Linke - Artinfo

AsiA edition
> turning toward theater
sugimoto
changes
focus
art / architecture / DeSiGN / lifeStyle / travel
march / april 2013
Feet First
shoes step
into the Fashion
spotlight
Yiqing Yin
haute Couture
as sCulpture
“no
CountrY”
ContemporarY
asian art at the
guggenheim
liang
shaoji
the artist and the
silkworm

Scope New York
Booth C25 | March 6 - 10
Art Dubai
Booth A46 | March 20 - 23

Wim Delvoye
RonalD ventuRa
3 April - 11 May 2013
Wim Delvoye “Gloria Victis Rorschach” 2012, Nickeled bronze, 44.4 x 21.3 x 29.6 cm / 17 1/2 x 8 1/4 x 11 1/2 inches, © studio Wim Delvoye, Belgium
Farhad Moshiri “BIRD GIRL” 2013, Embroidery on canvas,180 x 123 cm / 70 3/4 x 48 1/2 inches
FARHAD MOSHIRI “PICNIC”
JIN MEYERSON “No Rest foR the WICked”
26 February - 30 March 2013

yousuke takeda
AsiA edition
56 the artist
hiroshi sugimoto
as he prepares for a November
retrospective in seoul, the master
photographer immerses himself in
traditional Japanese theater.
by soNia kolesNikov-Jessop
60 the eVent
rethinking a region
a new show at the Guggenheim Museum
brings contemporary south and southeast
asian art to New york.
by adeliNe chia
64 the collector
when what’s new is
heritage, too
in a New delhi shopping mall, kiran
Nadar’s museum redefines
how contemporary art meets its public.
by rosalyN d’Mello
Departments
12 masthead
14 art on the move
16 the reporter
What led three major artists to
venture out from Gagosian’s aegis?
by Julia halperiN
18 dealer’s notebook
united arab emirates gallerist
asmaa al-shabibi.
21 datebook
“The house is a place for my family’s
74
life, so I wanted to build it with my friends.”
—daisuke miyatsu, whose modest tokyo-area home
incorporates works by many of the artists in his collection.
march/april 2013

AsiA edition
the art of living
35 luxuRy CuRATEd
a show of shoes in new york,
50 fabulous frocks in Bath, u.k.
39 THE COnnOISSEuR
the eminently discoverable
metalwork of marie Zimmermann.
By william l. hamilton
42 THE ART Of
CRAfTSmAnSHIP
chanel’s diamond “shooting star.”
45 ART On THE wRIST
marquetry in miniature.
By sonia kolesnikov-jessop
49 ART On THE CATwAlk
inspired by sculpture, couturier
yiqing yin goes for the flow.
By sonia kolesnikov-jessop
52 ART On THE PAlATE
finding the best Barolos.
By james suckling
54 muST-HAVES
the delicacy of marquetry furniture.
By sarah p. hanson
the
the asian scene
71 THE mECEnE
a brewer cultivates a cutting-edge
art scene.
By adeline chia
72 THE muSEum
a “floating box” in singapore.
By sonia kolesnikov-jessop
74 lIfE And ART
with the help of artist friends, a collector of
modest means builds his dream house.
By madeleine o’dea
82 In THE STudIO
liang shaoji finds inspiration in silkworms.
By madeleine o’dea
86 THE dATAbAnk
taking the pulse of the contemporary
asian market.
By roman kraeussl
88 COnVERSATIOn wITH
leng lin of pace Beijing.
By Benjamin genocchio
march/april 2013
35
COVER: Hiroshi Sugimoto
with a selection of his works
exhibited at Art Stage
Singapore 2013 by Gallery
Koyanagi. Photograph by
Richard Koh.
THIS PAGE: Shoe
from the Prada spring
2012 collection.
top: prada and the museum at fit, new york. cover image: art stage singapore 2013 and gallery koyanagi
www.desarthe.com
Mariko Mori: Flatstone
28th March - 28th April
Tel : 852-21678896 Email : hongkong@desarthe.com
8/F Club Lusitano Building, 16 Ice House Street, Central Hong Kong
Mariko Mori, 1967, Flatstone, 2006, Ceramic stones and acrylic vase, ed 2/2, 488 x 315 x 8.9 cm

12
AsiA edition
volume I no. 2
Benjamin Genocchio
editorial director
Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop
editor iN chieF
Susan Delson
executive editor
Penny Blatt
creative director
Katharine van Itallie
art director
Anne Donnelly Andres
ProductioN director
Paul Kolbe
ProductioN maNager
louise Blouin media
louise Blouin
chairmaN aNd ceo
Ben Hartley
PresideNt
B. William Fine
PresideNt, global sales
Dawn Fasano
geNeral couNsel
Blouin Artinfo.com Asia edition does not assume
responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts,
photographs, or illustrations. Copyright worldwide
of all editorial content is held by the publishers,
lTB (u.K.) limited.
Reproduction in whole or part is
forbidden save with express permission
in writing of the publishers.
march/april 2013
Wendy Buckley
Publisher
Northeast/midwest/southwest sales, u.s.
tel +1 646 348 6308 fax +1 617 830 0035 wbuckley@artinfo.com
Kate Shanley
associate Publisher
Northeast/southeast sales, u.s.
tel +1 917 804 4642 fax +1 617 830 0035 kshanley@artinfo.com
Kathy murphy
sales director
west coast sales, u.s.
tel +1 917 767 3279 fax +1 617 830 0035 kmurphy@artinfo.com
InTeRnATIonAl
Trapp lewis executive vice PresideNt, JaPac
tel +6591019117 trapp@artinfo.com
Janice Febbraio maNagiNg director, greater chiNa
tel +8618500027190 janice@artinfo.com
Inna Kanounikova sales director,
chiNa + hoNg KoNg
tel +86 136 8105 8105 (mainland china)
tel +852 63723963 (hong kong)
ikanounikova@artinfo.com
mark Shriner maNagiNg director, JaPaN + Korea
tel +818094331966 mshriner@artinfo.com
michelle Park director, southeast asia
tel +6581984897 mpark@artinfo.com
Jean Ruffin sales director,
FraNce, beNelux, FreNch-sPeaKiNg switzerlaNd
tel +33 1 40 06 03 10 fax +33 1 40 06 03 92 jruffin@artinfo.com
maria Bernal sales director, austria,
germaNy, germaN-sPeaKiNg switzerlaNd, sPaiN
tel +49 30 346 21 535 fax +49 30 346 21 536 mbernal@artinfo.com
Romina Provenzi sales director, u.K., italy, greece
tel +44 20 7193 2709 rprovenzi@artinfo.com
Robert logan sales rePreseNtative, euroPe
tel +44 20 8579 4836 fax +44 20 8579 5057
rlogan@robertlogan.co.uk
lindsay Russell sales rePreseNtative, u.K.
tel +44 207 985 9640 lrussell@artinfo.com
blouin artinfo.com asia edition is published by louise blouin media, inc., 601 west 26th
street, suite 410, New york, Ny 10001. copyright © 2013 louise blouin media, inc. all material
is compiled from sources believed to be reliable but published without responsibility for
errors or omissions. blouin artinfo.com asia edition accepts advertisements from advertisers
believed to be of good repute but cannot guarantee the authenticity or quality of objects
or services advertised in its pages. blouin artinfo.com asia edition assumes no responsibility
for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs. return postage should accompany such
material. all rights, including translation into other languages, reserved by the publisher.
Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher. the
name blouin artinfo.com asia edition ® is a registered trademark owned by louise blouin
media, inc., and cannot be used without its express written consent.
© Marie Clérin Galerie Downtown François Laffanour
Charlotte Perriand
Jean Prouvé
Le Corbusier
Ron Arad
Ettore Sottsass
Pierre Jeanneret
Georges Jouve
George Nakashima
Choï Byung Hoon
Jean Royère
Serge Mouille
Isamu Noguchi
Kenzo Tange
Vassilakis Takis
Galerie DOWNTOWN François Laffanour
18 & 33 rue de Seine 75006 Paris - France
+33 (0)1 46 33 82 41 - www.galeriedowntown.com

14
Kazuo Shiraga’s
oil on paper
Work II, 1958, at
the Guggenheim
Museum.
ARTonTHEMoVE
new york
Going Gutai
Call it high-action painting. Already known for canvases painted with
his bare feet, Kazuo Shiraga took his subversion of the medium even
further at a 1955 exhibition in Tokyo when he rolled around in a pile of
mud and wet cement and used his entire body as a kind of paintbrush.
The result, Challenging Mud, is a defining work for the postwar
Japanese movement Gutai—and for an exhibition now at the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum. Such works “still look fresh, 60 years later,”
says Ming Tiampo, co-curator, with Alexandra Munroe, of “Gutai:
Splendid Playground,” the first U.S. museum retrospective to address
the influential Japanese movement.
Rising out of the physical and cultural voids left in Japan after World
War II, Gutai (“embodiment”) was founded in 1954 by Jiro Yoshihara,
who dared artists to distance themselves from traditional Japanese
painting and “do what has never been done before.” Followers, including
Sadamasa Motonaga, Atsuko Tanaka, and Shiraga, turned to action,
abstraction, and unorthodox materials, foreshadowing Arte Povera,
Fluxus, Conceptualism, and performance art.
“We see its influence very clearly on key artists we represent,
including Allan Kaprow and Eva Hesse,” notes Marc Payot, of Hauser
& Wirth. “For us, interest arose from this connection, and because the
town house we occupy in New York City was the site of the very first
Gutai show in America.” Last year the gallery celebrated that historic
1958 Martha Jackson exhibition with its own, “A Visual Essay on
Gutai at 32 East 69th Street.” The vogue for Gutai has pervaded the
market as well. “There is a lot of renewed interest,” Payot confirms.
“The buyers are very sophisticated, committed private collectors and
museums.”His gallery has placed works at prices from $50,000 to
$1.5 million. — k r i s w i lto n
“Gutai: Splendid Playground” remains on view at the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum through May 8.
hong kong
Ritz Fit
Claire Hsu-Vuchot, co-founder of
Asia Art Archive, has become an
ambassador for The Ritz-Carlton,
Hong Kong. The expert on Chinese
art will be working with the hotel
to organize events, talks, and
exhibitions centered on Asian art.
Currently under discussion:
programming during Art Basel
Hong Kong, which will take
place May 23-26, and ways of
engaging with the local community
during the event.
Pierre Perruset, the General
Manager of The Ritz-Carlton,
Hong Kong, says it is more than just
Hsu-Vuchot’s expertise in art
that makes her a good match for
the hotel, but her “embodiment of
elegance and grace.” Hsu-Vuchot
sits on the museum and museum
acquisitions committee for the
West Kowloon Cultural District,
the board of The Foundation for
Arts Initiatives in New York, and
the advisory committee of the
Academy of Visual Art of Hong
Kong Baptist University. She
received one of the first RBS Coutts/
Financial Times Women in Asia
Awards in 2009. —zoe li
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
left, hyogo prefectural museum of art, kobe; right, asia art archive
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: TAIYE IDAHOR AND ART DUBAI; HEMAN CHONG AND SINGAPORE TYLER PRINT INSTITUTE, SINGAPORE; ROSSI & ROSSI, LONDON
DUBAI
West African “Marker”
at Art Dubai
Art from West Africa will take center
stage at Art Dubai 2013, with a set of
curated concept stands dedicated to the
region, presented under the fair’s
Marker program.
This year’s program is curated by Bisi
Silva, Lagos-based independent curator
and founder of the city’s Center for
Contemporary Art. Silva is using the
work of upcoming and established
artists to explore the nature of evolving
cities in West Africa and the way that
changes in these cities impact society.
“The theme allows each contributor
to approach it from a local context. At
the same time, visitors to the fair will
discover several common threads that
link the works — the vibrant dynamics
of the cities as well as the tensions that
arise when the modern collides with
the traditional, the urban displaces the
rural, and the boundaries between
the public and private become blurred,”
Silva stated.
Silva selected five art centers to
present works in their nominated cities’
exhibition spaces at Art Dubai: Espace
Doual’art (Douala, Cameroon); Maison
Carpe Diem (Segou, Mali); Nubuke
Foundation (Accra, Ghana); Raw
Material Company (Dakar, Senegal);
and Centre for Contemporary Art
(Lagos, Nigeria).
Working with the curator and the
fair organizers, each art group is
presenting recent works by such artists
as Soly Cisse (Senegal), Ablade
Glover (Ghana), Abdoulaye Konate
(Mali), and Taiye Idahor (Nigeria).
— SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP
BLOUINArtinfo.comAsiA | MARCH/APRIL 2013
SINGAPORE
STPI to Art Basel 2013
The Singapore Tyler Print Institute
will become the first gallery from
Singapore to participate in Art Basel.
This marks another major
milestone for STPI, which celebrated
its tenth anniversary in 2012. Last
March, STPI became the first Southeast
Asian gallery to present at The
Armory Show, New York.
STPI’s Chairman Ong Yew
Huat notes that presenting at
Art Basel 2013 will be “a defining
moment, a huge step up for STPI and
Singapore as it pushes the envelope
for the arts.”
Art Basel receives an average of
1,200-1,500 applications annually
for 300 coveted spaces. “STPI
acceptance into Art Basel is
validation of its programming and
collaborative work with artists from
HONG KONG
A Contemporary Silk Road
Singapore, the
region, and the rest
of the world. This is
a good opportunity
to introduce art from
Singapore and the
region on this international
platform, which will be attended
by elite collectors, curators and
galleries,” says STPI Director Emi Eu.
Eu, who sits on the selection
committee of Art Basel Hong Kong
and is a global committee member
for Art Basel, adds that STPI’s
acceptance into the prestigious art
event is timely. “The world is looking
at the exponential growth of cultural
developments in Asia, especially in
Singapore, with Gillman Barracks, the
National Art Gallery, and Art Stage
Singapore,” she says. —SKJ
Fabio Rossi of London’s Rossi & Rossi and Chinese
contemporary art dealer Jean Marc Decrop have joined forces
to open Yallay Space, a new gallery in Hong Kong specializing
in Middle Eastern and Asian art.
The 600-square-meter space in Wong Chuk Hang, Hong
Kong’s up-and-coming art neighborhood, opened in January.
Rossi and Decrop chose to set up shop away from the community
of galleries on Hollywood Road in the Central district—where,
says Rossi, “rents are prohibitive. Whereas in Wong Chuk Hang
we were actually able to buy our space.”
Rossi specializes in classical Himalayan art and is
particularly known for his passion for Tibetan art. Decrop has
expertise in contemporary Chinese, Southeast Asian, and
Middle Eastern art. For the year ahead, the two have developed
a program for Yallay Space that draws connections between
these regions in what they call “a contemporary Silk Road.”
Decrop has worked with Chinese artist Xu Qu to curate “Post
Generation,” a show of eight Chinese artists born in the late
1970s to early 1980s, on view in March and April. During May
and June, the new gallery will take advantage of the Art Basel
Hong Kong buzz to showcase the work of Iranian poet, artist,
and filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami in a solo exhibition. —Z L
Above, Heman
Chong’s Bloom
(Blob), 2012, one
of the works that
the Singapore
Tyler Print
Institute will
display at
Art Basel;
left, “Head”
Series (No. 6),
2012, by Nigerian
artist Taiye
Idahor; below,
Mutation, 2009,
by Erbossyn
Meldibekov at
Yallay Space.
15

16
THEREPORTER
Artists Shift Allegiance
THE ART WORLD IS ABUZZ AFTER GAGOSIAN GALLERY STARS JUMP SHIP
Larry Gagosian
ON THE FIRST DAY of Art Basel
Miami Beach this past
December, Gagosian Gallery
sold Jeff Koons’s wooden
sculpture Buster Keaton,
1988, for approximately
$5 million. That same day,
word spread that Koons
was planning a major show
of new work—but the
exhibition, which opens in
May, would be with Gagosian
competitor David Zwirner.
Koons did not say he
was splitting with the blue-
chip international gallery
where he has shown for
more than a decade. And
Gagosian Gallery said in a
statement that it continues
to represent Koons in
partnership with Sonnabend
Gallery, the Zwirner show
notwithstanding. Just
over a week later, however,
two of Gagosian’s other
high-profile artists, Damien
Hirst and Yayoi Kusama,
announced they were
leaving the gallery for good.
Neither of them gave a
reason for doing so and
the gallery did not respond
to a request for comment
by press time.
Observers wondered
if these departures suggest
that the dealer’s art world
dominance is waning. Could
it be that his business has
simply grown too big?
“His expansion has been
unprecedented,” says art
adviser Lisa Schiff. Indeed,
Gagosian has opened six
galleries in as many years,
spreading his empire across
three continents. The dealer
recently estimated his gallery
network employs roughly 150
people, 20 to 25 of whom are
devoted to sales. According
to figures published in the Art
Newspaper, rental costs for
11 of Gagosian’s spaces—not
counting his 25,000-squarefoot
property on West
24th Street in New York,
which he owns—may exceed
$11 million per year.
The moves of the three
artists come at a critical
moment for each. The final
exhibition at the Whitney
“Dealers cannot serve buyer,
artist/seller, and themselves without
giving someone short shrift.”
Museum’s Madison Avenue
location (before a 2015
move to the Meatpacking
District) will be a major
Koons retrospective. Hirst
and Kusama are fresh off
career retrospectives
at Tate Modern and the
Whitney, respectively.
Some observers speculated
that a large operation
might find it more difficult
to cater to the needs of
major artists. “Dealers cannot
serve buyer, artist/seller,
and themselves without
giving someone short
shrift,” says London-based
dealer Kenny Schachter.
That question of where a
dealer’s priorities should
ultimately lie—with the buyer,
the artist, or the dealer
himself—has also driven two
recent lawsuits against both
the gallery and Larry Gagosian
personally by claimants
who accuse him of withholding
information to profit
unjustly from a deal. The
first suit, filed by collector
Jan Cowles in January
of last year, concerns Roy
Lichtenstein’s enamel
Girl in a Mirror, 1964, which
Cowles’s son Charles
allegedly consigned to Gagosian
without her knowledge
or consent. Jan Cowles
contends that as part of the
unauthorized sale, Gagosian
wrongfully skewed the
balance of information in
favor of the buyer to achieve
an unusually high commission.
In November, both
sides agreed to mediation.
Another lawsuit was
brought by billionaire
Ronald Perelman, in New
York State Supreme Court
this past September, alleging
that Gagosian’s failure to
disclose “secret contract
provisions” during negotiations
over the sale of a Koons
sculpture cost the collector
millions of dollars. According
to court papers, in May 2010
Perelman agreed to buy a
new granite sculpture by
Koons, titled Popeye, for $4
million and the sculpture was
to be delivered to Perelman
in December 2011. After
fabrication delays, Perelman,
through one of his holdings,
negotiated a group of art
transactions to acquire a different
work from Gagosian,
not identified in court papers,
to be “paid for...with cash
and...certain works of art,
including the sculpture
Popeye, thereby receiving a
credit for the purported value
of the works.” When Gagosian
refused to value Popeye
for over $4 million, the suit
alleges, Perelman learned
of “the existence of a secret
contract with Koons”
whereby the artist is entitled
to 70 percent of any resale
profits above the original
sale price. Perelman claims
Gagosian “was required
to share such information”
at the time of their initial
agreement on Popeye.
On January 18, Gagosian’s
attorneys filed a motion
to dismiss the case.
Such specific artist and
dealer contract details are
rarely leaked to the public,
and sources say the
revelation could have been
a factor in Koons’s decision
to show with another gallery.
Hirst’s motivations for
leaving the gallery, however,
may simply stem from
dissatisfaction with his sales
figures. “There’s no
doubt Hirst has saturated
his market,” says Alberto
Mugrabi, a collector
who owns approximately 300
Hirst pieces. Nonetheless,
he says, “I think Hirst has
been his own dealer for a long
time. I think eventually he’ll
reject the system entirely.”
The reasons for Kusama’s
move—sources say
the artist is planning to join
Zwirner’s stable—are not
clear and Zwirner
representatives declined
to confirm or comment on
Kusama’s reported switch.
That blue-chip artists are
more frequently calling the
shots in their own careers
is a consequence of the very
art world corporatization
Gagosian helped pioneer,
observers say.
“Expansion on this level
is still a novelty,” Schiff says.
“Coming up with the right
recipe for growth is
important, and I don’t think
we’ve figured it out yet.”
—JULIA HALPERIN
MARCH/APRIL 2013 | BLOUINArtinfo.comAsiA
AMBER DE VOS

