Out Now
As most of the art world in the northern hemisphere returns from their summer holidays, a new season unfolds with a dozen large-scale festival exhibitions. In Asia alone, Gwangju, Busan and Media City Seoul in South Korea, as well as the Taipei Biennial and the Shanghai Biennale will open this autumn. New and young regional shows include the Beijing Biennale, Palestine’s Riwaq Biennale and the inaugural Tbilisi Triennial in Georgia. Further afield is the São Paulo Biennial, along with Liverpool’s in the United Kingdom. The September/October issue of ArtAsiaPacific celebrates these extravaganzas that encourage risk-taking artists who embrace collaboration, experimentation and a re-examination of significant historical moments.
For our cover feature, AAP‘s London desk editor John Jervis visits the studio of composer Haroon Mirza, who will exhibit a new work at Gwangju in September. Jervis investigates the 35-year-old’s London-based practice, which includes piecing together vintage furniture, junk TVs and audio and lighting equipment. Also participating in Gwangju is Korean-American artist Michael Joo. Reviews editor Hanae Ko explores his works—which encompass science, spirituality and the environment—beginning with The Saltiness of Greatness (1992), comprised of four massive compressed salt cubes soaked in synthetic sweat, and leads us to his residency at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, later this year.
Rachel Kent, senior curator at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, examines the collaborative nature of the work of Taipei- and New York-based Lee Mingwei, fresh from his Mending Project at this year’s Biennale of Sydney. Kent explains that Lee’s practice deals with “seemingly ordinary activities, such as walking, dining, sleeping, writing or playing music,” that become “meaningful opportunities for connection and intimacy.” Rounding out Features, editor-at-large HG Masters discusses the anthropological and documentary-infused work of Esra Ersen, who examines the different cultural behaviors that influence the individual and society.
Our Profiles include an interview with Neama A. Alsudairy, co-founder of Riyadh’s first contemporary art center, Alãan Artspace, which opens in September. Guest contributor Lee Ambrozy takes a close look at Shi Qing’s installations on the eve of his participation at the Shanghai Biennale, while Dubai desk editor Isabella E. Hughes meets Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui and discusses his most recent commission in collaboration with MinRasy Projects, titled Unplified (2012), for Kuwait City’s Museum of Modern Art.
In Essays, we continue the second part of a treatise by art historian and critic Terry Smith on biennials and how they have increasingly been co-opted by the museum establishment over the past decade. In Tokyo, James Jack conducts a series of conversations with three artists involved in Mono-ha, recording their reactions to the recent interest in the United States toward the late-1960s and early-1970s art movement. For Case Study, contributing editor Chin-Chin Yap takes on the conceptual designs of Beta Tank and explores how a work’s transformation—say, from a chair to an art object—can be subjected to arbitrary duties imposed by clueless customs officials.
For The Point, independent curator Hou Hanru contemplates institutional organizations that fall victim to the art market and to the interests of their patrons. AAP Taiwan desk editor David Frazier files a Dispatch from Taipei, writing on the local art community’s great hopes for Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s new director Huang Hai-ming, who is neither a politician nor a technocrat like his predecessors, but rather an art scholar. Indonesian artist Jompet Kuswidananto, who will participate in this year’s Taipei Biennial, answers our Questionnaire, and for our new column, Fine Print, art lawyer Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento explains how legal issues such as intellectual property and copyright are informed by “the diversity and independence of cultural, ethnic, linguistic, historical and art historical factors.” We hope that a universal law for art is far from the sights of legislators, and that the art world will remain respectful of the unique specificities that artists and biennial curators continue to embrace.
Select articles now online in Arabic and Chinese: artasiapacific.com
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