Going Straight to the Source
Rabu, 24 September 08 - oleh : admin

AS any globetrotting art collector knows, some of the hottest art markets these days are in Asia. But to be a part of this bubbling contemporary art scene, you often had to head to the auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s, where Asian works now command record prices.

This fall, however, there’s a fortuitous new way to discover the contemporary Asian art scene. A crop of international art biennials and triennials has sprouted across Asia in recent years, opening the door to untapped art markets as diverse as Yokohama and Nanjing. And this month, the stars have aligned, so that it’s possible to hop to nine major arts shows in five separate Asian countries.

“There is so much energy and production in Asia,” said Roxana Marcoci, the photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who will be visiting arts fairs in Guangzhou, Shanghai and Nanjing in China and Yokohama, Japan, this month — all in the course of a week.

One of the oldest is the Gwangju Biennial (www.gwangju-biennale.org), held in the industrial city of Gwangju in South Korea. Founded in 1995, the fair now draws more than one-million visitors, including many of the same movers and shakers who flock to Art Basel and the Frieze Art Fair in London. Under the artistic direction of Okwui Enwezor, this year’s fair takes place Sept. 5 to Nov. 9 and will feature more than 100 artists, from the Korean video artist Donghee Koo to the German photographer Thomas Demand.

After Gwangju, contemporary-art buffs can extend the party to eight other art fairs in Asia, nearly all of them started since 2000. One of the newest is Media City Seoul (www.mediacityseoul.or.kr), a platform for digital art that takes place Sept. 12 to Nov. 5.

“Every major city wants to become a cultural hub in Asia,” said Melissa Chiu, director of the Asia Society Museum in New York, who is planning to attend the Singapore Biennial, which started in 2006 and has since spawned Showcase Singapore (www.showcasesingapore.com), a strictly commercial fair that runs from Sept. 9 to 12.

In this year’s follow-up, the Singapore Biennale (www.singaporebiennale.org), which takes place from Sept. 11 to Nov. 16, will feature 50 international artists, including Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, who live and work in Moscow and New York.

Like other shows, the Singapore biennial also showcases the local art scene and part of the exhibition will be held along the downtown waterfront, in a pavilion made of 150 shipping containers.

Moreover, many of the Asian art shows are being organized by local curators, including Mizusawa Tsutomu in Yokohama and Johnson Chang in Guangzhou — the better to offer an insider’s view of Asia’s emerging young artists.

“The best biennials give you access to the entire city,” said Ms. Chiu. source:www.nytimes.com

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