ArtReview Asia Autumn 2020

Martha Atienza and the fight for environmental justice in the Philippines

Thailand’s underground art scene

The continuing erasure of India’s lowest caste

Resistance

Opposing the colonising gaze with Trinh T. Minh-ha

施拉泽·赫什阿里

Shirazeh Houshiary 时间于此

As Time Stood Still

ArtReview Asia vol 8 no 3 Autumn 2020

More than one problem ArtReview Asia is an optimistic creature. But it’s also pragmatic. Problems can be solved, but maybe not all at once. And this year has given it a lot of time to think about how to take action, and what to do when you can’t act, and how to respond to the troubles of the world either way. Because in a world in which galleries and museums have closed, where parts of the ‘artworld’ – like art fairs and biennials – have been cancelled or postponed, artists have had to come up with every bit of resourcefulness and ingenuity to survive, to carry on making work that speaks to every other trouble of the world right now and find ways (and forms of art) to face them.

So this issue seeks out artists who work with the troubles they find (troubles which persist, with or without covid-19). Making art that might change society is hard but making art that refuses to acknowledge what’s going on is an easy out.

So acknowledging people’s existence is an act of solidarity, as in the photographs of M. Palani Kumar, who records the abject reality of India’s poorest, working and often dying in the filth of urban sewers; or in the films of Trinh T Minh-ha, a filmmaker who, instead of ‘speaking for’ her subjects, highlights the relations of power between who’s being represented and who’s doing the representing; or in the videoworks of Martha Atienza, which attest to the destruction and erasure of the environment and peoples of Bantayan Island in the Philippines. Not forgetting that forms of resistance can be found in obliquity, the minimalistic works of Burmese artist Po Po evade direct meaning and interpretation, pointing both to Burma’s Bhuddist traditions and to the political struggles of a country that suffered five decades under dictatorship.

As old artworld structures wobble, this issue finds radical currents at work in the art scene of Isaan, while curator Jacob Fabricius talks about the challenges of curating the upcoming Busan Biennale. Meanwhile, despite our currently fragmented existences the photographer An-My Lê still managed to find solace, during New York’s lockdown, in the messages of solidarity posted on the city’s arthouse marquees. Right now, ArtReview Asia is starting to think as it puts on its facemask, resisting is as basic an act as just stepping outside. Just as long as it remembers its keys…

Baby steps

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CODY CHOI

崔玄周 硬混大师：贵族杂种 MR. HARD MIX MASTER: NOBLESSE HYBRIDIGE

2020.10.17–11.15 D-06, 798 ART ZONE, 2 JIUXIANQIAO ROAD, CHAOYANG DISTRICT, 100015, BEIJING 朝 阳 区 酒 仙 桥 路 二号 院 798 艺 术 区 D - 0 6，北 京 ，+86 (10) 5762 6012, SPURSGALLERY.COM

Art Previewed

Previews

by Nirmala Devi 14

Jacob Fabricius on Busan Biennale 2020 interviewed by Mark Rappolt 38

Points of View Charu Nivedita, Deepa Bhasthi 28

Art Featured

Martha Atienza

by Marv Recinto 44

Isaan’s Underground Art Scene

by Max Crosbie-Jones 66

Po Po

by Adeline Chia 52

An-My LĂŞ interviewed by Fi Churchman 74

Trinh T. Minh-ha

by Patrick J. Reed 60

page 66 Lu Yang, Delusional Mandala (still), 2015, single-channel video, sound, 16 min 27 sec. Courtesy the artist

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comment & exhibitions 86

books 96

Yokohama Triennale, by Taro Nettleton Participation Mystique, by Sylvia Bai Ebbe Stub Wittrup, by Rodney LaTourelle Los Angeles, by Cat Kron New York, by Rahel Aima The artworld is running on empty, by Martin Herbert Nontawat Numbenchapol, by Max Crosbie-Jones

Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, reviewed by Adeline Chia John Cage: A Mycological Foray, edited by Ananda Pellerin, reviewed by Oliver Basciano The Coffer Dams, by Kamala Markandaya, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Wendy, Master of Art, by Walter Scott, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century,

by McKenzie Wark, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth The Story of Contemporart Art, by Tony Godfrey, reviewed by Novuyo Moyo ps 102

page 88 Marianna Simnett, Faint with Light, 2016 (installation view at Copenhagen Contemporary, 2019). Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy the artist

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Art Previewed

That lead men to art and science 13

10 Christian Jankowski, Traveling Artist – West, 2018, inkjet print, 200 × 147 cm. © and courtesy the artist

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Previewed 1 Asia Society Triennial Asia Society Museum New York, and various venues 27 October – 27 June

7 Between Earth and the Sky Taipei Fine Arts Museum Through 18 October

14 Marnie Webber Simon Lee, Hong Kong Through 31 October

Shirazeh Houshiary Lisson Gallery, Shanghai 12 September – 24 October

Tomoo Gokita Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo Through 26 September

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Immaterial/Re-material ucca Beijing 26 September – 17 January 2

9 Yto Barrada Mathaf, Doha Through 30 November

More, More, More Tank Shanghai Through 31 January 3

Nalini Malani Whitechapel Gallery, London 23 September – May

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Michaël Borremans and Mark Manders 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa 19 September – 28 February

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Time Flows: Reflections by 5 Artists Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Through 11 January 4

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Shanghai Waves: Historical Archives and Works of Shanghai Biennale Power Station of Art, Shanghai Through 15 November Nez à Nez Power Station of Art, Shanghai Through 25 October 6

11 The Stillness Within 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong Through 11 October

Thy Nguyê˜n The Factory, Ho Chi Minh City Through 4 October 17

Zhang Huan The State Hermitage, St Petersburg 9 September – 8 November

Bangkok Biennial 2020 Various venues, Bangkok 31 October – 21 November 13 March – 3 April 17 September – 9 October

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19 Chen Zhen Pirelli HangarBicocca 15 October – 21 February

Bangkok Art Biennale Various venues, Bangkok 29 October – 31 January 13

10 Rongrong and Inri, Tsumari Story No.13–5, 2012, silver gelatin print, 51 × 61 cm.

Courtesy the artists and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong

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One of the many things that ArtReview Asia learned during lockdown was what a chocopie is. It’s two layers of cake sandwiching marshmallow and covered in chocolate. Sounds disgusting. But, as with many things right now, ArtReview Asia has never tried one irl so it can’t say for sure. (But it knows.) It has ‘sent’ a virtual one to a friend however, via Mina Cheon’s online artwork Eat Chocopie Together (at EatChocopieTogether.com), which is the opening gambit of October’s inaugural 1 Asia Society Triennial titled We Do Not Dream Alone. Launched on Korean Liberation Day (15 August, commemorating the peninsula’s liberation from Japan) the project benefits the Korean American Community Foundation’s covid-19 Community Action Fund. Two dollars are raised (thanks to an anonymous benefactor)

when you select a cake and send it to someone and another when it is (virtually) eaten by the recipient. Chocopies (an early-twentieth-century American ‘snack’ that was exported to South Korea during the 1970s, where it became an enduring hit) became a symbol of crossborder solidarity in Korea in 2013, when South Korean workers at the jointly managed Kaesong Industrial Complex gave them to their North Korean counterparts, starting a craze. The virtual installation is based on Cheon’s real installation of real chocopies that visitors were invited to (really) eat at the 2018 Busan Biennale. All of which (the real to virtual, enigmatic fundraising initiatives, etc) makes you wonder if art is sometimes merely an excuse for doing things in a roundabout way.

Or perhaps this virtual edition is simply a way

of fuelling your hunger for the real thing – whether that’s real installations, real chocopies or a real feeling of friendship and solidarity in these atomised times.

The ‘real’ triennial, curated by artistic director Boon Hui Tan and associate director Michelle Yun, will take place at the Asia Society Museum and various venues around New York, and aims at promoting discourses surrounding Asian art and culture in the heart of America’s famously myopic artscene. The title is borrowed from Yoko Ono’s 1964 publication Grapefruit and artists include ArtRevew favourites, kimsooja, Song-Ming Ang, Dinh Q. Lê, Prabhavathi Meppayil, Hetain Patel, Melati Suryodarmo, Xu Zhen® and many others whose work ArtReview Asia will doubtless learn to favour once it – errr – actually tucks in.

1 Mina Cheon’s virtual chocopie for the digital Eat Chocopie Together initiative, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Asia Society Triennial

2 Ryoji Ikeda, data.tron [wuxga version], 2011, audiovisual installation, dlp projectors, computers, speakers, dimensions variable. Computer graphics, programming: Shohei Matsukawa, Tomonaga Tokuyama. Photo: Mikael Lundgren. Courtesy the artist

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John Gerrard, Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), 2017, simulation, dimensions variable. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery

Fei Yining & Chuck Kuan, Breakfast Ritual: Art Must Be Artificial (still), 2019, two-channel hd video, colour, sound, 9min 50s. Courtesy the artists

3 Ghislaine Leung, shrooms, 2016, nightlights, plug adapters, dimensions variable. Photo: Yuchen Liu. Courtesy tank Shanghai

Despite the mainstream artworld’s relative slowness to embrace it, the turn to digital art (or the use of the computer as a primary tool for creating art) is, of course, far from a new phenomenon (not everything was invented in the age of the virus) and ucca Beijing’s 2 upcoming exhibition Immaterial/Re-material: A Brief History of Computing Art sets out to remind us of its history. Beginning in Europe during the 1960s, when artists such as German Manfred Mohr switched from Abstract Expressionism-type paintings to representing computer-generated geometries, the exhibition, which features work by 30 artists goes through to Japanese musician Ryoji Ikeda’s experiments in giving form to big data and China’s own aajiao’s investigations of social media and digital information filters. Alongside nods

to some of the pressing issues of our current times, the exhibition also references (in its title) Les Immatériaux, philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s landmark 1985 exhibition at the Pompidou Centre (cocurated with design theorist Thierry Chaput), which the Frenchman (bestknown as a theorist of postmodernity) described as ‘a kind of dramaturgy placed between the completion of a period and the anxiety for an emerging era’; a show which foregrounded new material sensibilities heralded by the advent of globalism and related developments in new media and technology, and proved an inspiration to artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno. High standards then for ucca to match.

The move away from traditional material culture is also in evidence at tank Shanghai,

Autumn 2020

3 although the inspiration for the title More, More, More comes from a 1970s disco song by The Andrea True Connection rather than French postmodern philosophy. Still, perhaps, as this show curated by the Guggenheim Museum’s X Zhu-Nowell and musicologist Frederick Nowell (who distance themselves from their own materiality by practicing under the name Passing Fancy) demonstrates, the links between the two are not so stretched as you might think.

Works by 28 international and local artists incorporate materials such as perfume, music, bacteria and digital machine-readable formats, alongside poetry, figurative painting, ink painting and line drawing in a show that’s designed to engage all the senses and operate, one presumes, in a continual flux of dis- and re-embodiment. Among the artists whose work

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is on show are Sophia Al-Maria (fresh from screenwriting the Sky Atlantic series Little Birds), Ho Chi Minh City-based collective Art Labor, Foshan-based duo Mountain River Jump! (whose work also features in the Asia Society Triennial), Swiss sculptor Claudia Comte, Berlin-based Jesse Darling (whose work, in a variety of media, focuses precisely on what it means to be a body in the world), Laure Prouvost (whose film installation in the French Pavilion was one of the standout works of the 2019 Venice Biennale) and cult Chilean artist, poet and activist Cecilia Vicuña.

Also exploring the current turn away from materiality (it’s only natural in a world in which bodies are not travelling, materials are not shipping, borders are closing and ideologies clashing) is the Hara Contemporary

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4 Art Museum’s group exhibition Time Flows: Reflections by 5 Artists. Although here the emphasis is largely on attempts to capture the immaterial in material form. The five in question are photographers Tomoki Imai, Tamotsu Kido and Tokihiro Sato, animator Masaharu Sato and mixed media artist Lee Kit. Lee’s Flowers (2018, and in the Hara collection) is an installation of projected light into the darkened gallery spaces; Sato presents work from his Photo-Respiration series (2020), comprising long-exposure photographs of landscape scenes that capture the movement of handheld penlights or mirrors. Imai’s Semicircle Law series (2013–) comprises photographs taken from peaks within a 30km radius of the failed Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant shot in the direction of the doomed plant.

Tamotsu Kido, Sunlight and Mandarin Orange, 2019, C-print. © the artist

5 Yan Pei-Ming , Self-portrait 2, 2000, oil painting, 235 × 200 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy adagp, Paris, 2000

4 Lee Kit, Flowers, 2018, acrylic, emulsion paint, inkjet ink and pencil on cardboard, projector light, dimensions variable.

Photo: Shigeru Muto. © and courtesy the artist

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While the late Masaharu Sato (who died last year) used animation and live footage in Tokyo Trace (2015–16, also in the Hara Collection) to contrast the dreams and reality of the Japanese capital as it prepared to host the 2020 Olympic Games, now scheduled to take place in 2021.

Time flows indeed.

Which is why, perhaps, it’s much easier to chase past time than anything in the elusive present or illusional future. This is precisely what the Power Station of Art (psa) in Shanghai 5 is doing with Shanghai Waves: Historical Archives and Works of the Shanghai Biennale, an exhibition that looks back at the history of mainland China’s first biennial of international contemporary art (founded in 1996) in preparation for the launch of the now postponed 2020 edition, titled Bodies of Water and curated by architect Andrés

ArtReview Asia

6 Nez à Nez: Contemporary Perfumers, 2020 (installation view).

Courtesy Power Station of Art, Shanghai 6 Nez à Nez: Contemporary Perfumers, 2020 (installation view).

Courtesy Power Station of Art, Shanghai

7 fameme, durian Pharmaceutical, 2020, interactive installation, performance, dimensions variable.

Courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Jaque. (It will now take place in phases beginZhou Tiehai – effectively the great and the good 7 Between Earth and the Sky is a group exhibition ning on 10 November and running through of the artworld today – the exhibition also that focuses on immersive art experiences that until 27 June.) Particularly poignant then, includes their reminiscences of past biennials, complicate the relationship between artist and among the more than 60 artworks (created by postcards, letters and books to create a docuviewer, performer and spectator. The general 51 international and domestic artists or groups) ment that is as much personal as it is artistic. aim is that by the time you come out of the on show is Xu Zhen’s Dang, Dang, Dang, Dang…

But wait – just in case you thought the show you might not be too certain which is (created for the 2004 biennial), a replica of the Power Station of Art was missing out on the which. Hopefully that means you’ll have clock from what was then the China Art Museum current taste for the immaterial, they’re also gained some agency even if you don’t actually (which formally hosted the biannual event and 6 showing Nez à Nez: Contemporary Perfumers, know it. Or have it. is now the Shanghai History Museum) whose an exhibition focusing on the processes of scent Here durians – a proper snack – replace hands run 60 times faster than normal. The developers curated by the Musée de design et chocopies in the form of Durian Pharmaceutical exhibition as a whole provides an overview of d’arts appliqués contemporains in Lausanne.

(2020) a product of Yu Cheng-Ta’s alter ego changing tastes and interests in art over the last You may be able to rewrite the past or reimagine fameme, a Taiwanese farmer-turned-internetquarter century as well as a lens through which the future, but the contemporary, the present celebrity-turned-influencer, who having to view how the city has evolved (rapidly) during – that’s something that happens to you, as proclaimed the magical properties of the infathat time. Alongside works by Chen Zhen, viruses have helpfully demonstrated. mously odoriferous (but delicious) fruit in the Willem de Rooij, Ding Yi, Gu Wenda, Liu Wei, Not that ArtReview Asia’s a total fatalist. us (at Performa 19) and South Korea (at the Raqs Media Collective, Zhang Enli, Zhang Huan, Over at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, where earlier

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7 Baboo, Corona Villa, 2020, installation, live stream, interactive performance, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum

8 Shirazeh Houshiary, Mind and Matter, 2020, pigment and pencil on white aquacryl on canvas and aluminium, 120 × 120 × 6 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy Lisson Gallery, Shanghai

this year he introduced the Durian Exercise Liang-Hsuan Chen & Musquiqui Chihying’s Room), is now moving into the pharmaceutical The Gesture II (2020), which explores a history industry by launching the Durian Pharmaceutical of hand gestures from Hong Kong zombie Co., Ltd to exploit and promote (same thing movies of the 1990s (for more on which you’ll really) the healing properties of the durian want to have checked out the summer issue extract Misohthornii (mst). Which will doubtof ara) through to expressions of hygiene and less shortly be on Donald Trump’s list of miracle communication in our masked-up covid-19 era. ‘cures’ for covid-19. He’s probably got shares What? You might as well stay… Oh. Well, you’d in Baboo’s topical Corona Villa (2020), an ‘antibe missing out on dance performances choreoepidemic hotel’ (installed in the museum) graphed by Chen-Wei Lee and meditations on offering services such as virtual lovers, singathe novel by Ching-Yueh Roan too. You should longs, collective sketching and valet shopping really get out more (as long as it’s safe to do so).

Not getting out is, in part, the subject of – yeah, ArtReview Asia knows: you might as 8 Shirazeh Houshiary: As Time Stood Still, at Lisson well stay at home. But life is always better in a Gallery, which is, ironically, given that subject gallery, where you can be a viewer not a victim… matter, the British-based Iranian artist’s oh… In any case, you’d be missing out on

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exhibition in Shanghai. Five new paintings and a sculpture are on show, all inspired by the artist’s period of virus-containing lockdown in the uk, and her increasing awareness of natural beauty during the period. A Turner Prize nominee back in 1994, Houshiary was awarded the Asia Society’s ‘Game Changer Award’ in 2018. Appropriately then, her abstract, maplike works in this show aim at capturing change and movement via the effects of light and atmosphere, and patterns that look at once like fingerprints, weather maps and particle flows. Alongside these, her sculpture Duet (2020) was partly inspired by the ribbon motifs she encountered during a visit to the Mogao Grottos in Dunhuang and their repositories of early Buddhist art.

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French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada their seriousness with a healthy dose of humour Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Milan Kundera, George Orwell improbably addresses themes of architecture, and fun. (Both of which seem in somewhat short and Wislawa Szymborska. urban transformation, botany, geology, experisupply across Asia’s artscenes this autumn.)

