ArtReview Asia Autumn 2016 by ArtReview

Yuko Mohri

Contemporary art in Cambodia Chen Shaoxiong, Kwan Sheung Chi

SIGNATURE DE CHANEL NECKLACE AND BRACELET IN WHITE GOLD, SAPPHIRES AND DIAMONDS RING IN WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS

CHANEL.COM

IS A

THERE PLACE WITH FOUR SUNS IN THE SKY RED WHITE BLUE AND YELLOW 目之所及 25.08-17.09

之博 Edouard Malingue Gallery

馬凌畫廊

wang zhibo

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edouardmalingue.com

Sixth Floor 33 Des Voeux Road Central Hong Kong

Gestures and archives of the present, genealogies of the future

Jean-Luc Moulène, The Red Gauloises, from the serie Thirty-nine Strike Objects, 1999-2000 © The artist & ADAGP

: A new lexicon for the biennial TAIPEI BIENNIAL 2016 SEPTEMBER 10, 2016 FEBRUARY 5, 2017

www.taipeibiennial.org

TWO YEARS EARLIER, ARE RECOVERED IN A POLICE RAID IN OSLO.

IN 2006

AT THE CENTRE POMPIDOU 77-YEAR-OLD NOMINAL PERFORMANCE ARTIST PIERRE PINONCELLI CRACKED MARCEL DUCHAMP’S FOUNTAIN, 1917, WITH A HAMMER.

INFO@MASSIMODECARLO.COM

THE SWISS ARTIST URS FISCHER PARTICIPATES IN A DOUBLE EXHIBITION WITH RUDOLF STINGEL AT MASSIMO DE CARLO, MILAN.

@MDCGALLERY

MASSIMODECARLOGALLERY

IN 2016 MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS THE SEASON WITH A DOUBLE SOLO EXHIBITION IN VIA VENTURA AND PIAZZA BELGIOIOSO BY URS FISCHER. THE SCREAM AND MADONNA, TWO ICONIC PAINTINGS BY EDVARD MUNCH, STOLEN TWO YEARS EARLIER, ARE RECOVERED IN A POLICE RAID IN OSLO.

INFO@MASSIMODECARLO.COM

DAN COLEN, OH SHIT, 2011, OIL ON CANVAS, 152.4 X 127 CM

JOSH SMITH, UNTITLED, 2014, OIL ON CANVAS, 223.5 X 195.6 CM

DAN COLEN, OH SHIT, 20 MASSIMODECARLOGALLERY @MDCGALLERY INFO@MASSIMODECARLO.COM

URS FISCHER, UNTITLED (DOOR), 2006, CAST, ALUMINIUM, ENAMEL, 215 X 136 X 51 CM

JOSH SMITH, UNTITLED, 2

URS FISCHER, UNTITLED

WWW.MASSIMODECARLO.COM IN 2016 MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS THE SEASON WITH A DOUBLE SOLO EXHIBITION IN VIA VENTURA AND PIAZZA BELGIOIOSO BY URS FISCHER. THE SWISS ARTIST URS FISCHER PARTICIPATES IN A DOUBLE EXHIBITION WITH RUDOLF STINGEL AT MASSIMO DE CARLO, MILAN.

WWW.MASSIMODECARLO.COM URS FISCHER, UNTITLED (DOOR), 2006, CAST, ALUMINIUM, ENAMEL, 215 X 136 X 51 CM

JOSH SMITH, UNTITLED, 2014, OIL ON CANVAS, 223.5 X 195.6 CM

DAN COLEN, OH SHIT, 2011, OIL ON CANVAS, 152.4 X 127 CM

URS FISCHER, UNTITLED (DOOR), 2006, CAST, ALUMINIUM, ENAMEL, 215 X 136 X 51 CM

JOSH SMITH, UNTITLED, 2014, OIL ON CANVAS, 223.5 X 195.6 CM

THE SWISS ARTIST URS FISCHER PARTICIPATES IN A DOUBLE EXHIBITION WITH RUDOLF STINGEL AT MASSIMO DE CARLO, MILAN. IN 2016 MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS THE SEASON WITH A DOUBLE SOLO EXHIBITION IN VIA VENTURA AND PIAZZA BELGIOIOSO BY URS FISCHER.

DAN COLEN, OH SHIT, 2011, OIL ON CANVAS, 152.4 X 127 CM

MASSIMODECARLOGALLERY @MDCGALLERY INFO@MASSIMODECARLO.COM

THE SCREAM AND MADONNA, TWO ICONIC PAINTINGS BY EDVARD MUNCH, STOLEN TWO YEARS EARLIER, ARE RECOVERED IN A POLICE RAID IN OSLO.

AT THE CENTRE POMPIDOU 77-YEAR-OLD NOMINAL PERFORMANCE ARTIST PIERRE PINONCELLI CRACKED MARCEL DUCHAMP’S FOUNTAIN, 1917, WITH A HAMMER.

WWW.MASSIMODECARLO.COM

IN 2006

Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to announce the first New York solo show by

Yuko Mohri November 10th - December 17th

518 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011

UGO RONDINONE TWO MEN CONTEMPLATING THE MOON 1830 SEPTEMBER 16 – OCTOBER 22, 2016 DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER NOVEMBER 4 – DECEMBER 17, 2016 — ESTHER SCHIPPER SCHÖNEBERGER UFER 65, D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM ABC CHRISTOPHER ROTH SEPTEMBER 15 – 18, 2016 FRIEZE LONDON OCTOBER 6 – 9, 2016 FIAC OCTOBER 20 – 23, 2016 WEST BUND ART & DESIGN NOVEMBER 9 – 13, 2016 ART021 SHANGHAI NOVEMBER 12 – 13, 2016

FRIEZE LONDON OCTOBER 6 – 9, 2016 FIAC OCTOBER 20 – 23, 2016 WEST BUND ART & DESIGN NOVEMBER 9 – 13, 2016 ART021 SHANGHAI NOVEMBER 12 – 13, 2016

ArtReview Asia vol 4 no 4 2016

Splitting the difference People are always asking ArtReview Asia to explain difference to them. What’s the difference between ArtReview and ArtReview Asia? they chirp. Perhaps it’s understandable given that ArtReview was born in a land that’s just voted for Brexit. Not that that stops ArtReview from replying ‘What’s the difference between Britain and France?’ Nevertheless, it’s something that’s worth making clear (the Asia difference, not the Anglo-French one, that’s not worth it). It’s not that ArtReview Asia exists because art produced in Asia is fundamentally other to art in the rest of the world. If you carry on down that road every work of art is fundamentally other to every other work of art by virtue of the differences, however slight, in the circumstances of its production. Which is certainly one way, however atomistic, of looking at things. But it’s not like ArtReview Asia would publish a separate magazine for every work of art. Ultimately, if we believe in art as an important force in the maintenance of free thinking and the free expression of those thoughts, we must also believe that it operates as a language that is open to everyone. Yet while asserting a radical regional difference in the nature of artmaking is not at the heart of ArtReview Asia’s mission plan, that’s not to say that our understanding of art, wherever it is made, is not deepened by some knowledge of the situation and context of its production. And that’s something that discussions from multiple perspectives – both local and global, invested or dispassionate, factual or speculative – can provide in a way that exhibitions and other displays cannot. But this would be true of art produced anywhere, at any time. Perhaps more pertinent to the matter of what ArtReview Asia is all about is the fact that Asia is a very big place. It has a lot to offer. Because there is a lot going on. And it’s that fact together with the sheer quantity and variety of art being produced across the continent that allows a magazine like ArtReview Asia to exist. You bring the quantity and we’ll define the quality! That’s what ArtReview Asia’s marketing people, who are constantly peering over its shoulder, have just shouted at it. And when they can come up with slogans such as that, who is ArtReview Asia to argue with them? Without magazines like this one, you’d find it very difficult to keep up. Indeed, ArtReview Asia is always coming across things that it has somehow missed or overlooked. In this issue alone ArtReview Asia is covering artists from and exhibitions in India, Pakistan, China, Cambodia, Korea, Singapore, Japan, France, the UK and the USA, to name but a few of the points at which it touches down. Of course, within it all ArtReview Asia aims at giving primacy to an Asian perspective but it’s open to perspectives from around the world as well. These days ArtReview Asia leaves explanations of difference to Brexiters. ArtReview Asia

Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 19

Maria Lind Interview by Mark Rappolt 38

Points of View by Aimee Lin, Clarissa Oon, Charu Nivedita, Paul Gladston 31

Zhou Tiehai Interview by Aimee Lin 44

page 29 Samson Young, To Fanon (But my mother weeps rich black tears) (detail), 2016, pastel, coloured pencil, photocopy, silk screen print and mixed media on 8 original composition manuscripts (ink on paper), 30 × 42 cm. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata

Autumn 2016

Art Featured

Yuko Mohri by Mark Rappolt 52

Waqas Khan by Mark Rappolt 72

An Absent Present by Roger Nelson 60

Kwan Sheung Chi by Ming Lin 78

Chen Shaoxiong by Edward Sanderson 66

page 66 Chen Shaoxiong, Anti-Terrorism Variety, 2012, dual-channel video installation, 5 min 14 sec. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 80

Books 104

That Has Been, and May Be Again, by Adeline Chia Ma Qiusha, by Edward Sanderson Miao Ying, by Gu Ling Chou Yu-Cheng, by Aimee Lin Teppei Kaneuji, by Edward Sanderson Tam Ochiai & Hiroyuki Oki, by Taro Nettleton Yang Fudong & Bae Young-Whan, by Aimee Lin Charles Lim, by Adeline Chia Each Blade of Grass Each Shrub Each Tree, by Guo-Liang Tan Degenerate Art, by Tiffany Chae Shooshie Sulaiman, by Robert Barry Beili Liu, by Nirmala Devi Tromarama, by Laura Robertson Bhupen Khakhar, by Niru Ratnam Nasreen Mohamedi, by Joshua Mack

Human Acts, by Han Kang Self-organised, edited by Stine Hebert, Anne Szefer Karlsen Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century, by Gideon Rachman Qiu Zhijie: Unicorns in a Blueprint, edited by Defne Ayas Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book. Vol I of V, by Shubigi Rao The Nakano Thrift Shop, by Hiromi Kawakami THE STRIP 110 OFF THE RECORD 114

page 92 Tam Ochiai, ashtray sculpture (headquarter), 2016, mixed media, 6 × 36 × 27 cm. Photo: Fuyumi Murata. © the artist. Courtesy Arataniurano, Tokyo

ArtReview Asia

D AV I D S A L L E SEPTEMBER 8-NOVEMBER 12, 2016 4 0 7 P E D D E R B U I L D I N G , 1 2 P E D D E R S T R E E T, H O N G K O N G | l e h m a n n m a u p i n . c o m

Art Previewed

There are fishes there that look like a bull and live in the highlands. They have a serpent tail with wings. Their feathers are below their flanks… They die during winter and are born in the summer. Its consumption prevents swellings 17

Previewed SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016 Seoul Museum of Art 1 Sep – 20 Nov

Studio Qiao Space, Shanghai 8 Sep – 21 Oct

Lee Kun-Yong Gallery Hyundai, Seoul through 16 October

32 Bienal de São Paulo Parque Ibirapuera, São Paulo 10 Sep – 11 Dec

Singapore Biennale 2016 Singapore Art Museum and various venues 27 Oct – 26 Feb

Connect 1: Still Acts Art Sonje Center, Seoul through 20 Nov

2016 Gwangju Biennale Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall and various venues 2 Sep – 6 Nov Busan Biennale 2016 Busan Museum of Art and various venues 3 Sep – 30 Nov

Simon Starling Japan Society, New York 14 Oct – 15 Jan MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2016: Kimsooja National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul through 5 Feb

Shanghai Project Shanghai Himalayas Museum and various venues 4 Sep – Jul 2017

Koo Jeong A Korean Cultural Centre UK 7 Oct – 19 Nov

Yinchuan Biennale MOCA Yinchuan 9 Sep – 18 Nov

Chiharu Shiota Blain/Southern Berlin 17 Sept – 12 Nov

Zeng Fanzhi Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing 19 Sep – 19 Nov

Nil Yalter Arter, Istanbul 14 Oct – 15 Jan

Okayama Art Summit 2016 Various venues, Okayama 9 Oct – 27 Nov Muga Miyahara Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo through 17 Sep Leung Chi Wo Rokeby, London 16 Sep – 11 Nov Samson Young Experimenter, Kolkata 20 Aug – 29 Oct Trevor Yeung Blindspot, Hong Kong 19 Sep – 5 Nov As the Leaves Fall 1a Space, Hong Kong 10 Sep – 28 Oct

New Directions: Nadim Abbas Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing Through 23 Oct

11 Simon Starling, At Twilight / Mask of W.B. Yeats, 2016. Mask by Yasuo Miichi. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow

Autumn 2016

What’s the collective noun for a group of bienMoving Castle), the themes tackled by this year’s nials? A drove? A troop? A plague? A swarm? 1 ninth SeMA Biennale are less exotic than they are prevalent (read on for more about that): Who knows? However, there are many who how to deal with the sometimes alien baggage would argue that the fact such a question even of history while simultaneously preparing pops up these days is cause for concern. Bring a language of the future. Curated by Beck back the days when it was Venice, São Paulo or Jee-sook, former director of ARKO Art Center, staying at home and watching an episode of The the biennial includes works by 61 artists, inLone Ranger! Those of you not living in the 1950s, cluding Pierre Huyghe, Carolee Schneemann, however, might well be planning to visit the Christine Sun Kim, Zanele Muholi and Oliver busyness of biennials opening across Asia over Laric, and will run across all three sites of the the next three months. ArtReview Asia knows that Seoul Museum of Art. In addition, the event its travel agent is rubbing his hands in anticipawill encompass two ‘summer camps’: The Village, tion. Maybe he’ll even go on holiday himself. a temporary village run by a community That’s not to say there isn’t plenty to get of visual art educators and artists, organised excited about though. And it all starts in by artist Yang Ah Ham; and Taeyoon Choi’s South Korea… Uncertainty School, which promises to explore While its title, NERIRI KIRURU HARARA, the development of languages without certainderives from a Martian language (dreamed up ties (and if that floats your boat, you biennialby Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa in his 1952 work ‘Two Billion Light Years of Solitude’ – who, trotters will certainly want to check out btw, when he wasn’t projecting himself onto 2 this year’s Bienal de São Paulo, titled Live Uncertainty, for more of the same). other planets, used to translate the Peanuts comic Of course, you shouldn’t immediately join strip into Japanese and wrote the lyrics to the the stampede from Korea to Brazil. It’s not theme song of the 2004 animated classic Howl’s

like you’re part of a mindless herd of biennial chasers. You’ve still got time to catch this 3 autumn’s big biennial in Gwangju. Assembled under the artistic direction of (ArtReview columnist) Maria Lind, this event doesn’t shy away from the big question: What does art do? ArtReview Asia remembers its careers adviser being very clear about the answer to that one as it left school: nothing. Presumably Lind and her team of curators are pursuing an alternative take on that conclusion. The biennale’s full title is The Eighth Climate (What does art do?) with the ‘Eighth Climate’ business being a concept borrowed from twelfth-century Persian mystic and illuminist philosopher Sohrawardi, concerning the role and existence of a realm of ‘imaginative knowledge’ in addition to the seven earthly climates. Presumably that’s the realm to which art aspires, and 101 artists and collectives have been assembled to make sense of it all (ArtReview Asia will be looking out for works by New York-based Tyler Coburn, New Delhi’s Raqs Media Collective – who’ll be curating their own biennial in Shanghai this November

2 Pilar Quinteros, Cathedral of Freedom (Cathedral da liberdade) (still), 2015, video, 20 min 1 sec. Courtesy the artist 1 Ursula Mayer, Gonda, 2012, 16mm HD, 28 min. Courtesy the artist and Mediacity Seoul 2016

3 Sachiko Kazama, Nonhuman Crossing, 2013, woodcut print (panel, Japanese paper, oil ink). © Sachiko Kazama. Courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

ArtReview Asia

4 Katharina Sieverding, Looking At The Sun At Midnight (Red), Sdonasa, 2016, digital film projection. © the artist/VG Bild-Kunst

5 Douglas Coupland, Slogans for the 22nd Century, 2016. Courtesy the artist

– Bangkok-based Pratchaya Phinthong and future’: sound familiar? ArtReview Asia’s not Berlin-based Hito Steyerl). Expect art’s potential saying nothing. But do look out for the show to generate future projections to be on show at the Busan Museum, which focuses on avanthere too. Given that Lind is going to explain the gardes in China, Korea and Japan, many of whole thing in her own words in a few pages’ which are currently enjoying an international time, ArtReview Asia will leave it at that for now. commercial renaissance. Talking of those kinds of cultural ties, But don’t go jumping off to the LATAM Yongwoo Lee was the founding director of website just yet. It’s not time for you to leave 4 Korea. You don’t want to miss this year’s Busan the Gwangju Biennale and president of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation from 2008 to Biennale, Hybridizing Earth, Discussing Multitude. 2014, when he resigned following a censorshipThis one is under the artistic direction of Yun related controversy involving a painting due Cheagab (he’s director of the How Art Museum to have been exhibited in an exhibition celein Shanghai) and consolidates what were brating the 20th anniversary of the biennial. once three separate events – the Busan Youth Now he is director of the Shanghai Himalayas Biennale, the Sea Art Festival and the Busan Museum and, with Hans Ulrich Obrist, coInternational Outdoor Sculpture Symposium 5 director of the newly inaugurated Shanghai – into one. The biennial retains a tripartite Project, a 100-day series of events and exhibistructure (two exhibitions and a seminar) and tions taking place throughout the city. It’s titled features 320 artworks by 121 artists or collectives Envision 2116, and its lead sponsor is Envision (although it’s not about numbers or competiEnergy, ‘the world’s leader in smart wind turbine tion). The biennial aims at ‘discussing multitude and offshore wind power technology’, but, like where artists and scholars of diverse religions, ArtReview Asia said to the bank manager, money ethnicities and nationalities gather to discuss isn’t everything. And while we’re at it, you the issues of humanity’s past, present and

Autumn 2016

shouldn’t read too much into the fact that the Shanghai Project opens around the same time as Gwangju either. With that out of the way, it has to be said that the Shanghai Project is an incredibly ambitious event, involving partnerships with almost every major museum in town, as well as its primary art fairs, and drawing together practitioners from a variety of disciplines, among them art, science, technology, medicine and ecology. You’ll have gathered, of course, that the theme is all about imagining the future of mankind 100 years from now. The project launches in two phases, the first in September and the second in April. Part one centres around a 670sqm Sou Fujimotodesigned pavilion that will feature a multisensory Cildo Meireles installation (you see? You never needed to go to Brazil) an investigation into humankind’s relations to the land led by Otobong Nkanga, neon signs by writer and artist Douglas Coupland and an online game designed by Zhang Haimeng, principal and managing partner of McKinsey Shanghai. Naturally, the latest iteration of Obrist and Simon Castets’s

89plus project will be on view elsewhere, alongbility therein’, seems particularly appropriate. side a series of conferences and discussions Setting out positions on acknowledging and (ArtReview Asia is most intrigued by a roundtable overcoming global conflict will be around featuring Kim Dae-shik, professor of laboratory 74 artists ranging from Ai Weiwei and Heman for brain reverse engineering and imaging at Chong to Liu Wei and Abigail Reynolds. Back in the Chinese capital, this June, much KAIST) and much more besides. to the consternation of many in the Chinese art Reverse up to northeast China and there’s scene, it was announced that Beijing’s Ullens another new biennial opening this September. 6 The Museum of Contemporary Art Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) was up Yinchuan’s venture is headed by artist Bose for sale. In some ways, then, it’s appropriate Krishnamachari (cofounder of India’s increasthat this September UCCA is hosting Parcours, the largest solo show to date of work by one ingly influential Kochi-Muziris Biennale back in 2010), meaning that in a triumph of some7 of China’s most expensive living artists, Zeng Fanzhi. His painting Last Supper (2001) sold times fraught Sino-Indian relations (which at auction for US$23,269,070 in 2013, and it’s China has claimed will be the most important presumably people who can afford works like bilateral partnership of the coming century), that who UCCA founder Guy Ullens currently both of China’s biennials (the other of which wants to meet. Still, as ArtReview Asia likes to will take place in Shanghai this November) tell its bank manager, it’s not all about money. will be helmed by Indian artists. Given all that, The Beijing-based artist fuses Chinese and Krishnamachari’s theme, For an Image, Faster Western influences and techniques in such Than Light, with its aim of ‘spiritual and social a way as to make his work feel completely at consciousness, an examination of political home in either painting tradition, but nevernarratives and critical global engagement and theless unique in and of itself. And that has an acknowledgment of a collective responsi-

made him one of his country’s leading practitioners in the medium. And be sure to look beyond his celebrated ‘masks’ series at his Pollocklike landscapes too. Also worth poking your nose into while you’re there is Hong Kong installation-artist 8 Nadim Abbas’s first solo exhibition in mainland China. The show comprises a single large work, The Last Vehicle, which divides UCCA’s Long Gallery into an alien landscape and a domestic living environment, collectively explored by a remote rover fitted with a prosthetic eye and wireless transmitter that sends images from the explorer to a viewer seated in an armchair. Like the artist’s previous Apocalypse Postponed Absolut Art Bar created for Art Basel Hong Kong two years ago, the new work nods to the work of French theorist Paul Virilio, while also addressing issues surrounding how we construct our environments and the experiential relationship between image and reality in contemporary life. Does the image precede the reality these days? And is that up to armchair critics to decide? And, yes, it does sound like a project that could have

7 Zeng Fanzhi, Blue, 2015, oil on canvas, 400 × 700 cm. © Zeng Fanzhi Studio

6 MOCA Yinchuan

8 Nadim Abbas, The Last Vehicle, 2016, mixed-media installation with durational performance, dimensions variable. Courtesy UCCA, Beijing

ArtReview Asia

9 Zeng Fanzhi, On 22 July, 2016, 60 × 90 cm, inkjet print on paper mounted on aluminum in artist’s frame. Courtesy Zeng Fanzhi Studio

10 Martha Atienza, Endless Hours At Sea, 2014. Courtesy the artist

been part of the SeMA Biennial – what did ArtReview Asia tell you? Prevalent! Talking of which, Zeng is also a part of 9 Studio, a group exhibition featuring 12 of China’s most prominent contemporary artists that takes place at collector Qiao Zhibing’s project space in Shanghai’s up-and-coming West Bund devel10 opment. The majority of Qiao’s collection of Chinese and international contemporary art (which features work by Antony Gormley, Olafur Eliasson, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Houseago and Theaster Gates) is spread across the nightclubs he owns in Shanghai and Beijing: if you are in Shanghai, then a trip to Shanghai Night (Qiao’s four-storey karaoke bar) is certainly worth making (maybe brush up on some Faye Wong numbers first). In 2017 he’ll open a vast new cultural centre in five former oil tanks in West Bund. For now, though, his project space offers a relatively intimate experience, which is in many ways the theme of the Studio exhibition. It aims at offering a glimpse into the working conditions of each of the artists’ studios (besides Zeng’s, those of Ding Yi, Jia Aili, Liu Jianhua,

Liu Wei, Liu Xiaodong, Mao Yan, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yan Pei-Ming, Zhang Enli, and Zhang Xiaogang) that will bring viewers the kind of intimate insights that have inspired Qiao’s collecting in recent times. And so, back to the chattering of art consumers on the biennial trail, and this time to Southeast Asia, where this year’s Singapore Biennale opens in October. Focusing on art from Southeast, South and East Asia, the theme set by the biennial’s creative director, Susie Lingham (who is working with a team of curators both from the Singapore Art Museum and the region), looks to voyages of external and internal discovery and how these are mapped and represented and constantly reimagined: An Atlas of Mirrors aims at offering multiple perspectives, then, on how we see the world and ourselves. Curiously, Singapore’s biennial is one that eschews those bits of the traditional format that involve it taking place every two years (the last was in 2013), but as Singapore stakes its claim to be the artistic centre of what’s arguably one of the more diverse and interesting regions

