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john jervis — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:19:52 -0400

Hong Kong Bedazzled By Basel

john jervis — Tue, 21 May 2013 22:44:36 -0400

Blog/HongKongBedazzledByBasel

It was the question on the tip of every reporter’s tongue. What will Art Basel, opening this Thursday in Hong Kong, bring to the city? At a press conference earlier this year to mark the flagship’s take-over of local art fair Art HK, Marc Spiegler, the director of Art Basel, responded that the brand would boost Hong Kong’s international profile, citing the economic and cultural precedents in Miami Beach. But what has Art Basel actually done for Miami?

While the state’s low corporate tax rate and proximity to Latin America has made Miami into a commercial goldmine, the city offered little by way of art until Basel debuted there in 2002, effecting astonishing results on the city’s cultural landscape according to some commentators. The central arts district in Wynwood, for example, grew from four galleries in 2000 to over 70 today.

Public and private museums, along with theater companies, also benefitted from the international attention, which has challenged them to create year-round, world-class programming in addition to hosting the numerous satellite events surrounding the fair. In addition, many ambitious expansion projects have been undertaken by the larger institutions, including a USD 13.5 million plan to triple the size of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

But such advances have been slow, particularly for local commercial gallerists and artists. An article published days before last year’s Art Basel Miami still referred to Miami as a “city starting to come into its own.” While galleries continue to proliferate in the Wynwood area, their life spans tend to be short. Galerie Perrotin, a well-established gallery, lasted just over three years in the neighborhood, closing in January 2009. A sustainable gallery culture, moreover, does not exist there, and Art Basel does nothing to foster one. Last year only two out of the 257 galleries present at the art fair were from Miami, making it abundantly clear that the draw for the international collectors and arts professionals is not the local fare.

Art Basel Miami’s strength lies in its ability to foster connections between Latin American and international markets, and in Hong Kong, Art Basel may likewise bring together galleries from the West with those from Asia. Already its first iteration anticipates 48 international galleries, including at least ten from the Asia-Pacific. Hong Kong will receive major representation with 28 local galleries (albeit many among them global galleries with branches in Hong Kong). Unlike Art Basel Miami, locals won’t be snubbed.

While it is clear that the organizers of Art Basel have taken pains to retain the essential character of Art HK, as of yet there is no discernable correlation between Art Basel’s entrance and the advancement of Hong Kong’s art scene. Ultimately, the latter’s vitality will be in the hands of the Hong Kong art community itself.

Boya Boya Boya Ammar Al Beik

noelle bodick — Tue, 21 May 2013 00:03:53 -0400

Magazine/WebExclusives/BoyaBoyaBoyaAmmarAlBeik

“Boya Boya Boya,” a solo show by the Dubai-based Syrian artist and filmmaker Ammar al-Beik, was a profound elegy on the plight of ordinary—yet extraordinary—Syrians, manifested through an exploration of one man, Abou Hani, and his profession, shoe shining. Al-Beik met Hani in Lebanon, where the latter lives and works, two and a half years ago, and Hani’s shoe-shine box, and the objects and stories it holds, were the inspiration behind the works exhibited at Ayyam Gallery’s al-Quoz location in Dubai.

Included alongside the blue shoe-shine box and accompanying stool were scanned images of the box’s contents, photographs of Hani at work and a music video of the song “Boya Boya Boya,” performed by classic Lebanese singer Nassri Shams al-Din. In the video, al-Din sings about one man’s need to provide food, education and toys for his children with his earnings from shoe shining, bringing to mind the countless deprived children in today’s conflict-ridden Syria.

Walking into the 930-square-meter gallery space, visitors to the exhibition were first greeted with a personal message from the artist on the wall. In this text, al-Beik explained his feelings on conceptual art, saying it “doesn’t follow any trends,” and it is “an urgent need to express existence through objects, ideas, images, sounds and space.”

Only one work in the show had a title. Show Shine Box (2013) consists of the actual shoe-shine box, the stool and paraphernalia related to the profession, all purchased by the artist two years previously and presented in a glass vitrine in the first room of the gallery, very much in the fashion of relics at a natural-history museum. It was unexpected that the eight archival prints on cotton paper that hung on the surrounding walls and depicted scanned images of the tools from the box were at such a large scale. In comparison, the box itself was small and humble in stature.

The most political image among these prints depicted the grubby cap of a shoe-polish tin, with “Lion Shoe Polish” printed on it in English. A version of the phrase is also printed in Arabic, except al-Beik has altered the wording to read, roughly, “Lion Shoe Polish since February 22, 1971; al-Assad cleans shoes shoe polish.” The date, which is also written in English, is extremely significant as it was the date on which Hafez al-Assad resigned from the Syrian Air Force, an important turning point in the al-Assad family’s seizure of the Syrian presidency, a post they have held ever since. One cannot help but read this as a political dig at Bashar al-Assad, perhaps referencing how he treats the life of Syrian citizens like dirt, wiping them out like a shoe shiner would polish a smudge off a shoe.

This acerbic political commentary explored in shoe polish was juxtaposed with the unconventional beauty of an untitled scanned print of a shoe-shining cloth. Stained with black and brown circular smudges, the image uncannily suggests a woodblock print on fabric from an ambiguous country rather than the humble cloth that it actually is.

After exiting the first gallery, visitors walked through a hallway in which 14 documentary-like photographs of Abou Hani at work were presented on one wall—each mounted onto a small, white box—while al-Din’s music video played on another. Then, entering into the final gallery, visitors unexpectedly encountered the physical shoe-shine paraphernalia—a broom, sponge and rag, among other tools, each mounted and framed—that had been displayed as scanned prints in the first room at such a large scale that they were mostly unrecognizable as trade tools. Although not in vitrines, the manner in which these objects were presented again exuded a scientific and anthropological quality.

In “Boya Boya Boya,” al-Beik presented a visual surprise for anyone who has been following his recent career. The erudite, Zen-like aesthetics of his new works are a refreshing turn for al-Beik, who as a visual artist is best known for his eccentric, busy and colorful photographs; nonetheless, their apparent examination of social and political nuances is true to his enduring conceptual oeuvre.

Upscaling Ambitions From Small Nonprofits To Global Institutions

Jen Kwok — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:10:02 -0400

Magazine/83/UpscalingAmbitionsFromSmallNonprofitsToGlobalInstitutions

Introduction

In early March, seven influential figures, each laboring at diverse but vital coalfaces across the Asian art scene, gathered in Spring Workshop on the south side of Hong Kong Island. The possibilities offered by current and future models of the art institution were explored, and the nature of their contributions to and dependence on wider ecosystems—within both the arts and society—was questioned. During the daylong event, valuable insights were also transmitted on Skype by Hou Hanru and the indefatigable Shahidul Alam, the latter trapped on the wrong side of the gates at Singapore’s Changi Airport. Below is an edited transcript disputes, deliberations, dialogues and more.

Participants:

Shahidul Alam (SA)

Photographer whose work centers on issues of social justice, and founder of Drik Picture Library, Dhaka.

Wassan al-Khudhairi (WK)

The first director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, and specialist in modern and contemporary Arab Art.

Tobias Berger (TB)

Managing curator at M+, the new museum for visual culture in Hong Kong, which is scheduled to open in 2017.

Chang Tsong-zung (CT)

Curator and director of Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, and instrumental in establishing the international image of Chinese contemporary art.

David Elliott (DE)

Former director of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and currently serving as art advisor for the Central Police Station, Hong Kong.

Hou Hanru (HH)

Director of exhibitions and public programs at the San Francisco Art Institute from 2006 to 2012, and currently curating the 5th Auckland Triennial, opening in May.

