3rd May 2022

NB. I felt it necessary to include more images than normal to give a sense of the noteworthy and unusual event..

Dear friends and colleagues

What is this decayed and crumbling building? Who are these...

Dear friends and colleagues

It has been just over two years since I sent you a Tuesday in the Tropics and the time has come to restart.

In the last two years I have rarely strayed from my home beneath Mount Maculot. I have not been on a single airplane flight and very rarely been to a gallery in Manila, or anywhere else. After 43 years...

Dear friends and colleagues

Today I want to talk about the two art fairs Manila now has and which were both prese ted in February. Why two? Is the art market here big enough to justify two art fairs? Apparently so.

I also want to talk about why this will be the last Tuesday in the Tropics – or at least in its current form – and what...

Dear friends and colleagues

On Parties and green, growing things.

4th Jan 2020 near Tagaytay

At Gregory Halili’s house. It was a birthday party for Gregory and two other artists – MM Yu and Elaine Roberto Navas. Many other artists that we have mentioned in previous letters were...

Dear friends and colleagues

Of volcanoes and gardens.

Last summer for the first time I went walking in Constable country along the Stour past Flatford Mill to Dedham. It was a wonderfully hot day, but with a gentle breeze. Many people were boating on the river or walking alongside it or having coffee and cakes at the National Trust café...

TUESDAY ON THE TROPICS 160

14th January 2020

Dear friends and colleagues

In the island at the centre of Lake Taal near us is an active volcano. Although it has not erupted for about seventy years, previous eruptions have created tsunamis in the lake or...

Dear friends and colleagues

Why must every film or video be shown separately in its own allocated space? How many video projectors and screens were deployed in this 2019 Singapore biennale I do not know – a lot, certainly! It must have been a bonanza for the suppliers of video projectors and monitors. It was not always so. For example in the Whitney Biennial of 1993 all the artists were...

Dear friends and colleagues

Alas, I could not send this on Tuesday last week as we were hit by a typhoon. Not bad enough to blow the house down or indeed blow trees down, but enough to force a leak in my library roof and cover the ground outside with sodden leaves and small branches. As you can see it was strong enough to make the bamboo goes nearly horizontal. Also, inevitably it knocked out...

Dear friends and colleagues

On the fourth of June this year I was in Shanghai to meet with Ding Yi to discuss any final adjustments to the book I had written with Wang Kaimei about him and his work. It was an opportunity to also go see the exhibition The Challenging Souls at the Powerhouse Museum which brought together Ding Yi, Lee Ufan and Yves Klein. In the morning on our journey there my...

Dear friends and colleagues

“I knew that a film could indeed portray everything that might happen outside oneself – while under no circumstances could it tell an individual what would happen inside him.”[1] Oliver Campbell, the photograph of whom we discussed in my last letter, is reflecting on what happened when after...