ALMANAC 2011

For 18 years, ArtAsiaPacific has closely mapped the cultural landscape of Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East. Since 2006, AAP’s editors have produced the Almanac, the first permanent record of the art scene in all 67 of the countries and territories of the magazine’s geographical coverage—some basking in the limelight and others laboring for support and acknowledgment. The Almanac 2011 sustains the core values of research that have made it indispensable to the contemporary global art world.

Since its debut, the Almanac has been the prime source for artists, collectors, curators, scholars, auction specialists and gallerists seeking information about these regions; AAP has earned this reputation by providing a detailed and lavishly illustrated A-Z of country reports alongside fresh articles on the year’s news headlines and highlights in festivals, museum exhibitions, commercial gallery shows, publications, auctions and art fairs. Both far-reaching and focused, the Almanac’s goal—to celebrate the visual culture of the Asia-Pacific and Middle East—would be impossible without such research.

For this year’s edition, we have invited six influential figures to reflect on recent developments in the region’s varied art scenes. These include curators David Elliott, artistic director of the highly praised 2010 Biennale of Sydney; Manray Hsu, an expert on institutional cultural politics in Taiwan; and Nigora Ahmedova, best known for her work on the Tashkent Biennial. Shahidul Alam, founder of Dhaka’s pioneering Drik Picture Library, and Valentine Willie, long-time advocate of Southeast Asian contemporary art. Finally, coinciding with the opening of Mathaf, the first museum of modern Arab art, in Doha, we are delighted to publish the reflections of His Excellency Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali al-Thani, the institution’s founder.

The Five Plus One section, in which the editors nominate five artists who have made a significant impact in 2010 and one who promises to do so in 2011, features special profiles of artists as varied in outlook as Lee Ufan, Yael Bartana, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pak Sheung Chuen, our “plus one.” The Almanac’s cover offers a specially commissioned artwork by Tavares Strachan, entitled Our Invisible World—an innovative work, invisible to the naked eye on the all-white surface, that can only be revealed under black light. Strachan’s work is a portrait of the near-invisible world that AAP aims to reveal—intricately networked, these regions are there, rich with complexity and detail, waiting to be seen.