Alternative takes on the relation between mental education, and home economics in Over in London, Nalini Malani, one of the people, nature, stillness and time are on offer 10 My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nougat, pioneers of film, video art and performance 11 in The Stillness Within, a group show of phoher curiously titled solo exhibition at Mathaf (sometimes all at once) in Indian contemporary tography at 10 Chancery Lane in Hong Kong. in Doha. Barrada approaches these subjects art, and generally one of the most interesting Works include photographs from Beijingthrough the life stories of five women: her own artists working right now (whose 2017 retrosbased Cang Xin’s 2007 series Man and Sky as One, mother (who was instrumental in establishing pective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris was featuring portraits of the artist, naked on a a Montessori school in Morocco); ethnographer cheerily titled The Rebellion of the Dead), also hilltop, mystically (it’s a vibe – his back is turned Thérèse Rivière; and artists Bettina, Saloua incorporates the lives of others into her new towards us) contemplating the horizon across Raouda Choucair and Lourdes Castro. The work commission Can You Hear Me? The installation, the green plains of inner Mongolia (the region of on show are derived from bathroom fittings, in what used to be the reading room of the his birth); Anothermountainman (aka celebrated educational toys, maps, mnemonic phrases, Whitechapel Public Library, takes the form Hong Kong designer Stanley Wong) has wallpaper and, of course, pieces of nougat of 84 projections featuring hand-drawn images photographed ikebana master Shuho’s ‘reborn (here the material for a series of sculptures), and notes and quotes paying homage to an ikebanas’ (traditional arrangements that start and explore received and acquired learning, array of writers including Hannah Arendt, from dead or withered plants) for an alternative plurality and authenticity. While also mixing James Baldwin, Bertolt Brecht, Veena Das, take on the relationship between the natural and

10 Nalini Malani, Can You Hear Me?, 2019, 11-channel installation with 56 single channel stop motion animations, sound. Photo: Ranabir Das. © and courtesy the artist

9 Yto Barrada, My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nougat, 2019, letterpress print, 48 × 32 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut and Hamburg

11 anothermountainman x Shuho, reborn ikebana 03A, 2011, inkjet on archival fine art paper or tyvek paper, 180 × 93 cm. Courtesy the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong

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12 the artificial and notions of rebirth; while, just Back in Thailand, the Bangkok Biennial in case things were getting too positive, Thai (not to be confused with the Bangkok Art artist Manit Sriwanichpoom’s 2009 series Masters Biennale) has restructured itself for its second focuses on the commercialisation of Buddhism iteration in the wake of the current pandemic. (and veneration of the individuals rather than The event, which has no overall directors or concepts) in Thailand in the form of blurry curators, functions as a series of pavilions images of withered old priests. After that you’ll proposed on an open-call basis in an attempt to decentralise conventional art practice, encourage want to cleanse yourself by staring at RongRong diversity, and move away from received wisdom & inri’s (the pair founded Three Shadows and top-down curatorial models. The 2018 Photography Art Centre in Beijing’s Caochangdi edition gathered 200 artists from 26 countries in art district) beautifully erotic black-and-white just under 70 pavilions. Reviewing it, ArtReview 13 portraits of light, fabrics, Japanese interiors and naked bodies from their Tsumari Story series Asia Contributing Editor Max Crosbie-Jones (2014). Works by Fiona Pardington, Gerry Li noted that its opening ceremony alone seemed and Huang Rui complete the set. ‘a world away from the billowing curator-speak,

arse-kissing of headline sponsors and other stale formalities that normally mark the opening of a commercially underwritten art event’. This time the unruly event, which back then drew together many of the marginal factions within Thailand’s diverse art scene, will take place in three phases, starting at the end of October and lasting the course of a year. Still time, then, to get your proposals for a pavilion in.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, where (presumably) some arses are kissed and curators are allowed to speak, the Bangkok Art Biennale (not to be confused with the Bangkok Biennial) is also launching its second edition this October. Titled Escape Routes and starting from

13 Marina Abramović, Rising (still), 2017. Courtesy Acute Art

13 Ga Ram Kim, #selstar, 2016, acrylic, mirror, lights, makeup cosmetics, 750 × 50 × 162 cm.

Courtesy Savina Museum, Seoul

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14 Marnie Weber, Wisdom of the Owl, 2019, collaged archival elements, encaustic wax on a framed wooden panel, 52 × 42 × 6 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong

15 Tomoo Gokita, Late Marriage, 2020, acrylic and pastel on canvas, 259 × 194 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

the premise that ‘our dream of utopia is running on empty. The fantasy paradise in the Land of Plenty where wine, milk and honey flowed as people partied, sunbathed and slept around, an escape from earthly suffering, has turned bitter and sour’. And that was written by artistic director Apinan Poshyanada and his curatorial 14 team before the eruption of covid-19. In any case, however miserable the pre-covid era had become, there’s no doubt that Escape Routes has added relevance now, as, probably, does its optimistic pledge to offer ways out of the current calamity. And the calamity before the current one. Among those artists providing the exits are Marina Abramović, Anish Kapoor, Araya

Rasdjarmrearnsook, Christian Jankowski, Yoko who is threatened by a flock of angry birds, the Ono, Dinh Q. Lê, Reena Saini Kallat and Rirkrit show at Simon Lee focuses on a series of collages Tiravanija. While venues include the Wat Arun that expand that folkloric realm. Girls with the and Wat Phra Chetuphon temples. Remember faces of owls recline eerily amidst the clouds, the lesson from Manit: it’s about ideas not clowns cavort around a dilapidated barn like individuals. Unless you have to kiss their arses. an at times nightmarish, at times cutesy fairyWhich you shouldn’t. In these sanitised times. tale world of the subconscious.

15 Los Angeles-based artist Marnie Weber Similarly outlandish are Tomoo Gokita’s is taking part in Asia’s other autumn biennial, outherworldly pastels, on show at Taka Ishii in Busan, South Korea (more on that later in Gallery in Tokyo. The Japanese artist (formerly this issue), in the meantime an exhibition of her a graphic designer) is best known for his cult work goes up at Simon Lee, Hong Kong. While book Lingerie Wrestling (2000) and grayscale the Busan Biennale will feature an installation paintings that range from photorealism to centred around a new film, Song of the Sea Witch looser depictions of subjects such as wrestlers (2020), which focuses on a mysterious sea witch and dancers, drawing all the while on references

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16 Michaël Borremans and Mark Manders, Double Silence, 2020 (installation view). Photo: Peter Cox. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp; Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Los Angeles; David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong

17 Thy Nguyễn, Other Futures, 2020 (installation view).

Courtesy The Factory, Ho Chi Minh City

to pop-culture magazines and Surrealism.

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, The works on show at Taka Ishii are in colour Kanazawa. In Double Silence, their works unpick (pastel and acrylic on canvas), drawn from the language of their respective mediums to memory rather than external sources, and operate in a dialogue that spins through the present an array of fluid, melting forms. materiality of the human body and its represenA couple on a beach in Late Marriage (2020) tations or transfigurations through pasts, look vaguely amoeba-like; what can approxipresents and futures. Which, presumably, is mately be described as ‘heads’ grow out of the, um, ‘sound’ of silence. The whole thing, their bodies like a pair of dissected mushrooms. of course, will be laced with irony. Particularly The organic version, perhaps, of Weber’s Dr now that we’re being educated to think that Moreau-style hybrids. other people’s bodies are little more than There’s a surreal quality too in the work of walking plague pits. two of Europe’s most influential living artists, Silence and solitude are also a theme of 17 Thy Nguyễn’s silkscreen prints, on show 16 painter Michaël Borremans and sculptor Mark Manders, who exhibit together at the in the artist’s first solo show at The Factory

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in Ho Chi Minh City. The layered works, often depicting solitary figures in interiors, are paired with digital projections and unfold serially, in different states and versions through the show (titled Other Futures) offering variations of the possible worlds contained in the present by encouraging different readings and perspectives from one print to the next. In Contemporary Habitat (details) (2019), a man sits on a couch staring out at us; next to him, as if dropping in from another world are a pair of dancing feet. A memory? A desire?

A simultaneous happening? Or perhaps just a picture of a future in which sociability is a thing of the past.

September sees the delayed opening (originally scheduled to open in May) of 18 Zhang Huan’s largescale solo exhibition 19 at The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The thirty works on show include examples of the artist’s celebrated ‘ash paintings’ (created using the ash from incense burned in Buddhist temples), a series of new works created in response to the Hermitage collection and his new Love series of paintings created during lockdown in China as a way of preserving the memory of those who died as a result of the pandemic. Painted in red on white canvas (and evolved from the artist’s Reincarnation series), the images look like a series of giant, torn-out hearts.

At this stage you might need to look at something of a more curative nature. And that’s certainly an aspect of the work of Chen Zhen, 20 of whose installations from the last ten years of his life (he died of cancer in 2000, aged forty-five, having been diagnosed with autoimmune hemolytic anaemia aged twenty-five and given five years to live), are on show in Short-circuits at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan. ‘As an artist,’ Chen once stated, ‘my dream is to become a doctor. Making art is all about looking at oneself, examining oneself and somehow seeing the world.’ Jue Chang, Dancing Body – Drumming Mind (The Last Song) (2000) is an installation of chairs and beds gathered from around the world and

covered in cow hide and suspended from frames to create an improvised drum set in a manner reminiscent of a Chinese bianzhong. The work is activated by performers who use their bodies to beat the drums in motions reminiscent of traditional Chinese massage techniques. An earlier version of the work from 1998 featured chanting Tibetan monks (praying for peace).

Also on show is Jardin-Lavoir (2000; having grown up in Shanghai, the artist moved to Paris in 1986), a series of 11 beds transformed into basins and filled with continually flowing water that ‘purifies’ everyday objects, such as clothes and books. That’s the new normal for you and me. Nirmala Devi

19 Chen Zhen, Jue Chang, Dancing Body – Drumming Mind (The Last Song), 2000 (installation view, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2007). Photo: Ela Bialkowska. © adagp, Paris.

Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, Havana and Rome

18 Zhang Huan, Prodigal Son, 2019, ash on cloth. © the artist.

Courtesy Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong

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Points of View

It’s good to be back after a hiatus. And needless to say, it’s good to be back alive. Like most Indians, I have a heart condition. The polluted air does not help my cause. Even before the onset of covid-19, I had two recurring problems – shortness of breath and frequent colds. So, during the current emergency, my wife, Avantika, our seven cats and I have confined ourselves to our home on the first floor of an apartment block. My readers (those who live locally) and the security guards in our building have helped us to procure groceries and cat food.

I have been stepping out of my apartment only twice a day, to give food to a dozen stray cats that roam around the ground floor. I spend my remaining time writing and doing the dishes. Despite the fact that the management of our apartment block is allowing maids to enter the building, Avantika has yet to relent to that. I’ve come to realise that it’s only people who adhere to Indian cooking, and cooking South Indian food in particular, who appreciate the difficulty of doing the dishes. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos might call the chore a ‘happiness booster’ (back in 2014, Bezos went so far as to call it the sexiest thing he does), but given the amount of oil and spices used in South Indian cuisine, doing the dishes puts your shoulder through a tremendous stresstest. Particularly if you have a heart condition.

Beyond those workouts, I have written 120 blog posts of a semiautobiographical nature under the title ‘Bug’. My peer Jeyamohan has written 120 short stories. We write every day, and both of us have written more during the lockdown than many writers do in a lifetime. But the fact that all these and other works

by Tamil writers have not gained traction in European languages has been my eternal grievance. Twenty-four years have passed since my novel Zero Degree was published in Tamil.

It has been translated into English, nominated for prizes and featured in numerous ‘best of’ lists. But I see no signs of translations in French, Spanish or German. The works

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notes from madras Charu Nivedita reports on the trials of confinement and the perils of transgression

Migrant workers queuing for food at a New Delhi government school during covid-19 lockdown, April 2020. Photo: Goutam Dutta.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

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of most Indian authors continue to go unnoticed, like a beautiful waterfall hidden in a deep jungle. To use a somewhat clichéd simile.

In the Olympics, India always appeared at the bottom of the medal chart (with just a silver and a bronze medal for its tally at the 2016 games). We’re used to it – corruption runs deep in the sports department. Similarly, India was, for some time, at the bottom of the covid-19 table. It would have been naive in the extreme to get used to that. Now it is in the third spot, behind the us and Brazil. By the time you read this article, it could well be at the top.

It is impossible to regulate social distancing in a country like India.

Everyone knows about the infamous ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’.

On 20 June 1756, the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, dumped 146 pows in a 4.3 × 5.5m dungeon in Fort William; 123 died that same night. In India’s slums today, a family of eight lives in a 3 × 3m space covered by an asbestos roof. Every time I look at such a congested space, it reminds me of the Black Hole.

Eight people cannot sleep in such a confined environment.

That’s why you find some of them sleeping on the pavements.

Unfortunate incidents like Bollywood-star Salman Khan’s car running over five innocents who were sleeping on the sidewalk back in 2002 are a regular occurrence in India (Khan was convicted of culpable homicide in 2015 but cleared on appeal a few months later, after the prime witness, a police officer, was kidnapped and later killed).

The government is yet to entirely lift the lockdown announced at the end of March.

In India, laws aren’t framed with human consideration, nor does anyone, be it rich or poor, respect those laws. In the case of the first, consider a day labourer whose job is to break rocks all day. They get 200 rupees (around £2) for their day’s work. Then they are pressured to pay taxes, but how can they? The only purpose of the tax laws seems to be to keep them poor. It’s no wonder that many smalltime businessmen have committed suicide.

On the other hand, anyone who has driven in India may very well infer that Indians do not respect rules. The country’s road traffic makes you feel that you are living in an insane asylum.

So, who does anyone think will obey curfews and lockdowns? No one cares for anything.

That is why we have seen demoralised Indian police officers beat up people who they deem to have broken curfew. I had to advise a friend, who is a doctor, to wear his stethoscope visibly when he walks out. Otherwise the police would beat him up too. On 19 June, an appalling incident happened in Tuticorin, where the police took a shopkeeper, Jeyaraj (aged sixty-two) into custody because he kept his shop open past 8pm and then argued with them when asked to close it. Shortly after, Jeyaraj’s son went to the police station to see his father. They were both stripped naked and tortured by inserting an iron rod in their rectum, which eventually led to their deaths

Police controlling shoppers seeking to buy alcohol on the outskirts of Chennai following easing of covid-19 lockdown measures, May 2020.

Photo: Arun Sankar via Getty Images

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(the pair had been hospitalised following their maltreatment, and the police had advised their family to bring them dark-coloured lungis in order that their continual bleeding not be noticed). Unlike the American police, the Indian police tend not to perform acts of brutality in broad daylight and make it a public spectacle. The officers involved in Jeyaraj’s case are now in prison, but only after a massive public protest.

What I was saying earlier about a lack of appreciation for Indian writers is no different in India itself, by the way. No one knows the true meaning of the word ‘writer’ in Tamil Nadu. A writer named Dharman heads to the apothecary to get something for his stomach pain during the curfew. The police stop him and ask him who he is and what he does.

Dharman thinks that they might not recognise ‘writer’ as an occupation. So he just gives them his name. They insist that he must come to the police station. Dharman knows that there is no guarantee that he will return alive. So he calls the district police chief, who is a friend. The police chief tells his officers that Dharman is a writer and instructs them to leave him alone.

Hearing this, the policeman salutes Dharman and says, ‘Oh sir, I didn’t know that you are a writer, but in which station?’ Do you get it?

There is a job at police stations for someone who writes down complaints: that’s a ‘writer’.

Translated from the Tamil by Vidhya Subash

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A timely, well-made photograph has the potential to change society, and perhaps, in turn, the world. Or so M Palani Kumar used to think. Speaking over the phone from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, where he is based, the young photographer tells me that such illusions left him soon after Kakkoos – the critically acclaimed 2017 Tamil documentary (directed by Divya Bharathi) for which he was the cinematographer – was released. Denied certification by India’s Central Board of Film Censors, Kakkoos (which means toilet in Tamil) was eventually released on YouTube and exposed the continuing existence of India’s caste trap and societal apathy towards communities forced to do manual scavenging.

caste aside When it comes to depicting India’s underclass, Deepa Bhasthi explains, politics is more important than aesthetics

Depending on the situation, manual scavengers have to get down fully inside the sewer to clean

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Manual scavengers are sanitation workers, and in the Indian context, ‘manual scavenging’ specifically refers to the practice of manually cleaning and disposing of human excreta from dry toilets. This inhuman job, allotted for decades to some of the most disadvantaged castes in the Indian society, has been illegal since 1993. But it continues unabated – supported by patriarchal practices and the oppressive caste system. While new technology has been developed to mechanically clean clogged sewers and drains, its prohibitive costs encourage civic contractors to instead hire manual labour that is extremely cheap in comparison. The workers that go in – nearly always without any protective gear – are exposed to sewer gas, a combination of hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide and methane, leading to severe health problems in the long term, or a quick death by asphyxiation on the job. More often than not, they are men in their twenties and thirties, and leave behind very young families. More often than not, the job passes on to wives, who, for lack of choice, are forced into the profession.

Thanks to the stigma attached to families in such sanitation sectors, children rarely get higher education, and the vicious cycle continues, with them finding themselves as manual scavengers in adulthood.

The film made big news in Kumar’s South Indian home state, which, in turn, led to renewed calls to end this abuse of human rights. And yet, by the end of the week of the movie’s launch, three more workers had died on the job (the film itself documents 27 fatalities), while its director reported receiving several death threats.

Even after the film’s release, Kumar, however, could not let the subject matter go and continued to meet and photograph the families of manual scavengers, in order to maintain awareness of the ongoing abuse.

The noxious combination of being from oppressed castes, the stigma attached to their work, the poverty and the invisibility accorded to their lives, ensures that this whole class of workers is erased from view, expunged from wider society. As if that might be in any doubt, one of Kumar’s photographs shows a worker just out of the sewer taking a break, the black outpourings of the drains around him; passersby look away, and a girl holds a handkerchief to her nose to mask the stench. To be part of the sanitation world is to be avoided and erased by the eyes and histories of those who, ultimately, reap its benefits in their own clean living.

It is only in death that the presence of manual scavengers is registered, their numbers added to and buried in a national

Suganya (22), wife of Arunkumar (24) kisses him a final goodbye at their home before he is carried away to the burial ground.

They had been together from when they were 14 and 16, respectively.

They had a 7-month year old child named Dhiksha

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above Anushya before the coffin of her husband Mari (33).

He was killed in July 2019 when he went down a sewage canal that had previously killed two people in Villupuram, Tamil Nadu. Most homes are left without a breadwinner after the husband and father dies, forcing many young women to take care of their children alone

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facing page, top Depending on the situation, manual scavengers have to get down fully inside the sewer to clean

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facing page,bottom Manual scavenging has been illegal and punishable by law for nearly three decades now.

But it is government civic agencies that employ these manual workers, sometimes through labour contractors.

Without personal safety equipment, many are forced to wear make-shift plastic bags as gloves and over shoes

statistic. Kumar’s photos, in showing them as members of families – as siblings, parents, children and friends of fellow human beings – restore them the dignity, the respect and a participation in public consciousness that has always been denied to them.

Questions of who sees what, how and why are urgent, especially in the context of the hyperconsumption of images to which we are now accustomed. There is a thin line between dignity and voyeurism in photography, between documentation and unnecessary intrusion, between the demand for privacy and the active need for social journalism. These politics of choice and the ethics of seeing are constantly present in Kumar’s work.

Death is a daily routine in the lives of manual scavengers, Kumar told me. The children left behind by those who die from inhaling poison inside sewers are what bother him the most, a preoccupation that led to a series on the children of manual scavengers.

The photos are haunting; the children’s eyes ask questions that require deep reflections by a society that refuses to see them. “How to look at these children is a constant problem for me. I’ve seen a lot of deaths – a small child looking into the coffin carrying her father’s body, a child unable to explain how the father died when schoolmates come to pay condolences. A lot of people keep the nature of their jobs secret from even their own families because of the shame involved,” Kumar says.

This secrecy makes it necessary for him to focus his lens on feet, on hands covered in plastic covers (the only protective gear available), on turned backs.

There are also images of naked grief.

The most moving picture in the series is that of a young woman named Suganya cradling the body of her husband, Arunkumar, and placing a tender kiss on his lips, one last time.

His body is swaddled; a hand comes into the frame, perhaps pulling Suganya away, perhaps consoling her. Several sets of feet stand in the crowded background. Arunkumar died late last year aged twenty-four while trying to bring his unconscious brother out of a manhole that the latter had gone into to clean.

He and Suganya had been together since he was sixteen and she fourteen. They had a daughter, seven months old when he died.

The death of a manual scavenger follows a protocol: the body is pulled out and displayed for hungry media cameras, then taken to a local hospital for postmortem; the death is registered and the body is handed over to families. Burials are often in sequestered nooks, for the names of the dead are not

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allowed to be seen in most graveyards, such is the stigma attached to the role they performed when alive. Compensation is sometimes promised to families, but more often than not, it never materialises.

The community, an integral part of Kumar’s work, takes over, folding the bereaved families into itself. His sensitivity in capturing this solidarity, the feeling of a community mourning every death and nurturing its own society, is poignant; death is never a number for them, it is a husband, a father, a relationship lost. The dead are not just bodies, they are not manual scavengers, but citizens of social structures, contributors to what makes a country, its people.

This humanising of essential workers who have always been relegated to back doors and dark hours is what makes Kumar’s photographs stand out. The son of fishmongers, he studied to be an engineer because that was his mother’s one great wish. Politics, not aesthetics, took him to art.

He is an insider in the grief of the families he photographs because they are not just a subject. “Talking to them, sitting next to them, sharing a cup of tea with them, these are very important to them,” he tells me.

To do so is transgressive, because not sharing physical space, not considering them deserving of touch, of camaraderie, are among the first rules of the caste system.

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He has been using the photos he has taken as pedagogical tools to raise awareness in schools. He plans to stay with the community, but in the future to document life away from their work and its often tragic consequences, instead showing how communities engaged in manual scavenging celebrate festivals, the food they eat, how they live when not grieving the dead. Teaching the children of these workers to take pictures – “How would they see their parents beyond their jobs?” – is another work in progress.

There is no ‘final photograph’, Susan Sontag wrote in ‘Photography: A Little Summa’ (2003). Similarly, the caste system that actively enables a human rights abuse like manual scavenging is not about to suddenly undo itself on the basis of a moving photograph, no matter how moving it is.

Such change can only be the result of constant work, not a single definitive image. But by giving manual scavengers and their families faces, by telling their very human stories with respect and ensuring their dignity remains intact, Kumar’s work at least brings them into the social fold.

top Mari’s family before his coffin. He was the father of three daughters, a fourth was born after he died. above The children of P Balakrishnan at their house in Karur, Tamil Nadu. Balakrishna died in 2015 while cleaning a sewer. His family lives in a single room so small that they couldn’t build a toilet inside the house. all images Photo: M. Palani Kumar.

