Visual Art

Roger Boyce explores the photographic still lifes of New Zealand artist Fiona Pardington in lucid, evocative prose. Drawing on the history of painting, he examines their rich pathos and visual power as an 'amor fati'—a profound veneration of things in their inviolable circumstance.

Yao Jui-Chung is one of Taiwan’s most acclaimed contemporary artists. In this major 2020 interview with White Fungus editor Ron Hanson—conducted on the occasion of his mid-career retrospective Republic of Cynic at C-LAB—he reflects on coming of age after martial law, running a karaoke room during his Air Force military service, and Taiwan’s complex history and identity.

In 1959, Wallis Islander Aloï Pilioko met Russian French artist Nicolaï Michoutouchkine in what is now Vanuatu. The encounter proved pivotal as Michoutouchkine encouraged Piliko to become an artist, and he would go on to become one of the most famous Pacific artists of his generation. The pair became inseparable and began a remarkable decades-long adventure of traveling, collecting, exhibiting, and making Oceanic art all over the world. Peter Brunt wrote about the unique artistic collaboration for White Fungus.

Taipei-based artist Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) creates work dealing with the impact of colonization on the First Nations Atayal people of Taiwan while exploring the possibilities within her Indigenous culture for activating a queer space. In Lin's recent artworks, she seeks to recreate the spirit of Temahahoi, a place, according to Atayal oral stories, where a self-governed community of women resided independent of men.

David Frazier charts the growth of inter-Asian dialogue and networks in the art world amidst the fissures of globalization and a still-dominant Western paradigm for viewing art.

Kyra Kordoski revisits the pantheon-building art theory of Clement Greenberg and its connection to modernity through the prism of the matsutake mushroom.