Art Stage Singapore 2016

ART STAGE SINGAPORE 21– 24 J AN’16

SUNDARAM WE ARE AS IA TAGORE GALLERY

GALLERY MISSION Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. With spaces in Singapore’s Gillman Barracks, New York City (in Chelsea and on Madison Avenue) and Hong Kong, the gallery was the first to focus exclusively on the rise of globalization in contemporary art. The gallery represents painters, sculptors and photographers from around the world. They each work in different mediums and use diverse techniques, but share a passion for cross-cultural dialogue. The gallery is renowned for its support of cultural activities— including poetry readings, book launches, music performances, and film screenings—that further its mission of East-West exchange.

ART STAGE 2016 Sundaram Tagore Gallery is pleased to present a curated exhibition of paintings, photographs and installations by an international group of artists exploring themes of cultural entanglement. This fair marks the gallery’s sixth consecutive year at Art Stage.

Known for its boundary-pushing exhibitions, the gallery has built its reputation featuring artists who share a global prospective, living and working between cultures. This year’s fair presentation examines the results of these cultural exchanges through the work of such artists as Japanese painter Hiroshi Senju; American photographer Steve McCurry; Iranian painter Golnaz Fathi; Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky; Japanese-American metal artist Miya Ando; and Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.

Many of the artists in this exhibition were part of Frontiers Reimagined, a global contemporary art exhibition and a Collateral Event of the 2015 Venice Biennale. The show, curated by Sundaram Tagore and art historian Dr. Marius Kwint, was mounted at the 16th-century Museo di Palazzo Grimani.

The exhibition received wide acclaim and was named one of the five best exhibitions at the Biennale by The Art Newspaper.

The gallery is also pleased to present, at the invitation of Art Stage, a large public installation by Chinese sculptor Zheng Lu.

MIYA ANDO A descendant of Bizen sword makers, New York-based emerging artist Miya Ando was raised among Buddhist priests in a temple in Okayama, Japan. Ando is half Japanese and half RussianAmerican and grew up within two distinct cultures, spending her childhood between Japan and Northern California. She received a Bachelor’s Degree in East Asian Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and attended Yale University to study Buddhist iconography and imagery.

After university, she apprenticed at the master metal smith Hattori Studio in Japan and in 2009 did a residency at Northern California’s Public Art Academy.

Combining traditional techniques of her ancestry with modern industrial technology, Ando skillfully transforms sheets of burnished steel and anodized aluminum into ephemeral, abstract paintings suffused with subtle gradations of color.

The foundation of her practice is the transformation of surfaces. She produces light-reflecting gradients on her metal paintings by applying heat, sandpaper, grinders and acid, irrevocably altering the material’s chemical properties. It’s by an almost meditative daily repetition of these techniques that Ando is able to subtract, reduce and distill her concept until it reaches its simplest form. For Ando, the paradoxical pairing of metal with spiritual subject matter is intentional. She says: “My work is an exploration into the duality of metal and its ability to convey strength and permanence, yet in the same instance absorb shifting color and capture the fleetingness of light.

It reminds us of the transitory nature of all things in life.”

Miya Ando is the recipient of many awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2012. Her work has been exhibited extensively all over the world, including in a recent show curated by Nat Trotman of the Guggenheim Museum and in Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale curated and organized by Sundaram Tagore, in 2015. Ando has produced numerous public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall commemorative sculpture in London built from World Trade Center steel to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11.

Born in Los Angeles, 1978 | Lives and works in New York 6

Winter Dark Grey, 2015, urethane and pigment on aluminum, 36 x 72 inches/91.4 x 183 cm 7

EDWARD BURTYNSKY Photographer Edward Burtynsky chronicles human impact on nature in his disarmingly beautiful images of industrial landscapes around the world. Burtynsky’s painterly, often abstract photographs, frequently shot from an aerial perspective, show the massive scale of environmental devastation. Burtynsky began photographing nature in the early 1980s. His early works were intimate explorations of Canada’s unspoiled landscapes. By the late 1980s, however, he turned away from the quickly disappearing natural terrain, realizing that this was the world we were losing not the one we were to inherit. Instead, he began to investigate industrial incursions into land with arresting results. This image comes from his Water series, a vast body of work begun in 2007 documenting how human interference and consumption are depleting this precious resource.

Edward Burtynsky was recognized with a TED Prize in 2005. In 2006 he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors. He holds six honorary doctorate degrees and his distinctions include the National Magazine Award, the MOCCA Award, the Outreach Award at the Rencontres d’Arles and the Applied Arts Magazine Complete Book Photography Award. In 2006, Edward Burtynsky was the subject of the award-winning documentary Manufactured Landscapes, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. His newest film, Watermark, debuted in 2013.

