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Apr 26 2020

Online Viewing Rooms

by ArtAsiaPacific

Illustration by Tiffany Tam for ArtAsiaPacific. 

James Cohan

Nam June Paik

May 27 – Jul 31

XU ZHEN ®

Apr 29 – Jun 30

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Feb 28 – Jun 30

Since the beginning of her practice Simpson has used her work to suggest or point to a narrative while simultaneously imbuing a distinct sense of ambiguity. The collage works use fragmented figures to continue these notions as well as exemplify a surreal side of Simpson’s practice through multifaceted layers of both abstraction and figuration.

‘Give Me Some Moments’ follows the artist’s critically acclaimed 2019 exhibition ‘Darkening’ at Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street gallery in New York. In 2019, Simpson was awarded the esteemed J. Paul Getty Medal, honoring her extraordinary contribution to practice, understanding, and support of the arts.

Under the umbrella of Hauser & Wirth’s new global philanthropic and charitable initiative #artforbetter, we are donating 10% of gross profits from sales of all works in our online exhibitions to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization.

Lehmann Maupin

“McArthur Binion – healing:work” features 10 works from Binion’s most recent series of work on paper. Composed entirely of graphite and ink on paper, this series is the beginning of a larger body of work that will culminate in a site-specific altarpiece painting, to be unveiled in Florence, Italy in October 2020. Though he ended his own relationship with the church at a young age, Binion was inspired by the invitation to create an altarpiece, combining his own unique minimal aesthetic with the arch shape emblematic of religious spaces. This series marks the first time Binion has dealt directly with religion in his practice. Reminiscent of the neoclassical Roman Arch found in many churches, the shapes in the healing:work series suggest a more narrative gesture than is often conveyed in the abstract forms of Binion’s previous work. The single, double, or overlapping arches evoke a distinct tone; where a solitary deep blue arch suggests mourning, overlapping purple arches imply a union or harmony of sorts.

A portion of the proceeds from this Online Viewing Room will be donated to Modern Ancient Brown. Established in 2019 by McArthur Binion and headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation endeavors to support the intersection between the visual and literary arts in the Detroit community. In 2020, the Foundation announced the opening of its one-month literary residency for underrepresented contemporary artists and in-market grant support for Detroit-based artists.

Galerie Lelong & Co.

“Small Works”

May 26 – Jun 9

Galerie Lelong & Co. is pleased to present Small Works in our online viewing room. While some artists included here regularly work in an intimate scale, others take down their usual dimension to reveal their hand in a direct, concise format.

The artists included in this presentation are Etel Adnan, Sarah Cain, Angelo Filomeno, Ficre Ghebreyesus, Cildo Meireles, Lin Tianmiao, Jaume Plensa, Zilia Sánchez, Kate Shepherd, Michelle Stuart, Mildred Thompson, Juan Uslé, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Catherine Yass.

Lévy Gorvy

Lévy Gorvy is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Pierre Soulages, France’s foremost living artist. On view from 7 July through 10 September, 2020, Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir will continue the global celebration of his 100th birthday, following solo survey exhibitions in New York at Lévy Gorvy and in Paris at Musée du Louvre—only the third time in the museum’s history that the Salon Carré has been devoted entirely to the presentation of work by a single living artist, an honor shared only by Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. “Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir” will be the first exhibition in Hong Kong organized with the artist.

A contemporary of the American Abstract Expressionists and of artists working in Paris like his colleague and lifetime friend Zao Wou-Ki, Soulages has remained a key figure in the international developments of contemporary art for seven decades. Throughout his career, Soulages has explored the poetic possibilities of his radical approach to abstraction, which he continues to pursue as an active painter. His striking Outrenoir paintings—a term invented by Soulages which translates as “beyond black”—is an ongoing body of work that examines the physical and psychological qualities of visual experience through the use of black paint.

JAMES CLAR, Methane Waves (Titus), 2019, LED Panel, Wave Render Simulation, Dichroic Filter, 24 × 76 × 15 inches.

Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to introduce our Earth Day viewing room, In Celebration of the Natural World, paying homage to the global movement for climate action. Featuring work by Squeak Carnwath, James Clar, Lucy + Jorge Orta, Dan Perjovschi and Elizabeth Schwaiger, the exhibition showcases artwork made both in celebration of the natural world and in response to its need for preservation.

The artworks presented within In Celebration of the Natural World purposely resist fixed narratives of a climate unaffected by or adapted to human occupancy. Acting as a conversational junction, the exhibition creates threads between the symbolic, the abstract and the veridical to provoke larger discussions around environmental awareness and preservation. To foster education and innovation in the areas of climate change, the gallery has decided to donate a percentage of sales to Ocean Conservancy, an environmental charity working to protect the ocean from today’s greatest global challenges.

Kukje Gallery

kukje ON

Apr 22 –

Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of kukje ON, a new digital initiative developed to recalibrate the gallery’s means of outreach during these changing times. kukje ON aims to complement the offline experience of physically visiting an exhibition and chart an exciting path for the gallery to better engage audiences worldwide.

The inaugural edition of kukje ON, which will remain on view from April 22, 2020, brings together 22 works by a discrete roster of 10 Korean and international contemporary artists. Highlights include recent works by the Dansaekhwa master Ha Chong-Hyun, along with celebrated works by subsequent generations of Korean artists including Haegue Yang, Kyungah Ham, Ahn Kyuchul, Gimhongsok, and Sungsic Moon. This online showcase will also introduce works by prominent international contemporary artists including Jenny Holzer, Julian Opie, Jean-Michel Othoniel, and Daniel Boyd. Individual artworks can be clicked on to access further information and additional images.

Opera Gallery

“Masterpiece”

Jun 22 – Jul 8

For the 2020 online edition of Masterpiece London, Opera Gallery has chosen to establish a subtle dialogue between artists of different genres and backgrounds with a presentation that bridges contrasting approaches. This exhibition presents an exceptional selection of works on canvas, works on paper and sculptures by renown artists Fernando Botero, Marc Chagall, Manolo Valdés, Pierre Soulages, Jean Dubuffet, Yayoi Kusama, Niki de Saint Phalle, Alex Katz, Keith Haring and George Condo.

Ora-Ora

Peng Jian: “Atelier”

June 11 – July 8

Courtesy the gallery.

Pace

Paula Cooper

Employing photography both as medium and subject, Sarah Charlesworth’s work effects a radical deconstruction of cultural imagery. Influenced by the resurgence of Saussurean linguistics in structuralist and post-structuralist thought, Charlesworth developed a semiotic approach to photography, whereby she isolated visual signs to allow for unmediated examination. For her groundbreaking Objects of Desire series, produced between 1983 and 1989, Charlesworth sought to make visible the “shape of desire.” Meticulously excising images from a range of sources—including fashion magazines, pornography, fanzines, and archeological textbooks—she rearranged and re-photographed the cutouts against fields of pure, saturated color. Enclosed within lacquered frames, the seductive Cibachrome prints propose an iconography of visual culture, as well as the desires and values encoded within. Paula Cooper Gallery is thrilled to present this selection of Charlesworth’s Objects of Desire, one of the artist’s most celebrated bodies of work.

AYA TAKANO, Radiating Moonlight, the Sky-glow of Dawn, 2018. Oil on canvas, 91 × 72.7 cm. ©︎2018 Aya Takano/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.

Dreams in Bloom is Perrotin’s new and first-ever Viewing Salon in English and Japanese. Featuring nine artists, the Viewing Salon is on show through June 9, 2020, online as well as by appointment in Perrotin’s Tokyo gallery.

Dreams in Bloom unfolds a series of dialogues between the works and Hyakunin Isshu, a collection of one hundred traditional Japanese waka poems, composed for the most part over a period of some three hundred years, from the early tenth to the early thirteenth centuries. 

Both individually and as a whole, the works on view blur the boundaries between reality, fantasy, and memory, resulting in a dreamlike utopia where all beings can embrace their own fleeting feelings of desire and melancholy.

