Schimmel is vice president and
partner of the new Los Angeles
gallery Hauser Wirth &
Schimmel, which opens this
month with “Revolution in the
Making: Abstract Sculpture
by Women, 1947–2016.”
On page 68, Schimmel and
co-curator Jenni Sorkin take
Art+Auction on a tour of the
show’s highlights, including
work by Louise Bourgeois, Eva
Hesse, and Hannah Wilke,
among others. An avid skier and
diver, Schimmel’s curatorial
career traces back four decades,
and includes his having served
as senior curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and
chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. During
his tenure at moca, from 1990 to 2012, he oversaw major retro-
spectives for Robert Rauschenberg, Takashi Murakami, Laura Owens,
and Willem de Kooning, as well as numerous thematic exhibitions.
In 2010 President Barack Obama appointed Schimmel to serve on the
Committee for the Preservation of the White House.Born and raised in Singapore, Wee is now based in Tokyo. He is
Blouinartinfo.com’s head of visual arts in Asia and contributes
regularly to both Art+Auction and Modern Painters. Wee graduated
from Harvard University in 2006 with a BA in French language
and literature and has since worked as a translator, consultant,
and writer for publications such as the Wall Street Journal,
Artforum, the Japan Times, and Tokyo Art Beat, where he served
as an editor from 2008 to 2012. On page 38, Wee explores the
Setouchi Triennale,
which takes place across
12 islands in the Seto
Inland Sea. “As an
instructive, rural
counterexample to the
slew of urban art
festivals and biennials
exploding across Asia,”
Wee says, “the Setouchi
Triennale offers a
sobering vision of an
impending downshift of
gears as the art scenes
in China and elsewhere
start to cool.”12
CONTRIBUTORS
Ko Sasaki
Paul Schimmel
Deborah Wilk
Darryl Jingwen Wee
Jenni Sorkin
“I take photographs to seek out what we, as humans, are; why
we do certain things,” says Sasaki, whose images of Japanese
ceramicists Satoru Hoshino and his wife, Kayoko Hoshino,
are featured on page 56. After his photo shoot, Sasaki joined
the Hoshinos for dinner, where he and Satoru discussed
the evolution of the artist’s style and how the landslide that
destroyed his studio in the 1980s became a pivotal moment
in his career. Satoru “went from making ceramic objects
with clean, sharp edges to pieces that are like liqueied earth
and magma, expressing the power of nature,” Sasaki says.
The photographer, who is based in Tokyo, had experienced
a similar life-changing event after the tsunami and the
subsequent Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown in 2011.
He covered the disaster for the Wall Street Journal, and
his photographs of the devastation were featured on the
New York Times Lens blog. Five years later, he still visits
the site where people are recovering. The tsunami, he says,
“showed that nature is much more powerful than we can ever
imagine. Satoru’s work reminded me of this.”
“Writers are required to analyze and
disseminate the details of a range of
industries,” says Wilk, who interviews
former Art+Auction editor in chief
Benjamin Genocchio on the occasion
of his recent appointment as director
of New York’s Armory Show
(page 30). “It should hardly be a
surprise when a seasoned journalist
is asked to take the reins of any
business.” Wilk’s own career includes
stints at the Chicago Tribune and
Chicago magazine as well as Art+Auc-
tion, which brought her back to her
art-magazine roots, formed at the
New Art Examiner. There, she worked
with John Corbett, who now runs
Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey,
and best-selling author Sarah Vowell.Sorkin is an assistant professor of contemporary art history at
the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a Ph.D. in
the history of art from Yale University, an MA in curatorial
studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College,
and a bfa from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
She has received fellowships from the Henry Luce Foundation/
American Council of Learned Societies and the Getty Research
Institute. Her writing has appeared in Frieze, Modern Painters,
and Texte zur Kunst. In this issue, Sorkin joins Paul Schimmel
on page 68 to discuss their new exhibition of sculptures
by women artists at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. “Curating this
show was an extension of my academic work and resulted
in an aesthetically beautiful exhibition,” Sorkin says. Her book
Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community, about gender
and postwar ceramic practice, will be released this spring.CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DOMINIC NAHR; KRISTINE LARSEN; JUSTIN NG; TWO IMAGES, LEO CABAL PHOTOGRAPHYART+AUCTION MARCH 2016 (^) | BLOUINARTINFO.COM