ArtReview Asia Autumn 2019

Suki Seokyeong Kang

The Theatre of Objects

Hong Kong 50 Connaught Road Central 白立方 香港中环干诺道中50号

Qin Yifeng, 2017/05/21 12:10 Cloudless, 2017

Qin Yifeng Negative Reading | Reading Negatives 4 September – 16 November 2019

秦一峰 負讀 • 讀負 2019年9月3日 至 11月16日

WeChat: 微信 : whitecubehk whitecube.com

ArtReview Asia vol 7 no 3 Autumn 2019

오나라 오나라 아주오나 ‘Britain is a mixture of despair and hedonism… newly minted revolutions and criminal gangs are fighting for survival in a nation rocked by economic upheaval.’ Welcome to ArtReview Asia’s world, where it turns out tv addiction is a real thing, not just something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Or so ArtReview Asia learned when it found a name for its pain after Googling whether or not it was normal to sit awake into the early hours rewatching old episodes of Peaky Blinders to find out when and how the latest antagonist to the Shelby clan (aka the Peaky Blinders, who’ve previously battled Jews, Italians, Russians…), a Chinese opium dealer called Brilliant Chang (brilliant, and based on a real-life London drug lord), might have been wronged by the kingpins of 1920s Birmingham’s crime scene. ‘Nothing good would come of trade and earning one’s money by one’s own sweat and blood,’ as Mr Ma says in Lao She’s brilliant account of Chinese immigrants living in the British capital at the time (that’s the motto by which ArtReview Asia continues to live its life today btw). Still, old habits die hard, and everyone wants vengeance, especially the Yellow Peril lot (portrayed in the television series as sneaky, manipulative and untrustworthy – and ah, ok, well, that’s pretty accurate for Western thinking at the time, so a bit awks but at least historically correct…). Enter… no, not the dragon, but Andrew Koji! Who’s that, you ask?

Shame on you! Just the actor who plays Brilliant Chang (and who, incidentally, is the first Chinese character of the series that’s not just introduced to be chased and killed in the back of a brothel or drug den). A fellow mixie! Koji’s British (from Epsom) and Japanese, but who cares because we all look the same, and anyway, he’s pretty. There’s a limit to how accurately race can be represented on television, don’t you know.

Anyway, ArtReview Asia’s been binge-watching the autumn season’s new tv series and whatever sausage-shaped film is ground out by Netflix and Amazon (anyone seen

Waffle

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4 SEPTEMBER – 9 NOVEMBER 2019

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HONG KONG WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

H A N S ( J E A N ) A R P, S T E R N / É T O I L E (S TA R ) , 19 5 6 , B R O N Z E , 6 3 × 3 5 × 17 C M / 2 4 ¾ × 13 ¾ × 6 ¾ I N , © S T I F T U N G A R P E .V. , B E R L I N / R O L A N D S W E R T H / 2 019, P R O L I T T E R I S , Z U R I C H , P H O T O : S T E FA N A LT E N B U R G E R P H O T O G R A P H Y Z Ü R I C H

ARP: MASTER OF 20 TH CENTURY SCULPTURE

Always Be My Maybe? It’s a Korean-American romcom – predictable and cutesy, with such a panoply of racial clichés that Netflix is in danger of having none left for its next project), and given that it might not always have the best taste (but in the end it’s only about what tastes good, right?) in television, ArtReview Asia is seriously considering that it might have a problem. Alright, it’s not technically listed as a specific addiction, or classed as ‘substance abuse’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but it’s a real thing: how else would you describe something that helps you escape the neverending dullness and monotony of real life, which in the end is all a construct, like a cardboard film-set built up to cover the truth that humans are in fact here to reproduce and then die, so that the species just goes on and on and on, all while you ponder how ultimately meaningless you are… or so ArtReview Asia would have thought in those early morning hours were it not staring at Tommy Shelby’s otherworldly cheekbones.

“But can’t you find an antidote to this malaise in other forms of entertainment and culture?!”, ArtReview Asia hears you chide (and yes, it is all-hearing as well as allseeing – remember that). Tell that to David Foster Wallace. “Why are you being so self-destructive? You’re an art magazine! Why don’t you look at art?!” Wow, really? tv is art. Everyone knows that. At least everyone born after Nam June Paik, who invented tv art (it says so later in this issue). Next you Luddites will be suggesting that ArtReview Asia ‘connects’ with a Rothko to understand its own ‘feels’. Bit unoriginal.

By ‘you’, ArtReview Asia knows it’s really responding to the voices in its head, but then again, you don’t have a voice here. Only on WeChat or Grindr. Still, to prove it’s not totally insane, it has hosed off the dumpling dribble and sprayed on some air freshener to bring you examples of artists who eschew the conventions and limitations of their mediums and change the way the public perceives modes of representation, where photographs become architecture, sculpture becomes performance or… tvs are art.

And therefore an antidote, and so, in fact, good for you. They say the best therapist is yourself. Well, ArtReview Asia does anyway. And obviously it’s right. It’s always right.

Right – anyone seen Dae Jang Geum? It’s got orphans, cooks, doctors, feminists, hanboks and illegal touching of the king’s body: ArtReview Asia can’t wait… ArtReview Asia

Courtesy

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PARIS ERIC DUYCKAERTS LIONEL ESTEVE THILO HEINZMANN

HANS HARTUNG

SHANGHAI AUGUST 30 − OCTOBER 20, 2019

NEW YORK BERNARD FRIZE LESLIE HEWITT JR

HONG KONG BARRY MCGEE

SEOUL TAKASHI MURAKAMI SHANGHAI HANS HARTUNG NI YOUYU

T1989-U44, (detail) 1989. 130 x 195 cm | 51 3/16 x 76 3/4 in. Courtesy the artist & Perrotin

TOKYO EMILY MAE SMITH

展覽地點─── Venue─── National

國立臺灣美術館

Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts

40359 臺灣台中市西區五權西路一段2號 Tel: +886-4-23723552

2, Sec. 1, Wu Chuan W. Rd., 40359 Taichung Taiwan, R.O.C. http://www.ntmofa.gov.tw

Art Previewed

Previews

by Ben Eastham 21

Sounding Off

by Patrick Langley 35

Notes from Madras

by Charu Nivedita 32 Art Featured

Suki Seokyeong Kang

by Mark Rappolt 38

Nam June Paik

by Juliet Jacques 64

Freewheeling Trip

by Ni Youyu 46

Mark Bradford Interview by Mark Rappolt 70

Dayanita Singh

by Fi Churchman 56

page 64 Nam June Paik, Merce by Merce by Paik: Part One: Blue Studio: Five Segments, 1975–76, single-channel videotape, colour, sound, 15 min, 38 sec.

Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (eai), New York

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Art Reviewed

exhibitions 78

books 90

Aichi Triennale, by Max Crosbie-Jones The Invisible Hand, by John Quin Wong Ping, by Louise Darblay Arin Rungjang, by Adeline Chia Brian Jungen Friendship Centre, by Bill Clarke Parallel: The Ramasun Station Art Trail,

by Max Crosbie-Jones Shin Egashira, by David Terrien Dale Frank, by John Quin

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong Model City: Pyongyang, by Cristiano Bianchi and Kristina Drapić Insurrecto, by Gina Apostol Waiting: A Collection of Stories, by Nighat Gandhi Plastic Emotions, by Shiromi Pinto The Bastard Cookbook, by Antto Melasniemi and Rirkrit Tiravanija Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, by Johny Pitts Zeichnungen, by Peter Handke lost in space 98

page 94 exonemo, Kiss, or Dual Monitors, 2017, hd video, cables, dimensions variable.

Photo: Kai Wasikowski. Courtesy the artists

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Roman Ondak Perfect Society September 13 – October 26, 2019

Potsdamer Strasse 81E D – 10785 Berlin www.estherschipper.com

Art Previewed

The emperor of the Southern Seas was Lickety 19

SEA ART FESTIVAL 2019 2019 바다미술제 SEA ART FESTIVAL 2019 상심의 바다

SEA OF HEARTBREAK

2019/9/28~10/27 다대포해수욕장

DADAEPO BEACH, BUSAN, KOREA

SEA OF HEARTBREAK

Previewed Wu Tsang Gropius Bau, Berlin Through 12 January

Naeem Mohaiemen Experimenter, Kolkotta Through 5 November

Karen Knorr Sundaram Tagore, Singapore 21 September–16 November

Micro Era. Media Art from China Kulturforum, Berlin Through 26 January

Nikhil Chopra Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 12 – 20 September

rifts: Thai contemporary artistic practices in transition Bangkok Art and Culture Centre Through 24 November

Sita and Rama: The Ramayana in Indian Painting Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Through 23 August 2020

Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage & Arts, Hong Kong 4 October – 4 January

A distant relative Hopkinson Mossman, Wellington Through 28 September

Liquefied Sunshine | Force Majeure Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong Through 2 November

kaws National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 20 September – 13 April Philip-Lorca diCorcia David Zwirner, Hong Kong Through 12 October

What Lies Within: Centre of the Centre Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila Through 1 December Istanbul Biennial Various venues, Istanbul Through 10 November Nam June Paik Tate Modern, London 17 October – 9 February The Herstory of Abstraction in East Asia Taipei Fine Arts Museum Through 27 October

Xiao Lu 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong Through 5 October Ryoji Ikeda Taipei Fine Arts Museum Through 17 November

Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance Rubin Museum, New York Through 6 January Genieve Figgis Almine Rech, Shanghai 20 September – 19 October Atsuko Tanaka Moderna Museet, Stockholm Through 16 February

4 The Combat of Rama and Ravana, India, Coromandel Coast, late-eighteenth century, painted and mordant-dyed cotton, 87 × 539 cm.

Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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After the tyrant Iskander is overthrown in Salman Rushdie’s 1983 novel Shame, his exiled wife weaves the history of his reign into 18 magnificent shawls. Rather than the glowing tributes to his greatness that the king might have expected from a dutiful consort, however, Rani’s fabrics relate in graphic detail the systematic torture, sexual violence and moral corruption through which her husband exercised power. Life came to imitate art when, after the publication of his ‘blasphemous’ next novel prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa against him, Rushdie was also forced into hiding. The official histories of absolutist regimes are enforced, as neither the author nor his character needed to be told, by violence.

If everyone projects their own truth onto (whether of gender, nationality or any other reductive category) as, according to curator 1 the world then, as the title of Wu Tsang’s exhiStephanie Rosenthal, ‘a crisis of representation’. bition at Berlin’s Gropius Bau proposes, ‘there Such crises are the theme of Ovid’s is no nonviolent way to look at somebody’. This Metamorphoses (c. 8CE), source of the legend survey of the trans artist’s work, which includes a new video installation shot on the Greek island of the weaver Arachne that Rushdie adapted at the centre of the migrant crisis, extends the to the subcontinent’s post-partition history. artist’s attempts to unsettle fixed categories (of A similarly syncretic approach to Asian and gender, ethnicity, nationhood) by disrupting the European cultures informs the work of phoconventions of documentary filmmaking. By 2 tographer Karen Knorr, who juxtaposes interpreting the world through fluid and hyanthropological studies of the English upper brid narrative strategies that recall Rushdie’s class (Belgravia, 1979–81) with her celebrated magical realism, Tsang’s work also suggests that, series India Song (2008–17) at Sundaram Tagore while looking is always fraught, some ways are in Singapore. The photographs in a series more compassionate than others. The effect is titled, conveniently for the sake of this digest, to render the dissolution of real-world borders Metamorphoses (2014–18), transport conspic-

2 Karen Knorr, Love at First Sight, Palazinna Cinese, 2017, Hahnemühle inkjet print, 80 × 100 cm.

Courtesy Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, Singapore & Hong Kong

1 Wu Tsang, One emerging from a point of view (detail), 2019, two-channel overlapping projections, sound, 43 min.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

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Nikhil Chopra, 2019. Photo: Stephanie Berger. Courtesy the artist

4 The Monkey Prince Angada Steals Ravana’s Crown: Folio from the dispersed Shangri Ramayana series (Style iii), India, Punjab Hills, kingdom of Jammu (Bahu), c. 1700–30, opaque watercolour on paper, 35 × 22 cm. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

uously ‘exotic’ animals into opulent Italian palazzos, the free play of signifiers seeming to celebrate the movement of people and ideas across borders. Besides which, who doesn’t want to look at a photograph in which a giraffe appears to lick clean an Orientalist fresco.

ArtReview Asia can only hope that Nikhil 3 Chopra’s transplantation into the Metropolitan Museum of Art is similarly irreverent. For nine consecutive days the performance artist will meander through the museum’s collections, adopting a variety of different personae in the course of his tours. ArtReview Asia imagines that the artist will improvise a loosely autobiographical story that threads the different objects he encounters (and the cultures they

represent) together. Or, more precisely, that the multiplicity and contradiction of voices will unravel the justifications underpinning the idea of a ‘universal museum’. Either way, 4 let’s hope that the tour makes time for Sita and Rama: The Ramayana in Indian Painting, which displays work made between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries inspired by the Sanskrit epic. The Ramayana offers another example, if it were needed, of how art can be used to support or disrupt the fixed and singular narratives that buttress the myth of fixed and singular identities: in 2011, a celebrated essay

by A.K. Ramanujan was removed from the syllabus of Delhi University after protests that its celebration of the poem’s hundreds of different

Autumn 2019

versions was offensive to ultra-orthodox Hindus.

For a less prescriptive reading of the world’s cultures, meet Chopra in The Temple of Dendur (floor 1, gallery 131).

After Arachne had the temerity to express her own experience of reality (in which the gods abuse their power over humans) and defeat her divine rival in a test of skill, Minerva beat her over the head with a shovel (rather proving her point). Which might serve as a warning to Ruth Buchanan, Oliver Perkins, Peter Robinson and Renee So, whose disparate practices are threaded together at Wellington’s Hopkinson Mossman by their shared inheritance of Arachne’s… umm… thread. With a title that nods to the looseness of the ties that bind these

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5 Ruth Buchanan, Can tame anything, tables, tables, doors, blinds, bodies, 2016, mixed media, 90 × 90 × 120 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Hopkinson Mossman, Wellington

6 kaws, 2016 (installation view, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, uk). Photo: Jonty Wilde

7 Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Head #23, 2001, chromogenic print, 125 × 156 × 5 cm (framed). © the artist.Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York, London & Hong Kong

5 artists together, A distant relative features ‘knitted tapestries, paintings tied up with braided rope, hand-latch hooked rugs, and drooping felt’. A craft always associated with the structuring of subaltern narratives offers a means by which artists can, it is proposed, ‘position themselves in relation to a total(ising) structure’ of power. Arachne, it seems fair to presume, would sympathise.

New York-based kaws first came to promi6 nence as a street artist making interventions on billboard posters in his hometown, a practice he labelled ‘subvertising’. While he may share our heroine’s desire to undermine the stories told by the hegemonic power struc-

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the pointedly titled East of Eden (2008), which tures, he diverges from her in his wholehearted captured a moment at the end of George W. embrace of revenue streams including the proBush’s tenure that the artist might reasonably duction of collectible toys. This major retrospechave assumed marked a generational low in the tive of his paintings, sculptures and design at country’s political disenchantment. That these the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne photographs look in retrospect like artefacts showcases superficially brash, bold productions from a cosy prelude to the terrifyingly unstable that are distinguished by their note of lament politics of today is testament, at least in part, to for lost innocence. the profound unreliability and unaccountability Troubling easy binaries between the ‘auof our era’s most influential narrators. thenticity’ of the street and the ‘artificiality’ 7 of the artist’s studio, Philip-Lorca diCorcia The post-partition histories of the subcontiis best known for his superficially spontaneous nent fictionalised by Rushdie find new tellers but precisely choregraphed photographs.

8 in Naeem Mohaiemen’s Volume Eleven ( flaw in His latest exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong the algorithm of cosmopolitanism) at Experimenter, Kong, includes works from series including Kolkata. The show takes as a starting point a

ArtReview Asia

series of essays by the influential Bengali writer Syed Mujtaba Ali which, written between the world wars, predicted that Germany would defeat Britain and hasten India’s independence.

Mohaiemen riffs on freedom and division by combining typewritten pages, photographs taken by the artist’s father during the 1950s, a video responding to those photographs and a transcribed conversation between the artist, his father and two aunts. Together they tell the stories of a family scattered across the world by the violent consequences of a society’s failure to accommodate different ways of seeing the world.

How artists can respond to social change 9 is one subject of Micro Era. Media Art from China at Berlin’s Kulturforum, which features 10

moving-image artists Cao Fei, Lu Yang, Fang Di and Zhang Peili in a follow-up to 2001’s living in time. 29 contemporary artists from China. The narrative that this exhibition seeks to challenge seems by comparison to the above examples a little academic: video art’s reputation, ‘within the Euro-American context’, as a democratising artform. Yet by interrogating the presumption that the free circulation of information is necessarily empowering to the majority, it might be hoped the show draws attention to how unevenly distributed access to technology is shaping the way that ‘truth’ is being manufactured and disseminated.

At Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, meanwhile, rifts: Thai contemporary artistic practices

in transition documents a comparably dramatic shift in the country’s production of contemporary art from the late 1980s onwards. Those changes were effected through new infrastructures as much as new media or subject matters, with artists establishing independent spaces and transnational networks; that new connections fragment old unities is reflected in the ambivalent title. Nevertheless, the exhibition features many of the biggest stars among the artists who emerged onto the national and international stage during the 1990s and 2000s, among them Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Chatchai Puipia, Chumpon Apisuk, Kamin Lertchaiprasert, Kamol Phaosavasdi, Manit Sriwanichpoom, Michael Shaowanasai, Montien Boonma, Navin

8 Naeem Mohaiemen, Baksho Rohoshyo (Chobi Tumi Kar?), 2016–, solvent transfer prints of drawings and text onto bfk Rives paper, reproductions of vintage photo strips. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata

10 Montien Boonma, Manual Traces in the Paddy Field with Fish Net and Spade, 1991, soil pigment on papers, terracotta, fish net, spade, dimensions variable. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong & Shanghai

9 Lu Yang, Delusional Mandala (still), 2015, single-channel video, colour, sound, 16 min 27 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

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12 South Ho Siu Nam, Whiteness of Tree I (detail), 2018, archival inkjet prints, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

11 Chen Wei, In the Waves #3, 2013. Courtesy the artist

12 Ching Chin Wai, Weather Report: Liquefied Sunshine (documentation), 2014–15, two-channel video, 3 min 40 sec.

Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

Rawanchaikul, Pinaree Sanpitak, Prasong Luemuang, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tawatchai Puntusawasdi: a generation that continues to exert a huge influence on the kingdom’s artists today.

