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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization. The images show the diversity of forms of life on earth. These forms are associated with texts that relay a form of propaganda.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

On Fire by Runo Lagomarsino comprises twenty pieces of parchment, each of which has had the contours and map of Brazil burned in stages. The work’s connection to Amazon deforestation is difficult to ignore. Yet still, it also engages in broader issues about the country’s fractures, such as the 2018 fire at Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum and the ongoing erasure of its past.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This selection of poster prints of Wong Ping’s animations includes the films Jungle of Desire, Doggy Love, Slow Sex, An Emo Nose, and Stop Peeping . They serve as a glimpse into the discourse and intricacy of the artist’s imagined, yet responsive approach to his realities. The series of posters echoes the once-vibrant aura of movie posters, when they were designed by artists and designers to encapsulate the tone, story, and visual style of a film in one large image, and were often as iconic as the movie itself.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

22022021, Yawnghwe Office in Exile by Sawangwongse Yawnghwe belongs to a body of work made in response to the Myanmar military coup that began in February 2021. The work employs traditional Burmese textiles, which have been employed by protesters harnessing the power of old Myanmar lore. It is said that women’s bodies and the garments that cover them sap men of their power.

Painting (Painting)

Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s recent drawing of cutout figures on architectural tracing paper takes a statement by Leoluca Orlando, the Mayor of Palermo, as a point of departure for the work. Stating, “migration problems can and should find their solution within the affirmation of ‘freedom of movement’ as the new inalienable right of humans. No human has chosen or chooses the place where they were born.

Painting (Painting)

Too Many Names by Troy Chew is a patchwork of contemporary Black culture and resistance, including hand-sewn symbols and patterns found in the coats of arms of the kings of the Dahomey region (now Benin) that ruled from 1600-1900. This painting is part of the series Out the Mud, a longterm project in which the artist explores African American history through the lens of traditional mudcloth techniques found in the West African countries involved in the Transatlantic-slave trade. The title of the series references the technique and materials for making mudcloth.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Study of History VI by Subas Tamang is an etching and aquatint print based on photographs taken by German photographer Volkmar Wentzel in 1949. Wentzel’s original color photographs document the transportation of a Mercedes Benz, carried on a wood armature by sixty porters, over a rocky trail from Bhimphedi to Kathmandu in Nepal. At the time of Wentzel’s photographs, paved roads in Nepal only existed within the Kathmandu Valley and cars had to be carried into the city from the surrounding hills on foot.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Adam is an emblematic work within Jean-Charles de Quillacq’s oeuvre. The artist has created a number of pieces entitled Adam , referring to original man, incarnated in multiple objects at once. Materially, Adam is a fluorescent yellow walking rope with an epoxy coating on one side, rendering the structure rigid, demonstrative of his sculptural practice which is both conceptual and sensual.

Photography (Photography)

Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012). In photographing seemingly mundane images of doorways and walls, Wiley collapses the viewer’s experience of inhabiting space by foregrounding features that we all too often miss in our built environment: the peeling white paint on a Corinthian column or the rusty studs on a blue door.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Las Bambas by Elena Tejada-Herrera takes the name of a copper mine in the Andean department of Apurímac, Peru. The operations of this mining project were resisted by the local peasant communities, whose protests forced it to paralyze its operations. As of 2023, this is the most serious unresolved social conflict in the country.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Between 1951 and 1974, Dr. Albert M. Kligman, a professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania, oversaw medical experiments conducted on incarcerated people at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia. These non­therapeutic tests ranged from athlete’s foot powders, dandruff shampoos, deodorants, and detergents, as well as more hazardous materials such as dioxin, radioactive isotopes, and mind-altering psychotropics. During his tenure at Holmesburg, Dr. Kligman worked for companies such as Johnson & Johnson, developing the acne medicine Retin-A, and for Dow Chemical Company and the U. S. Department of Defence, testing the ‘tactical herbicide’ Agent Orange.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Canoas by Tamar Guimarães is a film made for the 2010 São Paulo biennial as an exercise in the projection of national identity. The main subject and setting of the film is Casa das Canoas, the home that architect Oscar Niemeyer built for himself in the early 1950s. Overlooking the bay on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, the building has achieved iconic status in Brazil.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Gozo Yoshimasu’s visual-poetry series Dear Monster (Kaibutsu-kun) explores his response to the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. He embarked on the project out of a deep sense of sympathy and commitment, in pursuit of “poetry possible after March 2011”, without exactly knowing where he was heading. He started scribing lines and letters on exceptionally large manuscript paper that he handcrafted every day.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Steak House is a video representing two small puppets smearing the artist’s face with paint while he is sleeping. The work is based on modest means and reuses the classic theme of inanimate objects coming to life during the night while humans sleep. Is this the artist’s return to repressed feelings or fatigue provoked by the task?

Photography (Photography)

Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages. The artist used found images from the internet, including a viral photo of an elderly woman who took part in the 2016 “Black Monday” strike against a proposed anti-abortion law in Poland, and another image taken the same year of a group of protestors in the United Kingdom, rallying for the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing parallels with Hank Willis Thomas’s I Am a Man (2013) painting in the KADIST Collection, Wong employs the visual language and terminology of mass media, specifically borrowing images from protests on civil rights issues.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This work exemplifies George Pfau’s interest in zombies and liminal embodiment. In different ways, zombies are present here as an icon of coming apart, yet they retain a persistent thereness. In Zombie Swallows The World, the image of the figure is almost overcome by strong light that visually blows away the edges of the body.

Painting (Painting)

Adnan’s paintings are simple images with bold contrasting colors and rich textures. This particular work has an iconic feel and a strong physical presence in spite of its diminutive size. All of her paintings are small but, like Howard Hodgkin’s work, their intensity gains from their diminutive size.

Painting (Painting)

En Guard Souvenir is composed of a group of eleven elements (ten paintings on paper and a sculpture) which deconstructs and recomposes the context of Tienanmen Square in Beijing. This square is known for numerous political events : the cultural revolution between 1966 and 1976, the arrest of the Gang of Four and protests in 1989 where thousands of demonstrators who were protesting against the corruption of the regime were killed. In this work, Bruno Pacheco alludes to the historical importance of this place, the choice of viewpoints reveals very precise but sporadic details there : part of the mausoleum devoted to Mao, a portrait of him and its frame, a view overlooking the Forbidden City, etc.

Photography (Photography)

Borrowed Faces is a photo novel published in 2019. These framed colour photographs are selected scenes from the novel. They mimic the aesthetic of a dated comic strip but instead contain vibrantly coloured, digital photos; here the ‘live’ element of the photographic medium meets the theatrics of the graphic novel.