This year in its fifth edition, ASIA NOW is the first European art fair dedicated to promoting and showcasing the diversity of the contemporary Asian art scene. ASIA NOW provides a platform for dialogue and interaction among different players in the Asian art world, with participating galleries hailing from East to Central and Southeast Asia, ranging from established ones to younger galleries less than five years old, presenting well-known, up-and-coming and emerging artists from Asia. ASIA NOW also has a curatorial platform with a guest curator presenting a special exhibition, a programme of special projects and a conversations platform.
This year ASIA NOW includes a Design section, featuring designers who create alternative, modular and multi-functional objects that redifine the space we live in. The fair also has organised offsite exhibitions in collaboration with art institutions in Paris, namely Musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet, Maison de la Culture du Japon à Paris, Musée Cernuschi – musée des arts de l’Asie de la Ville de Paris and Maisons du Voyage.
ASIA brings you some highlights not to be missed at this year’s fair.
2019 Galleries
This year, there are some newcomers among both established and emerging galleries. Among the first are Chambers Fine Art with spaces in Beijing and New York, M97Gallery from Shanghai, and Galleria Continua from San Gimignano/Beijing/Les moulins/Habana.
Chambers Fine Art will present recent works by Fu Xiaotong, Guo Hongwei, Pixy Liao, Wu Jian’an and Yan Shanchun, a selection of varied practices that is representative of the stylistic diversity of contemporary Chinese art today.
Galleriea Continua will feature in the Special Projects with a solo exhibition entitled “Map of Mythology” by Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie. Qiu Zhijie – curator, artist, writer and historian – is the incarnation of the contemporary literati, or scholar, known for his calligraphy and ink painting, photography, video, installation and performance works. His art represents a new experimental communication between the Chinese literati tradition and contemporary art, social participation and the power of self-liberation of art.
M97 Gallery represents artists working with photography in both traditional and experimental ways. At the fair, the gallery will feature the work of Sun Yanchu (b. 1978) whose experimentations with the photographic medium juxtapose his expertise as a photographer, darkroom printer and painter, using both his own photographs and images gathered from flea markets. His works range from plastic experiments on prints mixing gold leaf, watercolour, acrylic, soy sauce, aging and altering their original content, to his latest series “Developer Paintings” created in the darkroom in the style of traditional Chinese ink and brush paintings.
Young galleries participating for the first time include OVER THE INFLUENCE (Hong Kong, Los Angeles), Galerie OVO (Taipei) and Aspan Gallery (Almaty, Kazakhstan). OVER THE INFLUENCE features a solo presentation of Korean-born artist Anna Park’s large-scale works on paper. Park re-appropriates images found on the internet, which seem to represent dysfunctional social behaviour, emphasising hysterical emotions and cartoonish gestures.
Taipei’s Galerie OVO will present “Jardin Chinois”, including Ni Jui Hung’s colourful installations inspiared by the colours of Taiwanese temples, Cheuk Wing Nam’s sound work providing an alternative way to ‘see’ sound, and Zhu Lan Qing’s photography highlighting the concept of the modern garden in southern parts of China.
Aspan Gallery will feature Kazakh artist Gulnur Mukazhanova, whose practice employs traditional Central Asian materials, like felt and brocade, and subverts their conventional uses in domestic environments. The artist uses them to create complex installations and props for her photo and video projects, shifting the focus from the material itself to its performative quality.
Several galleries are returning this year, including important players such as Beijing Commune from China or Primo Marella from Italy, as well as several from Southeast Asia, such as Yavuz Gallery (Singapore), The Drawing Room from the Philippines and Galerie Quynh from Vietnam. There are also many galleries from Japan and from Korea, bringing in interesting perspectives on their art scenes.
Curatorial Platform: IRL {In Real Life}
The curatorial platform this year is devised by guest curator Xiaorui Zhu-Nowell, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim New York, and celebrates an emerging generation of artists who are digital natives and whose work critically engages with new media. The platform works in collaboration with various galleries, including, among others, SABSAY (Copenhagen), a.m.space (Hong Kong), Chi-Wen Gallery (Taipei), YveYANG Gallery (New York), MadeIn Gallery (Shanghai), A Thousand Plateaus Art Space (Chengdu) and Vanguard Gallery (Shanghai).
a.m.space presents a new video installation by New York- and Hong Kong-based artist Wong Kit Yi. The mini iridescent karaoke booth addresses the question “How long is forever?” through legal contracts, genetics, biotechnology, art and our personal lives.
Chi-Wen Gallery features a video installation by drag queen artist Victoria Sin, which explores how speech influences one’s ascription of gender. MadeIn Gallery also engages with issues of gender, with a video work by Shen Xin examining queernes and queer aesthetics.
Taipei’s Hong-Gah Museum presents Taiwan International Video Art (TIVA) Screening Programme, curated by its director Frankie Su, featuring young Taiwanese video and performance artists I-Hsuen Chen, Chen-Yu Chen, Sheng-Wen Lo, Pei- Hsuan Wang, Yu Liu, whose video works will be screened for the first time in France at ASIA NOW.
