ArtReview Asia Autumn 2015 by ArtReview

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LUCERNE

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BEIJING

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Cheng Ran

䲚䏅

Yan Xing

掱搡

A Film in Progress 18. 9. – 24. 10. 2015

扪䲚₼䤓䟄㈀

18. 9. – 24. 10. 2015

Thief 29. 8. – 25. 10. 2015

Julia Steiner

Xie Nanxing

庱 ◦㢮

7. 11. 2015 – 6. 2. 2016

Chen Fei

棗歭

13. 11. 2015 – 16. 1. 2016

12. 3. – 30. 4. 2016

忋

29. 8. – 25. 10. 2015

12. 3. – 30. 4. 2016

ARTISTS 唉㦾⹅ Ai Weiwei Chen Fei Chen Hui Cheng Ran Wim Delvoye Andreas Golder Hu Qingyan L/B Li Gang Li Zhanyang Liu Ding Meng Huang Qiu Shihua

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Tobias Rehberger Christian Schoeler Shan Fan Shao Fan Anatoly Shuravlev Julia Steiner Not Vital Wang Xingwei Xia Xiaowan Xie Nanxing Yan Xing Zhou Siwei

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ArtReview Asia vol 3 no 3 Autumn 2015

Big-game hunting With the ethics of big-game trophy hunting so much in the news after the death of ‘Cecil’ the lion at the hands (or bow and rifle) of an American ‘sportsman’ in Zimbabwe, there’s perhaps some irony in the fact that this issue of ArtReview Asia sees it taking a potshot at the elephant in its own room. In the three years of the magazine’s existence, that elephant has always been the definition of ‘Asia’, and to a lesser extent what might be considered ‘Asian’ about the art it covers. Particularly in the context of its smugly self-assured sister publication, ArtReview (motto: ‘If it’s art, we review it’). In this issue ArtReview Asia talks to Sun Ge, a Chinese academic (and major influence on ArtReview Asia’s thinking) whose research on the literatures and philosophies of China and Japan across the boundaries of academic disciplines and departments has led her to investigate ideas of what might be necessary to construct and articulate an idea of Asian-ness. ArtReview Asia peppered her with questions. Elsewhere, we look at how art connects with Asian contexts in more pragmatic ways, through an examination of three different types of art that might, in fashionable parlance, be considered ‘activist’. More specifically the work of artist collectives Chim Pom and Double Fly Art Center, and of the documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, all of whom seek to reveal and question particular issues of local sociopolitical contexts (which ArtReview Asia, in its more expansive moments, sometimes likes to call ‘life’) in Japan, China and India respectively. Self-knowledge – it’s a lifelong process, after all. And thank goodness for that. What would ArtReview Asia have to talk about otherwise? Next month: giraffes and ‘Art – what is it?’ ;) ArtReview Asia

bang!

Art Previewed

Previews by Hettie Judah 27

Points of View by Hu Fang, Sherman Sam, Du Qingchun, Kimberly Bradley & Kevin Jones 41

page 27 Guan Xiao, One to Another (detail), 2014, coloured stainless steel, coloured aluminium, 150 × 120 × 150 cm. Courtesy the artist. Included in the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

Autumn 2015

Art Featured

Chim Pom by Taro Nettleton 50

Sun Xun by Hanlu Zhang 76

Anand Patwardhan by Rosalyn D’Mello 58

Sun Ge interview by Aimee Lin 82

Double Fly Art Center by Aimee Lin 66

Hiraki Sawa: Envelope and Lineament by Mark Rappolt 88

page 58 Anand Patwardhan, Jai Bhim Comrade (still), 2012, video, 182 min. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

Art Reviewed

exhibitions 102

books 116

Chen Zhen, by Mark Rappolt Liu Shiyuan, by Eva Renaud Yan Lei, by Aimee Lin Balance Sheets, by Ming Lin Tao Hui, by Mariagrazia Costantino Construct / Construction, by Charu Maithani Kyungah Ham, by Tiffany Chae Haegue Yang, by Aimee Lin Hwayeon Nam, by Tiffany Chae Rasheed Araeen, by Bansie Vasvani Paul Chan, by Stephanie Bailey The Family Tree of Russian Contemporary Art, Field Research: A Progress Report & Rirkrit Tiravanija, by Mark Rappolt

Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring: Conversations with Artists from the Arab World, by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath An Era Without Memories, by Jian Jiehong 3 Parallel Artworlds: 100 Art Things from Chinese Modern History, edited by Chang Tsong-Zung, Gao Shiming and Valerie C. Doran I’m Very into You: Correspondence 1995–1996, by Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark the strip 122 off the record 126

page 109 Kyungah Ham, Needing Whisper, Needle Country from SMS Series in Camouﬂage, 2014–15, North Korean hand embroidery, silk threads on cotton, middle man, anxiety, censorship, wooden frame, 202 × 199 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

ArtReview Asia

David Zwirner Books New York & London

davidzwirnerbooks.com

Art Previewed

It’s a horrid suspense ﬁlm with unexpected ending, the meticulous psychological description will leave some people wanting more 25

Previewed Bruce Yonemoto Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei 19 September – 8 November

A Luxury We Cannot Afford Para Site, Hong Kong 19 September – 15 November

Nissan Art Award 2015 Bankart Studio nyk, Yokohama 14 November – 27 December

Hugo Boss Asia Art Award Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai 12 September – 8 December

Opening Celebrations National Gallery Singapore 24 November – 6 December

Amar Kanwar Goethe-Institut Mumbai from December

West Bund Art & Design Fair West Bund Art Center, Shanghai 8–13 September

PhotoBangkok 2015 International Photography Festival bacc and various venues, Bangkok through 4 October

Reena Saini-Kallat Vancouver Art Gallery through 12 October Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai from 11 September

Random International Yuz Museum, Shanghai 1 September – 31 December 15 Rooms Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai 25 September – 6 December Yang Fudong Yuz Museum, Shanghai 1 September – 15 November Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki 26 September – 25 January

pause bacc, Bangkok through 1 November Tokyo Art Meeting vi Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo 7 November – 14 February Yoko Ono: From My Window Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo 8 November – 14 February

Wong Ping Things That Can Happen, Hong Kong 5 September – 15 November

Shumon Ahmed Project 88, Mumbai 29 September – 7 November Kaleidoskop Residency Exhibition Kedai Kebun Forum, Yogyakarta 9 September – 10 October The Heart is a Lonely Hunter yarat Contemporary Art Centre, Baku 25 September – 9 January Zhang Ding ica Theatre, London 12–25 October

2 Moe Satt, The Bicycle Tyre-rolling event from Yangon, 2013, performance and photography. Courtesy the artist

Autumn 2015

Growing up in California during the 1950s of people, place and process, colliding apparently unrelated phenomena – Argentina as (his parents were among the 120,000 Japanesethe last site in the world both of a growing Americans interned during the Second World glacier and a growing Lacanian psychoanalytic 1 War), Bruce Yonemoto experienced the barrage practice; or, for North South East West (2007), of seductive iconography relating to self-image, Asian-American soldiers in the Civil War, Walter sexuality and ethnicity that pumped out of Benjamin’s concept of aura and D.W. Griffith’s American tv and cinema screens of the era. Ku Klux Klan-rousing film, Birth of a Nation Yonemoto’s film-based works, created, up until (1915) – to create multiperspectival works of the end of the 1990s, in collaboration with his unsettling power. The description of An Asian older brother, Norman (their debut being Garage Survey as Yonemoto’s first solo show in Asia Sale, 1976), went on to probe the uncomfortable is bittersweet, following, as it does, the death spaces between the human experience as depicted in mass media and that of messy reality. of his brother in 2014. For this, its second edition, the Hugo Boss Always probing for the unseen or overlooked, 2 Asia Art Award has broadened its scope Yonemoto triangulates the particularities

beyond Greater China (the geographical limit for entrants to the first award) to achieve a shortlist that also includes early-career artists from across Southeast Asia: Guan Xiao (China), Huang Po-Chih (Taiwan), Moe Satt (Myanmar), Maria Taniguchi (Philippines), Vandy Rattana (Cambodia) and Yang Xinguang (China). It’s a little bit more genuinely ‘Asian’ in makeup then, but still has some way to go before it has a shortlist that in any way reflects the scope projected by its title. The exhibition of specially commissioned works from the six finalists will form the basis for the jury’s selection of an overall winner in November. No pressure, then.

2 Huang Po-Chih, Production Line – Made in China & Made in Taiwan (detail), 2014, installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

1 Bruce Yonemoto, nsew (North South East West), 2007, c-print. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

4 Random International, Rain Room, 2012 (installation view, moma, New York). Courtesy the artists

6 Yang Fudong, The Coloured Sky: New Women ii, 2014, ﬁve-channel video installation. Courtesy the artist

A second edition, too, for the West Bund the participating artists as yet (hey – the drama more capacity than either the London (2012) Art & Design Fair – and unusually for such is part of the project), but expect a starchitect or New York (2013) versions. If you want to make events, it’s run by an artist, Zhou Tiehai – which collaborator for the rooms themselves, notable like Moses and watch the waters part around returns with 30 exhibiting galleries (from all inclusions from the Chinese art scene and you, book ahead: in Shanghai the queues on over the world) and forms part of a citywide art Marina Abramović (maybe). the day will be for viewing-only tickets, not full takeover that extends to the Photo Shanghai fair A busy autumn for Yang Fudong: the interactive access. Also rolling into town in 6 and Art in the City Festival. ArtReview Asia will Shanghai-based artist’s oneiric, melancholic 5 a supersize version is 15 Rooms, a beefed-up big be weighing in with sharp insights and fearless moving-image works (which were part of the brother to the 11 Rooms performance-art-aswit during the fair’s talks programme – check sculpture concept debuted in Manchester in 2013 launch issue of ArtReview Asia back in May 2013) by artworld kings of Instagram Klaus Biesenbach will be the subject of major survey shows in artreview.com for details and catch us if you can. and Hans Ulrich Obrist, and which has grown Blockbusting artertainments now seem both Shanghai and Auckland. The Yuz Museum by a room with each new staging (which makes to tour the globe like boybands (or perhaps fastshow will pay tribute, in particular, to Fudong’s this, for those of you who can count, the concept’s nonlinear approach to filmmaking, following 4 food franchises?). Random International’s fourth iteration, the most recent having coinRain Room rocks up to Shanghai’s Yuz Museum sensibility, mood and happenstance rather cided with last year’s Art Basel). No details of in a 150sqm site-specific version that gives it than a script or fixed image in works exploring 3

Autumn 2015

the resonance of China’s artistic, philosophical will this September launch Things That Can Taking its cues from an infamous 1968 Happen, a nonprofit art space aimed at reflecting and cinematic heritage on the lives of a new speech by late Singaporean premier Lee Kuan and nurturing the sense of cultural awakening generation. Both exhibitions will include an 8 Yew – the ‘luxury we cannot afford’ in that installation of the recent five-channel The Coloured in the city to which both have strong ties. case being the creative arts at a time when the Sky: New Women II (2014), the artist’s first foray Located in a residential building in the old, newly formed city-state urgently needed to industrialise and nation-build – Para Site into digital video, shot on an artificial beach – market-lined district of Sham Shui Po (whose will examine Singapore’s cultural history over complete with beautiful (1940s-style) bikini-clad Golden Shopping Centre is still considered one of the cheapest places to buy or build a the past 50 years, and the nuanced language and women and stuffed deer (an ongoing reference to early Chinese fable) – flooded with crepuscular computer) in Kowloon, the apartmentlike space ideology that has evolved around the concept of light filtered through large sheets of tinted is conceived as a site of dialogue as much as the necessary and the ‘luxurious’. Works range acrylic. Look for a visually stunning show in display. For the official opening, ttch will from social-realist pieces from the 1950s through direct responses to historical events – such as Lim which the past and the present meet. 7 present work by Wong Ping that investigates Yew Kuan’s woodblock print After the Fire (1966) – Stimulated by a sense of ‘social and political the local sex industry, as part of which the artist to the work of contemporary artists including urgency’ in Hong Kong following last year’s will re-outfit the gallery to resemble the rooms protests, artist Lee Kit and curator Chantal Wong Heman Chong, Nguan and Green Zeng. used by sex workers in the neighbourhood.

7 Wong Ping, Jungle of Desire, 2015. Courtesy the artist

7 The gallery space of Things That Can Happen, housed in a traditional tong lau residential building. Courtesy Things That Can Happen, Hong Kong

ArtReview Asia

11 Tavepong Pratoomwong, untitled work from the series Good Day Bad Day But Every Day, 2014, photographs. Courtesy the artist 10 Nazaruddin Abdul Hamed, untitled and undated photograph. Courtesy the artist

Speaking of Singapore’s 50th birthday celebrations, the crowning moment for its art scene arrives this November, when the country’s 9 National Gallery opens its doors for the ﬁrst time. Located in 64,000sqm of what was once Singapore’s City Hall and Supreme Court, the new institution aims at being the authority on Singaporean and Southeast Asian art from the nineteenth century to the present. We can only presume that the question of where and what Southeast Asia is will be one of the topics raised by the initial displays. Running during and beyond the 10 PhotoBangkok 2015 International Photo11 graphy Festival, bacc’s Pause is a rush-averse

Tabor Robak, 20xx, 2013, hd video, real-time 3d, 8 min. Courtesy the artist and Team (Gallery, Inc), New York

exhibition of works by camera-wielding practitioners from different core disciplines and regions across Southeast Asia. Guest curator Ark Fongsmut recomplicates the question of photography’s status in the artworld, arguing that the speciﬁcity of place and context brings with it varied textures of light and ‘thingness’ that disrupt Western art-historical distinctions between documentation and personal expression in photography. A dedicated international survey, the show includes artists from Yogyakarta’s Mes56 artist space, as well as artists from Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Spreading beyond the doors of bacc across 12

ArtReview Asia

multiple venues, the inaugural edition of PhotoBangkok offers talks, events and exhibitions around the Thai capital aimed at fostering creative development in the city and celebrating forgotten and overlooked photographic masterworks from earlier generations. Looking forward, and with a ﬁrm sense of urgency, Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art takes stock of the city’s identity in advance of the 2020 Olympic Games, and in the wake of cultural precarity generated by the Tōhoku earthquake of 2011. Navigating a route between the ‘hot magma-like culture of the 1980s’ and the glacial, reﬁned cultural face that Tokyo has presented in the digital era, the Art Meeting brings together

six cultural luminaries operating from the city in diverse fields – including techno-pop legends the Yellow Magic Orchestra, online art practi- 14 tioners ebm(t) and playwright/founder of the Chelfitsch theatre company Toshiki Okada – each of which will curate a themed section of the show (neoteny, post-Internet sensibilities, splendour and fragility…). A second section will exhibit new commissions addressing aspects of contemporary Tokyo by artists from Japan and beyond, including [Mé], Lin Ke and Saâdane Afif. Running concurrently, a survey show of 13 works by Yoko Ono will foreground the Tokyoborn artist’s projects as they relate to Japan and her roots in the city.

Following a ﬁrst round of judging in Venice earlier this year, seven ﬁnalists have been selected for the second biennial Nissan Art Award. 15 The winner of the last edition was Aiko Miyanaga, and though passing allusion is made to the ‘potential of young artists’, the selection tends strongly towards midcareer artists – such as photographer Tomoko Yoneda – as well as supporting younger artists such as animistically inclined installationist Tsuyoshi Hisakado. And where would ArtReview Asia put its money? Probably on Yuko Mohri, whose installations, which often make visible invisible forces such as sound and electricity, featured prominently in last year’s Yokohama Triennial and Sapporo International Art Festival.

Following early-stage exhibitions at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and at Documenta 13 (both in 2012), Amar Kanwar’s The Sovereign Forest (2012–) has evolved and expanded with each exposure (it’s been to Yorkshire and Vienna since) and, fresh from an outing at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, will be shown in its latest incarnation in Mumbai this autumn. Examining the validity of artistic, poetic evidence when held against political or criminal malfeasance, through ﬁlm, photographs, texts, objects and events, Kanwar’s expanding work circles around the disappearing landscape of Odisha (formerly Orissa), considering the aggressive acquisition and development of the state’s natural landscapes

15 Amar Kanwar, The Sovereign Forest, 2012– (installation view, tba21–Augarten, Vienna, 2014). Courtesy the artist

14 Tomoko Yoneda, Chrysanthemums (from the Cumulus series), 2011, c-print, 65 × 83 cm. © the artist. Courtesy ShugoArts, Tokyo

ArtReview Asia

17 Shumon Ahmed, Metal Graves, 2009, photographic print on archival Hahnemühle ﬁne art paper, 61 × 193 cm. Courtesy the artist and Project 88, Mumbai

18 Presentation by Putri Siswanto, artist in residence at the Ace House Collective, Yogyakarta. Photo: Fajar Riyanto. Courtesy Ace House Collective, Yogyakarta

16 Reena Saini-Kallat, Ruled paper (red, blue, white), 2014, electric wire on paper, 109 × 79 cm. Courtesy the artist and Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai

to have rendered it a crime scene. If humanity’s relationship to the land is one of the most pressing issues of our times, then this project is one of the most intricate, expansive and in many ways epic documents about why that should be the case. Bureaucracy’s power of erasure and the traces left by human movement form twin axes in the 16 work of Mumbai-based Reena Saini-Kallat, 17 who’s current Vancouver Art Gallery show features Woven Chronicle (2015), a vast map of global migration routes woven from electrical wire and circuitry parts that seeks to connect the effects of migration and social transformation on an urban scale to its impact in a global context and,

and the human and environmental impact of conversely, look at how the former might deal the ‘dead’ containerships beached in Chittagong with pressures asserted on it by the latter. In in the Bay of Bengal waiting to be broken up for Hyphenated Lives, her ﬁrst solo show at Chemould for seven years, woven wires splice banyan steel, the tools of global trade now ripped apart to be traded themselves; and their links back to and deodar trees, a stag and a tiger, an oak and the ships of colony and Europe’s Age of Discovery. a palm: hybrid forms that speak of interdependAntihierarchy, community spirit and collecence between nations and shared resources. Related to that, Dhaka-based photographic 18 tive creativity infuse the biennial Kaleidoskop artist Shumon Ahmed’s projects turn around residency and exhibition coordinated by three of Yogyakarta’s artist-run spaces: Kedai the less-seen or overlooked – a Guantánamo Bay Kebun Forum, Ace House Collective and Mes56. detainee returned to Bangladesh after ﬁve year’s incarceration; the artist’s complex feelings This exhibition of work by a dozen young arttowards his ‘mad’ mother. In Metal Graves ists follows a month of workshops, training (2009–11, shown last year at the Kochi-Muziris and the exchange of critical discourse inspired Biennale) he meditates on the materiality, by Walter Gropius’s idea of a workshop formed

Autumn 2015

of ‘like-minded artists’. Taking the commitment to a productive economy one step further, the residency is part-funded by Kaleidoskop merchandising linked to locally produced goods including coffee, bamboo-cotton T-shirts and sunﬂower seeds, maintaining a link between the production and distribution of art, and the production and distribution of food and apparel. Riffing off the themes of alienation and 19 longing in Carson McCuller’s 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the yarat Contemporary Art Centre’s group show, cocurated by the institution’s curatorial director, Suad Garayeva, and Rhizome’s artistic director, 20 Michael Connor, features a broad range of work

by artists such as Neïl Beloufa, Parker Ito, Camille Henrot and Lu Yang. Central to the display is the trajectory from emptiness to a form of selfawareness as documented in Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno’s No Ghost, Just a Shell (1999–2002), which centres on the ‘life’ of a shop-bought anime character, AnnLee, as it is ‘filled-in’ by various other artists who use her. On show in Baku will be two of Huyghe’s videoworks featuring the character, hopefully passing on the curators’ stated aim of projecting the message that ‘fictive characters have realworld effects and affects’. Talking of fictive characters, it’s time to polish up those metal claws: Zhang Ding is transforming the theatre of London’s ica this

autumn with an immersive mirror and light installation inspired by the reﬂecting-maze ﬁght scene in Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (1973). Instead of battling martial artists, the space will be animated by performances by musicians, dancers, sound artists and poets selected in association with London’s Dalston-based independent music station nts. Despite the setting’s bellicose inspiration, the plan, apparently, is to encourage ad hoc collaboration between randomly programmed performers in the space. In the spirit of fruitful collaboration, perhaps it would be wise for the more typically fractious elements of London’s music scene to bear in mind the great Lee’s immortal words: ‘The word “I” does not exist.’ Hettie Judah

19 Parker Ito, A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night, 2015 (installation view, Château Shatto, Los Angeles, 2015). Courtesy the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles

20 Zhang Ding, Enter the Dragon, 2015. © the artist

ArtReview Asia

The Legends Beyond

THE GREAT WALL China West Film Studio International Art Festival

2015.7.10 - 10.5 China West Film Studio Zhen Bei Pu, Xi Xia District, Yin Chuan, Ning Xia, China

Hotline: 4006-1888-92 w w w . c h i n a w f s . c o m The first China "Burning Man Festival" World amazed wonder is accomplished by years diligent Chinese devotion.

EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION

Ꭽ๏ጌᓨషЧᘩ The Purple Roof Art Gallery

SUPPORTERS ˗‫ڎ‬ᎿషߦᬓНСᓨషߦᬓ

CHIEF MEDIA PARTNER

MEDIA PARTNER

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2015 Exhibition Series:

Folklore of the Cyber World: an Online Exhibition for the Chinese Pavilion le Biennale di Venezia 2015

Michael Joaquin Grey Apr. 1–May. 2

SHEN Xin: Rhythms of Work - Means Something to You

Wolfgang Staehle

May. 8—Jun. 7

May.10–Jun.10

GUO XI & ZHANG Jianling: The Grand Voyage

George Legrady

Jun. 8—Jul. 7

Jun.21–Jul.19

MIAO Ying: Holding A Kitchen Knife to Cut the Internet Cable

Marina Zurkow

Jul. 8—Aug. 7

Jul.26–Aug.26

WANG Yuyang: Lettering - A work of The Dictionary Series

Casey Reas

Aug. 8—Sep.16

Sep. 6–Oct. 4

YE Funa: Nail to Go

Jim Campbell

Sep.17–Oct.16

Oct.11–Nov.11

LIN Ke: Lens from E-world

AL & AL

Oct.17–Nov.22

Nov.22–Dec.30

Tseng Yu-Chuan Information-Procedure-System: an Aesthetical Discussion on Digital Art Sep. 5

THE LEONARDO ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY LECTURE SERIES David Joselit Aug. Sean Cubbit Oct. Rudolf Frieling Dec.

www.chronusartcenter.org |

info@chronusartcenter.org

Points of View

It was V, an artist exiled in Germany, who told me the story of Conqueror Island. I dimly recall that we were in a restaurant when the subject came up, and I should add that this friend of mine was a food lover and connoisseur. Even in desperate times, he would not mistreat his belly. His predilection led me to realise that depriving someone of good food could be more cruel than depriving them of freedom. Yes, it was in a restaurant in some small town close to the Austrian and Czech border that we spoke of the island. The town had a typical baroque-style town hall and when we passed the fountain in the town square, V abruptly stopped and pointed at the fountain as it sprayed water every which way. “I did a piece here,” he said. He explained how he had cut away parts of the beautiful exterior of the fountain, revealing the rust-spotted iron pipes inside, which had in turn been bent into the shape of a crestfallen man. The crucial element was this: the ﬂow of the water from the fountain was irregular, suggesting to any spectator the image of a man suffering from prostate problems. Now I recall – it was at that restaurant when, as soon as we sat down, he read out the menu to me. To translate that menu into Chinese faithfully required surmounting countless cultural and linguistic obstacles. You can imagine what a strong attachment to times past there was in his dramatic reading in this old-school European restaurant, with its perhaps excessively dim lighting and crude tables, and its waiters all at least two or three times older than myself. V described to me in detail the composition of the beef, and the astounding journey it had taken to our table. Our conversation gradually grew around the subject of Tafelspitz, and it was not until we had arrived at dessert (a Sachertorte that I ultimately toppled) that he began speaking about Conqueror Island, as if the island’s bitter history could only be revealed if accompanied by the fragrance of chocolate and ground almonds. “At ﬁrst, it was the island’s rocks that attracted me. They have a particular texture

the comfort of captivity by

Hu Fang and colour that’s related to the geological origins of the island, which is also barren of grass and trees due to that unusual geology. Standing on the cliffs, all you can see is the endless, churning ocean.” “Did you go to the island looking for rocks?” “I had never thought that I would ﬁnd anything there. In fact, I had never thought that I would go there at all. All I did was accept an invitation from an arts institution and once I got there I was drawn to the rocks. On the small strip of ﬂat land on the overhanging cliff, I walked into an array of boulders that had endured years of erosion from the sea breeze and rainwater. The solid surfaces had become pitted and rough and their original spatial arrangement had become less obvious. Passing among them, I pondered the original purpose of the array of stones, but I could not imagine what it was, nor how they had been assembled in this desolate and uninhabited place.” “Did it look like an ancient Greek ruin?” “Perhaps it more closely resembled a prehistoric temple. Regardless, it was a marvel, built by a group of people. Even if I now tell you the real history, it would not change the fact that it was a marvel – it would probably make you even more impressed. The array of stones I passed through was a prison, built in the nineteenth century.” “Huh,” I exhaled, and my spirits sank, but then I distinctly felt my pulse quicken with wild joy. “It’s an absolute fact: it was a prison, and moreover, a prison built by the prisoners themselves. They had been sent to this desolate island, and they used these stones to build a prison for themselves.” As an architect, I had once been fascinated by the history of mankind’s building of prisons

Autumn 2015

and particularly infatuated with prisons built by prisoners themselves. I am not sure exactly when this long tradition disappeared. “Did anyone escape from there?” “It is said that there was a prisoner named Christian. He swam out to sea and escaped with his wife’s help. But nobody has ever found proof. Of course, I know many more stories of those who failed to escape and found their graves at the ocean ﬂoor. Standing on the cliff, you could see that the night sky was extraordinarily clear. The stars were more dazzling than anywhere else on the earth. To the prisoners, they must have seemed like an alluring summons.” In the noisy restaurant, he gulped down the chocolate ﬁlling in front of him as if it were happiness trying to escape from him. The piercing northern winds outside the window carried cold air from Siberia, swept through ocean straits, and stirred a body amid its attempt to escape from a stone prison. That body was perpetually suspended in its drop from the clifftop to the tumultuous surface of the ocean below. “I swam to the end of the ocean, and once I was there, I imagined that I was a descendant of that prisoner, endlessly searching for my own free air.” He drank a double espresso in one swallow and then sprang to his feet. We left the restaurant and leaned into the frigid wind, both inhaling sharply. In the days that followed, I saw him over and over again. Each time we met, he would search through his pockets and show me, with a hint of pride, the things he had picked off the ground that day: a piece of rubber, a twig, a coin, a balled-up piece of paper (he opened it up and read the German written there: ‘Zyklon B’), a candle stub, a bit of gravel. These objects that formed his daily collections were gradually taking over his apartment. “This will be my most important work,” he said. I was not sure if he meant the objects he had picked up off the ground, or the things that were about to happen in his imagination. Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

Given that we collectively imagine islands in the tropics to be chilled-out places, Singapore is a very un-island nation. It is an economic hub, populated by workaholics concerned with enterprise. The economic drive and search for progress seem relentless, almost to the point of paranoia. This is, of course, the ethos fostered by Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015), Singapore’s founding prime minister, fondly referred to as lky, who passed away in March of this year. The question since his demise has been that of his legacy. In terms of the country, its economy and global position, the answer is obvious. But what did he do for the arts? In his weekly blog, the Singapore/Manilabased critic and art historian Tony Godfrey wondered what Singapore could have been like had Lee or his wife actually been interested in art. He compared lky to Sukarno (1901–70) – the founding president of Indonesia – who had also been an amateur painter and who ‘created a situation in Indonesia where artists were respected and taken seriously’. In fact, a young journalist delivering one of lky’s eulogies recounted that the only thing he failed at in life was an art exam when he was in primary school – not really important in the grand scheme of things. The point of Godfrey’s question is that the arts in Singapore could certainly have developed very differently. The country is very much a top–down economy across the board, and the visual arts are no different. The museums, as in most countries, are creations of the state. However the commercial scene has been fostered more by the edb (Economic Development Board) than by entrepreneurial art dealers or even art lovers. The art schools – not to mention the biennials and art fairs – are state supported of course, via agencies like the nac (National Arts Council). However, galleries and museums have proliferated over the last 20 years, all part of a multistage development strategy on the government’s part. But does that make it a bad scene or even an uncritical one? It is certainly an unusual model, but a uniquely Singaporean one, and it is a model that the country has used successfully in developing industries such as ﬁnance or tourism. Perhaps the arts should be treated as an industry as well. What about the artists? Do they reﬂect the society they live in? Singapore is a technocratic state, and in 2011 The Economist described the country as the ‘best advertisement for technocracy: the political and expert components of the governing system there seem to have merged completely’. Given such an ‘ecosystem’, and in a country with a dearth of space (hence one reason for a lack of painters and sculptors in the country, when compared to other, similar states), then could the artist also be some kind of technocrat?

As well as marking Singapore’s 50th birthday, this year witnessed the death of its founding prime minister lee kuan yew who

once famously described poetry as ‘a luxury we cannot afford’ so

how much of Singapore’s developing art scene is the result of his legacy? by

Sherman Sam An artist from Singapore

‘Harry was given three hard strokes of the cane.’ From A Boy Named Harry: The Childhood of Lee Kuan Yew, by Sheri Tan and illustrated by Patrick Yee, Epigram Books, 2014

ArtReview Asia

What sort of art would such an artist produce? If a technocrat is someone who manages with technical expertise, then perhaps the art would be a ‘knowledgeable’ art – perhaps art about art or otherwise illustrating layers of information. More likely the artist is a manufacturer of meaning or a knowledge producer. Meaningfulness, or a certain social purpose, does seem to dominate approaches to art production in the country. Perhaps this could be the equivalent of some kind of ‘capital’ in that it provides use value leading to exchange value, and lky would have appreciated this. For example, Shirley Soh’s Seeing ( from) the Other (2013), first shown at the 2013 Singapore Biennial, involved working with female prison inmates to embroider statements and images that reflected their future aspirations on table linen. Whereas Michael Lee’s print on glass panel, Notes Towards a Museum of Cooking Pot Bay (2010/11), displayed on Singapore’s underground system, imagines a history of the neighbourhood by mixing fact with fiction in diagram form. Somewhat like a fictive variation of the social diagrams of the American artist Mark Lombardi, but writ large and placed prominently on an underground platform, it is what the artist describes as a ‘mind map of notes’. Both these works may achieve a value in the market, but they also provide a useful social purpose: Soh’s embroideries actually connect with disenfrancised society, while Lee’s imaginative remapping of a neighbourhood is easily accessible to the public. The ethos of a country with no natural resources is that, in lky’s view, people working – together or apart – has to be the nation’s economic driving force. Following that perspective, it would seem that the artist should be no different: knowledge- or meaning production must be profitable (whatever that means). But just maybe there is another spirit of lky that abounds: he also had a reputation as a hard man. A boxer while studying law at Cambridge, Lee brought a pugilist’s approach to government; he would sue for defamation and never lost a lawsuit. Perhaps if artists find themselves nagging or cajoling their dealer ‘aunty-style’, making demands of the local museum or being haughty with collectors while managing a studio full of interns… well, perhaps that too is in Lee’s image. With a young and growing art scene, both commercial and public, the question will be how this pragmatic economic approach develops the scene. And – hopefully – as money begins to feed the culture industry, perhaps this other side of lky will be more prominent. In which case, maybe another kind of art, perhaps more argumentative or pugilistic, will also make itself visible.

In a park in Gyeongju, South Korea, a man on the brink of middle age abruptly diverts from his walk and starts to practise tai chi to music played by an old man. This behaviour is abnormal by contemporary East Asian standards, and when I say abnormal, I am not talking about the practice of a Chinese martial art in a Korean park; rather, what’s unexpected is the sudden way in which this man actively interferes with the lives of others. The old man’s spontaneous response is even more abnormal: he expresses neither surprise nor curiosity about the newcomer. Instead, he begins imitating the younger man’s style of tai chi, and not without a bit of awkwardness. Abnormality leads to further abnormality, in a chain presented as an indivisible totality. The scene is part of Gyeongju (2014), a Korean-produced film by Zhang Lü, a Chineseborn, ethnically Korean novelist who now works in South Korea as a film director. Gyeongju is a typical East Asian art film. The rhythm is leisurely and dispersed; the cinematography assumes an angle of quiet observation; the mild colours and characters do not directly challenge the eye. Even the modest hints of surrealism do not disrupt the film’s naturalistic and comfortable portrayal of life. The man who suddenly begins practising tai chi is Choi Hyeon, a Korean professor of Northeast Asian politics at Peking University with a troubled marriage to a Chinese woman. Because she does not allow him to smoke, he holds his Chinese-made cigarettes under his nose in order to satisfy his nicotine addiction, even while he is back home in Korea. He resembles a Korean movie star (of course, he is also portrayed by one) to such an extent that some female Japanese tourists ask to take a picture with him. He speaks Chinese and Japanese. Zhang Lü uses this highly competent character to shape the discourse of his film. The film, driven by this man’s desires, is an unhurried stroll through the mists of identity and sexuality. While firmly established in both these regards, Choi urgently seeks comfort and harmony amid the fracturing of identity and the slipperiness of sexuality. The narrative of Gyeongju begins with Choi’s journey to the funeral of a male friend. At the funeral, the subject and notion of sex lead him to embark on a new journey of peaceful retrospection: he goes to look for a pornographic painting that he and his late friend saw at a teahouse in Gyeongju several years prior. Of course, he also arranges to meet an old flame in Gyeongju and then encounters two new female counterparts. One of these women emerges as the film’s female protagonist. Her surname is Gong, the same Chinese character of kong, the surname of ancient Chinese sage Confucius, marking her as

gyeongju, a korean arthouse film or

East Asian modernity as a site of conﬂict between nations and with traditions or

Does the arthouse format allow you to mix commentaries about national identity with a populist romance? or

does the one type undermine the other? by

Du Qingchun

a descendent of the aforementioned thinker. She is the current proprietor of the teahouse with the pornographic painting, and she and Choi enact a subtle dance of desire and restraint. Gong is conversational in Japanese, whereas the other woman, who works at a tourist information centre, can only muster a few halting sentences of Mandarin. Choi also encounters two other important female characters: a mother and her adorable daughter who together commit suicide in Gyeongju. I am compelled to disclose this part of the plot to demonstrate the film’s defining characteristic: the director employs elements of shocking abnormality in an apt and naturalistic fashion that somehow manages to conjure a sense of equilibrium. With the emergence of East Asian modernity, the conflicts between nations, and between tradition and modern civilisation within each nation, have produced historical and persistent traumas. Zhang’s Gyeongju is clearly highly focused on these traumas. Gyeongju is an ancient Korean city, home to regal tombs that are today a major tourist attraction. Indeed, due to its historical background, the entire East Asian region has become a tourism zone of ambiguous or floating identities, a trend that may be especially obvious to Zhang, given his personal background. Indeed, this aspect of his identity contributes some politically taboo themes to his filmmaking discourse, such as the Koreanethnic Chinese’s marginalised position in China and the two Koreas (which is the theme of

South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin’s 2010 film Hwanghae, or The Yellow Sea), and the political, economic and cultural tension between today’s China and South Korea. For this reason it may better to shift the focus of the Gyeongju story towards sex and away from identity. Or perhaps I should attempt to return this discussion to the most straightforward representation of these elements in Zhang’s film: national identity adds tension to the love story, but also limits the romantic element of the film to a superficial exploration of the vagaries of desire. Gyeongju, 2014, dir Zhang Lü

Autumn 2015

Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

How much art can a viewer see in a day? How fast can a critic ‘do’ a biennial? How much does a curator comprehend after ten seconds (which, as Philippe Parreno notes, is how long on average museumgoers look at an artwork) – or even one minute? These are questions I (once a normal viewer, now something between a critic and arts journalist) ask at an art fair, biennial or any exhibition of the ‘mega-’ sort – those events whose deeper purpose I increasingly question and whose halls and streets I now run through faster, faster, faster, to see more, more, more. Not long ago I was slow and thoughtful – I stayed a week at my first Art Basel (I was far less experienced as a viewer, and possibly kinder, more patient and certainly less harried as a person, but that’s another story). I’ve since become frighteningly proficient at seeing and evaluating tremendous amounts of art in the shortest times possible, rushing through crowds of fellow art professionals, some of them friends; jostling, even jumping, to ‘see the work’, and at times deciding whether I understand or like a piece in even less than ten seconds (unless it’s a long video, in which case I throw an internal hissy fit at the inherent time commitment). Often I must write about what I saw, or ‘saw’, within hours. Nearly every week a major art event opens somewhere. Which means that for critics, but also curators, flacks and collectors, speedviewing has become a necessary if lamentable skill. There’s simply too much one is supposed to see, and though it’s true that after seeing a lot of art for a long time, you do get a quick sense of what sucks or doesn’t, it’s too much. Haste makes waste – sometimes I gravely misjudge, due to hurry and physical exhaustion, and there’s also the siren call of mega-exhibition hearsay (‘What did you think of X?’ and ‘Go see X; it’s amazing’ can easily turn into hivemind-driven, uncritical consensus – a danger of too much scene and not enough seen, too much herd and heard and not enough heart, and mind, and time). Depending on the art’s quality, it’s akin to gorging on a gourmet meal or, conversely, stuffing yourself with two bags of potato chips and feeling horrifically empty-but-full afterward. A critic might then figuratively stick fingers down his or her throat for the purge – writing, armed with a stack of cryptic press releases and a thousand iPhone pics, half of wall labels (maybe the writer took the pic before viewing, and Walter Benjamin takes another spin in his grave), a critique of stuff she was too ‘full’ for in the first place. Quickly describe/evaluate/ contextualise, update social media status with ‘Art hangover. Again’ and board another plane for the next mega-event. En route, consider that artists, too, are caught in the spin cycle – spectacle be damned, just don’t be forgotten or unsold,

A once-hurried critic steps off the artworld’s globalised merry-go-round to inaugurate her own Slow Art Year by

Kimberly Bradley

both images Art Basel, June 2015. © Art Basel

ArtReview Asia

or too complex and arcane. Win shares in the attention economy. Lather, rinse, repeat. See. Buy. Fly… Why? Blame it on the market, technology, 24-hour art news websites, globalism, neoliberalism, the culture industry. Blame it on the boogie, blame it on the rain… gotta blame it on something. But we can only blame ourselves; our peripat(h)etic lives and participation in what amounts to an offline Internet (to evoke Hito Steyerl); we physically jump between images, experiences and people faster than we toggle tabs on broadband connections. Is artworld accelerationism the ultimate in first-world problems, and where might it lead? Must we be complicit? No one is forcing me to accept an exotic press trip (the implied assent is problematic anyway) or book another EasyJet flight I can’t really afford and join what Cuauhtémoc Medina calls the artworld’s ‘jet proletariat’. In a moment of fatigued epiphany and subsequent Google session, I discovered that in the noughties, eccentric Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry declared the launch of the Slow Art Movement – something worth revisiting. ‘Art-world acceleration I put down to various forces,’ he said. ‘First, we are… prone to being sucked into the idea that fast is somehow central to modernity.’ Is it? I think not, or not only. I suspect I am not alone. I’m seeing more art about the slowest but most powerful force of all – nature (perhaps as a countermovement to what Brad Troemel calls ‘Athletic Aesthetics’, which is about constant, high-quantity broadcasting). Established artists and dealers are leaving the game in frustration, or just to think and work. I live with an artist whose practice is about deceleration, landscape and analogue production (like his mentor-of-sorts Hamish Fulton, he walks – and hates my deadline-driven frenzies). This year, I’ve followed his lead and learned to resist my fomo. It makes no sense to try keeping up with the Koonses. I’m still here, and I’m ok. I’m healthier and think more deeply about more things. It is an unintentional but necessary Slow Art Year. My advice so far: go local, go peripheral. Look at a single piece in your home city for a half-hour. Ask an artist or gallerist to explain the work, and listen without drifting off or texting. Reread John Berger’s simple but powerful Ways of Seeing (1972) (in fact, reread all your favourite slow stuff). Consider your smaller carbon footprint. Skip biennial openings and go a month, or months, later, when the crowded rush calms into a lovely flow, and savour, not just consume, the wonder, the transformation, the privilege that is good art. An artwork is one of humanity’s hardiest yet most fragile productions, and deserves more than a distracted ten seconds.

The Persian Gulf is traditionally considered a hub, with the oil-rich states that border it offering a pivot on which the enterprising West can capitalise on Middle and Far Eastern market promise. Set against the background hum of burgeoning infrastructures built by South Asian migrants, Dubai’s constellation of free zones crystallise the emirate’s vocation as corporate epicentre. These capital-attracting regulatory blind spots, where international corporations set up shop in state-intervention-free business parks, function like pockets of capitalistic ‘anything goes’ in an Islamic autocracy where much doesn’t. In the early days, naively named free zones Dubai Media City and Dubai Internet City lured giants like cnn, Reuters and Oracle; today they are flirting with start-ups helmed by budding entrepreneurs hailing from Iran, India, Pakistan and points east. The gradually maturing arts infrastructure in Dubai, although incapable of rivalling the free zones’ laissez-faire magnetism, has a worldview that transcends the neat East/West binary. Art fairs, biennials and foundations source content and audiences from a tangle of directions, finding more potent commonalities with other emerging art centres and nascent markets along East–East and South–South (rather than East–West) lines. From Kochi to Sharjah, Nairobi to Dubai, Karachi to Jeddah: the flux of artists and ideas is intensifying along “these lateral connections that increasingly bypass European mediation”, as South African scholar Sarat Maharaj framed it in his keynote address at the 2013 Sharjah Biennial. “Art Dubai doesn’t want to be Art Basel,” insists fair director Antonia Carver, foregrounding a will to differentiate, underpinned by the clear obligation to occupy a niche in this emerging market. Shunning the blue-chip-laden Western franchise model, the nine-year-old fair hosts galleries from the nooks and crannies of the so-called Global South, complementing the bedrock of mena galleries (that is, those in the Middle East and North African region), with only a sprinkling of Victoria Miros and Marian Goodmans. Audience-wise, a fairgoer is as likely to rub shoulders with a curator from India’s Clark House Initiative or Beijing’s Ullens Center – come to sample the all-under-one-roof menasa (mena + South Asia) zeitgeist – as with a moma PS1 or Tate heavy, the likes of whom are increasingly intrigued by this ‘alternative’ mix. New collectors hail from West and East Africa and Central Asia, in addition to strongly represented countries like India, Pakistan and Iran. On the museum front, in late 2014, as state-backed Qatar Electricity & Water finetuned its partnership with Japanese trading company Marubeni to build power plants around the world, starting in Kenya, Qatar

The Hub or

the place where old and new regions of the global artworld converge and intersect, spinning off in new vectors of cultural trade and requiring neologisms such as

South–South East–East, mena and menasa by

Kevin Jones

Architect’s rendering of Louvre Abu Dhabi. © Ateliers Jean Nouvel

Autumn 2015

Museums wooed museum power-players from 52 countries to Doha for the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (cimam) conference. After three days of debating public interest and private resources, the crowd flew to the uae to fathom the Sharjah–Dubai–Abu Dhabi triad. Though Sharjah counts nearly 20 museums of all stripes, the emirate’s breadth is outdone by the pageantry of the upcoming behemoths on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island. Arms in Abu Dhabi’s cultural diplomacy arsenal – which has less to do with exporting ideology than cultivating bicultural experiences in the petri dish of the country itself, so citizens and transients alike might see the emirate as an enlightened and tolerant place – the Louvre and the Guggenheim will also be, more mundanely, tourist magnets for a capital city intensifying its courtship of Asian, notably Chinese, vacationers. How human rights sits with that, obviously, is another question. Western they may be, but the museums just might, rather circuitously, fill the holes of a lopsided local ecosystem in this emirate that counts one commercial gallery, and a single yearly fair, Abu Dhabi Art, of which the royal family are the major patrons. “They’ve committed to the end of the sentence,” says Emirati writer and think-tank leader Mishaal Al Gergawi, referencing the sparkling museum endgame. “Now they have to go back and fill in the beginning.” This ‘beginning’ might include powerful residencies for artists from the broader region who will write the uae art story, a collection, a public space, maybe an art school. Once this backtracking is complete, the museums will make more domestic sense, perhaps functioning as a permanent locus of multidirectional exchange, contrary to the intermittent fairs and biennials. Although Western art professionals tend to struggle with the brazenness of this cultural acquisition binge, something shimmers in this Gulf land of promise that draws them: funding. Taking a somewhat hypocritical swipe at the flagships of the fledgling uae museums, Tate Modern director Chris Dercon boasted, in a 2011 presentation in Doha on audience engagement, “Tate Modern doesn’t need faraway franchises to connect or to cooperate with the new global arts.” What he did need, though, was Sheikha Mayassa’s ‘sponsorship’ of 2012’s Damien Hirst show, providing Tate Modern with the third most successful show in its history, and hoisting Qatar up a rung of cultural credibility. Although the day may come when Western institutions cease to be sources of validation or benchmarking, for now, no matter how much the Gulf view sweeps across the Global South, it still has the West squarely in its sights.

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Art Featured

Watching this ﬁlm is like enjoying relaxed holiday, without purpose and profound theme, you will not only have a great view of Europe, but also make you smile 49

Chim Pom by Taro Nettleton Photographed by Monika Mogi

In January this year, the six-member Tokyo-based art collective Chim Pom won the Emerging Artist of the Year Award at the 2015 Prudential Eye Awards for Contemporary Asian Art. The group was established a decade ago, when its members – Ushiro Ryuta, Hayashi Yasutaka, Ellie, Okada Masataka, Inaoka Motomu and Mizuno Toshinori – were in their twenties, and their youth is a prominent factor in writings about their work. Yet today, the oldest member is thirty-eight. It may thus be more apposite to characterise the group’s work as youthful. The overwhelming image that Chim Pom has diligently cultivated, however, is one of the ‘bad boy’. Somewhat predictably then, in response to winning the prize money, they told The Straits Times, ‘We are going to drink 10,000 gallons of alcohol with it.’

A household name in Japan, Chim Pom has thus far received relatively scant critical attention abroad. The collective is known for its provocative works, which frequently incite situations that point to local, contemporary, social concerns. Domestically, they have laboured to construct a critical discourse for their output. In 2012 Chim Pom published Geijutsu jikkohan (Art As Action, 2012), a book explaining their works and placing the group in the milieu of ‘artivists’ from around the globe, such as Banksy, JR, Voina, the Bruce High Quality Foundation, Gelitin and Double Fly Art Center, with whom they feel an affinity. There is also an entire volume of contributions from prominent art critics, curators and artists dedicated to the controversy that erupted around a work they produced in Hiroshima.