18
Dealer’snotebook
Asmaa Al-Shabibi
What is your background? Was there
art around when you were a child?
My mother was an artist and dealer,
and so we had art on our walls and
artists coming through the house quite
regularly. In many ways we take things
like that for granted and often rebel
against it. I studied law in the U.K. and
trained as a solicitor, and I practiced
banking and finance law in London
and Singapore for about nine years.
How did you decide to shift your
focus from law to art?
It was really one of those stories about
being in the right place at the right
time. I decided to quit law but wasn’t
sure what to do, other than needing
to be more creative. In 2007 I came
across an advert for the inaugural
difc Gulf Art Fair, later renamed Art
Dubai, and got so excited. The fair itself
blew me away, and I immediately called
them up and asked to join their team.
The art scene in Dubai was nascent—
the fair was a smaller operation back
then—but the people behind it were
ambitious and had real vision. It was
a steep learning curve for me. One
aspect of my role was fund-raising,
and the pivotal moment was securing
a headline sponsor at the 11th hour.
I was also involved in the initiation of
the Abraaj Capital Art Prize, which
is the largest such prize in the world
at $1 million annually. I left after about
three years because I wanted
to work directly with artists.
When did you open your gallery?
After I left Art Dubai I was thinking
of opening a gallery and approached
William Lawrie, then the Middle East
specialist at Christie’s, as a neutral
person who would be able to give me
some pointers as to what was missing
in the market. In the course of our
meeting we realized we had a lot of the
same ideas. A few weeks later he called
me up, and we opened in March 2011.
For me, the process of putting together
shows is the most interesting part of
the art scene and really what drew me
to the business.
How did you choose your specialty?
Initially, working with artists from the
region made sense given that we are
based in Dubai, which for years has
been a trading port between East
and West. However, we deliberately
aimed for a more diverse roster of
artists so as not to concentrate on
any one country from the region.
What is the most challenging part
of running an art gallery today?
What is the most rewarding?
Unlike a city like New York or
London, the population in Dubai
and the proportion of people
interested in art are small. More
important, there are no museum
directors and very few curators
or writers, especially writers for
international art publications. This is
quite frustrating, as it feels sometimes
that our exhibitions take place in a void.
Age: 41
HAils from: London via Baghdad
Presides over: Lawrie Shabibi,
Unit 21, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai,
United Arab Emirates
gAllery’s sPeciAlty:
Contemporary art from the Middle
East, North Africa, and South Asia
Artists sHown: Hamra Abbas,
Sama Alshaibi, Asad Faulwell, Selma
Gürbüz, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Nabil
Nahas, Driss Ouadahi, Shahpour
Pouyan, Marwan Sahmarani, Gazelle
Samizay, Yasam Sasmazer
first gAllery sHow: “Palms
and Stars,” a solo exhibition by Nabil
Nahas, in March 2011
I am confident this will change over
time as our artists and the gallery gain
more international exposure. The most
rewarding part is seeing the career of an
artist take steps in the right direction
because of the efforts that we make.
What is your local art market like?
How is it changing?
The art market in Dubai saw tremendous
growth over the last seven years,
but I would say that it has reached a
plateau. There are now a large number
of art galleries in relation to the
number of collectors in the city, and
so there is a lot more competition than
there was a few years ago.
What sets your gallery apart?
We have a roster of young artists, all
under 40, but we also put on two shows
a year with established artists such as
Nabil Nahas, Farghali Abdel Hafiz,
and Selma Gürbüz. In a young city like
Dubai I believe that this
is important, as it puts the younger
shows in context. And we’d like to
dispel the myth that Middle Eastern
art is a new thing. Likewise, I’d like
to do away with the notion that art
from this region is only political, about
war or about the sad plight of women.
Although art should certainly provide
a sociopolitical commentary, I look for
artists who convey these messages in
an intelligent and more abstract way,
such as Wafaa Bilal, Sama Alshaibi,
and Nadia Kaabi-Linke.
If you were not an art dealer, what
would you be doing?
I would be a full-time collector and art
patron! But if I could really have it
my way, being an Olympic gymnast
was my childhood dream.
MARCH/APRIL 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
vital stats
LAWRIE SHABIBI, DUBAI
Audubon and Bachman, The Viviparious Quadrupeds of North America, New York, 1845-48. Estimate $250,000 to $350,000. At auction April 11.
Swann Auction Galleries
Books & Manuscripts • Maps & Atlases • Photographs & Photobooks • Prints & Drawings
Vintage Posters • African-American Fine Art • Fine & Vintage Writing Instruments
104 East 25th Street
New York, NY 10010
tel 212 254 4710
SWANNGALLERIES.COM

THROCKMORTON FINE ART
HONGSHAN
March 7th - April 27th, 2013
Catalogue available: HONGSHAN: $45.00
Image: China, Coiled Zhulong (“Pig Dragon”),
Hongshan Period, Neolithic Era, ca. 4700 - 2920 BCE, Jade, H: 7 1/4 in.
145 EAST 57TH STREET, 3RD FLOOR, NEW YORK, NY 10022
TEL 212.223.1059 FAX 212.223.1937
info@throckmorton-nyc.com www.throckmorton-nyc.com
CLOCKWISE FROM LOWER LEFT: SOTHEBY’S HONG KONG; BASELWORLD; THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES
DATEBOOK
ON THE CALENDAR
watches and wines
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | MARCH/APRIL 2013
Baselworld 2012
The elBulli Wine Cellar. In 2011, gastronomic innovator Ferran Adrià closed
his celebrated elBulli restaurant in Spain and started the elBulli Foundation,
a research center devoted to creativity and cooking. International cuisine is
still adjusting to the loss, but there’s an upside: this season’s highly anticipated
auction of wines from the elBulli cellars to benefit the foundation. More than
5,000 bottles will go on the block in Hong Kong and New York, including some
1,400 of red burgundy and 2,000 of Spanish wine. Highlights include five
vintages of Yquem from 1989–2001 and a selection of rare oloroso and solera
sherries dating back to 1830—as well as a series of “lifestyle lots” that include
elBulli memorabilia and a meal with the master chef himself. Sotheby’s,
April 3 – Hong Kong and April 25 – New York.
Important Watches. More than 400 lots go under the
hammer in this sale, including an A. Lange & Söhne “Pour
Le Merite” tourbillon wristwatch—number 8 in an edition
of 15—and a Patek Philippe reference 3974 in a white-gold
case, only the second to come to auction in 20 years.
Also on offer: a selection of custom-built Patek Philippe
clocks, such as the gold “Magpie’s Treasure Nest” clock,
left, embellished with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and
semiprecious stones. Sotheby’s, April 7 – Hong Kong.
Baselworld. For the latest in technological breakthroughs and style trends
in luxury watches, the spotlight shifts to Switzerland, where Baselworld
opens April 25. Though strictly speaking a trade show, Baselworld is the
preeminent global launchpad for new models and editions, and international
media coverage ensures that word filters out quickly. This year’s event
inaugurates a new exhibition complex designed by Herzog and de Meuron;
global brands like Patek Philippe and Chanel have a hall to themselves, and
so do jewelers specializing in diamonds, pearls, and other precious stones.
April 25–May2, Basel. —SUSAN DELSON
LOS ANGELES
Mystery Man
The Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens never
traveled to Asia. Nor were there diplomatic relations
between Korea and Europe during his lifetime. So
how he was able to draw Man in Korean Costume,
circa 1617, below, remains an unsolved art historical
mystery. An exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum,
“Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia,”
invites experts to examine the possibilities. At the
center is Rubens’s drawing, previously thought to
depict a Siamese ambassador but identified in 1983 by
a Korean newspaper as a man in traditional Korean
garb. Orbiting around it are potential shreds of
evidence such as Rubens’s contemporaneous portraits
of the Jesuit missionary Nicolas Trigault and an
account of the only Korean slave recorded in European
history, Antonio Corea, arriving in Italy. While
many have speculated that the drawing depicts Corea,
the show’s curator, Stephanie Schrader, theorizes
that Rubens accessed the costume via Trigault, who
might have brought it back from China. “Instead of
trying to find the one Korean who was ever in Europe
when Rubens was alive, I think the question is more
‘How could Korean goods have come to Europe?’ ” she
explains. “The focus gets broader instead of narrower.”
On view through June 9. —GEORGINA WELLS
21

22
datebook
TEFAF standouts, counterclockwise
from top: Domenico di Zanobi’s
15th-century panel painting painting Cassone
with Scenes of of a Battle, Battle at Moretti Fine
Art; Otto Jakob’s Corona earrings
with Burmese spinels and diamonds; a
detail of Pieter Brueghel the
Younger’s Proverbs, at De
Jonckheere; and Alberto Giacometti’s
Annette Venice, ca. 1960, at
Dickinson, of London.
MAASTRICHT
fully vetted
Following the pizzazz of the European Fine Art Fair’s silver jubilee last year—
which featured a 1975 Le Mans BMW painted by Alexander Calder—this year’s
edition of TEFAF, running March 15 through 24, looks decidedly more temperate.
Growing steadily since it launched in 1988 with just 97 galleries, the fair is up
to 288 exhibitors. Tom Postma has been retained for another redesign that will
frame each stand with LED lights. The 35,000 visitors, however, come not for fresh
surroundings but for fresh-to-market masterpieces evaluated by an international
team a week before the fair.
This year’s offerings include Jan Brueghel the Elder’s stygian oil-on-copper
Crucifixion, 1594, emerging from four centuries of private ownership by an Italian
noble family at the De Jonckheere booth. London’s Mark Weiss—who parted
with a “pretty unrepeatable” rediscovered portrait of King Henry
VIII for £2.5 million ($3.9 million) on opening day last year—is
putting his chips this year on Louis XIII’s sitting for Frans
Pourbus the Younger, , part of a mini-exhibition of the
Pourbus family. And Otto Naumann, , of New York, unveils
the Florentine painter Giovanni Bilivert’s Venus, Venus, Cupid,
and Pan, long in private hands but sold for £541,250
($850,000) at Sotheby’s London last July, indicating
a lessening of the stigma on recently auctioned works.
TEFAF’s ’s clientele has long been European and American, but
an ever more prominent prominent Asian Asian contingent was a target last year,
as the fair invited a hundred or so collectors from the region. region.
Still, the influx of Chinese interest is both a boon and a
headache, says Brussels dealer Gisèle Croës.
“I’ve devoted my whole life to Chinese art, but I’m
a bit disappointed lately,” she says, suggesting that
cultural differences regarding the oral contract are
an issue. “But of course I also have Chinese clients
who do pay,” she adds. Croës will appeal to them
with a unique Neolithic vessel from 3500 B.C., a stylistic
precursor of an archaic bronze ding on three legs.
Dealers generally do not report tailoring their offerings
to a new wave of buyers, but “we are not blind, and the
Asian clientele is certainly a growing market,” says Antwerp’s
veteran Asian art gallerist Marcel Nies, , citing interest in repatriation from
wealthy Thai and Indian buyers. Nies, who has presented at Maastricht from the
start, is bringing a 40-inch Gandharan bodhisattva on a throne—a rare work in
terra-cotta—as well as a 12th-century Chola bronze of a dancing Krishna. In the
contemporary sector, Gagosian Gallery will bridge the modern and ancient with
Jeff Koons’s take on the theme of Pluto and Proserpina, 2010—nearly 11 feet
tall, in bright yellow chrome, and sure to be arresting. But for historic significance,
it will be hard to beat Carl Fabergé’s imperial seal for Czar Nicholas II,
bearing a pellet of lead from a shot misfired—an assassination attempt?—during
a ceremonial salute at the Winter Palace in 1905. The 2½-inch-tall seal will be at
Russian specialist Wartski, of London. —NICOLAI HARTVIG
MARCH/APRIL 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
COUNTERCLOCKWISE FROM TOP: MORETTI FINE INE ART, LONDON; OTTO JAKOB; DE JONCKHEERE, PARIS; DICKINSON, LONDON

24
datebook
Fairs&events
4/30–5/3
art beijing
Amassing works by close to 1,000 artists in an exhibit
space of nearly 20,000 square meters, Art Beijing 2013
could never be accused of thinking small. Last year’s
fair drew 52,000 visitors, and the 2013 edition could
easily top that. Combining contemporary and classic art
sections, this year’s fair features approximately 130
galleries and 20 art organizations. Of these, 40 or so can
be found in the classic art section, showing a range of
works from Western-style oil painting and sculpture to
17th-century furniture. Look for exhibition booths
by art tree gallery, galerie cinquini, Jing Xian
room, and other galleries, as well as a special focus
on emerging artists from Korea and elsewhere in Asia.
One highlight for collectors: the VIP Education
Forum, a series of lectures by scholars and experts on
the latest trends in the Chinese art market.
3/13–5/13 l sharJah
sharJah BiEnniaL
The 11th Sharjah
Biennial, titled
“Re:emerge:
Towards a
New Cultural
Cartography”
and curated by
yuko hasegawa,
opens at the
new Sharjah Art Foundation exhibition complex. On
view: works by shahzia sikander, Liu Wei, thomas
Demand, Valia Fetisov, simon Fujiwara, carsten
höller, gabriel Lester, Pedro reyes, and Jananne
al-ani, whose Aerial IV, 2011, a production still from her
video Shadow Sites II, is shown above.
3/20–23 l DuBai
art DuBai
Art Dubai’s seventh outing boasts
500 artists from 29 countries. Local
galleries like grey noise and the
third Line stud the roster, while
well-known European players like
yvon Lambert of Paris try their
luck for the first time. The curated
Marker section of the fair will bring
the focus to West Africa in works like the acrylic Diverses-
Cités, 2011, above, by Gabonese artist Boris nzebo, brought
by Espace Doual’art, of Douala, Cameroon.
3/22–24 l tokyo
art Fair tokyo
Eight years ago, Art Fair
Tokyo changed its name
and cast off its strictly
contemporary focus.
Today it includes genres
ranging from traditional
nihonga to modern art.
This year’s 142 galleries,
mainly local, include scai
the Bathhouse; tomio
koyama; sho contemporary, highlighting photographs by
Helmut Newton and others; and gallery gyokuei, showing
tetsuya noguchi’s tiny samurai figures. The specialprojects
menu includes Discover Asia, which showcases
Southeast Asian talents like Thai filmmaker apichatpong
Weerasethakul; an exhibition of calligraphy and ceramics
by former Japanese prime minister morihiro hosokawa;
and a section devoted to contemporary jewelry.
4/3–5 l hong kong
yoshitomo nara at auction
One of the first private collections
devoted to the art of Yoshitomo
Nara goes up for sale at sotheby’s
hong kong. “you are not
alone: yoshitomo nara Works
from the kurokochi collection”
includes 35 lots, all fresh to
auction. Featuring works acquired
as early as the 1980s, when the artist was in his twenties,
the sale is expected to fetch upwards of $2.4 million.
Among the highlights: White Night, 2006, above, estimated
at $620,000–$830,000. The public exhibition runs April
3–5; the sale takes place on April 5.
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
CloCkwise from left: art beijing; adrian warren, jananne al-ani, and abraaj Capital art prize; boris nzebo and espaCe doual’art, douala, Cameroon; galerie gosserez, paris; yoshitomo nara and sotheby’s hong kong
the deLIGHTed eye: Modernist Masterworks
from a Private Collection
New York · april 4
Viewing
March 29–april 3
20 Rockefeller Plaza
new york, ny 10020
Contact
Deborah Bell
dbell@christies.com
+1 212 636 2330
Man Ray
Untitled Rayograph, 1923
unique gelatin silver print photogram
$250,000–350,000
© 2013 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
christies.com

26
datebook
SYDNEY
P r iDE of thE NatioN
Consisting of some 285 lots
of Australian contemporary
and indigenous art, the sale
of the Laverty Collection at
Bonhams on March 24 presents
a rich trove of paintings by
the country’s chief 20th- and
21st-century practitioners.
Amassed over 40 years by
Sydney-based Dr. Colin Laverty
(the retired founder of a highly
successful private pathology
practice) and his wife, Elizabeth,
the 2,000-piece cache is the
moS cow
A Seat at the Table
product of instinct and inclination
rather than prevailing art trends.
“We collect with our hearts,
not with our heads,” Elizabeth
says. “We want people to
recognize indigenous Australian
art as great contemporary art and
not be pigeonholed as tribal or
ethnographic,” Colin adds.
The works on offer are valued
at $A4 million to $A6 million
($4.2–6.3 million) and include
major canvases from Ken
Whisson, whose eclectic
Talk about a movable feast. The spring
edition of the Russian Antiques Salon,
March 30 through April 7 at the Central
House of Artists, will feature a lavish table
spread modeled on Romanov state dinners
in commemoration of the upcoming 400th
anniversary of that dynasty. “Every year
we have a section that we use for a special
presentation,” explains director Natalia Koren. “This year we
found a private collection of the coronation menus of
several czars. We will have a large table set up the way it used
to be in the 18th and 19th centuries.”
paintings merge figuration
with abstraction; Abstract
Expressionist Peter Upward;
contemporary landscape artist
William Robinson, whose
paintings are in the collection
of New York’s Metropolitan
Museum of Art; and Rosalie
Gascoigne, the first female
artist to represent Australia
at the Venice Biennale. Works
by Aboriginal artists such as
Sunfly Tjampitjin, Emily
Kngwarreye, and Eubena
Filippo Indoni’s undated watercolor
Sweet Melody will be offered by Viardo Gallery
at the 34th Russian Antiques Salon.
Nampitjin are among the most
important in private hands, as
their loan history to institutions
such as London’s Hayward
Gallery attests. Fittingly,
the auction will be held at the
Museum of Contemporary Art
Australia, of which the couple
are longtime benefactors.
Bonhams’s senior consultant
Tim Klingender is banking on
the works’ novelty and quality
to lure a new audience. “In my
experience,” he says, “collectors
are jaded by seeing the same
things over and over.” Exhibiting
30 key pieces in New York and
London “will give international
collectors the opportunity
to respond directly to fresh,
exciting Australian art that
is characterized by a strong
visual language and a universal
aesthetic.” —nicholas forrest
Tommy Watson’sWangkamarl, 2003
(est. $74,000–105,000), left, and Ken
Whisson’s Flag to Replace the Red and
Blue Ensigns (Flag of My Disposition No.
14), 1980 (est. $32–53,000), above, will
be auctioned by Bonhams in Sydney.
Several of the 250 dealers are flaunting
unique items. The Russian Avant-Garde
gallery, for example, has prepared a
photography exhibit—rare at the classically
oriented Salon—including works by
Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky
and ranging in price from $2,000
to $200,000. On a more traditional note,
seven Isaac Levitan works will
hang alongside genre paintings and Asian
watercolors at the Akant and Viardo
galleries’ joint booth. Natalia Marova,
of Shon Gallery, Moscow, will show 19th-century Japanese
ceramic statuettes and notes that with nearly 93,000 square
feet of space, “the Salon lets us show good works in a respected
place and make a real exhibition.” —nastassia astrasheuskaya From Top: Two images, Bonhams; russian anTiques salon, moscow
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA

28
datebook
cuRATOR’S c h O ice
Yuko Hasegawa
cuRATOR Of
ShARjAh BienniAl 11
What works of art would you own, if
space and cost were no object?
A Skyspace by James Turrell or On
Kawara’s book One Million Years.
Which artist, critic, or art world
personality, living or dead, would you
most like to have a spirited
argument with?
I would like to discuss spaces of coexistence
and communication through art with Peter
Sloterdijk, who rejects dualisms and
reconciles a rigorous academic approach
with an antiacademic sensibility in
pursuing a new ontology sometimes referred
to as posthumanism.
What’s the last great book you read?
Maurizio Lazzarato’s La politica dell’evento
[The Politics of the Event], 2004.
And your most recent musical discovery?
Yodeling, a form of singing practiced in
Alpine regions that incorporates rapid and
frequent changes from the natural voice to
the falsetto voice, as well as a method of
communicating vocally across mountains
and valleys. I became interested in it as a
practice that points to the original function
of singing and the human voice.
What’s one artistic trend that continues
to inspire you?
The cross-disciplinary trend. In particular,
I find collaborations and crossovers
between architecture and art the most
inspiring because they seem to incorporate
similar tendencies, including not only a
reconsideration of things like subjectivity
and emotion but also the creation of event,
relativity, and social space. I regard
architects as artists. In Sharjah I intend
for them to be involved at different levels,
from the construction of buildings and
pavilion-like structures on a small scale,
An aerial view of the exhibition spaces
for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial.
to interventions in spaces, collaborations
with artists, and so on.
Which exhibition that you’ve curated
recently are you the most proud of?
“When Lives Become Form: Contemporary
Brazilian Art, 1960s to the Present”
[2008–09 at the Museum of Contemporary
Art Tokyo, which traveled to the San
Francisco Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
in 2009]. The exhibition included works
representative of the Tropicália movement
of the 1960s, which involved music,
subculture, architecture, and art,
alongside works by contemporary artists
who have carried on this tradition and
have sought since the 1990s to involve
themselves in the urban landscape
and the people who live there. It became
a kind of fundamental statement for
me of one the reasons why art exists.
What have you discovered while
preparing for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial?
The Islamic courtyards and labyrinths in
Sharjah that have become part of Arab
culture are inspiring. Courtyards
incorporate elements of both public and
private space, with the balance between
the two being different in various parts
of the world that have adopted courtyard
culture. Courtyards spread from the
Islamic world to the Alhambra and other
parts of Spain, Portugal, and the
Mediterranean, to Mexico and South
America. They also became prevalent in
North Africa. They developed eastward
via the Mughal Empire to India, China,
and Japan. These new cultural topologies,
and the new knowledge generated
through negotiation between the interior
and exterior of these courtyards,
presented me with the basis of a theme
for the biennial.
TOkyO
Gallery Talk
In March, the Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe
opened an exhibition space in Tokyo, Japan,
where co-owner Timothy Blum has spent a lot
of time in the past 25 years. Orit Gat talked to
Blum about the new outpost, which will be
directed by art historian Ashley Rawlings.
Tokyo isn’t an obvious choice.
The gallery has had a strong presence there
for 18 years now. But we got more actively involved
with Japan through our major show of the work
of the Mono-ha artists last year. That exhibition was
curated by Mika Yoshitake, who—until she took
a job at the Hirshhorn—was living in Japan and
working for us. So we had someone on the ground
there for years. When she moved on, it became
rapidly apparent that we needed not only to find
a replacement for her but also to ramp up
our presence there.
Why is that?
We now represent nine Japanese artists, and
we are getting more involved with the postwar
material. Mono-ha was one of the most successful
shows—if not the most successful—in our history.
And now we’re doing further study and looking into
individual artists. Couple that with Takashi Murakami,
Yoshitomo Nara, Chino Aoshima, and Lee Ufan,
who were already represented by the gallery—we
simply realized it needed to happen.
Is it your door to the region?
We have been talking about having a large presence
in Asia anyway, and it’s such a vast area that it
almost doesn’t matter where you are; you’re going
to have to travel constantly to keep up with things.
Will other galleries follow?
I don’t think there will be a rush to open galleries
in Tokyo. The market there is really difficult. For us
it’s first and foremost a function to be in Japan
for the artists. It’s a multifold project comprising
an office and, of course, an exhibition program.
Timothy Blum
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
from left: two images, sharjah art foundation; margarete jakschik

30
datebook
new york
asia–nyc
Sopheap Pich, Junk Nutrients, 2009
With dozens of museums, galleries, and auction houses, New
York is rarely lacking in Asian art. But even by New York
standards, the first half of 2013 has brought a rich calendar
of Asian-themed exhibitions and events to the city’s museums,
especially in modern and contemporary art. The Museum
of Modern Art started things off with “Tokyo 1955–1970:
A New Avant-Garde” (now closed), overlapping in topic and
timing with “Gutai: Splendid Playground,” currently
on view at the Guggenheim Museum through May 8. (See
“Art on the Move” in this issue.) There’s more Asian art at the
Guggenheim, too. “No Country: Contemporary Art for
South and Southeast Asia” runs through May 22 (see the
feature story in this issue), and “Zarina: Paper Like Skin,”
a retrospective of the Indian-born New York artist Zarina
Hashmi, is on view through April 21. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art and other museums are also showcasing
contemporary Asian art. Here’s a quick snapshot of Asian
shows at New York museums this season.
Cambodian rattan: The Sculptures of
Sopheap Pich. In years past, the Met might
not have been a prime spot for contemporary
Southeast Asian art. But that was before
Sheena Wagstaff, former chief curator of
Tate Modern, came on board to chair the
Met’s reorganized department of modern and
contemporary art. She and John Guy, the
museum’s curator of South and Southeast
Asia, have organized a show of ten large-scale
works by Pich, a Phnom Penh–based artist
who’d previously lived in the U.S. Among
the sculptures on view: Buddha 2, 2009, an
openwork depiction of a Buddha torso, its loose
rattan strands left to hang freely in space;
and Morning Glory, 2011, a spectacular,
large-scale merging of landscape and memory.
Through June 16.
Season of Cambodia. “Cambodian Rattan”
is the marquee exhibition for Season of
Cambodia, a citywide cultural initiative
featuring exhibitions and installations
as well as music, dance, and theater
performances; film screenings; artist
residencies; and cultural events. Venues
include the Brooklyn Academy of Music,
the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and
Arts at the World Financial Center.
For dates and details, check the website at
seasonofcambodia.org. Through June 16.
Bomb Ponds. Asia Society Museum’s
contribution to Season of Cambodia is a
project by artist Vandy Rattana, shown
this past summer at Documenta 13: a series
of photographs and a video documenting
the massive craters—now filled with toxic
water—left behind by the secret U.S. >
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
sopheap pich and tyler rollins fine art
Galleries | 10 Chancery Lane | 100 Tonson | 1301PE | 303 Gallery | A | Acquavella | Alisan | Ameringer McEnery Yohe | Andersen’s |
Andréhn-Schiptjenko | Arario | Ark | Arndt | Atlas | Aye | B | Beck & Eggeling | Beijing Art Now | Beijing Commune |
Bernier/Eliades | Peter Blum | Blum & Poe | Boers-Li | Boesky | Breeder | Ben Brown | Buchmann | C | carlier gebauer |
Casa Triângulo | Castelli | Cera | Chemould | Chi-Wen | Cohan | Coles | Contemporary Fine Arts | Continua | Corrias | Cristea |
Crousel | D | De Carlo | de Sarthe | de Torres | Delhi Art Gallery | Dirimart | Drawing Room | E | Eigen + Art | Eslite | Exit |
F | Friedman | G | Gagosian | Gajah | Galerist | Gandhara | Gladstone | Gmurzynska | Marian Goodman | Goodman Gallery |
Richard Gray | Greve | Grimm | Grotto | Guild | Gupta | H | Hakgojae | Hanart TZ | Harris Lieberman | Hauser & Wirth | Hoffman |
I | Ibid | Ihn | Ingleby | Ishii | J | Jacobson | Jensen | Johnen | Juda | K | Kaikai Kiki | Kasmin | Kelly | Keng | Kerlin | Koyama |
Koyanagi | Krinzinger | Kukje | L | Lam | Lambert | Langgeng | Lee | Gebrüder Lehmann | Lehmann Maupin | Lelong | Lévy | Lin & Lin |
Lisson | Lombard Freid | Long March | M | Maggiore | Mara La Ruche | Marlborough | Mayer | Mayoral | McCaffrey | Meile |
Mezzanin | Miro | Mizuma | Modern Art | Müller | N | Nadi | Nanzuka | Nature Morte | Navarro | neugerriemschneider | Ning |
O | Obadia | OMR | One and J. | O’Neill | Osage | Ota | Oxley9 | P | Pace Gallery | Pace Prints | Paragon | Pékin | Peres Projects |
Perrotin | PKM | Platform | Polígrafa | Prats | Presenhuber | Project 88 | R | Rech | Roesler | Ropac | Rossi & Rossi | Rumma |
S | Sakshi | SCAI | Shanghai Gallery | ShanghART | ShugoArts | Sies + Höke | Sikkema Jenkins | Silverlens | Skape | Soka |
Sprüth Magers | Starkwhite | Stigter | STPI | T | Tang | Taylor | Templon | Tornabuoni | V | Vadehra | Van de Weghe | Vitamin | Volte |
W | Wako | Wentrup | Werner | White Cube | White Room | White Space Beijing | Wigram | Wilkinson | X | XL | Y | Yamamoto Gendai |
Z | Zwirner | Discoveries | 2P | Aike-Dellarco | Balice Hertling | BolteLang | Cooley | du Monde | Houldsworth | Jongma | Kalfayan |
Karma International | Mendes Wood | Francesca Minini | Monitor | mother’s tankstation | Mujin-to | Paradise Row | Plan B |
RaebervonStenglin | Rokeby | S.A.L.E.S. | Seven Art | SKE | Take Ninagawa | Utopian Slumps | Weingrüll | Workplace | Xu |
Insights | 313 Art Project | A Thousand Plateaus | Arataniurano | Art:1 | Artcourt | Artinformal | Blindspot | CAIS | Canna |
Cda-Projects | Chambers | Chan Hampe | Cheng | Chiba | de Montferrand | Edwin’s | EM | Exhibit320 | Feast | Fine Arts Literature |
ifa | Magician Space | Malingue | Manila Contemporary | Mirchandani + Steinruecke | Neon Parc | Ora-Ora | Park Ryu Sook | Pi |
Renshaw | Schoeni | Semarang | Shin | Side 2 | Sin Sin | Standing Pine | Star | Sullivan+Strumpf | tanzer | Tolarno | Tsuruno |
Wei-Ling | x-ist | XVA | Y++ Wada | Yamaki | Yang
Vernissage | Wednesday, May 22, 2013 | By invitation only
artbasel.com | facebook.com/artbasel | twitter.com/artbasel

32
datebook
Clockwise from left:
At the Met, Sopheap
Pich, Buddha 2,
2009; Emily
Allchurch, Tokyo
Story 1: Lotus Garden
(after Hiroshige),
2011, in “Edo Pop”
at Japan Society;
Zarina Hashmi,
Cage, 1970, relief
print on Indian
handmade paper,
on view in the artist’s
retrospective at the
Guggenheim.
bombing campaign during
the Vietnam War. (On view
through June 2.) Also at Asia
Society Museum (through May
12): Blowin’ in the Wind, Bob
Dylan, 1963, a 2013 work by
Chinese-Canadian artist Tim Lee
that doubles as an impromptu
karaoke pavilion and—on a more
traditional note—“The Artful
Recluse: Painting, Poetry,
and Politics in 17th-Century
China” (through June 2).
Edo Pop. Japanese popular
culture has been inspiring
artists for centuries, and this
exhibition at Japan Society
offers up-to-the-minute proof
of that fact. “Edo Pop: The
Graphic Impact of Japanese
Prints” showcases more than 100 18th-
and 19th-century ukiyo-e prints alongside
approximately 30 contemporary works by
ten international artists. They range from
Brooklyn-based graffiti master Aiko (who
created the mural at the show’s entrance)
to Tokyo artists Hatakeyama Naoya and
Kazama Sachiko, and Masami Teraoka,
the unofficial elder statesman of pop-meetsukiyo-e
mashups. Through June 9.
Projects 99: Meiro Koizumi. At the Museum
of Modern Art, “Projects 99: Meiro Koizumi”
is the video and performance artist’s first solo
museum show in the U.S. Koizumi’s work
inhabits an uncomfortable ground between
cruelty and comedy. His most recent video,
Defect in Vision, 2011, explores the concept
of blindness through the repeated enactment
of a domestic scene set during World War II.
Through May 6. —susan delson
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
clockwise from left: the metropolitan museum of art, new york; minneapolis institute of arts; zarina hashmi and luhring augustine, new york
Zhang Huan, Ash Army No. 2, 2008, ash, steel and wood, 55.9 x 47 x 50.2 cm.
Private Collection. Image courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio and Pace Gallery.

masaya kushino and the museum at fit, new york
The Art of Living
Obsessed
A lavish exhibition brings
everyone’s favorite fashion obsession
out of the closet
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | mArch/April 2013
Manolo Blahnik, Christian louBoutin, roge r V i Vier,
salvatore Ferragamo, and more: exquisite footwear from
the Who’s Who of high-fashion shoe design currently can be
found in the Museum at the Fashion institute of technology
(MFit) in new York City.
“shoe obsession,” running through april 13, features some
150 examples of the imaginative and lavish designs that have
made shoes central to contemporary fashion.
35

The Art of Living
36
luxuryCurated
The style-conscious characters on the popular television
series “Sex and the City” helped make Manolo Blahnik and
Jimmy Choo household names. Along with designers such as
Christian Louboutin, with his signature red soles, they’ve made
fashionable footwear as important to a woman’s look as
anything else she might wear.
In addition to showcasing leading shoe designers, “Shoe
Obsession” features eye-popping styles from major fashion
houses. One design, from the Givenchy spring 2012 couture
collection runway show, is adorned with a metal T-strap and
“piercing” detail that echoes the extreme jewelry worn by the
models. Styles by more avant-garde designers are also
highlighted, including Japanese designer Noritaka Tatehana’s
“Lady Pointe” shoes, worn by Lady Gaga, which measure a
vertiginous 18 inches tall.
Upcoming designers such as Nicholas Kirkwood,
Alexandre Birman, and Charlotte Olympia also claim their
share of the spotlight, giving viewers a glimpse of the
industry’s intriguing future. One highlight: Alessandra
Lanvin’s Cubist-inspired “Geisha” heels, which have made
her Aperlaï brand one to watch.
The exhibition also taps the collections of a select few
who, as the show’s title suggests, have a particular fascination
with this fashion essential. Among them is influential style
icon Daphne Guinness, who is lending a selection of shoes
from her own expansive closet, including designs by Alexander
McQueen and Nina Ricci. –Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop
“Shoe Obsession” runs at the Museum at the Fashion Institute
of Technology in New York through April 13.
BEST FOOT FORWARD Clockwise
from far left: Chanel, 2009; Tom
Ford, 2012; “Eyelash Heel” by
Bruno Frisoni for Roger Vivier,
2012-13; Christian Louboutin
“Pigalle” pump, 2012. Previous
page: Masaya Kushino, “Lung-ta
[The Wind Horse]“ shoe, 2008.
MARCH/APRIL 2013 | BLOUINArtinfo.comAsiA
CLOCKWISE FROM LOWER LEFT: THREE IMAGES, FASHION MUSEUM, BATH; CHRIS MOORE AND FASHION MUSEUM, BATH.
OPPOSITE PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM LOWER LEFT: TWO IMAGES, THE MUSEUM AT FIT, NEW YORK; STEPHANE GARRIGUES
AND ROGER VIVIER; CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN.
50 for 50
Clockwise from left:
Champagne-bottle dress
and matching “cork” hat,
worn to a costume party
in 1902; gold latticework
and lace dress by Paul
Poiret, 1925; red and navy
blue lace dress by Erdem,
autumn-winter 2009.
“50 Fabulous Frocks,” now on
view at the Fashion Museum in Bath,
showcases outfits by some of the
most influential designers of the
20th century—Schiaparelli, Poiret,
Vionnet, Chanel, Dior, and Yves
Saint Laurent, to name a few—while
aiming to present key historic
fashion “moments” dating back to
1660. The exhibition celebrates the
museum’s 50th anniversary.
Highlights include a gold
embroidered Georgian court dress
and a delicate 1870s gauze bustle
day dress,reminiscent of the
paintings of Tissot, alongside a
svelte crepe evening dress by Ossie
Clark, a classic Chanel suit, and an
ostrich-feather-and-rhinestone
Yves Saint Laurent ensemble
originally worn by English ballerina
Dame Margot Fonteyn, partying in
New York nightclubs with Rudolf
Nureyev in the 1960s.
The display also includes
curious pieces from the museum’s
collection, such as a Champagnebottle
gown worn at a fancy dress
party in Edwardian times. Men are
not forgotten, with masculine
fashion represented by such
pieces as an ornately embroidered
coat from the early 18th century
and a pair of bondage trousers by
punk doyenne Vivienne
Westwood. —Samantha Tse
“50 Fabulous Frocks” will be on view
through December 31 at the Fashion
Museum, Bath, U.K.
37

Asia Society
Art Gala
MAY 20, 2013 • Hong Kong
Celebrating Visionary Contemporary artists
Lee Ufan
Nyoman Masriadi
Zeng Fanzhi
Coincides with the first edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong
Please contact ArtGala@AsiaSociety.org or visit AsiaSociety.org/ArtGala2013 for more information.
FROM TOP: RAGO, LAMBERTVILLE, NEW JERSEY; DAVID COLE AND AMERICAN DECORATIVE ART 1900 FOUNDATION
American Original
Inventive, independent, and under the radar, 20th-century
designer Marie Zimmermann is ready for a new generation of collectors
By William L. Hamilton
A ONE-WOMAN DECORATIVE
ARTS MOVEMENT
Zimmermann richly deserves it. Her
output, dating from 1902 to 1939,
displays astonishing range: work in
copper, bronze, iron, silver, gold,
and precious stones, in styles fluent
with inspirations from historical
classicism and ancient Asia to the Arts
& Crafts, Art Deco, and modernism
of Zimmermann’s own time. And
her designs—bowls, vases, lidded
vessels, table service, gates, garden
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | MARCH/APRIL 2013
furniture, candelabra, jewelry—were
realized with a boldly experimental
approach to patina, coloration,
and applied ornament.
“She marched to the beat of her
own drum,” says Nonie Gadsden,
the senior curator for American
decorative arts and sculpture at the
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, who calls
Zimmermann an “iconoclast,” in part
because she entered and mastered a
field—metalwork—regarded strictly as
men’s work. Reviewing a Zimmermann
theconnoisseur
There aren’t too many names left to discover in 20th-century design, but Marie Zimmermann, a New York metalworker
who created decorative objects and jewelry, might be one of them. Despite inclusion in “High Styles,” a seminal exhibition
of 20th-century 20th-century American design at at the Whitney Museum in 1985, and “The Art that is Life,” an important show of
American Arts & Crafts at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston two years later, Zimmermann is known to only a small
circle of cognoscenti. Among these are Rudy Ciccarello, the American Arts & Crafts collector and patron of the
Two Red Roses Foundation; Jacqueline Loewe Fowler, who set the auction record for Zimmermann with her purchase
of a carved, jeweled chest for $120,000 in 2005, which she donated that year to the Metropolitan Museum
of Art; and Bruce Barnes and and Joseph Cunningham, founder/president and director, respectively, of the American
Decorative Art 1900 Foundation, whose American Arts Arts & Crafts collection is considered one of the finest in the councountry. In 2011 the foundation and Yale University Press published The Jewelry and Metalwork Metalwork of Marie Zimmermann, by
Barnes, Cunningham, and Deborah Dependahl Waters, which should bring Zimmermann (1879–1972) wider notice.
gallery exhibition in 1916, the New
York Evening Sun told readers, “This
being a feminist age, the village smithy
is a studio and the smith is a comely
young woman.” Covering her onewoman
show in Charleston, South
Carolina, in 1935, the local press called
Zimmermann “the female Cellini.”
Born into an affluent Brooklyn
family, Zimmermann lived as an
independent professional at the
National Arts Club in Gramercy Park,
in Manhattan, moved in high society,
Just under a foot
tall, the richly
carved and
jeweled wooden
chest, top, fetched
$120,000—still
the artist record—
at Rago in
Lambertville,
New Jersey, in
2005. Created
prior to 1922,
the handsome
gold ring,
above, features
a baroque pearl,
emeralds, pink
sapphires and
(possibly) rubies.
The Art of Living
39

