Among the many iconic figures artists choose to portray, Bruce Lee is one of the most popular,
usually depicted topless in a fierce fighting pose, as in the portraits by Yan Pei-Ming. I have
never really followed the oeuvre of the martial artist, actor, filmmaker and founder of Jeet Kune
Do, and have never seen his movies or appreciated his teachings. Nevertheless, I became
obsessed with the idea of dedicating an issue of Pipeline to a figure who seemed to appear in
so many artists’ work around the globe – and not only artists who produce large numbers of
celebrity paintings, featuring a range of famous people that happens to include Lee.

Initially, I was pondering for this issue of Pipeline the notions binding together the ideas of leaving or exile, not as categories but as gestures and states of mind. The idea of artists in exile mostly describes those who have fled their country because of wars or oppressive regimes — while we don’t tackle the migrant crisis in Europe here, it casts a long shadow — and who can’t go home. Exile can mean rebuilding one’s life and practice, constantly revisiting and reliving memories while growing older somewhere else, filtering both old and new experiences through a combined set of references.

Body, space, time and presence but also rituals and inspirations are all part of Dancing in The Wild.
Buying objects, paintings and drawings especially, is the easiest strategy to follow for well-off, investment-minded individuals who are thinking about becoming collectors to validate their position as art connoisseurs. But intangible, experimental or in-progress works of art, which are sometimes awkward or progressive and not easy to brand, naturally get overshadowed in the art market. It is probably a shortsighted version, and one that might be evolving in particular cases, but it is understandable in the survival-of-the-fittest atmosphere of the art world. Hesitation, vulnerability and uncoolness are only accepted if the artist promises to be market-savvy. 

But it is this quality, and the relinquishing of control over one’s market success, that makes many works interesting – in addition to the works themselves actually being interesting. Openness to the unsafe, an attitude tainted of freedom when it comes to art creation and the bravery to be unique are the main theme of this issue of Pipeline. Dancing in the Wild represents the shaking off of inhibitions often associated with dancing, and the leaps of faith necessary to embracing the unknown. It is a refreshing issue, but one that still tackles grave subjects.

A case in point is the work of Japanese collective Chim↑Pom, featured here after I visited their studio in Tokyo. They and their work are full of risk-taking and wildness, even including exposure to radiation and land mines. Yet their process is well thought through and marketed, and they are getting much of the traction necessary to survive as artists. 



This issue of Pipeline is about Electric Spaces: the pulsing, vibrant art works that embody our modern world’s visions and experiences. It features works connected to electricity effectively, conceptually or aesthetically, that are themselves the locations of a contemporary language informed by technological progress but reflective of human experience. I wanted to work with artists who create charged, expansive works whose presence would reveal a natural connection with the side of our lives dependent on technology and point at the gaps and the overlaps between the values and aspirations of our introspective selves and those of a collective urban civilisation. Often kinetic, they are also characterised by a high degree of autonomy in the way they function and the ways people read them, either because they are site-specific or because they could 
easily be standalone pieces. These are artists who create a palpable tension for the audience who experience their art works, shifting perceptions of perspective and time. There are many entry points in the art presented in this issue: neon lights, wired architecture and obsolete tapes, fans, blinds and motors. Even in two-dimensional, non-plugged pieces such as paintings and photography we find an obvious or implied electro-luminescence.


Every photography issue of Pipeline has been different.
We made our first efforts to acknowledge the medium in 2011, with a special issue about photographers, then put out a call inviting them to participate a year later. Last year I invited co-jurors to help us expand our judging muscles, and we have kept this model for this second juried issue of our Photo Annual. The various approaches have reflected our intention to poke around and discover things, try new angles and enjoy the level of experimentation that a non-commercial, independent magazine affords us.
For this issue I had the pleasure to be joined as co-jurors by curators Alia Swastika and Esther Lu. We came up with a selection in which no one series resembles another. They include a photo essay by Ange Ong, who roams the post-umbrella-movement streets of Hong Kong 
experimentally; and young practices of self-exploration through geography, such as Mahroo Movahedi’s 
mirror images, John Clang’s superimposed portraits about family ties, and the Nordic reveries documented in Cédric Maridet’s landscapes. We slipped in a couple of more established series: a documentary but artistic take on portraiture of young male street prostitutes in Thailand by Ohm Phanphiroj, and a project by Wawi Navarroza that is both street-based and rather plant- and earth-oriented. There is also room for staged photography and Photoshop, with Allysa Sing Zhi Bing’s kitsch, amulet-like 
constructions, and Daniel Eskenazi’s smoke machines resembling Chinese stones.
We will always value photography as a medium and are thrilled to offer a platform for the expression of projects that place an idea or concept at their core. I would like to encourage more original takes, critical vision and openness from artists, especially in a medium that still has so much unexplored potential.

