137 (Mar/Apr 2024)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

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ArtAsiaPacific
EDITOR & PUBLISHER Elaine W. Ng DEPUTY EDITOR & DEPUTY PUBLISHER HG Masters ACTING MANAGING EDITOR Oliver Clasper SENIOR EDITOR Don J. Cohn ASSOCIATE EDITOR Alex Yiu ASSISTANT EDITOR Anna Lentchner CORRESPONDING EDITOR Richard Vine COPY EDITOR Isabel
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Moveable Feasts
Our daily lives are increasingly digitized via virtual and simulated experiences. Note the wave of “immersive” exhibitions featuring large projections of famous images (sometimes animated) in place of actual artworks, or interactive light and video e
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Contributors
Christine Han is a Singapore-based art writer. She was previously a contributing editor at World Sculpture News and Asian Art News, and her writing has appeared in Artforum, ArtAsiaPacific, Artlink, e-flux, Frieze, Flash Art, Mousse, Ocula, and Sculp
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Isaac Chong Wai on Käthe Kollwitz
In the winter of 2015 I found myself sitting on a windowsill in a warm, ground-floor exhibition room at Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. I had momentarily forgotten that it was snowing outside, and as I leaned against the window I looked out toward the
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Eora/Sydney
At first glance, Eora/Sydney’s art scene appears more robust than ever. Over the summer, the city hosted three blockbuster exhibitions—for Vasily Kandinsky, Louise Bourgeois, and Tacita Dean—as part of the Sydney International Art Series held across
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News Round Up
The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) announced on January 19 that it had postponed the 18th Istanbul Biennial (originally scheduled to open on September 14), until September 2025, and that the previously appointed curator, Iwona Blazwi
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Palestinian Artist’s Retrospective Canceled
A retrospective exhibition at the Indiana University Bloomington (IU) of 87-year-old Palestinian American artist and alumna Samia Halaby, titled “Centers of Energy,” was abruptly canceled on December 20 ahead of its February 10 opening. The universit
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The Edge of Pluralism
Germany has been in the news recently after a wave of cancellations made international headlines. The reason offered by the institutions involved, the German punditry, and the current government, is that contemporary art is saturated with antisemitis
ArtAsiaPacific4 min readWorld
Regions for Growth
Singapore’s warm air of optimism comes from the influx of new-moneyed immigrants despite the recessionary winds hitting the region caused by the dwindling growth rate of the Chinese economy. In its second edition at the Expo and Convention Centre at
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60th Venice Biennale
The impacts of climate change, regional conflicts, political instability, and economic hardship have fueled a planet of migration. Many societies of the Global North have struggled to balance societal changes and economic growth, leading to the eleva
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National & Collateral Pavilions
Archie Moore Born in Toowoomba, Queensland, Archie Moore explores key signifiers of identity, intercultural communication, and racism through his conceptual and research-based works that portray his personal and national history. With language a cent
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Objects Of Our Emotion
HONG KONG The circulation of global capital often results in an exchange of objects and symbols that connects the internet and the physical world. It is also a transfer that informs Vunkwan Tam’s artistic practice. The Hong Kong-based artist is known
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Geraldine Javier
Having explored themes of death, decay, and mortality over a three-decade career, one might expect Geraldine Javier to be serious, sullen, even morbid. But when we met at her latest solo exhibition at Silverlens in Manila, she was quiet, engaging, an
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Robert Zhao Renhui
For the past seven years the interdisciplinary artist Robert Zhao Renhui has been investigating a number of secondary forests in his native Singapore—specifically, one nestled between expressways near his home, the other surrounding Gillman Barracks,
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readGender Studies
A Room Of My Own
In queer culture, a “second adolescence” often occurs after coming out, as one experiences a transformation typically associated with teenage development. For me, that metamorphosis occurred during my late 20s when I began navigating my deeply ingrai
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Proof Of Personhood
In 1978 the late German artist Joseph Beuys argued in his essay “Appeal for an Alternative” that “the dignity of man stands and falls with the inviolability of the person, and whoever disregards this, steps down from the level of humanity.” Today, ma
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Yuko Mohri
A bowl of fruit is a classical subject in European painting. A long roll of paper might provide the perfect surface for a calligrapher’s strokes or an ink painter’s depiction of a beautiful landscape. A well-tuned piano’s strings vibrate at just the
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Natascha sadr Haghighian
What gives comfort? What offers support? And what small moment of kitsch sparks a sense of fleeting joy? (One set of answers: break-up songs, walking-assistant devices, and iridescent plastic animals.) Watershed (2023), the Berlin-based, Tehran-born
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Hoda afshar
“Women, life, freedom.” This was the slogan adopted by thousands of Iranians who took to the streets in September 2022 after Jina Mahsa Amini, aged 22, died in police custody following her arrest for improperly wearing her hijab. Amini’s death, and t
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Robert Gober
Robert Gober was born in a small town in Connecticut in 1954 and is known for his wry, terse, whimsical sculptural lexicon and his depiction of domestic, quotidian objects, such as legs, babies’ cribs, doors, wallpaper, newspapers, and kitchen sinks.