All in the Details
+ Although critically
acknowledged,
Zimmermann was
never a commercial
success, which led her
to close her workshop
in 1939. In a letter
at the time, she wrote
she was “too tied up
and too discouraged
to carry on.”
+ Her first piece to enter
the Metropolitan
Museum of Art,
a covered jar in gold,
jade, rock crystal, and
rubies, was acquired
in 1922 for the new
department of modern
decorative arts.
+ Zimmermann did not
execute every aspect
of her work herself.
She called in experts
as needed, including
Riccardo Bertelli
of Roman Bronze
Works, in Brooklyn,
and a smithy in Pike
County, Pennsylvania,
for black ironwork.
theconnoisseur
managed a staff of six, sold work
to Edsel B. and Eleanor Clay Ford,
and executed commissions for A.
Montgomery Ward and others. She
also rode, fished, and hunted—
bears included—equipping herself
at Abercrombie & Fitch, then a
leading gunsmith. And she was an
avid motorist, often seen at the wheel
of her late-model McFarlan Roadster
on the back roads of Pike County,
Pennsylvania, where her family
had a farm.
WHERE IS THE MARKET?
“So little by Zimmermann has come
to market that I don’t think collectors
understand her work,” says Jodi
Pollack, senior vice president and
head of the 20th-century design
department at Sotheby’s New York,
which sold a Zimmermann vase in
2010 for $16,250
(est. $15–20,000).
Pollack adds
that much of
the work work remains
in the the possession
of the the family—Jack
family—Jack
Zimmermann, the
artist’s great-nephew,
in particular, who has
sold items items sporadically.
“There’s a great great deal
of inconsistency in what
she produced; a a lot of it is minor,”
says David Rago of Rago Arts and
Auction Center Center in Lambertville, New
Jersey, who says he has has handled
roughly 400 Zimmermann
pieces in 40 years, including
the record-setting carved
chest. “More than any other
artist I’ve seen, when
she chose to make a
masterpiece, she
did.” Rago says that
the better works,
like the patinated patinated
copper vessels
most familiar familiar
to the the market,
have have sold for
under $10,000, $10,000,
while while much much of the
rest has sold sold for
between between $3,000
and $5,000.
Richard Wright
of Wright
in Chicago has handled four lots,
including a pair of vases on stands
offered in June 2012; estimated at
$7,000 to $9,000, they went unsold.
The jewelry, with only several
hundred examples extant, is scarce
almost to the point of nonexistence.
Zimmermann’s strength as an artist
has been a key factor in the weakness
of her market. “She “She defies
categorization, which which I
suspect would please
her,” says Rosalie
Berberian, Berberian, a a scholar and
appraiser appraiser who has worked
with Jack Jack Zimmermann to
place pieces for sale. The
output resists specialists’
collecting. Zimmermann’s
interest in antiquities, from Celtic
patterns to Tang Dynasty colors,
puts her work literally all over the
map, with a 2,000-year spread.
HOW TO BEGIN AND WHAT AT A
TO LOOK FOR
“She’s so idiosyncratic,”
Barnes tells potential
Zimmermann buyers, that
what you decide to collect
“doesn’t make a difference.
What do you gravitate
toward? It’s It’s what what you respond
to when you look at it.”
Jane Prentiss, director of the
20th-century design department
at Skinner, advises collectors that
“the form, the patina, and whatever
decorative element—these three
things together create the ‘signature’
for her work.” Prentiss says the
Boston auction house was the first
to sell a Zimmermann piece, a bowl
for $300, in 1994.
Zimmermann experimented with
chemicals, heat, paints, waxes,
and lacquer to produce remarkably
layered patinas in rich tones like red
and verdigris. Some colors, like a
midnight blue-black, are more rare than
others. Zimmermann also gilded and
plated objects.
The works are incised with a
distinctive MZ logo on the bottom.
Zimmermann was proud of her career
and promoted herself vigorously,
once sending a letter to the editor of
Vanity Fair signed “A Subscriber” and
recommending a current exhibit by
Marie Zimmermann. Locating a date on
a work is not an issue: She never dated
pieces. Nor are fakes and forgeries
a matter of concern. The techniques
are complicated, and, for the moment,
no one has reason to copy them.
Condition is trickier. Zimmermann liked
distressing and artificially aging her
work to “antique” it. A buyer should be
alert to what is original and what is
wear and tear.
A colorful bracelet in gold, enamel, and
sapphires, top, and three vessels that
exemplify the range of Zimmermann’s forms,
materials, surfaces, and prices: a silver
centerpiece, ca. 1920, above, that sold for
$18,800 at Christie’s in 2000; a spun copper
vase with verdigris patina, 9¾ x 10 inches,
left, that fetched $1,586 at Rago in 2010; and
a patinated bronze vase, “Model No. 77,”
ca. 1920, nearly eight inches tall, center of
page, purchased at Sotheby’s in 2010 by the
Two Red Roses Foundation for $16,250.
MARCH/APRIL 2013 | BLOUINArtinfo.comAsiA
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: DAVID COLE AND AMERICAN DECORATIVE ART 1900 FOUNDATION; CHRISTIE’S; RAGO; TWO RED ROSES FOUNDATION AND SOTHEBY’S

The Art of Living
42
theartofcraftsmanship
1
one of many
One of the small diamonds in the Comète
is placed in its setting. A total of 1,424
diamonds are used in the necklace and
brooch ensemble.
Evening Star
2
a tail of baguettes
The artisan works on the chains of
semiclosed-set, baguette-cut diamonds
for the tail of the shooting star,
which is fully articulated to follow the
body movements of the wearer.
The Étoile Filante (Shooting Star)
necklace recreates Chanel’s 1932
Comète (Comet) sautoir design, with
an enormous 8.8-carat diamond in
a star that can be positioned on the
shoulder or bust, or removed and
worn as a brooch. Made from 18-karat
white gold and an arrangement of
five cascading chains of various cut
diamonds, from baguette and fancy-
cut to briolette and princess-cut,
this exquisite necklace is a testament
to the diamond-cutting know-how
of Chanel’s jewelry atelier.
3
the finishing touch
The center stone is carefully mounted:
an 8.8-carat diamond, enhanced
by an openwork-on-prong setting.
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
all images: chanel fine jewelry
Yuki
Katsura - A FABLE
6 April – 9 June 2013
Yuki Katsura, Resistance, 1952, Oil on canvas,
Collection of Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Francis Alÿs, Tornado , 2000-10, Milpa Alta
Video documentation of an action photo: Jorge Golem
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
4-1-1, Miyoshi, Koto-ku, Tokyo,
JAPAN 135-0022
TEL:+81-(0)3-5245-4111
www.mot-art-museum.jp
Francis Alÿs
Part 1 MEXICO SURVEY 6 April – 9 June 2013
Part 2 GIBRALTAR FOCUS 29 June – 8 September 2013
Francis Alÿs, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River, 2008, The Straits
of Gibraltar, Video and photographic documentation of an action photo: Jorge Golem

CARTIER
arTonThewrisT
Painting with Wood—
The Art of Marquetry
This venerable technique is best known for its use in decorative furniture of the
17th and 18th centuries. But contemporary artisans are finding new ways of using the
craft—including miniature artworks for some of the world’s top watch brands.
By Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop
BLOUINArtinfo.comAsiA | MARCH/APRIL 2013
The Art of Living
45

46
Dating back to the 16th century, marquetry is
a technique in which different shades of a natural
material—wood veneers, ivory, mother-of-pearl,
marble, or semi-precious stones—are carefully
cut to fit precisely together to create a single
design. The effect produced from this elaborate
technique is similar to inlay, but in the latter, a
solid body of one material is cut out to receive
pre-cut pieces of another to form the pattern.
“Marquetry is a very old technique, which
was first used by cabinetmakers on wood
paneling—playing with different types of
woods, different colors, and different veneers,”
explains Pierre Rainero, Style, Image and
Heritage Director at Cartier.
“It can really be considered a classic métier
d’art, which reached its apex in the 18th century.
The ways to play with the technique are endless.
You can create abstract or figurative patterns. It
can be done very colorfully, playing with different
woods, or more subtly using only tone-on-tone
contrasts.” He adds that one renowned
cabinetmaker during the reign of Louis XIV,
André-Charles Boulle, combined marquetry and
inlay techniques to develop the famed Boulle
marquetry, which uses different types of wood
along with brass and tortoiseshell.
Over the centuries, marquetry has been
principally used for the decoration of large
wooden furniture. Though this has long included
clock dials, its use in a miniaturized form for
wristwatches is fairly recent.
“It is a new development. So far, watchmakers
have done a lot of enamelling—a tradition that, by
the way, comes from pocket watches. But marquetry
is really new,” Rainero says.
In 2010, Cartier unveiled the Rotonde de
Cartier jumping hours watch, with a marquetry
bear on the dial. It was created by award-winning
marqueter Jérôme Boutteçon, who had previously
worked on clocks for Jaeger-LeCoultre and on a
series of extremely intricate wood marquetry
watch faces, featuring a leopard, for Chopard.
Using 280 tiny pieces of wood for the Chopard
design, Boutteçon created a wood-veneer mosaic
that had an almost photographic quality.
By comparison, the Cartier bear dial is
composed of 38 small wood veneers that were
meticulously cut and pieced together to create the
head of a brown bear. Boutteçon used ten
different species of wood, ranging from holly,
chestnut, and poplar to walnut and pink
maple—playing on their colors and contrasting
wood grains to suggest the texture of fur.
Above: selecting,
cutting, and assembling
the precise,
tiny elements of
Cartier’s marquetry
koala watch, right.
Below: one of the
four Calatrava
Rabbit marquetry
designs introduced
last year by Patek
Philippe.
MARCH/APRIL 2013 | BLOUINArtinfo.comAsiA
CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT: FIVE IMAGES, CARTIER; PATEK PHILIPPE. OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP: HERMÈS AND CLAUDE JORAY; SIX IMAGES, HERMÈS AND JÉRÔME GALLAND
Marquetry is a technique that requires intense
planning and precision. Based on a drawing
supplied by Cartier, Boutteçon first created a
simplified line drawing that would allow him to
outline each piece of the puzzle and then saw the
veneer in stacked layers. He then reassembled
the tiny pieces on the dial before polishing it to
achieve the final finish.
In 2011 Patek Philippe introduced the Patek
Philippe Tiger Marquetry limited edition (ref.
5077P), a set of four timepieces depicting wood
marquetry tigers in different poses. Between six
and eight types of wood were used for each dial,
which required from 120 to 137 pieces. Last year
the watchmaker followed up with another set
of four timepieces, the Calatrava Rabbit (also
ref. 5077P), this time decorated, as the name
suggests, with rabbits. Each dial required 60
hours of work, and from 141 to 188 pieces cut
from 18 species of wood.
More recently, the straw marquetry technique
has also been used on watch faces, updating a
decorative technique used on royal furniture in
the 18th century and revived in France in the
1920s and ’30s by André Groult and Jean-Michel
Frank. “There is a whole idea of richness and
refinement linked to straw marquetry in
furniture,” Rainero says.
Last year Hermès launched its Arceau
Marqueterie de Paille watch. The dial features an
overlay with a high-quality rye straw, selected for
its sturdiness and luster.
The straw is hand reaped, colored, and dried
before being carefully split into strips. Each strip is
then manually ironed flat, using a bone burnishing
tool. The straw strips are cut with a fret saw and
assembled and glued, jigsaw-puzzle-like, onto the
brass dial in a chevron or small-square pattern—
both well-known Hermès tie motifs.
Agnès Paul-Depasse, the artisan who created
the Arceau Straw Marquetry watch, explains that
straw can be more difficult to handle than wood.
“The straw is thinner, and because of that, it’s not
cut with the same tools and not glued the same
way,” she says, adding it takes almost 40 hours to
complete one dial.
Cartier’s Rainero adds that, being much
thinner than wood, straw is a more delicate
material to handle, “but at the same time, its
lightness makes it more appropriate for a dial.”
Finding artisans who can use marquetry
techniques on the small surface of a watch face is
quite difficult nowadays. But the appeal of these
watches is extremely strong because, like all those
created using métiers d’art techniques, they are
one-of-a-kind pieces.
“That definitely appeals to customers
who appreciate the fine quality of work,”
Rainero notes.
BLOUINArtinfo.comAsiA | MARCH/APRIL 2013
Right: Hermès
Arceau Marqueterie
de Paille timepieces
with
distinctive
marquetry patterns
that recall the
brand’s neckties.
Below: steps in the
straw marquetry
process include
dyeing, flattening,
cutting, and
weaving.
arTonThewrisT
The Art of Living
47

CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT: LEE KA-SING AND KAI CHAN; TWO IMAGES, SHOJI FUJII AND YIQING YIN.
The Sculptural Couture
of Yiqing Yin
A French designer shapes fabrics on
the body body to create soft feminine armor
By Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop
YOUNG FRENCH COUTURIER Yiqing Yin
has found rapid success since she
launched her first collection in 2010. That
year, she presented her creations at the
prestigious Hyères International ternational
Festival, won the Grand Prix of Creation
awarded by the City ty of of Paris, and and saw
her her designs designs displayed in in the the windows of of
the Culture Ministry and at the Théâtre
National de Chaillot. The e following year,
her her second second collection, collection, the Dreamer, Dreamer, was
exhibited at the Hôtel de Crillon illon during the March 2011 Women’s Women’s
Fashion week curated by Vogue Paris. A A few months later, she
was awarded the Andam Prize for First Collections. Then en in
2012, she debuted as an invited guest during Haute Couture uture
Fashion Week in Paris and successfully launched a readyreadyto-wear collection internationally. I recently recently sat down with the
27-year-old 27-year-old designer for a discussion about her practice.
A lot of your designs are very sculptural.
Have you studied art?
I studied arts and crafts at the École Nationale tionale Supérieure des
Arts Décoratifs for five years. We did many things, from
sculpture and stage design to graphic design and photography.
We studied space, objects, and images all together through
different forms of expression. I always loved the sculptural
element. Sculpture is very important when you put it in situ; it
comes with the space surrounding it. That’s at’s very important. important.
And I see fashion as a way of sculpting on a living body as a
support, using fabric as a medium. But it is something that is
always moving, so it ’s ’s movement within a space and it needs to
relate to its environment. It’s ’s a moving sculpture, and the
movement and the imprint that the body body leaves leaves behind as it
moves—the grace, the the body body language—is all part of of the final
result. In a way, I have the original idea but it ’s actually the
person who wears the garment who finishes it.
What was the starting point for your Spring-Summer
2013 collection?
The e thread, the line, and the unweaving motion of matter were were
the starting point. My mood mood board was dark, muted, and austere,
with pictures of sculptures by the Russian artist Naum um Gabo,
who sculpted ethereal, hyperbolic volumes out of thread
without ever invading the space. I was also influenced by thread thread
sculptures by the artist Kai Chan. There ere were also bondage
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | MARCH/APRIL 2013
artonthecatwalk
Above, two designs
from the Spring-
Summer 2013
couture collection
by Yiqing Yin, who
cites the influence
of Russian sculptor
Naum Gabo
(1890–1977) and
contemporary
Canadian artist Kai
Chan, whose 2012
silk thread installation,
Scent of Roses,
is at upper left .
The Art of Living

The Art of Living
50
Above, Yiqing Yin
backstage at the
Paris show for her
Fall-Winter 2012
collection.
Opposite, clockwise
from left: a
sketch for one of
the designs in the
Spring-Summer
2013 collection;
four runway looks
from the Spring-
Summer 2013
collection; an
ensemble from the
Fall-Winter 2012
collection, edged
in white feathers.
ARToNThecATwAlk
pictures with details of intricate knots and beautiful tensions
with the skin, as well as rays of light decomposing into stardust,
and spiderwebs with galactic compositions of water drops.
How different was this collection from previous ones?
The earlier collections were about the human body and
animals. The last collection was more about the vegetal and
the mineral. This time, it was about finding knots, tensions, and
the tangling of shapes upon the body, as well as the unweaving
movement of networks of matter around the body. The thread
theme was a beautiful way to treat the contrast between its
violence and sharpness on one hand and its complete fragility
on the other. I liked this paradox, so I pushed the study of
“lines,” from thread to fabric, fiber to ropes, chains, Swarovski
line patterns, velvet devorés, metal rope sculpture, etc.
This collection had a few sculptural pieces, but was
overall a much sleeker silhouette.
Indeed, the overall silhouette is a stretched-out vertical one,
quite strict in a sense, and close to the body. Semi-structured
tailoring, with details of draping in luxury Escorial fabric [the
world’s finest naturally grown wool], which is traditionally used
for menswear tailoring for outerwear, along with a lot of
jerseys for dresses and skirts. I wanted the garments to be
comfortable, flattering, and easy to relate to. All the sculptural
and draping vocabulary is injected more subtly in fine details,
but follows the landscape of the body without damaging its
proportions, for a very wearable result. The piping on the front
of the legs is one of the many small details found throughout
the collection. Apart from the interesting variations in tone it
provides, it helps highlight the verticality of the slim silhouette.
Some of the dresses seem to have applied thread
embroidery on top.
Yes, the dresses are in silk organza with three different sizes
of thread applied as embroidery, along with dustings of
crystal pearls spread along some areas. In one dress, the
embroideries hold the draping details and pleats close to the
body, as if circulating in and out of it. In another, the very
fragile embroidery is composed so as to give an almost liquid
feel to the threads, as if dripping from the inside of the
second-skin dress.
In your previous collection, the key focus was the
back. What about this time?
Backs are still a very important and sensual element of the
silhouette. Back details such as décolletés, slits, cutouts, and
fountain drapes are the counterbalance to the otherwise
austere and strict front lines.
What does this most recent collection say about you
as a designer?
I think it is important as a designer to be in coherence with a
generation. Clothes are meant to be worn, so I tried to make
real clothes for real women to live in, without sacrificing any of
the creativity and poetry of my garments. It is harder to work
the codes with subtlety, and my maturing as a designer is all
about the balance between offering people dreams and
creating a realistic product to be made their own, but with a
strong identity value. There are multiple layers of reading in
complexity. Sometimes less is more, and the true value of
luxury is found in control, precision, and balance, rather than
dramatic decoration.
MARCH/APRIL 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: YIQING YIN; FIVE IMAGES, SHOJI FUJII AND YIQING YIN.
OPPOSITE: JONATHAN P. LEVY AND YIQING YIN.
You sketch but also use swatches of fabrics to build the
garment on your mannequin. It’s a very sculptural approach.
It is. It’s a very instinctive and sensitive approach. I draw a
rough-proportion sketch to note the idea, but most of the
design I find while sculpting directly on the mannequin. So the
creative process happens directly, with the draping action.
Is draping part of your signature design?
I think so. Draping is a way to construct garments; it’s a very
traditional construction method, as opposed to flat
patterning. I do most of my designs by draping, in volume, in
three dimensions. But I also think that by de-structuring and
changing the traditional method of draping, I’ve found
interesting new elements, shapes, and volumes. Pleating is
also recurrent in my work, because I think it’s quite an
interesting technique, with a lot of potential to develop
from a flat surface into a multifaceted, three-dimensional
garment. Pleating gives dynamics to a flat surface.
By contorting the fabric you can create something complex
to the eye, which is also quite mathematical in a way.
You launched a ready-to-wear collection in 2012. How do
you approach that differently from couture?
Ready-to-wear is about working the product—starting from an
ideal but making it accessible for the customer. Couture does
not have a meaning if, in the end, the ideal is not worn by a
woman. I don’t want to be elitist. The couture pieces on the
runway are more experimental, which allows me complete
creative freedom with no restrictions. Couture is like a
laboratory, and from those experiments we pick the strongest
influences and translate them for ready-to-wear.
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | MARCH/APRIL 2013
85