I received disparate reactions when I mentioned colours as a theme for this issue of Pipeline. Many of the artists I probed and tested stared past me disappointingly. Some told me straight out not to care about colours: “They are not important,” I kept hearing. It would appear that colour is the degenerate distant cousin of concept, archaic – colour had moment of its glory when painting as a medium did – and too shallow to talk about. And yet. In the very technical overview of colours A History of Color by Manlio Brusatin, from very scientific explanations of colour to Goethe’s theory of colour, we learn how its history is intricately intertwined with that of textiles; that until the mid-19th century, in Europe, wedding dresses used to be red; that palettes varied by religion: the discreet tones of protestant Rembrandt, the colourful ones of catholic Rubens; and about the chemical instability of green, which was made directly, and not as a mixture of yellow and blue, until the 17th century. The writings of Michel Pastoureau did much to flesh out and romanticise the subject. Dubbed the historian of colours by The New York Review of Books, he allocated individual volumes to Blue, Green, Black and so on. He points out, for instance, that blue was once considered a warm colour. 

Dreams are personal mental experiences that usually seem rather convincing in spite of their illogical and bizarre circumstances. Often they carry intense emotions, symbols of underlying or unresolved issues, elements of our relationships with reality: objects, places and other humans and animals.

Dreams provide a psychological space where complex affects and surreal narratives can be experienced safely. Memories, conflicts and fantasies can be recalled in dreams; equally, one can play out desired outcomes, examine pain and gather clues about the self in order to reach a higher level of awareness and connection with reality – an endeavour often at the core of artistic pursuits. 

For this, the Dreams issue of Pipeline, I was interested in asking artists about their relationship to dreaming, and by loose extension to daydreaming, fantasising and other states, dissociated or not, involving the mind and its power of imagination, rather than body-action. Mainly I enquired about artists having any use for their dreams, and if so how they processed and recycled them – or not.

For this issue of Pipeline, I asked artists to reflect on the theme of obsession, whether they base their production on it, making art objects as a byproduct of an obsessive endeavour, or whether they create situations derived from their fixations through performance, conceptual work and process.

Without the benefit of an environment and time, in which to evolve, innate talent will remain unrealised potential. In creating art so much relies on the artist’s surroundings. Our Nurture issue which follows immediately from the Nature issue includes writings on inspiration and influence. It seems relatively easier for artists in Asia to acknowledge influences than it is for their counterparts in Europe and America, while also claiming the integrity and singularity of their work. It is common to see initiatives in the region taken by artists or curators – such as organising debate fora, or opening gallery spaces – aimed at creating a better environment for others to develop their practices, without seeking governmental help.

Growth, cycles and beauty are all characteristic of the natural realm. Nature, apart from standing on its own without humans, is both a metaphysical concept, pointing at the way humans live and organise themselves, and a pragmatic one that relates to how and where they dwell. It has been the subject of artistic production since prehistoric times, by means of direct description, as a process to be observed, or even as an altar from which to draw stimulus. So as a subject, a catalyst and an omnipresence, nature is an essential part of this whole to which artists connect, and a means to their ends.

The Photography Annual started with the first issue of Pipeline in September 2009, and has involved a call for submissions since 2012. This year has been the first that a jury has worked with the editor-in-chief.

