138 (May/Jun 2024)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
ArtAsiaPacific
EDITOR & PUBLISHER Elaine W. Ng DEPUTY EDITOR & DEPUTY PUBLISHER HG Masters MANAGING EDITOR Oliver Clasper SENIOR EDITOR Don J. Cohn ASSOCIATE EDITOR Alex Yiu ASSISTANT EDITOR Anna Lentchner CORRESPONDING EDITOR Richard Vine COPY EDITOR Isabelle Fran
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When Lives Become History
As storytellers, artists are often fascinated with the personal lives and creative output of others. But how can (or should) artists transform these stories into their own work? And as these artworks enter public circulation, what responsibilities do
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Contributors
Born and raised in Manila, Sam Del Castillo studied art at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She was a student journalist for the Philippine Collegian before serving as associate editor for two years. (See PROFILES) Across a 20-year practice
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Chitra Ganesh on Rummana Hussain
Rummana Hussain (1952–1999) is widely considered one of India’s foremost conceptual artists. I had the great fortune of seeing her last solo show before she died, “In Order to Join,” held at Art in General in New York in October 1998. The exhibition
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Mumbai
In Mumbai, growth is the only constant. Along with an expressway being built across the entire coast and reclaimed land being dug up for an ever-delayed metro project, there are so many ongoing construction sites in the financial capital that it peri
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News Round Up
Several leadership changes were announced at Asia’s major art institutions. On April 1, Eugene Tan, the current director of the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) and Singapore Art Museum (SAM), took over as CEO of both institutions from Chong Siak Chi
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Hong Kong Public Art Looks to Inflate Visitor Numbers
From chubby hearts to luminous eggs, two of Hong Kong’s government-funded recent “mega events” have drawn selfie-seekers as well as criticism from residents. Announced in 2022, the Mega Arts and Cultural Events (ACE) fund is an initiative to support
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Paying For The Privilege
Dreams of easy money are a recurring fantasy among art fair entrepreneurs, both seasoned and green. Art Basel held its first full-sized Hong Kong edition since pre-pandemic 2019, overflowing with more than 240 galleries across two floors, and overrun
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Brick by BRIC
The biennial Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) (February 22–25) was back in force at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, attracting more than 15,000 visitors and achieving USD 9.53 million in sales, a reported 37-percent increase from its 2022 edi
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Soft At The Top
Interest in South Asian art surged during Asia Week in New York. At the South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art auction on March 20, Christie’s New York brought in just under USD 20 million from 93 lots, a 79-percent increase from its USD 12 million
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60TH VENICE BIENNALE COLLATERAL EXHIBITIONS Apr 20–Nov 24
Hansol Foundation – Museum SAN “La Maison de la Lune Brûlée” (The House of the Burning Moon) is a showcase of the charcoal-derived works by South Korean artist Lee Bae, who explores the centuries-old “moonhouse burning” ritual. With themes of renewal
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Bodies Of History
YOGYAKARTA Chibi-like characters with oversized eyes, anthropomorphic animals, decapitated dinosaurs, and fleshy aliens appear often in the work of Yogyakarta-based artist Roby Dwi Antono. Brimming with surreal imagination, Antono creates worlds fill
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Chronicles of Displacement MARK SALVATUS
Amid the din of everyday life, Filipino interdisciplinary artist Mark Salvatus demands that we attend to the tensions and contradictions within the quotidian and the mundane. Born in 1980 in Lucban, Quezon Province, and raised in a rural town situate
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA In A Troubled Orld
Looking back over half a century of confronting the Hydra-headed force of global affairs, the esteemed Turkish artist Gülsün Karamustafa has two words for humanity: hollow and broken. These words also form the first part of “A State of the World,” th
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The Urgent Present Continuous
“It’s a pleasure to be here,” artist Nida Sinnokrot said quietly, before pausing. “‘Pleasure’ is not the right word—it’s good to be here, in company. We thank you for your solidarity, your shared sense of urgency, and for organizing this March Meetin
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No Culture In A Dry World
“When do we reach the sea?” my companion asks, clinging to the front seat of the car as it lurches in the tracks cut into the desert floor. Our guide, a Russian-speaking local from the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan in the northwest of Uzbekis
ArtAsiaPacific10 min read
Kang Seung Lee
Friendship, kinship, community—how can these interpersonal connections be established and maintained across geographies and even across generations? The multiplicity of relationships that Kang Seung Lee forms through his artistic practice is both ima
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Manal Aldowayan immortal Traces
For a long time, Manal AlDowayan did not see herself as an artist. Having grown up in the Saudi Aramco residential compound in Dhahran during the 1980s, she witnessed few, if any, examples of full-time artmaking, let alone by women. Confining her pra
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Embracing Unknowns philippe Parreno
Over the course of nearly four decades and across a diverse range of mediums, Philippe Parenno has investigated such fundamental concepts as language and communication, time and memory, and the nature of reality and fiction. A frequent collaborator w