ArtReview Asia

Autumn 2015

Super Rat (still), 2011, hd video, sound, 2 min 28 sec. © the artists. Courtesy mujin-to Production, Tokyo

ArtReview Asia

The lack of a parallel discourse in English makes Chim Pom’s work, in many cases, difficult to appreciate outside Japan. The group’s obvious desire for transgression also often overshadows other merits of their output. Seen as an oeuvre, Chim Pom’s works alternately address the trivial and the profound. And in their most successful pieces they bridge the gap between the two. One of their ﬁrst works, Super Rat (2006–), is a case in point. For this, the artists used ﬁshing nets to hunt the titular creatures (so-called by exterminators due to their seemingly supernatural adaptation to the urban environment, both in cunning and physical resilience), in Shibuya’s Center-Gai, a street known for its grit and youth culture. They then taxidermied

Real Times, 2011, video. © the artists. Courtesy mujin-to Production, Tokyo

the super rats and painted them into real-life (or real-dead) ‘Pikachu’. In these garishly coloured rodents, members of Chim Pom saw a reﬂection of themselves: they too made Shibuya their home, and they found the super rats’ adaptability and strength inspiring. They also suggest that it cemented the social and public orientation of their practice. Perhaps not coincidentally, in the hit song Linda Linda (1987), released almost exactly 20 years prior to the creation of Super Rat, sentimental Japanese pop-punk sensation the Blue Hearts sang, “I want to become beautiful like a sewer rat, because there is a kind of beauty that does not appear in a photograph.” In 2011 Chim Pom recreated Super Rat to address the possibility of mutation, particularly of the nuclear kind, which had for so long captured the Japanese imagination but had suddenly become a very real possibility, for the ﬁrst time since 1945, in the aftermath of the nuclear meltdown caused by the great northeast earthquake and tsunami of 11 March that year. Like the beauty of the sewer rat, radiation cannot be seen. The question of what one can and cannot see, and the correlative of what one is shown and not shown, have thus become a central concern for many living in post-3/11 Japan, and the Abe administration’s brazen censorship of journalists and artists has compounded the issue. Chim Pom was recently told by a Japan Foundation official in

response to a work it proposed for an international exhibition that the Abe administration will not allow the foundation to fund any works involving the keywords ‘Fukushima’, ‘nuclear’ or ‘comfort women’. As of this writing, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government are pressuring the group’s mentor Aida Makoto to either remove or alter two of his works – one criticises the Ministry of Education and the other spoofs ‘a man calling himself the prime minister of Japan’. To address the question of visuality in post-3/11 Japan, Chim Pom has recently initiated Don’t Follow the Wind (11 March 2015–), a group exhibition currently displayed in the exclusion zone of Fukushima, where, for all practical purposes, it remains invisible. In September, Don’t Follow the Wind – non-Visitor Center, a satellite exhibition, will open at Watarium in Tokyo. As Chim Pom’s leader Ushiro explains, the show comprises works by an international group of artists, including Ai Weiwei, to address the nuclear meltdown as a problem that needs to be considered on a global scale. Furthermore, Ushiro hopes that the satellite exhibition will provide the kind of alternative public relations work needed to challenge the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (tepco) own formidable pr efforts. Asked whether making the show visible detracts from its message, Ushiro answers, “The satellite show is a practical necessity to avoid the pitfall of self-satisfaction. We also need to provide a catalyst to spark the [public’s] imagination.” Throughout the last decade, Chim Pom has continuously interrogated the everyday, a particular type of the invisible. In this, they carry on the tradition of Japanese ‘Anti-Art’ artists of the 1960s, such as the Neo Dada Organizers (active 1960–63) and Hi Red Center (1963–4), who, amid the political and social turmoil that characterised that decade, saw their work as social agitation.

Coyote, 2014 (installation view). © the artists. Courtesy Friedman Benda, New York

Autumn 2015

Inherent in the everyday is the ideological; the everyday is all that we take for granted, and it is difficult to see ideology at work, precisely because, like a spy, ideology stops functioning once it is recognised as such. The events following 3/11 exposed one crucial ideological myth at work in postwar Japan – the safety of nuclear power. tepco promoted the safety myth belligerently by paying off the media. When Chim Pom saw that the media had failed adequately to report the aftermath of the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, it took matters into its own hands with admirable speed. For Real Times (2011), the group’s members travelled down the broken roads to Fukushima, penetrating the boundary of the 20km exclusion zone, and videotaped themselves walking, in hazchem suits, up to an observation tower located just 700m from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Once there, they planted a white flag signifying defeat (while echoing expeditions to the moon or Mount Everest), spraypainted a red dot in the centre to create a Japanese flag, then added three blades to it, transforming it into the international symbol for radioactivity. While Chim Pom’s works have increasingly taken a more explicitly political bent, explicit politics is no guarantee of artistic effect. In this context, Ushiro considers Real Times a product of ‘journalism’, a method needed at the time, but one he no longer sees as the most viable. Today, he is interested Real Times, 2011, video. © the artists. Courtesy mujin-to Production, Tokyo in “less literal, and more artlike” methods. Post-3/11, the collective has left an uneven track record in this regard. ‘social phenomenon’. Though compared by its detractors to an attack This, however, is also a testament to their willingness to take risks. on the survivors of the atomic blast, the work attests to the unrepreA recent work, It’s the Wall World, shown in various forms since 2014, sentability of the trauma of the atomic bomb. One is reminded of the and planned for inclusion in their upcoming solo exhibition at the opening sequences of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), in Saatchi Gallery, trades puzzle-piece-shaped cutouts of the gallery which the Japanese architect repeatedly tells the French actress, “You wall with those taken from various locasaw nothing in Hiroshima.” The simple action of inserting the onomatopoeia flattions in the ‘outside world’. The metaphor The group travelled down is easy and the work is visually humdrum. tens ‘Hiroshima’ and turns the scene, as the broken roads to Fukushima, The integration of art into the ‘real world’ critic Noi Sawaragi suggests, into a comic into the exclusion zone, and is something Chim Pom already achieved book panel. In lieu of depth and seriouswith Super Rat, and has successfully made videotaped themselves planting ness, which could never be adequate to the a cornerstone of their practice since. As a event, the wispy text set against the bright and spraypainting a white flag blue sky works in the insurmountable gap result, It’s the Wall World feels redundant. near the damaged power station between the weight of the event and utter In their best works, Chim Pom deftly employ artistic techniques of gestural lightness of its representation, literally economy, moving spectacle and estrangement to poetic and even weightless. Here Chim Pom successfully points to the unexamined, alchemical effect. For their most controversial work to date, a 2009 quotidian acceptance of ‘peace’ and the simultaneous forgetting of video piece entitled Making the sky of Hiroshima ‘pika!’, Chim Pom the Pacific War in postwar Japan. hired a skywriter to form the onomatopoeic pika (flash) above the Chim Pom will return to the Hiroshima theme in a characterHiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome. Due in large part to a local newspa- istically iconoclastic new work planned for their Saatchi Gallery per’s muckraking efforts, the event became, in Chim Pom’s words, a exhibition. The piece revisits the mountain of origami cranes, sent to

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Black of Death, 2007–8, lambda print. © the artists. Courtesy mujin-to Production, Tokyo

Autumn 2015

Hiroshima from around the members and local young men world as prayers for peace, huddle together and peer into which the group exhibited in the camera as they yell phrases Hiroshima!!!!! (2013, the fourth to ostensibly focus their enerin a series of exhibitions degies and boost morale. The veloped by Chim Pom on the local youths were both victims subject of ‘nuclear power in and volunteers, and the words our age’, the ﬁrst of which was they chant are no less ambivalent. The chants start off as titled Hiroshima!, with each one might expect, with a call subsequent iteration acquirto “work hard and rebuild!” ing an additional exclamaThere are humorous chants, tion mark). In the upcoming such as “I rule!” and “I want work, however, Ellie will sit a girlfriend!”, which compliatop the mountain and uncate outsiders’ tendencies fold the cranes individually, giving viewers an opportuto pigeonhole victims’ lives as nity to refold them. Following ones of suffering. In perhaps Real Times, 2011, video. © the artists. Courtesy mujin-to Production, Tokyo ‘pika!’, the piece will deploy the most shocking moment of a simple, yet venomous and unnerving gesture to problematise the the piece, a local yells, “Radiation rules!” and another answers, “I want discursive production of ‘Hiroshima’. some more!” Here too, the image of the victim is refuted in surprising In an earlier work, Black of Death (2007), which foreshadows ‘pika!’, ways. Even more troubling, however, is the chant “Japan rules!”, as Chim Pom herded a murder of crows with the use of a stuffed crow it sublimates the subversive character of the event/video into someand a loudspeaker amplifying a recording of crowing. Like ‘pika!’, the thing like the Japanese state’s official call for Japan and its northeast work involves an aerial manoeuvre. In the most interesting version, region to ‘do your best’ in the aftermath of the disaster, showing that the crows circle above the National Diet Building, creating a magical calls to emotion can be a dangerous game that usurps genuine action and eerily suggestive picture. In 2000, then Tokyo mayor Shintaro and lends itself to uncritically nationalist sentiments. Ishihara declared war on crows, calling them a public nuisance. Is Chim Pom’s practice can be understood as artful ways of ‘makBlack of Death an act of revenge enacted on behalf of the crows or some- ing do’. Lacking art training (Ellie is the only member who attended thing more symbolic? In both ‘pika!’ and Black of Death, the works’ art school), they’ve primarily employed performance and video to ambiguity and visual punch refutes easy categorisation as mere prank. produce their works. Faced with an oppressive administration; a mass Ambiguity is also at work in Chim Pom’s 2011 video kiai 100. media that fails to function critically; a gallery system that lacks the Filmed in one improvised take in Soma, Fukushima, a city not only collectors it requires to function properly; and conservatively run devastated by the quake and tsunami but also by a shortage of volun- museums, the direct actions that Chim Pom have taken are best teers due to its proximity to the Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, group understood as necessary tactics of survival. The collective’s opening of Garter, an artist-run gallery, earlier this year is another of its attempts to gain some autonomy. Ushiro says he has noticed among his students a “strong sense of frustration”, similar to that which initially inspired the members of Chim Pom to start making art. Whether younger Japanese artists will follow in their steps remains to be seen, and Chim Pom’s nearly-tenyear career is a testament to the fact that tactics need to be continually renewed for efficacy. For Chim Pom, complexity and poiesis, already hinted at in its strongest works, will be key to gaining relevance in the global context as the collective grows out of its youth. ara

Making the sky of Hiroshima ‘pika!’, 2009, c-print. Photo: Cactus Nakao. © the artists. Courtesy mujin-to Production, Tokyo

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Work by Chim Pom is on show at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 9–20 September, and will be included in the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial in Moscow, 9 September – 10 November. Don’t Follow the Wind (dfw) is on show at Watari-Um Museum, Tokyo, from 19 September

A Chim Pom Super Rat (2006–), photographed by Monika Mogi in the artists’ Tokyo studio

Autumn 2015

Anand Patwardhan Throughout his 40-year career, the Indian filmmaker has consistently sought to document the struggles and champion the rights of the powerless in the face of the powerful, all the while developing a style in which the rawness of reality is never finessed, however exquisitely each film is crafted. In the face of conflict and controversy, his works maintain a constant message of hope by Rosalyn D’Mello

Sometime during the course of viewing the 16 major films that com- most committed documentary to date, the three-hour-long Jai Bhim prise Anand Patwardhan’s 40-year-long career as a documentarist, I Comrade. This film was the culmination of 14 years spent recording chanced upon an isolated piece of paper. ‘You look at someone long the Dalit (the political name of castes who were formerly considenough, you discover their humanity’, it read – a trace from a long-ago ered ‘untouchable’ according to the age-old Hindu caste hierarchy) viewing of James L. Brooks’s 1997 film As Good As It Gets. It was a fine community’s struggle for justice following an incident on 11 July, instance of synchronicity, for what marks Patwardhan as an auteur 1997 in Ramabai, a Dalit colony in Mumbai. The residents had taken is the inimitable manner in which his camera brazenly lingers over to the streets to peacefully protest the desecration of the statue of their a speaking subject for those seemingly interminable moments that icon, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, a fellow Dalit who fought caste oppression follow the end of his or her speech. Across each of his films the now and rose in rank to become the prime architect of the Indian constisixty-five-year-old filmmaker looks long and searingly enough either tution: the colony had woken up that morning to find Ambedkar’s to uncover his subject’s humanity or, on occasion, to expose the abject statue garlanded with slippers. Members of the special reserve police lack of any. Through his role as the producer, editor and director force opened fire on the protesters, killing ten of them. In anger of each of his films, Patwardhan has and as a mark of protest, Vilas Ghogre, a Provoked by an irrepressible rage ensured that those presumably still morenowned Dalit singer, poet and activist, ments, which most of his peers would against the violations of the basic rights hanged himself. have abandoned to the cutting room Ghogre’s suicide came as a serious jolt of the politically marginalised, floor for fear of impeding the cinematic to Patwardhan. Between 1983 and 1984 each of his films is the artistic outcome he had spent time recording Ghogre’s pace, are deliberately retained as a signimusic, committing one of his songs to ficant narrative device. This is one of of this activist stance Patwardhan’s most vital editing techfilm and using it poignantly in his niques. It is perhaps even the basis of his visual vocabulary. award-winning documentary Bombay: Our City (1985), an examination Patwardhan’s films begin and end with the same ever-pertinent of the slum-demolition drives in the city as symptomatic of the poliontological question that Judith Butler concerned herself with in her tics of caste and discrimination against the poor. Ghogre’s death ‘was book Undoing Gender (2004): ‘I would like to start, and to end, with the a shock and I thought I had to do something about it’, Patwardhan question of the human, of who counts as the human, and the related said after the screening of Jai Bhim Comrade at the Dharamshala question of whose lives count as lives, and with a question that has International Film Festival in 2013. preoccupied many of us for years: what makes for a grievable life.’ His Patwardhan was three-films-old when he released Bombay: Our films are provoked by an irrepressible rage against the violations of City. His first significant effort had been his chronicling of the 1974–5 basic rights to life, livelihood and the dignity of labour of the polit- people’s uprising in Bihar, helmed by veteran Gandhian socialist ically marginalised by those in power to serve their own corrupt, Jayaprakash Narayan, who had galvanised the masses across caste and vested interests. Each of his films is the artistic outcome of this activist class barriers against governmental corruption. The movement led stance. ‘I take out the camera only when I’m upset enough,’ he said in to a repressive state of emergency being imposed by the then prime an interview in 2010, a year before the release of his most recent and minister Indira Gandhi. Titled Waves of Revolution (1975), the 30-minute

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A Time to Rise, 1981, 40 min (coproduced with Jim Monro)

Autumn 2015

Bombay: Our City, 1985, 75 min

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film was shot using outdated film stock, makeshift equipment and a Throughout his career Patwardhan has been and remains one of borrowed Super-8 camera, the footage from which had to be projected India’s staunchest champions of the constitutionally mandated right and refilmed with a 16mm camera, lending parts of the film a strobe- to freedom of speech and expression. light effect. In September 1975, three months into the emergency The absence of neutrality marks Patwardhan’s filmmaking oeuvre, during which the right to freedom of speech and expression was despite his obsession with recording every existing side of an issue, severely curtailed and where any form of dissent could be met with even those that are dissonant with his more pronouncedly humaniimmediate arrest, one of two existing prints that had been processed tarian standpoint. In fact, Patwardhan often goes so far as to reason secretly across various laboratories under threat of discovery was cut with those whose beliefs run contrary to his own. His use of this prointo segments and smuggled into Canada, where it was reassembled clivity as a prominent narrative technique is effectively illustrated in for circulation among nonresident Indian organisations. Though a scene in War and Peace (2002), his antinuke exposé of India’s blind in an interview included on the dvd Patwardhan describes the film jubilation after its nuclear tests in Pokhran in 1998 sparked its neighas technically his worst, its antifascist tenor and evident sympathy bour Pakistan’s own nuclear programme. On one of his trips to Lahore, towards the disenfranchised, marginalised working-class established Patwardhan engages with schoolgirls at the Lahore grammar school for him as well as his audience the moral standpoint that would come who’ve been split into teams in order to argue the merits of Pakistan’s to define not just his next two films, Prisoners of Conscience (1978) and nuclear tests. After hearing both sides of the debate, the filmmaker interjects from behind the camera to speak of the overwhelming A Time to Rise (1981), but the totality of his still-evolving oeuvre. The Mumbai-based filmmaker did not consciously set out to friendship he received from the average Pakistani, offering his pacifist make Waves of Revolution. “My job was simply to keep a record of police opinion on the issue, beseeching the girls to question their belief in violence if and when it occurred,” he says in the same dvd interview. the majoritarian view that supports nuclear testing and to seek peace His continued deployment of the camera as a witness is apparent in instead. The scene ends with the girls coming around to his point his other films. In the Name of God (1992) documented the systemic rise of view and singing a pro-peace song in their impeccable Urdu. By of Hindu fundamentalism that led to the demolition of the Babri never pretending to be neutral or unbiased, Patwardhan’s films offer the viewer the kind of perspective that mosque by members and associates Despite their apparent gloom and is inflected by ground realities as well of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as a plenitude of diverse and opposing (rss), a Hindutva body that was allegominous setting, Patwardhan’s films opinions, not just naive idealism. Each edly responsible for Mahatma Gandhi’s are laced with hope. They celebrate film is an investigation into a proposiassassination in 1948. The mosque deboth the small and the significant tion that Patwardhan sets off to explore molition sparked a spate of Hindu– Muslim riots across India. Father, Son achievements that come to pass when across each narrative arc, imbuing them and Holy War (1995), a powerful two-part with an essayistic flair. ‘I will grant that the disenfranchised consciously my films are more verbal than visual in cinematic film, in turn explored the organise nonviolent resistance against that I am wary not to rob people of their hypothetical link between violence pervoice and steal only their image,’ he said petrated in India against minorities, exploitative powers that be lower castes and women, and the psyin his interview with bfi while elaborating on his acceptance of the essay as the genre that perhaps best chology of male construction of manhood and machismo. Patwardhan wields his camera as an extension of his own con- embodies his formal technique. ‘In deeply unjust and segregated science, which has led critics to brand his films as examples of agit- societies they do the job of democracy. Silence or non-verbal moments prop, a term he dislikes. ‘My problem with the “agitprop” tag is not in these films occur rarely, but when they do, they are significant that I disavow the engaged nature of filmic intervention, but that precisely because they are rare.’ the word “prop” is short for “propaganda” and propaganda is generPatwardhan’s camera peers into the heart of deep, festering ally what one does not agree with or trust,’ he explained in a recent wounds, whether inflicted by the trauma of partition, the repression interview with the bfi. ‘At best the label reeks of a subtle put-down of the emergency, the terror of having one’s lands and livelihoods from those who believe that art and politics are mutually exclu- seized by a greedy government, or the consequence of centuries of sive and there is a pecking order between them.’ The category also casteist oppression and violence. His films arise from and invoke the does Patwardhan a real injustice, considering he began his career spirit of protest that is provoked by the act of grieving. Patwardhan’s at a time when the only kind of documentaries being made were 57-minute film A Narmada Diary (1995, directed with Simantini state-sponsored, actively propagandistic and meant for broadcast Dhuru), which traces the struggle of the indigenous Adivasi commuon the state-owned tv channel, Doordarshan, which he has often nity against the ecological implications of the construction of the taken to court for its refusal to screen his films despite their having formerly World Bank-funded Sardar Sarover Dam in western India, garnered prestigious national and international awards and critical has one spine-chilling moment of grief: members of the tribe mournacclaim. Patwardhan’s films actively challenge predominant ideolo- ing the martyrdom of a sixteen-year-old boy shot by the police during gies of Hindu fascism, nuclear nationalism and systemic casteism. one of their many peaceful demonstrations. The tribe performs a rituThat explains why he is constantly in the eye of several censorship alistic lamentation involving a collective wailing, and Patwardhan’s storms, the most recent instance being when the ils Law College in inclusion of this haunting, nonverbal chorus of howls irrevocably Pune cancelled the screening of In the Name of God, prompting the marks every viewer of the film by enunciating our unconscious collufilmmaker to upload the entire documentary on YouTube, making sion in the atrocities being enacted against the disenfranchised under it available and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. the guise of ‘development’. Another powerful scene in the film has

Autumn 2015

Waves of Revolution, 1975, 30 min

ArtReview Asia

In the Name of God, 1992, 75 min

Autumn 2015

an older Adivasi man pointing out, for the benefit of Patwardhan’s instrument in voicing dissent in a country where a vast majority camera, a piece of land that belonged to his family for generations that is illiterate. The Otolith Collective recognised the vitality of this had been entirely submerged as a consequence of the dam’s construc- aspect of Patwardhan’s practice in choosing to title the retrospective tion. This footage strikingly reveals to us how, when and if built, they curated of his films at Tate Modern in July 2013 A Cinema of Songs the dam will primarily serve India’s privileged elite at the expense and the People. of the original residents, who will have had to suffer the trauma of To have his films screened at Tate Modern signalled a crucial an unfair and inadequately compensated dislocation despite having moment in Patwardhan’s career. For someone who had often been told his films were too issue-oriented and utilitarian for them to be inhabited those lands for centuries. Still, despite their apparent gloom and ominous setting, considered works of art, the retrospective at Tate Modern was a kind Patwardhan’s films are laced with hope. They celebrate both the of vindication, he believed. ‘Their aesthetics were rarely discussed small and the significant achievements that come to pass when the because the issues they raised grabbed all the attention,’ he said in an disenfranchised consciously organise nonviolent resistance against interview in July 2013 with Blouin Artinfo. Patwardhan felt he could the exploitative powers that be. Fishing: In the Sea of Greed (1998) is never stomach the supposed dichotomy between art and politics. one such poignant example, documenting the agitation of several ‘I retaliated by denying the importance of an art that did not speak to Indian fishing communities against the reality of people’s lives, an art that the industrial fishing practices of was to be hung in galleries and in the gigantic factory ships and the unhomes of the elite.’ Patwardhan sees precedented success they achieved by art as a byproduct of the attempt to communicate. ‘When this act of protesting under the single banner of the National Fishworkers Forum, communication transcends time and geography, it transcends its immefounded during the 1970s. Through hunger strikes and mass rallies, the diate purpose.’ traditional fisherfolk managed to Patwardhan’s films are neither exert pressure on the government, slick nor savvy; the jerky quality of compelling it to rethink its profitthe handheld camera footage lends able encouragement of the oversize them a rawness that is never procesmultinational trawlers that had been sed or smoothed over in the editing room. Yet each film is expertly pillaging the seas, thus leading to a significant decrease in the density of crafted to present a cogent argument against the prevalence of injustice. traditional community’s daily catches The editorial finesse is embodied in while destroying the ecosystem of the the layering of the visual and verbal Arabian sea. Local remonstrations narrative and the choice positioning expanded to incorporate the concerns of fisherfolk abroad, leading to of oppositional points of view, allowing for critical moments of satire and greater checks on reckless overfishing and dangerous land-based prawn subversion. This is cleverly exemplified in one moving scene in In the farming that rendered soil infertile Name of God, just after we’ve been and corrupted the groundwater. The sustained movements were responwitness to a hate speech of the vilest sible for many small victories, includkind delivered by rss kar sevaks. ing the institution of the Coastal These worthies justify the murder of Regulation Zone (crz) in 1991 proMahatma Gandhi and believe themhibiting the construction of any permanent buildings within 200 selves to be the incarnation of God, as they continue their march meters of the high-tide line across India’s 7,500km coastline (this into Ayodhya to stake claim over the Babri Masjid, which they are was amended to 100 meters in the 2011 update of the crz notifica- convinced is the birthplace of Ram. Then at the same site Patwardhan tion), besides providing guidelines for the protection of the liveli- interviews an old man who turns out to be a Hindu priest. After a hoods of the traditional fishing communities and the preservation rapid-fire round of questions, it is established that the interviewee of the ecology. has traveled to Ayodhya for spiritual reasons and wants nothing to do The zealous recording of the rich repertory of protest music with the dispute over the Babri mosque. “I’m not saying anything. composed to evangelise the cause of justice is another coherent feat- I’ve just lost my glasses and I’m blind without them.” He follows the ure that marks all of Patwardhan’s films. It will perhaps constitute old man who is guided away by a police constable, and records his his legacy. Over decades, Patwardhan has systematically documented final apologetic quote, “I dropped my glasses”, as he fumbles onward the spirit of every revolution his camera has witnessed, however into the distance, tapping the ground with his walking stick. Like the minor or historic, through its articulation in the form of protest old man, all of us who buy into dominant ideologies without quessongs. The ensuing soundtrack of each film is no tioning their propagandist nature also suffer from circumstantial blindness. Patwardhan seeks not to mere background score but serves to profoundly Bombay: Our City, 1985, illustrate the active role of music as an integral restore our sight but to renew it. ara 75 min

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Father, Son and Holy War, 1995, ﬁlm poster all images Courtesy the artist

Autumn 2015

Double Fly Art Center by Aimee Lin

Is there a deeper strategy behind the art collective’s grotesque performances?