Hyunjin Kim (HK)

Co-curator of the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008) and recently appointed as chief curator at the Ilmin Museum, South Korea.

Rudy Tseng (RT)

Independent curator and art collector based in Taipei, currently working as artistic director of the Dojima River Biennale in Osaka.

Valentine Willie (VW)

A pioneer in promoting Southeast Asian art, founding an art consultancy and launching five galleries across the region since 1996, and now promoting related scholarship

Louvre Abu Dhabi Presents Birth Of A Museum

Jen Kwok — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:47:54 -0400

Blog/LouvreAbuDhabiPresentsBirthOfAMuseum

On April 21, notable members of the international art community gathered in Manarat al Saadiyat, off the coast of Abu Dhabi, where the Louvre Abu Dhabi (LAD) opened its second exhibition “Birth of a Museum.”

Sheikh Hazza Bin Zayed al-Nahyan, vice chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, officially inaugurated the show and was accompanied that evening by VIPs including Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak al-Nahyan (minister of culture, youth and community development), Aurélie Filippetti (French minister of culture and communication), Jean-Luc Martinez and Henri Loyrette (current and former Louvre directors, respectively) and LAD’s architect Jean Nouvel, among others.

The exhibition brought together 130 pieces of the museum’s growing collection and made sometimes-convincing connections between these artworks across time and space, part of the mission of this so-called “universal museum.” The first gallery successfully juxtaposed contemporary art and works of antiquity—the statuette of the Bactrian princess standing alongside a two-headed Cypriot idol from the Bronze Age, placed next to Yves Klein’s Anthropometry (1960). These works depict the diverse ways in which humans have represented themselves in figurative form. “I wanted to start the exhibition with a simple and strong statement,” explains Laurence des Cars, curatorial director of Agence France-Muséums, an organization established in 2007 for the purpose of mediating this joint venture between the Louvre and the LAD.

Frieze Frame Take Two

noelle bodick — Fri, 17 May 2013 10:39:57 -0400

Blog/FriezeFrameTakeTwo

Playful insincerity loomed over Frieze New York in the form of Paul McCarthy’s Balloon Dog sculpture, invariably the first thing visitors commented on as it managed to both dwarf the 186 galleries clustered under the sprawling white pavilion and bulge with the excess of not being by Jeff Koons. Indeed, the irony of kitsch pervaded Randall’s Island, a small landmass east of Harlem, usually visited (if visited) for a different kind of play; the island’s permanent infrastructure are mostly recreational facilities and fields. Yellow school buses released loads of fairgoers onto a makeshift platform protecting them from sinking several inches deep in mud, while other visitors disembarked from specially chartered water taxis.

Despite its unconventional destination, the second annual edition of Frieze NY built well on the successes of the first. Retaining its lofty exhibition space and robust program of lectures and events, it was designed as much for the general public as for seasoned collectors—one could even take live audio tours.

This year, food was again a focal point of the fair, with anticipation of some pop-up eateries rivaling the art on display, and Tom Friedman’s giant Styrofoam junk food occupying prime real estate along one of the pavilion’s central arteries. Where last year’s fair saw Rirkrit Tiravanija grilling up sausages, Frieze 2013 installed a temporary restaurant as part of a series of specially commissioned projects. FOOD 1971/2013 revisited the legendary SoHo establishment of Gordon Matta-Clark, bringing some of the original chefs to curate daily menus. (Those less interested in the remake can find original footage in the founders’ 1972 documentary.) Although the genteel riverside picnic tables lacked the grit and spontaneity of the original establishment, the outdoor café offered a welcome alternative to the hour-long line for pizza from Bushwick.

Caricatures of age difference flourished elsewhere. Fairgoers flocked to the event’s token performance piece, Ann Lee (2011) by Tino Sehgal, on show at the Marian Goodman Gallery. In an otherwise empty room, a young girl explained how she had transformed from a Manga character into a three-dimensional being, confounding onlookers with questions about their own perceptions of daily life. Recording the work is prohibited, and ownership of the performance is rumored to cost six figures. Like McCarthy, Sehgal was enacting something of an inside joke. French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno first bought the rights to Ann Lee from a Japanese company in 1999, then inviting other artists to develop the fictional character.

From A To Zine Shoppinghour Magazine

noelle bodick — Thu, 16 May 2013 05:00:22 -0400

Blog/FromAToZineShoppinghourMagazine

Shoppinghour Magazine, a London-based publication founded in 2008, collects words, images, thoughts and experiences relating to contemporary life. Check out shoppinghourmagazine.com. All images copyright petereramian.com.

From A to Zine is a showcase of zines and small press publications. Created by our designer, Jen Kwok.

Art Fare Michael Rakowitz S Dar Al Sulh

noelle bodick — Wed, 15 May 2013 03:52:33 -0400

Blog/ArtFareMichaelRakowitzSDarAlSulh

Michael Rakowitz believes art can be invisible. His work has hidden behind a Brooklyn storefront (Return, 2004–), nestled inside heated tents (ParaSITE, 1997–), fuelled a food truck (Enemy Kitchen, 2004–), paraded as a main course in a Park Avenue restaurant (Spoils, 2011), and, for seven nights in May, wafted through a pop-up restaurant in Dubai’s Traffic art space.

Dar al Sulh, commissioned and co-produced by The Moving Museum as part of its recent “Tectonic” show, is billed as the first Arab-Jewish restaurant in the Arab world, serving recipes culled from the culinary repertoire of Rakowitz’s grandmother, an Iraqi Jew who fled Baghdad in 1946. “You are eating a dying language from the plate of a ghost,” informs an eerie sign on the threshold, stressing the “endangered” status not only of the dishes served, but of Arab-Jewry itself.

The title, which can be translated as “Domain of Conciliation,” harks back to the halcyon days prior to the emergence of the state of Israel. In Iraq, “oriental” Jews, present for millennia, lived harmoniously with their Arab neighbors, until they fell on the wrong side of both Arab and Jewish nationalisms. In the 1940s, the Jews either fled Iraq, or were ensnared in the “rescue” net cast out by Israel. Dar al Sulh, like a time machine infused with spices and music, intends to reactivate this bygone era.

Like other Rakowitz works, Dar al Sulh is as intricate as it is politically charged. A pinch of agitprop, a dash of performance, and the artist concocts a critical moment wherein guests, almost in spite of themselves, wrestle with thorny issues.

The work is heir to Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen, a Chicago food truck that teamed Iraqi immigrant cooks with US veteran sous chefs. The same heritage recipes—kubba qari’ya, tabyit, amba salad—were served to an American public momentarily sensitized to the complexity of the demonized “other.” While Dubai’s Dar al Sulh tackles insidious Arab versus Jew antagonism, it is fuelled by the same will to provoke exchange. “The critical aesthetic moment in the work,” reveals Rakowitz, “is in the smells and the consumption. I try to render my intention through the senses and the proximity of who is next to you.”

Ultimately, the success of the work hinged largely on your dining companions. Up to 80 people congregated nightly at long communal tables. The discussion ricocheted off of the evening’s many stimuli (music, vintage plates, storied tableware, a worn photo illustrating Palestinian Jewish solidarity). Older Iraqis came out of the Dubai woodwork, some of whom brought a tinge of resistance, like the couple who complained they had paid for Jewish food, “but there was nothing Jewish about it” (which was, of course, the point). “Antagonism is part of all this work,” says Rakowitz. “I appreciate people who can bring difficult information. Or disdain.”

But such encounters seemed rare. Given the high risk of inciting municipal ire with Dar al Sulh, little was done to promote the work prior to opening, so it remained a bit of a Dubai art-world secret. Unsurprisingly, the gathering at times felt more like a networking event than a space of discourse à la Enemy Kitchen.