Featured artists: Chiho Aoshima, Hernan Bas, Hans Hartung, Bharti Kher, Klara Kristalova, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Aya Takano, TOILETPAPER: collaboration Maurizio Cattelan / Pierpaolo Ferrari, and Otani Workshop.

Landscape Painting: Past and Present

While landscape painting dates back to antiquity, it only became a serious genre when artists began using landscapes as a retreat from the complexities of modern life. The 19th century brought landscapes to the forefront through plein air techniques. The landscape became a reflection of the philosophy when previously, landscapes were simply an image of pastoral idyll.

The effects of the anthropocene on art have intensified with time. Today we are faced with new challenges: climate change, environmental destruction, and population density. The 21st century has an even more strained relationship with nature and an even greater dependence on technology. Our ecological crisis marked the collapse of traditional landscape, and modern gives way to contemporary. We have a radical new conceptualization of landscape, no longer tethered to factual depiction. Our perception is distorted by digital aesthetics which results in new, imagined landscapes. Scenes that could only be afforded by contemporary technology are present in the works by Yael Bartana, Thomas Eggerer, Sean Landers, Adam McEwen, Rodney McMillian, Sarah Morris, Seth Price, Stephen Prina, Dirk Skreber, John Stezaker, Nicola Tyson, and Corinne Wasmuht. Today, we can only dream of the bucolic landscapes of the past while we try to make sense of the present.

Rossi & Rossi

As a young Iranian growing up in Tehran, Siah Armajani harboured a deep love for Persian poetry, literature, miniature paintings and folk art. His home was full of books, along with the lyrical poems of Sa’di and Hafez; the stories of the Shahnameh were constantly recited, told and retold. During his formative years, Armajani witnessed the exile of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the the democratically elected premier of Iran, in 1953. The Shah’s regime was subsequently reinstated. The turn of events spurred a boarder movement of Iranian nationalism, in which Armajani was actively involved. His participation eventually led him to leave the country in 1960.

The works from his ‘Persian Period’, range from 1957, when Armajani was living in Tehran, to 1964, a few years after he reached the American shore.

Pinaree Sanpitak, Two Breasts 3, 2018, Unframed: 77.5 × 112 cm, screenprint on paper.

STPI is delighted to present a solo showcase of Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak in the inaugural edition of IFPDA’s Online Viewing Rooms. Renowned for her evocative use of the “breast-stupa” form, Sanpitak enables reconsiderations of age-old motifs to emerge, allowing viewers to reflect on the symbolism they hold across histories. Here, explorations of the body, its forms and the spaces it produces and inhabits, negotiate the boundary between what is shared and what is shielded, what is sacred and profane, the ethereal and the sensorial. Presenting themselves as a series of playful provocations in a range of print techniques such as collagraphy, etching and screenprint, these works create emphatic gestures that respond to lived experiences, and bring us into deeper engagement with each other and with the world we occupy.

Sullivan + Strumpf

Courtesy Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney / Singapore.

Sullivan+Strumpf is delighted to present a new exhibition by Darren Sylvester, his first in Sydney since the blockbuster survey show “Carve a future, devour everything, become something” held at NGV Australia last year.

Each of Sylvester’s exhibitions is the result of a detailed process of planning and research, involving a wide range of pop culture moments and artefacts, designed to investigate the language between perceived high and low culture, authenticity, desirability and mortality. In “Balustrade Stake,” props and sets built in studio are photographed with his continued use of large format transparencies, creating intense saturated hyper-real images while wood carvings are turned into patinated rose gold bronze sculptures.

In Psychics house and Burning candle, two full-scale sidewalk sets with custom neon signs become New York city styled venders. Each neon sign showcased from out from their buildings acts as a call and advertisement of a spiritual or psychic power available to you inside.

Scattered throughout the gallery are three bronze ‘vampire’ stakes. Reminiscent of film props and finished not dissimilar to Cartier Juste un Clou bracelets, these carved wooden stakes have had their potential power to vanquish vampires with wood rendered useless by bronze casting, resulting in literal weapons with titles like charms; Bat stake, Bone stake and Balustrade stake.

