110 (Sep/Oct 2018)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Dragons, Hydra and the 21st CenturyTest
TestBack in 1993, when ArtAsiaPacific published its first print edition, the Internet had just broken out of its shell as the World Wide Web and was still a duckling learning to swim in the waters of global communication. Today, the Internet and its
ArtAsiaPacific7 min read
Contributors
Massimo de Carlo is the founder of Massimo de Carlo in Milan, London and Hong Kong. (See FEATURES) Tsong-zung Chang is the founder of Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong. (See FEATURES) Aric Chen is curator-at-large at Hong Kong’s M+ Museum, where he led th
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
MAP Office on Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
A photograph of a scuba diver painting underwater on a red canvas is on the cover of one of Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s monographs, produced by Mori Art Museum in 2004. The image is a still from Jun’s underwater film Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas: Battle o
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Ai Weiwei’s Beijing Studio Torn Down
Artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s Zuoyou studio was recently demolished without warning in Beijing. A demolition crew turned up at Ai’s studio on the afternoon of August 3 and began to smash the windows of the former factory building while a drill truc
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
B Movie Synopsis
“In film school, B had sworn to create only images of artistic honesty, kindness and authenticity. B’s claim to fame is what some curators might call a resuscitation project. At the height of his career, Brandon Lee was a fierce top among hordes of a
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Knowledge Is King
Reconnaissance is the name of the game in the art world. And at Christie’s, various teams are researching new strategies for moving money from pockets to profit sheets. In Hong Kong, the big guns from the European offices organized a lunch with a num
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Up and Down
While this year’s March auctions kicked off with a bang, results were markedly less outstanding in the ensuing months. Auction houses seem to be responding by looking closely at what has worked in recent years, including a mix of big-name modern arti
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Back With A Bang?
In an increasingly crowded market, art fairs come and go. This year, it was Art Stage Jakarta’s turn to postpone, while the biennial Melbourne Art Fair returned after skipping its 2016 edition. Fairs may tenaciously grind along, but results remain un
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Latitudes and Longitudes
9/7–11/11 The 12th Gwangju Biennale will investigate migration, territorial conflict and shifting geographies in today’s world, presenting both regional and global perspectives across seven individually curated exhibitions, and featuring 165 artists
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Global Curatorial Futures
For ArtAsiaPacific’s special 25th anniversary issue, we asked Yung Ma, curator of the Contemporary Art and Prospective Creations Department at Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Clara Kim, Daskalopoulos Senior Curator, International Art (Africa, Asia and th
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readWorld
Rising Generation
Collecting art is an ever-changing endeavor. With the exception of certain inexperienced collectors, most people who love to buy art change their taste as they acquire more knowledge and experience. Good collectors must constantly strive to refine th
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Double Time
New York-based conceptual artist Wong Kit Yi shares a website, apartment and body with her business manager Ali Wong. “Kit Yi” was born in Hong Kong in 1982 and named as such by her parents following the advice of a feng shui master. “Ali” came about
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Architect of Virtuality
The corridor is rich in symbolism. In art and literature, it often appears as a shadowed area in which the uncanny—doppelgängers, phantoms, ghostly doubles—disturbs a sense of security. In video-game designs, architectural spaces like corridors creat
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readWorld
Between Future and Fiction
In August 2017, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on Facebook—and then quickly deleted—a photograph of a coin found by an eight-year-old girl in the West Bank settlement of Halamish. The coin, he wrote, dated back 2,000 years and was p
ArtAsiaPacific4 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Bangalore 1/5k!
Souvenir Maker: Designed in America, Conceptualized in India, Made in China, Sponsored by Korea, Yes we are conditioned to think under flag… is the title of a work I made in 2008. I may have to revisit this statement in 50 years, when I might operate
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
9 August 2050, Singapore
Dearest Elaine, I am writing to you from the year 2050. I don’t know what you will make of this letter from the future, appearing out of nowhere on your desk in Wong Chuk Hang in 2018. I had suggested that we build a clone that looks like Arnold Schw
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Neom 2050
By 2050, hundreds of new economic cities will stand across Asia, sprung from empty lands in half a century of building. So many of these tech-driven, future-facing metropolises are being master-planned (some estimate 285 in China alone) that there is
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Shenzhen: Special Economic Zone 2050
The old glass facade of the SEG Plaza in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, reflects a sky full of burning, flare-like clouds at sunset—in the same way that the vitrines in its shops reflect hundreds of LED lights. Transactions within the plaza’s electronics mar
ArtAsiaPacific4 min readTechnology & Engineering
Abexist-ence: The Galaxy Of Presence In 21st-century Seoul
This article is written in 2018, with the assumption that I’m writing in 2049 and that it would be read by you around 2050. Therefore my text confuses past, present and future tenses. For example, the present of 2018 is the past, the future of 2049 i
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Form Follows Programming
One could argue that it was in the early 1960s that museums ceased being museums. That was when the British architect Cedric Price (1934–2003) began work on his Fun Palace, a “laboratory of fun” he dreamed up for a site in East London. Commissioned b
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Future Present: Practicing The Commons As Kongs 共/空
When I met the Buddhist monk Jongrim, he reintroduced me to a familiar Buddhist maxim: live the present. He was responding to my questions about his view of the future from the perspective of social change. He explained that he does not concern himse
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Art Of The Possible
If museums are intent on making a positive contribution in the world, how might they navigate the urgent issues of funding and revenue generation? How will we create sustainable financial platforms? One hundred and fifty years ago, the notions of “th
