ArtReview Asia Autumn 2017

Park Chan-kyong

Charu Nivedita on why, 70 years after independence, India today is far from free The uncommon sense of Anicka Yi

From Hitler and Thai diplomacy to Portuguese nuns and egg thong yod

ai weiwei, GarbaGe Container, 2015

gianfranco Baruchello - marcel duchamp, amuser, 1968

massimo de carlo, milan / Belgioioso septemBer 12, 2017 - octoBer 18, 2017 — opening: septemBer 11, 2017

yan pei-ming, napoleon CrowninG Himself emperor (detail), 2017

AI WEIWEI

GIANFRANCO BARUCHELLO, MARCEL DUCHAMP massimo de carlo, hong Kong septemBer 15, 2017 - octoBer 28, 2017 — opening: septemBer 14, 2017

massimo de carlo, london octoBer 04, 2017 - noVemBer 11, 2017 — opening: octoBer 03, 2017

info@massimodecarlo.com

YAN PEI-MING

@mdcgallery massimodecarlogallery

www.massimodecarlo.com

ANN VERONICA JANSSENS WIEBKE SIEM NOVEMBER 4 – DECEMBER 16, 2017 — POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

ART BERLIN SEPTEMBER 14 – 17, 2017 FRIEZE LONDON OCTOBER 5 – 8, 2017 FIAC OCTOBER 19 – 22, 2017 WEST BUND ART & DESIGN ART 021 NOVEMBER 10 – 12, 2017 ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH DECEMBER 7 – 10, 2017

LUCERNE

卢森

BEIJING

北京

Aldo Walker

Aldo Walker

Cheng Ran

程 然

2. 9. – 28. 10. 2017

2. 9. – 28. 10. 2017

Diary of a Madman 9. 9. – 22. 10. 2017

狂人日记

9. 9. – 22. 10. 2017

ARTISTS 艺术家 Ai Weiwei Aldo Walker Cao Yu Chen Fei Cheng Ran Andreas Golder Hu Qingyan L/B Li Gang Li Zhanyang Liu Ding Meng Huang Qiu Shihua

艾未未 曹雨 陈飞 程然 胡庆雁 李钢 李占洋 刘鼎 孟煌 邱世华

Tobias Rehberger Christian Schoeler 单凡 Shan Fan 邵帆 Shao Fan Anatoly Shuravlev Julia Steiner Not Vital 王兴伟 Wang Xingwei 谢南星 Xie Nanxing 鄢醒 Yan Xing 杨牧石 Yang Mushi 周思维 Zhou Siwei

Galerie Urs Meile Lucerne Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Lucerne, Switzerland T +41 (0)41 420 33 18, F +41 (0)41 420 21 69

麦勒画廊 卢森 瑞士卢森 Rosenberghöhe 4号, 邮编 6004 电话 +41 (0)41 420 33 18, 传真+41 (0)41 420 21 69

Galerie Urs Meile Beijing D10, 798 East Street, 798 Art District, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing, China

麦勒画廊 北京 中国北京市朝阳区酒仙桥路2号798艺术区798东街 D10 , 邮编100015

ARTFAIRS 博览会 West Bund Art & Design Shanghai, China November 10 – 12 Art Basel Miami Beach Miami, USA December 7 – 10

www.galerieursmeile.com galerie @ galerieursmeile.com

ZHONGGUO 2185 Curated by Victor Wang 21 September – 04 November 2017 Sadie Coles HQ 62 Kingly Street London W1B 5QN www.sadiecoles.com Lu Yang, Gong Tau Kite, 2016. Courtesy the artist.

Sadie Coles HQ

ArtReview Asia vol 5 no 3 Autumn 2017

Micromégas What with all the provocative rhetoric and even more provocative rockets flying about East Asia over the past few months, it will be no surprise that this issue of ArtReview Asia features a close look at one of South Korea’s most thoughtful and thought-provoking artists: Park Chan-kyong. Over recent years, through a series of quite remarkable video and slide works, Park has developed a unique way of examining the past (in terms of both history and art history) as a means of understanding and unfolding the complex issues that define the present and shape the future: crucially in a manner that speaks to a localised context while resonating with narratives grand and small across the world.

