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40 Articles

Abu Dhabi Art to Host Largest Fair to Date

Held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, Abu Dhabi Art 2023 will take place from 22 to 26 November, 2023, at Manarat Al Saadiyat. Organised by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi, the upcoming 15th edition will be its largest yet, featuring 92 galleries from over 31 countries. The art fair is a culmination of Abu Dhabi Art’s year-long visual arts programme and plays a vital role in the burgeoning art scene of the West Asia, North Africa, and South Asia (WANASA) region. Abu Dhabi Art’s annual fair is an important cultural platform for West Asia. With 37 new and 55 returning galleries, this year’s edition…

Abu Dhabi Art to Host Largest Fair to Date

Objectified Relations

We often think of objects as lacking agency. Yet, the power they can have over humans is understood when we reference works of art—our attachments to them, what they represent, and the values we confer on them. With the rise of artificial intelligence and technology that animates ordinary objects like never before, our relationship to things has begun to change. The cover Feature of this issue is an interview with Kim Beom, an artist who imagines the consciousness or agency that objects might possess through projects dating back several decades. A playful postmodernist of the 1990s art scene in Korea, Kim explores philosophical questions about our perceptions and how these can be manipulated to humorous or tragic ends. Over the decades, his works have taken on new resonances with viewers…

Objectified Relations

PIO ABAD Pio Abad’s artistic practice is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects and is informed by events in the Philippines, where the artist was born and raised. His solo exhibitions include “Fear of Freedom Makes Us See Ghosts” at the Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila, in 2022. (See THE POINT) RUBA AL-SWEEL Ruba Al-Sweel is a multidisciplinary creative focused on online movements and digital communications. With a master’s degree in media and creative industries from Sciences Po, Paris, she has published on visual anthropology, focusing on the Gulf. She manages global communications at Art Jameel. (See FEATURES) VANESSA FAJEMISIN Vanessa Fajemisin is a writer and cultural curator living and working on the shared, unceded, ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, known as Vancouver. Her…

Tsherin Sherpa on Urgen Dorje Sherpa

Born into a Nepali family of traditional artists in Boudha, Kathmandu, a melting pot of diverse traditional Himalayan artists and communities, I was introduced to thangka painting at home. The traditional Tibetan Buddhist scroll-painting practice was central to the social fabric of my childhood. Among the artists I was surrounded by, my father, the traditional master painter Urgen Dorje, had the strongest influence on me. He was born in 1944 to a family of nomadic herders in Ngyalam, a village bordering of Nepal and Tibet. As the yaks grazed he would collect broad leaves from trees and practice line drawings on them. But because of his parents’ disapproval, he suppressed his interest in art throughout his childhood; when he turned 16 he moved away, leaving the family work behind. He…

Tsherin Sherpa on Urgen Dorje Sherpa

In the busiest month for Taipei of the postpandemic era, previously postponed exhibitions get their due. Despite heightened political tensions across the strait in anticipation of the upcoming presidential election in January, residents appear as ready as ever for the city’s peak art season. The upcoming Taipei Biennial, “Small World,” breaks from the previous thematic focus on ecological crises. Curated by Freya Chou, Brian Kuan Wood, and Reem Shadid, the 13th edition aims to explore the unknown, challenging the scales, values, and measures we are accustomed to. Starting from November 18, the Biennial’s organizer, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) will transform into an exploration space, hosting live performances such as that of artist Li Jiun-Yang. Known for sourcing imagery from Taiwanese temples and pop culture, Li will improvise mixing…

CONTROVERSY: PAY THE PRICE On August 24, a Beijing intellectual-property court found Chinese artist Ye Yongqing guilty of copying 87 works by Belgian artist Christian Silvain over a period of 25 years. The court ordered Ye to pay EUR 650,000 (USD 696,000) in damages and publicly apologize in the media, marking the most expensive fine arts settlement in China to date. Over the course of his career, Ye has made an estimated USD 15 million from the plagiarized artworks. Following artist-activist Lim Ok-sang’s conviction for sexual assault in mid-August, the Seoul Metropolitan Government removed several sculptures, including Earth’s Eye and Navel of the World (both 2016), from the Site of Remembrance in Namsan Park, dedicated to victims of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery. A key figure in the Minjung art movement,…