An issue about art and fashion wasn't a result of observing what happens in Hong Kong. Many such pairings here result in marketing events that are either too limited to a privileged group or too commercial to be interesting additions to the temple of art’s diversity or as an experience in reality-shifting. Thing is, the connections between art and the art of fashion run deeper and are more intricate than first impressions might suggest. The two fields share common ground, crossing from highbrow through middlebrow to lowbrow. And, when fruitful, collaborations between them open new audiences to artists, as well as welcome funding, while benefiting brands and commercially constrained designers by stimulating creative processes and progressive thinking.

Recently made public, Cornelius Gurlitt’s art collection, inherited from his art dealer father
Hildebrand, consists of about 1,400 works, the company of which the peculiar, reclusive
Gurlitt junior prefers to that of any human being. This emotional attachment to things that are
gathered, whether they were initially works of art by design or were made into them by the
transcendent force of the hoarder’s affection, also reaches architectural proportions – as we
have already seen it in our first Hoarding issue in November/December...

It might seem peculiar at first to use an antipathetic theme such as hoarding – implying a situation without aesthetic strength or conceptual content – to approach artistic practices. Hoarding behaviours are associated with illnesses such as obsessive-compulsive disorder,
and many medical sources cite a link with depression, with hoarding either a relief from it or the cause of it. ...

用囤積來做主題可能會讓人在一開始覺得反感，──它暗示着沒有審美深度或概念內涵來處理藝術實踐。囤積的行為總是與病態相關聯，比如迷戀性和強制性的精神錯亂，許多醫學理論甚至認為它與抑鬱有關，因為囤積行為可能是抑鬱的良藥也可能是它的起因。...

Death and transformation are the themes of Pipeline’s Autumn issue. An artist once told me that if you wanted to create art that is even remotely interesting, you should tackle death and life – and many artists do just that. The morbid iconography linked to the physicality of death and the dealings of religion is a common sight, with its skulls and representations of dead bodies, cemeteries and crosses. But beyond that, artists deal with the psychological, emotional and philosophical consequences of being in the presence of death or aware of their own mortality. They rely sometimes on shock tactics but not without involving a personal dose of risk, beyond aesthetics, that includes introspection and taking a stance.

This issue of Pipeline is about photography. Once a year we like to focus on art that results from the interaction between light and light-sensitive material. Since the 1960s and the weakening of the social and political agendas of modernism, which prioritised the representation of human society through progress, art practices have become available to those minorities previously excluded: women, as reflected by the Untitled Film Series (1977-1980) by Cindy Sherman, a series of self-portraits as various stereotypes of western women; ethnic minorities; the lower classes of society; sexual minorities and so on. Since the 80s, contemporary artists have engaged with the mundane and the ordinary, coinciding with photographic material’s increasing everyday presence. It is therefore interesting to differentiate the versatile functions of photography in contemporary art-making; popularly employed for its documentary qualities within conceptual endeavours, it is also a good companion to figurative painting, especially since its recent transition back from abstraction.

The May/June issue of Pipeline tackles questions of national representation and authenticity. <i>This Is Not An Asia Issue</i> emphasises the complexity of the magazine’s situation. While affected by our geographical position – Pipeline might be a little eastern-centric in its treatment of artistic concepts; for example here we are a little less embarrassed about painting as a medium – it also has been, is and will always be open to international writing and artists for every editorial theme: artistic themes are just too universal to be geographically limited.

As a place of commerce, Hong Kong has long learned to negotiate the different communities, races and interests that dwell permanently or temporarily on its shores as long as they don’t interfere too much with each other. But that way of functioning, where each interest group remains an island, clashes, in the art world at least, with the ambition or necessity for Hong Kong to show some leadership in the arts, to be more than a mere place of transactions. The recent disagreements about the future of the M+ museum and the kind of collections it should carry illustrates the current lack of vision

Departing from the realisation that the work of Singapore artists is often overlooked, suffering both from a general lack of self-confidence emanating from the local art scene and the sweeping state- ments made about the authoritarianism of their state by outsiders, this issue of Pipeline aims to show some of their practices together, rather simply in the form of a special issue.
This issue proposes an introduction to a place that is, despite its flaws, thriving with more artists than one would think.