Edward Burtynsky’s works are in the collections of more than fifty museums worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; The Photographer’s Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, 1955 | Lives and works in Toronto

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Rice Terraces #5, Western Yunnan Province, China, 2015, urethane and pigment on aluminum, 36 x 72 inches/91.4 x 183 cm 9

KAMOLPAN CHOTVICHAI Kamolpan Chotvichai addresses issues of identity and gender in her photo-based self-portraits.

At the same time, she challenges the formal limitations of canvas by meticulously hand-cutting her images, creating sinuous ribbons along various parts of her anatomy. Her goal is to dissolve her form, based on an understanding of the Buddhist teachings of the three characteristics of existence: anatta (the eternal substance that exists beyond the physical self); dukkha (sorrow and dissatisfaction); and anicca (impermanence). She obliterates her identity, eliminating her face and literally stripping away her physical form, in the process relinquishing attachment to her body.

The artist received a Master of Fine Arts degree at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, and has since been awarded numerous scholarships and art prizes, including a Gold Medal at the 58th National Exhibition of Art (2012), Bangkok.

Kamolpan Chotvichai was invited to participate in ON PAPER, a paper art workshop that was part of the ON PAPER—Paper & Nature exhibition at Tama Art University Museum, Tokyo. Group exhibitions include Anthropos Bangkok, Numthong Gallery, 2013; Anthropos: Navigating Human Depth in Thai and Singapore Contemporary Art, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Singapore and New York, 2013; the 4th Young Artists Talent Art Exhibition 2013, Royal Thai Consulate-General, Los Angeles; the 2012 International Women Arts Exhibition, Lights of Women, Gwangju Museum of Art Kum Namro Wing, Metro Gallery, Korea, 2012; and Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale curated and organized by Sundaram Tagore, 2015. Chotvichai was a featured artist in Thailand Eye at the Saatchi Gallery, London, which closed January 5.

Born in Bangkok, 1986 | Lives and works in Bangkok

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Flux, 2015, c-print on hand-cut paper, 29.1 x 44.1 inches/74 x 112 cm 11

CHUN KWANG YOUNG Chun Kwang Young produces sculptural compositions made from small, hand-cut pieces of Styrofoam wrapped in antique mulberry paper sourced from Korean periodicals and academic texts that have been tinted with teas, fruits and flowers. Often massive in scale, Chun’s highly tactile sculptures and three-dimensional canvases are embedded with Korean tradition and history while articulated in a contemporary visual language.

Although he began his career as a painter, Chun started to experiment with paper sculpture in the mid-1990s and over time his work has evolved in complexity and scale. The development of his signature technique was sparked by a childhood memory of seeing medicinal herbs wrapped in mulberry paper tied into small packages. Chun’s work subtly merges the techniques, materials, and traditional sentiment of his Korean heritage with the conceptual freedom he experienced during his Western education.

Chun Kwang Young received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Hongik University, Seoul and a Master of Fine Arts from the Philadelphia College of Art, Pennsylvania. His work is in numerous public collections, including The Rockefeller Foundation and the United Nations, New York; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Society Building, Pennsylvania; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, and the Seoul Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the National Museum of Fine Arts, Malta.

He was named Artist of the Year by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, in 2001 and in 2009 he was awarded the Presidential Prize in the 41st Korean Culture and Art Prize by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

Born in Hongchun, Korea, 1944 | Lives in works in Seongnam, Korea

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Aggregation 11, 2011, mixed media with Korean mulberry paper, 38.5 x 51.5/98 x 131 cm 13

GOLNAZ FATHI Drawing on her extensive training as a calligrapher, Golnaz Fathi uses texts and letters as formal elements, transforming traditional calligraphy into a personal artistic language. She studied classical calligraphy before she established her own style of working, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Graphics from Azad Art University, Tehran, and completing further studies at the Iranian Society of Calligraphy.

Fathi works in fine pen, mostly on varnished raw, rectangular, polyptych canvases, in a limited palette of white, black, red and yellow. She layers the surface of the canvas with thousands of minute marks that echo the curvilinear forms of calligraphic letters and words. These intricate lines coalesce into minimalist compositions that can be read in multiple ways—as landscapes, electronic transmissions or atmospheric phenomena. She refrains from titling her works, which allows the viewer free reign to assign his or her own interpretation.

