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...

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,...

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...

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...

Dear friends and colleagues

Some thoughts about biennales, in particular those in South-east Asia.

I am closing all my books and putting them to one side whilst I write this: I am trying to get down to basics. As I said last week, I want to ask what the...

Dear friends and colleagues

We return to Bangkok! How curious that a two-day trip takes four weeks to discuss and write up! It reminds me of Joyce’s Ulysses which recounts eighteen hours in a day but is pretty impossible to read in under a fortnight. This letter may not be of such literary value however.

To resume: we have done the wats,...

Dear friends and colleagues

So, on my second day in Bangkok I planned to – filled with enthusiasm – get up well before seven and be at those wats where art was being shown as soon as they opened and then see art till the late evening.

What are wats? Buddhist temples or pagodas. Three wats and five other art-sites were on or near...

Dear friends and colleagues

Before Christmas I went, as you know, to the first Bangkok Biennale, curated by Apinan Poshyananda. Advance publicity suggested the theme of the exhibition was “happiness”. How nice I thought, a biennale that for once had a simple theme that we could understand, but that raised interesting and important questions: how do we assess happiness? How do we achieve...

SEMIOTICS OF THE CHRISTMAS TREE, PART 3

Dear friends and colleagues

I went to Bangkok last month to see the first Bangkok Biennale. After, as I sat down in the plane that would return me to Manila, the piped music began with the tune of In the bleak mid-winter ...

Dear Friends and Colleagues

I have just got back from Shanghai. Among other things I saw exhibitions by Nalini Malani at Arario Gallery, Louise Bourgeois at the Long Museum and the Shanghai Biennale. What do all those exhibitions have in common?

Censorship.

Apparently, Malani was...