Busan Biennale pushes for new discoveries in contemporary Asian art – artist list

KOREA ART EXHIBITIONS BIENNALES ART EVENTS EMERGING ARTISTS

The Busan Biennale 2010 will be held from 11 September until 20 November at several locations in Busan, including the Busan Museum of Art, as well as at the nearby Yachting Center and Gwangalli Beach, under the theme of ‘Living in Evolution’.

The Biennale’s website describes the theme as such:

The official 2010 Busan Biennale poster, designed by Lee Pooroni and based on the theme ‘Living in Evolution’.

We are living individual lives. Yet at the same time, we are living in the processes of evolution. Evolution will continue. But no one knows the direction of this evolution.

This exhibition will try to think through the relations between art, society, world, history and the future by considering the dual time axes in which we are living today.

Featuring 161 works from 72 artists, the art festival will make a new attempt of integrating three existing exhibitions – “Contemporary Art Exhibition”, “Sea Art Festival” and “Busan Sculpture Project” – into one.

The Busan Biennale has been held every two years since the beginning of 2000. This year’s biennale makes an attempt at new discoveries and insights on relations between individuals and mankind, past and future and arts and society.

Kiichiro Adachi, 'Antigravity device', 2009, tulip, soil, neodymium magnet, stainless steel, halogen light.

In an unusual move, the 2010 Busan Biennale will have one single director, Azumaya Takashi, planning for all exhibitions. As an independent curator hailed for his experimental approach to exhibitions, Azumaya has held curatorial posts at the Setagaya Art Museum and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. He was commissioner of the 2002 Media City Seoul and guest curator for the 2008 Busan Biennale.

The art festival aims to help forge a closer link between the public and contemporary art through creating connections between the featured works and exhibition venues. Large-scale installations will be placed at several key spots in the city to serve as landmarks, depicting the exhibition theme and symbolising civilisations.

Along with the main exhibition, directed by Azumaya, the 2010 Busan Biennale will be composed of special exhibitions such as “Now, Asian Art” and joint exhibitions such as “Gallery Festival” and “Exhibition at alternative spaces”.

Featuring young and experimental artists from Korea, China and Japan,”Now, Asian Art” aims to tighten regional networks in Asia and strengthen contemporary Asian art. “Gallery Festival” is a set of special exhibitions presented by local art galleries, again featuring artists from Korea, China and Japan.

Educational programs, including a contemporary art course called “Art Story”, will be available. The course is scheduled to open in October and targets adult art lovers and aspiring artists. In addition, a conference of art editors in Asia will be held on September 12 under the title of the “Asian Editors’ Conference”.

Asian artists participating in the 2010 Busan Biennale include:

Donghee Koo, 'Souvenir', 2008, wood, light fixture, mirror, and artificial plant.

Korea
Min-Kyu KANG
Tae Hun KANG
Donghee KOO
Dalsul KWON
Eunju KIM
Jung-Myung KIM
Shinjung RYU
Bal Loon PARK
Sung Tae PARK
SATA
Moo-kyoung SHIN
Sangho SHIN
Dayeon WON
Kibong RHEE
Byungho LEE
SongJoon LEE
Young Sun LIM
Seung JUNG
Jinyun CHEONG
Hye Ryun JUNG
Jung Moo CHO
Ki-Youl CHA
Bongho HA

Thaweesak Srithongdee, 'Zoo', 2009, acrylic on canvas.

Japan
Kohei NAWA
Saburo MURAOKA
Kiichiro ADACHI
Kenji YANOBE
Miki JO
Akira KANAYAMA
Tomoko KONOIKE
Kosei KOMATSU

China
MadeIn
Shun YUAN
Anxiong QIU

Thailand
Imhathai SUWATTANASILP
Thaweesak SRITHONGDEE

Turkey
Emre HÜNER
Inci EVINER

UK, Israel
Yishay GARBASZ
Zadok BEN-DAVID

Mongolia
Amarsaikhan NAMSRAIJAV

Vietnam
Dinh Q. LÊ

Philippines
Christina DY

Taiwan
Shih Chieh HUANG

Egypt
Doa ALY

VL/KN

Related Topics: Korean venues, biennales, emerging artists, promoting art

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Israeli kinetic artist Yaacov Agam helps make “Taipei Beautiful”

PUBLIC ART INSTALLATION ISRAELI ARTISTS KINETIC ART

A public art installation by pioneering Israeli kinetic artist Yaacov Agam was inaugurated in May this year in Taipei City, Taiwan. The NTD60 million design was commissioned to cover Shuiyuan Market in the city’s Gongguan business district as part of the Taipei City Government’s “Taipei Beautiful” project.