Double Fly Save the World (still), 2012, video

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It has been seven years since Double Fly Art Center was established. it seems just about possible when you foster the image of nine ‘bad Last April the collective opened two solo shows in Beijing. At Space boys’ bolstered by collective courage. Indeed, when acting individStation, a gallery located in the 798 Art Zone, under the title Double ually, these ‘bad boys’ are the very opposite of crazy, pissing-around Fly’s Klein Blue, they re-performed Yves Klein’s classic 1960 perfor- Double Fly Art Center: nerds glued to a computer screen; artists mance work Anthropométrie de l’Époque bleue and transformed the who don’t know how to reply to a curator’s email; one too shy to call gallery space into an adventure playground that mixed music, action himself an artist because he goes to work from nine to five; another painting (and sculpting), performance and game- and reality shows. the kind of young man who is always getting a call from his pregnant Only a week later, at the Today Art Museum, they launched Double wife wondering why he is still playing videogames at a friend’s house Fly Egg-crushing Tournament! There, visitors were asked to purchase a at midnight. raw egg for ¥1 and to press it against another visitor’s egg; the person Indeed, when the nine members of Double Fly assemble, they whose egg remained unbroken would win the game. According to generate the energy, courage and opportunity to do crazy and seemDouble Fly, the game, sharing the spirit of the Olympics, aimed to ingly silly art. Since its establishment, Double Fly’s performances ‘expel bias and troubles in the minds and have been carnivallike games indulging in wild fantasy, drawing on crazy stories that rebuild the link of peace and friendship’, and the group hears or has encountered in real to answer the question: ‘which came first, the life as raw materials. In Double Fly Kill Art chicken or the egg?’ After seven days of intensive contests, Hostage (2012), they appeared as kidnappers of around 1,600 eggs were sacrificed for Double various artworks, eventually ‘killing’ them. Fly’s art, but the philosophical dilemma In Double Art Allstar Project (2011), they invaded remained unsolved. In reality, when Double a boutique hotel, sharing a bathtub filled Fly thinks, people laugh, and when it with milk (they called it ‘milk of pure love’), performs, people laugh themselves to death. exercising in the gym and playing football While it has a name that projects it in the on the lawn. In Dancing King (2009), wearing guise of an art institution, Double Fly never black bankrobber’s balaclavas, they initiated a hides its openness to invitations to perform dance competition on a busy shopping street. at exhibitions, art fairs and any place that Back in 2009, six years before they mimicked needs a live(ly) event. Indeed, it is best to Yves Klein’s Anthropométrie, they had made consider Double Fly Art Center as a popular Imitated Pollock, a performance whose wild performing art group. Like a typhoon, it paint-throwing at blank canvases in the lands on Shanghai or Basel or New York or street now looks like a precursor to the interLondon during the art-fair season, at the nationally popular 5km ‘Color Run’ events. It openings of exhibitions and art awards, and was also in 2009 that the members of Double all those events at which performance art is Fly found a not-yet-fitted-out branch of the considered a must-have in the spectacular Industrial and Commercial Bank of China culture of the art-fair economy. and enacted Double Fly Robs the Bank, in which Double Fly Art Center is a group of nine the group’s masked members steamed up guys – Cui Shaohan, Huang Liya, Li Fuchun, in a minivan to steal nothing much (paint Li Ming, Lin Ke, Wang Liang, Sun Huiyuan, buckets, bags of plaster) from the not-yetYang Junling and Zhang Lehua – who got functioning bank. Perhaps as a result of their to know each other as students in the newmedia-art background, the group also makes media art department of Hangzhou’s China videoworks and publishes them online, often Academy of Art between 2004 and 2008. in a music video format, as well as producing For art students in China, as in other places, funny staged photographs that imitate graduation is an existential fork in the road, commercials, and even creating sculptures – at which they have to decide whether they normally pieced together from small, cheap want to continue to work as professional commodities found in local markets. artists or find a ‘normal’ job to earn a living. So in 2008, Double Maybe due to their carnivalesque style and its somewhat tornadoFly’s nine members, facing the challenge of their uncertain futures, like realisation, ‘activism’ is a word sometimes used to describe rented a house together so that they could continue making art, Double Fly Art Center’s performances. However, the group doesn’t crazily and hopelessly. They named this house Mansion Double maintain or declare any clear political, social or artistic position. Fly. In classical poetry, the expression ‘double fly’ literally means Precisely speaking, the art of Double Fly is a response to their own two birds flying together, and is used to refer to two people in love. situations as artists, rarely dealing with bigger, real-world issues. But in contemporary Chinese idiom, it refers to a sexual threesome; The group’s physical engagement is a means for the mob (this term more specifically, the male heterosexual fantasy of one man having is used here in a neutral sense) that has nothing but its body to confront the world. But does Double Fly really sex with two women. To launch a serious art career with a name want to beat the world? Perhaps it simply wants Double Fly Robs the Bank (stills), 2009, like this is not an easy thing in China, though to provide an alternative to all those individual video, 1 min 26 sec

Autumn 2015

Atom Egg, 2015, video, 4 min 6 sec

ArtReview Asia

Kung Fu Hustle, 2004, dir Stephen Chow. Courtesy Columbia Pictures

Autumn 2015

of the works of the Renaissance satirist François Rabelais, but the goal of carnivalesque literature, to create an alternative world, a ‘world upside-down’ – in which it’s ok to rob a bank, be a kidnapper or attack people with raw eggs – in order to test the truths of this one, seems not too dissimilar to that of Double Fly’s artworks. Despite, or maybe even because of, their name, Double Fly Art Center never ‘institutionalises’ itself or talks down to people like a dustcovered book. Instead it mocks authority, exclusivity and narrow-minded seriousness. It’s for these reasons that Double Fly Art Center In honour of the sixth anniverholds an interesting posisary of the gay establishment tion in China’s art scene, a of the Double Fly Art Center, scene that is driven by the distribution of the commemomarket and dominated rative currency will take place by galleries and collecin Beijing, Hebei, Shanghai, tors. The art of Double Fly Hangzhou and Shenzhen. The could bring people back anniversary-themed currency to a time when an artist is divided into the following would tell you that his or categories: Double Fly Art Center Bank Robbery Currency, denomination zero her ultimate goal in making art was to make a pornographic film, and over, to be distributed in the Hangzhou region; Double Fly Art Center because they liked the medium; today an artist educated in marketSixth-Anniversary Commemorative Currency, denomination zero and over, to driven expectations will normally tell you something like: “To me, it be distributed in the Beijing region; Double Fly Art Center Village Surrounds is the concept and practice, not the media, that is of the most imporNew York Commemorative Currency, denomination zero and over, to be distribtance”, or launch into a discussion about the “the research-based sociuted in the Shenzhen region. The distribution represents a great innovation in ology methodology” that he or she adopts. the history of Chinese currency and will be documented in the annals of exotic As I was writing this, a Double Fly member (who wants to stay flowers. anonymous) asked me to describe him in this article as a transhuman To explain the spirit of Double Fly Art Center, two examples come to who can see through walls or the surface of things. Of course, I refused. mind; not from their works, but more as embodiments of their atti- To me, the members of Double Fly Art Center are not supermen but tude. The first is Hong Kong director Pang Ho-Cheun’s comedy film monsters. Since the 2008 Olympics, and alongside rapid economic A.V. (2005), in which a group of young men come up with an elaborate development, the Chinese people have gained in national confidence, plan to sleep with girls by faking a porn movie production, allowing but also have to face the fact that this development hasn’t really provided equal opportunities or the happithem to have sex with a Japanese porn actress. ness that was promised with it. They also The second is Stephen Chow’s film Kung Fu Double Fly’s performance art is Hustle (2004), which tells the adventure story have to face regional imbalances between city a crazy party that exists on the of a mixed-up young man, who learns by and countryside, and the imbalance between chance the ‘Buddha’s Palm’ (a mysteriously border between making trouble art/cultural and economic developments. It is powerful kung fu move), triumphing over and playing the fool, not just in a time for monsters – but today, our monsters assorted bad guys. Something of the knocksing and entertain. We live in the age of Shrek about spirit of these films is present in Double the sense of the negative implica- (2001) and Monsters, Inc. (2001), rather than Fly, whose motto might be ‘no matter how tions of degradation and destruc- that of King Kong (1933) or Godzilla (1954), despite the many attempts to remake these stupid it is, we will just do it’. Double Fly’s tion, but also in the sense of a last two. In that sense, Double Fly Art Center performance art is a crazy party that exists positive one of regeneration are the true monsters of our historical and on the border between making trouble and spatial reality, devouring unselectively what playing the fool. In this context, ‘playing the fool’ is not simply intended to convey negative implications of degra- is created in contemporary culture, and regurgitating funny, enterdation and destruction, but also a positive one of regeneration. In a taining yet powerful responses. Through the organisation of a collecsense it might correspond to Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s consti- tive, the nine members of Double Fly have transformed individual tution of the four categories of the ‘carnivalesque’ as a literary style: experience into an improvised carnival-style performance, and as this familiar and free interaction between people; eccentric behaviour; has gained a reputation, people have started to talk about its artistic carnivalistic misalliances (say, young and old, strategy. Strategy? It’s hard to believe these heaven and hell); the freedom to enact sacrilenine have anything as planned-out as a strategy! Pure Love Bath in Milk, 2011, And yet… ara gious events. Bakhtin was thinking in particular video, 5 min 23 sec

situations in which each of the members would otherwise be themselves constrained. The contrast between the meanings of ‘double ﬂy’ in classical Chinese poetry and contemporary vocabularies is symbolic. The contrast between vulgarity and high art is one of the most important components of Double Fly’s aesthetics. The artists’ statements and descriptions of their works are always as funny and senseless as those of a comedian. For example, last year when Double Fly launched its own currency, the promotional text read:

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Double Fly’s Klein Blue, 2015, performance all images Courtesy the artists

Autumn 2015

MAISON BLEU STUDIO

MORI KEITA LI CHEVALIER JEONG YUNKYUNG WANG KEPING

CHANG LING

EXHIBITION

LIM HYUNJUNG

VIDE ET PLEIN

KO YOUNGHOON

2015

ONISHI YASUAKI

PA R I S HUANG XIN

OPENING BY INVITATION 19.10.2015, 19H - MIDNIGHT EXHIBITION 20.10.2015 - 23.10.2015, 11H - 20H 17 RUE COMMINES 75003 PARIS

AI WEIWEI

London Regent’s Park 14–17 October 2015 Preview 13 October friezelondon.com

Participating Galleries 303 Gallery, New York A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid The Approach, London Laura Bartlett, London Elba Benítez, Madrid Blum & Poe, Los Angeles Marianne Boesky, New York Tanya Bonakdar, New York The Box, Los Angeles The Breeder, Athens Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York Buchholz, Berlin Cabinet, London Campoli Presti, London Canada, New York Gisela Capitain, Cologne Casas Riegner, Bogotá Cheim & Read, New York Sadie Coles HQ, London Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Pilar Corrias, London Corvi-Mora, London Chantal Crousel, Paris Thomas Dane, London Massimo De Carlo, Milan dépendance, Brussels Eigen + Art, Berlin FGF, Warsaw Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo Marc Foxx, Los Angeles Carl Freedman, London Stephen Friedman, London Frith Street, London Gagosian, London Annet Gelink, Amsterdam Goodman, Johannesburg Marian Goodman, London Greene Naftali, New York greengrassi, London Karin Guenther, Hamburg Bruce Haines, Mayfair, London Hauser & Wirth, London Herald St, London

Max Hetzler, Berlin Hollybush Gardens, London Hyundai, Seoul Ibid., London Taka Ishii, Tokyo Alison Jacques, London Martin Janda, Vienna Casey Kaplan, New York Georg Kargl, Vienna Anton Kern, New York Peter Kilchmann, Zurich Tina Kim, New York Johann König, Berlin David Kordansky, Los Angeles Andrew Kreps, New York Krinzinger, Vienna Kukje, Seoul kurimanzutto, Mexico City Simon Lee, London Lehmann Maupin, New York Lia Rumma, Milan Lisson, London Kate MacGarry, London Mai 36/Victor Gisler, Zurich Maisterravalbuena, Madrid Mary Mary, Glasgow Greta Meert, Brussels Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo Kamel Mennour, Paris Meyer Kainer, Vienna Victoria Miro, London Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London The Modern Institute, Glasgow MOT International, London mother’s tankstation, Dublin Taro Nasu, Tokyo Nordenhake, Berlin Lorcan O’Neill, Rome Office Baroque, Brussels P.P.O.W, New York Pace, London Maureen Paley, London Peres Projects, Berlin Perrotin, Paris Plan B, Berlin Gregor Podnar, Berlin Project 88, Mumbai

Rampa, Istanbul Raucci/Santamaria, Naples Almine Rech, London Anthony Reynolds, London Rodeo, London Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Salon 94, New York Schipper / Johnen, Berlin Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich Sfeir-Semler, Beirut Shanghart, Shanghai Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Sprüth Magers, Berlin Standard (Oslo), Oslo Stevenson, Cape Town Luisa Strina, São Paulo Supportico Lopez, Berlin T293, Rome Take Ninagawa, Tokyo Timothy Taylor, London The Third Line, Dubai Vermelho, São Paulo Vilma Gold, London Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou Michael Werner, New York White Cube, London Wien Lukatsch, Berlin Wilkinson, London Zeno X, Antwerp David Zwirner, London

Focus 47 Canal, New York Antenna Space, Shanghai Bureau, New York Callicoon, New York Carlos/Ishikawa, London Clearing, New York Croy Nielsen, Berlin Experimenter, Kolkata Fonti, Naples Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles Freymond-Guth, Zurich François Ghebaly, Los Angeles Grey Noise, Dubai Dan Gunn, Berlin

High Art, Paris Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland Jan Kaps, Cologne Koppe Astner, Glasgow Emanuel Layr, Vienna Limoncello, London Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo Misako & Rosen, Tokyo Múrias Centeno, Lisbon Night, Los Angeles Simon Preston, New York Project Native Informant, London Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw Jessica Silverman, San Francisco Société, Berlin Gregor Staiger, Zurich Stereo, Warsaw Simone Subal, New York Sultana, Paris The Sunday Painter, London Rob Tufnell, London Leo Xu, Shanghai

Live Arcadia Missa, London Amalia Ulman Luhring Augustine, New York / Franco Noero, Turin Tunga Meyer Riegger, Berlin Eva Kot’átková Misako & Rosen, Tokyo Ken Kagami Southard Reid, London Edward Thomasson & Lucy Beech Kate Werble, New York Rancourt/Yatsuk

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Sun Xun Over the past two years, one of China’s leading young artists has become an increasing presence on the international stage, but closer to home, and away from the art market, he’s been pioneering a new type of site-speciﬁc public art in the cinema of a local shopping mall. So, is there such a thing as public art of this type in China? You’re about to ﬁnd out… by Hanlu Zhang

Autumn 2015

What verb would best describe Sun Xun’s two-month residency at and embracing it as their inspiration. In Sun’s work, hundreds of Hangzhou’s Zeyi Cinema and his complete transformation of its inte- years of literati culture – the main field of what has been traditionally rior space? Occupy? Permeate? Parasitise? The first two come from considered art in ancient China – is reenacted. media reports on Sun’s site-specific project, The Script; the third was Even before entering the cinema, the audience is confronted with used by Sun himself in an interview conducted two hours before the a line of fluttering (thanks to big electronic fans) flags, whose white opening reception on 7 June. backgrounds feature black drawings of a variety of animals and The thirty-five-year-old Beijing-based artist is famous for his loose red doodles. In this context the flags seem unusual; passersby whimsical, imaginative animations and brush drawings. The image stop to take photographs. In the main lobby of the cinema, standing of a magician frequents Sun’s narratives. The artist is also often de- slightly to the left of the central area, is a large metal disc, engiscribed as a magician, as he mesmerisingly merges modern life, his- neered so as to rotate on its vertical plane. The rotation is quick but torical imagery (often alluding to communist events and ideology) somewhat awkward – the mechanism looks low-tech and nonfuncand ancient mythologies. The dark storyline painted in an acid-bright tional – and creates a reflection of the viewers standing in front of it. Not far to the right, numerous palette is his signature. Sun took up the cinema residency not long palm-size monitors form a cylinafter returning from New York, foldrical larger screen wrapping one of lowing his first us solo exhibition, the columns in the lobby. Abstract images appear, disappear and move at Sean Kelly Gallery, in January, part of which involved an open across on the screens. Near the inner residency. At the beginning of last entrance to the theatres, on the wall, year, New Yorkers could find his Sun has replaced the posters prowork featured in the Metropolitan moting blockbusters with cut-paper Museum of Art’s Ink Art: Past as work of fairytale scenarios glued Present in Contemporary China, while onto the inner surface of the lightcloser to home it was also included boxes. With some elements moving in Social Factory, the 2014 Shanghai or floating (presumably due to anBiennale. All of which is to illustrate other set of fans), it appears as if we that when it comes to the tricky are being presented with a shadowcombination of commercial success, puppet play. On a broader level, the three installations collectively international exposure and unique form a tribute to another of Sun’s artistic expression, Sun is unargupreferred mediums: they highably one of the leading artists of light the elements – light, image China’s younger generation. and shadow – essential to film and Zeyi Cinema is situated in a sunken shopping outlet called Sasseur the other photographic arts. At the opening of the project four of the Life Plaza, located in the middle of cinema’s seven theatres screened an unfinished development presumSun’s animated shorts; the entire ably designed to serve as a new busicinema complex seemed activated ness district for Hangzhou, which to celebrate his residency, as well as is the capital of Zhejiang province, in Eastern China. A gigantic golden film’s status as a form of art. globe that turns out to be the InterMore than that, the project as a whole offers insight into Sun’s own Continental Hotel stands very close practice. When the artist talks or to the ground-level accesses to the mall, alongside a series of other eccentric architectures under con- writes about his work, his remarks are not always directly relevant to struction. Few people are spotted walking on the exceptionally clean his art; rather, they seem more like general comments on larger issues, streets, but while the siting of Sun’s project is intriguing, the artist’s such as art, people and the world. ‘Cinema lies,’ claimed Sun in various focus is more about the larger location: his second home, Hangzhou. texts and interviews at the time of the project’s opening. It’s a stateHe moved here at the age of fourteen to study calligraphy and ink ment that was offered during his New York show, The Time Vivarium, painting, both of which remain important to his oeuvre. A series of which was inspired by a visit to the Natural History Museum (which wall and ceiling paintings in the cinema nostalgically depict the city the artist discovered to be another promoter of untruths). And as and its familiar West Lake. From a documentary, screened during the always in his work, history is the biggest liar. (Sun often attributes opening of the project, we learn that Sun completed the painting of this sense of disbelief to the incompatibility between family history, a delicate small folding-screen entirely during the course of a pictur- told by family members, and official history, taught by textbooks.) esque boat trip on the lake. In this regard, Sun Offering no hope or way to escape such a ‘horrible’ above One Second Movement, 2015 (installation seems to be following in the footsteps of numerous view, The Script, Zeyi Cinema, Hangzhou, 2015) fictive world, Sun is not interested in tending to other intellectuals passing or dispatched to the preceding pages Eidolon, 2015 (installation view, contemporary realities. This time, too, with the cinema project, the artist is more interested in city of Hangzhou, appreciating the natural beauty The Script, Zeyi Cinema, Hangzhou, 2015)

ArtReview Asia

both images The Script, 2015 (installation views, Zeyi Cinema, Hangzhou)

Autumn 2015

exhibiting his art and values in the context of a movie theatre than as active sites of/for community engagement. Where in the context of these two now-classic poles and in the context of China does The in considering the work as a site-specific, public-engaging project. Albeit hinting at a political agenda, his films have hypnotising Script fit in? Sun himself talks about his project as a rare rendezvous effects, overflowing with symbolic images and narratives. The Time of two values: the so-called mainstream values of the regular cinema Vivarium, which was screened at the opening at Zeyi, is filled with audience and the marginalised values of the contemporary artworld. instantly recognisable images: Tiananmen Square, stone lions, a tiger When asked as to whether or not he had kept the public in mind wearing a gas mask, skulls and so on. They emerge and fade out like while creating the work, his answer is equivocal: “The project offers a fireworks show. In this work, most evidently, film as a medium a chance to test the potential of these both.” But looking at the result, becomes reducible (to slideshows). Sun’s image-production works in the communication is still unilateral. the same way as his sloganeering. Site-specific public art is a relatively new phenomenon in mainIn classic shanshui paintings, artists are almost always state offi- land China, and the collaboration between Sun Xun, New Century Art cials who regard the practice more as a form of leisure that conveys Foundation and Zeyi Cinema sheds some light on the future develpersonal expression and cultivates a metaopment of similar projects, as collectors are keen on exhibiting their new acquisitions physical worldview. Anything too specific ‘Cinema lies,’ Sun has claimed and business owners are eager to embrace or overtly political would be incongruous in various texts and interviews. with their professional identity. Sun Xun’s contemporary art. Maybe it is more accurate And as always in his work, background, work and artistic approaches to call it quasi-public art, given that no pubare reminiscent of this. New York Times critic lic bodies played a role in the commissionhistory is the biggest liar Martha Schwendener did not see this speing of the work (both sponsors are private; cific reference in Sun’s lack of critical inquiry, but her overall assess- New Century Art Foundation is a renowned contemporary art founment remains accurate: ‘Mr Sun’s work has the same bombast and dation that supports not-for-profit art spaces nationwide), and the grand-narrative-style ambition [as eighteenth-century works by cinema itself is not exactly a public space. But perhaps that in itself Honoré Daumier or William Hogarth], as well as a universalizing bent tells us something about the way in which, in China, because of a lack to the work that is frowned upon by many artists and critics working of foresight in government cultural policy, privately funded projects in a globalized industry. After all, one artist and his assistants can’t and institutions have taken up the role of coordinating contemporary art within the public domain; some private institutions in Beijing and speak for everyone affected by history. Or can he?’ During the 1970s, there was an ideological transition in the Shanghai, for example, are dedicated to providing extensive public us among different public art commissioning bodies, from seeing programmes. And intentional or not, one of the things projects like contemporary art pieces placed in public space as showcases of indi- this highlight is the need for a debate about the ‘publicness’ of China’s vidual mastery and an extension of the museum, to regarding them public art. Perhaps, to use Sun’s favoured idiom, ‘public art is a lie’. ara

Screening of a Sun Xun work as part of The Script, 2015, Zeyi Cinema, Hangzhou

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The Time Vivarium – 29, 2014, acrylic and pastel on museum board, 51 × 41 cm. Photo: Jason Wyche, New York. © the artist. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York all images but this page Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai & Beijing

Autumn 2015

Sun Ge interview by Aimee Lin translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

Is ‘Asia’ a construct of the West or the East, and is its meaning anything more than geographic? And what do the answers to those questions mean for ‘Asian’ art?