The Art of Living
52
arTonThepalaTe
Provenance can
add a premium to
wine prices. A
six-bottle lot of
1978 Barolo
Monfortino
Riserva Speciale
Giacomo Conterno
sold for $14,400
at Zachys’s
November 2009
sale of vintages
from the storied
Big Guy Collection.
King of Italian Reds
In many ways comparable to Burgundy, the complex wines made around the Piedmontese
hamlet of Barolo are finding a growing fan base among collectors
Italy’s magnificent red, Barolo, is coming of age—not that it wasn’t well known in
the past. The earliest Barolo dates back to the end of the 18th century. However, a
string of excellent vintages and a vast improvement in viticulture and winemaking in
the last two decades have created more great wine producers and more great wines.
“We make much more friendly wines than we did 20 or 30 years ago,” admits
Paolo Damilano, whose family—the biggest producer from the area’s top vineyard,
Cannubi—makes excellent Barolos under their name. “Our Barolos are much more
approachable and drinkable when young. They are more like Burgundy.”
“Piedmont is one of Europe’s greatest wine regions,” says John Kapon, CEO of
Acker Merrall & Condit, the oldest wine merchant in the U.S., “and great Barolos are
unique and special wines, on par with the top French wines.” Yet the market is only
beginning to reflect this, and so the wines remain affordable—for now. “Burgundy
is the second largest wine market after Bordeaux but growing quite significantly,”
notes Jeff Zacharia, president of wine auctioneer Zachys, in Scarsdale, New
York. Given that Barolo is “growing but is starting from a much lower point than
Burgundy,” there has never been a better time to buy, drink, and collect it.
VILLAGES AND VINEYARDS
“Barolo can be complicated to know and
understand,” Kapon says. “There are so
many great vineyards and winemakers.
They are unique and special, and collectors
worldwide recognize this.” There are many
parallels between Barolo and Burgundy.
One of the most obvious is the importance
of villages and single vineyards. Besides
Barolo itself, the wine’s top towns include
La Morra, Serralunga, and Monforte d’Alba.
Furthermore, each village, whether in Barolo
or Burgundy, has particular vineyard sites
that grow the highest quality grapes and
produce the best wines. Most top Barolos
AUCTIONS
carry single-vineyard designations on their
labels, such as Brunate or Cannubi. The
WINE
French have codified this into an appellation
system. Barolo has no official vineyard ZACHY’S
MARCH/APRIL 2013 | BLOUINArtinfo.comAsiA
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ACKER MERRALL & CONDIT; BARTOLO MASCARELLO; GAJA; BRUNO GIACOSA
ranking, but such vineyards as Brunate near
La Morra and Cannubi in Barolo have long
been considered the region’s finest. “There
are many excellent small vineyards for Barolo
but the very best are well known,” says
Bruno Ceretto, whose family is a top producer
of Barolo and other wines of the region.
“We are lucky enough to own parts of many
of them including Cannubi and Rocche.”
TOP WINERIES
A number of wineries and growers may
share ownership of a vineyard. The vineyard
of Cannubi, for instance, has almost twodozen
individual grape growers and almost
as many different wine producers using the
name. Granted, nothing is as complicated
as Burgundy, with such appellations as Clos
Vougeot, which includes almost 70 different
owners, but Barolo has similar complexity
that takes some time to understand. For
those new to collecting, it is easier to focus
on the best producers with long reputations
for making top wines. Some excellent
wineries to consider that are readily available
are Ceretto, Pio Cesare, Aldo Conterno,
Giacomo Conterno, Bruno Giacosa, Luciano
Sandrone, Paolo Scavino, and Roberto
Voerzio. Angelo Gaja is also a great producer
of reds from the Barolo area, but the winery
labels its best wines under the appellation
Langhe Doc. His two top wines from the
area are Conteisa and Sperss.
VINTAGES TO WATCH FOR
Choosing the best vintages in Barolo is less
difficult. Every year after 1995 is outstanding.
In fact, Barolo hasn’t had a poor vintage
overall since 2002. “Barolo has had so many
excellent vintages in the last 15 years that
it’s almost a problem,” admits Matteo Einaudi
of Luigi Einaudi, whose Cannubi Barolo
BLOUINArtinfo.comAsiA | MARCH/APRIL 2013
is top-tier. I am a fan of warmer, sunnier
vintages that produce rounder textured and
richer Barolos. These years include 1997,
2000, and 2007. I also like sunny, fresh, and
late grape-growing seasons that make more
balanced wines. These vintages include 1996,
1998, and 2008. Colder years produce more
tannic wines, as in 1999 and 2006, which
need more bottle age to soften and become
drinkable. Older vintages to keep an eye out
for are: 1978, 1982, 1985, 1989, and 1990.
These show how Barolo ages wonderfully and
approaches great Burgundy as it matures.
A GROWING AUDIENCE
“Italy has done a great job marketing
itself as a brand throughout Asia for style,
fashion, wine, and food,” Kapon says.
“Italian wines, and Barolo specifically, are
among the beneficiaries. Our collectors
in Hong Kong want to add the top Barolo
producers to their collections, older and
more recent vintages alike.” Both Kapon
and Zacharia, however, note that the
U.S. market has been growing consistently
for more than five years and that South
American collectors have also been laying
in Barolos recently. “Demand for Barolo is
becoming increasingly global,” says Kapon.
THE ALLURE OF PROVENANCE
The top names for collectors and
investors in Barolos (not including Gaja
because technically it doesn’t make one)
are: Aldo Conterno, Giacomo Conterno,
Bruno Giacosa, Bartolo Mascarello, and
Roberto Voerzio. When buying at auction,
provenance—as well as winery and vintage—
can be a factor. “Owing to Barolo’s not being
widely collected in the U.S. before the late
1990s,” Zacharia says, “Barolo rarities tend
to appear as part of truly great cellars that
were amassed over decades, rather than
a case here, a case there showing up at
auction.” Bottles from such collections are
likely to fetch higher prices than ones with
lesser-known backgrounds. For example, the
highest price Zachys has ever realized for a
single bottle of Barolo Monfortino Riserva
Speciale Giacomo Conterno 1961 was $1,680
in November 2009. It was auctioned as part
of the Big Guy Collection, an extraordinarily
strong group that spanned several auctions.
Since that time, bottles of the same wine
have earned from as low as around $650 to
as high as $1,220, but have never achieved
quite the same price. — JAMES SUCKLING
All in the Details
+ The Accademia del Barolo, comprising
14 producers who work together to promote
Barolo appreciation worldwide, holds
events and auctions at least twice yearly, in
Europe, Asia, and North America.
+ Be careful when purchasing older vintages.
Many ancient bottles of Barolo have not
been stored properly, particularly those
under the Gaja and Giacomo Conterno
From left:
An enormous
bottle of a great
Barolo, the 1952
Giacomo Conterno
Monfortino,
fetched $24,200
in April 2008, the
highest price paid
for a bottle of
Barolo at an Acker
Merrall & Condit
auction. That price
was an anomaly
because it was
such an unusually
large bottle—13.5
liters, more than
an entire case
of wine in a single
bottle—a size
rarely made these
days. Among
the best regarded
winemakers and
most sought after
estates of the
region are Bruno
Giacosa, Angelo
Gaja, and Bartolo
Mascarello.
labels. Nonetheless, I have recently
drunk amazing old bottles of Giacomo
Conterno Monfortino Riserva from the
1960s and 1950s.
+ Older vintages, whose age brings out
similarities to Burgundy, include 1978, 1982,
1985, 1989, and 1990.
+ For more information go to jamessuckling.com
53

The Art of Living
54
1
must-haves
5
2
Marvelous Marquetry
Must-Haves
by Sarah P. Hanson
1. RARE ART NOUVEAU WORKTABLE in fine-grain fruitwoods, France, ca. 1905; $34,500 at M.S. Rau Antiques, New Orleans. 2. BAROQUE-PERIOD CABINET
in walnut and fruitwood, Germany, 18th century; $45,000 at Foster-Gwin, San Francisco. 3. ART DECO DROP-FRONT DESK in elm and birch with exotic wood inlays
by Ferdinand Lundquist, Sweden, 1930s; $6,400 at Svenska Möbler, Los Angeles. 4. PIETRA DURA CHEST WITH MARQUETRY, late 17th to early 18th century,
Florence; price on request at Galerie Steinitz, Paris. 5. PARQUETRY WRITING DESK in exotic woods with mother-of-pearl, Syria, 1920s; $11,800 at Red Modern
Furniture, Phoenix. 6. SPANISH COLONIAL ESCRIBANIA in fruitwood with mahogany, cedar, and bone inlays, 17th century; $27,500 at Colonial Arts, San Francisco.
6
4
MARCH/APRIL 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
3

64
Hiroshi Sugimoto at
the unveiling of
“Couleurs de l’Ombre,”
his collaboration with
Hermès presented at
the Museum der
Kulturen in Basel last
June. Opposite page:
a scene from
Sugimoto bunraku:
Sonezaki shinju, the
artist’s re-envisioning
of a classic of
traditional Japanese
puppet theater.
Sotheby’S
hiroShi Sugimoto and odawara art foundation. oppoSite page: tadzio and hermÈS
Japan’s Master Photographer
Turns His
Focus to Theater
on january 1, hiroshi sugimoto headed two hours southwest
of Tokyo and set up his camera equipment at the oceanfront
of the town of Atami. The 64-year-old artist worked for only a few
hours early in the morning, “before the sun comes up too high.”
He took about twenty rolls of film, using an old-fashioned largeformat
camera.
“New Year’s Day is the best time to take these photos, because
you have less chance of traffic on the sea. Fishermen are resting and
there are very few boats for a few days,” he quips.
The new photographs are part of “Seascapes,” the artist’s
ongoing series of black-and-white images of the sea and its horizon,
which he started in 1980. But they will not be shown in public
for many months: Sugimoto takes his time, giving painstaking
attention to each one in order to fully render a rich palette of blacks,
whites, and grays. “First I have to send the film to New York for
processing. Then I have to choose the most successful photographs
and print them, and then there is the final mounting and framing.
So this takes a very long time,” he explains.
While photography remains the artistic medium for which
Sugimoto is best known internationally, in the last 12 years
he has stretched his creativity in a new direction: the performing
arts. This year, most of his energy will be focused on the
production, staging, and directing of Noh and bunraku (puppet)
theater performances.
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
By Sonia KoleSniKov-JeSSop
theartist
Hiroshi Sugimoto
At the end of March, Sugimoto is collaborating with renowned
kyogen actor Mansai Nomura to present “Sanbaso: Divine Dance”
at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In the museum’s Frank
Lloyd Wright rotunda, Nomura will perform Japan’s oldest
celebratory dance of thanks to the gods, in costume and setting
designed by Sugimoto. In Paris in October, Sugimoto will present
his vision of another traditional Japanese performing-art form
with an adaptation of the famed bunraku play The Love Suicides
at Sonezaki (Sonezaki shinju). The artist collaborated in adapting the
classic play and first presented his production, which he
also directed, in 2011 at Yokohama’s Kanagawa Arts Theater.
Written in 1703 by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, The Love
Suicides at Sonezaki revolves around a young clerk and his
courtesan lover, who, after realizing that they cannot stay
together, commit double suicide. Based on an actual event, the
play in turn inspired so many copycat suicides that in 1723 its
performance was banned by the Tokugawa Shogunate. By the
time it was revived more than 200 years later in 1955, many of the
original lines and directions for puppet handling had been lost.
Sugimoto stresses that, while he is keen to preserve tradition,
he also wants to draw on his own 21st-century sensibility and
tinker a bit with conventions. In his production, all puppeteers
are masked so the audience can focus on the puppets, and he
reinstated a shortened version of the traditional prologue, which
57

10 Questions for
Hiroshi Sugimoto
The “Couleurs de l’Ombre”
scarves that you recently
designed for Hermès were
your first collaboration with
a fashion brand. Why did you
decide to do them?
It’s really not like Murakami’s or
Kusama’s collaborations
[with Louis Vuitton]. It’s not a
commercial production. It’s
more a case of serious art sold
at art prices. The scarves are
not selling in the stores; they’re
presented in museums or
galleries. But art has become
very commercialized anyway.
Given the subtlety of color
gradations in your work and
the technical difficulties of
creating this effect on silk,
how happy are you with the
final results?
I think technically it’s very
successful and I’m very happy.
What I like about Hermès is
their very high standard of
quality control. That’s why I
agreed to this project.
Craftsmanship is something
I’ve always paid very strong
attention to in my own work;
that’s my quality control.
What’s the most
indispensable item in
your studio?
My negatives, and my negative
attitude.
Where are you finding ideas
for your work these days?
In my mind.
What’s the last show you saw
that surprised you?
Makoto Aida at the Mori Art
Museum. I found the show
interesting for its sexual and
moral codes.
What’s your favorite place
to see art?
In my living room.
What’s your favorite
post-gallery watering hole
or restaurant?
A Japanese hot-spring bath.
What international art
destination do you most
want to visit?
The yet-undiscovered pyramid
chambers of Egypt.
Who’s your favorite
living artist?
All the nearly dead artists.
Do you collect anything?
Ideas.
he felt was needed to give the story a religious dimension.
Sugimoto got involved in theater in 2001, when he integrated
his design for a Noh theater stage set into a presentation of his
photographs at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria. In his set design,
photographs from his “Pine Trees” and “Seascapes” series replaced
the traditional painted stage set, becoming an integral part of the
performance by the Naohiko Umewaka Noh Theater.
The artist says he has always been attracted to Japan’s medieval
era, the 15th century in particular, because at the time Japan
was “so separate from the influence of Chinese culture. It really had
a very unique culture, which I found fascinating.”
Noh theater dates from the late 14th century. A stylized stage art
that follows an extremely codified system, it is acted solely
by male performers, who often wear masks. Rhythmic recitation
of a text and symbolic, standardized gestures and dance
movements are performed to classical Japanese music. “I have
learned to train myself in reading those old texts. It’s a bit like CLOCKWISE FROM LOWER LEFT: TADZIO AND HERMÈS; TWO IMAGES, HIROSHI SUGIMOTO AND GALLERY KOYANAGI, TOKYO
clockwiSe froM lower left: tadzio and herMÈS; two iMageS, hiroShi SugiMoto and gallery koyanagi, tokyo
odawara art foundation and Shinji MaSakawa
Shakespeare, maybe a little harder,” Sugimoto laughs.
The Guggenheim Museum in New York is currently presenting
“Gutai: Splendid Playground,” a retrospective exhibition of the
Gutai Art Association (1954–72), a radically inventive, influential
Japanese art collective and movement. As part of this retrospective
and as a tribute to the spirit of Gutai, “Sanbaso: Divine Dance”
will be performed on March 28 and 29.
Sugimoto explains that the presentation will be traditional
with a contemporary twist. He is replacing the pine-tree landscape
associated with Noh theater with two panoramic banners from
his “Lightning Field” photographic series, representing the chaotic
era of the play. The dance will be performed once more this spring,
on April 26 at the Shibuya Cultural Center in Owada, Japan.
Sugimoto’s support for the traditional performing arts runs
deep. In 2009, he set up the Odawara Art Foundation to produce
and support classic theater forms. The artist is keen to bring Noh
theater back into its traditional performance setting—outdoors—
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
Clockwise from
opposite page, far
left: Couleurs
de l’Ombre scarf
107, designed by
Sugimoto for
Hermès; Lightning
Fields 222, 2009,
from one of
the artist’s
ongoing
photographic
series; star
kyogen actor
Mansai Nomura,
wearing a
lightning-inspired
costume by
Sugimoto in a
performance of
“Sanbaso: Divine
Dance”; Five
Elements:
Tyrrherian Sea,
Positano, 2011,
composed of
clear optical glass
and inlaid
seascape film
taken by
Sugimoto in 1990.
and the foundation is currently building a theater in Odawara
that Sugimoto hopes will be finished in 2016.
“It has been designed to show traditional Noh theater, but it
could be used for any performance, including contemporary ones.
It’s more in the 15th-century style: outside and open, for people
to gather around a very small stage, only five meters square. It will
be quite intimate, with real pine trees everywhere,” he explains.
While in Paris for the October performances of The Love
Suicides at Sonezaki, Sugimoto will also present a video at
the Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent Foundation: Accelerated
Buddha, a version of his 1995 video, Sea of Buddhas, re-edited
using the latest digital technologies. In November, he opens a
retrospective at the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul.
Sugimoto points out that beyond Noh and bunraku, there’s still
one more traditional form of Japanese theater for him to tackle:
kabuki. “I’m just conquering them one by one,” he said, admitting that
he’s already thinking about how he will approach this next challenge.
59

60
theevent
Rethinking a Region
By Adeline ChiA
f
rom the broad swath of the Indian subcontinent to the thousands
of islands in the Indonesian archipelago, South and Southeast
Asia are home to some 20 nations. Yet despite a rich culture and
diverse contemporary art practices, the region has been woefully
underrepresented on the international art scene.
Now, a landmark exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum in New York is taking steps to address this imbalance. “No
Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia,” on view
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
poklong anading
through late May, is a broad-ranging exhibition that highlights
the richness and diversity of the contemporary-art scene in
South and Southeast Asia, showcasing top artists who are welltraveled
on the international biennial and exhibition circuit. They
include prominent Indian multidisciplinary artist Shilpa Gupta,
Filipino multidisciplinary artist Poklong Anading, Malaysian video
and photography artist Wong Hoy Cheong, and London-based
collective and Turner Prize nominee the Otolith Group.
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
A wide-rAnging exhibition
brings contemporAry south
And southeAst AsiAn Art to
A top new york city museum
But how does one organize an exhibition with such a broad
geographical reach? June Yap, the Singaporean curator of “No
Country,” spent an intense three months of travel researching artists
in the region. A truly comprehensive survey, she says, is impossible.
All the same, she resisted the urge to stage a show where each
artwork was tasked with saying something representative about its
respective country; instead, she chose to subvert the idea of national
borders and boundaries.
A production
detail of poklong
Anading’s
Counter Acts,
2004, a light-box
mounted photo
transparency in
four parts.
61