ArtReview Asia

(Southeast Asia) for contemporary art production, there’s every chance that it might provide unconventionality in more ways than that. Look for projects by Thai multidisciplinary artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Martha Atienza from the Philippines and Vietnam’s Nguyen Phuong Linh. 11 This October Simon Starling’s At Twilight transfers from the Common Guild in Glasgow to the Japan Society in New York, where it will be the British artist’s first solo institutional exhibition in New York. Of course, that last bit is just the kind of weird trivia that most press machines use to generate excitement and most curators use to embellish their CVs. What you want to know about is what Starling is going to be doing in this US debut. At Twilight revolves around a W.B. Yeats play At the Hawk’s Well, which was written and performed in April 1916. At the time Yeats was working with the poet Ezra Pound and inspired by traditional Japanese noh theatre. Japanese dancer Michio Ito played the Hawk in the 1916 production, which came at a time when noh seemed to offer new

possibilities to Western avant gardes. Starling moving into video, installation and perforand audio works that often bring out the mance, places questions of identity at the heart himself describes the play as ‘an odd crossuncanny properties of a space. Last year she of her output, often perusing that interest cultural mash-up in an English garden, at a created Evertro, a glow-in-the-dark skatepark through an investigation of textiles. This year traumatic moment in European history’, and in Liverpool; in London she’s inviting fellow she follows Lee Bul (2014) and Ahn Kyu-chul at the Japan Society he will up the mashing artists to join in the fun by responding to her (2015) as the featured artist in Hyundai’s annual of the traditional and the modern with the 2005 line-drawing A Civilizing Process, which Motor Series display at the National Museum contemporary in a display that focuses on the features a flying eagle gripping a naked human of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, where circumstances and key protagonists in Yeats’s in order to create a series of alternate narratives Kimsooja will focus on recent developments in production: a new series of noh masks made for the work and deconstruct the essence of her work, presenting a new film in her ongoing by Yasuo Miichi, a new choreography by Javier a solo exhibition. Thread Routes (2010–) series, an outdoor sculpture 13 de Frutos and three noh ‘stages’ featuring Over at Blain/Southern Berlin, Chiharu and Archive of Mind (2016), a new performative the masks and the dancing, and additionally Shiota is taking a more traditional approach installation in which viewers roll a lump of clay evoking the circumstances of the First World to the idea of a solo show with Uncertain Journey into spherical forms on an elliptical wooden (she’s even plugged into that uncertainty theme). War and the modernist tradition in art. While setting up a personal website, There, the Berlin-based Japanese artist (who, table, a process that evolves from Kinsooja’s Korean artist Kimsooja came up with the idea biennial lovers, represented Japan at the 2015 longstanding interest in bottari (Korean for Venice Biennale) will produce a new monuof changing her name into one word in order bundle, used by the artist to designate the process of saving or wrapping-up by travellers). mental installation. The key elements (ArtReview to deny its signification as to gender, marital status and ancestry. The act was then commem- 12 Over in London, it’s Koo Jeong A who’s Asia isn’t going to bother excusing the pun, because until you read on you won’t realise its orated in an artwork titled One-Word Name Is An being celebrated as the Korean Cultural Centre Anarchist’s Name (2003). Needless to say, the artist, full horror) of the Venice installation, The Key UK’s artist of the year. The artist focuses on who exhibited in the first Gwangju Biennale in the Hand, were some old boats topped by an reinventing spaces, a process that has previously in 1995, and began her career as a painter before explosion of red threads (connecting threads encompassed moving walls, scents, and visual

14 Nil Yalter, Harem, 1979, b&w video, 42 min. Courtesy the artist and ARTER, Istanbul

12 Koo Jeong A, Civilising Process, 2005, pen drawing on A4 paper. Courtesy the artist

13 Chiharu Shiota, The Key in the Hand, 2015 (installation view, Japan Pavilion, 56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale). Photo: Sunhi Mang. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

15 Lee Kun-Yong, Cloth-Pocket, 1974, oil on cloth, 170 × 250 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul

16 Chung Seoyoung, Lookout, 1999, wood, 120 × 210 × 88 cm. Courtesy Art Sonje Center, Seoul

17 Lawrence Weiner, 1/2 BEGUN 1/2 FINISHED WHENSOEVER, 2008/2016, mocked-up photograph. © the artist / ARS / JASPAR, Tokyo. Courtesy Moved Pictures Archive, New York

being something of a signature in her work) from which dangled a positive skulk of keys – as if some sort of neural or circulatory network connected to the boats was floating there, waiting to be unlocked. A similar sort of voyage, connecting the invisible to the quotidian, is promised in Berlin. Although the seven panels and seven 15 videos recording, with a characteristic mix of documentary and poetry, the lives of immigrants in Istanbul, Paris and New York that make up her Temporary Dwellings (1974–7) have recently popped up on display in Tate Modern’s new 14 extension, there’s no doubt that Nil Yalter remains one of the more underrated artists of her generation. So you’ll be extremely excited to hear that a survey of work from the 1970s and 80s by the Paris-based Turkish artist is going to be on show at Arter, Istanbul, this October. While even ArtReview Asia hesitates to speculate about how her work, which fuses sociological, ethnic and class studies relating to marginalised communities, will chime with Turkey’s current

16 political situation, there’s no doubt that her focus on memory and immigration will certainly strike some chords. Although there aren’t any actual chords in her work. Staying with the 1970s, but going back to Seoul, Gallery Hyundai hosts an exhibition of restaged works from that decade by pioneering Korean performance-artist Lee Kun-Yong. In Logic of Place (1975), Lee uses a nail to draw a circle into the ground, announces ‘There’ to the audience, stands inside the circle and shouts ‘Here’ while pointing to the floor and then steps outside the circle, points back at it over his shoulder and shouts ‘Over there’. He repeats the actions and then walks around the circle shouting ‘Where’ three times. At the heart of the performance, Lee later told art-historian Joan Key, was a need to establish truth: ‘[Yushin Korea] was a society of lies,’ he stated. ‘Trying to figure out what in fact was true became the most important priority.’ Given the authoritarian nature of the current Korean regime, it will be curious to see how, if 17 it all, the relevance of such works has changed.

Autumn 2016

In a similarly reflective vein, Connect 1 is the first in a series of exhibitions tracing the history of Art Sonje Center. This presentation traces shows put on between 1998 and 2004 (when the institution had a temporary hiatus for restorations), in the form of three parallel solo exhibitions (which in turn reflects Art Sonje’s own practice of commissioning new works through solo exhibitions). Sora Kim reinterprets her 2004 work Library, first shown at Art Sonje that year; Chung Seoyoung’s three works Lookout (1999), Flower (1999) and Gatehouse (2000) were first presented in 2000; while Lee Bull’s Cyborg (1998) series was the institution’s first exhibition and is on show alongside a rearranged version of the same artist’s Majestic Splendor (1991–7). Three more big hitters of the Korean art scene, then, and another opportunity to reevaluate the signs of the times. But enough of the navel-gazing – what’s better than a biennial? A triennial! And luckily for you there’s a new one – Okayama Art Summit 2016 – launching in Japan this October. Titled

18 Muga Miyahara, Untitled, 2015, photo collage on paper, 52 × 36 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

Development and directed by artist Liam Gillick, the inaugural focuses on artists – among them Shimabuku, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Trisha Baga, Tatsuo Majima, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Anton Vidokle, Lawrence Weiner and Anicka Yi – who frame or play with encounters with the structures and rhythms (change, renovation and rebuilding) of the city. As director, Gillick is also interested in ‘development’ as an aspect of pre- and postproduction – ‘in cinema, developed capitalism and strategic planning’ – and in artists’ use of time outside of time-based media. In keeping with this, and an ongoing interest in works that reflect on the conditions of their production and their reception, Gillick will propose two ways of viewing the triennial: the first as a camera, ‘seeing the city and the artworks from specific points of view’; the second as a subject, ‘a camera may pass a group and a group may pass a camera’. The only way you’ll find out how that works is by going yourself. A reflection on both the production and reception of artworks and cultural artefacts

19 Silent Music Plane 1967, 2016, Life magazine cover (2 June 1967), 1967 five-cent Hong Kong coins, sound recordings Long Life Chairman Mao (Central Ensemble of Songs and Dances, 1966) and Yesterday (Beatles, 1965), variable-speed motor, media player, earphones, electronic controller, tripod, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Rokeby, London

18 certainly lies at the bottom of Muga Miyahara’s

photographic works. For his first show at Taka Ishii he’ll be showing his Renaissance series, made up of his own prints, torn and collaged into new forms, in a process that plays with both their two- and three-dimensional aspects, and with their subjects. Having worked in (Westernstyle) commercial and editorial photography, around 25 years ago, Miyahara began taking snapshots of daily life in Japan, leading to a parallel practice that explores the sensibilities of Japanese culture (a book of the snapshots, published in 2014, is titled Shinken-shirahadori, Japanese for the technique of stopping a blade between two bare hands). The fragmented, reassembled multiple images on show here will perhaps provide a glimpse into the artist’s own psyche. From the essence of Japan to the social and political architecture of Hong Kong: the 19 ongoing subject of Leung Chi Wo’s second exhibition at London’s Rokeby. An iconic figure in the Hong Kong art scene, Leung is certainly part of its architecture, having cofounded the

ArtReview Asia

influential Para/Site nonprofit and having been selected to be the first artist to represent the autonomous territory at the Venice Biennale back in 2001. The central work of the artist’s upcoming exhibition is a new installation titled Silent Music Plane 1967, which features a paper aeroplane made from the cover of a LIFE magazine from that year flying through the gallery in time to two songs: Long Life Chairman Mao, released by Central Ensemble of Songs and Dances in 1966, and the Beatles’s Yesterday (1965). Back in 1967, a year after the start of the Cultural Revolution in China, Hong Kong was the scene of anticolonial rioting. While music was broadcast from the Bank of China building by the protesters, the Hong Kong government installed military loudspeakers on the nearby Government Information Services building and played jazz and popular Western music. All in all, the work promises to be a timely (for British, Chinese and Hong Kong audiences) reminder of how the seemingly innocent can be ideological, how ideology can be expressed in insubstantial ways and how the very fabric

of our cities can been instrumentalised to Completing a trinity of Hong Kong-based fight ideological battles. 21 artists is Trevor Yeung, whose work often Hong Kong’s representative in the 2017 deploys biological systems as metaphors for Venice biennale will be artist and musician human relationships. At The Sunset of Last 20 Samson Young, whose work, in the form Summer, his forthcoming show at Blindspot, this will be coming in the form of an installation of works on paper, videos and a durational comprising, plants, specimen shells, a fish tank performance, is currently on show at Experimenter in Kolkata. While the title of and a mock Chinese garden. All of it preceded the exhibition, Mastery of Language Affords by a photographic installation evoking the memRemarkable Power, evokes the work of psyory of a past love affair. But this artist’s endgame is far from gloomy: ‘memories are always chiatrist Frantz Fanon, the works on paper beautiful’, apparently. This will be your chance – manuscripts of the artist’s own musical to find out how much truth there is in that. compositions created between 2005 and 2015, Beautiful or not, everyone knows that drawn, stamped, printed and collaged over to the point of various degrees of illegibility – memories are all old people have left once they are explicitly dedicated to the philosopher reach a certain age. Unless, that is, they’re part and his work on the role of spoken language 22 of 1a Space’s As the Leaves Fall (subtitled Teeth in cultural domination and its resistance. Falling Out, Story Begins), an exhibition curated The themes introduced by the drawings are by Grey and Green Ping Pong, and featuring then played out through two videoworks seven artists paired with seven older people. from Young’s Muted Situation series (2014), The process starts with the artists showing the in which a lion-dancing troupe and a violin oldies their favourite spots or leisure activities quartet perform with the sound suppressed. (karaoke, hiking, treasure hunts), with the

20 To Fanon (Resonance Study I) (detail), 2016, pastel, coloured pencil, Xerox print, silkscreen print and mixed media on original composition manuscripts (ink on paper), 29 × 43 cm each, suite of five. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata

process then reversed (practising tai chi in the park, gardening, having a yum cha gathering, and weaving at home). Finally, on show at the gallery, will be a collaborative artwork made by the two parties. ArtReview Asia cannot wait. Incidentally, when it first got wind of this show, it thought that the teeth-falling-out business was purely another metaphor for decay. It’s not, as the gallery makes clear: ‘The prevalence of tooth loss in seniors severely affects their daily lives. According to the Oral Health Survey (OHS) 2011 published by the Department of Health, there are 5.6 % of non-institutionalized seniors with no teeth. With a base of 450,800, there are 25,245 toothless seniors in Hong Kong excluding those in the age above 75. Meanwhile, the tooth loss conditions of seniors of the Social Welfare Department long-term care services were even worse. About 20% to 30% of them had no teeth at all. Each had 9.4 remaining teeth on average. The unaffordable dentistry is the main cause of this situation.’ Nirmala Devi

21 The Sunset of Last Summer, concept image. Courtesy Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

22 Group photo of the participating artists and elderlies at 1a space. Photo: Jesse Clockwork (Wong Man Kit)

Autumn 2016

Points of View

Located by a quiet but windy canal in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, The Feuerle Collection is at first an amazing architectural renovation project, carried out by British minimalist John Pawson. Prior to its conversion, the building had been left to rot, a symbol of Berlin’s wartime past: built between 1942 and 1944, it was originally a pair of telecommunications bunkers; after that merely a burden to the city authorities. Now it is the permanent home for Désiré Feuerle’s collections of antique Southeast Asian sculpture, his contemporary art collection and a collection of Imperial furniture from China. When I visited it in early summer, the renovation of the building was not entirely complete. However, when I walked along the canal and looked up at the building, it seemed to me that the architect had applied elements that, while preserving the building’s history, evoked our present digital age – the outer walls of the office attached to the main building on the ground floor and the apartment added on top of the roof are made of silver white material in a manner that evokes a digital minimalist style: like the aluminum case of the desktop external hard drive produced by G-Technology. Connected at basement level, the bunkers appear like icebergs that hide most of their volume underwater. Despite a series of functional alterations (an office, stairs and an apartment), the additional architecture intervention to them is reduced to the minimum. Marks left by squatters (such as graffiti) are removed, while traces of water damage seem to have attained a certain aesthetic value, and are partially retained. ‘Look at this. This crack…’

Eyes through the telescope Berlin’s latest private museum adds a new perspective on both Chinese and Asian heritage by Aimee Lin said Pawson during my visit, his finger pointing at a crack – caused by an extension at the second basement level – in the middle of a thick concrete column. As my attention moves with Pawson’s fingers while they run over the crack, I realise that in this project, the architect’s achievement is to express the very nature of the architecture, and to free that to its extreme. To do so, the biggest intervention that he has made is to build up a grand glass wall at the second basement level, and to fill with the empty, sinking space at the far side of it with water. By doing so, he made a pool, which becomes a mirror, a theatrical device that produces imaginaries of the architecture, the space and its contents : via the glass wall the architect creates the mirror image of the interior of the space, then via the surface of the water, he creates the reflection of the mirror image.

Autumn 2016

In my eyes, however, the glass wall and the pool offer a symbolism that goes beyond the architecture itself, and corresponds with Désiré Feuerle’s collection. The collection includes seventh-to-thirteenth-century Kmer statues in stone, bronze, and wood as well as Imperial Chinese furniture spanning from the Han to the Qing dynasty (200 BC to the eighteenth century), and these objects from ancient times are juxtaposed with contemporary works by Cristina Iglesias, Anish Kapoor, Zeng Fanzhi and James Lee Byars. It seems to me that the collection has created a European imaginary of the ancient Eastern civilisation in a space that has abstracted aesthetic value from its material and functional status. This is not the first time I have seen my culture as if through an inverted telescope. At the Feuerle Collection, when the ideas and imaginaries of things like Asia, China and Eastern civilisation are embodied before me, I feel as if I am immersed in a real virtuality, and yet in something that is at the same time very real. It is just like what Benedict Anderson described in his introduction to The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (1998): ‘(he) can no longer matter-of-factly experience them, but sees them simultaneously close up and from afar’. But what Anderson called ‘the spectre of comparisons’, I, as a visitor to this collection, can take as the process of loosening the boundaries between various cultural and historical identities. The Feuerle Collection will be officially open to the public in October. A visit to it is by appointment only

Original sins Literary sensation Eka Kurniawan challenges the official history of modern Indonesia, harking back to work by earlier dissident artists by Clarissa Oon

In postcolonial countries where brutal power struggles and deep differences of ideology have marked the transition to an independent nation-state, government-sanctioned history is like a red flag to a bull when it comes to dissident artists and intellectuals. In Indonesia, where the 1965 killing of hundreds of thousands of suspected communists still casts a long shadow, modernist masters such as painter S. Sudjojono and writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer have reflected the country’s turbulent path in their works. A onetime Communist party member of parliament, Sudjojono withdrew from politics in the late 1950s, but Pramoedya was one of thousands of leftists incarcerated without trial. His famed Buru Quartet of novels (1980–88) about the injustices of colonial rule, set in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century, was conceived during the ten years he spent in a forced labour camp on Buru Island, before being released in 1979. Little wonder that current Indonesian literary star Eka Kurniawan, hailed at home and abroad as Pramoedya’s successor, should want to take on, as the backdrop for his first novel, all that is disturbing and horrific about Indonesia’s history – local women forced to become concubines to Dutch landowners; Dutch girls corralled into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War; and, of course, that postindependence wipeout of the PKI, then the third-largest communist party in the world. Beauty is a Wound, first published in Indonesian in 2002, was a sensation in his home country. The English translation by Annie Tucker was published late last year, alongside that of his 2004 thriller, Man Tiger [reviewed in ArtReview Asia, Summer 2016], translated by

from top Eka Kurniawan, Beauty is a Wound, 2015, New Directions Publishing, New York; Eka Kurniawan, courtesy Verso Books, London

ArtReview Asia

Labodalih Sembiring; both have received international acclaim, with the latter recently making the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize. A raconteur whose third-person narratives exude the earthy charm of village folklore, Eka has a skill for adroitly meshing humour and tragedy, the lyrical and the bathetic, one heightening the other to great effect. This is beautifully sustained in Man Tiger, about a young man named Margio who is possessed by a supernatural female tiger; the fictional tale was inspired by a real-life small-town murder in late-1990s West Java, but contains no obvious historical or political references. In comparison, Beauty is a Wound feels like the weaker novel, its smorgasbord of characters and interlocking narratives dished up audaciously with plenty of violence, sex and loopy time-shifts more Thomas Pynchon than Pramoedya. The spread thins out particularly in the second half of the 470-page novel, as the tussles among the army, communists and organised street gangs intensify; history here is rendered with plenty of absurdist touches, but does not quite draw blood. In the introduction to Man Tiger, Benedict Anderson, an academic with expertise in Indonesian affairs, notes that Eka, in his undergraduate thesis on the Buru Quartet, ‘is affectionately admiring of Pramoedya’s political courage

and innovations in Indonesian letters, but he argued that socialist realism was a passé literary form’. Eka’s accomplishments and limitations, on display in Beauty…, can be seen, in many respects, as a response to the earlier tetralogy, which is grave, vivid and perspicacious in exposing the banal evils of colonialism and depicting the political awakening of its Dutcheducated Javanese protagonist. Eka’s approach in Beauty… mixes seriousness with irreverence, juxtaposing historical fact and magical realism in a manner reminiscent of Salman Rushdie. Beauty… opens on a raucous note with the resurrection of a fabulous Indo-Dutch prostitute, Dewi Ayu; after 21 years in the grave, she comes face-to-face with the grown-up fourth daughter she never met, face as dark and misshapen as coal, unlike her stunning older sisters, who all flew the coop ‘as soon as they learned how to unbutton a man’s fly’. Going back in time, the next chapter sees Dewi Ayu pulling a role reversal of sorts when she chooses her mate – a wizened old man whose teenage sweetheart had been forced to become a Dutchman's concubine – and coerces him into marriage. The episodic narrative builds into a cycle of rape, lovemaking, incest, violence and death. Running through all this is the somewhat tired metaphor of beauty as a snare for both the onlooker and object. What provides a lift are the strong female characters, particularly Dewi Ayu – self-possessed, watchful, endowed with superhuman looks and talents, and more than a little crazy. Her four daughters, who have each inherited some of her traits, are only marginally less compelling. Shunned by the neighbours for her grisly visage, the youngest daughter,

from top S. Sudjojono, Preparation for Guerrilla, 1964, oil on canvas, 149 × 175 cm, courtesy Sudjojono Center, Tangerang; Pramoedya Ananta Toer, c. 1955

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ironically named Beauty, has her alienation depicted with great tenderness: ‘She would go out in the early morning when people had not yet awoken… That was the time when she could get to know the world, with bats who went home to their nests, with sparrows who alighted on the buds of the almond trees, with chickens who cockadoodledooed loudly… As soon as day dawned, she would vanish inside the house, like the head of a turtle shying from those who disturb it.’ Eka is far less inventive with the men of Beauty…, depicted either as pining away for an unattainable love, or as some variation of seducer/aggressor/brute, which is where the novel founders. Man Tiger, his second novel, is a much more assured coupling of myth and realism. It opens with a murder, and then backpedals to flesh out the relationships between two dysfunctional families living next door to one another. From the awkwardness and ardour of young love, to the accretion of disappointment and betrayal felt by old married couples, Eka maps it all out with incisiveness and exuberance. In the process, he evokes the textures of village life in smalltown Indonesia, the grinding poverty as well as what is a numbingly patriarchal reality for women. This is seen most starkly in the fate of Margio’s mother, a ‘faded beauty’ often raped and beaten black-and-blue by her husband, yet who stays married to the bitter end. The endings of these two novels could not be more different – Man Tiger’s has the force of a gunshot and Beauty… that of a hollow thud. And yet, for all its flaws of construction, it is the latter novel that supplies Eka’s most memorable moment of sociopolitical commentary. Three-quarters of the way through, after being bludgeoned by scenes of violence and with more to come, the reader is presented with a masterpiece of understatement when communist leader Comrade Kliwon returns to his family after having spent over a decade on Buru Island. Restrained in his handling of the Buru scenes, Eka presents the once-eloquent Kliwon as reticent and estranged from his wife and son. He is visited by ghosts, before finally extinguishing his will to live. That, Eka seems to be saying, is the sum of reckoning for Indonesia and all who care about justice and political freedom. Buru is a dark stain that no amount of historical amnesia can wash away, and the lives and ideals of patriots cruelly and corruptly destroyed cry out to be acknowledged.

A lewdly morphed image of a twenty-one-yearold girl called Vinupriya appeared on Facebook. Her father ran from pillar to post to complain to the police. He was forced to offer a smartphone as a bribe to a constable, who upon receipt of the gratification assured him that necessary action would be taken to undo the damage. The police assured him that they had written to Facebook’s head office and the picture would be taken down. Unable to live down the ignominy, Vinupriya committed suicide. A thirty-five-year-old man killed his partner, a thirty-eight-year-old woman, and her three daughters (from her previous marriage), aged nineteen, eighteen and sixteen. He lived with the corpses for four days until his landlord complained to the police about the smell of putrefaction. He confessed that he wanted to marry the elder daughter; when his partner opposed the proposal, he killed all four women. Twenty-four-year-old Swathi was murdered in broad daylight in the heart of the city – the Nungambakkam railway station. No one even bothered to cover the body for nearly two hours. Ramkumar, the accused, confessed, stating that she had failed to respond positively to his amorous advances. Ramkumar seems to be influenced by mainstream Tamil movies. Tamil films often glorify, nay legitimise, unemployed wastrels who, taking a fancy for

Notes from Madras Matinee idols have stepped in where gods once roamed – with horrific consequences to Indian society, writes Charu Nivedita

ArtReview Asia

educated young women from politer sections of society, by hook, crook and the brute force that a true-blooded Tamil male must possess, achieve the ultimate goal of marital union. More recently, a young man shot a video of himself throwing a three-month-old dog from a terrace, and circulated it on social media platforms. It emerged that the young man and his friends who helped film the grisly act were medical students. They were arrested but released on bail of Rs 5,000 (roughly £60). If proven guilty, they could get away with a fine as little as Rs 50 (about 50 pence). A seat in a private medical school costs nearly Rs 10 million. Each of these events sounds like it could make its way to the year-end list of horribly perverted acts in an Indian magazine or newspaper. However, all of them – and there are hundreds more, I assure you – took place in Tamil Nadu over the course of seven days. Yes, you read that right. The situation in the rest of India is hardly any different. The gang rape and murder of a young student called Jyoti Singh by five men (some of them not yet eighteen) in 2012 in Delhi became a lightning-rod issue. There were massive nationwide protests and spontaneous outrage on a scale not seen in India before. Hundreds of such atrocities against women have taken place since.

common for houses in Tamil Nadu to have something known as thinnai, a small elevated structure abutting the outer wall right next to the entrance. In part, the thinnais were built so that passersby could spend a night under the thatched or tiled shade. It was common practice for the owners of the house to offer such complete strangers food and refreshments. One hundred years ago, this was the way of the Indian life. Adi Shankara, arguably the greatest Indian philosopher and theologian, in his eighth-century Sanskrit composition Bhaja Govindam, wrote that knowledge without wisdom is useless tinsel. In the last quarter-century, India has witnessed an unprecedented technology boom. In a society that has recently discovered the pleasures of mindless conspicuous consumption, and where material advancement is the sole driving force of life, there is now a spiritual vacuum being filled by matinee idols (see pictures). Increasing prosperity is making young Indians behave like tiny tots in a candy shop. Technology in their hands is like the proverbial string of flowers in the possession of a monkey.

