Starchitect Rem Koolhaas will curate the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennnale. Koolhaas heads the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), known for iconic structures such as the CCTV building in Beijing. He received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Biennale in 2010 and was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2000.

In a statement issued by the Biennale, Koolhaas said he would like “to take a fresh look at the fundamental elements of architecture — used by any architect, anywhere, any time — to see if we can discover anything new about architecture.”
Image: Koolhaas receiving the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale 

The Art Basel Group has announced the exhibitor list for the debut edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong, which will take place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre from 23 – 26 May. More than half of the exhibitors hail from the region, putting to rest fears that the revamped fair would lose its Asia/Pacific focus under Art Basel management. Exhibitors from Australia and New Zealand are included in the lineup: Jensen Gallery (Sydney) Murray White Room (Melbourne), Roslyn Oxley9 (Sydney) and Starkwhite (Auckland) in the Galleries section; Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects (Melbourne), Neon Parc (Melbourne), Ryan Renshaw Gallery (Brisbane) and Sullivan + Strumpf (Sydney) in the Insights section; and Utopian Slumps (Melbourne) in the Discoveries section. View exhibitor list.
Image: Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, venue for the inaugural edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong

Long-haul Air New Zealand passengers could soon be soothed to sleep by a new artwork on the airline's inflight entertainment programme. Clinton Watkins, who specialises in investigating the effects that combinations of sound and vision can have on the viewer/listener, has produced a video featuring a continuous slow shot along a New Zealand east coast road and a gentle soundtrack that incorporates delta waves. These inaudible low frequency sound waves are present during sleep and the intention of the work is to lull passengers into a sleepy state. View video excerpt.
Image: Clinton Watkins' Delta, video still

We open our 2013 programme with an exhibition by Martin Basher, which runs from 4 February to 2 March.
Image: Martin Basher at Saatchi & Saatchi NY

Starkwhite is closed over the Christmas/New Year period, reopening Tuesday 15 January. In the meantime, we wish our readers a Happy New Year.

We are taking a break over the Christmas/New Year period, resuming regular posts on 14 January 2013.
Image: The flower of New Zealand's Pohutukawa also known as the Christmas tree

The Rubells show of their famous art collection via ARTINFO. View video

Ross Manning's Field Emissions closes today at 3pm. This link takes you to a review of the show.
Image: Ross Manning, Field Emissions (2012), installation view, Starkwhite, December 2012

The Guardian is offering artists' screensavers to its readers, including this one by Urs Fischer who declined to give an explanation for his work. You can download the screensavers here.
Image: Urs Fischer's Christmas screen saver, available courtesy of The Guardian

This month India launched its first biennale in Kochi, one of the oldest ports in the state of Kerala. It got off to a slightly shaky start, but Newsweek's Annie Paul says there was much to celebrate. Read more…
Image: M.I.A and Bollywood star John Abraham at the launch of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 

Paris' Centre Pompidu has joined the international lineup of institutions sending collection-based exhibitions to Shanghai's new art museums. The exhibition, Electric Fields: Surrealism and Beyond – La Collection du Centre Pompidou, opened recently at the Power Station of Art as part of the Shanghai Biennale. It follows presentations at the China Museum of Art including: contemporary works from the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; American masters from the Whitney Museum; Vermneer masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum; works from the collections of Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris, the Museo National de San Carlos in Mexico city and the British Museum; and the exhibition Naturalism in France.from the Musee d'Orsay.
Image: visitors at Electric Fields: Surrealism and Beyond, Power Station of Art, Shanghai

Jeff Koons has created the label for Chateau Mouton Rothschild's 2010 Pauillac first growth, working over a Pompeii fresco of the Birth of Venus with a silver line drawing of a ship sailing under a bright sun. Previous artists engaged to produce a label include Warhol, Picasso and Dali.

Nepal has just launched the second edition of its triennial Kathmandu International Art Festival, with climate change and its human impact as its curatorial agenda. Kurchi Dasgupta was there to cover it for frieze. Read more…
Image: Jyoti Duwadi's Shades of Seeds

Andy Warhol's images of Chairman Mao won't be part of a traveling exhibition of his work when it goes to China. According to Bloomberg, the Mao works have been rejected by the Ministry of Culture. If mainland fans of Warhol want to see silkscreens of the great helmsman they will have to catch the Hong Kong leg of Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal. Read more…
Image: Andy Warhol's Mao

Faced with the groundswell of huge new building projects in China, this year's Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu has proposed an alternative view saying they are not the only architectural products his country has to offer. The practice he runs with his wife Lu Wenyu, is concerned with such things as memory, location, craft and identity, for “real feeling between people and construction” and the ways in which they can be recognised in the extraordinary time through which China is now passing. Read more…
Image: Ningbo History Museum designed by Weng Shu

According to GalleristNY, art publisher Louise Blouin has finalised plans to buy The Armory Show from Merchandise Mart Property Inc. Ms Blouin is CEO and president of Louise Blouin Media, which owns Art + Auction and Modern Painters and founder of ARTINFO.
Image: Louise Blouin

Each year Peter Peryer releases a small, low-cost photograph just before Christmas – this time in association with Starkwhite.