Above, a frame
from Ho Tzu
Nyen’s 2011 video,
The Cloud of
Unknowing. Set in
a low-income
district in
Singapore, the
video takes its
title from a
14th-century
treatise on
monastic
contemplation.
True to its title—itself a denial of discrete nationalities—“No
Country” reveals the region as a complex web of historical and
cultural relationships, with interwoven histories and shared
traditions as well as conflicts. As such, the show is not organized
by nationality; instead, Yap looks to complicate the notion of
origins. For example, in Places of Rebirth, 2009, the Chiang Mai,
Thailand–born artist Navin Rawanchaikul explores his Indian
roots—his parents left Punjab during the 1947 India-Pakistan
partition—in a vividly colored, Bollywood-style poster.
Another diasporic work is the Otolith Group’s Communists
Like Us, 2006–2010, a photo-essay film featuring images from the
family archive of Anjalika Sagar, one of the collective’s cofounders.
The artist’s grandmother was an Indian diplomat who traveled to
Mao’s China, and her photos of exchanges between Indian and
Chinese politicians provide the backdrop for an unfolding dialogue
between two fictional characters.
Many of the show’s artists have been critically well-received
but are not necessarily commercial successes—yet. Their stars
will undoubtedly rise through participation in the show: all of
the works in “No Country” will enter the Guggenheim collection,
along with selected pieces not on view. (The Guggenheim declined
to comment on the precise number of works.) The acquisitions
couldn’t be more timely: according to a Guggenheim spokesperson,
the museum has more than 7,000 works in its collection, but of
these, only 12 are South and Southeast Asian works dating from
the 1970s to the present.
Yap explains that the title “No Country” references “Sailing to
Byzantium,” a poem by William Butler Yeats that inspired the novel
No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy, which in turn was
made into a film of the same title by the Coen brothers. “This
passage from poem to novel, film to exhibition in a way represents
the translation of culture, knowledge, and even histories in the
region,” Yap says. “The themes of cultural achievement, time,
morality, and mortality that are present in all these media—the poem,
the novel, and the film—are also in the artworks in the exhibition.”
Prior to coming to the Guggenheim, Yap worked with
such institutions as the Singapore Art Museum and the Institute
of Contemporary Arts Singapore. She most recently curated
a show by artist Ho Tzu Nyen for the Singapore Pavilion in the
2011 Venice Biennale; his Biennale film, The Cloud of Unknowing,
2011, is included in the Guggenheim show.
After closing in New York, “No Country” is slated to tour
to venues in Hong Kong and Singapore. The exhibition is the first
of three supported by the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art
Initiative, a program designed to highlight global regions that are
underrepresented in the international art scene. The second and
third parts of the project will focus on Latin America and the
Middle East and North Africa, respectively.
Asked if she felt pressure in making her selections for the show,
given the difficulties of representing such a culturally diverse area,
Yap reflects for a moment, then says: “I don’t feel the pressure,
personally. I have tried to look for a spread of countries and a crossgeneration
of artists. This project is not a comprehensive exhibition.
And that’s the nature of exhibitions, really.”
“No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia”
remains on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New
York through May 22.
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
From top: the otolith group and project 88, mumbai; reza aFisina; navin rawanchaikul. opposite page: russell morton and ho tzu nyen.
cuRATOR’S INSIGHT
June Yap on 5 Artworks
Poklong Anading (Philippines),
Counter Acts, 2004
In 2004, Anading began a significant
series, “Anonymity,” with this work. In
the series, he persuaded people on the
street to be photographed while
holding circular mirrors in front of
their faces. The photographic gesture
of seizing a moment in time, in which
the act of seeing and the nature of
light dictate the visual result, is
doubled and foiled here. The light from
the sun—reflected in the mirror—
obscures the views of both artist and
subject. In the context of the
exhibition, this visual paradox of sight
and obscurity could be a cue for us to
consider how one views Southeast
Asia both from within and outside the
region (from the United States, for
example) and what we think we might
be observing.
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore),
The Cloud of Unknowing, 2011
The Cloud of Unknowing is named after
a 14th-century mystical treatise
intended as a primer for aspiring
monastics on the art of contemplative
prayer. Thoughtful and enigmatic, Ho’s
film—set in a low-income estate in
Taman Jurong (a residential district in
Singapore)—is a visual and aural
interpretation of the representation of
the cloud across Eastern and Western
cultures. In this work, the lines between
the two cultures are blurred, in the
same way that one cannot quite lay
claim to clouds. While “No Country”
presents artworks relating to a region
of Asia, the distinction between East
and West is deliberately left vague.
Hopefully, this enables us to become
more conscious of how we make such
observations and divisions.
The Otolith Group (London),
Communists Like Us, 2006–2010
The Otolith Group is the duo Anjalika
Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. Their work
Communists Like Us contrasts a
dialogue about political action taken
from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La
Chinoise with images belonging to
the photographic archive of Anasuya
Gyan-Chand, Sagar’s grandmother.
These documentary images depict
encounters between Indian
politicians and activists, and their
counterparts from the Soviet Union,
China, Japan, and other countries in
Asia in the 1950s and ’60s. The
images from the archive are
significant in showing the extensive
nature of diplomatic relations in
postwar Asia, and what such a history
might mean for us in contemplating
the future of the region.
Navin Rawanchaikul (Thailand),
Places of Rebirth, 2009
Rawanchaikul is a truly cross-cultural
example in Asia. In this artwork, he
traces his ancestry from South Asia’s
1947 partition of India and Pakistan
all the way through to his Thai and
Japanese family in East and
Southeast Asia today. Painted in the
style of a Bollywood movie poster, the
diasporic nature of his family’s story is
depicted in images of the artist’s family
and strangers he encountered in
Pakistan, as well as pictures of India
and Pakistan’s historic split. The title
Places of Rebirth suggests the
possibility of multiple origins and
challenges how identity is constituted.
Reza Afisina (Indonesia),
What..., 2011
This video performance shows the
artist reciting the biblical verses Luke
12:3–11, in which Luke relates Jesus’
warnings against hypocrisy and
stresses the importance of truth and
confession. While reciting, the artist
repeatedly slaps himself, emphasizing
the biblical injunction further through
violence upon his own body. The
artist, who comes from a moderate
Muslim family, here examines the idea
of punishment and violence, and the
physical severity of the performance
provokes feelings of empathy in the
viewer. As Indonesia is a secularly
administered but dominantly Muslim
country, the artist’s work presents
an inclusive picture, where the values
of different religions converge in
human empathy.
Left, a frame
from the
Otolith
Group’s video
Communists
Like Us, 2006-
2010; center,
What . . ., a
2001 video by
Reza Afisina.
In Places of
Rebirth, 2009,
below, Thai
artist Navin
Rawanchaikul
depicts
his personal
history in a
Bollywoodstyle
movie
poster.
63

64
When
What’s What’s
neW is
heritage,
too
Progressive
and contemporary
Indian art are
Kiran Nadar’s passions
BY ROSALYN D’MELLO
in april 2012 more than a few visitors to the dlf
Place mall in Saket, New Delhi, believed they had come
upon an unconventional retail display of stainless
steel pots and pans in the form of a soaring mushroom
cloud, nearly 33 feet tall. The installation was, in fact, the
monumental sculpture Line of Control, a 2008 work by
Subodh Gupta, the reigning star of contemporary Indian
art. The baffled visitors had unknowingly left the mall
proper and entered the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (knma),
an 18,000-square-foot exhibition space that opened
in 2011 and bears the name of the collector, patron, and
philanthropist who founded it.
Line of Control debuted in London in the 2009
Tate Triennial, which is where Nadar first encountered the
MARCH/APRIL 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
KNMA, New Delhi; OppOsite: RAM RAhMAN
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
thecollector
Subodh Gupta’s Line
of Control, 2008,
a 32¾-foot-tall
mushroom cloud of
stainless-steel
kitchen utensils, was
installed last spring
at the Kiran Nadar
Museum of Art in
Saket, New Delhi.
Opposite: Kiran
Nadar at her New
Delhi home. Behind
her hangs Raja Ravi
Varma’s Shakuntala
Patralekhan, 1894.

66
Below: knma’s 2012
exhibition “Crossings:
Time Unfolded II”
included Ravinder
Reddy’s Woman
Braiding Her Hair,
2008, a nude figure in
gilded and painted
polyester resin fiberglass,
left foreground,
and Rina Banerjee’s
The World as Burnt
Fruit, 2009, right
foreground, a monumental
mixed-
media floor piece.
Opposite: Ranbir
kaleka’s Crossings,
2005, top, a video
projection on painting
with audio, and
Syed Haider Raza’s
Saurashtra, 1983,
the acrylic on canvas
painting for which
nadar paid a record
$3.5 million, confirming
her commitment
to bring important
art back to India.
piece. “Overwhelmed,” as she describes it, by the work’s
“awe-inspiring” nature, she decided on the spot to acquire
it for knma, India’s first private museum for modern and
contemporary art. “It is one of the most phenomenal
works any artist could have done. I had to have it,” Nadar
said with conviction when asked if she had considered
the logistical challenge that transporting and installing
such a gargantuan work would present. Shipped to India
in four containers, the 15-section sculpture was assembled
over seven days by the team that had set it up at Tate
Britain. The ceiling of the mall’s basement was reinforced
to bear the colossal load, and a nearby shop front had
to be dismantled to make way for the three cranes required
for the sculpture’s assembly. Nadar remains mum about
the amount she paid Hauser & Wirth, the gallery that
represents Gupta internationally. “It wasn’t cheap,” is
all she has been willing to share.
One outcome of this spectacular purchase is the
emergence of Line of Control as a visual magnet to lure
mall-goers who might otherwise not visit the museum,
where admission is free. “We hope that the viewership of
Subodh’s piece will bring more traction for the museum,”
Nadar explained at the press conference marking the
unveiling of Line of Control. Although Gupta’s work
has won critical accolades and collector support on the
international art circuit, his intricate assemblages had never
been presented to a popular audience in India. For Gupta,
who was present at the press conference, the thrill lay in
having the work—whose shape alludes to the potentially
deadly tension along the India-Pakistan border—displayed
in his native country. “An artist couldn’t be prouder to
have his work come home,” he said.
A comparable commitment to home and heritage
motivates Nadar, and a key mission of knma is to bring
significant art by Indian modernists back to India so the
full range of the country’s art history can be viewed and
appreciated. In 2010, for example, she paid a recordbreaking
$3.5 million at Christie’s London for Saurashtra,
a 1983 painting by Syed Haider Raza. The artist was a
central figure in the Bombay-based Progressive Artists
Group, which was established in 1947 and included
Maqbool Fida Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee,
and Francis Newton Souza. Discouraged by the lack of a
thriving art scene and the dearth of indigenous collectors,
Raza, like many of his contemporaries, moved abroad.
He lived in Paris for six decades before returning to New
Delhi in 2011. Saurashtra came from the French collector
who had bought the work directly from Raza. A large,
square canvas featuring geometrically arranged blocks
of reds and oranges and the bindu motif, symbolizing
spiritual consciousness, Saurashtra was Nadar’s most
famous acquisition prior to Line of Control and was
displayed prominently on one of the four red walls that
framed a section of knma’s 2012 show “Crossings: Time
Unfolded II.” That show also included Souza’s electrifying
The Red Road, a 1962 landscape whose palette and
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
this page and opposite: KnMa
coarse texture are influenced by laterite, the rust-red soil
of his birthplace, Goa, a coastal state south of Mumbai.
Nadar’s pursuit of art isn’t limited to acquiring
high-priced, high-profile works abroad, though several
Indian art critics have grumbled, especially after she paid
£993,250 ($1.5 million) at Sotheby’s London in 2010 for
Bharti Kher’s The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own,
2006, a life-size fiberglass elephant with Kher’s trademark
bindis affixed across its surface. Her collecting is part of
a larger philanthropic vision she shares with her husband,
Shiv Nadar, who founded a technology start-up in 1976
that has grown into the global behemoth HCL Enterprises.
She began to acquire art in the late 1980s with the simple
aim of decorating her walls. “I started collecting for our
home, which we were building at the time. There was no
thought of a museum,” she explains. “I commissioned
art from Husain and bought works by Manjit Bawa and
Rameshwar Broota; all three pieces are still in the house.”
Nadar’s acquisitions budget—and her vision—grew
with her husband’s success. The two met when Nadar
was working for an advertising agency, and they soon
became bridge partners. (She continues to play competitive
bridge and has represented India in international
tournaments.) HCL was flourishing, and Nadar, not
content with being the idle wife of an entrepreneur,
became instrumental in the company’s philanthropic
and educational initiatives, which include the Shiv Nadar
Foundation, established in 1996, and Shiv Nadar
University, which had its first graduating class in 2011. She
was on Forbes Asia magazine’s 48 Heroes of Philanthropy
list in 2010; her husband followed one year later.
By 2005 the Nadar home could no longer accommodate
the collection, which had steadily grown, its focus no
longer confined to Indian Progressive artists but expanded
to embrace contemporary Indian lights like Atul Dodiya,
Rina Banerjee, Ranbir Kaleka, and Anish Kapoor. “At
some point I had a lot more art than I had wall space,
and I had to decide whether to stop collecting or to keep
putting works in storage,” Nadar says. “Keeping them
in storage didn’t seem like a very wise thing, so I decided
to do something more meaningful and set up a museum.
And after I first had the thought, in 2006, it took me two
or three years to plan it and get down to it.”
“In late 2009 Mrs. Nadar and I started looking at
all she had acquired since the late 1980s, so that the
first step—to put the inventory in place—could begin,”
recalls Roobina Karode, director and chief curator of the
museum. knma opened in 2010, first in a location on
the vast HCL campus in Noida. The inaugural exhibition,
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
“building an
iconic structure
is as important
for a museum
as the art
it houses.”
67

68
Above:
Gulammohammed
Sheikh’s Speechless
City, 1975, a 42-inchsquare
oil on canvas.
Opposite: The 2011
inaugural exhibition
at knmA in Saket,
“Time Unfolded,”
top, with Bharti kher’s
The Skin Speaks a
Language Not Its
Own, 2006, a life-
size fiberglass
elephant covered
in bindis, prominently
displayed. Yatra,
1955, below, is one
of several works by
m.F. Husain in the
nadar collection.
“Open Doors,” was curated by Karode. “The title had
both a literal and a metaphoric sense, as knma opened its
doors to the larger public to share Mrs. Nadar’s
art collection, which was now placed in the public
realm,” Karode explains. “Some rare works by Souza,
Husain’s Mothers, 1990; Broota’s Runners, 1982; Bikash
Bhattacharjee’s “Doll” series, 1971; A. Ramachandran’s
Towards the Sun, 2004; N.S. Harsha’s Nations, 2007;
and Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Speechless City, 1975,
were all part of this exhibition, which introduced the
collection to the art community and the general public.”
But Noida proved an inconvenient location; Nadar’s
mission of creating visual literacy through art and
encouraging art appreciation among the general populace
was difficult to achieve there. In January 2011 knma
opened its second space at the mall in Saket with “Time
Unfolded,” an expansive show curated by Karode that
covered a range of modern and contemporary Indian
expression, with special focus on the Bengal region as
a hub of modernism in pre-independence India. The show
highlighted work by the Progressives and included art
by diaspora artists like Kapoor and Raqib Shaw. Among
the more emblematic pieces was Gupta’s life-size fiberglass
sculpture of an Indian family of four riding a Bajaj
scooter, 2006, which has come to epitomize the country’s
middle class in the 1970s and ’80s. The lavish opening
coincided with the India Art Summit (now the India Art
Fair) and brought together the biggest names from the
country’s art world as well as figures from the inter-
national circuit. The museum was hailed as India’s first
philanthropic institution for modern and contemporary
Indian art. “It’s a vision that India needs,” says Nadar.
Meanwhile, programming continues at the Noida space,
which hosted two exhibitions in 2012: “Cynical Love:
Life in the Everyday,” a group show with a technological
theme curated by Gayatri Sinha, and “Of Bodies, Armour
and Cages,” a solo show of Shakuntala Kulkarni’s installations
and photographs that address the relationship of
the body to the dual notions of protection and entrapment,
curated by Karode. “Zones of Contact,” organized by in-
house curator Akansha Rastogi and guest curators Vidya
Shivadas and Deeksha Nath, is the latest show to open
in the Noida space and remains on view through September.
The 2013 program at Saket promises to be a more
ambitious affair, according to Karode. “At knma, we
are showcasing the first comprehensive retrospective of
Nasreen Mohamedi in India,” she says. The Karachi-born
artist, who died in 1990, was known for her Mondrianinspired
minimalism. The museum is simultaneously hosting
(through November) two additional new shows, “Amrita
Sher-Gil: Self in the Making,” co-curated by Karode
and Vivan Sundaram, the artist’s nephew, and a third show
curated by Karode, which features work by several artists.
“The galleries are divided so that all three exhibitions
coexist, and the entire 18,000 square feet is not used for just
one exhibition as before,” says Karode.
For all the intensive programming at both venues,
Nadar isn’t satisfied. “The aim is to eventually build a
museum,” she says. “I think the building of an iconic
structure is as important for a museum as the art it houses.
That’s the legacy that I’d like to leave.” Aside from tax
exemptions, Nadar has received no governmental support
for her initiatives. “Trying to get land or trying to get
the government to see the importance of a museum is an
uphill task,” she says. “All across the world, private
museums are funded through a public-private partnership
where land is normally granted. That is the kind of
model we’d like to get into.”
Nadar is currently seeking a 100,000-square-foot site
for a new building that can house her growing collection,
which she currently estimates at more than 500 works.
As ambitious plans for expansion and longevity evolve,
Nadar’s focus remains squarely on collecting works
by India’s modern and contemporary artists. The sole
exception is her recent acquisition of a Marina Abramović
print, Artist Portrait with a Candle, 2012, which features
the artist seated solemnly, garbed in black, candle in hand,
its light shining on the backdrop like a halo.
knma has set many precedents in India, with its state-
of-the-art conservation practices and clarity of mission,
particularly impressive as the National Gallery of
Modern Art (the only state-run institution for modern
and contemporary art) founders without a coherent
acquisitions policy. Another precedent is its vision of the
museum as a hub for conversation between artists in
the presence of artworks and for interventions by artists
such as Sonia Khurana and Zuleikha Chaudhari, who
have reimagined the museum space through performance
and interactive installations. In just three years Nadar has
established an institution recognized for the quality of its
holdings and respected as the place where works that have
been in exile, like Saurashtra, will find a permanent home.
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
this page and opposite: knma
“a public-private
partnership
is the kind
of model
we’d like
to get into.”
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
67

