Compiler

Kazuna Taguchi, Love is like the measles, 2006, gelatin silver print. From the exhibition Trace Elements: spirit and memory in Japanese and Australian photomedia at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (TOCAG) from 19 July to 13 October. Curated by Bec Dean (Performance Space, Sydney) and Shihoko Iida (TOCAG). Image courtesy the artist and TOCAG. www.operacity.jp/en/ag

ASIA Jayne Dyer, Reg Newitt, Carol Archer, Gina Fairley & Neilton Clarke

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ginafairley@pacific.net.au

Nudity in Shanghai, humour in Guangdong

While the Australian arts community is still reeling from yet another case of state censorship, the trend towards more liberal attitudes to nudity – at least where highly profitable works of art are concerned – continues unabated in China. Participating in Naked are 13 Shanghai-based artists, active in the contemporary art scene for the past 2 decades, whose works are inspired by sex and sexuality. The press release points out that ‘the show reveals the impact that these themes have had on the life of Chinese citizens in the current society, which is increasingly more open than before’. Until 3 August at 140sqm Gallery, Shanghai. Visit www.140sqm.com for more … Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou is hosting Wu Shanzhuan Red Humour International, curated by Xiaoyan Guo, Johnson Tsongzung Chang and Shiming Gao. Runs to 27 July. Further info at www.gdmoa.org. CA

Beyond Naked Skin

Curiously, while the storm surrounding the censorship of Bill Henson’s image of a pubescent girl was the talk of Australian art circles, Shanghai-based Xiang Jing’s sculptures of equally provocative adolescent girls were celebrated in Bangkok. The difference? Xiang Jing’s works resonate with comic-book style and proportions blurring their naked reality and acceptance. Space and lighting is equally important for both artists in evoking drama and role-playing, yet both engage in real time and space when viewed within the gallery environment. While Bangkok television broadcasts are rigidly censored from ‘profanities’, this exhibition was not; a curious comparison to Henson. Showing at Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok during June and their Beijing space in September. www.tangcontemporary.com GF

Olympic fever

Beijing is in the final throes of pre-Olympic fever. Building developments throughout the city are competing to open their doors by August. The prestigious Swire development in Sanlitun raises the bar with innovative, individualised architecture and art, including a commission from Queensland artist Pamela See. Over the past 6 months, See has been regularly in Beijing transforming her paper-cut and stencil work into metal, assisted by Beijing artist Li Gang, whose sculpture has also been commissioned. JD

Hats off to the bird’s nest

Beijing-based artist Shi Guorui uses a pinhole camera to photograph cities and landscapes on a monumental scale. Each photograph takes between 8 to 24 hours, a process that the artist finds meditative. The new Olympic stadium is one iconic subject in his New Works by Shi Guorui exhibition currently on display at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery in SoHo, Hong Kong island until 30 August. Visit www.10chancerylanegallery.com for details … Meanwhile, YY9 Gallery is celebrating its move to Happy Valley, with Chris Lo’s ceramic exhibition titled To Serenity. The figure-based works were made last year during Lo’s stint as artist-in-residence in the USA and Japan. Until 19 July. More at www.2bsquare.com ... The academic year has just careered to a halt, and Chinese University Hong Kong has several concurrent exhibitions: of graduate and postgraduate works, plus the annual invitational exhibition, this year curated by students from the Fine Arts program. All the shows are held in the Cheng Ming Building and run until 16 July. Details at www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/~fadept/FAA2008/index.html. CA

History in the making

Guan Wei has been in Beijing since March preparing for his major solo exhibition Histories of the Imagination - China Discovered the World at Ge Hua Museum. The 8 paintings offer comparisons to the tradition of history painting in both the scope and scale of the work. The show opened on 25 June, at the start of the Beijing Olympic Art Festival, and runs to 14 July. JD

