ArtAsiaPacific Foundation is an educational platform committed to spreading awareness and understanding of modern and contemporary art through publishing projects and public activities. Art plays a vital role in creating and maintain a tolerant and inclusive society, and for that reason we are dedicated to embracing the diverse ideas and points-of-view that are intricately woven into the art of today in Asia.
A sibling organization to the 25-year-old bimonthly magazine, ArtAsiaPacific Foundation is a nonprofit organization that offers a unique platform and voice in the fast-expanding field of contemporary art in Hong Kong and throughout Asia. At the heart of our mission is the advancement of knowledge about contemporary visual art from Hong Kong, Asia and beyond, through research, scholarship and the dissemination of information about art today to the wider public. The Foundation initiates its own educational activities and publication projects, in addition to collaborating with art museums, nonprofit organizations, public libraries, schools and universities.
Directors and Advisory Board
Projects
Almanac
The Almanac, published annually since 2005, surveys the past year in 53 countries and territories from Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East. The primary objective of the Almanac is to create an archive in a book format that records all of the contemporary visual artistic activity occurring in the fast-growing Asia region. It serves as a valuable resource to future historians looking back on the changes in Hong Kong and the wider region.
Talks
In addition to its education program, the foundation also organizes talks and frequently participates on panels and discussions. Some of the talks organized by the foundation, include:
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"Write! Print! Post! Art Writing and Criticism" co-organized with Asia Society, Hong Kong, October 2018
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"Artistic Visibility 101," co-organized with Mana Mass, USA, November 2018
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"United Arab Emirates Ecosystem," a three part series held in Dubai, 2015
Roundabout° explores the possibilities of artistic exchanges between geographically separated cultures and of different traditions and languages. This full-color catalog designed by award-winning graphic designer Paul Sahre, features the work of 108 artists from around the world, including New Zealand, Australia, Japan, South Korea, China, India, Bhutan, Tibet and Thailand. It also includes four scholarly essays by Nicholas Thomas, Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Don J. Cohn and Marisa Mazria-Katz. Robert Thurman, Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, contributes a special foreword. The publication accompanied the exhibition
of the same title which toured to New Zealand at the City Gallery Wellington in 2010 and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2011.
Published with the support of private individuals.
Education
The foundation hosts cultural programs with arts organizations, offers art tours and organizes workshops to teach the craft of writing about art for universities and secondary schools in Hong Kong and other cities in the region.
Books
Working with artists, curators, scholars and arts institutions, the foundation publishes artist-made books, books about art, curatorial anthologies, handbooks on art spaces and compendiums that document artistic activities and initiative. Our titles include:
Tradition Transformed:
Tibetan Artists Respond
Tradition Transformed: Tibetan Artists Respond features nine Tibetan artists—Dedron, Gonkar Gyatso, Losang Gyatso,Kesang Lamdark, Tenzin Norbu, Tenzing Rigdol, Pema Rinzin, Tsherin Sherpa and Penba Wangdu—who are trained in traditional painting and the strict interpretations prescribed by Buddhist religio-spiritual formulas and artistic norms, from which they break by experimenting with alternative media, and extracting sacred symbols from their religious context, repurposing them for their own self-expression. Included are essays by HG Masters, Michael R. Sheehy, and Anna Bremm, as well as an interview with Paola Vanzo of the Trace Foundation in New York.
Tradition Transformed: Tibetan Artists Respond is co-published with the Rubin Museum of Art, New York for the occasion of the exhibition of the same title in 2010.
Published with the support of the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, Trace Foundation, New York, and other private individuals.
Naiza Khan:
Works 1987-2013
One of Pakistan’s most influential contemporary artists, Naiza Khan (born 1968) captures the experience of living and working in Karachi, where everyday life is affected by natural disaster, urban migration and political struggle. Khan’s practice includes paintings, sculpture, wall drawings, performance and video. This fully illustrated book, designed by Philipp Hubert and includes a foreword by Michael Rush, Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, essays by Salima Hashmi, Karin Zitzewitz, Nafisa Rizvi and an interview by Iftikhar Dadi. Co-published with the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, and accompanied Naiza Khan’s first US solo exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in 2013.
Published with the support of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, Burger Collection, Hong Kong, Rangoonwala Foundation, and other private individuals.
Sara Rahbar: I Have No Faith Left for the Devil to Take is the first book to examine the practice of Sara Rahbar, including her early installations for the Queens Museum of Art, a photographic series made in Tehran, and the politically inspired textile-based works, all which use historically charged materials and forms. Design by Office of Paul Sahre with Ramona Heiligensetzer. Essay by Catherine Grenier, adjunct director of Centre Pompidou.