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Born in 1955 in Changchun, Jilin, China, Sun Ge studied Chinese literature at Jilin University and is a professor at the Institute of Literature in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Interested in the issue of East Asia from early on, she has conducted comparative research on the literatures and philosophies of China and Japan across the boundaries of academic disciplines and departments. Her ﬁelds of interest include modern Chinese literature, the history of modern Japanese thought and comparative cultural studies. Her major works include How Does Asia Mean? (2001), Space of Pervasive Subjectivities: The Dilemma of Discursive Asia (2002), The Paradox of Takeuchi Yoshimi (2005), The Literary Position: Masao Maruyama’s Dilemma (2009), Why Shall We Talk About East Asia: Politics and History in Situation (2011).

I. What does Asia mean? artreview asia What does Asia mean? Does it possess meaning beyond its geographical connotations? sun ge Of course. Asia is more than a spatial concept, which is to say, it is more than a geographical concept, and it is also more than a political-historical-geographical concept. In academia, there is now a ﬁeld called political historical geography in which various political, cultural and historical questions are discussed in the context of where they happened. Asia is indeed a compound concept of politics, history and geography, but in addition to that, I believe it has an important alternative function, one that is often overlooked: its spiritual fūdo character.

society and the humanities are discussed within the context of a particular space. ara ‘Asia’ was originally a name that outsiders used for a speciﬁc geographical space. Does Asia, or the concept of Asia, mean something to the people who live within this space? sg Prior to modern times, ‘Asia’ did not have any connotations of subjective identiﬁcation, but in the twentieth century that changed. From the Crusades, when the term referred only to Asia Minor (Anatolia), until the turn of the twentieth century, as Europe gradually subjected the world to colonialism, the Asia discourse of the West was consistently one in which Asia served as Europe’s ‘other’. During the powerful classical period of the Islamic world, this ‘other’ was a formidable foe. In modern times, this ‘other’ has become a source of comparison – evidence against the predominance of European culture. Until the end of the Second World War, European ideology did not acknowledge that Asia could be an equal counterpart with which mutual understanding was possible. Even then, such a relationship was merely a possibility. And to this day, this possibility remains relatively marginal in Europe.

ara What is fūdo? sg Fūdo refers to the natural geographical characteristics possessed by a given region or geographical space. The combination of these characteristics with the particular spiritual life of people via social activities is called fūdo. [Fūdo, or Fengtu, is a term used by Japanese philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji (1889–1960) in Fūdo: ningengakuteki kōsatsu (1935), translated in English as Climate and Culture (1961). The term signiﬁes ‘wind and earth… the natural environment of a given land’.] So the concept of Asia is at the very least a particular natural geographical space that bears the weight of political, historical and spiritual culture produced by human activity within it. The various spiritual products of

As for Asia, it was not until the end of the Second World War that a relatively widespread trend emerged in which the meaning of ‘Asia’ was reversed in order to connote a subjectively identiﬁed political symbol. At that point, one could no longer say that Asia was merely a concept created by the West. This change in the symbol was marked by the Bandung Conference of 1955 [the meeting of African and Asian states that anticipated the formation of the

Victor Levasseur, Atlas Universel Illustré Asia, 1856, painted copper engraving, 435 × 288 cm. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan

Autumn 2015

Non-Aligned Movement of countries]. Of course, that was just one phase of its evolution. In terms of major historical trends, the general development of the Asia discourse began in the twentieth century as ‘Asia’ was transformed into a symbol of self-identification in some societies in the Asia region. Japan was the first place where this self-identification occurred. The growth of Asianism in Japan reached its peak with Japan’s victory in the 1904–5 Japanese–Russian War. The Japanese saw this as a war between races: a victory of the yellow race over the white race. In his ‘Talk to the Kobe Chamber of Commerce and Other Organizations’ [1924], [Chinese revolutionary] Sun Yat-sen recounted how, on his boat trip on the Suez Canal, an Arab asked him if he was Japanese. At that time, Arabs rarely expressed their sense of solidarity with East Asia, but the Japanese–Russian War had contributed to Arabian identification with Asia as part of the yellow race. The unfortunate thing is that Japanese Asianism accompanied war, and their methods of war were imitations of European colonial methods. So Japan’s path was not one of genuine Asianism; it was a path of Europeanism. This Europeanism was most typically exemplified by the Second World War and Japan’s invasion of East and Southeast Asia. Japan’s colonialism, along with its methods of advancing the war, was completely in the mould of early European colonialism. Therefore, if it can be said that Asianism exists in Asia, then this Asianism has many faces, and tension exists between them. But we can say without value judgement that in the late nineteenth century a trend emerged in which several different parts of Asia, in many different forms, began to cast off the cultural symbols of the Western ‘other’ and adopt subjective symbols of self-identification. It was a historical trend, and so the earlier period of history in which ‘Asia’ was named by the West cannot be used to explain the use of the nomenclature of Asia by Asian people after the turn of the twentieth century. ara Then what changes have occurred in the meaning of this idea of Asia since the end of the Second World War? sg After the Second World War, this idea of Asia was used at the Bandung Conference in the context of Afro-Asia – ie, Africa and Asia – and the national independence movements of the two continents. At that point, a core aspect of Asian identity was the national independence movements at the state level. During the process

of Asia’s rise during the 1950s, the principle signiﬁcance of Asia as a political unit was political subjectivity. Other than Japan, the vast majority of Asian regions had experienced either direct or indirect colonisation. In this context of being discriminated against and feeling humiliated, Asia experienced a sharp surge in solidarity during the 1950s. Asia is not like Europe in that it cannot be roughly integrated on the basis of a single religion. There are at least three major civilisations in Asia, and more than three main religions that cannot be easily integrated. However, the Bandung Conference symbolised a period of integration during the 1950s in which the concept of Asia was spread vigorously through virtually the entire region. As these states gained independence and sovereignty, so the situation changed.

geographical concept. It is also an amalgamation of political, historical and spiritual culture. It symbolises people’s spiritual activities, and the fūdo character of social and artistic activities. In this sense, I believe that today we have reached a stage where we can reorganise and rephrase the discussion by treating Asia as a set of principles. ara You have previously written about the question ‘how does Asia mean?’ But it sounds quite new when you mention ‘Asia as principle’. sg I reached this step quite recently. In my opinion, the present Asia discourse is still off the mark. If Asia does not have its own principles, then it truly is no more than ﬁeld material

ara Roughly when did that happen? sg I would say it happened as the Cold War structure began to disintegrate. Asia began to split up during the 1970s, because at the time the entire continent was facing a developmental problem: how to achieve modernisation. The result was all sorts of dialogue, exchange and cooperation between Asia and the West. Thus, after the 1970s, a new round of colonialism began, but this time in an invisible form. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the early 1990s, Asia was faced with the question of forming new alliances. So new coalitions, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation or the brics countries, are in fact symbols of Asia’s reorganisation of international relations. In these circumstances we discover that Asia is already incapable of acting, in terms of geography, as an independent unit in order to emphasise its identity. For example, the Six Party Talks in Northeast Asia are a major thing for Asia, but nobody raises an eyebrow at the participation of two non-Asian states (Russia and the United States). By means of the Second World War, the United States had already completed its internalisation in Asia, and especially in East Asia. These circumstances have led some people to say that Asia has not been established as a reality. From a geographical perspective, Asia does indeed seem unable to cast off the countless claims of other regions. The solidarity of the 1950s symbolised by the Bandung Conference has indeed disintegrated.

II. Asia as Principle ara So the integration of Asia as a geographical space was not achieved. sg That’s right. But if we recall our initial discussion, we said that Asia is more than a

The spiritual activities of humans must have form before they can present themselves to us. Art utilises the form of direct observation to communicate this spiritual information. I can say that, to date, the art I have been exposed to, such as the fine arts, theatre and film from East Asia, are Westernised in the mainstream. Their Asian-ness is insufficient. ara Are you saying that the reasoning behind it lacks that awareness of so-called Asian subjectivity, and it unconsciously uses Western methods or Western perspectives? sg Yes, it uses Western perspectives. The most typical example is Zhang Yimou: all of the expressions of Chinese-ness in his films are intended to cater to the requirements of Hollywood. Of course, there are other ambitious artists who are not as superficial as Zhang Yimou. They are more inclined to seek an Asian element, but these artists, including art curators, have an essentially Western field of vision. For example, one deeply rooted idea in the minds of contemporary artists and curators is modernity. If you do not let them talk about modernity, they basically cannot function. This is a trend that exists today, and I do not believe that it should be negated, because in a certain sense it expresses the consequences of Western infiltration of all of Asia, from politics and economics to culture. But in fact, there are fringe cultural and artistic activities in which comparatively Asian elements are developing. This development requires nourishment, but I believe that Asian intellectuals seem to have not yet reached this point. It requires a process. ara Can you give an example of the cultural activities you mentioned?

within the framework of Western discourse. To date, that is how Asia has been treated in Western and Chinese scholarship, but I believe that we should now produce Asian principles. However, producing Asian principles is not only for the beneﬁt of Asian people. I think it is a historical responsibility for the beneﬁt of humankind. Asian principles are simply principles that are relative to European, African and Latin American principles. The discussion of them is not an intellectual activity intended to resist or replace the West. ara Before we start discussing Asia as principle, I want to ask you: do art or culture play a role of shaping the identity of Asia or the idea of Asia? sg Art and culture give form to spiritual energy. Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Image (stills), 2011, Super 8 and hd video, 66 min. Courtesy the artist

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sg One example is the Japanese playwright Sakurai Daizo. His Tent Theatre is extremely Japanese. The performances draw on the lives of ordinary, lower-class Japanese people. It is a very special artform. Sakurai is very imaginative, but the number of intellectuals who can appreciate his Tent Theatre is limited. Yet Sakurai has received acclaim throughout East Asia. Young intellectuals are especially fond of his plays because his methods are very fresh. But the Asian element that he contains must evolve. Another example is the printmaking activities in the Korean city of Gwangju. There are also some artistic activities in Okinawa, such as photography. That area retains its original religion, which resembles shamanism. There is a photographer who photographs a sacriﬁcial ritual that takes place every February in the Miyako Islands [the largest archipelago in Okinawa Prefecture]. But this kind of genuinely indigenous artistic or literary activity that does not utilise Western concepts and

hermeneutics is to date very difficult to circulate and share widely. This is a basic fact, but this wellspring possesses powerful vitality. It will not disappear. ara Perhaps the explanation lies in the mechanisms of acknowledgment and circulation in contemporary art. After all, the people within these mechanisms have no ability to see and understand this kind of art. sg I think this is a matter that requires a bit more time, and moreover, it is not just a matter for Asian people to resolve. The status and function of the Western intelligentsia, or one could even say the entire Western world, changes. The Western intelligentsia’s conception of Asia is also changing. I think that ambitious intellectuals, whether they are Asian or Western, will not be satisfied solely with questions of so-called modernity and postmodernity when the reality of our lives is so diverse and abundant. The day will come when everybody’s experience will be fresher and more abundant. In this sense, art and culture can play an extremely important role, but to this point, they have really not done much. ara There are some Westerners who believe that the language barrier is the reason that Western people define Asian identity through culture. They can only mechanically imagine other cultures. What do you think of this opinion? sg I think it is definitely one factor, but it does not tell the whole story. The lack of understanding of Asia in the West is in a certain sense due to the excessive autonomy of the West, which has only just begun to change. When Westerners begin asking this kind of question, it demonstrates that they have begun to recognise the problem. Yet to this day, the majority of Western European and North American intellectuals lack genuine curiosity about Asia, and the reason for this is certainly not the language barrier. ara Is it a kind of insularity in their own cultures? sg That goes together with the historical trends in politics and economics of recent times: the West going forth to conquer the whole world from an advantageous position. Culture cannot be separated from politics and economics, even though they each have their own characteristics. Cultural people in the West with a genuine awareness of Asia are definitely on the fringes. ara There are very few.

sg But I believe there are some. When I discuss the China question with Western European and North American intellectuals, they ﬁrst trot out a few frameworks, such as modernity, postmodernity, rationality, individual rights, scientism and evolution. All of these frameworks in fact constitute the quite mature cultural structure of modern Europe, and Western intellectuals have been instructed within this cultural system to see them as normal. But the question is, what do they do when they are faced with the East, which does not share

ie, governed by fūdo. This means that you cannot take your European or North American partial experience to other regions and treat it as a global experience shared by all humankind. This kind of approach should be negated right from the start. This is the demand that Asia as principle makes of humanity. At present, if you view Asia from the perspective of European principles, then you will use an allegedly universal imagination to view Asia. So you will search for modernity in Asia, and search for scientiﬁc rationality. It is not just Westerners who do this. Asian people also do this. ara That is because in our minds we have already become like them due to our education and academic training. But our lives, and our physical and sensory experiences, go beyond that mental aspect.

The spiritual activities of humans must have form before they can present themselves to us. Art utilises the form of direct observation to communicate this spiritual information these traditions but only imports parts of those elements (from those frameworks)? It seems that every Western intellectual I encounter always tries hard to take whatever unfamiliar experience he or she witnesses and hesitantly cram it into these frameworks, and use them to interpret it. ara When you put it that way, the necessity of Asia as principle becomes apparent, because to them as well this is a huge challenge, a very difficult task. sg Yes. ‘Asia as principle’ is not an empty phrase. It means that we must redeﬁne what is universal. We must start from this perspective: any intellectual or spiritual activity is endemic,

Sakurai Daizo’s tent theatre at Power Station of Art, Shanghai, during the 10th Shanghai Biennial, November 2014. Photo: Aimee Lin

Autumn 2015

sg Everybody with this kind of educational background has trouble interpreting the change that is occurring in the various Asian societies. For example, how should we interpret the present high degree of mobility, or more speciﬁcally, the massive phenomenon of migrant labour in Chinese society? The point is not to give a basis of legitimacy to the existence of every society. This is a kind of intellectual work, so it is not about affirming or negating. What we want to do is to understand. I do not make art, but from the perspective of intellectual history, this issue is extremely pressing. This is what compels us to discuss Asian principles. I think Asian principles in their most simpliﬁed form are a universalism based on the premise of the coexistence of a diverse plurality of physical phenomena. ara When you say physical phenomena, is that the fūdo you mentioned? sg That’s right.

III. The Prerequisite for Asian Art ara From your perspective as a scholar, is there such a thing that can be called Asian art, and if so, what constitutes the so-called Asian-ness of this art? sg This is truly a big question. First of all, I think the existence of Asian art is not only possible but necessary. However, the existence of Asian art is deﬁnitely a diverse existence. So when we talk about Asian art, the prerequisite is that it does not have representatives. We cannot

say that Western art has definite representatives – in fact it is very easy to name several different schools of Western contemporary art. I believe that Asian art is the same. But there is also a way in which it differs from Western art, in that there is no ‘primariness’ that encompasses Asian art. ara It has no unifying characteristic. sg That’s right. Over at least the last one or two centuries of forceful moulding by the West, we have become accustomed when discussing a given field to identify a representative and talk about their primariness. What we should do now is discuss the plurality of a field, but people have not yet formed this habit. This is the prerequisite for discussing Asian art. The reason we need this prerequisite is because Asian art cannot be unified. It is varied and plural. The Chinese philosopher Chen Jiaying has proposed the terminology of ‘the particular’, which emphasises the combination of the individual and the characteristic. I think Asian art comprises countless particulars, but what we want to talk about is not a buffet. If it is a buffet, then Asian art does not exist, because it is too dispersed. There are relations between the particulars, and we must use Asian principles to interpret these relations. What is the meaning of these relations? Well, the various particulars are absolutely not the same, and the ways in which they coincide with each other are also not uniform. In establishing these relations between particulars, there is no good and bad. This idea does not comport with European principles. Asian art takes form when we have the goal of establishing relations between the particulars through mutual understanding, through self-liberation and through the individual’s transcendence. This is related to the need for us to change our practice of appreciating Asian art on the basis of European modernity and postmodernity. Our current custom of appreciation is to first translate our culture into English, and then use it to enter other cultures. ara Are there some aspects of this idea of Asia that contradict or oppose the Western world and its theories? sg Yes, but I think that point is not so important. Opposing the methods of the West has been necessary thus far, but as soon as you oppose something, you become subject to the limitations of your opposition. ara You are ‘countered’. sg Yes, which means that this part of the production of knowledge is transitionary, and not particularly constructive. For example, postmodernity is restricted by modernity, so it cannot be free. Asia is restricted by the West: an unavoidable historical fact. If you want to work towards genuine self-liberation from this state

of being restricted by the West, I think criticism is ineffective. You must relativise the West, not negate it. The crucial thing is to build our own framework of understanding and organisation that includes the effects of the Western infiltration of Asia. Negating and opposing the West has no constructive function. The establishment of Asian thought and culture requires structural construction. At present, two relatively familiar methods of Eastern intellectuals are those of critiquing the West and reforming the West. These two modes are both significant, and they are both closely linked to the West itself. But I believe that they are transitionary. They form the foundation on which we must engage in our own construction, unrestricted by the West and not predicated on opposition to the West. We must imagine more freely and build more autonomously. ara Is this idea of Asia driven by competition and opposition, or by cooperation? sg A little bit of each. If we’re talking about the economy, then it is definitely competition; and cooperation, which serves the needs of competition, is always provisional. Politics is similar. But I think competition and cooperation are a difficult terminology to use to understand the realm of culture, and particularly the creation of spiritual products. In fact, I think the creation of spiritual products in Asia is intermediary. ara What do you mean by intermediary? sg I mean that I treat my counterpart as a medium, and draw on their work and their spiritual production to fuel my own imagination and creative motivation. Intermediary means that my work is not entirely their work, and their work cannot interpret my work, but if we did not understand each other, then my work would not be the way it is. For example, the spiritual production between China and Japan has to date been imagined in an extremely material form, which is a low-level way of thinking. The truth is that we should take the next step, into a field of greater quality. The relationship between China and Japan should be intermediary, or reciprocal, which is neither competition nor cooperation. ara This year is the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Historical factors have created an extremely powerful state of psychological tension between, for example, South Korea and Japan, and China and Japan as well, which has still not dissipated. Can art or culture, through certain means, dissipate this tension? sg There are several ways to look at this. Ideally, culture will transcend borders, and in this way it can dispel the imagined opposition between different societies created by national tension

ArtReview Asia

– for in fact this opposition exists only in the imagination. But the truth is not that simple. When cultural workers do their thinking and creating, it is their mother tongue that determines their identity. The vast majority of cultural people rarely reflect on this self-identification. If culture is to transcend the tense mentality between nations, then cultural people must first reflect on the very presupposition of their self-identification, and then form an identity for themselves that is greater than their national unit. I believe that people who cannot transcend this specific unit cannot create truly world-class spiritual products. This is not to say that if you transcend your national unit then you have no nationality. No, what I want to emphasise is that of one’s fixed cultural characteristics, one’s mother tongue is certainly a fundamental source of one’s creative practice, but one need not treat one’s nationality as an absolute presupposition. I believe that there are various levels of depths in cultural identity. If a cultural identity reaches the depth of human spirit, it will reflect it [human spirit] by means of nationality, while resisting an abstract, general expression. ara I am reminded of certain artists and curators who live abroad. They can freely travel to the most distant parts of the world, but their spirituality seems somewhat lacking. Once a person completely ceases to believe in nationality or their original culture, they may be able to depart a place, but they ultimately never arrive at a new place. sg Yes, I think that is very accurate. Artists with no roots have no prospects.