Mongolian Festival on record

Victorian artist Marcus Schutenko is in Mongolia on a 2008 Asialink Residency, hosted by the Arts Council of Mongolia. He is working on the coordination and evaluation of the inaugural Cultural Naadam, a seven day cultural festival that coincides with the traditional Naadam Festival in July. JD

Tasmanians in China

3 Hobart-based artists – Anton Holzner, Geoff Dyer and Chen Ping – held an exhibition at Guangdong Museum of Art, China from 22 May to 10 June. After the exhibition, one work from each artist became new additions to the museum collection. Chen Ping is continuing his residency with Red Gate Gallery in Beijing until the end of July. Geoff Dyer returned to Hobart to give lectures and workshops with art students of the University of Tasmania on the experience of exhibiting in China and his impressions of the current art scene. JD

China reviewed

Based in Melbourne since 2001, Louis Porter is in Beijing for June and July on an Australia-China Council grant. He is researching Beijing Reviewed, a photographic project examining the social effects of modernisation on Beijing. Accommodation subsidies support Rachael Swain and Tony Ayres’s Shanghai Lady Killer, an intercultural, multimedia performance project, and Anna Glynn’s painting project Parallel Dreams. JD

Hara ARC @ twenty

Prominent Meiji-era industrialist Rokuro Hara (1842-1933), great grandfather of current Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo) director Toshio Hara, put together the Hara Rokuro Collection of traditional East Asian art. Hara Museum ARC, the museum’s annexe venue overlooking the Haruna and Akagi mountains in Gunma prefecture, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year with the opening of its Kankai Pavilion. Designed by architectural guru Arata Isozaki, this contemporary edifice referencing traditional Sho-in architectural style has been integrated into the existing site and permits display of the Rokuro Collection, mostly comprising Edo-period Japanese paintings. Kankai opens 27 July. Meanwhile, catch Art Scope 2007/2008 at Hara Museum, Tokyo – spotlighting work by artists Izumi Kato, Yuken Teruya (Japan), Eva Teppe and Ascan Pinckernelle (Germany) following their exchange residencies co-organised with the Daimler Foundation. Until 31 August. Visit www.haramuseum.or.jp NC

Utopian

A little reminder – the big exhibition Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye by the Indigenous Australian artist is, having run successfully at The Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, now at The National Art Center, Tokyo until 27 July. Emily Kngwarreye and Her Legacy, a Coo-ee Gallery (Sydney) exhibition of work by her, Gloria and Kathleen Petyarre, Abie Loy Kemare and the Ngal sisters ran at Hillside Gallery (in association with Art Front Gallery), Tokyo from 28 May to 13 June. Visit www.nact.jp and www.cooeeart.com.au NC

Spirits & memory

Australian artists Philip Brophy, Jane Burton, Alex Davies, Genevieve Grieves and Sophie Kahn (current OzCo Tokyo Studio resident) are strutting their stuff at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (TOCAG) this month alongside Japanese counterparts Teiji Furuhashi, Seiichi Furuya, Chie Matsui, Lieko Shiga and Kazuna Taguchi in Trace Elements: spirit and memory in Japanese and Australian photomedia. A collaboration between curators Bec Dean (The Performance Space, Sydney) and Shihoko Iida (TOCAG, with space and audience numbers par excellence), the exhibition ‘… considers the ways in which contemporary artists are addressing the intrinsic relationship of photography to time, memory and the metaphysical association of the medium to phantasmagoria and the semblance of lived experience’. Lost? Just land at Narita and head to TOCAG. From 19 July to 13 October. Visit www.opercity.jp/en/ag NC

Ron on a roll

With a solo ‘bare all’ currently at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, London-based Australian artist Ron Mueck (b.1958, Melbourne) is becoming quite an item here in Japan with his hyper-real figurative sculptures produced from fibreglass and silicone resins. Mueck’s ‘apprenticeship’ making film-set models and props in earlier days has served him well, with inclusion in collections such as the Cartier Foundation (a Tokyo showing drawing raptures 2 years ago) helping it all figure. The newly opened Towada Arts Centre in northern Honshu, Japan also has a space devoted to his work. Curated by Daisuke Murata, Ron Mueck has been made possible with assistance from Japan Airlines, and Nanjo & Associates. Until 31 August. Visit www.kanazawa21.jp & www.city.towada.lg.jp/artstowada/eng NC

