ArtReview Asia Winter 2023 by ArtReview

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Neo Rauch, Feldzeichen (detail), 2023. Photo by Uwe Walter, Berlin. © Neo Rauch/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the artist, Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin, and David Zwirner.

Neo Rauch

Field Signs

David Zwirner

November 16–February 24 H Queen’s 5-6/F 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong

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SARAH BUCKNER JEDEN KLEINEN FINGER, SOGAR NOVEMBER 3 – DECEMBER 2, 2023 ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

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ArtReview Asia vol 11 no 4 Winter 2023

Nothing if not self-critical One of the ironic things about putting its magazine together, ArtReview Asia finds, is that while it invented itself in order to insist on art histories rather than art history (that’s ArtReview, ha ha ha), it’s always preaching at you in English, which serves to obscure the very things it’s trying to reveal. There’s a power dynamic at play in all that of course. Not just as a result of centuries of colonial abuse, but in the demand that the multiple aspects of Asia reveal themselves in ArtReview Asia’s chosen language. Maybe ArtReview Asia is writing this to tell you that it knows about its own contradictions, its own hypocrisies. Which doesn’t resolve them or excuse them, but ArtReview Asia wanted you to know that it thinks about them a lot. It even launched a version of itself in another language last November (Chinese; out quarterly). Which is just the tip of a linguistic iceberg. And, of course, ArtReview Asia is also aware of the fact that trying is lying. But it’s a start. Somehow. In a small way. Towards the creation of something that might be as polyphonic as the territories it seeks to cover. In the same vein, ArtReview Asia is also aware that celebrating one thing at one end of the world’s largest continent comes at the expense of appearing to ignore the very real violences taking place at the other. (ArtReview Asia is aware there are always various violences taking place everywhere; the difference is in the visibility and the scale.) And that you can’t pretend to cover an entire continent unless you’re actually covering an entire continent. But that is exactly the kind of Sisyphean task that makes ArtReview Asia keep trying. And, as a side product, lying. ArtReview Asia

Appearances

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RAMESH MARIO NITHIYENDRAN IDOLS OF MUD AND WATER

Seated Bronze Figure with Masks, 2023, bronze, beads, 136 x 104 x 95 cm

at Tramway, Glasgow, UK 24 November 2023—21 April 2024

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Art Previewed

Previews by ArtReview Asia 16

The Interview Hiroshi Sugimoto by Lance Henderstein 30

Razzle-Dazzle Art by Max Crosbie-Jones 42

Not Silenced by Frances Forbes-Carbines 40

Art Featured

Citra Sasmita by Adeline Chia 46 Shuang Li by Stephanie Bailey 54

Namak Nazar by Hylozoic/Desires Artist project by Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser 59

Soumya Sankar Bose by Najrin Islam 67 Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit by Max Crosbie-Jones 74

page 54 Shuang Li, Déjà Vu (still), 2022, five-channel video, 7 min. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin, Seoul & Milan

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Art Reviewed

Exhibitions & Books 84 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, by Ophelia Lai Jogja Fotografis Festival, by Mira Asriningtyas Jewyo Rhii, by Mark Rappolt Cosmic Beings, by Tai Mitsuji Maryanto, by Marv Recinto Cian Dayrit, by Martin Herbert Snare for Birds, by Portia Placino Phumzile Khanyile, by Matthew Blackman Jinjoon Lee, by Yuwen Jiang World Classroom, by Lance Henderstein White Noise, by Hung Duong María Magdalena Campos-Pons, by Zoë Hopkins

Midnight’s Third Child, by Naeem Mohaiemen, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Contemporary Queer Chinese Art, edited by Hongwei Bao, Diyi Mergenthaler, Jamie J. Zhao, reviewed by Yuwen Jiang Tellurian Drama, by Riar Rizaldi, reviewed by Adeline Chia Monica, by Daniel Clowes, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Selected Nonfiction, 1962–2007, by J.G. Ballard, reviewed by David Terrien Artists Making Books: Poetry to Politics, by Venetia Porter, reviewed by Nirmala Devi COMIC by Justin Wong 106

page 95 Jinjoon Lee, Fresh Nature: Black Milk, 2023, artificial tree branch, M10 plaster, sumi ink for calligraphy and golden leaf sculpture, 22 × 30 × 60 cm. Courtesy Korean Cultural Centre UK, London

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EIGEN+ART ASIA SPOTLIGHT

ou e S y dr n u o SS F 16, 2023 O R N G ember I T R MA 1 – Sept July 2

CARSTEN Novembe NICOLAI AC T F e s t iva l G r 17, 2023 wa n g j u 23 0 2 e l nna e i B i ai a h h g g n an Sha h I A S L m 4 ICO u N e 3 N 2 E s 0 T u 02 2 M , CARS ber 11 – 12, 2 5 OW uary 2 H Novem NZ – Febr E M i IE 23 e H 0 2 p C , i S Ta KAI ember 8 I K v A o N NZ E ei IEM p i H Ta SC I E A K C / A KI 023 S P 23 S 2 T W , KO 7 – 29 A R 3, 20 E O UWtober TA ber 2 Y Oc LE ecem S O 4–D UPCO ART BAS M EL HONG MING 2024 r N KO e A March 28 NG 2024 H o n g b KAI SCH Y Ko n g – 30, 2 IE R vem MENZ G o e t h e - In 024 s t it u t H o March n g Ko n g No LOUISA C 26 – 30, 2024 LEMEN

T Na CARSTEN Au NICOLAI tumn / Winter 20 n ji n g 24 Museum o Decembe f Contemporary Art To k y r 2024 o

www.eigen-art.com

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Art Observed

Does not think 15

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22 Elmgreen & Dragset, What’s Left? (studio view). Courtesy the artists and NGV Triennial

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Previewed 1 14th Shanghai Biennale Power Station of Art, Shanghai 9 November – 31 March

10 Colomboscope 2024 Various venues, Colombo 19–28 January

17 Thailand Biennale Various venues, Chiang Rai 9 December – 30 April

2 Zhang Ruyi Don Gallery, Shanghai 3 November – 31 January

11 88 Acres: The Watapuluwa Housing Scheme by Minnette De Silva MMCA Sri Lanka, Colombo 30 November – 7 July

18 Jakkai Siributr CHAT, Hong Kong 11 November – 13 February; Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong 15 November – 6 January; 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok 30 November – 24 May

3 Shen Xin, YOYO MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai 6 November – 30 December 4 Korakrit Arunanondchai K11 Musea, Hong Kong 15 December – 14 January 5 13th Taipei Biennial Taipei Fine Arts Museum 18 November – 24 March 6 Busan Sea Art Festival Ilgwang Beach and other venues, Busan Through 19 November 7 28 North Parallel Khoj Studios, New Delhi 31 January – mid-March 8 Indian Ceramics Triennale 2024 Arthshila Delhi, New Delhi 19 January – 31 March

12 THE NO NAME SHOW 3.0 Gravity Art Space, Quezon City 15 December – 13 January 13 VIVA ExCon Antique 2023 Various venues, Antique Province, Panay Island 8–10 November 14 Lee Bul STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore 4 November – 23 December 15 Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America National Gallery Singapore 18 November – 24 March 16 Ho Tzu Nyen Singapore Art Museum 24 November – 3 March

9 Book of Gold: The Kanchana Chitra Ramayana of Banaras Museum of Art & Photography, Bengaluru Through 8 March

20 Fashioning an Empire: Textiles from Safavid Iran Museum of Islamic Art, Doha Through 20 April 21 Sharjah Architecture Triennial Various venues, Sharjah 11 November – 10 March 22 NGV Triennial 2023 NGV International, Melbourne 3 December – 7 April 23 Kim Lim Hepworth Wakefield 25 November – 2 June 24 Heecheon Kim Hayward Gallery, London 1 December – 7 January

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19 Orawan Arunrak Bangkok CityCity Gallery 16 December – 20 January

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Helmed by New York-based artist and publisher origins, given that the PRC is currently also 1 Anton Vidokle, the 14th Shanghai Biennale, thinking on a cosmic level and now operates titled Cosmos Cinema, is the ideology of ‘Cosmism’. one of the world’s most active space proEmerging in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth grammes. While early statements nod and wink and twentieth centuries, the notion folded to German author-thinkers such as Alexander philosophy, religion and ethics in with theories Kluge and deceased French film critics such as concerning the past, present and future evoluAndré Bazin, there’s no word yet on the artists tion of the cosmos, mixed with a healthy dose who’ll be showing, other than that they’ll of mysticism. It’s a subject that Vidokle, both be drawn from both local and international in his own moving-image works and publicascenes. Given that Vidokle was only (publicly) tions through his e-flux platform, has been appointed this past May, presumably it’s all pursuing for some time. If the 13th Shanghai been a bit of a rush. But perhaps that’s the Biennale, Bodies of Water, which opened three human condition when you’re thinking on years ago mid-pandemic, asked us to look a cosmic level. (ND) In her solo exhibition at UCCA in Beijing within and around us, in this edition Vidokle 2 earlier this year, Zhang Ruyi covered the is asking us to look up, promising that the galleries in white rectangular ceramic tiles, exhibition ‘will reflect on how artists have advanced our understanding of the relationmaking the exhibition space look like the ship between life on earth and the cosmos that exteriors of China’s socialist-era building nourishes and conditions it’. Perhaps it’s both blocks. Chunks of concrete rubble were scattered on the floor throughout the rooms, appropriate and timely, despite its century-old

and fossillike casts of cactuses infested such cold, unwelcoming territories, setting into conversation the vigour of life against a dystopian vision of death and ruination. Such sensibilities for space and materiality characterise Zhang’s work. At Don Gallery, Zhang will present a series of new works and site-specific installations that, as the exhibition’s title, Once Remain, Once Remould, suggests, will continue to wrestle with ideas of decay and renewal. (YJ) Shen Xin’s videoworks deal with stateless3 ness, language and acts of translation. In the five-channel video installation Brine Lake (A New Body) (2020), two female protagonists converse in Japanese, Korean and Russian in a fictional iodine-recycling factory, their conversation drifting into Korea’s complex territorial disputes and related emigration (forced and otherwise) history with Russia and Japan, and the resulting liminal state of

1 Jonas Staal, Exo-Ecologies, Portrait Study, 2023. Photo: Tom Estrera III. Courtesy the artist

2 Zhang Ruyi, The Dry-As-Dust Island (detail), 2022, concrete, rebar, steel wire, 40 × 21 × 15 cm (sculpture), installation dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Don Gallery, Shanghai

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3 Shen Xin, Brine Lake (A New Body) (still), 2020, five-channel video installation, 20 min. Courtesy the artist

5 Hsu Tsun-Hsu, The More We Get Together series, 1989–98, giclée print, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

4 Korakrit Arunanondchai. Photo: Kelvin Boyes

dislocation and belonging. In New Light (2022), a two-channel work, the voice of the artist learning to count in Tibetan and Arabic is played alongside 8mm film recordings of animals strolling around zoos and preservation centres in Minnesota (where the artist is currently based) – bringing into question the additional histories, structures and ideas that come with language. Both works are on view in this solo show at MadeIn Gallery, titled one, arriving at floodplains, which will take rivers and their surrounding floodplains as a metaphor for fluidity and the forces of change in shaping knowledge and identities. Showing concurrently will be 3 another solo exhibition, of the artist YOYO, who will present drawings and sculptures that explore the interplay of nature and history in China’s Qinling mountain range – a topic that has continued to inspire him since his solo exhibition The First Emperor of Qin Is Not a Mountain at the gallery last year. (YJ)

Jet skis on the Chao Phraya River, hip hop, dirt bikes, plenty of crocodiles, denim, double denim, ripped denim and tons of very colourful paint: just a few of the components in Thai artist 4 Korakrit Arunanondchai’s videowork Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (2015). At K11 the work will be shown at its full scale for the first time since its initial display, as part of an immersive installation. At play are processes of remembering and representing, high and low culture, relations between the body and spirituality, as well as the relation between nature and culture, the land and the city, with personal relationships and solidarities spinning around the middle of it all. (ND) 5 Small World, as the 13th Taipei Biennial is titled, is directed by an intriguing trinity of thinkers and curators: Hong Kong- and Taipeibased curator Freya Chou, e-flux editor Brian Kuan Wood (whose boss, if you’ve been paying attention, is curating the Shanghai Biennale),

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and Reem Shadid, director of the Beirut Art Center in Lebanon. ‘No matter what kind of hell you’ve been through in the past few years,’ they collectively chant in the show’s press release, ‘you have most likely felt and seen endings become beginnings and beginnings abruptly end. You may have run for cover in the nearest enclosure, only to find yourself in a shrinking pod made of cameras and screens feeding your eyeballs and draining your energy. Perhaps it’s time… to explore the unknown power of the ground just underneath our feet.’ In other words, Small World promises to be the opposite perspective to Wood’s boss’s Shanghai cosmic confection: a reflection on the isolation of the COVID years, the potential for individual agency and a rethinking of what it means to be ‘close’ to each other. More practically, that means new commissions from Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Pio Abad, alongside works by Kim Beom, the late Huguette Caland, Jumana Manna,

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8 Parag Tandel with Bhupen Jaidev Baghel, Into the Bones-201911, 2019, brass, river clay, farm clay, termite hill clay and rice husk, 12 × 35 × 10 cm. Courtesy the artists

6 Muhannad Shono, I see you brightest in the dark, 2022 (installation view, Noor Riyadh, 2022). Photo: Eliot Blondet

7 Atul Bhalla, to false clouds-I, 2023, archival pigment print, 76 × 114 cm. Courtesy the artist and Khoj Studios, New Delhi

Irini Papadimitriou, is titled Flickering Shores, Sea Ellen Pau, Hema Shironi and Wang Wei. To name Collective, who will be considering water and its place in geography and history, both in India Imaginaries and aims at exploring the tidal pulls but the smallest tip of the Small World. (ND) 6 Busan Sea Art Festival started out during and along the latitudinal axis. This exhibition of exploitation and survival when it comes to the buildup to the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. emerges as part of a collaboration between Khoj humankind’s relation to the sea. The exhibition, Held annually until 1995, it was subsequently centred around Ilgwang Beach, features work and the World Weather Network, a two-year incorporated into the better-known Busan by artists such as Saudi Arabia’s Muhannad project initiated in 2022 that brings together Biennale, whose organisation still runs the Shono and Busan-native Kim Doki, but for the an international community of artists and biennial event. The point of it, in case it wasn’t main part a series of collectives and groups, such scientists to foreground an interdisciplinary obvious, is to place art in the context of the as the nomadic STUDIO 750. Presumably they’ll approach to climate. ‘Weather stations’ have South Korean coastline and make that marine be urging us to wake up from the zombie-apocabeen set up with 28 different art institutions environment the centrepiece of the show – around the world as loci for engagement, lypse that characterises our current relations to and given the speed at which that environment the sea, and of course to Busan’s place in pop including Philippines, Bangladesh, Dubai, is changing (from desiccated corals to rising culture. Time for a sea change. (ND) Istanbul, South Korea, China and the Arctic The 28th north parallel is a circle of latitude Circle, with projects rooted in their respective sea levels and unpredictable typhoons and monsoons), the notion of the Sea Art Festival as that passes through New Delhi, Mount Everest, locality, in a shift beyond the ecological crisis’s the Himalayas and Khoj Studio’s weather a warmup act has taken on a whole new depth of Global North-centred narrative. (MVR) station. Khoj is dedicating a six-week exhibimeaning, which would also make you think that Having garnered critical attention for such an event would be a little more prominent 7 tion to the 28 North Parallel, for which it has its first edition, in 2018, the open-submission in the artworld imaginary than it currently is. commissioned a series of multidisciplinary 8 Indian Ceramics Triennale’s return was hampered by the pandemic. Now it opens with This year’s edition, curated (following an open artists including Mithu Sen, Shahana Rajani, call) by digital-media and maker-culture expert Zahra Malkani, Atul Bhalla and Raqs Media approximately 50 ceramic-based artists and

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10 Zihan Karim, EYE (I), 2015 (installation view, Dhaka Art Summit, 2016). Photo: Fiona Cheng. Courtesy the artist

9 Kaka Bhushundi Narrates His Own Story to Garuda, 1814, painted by artists from the second wave of migrations from Jaipur, perhaps assisted by local painters, 48 × 36 cm. Courtesy MAP, Bangalore

11 Minnette De Silva at Watapuluwa. Courtesy MMCA Sri Lanka and Plesner Archives

collectives showing work under the literal and Awadhi language, based on the Ramayana, is titled Way of the Forest and features work by metaphorical theme of Common Ground: ‘The and composed by the sixteenth-century Indian more than 40 local and international artists. Bhakti poet Tulsidas. The poem is structured ground we walk on is uneven. We are separated The forest, in this context, is simultaneously around three conversations, between married by privilege, politics, motivation, experience a site of extraction, ecocide and genocide, and Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati, Vedic sages and access to knowledge, yet we remain bound of deities, ancestors and nourishment (not to Bharadvaja and Yajnavalkya, and finally by a common humanity,’ the curators write. mention, in the recent local past, a bloody civil Kakbhushundi, a sage in the form of a crow, The works that will feature range from Kate war). Each of the curators comes with their own take on the operations of those polarities, as addressing the king of birds, the eaglelike Roberts’s ceramic wall ‘drawings’ to an installaGaruda. What makes this edition of the poem a chance to embrace the potential of art in tion by Neha Gawand Pullarwar that links so remarkable, however, is how richly it has a multispecies world; as for the artists, they’re Stoke-on-Trent, the centre of British pottery manufacture, and colonial Bombay/present-day been illustrated: every page comes with facing yet to be announced. (ND) Mumbai, once the centre of Indian cotton 88 Acres: The Watapuluwa Housing Scheme illustration, by different artists, totalling 548 11 by Minnette De Silva, at the fledgling MMCA manufacturing and trade. (OB) paintings – of which approximately 80 appear While conventional history tells of the Sri Lanka, focuses on a single project, by an in this show, revealing courts, gardens and decline in Indian miniature painting by the architect who is considered by many to be the gods in glorious detail. (OB) pioneering force when it came to introducing Curated by Hit Man Gurung, Sheelasha 9 nineteenth century, Book of Gold: The Kanchana the modernist style to the country. De Silva was Chitra Ramayana of Banaras tells another story. Rajbhandari (both Nepali artists and cultural The Kanchana Chitra Ramayana – Golden also the first Sri Lankan woman to be trained as organisers), Sarker Protick (a Bangladeshi artist Illustrated Ramayana – was made over 18 years, and photographer) and artistic director Natasha an architect (she had to go to India to do that), beginning in 1796, for the royal court of the first Asian woman to be elected to the Royal 10 Ginwala, Colomboscope 2024, the eighth Banaras. The book is an epic poem in the edition of the Sri Lankan visual arts festival, Institution of British Architects (although that’s

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12 Artist anonymous, Maraming Seaman sa Pilipinas, 2023, oil on canvas, 61 × 91 cm. Courtesy the artist

13 SKYLAB, UMMMA, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the artists

rather less meaningful to republicans like While the question of whether authorship ArtReview Asia) and a close friend of Le Corbusier can be separated from artwork continues to (as well as Picasso, Henri Cartier-Bresson and baffle professional and amateur philosophers Laurence Olivier; though before you start thinkalike, Gravity Art Space – a contemporary ing whatever you’re thinking, she never married gallery run by two former mathematicians and claimed husbands were only good for carrywith a focus on events and community 12 building – is stirring the pot with THE NO ing bags). Watapuluwa opened in 1958, and today there are no extant original models or NAME SHOW 3.0. Without those pesky little drawings of the project (indeed, De Silva died artist names, and the accompanying weight virtually penniless and widely unacknowledged of artistic ownership, you can freely wonder for her achievements, other than a Gold Medal about an artwork’s subject or technique, or awarded to her by the Sri Lanka Institute of even whether that blobby painting is actually Architects in 1996, two years before her death good. Now in its third iteration, the freeat the age of eighty). The exhibition looks at for-all exhibition features a range of media, Watapuluwa’s formation and influence 65 years including painting, drawing and sculpture. What began in 2021 as an observational later, aided by a newly commissioned animaexperiment on the collecting habits of the tion film by artists Irushi Tennekoon, Sumedha gallery’s patrons has proved to be a compelling Kelegama and Sumudu Athukorala. Those of premise that builds upon wider questions you who can’t wait until the show opens can of, yes, authorship but also authority, taste check out Shiromi Pinto’s novel based on the and contemporary connoisseurship. (MVR) architect’s life, Plastic Emotions (2019). (ND)

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Initiated by the Black Artists in Asia collective in 1990, the travelling Visayas Islands Visual 13 Arts Exhibition and Conference (VIVA ExCon) is the Philippines’ longest-running biennial and a beloved fixture in the country’s art ecosystem. This, the 17th edition, organised by Green Papaya Art Projects and the Antique Visual Arts Association, travels to San Jose and Sibolam, in the Antique Province of Panay Island, for the first time, where artwork will be shown across three venues and public spaces, including a former rice mill. Over 60 artists and cultural workers from the Philippines and abroad will descend on the island for the three-day affair. Multidisciplinary artists and collectives, mostly local to the Visayas region and with a focus on community-based projects – including Martha Atienza and GOODLand collective, Kiri Dalena, Mark Salvatus (who will be representing the Philippines in the forthcoming Venice Biennale), SKYLAB and

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Rural Architecture Forum – make up the exhibition, Suba sa Iraya (in Kinaraya, a phrase that generally translates to ‘swimming towards the source’ or ‘against the current’). The accompanying conference features speakers such as John Tain of Asia Art Archive, Mirwan Andan of ruangrupa and Mayumi Hirano of Load na Dito. This perhaps seems like a lot of art to cover over a three-day period, but VIVA ExCon promises to be well worth the energy and time. (MVR) Lee Bul is known for her largescale sculp14 tures and dazzling immersive installations. STPI, specialising in paper and prints, promises to reveal a more intimate side to the artist’s practice, though admittedly these prints are large for their medium – many over a metre wide. Still, the works seem to offer a sense of spatial proximity to the viewer characteristic of Lee’s wider practice: Untitled – SFLB (2023) is a large work made from screenprinting foil

on paper in which sharp, geometric shapes collide with each other, mimicking a shattering mirror. It comes close to capturing the dizzying effect of such giant installations as Civitas Solis II (2014) in 2D, but without the mirrors. Her Untitled – PI (2023) series is a selection of prints made from the same intricate screenprinting plate, in which yellow, pink and black lines of amorphous shapes resembling clouds and futuristic structures intersect; the Untitled – SI (2023) variation takes this same plate, but where the PI prints are airy and light, here the rust-coloured ink – its warm tones made from copper – endows a kind of welcome heaviness to the imagery. (MVR) When Portugal ushered in the Age of Exploration, it also catalysed what many historians consider the beginnings of modernity and globalisation, including, from the fifteenth century on, the Global North’s colonisation of much of the rest of the world.