Yaacov Agam's 'The Heart of the Fountainhead' covers Taipei City's Shuiyuan Market.

Catherine Shu, in a feature article published in the Taipei Times, describes the work, titled The Heart of the Fountainhead, as such,

It encompasses the exterior of Shuiyuan Market near National Taiwan University, with rainbow-colored panels concealing air conditioners (which Agam refers to as “visual aggression”). The centerpiece is a giant mural facing Roosevelt Road that relies on audience participation to fully blossom. From the left of the artwork, viewers see a blue and white grid, with ovals, circles and triangles sparsely interspersed throughout. From the right is a geometric rainbow that spirals into a white center.

In this same article, Agam describes his work:

The artwork I call unity and diversity, because [on one side] you have this composition, it is only blue and white and then you have the other side, which is all color. The two are different, so you can call it the yin and yang. [The right side] is like the positive, with the revolving lines, the spiral and the color. It’s positive like the movement of life and then the other side is the opposite, with no color.

This is not Agam’s first project in Taiwan; two years ago he erected an installation titled Peaceful Communication for the World, consisting of a number blocky colorful columns, at the Kaohsiung National Stadium. It was one of five public artworks created by world-renowned artists, invited during the building of the stadium.

Yaacov Agam's 'Peaceful Communication for the World' at the Kaohsiung National Stadium.

This could explain why, as stated on the Park West Gallery Art Blog, “when the Taipei City Government decided a renovation was in order for Shuiyuan Market, they immediately invited Agam to design a large-scale public artwork.”

According to the Taipei City Government’s Department of Culture Affairs, The Heart of the Fountainhead “is the first super-size polymorph creation in Asia.”

KN

Related Topics: public art, kinetic art, Israeli artists, utopian art

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Leading non-profit institutions gathered by Tate Modern for art event: Art Radar Asia lists Asian participants

TATE MODERN ARTS FESTIVALS ASIAN ART INSTITUTIONS LISTS

In celebration of the Tate Modern‘s tenth birthday, thirteen Asian art institutions were invited to join global arts festival No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents in early May this year. The event brought over seventy independent art spaces, non-profit organisations and artists’ collectives from across the world to the Turbine Hall, indicating which institutions the Tate considers leading in the global art scene.

Read on for more about the thirteen Asian art organisations in attendance at No Soul For Sale. (Listed in alphabetical order.)

98 Weeks – Beirut

Initiated in 2007 as an artist organisation devoted to research on one topic in depth for 98 weeks, 98 Weeks has also become a non-profit project space since 2009 and has been organising workshops, seminars, reading groups and other art activities in Beirut. The project space is committed to providing a gallery for artists to research and develop ideas, exhibitions and artworks; a platform where artists, cultural practitioners and neighbors are welcome to propose ideas and a space to enhance self organised initiatives and the sharing of artistic resources.

Arthub Asia – China

'Crazy English', a performance by the Shanghai-based Chinese artist Zhou Xiaohu, was staged in No Soul For Sale 2010

Being a multi-disciplinary organisation dedicated to creating arts in China and the rest of Asia, Arthub Asia is devoted to initiating and delivering ambitious projects through a sustained dialogue with visual, performance and new media artists as well as collaborations with museums and public/private spaces and institutions. It is a collaborative production lab, a creative think tank and  a curatorial research platform. Initially conceived to support the non-profit BizArt Art Centre through structural funding in 2007, Arthub Asia has facilitated more than 110 activities in China and the rest of Asia and has become the major provider of structural support not only for artists working in China and across Asia, but also for a global community of leading curators, art professionals and producers.

Alternative Space LOOP – Korea

Devoted to defining alternative Asian art and culture by confronting Western-oriented globalisation, Alternative Space LOOP is committed to the search for young defiant emerging artists, promotion of connections between visual arts and other genres, establishment of international networks of alternative spaces, support for creative activities and better environments for exhibition. The art space, which was established in 1999, has been planning to expand its size since 2005.