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4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art 181-187 Hay St Haymarket Sydney, Australia 4a.com.au @4A_Aus Current projects: 4a.com.au/4a-digital 4a.com.au/4a-kids Current exhibitions: Holding Patterns 9 JUL – 23 OCT 2020 4a.com.au/holding-patterns

Dean Cross: Monuments 13 AUG – 1 OCT 2020 4a.com.au/monuments

Jacob Fabricius on directing Busan Biennale 2020 interview by Mark Rappolt

Jacob Fabricius. Photo: Laura Stamer. Courtesy of Busan Biennale

‘It has been very humbling to see and experience how the artists have worked around the pandemic’ 38

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The Busan Biennale 2020, titled Words at an Exhibition: an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems, launches this September and is one of the few largescale art events in Asia that will take place this autumn. Directed by the Danish curator Jacob Fabricius (currently artistic director for Kunsthal Aarhus in his native land), who was appointed in July of last year, the exhibition takes as its generating concept the interpretation of works of art and their translation into another artform. Eight Korean and three fiction writers from Denmark, Columbia and usa, representing different generations, genres and ways of writing, were invited to visit Busan in late 2019 and then commissioned to write stories or poems ‘around or about’ the city.

The stories structure the exhibition’s ‘chapters’ and the poems provide ‘intermezzos’. Each of the 67 participating artists and 11 musicians (from around the world) was asked to create a work in response to one of the texts. ‘This exhibition [which takes place at moca Busan and a number of spaces in the city’s Old Town as well as a warehouse in the Youngdo harbour] will also attempt to create multiple layers of fiction, and add numerous new filters, through literature, sound and art, to the city,’ Fabricius writes. ‘The audience will become detectives in the city… that’s how I imagine it.’ ArtReview Asia caught up with him during his two-week quarantine following his return to South Korea. ara You placed an emphasis on words and storytelling for this edition of the biennial. Why is that, and, given that you are working in Korea, what place does translation hold within that? jf On a conceptual level the exhibition is inspired by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s most imaginative and frequently performed work, Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) , a cycle of ten piano pieces describing paintings in sound. The poems that behave as ‘intermezzos’ recall Mussorgsky’s use of the ‘promenade’ in this work. Where Mussorgsky turned paintings into music, this exhibition will turn poems, short stories and urban space into a kaleidoscopic view made up of soundscapes and artworks. That’s a form of translation, or transmutation, as semioticians like Roman Jakobson (he coined the term) or Umberto Eco would put it.

The curatorial backbone is words, stories and poems written by 11 authors. Busan can in many ways be seen as a city of fiction – it’s the Korean capital of films like Train to Busan (2016), Ode to My Father (2014), among others – and hosts one of the largest annual film festivals in the region.

Why storytelling? Busan was one of the only cities that was not captured by North Korean troops during the Korean War, so given

the content, place and local history I wanted to focus on stories that can be related to the city and South Korea. As a foreigner I feel I easily get lost in translation, lose track, or get lost in general because I don’t know the language, the signs, cultural codes and their differences. Storytelling is a different way of getting to know a place. ara Why is the fact that Busan was one of the few cities not captured by North Korea during the Korean War still relevant to a biennial today? It seems to me, with some of the editions of the Gwangju Biennale too, that history, or the past is used to frame the present to the extent that it can become something of a bind. jf It can of course be a bind, but considering how present the dmz and the division between North and South Korea is – through the uncertainties, conflicts and constant powerplays – I completely understand why the topic is often echoed in the biennales here. Koreans are constantly reminded of the situation, it is in their dna, history and pride. Of course, I could have chosen writers who mostly just dealt with historical issues, but I selected a variety of writers and styles from different generations – some point towards the past, but most of the short stories deal with present, contemporary issues. ara Were there things about the contemporary city that inspired you? jf The harbour is amazing. It’s huge. It’s rough.

It has a certain smell. I love the machines, the rusty ships, the thick ropes and steel chains.

All along the waterfront you’ll find evidence that land has been reclaimed and developed.

From the first Japanese settlements during the 1890s and throughout the twentieth century, the harbour has been the key to Busan’s growth and its strategic placement in relation to international trade. Busan is a large city that is squeezed in between the ocean and the mountains and eats its way into the landscape similarly to Los Angeles. Busan constantly grows and redevelops itself. ara On a more general level, what do you think is the purpose of the biennial? Is it to bring attention to Busan? jf It was initiated in 1981 as the Busan Youth Biennale, by local artists who wanted to create an energetic scene. The merging of the Sea Art Festival and the Busan Outdoor Sculpture Symposium in the early 2000s forged what has become the Busan Biennale as it is today.

It’s distinct from other biennales in having been initiated with the spontaneous participation and commitment of local artists. But I guess all biennales want to be in contact with the world, to bring attention to and showcase the scene and the city.

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ara Mussorgsky set out to achieve a kind of unique ‘Russian identity’ with his music, or at least an identity that existed outside the Western canon and drew on ostensibly ‘Russian’ themes. How do you fit these kinds of ‘local’ accents into your exhibition, particularly as a foreigner in Korea?

Does your edition continue to interact with the local art scene? jf I think it does. There are local artists on the board and there is a strong interest in the local scene. I have included local writer Kim Un-su, musicians Say Sue Me, Kim Ildu, J-Tong and Jinjah, and about five local artists in the exhibition. I have also selected some of the small Totatoga artist-run spaces as venues in the Old Town. The audience will get a glimpse of the scene and environment here. The warehouse in the Yeongdo harbour, for example, is very interesting because it shows the raw side of Busan and not the touristy beach side of the city.

It’s true that Mussorgsky was inspired by and wanted to portray the Russian folk spirit.

The ‘local’ accents have come quite natural to me, because I have worked with quite a few Korean artists before. But my new discoveries and the presence of ‘local’ accents are more evident within the selection of writers and musicians. And I must admit that I had not seen the works of Nho Wonhee and Suh Yongsun before: they belong to an older generation of political painters, and I was astonished by their works. ara How did you choose the writers for this project? jf Originally, I thought it was impossible to commission new texts within such a short time – and wanted to build the curatorial frame on existing novels and stories. After a while I realised that it was much more interesting to invite writers, give them a short deadline, have them visit Busan and write their stories. This all happened during October and December 2019.

Last summer I was researching and reading quite a few young Korean writers. Luckily the Literary Translation Institute of Korea support a lot of young Korean writers by getting their stories translated and promoted. I have mainly invited South Korean authors because the country has a complex history and I was interested in finding writers who could dive into the language, locations and history on as many levels and different genres as possible.

Given the short timeframe I thought having too many foreign writers would be difficult… that they would get lost before they had begun and time didn’t allow for that. But I also wanted foreign writers who could get lost in translation.

In fact, Mark von Schlegell wrote a story about a writer getting lost, and in a different sense, Andrés Felipe Solano’s detective gets lost

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Refuge

by Kim Hyesoon Houses climbed the Mountain. They were Houses driven in by war. They drove stakes into the Mountain. They hung windows on the ropes coming down from the sky. The Houses left their homeland, and the sky was the Mountain’s homeland. The Houses tried to climb the Mountain, and the Mountain tried to float up to the sky. So the alleys were slippery every day.

Houses filled the Mountain. Then the Mountain was filled with mazes.

Women fetched water from the bottom of the Mountain and carried it to the top. Pee dribbled down and drinking water was brought up. 70 years later, in the middle of the night, I got lost in the maze. Inside rugged walls were murmurs of people and flinches of cats. I was afraid that I would be dragged into my head again. The moon was out and an old man emerged to tell me the way. He said, Do not go down, go up toward the head. He said the name of this mountain is Pegasus. Then, it felt like someone was fumbling the inside of my head. I wanted to stick a toothbrush inside the night’s mouth and scrub its teeth. When I climbed the mountain, I could see the whole city swarming with refugees. Wandering the alleys until dawn, I met the old man again. The whole night, I could barely move three steps, I said.

The Pegasus floated three steps toward the sky, too, I said. I am on my way to take the first bus, so follow me, the old man replied. The natives are all gone, except for just two households, he said. Now that outsiders are moving in and even foreign tourists are pouring in, the noise keeps me up at night, he said.

Refuge is one of five poems by Kim Hyesoon commissioned by the Busan Biennale 2020 Translated from Korean by Emily Jungmin Yoon

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in his ‘self’. Andrés is Columbian but lives here with his partner, so he has an interesting double perspective of things in Korea. Amalie Smith works as a visual artist and has also published several books, and I have worked with her once before. I like the fact that she occupies a double role – a few of the artists in this biennale have worked in different fields, like Hannah Black, Gerry Bibby and Kim Gordon. ara And has this form of mediation proved even more useful in and out of lockdowns? jf The lockdowns have been a nightmare on many levels, but the conceptual skeleton was there and luckily the stories were already finished before March 2020. It has not been easy for many artists to produce and do research. But many have developed news ways of researching, finding material and producing work. It has been very humbling to see and experience how the artists have worked around the pandemic.

I had just spent 10 to 14 days in Korea between February and March, and arrived back in Denmark five days before Denmark closed its borders on the 14 March. If I hadn’t been there during those weeks, it would have been very difficult to select spaces, locations and so on. During the lockdown I would Skype with the exhibition team leader, Seolhui Lee, for up to five hours daily. ara You said ‘many artists have developed news ways of researching, finding material and producing work.’

Could you give some examples of that? jf Generally speaking, the artists have in several cases had to rely on the help from the exhibition team in Busan. They sent instructions and asked the team to use their hands, eyes and ears in relation to collecting, recording or researching for their new works. The exhibition team have been activated in ways that could not have been imagined had artists been able travel to Busan themselves.

Kim Gordon, for example, sent short descriptions and instructions like: ‘Some back alley, if possible the back of a restaurant or an alley where there are noodle shops in the old part of the city.

A young man/boy and girl wearing denim jackets looking at each other and then they kiss. Also a cigarette stuck in the boys mouth without lighting it and then giving it to the girl. The boy riding on a bus. A woman eating a donut with long legs. An old woman eating noodles. A boy sleeping. Walking thru the big shopping complex shooting the shops etc that could be longer like 10 min […]’. This was to be filmed with a smart phone in Busan. JiYeon Seong (from the curatorial team) then asked friends to participate, found the places and settings, and filmed it with her phone before sending the raw footage to Gordon, who then edited them with her own clips and made a soundscape.

It turned out to be an amazing hallucinogenic film.

Francesc Ruiz asked the team to find lgbt+ logos in Busan, and to do research on queer festivals, protests and related issues around the city. From this research Ruiz has created a storefront zine shop with his own comics, posters and stickers in the Old Town area. Gerry Bibby asked a Korean friend to be his ‘spy’ in Busan and do several readings and performances with him in public spaces, also relating to lgbt+ people and locations in Busan. Gerry asked Pooluna Chung from our team to measure weird architectural details at moca Busan for his concrete poem sculptures.

Robert Zhao Renhui was looking for wildlife in urban spaces, so he asked Jihyun Woo from the team to reach and find locations in the harbour – together they selected and placed four surveillance cameras in a small abandoned house and filmed the space for weeks. The recordings were sent to Robert, who then edited and made an installation at the warehouse venue in the harbour.

Lasse Krogh Møller’s instruction was: ‘Pretend, if you can, that you have never set foot in Busan before. Look at the streets, the shops, the buildings, the people there. What do you see? Pay notice to the small, diminutive things or phenomenons in the street. Look for signs of human activity. Also diminutive traces and leftovers. Collect or register some of these things. Either bring them with you, or take a photograph of them, and/or describe them with words. Please note the location; address, name of supermarket etc. Ask someone on the street, or in a shop, if they will be so kind and draw you a map, that gives you direction to another spot, of your own choice in Busan. It can be far away or it can be nearby; as you like. (Pretend that you don’t have a phone with a map, if needed. Or something else).’

Other artists like Louise Hervé and Clovis Maillet, Zai Tang and Rei Hayama, Mercedes Azpillicueta, Dave Hullfish Bailey, and Inger Wold Lund created their own ways to do site-specific pieces and collaborations without having ever been to Busan. While Angelica Mesiti and Nicolas Boone, both living in Paris, and Sara Deraedt, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Stephan Dillemuth, and others, found their own ways of generating material and producing new works that related to the stories they chose. All in all, there are many really exciting approaches I think. I have not mentioned any of the Korean artists because they could easily come to Busan and do research and make site-specific works and installations. ara When you talked about Busan earlier, you referenced film (Train to Busan, etc), and the curatorial conceit derives from music and fiction: to what extent is the biennial a meditation on mediation and its effects?

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Particularly given the increasingly mediated lives people have had to experience during lockdowns.

And to what extent have you had to rethink the idea of the biennial as a social gathering? jf This year we have had to rethink everything we do, how we work, how we travel and transport work, not just me of course nor the biennale – everybody has been influenced and affected.

Generally speaking, it took a longer time to settle on particular artworks, and during the lockdown some artists have changed their contribution completely. People have reacted very differently to the lockdown and their suddenly exhibition-free calendars.

Right now, South Korea is experiencing a second wave of covid19, so now we are discussing how we can host an alternative opening and distanced press meeting and so on. During the lockdowns we reached out and did three open calls to Busan citizens. We did it to engage people in the biennale and asked people for their scent and sound memories, to involve them in the process and creation. We got 842 people to participate in the open calls. ara Has the limited potential for international travel (in terms of visitors coming to see the show from outside of South Korea) changed your idea of the audience you are serving? jf There will be very few international visitors – two weeks quarantine in a government appointed hotel with daily (cold) meals at 8am, noon and 6pm will scare most travellers away (trust me, I know). Actually, it has not changed my idea at all – when covid19 hit us in the spring, I had already finished my artist list, which included many Korean artists, writers and musicians.

Usually there are around 300,000 visitors to the Busan Biennale, and if 5% are international visitors, we lose 15,000 visitors. It is a real shame and I would have loved to share this with artists, colleagues and friends… but unfortunately this will not happen. The only non-Korean artist who has chosen to do the quarantine is Bianca Bondi.

ara Do you think this a change that large art events will now have to calculate for? (Environmental concerns come into play here too.) And does it perhaps provide an impulse for a recalibration of the very idea of a ‘global’ artworld? jf I think people will choose their travel more carefully and not zip from art fair to art fair or biennial to biennial – I know I will. It may come back, but it will take some time.

The Busan Biennale 2020 is on through 8 November

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Art Featured

Is escape from everyday life 43

Martha Atienza

by Marv Recinto

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The Dutch-Filipino artist traces evidence of the current global climate crisis through the changing life of islanders in the Visayan Sea

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preceding pages Our Islands 11°16’58.4 N 123°45’07.0 E, 2017 (still), single-channel hd video, no sound, 72 min (loop)

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above Fair Isle 59°41’20.0”N 2°36’23.0”W, 2016 (still), single-channel hd video, no sound, 63 min (loop)

ArtReview Asia

As is the case elsewhere across the globe, the dominant forces of the the revoked status beyond the obvious probes into the Philippines’ twentieth and twentieth-first century – neoliberal and autocratic economic, political and cultural motivations – a consistent focus of politics – have brought environmental destruction to the Philippines. her oeuvre so far, which endeavours to identify, examine and present Here, environmentalists date much of this destruction to the second the environmental crisis as an omnipresent and central force rather half of the twentieth century, when President Ferdinand Marcos’s than a peripheral concern. modernisation policies, such as the 1967 Investment Incentives Act, Atienza’s various films, in turn, are interconnected as they docuaggressively encouraged foreign investment that broadly stimulated ment and interact with the changing nature of Bantayan Island and and facilitated the abuse of natural resources. A 2002 study titled those who inhabit it. In works such as Anito 1 (2011–15) and 2 (2017), ‘Philippine Biodiversity Conservation Priorities’ (copublished by the which were shot over several years, she follows tangible existential Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Conservation and cultural shifts of the kind she pointed out in a 2017 cnn article: International, the University of the Philippines Center for Integrative ‘People are simply hungrier than before, and it shows…,’Atienza is and Development Studies, and the Foundation for the Philippine quoted as saying. When it comes to community gatherings and tradiEnvironment) estimates that only 7 percent of the country’s original, tional festivals, there are ‘no more crazy, elaborate costumes; no more precolonial forest cover remains. painted rice sacks. Some people don’t even join [traditional festiThese ecologically reckless policies, in tandem with the country’s vals] because they choose to go fishing instead – their families have rapid population growth and general vulnerability to augmented to eat.’ In her most recent film, Panangatan 11°09’53.3”n 123°42’40.5”e natural disasters caused by climate change, are now having serious 2019-10-24 Thu 6:42 am pst 1.29 meters High Tide 2019-10-12 Sat 10:26 am financial and social consequences: a 2013 article by Time maga- pst 1.40 meters High Tide (2019) – in which she documents the state zine titled ‘The Typhoon’s Toll’ estimated that that year’s Typhoon of the islet’s coastal decay at high tide via the effects of rising sea levels Yolanda (Haiyan) cost the Philippines approximately us$14 billion; on housing – she highlights the contemporaneous consequences the 2016 El Niño caused significant declines in fishing as well as in of global warming. sugarcane and rice production, heavily impacting the rural poor in For Gilubong Ang Akong Pusod Sa Dagat (My Navel is Buried in the Sea) particular, who largely rely on local agriculture and fisheries for food (2011), Atienza collaborated with the locals of Madridejos, Bantayan supply; 50 of the country’s 421 principal rivers have been declared Island, as well as Overseas Filipino Workers (ofw) in Rotterdam to create a three-channel installabiologically dead. It is worth noting They are compressor divers, a dangerous tion. The 31-minute film oscillates that the government’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources type of fishing profession that borrows its between the lives of locals and ofw has taken serious steps in reevaluname from the low-pressure air compressor as they interact with the sea for their ating the Philippine Biodiversity livelihood. There are closeup shots of to which the plastic tubes are attached Strategy and Action Plan and has led men layering on worn long-sleeved initiatives supported by President shirts – unusual when compared (they are also run through a bottle of Rodrigo Duterte to clean Manila to the developed world’s notion of Sprite to cleanse the taste) Bay and Boracay. Environmentalists diving gear – and engaging with have voiced their concerns, however, that these actions are once Visayan voices offscreen: “Put your hat on properly!” one says, as the again economically motivated, as the president is simultaneously man quickly fixes his balaclava, “Like a thief,” another voice suggests. pushing an aggressive charter change to the 1987 constitution that The crowd cheers the men on when they finalise their uniforms and would remove restrictions on foreign ownership and control of land, pull on oval diving masks complete with makeshift headlamps made once again making the country’s natural resources susceptible to from a flashlight and the tyre of a child’s bicycle. Additional scenes show the men jumping into the ocean with tubes in their mouths – capitalist abuse.

Born in the Philippines to a Dutch mother and Filipino father, they are compressor divers, a dangerous type of fishing profession Martha Atienza uses her artistic and ecologically focused practice to that borrows its name from the low-pressure air compressor to which reappraise the local traditions in which human subjectivity, society the plastic tubes are attached (they are also run through a bottle of and the environment are intertwined. She splits her time between Sprite to cleanse the taste). both countries, making her home in the Philippines on Madridejos, My Navel… interrupts these local scenes with clips of Filipinos Bantayan Island, in the Visayan Sea, where she grew up. President working onboard a cargo ship. In the Philippines, making a liveMarcos granted the island (and over 50 others) protected status as a lihood as an ofw is seen as more lucrative than local fishing, in Wilderness Area in 1981 with Proclamation No 2151, which prevented part due to the unprofitability of fishing due to climate change: ‘sale, settlement, exploitation of whatever nature […] subject to ‘Imagine,’ Atienza says in the cnn article, ‘before it would take a existing recognized and valid private rights’. The 109 sq km island few hours to catch 40 kilos. Now it takes a whole night to catch a has a population of approximately 120,500 people but was devas- few kilos. And the fish caught are actually too small – they haven’t tated by Yolanda. The local government has wanted to prioritise the spawned yet.’ This lifestyle echoes that of others in Southeast Asia rebuilding of the island for tourism and economic profit, resulting who are tied to the changing sea. In a 2016 documentary titled Jago: in the Philippine Congress voting to revoke the island’s Wilderness A Life Underwater, for example, Rohani, an eighty-year-old hunterstatus in November 2019 (House Bill No 3861). Atienza’s most recent diver of the nomadic Bajau people, recounts the transformations exhibition at Silverlens, Manila, which took place at the end of last that have occurred during his own life, including industrialised year, operated within the context of this uncertainty and was titled trawler fishing, a decline in fish stocks and the death of his only son Equation of State. In it she prioritised the environmental impact of following a diving accident.

