124 (Jul/Aug 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 EDITOR Pamela Wong EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Cassie Liu EDITORIAL INTERNS Judy Chiu, Chlo
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Contributors
Emily Chun is a Korean American art writer based in New York City. She was involved in various curatorial projects at the Tufts University Art Galleries in Massachusetts, Litmus Art Space in Seoul, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. (See REVIEWS)
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Shape-shifting
Whether adopting pseudonyms, exaggerating personas, or inventing alter-egos, artists have been leading imagined existences throughout time in order to tease out the fine lines that divide fiction and reality. There are many para-fictional approaches
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Trevor Shimizu on Dan Graham
For those of you who do not know me personally this may come as a bit of a surprise—Dan Graham is a big influence. Dan, his words and his work, helped inform much of what I made in previous years. His statement, “my work is for children and parents o
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São Paulo
Before I dive into the artistic scene that has developed in recent years in São Paulo, I must draw attention to a fact: I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, but am in love with the so-called “land of drizzle.” My observations, therefore, come bot
ArtAsiaPacific6 min readWorld
Cultural Solidarity for Palestinians Surge After Israeli Attacks
In May, art communities around the world witnessed newly energized and vocal support for Palestinians facing brutal Israeli attacks and forcible displacement. The surge in displays of solidarity—ranging from statements to renewed calls for boycotts o
ArtAsiaPacific3 min readDiscrimination & Race Relations
Mobility, Racialized
In 2021, the Point asks writers to imagine post-pandemic futures. For this issue, we asked artist and incoming Asia Art Archive director Christopher K. Ho to discuss forms of solidarity that break from ethno-nationalist thinking. Pundits predicted th
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Climate Change
The summer is off to a hot start in Hong Kong, as the mercury passed 36°C on the last day of Art Basel Hong Kong—in May. For those dealers wishing to stay cool and continue exhibiting and selling works of art, the city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam,
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The Real Deal
Major art fairs in New York, Busan, and Hong Kong launched their first physical editions since the outbreak of the pandemic, implementing parallel online programs and alternative on-site staffing plans to maximize participants and audiences in spite
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In Retrospect
JUL 17–OCT 17 MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, TOKYO (MOT) Groundbreaking graphic designer and painter Tadanori Yokoo creates visual poetry through his cross-cultural, strident, and colorful imagery. Playing on “genkyo,” a homophone for “present state,” h
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Beyond Recognition
Stella Zhong is a cartographer of limbo. Her paintings, videos, and sculptures depict environments at the threshold of reality, in which Escherian edifices manifest an awkward tangibility. In the video Pond in Pond (2018), futuristic buildings and br
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Owned By Others
Berlin’s Museum Island is hailed as one of the most prestigious cultural hotspots in Europe. Located at the very heart of the city’s historical center, it is home to five institutions—the Pergamon Museum, the Old and New Museums, the Old National Gal
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The Ingenuity of Nature AKI INOMATA
Born in 1983 in Tokyo, Aki Inomata grew up in a “forest of concrete buildings.” She found respite at her elementary school, which was located on a verdant college campus, “a precious place where I could contact various creatures, such as red dragonfl
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Pulling Back the Curtain PAO HOUA HER
Pao Houa Her was only three years old when her family, of the ethnic Hmong group, fled Laos. At the time, communists and the Royal Lao government were fighting each other in the 1959–75 Secret War, each backed by proxies and allies of the Cold War su
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Signs of Transition MITI RUANGKRITYA
The concrete road beneath the car has run out. A bumpy stretch of dirt lies to the left of the silver vehicle; before it is a muddy lake and swaths of unkempt scrubland, speared by the occasional towering palm tree. This is the sight that Thai photog
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Mutter, Ich bin Dumm!