Arrow Factory – Beijing

Located in a small hutong alley in Beijing’s city center, Arrow Factory is self-funded, independently run art space that can be visited 24-hours a day, 7 days a week. It is committed to presenting works that are highly contingent upon the immediate environment and responsive to the diverse economic, political and social conditions of the locality. Founded in 2008, Arrow Factory was initiated as a response to commercially defined contemporary art in Beijing, which is also increasingly confined to purpose-built art districts in the remote outskirts of the city.

Artis – Israel

With the firm belief that artists are cultural emissaries and agents of social change, Artis aims at expanding the innovative practices of Israeli artists around the world and aiding them to reach global audiences by holding cultural exhibitions and events. Since its establishment in 2004, it has been running numerous art-related programs including curatorial research trips to Israel, a grant program for international exhibitions and events, international commissions, performances, events, talks and an active website with artist profiles, articles, videos, news, and events.

Barbur - Jerusalem

Barbur – Jerusalem

Founded in 2005 at the heart of Jerusalem, Barbur is an independent nonprofit space for art and artists with the aim of being a platform for critical debate that deals with social issues while developing projects with local communities through monthly exhibitions and weekly screenings, lectures, workshops, music performances and other events.

Collective Parasol – Japan

Founded in January 2010, Collective Parasol is a private organisation for art and social-cultural activity. It is run by its artists, curators, a filmmaker, an art law specialist and an art student. It provides an open-ended platform for a wide range of projects and aims to establish a new form of “collective” that questions the solidarity, essentiality and possibility of artist collectives/communities and alternative spaces. Each member organises his or her own projects, puts together an idea with other members and collaborates with guests from a wide range of fields who are working within creative projects. The platform can take the form of a café, gallery, theater, studio, residency, meeting place for local people… the list is essentially endless. Collective Parasol is open to non-members who can use the space, equipment, and technical support.

Green Papaya Art Projects – the Phillipines

Founded in 2000, Green Papaya Art Projects is the longest running independently run creative multidisciplinary platform in the Philippines which specialises in exploring tactical approaches to the production, dissemination, research and presentation of contemporary practices in various artistic and scholarly fields. It tries to be a platform for critical intellectual exchanges and creative-practical collaboration among the artistic community.

PiST///Interdisciplinary Project Space - Istanbul

Para/Site Art Space – Hong Kong

Founded in 1996 in Hong Kong, Para/Site Art Space is devoted to bringing leading international practitioners to Asia, increasing the visibility of Hong Kong artists and facilitating East-West dialogues through an ambitious program of exhibitions, screenings, talks and events.  It is a platform for artists and other art practitioners to realise their vision in relation to their immediate and extended communities with the aim of nurturing a thoughtful and creative society.

PiST///Interdisciplinary Project Space – Istanbul

PiST///Interdisciplinary Project Space is a non-profit art space in Istanbul that produces new and experimental works which explore urban environments, everyday life and public/private space conflicts through collaborative experimental work with local and international art professionals. The art space acts as a runway for local and international art professionals to land on and take off from.

Post-Museum – Singapore

Founded in Singapore in 2007, Post-Museum is an independent cultural and social space dedicated to encouraging and supporting a thinking and pro-active community through providing an open platform for examining contemporary life, promoting the arts and connecting people.

Sala-Manca + Mamuta – Jerusalem

Sala-Manca is a group of independent Jerusalem-based artists who stage performances and create videos, installations and new media works which deal with the poetics of translation (cultural, mediatic and social), with textual, urban and net contexts and with the tensions between low tech and high tech aesthetics, as well as social and political issues. Having produced and curated Heara (comment) events, it has also published the art journal (H)Earat Shulaym without any external official, political or economic support.  It founded and directs Mamuta, a platform that promotes artistic experimentation as well as social and political engagement through providing studios, a residency program and production labs that facilitate exchange and dialogue between artists.

Sàn Art – Vietnam

Sàn Art is an independent, artist-run exhibition space and reading room in Ho Chi Minh City that supports the country’s thriving artist community by providing an exhibition space, residency programs for young artists, lecture series and an exchange program that invites international artists and curators to organise or collaborate on exhibitions.

CBKM/KN

Related Topics: Asian artists, non-profit arts, art events

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Young Israeli artist Karen Russo photographs tunnels and the other side of the moon in London

 ISRAELI PHOTOGRAPHY VIDEOS AND DRAWING

‘On a Clear Day We Can See Forever’, a solo show by Israeli-born artist Karen Russo is presented by Paradise Row until 13th June 2009. In her video installations, drawings, writing, and photographs, Russo attempts to illuminate the murkier side of human life. 

Karen Russo, The Mole Man 1, 2008, C Print on aluminium with wall mounted text

 

The exhibition unites two bold  bodies of work.  

The Mole Man

The Mole Man is a fascinating photographic record of the compulsive activities of 75-year old William Lyttle, a long-term resident of Hackney, London, who has spent several decades digging an elaborate network of tunnels beneath his house.

Karen Russo, Mole Man 3

Russo’s work examines the parallels between Lyttle’s subterranean tunnel-making and the process of artistic production. The underground world the work inhabits also delves deep into ideas of human consciousness and invisibility.

 Target: 090913 977 (Silberschlag Crater on Moon)

Target: 090913 977 (Silberschlag Crater on Moon), a video and sculptural work commissioned by the Hayward Gallery Project Space for a forthcoming exhibition ‘Deceitful Moon’, explores a controversial mental faculty know as Remote Viewing.

Discovered by ‘Consciousness Researcher’ Ingo Swann, and developed by physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ for a CIA sponsored programme in the early 1970’s, Remote Viewing enables the perceiver or ‘viewer’ to describe in vivid detail a visual target without access to normal sense data or prior knowledge. The only information the viewer receives about the target is a series of coordinates which serve him as a reference.

The video documents the process of a ‘Remote Viewer’ attempting to identify a target on the dark side of the moon. His graphic impressions were recorded and then delivered to a professional sci-fi movie model maker who was, in turn, instructed to build a model based on the visual descriptions provided.

 

 

Karen Russo, Target: 090913 977 (Silberschlag Crater on Moon)

The resulting sculpture presents a fictional lunar landscape based on psychic information, where a poetic and fictional proposition becomes more tangible than a physical place. Different modes of perceiving the world – both the world outside and the world within – are engaged and a zone where the two might meet is suggested.

 

About Karen Russo

Born in Israel in 1974, Russo studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. She has had solo exhibitions in The Israel Museum in 2001 and the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel in 2000. She has been in group exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, in 2009, the Ein Harod Museum, Israel in 2009, the Busan Biennial Korea 2008, the Tel Aviv Museum in 2008 and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 2007.

Subscribe to Art Radar Asia for young Asian artist ideas

MOMA acquires Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner video Moby Dick

ISRAELI NEW MEDIA

This year Israeli artist’s Guy Ben-Ner’s Moby Dick (2000) has been acquired by MOMA. Ben-Ner was born in 1969 and is resident in New York and Berlin. He represented Israel in Venice Biennale 2005.

His art, resonant with socio-political allusion, is deep but far from bleak. His comic soap-opera style videos retell stories appropriated from other cultures and feature his family and household objects in a gloriously amusing, jerky slap-stick style.

Guy Ben-Ner, Moby Dick, video still, 2000

In New York Magazine, Jeremy Salz described why Ben-Ner’s work is so different

All art comes from other art, and all immigrants come from other places. What makes Ben-Ner’s art stand out is that he puts these ideas together so well, continually cannibalizing the culture and objects he encounters, trying to make these things work for his art and his family. In this way, he echoes the immigrant’s story and the artist’s quest.1

Link to part of Ben-Ner Moby Dick video on youtube

Ben-Ner’s Moby Dick is a sly, improvisational retelling of Herman Melville’s novel in the form of a short, silent video punctuated with intertitles and magic-trick asides.

Turning the kitchen of his family home into an impromptu set, Ben-Ner and his young daughter reenact the novel from the time Ishmael (Ben-Ner) arrives at the Spouter Inn until the denouement of the story, when Captain Ahab (also played by Ben-Ner) meets his demise at sea. His daughter Elia plays the landlord of the Spouter Inn and later Pip, the deck boy of the whaling ship Pequod.