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Panangatan 11°09’53.3”n 123°42’40.5”e 2019-10-24 Thu 6:42 am pst 1.29 meters High Tide, 2019-10-12 Sat 10:26 am pst 1.40 meters High Tide, 2019, (still), single-channel hd video, no sound, 5 hr 7 min (loop)

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Anito 2, 2017 (still), single-channel video, sound, 7 min 18 sec (loop)

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Equation of State, 2019 (installation view, Silverlens, Manila, 2019)

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Ultimately, My Navel… was created for and by the people of Atienza’s internationally acclaimed work Our Islands 11°16’58.4” n Madridejos as a collaborative project to instigate a discussion among 123°45’07.0” e, which won the prestigious Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in the local community. The project’s dedicated blog explains, ‘It was 2017, coalesces the major subjects of My Navel… and Anito. In this singleimportant to emphasize on the importance of sharing stories and channel, 72-minute film, compressor divers in familiar costumes (the experiences with one another: families and members of the commu- Santo Niño, the Typhoon Yolanda survivor, Manny Pacquiao and the nity’. First and foremost, this film aimed to empower those it drug lord are among those from Anito) execute the Ati-Atihan procesportrayed. In a related interview, fisherman Mario Forrosuelo reveals, sion underwater to alienate the viewer and force them to confront the ‘Our ancestors used to say, “We come from the sea, there is where we palpable oceanic climate change seen in the seabed of dead coral. The start and where we will end. That is our inheritance.”’ Atienza would participants first move slowly across the screen from left to right, then continue to work with local compressor divers in later series. disappear behind the camera and circle to appear, once again, on the She also continued to probe the traditional relationship between left side of the screen; each time they pass the lens, the performers the residents of Bantayan Island and their culture in Anito 1, which accelerate to close the gaps between one another. As these figures move documents the Ati-Atihan festival that honours Santo Niño, the Infant across the barren seabed, the consequences of climate change are undeJesus of Roman Catholicism. Ati-Atihan, however, means ‘to be like the niable and ubiquitous. Experiencing the soundless Our Islands is almost Aeta’, which are an indigenous group thought to be one of the archi- voyeuristic – you feel like you’re a visitor to an aquarium – marking pelago’s first inhabitants. Popular religion in the Philippines tends the separation between passive viewer and active diver. However, what to combine precolonial spirituality with the Catholic canon, with distinguishes this from a demonstration of the typical voyeuristic gaze the animist influence being more pronounced in rural areas. Though is the consciously performative nature of the procession. The costumes the definition of anito varies by region – given the oratory tradition and animist traditions seen in Our Islands further prompt the quesof indigenous religion – it generally tion, ‘Who do these islands belong Here we see a man holding a sign that describes the sentient spirits of both to?’ The passive international viewer, reads, ‘I am a drug lord, do not copy me’ ancestors and nature that commuor the participating, local communicate with the Supreme Being for while Anito 1 and 2 document events as seen nity? In several Filipino languages, intercessions on behalf of the living. ‘our’ is translated into different words by the Bantayan Island community, the Anito 1 documents the comedic and that either include or exclude the films also make connections to the past, satirical personalities participants addressed – in Visayan, kanato and adopt via their costumes, which are kanamo respectively. Given Atienza’s when relationships between man, spirit often critical of current events: for previous willingness to title her films and nature were integral much of the film, it follows a shirtwith local languages, the deliberately less man donning a golden and curly wig, dressed as the Santo Niño vague English ‘our’ leaves the islands’ referential relation ambiguous. sculpture he carries as he struts through the streets. Other costumes Significant to Atienza’s aesthetic practice is her active social obligainclude world-champion-boxer-turned-politician Manny Pacquiao tion to her community. Rather than passively documenting the people and a Typhoon Yolanda survivor. and ecology of Bantayan Island, her social practice helps to augment Atienza reprised the project two years later with Anito 2 because the full complexities of human subjectivity, society and the environshe saw a clear difference in the ways that the Madridejos locals ment. As she says, ‘My work is always inspired by the question: can art celebrated the festival: there were fewer and fewer participants as trigger empowerment and tackle real issues in society?’ On a microworking came to be prioritised over celebration, and costumes turned level, Atienza has prioritised the empowerment of the local communiless colourful, more sombre. Here we see a man holding a sign that ties her art depicts. Para sa Aton (For Us) (2013) – which uses the inclusive reads, ‘I am a drug lord, do not copy me’ in Visayan as he is escorted by ‘us’ – documents the community working together to study bio-intenuniformed men holding guns. While Anito 1 and 2 document contem- sive farming, rebuild a marine sanctuary and develop sustainable paid porary events as seen by the Bantayan Island community, the films opportunities for women. On a wider, macro-level, Atienza has imporalso make connections to the past, when relationships between man, tantly developed an artistic practice rooted in the invigoration and spirit and nature were integral. Indeed, conservationists and envi- preservation of heterogeneous experience that is presented nationronmentalists have begun to look towards folk beliefs for guidance ally and globally as a form of difference within the mutually inclusive in protecting nature. Elias Victor, an Ati leader quoted in a bbc article global crisis. ‘Climate change isn’t only happening in the Philippines,’ this past July, says, ‘This what our ancestors told us: “It is not just us Atienza has said. ‘It’s a common issue we all have, and we need to talk – humans – who exist in this world. There are also those that are not to each other as neighbours.’ ara visible to our eyes… They take care of the source of our food and water.

When we eat, we invite them, too.”’

Marv Recinto is a writer based in London

all images Courtesy the artist and Silverlens, Manila

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What to Make of Po Po? The struggle to explain an art that looks like it belongs to a globalised, homogenised creative language and yet was created entirely without knowledge of its existence

by Adeline Chia

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above Out of Myth, Onto_Logical, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

preceding pages Negative Space #9 (Winter Lane), 2018, fabric, string, iron rods, brass bells. Photo: Wang Chunshan.

Courtesy the artist and Guang’An Field Art Biennale

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body of work including paintings, In the beginning was the word – or sculptures, installations and perforshould that be the image? This question hangs in the air in Burmese mances whose subject matter is a artist Po Po’s slow burn of an exhibihard-to-summarise mix of Buddhist tion, Primeval Codes, at Yavuz Gallery philosophy, sociopolitical commenin Singapore. Comprising a body of tary and whatever he happened to be paintings sketched during 1986–88 into (such as the ancient languages in but realised only this year, the works Primeval Codes). Because of the state’s depict simple geometric forms in strict isolationist policy, it was not austere compositions and a red-anduntil the late 1990s, when the borders black palette. They are, we are told began to loosen and Burmese artists by the wall text, inspired by third- to started exhibiting abroad, that he thirteenth-century scripts from Pyu, became more widely known.

Bagan, Inwa and Pinya that influA common refrain about Po Po’s enced the Burmese alphabet, as well work, especially among viewers as by contemporary traffic signs. This from outside Myanmar, is to say how unexpected combination of influremarkable it is that it feels familences has been distilled to a vocabuiarly contemporary (at least in the lary of squares, rectangles and trian‘global’, or rather Euro-American, gles, whose meanings remain open. sense), although a large part of it was made with almost no knowledge of That is, until you get to the titles.

Two right-facing triangles stacked one over the other: Fertility. such trends or art vocabularies. This judgement is (inadvertently) A black square divided into four by red lines: Partnership. At first the patronising, because it assumes that the adoption of a recognisably titles sound arbitrary, but after some time with the works, a weird thing ‘conceptual’ practice signifies an arrival of sorts for an artist. Even happens: I start to agree with them. Not through any logical deduc- the most well intentioned attempts to connect Po Po to an internative process, but rather through cumulative exposure. For example, tional context have resulted in awkward moments, like the inclusion a red bar bisecting a black square vertically is titled Freeze. This makes of Red Cube (1986) in the National Gallery Singapore’s ‘blockbuster’ sense: verticals are decisive, solid, unmoving. When a red bar bisects Minimalism: Light. Space. Object. exhibition in 2018. Made when the a black square diagonally the title is Wholeness. This is unexpected, artist was in his late twenties and featuring a rectangular canvas tilted but again, perfectly reasonable. at an angle, below which is a pile This diagonal, or slash, represents Red Cube could, in formal terms, pass as one of of rocks, Red Cube could, in formal divisions or fractions. Here, there the geometric works that dominated the rest terms, pass as one of the geometric is no numerator and denominator, works that dominated the rest of of the survey show.

The problem is, Po Po had just a division sign with nothing to the survey show. The problem is, Po divide – an elegant way to imply an never heard of Minimalism when he made it. Po had never heard of Minimalism empty sort of wholeness. when he made it. Over the years, he How are these meanings generated? It could be that the images has said different things about how this work was made to different also echo other signs, and the titles pinpoint one of these associations. people. The story he tells ArtReview Asia, via email, is that he had But it could equally be that these paintings are inherently neutral, been experimenting with different shapes for canvases and ways of and that the titles call their meanings into existence. Or there could hanging them. At the same time, he also had some granite stones in be a third way: the series creates meaning in both directions – image his studio that he had been stacking into a pile, a practice informed influencing title influencing image – in a mutually reinforcing feed- by that of Buddhist monks who, meditating in the jungle, would use such techniques to focus the mind. One day, he noticed he had back loop.

These works, which explore semiotics in such a playful and con- positioned the mound of rocks right under the slanted painting, and fident manner, were conceptualised when Red Cube was born.

Red Cube, 1986, oil on canvas, Myanmar was ruled by a military junta and Calling Po Po a minimalist, then, might be paper collage, gneiss, largely isolated from the rest of the world. construed as a heroic embracing of the ‘intendimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore Since the late 1970s, Po Po has created a diverse tional fallacy’. But it is also a wilful erasure

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Negative Space #8, 2007, fabric, string, dimensions variable.

Photo: Myo Myint Swe. Courtesy the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

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of the circumstances and thought processes behind the work, which on top of a mirror laid on the ground. Evoking both a tied are far from the common reference points of a more homogeneous sausage and a limp phallus, the work oozes a defeated, blocked and globalised artworld. sexuality: self-obsession as bondage and impotence.

The fact is, Po Po developed his art in a culture that has faced about Born in 1957 in Pathein, a rice-producing region in Southwest 60 years of political struggle, isolation and censorship. The national Myanmar, Po Po had a talent for drawing at a young age. The sum of his religion, Buddhism, is an abiding influence in his work, and a lot of formal art education, however, was in attending summer art classes what looks like cerebral, contentless abstraction (as in Red Cube) is – as run by the Ministry of Education in high school, where he learned explored below – in reality a literal translation of Buddhist precepts about perspective and composition. In 1979 he graduated from and practices.

Pathein College (now Pathein University) with a degree in botany, and The most extraordinary thing about his work, though, isn’t just a year later moved to the capital city, Yangon, where he worked as an his environment: it’s the man himself. A scholar-artist, Po Po ponders illustrator and graphic designer while practising as an artist. aesthetic-philosophical problems That first solo show, featuring seriously and deeply, and solves Calling Po Po a minimalist might be construed six soft sculptures and 31 abstract them for himself. A year after as a heroic embracing of the ‘intentional fallacy’, geometric paintings, sealed his reputation as the ‘bad boy’ of his first solo show, in Yangon in but it is a wilful erasure of the circumstances 1987, where he presented abstract Burmese art in a scene that mainly geometric paintings, he declared favoured realism. The soft sculpand thought processes behind the work painting dead in interviews, seetures included the Greek-inspired ing no difference between prehistoric cave paintings and modern series, as well as others that openly explored sex, such as the pair of ones on canvas. In information-starved Myanmar, he imbibed what- gently intertwining bolsters, Erotic (1982–86). Of the paintings on ever scrap of foreign knowledge he came across and spat it out in show, the most well-known are the quartet Tejo, Vayo, Pathavi, Apo his art in weird and wonderful ways: in that first solo show, for (1985), inspired by the four elements of the universe in Buddhism: example, his representations of Greek gods (a response to what Tejo (kinetic energy, or fire), Vayo (fluidity; water), Pathavi (solidity; he read in stray texts that were floating around) as undifferenti- earth) and Apo (movement; wind). These forces of nature were here ated tubes of cloth stuffed with cotton, seem gleefully opposed to translated into a triangle, circle, square and semicircle respectively, the hardness, realism and idealism of classical marble sculptures. each with gradated combinations of colours that glow and pulse.

Narcissus (1987 –94), inspired by the myth of a beautiful young man Like luminous visions from deep meditation, they somehow manage in love with himself, is a silk bolster tied by crisscrossing rope, lying to be universal yet totally idiosyncratic.

Narcissus, 1987–94, silk, kapok, mirror, rope, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

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A year after his Yangon show, Myanmar was thrown into crisis. powerfully. Stretched out across the ruins of a fallen empire, holding In 1988 a series of nationwide protests against the junta’s botched nothing but wind, it suggests both the ephemerality of civilisation handling of the economy culminated in bloody confrontations that and the nature of emptiness in Buddhist thought. In Road to Nirvana left thousands dead. Po Po, who was also involved in the demonstra- (1993–2013), commissioned by the 2013 edition of the Singapore tions, became disillusioned with art. He chose to go on a ten-year Biennale, a path is demarcated in the forest by a crisscrossing pattern hiatus where he only sketched out his ideas but did not realise any of green strings tied across tree trunks, forming a web that visualises projects. (This is why his works often have two dates attributed to the interconnectedness of living things.

Because of his limited output and the long gaps between his exhithem – one for when they existed only as ideas, another for when they were realised as physical entities.) In 1997 he opened his second show, bitions, Po Po does not consider himself a successful artist. But as Solidconcepts, consisting of installations of cardboard boxes, mir- of late a second wind is blowing. Old works are resurfacing; unrealised ideas being realised. In 2017, rors and wooden crates that reflect after his wife posted pictures on his newfound interest in different In information-starved Myanmar, Facebook of autokinetic paintings materials. Significant works from he imbibed whatever scrap of foreign this show include Controlled Tejo, he did during the 1990s, the reknowledge he came across and spat it out Controlled Vayo, Controlled Pathavi sponse was sufficiently encouragand Controlled Apo (1991–97/2015), ing for him to stage a show of them in his art in weird and wonderful ways which encased the four elements in Yangon. The process of throwing in wooden crates. Fluorescent light tubes stood in for fire, rubber for these black brushstrokes on Shan paper (which is made from the bark water, bricks for earth, and a chunk of ice – melting over the course of of the mulberry tree) was, he told a Burmese newspaper, like ‘riding a the exhibition – for wind. wild bull’. His representation by Yavuz Gallery in Singapore has also During the late 1990s and early 2000s, he started making ambi- yielded two solo shows: Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (2015), showcasing tious outdoor, site-specific installations in nature, further exploring works made from 1982 to 1997, and Primeval Codes.

The gallerist at Yavuz shared a tidbit. Red and black, he explained, and dramatising Buddhist concepts. Negative Space #8 (2007) comprised two huge sheets of red cloth hung across two walls in the ancient were sensitive colours in Myanmar because of the quirks of the censorcity of Sri Ksetra, one suspended in the air and the other at ground ship board under the junta. It frowned upon white and black for the level. This work, which refers to the traditional canopy above ancient contrasting images of goodness and evil they represented, and red Buddha statues in Myanmar, is documented with the sheets rippling for its association with revolution (and after 1988, its link with Aung

Controlled Vayo, Controlled Tejo, Controlled Pathavi, and Controlled Apo, 1991-97 / 2015, mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

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San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy). Abstraction was also But I get the sense that Po Po is not playing intellectual games with viewed with suspicion, because it could smuggle in political criticism semiotics. The titles tell us he means business. What he is taking on, or foreign influence. Had Po Po made these works in 1988, they might unironically, unabashedly, are the Big Questions: God (two squarish not have gone down so well at home. oblongs stacked lengthwise over breadthwise; a fat cross); Need In this respect, Po Po’s works have an element of resistance. (two horizontal bars across a square, slightly staggered, not meeting); This opens up another dimension in his interest in codes: that and Encounter of Death (a black vertical plank with a square face on top; communicating in secret signs and systems might be a neces- a geometric sarcophagus). sary condition of artmaking in Myanmar, where speaking truth to Every encounter with an artist of consequence, in a sense, involves power could get you tortured or thrown into jail. This may explain learning a new language. Driven by a fiercely personal logic, shaped titles, such as Leader and Justice, Hardship, Warrior, Defence and by his environment but irreducible to it, absorbing outside influProvocative, that allude to politences and then mutating them, ical struggle. But unlike the more Communicating in secret signs and systems and passing through minimalist, obvious activism of some of his conceptual or otherwise contemmight be a necessary condition of artmaking porary art without having heard compatriots, whose banned works in Myanmar, where speaking truth to power of them at the moment of creation, have messages hidden in the canvasPo Po’s language is communicative es, Po Po’s works are not ciphers that could get you tortured or thrown into jail without being completely legible. can be cracked. His is a more slippery tongue.

He speaks in codes that resist codification.

Meaning flickers in and out of focus in Primeval Codes. Under close But are there ways to get him? The exhibition title, Primeval Codes, attention, certain patterns seem to emerge, and yet, when I try to suggests that he is trying to tap into something ancient and primipin them down, recede. Left-facing triangles tend to be aggressive tive about communication – a part that is more instinctive and unrea(Provocative; Warrior), and tall rectangles imply some form of blockage soning, perhaps even fundamental to life. Take the powerful, even talisor stoppage (Constraint; Defence; Encounter of Death), but these are manic image, Unknowable, which depicts the outline of a circle within vague tendencies, not hard and fast rules. The eclectic symbology the outline of a square, their sides touching. It is mathematical, almost suggests a system without fossilising into one. If Po Po has an unre- fated: Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man without the man. Against the leased painting from this series in the storeroom, and the title were solid black background, the circle glows thinly, the sun’s corona during a solar eclipse. Moon over Sun. Day, night, unknowable. Yes. ara hidden from me, I wouldn’t be able to guess it.

Wholeness, 1988 / 2020, oil on canvas and mounted wood, 92 × 93 × 6 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

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Around About Trinh T. Minh-ha

by Patrick J. Reed

What can the Vietnamese filmmaker’s ‘antiethnography’ teach us about how we might share the experiences of others?

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I took a stroll down a residential street in Los Angeles, one of the most filmmaker’s films as part of a yearlong project titled ‘Trinh T. Minh-ha diverse cities in the world, and witnessed teenage boys of European is on our mind’. descent speaking ‘fake Asian’, much to their own dumb amusement.

At this juncture in living history, one might struggle to find It had already been another dire day in the headlines for the faltering urgency in these films. For some years the world has been afflicted by usa: fires were in the hills; the virus was out of control; the govern- a posttruth regime, a cynical phenomenon that promotes speaking ment was out of control too. This sidewalk banter seemed to confirm only of oneself and cares nothing for philosophical rigour as regards the disintegration of the moral social fabric as well. The boys’ behav- the elusive nature of truth. And for all of its influence in the literary iour illustrated the casual racism that heralds the systemic racism and visual arts, deconstructionism – a prominent influence on the that plagues the nation. What, I wondered, constituted behaviour or work – is not exactly au courant. The films are products of their eras, speech that would provide viable resistance to their cruel laughter despite their timeless intentions, which begs the question: why do and all it implies? Certainly my scolding would not suffice. Let’s be they endure? real. More thoughtful work is needed, which is why I found heart Reassemblage, with its nonlinear construction and soliloquy, sets out many of the reasons why Trinh’s output remains the object of so in the films of Trinh T. Minh-ha.

A general tactic for grasping Trinh’s cinema is supplied by the artist much contemplation. It defies narrative conventions but contributes herself. The frequently quoted line from her first film, Reassemblage to the history of the documentary, with its conspicuous self-reflex(1982), a study of women and rural life in Senegal, where she lived for ivity leading many to label it an ‘antiethnographic’ film. Here, ‘anti-’ three years while teaching at the National Conservatory of Music in opposes the discipline of ethnography and its colonising gaze. The Dakar, goes: “I do not intend to speak about; just speak nearby”. Trinh negative prefix indicates resistance to the status quo. We are not meant refers to her position as a visitor vis-à-vis the villagers she met and to conclude, however, that Trinh’s lens achieved radical objectivity.

Rather, she upheld the gap between seer and seen by incorporating discloses her position as an un-authoritative narrator.

Trinh is now a professor at the Gender & Women’s Studies and self-awareness into the very process of filmmaking: ‘speaking nearby’ Rhetoric departments at the University of California, Berkeley, is the creed of a conscientious interloper.

But what sets this apart from well-established but her influence on contemporary filmmaking facing page and above is such that each Thursday this past July the doubts about film as a vehicle for pure truth?

A Tale of Love (still), 1995, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, in Trinh rejects the fiction/nonfiction binary – each, dirs Trinh T. Minh-ha San Francisco, used its YouTube channel to she recognises, contains aspects of its supposed and Jean-Paul Bourdier, 108 min. broadcast one of the Vietnamese theorist and opposite; both are dubious in their own right.

Courtesy Trinh T. Minh-ha

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In that dichotomy’s place she foregrounds doubt and situates the Wattis in September 2019. Simply put, to read across is to engage a language of film in a deconstructive mode, allowing her to manifest text in simultaneous operations. It is to engage, for example, poetry the living complexity of those who populate her films yet leave them as both poetry and philosophy or vice versa (in a literary tradition in which the two are kept separate). It could even read poetry into unscathed by ‘authoritative’ qualification.