“Does everyone realize they are sitting in an artwork,” wondered aloud one of my art-world neighbors, oblivious to Rakowitz’s pedigree in making work that blurs into the real world. If nothing else, Dar al Sulh has whet the local appetite for art that doesn’t rely wholly on the idea that it is artwork. As a result, Dubai is looking forward to future iterations of Dar al Sulh: as one fellow diner summed up on closing night, “We’re still hungry.”

Biennale Of Sydney Announces Theme And Artists

noelle bodick — Tue, 14 May 2013 04:07:34 -0400

News/BiennaleOfSydneyAnnouncesThemeAndArtists

The 19th edition of the Biennale of Sydney, opening March 2014, will celebrate art’s ability to envision future, possible worlds. The director of “You Imagine What You Desire,” Juliana Engberg, hopes to remind audiences that “art is not divorced from the cultural conditions, political, social and climatic environments in which it is generated,” and that a “happy anarchy” is possible through works that inspire and activate imagination.

Artists to partake in the biennale so far include Yael Bartana, Ulla von Brandenberg, Mircea Cantor, David Claerbout, Yingmei Duan, Krisztina Erdei, Douglas Gordon, Henna-Riikka Halonen, Roni Horn, Mikhail Karikis, Laurent Montaron, Agnieszka Polska, Augustin Rebetez, Maxime Rossi, Wael Shawky, John Stezaker, Corin Sworn and Tori Wrånes.

Engberg, director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, was presented with the Australia Council Visual Arts Award earlier this year. Noted for her contributions to the Australian art scene, Engberg has introduced internationally renowned artists to the country including Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Kruger and Pipilotti Rist.

Replace Alter Adorn Ali Kazma

Jen Kwok — Fri, 10 May 2013 05:22:24 -0400

Magazine/83/ReplaceAlterAdornAliKazma

Ali Kazma is quite clear. On the day we meet for lunch in Istanbul in early March, he makes it clear that he is not in Turkey. He is “underground,” trying to concentrate on editing during this brief two-week stint back in the country. He is also clear that he is making an exception to talk to me, for which I am grateful. Above all, he is clear that “Resistance,” the new project he is producing for the Turkey Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, is a series of between 12 and 15 high-definition videos, each between five and nine minutes in length, to be shown on five large screens.

We don’t make small talk. Within two minutes, Kazma is articulating what he wants to say about his subject—the human body—“as a platform of resistance to the horizontalization and the complete abstraction and codification of the world,” the ways in which it is “poked, written on, operated on, transformed, used to perform and appropriated in the form of the robot.” He jokes, “I am interested in how the body can be like an embarrassing cousin who shows up at a party at the wrong time. You get hungry, you get fat, you get sick, you have gas, your eyes go bad. The body needs constant care and attention. It takes you places and gives you unique experiences, but it can also really embarrass you and let you down. And, ultimately, it always lets you down.”

Kazma has a wry sense of humor. His other mode of speaking is quite critical—he can be brutally clear about what he doesn’t like. “This condition [of the body] is completely overlooked by the new code of the world, which is: You can do it! Think positive! We can all do this and we can all do that. But, in the end, this is a very one-sided, ideological and cynical outlook. The body is such an obvious point of resistance. I cannot exchange my experience for yours. This uniqueness is what still stands as one possibility to resist the bulldozing of all values.”

At the time of our meeting, he had finished five of the videos for “Resistance,” after recording footage at more than 16 locations, including New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and Istanbul—all major urban centers that he sees as epicenters of what he and I conspicuously do not call neoliberalism, but which, between the two of us, we understand nonetheless as something like “the way we live now.” In these works, Kazma is also examining spaces of bodily transformation or control—their architecture and design, in addition to what goes on there. His list of such locations includes the interiors of the Galatasaray High School in Istanbul, a Turkish prison, a New York theater, a London tattoo parlor, a Berlin robotics laboratory, a film set in Paris, hospital operating rooms and weight-lifting gyms—all places where the body is shaped, altered, confined, displayed and adorned.

The cycle of videos is not a new turn for Kazma. He describes it as an intensification and expansion of his ongoing “Obstructions” series (2005– ), which presently is comprised of 16 videos focusing on people at work—a taxidermist, a ceramicist, a clock-maker, a chef, a brain surgeon, dancers, a factory worker making jeans, a steelworker and others. These videos are characterized by a silent fascination with the process of labor. There are no narratives or voice-overs, just a precise attention to the details of how these individuals use their tools and interact with the products of their vocation.

In all of Kazma’s works, the subjects come through on their own terms. He explains to me how over time he has developed tactics to disappear in front of people, even though he is holding the camera. He stands at an angle, he moves slowly to avoid alerting them when he is interested in something, he doesn’t ask questions. He says that the people he films quickly get absorbed in their tasks, but his favorite moments are the irregular ones when the routine is punctured—for example, he loves it when someone drops something.

Kazma began making videos in 1998 while studying film in New York, but he prefers the art context to the film one. He felt like an outsider in the latter, as he was never interested in making narrative works. Once you give up on this, Kazma explains, you are relegated to the genre of experimental filmmaking—which, he laments, is considered by the film industry, and even by film festivals, as “the ghetto or dustbin.”

Kazma’s videos are as handcrafted as a video can be. They have a single creator. He shoots all of the footage himself. He does the sound. He edits them himself. Although the Venice Biennale commission necessitated hiring a producer to help him access certain sites, he does not collaborate; instead he forms deep personal relationships with his subjects.

When discussing “Resistance,” I ask him how his series compares to those American television programs that depict extreme surgeries, or glorify the brutal and often gruesome acts of transformation that people undergo. Kazma replies simply, “Because they are doing it, I have to do it.” He wants to return the human body to dignity. For him the ethics of filmmaking and representation are clear. His responsibility, in terms of bringing new images into the world, is to avoid creating crass sensationalism or pornography, which level experiences to those found in other forms of violence. It is his duty, he says, to distinguish between what he finds obscene and what is necessary, and to make sure that the images themselves correspond to the reality he witnesses. Quoting John Berger’s Art and Revolution (1969), he says, “The essential quality of the legless man is that he is alive, not that he is legless.”

Kazma explains that his images are what teach him, and that he remains interested in learning how to live, how to be free of the defeatism occasioned by this unnamed thing that we aren’t calling neoliberalism. He points to his arms, his head, his chest, saying that something might be clogging an artery here or here or there. He says we carry death, in order to live freely. He smiles.

Perdido Eden

noelle bodick — Fri, 10 May 2013 03:54:46 -0400

Magazine/WebExclusives/PerdidoEden

The sense of dislocation is immediate, and visceral.

Sitting in the center of the gallery’s pristine space—which is situated in one of Singapore’s most upscale malls—is a small pyramid of broken concrete slabs, topped by a lightning-shaped shard of aluminum. It appears as if the elements have reduced These Weeks Scatter Like Seconds (2012), by Filipino artist Paul Mondok, to this pile of wreckage, which functions here as a memento, an evocation of the gritty milieu from whence it emerged. What is most compelling about Mondok’s piece is its context. The disjuncture between rough-hewn construction debris and the gallery’s smooth, glimmering surfaces constitute a broader statement on two antithetical urban ecologies: that of Manila and Singapore.

Perdido Eden, curated by Isabel Ching, attempts to conjure a sense of Manila as a lived entity. As the title (“lost Eden”) suggests, the experience of spatial estrangement is central to its project. Ching’s catalogue essay quotes a visitor to the city: “Manila is not for the faint of heart . . . [There are] makeshift houses made of corrugated sheet metal, cardboard boxes, plastic awnings, and other junk scavenged from a dumpsite; naked homeless kids washing in dirty unsanitary water; people begging; people sleeping on the pavement . . . ” This is a slice of life from Southeast Asia as most people would envisage it, a densely packed dystopia dogged by economic and infrastructural underdevelopment—made all the more cogent for its juxtaposition against the sleekness of the exhibition site.