The basis of Fathi’s practice is siah-mashq, a traditional exercise in which the calligrapher writes cursive letters across the page in a dense, semi-abstract formation. The letters aren’t meant to form words or convey meaning, but rather strengthen the skill of the scribe. Fathi reinterprets this technique, drawing inspiration from Western and Eastern sources, including American Abstract Expressionism, as well as the work of Iranian and Middle Eastern modernists who pioneered the use of the written word as a pictorial element in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By skillfully combining these various elements, she has created a unique visual language with universal appeal.

Golnaz Fathi’s works are in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brighton & Hove Museum, East Sussex, England; Carnegie Mellon University, Doha, Qatar; the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur; the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore; the British Museum, London; the Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; and The Farjam Collection, Dubai.

In 2011, Fathi was chosen as a Young Global Leader Honoree by the World Economic Forum and in 2015, her work was included in Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale curated and organized by Sundaram Tagore.

Born in Tehran, 1972 | Lives and works in Tehran and Paris 14

Untitled, 2014, acrylic and pen on canvas, 57.7 x 49.1 inches/146.6 x 124.7 cm 15

SHI GUOWEI Photographer Shi Guowei explores a range of themes in his practice, but he is best known for images that examine the complex issues that arise when traditional Chinese culture collides with current social and political realities. He skillfully transforms black-and-white images into visually compelling social commentary. In this new series of color-saturated landscapes, the artist draws attention to the effect of industry on nature and the devastating impact of chemical pollution on future generations.

History is an integral part of Shi’s work. He has appropriated iconic paintings from both Eastern and Western art history, such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, into which he injects his own brand of symbolism delineating contemporary Chinese society. He begins by taking digital black-and-white photographs of his subject matter and then transforms them by carefully applying a water-based paint to add color, producing images that create an ambiguous sense of time and space.

With his latest body of work, Shi explores the effect of color on form. Contrary to Chinese tradition, where landscapes are often rendered in the form of a vertical scroll, the artist presents his subjects in a horizontal format. In the hand-painted photograph on view at Art Stage, the highly color-saturated landscape appears otherworldly and foreboding, symbolizing man’s handprint on nature and the ill effects of industrial pollution.

Shi Guowei graduated from Tsinghua University Academy of Arts & Design, Beijing, in 2002 and received a Master’s Degree in photography from Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Germany, in 2006. He has exhibited extensively in museums and cultural venues in Asia and the West, including the Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing; the Soka Art Center, Taiwan; the Hong Kong Arts Centre; the China Cultural Centre Sydney; and the Adelaide Festival Centre, Australia.

His work is also part of the UBS corporate collection.

Born in Luoyang, Henan Province, 1977 | Lives and works in Beijing

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The Lab (A), 2013, hand-colored black-and-white photo, 68.9 x 74.8 inches/175 x 190 cm 17

KIM JOON Kim Joon creates digital prints focusing on themes of desire, memory and fragility. He uses the human body as his canvas, superimposing tattoos and brand logos on hyperrealistic flesh and porcelain fabricated using three-dimensional modeling and rendering software. The artist has long been preoccupied with tattoos, a social taboo in Korean society, which he uses as metaphors for unconscious desires.

Kim’s elaborate tableaux consist of tableware, fragments of idealized nudes and icons of Western pop culture, including guitars, cars and guns. Juxtaposing old and new, traditional Asian motifs and new media, he raises questions about conflicting forces of identity in Korea’s increasingly Westernized culture. By using brand logos and luxury products, he also explores society’s materialism, commodification and a loss of individuality in the era of globalization.

Kim Joon’s works have been exhibited extensively across the globe, including in Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale curated and organized by Sundaram Tagore, in 2015; the Saatchi Gallery, London, where his work was featured on the cover of Korean Eye: Contemporary Korean Art, the book that accompanied the exhibition of the same name; the Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea; and the National Taiwan Museum.

Born in Seoul, 1966 | Lives and works in Seoul

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Ferrari, 2014, digital print, 47.2 x 75.6 inches/120 x 192 cm 19

AARON TAYLOR KUFFNER Aaron Taylor Kuffner creates site-specific sonic, kinetic sculptures comprising an orchestra of handcrafted percussion instruments derived from the Indonesian gamelan and robotic technology.

Kuffner, an American-born conceptual artist, has immersed himself in the study of gamelan music for the last decade. He both preserves and reinterprets this tradition.

