127 (Mar/Apr 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 ASSISTANT EDITORS Pamela Wong, Nicole M. Nepomuceno EDITORIAL INTERNS Maggie Yip CHINESE TRANSLATORS Peter Chung, Pamela W
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Contributors
Aqilah Ali works as content director at the Bruneibased marketing agency Ctrl+ Creative. In 2021, she self-published and exhibited a research-based infographic magazine about the development of Brunei’s creative industries called The Prolific Industr
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Images of Identity
Nowadays, most of us watch the world change through a screen. This was the case for multimedia artist Simon Fujiwara, who observed the torrent of images on social media as the pandemic and social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, revealed societ
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Enoch Cheng on Michaela Coel
We thought we had seen the worst of Covid-19. But in 2022, the shocks of the pandemic are still bringing us down. What is most disturbing is how quickly new normals are absorbed into our lives, including our emotional state of shock. Perhaps this is
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Brunei
When non-residents imagine the culture of Brunei Darussalam, they most likely picture serene mosques, the stilt houses of water villages, and eating family meals on a woven bamboo mat. Conversely, those who call Brunei home feel in their bodies the c
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Etel Adnan
Etel Adnan, the late Lebanese-American poet, writer, and painter, started a chapter of her short-story collection Master of the Eclipse (2009) with the following question: “Why is it that when one has more past than future, life’s earliest memories a
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Hossein Valamanesh
We lost a true poet with the sudden passing of Hossein Valamanesh. Drawing on the cultural and natural worlds of Iran, where he was born in 1949, and his adoptive home of Australia since 1973, Hossein explored the entwined spheres of love, spirituali
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Taiwan Terminates Venice Biennale Plans Mired By Sexual Assault Allegations
After social-media posts by women claiming to be sexual-assault victims of Sakuliu Pavavaljung began to circulate online in mid-December 2021, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) decided to cancel the artist’s solo showcase at Taiwan’s collateral pavi
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Self-organize And Self-educate
See our website for the Chinese version of this article. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Chinese art schools adopted the Soviet education model, with majors divided into Chinese painting, oil painting, printmaking, sculp
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59th Venice Biennale
Surreal is an apt description of recent years, as the pandemic has upended lives in ways both tragic and absurd, fueled a surge in virtual-reality technologies, and rendered the familiar world unrecognizable. For Cecelia Alemani, artistic director of
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Rule – Breakers
Two houses collided. One was sliced open and detached from its foundation, lodged into the living room of the neighboring structure. Titled Collision (or Rupture) (2021), this installation by Atsuko Mochida was shown at the 2021 Northern Alps Art Fes
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Synchronized Frequencies
In July of 2021, the Chinese central government enacted new regulations, ostensibly designed to reduce the burden of the nation’s young students. The crackdown, known as the Double Reduction Policy, took aim at extracurricular tutoring businesses who
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Bariş Doğrusöz
“Until the time is right, the only way to preserve what we discover is to bury it under the sand,” a computerized voice intones over a vividly orange-saturated aerial view of desert sands at the opening of Barış Doğrusöz’s multichannel video installa
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Sin Wai Kin
See our website for the Chinese version of this article. “It felt like home,” Sin Wai Kin said effusively when asked about their monthlong trip to Hong Kong in November 2021. Born to a Hong Kong Chinese father and a White British mother, Sin grew up
ArtAsiaPacific11 min read
Simon Fujiwara All The World‘s A Cartoon
“How can I make art when all the world is a conceptual artwork? What do you do then?” Simon Fujiwara is known for his complex and multilayered works spanning everything from the rebranding of a woman whose career was destroyed after her private photo
ArtAsiaPacific11 min read
History Through The Bamboo Camera
Conversing with Kidlat Tahimik was as surreal as watching his movies. His narratives unfold in different layers, steadily unraveling stories and perspectives, giving insight into his practice and the world he examines. He described his film practice
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Up Close
Welcome to M+! Welcome to our brutalist, secular Temple of Culture! Oh my word—OMG!—what is this giant crucifix doing here?! “In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was God” didn’t they say? “OH YEAH! /噢耶!” reads the flashing text, sardonically
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Twilight Of The Communist Idols
As an object of analysis, China is a moving target. Its economic rise and social transformation keep producing outcomes that make definitive judgment or prediction imprecise if not impossible. Most of what is said or written about China might better
