Comic art of Popok Tri Wahyudito portrays scenes of transport calamity

GALLERY SHOWS COMIC ART DRAWING INDONESIA

In July this year, Valentine Willie Fine Art (VWFA) partnered with Kuala Lumpur’s The Annexe Gallery to bring “BERGERak” to Malaysia. In his first Malaysian solo, Indonesian artist Popok Tri Wahyudi, uses “Jogja comic style” to create paintings which narrate the experiences of “cattle-class” airline travellers and other mass transport users. His work is accessible to a wide audience because of its familiar subject matter and simple, colorful presentation.

'Please Let Me Go', 2010, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 188 cm. Image courtesy of VWFA.

“Popok Tri Wahyudhi’s works in his first Malaysian solo exhibition are stories about commuting, travelling, human mobility and migration. Presented in a wide range of media, from paintings and drawings to woodblock prints, silkscreen on canvas and mini sculptures, these bittersweet and sometimes macabre narratives negate the glamorous images of the jet set…” Valentine Willie Fine Art

The artist is one of the founding members of Apotik Komik, an artist group formed in 1997 by thirteen students from Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta. The group first created mural work and then moved into printing comics, publications more visual and alternative than what was available in Indonesia at that time. Their style, influenced heavily by popular culture, is known as “playful”.

'...oops!!!', 2010, woodcut on paper, 79.5 x 54.5 cm. Image courtesy of VWFA.

He is most well known for portraying Indonesian life and political situations in a sinister comic light. However he has worked with international subject matter, most notably during artist residencies at California’s 18^th Street Art Center in 2001 and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart in 2007. In addition to making paintings in his signature comic style, he has also worked on large scale wall art and created and exhibited three-dimensional pieces.

Popok Tri Wahyudi was born in Mojokerto, East Java, in April, 1973.

KN

Related Topics: Indonesian artists, Southeast Asian artists, gallery shows, drawing

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Emerging artists Min Xiaofang, Kang Yongfeng and Song Yongjun win Chinese Art Prize awards 2008

CHINESE ART PRIZE
The winners of the Chinese Art Prize 2008 are: Min Xiaofang (Gold) and Kang Yongfeng (Silver). The Viewers’ Choice Prize went to Song Yongjun.
In 2008 more than 1,000 emerging Chinese artists applied for the CAP. The jury narrowed the field to 25 finalists.
Gold Prize winner Min Xiaofang’s renders two meter-tall paintings of children’s homework – mathematics, grammar, English – all graded and corrected in red ink. 10cm-wide patches of white, which looks like correction fluid, add to the authentic appearance of the paintings. In certain pieces, hints of text on the reverse side of the original notebook pages are visible. Female artist Min’s work inspires viewers to ponder the content and meaning of what is being taught to children as if being viewed under a microscope.
CAP Silver Prize winner Kang Yongfeng paints twisted, mangled vehicles, with extremely thick chunks of metalwork-looking paint protruding off the canvas. Kang’s brushstrokes are so intertwined that the pieces appear to be almost abstract when viewed at close proximity.
The top 25 artists’ portfolios can be viewed online at: http://www.ChineseArtPrize.com. Also view other works by the prize winners on the site.
The Chinese Art Prize is the only annual art prize that focuses on young, emerging Chinese painters and hais the highest cash prize, 66,000 CNY [9650 USD], for any art competition in China.

CAP 2008 jury includes:

• Gerard Goodrow (Director, Phillips de Pury, Germany; former Director, Art Cologne),
• Daniela Bousso (Director, Paco das Artes, Brazil),
• Ami Barak (Curator, “Art for the World,” Shanghai World Expo 2010; Curator, Art Forum Berlin 2007),
• Linel Rebenchuk (Director, Toronto International Art Fair),
• Du Xinjian (contemporary Chinese artist and former professor at Central Academy of Fine Arts),
• Alexandra Seno (Writer).

Chinese Art Prize website

Min Xiaofang

Song Yongjun

Central Asian art joins mainstream market – Eurasianet

Metal Truck Caravan Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek

CENTRAL ASIAN ART

The strong presence of Central Asian artists at recent art fairs and exhibits in New York is helping to underscore the fact that the region has joined the mainstream of the international art market reports Eurasianet.

A special exhibition titled Given Difference at the Asian contemporary art fair in New York in November featured six artists from Kazakhstan, Georgia and Turkey.

Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan was represented by two rising stars of the Central Asian art world — Erbossyn Meldibekov and Almagul Menlibayeva.

