The President’s Young Talents (PYT), inaugurated in 2001 and organized by the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and the Istana, aspires to “nurture a developmental platform for promising local artists under the age of 35 working with emerging contemporary art practices.” PYT began to adopt a new format in 2009, with members from the curatorial committee—…

The exiled knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. — Edward Said Anida Yoeu Ali’s “Buddhist Bug Project” offers a particularly unique perspective on dis- placement:…

For the art audience in Jakarta, Yuz Museum has its particular position, which is quite different from other spaces in the city. Yuz Museum has a focus on showing Chinese contemporary art, especially from its collection, which is quite distanced from Indonesian audiences. In the beginning of its establishment, Yuz Museum had shown important figures…

“Let’s get lost, lost in each other’s arms / Let’s get lost, let them send out alarms,” Chet Baker praises the romantic mystique and disruptive force in letting go of orientation. This lust of wandering reflects the mood of “Urban Synesthesia,” a five-person group exhibition curated by Wang Chun-Chi. The usual highways to understanding an…

Showcasing Song Dong’s work from the mid-1990s to the present, “Doing Nothing” occupies two out of three of Pace’s 25th Street galleries. Pace’s larger space, 534 W 25th, surveys Song’s performance-based work from 1994-2012 through video, sculpture, photography, and installation, while the smaller space at 510 W 25th St presents new, mostly sculptural works expanding…

For his first solo show in the United States, Liu Wei fashions reclaimed wood from domestic interiors into a soaring, architectural ensemble, transforming the gallery space into a curious amalgam of Gothic cathedral and country home. A version of this body of work first debuted in the 2010 Shanghai Biennale, where the improbable title— Merely…

What can Andy Warhol do for us? At the Hong Kong Museum of Art, situated by Victoria Harbour, “15 Minutes Eternal” features over 400 works brought from the collection of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, on the streets surrounding the museum, tourists from all over the world are busy racking up their credit…

Double entendres and word plays abound in this exhibition, which is intent on displaying the dual contexts that result from cultural translation, often with comical results. Zhang Lehua delights in such post-colonial treasure hunting. From the words and phrases incorporated into his works, the images used, exhibition layout, to the show’s title, and even the…

After first passing through a black room, the viewer discovers that the large exhibition hall actually contains three rooms, each painted a different color. The middle room is yellow. A blue room, multi-angled, juts out from one end of the gallery, its walls seemingly transparent and spectral. Only one work is placed outside of the…

Executive Director of M+ West Kowloon Cultural Authority LEAP Why did you decide to accept the position at M+? LARS NITTVE What really attracted me to the job was that the ambitions here were quite uncompromising. On the one hand, they are trying to create something that sets really high standards. At the same time,…

ART FAIRS PRESENT perfect opportunities to observe the local economy and art ecology. Already in its third year, Art Stage Singapore has again chosen the country’s most luxurious locale, the Marina Bay Sands conference center, as the exhibition venue. A total of 131 galleries from 25 countries participated in this year’s fair. Seventy-five percent of…

NICOLAS CECCALDI A friend recently complained about Nicolas Ceccaldi’s exhibition “Wearables” at Real Fine Arts in Brooklyn: “Yeah, you can tell he’s from Berlin. No one who lives in New York would waste that opportunity.” Though Ceccaldi’s exhibition undoubtedly wasn’t a missed opportunity in the opinion of yours truly, it precisely challenged the male-ego-driven sculpture…

SONG DONG’S 36 Calendars installation offers, through its participatory, dialogic dimension involving more than 400 members of the Hong Kong public, a way to examine local Hong Kong perceptions of history, and also perhaps highlights the issue of the difference that may exist between Mainland and Hong Kong senses of history. Calendars are a traditional…

SINCE 1997, HONG Kong has been a space of constant debate as it has transitioned from a colonial outpost of Britain to a Special Administrative Region of China, still operating as a capitalist free port until 2047 as stipulated by the Basic Law. From social concerns regarding the monumental gap between rich and poor and…

HONG KONG HAS provided the documentary and conceptual material for much of MAP Office’s practice since 1995. Here, we unfold chronological the set of tools that guided us to use Hong Kong as a cutting-edge laboratory for an innovative appropriation of the city/territory. 1995-2000 Starting with a research-oriented platform on territorial development, we set up…

“I had never believed in ‘political art,’ but in 2012 I ran for the Legislative Council as an artist.” “The art world is polarized into two camps. There are artists who energetically participate in social movements, gradually distancing themselves from art and even believing aesthetics to be pointless decoration. In the other camp are artists…

IF THERE IS anywhere that the juggernauts of the Chinese media could market art as an aspirational lifestyle, that place is Hong Kong— and yet nowhere else does the reality of art as a lifestyle diverge more absurdly from this imagery. Ironically enough, it was probably through the boom in Mainland contemporary art that Hong…

DURING HONG KONG’S colonial period, the British administration was unwilling to cultivate a cultural mainstream for fear that it would threaten the position of the government. As a consequence, a divide-and-conquer strategy characterized the allocation of cultural space and art funding in post-1960s Hong Kong. This approach was intended to preclude the formation of a…

WYNDHAM STREET IN Central has all the features of a typical Hong Kong street: it is a narrow, steep, winding road bustling with activity. Heading up towards where it joins Hollywood Road, the street gets even more crooked, the sides of this famous section lined with shops selling curios and collectibles from all over the…

For a contemporary art exhibition of any scale, plans can change quickly. Whether it is achieving the potential of the concept through implementation or meeting local requirements for fire safety at the site, the audience remains unaware of the multitude of factors that influence the final outcome. So for artists, their artworks, and exhibition layout,…