The trouble with [AR]T—an augmented reality initiative produced by Apple in collaboration with the New Museum—began when I tried to get tickets. Because it was framed as a free public art experience, I thought that the [AR]T Walk would be easily accessible, like a drop-in guided tour at a museum. But Apple's home page offered no...
Last month, a new sake bar opened at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts: a softly lit tunnel of booze that promises the kind of entrancing conversation one can never quite remember the next morning. A permanent installation designed by the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed) is furnished...
SINGAPORE - 'Nutty humour on the dark side with spicy evil notes and aromas of moldy dungeon evoking musty playboy mansions for geriatrics.' This is how Filipino artist Manuel Ocampo, with characteristic irreverence, describes his solo show in Singapore in a nutshell.
There are hundreds of exhibitions in Venice during the Biennale. Alongside the main exhibition in the Giardini and Arsenale, there are 90 national presentations, many in nearby pavilions in the Giardini and in spaces around the Arsenale, but also dotted throughout Venice. Then there are the official collateral exhibitions in museums and galleries...
A new gallery has opened in the rolling green paradise of Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Or rather an ace cafe with a space for art. The new Weston building, a visitor centre designed by architects Feilden Fowles, is light-filled, airy and undoubtedly beautiful, its concrete and polished plaster tinted to match the sandstone bedrock of this glorious...
TO GET ACQUAINTED with Trenton Doyle Hancock's work—or, better yet, his world—is to become versant in an origin story that the artist first conceived of when he was in the fourth grade. As a precocious ten-year-old, Hancock drew Me Turning into Torpedoboy, 1984, a prescient sketch of his morally indifferent alter ego/superhero. But...
Strange Days: Memories of the Future is overwhelming: complex, at times annoying and confusing, repetitive, uplifting and baffling. Like life, really. Films and videos by 21 artists are spread over three floors of the Store X on London's Strand.
It was a telling coincidence that the opening of the tenth Liverpool Biennial, curated by Kitty Scott (a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario) and Sally Tallant (Director of the Liverpool Biennial), timed with Donald Trump's state visit to the UK.
In his solo exhibition at Singapore's STPI—Creative Workshop & Gallery, titled Monuments and Memorials, multidisciplinary artist Dinh Q. Lê pursued the cultural and political trajectories of Cambodia through distinct moments in its history, interweaving lovely imagery of stone friezes from the ancient Angkor Wat temple complex with...
Many of the art spaces in early '90s Berlin were located in vacant, abandoned, often ruined buildings that artists had taken over. Artists were running studio collectives and co-ops, outfitting surprising storefronts, and creating nightclubs and music programs. One very influential artist for me was Daniel Pflumm, who was organizing the...
You can't help but see red at Jane Lee's first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. The floor outside the Pao Galleries at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in Wan Chai is covered in ribbons of red, stripped canvases, and nearly everything inside is red. It is a colour redolent of so many things that one may assume the Singaporean artist has chosen it for a...
'The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams.' The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's tender observation, made in his hymn to architecture, The Poetics of Space, speaks eloquently to the art of Do Ho Suh.
Cockatoo Island, a short ferry ride from Sydney’s Circular Quay, is the least likely place one would expect to be simultaneously cast and filmed for a motion picture set predominantly in Berkeley, California. But A-frame signage dotted around the abandoned shipyard informs visitors of their every move potentially being documented.
New Delhi art duo Thukral & Tagra explore memory in their installation for India Art Fair. Once art directors in the world of advertising, Indian art duo Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra - informally known as T&T - have been collaborating since 2000, producing their darkly witty works across a range of mediums including painting, film...
Running until 18 January 2018, Qiu Zhijie: Journeys Without Arrivals focuses on the work of the artist Qiu Zhijie, who made waves for his satirical, often tongue-in-cheek calligraphic maps of the world. The Beijing-based artist is known for producing enormous, overwhelming ink maps, which often provide an underlying commentary that weave...
Plastic lids and tops in bright reds, yellows, and greens. Ripped canvases. What look like painted papier mâché and cotton fleece. Shoe insoles. Felt, holes in the canvas, errant hearts and backwater crosses. Add blazing heads and distended organs. These all make up cartoon figures that are said to be part of the fictional cosmology that Trenton...
When one is new to Jakarta, one makes the mistake of not telling the cab driver to travel via the toll roads. And so it is that while creeping through the city's tight tangled backstreets, the cab finds itself coming head-to-head with another car, both unable to give way because they are simultaneously surrounded by three dozen motorcycles. But...
Brisbane- and Manila-based artist couple, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, have travelled to many parts of the world. The installation artists often work closely with the communities they enter, creating site-specific artworks that explore themes of home, longing and loss. "It is always a collective effort," says Isabel Aquilizan. As their...
A lasting impression one got from the exhibition After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History at the Asia Society Museum in New York was the sense of art's power to propel. Walking a tight rope between personal aesthetics and the repressive sociopolitical conditions of their countries, seven artists and a collaborative...
Trenton Doyle Hancock never got to wear costumes on Oct. 31 as a kid growing up in East Texas. His parents thought Halloween was 'Satan's holiday.' But the prolific and super-successful artist, who has lived in Houston during most of his 20-year career, is making up for that lost bit of childhood with one of his current projects: He's designing...
Historians can never agree about the so-called "Age of Enlightenment". The narrow definition has it beginning with the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and ending with the French Revolution in 1789. The long version begins somewhere in the late 1600s and fizzles out in 1815 with Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.
Every now and then you encounter an artist who resonates so deeply with you that they become a reference against which you assess all others. Do Ho Suh is one of them for me. I first discovered his work at his first Hong Kong solo exhibition, here at Lehmann Maupin, when his ongoing Specimen Series, small apartment fixtures and appliances...
While browsing the labyrinth of the Asian Art Museum near Civic Center station, it's very possible that viewers might look through centuries worth of art from the Asian diaspora before finding the two small rooms dedicated to the special exhibit currently on view, Philippine Art: Collecting Art, Collecting Memories. Tucked away in a back gallery...
Chinese collectors have so quickly become a mainstay of the art market that it is easy to forget that wealthy Southeast Asian connoisseurs started buying contemporary art decades earlier.
