Weekly News Roundup: September 6, 2024

Vietnamese Gallery Wins Frieze Seoul Prize

Frieze Seoul’s 2024 Seoul Stand Prize has been awarded to the Ho Chi Minh-based Galerie Quynh, whose booth at the art fair (September 4–7) features an installation by Vietnamese American artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn. The presentation was selected by a three-person jury, including Christopher Y. Lew, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Wassan Al-Khudhairi, co-curator of the 2025 Hawaii Triennale; and Victoria Sung, senior curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Nguyễn’s solo show presents kinetic sculptures made from recycled bomb metal, which are tuned to different healing frequencies. The work is related to his film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022), exploring the legacies of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Quang Tri, a coastal province that was one of the most severely bombed places in the America-Vietnam war. 

Bengal Biennale Announces Debut

The inaugural edition of the Bengal Biennale will be hosted in Kolkata and Santiniketan, two cities in West Bengal, India, marking the first major art event in the region. The nonprofit arts festival will feature more than 100 artists from diverse disciplines, spanning installation and musical and theater performance, with a focus on fine art. The participating artists include Mumbai-based painter Sudhir Patwardhan, Kolkata-based multidisciplinary artist Paula Sengupta, and New Delhi-based photographer Dayanita Singh, among others. According to the biennale’s curator, Kolkata-based art critic Siddharth Sivakumar, the event aims to “invoke the multilayered cultural heritage and intellectual history of a liberal Bengal” through its “inclusive approach to modernism [and] Indian traditions.” The biennale’s advisory panel comprises leading figures in the regional art scene such as Santiniketan-based artist Jogen Chowdhury, and Kolkata-based gallerists Prateek Raja and Rakhi Sarkar, among others. Taking place across more than 20 venues, the event is slated to run from November 29 to December 22, 2024, in Santiniketan, and from December 6 to January 5, 2025 in Kolkata.

Thailand Biennale 2025 Reveals Details 

The Thailand Biennale has announced that Bangkok-based artist Arin Rungjang and Singapore-based art critic David Teh will be the artistic directors of its fourth edition, themed “Eternal (Kalpa)” and slated for November 2025. Rungjang, known for revisiting lesser-known aspects of Thai history, often through video and site-specific installations, has represented Thailand at the 55th Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. Teh is a researcher and art critic with curatorial experience in various biennales across Europe, Australia, and Asia. The artistic directors will receive curatorial support from Hera Chan, a curator of Asia-Pacific art at London’s Tate Modern, and Marisa Phandharakrajadej, a Thai curator and lecturer at Burapha University. As for the theme, Rungjang stated that “Eternal (Kalpa)” aims to explore the intricate relationship between humans, nature, and time, all of which are influenced by the threat of ecological degradation, technology, and global conflict. The fourth edition of the Thailand Biennale is set to take place on the island of Phuket and run until April 2026.

Digital Art Fair to Join Hong Kong Art Month 2025 

Gillian Howard, the founder of Hong Kong’s Digital Art Fair, announced that the event will be returning to Hong Kong in March 2025. The fourth edition will take place during next year’s Art Month, coinciding with mega fair Art Basel Hong Kong and the midsize Art Central. Since its launch in 2021, the Digital Art Fair has highlighted non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and digital art from global galleries as well as regional partners. The fourth edition will also showcase its collection curated by galleries, artists, and partners, including South Korean conglomerate LG Electronics, which has extended its collaboration to 2026. In preparation of the Digital Art Fair, Howard has made an open call for artists, galleries, tech companies, and cultural institutions to participate in its 2025 iteration. 

National Portrait Gallery Offers to Return Billionaire’s Donation

Australia’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and the nation’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart, have once again made headlines over a portrait of Rinehart that she gifted to the gallery in 2019. Five years later, the work has yet to be displayed, as the NPG and Rinehart are caught in a legal dispute about the details of the donation. The NPG has now offered to return the painting to Rinehart, although a response from the mining magnate is still pending. The saga was exacerbated by a controversy in May, when Rinehart demanded that a separate, reportedly “unflattering,” portrait of her be removed from Archibald Prize winner Vincent Namatjira’s solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), “Australia in Colour.” Associates of her mining company, Hancock Prospecting, sent dozens of complaints to the gallery, and Rinehart herself reached out to NGA leaders to remove the work, but the institution ultimately refused.

First Nations Artwork Acquired by Australian Art Institution

On September 2, the Newcastle Art Gallery (NAG) in New South Wales, Australia, announced the acquisition of an artwork by the acclaimed Quandamooka artist Megan Cope. Titled Kinyingarra Guwinyanba (Off Country) (2022), the installation features 44 two-meter-long poles adorned with rock oyster shells, which will be suspended within NAG’s new central atrium. The work is a part of Cope’s ongoing project of oyster-shell sculptures which trace the environmental impact of lime-burning, as well as the destruction of Aboriginal oyster reefs in Quandamooka Sea Country, in Southeastern Queensland. Cope explained that Kinyingarra Guwinyanba—which translates to “place of oyster rocks” in the Jandai and Gowar language—is “a living, generative land and sea artwork that demonstrates how art can physically heal country that has been colonized through the practice of ecologically restorative and ancestral processes.” The work was donated by the Newcastle Art Gallery Foundation, the gallery’s nonprofit fundraising arm, marking a significant addition to NAG’s collection of First Nations art.

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