In India, it is now acceptable to invade anyone’s privacy unchecked. Especially a woman’s: you can stalk her, bully her, kill her in broad daylight without any fear. A friend, while flying down from Delhi to Chennai, unfortunately ran out of cash. He had multiple credit cards and debit cards backed by a comfortable bank balance. He was hungry and wanted to grab a bite to eat on the plane. Sorry, they won’t serve you even a cup of coffee if you can’t pay in currency notes carrying the Mahatma’s picture. U.V. Swaminathan Iyer, a man billed the ‘grandfather of Tamil’ for his efforts to preserve classical Tamil literature, recounts an incident in his memoirs. At around ten o’clock one night, his wife asked him if she could pour water in the leftover rice (the ritual that marks the closure of kitchen for the day). Swaminathan replied: ‘The last train to the city seems to be running late. Let’s wait a little longer.’ Those arriving by the last train would most certainly find eateries closed. Anyone hungry could turn up at the Swaminathan household for a meal. The standard practice at their home was to close the kitchen some 30 minutes after the last train had arrived. Till a few decades ago, it was

top Flyposter for film star Rajinikanth’s Kabali (2016) above and facing page Fans give a milk bath (abhishek) to a cutout of Rajinikanth on the occasion of the release of Kabali (2016). all images Prabhu Kalidas

Autumn 2016

The review of my monograph Yu Youhan published in ArtReview Asia (vol 4, no 1) misrepresents the book in question to such an extent that I feel a response is necessary. The review begins by acknowledging that the book is the first comprehensive analysis of the life and work of the historically important Shanghaibased painter Yu Youhan. It then goes on to make a series of critical points that demonstrate a fundamental misreading of the book: first, that I mistakenly present Yu’s work as ‘postmodernist’ through an unproven comparison with that of Gerhard Richter; second, that I do not situate Yu’s work adequately in relation to other exponents of Political Pop in China; third, that I make simplistic connections between Yu’s work and aspects of traditional Chinese cultural thinking and practice; and lastly, that I fail to discuss Yu’s legacy in relation to the work of other artists from China. The review also asserts that my analysis is generally lacking in sophistication. The extended essay by me included in Yu Youhan is in five parts. The first is an introduction situating Yu’s work as a mature artist since the early 1970s in relation to the wider contexts of the development of Western(ised) modernist, postmodernist and contemporary art, and of socialist realist, modern (xiàndài) and contemporary (dāngdài) art within the People’s Republic of China. Provisional rhetorical comparisons are drawn between Yu’s stylistically varied output and that of the supposedly exemplary ‘postmodernist’ Gerhard Richter, both of which are characterised by continual, arguably deconstructive shifts between figuration and abstraction in contextual relation to contesting capitalist and communist ideologies. Close critical attention is also paid to the reception of Yu’s Political Pop paintings and those of his contemporary Wang Guangyi as well as the related ‘genre’ known as Cynical Realism. The next three parts present a chronological narrative of Yu’s development as a painter in relation to his personal life experiences and the wider conditions of artistic production and reception during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The final part presents a theorised analysis of Yu’s work as an artist. This analysis deploys two related concepts: parallax, that is to say, changes in the appearance of an object relative to shifts in the position of its observer; and deferred action, delayed reconstruction of past events perceived as traumatic. The first of these concepts is used with reference to statements by Yu to argue that his work cannot be defined simply from a Western(ised) deconstructivist point of view, but is also open

A response to the review of Yu Youhan published in ArtReview Asia vol 4, no 1 by Paul Gladston

to interpretation as the outcome of a divergent desire to arrive at states of formal harmony and expressions of essential localised identity resonant with the artist’s readings of traditional Chinese cultural thought and practice (principally Daoism). It should be noted that the connection between Yu’s varied practice as a painter and traditional Chinese cultural thought and practice is made by the artist himself in a number of published and unpublished texts. By contrast, I take a sceptical view of this

Books, ArtReview Asia, Vol 4, No 1. Photo: Mikael Gregorsky

ArtReview Asia

connection, presenting its metaphysical outlook as demonstrably self-deconstructing and related to questionable nationalist-essentialist discourses still prevalent within the PRC. The second concept is used to support a reading of Yu’s Political Pop paintings as an attempt to reconstruct the traumatic events of the Cultural Revolution by drawing critical attention to what Yu asserts is the largely unrealised potential of the Maoist era for personal self-actualisation and freedom of expression (Yu experienced the Cultural Revolution firsthand as a student in Beijing during the 1960s). It also supports a wider critical-genealogical reading that sees Yu’s work as a whole and its imputed relationship to Chinese tradition as an attempt to reconcile two further historical traumas: disruption to the continuity of traditional modes of painting by the development of Modernism in China; and the seminal emergence of highcultural literati ink and brush painting as a consequence of the expulsion of scholars from the imperial court by northern invaders during the Yuan Dynasty. Yu’s work is interpreted in this regard as a resistant attempt to uphold painting as high-cultural free expression in the face of persistently interruptive historical traumas and, therefore, a serially (dis)placed manifestation of the traces of China’s literati traditions. The review of Yu Youhan published in ArtReview Asia omits any detailed discussion of this chain of analysis, preferring to interpret my text in unduly simplistic terms. Instead of claiming that Yu’s work can be described definitively as ‘postmodernist’ and that its significance is located in a straightforward correspondence with traditional Chinese cultural thought and practice, as the review suggests, my text seeks to explicitly refute the authority of both those readings; thereby resisting the colonising imposition of Western(ised) artworld perspectives as well as a questionable (though understandably anti-imperialist) national-essentialism still prevalent within the localised artworld of the PRC. The well-signposted critical intention of my text is the precise opposite of that which the review ascribes to it. Assertions in the review that I overlook the relevance of Yu’s work as a locus of cultural contestation are patently misplaced. The review proceeds largely by assertion without any substantive refutation of my methods or theoretical outlook. Paul Gladston is professor of contemporary visual cultures and critical theory at the University of Nottingham

On the Spot No 1

Maria Lind The artistic director of this year’s Gwangju Biennale on what makes a good biennial, the importance of indeterminacy, teamwork, thorough thinking without utilitarianism, creating contact surfaces, recognising that doing nothing is actually doing something, and her own methodology for getting all this biennial-organising business done… Interview by

Mark Rappolt A curator and critic based in Stockholm, Maria Lind is director of the Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, and artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale (GB11), which is titled The Eighth Climate (What does art do)? and runs from 2 September to 6 November. She was previously director of the graduate programme at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2008–10), director of IASPIS in Stockholm (2005–7) and director of the Kunstverein München (2002–4). In 1998 she was cocurator of Manifesta 2 and in 2009 she won the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In addition, she has a regular column in ArtReview and contributes articles to a number of other newspapers and magazines. Her Selected Maria Lind Writing (2010) was published by Sternberg Press, and she is the editor of Abstraction (2013).

ArtReview Asia

ArtReview What do you think is the purpose of an art biennial? Is there some general purpose or does it differ from place to place and biennial to biennial? Maria Lind It differs from biennial to biennial, and over time. Among my highlights are the different editions of the Perifieric in Iasi in the early 2000s, the 2013 Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre and last year’s Ural Industrial Biennial in Ekaterinburg. The Perifieric because it grew out of artist circles, had good timing with the artists they invited and managed to make a difference in the city. The Bienal do Mercosul was carefully curated by Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy with a gentle process leading to excellent commissions and a beautifully installed show pertaining to contemporary concerns around the climate. The biennial in Ekaterinburg, with its embeddedness through, for example, production with local factories and grounding in the historical context. Among the big biennials, São Paulo stands out as one with a rich legacy both in terms of the exhibitions and how it connects to the city through a solid engagement with mediation. AR Are there things about the history and location of Gwangju that affect how you approach the biennial? Or the context of Korea perhaps? How do you keep a sense of a particular place and time in an event that is international and forward-looking? ML The Gwangju Biennale was partly founded as a living memorial to the 1980 May 18 uprising, when the citizens of Gwangju demonstrated for

democratisation and against martial law. With US blessing, the military dictator [Major General Chun Doo-hwan] sent in the paratroops, who cracked down on civilians in extremely brutal ways, only to be pushed back by the citizens, who then held the city for several days until the final, excessively violent take over by the military. During those days the city self-organised and functioned as an 1871 Paris Commune in miniature, giving rise to notions such as ‘absolute community’ and ‘the Eros effect’. This legacy is not only extremely interesting, but also humbling, connecting the biennale to the location in a special way. The city has gone through something remarkable, in addition to what has happened in general in the country, with the long period of dictatorship and struggles for labour rights in the midst of rapid economic development. Wanting to make a more ‘embedded’ biennial is related to this particular history of the biennale, which in turn grew directly out of the city’s past. Not through a theme or the like, but a methodology. The fact that Korea generally speaking is hierarchical, patriarchal and very formal has been motivational in terms of bringing in other approaches and methods, which I and the above Anicka Yi, Fontenelle, 2015, vinyl, steel pipes, motorcycle helmet, scent diffuser, glass container, water, kombucha scoby leather, nylon string, worklight, 310 × 198 × 127 cm. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York facing page Bernd Krauss, OM 15, 2015. Courtesy the artist

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curatorial team usually stand for and employ. Just one example: to have everybody on the curatorial team speak at the first press conference this year required a long and hard discussion with the Gwangju Biennale Foundation; now it is accepted that this is the way we do it. I was fortunate enough to be able to invite curator Binna Choi and assistant curators Azar Mahmoudian, Margarida Mendes and Michelle Wong, and we eventually asked the local art collective MiteUgro to join us as local curatorial associates. As well as differences, we share experiences from self-organisation and mediation. AR Could you briefly go over the concept for the biennial and how the artists were selected? What do you mean by The Eighth Climate? And given that there is an implicit connection with an issue such as climate change here, what can art do about that? ML The Eighth Climate (What does art do?) is not a ‘theme’ or a ‘concept’, but rather indicates a set of parameters for GB11. It is about placing art centre-stage, art’s capacity to always say something about the future, connect dots over small and big distances, its embeddedness in particular situations, and their mediation. What happens if we try to tease out more of the artworks in this eclectic, kaleidoscopic and puzzling adventure? What happens if we accept their invitation to engage, and take their interpellation more at face value? One of the things that we might end up doing is to enter a dance of futurity where the past is neither completely

forgotten nor a guiding light. In this sense, GB11 is a temperature check of art today. A number of works in GB11 pertain to the dire conditions of the planet, including temperature change and other factors affecting the climate, as well as natural resources and land rights. Take for example Alma Heikkilä’s seductive series of large paintings, Things that are massively distributed in time and space (2016), where, in these airy closeups of molecular matter, all material agents (water, pigment, etc) are quoted as coauthors, echoing disputes over visibility and the metabolism of everyday life. Or Pratchaya Phinthong’s modest photo series of a small dark puddle that is burning – it is gas hydrate, which is a potential future replacement for oil. Fernando GarcíaDory is making a new work in and around the last rice field in Gwangju, developing a play, The Lament of the Newt, about the location and its past and future, food production and rapid gentrification, together with inhabitants in the nearby area. The play will be performed at the rice field. The curatorial team went on a first site visit in September of 2015, together with a dozen artists – strong and relevant practices – who were invited to make new work. We encouraged them to think about local production in terms of materials, techniques, skills, etc, rather than making straightforward site-specific or contextsensitive work. Another dozen were invited in a similar manner during the winter, and the oeuvres, practices and methodologies of the first group of invited artists indicated the direction of the exhibition. Eventually several methodological and thematic strands were noticed and developed. Subsequently, another 70-odd artists have been invited to show existing work, which emphasises and complicates the various strands. Many of the art projects pertain to more than one strand, which hints at possible readings of works rather than aiming at firmly framing them. The strands include ‘above and below ground’, ‘right to opacity’, ‘the image people’ and ‘new subjectivities’. For example, siren eun young jung’s intriguing video Act of Affect (2013) pertains to ‘new subjectivities’ as well as ‘the right to opacity’, in terms of how gender is performed beyond norms and how the condition of illegibility is necessary for certain kinds of self-determination. The video is part of her long-term research on the Korean theatre tradition of gukgeuk, a type of vaudeville performance in which all roles are played by women actors, who consequently formed tightly knit communities. Gukgeuk was particularly popular during the Korean War, and siren’s project highlights how the tradition is carried on from generation to generation, until today. GB11 can also be seen as a constellation of many parts happening over one year, starting in January 2016. Thinking thoroughly about

what art does – without necessarily implying a utilitarian approach – how it lands in different contexts, and how it sits in society and creates ripples on the water, GB11 comprises ‘Monthly Gatherings’, or Wol-rae-hoe, made together with Mite-Ugro; an ‘Infra-School’ in Gwangju, Seoul and beyond; around 100 national and international biennale fellows; a forum with the fellows; two publications; a blog; and an exhibition that stretches from the Gwangju Biennale building to other venues and places in the city, including Asia Culture Center and the 5.18 Archives, and online. The new commission by Metahaven, Information Skies, can only be viewed online. AR How will the Infra-School work within the framework of the biennale? And what role do you think education plays in the mission of a curator (in general)? ML Together with the Monthly Gatherings, Infra-School is about using what is already there. Instead of setting up an education arm of GB11, we opted for collaborating with existing educational institutions, where we plug in GB11

‘Any project needs to have a certain indeterminacy, ending up being somehow different from what you anticipated – otherwise it is a desk product. Everything does something – a stone, a book, a star, and an artwork – and I am interested in what art does’ artists and the curatorial team, doing lectures, seminars, workshops, crits, etc. Our partners range from Seoul National University and the self-organised RAT school of art in Seoul to Gwangju’s Chosun University and the Gwangju International Center. It is a very simple and rewarding way of setting up situations of exchange between residents and visitors. A common denominator for those moments of exchange is to talk about art, about specific works and practices. Both the Monthly Gatherings and the Infra-School are integral and seminal to GB11, being intensive moments of interaction about artworks, creating contact surfaces with people who have shared concerns. In and of itself, this gets the biennale outside its usual confinements, and helps create a sense of embeddedness. There are certainly limits to embeddedness, as Hito Steyerl has pointed out: the closer the embedded journalists got to the actual fighting in the Iraq War, the blurrier the images became. You can lose sharpness by being too close, but I don’t think we have reached that point with GB11!

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It is hard to talk for other curators. I have practised a kind of triangulation since the early 1990s: curating, writing and teaching. None of them can survive without the other. This being said, within my work as director of Tensta Konsthall, what you mention as ‘education’ goes under the rubric of mediation. This implies trying to identify and create contact surfaces, based on shared concerns, between particular artworks and projects and people, whether individuals or groups. It is an art-centric approach, which has turned out to work really well in Tensta. We are borrowing some of this for the mediation activities of GB11 too. AR Do you approach the biennial with an idea about what art can do or is the biennial a testing ground for the question? And, perhaps more fundamentally, why should it do anything? How is art defined in this context? ML We do both: there is an idea that is there to be revised and reformulated through the process of making the biennale. Any project needs to have a certain indeterminacy, ending up being somehow different from what you anticipated – otherwise it is a desk product. Everything does something – a stone, a book, a star and an artwork – and I am interested in what art does. In this case it is molecular in the sense that it is about the individual artworks, and what happens when they sit next to each other in physical space, more than the category of art. Seemingly doing nothing is also doing something. Think of the work of Bernd Krauss, who is showing in a small private museum near the Gwangju landmark the Mudeungsan Mountain. His practice is a great example of an ingenious avoidance of given categories and frameworks, always teasing out something unexpected and yet pertaining to what artistic work is, ranging from the amateur to the professional. He has also made it part of his practice to use what exists in his immediate surroundings, quite literally, and often to spend a lot of time in the exhibition space continuing working after the opening. It is the institutional model that is at play here: art is that which is made within the framework of the sphere of art and by people identified as artists. AR Is there a message that you want people to take away from a visit to the biennial? ML That spending time with art can be incredibly exciting, mind-blowing. And that artworks do these things in radically different ways. It is not about art for art’s sake but about art itself. And that it is possible to make a major art event with limited presence of the commercial art market. A minority of the artists in GB11 operate within that circuit.

AR As I understand it, the biennial theme has one aim of investigating art’s potential agency in terms of imagining a future in a manner that’s perhaps less cloistered by prevailing ideologies. Is there a risk that such speculation, taking place in the context of an art biennial, has a diminished agency because of the structures of both ‘art’ (in the sense of a relatively free and ‘unreal’ zone) and a ‘biennial’ (in the sense of a festival that occurs over a fixed period of time and then expires – and is safe because of that)? ML Sure, the resonance is very limited, if you compare it to using other formats and media, and certainly very temporary, with the exception of certain works that might live on after the closing of GB11. However, strong and relevant art tends to be agile and slow-burning, and dispersed, so there are other modus operandi and criteria of assessment. And the artworks will have lives after GB11, in many different parts of

the world. The risk of the perpetual indeterminacy of contemporary art is there too, but I believe that the works in question here convey their own commitment. For me, this biennial is a giant amplifier weighed against what is usually at my disposal – I have primarily worked with small structures in relative peripheries. It actually feels ‘big’! To do this in Gwangju, where many inhabitants have a feeling of ownership of the biennale, is exciting.

AR There’s a sense in both the artists selected and the theme itself of gathering together disparate themes and ideas. Do you think that there’s a strength in the sense that art can draw a little from every trade or culture, while not necessarily being expert or embedded in any? That it can allow for a mobility of thinking because of this, that other structures or disciplines eschew? ML Art can do both: be deeply entrenched in something and use the smorgasbord model. Its ultimate strength comes from it being a metacategory, encompassing everything else: philosophy, science, politics, psychology, the other arts, etc. You describe it as mobility of thinking – I don’t know anything in contemporary life and existence that has this capacity, to this degree. Art is unruly, and undisciplined, at the same time as it can be sharp and precise.

Ann Lislegaard, Oracles, Owls...Some Animals Never Sleep (still), 2012–13, two-channel 3D animation, sound, 12 min 48 sec. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam; and Murray Guy Gallery, New York

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新媒體藝術聯展 New Media Group Exhibition

開幕／Opening

策展人 | Curator

2016.9.10, 5 - 7 pm

顧錚 Gu Zheng

展期／Duration

2016.9.11 - 2016.10.30 地址／Venue

藝術家 | Artists

Ferguson Lane, 376 Wukang Rd., Shanghai

徐文愷

上海市武康路376號武康庭內

韓金鵬李郁＋劉波林欣劉國強馬丁·迪爾鮑姆湯南南

Aaajiao

Han Jinpeng

Li Yu + Liu Bo Lin Xin

Liu Guoqiang

Martin Dörbaum Tang Nannan

www.leogallery.com.cn

獅語画廊 | 上海 Leo Gallery Shanghai

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上海市武康路 376號武康庭內

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Hong Kong

On the Spot No 2

Zhou Tiehai For well over a decade, the Shanghaibased artist has played a key role in the engagement between the Chinese art scene and its international counterparts. During that time he has been artist, curator and museum director. And now he’s an art-fair director. In 2014 he established West Bund Art & Design, a fair that brings international and Chinese art into even closer proximity in his hometown. How does he see this relationship developing in the future? What can we expect? Interview by

Aimee Lin Zhou Tiehai’s artwork, which often exposes the structures and strategies of the art market and art history, has been exhibited in museums and biennials internationally, ranging from the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York, to the 48th Venice Biennale and the 5th and 6th Gwangju Biennales. From 2009 to 2012 he was executive director at Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, before founding West Bund Art & Design

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ArtReview asia You have a very rich personal history. To start with, you are a successful conceptual artist. In your signature series of airbrush paintings, you created a fictitious character, ‘Joe Camel’, and replaced the head of portraits made by da Vinci, Goya and Ingres, as well as contemporary stars like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Maurizio Cattelan, with it; in your 1996 video piece Will/We Must, you revealed a power dynamic between the local art scene and the international artworld that still hasn’t changed much today; from 2009 to 2012 you were involved in the founding of Shanghai’s Minsheng Art Museum and were its first director; now you are also a founder and director of an art fair. Indeed, your involvement in art fairs began much earlier, when you were involved with the founding of the first edition of SH Contemporary, in 2007. How do you come to have occupied so many roles in the artworld? Zhou Tiehai It happened naturally, sometimes due to practical reasons. But in general it is closely related to the experience I’ve accumulated through being directly involved in the artworld for such a long time and the judgements I’ve been able to make as a result of that. I went to Art Basel for the first time in 1997; three years later one of my artworks was part of its Statements section. Since then I’ve been to almost every major art fair in both the West and in Asia, either as a visitor or participating artist. During the course of all that I’ve gradually come to my own understanding of art fairs. So when I was invited to start a new one in Shanghai, I felt like it was doable. I’ve also witnessed a trend towards homogenisation

within art fairs, but that means, on the other hand, that there is a greater possibility to shape something that’s different. So when West Bund approached me in 2014 and showed me the space, I felt like I could pick it up again. ARA This November will see the third edition of West Bund Art & Design. How did the fair come into being? ZTH In Jan 2014, the West Bund Group took me on a trip to a factory along the bank of Huangpu River that had been deserted for five years; they asked whether I would be interested in creating an art fair on the site. The West Bund Group is an institution led by local government that is seeking to transform an area along the bank of Huangpu River, referred to as West Bund now, into a culture corridor. The area was the site of the first international airport in China (Longhua Airport), with an early train station, cargo terminal and civil aviation facilities. That unique history has left the area with very special architectures and cultural landscapes. The West Bund Group’s plan is to turn the area into a zone comprising museums, art centres, galleries, architecture and artist studios, art education and leisure centres. Long Museum West Bund and Yuz Museum started operating in the area during the spring of 2014, and prior to that it had been a site for largescale architecture and sound art exhibitions. The building in which the art fair itself is housed was formerly an above West Bund Art & Design fair exterior, Shanghai facing page Zhou Tiehai. Photo: Ma Liang

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aircraft manufacturing plant. The highest point of its rooftop reaches 20 metres, and within the main area of its 55-by-120 sqm space there are no pillars. The whole space is open and grand, characterised by the functionalist aesthetics of industrial architecture, and that’s something that moved me deeply. At the time, there were many art fairs in Asia, such as the ones in Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, Beijing and Shanghai, but here, with this space, one can make a different kind of art fair, something unique, and that was the basis for us to begin. ARA As you mentioned, you were one of the first Chinese artists to be shown at Art Basel when your airbrush series Placebo was exhibited in the Statements section by ShanghART Gallery in 2000. Can you describe the experience? ZTH It was a very small booth and we brought three works with us, one of which was sold. At that time, as it was the first time that the gallery or I had been to Art Basel, our expectations were limited: we thought it was totally reasonable if we didn’t sell even one piece! So we were very pleased with the final outcome. ARA Nowadays West Bund Art & Design has become the platform via which many Western artists and their works enter the Chinese market for the first time. Do you think Shanghai has become a true marketplace for international art? ZTH In China, many established collectors who began their collections with Chinese art are now capable of and used to purchasing international

art. They buy artworks across the globe at different art fairs, from galleries and from auction houses. But there are a lot more who just started collecting; and right from the start they have been very interested in both Chinese and international art. Alongside that, company collections are also growing at a rapid speed. The tariff on importing artworks to the mainland of China, no matter whether the purchase takes place on the mainland or out of it, is as high as 23 percent [17 percent VAT plus 6 percent customs duty]. Even so, Shanghai is ripe with potential to become an international art market. The biggest challenge for audiences is to understand the artworks, which takes time. However, there are local collectors who are willing to spend time to study and research such works, and I think assisting with this is something to which galleries need to devote more effort. ARA More and more international galleries are trying to enter the Chinese market. Chinese collectors’ purchases in auction houses and at international fairs have also attracted much attention. Who is this group of people that are buying contemporary art? Apart from the big names (such as Shanghai-based couple Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, who own three Long Museums, one of which is located in West Bund), who else is out there? What kinds of works are they interested in? Apart from those who own private museums, do normal collectors buy international art? ZTH China doesn’t have a very long history when it comes to collecting contemporary art. In the early days, collectors focused more on local art and liked to spend a lot of time with

the artists, getting to know them privately. The ones who started collecting Western art either have a background of living abroad, or got to know Western culture early; there are some who came into contact with foreign galleries or attended Western art fairs early. Among them, some are more interested in classical Western works, while others are more interested in contemporary ones. Currently it is easier for them to engage with artists who are established

‘Artistic activities led by the government or the market have become the norm. In comparison to the rest of China, Shanghai residents are relatively more curious about Western culture, and young people consider the consumption of contemporary art as part of a hip lifestyle’ figures within art history. Some collectors are very sensitive to the current trends in the international market as well. Compared to more conceptual works, they are more into the finelooking and delicately produced works. Collectors usually like to exchange information and communicate with each other, and they like to go on studio visits. I’ve seen some unique concepts in collecting among collectors in recent years. What’s more, there are always newcomers. There are certain collectors, beyond those who

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own private museums, who purchase contemporary international art as well. They usually purchase works of artists who are well known as well, but they are also very open to new art. And I am happy to see that West Bund is playing a positive role in bringing both kinds of art to China. ARA What role does art play in the culture life of Shanghai? How has that changed in the past 20 years? ZTH Contemporary art within the last 20 years has gone from being underground to mainstream, with a market that once didn’t exist now developing rapidly. Artistic activities led by the government or the market have become the norm. In comparison to the rest of China, Shanghai residents are relatively more curious about and tolerant towards Western culture, and young people consider the consumption of contemporary art as part of a hip lifestyle. Besides all that, the development of contemporary art in Shanghai has a lot to do with the urban transformation and urban planning. ARA Speaking from the market perspective, galleries centred on 798 Art District in Beijing started to develop in scale after the year of 2000 (I remember the pivotal point was 2001, when Beijing won the bid to host the 2008 Olympics). Within the last couple years, because of the opening of private museums as well as the activities of old and new galleries, Shanghai has come back to the fore. How do you see the recent developments of art in Shanghai? ZTH Actually private museums had already started to emerge in Shanghai as early as ten

years ago. We still encounter a lot of problems, for example the lack of qualified professionals working in museums, galleries and other types of organisation. But despite that we are working hard and there are more and more international exhibitions and projects. ARA Ideally what kind of art fair does Shanghai or China need? ZTH As the global agenda of fairs becomes busier and busier, we need a simplified fair with a careful selection of participating galleries. The ideal art fair needs a humanised design that makes people feel comfortable inside, so that they can not only focus on the works but also enjoy the general atmosphere of the fair. In other words, double the pleasure by combining ‘shopping’ and ‘wandering’. ARA What advice would you give to international collectors who’d like to get a foothold in Chinese art, and for local collectors interested in international art? ZTH International collectors should try to come to China if possible and work with credible galleries. When confused about the works, it is best to communicate directly with the artists. Local collectors likewise should visit more exhibitions, and communicate with credible galleries and artists. For both of them, it is very important to spend (or invest) their time. ARA This year West Bund Art & Design has moved from September to November to coincide with the Shanghai Biennale. What role does West Bund play in the local ecosystem of art?

