{"id":625852,"date":"2026-09-24T09:48:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T09:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/625852\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T09:48:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T09:48:21","slug":"what-are-artists-like-at-25","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/625852\/","title":{"rendered":"What Are Artists Like At 25?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On its own 25th birthday, Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong looks to the early worlds of artists for counsel<\/p>\n

To commemorate its 25th anniversary, Asia Art Archive (AAA) has returned to source, with a two-part show looking back not on the institution\u2019s history but rather to the times when eight contemporary artists from Asia were twenty-five years old. Conceived by Anthony Yung with curators Christina Bartosch, Hazel Kwok and Rebecca Tso, each part features four artists represented by a cluster of artworks and archival materials positioned across the AAA library that revolve around their 25th year. Painter Zhang Xiaogang\u2019s capsule of frenetic earth-toned paintings, studies, sketches and diary entries hinged to 1983 \u2013 a decade before his celebrated Bloodline series, based on family studio-portraits from Cultural Revolution-era China, emerged \u2013 express a time in which his mind was, he says in a video interview with AAA, \u201cmost chaotic\u201d. Freshly graduated and working as a costume designer, Zhang is represented here by a constellation of photographs, magazines and books that tap into the Opening Up and Reform era that had recently commenced: among them, a photo Zhang took of TV drama Miss Brightness filming in Kunming in 1983, a Journal of Pop Television article from that year titled \u2018China Enter[ing] the Television Era\u2019 and a 1984 photo courtesy of Xu Qingyuan, of people watching colour TV in a Kunming department store.<\/p>\n

Context is everything in this exhibition, with ephemera mapping the grounds from which artists evolved. For Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook<\/a>, a Bangkok capsule set in 1982 is anchored to the artist\u2019s regular commute across the Thai capital between her home, the College of Fine Arts, where she taught printmaking, and Silpakorn University, where she undertook graduate studies: a route traced on a \u2018Bangkok Routes Project 1978\u20131982\u2019 map reproduced in 2026 courtesy of the National Archives of Thailand. By this time, the artist had gained a reputation for printmaking, and two 1982 works testify to that: the photo etching Power and Loneliness No. 2, of a field strewn in shrouded chairs, and Power and Loneliness No. 3, a relief etching and aquatint of canine carcasses strewn over a landscape save for a live black dog, express a subtle yet thorough interrogation of power as experiential feeling. That uncanny tension likewise charges I Am An Artist (He Said) (2022), among the publications by Rasdjarmrearnsook at AAA: a collection of columns playing with the male and female voice written by Rasdjarmrearnsook during the mid-2000s.<\/p>\n

\"\"Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Power and Loneliness No. 3, 1982, relief etching and aquatint, 93 \u00d7 80 cm (installation view, At 25: Artists\u2019 Early Worlds: Part 1, 2026). Photo: South Ho. Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

\"\"Raqs Media Collective, Black Waters: An Event Shaped Hole, 2026 (installation view, At 25: Artists\u2019 Early Worlds: Part 2, 2026). Photo: South Ho<\/p>\n