The difficulties for artists and writers in keeping pace, much less predicting, the technological advances that have shaped twenty-first century life were first laid out in the offshoot of New Wave science-fiction that emerged during the 1980s and came to be known as cyberpunk, the wide-ranging influence of which inspires 11 Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future at Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage & Arts. In what some might say is a further excava-

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tion of the themes recently showcased in the institution’s Takashi Murakami exhibition, Phantom Plane explores how cyberpunk aesthetics began to seep into popular visual culture, fuelled

by Manga classics such as Katsuhiro Otomo’s 12 Akira (1982 and its 1988 anime adaptation), Ridley Scott’s Hong Kong-inspired adaptation, Bladerunner (also 1982) and various iterations of cyberpunk superstar William Gibson’s fiction (although ArtReview Asia is curious to see whether or not Robert Longo’s 1995 commercial flop Johnny Mnemonic makes the grade). In any case, cyperpunk’s dystopian and underground visions may be very apt for Hong Kong right now, although it’s fair to say that its immediate present

ArtReview Asia

may be a more pressing concern to visitors than any visions of a future to come.

Because, as no one will have failed to notice, the licence and limits of speech are being violently contested on the streets of the sar. For their dual exhibition Liquefied Sunshine | Force Majeure at Blindspot Gallery, Luke Ching Chin Wai and South Ho Siu Nam draw an Ovidian analogy between the exercise of divine and temporal power. The only difference is that, rather than classical legends of Gods killing humans for sport, they take for a metaphor the ‘acts of God’ described in insurance claims.

Where Ching’s video tracks destructive weather phenomena in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Ho’s

photographs document the damage incurred the artist exhibited no new work. Having had he makes art. The title of his major retrospective when a powerful tropical cyclone made landher tongue cut out by King Tereus, Philomela at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, A Cosmic Journey from fall. Both present Hong Kong as at the mercy smuggled a tapestry telling the story of her rape Infinitesimal to Astronomical, makes clear the scope of greater forces. and mutilation to the king’s wife – she reacted of his ambition as realised in immersive sound 13 Seamlessly picking up the thread, Xiao by chopping up their only son and feeding him sculptures and audiovisual installations, and Lu calls to mind another weaver from the to Tereus in a stew – before transforming into isn’t to be missed. Not to be outdone in the comMetamorphoses, Philomela. A retrospective at 10 a nightingale in order to broadcast the crime petition to find a title which is both bombastic Chancery Lane in Hong Kong gathers together in song. You might want to stay away from any and deeply helpful for writers trying to work out works including Sperm (2006) – a protest against what the show might actually be about in advance canapes at the opening of this one. the denial of women’s reproductive rights – of its opening, the Museum of Contemporary Taking big data for their source, the ‘data14 matics’ of glitch-music superstar Ryoji Ikeda and the hugely influential Dialogue (1989), 15 Art and Design in Manila plumps for What Lies Within: Centre of the Centre. How the ‘centre which staged the artist’s experience of sexual generate pattern and form from the frightenabuse as part of a wider protest against the abuse ingly unpredictable and bewilderingly complex of the centre’ is distinguished from ‘the centre’ of power, prompting a backlash that contributed systems that shape our lives. Which is, it occurs continues to escape ArtReview Asia, but maybe to ArtReview Asia, just another way of saying it’s just not getting into the spirit of a show that to a period of almost 15 years of silence, in which

14 Ryoji Ikeda, code-verse, 2018. © the artist. Courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum

13 Xiao Lu, Dialogue, 1989, c-type print on vinyl, documentation of installation and performance during China/Avant-Garde at National Art Gallery, Beijing.

Courtesy the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong

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will ‘question notions of perception, intuition, and empirical knowledge’ through the work of Mel O’Callaghan, Laurent Grasso, Suzanne Treister and Pamela Rosenkranz. No answers to the aforementioned questions will be forthcoming, the press release warns, only ‘visceral presentations of probabilities and truths’.

Which gruesome image suggests the Roman practice of divination by reading the entrails of disembowelled animals, which is how ArtReview Asia currently feels about interpreting gallery press releases.

The director of the Istanbul Biennial might be accused of having tempted the fate that fortune tellers read when announcing that the institution has always ‘turned the lack

of a permanent venue to its advantage’, only for it to transpire that the landmark venue it had earmarked for the 2019 edition was packed to the rafters with asbestos. The last-minute resettlement of a number of the biennial’s artists, nonetheless, a useful metonym for an 16 exhibition that, under the title of The Seventh Continent, will investigate the causes and consequences of ecological crisis and the movement of people. Figuring the artist as ‘foreigner’ or ‘savage’ to the self of the viewer, curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s statement promises a show focused on archipelagic models of social organisation in the Anthropocene. Which of course sparked a serious-minded philosophical debate in the offices of ArtReview Asia, at least until someone

pointed out that there are now only five continents (there used to be seven but Europe and Asia have been folded together by some ‘modern’ geographers, as were North and South America), in which case the island of plastic floating in the centre of the Atlantic to which the title nods should be the sixth, not the seventh. But if there are in fact seven actual continents, it would make the artificial landmass the eighth. After much debate, it turns out that no one really knows. Which lesson, ArtReview Asia often thinks, might be the real message of all art.

The inability of the world’s great minds to agree on what constitutes a continent does not inspire hope for a coming era of global intellectual cooperation. But a significant survey of the

17 Nam June Paik, Magnet TV, 1965, television, magnet, 72 × 49 × 62 cm. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Tate Modern, London

16 Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Eastern Promises viii), 2018, ink, acrylic and oil on jute over canvas. Courtesy the artist

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ArtReview Asia

19 Kimsooja, Lotus: Zone of Zero, 2008 (installation view, Galerie Ravenstein, Brussels).

Photo: Fabrice Kada. Courtesy the artist, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Korea, and Galerie Kewenig, Berlin

18 Yang Shih-Chih, An Elusive Curve, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 180 × 300 cm.

Courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum

17 pioneering work of Nam June Paik at London’s Tate Modern (travelling afterwards to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) offers a glimpse of what a global, open, interdisci-

plinary and genuinely democratic cultural discourse might look like. At a time when the superficial freedoms fostered by fast-access telecommunications networks have come to seem sinister, Paik’s demonstration of the capacity of new technologies to advance rather than obstruct progress feels timely. Not that anyone knows what progress is either.

Indeed, the branching and unpredictable ways in which intellectual currents travel 18 around the world are traced by The Herstory of Abstraction in East Asia at Taipei Fine Arts

Museum. Telling the stories of the evolution of the story to demand inclusion of their own of modernisms through Taiwan’s Fifth Moon tragedies, histories and comedies.’

Language is among the battlegrounds of Group, Japan’s Gutai group and Korea’s history, or herstory, or rather her/his/tory/ies.

Dansaekhwa movement, the show contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the dis19 Curated by Sara Raza, Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance at the Rubin Museum, parate forms and versions that an idea or set New York brings together Lida Abdul, Kader of ideas can, like the basic narrative structure of The Ramayana, accommodate. Atsuko Tanaka’s Attia, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Naiza Khan, Kimsooja, Denkifuku (Electric Dress) (1956) – more on which Pallavi Paul, Shahpour Pouyan, Ibrahim Quraishi, Nari Ward and Hank Willis Thomas on later – appears here in the form of the preparathe principle that their works ‘poetically employ tory drawings that will be exhibited alongside non-conformity and resistance as tools to works by artists including Yayoi Kusama, Yang question and upend power in society’. Given Shih-Chih and Ahn Mija. ‘The women seem to that ArtReview Asia’s attempts to weave these have taken over,’ says the narrator of Shame in previews together with reference to a variety of a quote that could serve as an epigraph to this verse epics has frayed disastrously, it would draw show, ‘they marched in from the peripheries

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20 Genieve Figgis, Teatime, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 100 × 140 cm. © the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech, Shanghai

21 Atsuko Tanaka, Denkifuku (Electric Dress), 1956, the artist wearing her Electric Dress suspended from the ceiling at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition in Ohara Hall, Tokyo. © Kanayama Akira and Tanaka Atsuko Association

your attention to the use of the word ‘poetically’. to escape the crises of twenty-first-century Let’s hope that the adverb here connotes an life. But it’s difficult to begrudge these selfconsciously literary paintings their eccentric approach that resists fixed (and by extension humour and commitment to sensory pleasure, violent) definitions in favour of describing the not least because they feel so defiantly at odds world exactly as it is observed, which is to say with the wider mood. If we accept that a healthy truthfully. (ok, ArtReview Asia also knows that culture should be able to accommodate different ‘poetically’ might be as potentially meaningless as the seven continents and progress.) perspectives on the world, that should include If even poetry is a weapon of the resistance, even those that seem to have turned away from it.

Ultimately, as ArtReview Asia is coming to feel as the Rubin’s press release implies, you might about this article, it might be better to rip up reasonably ask if there is anything left that is the stitching and start again. A retrospective not political. One answer might be the paintings 20 of Genieve Figgis exhibited at Almine Rech, 21 of Atsuko Tanaka (see the promise three paragraphs back – ArtReview Asia is a deliverer!)

Shanghai, which in their indebtedness to the at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet shows how boisterous scenes of Watteau seem determined

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ArtReview Asia

she and her colleagues in the postwar Gutai group constructed a new idea of art from the scraps of a devastated society. The most famous of her works is Denkifuku (Electric Dress) (1956), a costume comprising hundreds of coloured lightbulbs that flashed when worn by the artist.

This is the point at which ArtReview Asia would, had it not comprehensively run out of steam, wrap up its themes of new media, performance and the future in this image of the artist as postmodern seamstress. Instead, it will finish with the short film Round on Sand (1968), which shows Tanaka on the beach drawing circles to be washed away by the tide, like a spider building a web in the wind. Ben Eastham

Celebrating London’s architecture: Sir John Soane’s Museum. Photograph: Dan Tobin Smith.

Frieze London & Frieze Masters 3–6 October 2019 Tickets at frieze.com

I recently visited Peru and Chile for three weeks.

Reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels had left me with an insatiable curiosity to visit the former, the latter was an even older dream-come-true.

Names such as the former president Salvador Allende, poets Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra, musicians Violeta Parra and Victor Jara, and writer Antonio Skármeta (the author of two exceptional novels – The Postman, 1985, and I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning, 1975) are an integral part of my life. Even in India.

Entertainment for Tamils usually means cinema or cricket; literature is an afterthought, if that. Ironic, really, given that language is all that defines someone as being Tamil. The writer lives in a pathetic situation: in most cases around 200 copies of his or her books sell at home and Tamil books are rarely translated and published overseas. The writers are forced to take up second jobs to make a living. The twentieth-century short-story writer Thi. Ja. Ranganathan is just one of many great Tamil writers to have been forgotten. Not just by readers but by today’s Tamil authors too.

He was an inspiration to writers of his own era, and a symbol of Gandhian principles. He was a freedom fighter, involved in the independence struggle, but refused to accept the financial help offered by the postindependence government, claiming that he and others like him hadn’t sacrificed their lives for monetary benefit. In 1927, when he was a young man, there was a three-day Congress Party conference held in Madras. Thi. Ja. Ranganathan was attending for the great leaders like the Mahatma. As soon as it ended, at around 11pm, Ranganathan rushed to get home. The convenor of the conference asked him what his hurry was, told him to relax and leave with everyone else the next morning. But Ranganathan insisted. When the convenor asked him what the problem was, Ranganathan replied, ‘My one-year-old child expired this morning, I have to do the rituals’. ‘omg, are you a human being?’ the shocked convenor asked. ‘No sir, I am a worker for Congress,’ Ranganthan replied.

Although he lived a long life (1901–74), I barely managed to find even one photograph of him. In his old age he did not have anywhere to live before eventually allotted a home by the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board. In the one photograph I did

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Points of View notes from madras Charu Nivedita compares the lot of tamil writers to his cultural heroes in peru and chile

The author outside Victor Jara Stadium, Santiago

ArtReview Asia

obtain, he stands with the document number of the house assigned to him written on a chalkboard. It looks like one of those mugshots in which the inmate holds a card with his identification number on it. Sadly, the count of Tamil writers who have lived and died in poverty doesn’t end with Ranganathan.

Every Tamil writer vanishes without having received their due credit. This is even more the case on the international stage. To me, the poet Subramanya Bharathi (1882–1921) is on a par with Rabindranath Tagore for his poetic excellence, but the sad truth is that the rest of the world doesn’t know much about him.

The reason? No one cared to bring him to light and translate his work to the world (even though Gandhi, having met Bharathi on just one occasion in Madras, was moved to declare to local politicians, ‘This man is your treasure; take good care of him’). Meanwhile, the Chilean poet Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández (1893–1948) was claiming that Pablo Neruda had plagiarised Tagore in his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). Bharathi’s family struggled to make ends meet, while Tamil professors in prestigious universities remain completely buried in the glory of 2,000-year-old Sangam literature to the exclusion of any notion of contemporary writing, however brilliant.

I was once invited to give a lecture in the French department of a university in Madras.

When he met me, the institution’s vice-chancellor proudly announced, “I’ve seen you on tv!” I could understand a cab driver saying something like that, but this man belonged to the university’s Tamil department. That’s a painful truth.

Made more so by the fact that when I encountered a cab driver in Chile, he had a novel by José Donoso on the seat next to him.

Although Santiago, at the outset, resembles a Western European city, it turned out to be rather more ‘third world’ in many aspects. Despite the cold temperatures (it was between 0 and 10 degrees Celsius), I couldn’t find hot water anywhere. The shower produced a frequent but nevertheless shocking cold splash and the hotel room had no heater. When I asked my travel guide, Roberto, how he managed to survive the cold in his home, he said, smiling, “I can’t afford a heater.

Just wine and a quilt.”

In South America everyone I met seemed to start their day with a litre of fruit juice, switch to green tea during the day and wine/beer at night. More than that, here water and beer cost the same. Unfortunately for me, when I drink beer, my thirst only increases.

Another surprise was to find out that Lima’s upscale Miraflores district neighbours a decidedly downscale slum called San Juan de Miraflores.

The slum is separated from the city by a 10km wall that some tourists have referred to as the ‘Wall of Shame’.

When I told the hotel staff that I wanted to see all this, they immediately advised against it, warning me that I wouldn’t return alive. Even the local cab driver was against the idea. Until I agreed to pay him extra.

The sight of San Juan’s slum was shocking, something I had not seen even in India. It was as if a place with a population of just over 300,000 did not have a single toilet. Indeed, each family, it turned out, had a dwelling space that was no more than a 3m by 2m room with an asbestos covering. They cooked in the open. Every home seemed to have at least four or five dogs and cats.

How could the government let its people survive

from top ‘Wall of Shame’ separating the upscale Miraflores neighbourhood from the impoverished San Juan de Miraflores, seen in the second photo

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in such dilapidated conditions? I asked a child, using the little Spanish I knew, if she went to school. She replied that she was attending a government-run elementary school. But I know for a fact that most of the children here could never afford the cost of attending school past elementary level. Most likely she will end up as domestic help in one of the well-to-do houses.

Despite their living conditions, the people I met there were incredibly caring. That day Peru was playing Uruguay in the 2019 Copa América.

Peru was inching closer to victory, and every household was going berserk with joy. A worker invited me to dine with him. But I was too scared because of the dogs and their constant barking.

Even though I love and raise dogs myself.

From Lima I went to Machu Picchu. To me it is unique among all the wonders of the world, because it is only there that you see nature’s extravagance and man’s creative brilliance coexisting. From there I stayed overnight in Cuzco before heading to Bolivia. Cuzco is at an elevation of 3,399m, and I could hardly breathe at such a high altitude. Like most Indians, I have a heart condition. I did find Sorojchi pills at Lima airport, but my cotraveller from Bangalore stopped me from buying them, pointing out how expensive they were – equivalent to Rs 2,000. He suggested that we get some in Cuzco instead. I don’t have much knowledge about anything other than reading and writing, so I readily went along with his suggestion. But by the time we reached Cuzco most of the shops were closed. And the few that were open didn’t stock the pills. I began to dread that I was going to return to India inside an aluminium box.

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I had to resort to breathing with the help of an oxygen cylinder, not once but twice. But that relief only lasted an hour each time. I couldn’t sleep that entire night and cancelled my trip to Bolivia and returned to Santiago.

The next morning when I left the hotel in Cuzco, I saw several older men and women, probably in their eighties, making merry by drinking beer to their heart’s content. It made me pity the Indian lifestyle that has left people in their fifties so unhealthy.

The first thing I wanted to do in Santiago was to see Victor Jara Stadium. On 11 September 1973, the presidential palace, occupied by Salvador Allende, the first openly Marxist politician to be elected president of a liberal democracy, was bombed and shot at on the orders of Chilean general Augusto Pinochet.

That afternoon Allende is said to have taken his own life using an ak-47 presented to him by Fidel Castro. Shortly after the coup, Pinochet’s army imprisoned, tortured and killed thousands of intellectuals, leftists, professors and student leaders in the National Stadium of Chile. Victor Jara, the famous Chilean singer and supporter of Allende, was among those incarcerated.

His guards tortured him, brought him to the centre of the stadium, made him put his hands on a table and smashed them to a pulp with an axe.

Then they dared Jara to sing. Which he did, with a smile on his face.