Israel-Gaza War Fractures Region

On October 7, Hamas militants fired 3,000 rockets into Israeli territory, invaded dozens of border towns, and stormed the Supernova psychedelic trance festival in the Negev desert, killing more than 1,400 people in total and abducting an estimated 200 hostages. In response, Israel embarked on a bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip ahead of a planned ground invasion that in the first 11 days has killed more than 3,000 people and displaced nearly half of the territory’s two million residents. Amid the devastation, regional artists have become victims of war. Thirty-six-year-old Israeli filmmaker Yahav Winner was found among the dead in the kibbutz Kfar Aza; he died protecting his wife and one-month-old daughter from Hamas militants. Winner’s films include Neurim, which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2020,…

Israel-Gaza War Fractures Region

In mid-September, the Barcelona-based Han Nefkens Foundation, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, M+ in Hong Kong, and the Singapore Art Museum named Beijing-based Hao Jingban the winner of its USD 100,000 Moving Image Commission 2023. Indian photographer Gauri Gill was awarded the 10th photography and sustainability Prix Pictet on September 28 for her black-and-white portrait series Notes from the Desert (1999–), receiving a prize worth USD 109,000. The 30th edition of the annual Wolfgang Hahn Prize, from the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, was been awarded to Anna Boghiguian, who will take home USD 105,000.…

On August 18, Japanese artist Tadaaki Kuwayama, known for his minimalist explorations of space, color, and surface, passed away at age 91 in New York. Kuwayama sought to revolutionize color field and monochrome painting into “pure abstract” art, devoid of historical context. Park Seo-Bo, a Korean artist revered as a pioneer of the Dansaekhwa movement, passed away on October 14 at age 91. Known for his Écriture series (1973–2023), Park influenced a generation of Korean artists to pursue meditative, process-oriented abstraction. His artworks are in collections of major public and private museums around the world.…

Art after Evidence

During the opening of the Honolulu Biennial in February 2019, a woman approached me and my wife Frances as we stood next to our newly commissioned installation. “I have been looking for these for 30 years,” she said, pointing to the plinth showcasing two-dozen 3D-printed sculptures we had created for the Biennial. The woman, it turned out, was Honolulu-based lawyer Sherry Broder. Since 1986, Broder has been part of a nationwide team of attorneys fighting to collect damages for a class of victims tortured and killed during the first Marcos regime. In 1994, they won a class-action lawsuit with a total settlement of USD 2 billion, one of the largest personal injury verdicts in United States history. Broder’s life’s mission has been to collect this settlement, hunting down shell companies…

Art after Evidence

Who Runs the World?

Women are causing ripples in the art world. Hillary Clinton used her magnetic charm to pull out of his studio the reclusive Ai Weiwei, who since decamping from Berlin to the countryside in Portugal, has been enjoying newfound rural solitude since late 2021—mainly traveling only for museum openings. He accepted the invitation to do a one-on-one talk with the former US Secretary of State for her husband’s Clinton Global Initiative forum in New York City in September. True to form, Ai was more animated when discussing social issues—from artificial intelligence to the ongoing refugee crisis— compared to the rather narrow confines of art, instead saving the latter for a sideshow appearance in Los Angeles to discuss one of his earliest video works, Chang’an Boulevard (2004), with Museum of Contemporary Art’s…

Who Runs the World?

