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Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia Jun 28 - Jul 27, 2008 |
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Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia
Exhibition Duration: 28 June – 27 July 2008 TAIPEI, 6 JUNE 2008 – Eslite Gallery is proud to present the first major exhibition in Taiwan of Contemporary art from Southeast Asia. Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia, featuring close to 40 works by 17 artists from six Southeast Asian countries. This exhibition explores the current state of contemporary art practice in the region, defined by the context of post-colonialism and globalisation. The title of the exhibition is derived from three things that are useful metaphors for understanding Southeast Asia’s relationship to the West and the international community. First, coffee and cigarettes highlight the economic relationship that exists. Coffee is currently repackaged and presented as a Western lifestyle product to the region even though its origins are much closer to home, while the region is seen as one of the last few growing markets for cigarette consumption by Western tobacco companies, after an awareness of smoking’s hazards have limited market growth in developed countries. This is pertinently reflected in Indonesian artist Agus Suwage’s installation in the exhibition, I Want to Live Another Thousand Years, which features a street vendor’s cart filled with cigarette butts, set against a backdrop of images of famous but dead cultural icons smoking away. Meanwhile, the popular Thai noodle dish of Pad Thai highlights the cultural dimension of Southeast Asia’s relationship to the West. Apart from being a popular dish in many trendy Thai restaurants in the West, it was through Pad Thai that the West was introduced to Contemporary art from Southeast Asia, namely through the work of Thai artist Rikrit Tiravanija. The artist’s relational works in the early 1990s involved him cooking Pad Thai for visitors to his exhibition in New York. Tiravanija has also recently become the first Southeast Asian artist to have a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, having won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006. The popular dish of Pad Thai has therefore come to perform an important cultural role for Southeast Asia, introducing not only audiences in the West to Thai cuisine but also to Contemporary art from the region. This exhibition, curated by renowned Singaporean art critic, historian and Singapore Biennale 2006 co-curator Eugene Tan, thus highlights how artists from the region engage with forms of expression that challenge existing perceptions of art from Southeast Asia. The artists featured in the exhibition demonstrate the diverse ways through which ongoing transformations of their specific societies and environments are reflected, within the wider international context of post-colonialism as well as globalisation, in particular the tensions that have thus arisen. This is evident in, for example, Thai artist Nipan Oranniwesna’s City of Ghosts, an installation comprising the cityscapes of eight metropolitan cities (including Taipei), made entirely from talcum powder, thereby reflecting the social, political and economic precariousness of many cities in the region. In addition to Oranniwesna, Suwage and other internationally established artists such as Manit Sriwanichpoom (Thailand) and Wong Hoy Cheong (Malaysia), the exhibition also features the work of artists such as Poklong Anading (Philippines), Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore) as well as Richard Streitmatter-Tran (Vietnam), among others, whose works demonstrate the diversity, vitality and creativity of artists from Southeast Asia. Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia Exhibition Curator Eugene Tan (Singapore) Eugene Tan is the Programme Director for Contemporary Art at Sotheby's Institute of Art – Singapore. An art historian, critic and curator, he holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Manchester. He was previously Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts. He was also curator for the Singapore Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale and co-curator of the inaugural Singapore Biennale in 2006. He is co-author of the publication Contemporary Art in Singapore and has written for many exhibition catalogues and publications, including art magazines such as Art Asia Pacific, Art Review, C-Arts, Contemporary, Contemporary Visual Arts, Flash Art, Metropolis M and Modern Painters. List of Artists
Poklong Anading (Philippines)
Exhibition Programmes
Artists’ Talk: 29 June 2008, 4:30 – 6:00PM
Participating artists include Poklong Anading, Ho Tzu Nyen, Donna Ong, Nipan Oranniwesna, Manit Sriwanichpoom, Agus Swage and Wong Hoy Cheong as well as Exhibition Curator Eugene Tan.
Special Film Screening: 29 June 2008, 6:00PM – 7:00PM
Films screened include: Bohemian Rhapsody by Ho Tzu Nyen
Jenning King |
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