His body, riddled with bullets, was found a few days later. (Eight former army officers were sentenced last year in Chile for Jara’s murder, with a ninth sentenced as an accessory; in 2016 another officer was found liable in us courts for the singer’s death.)

Naturally Roberto knew about Jara, but he had no clue that a sports hall had been renamed after him in 2004. Neither did any of his fellow guides.

We had to resort to a map to help us get there. The stadium manager shared a piece of information with me: “Victor Jara’s hand was smashed not with an axe, but with a hammer”, at which point he broke down and cried. The street outside looked like those in India – an open toilet. On the main road,

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several Haitians had set up small stalls and were selling fakes of branded shoes and socks at a very cheap rate. The moment they sensed a cop around, they immediately scooped their stuff, bundled it up and fled the place. They were back as soon as the police left the scene. This game reminded me of the mysterious old Haitian lady in Rogelio Sinán’s novel The Red Beret (1954).

Roberto said that Haitians were goodhearted people despite their poverty.

The stadium manager told me how despondent he was about the fact that so few visited his venue any more since they stopped hosting music events in 2009. “When we were returning from Valparaiso to Santiago we came through a small village called Pomaire. I heard a young lady in a restaurant singing Victor Jara’s songs.

Such is his greatness that he has become one with your lives and culture,” I said.

Charu Nivedita is a novelist and writer living in Chennai. This text has been translated from the Tamil by Vidhya Subash

A woman sings the songs of Victor Jara in a restaurant in the town of Pomaire all images Courtesy the author

ArtReview Asia

I recently treated myself to a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. I should have done it years ago.

They have improved my life immensely. As one irate Amazon reviewer pointed out, in a fit of buyer’s remorse, the headphones don’t quite cancel noise, not entirely. That would be impossible. After visiting an anechoic chamber at Harvard in 1951, John Cage observed that, once external sounds had been removed, he could hear the low hum of his blood and the high whine of his nervous system.

(The latter is controversial: it may have simply been tinnitus.) ‘There is no such thing as silence,’ he concluded of his revelatory encounter with quiet. It hasn’t stopped scientists attempting to engineer it.

As the irate reviewer notes, my headphones don’t cancel. They dampen, mitigate, soothe. This act of sonic subtraction, which has done wonders for my ability to focus on work or zone out during long commutes along grinding train tracks, is revealing in itself. The ambient disarray of our acoustic commons subsides at the click of a button.

In its absence, I hear, perhaps paradoxically, the sound of noise-cancellation at work – a process in which unwanted sounds are more or less erased by soundwaves of equal amplitude but inverse phase.

(A process of addition, then, rather than subtraction: of sound destroying sound.) The result is a high-frequency residue of normal hearing that, to my ears, has an unmistakably dry quality.

It makes me think of iced Campari, a bitter, crisp drink for the ears.

I’ve recently become preoccupied with sound and how it influences – saturates – my experience of basically everything. It’s partly a belated effect of growing up with a pianist grandmother, sitting at her side while she taught me Chopsticks, observing her hands as they crossed the keys, and understanding that the soft hinged clack of the action being pressed was as satisfying to hear as the notes they summoned.

And it’s partly a result of living in 2019, when spending two seconds on social media, tuning in live to the latest Westminster meltdown or hearing language itself further debased with every fresh wash of the news cycle fills me with a desire for noise-cancellation on a global scale.

I’m working on this piece at the library, or trying to, when a school group in matching hi-vis tabards bursts into a full-throated, borderline atonal rendition of Baa-Baa Black Sheep in the picture-book section behind me. (Sorry, kids: the sheep drowned in a flood, you will inherit a ruined earth.) I flick the switch – ah, that crisp hiss – and my head is suspended in a private, sound-proofed

sounding off

Patrick Langley enjoys the silence

A scientist performs an acoustic experiment in the Bell Labs anechoic chamber, Murray Hill, New Jersey, 1947. Photo: Eric Schaal

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booth, a black box for the mind. The kids are still there, but it’s hard not to feel affection for their exuberant, Johnny Rotten-ish howls, now that the edge has been taken off.

Becoming aware of a reduction in noise makes me more aware of what I’m missing – the remainder that refuses to be erased. This, I realise now, is what makes sound so exciting for me, and such a headache for curators: its spooky refusal to stay in the frame. It’s always going places it shouldn’t, leaking, seeping, infiltrating, however hard we attempt to suppress it. It careens around corners, leaks from monitors, wobbles through walls. The German word for sound art – a loose, slippery term for a bunch of practices that blur the distinctions between music and art, concert hall and gallery – is predictably evocative here: Klangkunst. The word itself reverberates. Sound clangs in ways we don’t always expect.

I was reminded of all this the other day, while standing in the genteel confines of a Mayfair gallery, frowning at the fleshy smudges and crimson smears of an abstract painting. A car with a thumping sound system drove past. Its subwoofer was so loud I would have needed a Richter scale to measure it. The gallery was physically affected by sound, perhaps even structurally compromised. Windows hummed in their frames. Pictures buzzed on their hooks. These noises blended with the drone of the aircon unit above the entrance, the clack of desktop keyboards behind the front desk, the hum of fluorescent tubes, the sigh of traffic muffled by glass, the squeak of Nikes on polished concrete, the invigilator clearing his throat, all of it overlapping, interfering, blending, causing me to project a state of momentary confusion onto the painting itself. The car drove past. A monkish hush resumed.

Which was the more conducive state, I wondered, to appreciating that (or any) painting? I don’t think of the car and its weapons-grade sound system as having intruded on my pure, solitudinous contemplation of a visual object, because such purity, like silence, simply doesn’t exist. Sound is integral to the experience of art. You can’t cancel the noise, just reduce it. Listening conditions looking, and vice versa.

Perhaps the two are inextricable. Here’s a quick test: are you looking at this sentence, or hearing it in your inner ear?

Patrick Langley is the author of the novel Arkady (2018) and an editor at art-agenda

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Coming in November

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Art Featured

The emperor of the Northern Sea was Split 37

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Suki Seokyeong Kang The Art of Falling Apart

by Mark Rappolt Portrait by Albrecht Fuchs

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One of the many ways in which one might seek to define contemporary clear or self-evident, but precisely because it evades easy readings or art (assuming that you’ve ruled out the most obvious ones to do with quick definitions. temporal immediacy – and let’s face it, something like Wikipedia’s Kang studied oriental painting (‘very typical, traditional’ in the ‘contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the artist’s words) at high school and then at Ewha Woman’s University 20th century or in the 21st century’ is both vague and contradictory, in Seoul, where she is currently a professor of Korean painting. and a lot less than specific) is to say that it describes an artform that Following these studies in her homeland she completed an ma in moves outside the restraints of any single medium. Because today the painting at the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 2012. world belongs to those who wish to resist any attempt to define and Grandmother Tower (2011–13) is a foundational work and has been pigeonhole them (despite the persistent attempts of governments followed by an ongoing series of similarly titled sculptures (the around the world to do precisely the opposite). By that standard, Suki latest of which is on show in the Central Pavilion in Venice) that Seokyeong Kang is a contemporary artist. And other people, notably evolve the initial theme. The latter was originally developed at the the curator Sungwon Kim, have written elegantly about her in these time Kang’s grandmother, who had been a central force in her life to date, was dying, and was designed kind of genre-busting terms.

Kang is a painter who produces sculpture, to mimic her height and posture Kang is a painter who produces sculpture, a sculptor who tends (later versions have reached greater a sculptor who tends to organise her work to organise her work as installaheights) as she arrived at the point as installation and eschews static form. She at which her body could no longer tion and eschews static form. She support its own weight. (Each unit embraces both representation and embraces both representation and abstracabstraction; some might call her a of Kang’s work is still designed not tion; some might call her a performance performance artist, others a designto exceed the average weight of a artist, others a designer. All this appears to human body.) Its form is a leaning er. So far so little: all this appears to tell you something, while actutell you something, while revealing nothing skeletal structure, constructed out of the variously sized, modular, ally revealing nothing. If the medium is not the focus, then it must be the message, you cry! There’s drumlike frames of industrial dish carriers. It describes a form of nothing more contemporary than that! And yet any discussion of the seriality, but one that lacks precision and rigour. Each of the metal ‘message’ in Kang’s output is no more straightforward than the defi- carriers is wrapped in coloured thread, or sometimes leather, that nition of her medium. That, at least, was certainly my experience of the artist has described as a reflection of the colour and glamour she bumping into her Land Sand Strand (2016–18) at last year’s Liverpool saw in her grandmother, but which also provides the friction and Biennial (another version is on show in the Arsenale at this year’s grip that enables one unit to support the weight of another. The Venice Biennale). Even after I had picked up an ‘activation manual’ whole looks solid but precarious, static but on the brink of collapse, that contained stick-figure instructions for positions and move- composed of lines but emphatically three-dimensional, safe but ments of the body and a maplike grid. But sometimes a work of art potentially dangerous. Paradoxical yet axiomatic, it has something can intrigue you not because it articulates something that is instantly to say, but it is what it is: a series of found objects rearranged and

preceding pages Suki Seokyeong Kang, 2019, installation view at Mudam, Luxembourg.

Photo: Albrecht Fuchs

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Land Sand Strand, 2012–19, installation view at the 58th Venice Biennale. Photo: Chunho An. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

ArtReview Asia

this and following pages Black Mat Oriole, 2016–17, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist, Kukje Gallery, Seoul, and Tina Kim Gallery, New York

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above Grandmother Tower–tow #19-03, 2013–19, thread on painted steel, aluminium wire, brass bolts, leather scraps, wheel, 34 × 47 × 117 cm.

Photo: Chunho An. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

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facing page Land Sand Strand (still), 2018, video, colour, sound, 6 min 22 sec. Photo: Chunho An. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

ArtReview Asia

renewed, or a series of coloured lines, a demonstration of the action came across as an assault course of metal frames, woven mats and of and a reaction to the force of gravity. But equally its structure wheeled sculptures with painted elements. Or, to use the terms of speaks of age and change, with an implied sense of rhythmic preci- painting and sculpture, a space formed of colour and line, texture, sion. This sense is even greater in later iterations of the work, such planes and fields. An intriguing arrangement of traditional craft, as Grandmother Tower–tow #19-01 (2018–19) or Grandmother Tower–tow adapted, totemlike furnishings, modular structures and painted #19-03 (2013–19), which further incorporate variations on a wheeled gestures produced a space through which viewers were forced to naviwalking frame (which is also the basis of the Circled Stairs series, 2011–, gate rather than simply proceed. The space was further activated by in which walking frames are piled one on top of another to create the dancers performing movements derived from Kang’s research into frame of a ladder or staircase) into the base of the tottering tower, the Chuangemu (which the artist translates as ‘Spring Oriole Dance’), and which are at times further activated by performers who preform a royal dance developed in Korea under the Joseon Dynasty during choreographed movements or interact with the objects. the early nineteenth century. While the structure evolved from the For Kang, her traditional training began with a bodily relation- jeongganbo notation, developed in Korea during the fifteenth century, for choreography and music, and ship to a horizontal sheet of paper, articulated in the form of a block defined by the need to ‘pour’ her Her structures may look like they are of cells (representing the passage narratives onto its surface. It’s easy designed to support bodies (or indeed of time) in which symbols repreto see how a similar process has to describe support – objective or intershaped her attitude to filling space senting musical notes or chorewith objects that evoke bodily ographed actions are described. personal – more generally), but as you gestures and narratives in the Surrounded by Kang’s sculptures, walk through a show of her work, it’s minds of viewers. In the case of the the solo dancers performed a series not like the artist is holding your hand latter, while she gives hints, you’re of movements within the space of largely left with a space in which a square hwamunseok mat. In Kang’s and telling you what’s going on you can create your own connective work, and extending the ideas first threads – via, perhaps, memories of your own grandmother, rather developed in Grandmother Tower, the mat becomes the restricted space than hers. Her structures may look like they are designed to support in which a dancer, performing to music, explores the dimensions of bodies (or indeed to describe support – objective or interpersonal – and space available to their bodies, which within this forest of sculpmore generally), but as you walk through a show of her work, it’s not ture seems analogous to the creation of individual space within a like the artist is holding your hand and telling you what’s going on. uniformly arranged urban environment. It’s a space for bodies at rest Kang’s more recent multimedia installations such as Land, and in motion, for stasis and change. A present informed, for those Sand, Strand or Black Mat Oriole (2017) are more complex still, incor- who wish to find it, by the past. ara porating multiple sculptures, performances and videoworks to expand the process that evolved from two to three dimensions into Work by Suki Seokyeong Kang is on show at Mudam, Luxembourg, a fourth dimension of time. In Liverpool, Land, Sand, Strand initially through 1 April

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Freewheeling Trip

by Ni Youyu

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pages 46 and 47 Freewheeling Trip (Imaginary Places of Interest), 2017, found photographs, 22 × 62 cm pages 48 and 49 Freewheeling Trip (Swimming with Chairman Mao), 2018, found photographs, 22 × 70 cm pages 50 and 51 Freewheeling Trip (The Ideal Lake Tai), 2018, found photographs, 22 × 62 cm pages 52 and 53 Freewheeling Trip (International Holiday), 2018, found photographs, 22 × 70 cm pages 54 and 55 Freewheeling Trip (Fake West Lake), 2018, found photographs, 22 × 70 cm all images Courtesy the artist

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ArtReview Asia

Ni Youyu is based in Shanghai. A graduate of the Shanghai Academy of Arts, where he majored in traditional Chinese painting, he works across a variety of mediums, merging traditional and contemporary techniques or methodologies, and often using found objects.

The passage of time, its measurement and recording is a frequent subject. New work is on show at the Yuz Museum and at Galerie Perrotin in Shanghai through 20 October

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The Reinvention of a Medium Dayanita Singh’s drive to undermine the conventions of photography as art changes the way we think of the photographic object itself

by Fi Churchman

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above Pop-Up Book Shop / my offset world, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Dan Bradica.

Courtesy the artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York preceding pages Pothi Khana, 2018 (installation view, Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 2018) facing page Mona and Myself, 2018, extracted diptych from Museum of Chance Book Object series, two hinged wooden structures, 30 × 66 × 3 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York

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ArtReview Asia

“I call myself an offset artist,” says Dayanita Singh. Anyone who an important photographer, then we will see.’” She was eighteen at follows contemporary art closely knows her as one of India’s leading the time, and after accompanying Hussain on tour for the next six photographers. Yet, as we talk over a video link (she is in New Delhi, winters, in 1986 she produced her first photobook, titled after her the place of her birth and a city she has called home, periods of study subject, as her final degree project. in Ahmedabad and New York aside, ever since), she makes the stateThe photographs in that book became more than a series of ment with an ease and certainty that I can only imagine comes from concert shots, instead forming an in-depth study of Hussain – with decades spent trying to figure out where she fits within the traditional images of the musician during his practice sessions and concerts set parameters of being a ‘photographer’. And, to be fair to her descrip- alongside intimate scenes at rest and with his family, captioned with Hussain’s handwritten notes and printed alongside excerpts from tion, the printed book is her primary exhibition format.

Although Singh grew up surrounded by the photographs and interviews between Singh and the tabla player. family albums made by her mother, Nony Singh, who is also a photog“I realised if I could just say ‘I’m a photographer’, then I could rapher, her initial studies were in the field of typography, fuelled by go wherever I liked. I could travel with whomever I liked. I didn’t an ambition to create new fonts that would better reflect the diver- have to be answerable to anyone. I just invented the role of photogsity of languages spoken in India. rapher for myself so that I could “I didn’t have to be answerable to anyone.

It was, appropriately, a book, and be free and not get boxed in by more specifically an assignment marriage or family or gender or I just invented the role of photographer to produce one during her first artform or nationality. I hate all of for myself so that I could be free and year at university, that led her to that.” When she decided to study not get boxed in by marriage or family the medium with which she is at New York’s International Center now identified. She tells me she of Photography, Singh asked her or gender or artform or nationality” thought that if she could quickly mother to use the money that had photograph the famed tabla player Zakir Hussain during a concert been set aside for her dowry to pay the school fees. Nony, keen that in Bombay for this homework, she could then spend the rest of the her four daughters be financially independent, granted her eldest evening partying in the city. It’s a story she’s well versed in telling: an daughter Dayanita that wish. This independent streak, encouraged organiser at the concert told her not to take the photos, then pushed by her affluent and comfortably liberal upbringing, freed her from her away. She fell in front of a hallful of people and was left humili- the social constraints of the time. ated. Yet the second part of the story reveals something about Singh, While she studied the work of, as she calls them, the “American not as a photographer or artist, but as a person: her tenacity and defi- masters of photography” (she means the likes of William Eggleston ance of expectations, both professional and social, that would drive and Garry Winogrand), she says that none, bar Robert Frank, had a direct influence. Instead, inspiration came, and continues to do so, her practice for the next four decades.

“I went outside and I waited for Zakir Hussain to finish the from music and literature. “I use literature to get out of photogconcert,” she recalls. “He came out and I put my hands on my hips, raphy,” she is fond of saying. She mentions Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters and I said, ‘Mr Hussain, I’m a young student today. Someday I’ll be to a Young Poet (1929) – specifically the first in the series – in which the

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poet writes that a work of art will be good when it arises out of a necessity represents something that, for Singh, is alive and evolving, expanding to create, and finds inspiration in the personal and the everyday. the medium of photography beyond the frame of the image.

That line of thought translates to the pictorial work of Singh, We discuss the current position of photography within the who additionally chooses to give less importance to the individual artworld and she is quick to criticise how contemporary photography photograph as a work of art, treating it more as a raw material, like exhibitions are “fossilised”, stuck in the mode of showing photoink or paint, that can be applied to an object. “Photography in itself is graphic prints on a wall. She says when she first began showing silver just not enough,” she says. “We have to do more with it. I knew from gelatin prints in wall-mounted frames, she felt stifled: “There must the beginning that the book was at the heart of my work. That’s all I be other ways of sharing that work. We cannot follow the dictate of a museum or a gallery space on how wanted to do.”