The National Gallery’s forthcoming large15 scale exhibition Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America seeks to take a ‘comparative approach’ between these two regions’ centuries-long struggles against colonialism that continue today. Featuring over 200 works and around 70 artists, including David Medalla, Tarsila do Amaral, Diego Rivera, Patrick Ng Kah Onn and Helio Oiticica, this exhibition inspects how post- and decolonialism might manifest in different and seemingly disparate geographies and cultural landscapes. Also included here: Emiria Sunassa, who actively campaigned for Indonesia’s independence against the Dutch, creating paintings depicting marginalised communities; and Frida Kahlo’s paintings interrogating Spain’s colonial legacy and America’s neocolonial one. (MVR) With over two decades of a multidisciplinary practice that includes painting, film,

14 Lee Bul, Untitled – SFLB, 2023, screenprint and foiling on paper, 88 × 115 × 5 cm, variation 1 of 4. © and courtesy the artist and STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore

15 Latiff Mohidin, Tumbuhan Tropika (Tropical Growth), 1968, oil on canvas, 99 × 89 cm. ©️ the artist

15 Patrick Ng Kah Onn, Self-Portrait, 1958, oil on paper, 49 × 75 cm. © Estate of Patrick Ng Kah Onn. Courtesy National Gallery Singapore

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theatrical performance, video installation, of a new video installation commission, T for writing and cocurating the influential 2019 Time, follows the iconic alphabetic model to interrogate the ‘heterogeneous experiences 16 Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan, Ho Tzu Nyen’s of time’. (MVR) prolific and important work certainly warrants The third edition of Thailand Biennale this midcareer-survey treatment. His epic on17 arrives in Chiang Rai this December. Guided by going project The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2012–), which takes the form of both online artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and curator Gridthiya and print mediums, functions as a sociopolitical Gaweewong, the exhibition is themed as The inquiry into the geographies that constitute Open World, a title inspired by the enshrined and cohere the region: ‘t for tiger’, for example, Buddha at Chiang Rai’s Wat Pa Sak, whose highlights the animal as ‘an inhabitant of the power ‘opens’ three worlds: the god world, liminal zone between the civilised and the wild’. the underworld and the human world. With The tiger has remained a consistent focus in the aim of ‘opening up’ new connections and Ho’s work, from Utama – Every Name in History conversations, The Open World has invited both Is I (2003) through to One or Several Tigers (2017), local and international artists to engage with reincarnated from one work to the next at sites the region through questions posed to them of confusion and invention during the course by the curatorial team, such as: ‘How do we of Singapore’s and the region’s colonial and deal with the complex history of the city?’, ‘How can we share resources?’ and ‘Can we postcolonial history. Indeed so present is the imagine the possibility of a better future?’ The tiger in Ho’s work that it forms one half of this exhibition’s title: Time & the Tiger. The title works of Chiang Rai-based interdisciplinary

artists Busui Ajaw, Chata Maiwong, Sriwan Janehuttakarnkit and Sompong Sarasap will be engaging with national figures like film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and design studio All(Zone), as well as international artists Nguyen Trinh Thi, Ernesto Neto and Kader Attia. The cumulation of this range of practices promises a fascinating inquiry into the way local specificity might be interrogated by differing global perspectives. (MVR) Based in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Jakkai 18 Siributr works to create intricate tapestries, quilts, clothing and fabric installations. But even as the artist stitches fabrics together, he uses that same action to unpick the social and historical fabric of his homeland as it has developed in recent years. Everybody Wanna Be Happy at CHAT (Center for Heritage and Textile) marks his first retrospective exhibition outside of Thailand and will feature works that surface personal stories, as well as those created

16 Ho Tzu Nyen and Vindicatrix, One or Several Tigers (still), 2017, synchronised double-channel HD projection, automated screen, shadow puppets, 10-channel sound, show-control system, 33 min 33 sec. Courtesy the artist and Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong

18 Jakkai Siributr, Bridge House (detail), 2023, disassembled garments, beads, threads, 108 × 153 cm. Courtesy the artist 17 Wit-Pimkanchanapong, Maze, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Mae Fah Luang Foundation

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collaboratively, involving other communities. Luxury textiles were one of the most simply be – amid movement: this is the emo‘Textile can be anything,’ he says. ‘It does not lucrative businesses for Safavid Iran (1501– 19 tional core of Orawan Arunrak’s artmaking.’ That’s according to ArtReview Asia’s Max Crosbie1736). They served as diplomatic gifts to forge always have to be a two-dimensional wall Jones, writing about the Thai-born, Berlininternational ties and incurred immense hanging. It can be decorative, or conceptual.’ wealth through east- and westbound trade. based artist, whose largely conceptual practice 18/28: The Singhaseni Tapestries (2017–18) was They became so popular that exporters started takes the form of drawing, painting and instala response to the death of the artist’s mother adding wealthy Europeans’ coats of arms onto lation, a year ago. Counting (2019) took the form and featured five of her dresses, which he had their commissions, and you’d see Persian rugs of 21 breezeblocks that had been sanded-down embroidered, as well as the disassembled outappear in compositions from Jan van Eyck’s in the fabricator’s yard, drawn on in coloured fits of family relatives turned into largescale pencil and then stacked up into columns in Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele (1436) tapestries. These themes are again picked up the gallery space. The artist’s latest exhibition, to Johannes Vermeer’s Lady at the Virginals with back on home soil in Matrilineal at 100 Tonson, titled The 4 Foundations, features works derived a Gentleman (c. 1660), and among endless genre where the artist will continue to follow those from stories told by and conversations with threads in a wider effort to subvert his home20 paintings and vanitas. Fashioning an Empire: other people and other objects, and observations Textiles from Safavid Iran, first presented at land’s patriarchal histories. Back in Hong Kong, from the pandemic years, when the former at Flowers, it’s the uniforms of service-industry the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian workers that form his base material, here detype of conversations stopped. Oh… what are Art in Washington, DC, in 2021, digs into these ployed to create a series of intricate tapestried the four foundations? According to the artist intricately designed and heavily patterned installations that reflect on Thailand’s handling they’re ‘Mindfulness’, ‘Perception’, ‘Mental woven fabrics. The four-part exhibition goes Awareness’ and ‘Form’. As to how she’s going of the COVID-19 pandemic. (ND) from Abbas the Great’s silk monopoly and to guide you to them, you’ll have to visit ‘Selfhood – what it is to dwell, connect, state-funded textile industry to the bustling Bangkok to find out. (ND) listen, think, meander, take your time, belong, marketplace of Abbas’s new capital, Isfahan,

19 Orawan Arunrak, Study for Swan Dive.Boomerang.Mermaid. One Leg Circle.Cobra.Breastroke.Rolling Back.Clam, 2023. Photo: Wolfgang Bellwinkel. Courtesy the artist and Bangkok CityCity Gallery

20 Portrait of a Gentleman, Iran, Isfahan, Safavid period, c. 1650–75, oil on canvas, 220 × 137 × 5 cm. Courtesy Museum of Islamic Art, Doha

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22 Hito Steyerl, Tent Texture III, Kharkiv, 2015, UV pigment print on Dibond, 100 × 100 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

21 FormaFantasma, Cambio – Seeing the Wood for the Trees (still), 2020–23, video, 16 min 32 sec. Courtesy the artist

practices of self-fashioning in Safavid society and – expanding on the Smithsonian’s original exhibition – contemporary designs inspired by Safavid textiles. More than 100 works from the MIA and Qatar Museums’ collections will be on show, which perhaps continues to weave together art and the powers that enable it. (YJ) Titled The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability and curated by Lagos-based architect Tosin Oshinowo (who’s known for combining a socially responsive approach to architecture with an ability to create elegant commercial spaces), the second 21 edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the emirate’s newest recurring festival, promises displays by 30 architects, designers and studios that will offer ‘innovative design solutions born out of conditions of scarcity in the Global South’. Of course, part of the

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thing about solutions is that they require the non-Australian artists able to get to the someone to identify the problems; with the show. The triennial is an ambitious interdisciadded complication here of also defining what plinary gathering of work by over 100 artists, is meant by the increasingly imperfect designadesigners and architects, offering a survey of tion ‘the Global South’. Still, architecture is one both national and international art goings-on of those disciplines that thrives on identifying to an audience that, given Australia’s distance problems as much as it does on solving them, from most other places, might not otherwise which was certainly the case with the previous have the chance to see. Which means that NGV edition of this event, which mixed research Triennial is framed as a response to ‘the most practices of the likes of Feral Atlas with the relevant and critical global issues of our time’. struggle for indigenous land rights, curated (Which, to be fair, a lot of triennials are – releby Adrian Lahoud. Look in this edition to Hive vance and global issues being what internaEarth approaching the use of natural building tional contemporary art is supposed to be all materials, Thomas Egoumenides’s resistance about.) In 2020 those issues included ‘climate to waste culture and Formafantasma’s examichange, representation and race, isolation and nation of the colonial wood industry, to name 22 speculation on the future’. For NGV Triennial just a few. (ND) 2023 the big themes are ‘Magic, Matter and Inaugurated with its 2017 edition, the NGV Memory’, so expect work that deals with belief Triennial’s second edition found itself opening systems, natural resources and human histories and identity. There’s a solid contingent of in shadow of the COVID pandemic, with few of

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familiar international art names (Yoko Ono, Tracey Emin and Hito Steyerl, for starters), and a broad sweep of contemporary activity, including a newly commissioned installation by Iranian Hoda Afshar, taking on colonialism and female representation; a room by Japanese Azuma Makoto, of floral and botanical specimens captured for eternity in acrylic blocks; and Hawaiian Lehuauakea’s mixed-media installation that puts indigenous ecological knowledge into dialogue with ‘Western’ science. ArtReview Asia tries not to fly so much these days, so if it sets sail now, it should be in Melbourne for the opening. (JJC) Kim Lim was a rare figure in postwar 23 British art: born in Singapore to Chinese parents in 1936, she left for London at the age of eighteen to study art at Central Saint Martin’s, and then the Slade School of Art. She soon became a well-regarded and successful sculptor and printmaker, at a moment when modern

of an artist whose contribution to British art sculpture in Britain was booming, but in a history has been long overlooked. (JJC) scene then almost entirely dominated by men. For the past eight years or so, Seoul-based Lim’s pared-down abstract sculptures, never harshly geometric, often comprised similar 24 artist and filmmaker Heecheon Kim has dealt with the interface of the physical and nonphyselements brought together, or else suggested themselves as fragments of absent wholes – an ical (or digital) worlds, and how the one affects approach that drew attention to the negative the other. Earlier this year, Kim was awarded the biennial Hermès Foundation Missulsang art and the void as a counterpoint aspect of prize (which comes with a fund of around sculptural language, and which Lim would $15,000 and a show at Hermès Seoul), given to pursue through the 1970s and 80s in works increasingly made in stone and marble. Sifting an emerging South Korean artist. Kim’s London influences from East and West – Lim travelled exhibition, titled Double Poser, will feature Deep in the Forking Tanks (2019), inspired by diving to Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, China and India culture and sensory-deprivation tanks and a between the 1960s and 80s – her organic and new commission that will draw on videogame gestural forms coupled minimalism with a close attention to the qualities of her materials. Lim engines and the skateboarding culture that has died in 1997, and her last major institutional for some time been part of the Hayward’s home show in Britain was staged in 1999. This on London’s Southbank. (ND) retrospective at Hepworth Wakefield brings together over 100 sculptures and works on Oliver Basciano, J.J. Charlesworth, Nirmala Devi, paper from across her career, offering a view Yuwen Jiang, Marv Recinto

24 Heecheon Kim, production still, 2023. Courtesy the artist

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The Interview by Lance Henderstein

Hiroshi Sugimoto

“I think the end is coming pretty soon”

Hiroshi Sugimoto is best known for his ethereal black-and-white photography, beginning with the series Diorama (1974–), for which he photographed the uncanny displays of animals and prehistoric human beings showcased in New York’s American Museum of Natural History. Followed by the haunting series Seascapes (1980–), with its minimalist ocean horizons, and Theaters (1976–), which consists of shots of cinema screens in empty theatres illuminated bright white through single exposures lasting the duration of projected films. Sugimoto’s choice of subject matter, use of large-format antique cameras and subsequent hand-development of black-andwhite prints offer a photographic meditation on nature, time, history and human consciousness. The result lends his work a place- and timelessness; each series a collection of transient moments captured in permanence.

In more recent decades, Sugimoto has ventured into sculpture, architecture and the performing arts. His foray into architecture in 1996 resulted in the restoration of Naoshima’s medieval Goō Shinto Shrine: inspired by elements of animist worship (which often focuses on sites of natural force – a waterfall, a tree, a large boulder), Sugimoto also installed a glass staircase to allow access between the main sanctuary and an underground rock chamber; visitors can exit from the latter via a concretewalled tunnel that opens out onto a mountainside view of the sea. Not a licensed architect himself, Sugimoto partnered with architect Tomoyuki Sakakida in 2008 to found New Material Research Laboratory that designed the monumental Enoura Observatory in Odawara. The spectacular observatory overlooks Kanagawa prefecture’s Sagami Bay and contains a gallery space, a Noh theatre stage,

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tea ceremony room and gardens. It is part of Sugimoto’s Odawara Art Foundation, which he founded in 2009 with the aim of promoting Japanese history through classical and avantgarde theatre arts. From the 2000s, Sugimoto began to create site-specific sculptures inspired by mathematical concepts. The resulting works have been installed at different locations around the world, from Concept of Moss (2009) at Benesse House, Naoshima, to Confession of Zero (2014) at Castello di Ama, Siena. Sugimoto’s photographic work is the focus of Hiroshi Sugimoto, his largest exhibition to date and currently on view at London’s Hayward Gallery. Now seventy-five and as prolific as ever, Sugimoto took time in his Tokyo studio to reflect on his life of photography, philosophy and architecture, and the apocalyptic visions of the near future that are informing the legacy he hopes to leave behind.

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Are You Experienced? ArtReview After spending most of your professional life living in New York City, you recently returned to live in Tokyo. Why? Hiroshi Sugimoto New York is no longer so attractive to me because it’s been changed. Many of my friends have passed away or retired. Manhattan is not a place for young artists to play around, everything is so costly. I was in New York from 1974 and artists were mainly based in SoHo and Manhattan. There was an art community. Now there are only the galleries and rich people. The art market keeps getting bigger and bigger. And it keeps kicking artists out of the city. Art became a commodity. People buy art for future profit. Citibank approved art as an asset and will loan money using art as the collateral. AR Do you find any conflict there for yourself? HS Well, I only started making money at fifty years old. Before that I was giri-giri [Japanese for ‘just barely’] – barely even able to buy my film. I asked myself: what should I do with all this money? So I decided to reinvest all the profit back into my art. I try not to keep cash. That’s the idea behind the Odawara Foundation. I told my kids, you aren’t getting cash, but you will inherit this valuable foundation that you may run in the future. AR Did your lengthy experience living in America change your sense of identity? HS I was in Japan until I was twenty-two years old, and my main area of study was Marxist

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economics. It was the late 1960s and at that time socialism and communism were the study of the intelligentsia. To learn Marxist economics you had to learn German philosophy – Hegel, Feuerbach and Kant – so that was my basic study. In Japan I tried to catch up to European and American thinking. But when I moved to California there was a hippie movement and everyone was asking me if I was ‘enlightened’ or not. So I had to quickly change course. Reading D.T. Suzuki’s book [Essays in Zen Buddhism, 1927] was really helpful with that. When people would ask if I was enlightened I would say, “Of course I am”. AR So you’re kind of playacting for people or leaning into Japanese stereotypes to give them what they want? HS For my art, I’m just trying to give the most artlike art I can make, to satisfy people. I always say you can write anything you like about art. Nothing is wrong, which means any kind of criticism, I can accept it. It may not be true, but it’s also not necessarily wrong. AR I recently saw a selection of prints from your Conceptual Form series [2004, photographs of sculptures that visualise mathematical concepts, including zero and infinity] at the Mori Art Museum here in Tokyo. Yet you’ve previously said that you don’t fully subscribe to the Western notion of a rational world. Can you explain what you mean by that? Union City Drive-in, Union City, 1993. © and courtesy the artist

Am I Hallucinating? HS I was always wondering what this world consists of – the elements. I’m a dreamer. My childhood was spent wondering if this world actually exists or not. It could all be my hallucinogenic vision. I was into building models as a kid, model trains and model ships. To make a model I had to go and see the actual locomotive. And that’s how I started photography, taking photos of those trains. AR How old were you when you began to have these existential thoughts? Or to think that the world might not be real? HS Elementary school. I was in bed and couldn’t sleep and stared at the wooden ceiling, at the knots in the wood, and they started to move, to expand. I became aware of myself. I had this kind of dreamy imagination. I still have it. I’ve said it before, but the seascape is my first memory. And that happens to be the location for the Odawara Foundation. You could say I decided to buy my memory back, when I bought the site. AR Some of the models you photograph, like those based on a Kuen surface, start off as computer renderings that can only be created as an object by a five-armed robotic machine. How do you feel about generative art, machine learning and AI? HS I’m kind of scared of it. Once it can do a job better than a human, what can a human do? Particularly in terms of the skills involved in thinking and imagination. If a human can’t

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Conceptual Forms 0003 Dini’s surface: a surface of constant negative curvature obtained by twisting a pseudosphere, 2004. © and courtesy the artist

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Underside view of the cantilevered summer solstice observation gallery of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Odawara Art Foundation, Japan. Courtesy the artist

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do as good of a job as the machine, then what is the point of a human? The brain has to be trained to keep thinking. If you don’t have to think deeply – if you let the computer think for you – then the human brain will have to become something else. AR That’s transhumanism, isn’t it? Where humans interface fully with technology. Do you think that’s inevitable? HS I’m just glad I’m not going to be living in that future. But the world will end very soon in my estimation. For example, if you compare last year’s global temperature with this year, it’s one or two degrees hotter now – global warming is now global boiling. I think the end is coming pretty soon.

