121 (Nov/Dec 2020)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Contributors
Frances Arnold is a Berlin-based freelance writer. Having started her career at museums in the United Kingdom, she moved to Shanghai, which sparked her passion for art from Asia, as well as topics around architecture and the built environment. In add
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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 NEWS & WEB EDITOR Lauren Long ASSISTANT EDITOR Pamela Wong EDITORIAL INTERNS Margarita Cheng,
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Practices of Realignment
Recognizing our interdependence with our environments and earth’s diverse organisms is becoming increasingly critical as the planet’s ice caps melt at rates beyond scientists’ expectations, wildfires ravage lands from California to Siberia, and droug
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Raja’a Khalid on Kurt Vonnegut
The first Kurt Vonnegut book that I ever read was his memoir, A Man Without a Country (2005)—incidentally, the last title that he had promised to write and publish. It was 2006, and my father had picked up a copy from an airport. After reading only a
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Picture Window with Two Chairs
I first met Siah Armajani in 2008 when I became director of the Walker Art Center. I was struck by the quiet, soft-spoken qualities of the humble citizen-artist, whose towering legacy had shaped my sensibilities as a young curator more than a decade
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Marid
During the office of the socialist mayor Manuela Carmena (2015–19), the names of 52 streets in Madrid were changed. The original street names used before the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) were recuperated, or else the names of women scholars or pedag
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Obituaries
Artist-architect Siah Armajani (1939–2020), known for championing democracy through his sculptures and installations, died of heart failure in Minneapolis on August 27. That same day, Mono-ha artist Noriyuki Haraguchi (1946–2020) passed away from an
ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
Awards
On September 24, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara won the inaugural NZD 25,000 (USD 16,340) My Art Visual Arts Award, granted by New Zealand’s Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi. Painter Vincent Namatjira became the first Aboriginal artist to receive th
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Singapore Loses Major Exhibition and Residency Platform
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA), a leading nonprofit organization in Southeast Asia for artistic research, residencies, and exhibitions, will shutter its seven-year-old facilities at the Gillman Barracks arts precinct in March 202
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To Conceive Of The Curriculum Of The Forest
The Forest Curriculum is a platform for inter- and anti-disciplinary research and co-learning that attempts to reorient forms of knowledge away from the planetarity of the Anthropocene toward an ecosophical mode of thinking rooted in the cosmologies
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Fun for All
The art world is holding on to its mask as one of many passengers on the never-ending Covid loop-the-loop. Continuing to defy gravity, and tagging along with the cresting United States stock market, is the world of auctions. In India, a one-time art
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Back in Business
Christie’s Asian Art Week series (September 22–October 1), spanning eight live sales of art and antiques, achieved a total of USD 82.8 million, doubling the USD 41.64 million total from the six sales in September 2019. The dedicated 2020 sale of Sout
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Online Shopping
The second edition of the boutique June Art Fair (August 20–31), hosted on a dedicated platform by Hauser & Wirth, featured solo presentations from 17 smaller, younger galleries, an increase on the 14 exhibitors at the 2019 live fair. Participants re
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Shifting Grounds
NOV 7–MAR 21, 2021 QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY | GALLERY OF MODERN ART, BRISBANE Gordon Bennett’s upbringing was “strictly Euro-Australian,” in his words. It wasn’t until his teens that he learned of his Aboriginal heritage. This discovery had a tremendou
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Restoring The View
Embracing performance as a spontaneous, organic form of expression, Tong Wenmin utilizes her own body to explore her relationship with her surroundings. In Lawn (2018), Tong, wrapped in a long coat stitched from green turf, silently lies face down on
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Every Day Earth
Our blue planet has made more than 18,450 full rotations since the first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970, in major cities and on university campuses across the United States. Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, who was inspire
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readTechnology & Engineering
Irene Agrivina
Born in Yogyakarta in 1976, Irene Agrivina experienced firsthand the seismic social and political shifts that unfolded across Indonesia following the end of Suharto’s 31-year autocratic rule in 1998. Among the Reformasi period’s most significant chan
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Tamara Dean
Every ritual tells a story of how we relate to the world. It connects us to a sense of order, structuring our days, imparting fortune, marking our place in society. Australian photographer Tamara Dean remembers devising rituals using stones and feath
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Mae-ling Lokko
The upcycling of agricultural waste into building components, water treatment technologies, household goods, and other items is a growing sector of sustainable material research. A proponent of this field of innovation is Mae-ling Lokko, an architect
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The Materiality Of Memory thu Van Tran
Grotesque histories of political domination and beautiful moments of intersubjective connection—for Thu Van Tran, these are both instances of contamination: a phenomenon where disparate agents come into contact, and a process that has fundamentally i
ArtAsiaPacific12 min readEarth Sciences
Beneath The Concrete, The Ocean
The history of the 21st century will be written on water. When sea levels are certainly on the rise, the sea becomes our new desert. – MAP Office, 2009 Our collective future lies in the ocean, and with the ocean. Deep in that future there is history—
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Prabhakar Pachpute