Although Reassemblage was screened at Wattis outside of the frame- film. “Information can come in many ways, and it doesn’t have to work of the film club, its thesis applied to the whole online programme, be descriptive,” said Trinh. “And this is where resistance comes in, including The Fourth Dimension (2001), Trinh’s first digital film, which because with theory, the analytical mind, the dissecting mind, is very concerns time as she experienced it in Japan. Through layered images, sharp. With poetry, on the contrary, ‘I’ is not just this individual, but text and sounds, the film registers the oscillation of tradition and ‘I’ is an open space where every ‘I’ can come in.” Reading across frees a text from its boundaries and progress that conjures a phantasmic Japanese culture situated We are not meant to conclude, however, that frees a person from the limitations somewhere between the protracted of selfhood; it is an extension of Trinh’s lens achieved radical objectivity. ‘speaking nearby’, wherein selves intervals of Noh theatre and the Rather, she upheld the gap between seer commingle through the written rushing speed of a bullet train.

This temporal flexibility influword, or with the moving image. and seen by incorporating self-awareness ences the film’s structure. In a brief Surname Viet Given Name Nam into the very process of filmmaking scene showing a waterfall flowing (1989), a collage film, explores the at a natural rate one moment then in slow motion the next, it appears concept of the poetic ‘I’ through a series of displacements. Five as an abrupt manipulation, reminding the viewer that the film docu- Vietnamese women living in the United States recount hardships they ments Trinh’s investigation of a perceptual phenomenon and not endured in their home country and as immigrants. What appears to be a culture’s essence. Arguably, this moment demonstrates, to quote a garden-variety documentary loses its centre when it is revealed that Trinh’s script, “the shape of living, caught in the unfolding course the interviewees are nonprofessional actors interpreting the words of a digital plane”. In other words, it glimpses the fourth dimension; of other Vietnamese women whose experiences are different from but resonant with their own. Speaking nearby becomes a manner of filmic time and lived time coincide.

The temporal conjunctions that are explored in and through The issuing respect as it unfolds between Trinh and the characters, Trinh Fourth Dimension echo the idea of ‘reading across’, proposed by Trinh and the actors, and the actors and the women they portray. Identity is during a conversation with ntu cca director Ute Meta Bauer at at issue for them, none of whom testify or concede to an immutable

facing page and above A Tale of Love (still), 1995, dirs Trinh T. Minh-ha and Jean-Paul Bourdier, 108 min. Courtesy Trinh T. Minh-ha

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self, despite the pressures of familial obligation, national loyalty characters occupy a textual limbo, and the film’s title refers to both their or the curious camera, all of which conspire to fix them as mother, travel and the various discourses on mortality, spirituality, language if not daughter of the state, if not an immigrant. and time that they find in each zone. Theirs is an adventure in embodied A nineteenth-century epic poem, The Tale of Kieu, by Nguyen Du, cross-reading; the multiple Heavens they encounter are their texts. which is considered a treasure of national literature in Vietnam and So how does one reconcile the equanimity of ‘speaking nearby’, an allegory for the history of the country, figures as a point of reference the kinship produced by ‘reading across’ when one confronts repugin Surname Viet… and as the narrative fulcrum in A Tale of Love (1995). nant ‘speaking about’, when ‘one watches things that make one sick Codirected with Trinh’s husband, the artist Jean-Paul Bourdier, at heart’, as writes Nguyen in The Tale of Kieu? One lives by the ethics A Tale of Love portrays a young Vietnamese immigrant navigating of both. One reads across the lines of one’s own station to express soliher life as a writer and a model in darity with, for example, a margin“Information can come in many ways, and San Francisco. Her circumstance alised community without lapsing loosely parallels The Tale of Kieu, it doesn’t have to be descriptive,” Trinh said. into saviourism, lip service or moral even as she analyses the poem superiority. In 2020, such a lesson “And this is where resistance comes in, from a feminist and diasporic could not be more relevant to allies because with theory, the analytical mind, perspective. Like her counterparts of the Black Lives Matter movement whose own lives have not in Surname Viet…, she maintains a the dissecting mind, is very sharp” been marked by police brutality; multiplicity of roles, undeterred by the demands of any single category: devoted daughter, serious or, in the United States, to those who are counteracting anti-Asian scholar, erotic muse and self-proclaimed ‘woman of the nineties’. She coronavirus racism but who have never known racist mistreatment. moves across simultaneous realities unfolding in the course of her (People like myself.) The enduring relevance of ‘speaking nearby’ is its protest and inherent respect. Its enduring power lies in the own character. Sometimes, she speaks nearby herself.

And in the digital film Night Passage (2004), Trinh and Bourdier human dignity it preserves. ara adapt Milky Way Railroad (1927), a novel by Kenji Miyazawa, to similar effect, yet the multiplicity in question pertains to ‘reading across’.

Trinh T. Minh-ha. the final exhibition at ntu Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, is on view from 28 October to 28 February In this sci-fi narrative, three youths ride a spectral train on a journey between life and death, passing through a series of fantastical zones.

Considering their train ‘runs on words’, one can speculate that the Patrick J. Reed is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles

above and facing page Surname Viet Given Name Nam (still), 1989, dir Trinh T. Minh-ha, 108 min. Courtesy Trinh T. Minh-ha

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A Revolution in Isaan?

The art scene in Thailand’s northeast is building momentum thanks to grassroots activism and an emphasis on collectivism

by Max Crosbie-Jones

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The institutional plaque and auspicious offerings at the forthcoming The Manifesto

by Maielie gallery in Khon Kaen province. Courtesy Khon Kaen Manifesto

A Bun Phra Wet festival procession in Tansum district, Ubon Ratchathani province, 2015.Photo: Teerasakchai Sirichana

A Bun Phra Wet festival procession begins to move in BÄ n Chik Lum, Ubon Ratchathani province, 2015. Photo: Teerasakchai Sirichana

preceding pages Mobile Mo Lam Bus Project at Wonderfruit Music Festival. Courtesy John Clewley

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A few years ago, Chiang Mai – the ancient yet cosmopolitan ‘rose’ of recently staged an exhibition amid the monolithic radio masts and Thailand’s north – enjoyed its moment in the sun. For much of 2016, it cracked structures of Ramasun Station, a former us Army intelligence was nigh on impossible to flick through the pages of an Asian inflight base left to nature since the end of the Vietnam War. And then there’s or travel magazine and not encounter a story praising this city’s ‘flour- the truculent art activism of Thanom Chapakdee: the bespectacled art ishing’ visual-arts scene. Driving this surge in interest – including a curator-critic, born and raised in Isaan’s Sisaket province, agitating feature in this very magazine – was a new private museum, maiiam for an art scene that, in a nod to relational art and lusty revolutionary Contemporary Art Museum, that added a glittering, bricks-and- Marxism, unites and awakens. mortar destination to what had been, up to that point, a diffuse This last development is particularly in-your-face. In Thai Art: network of galleries and project spaces, many helmed by artists who Currencies of the Contemporary, art historian David Teh writes that live in and around the city. Its emergence hastened a neat, rise-of-the- culture itself, rarely armed revolt, has long been the core channel by underdog narrative – the overdue decentring of the Thai art scene which Isaan folk have resisted the state programme of ‘civilising’ the away from the capital, Bangkok – that came bolstered by a genteel northeast that began under King Chulalongkorn (ruled 1868–1910). backstory: centuries of folk-craft heritage, as well as what ArtReview This resistance to what many from the region have long viewed as a called ‘an organic though skittish history of nonprofit community form of creeping internal colonialism – a progress-led process that has pivoted upon the projection, by an often tone-deaf Bangkok, of projects’, meant Chiang Mai well deserved the hype.

Over the mountains to the east, however, a much scrappier story is a homogenising notion of kwampenthai (Thainess) and successive playing out in Isaan: the Northeast. No world-class private museum national development policies – can arguably be traced, to varying is galvanising the local art scene. But what can be found in Thailand’s degrees, in the region’s old folk music, textiles and temple murals. biggest geographic region – a largely flat and arid, rice-growing land Ditto the work of a few radical filmmakers (essential viewing: the Isan of over 22 million people, many of them with stronger ethnic and Film Group’s Tongpan, a social-realist docudrama exploring, through linguistic ties to adjacent Laos than Central Thailand – is another farmers’ eyes, the pernicious effects of inexorable modernity – banned decentring of sorts. In lieu of a rich gallery ecosystem, several artist- in 1977, the year it was made, but now on the Kingdom’s official film or activist-led events and platforms aimed at spurring new enquiry heritage registry). into microhistories and public participation in cultural producChapakdee, however, has tried to up the ante with a combative tion and political discourse have strain of culture activism and uremerged. Also, a state biennale for ban interventions – a strategy that These nascent initiatives and projects Isaan is being cobbled together: chimes with the pop cultureare, says Thai curator Gridthiya inspired protest art and socialon 11 June 2021, the postponed Gaweewong, “showing us the other side: media-driven guerrilla tactics of second edition of the roving the country’s Free Youth moveThailand Biennale, led by guest the intellectuals, the forward-thinking curator Yuko Hasegawa, is set to ment (which is currently calling ideas” and “shattering the clichés of Isaan explore the institutional capital for Thailand’s parliament to be people as stupid, poor and in pain” and ancient ruins of Korat, the dissolved, state harassment ended region’s largest, gateway province. and a new constitution minted).

What to make of it all? For leading Thai curator Gridthiya In October 2018 he launched Khon Kaen Manifesto: a three-week Gaweewong, the clusters of agonistic grassroots activity are, while exhibition that railed against the myriad forms of social injustice belated, especially exciting, as they are bound up tightly with the inflicted on the Thai and Isaan people by authoritarian administrations region’s unique sociohistorical conditions. “In Chiang Mai, things old and new. And this former art professor set out his stall dramatically: are more aesthetic, community orientated, whereas in Isaan it’s more he invited artists from the fringes to take part without limitations; about the political collective and collectivism,” she explains. For he held the event in a spectral symbol of the 1997 Asian financial crisis decades, Isaan has been subject to lazy stereotyping – portrayed as (a derelict office building that was never finished); and he didn’t tell either a simple land of somtum (green papaya salad), animist spirits, the local authorities his plans. lao khao (rice whisky) and driving mor lam folk music, or a hotbed of They showed up anyway, and promptly ordered him to cover up grinding poverty and Communist or Red Shirt resistance – but these an artwork that placed Jatupat Boonpattararaksa, a leader of a stunascent initiatives and projects are, she adds, “showing us the other dent activist group who recently served a sentence for royal defamaside: the intellectuals, the forward-thinking ideas” and “shattering tion, alongside other symbols of resistance and protest from modern the clichés of Isaan people as stupid, poor and in pain”. history. But even if it hadn’t received the stamp of authoritarian disapThese developments include The Isaan Record, a Thai-English proval, this three-week pop-up event would still have been deemed a language website founded in 2016 by a German journalist-anthropol- success: it was well received in left-leaning quarters of the Thai media ogist named Fabian Drahmoune. Spanning human rights, democ- (including The Isaan Record: ‘The festival provided a rare acceptance in racy, development issues, local politics and the arts, its reporting on Thai art of democratic expression and countered a dominant discourse the grassroots issues of the region is steady and unflinching. Recent that condemns peripheral narratives as illegitimate and unworthy contributions have included a long-form photo essay on villagers in of respect’). Among the artworks was an event poster mocking the Sakhon Nakhon province opposing a proposed potash mine, observa- rhetoric of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, the infamous military tions from a recent youth protest and an essay on state eradication of dictator who, during the 1960s, used the city of Khon Kaen as the Tai Noi script, the written language of the ancient Lao Kingdom. Also model-cum-launchpad for his vision of a developed, communist-free notable is Noir Row Art Space, a gallery in the city of Udon Thani that Isaan. Another was nothing more than a chair, hanging upside-down

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from a noose in an empty room – an elusive work by Nutdanai Jitbunjong that harked back to Thailand’s 6 October 1976 massacre, still a contested paroxysm today.

The abandoned building in which the first Khon Kaen Manifesto took place is now locked and empty, but Chapakdee is only just getting started. Perhaps the most symbolic moment vis-à-vis his desire for a paradigm shift in Thai art came on a nondescript Monday in June 2019, when he unveiled plans for The Manifesto by Maielie – a new art gallery that will also serve as a cultural exchange centre, a public forum for nonmainstream discussion and progressive points of view. Coming a few months after the government’s post-2014-coup ban on political gatherings had been lifted, this announcement was timed to coincide with the 87th anniversary of the Kingdom’s transition to a constitutional monarchy (24 June 1932).

“The people of Khon Kaen have always had a rebellious spirit, and we want to see more of it,” he told the small gathering, which included the then-leader of the recently dissolved Future Forward, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, and a fresh-out-ofprison Boonpattararaksa. Also present were the driving forces behind the maiiam Contemporary Art Museum back in Chiang Mai, Eric Bunnag Booth and his stepfather, Jean Michel Beurdeley, both avid patrons and collectors of contemporary Thai art. Much of the excitement at this event was directed towards a clear plastic plaque engraved with the words ‘Aesthetics of Resistance’ – a tribute to the small brass plaque that discreetly commemorated the 1932 revolution that led to the end of Thailand’s absolute monarchy, but disappeared, in mysterious circumstances, from Bangkok’s Royal Plaza in April 2017. A lost monument that one academic has called a ‘dark spot on the royal space’ was, here, reimagined and installed as the emblem of a new revolution – a source of hope in a disruptive civic space.

As of writing, The Manifesto by Maielie isn’t yet open. However, the planned dates for a new exhibition, ubon Agenda (21–30 November),

and the second Khon Kaen Manifesto (10–20 December), point towards a slow, strategic building of steam, and also an urge to fan out into new urban contexts. The former will take place in an abandoned school in the built-up city centre of Ubon Ratchathani; the latter in a ‘smelly’ former brothel in downtown Khon Kaen. Artists are unconfirmed, but it seems likely that both exhibitions will be salons des refusés, consisting mainly of works by artists snubbed by the curatorial teams behind the forthcoming Bangkok Art Biennale and Thailand Biennale. Of his Khon Kaen outing, Chapakdee says: “This time we are expanding upon the idea of modernisers coming and making monuments.” Unperturbed by covid-19, he adds that, once again, it will explore the genius loci of its venues – and fly under the radar. “We will just make an eruption,” he says with a low, conspiratorial laugh.

“And, of course, there will be mor lam music.”

There is, undeniably, a partisan political element to these events, but Gaweewong, a close friend of his, believes its mechanics show how decentring should be done. “I like that Thanom is not focusing only on Khon Kaen,” she says. “I like the way he’s building and expanding and trying to use other provinces across Isaan not only as a site of artistic production, but also as a site for reinvestigating the history of each city, each province.”

Another rallying figure, she is well placed to comment on the merits of, and best methods for, shifting the power balance away from Bangkok. For well over a decade, the only steady source of wellresearched exhibitions loosely concerning Isaan were the private institutions she works for: Bangkok’s Jim Thompson Art Center, where she serves as artistic director, and Korat’s Jim Thompson Farm, where her team guest-curates each winter. Although both on hiatus (the new building of the former is under construction, the latter will skip its December–January open season due to the pandemic), these closely linked institutions have, since 2003 and 2012 respectively, consistently sought to historicise and promote not just the region’s

Mit Jai Inn, Untitled, 2019, site-specific installation at Jim Thompson Farm’s Art on Farm 2019.

Photo: Ekkalak Napthuesuk. Courtesy Jim Thompson Farm, Nakhon Ratchasima

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The circular antenna array of Ramasun Station, Udon Thani province, Northern Thailand. Courtesy Noir Row Art Space

Mobile Mo Lam Bus Project exhibition. Courtesy John Clewley

Detail of Pinaree Sanpitak’s collaborative meal, Breast Stupa Cookery

By Samuay & Sons, with chef Weerawat Triyasenawat at Jim Thompson’s Farm, 2018. Courtesy Jim Thompson Farm, Nakhon Ratchasima

Artist’s protest graffiti at Khon Kaen Manifesto, 2018.

Courtesy Khon Kaen Manifesto

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Dusadee Huntrakul, There are More Monsoon Songs Elsewhere (detail), 2018, 16 drawings, charcoal powder and white chalk, 34 × 26 × 4 cm each (framed). Courtesy the artist and 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok

Prateep Suthathongthai, Biography of Sarit Thanarat, A Conqueror, 2018, oil on linen, 32 × 40 cm.

Courtesy the artist and 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok

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Prateep Suthathongthai, History of Thai Women, 2018, oil on linen, 32 × 40 cm.

Courtesy the artist and 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok

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sericulture – the source of the Jim Thompson company’s lustrous province’s often bawdy Phi Ta Khon festival – when the unassuming streets of Dan Sai village are filled with ghoulish masks made from silks – but also its vernacular traditions, rituals and forms.

In 2015, for example, multimedia exhibition Joyful Khaen, Joyful Dance wicker and palm fronds, and palad khik (penis-shaped amulets) branreappraised mor lam music from a broad sociohistorical perspective, dished – by a host of authorities, including the Tourism Authority of then went on to spur the creation of the Mobile Molam Bus Project, Thailand. Elsewhere, state-funded exhibitions such as the Bangkok a melodic museum on wheels that has done laps of the local festival Art & Culture Centre’s Isaan Contemporary Report (2018) have presented circuit. At Jim Thompson Farm’s Art on Farm season last December, visi- a Bangkok-centric vision of the region that, while acknowledging tors encountered a showcase of pa pawet, the long, delicate fabric scrolls its dynamism, creativity, growth and history predating the nation, that are painted with coarse takes on Buddhism’s Vessantara epic and smoothed out – or omitted – the rough edges: the political discontentparaded through villages during Isaan’s annual Bun Phra Wet festival. ment, the animist practices, etc.

For Art on Farm, contemporary artists – Pratchaya Phinthong, Pinnaree But while there is plenty of latitude for criticising the Thailand Sanpitak, Mit Jai Inn and many others – have also been invited to make Biennale, could there also be room for excitement? Some observers site-specific works addressing Isaan’s historical and cultural context. believe that it is likely to produce some stimulating projects, largely On the face of it, the forthcoming Thailand Biennale aspires to on account of the number of Thai artists currently based in or actively such deep, long-term engagement. ‘The theme for this particular exploring Isaan. At this point, it would be remiss not to mention biennale’, the official announcement states, ‘is a proposal and a prac- Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who grew up in Khon Kaen and has tice, primarily focusing on the ecologies specific to this region, in an routinely used Isaan – ‘The most precious treasure of all,’ he once said attempt to create autonomous micro-ecologies.’ Hasegawa, the widely – as a source of inspiration and site of production for his features, respected artistic director at Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art, short films and video installations. But past run-ins with the Thai hopes to “bring out” the potential of Korat’s national parks, its ancient culture ministry mean any involvement on his part is implausible.

Khmer ruins (Phimai Historical Park), its silk villages, its city colleges However, the talent pool is big, these days. Of late, there has been and temples. And, speaking to ArtReview from Tokyo, she seems confi- no shortage of Thai artists striving to find fresh angles on the region, particularly ones pertaining to its dent that something lasting can be role in the Cold War. Not all are created in spite of the many logisThrough drawings of ceramics unearthed from Isaan. “A lot more artists from tical hurdles thrown up by the in Isaan then lost to a us museum, Bangkok and other areas want to pandemic. “It’s very important to Dusadee Huntrakul teased out rarefied create legacy,” she says. “Instead of explore what is going on – and went projecting something, we are more on – here,” says Gaweewong. themes – neocolonialism, cultural focused on finding possibility, on More Monsoon Songs Elsewhere restitution – dominating discourse about highlighting forms of potential, (2018), by the Bangkok-born Dusadee the discovery of Isaan’s lost Ban Chiang on engendering something that Huntrakul, featured hyperrealistic already exists.” Permanent works drawings of ancient ceramics uncivilisation during the Vietnam War are in the pipeline, as is lots of crossearthed in Isaan by American archaedisciplinary collaboration. ologists, then lost to a us museum. Through these drawings, he Gaweewong, however, is a bit sceptical. She worries that the place- teased out the rarefied themes – neocolonialism, cultural restitumaking she hopes to find in a biennale – the creation of a sustainable tion – dominating academic discourse about the discovery of Isaan’s bottom-up legacy in the host community or city – will prove tricky to lost Ban Chiang civilisation during the Vietnam War. Also shown at realise. “The problem is it’s really top-down,” she says, in reference to Bangkok’s 100 Tonson Gallery was Prateep Suthathongthai’s A Little the Ministry of Culture department overseeing it, known as the Office Rich Country (2018): a series of small paintings replicating the covers of Contemporary Art and Culture. Also of concern is the peripatetic of midcentury books, each one worn and faded after years of being format – it doesn’t lend itself to cultivating relationships and mean- used to promote or indoctrinate the region. Another still to have ingful engagement. “One of the producers of Setouchi Triennale once substantively grappled with Isaan is Korakrit Arunanondchai – told me: if you want to do something right, you have to do it at least during the research phase for his videowork No history in a room filled two times. The curators are going to have to work very hard to get into with people with funny names 5 (2019), he went to Udon Thani province the history and ethics of each site.” in search of ‘naga portals’, a secret cia black site, and folklore.