Echoes of this approach can also be found in the work of Thai artist Arin Rungjang, whose work focuses even more particularly on the role that apparently minor stories interweave no less importantly in the larger whole. Ultimately the works of both artists highlight the importance of valuing a plurality of perspectives and understanding different points of view: things that art, perhaps more than some of the specialist filters through which we engage with the world, is uniquely placed to do. Hey – that’s certainly one of the reasons why ArtReview Asia goes to all those shows that it lists on its fabulously extensive preview pages. Of course, ArtReview Asia isn’t suggesting that art is the cure for all the world’s social and political ills; it’s certainly not going to directly help with any of that. But looking at the stuff and thinking about it – whether or not the object of your reflection is seemingly good or bad – is certainly a way of training your mind to accept a plurality of worldviews and, perhaps more importantly, to develop the patience and tolerance to engage with them. Not that ArtReview Asia wants to go all hippy on you and suggest that looking at art is always some sort of transcendental meditation or fundamentally monkish pursuit. While it would love to think that a couple of biennials would be just the ticket to sort out Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, that’s not really the case. Maybe a ‘talks marathon’, though (art’s other voguish device)? Now that’s a different thing. ArtReview Asia

Perspective

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Art Previewed

Previews

by Nirmala Devi 21

Points of View

by Hu Fang, Charu Nivedita, Aimee Lin 37 Elmgreen & Dragset Interview by Nicole O’Rourke 46

page 28 Kenji Yanobe, Atom Suit Project – Desert, 1998, c-print, 50 × 50 cm. © the artist (exhibited in Japanorama, Centre Pompidou-Metz)

Autumn 2017

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Art Featured

Park Chan-kyong

by Aimee Lin 54

Arin Rungjang

by Adeline Chia 72

Anicka Yi

by Ming Lin 64

page 64 Anicka Yi, Escape From The Shade 1, 2016, epoxy resin, stainless steel, lightbulbs, digital clock interface, wire, 177 × 62 × 59 cm. Photo: Fabian Frinzel.

Courtesy the artist, 47 Canal, New York, and Fridericianum, Kassel

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Bernard Frize “Ule”, (detail) 2005. Acrylic and resin on canvas. 160 × 140 cm / 63 × 55 1/8 in. Photo: Claire Dorn. © Bernard Frize / ADAGP, Paris & SACK, Seoul, 2017

NEW YORK LOWER EAST SIDE

PARIS MARAIS

HONG KONG CENTRAL

SEOUL JONGNO-GU

TOKYO ROPPONGI

WIM DELVOYE

CHEN FEI

JOHN HENDERSON

BERNARD FRIZE

PAOLA PIVI

SEPTEMBER 9 - OCTOBER 29

SEPTEMBER 7 - OCTOBER 7

SEPTEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 11

AUGUST 30 - OCTOBER 21

AUGUST 26 - NOVEMBER 11

KLARA KRISTALOVA

JESPER JUST

SEPTEMBER 7 - OCTOBER 7

SEPTEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 11

XAVIER VEILHAN SEPTEMBER 7 - SEPTEMBER 23

Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 82

Books 102

Octopus 17: Forever Transformed, by Tristen Harwood The National: New Australian Art, by Mark Rappolt Patty Chang, by Li Bowen Wang Wei, Ko Sin Tung, by Li Qi Canton Express: Art of the Pearl River Delta, by Morgan Wong Noh Suntag, by Morgan Wong Tomás Saraceno, by Mark Rappolt Kryzstof Wodizco, by Mark Rappolt Chia En-Jao, by Guo Juan Tang Da Wu, by Adeline Chia Hiroshi Sugimoto, by Aimee Lin Rehearsals from the Korean Avant-Garde Performance Archive, by Fi Churchman Jennifer Tee, by Ben Eastham Minimalist Anyway, by Zehra Jumabhoy Jia Aili, by David Terrien

SouthEastAsia: Spaces of the Curatorial, edited by Ute Meta Bauer and Brigitte Oetker Black: An Artist’s Tribute, by Santosh Kumar Das The Battle for Home: The Memoir of a Syrian Architect,

by Marwa al-Sabouni Abandon, by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader, edited by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton The Art Museum (revised edition) THE STRIP 106 OFF THE RECORD 110

page 89 Noh Suntag, In Search of Lost Thermos Bottles (detail), 2010, inkjet pigment print, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Art Sonje Center, Seoul

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20th Century.