Kuffner’s sculptures combine traditional bronze, brass and iron instruments with robotic mallets on ornate mounting systems that are connected to a computer network that transcribe his compositions. The compositions range from solitary reverberations of gongs and singing chimes to full ritual or storytelling orchestrations. Each object, robot, installation and musical composition the artist creates is unique and largely determined by the layout of the site.

Kuffner is a trained painter and metal sculptor, a former street artist and music producer. Upon moving to Indonesia for six years and studying at the Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta, he embraced the traditions of both the gamelan and village life. After returning to the United States, and following an artist-in-residency with the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots in Brooklyn, Kuffner began The Gamelatron Project, which concretized the concept of merging robotic technology and gamelan instruments.

Kuffner has created more than twenty Gamelatron sculptures in the last seven years and his works have been installed worldwide, including in Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale curated and organized by Sundaram Tagore in 2015, and two exhibitions in New York curated by Alanna Heiss, founder and former director of MoMA PS1. He has received grants and sponsorship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Trust for Mutual Understanding, New York; the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Baltimore, Maryland; and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jakarta.

Born in New York, 1975 | Lives and works in New York

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Mantera Hijau, 2014, silicon bronze, pumpkin pine, patinate Balinese gongs, teak, black anodized aluminum mechanical mallets, 102 x 70 x 24 inches/259 x 177.8 x 61 cm 21

YAYOI KUSAMA Over a prolific career of more than six decades, Yayoi Kusama has worked in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, performance and film. Best known for her Infinity Nets—dense, repetitive proliferations of thick dots and loops upon canvas and sculpture— Kusama studied nihonga painting in Japan prior to moving to New York City in 1958. It was in the thriving environment of the city’s postwar international art scene that she produced the first of her Net paintings.

Kusama’s monochrome paintings on canvas measured more than thirty-feet wide and enveloped viewers not only with their sheer scale but also with the obsessive and hypnotic network of dots. These paintings also suggested a void beneath the surface of dots, drawing on a recurring philosophical theme in Kusama’s work that questions the line between illusion and reality, infinity and limitations. Her early paintings were groundbreaking, impressing critics such as Lucy Lippard and inspiring artists including Donald Judd, Eva Hesse and Joseph Cornell. They served as a harbinger for both her signature style and for the Minimalist movement that was to dominate the New York art world, establishing Kusama as a truly original artist.

Having suffered from hallucinations in which the world appears covered in vivid nets and dots, Kusama’s work is also rooted in this persisting psychological trauma (since 1977 Kusama has willingly lived in a psychiatric institution in Japan), serving as both inspiration and outlet. Kusama went on to incorporate the dots motif with striking bodies of work, from soft-sculpture phallic forms to provocative art “happenings” staged across New York City and from rooms made up of mirrored walls to monumental outdoor pumpkin sculptures.

Yayoi Kusama’s work is in the collection of museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Major outdoor sculptures have been commissioned for both public and private institutions including the Benesse Art Site of Naoshima, the Fukuoka Municipal Museum of Art and the Matsumoto City Museum of Art, Japan; Lille Europe train station, France; Pyeonghwa Park, South Korea; and Beverly Gardens Park, California.

Born in Matsumoto City, Japan, 1929 | Lives and works in Tokyo 22

Heart, 2007, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 57.5 x 57.5 inches/146 x 146 cm 23

Red Pumpkin, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 5.6 x 7 inches/14.2 x 18 cm

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JANE LEE Jane Lee is best known for her inventive techniques and innovative use of materials. She explores the very nature of the way paintings are constructed by treating the components of a painting— stretcher, canvas, and the paint itself—in new ways.

The surfaces of her paintings are highly tactile and sensuous, often dimensional enough to be considered sculptures. In some cases, Lee dispenses with canvas altogether extruding acrylic paint directly on wooden stretchers, which results in a hollow, three-dimensional object, with the paint at the bottom seemingly giving in to gravity. Many of her works appear to move: they fall, unroll, hang or slide suggesting, in the process, everyday objects (a hose, a carpet, a window).

Operating in a post-colonial Southeast Asian context, Lee re-examines the significance of Western painting practices while asserting her own culture. Pushing the boundaries of the medium, her work echoes the breakdown of cultural barriers in the era of globalization and affirms the universality of contemporary art.