ZTH West Bund Art & Design has managed to build a high-quality, open and vigorous image of the Chinese art market. Together with other institutions, academies and artists in and around Shanghai, we manage to bring local art into international view and international art to local audiences. Besides that, it is set in the West Bund Corridor, and together with our neighbouring private museums, art centres, galleries and artist studios, it is starting to create a new cultural landmark in the city. This autumn in Shanghai, apart from the 11th Shanghai Biennale, curated by Raqs Media Collective, the city will also see the first Shanghai Project, codirected by Hans Ulrich Obrist and its initiator Yongwoo Lee. During the fair there will be collective openings of institutions, museums and galleries, and pop-up shows, not only in the West Bund Corridor, but also in other places in Shanghai. ARA Besides West Bund Art & Design, another art fair, ART021, will also take place this November in Shanghai. Would you please elaborate on what sets West Bund Art & Design apart from ART021? ZTH Once I asked a participating gallerist why they would take part in West Bund, he replied that because it is the ‘future of art fairs’. This year, just like before, we still keep the number of participating galleries around 30 while carrying out a new curated section, Xiàn Chǎng, in collaboration with ArtReview Asia. This section above West Bund Art & Design fair interior, Shanghai. Photo: Ma Liang facing page West Bund Corridor, Shanghai

Autumn 2016

will invite international and Chinese artists to showcase largescale sculptures, installations, paintings as well as photography and moving images across the main space of the fair, a newly built tent and outdoor spaces. Crucially, this section is not only open to artists represented by galleries participating in the main fair but also to other artists who bring new positions and perspectives to the event. Perhaps this is something that’s very particular about West Bund Art & Design: it is of course an art fair, but it also has a mission to develop and expand the understanding of art for both local and international audiences, which, as I said before, is crucial to the development of the contemporary art scene in the city. ARA Is Shanghai capable of hosting two art fairs (at the same time)? ZTH It is not about how many art fairs Shanghai can support, but the need for art fairs of different orientation, characters and types. ARA A lot of international galleries are concerned about state censorship in China. What do you think is the effect of censorship upon art production and the work shown in fairs? ZTH State censorship has always been a problem that art professionals need to deal with anytime, anywhere. I believe that one of the particular charms of art is the way that it allows artists to create and deploy imaginative strategies, especially when it comes to this matter. Translated from the Chinese by Shuang Li

A Neo-Classical arch at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Image selection: Pablo Bronstein. Photography Luke Hayes.

London Regent’s Park 6–9 October 2016 New Preview Day Wednesday 5 October Tickets at frieze.com

Art Featured

There is an animal there that looks like the raccoon dog and has a mane. Its name is lèi. It is hermaphrodite. Its consumption cures jealousy 51

Yuko Mohri

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How art appropriates life by Mark Rappolt

Autumn 2016

Yuko Mohri’s I/O: Chamber of a Musical Composer (2014) is a room-size solo show by Kosugi Takehisa (who was associated with Fluxus and installation in which looping, continuous rolls of paper, suspended cofounded Group Ongaku in 1960, going on to became a pioneer of from wooden frames attached to the ceiling, slowly unfold and droop group improvisation and multimedia happenings in Japan), which down to touch the floor. By the time they are spooled back up, they made Mohri curious about the possibilities of sound art. “It’s more have collected (in a less-then-obvious way) traces of dust and dirt comfortable for me”, she continues, “doing something with sound or gathered during that fleeting moment of surface contact. These mark- music.” So she entered university in Tokyo (first at Tama Art University ings then provide an automatic score for a series of musical instru- and then for an MFA at University of the Arts) to study new media art ments, spread out across the space and decorated in a carnivalesque with sound art as a focus and practitioners such as Carsten Nicolai as red and gold, that bang, chime and wheeze in seemingly random an inspiration. Although she prefers to call sound art “music without fashion. The instruments are also attached to a series of winking fair- musicians”. “I played in a band before,” she continues “but I’m really ground lights and a framed window-blind that opens and closes as shy. When I was drunk, I could stand up to an audience, but I couldn’t a current passes through it, acting as a surrogate stage-curtain or continue all the time. I prefer to watch the music, or to feel the atmosbackdrop (depending on your point of view) to the performance. phere of a gig.” And that, of course, is one of the sensations you expeBeyond the obvious connections in this enclosed circuit (which rience when watching I/O: Chamber of a Musical Composer. Nevertheless, include the influence of Fischli Weiss’s 1987 The Way Things Go), the Mohri has kept in contact and collaborated with some of the leading instruments themselves – a homemade organ, drums and bells – figures in Japan’s avant-garde music scene, among them Ryuichi enclose another narrative: they were once the property of Oklahoma- Sakamoto and Yoshihide Otomo. born Victor Clark Searle, who emigrated to Japan during the 1950s, Even after graduating, Mohri felt a sense of conflict about her after his father was assigned to General Douglas MacArthur’s staff. interests in music and contemporary art and how they might fit Searle stayed on in Japan, working as a musician, composer and together. “It felt more like there was a war between new media teacher, and on his death, in 2012, Mohri had only met him once, but and the contemporary art,” she explains, referring not only to her inherited a collection of his instruments, many of which he had made internal sense of oppositions, but also to how sound and media art himself (Searle’s homemade glockenspiel, together with another are viewed by the artworld in general. “I was really a little unsatisfied window blind, is the centrepiece of Mohri’s Oni-bi ( fen fire), 2013–14). with life,” she continues, with her usual sense of understatement. “Then, three years ago, some artist It’s fair to say that in person Mohri ‘Basically, the important thing is friends had suggested that I should can make her oftentimes complex really work hard as an artist one day. installations, and indeed the whole collecting objects randomly, and then So I just rented out a studio and then business of being an artist, seem effortI think about something, or I just tried to do it my way.” She invited lessly straightforward. “I’m a beginner, start to make something small, then some curator friends to come and visit when it comes to contemporary art,” she her, and one year later her work was says rather disarmingly when we meet combine everything. For me, that on show in Yokohama and Sapporo. in London. Two years ago her work practice is like drawing’ “I just changed my mind,” she says was on show in both the Yokohama Triennale (where I/O: Chamber of a Musical Composer was on display) and with typical straightforwardness. the inaugural triennial Sapporo International Art Festival. At the end In many ways, I/O: Chamber of a Musical Composer can be viewed as of last year she won the second Nissan Art Award (for an exceptional symbolic of that change inasmuch as it transforms a series of musical work by a Japanese artist). It’s as a result of the last that she’s currently objects and the memory of a musician (an objective and subjective relaon a residency at Camden Arts Centre in London. She’s recently had a tion) into animated sculptural form. The installation also articulates solo exhibition at Project Fulfil Art Space in Taipei, another opening many of the themes that have come to characterise Mohri’s artworks at Jane Lombard Gallery in New York in November. After that, in since that time: the mix of audible, visible and invisible narratives; December, she’ll be taking part in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which an extrinsic randomness that conceals an inherent connectedness; in turn will be followed by a February solo show at London’s White a series of apparently ordinary objects rendered extraordinary (at one Rainbow. And there’s a new project gestating for next year’s Sapporo point in the work, a pair of table forks are used to trigger an electronic switch); and an interest in a certain type of animism. Beyond that, the International Art Festival. Not so bad for a beginner. Indeed, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Mohri’s admission work expresses a fundamental interest in the nature of performance, is simply a case of stereotypical Japanese humility. It’s not. Well, not performativity and a creative process that runs from inspiration (even exactly, given that even back in 2006, when Mohri was still a masters if its visible source is merely the dirt in a room) through to composistudent, her sound installation vexations was picking up awards at tion and execution. both the Ars Electronica and Transmediale cultural festivals. But three And if that work seems to undermine many of the great myths years ago she was working parttime as a carpenter, and wondering of creation in art, Mohri is equally down-to-earth when it comes to describing her own process. “Basically, the important thing is where exactly her life in art was going. Growing up in Kanagawa, just south of Tokyo, Mohri’s orig- collecting objects randomly,” she says, “and then I think about someinal interest had been music: “My hometown doesn’t have any good thing, or I just start to make something small, then combine everymodern art museums,” she points out, “we have a really conserva- thing. For me, that practice is like drawing. So when I get an opportive collection: really old-style.” While, in art terms, the coastal city tunity, for a group show, or for a solo show, or triennale, biennale, it’s is probably still best known for being the location of Hokusai’s cele- good, because they have a theme. Then I start to think about how to brated woodblock print The Great Wave (c. 1830–33), it did host a 2002 fit with the theme.”

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above Circus in the Ground, 2014, compass, fossil, chime, bell, garden funiture, feather duster, ruler, light, umbrella, gut, motor, light bulb, roll paper, picture (installation view, Sapporo International Art Festival) preceding pages I/O: Chamber of a Musical Composer, 2014, paper, wood, acrylic, dust, blind, fork, organ, drums, wind-bell, toolbox (installation view, Yokohama Triennale) both images Courtesy the artist and White Rainbow, London

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facing page and above Moré Moré (Leaky): The Waterfall Given #1–3 (detail), 2015, installation. Photo: Keizo Kioku. Courtesy Nissan Art Award 2015

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Autumn 2016

Moré Moré (Leaky): The Waterfall Given #1–3, 2015, wood, umbrella, hose, PET bottels, rubber glove, bucket, wheel, duster, sponge, pump, acrylic resin. Photo: Keizo Kioku. Courtesy Nissan Art Award 2015

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Circus in the Ground (2014), an installation across two sites created overwhelming experience of it all remains one of a series of random for the first Sapporo Art Festival (its theme was ‘City and Nature’), events waiting to be reconciled. Like the dust on the floor waiting the random objects it comprises include compasses, fossils, a chime, to be played. While her art sometimes audibly relies on power, it’s a bell, garden furniture, a feather duster, a ruler, lights, a polka-dot notable for the way in which it quietly undermines any overt potency umbrella, an electric fan, lampshades, motors, a roll of paper and a in the power relationships it describes. framed picture, all of them drawn from the collection of objects Among her more recent productions, all this has come to a head salvaged from around the world that the artist hoards (“I keep so in Moré Moré (Leaky): The Waterfall Given #1–3 (2015), the work for which many items all the time, even just a cup”) in rooms in her parent’s the artist won the Nissan Award. It consists of three large wooden house and her own apartment. The bulk of the installation was frames that clearly evoke Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915–23). housed in Seikatei, a wooden structure located in Kairakuen Park – Suspended within them are a plastic bag, a rubber glove, a watering the ancient site of a memu (which in the language of Hokkaido’s indig- can, a wire basket, ladles, aluminium pots, buckets, lightbulbs, a birdenous Ainu people designates a spring) – in Sapporo that was built in cage and, naturally, a bicycle wheel. All of them deployed to collect 1880 as a guesthouse for the Meiji Emperor and other distinguished and recirculate water introduced by the artist causing a ‘leak’ to visitors to the city. It is notable for having the external appearance of appear onsite. The system plays music too, but this time it seems incia Western architecture (Alpine cottage crossed with urban Victorian) dental to Mohri: “I didn’t expect it, but every frame has a different and a traditional Japanese interior. And for the way the architecture sound, like a raindbow hitting an object,” she says. draws in natural light. There’s a sense that this work has marked an overcoming of For all that background noise, the experience of viewing Mohri’s Mohri’s anxieties about the irreconcilability of music and sound art installation in the building was of seeing a series of random objects and the kind of contemporary art practice that is held up as the mainarranged on the floor, and seeing and stream by both art institutions and the ‘Japan is such a shaking island, hearing them equally randomly turning market. And that overcoming has helpthemselves on and off. The work’s title ed her and her work further embrace a and even a new metro station has derives from John Cage’s ‘Autobiographical certain contingency: “At first, I was really a water leak installation’ curious about sound installation,” she Statement’ of 1990, in which the American artist-composer writes: ‘In Sevilla on a street corner I noticed the continues “but now I’ve switched to liking movement more, or at multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going least not only sound right now. I really like a changing situation or together in one’s experience and producing enjoyment. It was the flux situation.” beginning for me of theater and circus.’ And yet there is more to the However Moré Moré (Leaky): The Waterfall Given #1–3 really begins work than its replication of the saturated experience of the circus of neither with an awards exhibition, nor an epiphany. Rather its roots lie in an ongoing collection of photographs (Moré Moré Tokyo, 2009–) urban life. Linked by a series of sensors and connections, beginning with of Tokyo stationmasters’ homemade attempts to patch leaks in the the vibrations of the compass needles, which are arranged in a circle, city’s subway stations using found materials such as umbrellas, and continuing through the wind generated by the fan and the plastic sheets, hazard tape, pipes and plastic buckets. “Then I reallight emitted by bulbs, the objects and their behaviour both mimic ised that Japan is such a shaking island, and even a new metro station and explain a natural system governed by light, wind, gravity and has a water leak installation,” Mohri says of her initial discovery of magnetic force. In the first three instances these are elemental forces the phenomenon. But more than that, she continues enthusiastically, that architecture either resists or adapts. In a far less obvious way, “It was as if the station employees made some sculptures using the Mohri’s installation articulates a philosophy of the Ainu people plastic objects. I felt it was really an installation. You know, that art (expressed through the construction of their language) that traces pieces really happen all the time.” ara the act of sensing to the presence of sound, which comes into being when a circle reverberates – like ripples across a spring. And yet, as Solo shows by Yuko Mohri can be seen at Jane Lombard Gallery, much as this work traces the roots of an ancient culture down from New York, 10 November – 17 December, and White Rainbow, London, in February. Her work is included in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the branches of a present one and can been neatly explained to fit with 12 November – 29 March the artist’s stated purpose of adapting her materials to a theme, the

Autumn 2016

An Absent Present by Roger Nelson

The work of many of Cambodia’s contemporary artists reflects preoccupations with the past and future that leave the present squeezed out. But are these compelling expressions of contemporaneity the result of historical forces specific to the country, or the expectations of curators and critics at home and abroad? 60

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Contemporary art in Cambodia may be as diverse as it is anywhere, in works by Neak Sophal, Sopheap Pich, Svay Sareth and Kong Vollak, but there are two key tropes that recur in works by the generations of all of which were on show in the Histories of the Future exhibition, and artists who have come to local and international prominence during in other works by Battambang-based artists including Sin Rithy and the past decade. The first, informed by concerns over rapid environ- Pen Robit. As well as this formal similarity, in recent years all such mental, urban and other transformations, is a desire to imagine (and works dealing with this difficult history centre on deeply personal a compulsion to worry about) the future. The second is a desire to visu- narratives. alise the past. This is informed, perhaps in equal measure, by a recent In the last half-decade or so, individual stories and voices would history that is perceived as being defined by ruptures, and by the appear to have become the predominant mode for Cambodian artists persistent patronage by international organisations and curators of to imagine and image the nation’s troubled past. This marks a distinct works that address memories of war and genocide in ways that are shift from earlier representations, which projected a more generalised legible to international audiences. experience of political turmoil. Hen Sophal’s The Khmer Rouge Leader Both trends are represented in Cambodian works displayed Reigned Over More Than 3 Million Bones (2000), an oil-on-canvas portrait in major biennales in recent years, including in Pen Sereypagna’s of a grinning Pol Pot sitting on top of a mountain of skeletons, has two projects dealing with architectural history and urban futures, been used as the cover of several books on this period, yet now appears showing at the current Taipei Biennial. And both trends are promi- somewhat dated in its mode of visualising this history. Another key nent in an exhibition recently on show at the National Museum in example of the former mode of depicting history is the late Svay Ken’s Phnom Penh, titled Histories of the Future (2016). Two examples from scenes of life under the Khmer Rouge regime, including his Monthly that exhibition will serve to illustrate key features of each tendency. Mandatory Meeting, 1975–1979 (1994), one of the only Cambodian Kim Hak’s English Dictionary of Lim Kim Vang (2015) is a medium- works showing in the National Gallery Singapore’s ongoing opening scale colour photograph of an old dictionary, ID card and coin: all display of Southeast Asian modern art. The work is evocative and objects kept (under the threat of death should they have been discov- moving, but the figures it depicts are anonymous, and thus it lacks ered) by their owner during Pol Pot’s violently anti-intellectual Khmer the personal narrative specificity of more recent approaches to this Rouge regime. Photographed in fine subject, such as Kim Hak’s. The turn That Cambodian artists are concerned to the individually particular as the textural detail against a flat black background, these humble possessions are primary frame for approaching the past with the future of their small made heroic, posited as synecdoches seems to have approximately coincided nation, vulnerable to larger and for the bravery and suffering of Lim with the widespread adoption of black Kim Vang and so many others like him. wealthier neighbours, is to be expected; in images dealing with memories of war and its effects. The artist records the man’s story, and so too is it unsurprising that a presents it in Kim Vang’s own words as A stark contrast to this recurrent generation of artists born in the a bilingual text alongside the image: a compositional emphasis on sombre aftermath of the civil war of the 1970s tones, and in particular to the simple gesture suggesting that the process of gathering these memories is as crucial composition and personalised narrashould wish to explore memories tive of Kim Hak’s photograph, is our here as the photograph itself. and mementos of that experience second key example from the Histories This participatory and auto-ethnographic approach is familiar in many Southeast Asian practices, but of the Future show, Lim Sokchanlina’s Urban Street Night Club (2013). the emphasis on sharp-focus photography of personal mementos Preoccupied not with the past but concerned for the future, the shot theatrically against a flat black background is becoming a work is a single-channel video with sound. It depicts in vibrant, Cambodian device. A strikingly similar approach is seen in Khmer- flashing colour the recent and sudden appearance in Phnom Penh American photographer Pete Pin’s series entitled Cambodian Diaspora: of LED-illuminated billboards advertising new real-estate developMemory (2010–), which documents the possessions and memories ments planned for the city and funded by foreign investors. Images of refugee communities in the US, again making extensive use of of the proposed luxury highrises are juxtaposed in the advertisemonochrome black or white backgrounds. Also somewhat alike are ments with stylised imagery of Angkor Wat, waterfalls and other Amy Lee Sanford’s photographic prints, such as République Khmère touristic clichés, rendered garish by the washes of rainbow colours (January 13, 1975) (2015), which depicts scanned fragments of hand- cast over them. The artist has carefully framed his video footage so written letters sent by her father in the months leading up to the that the dark silhouette of motorcyclists and pedestrians passing the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge. These deeply personal and illuminated billboards appear almost to be dancing. Lim Sokchanlina tactile documents appear to be floating against velvety black back- is wary of the future promised to the wealthy few in advertisements grounds in Sanford’s prints. Pin is not included in the Histories of the such as these, but his video also seems entranced by the seductive Future exhibition, and neither is Sanford’s photographic series, but charm of their hedonistic hopefulness. a related videowork by her, titled Cascade (2014), in which scanned An emphasis on explosive colour and light, and an ambivaimages of her late father’s letters are set against a dark background, lent attitude to the future of a rapidly transforming Cambodia, are serves as the first work most visitors to the National Museum exhibi- themes shared by many Cambodian artists. Among the most visible is tion would have encountered. Anida Yoeu Ali, whose project The Buddhist Bug (2012–) was a highlight The recurrence of black as the predominant of the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial, held in Brisbane facing page Kim Hak, English Dictionary tone in works dealing with sombre memories of last year and earlier this year, with two related of Lim Kim Vang, 2015, digital colour print, the Khmer Rouge and its effects can be seen also prints displayed on lightboxes in the Histories of 42 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist

Autumn 2016

Amy Lee Sanford, Cascade (still), 2014, single-channel video, colour, sound, 16 min 17 sec. Courtesy the artist

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Pete Pin, Meas Duong – Stockton, CA, Cambodian Diaspora – Memory, 2010, archival pigment print, 91 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist

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the Future exhibition. Ali is skilled at selecting visually startling and metaphorically loaded locations for her documented performances. Into Dreamland (2015) sees the artist-as-bug posed in a low-cost funfair popular with middle-class youth in Phnom Penh, perhaps representative in part of the escapist embrace of entertainment among new generations. Another work shot in a dilapidated rural cinema in Battambang speaks eloquently of the enduring physical legacy of civil war, and of the uneven state of arts infrastructure in the present. That Cambodian artists are concerned with the future of their small nation, vulnerable to larger and wealthier neighbours, is to be expected; so too is it unsurprising that a generation of artists born in the aftermath of the civil war of the 1970s should wish to explore memories and mementos of that experience. Yet to understand much contemporary art as being oriented either to an imagined future or a remembered past is not, in fact, as standard as it might seem. In the purportedly global discourse of contemporary art, it is a widely held view that contemporary practices are, rather, chiefly concerned with the present. According to this theory, classical art dealt with historical subjects, modern art looked to visions of the future, yet in contemporary art – much like in contemporary digital newsfeeds – any meaningful sense of past or present has dissolved. Influential theorists have advocated such an understanding, with Boris Groys for example writing in 2008 that

‘today’s contemporary art demonstrates the way in which the contemporary as such shows itself – the act of presenting the present’. Closer to Cambodia, Indonesian curator Jim Supangkat in 2009 argued that contemporaneity in art rests in part on an inattention to art history. In a similar vein, in 2011 art-historian Kevin Chua argued that, as a result of what he terms ‘the evacuation of time in a work of art’, the contemporary practices of this region display a ‘historical belatedness’. Like Supangkat, Chua sees this as having something to do with art history. ‘Not having a relationship to modernism (of both East and West) is, ironically, contemporary Southeast Asian art’s belatedness,’ Chua suggested. He also noted the small number of contemporary works in the region that ‘dealt with historical themes in a formally compelling way’. Histories of Cambodian art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are somewhat hard to access here. The exhibition at the National Museum in Phnom Penh has drawn in unprecedented numbers of Cambodian viewers for contemporary art. It remains to be seen whether these new audiences will find the preoccupation of many artists with the past and with the future to be compelling. Exhibition-goers outside the country certainly do. ara The 10th Taipei Biennial takes place from 10 September to 5 February

Lim Sokchanlina, Urban Street Night Club (still), 2013, single-channel video, colour, sound, 16 min 16 sec. Courtesy the artist and Sa Sa Bassac, Phnom Penh

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Anida Yoeu Ali, Into Dreamland, The Buddhist Bug, 2015, digital colour print on film, lightbox, 75 × 113 cm. Photo: Masahiro Sugano and Sam Jam. Courtesy the artist and Studio Revolt, Phnom Penh

Autumn 2016

Chen Shaoxiong by Edward Sanderson

Throughout the course of his career, the South China artist has sought to expose or strip away the influence of subjectivity and ideology 66

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in order to find truth in shared histories and collective memory. Now, as he fights bone cancer, he may have found his most pure memories yet Autumn 2016

above Five Hours, 1993, installation, mixed media, dimensions variable preceding pages The Views, 2016, four-channel video installation, dimensions variable

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Chen Shaoxiong was born in Shantou, a small city located in result of the differing pressures upon the art scene in Beijing in the Guangdong province in South China. Shantou holds a special place north and Guangzhou in the south. Hou proposed that at the root in the development of the Chinese economy, as it was one of the first of this distinction was the difference between a top–down power Special Economic Zones (SEZ), established in the early 1980s. These system in the political centre, and a bottom–up momentum of social SEZ are areas where semifree-market conditions apply, established claims in the southern metropolis, manifested in situations of direct as part of the policies of the ‘Reform & Opening up’ led by Deng confrontation in the north, versus ‘non-confrontational proposals Xiaoping. Although Deng officially retired from political life after aimed at opening up a new horizon of change beyond the established 1989, he remained active in the background and cemented his vision models of struggle’ in the south. These last are reflected in what Hou for economic reform by undertaking a ‘southern tour’ of a number of describes as ‘Do-It-Yourself initiatives and anticipations’ that he felt the SEZ in 1992. Chen has been active as an artist based in Guangzhou, the group embodied. the capital city of Guangdong, since the early 1990s, identifying Although the group exhibited together, each artist pursued his himself closely with his home city and the cultural life of this region. individual style. In 1997 Chen began work on a series of photographic In 1996 curator and critic Hou Hanru wrote that Chen’s works, pieces entitled Street… (each title followed by the location in which at that time largely taking the form of performance and installation, it was produced), reflecting upon everyday situations, the under‘explore time as a sign of life and its limit in the real’. Three major early standing of a place through events occurring there and, importantly, an acknowledgment of the contingency works, Seven Days of Silence (1991), 72.5 of that understanding. The impossiHours of Electricity Consumption (1992) and Five Hours (1993), all addressed processes bility of capturing the rapidly-changing related to time and production. In Seven urban environment on film in Street… Days… Chen hung large sheets of white developed out of his Sight Adjuster series plastic that he proceeded to paint black (1995–9), where video was interrogated during the named period of time; 72.5 as to its ability to present a coherent set Hours… was an elaborate installation of of truths about the world. In the Street… fluorescent strip-lights arranged in the works Chen attempted to photograph shape of human figures, an electricity every element of the street scene in front meter recording the power being used of him. Each element was then printed, to light the sculptures and a painting cut out and reconstructed on a strip of onto which the power consumption was card. The artist held up this constructed scene in front of the same location to progressively recorded; and in Five Hours create the final photographic composiChen sat at the entrance to a bar with tion, presenting the memory of a place another installation of fluorescent lights with its new condition. In this way and electricity meter, five hours being the Chen pursued his aim of creating what maximum amount of time the owner of he called a ‘memorial’ to every entity in the bar would allow him to remain there. that location, attempting to open up In these works Chen sought to highlight the static image to further temporal and the fact that nothing really happened within the performances, beyond the spatial possibilities, despite the apparent mere consumption of energy or time. futility of the act. This was relevant to Chen’s wish to bring In these early works Chen began to explore the way images of the world art into direct relation to our existence come about and how they are exploited within daily life: ‘The everyday is as it is to communicate certain ideas and relain my work.’ These works were presented under the auspices of the Guangzhou- tionships – in other words, the ideological implications of imagery. based collective Big Tail Elephant Group (daweixiang gongzuo zu, some- Chen has always been aware of the limitations of the techniques that times translated as ‘Long Tail Elephant Group’ or ‘Big Tail Elephants he is using, whether they are the practical limitations of capturing the Working Group’, and holding the ironic meaning of ‘an elephant with world in an image, or the ethical consequences of presenting these big expenses’), of which Chen was a founding member, with fellow images as an authoritative statement about their subject. He sees the artists Lin Yilin and Liang Juhui (artists Xu Tan, Zheng Guogu and photographic or video image as, by its nature, irretrievably divorced Zhang Hai’er joined later on). For Hou, who was born and grew up from the location and context that it purports to capture, leaving it in Guangzhou, and has been closely associated with the group over ethically bereft. As he points out, in an image, ‘No responsibility can the years (most recently as cocurator, with Nikita Yingqian Cai, be taken for the before and after development of the event.’ of the retrospective Operation PRD – Big Tail Elephants (2016), at the So Chen sought out a way to develop an ‘anti-narrative’ in his Guangdong Times Museum until early October), the group’s atten- works, attempting a ‘direct viewing’ of the images of events. He did tion to its locality is a source of its defining characteristics. As well this by reproducing the original photographic images as ink drawas reflecting aspects of the rapid economic develings and presenting these drawings in sequence in opment of the area, this ‘specific social context’ his videos, much like an animation. By presenting Ink Diary, 2006, (as Hou has referred to it in his writing) was the them in this way, he felt that viewers could retain single-channel animation, 3 min

