131 (Nov/Dec 2022)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Contributors
Amin Alsaden is a curator, educator, and scholar whose work focuses on transnational solidarities and exchanges across cultural boundaries. His research explores the history and theory of modern and contemporary art and architecture globally, with sp
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
ArtAsiaPacific-
EDITOR & PUBLISHER Elaine W. Ng DEPUTY EDITOR & DEPUTY PUBLISHER HG Masters MANAGING EDITOR Chloe Chu SENIOR EDITOR Don J. Cohn ASSOCIATE EDITORS Tiffany Luk, Pamela Wong ASSISTANT EDITOR Nicole M. Nepomuceno EDITORIAL INTERNS Monica Gabrielle Fernan
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
What Lies Beneath
So much of art is about surfaces and appearances—whether it’s what lies on a canvas or appears on a screen, or how an object looks or a performer moves. And yet with these visual cues, we are drawn deeper into other worlds and stories. For our cover
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Leung Chi Wo on Christian Boltanski
See our website for the Chinese version of this article. I went to art school in Hong Kong in the late 1980s when the future of this former colony was settled with a date that was somehow remote for me—ten years is long for a teenager. I was naive; a
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Bangkok Creating A Livable City
Thailand’s art scene is beginning to breathe again as the strangleholds of politics and pandemic ease. In 2020 and 2021, art suffocated under Covid-19 lockdowns and a crackdown on young pro-democracy protesters. The government’s harshest weapon was A
ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
Awards
On September 15, the Japan Art Association selected Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei as the winner of the 33rd Praemium Imperiale prize for sculpture. He received a medal and a cash prize of JPY 15 million (USD 105,000) at a ceremony in Tokyo on O
ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
Obituaries
On August 13, Japanese artist Taro Shinoda (1964–2022) died of an accident while creating a new artwork at his studio in Ibaraki prefecture. Incorporating elements from traditional Japanese garden design, Shinoda’s large-scale installations delve int
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Cultural Voices in Solidarity with Iranian Women
Since mid-September, artists around the world have been staging protest-performances, joining rallies, and circulating open letters to support the growing Iranian movement calling for women’s rights and an end to the country’s theocratic regime. The
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Southern Realignment
In an affirming nod to Singapore as a burgeoning Asian art-market capital, Sotheby’s first Modern and Contemporary Art auction on August 28 in the Lion City churned up a total of USD 17.4 million, flying over its USD 13 million estimate, across 47 so
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
New Hotspots
Following Art Jakarta Gardens, an outdoor edition of the regional fair held at the Hutan Kota by Plataran in April, Art Jakarta (August 26–28) returned in full swing at the Jakarta Convention Center. Featuring more than 60 local and international gal
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
The Re-Turning World
As 2022 comes to a close, people in Asia are finally taking off their masks and slipping back into the global groove as far as Covid-19 is concerned. Since March, Southeast Asia has drawn the roadmap for most of its East Asian neighbors to escape Cov
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Reforming Relationships In The Classroom
For 2022, the Point asks writers to examine art-education models. Below, curator and researcher Naz Cuguoğlu reflects on her participation in the Whole Life Academy initiative. How can we use collaborative learning tactics as a speculative methodolog
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Under The Spotlight
NOV 1–FEB 5, 2023 NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, TOKYO Multidisciplinary artist Shinro Ohtake’s first major retrospective in 16 years will retrace his nearly half-centurylong career with around 500 works. Presented under seven themes, such as “Time,”
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Taking On Tradition
See our website for the Chinese version of this article. BALI/LONDON By wanting to protect their daughters from what they have experienced, mothers sometimes instil fear into them, passing on trauma from generation to generation. Victoria Kosasie’s l
ArtAsiaPacific6 min readWorld
Queering The Dot
See our website for the Chinese version of this article. “I believe this is the right thing to do, and something that most Singaporeans will now accept. This will bring the law into line with current social mores, and I hope, provide some relief to g
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
RADHIKA KHIMJI Embodying the Mind’s Eye
In our public lives as much as in our private spaces, we are constantly negotiating who gets to see what of ourselves. Where and how are we allowed to be seen? How much of ourselves—physically, emotionally, or culturally—can or should we reveal? Who
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Land of Shadows Fertilized with Unbridled Memories
Ali Eyal has been exploring the complex relationships among contemporary politics, personal history, and the ways in which catastrophes are remembered, especially in his hometown of Baghdad following the 2003 American-led invasion. In his distinctive
ArtAsiaPacific12 min read
Stitched, Padded, And Layered Senses Of Self
Despite being the largest non-Chinese population in Hong Kong, and the providers of many essential forms of labor, the city’s 200,000-plus Filipino residents are largely absent from its cultural ecosystem. Having landed in Hong Kong from the province
ArtAsiaPacific12 min readWorld
Crisscrossing Time
History as fiction, fiction as history—over the last five years, in his multimedia projects encompassing video installations, sculptures, and publications, Hong Kong-based artist Lee Kai Chung has been unraveling official narratives of the Second Sin
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Mika Rottenberg and mahyad Tousi
Referencing director Chantal Akerman’s classic 1975 film about a woman’s unraveling life, Mika Rottenberg described her first feature-length film Remote (2022) as “Jeanne Dielman during a pandemic in the future.” True to this analogy, Rottenberg’s co
ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
Riya chandiramani
Hindu deities Vishnu and Lakshmi are painted lounging on the back of the multiheaded serpentine demigod Shesha. Behind them, a propagandistic logo of the ubiquitous, Indian-produced milk-and-wheat biscuit Parle-G overcasts the psychedelic scene. Cont
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Chang yoong Chia
A Leaf Through History: Family Tree (2022) by Chang Yoong Chia comprises 28 batik paintings, mounted in four rows of seven. It seems to adapt the structural conventions of an altarpiece, showing “crucifixions” with a story of a Passion and transfigur
ArtAsiaPacific9 min read
How Can You Feel Something That You Cannot See?