I am looking at a painting by the Chicago-based Surrealist artist Gertrude Abercrombie, Self-Portrait of My Sister, created in 1941. The woman has sharp features, an elongated neck, and her gaze projects onto an unknown horizon beyond the picture fra
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Research And development carl Cheng
In 1969, the John Doe Co. of Santa Monica, California, released the first in its line of “nature products”: Erosion Machine, a yellow, hi-tech-looking, microwave-size appliance. A switch on its exterior activates a pump inside one of its two chambers
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Jes Fan
Living in humid environments entails a constant battle with mold. It gets in bookshelves and closets, spoils food, and stains all manner of surfaces. Mold, it would seem, is not our friend. Jes Fan, however, sees it differently. “Since 2018, I’ve bee
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Zhao Zhao
The Turpan Basin is a desert oasis in Xinjiang, western China. It has witnessed the coming and going of ancient civilizations, though records of these cultures have mostly been destroyed in the vast number of wars fought over the territory. Famously,
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Deni̇z Gül
Words can be “#pointless #low #unprecedented #confession #relief #sweat […]”; these particular ones linked to other websites from the homepage of hashwords.net, a continuously updated index of 2,753 hashtagged words chosen by Deniz Gül, for which an
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Take Me Away: On the Works of Bianca Kennedy
A woman in her sixties reclines in a frothy bubble bath. This is perhaps not an odd image in itself, but in Bath the Pain Away (2021), German artist Bianca Kennedy’s current in-progress film, the woman is in a bathtub-on-wheels in a sun-drenched room
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Itinerary
Haegue Yang: Strange Attractors Tate St. Ives Cornwall Theaster Gates: Bad Neon TANK Shanghai Nevin Aladağ: Traces Arter Istanbul The National 2021: New Australian Art Multiple locations Sydney Pixy Liao: Your Gaze Belongs to Me Fotografiska New York
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Art Directory 124
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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13th Gwangju Biennale: “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning”
The year 2020 marked a global shift in biennial scheduling, with major art festivals in Venice, Lyon, Liverpool, São Paulo, Sharjah, and Dakar all deferring their forthcoming exhibitions due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. Notwithstanding, a handful
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13th Shanghai Biennale: “Bodies of Water”
The role of chief curator for the 13th Shanghai Biennale was, in many respects, an unenviable one: appointed in November 2019, Andrés Jacque barely had time to acquaint himself with Shanghai before the world was upended by Covid-19. It was in this co
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Yhonnie Scarce Missile Park
“COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA/DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE/WOOMERA PROHIBITED AREA.” These lines featured on a sign photographed by Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha and Nukunu) on a recent research trip to Woomera, where the artist was born. The image appears in the ca
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Manbo Key Father’s Video Tapes_Avoid A Void
In September 2020, fixtures of Taipei’s queer nightlife circuit drove out to a Taoyuan warehouse to film a music video. In the final release of “Matched!” by Indigenous Taiwanese pop singer Amuyi Lu, queens and queers sporting harnesses and pearls cr
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David Adjaye and Adam Pendleton
We tend to think of fracture as a kind of termination—an end to a functional and desirable wholeness in form, as with a broken vase, or in meaning, viz. a breakdown in communication. In a compelling dual presentation at Pace Hong Kong, architect Davi
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Seher Shah When Words Disappear into Trees
Seher Shah penned an intimate journal to accompany her solo exhibition “When Words Disappear into Trees” at Dubai’s Green Art Gallery. The poignant prose relates the inadequacy of language to aptly express the full emotional breadth of the sentient e
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Etel Adnan Impossible Homecoming
Etel Adnan’s retrospective at Istanbul’s Pera Museum, “Impossible Homecoming,” encompassed the life’s work of a prolific poet and artist. Co-curated by Serhan Ada and Adnan’s partner, the artist Simone Fattal, the exhibition brought together art and
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Taloi Havini The Soul Expanding Ocean #1
Born on the island of Buka in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Taloi Havini delves into the history connected to her native Papua New Guinea and its endangered ecosystems through photography, sculpture, video, and installation. An ecological co
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Rana Begum
Rana Begum’s work to date has followed in the lineage of artists like Josef Albers, Bridget Riley, and Robert Irwin, whose varied practices all maintained at their core the enquiry of seeing itself. Begum’s first solo exhibition at Kate MacGarry, spa
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Dominique Fung It’s Not Polite to Stare
We are familiar with critiques of Orientalist fantasies, especially as such fantasies manifest throughout the Western art-history canon in the works of painters such as Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Such critiques, à la Edward Said, are ofte
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Ben Sakoguchi Chinatown
Borrowing from the language of commemorative plaques, comic books, political cartoons, and pop culture, Ben Sakoguchi’s 15-panel, acrylic-on-canvas Chinatown (2015) was the banner work in his exhibition of the same name at Bel Ami gallery, itself loc
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Rousing Revivals
Text by Fatris MF; photos by Muhammad Fadli; design by Jordan Marzuki and Laras Koesoemo Published by Jordan Jordan Edition, Jakarta, 2021 I get an inexplicable rush from imagining the people whose footsteps I might be serendipitously retracing on hi
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readPopular Culture & Media Studies
Aaajiao
Located in Berlin’s western district of Charlottenburg, the modern and airy apartment of aaajiao is not as grandiose as its exterior suggests. From the street, the building—a former maternity hospital dating from the early 20th century—is all wrought
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Gala Porras-kim
It was in the early 20th century that archaeologist Edward H. Thompson dredged the Cenote Sagrado, a water pit dedicated to the Mayan god Chaac in Chichen Itza, Mexico. At its bottom, some 18 meters deep, was an abundance of sacrificial artifacts, in
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A Shaky Comeback
Live auctions in Hong Kong and New York saw eager buyers, with the usual blue-chip artists securing premium prices. However, a number of much-vaunted lots fell short of expectations. After a delayed and whittled-down four-sale series last July and ei

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