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their critical awareness in front of these images, interrupting ideo- works to cement, a method that accepts the inevitable lack of precilogically applied meanings. Chen’s videos bombard the viewer with sion the finger-painting method entails. For Hou this represents the images whose values have become flattened, subverting any prior ‘permanent struggle between the official ideology and individual meanings attached to them. This tension between the ongoing resistance, between political correctness and personal deviation’. sequence of images and their disjointedness forces the viewer While original meanings of the images Chen adopts may have endlessly to consider the possible connections between the images as arisen from the workings of ideology, his artworks do not reinforce the ideological work that has already gone into them. His artworks time passes. These ink drawings are a dominant feature of Chen’s videos over put the images back into contention, to point out that they are always the past decade. In Ink Diary (2006), the drawings seem to record snap- partial images and hence ethically suspect. Ideology and propaganda shots from the artist’s day; Ink History (2008–9) presents the drawings have built the infrastructures that insert these images into daily life, in a semichronological sequence of media photographs of historic where they act as subtle symbols within an instrumentalised collective memory. Chen’s use of the images events (by and large related to twencan be seen to trouble this insertion tieth-century Chinese history); and As Chen sees it, the photographic or Ink Media (2013) culls media photoby usurping the role of each image video image is irretrievably divorced from (and event depicted) within the field graphs of civil protests from around the location and context that it purports of ideology, potentially leading to the world. For Chen each of the original a reassessment of the narratives into to capture, leaving it ethically bereft photographic images embodies a mewhich they had been co-opted. diated memory. Viewers will not have any direct relation to the events We can find parallels between this urge to upset assumed readbeing presented in these images, but – at least in the historical images ings of images and Chen’s collaborative works (with Tsuyoshi Ozawa – they may have seen them before, in history books, on the Internet from Japan beginning in 2005, later joined by Gimhongsok from or in other media. Viewers will then already have understood them South Korea) as the Xijing Men. Their practice is built around the in relation to associated images or pieces of knowledge about the invention of the nation of Xijing, an imaginary place they exploit as a events depicted. The images that have become more widely dissemi- site for activities that serve to question the nature of nations, nationnated, or are more strongly written into a particular narrative, will be alisms, how belonging is expressed through ideology and the consemore consistently understood by larger groups of people. This marks quences of this expression. A strong current of humour runs through a collective process of understanding these images that might be these questions, ensuring that Xijing Men’s propositions are never understood as a ‘collective memory’. Consequently Chen’s ongoing taken too seriously. The humour involved in their artworks reflects series of artworks titled Collective Memory (2004–) questions the the utopian nature of their proposals, the possibilities that are develmeaning and coherence of these apparently ubiquitous memories. oped through the creation of such an imaginary realm and the effects Each work of Collective Memory is made up of countless finger- the mere existence of these possibilities can have on the other utopias prints. Much like the individual dabs of paint in a pointillist painting that are imposed upon us. or the varying tones of pixels on a computer screen, these marks build The Views (2016) reflects Chen’s current reality – the state of his up to form an image of a landmark structure. To create these works, health: “The works that I have done in the past might have been more Chen brings together a group of participants with knowledge of the focused on the social and the political; I have never placed too much subjects being represented to create the final image. The participants consideration on the issue of life and death. But the way I am now share their individual knowledge of the subject matter, but work in allows me to consider it.” This large-scale, four-channel video instalparallel rather than directly with each other, such that the image in a lation, shown recently at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, presents the way represents the sum total of their knowledge, a collective memory artist’s apparently calm contemplation of the world around him. The of the place negotiated by all the participants. During a recent inter- four videos present a set of personal image-memories, drawn from view conducted in hospital, where Chen is being treated for bone the period immediately before he entered hospital. Large areas of the cancer, the artist provided details of images are still, but slight movements His artworks put the images back the creation of Collective Memory: Foshan of a figure or animal occur within the (2013) (Foshan being the neighbouring frame as time passes. This suggests a into contention, to point out that they static, intense inspection of the world city to Guangzhou), saying, “This are always partial images immediately outside the boundary of idea of the ‘collective’ is related to the building in the image… There were these members of the Chinese the body. In conversation Chen appears phlegmatic about his situadiaspora who brought their children with them [to participate in the tion, stating, “It is almost as if these are the last few memories I have creation of the artwork]. Their children have never lived here; these before I face death. These seem to me as if they are my last views. In images are like postcard images for them. The adults possess expe- that sense, I am (in a way) trying to form memories for the future.” rience about this place: they may perhaps have lived around here or If Chen’s previous videos have dealt with the collective memory lived in [one of these buildings]… What I wanted was not only for that each person experiences as a mediated memory, then this new these people to make the work by putting their fingerprints on it, but work returns to the earlier, more diarylike works, presenting the also for them to talk among themselves. I want them to communicate artist’s direct experience as its source material. But given the way Chen has put imagery into question in his work, we can assume that with each other.” Writing about an earlier Collective Memory work, Hou explains that he presents these four views as in themselves mediated memories, this collective participation combats the identity that propaganda their meaning also open to question. In his previous works Chen

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is presenting what he sees as ‘secondhand memories’ or fabrications of memories. His own fabrications of these memories involve creating alternative and potentially disrupting perspectives on them. He proposes all the images in his works as memories for the future, questioning: “Are [these images] our memories of the past? Or are we making new memories for the future?” But the scenes in The Views were not originally placed in the world in the service of ideology; they are original images from Chen. It seems that this work approaches

Chen’s ‘direct viewing’ of the image, an optimistic effort to address a future viewer with a set of memories of the world free from the suspicion of ideology. ara A retrospective of work by collective Big Tail Elephant Group, Operation PRD – Big Tail Elephants: One Hour, No Room, Five Shows, of which Chen Shaoxiong is a founding member, is on view at Guangdong Times Museum through 7 October

top Street, 2005, photo cut-collage, 30 × 30 × 1000 cm above Collective Memory: Foshan (detail), 2013, fingerprints on canvas, 170 × 1030 cm. Courtesy Foshan Lingnan Tiandi all images except above Courtesy the artist

Autumn 2016

Waqas Khan by Mark Rappolt

Between the Palms IV (The Breath of the Compassionate), 2016, archival ink on wasli paper, 140 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sabrina Amrani, Madrid

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Sufi mysticism, dervishes, Dhikr, peace, love... all of this could be present in the artist’s work, or none of it at all

This is a question I always face from outsiders: people ask me, ‘Are you really from Pakistan? Where are the guns, bullets, women and everything?’ There are so many other things that are happening. We have so many other things we can share with the world. Waqas Khan

where he trained at the National College of Arts (NCA, from where he graduated in 2008) in printmaking and exhibited there alongside miniature painters (at the instigation of fellow artist and NCA graduate Imran Qureshi). All that following an abortive stint studying medicine, the profession that his parents (a businessman and Art is our one, true global language. That’s how they sucker you in. a mathematician) wished him to adopt. He’d heard about NCA from That’s why an artist from – let’s say Pakistan – can show his or her the canteen-walla during his time at medical college and had applied work at – for example – an art fair in Hong Kong, or in an exhibi- in order to pursue his interest in graphics and drawing. He was tion in Austria or the UK. Because he or she speaks a language that rejected twice before he got in. everyone can understand. Not like Urdu or Pashto, and not like the Khan’s works are largely abstract, often largescale monochrome specific languages of astrophysics or computer science. That’s how drawings executed in permanent ink using a Rapidograph on the something like the British Museum works, where art created by all type of thick, archival wasli paper traditionally used in miniature nations and at all times can be consumed as one. painting. For Khan the paper is valuable not so much for its historical But, then, once they’ve sold you on that, they start qualifying uses as it is for the fact that it can support the pressure of his hands that language by pointing out the variations of its use in particular (and the weight of his 188 cm frame) as he painstakingly (he admits contexts, with its vocabulary filtered through innumerable specific that a typical drawing session can only last as long as his back allows) histories and theories. Then they start connecting its various intona- constructs the weblike network of dots and lines (each one less than tions with geography, sociology and, in extremes, politics. Suddenly a centimetre in length) that make up his finished works. The permayou don’t really understand the work unless you really understand nent ink calls for absolute precision and allows for no mistakes and Islamic culture, Sufism, the history of Mughal miniature painting few revisions. He holds his breath while he makes each mark. Each work, then, is in some ways a register and the conflicts and legacies of a colo‘I want to connect with everybody: that’s of each tick of his body clock. “I want nial and partitioned past and panmy viewer to remember what I did,” Islamicist present. And in the end the reason for me making art’ he says. And there’s a sense in which you’ve lost track of how you were ever sold on it as a global language in the first place, when it seems to each of his works is a page torn from his personal diary. operate as a series of multiple, particular languages, all of which they It’s fitting then that Khan’s works, when viewed from a distance, expect you to learn. You need to go on studio visits to understand a give the overall impression of being like a fingerprint, or the concen‘practice’, you need to read interviews and do research in an attempt tric rings that mark the growth of a tree, or the transport of some to understand the mindset of each individual artist, to understand celestial bodies. All of the above are certainly in play within the his or her work. Unless you understand the artist’s intentions, you’ll broadly circular forms in the suite of works titled Between the Palms never properly be able to value that artist’s work. That’s how it goes in IV (The Breath of the Compassionate) (2016), exhibited at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong by Spanish gallery Sabrina Amrani. Look up-close, art these days. But it’s not how it goes with the work of Waqas Khan. “I wanted to create a global language,” the artist says of what got though, and it’s like a hypnotic view of some sort of cellular division, him into the whole business of making art in the first place. “I wanted as each stroke, dot and circle comes into focus in the manner of an to connect with everybody: that’s the reason for me making art. I don’t individual organism swirling under a microscope. You can see the want to confine myself to a certain South Asian spectrum.” amount of pressure exerted, energy expended, perhaps even time Matters in that regard might seem a little complicated when you taken on each individual stroke of the pen. learn that the artist was born in Akhtarabad (Wikipedia only has an Khan himself describes his process as being like a dance, an entry for the train station, so forget about that), near Okara in the experience he wishes his viewers to experience as well. It’s a way of Punjab province of Pakistan. And that he currently resides in Lahore, thinking inflected by his own experiences of and engagement with

Autumn 2016

Between the Palms IV (The Breath of the Compassionate) (detail), 2016, archival ink on wasli paper, 140 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sabrina Amrani, Madrid

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Between the Palms I-Vii (The Breath of the Compassionate), 2016, (installation view, Sabrina Amrani, Madrid, at Art Basel Hong Kong). Courtesy the artist and Sabrina Amrani, Madrid

Autumn 2016

In the Name of God, 2015, ink on paper, metal. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna

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Sufism, beginning as a child, when he heard people at gatherings sing about the Sufi mystics. And now, what with the circles, the breathing, the repetitive process and the Islamic heritage, you’re thinking of dervishes or the repetitive practice of Dhikr and the ways in which we express an awareness of the divine. And perhaps you are supposed to be when you view Khan’s work. In a general, nonspecific way. “Sufism is only about behaviour,” Khan asserts. “It’s like a meditative practice. It’s a message of peace and love, that’s it.” And if there’s one adjective that truly describes the experience of viewing Khan’s work, then ‘meditative’ is it. You know by now, don’t you, that I’m only feeding you all this biographical and circumstantial information so that I can deny it to you? So that I can take it away before you swallow it whole? So that I can leave you with the work standing in front of you, alone. For that, in the end, is what the experience of looking at art really is.

Khan’s In the Name of God (2015), presented at the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh, features four pairs of large, red drawings (239 by 270 cm), presented in metal frames arranged so as to give the impression that each pair is a spread from an open book. Khan’s spidery marks almost completely fill each page. But as much as you’re presented with the evidence that ink has been added to paper, you’re also conscious that, if this is a book, every gesture on the page has taken something away. That the text isn’t recognisable as forming a construction made up of any particular language, as is the norm with books, but with a series of marks that could be read in a variety of nonparticular ways. The experience is like that of witnessing a city’s-worth of electrocardiographs simultaneously unfolding across the ‘page’. While the general idea of language is asserted, it is also expressly denied. If any language can claim to be universal, it has to have a freedom such as that. ara

Around the Edges, As I See It, 2015, ink on paper, 136 × 238 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna

Autumn 2016

Faint Praise Don’t let Hong Kong artist Kwan Sheung Chi’s deadpan take on glitzy self-celebration in the commercial artworld distract you from a body of sharp conceptual work – or from his own very real success by Ming Lin

Kwan Sheung Chi and Wong Wai Yin, Man’s Future Fund - Gold Nipple, 2014, installation; pure gold, LED torch, lambda print, wood shelf

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‘Kwan Sheung Chi was born in 1980, Hong Kong. He obtained a fanfare. Such affirmations do not particularly interest Kwan, who third honor B.A. degree in Fine Art from The Chinese University regards the bureaucratic structures of the artworld with a degree of of Hong Kong in 2003. His artworks haven’t been widely exhib- remove and scepticism. His decision not to dwell on these things, ited around the world, and he has never participated in any major and tendency to flaunt them as performative gestures, forms its own exhibitions held internationally.’ So reads the very candid bio on strain of criticality. There shouldn’t, he tells me, “be competition the back cover of A Brief Chronicle of Kwan Sheung Chi’s Artistic Career, a between artists”, while in the same breadth admitting, “I don’t mind 2010 monograph tracing the artist’s trajectory from the year 2000 to if there are a considerable amount of prizes, I wish I could win every 2009. Though it was published at a time when the work might not year to make living easier.” It can be difficult not to become beholden to the financially driven yet have been considered fully-fledged enough to warrant retrospect, fast-forward the six years since and you’ll find a résumé that reads far interests of the artworld in Hong Kong, often considered Asia’s more illustriously. Despite numerous accolades and participation in cultural capital, where opportunities to make work come with the both national and international exhibitions since then, however, the expectation of high returns on behalf of investors. In 2010, Kwan and Hong Kong artist remains decidedly unfazed by his achievements to his wife, a frequent collaborator, were sponsored by K11 Art Mall to date, consistently creating works that maintain a degree of wit and debut a new work at ARTHK 10 (Art Basel Hong Kong’s predecessor) institutional cynicism. and asked to preview this work, Everything Goes Wrong for the Poor Couple, In 2013, for example, upon receiving the inaugural Hugo Boss Asia on the premises of the mall. Rather than submitting themselves to Art Award, Kwan told the press, frankly, ‘I’m still the same artist, I do the distinct branding of the commercial enterprise and its luxury, not gain more talent by winning this award.’ He spent his winnings stiflingly perfumed environs in the glitzy, tourist-ridden shopping on a camera, a tie for his father and, at her request, a pair of fake pearl district of Tsim Sha Tsui, Kwan and Wong opted instead for inaction. earrings for his wife (Wong Wai Yin, also an artist). Prior to that he With the artists and sponsors having announced the title and durahad taken the stage once before, at the 2008 Hong Kong International tion of their piece, 15 Minutes Performance, visitors and members of the Arts and Antiques Fair, for the Grand Prize of the Hong Kong Arts press who showed up, the latter armed with heavy documentation Centre 30th Year Award, accepting the prize on behalf of a close friend equipment, were bemused as they waited patiently for something to and fellow artist, the painter Chow Chun Fai. Kwan filmed himself happen, only to find the two artists themselves waiting for an event walking up to the podium and accepting the award, and this became a – Kwan was seen frequently glancing at his watch – that seemingly sub-two-minute videowork, which he titled For All never occurred. Afterwards, the two were found at a Kwan Sheung Chi, For All the Artists the Artists who Want a Prize, demonstrating flippant neighbouring bookshop celebrating the launch of who Want a Prize, 2008, single-channel regard for institutional praise and its attending their new book with no acknowledgement of the video, 1 min 43 sec

Autumn 2016

Kwan Sheung Chi and Wong Wai Yin, Everything Goes Wrong for the Poor Couple, 2010, video installation with live performance

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anticlimactic Beckettian event prior. Making spectacle out of the spec- own definition of what they considered the territory’s core values, tacle of the artworld itself, the performance shed light on the struc- from which a ‘winning’ answer was drawn. This participant was then tures, formalities and expectations constituting an ‘art event’. lavished with a 181g gold coin bearing the Bauhinia blossom, the While shopping malls aren’t typically considered ideal exhibi- national flower of Hong Kong, which is itself a contentious symbol tion venues, in Hong Kong, where nonprofits and artist-run spaces that highlights the fraught relationship between Hong Kong and the are few and far between, and larger art museums and institutions are mainland (as witnessed by the hoards of Chinese tourists who flock to relatively conservative in their curatorial efforts, they have emerged the gilded flower statue gifted to Hong Kong by the mainland, which as a third space, emblematic of the commercial and private interests sits behind the Hong Kong convention centre on Golden Bauhinia underpinning the development of the arts and culture sector. These Square, a site neglected by Hong Kongers themselves), which the spaces also hold the potential to open up more democratic and acces- winner was then given the option of keeping or throwing into the sible modes of viewing, and as Kwan himself acknowledges, propri- harbour. The winner was Leung Kwok Hung, a local leftwing politician who goes by the name of ‘Longetors of these establishments may have He spent his winnings on a camera, a tie Hair’ (known for his radicalism, he more resources and further-reaching was recently arrested for allegedly influence than a lot museums. Many for his father and, at her request, a pair making undeclared payments to a of these mall magnates, he points out, of fake pearl earrings for his wife local media tycoon, an investigation are quite ambitious in setting up arts foundations and new exhibition sites even outside of the shopping he says is politically motivated). In 2012 Long-Hair opted to keep the arena. The commercial context, however, effectively serves as potent coin, claiming that his party, the League of Social Democrats, could certainly use the funds. Feeding back into the political system, this backdrop for the cheeky evasions and inversions of Kwan’s work. In a city increasingly overrun with neoliberal ideals and the atti- work might be seen as a source of anxiety or achievement. The curatudes bred by them, what are the real ‘core values’ that define Hong tors of the exhibition likely breathed a sigh of relief that the coin – Kong? Using the official rhetoric of the government, Kwan took which cost a considerable amount to produce – was at least not swalup this question in a project commissioned by M+, Hong Kong’s lowed by the watery depths. As to the core values, it would appear that Museum for Visual Culture, for its offsite Mobile exhibition in 2012 these remain elusive or just out of reach. (the museum’s permanent premises is set to open in 2019). His work, Funnelling the resources in and out of institutional frameworks, made in collaboration with Wong, was titled To taking events from his own life as source mateKwan Sheung Chi and Wong Wai Yin, Defend the Core Values is the Core of the Core Values, Everything Goes Wrong for the Poor Couple (still), 2010, rial: these tactics on Kwan’s part are both pragand in it, viewers were invited to record their matic and conceptual. In 2014 Kwan and Wong video installation with live performance

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established Man’s Future Fund in an effort to generate financial security Artpartment, founded by Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng, the bifor their young son, Man. Using red-packet money – cash gifts made monthly Under the Bed series, for example, invites artists and peers to children from loved ones – to fund an initial work (Gold Nipple, 2014, to share unseen, or previously ‘swept-under-the-bed’, work. In addia shelf on which sat various objects, including a baby bottle teat cast tion C&G Artpartment hosts a painting school and exhibition space. in gold), the proceeds from the sale of which will then be used in the Cheung and Cheng, along with Wong and Kwan, are some of the production of the next work in the series (Gold Nipple was on show at artists in Hong Kong who have been working towards a more multiArt Fair Tokyo in 2015), the couple plans to create a new work each year faceted local arts ecology. until their son reaches the age of eighteen, at which point all profits Having come so far since penning that original downbeat biogwill be passed to him. While often creating works that manifest the raphy for himself, Kwan now has a lot to live up to – or perhaps having utilisation of art’s formal properties towards material or ideological already mentally reached this career apex is what allows him the space ends, art, Kwan asserts, doesn’t have to comment on society, nor can for unhindered contemplation. To his credit he has no pretensions it be a solution for actual problems. In his view, rather, making polit- about what the life of a successful artist should look like. For the better ical work is an evasive manoeuvre that enables him to avoid making half of last year he spent several hours a day at his local McDonald’s, concessions to the realm of pure spectacle. Projects such as Man’s a wifi nomad like so many others seeking refuge for the price of Future Fund and To Defend the Core Values… may be viewed as subverting a cup of coffee under the golden arches. Each day he sat and watched, art’s co-option by capital, overturning the exploitative characteristics content, in his own words, to observe just “how people deal with their of the market and overtly channelling resources back to where they difficult lives and boring work”. In a city as dense as Hong Kong, as in are needed. most global cities, public space is an increasingly rare thing to come His interest in refuting established structures drives his con- by. Kwan’s work reactively highlights areas of lack, operating inversely certed attempts to mimic and construct his own. These efforts are and challenging viewers’ notions of what to expect on encountering aided by the close-knit group of artists and friends that Kwan has an art object. He works persistently not to build visions for a utopic gathered around him, most of whom he met while still a student future but rather to bring forth and highlight the structures that are at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2009 Kwan and Wong already there. ara were also part of the group that founded Wooferten (now itinerant), at Shanghai Street Art Space in the Yau Ma Work by Kwan Sheung Chi can be seen in the above Kwan Sheung Chi and Wong Wai Yin, Tei district, which was part of an initiative of To Defend the Core Values is the Core of the Core Values, 2012, exhibition Public Spirits, on view at the Centre installation with happenings and video for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council from 22 September through 8 January to cultivate a vernacular art scene. At C&G all images Courtesy the artists

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There is also a bird on Mount Ji that resembles the rooster and has three heads, six eyes, six feet and three wings. Its name is chǎngfù. Its consumption decreases having to lie down 85

That Has Been, and May Be Again Para Site, Hong Kong 11 June – 21 August Para Site’s open call for emerging curators has resulted in this sensitive, witty and intelligent show about Chinese contemporary art during the 1990s, put together by two young Chinaborn, Hong Kong-based curators, Leo Li Chen and Wu Mo. That Has Been, and May Be Again offers an admirably clear-eyed view of that decade and the parallels with and ramifications for the present. Post-Tiananmen, the 1990s were a bad time for art and human rights in general in China (arguably, things haven’t improved much since then), and some of the artworks on display are products of that repressive atmosphere, including several drawn from exhibitions shut down by the authorities. Together, they demonstrate anxieties about artmaking and a wider sense of social malaise. All this is heavy stuff. But the exhibition also retains a lighter, more playful side, showing pockets of joy and freedom amid oppression, with a special interest in the consolations of cheap, popular art. Both curators grew up during the 1990s, and their affinity with that period might explain the specificity and liveliness of their selection. The charmingly 90s, pre-Internet subjects of some of the artworks – the book-rental business, trashy movies from Hong Kong – have a refreshing, life-affirming air. I certainly walked out with a skip in my step. Like many Chinese critics, the curators have a bone to pick with accounts of Chinese contemporary art that are ‘mainly constructed around the concepts of “Political Pop” and “Cynical Realism”’. They are referring to the market-driven importance placed on artists whose entrepreneurial appropriations of Maoist imagery (Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan) and alienated figures (Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang) have dominated international auctions. What’s new is that this show offers an alternative, corrective reimagining of the 90s Chinese art scene that reunites the skittish, underground energies of that generation and its wider sociocultural environment but does not force them into a resolution. It doesn’t present an argument as much as a state of mind.

