ArtAsiaPacific
Almanac 2014 Volume IX
Out now
An all-knowing Big Brother has revealed what we really talked about most in 2013. Around the world, we chatted about what recipe we just tried, the cute habits of a new pet and quitting a presumably bad habit, or several. We gossiped about our friends, enemies and “frenemies” or discussed the new Pope Francis, the royal baby George and horrific floods and typhoons the world over. This is the world according to Facebook, thanks to the 1.19 billion users who freely tap their data into the voracious media giant.
The editors at ArtAsiaPacific also data-hoard, but on topics that are presumably a little more uplifting and revealing about art—namely, its social and aesthetic value. And instead of immediately handing this information over to third parties, we offer this cultural compendium known as the Almanac to whoever is curious about the artists and their artworks, the openings and closings of 2013, and about what we are looking forward to most in our home territory in 2014.
In each edition of the Almanac, now in its ninth year, we provide annual reports about the 67 countries in the region—including Papua New Guinea, North Korea, Myanmar, Bhutan, Uzbekistan and Qatar, among others—and track a year’s worth of controversy, scandal, career moves, awards and other major headline news. We also invite distinguished art-world figures to consider the major cultural events of the past year and the year to come. Aida Mahmudova, artist and founder of Yarat Contemporary Art Space in Baku, Azerbaijan, and Mella Jaarmsa, artist and co-founder of Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, are each very proud to find their respective country’s art communities launching vital new initiatives—whether participating in the Venice Biennale or expanding the scope of homegrown events. From geographically distant perspectives, the Sharjah Art Foundation’s president Sheikha Hoor al-Qasimi and Samoan interdisciplinary artist Shigeyuki Kihara reveal details of their busy schedules, as cultural ambassador and artist respectively, recalling many of the year’s best moments on their global tours of their own art worlds. Chinese-Indonesian collector Budi Tek, who will be unveiling the second branch of his Yuz Museum—this time in Shanghai—in 2014, discusses the need for a higher standard of professionalism in China in an age of museum building. And from Kolkata, Prateek Raja of Experimenter gallery points out the continuing dynamism of India’s art scene in spite of, or perhaps because of, a market slowdown.
The Five Plus One section, in which our editors select five artists who have made a significant impact in 2013 and one who promises to do so in 2014, features profiles of artists as varied in outlook as Richard Bell, Lee Mingwei, Shilpa Gupta, Shinro Ohtake, Sopheap Pich and Simon Fujiwara, while our Books section presents the 12 books that have given us the greatest pleasure this year.
From balloon art in Hong Kong (including a giant yellow rubber duck bobbing in the harbor) to Hüseyin Çetinel’s feel-good project of beautifying his hometown, Istanbul, Imran Qureshi’s expansive yet miniaturist mural painted on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the endless towers of light cast into Sharjah’s night sky by Ryoji Ikeda, the Almanac not only presents the hard data on the most dynamic nodes in today’s art scene, but also reveals that this creative world is a real-time, face-to-face, interactive social network on an exhilarating scale.
Select articles now online in Arabic and Chinese: artasiapacific.com
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