Jane Lee has won numerous awards, including a Celeste Prize for painting in 2011. She was a finalist for the 2007 Sovereign Asian Art Prize and was the first recipient of the Singapore Art Exhibition International Residency Prize in 2007. Her work was showcased at the Singapore Biennale 2008, Collectors’ Stage at the Singapore Art Museum in 2011 and in the Southeast Asia Platform, a curated exhibition of cutting-edge work organized by region, at Art Stage Singapore in 2014. In 2015, her work was selected for Prudential Singapore Eye, one of the largest surveys of Singapore’s contemporary art to date, held at the ArtScience Museum and Medium at Large, a year-long exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum. Her work is now on view in the solo exhibition Freely, Freely at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, where she recently completed a residency.

Jane Lee has a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Diploma in Fashion from LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries in Asia and Europe, among them the Hong Kong Arts Centre and the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Born in Singapore, 1963 | Lives and works in Singapore 26

Portrait #12, 2015, acrylic paint and heavy gel on fiberglass, 40.1 x 40.1 x 2.4 inches/102 x 102 x 6 cm 27

Portrait #11, 2015, acrylic paint and heavy gel on fiberglass, 40.1 x 40.1 x 2.4 inches/102 x 102 x 6 cm

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HASSAN MASSOUDY Classically trained calligrapher Hassan Massoudy inscribes oversized letters in vibrant colors on paper or canvas to create visually compelling works that bring traditional Arabic script into a contemporary context. Massoudy sources words from Eastern and Western authors, poets and philosophers. He selects a passage, which he writes at the bottom of a sheet of paper, then extracts a single word, enlarging it to monumental proportions over the entire surface of the paper.

In accordance with tradition, Massoudy makes his own tools and inks, but breaks from the Arabic custom of using only black ink by incorporating a bold palette of blues, greens, yellows and reds.

Although executed with the utmost control, his letters are gestural, fluid and charged with energy, as he skillfully transforms the written word into a pictorial element.

Massoudy studied classical calligraphy in Baghdad. He moved to France in 1969, continuing his education at the L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

He has shown his work at The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.; the British Museum, London; Musée d’Avranches, France; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Abbaye de Trizay and the Palais des Congrès de Grasse, France. His work is in the collections of The British Museum, London; Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore; and Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. He has also shown at the Sharjah Biennale 11, 2013.

Born in Najaf, Iraq, 1944 | Lives and works in Paris

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Untitled, 2012, ink and pigment on canvas, 29.5 x 21.7 inches/75 x 55.2 cm 31

RICARDO MAZAL Ricardo Mazal explores themes of life, death, transformation and regeneration through a multidisciplinary approach to painting that includes photography and digital technology.

In 2004, the artist embarked on a trilogy examining the sacred burial rituals of three cultures, continents, and time periods. He began at the Mayan tomb of the Red Queen in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, then traveled to the FriedWald forest cemetery in Odenwald, Germany. His final series was inspired by the sky burials and prayer flags of Mount Kailash, Tibet’s holiest summit.

Mazal conveys his experience of these spiritual sites through an iterative process of abstraction, building up the painting from photographs gathered in situ and digital manipulation. Applying and scraping away oil paint with foam-rubber blades, he creates works layered with luminous passages of color.

Ricardo Mazal’s work is included in the collections of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Museo de Arte Abstracto Manuel Felguérez, Zacatecas, Mexico; Maeght Foundation, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France; and Deutsche Bank, New York and Germany. In 2006, a retrospective of his work was held at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City. In 2015, the artist’s work was included in Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale curated and organized by Sundaram Tagore and he had his second solo show at Mexico City’s Centro Cultural Estación Indianilla.

Born in Mexico City, 1950 | Lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico and New York

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Black Mountain MK5, 2014, oil on linen, 66 x 98.5 inches/167.7 x 250 cm 33

STEVE MCCURRY Magnum photographer Steve McCurry is best known for his evocative color images, many of which have become modern icons. Born in 1950 in a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he studied film at Pennsylvania State University. After graduating cum laude he worked as a photojournalist for a local newspaper. Upon visiting India in 1978, the first of countless visits, McCurry embarked on what were to become the formative years of his astonishing career. As the Soviet-Afghan war commenced and Western journalists were prohibited from entering Afghanistan, McCurry crossed the border from Pakistan. He became the first photographer to bring the world images of the Afghan conflict.

McCurry has since travelled extensively around the globe for his photographic projects, covering areas of international and civil conflict and documenting ancient traditions, vanishing cultures and contemporary culture. In each of his images he transcends cultural boundaries to capture the essence of human struggle, joy and unguarded moments.