Outliving Humanity AR Do you have a sense of impending doom? HS I did a show at Palais de Tokyo called Lost Human Genetic Archive [2014], which included 33 stories about the end of the world, narrated by fictional characters. That was meant halfseriously and half-jokingly, but now so many things I thought about are becoming a reality. So I may be able to encounter the end of the world while I’m living. AR With your architecture you say you are trying to create structures that will last beyond humanity, but what if nobody is here to see it? HS The Odawara Foundation is intended to be present 5,000 years in the future. I’m

thinking of how beautiful it can be standing as a ruin. So, the structure dies, the glass is smashed, the cantilevered tip is bending down, but the stone structure remains – same as a pyramid or a Greek temple. Conceptually, if humans are gone, who records history, or the presence of materials, or the world, or the universe? It’s interesting to think about what might happen to human memory once humans no longer exist. Who would own those memories… God or not? AR Do you believe in God? HS Not in the personalised God. But I believe in some kind of eternal spirituality or some kind of presence of spirit. In the Shinto religion, we believe there are spirits in nature. We have to worship in nature. But humans separate themselves from nature, then invade it, cut the roots, cut the forest, make flat land and cultivate it, and that becomes ‘civilisation’. Civilisation means breaking nature. But in the Shinto belief-system, if you cut the root and cut the forest, you would be punished by nature’s spirits. So in Japan we have had to find a way to cultivate and civilise, while protecting nature as much as possible.

Cultivating Gardeners AR I’d like to talk about architecture a bit and the New Material Research Laboratory. For the Enoura Observatory and other projects, you repurpose some rare and salvaged materials – yakusugi [Japanese cedar],

ancient stonework, Canadian cypress. Some of these materials are no longer legally obtainable. What’s the intention behind that? HS I’ve been able to find some yakusugi from 100 years ago, which is now illegal to cut down. Occasionally a typhoon comes and a beautiful yakusugi tree falls and the government will put it on the market. It’s also a material used in some old wooden buildings. When these are demolished, I’m able to salvage some good parts from the remains. AR How do you find these materials? How do you seek them out? HS I have a network – like a ninja. I’m one of the few people who pays attention to and has an interest in these materials. There’s a shared interest among us. So I’ll receive a call and someone will say, “I found this beautiful material, will you take this?” Sometimes it’s free, sometimes it comes at a very high price. So, I know all the gardeners in the Kansai region. AR You have a spy network of gardeners? HS Odawara Foundation happens to have one of the finest collections of precious stones from ancient temples. Todai-ji temple [in Nara] had a huge eighth-century base stone from the pavilion, which we installed last year near the stone stage. AR What is it about this era of stonework that fascinates you? HS The history of Japan. Especially in the ancient capital of Nara, you can see the quality

Bird’s-eye view of the Odawara Art Foundation, Japan. Courtesy the artist

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World Trade Center, 1997. © and courtesy the artist

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of the stone that a human chiselled out as a sculpture. Modern people can’t make that. Even by the fifteenth century, stone sculptures get less and less interesting. I think the very primitive method of forming a shape is better. It takes more time, but makes a better shape. It’s that entire history, an architectural history, that I’m collecting. AR Are you trying to show that trajectory? We think we’re progressing culturally and technologically, and that we’re going to reach some pinnacle of humanity. But you’re saying – HS It’s going slowly downward [laughs]. The peak was the twelfth-century Fujiwara period, I think. I value it as the peak of Japanese production. AR Do you hope that New Material Research Laboratory and your architectural works will act as a storehouse of knowledge for future generations to draw from just as you are drawing from that period? HS I do. But I expect the next ‘big one’ [earthquake] is coming. When the cities are wiped out, it’ll be nice to rebuild. AR An opportunity out of tragedy. And if you could reshape the world (or Japan), what else would you do? HS Well, rural areas and smaller cities are still beautiful. Odawara, for example, is still beautiful. With new technology and communication, people can live far from the city and still work and be in communication. A good thing about COVID-19 is that we saw we could decentralise where we live.

AR Since you draw so deeply from traditional Japanese culture and present it to Western audiences who may not know much about this history, is there ever a danger of exoticising it? HS There is a kind of clichéd image or premade image of Japan that I’m trying to sometimes use. As a Japanese person living outside of Japan for more than 50 years, it’s a kind of tactic and technique. I have to explain Japanese culture to American and European people, but I also have to teach Japanese people to more seriously consider: what is the true spirit of the Japanese? Even then, I have to teach myself who I am as a Japanese. But I am not American for sure.

Free to Be AR Can you tell us about your retrospective at the Hayward? HS Well, at first I told them let’s do it after my life is over. A retrospective usually honours the entirety of the artist’s work, so they have to be dead for it to be complete. AR You make it sound like a living funeral. HS No, it’s called a ‘midcareer’ retrospective [laughs]. A new phrase. So I accepted. It was unusual as they requested only my photography. I do many things, architecture, sculpture, theatre, but they really wanted to concentrate on my career as a photographer. I think it’s a good idea.

AR Well, all of your work overlaps, doesn’t it? HS Yes, it’s all interconnected anyway. But they didn’t include my most recent photographs, they drew a line at work made up till about five or six years ago. They had to draw a line somewhere. Maybe Optiks [2018] is the most recent work included. AR You are now seventy-five and still prolific. When he was seventy-seven, Akira Kurosawa wrote a letter to Ingmar Bergman describing the brilliance of the artist Tessai Tomioka’s work after the latter turned eighty. He believed artists can produce their purest works during their ‘second babyhood’, as he called it. Do you feel any truth in that? HS Yes, I do feel I am going back to the ‘second babyhood’. I feel more free than when I was middle-aged. AR How so? HS I’m freed from sexual ambition. That gives me more free time. I don’t have to think about sex. When I was a baby, I didn’t think about sex, so I was more free – my mind was using its full imagination. After my teens 90 percent of my mind was focused on sex, and only 10 percent played with imagination. Hiroshi Sugimoto is on view at the Hayward Gallery, London, through 7 January Lance Henderstein is a writer and photographer based in Japan

Sea of Buddha 049 (Triptych), 1995. © and courtesy the artist

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尼奥·劳赫 Neo Rauch, 装载 Die Beladung, 亚麻布面油画 Oil on linen, 50 × 40.5 cm, 2023 © 尼奥·劳赫/ VG Bild-Kunst版权协会，波恩图片由艺术家、艾根画廊（莱比锡/柏林）及卓纳画廊提供 © Neo Rauch / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Courtesy the artist, Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin, and David Zwirner

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‘Every day, thousands of sad and thousands of sweet acts are taking place at the same time,’ describes an anonymous writer in Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women’s Protests in Iran (2023). On the one hand, people feeling the stirrings of renewed hope are ‘a lot kinder to each other’. On the other, there are arrests: ‘a lot of activists and journalists – many more than before’. In this anthology of writings, artworks and photographs, editor Malu Halasa collects works by household-name artists of the Iranian diaspora, including documentary photographer Hengameh Golestan and author Kamin Mohammadi, alongside works by emerging artists, including students. Many are anonymous, writing from Tehran and fearing retribution: arrests, torture, the death penalty. What unifies them is their determination against all odds. The Woman Life Freedom movement exists in response to real-life tragedy; the title itself is a translation of the protest cries in Farsi and in Kurdish, sparked by the murder of twenty-two-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini in Tehran. On 13 September 2022 Amini was detained, accused of breaking the law for wearing a scarf and robe rather than a hijab. She was beaten in a police cell and died in a hospital on 16 September. Authorities attributed her death to a heart attack, while hospital photos showed wounds indicative of a brain injury sustained through a trauma to her head. The erasure of human lives, and the truth about them, is a form of memoricide – the destruction of stories we share as human

Not Silenced

A year on from the ‘Hijab Revolution’ Frances Forbes-Carbines listens to the voices of continuing protest in Iran, collected in a new anthology

beings. In the face of such horrendous acts, what can art possibly do? In the chapter ‘Keeping the Revolution Alive: Art for Social Change’, illustrator Roshi Rouzbehani explores why authoritarian regimes attack the arts, writing that the insistence that ‘good’ art is necessarily apolitical is often ‘rooted in the belief that art should be an escape from the realities of the world’. She believes, however, that this is now seen differently: ‘people are noticing that art is not created in a void and cannot be separated from the society in which it is created’. Reading this book – and thinking more widely about ongoing atrocities – it’s crucial to keep in mind the levels of censorship met by artists in different parts of the world today, as well as the levels of risk they face when sharing their work. For Mana Neyestani, in his essay ‘Drawing the News’, art is the only way of escaping the chokehold of autocracy: ‘If one feels that the influence of political art is stronger in Iran than in Western countries, it is only because of Iran’s closed political system. In fact, cartoons, graffiti, photographs, to name a few, are the only ways to “breathe”.’ If creativity, as a means of protest, is often limited to the production and circulation of forms society recognises as art, then this anthology makes a strong argument for the political potency of visual signifiers that lie outside of the traditional white cube. A photo essay by Shiva Khademi explores how a fashion movement can engender real change: walking

One of ‘The Smarties’ – women who use hair colour as protest – photographed by Shiva Khademi on the streets of Tehran. Courtesy the artist

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the streets of Tehran with ‘The Smarties’, Gen-Z women who dye and show their hair in defiance of the authorities, despite the potential consequences. ‘The women I met were as diverse and complex in personality as in appearance,’ Khademi writes. ‘For them, their hair colour was not superficial; it represented a freedom they were willing to fight for… I think the Smarties were the pioneers of the shift we’re now witnessing, and their numbers have increased too.’ There are other examples of pioneers throughout the book. In ‘Rebel Rebel’, Halasa looks at Iran’s prerevolutionary feminist icons as depicted by artist Soheila Sokhanvari, whose practice involves mixing colour pigments with egg tempera and painting on calf vellum: this is an aesthetic rooted in tradition. ‘In the ornate settings of Persian miniatures,’ writes Halasa, ‘more attention is often paid to the background than the foreground.’ This is true of Sokhanvari’s portrait of the prolific singer Googoosh: the wallpaper, floor tiles and singer’s dress are vividly hued, while Googoosh herself is drained of colour. After all, time has passed since the 1970s, the days of Googoosh’s meteoric rise to fame as a singer in Iran through to the time of the revolution, when she was banned from singing. In the prerevolutionary time memorialised by Sokhanvari, Googoosh’s face appears in grey hues, like a black-and-white photograph from a time that can never be regained. ‘Apparently, the world has heard our voice this time. At least that’s what we’re told,’ Sara Mokhavat writes wearily in ‘On the Pain of Others, Once Again’. But it’s hard to believe: ‘We are too exhausted, too anxious, to sift the truth from propaganda.’ Even if believed, can the solidarity of people living in the West be counted on as genuine? And is solidarity enough? Mokhavat questions posts on Instagram purporting to support the protests, like well-known French actresses ‘cutting off bits and pieces of their hair to show sympathy for the women of Iran’. Juliette Binoche started it, cutting off a strand of her hair, holding it to the camera and declaring it an act ‘for freedom’. Other famous actresses followed suit. For Mokhavat, the gesture feels perfunctory: she is forced to reflect on how different her circumstances are from theirs: ‘I wish I had these women’s lives’. For people in Western countries, what does going beyond expressing comfortable solidarity actually look like? It is so hard to read Mokhavat’s wish to have the basic freedoms of women in the West, while being cognisant of the politics that currently prevent those freedoms. We read for awareness, for galvanisation. This book joins, for example, Marjane Satrapi’s immensely popular series of graphic

novels Persepolis (2000), which gives a personal view on the history of women’s rights in Iran. We can join #EyesOnIran – a campaign by Iranian activists to ensure international audiences and institutions keep the spotlight on Iran. We can back human rights organisations in their mission to support the rights of Iranian women. We can attend marches or vigils taking places internationally on 16 September 2023: a show of solidarity across borders. There is no conclusion, no ending to this Woman Life Freedom book – how can there be, when new horrors come to light daily? And, soberingly, there is no end to the bravery and effort of those who risk their lives when they proclaim ‘Woman Life Freedom’. Ghazal Foroutan, The Persian Rosie (2022), two-colour risograph print, 28 × 38 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Frances Forbes-Carbines is a writer based in London

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Here’s a surefire prediction for the winter months: Thailand’s northernmost province, Chiang Rai, will host a sprawling showcase of contemporary art. And here’s another: visitors to that showcase (the third Thailand Biennale) will, at some point during their trip, find themselves staring at the pious and phantasmagoric visions of one of the country’s brashest National Artists (a title awarded annually by Thailand’s culture commission). The off-piste surprises that await art lovers include polished paintings of the Buddha, devas (celestials) and mythical fish levitating in aqueous skies speckled with rococo clouds; a golden city clocktower ornamented with flaming lai kranok motifs; murals of the Traiphum (Thai Buddhist cosmology’s three worlds) featuring cameos from The Matrix’s Neo and from Hello Kitty; and, most famously, a baroque temple (the sprawling complex of which is one of the biennale’s host venues) that appears to have been dusted with icing sugar. In short, while the Thailand Biennale wants visitors to mull over a range of political and historiographic questions pertinent to the ethnically diverse city of Chiang Rai (and the mountainous region surrounding it), some are also likely to come away asking: how did one local artist accrue so much power within it? For over two decades, the ethereal Theravāda Buddhist baubles and confections of Chalermchai Kositpipat – at once a celebrity known for his loose tongue and a master of delicate line and form – have been one of the province’s biggest tourist draws. But his distinctive oeuvre is also of broader significance: tapping clubby networks of corporate patronage, reverentially riffing on temple mural traditions, ostensibly divorced from worldly materialism yet exceedingly bankable, gaudy yet seductive, it arguably ranks as the ne plus ultra of Thailand’s so-called Neotraditional art movement. Not least because Kositpipat’s coming to prominence during the late 1970s is indivisible from the milestones that mark this parochial, arguably retrograde school of art’s emergence. Born in Chiang Rai in 1955, he first gained public recognition for his tempera paintings of temple scenes, most humbly depicting worshippers praying or chatting. While hardly groundbreaking, the linear perspective and technical virtuosity of one painting in particular, A View of Thai Life (1977) – featuring women clad in paasin (wraparound silk dresses) drinking tea or chewing betel nut – was deemed inventive

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Razzle-Dazzle Art

In the runup to Thailand Biennale in Chiang Rai, Max Crosbie-Jones pauses to consider the origins of one native son’s staggering cultural power

Chalermchai Kositpipat, Indra at Travatimsa Heaven, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 89 × 119 cm. Courtesy the artist

enough to bag him first prize in a fledgling art competition. Launched in 1974 by one of the country’s top banks, the Bualuang Painting competition (now in its 44th edition) has been credited with spurring the outpouring of establishmentfriendly nostalgia – archaic Siamese motifs rooted in Buddhist and Brahmin beliefs, often filtered through a surrealist sensibility that owes more to the mythic magic of the Thai spirit world than the automatist’s mind – with which Kositpipat is today synonymous (he’s now on the judging committee). ‘Prior to this period,’ writes Apinan Poshyananda in Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1992), ‘traditional Thai painting, with its emphasis on iconography, was regarded as old-fashioned… But by offering this category in the contest, the Bangkok Bank stimulated the blossoming of new works in the traditional Thai style. Indeed, the policy of the bank was so effective that a few years later a Department of Thai Art opened at Silpakorn University.’ One of this department’s first two graduates, Kositpipat emerged, in the decade after receiving this award, as the personification of a shrewd new type of unofficial artist –civil servant. Since its inception during the 1940s, Bangkok’s Silpakorn University – an integral player in the country’s nation-building and projection of worldliness – had churned out artists drilled in the modernisms of the West, especially Italian academic fine-art, to the detriment of vernacular traditions. But Kositpipat and his ilk sought to resuscitate the skills of the country’s khru chang (artisans), namely the temple painters sidelined amid the country’s modernist fervour. In commercial terms, they succeeded. Between 1984 and 1988, he, alongside another graduate from the department, Panya Vijinthanasarn, dedicated himself to decorating the ubosot (ordination hall) at Wat Buddhapadipa in leafy southwest London – a Thai government-backed project often held up as the movement’s defining achievement (one they apparently worked on for free). Amid its afterglow, and the burgeoning art competitions back at home, they and other neotraditional artists went on to enjoy market success and institutional stature. Their works were snapped up by the nouveau riche, or mounted in the headquarters of banks and in the lobbies of gaudy hotels. According to some academics, this revivalism dovetailed neatly, and advantageously, with a renewed neoconservatism and demonstrative

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monarchism among a certain sector of society (the student massacre of 6 October 1976 had halted a leftist social awakening and ‘art for life’ movement). ‘What the new bourgeoisie needed, above all,’ writes David Teh in Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary (2017), ‘were ways to demonstrate its Thainess (kwampenthai) in the eyes of an elite increasingly given to pretentious displays of loyalty to the throne… Buddhist and pseudo-Buddhist symbolism offered a fittingly empty vessel, into which could be poured this or that mythic notion of kwampenthai. “Traditional” motifs mushroomed, in inverse proportion to the new patrons’ actual connection to this aesthetic heritage.’ This reading exposes a crack in Kositpipat’s larger-than-life persona and practice. In the eyes of many Thais, he’s an iconoclast – a gadfly known for being loud and unfiltered, whether he’s helming an American Idol-style art talent TV show, hogging the microphone at an opening or venting about the transfer of Chiang Rai’s governor in the runup to the biennale. Meanwhile, Wat Rong Khun, his stucco-accented ‘White Temple’ on the outskirts of the city, is often held up as the audacious masterpiece of an avant-gardist who has forever shaken up the stagnant discipline of Buddhist art. Behind these contrarian facades, however, lurks a social conservative, a man fixated on ossifying the country’s three pillars – Buddhism, nation and monarchy – not interrogating or moving past them. For all its breaks with

Wat Rong Khun (‘White Temple’), Chiang Rai. Photo: Stefan Fussan (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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tradition (its shimmering whiteness and mirrored surfaces, for starters), the White Temple is dedicated to the most orthodox Thai subject of all: the reign of a monarch, the late King Bhumibol. Moreover, despite his use of acrylic rather than tempera paints, its murals – which juxtapose celestials with images of the flaming World Trade Center and Batman – are arguably in keeping with Buddhist temple painting, not contrary to it. According to Andrew J. West in Thai Neotraditional Art (2015), Thai murals have long paired ‘extramundane religious material’ with ‘contemporaneous elements reflecting the society and culture of the general population as manifested at the moment they were composed’. This is especially the case in the temples of the Kingdom’s far north, the Lanna region. Now sixty-eight, and semiretired, Kositpipat’s singularity – and eminence in the Thai painter pantheon – may simply boil down to his replacing the shock of the new with the shock of the old with added theatricality and tenacity, more compositional harmony and clarity of vision, more pizzazz, than his peers (to say nothing of his hucksterish, devil-may-care attitude: ‘I’m fucking perfect. I’m good at art, management, PR and presentations. There is no defect in me,’ he once said). Anecdotally at least, an hour or so spent exploring his masterwork confirms this. Visitors, before or after relieving themselves in the complex’s golden restrooms, or viewing his sketches and paintings, enjoy an experiential form of Buddhist exegesis: to reach the White Temple’s murallined ubosot, we must reenact the cyclic journey of samsāra by strolling across a pit of writhing arms (ie, Hell), then crossing a dazzling bridge representing rebirth. While neotraditionalist canvases that juxtapose the extramundane with quotidian ordinariness are ten a penny (something that Thailand Biennale visitors may also discover – Chiang Rai is something of a stronghold), Kositpipat set himself and his faith apart by going 3D, transposing the devotional cosmologies of his didactic paintings into a wacky, yet workable, architectural blueprint. Moreover, by realising it he has elevated the movement’s schtick – contemporary reworks of noble truths and state-sanctioned vestiges of the past – to yet another plane of existence: the realm of mass tourism.