Correction Point

HONG KONG In late August, Sotheby’s Hong Kong announced it would hold the first of several auctions of modern and contemporary artworks collected by the Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei, who in 2012 founded the private Long Museum in Shanghai and later a second branch in Shanghai and a satellite space in Chongqing. While maintaining that the works destined for sales come from their personal collection, Liu and Wang consigned a portion to Sotheby’s Hong Kong for the house’s auction week, (October 2–9), marking its 50th anniversary in Asia. The special sale, “A Long Journey,” was held on the evening of October 5 between Sotheby’s modern and contemporary sales. Of the 39 works from Liu and Wang, 29 sold for an accumulated total of HKD 544…

Correction Point

Demand for More, or Less?

SEOUL In the five-year partnership between KIAF (Sep 6–10), run by the Korean Galleries Association, and London-based, American-owned Frieze Seoul (Sep 6–9), the two fairs occupy different floors at the Coex convention center during the same week. Their dates coincide but their audiences are complementary. Frieze Seoul is an international art fair with a significant Korean focus, while KIAF is more oriented toward the domestic market and younger collectors. With the Korean economy slowing and a dramatic downturn in the domestic art market year-on-year, galleries arriving in Seoul had modest expectations ahead of the fairs. While North American museum groups grew in number, many Chinese buyers were on their first post-pandemic trip to Korea. For its sophomore edition, Frieze hosted more than 120 galleries of which more than 55 percent…

Demand for More, or Less?

WORLDING ADVENTURES

NOV 9–MAR 31, 2024 POWER STATION OF ART, SHANGHAI 14th Shanghai Biennale Cosmos Cinema The 14th Shanghai Biennale, “Cosmos Cinema,” is led by e-flux cofounder Anton Vidokle with a curatorial team of Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis. Located at the Power Station of Art, “Cosmos Cinema” creates a spacetime continuum across past and future to explore the intrinsic relationship between life on Earth and the universe, connecting ancient Chinese philosophy and artistic engagements with cosmology. Featuring more than 80 artists, the Biennale attempts to reposition Shanghai’s cosmopolitan history within East Asia, coinciding with China’s ambition to turn the city into a hub for the development of space technologies. NOV 18–MAR 24, 2024 TAIPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM, TAIPEI 13th Taipei Biennial Small World The 13th Taipei Biennial, “Small World,”…

WORLDING ADVENTURES

DIVERGENT DICHOTOMIES

Chan Ka Kiu HONG KONG Born in Canada and based in Hong Kong, multimedia artist Chan Ka Kiu concluded her recent three-month residency at De Sarthe Gallery with a solo exhibition titled “Late to the Party.” Dealing with the anxieties of aging, Chan referenced the infamous “27 Club” (a list of musicians and artists who died at 27) as the impetus for the exhibition. Here, Chan’s video installation Back & Forth & Back (2023), which uses found and AI-generated footage, narrates the journey of an AI horse’s afterlife as it travels from heaven to hell—a tongue-in-cheek reference to the visuals in Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1490–1500). In a sardonic response to the exhibition’s concept and mimicking the fountain in Bosch’s painting, her installation Happy Birthday…

DIVERGENT DICHOTOMIES

The pink dolphin of the Pearl River Delta is a lost species, long associated with Hong Kong but now more mythical than real as its numbers have dwindled to the point of extinction. The memory of them, or the imagination of them, as cultural signifiers, returns anew in Cici Wu’s new lantern-sculpture Foreign Object #2 Umbra and Penumbra (Dolphin) (2023). Constructed with bamboo and rice paper, the various-shaped lanterns she has made in recent years are central to her practice. They become visionary devices, illuminating the darkness and casting undefined shapes, light, and shadows, as if animating the ways our memories can be transformed and resurface in unexpected ways, invoking the interplay between our identity and memory. For Cici Wu, many of the questions she raises in her practice tackle…

SUNG NEUNG KYUNG

With a newspaper held outstretched, a man with a white chin beard, black ponytail, and gray fedora stood on stage. In a declarative voice, he read an article aloud in Korean, then placed the spread on the table before him and cut out a rectangle. He repeated the sequence: lifting the paper up and reading, cutting out a section, and holding the paper in front of his face. Next it was our turn. Lights illuminated rows of tables where more than 100 of us—all non-Koreans—as we stood and mimicked him, reading articles in our native languages, then cutting them out. The German exchange student next to me giggled, mid-Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article, after I read a quote from politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in The New York Times; the Shanghai art journalist…