AsiA PAcific Breweries limited
Street Beat
an arts-savvy asian brewer connects
with young audiences through
an edgy international arts festival
By Adeline Chia
The firsT 2013 ediTion of Tiger TrAnslATe, the streetwise,
not-quite-underground arts festival, took place in Dubai in
January. It was held in a typically offbeat, slightly grungy
location: the car park of the Media One Hotel. The headliner
was Pat Mahoney, best known as the drummer in the awardwinning,
now-defunct electronic band LCD Soundsystem.
Also laying on the grooves was DJ Paul “Seiji” Dolby, a
founding member of the broken beat collective Bugz in
the Attic. Meanwhile, New Zealand street artist Enforce
One (also known as Gary Yong), along with Mongolian artists
A.N. Unaran and Batbayar Purew, attacked the walls of the
car park, covering them with their style of street art.
Tiger Translate is a multi-genre arts mashup that
showcases the work of young, emerging Asian “creatives”—
street dancers, deejays, graphic designers, and graffiti
artists—pairing them with more established international
artists. From staging a dance battle in Bangkok’s famous
Suan Lum night bazaar to throwing a party in an abandoned
prison in Hanoi, Tiger Translate has been making waves
in the Asian underground creative circuit where music,
design, and art intersect.
The festival is an initiative of Asia Pacific Breweries (APB),
a regional powerhouse with breweries in 14 countries and more
than 40 brands of beer. Named for APB’s dominant label, Tiger
Beer, the festival showcases the work of young, emerging Asian
creatives. Launched in 2005 in Auckland, New Zealand, as a
music-themed platform merging East and West influences,
over the years Tiger Translate has grown to encompass a broad
range of creative expression. Last year alone, it travelled to
nine cities, including Ulaanbaatar, Phnom Penh, and Singapore.
While the APB initiative aims to connect the Tiger brand
with a younger audience, senior brand manager Kenny Tang
notes that its more important objective is to uncover emerging
artistic talents before they hit the big time, and to highlight
the work of young Asian creatives while enabling them to
experience and explore different cultures. “Tiger Translate
doesn’t reach out to a mass audience like the football fans;
it has a niche, cult following,” he points out. Creatives such as
Singapore’s Phunk Studio, which took part in the 2006 Dublin
edition, and the New York street-art collective Faile, which
participated in the 2006 Shanghai edition, are among the
more distinguished festival alumni.
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
theMecene
Tiger Translate typically starts as a week-long camp in
each city. The artists immerse themselves in the locale and
are encouraged to brainstorm, collaborate, and create works
together based on a common theme. The intensive retreat
culminates in a bash where these collaborations are exhibited
and the artists demonstrate their skills “live” in the form of,
say, a DJ set, an on-the-spot graffiti art piece, or a
breakdance performance.
Enforce One, aka Gary Yong, calls his participation in this
year’s Dubai edition an “eye-opener.” The Kiwi illustrator and
stencil-and-aerosol artist says that he has been inspired by
the city and the band of artists he’s been travelling with. “With
the artists I meet, I find we share a passion and a great energy for
the arts. Moreover, I’ve also had the chance to meet creatives
in various media, including film and music. Interacting with them
and seeing their works has allowed me to think further and
move out of my comfort zone in exploring other approaches.”
Looking ahead, Tang says that he wants to expand the focus
of Tiger Translate to embrace such disciplines as light art
and other music genres such as dubstep. “The important thing
is to keep one’s finger on the pulse of the times,” he says,
“and to be always on trend.”
The Phare
Ponleu selpak
dance crew,
from Battambang
province in
Cambodia,
performing
in Tiger
Translate 2012.
Anish Kapoor
The Asian Scene
71

The Asian Scene
72
above, a rendering
of the titanum-clad
addition to the
asian Civilisations
Museum designed
by singaporean
architecture firm
GreenhilLi. right,
a 17th-century
work from the
museum’s collection
of blanc de
Chine porcelain,
depicting the
goddess of mercy
Guanyin seated in
an ornate grotto.
themuseum
AsiAn CivilisAtions MuseuM
Blanc de Chine in a Floating Box
The Singapore museum’s new wing will display its rarely seen Dehua porcelain,
museum director Alan Chong tells Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop
Thanks To a privaTe donaTion, the Asian Civilisations
Museum (ACM) in Singapore will incorporate a new wing to
its landmark colonial-era buildings by 2015.
Designed by the Singaporean architecture firm GreenhilLi,
the new wing will be a distinctive architectural departure from
the 19th-century Neoclassicism of the original structure. Clad
in titanium, the extension will look like a solid box floating in
an enclosed space, a metallic cuboid “weightlessly” elevated
one level above the ground. A three-level glass atrium
between the existing building and the new exhibition space
will provide plenty of daylight and ventilation to part of the
first-level gallery space, while providing a visual contrast
between the old and the new that also reflects the vibrant
city-state in the 21st century.
“We wanted something that would be visually separate
from the original museum,” explains Alan Chong, director
of the museum.
The S$5 million extension is made possible through
a donation by the Hong Leong Foundation. About
S$500,000 of the donation will be used to acquire
artifacts related to Fujian culture, both to
expand the collection of Chinese objects and
to allow audiences to make connections with
this province and its place in Chinese trade
and immigration.
This is the second time the Hong
Leong Foundation has provided major
support to the ACM. In 2001, it donated
S$2.8 million for the establishment of
the museum’s China gallery, which is
named after the Hong Leong Group’s founder, the late Kwek
Hong Png. The latest donation is part of the philanthropic
foundation’s ongoing efforts to promote the understanding
and appreciation of Chinese art and culture.
Announcing the donation, Kwek Leng Beng, governor
of the Hong Leong Foundation and son of the company’s
founder, said, “By working with the Asian Civilisations
Museum, we hope to be able to inform and educate future
generations about the roots of our forefathers. The Fujian
culture is especially meaningful to me as my late father
was born in that region. He came to Singapore at the age
of 16 but never forgot his roots.”
Chong says the new wing will display Singapore’s historical
connections with China, “not just the ancestral roots in Fujian
of many immigrants to Southeast Asia, but also the many
trading connections between China and the world.”
Chong points out that the ACM has a beautiful collection
of Dehua blanc de Chine porcelain, of which very little can
now be displayed. “The natural light of the new galleries
will be ideal for the subtle variations of tone found
in the white Dehua wares,” he says.
Chinese culture from Fujian province is closely
connected with mainstream Chinese culture but
has special characteristics. “In many ways, it
was an outwardly looking part of China, with
strong links to trade and exchange, as well
as to Taiwan and the rest of Asia,” he says,
adding that the ports of Quanzhou and
Xiamen were vibrant centers that can be
regarded as precursors to Singapore.
MArCh/April 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
two images: asian civilisations museum, singapore
Turon Travel, Inc.
“This art travel agency's extreme degree of specialization has only made it more essential
with the proliferation of art fairs, biennials, and auction houses all around the globe.”
by ARTINFO Published: June 5, 2012
“Collectors, dealers and creative people have very high standards of taste.
We want their travel experience to meet their criteria for service and for surroundings.”
Nicholas Christopher, Leslie Rankow Fine Arts Blog, 12/11/11
Serving the Art World Since 1979
Art Fairs & Biennales
Quarterly eDirectory
Museum Groups & Art Specialist Tours
North America Europe Asia
Art Basel Miami Beach Art Basel Hong Kong
ADAA: The Art Show ARCO Art Stage Singapore
The Armory Show Art Cologne
Art Los Angeles Contemporary Art Paris Art Faiir
Art Platform - Los Angeles DesignMiami/ Basel
Art Rio FIAC
Art Wynwood Frieze
EXPO CHICAGO/2012 Masterpiece London
Design Miami/ Basel Paris Photo
Frieze NYC TEFAF Maastricht
IFPDA Print Fair Venice Biennale 2013
Pulse NYC
ZONA MACO
2 Wooster Street, SoHo, New York, 10013
212.925.5453 800.952.7646
www.turontravel.com
sm

64
Daisuke Miyatsu in
his book-lined living
room. Conceptual
artist Taro Shinoda
designed the shelves,
whose color and lines
were inspired by
the packing crates
used to ship art. The
standing lamp is
by Choi Jeong Hwa.
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
lifeandart
Daisuke
Miyatsu:
The
Salaryman
Collects
With limited means, unlimited
passion, and a little help from his
artist friends, a Japanese collector
builds a home like no other
By MADeleINe O’DeA
photographs by yousuke takeda
ichikawa is a modest town outside
Tokyo, close enough to the capital to be
convenient for commuters but far enough
away to feel like a village. On a Sunday
afternoon I arrived at Ichikawa railway
station and made my way up through
narrow streets in search of the home of one
of Japan’s most notable collectors, Daisuke
Miyatsu. I found the house not far from the
pride of Ichikawa, the Buddhist temple of
Nakayama Hokekyo - -ji, which on this sunny
day was crowded with visitors drawn to the
perfection of the blossoms on the temple’s
cherry trees. After so traditional a setting,
the last thing I expect to encounter is the
joyous pink and blue façade of the simple,
angular residence that Miyatsu calls his
“dream house.”
Begun in 1999 and still a work in progress,
the house was created in collaboration
with French installation and video artist
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, whom
Miyatsu cajoled into taking on the role of
architect for the first time. Together they
conceived the house as “one big artwork,”
and every corner bears the stamp of an artist
whom Miyatsu knows and collects. On a
sliding screen in a traditional Japanese-style
The Asian Scene
75

76
room, Yoshitomo Nara has painted one of
his trademark feisty girls, eschewing his usual
acrylics and oils for traditional ink and
wash in this commission for his old friend
and longtime collector. The bathroom is
wallpapered with sketches by the conceptual
artist Shimabuku, each referring to one
of his whimsical works. In the main bedroom
there is a trompe l’oeil ceiling by the young
Japanese artist Teppei Kaneuji in which
strange creatures created from hand-dyed
and collaged papers peek out from the knots
in the wood. And on the landing stands a
mirror whose frame was created especially
for Miyatsu by Yayoi Kusama.
This is art made domestic and intimate.
“The house is a place for my family’s life, so
I wanted to build it with my friends,” Miyatsu
explains. His formal holdings of more than
300 works are miles away, in a temperaturecontrolled,
earthquake-proof Tokyo
warehouse. In summer 2011 the collection
was celebrated in the well-received
exhibition “Invisibleness Is Visibleness” at
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei,
which featured 61 works by an international
roster of artists (Vito Acconci, Jan Fabre,
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kusama, and
Apichatpong Weerasethakul among them).
Miyatsu happily calls collecting an
addiction, and he has fed his habit for the past
18 years, even though he has nothing that
approaches the wealth that many of today’s
global collectors bring to the table. In fact,
he is widely known in Asia as the Salaryman
Collector for having financed his impressive
array of international contemporary art
with just the earnings from his job as a Tokyo
office worker. He has devoted every spare
yen to art, and at times he has even taken a
second job to fund his collecting.
Miyatsu’s passion for contemporary
art was first sparked when he was still
a teenager by an encounter with the art of
Andy Warhol. “Before I saw his works,
I was familiar only with traditional Japanese
art, where the subject might be a beautiful
woman or a flower or a landscape, all
rendered in a refined style. And suddenly
there were these pictures showing a car crash
or an electric chair. Looking at these, I
experienced a really strong shock. It was
totally different from the art I knew.”
But it was an artist closer to home who
transformed Miyatsu into a collector. While
at university he fell in love with the work
of Kusama, Japan’s eccentric genius. “Do you
know the film 2001: A Space Odyssey?” he
asks. “Do you know how the astronaut
feels when he encounters space? That’s how
I felt when I first stood in front of a work by
Kusama. I could never forget her.” A few
years later, in 1994, when he had a steady
job, Miyatsu found the gallery that represented
the artist. “They had a very small
drawing,” he recalls. “It was very reasonable
in comparison with now but still not cheap.
It was very beautiful. I started my career
toKYo
as a collector with that small drawing by
Kusama from 1953.”
GallerY,
In the years that followed, Miyatsu’s
KoYama
holdings of Kusama grew to 10 pieces that
ranged from the 1950s to the ’70s. For a
tomio
while he took a second job as a night porter
aNd
so he could afford her works. But in 1996
Nara
his taste leapt far beyond his budget: He
fell—hard—for a large 1965 painting from
Kusama’s “Infinity Net” series. Priced at
Yoshitomo
$65,000, it was worth more than he earned
in a year. Miyatsu’s family was aghast to
bottom:
learn that he had put a deposit on the work.
Japan’s magazines were full of ads for opposite,
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013
The interior of the
Miyatsu home, where art
is not so much installed
as incorporated. From
top: silkscreened
wallpaper in the bathroom
by Shimabuku, 2001;
a trompe l’oeil collage,
Muddy Stream from
a Mug, 2009, by Teppei
Kaneuji, on the bedroom
ceiling, which also features
a light fixture by the
mid-century Danish
designer Verner Panton;
and Fusuma of HEY HO
LET’S GO !, 2011, rendered
in ink and wash on a
sliding screen by Yoshitomo
Nara. Opposite: The
exterior of the Miyatsu
home, designed by
Dominique Gonzalez-
Foerster. Construction
of the house began
in 1999, and is ongoing.

Three videos from the
Miyatsu collection,
installed in a 2011
exhibition at the Museum
of Contemporary Art,
Taipei: Honey, 2003,
by Yang Fudong, above;
Ham & Cheesomelet,
2001, by Ming Wong,
at the end of the
hallway; and, on the
floor, Documentary IV-
Little Mince Cloth,
2010, by Wu Chang-Jung.
Opposite: Infinity Net,
1965, a 52-by-60-inch
oil on canvas by
Yayoi Kusama. Miyatsu
owns 10 pieces by
Kusama, one of which
is the first artwork
he ever purchased.
YaYoi Kusama studio inc. and ota Fine arts, toKYo. opposite, From top: Yang Fudong, shanghart gallerY, shanghai, and moca,
taipei; ming Wong, Vitamin creatiVe space, guangzhou, Wu chang-jung, project FulFill art space, taipei, and moca, taipei
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | mARch/ApRil JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013
2013
companies offering financing to all comers,
and his wife knew he was just mad enough
about art to go into debt. One day she called
him and asked that he hurry to the family
home, where she was waiting with his mother
and grandmother. To keep him out of the
clutches of loan sharks, they had pooled their
funds to advance him the money he needed.
In 1998 Miyatsu had the pleasure of lending
the painting to the first major Kusama
retrospective, which opened at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, subsequently
traveled to New York’s Museum of
Modern Art and the Walker Art Center, in
Minneapolis, and finally arrived at the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.
Seeing the painting hanging in a museum in
the capital, his family finally conceded
that perhaps he wasn’t so crazy after all.
“I am very lucky,” Miyatsu reflects.
“I started my career with Kusama. And then I
began to meet artists of my generation, like
Olafur Eliasson and Nara. Now they are very
established, but 15 years ago they weren’t.
They were just emerging—cheap but very
interesting. It is a very special generation.”
With these artists he established a pattern
of building a network of relationships through
his collecting. “For me it’s very important to
communicate with artists as well as to collect
them,” he explains. “One of the very big
charms of contemporary art is that I can
communicate with each of the artists I’ve
collected, from Kusama to the youngest ones.
If I wanted to talk to Vermeer, for example,
I couldn’t do it. So every art work I own is
attached to a memory and a communication.”
Miyatsu has never sold a work, and
he continues to finance his collecting with
his salary. In recent years he has become
interested in the younger generation
of Taiwanese artists, and in video and new
media in particular. His collection of the
latter is particularly strong and includes
work by Cao Fei, Takagi Masakatsu,
Weerasethakul, and Yang Fudong. During
Art Show Busan 2012, the Asia-Pacific
contemporary fair that debuted last June
at the Korean city’s just-opened convention
center, Miyatsu presented a focused
exhibition of 20 new-media works by
Asian artists from his collection.
We talk about all this in the welcoming
living room of his house, facing walls
of books and catalogues from which
he constantly selects volumes to point out
the works of artists he admires. Even in this
casual setting, almost every object
possesses an artistic pedigree, including the
bookshelves, which were designed by
conceptual artist Taro Shinoda and inspired
by the shape and color of the packing crates
that have delivered many artworks to
Miyatsu’s door. The curtain that hangs across
the room’s window tells a more intimate
story. It was created by Nakagawa Sochi,
a group of Japanese fashion designers who
are inspired by the possibilities of recycling
old clothes, in collaboration with Hong
Kong artist Lee Kit. The materials they
worked with were gathered from members
of Miyatsu’s family, all of whom were asked
to donate something old and well-worn.
An ongoing project, the curtain is like
a portrait of the collector’s extended family
rendered in vibrant Japanese fabrics.
Miyatsu tells me this is not the only part of
his home to incorporate traces of his family.
In the simple garden created by his friend
Shimabuku are a weathered stone lantern
and some stones salvaged from the garden of
his grandparents’ old home. The idea was
Shimabuku’s: He went with Miyatsu to
search for what remained of the old house,
and although the original was long gone, they
found some fragments for the new garden.
“You know, there is something egotistical
about being a collector,” he tells me at
the end of the day. “And that is why it is my
responsibility to keep the collection safe
in storage, so that one day it can be passed
on.” But for Miyatsu the “dream house”
is a different matter. He is happy to see signs
of wear appearing around the place, even
as it remains unfinished, because although the
house is undoubtedly a work of art in itself,
it is all the better for being lived in and loved.
79

Modern + ConteMporary art + design 10 Chancery Lane Gallery (Hong Kong) | 16th Line Gallery (Rostov on Don)* | 313 Art
Project (Seoul) | A2Z Art Gallery (Ivry-sur-Seine) | Acabas (Paris)* | AD Galerie (Béziers/Montpellier) | Louise Alexander Gallery (Porto Cervo) |
Galerie Alexis Lartigue (Neuilly-sur-Seine)* | ALFA Galerie (Paris) | Analix Forever (Geneva) | Galerie Anne de Villepoix (Paris)* | Arka Gallery
(Vladivostok)* | Arte Estampa (Madrid)* | Galerie Arts d’Australie • Stéphane Jacob (Paris) | Backslash Gallery (Paris)* | Galerie Hélène Bailly (Paris)*
| Baudoin Lebon (Paris) | Galerie Renate Bender (Munich)* | Galerie Christian Berst (Paris)* | Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès (Paris) | Galerie Blue Square
(Washington, DC)* | Bodson-Emelinckx Gallery (Brussels)* | Galerie Jean Brolly (Paris) | Cat-Berro Galerie (Paris)* | Galerie Bernard Ceysson (Saint-
Etienne/Luxembourg/Paris/Geneva) | Galerie Pierre-Alain Challier (Paris) | °Clair Galerie (Munich/Saint-Paul de Vence) | Galerie Claude Bernard
(Paris) | Galerie Claude Lemand (Paris)* | Galerie Coullaud & Koulinsky (Paris)* | Galerie Da-End (Paris)* | De Primi Fine Art (Lugano) | Galerie De
Roussan (Paris)* | Domeau & Pérès (La Garenne Colombes) | Galerie Dukan (Paris) | Duplex 10m2 (Sarajevo)* | Edward Cutler Gallery (Milan)* |
Eidos Immagini Contemporanee (Asti) | Erarta Galleries (London)* | Esther Woerdehoff (Paris) | Galerie Les Filles Du Calvaire (Paris) | Flatland
Gallery (Utrecht/Amsterdam) | Galerie Fleury (Paris)* | Gagliardi Art System (Turin) | Galerie Christophe Gaillard (Paris)* | Galerija Fotografija
(Lljubljana)* | Galerie Claire Gastaud (Clermont-Ferrand) | Gimpel & Müller (Paris/London) | Glaz Gallery (Moscow)* | Gallery Grinberg (Moscow)*
| Galerie Guillaume (Paris) | H.A.N. Gallery (Seoul) | Galerie Mark Hachem (Beirut/Paris)* | Galleria Heino (Helsinki)* | Heritage International Art
Gallery (Moscow)* | Galerie Thessa Herold (Paris)* | Galerie Ernst Hilger (Vienna) | Galerie Catherine Houard (Paris) | IFA Gallery (Shanghai) | Ilan
Engel Gallery (Paris) | Galerie Imane Farès (Paris) | Inda Galeria (Budapest) | Galerie Iragui (Moscow)* | Galerie Catherine Issert (Saint-Paul de
Vence) | J. Bastien Art (Brussels) | Galerie Pascal Janssens (Gand) | Galerie Jean Fournier (Paris) | JGM. Galerie (Paris) | Galerie Bernard Jordan
(Paris)* | Galerie L’aléatoire (Paris)* | La Galerie Particulière (Paris) | Galerie La Ligne (Zurich)* | Galerie Lahumière (Paris) | Laurent Delaye Gallery
(London)* | Lehr Zeitgenössische Kunst (Cologne)* | Galerie Leonardo Agosti (Sete)* | Gallery Lilja Zakirova (Heusden)* | Galerie Maeght (Paris)*
| Magnin-A (Paris)* | Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts (Budapest) | Mam Galerie (Rouen)* | Marina Gisich Gallery (Saint-Petersburg) - Ural Vision Gallery
(Ekaterinburg)* | Mazel Galerie (Brussels) | Galerie melanieRio (Nantes)* | Galerie MiniMasterpiece (Paris)* | Galerie Alice Mogabgab (Beirut) |
Galerie Frédéric Moisan (Paris)* | Galerie Lélia Mordoch (Paris) | Mitterrand+Cramer (Geneva)* | Nadja Brykina Gallery AG (Zurich)* | NK Gallery
(Antwerp)* | Nuovo Gallery (Daegu)* | Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris/Brussels) | Oniris - Galerie d’Art Contemporain (Rennes) | Galerie Paris-Beijing
(Paris/Brussels) | Galerie Priska Pasquer (Cologne) | Pechersky Gallery (Moscow) | Hervé Perdriolle Inde(s) (Paris)* | Perimeter Art & Design
(London)* | Galleria Giuseppe Pero (Milan)* | Pièce Unique (Paris)* | Galerie Placido (Paris)* | Galerie Polad Hardouin (Paris)* | Pop/Off/Art Gallery
(Moscow/Berlin)* | Galerie Catherine Putman (Paris) | Galerie Rabouan Moussion (Paris) | RCM Galerie (Paris)* | Revue Noire (Paris) | Galerie Richard
(Paris/New York) | J.P. Ritsch-Fisch Galerie (Strasbourg) | Rue Française By Miss China (Paris)* | Sarah Myerscough Fine Art (London)* | Galerie
Sator (Paris)* | Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea (Milan)* | SEM ART Gallery (Monaco)* | Semiose Galerie (Paris) | André Simoens Gallery
(Knokke) | Galerie Slott (Paris) | Galerie Véronique Smagghe (Paris) | Michel Soskine Inc (Madrid/New York)* | Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève (Paris)*
| Galerie Taïss (Paris) | Galerie Taménaga (Paris/Tokyo/Osaka) | Galerie Tanit (Munich/Beirut)* | Galerie Daniel Templon (Paris) | The Empty Quarter
(Dubai)* | Galerie Patrice Trigano (Paris) | Trinity Contemporary (London)* | Galerie Tristan (Issy les Moulineaux)* | GVQ - Galerie Vanessa Quang
(Paris) | Várfok Gallery (Budapest)* | Venice Projects (Venice) | Galerie Vieille Du Temple (Paris) | Galerie Vu’ (Paris) | Galerie Wolkonsky (Munich)*
| XPO Gallery (Paris)* | Galerie Zürcher (Paris/New York)
List of galleries by 1 st February 2013 | * new participant

