
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Stewart Uoo
Stewart Uoo is something of a rhizomatic artist; spanning conceptual sculpture, video, fashion editorial-like photography, collage, and a cult art-and-performance event called It’s Get Better (2013–), his practice is characterized by a radical indete
ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
HA CHONG-HYUN Method Painter
In 1974, Ha Chong-Hyun turned conventional notions of painting upside down by adopting a new technique for his work. He began pushing oil paint through loosely woven burlap canvas from back to front, then scraping the agglomerated droplets with repet

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