IV. Contemporary Art as the Production Platform of Asia Discourses ara Recently, new cultural and art organisations or institutions have been established in Hong Kong, Gwangju, Shanghai, Singapore and the oil-exporting states in the Middle East. They all proclaim the intention of establishing their position on a regional scale. Together, they appear to present the formation of a regional ﬁeld of vision. What effect does this trend have on our Asian-ness or our self-identiﬁcation as Asian people? sg This is a very encouraging phenomenon, because when the Bandung Conference was convened in 1955, the only people talking about Asia were politicians. Today, the biggest change is that our politicians are still talking about Asia, but Asia is no longer a presupposition for them. But to people in the worlds of art and culture,

this trend you mention is a symbolic change that represents the imagination of Asia and the formation of its subjectivity, guided by the cultural world at different levels of society – although I use that word reluctantly. Some people who do academic research are still content to treat Asia as either a ﬁeld for the West or a big buffet. As for China, it is treated by some intellectuals as a representative of Asia, just like Japan was previously. So when the artworld invites me to talk about Asia, I recognise that contemporary art has already become an important platform for the production of Asian principles. It also symbolises the transition from the politics-driven period of the Bandung Conference, where the subject was Asian independence movements at the state level, to a culturedriven period in which we search for principles. The various biennials in the region may take place in Asia, but the content of the exhibitions are basically a big buffet of their own region. In a lot of places, when they say Asia, they are really talking about themselves. Sometimes they switch to talking about Asia, so what is the difference between the two? It lies in whether or not you are able to deeply explore the principles of your own culture, and if you are, whether or not you are able to use open, principled, relativised methods to transcend yourself. The ability to transcend the self is one of the most important characteristics of Asian-ness. When you discuss a local culture, you can take the approach of Asian principles. This culture of yours can possess Asian-ness, and you can use the approach of Asian principles to address your local issues, which are otherwise merely a particular situation. So I don’t think the question of being a particular region is that important. The crucial thing is how you do it. Conversely, we see many events with ‘Asia’ in their title that assemble large quantities of Asian things to exhibit, but the Asian-ness of these events is in fact quite shallow. But regardless, I think it is an important phenomenon that Asia is now obtaining attention. ara On the subject of the Third World, you once said that each state’s understanding of the centre of the Third World is different. When we discuss Asia, we face the impulse of different states to establish a world or an

Asia in which they are at the centre. In these circumstances, there are many blind spots in how states within Asia relate to and acknowledge each other. Each of us inhabits a specific reality and culture, and we require an operational solution to overcoming these blind spots in our fields of vision. If we can do that, then we can see and understand the regional situations within Asia. sg To elaborate on that point, I would say that the problem can be identified. In what circumstances should we seek to understand ‘the other’? For example, though I am a Chinese person, I have the desire to understand the Middle East. The blind spot is a problem of motivation, not a problem of knowledge. Where does this motivation come from? We can see that most intellectuals in the Third World today, particularly in the mainstream, have quite

complete repositories of European and American knowledge. Even if they do not speak English, they read the European classics in translation, and quote them authoritatively in discussions. But they have no interest in Africa, no motivation. They think it is a place that does not produce ideas or principles. This kind of blind spot is the result of the prevailing Western-centric power structure of knowledge and reality. Moreover, whenever a new nationstate is formed, it reproduces this paradigm. So you cannot locate this problem solely in the West. All of the societies of Asia are like this. They put themselves at the centre and actively respond to the demands of the dominant culture. To an extent, this situation will be resolved by history. This is not something that we can rely on artists to guide us through by

Polit-Sheer-Form-Office, Tofu, Kungfu, Polit-Sheer-Form, 2009, video, 3 min 5 sec. Courtesy the artists

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emphasising certain ideas – that is useless. We must pay attention to the limitation of the effectiveness. Artists can do some work, for example urging people to resolve certain problems in Chinese society. But the solutions to these problems are not easy to identify. Accessing the resources of other regions of Asia can be very helpful if they can be transformed into the intermediary of reflection, and will naturally lead to new ideas. ara I have recently been observing artistic exchanges between China, Japan and South Korea (not including art programmes sponsored by government cultural or diplomatic initiatives). As an observer, I sense that China is the state that least cares about other Asian states. How do you view this issue? sg I think there is some truth to your observation, which is related to the anxiety that has afflicted the entire state since it was established in 1949. In 1958, the national slogan was chao ying gan mei: ‘Surpass England and Catch Up with the United States’. This was because our enemies came from the West, which was also the source of our modernised imagination. Once the state had been established and society began to develop, that is to say, during the reform period that followed the Cultural Revolution, the political modes inherited by the intellectual class were transformed into cultural modes. So you see our leading intellectuals are those who studied in Europe and the United States. Their discourse is essentially an Englishbased discourse. Their only contribution is either to critique or to reform Europe and the United States. Given this framework, our imagination of international relations in the cultural field essentially runs on a Western track. As a consequence of these circumstances, the present effort to develop an Asian imagination is a nascent one. This fact influences the fine-arts world as well as other fields that overlap with the intellectual world. There is a certain historical logic to our neglect of other Asian states, of our neighbours, but that is not a justification. Now, things are beginning to change. In recent years, curators are always dragging me out to talk about Asia, which has led me to recognise what I just mentioned: cultural people have moved to the front. The artworld has moved to the front. ara

Hiraki Sawa ‘In every enumeration there are two contradictory temptations. The ﬁrst is to list everything, the second is to forget something. The ﬁrst would like to close off the question once and for all, the second to leave it open.’ Georges Perec, ‘The ineffable joys of enumeration’, from Think/Classify, 1985 by Mark Rappolt

The list here is of scenes from a two-channel audiovisual installa- with Lineament at James Cohan Gallery, Shanghai), the artist plays tion by the Japanese-born, London-based artist Hiraki Sawa titled with linear and nonlinear time, via bodies repeating actions, bodies Lineament (2012). The list is partial in the sense of being a selection and objects being doubled, the use of mirrors (in the case of the singleof scenes remembered from a work that lasts 18 minutes and 47 channel Envelope, mirrors are installed to reflect the video projection) seconds. In a way this ‘forgetting’ is appropriate given the fact that and Eadweard Muybridge-style motion-capture. It’s even harder to Lineament is a continuation of a project titled Figment, begun in 2009 make a list when things repeat themselves. and responding to one of the artist’s close friends (a music lover) As a viewer of a work by Sawa, you’re conscious of being pushed having had a sudden amnesiac episode in which he forgot everything into constructing or assembling something – in Lineament a story of amnesia (in itself almost a contradicabout his past life (including his love A turntable on a mirrored plinth on a beach. tion in terms) – just as the protagoof music). In the video a male protagoThe tide coming in to flood its base. nist in the video seems to be doing nist awakes in a room and explores an A bed. apartment in which various objects – to the world around him. And that’s Two views of the same room. clocks and records – unravel or come not least because while there are A head. apart, while the protagonist appears images of records playing in the video, Two views of the same feet. to try and work out what they are when the work is shown in a gallery A wall. and how they connect into a whole. there is also a record (playing a palinA man ‘playing’ a record using his finger as a stylus. Rather like the experience of viewing dromic soundtrack – it plays one way, The shade of an anglepoise lamp seeming to follow the motion the work. Rather like the experience then the other – by Dale Berning and of another record as it spins. of assembling a videowork – frame by Ute Kanngiesser) playing in the room The record slowly unravelling like a piece of string or tape. frame – as well. with you. A man’s head tick-tocking from side to side as if he were Once you start listing the imagery Perhaps all this comes to the fore a human metronome. or, perhaps more accurately, groping because in this work the protagoStrips of vinyl from the record covering a man’s head for the points of reference in an nist, due to his lack of memory, navilike the curving patterns generated by a spirograph. animation by Sawa, it’s easy to make gates a world in which objects seem to A radiator. the world he depicts seem odd. But be just that and nothing more. While A kettle. perhaps that’s not because of the we, as viewers eager to consume and The string of vinyl going through the man’s head: ear to ear. oddness or surreal quality of the interpret the artwork, pile into it Sprockets, bolts, cogs and spirals. imagery in his animations, but rather with an innate subjectivity, thrusting A shelf. because his animations, in which meaning into and feeling resonance in A head encrusted by clockwork, like so many barnacles. objects play a key role (early works every single frame. And there’s a good such as Dwelling, 2002, and Migration, 2003, featured miniature aeroplanes and airports located in domestic settings), resist objective description. In part because by its very nature (a sequential series of images) a videowork cries out for subjective interpretation, or at least to be turned into some sort of story by the viewer. Although in Hollywood-type movies, of course, that would be the job of the director and scriptwriter. Perhaps this impulse is something Sawa attempts to defy. In both Lineament and Envelope (2014, recently shown together

and bad side to this. There is something at once uplifting and terrifying about the idea that nothing in the world is so unique that it cannot be entered on a list. (Perec) To some degree the images that follow this page came out of a discussion of sorts with the artist about how one might represent a moving-image work within the pages of a magazine, how one might attempt to make a whole of something that, because of the nature of the printed page, can only be represented as a series of parts. What follows is a ‘list’ assembled by the artist.

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pages 89–91 Envelope, 2015, giclée prints of screengrabs (from Envelope, 2014), 15 × 10 cm. page 92 Untitled, 2014, ink drawing on sketchbook, 23 × 15 cm. page 93 Envelope, 2015, giclée print of screengrab (from Envelope, 2014), 15 × 10 cm. page 94 Objects for Under the Box, Beyond the Bounds, 2013–14, Jesmonite: cup 11 × 9 × 5 cm; radiator 16 × 5 × 18 cm; fossil 9 × 6 × 6 cm; metronome 6 × 6 × 10 cm. page 95 Wax, 2012, graphite drawing, 100 × 70 cm. page 96–8 Lineament, 2015, giclée prints of screengrabs (from Lineament, 2012), 15 × 10 cm. all images Courtesy the artist Envelope, 2014 video, colour, three mirrors with transducer speakers, ﬁve-channel sound. Soundtrack by Dale Berning and Saya (tenniscoats), 11 min 20 sec Lineament, 2012 two-channel video, colour, silent. Customised record player, vinyl record, stereo sound. Soundtrack by Dale Berning and Ute Kanngiesser, 18 min 47 sec. Supported by Shiseido

Art Reviewed

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Chen Zhen Without going to New York and Paris, life could be internationalized Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai 30 May – 7 October Chen Zhen Frith Street Gallery, London 9 July – 14 August

As well as being widely acknowledged as one of the pivotal figures of the Chinese avant-garde that came to prominence during the 1980s, Chen Zhen, whose work spans drawing, collage, sculpture and installation, is often cited as an early proponent of artistic multiculturalism, inasmuch as that refers to a blending of philosophies and art practices from what we might broadly refer to as the East and the West. Born in China and raised there during the Cultural Revolution, he emigrated to Paris in 1986 to study at the École des Beaux Arts and was largely based there until his death in 2000. This summer sees two exhibitions of his work: the first a major retrospective in his native Shanghai (only his third solo exhibition in China); the second a much smaller commercial gallery show in London. Curated by Hou Hanru and Chen’s partner, Xu Min, the Shanghai show sets out to demonstrate that despite his long absence from the city (he first returned to visit ten years after he left), Shanghai and its influences remained a key to Chen’s output. This is most evident in a framed collage titled Social Investigation–Shanghai No. 1 (1997), in which a grid of 47 photographs documenting Shanghai’s rapid urbanisation are accompanied by notes questioning its purpose and ambition, as well as presenting the notion of the city as a conglomeration of past, present and future. ‘Pu Dong – future oriental Manhattan’, reads one; ‘Is there a real or pure Asia for Asia people?’ another. The focus of the exhibition, then, is largely on works from the 1990s as well as Untitled (1997–2015), a sculpture featuring two interlocked wooden motorboats, one carrying goods from the West the other goods from China, that lacks the artist’s usual subtlety, executed after his death according to drawings he left. In Daily Incantations (1996), 101 old-style Shanghai

wooden chamber pots are ﬁtted with speakers broadcasting the sound of their being washed, and hung, rather like tiered theatre seats, around a caged ball of redundant electronic paraphernalia (monitors, mixers, speakers, turntables and various cables): new shit replacing old shit (there’s a constant questioning of modernisation here), but somehow the same shit, recycling with the regularity of a quasi-religious chant. A similar sensibility is evident in Le Bureau de Change (1996–2004), in which an old-style Shanghai toilet is converted into a money-changing facility, the coins lying where the shit normally ends up. Indeed, similar themes, albeit by necessity projected through smaller-scale works, lie at the heart of the London show (also focused on his late period), where Chen’s Instrument Musical (1996) features the chamber–pot-and-speaker combo, and two works from his L’Autel series (1993) place consumer objects in wall-mounted glass vitrines, acknowledging them as objects of veneration while at the same time rendering them redundant, perhaps even advertising redundancy as their ultimate end. But that’s not to suggest that Chen, who suffered (and eventually died) from a serious blood illness and devoted the last three years of his life to the study of medicine – both traditional Chinese and Western – is an artist focused on presenting the modern world in negative terms. Perhaps it would be truer to say that Chen was more focused on the idea of human life as an ultimately organic process. Both exhibitions include one of Chen’s 12 (for the number of Zodiac signs) Crystal Landscape of an Inner Body (2000), each of which comprises a series of transparent crystal organs laid out on a clinical observation bed, suggesting an idea of the importance of clean living or health as the ultimate goal (sound in body, sound in mind),

facing page, top Puriﬁcation Room, 2015. Photo: Rockbund Art Museum. © Estate of Chen Zhen / adagp, Paris / sack, Seoul, 2015 Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins

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and of ultimate human sameness: ideas that go well beyond any notion of specific cultures. (The drawings, texts and photographs that make up My Diary in a Shaker Village, 1996–7, on show in Shanghai and documenting Chen’s analysis of the material and spiritual lifestyle of the community, bear further testimony to this.) Yet however much there is a universal concern for humanity in his work, Chen’s ‘multiculturalism’ doesn’t advocate a universal culture. In works such as Daily Incantations or Social Investigation–Shanghai No. 1, the cultures and cultural relics of China and the West remain easily identifiable binary poles: indications of choices to be made, perhaps, rather than regimes to be followed to the exclusion of all else. Perhaps the key to why Chen is such an important artist, particularly in the context of a hyperinflated art market, is the way in which his holistic vision of art offers a mode of practice based on the necessity of reacting to, investigating and challenging (and perhaps seeking to better) the world around him, rather than simply filling it with more products. And while this is evident throughout both exhibitions, it’s nowhere better demonstrated than in the opening work of the Shanghai show: Purification Room (2000–15), a room-size installation (the last in series of similar works, recreated for this installation) that features a selection of found objects – among them a bicycle, armchair, suitcases, kettles, ladders, cupboards and electrical cables – all coated in the kind of grey-brown clay that so many origin myths posit as the beginning of human life. Part archaeological site, part cleansing mudbath and part ironic commentary, nothing better exemplifies the artist’s starting point: the detailed, distanced, dispassionate, humorous, yet always thoughtful observation of contemporary life. Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom Chen Zhen, 2015 (installation view, Frith Street Gallery, 2015). Photo: Andy Stagg. Courtesy ADAC / Association des Amis de Chen Zhen

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Liu Shiyuan Lost in Export White Space Beijing 25 April – 7 June Liu Shiyuan’s short film Lost in Export (2015), a work completed over the last two years and screened here alongside a single sculpture, tells the story of two young couples’ encounters, their frustrations with their jobs and their relationships, and ultimately their infidelities. Yet this seemingly linear cinematic narrative is in fact a trompe-l’oeil. During the course of its nearly 34 minutes, the artwork offers a series of reenactments of famous cinematic scenes extracted from various gems of the art-film romance genre. You probably need to be a true aficionado to identify every allusion in this collage of clichéd love scenarios, but perhaps the title of the artwork, purposefully adopted from Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), gives a clue to its underlying and perhaps even contentious intent. For Lost in Export seems not intended as a tribute to epic moments from the history of cinema; rather, it inquires into the affects of cinema and, by the very fact of its appropriation of cinematic readymades, probes at what constitutes the power of filmmaking itself. Apparently inspired by Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011), and perhaps

more precisely A.O. Scott’s description of that work in The New York Times as ‘the place from which all future revisionism must start’, Liu ﬁlters her doubts about the aforementioned affects of cinema through various devices. These include: the ﬁlm’s narrative (for instance, one of the characters, John, introduces his relationship to another character, Sophie, saying, “But the thing is, when you fall in love with the landscape, a picture, or a culture, it means a change for you and the people around you”); its staging (a seemingly inadvertent closeup of the cover of a book titled Photography Changes Everything, as John and Sophie are having a conversation about her discontent with her job); or those parodies of well-known scenes from The Beach (2000), In the Mood for Love (2000) and Romeo + Juliet (1996), to name just a few. Furthermore, Liu has even intermittently mixed a wide array of technical variations – elements of montage, visual superimposition, low-resolution or incandescent images, and even shifts in the dimension of the images – into her narrative, serving to highlight its construction. Most of all, if one approaches

Lost in Export, 2015, single-channel video, colour, sound, 33 min 43 sec. Courtesy White Space Beijing

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the film with a set of finely tuned ears, one would notice that unlike the corny moodinducing music in sappy love stories that is generically paired with visual narrative in order to kidnap our emotions, the soundtrack throughout this work is incongruent with its visual other. Indeed, its electronically generated plasticity further emphasises the artificiality of cinematographic affects and its engendering of human emotions. The result of Lost in Export is not only a banter with ‘romantic cinema’ as a form of manipulated visual consumption that generates certain conditioned emotional responses through its deployment of well-worn clichés. At the same time Liu Shiyuan successfully inquires into all aspects that challenge the establishment of the power of discourse in film. Perhaps like the artist’s Chair-No.2 (2015), a bouncing chair with two legs installed on balloons at the entrance of the gallery in which the short film is shown, Liu rescues viewers from being abducted by cinematic godfathers, and allows them a moment of deliberate madness. Eva Renaud

Yan Lei Rêverie Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing 25 April – 15 July Besides being the title of this exhibition, Rêverie is also the name of a company that Yan Lei started in 2001. The word means ‘fantasy’ in English, but its phonetic translation in Chinese – liwuli – has punlike qualities, meaning both ‘fantasy-disillusion’ and ‘proﬁts bring more proﬁts’. Starting from this simple and exotic term, Hou Hanru, the curator of the show, draws a unique portrait of Yan Lei in the Chinese contemporary art scene: he is an artist who claims not to make art; instead he immerses himself in daydream, or fantasy; his predecessor is Marcel Duchamp, but in the context of contemporary China, his gesture expresses an artist’s quest for individual freedom and his resistance to power. Yan’s statement about ‘not making art’ sounds a bit tricky to me. For what he really means is that while he doesn’t participate in its production; he does set out its concepts. Rêverie (2015) is an installation that draws inspiration from an automobile production line that Yan discovered in the Volkswagen factory in Kassel, Germany; Limited Art Project (2012) is a reinstallation of his project for Documenta 13 at Kassel; and xanax (2015) is eight models of Kassel’s Documenta-Halle, inside which viewers can see miniature paintings hung on the walls: all are made by nonartist fabricators whom Yan never personally guided during the process of making

the works. Meanwhile, the intellectual side of the ‘production’ of art – the interpretation of the works, the making of the exhibition’s concept and the creation of discourse – is given over to the curator, the professional in those areas. What’s left? The artist reserves his right to create the concept and to claim his authorship of the art on display. Given this situation, further interpretation of the works in this show is almost unnecessary, as they either function as items of display and products in circulation, like the car body panels in Rêverie and the paintings in Limited Project (both could be hung on the wall individually or as a set), or as a stage prop used to adopt a certain posture, like the Rêverie wine (2015) presented in the gallery and available to drink, or the licenses of Yan’s company liwuli, also on display (albeit in a place where it is hard for them to be seen). Perhaps the real artistic work – at least as proposed by the artist and the curator – is the artist’s resistant gesture. However, there is often a contradiction lying behind a myth. In Yan Lei’s case, as people enter the exhibition space they will immediately sense that the works in the show are deliberately related to the artist’s understanding of the art market. Which in turn leads to a comment by Yan that is highlighted by Hou: ‘Making art and doing other business are the same thing.’

The exhibition also shows Yan’s consistent sensitivity to the relationship between art and power. As one of the contemporary Chinese artists who was accepted early on by the Western art market, Beijing-based Yan is deeply and critically concerned with the confrontation between ‘global’ and ‘local’, and the mechanism of the market and power. By reinstalling his Documenta 13 project (Limited Art Project) and building the miniatures of the Documenta-Halle (xanax) in a private museum in China, Yan has, in a certain sense, cleverly created a rough visual authentication mechanism between an international institution and a local one, hence triggering the market operation that changes the (market) value of art. Through Rêverie, Yan has cut the natural link between production (via outsourcing) and creation (in his case, meaning fantasy or to dream). In doing so, he (re)deﬁnes what artistic labour constitutes, and with that artistic identity. This gesture of negation also provides critics and curators a potential space to produce discourse. It’s not difficult, for example, to imagine a 3,000-word essay being written on the typical Eastern philosophy – from Sun Tzu’s sixthcentury bc text The Art of War – of ‘advancing through retreat’. Aimee Lin

Limited Art Project, 2012–15, oil and acrylic on canvas, dimensions variable. Photo: Xing Yu. Courtesy Red Brick Museum, Beijing

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Balance Sheets Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong 3 June – 23 July If the objective of Balance Sheets is to explore the relationship between art and economics, then the intimacies that it reveals seem to be those of a conspiring or mutually beneﬁcial nature. The works in the exhibition attempt to draw parallels between the forms and aesthetics of economics and art, as if, in this late stage of capitalism, the two weren’t already linked by more subtle and intrinsic ties. As critic Isabelle Graw notes, during the latter half of the eighteenth century the turn of art away from purpose and towards a purely aesthetic principle made it ripe for exploitation by capital. In other words, the autonomy of art, while ideal in theory and intention, also renders it the perfect object to which unbridled and unregulated value can be attributed. Yet the very literal treatment of the subject matter in this exhibition ignores their shared tropes and origins, supposing that art, through mimicry, implicitly seeks to transform, magnify or purify capital’s exigencies. As such, critical commentary is at a distance. Art comprises visual systems and codiﬁed meanings. Therefore, addressing the opaque processes of the market through the aestheticisation of its tools and functions seems an exercise in further abstracting the abstract. Perhaps pronouncing this attribute was the goal in itself,

though it is hard to distinguish the precise effect. For example, Toril Johannessen’s Expansion in Finance and Physics series (2010) consists of highly stylised scientific and financial charts rendered large so as to reveal the fine print. Its aim is to show how the same language applied within positivist fields of finance is also frequently found in art-historical discourse, leading to the conclusion that art and science are not so diametrically opposed and may in fact rely on the same value system. Heidi Voet’s scintillating constellation of faceless euro coins strewn across the gallery floor further indicates how art objects become innocuous forms in which value may be harboured. Ximena Garrido-Lecca’s traditional Peruvian hats, painstakingly photocopied and handcoloured on the eponymous ‘balance sheets’, appear an attempt to rope a more sentient discussion of global capital and its effects on culture into what is a predominantly sanitised take on the world’s financial systems. They therefore seem out of place, furthered by their somewhat diminutive placement on a backwards-facing wall. This disjuncture however is not the only one felt; all around the exhibition a vaguely anachronistic flavour is present. Gabriel Kuri’s two Coin and Cigarette Butt Board (2014) works

Heidi Voet, Stars and Constellations, 2013, coins and tokens, dimensions variable. Courtesy Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong

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are installed in antique-looking wooden cases, while Duncan Campell’s 39-minute black-andwhite ﬁlm Arbeit (2011) compiles copious imagery of workers in a factory reminiscent of earlytwentieth-century Europe set to a dry voiceover detailing the biography of a German technocrat. Both of these works share a constant, referring to an outmoded version of what ‘the market’ looks like. Lia Forslund and Franek Wardynski’s R.M.B.S. (2015), a receipt machine that bears instead a morose tale in which the protagonist details investments made before the ﬁnancial crisis on printouts that visitors can take away is one of the more convincing transformations whereby a tool of exchange is effectively appropriated towards a means of critique. This stands apart from other works in the show, where economic mediums (coins, charts, accountancy reports) are inconsequentially altered, sometimes even inversely suggesting capital itself as an artform. If taken as such, Balance Sheets either misses the plot or successfully presents a very cynical take on the potential that art has to comment on or engender new feelings about our economic environment. If we were to assume this intention, then yes: it would appear that art and capital are indeed two sides of the same coin. Ming Lin

Tao Hui 1 Character & 7 Materials Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai 18 April –18 May Ghosts are everywhere: they populate a fold between space and time that we cannot see, but sometimes vaguely sense, as if in a state of drowsiness. Ghosts are not (only) supernatural entities, but first and foremost phantasmic epiphanies that embody – or disembody – the conflicts of the contemporary world as it deals with an uncomfortable past that always haunts the present. 1 Character & 7 Materials is a powerful narrative in the form of an exhibition that goes beyond the conventions of a gallery showcase to become a paradigm of the (Asian) gothic tale. As in the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tao Hui entrusts a ghost with the task of uttering the unutterable, digging out some inconvenient truths and laying bare the contradictions and twists of modernity. Of course, ghosts and spirits are central to popular legends around the world; but in Asian countries in particular, they have been used as an allegory for the return of the repressed and adapted to the postcolonial scenario of anxiogenic memories and battered populations. Tao’s narrative and visual apparatus play with Freud’s concept of the uncanny, unheimlich, and one of its most typical tropes – the double (a ghost is already a replica).