Pipeline is an art magazine based in Hong Kong that first appeared as Hong Kong Gallery Guide in August 2009; we changed our name in September 2011 to Pipeline and extended our editorial coverage to more experimental and more international subjects. Since then, we have been further refining our editorial identity issue after issue, inviting artists, as well as curators and other art insid- ers, to participate and experience.

The October edition of Pipeline is themed Meeting the Other (or other non-capitalised), a vast
and abstract theme that focuses non-academically on the idea of the encounter, on the different personal perceptions of otherness and the act of going towards it to see for oneself if it can be beneficial – specifically in the context of art practices.

For its third time the September edition of Pipeline opens its pages exclusively to photography. This September, we decided to give room to young photographic practices by issuing a call to artists who aren’t yet fully established to submit series deeply committed to the medium of photography. We purposefully stayed away from some of the more nostalgic submissions, road trip-inspired series and work that was too documentary in nature – although we had excellent submissions in those catego- ries and aim to keep in touch with all the artists who sent us their works and follow them in the future.

The Summer issue of Pipeline is all about the fun. In Recess, Hong Kong artist, Yokky Wong, presents a ceramic game of noughts and crosses. In our Summer Fun Capsule we highlight works by several artists - including Paul Saint from Australia; Feng Mengbo from China; Yong Kwan Kim from Korea; Rashaad Newsome from Indonesia; and Richard Ho from Hong Kong - along with some of the statements they have made about utilising "the playful" in their works.

The May issue of Pipeline is about the use of the sensual, sexuality and sex in art. We initiated the topic with an introductory non-exhaustive overview, and exhibit a handful of artworks as visual examples of how the subject is incorporated or directly addressed in artistic practices.

The April issue of Pipeline is the Hong Kong issue. So far the biggest change that has occurred in Hong Kong since last year - while we wait for the fifth edition of Art HK to attract to town Past, Present, and Yet to Come art hitters - is the amount of galleries opening new spaces all around the city.

The March issue of Pipeline is the issue about space issues. We asked artists to talk about their relationship with space, and how relevant it is to their works - and to the way they work. Curators and exhibition directors, such as Hong Kong's M+ Lars Nittve and Tobias Berger; Enin Supriyanto from Langgeng Art Foundation; Tamsin Dillon from London's Art in the Underground; Bangkok's BACC Pichaya Aime Suphavanij, and globetrotter David Elliot - amongst some excellent others - address issues of space when it comes to exhibition venues.

For this special issue of Pipeline Asthma and Other Wicked Catalysts, about constraints that enable art making, covering the months of January and February; we called for artists and curators to participate by sharing about their experiences of dealing with restrictions and limitations in their practice. Our usual features such as Profile, Private Initiative, and Recess, have been put aside to make way for the various forms that the answers to our questions took.

Issue 52

Pipeline  - Issue 52

Issue 51

Pipeline  - Issue 51

Issue 50

Pipeline  - Issue 50

Issue 49

Pipeline  - Issue 49

Issue 48

Pipeline  - Issue 48

Issue 47

Pipeline  - Issue 47

Issue 46

Pipeline  - Issue 46

Issue 45

Pipeline  - Issue 45

Issue 44

Pipeline  - Issue 44

Issue 43

Pipeline  - Issue 43

Issue 42

Pipeline  - Issue 42

Issue 41

Pipeline  - Issue 41

Issue 40

Pipeline  - Issue 40

Issue-39

Pipeline  - Issue-39

Issue - 38

Pipeline  - Issue - 38

Issue - 37

Pipeline  - Issue - 37

Pipeline杂 志是供艺术家、艺术研究者、策展人和艺术爱好者头脑风暴的平台。我们集思广益、开诚布公，致力于严肃艺术但不限于精英份子。在某几期刊物中， 我们为艺术家 和试验型项目提供了一个游乐场，而在每一期我们都旨在将当代艺术中分门别类、跨越地域的艺术实践联系起来，其中包括众多美术馆、展览以及非营 利性艺术空 间。Pipeline由香港Double Pipe出版社主办，每年出版六期。作为一本独立艺术杂志，Pipeline内容面向国际题材同时提供当地美术馆指 南。

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Pipeline - Issue 41

Pipeline - Issue 41

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