Contemporary.

Now. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening & Day Sales Evening Sale: 6 October 2017 Day Sale: 5 October 2017 Adrian Ghenie b. 1977 The Collector 4 oil on canvas 200 x 240 cm (78 3/4 x 94 1/ 2 in.)

Painted in 2009. © Adrian Ghenie, courtesy Pace Gallery

phillips.com

Viewing 29 September – 6 October 2017 30 Berkeley Square, London, W1J 6EX Enquiries contemporaryartlondon@phillips.com +44 20 7318 4050

形式力場

Curator Huang Du 策展人 黄篤

Public Opening 2017.9.30, 5－7pm Duration 2017.10.1－11.4

Venue Leo Gallery Shanghai

Shanghai | Hong Kong Ferguson Lane, SH 376 Wukang Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai 200031, China SOHO 189 Art Lane, HK 189 Queen's Road West, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong www.leogallery.com.cn

Art Previewed

I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history 19

Previewed Paola Pivi Perrotin Tokyo through 11 November

Sahej Rahal CCA Glasgow 16 September – 29 October

Cheng Ran Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing 9 September – 22 October

Jesper Just Perrotin Hong Kong through 11 November

Oku-Noto Triennale Suzu, Japan through 22 October

Zhang Hai’er SCoP, Shanghai 6 September – 30 October

Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 6 October – 7 January

Japanorama: New Vision on Art Since 1970 Centre Pompidou-Metz 20 October – 5 March

Alice Wang Capsule Shanghai through 18 October

2017 Nissan Art Awards BankART Studio NYK 16 September – 5 November

Tabaimo Hammer Museum, Los Angeles through 3 December

Tatzu Nishi YCC Yokohama 18 September – 5 November

Takashi Murakami Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow 29 September – 4 February

Hyper Real National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 20 October – 18 February Zhongguo 2185 Sadie Coles HQ , London 21 September – 5 November Céleste Boursier-Mougenot Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum through 12 November Occulture: The Dark Arts City Gallery Wellington through 19 November

Korea Artist Prize 2017 MMCA, Seoul 13 September – 18 February Yoo Geun-Taek Gallery Hyundai, Seoul through 17 September

Colonial Sugar City Gallery Wellington through 19 November

Culture City of East Asia 2017 Kyoto: Asia Corridor Contemporary Art Exhibition Nijo Castle, Kyoto Art Center through 15 October Aki Sasamoto Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo through 16 September Sakarin Krue-On Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok through 23 September

18 Alice Wang, Untitled, 2017, iron meteorite, 9 × 30 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Capsule Shanghai

Autumn 2017

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They all look the same. The seasonal-previewwriter’s rulebook states, categorically, that this last sentence is no way to begin a summary of exhibitions that you’re inviting readers to check out over the coming months. If there’s an equivalent manual for gallerists, then presumably that phrase has similar prohibitions relating to its use as a title for a commercial art exhibition. The thing about selling the contemporary is that you are required to feed your customers a steady diet of difference, uniqueness even; people never want ‘the same’. Nevertheless, They all look 1 the same is the title of Italian Paola Pivi’s latest exhibition at Perrotin in Tokyo. She’s a bit of a joker: her last exhibition at Perrotin New York was titled OK, you are better than me, so what? She presented a collection of her signature lifesize feathered polar bears in that show; she’s showing more polar bears here. They’re formed naturalistically out of urethane foam and covered, unnaturalistically, in feathers rather than fur.

2 That last gives them the appearance of a child’s

toy that’s been washed once too often (think Sebastian Flyte). And, weirdly, that makes them feel more familiar than an actual polar bear.

The artist herself, who lives in Alaska, considers the actual animals her ‘neighbours’. Often her bears look suitably depressed about that. After all, they’re unnaturally naturalised. They come in a variety of more-or-less garish colours and are frozen in a variety of poses that suggest dancing, sitting, slumping and sprawling.Overall they seem to contain equal measures of the surreal, the cartoonish and the sublime. The bears in the Tokyo show will be complemented by a series of kinetic sculptures featuring bicycle wheels adorned with various bird feathers.