Such misgivings are warranted – the first Thailand Biennale, in While the Thailand Biennale’s list of participating artists won’t be South Thailand’s Krabi province, was tainted by bureaucratic snafus confirmed until the new year, the robust curatorial team headed by and missteps. An artwork was removed on grounds of cultural sensi- Hasegawa is also cause for early optimism. Well versed at navigating tivity; others went unrealised; a bizarre televised opening ceremony highly centralised art bureaucracies, she certainly won’t be fostering made it look like an extravagant prop in a Geertzian theatre state. hyperlocal forms of counter-hegemonic dialogue, dissent and expresThere is no discernible legacy to speak of. sion, as in the agonistic public interventions and democratic arenaMoreover, when it comes to appropriating the culture of Isaan, making of Chapakdee: “I’m very polite when I enter somebody else’s the Thai state arguably has form. Teh believes the shallow processes land,” she says diplomatically. But she is determined to contribute of affiliation and encompassment, part of what he has termed ‘a meaningfully to Isaan’s recent stirrings. “I’m no pop-up curator,” wider economy of appearances’, began in the nineteenth century she says. “I don’t like biennale exhibitions where, once everything is with the photographing and collecting of ethnic costumes by Siam’s finished, nothing is left. Creating a cultural legacy for the people of royal elite. More recent examples include the attempts to co-opt Loei Isaan is very important to me.” ara

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An-My Lê A photographer reconnects with her city via its arthouse marquees as told to Fi Churchman

These photographs were made in May when it was only beginning to feel safe to go out in the street during the pandemic here in New York City. This was fairly early on and there was hardly anyone around.

I had started venturing out to my studio after about two or three weeks sheltering at home. My studio is a 20-minute walk from my house, in an office building that was completely deserted at that time.

My space is perched in one of the rooftop towers, up 12 flights of stairs, so I felt fairly safe being there. Still, there was an incredible feeling of trepidation leaving the safety of my home to go on what seemed like a risky adventure.

Out there, at the time, I felt completely gripped by the lack of life in the street. I would be walking carefully and with intention. I would notice anyone moving perhaps too close to me. And I would pay attention to the smallest thing – like a piece of paper flying in the wind.

There was no traffic, and the silence was eerie. The moments of introspection were intense during these walks. I was in my head so much, processing my fears and insecurities about the future, hatching plans, yet I also realised that the city was speaking to me and I needed to pay attention to what it was trying to tell me.

Three quarters of the way home from the studio I always pass Cobble Hill Cinemas, my neighbourhood movie theatre. One day I noticed that the marquee carried messages: ‘We love you Brooklyn’, ‘Be well and safe’ (the message in the photograph here is, of course, more specific to ‘Jax’). Those lines made me feel seen and heard – the city was speaking to me and I needed to pay attention. I would see these messages regularly, and over time I realised that other small theatres also carried their own idiosyncratic messages. (Not the large chain cinemas, but the arthouses.) It wasn’t long before I photographed the Cobble Hill marquee. And then eventually I got on my bike and rode into Manhattan to photograph the other theatres. The

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experience of riding my bike over the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridges, the vastness and endlessness of the empty city, the nakedness of architecture in the deserted streets, all reconnected me to the city. It was a connection that I hadn’t experienced since I first got to New York in the mid-80s.

Movie productions and war reenactments have been important in my work for a while. Allowing me to consider complicated layers of history, they are the perfect foil for exploring what is real and what is fictional in photography, a paradigm that is inherent to the medium but that is never a concern for filmmakers. Usually a marquee will advertise the next feature – a promise of some spectacle, or a journey.

Movie theatres are like a secular place of worship. Now we have found ourselves without access to this promise. What the theatres gave us instead were these idiosyncratic messages which I thought were very moving – they spoke to me in powerful ways, during a time when I felt so uncertain.

In the last few years, for my project Silent General, I have found myself engaging with the idea of the American roadtrip, which was very unexpected. I never thought I had anything to contribute to that genre. Now, these movie theatre photos have something to do with the tradition of street photography. It’s a genre that I studied, and I think it’s wonderful, but I am also aware of its criticism – the idea that it lacks authorship, that there is no thinking behind it. So it is a challenge to find myself engaging with a process that tries to capture ‘everyday’ life in a moment that is so extraordinary. The Joyce Theater is a dance performance space. I was drawn to the scripted choreography of two firemen who were walking under the canopy of the building (9/11 is a distant past) while a man hoses the pavement.

On the right of the frame, two men struggle with what I assume are laundry bags, and ahead a masked man turns the block corner with

ArtReview Asia

his beautiful dog. An everyday moment, set off in unexpected ways, feel that way in wartime. The big difference between a pandemic and I think, by the message that hangs over them all, ‘We will dance again’, a war is that if you prepare and know what your parameters are (of course at the beginning we didn’t know much about how this virus on the marquee.

One of the movies I watched with renewed interest during the was transmitted), and you follow the strictest rules, you could make second week of the pandemic was Contagion (2011), and it was as if it through. In war, there is only so much you can prepare for: a rocket what was in the theatre had been brought to life – and that made can fall on your home any time. the dichotomy even more interesting to me. The thought that this ifc Center, New York (2020) has the most obvious message: Black blockbuster had stepped out of the screen and onto the streets, and Lives Matter. This is one of the few photographs I’ve taken recently is now enveloping all of New York City, was surreal. Working with that has such a clear and direct message. the messaging on those marquees reminded me of Ken Lum’s brilI think there’s a shared anxiety among artists as we ponder about liant Shopkeeper (2001) and Strip mall (2009) series, which both subvert forms of direct political action and protest. Sometimes there’s a their anticipated transactional messages. I particularly love Midway sinking feeling about art’s usefulness, but for me, the spectacle of Shopping Plaza (created for the 2014 Whitney Biennial). He was protest, the voices, signage, performance and elocution, are lessons inspired by the Vietnamese businesses tucked in a shopping mall in humility. near his house in Philadelphia. He recreated the signage advertising Protest is a commitment to clarity, urgency and spontaneity. The these businesses but subverted the messaging by inserting impor- slogans and chants only work if they can be shared and invested with tant historical moments, places and people related to the Vietnam belief. I used to shy away from explicit language, political or otherWar, such as Thích Quang Ðúc’s name, a monk who self-immolated wise, as a subject for my work because I feared I would neither document nor reveal anything that wasn’t already there or already stated. in 1963.

With the sheltering-in-place order on the horizon, I developed Recently I’ve come to the conclusion that the language of protest and intense preparedness ptsd. I was brought straight back to my child- resistance is not complete without a response… It invites and demands hood during the Vietnam war. I had a conversation with the author a response. So, with these photographs, I’ve tried to present protest Viet Thanh Nguyen, who lives in California. He’s always prepared for and public address as intimate and integral gestures, within time and place, that hopefully push back at the an earthquake so lives with fear, but for me the following pages more predictable images and commentaries ptsd all started in February from watching Cobble Hill Cinemas, Brooklyn, New York, 2020; we expect. If these photographs contribute too much cable news about the outbreak in ifc Center, New York, New York, 2020; China. I made my son go to [the] cvs [pharanything… Maybe it’s to offer the view of poliNitehawk Cinema, Brooklyn, New York, 2020; tics as infrastructure and ideal within a culture macy] with me at 11:30 one night to stock up The Joyce Theater, New York, New York, 2020 on supplies. Once I had everything I needed, and city where everyone goes to the movies, all images Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London I felt safe and in control. It is impossible to everyone votes and everyone is a critic.

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Episode 3 Listen now Ross Simonini with Mason Currey Natalie Labriola CAConrad Candice Lin With new music by Astral Oracles and Sam Gendel

ArtReviewPodcast

Art Reviewed

With its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness 85

Yokohama Triennale 2020 Afterglow Various venues, Yokohama 17 July – 11 October One can look almost anywhere – from the rise of femicide in Turkey, the murder of Black people by police and of trans people in America, and China’s crackdown on Hong Kong, to the fortification of national borders and the fact that climate change is turning more and more of the global south into a living hell – to see that these are degenerate times.

Yet these are also transformative times.

We’re seeing changes being made as a result of the largest antiracist movement in history.

Ordinary people have appropriated the internet as a political tool to fight for diversity, equity, inclusivity and justice. In this context, Yokohama Triennale 2020 should be celebrated. It brings, for the first time, a non-Japanese artistic director, Raqs Media Collective, which comprises three artists based in New Delhi, who have selected 67 artists (individuals and groups) from around the world to make work in three physical venues and on one virtual platform. More than half are showing in Japan for the first time.

Unfortunately, the Yokohama Triennale 2020 also feels out of joint. The title of the show is Afterglow. The exhibition’s key idea is framed as ‘luminosity’, which stands in the curatorial framework alongside terms like ‘autodidact’, ‘care’, ‘friendship’ and ‘toxicity’. The metaphor of radiance is inspired by corals that glow to warn of ultraviolet irradiation and the fact that television static is, in part, transmitting the afterglow of the Big Bang.

As Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 film, Powers of Ten, demonstrates, thinking at different scales can be electrifying. There is a risk, however, of mystifying and naturalising micro issues such as nuclear power or the status of television as a medium by considering them at a cosmic scale.

It’s well known that when Philo Farnsworth first demonstrated his invention – the television set – to the press in 1928, he transmitted a dollar sign.

Much of the voting public in Japan are elderly television watchers, and Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike, a nationalist and xenophobic revisionist, successfully manipulated the medium in the recent election to shut out any opposing voices.

Aren’t these stories more telling than the cosmic late-night stoner tale of Big Bang transmissions that fascinates the curators?

Renuka Rajiv’s papier-mâchés, monoprints and fabric pieces, which combine playful, almost childlike imagery with idiosyncratic sentiments, and humorously, movingly articulate intersections of the psychosexual and sociopolitical, demonstrate that neither an appeal to the cosmic nor the sacrifice of the local is necessary for

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broader communication. The text in one work reads ‘vivid like a covid dream’ and ‘hope things never go back to normal’, showing that micro-personal expressions can resonate effectively within a broader social context.

Raqs Media Collective claims that this edition is site-specific. Here’s a local context for understanding Yokohama Triennale 2020: despite a record-breaking surge in covid infections, Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism moved up the launch of its ‘Go To’ tourism campaign, which will subsidise domestic travellers, to a week after the opening of the Yokohama Triennale. The cost of this campaign is ¥1.6 trillion, more than double the spend on covid infection-prevention measures.

In the context of its site, the opening of Yokohama Triennale, a state- and media-organised exhibition (involving the city of Yokohama, Japan’s national broadcaster nhk and national newspaper The Asahi Shimbun), functions as part of a larger national programme of deceit and normalisation that also comprises the ‘Go To’ campaign and 2020 Olympic Games, which had been scheduled to open a week after the Triennale. The curators say they want to cultivate discourses of justice, but the political infrastructure is precisely what’s left out of discussion. How then can we understand this exhibition as anything but a tone-deaf spectacle?

Watching multiple masked and uniformed museum staff standing in the searing sun through the cool, blue glass walls of the second site, Plot 48, a repurposed recreational facility for children, I am transported to the eerie world of Todd Haynes’s 1995 film, Safe. Hygiene is apparently maintained with strict discipline in the exhibition, but something isn’t right. Yes, temperatures are taken at the door. Yes, a neatly dressed white-haired man sanitises the railing while I walk down the stairs. But who’d feel safe spending hours in a series of black rooms watching all the exhibited videos right now?

An elephant lingers in every dark room illuminated by a screen: must the show go on?

There was a Yokohama Triennale in 2011, held after another invisible and manmade disaster – nuclear radiation caused by the meltdown of tepco’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. As a part of that exhibition, the Japanese artist Shimabuku made Stop and Think (2011), a remote sign installed with the titular message, a message of which the current Yokohama Triennale organisers might have taken heed.

Many of the exhibited works are of interest and should be experienced. At one point I am

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delightfully surprised watching and taking respite in Sarker Protick’s blissed-out ambient sound-video piece when admonishing calls to “stop slouching!” “be quiet!” “don’t eat so much!” and “chin up!” dissonantly emanate from Taus Makhacheva’s installation of strange gymnastics equipment. Single-channel videowork, of which there are many, could easily be delivered online, however. Iiyama Yuki’s 100 Living Tales (2016) is an important political work in the classic, edifying sense. It admirably, if very conventionally, tackles the complicated intersections of ableism and nationalism by shedding light on the grassroots struggle of lifelong Japanese residents of Korean nationality with disabilities to receive pensions.

Properly disseminated, works like this may convey to the Japanese public that institutionalised prejudice is not a problem that exists exclusively in faraway lands.

Zheng Bo’s very queer and relatively short video Pteridophilia i–iv (2016–19) is more experimental in its treatment of sex. Sex can create new intensities, new pleasures and new linkages. By contiguity, the projected images of young naked men in a lush forest making out with ferns turns the gallery space into a potential cruising spot. As a public experience, watching Pteridophilia and being turned on presents a real opportunity to form new relations with strangers. This potentiality, under-addressed in dominant art discourse but long recognised by queer users of cinema houses, shifts the masked condition of our new reality from one that restricts affective communication to the enabling, lustful freedom of anonymity.

There’s also something wonderfully dislocating about entering the dilapidated room that houses Farah Al Qasimi’s Jazira Al Hamra (2020), named after a haunted ghost-town in the uae, and made of cheaply outputted and deliberately kitsch colour photographs directly adhered to the walls and a window, addressing jinn possession and its exorcism in the contemporary postinternet world. I must have sensed a gaze when I looked up at the ceiling and found an image of a green ectoplasmic radiating evil eye (think Raiden from Mortal Kombat) coupled with the words ‘Ruqyah to Remove Black Magic’.

Clearly, mysteries and spiritualisms survive, as they should, in this increasingly rationalised and unempathetic world. Let us not, however, fall into the trap of drawing cosmic conclusions from historical circumstances that affect the personal and the political, only to write them off as a result of stars aligning. Taro Nettleton

top Zheng Bo, Pteridophilia ii (still), 2018, 4k video, colour, sound, 20 mins

above Renuka Rajiv, Cyborgs are Susceptible, 2020. Š the artist.

Courtesy the Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale

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Participation Mystique Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai 27 June – 6 September Situated in the northern part of Shanghai, Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM) is off the beaten path and certainly far from the city’s established art districts. McaM is further distinguished by the fact that, since 2015, its programming has been focused on performance, multi-media art and experimental theatre. Curated by Sam Shiyi Qian, its latest group exhibition is no exception.

Participation Mystique features 16 works by 14 artists and collectives, most of them in installation form and shown for the first time in China. Collectively, they offer different interpretations of the exhibition’s ambiguous title, a concept proposed by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. (The Chinese translation of the exhibition title sounds a little worldlier.)

Francisco Camacho Herrera’s newly commissioned multimedia installation work Lucid Dream (2019–2020) features a two-channel, 18-minute video projected on the wall of a screening room, the artist’s collection of antique alchemy books and his fictional writings displayed in vitrines, all of which ruminate on the art of alchemy. The video locates the visitor in a ‘real-time game environment’, guiding one through an exploration of alchemical symbols and the seven stages of alchemical transformation. It leads me to wonder whether accessing the gateway

to the spiritual and connecting subconsciously with, say, the exhibition viewer seated next to me, would really be as easy as playing a video game. It’s a thought that follows me as I approach the laborious breathing sounds that emanate from Marianna Simnett’s audio and light installation Faint with Light (2016).

The ragged gasps are made by the artist who repeatedly induces fainting episodes by hyperventilating. A 12-metre-wide wall of horizontal led strip lights glows and diminishes in tandem with the artist’s breathing.

As I move on the visual effect persists, disturbingly, as if I am caught in a liminal space that is neither ‘clear’ nor ‘blurry’, neither ‘alive’ nor ‘dead’.

Quieter works are equally contemplative: Y no hai remedio (Press Conference) (2016) is a video installation in which 12 figures (all played by the work’s artist Museum Clausum) sit side-byside along a table, each with a microphone in front of them, and make exaggerated expressions and gestures in a scene that at once recalls a press conference and Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (c. 1495-98); Gary Zhexi Zhang’s film Parasite (2018) is a close inspection of the life cycle of an amoeba and its ‘interactions’ with its human-body host; Shanghai-based duo Birdhead’s installation Breeze (2018) is composed of colourful pinwheels, while Phototheism (2019)

is a series of smallscale ‘statues’ (set into rough niches cut into a wall painted black) that evokes the imagery and iconography of belief systems that resonate with those featured in Lucid Dream.

Sky Eyes (2019) by Yuichiro Tamura contains a complex set of narratives hidden in and made up of an architectural model of a burger-chain outlet, a table and chairs, oars and mangled license plates, videos and photographs. It takes patience to work out that there is a phonetic link between the oars scattered on the floor and ‘or’ in New Hampshire’s state motto (printed on license plates laid out in rows on the floor): ‘Live Free or Die’. There is also a repeated emphasis of the sound ‘or’ in the video installed above the oars, in which luminous yellow objects evoke a certain fast food chain’s omnipresent logo. I end up fantasising about owning a set of ‘sky eyes’ myself, so that I might get a clear overview as I discover more and more unsolved elements in the work. Reflecting Memory (2016) by Kader Attia, is a 48-minute video on the phenomenon known as ‘phantom limb syndrome’ (the feeling of sensations in a limb that has been removed).

The condition, discussed in Attia’s work by patients, surgeons and psychoanalysts, keeps coming back to my mind as I hear the sound of heavy breathing and whispered or sounds continuously floating around this former paper factory. Sylvia Xue Bai

Yuichiro Tamura, Sky Eyes, 2019 (installation view at The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2019).

Courtesy the artist and Yuka Tsuruno Gallery, Tokyo

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Ebbe Stub Wittrup Botanical Drift Copenhagen Contemporary 25 June – 19 July In Botanical Drift, Copenhagen-based Ebbe Stub Wittrup presents a range of objects whose meaning and value have been renegotiated by the forces of colonisation and globalisation.

Questioning the colonial practice of ‘rewriting’ indigenous cultures in the name of science and industry, four installations give form to the shifting overlaps of political and economic power, culture and perception.

Original pressed plants collected and classified by Nathaniel Wallich, who was posted to the Danish colony in India during the early 1800s, are shown in display cases constructed from a species of ash wood named after the aforementioned Danish botanist.

Known for identifying thousands of plants, including flora that became commercially profitable in European markets (among them the ‘English’ staple of Assam tea), Wallich also named numerous species after himself. It was precisely this ‘disconnect’ – Indian fauna named after a Danish botanist (and thus, in effect, ‘made’ Danish), now ubiquitous to Denmark’s botanical gardens and even its supermarkets – that prompted Wittrup to examine this colonial history from a vegetal point of view.

Several of the herbarium sheets on display show both the Indian plant name and the Latin name from the European classification system that Wallich deployed. For Wittrup, the reassignment of plant names according to European standards signifies the imperial mindset of ‘overwriting’ local culture. The renaming facilitates oppressive forces with its exceptionalism: ignoring the importance of local names that are the literal roots of traditional plant biodiversity knowledge.

The exhibition is anchored within the expansive space by seven large monochrome banners hand-dyed with pigments from Indian plants, including indigo (from the Ancient Greek for ‘Indian dye’). Each banner is made up of two vibrant tones derived from a single species: a paler rectangle set slightly askew within a larger darker tone that creates a dynamic, spatial effect. The overall grouping of deep and immersive coloured fabrics encourages further sensual and perceptual interaction.

Reminiscent of national flags, the banners return representational and territorial notions back to the land: foregrounding biological over geopolitical affinities.

If indigo played a central role as a prized commodity of global trade during colonial times, in today’s networked (and stressed-out) world the practice of yoga has become one of India’s most successful exports. Wittrup’s 24 Characters represents the ritual hand signals, called mudrās, used in yoga and meditative practice. These gestures are cast in bronze as if gloved in black, possibly recalling both the early colonialist obliviousness to this esoteric language and the current power these practices have over the self-awareness-seeking Western middle class.

The fourth work, a collaboration with Peter Rasummsen, is a Jaguar Mark 2 car, well-known as a coveted British luxury design icon, here refitted with interior elements crafted from wood species classified by Wallich. Since Jaguar’s purchase in 2008 by the Indian conglomerate Tata Motors, which once provided cheap steel for the car, it has become a symbol of the postcolonial shift in power: economically, politically and culturally. Here and throughout, Wittrup’s perceptual tools provide a compelling, corporeal negotiation between language, power, ownership and the hierarchy of visibility.

Rodney LaTourelle

Twenty-Four Characters (detail), 2020, 26 bronze-cast gloves, dimensions variable. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.

Courtesy Copenhagen Contemporary

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By Appointment Only Los Angeles galleries cautiously reopen A sensorial vertigo afflicts many East Coast transplants, enhanced by blinding sunlight and the ambient hum of air conditioners and helicopters. Early this spring, however, access to outside stimuli was cut. Meanwhile water was still scarce, and the air felt suddenly precious – newly coveted and feared.