What is striking across clusters is how differently archives and works have been activated. Objects related to Salima Hashmi \u2013 from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, representing the literature with which Hashmi connected to her mother\u2019s English heritage, to a copy of \u2018Sochne Do\u2019 (\u2018Let Me Think\u2019), a poem written in 1968 by Hashmi\u2019s father, Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz \u2013 are displayed alongside a QR code that links to audio and video recordings of the artist contextualising each. Coming out of left field, given the cinematic universe he has since built, is Ho Tzu Nyen\u2019s Entropy (2001), a creamy monochromatic accumulation of newspapers, acrylic, emulsion, lacquer and hair on canvas \u2013 for which he received the UOB Painting of the Year Award \u2013 presented alongside other early abstractions and a playlist of songs defining his twenties. Raqs Media Collective\u2019s stunning Black Waters: An Event Shaped Hole (1993\/2026), recomposes the materials for an unmade 16mm film \u2013 the collective\u2019s first project \u2013 into a sculptural installation that unfolds its original proposal: \u2018to reveal the methods and means by which our vision is directed and organised to look at peoples and cultures as adversaries\u2019, through the geohistorical lens of the Andaman Islands. Overlaid on either side of two curved display walls facing one another are printed layers of annotated photos, maps, films, book pages, diagrams, research notes, a partial film script and letters.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something revelatory in each material accumulation. Take the moving tribute to late Hong Kong photographer Holly Lee, anchored to the year 1978, when she quit her banking job to focus on her practice. Lee co-ran a photography studio with her partner Lee Ka-sing, with whom, alongside Lau Ching-ping, she cofounded the photography journal NuNaHeDuo (Dislocation). As a testament to their lifelong partnership, Ka-sing is the source of much on view: early woodblock prints by Lee from the 1970s, her tools, contact sheets, articles written by both, press clippings on Lee\u2019s work and promotional materials for their photography studio in Hong Kong. Songs by Joni Mitchell, whose music informed Lee\u2019s semi-autobiographical novel Sushi Grass in Paradise (2019\u201320), can be heard in this section. Lee\u2019s book is grouped with related publications held by AAA, including Transporting the Emporium, a 1996\/1997 issue of West Coast Line journal featuring Ka-sing\u2019s writing and Lee\u2019s arresting Hong Kong Memories series from the 1990s, transposing historical and personal images into layered compositions, such that a hand looms over an aerial view of Hong Kong like a shadow. Then there\u2019s the central arc of Korean artist Bahc Yiso\u2019s archival assemblage: meticulously detailed letters he wrote to his family while a postgraduate student in New York during the early 1980s. These are shown alongside photographs from his time there, including one of Minor Injury, an alternative arts space Bahc founded in Greenpoint in 1985 and ran until 1989, the year the space hosted Homeland: A Palestine Quest, organised by Yong Soon Min and Shirin Neshat<\/a> in solidarity with Palestine.<\/p>\n

\"\"At 25: Artists\u2019 Early Worlds: Part 2, 2026 (installation view featuring Holly Lee). Photo: South Ho<\/p>\n

\"\"Tehching Hsieh, Jump Piece, 1973, photographic reproduction (installation view, At 25: Artists\u2019 Early Worlds: Part 1, 2026). Photo: Stephen Lam. Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

In the case of Tehching Hsieh, a focus starts with Jump Piece: six photos from 1973 showing a twenty-three-year-old Hsieh jumping from a three-storey building in Taiwan and breaking both his ankles. One year later, the artist jumped again. This time into the Delaware River from an oil tanker he boarded in Taiwan, entering the United States undocumented and ending up in New York City: a journey marked out on a world map. He would commence his storied One Year Performance series in 1978, but those documents are not included. Instead, a black-and-white 1978 video, shown for the first time, captures Hsieh cleaning the Chinatown restaurant at which he worked: a sketch of sorts that captures how the years passed between his arrival and when his first One Year Performance commenced. A colour video filmed in 2026 by AAA researcher Tzuman Tseng in Hsieh\u2019s home studio plays below: the artist comes in and out of view, always an enigma. Emphasising that continuity is an Instagram reel introducing the artist by splicing recent footage of Hsieh on a snowy New York street with a black-and-white photo of him decades ago. \u201cHe has always been on the move,\u201d says Hazel Kwok. \u201cAt twenty-five, he was no different.\u201d The idea that movement is constant is an apt throughline between the artists in this show and the many lives they\u2019ve lived: a motion threading one life, and one era, to the rest.<\/p>\n

At 25: Artists\u2019 Early Worlds at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, through 31 October<\/a><\/p>\n

From the Autumn 2026 issue of\u00a0ArtReview Asia\u00a0\u2013\u00a0get your copy.<\/a><\/p>\n

Stephanie Bailey<\/a>Reviews<\/a>September 23, 2026ArtReview Asia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On its own 25th birthday, Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong looks to the early worlds of artists…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-625852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}