picks September 17, 2021

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe

Hanging on a clothesline at the entrance to Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s exhibition at Jane Lombard Gallery, “Cappuccino in Exile,” is a work made up of unstructured, sarong-like garments, or lungis, that are richly patterned with zigzags, stripes, florals, and diamond shapes. The wraps are not only fashion staples for the women of Myanmar, but they are also supernatural objects. Because a lungi covers the lower half of a woman’s body, it is believed that it can drain a man of his strength if he gets too close to one. Reeling from the country’s military coup that took place in February of this year,

picks June 01, 2021

Minoru Onoda

Hovering in a fantastically cavernous room in Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie’s freshly launched virtual showroom as part of “Minoru Onoda: Through Another Lens,” WORK75-Blue1232, 1975, offers a diptych of concentric circles in soft shades of blue by the second-generation Gutai artist. Currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Himeji City Museum of Art in Japan, Onoda has been increasingly thrust into the limelight in the wake of recent reappraisals of the Gutai group led by scholars and curators such as Joan Kee, Ming Tiampo, Alexandra Monroe, and Shoichi Hirai. With its darker tones

picks January 20, 2021

Zulkifli Lee

A sense of order, logic, and stability emerges from Zulkifli Lee’s fourteen geometric sculptures in “Interdependence,” where monuments of fused wood and steel offer harmonious meditations on interconnectedness amid uncertain times. In Segugusan, 2020, three gridded steel cubes are affixed between the layered blocks jutting out from a piece of Chengal wood. The metal cubes appear ornamental, but they provide additional weight and a wider base to the sculpture for equilibrium. In MutuSekutu, 2020, modular blocks of steel wrap around a column of notched, reclaimed wood that, in an earlier life,

picks October 12, 2020

Ho Rui An

Ho Rui An’s first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia delves into the compromises that the East made to achieve capitalist modernity—and the repercussions thereof. The performance-turned-installation Asia the Unmiraculous, 2018—, consists of videos of Ho’s lecture at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, the images which accompanied his presentation—all related to the Asian financial crisis of 1997—encapsulated in light boxes, and key texts by formidable statesmen marking the region’s defiant turn away from the West. Asia the Unmiraculous takes the audience on a journey through the continent’s

Eric Goh