MM Yu’s selection of work here demonstrates a tension between the city’s blighted urban fabric and its aesthetic re-imagining. Her Untitled (2012) is an abstract canvas of rainbow-hued paint drips, while Standstill (2000–2012) is a series of photographic images of Manila’s slums, landfills and dumping grounds. Yet, even in the latter, one detects accents of color amidst the otherwise dull palette, a spectrum of discarded objects from containers to straws to grocery bags. Put in conversation with these snapshots, Yu’s painting becomes more than a mere tribute to the legacy of color field abstraction, particularly Washington Color School artists like Gene Davis, or, more recently, Turner nominee Ian Davenport. The multitude of individualized, painterly streaks in Untitled serves to transform chromatic details of the photographs—details peeking through the cheerless landscape like obscured lives—into a lush, vibrant tableau. The work serves as a reminder of the human existences that inhabit an otherwise inimical terrain.

Gary Ross Pastrana’s White Flag (2012–13) bears testament to the increasing vocal ideological battles being waged in the public sphere (of which the Occupy movement was the most notable). Created while the artist was in residency in Thailand, the image documents a makeshift Philippine flag sewn together from old t-shirts and then raised over a balcony in Bangkok. The vista below is tranquil, belying the massive disruptions the city has suffered in recent years from the conflict between royalists and supporters of deposed premier, Thaksin Shinawatra. Pastrana’s white-shirt flag riffs on the colors of the yellow and red shirts, as the two camps are respectively dubbed, while holding out the possibility of a truce. Though speaking to the current situation in Thailand, the work’s broad thematic engagement evokes socio-political movements elsewhere in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, a country which has seen its share of democratic uprisings, beginning with the 1986 People Power Revolution that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Finally, Victor Balanon’s cinematic dreamscapes in black-and-white provide an elegiac coda of sorts to the show’s concerns. Part of an eponymous series, Dream of the Nameless Hundred XXXVI and XXXVII (both 2013) rework scenes from Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, Nostalghia and Zerkalo, rendering them in a muted, velvety chiaroscuro. There is neither depiction of urban decline nor social upheaval here. Instead, a melancholic reverie provides an escape from Balanon’s native Manila, his oneiric utopias the obverse of the city’s stark, brutal realities.

Weight Of History The Collectors Show

noelle bodick — Thu, 09 May 2013 23:59:42 -0400

Magazine/WebExclusives/WeightOfHistoryTheCollectorsShow

It’s difficult to imagine a private collector buying something like Thai artist Montien Boonma’s Nature’s Breath: Arokhayasala (1995). The installation is comprised of modular, makeshift columns formed from metal mesh boxes, the pillars arching at their summits to support numerous bags filled with medicinal plants. It seems incongruous, but eventually one figures out that the sharp, bitter fragrance of dried herbs drifting through the gallery emanates from the cryptic assemblage of industrial objects.

Yet Boonma’s deliberately self-contradictory work—caught in a tension between the physical presence of sculpture and the fleeting ghostliness of scent—is striking, making it one of the highlights of the third annual Collectors Show at the Singapore Art Museum. In a turnaround from the conceptual thinness of the previous year’s show, the present edition, titled “Weight of History,” attempts to demonstrate that private collecting and contextual complexity are not necessarily incompatible; individual art collections may yet prove fertile ground for weighty subject matter.

Similarly, Singaporean Tang Da Wu’s Same Same and No Difference Between Unity and Self-Destruction (1994–2010) hardly looks as if it belongs in a living room somewhere. A pile of hammers held together by nails, the work has been said to simultaneously offer an abstract portrait of former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and to constitute a vision of a tenuous body politic, brought about by the sheer force of Lee’s personality. Here, however, the piece seems to allude not just to historical narratives, but current political realities: the hammer is the symbol of the opposition Workers’ Party, which, since the game-changing General Elections of 2011, has gone on to capture an unprecedented number of seats in parliament. Obliquely, cannily, the inclusion of Same Same suggests shifts in the political landscape of the so-called nanny state of Southeast Asia, conflating past and the present, authoritarianism and a burgeoning pluralism.

The pressures of tradition are foregrounded in Gonkar Gyatso’s Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky (2011). A Buddha statue sits on a pedestal in a gold-and-cream-colored gallery, the soft effulgence of the lights overhead veiling the space in a shimmery glow; the scene evokes the candlelit and gold-leafed icons found in Buddhist shrines. Gyatso, however, has plastered the surface of the sculpture and the surrounding walls in children’s stickers, a parade of bright colors and stereotypical, anodyne imagery. The incongruity between sacred idol and mass-produced kitsch is instructive: the figure assumes the bhumisparsha mudra, or gesture of touching the earth, which symbolizes the attainment of enlightenment. The spiritual awakening of the Buddha, in this case, is rendered ironic, mutated into a statement about the incursions of popular culture and globalization into Tibetan socio-religious traditions.

It is Yee Sookyung’s Translated Vase (2007) that provides the ultimate moment of self-reflexive skepticism. The artist has combined pieces and fragments of ceramic ware—those collectible objects par excellence—into a grotesque new form, the result resembling something out of sci-fi or anime. (Think the final scene of Akira.) Here, then, is the culture of collecting turned on its head: the bloated, bulbous amalgamation of cast-off ceramic bits, of broken, fractured remainders, serves to caricature the aura and the authenticity of antiques so fetishized by their admirers. In utilizing a material closely associated with the history of art and of collecting in East Asia, Yee articulates instead a wry, satirical view of the acquisitive practices that so often underlie the determination of art historical canons. Here are no picturesque landscape paintings or conspicuously aesthetic objects, no uncritical celebration of individual taste; what we are presented with, instead, are the broad, socially-oriented engagements that may—and do—inform private visions.

Untitled Selection Shiyuan Liu

noelle bodick — Thu, 09 May 2013 00:37:49 -0400

Blog/UntitledSelectionShiyuanLiu

Shiyuan Liu’s The Edge of Vision, or the Edge of the Earth will be on view at Art Basel in Hong Kong. See more of Shiyuan Liu’s work here.

Flatstone Mariko Mori

john jervis — Thu, 09 May 2013 00:37:18 -0400

Magazine/WebExclusives/FlatstoneMarikoMori

Japanese artist Mariko Mori recently held a major exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, which showcased key pieces created over the past decade. Last month, two acclaimed artworks from the retrospective were on view for the first time in Hong Kong at de Sarthe Gallery.

Titled “Mariko Mori: Flatstone,” this modest exhibition consisted of the floor installation Flatstone (2006) and the sculpture Tom Na H-iu (2006), the latter of which perhaps best captures the artist’s gradual transition away from her earlier self-portraits. Since the late 1990s, Mori has been increasingly inspired by her observations of nature, her works conveying universal concerns of the human experience.

One aspect of Mori’s highly diverse oeuvre reflects her growing interest in prehistoric cultures, leading to her archaeological fieldwork. The title work of this exhibition emerged out of the artist’s research into the people of Japan’s mid-Jōmon era (3500 to 2500 BCE), an agrarian society that honored spirits of nature.

Upon entering the gallery space, viewers were greeted with Flatstone’s 22 white ceramic forms, each resembling a smooth, large-scale pebble. These stones create a visual path, the viewer’s gaze following their circular expansion outward from an ornate acrylic vase at their center. Alluding to the Jōmon shrines used in ceremonies celebrating the arrival of the winter solstice, the stones are a moment of transition, or renewal, from winter to spring.