Published with the support of private individuals.
Sara Rahbar:
I Have No Faith Left for the Devil to Take
The Art Spaces Directory is an international guide to the sites where contemporary art and artists are nurtured, interrogated and sustained. With detailed profiles of over 400 independent art spaces from 96 countries around the world, this easy-to-use volume is a useful tool for artists, curators, students and the general public. In addition, it includes essays by Víctor Albarracín, Reem Fadda and Christine Tohme, Stefan Kalmár, Naiza H. Khan, Catalina Lozano, Elaine W. Ng, and tranzit.org. Designed by NR2154. Co-published with the New Museum on the occasion of the exhibition “The Ungovernables” curated by
Eungie Joo in 2012.
Published with the support of the New Museum, Burger Collection, Hong Kong, the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, and other private individuals.
Art Spaces Directory
Roundabout
(forward by Robert Thurman)
Anonymous:
Contemporary Tibetan Art
Anonymous: Contemporary Tibetan Art reflects upon the complex relationship between ancient Tibet’s artistic tradition of anonymity and contemporary artists’ search for a voice in the present. This fully illustrated catalogue, designed by Philipp Hubert, and includes texts by exhibition curator Rachel Perera Weingeist, curator and writer David Elliott and Tibetan cultural activist Jamyang Norbu. Participating artists Penba Wangdu, Tenzing Rigdol and Tsherin Sherpa also contribute essays sharing personal insight into their artistic practice. Anonymous: Contemporary Tibetan Art is co-published with the Samuel Dorksy Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz, and accompanied the exhibition of the same title which toured from 2013-2014.
Published with the support of the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, and other private individuals.
Tavares Strachan:
Seen/Unseen
Seen/Unseen is an artist book and monograph documenting Tavares Strachan’s 2011 survey exhibition “Seen/Unseen,” installed in an undisclosed New York City location and deliberately made inaccessible to the general public. Navigating through the polarizing dichotomies of presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, and man and nature, Strachan has engineered a multidisciplinary artistic practice that mobilizes our visual, intellectual, and emotional faculties. Aeronautical and astronomical science, deep-sea exploration, and extreme climatology are but some of the thematic arenas out of which Strachan creates performative allegories that tell of
cultural displacement, human aspiration, and mortal limitation.
Seen/Unseen is designed by Sagmeister&Walsh and features new texts by Gregory Volk and Robert Hobbs and interviews between the artist and Franklin Sirmans and schoolchildren of the Cary Academy.
Published with the support of private individuals.
Heman Chong:
The Part in the Story Where We Lost Count of the Days
Heman Chong: The Part In The Story Where We Lost Count Of The Days is an artist book and monograph that reflects on the artistic practice of Singaporean artist Heman Chong. Acting as both maker of objects and facilitator of situations, Chong’s work sits at the intersection of multiple genres: visual art, performance, writing, installation and science fiction. Through commissioned texts and explanations of Chong’s selected projects, this publication seeks to engage and unravel these categories as well as to highlight their overlapping and circuitous nature.
Edited by Pauline J. Yao and designed by H55 in
Singapore, The Part In The Story Where We Lost Count Of The Days features new texts by Nav Haq, Ahmad Mashadi, Claudia Pestana, and Tirdad Zolghadr, and an illustrated project index by Amanda Lee Koe.
Published with the support of the National Arts Council, Singapore, STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery, Burger Collection, Hong Kong, Spring Workshop and Rossi & Rossi.
Leung Chi Wo:
So I Don’t Really Know Sometimes if It’s Because of Culture
So I don’t really know sometimes if it’s because of culture is an artist book that began as a series of conversations between artist Leung Chi Wo and two Moroccan women living in Hong Kong. Assia, born in Morocco, was trained as an interior designer and came to Hong Kong with her husband, an investment banker; she’s now a housewife. Saloua, born in France, is an architect who was sent by her firm to start up a studio in Hong Kong. The conversations were adapted as a 4-channel video installation commissioned by the Marrakech Biennale 2012. The book documents the artistic process, and is designed by award-winning designer Luk Chi Cheong and includes an artist interview conducted by Berlin-based curator Carson Chan and essay by art historian Pamela Kember on Leung Chi Wo’s artistic practice.
Published with the support of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.
Support us
The ArtAsiaPacific Foundation Limited is a registered, nonprofit Hong Kong charity. We rely on the generosity of private and government support for our initiatives.
Major sponsors include: Burger Collection, Hong Kong, Frank Y. Yang Foundation, Mapletree, Sharjah Art Foundation.
To support the foundation’s educational programs and research projects, please contact us:
Contact us
For press, partnerships and all other inquires, contact us at: