ArtAsiaPacific Magazine - March - April 2021

In this issue

It feels like it was both a century ago and just yesterday when news of a mysterious coronavirus first started to spread across the globe. In warping our experiences of time, the pandemic has drawn attention to the unstable nature of how we relate past with present.
In ArtAsiaPacific’s March/April 2021 issue, we spotlight two artists whose conceptions of time reveal the messy entanglements between historic and contemporary realms. Our cover Feature examines the practice of Wang Tuo, whose recent films present parallel realities grounded in pivotal moments in China’s modern history. Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, the subject of our second Feature, traces the architectural transformations of cities through her sculptures, installations, videos, and drawings. Up Close highlights new works by Lu Yang, Cian Dayrit, and Yang Fudong, while Inside Burger Collection delineates the work of photographer Paul Hutchinson.
The issue includes an essay on two Vancouver exhibitions that surfaced issues of decolonization. Hiwa K, Min Oh, and Au Sow Yee are profiled. Elsewhere, the Seoul-based collective Listen to the City write about the impact of Covid-19 on people with disabilities and how we might reconceive urban communities to create resilient post-pandemic cities. Dispatch follows how Rome’s arts community is devising strategies to thrive, despite an infrastructure that was crumbling long before the pandemic hit. For One on One, artist Wong Kit Yi pays tribute to dealer and writer Michael Findlay, whose time-hopping art historical accounts have inspired Wong’s projects. Lastly, we visit the Brooklyn studio of Chitra Ganesh, whose paintings, drawings, and videos collide age-old mythologies with futurist motifs. As the works of Ganesh, Wang, and Büyüktaşçıyan show, the past inevitably influences the present, but in each moment of encounter, there is also the potential to break from established histories and imagine the world anew.