The work was originally meant to be displayed indoors, but gallery founder Pascal de Sarthe, who owns the piece, asked for the artist’s permission to display it outside, having limited room in his home. Mori made slight material alterations to Flatstone to accommodate the outdoor setting, but one cannot help but question whether this new location, and the consequent exposure to the elements. have stunted the work. What was originally a clear, translucent vase now looks golden, having undergone a natural weathering process.

While Flatstone’s expansive display took up the main exhibition space, Mori’s Tom Na H-iu was tucked in the corner, at the end of the adjacent hallway. With similar contours to the ceramic stones, this acrylic sculpture stands erect, its translucent surface catching the light and revealing its pearl-like luster.

The work derives its name from an “in-between” place, where, according to ancient Celtic mythology, souls waited to be reborn. The monoliths were placed to guide spirits back to the earthly realm. Mori’s adaptation references this belief, while also doubling as a metaphorical gateway to the universe, where stars also undergo a cyclic life journey. Her larger sculpture of the same name is lined with LED lights, which connect to an observatory at the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research in the University of Tokyo, flashing as supernova explosions occur in the universe. The death of one star is used to create new patterns of light. Disappointingly, this smaller version of Tom Na H-iu remains merely a shell, and the connection with the cosmos is lost, even if its intimate scale, simple form and iridescent surface succeed in retaining elements of the eternal.

Though small in scope, one should not underestimate the substance of this show. The strength of Mori’s works lies in her ability to layer meaning while preserving a minimalist aesthetic. Perhaps giving Tom Na H-iu more space might have enhanced the viewing experience, allowing visitors to walk around the sculpture; nonetheless, the exhibition provided a moment of quiet refuge and contemplation amid Hong Kong’s bustle.

Inflatable Art In Hong Kong

noelle bodick — Wed, 08 May 2013 11:41:09 -0400

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An improbably large cockroach, suckling pig and pile of excrement are among the inflatable sculptures that arrived on Hong Kong’s West Kowloon waterfront last week. Welcome to the museum without walls where the future M+—due to open in 2017—has populated its construction site with temporary, vinyl art.

Bordering on the compressed bustle of the city, the show is a continuum of the street and appeals to the passerby in the same way as an amusement park or fair. The works, however, are not trivial in their intention or mild in their effect. A 16-meter high pile of feces by Paul McCarthy sits suggestively close to the ICC (International Commerce Center) Tower, while the symbol of Buddhist spirituality, a lotus flower, by Choi Jeong Hwa, has turned black, withering on the reclaimed promenade. Other works surfeit the viewer’s baser appetites and desires. Cao Fei enlarges a suckling pig, a traditional Chinese delicacy, to gross proportions. Across the park, a long lady, imagined by Tam Wai Ping, has fallen headfirst onto the waterfront.

The seven outsized sculptures are a catchall of styles: comic, dark, monumental, banal—often all at once. At their best, the works—like Jeremy Deller’s bouncy replica of Stonehenge, a sacred monument cordoned off since 1977—consciously carve out public space in the densely packed and fiercely commercial city.

Here’s a look at the opening day . . .

Whats Up Hong Kong

noelle bodick — Wed, 08 May 2013 00:19:28 -0400

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The “What’s Up” blog tours art spaces across the Asia-Pacific region.

Roberto Chabet Dies Aged76

noelle bodick — Mon, 06 May 2013 05:49:12 -0400

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Known as the father of Philippine conceptual art, Roberto Chabet passed away on Tuesday, April 30 following a cardiac arrest at the age of 76. According to relatives, Chabet was hospitalized Monday with a high fever and suffered a first heart attack on Tuesday. He succumbed to a second heart attack that same day. The country is mourning a teacher who inspired a generation of Filipino artists and curators.

Part of Chabet’s legacy is the 13 Artists Award, which Chabet initiated in 1970 as the founding museum director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). The annual award, honoring the 13 Modernists in Philippine art history, recognize young artistic talent in the Philippines. Under his brief tenure, Chabet established CCP as a prime venue for artistic experimentation and collaboration, and also mounted his first large-scale sculptures and installations in this space. During this same period, he received the 1972 Republic Cultural Heritage Award.

For over thirty years following his term at the CCP, Chabet taught at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts (UP CFA), encouraging students to find their own meaning in their art practice. He became a father figure to many of the established and innovative artists in Manila today such as Nilo Ilarde, Juni Salvador, Pardo De Leon, Jonathan Olazo, Wire Tuazon, Yasmin Sison, Geraldine Javier, Louie Cordero, Nona Garcia, Ringo Bunoan and Poklong Anading. Arguably the most influential and well-loved artist-curator of contemporary art in the Philippines, Chabet organized numerous landmark exhibitions over his lifetime, often featuring works by his students.

Though visibly weakened from a previous stroke and often seen in a wheelchair, Chabet remained highly active in the art circuit up until his death. He exhibited his own work, provided curatorial counsel and continued to support other artists and former students. His last show, “China Collages, Ziggurats, & Other Unexhibited Collages,” ended last April at the West Gallery in Quezon City, and his work is currently on view in “The Mona Lisa Project,” a group exhibition at the CCP. In February 2013 at Finale Art File, Chabet exhibited a stunning show titled “Labyrinth.” The works included an actual labyrinth constructed out of hollow blocks covered with glass shards. In the two spaces above the ground floor labyrinth, a red nylon cord descended from the ceiling into tangles across the floor, and a series of red fluorescent lights in the shape of arrows pointed in all directions. It was impossible to be unaffected by this exhibition that was both poignant and playful.

Drawing from his background in architecture, Chabet’s work often revolves around the transitory nature of commonplace material. His visual language uses a series of recurring materials and objects, such as plywood, neon lights, shelves with metal brackets, crowbars, boats, parachutes, drums, harmonicas, tables, mirrors, canes, clipboards, maps–an inventory of anxious objects waiting to collide. In 2011, Asia Art Archive (AAA) and the Lopez Memorial Museum presented The Chabet Archive, a milestone research and digitization project titled “Roberto Chabet: Fifty Years,” with works touring galleries in the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong. From his first solo exhibition at the Luz Gallery in 1961 to his most recent exhibitions, the Chabet Archive is an unprecedented mapping of the artist’s body of work and his contributions to Philippine art. The Chabet Archive is now a precious resource for those interested in the history of conceptual art and the extraordinary role played by its founding father, as well as a starting point for young Filipino artists who will no doubt continue to be inspired by Chabet’s work.

Ai Weiwei

john jervis — Sun, 05 May 2013 22:45:43 -0400

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Ai Weiwei’s life is indivisible from his art. Even his address, 258 Fake, posted outside his studio-home in Caochangdi, is an artful wordplay. In Chinese, the characters that sound like “fake” (发،ٌ) mean “scientific development,” a Communist Party catchphrase. The spoken words also sound like how a Chinese person would say “fuck” (Fa-ke).

Across the street from the compound two policemen doze in the front seats of an unmarked van. Mounted on a nearby telephone pole, a video camera focuses on Ai’s green metal front door to monitor the comings and goings. Just inside the entrance, F-U-C-K is spelled out in large neon letters on the courtyard wall. The word recalls the “Fuck Off” show Ai co-curated in 2000 with Feng Boyi, in Shanghai, and his series “Study of Perspective” (1995–2003), featuring his extended middle finger directed at, among other icons of power, Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square.

In the center of the grassy courtyard a tent has been erected, a prototype for the interactive 1,000-tent installation planned for an eco-art project in western Germany. The tents will be available for use by the public for a nominal price. Nearby, a cat preens itself in the sun.

