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(b Karachi, 1935).

Pakistani conceptual artist, sculptor, painter, activist, writer, and curator, active in England. Originally trained as a civil engineer, Araeen began painting in the 1950s while living in Karachi, Pakistan, where he and a few artists created art in a modern style that was not fully accepted in the cultural milieu of the time. Lack of positive reception in Pakistan prompted his move to London in 1964, where he found more like-minded artists and gained further exposure to contemporary art. This helped him to develop his practice, which gradually shifted from painting to sculpture. Araeen was especially influenced by the works of Anthony Caro and Sol LeWitt, and started producing objects in a highly reduced abstract vocabulary, becoming a pioneer of British Minimalism. He drew on his experience as a civil engineer when constructing grid-like forms using lattice patterns similar to window structures. His sculpture Second Structure (1966–1967) employed crossing elements imbued with political content and articulated his solidarity with the oppressed around the world. Moving to London did not result in reception so different from Karachi—museums and galleries in England overlooked his work and did not provide support for him as an artist. These acts of institutional marginalization appalled Araeen and fueled the politicization of his art and life. He began to make art addressing identity politics and racism and became active in groups such as the Black Panthers. In ...

(b Karachi, Pakistan, April 18, 1968).

British film maker, installation artist and conceptual artist of Pakistani birth, active in England. She completed a BFA at Goldsmiths’ College, London, between 1991 and 1994. For her degree show she created Pushed/Pulled (1994; see 1998 exh. cat.), changing the door panels at the entrance to the college’s studios so that they read ‘Pushed’ and ‘Pulled’ rather than ‘Push’ and ‘Pull’. This kind of conceptual slippage is typical of Floyer’s work. In Light (1994; Berne, Ksthalle), a disconnected lightbulb is illuminated by the beams from four slide projectors; the blandly descriptive title, like the work itself, is both truthful and paradoxically misleading, undermining the viewer’s expectations of the object’s functionality. Floyer uses these dislocations to produce situations in which viewers are made to feel very selfconscious about what they should be seeing, often using projections as a means of producing apparent displacements of objects or sounds. In the video ...

(b Singapore, July 12, 1959).

Malaysian conceptual artist, active also in Australia. Gill studied at the University of Western Sydney, completing her MA in 2001. Despite working in a range of media, she is best understood as a process-based artist who has consistently explored notions of migration and transformation within material culture. These include the effects of international trade on such everyday activities as cooking and eating. The spiral form of Forking Tongues (1992; Brisbane, Queensland A.G.), for example, entwines Western cutlery and dried chillies from the Americas and Asia, highlighting how foods and utensils from across the globe have come together to transform local cuisines and inform culinary habits. Gill’s later photographic series refer to other understandings of migration, such as the spread of the English language or of capitalist desire throughout South-east Asia in recent decades. For Forest (1998; Sydney, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery; see Chua), Gill cut out words and sentences from books written in English, placed the texts within tropical landscapes and photographed the results before the books’ paper began rotting into the humid environment. For ...

(b Bombay, Aug 26, 1976).

Indian conceptual artist. Gupta studied sculpture at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay, graduating in 1997. Gupta was the Indian artist who most explicitly embraced digital and web-based art practice. Her first work to gain wide attention in India was Untitled (2002), a video of the artist in multiple, watching the viewer in a confrontational and provocative manner. Her works address the manipulation of the lower classes through religion, politics or commerce, often employing irony and humour. Gupta created websites as art works, addressing subjects such as the exploitation of labour in diamond mines (Diamonds and You, 2000), romantic and matrimonial connections fostered by the internet (Sentiment-Express.com, 2001) and an ironic take on pan-religious devotion (Blessed-Bandwidth.net, 2003, commissioned by Tate Modern, London). In each work, the artist used the anonymity that cyber-space provides to focus on societal changes of behaviour and the redefinition of artistic possibilities....

(b Ha Tien, Nov 16, 1968).

Vietnamese conceptual artist. Lê was born near the Cambodian border, but fled with his family when his hometown was invaded by the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Lê moved to Los Angeles and studied photography at the University of California, Santa Barbara and received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1992. In 1989, while at the University of California, Lê enrolled in a class on the Vietnam War (1955–75) that emphasized American hardship. This sparked Lê’s earliest public art project, Accountability, a series of posters that Lê put up on his college campus (reproduced in 1992 for Creative Time, New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles). These posters juxtaposed American media images of the Vietnam War with explicit pictures of Vietnamese suffering, accompanied by captions detailing the damage done to Vietnam. The desire to intervene in dominant perceptions of the Vietnam War propelled Lê for much of his artistic career....

(b Simla, May 28, 1943).

Indian conceptual and installation artist . Sundaram studied painting (1961–5) at the M.S. University of Baroda, in the western Indian state of Gujarat and at the Slade School in London (1966–8). In 1970 he returned to India and developed a style of figurative painting that became associated with what came to be known as the Baroda School (his peers being Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003), Gulammohammed Sheikh (b 1937), Nilima Sheikh and Nalini Malani). The Baroda School championed a re-negotiation of figurative painting, employing both narrative devices and art historical quotations. During the 1970s and 1980s, Sundaram’s paintings employed an Impressionistic technique paired with Magic Realist imagery, often alluding to autobiographical events or social situations specific to India ( see fig. ). One notable series of drawings, The Heights of Maacchu Picchu (1972; see Sheikh, p. 174) attempted to address the struggles of the masses through graphic terms. This preoccupation with articulating his own ideological preferences is a recurring leitmotif in his art....

(b Buenos Aires, July 21, 1961).

Thai conceptual and installation artist, active also in the USA ( see fig. ). Tiravanija, son of a Thai diplomat, studied at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto and the Banff Center School of Fine Arts, before attending the art school of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Tiravanija’s practice often involves everyday actions and commonplace materials, as well as audience interaction. His first untitled solo show, at 303 Gallery, New York in 1992, consisted of offering visitors Thai food cooked on-site. In 1995 he presented a similar untitled work at the Carnegie International exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. At this venue he included wall text that presented written instructions for cooking South-east Asian green curry, which was then prepared for visitors ( see fig. ).

The participatory and performative aspects of Tiravanija’s art, combined with straightforward instructions, recall elements found in work by the Japanese Fluxus artist ...