THE ART OF PAPER
THE ART OF PAPER NOVE M B E R 15–DECE M B E R 15, 2018 SU N DAR AM TAGOR E CH E LSEA
GALLERY MISSION Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. With spaces in Hong Kong, Singapore and New York City (in Chelsea and on Madison Avenue), 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.
ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA Anila Quayyum Agha examines issues of global politics, cultural identity, mass media and gender roles in her multi-disciplinary practice. The Pakistani-American artist is best known for her immersive, large-scale light installations in which she laser-cuts elaborate patterns into three-dimensional cubes. Suspended and lit from within, the cubes cast lace-like, floor-to-ceiling shadows that completely transform the surrounding environment, alluding to the richly ornamented public spaces such as mosques that Agha was excluded from as a female growing up in Lahore. In addition to her suspended light installations, Agha also creates wall-mounted sculptural works, including her Flowers series (2018) that explores love and loss inspired by the mixed emotions she experienced following her son’s wedding and mother’s passing, events that happened in the same year. Although these works may appear decorative, they are imbued with meaning, from the floral patterns that express the beauty and femininity of her mother, to the metallic threads commonly used for wedding dresses in Pakistan. The visual elements collectively amplify the interplay between the matrimonial and the funereal, and by extension, the larger cycle of life. To produce these elaborate works, Agha laser-cuts vibrantly hued encaustic paper with intricate patterns and adorns them with light-reflecting embroidery and beads. These exquisitely detailed drawings are framed within shadow boxes, allowing light to pass through the cut-outs and cast patterned shadows in a manner similar to her large-scale light installations. The framing and shadows allow these works to transcend their two-dimensionality. Anila Quayyum Agha has an M.F.A.in fiber arts from the University of North Texas. She has exhibited her work across the globe, including in the 2018 Kansas City Biennale, curated by Dan Cameron; the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; the Dallas Contemporary Art Museum, Texas; the National Museum of Sculpture, Valladolid, Spain; and the Cheongju Craft Biennale, Korea. Her work is in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan; and the Kiran Nader Art Museum, New Delhi. In 2014, Agha was awarded the popular and juried vote at ArtPrize for her installation Intersections, a first in the history of the Grand Rapids-based competition. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, 1965 | Lives and works in Indianapolis, Indiana
Flowers (Black and Gold Cutout Diamond), 2017, mixed media on paper (encaustic gold square stitching and square laser cuts, gold and black beads on black paper), 34 x 30 inches/86.4 x 76.2 cm
Flowers (Green and White Squares), 2017, mixed media on paper (encaustic green square with white stitching in center), 29.5 x 29.5 inches/75 x 75 cm
Flowers (Garnet Diamond), 2017, mixed media on paper (encaustic garnet square with clear and garnet beading), 29.5 x 29.5 inches/75 x 75 cm
Flowers (Mustard Yellow), 2017, mixed media on paper (encaustic mustard-yellow flower with gold beading), 30 x 22 inches/76.2 x 55.9 cm
MIYA ANDO A descendant of Bizen sword makers, New York-based artist Miya Ando spent her childhood among Buddhist priests in a temple in Okayama, Japan, and later, in California. Best known for her sublime metal paintings, Ando combines the traditional techniques of her ancestry with modern industrial technology, skillfully transforming sheets of metal into ephemeral, abstract paintings suffused with color. The focus of Ando’s practice is the intrinsic connection between the human sphere and the natural world. “My interest is in creating work that allows viewers to experience a relationship to nature and to be truly in the moment as they encounter the transitory qualities of light,” Ando says. “I want to draw people into a slowed-down environment with work that is experiential and employs the visual vocabulary of natural phenomena and transformation.” Transformation—both in the physical and the metaphysical sense—is the unifying element in all of Ando’s work. To produce the light-reflecting gradients on her metal paintings, Ando applies heat, sandpaper, grinders, acid and patinas to the metal canvases, 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. Miya Ando has a Bachelor of Arts degree in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and attended Yale University to study Buddhist iconography and imagery. She apprenticed with the master metalsmith Hattori Studio in Japan, followed by a residency at Northern California’s Public Art Academy. Her work has been shown worldwide, including at the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, California; in a show curated by Nat Trotman of the Guggenheim Museum; at the Queens Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the American University Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Nassau County Museum, New York. In 2015, a large-scale installation, Emptiness the Sky (Shou-Sugi-Ban), was included in Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the 56th Venice Biennale. Miya Ando has produced numerous public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall sculpture in London built from World Trade Center steel to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, for which she was nominated for a DARC Award in Best Light Art Installation. Awards include the PollockKrasner Foundation Grant, 2012. Born in Los Angeles, 1973 | Lives and works in New York