Ai lives and works in the studio-house compound, which he designed himself to accommodate his complex life. Friends come to hang out and eat, smoke and talk, joke or play poker. Journalists come for a scoop. The studio was used for the set of his video pastiche of South Korean phenomenon Psy’s pop hit “Gangnam Style.” At the end of the video, Ai dances while wearing handcuffs, commenting directly on the government’s crackdown on freedom of expression and his own arrest in 2011.

Featured in the video are his staff and his close friend, the musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou, a regular at the studio, who was also present during Ai’s 2009 beating and detention by police in Chengdu, where Ai was attempting to testify in the trial of human-rights activist Tan Zuoren. Zuzhou wrote and sang the score for Ai’s recent short film, How to Scientifically Remove a Shiny Screw with Chinese Characteristics from a Moving Vehicle in Eighteen Turns (2013). Shot through the rain-streaked window of a city bus headed across Tiananmen Square, the piece refers to the recent 18th Chinese Communist Party Congress, during which time all windows on public transportation were screwed shut for “security” reasons—in fact, so that people couldn’t yell out the windows or throw out protest leaflets.

In Ai’s main office, half a dozen people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, sit clicking away at computers. An assistant comes over to explain that there’s a delay in the morning’s schedule because the police chief in charge of Ai’s probation has made an unexpected visit. An hour later, Ai politely walks the plainclothes agent through the courtyard, past the FUCK sign, to the front gate. Back in the office, Ai explains that the man was confronting him about the nonstop stream of interviews he’s given lately. It’s apparently a violation of his probation to discuss his incarceration with the press. Ai doesn’t appear concerned, or perhaps he’s desensitized to police harassment.

Two Decades Old Twenty Years Young

john jervis — Sun, 05 May 2013 22:43:29 -0400

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An art magazine is a business, if viewed solely by the bottom line. But it also represents a community, a persona and, at its best, a stimulating presence in the lives of all who produce it and read it. These days, 20 years is still baby-faced for a human being, but considerably more wrinkled for a magazine, which must defy aging by a constant transfusion of talent, inspiration and support from our contributors, readers and advertisers. How then to celebrate this milestone?

For this festive occasion, the editorial and design teams have concocted a rejuvenating injection of Special Features. In early March, ArtAsiaPacific convened in Hong Kong a small group of museum directors, curators, writers, collectors and gallerists from around the region. They discussed the changes that have taken place in the Asian cultural infrastructure over the past two decades, while also ruminating on present challenges and how to solve them. Excerpts from their lively exchange—including cameo appearances on Skype from both an itinerant curator who was weekending in Tel Aviv and a Dhaka-based photographer-activist marooned in the Singapore airport—are reprinted here, and a full version will be posted on our website.

In another effort to look back and peer forward, for a section entitled Time Capsule, we invited four past contributors to offer commentary, follow-ups and addendums to articles they had previously published in AAP. Times have changed, as have our writers and their subjects, but as these pieces reveal, the authors’ engagements with their original concerns have only deepened over the years. In three Photo Essays, we travel back in time to the art scenes of the 1990s and 2000s in Istanbul, Karachi & Lahore and Yogyakarta, presenting the artists, curators and movers-and-shakers through the lenses of those who lived there and then. Additionally, we have reprised Influential & Emerging, a section introduced in the magazine’s 15th anniversary issue—except this time we’ve asked eight past and current editors at AAP to draw connections between artists’ practices otherwise divided by time and place.

We are also launching a special yearlong feature called 20/20, in which our contributors pinpoint important—that is, seminal but perhaps noncanonical—art projects made or mounted during each of the years of the magazine’s history, 1993 to the present. These projects mark larger moments of beginning or ending, discovery or maturity—moments that altered how we look at an artist’s practice, or our artistic communities.

Additionally, our long-running column Where I Work gets the VIP treatment. In Beijing, cinematographer Christopher Doyle and writer Andrew Cohen visited the closely watched Caochangdi residence and studio compound of China’s best-humored artist, dissident, prankster and now heavy-metal rocker, Ai Weiwei. From Tokyo, journalist Edan Corkill and photographer Yuriko Nakao peeked into the vibrant mind and studio of Yayoi Kusama and discussed with her the radiantly eccentric paintings that she is making there.

In Profiles, we look at three artists who will be featured at the Venice Biennale in late May, as well as the dynamic collector-cum-patron Monique Burger—whose “Quadrilogy” exhibition series, curated by Daniel Kurjaković, will open in Hong Kong in May. Assistant editor Noelle Bodick visited Mohammed Kazem in Dubai as he was preparing works for the UAE Pavilion at Venice. Reviews editor Hanae Ko sat down with Kimsooja in her studio in Long Island City, New York, to discuss her proposed transformation of the Korea Pavilion, while editor-at-large HG Masters caught up with video artist Ali Kazma in Istanbul as he was in the middle of producing a new cycle of works for the Turkey Pavilion.

In Essays, we focus on historical moments and contemporary trends. Doug Hall, former director of the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, recalls the early years of the Asia Pacific Triennial more than two decades ago, while from Hong Kong, Para/Site co-founder Leung Chi Wo recounts the “Space Traffic” conference in 2001 that brought together many of the then-fledgling nonprofits around the region. Susan Gibb observes how Australian museums are rethinking the purpose and display of their permanent collections, while Xhingyu Chen looks at the potential (and potential pitfalls) of the recently opened, privately run Long Museum in Shanghai.

In the rest of the magazine, we offer glimpses of the upcoming Venice Biennale and its national pavilions in Previews. New-media artist Shilpa Gupta explains her admiration for the paintings of Sudhir Patwardhan in One on One. For our Dispatch column, the voluble artist Heman Chong and contributing editor Ho Rui An team up to offer criticism of Singapore’s centralized arts policy.

In the expanded Reviews section, we travel from Sydney to Seoul, stopping in Brisbane, Singapore, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Taipei. In West Asia, we attend exhibitions in Istanbul and Kuwait City before taking a close look at the 11th edition of the Sharjah Biennial. Managing editor John Jervis visits the Victoria & Albert Museum’s “Light from the Middle East,” while reviews editor Hanae Ko contemplates the legacy of the Gutai movement while strolling up (and down) the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp. In this issue’s Book Review, instead of picking apart the latest artist monographs, senior editor Don J. Cohn nominates three books on China and Chinese culture that he considers must-haves for any aspiring or veteran Sinologist (caution: one of the books is 1,100-plus pages, without illustrations).

If the magazine looks a little different to our loyal, attentive readers, it’s not only because we are now 20 years young. Art director Danielle Huthart, photo editor Ann Woo and designer Beryl Kwan have given AAP’s look a freshening-up that allows words and images alike a little more room to breathe. In case you were wondering, the ornate Hong Kong confection on the cover was as delicious to eat as it was marvelous to behold.

Admittedly, we are concerned with appearances—this is an art magazine, after all—but we are equally concerned about our core mission, which after 20 years remains the same: to remind the world that contemporary art’s most lustrous pearls are to be found hugging the shores not of the Atlantic, but rather around the Pacific and Indian oceans, and to remind ourselves that no joy exceeds that of inviting the world to join us for a dip in search of them. After all, as many Hong Kong residents would attest, a daily swim in the sea is the key to longevity.