The latter, we are told, are sourced in Japan (where, as it happens, Pivi’s work is also included in the ongoing Yokohama Triennale). Does that make them site specific? Multicultural?

Maybe multinational. Which leads us seamlessly over to Perrotin’s Hong Kong space, where there’s something different: Jesper Just’s

Continuous Monuments (Interpassivities). The title references influential late-1960s radical architects Superstudio’s (semi-ironic) proposal for a continuous, monotonous, grid-based urban form that would pass over or around fields, mountains, rivers and existing cities, and builds on the Danish artist’s interest in architecture and the effects of the built environment on social formation, which came to the fore during Intercourses, Just’s multichannel video installation for the Danish Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. The Hong Kong show also nods to Interpassivities, Just’s recent collaborative performance with the Royal Danish Ballet (with music by Kim Gordon), which took place this past March in Copenhagen. Featuring a mix of recorded and live material, it was based on the Jorge Luis Borges story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1946), itself based on a scene from Lewis Carroll’s final novel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1889), concerning an obsession with cartographic accuracy that escalates until the map is the

1 Paola Pivi, Too late, 2017, urethane foam, plastic, feathers, 234 × 173 × 87 cm. Photo: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy Perrotin, Tokyo

2 Jesper Just, Continuous Monuments (Interpassivities) (still), 2017, video.

Courtesy Perrotin, Hong Kong

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3 Huang Yong Ping, Theater of the World, 1993, mixed media, 150 × 270 × 160 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

4 Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Old People’s Home (detail), 2007, 13 lifesize puppets in electric wheelchairs. Courtesy the artists

same size as the territory. Asked if the map in question has ever been laid out, one of Carroll’s characters replies: ‘The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’ Expect some musing on the fluid interrelationships between reality and its representation then, and the ways in which environments shape the territory of things such as labour, relationships and gender.

Mapping a territory is certainly the theme 3 of the Guggenheim’s big autumn show, Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World. You’ll have observed a certain grandiosity (and remapping) in that schema – China as the centre of the world via a show in New York – which might have made Carroll’s mapmakers proud, but which also hints at the fact that this is a hugely ambitious project. Curated by the Guggenheim’s Alexandra Munroe with assistance from MAXXI’s Hou Hanru and UCCA’s Philip Tinari,

the exhibition maps out a temporal span starting at the end of the Cold War and ending with the rise of globalism (taking in two generations of conceptualist artists). In spatial terms it’s about China and – more ambitiously still – art’s role in anticipating ‘the sweeping social transformation that has brought China to the center of global attention’. In real terms it features work by 75 artists and collectives, ranging from Ai Weiwei (of course) to Zhou Tiehai (whose landmark nine-act film Will/We Must, 1997, cruelly skewering the ambitions and realities of China’s contemporary art scene at the time, together with a series of associated paintings, was recently on show at Shanghai’s Yuz Museum). Look out also for Huang Yong Ping’s Theatre of the World (1993), a cagelike structure in which thousands of live scorpions, beetles and ‘lesser’ insects will gradually devour each other over the course of the show. Who needs Mayweather vs McGregor? This shit is real. Or at least as real as it gets in an art gallery.

Autumn 2017

That said, things are even more real over in Canberra, at the National Gallery of Australia’s 4 Hyper Real exhibition, where the word ‘uncanny’ will doubtless be bounced around more times than a squash ball. More real than real is a ‘thing’ in Australian sculpture, so expect to be freaked out by works by Patricia Piccinini, Ron Mueck and Sam Jinks. The exhibition maps out sculpture produced between 1973 and the present day, and also samples from the oeuvres of Maurizio Cattelan and earlier pioneers, such as the late, great Duane Hanson, of the sculptural real.

Pick of the bunch, however, might be Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Old People’s Home (2007), in which 13 lifesize sculptures of world leaders (of a generation ago: think Yasser Arafat), aged and decrepit, engage in a version of automated dodgem in their motorised wheelchairs.

