Ocula Report At Art Taipei, Galleries Adapt to Regional Politics By Sam Gaskin, Tapiei In Taipei, the artwork that said most about the contemporary art market's fraught situation in East Asia was not at the 26th Art Taipei (18–21 October 2019), but across town at the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, a publicly funded art park established in Taiwan's former Air Force Command Headquarters in 2018. Chin Cheng-Te's Tender Soul –...
Ocula Report Daido Moriyama: The Erotics of Photography By Tianyuan Deng, Tokyo In a documentary video published by Tate Modern to accompany its exhibition William Klein + Daido Moriyama in 2013, Moriyama, one of the most influential avantgarde photographers to emerge out of postwar Japan, roams the urban streets of Shinjuku equipped with a compact digital camera. Dressed in a low-key black jacket, his gait is relaxed but...
Ocula Report Go East: The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection By Jane O’Sullivan, Sydney Yang Zhichao’s Chinese Bible is both unyieldingly monumental and humble. In the latest presentation of the work in Sydney, all 3,000 of the diaries he has collected from Beijing’s fleamarkets are placed in neat rows on a large, rectangular plinth. Dated from 1949 to 1999 they record 50 turbulent years in China’s history....
Ocula Conversation Gene Sherman & Suhanya Raffel By Jane O'Sullivan, Sydney When Australian collectors and philanthropists Gene and Brian Sherman moved from South Africa to Australia in 1976, Gene says they instantly recognised a “buzz about Asia” that they weren’t expecting. As an academic teaching French literature, the push towards Asian languages also put her out of a job. “I went...
