Out now
ArtAsiaPacific‘s November/December issue considers the many frameworks already operating in Asia alongside those that are taking root, and the figures who influence these nascent communities.
In our cover feature, managing editor Olivier Krischer ponders the work of young Hong Kong artist Wong Wai Yin, fresh from a residency at the Asia Art Archive, whose whimsical project to create an alternative Hong Kong art history points to identity issues in the territory’s tightly-knit art scene. Meanwhile in Singapore, Susie Lingham, assistant professor of visual and performing arts at Singapore’s National Institute of Education, considers the state’s history of censorship in the arts and how such actions—whether in the insidious form of self-censorship or the explicit blacklisting of artists and their supporters—hinder free expression.
AAP contributing editor Andrew Cohen looks back at the self-taught sculptor Wang Keping‘s oeuvre to investigate the role of artists in China’s liberalization. Wang and his contemporaries made history when they challenged the system as China began to open under Deng Xiaoping. Turning to West Asia, in a forum organized by independent nonprofit arts organization Artis and AAP‘s editor-at-large HG Masters, we invited reflections on navigating the art worlds in Israel and the occupied territories of Palestine. Included among the storytellers are: Said Abu Shakra, director of the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery; Jack Persekian, founding director of al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem; Raphael Zagury-Orly, director of the MFA program at Bezalel Academy of Arts and design; and Israeli artist Ronen Eidelman.
In Profiles, contributing editor Michael Young sits down with artist Yee Sookyung and reflects on the new direction of her work. Allison White travels to Karachi to snapshot the diverse activities of Pakistani artists’ collective Vasl. Dubai desk editor Isabella E. Hughes visits the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art to speak with its co-founders, Edward and Sonia Balassanian, about cutting-edge art in Yerevan over the past 20 years.
In Essays, Jyoti Dhar comments on curatorial practices in India, and reviews editor Hanae Ko questions Japan’s institutional understanding of “culture” reflected in the government’s Order of Culture prize. For Case Study, Chin-chin Yap discusses the recent copyright lawsuit brought against painter Sarah Morris by six origami artists and its impact on artist’s right to “fair use.”
This issue’s Dispatch is filed by independent curator and scholar Sunjung Kim from Seoul, which, with the recent and upcoming opening of new nonprofit spaces and museums, may have the most dynamic art infrastructure in the region. Not all expansion efforts are cheered, however. In the Point, Gregory Sholette, one of the group of artists protesting the construction of monumental brand-name museums in Abu Dhabi, explains why they are boycotting the Guggenheim’s Saadiyat Island development.
Exhibition reviews take us from Karachi to Los Angeles, Port Moresby to Florence—and places in between. In Beijing, we attend the new-media bonanza exhibition, “TransLife“; in London, we visit “Between Heaven and Earth: Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia,” curated by David Elliott and featuring over 20 artists from Central Asia; and in Chicago, we report on the Museum of Contemporary Art’s showcasing of works by Japanese pioneer dance artists Eiko & Koma. We also include a long-form review of this year’s Yokohama Triennale, entitled “Our Magic Hour.” In the aftermath of the tragic earthquake and tsunami on March 11, the Triennale posed the question: “How much of the world can we know?”
Select articles now online in Arabic and Chinese: artasiapacific.com
