March/April No. 67 Issue
Out Nowwww.aapmag.com
As we anticipate the styles, themes and critical territory of the decade in art to come, ArtAsiaPacific meets 2010 with a longer view, focusing on the stability offered by measured perspective, the merits of historical awareness and the bravery of decisive re-evaluation.In Features, Jacqui Durrant meets with the Niuean artist, novelist and poet John Pule, positioning him within 30 years of development in the art world of the Pacific. Ashley Rawlings examines a pivotal moment in the career of Agus Suwage, an Indonesian painter whose place as a sensationally popular, widely exhibited and inspirational local figure now butts up against Indonesian social conservatism. Checking in on two artists who have seen their careers evolve dramatically in the four years since AAP last examined them, William Pym spends time with Indian sculptor Subodh Gupta in the days following his solo debut at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in London, an exhibition which shows Gupta both hamstrung by the past and aggressively anticipating future forums for his work, while Andrew Cohen details the progress of Chinese artist Zhan Wang by letting him explain his iconic, mystical 20-year sculpture practice in his own words. HG Masters rounds out Features with a close read of the unprecedented 150-year survey of South Asian photography, When Three Dreams Cross, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
In Essays, Rupert Arrowsmith offers both a scholarly and vivid look at the inspiration provided by the British Museum’s collection of Assyrian, Indian and Pacific sculpture on the first generation of British modernists, a remarkably personal narrative seen through the eyes of pioneer 20th-century sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Xhingyu Chen meets Xu Zhen, a young Chinese artist whose recent exhibitions in Shanghai and New York of “Middle Eastern art”—created in China by the artist and his Chinese assistants—provides a glimpse on a new generational attitude towards communal identity and world views. The recent softening of cross-strait relations between Taiwan and China through art exhibition is considered within a longer cultural continuum by David Frazier, while Nicholas Bonner, who has done cultural work in North Korea for two decades, ponders the political implications surrounding denied entry visas for five North Korean artists invited to attend the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia.
In Profiles, Murtaza Vali frames ten years of work by Pakistani video artist Bani Abidi, and Istanbul Biennale curator Vasif Kortun provides an unflinching first person perspective on the past, present and future of the global festival scene. Eliza Gluckman takes a look at one such festival in our Feature Review, unpacking the diffuse assault to the senses that was the Lyon Biennale. The remainder of our Reviews section travels from Shanghai, where influential 1980s artist Tang Song showed his first complete body of work in 20 years, to London, where John Jervis weighs up the ambition against the execution of “ethKnowcentrix,” a group show of contemporary Pacific-Island art. In Books, Don Cohn compares a monograph on Japanese photo books of the 1960s to a contemporary evolution of that humble form, Korean photographer In Sook Kim’s Saturday Night. News, auction and fair reports, and Projects, including commissioned works from Heman Chong and Pak Sheung Chuen, round out the issue.