Ben-Ner’s rendition of Moby Dick is reminiscent of early silent cinema’s melodrama and slapstick comedy routines. The props that turn the kitchen into a theatrical set are entirely homemade and are wildly inventive. Cabinets and sink first stand in as the bar at the Spouter Inn, then with a wooden mast added they become the Pequod floating atop the sea (the kitchen floor). Simple cinematic illusions using magic tricks, animation, and sight gags abound, making reference to the comedic ploys of Buster Keaton and the magical trickery of Georges Méliès. The playful antics of father and daughter are fun to watch, but the work is not simply a parody. It is, rather, an investigation of creativity and innocence, the father/child relationship, and the home as a site for wayward adult and adolescent fantasies.2

note 1: Review of Guy Ben-Ner video in ‘Stealing Beauty’ New York magazine by Jeremy  Saltz

note 2: The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights since 1980, New York: The Museum of Modern Art , p. 191

note 3: Details of the Guy Ben-Ner’s Moby Dick in MOMA collection

note 4: Gallery show 2006 press release lists other videos

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Subscribe to Art Radar Asia to find out which Asian artists are in major museum collections

Who are the emerging Generation Y artists from Asia? The New Museum selects

EMERGING ARTISTS ASIA

Trend: Generational grouping of art

The New Museum in New York chooses 8 artists from Asia and a total of 50 globally, to describe the next generation of emerging artists (born after 1976) as part of its new signature triennial exhibition “the Generational” which runs til 14 June 2009.

Tala Madani Spraying Stripes

About the exhibition

For “Younger Than Jesus,” the first edition of “The Generational,” fifty artists from twenty-five countries will be presented.

Known to demographers and marketers as the Millennials, Generation Y, iGeneration, and Generation Me, this age group has yet to be described in any way beyond their habits of consumption. “Younger Than Jesus” will begin to examine the visual culture this generation has created to date.

First major international museum exhibition for 80s artists

Consistent with the New Museum’s thirty-year mission to present new art and new ideas, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” will be the first major international museum exhibition devoted exclusively to the generation born around 1980, tapping into the different perspectives prescribing the future of global culture.

Elad Lassry untitled film

Huge demographic

In the United States, this demographic group is the largest generation to emerge since the Baby Boomers, while in India half the population is less than twenty-five years old; the sheer size of this generation ensures its worldwide influence.

By bringing together a wide variety of artists and contextualizing their different approaches, “Younger Than Jesus” will capture the signals of an imminent change, identify stylistic trends that are emerging among a diverse group of creators, and provide the general public with a first in-depth look at how the next generation conceives of our world.

Chu Yun Love - a project created for Siemens

Artists from Asia

China: Chu Yun, Cao Fei, Liu Chang

India: Shilpa Gupta

Israel: Elad Lassry

Iran: Tala Madani

Kazakhstan: Alexander Ugay

Turkey: Ahmet Ogut

Publications

For those who can’t make it to the show at the Bowery, the New Museum’s publications are the next best thing.

Buy Younger Than Jesus Directory

Biographical information and images from the over 500 artists who were submitted for consideration for the exhibition by the global network of informants will be included in the publication Younger Than Jesus: The Artist Directory, co-published by the New Museum and Phaidon. The publication will serve as an informal census of the artists from this generation, and will expand the exhibition by adding an additional platform.

The exhibition catalogue, co-published by the New Museum and Steidl, will include reproductions of the work of the fifty artists chosen for the exhibition, as well as original essays by the exhibition curators and an anthology of articles by a diverse group of writers including philosophers, sociologists, journalists, activists, and marketing and technology experts. It is intended to compose a complex picture of the art and preoccupations that animate the work of this emerging generation.

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Subscribe to Art Radar Asia for news and trends

Guide to art scene Tel Aviv, Israel – New York Times

Ori Gersht Blow Up Detail

 

 

ART CITY ISRAEL

While Jerusalem is home to Israel’s major museums, Tel Aviv is its contemporary arts capital. It is a livelier, more progressive city, where young artists live, work and show their wares in more than 30 contemporary galleries, a third of which opened in the last two years.

Unlike art hubs like Berlin or even Dubai, Tel Aviv still feels intimate and undiscovered says The New York Times . Moreover, the emerging art displays a strength and seriousness that is undoubtedly informed by Israel’s entrenched contradictions and intractable conflicts. Art in this beachside city, it seems, stands for something.

“In Tel Aviv, it feels like every conversation, gesture, project and event has a sense of meaning to it that I’ve never felt in such concentration elsewhere,” said Shamim Momin, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, who visited Tel Aviv for Art TLV. “Yet at the same time this place feels remarkably joyful and — dare I say — decadently laid back.”

But one thing the city’s art boosters are not laid back about is their plan to make Tel Aviv’s art scene, and Israeli artists in general, known to the world. Art TLV, started by a cadre of art dealers and curators, including Irit Sommer, Rivka Saker, Yehudit Shapira Haviv and Shifra Shalit-Intrator, was a rigorous five-day marathon that included lectures, openings, dinners, museum and home tours, private screenings and hourlong jaunts to Jerusalem.