“I always felt that I wanted the book to be the photography has to be seen.”

By calling herself an offset artist, Singh sets herself apart from the catThis frustration at the lack of exhibition. I wanted to slip the book into the innovation in the medium, couegories of ‘photographer’ and ‘pubframe so that people would know that even pled with the desire to change how lisher’, but at the same time situates if they can only see one image, I have a whole photography is experienced in muthe output of both those professions within the artworld. Further, as the symphony that I created around that image” seum spaces, has led Singh to esdominant form of processing large chew that conventional method, print-runs, offset printing is a cost-effective way of making books that and instead find ways to fill the negative spaces of a gallery with her allows Singh to experiment with the way they might be bound – as book objects, boxes and ‘museums’. “I love the book, but I also love the well as to challenge how art, especially that which can be printed to museum space, and I wanted to find a way between the two – a third demand, is ultimately valued in the context of that artworld. space. So I started to make my book objects,” she says. “I always felt that But when she says the book is at the heart of her work, Singh’s devel- I wanted the book to be the exhibition. I wanted to slip the book into opment of the form suggests that it’s more than just the the frame so that people would know that even if they Montage 1, 2019, can only see one image, I have a whole symphony that primary output of her practice. It seems essential. As if black-and-white montage, I created around that image,” she explains, referring the book is not just a means of presenting her work, but 78 × 78 cm (framed)

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to File Room Book Object (2013), an exhibition series that is the product and even a bed (Museum Bhavan, 2013, and Museum of Shedding, 2016), of File Room, a book published the same year. It’s the first book Singh all of which can be safely enclosed by the main structure. Her most published with a series of different covers, each bound with a different recent installation, Pothi Khana (Archive Room, 2018), was shown at the colour cloth and showing a unique image – a format that was followed 57th Carnegie International, and consists of modular columns that

by Museum of Chance Book Object (2015), which was published with 88 contain images taken inside an archive of papers wrapped into cloth different photographs that appeared on the front and back covers in bundles, desks piled high with documents, shelving units and filing random pairs – a decision that places those books somewhere between cabinets, accompanied by wooden stools. Singh intends to show this a unique art object and a mass-produced edition. work at an upcoming solo exhibition in London, but, ever looking for In 2012 Singh presented her first new ways in which people might “If 20 people had come and said, experience her work, has decided ‘museum’, also bearing the title File Museum, in which black-andto reconfigure it.

‘This is amazing’, I would be worried white photographs of the paper Searching for new ways to prebecause I would think that I didn’t really sent her books – ways that mean archives of government and municmake a step forward or a step away they can be shown outside of the ipal offices are presented inside the museum context – Singh launched windows of a large teak structure from what I was already doing” Spontaneous Books as an unconthat can be opened up via hinged panels to reveal smaller structures that make up storage space for yet ventional ‘publisher’: “If the forms don’t exist for it to be displayed more photographs (there are 140 in total) from the series inside. It’s a the way I would like to display it, I can make those forms myself.” homage to archiving, storing and arranging, and one that also reflects Instead of the traditionally printed and bound book, she began to on Nony Singh’s practice of photographing and collecting pictures of make teak boxes. Singh started with Kochi Box (2017), a collection of 31 family and friends. Dayanita prefers not to show work chronologically photographs printed on card and kept within a box that has a window but instead draws from her own extensive collection cut out on the front to display just one of the prints Montage 2, 2019, of photographs taken since the 1980s. Since then, her at a time. When presented at an exhibition, 31 boxes black-and-white montage, ‘museums’ have expanded to incorporate desks, stools are on display, each showing a different photograph 79 × 79 cm (framed)

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Museum of Shedding, 2016, 73 framed photographs, museum acrylic, teak structures. Photo: Stephen White

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resulting in countless combinations, but Singh also has in mind the would be to single out or elevate it beyond the others, and the longer way someone might choose to show it in their own home; whether you spend with her works, the more you realise that the photographs they have one box or three, that someone becomes the curator of their in each book, object, museum or box should be considered as if they own miniature exhibition of Singh’s works. By transferring agency to were a collection of everyday records, a messy and chaotic mixture of the viewer, Singh, apart from choosing which images to include in people, places and experiences, fact and imagination. a series, relinquishes control over how and in what order the viewer Circling our conversation back to past influences, she tells me interprets them, and in this sense reduces the importance of the that apart from the Swiss-American Robert Frank (who produced the documentary series The Americans in 1958), she didn’t really subjects of her photographs.

‘We’re constantly changing as people, nothing is static, so why look to other photographers. Instead she credits her best friend of shouldn’t the work change with us?’ Singh said in 2013, referring to three decades, Mona, a eunuch she met who lives in a graveyard and Museum Bhavan during an interview with The New York Times. It’s an about whom she made a book titled Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), which ideal she applies to all of her works. For her most recent box series, Box evolved from a photojournalistic assignment into a more intimate 507 (2019), commissioned by the Geoffrey Bawa Foundation to cele- portrayal of her friend’s difficult life. She says she finds inspiration brate the 100th anniversary of the Sri Lankan architect’s birth, Singh in the way Mona has chosen to live “outside of the system” – that tells me that by making her own alterations to an offset printer (“You system which dictates societal ‘norms’. And of course, Hussain, who could say I remove two layers from the print”) so that the resulting Singh refers to as her mentor and from whom she learned about images are rendered more like pencil drawings, she has been able to sequencing, pace, tone and perseverance. “I think classical music further remove her presence from her photographs. became the biggest influence and I would say my training is not as a At the opening reception, Singh recalls, “Most people were like: photographer. My training is really how to be an artist, how to live ‘It doesn’t even look like Dayanita’s work’. the life of an artist. The focus, and rigour, I was really happy. If 20 people had come and disappointment, all of that, I learned “My training is really how to be and said, ‘This is amazing’, I would be from Zakir. He made sure that I stayed an artist, how to live the life of an worried because I would think that I with photography,” she explains. artist. The focus, and rigour, and didn’t really make a step forward or a step Singh often uses musical termiaway from what I was already doing.” nology to describe her practice, and when disappointment, all of that” This pursuit of new forms, of making I mention that the way her work slips a step forward, has led to her latest work – a collection of photo- between different forms of presentation, finding its own space somegraphic montages. Each work in the series is built up of architec- where between a book and exhibition, or how the photographs hide tural photographs that are structurally composed in a manner that any concrete narrative, or the way she evades being categorised as an reads as an actual building, until you realise that you’re looking at ‘artist’ or ‘photographer’ by calling herself an offset artist reminds interiors spliced with exteriors in a way that appears seamless. Cut me of the microtones found in various musical traditions – the pieces of black-and-white photographs of columns, windows, facades unnameable ones that slide between each note of a scale – she smiles and sections of rooms are set alongside each other, the gaps and and says, “That very intense training from Zakir, and being around spaces between their locations made barely visible by the thin lines musicians for six years, allowed me to find my own microtones. But that divide them. Singh has written before about the inspiration she I’ve also written about the empty note, the khaali. It’s a gap between takes from Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows two notes, but it’s also a note. It has its own place. I don’t usually get (1929), in which he describes the merits of darkness in architecture, as into it because it’s difficult to explain. The secret really is in witha method of introducing the unknown or mysterious, as an element holding, like a great musician knowing when to stop and how not to that obscures – and that mode of thinking translates to the way the reveal the whole thing. It’s what’s unsaid, and if I could say it, then montages leave you accepting the strange new spaces that you, as a why bother photographing it?” ara viewer, are drawn into.

It’s part of what makes it difficult to pinpoint the subjects of Work by Dayanita Singh is on show at Frith Street Gallery, London, her photographs, and Singh is adamantly against offering any kind through 9 November. Zakir Hussain Maquette, Singh’s first photobook, of straightforward narrative. To try to describe any image in depth is republished by Steidl in September

all images except where otherwise noted Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

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tv Personality

by Juliet Jacques

Could Nam June Paik’s utopian experiments in global broadcasting show us how to counter the divisive effects of digital media culture?

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these and preceding pages Good Morning Mr. Orwell (stills), 1984, single-channel video, colour, sound, 30min. Š the estate of the artist.

Courtesy the estate of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix (eai), New York

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On New Year’s Day 1984, using a conference link between a pbs station from which were turned into visual line formations by an integrated in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and in collaboration sound-frequency amplifier. with broadcasters in Germany and Korea, Nam June Paik broadcast Paik was a craftsman in his medium – during the late 1960s he built Good Morning, Mr. Orwell to 25 million people across the world. Now a video synthesiser with tv technician Shuya Abe that allowed him to accessible via YouTube, the hourlong television programme was, in mix seven different colours received from seven cameras into a single the artist’s own words, a compilation of ‘positive and interactive uses image – as much as a media theorist, famously coining the phrase of global media, which Mr. Orwell, the first media prophet, could never ‘electronic superhighway’ in 1974. These experiments advanced the have predicted’. Testament to Paik’s belief (contra Orwell’s 1984, 1949) potential of telecommunications as a two-way system and challenged that art could break down geographical and cultural barriers, this the top-down, one-to-many structures of cinema and television. variety show combined live and recorded sections and showcased The Korean artist, who died in 2006 (after having moved to New musicians such as Laurie Anderson and Peter Gabriel alongside York in 1964), lived to witness the invention of the Internet and the Salvador Dalí, Joseph Beuys and Paik’s mentor, John Cage. The effect rise of broadband, but never made work specifically for distribution was to take the avant-garde out of the gallery and onto a medium more via digital networks. Still, it feels appropriate that his videos have been commonly associated with mass entertainment, the revolutionary made easily available on a platform like YouTube, as well as downpotential of which was dismissed by social loadable via UbuWeb – the avant-garde theorists including Guy Debord, who, in repository started by Kenneth Goldsmith These experiments advanced the Panegyric (1989), called television a weapon in 1996 in response to the marginal distripotential of telecommunications for the ‘constant reinforcement of the bution of experimental and underground and challenged the top-down conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds”’. art, films and texts. But the potential for Televisions had featured heavily in structures of cinema and television television to deliver art to a mass audience Paik’s work since the beginning of his that Paik identified has remained largely career as part of the Fluxus movement in West Germany (to which he unrealised. In the uk, Channel 4 continues to commission approxhad moved from Tokyo, the city to which his family had emigrated imately 50 short artist films each year through their Random Acts during the Korean War, to study music history) alongside Wolf strand, and artists including Grayson Perry and Jeremy Deller have Vostell, another pioneer of the medium. In Exposition of Music – recently presented documentary series on the subjects of, respecElectronic Television (1963), he laid 13 ‘prepared’ tvs on their sides, tively, the British class structure and rave culture. Yayoi Kusama their reception detuned so that the static presented as a constantly designed T-shirts for Nippon tv’s annual 24-hour charity fundraiser shifting work of audiovisual art. The work displayed the influence in 2013, and also participated in Peter Gabriel’s music and art videoof Cage in encouraging its audience to attend to images and sounds game experiment eve (1996). But these initiatives invite artists to that they would normally disregard, while the composer’s advice that work within existing televisual formats rather than invent new ones, Paik explore Buddhist philosophies in his work can be identified in as Paik and his contemporaries Laurie Anderson and Robert Ashley, Zen for tv (1963), which reduced the tv picture to a wavering vertical with his 1984 tv opera Perfect Lives, strove to do; they do not aim to jolt line. Participation tv (1963/98), meanwhile, made the medium inter- the viewer with any formal strangeness like the brief, unannounced active, allowing viewers to modify a set of lines that appeared on microdramas that Stan Douglas inserted between programmes on the screen by speaking into an attached microphone, the signals Canadian television between 1987 and 88.

Self-Portrait, 2005, single-channel video installation with 10’’ lcd colour monitor, 35 × 46 × 50 cm. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel.

Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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The live global broadcast that made Good Morning, Mr. Orwell so artist films and videos may occasionally spring into the feeds of those distinctive at the time is now easily replicated through the Internet, who have not followed them, but these very rare intermissions have but the sense of event that accompanies a huge audience watching nothing like the reach provided by television. Indeed, despite the simultaneously at a determined time has been diluted, if not early enthusiasm for the Internet’s democratising potential in relacompletely destroyed. What has been lost is something of the element tion to new art, it can feel that the digital revolution of recent decades of chance encounter that is so important to Paik’s practice. The gener- has ended up reinforcing boundaries between popular entertainment ative potential of unpredicted meetings is apparent in Good Morning, and works of art or communal events of the kind produced by Paik, Mr. Orwell, which brought disparate artists and musicians together, rather than eroding them. In addition, large social-media platforms via satellite if not in person, in new creative relationships. In a similar tend not just to hide artists’ work from the wider public, but also to spirit, many of my most powerful encounters with artist films and censor them, illustrating the amount of power these companies now videos, as when I channel-flicked onto a Man Ray film on bbc Four wield and making both Paik’s optimism and the techno-utopianism many years ago, were made more memorable by their unexpectedness, of early Internet adopters hard to sustain. their formal experimentation exposing the conventions of the vast It is not hard to imagine a contemporary equivalent of Paik propos majority of television programming. YouTube’s algorithms may, over ing a showcase of contemporary artists and musicians to a streamtime, throw up an occasional surprise for ing platform such as Amazon Prime or Netflix. The political implications would those who have trained them by watching Interplay between Internet and be different to Paik’s use of American hours of avant-garde film (though even television broadcasters has the public-access television, or uk artists’ colthen it may just default to alt-right ideopotential to break through the logues), but will not bring such works to laboration with the publicly funded bbc, a general audience; indispensable though not to mention that such companies ‘filter bubble’ of social media it is, UbuWeb is daunting for the uninimight baulk at such largescale and potentiated, with its Film & Video index providing no more than an alpha- tially unprofitable projects, even if the artists had no ethical qualms betised list of names for visitors to click through. about cooperating with them (a situation which in the current context Social media has, it’s true, allowed for a sense of occasion to be seems unlikely). International coordination between large, nationally created around works such as John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, funded arts organisations could allow the creation of new works with Texas) (2017), a real-time, computer-generated simulation of the site similar scope to the New Year’s celebration, with the added bonus in Texas where a massive oil-gusher announced the dawn of the of operating in Paik’s spirit of working across national and cultural modern oil industry. The simulation ran online for a year but broke barriers. If the sense of event generated for Good Morning, Mr. Orwell unannounced onto national television broadcasts on Earth Day in could be recaptured, it might even be that the comments section of April 2017, creating the kind of disruption that Douglas had achieved YouTube and the generation of memes and social media chatter could in Canada three decades earlier. This interplay between Internet and generate more audience interaction than even Paik could have imagtelevision broadcasters has the potential to break through the filter ined. Something that might, with borders hardening all over the bubble of social media, according to which algorithms limit our world, give cause for a little more technological optimism. ara exposure to new information by guiding us towards things that our browsing history suggests we already ‘like’. Specialist accounts for Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London

tv Garden 1974–1977, 2002, single-channel video installation with live plants and television monitors (colour, sound).

Courtesy Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

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Mark Bradford This is Not America Interview by Mark Rappolt

Mithra, 2008, mixed media, 726 × 1963 × 635 cm. Photo: jjyphoto

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ArtReview Asia caught up with Los Angelesbased artist Mark Bradford in Shanghai at the launch of an exhibition titled Los Angeles, a ten-year survey of his painting, sculpture and videowork at the Long Museum, West Bund. It includes largescale sculptures such as Mithra (2008), an arklike structure created for Prospect.1 in New Orleans as a sign of potential renewal in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, and a new series of paintings referencing the Watts Rebellion, which took place in Los Angeles in 1965. While many of the works draw on the particular conditions of the urban experience in the us, other works respond specifically to the Long Museum’s industrial architecture or, in the case of a series of suspended globes (in which the African continent holds a more dominant position than it does in traditional projections), look to a wider perspective.

Beyond his own creative production, Bradford cofounded the la-based nonprofit Art + Practice, in 2013, which is a hybrid exhibition space and social services centre for young adults who are on the point of exiting the foster-care system.

In 2017, as part of his presentation at the us Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, he included a training programme for local prisoners.

Back in Shanghai it is July and the city is at its hottest and most humid. Even the coolest of cucumbers is sweating, and the flowers that marked the exhibition’s opening the night before are starting to wilt. artreview asia There’s a big sign outside this museum… mark bradford …that says ‘Los Angeles’. ara I think that there is something very architectural, perhaps more specifically urban, about the surface and skin of your paintings. mb Yes, which I’ve always been kind of obsessed with: architecture, skin, grids, repetition. ara Are you conscious of an audience here in Shanghai that might not be familiar with la, that might not speak English and not be able to piece together the context for some of the works? mb I’d say that they would probably be less familiar with the complexity of AfricanAmerican culture, because everyone has some form of YouTube or WeChat or Instagram, so unfortunately we’re broadcasting stereotypes all over the world. People are like, “Oh, I know you!” It’s horrible. It’s just shameless, right? I think it’s actually doing us a disservice in some ways. People saying, “Oh, I know.

I’ve seen you on YouTube. I’ve seen you on Instagram. I’ve seen you on Vine.” And I’m like, “ok. Wow, all right.”

ara Are you conscious then about the focus being on your person – your height, your being an African American in China – as much as your art?

few African-American gallery directors. There are certain things that are just built-in and so on a social level, it’s something I’m fascinated by.

mb In this instance, I made a T-shirt that said, ‘Yes, I am two metres, seven centimetres’ [in Chinese and on sale in the gift shop]. Every once in a while, I decide to play with it. Sometimes I’ll just say, “I don’t feel like being an object.

I think I’ll be a subject playing with an object.”

It’s not going away. It comes up in almost every article – they just comment on my physicality.

What I hope comes through is a reaction like, “Huh? ok, this is not the blackness that I’m familiar with”. That’s all you want: plurality.

ara How do you feel when you look back at an older work? Do you ever wonder, “What was I thinking at the time?” Or is it always clear that you knew exactly where you were and what you were thinking?

ara That is the interesting thing about having a place as the title of the show – and I mean, more specifically, a place that is not where the show is – because it already embeds a context as a subject matter that is not about your identity. mb That’s what I wanted to do.

