Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva

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  diary August 20, 2016

  Night Fever

  “I PREFER SEEING PRIVATE COLLECTIONS TO MUSEUMS,” said collector Wiyu Wahono. “They are like an enigma to decipher.” We were at a dinner at the home of another collector, Prasodjo Winarko, on the eve of the opening of Art Stage Jakarta, and Wahono’s opinion didn’t seem entirely unpopular, if only for the reason that visitors to his collection earlier that day were still in awe. The inaugural edition of the export of the Singaporean fair promised to be cheerful despite the city’s crippling traffic. “Hands down, they win!” muttered Singapore-based Filipino collector Lourdes Samson, comparing the

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  picks June 14, 2016

  Günther Förg

  In Günther Förg’s lifelong relationship with abstract painting, he embraced colors even if it included limiting his use of them. He played unwaveringly with the sense of proportion on his canvases. The paintings on exhibit here were made after 2007 and after he had established a reputation for lead paintings and monochromes. But unlike his earlier Minimalist works, these varicolored renditions are abundantly expressive. For instance, Untitled, 2008—a large, white-primed canvas on which the artist energetically scribbled blocks of pink and ocher amid occasional incidents of blue, yellow, and

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  diary May 31, 2016

  Formosa and Function

  “THAT’S HOW YOU DO BUSINESS,” cheered Wei-Wei Wang, director of the inaugural Formosa 101 art fair. Dealer Tong Walton had managed, within a minute of our encounter, to add me on WeChat and send along a PDF of Liu Xia’s dark-humored paintings while talking up a storm. Although business—or at least the VIP itinerary—wasn’t quite on par with other fairs of its size, Formosa generated some remarkable solo presentations from its thirty-two invited galleries. “With Art Taipei’s quality declining, we wanted to create a competitive fair in Taiwan,” explained Formosa 101 founder Richard Chang. But

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  picks May 10, 2016

  Yeh Shih-Chiang

  Yeh Shih-Chiang’s brushstrokes are arresting despite the deliberate simplicity of their compositions. The exhibition features twenty-eight of the artist’s large, tranquil landscapes painted in the last two decades of his life. Yeh used both ink and oil on paper and canvas, and many works are painted to the extreme edge of their surfaces, acting as windows into his world. He traveled to Taipei from Southern China in 1949 but never made it back. Estranged from the city, he learned to play the zither and created a Chan Buddhism–influenced body of work that resonated with his antiestablishment

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  diary March 26, 2016

  Fantastic Four

  “LAST TIME I CAME TO HONG KONG I was sixteen, and that was in 1961,” recalled the Indian artist Nalini Malani last Sunday. “I had just finished high school, so my mother wanted to reward me with a trip, but nowhere too far. She said: Here is a ticket, I have friends there you can stay with.” It took fifty-five years for another auspicious occasion to return. But what an occasion it was. Three hundred of us were about to be seated in the Grand Ballroom of the Conrad Hotel for Asia Society’s gala honoring Malani as well as Cai Guo-Qiang and Yoshitomo Nara—also celebrating the august and essential

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  diary March 19, 2016

  More or Less

  “IT’S A GREAT IDEA to repurpose a parking lot,” said one of the guests filling the lifts that serviced the Link Carpark in Makati, where the fourth edition of Art Fair Philippines opened last month. “But couldn’t they have invested in a grander entrance?”

  On the sixth floor, we were greeted by nascent VIP queues and air-kisses from those who had already snatched their passes and made it inside. On the seventh floor, Nick Buckley Wood from Pearl Lam Hong Kong was running late for the airport and swiftly scanning the more than forty galleries and project spaces. “I came for that opera thing last

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  picks March 16, 2016

  Michael Lin

  Three monumental floral-patterned murals, Autumn Gold, Deep Ravine, and Dragon’s Fury (all works 2015), together with Untitled Gathering, Manila, a sitting area with 240 similarly painted stools, fashion one of Michael Lin’s patent architectural canvases-cum-retreats. It is a quiet oasis amid an ungentrified neighborhood known for its density and grittiness. While lounging in the generous reds, yellows, and greens of the Taiwanese textile-inspired frescoes of oversize blossoms, viewers might see one of fifteen for-hire pedicabs refurbished with equally vibrant tarps that occasionally pass through

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  diary January 30, 2016

  Stage and Screen

  LAST WEEK in Singapore the flow of the art was as inconsistent as the tropical downbursts. The slew of events and exhibitions—including the sixth edition of Art Stage Singapore—evoked mushrooms sprung up after the rain: hard to spot but fun to hunt and with a dizzying array of potential effects.

  In July, the city-state came under criticism from international human rights groups after sixteen-year-old blogger Amos Yee was sentenced to four weeks of detention for posting collaged videos of Singapore’s recently deceased founding father, Lee Kuan Yew. That thought lingered in my mind on Tuesday at

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  diary November 09, 2015

  Gimme Mori

  UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES the Tokyo art world favors discretion over the spotlight. But it’s not every day that Takashi Murakami opens a show like “The 500 Arhats” at the Mori Art Museum, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Tokyo in fourteen years and the Japanese debut of his titular opus, a three-hundred-foot-long painting first shown in Qatar in 2012. Could an enduring global phenomenon like Murakami pull the same weight at home as he does abroad? we wondered. The stakes seemed high and the show galvanized an unusually ebullient art week that happened to begin with the second edition of

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  picks October 30, 2015

  “Trio”

  With a strange but formal elegance, “Trio” pairs recent acrylic-on-paper works by Nalini Malani with collages, photographs, and a video, all made between 1967 and 1996, by the late artists Nancy Spero and Ana Mendieta. Their commonality resides in the inward focus of their artistic strategies and simultaneous public engagement with feminism and politics. Each artist employs a similar aesthetic: an intriguing repertoire of figurative imagery and mythical creatures in a natural, ocher-dominated or black-and-white palette.

  In a digitized version of Silueta Sangrienta (Bleeding Silhouette), 1975,

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  picks August 06, 2015

  “Can The Museum Be A Garden?”

  This generous exhibition, which features works of thirty-six artists using sound, paper, video, photography, installation, and painting, ponders whether a museum can be a garden, by taking elements commonly found outdoors and inviting them inside. Covering two floors joined by a nearly hidden narrow stairway hosting the disturbing yet fascinating feminist sound piece Birdcalls, 1972–81, by Louise Lawler, where she mocks art-market gender inequity by twisting the enunciation of famous male artists’ names into birds whistles, the works filter the natural world by following their own art-historical

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  picks July 06, 2015

  Sérgio Costa

  In “Sampling Strata,” Lisbon-based artist Sérgio Costa presents a geological and naturally inspired series of works that could in fact be categorized as a reflection of extreme perceptions. On the lower floor of the gallery are his clouds paintings, a series of five similar oil and enamel canvases of vapor-like gray masses on dark backgrounds, all possessing rather emotional titles such as Fucking Haziness!, Eventually, and Mindless into the Cloudburst Overhead, all 2015. These words express a dynamic, violent desperation that is not entirely represented, in spite of the works’ gloomy palette,