Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva

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  diary September 23, 2017

  Rama Lama Ding Dong

  “MARSEILLE WAS BUILT ON A HISTORY OF FAILURES,” curator Cédric Aurelle gushed. Our friendly little group—which included Véronique Collard Bovy, the chic producer of the city’s flagship event Art-O-Rama—stood sipping white wine and philosophizing about the decline of French civilization outside M-Arc/Le Box, the space that collectors Marie-Hélène and Marc Féraud were opening with an homage exhibition to artists Pierre Bertrand et Francois Morellet. That evening, the former coastal slaughterhouse turned art hangar hosted a bizarre mix of fellow travelers from Berlin, Warsaw, Lisbon, Paris, Mexico

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  diary September 08, 2017

  Emory Memories

  THE MODICA STOP on the erratic airport bus from Catania was more rugged than I expected for an ancient UNESCO World Heritage spot. But a few hills down the road we were engulfed by the voluptuous Baroque architecture that defines this beautiful Sicilian comune: “The historical center is over there,” the driver beamed.

  Sveva D’Antonio of Laveronica Arte Contemporanea met me at the parking lot with a disarming smile and the equally disarming presence of seventy-four-year-old Emory Douglas, the graphic artist behind the Black Panther newspaper (1967–80). Douglas had wanted to go on a stroll, and

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  diary June 05, 2017

  Down the Loophole

  ON A RECENT SUNNY WEDNESDAY, I walked by the skateboarders riding in front of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and descended to the dark auditorium just in time to hear director Ferran Barenblit introduce Video Data Bank’s Abina Manning. Manning had selected works by women artists—Hermine Freed, Lynda Benglis, Barbara Aronofsky Latham, Suzanne Lacy, Linda Mary Montano, and Susan Mogul, all pioneers of video art in the 1970s—who had taken advantage of the emergence of Sony’s Portapak camera. The grainy, poignant experimental films made a couple of people flee, but mostly they

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  diary June 03, 2017

  Lisbon Rendezvous

  “WE THOUGHT ABOUT EXPANDING TO LATIN AMERICA, but it was more complicated. So we decided to open a gallery here,” Pedro Maisterra said at the inauguration of his and Belén Valbuena’s new gallery branch in Lisbon’s Alvalade barrio. “Spain and Portugal don’t usually look at each other, which is crazy when you think about it! But it’s ripe with great energy.”

  The Portuguese art scene was lush indeed, as lush as the blue jacaranda blossoming across the city. The patio in front of the new space was already lively when we arrived, straight from the opening of Carlos Garaicoa’s massive installation

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  picks May 18, 2017

  Zhou Li

  In the pitch-black two-room gallery, Zhou Li’s cream-gray paintings on the walls glow in the dark. The opening work, Reflections in the Mirror, 2017—a drawing that turns out to be a light box painted black but for a single snaking line allowing light through—could be mistaken for a twisted neon tube. At the end of the second, bigger room, two paired, grand red monochrome paintings (the only instance of the hue in the show) titled Loving No1 and Loving No2, both 2017, provide a quieting emotional release, as a contemplative form of color-field painting, to a tumultuous inner journey conjured by

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  diary March 24, 2017

  Best in Show

  “THERE ARE MORE PEOPLE in this room than there are in all of Marfa, Texas. Although—it’s just as international,” said Chinati Foundation director Jenny Moore to an agreeable Jay Jopling.

  It was Monday night, and we were at the Balinese Potato Head’s bar in Sai Ying Pun celebrating the opening of Theaster Gates’s solo show as well as the soon-to-open fifth edition of Art Basel Hong Kong. And the crowds were international indeed, including patrons Ivan Pun and Alan Lo, artists Carlos García de la Nuez and Eddi Prabandono, collector Serge Tiroche, RA’s Tim Marlow, and Taipei-based model and designer

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  diary March 09, 2017

  Good Humor

  I HAVE YET TO FIND a taxi driver who thinks wrong of president Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte since his election last May. His approval ratings regularly exceed 80 percent, despite the controversial hero’s burial he organized for former dictator Ferdinand Marcos last November, or the indiscriminate slaughtering of suspected drug dealers and users—including children. His war on drugs amounts to more than seven thousand shot dead so far (more than during the martial-law period, artists tell me), reinforcing the “doing what it takes” attitude gaining popularity worldwide. And yet the economy seems pleased,

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  diary January 17, 2017

  Attitude Adjustment

  “FINALLY!” was all anyone could think last Tuesday when Myanmar-based artist Aye Ko received the 2017 Joseph Balestier Award for the Freedom of Art. He’d been nominated for the prestigious prize three years running.

  Ko immediately promised to “share it with the community, with the children, and for their education.” Kirk Wagar, US ambassador to Singapore, and Art Stage director Lorenzo Rudolf presented the elated artist-activist with an oversize check for $15,000. “His work is a good investment too,” said Rudolf, who apparently gets asked about this a lot. The other nominees, Indonesia’s Arahmaiani

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  diary January 04, 2017

  The Lucie Show

  THE INDONESIAN ISLAND OF BALI isn’t (yet) an art-world hotspot. “It’s like you are coming to the forest with us before all the trees are cut,” joked Esti Dewi, the wife of artist Filippo Sciascia, hinting at the promise for industry scouts. Nested in a vacant joglo (a traditional Javanese house) containing intricate folk treasures, Kayu, the Balinese branch of conceptual “art employer” Lucie Fontaine, was launching its fifth project. “Ritiro” (retreat) opened at the beginning of last month and then moved on to Java’s Gereja Ayam, or Chicken Church—the weirdest of the anti-white-cube spaces on

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  diary November 15, 2016

  The Wild Bund

  LAST WEEK I SPENT THE SHOCKING, watershed days around the dawn of Trump’s America in Shanghai. While the events resonated here, it was less a shake than a quiver. After all, China and its overheating art world are far from the center of that particular storm—even if “Shyna,” as Trump so dismissively puts it, is in his crosshairs.

  It wasn’t that long ago that Beijing, with its massive network of artist studios, underground movements, and exhibition spaces, was the center of the Chinese art establishment. But the past seven days confirmed a shift east toward Shanghai, with the business of exhibiting

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  diary November 04, 2016

  Fall Forward

  “AREN’T YOU HOT IN THAT?” I asked Frog King, swathed in his usual animistic garb dangling with sculptures and talismans, as he stood in the courtyard at PMQ, the “creative industries” hub in a former government school and quarters for married police officers.

  “It’s my summer outfit!” he rejoiced, upbeat as ever, as he strolled onstage to unveil a Le Mans race car that he had covered in graffiti. The ceremony honored the launch of Hong Kong Art Week—autumn edition. The artist had all the officials wear frog glasses as they shook rattles made of plastic bottles and buttons, summoning for someone

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  picks October 10, 2016

  Danh Vō

  Danh Vō excels in arranging striking presentations from improbable associations between autobiographical innuendos and artifacts. On the ground floor, Lick Me, Lick Me, 2016, a fridge cooling a sixteenth-century wooden Jesus head, acts as a pedestal for a lump from a Roman Empire marble support. Or is it the marble, like an oversize paperweight, keeping the fridge grounded? The stairway holds 2.2.1861, 2009, one of the laborious transcriptions the artist’s father, Phùng Vō, has made of Théophane Vénard’s last correspondence to his father in 1861. In it, the French missionary compares his soon-to-be