Oh Ma … Murcutt

Gallery Ma (Tokyo), specialising in exhibitions of an architectural/design bent, currently has Glenn Murcutt: Thinking Drawing / Working Drawing – featuring drawings, photographs and scale models by the Pritzker Prize-winning Australian architect. The 7 highlighted works include the Simpson-Lee House (NSW), the Arthur & Yvonne Boyd Art Centre (NSW) and Walsh House (NSW). Until 9 August. Visit www.toto.co.jp/gallerma/ex080612/index_e.htm NC

Absolute Horror

Rather than dwelling on the fashionable frame of global terror, Luisito ‘Louie’ Cordero’s new body of paintings and sculptures terrorises with ‘freak show’ spectacular. A collision of cheap anatomy instruction charts with heavy metal fonts, religious cult iconography, zombie heads and kaiju monsters, Cordero’s huge paintings and plaster sculptures sit in ultimate contrast with the slick gallery space of MO, located atop Manila’s ultimate designer furniture store. Cordero is of a generation of artists that have moved beyond comic-book culture and into their own subculture. Showing until 21 July.
… and illustrating the diversity of the Filipino art scene, in the neighbouring Manila suburb of Pasay, Roberto Robles sculptures and Zen paintings open at Galleria Duemila. Showing 5 to 30 July, visit: www.galleriaduemila.com GF

Grand Finale

While Manila’s Finale Art File gallery will be closing two of its venues – Makati LaO and Megamall – by September, it will be opening a new warehouse space in the quickly developing new art gulch of Pasong Tamo on the edges of Makati. It will join Slab, also opening in September, and Silverlens, the first along this strip of larger sites. Finale will open with a series of three ‘young contemporaries’ exhibitions. Leading up to this, Finale will be showing three artists hot off last month’s Southeast Asian auction market: Geraldine Javier with the new Sampaloc Cave Paintings until 7 July, followed by Nonia Garcia 9 to 21 July, and Wire Tuazon in August. www.finaleartfile.com GF

New directions in Thai assemblage

The young Thai artist Vichaya Mukdamanee is standing out from the scene. Graduating from Silpakorn University in 2006, he received a Freeman Foundations Fellowship, a residency at the Vermont Studio Centre, USA, was awarded a 2008 Fulbright Scholarship and has recently commenced his Masters. His most recent exhibition, Urban Motion, at Bangkok’s Whitespace Gallery shows his great capacity for translating material from industrial waste to collaged paper works. GF

Keeping them honest

Thailand’s celebrated artist Montri will transform 100 Tonson’s Bangkok gallery with a photographic installation titled Nanothailand. Continuing his interest in cultural hybridity, the subject of these biting images are refugees and exiles. Representing the Thai Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, Montri is no stranger to drawing attention and this powerful exhibition promises to pack a punch. Showing until 10 August, visit www.100tonsongallery.com GF

Playing in Singapore

Experimenta, Australia’s contemporary arts organisation dedicated to supporting media art, is part of the growth-story of like-minded organisations around the globe, including the NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo. Opening at Sculpture Square, Singapore this month as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) 2008, the Experimenta-curated Experimenta Play ++ consists of 5 interactive artworks by some 16 of Australia’s brightest media-savvy creators. Executive director Caroline Farmer, co-curator Liz Hughes and a number of the above artists will be in Singapore for the event. Runs 25 July to 2 August (reception 28 July). Visit www.experimenta.org, www.isea2008singapore.org and www.sculpturesq.com.sg NC

Bio

Sydney artist and arts writer Jayne Dyer is in Beijing working on projects involving Asia and Australia. She is on leave from her position as Head of Public Programs at the National Art School.