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Art Featured

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Season of the Snake by Adeline Chia

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Citra Sasmita’s paintings subvert old sources to tell new tales

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Allegory of Archipelago (2023), currently showing at the Bienal de São For the past decade or so, Sasmita has been revisiting ancient Paulo, is a teeming, churning phantasmagoria of heaven and hell and mythologies and reviving traditional artistic techniques to critique everything in between. Created by Balinese artist Citra Sasmita, the patriarchal and colonial legacies in her native country. In her paintwork takes the form of a largescale installation comprising several ings, she replaces origin stories from the Indonesian archipelago with suspended painted scrolls. Central among these is a nine-metre-long her own visions of a female-centred cosmology, by drawing on various canvas floating horizontally, depicting a tripartite cosmology starting models of strong feminist archetypes from Hinduism (which started with a harmonious Edenic realm of supersize tree- and snake-women, to arrive in the archipelago during the first century and the contemthen descending to an earthly zone of war, before ending in a fiery porary practice of which, in Indonesia, centres around Bali) and from underworld of heads on stakes and figures in boiling cauldrons. Indonesian history, and by simply inventing her own goddesses and their magical abilities. In authoring This mythological view of the her own mythos of the feminine, she Indonesian archipelago is combined Sasmita has been revisiting ancient revisits figures of anticolonial resistwith a pointed critique of the country’s mythologies and reviving traditional ance, folding their stories into her violent colonial legacy. In front of the artistic techniques to critique scroll, on the ground, is a golden figure teeming canvases. of a kneeling Caucasian man holding a Sasmita’s work is also subversive patriarchal and colonial legacies money bag. The statue is a replica of an because of the way she has creativeactual figure that was placed in front of the gate at the royal palace ly appropriated Balinese Kamasan painting, a highly detailed tradiin Klungkung, the last Balinese-kingdom holdout against Dutch tional artform used to depict myths and romances from Hindu and invaders during the early twentieth century. After razing the palace indigenous sources. Its origins are unclear, but scholars believe that and destroying its original Hindu statues at the gate in 1908, the Kamasan painting was influenced by court art from the East Javanese Dutch replaced the them with figures of white men to be worshipped Majapahit Empire. In Bali, this style of painting blossomed from the by the local population. In the artwork, a rope runs from the bottom of sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, with the village of Kamasan, the painted scroll and winds around the figure’s neck in a noose. The which is located between the east coast and the mountain ranges of gold-plated squatting idol – symbolic not just of colonial greed and Gunung Agung, becoming the centre of production. conquest, but of cultural brainwashing and perhaps, as recent history Kamasan paintings, whether as temple frescoes or on canvas, are has demonstrated, even the overarching power of Western neoliber- typically executed by male artisans. They are painted in a flat, busy composition that is crowded with figures such as deities, princes and alism – is gnomish, vulgar, powerful.

Archaeology of Archipelago, 2023 (installation view, 35th Bienal de São Paulo). Photo: Levi Fanan. Courtesy Fundação de São Paulo

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above Theater of The Doom, 2023, acrylic on Kamasan canvas, 147 × 132 cm. Courtesy Yeo Workshop, Singapore opening pages Peculiar Garden, 2022 (detail), ink and acrylic on Kamasan canvas, 135 × 150 cm. Courtesy Yeo Workshop, Singapore

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noblemen. Empty space is adorned with natural decorative motifs Yet these women seem at peace. Their faces have blithe, serene such as flowers and trees. The works depict scenes from Hindu epics expressions, even as their bodies undergo ferocious transformations. such as the Mahabharata or the Ramayana, as well as Javanese classics In a sense, it’s a Day of Judgment without a sense of judgment, in such as the Panji tales, centring on the adventures and exploits of the which categories of good and bad, animal and human, become eroded titular Javanese prince on a quest to find a beloved princess. Women or irrelevant. The women depicted here create and destroy with impuoccupy a peripheral role in these masculine discourses, typically as nity and freedom. victims, as ornamental, sexual objects or as villains, like witches. Hindus, especially the goddess worshippers, might call the energy From 2019, as part of her ongoing Timur Merah (The East is Red) that they are channelling Shakti, the primordial force that is responseries, Sasmita flipped the script on these traditional tales. She sible for the creation, maintenance and destruction of the universe – retains elements of original Kamasan iconography, such as the flat and which is associated with the feminine divine. But Sasmita’s icofiguration, crowded composition and recurring decorative motifs, nography is eclectic and personal. Her work celebrates a universal, and she uses traditional Kamasan canvas, which has a distinctive unending and revelatory cycle of change that flows through living pale-ochre colour (it is usually prepared by artisans in a painstaking beings, rending them and stitching them together again, in which process that involves dipping the canvas into rice porridge, drying it bodies become continuous with other bodies and beings, in an eternal in the sun and scraping the surface repeatedly with a shell to smooth process of becoming and unbecoming. it out). A key inspiration, says Sasmita, is Dewa Agung Istri Kanya, a Where she parts ways with tradition is in her content. In Theatre warrior-poet queen from the Klungkung kingdom who ruled Bali of The Doom (2023), a representation of the Day of Judgment, the line from 1814 to 1850 and led native troops to repel Dutch forces during dividing sinners from saints, and suffering from ecstasy, is unclear. the battle of Kusamba (1849). While she has appeared as a heroic leader The work is split diagonally into four main zones; each is crowded in several works, the queen’s life and times were given the fullest with nude female figures in states of violent, radical change. Some of treatment in the eight-panel installation Timur Merah Project VIII: their heads and bodies are combusting. Others have trees bursting out Pilgrim, How You Journey (2022). In the first few scrolls, we see a Dutch of their torsos, necks and legs. Some have blood – enough blood to fill a warship rigged with batik sails, suggesting that it might come pond – shooting out of a gash in their bellies. Severed heads are every- in peace. Inhumane Hindu rituals such as sati, the widow’s sacrifice on the husband’s funeral pyre, are shown where: some are skewered, others are stacked The Birth of Universe, 2023, side by side with colonial violence. When the up like totem poles. Others still are split open acrylic on Kamasan canvas, 66 × 58 cm. queen makes her appearance, she is leading to reveal heads within heads, like Russian dolls. Courtesy Yeo Workshop, Singapore

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Timur Merah Project II: Harbor of Restless Spirits, 2019 (installation view, Garden of Six Seasons, 2020, Para Site, Hong Kong). Courtesy Para Site, Hong Kong

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The Genealogy of Enlightenment, 2023, hair, acrylic on Kamasan canvas, 85 × 65 cm. Courtesy Yeo Workshop, Singapore

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armed resistance against the Dutch. In other paintings, we see elab- archetype that Sasmita often taps is that of the snake, which holds orate scenes of paradise and the underworld drawn from the Bhima great symbolic meaning in Balinese lore and Indonesian culture. Swarga, an episode from the Mahabharata in which a soul descends Her protagonists are often depicted with snakes encircling them from heaven to hell, a story depicted in a famous painting on the or hybridised into half-snake, half-women. In Hinduism and ceiling of Kerta Gosa, a temple in Klungkung. (The Bhima Swarga Buddhism, nagas are a powerful semidivine race that can appear as was also evoked by the queen in her anti-Dutch propaganda.) The last human, a partial human-serpent or a whole serpent. In kundalini painting depicts women on boats, referencing the slave trade during yoga practice, the snake is the image of vital energy in the cosmos, the Dutch occupation, which trafficked thousands of Balinese people and is coiled up at the base of the spine. yearly, including a great number of women, to other Dutch colonies. Snakes will play a huge part in her upcoming work in the Thailand Sasmita comes from a limited but Biennale in Chiang Rai. It will be a quasiSevered heads are everywhere: impactful lineage of female artists who shrine to feminine energies – a circular explore issues around female bodies structure with 900 braids of red ‘hair’ some are skewered, others are and experience. She cites as a key influ(made from rope) hanging from the stacked up like totem poles. ceiling. The red hair is inspired by the ence the late Bali-born painter I Gusti Others still are split open Ayu Kadek Murniasih, who was active story of Draupadi, the main female produring the 1990s and early 2000s and tagonist in the Mahabharata. In certain to reveal heads within heads was well known for her depictions of adaptations of the story, she washes the female body and female sensuality. Recurrent in her work are her hair with her brother-in-law Dushasana’s blood in revenge, warped and amorphous bodies of humans, animals and vegetation, after he had molested and tried to disrobe her in public. Referring rendered in a simple graphic style in black outline. Erotic content is to the purifying nature of righteous anger, the end of every sinuous often explicit and exaggerated, with phalluses, vaginas, breasts and blood-red braid in Sasmita’s work culminates in a snake head sexual penetration rendered unsparingly. made of brass, connecting justice-seeking vengeance with a symbol Sasmita’s work is contemporary in that it takes a posthuman of divine energy. ara feminist stance; besides fighting for gender equality, she goes deeper to destabilise the assumptions underlying other binary strucCitra Sasmita’s work can be seen in the Bienal de São Paulo through 10 December, the Thailand Biennale from 9 December to 30 April, tures, such as anthropocentric biases, and hierarchical categories of and the Biennale of Sydney starting 9 March through 10 June nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman. One nonhuman

Timur Merah Project: The Embrace of My Motherland, 2019 (installation view, Biennale Jogja XV, Yogyakarta, 2019). Courtesy Biennale Jogja, Yogyakarta

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From lockdown to fandom, Shuang Li’s circular tracks are charting new directions by Stephanie Bailey

Born in 1990 and raised in Wuyishan City in southeastern China, Shuang Li remembers feeling like she’d never related to anything more in her life than when she discovered American punk and emo bands as a teen. Thinking about it in 2023, she understands why: “All these bands were kids from suburbia in America and their songs were all about getting out of there”. Indeed, according to the artist, the only lyrics she could understand back then were those along the lines of “I wanna get out of here”. It resonated with a desire to escape both her surroundings and her body, which she channelled by savouring the limited time she was permitted online. Until, that is, she gravitated towards one band in particular – My Chemical Romance – and learned English through their songs. My Chemical Romance’s influence on Li’s practice feels increasingly significant now that the subject of fandom has become a focus in her work. When we met via Zoom in August 2023, an image of the band’s lead singer was the only visual attached to a board behind her. At the time, the artist was developing new works for a string of exhibitions: a group show at Fondazione Prada, Milan, in October and a solo show with Peres Projects, also in Milan, in December; work for the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in Geneva, in January 2024, and a solo at New York’s Swiss Institute in May. To prepare for this last show, Li travelled to New Jersey earlier in 2023 for an autograph signing with My Chemical Romance guitarist Frank Iero. She brought with her two copies of a Flash Art issue that featured Li’s January 2022 performance Lord of the Flies on the cover. In 2022, for the opening of a group show at Antenna Space in Shanghai while she was stuck in Europe due to COVID-19 travel-restrictions, she recruited 20 performers to dress like her and attend. Styled identically, with a ponytail and blunt-cut fringe, each wore a My Chemical Romance T-shirt over a white shirt, plus a black blazer, tartan skirt, black boots, legwarmers and a silver backpack. Li’s avatars were shown photos of her friends, so they could seek them out in the crowd and read a personal letter she had written for each of them. Matrix-like spycam glasses were worn by each to record these interactions, and the footage, alongside shots from a camera attached to a duck’s neck in Geneva, was edited into the 16-minute video Déjà Vu (2022). Déjà Vu reflects on Li’s time living between Geneva and Berlin, during Europe’s lockdowns and border closures, when screens mediated the artist’s physical displacement into a virtually disembodied presence. ‘There are no more copies / as there’s no more original’, subtitles state, as Li’s replicas move through the

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crowded gallery in Shanghai. Then the screen splits into six, with each window focusing on a different version of the artist, who ultimately remains absent. “It’s funny, because every time I make a work I try to make it simple, but it kind of takes on its own life and keeps growing,” Li muses. “Lord of the Flies definitely made me see that. Because it started from a simple idea – I couldn’t go back to China – and developed from there.” When she staged Lord of the Flies, Li says she didn’t consider My Chemical Romance a conceptual component of the performance, beyond dressing her avatars in the band’s T-shirt as something distinctly representative of who she is. But now she can see the performance’s significance, given the direction her work is taking. “I wasn’t thinking about how 20 people wearing the same band outfit evokes the imagery of fandom,” Li notes. “Obviously it’s where I come from, but it’s not something I’ve consciously worked with.” Until now. For her show with Peres Projects, Li will restage Lord of the Flies as an installation that stays true to the performance’s reflection on absence. When we spoke, she had settled on the idea of turning boots and legwarmers into sculptural vessels – some had been cast in concrete directly, others from moulds based on 3D models. She was also layering fan letters to My Chemical Romance with fabrics and posters to create wall pieces, which circles back to New Jersey. When Li came face-to-face with Iero, she showed him her Flash Art cover, introduced Lord of the Flies and asked him to sign the magazine, which he did before asking Li to sign one cover for him. Creating an uncanny reflection, the encounter evoked the circular tracks described in Li’s video ÆTHER (Poor Objects) (2021) – an anarchic edit of footage in which a camera ring-light is equated with the total eclipse of the sun – which Li describes as a spiralling ascent towards some kind of truth. Here, a rockstar whose replicated image has rendered them iconic came faceto-face with an artist who once multiplied themselves into an iconic avatar: a perfect loop. Since that meeting, Li has started exploring the concept of fandom more intently. “I’ve never been to a [celebrity] meet-and-greet before, and it’s crazy to see somebody in that position,” Li comments. “You basically become like a cult leader.” When I ask how this has influenced her understanding of fandom, the artist describes people feeling like their lives were saved thanks to My Chemical Romance, or how Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ is propping up the US economy by generating nearly $5 billion in consumer spending, according to one projection – “that’s like the GDP of a small country!”

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above Shuang Li, music by Labour (Farahnaz Hatam and Colin Hacklander), ÆTHER (Poor Objects) (stills), 2021, video, colour, sound, 18 min 28 sec. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin, Seoul & Milan

following pages Lord of the Flies, 2022 (performance view, opening of Where Jellyfish Come From, Antenna Space, Shanghai, 8 January 2022). Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

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Sasmita has been revisiting ancient mythologies and reviving traditional artistic techniques to critique patriarchal and colonial legacies

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There’s a politics embedded in this reading – the kind that charges of the real-estate bubble within which she grew up. “I want to tap Li’s I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side (2019). In the 25-minute video into those architectures”, the artist says of her Swiss Institute show, a Chinese factory worker, whose narration intertwines with that of “and combine that with fandom in some way.” Death Star, Li’s recent his French paramour, describes producing the yellow vests that came solo show at Lisbon’s Galeria Madragoa, showed signs of these ideas to symbolise the ‘gilets jaunes’ protests in France, which erupted in converging. Déjà Vu was presented on five screens to frame the instal2018 against planned tax hikes on fuel. “Every single item you make lation Desert Song (2023): stacked cardboard boxes and metal sheet is lighter than the weight of a soul, which is obviously 21 grams,” the columns – plus a rattan cabinet on Perspex steps and a stuffed boot worker notes, “but together they can lever the earth.” By focusing on a and legwarmer topped by a metallic ball – arranged like a cityscape. mass-produced item’s transformation into a point of potent commu- Recently, Li has also been inviting musicians to cover emo punk songs nication between individuals, mirrored by the internet’s ability to from a playlist the artist compiled, which will ultimately result in facilitate relationships between people at opposite ends of the earth, a series of music videos, and an album that reinterprets tracks like Li highlights a cycle coded into global capitalism, where alienation My Chemical Romance’s Thank You for the Venom (2004). produces a commodifiable demand for life-affirming connection, In each case, a common form – a building, a song – is remade to and signals the possibility of rerouting it – something that fandom channel the unceasing oscillation between real and virtual, particular mirrors. But she also laments that potential’s limit. At one point, the and general, and near and far that defines life within a hyperconnarration describes one factory worker’s suicide, who was a poet, as nected globalised world. A world in which, as ÆTHER points out, something long forgotten; such is the history might be too big a thing for us “I wasn’t thinking about how pace of hypercapitalism, where “blood to understand as circular, even when an stains are wiped off by passersby and 20 people wearing the same band outfit encounter can feel like two distant points delivery scooters”. meeting to complete a cycle. Take the evokes the imagery of fandom” Hence the story that opens I Want video Li is developing for the Biennale to Sleep More but by Your Side. Over the footage of a car ascending a de l’Image en Mouvement, based on a family photo album the artist circular parking ramp – another invocation of a circular track – the grew up with, whose cover featured a stock image of a castle she later narrator quotes from a section of Georges Perec’s 1975 novel W, or the saw ‘IRL’ while on a train in Switzerland in 2020. That discovery Memory of Childhood, about a boy’s futile search for a place of miracles – prompted Li to investigate how that image circulated before the ‘where suddenly, it could all happen’. That yearning for a horizon internet, which yielded two photo albums the artist found with that of transformative possibility feels actualised in Li’s description to same cover, one containing images of temples and the other with me of hearing My Chemical Romance for the first time as world- bridges. It’s a random but relational pairing that loops back to the two changing. “I keep wanting to repeat that kind of sentiment in my narrators in I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side. Each is described as own work, which is why I don’t always know what I’m making or coming from a different place: one filled with deserted factories and what I’m aiming for,” the artist elaborates, referring to the exhilara- the other with deserted castles. Yet somehow they connect. ara tion of the search, “because it’s something that’s supposed to happen to me, not the other way around.” Far from a passive surrender, this Work by Shuang Li can be seen in the group show Paraventi, idea of allowing things to happen not only speaks to fandom as an at Fondazione Prada, Milan, 26 October – 26 February; in a solo show at Peres Projects, Milan, 12 December – 26 January; experience of discovery; it also privileges intuition within the artistic in the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Geneva, 24 January – 16 May; process – a conviction that replaces a sense of limitation with a boundand in a solo show at New York’s Swiss Institute in May less horizon. As Li says, the work shows her where to go. Returning to China after three years has certainly influenced the Stephanie Bailey is a writer and editor based in Hong Kong artist’s direction, with empty skyscrapers signalling the bursting

I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side (still), 2019, video, colour, sound, 25 min 26 sec. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin, Seoul & Milan

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Namak NamakNazar Nazarby byHylozoic/Desires Hylozoic/Desires (Himali (HimaliSingh SinghSoin Soinand andDavid DavidSoin SoinTappeser) Tappeser)

It’s It’slike likeGod, God,ininaaway. way. ItItisisthe theroot rootofofthe theart, art,the thesoap soapofofthe the sages, sages,the thesun sunofofthe thesea. sea. The Thebigness bignessofofthe theworld: world:the thelines linesofofhistory historyseeping seeping into intothe thecracks cracksofofgeology geologyand andthe thespouting, spouting,spewing, spewing, foaming, foaming,smoking smokingofofchemistry. chemistry. The Thearsenic arsenicininthe thesalve, salve,the thetrinity trinityininduality, duality, self-arising self-arisingand andundying. undying. The Themicro, micro,the theminiscule, miniscule,the thecrystal, crystal, the thechloride, chloride,the thefractal, fractal,the themolecule, molecule, the theetheric ethericaeration, aeration, the theunseen unseensensation. sensation.

ItItgoes goesby— by—So. So. So. So.So, So,the theambiguous ambiguousin-between in-betweenofof opposing opposingforces. forces.AAdegree, degree,an anintensity, intensity,aa continuation, continuation,aareason. reason. Not Notfrom fromhere hereororthere, there,sosoaacreolized, creolized,hybrid hybridbody. body. SoSoamphibious. amphibious.Alchemical Alchemicalbits bitsremembering rememberingthe the trauma traumaofofthe thewaves wavesthey theyarrived arrivedon. on. Settlers Settlersclaim claimland landononitsitscovenant; covenant;revolutions revolutionsbegin begin with withitsitswhite whiteflares flaresburning burninginto intoblack blackfaces; faces; prophets prophetsheal healthe thedesert desertwith withititand andthose thosewho wholook look back backtotoreceive receivethe thegaze gazeofofthe theother other are areturned turnedinto intopillars pillarsofofit.it. SoSoisisdisobedient. disobedient.

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So is an ominous omen, some supernatural logic.

What is it like to be so? Maybe we can all know, before we disappear in its afterglow.

So is not beyond language: so is a sign, a symbol, so essential, so memorable and metaphorical, So– is an oracle.

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So is a temperament marking the onset of anxiety.

A shore crusted white with gills and fins and eyes that look away. You can smell the residue for miles. The fish cling to nothing, occupy all the nine directions, they do by not doing, stay light in order to absorb the weight of grief, they take a small sip and quench centuries of thirst.

The jungle, once swarming, buzzing, humming, is now a desert, frozen in So.

Now danger, gases, flesh, filters and vapour. Barometers of what is brewing.

Clouds like tongues licking the aura of the anthropocene.

A hermetic seal, regenerating where the cracks form. Keeping things together even as they fall apart.

So lines are markers of a place so thick with heat that the lakes begin to levitate mirages so what is solid ceases and becomes spirit.

So is psychic, forecasting that droughts and floods are on their way. The frontier of our parched minds. So absorbs moisture out of this world. What’s left of life is saline, so saline your skin stings and you grow scales.

So never forgets.

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Reads the reader, loves the lover, eats the eater, protects the preserver, witnesses the witness.

So is subject. Subject that feels, thinks, observes, sparkles, speaks. Subject with a sense of self. Skin and soul. Reflection of the other: the other, the sameness within us all. So looks back at you, breaks the spell, you are now me and I am ever So

So mirrors the mirror.

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ver, ess.

Spill it! In Faiyum, to roast on hot coals so your journey into the desert is safe. In Lhasa, to be exchanged instead of money. In Paphos, to give birth to Aphrodite in sea spume.

