Tagged Asia-Pacific

It Follows – TCAC at Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington

DAMP OCEAN | a contemporary art space in Te Whanganui-a-Tara: is it? should it? could it? would it? The exchange show between Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC) and Enjoy Public Art Gallery comes in two parts. A survey opening up the space to the voice of the New Zealand viewer, reworking the questions that stimulated the founding of TCAC here to gauge the voices that are, should, could, would in an unfamiliar space…

A view from Nanji-do ecological park, Seoul, Korea, 2015. Photo by Xin Cheng

Mountain Stories

XIN CHENG | The last three months of 2015, I lived on a trash mountain. I thought I was going to an eco-park. The morning after my arrival, I walked out of where I had slept, and discovered a giant dome building, a huge chimney, trucks coming in, and a blinking board of what looked like toxic chemicals with numbers beside them…

Fresh Off the Page with Ellison Tan

CHYE-LING HUANG | In July, Fresh Off the page will present Conflict Circle, Singaporean playwright Ellison Tan’s foray into the absurd. With three professional productions under her belt, Ellison’s Conflict Circle challenges the nature of theatre and the futility and absurdity of performance…

Mass grave at Blitar, East Java. Part of the Mass Grave Project, ongoing. Photo by FX Harsono

In conversation with FX Harsono

AISHA JOHAN | FX Harsono is a leading figure within the Indonesian contemporary art scene. Over the past four decades, his work has developed against the backdrop of the rise and fall of the Soeharto regime, through revolution and reformation. On the eve of Jakarta’s election, which have incited simmering racial and religious tensions in the world’s most populous Muslim country, Harsono’s practice resonates with the national search for plurality. Aisha Johan caught up with the artist to talk…

FX Harsono, Pilgrimage to History, 2013

In conversation with FX Harsono (English Translation)

AISHA JOHAN | I am very drawn to one of your works, Pilgrimage to History, 2013. I feel that you are giving a voice to those who no longer have one, from mass grave to mass audience. Could you please tell me more about the work? FX Harsono: In the beginning, I started this project about the genocide and mass grave that I had found out about in Blitar, a city where I was born and raised…

Artist John Young Zerunge. Image courtesy of John Young Studio

In conversation with John Young Zerunge

AMY WENG | John Young Zerunge is an Australian-Chinese artist and one of the co-founders and founding president of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney. An initiative formed by the Asian Australian Artists’ Association in 1996, 4A has become a leading art institution in Australia, encouraging dialogue on Asian and Australian cultural relations, and…

In conversation with Vera Mey

AMY WENG | Vera Mey is an independent curator. The following is a except of a conversation between Mey and HAINAMANA editor Amy Weng. Here, they talk umbrella identities and redefining a position of alterity…

Xin Cheng, found in the Kobe mountains, Japan, 2016

I AM…

XIN CHENG | Early 2015, I performed for MAU/Lemi Ponifasio’s I AM at Aotea Centre as part of the Auckland Arts Festival. It was an intense and transformative experience. For a start, I was grateful for having been included as a volunteer, despite being an amateur to the world of performance (I had only started getting my toes wet…

Notes from the third space

Notes towards a third space: On a prevailing easterly wind

AMY WENG | In 1992, on the corner of Wellesley and Kitchener Street, on the southern facade of what was then the Old Art Gallery, a lighted window containing an ink painted backdrop and elongated rosary was installed. Four calligraphic characters were painted on its face, and this window changed- illuminating and dimming according to the hour of the day…