MANY galleries are clustered along Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv’s most elegant street, lined with Bauhaus buildings, banks and the former mansions of the city’s founders. Running down the middle is a shaded pedestrian path dotted with tiny cafes and boules courts where old men play. As the art events got under way, it became a veritable runway for gallery-hopping curators and collectors.

A steady stream made its way to galleries like the Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, a narrow two-story space on a palm-lined side street known for provocative and often amusing works, mostly by Israeli artists. On exhibit were a series of lushly colored photographs and time-lapse video still lifes by an Israeli, Ori Gersht.

But Tel Aviv’s sunny and casual art scene, like everything else in Israel, is tempered by Middle Eastern politics and bloodshed. Only four years ago, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a cheese shop near the intersection of Rambam and Hacarmel Streets, less than a mile from the galleries, killing three and injuring more than 30.

That peculiar way of life — a laidback Mediterranean vibe salted with an ever-present fear of violence — infuses the best of Tel Aviv’s contemporary art. At Dvir Gallery in the city’s north, large-scale photographs by Pavel Wolberg, a Russian-born photojournalist who lives in Tel Aviv, depict masked Palestinian youths with slingshots, Orthodox Jewish weddings and tense and often poignant interactions between Jews and Muslims. His images are defiant scenes of a young nation struggling to contain contradictions and honor traditions.

Other darlings of the Tel Aviv contemporary art scene include Rona Yefman and the sculptor Ariel Schlesinger. One could see Ms. Yefman’s grainy video “Pippi Longstocking, the Strongest Girl in the World, at Abu Dis,” which depicts a red-braided girl dressed as Pippi Longstocking beating on the wall that divides Israel and the Palestinian territories. The video is pitch-perfect in its razor-edged absurdity and was among the most talked-about works that week.

Mr. Schlesinger, an Israeli who lives in Berlin and shows with Dvir Gallery, makes absurdist sculptures like “Bubble Machine,” a messy if poetic scaffold of wood, wire, a drill and whirring metal parts. It’s a useless appliance whose sole purpose is to emit a bubble that drops, every few seconds, onto a searing grill. On impact the bubble bursts into flames, only to be repeated again in a vicious circle that evokes the combustible politics of the Middle East.

Similarly, the country’s nascent contemporary art institutions are both high-minded and risk-taking. The Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, once a dusty cultural center and war memorial on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, is now a serious art venue art with a socio-political bent. Its curator, Dalia Levin, champions Israeli artists like Sigalit Landau, who infamously videotaped herself bloodying her naked body with a Hula Hoop fashioned out of barbed wire.

During Art TLV, a new art fair, the London-based curator Andrew Renton brought a smattering of art cognoscenti to Israel for the first time. Many attended the opening night party for “Open Plan Living,” Mr. Renton’s sprawling group show at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, part of the Tel Aviv Museum and widely considered the city’s most prestigious art venue.

See

• complete article in New York Times including travel details
• artTLV website
• more about Israeli art

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Art fair Shanghai breaks new ground with Best of Discovery emerging artists – Financial Times, Artkrush

 

Tushar Joag 

ART FAIR CHINA EMERGING ARTISTS

“Best of Discovery” is a unique curated section of Shanghai’s premier art fair ShContemporary 08 featuring over 30 selected emerging artists from the Asia Pacific region who are presented to a global audience for the first time. 

In a “ground-breaking move”  ShContemporary founder Rudolf has commissioned a team of  independent curators with knowledge of their given regions to make an informed selection of work by promising younger artists largely unknown on the international stage says the Financial Times.  They have scoured not only China but Australasia, Central Asia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, Taiwan and Thailand.

The works are on display in an open-format, museum-like installation in the grounds of and inside the imposing Soviet-built Shanghai Exhibition Centre, where the ShContemporary fair is held from September 10 to 13 2008.

Selected on merit not gallery affiliation

The pieces have been selected not on gallery affiliation but on merit alone. “In fact” says the Financial Times “half the artists selected had no gallery representation at all. For the purposes of the fair, exhibiting dealers have sponsored these artists, forging temporary relationships that may well continue after the event.”