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2021 Asian Art Biennial: “Phantasmapolis”
See our website for the Chinese version of this article. In architect Wang Dahong’s novel Phantasmagoria (2013), satyrs chase nymphs through tapestries in the dining hall of the spaceyacht Medusa as a young prince and his tutor munch on foie gras whi
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
10th Asia Pacific Triennial
First established in 1993, the Asia Pacific Triennial has long been recognized for its monumentality, proclivity for spectacle, and festival-like atmosphere, manifest through its large-scale installations, new commissions, and extensive events progra
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Cast But One Shadow: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities
“Cast But One Shadow: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities” was a densely researched exhibition. It was the Manila iteration of curators Carlos Quijon Jr. and Kathleen Ditzig’s ongoing project reviewing global solidarities from a Southeast Asian positiona
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Guo-Liang Tan Soft Turnings
Spread across Ota Fine Arts Singapore for Guo-Liang Tan’s solo exhibition “Soft Turnings” were five H-shaped wooden stands, each holding up a painting executed on translucent fabric. Gradient stains in soft shades of magenta, teal, cobalt, gold, and
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Kartik Sood In Thin Air
On the innermost wall in the dim basement of New Delhi’s Talwar Gallery, an image flickered to life. A red-robed woman, visage indiscernible, began moving slowly to a mournful thrum, the torpid choreography seemingly prolonging time. A lion, blackgar
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Manal AlDowayan The Eternal Return of the Same
Deep time is a salient theme in “The Eternal Return of the Same,” Manal AlDowayan’s first solo exhibition at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde in Dubai. Fixated with the cycles of nature that run like clockwork, and the births and deaths that occur in-b
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Candeğer Furtun
“Human” has the same etymological root as humus, the Latin word for “earth.” Since the dawn of existence, our relationship with soil has formed the basis of our cultures and civilizations, and opened up understandings of the interconnectedness of all
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Thea Djordjadze All Building As Making
The use of daylight in Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze’s solo exhibition at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, “all building as making,” focused the senses to the rhythms of the institution. Stepping into the muted exhibition space, lit by the sunless sky of a wi
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Sutapa Biswas Lutmen
“Lumen,” Sutapa Biswas’s first solo show in 14 years, began with Kali. The goddess loomed over viewers at the entrance of Kettle’s Yard in the mixedmedia work Housewives with Steak-Knives (1983–85), holding a machete and wearing the severed heads of
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Wifredo Lam The Imagination at Work
See our website for the Chinese version of this article. Born to a Chinese father and Congolese-Spanish mother, Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) created radically unassimilable paintings that synthesized European Surrealist and Cubist strategies with the Afro
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Hung Liu Portraits of Promised Lands
Unveiled on August 27, 2021, just three weeks after the passing of Hung Liu from pancreatic cancer, “Portraits of Promised Lands” was not just a highly anticipated celebration of the artist’s career of five decades, but a vital opportunity for insigh
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Basel Abbas And Ruanne Abou-Rahme If Only This Mountain Between Us Could Be Ground To Dust
Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme have created an exceptional and unabashed statement on what it means to give mediated presence to a people whose existence is the target of eradicative forces. Going far beyond addressing flaws in
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Itinerary
Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands National Portrait Gallery Washington, D.C. Bani Abidi: The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians Asia Society New York Between C
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
In Full View
By Hanan Toukan Published by Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2021 In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the United States responded not only with military aggression but also a campaign to win “hearts and minds.” Explicitly a
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Tino Sehgal
For six weeks beginning in October 2021, the Prison Yard at Hong Kong’s heritage and arts complex Tai Kwun was busier than usual. Among visitors indulging in a cool courtyard respite were the living components of Tino Sehgal’s human sculpture, These
ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
Jumana Manna
In artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna’s latest film, Foragers (2022), Palestinians are caught by Israeli police for picking the wild herb za’atar (thyme), the thistle-like akkoub (gundelia), and other plants. Portrayed with devastatingly restrained hu

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