120 (Sep/Oct 2020)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

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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 Kaitlin Hao, Cha
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Contributors
Johnson Tsong-zung Chang is the founder and director of Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong; a guest professor at China Academy of Art, Hangzhou; and the co-founder of Asia Art Archive. Since the 1980s, he has curated exhibitions of Chinese art, including t
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Radical Hope
The pandemic-plagued world is ripe with divisions. The social-isolation methods and restrictions on travel that have kept people apart are further hardening opinions and hearts to our shared predicaments. Finding new ways to connect to one another an
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Inas Halabi on Rosalind Nashashibi
Rosalind Nashashibi’s Hreash House (2004) is centered on the collective existence of an extended family. Set in a concrete block in Nazareth during the month of Ramadan, the film is structured around the preparation of a feast and its subtle aftermat
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Vancouver
In Vancouver, virtually every conversation is about space in one way or another. The ongoing housing affordability crisis casts a perpetual cloud of precarity and anxiety that rivals the city’s notoriously gray skies. In the art community, the omnipr
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Awards
On June 15, Prix Ars Electronica conferred a Digital Communities Golden Nica to the Hong Kong people for digital activism, while Miwa Matreyek won in the Computer Animation category for her climate-crisis project Infinitely Yours (2020). The awards e
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Obituaries
Modernist Gaylord Chan (1925–2020), recognized for his playful abstract compositions, passed away on June 22 in Hong Kong. That same day, it was revealed that photojournalist Li Zhensheng (1940–2020), known for capturing China’s Cultural Revolution,
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Beirut Explosion Devastates City and Cultural Community
The blast in Beirut’s port just after 6pm on August 4 destroyed huge swathes of the city and crippled the local art scene. Letitia Gallery’s director, Gaia Foudolian, and architect Jean-Marc Bonfils, a professor at the Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Ar
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Imagining the Impossible
At times, as artists, we have to convince ourselves that we have something valuable to contribute to environmental justice. We find ourselves asking: Is what we do in any way comparable to direct environmental activism, or remediation, or public educ
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Hang Ten
Whether it’s the first wave, second wave, or third wave, the endless summer of Covid-19 continues to wreak havoc on every shore around the art world. For commercial galleries that haven’t wiped out already, it’s sink or swim. Buoyed by multimillion-d
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Gaylord Chan, 1925–2020
I think Gaylord would have liked to be missed, but not mourned. It is not easy to think about him except in the most vivid present tense. Gaylord himself would surely complain in Hades if we relinquished thoughts of him to the past. It has never been
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Bumpy Recovery
Held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC), Sotheby’s 17 sales spanned fine art, antiques, wine, jewelry, and watches, and brought in USD 411 million—the seventh consecutive Hong Kong series total to exceed USD 400 million. The fi
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New Protocols
For its 50th anniversary, Art Basel in Basel had to cancel its real-life celebrations and opt instead for an online iteration (June 19–26), the fair’s second following the digital version of Art Basel Hong Kong (ABHK) in March. Organizers had initial
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Sites And Sights
Busan Biennale 2020: “Words at an Exhibition – an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems” For this year’s edition of the Busan Biennale, curator Jacob Fabricius invited ten fiction writers and one poet to write about the features of Busan. Their t
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Give It A Twist
“guileless”/“bone”/“desire”/“sinking.” These are among the roughly 40,000 words that flash on the black screens embedded in twin decrepit chaises longues, installed opposite one another at Catalina Ouyang’s exhibition “it has always been the perfect
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Whose Land?
