Asia Art Archive’s Annual Auction: Beyond the Fold
Asia Art Archive’s annual fundraiser will take place at the end of October 2021, with 48 works up for bid. Here we highlight the auction’s range of powerful paper-based pieces by women artists
Patty Chang, Milk Debt (Hong Kong), 2020. Letterpress on French paper, Speckletone paper
When American performance artist Patty Chang asked students at the University of Hong Kong about their greatest fears, she received a flood of replies. They shared concerns about their language dying out, the world ending, and feeling inadequate. Last year, she had these notes letterpress printed onto recycled paper, which she then folded into origami shapes. The resulting work is a highlight of Asia Art Archive’s upcoming annual fundraising auction, which features a range of powerful paper-based pieces by women artists.
For Chang, working with paper was a natural choice as she wanted to create a close connection with viewers. The origami forms were an extension of her video project Milk Debt, which features women pumping breast milk while reciting their fears. While the videos are compelling, the paper works have an even greater impact. Chang compares them to gifts that can be held in your palm, unfolded and read like a letter. ‘I think it’s a really intimate piece,’ she says. ‘When a viewer reads the words to themselves it’s an act of internalising the language. Since most of the language is in the first person, the fears are of others, but also of oneself.’
Other paper pieces in the auction have a similar visceral effect, such as a blood-red drawing by Indian artist Mithu Sen. The mixed-media work Untitled (2021) depicts a foetus-like form with an umbilical cord reaching up to connect to a tree with a female body emerging from the branches. By embroidering the paper with delicate stiches and adding runny blots of crimson paint, Sen vividly calls to mind the fragility and physicality of childbirth.
The female body was also a source of inspiration for renowned Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak’s Number 5 (2020). From hand-torn stacks of mulberry paper she has created a series of tactile sculptures that at once evoke breasts and Buddhist stupas. Displayed in a bronze vessel, the organic paper forms look almost like a religious food offering, blurring boundaries between the sacred and the sensual.
Meanwhile, Singapore-born artist Simryn Gill uses paper to explore the natural world. In Studies from Maria’s Garden: Bird of Paradise; Plum; Loquat & Persimmon (2021), Gill pays tribute to her late neighbour’s beloved garden, which was demolished after her death. She created the drawings by using rollers to apply etching ink onto foliage from the garden. ‘The process required these plant parts be wrestled, beaten almost into interpretations of flatness by wrapping and pulling and pushing the paper down to make a surface suitable for rubbing,’ Gill explains. ‘The works are made from a close, almost visceral interaction between plants, ink, paper, tools held in your hands, and your fingertips.’ The results are ethereal prints with feathery marks and subtle sap stains that celebrate the vitality of nature.
Other highlights include Chinese artist Song Dong’s Fireworks under the midsummer moon with Western porridge (2014), realised playfully in edible sauce, and Taiwanese artist Charwei Tsai’s meditative abstract painting We Came Whirling Out of Nothingness XII–VII (2021), made with natural pigments traditionally used for medicinal purposes.
Far from modest or unassuming, the paper-based works in the Asia Art Archive auction push the boundaries of the medium with exciting, thought-provoking and often surprising results.
Text / Payal Uttam
Mithu Sen, Untitled, 2021. Mixed media and collage on handmade paper. Unique, generously donated by the artist
Pinaree Sanpitak, Number 5, 2020. Unniyappam bronze pan, Thai, Laotian, Japanese mulberry paper, needles. Unique, generously donated by the artist
Simryn Gill, Studies from Maria's Garden: Bird of Paradise; Plum; Loquat & Persimmon, 2021. Ink on paper. Unique, generously donated by the artist and Tracy Williams, Ltd., New York