The faces may change, but the game does not…

Except the Chinese art game of course, which remains the flavour of the next few months, this time in London, where Sadie Coles HQ will stage

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‘All art is Magick,’ wrote the turn-of-theof ArtReview Asia for more on her), Sun Xun and century English occultist and sometime painter Tianzhuo Chen in that fertile soil.

Aleister Crowley (no stranger to Vedic philosAnd fertile it certainly is, for back in China, 6 Frenchman Céleste Boursier-Mougenot will ophy himself). Crowley took up the brush during first (unpublished) novel by Chinese sci-fi star be offering his own vision of posthumanism the First World War while in the US, campaignLiu Cixin. Best-known internationally for his at Shanghai’s Minsheng Museum. SONSARA ing for the German war effort – a move he later Three-Body Problem trilogy (2007–10), Liu wrote Zhongguo 2185 (China 2185) in the spring of 1989, (in the spirit of cultural exchange, the exhibition claimed was an infiltration at the behest of the title fuses the French word for sound – son – and the text has since circulated (in Chinese only) British secret services: Magick. Still, the earlier – an idea developed with the Sanskrit Samsāra on the Internet. The work itself concerns a young quotation is the jumping-off point for the City . in the Vedic Upanishads that denotes the world, 7 Gallery Wellington’s group exhibition Occulture: computer engineer’s visit to the Mao Mausoleum in the sense of the cyclical nature of existence) The Dark Arts, which aims at exploring the ways in Tiananmen Square (the story was written just before the protests), which leads to the virtual in which art has drawn on the occult and the will feature six sound installations. The exhibition seeks to tackle the twin issues of ‘how resurrection of the Chairman’s consciousness esoteric in order to explore alterity. On show, (along with those of five other dead individuals), humans co-exist with the artificial nature’ among other things, will be Kenneth Anger’s which in turn leads to the creation of an online and ‘building an ecology, imaging the world short film Lucifer Rising (1972; incidentally, but utopian revolution and republic, which begins after human’. What does that actually mean? because everything is connected, Anger met Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page when the pair were to affect ‘realworld’ China. The republic and The artist’s installation clinamen (2013), for the revolution eventually die out, leaving behind example, features a collection of variously bidding for a piece of Crowley memorabilia in a debate about that most fashionable of art sized white porcelain bowls, floating in London and convinced him to compose a soundtrack to the film; Anger later fell out with Page, subjects: posthuman alterity. Curator Victor an intensely blue-lined tank of water and Wang will be planting works by Yu Ji, Lu Yang, producing bell-like sounds as they randomly ending the project, and Page’s music for the film Nabuqi, Zhang Ruyi (see the spring 2017 issue clank into each other. was released only in 2012) and a wallpainting

5 Zhongguo 2185, a group exhibition of work by young Chinese artists, just in time for Frieze London. The exhibition’s title derives from the

5 Tianzhuo Chen, Scapegoat 01, 2015. © the artist. Courtesy Long March Space, Beijing

6 Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, clinamen, 2013. Courtesy the artist

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ArtReview Asia

天才帐篷

1335MABINI 3812 Gallery 3812画廊 Canton Gallery 广州画廊 Capsule Shanghai 胶囊上海 HDM GALLERY Hunsand Space 拾萬空间 J: GALLERY GALERIA JAVIER LOPEZ & FER FRANCES Galerie Mazzoli Project Fulfill Art Space 就在艺术空间 Tabula Rasa Gallery ROH Projects Shanghai Gallery of Art 沪申画廊 ShugoArts Yeo Workshop YveYANG

www westbundshanghai com

9 Sahej Rahal, Contingent Farwell, 2016. Photo: Christie Yuri Noh

7 Yin-Ju Lieyu, Lieyu Massacre, Taiwan, 1987, 2014, from the series Liquidation Maps, charcoal, pencil, 125 × 126 cm.

Courtesy the artist

by Australian Mikala Dwyer. The highlight, particularly, that of the 62,000 people who, however, may well be Taiwan-based Yin-Ju Chen’s between 1863 and 1904, were taken from their mandalalike Liquidation Maps (2014), a series of five homes in the Pacific and enslaved on sugarcane charcoal charts that investigate five political geno- plantations in Queensland Australia. The praccides and massacres in recent Asian history (the tice ended when sugar was declared a ‘white 1987 Lieyu Kinmen Massacre in Taipei; the 1942 industry’ and many of the slaves were deported.

