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The Autumn issue of ArtReview Asia explores questions of inhabitation and communication.
Mark Rappolt interviews Sri Lankan artist and activist Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah, whose drawings, sculptures, videos and installations explore how conflict impacts landscape, and the question of moving on from the trauma of the Sri Lanka civil war. ‘I’m asking audiences to come and see my history’, Pakkiyarajah says, ‘see how everything is connected, and how even my war is also connected with everything.’
A new artist project by the Keralan Lakshmi Nivas Collective, Landscape Lexicon, explores this notion from a different perspective, with drawings and text exploring animal migration: ‘how the landscape sees us matters’.
As Thai writer and artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s retrospective The Bouquet and the Wreath runs at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, Max Crosbie-Jones examines the themes of mortality and feminism running through her work, as well as the presence of dogs in her sculptures, films, paintings and installations.
Mikala Taidiscusses the work of lens-based artist Hayley Millar Baker, whose ongoing series of moving-image works each depicts First Nations women as embodiments of ancestral spirits. ‘Baker draws’, Tai writes, ‘on cinematic traditions of the horror genre to build unease and anticipation for the viewer.’
‘I’m looking at the act of remembering and the memorialisation process,’ Naeem Mohaiemen says about his new three-channel film, THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY, currently on view in London. Oliver Basciano explores how the film, centred on two events of US state violence in 1970, deconstructs the media narratives around these events, and what it offers us for the present.
To mark Singapore’s 60th year of independence, the National Gallery Singapore this year staged a rehang of their permanent collection. Adeline Chia takes a look at what stories are told through this new national survey, and what is absent. ‘Discomfort’, she writes, ‘is key in any national survey worth its salt.’
Also in this issue, Xueting C. Ni looks at the rise of female wuxia writers changing the genre, Gladys Lou finds a subtle queer aesthetics in Hiroshi Okuyama’s film My Sunshine and Mark Rappolt annotates Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace’s writings from the Malay Archipelago. The issue includes reviews of new books by Munem Wasif, Daido Moriyama and Rie Qudan, exhibition reviews of Phuong Linh Nguyen in Bangkok, Min Tschang-Yeul in Seoul, Takako Yamaguchi in Los Angeles, as well as reviews of the group exhibitions Artists for Artists in Kolkata, Canton Modern in Hong Kong and The Plantation Plot in Kuala Lumpur.
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