The exhibition title has been doubled, as has the installation inside the gallery space: a recording booth and, in the adjacent space, a projection inside a structure reminiscent of a cantilevered bus stop shelter, materialising waiting as well as absence. The double is also translated in the mismatch between audio and video, and doubled too are the audio channels (a deep female voice speaking in English and a high-pitched male voice for the Chinese version). 1 Character (all works 2015) is the recording booth, complete with microphone, featuring a sound installation experienced via wireless headphones: the voice of the lingering ghost of a woman, her words supposedly recorded in the booth, narrating her story, one the artist heard when he was a child. We are informed about her childhood in a village near the Yangtze River, and of how, after studying and working as musician in Shanghai for some time, she went back to the village, fell in love with a student, had a baby, was abandoned, remarried and one night fell in the river, letting herself drown. The video 7 Materials is a single-channel video composed of seven scenes, looping in a random order and featuring surreal characters and circumstances: a reporter interviewing the

victim of a car crash; a jailed woman bursting into tears behind prison bars during a storm; a waitress washing and smashing dishes with impeccable efficiency; a (man disguised as a) Taoist deity sailing the river onboard a speedboat; ﬁve girls dressed in folk costumes clustered inside a pit; ballet dancers hanging upside down from wooden stacks; a ﬁgure seen from behind falling dead into the river after a blast of gunshots… all visual renditions of the notion of ‘uncanniness’, eerie enough to be(come) relevant to the narration that the viewers in fact automatically associate with the images. The ‘removed’ returns here in the guise of neglected social groups and individuals: ethnic minorities, marginalised women, bodies deprived of their voice… the camera follows them closely, alternating dynamic shots with static ones, which makes some of the clips gain a paradigmatic quality. In this project everything takes on a ghostly quality. Without intellectual poses or reveries, and like the real storyteller he is, Tao transfers a kind of ancient wisdom onto us. Among the many secrets this exhibition whispers is also the revelation that the experience of art is already, perhaps, an incursion into an afterlife. Mariagrazia Costantino

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Constructs / Constructions Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi 23 April – 20 December For a brief period during the 1970s, human civilisation was convinced that it would establish a human colony in outer space within the next decade. Serious plans and designs for such colonies were discussed. But the bubble quickly burst, and decades later we are still on earth, tackling problems of urban expansion, unfettered construction in the guise of development and progress. Featuring works by 30 Indian modern and contemporary artists, this show interrogates the physical and psychological conditions of such earthly constructions. Those works, by artists spanning different generations, deploy a variety of materials and approaches – formalist, abstract, modernist and conceptual – with some taking an architectural form, combining visual and spatial properties to create an aesthetic experience. Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home (2008) is an installation of 34 panels that covers an entire room. Kaavads are a method of traditional storytelling made using intricately decorated multipanelled wooden boxes, and here Sheikh depicts incidents and characters from his own life in a ﬁgurative and narrative style of painting, inﬂuenced by the aesthetics of traditional image-making styles of India, China, Japan and Persia. Elevator from the Subcontinent (2011) by Gigi Scaria is viewed in a static elevator. Inside, the viewer is disoriented by scrolling

screens on three sides of the lift that dizzyingly simulate the upward motion of an elevator, and then giving a vertical tour of a building. Starting in the underground car park, it moves up to the terrace to view a dense concrete urban cityscape, passing through the living rooms of various lower-middle-class and upper-middleclass apartments – the decoration and arrangement of furniture in the rooms give away the social positioning of its residents. The work, ﬁrst shown in India’s pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, negotiates the metropolitan social divide of class and caste. Constructs (2008–15) by Nataraj Sharma is an installation of two large iron towers, rusted and halfconstructed, built like modern apartments. The repetition of patterns, structures and its scale comments on the entrapment and unfeeling environment of our living. This installation is viewed with several large-scale paintings by Sharma that show various scenes from a construction site – towering buildings against the miniscule size of man, tall cranes and extensive scaffolding, to display the scale of constructions. The urban landscape – the density, the overpowering ﬁelds of concrete – can be seen in most of the artworks. The paintings of Indian modernists F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza and Ram Kumar show earth, streets, churches and

Trace i, ii, iii & iv (detail), 2013, set of four c-prints, each: 28 × 36 cm. Courtesy Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

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villages. While most of the works in the exhibition focus on buildings, few focus on human relationships with buildings. Sudarshan Shetty and Zarina give different articulations of home, waiting and longing in their work. The abstraction of forms is seen in that of Yamini Nayar, Jeram Patel, Ganesh Haloi and Velu Viswanadhan. Nayar’s photographs are closeups of collages created by pasting, cutting, ripping, scratching, sticking paper, glass, thread and wire; Haloi’s perception of landscape is conceptualised in geometric forms in his paintings. The abstractions are memories of an imagined space constructing sublime feelings and transcendental space. Urban life offers us plenty of experiences of sites of construction, but the construction of memories and experiences is far more appealing, as it challenges the current state while constantly reviewing our world and perception. More bent on the physical entrapments of the urban jungle, the exhibition has an exiguous engagement with the constructions of the mind as seen in the more abstract forms. One work epitomising this is Anish Kapoor’s In Mind (2014), where a transparent acrylic cube manifests emptiness by trapping air bubbles, perhaps the way an artist constructs with materials to reify mental imagery. Charu Maithani

Kyungah Ham Phantom Footsteps Kukje Gallery, Seoul 4 June – 25 July Kyungah Ham is one of many artists who deal with politically sensitive matters of the world. So what is it that makes her practice appealing? On the evidence here, it’s the tenacious, sometimes absurd actions that highlight distorted aspects of reality. In previous works, Ham stole crockery and cutlery from every foreign hotel at which she’d stayed over a ten-year period and then presented them in a form of display parodying that used in Western museums ﬁlled with stolen cultural relics. For another seven years, for the project Abstract Weave / Morris Louis (2014) the artist, via a middleman, asked North Korean women to fabricate hand embroidery, combining phrases from Internet news articles onto images of paintings by the American abstract artist Morris Louis, which she would receive after a long wait. The list of materials for a typical work from the series reads: ‘embroidery, collected word from Internet news articles, middleman, anxiety, censorship, tassel, wooden frame’, and is accompanied by the number of hours and people required to produce it. It was her response to the outdated North Korean propaganda leaﬂets that arrived at her house seven years out of date.

Ham’s new embroidered project sms Series in Camouﬂage (2014–15) takes a different approach. The images are much bigger, more complex and more ﬁgurative. Amidst the richness of colour and detail, you will occasionally spot the marks left by the needles; probably the points at which the workers would stop sewing and take a look at the whole picture. You cannot stop imagining what they were thinking at those points. Whereas Abstract Weave… contains a collage of words from news articles, the new series uses more sentimental quotes from a South Korean pop song, like ‘Are you lonely too?’ or ‘Though, if you are like me’. Whereas Abstract Weave… mocks North Korea’s communist regime through the American star artist, sms Series… becomes a personal message to the workers in North Korea. Each letter appears subtle and is often overlapped with different layers of patterns in strong colour variations that mirror the background images. Hence the texts are not clearly visible unless you look for them carefully. From a distant view, you can at last recognise the fragments of the sentences. These elusive letters also appear in the embroidered series What You See is the Unseen / Chandeliers for Five Cities (2012–15), which depicts

huge swinging chandeliers with yellow lights on a black background. Trying hard to read vague characters hidden in the beautifully perfect patterns, which resonate with images of North Korean mass games, I suddenly ask myself: ‘Do I only see what I want to see? Is what I see actually there? What can I see and what can I not see?’ This confused feeling might be connected to my imaginative thoughts about North Korea – curious, ambiguous, sometimes romanticised – all coming from the absence of actual communication. Can Ham’s art communicate with North Korean workers in such slow and complicated ways? It is possible. Similar to an echo in a mountain in thick fog, even after long silence, the artist’s voice is always bounced back from far away. The fact that the ﬁnished works’s colours go deeper or that the patterns are partly missing can be seen as evidence that the workers in North Korea interpreted Ham’s design in certain ways, even though it was related to her tactical self-censorship to pass the North Korean government’s inspection. Just like an echo, what completes Ham’s work is its immateriality and temporality due to the current political situation of the two Koreas. Tiffany Chae

Money Never Sleeps 01, from sms Series in Camouﬂage, 2012–13, North Korean hand embroidery, silk threads on cotton, middleman, anxiety, censorship, wooden frame, 188 × 183 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

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Haegue Yang Shooting the Elephant ㇟ Thinking the Elephant Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul 12 February – 10 May Shooting the Elephant ㇟ Thinking the Elephant is Berlin-and-Seoul-based Korean artist Haegue Yang’s first show at her home country in five years. It is a retrospective that shows work from almost all of her important series, some of which are shown in Asia for the first time. For example Cittadella (2011), one of the most famous and largest Venetian blind installations made by the artist, creates an immersive experience of space and time via ‘immaterial’ elements like light, shadow and wind. Boxing Ballet (2013/2015), a set of mobile sculptures made of bells and metal structures, is a result of Yang’s study of the Russian avant-garde and her experiments in introducing sound elements and movement or mobility to classical sculpture. Storage Piece (2004) looks extremely small and quiet when it is placed along with other works, despite the fact that it is accompanied by Speech for Storage Piece (2004), a related sound element. The reinstallation of Yang’s 2001 vip’s Union, is an example of the artist’s very early work – distinct from her later installations – setting a practical resting room in the exhibition space with chairs and tables collected from people from different backgrounds, working in Seoul. Walking through the retrospective, it is not hard to become conscious of the development of Yang’s language, and the progress or change in

her interests and attention over time. Yet, some continuous features can be found in the works from every stage. For example, VIP’s Union, created 14 years ago, obviously aims to build up a temporary community of people who lent their furniture to the artist. But look at the composition of those objects and it is not hard to see Yang’s rational sensitivity to the space and her interest in abstract painting, which relates this piece to her later Venetian blind installations, including one newly created for this show – Sol LeWitt Upside Down – Structure with Three Towers, Expanded 23 Times (2015). More interestingly, the artist doesn’t seem to be satisﬁed with simply reinstalling old works. Indeed, not only to the visitor, but also to Yang herself, the show (or the planning and making of it) is an opportunity to look back on old works, and to ‘invent’ a new interpretation or variation of them. For example, Hovering Line Dance – Trustworthy #240 (2015) is a conversation between Yang’s graphic project Trustworthies (2010–) and her new wall piece. There are many other cases in this show that demonstrate the relation, dialogue and evolution between one work and another, perhaps telling us that an artist’s oeuvre is an organic organisation that has an ability to self-maintain and regenerate. Besides that wall piece and the new Venetian

blind installation, Yang has also created a new series of work for this show: a group of sculptures and three architectural structures made of artificial straw, titled The Intermediates (2015). Materials to Yang are a carrier of meanings and cultures, and so straw, as a living and construction material in many cultures, is a material language through which she can discuss culture. The sculptures and the large-scale architectural structures are built, in a metaphorical way, as an assembly of individuals and the abstraction of collective. They coexist, confront, function as the reference and recourse to each other. The dialectical relationship between them somehow creates the theme of the show. It is always a huge challenge to place a number of large installations in one show and to organise the space in a rational way. The two-storey museum is actually a bit confusing due to its irregular shape, massive columns and sloping passage. Given this, the exhibition performs beyond expectation. With the contrast between bright ground floor and dark upper floor and the straw architectural structures functioning as Yang’s Venetian blind unit in the installation, but in a larger scale, the exhibition builds a rhythm that it is evident to anyone moving through it. Aimee Lin

Boxing Ballet, 2013/2015 (installation view, Shooting the Elephant ㇟ Thinking the Elephant, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, 2015. Photo: Hyunsoo Kim. Courtesy the artist

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Hwayeon Nam Time Mechanics Arko Art Center, Seoul 10 April – 28 June Time Mechanics is Hwayeon Nam’s first solo show in her native Korea. Although the five newly commissioned works in the exhibition do not necessarily relate to one another, they nevertheless feel interlaced. Not least in the case of three videoworks projected onto one huge wall, so that the wall looks as if it is a computer screen belonging to an avid multitasker. Ghost Orchid (2015) plays in the middle: in it, a man mimics the shape of Cypripedium and other plants in a botanical garden while a voiceover (transmitted by speakers, whereas the other two works on the wall require headphones) reads out a letter by Wilhelm Micholitz, one of the most celebrated nineteenth-century orchid hunters, in which he describes the difficulties of importing rare and unique orchids. The actor’s gestures are serious but comic too, reminiscent of a young child’s, but also reflecting Nam’s imaginative use of naivety when trying to comprehend nonhuman subjects: she has previously mentioned that she has always been curious about how her dog perceives time, so it is no surprise that animal

time or the human perception of animal life is a feature of her new works. Ant Time (2015), a photodocumentary series, records ants’ trajectories along a 90cm-long thread, which allows the duration of their movements to be measured. In the video Field Recording (2015), a phrase normally associated with the capture on tape of birdsong in the wild, the artist records a performer mimicking various birdcalls in a studio as they are played to him on a set of headphones. Time is not just a subject but also a key material for Nam. Her video Coréen 109 (2014) centres on the artist’s lack of access to the Jikji simchae yojeol, the world’s oldest book to be printed with moveable metal type, made in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty in 1377. Since the artist could not consult the book directly (it is held by France’s Bibliothèque Nationale – its catalogue number providing the title of Nam’s work – and is the subject of an ongoing repatriation controversy), she collected images and texts from Google or Wikipedia, and ﬁlmed her computer screen while she clicked through them.

Another video, The Adoration of the Magi (2015), shows the star of Bethlehem as depicted in Giotto’s fresco of the same name (c. 1305–6). The star in the painting marks the birth of Jesus in the Christian tradition, but the European Space Agency (esa) has proposed that it is evidence that Giotto was one of the ﬁrst people to see Halley’s Comet. While showing footage from ﬁlms of the esa’s Giotto spacecraft mission, Nam’s voice insists that the “camera is an extension of human eye”. Here a nonhuman object engages with the human body in an existential way. For Coréen 109 and The Adoration of the Magi, the artist weaves her own time into the video. The artist herself becomes a performer, playing the different roles of researcher, archivist and narrator at the same time. Nam’s proactive practice towards time results in the materialisation of time. It also stimulates our desire to control time. Nam admits her practice is “the best system for me to spend my time in a most creative way”. By watching her art, a viewer can consume Nam’s time while offering his or her own time in return. Tiffany Chae

Time Mechanics, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy Arko Art Center, Seoul

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Rasheed Araeen Minimalism Then and Now: 1960s – Present Aicon Gallery, New York 7 May – 13 June Acknowledgement for octogenarian Rasheed Araeen’s contribution to Minimalism is long overdue. Marginalised and overshadowed for the most part by American stalwarts such as Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre and Donald Judd, the pioneers of the movement during the 1960s, Araeen’s institutional recognition has only been recent: his solo exhibition Zero to Infinity (2012), at Tate Modern in London, was followed by his inclusion in the group exhibition Other Primary Structures (2014), at the Jewish Museum, New York. In his first solo gallery exhibition in New York, the artist’s obsession with symmetry (which stems from his training in engineering) is visible in a selection of early drawings executed in Karachi. Smooth and pliant zigzag lines and a mat of squiggles drawn with felt-tip pens fill the page in Series A (1961) and Series B (1962). The fluidity that will become his work’s most distinguishing characteristic takes shape. On relocating permanently to London in 1964, Araeen’s work morphs into major multicoloured sculptures after his exposure to British modernist Anthony Caro. From his sketches of three-dimensional structures made between 1965 and 68, hung in the vestibule of the gallery, Araeen’s trademark cubes and vertical structures are born. When asked about the resemblance between his work and LeWitt’s, Araeen pointed out

the demarcation between him and his famous American counterpart: unlike LeWitt’s constructions of strictly vertical and horizontal grids, continuing Piet Mondrian’s dedication to similar geometric strictures during the 1920s, Araeen’s frequently deploy a diagonal line. In Chaar Neelay Heeray (Four Blue Diamonds) (1971/2014) an elaborate latticework of crisscrossed wooden pieces assembled at perfectly measured intervals transforms the rectangular structure into a woven tapestry. While most minimalist work is admired for its industrial forms and meticulous linearity, Araeen’s painstaking creation of four large diamonds within a backdrop of countless smaller ones converts the artwork from a static sculpture to a refreshingly dynamic object. His inclusion of diagonal lines creates the illusion of mobility such that the three-dimensional diamonds become two-dimensional, and vice versa, as one walks across the sculpture. Araeen’s single-minded, viewer-engaging focus on ﬂuidity and symmetry is paramount in his practice. His mostly 180cm vertical sculptures are encountered at eye level and experienced spatially. Placed on the ﬂoor at the far end of the gallery, Rang Baranga ii (1969/2014) allows one to admire the mathematical precision of woven patterns that hardly stay still. A vibrant

Chaar Yaar ii (Four Friends), 1968, wood and paint, 61 × 122 × 122 cm. Courtesy the artist and Aicon Gallery, New York & London

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palette of red, blue, green and yellow structures are knitted such that they form a continuous spectrum of colour. Araeen’s use of primary colours also brings cheer and an element of playfulness to his vivacious constructions. Cubes play an equally important role in Araeen’s oeuvre. Displayed in a large group in a smaller room, 45cm multicoloured wooden blocks fitted with diagonal lines can be rearranged as visitors see fit. As images of his early performative work Springtime in Euston Square Gardens (1970), in which cubes were placed in a public square in London and hoisted onto trees, propose, Araeen continues in a belief that began when he experimented with the idea that the body and empirical experience might be the primary site of knowing and understanding his work. Perhaps the most engaging works from that period are his Triangles (1970). Wooden triangles shaped such that the hypotenuse forms a semicircle are arranged on the floor in the gallery to make a perfect square. This work was originally conceived so that viewers could drop the works in water. Archival documentary images in the gallery showcase the floating wooden triangles forming their own patterns, reinforcing Araeen’s conviction in perceiving the world through one’s body. Bansie Vasvani

Paul Chan Hippias Minor Deste Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra 15 June – 30 September The exhibition Hippias Minor is based on a book published by Paul Chan: a new translation and radical interrogation of Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and the sophist Hippias. While traditional translations of the text are subtitled ‘The Art of Lying’, Chan’s version (translated by Sarah Ruden and published by the artist’s own Badlands Unlimited in collaboration with Deste) is subtitled ‘The Art of Cunning’. The core of the argument is that an examination of the cunning figure leads to an understanding of creative force and hence the creative act. The Homeric hero Odysseus is the embodiment of ‘the excellent man’ who is ‘knowledgeable at what he excels in’ and ‘capable of manipulating the field to suit his interest and will’. Art is a form of ‘wrongdoing’. The exhibition begins on the walk to the Slaughterhouse, which is perched on the side of a cliff overlooking a magnificent chunk of the Aegean. As the building comes into view, so too do three large white fabric forms mounted on fans and flapping upwards from the structure’s roof. One has four branches, another has two, while the central figure is a single column, almost a tentacle. At night, during low winds, they emerge upwards, illuminated a soft blue – causing them to appear like flames, or spectres. Inside the Slaughterhouse, concrete-filled shoes have been placed on the floor, and from them electrical cables emerge, snaking around corners of the space. On the walls hang two pieces of

fabric stitched into the abstract shapes of cloaks, each with a sewn-in label that reads, in Greek, ‘nobody’: what Odysseus called himself to escape a blinded Cyclops in Homer’s epic The Odyssey (c. 700 bc). Though the show itself is beautiful, made more so by the ﬁlmed-by-drone trailers viewable on the exhibition’s website, my ﬁrst impression was that this was a platform to sell a book: the latter was positioned on a table on the Slaughterhouse balcony, on sale for €15. Its presence split this exhibition into two tiers of access: it suggested that in order truly to understand Chan’s premise, the book would have to be read, and thus bought. This ignited my most immediate reaction, which, given the nature of the Slaughterhouse – an intimate space that brings few visitors at a time – I vented at the exhibition attendant. How could a project space – that has traditionally opened its shows to the public for free – deny audiences the full meaning of an exhibition by placing an economic tariff on one of the exhibition’s key components? Especially during a time of crisis, when a boat ticket to Hydra itself constitutes a pricey visitor’s fee? I wasn’t alone: on the day of my visit, a family walked in and expressed my own initial sentiments: “Is that it?” As the attendant – who had clearly read the book a number of times – noted, the levels of reaction vary, my own being located at one end of the

spectrum. We had sat together on the balcony by this point, looking at another storehouse perched lower down the cliff with another set of table and chairs positioned on the roof. Initially, he told me, the book was part of that installation until two instances of theft. We joked that the thief may well have been the artist himself, which would have made perfect sense, given that Chan’s is a trickster’s discourse, after all. This is when the exhibition came together. In the book, Chan talks about the apostle Paul’s Letters to the Romans, locating ‘a psychosomatic dynamic of law’, in which the attempt to inﬂuence behaviour through regulations and prohibitions ‘also agitates and excites us physically and emotionally’. Chan certainly ignited a response: he created a hierarchy in which meaning was organised through various levels of access. This even occurred on the poster: one of the most beautiful ‘objects’ that constitute this show, and which is completely black save for the white silhouettes that ﬂy out of the Slaughterhouse roof. Chan’s name is also printed in white, with a question mark added at the end for enigmatic measure: a kind of disavowal that mirrors the moment Odysseus escaped death from the Cyclops by renouncing his identity. In this formulation, the viewer is the Cyclops; a perspective implicated in what feels like both a trap and initiation. Stephanie Bailey

Hippias Minor, 2015 (installation view, Deste Foundation Artist Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra). Courtesy the artist and Badlands Unlimited

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The Family Tree of Russian Contemporary Art 12 June – 9 August Field Research: A Progress Report 12 June – 23 August Rirkrit Tiravanija Tomorrow is the Question 12 June – 23 August Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow If you’re traditional enough to think of museums as institutions that, via study, collection and display, connect the present to the past, then the notion of a museum of contemporary art will always seem like something of a contradiction, given its apparent commitment to newness (or a moment that differentiates the contemporary from the historical) over continuity. Such broad debates, however current, admittedly fall beyond the purview of a review of an institution’s opening displays. But they are evidently something that the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art encourages, both through the design of the building that houses it and through the smorgasbord of future programmes that its opening exhibitions advertise. Of course, at a moment when privately funded cultural Xanadus are popping up around the world like so many mushrooms (this particular venue being paid for by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich), you might think that a fancy building is, indeed, what makes a contemporary art museum – not least because most museums, with their increasingly showy exteriors, invite you to do so. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, which, prior to the opening of its new space and the acquisition of a number of archives, was called the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, is housed in a 1,200-seat, two-storey Brezhnev-era restaurant located in Moscow’s Gorky Park. Dating from 1968, it has been resurrected by Rem Koolhaas’s architecture ﬁrm oma, fresh from opening Fondazione Prada’s new premises in Milan. If the name Garage preserves a history of its origins (the institution’s ﬁrst home was the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage in Moscow), then its new building does something similar. The original structure of the restaurant has been largely maintained, which means open spaces that declare the building’s public function. Retained, too, are various elements of period decor, including brickwork, bits and pieces of green tiling and, notably, the remains of a mosaic of autumn: the restaurant was

called the Vremena Goda (Seasons of the Year). The whole thing is encased in a reflective, translucent polycarbonate that functions like some sort of architectural aspic. Inside of this sit the building’s services, ‘revealed’ in a way that makes the most of the material’s translucency, projecting the idea that it is ‘open’ in every way and that preservation (climate control, at least) constitutes the very fabric of the building. In some ways this is clever, since form and function appear united. In other ways it’s not, since the narrative of the building competes with or perhaps even dictates the narrative of the art – leading to a feeling that the institution controls rather than enables its displays (and might one day suffer from a serious lack of wallspace that doesn’t articulate a narrative in competition with any work of art positioned on or next to it). The most dynamic of those aforementioned displays is Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Tomorrow is the Question (2015, which references an Ornette Coleman album title; there’ll be a Smiths reference later on). Located in the centre of the second floor, it contains three participatory elements – a series of ping-pong tables activated in partnership with the Moscow Ping Pong club; a series of dinner ladies preparing and serving pelmeni dumplings; and a group of students printing and distributing T-shirts with various slogans (‘How soon is now?’ etc) – as well as a small display of work by the Slovakian conceptualist Július Koller (1939–2007), one of Tiravanija’s inspirations (most obviously in this context via Koller’s 1970 Ping-Pong Club). With stray ping-pong balls bouncing all over the place, you’re in no doubt that the building is ‘activated’, a public engaged (eating, playing or T-shirt-wearing) and history – both art’s and the building’s – acknowledged. On the ground floor, history is more directly confronted via The Family Tree of Russian Contemporary Art, a small archival display of mainly Russian-language documents illustrating the web of relationships that constitute

facing page, top Field Research: A Progress Report, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov. © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