Los Angeles is a myth that’s lodged in our collective memory.

It’s nowhere and everywhere.

It’s that California sunshine – ‘Hollywood’. I love how in the artworld they’re always saying, “la is the place, la is the place. Everyone is moving there.” But la has always been the same. It’s manufactured.

It’s very dystopian.

It’s almost a new Las Vegas ara Is that something that’s a struggle these days? mb No. I think that me and the things that I’m interested in, and Mark Bradford, are two separate conversations. What I really try to do is be very straightforward about the things I’m interested in and very clear when I’m talking. ara What are you interested in now? mb I’m interested in public education. If we look at the practitioners in the artworld and what schools they come from, are we developing practitioners from state schools that come out of university owing a modest amount? Or are we constantly going back to the Ivy Leagues?

I’m fascinated by that.

I’ve been doing a lot more work than just with state schools. Because if we’re asking different questions, but we’re still going to the same groups, isn’t that a way that economic and power hierarchies are built in? There are very

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mb I would say that all the works are like a relationship. I do the best I can when I’m in it. And when I’m out of it, I look back, and I’m like, “Well, I could have done a little better”. ara Do you ever do that? mb Go back and reenter it? No, when it’s done, it’s done. I really know and understand that I can control what’s in my studio. I do know that. I can’t control a lot of stuff – less and less, actually – but I sure as hell can control that. Nobody gets to my studio, not a gallery, not a collector, no one is telling me what to do. I do that. I decide. ara How accepting of letting go are you once a work has left the studio? mb You have to let it go. Some artists get crazy with it, but you have to let it go. I think that if you’ve done everything that you can, and you’ve answered everything that you can, then you should be able to let it go.

There’s nothing more that I could do. My maturity level is not the same as it was 20 years ago, but 20 years ago, I did the best that I could at that level. I’ve grown. I can look at my own work and I can see the growth. ara How effective do you think art can be as a vehicle for commenting on social, political, racial issues? mb That’s a real slippery slope. At the end of the day, it’s just a painting. I’m very clear it’s a painting. You can construct things around it. There are much more direct ways of dealing with activist work. ara You tend to do a bit of both. mb I blur it. But then it’s always been blurred for me, because if I keep my mouth shut, maybe nobody’s going to pick up that I’m gay, but I’m always going to be black. There can be no, “I’m just an artist in the world”, it’s impossible. As soon as I step outside, I see the police, they see me, and they drive in the back of my car really fast and check me. I’m aware that the black body is always political. Blurring is the easiest thing in the world for me. ara Sometimes it feels that art is always doomed to stop at representation, both literally and in terms of society, rather than going directly to the heart of any problems it might seek to tackle. mb You know what, I always stayed away from representation because I just wasn’t comfortable

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representing anything. I don’t think anything’s a model, that’s my problem. Saying something like, “I will represent black culture” – that’s a model.

ara Do you think those kinds of spaces are still going to be wild or do you think they get better known and the wildness stops?

ara Do you get to choose to represent that or do other people choose that for you?

mb Well, do you know what happens now?

There are these ‘alternative sites’ or ‘underground sites’, but nothing lasts for more than 24 hours before somebody discovers it, uploads it to Instagram and it becomes a ‘thing’. There are no weird spaces because we all have these communication devices. You know what I think is going to happen? I think people are going to turn back and say, “You know what? We’ve had enough of that.” Those little hashtags are getting a little tired.

mb They try to choose it for me, but I have developed a practice for me that gives me space, that’s all. It’s ‘Los Angeles’, but it’s not Los Angeles – it’s my version of whatever I think it is. ara What do you think Los Angeles is? mb Los Angeles is a myth that’s lodged in our collective memory. It’s nowhere and everywhere.

It’s that California sunshine – ‘Hollywood’.

I love how in the artworld they’re always saying, “la is the place, la is the place. Everyone is moving there.” But la has always been the same. It’s manufactured. It’s very dystopian. It’s almost a new Las Vegas. ara I always think of Las Vegas as an extension of la because so many of my friends keep ‘popping’ over there for the weekend. mb Totally. And I’m comfortable in a place that eats its young. I like those spaces that are wilder.

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ara Do you tend to experience places by car, by foot? mb Both. A car if I’m seeing how things have changed in general. And if I really need to micro, I’ll stop and walk so I can really look, and think like, “What was here before? Yes, it was that.

Oh, that’s interesting. I haven’t seen this before.”

New companies pop up because the need is always there. It’s just basically some type of

Mark Bradford: Los Angeles, 2019 (installation view, The Long Museum, Shanghai). Photo: jjyphoto

ArtReview Asia

parasitic lender or some parasitic company.

If a company says, ‘We will get rid of bedbugs in 24 hours’, you know the bedbugs are already there. Or, ‘We will buy your home, fast cash in 24 hours’ – they already know you’re losing your home. The biggest one – now that we’ve gone through the bedbugs and we’ve gone through the quick loans, divorce and custody – that I see now is car title loans in ‘five minutes or less’. ara I was thinking of la as a place of circulation. mb It’s not, it’s very segregated. The freeways are the cutoff for race and economics.

The West and North are more affluent. In the South and East it becomes much more mixed, more working class. There are some affluent pockets, of course. ara In his 1971 book on la, the architecture critic Reyner Banham has a great passage where he talks about how coming off the freeway is the transition between private and public space, because that’s where a woman starts to apply her makeup. mb That’s great. That’s exactly where I am.

I’ve seen much more culture, and more emigration in my neighbourhood. I see street vendors more, I see policing more. You just see it more.

You optically see it more.

ara Do you try and take that way of seeing into the paintings? mb I think it seeps in. ara I think there’s a way that your paintings present themselves as a complete whole that then gets atomised the more you look at it, into gestures or signs… mb Yes. I take material from social things like that, but you know what else I think I do? I try to take it from somewhere and then I try to scrub it as if nobody’s going to know where I got it from. It’s silly, right? It’s like a palimpsest. I guess I don’t know why I do that, I just do. Who cares where it came from? ara Do you see yourself as part of the continuum of this ever-growing palimpsest? That at some point, people see your work and contextualise it completely differently, and it becomes part of a different story?

mb Yes. It seems like I’ve been a part of two or three stories thus far. It seems like I’ve been ‘the hairdresser’, and then I was ‘the urban kind of person’, and then I’ve become ‘the Jackson Pollock of our age’ [a headline for an Artnet.com report on Bradford’s project for the us Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale]. But that stuff just doesn’t touch me.

ara You can’t control it. mb No, you can’t control it. That stuff just stays out of the studio. It really does. I’ve always been a reader. I’ve always been very curious, and I tend to follow whatever I’m interested in and I do a lot of research. I just kind of do that. ara Why did you become interested in visual arts generally, and painting specifically? mb Why did I do visual arts? It never was this lightning-bolt thing. I never really thought of myself as being an artist. When you come from a working-class family, you don’t think of being an artist as something to make money at, especially if your mother is a merchant. Well, you know what, my mom was a hairdresser and I was a hairdresser. She was like, “Look, you’ve got to have a gig to make money. I guess your gig is hair. So do whatever you want.” In some ways, it was kind of freeing. I always felt like I could do whatever I want.

But being a visual artist, I always knew I needed something that I could do every day.

I knew I’d like to have a studio practice. I like Knot, 2019, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Photo: jjyphoto

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going to a site, and that might come out of being a stylist. You get into your car, you go to a place, you open shop. There’s a part of me that likes that.

I’m really a shopkeeper. I knew I wanted something studio-based, not poststudio.

Other than that, and going to clubs, travelling and working in a hair salon, it’s like art was the only thing that held my interest.

When I started taking classes at the community college it was the only class that I passed and would show up for. Because I had a very long history, from sixth grade until I sort of graduated, of not showing up, not finishing the papers, being in the back – I was that boy.

I was surprised that in art class I sat in the front. When the teacher was talking, I actually understood what he was saying and I was engaged. I thought, “Oh, this has never happened”.

I’ll take another class, and another one. Then I looked up and I said, “Well, I’ll be damned, I’ve finished a whole semester – with decent grades”.

That was unheard of. I would study, and I was like, “Oh, wait a minute, this is a whole new me”.

So really, it was just incremental.

Then somewhere along the line I said, “I’ll be damned, maybe I’m an artist”. But that was a really small voice, because I was still going to

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He would see this country burn if he could be king of the ashes, 2019, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Photo: jjyphoto

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clubs and still working in the hair salon. I was really basically going to the community college.

Everything was slow. I bumped into myself. I wasn’t one of those people that just knew what they wanted to be. I bumped into it. Even though the signs were always there. I was always creative, I was always making stuff. I was doing stuff for my mom, and just didn’t put the dots together.

When I was a little boy, I used to collect models of airplanes, and I’d put them on strings all in my bedroom. I’d look at the airplanes flying around. I didn’t know years later I was going to travel. I never connected. People would say, “Mark, you want to travel the world?” And I said, “No, no, I’m just making – I just like making airplanes”. ara So what are you planning for London this October? mb A series of paintings. There is a video. I’ve been working on these for about two years.

Some of them are based on one of the paintings here and then it just goes where it goes. ara Does it always go where it goes? mb Unfortunately. ara But that can be good: the worrying thing for a lot of people is that it goes nowhere. mb You know, I grew up in a very unstructured environment; I grew up in a fluid environment.

My mother was an orphan very young – at three.

She was raised by family members. So she has a very organic, ‘go with the flow’ kind of thing, and when she had me, we went with the flow.

I think that whatever you naturally have, you always look for a little bit of the other. So structure was something I was always trying for – well, I was kind of fake-looking for it.

ara You never have a moment when you get into the studio and nothing happens? mb No. Jesus Christ, no. It goes, it always goes.

I’m always trying to structure. ara So you have a structure? mb It’s like, “Holy shit: hold it!” The flow I can do, but the structuring, I really need to pump the brakes. That’s what I’m telling myself all the time, “Mark, pump the brakes, pump the brakes”. ara Do you exhaust places? Do they stop intriguing you? mb Sometimes what I get less and less intrigued by are just white boxes. ara Interchangeable ones. mb Yes, interchangeable white boxes sometimes. One thing I like about being here [in Shanghai] is you see history stretch out a little bit more than just the West, where all cultures started in the Greco-Roman, and that for me is super exciting. I think it’s healthy for a [Western] artist to get out of the West sometimes and see that they don’t need us. Just because you walk in, doesn’t mean that the room always turns to read you. That’s really exciting, because it opens up how you think about Asia, how you think about Africa. You think about all these different people and cultures that we’re taught are, at best, second-class citizens in our school. ara Politically and economically, it seems that China is thinking about Africa a lot. above Mark Bradford.

Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London

Autumn 2019

mb Absolutely, and when you’re in Africa, you see China in a big way. It’s like, “Huh?!”

I just spent a lot of time in Rwanda, and I was like, “Huh?!” ara I was in Sri Lanka over the New Year and all the construction sites were signed in Chinese. mb Yes. Again, I don’t have a judgment on it, it’s just interesting. But you really have to step outside of the Western and us narrative, you know? It’s constantly being supported as the ‘centre of culture’, the ‘centre of art’, the ‘centre of rational thought’, right? And it’s like, “ok.

Well, I guess everything that came before that was irrational?” ara Also, I think here, the city, the portraits it leaves of the foreign occupiers are kind of weirdly interesting.

If you looked at French people from Shanghai’s point of view, they’re just obsessed with trees, and their own trees as well. mb I noticed that. I was like, “Oh, ok!” ara And with the British, it’s bank security – bunkerlike banks. mb These strange architectural things, and these little memories of these vestiges of culture are always like that. Those are the things I am always looking for in the city: vestiges of something. I’m never looking for anything whole. I’m looking for a piece of something that I can pull in and that still has something, but it also really talks about the history of painting as well. ara Los Angeles is on show at the Long Museum (West Bund), Shanghai, through 13 October.

Admission is free. Cerberus is on show at Hauser & Wirth, London, from 2 October to 21 December

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The ArtReview Newsletter

Marlboro Series (1971) acrylic on board, 47.44h x 23.82w in.

SA N T I AG O B OSE curated by Patrick D. Flores Santiago Bose: Painter, Magician Exhibition Series 17 August to 14 September 2019 Silverlens, Manila

Charms Series (2019) oil on canvas and wax, dimensions variable.

M I T JA I I N N

Your weekly guide to the best shows, the latest news and fresh ideas you won’t want to miss

21 September to 19 October 2019 Silverlens, Manila

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And the emperor of the Center was Wonton 77

Aichi Triennale 2019: Taming Y/Our Passion Various Venues, Nagoya & Toyota City 1 August – 14 October That old adage about the quiet type being the most dangerous type came to mind during the tragicomic opening days of the fourth Aichi Triennale. Before it had even begun, rightwing sections of the Japanese media were questioning the inclusion of Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung’s lifesize statue of a socalled comfort woman (Statue of Peace, 2011), an unassuming tribute to the Korean victims of Japanese military sex-slavery before and during the Second World War. On day three, the official denouncements and terrorist threats resulting from the presence of the taciturn girl with fists clenched led to the closure of After ‘Freedom of Expression?’, a microexhibition within the main exhibition made up of works recently censored or deemed taboo in Japan.

By week three, 11 additional artists had withdrawn or altered their own work in solidarity.

Conservative outrage and historical revisionists: one; reasoned debate and sanctity of the art object: nil. Or perhaps not. Media-activistturned-artistic-director Daisuke Tsuda, his five curators and 90 artists were rightly dismayed at the kneejerk closure, but the on-the-ground reality is that this full-blooded triennale has not been disproportionately vandalised by it.

Indeed, if, as Tsuda explained, it is designed to flow and feel like a magazine, then After ‘Freedom of Expression?’ was always a bonus pullout section: arguably superfluous, deliciously incendiary.

Moreover, the rest of Taming Y/Our Passion – an issues-based festival that seeks to address, ironically it now seems, ‘the sensationalisation of media that at present plagues and polarises people around the world’ and ‘to speak to our compassion’ in the hope of ‘solving this predicament’ – plays the role of mature intermediary more persuasively. In service of this right-on mission, it smartly exploits the semantic ambi( , or jō guities of the Japanese title in kanji, can apparently mean emotion, information or compassion, none of which are in short supply here), and in contrast to the 2016 edition, which celebrated the creativity and manufacturing industry of Aichi Prefecture, traffics mainly in hard realities, not reveries.

At the main venues, the Aichi Arts Center and Nagoya City Art Museum, the feel is more scrapbook than neatly edited magazine, but in a good way. Themes and mediums are circuitously explored, looped around. So it is that you might find yourself deflecting the suave

advances of Dora Garcia’s dishy male interlopers (The Romeos, 2019) while admiring exonemo’s posthumanist sculpture of two screens kissing (The Kiss, 2019). Or kneeling down to survey the unearthly terrain of Imamura Yohei’s scale model-like sculpture made from repeating the silkscreen printing process thousands upon thousands of times (tsurugi No.1, 2016) one minute, gazing up at Yuan Goang-Ming’s drone footage of deserted Taipei streets during the annual martial law drill (Everyday Maneuver, 2018; suspended as of writing) the next.

A fair proportion of works, such as Ugo Rondinone’s Vocabulary of Solitude (2014–16), a room filled with 45 contemplative clowns squatting, lying or kneeling, pair a showstopping scale with a terse punchline. Another is Takamine Tadasu’s Anti-thesis: Gazing up at the endless blue // stained forever by its color // I have ceased to be myself (2019), for which a section of an old swimming pool located near the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art has been flipped 90 degrees skyward.

Cutting deeper are the works I can imagine Tsuda and his team classifying as of the cutout-and-keep variety: research-driven multidisciplinary projects that either already have a life beyond the festival or, failing that, have the potential to achieve it. In addition to welltravelled series, such as Taryn Simon’s Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) – photographs of impossible floral centrepieces paired with political accords, contracts, treaties and decrees – new ones in this ruminative vein include a roomful of letters, Psicomagia (2019), relating to a form of let-it-all-out psychotherapy developed by Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and his wife, artist Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky.

Other new commissions tease out the topical dichotomies that are this staunchly left-leaning triennale’s bread and butter: discrimination and tolerance, machines and humans, collective memory and amnesia. Among them, Koki Tanaka’s Abstracted / Family (2019) explores the suburban milieu and misgivings of mixed-race Japanese families through abstract paintings, family photos, documentary and notes. And Ho Tzu Nyen’s Hotel Aporia (2019) tackles the anguish of unresolved history in a more lyrical manner than the didactic and hectoring After ‘Freedom of Expression?’ section. Projected on walls and screens in a late Meiji-period inn over in

facing page, top Mónica Mayer, The Clothesline, 1978– (installation view).

Photo: Yorita Akane. Courtesy Aichi Triennale

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Toyota City, his phantasmagoric video shorts comprise Yasujirō Ozu movie-clips that indirectly touch on war, and feature faces smoothed out to a searing nothingness.

Back at the Aichi Arts Center, the implications of cutting-edge tech – a pertinent topic for a nation with an ageing population and a bad case of Galápagos syndrome – are broached in Goro Murayama’s The portrait to Umwelts & Programs (2016), which juxtaposes photographs of people pulling funny faces that aren’t picked up by facial-recognition ai with paintings of abstracted facelike patterns that are; and Decoy Walking (2019), a tv studio setup that is intended to dupe gait detection software. A few rooms on, Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s chilling Stranger Visions (2012–13) is a series of 3D-printed faces, each hovering above cigarette butts, hairs or chewing gum – the New York street-trash from which dna samples were scraped to create them.

This is a supple, stimulating triennial (other subthemes, such as Nagoya’s South American migrant communities, are circled around, and the separate film and performing-art strands are similarly piquant) shot through with Tsuda’s liberal sensibility: it strives, on paper at least, to challenge regressive conservatism and bigotry of all stripes. I salute his idealism, but given the rocky start and the allegations of censorship surfacing since, I must also wonder: will it end well? After ‘Freedom of Expression?’s closure may have succeeded at exposing the limits of freedom of expression in Japan, but on the other hand, trolling the country’s vociferous right wing and then capitulating to their demands (ostensibly on ‘risk management’ grounds) has backfired spectacularly.

