ArtAsiaPacific - November - December 2021

In this issue

ArtAsiaPacific's November/December issue looks at artists who have devoted their practices to creating space for reflection, reconnection, and healing. Our cover feature is a conversation between Tuan Andrew Nguyen and associate editor Ophelia Lai about the role of voice and song in the Ho Chi Minh City-based artist’s recent film works. For the second feature, deputy editor HG Masters spoke with pioneering modernist painter Park Seo-Bo, who looks back on his career on the eve of his 90th birthday. Closing out the Features section is Up Close, where the editors spotlight new works by Lee Kai Chung, Bani Abidi, and Yao Qingmei.
In Profiles, we trace the choreographic practice of Berlin-based Choy Ka Fai, and the politically engaged art projects of Leslie de Chavez.
In his essay, Hutch Wilco interviews the organizers behind some of Shanghai’s new grassroots art initiatives about their strategies and motivations. The second Essay looks at the evolution of the archival turn, with a focus on “Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys,” an exhibition rooted in the repository of materials compiled by artist Ha Bik Chuen.
The issue also includes The Point by artist, curator, and educator Taeyoon Choi who probes how we might address the ways our virtual realms perpetuate violence and inequity. Filing a Dispatch from Beijing, Jaime Chu expounds on how social-media metrics and Chinese internet culture have affected what gets shown in China’s art-exhibition spaces. Meanwhile, in One on One, artist Monira Al Qadiri describes her fascination with the writing of novelist Yukio Mishima, who has long been sidelined in Japan for his homosexuality, extreme right-wing politics, and public suicide following a failed coup.
Finally, for Where I Work, contributor Tiffany Leung visited the riotous London studio of Chila Kumari Singh Burman, who reminds us “that imaginative joy is entwined with subversion and resistance, and prevails through darkness into light.”

ArtAsiaPacific Magazine Description:

For 20 years, ArtAsiaPacific Magazine has been at the forefront of the powerful creative forces that shape contemporary art from Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East. Covering the latest in contemporary visual culture, ArtAsiaPacific is published 6 times a year in Hong Kong, with editorial desks in 25 countries around the world. Our special annual issue, the ArtAsiaPacific Almanac, published in January, covers the major art events of the past year and forecasts the key trends of the year to come.
The dominant artistic influence in the world today - and for many years to come emanates from the vast territory that lies between Turkey and the Pacific island of Tonga that we call the Asia-Pacific. This territory includes India, China, Japan, Australia, Thailand, Pakistan, New Zealand, Korea and Indonesia, whose combined populations make up an amazing half of the world's total population. Also included are Burma, Cambodia, Kiribati and Uzbekistan - places hitherto overlooked, but which like their gigantic neighbors, are producing cutting-edge art of stunning and unexpected quality.
ArtAsiaPacific is authoritative, accurate, even-handed, exact and essential. Included in each issue is an up-to-date directory of the major galleries, not-for-profit organizations and museums with a focus on contemporary art from our geographical footprint. ArtAsiaPacific offers thoughtful reportage, analysis, comment and criticism to its readers made up of collectors, gallerists, curators, artists and those who want and who need to know the latest developments in the fastest-growing and most astonishing region of the contemporary art world.