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Gekkou (August) Moonlight 15, 2018, silver-leaf pigment on Arches paper, 41 x 29 inches/104.1 x 73.7 cm 13
Gekkou (August) Moonlight 5, 2018, silver-leaf pigment on Arches paper, 41 x 29 inches/104.1 x 73.7 cm 14
Gekkou (August) Moonlight 4, 2018, silver-leaf pigment on Arches paper, 41 x 29 inches/104.1 x 73.7 cm 15
Gekkou (August) Moonlight 2, 2018, silver-leaf pigment on Arches paper, 41 x 29 inches/104.1 x 73.7 cm
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OLIVIA FRASER Born in London, brought up in the Highlands of Scotland, Olivia Fraser has lived and worked in India since 1989. She combines the techniques, vocabulary, mineral and plant pigments and handmade paper (wasli) of traditional Indian miniatures with forms and ideas inspired by modern Western art, including the archetypal shapes, colors and rhythms in the works of Kazimir Malevich and the Suprematists as well as in the Op Art of Bridget Riley and Sol LeWitt. Her experience as an immigrant physically entering the Indian landscape is reflected in her use of landscape as a starting point in many of her works. Fraser has an affinity with the manner in which topography is depicted in miniatures: “This is a visual language through which I feel I can communicate, and tear down the frontier of foreignness to arrive at a sense of belonging.” Olivia Fraser graduated with a Master’s degree in modern language from the University of Oxford and spent a year at Wimbeldon Art College before settling in India. Since then she has studied traditional Indian miniature painting techniques under Jaipuri and Delhi masters. She follows in the footsteps of her ancestor, James Baillie Fraser, who painted India, its monuments and landscape in the early 1800s. The artist’s work is included in public and private collections in Australia, France, India, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Museum of Sacred Art, Septon, Belgium. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in India, China and the United Kingdom. In spring 2015, her work was included in Forms of Devotion: The Spiritual in Indian Art at Lalit Kala Galleries, Rabindra Bhavan, in New Delhi, an exhibition organized by Lalit Kala Akademi (National Academy of Art) India and the Museum of Sacred Art, Belgium and Italy. Born in London, 1965 | Lives and works in New Delhi
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The Sacred Seas, 2015, stone pigment and Arabic gum on handmade Sanganer paper, 26.75 x 26.75 inches/67.9 x 67.9 cm 19
Chakra, 2015, stone pigment, Arabic gum and gold leaf on handmade Sanganer paper, 72 x 72 inches/182.9 x 182.9 cm
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RICARDO MAZAL Ricardo Mazal, one of Mexico’s most prominent contemporary artists, explores themes of life, death, transformation and regeneration through a multidisciplinary approach that includes painting, photography and digital technology. The artist’s most recent body of work, Violet, is a series of highly distilled color studies on canvas that amplify his longstanding process of reduction, focusing on a singular subject in what is his most refined—and personal—presentation to date. Mazal’s previous studies include a large body of multidisciplinary work inspired by investigations into sacred burial rituals. With each investigation, Mazal has honed his vision, reducing and distilling his concepts to their simplest form. Here he is showing abstract, photo-based prints of tumbleweeds he shot at night using a flash. For Mazal, photography is an important impetus to his painting process, which he likens to a bridge that links reality and abstraction. 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 56th Venice Biennale and he had his second solo show at Mexico City’s Centro Cultural Estación Indianilla. A retrospective, Ricardo Mazal: A Fifteen Year Survey, opened at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, New Mexico, in June 2018. Born in Mexico City, 1950 | Lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and New York
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Noche Transformada #5, 2013, archival pigment ink print on paper, 28 x 24 inches/71.1 x 61 cm 23
Noche Transformada #6, 2013, archival pigment ink print on paper, 28 x 24 inches/71.1 x 61 cm 24
Noche Transformada #7, 2013, archival pigment ink print on paper, 28 x 24 inches/71.1 x 61 cm 25
Noche Transformada #8, 2013, archival pigment ink print on paper, 28 x 24 inches/71.1 x 61 cm