SUNG NEUNG KYUNG

In Yu Hong’s paintings, the very nature of time is at stake. Her artistic practice contrasts the weight of history against present banality, merging significant and ordinary time alongside grand narratives and personal memory. These dichotomies aptly coalesce in her colossal, nine-meter-wide triptych The Ship of Fools (2021), in which Yu centers the composition on a vessel which is about to capsize. The painting’s title and theme are borrowed from one of Hieronymus Bosch’s panels in an iconic triptych of the same name from the 1490s, wherein a group of ravenous adults don’t seem to notice the menace that awaits them while they carry on dining. In Yu’s depiction, however, a dozen adolescents cling to the angled bow and sides, the only portion of the ship still protruding from the…

THE STORIES WE TELL

As a professional storyteller, there is perhaps no better history for Simone Fattal to divulge than her turbulent, inspiring own. After enduring a riotous and fraught youth in Beirut, the Damascus-born artist studied philosophy at the Ecole des Lettres before moving to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. But Fattal soon grew tired of the Western canon’s confines, returning to Beirut in 1969 and abandoning her prior philosophical pursuits in favor of creation. She started working as a visual artist (initially focused on painting) and before long was exhibiting in local galleries. In 1975 the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War halted her success, and five years later she fled to California and founded The Post-Apollo Press, an experimental publishing house responsible for publishing her late partner Etel Adnan’s poetry, among…

THE STORIES WE TELL

Kim Beom was once an artist’s artist, admired by those who knew him for his droll takedowns of modern art’s sacred conventions. Today, pirated copies of his video Yellow Scream (2012) are viral hits on YouTube, and he was the subject of a major retrospective in 2023, “How to become a rock,” at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul. Though his audience has widened in recent years, Kim has never altered his approach to interrogating the means of communication that can, or cannot, happen through art. Can a hammer become pregnant? Can a rock learn the poetry of the Korean modernist writer Jeong Ji-yong? Can a tool ever understand that it is just a tool? The son of sculptor Kim Se-Choong and poet Kim Nam-Jo, Kim studied painting at…

“How does one differentiate reality from dreamscape?” As a pertinent question raised by Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi, we may desire a more ambiguous boundary between the real and unreal, as the reality we live in—the climate crisis, war, political turmoil, economic hardship—could all be a dream. Yet, we can’t control our dreams, and our nightmares emerge as mirages of reality, absurd and fragmental. Confused, we might then suffer from madness, a syndrome caused by dementia, depression, sleep deprivation, and even emotional stress. Mark Chung’s Calenture (2023), a wooden structure covered with plastic sheets, is an oddly accurate manifestation of such hysteria. Occupying the unlit main gallery space of Rossi & Rossi in Hong Kong, Calenture was a wall-sized installation with a curvature reaching the ceiling built for his solo exhibition “Splinter.”…

Across 25 years of artistic practice, Yeondoo Jung has explored the theatrical space between individuals’ dreams and reality, their imaginations and history. While on an artist residency in Jeju Island, Jung encountered prickly-pear cactus plants and learned the seeds had originated in Mexico and were carried across the Pacific by the Kuroshio Current. Investigating the countries’ connections, Jung found that in 1905, a British merchant vessel, the SS Ilford, transported more than 1,000 workers and families from Incheon to Merida, in the Mexican state of Yucatan, to work in the henequen industry. He subsequently spent two years interviewing second- to fifth-generation members of the Korean diaspora in Mexico, giving form to the multipart project One Hundred Years of Travel (2023). Projected into a white-hued room with installations in henequen- and…