In March, soon after quarantine, I began taking drives to the only acquaintances it was safe to visit in close range. I counted myself lucky to have a means of escape from my apartment that most of my New York-based friends, and the less fortunate citizens of this city, did not. I drove a rinky-dink 2007 Prius Hybrid with reasonable fuel efficiency and thus allowed myself this luxury. The inviolability one feels in a car has long been passed off as an excuse for selfish behaviour behind the wheel; it took on an additional false sense of hermetically sealed security, as from behind closed windows I spent mornings observing and photographing notable trees of Los Angeles’s East Side. With galleries, libraries and other nonessential businesses and centres closed, these trees provided a respite from the visual monotony of unmarked days, just as driving provided a bodily reprieve from the confines of my apartment.

I made regular pilgrimages to a Moreton Bay fig in Pasadena. Brought to California from Australia during the 1870s as specimen trees to beautify and enhance rapidly developing urban landscapes, Moreton Bay figs revealed over time their ability to grow to more than 60 metres in height, their exposed ‘buttressed’ roots now sprawling across sidewalks. Pasadena, with its palatial estates, is one of the only residential neighbourhoods where this solemn, patiently elephantine tree is not in danger of being cut down. In the car I listened to Roberta Flack’s Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye (1969) on repeat.

Many loved before us. I know we are not new. In city and in forest they loved like me and you.

In May, la galleries began to cautiously reopen, adding appointment registries to their websites and implementing visitor caps and mandatory masks for entry. Then one more Black citizen was brutally murdered by a white law officer, and the scales tipped. I am not the right person to speak to this, and the piece I set out to write is about galleries and trees.

facing page, top Van Hanos, Eagle, Crow, Snake, Fish Face, 2020, oil on linen, 31 × 26 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles

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I am trying instead to listen to others, better versed and equipped.

The next month, amid protests, lockdowns and curfews, I registered to see Ricky Swallow’s Borrowed Sculptures at David Kordansky Gallery in Mid-City. The Australian-born Angeleno’s latest sculptures continue his work recreating domestic materials in cast and painted bronze, their impressive trompe l’oeil effect overshadowed by the delicacy of their readymade referents. One lone form, Stringer (2020), whose motif suggested a stair rendered from coils of rope, graced the gallery’s southern wall like a Celtic knot. A bronze rocking chair, Rocking Chair with Rope (meditation chair #1) (2020), cast from a model in the artist’s studio, appeared to hang, as though suspended from bronze ropes strung to a nonexistent ceiling-mounted hook, with the tensile restraint of a Fred Sandback installation.

I shared the gallery with only one other visitor.

Another stood patiently at the door, waiting for one of us leave.

I made an appointment at Château Shatto downtown to see Van Hanos’s Interiors.

Characteristically virtuosic (the New York-based artist, who recently relocated to Marfa, is among the most facile painters currently working) and teasingly referential, this new set of works demonstrated stirrings in the evolution of Hanos’s conflicted attitude towards the heroic oil painting. Among the exhibition’s largest canvases, Interior (2020) ensconced a deadpan ‘pictorial’ painterly view out from a paned window within a palette-knife-scraped frame that made explicit allusions to Gerhard Richter.

The adjacent, modestly scaled Eagle, Crow, Snake, Fish Face (2020) took this reference to its arthistorical endpoint: here the artist had used this chromatically striated scraped canvas as an underpainting, burying it beneath a coat of Ad Reinhardt-esque black before scraping a portrait onto its surface to reveal its base as if it were a Rainbow Scratch craft paper.

The appointment system was itself new and strange. I’d previously tried to see shows with as few preconceptions as possible. (Although with galleries strewn across miles and potentially hours of traffic, this had already proved somewhat impractical.) On the other hand, these restrictions were conversely appealing

when you remembered summer openings of prior years – edging past clots of sweaty revellers to see the work they were standing in front of.

An appointment made a visit intentional; the visitor cap created a dual sense of intimacy and urgency. Masks, on the other hand, are simply a present necessity as well as a gesture of respect and appreciation for the many people who make these visits possible.

I discovered a trio of shrubs pruned in the shape of giraffes in a garden I can only appreciatively describe as extremely whimsical, and was tipped off to the location of a yucca whose trunk resembled musculature riddled with bulging cysts. The days grew hotter earlier. On cool mornings, however, it finally seemed safe again to climb the 383 stairs off La Loma – huffing through a mask, passing a young oak whose bow had extended into the pathway and been tagged with a red ribbon so that walkers wouldn’t hit their heads. Like the Moreton Bay fig, the oak can grow to massive proportions. Unlike the imported tree, it is native to California, and its nutritionally dense acorns historically provided sustenance for indigenous peoples.

Among the venues that most nimbly adapted to the city- and state-wide ordinances was Parker Gallery, in Los Feliz. The residencebased gallery hosted a series of two-week-long outdoor exhibitions entitled Sculpture from a Distance (parts i, ii and iii), featuring celebrated la artists Melvino Garretti and Peter Shire and emerging artists including Alake Shilling and Anne Libby. Circumventing the need for reservations (although not masks), the shows were designed with comfort and safety in mind; one could wander freely through works installed on the grass and mounted to the sides of the building.

As of August, the trees continue their efforts to purify our air while cars (mine included) poison it. Leonard Cohen’s original lyrics to Flack’s cover were, “Many loved before us.

I know that we are not new. In city and in forest they smiled like me and you.” Flack’s rendition is better, but the poet knew what he was doing.

‘Smiled’ is both less expected and infinitely sadder than ‘loved’ while signalling essentially the same thing – even from behind a mask.

Cat Kron

facing page, bottom left Moreton Bay fig, Pasadena.

Courtesy the author

facing page, bottom right Ricky Swallow, Rocking Chair with Rope (meditation chair #1), 2020, patinated bronze and oil paint, 172 × 61 × 89 cm.

Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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Autumn 2020

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Fresh Out of Lockdown A summer tour around galleries in New York Late in May, as New York City morgues reached capacity and bodies were relegated to refrigerated trucks parked outside hospitals, a corpse flower began to bloom for the first time. Located in the Barnard College campus greenhouse, its brief flowering – just 24–36 hours, once every decade or so – was broadcast on the institution’s YouTube channel. It felt a little on the nose, but what does a plant know? I tried watching the livestream, but I had had enough of staring at things, at screens of video art, of virtual anything.

Given all that, as galleries themselves started cautiously opening up over the last few weeks, you’d think I would have been hyped. But even as the worst is decidedly over in nyc – albeit just beginning in other states – the tide of police brutality continues unabated. The country is aflame with ongoing protests, unemployment remains rampant and a catastrophic eviction crisis looms when courts reopen this month.

Going out to see art felt a long way down the list of priorities. There wasn’t even all that much open: some spaces will remain closed until the art season’s traditional post-summer-vacation reopening in early September. Some are moving to cheaper neighbourhoods, or joining the new locus forming in TriBeCa. Some have closed permanently or, in the case of Gavin Brown, are ‘merging’ with Chelsea stalwarts like Gladstone to form new megagalleries. Nevertheless, at the end of July I dutifully called and emailed and made appointments (offered at 10- or 30-minute intervals), and hopped on the train for the first time since March.

There’s a particular way I like to see art in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Get off the F train at East Broadway and hit up Reena Spaulings. Wind my way first eastwards then westwards, making hairpin turns to cover each street between Norfolk and the Bowery, Canal and Houston, stopping for bubble tea (almond, 75 percent sugar – liquid marzipan), snacks and later drinks, sometimes meeting others. Seeing absolutely everything that’s currently on. I never studied art history, see: for years I didn’t trust my own conclusions, and compensated by seeing everything, at least Downtown and in Chelsea.

Today, although I’m more sure of my convictions, the routine stands.

The first surprise was the subway. It came on time, it was spotlessly clean and everyone was wearing masks and observing social-distancing practices: a fleeting vision of what it might be like to live in a functioning city and not a failed state.

The second was realising that the safety-first, ‘by appointment only’ routines at the galleries were

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mostly empty theatre. At one appointment, I arrived to find the gallery locked and the phone ringing unanswered. Others that didn’t require appointments were randomly closed despite their stated hours. Only two places asked me for my details, presumably to allow for contact tracing down the line. Not every gallerist or visitor was wearing a mask, though most of the time I was the only visitor. In the end, apart from the occasional bottle of hand sanitiser perched by the gallery guestbook, not much was different.

The biggest surprise, however, was how few of the shows I saw responded to the current moment. At most, there were awkward links to the ongoing Movement for Black Lives, as in Billy White’s solo at Shrine, which was postponed as a result of covid-19, but now, according to the gallery, ‘has taken on more poignant meanings and a sense of urgency in light of the recent calls to action’. Why this might be the case is unclear, but the loose paintings of celebrities depicted mostly in profile – Elvis, Eddie Murphy, Joe DiMaggio, Fred Flintstone with a bloodied mouth – and small melty ceramics are exceedingly charming nonetheless. The paintings in particular have a layered quality that suggests an accumulation of multiple characters painted over each other, like a time-lapsed face or a 1990s music video.

A number of untitled works feature a uniformed man in blue, which, along with a small ceramic police car, seems to hint at the complicated figure of the Black cop.

At Essex Street, Park McArthur directly addressed the twinned crises of breathing with a spare, sterile show that included a sculpture made from her ventilator’s filters – needed for reasons unrelated to the current pandemic – which hangs near the open gallery doors.

The bulk of the show features a framed printout, blue ink on white paper, installed by the gallery elevator and on the mezzanine floor below.

It depicts the markings on a device known as an incentive spirometer, which provides users with a volumetric measurement of their breath and encourages deep breathing. The text is rendered backwards, the way it might look if we were somehow inside the spirometer; the effect is to turn the gallery into a kind of breathing apparatus. Here too is McArthur’s characteristic emphasis on access: the exhibition also exists online, with robust, descriptive alt text captions, and as a described audio and video guide.

Elsewhere I found myself especially drawn to paintings that were subtly appliquéd, perhaps relishing the fact that they would read so

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differently in jpeg form. In a group show at Thierry Goldberg, Bony Ramirez’s colourful paintings featured voluptuous, muscly figures in littoral or tropical settings, carrying swords, seashells and swans. Their curving hands and feet are especially memorable, suggesting a cross between webbed, amphibious creatures and Roald Dahl’s witches. But this is no Caribbean idyll: some figures are being stabbed in the head, in the manner of Peter of Verona, or in a hand. In the compelling El Mar Que Extraño / I Miss The Ocean (2020), the figure walks on a bed of hobby blades stuck onto the canvas. Biblical themes also pervaded Emmanuel Louisnord Desir’s intriguing, sinewy wood-and-metal installations – and first-ever solo – at 47 Canal.

For their fresh visual vocabulary and inventive use of materials, both are definitely young artists to watch, reminding me of that forgotten pleasure of discovery upon encountering a new-to-me artist. Is it just the thrill of novelty?

I’m reminded why I love seeing art and being surprised by art despite everything else going on in the artworld, from the dirty money that funds it to the revelations of systemic racial discrimination and abuse, as documented by new Instagram accounts like @cancelartgalleries.

That as nakedly calculating as galleries’ sudden interest in showing very young poc and especially Black artists is, audiences can only benefit.

In a two-person show at Rachel Uffner, Arghavan Khosravi’s muted paintings on canvas and fabric feature a photorealistic female subject, doubled or tripled as if captured with a stereoscopic camera. Sometimes the cloth is left unpainted – a busy paisley stands in for yoga pants, for example, and in one work, threads and the tassels of a printed cotton tapestry add textural interest. But it is the marvellously weird solo upstairs, of work by Curtis Talwst Santiago, that really excites: glass noses – the kind that were once lopped off Ancient Egyptian statues to make them appear less African, apparently; paintings with incandescently red-faced knights; a tiny diorama in a box; and an enormous suit of arms made out of beadwork.

There were other shows in other galleries, but these mostly featured the usual end-of-term summer dross, or still had their prepandemic shows up. I thought about returning to the restaging of John Boskovich’s claustrophobic, fetishistic Psycho Salon at David Lewis, which both fascinated and repulsed me when I saw it in March. I sat in a park with bubble tea instead.

Rahel Aima

above Arghavan Khosravi, The Balance, 2019, acrylic on found fabric mounted on wood panel, 103 × 80 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York

top Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, Captivity of the Spirit and the Flesh, 2019, steel, bronze, cast iron radiators, wood, wood planks, 100 × 137 × 56 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse.

Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York

Autumn 2020

above Billy White, Untitled (man with mustache), 2019, acrylic on canvas, 122 × 91 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Shrine, New York

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The artwold machine has stopped – will it change gears when it starts up again?

I wandered into the contemporary art scene during the mid-1990s, the commercial heyday of Young British Art. This was a movement, a thing – also a hype, of course – and to me, a greenhorn, it made sense that there would be more such things, even after postmodernism had supposedly put an end to progressive developments in visual art and elsewhere. And there were, kind of. First, in London, there was something laughable and cobbled-together called New Neurotic Realism, which demonstrated that collectors (in this case Charles Saatchi) shouldn’t try to launch their own movements. There was a craft revival.

There were several painting revivals.

There was relational aesthetics, aka a 1960s revival. There was a despondent, rubble-raking revisiting of utopianism.

During the 2000s – I know you know all of this, bear with me – any momentum seemingly shifted to the art infrastructure itself: novelty came in the shape of global biennials and burgeoning internationalism, spectacle, the endlessly dilating art market, the redrafting of the art-historical canon, etc. Meanwhile, as many people have pointed out, art became ever more like fashion, stylistic changes speeding up while seeming to count for less. There’s a season of abstraction and then, just in time for the September issue, we’re back to paintings of people again, maybe with a zesty dash of Surrealism. Misty esotericism gets a moment.

Anselm Reyle makes one of his periodic rises from the dead. Amid all this, the last thing that felt like a thing was postinternet, almost a decade ago, and mostly it – this work whose elevator pitch to the busy collector was ‘art about the internet’ – wasn’t a very good thing, or at least it isn’t ageing well. (It’ll probably be back, though.)

Prepandemic we were having another swing at colourful figurative painting, fizzy yet often

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soothing. Had things not worked out the way they did, the wind might be going out of that evanescent style’s sails and tastemakers would already be casting around for something interestingly démodé to replace it, maybe underwritten by the discovery of a few brilliant but obscure octogenarian exponents of the style, blessed with studios full of their hitherto unpopular and thus unsaleable output. And, distracted as many viewers have been by there being too much art to process and too many ways to experience it, probably it’d have gotten a pass,

this latest wrinkle; certainly the phalanxes of art advisers would have done their best. But it wouldn’t have had a reason to exist, beyond the fact that the old-old thing was now overfamiliar and it was time for the new-old thing, because this year’s fairs and shows can’t look exactly like last year’s; that would be terrible, because art is change. While the wheel of style is spun, the artworld’s wheels spin. Or at least they did.

Aside from a speckling of outstanding outliers, is that now the best a viewer can hope for? That, if a vaccine were found tomorrow and the system regained its former velocity, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Gallery, 1997 (installation view of works by Damien Hirst and Mark Wallinger at the Royal Academy).

Courtesy Saatchi Gallery, London

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we’d mostly look forward to a long-term settling of scores in which every neglected artist gets their time in the sun, and that a mixture of new and old artists are convened every few months or years into a tweaked presentation of something grounded enough in familiarity that it doesn’t aggressively impose on our neuroplasticity, because there’s enough else in the world that’ll do that? The upside would be that, over time, we’d all fill the gaps in our art educations: don’t know much about Orphism, or the Incoherents?

You will, eventually. The downside is that the cultural weather often feels valedictory even when the work is new, and on a certain level it really makes you tired.

I say this because, although my judgement may be warped by exposure to the malcontents on Art Twitter, I’m not detecting much excitement about the artworld starting up again, in any fashion, beyond the fundamental and substantial fact that a lot of people are hurting financially. Has it, conversely, felt like a tragedy that we couldn’t see what artists are doing next? Not really.

I suspect most people have a good idea of what artists are going to do next, with (again) honourable exceptions: something somebody already did, with a twist.

It’s not enough, either, to divert one’s interest onto shenanigans like big galleries merging and consolidating; I really don’t want to have to give a shit about that, significant though it is in its way, just because there’s nothing else to look at. But that was somewhat the case before the shutdown. In this sense, as it has done with so many other things, the pandemic has only illuminated what was already awry. Any potential reconstruction, at whatever scale, has to take that into account: the artworld has lately gotten very good at perpetual motion, and meanwhile forgotten about traction.

Martin Herbert

Nontawat Numbenchapol The Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home Gallery Ver, Bangkok 11 July – 22 August At the best of times, life for Thailand’s millions of cross-border migrants is precarious. Those lucky enough not to have bosses who flout workers’ rights face a cumbersome bureaucracy and the perpetual threat of confinement or being sent home should their paperwork not be in order. And at the worst of times? Well, the post-covid-19 reports offer a sobering glimpse. According to the International Labour Organisation, they were – quelle surprise! – among the first to lose their jobs as employers downsized. In Thailand alone, an estimated 700,000 of them – most working in the tourist, services and construction industries – find themselves without work, unable to return home and with little or no access to financial aid.

Some months before their tenuous situation was intensified by the pandemic, documentarymaker Nontawat Numbenchapol set out on a circuitous journey with a migrant worker. Tah, a twentysomething employee of a Chiang Mai bar of undisclosed repute, needed to return to his Tai Yai village, deep in the hilly interior of Myanmar’s ethnically splintered and politically embattled Shan State, to replace a national id card. Numbenchapol alone, without a film crew in tow, joined Tah’s two-week expedition from foreign soil to the faded familiarity of a home not seen for six years. Then, once his mission was complete, straight back again. The resulting video installation – his first – benefits not only from what sociologists call a ‘nonparticipant observation’ approach to research, but also some

intrepid editing: across four large screens, his footage plays alone, concurrently or not at all, creating moments that veer from multisensory action to sylvan hush.

Much of the running time captures the tedium of being in transit. A bus journey segues into the indolence of waiting for the next ride.

Later, there are rushed meals and jerky images of motorbike tires spinning through swampy dirt tracks, as they venture at night towards his township. Presented through an unstable mix of wide shots, B-roll closeups and low-angles are visceral outdoor scenes – sowing rice, helping to kill a pig, splashing in the paddy with old friends – and asinine yet essential conversations: “How much for a new id?”, “Will you be able to get back in?”, “If you tell them you lost it, they’ll give you a new one.” The point is this: to stay in Thailand legally, Tah had momentarily to leave.

As well as to this journey, the idiom of the title also applies to Numbenchapol’s practice of late: he, too, refuses to take the quick and easy route. Over the last four years, he has been working on the script for his first feature – about a Tai Yai man in Chiang Mai, tentatively titled Doi Boy – but doing so slowly, in the belief that the more he researches and refines his methodology, the easier it will be to move forward with it.

The first byproduct was Soil Without Land (2019), a feature-length documentary about a Tai Yai migrant, also recently returned from Chiang Mai, forcibly drafted into the Shan State

Army. This, the second offshoot, shows the other side of the same coin: the plight of a workingage Shan migrant who did manage to escape the region’s deep-seated militarism, but is nonetheless still being moulded by it.

‘Borders’, writes film critic Kong Rithdee in one of the exhibition’s essays, ‘are a nuisance: illusory, misleading, overly politicized, a sum concept of human hubris. They sever, mutilate, divide and dismember.’ Indeed, it’s all up there, playing out as we loll on the large woven cushions: the belittling bureaucracy, the snatched reconnections, the acquiescence to a life doomed to be lived without anything resembling self-actualisation – all because, to the system, you are an economic migrant above all else.

Interspersed with the footage are interviews, shot against green screen, in which Tah talks, in fluent Thai, of abandoned dreams (becoming a footballer) and a louche working life (nights spent sinking drinks with customers in the hope of tips). More frank testimony from other Tai Yai interviewees plays on rotation in Gallery Ver’s Project Room, or ‘Casting Room’. Yet only the central installation tests the formal boundaries of ethnographic practice and observational cinema with a measure of ingenuity. At moments, the total environment feels less like dutifully captured fieldwork and more like a restive dream-state – a parade of atomised memories, hazy yet filled with longing for what might have been. Max Crosbie-Jones

Nontawat Numbenchapol, The Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home, 2020 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Gallery Ver, Bangkok

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Books Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson Ethos Books, SG$23.36 (softcover) The title essay in this youth-powered anthology of environmental thinkpieces asks: how acceptable is it to eat chilli crab (a local delicacy comprising mud crab stirfried in tomato and chilli sauce) during a geological epoch marked by human activity on earth? The essay, written by Neo Xiaoyun, takes you on a meandering journey through historical crab-human relations, Singapore’s culinary tourism marketing, crab biology and farming, and a brief David Foster Wallaceinspired detour into a discussion on whether crustaceans feel pain. Short answer: put down those seafood mallets.