To see your lover in dream milk, and quench your thirst. To stare into the chimney and ease homesickness. To impart to birds their swiftness of flight.

The Chibcha lords, the Aztecs, the Egyptian priests, Gandhi too, abstained from So. So’s pleasure is withdrawal.

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But So has been cursed by accumulation– a sediment, a square, a deposit, a triangle, a mountain, a planet. Even Pythagoras was mystified by its lines. The So line, a hedge 4000 miles long and 12 feet high, prevented smugglers gamboling across borders. So, an atomic fugitive in the gnarl of the prickly pear, acacia and bamboo. So, a slithering particle in the thin, coastal places where silt leaves territory undetermined. A fish from one country deflected by the current finds itself caught in the other. The mosque of Taghaza built from So mined by the Masufa’s enslaved, then bartered for gold. So on 40,000 caravans of camels to Timbuktu. Traded, taxed, tired. Then more slaves, more gold, kola nut, cotton. So, from salary, soldier. So in gunpowder. Dead from hunger. 64

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by n– e, e, et. as es.

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Our only obligation to So is to do at any time what you think is right. 24 days and 240 miles later, a handful of So in our fists. So is the will to protest. So blows conch shells and spreads flowers, announcing non violence even in the face of brutality. The So gatherers become Flamingo, fragile stance and splayed feet so you don’t sink into the thick layer of shimmering clay. We can all be this way: blushing with the land, imprinting our stories in the sand, sand that will soon be underwater, anchoring in the gales and the gusts, we learn to move with such lightness that even the scorpion softens in our shadow.

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Nazar— Nazar—sosoare arewe weso. so. We Weare arepieces piecesofofmineral, mineral, rocks rockstotosea seatotomoon moontotodust dust and andlight lightasaslight. light. We Weare areaacosmic cosmiccomic. comic. We Weare aretranslucent. translucent. Visible Visibleand andinvisible, invisible, dense denseand andsheer. sheer. Frost. Frost. Glinting, Glinting,our ourfires firesspeckled, speckled,our oursecrets secretsclose. close. We Weare areillegible illegibleand andlucid. lucid. We Wevanish vanishininwater. water. The Thebodies bodiesofofthose thosewho whoare arebodiless bodilessare areours. ours. Ours Oursare arebodies bodiesembalmed, embalmed,revivified, revivified,immortalized. immortalized. We Weare arethe thelonging longingthat thatcrosses crossesthe theeternal eternaldesert desert totobe bewith withour ourbeloved. beloved.We Wecarry carryaashell, shell,from from when whenthis thisscorched scorchedland landwas wassea, sea, totoguide guidethe theway. way.

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Namak NamakNazar Nazarwas wascommissioned commissionedbybyDesertX DesertX and andisisthe thefirst firstofof3 3saltworks saltworksbybythe thecollective. collective. Formatted FormattedbybyLakshita LakshitaMunjal. Munjal.

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Soumya Sankar Bose

by Najrin Islam

In search of lost time Winter 2023

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preceding page Work from the series A Discreet Exit Through Darkness, 2020–, inkjet print on archival paper, mounted on Dibond, 127 × 102 cm above Work from the series A Discreet Exit Through Darkness, 2020–, inkjet print on archival paper, mounted on Dibond, 25 × 20 cm

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What kind of life does a story contain in the absence of its teller? Does it framed photograph shows a white circular screen that partly obscures cease to exist? Does it find voice through future generations? Do bodies two recognisably female children – one in a frock (considered a child’s of the past inherit spaces in the present? Do memories evolve and scars garment) and the other in a sari (a garment for women). While one change shape? In Soumya Sankar Bose’s oeuvre, forgotten and unre- of their heads peeps out from behind the screen, the other remains solved histories are exhumed through creative reinterpretations in a silhouette. The bodies are identical in their figurative likeness. An image, sound and video. Stories are released through substitute bodies obverse of a black hole, the whiteness of the screen is a loud reminder that are located at a distance from the trauma that Bose excavates, which of the cognitive excision attendant to the artist’s mother’s story. As lends the narratives subjective appeal. Situated at a further remove from performative surrogates for a lost childhood, the figures in the photothe concerned event yet invited to spectate its performative double, the graph inhabit the same person – they grew up and apart from each viewer becomes a belated witness. In the artist’s ongoing multimedia other overnight. series A Discreet Exit Through Darkness (2020–), an intimate, generational After exhibitions in Mumbai and Kolkata, A Discreet Exit Through wound is laid bare. Darkness was showcased at Les RenThe artist’s drive to collect Bose’s mother went missing as a contres d’Arles 2023 photography nine-year-old in 1969 after she left her festival in the South of France. Winner information is premised on both home on a casual stroll to a sweetshop. of the Discovery Award supported by a response to and fear of loss Three years passed before she turned the Louis Roederer Foundation, the up at her residence again, but with no memory of what had transpired project was part of a show curated by Tanvi Mishra at the Église des during that time. The erasure is driven by a condition called proso- Frères Prêcheurs, one of the festival’s signature sites. In this version pagnosia, and this temporal void has haunted the family ever since. of the exhibition, the artist delves into his family history, and suppleIn what should have been a formative time, Bose’s mother experi- ments oral testimonies from family members with archival docuenced something that has not yet been transcribed into words. In its ments such as police records and images of children who went missing unknowability, this period of time registers as a tabula rasa, a blank during the 1970s. The artist’s drive to collect information is premised slate. Bose’s mother may have been sold into human trafficking when on both a response to and fear of loss. Loss, in fact, becomes a current she went missing. Bose made this tangential connection while going that charges the exhibition through both recall and repair. through police diaries around missing children during that time, but Significantly, Bose ascribes the voice of the narrative to his could not find his mother’s reports to be able to confirm his conjecture. maternal grandfather, who walks the audience through his own inner His mother does recall some details to this end, but remains unable turmoil following his daughter’s unexplained disappearance. The narrator and his subject are both absent figures (or reluctant) to share more. Work from the series A Discreet Exit that shape the story through a single-channel, Mounted on a wall in the Hindustan Road Through Darkness, 2020–, inkjet print on archival 360-degree feature-length virtual reality film premises of Kolkata gallery Experimenter, a paper, mounted on Dibond, 81 × 102 cm

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(showcased only in the exhibitions mounted in India), which is expe- grandfather is remembered to have passed out often near a well while rienced individually through a headset. As one progresses through he was in the throes of alcoholism. (That addiction eventually led to the film, the artist’s grandfather (voiced by an actor) recalls his memo- his demise, which tragically happened before his daughter returned). ries, drawing the audience’s imagination towards an expansive land- Set against conditions that draw from the visual vocabulary of plural scape that includes the house in Midnapore that the artist’s family retellings, the photographs capture the inconsistency of his presence inhabited during the late 1960s. In the beginning, the film plunges through strategic juxtaposition. the viewer underwater and emulates the sensation of floating back This is also reflected in Bose’s previous body of work, Where the Birds to the surface once it ends. The story thus seems to take place in an Never Sing (2017–20), for which he photographed actors embodying aqueous nowhere, where dreams, nightmares, guilt, grief, brick and the survivors of the Marichjhapi massacre, where several thousand Dalit refugees were purportedly killed by the Left Front in the eponyair collide in lyrical deference to the pervasive sense of loss. Bose uses embodiment as both process and strategy. In his oeuvre, mous region in West Bengal in 1979. Engineered by the then government, the violent event is absent from the original protagonist is displaced The story seems to take place institutional records. Bose turned to by a stand-in who communicates the story while maintaining a judicious the survivors, collecting oral testimoin an aqueous nowhere, where guilt, distance from the associated trauma. nies to craft a series of images in both grief, brick and air collide He does this with ethical concern for remembrance of and reverence to their the survivor(s), as a direct testimony carries the risk of retraumati- trauma. In the resulting photobook, Bose photographed dramatised sation. Even when working with archival documentation such as reenactments of the anecdotes he had recorded during his research. police reports or photographs of family members, Bose makes artistic Bodies, sites and colour come together to create composite reimagininterventions (such as scanning the images in negative formats and ings of the massacre that counter (and condemn) their erasure from scratching out vulnerable faces in digital renderings of the photo- administrative records. His photographic work on Jatra performers graphs) in keeping with this objective. Bose is therefore hesitant to in Bengal (Let’s Sing an Old Song, 2011–15) as well as queer bodies (Full use the word ‘staged’ for the images he creates, as it implies the exist- Moon on a Dark Night, 2015–) took similar routes in reaffirming identity ence of an indexical referent. Here, it is absentia that is ascribed flesh through performative substitution. Bose is consistently sensitive to through contemporary referents, essentially creating what he calls questions of identity and its visibility. In A Discreet Exit Through Darkness an ‘alternative archive’ of an ephemeral event. For example, in the (in all its iterations), his mother remains protected as a person despite version of this exhibition mounted in Kolkata, four photographs are being hypervisible as subject. placed in tandem to record a recumbent body Interestingly, Bose uses mediatic hauntWork from the series Where the Birds ings as a methodology to review the past in this moving in and out of the frame – a motion made Never Sing, 2017–20, inkjet print exhibition. He places technology at the centre all the more obscure by thickets of foliage. Bose’s on archival paper, 38 × 31 cm

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Work from the series Where the Birds Never Sing, 2017–2020, inkjet print on archival paper, 76 × 61 cm

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Work from the series A Discreet Exit Through Darkness, 2020–, inkjet print on archival paper, mounted on Dibond, 81 × 102 cm

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of this reparative approach to dealing with institutional omissions. only living link to what her husband went through during the three Bose kept a diary during his research process in which he noted down years that their daughter was missing. The artist’s sustained attempt hypothetical thoughts in the voice of his grandfather, which are later at detangling a temporal knot that has afflicted his family is thereby translated to the VR film in a measured yet affective narration of enabled through innocuous transactions. He admits that some of her pathos. The immersive experience is designed to enable an incomplete stories may have been improved, embellished, revised or entirely fabrigrasp of the story by the viewer (as diegetic events exceed the periphery cated – attesting to the fallible nature of memory itself. Bose assimiof human vision), in kinship with the family’s fragmented perception lates these exaggerations in his images as much as he absorbs the folkof it. A series of radio broadcasts in the film’s soundtrack rehearses the lores around his grandfather’s persistent ghost roaming where their gamut of political events around the time, highlighting the cohabita- house once stood (perhaps still in pursuit of his daughter). His phototion of logic and superstition in a newly independent nation. Towards graphs and film then assume the quality of a dream – one that fiercely the end of the film, a scene focuses on a small television that plays resists resolution. moving footage of real family events surrounding birth and death, Bose is currently working on the second chapter of this project, becoming an archive in retrospect. A range of media then frames the which seeks to look at the same story but through his mother’s lens. The family’s experiences, as they breathe through expanded public events same events would be looked at anew, and a different set of experiential that play out alongside their own. coordinates may emerge in these interactions. The artist talks about Over a remote conversation, Bose talks to me about how the figure how his mother was sceptical of public reactions to her story while this of the ghost in the Indian subcontinent constitutes a para-archive of exhibition was shaping up, afraid that she would be judged for her sociopolitical anxieties; it is suppressed history resurfacing as spectre. predicament. Eventually, the artist informs me, she felt reassured by Embedded in vernacular cultural memories, ghosts become carriers of the more nuanced reactions of audiences – although he also took care lived histories that are occluded or denied by official accounts. Bose’s to protect her from potential scrutiny. Interested in what is ‘missing’ grandmother was much younger than her husband when he passed from the story, Bose’s work is predicated on a curiosity for answers. away, and she has fantasised about this absent figure for decades since, Reassembling history through material fragments and oral narratives, the artist says. Representative of a time when widows were socially obli- he crafts work that attests to both the transient nature of memory and gated to harbour this absence for the rest of their lives, Bose’s grandfa- the power it holds over the present. In this exhibition, he literalises ther’s entity kept accumulating as memory. Bose talks about endearing imprints and trails through a haunting topography, using fiction to moments from his research period when his bolster fact. What emerges through this osmosis is Work from the series A Discreet Exit Through grandmother would only divulge something of a palimpsest of memories and anecdotes narrated Darkness, 2020–, inkjet print on archival paper, her past (involving her husband’s search for their under the gentle gaze of a filial storyteller. ara mounted on Dibond, 102 × 127. daughter) to him if he got her sweets or chanaall images Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, chur (a savoury snack) in exchange. She is the Najrin Islam is a writer and curator based in London Kolkata & Mumbai

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Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit

by Max Crosbie-Jones

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Within Thailand, the name Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit is synon- detritus of pop culture and cosmopolitan city life (a crushed pack of ymous with formally playful character-studies and humorously Hope Menthol languishing on a tiled floor, etc). perceptive coming-of-age tales – films that blend trifling yet affecting On another level, HEAVY is something more high-flown and ambiplots with an everyday aesthetic. Equally, this Bangkok-born-and- tious: an attempt to ‘transform the archetypal spectatorship of exhibibred screenwriter-director is renowned for populating his social- tion-going’, as the exhibition text puts it. Seventeen of the 110 × 165 cm media-savvy shorts, feature films and commercials with subtly prints are spaced along Bangkok CityCity Gallery’s walls, but the skewed fictional versions of the city’s mildly troubled adolescents and remaining 103 or so are stacked unevenly on ten wooden plinths arlistless young adults. ranged in two columns in the exhibition space. As a result, most We have, for example, the alienated teacher’s pet of I Believe That images go unseen – until, that is, people start to interact with them. Over 1 Million People Hate Maythawee (2010, a high-school-bound mock- During the preview, actors from the director’s past films teamed up umentary short that serves as a piquant introduction to the dry, natu- to lift and carry the wood frames sideways between plinths. Similarly, ralistic slow-burn of his youth-orientated filmmaking). Moving visitors can rearrange the piles – which bear a passing resemblance to Donald Judd’s rectilinear floor swiftly forwards through his catalogue, we also find a workaholic sculptures, or excavation pits – until The idea for Heavy came about, freelance creative with an unexthey find an image that resonates. he explained, when, after ordering plained rash (the protagonist of Watching young groups ferrying a 110 × 165 cm print to his home, Heart Attack, 2015), an evangelical pictures around the show is, for me, lover of Scandinavian minimalism a reminder that: (a) Nawapol, as he is the delivery man refused to carry it in beset by piles of emotional baggage better known, has a loyal following, (Happy Old Year, 2019) and a man-child with a frivolous yet home- particularly here in his natural milieu, Bangkok; and (b) this popuwrecking hobby (‘sport stacking’ – the stacking of cups as fast as larity among millennials has more to do with a sense of affiliation possible) is the MacGuffin in his most comedy-driven movie to date, and ownership than passive spectatorship. With his dialogue and plot points often scraped from social media – an approach reflected the unusually frenetic Fast & Feel Love, 2022. Currently, this cavalcade of out-of-sorts Thai youth also populates in his film’s blinking text cursors, expository intertitles and sound HEAVY (2023): a solo exhibition of over 120 large-format photographs effects (social media pings and fingers tapping keys) – and revolving – production stills of actors in character and personal snaps – drawn around the humdrum routines, relationships and patois of young from a collection of over 50,000 images that Thamrongrattanarit has adults, he’s earned his indie-auteur stripes by working his way under amassed over the course of his career. A ludicrously oversize photo the skin of a niche Thai demographic. So, when he holds an exhibition album of sorts, it is on one level a backwards glance at a directorial that feels very much like an extension, abstraction or celebration of vision that has enjoyed dalliances with Thai celebrity (local house- his filmmaker universe – as he has done with HEAVY, and two previous hold names Sunny Suwanmethanont and shows at Bangkok CityCity Gallery – the fans above 7.7 MB, 2023, giclée print Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying, among descend in droves. on resin-coated photo paper, 110 × 165 cm. others, appear), made inroads beyond ThaiCollectively, these have shown how Courtesy the artist and Bangkok CityCity Gallery land (some images were shot at international Thamrongrattanarit often cannibalises, or facing page 74.59 MB, 2023, giclée print premieres and screenings) and found a muse mirrors, his target audience. For his 2019 on resin-coated photo paper, 110 × 165 cm. exhibition, second hand dialogue, the gallery in the mundane landscapes and quotidian Courtesy the artist and Bangkok CityCity Gallery

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became a bare, Wonka-esque screenplay factory or lab in which architecture that signposts Bangkok’s halting socioeconomic progwilling participants (lots of them) queued to record three-minute ress), but also his actor’s performances. phone conversations with a person of their choosing. In the large An outlier in a country in which directors tend towards ‘visitor room’ adjoining the ‘recording room’, their dialogue was producing cookie-cutter TV dramas featuring one-note characters, transcribed live and spat out on a screen in front of a rapt crowd. Thamrongrattanarit has a proven knack for getting the best out of Listening to these conversations being played back over a Tannoy his stars. In part this is because they appear ordinary and normcoresystem, seeing the germs of stories take shape in the verbatim tran- clad, but mainly it’s because he offers them a rare chance to deliver script, confirmed for me where the moments of situational irony and a realism that’s glaringly absent from most mainstream Thai films absurdism, as well as awkwardness and cringe, that we find in his or television. Stories evolve through the cut and thrust of small talk films derive from: this was public eavesdropping as screenwriting. and repartee, not melodrama. His first ever solo exhibition, i write you a lot. (2016), also had a live Then there are his long-form commercials: another signature screenwriting element: watching the gallery’s comings and goings component of the Nawapol brand. On a pragmatic level, branded via CCTV in another room, Thamrongrattanarit adlibbed the stories marketing videos – some of which have racked up millions of views – of random attendees (“a man with colourful shirt tries to study Thai offer, as he told me back in 2018, “an opportunity to experiment, learn from the script on the table”, etc), and let us watch him work via a wall more filmmaking skill, explore new casting and practise pitching projects before going back to make projection of his computer screen. He’s earned his indie-auteur stripes my own new feature”. But they’re In an archived recording of one of more than simply opportunities to these sessions, the crowd breaks by working his way under road-test new actors or approaches, into ripples of laughter as a boy and the skin of a niche Thai demographic or proof of concepts. Pull up a few a girl start to act out the semifictional characters and off-the-cuff prompts being typed into his word- on YouTube and you’ll quickly see how his trademarks – “Realistic, character study, political inside, black comedy and Thainess”, processing document. Thamrongrattanarit’s symbiotic relationship with his target as he once put it to me in an email exchange – align across all the audience was perhaps most deftly realised in the sophomore film that mediums he dabbles in, no matter how nakedly corporate their sealed his tastemaker status: the fun and freewheeling, if occasionally end goals. twee, Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy (2013). In it, Thamrongrattanarit In, for example, his Cannes Lion-winning promo for a Thai twists 410 tweets, appropriated from a real-life Twitter account that he banking app – in which deadpan delivery meets rapid-fire cuts and stumbled across, into an episodic teen drama. Appearing as onscreen a growling acid-techno soundtrack – a socially awkward schoolcaptions, @marylony’s epigrammatic life tips (‘It’s dangerous not to girl who struggles to make friends gets on a bus to a new school know yourself’) and stream-of-consciousness ramblings (‘My port- (Friendshit, 2017). En route, her best friend screams advice for how folio is very minimal’) drive forward and dictate the actions of two to become popular – “Don’t be complex. Be mainstream!” – while schoolgirls as they discuss and navigate everything from yearbook performing daredevil scooter stunts alongside the speeding vehicle. projects to puppy love. It was a sleeper hit among the age group it This is Thamrongrattanarit at his most clownish and dialled up, and depicts, largely on account of its verisimilitude to their lived online yet Friendshit’s aesthetic and core concerns (beyond its cursory plug and offline experiences and liminal setting (Thamrongrattanarit for the banking app) – interpersonal relationships, how technology is is an assiduous location scout, with a good eye for peeling modern shaping the experience and argot of a generation, humour as release

above Die Tomorrow, 2017, feature film. Courtesy the artist preceding pages HEAVY, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Soopakorn Srisakul. Courtesy the artist and Bangkok CityCity Gallery

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Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy, 2013, feature film. Courtesy the artist

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for pent-up ennui, fitting in and finding your place – is of a piece with much of his back catalogue. He’s called this approach, partly born of the perennial difficulties of getting films funded in Thailand, the ‘noodle stall method’, likening it to a family recipe. ‘If the noodle is good, customers will find you. And there’s no need to tweak the taste,’ he told a Thai interviewer in 2018. HEAVY, with its approximately 120 photographs plucked from across this variegated career (including his commercials), and crowds manhandling them, is arguably yet another reminder of this modus operandi – and its enthusiastic domestic reception. For Thamrongrattanarit, however, the groups ferrying pictures around the exhibition also personify something interior: the Proustian melancholy he felt while putting it all together. The idea for HEAVY came about, he explained, when, after ordering a 110 × 165 cm print to his home, the delivery man refused to carry it in. After doing it himself, Thamrongrattanarit decided then and there that carefully piloting a giant frame is a solid metaphor for the intangible burden of the mental furniture we are all saddled with. Lifting and carrying then became the participatory conceit for his first official photo exhibition – the curating of which, if we take his artist statement at face value, was a test: “The digital memories, initially perceived as weightless, suddenly become heavy when they are all piled up in front of you”. While this conceptual framing may smack slightly of contrivance, Thamrongrattanarit – a self-confessed dabbler in the fresh forms of audience engagement the white cube affords him, not an artist per se – has a track record of using objects to reify the workings of the mind, to make tangible his thinking on what he has called “memory management”. Two of his most singular films attempt something similar. In 36 (2012) – the experimental feature debut that first gained him international recognition – a location scout, Sai, chats with a politely spoken art-director while she conducts a photographic survey of a rundown rongraem manrut (love motel). In the first half of this hourlong film, which is told through 36 static shots (the number of

exposures in a standard 35mm film roll), Sai explains how she stores her memories as jpegs on hard drives (“one for every year”). Which helps explain her cavalier attitude to the moments they bond over. In shot seven, titled ‘A red-violet bird was flying in the sky’, she brushes off his comment that “It would be prettier if you look at it with your eyes” with a curt “Yes, but now I can keep it”. Later, however, when the ‘2008’ hard drive containing the only reliable record of their time together fails, the film sets about challenging her approach to remembering. “It’s like the whole year has been lost,” she tells a friend, before heading off to try and repair it. And then there’s the antihero of Happy Old Year (2019), a feature produced by Thai film studio GDH 559. Back in Bangkok after three years in Sweden, aspiring interior designer Jean (played by Chuengcharoensukying) is tiresomely smug about the style she came to admire there: “Minimalism is like a Buddhist philosophy. It’s about letting go,” she tells her sceptical mother and brother, trying to convince them to let her convert the untidy old family home into a sleek white office. Initially she makes good headway – “garbage bags are like black holes”, she says while stuffing them full – but her enthusiasm soon wanes when certain objects trigger pangs of repressed emotional pain. And so Jean pivots from tossing out to returning things – a double bass she borrowed, a ghosted ex’s camera – to their owners. And this process of returning and reconciling proves even more traumatic. “We see what we want to see. We remember what we choose to. That’s all there is. Just get on with your life,” the no-longer-ghosted ex yells at Jean, shortly after his jealous new girlfriend has run for the hills. In Thamrongrattanarit’s most tear-sodden coming-of-age tale so far, memory is not a framed photo that we must lug around, nor an old hard drive that we must fix, but a clutter that we must, as adults, learn to carefully sort into piles of trash and treasure – and sometimes hold onto forever. ara Heavy is on view at Bangkok CityCity Gallery through 11 November

Happy Old Year, 2019, feature film. Courtesy the artist

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12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Various venues, Seoul 21 September – 19 November

The notion that cartography is inseparable from the desire to possess, control and exploit land (often other people’s) has become almost a truism in contemporary art. Recent years have seen no shortage of ‘urgent’ exhibitions addressing the politics of mapping, migration and globalised resource extraction, even as the same inequities in wealth and power that are condemned in such exercises remain baked into the artworld. Rachael Rakes, artistic director of the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (SMB12), titled THIS TOO, IS A MAP, writes frankly in the exhibition’s companion anthology about the cynicism surrounding the hollow ‘save the world’ messaging that has ‘become innate to contemporary art practice, which is always stuck in a loop of self-valorization for itself to continue, or at least stay contemporary’. Resisting this impulse, Rakes and associate curator Sofía Dourron have instead oriented SMB12 towards different modes of encountering and representing the world. At the Seoul Museum of Art’s (SeMA) Seosomun building – the largest of the biennale’s six venues – Agustina Woodgate’s installation The New Times Atlas of the World (2023) employs a custom machine-learning program to regenerate outdated maps the artist has sanded down into blurry, pastel-hued land masses. With each turn of the page by an automated flipper, the system projects a reconstituted image onto an adjacent screen. The work goes beyond the usual gimmickry of AI art to visualise constructed terrains while echoing, in its use of an obsolete atlas, the problem of machine learning’s reliance on existing sources of information, with all their errors and biases. A compellingly low-tech subversion of territorial representation is Anna Bella Geiger’s blackand-white film series Mapas elementares (1976), produced 12 years into a military dictatorship in the artist’s native Brazil. In one clip, Geiger is shown colouring in a map of the country with a black marker, accompanied by a deceptively cheerful-sounding song by Chico Buarque that

relates how, despite the football and samba, “things here are pretty nasty”. In another film, she traces similarly shaped outlines of South America, an amuleto (amulet), a mulata (the mulatto woman) and a muleta (the crutch), alluding to arbitrary demarcations of land as well as loaded signifiers of culture, race and class. The exhibition frequently contends with the limitations of language in expressing our experiences of the world, as exemplified by Shen Xin’s atmospheric installation ས་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་འགྱུར། (The Earth Turned Green) (2022). Displayed in a darkened room, a double-sided projection captures the changing light inside a bare studio, from amber ripples to Rothko-esque fields of blue and vermilion. In the accompanying audio recording, the artist converses in Mandarin with a Tibetan-language teacher about ways to describe various colours and natural phenomena, with subtitles in Korean, English and Tibetan projected onto the floor. As we learn how the Tibetan word for fog can also refer to clotted blood, and how the verb ‘to flourish’ is connected with fire, we are reminded of how our relationship with nature is at once close and alienated – after all, the vibrant lightshow onscreen is artificial. Christine Howard Sandoval attempts to bridge this distance in Surface of Emergence (diptych) (2023), rendering Spanish Colonial-style arches in adobe to interrogate the material and aesthetic legacies of conquest. Extractivism is the focus at SeMA Bunker, where Femke Herregraven’s two videos on mining in Africa stand out. I See What You Don’t See (2019) features aerial footage of rocky terrain as a woman lists valuable minerals and metals in a hypnagogic whisper. Nearby, Prelude to: When the Dust Unsettles (2022–23) splices exploratory drone footage and 3D simulations of detonation sequences to demonstrate how advanced imaging technologies are being used to develop lithium mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These abstracted images are further

facing page, top Shen Xin, ས་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་འགྱུར། (The Earth Turned Green), 2022, three-channel video, sound, 38 min 39 sec. Courtesy Seoul Museum of Art

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distorted by the peaks and troughs of the terrain model onto which the video is projected. An intriguing question that recurs throughout the exhibition is whether a given place – or the standards and modes of its representation – can be thought of as real. This is accentuated in works that engage with diasporic reimaginings of home. In Tenzin Phuntsog’s film Pure Land (2022), shown at SeMA Seosomun, a photographer drives across Montana in search of a location that resembles his mother’s native Tibet, leaving voicemails to ask about the colour of the Himalayas in spring and the cold earth in winter. Shot on Blackfeet tribal lands, Phuntsog’s poignant film enacts a futile substitution that gestures to shared histories of exile and dispossession. The entire SMB12 venue at the Seoul Museum of History was devoted to Jesse Chun’s practice on dislocation and untranslatability, including a new series of large-format paper works adorned with gradient patterns of horizontal graphite lines and cutout shapes derived from Korean and English graphemes (시:concrete poem, 2023). These abstract compositions of textual fragments complement Chun’s three-channel video installation O dust (2022), in which superimposed imagery of waves, a full moon and empty conference rooms at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris disappear and reappear on screens and floor-based mirrors to the sound of overlapping utterances such as “oh” and “sh” along with phrases in French, English and Korean. Rife with ruptures and interpolations, Chun’s works reveal the constant negotiations of linguistic hierarchy, belonging and memory that inflect the diasporic experience. SMB12 is low on spectacle, and the projects that best encapsulate the exhibition’s ideas tend to be understated and contemplative. At times, the biennale can feel constrained and repetitive, retreading rather than transcending familiar formal and conceptual boundaries, but it attests to an assured curatorial hand and rewards the patient viewer. Ophelia Lai

facing page, bottom Bo Wang, The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned (still), 2022, two-channel video, 27 min. Courtesy the artist

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Jogja Fotografis Festival 2023 Galeri R.J. Katamsi, Yogyakarta 18 August – 11 September This inaugural photography festival is an ambitious showcase that explores issues of inclusion and exclusion in sociopolitical narratives and history. Starting with the idea of a ‘frame’ (the festival is titled Mengukur Panjang dan Lebar Sebuah Bingkai, which translates as A Strategy to Measure a Frame), the exhibition investigates what falls outside any definition of narratives deemed ‘worthy’ of representation. Many of the works, by 29 photographers and artists from around the world, investigate how photography can give voice to historically marginalised communities in parts of Asia and beyond. The lower floors of Galeri R.J. Katamsi offer reasonably straightforward documentary works, and as we move up through the four levels, the idea of ‘fotografis’ (photographic) instead of ‘fotografi’ (photography) takes over, resulting in an expanded view of photography as a genre that hybridises easily with video, text-based works, performance and installation, extending the possibilities of the photographic medium. On the ground floor, a standout series is This is Us (?) (2019–), by Aceh-based Riska Munawarah. Six images of women in black hijabs confront

the viewer with their anonymity. Aceh is the only province in Indonesia that applies sharia law, and in 2006 the government mandated the wearing of the hijab for all Acehnese Muslim women. In between the larger prints, Munawarah shows three smaller images of her mother and aunt without headscarves in 1982, giving us a more intimate and private glimpse of a time of greater freedom, and where women had greater participation in society. Moving upstairs, Eat with great delight (2018), by Rajyashri Goody, explores the artist’s Dalit heritage and calls attention to Dalit communities that suffer under the caste system. Heartwarming photographs of her family, taken from the 1980s to the 2000s, depict relatives socialising and gathering over food. Food has been a central theme for Goody, who was born and raised in Pune in a half-Dalit household. Since 2017 she has been collecting extracts of Dalit literature mentioning food, and compiling them into books of recipes. Meanwhile, Posak Jodian’s Misafafahiyan Metamorphosis (2022–) takes us to Taiwan’s indigenous Amis tribes, and the moving story of Misafafahiyan, a seventy-year-old trans Amis

performer. The work features a 16-minute documentary-style video covering their life – from their training as a hairdresser and their performances in glitzy dresses and headdresses in Taipei and Japan. The artist also included three jigsaw puzzles showing Misafafahiyan’s portrait, alluding to how indigenous peoples can self-construct their own images. Finally, expanding on the conception of photography beyond hanging prints on the wall is Bahwasanya Anda di Lembâna (Now That You Are in Lembâna, 2022–23), an installation about life in a village in Madura, the hometown of the art collective Lembâna Artgroecosystem. The work is a multimedia and microcosmic ‘recording’ of life in the village. There is a video depicting mundane everyday life of the villagers. On another wall is a long novelistic narrative describing a day in the Madura (‘It is 6am, the morning sun cast a shadow on Mrs XX’s shop…’). Artefacts such as sarung (a fabric worn by man and woman as a skirtlike garment) are also presented. Here, echoing the theme of the festival, the ‘photographic’ is an approach and philosophy – an attentive curiosity towards life – rather than a medium. Mira Asriningtyas

Lembâna Artgroecosystem, Bahwasanya Anda di Lembâna, 2022–23, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Tim Dok. Courtesy Jogja Fotografis Festival, Yokyakarta

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Jewyo Rhii Hundred Carts and On Barakat Contemporary, Seoul 31 August – 27 October Spread across the ground and basement floors of the gallery is what has become one of Jewyo Rhii’s signature storage facility-cum-laboratory installations. The work follows in the footsteps of Love Your Depot (2019), an installation (first shown at MMCA Seoul as part of the Korean Artist Prize) that has had several iterations over the years. It pursues a line of enquiry that goes something like this: ‘What happens to the work after the exhibition? Or to works that have nowhere to go?’ Both her own (the original had 20 years’ worth of works in crates next to it) and those of her colleagues and contemporaries. (There are echoes, of course, of fellow South Korean Haegue Yang’s Storage Piece, 2003.) As in her earlier work, here Rhii takes what might normally be a dead, purely archival system, containing shelving units

and storage racks, filled with paintings, sculptures, lightworks, videos and texts, and activates it as something approaching a dynamic, living entity. On one shelf is a collection of white footballs with the brand names blacked out; on a lower shelf, what look like lumpen, experimental plaster sculptures. All of it (titled Turn Depot, 2021–23) on a metal shelving frame on wheels that are locked into a circular track, making it look more like something clockwork or a record of the passing of time: functional, mobile but stuck. There are drawings clipped to wire-frame hangers (Drawing Rack, 2019–23), Flavinesque but slightly ramshackle lit white neon tubes. What looks like a candelabra cactus standing on a palette as if ready to be shipped, covered in a blanket either to keep the dust off

or to make it look like a Halloween ghost. And much, much more. Each work seems on the verge of telling a story, of conversing with those around it, but is strangely muted by the cacophonous clutter. Other works, however, tell a story more directly. A large text displayed in one of the racks is titled ‘Dear My Love – anti-capitalist’. What follows is both a love letter and a potential commentary on the works that surround it. ‘How have you been?… The second winter after our parting has passed… I’ve thought about you a lot, and I bet that you are just the same.’ And yet, one of the messages of this work and the conversations and dialogues it elicits, both between materials and audiences and within the context of the materials themselves, is that nothing ever remains the same. Mark Rappolt

Turn Depot (detail), 2021–23, aluminium, iron, stainless steel. Courtesy Barakat Contemporary, Seoul

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Cosmic Beings Cement Fondu, Sydney 5 August – 24 September The first thing I see in this group exhibition is an alien. Its bulbous green body sits on top of a high wall above the entry stairs leading into the gallery, greeting visitors. Perhaps ‘greeting’ is not the right word. Tony Oursler’s Blue (2006) is a sculpture of an alien animated by a video projected onto it; and it’s not exactly welcoming. Indeed, it quickly veers towards outright hostility. The alien spouts a staccato stream of consciousness, which both defines and punctuates the space: “Time out, time is up”; “I want to control your DNA”; “Who made you the head of the universe?”; “Save yourself”. You enter the exhibition to this chorus of anxious utterances. Moving away from the alien’s alarmist speech and towards – as the exhibition text suggests – a kind of new ‘cosmic understanding’, visitors encounter artworks

(by an international grouping of eight artists) that ‘offer alternative and speculative narratives, as well as new ways of being now, anticipating how artificially imposed divisions – between humans, the natural world and other species – might evaporate when viewed from an outer space perspective’. The rhetoric here is loaded with utopian promise, teetering on the edge of being overloaded. Yet the text also sets the stakes for the exhibition, which feels all the weightier for it. Cosmic Beings promises to cast us out into the universe and bring us back down to Earth, so that we might, even briefly, radically reimagine a more united and more equal world. Kalanjay Dhir’s video installation A Perfect Storm; Taju’s time on Earth with seven humans (2023) immediately seems to fulfil the broad strokes of this promise, as it tracks the journey of its

title character: an alien who has been sent to Earth to better understand humanity and its overconsumption of energy. Taju, in the form of a fluffy alien hand-puppet, is shown speaking to Sydney locals about a series of seemingly unconnected topics: from composting, to the stretches that one does after dancing, to the reverb in a music track, to nail-painting routines. The setup is kitsch and has something of the easy didacticism and nostalgia of Sesame Street to it. Yet these stylings do little to propel us towards any kind of revelation. And while the everyday is made strange, there is little in the way of profound insight that results from this transformed perspective. Perhaps it is unfair to subject a single artwork to such a criteria and expect it to have some sort of revelatory effect – but this is the very yardstick against which the curators seem to have set their selection.

Tony Oursler, Blue, 2006, Plus v-339 projector, dvd player, dvd, fibreglass, dimensions variable. Photo: Creative Events Photography. Courtesy the artist

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An installation by Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) – the name of the interdisciplinary collaboration between musician, composer, poet, artist and curator Camae Ayewa, and artist, lawyer and community activist Rasheedah Phillips – pulls together a variety of reference materials from quantum physics, Afrofuturism and Afrodiasporic epistemology. Across a pair of vinyl diagrams installed on the gallery’s walls and two sound recordings (all, fittingly, undated), BQF works to question the oppressive orthodoxies of Western notions of spacetime. Through this work, the collective seeks to ‘shift the standards of time that leave Black people locked out of the past and future, and stuck in a narrow temporal present’. The most successful of BQF’s works are the two recordings of discussion groups, abbreviated here as Time Zone Protocols, Quantum Event Map, Surveyors Discussion Group #1 and Time Zone Protocols, Non Linear Timeline, Surveyors Discussion Group #2, which took place with 21 participants at the Prime Meridian Unconference in New York, in 2022. While BQF’s other diagrammatic

works are visually impactful – they have arrows pointing in various directions that gesture towards a mapping out of knowledge – their specific teachings remain largely opaque; they frustrate the eye, presenting the trappings of knowledge while also foreclosing access to any discernible information. By contrast, the recordings of the discussion groups feel instantly accessible: as I slip on my headphones, a voice speaks about the disproportionate eviction rates of Black women in Philadelphia, and I can hear the rhythmic tapping of a keyboard in the background. It almost feels like I’m sitting in a classroom or communing around a table. The experience is marred only by the fact that the exhibition does not allow me to forget the reality of where I am standing: there is nowhere to sit near the work, nowhere to linger for the 31 minutes of discussion, nowhere to give it the very time of which the works speak. While the minimalist exhibition is dimly lit and visually arresting, evoking the vast emptiness of outer space, it almost works against the works on show – both lending

them an immediate impact and diminishing the likelihood of a more enduring effect. Chitra Ganesh’s looped digital animation Before the War (2021) casts the gallerygoer tumbling into a kaleidoscopic series of oneiric visions. Here, drawings are interspersed with archival silent film footage, Buddhist iconography and an eclectic mix of other styles and icons that enter and exit the screen too quickly for me to process: a flock of birds slowly fly beneath a shadowed canopy; a figure pulls apart their right eye to reveal the universe; a cat-human hybrid appears and disappears; a masked person explodes into shards of crystal. On and on it goes, like a sequence of flickering brainwashing images – until a vague, subliminal message about dissolving hierarchies between human and nonhuman species seems to sink in. Cosmic Beings brings together an ambitious range of works, which purport to estrange us from the received assumptions of our everyday. There are moments of turbulence, but that is the nature of interstellar travel. Tai Mitsuji

Chitra Ganesh, Before the War, 2021, digital animation, sound by Saul Williams, 3 min 50 sec (looped). Photo: Creative Events Photography. Courtesy the artist

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Maryanto Fractured Paradise Tabula Rasa, London 15 September – 5 October The selection of Maryanto’s recent works – consisting of ten drawings and a sevenminute single-channel video of clips from the Indonesian artist’s ascent to the peaks of two sacred stratovolcanoes – on show at Tabula Rasa’s single-room space are arranged to encourage navigating the room clockwise. The exhibition starts with two monumental stretched canvases, titled Iereng Gede biosphere (The Biosphere of Mount Gede, 2023) and Iereng Pangrango biosphere (The Biosphere of Mount Pangrango, 2023) – each representing one of the sacred peaks. In both, the artist has covered the canvas in black acrylic paint then scratched away at its surface to create detailed scenes of West Javanese forest floors. Their scale envelops the viewer, immersing them in an environment of moss-covered branches, fallen trunks and a plethora of plants that seem undisturbed by human intervention, imparting a sense of quiet serenity. Maryanto’s techniques in creating such works seem also to reflect a moral position on the landscapes he depicts. In these two works his process is ‘negative’, in the sense that he

is scraping away paint, which might in turn be read as reflecting the fact that a lack of human intervention is what makes these scenes beautiful. In the remaining works he uses the ‘positive’ technique of applying charcoal to paper and canvas to illustrate what might be described as the negative effect of humanity’s interventions in nature. These six works on paper and two on canvas see Maryanto drawing grim scenes of humanity’s exploitative presence in the natural world. Selfie Spot Ijen (2020), for example, is set in what seems to be a forest but in which the view is obscured by a large manmade backdrop of a majestic mountainscape seen from a peak. Three men sit idly by, perhaps waiting for customers who might pay to pose in front of the manufactured scene rather than climb the actual mountain on which the forest grows. In Sunrise Antusias (Sunrise Enthusiast, 2020) an overwhelming crowd of people (masked but clearly not socially distanced) obstruct the view of the mountains they are attempting to photograph. While these scenes do not depict

flagrant environmental destruction, they nonetheless impart a sense of dread of tourist gawking that sets out to celebrate nature but inevitably results in its ruin. Meru / Fractured Paradise ends with two large unstretched canvases suspended from the ceiling, one of which is titled Sapa Seneng Ngrusak Ketentremane Alam Ian Liyan Bakal Dibendhu deneng Panger an Ian Dielehke dening Tumindhake Dhewe #1 (For Those Who Disturb Nature and Supernatural Beings Will Be Punished by God, and Get Karma for Their Own Actions #1, 2021) and shows an open-top truck at an excavation site that appears to have narrowly avoided being hit by a giant boulder. While the drawing is obviously recording the extraction of the region’s mineral-rich volcanic soil, the title also hints at a spiritual dimension to the work and the presence of sacred sites on Indonesia’s mountain areas. The artist’s drawings illustrate that overexploitation (in various ways) of land has left his homeland environmentally devastated. Marv Recinto

Selfie Spot Ijen, 2020, charcoal on paper, 54 × 80 cm. Courtesy the artist

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ArtReview Asia

24/10/2023 13:50

Cian Dayrit Schemes of Belligerence Nome, Berlin 14 September – 4 November Cian Dayrit’s latest Berlin exhibition outwardly appears to speak the language of state-sanctioned narratives: squint at the opening room of the Philippine artist’s third show at Nome, presented against brownish-orange walls, and you could be in a national museum. The room-filling installation Imperial Puppet Regalia (2022) features carved and polished wooden figures perched on the crossbars of suspended embroidered heraldic crests, military shirts and peasant hats on wooden supports, and a rack of carved wooden canes. Very quickly, though, it’s apparent that this is an antiauthoritarian display, a seething counter-history. The jointed, bobble-headed figures are soldiers toting pistols and rifles and, pointedly, puppets. The crests, mixing methods of traditional embroidered craftwork with the sewn-on badges that adorn military outfits, are blazoned with the stitched phrases ‘Deception’ and ‘Dominion’ and feature patterns of gunsights, all-seeing eyes and plants with bloody roots. At the foot of the costumes, meanwhile, are encircling sandbags. And the canes are topped with tightly whittled forms including a crown-wearing lion, an eagle, a clenched fist and a spiky COVID-19 virion.

