Featuring Shubigi Rao, Michael Wang, Hyun-Sook Song and Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The Spring issue of ArtReview Asia is out now.
Over the past three decades, Apichatpong Weerasethakul has emerged as one of Thailand’s most acclaimed film directors and leading visual artists. If, writes Max Crosbie-Jones, Weerasethakul has been a longtime chronicler of the confusion, torpor and amnesia of local Thai reality, his latest feature film, Memoria, filmed in Colombia, reflects a political stance in relation to the possibilities of shooting in Thailand in the face of state censorship. Following the youth-led protest movement that shook the Thai establishment in 2020 and 2021, however, the director has found a new sense of hope, he tells Crosbie-Jones: “It’s about surviving here, what it takes and recording memories.”
Meanwhile, Singapore-based artist Shubigi Rao (who not only represents the island-state at this year’s Venice Biennale but will also curate November’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale) looks at how the ongoing practice of banning and destroying books and libraries can throw up moments of hope as well as evidence of hate.
Also in the issue…
Venus Lau explores how American artist Michael Wang finds planetary connections in the rubbish dredged up from a Chinese lake. And Wenny Teo examines the ways in which German-Korean painter Hyun-Sook Song slows down time and compresses space in paintings so controlled that you can count the number of brushstrokes within each one, but in which you can nevertheless perceive a political consciousness honed through nearly five decades of practice and the cultural and social preoccupations of both the East and the West.
Plus…
Extensive previews of exhibitions around the region this spring, as well as reviews of new fiction by Gina Apostol, Pankaj Mishra, Yoko Towada and Melissa Fu, of the 10th Asia-Pacific Triennial and the Thailand Biennale, and of a new film by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.
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