Steve McCurry has been honored with some of the most prestigious awards in the industry, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal, National Press Photographers Award, and an unprecedented four first-prize awards from the World Press Photo contest. In 2013 the Minister of French Culture appointed him Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. Most recently, the Royal Photographic Society in London awarded McCurry the Centenary Medal for Lifetime Achievement. McCurry has scores of book and magazine covers and countless exhibitions to his credit.

A solo exhibition of his work is currently on view at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Singapore.

Born in Philadelphia, 1950 | Lives and works in New York

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Dust storm, Rajasthan, India, 1983, digital c-print, 60 x 40 inches/152.4 x 101.6 cm 35

Procession of nuns, Rangoon, Burma, 1994, digital c-print, 40 x 60 inches/101.6 x 152.4 cm 36

A young monk runs along the wall over his peers at the Shaolin Monastery in Henan Province, China, 2004, digital c-print, 40 x 60 inches/101.6 x 152.4 cm 37

ANTHONY POON Anthony Poon was a leading abstract artist and sculptor from Singapore. Poon began his art training at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied between 1964 and 1967, focusing on modernist techniques such as Cubism. In 1967, he enrolled at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, followed by Bradford Regional College of Art. It was during this time that Poon became aware of progressive abstract styles being pioneered in the West, such as hard-edged, geometric abstraction, focusing on line, geometry and color theory. His own work changed radically and he began creating curvilinear repetitive shapes, which became known as the Kite series, and then the Wave series.

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, Poon began experimenting with sculptural three-dimensional creations. This led to the groundbreaking 3D Waves works, which transformed the physical surface of the canvas into undulating planes and troughs. Poon’s new direction echoed the spatial investigations made by artists such as Lucio Fontana and Agostino Bonalumi, however Poon’s re-creation of the canvas framework was more drastic and sculptural due to his keen experiments with metal and aluminium materials, and innate sense of perfectionism. Poon also started to work on free-standing sculptures and was awarded his first large-scale public commission in 1985. From the mid-1990s onward, Poon was almost entirely devoted to creating sculptures and hanging installations, taking on monumental public commissions from the Singapore government and other corporate bodies. His sculptural works are prolific and many of these can be seen within the Singapore landscape today.

Poon was the recipient of numerous awards, including the First Prize in the United Overseas Bank Painting of the Year, 1983. In 1990, Poon was awarded the Cultural Medallion, Singapore’s highest honour for achievement in the arts. In 2009, the National Gallery of Singapore held a major retrospective for the artist, featuring a chronological survey of his major paintings and sculptures.

Poon’s works are held in prominent private, corporate and Singapore museum collections.

Born in Singapore, 1945–2006

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Blue Waves, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 55.9 x 55.9 inches/142 x 142 cm 39

SEBASTIAO SALGADO Sebastião Salgado has made it his life’s work to document the impact of globalization on humankind. His black-and-white prints lay bare some of the bleakest moments of modern history as well as some of the planet’s last remaining wonders.

In the past three decades, Salgado has traveled to more than one hundred countries for his photographic projects and devotes years to each series in order to grasp the full scope of his topic. Breaking down barriers, he lives with his subjects for weeks, immersing himself in their environments. Salgado describes this approach as photographing from inside the circle. Each of his images is infused with empathy and respect for his subjects.

The images on display come from his most recent series, Genesis, which he began in 2004 as an antidote of sorts to the harrowing scenes encountered on previous projects. With the aim of reviving hope, Genesis pays homage to nature left unscathed by humankind.

Sebastião Salgado began his career as an economist. It was not until the early 1970s, after his wife and frequent collaborator loaned him a camera, that he embarked on a career as a photographer.

Salgado has had solo shows at the Barbican Art Gallery, London; the International Center of Photography, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Photographers’ Gallery and the Natural History Museum, London; and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

Among his many honors, Salgado has been named a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2015, his work was included in Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale curated and organized by Sundaram Tagore.

In 1998 Sebastião and Lélia Salgado founded the non-profit Instituto Terra, an organization focused on reforestation and environmental education. Since the 1990s, they have been restoring a portion of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil.

Born in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1944 | Lives and works in Paris 40

Chinstrap Penguins on an Iceberg, betwenn Zavodovski and Visokoi Istands, South Sandwich Islands, 2009, gelatin silver print, 36 x 50 inches/91.4 x 127 cm 41

Mentawai Climbing a Giant Tree to Collect Durian Fruit, Siberut Island, West Sumatra, Indonesia, 2008, gelatin silver print, 60 x 81 inches/200 x 146 cm

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HIROSHI SENJU Japanese-born painter Hiroshi Senju is noted worldwide for his sublime waterfall and cliff images, which are often monumental in scale. He combines a minimalist visual language rooted in Abstract Expressionism with ancient painting techniques unique to Japan.