Sook Ching Massacres in Singapore; the 1975–9 Jasmine Togo-Brisby, an Australian South Sea Cambodian genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Islander whose great-great-grandparents were Rouge; the 1999 East Timor massacres; and the taken from Vanuatu as children, shows Bitter 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea) through Sweet (2015), a pile of skulls cast in unrefined sugar and resin (and prompted by the discovery the lens of astrology and astronomy in order to engage with themes of predetermination, cosmic of an unmarked mass grave in Queensland), planning and subjective views of history. The while Sydney-based Tracey Moffatt (who is also representing Australia at this year’s Venice Liquidation Maps also feature in the group show Biennale) shows Plantation (2009), a series of Interrupted Survey: Fractured Modern Mythologies photographic diptychs, arranged in 12 chapters, at the ACC in Gwangju (through 30 September).

When it comes to the reconsideration that chronicle colonial ‘sugar slave’ tropes. of atrocities, the City Gallery is on something Mapping and the occult come together of a roll. Concurrently with Occulture, the again in Mumbai-based performance and mixed8 institution is staging Colonial Sugar, a two9 media artist Sahej Rahal’s Barricadia at the CCA person exhibition that investigates the legacy Glasgow. Rahal’s work is notable for its fusing of the British colonial sugar trade and, more of history, mythology and popular culture in

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ArtReview Asia

order to create metanarratives that interrogate the realities of contemporary urban life. The exhibition features a series of new works created during a residency at Cove Park, overlooking Loch Long on Scotland’s West Coast. These include a series of drawings, a development of Rahal’s recent videowork The Dry Salvages (2017, named after the third of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, 1943, in which the British writer continues his meditation on mankind’s relation to time through a mix of Eastern and Western theology – in this case the image of Krishna) and a series of works, centred around an imagined grimoire and various other artefacts relating to the borders and land of ‘Barricadia’.

The exhibition as a whole merges fact and fiction to comment on current political events in India: notably a series of Islamophobic lynchings and the subsequent public response. This is the second in a series of three episodic exhibitions, the final instalment of which will be on show at the MAC, Birmingham in 2018.

Unlike Barricadia, Suzu is a real place, located on the northeasternmost tip of the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, but it will 10 soon be subjected to many of the thematics present in Rahal’s recent work. A flourishing centre of international trade that became increasingly isolated as routes in the area switched from sea to land, and more recently destined to be the site of a proposed nuclear power plant (a plan now frozen), the city, located in an area of natural beauty (the point at which the warm and cold currents of the Sea of Japan meet), is these days notable for the way in which, thanks to its geographical isolation, residents have preserved many traditional customs (among them a method of producing clay stoves in a manner practised since the Edo period).

What better way could there be to liven things up and drag this region into the present than to introduce a new contemporary art event

to this antediluvian culture? ‘Forgotten Japan Tobias Rehberger and Raqs Media Collective, is still there,’ claim the organisers of the inauamong others, while you can expect works gural Oku-Noto Triennale, excitedly. It won’t

by Hiraki Sawa, Chiharu Shiota and Maki be for long if they have their way. Under the Kijima to feature prominently among direction of Fram Kitagawa (a curator who by the Japanese contributions. Mitsukejima, now specialises in producing exhibitions – not a ‘strangely shaped’ rock on the Noto least the last six editions of the Echigo-Tsumari Peninsula, may well outshine them all.