The farmers of India have been toiling on the front lines of climate change and crony capitalism for decades. In Prabhakar Pachpute’s home state of Maharashtra, in western India, more than 32,000 farmers committed suicide between 2001 and 2019, as re
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Truong Cong Tung
Historically, Vietnam’s Tay Nguyen (Central Highlands) region was coveted for its rich basalt soil, which allowed French colonizers to establish profitable rubber tree plantations. Even after Vietnam’s 1975 independence and its economic reform in 198
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Su Yu Hsin
Inspired by French philosopher Felix Guattari’s book The Three Ecologies (1989), Su Yu Hsin’s three-part video Mori (2020) investigates how nature, communities, and individuals mutually influence each other. The first chapter, “Shou (to protect),” fo
ArtAsiaPacific10 min read
3 7 Meret Oppenheim: Every Idea Is Born with Its Own Form
“Every idea is born together with its own form.” This statement provides us with a clue to follow Meret Oppenheim’s practice; an interesting one, because the artist is doubtless one of the most prominent of her generation, especially among those who
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Itinerary
MAR 11–NOV 22 Michael Rakowitz Jameel Arts Centre Dubai JUL 30–MAR 29, 2021 The Vision of Fantasy that We Have Never Seen is This Splendor Yayoi Kusama Museum Tokyo JUL 31–JAN 3, 2021 STARS: Six Contemporary Artists from Japan to the World Mori Art M
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Art Directory
www.nyuad-artgallery.org nyuad.artgallery@nyu.edu New York University Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dha T +971 2 628 8000 Mon–Sat 12am–8pm An academic museum-gallery presenting exhibitions by internationally established artists, curators, and schol
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7th Yokohama Triennale: “Afterglow”
At last. This sentiment arose when I visited the 7th Yokohama Triennale not only because it was the first major international festival to open following many pandemic-related postponements, but also because it marked many unprecedented changes for th
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Khaled Sabsabi A Promise
The Sufi poet Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil-Kheir (967–1049) urged his contemporaries: “To your mind feed understanding, to your heart, tolerance and compassion.” In the last few decades, Islam has been portrayed in the West as violent, warring, and extremis
ArtAsiaPacific3 min readWorld
Xu Zhen Eternity Vs Evolution
In her 2009 Frieze article “The Big Issue,” critic Carol Yinghua Lu decried the trend toward large-scale spectacle in contemporary Chinese art driven by market forces that favored “visual extravaganzas” over criticality. Over a decade on, Lu’s concer
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
More, More, More
“More, More, More” was a garden of sensory delights. Works in this thematic exhibition drip, stain, aromatize, sprout, and glow throughout the spacious galleries of TANK Shanghai. Curated by Passing Fancy (X Zhu-Nowell and Frederick Nowell) with Elis
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Koo Jeong A 2O2O
Duality is a dialectic often claimed by contemporary artists to characterize a broad spectrum of works that assert a coexistence of discrete sensibilities. While such sensibilities may occasionally operate in harmony, they more often compete for domi
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Mark Chung Wheezing
Wheezing: strained breaths signaling a deficiency of air; the desperate noise one makes after running up a flight of stairs too quickly, or getting punched in the diaphragm. Mark Chung took this word as the title of his debut solo exhibition, at de S
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My Body Holds Its Shape
“We are all prisoners here,” is the thought I had each time I went to visit the exhibition drafted by Xue Tan, “My Body Holds Its Shape,” over the course of its four-month run. The pair of live performers clad in gray sweatsuits in Eisa Jocson’s Zoo
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Hương Ngô Lost from View
Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, a prominent communist revolutionary executed by the French colonial government in 1933, is a national hero in Vietnam, where many streets and schools bear her name. Yet, despite Minh Khai’s recognition, her identity exists only
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art: “The Crack Begins Within”
The 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art unfolded as a process rather than as a single event, prefaced by three programs of readings, workshops, and performances that launched last year at the ExRotaprint complex. Curated by Maria Berrios, Renat
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
A Slightly Curving Place
In 1995, sound recordist Umashankar Manthravadi was invited by Thomas Ault, professor of theater at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, to prove a hypothesis surrounding India’s Rani Gumpha caves: that as well as being a Jain monastery dating to circ
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Thao Nguyen Phan Becoming Alluvium
A hunk of an object—green, glossy, and grainy—opened “Becoming Alluvium,” Thao Nguyen Phan’s show at Chisenhale Gallery in London. The six-sectioned lacquer screen, Perpetual Brightness (2019–20), has a surface dense with swirls of deep mineral pigme
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Kaz Oshiro 96375
Born and raised in Okinawa near an American military base (ZIP code 96375: the show’s title), Kaz Oshiro once came across a poster of a Ralph Goings photorealist painting of a ketchup bottle and salt and pepper shakers at an American-style restaurant
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Otherworldly Journeys
By Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby with contributions by Denise Newman and Jordan Stein Published by X Artists’ Books, South Pasadena, 2020 The ancient priestesses of Delphi delivered ambiguous prophecies. The task of finding the truth in their messa
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Kelly Akashi
Artist, educator, and curator Kelly Sumiko Akashi is well known in Los Angeles for her nimble mind and dexterous hands. A genuinely curious person, she enjoys visiting different places and observing a wide range of plants and creatures. Her mixed-med
ArtAsiaPacific1 min readWorld
Memories of Murder
In 1996 in northwest China, a 13-year-old called Zhang Koukou watched his mother die after her fight with a neighbor turned violent. Twenty-two years later, Zhang brutally murdered his mother’s killer, along with the man’s brother and elderly father.

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