Born Slippy
With opening up comes reform, or so certainof us have been taught to believe. As ArtReview Asia writes this, some parts of the world areopening up after a lengthy period of pandemic-inflicted lockdown, whileothers remain firmly in the thick of it. ArtReview Asia was founded, back in 2013, both tooer a platform for discussion of art in the region independent ofdominantWesternnarratives and to demonstrate in the faceof a homogenising, globalised artworld that dierent contexts produce dierent art histories – across the continent, across regions and even in the territory of a single country itself. Thanks to the way that the institutions of the artworld are programmed to transform speculation into fact, divergence into convergence and revolt into acquiescence, it’s neverbeen easy. Particularly because ArtReview Asia has, however reluctantly and however small the scale, inevitably become one of those institutions itself. But while the pandemic has been a global phenomenon it has also revealed geographic and social inequalities and dierences in ways that ArtReview Asia could never have imagined, however embedded and longstanding those inequalities might be. Its ‘mission’ therefore remains as valid as ever before.So while ArtReview
Asia’s thoughts are first with those who remain under the pandemic’s cosh, its thoughts turn too to the matter ofreform and the shapeof the artworld to come. In this issue we look at how the work of Shahzia Sikander and Julie Mehretu are queering and recasting conventional notions of art. In the faceof widespread anti-Asian prejudice in the West, we look at how Richard Fung, Hamishi Farah and Arahmaiani have responded to its dierent incarnations, each in their own way. We look at how Ayman Zedani is reimagining theGulf as a siteof natural collaboration rather thannatural extraction. And last but not least we look to the ways in which Kurdish artist Zehra Doğan has been shaping an art of the people rather than for the people. Museums be damned. ArtReview Asia