ELYSA WENDI & LEE WAI-SHING

A man enters frame right and tracks a small ravine as sunlight casts through the foliage, striking the ink-green, algae-covered ground. At times, he crawls, holding tight to the wall, trying to maintain his balance. The man is Ong Yong Lock, a veteran Hong Kong-based Malaysian dancer and choreographer, and the short film is A Long Walk (2022), co-directed by Elysa Wendi and Lee Wai-Shing and commissioned by Tai Kwun. But despite initial impressions that this film might be a covert reflection of Hong Kong’s political unease and social disruption, it is, in fact, a portrait of Ong and his struggles throughout a long and seasoned career. The title card appears, and in an instant all life drains from the picture—a reversal of the sublime switch from black-and-white to color…

ELYSA WENDI & LEE WAI-SHING

What is a monument? What values do monuments project into civic spaces? And what does it mean to work in a monumental format? The three-person collective Tromarama, comprised of Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans, and Ruddy Hatumena, conceived of their moving-image work Growing Pillars (2023) for the giant 65-by-110-meter screen on the M+ Facade as an intimate family tribute. Instead of digging into a nation’s history for the iconography of heroic and nationalistic tropes, each member of Tromarama explored materials from their own families’ past, uncovering stories—in some cases unknown to them about their own relatives—that revealed details of their individual heritage and, more widely, the stories of a nation in the postcolonial era. In Growing Pillars, Tromarama composed a multilayer animation incorporating old footage digitized from Betamax and VHS tapes,…

Treasures of a Drifter IDA EKBLAD

INSIDE BURGER COLLECTION There is no surer welcome for a graffiti artist than the humble iron gate: ornamental, industrial, and imposing, these barred portals present irresistible frontiers that invite as much as they repel. For Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad the fence circling a bus depot in Oslo was once an oblique point of entry, a place into which she could drift and paint murals on the walls and roof, leave her mark, and turn a municipal complex into a summer hideout with her peers. Ekblad has carried this dauntless free spirit into adulthood, creating paintings, sculptures, and installations, as well as building communities that are improvisational, nonhierarchical, collaged, and coltish. Staying true to her industrial-inspired roots, Ekblad’s artistic process often includes foraging discarded materials during dérives (“drifts”), a foundational term…

Treasures of a Drifter IDA EKBLAD

Tuan Andrew Nguyen Radiant Remembrance

It is hard to think of a more optimistic artist working today than Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Odd, given that his subject matter is the intergenerational trauma provoked by the long legacies of colonial war in his home country of Vietnam. His latest solo exhibition, “Radiant Remembrance,” at the New Museum in New York, transmuted pain through elements of the sublime, and the presentation of sculptures, video installations, and still photographs coalesced in a reflection on the legacy of violence across multiple countries. Under Nguyen’s spell, dark material shimmered. The first exhibition space juxtaposed a large Alexander Calder-esque mobile sculpture, A Rising Moon Through the Smoke (2022), with a 60-minute video titled The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). The film follows the story of Nguyệt, a young Vietnamese woman…

Tuan Andrew Nguyen Radiant Remembrance

She could lie on her back and sink

The exhibition of four artists “She could lie on her back and sink,” curated by Lisa Beauchamp, was a conceptual exploration of alternative knowledge as embodied by the historically mythic figure of the witch. Though rather than serve as a metaphor for the demonization of nondominant thinking, the witch was deployed in service of deconstructing other contemporary issues: colonialism, transgenderism, and psychedelic utopianism. The show’s strongest work was Ann Shelton’s i am an old phenomenon (2022–), lush photographs of roots, herbs, and fungi that hold medicinal or hallucinogenic qualities, here displaying a visual compendium of knowledge of the natural world held by wise women and witches. Shelton’s work refers back to collective female practices which were eradicated in the witch-hunts of the late Middle Ages, drawing connections between these purges…

