Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva

• 

  picks June 29, 2015

  “ART BRUT LIVE”

  When Jean Dubuffet coined the term art brut, he did so out of reverence for those outsiders of the art world whose authenticity drew as much from their asocial behavior or mental illness as from their resolve to put all they had into their artwork. This gathering of work from the abcd collection—presented with Mario Del Curto’s photo portraits of the artists—would almost be too didactic, but with fervor comes momentum, and across many mediums, from the tribulations of Henry Darger’s watercolors of little girls, to Judith Scott’s lumpy fiber compositions hanging low above the floor, to Koji

• 

  diary June 29, 2015

  Making a Scene

  COINCIDING WITH THE FINAL WEEKEND of Art Basel, the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space took over the Czech city’s historic center. Organized around the three themes of Music, Weather, and Politics, the thirteenth edition focused on the “social function” of scenography, and featured more than sixty participating countries, with street performances, talks, exhibitions in Baroque interiors, sound walks, and boat rides down the Vltava River. There were easily as many perspectives as there were nations. “The world is not global as everyone is trying to tell us. It’s local,” said Sodja

• 

  diary June 11, 2015

  In the Loop

  TWO EVENINGS before the vernissage of the thirteenth edition of the moving-image fair Loop, I strolled down the streets of sunny Barcelona toward the galleries for the soft launch to the week’s festivities. At ProjecteSD, crowds had gathered for the opening of “Close-Cropped Tales,” and I grabbed an Estrella beer and talked to gallery founder Silvia Dauder and curator Anne-Laure Chamboissier about the constraints of collecting and storing video art. “Imagine what it’s like for sound!” said Conrado Uribe, the artistic director of the citywide festival, also called Loop, that runs parallel to the

• 

  picks April 06, 2015

  Poklong Anading

  In this exhibition, Manila-based artist Poklong Anading freely cycles through such mediums as video, sculpture, found objects, and film to record a line, a sound, or a passing thought. His observations of urbanity culminate in a series of freestanding objects. Installed serially yet all unique, five stainless-steel sculptures of incrementally increasing sizes—all titled Homage to Homage and from 2014–15—dominate the main exhibition space. Anading here transforms the provisional into contemplative objects similar in appearance to the makeshift wooden scaffolding often used throughout the city in

• 

  diary February 24, 2015

  Third Time’s a Charm

  “REMEMBER LAST YEAR, the people dancing on the first night?” asked dealer Edouard Malingue as we stood in a car park in Makati, the wealthiest of the cities composing metro Manila. “Of course I had to come back.”

  For one week earlier this month the car park doubled as the grounds for Art Fair Philippines, at which Malingue was showing Jeremy Everett’s pastel-decayed blanket canvases. Except for a few galleries like Malingue’s who brought non-Filipino artists, the fair mostly surveys the local scene. Highlights included special projects such as Roberto Feleo’s large installation of earth-toned,

• 

  picks February 03, 2015

  Manuel Ocampo

  Putting aside his well-known colorful palette, Manuel Ocampo’s solo exhibition of twenty somber, sepia works—ranging from pieces made with oil on canvas, ink on paper, and mixed media—appear at once irreverent, funny, and occult. The most remarkable painting—and the biggest, taking up the entire central space of the gallery—is Fashion Update (all works 2014). This depicts a messy yet nearly classically composed otherworldly tableau, emulating the visual effect of etching techniques in a religious scene in the nude, with trees, clouds, and more animistic black-and-white markings of crosses,

• 

  picks February 02, 2015

  Shio Kusaka and Jonas Wood

  Potter Shio Kusaka and painter Jonas Wood share an obsession with vessels as pictorial tropes. Along with other artistic couples maintaining independent practices—such as painter Madelon Vriesendorp and architect Rem Koolhaas, whose dual visual pursuit of surrealist architectonics is strengthened by both their lines of work—Wood and Kusaka converse with the same muses without the stamp of collaboration. Fresh and hospitable, this exhibition of their work conjures an impression of prolific artistic endeavors in a continuous evolution, all born from their Los Angeles studio.

  Here, the glazes on

• 

  diary January 27, 2015

  Awards Season

  “I DON’T KNOW if there is anything sexy going on,” Asia Art Archive’s Chantal Wong told me when I bumped into her on a plane bound from Hong Kong to Singapore last Tuesday, though I think she was just being modest. While the rest of us were flying over to catch some of the radiant waves around Art Stage Singapore, Wong was in the small but powerful city-state on a twenty-four-hour award run on behalf of AAA for Best Institution, one of thirteen categories organized by Prudential Eye Awards. (The main recognition went to Japanese collective Chim↑Pom with a prize of $50,000; another went to the

• 

  picks October 20, 2014

  Robin Rhode

  Contradictions abound when street-art interventions turn up in a gallery space. But South African–born, Berlin-based artist Robin Rhode succeeds in this context, bringing genuine impulsiveness to his first Hong Kong show. Mainly focusing on process, the exhibition, which includes video, photography, and animation, found its rationale on opening night, when Rhode galvanized the huddled crowds with a performance titled Car Wash, in which he drew a car on an empty black wall with chalk. Running back and forth, he embraced a gestural approach, evoking an admixture of capoeira and warm-ups for hip-hop

• 

  picks August 01, 2014

  Paul Chan

  This twenty-four-room exhibition surveys Paul Chan’s sculptures, videos, animations, drawings, and projections, as well as his often-political ruminations on life and death. Though he appears to keep his art-making and activism mostly separate, here Chan absorbs a multitude of intellectual and otherwise notable sources, such as Henry Darger, Charles Fourier, Diane Arbus, the Marquis de Sade, Samuel Beckett, and even Batman, the Joker, and George W. Bush, with a twist.

  Beginning with one of the earliest works on view, the low-tech colorful animation Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of

• 

  picks July 09, 2014

  Michael Williams

  A never-declining artistic medium—painting—is granted yet another harlequin incarnation in Michael Williams’s latest exhibition, where his compositions bring together large-format ink-jet, airbrush, and acrylic on canvas, as well as smaller collages and pen-on-paper works.

  DAD (all works cited, 2014) depicts a jolly character in suspenders set against a bright green field and a pink-clouds sunset. On top of his forehead, mistaking the canvas for a monitor, is a pop-up window asking for decisions: DON’T SAVE, CANCEL, SAVE, prompts that arise when one closes a document on a computer. In turn, New

• 

  picks July 03, 2014

  “Ten Million Rooms of Yearning. Sex in Hong Kong”

  Sex is messy. Establishing a correlation between high population density and a diversity of carnal urges, “Ten Million Rooms of Yearning. Sex in Hong Kong” is a five-venue show spread across town that addresses an arguably decreasing local libido, through the aesthetics of the crowded and the homoerotic. More generally, it open-mindedly speaks to the nonmainstream practices of BDSM, Internet sex, and paid sex. Works by thirty-nine artists in media including painting, drawing, photography, digital animation, video, sculpture, print, and installation—mostly overtly phallic—give the exhibition a