There’s anger here, definitely. One strong theme that bubbles up is an abiding concern about the human costs of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. There are works of straightforward elegy, such as Farewell Poem (2002) by Sichuan-based Chen Qiulin, a nine-minute video chronicling the brutal destruction of her hometown, Wanxian, which was demolished and gradually submerged by the rising waters of the Three Gorges Dam. Grainy footage of the wreckage is interspersed with a figure dressed in a Chinese opera outfit picking her way through the rubble. Tackling human alienation in a mechanised age is Binding (1996) by Zhu Jia, a seven-minute video in which a magazinebinding machine is shown in closeup together with the two pairs of human hands that work it. Position book, staple, remove book. These actions go on repeat in an almost soothing way, until the camera makes an abrupt cut to a worker staring straight at the camera. The realities of artmaking in a climate of censorship and economic privation are highlighted too, with varying degrees of selfdeprecation and humour. Jiang Zhi’s fiveminute video Fly, Fly (1997) depicts a hand doing the flapping motions of a bird through a cramped, shabby apartment, with the camera roving from piled up canvases to a squatting toilet. It’s a hovel, basically, but elevated to tragicomic heights by the heroic strains of Massenet’s Méditation de Thaïs (1894) in the soundtrack. Meanwhile, Hu Jieming’s installation Related to Happiness (1994/2016) explores notions of solipsism and capitalist exchange in the art market. The work features a self-playing piano tinkling out a shapeless tune driven by the heartbeat of a man masturbating on a TV monitor. Besides art developed during the 1990s, the exhibition includes recent works that look back at the decade. Two pieces set in Dongguan in Guangdong province stood out for me, because they go beyond the artworld to celebrate forms of popular entertainment and their consumers: the hard workers behind China’s industrial boom. Dongguan, known as the ‘world’s factory’, is a manufacturing powerhouse, making toys,

facing page, top Li Jinghu, Today’s Screening (To Where The Sentiment Belongs), 2014, video installation, found film, sequined fabric, dimension variable. Courtesy the artist and Magician Space, Beijing

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mobile phones, clothes and furniture for export, and drawing labourers from all over China. It doesn’t seem like a place to breed artists, and yet it did. For Love Story No. 8 (2006–14), Dongguan homeboy Liu Chang bought up old romance novels from rental bookshops in the city. These battered bodice-rippers used to circulate among bored readers, who scribbled their own texts into the pages: short stories, poems, confessions and dating profiles, ranging from weird to downright tragic. ‘In this year I turn thirty,’ reads one, ‘like an egg cooked and put on a table’. The artist has magnified some of the scribblings and covered the walls with them, and the roomful of crowd-sourced fiction upon fiction is a tender and empathetic portrait of the dreams of an entire class of workers. The second Dongguan work is Today’s Screening (2014), by Li Jinghu, who also hails from the city. His video installation projects an unannounced programme of Hong Kong movies onto a rhinestone-studded curtain so that the viewer gets a blurry, fractured picture of the films, while the bejewelled screen casts a shimmering pool of light on the floor. The piece is inspired by the city’s ubiquitous ‘video halls’ in the 1990s, where a piece of cloth is hung up in an alleyway between worker dorms to become makeshift theatres. In Li’s work, the screen is embellished with rhinestones manufactured in Dongguan. ‘Crystal beads and screening halls more or less made up the entirety of what might be encountered in a single day of these workers’ lives,’ the artist said in a 2014 interview in Time Out Beijing. ‘During the day, crystal beads at their work; at night, screening halls to pass the time.’ His artwork combining the two elements is a gentle and sympathetic tribute to their lives. The publicity image for his piece shows Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-fat lighting a cigarette with a burning dollar bill, from the 1986 John Woo gangster flick A Better Tomorrow. When I was there, there was a scene from the same film featuring people laughing in a hotel lobby. Broken up on that screen with twinkling, silvery tat, it was the saddest and most beautiful sight in the entire show. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Liu Chuang, Love Story No. 8, 2006–14, books. Courtesy the artist

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Ma Qiusha Wonderland Beijing Commune 25 June – 13 August Wonderland does not easily fulfil any expectation that a solo show should present a coherent set of works: the four pieces presented in Ma Qiusha’s exhibition maintain a level of detachment from each other that hinders their being understood as parts related to a whole. Nevertheless, although their dialogue with each other and collectively therefore with the audience is muted, these works maintain the artist’s practice of presenting tantalising visions of a world in which acts are left without apparent goals, and meaning is always yet to be discerned. In this way the works develop an eroticism that endlessly defers resolution. The overall title of this show is also that of the major installation in the gallery space, and refers to a much-anticipated, never fully completed and now demolished amusement park developed on the outskirts of Beijing during the 1990s. Wonderland (2016) is a large rectangular expanse of broken concrete slabs on the floor, each fragment wrapped in skincoloured stocking material that softens their surfaces and adds a hint of fleshtone to the otherwise grey material. This stocking material is of an old fashioned type: it is cheap, of limited elasticity and susceptible to ladders that the artist arrests by dabbing nail polish at strategic points on the material. Does this broken concrete refer to the ruins of the amusement

park? Does the stocking material erotically transfigure the cement skin? In the three-channel video Avatar (2015), women in black bikinis lounge on a sandy expanse in bright sunshine, their sweaty, golden bodies expressing indolence. They leaf through a Bible, handle prayer beads and smear sun cream on their exposed bodies. The artist’s close attention to these actions creates an erotic tension, yet their meaning remains ambiguous. There is the sound of what might be a kettle coming to boil, at which point the women rise and abandon their props in the sand; the camera (at this point looking down from above) zooms out to reveal their sandy setting as the back of a moving truck. Sand reappears as the main subject in the single-channel video Mars (2016), which presents the material and its qualities at various scales: from microscopic closeups to footage of largescale dunes being reformed by wind. The fourminute video is suffused by a deep golden hue, as if filmed on the red planet itself. It ends with a sudden freezing of the sound and image – a technical glitch? But it is deliberate, perhaps serving to jolt the viewer from any reverie that the golden imagery may have generated. The endings of Mars and Avatar could both be seen to be rude awakenings from our daydreams. In the latter the revelation of the

Avatar, 2015, three-channel video, 4 min. Courtesy the artist and Beijing Commune

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truck is a twist in the tale, but instead of forcing a rereading of the previous footage, it simply replaces one reality with another. In the former the interruption of the video seems to be designed to force the audience to reenter the reality of the gallery installation. The remaining work, the installation Medal (2016), seems the least developed of the artworks in this show. Hundreds of pieces of gold-foilcovered card are arranged in a grid on one wall. Bakeries use these cards to provide stiff bases for slices of cake, and here they have been recontextualised by the artist as decorative elements, with the title suggesting they can be seen as some kind of award or honour – but this reading seems arbitrary and unconvincing. Medal lacks the strangeness seen in the other works in Wonderland, with their implications of underlying motives and meanings making them more successful as artworks. However, over the exhibition as a whole there is a lack of coherence between the works, and this relationship with meaning is stubbornly prevented from countering a suspicion that what you see is essentially what you get. Ma Qiusha’s works are certainly not mute, or entirely closed off to the viewer, but they leave a seemingly unbridgeable void between themselves and the audience that is as frustrating as it is fascinating. Edward Sanderson

Miao Ying Content-Aware MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai 4 June – 23 July Shortly before Chinternet Plus – Miao Ying’s online exhibition featured in First Look: New Art Online at New York’s New Museum – went live, Content-Aware: Half-Assed Aesthetics in the Age of the Sub-Amateur, her first gallery solo show in China, opened at MadeIn Gallery. Although 4 June was not chosen for any political reason, it nonetheless was a meaningful date to celebrate the work of this Shanghai-born, Beijingbased post-1985 New Wave generation artist who has always paid close attention to politically sensitive issues on the Internet (that being the Chinese Internet, behind the Great Fire Wall) and mobile networks. Since 2007, when Miao made The Blind Spot (a full, printed dictionary of words censored from google.cn) as her graduation project, censorship and selfcensorship have been key focuses of her practice. Curated by Michael Connor, the show presents a set of digital images, GIFs and videos. On a square, marble-textured platform, largescale versions of common computer-generated Windows-style desktop images wrap around five large pillars (‘the five pillars of awareness’) to form one undulating backdrop. This installation is named after an auto-clone fill function in Photoshop: ‘Content Aware’ (all works 2016). On one side of the backdrop is the slogan

‘Reclaiming Ownership of Your Mind, Body and Future’. A lack of aesthetic quality, and a visual culture in which images are produced as quickly and easily as possible, with intentional flaws, in order to be cool and become popular on social media, is now, according to the wall text, an aesthetic. In the opposite corner of the room are three black, shopping-centre-style scrollingadvert lightboxes. Golden formula, edge of footage continues the discussion around image manipulation, but rather than having been badly photoshopped, here the images remain untouched, invoked only as footage. Flatscreens are installed on the surface of the lightboxes, showing bestselling stock images and videos of recognisable subjects (nature, happy families, successful businessmen, pets). But instead of showing the images themselves, one sees the seams between them, and a repeated, madeup formula: ‘A + Σ b(c) log b(c) =∞(?)’, which can be interpreted as ‘footage (a) plus footage (b) plus footage (c) equals infinity (?)’. A mix of bestselling tracks from ‘Audio Jungle’ (a stock-audio brand) lends a soundtrack. The visitor may arrive at their own equation: ‘unedited or edited are both edited’. Other works are also displayed as if in a poor-quality retail environment. In Fresh

Images, a pollution-removal filter from photoediting app MeituPic is applied to photos of Tiananmen Square and Chairman Mao statues in urban landscapes; these are shown as ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions and juxtaposed with stock imagery of scientists at work. Repeated semitransparent watermarks read ‘Fresh Images’. In the installation God, Goddess, and Godfather, a video clip of Alibaba founder Ma Yun in conversation with President Obama at the 2015 APEC CEO Summit is covered with horizontallyscrolling waves of real-time ‘bullet-comment’ texts as seen on Chinese video-sharing websites such as Bilibili. This summit is interrupted by random wolf-howling clips playing on neighbouring iPad screens. These formats – badly photoshopped images, GIFs, found footage, bullet comments – are constantly-developing creative forms of self-expression for netizens. By formatting visual language born on the Internet and showcasing it in a gallery, Miao Ying makes us more aware of content whose meanings and multiple realities are dissolved in its self-invented aesthetics, and hints that the role played by artists today is more akin to that of an editor, one that manipulates and demonstrates the relationships within that aesthetics. Gu Ling

Content-Aware, The Five Pillars of Awareness: Reclaiming Ownership of Your Mind, Body and Future, 2016, pop-up stand, print on fabric, UV print on PVC, 350 × 350 × 225 cm. Courtesy the artist and MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai

Autumn 2016

Chou Yu-Cheng Chemical Gilding, Keep Calm, Galvanise, Pray, Gradient, Ashes, Manifestation, Unequal, Dissatisfaction, Capitalise, Incense Burner, Survival, Agitation, Hit, Day Light. II Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong 23 June – 13 August Chou Yu-Cheng’s solo, and all the works in it, including paintings on canvas and a set of installations hanging on the wall, are titled Chemical Gilding, Keep Calm, Galvanise, Pray, Gradient, Ashes, Manifestation, Unequal, Dissatisfaction, Capitalise, Incense Burner, Survival, Agitation, Hit, Day Light. II. A similar title (without the number II) was deployed for his solo exhibition at Berlin’s Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2015 and will be used for the third time (appended by the number III) in his upcoming show in Taipei . This reflects a major focus of Chou’s practice: to develop continuous long-term projects and to frame the work under the concept of the project rather than in terms of the individual works themselves. At the same time, this weirdly longwinded title invites speculation as to what’s on the artist’s mind: can we take physical matter, personal moods and emotions, sociological and political perceptions, and human actions as materials for art? And can these ‘materials’, formed into an artwork, then be used to demonstrate and even correspond to issues in our social reality? Perhaps the show can be seen as the investigation into these questions, and the works in it as the answers the artist has come up with so far.

The first thing one sees upon entering the gallery is a set of digital-style acrylic paintings on canvas that depict different colours of the sky. What look like airbrush paintings are actually made by the artist’s hand, each work consisting of around 30 layers of acrylic. On one of them the artist has painted the title of the piece and added a plaster sphere to the surface. A group of installations hang along one wall, each consisting of several individual pieces attached to a steel plate (a common construction material) that acts as its main body. One of these, recycled from the Berlin exhibition, is coated with a gold colour and dented as a result of stones having been thrown at it by visitors to the earlier show. The rest might almost be mixed-media works by Robert Rauschenberg, albeit in a more digital style, constructed out of components such as neon, paintings on canvas, plaster models of geometric shapes and bowls (still used today as teaching aids in painter training) and real fruit. Except for the fruit, which rots and is replaced over time, all the components are finely produced, with a gloss to their surface that is both digital and abstract. They are layered as if in Photoshop, overlapping or blending into each other,

Chemical Gilding, Keep Calm..., 2016 (installation view). Courtesy Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong

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thus creating a conceptual friction between digital-image production and formative fineart creation. In addition to experiments on the boundary between physical fine art and virtual digital images, Chou has created a semiotic system to build up his own vocabulary of meanings. For example, the artist uses geometric forms to represent fine art and its education, while stainless steel plates point to residential and commercial construction, which when coated in gold colour evoke capitalism, the subsequent denting by thrown stones referring to action and social and political criticism. With this meticulously constructed system, Chou attempts to turn a logic and methodology of artmaking into an experiment into the potential extensions of art’s interpretation. The funny reversal here comes when one realises that what Chou’s silent semiotic machine has actually produced is extraordinarily decorative artworks. It is like killing two birds with one stone: in the end, the artist not only completes his personal conceptual journey but also lives up to the most commonly held ideal of art in society at large. Aimee Lin

Teppei Kaneuji Zones MIMOCA Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art 17 July – 6 November Zones presents a thorough and valuable overview of Teppei Kaneuji’s current production, but the sheer quantity and apparent diversity of the more than 125 works on show make for a demanding experience when trying to get a sense of it all. Included here are paintings, sculpture, posters, collage pieces, furniture (made in collaboration with Shusuke Kaneuji, the artist’s father), mobiles, makeshift space dividers, videos, wood carvings, glass pieces and several wheeled pallets holding collections of brightly coloured domestic objects. The representation of meaning through image and material seems to be a basic theme under interrogation throughout Zones, perhaps most obviously in the latest examples of Kaneuji’s White Discharge series (White Discharge (Built-up Objects/Ghost of Sculpture), 2016), for which the objects on the pallets are the starting point. On the exhibition’s opening night, participants (named in the titles of the individual works) arranged these objects in towering structures, over which a thick white liquid was poured. The end products are sculptures that retain hints of the underlying objects, while the congealed white material smothers and abstracts them. The artist’s origin story for this series tells that one day he noticed how a thick layer of snow brought valuable and worthless objects into some kind of parity. The resulting artworks propose that between

liquid and solid is the space of negotiation of forms and meanings; if a form gives an object meaning, this meaning becomes confused, merged and reconstructed through the mechanism of the white liquid. In this way it could be said that the White Discharge works are a fairly straightforward demonstration of cause and effect for the artist – a way to upset the inherent meanings of an object, while creating a new, slightly grotesque form in its dripping and smothering features. This focus on liquid forms also occurs in the many instances of the 2016 series Ghost in the Liquid Room (Make-up Shadow) that appear throughout the museum’s spaces, featuring images of drips or smears of makeup products (or in one case molten chocolate) taken from adverts. These elements are isolated from their original context and arranged across the wall surfaces, sometimes projecting out from the wall to become structural supports for installations, or hanging as mobiles. As with White Discharge, these works seem to express a disconnection between an image, its form and any meaning it may be assumed to have. This unsettled experience is also developed through absences, through the negative spaces of form. In a large wall-based work, The Eternal (Udon) (2016), the titular noodle form appears as a snaking line cut into the many sheets of multicoloured wrapping paper that cover

the wall. The Ghost Buildings (2016) series adopts used sheets of stickers that children collect, leaving only the surrounding paper outlines as the form of the work. The artwork’s title suggests the leap of imagination that a child might make when playing, creating imaginary structures from these leftovers. The works seen in Zones suggest certain investigations into the meaning behind the materiality of the artefacts of popular culture, be that in relation to the colourful objects in White Discharge, to advertising in the images of the makeup and chocolate, or to the cartoonlike representations of objects that are collected in seemingly arbitrary arrangements in the Games, Dance and the Constructions (2016) series. But this investigation remains on the level of the surface, arguably reflecting how these materials and images are mediated through contemporary popular culture. If such popular culture is understood as being shallow, then Kaneuji’s artworks exploit that shallowness to construct a revised view of that culture. Unfortunately that revised view remains at the level of simply making it appear strange. If shallowness means the evasion of further critique, and this is then a feature of Kaneuji’s work, it creates the lingering suspicion that this is not enough, and the works are unable to extricate themselves from the level of superficial imagery. Edward Sanderson

Zones, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Yuki Moriya. Courtesy MIMOCA

Autumn 2016

Tam Ochiai and Hiroyuki Oki re wild(e) Arataniurano, Tokyo 16 April – 21 May Soon after arriving at the gallery, one is faced with the choice of entering the main space either through a waist-level opening in drywall cobbled together from remnants of previous exhibitions or a felt curtain blocking the narrow path leading to the same space. The nearly 40 works displayed here were produced independently and collaboratively, many of them onsite. Scattered throughout like signs left behind by two itinerant artists on a dérive (the show was differently hung all four times I visited), they reflect Hiroyuki Oki’s diaristic, poetic style and Tam Ochiai’s penchant for combining cryptically private thoughts with cultural references. Ochiai’s work often capitalises on coincidence; a previous show was based on the similarities between his name and that of Tiam O’Shian IV, a prizewinning cat from the late nineteenth century. Ochiai also once suggested to me that it would be interesting to live one’s life according to astrological readings (the philosopher Theodor Adorno did not agree). When one overburdens every coincidence with meaning, one becomes new age. When one filters chance through critical intellect, one becomes Cagean. Ochiai might be the new Cage. Many of Ochiai and Oki’s drawings,

marked with quivering and staccato lines and words, resemble a cross between graphic compositions and psychogeographical maps. Their collaborative video UJPS (all works 2016) comprises short shots of light in various forms – reflected in puddles, cast as slivers on the street, caught as halation and seen through fences and windows – and everyday images such as the moon, pigeons, rustling trees, a hand holding a glass and the inside of a bus. Both UJPS and Oki’s new edited-in-camera video Melody of Buddy Matsumae III feel ambulatory and revel in moments of beauty found in the mundane. As a more extended visual meditation, the latter especially suggests that everything need not be significant, but anything – from a long shot of the Sea of Japan, a fox, or the momentary meandering of the camera away from the face of an attractive man, either blushing from embarrassment or flushed with drink, to the more ordinary families and workers conversing behind him – is susceptible to signification. Melody… is at once a portrait of the city of Matsumae and the relations Oki forges in it. The recurring images of light, vernacular commercial interiors and human interactions are rendered equivalent. In one shot, Oki confesses

that his primary themes are music, dance, performance, light, people and love. The diegetic setting of every human exchange in bars, clubs and eateries identifies the commercial mediation of every interpersonal relation in the city. This idea is underscored by the various bar and restaurant receipts tacked onto the gallery walls. Galleries too can become a place for such relations. Ochiai’s new Ashtray Sculptures series comprises variously shaped and painted boards presented horizontally and as supports for vintage ashtrays. During the opening reception visitors used the ashtrays, adding ash and butts to the works. Like Martin Kippenberger’s 1987 Model Interconti table made with a Gerhard Richter painting, these pieces turn (here Ochiai’s own) paintings into utilitarian objects, critically pointing to the importance of verticality for paintings to register as artworks and not mere objects. At the same time, as memento mori, they point to the fleetingness of life through the social interactions they produce as ashtrays and the actual cigarettes vanishing in smoke. Both this series of works and the show as a whole are poignant documents, then, on the passage of a few persons through a rather brief period of time. Taro Nettleton

Ashtray sculpture (swan), 2016, sculpture: 10 × 36 × 27 cm, mixed media. Photo: Fuyumi Murata. © the artist. Courtesy Arataniurano, Tokyo

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Yang Fudong The Coloured Sky: New Women II Platform-L Contemporary Art Space, Seoul 12 May – 7 August Since its completion in 2014, Yang Fudong’s debut digital film in colour, The Coloured Sky: New Women II has been shown in France, New Zealand, China and Australia, and now Korea, where it is the inaugural show at Platform-L. The work is a sequel to New Women (2013), a black-and-white multichannel video installation that has also been shown in the contexts of film festivals, commercial galleries and art fairs in North America (Toronto), East Asia (Shanghai) and Europe (Basel). From a feminist point of view, a male artist’s continuous and closeup focus on the female form (nude in New Women and wearing 1930s-style swimsuits in The Coloured Sky) and the seeming lack of any critical response to such works by viewers, the critics and the market in all of these contexts, is immediately suspicious and heightens your sensitivity to issues of gender and subjectivity from the outset. And yet, on viewing the artworks, it is clear that their focus relates neither to gender issues (in the sense of men versus women) nor their associated politics. Nor does it bring these into play through any kind of wilful omission. Rather, in the first instance, both New Women and The Coloured Sky are a tribute to director Cai Chusheng’s classic leftist film New Women (1935), which, set during the 1920s, tells the tragic tale of an educated, modern woman. Indeed, it was screened at Platform-L midway through Yang’s exhibition.

Even then, Yang’s New Women and New Women II appear to have no intention of responding to Cai’s political concerns about gender issues; rather, they speak for Yang’s research into twentieth-century black-and-white cinema in China, and its status as an artform that created a Chinese aesthetics and cinematic language. Yang’s New Women creates a narrative that is grand and universal – women as an ideal or a dream – while The Coloured Sky zooms in and reverses the ideal into fantastical scenes of women’s childhoods. In the randomly synchronised five-channel videos, girls in retro swimsuits are playing alone or with one another in colourful, fairytalelike settings; some are posing, innocently and sketchily, but often with a mature woman’s gestures. Unlike most of Yang’s black-and-white works, which often carry the visual features of classic film and photography, in The Coloured Sky Yang draws on a language normally used in commercials: gloriously bright (artificial) sunlight produced in a studio illuminates the still objects; the red, purple or blue evening sky provides bright and gorgeous backlight; the images of the girls are beautiful and perfect and empty of credibility; when one of the girls is playing in the water, or playing with a white python, the movement of water drops or of the animal reminds one of the images captured by the high-speed cameras of the last decade.

‘Coloured Sky’ is not only part of the title but is also used as the background of all scenes in the work, providing an additional texture of oil painting to the video, which, combined with the artificial lighting, creates a symbol of young women’s inner worlds that is beautiful, appealing, mysterious and ultimately selfconsciously unreal. Yang’s first film, An Estranged Paradise (1997–2002), is also the last to have been scripted during production. Since then the artist has come up with the term ‘abstract film’ to identify the work that has no intention of telling stories or building up a sequences of actions and consequences over time. In its current gallery setting, New Women II might additionally be called a ‘psychological device’ – when you enter the darkened space, the first thing you see are five screens playing the colour videos. After your eyes get used to the darkness, they find that the room is not actually a black box but a colourful stage, with walls painted in highly saturated blues, purples and reds: like the coloured skies in the videos. If the women in Yang’s videos are projecting their own psychological desires, then viewers too are urged to enter a room transformed by the colours and shades of those desires, and to reflect and re-project the idylls they see onscreen. This perhaps is the most powerful effect of New Women II. Aimee Lin

The Coloured Sky: New Women II, No.3, 2014, colour inkjet print, photo, 120 × 180 cm. Courtesy the artist, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, Beijing & Singapore, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

Autumn 2016

Charles Lim Yi Yong SEA STATE NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore 30 April – 10 July In built-up Singapore, where highrises feature more prominently than beaches, Charles Lim wants to tackle an aspect of native amnesia: to make people remember that this is a place surrounded by water. Over the course of his career, he has insisted again and again on Singapore’s island reality, charting the unstable, shifting fringes of its coastline, and further out the even slipperier boundaries of its surrounding waters. Inland, he has navigated its various veins and cavities in short films, wandering through canals and drains for example, and descending to subsea rock caverns. This exhibition (a version of which was shown at the Singapore Pavilion in last year’s Venice Biennale) at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) is the culmination of a decade of research on the topic, comprising videos, films, photographs and installations. Last year’s stone-and-timber Arsenale venue had a historic texture, against which Lim’s minimalist presentation – framed maps, ultrathin, projected-to-the-edge plasma screens – fought to assert a different, cleaner aesthetic. The new, clean space at the NTU CCA, however, is a blank canvas to start with, and the artist has pushed his Marie Kondo-esque instincts to the extreme to create a white cube so luminously, evenly white that even spotlights are deemed too fussy and distracting. The lighting, diffused by soft boxes running across the ceiling, casts an unworldly, shadowless glow into the space.

Someone said he felt like he was floating in a zero-gravity spaceship. Someone else said it was like a radically empty, undefined space – a ‘ground zero’ concept of the sea if it were free from history and cartography Me, I felt like I was in an operating theatre. The hygiene didn’t just limit itself to the presentation, but to the art, which, for all its majestically self-possessed surfaces, felt sterile and quarantined. Make no mistake, in its germ-free way, SEA STATE is the most confident solo presentation by a Singaporean artist in recent years. It builds up a sustained if cold picture of the fluidity of transnational boundaries in both their representations and material realities. Time and time again, Lim has said that he wants to show that ‘Singapore does not exist’. His strategy is to interrogate the so-called state borders and show them up to be constructs. A wall is covered with 84 photographs of buoys, floating structures that are supposed to mark the edges of Singapore waters (part of SEA STATE 1: inside\outside, 2005). Nautical maps are placed side by side to show Singapore’s slow expansion via land reclamation (part of SEA STATE 2: as evil disappears, 2014). A former sand surveyor is interviewed about his experiences mining sand from Indonesia to Singapore in the 1990s, sometimes illegally (SEA STATE 7: sandman, 2015). Presented with little intervention from the artist other than the cosmetic, these pieces speak for themselves. The problem is that they say

SEA STATE 0: all the lines flow out (still), 2011, digital film. Courtesy the artist

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little that we don’t already know: that boundaries are unstable, imperfect and arbitrary. If you even tried following any international maritime dispute, such as the endless ones surrounding the not-so-faraway South China Sea, you’d know that lack of consensus isn’t earthshattering news. But even when Lim provides some intervention, it is done in a similar vein, which is to show the inconsistencies of cartographical systems in defining a country’s territory. Conscientiously and a little disingenuously, he applies these flawed systems to Singapore. One way is to ‘cut along’ port limits, represented by coloured dots in the water. This yields a diamond-shaped land with a fringe of water (SEA STATE 1: inside\outside, 2005). In another work, he applies ‘the GRID’, a system implemented by a former hydrographer that divides the sea into one-square-mile units, to land. The result is a blocky, quadranted cutout of Singapore (SEA STATE 8: THE GRID, 2014). These maps look good, but the concept feels thin, slightly hectoring. One could argue that his approach reflects Singapore’s relationship with the sea – organising, territorialising, industrialising – which is fair enough, but the representation of an impoverished relationship does not itself have to be impoverished. A more effective work is as evil disappears (Pulau Sajahat). In 50 years, Singapore grew by more than 20 percent, to its current size of 276.5sqm, the curatorial essay informs.