How else can one square a situation whereby, for example, Mónica Mayer’s ongoing participatory project The Clothesline (1978–), a simple yet emancipatory work that invites visitors to write notes about their experience of sexual harassment or violence against women and pin them up for others to read, has been silenced until the shutdown is reversed? One of these anonymous messages, now torn up and tossed across the floor by Mayer in protest, unwittingly captures the demoralised tone that prevails in the messy aftermath of those miserable opening days: ‘Sometimes, in the street, when men have yelled at me, I wish I had gone back and confronted them. I have not done it out of fear.’

Max Crosbie-Jones

facing page, bottom exonemo, The Kiss, 2019 (installation view).

Photo: Ito Tetsuo. Courtesy Aichi Triennale

ArtReview Asia

Autumn 2019

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The Invisible Hand A4 Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney 28 June – 11 August The Scottish Enlightenment economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith is thought to have invented the concept of ‘the invisible hand’ during the mid-eighteenth century: many still argue over his intended meaning, but the phrase is often used as a metaphor for any intercession by humans that has unplanned or unintended consequences. In this intriguing five-artist group show, which deploys Smith’s words as a title, the phantasmal notion is neatly repurposed as a skeleton to support works that consider, with a particular focus on East Asia, the far-reaching implications of global onlineplatform companies and their new technologies.

On the ground floor, Tokyo collective exonemo present Kiss, or Dual Monitors (2017).

Two faces on a pair of suspended and overlapping tv monitors appear to kiss while a dense spaghetti of multicoloured cables lies scattered on the floor below: a cynical vision of disembodied, digitally driven modern love. With Live Streams (2018), also by exonemo, two wallmounted video screens indeed livestream your own interaction with the work using a frontfacing camera – flattering anonymous texts and heart emojis from a chorus of online followers scroll upwards on one screen while on the other you are ignored: an online mirror reflecting the duality of our desires and fears, and their reshaping by social media.

Upstairs, Simon Denny’s Real Mass Entrepreneurship (2017) is a video about the zippy pace of working life in Shenzhen, a city in one of China’s Special Economic Zones and home to the likes of Huawei. The place is fertile ground for startups as well as for trailblazing improvisers; you can, it appears, build your own iPhone here from scratch via tech-minded street vendors. Denny’s installation Mass Entrepreneurial Huaqiangbei Market Counter in oct Theme Park Style – Battery (2017) sits in front of the screen. A yellow plinth illustrated with red Chinese characters, suggesting a hypertrophied computer part, squats on a bed of illuminated white tiles. The final scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) are recalled where we see the astronaut Bowman in a room with strikingly similar flooring. Denny hints, perhaps a tad too obviously, that such components are akin to the black monolith in the movie: a silent evolutionary driver of discovery, another invisible hand.

Sunwoo Hoon’s Flat is the new deep (2018) is operated via a scroll wheel set in a pleasingly designed clear Perspex column. Onscreen we move through a vertical ‘webtoon’ that begins with a single pixel, then multiplies and evolves into illustrations of the recent political history of South Korea. All of this peaks with the 2016 impeachment of former president Park

Geun-hye; the transition from street demonstrations to the new efficacy of online protest is highlighted. Hoon collaborates, as he has done repeatedly, with Mijoon Pak in the neighbouring work Flat Earth (2019), another webtoon, which part-fictionalises the frightening role the internet can play in subverting democracies. Finally, the Australian artist Baden Pailthorpe shows One and Three pcs (2019), a computer system designed to generate an image of itself, thus parodying our own incessantly selfie-obsessed culture. Pailthorpe uses an ai programme amusingly called Deep Convolutional General Adversarial Network: the (again) hal-like construction looks terrifically seductive, a swirling spiral platinum structure that contains machines with reassuringly lambent lights. Wall-mounted led screens on either side reveal an apparition, the flickering outlines of a spectre – the machine-selfie.

These, then, are visions of how our collective futures are being silently manipulated by hidden forces. The spooky gap between what those disembodied hands grab about us from their search harvesting and what we know about them and their noncorporeal form is here made solid. East Asia is where its political deployment is happening at warp speed; the works in this mesmeric show hint at all our fates, for good or ill. John Quin

Baden Pailthorpe, One and Three pcs, 2019, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Photo: Kai Wasikowski. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney

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ArtReview Asia

Wong Ping Heart Digger Camden Arts Centre and 5–6 Cork St, London 5 July – 15 September The scene in Camden Arts Centre’s garden might have come straight out of the gory cult-internet cartoon Happy Tree Friends (1999–): the body of a gigantic inflatable giraffe appears to have been exhumed from a heart-shaped grave, its neck ending in bare bone, its head missing. An accompanying text by the artist responsible, Wong Ping, offers a ‘back story’ (as well as an example of the Hong Kong-based artist’s taste for fantasy and the absurd): while digging a grave for his future lover, he uncovered this poor beast, whose neck was being used as an escape tunnel

by Hong Kong’s chief executive to flee the sar, thus solving the mystery of their ‘disappearance’ since Hong Kong-wide anti-extradition-bill protests started escalating in June. The upper part of the neck and head is ‘hidden’ in a storage facility on Mayfair’s Cork Street (this show’s second venue), Wong tells us, to trap the fugitives so that ‘they can have a taste of the suffering they’ve put hundreds of thousands through’: a metaphor, perhaps, of wishful thinking for a political separation between mainland China and Hong Kong.

Organic Smuggling Tunnel (2019), like the twisted and darkly humorous animations for which Wong is best known (and which earned him this show, as the winner of Camden’s inaugural Emerging Artist Prize), borrows from educational and moral narratives to describe

the absurdity and alienation of life in a capitalist world. Two recent examples of Wong’s idiosyncratic digital-animation work, contrasting playful technicolour aesthetics with tales of fucked-up domesticity populated by decaying, sex-obsessed characters, are installed in Camden’s galleries. Playing on a giant led screen at the bottom of which lie thousands of gold-toothed toy dentures, Dear, Can I Give You a Hand? (2018) tells the story of a widower who is seen in turn stealing his daughter-in-law’s dirty underwear, attacked by flesh-eating ants (sent to plague him by his dead wife) and buried under gold dentures (the only legacy left behind by his ex-spouse). Trapped in a posthuman ‘online cemetery’, his avatar eventually escapes and infiltrates a porn server, where he can masturbate happily ever after.

Here, as is the case with most of Wong’s narratives (delivered in deadpan Cantonese with English subtitles), everything revolves around sex: the character’s life is defined by endless loops of despair and pleasure, which feed into his pessimistic reflections about existence, desires and mortality in times of capitalism – his cynicism at times offset by some ironic situations (at one point the character resolves to throw his porn videos discreetly out in the street, but is lectured by a young woke woman on how best to recycle them).

Over in Cork Street are a series of four animated Fables (2018–), shown on two led screens, the space-cum-construction-site dressed up with a few inflatable structures to look at or sit on. Here, the widower has been replaced by equally messed-up animal protagonists, including a deviant three-headed rabbit and a formerly activist cow turned capitalist successstory; short and bittersweet, they each culminate in nihilistic teachings: ‘Striving for your own happiness by all means is already better than suffering together with your family’ one reads after one of the three rabbit-headed brothers, driven by jealousy and ambition, succeeds in killing his ‘siblings’. Yet these new works feel less cutting, as if the recourse to another layer of abstraction (the anthropomorphised animals as well as the geometrical simplification of the animation-style deployed

by Wong) flattens the tragicomic effect delivered by works like Dear…

Leaving the exhibition, I notice what look like spiders feasting on glass turtle-shells; checking the exhibition handout for a title, I find Wong’s trenchant irony again: A luxury faeces cocktail bar owned by a middle-class fly after gentrification pushed some of the poorest turtles out of their shells (2019). In desperate times, perhaps the best way to cope with the futility of existence is with a healthy dose of cynical humour. Louise Darblay

Heart Digger, 2018 (installation view).

Photo: Luke Walker. © the artist. Courtesy Camden Arts Centre, London

Autumn 2019

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Arin Rungjang They Beat Your Father Shanghart Gallery, Singapore 4 August – 30 November Shooting an Elephant and the Leader Shanghart popup space, Lock Road, Singapore 4 August – 26 September While working in Germany during the 1950s, Arin Rungjang’s father was violently attacked by a group of neo-Nazi racists. His health never recovered and he died aged thirty-five.

Runjang’s father haunts the two new works in this two-part solo exhibition: first, via Rungjang’s mother’s bittersweet recollections in They Beat Your Father (2019), and then in the commemorative Prayong (Aglaia odorata): Dedicated to my Father (2019), featuring tales of migrant workers.

Typically, the Thai artist’s work layers personal and wider historical narratives to allow connections that range from the directly causative to the poetically elliptical to emerge.

However, the two works on show here each focus on a single idea – a woman’s account of her life; a meditation on foreign labour – to mixed results.

In They Beat Your Father, visitors spend time in a room playing ambient sounds recorded in Runjang’s mother’s house, and read a booklet containing an extensive interview with her about her life, covering her childhood, the death of her husband and her raising two children on her own. Overall, the storytelling is relaxed but lacks focus, with the act of racial violence in the title just one of many episodes floating in a formless drift.

Rungjang’s father, who worked for a German company, was hardly ever home.

The 12 migrant workers from Bangladesh, India and China working in Singapore to support their families and featured in Prayong could be his contemporary counterparts. Construction workers are often invisible parts of the landscape in rapidly developing Singapore; Rungjang makes them the dignified subjects of his installation.

On video, silent portraits of these men gaze out at the viewer. On the first two nights of the show, dressed in helmets and hi-vis

vests, these workers performed simple choreographed movements derived from their everyday life: in the gallery, they sat, lay down, prayed; outside, on a balcony space, part of a purpose-built scaffolding structure, they perched in various positions of repose.

A handout offers background information on each individual. The content follows a similar structure: their hometown, when they came to Singapore, their dependents, etc. The purpose is to introduce them as people, but the repetitive template unintentionally renders the individuals anonymous, as if part of a survey. Their participation also feels mute and puppetlike, unlike, say, the migrant workers in Rungjang’s untitled installation in the 2011 Singapore Biennale.

There, the artist filled a room with Ikea furniture and invited Thai migrant workers to swap any of their old furniture with the items produced by the Swedish giant. Soon, the room was filled with a selection of old and new tables, chairs and chests, each of which had a story to tell. It was an exchange made with active agents, creating a roomful of objects that stand for the variety of characters and their implied experiences.

In parallel to the exhibition and in a separate popup space a few blocks from Shanghart, Rungjang shows a more ambitious work, the ten-screen installation Shooting an Elephant and the Leader (2018). The work, first shown in a censored form at last year’s Shanghai Biennale, draws on George Orwell’s 1936 essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and the harrowing real-life story of Wahduze Ali, a stateless Muslim man born in Mawlamyine (known as Moulmein during the British colonial era) in Southeastern Myanmar, the location of Orwell’s tale.

The work can be seen as a response to Orwell’s story, which is told by an angst-

top Prayong (Aglaia odorata): Dedicated to my Father (Southeast Asia Edition), 2019, performance, outdoor sculptural installation, scaffolding, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai, Beijing & Singapore

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ArtReview Asia

ridden white man, self-conscious of the position of power that comes with his race.

Orwell recalls how, while working as a policeman in Myanmar during the 1920s, he felt compelled to shoot the elephant to save face in front of the local population, whom, among many charming phrases, he describes as having ‘sneering yellow faces’. In contrast, Rungjang’s work gives voice to the powerless, one of the religious and ethnic minorities now persecuted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.

A black screen feeds the viewer a line-by-line account of Wahduze’s life of racial discrimination, poverty and abuse. It is both a catalogue of human suffering and an extraordinary tale of survival. Four other screens depict a man singing the ‘Ya-sin’, a section of the Quran, a reference to Wahduze’s Muslim faith.

Then there’s the elephant. Like Orwell’s assassinated beast, the significance of Rungjang’s pachyderm is difficult to read. Projected almost lifesize across five high-definition screens, gloriously betusked and giving seismic snorts, it is undoubtedly the star of the show.

Orwell’s dead elephant has been interpreted in many ways, including as the colonial master, the colonised country and the writer’s conscience. Whatever the case, it has typically been read as some kind of noble victim. Rungjang’s elephant is also ambiguous, but its immediate physicality has none of the portentous pessimism that dominates Orwell’s tale. There’s also a whiff of mischief: Orwell eventually kills the elephant, Rungjang gets one to play dead.

Lying on its side, its great flank rising and falling, it is very much alive, no more and no less than itself; and a closeup pan down the body showcases every wrinkle and hair in staggering detail. Facing it, as with Wahduze’s survivor story, the appropriate response is awe. Adeline Chia

bottom Shooting an Elephant and The Leader, 2018, ten-channel video installation, animation with audio.

Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai, Beijing & Singapore

Autumn 2019

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Brian Jungen Friendship Centre Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 20 June – 25 August For more than 20 years, Brian Jungen has been producing sculptural works that transform Western consumer goods into objects representative of traditional Indigenous culture in Canada. Many of the 80 artworks featured in this midcareer survey were created before the tone of discussions around reconciliation and colonialism’s effects on Indigenous communities came to feel so urgent. Given that the tenor of contemporary Indigenous art has also changed dramatically in recent years, how does Jungen’s earlier work hold up given the current political environment? As other Indigenous Canadian artists create works addressing issues directly and viscerally – Rebecca Belmore’s responses to the high levels of violence faced by Indigenous women, for example, or Kent Monkman’s undermining of stereotypical images of Indigenous people by queering them – might Jungen’s earlier work now come across as too polite?

Jungen’s practice appears to come from a less angry place than that of the other artists mentioned. The show’s title suggests how welcoming – at least on the surface – his art appears. It is also, according to exhibition materials, inspired by the name of an Indigenous community centre Jungen frequented as a youth, prompting ago curator Kitty Scott to envision the first exhibition hall as a basketball court, with lines on the floor and nets suspended at either end. Twenty sculptures from Jungen’s breakthrough series Prototypes for New Understanding (1998–2005) are among the artworks arranged around the space like

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players. The Prototypes consist of black, red and white Nike Air Jordans that the artist took apart and then restitched into new configurations, so that they resemble West Coast ceremonial masks in the forms of trickster ravens and other mythical creatures. Mounted on metal rods affixed to stands placed on plinths, their presentation replicates the deadening quality of typical Western anthropological museum display and hints at the calls for restitution of pilfered cultural artefacts.

Towering over the Prototypes are six ‘totem poles’ made of multicoloured nylon golf bags (all 2007), each titled with the first year of a decade, beginning with 1960, which without further explanation viewers might not know was the year Indigenous people obtained the right to vote in Canadian elections. Moving forward through Indigenous Canadian history, the totem titled 1990 marks the year of the ‘Oka Crisis’, a 78-day standoff northwest of Montreal between police and army officers and Indigenous protesters opposing the expansion of a golf course onto land containing a Mohawk burial ground. By replicating one culture’s fetishised artefacts (masks, totem poles) in the materials of another (sneakers and golf bags), Jungen gives form to the conflict that arises when values clash.

Also notable are the sculptures My Decoy, Eero and Walking Heart (all 2011), in which Jungen has encased the frames of iconic modernist chairs by Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames in rawhide, transforming them into ceremonial drums. These works lack the political bite of the earlier pieces, speaking

ArtReview Asia

rather to Jungen’s interest in Modernism and its failed promise of a better future for all through design.

The second gallery houses the exhibition’s centrepiece, Cetology (2002), an enormous sculpture of a whale skeleton made from white plastic chairs. Hanging from the ceiling as in a natural history museum, it’s a reminder of Indigenous people’s historic reliance on whale meat for food, and ties into current concerns about plastics in the ecosystem. Adjacent is the five-screen Modest Livelihood (2012/2019), a leisurely paced video showing Omaskêko Cree artist Duane Linklater, Jungen and Jungen’s uncle tracking a moose though picturesque Dane-zaa Treaty Lands in an area east of the Rocky Mountains. (Jungen’s mother was Dane-zaa; his father’s family background was Swiss.) The film’s title quotes a 1999 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that stated Indigenous peoples could hunt and fish, but only enough to maintain a ‘moderate livelihood’ for themselves. Such restrictions now seem part of a concerted effort, similar to the government- and church-sponsored residential schools, to suppress Indigenous culture by denying native Canadians the ability to practice or profit from it.

Much of this work now feels prescient.

Although formal aspects often take precedence over explicit political statements, Jungen was at the forefront of creating work through a postcolonial lens before the term was commonly used, suggesting that Western culture’s dominance has been, for too long, an insidious and destructive force. Bill Clarke

facing page Brian Jungen Friendship Centre, 2019 (installation view). © Brian Jungen.

Courtesy the artist and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

above 1980, 1970, 1960, 2007, polyester, metal, painted wood on paper sonotube, 396 × 122 × 91 cm (each). © Brian Jungen.

Courtesy the artist and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Autumn 2019

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Parallel: The Ramasun Station Art Trail Ramasun Station, Udon Thani (Thailand) 8–30 June While you sit in the back of a fast-moving military truck, the radio masts of Ramasun – a former American radio-research fieldstation in northeast Thailand – slowly emerge from behind a canopy of trees. They pierce the sky, all 48 of them, forming a giant ring that locals say resembles a kraal (elephant cage). It is an unnerving scene for first-time visitors. As the truck shakes and splutters, you can only hold on tighter and take in the awful, alien majesty of these Cold War relics.