Thematically, the balustrade appears again with a photograph of an oversized dream-like prop-staircase with ripped balustrade held out against an invisible enemy by an editorial model stretching across the frame in Balustrade stepper.

The saturated editorial style imagery continues with Overnight web, picturing a brass spider web that Sylvester made, lifted in design from an image of actress Carroll Borland advertising the film Mark of the Vampire (1935), her face pressed against a prop-built web that never appears in the film – a false ruse, advertising a moment that doesn’t exist. Here that same web returns illuminated in faux-morning light to serve as a beautiful trap, positioned within the same neon filled window structures shown elsewhere in the exhibition.

This dream-like installation hovers between violence, desire and prop house, presenting an environment providing pictorial opportunities with psychic mediums and literal self-defence weapons for unseen questions and enemies nobody knows.

Screen grab by ArtAsiaPacific.

“Pardon” is Tsun-shing Cheng’s first exhibition in Taiwan since 1975. Its title alludes to the photographer’s return to Taiwan after a long absence, while also expressing his humble plea for acceptance in his homeland. The exhibition comprises his first two series, which go on view consecutively. It is Cheng’s hope that this juxtaposition will provide a chance for Taiwanese viewers to experience what has been captured through his lens in different places and in different periods, allowing them to become re-acquainted with his work, as well as his steadfast identity as a photography artist.

“Raise the Dimness,” Kong Chun Hei’s first solo exhibition with TKG+, includes nine works by the artist. A dartboard and darts, flooding and measurement, blackness and transparency, removal and vacancy. In a contemporary society dominated by symbols and texts, most confrontations seem futile. The obscure state of art reinforces the symbol itself through its absorption into a structure, and the act of art making must be more dynamic and strategic in order to transcend these fixed associations. How can one extract elements from a fixed system, create disruption to loosen symbols from their rigid structures, and allow indistinct confrontations to be identified, examined, and judged? Kong Chun Hei ushers the viewer into a state of doubtful speculation by highlighting nuanced details in monotonous things and repeatedly posing equivocal questions. Only by constantly revisiting this state of speculation can one rise above the fateful constraints of symbols.

White Cube

As part of the ‘Introductions’ strand of our new online exhibition programme, White Cube is delighted to present the work of Tokyo based painter Minoru Nomata.

Over the past four decades, Japanese artist Minoru Nomata has created a lexicon of imaginary buildings, monoliths, ‘eco-scapes’ and hybrid aerostats. In his singular, striking and heroic forms, Nomata celebrates the machine aesthetic and ingenuity of structural design throughout the ages. As Motoaki Hori, Chief Curator at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery describes it: ‘The exquisite draftsmanship and unique formal imagination of these paintings produces strong, ebullient architectural forms that transcend real time and space.’
 
Having grown up in the industrial Tokyo district of Meguro, at a time when Japan was undergoing rapid economic growth, Nomata became fascinated by urban design and its distinct architecture. At university, he studied European and Asian art, particularly classical Islamic patterns, and became drawn to the Machine Age and the modernism of American Precisionist, Charles Sheeler. It is these formative influences that have remained a constant in shaping Nomata’s imagery.
 
Working in series, Nomata consistently returns to the rationale of a single central motif; a superstructure anchored to land, sea or rising into the air. Although appearing as functional buildings, with entrances, apertures, stairways and cladding – elements that allow the viewer to orientate themselves by providing a sense of archetypal familiarity – the functionality of the structures remain elusive. Amalgamating past and present, they equally allude to the future.

“Introductions: Minoru Nomata” is curated by Irene Bradbury, Director of Artist Liaison.

David Zwirner

David Zwirner is pleased to present Lìxià, a bilingual online-only presentation in Chinese and English highlighting major works by nineteen gallery artists. The title refers to the beginning of summer on the traditional East Asian calendars, a date which coincides with the reopening of the doors of our Hong Kong gallery.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.

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