One of the casualties is an offshore island called Pulau Sajahat. Two maps from 2000 and 2010 are placed side by side to show the country’s expansion via reclamation. On the first map, there’s a tiny dot of an island labelled ‘P. Sajahat’; on the second, it is engulfed by a larger blob, which is labelled with the suspiciously bland ‘Works in progress’. The navigational buoy marking the island, too, has gone, presumably buried under sand. Lim resurrects it by buying a similar buoy, soaking it in the sea for four weeks and dredging it up for show. You can’t miss it: a fallen tower the size of a truck, smelling like rotten fish, its surface encrusted with a leprous ecosystem of barnacles and mussels. Like an unexploded torpedo, it sucks the air out of the room. Its presence is dark and ominous, but you can’t quite pin down its meaning – for what is it, exactly? Sajahat’s Memorial? The Ghost of All Buoys Past? Both, probably, modified by the malign, productive agency of the sea. But the Sajahat buoy is as exciting as it gets in this show. It is the only point of escalation. The show’s title, SEA STATE, is a nautical term used to describe the conditions of the sea, from ‘calm’ (Sea State 1) to ‘phenomenal’ (Sea State 9). No such turbulence in the show’s cerebral surfaces, though; the entire business remains, for the most part, deathly calm. This might be a matter of Lim’s taste and personal temperament. He likes a certain

decorous quietness in things, and indeed, SEA STATE has the expensive austerity of a high-end showroom. Objects, themselves elegant, are elegantly spaced. High-def, bezel-less video screens hang from cables from the ceiling. One shows the coastline of Singapore, stacked in vertical stripes (SEA STATE 7: sandwich, 2015), another shows the artist capsizing his boat, over and over (SEA STATE 6: capsize, 2015). Both are unobtrusive as screensavers. There are brief flares of feeling in his short films, though overall their tones are sedate and muted, hinting at a menace the films wimp out of fully articulating. Someone is being followed through Singapore’s monsoon drainage system (SEA STATE 0: all the lines flow out, 2011), or some funky business is going on in the underworld Jurong Rock Caverns (SEA STATE 6: phase 1, 2015). Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink… I came away from this show dazzled by its pristine vistas but with an incredible thirst: I wanted it to have something to say. Something urgent, sharper, more invested. No doubt its glacial aloofness – elliptical cinepoems, the steady documentary of maps and screens – has an academic appeal. (‘Island Territoriality’, ‘Indirections’, ‘Drifting Conversations’, ‘The Department of Dreaming’ – these are some of the hem-haw titles of the essays in his catalogue.) But for all the critical frenzy it inspires, little feels at stake for the viewer in the deep chill.

The problem, I suspect, is that beyond a dogged decentralising instinct, Sea State does not risk a position. I’m not insisting on a master argument like Allan Sekula’s influential Fish Story (1989–95), where texts, photos and films build up to a grand critique of late capitalism on the high seas. But something provisional, something that pushes out to more imaginative terrain beyond a clinical dissection and articulation of existing realities and anxieties. An example would be the elegiac, fluctuating narratives of Singaporean artist Zai Kuning’s art, whose imperfect material investigations drift like his great topic, the stateless Orang Laut (sea gypsies) of the Riau Archipelago, with the artist fashioning ships out of rattan and objects out of beeswax, making drawings, films, music – all of them an eclectic and unpredictable synthesis of the artist bearing witness and offering up his personal response. For Zai, the source material is a point of departure. By contrast, SEA STATE, with the exception of the Sajahat buoy, feels imaginatively moored. There is a lot of painstaking rearrangement, reengineering and realignment – which commands a kind of respect – but in the midst of all the anxious tutelage, there is little invention. In this dry, fastidious way, symmetrical in concept and beautiful to behold, Lim’s work commands the viewer’s attention, but in a distant, admiring way – like looking at a ship in a bottle. Adeline Chia

SEA STATE 6: capsize (still), 2015, single-channel HD video, 7 min. Courtesy the artist

Autumn 2016

Each Blade of Grass Each Shrub Each Tree The Substation, Singapore 5–15 May Running along the Substation’s gallery walls like a skinny filmstrip is Geraldine Kang’s photographic installation By Unit of Measurement III (2016), in which the image of a construction fence is repeated in frame after frame. These pictures show a fence that ran around the century-old Bidadari Cemetery in Singapore, a multidenominational burial site that was decommissioned, with the approximately 147,000 graves it contained exhumed (between 2001 and 2004), to make way for new public housing and an underground train extension. This happened despite lobbying by heritage and green groups to preserve the cemetery’s historical significance and rich birdlife. In documenting this boundary, the work not only draws attention to the disappearance of precious ecology and history but also makes visible the discord between state planning and public sentiment. In the discussions it conjures, By Unit of Measurement III frames, literally and metaphorically, this entire exhibition, the first to open under the auspices of the Substation’s new director, Alan Oei, who also curated the show. Each Blade of Grass Each Shrub Each Tree is a response to another ‘pragmatism versus idealism’ debate that seems to be on repeat in the land-scarce city-state. This time, it’s the Cross Island Line discussion, centring on the question: should the government build a new train line through the country’s largest nature reserve, at MacRitchie? The exhibition, which includes a daylong forum, mixes art with activism by bringing together nine artists, academics and conservationists whose work touches upon the discourse of nature and the politics of its representation, much of it dealing with ecological and historical loss in the face of urban renewal. Conservationist David Tan exhibits a fridge full of dead

birds that flew into glass buildings; writerperformer Deborah Emmanuel composes an ode to the ocean, and so on. While the works speak in a variety of registers, from the overtly political to the more nuanced and personal, the overall tone is one of urgency, marked by constant references to topical issues. No surprise, given the nature-loving, Whitmanesque title, which is actually appropriated from a statement by the National Parks Board. (Tan Wee Kiat, the former chief executive of the board, reportedly used the phrase to refer to the extent to which greenery is controlled in Singapore.) In hosting such diverse voices, both within and beyond art, Each Blade… flattens as much as it amplifies. Drawing on personal photographs as well as colonial-era archive images, Susie Wong’s series of pencil tracings juxtaposes two sets of rural landscapes with quotations from Joseph Conrad. In the drawings The land remains where God had put it; but white men they come and in a little while they go (2012), it is unclear where the recorded terrain of the East Indies ends and where the artist’s own recollections of West Java, inflected by eighteenth-century Romantic ideals of the picturesque, begin. Memory here is a conjuring of both material and historical traces. These drawings are as precarious in their nostalgia for an imagined past as they are revealing about our subjective framing of nature and the ideological power of the image to territorialise both land and desire. In a different take on the notion of trace, Robert Zhao’s How To Make A Tree Disappear As Nature Intended III (2015) sands down the trunk of a Banyan tree that once stood in the carpark behind the Substation and ended up being sacrificed to make way for a university building. The collected sawdust spreads across the gallery

facing page, top Geraldine Kang, By Unit of Measurement III, 2016, 20 × 569 cm, PVC sticker on Katz board. Courtesy the artist

floor and gathers into a miniature landform on a tabletop, a gesture that returns the tree back towards its natural source. How long would it take for a tree to crumble to dust in nature? It’s hard to say, but we can read the act of sanding down as a form of acceleration. At its most engaging, Each Blade… balances sentiment with commentary by allowing content to be mediated by association and interpretation. But sometimes its eagerness to provide direct responses to public discourse veers close to being didactic. Sharda Harrison and Sean Harrison’s Letter to Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, Mr Masagos Zulkifli (2016), for example, addresses head-on the Cross Island Line debate by printing out their email correspondence with the authorities. Without the artists’ accompanying performance, which took place once during the exhibition, it is difficult to read these letters other than in a documentary manner. Chu Hao Pei’s mixed-media installation Developing MacRitchie (2015) is an immersive recreation of the reserve’s forested environment, complete with walking paths and warning signs. Alongside this, the artist gives voice to the reserve’s wild inhabitants in a series of documentary-style videos in which the creatures argue against human intervention – an ill-judged piece of anthropomorphology. As an exhibition that also seeks to be a forum, Each Blade… oscillates between the figurative and the literal in a bid to take the conversation beyond art. In a place where ecology often comes second to economy, there is an argument for art to speak more forthrightly, without poetry. But in this mixed bag of a show, at least, the most effective works are also the most affective, with the capacity to address an emotive subject on more levels than one. Guo-Liang Tan

facing page, bottom Robert Zhao, How To Make A Tree Disappear As Nature Intended III, 2016, 100kg of sawdust, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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Autumn 2016

Degenerate Art Art Space Pool, Seoul 23 June – 14 August In 1937 the Nazi government famously organised an exhibition titled Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) to showcase modern art it deemed injurious to the German soul and lacking in any artistic merit. On the walls were slogans denouncing the works, such as ‘nature as seen by sick minds’ and ‘an insult to German womanhood’. Some eighty years later, in Seoul, Art Space Pool is staging its own playful parody, curated by Sohyun Ahn, to showcase the new ‘degenerate’ art of contemporary Korea. Ahn says three aspects of the 1937 show had inspired her. Firstly, contemporary viewers would hardly find the artworks from the original exhibition to be as controversial as the Nazis once did; in fact, they are rather traditional in form and content, which reveals the distance between contemporary reception and a later viewership. Secondly, the derisive text labels had detailed arguments condemning the art’s ‘immorality’, charges that are still being levelled at contemporary art in Korea today. Lastly, its chaotic display in Munich’s former Institute of Archaeology – dark narrow rooms, noisy slogans – had a sophisticated,

postmodern air that seems up to date even in 2016 Seoul. Featuring nine artists, the exhibition showcases 50 artworks containing varied subjects such as sex, politics and terrorism. The presentation is deliberately haphazard. Some paintings and sculptures are hung from the ceiling and some videos are projected onto rough walls at random heights. Another reference to the 1937 presentation comprises critical texts stuck next to the artworks. For example, Okin Collective’s video installation Operation – For Something White and Cold (2015) shows its members clearing the streets of snow with slogan-less pickets. The text label accuses them of ‘disguising their harmful intention’ to instigate communism. The evidence is a pile of red pickets next to the video. The text goes on to encourage viewers to watch the video carefully for signs of super-subtle political undertones. In the meantime, Jang Pa’s Lady-X (2015) paintings are accused of featuring ‘meat-like pinkish female bodies and embarrassing postures ready for sexual pleasure, flamboyant colours and violent lines’. Indeed, female

Jang Pa, My Little Riot Girl, 2015, oil on canvas, 182 × 227 cm. Courtesy the artist

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subjects are painted with their legs spread, and with breasts and vulvas exposed. Because the canvases are stacked one over the other, the viewer is forced to move around to sneak a look. The artist, the text continues, is ‘stimulating our voyeurism and forcing us to admit our dirty mind’. In this way, the presentation implicates the viewer as well. Jang’s subjects are not passive but are meeting our eyes, maximising tensions. Woonghyun Kim’s Space Invaders (2014) is a single-channel video-compilation of footage from the 9/11 attacks. The clips are all extremely degraded on the screen. Those who jumped from the burning buildings are just pixels, which gives the work the look of the 1970s arcade game the title suggests. The text describes his work as ‘information in disorder’, expressing the ‘typical attitude of an anarchist who fantasizes dilapidation of social orders’. So what do the combination of text, funky display and artworks achieve? It stimulates the viewers’ minds to contemplate whether art can actually be propaganda and trigger potential change around it. In this way, what seems like an ambitious trial actually serves to reinforce the social role of art in contemporary Korea. Tiffany Chae

Shooshie Sulaiman Malay Mawar Kadist, Paris 11 June – 31 July In the 2014 Alan Rickman film, A Little Chaos (which, in France, took the typically overliteral title of Les Jardins du Roi), Kate Winslet plays a gardener in seventeenth-century France, hired by Louis XIV’s landscape architect André Le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts) to help design the gardens at Versailles. In an early scene, on her way to her first interview with Le Nôtre, Winslet’s Sabine de Barra is caught adjusting the position of a potted plant – evidence, in the film’s narrative, of an anarchic streak that will eventually draw her to the attention of the king (played by Rickman himself). Malaysian artist Shooshie Sulaiman, a keen gardener, watched A Little Chaos just before starting her residency at the Kadist Art Foundation. ‘It is not a film on everyone’s lips for critical value,’ she notes in an interview on the gallery’s website. But watching it nurtured in Sulaiman ‘a sense of marvel towards a model of gardening from a culture different from my own’. For her exhibition, Sulaiman has transformed the gallery itself into a garden, with woodchip strewn across the floor, which is in turn punctuated by geometric planters filled with grass and rose beds. She describes the installation, in that same interview, as an ‘experimentation with this idea of controlling nature’. The arrangement of the garden becomes a way

of exploring, and setting into dialogue, two very different conceptions of this contest with the soil: the French approach, exemplified by the gardens at Versailles, and the tradition Sulaiman grew up with in Malaysia, and that she applies to her own garden at home. Seen through that lens, we can grasp two very different visions of the world and one’s place in it. Most of the gallery’s floorspace is taken up by arrangements of turf according to patterns derived from a cross-section of the mangosteen fruit, an important symbol for the individual’s relationship with the cosmos in Malay culture. But removed from that cultural context, it seems like just another motif, akin to topiary at Versailles. The symbol has literally become a box for enclosing nature. Most poetically, in a detail that could easily be missed on a brief visit, one of the rose boxes set against the wall of the gallery contains a hybrid plant: a cutting from a dying bush at the grave of the artist’s mother in Johor State has been delicately grafted to the stem of a local rose plant. Perhaps their cultural differences, in combination, will make the union stronger. Brian Eno used to have a line of patter about composers of music ceasing to think of themselves as being like architects and picturing themselves instead as being more like gardeners.

He framed the process of making a new work in terms of the careful planting of well-selected seeds, nurturing their development, but ultimately sitting back to watch how they grow. There’s something of this approach in Sulaiman’s installation at Kadist – most explicitly in the half-dozen portraits, painted on paper with a mix of soil and water for paint, which Sulaiman has buried (or in some cases, only half-buried) in the planters throughout the gallery. Another 30 of these have been given to volunteers to bury in public green spaces throughout Paris. At the end of the show, at least some will be exhumed, the marks gained and lost during their burial having become an indistinguishable aspect of them. They will be products of a collaboration with nature’s unpredictable forces of which Eno would have approved. But for Sulaiman, it’s not really about the final object that either gets dug up or doesn’t, but rather what she calls ‘an aesthetic experience from the experimentation of self, feeling and thinking’. More than that, Sulaiman’s installation materialises the irrepressibility of culture. Like introducing ‘a little chaos’ into the rigidly structured world of the gardens at Versailles, bringing a garden into a Parisian gallery transforms the work of art into an open, living system, an object of care as much as planning. Robert Barry

Malay Mawar, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy Kadist Art Foundation, Paris

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Beili Liu Where Winds Are Gaining Speed Hå gamle prestegard, Nærbø 4 June – 28 August A renovated rectory and sixteenth-century barn in a farming area on the flat and rocky coast of Rogaland (the county that is the centre of Norway’s petroleum industry) is hardly the place you’d expect to find a cultural centre, let alone a cultural centre hosting a site-specific installation by a US-based Chinese artist that responds to the particularities of this rugged, glaciated landscape. Yet all of those things are here. On the one hand you could say that’s symptomatic of the fashionable ubiquity of contemporary art as the representative of a perceived globalised era of dislocated and ever-mutable identity (as opposed to the obsession with immutable identity that characterises most of the dominant political ideologies of 2016); on the other, that it speaks to art’s potential to articulate some sort of universal language (yep, let’s take it all back to the pre-Babel era). Which is to say that it’s probably both. At Hå gamle prestegard, the landscape is almost inseparable from the collection of buildings that make up the institution. The minimal relation between land, sea and sky dominates the location, and it’s a relief that

Liu has neither tried to ignore nor compete with the setting of this work. Perhaps that’s because she has a certain familiarity with the place, having previously created installations here in 2011; but more than that, it’s a reminder that contemporary art can sometimes be a matter of the simple execution of a poetic response to the world around us. (And hey, how often do you get that kind of romanticism in a magazine like this one?) Born in Jilin, in northeast China, Liu is currently based in Austin, Texas. Housed on the windowless top floor of the no-less-large barn that adjoins the main art centre, Where Winds Are Gaining Speed consists of a series of threads wrapped in cyanotype angling down from the wood-beamed gabled roof to a series of rocks of various sizes (but human-scaled – of sizes equating to heads through to palms), which look like they were lifted from the shoreline outside and arranged on the floor in a way that echoes the coastline. The pieces of cyanotype (a material that was once commonly used to create photograms of leaves and other biological materials), made blue by exposure to local sunlight (in the days before

the exhibition), give the threads the appearance of a simple, almost childishly pictogrammatic drawing of rainfall. And that’s an effect that is further enhanced by a series of spotlights on the roof, which cause shadows to be cast by the threads onto the floor in such a way that they appear as a secondary charcoal rendering of the same effect (and in this regard the slightly rough edges given to the threads by the cyanotype is a definite aid). If this sets in motion thoughts about how we capture or imagine the changing seasons of nature, it’s only enhanced by the presence of stones that are smoothed and shaped by millennia of elemental processes of the type that the threads seem to represent. Consequently, Where Winds Are Gaining Speed comes across as an attempt to capture the eternal (the rocks) and the ephemeral (sunlight, wind, rain), and their geological relationship to each other, while at the same time retaining the opposing and essential natures of both. Add to that the mix of China, America, Norway; photography, drawing, sculpture, installation; and it’s genuinely a pleasure to see something that could potentially be so alien seem right at home. Nirmala Devi

Where Winds Are Gaining Speed (detail), 2016, paper, thread, cyanotype, glacier stones, dimensions variable. Courtesy Hå gamle prestegard, Nærbø

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Tromarama One Park West, Liverpool 9–31 July I’ve always wanted to visit a haunted house. For its first UK exhibition, Indonesian collective Tromarama takes on the role of a naughty poltergeist by animating various household objects. The resulting installation – in addition to its studied reflection of the repetitive tasks of domesticity, the ‘stuff’, sentimental or not, that we hoard, and the similar, everyday objects bought and stored on shelves and under beds across the world – is tremendous fun. Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans and Ruddy Hatumena have invaded a real, inhabited new-build apartment, installing their DIY-esque videoworks throughout. Stop-motion animations made from HD photographs of toy trains and Russian dolls twirl on the living-room TV screen (Pilgrimage, 2011); an assortment of table lamps have a party (Wattt?!, 2010) on a screen in the washing-machine cupboard. The exhibition is largely silent, except for some occasionally heard and very merrily hummed tunes coming from a film and attached headphones in the hall. The exhibition has been staged concurrently with Liverpool Biennial and the apartment is open to visitors who book hourly tours at the nearby Open Eye Gallery (who present the show, curated by Ying Tan, alongside Hong Kong’s Edouard Malingue Gallery). From there, we are escorted to the apartment, which is situated on the Liverpool waterfront. Taking the lift up

six floors, and politely replacing shoes with slippers in the hallway, one enters an unassuming, rather bland flat: white walls, black leather sofas and wooden floors; this could be anywhere. I’m told that we are only allowed access while the homeowner is at work, from where he returns in the early evening. As I creep from room to room, anxious that the owner of the flat might return, the saying ‘while the cat’s away, the mice will play’ comes to mind. Tromarama has anthropomorphised unremarkable objects, transforming them into sweet characters that come alive when their human cohabitant is absent. The artists have also made us into voyeurs; not just of someone’s private space, which is a powerful experience in itself, but also, and unexpectedly, of the mass-produced, mundane things we all buy for our homes, no matter what country we live in (Ikea items feature prominently). We watch them play, and we also, quietly, admire their form and function. In the bedroom, Intercourse (2015), a brazenly titled live-action video, is shown on two flatscreen TVs positioned at either end of the bed. An electric fan features on the first screen, seemingly blowing air at a series of objects on the second: tickling napkins, the pages of a Yellow Pages directory and sheets of bubble wrap so that they quiver. When the fan stops on one

screen, the objects cease moving on the other. Their prominent placement in this personal space – we’re forced to stand a little too close to the bed – affirms the odd feeling of intrusion. The filmed objects are, after all, presented as if they are enjoying a private moment. Back to the living-room, and Unsettled (2015) and Living Room (2015) hang on the walls: two large, iPhone-ratio photographs overlaid with fairly emotionless, noncommittal text that, thanks to the lenticular print technique used here, changes according to where you are standing. Take a few steps and ‘I see what you see’ becomes ‘I feel what I feel’. Employing this holographic, old-fashioned media set into a recognisable, smartphone shape, these last works seem to watch us: moving slightly as we move, distant and artificial in tone, and to all appearances echoing a presence in the space. Which, one could say, is what objects do. TVs, tablets, laptops – things created in response to human need and behaviour, scattered around the home and assimilated into every part of life. Some of our most relied-upon possessions have integrated cameras, meaning there is the real possibility of being watched. Tromarama has successfully, via a clever combination of animism and setting, gently switched the perspective from our owning objects to objects owning us. Laura Robertson

Intercourse (detail), 2015, two-channel video, sound, 4 min 10 sec. Courtesy the artists

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Bhupen Khakhar You Can’t Please All Tate Modern, London 1 June – 6 November Like many of his paintings, Bhupen Khakhar’s Barber Shop (1973) features a central male figure looking out impassively at the viewer. The barber stands over his customer, who we see in profile looking towards a mirror at the righthand side of the picture. Yet the reflection in the mirror, as in Manet’s A Bar at the FoliesBergère (1882), offers a skewed reflection at the wrong angle, and forms a second disembodied face looking back at the viewer, a ghostly echo of the barber. Awkwardness; isolated, downbeat figures; disjointed, flattened pictorial space and a certain hallucinatory quality are all typical attributes of the idiosyncratic oeuvre of Khakhar. He emerged during the late 1960s as part of a generation of Indian painters who went to art school in Baroda and who rejected the prevailing trend to paint in the manner of the School of Paris (most notably seen in the Progressive Artists Group). Khakhar did not look to Paris or New York as the preceding generation had done and instead focused on Indian everyday life, particularly in what he called his ‘trade paintings’ from the early 1970s (such as Barber Shop). You Can’t Please All, this large survey of his work

at Tate Modern, has a strong selection of these in its second room, each filled with its own visual curiosities. Janata Watch Repairing (1972) shows a watch repairer diligently at work. A row of clocks on the back wall all put the time roughly at half past one, but framing the picture, and painted out of scale, are two watches with totally different times. From their position and size, they could be depictions of watches painted on the walls of the watchmaker’s shop. Or they might simply indicate something hinted at with the mirror in Barber Shop – the presence of overlapping realities. During the early 1970s Khakhar still tried to hide his homosexuality, although fellow artists were aware. Later on in the decade Khakhar was more open about his sexuality, and his paintings move on to expressing it. Yet there is no joyous release in his works that accompany this increased openness. You Can’t Please All (1981), seen as the artist’s public statement on his sexuality, depicts a naked man on a balcony watching a scene unfold beneath him that references Aesop’s fable of a man and a boy taking a donkey to market, and in their attempt to satisfy the comments of passersby,

inadvertently drowning the unfortunate animal. The work is rather mysterious and restrained, the central figure, like so many of Khakhar’s figures before he came out, isolated. Later paintings, after Khakhar suffers from cataracts, have looser handling, and works such as In the Coconut Groves (1983), In a Boat (1984) and Party (1988) display a more active sense of purpose. The men in Khakhar’s paintings finally stop looking so isolated and start looking like they are having some serious fun. In truth the two rooms of the exhibition at Tate Modern that focus on the trade paintings and the works from the 1980s would have made a strong, coherent exhibition. However, a desire to pack as much as possible into six rooms, some intensely painted exhibition walls for backdrop and the presence of vitrines containing written texts by Khakhar combine to give this particular exhibition a physical claustrophobia that does not help with unravelling this most conceptually claustrophobic of painters. A decent effort by Tate Modern in its ongoing attempt to be more international, but one suspects Khakhar would have only given the curatorial team a B+ for their efforts. Niru Ratnam

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Nasreen Mohamedi The Met Breuer, New York 18 March – 5 June The work of Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) seems both a textbook example of the complex fusion of intellectual, cultural and personal experience that constitutes international Modernism, and an ideal opportunity, particularly as one of the inaugural offerings at the newly opened Met Breuer, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art to demonstrate how it might expand both the museum’s and the public’s understanding of the ‘global’, the ‘local’ and the ‘individual’. Born in Karachi before the partition of the subcontinent and raised in Bombay, Mohamedi followed a degree course at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London between 1954 and 1957, and studied printmaking in Paris during the early 1960s. She travelled extensively in the Gulf (her family maintained a business in Bahrain); spent time at the Bhulabhai Desai Institute, a centre of the avant-garde in Bombay; and taught at the prestigious Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda from 1972 until 1988. She worked almost exclusively on paper and predominantly in greys and blacks. During the 1960s she made drawings and watercolours in which spidery lines articulate plantlike forms, or soft-edged planes abut and overlap.