64
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
inthestudio
Silk ROaD
Liang Shaoji
collaborates with nature
By Madeleine O’Dea
The Asian Scene
83

84
Installation
view of Chains:
The Unbearable
Lightness of
Being/Nature
Series No. 79,
2003. Silk,
iron chains.
It is not often
that a visit to an
artist’s studio
requires you to go
on a pilgrimage,
but on a spring day I set out for Tiantai
Mountain, a place sacred to both
Buddhists and Taoists, in pursuit of the
artist Liang Shaoji.
Liang went to live near Tiantai Mountain
at the turn of the millennium, but it was 11
years earlier, in 1989, that he began the
journey that would lead him there. That year
he was included in the pathbreaking “China/
Avant-Garde” exhibition at the National
Museum of Art in Beijing. His installation for
the show provided him the twin ideas that
have animated his work ever since: The theme
of his art would be life, and his medium would
be a humble living creature, the silkworm.
At 44, Liang was already much older than
most of the artists who were then beginning
to put Chinese contemporary art on the map.
He had graduated from the middle school
attached to the Zhejiang Fine Art School in
Hangzhou in 1965, on the cusp of the
catastrophic Cultural Revolution (1966–
76). In those years intellectuals were reviled
and the universities were closed, and Liang
found himself working in a textile factory
where he was involved in the manufacture of
carpets, fabrics, lampshades, handicrafts,
and tapestry, while in his spare time he
painted and made prints and sculptures.
Later he became the director of the Institute
of Arts and Crafts in Taizhou.
In the early 1980s he found himself
on a Chinese trade delegation visit to Europe
and the United States, during which he
explored the contemporary artworks in
museums such as the Centre Pompidou, in
Paris. Finally, at age 40, he decided to go
back to school. The Bulgarian artist Maryn
Varbanov had recently set up an atelier at the
Zhejiang Fine Art School, and in 1986 Liang
was accepted as a student. Varbanov, who
had arrived in the country as a student
in the 1950s and became a pioneer of the use
of textiles in installation art and sculpture,
was a profoundly influential figure on the
Chinese art scene. He made his name as one
of the first artists to take weaving off the wall
and present it in open space. Liang was
inspired by Varbanov’s radical approach to
materials and the way in which he merged
Western and Eastern techniques and
philosophies in his art.
In 1988, for the “China/Avant-Garde”
show, Liang created an installation called Yi
Series–Magic Cube, incorporating silk
fabric, dry silkworm cocoons, metal, and rice
paper—just the sort of experiment with space
and materials that Varbanov would have
relished. Later, when Liang was installing the
piece for a show in Hangzhou, a chance
breeze set the dead cocoons swaying in the
light. Looking at them, Liang found himself
wondering for the first time: What would it be
like to work with living silkworms?
The first thing I notice when I walk into
Liang’s studio is the stones. Dozens of them
cover the floor, and they seem to be dusted
with snow. But when I touch one, I find that it
isn’t cold but soft. Silken, sparkling-white
thread covers each stone. In a corner are
stacked dozens of large white disks. These
also turn out to be covered in silk. Liang
explains that when a silkworm isn’t in a
confined space, it won’t form a normal
cocoon but instead will just spin thread and
cover whatever surface it finds itself on.
He likes to quote a line from a poem by the
Tang Dynasty poet Li Shangyin: “Only at
death does the silkworm’s thread reach an
end.” To Liang, this line embodies the
silkworm’s devotion to creation, its
generosity, and its tenacity in life. He says
that in working with them he aims to capture
something of this spirit and to allow a
meditation on the passing of life and time.
The first major work in his “Nature
Series,” which he commenced in 1989 and
still continues today, was called Bed/Nature
Series No. 10, 1993. Liang raised silkworms
to live within tiny bedsteads that he had
fashioned from copper wire salvaged from
old generators. From these fragments of the
waste and ugliness of the man-made world,
Liang had created comfortable refuges that
the silkworms made their own, forming
cocoons, metamorphosing into moths,
laying eggs, and continuing their life cycle
over and over again. The work, which took
seven years to complete, was exhibited at the
Venice Biennale in 1999. Later Liang created
a piece in which silkworms covered
suspended heavy metal chains with silken
threads. He called it Chains: The
Unbearable Lightness of Being/ Nature
Series No. 79, 2003.
In an essay on the “Nature Series” that he
wrote last year, Liang says: “Every life is in
search for its own space for existence amid
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
tiger cai and Shanghart gallery, Shanghai; previouS S pread, ling bingliang
Liang Shaoji and Shanghart ga LLery, S hanghai
absurd and implacable contradictions. The
strong silk threads, symbol of life, as if to
break but resistant, show a strong will to life,
an unremitting life pursuit, a force to beat
the strong with softness, and life
associations with endless extension.”
By the time Bed/Nature Series No. 10 was
complete, Liang had decided to move near
Tiantai Mountain. It is home to the Tiantai
sect of Buddhism, which Liang describes as
the “most indigenous and most pristine” of
all the Buddhist sects in China, and a place
where over the centuries many “crazy
monks” have gone to seek enlightenment.
On Tiantai Mountain there is a platform
where the founder of the sect, Zhiyi, is
believed to have meditated. In 2007 Liang
went there to make the film Cloud Mirror/
Nature Series No. 101. Since moving to
Tiantai he has become committed to the
concept of the interconnectedness of living
beings. Liang thinks this is embodied in the
connection between silkworms and
humankind, and between both of them and
the rest of the natural world. In Cloud
Mirror he illustrated this connection by
holding up a mirror to the sky.
On the mirrors Liang laid out on Tiantai
Mountain, silkworms had already spun
their silk in patterns that evoked the shapes
of clouds. As real clouds passed overhead,
they and the sky itself were reflected in
Liang’s mirrors. In the video of the event,
spun silk and clouds merge in the reflected
sky until it is impossible to see where one
ends and the other begins. The video is a
poetic evocation of the passage of time, life,
and the natural world.
Liang likes to point out that in Chinese the
words for poetry and for silk are homonyms,
perhaps suggesting some deep cultural
connection. He tells me that sericulture has
existed in his country as long as the Chinese
have claimed to have had a civilization,
around 5,000 years. Taking the word
associations further, he points out that the
word for silkworm and the word for Zen also
sound alike; in a 2006 work called Listening
to the Silkworms, which he restaged at
London’s Hayward Gallery last fall, he aims
to induce a Zen-like state by inviting his
audience to do exactly what the title suggests.
The sound of silkworms eating mulberry
leaves is remarkably like the bubbling of a
running stream. In Listening to the
Silkworms Liang asks visitors to sit in
a darkened room and attend to the sounds of
the silkworms’ life. What you hear is not a
recording but silkworms living in an
adjacent room in real time. And as you listen,
you do begin to feel something of what Liang
himself feels deeply, the profound
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
connections that exist between everything
in the natural world.
In a catalogue essay for his exhibition “An
Infinitely Fine Line” at Shanghai’s Zendai
Museum of Modern Art, Liang wrote that
“the entire ‘Nature Series’ is a sculpture of
time, life, and nature, a recording of the
fourth dimension.” Looking at the works,
especially amid the ancient surroundings of
Tiantai Mountain, you see what he is getting
at. By working with silkworms he has
consciously slowed his artistic practice to the
pace of his tiny co-creators and connected
his art to natural forces beyond his control.
Liang calculates that he has raised around
90,000 silkworms in the 23 years he has
worked on the “Nature Series,” and estimates
that the silk thread they have produced
would wind around the world 10 times. One
imagines he might try that someday.
Detail of Bed/
Nature Series
No. 10, 1993–99.
Charred copper
wire, silk.

The Asian Scene
86
thE databank
Eastern Expansion
Coming off the implosion in the early 1990s of the real estate bubble in Japan and the resulting years of
stagnation, few could have predicted the explosive economic growth that would spread across Asia, especially in China and India,
over the past dozen years. As a newly wealthy consumer class has emerged in those two countries since the turn of the millennium,
demand for works made by their artists has likewise taken off. The paintings auction data that was used for this analysis—culled
from the Blouin Art Sales Index—indicate growth in all four countries highlighted. However, the most dramatic changes took place in
China, which today boasts the most sales and the most liquid art market. Moreover, while equities indices have shown average
annual returns in the single digits since 2000, some Indian and Chinese artists—both contemporary and traditional—have generated
returns of more than 1,000 percent, outperforming any other investment class. by roman kraeussl
indices by nation, 2000 through 2011
The Indian art index had an average annual return of more than 25 percent, but it also displayed the most volatility and, despite modest gains in 2010
and 2011, remains well off its 2007 high. In contrast, the Chinese market grew significantly from 2003 through 2007 and was less affected by the slump of
2008 and 2009, resulting in an average annual return of more than 30 percent. By 2010 its gains had overtaken those of the Indian market for the first
time. No longer “emerging,” China can now be considered the region’s dominant art market, heavily backed by national collectors. The index to Japanese
paintings behaves like a blue-chip investment, offering lower returns in exchange for lower risk, and reflecting that country’s established art market.
1600
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
market share by nation, 2000 vs. 2011
The small market for Korean art has grown roughly fourfold in recent years, yet its share of the region’s overall art market shrank between 2000 and 2011. Japan
likewise lost nearly half of its market share, with all of the differential from both countries accruing to China, which now accounts for nearly half of all lots auctioned
in the region. Despite the price volatility within its market, India maintained its share of the Asian sector during the period under consideration.
2000
market share by volume
31.2%
27%
31.9%
9.8%
China India Japan korea
2000 2003 2006 2009 2011
2011
18.3%
market share by volume
28.5%
48.8%
4.3%
China
India
Japan
Korea
marCh/aprIl 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
CloCkwise FRoM leFT: Two iMages, soTheby’s; Two iMages, ChRisTie’s
top asian artists by total value of sales, 2000 through 2011
While growth in the region’s art markets has been broad-based, occurring in all countries and across all art segments, the years from 2003 to 2007 saw the
emergence of a particularly dynamic and speculative contemporary category. Nowadays paintings by several Asian artists regularly fetch upwards of $1 million at
auction. Indeed, in the top-10 lists of artists with the greatest dollar turnover, those from the contemporary segment dominate all other styles in all four countries.
>> China
rank name # sales usD turnover
1 Zao Wou-Ki 344 $192,485,598
2 Zhang Xiaogang 206 $158,175,869
3 Zeng Fanzhi 160 $112,869,350
4 Yue Minjun 151 $101,864,573
5 Sanyu 59 $78,215,575
6 Chu Teh-Chun 300 $66,285,041
7 Wu Guanzhong 111 $51,208,285
8 Wang Guangyi 218 $45,379,428
9 Liu Ye 78 $42,004,442
10 Yan Pei-Ming 141 $37,842,265
>> Japan
rank name # sales usD turnover
1 Takashi Murakami 152 $55,949,713
2 Yayoi Kusama 356 $38,221,795
3 Yoshitomo Nara 189 $34,496,786
4 Tsuguharu Foujita 167 $17,097,531
5 On Kawara 29 $12,703,354
6 Kazuo Shiraga 63 $12,629,753
7 Takanori Oguiss 131 $8,263,429
8 Tetsuya Ishida 19 $5,116,326
9 Aya Takano 52 $4,706,970
10 Hiroyuki Matsuura 33 $3,153,307
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
Clockwise from left: Zhang
Xiaogang’s Bloodline: Big
Family No. 1, 1994, sold for
$8.4 million at Sotheby’s Hong
Kong in October 2011; Lee Ufan’s
From Line, 790294, 1979,
earned $1.4 million at Sotheby’s
New York this past May; S. H.
Raza’s Clocher du village, 1958,
realized $750,000 at Christie’s
London this past June; and
Yoshitomo Nara’s Missing
in Action, 1999, fetched $1.5
milion at the house in June 2011.
>> inDia
rank name # sales usD turnover
1 F.N. Souza 520 $73,718,847
2 S.H. Raza 513 $67,934,257
3 M.F. Husain 485 $66,429,540
4 Tyeb Mehta 67 $37,892,754
5 Subodh Gupta 88 $35,439,663
6 Ram Kumar 229 $28,934,745
7 Akbar Padamsee 131 $23,249,992
8 Vasudeo Gaitonde 38 $17,047,786
9 Jagdish Swaminathan 83 $14,146,983
10 T.V. Santhosh 76 $9,581,115
>> korea
rank name # sales usD turnover
1 Lee Ufan 50 $15,590,707
2 Kim Dong-Yoo 24 $8,453,725
3 Park Soo-Keun 11 $7,275,000
4 Kim Whanki 22 $6,104,209
5 Kang Hyung Koo 19 $5,892,013
6 Hong Kyung Tack 22 $5,408,542
7 Kim Tschang-Yeul 39 $4,045,680
8 Choi So-Young 20 $3,353,269
9 Oh Chi Gyun 7 $2,825,694
10 Kim Sou 6 $1,519,708
87

The Asian Scene
88
conversationwith
Leng Lin
The president of
Pace Beijing reflects
on the evolving Asian
art market with
Benjamin Gennochio
What does having a Pace
gallery in Beijing bring to
the Pace network?
Asia has been an essential
part of Pace’s development,
and Asia is also a very
important part of globalization
as a whole. China has
gradually reshaped itself as
the cultural center of the
future, and brings with it
the increasing influence
of Asia at the same time.
What role to do you see
the gallery playing in the
Chinese art scene?
Although China is the main
cultural hub in Asia, Pace
Beijing has tried to maintain
deep roots in China while
not limiting itself to Chinese
art only. Pace Beijing acts
as the window toward Asia—
showing artists like Hiroshi
Sugimoto, for instance—
and is committed to the
development of the broader
Asian art market.
Tell us about your
collector base. How has
it has evolved?
The vast majority of our
collectors are still
international, but local
collectors are gradually
extending and expanding.
Pace Beijing has built
connections with
influential and powerful
collectors throughout Asia.
What kind of changes have
you seen in the Chinese
art market since you
opened in summer 2008?
In the past, the art market
has been very volatile
with the ups and downs
of the economy. Although
the economy has not
yet recovered, it has had
a positive impact on the
Chinese art market’s
long-term development.
The market has
gradually shifted from
a non-rational frenzy
to an appreciation
of the art itself.
Based on your
experience
with clients,
what market
trends are you
seeing right now? How
about broader trends in
Chinese art?
The diversity of collectors’
tastes has expanded,
and market trends have
begun to diverge as well.
Currently everyone is looking
for a new direction, and that
impacts not only collectors
and galleries but artists.
It means that there are more
opportunities for emerging
artists. However, even
though these broader tastes
have appeared, it is still
difficult for new media,
such as installation art and
even photography, to gain
recognition.
Which show on your 2013
exhibition schedule are you
most excited about?
The Hong Hao retrospective,
which just opened. Hong Hao
is best known for his prints
and photographs, with many
of the works featuring
assembled scanned images
of various found objects,
including maps, books, tickets,
receipts, banknotes, food,
and containers. In his 2009
solo exhibition at Beijing
Commune, he exhibited
a series that featured the
bottom half of everyday
objects. By arranging the
scanned images according
to their forms and colors,
he deconstructed the
functional property of the
materials and reproduces
an undifferentiated,
flattened, deliberately
superficial world of aesthetics.
While Hong Hao
Hong Hao's
Deja vu II, 2012,
pen, pencil,
acrylic, and
digital print on
canvas, on view
through April 27
at Pace Beijing.
continues to work with
found objects, his most
recent solo exhibition dealt
with physical forms in a
more straightforward manner,
creating an interesting
dialectic development of
both the vocabulary and
concept of his art.
Is there a substantial
secondary market trade
at the gallery?
The primary market is
still the main trading body.
The secondary market
has not gone very far
yet, though we’re always
making preparations
for it in the near future.
Any final thoughts?
Chinese contemporary
art is still a relatively young
market compared to
Western art. The public
acceptance of contemporary
art is still weak, especially
without the assistance of
museums. The exchange
among galleries has basically
existed only since 2000,
and the art market was
initiated by the auction
houses, so there was a very
speculative atmosphere.
But after the economic
crisis in 2008, the
speculators failed hugely.
And that has actually had
quite a positive impact
on the Chinese art market.
Collectors have now
started to research relevant
aspects of art collecting
more deeply, instead of
being oriented towards
speculative investing.
MARCH/APRIL 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
FROM LEFT: PACE BEIJING; HONG HAO AND PACE BEIJING
141 Prince St NY 10012 . 37 West 57 St NY 10019
212.677.1340 gallery @ meiselgallery.com . meiselgallery.com
Peter Maier
New PaiNtiNgs
11 aPril - 4 May
HolsteiN, 2012, duPoNt croMax-at oN fabricated black aluMiNuM PaNel, 60 x 60”