Zh

Jen Kwok — Sun, 05 May 2013 22:27:11 -0400

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艾未未的生活和他的艺术创作密不可分。就连贴在他位于草场地的住所兼工作室外的地址“258 Fake”，也都是一个巧妙的双关语。以中文来说，“fake” 听起来像一个意味着“科学发展”的共产党标语（发科）。它同时听起来也像一个中国人带着口音说“fuck”（操、读音：Fa-ke）。

在他住所兼工作室复合式空间对面的街道上，两名警察在无记号的小型货车前座打瞌睡。而安装在附近电线杆上的摄像机，则是不停地监视着所有进进出出艾未未绿色金属大门的人士。门内入口处附近的院墙上，挂着拼写出F-U-C-K的大型霓虹灯字母。这个字不仅勾起人们对艾未未和冯博一于2000年在上海共同策划的《不合作方式》(“Fuck Off”) 展览的回忆，它也让人们回想起《透视研究》（1995-2003）系列作品，他在如天安门广场的毛泽东画像等其他的权力象征图标前伸出中指。

在他绿草茵茵的庭院中央树立着一座帐篷，它是为了在德国西部举办的一项生态艺术展中，计划展出多达一千座互动帐篷装置而设计的原型。这些帐篷将以象征性的费用供一般大众租用。帐篷附近，一只猫在阳光下舔舐自己的毛发。

为了应对自己生活的复杂性，艾未未亲手设计了一个同时可以供他生活和创作的住所兼工作室复合式空间。朋友来此聚会用餐、抽烟闲聊、互开玩笑或是打牌作乐，而记者则是来此挖掘独家新闻。该工作室也是他拍摄按南韩当红歌手PSY的流行曲“江南Style”所模仿改编的录像作品的场景。在此录像的结尾，艾未未戴着手铐载歌载舞，直接地评论政府镇压言论自由和自己在2011年被逮捕监禁的经历。

参与此录像影片演出的除了一些他的工作人员之外，还包括一位他的知心好友和工作室常客—音乐家左小祖咒。2009年艾未未因试图为人权律师谭作人的审判出庭作证，遭成都警方拘留和殴打，当时左小祖咒也在现场。此外，他为艾未未的近作，短片《如何科学地从一个移动物体上十八下拧下一颗辉煌的中国特色螺丝》（2013）创作并演唱配乐。这件作品在一辆穿过天安门广场的公交车上隔着雨迹斑驳的玻璃车窗拍摄，它意有所指的是最近举行的中国共产党第十八次全国代表大会。在开会期间，政府以“安全”考量为由，将所有公共交通车辆的车窗用螺丝钉锁死，但实际上这是为了要避免人们能够开窗大喊或是撒出抗议传单。

在艾未未的主要办公室中，6位大多是20到30多岁的年轻人坐在电脑前忙着点击鼠标。一名助理前来解释说，由于负责艾未未保释的警察局长今晨意外到访，上午的日程安排因此有些延迟。一个小时后，艾未未礼貌地随着这位便衣警官穿过庭院，经过FUCK霓虹灯，一直走到大门出口。回到办公室后，艾未未解释说，这名男子对他最近络绎不绝的采访人流提出质疑，因为这显然违反了他在保释期间不准与记者讨论其被捕入监过程的禁令。艾未未看起来似乎不太在意，或许他对警察的骚扰早就已经麻木了。

自从2011年以来，当局已先后拆除了艾未未在上海的工作室，将他隔离监禁81天并在禁闭期间让他饱受心理折磨，在他获释后施加旅行限制，还指控他骗税、强迫他缴纳高达1,500万元人民币（240万美元）的罚款，并且向他草场地的工作室发出将（有一天）被拆除的正式官方通知。加盖红色党章的这份通知书中注明： “拆迁日期未确定。”

Field Trip Taipei

noelle bodick — Sun, 05 May 2013 02:30:30 -0400

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The flight from Hong Kong to Taipei—the world’s eighth busiest route—is just over one hour in length, yet the Republic of Taiwan feels a world away. Clean, quiet, green, and efficient, Taipei is laid out on a modern city grid at the foot of the hills and surrounded by three tributaries that merge to form the Tamsui River, which heads north to the Pacific. Anchored by a respected biennial and several pioneering nonprofits, as well as regional museums, the island-nation’s art scene remains modest in size and staunchly self-reliant. So far, Taipei has been spared the hyperexpansion brought on by an influx of foreign capital, as seen in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. On a rainy weekend in mid-April, although many galleries were on hiatus between exhibitions, a tour around the city offered a partial glimpse into Taiwan’s quietly humming art community.

Spring Workshop And Moderation S

noelle bodick — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:13:48 -0400

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The relentless march of Hong Kong’s art scene toward regional domination is, for many, a given. But, alongside the advent of the unfortunately titled “Art Basel in Hong Kong” this year, the influx of numerous flashy international galleries able to afford the city’s spiraling rents, and the much-anticipated opening of the M+ museum of visual culture in 2017, there is one recent arrival that may prove just as influential for the long-term art ecology of Hong Kong.

Nonprofits are thin on the ground here, and their square meterage tends to be minimal. However, opposite the filth of the new Wong Chuk Hang MTR station, currently under construction on the south of the island, there is a newcomer on a rather different scale. Housed on one floor of an imposing 1970s industrial building, the Remex Centre, are the immaculate white interiors of Spring Workshop, the brain child of its dynamic founder and director Mimi Brown.

With four working studios and two (currently rather dusty) terraces, and a total of 1,350 square meters, Spring had its soft opening in December 2011, since when its program has slowly gathered pace. An ambitious year-long “Moderation(s)” project began on January 10 under the beneficent gaze of Singaporean conceptualist and curator Heman Chong, organized in collaboration with Defne Ayas, the director of Rotterdam’s Witte de With—an institution with an impressive record in promoting national and international collaboration among artists, but an unbecoming lack of hesitation in announcing, among other similar assertions, that its “position in the cultural field is unique.”

With its aim of providing forums for untrammeled, joyful and cross-disciplinary experimentation, “Moderation(s)” kicks off with a month-long residence by Barcelona-based curatorial duo Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna) entitled Incidents of Travel, during which four Hong Kong-based artists (Nadim Abbas, Sin Tung Ho, Yuk King Tan and Samson Young) are leading day-long tours across the city, each of which is based on the artist’s work and engagement with environments encountered during its creation. These tours also aim to explore and erode boundaries between curation and practice.

Extending the collaborative (or “exchanging,” as Chong has it) mission of “Moderation(s),” there will be a fiction writing workshop in June, led by an “established fiction writer,” for 15 artists, curators and writers. In October, artist group A Constructed World will create “The Social Contract,” an exhibition at which audiences will sign legal contracts restraining them from speaking about what they have seen on display, exploring the withdrawal of speech as a productive element. In addition, Singaporean artist Michael Lee will develop a series of maps to trace the progress of the project. Related performances and exhibits will take place at Witte de With in Rotterdam over the course of the year.

Perhaps a result of multiple-author syndrome, there is a strange mixture of grandiose pronouncement and self-parody in the prose that accompanies the launch of “Moderation(s),” giving an unfortunate impression that its validity and virtue are beyond dispute—that this is a munificent, profound gift dropping from the heavens into Hong Kong’s untutored lap. Despite this lack of humility (imported, one might presume, from the Netherlands), the first tour resulting from Incidents of Travel—lead by Nadim Abbas and allowing unexpected perspectives on Hong Kong from the underside of the hectic Connaught Road bypass, the notoriously dense Man Cheong Street Housing Complex, or the layered fabric of the Waterfall Bay Park—did prove that the nonprofit environment has the potential for the unexpected moments of joy and discovery that Defne Ayas is searching for. This flagship program suggests that the ecology of Hong Kong’s art scene should benefit from both Spring’s existence, and also from its example.

