November/December
No. 71
Issue out now
In Features, we examine the life and work of venerable critic-curator Li Xianting and note his incomparable impact on four decades of Chinese art as the man responsible for identifying and naming movement after defining movement, from Cynical Realism to Political Pop and Gaudy Art. Contributing editor Andrew Cohen’s illuminating and scholarly article includes testimonials from many of the artists Li has mentored—including Fang Lijun and Ai Weiwei—as well as candid new insights from Li himself. Managing editor William Pym similarly frames recent history with Ashley Bickerton, another maverick figure whose practice has spanned years of great change in the global art world. Working from the Indonesian island of Bali since 1993, Bickerton’s evolution as a figurative painter following the heady 1980s in New York is narrated as the mercurial artist’s true nature is revealed.
AAP 71 also proudly introduces new discourse on contemporary artists whose careers are beginning to crest. Features editor Ashley Rawlings delves into the delicately dark world of 35-year-old Japanese animator Tabaimo, who will represent her country in the 2011 Venice Biennale with poignant investigations into the emotional intricacies of modern Japanese life. AAP observes similar subtle signs and near-invisible messages in the community-based performance and sculptural works of Seoul’s Inhwan Oh, and assistant editor Hanae Ko takes on the collision of culturally universal themes such as love, war, prejudice and tolerance with historical and religious Islamic subjects in the work of Pakistan’s Hamra Abbas.
In this issue’s Profiles, we offer a personal history of Sara Rahbar, an Iranian-born artist who fled her birthplace during the 1979 Islamic Revolution and has dedicated her recent practice to rediscovering her roots, as well as an interview with the 2010 Turner Prize-nominated Otolith Group by contributing editor Shanay Jhaveri. On the eve of a significant exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, AAP senior editor Don J. Cohn reexamines the legacy of Xu Bing and his relationship with Chinese calligraphy. In Essays, Joseph N. Newland continue our series on the book as art object by peeling back the covers on a rarely seen 1971 monograph by Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara.
Reviews included a long-form read of the adventurous group show of Indian video art, “Being Singular Plural,” at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, rising star Haegue Yang‘s first solo museum exhibition at the Artsonje Center in Seoul and a revival of the unsung first-generation Turkish conceptualist Cengiz Cekil in Istanbul, as well as critiques from locales as varied as Auckland, Tokyo, Beijing, New Delhi, Dubai, Barcelona, Paris, London and New York.
