Published weekly 2014 – 2020 and monthly 2022 onwards, Tuesday in the Tropics are short illustrated reports on what Tony Godfrey saw in South-east Asia and its art world. All, or nearly all, Tuesday in the Tropics will eventually be placed on this website – with an index. See No. 1 for why I write them.

29th September 2019

Dear friends and colleagues

After the ambush.

It had been just over four months since I last wrote and perhaps you were thinking I had disappeared, or run out of puff, or lost interest in writing. To be honest I was exhausted. Having to complete a book for Thames and Hudson, The Story of Contemporary Art, one for Lund Humphries, Ding Yi in...

22nd May 2019

TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 154

22nd May 2019

Dear friends and colleagues

I have been doing a lot of studio visits recently to artists who will be in the show I am curating in Slovakia – Far away but strangely familiar: Twenty-three artists from the...

14th May 2019

Dear friends and colleagues

As I promised here are those elements that might interest you from my review of the Havana Bienal 13, declined by Burlington Contemporary as “too personal.” Although this is not about art from South-east Asia I feel impelled to send it out as this was an exhibition that was too little reviewed. I have not included anything I have written about in recent...

7th May 2019

TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 152

7th May 2019

Dear friends and colleagues

Having said I would try and reply in some way to what I felt the unreasonable element, even if unintentional, in the diatribe of Tania Bruguera in Hyperallergic, I found it strangely...

16th April 2019

Dear friends and colleagues

Manila-Toronto-Havana-Toronto-Manila

For the last eleven days I have been in Havana installing a work by Geraldine at the Bienal there as she couldn’t make it, and, of course, looking at a lot of art, and a country I had never visited before.

I will try and...

26th March 2019

TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 150

26th March 2019

Dear friends and colleagues

And so we progress to see the second part of the Minimalism show in Singapore’s Art and Science Museum’

It was pleasing to...

19th March 2019

Dear Friends and Colleagues

Susan Hiller

I have been working on a history of contemporary art and last week I got to a section where I had to say something about Susan Hiller and I couldn’t stop thinking about how she had recently died. I just need to say something about her.

I had...

12th March 2019

TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 148

12 March 2019

Dear friends and colleagues

So, on to the National Gallery of Singapore’s Minimalism show. But, as the title (Minimalism: Space, Light, Object) suggests, it isn’t just about Minimalism. There has, I believe,...

5th March 2019

Dear friends and colleagues

A three-day holiday in Camiguin island and I show you two posters or signs I saw there for your consideration. There are elections brewing for half the senators. I don’t think this poster for a candidate from Duterte’s party will endear him to you. Here, despite every denunciation in the Western press, Duterte remains remarkably...

5th February 2019

 

Dear friends and colleagues

How do you deal with poverty? How do we deal with the exponentially increasing gap between the income of the richest and the poorest?

Most of us are effectively middle-class professionals with middle class jobs (teaching, curating), middle class...