Ocula Report Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber 15 Mar 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula In Meiro Koizumi's three-channel video installation, The Angels of Testimony (2019), the central frame features an interview with Hajime Kondo about his time as a solider of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conversation centres on war crimes perpetrated in China, including the beheading of Chinese prisoners for...
Ocula Conversation Diana Campbell Betancourt Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator working predominantly across South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013 she has been the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a transnational art event that has grown in size and scale ever since its first edition in 2012. Backed by...
Ocula Report Chinternet Ugly at Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art 7 Mar 2019 : Mike Pinnington for Ocula China, home to 802 million internet users, is subject to sophisticated online censorship. This shrouded state of affairs, unsurprisingly perhaps, serves to reinforce stereotypes around conformity elsewhere. Any realm, digital or otherwise, subject to such strict scrutiny must necessarily be bland and uncritical, right? I was mulling over such...
Aaajiao, also known as Xu Wenkai, was born in 1984 in Xi'an, and later moved to Shanghai, where he continues to live and work. Aaajiao is one of China's foremost digital artists, bloggers and free culture developers. In 2003 he established the sound art website: cornersound.com, and in 2006 he founded the Chinese take on the blog we-make- money-not-art: We Need Money Not Art. He is devoted to Processing, an open source visual programming software, Dorkbot, a non-profit initiative for creative minds, and eventstructure, an interdisciplinary center for art, media technology and academic research based in Shanghai. In his works in general, Aaajiao focuses on the use of data and its various forms of display, and how meaning is understood through the process of transforming the movement from reality, to data, and back again. His most significant aesthetic contribution to new media in China is a social one, acting as a vector for the interpretation and communication of international and local trends in the usages of software in artistic practice.
AaajiaoWater Measure—Petroleum, 2017 Antipodes glass bottles, BLK water, peristaltic pump structure, metal and acrylic accessories
AaajiaoCandy Wrappers, 2017 single channel video, color; screen, cables duration: 26'36"
Ocula Insight Howard Bilton, founder and chairman of the Sovereign Art Foundation, Hong Kong 3 June 2016 Yorkshire-born businessman Howard Bilton is the founder and chairman of the Sovereign Art Foundation, established in Hong Kong in 2003. The Foundation focuses on both recognising the abundance of artistic talent in Asia and bringing the benefits of art therapy and education to underprivileged children.In both endeavours, the Foundation is...
Related Press Overpop ArtAsiaPacific : 19 December 2016 With two years' worth of research and multiple studio visits by the Yuz Museum's founding director Budi Tek and his team, along with New York-based gallerist Jeffrey Deitch and Karen Smith, director of OCAT Xi'an contemporary art center in China—the exhibition Overpop developed into a cross-cultural exchange of artists who are seen as a new...
Related Press Preview: Art Basel Miami Beach 2016 gallery highlights from Asia and Africa Art Radar Journal : 1 December 2016 From 1 to 4 December 2016 galleries from around the world will converge on Art Basel Miami Beach. In Art Basel’s 15th edition in Miami Beach, there are an impressive 269 galleries expected from 29 countries across North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The art fair is proven to be a highlight of the art calendar, with almost all...
Related Press 'Remnants of an Electronic Past' - in conversation with Chinese new media artist aaajiao Art Radar Journal : 19 September 2016 aaajiao explores the fate of obsolete computer technology in the face of its relentless development, as part of a programme aimed at stimulating debate around the relationship between art and technology, as well as e-waste and its relation to climate change and the environment. Art Radar speaks with the artist about his work.As the City of...