She could lie on her back and sink

After the Landscape Theory

“Landscape theory” (fukeiron), as theorized in 1969 by film critic and anarchist Matsuda Masao, states that the landscape of modern Japan is banal in its sameness and that this homogeneity is a product of the state’s authoritarian structure. The center reproduces itself in the periphery to the point that any dichotomy is flattened; there is no more hometown, only a longing to understand the nation’s hometown: Tokyo. “After the Landscape Theory,” a group exhibition exploring the seminal theory’s influence, started with works from the present day before gradually moving back in time. With this reverse chronological order, the exhibition drew viewers from the contemporary omnipresence and ubiquity of the camera into spaces of slower viewing in order to understand the concerns of the 1960s, a time of student movements and…

After the Landscape Theory

A One and a Two: Edward Yang Retrospective

“A One and a Two: Edward Yang Retrospective” was the latest attempt by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) to grapple with the weight of Taiwanese history, following on from “The Wild Eighties,” a widely discussed exhibition earlier this year concerning the explosion of creativity that emerged after the end of martial law in Taiwan in 1987. In this comprehensive account, the museum explored the legacy of Taiwanese New Wave cinema through the lens of one its most admired figures, filmmaker Edward Yang, who died in 2007 aged 59. Yang, who was born in Shanghai and rose to prominence in the 1980s alongside fellow Taiwanese directors Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, was heavily influenced by new movements in global cinema, in particular Italian neorealism and modernism. Yang’s films include the…

A One and a Two: Edward Yang Retrospective

Eunice Sanchez Sa Ilog, Nagtatagpo (On Rivers, Gathering)

Like water, grief seeps into everything. It trickles through cracks. It gathers speed and rushes in. Filipina artist Eunice Sanchez found herself amid pools of sorrow in her second solo exhibition, “Sa Ilog, Nagtatagpo (On Rivers, Gathering)” at West Gallery. Following in her hometown’s tradition of going down the river after a funeral to wash away one’s sorrow, Sanchez comes to terms with loss through cyanotype photograms of moving water, wintering trees, and fading images of loved ones. Steeped in a blue hue, these small prints on paper, put together in assemblages, create a ghostly sense of stillness against the shattering tragedy of death. More than lamentation, the impulse to make art out of loss is often the desire to concretize one’s absence. In Permutations I & II (2023), Sanchez…

Eunice Sanchez Sa Ilog, Nagtatagpo (On Rivers, Gathering)

signals … 瞬息

Small and midsize art institutions survive in precarious conditions, buoyed by artistic energy yet at risk of capsizing amid cruelly indifferent waves of support. Twenty-seven years into its existence, the Hong Kong nonprofit Para Site marked a self-declared “new direction” with the six-month-long, three-chapter exhibition project “signals … 瞬息,” helmed by director Billy Tang and curator Celia Ho. Taking cues from the short-lived international artist-run Signals Gallery in mid-1960s London, Greek artist Takis’s eponymous antenna-like sculptures, and forms of kinetic art, Para Site’s curators adopted contingency and exigency as core concerns, reflected in projects by more than 25 artists and collectives, some of whose works evolved across the multiple chapters: “signals … storms and patterns” (from March to May); “signals … folds and splits” (June through July); and “signals ……

Jompet Kuswidananto Dream Express: Personalized History of Mysticism

In a dark, black gallery space a strange figure lay face down on top of shattered glass and an ornamental rug, its upper half draped in a multichromatic Jathilan robe used in Javanese folk dances to invoke spiritual possession. Its lower half was dressed in a pair of jeans, feet splayed at awkward angles, arms stretched out as if attempting to crawl, head morphed into that of a wolf, concealing any indication of consciousness. Caught between awareness and entrancement, Subterranean Thunder #1 (2023), this half-human, half-lupine figure—and, by extension, the entire exhibition—became a portal through which Indonesian artist Jompet Kuswidananto projected his personal encounters with mysticism. The installation was Kuswidananto’s way of representing its role as a catalyst for collective resistance and populist intoxication. For trance-inducing rituals, the element of…