Built in 1964 with the aim of listening in on North Vietnamese and Vietcong communications, abandoned in 1976 to foragers and nature, and now an electrifying dark-tourism destination run by the Thai army, Ramasun stays with you. Unfortunately, though, the same can’t be said for the first exhibition held at this pockmarked monument to failed American greatness and Thailand’s strategic alliances: an all-Thai, 18-artist group show that sets out to ‘allude, express, make metaphors’ and compete with ‘the melancholy of gigantic architectural structures and the contradictory ensembles of objects’.

Staged by Noir Row Art Space, a young gallery from the nearby city of Udon Thani, the ‘art trail’ begins with the sound of bubblewrap popping underfoot as you enter a cavernous circular ‘ComCenter’ building.

Mounted on a stand placed over the partially unraveled roll of bubble-wrap is a neon sign that spells out ‘Udorn’ in glowing white letters. Perhaps Punyisa Silparassamee’s ud(o)rn (all works but one, 2019) is meant as a minimalist commentary on the multilayered history of the site, or even the scattershot carpet bombing of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam that may or may not have resulted from America’s intelligence gathering, yet the work feels too slight to be effective.

Other works, such as Amarin Buppasiri’s photorealistic oil painting of a pile of melting chocolate bars (apparently a metaphor for the messy reshaping of Thai–us relations), are simply lost in the space.

In ‘Area B’, a narrow 300m-long tunnel, the site’s textures are at least disrupted. Faint in the gloom, Surasit Mankong’s Interaction between vertical lines and horizontal lines is a crude wall-print depiction of gis proudly holding a giant oarfish. The photograph it is based on, taken in San Diego, California, in 1996, is a common sight in bars, restaurants and guesthouses in the northeast and typically captioned (falsely) as picturing a naga – a semidivine, mythical serpent – caught at a military base on the Mekong River in 1973. Further in, Thidarat Chumjungreed’s Flashing offers streaks of fluorescent paint up the walls, a reference to the folkloric, Hindu-Buddhist thunder god the base is named after.

Emerging from the tunnel, visitors are pointed towards the former operations buildings, and, for the closing salvo, driven on to the old living quarters where us Army, Air Force and security agency personnel slept and exercised. Across both these zones, my attention is drawn less to the discreetly concealed works than the marks of old and new interventions: a freshly painted mural of the mythical Ramasun doing battle with the lightening goddess Mekhala, the army camp detritus in the derelict gym, the piercing shouts of soldier drills underway nearby.

Some works do pipe up. Wilawan Wiangthong’s atmospheric opening night performance (Isan Women), wherein she peeled off layers of traditional Isan dress, felt akin to a scathing feminist tract, while Jedsada Tangtrakulwong’s blurry, distorted colour photographs (Local Influence) of

facing page, bottom Wilawan Wiangthong, Isan Women, 2019, live performance, 30 min.

Courtesy Noir Row Art Space, Udon Thani

facing page, top Jedsada Tangtrakulwong, from the Local Influence series, 2019, four digital prints.

Courtesy Noir Row Art Space, Udon Thani

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various Ramasun Station locales bottle something of its decay and mystery. And Viriya Chotpanyavisut’s draftee in service is a 55-second clip of a Thai army conscript, his face pixelated, drying fish on a placard listing the 12 core values that Thailand’s current prime minister, Prayut Chan-o-cha, believes every citizen should uphold and possess. Oddly, this gesture towards the still-evolving, transitory nature of the site is only accessible via a qr code hidden in the shallows of a putrid swimming pool.

Watching it later, it felt symptomatic of the whole venture: withdrawn, somewhat cowed by its surroundings.

The show’s failure to invoke the site’s juiciest modern myth only reinforced this impression. Aside from a one-off screening of a single-channel video from Korakrit Arunanondchai’s No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 (2018), the nonsensical official reason given for Ramasun Station’s recent reemergence as a ‘historical museum’ – to scotch rumours that the site served as a cia Black Site post-9/11 – is not even touched upon, let alone actively challenged.

Parallel’s circumspection and casual omissions (the most conspicuous: Ramasun’s belligerent anticommunist sorcery and all those who fell victim to it) could have been forgiven had the base’s profound impact on the modern infrastructure, economy and tourist sectors of its immediate surroundings been more keenly explored. As things transpire, however, signals strongly transmitting something of the lived experience, bittersweet memories and local legacy of America’s presence and largesse (think highways, American fried rice and R&R infrastructure such as the surviving Yellow Bird Nightclub) never arrive. Max Crosbie-Jones

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Shin Egashira Beautifully Incomplete Betts Project, London Comprising a handful of architectural drawings, a map and three wood-and-steel sculptural works loosely arranged around this small space off London’s Old Street, Beautifully Incomplete is an exhibition that baits the visitor (and reviewer) with both title and content. Take Bed Machine: dating from the late 1980s to the early 90s, the project is developed here across a map of London and six graphite-on-tracing-paper drawings that detail, in plan, cross section and axonometric projection, a record-player-like structure and related wheel-mounted mechanisms labelled, variously, ‘Bed’, ‘Fish Pond’, ‘Cat Man Tel’ and ‘Player’, each driven by belts, pulleys and hidden motors. Running around the outside edge of what, if Bed Machine were a functioning turntable, would be the platter are the opening lyrics to the blues standard ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’. In one of these drawings, an elevation showing the tone arm of this would-be phonograph as a daggerlike extension labelled ‘male’ penetrating a circular object labeled ‘female’, the title is elaborated as Bed Machine (Baby Please) (1992).

Visual- and wordplay aside, Bed Machine, while fantastically detailed, is most likely

unworkable as a music player, a device for sleeping or a polite request to mate, and yet the technical precision of its presentation challenges the viewer to work out what it does do, or at least where it’s coming from.

Its parts are separated into 69 discrete objects and presented in accompanying drawings that look like pages from a manual for technical illustration: bracket, cable, electrical switch, spring, lever, chair, window and other less identifiable but no less carefully rendered items. Through their numbering, which is indexed to the map of London, we might assume that these parts were sourced from or have an affective connection to areas of the city, perhaps as notional found objects, with particularly large clusters of numbers linked to Bloomsbury and Lambeth, and secondary groupings further east.

The smudging of pencil on aging, browning tracing paper, combined with the obscure inventiveness of the objects represented, bring to mind the notebooks of a fifteenth-century polymath, but given that the Japanese-born Egashira is an artist and an architect of the present time (having worked as an architect

in Tokyo, Beijing and New York, he moved to London in 1987 and has taught at the Architectural Association since 1990, while exhibiting internationally at the Tsumari International Art Triennial in 2000, as well as other venues), a closer kinship may be found in Le Corbusier’s notion of the house as a ‘machine for living in’, a formulation that in Egashira’s work manifests as both the mechanical nature of beings and the human traits of machines. This symbiosis is made more explicit in another series of drawings, titled Beauty of Our Pain (1995), in which a medieval torture device evolves into a universal weight machine. In Parallel Garden (1993), a residential environment is again populated by machines: a ‘Rice Driven Automobile’ and ‘Double (Cross) Globes’.

This last work appears to have been the inspiration for one of the only recently created works in this exhibition, a wood and steel sculpture featuring two globes that is, much like the drawings, at once technically rigorous and artfully handcrafted, a whimsical, notquite-functional evocation of the poetry of living spaces. David Terrien

Bed Machine (window), 1992, tape, graphite on tracing paper, 34 × 57 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Betts Project, London

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Dale Frank Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney 13 June – 6 July Art and vulgarity. Here’s the painter John Olsen quoted in Robert Hughes’s first book, The Art of Australia, from the revised edition published in 1970: ‘I can rejoice in it. [Vulgarity] has enormous vitality… one has to be prepared to be a bit corny.’

Such a throwback reference would be inappropriate here were it not that, on the evidence of this show, Dale Frank has a similar mindset.

Now in his sixtieth year, he isn’t afraid of his work being thought mushy or, as some of his titles and addenda to his 2d works suggest, risqué. There are paintings here made from acrylics, tinted varnish and epoxyglass resin on Perspex. These are abstractions where loops and smears mesh like the aftermath of wiping a mirror with Mr Muscle, their shiny colours recalling Quality Street sweet wrappers. Purple and viridian streaks collide with washes of cobalt blues and malachite greens; preening visions as brazenly shameless as a strutting cockatoo.

There’s a retro-psychedelic feel reminiscent of lava lamps or the mid-1960s back-projections for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

Painting on Perspex isn’t new, of course, and the spiky works of the Chicago Imagist Jim Nutt

have more clout, more daring. In the press release Frank makes the flashy assertion that such reflective surfaces show ‘the image of something that happens somewhere else’.

He sees the reflections as a means to escape full knowledge of what the work is, that it ‘exists only when you are not looking at it’.

Well, that really is a bit corny. Two paintings feature sculptural additives: View over Milano (all works 2019) is spotted with cock rings, while View over Rovaniemi features butt plugs that project threateningly, missile-fashion.

Frank’s more indecorous titles, meanwhile, are a lazy reviewer’s dream given their word count. One of the shorter ones goes: Cheryl always had the habit of farting every time she coughed which she thought no one noticed. They deliberately offer no clues as to the meaning of the paintings themselves, indeed they fatally distract. Poor Cheryl, you come away thinking.

In the centre of the main space sits The Lovers, a vitrine with human bones lying in a bed of refined sugar. We are not told the provenance of the remains; this seems indecent. The skeleton is ‘reconfigured’ to appear

like a Siamese twin with two skulls. Above it sits a faux Murano creation, glass tree shapes with baubles of coloured fruits. This, then, is an inexplicable scene from the life of a double monster. In another corner sits the gross Allied on-ramp public liquid Nitrogen making machine (urinal for men), a combine featuring an Ikea stool, catheter bags and what looks like real piss.

Two videos are also shown: tinder and the end of a perfect day have something of Throbbing Gristle’s wilful perversity about them, a sleazy fascination with furtive sex and horrific murders. Dale clearly loves to subvert and spike his sometimes-beautiful creations with a gratuitous ugliness, but this burlesque seems dated. Such antics designed to wind up puritanical ‘wowsers’ are old hat. This appears to be luxury art for the luxury market; seductive as the Lamington cakes the locals love but just as sickly.

Olsen’s conversation concluded: ‘The power of Australian society is its vulgarity’. Sadly, Frank’s ribald, retrograde work here comes over as archaically adolescent, as daring as a whoopee cushion. John Quin

Dale Frank, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Luis Power.

Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney

Autumn 2019

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Books On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, £12.99 (hardcover) For every action a reaction, Isaac Newton was fond of saying. We should take him seriously.

He invented gravity, after all. And so, with identitarian politics on the ascendant, well, everywhere, it should be no surprise that so many of the rising stars of art and literature are first- or second-generation immigrants or individuals whose identities are not so simple to categorise (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Thi Bui, Tash Aw, Korakrit Arunanondchai, to name but a few).

Ocean Vuong is one of them and his first novel follows hard on the heels of the Vietnamese – American poet’s awardwinning debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2017).

Framed as a series of letters from a son to his illiterate Vietnamese mother, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous turns on apparent contradictions. The narrative takes the form of a series of remembrances of the author’s childhood and adolescence and the tragedy and comedy of immigrants making a new home. On the one hand, it is an attempt to excavate a connection to a homeland that only his mother and grandmother really knew. On the other hand, it is a description of how he fell in love with a new homeland they will never really understand.

The story’s narrator is introduced only via his nickname, ‘Little Dog’, an affectionate term bestowed upon him, we are told, because his mother and grandmother, who lost almost everything as a result of America’s interventions in Vietnam, believe that ‘to love something… is to

name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched’. In the America in which Little Dog grows up, a dog is a dog: racial, economic and sexual differences are used to drag you down, to make you feel other, less than the rest. ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself,’ his mother warns Little Dog each day before he goes to school, ‘you’re already Vietnamese.’

In America his mother is definitely Vietnamese (although her father was an unnamed American soldier and, ironically, in Communist Vietnam she wasn’t Vietnamese enough). Instead of learning to read English (Little Dog offers to teach her), she colours in Thomas Kinkade pictures in shades she can’t pronounce. She’s managed to make it, with her son and her own mother, from her homeland to her new home in Hartford, Connecticut, and survived a violent husband, all without reading English, so why should she start now?

‘Have you ever made a scene… and then put yourself inside it?’ she says when challenged about her colouring craze. That might equally be a description of writing, the author wryly notes, perhaps a little too self-consciously. ‘It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English.

Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear,’ Little Dog writes later on as a kind of palliative.

There are times when the book conjures the writing of Joe Brainard in his elegiac memoir I Remember (1975), but without the constraint (every paragraph in the earlier work begins ‘I remember…’; here there’s a frequent use of variations on ‘that time when…’). However, Vuong’s narrator, now a successful writer, is keener to credit Roland Barthes and the posthumously published Mourning Diary (2010), a series of reminiscences written on slips of paper every day following the death of the French theorist’s mother in 1977, as an inspiration. More than anything it is a love story and a record of how beauty can be found in unexpected places: ‘I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be,’ Little Dog writes recalling his mother’s hands, mangled after years spent working in a nail bar in order to provide him with a better future. Little Dog’s coming-of-age love affair (described in some of Vuong’s most beautiful prose) with Trevor is similarly perverse, given that the object of his affection is white, lives in a trailer, likes shooting, truck-driving and 50 Cent, and smells of Burger King and razor-rust: on the surface a representative of the America of which Little Dog and his family can never be a part. Yet Trevor himself is similarly complex: he likes boys but doesn’t want to be the one underneath; he’s tender, protective and loving but doesn’t want to be gay. What makes Vuong worth reading is his ability to find and describe the flowers within the cracks. Nirmala Devi

Model City Pyongyang

by Cristiano Bianchi and Kristina Drapić Thames & Hudson, £19.95 (hardcover)

In the preface to this new photobook by Beijingbased architect Cristiano Bianchi, which documents North Korea’s capital, travel writer Pico Iyer writes ‘I am often shocked at how little most of us in the West know about daily life in this nation of 25 million’. It’s a weird comment, given the glut of similar publications.

The reader could turn, for example, to a book, published by Taschen earlier this year, by Oliver Wainwright, a British architecture critic who also contributes an essay here; or recent titles

by Nick Bonner, who helped facilitate Bianchi’s

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trip, or even the copious articles by Iyer himself.

Pyongyang is many things, but underexposed is not one of them (it is even the subject of a 2018 travelogue by Monty Python star Michael Palin).

This however is, as Iyer puts it, a ‘neutral’ study of the architecture in the hermit state.

This translates as photos of pristine modern and postmodern architecture, given a pastelhued colour grade, followed by easily the book’s most original element: a series of architectural plans of these buildings by Belgrade-based designer Kristina Drapić. Personally, I’d have

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liked more detail as to how ‘On Architecture’, a 170-page treatise written in 1991 by Kim Jong Il, the father of North Korea’s current leader, which the various essayists touch on, fitted with Juche, the all-pervasive ideology laid down by Kim Il-sung, the father of the nation. Yet for more pointed lessons in North Korean urban design, the reader might be better overall to study the 2016 aerial photographs obtained by Amnesty International of two of the country’s kwan-li-so, the penal colonies crammed with those who have fallen foul of the regime. Oliver Basciano

Autumn 2019

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Insurrecto

by Gina Apostol Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) The 1901 Balangiga Massacre was the bloodiest event of the Philippine–American War (1899– 1902). On that there is no disagreement. But how bloody it was, and who was massacring whom, depends on your point of view. On the one hand the designation refers to the killing of 48 us soldiers (or perhaps fewer, estimates differ) by townspeople and revolutionaries on Samar Island. In response us General Jacob H. Smith, tasked with pacifying Samar, infamously ordered that the island’s interior be turned into a ‘howling wilderness’, subsequently instructing his troops to ‘kill anyone over ten’. The result was an estimated 2,500 civilians dead – the actual figure remains unknown and might be as much as 50,000. So, on the other hand, this is the real massacre. History, as Gina Apostol’s fourth novel demonstrates, is a fabrication formed of opinion and interpretation, combined with the force of their projection, as much as it is of dates, statistics and what might be tentatively pushed forward as facts.

Balangiga, and its manifold interpretations, is the event around which Insurrecto circles.

Apostol herself is a us-based, Philippines-born writer who has won prizes for her work, which is written in English, in both her native and adopted homes. But as much as it revolves around history, the novel also turns on the role of women in those histories: primarily Chiara, an American filmmaker who is writing a script

about the massacre and whose father disappeared while shooting a movie in Samar; and Magsalin, her translator and guide, who is additionally writing her own script, ostensibly to ‘correct’ the inventions of the foreigner.

They’re travelling through Rodrigo Duterte’s present-day Philippines in search of their differing notions of truths about a past that, as one timeline bleeds into another, seems to be formed of anything other than history.

Or, as Apostol puts it towards the end of the book, this is a tale about the stories these women ‘wish to tell’. Not least among them is a version of Balangiga in which the revolution was led by women.

As the novel flips between the two women’s narratives and their contrasting national perspectives, a multitude of other stories are drawn into a whole in which fact, fiction, supposition, hearsay and theories of varying degrees of outlandishness merge (among them that nineteenth-century Filipino painter Juan Luna – who killed his wife while living in Paris – might be Jack the Ripper).

As narratives are gathered and generated through digressions into film and literary theory, internet searching and archival research, there are times when all you can see are the knowing ways in which the whirling plot is being constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed, again and again, by the author.

It’s just about saved from becoming a wholly irritating exercise in metafiction by the fact that history, and perhaps life itself, works in this way too. As Magsalin puts it, ‘Everybody is messed up and occupied by others! Even if you are not Filipino! We are all creatures of translation, parallel chapters repeating in a universal void!’

One digression, for example, evokes Vietnam war films shot in locations other than Vietnam and a bridge dynamited by the Japanese in 1943 that was left in ruins until 1976, when it was rebuilt for a movie, so that it could be blown up again. Fundamental to this novel is the way in which history and identity is mediated: here, a massacre ‘witnessed’ by Americans through photographs (and more-or-less accurate captions) and then retold to their victims through cinema, who in turn get involved in debates about which (American) soundtrack provides the most accurate soundtrack to Philippine history. ‘There was something both engrossing and pathetic about it,’ Apostol writes, ‘about reconstructing the trauma of whole countries through a movie’s palimpsest.’