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the Russian art scene from the mid-twentieth century onwards, presented as a graphic network diagram. It’s a project that at once acknowledges the Garage’s acquisition of archive material relating to this era and positions it as the academic research institution that will be central in creating the ‘story’ of the nation’s art – even though the diagram of the Russian art scene, despite some names being printed larger than others, pointedly has no individual or institution at its heart. Field Research: A Progress Report is a series of four embryonic exhibitions that essentially internationalise the Garage’s declared interest in documenting Russian culture, while simultaneously bigging-up the centrality of the arts to Soviet identity and the roles of institutions in preserving it. Two of the shows examine the importance of culture in Soviet diplomacy: one via the exploits of Russian-trained African and Arab filmmakers, another through the more confrontational impact of the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. The two other projects include Anton Vidokle’s This is Cosmos (2014), a fascinating film – the first part of a projected trilogy – exploring the utopian ideas of the late-nineteenth-century Russian cosmism movement, and Taryn Simon’s Black Square xvii (2015), a collaboration with Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation that will result in a black square (proportions after Malevich) made of vitrified nuclear waste, to be displayed at the Garage once it becomes radioactively inert, in a thousand years’ time. In case you were in any doubt, the Garage is here to stay. To some extent, it’s entirely logical for a (re)new(ed) institution to launch itself with a series of displays that have the controlled character of an aggravated mission or pr statement: self-justification, to an extent. Yet the sheer ambition and diversity of the activities advertised here indicate that the Garage’s future trajectory, should it be as open as the building that houses it seeks to suggest, will be one to watch. Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom Rirkrit Tiravanija: Tomorrow is the Question, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

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Autumn 2015

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Books

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Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring: Conversations with Artists from the Arab World by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath Skira, £22.50 / €26/$35 (softcover)

In 2010, curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath commissioned new works by 23 artists hailing from the Arab world for their exhibition at Doha’s Mathaf museum, Told / Untold / Retold. The accompanying catalogue, rather than spotlighting the completed works, told the ephemeral story of their making. Sketches, reference images, diagram-laden pages and photographs of halfmounted installations offered vistas onto rarely glimpsed artistic thought processes. The unfolding visual narrative of the works-in-progress was testament as much to the particular logic of each artist’s artmaking as it was to the curators’ hands in shaping it. The pair undertakes a similar exercise of freeze-framing artistic evolution in Summer, Autumn, Winter and… Spring, a collection of conversations with 11 mid-career Arab artists, many of whom ﬁgured in the 2010 show. The exchanges themselves took place shortly after the events later called the ‘Arab Spring’ by international media (hence the title’s emphasis), and the curators are vocal opponents not only to the kneejerk expectation for Arab artists to produce work about political turmoil (‘being the spokesman of where you come from’, as Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari describes it), but also to the regiontagging they witnessed in curatorial projects at the time. Bardaouil and Fellrath seem to have conceived Summer… as a kind of antidote, reckoning that illustrating the heterogeneity of these artists’ life stories will somehow remedy the easy

pigeonholing and reductive labelling that are thorns in Middle Eastern artists’ collective side. Intending to counteract what they call ‘the outdated rhetoric of identity politics’, the curators fan the identity ﬁre throughout their conversations. From staunch multiculturalists (Egypt-born, French-educated, New York-based Ghada Amer conﬁdes having ‘made the conscious choice not to be an “Egyptian artist”’ and Egyptian/French/Lebanese Lara Baladi claims ‘having no roots is [her] strength’) to the more locally political (‘Politics is part of who we are,’ says Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah), the complexities of the ‘who we are’ are sometimes offset by simple self-awareness (‘I’m not French or Moroccan or American,’ reveals Mounir Fatmi. ‘Deep down I’m just me.’) The human intimacy of these trajectories is critical to Bardaouil and Fellrath’s enterprise, as their curatorial practice is inspired by a biography-driven approach that would make Roland Barthes turn in his grave. ‘To understand the artwork,’ the joint voice proclaims in the introduction, ‘you need to know the artist; and that becomes possible only when you know who they are as human beings.’ Unsurprisingly, moving stories abound: the refugee-camp life of Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal, famous for having surgically implanted a camera into the back of his head in 3rdi, commissioned for the 2010 Mathaf show; how London-based Algerian/ French artist Zineb Sedira bonded with a Belgian

priest and his family during more than a decade of childhood summers in their home on the outskirts of Mechelen; Khalil Rabah rubbing shoulders with Robert Rauschenberg (with whom he shared ‘a sense of faith’) during a project in Geneva early in the Jerusalem-based artist’s career. Yet anecdote never overwhelms insight. Almost every conversation alludes to the genesis of artistic calling – the decisive moment when the interviewees became artists, or their epiphanies of having been artists all along without previously realising it. Baladi, for example, was an on-set photographer for Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine during the late 1990s, when she was touched by the legendary director’s work around fiction. ‘When this experience ended,’ she recalls, ‘I was ready to push my own passion for making images. I started to find my own voice.’ An uneven eloquence pervades Summer… Artists like Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige speak profoundly of the nature of representation and the power of images, and Zaatari, discussing the Arab Image Foundation he cofounded, nimbly plumbs the reinvention of history, or how collecting could be considered an art project. Other interviewees’ yarns are pithier, more episodic. But like the works in progress from the Told/Untold/Retold catalogue, the conversations in Summer… are ultimately stories of becoming: understanding ‘who we are’ is decidedly richer when glimpsed through ‘how we got there’. Kevin Jones

An Era Without Memories: Chinese Contemporary Photography on Urban Transformation by Jian Jiehong Thames & Hudson, £29.95/$45 (hardcover) Leaving aside the subplot surrounding the somewhat vexed question of what ‘contemporary photography’ is (in this book it encompasses, among other things, photographic records of sculptures and installations, and various degrees of digital manipulation), central to Jiang Jiehong’s thematic is a belief in art as a crucial and critical site of dialogue and debate about change in China. It’s all introduced by Stephan Feuchtwang, a professor at the London School of Economics, who calls into play many of the usual discussions about cities as sites of memory and community, the failure of investment and planning to match their physical expansion and so on. Halfway through, the professor dives into the fact that ‘the image a city presents is both virtual and real’. In part, because the reality of a city is too big and

too complex to take in. Contemporary architecture’s deployment of computer-generated rendering means that much of today’s constructions start as an image before they are spaces, and even when built are simply a sequence of images rather than a space. So where, then, you’re entitled to wonder, does that leave the images collected here in four thematic sections by Jiehong? More real than the reality of the contemporary city? Or as removed from reality as any image of an image of an image might be? Here, those images range wide and include Zhuang Hui’s Longitude 109.88° Latitude 31.09° (1995–2008), a series of black-and-white photographs of holes that he had dug in the ground and were now covered in water, following the construction of the Three Gorges Dam (completed in 2009), Ma Liang’s dreamy 2008

Autumn 2015

series of images of postmen, Zhang Dali’s chiselling out of his earlier graffitied heads on building facades during the late 1990s and Wang Qingsong’s accumulations of posters… If that starts to sound like a list, then in effect that’s what this book gradually and unashamedly becomes – a gloriﬁed gazette of art responding to an urban context in China. And despite Jiehong’s best written efforts to keep the focus personal and on spaces where individuals live, the transformation of those places into artworks always keeps things at one remove. Indeed, that feeling is only further enhanced by the fact that most of those works are conceptual rather than documentary, their data consequently more aesthetic than empirical. You can’t get away from the sense that looking at a photograph of a muddy hole is never the same as living in a muddy hole. Nirmala Devi

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3 Parallel Artworlds: 100 Art Things from Chinese Modern History edited by Chang Tsong-Zung, Gao Shiming and Valerie C. Doran Asia One Books and Hanart Projects, $HK960 (hardcover)

As a result of his studies in both the Western and Chinese classics, as well as the rapid development of mainland China and its art scene (for which he was a pioneering force), Chang Tsong-Zung, owner/founder of Hong Kong’s Hanart tz Gallery, possesses a rich cultural capital. In 2013, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the gallery, he presented the exhibition Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies – cocurated with Gao Shiming – together with a two-day forum, from which this book results. The exhibition and the forum successfully focused on both ‘things’ and ‘thoughts’. In between the rise of modern China and worldwide globalisation, they developed a new grand narrative of the nongovernmental perspective of art. Following on from the train of thought established in the exhibitions China’s New Art Post-1989 (1993) and Farewell to PostColonialism (curated by Gao at the Guangzhou Triennial in 2008), Chang seeks to establish rather than deconstruct, opening up the boundaries across disciplines of knowledge and realising his conceptualisation of the Greater China in material form through curatorial practice. Authors include Liu Tian (a young curator and writer from the China Academy of Art’s Institute of Contemporary Art) and Boris Groys (a guru of philosophy of contemporary art).

Starting from Chang’s ‘idiosyncrasies’, the book successfully preserves the authenticity of the exhibition. Moreover, it selects eight essential curatorial events staged by the gallery across greater China and India over the years in order to present Chang’s ambition and reconﬁrm his authorial role. The focal essay of 3 Parallel Artworlds – The Case of China is coauthored by Chang and Johan Frederik Hartle. It’s accompanied by a diagram of the three titular artworlds that organise artistic practice in China – global, socialist and traditional – and of four categories by which those artworlds are institutionalised: paradigmatic media and genres; exhibitions and spaces of legitimisation; logic of valorisation; and lineage, education and academic representation. Under the pressure to produce structural equivalence by globalisation, this essay comprehensively discusses the fracture of time and space in narrations about China. Nonetheless, and perhaps by necessity, such a meta-narrative often misses out some essential issues. For instance, in the discussion of modern nation building, though involving local perspectives, only Huang Sun Quan’s discussion on diaspora touches even a little on gender issues by differentiating notions of ‘Fatherland’ and ‘Motherland’.

Some essays take a serious consideration of ‘objects’, especially regarding the creation of ‘objects’ as the agent and the evidence of the nation-building of modern China. That view ambitiously makes use of material culture to break the limitation of visually oriented research. Both the selection of exhibits and the essays seem to suggest further investigation should focus on the material presence of the artworks in historic moments rather than treat them as merely a medium of representations. However, the theories and methodologies of things and objects are applied only to depict cases or examples. Daniel Miller and Fred Myers’s reexamination of materiality from the perspective of anthropology (Materiality, 2005) has provided rich resources to the ‘classic’ humanities like history, art history, religious study and even philosophy. As a discipline concerned with the preservation and reproduction of materiality, curating brings the theoretical discussion back to the practice of materials. In the end, though, one is left with the wish that Chang and his fellows could have explored further, to advance a methodology that goes beyond the frame of a nation. Anthony Leung Po Shan Translated from the Chinese by Pat To Yan

I’m Very into You: Correspondence 1995–1996 by Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark Semiotext(e)/mit Press, £9.95 / $13.95 (softcover)

I’m Very into You collects together an intense email exchange, most of which took place within a two-week timeframe, between the late American artist, novelist and punk icon Kathy Acker and Australian cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, following a brief ﬂing during a visit by the former to Australia and prior to an impending visit by the latter to Acker in San Francisco. What poet and critic John Kinsella, in his afterword, calls ‘almost love letters’ are just that: on the one hand a dialogue between two people who seek to sustain and build on the moment at which their bodies came together, by attempting to reveal their deeper selves; on the other hand a correspondence between two people whose public proﬁles are linked to their writing in such a way that a deeper intimacy becomes difficult. Indeed, initially at least, much of what the one understands of the other comes from reading their respective published writings (albeit Wark is far more familiar with the older

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Acker’s than she with his). And on some level one can read these emails – which travel across two continents and even more time zones, often passing each other in the ether along the way – as torn between seeking on one level to demonstrate the authenticity of those public selves and on the other to reveal a private self upon which the evidently longed-for intimacy might be based. In the latter respect, ‘I’m very into you’ (Acker to Wark) is about as direct as it gets. The rest of this romance is conducted via proxy – through discussions about Pasolini, Bataille, Blanchot, Marxism, Nietzsche, The Simpsons vs Beavis and Butt-head, Elvis, drunkenness, previous relationships, national identities and motorbikes. Ultimately, while ideas about authenticity (in the sense of a refusal to be pigeonholed according to social norms – about politics, philosophy, sexuality, etc) permeate the works of both writers, they each struggle to reveal their ‘authentic’ selves without something

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alongside which to deﬁne themselves. At this distance (7,500 miles) sex isn’t an issue, power relations are intellectual rather than physical and each writer has an overlong time to ponder the other’s email before the next one arrives. But beyond the voyeuristic but undeniable attraction of leaﬁng through this often clumsy courtship, these emails also serve to highlight the more general problem of intimacy (and to some extent knowledge) in an era of remote but seemingly instant virtual contact: ‘It was strange talking to you on the phone ’cause we’ve never really done it,’ Wark writes towards the end of the exchange; ‘I am awful at paraphrasing you,’ Acker states while trying to interpret one of Wark’s analyses of his other girlfriends, while, in the context of sex and their most ‘real’ experience so far, Acker wonders how she should interpret the message of Wark’s sleeping habits. There are some mysteries that cultural theory cannot solve. Mark Rappolt

Chim Pom, Tokyo, July 2015. Photo: Monika Mogi

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For more on Sung-hee Kim, see overleaf

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Contributors

Taro Nettleton

Tiffany Chae

is a visual-culture critic based in Tokyo. He is adjunct professor at Temple University Japan. In this issue he writes on the work of Chim Pom.

is a writer and editor based in Seoul. She holds a masters degree in contemporary art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. She contributed to Korean Art: The Power of Now (2013) and has coordinated various curatorial projects, including Byungboc Lee: Act iii, Chapter 3 (2014) at Arko Art Center and Re-designing the East and Roadshow (both 2014) at Total Museum of Contemporary Art. This month she reviews Ham Kyungah at Kukje Gallery and Hwayeon Nam at the Arko Art Center, both in Seoul.

Monika Mogi is a twenty-two-year-old photographer based in Tokyo. Having moved from the us to Japan at age twelve, she explores her experience of a mixed upbringing in her work. Her most recent project, Working Class Beauty (2015–), focuses on personal portraits and landscapes of her hometown, Zama, in Kanagawa, a suburb near an American military base. Mogi confronts issues of social class and shoots to empower herself and her community. For this issue she has photographed Chim Pom. Ming Lin is a writer-researcher whose work concentrates on the themes of production, distribution and consumer culture. She is currently pursuing a masters in visual anthropology at Goldsmiths, London. This month she reviews Balanced Sheets at Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong.

Kevin Jones is an independent arts writer based in Dubai. New York-born and Paris-bred, he has lived in the Middle East for the past nine years and is currently the UAE desk editor for ArtAsiaPaciﬁc. He contributes regularly to The Art Newspaper, artforum.com and Flash Art International. Regionally, his writing has been published in Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia, Bidoun, Canvas, Brownbook and The National. His blog, devoted to fostering a critical voice on art in the Gulf region, and titled unﬁnishedperfect.com, is perpetually launching.

Advisory Board Defne Ayas, Richard Chang, Anselm Franke, Claire Hsu, Pi Li, Eugene Tan, Koki Tanaka, Wenny Teo, Philip Tinari, Chang Tsong-zung, Yao Jui-Chung Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Writers Stephanie Bailey, Kimberly Bradley, Tiffany Chae, Mariagrazia Costantino, Nirmala Devi, Rosalyn D’Mello, Du Qingchun, Gallery Girl, Hu Fang, Kevin Jones, Anthony Leung Po Shan, Ming Lin, Charu Maithani, Taro Nettleton, Eva Renaud, Sherman Sam, Bansie Vasvani, Zhang Hanlu Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Sung-hee Kim, Monika Mogi, Hiraki Sawa

Sung-hee Kim (preceding pages)

South Korean writer and artist Sung-hee Kim began by majoring in international economics to please her parents, until one day the wind wafted a copy of the student newspaper across her path. “I took this as the answer,” she recalls. “I joined the newsroom and became the paper’s editorial cartoonist.” Her true calling had begun. Kim was drawn to the genre of autobiographical comics that her emerging peers Kim Subak, Kwon Yong-Deuk and Ancco were establishing in Korea at the time. “I was intrigued that they were drawing stories showing their discoveries about themselves. Through lots of conversations, we supported and competed with each other to ﬁnd a deeper ‘me-ness’.” Good-for-nothing Girl (2010), her candid graphic novel debut, presented a thirtysomething daughter’s perspectives on her place in society. “The family I grew up in was very patriarchal, but at least they gave boys and girls equal educational opportunities. Still, they had expectations for me to become ﬁnancially independent, which I had failed to meet.” Gradually, her comics career would take off. Kim followed up with I lived in Yongsan (2010), named after her own neighbourhood of Seoul, a ‘New Town’ redevelopment district. On 20 January 2009, residents had protested against being forcibly

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evicted from their homes without notification or negotiations. In their escalating clashes with 1,500 police and private security officers hired by the construction companies, five tenants and one policeman were killed. Brought to court, nine protesters were jailed for the cop’s death, but all 15 policemen accused of committing an illegal crackdown were acquitted. Kim was critical of Korean media coverage that “makes people see conflicts only through capitalistic lenses. I tried to explain the tragedy of real-estate development through the people being expelled, who have the right to live and make a living. I also focused on the violence by the state and capitalism. Making more money was the sole reason they hurried those property developments, even using illegal measures. Despite that, many thought this was simply the have-nots being greedy, or that they should put up with this sort of injustice.” Pursuing nonfiction reportage in her comics, in Dust-free Room (2012) Kim thoroughly researched charges that workers’ exposure to toxic materials while making semiconductors in Samsung’s factories had resulted in several deaths from leukaemia, with the powerful ‘chaebol’, or global conglomerate, refusing to admit responsibility. “Ordinary citizens

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take great pride in Samsung semiconductors, so they didn’t believe the story. Even the workers doubted it. That was my starting point. I met the victims’ families, learned all about the manufacturing process and researched working conditions through retired engineers.” The result is a startlingly clear graphic indictment of corporate denial. Kim’s new comic for ArtReview, The Tale of a Sad and Funny Country, looks back to the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster and its ongoing fallout. As for where this scandal will lead, Kim feels that “we are likely to witness lies being covered up with bigger lies. But civil society won’t simply leave the truth buried.” The impact of social situations on her own life and family is reflected in Life Energy at 4 o’clock, her return to autobiography and her first foray into regular webtoons, a booming phenomenon in Korea thanks to ubiquitous Wi-Fi and free downloads. Politically and socially committed, Kim might be seen as taking risks using her comics for citizen journalism. She admits, “At first, I was afraid as an individual. But what I felt was just the social pressure to remain silent, instead of any direct threat to me. I believe that with support for social exposé growing one reader at a time, I won’t be alone or afraid.” Paul Gravett

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Photo credits on the cover and on pages 50–51, 57 and 119 photography by Monika Mogi on pages 116 and 126 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Autumn 2015

Phrases on the spine (Chinese Zodiac, 2012, dir Jackie Chan) and on pages 25 (A Chilling Cosplay, 2013, dir Guangli Wang), 49 (Horseplay, 2014, dir Chi-ngai Lee) and 101 (Break Up 100, 2014, dir Lawrence Chang) are ﬁlm descriptions taken from the China Eastern Airlines inﬂight entertainment system

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Off the Record Autumn 2015 “Free-ee! Free-ee! Free, free free Ai Weiwei-wei-ei!” “Cut!” I order. “That third ‘wei’ is sounding weird to me. There are way too many wei’s, which are now sounding wei-rd.” I laugh at my own joke. Behind the glass partition in the recording studio Anish Kapoor throws his Cutler and Gross Round-Frame GoldTone Sunglasses to the ﬂoor. The great maker of voids is not laughing. “It has to be like that,” he replies ﬁrmly into the microphone, startling the producer and myself. “It’s got to sound like Free Nelson Mandela, by The Special aka.” He quickly apologises. “I’m sorry, Gallery Girl. It’s just that the pressure to follow up the YouTube sensation that was me lip-synching to Psy’s Gangnam Style in order to draw attention to the plight of Ai Weiwei is getting to me.” A burly technician mops the great artist’s brow with a black Alexander McQueen silk-jacquard pocket square. Just as I’m ready to order Anish to get back to his singing duties, the middle-aged German gallerist I’ve been working with for the past few months bursts into the studio. “Gallery Girl! Stop the recording! The Chinese have given Ai Weiwei his passport back! He’s free to travel to London for the opening of his Royal Academy show!” “Oh, shit,” I say wearily. “Trust the Chinese to go and fuck this up entirely. You know that this charity song is the only way we’re going to pay the rent on our 3,000sqm space in Gillman Barracks. “Ja, I know. It was a great idea, Gallery Girl. Getting Herr Kapoor to sing a proper protest song this time round instead of miming. Taking care of the ‘charity’ aspect and siphoning off 25 percent to pay our rent was one of your best ideas. But now what?” I press the intercom button to speak to Anish. “Actually, forget about what I said. The way you did it was brilliant. Take it from the top, and let’s do it around 17 times so we can layer you just like the Phil Spector Wall of Sound thing. I’m just off to the toilet, but don’t mind me!” Anish looks pleased and starts counting himself in. Meanwhile I hotfoot it out of the studio with the gallerist in tow, punching numbers into my zte Grand X smartphone. “Don’t worry. I used to do Nude Yoga with someone high up in the Home Office in London. Things got complicated during the Downward Dog once and he owes me a favour. They can refuse him his visa.” One week later and the British Government is apologising profusely for mistakenly refusing Ai Weiwei his visa. The Home Secretary has written him a personal apology for the inconvenience caused. My contact from the Home Office has been transferred to do some on-the-ground reconnaissance work at the Calais entrance to the Channel Tunnel, where Syrian refugees attempt to storm aboard

trains every night. The boss is in tears, slumped on the Keiji Ashizawa Kobo table that doubles as our intern’s desk-cum-apartment at the Gillman hq. I rise from the yogic Archer’s Pose I’ve been holding on the Zhang Zhoujie Triangulation Chair. I reach into my 3.1 Phillip Lim metallic woven shorts and pull out a handful of seeds I’ve been secreting down there. I stride over and slam them down in front of the boss. “What the fuck are these?” he asks, not unreasonably. “These porcelain sunﬂower seeds are a symbol of change,” I reply. “No more scams, no more relying on the credulity of new collectors. Let’s just do a series of great shows of contemporary art; let’s place works with great collectors with private museums!” “Hold on,” he replies, “aren’t those the things Ai Weiwei ﬁlled the Turbine Hall with?” “Well, yes, I bought them on eBay,” I say a bit sheepishly. My seedsof-change speech is probably not going to cut the mustard now that I’ve been found out. “Great stuff!” the boss says to my surprise. “Get a load of these in, and when Ai’s away we can stuff the gallery full of them and pretend we are having an exhibition of the great man. We can pipe Anish’s new single through the Moon Audio Signature Titan ii Speakers. Buy some nephrite jade from eBay as well and we’ve got a whole retrospective of his stuff.” “You mean we’re going to sell a load of fakes?” I splutter. The boss gives me a stare. The stare of a man who was there drinking with Martin Kippenberger at the cider bar in Sachsenhausen. “We are not selling fakes. We are setting Ai Weiwei free from the tyranny of authorship! Free, free, free Ai Weiwe-ei!” Gallery Girl

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