Art Fair

Paris Asian Art Fair 16-20 October 2019 IRL Platform

Makis

Asia Now Paris Art Far 2019 opened its doors to the public on October 16th and is soon to end, October 20th. Asia Now's mission is to show the diversity of Asia’s contemporary art scene. The art fair curator is X Zhu-Nowell, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim New York, featuring the IRL {In Real Life} programme which hosts an emerging generation of artists who are digital natives and hyperlinks them with the internet technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_60V9WAu694 The IRL {In Real Life} Platform The IRL {In Real Life} Platform is made up of four sections, Unboxing, Peer-to-Peer, Hyperlink, and Chat Room, inspired by the web interaction frameworks. You can take a look at some of the artworks which belong to each of the IRL Platform sections below. Unboxing The Unboxing section features new projects which will be revealed- or unboxed-

live to the art fair visitors. Section's name is taken from the popular Youtube Unboxing presentations where a YT user will buy a product and create a video while unboxing it, explaining it's features, pros and cons. Peer-to-Peer This section is inspired by the decentralized computer network systems which used to be the home of the open file sharing system such as Napster and BitTorrent. Visionary collectors will showcase works from their collections at the fair, as well as discussing them. Hyperlink The Hyperlink will host performances which will run for the duration of the fair and will be activated throughout the entire grounds, at various times. Chat Room The Chat Room section will connect artists, collectors, curators, thinkers, and gallerists together in an effort to create the ground for informal discussions for a wide range of topics.

Art

Interwoven Terrains by Yau Bee Ling

Makis

Yau Bee Ling is a 47-year-old artist from Malaysia who is presenting her recent artwork Interwoven Terrains at the Wei-Ling Contemporary. Her artwork is an extension of her life's journey where she outputs the twists and turns of her emotional state of mind as she is confronted by challenges of life in colourful drawings. Her previous artworks, By Hands

(2016), were mostly influenced by her grief which took place after the death of her younger sister. You can see samples of that artwork and you most certainly understand the mood change which happened during the time which passed between those two periods of Yau Bee Ling's life and work. You can read more about this special artist at OptionsTheEdge.com

Art

Aichi Triennale Controversy and hate speech over exhibition After ‘Freedom of Expression’?

Makis

Aichi Triennale open date was August 1st, 2019. From the first week, just 3 days after the opening, Aichi Triennale had to shutdown section After "Freedom of Expression?" because it hosted an artwork under the name "Statue of a Girl of Peace" by South Korean artist-duo Kim Seo-Kyung and Kim Eun-sung. This section and specifically this artwork presents ianfu or comfort women, a violent act where Japanese authorities forced women and girls living in

places occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army into being sex slaves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxedUiXRmTQ This artwork created lots of controversies and as a result, the Mayor of Nagoya demanded the exhibition's withdrawal which Agency for Cultural Affairs satisfied by shutting down the section which hosted this artwork. Even though the exhibit was re-opened on October 8th many artists like Minuk Lim expressed their concern for banning art from the exhibition because of hate speech and politics.

Art

Tetsuro Kano and his birdly point of view to our world

Makis

Tetsuro Kano was born in 1980, Miyagi/Japan. He holds a master’s degree in Fine Art from Tokyo Zokei University (2007).

He started working in 2005 mostly in installations and is continuing to work until now. His artworks express the diversity of the worlds perceived by different organisms

found in the everyday life sphere of human beings while birds are often used to show another point of view for our "human-like" world and nature surrounding it.

Art

Mono-ha the “School of Things” Japanese Art Movement

Makis

Mono-Ha was an art movement active between 1968 and 1975 by Japanese artists who wanted to draw attention to the space and the connection between things in an effort to make the viewer understand his position in relation to the work.

They didn't create artwork from scratch instead they used natural man-made materials and re-arranged them into artworks which later were usually destroyed. This movement was created as an answer to Japan's ruthless development and industrialisation. The first artwork which engaged with this movement was created in October 1968 by Sekine who created his work "Phase – Mother Earth" in Kobe’s Sumarikyu Park for the First Open-Air Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition. Lee Ufan Studio a Korean artist was the one responsible for setting the Mono-Ha movement philosophy

through his article "Beyond Being and Nothingness – A Thesis on Sekine Nobuo". Other artists who graduated from Tokyo’s Tama Art University during the late ’60s followed the Mono-Ha movement and created similar artworks Some of the most well know Mono-ha artists are Jiro Takamatsu Kishio Suga Katsuhiko Narita Keiji Uematsu Koji Enokura Koki Tanaka Lee Ufan Noboru Takayama Nobuo Sekine Noriyuki Haraguchi Susumu Koshimizu You can read more details about the Mono-Ha movement in TokeyoArtBeat article by Ashley Rawlings about "An Introduction to ‘Mono-ha".

News

Paradigm Swift from General Art Magazine to Asian Contemporary Art

Makis

Hidden Room was first published back in August of 2012, that was almost 7 years ago. From that day a lot has changed in my life and I had to focus on other things than art.

Even though I'm still busy running things offline I feel it's the right time to change the subject of this website and focus on Asian Contemporary Art. While blogging about art and artists I've found myself very interested in the Asian art scene because it has a weird and mysterious way to merge the traditional art and the new technology-inspired art styles. In fact, Asian art, in my opinion, is at the same time classical and avant-garde. So, without further ado, I want to announce a Paradigm Swift for Hidden Room from a blog dedicated to Arts in general to a magazine mostly focused and dedicated to promoting Asian art and its derivatives.