The 2019 Power 100 list by Art Review reveals a growing presence of art professionals from Asia, showing how Asia’s art scene is expanding exponentially to have a pivotal role in the international art world and its continuing development. In the top 10 of the list, in addition to most Instagrammed artist Yayoi Kusama at Number 8, we have a new entry to the list, Indonesian collective ruangrupa, at No. 10. The artist group will be curating the next Documenta, taking place in 2022, marking the first time a collective has curated the event, and the first time its curator has hailed from Asia. ruangrupa works as an “organism without a fixed structure”, and plan to continue to pursue how to turn their approach into a practice that covers the whole planet also in curating Documenta. Locally, in Jakarta, they have opened an exhibition and events venue, and founded Gudskul, a public education space in collaboration with two other collectives. ruangrupa exemplifies the creative possibilities of collaboration, social engagement and exchange.
Another collective from Asia has been appointed curator of an important event: at No. 89, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Raqs Media Collective will be curating the Yokohama Triennale in 2020.
Chinese artist Cao Fei, who in 2018 was a new entry to the list at No. 41, stands at No. 17 this year. Her new media practice tracks the unrelenting development in China, exploring surrounding questions around issues of change, memory, reality and virtuality, and the thin line that divides the two dimensions. This year Cao also became the first Chinese artist to have a solo show at Paris’s Pompidou, following a significant survey of her work at the recently opened Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong. Next year she will be showing at London’s Serpentine Galleries and Beijing’s UCCA.
Ai Weiwei hasn’t missed an year in the list since the first time in 2006, has had up and downs, reaching No. 1 in 2011. This year we find him at position 24, a drop from his last spot in 5th row, but nevertheless still a presence, which in 2019 takes him to the UK. Formery Berlin-based, the activist artist has recently moved to Britain, citing shifting attitudes to immigration in Germany as a reason to leave. This year he was also the subject of Cheryl Haines’s awardwinning documentary Yours Truly (2019), “revealing how simple acts of kindness can change the world”.
Worthy of note is Indian philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (No.30), who has devoted her career to decentering power and giving voice to marginal populations, specifically those of the Global South.
Filipino curator Patrick D. Flores (88) is raising the profile of Southeast Asian art. This year he is Artistic Director of the Singapore Biennale, titled “Every Step in the Right Direction”, which is opening on 22 November 2019. As Art Review notes, “Flores has described the biennial as an opportunity to extend the process of reimagining Southeast Asia independently of its construction by colonial powers.”
Contributing to the Southeast Asian art discourse in eruditely creative ways is Singaporean multidisciplinary artist Ho Tzu Nyen is a new entry to the list at No. 95. His ongoing magnum opus is The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia. The online database of texts, music and images provides an alternative A to Z to the region, and several of his projects are offshoots or elaborations of the Dictionary. 2019saw his first solo at Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong, titled “R for Rhombicuboctahedron”.
Another new entry is Lebanese-British artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan (98), show has collaborated several times with Forensic Architecture, and share their commitment to art as a form of political activism or, in his own words, “truth production”. This year he was nominated for the Turner Prize, for a body of work that maps a Syrian prison through prisoners’ recollections of the sounds they heard.
The list of Asian and Asia-based personalities is still long, making up more than a fourth of the whole 100, with 27 rankings among them. They also include: Sheika Hoor Al-Qasimi, President of Sharjah Art Foundation (No. 32); Korean artist Haegue Yang (36); Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani and Diana Campbell Betancourt who are working to build the Bangladeshi art scene (47); Eugene Tan, Director of the National Gallery Singapore (53); Seoul-based gallerist Hyun-Sook Lee (60); new entry Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Director of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (61); Christine Thomé, Director of Lebanon’s Ahkal Alwan artist association (68); Claire Hsu of Asia Art Archive (72); Adrian Cheng, Hong Kong collector and head of K11 Art Foundation (73); Lorenz Helbling, pioneer of the Shanghai art scene and founder of ShanghArt (75); Sunjung Kim, international curator and presindent of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation (77); Ute Meta Bauer, curator who is shaping the art discourse in Singapore and Southeast Asia (78); Wang Wei and Liu Yiqian, collectors and art patrons that founded the two Long Museums in Shanghai (79); new entry Brook Andrew, Australian artist and curator of the next Biennale of Sydney (81); Suhanya Raffel and Doryun Chong of M+ (82); Founders of Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou/Beijing Zhang Wei and Hu Fang (87); collector of Western and Asian art Richard Chang (91); Bose Krishnamachari and Shubigi Rao of Kochi-Muziris Biennale (99).