Jompet Kuswidananto Dream Express: Personalized History of Mysticism

Matthew Krishanu On a Limb

Over the years, Matthew Krishanu has divulged enough of his life to have his experiences inform his paintings. Onto Krishanu’s landscapes, for instance, we project the knowledge that he grew up in Bangladesh, where his British father worked as a Christian minister, or that every year he would visit India with his Bengali mother. And although the figures representing the artist and his family are pared down, Krishanu’s minimalistic, childlike style complements the period of his life he draws from. While the autobiographical matters—the paintings are based on Krishanu’s memories and photographic records—there is little preoccupation with authenticity. Most scenes he constructs are not exact recreations and anecdotes are seldom made available to the viewer, turning these assemblies into vessels for our imagination. We enter through the autobiographical and leap…

Matthew Krishanu On a Limb

Cengiz Çekil I Am Still Alive

Stepping into Cengiz Çekil’s retrospective at Arter, “I Am Still Alive,” visitors were confronted by WHAT TIME IS IT? (2008), a work consisting of 12 clocks mounted in a circle on the wall. Imprinted with the artist’s name, each clock was one hour behind the next, with only one showing the local time in Istanbul. This initial encounter set the stage for the exhibition, reflecting the artist’s fascination with the interplay between temporality and timelessness. It captured the underlying tension experienced in Çekil’s sculptures and installations—namely, a sensation of being bound to time, acutely aware of its perpetual passing. Spanning his career from the mid-1970s to his death in 2015, “I Am Still Alive” took its name from Çekil’s influential work Diary (1976), which emerged from a turbulent period in…

Cengiz Çekil I Am Still Alive

Daido Moriyama Retrospective

Drawn from an archive spanning nearly six decades, Daido Moriyama’s latest retrospective at C/O Berlin induced slow looking at fast pictures. A carefully conceived presentation of prints, books, and video installations allowed viewers to take in distinct phases of the Japanese photographer’s frenetic production, yet the barrage of images remained dizzying in its cumulative effect. Apt, given that Moriyama was a pioneer of blurry vision. Moriyama’s signature are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus) style renders the chaos of contemporary life with an immediacy that was hitherto novel in the photographic history of Japan. A small point-and-shoot was his camera of choice, with the impact of the images heightened by Moriyama’s preference for high contrast monochrome film. He photographed incessantly, often eschewing composition or, in many cases, even looking through the…

Daido Moriyama Retrospective

Kader Attia & Mandy El-Sayegh Disfigurations

Human beings are apt to seek meaningful patterns in things, with a wealth of research suggesting that the human brain evolved in this way to aid learning and survival. But can the patterns we see be influenced by our education and our history, that is to say, by power? And if so, can they be changed or undone? In “Disfigurations,” Kader Attia, who partly grew up in Algeria, and Malaysian-born Mandy El-Sayegh experimented with this pattern-seeking instinct, hence why none of the artworks here were labeled, a negation of context that could be interpreted as an exercise in deconstructing the underlying forces—such as capitalism and the colonial gaze—that make up the contemporary world and inform these learned patterns. At first glance, the two rooms of the exhibition looked like a…

Kader Attia & Mandy El-Sayegh Disfigurations

Maiko Jinushi Intimacies and Distances

“Intimacy” and “distance” are oppositional concepts often used to map and define the relationship between oneself and others. For Tokyobased interdisciplinary artist Maiko Jinushi’s first solo exhibition in Canada, she explored relationships with others through dialogue and collaborative performances. And by utilizing a wide range of media, Jinushi created works as a “visual form of literary experience,” with four recent video installations and preliminary drawings. The exhibition opened with fuchsia text on a single-screen projection. Jinushi could be heard reciting the lines of contemplative free verse poetry from the short multimedia work Lip Wrap / Air Hug / Energy Exchange (2020). Using elements of recitation, simple animation techniques, and stark self-portraits and drawings, this work reflected the emotional state of those reluctant to experience direct physical contact yet still desiring…

