September/October #70 Issue
As events such as biennials and festivals and the flow of commercial and intellectual capital make the world smaller, ideas of thinking locally, notions of home and conditions of connectedness loom large. Anticipating a cavalcade of biennials in the second half of 2010, ArtAsiaPacific‘s September/October edition looks at the work of artists who are acclaimed internationally for embracing their own particular place.In Features, editor at large HG Masters appraises the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul as the 40-year-old Thai artist finds himself, unexpectedly, at the forefront of contemporary art-film discourse after winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The complex and enigmatic prizewinning work, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, involves local casts in remote villages in northeast Thailand. Managing editor William Pym also considers the art of the moving image with a look at the practice of artist duo Muratbek Djumaliev and Gulnara Kasmalieva, recently nominated for the prestigious Artes Mundi Prize. Djumaliev and Kasmalieva’s works illuminate both the burgeoning Central Asian video-art scene and the tempestuous recent politics of the artists’ native Kyrgyzstan. Contributor Siddhartha V. Shah discusses the extraordinary career of MF Husain, the standard-bearer of Indian Modernism, beloved for his depictions of folk and tribal life in South Asia, as he celebrates his 95th birthday this month.
At the other end of the spectrum, features editor Ashley Rawlings offers a bracing refresher course on the pioneering Japanese street photographer Daido Moriyama through an analysis of a recent body of work shot in Hawaii, which Rawlings describes as the artist’s “search for a sense of home in a foreign landscape.” And contributing editor David Frazier considers the origins of Minimalism and installation art in Taiwan by focusing on the monochromatic paintings of Richard Lin and the bold spatial interventions of Tsong Pu, outlining their respective artistic struggles at home and abroad in the process.
In Profiles, the issue has solicited frank talk from this year’s upcoming biennial curators—Gwangju’s Massimiliano Gioni, Shanghai’s Gao Shiming, Busan’s Takashi Azumaya, Media City Seoul’s Clara Kim and Taipei’s Hongjohn Lin and Tirdad Zolghadr—as they share their motivations behind each ambitious project. In Essays, contributing editor Gregory Galligan offers a ground-level reading of Bangkok’s recent political volatility by discussing the population’s relationship to public art, while Jina Valentine draws inspiration from an exhibition of Japanese Art Brut in Paris to reflect on the history of Japanese society’s relationship to the mentally ill.
Reviews include an in-depth look at the Biennale of Sydney, FX Harsono‘s much-discussed retrospective at the Singapore Art Museum, Indian sculpture star Bharti Kher‘s debut at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in London, solo shows for promising emerging artists Fahd Burki and Gao Lei, and a specialized, expert appraisal of the ceramic work of Ai Weiwei.
For our commissioned projects, we invited this year’s Cartier Award-winner Simon Fujiwara to share candid thoughts on what he couldn’t live without, and what’s on his bedside table, in Questionnaire. For My Eight, Brisbane-based wife-and-husband duo Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, known for their process-based work of collecting and collaborating with migrant communities, share airplane assemblages created by young children from the region. Artist, professor and curator Salima Hashmi sends us a poetic postcard from her home in Lahore, while Auckland-born Anna Sew Hoy cuts up a napkin in order to revisit and reimagine a recently exhibited sculpture.
