Asia Week Contemporary in the Financial Times

"The inaugural Asia Week New York Contemporary arrives on May 2-10, featuring seven galleries showcasing the work of artists from China, Korea, Japan and India. Taking place at venues across Manhattan, the pieces on show will straddle conventional media such as oil paintings, take in sculpture and installations, and push into more unusual terrain with deconstructed ceramics and, in the case of South Korea’s Seungmo Park, stainless-steel mesh, as in his Maya 7616 ($32,000), on show with Kang Contemporary.

Joan B Mirviss gallery will feature a set of Nakamura Takuo’s stoneware sculpted plaques, which take the form of an apparently unfolding box decorated with kutani-glazed rinpa-inspired irises. This transformation of traditional vessels is part of a broader trend in Japan, according to Mirviss, with contemporary artists exploring the country’s long and celebrated ceramic history and becoming world leaders in the medium themselves. “Individual collectors, curators and dealers have recognised that ceramics constitute some of the best art being produced in Japan today,” Mirviss adds.

Working on paper, Chinese artist Mansheng Wang’s The Red Lotus ($45,000, on show with Kaikodo) is an enchanting, traditional-looking work in walnut ink on a hanging scroll, while Michael Goedhuis has Chinese calligrapher Wei Ligang’s strikingly contemporary Peacock: Jade Green ($75,000), made with ink, acrylic and lacquer.

Japanese artist Shun Sudo’s BUSTLE 3 ($12,000 with Onishi Gallery) is an eye-catching acrylic on canvas that is somewhere between Roy Lichtenstein and Keith Haring, while Navin Kumar is selling Indian artist Francis Newton Souza’s fiery oil painting Landscape in Red ($275,000), and Scholten Japanese Art has A Hundred Shades of Ink of Edo: Hiroshige’s Edo ($700), a Manga-style woodblock print by Scottish block printmaking specialist Paul Binnie.