The focus on the ethics of mundane choices is characteristic of this book, featuring 12 essays by Singaporeans or Singapore-based writers born between 1993 and 1998. By using a menagerie of familiar animals from Singapore’s wildlife (such as otters, monkeys and mynahs) as focal points for larger conversations, they aim to persuade more people to join the climate activism movement by showing that environmental concerns are part of the fabric of everyday life. Call it Asian tact or Singaporean pragmatism or whatever, their tone is gently cajoling rather than shaming, à la Swedish teen activist Greta How-dare-you Thunberg. The editor, Matthew SchneiderMayerson, says the book was written and edited in ‘a spirit of constructive and affectionate

criticism’. Respectfully, methodically, they hope to convince people and the government to mitigate, if not reverse, the catastrophic end towards which the planet is heading.

Schneider-Mayerson is assistant professor in environmental studies at Singapore’s Yalenus College; consequently most of the authors gathered here can be situated among his course’s alumni. The tome demonstrates the liveliness of thought in the fast-growing field of environmental humanities in Singapore, which links traditional humanities subjects, such as literature, philosophy and cultural studies, with environmental studies. The interdisciplinary flavour is borne out in titles such as ‘An Oily Mirror: 1950s Orang Minyak Films as Singaporean Petrohorror’ (in local urban legend, the orang minyak is an oil-covered sexual predator who eludes capture because of his literal slipperiness). Elsewhere, a look at the invasive species of Javan mynahs leads into an examination of the desirable human citizen in Singapore, while a discussion of the manmade landfill island Pulau Semakau becomes a way of talking about the erasure of indigenous histories – the island was the last stronghold of the seafaring orang laut.

Besides the intellectual exercises of deconstructing the complicated web of relations between nature and culture in Singapore, the book also provides alternative models.

The last few essays suggest ways in which to build a better world for humans and nonhumans, such as by inculcating new values like collaboration and frugality in the young to prepare them for living in a climate-changed world (optimistic projection) or general civilisational collapse (less optimistic). The final essay maps out a systematic degrowth plan for a post-carbon Singapore that every politician should read.

This is a well-shaped book in terms of its content, which is testament to a good editor – my only quibble is that it might be too edited.

The essays (by 12 different authors) are described as chapters (implying a consistent argument), and nobody disagrees with one another. The texts also have a similar format, often starting with a personal anecdote before segueing into a broader discussion, which, in itself, isn’t a problem, but begins to become repetitive when replicated 12 times. Moreover, the earnest first-person tone, with its penchant for breezy aphorisms (‘as go the crabs, so go you and me’), makes the book feel like the work of one author instead of many. Dumb as the conspiracy theory alleging that the global youth climate movement is manipulated by some sinister puppet master is, perhaps it would be more prudent to keep the voices a little uneven, a little more untamed. Multispecies flourishing, right? Adeline Chia

John Cage: A Mycological Foray edited by Ananda Pellerin Atelier Éditions, $55 (hardcover) It might seem of niche interest that composer John Cage was an amateur mycologist, but such was his passion that it undoubtedly came to influence his music. “I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom,” he is quoted as saying in this new two-volume study of the American’s forays into the world of fungi, which includes, alongside texts by writers, artists and curators, a reproduction of Cage’s 1972 Mushroom Book and his 1983 poem ‘Mushrooms et Variationes’. Cage was not interested in the psychoactive qualities of shrooms – he never took drugs in his life,

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he said. While he cofounded the New York Mycological Society and appeared on a quiz show with toadstool as his specialist subject, it seems less the wild foodstuff that inspired his musical work than the act of foraging for it.

Cage had gone to Stony Point, in upstate New York, in 1954 to establish an electronic music studio but was sidetracked by the local woods. His burgeoning hobby got off to a bad start when he misidentified a specimen, eating a poisonous hellebore that left him nauseous and hospitalised. It would seem that the lifeand-death potential of his mycological pursuits offered a useful contrast to the extreme freedom

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granted by avant-garde composing. ‘In the mushrooms it’s absolutely necessary you see if you’re going to eat them as I do, not to eat one which is deadly. Whereas I take the attitude in music that no sounds are deadly. It’s like the Zen statement that every day is a beautiful day.

Everything is pleasing providing you haven’t got the notion of pleasing and displeasing in you.’ Where composing should be concerned with chance and disharmony, Cage argued throughout his career, mycology was a world bound by strict rules in which experimentation might be fatal, making this hobby an important counterweight to his profession. Oliver Basciano

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The Coffer Dams

by Kamala Markandaya Small Axes, £9.99 (softcover)

By the time of her death in 2004, the works of Indian writer Kamala Markandaya (the pen name of Kamala Purnaiya Taylor), who had spent most of her life in Britain, had been largely forgotten. Her debut novel, Nectar in a Sieve (1954), a tale of rural love in modernising India, had been an award-winning bestseller, but as she turned her attention, in subsequent works, to issues of interracial relationships and eventually the immigrant experience in Britain, critics, audiences and publishers lost interest or tuned out. Markandaya became one of the many neglected English-language writers whose work tackled the experience of racism and contested identity in postwar India and Britain.

Last year Small Axes republished Markandaya’s extraordinarily poignant and powerful novel The Nowhere Man (originally published in 1972), a tale of the growing alienation and racism experienced by an elderly Indian immigrant to Britain, which sparked a mini-renaissance of interest in Markandaya. Now it’s the turn of The Coffer Dams (originally published in 1969), a work that tackles issues – among them racism, colonialism, the British class system, indigenous rights, environmental issues and the homogenising forces of modernity – that (as is the case with The Nowhere Man) are as live today as they were when the work was

originally published. Something that’s both a tribute to the author’s insight into the evolving world around her and a damning indictment of society’s wayward drift over the past 50 years.

The plot revolves around the construction of a dam in the hills of Karnataka and the contrasting characters of its principal builder, the Englishman Clinton, who is dangerously attracted to the idea that he might be some modern-day (but more ethically rational) equivalent of early rapacious colonial-era conquerors such as Robert Clive or Richard Wellesley, and his young wife Helen, a woman navigating a ‘man’s town’ (and a man’s marriage), more interested in the lives and fates of displaced locals than bringing modernity to the hills and plains of the region. Between these two poles lies a community of British engineers and builders, imported Indian labourers and the indigenous people of the Malnad, whose elders and women are pushed to one side (their villages displaced) while their young men are lured into the construction of the cofferdams that will pave the way for the construction of the Great Dam itself.

As building races at breakneck speed to beat the impending monsoons, the community is set up for a clash between academic (or modern) and local (or traditional)

knowledge and belief systems, between races and cultures, between people who are seen and unseen, and received attitudes to all of these that have changed not nearly as much as the local landscape is about to. It’s to Markandaya’s great credit (and thanks to her unique sensibilities) that these conflicts are enacted as much between modern and traditional Indians as they are between the former colonisers and the formerly colonised (although in the little town that has grown up around the dam there is little that’s ‘former’ about either of these positions). Both, it seems, are struggling to come to terms with their relationship to the ambiguous realities of a newly independent India and the conflicts that led to its birth. At heart, The Coffer Dams is a novel about how we justify and then adapt to change, and the price we pay for it.

While the novel suffers from the fact that the dam and its construction provides a somewhat disconnected stage set for this tragicomedy of clashing manners and customs, it nevertheless takes us to the roots of some of the key conflicts that have shaped our present. And ultimately, The Coffer Dams provides yet more evidence that Markandaya was not only one of the most acute analysts of the social conditions of her time but that, disturbingly, she continues to be that in ours.

Mark Rappolt

Wendy, Master of Art

by Walter Scott Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95 (softcover) This is the third in Walter Scott’s collection of ‘Wendy’ comic-strip collections. But it’s the first time I’ve met her. At a Berlin fetish club.

On page one. Hollow-eyed (she), her body bending itself improbably to the music, screaming about how high she is to a crowd of people wearing G-strings or less. You get the vibe that this is normal. For an artist, like Wendy, in the German capital. ‘I’ll just dance, in this club, in Berlin – forever,’ she squeals.

Eight pages later our Canadian heroine has been accepted onto the University of Hell’s mfa programme in Ontario, swapped the fetish clubs for Yarn & Yarn (a wool shop), Craig’s Lighter (jazz club) and her favourite new haunt, the Y-Not Bar + Grill.

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We’re introduced to Wendy’s classmates: Eric, a seething ball of rage who’s constantly worrying that he has blundered onto the wrong side of gender and identity politics; Maya, whose videos star celebrities such as Chloë Sevigny, and who is travelling the globe exhibiting in one biennial to the next; Yunji, interested in the semiotics of pissing and thinking about really long pieces of string; Etienne, who chants, ‘Through indirect provocation my work questions the implicity of arts education in global capitalism’; and Mahduri, working at the ‘intersection of fermentation, poetry and painting’. Their tutor, a permanent resident of Hell, is Cliff Masterson (‘You might remember me from my last solo exhibition, in 1998’).

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But you’d be wrong to think that this is simply a collection of stereotypes – a mocking portrait of all the people you already know.

Behind the posing, the pretentiousness and Scott’s sometimes unoriginal caricatures (at times the book feels like a poorer relative of Tony Hancock’s 1961 artworld satire The Rebel), the author does manage to develop, in words and images, a very human story about people looking to connect with other people, trying to escape from existential precarity (on every level) and struggling with the fact that an ‘artistic’ life of relative freedom is one of which it can be very hard to make any sense. And, of course, that this last is true of ‘real’ life too. With or without the freedom. Nirmala Devi

Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century

by McKenzie Wark Verso, $24.95 / £16.99 (softcover)

McKenzie Wark opens her introduction to Sensoria by asking, ‘What is the point of scholarship?’ Wark’s answer is that scholarship ‘is about the common task of knowing the world’. This seems a sound definition as well as a worthwhile project for humanity in the twenty-first century, and Sensoria collects essays in which Wark summarises and reflects on the writings of 19 contemporary writers who are obsessed with the development and overarching influence of technology, of the future of global capitalism, how the two intertwine, and their effect on human life and human consciousness.

Sensoria is a wide view of the hybrid intellectual culture that has formed somewhere across cultural studies, philosophy, art and the internet in the last two decades, with the texts grouped in three sections titled ‘aesthetics’, ‘ethnographics’ and ‘technics’. Wark’s essays on aesthetics range from her discussion of the fading (Western) ideal of beauty in Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic categories of contemporary online attention – the ‘zany, cute and interesting’ – to Kodwo Eshun’s writing about Afrofuturism, Detroit Techno and Black culture (in More Brilliant than the Sun, 1998), in which Wark finds a seminal example of an aesthetic that dissolves the limits of bourgeois (and white) humanism. In ‘ethnographics’, Wark takes a global tour of how politics and governance are being mutated by the power of information systems. Here she sets discussions of race

and algorithmic policing in America (in Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism, 2018) alongside the history and future of China’s Communist party-run capitalism (in Wang Hui’s China’s Twentieth Century, 2016), before turning to postcolonial writers who take issue with the intersection of the West’s philosophical tradition of Enlightenment and its imperial imagination – such as Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2001). Meanwhile, in ‘technics’, Wark zooms in on writers who theorise the new cultures shaped by technology and capital, such as Cory Doctorow on private property and digital creativity, Lev Manovich on software, and Benjamin Bratton’s planetary-scale vision of information and governance driven by computational networks, not nation states (in Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, 2016).

Running through many of the texts (or Wark’s attention to them) are two recurring preoccupations: the first is that we might be witnessing the end of capitalism, and the supersession of the commodity, or at least its total dematerialisation into information.

It has to be said, though, that for all its Marxiansounding talk of capital and commodities, Sensoria doesn’t really go for actual economic analysis, preferring the breathless, apocalyptic hyperbole of Accelerationism (to which, her misgivings and counterarguments notwithstanding, Wark seems enduringly indebted).

This links to the second main line: that the status of human being and subjectivity found in both Enlightenment thinking and the politics of liberalism are dissolved by this tech-determined mutation of capitalism. ‘The tech itself authors ways of being’, as Wark aptly summarises Eshun’s position, or, quoting Bratton, rather than being in charge of the system, we are merely ‘human hood ornaments’.

In this, Sensoria is very much in thrall to an outlook in much contemporary thinking that is indifferent to human beings, or what we might want, since we’re only really the product of processes – economic, technological and environmental – that we never determined from the start. As a counter to the Accelerationist and Speculative Realist thinking she can’t quite shake off, Wark’s alternative is to look for a more holistic, pre-modern erasure of the distinction between humans and nature, in which the old Western philosophical subject-object opposition disappears; ‘a structure for thought that… does away with attempts to find what is special in a human development out of the animal’. Marx once wrote that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world… the point is to change it.’

For Wark and her associates it’s humans who are going to be changed, since they’ve done enough of changing the world. The irony is that if that’s the case, scholarship, or the task of knowing the world, seems largely futile. J.J. Charlesworth

The Story of Contemporary Art

by Tony Godfrey Thames & Hudson, £29.95 (hardcover) On the face of it, Tony Godfrey has taken on a mammoth task in narrating the story of contemporary art. Mammoth because the ‘contemporary’ in ‘contemporary art’ stretches any common-sense notion of what that word means chronologically, and mammoth because there are so many competing stories of art with which to contend. In particular, Godfrey has set out to include perspectives from outside the West and beyond men only: the first a decision likely influenced by the time he has spent in Singapore and Manila (where he has been based since 2009) as an educator and curator; the second simply, one hopes, a quest for truth.

His story begins during the late 1970s and early 80s, with the accelerated commer-

cialisation of the artworld. From there the book cycles through established artists such as Yayoi Kusama and Bill Viola, while also giving attention to those less well known on the global art circuit, such as Filipina Geraldine Javier (Godfrey’s partner) and the indigenous Australian Emily Kame Kngwarreye. For Godfrey, what unites all this is less a matter of forms and materials, and more the offer of a particular experience (he uses a quotation from Liverpool football manager Jürgen Klopp to make the point, but, tellingly, leaves you to draw your own conclusions about the links between sporting and artistic spectacles). However, given that his book remains largely divided into chapters based on the rise

Autumn 2020

(or fashionability) of artistic mediums (with others based on the rise of contemporary art’s institutions), the idea quickly loses traction.

Where Godfrey shines is in his seamless weaving, from the very beginning, of nonWestern art into a history that has, until relatively recently, been dominated by it.

He doesn’t shoehorn it into a separate chapter, consolidating its entire narrative in a couple thousand words. He is deliberate in this and plays to the strengths of his knowledge and experience. He also delivers on his promise not to confuse the reader with academic rhetoric.

His account is informal and accessible, which makes the story an unintimidating if shallow introduction to the subject. Novuyo Moyo

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on the cover Martha Atienza, Anito 2 (still), 2017, single-channel hd video, sound, 9 min, loop.

Courtesy the artist and Silverlens, Manila

Words on the spine and on pages 13, 45 and 81 are by Albert Einstein, ‘Principles of Research’, 1918, in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol 7: The Berlin Years: Writings 1918–1921 (2002), translated by Alfred Engel

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Hi there. I’m Raja Singa ii, Emperor of Ceylon, King of Candy, Cota, Ceytavaca, Dambadan, Anorayapore, Jafnapatam, Prince of Uva, Mature, Dinavaca, the Four Corles, Grand Duke of the 7 Corles, Matale, Count of Cotiyar, Trinquemale, Batecalo, Velse, Vinatane, Dumbra, Panciapato, Veta, Putelaon, Vallare, Gale, Belligaon, Marquis of Duranura, Ratienura, Tripane, Acciapato, Lord of the Havens of Alican, Columbo, Negombo, Chilau, Madampe, Calpentyn, Ariputure, Manaar and the Fisheries of Gems and Pearls, Lord of the Golden Sun. At least that’s how I put it to the Dutch Governor of Paliacatta (in my day, that was a trading fort in Tamil Nadu, India) when I wrote to him back in 1636. I was twentythree or twenty-six (depending on who you believe) back then, had been king for about a year and wanted to remind him that I was the one who was wearing the trousers. And they were as magnificent as you’re imagining them to be.

Obviously, the Portuguese were occupying most of my kingdom’s coast back then, so the fisheries, gems and pearls and stuff were kind of off-limits in practical if not moral terms. And Jaffna had its own kings, most of them propped up by the Portuguese. Oh, and two of my brothers ruled Matale, and Vijaypala and Bintanne. I was mainly King of Kandy. But baggy trousers were a thing in my day. You had to wear them with pride.

Particularly when the fucking Portuguese were trying to turn them into children’s shorts.

But you didn’t come here to read about fashion; and I didn’t come here to write about it.

Over the past few months I’ve been reading, in these pages, the pathetic boasts and justifications of various colonisers trying to explain themselves.

I’m sick of it. It’s time the boot was on the other foot. Kandy was the only independent kingdom in Sri Lanka and I’m known as the king who kicked the Portuguese off the island. Although I half expect that the sick shits who edit this rag invited me to write this column because they want me to tell you about how I colonised myself.

By which I mean my people. But, you know, what’s the difference? None, if you ask me.

The Portuguese and me had been involved in what you people would call a game of cat and mouse since I got on the throne. They tried to tempt me into open warfare but I kept things on a hit-and-run basis. Things trundled along in this way for a bit, then they stole an elephant, so I stole some of their horses.

The horse-loving fools got pissed and set out to Kandy to raze the place. I let them. And then wiped the arrogant fuckers out on their way home at the Battle of Gannoruwa in 1638. Only 33 of them made it out alive, the heads of the remaining 4,000 were piled up before me.

It wasn’t all about my tactical genius, of course.

The gods were on my side too. I’d stopped by the Dodanwala Devalaya (you can get there by

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Postscript

In an ongoing series in which the great colonialists justify themselves, King Raja Singa ii says: enough!

road from the turnoff at Kiribathkumbura on the Kandy–Colombo main road and then it’s around three miles in the direction of Muruthalawa town) on the way to the battle and promised the gods my crown and jewels if we won. We did and I became a charity. (I’m a very spiritual man btw: my father was a Buddhist monk until he got lured into the ruling game; my mother was a Christian, but we don’t talk about that; I tended to play the field a bit when it came to religion – I was broadminded.) The crown eventually ended

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up in the Museum of Kandy, until it got stolen in 1960. Now you careless fools get to see a fake.

But I’m told (repeatedly, by the people who write for this magazine) that you live in a world in which everything is representation in any case, so you probably haven’t noticed.

Unlike you dirty bastards, I was a stickler for hygiene. Anyone serving me had to wear a muffler in case they breathed on my food.

I invented the facemask and lived a long and sometimes happy life (although I wasn’t walking much by the end of it, I had gout and stuff in my sixties and seventies, but that’s what bearers are for; I died on a couch). I hated the Europeans though. I made scarecrows of them to feed to my elephants. I collected exotic animals. I was the Joe Exotic of my day, except I was the Lion King, which is better. There should be a Netflix series about me. And then, when I got bored of my animal zoo, I started a human one. (That’s called progress btw, or ‘season two’ if you’re a Netflix exec.) And I was a dedicated collector, so there were examples of every race. People complain about my treatment of the Prince of Bengal, who was reduced to beggary to the point that he died, and the Europeans (a bunch of Carole Baskins) were none too happy about my execution of a Dutch tutor, even though it turned out he had been teaching me complete gibberish. Then they used to whinge about the impalings, the burnings, the tramplings by elephants and the chopping off of various limbs and appendages; but without discipline, what do you have?

The Portuguese, that’s what. Half our bloody language is polluted with their loan words!

Anyway, eventually I got the Dutch, via a mix of clever diplomacy and a bit of crop burning, to help me kick them out completely (that’s why the letter-writing and bragging about the size of the trousers I was wearing). The Dutch took Colombo in 1656. Boom! Sri Lanka decolonised! By me!

But then – and you won’t believe this bit – instead of giving it back to me, their ally, their helper, their host, their enabler, they kept it for themselves! And set about recolonising all the Portuguese bits of the island we had only just decolonised.

And they (the Dutch) called me a ‘horrible monster’ and claimed that I treated my pet people worse than a Turkish slaver (which, if you ask me, apart from being ironic, is doubly racist).

Even though one of my ‘guests’, the English sailor Robert Knox (he escaped after 19 years, even though I had let him work as a pedlar), went on to write a popular account of his experiences in my kingdom that, in turn, inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe and introduce the English to the idea of the realistic novel.

So, when you think about it, I invented that too.

The only good European is a trampled one.

Artists Pio Abad Barby Asante Rasheed Araeen Ruth Beale David Blandy Electronic Sheep Adam Farah Lucy Fine FOR NOW Carl Gabriel Avant Gardening Brian Griffiths

Jaykoe Dawn Mellor Dan Mitchell Yasmin Nicholas The October Anthropologist & Abäke Paul Purgas Imran Qureshi John Rogers Dhelia Snoussi Jude Wacks Abbas Zahedi

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