One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills. Divided into three versions, the video first shows a number of Japanese ten-thousand-yen bills being counted without in an orderly, efficient manner. In Two Million , a similar counting of one-thousand-dollar bills from Hong Kong follows.
A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. The artist asked his parents to perform a flags-raising-lowering ceremony on their home’s cloths drying rack, with the HKSAR regional flag, and the flags of PRC and The UK. Artist Lee Kit hand-painted the HKSAR regional flag following the detail instructions in “The State’s Standards of The People’s Republic of China, GB16689-1996”, issued by The State Authority of Technical Monitoring.
Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills. Divided into three versions, the video first shows a number of Japanese ten-thousand-yen bills being counted without in an orderly, efficient manner. In Two Million , a similar counting of one-thousand-dollar bills from Hong Kong follows.
An early work in Sung Hwang Kim’s career, the video Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937 is a fictional documentary, the film is based on a non-fiction travelogue, In Korean Wilds and Villages , written by Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman, who lived in Korea from 1935 to 1937. In Kim’s film, a Dutch female protagonist traces Bergman’s path in the present-day Seoul (Keijo was the Japanese name for Gyeongseong, currently Seoul). The protagonist navigates through spaces that have been rebuilt since the 1950s onwards, and the scenes are narrated by a voice-over based on Bergman’s written description of the modern city in 1937.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010. tranzit.cz is part of a network working independently in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic, and Romania since 2002. Such doodle-like drawings are often crucial components of Kim’s performances. The imagery of faces, heads, snakes, and serpentine paths are recurring motifs in the artist’s drawing practice.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010. tranzit.cz is part of a network working independently in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic, and Romania since 2002. Such doodle-like drawings are often crucial components of Kim’s performances. The imagery of faces, heads, snakes, and serpentine paths are recurring motifs in the artist’s drawing practice.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Sung Hwan Kim created the drawing push against the air 01 during a rehearsal for his eponymous 2007 performance at De Apple (as part of Prix de Rome), Amsterdam, and Project Arts Centre, Dublin. For the performance, Kim interviews his frequent collaborator David Michael DiGregorio and a fellow musician, Byungjun Kwon, about love songs they have composed. The performance appears spontaneous and creates a space of vulnerability and intimacy, however in reality, the three rehearsed the performance numerous times and performed it in numerous cities.
Office Lady with a Red Umbrella restages a figure from a 1980 postcard made from a photograph from 1950’s. The retro-glamor of the 1950s style is restyled devoid of the original context of a Hong Kong street scene, where the “office lady” is walking on Queens Road of the Central district. With the “office lady” facing away from the viewer with a bare background, an introspective tone is created in Leung’s restaging while highlighting the red umbrella resonating with a red pencil skirt emblematic of the identity of the professional urban woman when Hong Kong was under British rule.
Photojournalist with Two Cameras restages a portrait of a photojournalist from the background of an old photograph of protest published in South China Morning Post on January 10, 2010 under the headline “Return of the Radicals: Recent angry protests are nothing new.” The photojournalist in the photograph, probably from a protest of earlier decades, was capturing the scene of a protester’s arrest while wearing two cameras. January of 2010 was a time of pro-Democracy demonstrators called for the release of activist Liu Xiaobo, drafter of the Charter 08 manifesto calling for the end of authoritarian rule, was sentenced to 11 years in prison one month earlier. Leung’s isolating and highlighting of the photographer by bringing him from the original photograph’s background to the foreground of his studio shot calls attention to the two older cameras and the journalist’s retro-style clothing.
In Excerpts from the Analects of Confucius , Peng Hung-Chih explores the relationship between Confucianism and religion. Specifically, the piece questions the influence of Confucian teachings on the role of the intellectual in contemporary Chinese society. While Confucianism has its own ritual systems and temples, it is not known to be overly concerned with supernatural beings such as gods and demons.
Lack of evidence is the account of a Nigerian called Oscar exiled in France, which confronts a historical and social reality with a personal and intimate testimony. Taking as a point of departure Oscar’s request for asylum in France, this fictional document is a peregrination on the different levels of the reconstitution of memory and the subjectivity of its interpretation. Oscar’s legal testimony reveals a dramatic reality taking place in Nigeria, where family executions still exist in the case of having twins who are considered a ‘diabolical off-spring’.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement. These drawings were created during the trial of political activists pursued by the government that the artist would regularly attend. During the tribunal, the artist would let his pen slide freely across his notebook, replicating the automatic drawing techniques of the surrealists.
