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One way of looking at art is as an essay on the politics of visibility; the history of art, in those terms, tells us how those politics change over time. With that in mind, ArtReview Asia’s Autumn issue examines aspects of current thinking about who and what gets to be seen and heard. It’s sounds – musical and verbal – that provide the subject matter in the works of Korean artist YoungEun Kim. In particular, a series of works titled For Future Listeners explores how recorded (and not recorded) sounds can tell us both about the past and how the past is being constantly reshaped in the present. Hand notation and digital sound-editing programs illustrate histories of immigration and authenticity, highlighting how ‘history’, Mark Rappolt writes of her work, is a ‘struggle between those who have been heard and those who have not’.
Max-Crosbie Jones looks at the poetic films of Burmese artist Lin Htet Aung, whose works jump between surreal moments of domesticity to filming empty TV studios in Myanmar. Lin describes his films as capturing moments for ‘people looking back in the future’, and time, through the lens of different ways of understanding it, is a key theme in his work. Meanwhile Japanese ceramic artist Kazunori Hamana, in an interview with Chris Fite-Wassilak, talks about looking to handmade methods of the past to find a way forward, through creating ceramics, farming and renovating abandoned buildings for a rural artists’ residency. It’s an example of how art can suggest different ways of life and can privilege the quiet and the less visible as well as the showy and spectacular.
Also in the issue, Adeline Chia reports on how Indonesian collective Taring Padi’s unapologetically political art has found new currency in the international artworld; Suraj Yengde looks at the collages of Buddhist author Stephen Batchelor; Pramodha Weerasekera visits Raqs Media Collective’s first Indian solo exhibition in over a decade, in the mountainous Ladakh region of northern India; plus an interview with Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho, who speaks about his origins as a street artist: “I try my best to bring the spirit of the street – its temporary nature – into the gallery.”
Plus, exhibition reviews of Youth Palace at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, the 25th anniversary exhibition at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, and the Pattani Biennale, as well as reviews from Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Surakarta and Taipei, and book reviews of Kohei Toyonaga’s Yukio Mishima Prize-winning Hakushimuruchi, Ibtisam Azem’s The Sleep Thief and Meditations in Entropy, a survey of Delhi architecture practice URBANA and much more.
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