The influence of Paul Klee and Henri Michaux, as well as of Indian painter V.S. Gaitonde, with whom she was close, is clear. In 1970 she began drawing vertical and diagonal lines across horizontal registers, creating complex illusions of spatial rhythms and perspectival shifts. In later works, parallel lines, often on the diagonal, appear to float in an indeterminate pictorial space. Mohamedi’s break into geometric abstraction was sudden and anomalous, especially in India, where modern art was mostly figurative. Her work is clearly self-referential and personal – with particular pathos, as she suffered from Huntington’s disease and struggled to draw with precision. Any resemblance to ‘Western’ minimalism seems to be coincidental. Eschewing social and geographic clichés of centre and periphery, the Met survey presents the oeuvre in corridorlike spaces with wall texts emphasising its chronological and formal development, arguing, in effect, that it must be taken on its own terms. Those terms are set not only by the work’s physical presence but also by its context. While Mohamedi, according to several catalogue essays, spoke little about her art and left little archival material, she did

keep diaries rich in clues as to her wide-ranging erudition and personal spirituality (she was widely read in European philosophy and Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic religious texts). Entries include mentions of the Zen gardens of Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, and of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Irwin, as well as aphoristic snippets such as ‘full moon a perfect circle complete serenity’. She also took photographs of, among other subjects, desert landscapes and Mughal monuments that reveal an intense interest in light and shadow, perspective and line. The catalogue explores some of this material, but aside from a brief reference to Sufism and Islamic aesthetics in an introductory wall text, formalism drives the show. Mohamedi’s photographs are scattered through the galleries and appear more as modifiers for the drawings than as an aesthetically complete and complementary pursuit. Three diaries are also displayed, but in low cases, which makes them difficult to see. Their contents remain almost completely unexplored. These curatorial decisions evince an old-fashioned reading that limits understanding of the work to a small-bore, teleological pursuit of pure geometric abstraction. Joshua Mack

Untitled, c. 1975, ink and graphite on paper, 24 × 24 cm. Sikander and Hydari Collection

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Books

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Human Acts by Han Kang, trans Deborah Smith Portobello Books, £12.99 (softcover) Gwangju, South Korea: people died for democracy in May 1980. After the assassination of president Park Chung Hee in October 1979, a military coup led by Chun Doo Hwan (who served as the official president from September 1980 to February 1988) sparked unrest among university students across the country. On 15 May 1980, around 70,000 students from 30 different universities staged demonstrations in the city of Seoul, protesting against increasing censorship and a lack of freedom in education. Three days later, on 18 May, 600 students gathered in a similar protest in the centre of Gwangju. Some threw stones at the 7th Special Forces Brigade stationed there. The army’s response was to bludgeon, arrest and open fire. Following this, thousands more civilians were moved by the violence of the armed forces to join the pro-democracy protest, taking up arms themselves in a city-scaled insurrection. Official figures from the Korean government state that 200 people were killed, but other sources suggest that the number might be more like 2,000. Today, families of victims are still searching for the truth about the deaths and disappearances of the lost. In the seven chapters of Han Kang’s newly translated literary nonfiction, seven experiences are obliquely connected to one: that of fifteen-

year-old Dong-ho. Following his search for a friend who went missing after the May 18 attack, we meet other people, whose stories are told, sometimes indirectly, over the following chapters. Dong-ho, his unnamed mother, Jeong-dae, Eun-sook, Jin-su, Seon-ju, ‘the Prisoner’ and ‘the Writer’ – they can’t be called characters because the book is based on archival material and conversations with real people. Each chapter is carefully positioned, told not just for the sake of maintaining the web of tied experiences, but because each name represents something much broader: the limits to which the human body can suffer and the point at which a soul breaks. The book tells of the fight for democracy, of military violence and of government censorship through the stories of individuals and their relationships with one another. But what gives Human Acts such profound weight is that Han Kang addresses the trauma from these accounts with the kind of brutal honesty they deserve. The emotional and physical scars of the people who survived the Gwangju Uprising remain etched in the back of my mind long after I finish reading it. From the first chapter, Han establishes the reader’s role as participant and observer. Using a second-person narrative, ‘you’ become Dong-ho and you are caught in the middle of

the uprising. You appear in other chapters too, moving through different bodies, watching and listening as people struggle, disintegrate, lose hope, stop living. Through it all, the dichotomy of the soul and body pervades: ‘When the body dies, what happens to the soul?’ Dong-ho asks. ‘How long does it linger by the side of its former home?’ Han doesn’t spare the reader the explicit and the traumatic (the Prisoner’s chapter, in particular). The detail with which she describes decaying bodies, mutilation, broken souls and grief is at once emetic and – though curiously and to great effect, distanced – almost objective. If the last chapter, which presents Han’s own connection to and research into the web of relationships that comes before, seems like it might be in danger of wrapping the various narratives up a little too neatly, there is one story conspicuously left out. The recurring image of a girl’s rotting, unidentified and unclaimed body (whose origins, we learn, were the inspiration for the book) becomes a universal trope for the human capacity to perform great acts of violence – and to continue to commit them over and again. A symbol of ‘many thousands of deaths, many thousands of hearts’ worth of blood’, Human Acts hurts to read. Fi Churchman

Self-organised edited by Stine Hebert and Anne Szefer Karlsen, translated into Korean by Eunbi Jo, Hyo Gyoung Jeon, Gahee Park Mediabus, $16 (softcover) Recently, Seoul has seen the launch of several nonprofit art spaces run by individual artists or curators, such as Space Nowhere and Hapjungjigu. In this climate of lively private initiative in the arts, the publication of writings on selforganisation translated into Korean is timely. Independent arts producers seeking creative ways to challenge the dominance of existing museums, institutions and biennales will find plenty of food for thought here. Originally published (in English) in 2013 by Open Editions (London) and Hordaland Art Centre (Bergen), Self-organised was conceived as a response to challenging economic circumstances and a lack of confidence in public art institutions. It features a diverse set of discourses with a variety of geographical perspectives offered by a wide range of contributors:

museum directors such as Mathaf’s Abdellah Karroum and the Van Abbemuseum’s Charles Esche, artists such as London-based Céline Condorelli (whose contribution is a collaboration with an academic, Johan Frederik Hartle), critics such as Norway’s Jonas Ekeberg and Berlin- and Oslo-based Jan Verwoert, and Moscow-based art historian Ekaterina Degot. Given the subtlety and diversity of the selection, the book does not fall back on convenient binaries of ‘alternative’ or ‘nonprofit’ versus museum, institution versus noninstitution and economy versus antieconomy. Instead, self-organisation is an evolving concept. The book contains several histories of nonprofit artist-run spaces, namely L’appartement 22 in Rabat, Vector in Iaşi and Ersta Konsthall in Stockholm. More fundamentally, a group

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of artists, Anthony Davies, Stephan Dillemuth and Jakob Jakobsen, posit a sort of manifesto that asserts there is no future for individual creative producers unless they self-organise against the current flows of neoliberalism. The text as manifesto itself constitutes their self-organised activism. The book is translated into Korean not only linguistically but also on cultural and social levels, and its publication reflects the palpable need for self-organisation in the field of Korean contemporary art 15 years after the first generation of alternative spaces and artist communities were set up here. The more explicit discourses, complete with concrete applications to the Korean setting, constitute a direct appeal to individuals to initiate self-organised activities. Hyo Gyoung Jeon

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Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century by Gideon Rachman Bodley Head, £20 (hardcover) The basic premise of Gideon Rachman’s journalistic long-view of the political relationship between Asia and the West is as follows: by 2025 two thirds of the world’s population will live in Asia; large populations power upswings in economic might (which in turn translates to military clout); there’s a distinct danger that should Asia, and specifically China, overtake the West, specifically America, in terms of its economic and military power (or rather when it does so), the world will fall into a so-called Thucydides trap, an estimation of the certainty of war when an established power is challenged by a rising one (in 12 out of 16 cases since 1500 this is deemed to have been the case). The cogs have already been set in motion, warns Rachman (whose day job is the chief foreign affairs columnist at the Financial Times). In a book that is really more about China’s relationship with the West than Asia’s as a whole (the chapters on Japan and Korea, Southeast Asia and India in essence study those countries’ and regions’ relation to the West by way of China), Rachman notes that China is now the world’s largest economy in terms of purchasing power (according to the IMF; India and Japan

take up the third and fourth positions behind the US); China is increasingly confident in the various territorial claims contested by its neighbours (which, given Washington’s pact of military support to both the Philippines and Japan, could ignite conflict in either the South China or East China Seas); and has made strategic moves to consolidate both its regional and global dominance (in the case of the latter, not least by establishing itself as the African continent’s largest trading partner and key investor). To turn one’s attention to the other side, it hardly needs noting the belligerence with which the US will guard its superpower status (‘America has grown accustomed, psychologically and politically, to being the first among equals on the global stage,’ as Kurt Campbell, the former American assistant secretary of state for Asia immodestly puts it). Nonetheless, the 2015 formation of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, a financial institution that aims to support the building of infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region, initiated by and based in Beijing, to which the UK, Germany, South Korea and others signed up, risking the ire of

Washington, was – Larry Summers, Obama’s former treasury secretary, bemoans – ‘the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system’. While this book’s title suggests there might be some discussion of a cultural pivot to the East, mirroring the economic and political one underway, Rachman’s perhaps paranoid warnings of war (one that will make the various Middle East conflicts look like a ‘sideshow’, he claims) leave little room for such matters. Either way, he is surely accurate in his assessment that the wind is blowing in China’s favour and the era of America’s post-Second World War dominance is coming to an end. The soft power of popular culture and the arts, which goes hand in hand with money and military might, could, if Rachman’s analysis proves correct, usher in a wholesale realignment not just of the world, but also of how we think about the world. In the Autumn 2015 issue of ArtReview Asia the theorist Sun Ge refers to the ‘fūdo’ character of Asia, the ‘particular natural geographical space that bears the weight of political, historical and spiritual culture’. As Asia’s power spreads, will its fūdo follow? Oliver Basciano

Qiu Zhijie: Unicorns in a Blueprint edited by Defne Ayas Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, £15 (softcover) Qiu Zhijie’s Tattoo 1 (1994), in which the artist is photographed with the Chinese character for ‘no’ painted in red ink across his body and onto the wall behind him has become one of the most iconic works of contemporary Chinese art. The latest stage in the artist’s exploration of signs, codes and systems, is Qiu’s ink-based art maps, which reimagine domains in which boundaries between objective and subjective, past and present, fictional and real are wiped away. But just as cartography can never achieve complete objectivity, neither are Qiu’s art maps based entirely on his wilful subjectivity; instead he pursues a solid representation of universal values and realities. Comprising four texts, this booklet, recently published in Europe and out this month in the US, builds on Qiu’s 2012 exhibition at the Witte de With, Rotterdam, in order to focus attention on four of the artist’s maps, viewed in detail and from a variety of angles. Art historian Eugene Y. Wang contextualises The Map of Reactivation against a rich historical background; curator Charles Esche compares The Map of Utopia with the type of map

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one usually sees in science-fantasy literature. Curator Chus Martínez dialectically analyses The Map of Total Art with knowledge and empathy. The book ends with a personal take from artist duo Bik Van der Pol: a story that connects The Map of Inter-city Pavilion, an unnamed collector and that collector’s community. It is difficult to discuss Qiu’s works without mentioning the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk, both in reference to the all-encompassing worlds he maps and to his work as chief curator for the 9th Shanghai Biennale, in 2012, where his Map of Reactivation became the conceptual basis for the entire exhibition. Indeed, ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ might be the most frequently used word in this book (after ‘Qiu Zhijie’ and ‘map’). And yet none of the maps the writers consider is rendered in its totality (a foldout poster of a fifth map, The Map of the Third World, is included); rather we are presented with fragments accompanying the analytical texts: any overarching narratives are cut up. Moreover as hard as it apparently is to avoid invoking the word gesamtkunstwerk, it is, on the evidence here, even harder to come up with

ArtReview Asia

anything new to say about its application. Even the seemingly rebellious ‘anti-gesamtkunstwerk’ methodology proposed by Wang is not so much a new notion as a new name for an old thing. In an introductory text, Defne Ayas, director of Witte de With, acknowledges the inherent awkwardness of such a Western reading of Chinese contemporary art and the paradox of an art market that desires Chinese art to be both specific and universal at the same time. And yet in many ways Qiu is the ideal type of Chinese artist for Witte de With or other institutions and biennials. The universality embedded in his works (in spite of the Chinese references they contain), and his mild political stances (if there are any), make him a safe choice both inside and outside China. Just as a construction such as ‘anti-gesamtkunstwerk’ can never separate itself from the thing against which it is defined, the exhibition and the book never overcome the problems mentioned above, but in this case that is a consequence of the very nature and methodology of Qiu’s works (and of course the global art market at large). Shuang Li

Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book by Shubigi Rao Rock Paper Fire, SG$52 (softcover) In one particularly breathless section of Pulp, we encounter Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Luther Blissett (both the multiple-user pseudonym taken by a number of artists since 1994, and the footballer), H.G. Wells, Jan Morris, Gustave Flaubert, Agatha Christie, Alberto Manguel, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ronald Reagan, T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida and Herodotus, not to mention the invasion of Iraq, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the nature of fact, the nature of fiction, common perceptions of truth and falsehood, the exploitation of their perceived objectivity by figures of authority, Mein Kampf, the Bible and Aldus Manutius’s fifteenth-century novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, together with an image illustrating Pope Alexander VII’s censored copy of the same. You’ll gather then that the first instalment of artist Shubigi Rao’s projected ten-year, five-volume publishing project is ambitious in scope. Notionally Pulp is about the history of book destruction, censorship and related forms of repression; and of the book as a form of resistance to the above. In practice it is part autobiography, part book of the film (the artist’s, of the

same title, from 2014), part pancultural history (from Babel to the present day, although not always in chronological order), a crazy clamber through various branches of knowledge and, all in all, an indulgent display of bibliophilia and infatuation with the writing of Borges, written in occasionally florid and overwrought prose featuring an unhealthy love of alliteration, anachronism, prolepsis and throwaway soundbites. In short it is precisely the kind of exercise with which only an artist (as opposed to a historian or novelist) could get away. And for that we should be grateful. ‘Language and culture are much more interesting than wars and monomaniacal generals and statesmen,’ Rao announces in her preface. ‘What I really wanted to write about is our species’ propensity for violence and our justifications for genocide. It’s a subject for someone stronger than me… so I choose the book as stand-in for people,’ she declares in her afterword. Moreover Rao can’t separate making books from making art (as an undergraduate, she confides, ‘I started making more books than artworks’), just as much as she cannot separate drawing from writing

(‘drawing shares with writing the action of the first articulation of abstract thought’), so in some respects, as a reader, you have the suspicion that her real subject is neither books nor people, but rather art – and more particularly her own art. Each of the five sections, or approaches to the subject, that constitute this book culminates in a drawn ‘interlude’, the dustjacket’s interior features a drawn world-map and there’s a strong sense throughout of the old modernist adage about form following function. Marginalia is held up as a locus for uncensored medieval thought; Pulp features a series of marginal notes handwritten by Rao. Similarly the trauma of book destruction is given an autobiographical framework by Rao as she locates traumatic moments in her own childhood in the double loss of her family library: the first time through (she thinks) robbery, the second following her parents’ divorce. And while Rao’s overarching theme may be the importance of (written) culture to a free and civilised society, it’s the reflections on her self that drive this most intriguing project along. Just two more years to volume two. Nirmala Devi

The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami, trans Allison Markin Powell Portobello Books, £12.99 (softcover) This English-language translation of Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami’s Furudōgu Nakano shōten (2005) follows the bestselling translation of her first novel, Strange Weather in Tokyo (2001), published in English in 2013. Also set in Tokyo, the newly translated narrative centres on Hitomi, an introverted woman in her twenties who works in a thrift shop owned by the charismatic Nakano, a hoarder of secondhand knickknacks and a man with great bargaining skills as well as a weakness for women. Together with Nakano’s sister Masayo, an artist and motherlike figure, and Takeo, who joins the shop as a delivery boy after being bullied at school, they make up a family of misfits.

The characters’ varying degrees of social skill lead to many stilted conversations, where either too little is said (this proves quite a challenge to the nascent love between Hitomi and Takeo) or too much (as when Nakano speaks bluntly of his sex life). Despite the refuge from society these characters seem to have found in each other, what permeates the pages of The Nakano Thrift Shop is their sheer loneliness, conveyed through descriptions of how they negotiate their ordinary daily lives. The writing ranges from contemplative, at times poetic, to somewhat superficial. The novel’s plot is thin: the drift of a young woman and a love story of sorts

Autumn 2016

runs as a thread through the book but becomes a frustratingly meagre link in the long chapters (these read more like a succession of short stories). Kawakami’s prose is elliptical and offbeat, intertwining dialogue, observation and narration sometimes to the point of confusion. Although the elusiveness of the characters and of the language they use with each other is initially intriguing to one willing to spend the time reading between the lines, Nakano and his entourage lack depth and reveal almost nothing about themselves. Saddled as well with an anticlimactic structure, the book quickly turns into a disconcerting, hermetic read. Louise Darblay

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For more on Orijit Sen, see overleaf

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Contributors

Roger Nelson

Ming Lin

is an art historian and independent curator based in Phnom Penh. He is currently completing a PhD at the University of Melbourne, researching modernity and contemporaneity in ‘Cambodian arts’ from 1955 to 2015. He recently spoke on 1960s Cambodian painting as part of the Histories of the Future (2016) exhibition at the National Museum in Phnom Penh. For this issue of ArtReview Asia he investigates how ideas pertaining to the past and the future dominate contemporary art in Cambodia.

is a writer-researcher whose work centres on themes of production, distribution and consumer culture. She has contributed to LEAP, ArtAsiaPacific, artagenda and Art in America, and is currently pursuing a masters in research architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. For this issue of ArtReview Asia she profiles the work of Kwan Sheung Chi.

Gu Ling is a writer, translator and editor based in Shenzhen. In 2013 she translated Curatorial Challenges: Correspondences between Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist and participated in the translation of Yan Lei’s 2012 monograph, What I Like to Do. She was commissioned by Van Abbemuseum to edit for Li Mu: Qiuzhuang Project, which was published in September 2015. She has been deputy editor of Randian since 2012 and continues to contribute to numerous magazines. For this issue of ArtReview Asia she reviews ContentAware, a solo exhibition by Miao Ying at MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai.

Guo-Liang Tan is a visual artist and writer based in Singapore. He works between painting, text and the moving image, dealing with issues of abstraction and intermateriality. He also curates and writes for various art journals, catalogues and websites. For this issue he reviews Each Blade of Grass Each Shrub Each Tree.

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 Writers Robert Barry, Tiffany Chae, Nirmala Devi, Gallery Girl, Paul Gladston, Paul Gravett, Gu Ling, Hyo Gyoung Jeon, Ming Lin, Roger Nelson, Taro Nettleton, Charu Nivedita, Clarissa Oon, Niru Ratnam, Laura Robertson, Edward Sanderson, Shuang Li, Guo-Liang Tan Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Benjamin McMahon, Orijit Sen

Clarissa Oon is an arts writer and former journalist from Singapore. Previously a Beijing-based China correspondent and then arts editor of The Straits Times, she is the author of Theatre Life! (2001), a book on the history of Singapore’s English-language theatre. For this issue of ArtReview Asia she writes on the novels of Indonesian literary star Eka Kurniawan.

Orijit Sen (preceding pages)

The son of a cartographer for the government, Indian cartoonist Orijit Sen (born 1963) and his family would be posted to a new location every few years. “Perhaps that developed in me an empathy for ‘outsiders’ and people who didn’t fit in,” Sen reflects. Comics have been likened to maps, of time as well as space, their grids and iconic graphics enabling readers to navigate a narrative. Whereas his father recorded his environments into official topographies, Sen would go on to chart the places and people around him into personal and often political stories. While devouring whatever home-produced or imported comics and political cartoons he could get his hands on, Sen also admired Satyajit Ray’s films, and “wanted to make comics that would offer the same kind of immersive atmosphere and detail”. The uncompromising American underground comix of Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman were a revelation when Sen discovered them during his graphic design studies. “I learned a lot from reading their stories, observing their styles and even copying them.”

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In 1990 Sen and his wife started a studio and store called People Tree in New Delhi to bring together designers, artists and craftspeople working on a genuinely equitable and collaborative platform, a model intended to improve on the prevailing one of a head worker telling the hand workers what to make. In 1994 Sen won a grant from Kalpavriksh, a Delhi-based environmental organisation, to create and publish his first full-length comic, documenting the building of the contentious Sardar Sarovar Dam across the Narmada River in Western India. He visited the valley for several weeks, researching, sketching and talking with residents who were being displaced by the development, and with activists protesting alongside them. Combining these stories with lyrical indigenous myths and sensitive greytoned drawings, the result is the passionately biased River of Stories, originally published in English and translated into Hindi in small photocopied batches, but to be republished as a revised edition next year. “I still meet people who tell me they read River of Stories years ago and it helped change the way

ArtReview Asia

they look at development, ecology and the rights of indigenous people in India,” says the artist. It is recognised by today’s Indian graphic novelists as the country’s first graphic novel. Sen digs into Indian history in his new Strip for ArtReview Asia about a heroic but little-known Dalit (untouchable) woman called Nangeli from Kerala in the early nineteenth century. This is the latest in Sen’s catalogue of shortform, often documentary comics, from his early slice-of-life series ‘Telling Tales’ in India Magazine (1995–7) to ‘The Girl Not from Madras’, with journalist and writer Neha Dixit, a true story about human trafficking published in First Hand: Graphic Nonfiction from India, an anthology Sen coedited earlier this year. Two new graphic novels are in gestation, while Sen also works ‘off the page’ on art projects. Since 2013 he has been collaborating with students from Goa University, where he is a visiting professor, to investigate one of Goa’s oldest marketplaces, in the ‘Mapping Mapusa Market’ project. Like father, like son: in all his work Sen keeps a keen sense of place. Paul Gravett

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Photo credits

Text credits

on the cover and on page 108 photography by Benjamin McMahon

Phrases on the spine and on pages 17, 51 and 87 come from the Book of Mountains and Seas, or Shan Hai Jing, a classic Chinese text that dates from the fourth century BC. Translation from Eric Serejski’s version, Innovations & Information, Inc, 2010

on pages 106 and 114 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Autumn 2016

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Off the Record “Look at this!” Max hands me a letter that’s as crumpled as his oncehandsome face. I adjust the wrap-front lapel on my Ong Shunmugam blue fitted dress and wave the letter away. “Don’t you want to read it? Yet another rejection! Art Basel Miami Beach this time. And I even concluded our application with a motivational quote from Donald Trump: ‘Anyone who thinks my story is anywhere near over is sadly mistaken’. I thought the Americans would love it. But now this…” His sad eyes and puffy features remind me of Cao Fei’s inflatable suckling pig House of Treasures. “Pull yourself together,” I snap. “Remember this Trumpster quote instead: ‘I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.’ This rejection from Art Basel Miami Beach, along with the previous rejections from Frieze, Art Basel, FIAC and the Armory only prove one thing: these Western art fairs don’t want the likes of us!” “But we are one of the finest galleries in the entire Gillman Barracks! How can they not want us?” His sadness has turned to anger, and I know I must channel this energy. “Come on, Max!” I say urgently, grabbing my Saint Laurent Monogramme leather shoulder bag. “Let’s race to a hotel rooftop bar where we can drink and powwow via Google Hangouts with four other great Asian art dealers!” Just three hours later, after waiting longer than expected for a taxi to rumble into Gillman Barracks, we find ourselves at Hooters in Clarke Quay. The lack of wifi means that we have four gallerists on our gallery collection of Nexus 5X phones. “We’re here because all of us fine gallerists have inexplicably been rejected by leading Western art fairs,” begins Max, speaking to all the phones. He drones on for a bit about how unfair it all is, to murmured assents, but as soon as he pauses for a mozzarella cheese stick, I seize my moment. “OK, losers!” I shout, to the consternation of the waitress in a tight vest-top who’s bringing us our pitcher of Tiger Beer. “Here’s the plan. You guys are going to be the Asian equivalent of Ernst Beyeler, Trudi Bruckner and Balz Hilt!” There’s general confused muttering on all four phones. “The three legendary dealers who set up Art Basel! Or you could see yourselves as the Asian equivalent of Colin de Land, Pat Hearn, Matthew Marks and Paul Morris, the four buccaneering art dealers who set up the Gramercy International Art Fair, which with time became the Armory!”

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There’s still muttering coming from one of the phones. “Look,” I reply firmly, “I just don’t know what happened to Balz Hilt. The point is that we’ve got to stop relying on the largesse of Westerners and make an art fair organically for ourselves. We must tell people that we came together regularly for meditation and together formulated the idea of an art fair made by Asians, for Asians. And for Emmanuel Perrotin, of course, whom we will offer an 80sqm booth at the front for free!” There’s a question from one of the phones next to Max, who seems happier now that the pitcher of beer has arrived. I nod at the phone and Max listens to it closely. “He is asking whether we can have it in a shopping mall.” I shake my head firmly. Max communicates this. “He is now asking whether we can just get the folk from Art Central to wheel into town, appoint some random white person as director and do that thing they have with house music in the entrance lobby?” I shake my head again firmly, then address Max and all four phones. “We will do this ourselves. And I have already picked the location!” There is an expectant silence. “It will be Art Petaling Jaya! It is one of the wettest cities in Malaysia, meaning we can replicate that vibe of Art Basel Hong Kong this year. Like Basel itself, it started off as a small humble town that no one visited. It’s at least 20 minutes away from the centre of Kuala Lumpur, meaning it has that Frieze New York vibe! Also, it is so authentically Asian that not even Hans Ulrich Obrist has visited it, which means we can get him over to do a talk about the urgency of democratic transition in nearby Myanmar!” I can sense the general excitement on the phones. Max is picking them up all at once. “Yes! They say yes!” shouts Max at me. “And Gallery Girl, while we will be the founders, it is only right that you become the inaugural director.” And with that, Max orders four Jägerbombs. I realise our adventure has just begun. Gallery Girl