The third edition of Frieze New York, which returns to its gigantic white tent on Randall’s Island Park from May 9 through May 12, features a remarkable 18 exhibitors from Asia, including a smart mix of established and emerging galleries from Japan, Korea, China, India, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Israel and Turkey.

The Turkish capital has its own charms and historical interest.

Kazakh artist Erbossyn Meldibekov is in constant conflict with his identity. His exhibition “Mountains of Revolution,” now on view at Rossi & Rossi gallery in Hong Kong, demonstrates the struggle faced by an artist emanating from a region that is relatively unknown. In his performance at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Meldibekov introduced himself as being from the fictive nation of Pastan. When questioned on the gullibility of his viewers, the artist responded challengingly “few people care where Tajikistan or Turkmenistan is. To them, Central Asia might as well be a meteorite that exploded out of Venus.”

Cigarettes, incense and ash are rather uncommon materials in the context of traditional Chinese painting. Yet, since the early 1990s, Shanghai-based artist Wang Tiande has experimented with ink painting, transgressing assumptions of tradition to recontexualize the genre with a contemporary visual vocabulary. 

In early September 2013, the local government attempted to demolish artist Yuan Gong’s eponymous studio compound in Shanghai’s Changning District. One hundred black-shirted men, protected by a phalanx of police, arrived unannounced at dawn and quickly razed the upper floors and balconies to a pile of smashed concrete, shards of glass and twisted metal before Yuan and friends managed to stop them amid much pushing and shoving.

In an unlikely underground bar in the outskirts of Geneva, as part of the Antigel festival last February, contemporary dancer and artist Eisa Jocson delivered Macho Dancer (2013), a solo performance based on her study of male dancers in gay bars in Manila. Trained as a visual artist and with a background in ballet, Jocson investigates representations of the body. ArtAsiaPacific sits down with the artist to discuss her views on exposing gender biases, the politics of seduction and what constitutes Filipino identity.

Installations seem to grow ever more bloated in size in direct correlation to the thinness of a work’s conceptual framework. Paris-based artist Christian Boltanski’s Chance (2011), which was installed at Sydney’s Carriageworks up until last month as part of this year’s Sydney Festival, is no exception. Filling the length of the inner-city art space’s foyer, 16 tons of special scaffolding ran a continuous loop of 400 baby photographs, culled from the birth announcements of Polish newspapers, printed on reams of paper, reminiscent of a newspaper printing press. Occasionally a bell sounded and the whole process would grind to a temporary halt, only to start again with a second sounding of the bell.

The last Whitney Biennial to take place in the museum’s iconic modernist building on 75th street has met with some criticism due to the decision to divide the exhibition into floors—each curator given one each—rather than maintaining an overarching theme.  The result, however, benefits the viewer who is given the opportunity for comparison between the three curators—Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms and Michelle Grabner—who inevitably exhibit different styles and methodologies. This element of comparison, overall, enlivens the biennial, making the tripartite show stimulating in a multitude of ways. Below is a brief overview of the Whitney Biennial 2014’s diverse selection.

Contemporary Chinese art was the undisputed belle of the ball at this year’s Armory Show. The largest art fair in New York hosted 205 galleries from around the world, including 17 from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. The Armory’s “Focus” section, now in its fifth year, highlighted three decades of contemporary Chinese art, under the discerning eye of curator Philip Tinari, the Director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Clustered along the corridor connecting the modern section of the fair to the contemporary one, fairgoers could not transition between the two periods without encountering the many facets of the Chinese art scene—which, as Tinari emphasized, is making its own inroads too often overlooked by Western audiences. The following are some of the fair’s highlights from ArtAsiaPacific.

Last November, Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF), in the United Arab Emirates, announced Eungie Joo as curator of Sharjah Biennial 12, which opens in March 2015. Previously the director of art and cultural programs at Instituto Inhotim in Brumadinho, Brasil, and director and curator of education and public programs at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Joo recently curated SAF’s seventh annual March Meeting, titled “Come Together.”  This four-day symposium of presentations and panel discussions by cultural practitioners has become a notable platform for exchange between artists, curators and researchers.  At the meeting, Joo spoke with ArtAsiaPacific on her initial impressions of the art conference, her approach to “reactivating” the format, and also shared some thoughts about the upcoming Biennial.

Controversy has dogged the lead up to the opening of the 19th Biennale of Sydney (BoS), You Imagine What You Desire, with 9 artists pulling out pre-launch and over half of the exhibitors signing an open letter of protest to the biennale’s board over links between the event’s major sponsor Transfield, and off-shore asylum seeker detention centers.