You often speak of the “blind spot” or the “locked power” that you investigate in your work—an energy that is hidden, not being discussed in our society or among individuals. Where does this idea come from? I have always been interested in the areas
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams
A bizarre congregation of cartoonish fish characters perched atop the Central Pavilion’s roof greeted visitors. They hold surfboards, electric guitars, and ukuleles; two sharks appear to be chewing plush toys shaped like missiles. By the entryway, tw
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
17th Istanbul Biennial
Pushed back one year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the 17th Istanbul Biennial was realized in an unprecedented time of disintegration for our accustomed communication, social, and economic systems. This significant breaking point between past and pre
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Dane Mitchell Unknown Affinities
For his solo exhibition “Unknown Affinities,” Dane Mitchell transformed Two Rooms in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau into what resembled a liminal museum, with a hopscotch of uneven plinths and 107 meticulously exacted sculptural museum mounts for every bir
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Pipilotti Rist Behind Your Eyelid
“Behind Your Eyelid,” presented by Tai Kwun Contemporary, was Pipilotti Rist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Comprising more than 45 works from the Swiss media artist’s three-decade-plus career, the show promised to be the hottest Instagram spo
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Walking the Crack
Walking, for the able-bodied, is a quotidian movement with symbolic connotations. A child’s first steps are an important milestone, pilgrimages are often done on foot, and walkouts are an expression of protest—acts that embody a sense of innate agenc
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Aquifer
A series of technicolor drip paintings greeted viewers as they entered “Aquifer,” a group exhibition at Silverlens Gallery that featured Dina Gadia, MM Yu, and Jenifer Wofford. While the show was titled for the liquid-like evocations that the artwork
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Carved Conversations
There was a blaring and visible cognitive dissonance at work between the lines that contextualized “Carved Conversations,” a group exhibition that juxtaposed its 13th-century Seljuk architecture in the remote flatlands of inner Anatolia with the site
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Forming Communities: Berliner Wege
Initiated by artist-curators Li Zhenhua and Thomas Eller, the group exhibition “Forming Communities: Berliner Wege” at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art brought together 18 Berlin-based artists, with a focus on the city’s East Asian diaspora. Openi
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Ken Lum Death and Furniture
If bad art is esoteric and ostentatious, “Death and Furniture” epitomized excellence. The exhibition, a five-oeuvre anthology of Ken Lum’s career, testified to the philosophical potency of everyday objects and popular culture. Allegorizing mortality
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Do Ho Suh
Moving through life, what do you take with you and what do you leave behind? Do Ho Suh asks this question in his eponymous show at Lehmann Maupin New York. Centering on new works, this presentation explored memorialization on multiple levels: politic
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Tala Madani Biscuits
See our website for the Chinese version of this article. “Biscuits,” the first North American survey of Iranian-American artist Tala Madani, was awfully inviting: depicted in stark caricature form, giant splayed legs reveal a petite anus glowing abov
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Itinerary
59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams Multiple locations Venice Ahmet Doğu İpek: A Halo of Blackness Upon Our Heads Arter Istanbul Luis Chan Studio Hong Kong Arts Centre Hong Kong Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island Art Gallery of New South Wales Sydney
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Henry Shum
What does it mean to paint from your imagination? And what exactly are you painting then? I put these questions to Henry Shum when I visited his working space in Hong Kong before realizing that these are almost unanswerable questions for the person w
ArtAsiaPacific1 min readGender Studies
JES FAN Nature and Nurture
If gender and race are social constructs, then what lessons can the natural world offer about identity and its malleability? This question underlies the work of artist Jes Fan, who previously used organic materials such as bacteria, fungi, and bodily
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Voyages Through Time
NERVOUS FOSSILS: SYNDROMES OF THE SYNTHETIC NETHER Text by Mochu, images by Adityan Melekalam and Mochu; 3D modeling by Anmol Singh Jaswal Co-Published by Reliable Copy and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, 2022 Building on fact and theory, M

ArtAsiaPacific

More Issues From ArtAsiaPacific