REVIEWS

Ho Chi Minh City
Bruce Yonemoto: North South East West
Galerie Quynh
By Anne Elizabeth Moore

Bruce Yonemoto’s “North South East West” aimed to explore and expand on the histories we learn from books and our elders. Just four works spread over two gallery floors conveyed the complex set of familial relationships, international exchanges and national identities that guided the exhibition’s revelation of hidden histories. [more]

Istanbul
“A Room of One’s Own”
Outlet / Independent Art Space
By Irina Makarova

“A Room of One’s Own,” an all-female exhibition of five young Turkish artists and an artists’ collective, was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1929 argument that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The proto-feminist author’s view stemmed from the belief that women had been prevented from creating works of the same relevance as Shakespeare due impotence brought about by oppression and perceived ineptness. At their best, the participating artists—Irem Tok, Necla Rüzgar, Gökçe Erhan, Gülcan Senyuvali, Basak Özkutlu and the AtilKunst artist group—approached the age-old dispute with stirring, palpable vigor. [more]

Paris
Tsuruko Yamazaki: Beyond Gutai 1955–2009
Galerie Almine Rech
By Devika Singh

Between 1954 and 1972, the Japanese avant-garde art movement Gutai (meaning “concrete” or “embodiment”) challenged traditional artistic media through spectacularly orchestrated exhibitions. Kazuo Shiraga writhed in a viscous mass of cement and plaster in his performance, Challenging Mud (1955); Atsuko Tanaka donned a thatch of flashing lightbulbs, her visage poking through a conical tangle of cable and iridescence, for Electric Dress (1956). Although Gutai works have been included in the lastdocumenta and Sydney and Venice biennales, and it is one of the only non-Western movements acknowledged in the 2006 tome Art Since 1900, its history is still relatively unknown to the wider public. “Beyond Gutai 1955–2009,” a solo exhibit of founding member Tsuruko Yamazaki, now 85 years old, was thus quite timely. [more]

New York
Yin Xiuzhen: Collective Subconscious
Museum of Modern Art
By Dyer Cushman

Yin Xiuzhen creates sculptures from the detritus of urban living to relate personal narratives with larger commentaries on the march of Chinese civilization and its excesses. Her oeuvre blends materials that are sentimental with those that are coarse, often with a pervasive vein of nostalgia. Parked at the convergence of these ideas is Collective Subconscious (2007), a concertina-like modified minibus taken from a self-titled 2007 solo show at the commercial space Beijing Commune. It was exhibited for the second time in the latest installment of the one-person Projects series at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). [more]