These, evidently, are intended to microcosm the successive turbulent waves of colonisation, revolution and militaristic control inflicted upon the resource-rich Philippines over the past five centuries, variously under Spain, the United States, Japan, an internal military dictatorship whose legacy is reflected in Ferdinand Marcos’s son being the current president, and what Dayrit classes as today’s ‘neocolony’ status, in which covert US control underwrites a martial culture particularly evident in enforced COVID lockdowns and crackdowns on activism and free speech. Amid this, Dayrit’s approach to verifiable truth is pointedly blurry and tricksterish, using deception against deception. It’s not always clear, for example, where the military badges he uses – both affixed to outfits and as part of the multipart, mixed-media, wall-based presentations in the second room – are real or satirical. A metal ‘Expert Rifleman’ award is likely legit; an embroidered ‘Evidence Planter’ surely not; a third, reading ‘Let God Sort ‘Em Out! Kill ‘Em All’, could go either way. This last is part of a sardonic faux banner for a Philippine army recruitment office, which spells out Dayrit’s position in case you somehow missed it amid

his misdirects: ‘Do you want to be a mercenary for your beloved neocolony? Do you want to be a puppet of imperialist states?… Don’t read history, make it!’ Though this is a detail-rich presentation, the broad strokes come across quickly, underlining a feeling of impatience with artworld niceties or self-congratulatory conceptual cleverness. What mutates is Dayrit’s tone, which switches from directed anger to scything sarcasm. A repeated refrain in the stitched texts is a statement-concluding ‘hahaha’ that capsules gleefully uncaring authority. The artist, though, is careful to note – or at least the press release is – that this isn’t just the story of one country but a model of ‘the proliferation of fascist regimes and the cultures and norms such regimes inflict upon people’. Germany, of course, knows something of historical fascist regimes; but to judge from election results in the past few years, the country – led from the embittered eastern regions – is increasingly turning starkly rightward once again, lessons increasingly forgotten. Schemes of Belligerence, in this sense and in this location, constitutes both a warning from history and a warning from the present day. Martin Herbert

Theatrics of Power: Impunity, 2021, mixed media on woodwork, 60 × 76 × 10 cm. Photo: Billie Clarken. Courtesy the artist and Nome, Berlin

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Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila 16 September – 17 February Since 2020, artists Kiri Dalena, Lizza May David and Jaclyn Reyes have been collaboratively researching the imperial and colonial narratives from the American occupation of the Philippines – a process that was presented as benevolent assimilation, and resistance against it as insurrection by bandits. This group exhibition delves into European and American archives and various historical texts to grapple with obscure stories of violent personal experiences, with dense and layered works evoking unresolved stories and deeply felt responses. Central to the exhibition are three videoworks by Dalena that use research from the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum’s collection in Cologne and translations of the 1908 editorial

‘Aves de Rapiña’ (Birds of Prey) published in the bilingual Spanish-Tagalog newspaper El Renacimiento. Two projected videoworks in the loop – Mga Ibong Mandaragit (Birds of Prey, 2023) and Birds of Prey (2023) narrate the editorial in their respective titular languages over a series of archival photos of the Philippine countryside that were ubiquitous during American colonisation. The photographs highlight rough landscapes as just one part of the Philippines’ varied topography, often framing the country as raw and underdeveloped with unkept grasslands, trees and bushes. Towns and cities, even thriving farmlands, are often absent in such photographic representation. The purposeful depiction of sparseness and lack of built

infrastructure – rather than a fuller picture of diverse terrains including natural land and waterscapes, as well as marketplaces, Spanish colonial stone architecture and local architecture utilising natural materials – strengthened the colonial narrative of the Philippines as a ‘white man’s burden’ that required American presence. In contrast to these is Raubvögel (Birds of Prey, 2023), which uses contemporary moving images depicting aerial views of lush treescapes and birds flying in and out with German narration and English subtitles of again the same article, ‘Aves de Rapiña’. Though visually beautiful, the use of German language, here and in the subtitles of Mga Ibong Mandaragit,

Snare for Birds: Passages through the Colonial Archive, 2020–23 (installation view, Ang Panublion Museum, Roxas City, Capiz). Photo: Aina Shane Martinez

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feels out of place. Many of the archival photographs Dalena uses were from a research residency with the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, which explains the presence of German; but unlike Filipino, the national language of the Philippines, and English, the colonial language (and now also an official language), German fails to form a direct connection with the postcolonial narratives of the exhibition. ‘Aves de Rapiña’, referenced in these three videoworks by Dalena and looping on a single projector, is a critical text in representing the censorship and oppression of American colonisation despite the appearances of benevolent peace. The editorial alludes to Dean Worcester – then Secretary of the Interior in the colonial administration and a fierce advocate for colonialism – with references to his work as an ornithologist and suggests he used this as a cover to exploit Philippine resources for personal gain. The American

sued for libel and won. The resulting fines led to the closure of El Renacimiento, while Worcester’s writings and photographs (some of which went to the Rautenstrauch-Joest) became definitive in forming Filipino imagery and identity during this period. Dalena’s videoworks are not simply about the injustice of colonisation; more importantly they quietly highlight the continuing inequity in narratives of history. Jaclyn Reyes also utilises colonial photography, focusing on portraiture and engaging with how these depictions leave their Filipino subjects unnamed despite putting effort towards identifying the photographers and publishers that thereby sustain American colonisation through the archive. Often leaving the name and story of the photographic subject unknown, the archival process implicitly places more value on the colonisers who were behind the lens and production processes. The United States’

Library of Congress holds many of these photographs, including Filipino prisoners of war at Pasig, Philippine Islands (c. 1899), published by Strohmeyer & Wyman with the copyright claimed by Underwood & Underwood. In a bid to reframe the archival photo, Reyes draws the subjects of this image: Untitled (2020) is a charcoal portrait of the two persons standing in the upper-right-most frame of the photograph. She refers to her approach as ‘Drawing Portraiture as a Research Methodology’ in a selection of printed supplementary materials accompanying the exhibition, employing the hand-drawn form as an attempt to slow down the process of looking and supposedly redignifying the subject of the photograph. Though the intentions are sincere, the transfer of power in the representation remains elusive – the full context is still missing, and the subjects’ voices remain silent Portia Placino

Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive, 2020–23 (installation view).Photo: Clefvan Pornela. Courtesy Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila

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Phumzile Khanyile Sabela Uyabizwa Blank Projects, Cape Town 31 August – 14 October Dreams and visions are deeply ingrained in southern African culture. From San rock paintings, to the prophetess Nongqawuse’s visions of the ancestors driving the colonials into the sea, to the writer Olive Schreiner’s book of feminist allegories Dreams (1890): visions of a transcendental world have played a pervasive role in social, religious and cultural life. They still do. Phumzile Khanyile, we’re told, started work on this, her latest body of work, by trying to write her dreams down, but found the method elusive. Instead she began to draw them on her computer. Plastic Crowns, a 2016 series of photographic self-portraits, had a focus on the self, on identity, with hints of personal excess and anxiety, sharing the feel of early Tracey Emin works. But as is suggested in the title of her latest show, Sabela Uyabizwa (translated from isiXhosa as Respond, You Are Being Called), something has shifted in her practice. Khanyile talks in her artist statement of this as a ‘tower moment’, a dramatic shift in life. The drawings of her dreams, some superimposed on photo negatives, have the quality of pared-down Neo-Expressionism. The first work in the exhibition, Ukubona I (To See I, all works 2021–22), offers an

interpretive entry. A childlike drawing of a female figure holds onto the wire of an old portable TV aerial. This sense of dreams, of accessing the visions of another paradigm via a terrestrial transmitter, runs through the exhibition. But the image also contains another sense of multiple worlds. The ‘bunny ears’ of the television aerial are a marker of the distinction between the haves and the havenots in South African society: those who can access, via satellite dish, the subscriptiontelevision channels, and those who have only an aerial, for local terrestrial stations. This motif, of objects of the excluded, appears in many of Khanyile’s Untitled works: the blurred and refracted images of old computer monitors, rough, iron tables and metal gates. These are familiar objects to those economically segregated in one of the most unequal societies in the world. Throughout the exhibition, there is at play a sense of two worlds: of real world and dreamworld of blurred figures and animals, of privileged world and the excluded world, of Western and African cultures. This is not to suggest that the works address them as binary. In Ukubona II, a lionlike figure appears behind

a Panasonic computer monitor. The suggestion seems to be that these worlds (the world of dreams and the material world) are, in some manner, all part of a broader reality. In several of them, the drawn female figure appears as something like Dante’s Beatrice, acting as a guide or witness for these inconclusive and inchoate visions. In Bafikile, the witness stands before a horned animal that reminds one of the mythical animals of San rock paintings. In other images, figures of people are gathered in circles – perhaps gatherings of the ancestors. There is nothing overly prescriptive about these works; no formalised message or clear narrative sits at the surface of any of the individual works. The marks and rendering of the images offer no clear answer to the viewer as to what exactly these images are and what story they tell. There is the aura of something ancient in these images, something that is embedded in Khanyile’s cultural specificity, the hermeneutics of which sets a challenge for Western contemporary art discourse. They hold a psychological complexity of being between overlapping worlds, the multiple worlds that are the southern African experience. Matthew Blackman

Ukubona ii (To See II), 2021–22, giclée on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 59 × 65 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Blank Projects, Cape Town

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24/10/2023 11:45

Jinjoon Lee Audible Garden Korean Cultural Centre UK, London 1 July – 13 October Jinjoon Lee’s immersive exhibition, bathed in a neon-green ambient light, deals with perceptions, memory and a certain level of digital synaesthesia. In the abstract mural Audible Garden (all works 2023), which opens Lee’s eponymous show, scattered plot-points, representing (via their sizes) the velocities of each of the 88 MIDI notes from 22 to 109 (y-axis) at each given time (x-axis), form a diagram of sound. Packed in an orderly fashion onto a dotted grid, it recalls foggy mountains and trickling water streams (as you go back and forth in front of the work, the dotted image ‘flows’ as if animated) printed through a halftone process. On the other side of the wall is Daejeon, Summer of 2023, the source of this information graphic. Here, two rows of pale plaster discs cast in the shape of vinyl records are aligned on the wall, each depicting a pattern painted in ink that look like the growth rings of trees or isolines on a topographic map. Nearby, one of these painted discs rotates on a record player, and a camera, functioning like a stylus, reads the greyscale values of the image, converting them into melodies via a predetermined algorithm – one similar to the algorithm that informs the MIDI indexes and velocities in

Audible Garden. What the camera captures is then enlarged, applied with a monochrome filter and projected onto the opposite wall – a series of transformations turning the simplistic plaster discs into a mixture of visually and auditorily enhanced experiences. This long and winding journey of image processing – and metaphorically of our daily reality heavily mediated by technology, as the wall text tells us – characterises Lee’s show. In Lee’s work, every bit of our everyday perceptive experience is radically rearranged, to call attention to the blurry line between natural and artificial sensations. In Hanging Garden, recordings of birds chirping, flowing water and children’s laughter, intermingled with sirens and other urban noises, are broadcast into the gallery through a dozen dangling and slowly rotating directional loudspeakers. As one walks around and through the installation, the source of each sound in the installation becomes increasingly obscure, meshing natural and constructed spaces into the same disorienting soundscape. In Thrown and Discarded Emotions, five torso-height sculptures translate Lee’s brainwave charts into plaster scholar stones

– a staple display in the homes of East Asian literati that evokes nature and embodies an elevated interiority – their curving contours resembling at once medical diagrams and digital glitches. If in Daejeon, Summer of 2023, there’s an artificial sense of synaesthesia in the way visual and audio signals are translated and reprogrammed, here the invisible electrical impulses tied to one’s perception and memory are given a physical form – stripped of their medical significance, these dull analogue shapes appear, perhaps intentionally, rather clumsy and odd. The work that takes us back to our grounded, organic reality is a series of plaster sculptures cast from battered milk bottles scattered through the latter half of the show. In Fresh Nature: Black Milk, the solid black casts look as if the colour of milk had been digitally inverted, giving this quotidian nourishment an odd materiality. Still, they feel familiar. Unlike the artificially generated sound and imagery, the crushed shapes of the milk bottles suggest a knowable past with accidental contacts. Such might be the comfort of our corporeal world, in which a disorderly reality always threatens to escape algorithmic mediation. Yuwen Jiang

Hanging Garden, 2023, mixed-media mobile (piano wire, black acrylic panel, aluminium rod, directional speakers), dimensions variable. Courtesy Korean Cultural Centre UK, London

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World Classroom: Contemporary Art through School Subjects Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 19 April – 24 September This exhibition commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Mori Art Museum in the Roppongi neighbourhood of Tokyo. It presents itself as an attempt to reframe contemporary art through eight familiar school subjects, among them ‘Language and Literature’, ‘Social Studies’, ‘Philosophy’ and even ‘Physical Education’. The beauty of that arrangement is its familiarity to anyone who received a traditional education. As in a typical school day, gallerygoers are led from subject to subject. That standardised familiarity runs into trouble, however, when the school subjects are applied to contemporary art that seeks to deconstruct, and even defy, such rigid academic categorisations. About half of the approximately 150 exhibited works, created by over 50 artists and groups, are drawn from the Mori Art Museum collection. Iconic artists like Ai Weiwei, Nara Yoshitomo and Hiroshi Sugimoto are featured alongside newly commissioned works by artists such as Miyanaga Aiko and Jacob Kirkegaard to create a ‘classroom of the world’, hinting at the global representation of artists whose works, ideally, offer viewers alternative lessons based on their unique points of view. ‘Language and Literature’ is the first subject of the exhibition and leads with forerunner of conceptual art Joseph Kosuth and his installation One and Three Shovels (1965), in which a chair sits between a photograph of the chair and the dictionary definition of the word ‘chair’. The piece acts as an introductory lesson to Conceptual art and primer on how the definitions and visual representations we learn influence, and occasionally overtake, the original object itself in our minds. Nearby, a darkened room with rows of foldable, wooden classroom chairs hosts the poignant, immersive 30-minute video experience Lost and Found (2016) by multimedia pioneer Susan Hiller, an audio collage of recorded voices speaking

in 23 different languages – some now extinct – held together visually with a projection of a quivering green oscilloscopic line and English subtitles. A speaker of Wichita says she is the only person left who speaks her language, but by participating in Hiller’s recording, “I’ll be gone and they can still hear my voice”. For viewers who can give it the time it deserves, the effect is deeply moving. ‘Language and Literature’ concludes with Follow Me (2003), a large-format photograph by Chinese artist Wang Qingsong. The photo depicts Wang himself in the role of professor, pointing his stick at English and Chinese words and phrases, and logos of American companies such as Nike and McDonald’s on the massive blackboard behind him. English idioms one might find in textbooks (‘It’s for the birds!’) are written haphazardly alongside Chinese political slogans (‘Let China walks [sic] towards the world!’) commenting on the rapid social change wrought by Westernisation and capitalism after China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization and Bejing’s selection to host the 2008 Olympic games. Qingsong’s image neatly leads visitors into the ‘Social Studies’ section, where they are confronted by yet another blackboard, this one real, written on by German artist Joseph Beuys during a lecture at Tokyo University of the Arts in 1984, part of an eight-day trip that is held up as a seminal moment of influence for contemporary art in Japan. On the left side of the blackboard ‘West’ is written inside a circle, while on the right ‘Ost’ (east) is said to indicate the world to come, with musical notes drawn between the two. Playful rhymes of curating such as these two blackboards feature throughout World Classroom, enhancing the experience just as might a quip from a favourite teacher.

facing page, top Wang Qingsong, Follow Me, 2003, C-print, 60 × 150 cm. Courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

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Ironically, it’s the dreaded subjects many see as farthest removed from the arts – economics, engineering, mathematics and even religion – that provide some of the most compelling installations of the entire exhibit. Tamura Yuichiro’s Invisible Hands (2022) examines the economics behind the downfall of Japan’s porcelain ‘novelty’ figurines industry after the infamous Plaza Accord, signed in New York in 1985. In a three-channel video, Tamura imagines a surreal 22-minute conversation between the triad of revered economists John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx and Adam Smith (Smith’s theory of the ‘invisible hand’ of the marketplace gives the installation its title), each depicted as masked (and so ‘invisible’) kurogo puppeteers from kabuki theatre. Audio of the trio discussing the ramifications of their theories plays as the busts of the five politicians who attended the Plaza Accord, rendered in the porcelain of the novelties industry they decimated, sit mounted on the wall along with documentary photographs of the men at the event. The construct of separating diverse works into familiar academic categories illustrates the ways rigid categories – however arbitrary or restricting they may seem – aid us in defining where an artist and their work sit in relation to others. These much-maligned divisions and out-of-fashion definitions are what allow the viewer to identify where those very borders break down or do not apply, and at the same time highlight where seemingly unrelated concepts, approaches and subjects intersect. If it all sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. World Classroom is a decidedly more-is-more exhibition. By the end of the simulated ‘school day’ it feels a bit like visitors have crammed for a comprehensive exam. Lance Henderstein

facing page, bottom Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Forms 0010 – Surface of revolution with constant negative curvature, 2004, gelatin silver print, 58 × 47 cm. Courtesy Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo

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23/10/2023 16:21

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White Noise Nguyen Art Foundation (Nam Long campus), Ho Chi Minh City 9 August – 20 January This exhibition draws on the body and its constituent parts to question how human subjectivity, such as gender and national identities, are framed. A ‘medical scanner’ – which is actually a fluorescent tube propelled by an automated system of wheels attached to the ceiling – gives the show an eerie clinical atmosphere, as certain objects emerge, momentarily illuminated, before receding again into darkness. The lighting design reflects the darker themes explored in the show, which includes how contemporary Vietnamese artists use the hybridised body (combined with machines or animals) to revisit traumatic experiences and propose alternative understanding of social realities. In Lai Dieu Ha’s Hurt in here (2011), the traumatised body is compared to that of a suffering animal. Sheets of dried pork-skin are ironed until their surfaces blister, then soaked in water and stacked inside a Plexiglass cage. In this compressed state, the pig skin closely resembles human skin, alluding to the suffering and

oppression common between the two species – an idea explored in her harrowing performance Fly Off (2010), in which she ironed pig bladders and then her own skin. Self-mutilation and rebellion are also present in Trần Tuấn’s Forefinger (2021), a sculpture of a giant index finger clad in stainless-steel identification tags from American soldiers during the Vietnam War. To escape military duties, his father and uncles had chopped off their forefingers so they could no longer pull gun triggers. The detached finger, decorated to look like a piece of high-end furniture, also alludes to the materialistic values of capitalism, and the Western ideological forces involved in the war in Vietnam. The body is also a site of memory and collective experience. In Tongue (2021), artist Nguyen Phuong Linh creates composite images of salt fields and prints them on a magentacoloured PVC slab in the shape of a tongue. She had worked with salt farmers for a project

in 2009, but over the years she has witnessed their disappearance, as they moved to cities in search of better livelihoods. In her work, the visceral experience of saltiness is evoked on the viewer’s tongue, creating a physical connection to the lost salt fields. Tears, of course, are also salty – the work has an elegiac melancholy for these lost landscapes and ways of life. Another kind of loss is explored in Dinh Q. Le’s Adrift in Darkness (2017), comprising three hanging structures that are made from rattan and strips of photograph paper woven together. Printed on the paper are images of refugees escaping from Africa and the Middle East. Because the images are cut into strips woven together, the bodies and faces of the refugees are combined and intermingled, suggesting a collective identity that obscures the individual story. In any case, the collective story is a tragic one of being cast adrift. Suspended from the ceiling, the sculptures resemble three lonely rocks floating in the dark emptiness of space. Hung Duong

Trần Tuấn, Forefinger, 2021, iron frame, packaging foam, burlap, rivets, stainless steel, 300 × 80 × 130 cm. Courtesy Nguyen Art Foundation, Ho Chi Minh City

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María Magdalena Campos-Pons Behold Brooklyn Museum, New York 15 September – 14 January It is said among some Santería practitioners that during the transatlantic slave trade the seven Orishas (the major deities of the religion) took to the ships and journeyed alongside the enslaved; within the unspeakable brutality of the hold, there was also divine presence. This commingling is deeply felt in María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s retrospective, where the sacred is entangled not quite with the profane, but rather with the brutal and violent – with the foul markings of forced dispersal and its aftermaths. Yet in this exhibition, which designs a psychic space somewhere between biography, memorial and prayer, the artist leaves us with a sense that things can be made whole, that remedy is not only possible, but present at hand. The exhibition is deftly crafted through Campos-Pons’s singular transdisciplinary tactics: it is a meeting between photography, video, performance, mixed media and things in between. This dialogue of media begins with Spoken Softly with Mama (1998), an installation that incorporates all of the above. Here, Campos-Pons tends to the threads of her family narrative to weave a tapestry concerning broader histories of racialised and gendered migration and labour: seven ironing boards – a nod to

Black women’s domestic labour – function as arenas of display: three bear projections of video footage of household work, while the others are printed with family photos. On the floor in front of them, blown-glass sculptures shaped like irons are arranged in a pattern that resembles a fleet of ships, alluding to both migration and the slave trade. In her multipanelled Polaroid self-portraits, Campos-Pons takes these motifs inward. Here, her body is literally disjointed, cut into panels, while also being the element that unites and spills across them. She visualises her subjectivity as simultaneously fragmented and expansive, the site of both deconstruction and suturing. The formal vocabulary of the works strikes as a kind of visual metaphor for the vicissitudes of dispersal and dislocation. In both her portraits and videowork, Campos-Pons figures her body as a site of adornment, makes it resplendent with sundry and beautiful materials. More often than not, these decorative elements are encoded with spiritual references. Take, for example, Red Composition from Los Caminos (The Path) (1997), a photographic triptych in which the artist has isolated her hands, torso and feet in the three respective panels. Prayer beads are draped from

the head and rest gingerly around the face, traversing closed eyes and lips. Arms are streaked with red body paint – an homage to Eleguá, the Santería deity associated with possibility – while hands clasp coils of beads and ribbons. The artist appears composed, still, yet underneath this something stirs with the divine, flashes with a tinge of the surreal. Such portraits exact an almost unsettling command on the eye, reminding us of the exhibition’s title: Behold. It is indeed a fitting appellation for Campos-Pons’s work, both a solicitation and a provocation. The works here, in the directness with which they negotiate biography and history, body and spirit, ask: dare you look? What kind of gaze are you bringing to this material? Mobile #3 from the series Rise of the Butterflies (2021) gestures towards these questions explicitly. Here, Campos-Pons has configured a largescale mobile out of several blown-glass orbs she made after studying images of eyes and teardrops. Assembled together, these motifs allude to a collectively witnessed pain, a way of seeing and lamenting that is mutually implicated. To look and to grieve are woven together, but not reducible to one another. For our tender regard for one another will always be in excess of the hurt. Zoë Hopkins

Red Composition from Los Caminos (The Path), 1997, Polaroid Polacolor, 94 × 221 × 5 cm (0verall). Courtesy the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

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Books Midnight’s Third Child by Naeem Mohaiemen The title of this collection of writing from newspapers, magazines and catalogues by artist Naeem Mohaiemen is a polite translation of a phrase used in Bangla to suggest that the youngest child has to try harder. It refers to Bangladesh, the ‘forgotten’ third child of partition, ‘born’ in its current form following independence from Pakistan in 1971. Much of Mohaiemen’s research as both an artist and a writer is focused around this trinity of states (completed, of course, by the dominant mass of India) and the two moments of partition that created them as they stand today. The effect of all this, the author points out, was as deleterious for the art scene as it was for society in general, with artists choosing between Pakistan, West Bengal (in India, to where many Hindu artists retreated) and Bangladesh (in a reverse flow of Muslim artists). ‘The exact shape of the idea of Bangladesh’, he suggests, ‘remains contingent and contested.’ All this is given a further impetus as his homeland becomes, as he puts it, ‘a laboratory since the 1970s for every major developmentalist theory’ and, not unrelatedly, the latest focus (after its neighbours) of the global artworld’s ‘attention economy’, for both good and bad.

Nokta, Rs1,010 (softcover)

(Mohaiemen himself, who was born in London, was shortlisted for the UK’s Turner Prize in 2018.) As a whole, this collection is an effort to establish a specific art history of Bangladesh, and to define the role of the artist in that nebulous space. In the texts that follow he rails against the limitations of art education; the dominance of English over Bangla (who is the imagined audience?, he asks of local English-language art magazines); and the use of poverty tourism to satisfy white liberal guilt across the Global South. In one text he references the tribal people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (in southeastern Bangladesh) and Adivasi (indigenous) people more generally, lamenting the fact that the more art is afforded luxury status, the more it loses touch with a general audience. Nevertheless, he points out, the ‘periphery’ – of the Bangladeshi art scene and the global artworld – is precisely the space in which experimentation tends to happen. ‘The work of culture can reinforce essentialist ideas that give succour to hegemonic state mechanisms, or it can choose to challenge majoritarian views, especially vis-à-vis this country’s many others’, is the stark choice he offers in his introduction.

This discussion of audience leads into a text on the country’s advertising industry, which Mohaiemen claims has an audience that art spaces lack and is the natural space in which artists have historically found space for radical(ish) public expression. ‘Forced involvement in national politics is necessarily healthy for local artists,’ he goes on to say, ‘bringing them out of institutional navel-gazing and into larger questions of image-making, ownership and their role as public intellectuals.’ ‘Culture workers’, he declares, ‘were always a significant form of resistance to anti-democratic forces.’ Of which Bangladesh has suffered several. Midnight’s Third Child is a powerful argument for the notion that, as editor and curator Saida Rahman puts it in a conversation with the author for a 2016 exhibition catalogue, ‘artworks create knowledge’. It’s a powerful tool too for anyone (as ignorant as this reviewer) looking for stepping stones towards the individuals and organisations that make up the still largely veiled histories of contemporary art in Bangladesh, as well as an eloquent argument for the potentials of art in many other territories. Mark Rappolt

Contemporary Queer Chinese Art Edited by Hongwei Bao, Diyi Mergenthaler and Jamie J. Zhao Bloomsbury Academic, £85 (hardcover) In 1997 homosexuality was decriminalised in China; it was depathologised in 2001. In 2016 television was banned from depicting ‘irregular sexual relationships’ – a phrase that captured everything queerness might encompass. The period roughly bracketed by these events was one of leniency, when queer arts surfaced alongside avant-garde and feminist movements. Contemporary Queer Chinese Art takes us through this history. After an introduction that accounts for the key moments of recent queer history in China – including the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), the Beijing Queer Film Festival (2001–15), China’s first queer exhibition, Difference-Gender (2009), and Shanghai Pride (2009–20) – the book unfolds

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in 14 essays by artists, activists and curators who helped create those legacies. Among these are reflections by papercut artist Xiyadie, lesbian artist and icon Shi Tou and curator Si Han, who mounted the first institutional show of queer Chinese art, Secret Love (2012), in Stockholm’s Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in 2012. The book, however, is not simply an account of these seminal projects. Through a Judith Butler-inspired discussion about the agency of vulnerability, kinbaku artist and scholar Bohan Gandalf Li rethinks this originally sadomasochistic practice as a desexualised and nonbinary means of connection and care. Art educator Wei Yimu talks about his paintings of penises, inspired by the doodles a nine-year-old student

drew in his class, and how these childlike depictions can be a ‘visual spoof of the compulsory masculinization of Chinese men’. Filmmaker Popo Fan reflects upon the biopolitics of eating (‘When one cannot speak as one wishes, almost the only way to satisfy oneself is to eat. I could almost hear the authorities saying: “Shut the f*ck up! And just eat!”’ Fan writes). Despite the range of themes, at times the writing can feel vague and banal. Indeed, while reading this book you have the nagging sense that there’s another voice buried underneath these English texts speaking words that are perhaps ineffable in both languages. More effort to connect with it might have made this collection more poignant. Yuwen Jiang

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J.G. Ballard: Selected Nonfiction 1962–2007 Edited by Mark Blacklock Across this collection of short-form nonfiction by the British master of speculative fiction is a recurring image of the teenage J.G. Ballard wandering the Shanghai–Nanking railway line at the end of the Second World War, after the Japanese have surrendered but before American or Chinese forces have arrived. Ballard, newly freed from the Shanghai prison camp in which he and his parents had been interned for several years, is left to his own devices, eyewitness to a liminal, ruined world of bombed airfields, gutted houses exposing staircases to nowhere, prison camps self-policed and reinforced to keep the starving masses out; a world in which Japanese soldiers, effectively already dead, the cities of their homeland flattened, await their fate. The young Ballard speaks with them, shares his water, trades an item of clothing as one soldier takes a break from casually hanging a Chinese civilian with telephone wire. The writer was blessed, if that word can be used here, with a rich, early source of imagery and experiences that charged an aesthetic, a worldview, a literary career based on exploring civilisations collapsing, often calmly, under the weight of their ‘psychopathologies’, and what was left once those worlds had been washed away. But long before novels such as The Drowned World (1962), Crash (1973) and High-Rise (1975) established Ballard as the

MIT, £30 / $32.95 (hardcover)

seer of twentieth-century dystopias ruled, as he writes, by the ‘great twin leitmotifs’ of ‘sex and paranoia’, he was a workaday journalist and assistant editor at trade magazines such as British Baker and Chemistry & Industry, churning out book reviews to support himself and his family while writing short stories he would soon begin selling to titles such as New Worlds and Science Fantasy. Throughout his life he would continue producing a wide variety of nonfiction writing ranging from short essays and position statements, cultural commentaries and magazine features, literary and film criticism, travelogues, introductions to foreign editions of his novels, lists, glossaries, indexes. Though many of these writings have been collected previously (most significantly in A User’s Guide to the Millennium, 1996), the reasoning behind this collection, writes its editor, is to include texts that have disappeared from view due to the obscurity of their original publication or that were printed closer to the end of Ballard’s life. Those charged with selecting writings by a dead author have the advantage of shaping a collection to confirm that writer’s contemporary relevance. And Ballard is exceptionally prescient, capturing a world that didn’t yet fully exist or wasn’t visible to most but that today comes to us in waves of intrusive thoughts, from the distortions and alienations of social media,

confusions of spectacle and reality, ‘media manipulators with presidential ambitions… and every intention of producing a thousandyear movie out of them’, drugs created to absolve corporations of responsibility for the damage they have wrought, desert rivieras and other climatologically disastrous masterplans, to name the most obvious. The question then is do Ballard’s insights and visions paradoxically date this collection, in that so much of what he wrote speculatively is manifestly today’s reality (whatever that means), such that one struggles to distinguish between it and a once-outlandish-sounding Ballardian terrain in which people have to see themselves on TV to believe they are real, or to imagine a time when it wasn’t thus? It helps that the collection is introduced with a concise contextualising biography presenting the ‘derelict, dark and half-ruined’ Britain in which Ballard became a writer, and section paragraphs that tightly argue the evidence of Ballard’s continuing influence on culture. For the reader of Ballard’s short texts, polished and then elaborated on over the course of a lifetime, the reward is a sense of being engaged in conversation with a profound, sophisticated and witty companion who repeats himself at times, changes his stories a bit as he goes and trades in the totalising darkness of the human psyche. David Terrien

Monica by Daniel Clowes Jonathan Cape, £20 (hardcover) In Daniel Clowes’s comics the mundane life of ordinary people tends to twine and fuse with the weird, freakish and fantastical. Author of the acclaimed 1997 Ghost World – the zeitgeistcapturing story of American suburban ennui – Clowes has long mined the possibilities of colliding sci-fi tropes with indie-comics culture’s preoccupations with emotional complexity and the frustrations of dead-end contemporary life. Monica, Clowes’s first book since Patience (2016), is a more subtly woven exploration of history, personal regret and redemption, focused on its titular character’s search for the mother who abandoned her sometime during the 1970s, a casualty of the flower-power generation who disappeared into a cult. As the book follows Monica, from grief-stricken teen mourning

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the grandparents who raised her, to successful 90s entrepreneur and on to ageing postpandemic Gen Xer, it’s clear this isn’t just a tale about reconciliation, but a sadder elegy for the babyboomer generation and the optimism of the 1960s as it drifted into the economic and social decline of America during the twenty-first century. Interspersed with Monica’s tale, however, are altogether more bizarre chapters that tell of incursions of supernatural and demonic forces into everyday life – a sideways homage to a more chthonic tradition of horror comics. Monica’s quiet weirdness lies in how Clowes brings these stranger tales into unexplained proximity of his postboomer characters: Monica finds that her dead grandfather is communicating to her through an old radio; the ageing cult her mother escapes

lives on their founder’s origin myths of benign aliens, their hippy utopia gone disastrously wrong. But Monica herself is the heir of that counterculture’s solipsistic turn – making her fortune with designer candles, and ending up in a middle-class enclave of Gen X retirees, all makers of artistic and wellness knickknacks. Clowes’s genre-clashing conjures an apocalyptic view of human life and history – the one that produced the counterculture and its fantasies of end times and transcendence – piercing through the mundane everyday. Monica is a cryptic, sometimes disturbing reflection on human aspiration, disillusion and the fading embers of a more radical past, brilliantly told as the collision of two traditions of comic art – fantastic and realist – forever at odds. J.J. Charlesworth

ArtReview Asia

24/10/2023 11:09

Tellurian Drama by Riar Rizaldi, translated by Fiky Daulay In 1916 the Dutch colonial administration in West Java, Indonesia, started building what was then the world’s most powerful radio transmitter, in the Malabar mountain range, in order to send messages to the Netherlands more than 11,000km away. After the Dutch left Indonesia in 1949, the area was abandoned and the tower fell into ruin. In 2020 the Indonesian government began a plan to reactivate the site as a tourist attraction. That same year, artist-filmmaker Riar Rizaldi released his short film Tellurian Drama, exploring the stratovolcanic landscape surrounding the tower, as well as the intersection of the tale of the transmitter with histories of colonial rule and with indigenous perspectives that regarded the mountain as the abode of divine or ancestral entities. The film also narrates an obscure text by an Indonesian geologist who studied the area, called Drs Munarwan (Drs stands for Doctorandus, a Dutch academic title). His article, ‘Reconfiguring the Earth: Radio Malabar as a Geo-engineering Imagination’ (1986), sketched out the possibility of using radio waves to intensify the growth of flora – predating ‘geoengineering’, the contemporary field that studies ways to remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to combat climate change. The book version of that project is an experimental collage of various formats, with chapters taking the form of essays, fake biographies or fictional stories. One chapter, for example, is a running research log that Rizaldi

Jordan, Jordan Édition, $20 (softcover)

writes in the first person, detailing his interest in the history of radio in Indonesia and his recent trips to the tower; another is a Q&A conversation with a representative from a stateowned forestry company about the development around the site. At the heart of the book is the story of Drs Munarwan, whose background is both hyped and obscured. In the introductory text, he has been described as a ‘geologist and geodesic researcher’, ‘maverick scientist’ as well as ‘pseudoanthropologist, amateur historian, and sciencefiction writer’ – whose illustrious name has been somehow scrubbed clean from all official records. Luckily, Rizaldi manages to get excerpts of Munarwan’s writings, which were allegedly sent by an anonymous online contact. We get to Munarwan’s fiction in the final few chapters. ‘Kronos’, comprising only dialogue, is an extended argument between a ‘radio signal’ sent from the radio tower and an indentured labourer who helped to erect the structure. The signal sees itself as the supreme product of science and rationality, but the slave worker dismisses its importance by saying that he knew the ‘ancestors’ of this little radio signal. ‘We use them to interact with the mountains. It all happened without rationality,’ he says. ‘Our knowledge production has lasted for a long time. Western knowledge only discovered the way to utilize signals, they did not discover signals in a specific way.’ In ‘Tropical Planet’, the National Space Development Agency of Japan receives a message

from the year 2677 BCE about a mission to relocate the population of a dying earth to another planet, called Bumi, whose social organisation is similar to prestate communities in the tropics. In the Buminite commoning system, there is no private property and ‘resources and biodiversity is [sic] not just a property but an important part of cultural formation’. The mission considers going there to share Earth’s advanced technology with the Buminites in return for shelter, but ultimately decides not to, because it is ‘another form of colonialism’. As fiction, these stories are not the most compelling. But they are functional vessels to critique the Indonesian state’s extraction and exploitation of nature, and to suggest alternate futures built on indigenous perspectives. Rizaldi has said in an interview that he is a ‘big fan of conspiracy, fringe-theory, huge-claimtype pseudoscientific books, especially pulp and self-published ones’. His book has the same DNA – but the usual atmosphere of paranoia and excitement is diluted by didacticism. One wishes it were more playful and less of a soapbox; more speculative fiction, less agendaheavy theory. That said, Tellurian Drama is a sustained feat of world-building that explores tropical sci-fi visions inspired by indigenous belief systems. The main transmission I received from this ambitious endeavour is that the author is a new voice worth tuning into. Adeline Chia

Artists Making Books: Poetry to Politics by Venetia Porter British Museum Press, £25 (softcover) An artist book is not, as you might think if applying your knowledge of language and its normal usage, simply a book produced with the involvement of an artist. Or even a book about the work of an artist. Rather, it seems to be a publication in the production and physicality of which the artist is intimately involved. Photobooks yes; exhibition catalogues no. Although as far as this book is concerned, it’s not even as simple as that. ‘Artists books are hard to define as a genre,’ concedes Venetia Porter in her introduction, ‘but one common thread is that these works share a feeling of intimacy, a feeling of discovery.’ Which, you might well say, could include a large amount

of ‘conventional’ literature too. Still, if Artists Making Books is not exactly clear about what it’s about, it is very clear about where it’s about: the Arab-speaking world from the Middle East to North Africa, and South Asia. And it’s very clear too that it seeks to argue that the artist book is not exclusively the property of the Western canon. That’s one of the areas in which this book truly comes into its own; not just in linkages to Arabic calligraphy, miniature painting and literature, but also to concepts like daftar (coined by art-historian Nada Shabout, literally meaning notebook or ledger, but equally pointing to the context – Iraq – in which these books were made)

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and more generally to artist books as particular products of their times. Iranian-American artist Ala Ebtekar is quoted as saying that he is influenced by political pamphlets and zine culture as much as the Arabic classics. More than a simple reflection of the British Museum’s artist-book holdings (although it is substantially a catalogue of images of and pages from works in the collection), this is an important index of artists’ responses (by figures from Dia al-Azzawi and Etel Adnan, to Ahmed Morsi and Al Braithwaite) to the issues and circumstances that have shaped the Arab world in recent times. Nirmala Devi

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Text credits

on the cover Citra Sasmita, photographed by Gus Agung / Niskala Studio, Bali

Words on the spine and on pages 15, 45 and 83 are from Major Rock Edict no 10, attributed to Ashoka, third century BCE

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