Visual Art

Roger Boyce explores through lucid, evocative prose the photographic still lifes of New Zealand artist Fiona Pardington. Casting an eye back across the history of painting, Boyce addresses the rich pathos of Pardington’s photography and its visually arresting forms. He describes in them an audacious “through a glass darkly” veneration of things and their inviolable circumstance, an amor fati.

Yao Jui-Chung is one of Taiwan’s most prolific and esteemed contemporary artists. In 2020, White Fungus editor Ron Hanson interviewed Yao for a major profile on the occasion of the artist’s mid-career retrospective, Republic of Cynic, at C-LAB in Taipei. The feature was to be published in a new online Japanese art magazine commissioned by a Tokyo art collector. After the project was aborted due to a clash over the publication’s title, this profile sat dormant in our archives for almost four years. It has now been published for the first time.

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.