“Markedly experimental”

The 11 international curators selected a range of “markedly experimental” works says Artkrush. “Pieces by better-known figures such as Beijing’s Wang Luyan – a muscular satirist of consumption and politics – share space with Yael Bartana who employs cultural symbols to unpack political concerns, and from Japan, upstart provocateur Tadasu Takamine – most notorious for his controversial Kimura-san video, which shows the artist helping a disabled friend masturbate – is grouped with his more sedate countryman Sakae Ozawa.”

Intriguing art from Central Asia, Caucasus

The Financial Times notes that “the most intriguing is the work being produced in those regions where creativity has been frozen, corrupted or isolated for decades, even centuries”. Perhaps least known is the art of the new Central Asian republics which first made their debut on the international stage at the Venice Biennale in 2005. To represent Central Asia and the Caucasus, curator Sara Raza has alighted on the work of the outlandish Kazak performance artist Erbossyn Meldibekov and also on the emerging Georgian artist Sophia Tabatadze.

List of Asian artists: Cambodia: Sopheap Pich (1969 Cambodia), Central Asia: Sophia Tabatadze (1977 Georgia), Erbossyn Meldibekov (1964 Kazakhstan), China: Wang Luyan (1956 Beijing), Zhu Jinshi (1954 Beijing), Wang Zhiyuan (1958 Tianjin China), Shi Yong (1963 Shanghai), Chen Yenling (1969 China), Taiwan: Effie Wu (1973 Taiwan), Huang Po-Chih (1980 Taiwan), India: Tushar Joag (1966 India), Vibha Galhotra (1978 India), Ved Gupta (1975 India), Sumedh Rajendran (1972 India), Indonesia: Agus Suwage (1959 Indonesia), J Ariadhitya Pramuhendra (1984 Indonesia), Japan: Tadasu Takamine (1968 Japan), Sakae Ozawa (1980 Japan), Hiraki Sawa (1977 Japan), Korea: Jina Park (1974 US works in Korea), Clara Shin (1974 Brazil works in Korea), Jo Jong Sung( 1977 Korea), Thailand: Dearborn K Mendhaka (1979 Thailand), Vietnam: Nguyen Thai Tuan (1965 Vietnam), Israel: Yael Bartana (1970 Israel), Iran: Reza Aramesh (1968 Iran)

List of Asian specialist curators: Erin Gleeson (Cambodia), Sara Raza (Central Asia, Western Asia, Middle East), Huang Du (China), Sean CS Hsu (Taiwan), Deeksha Nath (India), Rikky Effendy (Indonesia), Reiko Tsubaki (Japan), Shin Young Chung (Korea), Sutee Kunavichayanont (Thailand), Din Q Le (Vietnam)

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Asian artists on show in Liverpool Biennial September to November 2008

EVENT BIENNIAL LIVERPOOL

Celebrating 10 years of commissioning ambitious and challenging new work by leading international artists, the 5th edition of Liverpool Biennial’s International exhibition MADE UP runs from 20 September to 30 November 2008.

Artists from Asia include:

Khalil Rabah

Khalil Rabah (Palestine 1961)

Using narratives that hover between fiction and reality, Palestinian Khalil Rabah’s installations, objects, videos, actions and interventions articulate the effects of war on Palestinian society, its economy and identity.

His ongoing Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind, for instance, which has had manifestations in Athens, Istanbul, Amsterdam and elsewhere, playfully interrogates history as an accumulation of fact and artifice. This fictionalised museum also questions the notion of archiving and the idea of the museum itself as a repository of objects and construction of collective knowledge. Similarly, in constructing a London office for the United States of Palestine Airlines in 2007, or planting olive trees – uprooted from their original home in Palestine – outside the United Nations in Geneva in 1995, Rabah provocatively plays out ownership of the past and reclamation of a future currently denied.

Yayoi Kusama (Japan 1929)

Working across a broad range of media, Kusama is perhaps best known for her compulsive repetition of a recurring vocabulary of forms – polka dots, or phallic tubers, for example – often rendered on bright yellow or red backgrounds.

U-Ram Choe (Korea 1970)

Kinetic sculpture maker U-Ram Choe’s work is a fanciful dialogue of aesthetics and machinery, and explores themes of biological transformation, flight, and movement.

Guy Ben-Ner (Israel 1969)

Low-tech, but ingeniously inventive, Guy Ben-Ner’s videos often centre on home and family, exploring, exposing and exploiting the relationship he has with his children.

Atelier Bow Wow (Japan) and Ai Weiwei (China) are also on show.

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• Liverpool Biennial website
• more news about contemporary Korean art
• more posts about Japanese art
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