Menlibayeva videos punkshamanism

Almagul Menlibayeva’s works attempt to distill traditional practices, ideas and imagery into a contemporary art form. Often described as punk-shamanism, Menlibayeva’s videos are theatrical and laden with complex references — from tribal symbolism to images of the communist industrial past.

A New Silk Road installation view

One of Menlibayeva’s videos shown at the New York art fair — Headcharge — is a story that casually begins in a restaurant in the city of Almaty and gradually slips into a disturbing ritual performed by the female protagonists. The video shows several urban young women eating a sheep’s head and feeding each other, thereby underscoring the juxtaposition of traditional nomadic beliefs with today’s urban lifestyle. Step by step, the film gives way to a parallel reality, referring to shamanistic travels between worlds.

Born and raised in Kazakhstan, Menlibayeva currently lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam. Art curators say she often depicts the cultural and spiritual traditions of her native country as erotic and strongly feminine dream sequences.

Menlibayeva’s second film, Kissing Totems, is a surrealistic journey inspired by her childhood memory of walking past Soviet factories, seeking the help of a shaman to cure her mother’s severe illness. With what seems to be the clear influence of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s enigmatic style (particularly the bleak interiors of Stalker), the split-screen video follows a girl, accompanied by her mother, entering an abandoned industrial complex filled with birds. The video then takes a surreal turn when she encounters female-like creatures, called peris.

Meldibekov: photographs of leaders and Peak Communism

The other Kazakh artist presented at the Asian art fair, Meldibekov, explores the question of belonging, but through a different prism. His series Family Album (made together with his brother Nurbossyn Oris) are historic photographs of groups of ordinary people — families or friends — posing in front of a public sculpture of their country’s leaders. Each old picture shot during the Soviet period is matched by a newer one of the same people at the same spot but with a different sculpture behind them — a change in the figure with whom they are associated, determined by the state and history.

Meldibekov looks at the figure of the leader as fetishized by ordinary citizens. He also shows people as if both empowered by virtue of proximity to the great leader and the due diligence of paying homage to him.

Meldibekov has recently begun a series entitled Peak Communism which was also featured at the New York Asian Art Fair. The artist inverts cheap metal pots and bowls and moulds their tops to show their shapes as different shapes — such as Communism Peak, Lenin Peak and Peak of the Pioneer.

Kyrgyz art: video and photography at Winkleman New York

Elsewhere, an exhibition of Kyrgyz artists Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, entitled A New Silk Road, is on display these days at the Winkleman Gallery in New York City. The show runs through January 10. A series of photo images and a 5-channel video, shot along the highways and small villages connecting China through Kyrgyzstan to Europe, capture the determination and resourcefulness that define this mountainous and economically impoverished region and provide snapshots of how local and global economics are intertwined.

• Eurasianet for more
• Winkleman Gallery for A New Silk Road images and artist bios
• To represent Central Asia and the Caucasus in 2008 Shanghai art fair Best of Discovery, 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 (see post click here)

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Emerging Chinese conceptual artist Li Hui defies recession at Christies Hong Kong Asian art sale December 2008

Amber

EMERGING CHINESE ARTIST HONG KONG AUCTION

Christie’s Asian Contemporary Art sale on 1 December was surprisingly encouraging for the art market, at least the Asian contemporary art market, although perhaps not too much should be read into that just yet. Nevertheless it was successful.

Some commentators have moaned that only half the lots did anything and in any event that estimates were restrained. This is just silly. In the present financial environment it should have been a disastrous sale. Going by previous economic downturns, it would have been.

But for some reason it did ok, in fact more than just ok, and right now that “ok” is very impressive, even ‘encouraging’. Interpreting this is difficult but it probably has a lot to do with the massive expansion of the art market since the last major downturn in the late 80s (by comparison the Tech Crash was just a wobble) and the fact that the market has also matured enormously since then, becoming vastly more professional, transparent (yes, compared to where it used to be, it is now positively crystal) and its consumers more numerous and as a whole better educated. To see whether Christie’s sale was a one off or whether there is real significance to be gleaned from it, we’ll just have to wait for further similar sales around the world in the next 6 to 12 months.

One of the artists who made the sale successful was Li Hui, a conceptual artist who works in diverse mediums including transparent neon-lit perspex sculptures and laser beams. Born in 1977, he graduated from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2003. Since then he’s been very busy and has gained a lot of attention, particularly from Taiwan and Korea, but not so much in the West. Until now.