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SANDI HILAL & ALESSANDRO PETTI
Midway across the Emirate of Sharjah lies an uninhabited settlement of houses with a mosque known as Al Madam, built in the 1970s to settle the region’s nomadic people in a modern village. Yet the waves of red sand carried by the wind across the dese
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Amar kanwar
Having become accustomed to consuming short-form content on social media, submerging oneself in long-duration video works can often induce a certain restlessness. But watching The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023) by New Delhi-born filmmaker Amar Kanwar, wh
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Tsai ming-liang
On the edge of a quiet river bank a barefooted, red-robed monk presses his heel carefully into the soil. Later, he walks at an inexplicably slow pace across the marble floor of Washington, DC’s iconic Union Station, entirely at odds with the anxious
ArtAsiaPacific8 min read
Framing the Physical TOSH BASCO
INSIDE BURGER COLLECTION Since the 2010s, Tosh Basco has established an interdisciplinary practice that is marked by an inner drive for improvisation. With past performance venues spanning the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Museum of Art to Berlin’s
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Itinerary
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind Tate Modern London Lala Rukh: In the Round Sharjah Art Foundation Sharjah Philippe Parreno: VOICES Leeum Museum of Art Seoul 24th Biennale of Sydney: Ten Thousand Suns Multiple locations Sydney Kimsooja: To Breathe – Const
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24th Biennale of Sydney Ten Thousand Suns
Consider a bamboo blind and the way it obstructs and concedes light across each corded slat; recall the coolness of a material that does not carry heat quite like concrete or brick. Placed in a climate-controlled museum, the defunct blind-turned-exhi
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Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living
What contributions has contemporary art made to address the world’s environmental crises? This was the question posed by co-curators Martin Germann and Tsubaki Reiko in the four-chapter group exhibition of 34 artists at the Mori Art Museum, “Our Ecol
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Pambabae: Exploring Abstraction by Women Artists 1969–1989
When art critic Linda Nochlin published her groundbreaking essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” in 1971, she shattered a male-centric canon that seldom recognized women’s accomplishments. But despite small progressions, half-a-century l
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Howie Tsui The Cradle Rocks Above an Abyss
For his first solo exhibition in the city of his birth, Canadian-Hong Kong artist Howie Tsui presented a new series of mixed-media works featuring surreal characters and absurdist scenes, in large part inspired by his nostalgia for mid-20th century C
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Heman Chong Meditations on Shadow Libraries
Over the past two decades, Heman Chong has harbored a deep fascination with knowledge circulation through his multifaceted, conceptually driven practice. “Meditations on Shadow Libraries” at STPI gallery represented the Malaysian-born, Singapore-base
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Sohrab Hura Ghosts in My Sleep
The exploration of what makes a “real memory,” what the renowned American photographer Nan Goldin defines as having “a smell and is dirty,” formed the nucleus of Sohrab Hura’s latest exhibition. It might even be possible to interpret the choice of pa
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
Responding to various global sociopolitical tensions, “Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art” at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, was as timely as it was resonant. Complemented by an increasing exposure to textile-based art, the exhibit
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
An-My Lê Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai Giòng Sông/Entre Deux Rivières
An-My Lê’s latest retrospective traced the artist’s career from 1994 to the present, rendering global conflict with self-reflexive nuance and grace. “Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières,” ranged in subject matter from eerily bu
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Jennifer Tee Ancestral Beginnings, Sessile Beings
Dutch artist Jennifer Tee insists on the essential bond between spirit and matter in defiance of the materialist understanding of world history. For her solo presentation “Ancestral Beginnings, Sessile Beings” she investigated the history of migratio
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Scratching At The Moon
The Model Minority myth that arose in response to historical events surrounding Asians and Asian Americans during the Second World War has been hard to shake. Not only is the stereotype incorrect as applied against a wide-ranging category that includ
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Precarious Times
By Byung-Chul Han Published by Polity Cambridge, UK, 2024 Whether railing against the invasive and invisible forces of global capital in Psychopolitics (2017), the cult of wellness and personal improvement in The Burnout Society (2015) and Saving Bea
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
IV Chan
The mid-February winds feel cooler in the New Territories neighborhood of Fo Tan. The streets are wider and more barren than in Hong Kong’s central districts, and it’s evident why so many artists have established their studios here over the years. Th
ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
Mao Ishikawa
For well over four decades, Mao Ishikawa has documented life on the margins of Okinawa, where she was born, as well as those whose presence on the Japanese island has caused great social tension. Some of her early works explored the lives of local ba

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