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SOHAN QADRI The late artist, poet and Tantric guru Sohan Qadri was one of the few modern painters of note deeply engaged with spirituality. He abandoned representation early on, incorporating Tantric symbolism and philosophy into his vibrantly colored minimalist works. He began his process by covering the surface of heavy paper with structural effects by soaking it in liquid and carving it in stages with sharp tools while applying inks and dyes. As a result, he transformed the paper from a flat surface into a three-dimensional medium. The repetition of careful incisions on the paper was an integral part of his meditation. Having lived and worked in more than a dozen countries, Qadri was one of India’s many post-Independence artists who formed a sprawling diaspora. He once said, “I did not want to confine myself to one place, nation and community….My approach to life has been universal, and so is my art.” Qadri was initiated into yogic practice at age seven in India, his birthplace. In 1965, he left India and began a series of travels that took him to East Africa, North America and Europe. After settling in Copenhagen in the 1970s, Qadri participated in more than forty solo shows, in Mumbai, Vienna, Brussels, London, Oslo, Stockholm, Montreal, Toronto, Los Angeles and New York. Sohan Qadri’s works are included in the British Museum, London; the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts; the Rubin Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; as well as the private collections of Cirque du Soleil, Heinrich Böll and Dr. Robert Thurman. In 2011, Skira Editore published the monograph Sohan Qadri: The Seer. Born in Chachoki, Punjab, India, 1932; died 2011 | Lived and worked in Copenhagen and Toronto
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Nitya, 2008, ink and dye on paper, 55 x 39 inches/139.7 x 99.1 cm 29
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-year-old nihonga style of painting, using mulberry paper, pigments made from minerals, ground stone, shell and corals suspended in animal-hide glue. 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 New Way of Tea, curated by Alexandra Munroe, at the Japan Society and the Asia Society in New York, 2002; Paintings on Fusuma at the Tokyo National Museum, 2003; and Frontiers Reimagined at the Venice Biennale, 2015. He was recently awarded the Foreign Minister’s Commendation from the Japanese government for contributions to art. In May 2017 he was honored with the Isamu Noguchi Award. Public installations include seventy-seven murals at Juko-in, a sub-temple of Daitoku-ji, a Zen Buddhist temple in Japan, and a monumental waterfall at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. The Benesse Art Site of Naoshima Island also houses two large-scale installations. The artist has just completed forty-four fusuma for the Kongōbu-ji temple at Mount Koya, Japan. Senju’s work is in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan; the Yamatane Museum of Art, Tokyo; Tokyo University of the Arts; and the Kushiro Art Museum, Hokkaido. In 2009, Skira Editore published a monograph of his work titled Hiroshi Senju. The Hiroshi Senju Museum Karuizawa in Japan opened in 2011. Born in Tokyo, 1958 | Lives and works in New York 30
Waterfall, 2018, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 55.2 x 50 inches/140 x 127 cm 31
At World’s End #21, 2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 57.3 x 35.3 inches/145.6 x 89.4 cm
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CHUN KWANG YOUNG Chun Kwang Young, whose work is on view at the Brooklyn Museum in the solo exhibition Kwang Young Chun: Aggregations (November 16, 2018 through July 2019), began his career as a painter. He experimented with paper sculpture in the mid-1990s and over time his work has evolved in complexity and scale. The development of his signature technique, on view here, 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 B.F.A. degree from Hongik University, Seoul. and a M.F.A. 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. The exhibition Kwang Young Chun: Aggregations opens at the Brooklyn Museum November 16, 2018. Born 1944 in Hongchun, Korea | Lives in works in Seongnam, Korea
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Aggregation 14 - JA005 Blue, 2014, mixed media with Korean mulberry paper, 60 x 76.8 inches/152 x 195 cm 35
Aggregation 18 - AU048, 2018, mixed media with Korean mulberry paper, 33.5 x 33.5 inches/85 x 85 cm
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Aggregation 10 - JL020 Red, 2010, mixed media with Korean mulberry paper, 44.9 x 76.8 inches/114 x 195 cm
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S U N D A R A M TA G O R E G A L L E R I E S new york new york hong kong singapore
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President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Sales director, Singapore: Melanie Taylor Registrar: Julia Occhiogrosso Designer: Russell Whitehead Contributing editor: Kieran Doherty
W W W. S U N D A R A M TA G O R E . C O M Text © 2018 Sundaram Tagore Gallery Photographs © 2018 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. Cover: Anila Quayyum Agha, Flowers (Mustard Yellow) detail, 2017, mixed media on paper (encaustic mustard-yellow flower with gold beading), 30 x 22 inches/76.2 x 55.9 cm