Another video art showcase is presented by the musée Cernuschi. “Cernuschi Video Art #3: Transmissions” features screenings within the fair evoking themese of birth, parenthood, education, love and mourning by Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese artists. The programme includes works by Ariyoshi Tatsuhiro, Jun Sojung, Chen Yin-Ju, Nguyen Trinh Thi, siren eun young jung, Jawshing Arthur Liou and Mariko Tomomasa.
IRL {In Real Life} also includes a special project by Cheng Ran (winner of the inaugural Nomura Emerging Artist Award). The Chinese artist will present MARTIN GOYA BUSINESS, a new platform encouraging and supporting local young artists and their new approaches, experiments or research that he has recently founded in Hangzhou. The artist will exhibit his own video work alongside a selection of young artists from China including ChillChill & Alex Wang, You A’da, Wenxin Zhang and PAPAPEPIA.
IRL {In Real Life} has four sections, each referring to a different mode of interaction in our contemporary digital environment: Unboxing, Peer-to-Peer, Hyperlink and Chat Room.
Unboxing takes its name from a genre of popular YouTube videos where a YouTuber will literally “unbox” or unwrap a new product in front of a camera. This section includes a solo show by Chinese artist Liu Wa, curated by Michael Xufu Huang (Collector and founder of X Museum), presented by SABSAY. There is also a Virtual Reality project, Suus ‘Oculis Meis by artist Judy Lui created in collaboration with computer scientist Michael Chang, and curated by Michael Xufu Huang. COLD SINGLE, a new experimental short film, premiering at ASIA NOW, by artist ITEM IDEM (Cyril Duval), is inspired by his life in Taiwan, and realised in collaboration with Taiwanese director MEL HSIEH, featuring a musical score by American producer DUTCH E GERM.
Peer-to-Peer takes its name from the decentralised computer network systems made infamous through early internet file sharing platforms such as Napster and BitTorrent, and showcases collectors’ collections, forming a direct network system where they will present and discuss their work. Participant collectors include Michael Xufu Huang (founder of X Museum), Jens Faurschou, Founder of the Faurschou Foundation (Copenhagen, Beijing, Venice) and Masha Sabsay Faurschou, Founder of SABSAY (Copenhagen), and Lu Xun, Co-founder and Director of the Sifang Art Museum (Nanjing, China).
Hyperlink features a series of performances running throughout the fair and taking place across the site. Among the programme’s highlights are a DJ set by ShuShu, underground DJ, songwriter and vocalist, specially invited by the collective Nüshu, and the lecture performance Hong Kong Weather Modification Office (Square Cloud) by artist Wong Kit Yi.
Finally, Chat Room will feature a series of dialogues hosted in an informal setting, using the idea of online chatrooms. This section will connect various artists, collectors, curators, thinkers and gallerists to discuss a wide range of topics, including art and religiosity in the work of Asian millennial artists, video art and its place in Asian art museums, the evolution of the private art institution, technology and the art experience, collecting new media art and the state of the Asian art market, among others.
Special Projects 2019
Other Special Projects not to be missed at this year’s fair include the presentation of “Huge Huge”, Sifang Art Museum’s residency programme, featuring works by twenty 2018 resident artists.
Cinéhaïku is an international competition of poetic short films, inspired by Japanese haiku. At ASIA NOW Cinéhaïku will be showing a selection of the best films from its previous editions. The Japanese theme is taken literally in “City Pop”, an exhibition presented by Julien Sato – TOKYOITE with five Japanese artists all connected to Tokyo: Takeru Amano, Fantasista Uatamaro, Ly, Yoshinori Tanaka and Victor Takeru.
Chinese conceptual artist He Xiangyu (b. 1986) creates projects that take as their subject the goods and products symbols of the mass production and consumption of the world while evoking the state of contemporary Chinese society. At the fair, the artist presents The Lemon Project, started in 2016, an encyclopedic collection of the multitude of meanings and functions of lemons and the colour yellow. For this project, He Xiangyu looked at scientific research, and historical, psychological, medical and cultural meanings associated with the colour yellow.
Singapore’s VADA – The Visual Arts Development Association, a non-profit organisation with an experimental approach, presents a solo exhibition in collaboration with Intersections Gallery and curated by Khai Hori (former Deputy Director of Artistic Programmes at Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Chief Curator of Singapore Art Museum). The show by young artist Desiree Tham, winner of the Chan Davies Art Prize 2019, features her latest installations and sculpture inspired by Chinese Feng Shui. Her work aims to blur boundaries between tradition and modernity, function and dysfunction, the irrational and rational.
KIRTI: an independent research initiative
At ASIA NOW 2019, VADA will support the soft launch of the first issue of KIRTI, a publication by Singapore- and Hanoi-based independent researcher Hunter Panther Deerfield. Positioned outside of institutional, curatorial and academic conventions, KIRTI aims towards expanding the frame of contemporary art. The platform is made of an online archive and an episodic print publication intermingling art – often framed in the studio or otherwise in situ – with process, commentary and other contextual documents.
ASIA NOW Paris Asian Art Fair runs from 16 to 20 October 2019 at 9, avenue Hoche, Paris 8.