After 15 years at the helm of the Auckland Art Gallery, Chris Saines has been appointed director of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, in Brisbane. He takes up his new position in March 2013
Image: Chris Saines, outgoing director of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

The Italian art magazine Flash Art is launching its own art fair in Milan. Scheduled for 7 – 10 February, it will feature 80 dealers who will each put on a solo show or curatorial project providing opportunities “to discover an emerging artist or rediscover an artist from the past.” Recognising the rising cost of fairs, the price for a 16 square-meter booth is 3000 Euros with 3 nights free accommodation for foreign participants.

David Gryn, the curator of the art video section at Art Basel Miami Beach, and Edward Winkleman, the co-founder of Moving Image the contemporary video art fair, discuss  how to present video at art fairs and the rise of the cinematic experience in making and showing art films at TAN (Video: the long game)
Image: Installation view, Moving Image New York, 2012

A Billy Apple billboard will be unveiled at 2:00pm today on Auckland's waterfront. The piece includes a mobile number so that viewers can text it to download a Billy Apple artwork to their phone with proceeds going to the Auckland City Mission.

Gavin Hipkins' experimental screen narrative, This Fine Island, is screening at the New Zealand Film Archive in Auckland (click here for screening dates/times). Hipkins' film revisits Charles Darwin's journey to the Bay of Islands in 1835, but in his adaption, Darwin's nineteenth-century travel writing in The Voyage of the Beagle becomes a vehicle for present day tourisms, travel romance, and racial othering, against the backdrop of New Zealand's lush landscape.
Image: Gavin Hipkins, This Fine Island , 2012 (production still), 12 mins, 16mm transferred to Digibeta

Paola Pivi's Untitled (Zebra) is the latest billboard project at New York's High Line. Pivi's work is the seventh installment on the 25-by-75-foot billboard, which has previously featured works by John Baldessari, Anne Collier, David Shrigley, Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, Elad Lassry and Thomas Bayle. Read more…
Image: Paola Pivi, Untitled (Zebras), High Line Billboard to 2 January 2013

Every year Auckland's Artspace works with artists to create a range of editions to support its exhibition programme. This year Alicia Frankovich has produced a tote bag in an edition of 100 and selling for $35. You can support Artspace by ordering one here.
Image: Alicia Frankovich, After Medea, 2012. Cotton tote bag, digital print.

frieze's Cristina Ricupero reports on a high season in Seoul where the country hosted four biennales concurrently, including the Gwangju and Busan biennales, along with two exhibitions of artists prizes (the Hermes Foundation Missulsang Prize and the new Korea Artist Prize), and a major exhibition celebrating what would have been Nam June Paik's 80th birthday. Read more…
Image: Nam June Paik, One Candle (1989), installation view, Nam June Paik Centre, Seoul

Video artist Elizabeth Price is has been awarded the Turner Prize 2012. Read more…

Recently Art Radar Asia talked to Rhana Devenport about the exhibition Sub-Tropical Heat: New Art from South Asia which ended last month at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. The exhibition was the fifth in a series of shows on contemporary Asian art which began with Media Arena: Contemporary Art from Japan and Transindonesia during Greg Burke's time as director of the GBAG, continuing with China in Four Seasons, Activating Korea and Sub-Tropical Heat initiated by the current GBAG director  Rhana Devenport. Read more…

Carriageworks and 4A Centre for Contemporary Art are presenting Waste Not, an exhibition by Chinese artist Song Dong that has traveled from the artist's family home in Beijing, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and on to the Barbican Art Gallery in London and now to Australia where it will be shown at Carriageworks in association with the Sydney Festival. At the same time, 4A is showing Dad and Mum, Don't Worry about Us, We are All Well, a survey show of Song Dong's work over the past two decades.

Waste not runs at Carriage works from 5 January to 17 March and Dad and Mum, Don't Worry about Us, We are All Well runs at 4A Centre for Contemporary Art from 5 January to 30 March 2013.
Image: installation view of Song Dong's Waste Not at the Barbican Art Gallery, London

MoMA has acquired 14 video games for its collection in the architecture and design department including classics like Pac-Man and Portal. They form the seedbed of an initial wish list of about 40 to be acquired in the near future.

“Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design appproach is what we chose for this foray into this universe,” says department curator Paoli Antonelli. “Our criteria, therefore, emphasizes not only the visual quality and the aesthetic experience of each game, but also many other aspects – from the elegance of the code to the design of the players's behaviour – that pertain to interaction design.”

Ross Manning's Field Emissions continues at Starkwhite this week.
Image: Ross Manning, Field Emissions (2012), installation view, Starkwhite, November 2012

Last month government officials ruled that a traditional Christmas tree should be banned from Belgium's main public square because it might offend the local Muslim community. Now the decision to replace it with an 8o-foot Christmas tree sculpture by French collective 1024 Architecture has come under fire from Catholic Belgians who see the work as an overly PC attempt to secularise Christmas.
Image: 1024 Architecture's ABIES Electronicus, Brussels

Teresa Margolles, whose work addresses the violence of drug-related crime in Mexico, has been named as the winer of the fifth Artes Munde Prize. The £40,000 prize is awarded ever two years to artists who engage with social reality and the human condition. Read more…