Report On Global Art Forum7

noelle bodick — Fri, 03 May 2013 00:18:47 -0400

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The staging of this year’s Global Art Forum at Art Dubai set the tone perfectly for what we were about to view: an animated, performative event. North African throws draped across the seating; potted palms flanked the platform; TV monitors intermittently blared ad-breaks, one featuring a group of Chinese girls enthusiastically singing in front of an SUV. You were not quite sure what the set was modeled after—perhaps a television talk show?—nor were you ever certain what would happen there next. On stage, quick-tongued hosts sat on sofas and were visited by a range of guests: writers, artists, curators and musicians, including the legendary front man of REM, Michael Stipe. GAF was by no means your typical conference with a series of talking heads presenting dry Power Points.

Over the course of the forum, these personalities lectured, improvised, performed and ranted about a range of salient political and philosophical issues relevant to the region; while unmistakably cerebral, the talks somehow maintained an informal and playful tone.

The idea of “place” shaped many of the discussions. Why is place important? How do we begin to discuss or define it? In their introduction to the forum titled “It Means This,” commissioner Shumon Basar and director HG Masters [AAP’s editor-at-large] asked: “Is place a place before it is written about?” and “Is reality not reality until it is profiled and captured in words?” The term MENA (Middle East, North Africa) was a useful starting point. First used in the financial world in the 1990s, the term was later adopted by the art world, despite the preferred name West Asia rather than Middle East.

Charles Arsene-Henry, a French writer, editor and founder of research and fiction agency, White Box Black Box, suggested that the disputed acronym shows how language can imprison imagination. He gesticulated fervidly as he spoke, perhaps himself attempting to move beyond the limitations of speech. He further proposed that words used to classify geographic regions often evolve in relation to culture.

Following Arsene-Henry, Palestinian artist Shuruq Harb spoke about her experience in Ramallah where the Palestinian Authority is attempting to re-label streets. How does the naming or re-naming of a place change the way we locate ourselves? Is this re-naming a way of “making history visible,” as Harb said?

In the same talk, London-based author of In Ramallah, Running, Guy Mannes-Abbot, agreed that art and literature were often the best forms to consider weighty, critical concepts, such as state and occupation. Later, after reading a passage from his book, he emphasized that “the notion of state is very limiting when it comes to understanding place.” In this case an abstract concept, rather than language, was the restricting factor.

Making Moves Interview With Home Shop

noelle bodick — Thu, 02 May 2013 07:18:09 -0400

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In 2008, amidst the clamor of the Olympics, HomeShop screened the athletic events in one of Beijing’s quiet, unassuming hutong alleyways. Neighbors and passersby were invited to partake in the spectacle and to further reflect upon its social impact. It was to be the first of many small public interventions initiated by the art space.

Now, five years later, the band of thinkers, writers and artists who have devoted themselves to the social politics and documentation of HomeShop’s surroundings are taking time to re-evaluate the project and determine where they are heading.

While on residency at Woofer Ten, one of Hong Kong’s own non-profit art spaces, HomeShop’s Elaine W. Ho and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga spoke to ArtAsiaPacific about social movements in Hong Kong, wordplay and the challenges of collaborative art.

Building Local Networks

Jen Kwok — Thu, 02 May 2013 00:02:01 -0400

Magazine/83/BuildingLocalNetworks

I enjoy seeing really old things—photos, clothes, buildings—as there’s sufficient distance for them to feel exotic, and a general impression that everything just looked nicer then. However, when it comes to subjects that are more personal or are very familiar, nostalgia is not so interesting. For me, the reason to look back is to see how much something has changed, not how good it was.

In 2000, when I came back to Hong Kong after a one-and-a-half-year stay in New York, I found things very quiet. Perhaps it was my version of the New York syndrome—the heady if misguided belief that you’d been in the center of the art world—or some sort of hangover from the media frenzy that surrounded the handover of Hong Kong to China. I returned to Para/Site, which I had co-founded four years earlier, mounting a couple of solo exhibitions by artists I’d met in New York, but these shows were met with indifference from the local arts community.

From then on, looking farther afield to see who might share my interests became natural. After exchanging a few emails with Brett Jones of West Space in Melbourne, with whom I had already collaborated twice at Para/Site, it became apparent that we both were eager to push things further and wider. As the “local” really amounted to an individual in a certain spot, a network connecting different “locals” would be a very basic way of making you feel that you were not alone. Thanks to the internet, we were able to communicate in a way that only bigger institutions had been able to afford ten years earlier. Our budding network was extended by friends’ referrals and by trips to various biennials and exhibitions.

I met Hank Bull of Vancouver’s Centre A and Gridthiya Gaweewong of Bangkok’s Project 304 at the Shanghai Biennale in 2000. An email discussion group grew. There was no structure or institutional framework, only a bunch of like-minded people who wanted to develop links and possibly stage a collaborative project one day. In April 2001, I met artist and curator Qiu Zhijie in Oslo for an exhibition of Chinese contemporary art, and, along with Ellen Pau of the Hong Kong nonprofit Videotage, we proceeded to introduce our independent organizations to the Norwegian audience. Memory fades but you always remember the excitement of trying to communicate something that interests you. This moment of sharing prompted me to explore the possibility of doing something similar in Hong Kong, but maybe bigger, longer and hopefully deeper.

In 2001, I was still running Para/Site and reserved the December slot for a collaborative project with West Space, which evolved into a multipartner symposium involving over a dozen organizations. It was Gridthiya who provided the idea of “trafficking,” while Brett came up with the word “space,” resulting in the title “Space Traffic: Artist-Run Spaces Beyond a Local Context.” At Para/Site, there was only me and one full-time assistant, Jeff Leung, to produce the program. Claire Hsu, who was busy founding the Asia Art Archive, kindly lent a hand in raising additional funding and in logistical support, while Elaine Ng, then manager of Videotage, helped to organize the symposium. It was the only time I had to work overnight at Para/Site, alongside Jeff and Para/Site co-founder Sara Wong, finishing the translation and graphic design for the Xeroxed exhibition booklet.

“Space Traffic” kicked off with a document exhibition at Para/Site and a two-day symposium at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre. The 22 presentations were loosely grouped into sections: “Everyday Practices/Experiences of Artist-Run Spaces,” “Cultural Exchange – Building of Networks” and “Centre versus Peripheral.” Looking back, it may not have been thoroughly thought out but the raw encounter was full of possibilities and energy. Realized on a shoestring budget, it was a truly international gathering of artists and curators who just wanted to share and reflect. It may appear to have been a modest Asian answer to the “First European Seminar for Artist-Run Spaces” (FESARS) in 1999, but it should be remembered that many small, independent, artist-run organizations in Asian cities in the late 1990s and early 2000s were responding to contemporary art developments in the region, as very few institutions were actually addressing these. The inclusion of organizations such as Hong Kong’s Videotage, Singapore’s Plastique Kinetic Worms (PKW), Bangkok’s Project 304, Taipei’s IT Park and Para/Site itself in the 2002 Gwangju Biennale, curated by Hou Hanru and Charles Esche, is testimony to this observation. This phenomenon continued for a few more years, until the explosion of art fairs and of major collectors in Asia in the late 2000s.

So what has happened to our comrades over the last 12 years? To name a few: Qiu Zhijie, artistic director of Shanghai Biennale 2012, was representing the Loft New Media Art Space back then. Sadly its spaces closed soon afterward. Vincent Leow of PKW moved from Singapore to Sharjah to teach, and PKW ended its physical presence in 2008. IT Park continues in Taipei but is now a commercial gallery. Project 304 is confined to its Facebook page, which shows archival images—founders such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul are busy pursuing their own careers. However, Project 304’s offspring, the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, remains active. In Hong Kong, long-running nonprofit Artist Commune quietly dissolved last year, while founding Videotage member Ellen Pau resumed her crucial position as artistic director there. Me? In 2007, I retired from Para/Site, which, I hope, continues to rejuvenate itself.