AWT Focus Selections: Nikita Yingqian Cai
Nikita Yingqian Cai, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Guangdong Times Museum, selects works from AWT Focus, EARTH, WIND, AND FIRE: VISIONS OF THE FUTURE FROM ASIA.
"Earth, Wind, and Fire: Visions of the Future from Asia” showcases artistic sensitivity to cosmic ideas from Asia. Circular conceptions of time-space can be found in Kisho Mwkaiyana’s ethereal representations of the invisible realm, Charwei Tsai’s textual engagement with Buddhist cosmologies, and Junko Oki’s meditative embroidery. Poklong Anading's photographs render individuals anonymous through light reflected from round mirrors, emphasizing the impenetrability of reality. Similarly, Lee Kit utilizes light to veil sociopolitical anxieties embedded in everyday life.
Kazuko Miyamoto may share her male cohort Kishio Suga’s minimalistic formalism, but her ironic commentary on masculinity is conveyed through laborious gestures. Miho Dohi’s buttai emerges from the organic process of tactile interactions, while Solange Pessoa’s paint on clay materializes the transformation of minerals and earth into aesthetic form. Drawing on the Akha culture of the Southeast Asian highlands, Busui Ajaw portrays the mother deity Amamata to challenge the boundaries between life and death, resistance and escapism. Heri Dono’s monstrous figures depict struggles in Southeast Asia, invoking the specter of developmentalism that haunts the exploited natural landscape.
The poet-artist Gozo Yoshimasu combines cross-linguistic wordplay with pictorial surfaces, and Shooshie Sulaiman exposes her intimate connections with the town of Onomichi through mixed-media paintings. Apocalyptic landscapes mirror each other in Kikuji Kawada’s photographs of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima and in Laurent Grasso’s scientific mythology, while Asako Fujikura’s virtual landscapes blur distinctions between the ancient and the contemporary, the fake and the true, to renew our perception of the future.
Nikita Yingqian Cai is the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Guangdong Times Museum. She has curated such exhibitions as “Times Heterotopia Trilogy” (2011, 2014, 2017), “Jiang Zhi: If This Is a Man”(2012), “Roman Ondák: Storyboard” (2015), “Big Tail Elephants: One Hour, No Room, Five Shows”(2016) , “Pan Yuliang: A Journey to Silence” (Villa Vassilieff in Paris and Times Museum, 2017), “Omer Fast: The Invisible Hand”(2018), “Neither Black/Red/Yellow Nor Woman” (Times Art Center Berlin, 2019), “Zhou Tao: The Ridge in the Bronze Mirror” (2019) and “Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison” (2021). She runs the Para-curatorial Series and the research network All the Way South, and is the coeditor of On Our Times and the podcast host of Rolling Congee. She was awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2019, and her writings have been published by Bard College and the MIT Press, Sternberg Press, Black Dog Publishing, Yishu, Artforum, and e-flux. She is the coeditor of Active Withdrawals: Life and Death of Institutional Critique (Black Dog Publishing, 2016) and No Ground Underneath: Curating on the Nexus of Changes (China Youth Press, 2013).