Land reclamation is a fact of life in Singapore. For decades, the country has been one of the world’s largest importers of sand, maintaining a rhetoric and practice of expansion that began almost as soon as the British first laid claim to the island
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Rachel Teo
I developed a pet peeve during the first months of Covid-19: articles about art collectors. Do these conversations—which often sounded detached from the realities and needs of this ailing world—matter? It got me thinking: how can an art patron be rel
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Zheng Mahler
Flanked by hills and quarries in northeastern Jiangxi province, Jingdezhen is famed for its porcelain. The region’s rich deposits of kaolinite resulted in exceptional wares sought after by European colonial powers. Kaolinite is useful for another rea
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Miljohn Ruperto
A conversation with Miljohn Ruperto can feel like the mental equivalent of walking along multiple meandering paths and unexpectedly finding that they all converge. With interests in philosophy, art, and digital technology, the artist draws from diver
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Collective hajra cosmologies Waheed
You step into the darkness. You look up, and through the layers of leaves, in the night sky, there is light. As you begin to move, a voice speaks. “The spiral is much more than just a form… It expands and contracts, increases and decreases… it is the
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Looking at Looking
It was July 1, the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from the United Kingdom to China, when I headed to the Hong Kong Museum of Art to see Lam Tung Pang’s video installation Image-coated (2019). Projected onto a translucent screen over windows
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Allison chhorn
Designed to protect plants from the fluctuating forces of the wild, greenhouses are symbolic of humankind’s attempt to tame nature. In Cambodian-Australian filmmaker Allison Chhorn’s 46-minute docufiction The Plastic House (2019), however, one such e
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Diane severin Nguyen
A bloated plastic bag tied off with red tape expands and contracts—gulping breaths that disturb its sloshing contents and rustle the leafy surroundings. The film cuts to a close-up of blood-orange jelly stars, quivering within the bag’s yellow, water
ArtAsiaPacific2 min readCrime & Violence
Forensic architecture
What is driving the current season of outrage? One contribution is a new, powerful form of data analysis and evidence-based virtual modeling. The research agency Forensic Architecture (FA), in the decade since its founding, has been at the forefront
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Itinerary
Michael Rakowitz Jameel Arts Centre Dubai Jitish Kallat: Return to Sender Frist Art Museum Nashville 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN Multiple locations Sydney Sanctuary Aga Khan Museum Toronto Latiff Mohidin: Pago Pago National Gallery Singapore Hiros
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Art Directory
120 www.nyuad-artgallery.org nyuad.artgallery@nyu.edu New York University Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi T +971 2 628 8000 Mon–Sat 12am–8pm An academic museum-gallery presenting exhibitions by internationally-established artists, curators, and
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From Photo to Fine Art: Tim Gardner’s Transformative Paintings
Artists have been using optical devices to assist in the making of paintings and drawings since the Renaissance, or at least according to the Hockney–Falco thesis.1 The theory advanced by artist David Hockney and physicist Charles M. Falco argues tha
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22nd Biennale of Sydney: “NIRIN”
A boy stands on a mountain, blowing a tiny plastic bugle, clothes whipping in the wind. A dirge-like sound grows louder and louder, drowning out the boy’s jaunty music. The noise reaches a pitch so high that it becomes unbearable, an aural presence t
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Insane Park “I Have No Idea, Because I Have No Idea” And “Joy Of Painting”
In times of uncertainty, the human brain has a tendency to seek reprieve by deliberately detaching from reality. While exercise and entertainment have historically served as palliatives, the most engrossing diversion from today’s postmodern malaise i
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Unusual Tranquility
Vinyl on Vinyl gallery’s exhibition “Unusual Tranquility,” which opened in early July as Metro Manila cautiously emerged from lockdown, brought together figurative paintings and works on paper by Philippine artists Dennis Bato, Archie Oclos, Roberto
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Diagonal
“Diagonal,” curated by Leo Li Chen, opened at Magician Space amid the aftershocks of another wave of Covid-19 cases in Beijing. Exploring the performance of identity through the video works of eight artists in East and Southeast Asia, the show also i
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Lorna Simpson Special Characters
When Lorna Simpson debuted a suite of large paintings of ghostly, surreal figures—including a woman with a leopard’s face robed in leopard print standing over a leopard with a woman’s face—at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, it marked an artistic re
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Lananh Le Frozen Data
We can think of the title of the late Lananh Le’s exhibition at MoT+++, “frozen data,” as questioning the idea of memory or experience as collective, contained, and rational. After graduating in 2015 from Stanford University with a degree in comparat
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Michael Rakowitz
Michael Rakowitz the artist, the archaeologist, the radio broadcaster, and the historian all congealed at his eponymous traveling survey. Debuted at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the exhibition jetted to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea
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Joonhong Min and Shinuk Suh Rendered Reality
On July 21, I stepped into a gallery for the first time in five months. I hadn’t ventured further than my local supermarket for weeks, and while I longed to stand under the glare of gallery lights once again, the idea of making that pilgrimage into c
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Haider Jabbar Decapitation
In 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) executed an estimated 1,700 young men at a military base near Tikrit, in Iraq. Among the victims was a friend of Brussels-based artist Haider Jabbar, who, over the next four years, painted appr
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Liu Xiaodong Spring in New York
Liu Xiaodong’s exhibition “Spring in New York,” presented online by Lisson Gallery, offered small windows of solitude and contemplation amid the chaos that has erupted in the United States. The 34 exhibited works on paper record Liu’s extended stay i
ArtAsiaPacific6 min readEthnic Studies
Cutting To The Core
By Anish Kapoor Published by Steidl, Gottingen, 2020 In Australia, it is customary to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which one stands. While the gesture is too nominal to redress centuries of injustice faced by Indigenous Austr
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Norberto “Peewee” Roldan
On June 3, a fire broke out in the two-story, 1940s-style apartment housing Manila’s oldest artist-run nonprofit, Green Papaya. Located in Kamuning, Quezon City, Green Papaya has served as a communal platform for two decades, hosting talks, artist re
ArtAsiaPacific1 min readEarth Sciences
Preserving Communities Of The Sea
The world’s busiest shipping lanes, fisheries for the planet’s most populous region, untapped deposits of fossil fuels and minerals—the South China Sea and its reefs, atolls, and newly constructed islands comprise an uncharted territory under siege b

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