ArtAsiaPacific
March/April 2016
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The cover feature of ArtAsiaPacific‘s March/April issue spotlights the labor-intensive work of Hong Kong artist Au Hoi Lam. Independent curator Charles Merewether discusses the evolution of Au’s work, from minimalist paintings of 86,400 tiny colored squares representing the seconds in a day to installations of pocket-size log books charting the year following her father’s death. From Istanbul, curator Nazlı Gürlek examines the 30-year career of İnci Eviner. Through a wide range of media—including video, drawings and performances—Eviner gives presence to women, third genders, migrants and refugees, who are invisible, voiceless or marginalized, in present-day Turkey and beyond.
Guest contributor Robert Liles delves into the work of an earlier artistic trailblazer, the 20th century Korean artist Kwon Young-woo (1926–2013). Although today mainly associated with the abstract-monochrome movement Dansaekhwa, Kwon’s career spanned six decades, often moving beyond the all-white surface, from his early ink paintings to later sculptural pop art. Also pushing the boundaries of traditional painting is Zheng Chongbin. Art historian Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres traces Zheng’s oeuvre, from his formative years in Hangzhou at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts to his relocation to San Francisco in 1988 where Zheng began revitalizing the revered practice of ink painting by combining elements of modernist painting, video and installation art.
In our special column Inside the Burger Collection, curator and scholar Erin Gleeson uses the metaphor of the fragmented artifact—here the controversial limbless ancient Khmer sculptures coveted by collectors and museums around the world—as a starting point to examine the work of five prolific artists working in Cambodia today.
Our Profiles section focuses on five collectors active in the Asia region: Taiwanese property-developer George Wong, Malaysia’s former finance minister Tun Daim Zainuddin, Melbourne-based Indonesian artist-turned-lawyer Konfir Kabo, Hong Kong designer Alan Chan, and Yan Shijie, real-estate developer and co-founder of the Red Brick Museum in Beijing.
In Essays, the research-driven artist collective Slavs and Tatars explore how the rise of philology in 19th-century Germany paved the way for the nation’s own gentler form of homegrown Orientalism. From Sri Lanka, contributing editor Jyoti Dhar looks at how art practitioners are finding their place in Jaffna, one of the main northern cities embroiled in the 26-year civil war that ended in 2009.
Elsewhere in the issue, independent curator and art critic Li Xu files a Dispatch from the city of Shanghai. In One on One, Brisbane’s lovable enfant terrible Richard Bell raps his affection for fellow aboriginal artist Gordon Hookey. In The Point, New Zealand artist Dane Mitchell explains how those operating outside the dominant centers of the art world, regardless of technological interconnectivity, still must overcome challenges of distance. For Where I Work, contributing editor Michael Young visits the Beijing studio of 1970s post-Mao artist Huang Rui, and in Fine Print Australian lawyer Roger Ouk offers a guide for artists on the “fair use” exception of copyright protection, and then gives a crash course on what to do if a copyright has been breached.
Reviews include:Chua Ek Kay at National Gallery Singapore; Focus: Works from Mathaf Collection at Mathaf: Museum of Modern Arab Art, Doha;Emily Jacir at Whitechapel Gallery, London; plus much more.
Select articles now online in Arabic and Chinese: artasiapacific.com
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