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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...