Pak created New York Public Library Projects (NYPLP) (2008) during a residency in New York, using public libraries as exhibition spaces and the books they house as raw materials. One of the nine parts of this work is Page 22 (Half Folded Library) , a site-specific installation for which Pak covertly folded dog-ears on page 22 of every second book (a total of approximately 15,500 books) in the 58th Street Branch Library in Manhattan. By claiming it as a “solo exhibition,” Pak intentionally turned a public institution into a private and personal museum where his works are more or less a “permanent collection.” Being open-ended as far as further interpretation (or not) by readers who encounter the folded pages, the project tests the political and social potential of personal gestures in the public realm.
Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans in India, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly coloured symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal. Visually seductive yet charged with political and symbolic associations, the rugs bridge elements of American popular culture with aspects of Islamic worship that may be poorly understood in contemporary secular contexts. Encouraged by Khan to take their shoes off and interact with the rugs, viewers participate in a decolonizing process as they meditate on their poetic allusions or perform the traditional salat, the daily prayers that constitute one of the five pillars of Islam, the others being faith, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.
Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans in India, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly coloured symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal. Visually seductive yet charged with political and symbolic associations, the rugs bridge elements of American popular culture with aspects of Islamic worship that may be misunderstood in contemporary secular contexts. Encouraged by Khan to take their shoes off and interact with the rugs, viewers participate in a decolonizing process as they meditate on their poetic allusions or perform the traditional salat, the daily prayers that constitute one of the five pillars of Islam, the others being faith, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.
In Kan Xuan’s four-channel video Island , a series of objects like nail clippers, hairbrush, toothpaste, and house decorations are shot in close-ups. These highly polished and aestheticized images create a poetic visual flow. However, in front of each object lies a coin of different value—two yuan, one pound, one euro, one dollar—that silently reveals the material value of the household supplies.
ÆTHER (Poor Objects) by Li Shuang builds on the artist’s consideration of the interplay between physical and digital spaces. Through a kaleidoscopic video collage, Li examines the complexities of personal subjectivity within an increasingly immersive and omnipresent online culture. Among disparate imagery that includes extra-terrestrial simulations, dizzying hordes of birds, animated figures trapped in dystopian virtual spaces, and real-life abandoned places, the video references the Chinese creation myth of Nuwa, a goddess who uses her own body to repair the sky.
Palimpsest is a series of what artist Phi Phi Oanh calls “pictorial installations”. Lacquerscope is the name she has given to the lacquer projection machines that she created from lenses and old parts of small format film projectors. The name harkens back to the early age of mechanical reproduction that also coincides with the “invention” of Vietnamese lacquer painting in the last century.
“We both died at the same moment” is a humorous observation of anthropomorphism, the attribution of human emotions to nature and animals. A siliquaria armata is a slitworm that loosley-coiles a shell. Growing inside a sea-bed, a siliquaria armata will grow vertically until it touches another siliquaria armata, at which point they will knot together.
The San Francisco–based artist Shaun O’Dell often uses natural settings as subject matter, lending an artistic complexity to the landscapes he depicts. Stereoscopic images are dual, slightly offset identical pictures that, when seen through a special viewing device, appear three-dimensional. In Temple Creek, a branch of Escalante River, Aquarius Plateau Utah n.d. (Stereoscopic view) (2011) O’Dell has chopped each of the two side-by-side images into 10 vertical strips and mixed them up, to construct a new image.
Ian Cheng’s project 3FACE is based on a model that is derived from both the artist’s extensive readings on psychology and cognition, and his own intuitive understanding of how people function. 3FACE positions the process of minting a generative NFT as a metaphor for personality development. While part of a series, because of the responsive coding, each NFT is unique and is informed by the contents of the owner’s wallet.
Shaun O’Dell’s paintings, installations, videos, sculptures, and music explore the overlapping realities of human and natural structures. Whether abstract or figurative, they often read like hieroglyphics, in that they piece together a philosophical portrait of reality. Purple Brush 8 is a painting that details a meeting of geometric forms, and the optical play that results.
The Lonely Age by Connie Zheng is the first chapter in a trilogy of short experimental films about the complex temporalities of navigating ongoing environmental crises, as seen through the lens of seeds real and imagined. The film is set in a highly toxic and ecologically ravaged near future, in which people begin to hear rumors of seeds that have washed up on the shores of California after escaping from a factory in China. The seeds are rumored to possess curative properties, but they are also said to be sentient.
Ian Cheng’s project 3FACE is based on a model that is derived from both the artist’s extensive readings on psychology and cognition, and his own intuitive understanding of how people function. 3FACE positions the process of minting a generative NFT as a metaphor for personality development. While part of a series, because of the responsive coding, each NFT is unique and is informed by the contents of the owner’s wallet.