Senju is widely recognized as one of the few contemporary masters of the thousand-yearold nihonga style of painting, using pigments made from minerals, ground stone, shell and corals suspended in animal-hide glue. Evoking a deep sense of calm, his waterfalls, which he creates with incredible delicacy by pouring paint onto mulberry paper on board, conjure not only the appearance of rushing water, but its sound, smell and feel.

Hiroshi Senju was the first Asian artist to receive an Honorable Mention Award at the Venice Biennale (1995), and has participated in numerous exhibitions including the Beauty Project in 1996 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, London; The New Way of Tea, curated by Alexandra Munroe, at the Japan Society and the Asia Society in New York in 2002; Paintings on Fusuma at the Tokyo National Museum in 2003; and Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale curated and organized by Sundaram Tagore, in 2015.

Public installations include seventy-seven murals at Jukoin, a sub-temple of Daitokuji, a Zen Buddhist temple in Japan, and a large waterfall at Haneda Airport International Passenger Terminal in Tokyo. The Benesse Art Site of Naoshima Island also houses two large-scale installations.

Senju’s work is in the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; The Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan; the Yamatane Museum of Art, Tokyo; Tokyo University of the Arts; and the Kushiro Art Museum, Hokkaido, Japan. In 2009, Skira Editore published a monograph of his work titled Hiroshi Senju.

The Hiroshi Senju Museum Karuizawa, designed by Ryue Nishizawa, opened in 2011 in Japan.

Born in Tokyo, 1958 | Lives and works in New York

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Cliff #27, 2015, natural, acrylic pigments on Japanese mulberry paper, 68.9 x 37.8 inches/175 x 96 cm 45

Waterfall, 2012, acrylic and fluorescent pigments on Japanese mulberry paper, 63.8 x 179 inches/162 x 455 cm 46

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Suijin, 2015, natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper, 102 x 228.9 inches/259 x 581.4 cm 48

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DONALD SULTAN Painter, printmaker and sculptor Donald Sultan takes as his subject fruit and flowers, which have been depicted by artists across cultures throughout history. Yet Sultan says his work, often categorized as still-life painting, is first and foremost abstract. Challenging conventions of materiality and technique, he transforms Western traditions of painting into a truly contemporary venture using materials gathered from everyday life.

Sultan juxtaposes classical approaches to painting with industrial materials including plaster, tar, Spackle and enamel. Creating layers on Masonite instead of canvas, he cuts and strips away sections, outlining and embossing his chosen shapes and forms before painting over them. He places equal emphasis on positive and negative space, enabling an element of ampleness to translate to viewers. Sultan describes his work as “heavy structure, holding fragile meaning” and it hovers between industry and nature.

Donald Sultan received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2002 he was a visiting artist-in-residence at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. His work is included in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. A monograph of Sultan’s thirty-year career Donald Sultan: Theater of the Object (The Vendome Press) was published in 2008. In 2010 Sultan was honored with the North Carolina Award, the highest honor the state can bestow upon a citizen.

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, 1951 | Lives and works in New York

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Black and Whites, Jan 20, 2015, enamel, tar and spackle on tile over masonite, 96 x 96 inches/243.8 x 243.8 cm 51

LEE WAISLER Over his long career, Lee Waisler has worked in both a radically abstract style and explored figuration. His early works from the 1960s were socially and politically charged, dealing with momentous historical events such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.

He then moved into abstraction, incorporating a multiplicity of forms, textures and perspectives.

It was after a journey to India in the mid-1990s that his works moved toward figuration. Driven by empathy for the human spirit, he turned to portraiture full-force in 2005, focusing on cultural and political icons who have defined the modern world. Distilled, linear, almost gestural in nature, these portraits aim to transcend the subjects’ iconic status.

“When the work is successful, the viewers can project themselves onto the subject,” says Waisler.

“Hopefully that connection—that moment when the viewers identify with the subject—will inspire them to act more humanely toward one and other.”

Lee Waisler’s work is included in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; and the Indian Museum, Kolkata.

Born in Los Angeles, 1938 | Lives and works in Los Angeles

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Lee Kuan Yew, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 36 inches/122 x 91.4 cm 53

SUSAN WEIL Susan Weil is fascinated by the relationship between seeing and knowing, and how to represent time, motion and language. She often fractures the picture plane in her work, deconstructing and reconstructing images using a range of materials including collage, blueprint, and paint on recycled canvas, acrylic and wood.

