2013 promises to be a big year for art fairs in the Asia/Pacific-Rim region. Art Los Angeles Contemporary and Art Stage Singapore both opened last night and run from 24 – 27 January. Next up is the India Art Fair  (1 – 3 February), followed by Art Basel in Hong Kong Art (23 – 26 May), Auckland Art Fair (7 -11 August), Korea International Art Fair (12 – 16  September), Shanghai Contemporary (13 – 15 September), Sydney Contemporary (20 – 22 September) and Art Platform – Los Angeles (27 – 29 September).

So where will the power plays come from in 2013?

After buying a majority interest in ARTHK, the Art Basel Group will roll out its debut edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong, putting an end to speculation over the past five years about which fair would become the Art Basel of the Asia/Pacific region. With more than half of the exhibitors coming from the region, the new owners have also eased fears that the revamped fair would lose its Asian identity under Art Basel management. Art Basel in Hong Kong is set to continue where ARTHK left off as the region's pre-eminent fair.

Directed by Lorenzo Rudolf, Art Stage Singapore is capitalising on Singapore's position as a hub between East and West, blending art from the region with international superstars. Rudolf is also making some new moves that will give Art Stage Singapore a point of difference from others in the region. He says international art fairs should not just be spaces for selling art, they also have a role to play in developing an eco-system between artists, galleries and collectors, and where galleries are failing, an art fair should step in. The current edition of his fair includes dedicated space for Indonesian galleries and an exhibition of about 30 Indonesian artists, but in an unusual move for an art fair, Art Stage Singapore is representing about two thirds of them. “We only want to show the best, but many Indonesian artists don't work with galleries,” he said. “The infrastructure is not there.” It's a bold new move, but raises questions about how participating galleries will feel about Art Stage Singapore competing with them for sales.

Olafur Eliasson's is heading to the World Economic forum in Davios where he will discuss Little Sun, an inexpensive solar-powered lamp that he and his engineer partner Frederik Ottesen have designed to be widely distributed in the developing world to people with no access to an electrical grid. The lamp gives 10 times more light than using a kerosene lamp, and at a 10th of the cost.

Daria Kirsanova reports on the emerging contemporary art scene in Iran, including a growing gallery system. Read more…

The curator of the 2013 Istanbul Biennial, Fulya Erdemci, has outlined her vision for the event, which will be staged across the city. Entitled Mom am I barbarian? the biennial will explore the notion of the public domain as a political forum, touching on notions of democracy, civilisation, barbarity and social engagement.

With Andrea Phillips, a reader in fine art at Goldsmiths College Gallery, Erdemci is also running a public programme called Public Alchemy in the lead up to the biennial. The first session, Making the City Public, runs from 8-10 February, to be followed by others including Public Address (22-23 March), Becoming Public Subjects (14-15 September) and Future Publics/New Collectives (1-2 November).

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