Shaun Leonardo uses his own body to communicate and portray imagery. In his film Bull in the Ring , hyper-masculine images of physicality are staged at the expense of his own physical comfort. The function of the male body has long been a signifier of self-worth and the body affirms and legitimizes feelings of control and agency over environment.
Ian Cheng’s project 3FACE is based on a model that is derived from both the artist’s extensive readings on psychology and cognition, and his own intuitive understanding of how people function. 3FACE positions the process of minting a generative NFT as a metaphor for personality development. While part of a series, because of the responsive coding, each NFT is unique and is informed by the contents of the owner’s wallet.
Ian Cheng’s project 3FACE is based on a model that is derived from both the artist’s extensive readings on psychology and cognition, and his own intuitive understanding of how people function. 3FACE positions the process of minting a generative NFT as a metaphor for personality development. While part of a series, because of the responsive coding, each NFT is unique and is informed by the contents of the owner’s wallet.
In the video installation Tremble, Jiang projected the life-size images of seven naked men and women onto seven individual screens. Each person displays a different facial expression and body position such as reading a book, arms open for a hug, holding a knife, raising a fist to take an oath. Each gesture reflects some essential social aspect of everyday life: hugging is about caring, taking oath has to do with politics, reading relates to acquiring knowledge, and raising a knife indicates violence.
Che Onejoon’s unsettling video My Utopia opens with a round table of women asking and answering the questions “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where should I go?” One of the women featured is Monique Macías, the daughter of Francisco Macías Nguema, the first Prime Minister of Equatorial Guinea.
In On Guard by Jeamin Cha, a security guard receives safety training, juxtaposed against his patrol of an empty building as he tries to give care instructions for his ailing mother over the phone. The film dismantles the binary oppositions between “caring” and “guarding,” two actions that parallel one another in their emphasis on attentiveness without a logical conclusion. Cha’s exploration of the relationship between these two focuses is channeled through nocturnal urban space, drawing attention to the labor that each requires.
Gan Chin Lee is a Malaysian artist of Chinese descent known across Southeast Asia for his realist paintings that painstakingly register the ethnic and religious complexities of Malaysia...
Embarking from myriad audio-visual narratives, Chia-Wei Hsu pursues imaginative interrogations of cultural contact and colonization in Asia, oftentimes amalgamating his primary narratives with non-human actors including technologies, animals, gods, environments, traditions, and material objects...
The work of Ian Cheng explores evolutionary processes, including mutation and adaptation in response to changing conditions...
In his practice, Sung Hwan Kim assumes the role of director, editor, performer, composer, narrator, and poet...
Jeamin Cha’s questions exist in the gyre between individual and social environment, stepping over conspicuous strands of relation between the two in favor of cultivating characters that dwell in the night, under-noticed or otherwise surplus figures outside of mainstream societal representation...
Kwan Sheung Chi obtained a third honor B.A...
Che Onejoon started working with photography in mandatory military service as an evidence photographer for the South Korean Combat Police recording different incidents for proof...
Leung Chi Wo tends to highlight in his art the boundaries between viewing and voyeurism, real and fictional, and art and the everyday...
Nguyen Trinh Thi is a moving image pioneer, not only within the landscape of contemporary art in Vietnam, but also broader South East Asia...
Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly colored symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal...
Phi Phi Oanh’s unique practice and methodology is anchored in the study of lacquer and pushes the boundaries of the material as a sculptural and conceptual form...
Raised in rural south-eastern China in the 1990s, Li Shuang grew up consuming popular media such as YouTube, MySpace, knock off Nintendo consoles, pirated video games, and dakou CDs...
Trevor Yeung’s (b...
Jay Chung and Takeki Maeda’s practice is characterized by performance, which often involves weighty unsettling humour...
Sung Tieu’s artistic vocabulary explores the vast and evolving protection and control industries, still rooted in the logic of the Cold War, used to restrict and mould subjects in subsequently globalized capitalism...
Chris Huen Sin-Kan (b...
Shen Yuan studied Chinese painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts as the first group of students admitted after the Cultural Revolution...
Shi Guowei is concerned with notions of historical and cultural traditions as they relate to current socio-political issues...
Born in 1981 in Seoul, South Korea Lives and works in Paris and Nantes Hayoun Kwon was born in South Koera in 1981 and moved to France in 2011 to pursue her studies at the Nantes School of Art and Le Fresnoy, where she presented the video Lack of evidence for her final diploma...
For the past decade Shaun Leonardo’s practice has been fully engaged in the politics of race, identity and pervasive male violence in sports...
Connie Zheng is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and field recordist...
Chia-En Jao’s artwork approaches issues of identity, political regimes, coded sign systems, and his own experiences as a migrant...
Ruijun Shen conceptualizes her painting-based practice as a form of extended meditation and a means of processing tensions between time and space in the world around us...
Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world...
In Seven Deadly Sins (2006), Shen utilizes abstraction to produce complex topographies of color that evoke associations with violently tumultuous landscapes...
A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China...
An early work in Sung Hwang Kim’s career, the video Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937 is a fictional documentary, the film is based on a non-fiction travelogue, In Korean Wilds and Villages , written by Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman, who lived in Korea from 1935 to 1937...
Drawing & Print
Sung Hwan Kim created the drawing push against the air 01 during a rehearsal for his eponymous 2007 performance at De Apple (as part of Prix de Rome), Amsterdam, and Project Arts Centre, Dublin...
In Excerpts from the Analects of Confucius , Peng Hung-Chih explores the relationship between Confucianism and religion...
Pak created New York Public Library Projects (NYPLP) (2008) during a residency in New York, using public libraries as exhibition spaces and the books they house as raw materials...
The application of bright colors and kitsch materials in Flower Tree manifests a playful comment on the influence of popular culture and urban lifestyle...
Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist...
Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society...
30 Proposals of Flag explores the relationships between signs, meanings, aesthetics, and nations...
Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda remake a clip from the 1970s they found on the internet, and without really changing this archive material, displace it by imitating the staging and the acting with scrupulous precision...
Drawing & Print
This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010...
Drawing & Print
This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010...
Office Lady with a Red Umbrella restages a figure from a 1980 postcard made from a photograph from 1950’s...
Photojournalist with Two Cameras restages a portrait of a photojournalist from the background of an old photograph of protest published in South China Morning Post on January 10, 2010 under the headline “Return of the Radicals: Recent angry protests are nothing new.” The photojournalist in the photograph, probably from a protest of earlier decades, was capturing the scene of a protester’s arrest while wearing two cameras...
Lack of evidence is the account of a Nigerian called Oscar exiled in France, which confronts a historical and social reality with a personal and intimate testimony...
Palimpsest is a series of what artist Phi Phi Oanh calls “pictorial installations”...
The San Francisco–based artist Shaun O’Dell often uses natural settings as subject matter, lending an artistic complexity to the landscapes he depicts...
Shaun O’Dell’s paintings, installations, videos, sculptures, and music explore the overlapping realities of human and natural structures...
Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills...
Marshal Tie Jia (Turtle Island) explores the history of a tiny island off of the coast of Matsu in the Taiwan Strait that has been instrumental in the geopolitical relationships between China, Taiwan, and Japan...
Contrast to the bustling and unrelenting experience of a city such as Hong Kong, Chris Huen Sin Kan paints the tranquil interiors of his apartment, where he leads a modest and almost hermit-like life...
For the last few years, Che Onejoon has been focusing on the relationships between African countries and North Korea...
Fog and Smoke is the first video Jeamin Cha made after returning to Seoul from London where she studied and started as an investigation into the meaning of “otherness” in documentary filmmaking...
Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period...
“We both died at the same moment” is a humorous observation of anthropomorphism, the attribution of human emotions to nature and animals...
The final work in the Marshal Tie Jia series (of which Turtle Island is in the KADIST collection), Spirit Writing features the Marshal in conversation with Chia-Wei Hsu, by way of a ritual involving the Marshal’s divination chair...
Drawing & Print
The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement...
Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans in India, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly coloured symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal...
Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans in India, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly coloured symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal...
Che Onejoon’s unsettling video My Utopia opens with a round table of women asking and answering the questions “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where should I go?” One of the women featured is Monique Macías, the daughter of Francisco Macías Nguema, the first Prime Minister of Equatorial Guinea...
In On Guard by Jeamin Cha, a security guard receives safety training, juxtaposed against his patrol of an empty building as he tries to give care instructions for his ailing mother over the phone...
Almost One by Jeamin Cha dives into an uncomfortable meditation on the relationship between socialization, performativity, truth, and childhood, filtered through the optics of a children’s acting class in South Korea...
The Lonely Age by Connie Zheng is the first chapter in a trilogy of short experimental films about the complex temporalities of navigating ongoing environmental crises, as seen through the lens of seeds real and imagined...
Reflecting upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition, AI, and the Internet, Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 – 10 cases 10 data restages the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni—a Venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922—as a high-tech surveillance space...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Stones and Elephants by Chia-Wei Hsu derives from the Malay literary classic The Hikayat Abdullah ...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Jeamin Cha’s essay-film Ellie’s Eye is an extensive examination of the human mind and the effects of new technology, such as chatbots and virtual avatar therapists on the mental health industry...
The essay film How to Improve the World by Nguyen Trinh Thi takes us into an indigenous village of the Jrai people in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, in Gia Lai province...