Coming of age at the centre of the New York School with its eclectic cultural influences and interdisciplinary experimentation, Weil studied under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College.

Her peers included Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. But unlike her contemporaries, Weil has never been afraid to pursue figuration and reference reality, drawing inspiration from nature, literature, photographs and her personal history, embracing serious and playful elements in her work.

Over the years, she cultivated strong interests in the great modern Irish author James Joyce, the Persian poet Rumi, and the pioneering English-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

Weil also studied in Paris and has exhibited in Sweden and Germany. Otherwise, however, she says, “I don’t travel a lot, but I travel in my mind.” She concludes: “I stand on a Susan spot. The world and the art world shift and change around me. I also deepen and build. It is a special perspective to watch this double cycling.”

Weil is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work is included in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Helsinki City Art Museum; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In 2010, Skira Editore published Susan Weil: Moving Pictures, a comprehensive monograph documenting her large and diverse body of art, livres d’artistes and poetry.

Thirty years of Susan Weil’s poems and drawings were on view at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, North Carolina, in the first half of 2015.

Born in New York, 1930 | Lives and works in New York 54

Whoosh, 2009, blueprint, 52.5 x 83.5 inches/133.4 x 212.1 cm 55

YANG XUN Yang Xun, one of China’s most prominent and influential young artists, infuses his paintings with historical references and iconic imagery that serve as a visual and metaphorical link between contemporary life and traditional Chinese culture—a history, as the artist describes it, which is both real and illusory to his generation.

Although Yang Xun’s paintings are romantic and ethereal in nature, they are rendered with near photographic precision. Framed in darkness with circular apertures of light that bring the subject matter into focus, they evoke a dream-like landscape, offering the viewer a portal to another place and time.

Bamboo Curtain Paper-Cut for Window (2014), from his Peony Pavilion series, comprises an eerily illuminated window partly obscured by a bamboo plant, a symbol commonly referenced by the literati. Works from this series are his subjective imaginings of a timeworn culture marginalized by modernity.

Yang Xun received his undergraduate degree from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chonqing, in 2005. He has exhibited extensively in both group and solo shows across the globe, including at the Louise Blouin Foundation, London; the Musée des Arts Asiatiques, Nice; the China Cultural Centre, Sydney; the Czech National Gallery, Prague; Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; the Poly Art Museum, Beijing; and 501 Contemporary Art Museum, Chongqing.

Born in Chongqing, 1981 | Lives and works in Beijing and Chongqing

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Peony Pavilion - Bamboo Curtain Paper - Cut for Window, 2014, oil on canvas, 47.2 x 28 inches/120 x 72.5 cm 57

ZHENG LU The gravity-defying sculptural works of Zheng Lu are deeply influenced by his study of traditional Chinese calligraphy, an art form he practiced growing up in a literary family. Zheng Lu uses language as a pictorial element, inscribing the surface of his stainless-steel sculptures with thousands of Chinese characters derived from texts and poems of historical significance.

To create his metal sculptures, Zheng Lu begins with a plaster base. He then laser-cuts characters into metal, and in a fashion similar to linking chainmail, the pictographs are connected and heated so that they can be shaped to the support. The resulting works are technically astonishing; their fluid, animated forms are charged with the energy (qi) of the universe, belying their steel composite.

Zheng Lu graduated from Lu Xun Fine Art Academy, Shenyang, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture in 2003. In 2007, he received his Masters of Fine Arts in sculpture from the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, while also attending an advanced study program at The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris in 2006. Zheng Lu has participated in numerous exhibitions in China and abroad, including at the Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem; The Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, Moscow; Musée Océanographique, Monaco; Musée Maillol, Paris; the National Museum of China, Beijing; the Long Museum and the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai.

Born in Chi Feng, Inner Mongolia, 1978 | Lives and works in Beijing

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Water Dripping - Splashing, 2014, stainless steel, 181.1 x 131.9 x 114.2 inches/460 x 335 x 290 cm, edition 1 of 4 59

SUNDARAM TAGORE GALLERIES new york new york hong kong singapore

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President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Hong Kong: Faina Derman Director, Singapore: Melanie Taylor Designer: Russell Whitehead Contributing editors: Kieran Doherty and Esther Bland Art consultants: Teresa Kelley, Gabrielle Mattox, Raj Sen, Addison Ying, Chelsea Zhao

WWW.SUNDARAMTAGORE.COM Text © 2016 Sundaram Tagore Gallery Photographs © Sundaram Tagore Gallery All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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