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Itinerary
OCT 18, 2023–MAR 31 Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living Mori Art Museum Tokyo NOV 3, 2023–APR 1 Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam NOV 4, 2023–APR 28 Guest Relations Jameel Arts Centre Dubai NOV 7, 2023–APR 14 Handan Börüte
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London
Hayward Gallery In 1974, Hiroshi Sugimoto was standing in front of a large diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in New York when he had a sudden revelation. Conceding that the backdrops looked fake, he noticed that by “taking a quick pee
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Seoul
Leeum Museum of Art One of the most traditional artists working in the field of contemporary art in Korea today is Suki Seokyeong Kang, though this can be hard to recognize when first encountering her artworks, which can take the forms of abstract pa
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Taipei
TKG+ Projects Prior to being an exhibition, Amol K. Patil’s “Lines Between the City” was a route. On one side, a wall was painted with an unbroken gray horizon; on the other, a rough plywood scaffold inhibited movement through the space. Nods to the
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Hong Kong
Tai Kwun Contemporary Comics, illustrations, graphic novels, and animations are seldom exhibited at art museums, as many of these mediums still rely upon traditional narrative structures of storytelling. Likewise, although their discernable visual id
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Chiang Rai
Multiple Locations The third, and arguably best, edition of the roving, government-sponsored Thailand Biennale took place in Chiang Rai, a remote northern province bordering Myanmar, Laos, and the Mekong River. This mountainous region is, however, mi
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Singapore
Singapore Art Museum Ho Tzu Nyen has maintained a longstanding fascination with the historical migration of tigers across Asia and their presence in the region’s histories and mythologies, particularly as weretigers in Malay cosmology. Traditionally
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New Delhi
Vadehra Art Gallery During a tea break in Ranjeetpura, a village in Rajasthan’s Bikaner district, the multidisciplinary artist Atul Bhalla noticed marbled sandstone on a nearby fence that resembled a piece of meat. After bringing the stone home, Bhal
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Vienna
Secession Whether edifices or objects (or even the people around us) things endow human life with stability and meaning. But as theorist Byung-Chul Han has noted, “This terrestrial order is today being replaced by the digital order.” Unmoored from th
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Milan
Pirelli HangarBicocca Thao Nguyen Phan’s works are at once beautiful and devastating, their harrowing stories poetically revealed like emotional gut punches. And one is struck by the extent of the tragedy and the burning shame at knowing almost none
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New York
Canal Projects Candice Lin’s recent solo exhibition, “Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory,” was as strange as it sounds. The immersive installation clacked and oozed and enveloped viewers in an environment that was as amusing as it was confounding. At
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Washington, DC
National Museum of Asian Art In Park Chan-kyong’s solo exhibition, “Gathering,” ghosts appeared in various forms: as radioactive remains, as a sun-dappled dream, as self-unravelling garments. Across five photographic and video works, the South Korean
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Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art In an age in which we spend our waking hours looking at screens, Paul Pfeiffer’s midcareer retrospective of manipulated videos and photographs from the last 25 years felt eerily prescient and pertinent. Presenting digital v
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Deni̇z Gül
Through a half-open door, Deniz Gül’s studio conveys the essence of space as the arch-material of all things. An inner-city dwelling amid the globalized hustle of downtown Istanbul, it is less a home than a shelter that gives life meaning and fosters
ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
Manal Aldowayan
Two millennia ago, the ancient Nabataean people inscribed their stories onto sandstone cliffs, clay walls, and tomb facades throughout Hegra, an archaeological site in modern-day Saudi Arabia. For the AlUla Arts Festival in February, multidisciplinar

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