On sale at Christies was Lot 912 Amber (2006), a transparent LED lamp, acrylic and stainless steel sculpture in the shape of a generic sports car and encasing the (also transparent) skeleton of a huge reptile. This work was previously shown at the 2006 Shanghai Biennial. It looks just stunning. As for its intellectual games, well for now I leave them to you. Christie’s estimate was HK$500,000 – $800,000 (USD $64,808 – $103,692). It’s sale price was HK$1,580,000 (USD$204,879), a sliver shy of double the highest estimate. And just to prove it wasn’t a mistake, a similar work Lot 913 went for HK$1,160,000 (USD $150,418 ) or almost 50% higher than the high estimate.

And this is not the first time he has done this. Li Hui’s work has been outdoing estimates for a while. See for instance Christie’s May November 2007 and May 2008 sales. The figures are impressive enough but that is only half the story. Remember that Li Hui is still quite young, only 31. Also remember that these works are not paintings, there is no Pop Realism or Political Pop to be seen. This is very refined conceptual art. It might look cool but it still demands that you think hard about it. In this context, the sale prices are event more impressive. By no means is Li Hui’s work easily affordable art but I have no doubt that its market price is headed in one direction only.

    Contributed by Chris Moore, a writer and a partner in the contemporary art investment firm mooreandmooreart.co.uk. He lives in Shanghai and specialises in contemporary Chinese art.

See Li Hui past lots at Christies, recent stories about recession, emerging artists, Chinese artists

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Filipino artist Alwin Reamillo’s Helicopter project to tour Australia in 2009

 

FILIPINO ART Australian-based Filipino artist Alwin Reamillo’s collaborative sculpture called the Thuringowa Helicopter Project is to tour Australia’s capital cities as part of Kultour 2009. “Craft refers to a process of making a creative form of some sort, but also refers to sea/water vessels.” explains Reamillo to Asia Art Archive magazine, Diaaalogue. In my work “I fuse these literal meanings or states with alternative references. Helicopters are vehicles, quite literally in the form they take, but also become vessels of culture, and projects that mobilize communities, becoming vehicles of change”.

Another project which is commanding international attention is his on-going Grand Piano project which has taken place in several countries and is currently on show at the UP Vargas Museum in the Philippines.The project, officially titled the Nicanor Abelardo Grand Piano Project,  takes the form of an installation, which also functions as a stage/workshop space for the restoration of three found pianos. “It breathes life into the musical legacy of one of the leading composers of the Philippines, Nicanor Abelardo” says Reamillo. “Nicanor Abelardo pioneered the research of traditional Tagalog folk music, and is considered the country’s first modernist composer”.

The installation focuses on Abelardo’s classical work, ‘Mutya ng Pasig’ (Muse of Pasig), which is animated through text, objects, found piano parts and imagery drawn from photographs and popular culture. The grand piano will be developed in September and will be launched for an all-Abelardo concert.

Autumn 2008 will be busy for Reamillo. He is involved in a project, which will culminate in performances and exhibitions in August/September 2008, based around the creation of a submersible deep-sea exploration vessel and a shadow play. At the same time he is currently preparing an exhibition of a new series of mixed-media objects in the form of toy piano wings, as part of an installation at Gallery East in Western Australia in August 2008 and Manila in December at Galleria Duemila.

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• full interview and more images on Asia Art Archive site
• more on Filipino contemporary art
• stories on sculpture, installations

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New contemporary art from India and Thailand in Bangkok to September 27 2008

Vidya Kamat Birthmark Series

CONTEMPORARY INDIAN AND THAI ART SHOW August 16 to September 27 2008

 Gallery Souflower, Bangkok’s only gallery exhibiting contemporary Indian art, in Silom Galleria  is showing “The Ethics of Encounter: contemporary art from India and Thailand” until September 27 2008. The show is a juxtaposition of Thai and Indian art and showcases a variety of media and methods, from video and painting to performance.

Artists include Ranbir Kaleka, Vidya Kamat, Manjunath Kamath, Sudsiri Pui-Ock, Navin Rawanchaikul, Pinaree Sanpitak, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Chintan Upadhyay.

Vidya Kamat Birthmark Series

Navin Rawanchaikul, a Thai artist who resides in Japan and has Hindu Punjabi origins has exhibited at many biennials and is known for his taxi themed projects such as Navin Gallery Bangkok Run from 1995 to 1998 in which the artist converted a taxi into an art gallery and invited artists from Thailand and around the world to exhibit.

Vidya Kamyat, who has exhibited in a solo show in New York concerns herself with the human body and its veils proposing that there can be no pure unmediated relationship with the body.

 

Navin Rawanchaikul Reception Room Video

 

 

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• more on contemporary photography
• UBS collects Navin Rawanchaikul
• more on Thai contemporary art
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• buy books about Indian art such as 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists and support this site

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