DAMP OCEAN | a contemporary art space in Te Whanganui-a-Tara: is it? should it? could it? would it? The exchange show between Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC) and Enjoy Public Art Gallery comes in two parts. A survey opening up the space to the voice of the New Zealand viewer, reworking the questions that stimulated the founding of TCAC here to gauge the voices that are, should, could, would in an unfamiliar space…
REBEKAH JAUNG | “Oh you’re Korean… North or South?” This question, which often follows the painful, “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?” interrogation that was recently demonstrated by Donald Trump, is familiar to literally every Korean who ventures into the English-speaking world…
XIN CHENG | The last three months of 2015, I lived on a trash mountain. I thought I was going to an eco-park. The morning after my arrival, I walked out of where I had slept, and discovered a giant dome building, a huge chimney, trucks coming in, and a blinking board of what looked like toxic chemicals with numbers beside them…
CHYE-LING HUANG | In July, Fresh Off the page will present Conflict Circle, Singaporean playwright Ellison Tan’s foray into the absurd. With three professional productions under her belt, Ellison’s Conflict Circle challenges the nature of theatre and the futility and absurdity of performance…
AISHA JOHAN | FX Harsono is a leading figure within the Indonesian contemporary art scene. Over the past four decades, his work has developed against the backdrop of the rise and fall of the Soeharto regime, through revolution and reformation. On the eve of Jakarta’s election, which have incited simmering racial and religious tensions in the world’s most populous Muslim country, Harsono’s practice resonates with the national search for plurality. Aisha Johan caught up with the artist to talk…
AISHA JOHAN | I am very drawn to one of your works, Pilgrimage to History, 2013. I feel that you are giving a voice to those who no longer have one, from mass grave to mass audience. Could you please tell me more about the work? FX Harsono: In the beginning, I started this project about the genocide and mass grave that I had found out about in Blitar, a city where I was born and raised…
AMY WENG | John Young Zerunge is an Australian-Chinese artist and one of the co-founders and founding president of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney. An initiative formed by the Asian Australian Artists’ Association in 1996, 4A has become a leading art institution in Australia, encouraging dialogue on Asian and Australian cultural relations, and…
AMY WENG | Vera Mey is an independent curator. The following is a except of a conversation between Mey and HAINAMANA editor Amy Weng. Here, they talk umbrella identities and redefining a position of alterity…
EMMA NG & IOANA GORDON-SMITH | ‘The Asia-Pacific Century: Part One’ is an open research space that will be at Enjoy Public Art Gallery from August 6- August 20, 2016. Ahead of its opening, co-curators Emma Ng and Ioana Gordon-Smith sat down to share with us their thinking on the project…
XIN CHENG | Early 2015, I performed for MAU/Lemi Ponifasio’s I AM at Aotea Centre as part of the Auckland Arts Festival. It was an intense and transformative experience. For a start, I was grateful for having been included as a volunteer, despite being an amateur to the world of performance (I had only started getting my toes wet…
AMY WENG | In 1992, on the corner of Wellesley and Kitchener Street, on the southern facade of what was then the Old Art Gallery, a lighted window containing an ink painted backdrop and elongated rosary was installed. Four calligraphic characters were painted on its face, and this window changed- illuminating and dimming according to the hour of the day…