And yet Insurrecto is not simply a demonstration of the dangers of pathetic passivity, but rather of the ways in which agency can be claimed, even if identity is an often comic process of occupation, translation and all that comes with it. Nirmala Devi

Waiting: A Collection of Stories

by Nighat Gandhi Zubaan Books, Rs 425 (hardcover) The women in Nighat Gandhi’s latest collection are disillusioned, angry and oppressed.

Set in India and Pakistan, with occasional diversions to the us, the stories confront the subjects of sexuality, marriage, poverty, body image, grief and depression. Despite this, the storytelling lacks a sharpness, the wider political context of those social issues muted by first-person narratives. Introspection permeates everywhere, and many of the characters, whose roles as mothers, wives and daughters are emphasised, err on the pathetic. Which is a pity, because many of the topics addressed here have been or still are relatively taboo in the South Asian societies from which the author draws her subjects.

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In ‘Shaming. Shaving’ for example a daughter brought up to feel ashamed of her periods has to shave her pubic hair every month during menstruation, a ritual enforced by her mother to ensure her ‘purity’; in ‘Slut Series’, a woman who gives refuge to an elderly homeless man is faced with her neighbours questioning her izzat (‘honour’ or ‘reputation’, in Urdu) and calling her a bazari woman (whore), while in the same story a sex worker makes a living to feed her baby and a schoolgirl writes to her friend about her rape. The men who feature in the collection are of various characters – kind, gentle, overbearing, violent – but what they have in common is that they either misunderstand or do not hear the women in their lives.

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One story stands out. ‘Panjpir Chowk’ describes a lesbian couple’s visit to a temple in a Taliban-controlled area of Pakistan, despite the fundamentalists’ threats to kill women seen visiting shrines (one also refuses to wear a headscarf, ‘Some risks I take. Some, I don’t,’ she says). It’s a story of disobedience and bravery made manifest in a seemingly simple act, and of carrying on with daily life regardless of arbitrary patriarchal oppression.

The next morning the couple wake to hear that Osama bin Laden has been killed at a nearby compound; they make French toast for breakfast. ‘Panjpir Chowk’ tells of an everyday form of resistance – if only more of the stories here followed suit. Fi Churchman

Plastic Emotions

by Shiromi Pinto Influx Press, £9.99 (softcover) The name Minnette de Silva is an undeservedly obscure one in architectural history. She was a pioneer in the modern style, marrying the avant-garde of European building design with the vernacular traditions and local peculiarities of her native Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then called). The concrete symmetry and functionality of her 1957 Pererea House in Colombo is softened by the presence of an elegant curving staircase with a flora-patterned iron balustrade, likewise she opened up the ground floor of another house in the capital, built three years later by including a series of courtyards and pools. After her first build in 1949, these private commissions were her bread and butter throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but the big public projects she wanted eluded her. Instead the reputation of her compatriot Geoffrey Bawa, who started his career a decade later, eclipsed hers, Bawa’s work becoming synonymous with so-called ‘tropical modernism’.

You will learn the basics from Plastic Emotions, Shiromi Pinto’s attempt to bring de Silva’s work to wider attention, but frustratingly it is written as a work of fiction centring mostly around the architect’s imagined private life.

It is a fact that de Silva had a close relationship with Le Corbusier and that the two exchanged frequent letters. In Pinto’s imagination this is expanded into an affair (Le Corbusier was married until the death of his wife Yvonne

in 1957, though his womanising is on record.

Whether he would have actually taken to the slim de Silva is debatable however, he once leched on a reporter with the gross chat-up line: ‘You are fat and I like my women fat.

We could have spent a pleasant night together’).

It is also entirely factual that de Silva was beautiful with a keen eye for elegant saris.

Yet it seems problematic that a supposed affair with a western architect and her looks are the two aspects of de Silva’s character that Pinto foregrounds in her attempt to rescue de Silva’s reputation from a male-centric version of Sri Lanka’s design history. Paragraphs such as ‘Minette has confided to her that their meeting places are not always indoors, that there have been tents and picnic blankets and that [Le Corbusier] has developed a knack for tying a sari’ seem gratuitous within this context.

It made me wish for an assiduous biography (judging from articles Pinto wrote in the press to promote the book, it seems the use of fiction was not for lack of source material or research), because as a newcomer to the subject it left me forever diving to the Internet to find out what was true, which characters really existed, and which are made up. Did de Silva also have relationships with David Lean and Ulrik Plesner? (Yes, with the British director, but I can find no evidence for the Danish architect, who worked with de Silva but left her

practice after she was no longer able to afford his salary.) Are her friends in the book, Siri and Laki, artists associated with the Colombo ’43 artist group, based on real-life figures (none of the core Colombo ’43 have those names)?

Did Siri really turn to hardline Sinhalese Nationalism? Did Laki, a Tamil, actually die during a protest against the increasingly powerful Buddhist monks? Did Laki take Siri’s place in an exhibition of Colombo ’43 at the 1956 Venice Biennale?

Taken on its own terms, ignoring the fact the writer is dealing with historical figures, Pinto has written an engrossing romance set in politically turbulent times. She has a way with language in which similes dance off the page. Minnette’s clothes are folded in a suitcase ‘like so many sparrows’ wings’, Ceylon is ‘lost, like a jewel from a precious heirloom’; the rain is ‘operatic’ (though she does go too far on occasions, when, for example, new year fireworks are deemed to be like ‘dandelions exploding over the lake’). The reader finds themselves successfully seduced by Minnette’s character too: Pinto conveys the architect’s easy charm, and pragmatic approach to working within a country spiralling into civil war.

Yet, by not deciding as to whether she’s writing fiction or nonfiction, she allows far too many frustrations to develop along the way.

Oliver Basciano

The Bastard Cookbook

by Antto Melasniemi and Rirkrit Tiravanija Garret Publications/Finnish Institute of New York, £32 (softish cover)

A friend of mine has a theory: you can measure the greatness of an artist according to their skill at presenting the obvious as if it were profound.

(She’s a bit hazy about whether or not great presenting skill = great artist, but that’s a story for another time.) Poets and (professional) theorists talk about similar things in terms of making the ordinary extraordinary, or looking at the overlooked. Whichever way you spin it, this (more pretentiously, ‘the endotic’, as Georges Perec would have it) is what The Bastard Cookbook, part index of recipes that ‘bastardise’ national cuisines and part ideological statement, is about. Debossed into its golden cover are the words ‘The Odious Smell of Truth’, a phrase Rirkrit Tiravanija has been

incorporating into his more conventional artworks for the past couple of years, as if to acknowledge this. One thing you learn here is that there are multiple ‘truths’.

For the past few years, Finnish musicianturned-chef Melasniemi and Thai artist Tiravanija have been operating as The Bastard Brothers (not to be confused with the Polish rock band or the eighteenth-century British architect-builders, John and William Bastard) to create cooking experiences around art fairs, exhibitions and other public gatherings. Art bleeds into life and all that stuff. Lola Kramer’s introduction talks about cookbooks as generators of dogma, cultural stereotypes and sacred family traditions (later essays discuss cookery

Autumn 2019

in relation to gender stereotypes too). This book is about freeing ourselves from that while making fish-sauce ice cream, spaghetti with Sai Ua sausage (boil the spaghetti, fry the sausage, add the spaghetti to the sausage), macaroni Pad Bai Kra Pao, curry sauce pizzas and Nordic Khao Soi soup. We’re warned that cooking times are estimated and vary in any case according to climate and geography. They are an inspiration rather than a rule. You should feel free to swap any of the ingredients around. I do this daily because I am lazy (in any case my local foodstore doesn’t stock the Kratin needed for Rirkrit’s local pesto), but in these days of cultural puritanism, sometimes it’s good to be reminded that there’s an art to that too. Nirmala Devi

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Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

by Johny Pitts Allen Lane, £20 (hardcover)

Johny Pitts takes us on a trip through a black Europe from which we rarely see and hear; when we do it is usually framed through a narrow, problematising lens. Pitts, a Sheffieldborn writer, photographer and broadcaster, who set up www.afropean.com in 2013 with similar aims, sets out to explore the ‘beauty in black banality’: in alluring, crisp prose he shines a light on the everyday lives of black people in a number of European cities, among them Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. At a time when the populist right is on the rise throughout the continent, this is an important project.

His journey, taken over several months, and his interviews with the people he meets along the way are a means of testing whether or not the term Afropean – first coined in 1993 by Marie Daulne, the Belgian-Congolese lead singer of Zap Mama – is a cohesive idea that can bind Europe’s diverse black populations. When Pitts first heard the term, he writes, ‘it encouraged me to think of myself as a whole and unhyphenated: Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity at large. It suggested the possibility of living in and with more than one idea: Africa and Europe, or, by extension, the Global South and the West, without being mixed-this, half-that or blackother. That being black in Europe didn’t necessarily mean being an immigrant.’

The European Union estimates that there are at least 15 million people of African descent living within its borders, most of them in France, the uk, Italy and the Netherlands.

For one thing at least, Afropean is a starting

point to examine the present conjuncture in Europe: not only in terms of what it means to be black in Europe today, but also to test whether we are at the cusp of a black identity that can be said to be pan-European.

To explore these deeper histories of black people in Europe means to uncover histories in which black bodies have been invisible, marginal in the continent, and present too, in which black communities experience insecure lives blighted by social deprivation, unemployment and racism.

But black people in Europe are a very diverse group: what connects the second-generation Afro-Cuban-Swede Lucille in Stockholm, with Mozambican-Portuguese Nino in Lisbon, both subjects Pitts meets on his journey, with Becky, the young woman trafficked by the Nigerian mafia to work in a brothel in Sicily, whom I interviewed last summer in Palermo? Beyond their shared blackness, a narrative is needed that can amalgamate these different individual histories and circumstances into an open and inclusive identity that, as Pitts writes, does away with the need for hyphens. While it may be a starting point for us to reflect on black Europe today, it is not clear that ‘Afropean’ does that job.

Pitts’s text does not delve into a number of important aspects of the black experience in Europe. Not just how conditions for newly arrived migrants from Africa will be very different to those settled on the continent, but also the roles played by Christianity and Islam in shaping black communities, and what it means to be queer and black, to name a few. Nor does he much acknowledge intergenerational tensions

that exist within black communities. The writer is, to be fair, honest about these intersectional shortcomings from the outset, admitting that the journey could never be exhaustive for all sorts of practical and economic reasons.

For me then ‘Afropean’ needs to exist alongside ‘the black Mediterranean’ – a term first coined by Italian academic Alessandra Di Maio in 2012 that drew inspiration from Paul Gilroy’s 1993 book The Black Atlantic. Since then it has sparked international interest in the relationship between Europe and Africa – and how much of this history is rooted in violence and oppression. At its heart ‘black Mediterranean’ is a means by which to examine the realities at Europe’s borders, to not treat the continent as an enclosed space, but one that is porous and rooted in histories of slavery and globalist mass extraction – a history in which black bodies have been brutalised to make Europe rich. These are histories denied as often as they are forgotten; they are histories of colonialism rarely discussed outside academia. Europe, unlike America, has all too often refused to confront the history of brutal racism and colonial plunder that is integral to the stories of migrant arrivals from Africa today. In former European colonial powers today such as Italy and Belgium there’s a collective amnesia over how these histories may shape a pan-European black identity. And all the while European countries have not sought to decolonise in order to create a new gaze on black bodies in Europe, a gaze in which black agency, not displacement or suffering, is the central component of their identity. Ismail Einashe

Zeichnungen

by Peter Handke Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, €39.80 (hardcover) Zeichnungen, or ‘drawings’, is a collection of 110 finely penned, fragmentary images taken from the margins of notebooks used by Peter Handke, one of the most successful, prolific and confounding authors in the German language of the past 50 years. Sporadically dated, from 2007 to 2017, most are hand-notated with a detail or two about what is depicted, and perhaps where the drawing was made: ‘The hour between swallow and bat, Aranjuez’; ‘Nocturnal facade, Versailles St Louis, and the wonderful swelling’ (I am translating with the assistance

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of Google; the book, including a short prefatory essay by Giorgio Agamben, titled ‘Zettel und Bilder’, notes and pictures, is in German).

Other subjects include a dead mole, a clay beehive resembling a human heart, ice crystals on an airplane window, the pattern of a sleeping child’s hair. Inked in blue, black, red, green and/or yellow, some dense to the point of obscurity, others sketchy, the drawings have been removed from the fuller context of the notebook page and reproduced at close to actual size, with a generous surrounding of white

ArtReview Asia

space to focus our attention on these images as images. For this Austrian literary figure, who has explored, obsessively, the limits of written and spoken language in novels, plays, screenplays (including Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, 1987), poetry and essays (and who has courted controversy through, for example, a prominent defence of the actions of Slobodan Milošević), Zeichnungen presents a disorienting if not quite faithful transition from words to images, and is perhaps of greatest interest to the Handke superfan. David Terrien

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on the cover photography by Albrecht Fuchs

Words on the spine and on pages 19, 37 and 77 are from the Zhuangzi’s ‘The Death of Wonton’, translated by Victor H. Mair and published in Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu, 1994

on page 91 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Autumn 2019

97

How does contemporary art contribute to our awareness of big issues? Sometimes like this: in the latest project to feature contemporary art and outer space (there have been a few), the African Art Space Project will commission an artist from Africa to create an image, to be applied to the nose cone of an Ariane 5 rocket launcher. Blasting off in 2021, it will deliver a European meteorological satellite into orbit, which will observe the African continent and collect meteorological data about how Africa is being affected by global warming.

If you’re wondering how anyone will see an artwork on the nose cone of a rocket that will be travelling at 25,000kph and then be jettisoned to plummet to earth, you’ve missed the point. According to the project’s initiators, African Artists for Development (aad), a foundation set up by French art collectors Matthias and Gervanne Leridon (they’re passionate about contemporary art from Africa), the work will be toured across Africa before being fired into space. It’s a symbolic act, the first work of African art in space, a ‘powerful symbol of the continent’s artistic power’, incarnating the ‘image of a modern, ambitious, optimistic Africa that takes us beyond the stars’.

Space is a strange place to want to send contemporary art, though it doesn’t stop artists (and art collectors) wanting to do just that. Yet maybe what art in space does best is show up the tensions of the artworld’s attitude towards it being a visible, influential culture, with access to the most elite levels of economic, social and cultural power. And, like misfiring rocket launchers, it produces its own spectacles of disappointment. Trevor Paglen’s Orbital Reflector, a 30m-long diamond-shaped balloon compacted inside a satellite, was launched into space on 3 December 2018.

Unfurled, the work would have been visible from earth. According to its commissioner, the Nevada Museum of Art, Orbital Reflector would help ‘change the way we see ourselves… and our place in the world’. For Paglen, this purely artistic gesture would encourage the world to ask ‘serious questions about who controls space: Does anyone own it? And who ultimately decides how it is used?’

As it turned out, due to the us government shutdown of early 2019 (caused by Donald Trump’s standoff with Congress), the tiny device that would have deployed the work couldn’t be given authorisation by the Federal Communications Commission. Running out of power, it now floats lifeless in Earth orbit.

But regardless of their success or failure, these art-in-space projects stand in uneasy rela-

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Space Junk(et)

Pioneer 10. Courtesy nasa

tion to the power and privilege that enables them. Ironies abound, since while these projects may raise big questions, such questions are full of equally big social and political issues that show up art’s relatively slow and secondary ability to respond to them. After all, we should all want a ‘modern, ambitious and optimistic Africa’. Who wouldn’t? But what that really demands is an economically vibrant, prosperous and wealthy Africa, and that might mean a few more co2 emissions, to eradicate human poverty and want from this poorest of continents. Meanwhile, Ariane 5 rockets are launched from French Guyana, a country in Latin America, remember, that is still an ex-colonial territory of France, is still run as a department of the French

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state and uses the euro as its currency. Fine words by wealthy French art collectors about the ‘power of African art’ don’t resolve the still-existing power relations between the powerful West and the weaker African continent. (Maybe, too, a project to send a work of African art into space would have had better optics if it wasn’t funded by donations of artworks by African artists.)

Paglen’s Orbital Reflector – launched on one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets – is also full of unintended ironies. Musk’s SpaceX company has the vaunting ambition of making space launches cost effective, so that his personal ambition of seeing humanity colonise Mars will be more achievable. Yet in today’s more downbeat and self-critical culture, humanity going to space is often seen less as a noble and optimistic vision of humankind and more as an opportunity for humans to pollute the cosmos with the same shit with which they’ve littered Earth. As T.J. Demos grumbled in a recent issue of e-flux journal, Musk’s ‘libertarian entrepreneurialism’ is another aspect of ‘a growing “colonial futurism” premised upon the neoliberalization of outer space… set on off-planet resource mining, terraforming other planets, and extending property claims far into the galaxy’.

For Demos, ‘with the neoliberal corporatemilitary-state complex determined to occupy and settle the very place that certain Afrofuturists have long sought as a destination to escape colonized Earth, such starry-eyed fantasies are quickly becoming grim futures’.

Artists often reflect and project the preoccupations and anxieties of their moment. Now artists worry about the environment and colonialism. The first artwork on the Moon, Fallen Astronaut (1971), by Belgian Paul Van Hoeydonck, memorialised the 14 Americans and Russians who have died in the attempt to explore space. It still embodied the sense of human significance in that project. Damien Hirst got to Mars before Elon Musk, his spotpainting-derived panel attached to the Beagle 2 Mars explorer in 2003. Its cheery cynicism said little about space and more about Hirst’s thirst for self-publicity.

The greatest work of human culture in space, if it still exists, isn’t even an ‘artwork’.

It’s the information panel bolted to the side of the Pioneer probe launched in 1972. Marked with schematics of Earth’s position in the universe and stylised images of a man and a woman, it’s not an attempt to communicate with ourselves, about our own worries, but to others, to say hello. J.J. Charlesworth