Maiko Jinushi Intimacies and Distances

DEAR FRANKLIN By Kurt Tong Published by Editions Xavier Barral Paris, 2022 Somewhere between journalism, documentary, and historical fantasy, Kurt Tong’s genre-defying Dear Franklin (2022) reimagines the boundaries of a photography book. Its origin story is perhaps as unique as the book itself: after being instructed to collect a Taoist-talisman sealed trunk in 2018 from his friend’s deceased neighbor, Tong was thrust into the mysterious world of its contents. Handwritten letters, old analogue photographs, vintage magazines, and dusty notebooks—all belonging to the allusive Franklin Lung and his fiancee Dongyu—portray snippets of a life destroyed by the grand flux of history. A tragic, drawn-out love affair dominates the majority of book’s narrative, while the rest explicates the Japanese occupation’s catastrophic impacts on China and fascism’s concurrent rise in Europe. To his…

There is a certain mystery to Hanoi in early autumn: the air is soft, and despite the pollution it is almost translucent, while the light is heavy with honeysuckle. It was during this time of year that I visited painter Ha Manh Thang’s studio in Dam Tri, an enclave tucked away near the West Lake. Around 300 years ago the area was a silkworm village and home to a number of female Vietnamese poets, such as Ho Xuan Huong and Doan Thi Diem, who sought refuge here to bask in the mist that rises from the tranquil ponds and caresses the lotus leaves before dissipating into the idle dawn light. Ha settled in this landscape in 2019, on, as it happens, an autumn afternoon. As an artist who reserves such…

Somewhere between entangled botanic installations and environments that elicit voyeuristic tendencies lies Trevor Yeung’s investigations into distant intimacy and interspecies relationships. The Hong Kong-based artist is known for a practice that integrates found objects, and plants, creating staged scenerios representing modes of affection, sociability, and desire. For his recent exhibition, “Soft ground,” at London’s Gasworks, Yeung delved into the capital’s notorious cruising area of Hampstead Heath to explore the anonymous interactions between humans amid the park’s natural environment. One photograph taken by Yeung during his research shows a mushroom growing on the trunk of a tree above a discarded condom, highlighting the imposition of human desire on the natural setting through discreet, and often indiscreet means—a tacit reflection of his personal gaze and private proclivities. In an upcoming issue of…

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Recent ArtAsiaPacific Digital Issues Browse all back issues

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription March 1st, 2024 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 137 (Mar/Apr 2024): $15.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription January 5th, 2024 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Almanac 2024: $15.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription November 1st, 2023 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 136 (Nov/Dec 2023): $15.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription September 1st, 2023 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 135 (Sept/Oct 2023): $15.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription March 1st, 2025 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 142 (Mar/Apr 2025): $18.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription January 1st, 2025 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Almanac 2025 (Jan/Feb 2025): $18.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription November 1st, 2024 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 141 (Nov/Dec 2024): $18.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription September 1st, 2024 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 140 (Sep/Oct 2024): $18.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription July 1st, 2024 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 139 (Jul/Aug 2024): $18.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription May 1st, 2024 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 138 (May/Jun 2024): $15.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription March 1st, 2024 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 137 (Mar/Apr 2024): $15.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription January 5th, 2024 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Almanac 2024: $15.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription November 1st, 2023 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 136 (Nov/Dec 2023): $15.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription September 1st, 2023 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 135 (Sept/Oct 2023): $15.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription March 1st, 2025 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 142 (Mar/Apr 2025): $18.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription January 1st, 2025 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Almanac 2025 (Jan/Feb 2025): $18.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription November 1st, 2024 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 141 (Nov/Dec 2024): $18.00

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) Subscription September 1st, 2024 Issue

ArtAsiaPacific (Digital) 140 (Sep/Oct 2024): $18.00

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ArtAsiaPacific Magazine (Digital) Subscription March 1st, 2025 Issue

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