133 (May/Jun 2023)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
ArtAsiaPacific
EDITOR & PUBLISHER Elaine W. Ng DEPUTY EDITOR & DEPUTY PUBLISHER HG Masters SENIOR EDITOR Don J. Cohn ASSOCIATE EDITORS Tiffany Luk, Pamela Wong ASSISTANT EDITOR Grace Jefferd COPY EDITOR Oliver Clasper EDITORIAL INTERNS Tong Tung Yeng, Denise Wang C
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Contributors
Béatrice Grenier is a curator and writer based in Paris. She is the director of curatorial affairs at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. (See ESSAYS) Johanna Palmeyro is a museum specialist, educator, and artivist who explores the in
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Time Memorialized
Whether it is resisting the currents of History or finding ways to shape the present, artists are continually engaged in a struggle against the times, and even time itself. For some, their art practice is oriented around the lived moment, full of the
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
LOS Angeles
On the night when multiple Asians and Asian Americans won Academy Awards—most notably for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)—I reflected on the Los Angeles art community from the perspective of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI). Sinc
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Co-Founder Killed
Philanthropist and art collector Myriam Ullens, who together with her husband Guy Ullens established the first private museum of contemporary art in Beijing, was shot dead by her stepson Nicolas Ullens on March 29 in Ohain village near Lasne, Belgium
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Kawita Vatanajyankur on Marina Abramović
During my final year at RMIT University in Melbourne, my professor made something clear: being an artist requires transcending conservative boundaries. It means the fundamental transformation of oneself. Repeating traditional patterns of thought and
ArtAsiaPacific3 min readWorld
Let’s Bring Down the Fence and Re-Build Together
For some of us it can be a perplexing exercise to contemplate the role of museums as public spaces. Regardless of where they are located, many museums make certain individuals and communities feel that they don’t belong. Perhaps this is because their
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
All the Best People
In New York City, artists and dealers alike cringed with delight during the new spring reality TV program The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist. Co-produced by MTV and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the series featured the Hirshh
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Season of Settling In
The Christie’s New York live auction of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art on March 22 during Asia Week brought in just under USD 12 million from 70 lots, further boasted by online sales (March 15–28) of an additional 120 works, netting just und
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
True Optimism
Dubai’s glitzy, fort-like Madinat Jumeirah resort hosted the emirate’s anchor fair, Art Dubai (March 1–5), drawing more than 30,000 visitors from around the world to this spotlight of art from the Global South. Now in its 16th edition, Art Dubai in 2
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Radical Explorations
IKON GALLERY, BIRMINGHAM In “Passionate Pilgrim,” Melati Suryodarmo brings her unrelenting, physically challenging performances to Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. Inspired by Javanese cultural traditions, and a disciple of key figures in Butoh dance and
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Urban Chaos Memory
HONG KONG Tiny, charcoal-gray human figures shuffle toward the center of a white landscape from all directions of a three-meter-wide screen. In the top left corner, the hands of an analog clock sweep forward relentlessly as these figures gather in th
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Architectures of Control SUNG TIEU
“I’m interested in how certain strands of my biography fit into a wider global history of Germany, the GDR [East Germany], and contract workers coming to Germany,” said Sung Tieu of her intertwining of archival research, fiction, and a notably distan
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Citra Sasmita
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries European colonizers routinely controlled the image of Balinese women for economic and political gain, linking, and thereby reducing, the role of women to fertility. Colonial photographers illustrated their anthr
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readVisual Arts
Surface Matters
For a short few weeks in early 2023, one could discover the atemporal beauty of the art of Yun Hyong-Keun at David Zwirner’s Parisian space. The selection of works for this exhibition included Yun’s paintings on canvas as well as works on hanji—tradi
ArtAsiaPacific11 min read
Shim Moon-Seup
Steeped in Taoist and Buddhist thought, Shim Moon-Seup once declared his artworks “anti-sculptures” in order to express the energy and spirit embedded in natural materials. Born in 1943, Shim was active in the Korean art scene beginning in the mid-19
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Up Close
Sit down, lie down, close your eyes, try to stop seeing, and just feel the sound around you. That itself is the first commitment to Hajra Waheed’s sonic installation Hum II (2023), which was installed in a conical architectural structure at Sharjah B
ArtAsiaPacific10 min read
The History is Female
Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s personal story is repeated in the lives of so many women in the Philippines: she raised a family, provided care for an aging parent, and became part of the Filipino diaspora. At the same time, since the 1970s when she became a
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Brook Hsu
Churches have long been sites where rituals of life and death took place side by side. It was thus fitting that Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, a deconsecrated 9th-century Roman church-turned-gallery space, housed Taiwanese American artist Brook Hsu’s painti
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Vaevae Chan
In the three years after her father’s sudden death and her home city’s historic sociopolitical unrest, Vaevae Chan built a cave to hide herself away. Now the artist has invited others to visit her refuge. To locate it, I journeyed to the 17th floor o
ArtAsiaPacific9 min read
This Is The Strategy
Over the past decade, Paris-based multidisciplinary artist Iván Argote has gained notable attention for his large-scale public monument projects and for the playfulness he brings to historical interrogations. During last year’s nomination for the Cen
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Itinerary
JAN 31–JUL 16 Maurizio Cattelan: WE Leeum Museum of Art Seoul FEB 7–JUN 11 Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present Sharjah Art Foundation Sharjah FEB 9–SEP 24 Cengiz Çekil: I Am Still Alive Arter Istanbul FEB 21–JUN 11 Wu Tsang: Of
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Sharjah Biennial 15 Thinking Historically in the Present
During a talk at Sharjah Biennial 7 in 2005, Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) proposed “thinking historically in the present” as a model for those in the cultural field to recover the emancipatory potential of postcoloniality—or “what the Third World meant
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Goro Kakei
In the Christian theological system, the body is not only a temple for God’s spirit to inhabit but the carnal representation of God himself. While the Earth and its bounty are evidence of God’s creative prowess, human beings are created in God’s imag
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Adaptation: A Reconnected Earth
A low-pitched buzz from a concealed speaker by the entrance reverberated throughout the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, welcoming guests to the exhibition “Adaptation: A Reconnected Earth,” curated by the museum’s director Joselina Cruz and sc
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Wang Tuo The Second Interrogation
If Wang Tuo’s earlier video The Interrogation (2017) carefully analyzes the body language and tactics employed by the Chinese national security apparatus during an interrogation process, the second episode, which premiered at Hong Kong’s Blindspot Ga
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Liu Kuo-sung Experimentation as Method
That Taiwanese modernist Liu Kuo-sung has earned a place in the canon of avant-garde ink art, or shiyan shuimo, is a fact. He invented the eponymous Liu Kuo-sung paper, from the surface of which fibers are removed to create textural effects. He is al
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Chitra Ganesh Orchid Meditations
After the recent death of her father, Chitra Ganesh was sent an orchid by a well-wisher. Somewhat ominously, it struggled to bloom. Rather than feeling dejected, Ganesh was intrigued that the plant appeared to thrive better in the shade, and it seeme
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Bollywood Superstars: A Short Story of Indian Cinema
“I love SRK. My Name Is Khan (2010) is a must-watch.” A Lebanese expatriate swooned over a cutout of Shah Rukh Khan, one of the idols lighting “Bollywood Superstars: A Short Story of Indian Cinema” at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The topic is dear to the Ar
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Martin Wong Malicious Mischief
A video clip from the documentary Portrait of Martin Wong (1998) by filmmaker Charlie Ahearn shows Wong (1946–1999) in the streets of New York’s Chinatown during Chinese New Year, amid an onslaught of exploding red firecrackers, thick smoke, and onlo
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Christine Sun Kim Cues on Point
Music]. Closed captions—if you’re a non-hearing person, you rely on them despite their obvious drawbacks. In this case, devoid of qualities such as tempo, intensity, and duration, you’re left to imagine the exact type of music. Conveying only the bar
ArtAsiaPacific6 min readWorld
Vintage Reflections
By Edward Tyerman Published by Columbia University Press, New York, 2021 At the core of scholar Edward Tyerman’s 353-page monograph Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (2021) about the brief period of political alignment in th
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Seung Yul Oh And Jungeun Lee
The demographics of Point Chevalier in New Zealand have long been in flux. Originally home to a small number of Māri settlements due to the lava formation of Meola Reef to the east of the peninsula, European colonization rapidly expanded the region a
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Samson Young Frames And Variations
Ekphrasis, or the translation of an image into words, is a shadow following many histories of visual art. As a literary device, ekphrasis promises, perhaps falsely, a separation of form and subject so that an artwork’s content might be poured from on

ArtAsiaPacific

More Issues From ArtAsiaPacific