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Glam Interfaces In 2050
Imagining futures for cultural institutions in the year 2050 requires us to stoke the furnaces of historical narrative. In 1889, curator GB Goode of the Smithsonian Institution delivered an anticipatory lecture titled “The Future of the Museum” in wh
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Institution As An Ecological Platform
“Today, cultural audiences are assertive and highly motivated neighbors, not just passive visitors to be educated by institutional experts. They are more interested in social interaction, participation and self-discovery than traditional learning. It
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
YOUNG & EMERGING
In 2009, three graduate students rented a musty, water-damaged basement in Seoul and invited guests to the space. As visitors descended the steps in galoshes provided by the trio, they first saw that the room was entirely flooded. Appearing like a bl
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Then And Now
These days, Yayoi Kusama’s ubiquity in the art world is taken for granted. But how did an eccentric, fiercely independent and largely self-taught artist come to prominence, first in New York in the 1960s and then again, in Japan, in the 1980s? Japane
ArtAsiaPacific7 min read
How To See [what Isn’t There]
“Absences are not just what there is not, but rather what was there and now is not any longer, or what should be there and yet is not.” The group show “How to See [What Isn’t There]”—on view at Langen Foundation, Düsseldorf, from September 2018 to Ma
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Zao Wou-ki
Zao Wou-ki (1920–2013) owes his greatness to the artistic patrimony of France, or so proposed the exhibition “L’Espace Est Silence” (“Space Is Silence”) held at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Museum chief curator Francois Michaud and i
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Sun Xun
There is a tall, sinister character who lords over many of Sun Xun’s gloomy, animated landscapes. He wears a top hat, and is the magician who rules the world. According to the artist, the truth is malleable in this figure’s hands—a magician’s job is
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Karrabing Film Collective
The Karrabing Film Collective was formed in 2008, following the Australian government’s Northern Territory Emergency Response or “Intervention” of 2007, when federal representatives suspended the protections of the Racial Discrimination Act, sent the
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Echigo-tsumari Art Triennale 2018
The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (ETAT) is the pioneer of land art festivals in Japan. First presented in 2000, the event germinated from discussions on Asiatic globalization, localism, symbiotic ecosystems and protests against forgetting. Rather tha
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Ho Tzu Nyen
Ho Tzu Nyen is a narrator of speculative fictions. The often crisscrossing timeframes in which his works are situated stretch from one million BCE to 2045. Building on his exhaustive ongoing project, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2011–)—
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Lin Tianmiao
In the 1970s and ’80s, Chinese avant-garde artists showed their work in apartment spaces to evade intervention by government authorities. As part of this Apartment Art generation, Lin Tianmiao is known for her intensely introspective installations th
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Xu Bing
A pioneering contemporary artist—with “Chinese” prefixed or not—Xu Bing needs little introduction, making him a more than suitable subject for what was essentially the comeback-blockbuster show of Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art after it
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
In Search Of Southeast Asia Through The M+ Collections
“In Search of Southeast Asia Through the M+ Collections” brought to mind the term “public engagement exercise.” The first (and only) time I heard the phrase used was by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, in reference to a series of open fo
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Paul Pfeiffer
An “incarnator” can be interpreted as one who materializes abstract concepts, while the Spanish equivalent, encarnador, refers specifically to the craftspeople who render religious statues humanlike by applying skin-colored paints. With these two und
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Shilpa Gupta
Mumbai-based Shilpa Gupta’s solo exhibition, “For, In Your Tongue, I Can Not Fit,” was a year in the making. Presented by Baku’s Yarat Contemporary Art Space, the show brought together new, site-specific works, including sculptures, installations and
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Silence
The fourth edition of Cappadox festival opened on June 14, just one week before Turkey’s snap elections took place. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had brought forward the presidential and parliamentary polls, originally scheduled for November 2019, t
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Eko Nugroho
“Plastic Democracy,” Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho’s solo exhibition at Arndt Art Agency in Berlin, refers to society’s possible shaping of governmental systems. Specifically, the title speaks to Nugroho’s focus on the political developments of his h
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Lee Bul
A work catching fire and forcing the cancellation of a preview would seem an inauspicious start to any exhibition. The ignition of Lee Bul’s Majestic Splendor (1991–2018), caused by the volatile potassium-permanganate agent meant to preserve the inst
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Out Of The Past
No matter our roots, we tend to feel incredible anguish when culture is erased, even if that culture is not our own. The loudest example that comes to mind is the occupation of Iraq and Syria by the so-called Islamic State, in which monuments, erecte
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Mit Jai Inn
Perhaps the best-known artist in Thailand is one the rest of the world has barely heard of. The day before visiting the studio of Mit Jai Inn, I visited MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, one of the most stimulating private institutions not only in Chia
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Reza Abdoh
Reza Abdoh may very well be America’s most prolific avant-garde playwright and director that no one has heard of. He died of complications related to AIDS in 1995 at the age of 32. “Although not always a popular success, his work was generally staged
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Flesh And Spirit And Advanced Lessons For Buying At Auction
The fracas leading up to and after Sotheby’s New York sale this year, of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1983 mixed-media work, Flesh and Spirit, highlights basic lessons that every collector must learn. The four-panel canvas, bestowed with not one, but two s

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