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Anticipating the season’s many festivals, ArtAsiaPacific 78 considers the work of artists participating in the Biennale of Sydney in Australia, the inaugural Kyiv International Biennale in Ukraine and this year’s Documenta 13—the exhibition established in Kassel, Germany, in 1955, originally to showcase avant-garde art that was considered “degenerate” by the vanquished Nazi regime. Inspired by these founding principles, the May/June issue underscores art’s ability to confront and challenge historical, social, and political assumptions.
For our cover feature, managing editor Olivier Krischer traces the development of Australian painter Gordon Bennett, who will take part in Documenta in June. Drawing on his English and Aboriginal heritage, Bennett has produced a formidable oeuvre that revisits historical images that have been assimilated as part of Australia’s national identity, while exposing the colonial origins that veneer the continent’s Indigenous heritage.
Also participating in Documenta is Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz. Reviews editor Hanae Ko takes a look at the artist’s ambitious projects, including his recent collaboration with a fashionable New York restaurant, where they served roast venison on plates once used in Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Through such works, Rakowitz manages to bring a human perspective to the recent tragedies that have befallen Iraq during the 20th and 21st centuries.
Editor-at-large HG Masters also takes a meditative look at the visual politics of West Asia through the films, videos, and photographs of Iraqi-born, UK-based Jananne al-Ani, who participates in the Biennale of Sydney in June. Masters discusses how her practice challenges ideas of representation—from the Orientalist fixation about the veil, to the manipulated images of war transmitted in the media that result in an ethical detachment from human suffering. Rounding out the Features, Han Keum Hyun discusses the conceptual practice of Kim Beom, whose playful works challenge the socially ingrained expectations of what one sees.
In Essays, Joe Martin Lin-Hill begins by looking into the annals of Documenta to see just how international this event has been since its inception. Assistant editor Kathy Zhang considers what long-term effects top-down cultural strategies, such as in Japan, Australia, and China, might have on artistic creativity in Asia. For Case Study, Chin-Chin Yap considers questions of moral rights in the complicated case in which the creation of one artist’s work involves the alteration, or destruction, of another’s.
In Profiles, Michael Young offers a candid introduction to Melbourne-based Stuart Ringholt’s brand of “art therapy,” which has included anger management workshops and naked art tours at museums in Australia. In Seoul, Jayoon Choi spoke with artist Do-Ho Suh about his re-creations of architectural spaces as sites of history and memory.
Following the news that Twitter and Facebook have made concessions to governments to censor messages on request, for the Point we invited artist and microblogger Ai Weiwei to explain what this means in China. For One on One, Turkish artist Ahmet Öğüt honors his conceptual colleague, peer, and local legend, Tunç Ali Çam. For Dispatch, M+ curator Tobias Berger looks at the tight-knit art scene in Hong Kong, as the city prepares for the region’s most international art fair, Art HK, which opens in mid-May. And Mumbai’s Nalini Malani takes time to fill out our Questionnaire, in which she admits she cannot live without her “daily dose of quirky Bataillean daydreams.”
In addition to reviews from Melbourne, Taipei, Beijing, New Delhi, Beirut, Istanbul, Berlin, Milan, London, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, this issue also takes us to Sri Lanka, for our long-form review of the second Colombo Art Biennale. For our Book Review, senior editor Don J. Cohn compares Tate Modern’s retrospective monograph of Yayoi Kusama, with the dotty grande dame’s own colorful version of events detailed in her autobiography, Infinity Net, reminding readers that to get the full picture sometimes you have to imagine what’s been left out.
Select articles now online in Arabic and Chinese: artasiapacific.com
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