Art Triennale – that focus on fostering commuIf Kitagawa is set on bringing the world nity outreach and regional development), and to Japan, then MOT artistic director Yuko Hasegawa is bringing Japan to the world. The coinciding with the region’s traditional Kiriko collision between traditional cultural heritage festivals (which feature giant lantern floats and have also been held since the Edo period), and a desire to be part of modernity is a guiding the triennale will bring a selection of projects 11 theme too in Japanorama, which takes place, under Hasegawa’s guidance, at the Pompidou(by 31 different, but largely Japanese, artists at Metz. The ambitious exhibition starts in 1970 the last count) to the region in order to explore (the Universal Exhibition in Osaka, the 10th ways in which the local traditional culture, Tokyo Biennale), with the emergence of groups when confronted by contemporary art’s concepsuch as Mono-ha and Nippon-Gainen-ha, tualising, can form a platform for Japan’s future. and takes its tale of Japanese art through to International contributions come from Eko works produced in the wake of the Fukushima Nugroho, Adel Abdessemed, Allora & Calzadilla,

10 Kodu Hibino, installation view at Oku-Noto Triennale, 2017.

Courtesy the artist

11 Tanaka Atsuko, Denkifuku (Electrical Dress), 1956/1999, mixed media, 165 × 90 × 90 cm © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Georges Meguerditchian / Dist. RMN-GP. Courtesy the artist

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12 Motoyuki Daifu, Still Life, 2013, c-print mounted on aluminium, 86 × 66 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nissan Art Award 2017

13 Tatzu Nishi, Perry’s squadron, 2013, lightjet print, 90 × 135 cm.

Photo: Ichiro Mishima. © the artist. Courtesy Urano, Tokyo

disaster in 2011. Underlying it all, as those of you who have been reading carefully might expect, is an interrogation of the ways in which art has reflected or even guided changes in Japanese society during that period. Themes such as the posthuman body and art’s interface with popular culture will of course be tackled in works by Kishio Suga, Atsuko Tanaka, Rei Kawakubo, Miwa Yanagi, Tadanori Yokoo, Naoya Hatakeyama, Yuko Mohri, Yoshitomo Nara, Lee Ufan, Yoko Ono and Chim Pom, among many others. Hasegawa herself has rehearsed similar themes using the permanent collection of the MOT, so this largescale show is not to be missed. Moreover, Hasegawa will return to Metz at the beginning of next year to curate the first French retrospective of iconic Japanese collective Dumb Type, so you might as well base yourself in the northwest of France until then.

Nishi is best known for turning historic or iconic If hanging out in ‘the cradle of Gregorian monuments into dwelling spaces: Singapore’s chant’ for three months is not your bag, then iconic Merlion statue was encased in a luxury why not take your newfound enthusiasm for hotel room as part of the city-state’s 2011 all things Japanese back to Yokohama and check biennale; the following year Gaetano Russo’s out the next generation of Japanese artists. statue of Christopher Columbus in New York’s At the port city’s BankART Studio NYK, work Columbus Circle became the centrepiece for by the five finalists for this year’s edition of the a luxury penthouse. There’s some joke about 12 biennial Nissan Art Award is on show. Two living the dream to be made in relation to that. years ago the award was given to Yuko Mohri, Four other artists hoping to live some sort whose kinetic sculptures-cum-orchestras have of dream will have work on show at the MMCA animated almost every biennale since (and the Seoul this September, when they compete for Japanese Pavilion at the one she’s not taking part in – Venice – features work by fellow 2015 14 the Korea Artist Prize 2017. Kelvin Kyungkun Park, Bek Hyunjin, Song Sanghee and Sunny finalist Takahiro Iwasaki); this year’s shortlist Kim are in the frame for an award whose past includes Motoyuki Daifu, Hikaru Fujii, winners include Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Ryuichi Ishikawa, Yuichiro Tamura and Nami Joonho (2012, whose Korean Pavilion was one Yokoyama. The winner is announced on 27 of the 2015 Venice Biennale standouts), and September. And if that’s not enough, work from Noh Suntag (2014), about whom you can read the Nissan Art Award Collection by 2013 finalist more in this issue’s Reviewed section. While 13 Tatzu Nishi is on show at Yokohama’s YCC.

Autumn 2017

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16 Cheng Ran, The Bridge (Diary of a Madman – New York) (still), 2016, single-channel HD video, colour, sound, 4 min 25 sec.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing & Lucerne

15 Yoo Geun-Taek, The Room, 2016, black ink, white powder and tempera on Korean paper, 145 × 145 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul

ArtReview Asia is not one to encourage betting, through their window lies a landscape with it will say that it has a soft spot for the work echoes of Cézanne. The atmosphere is creepy of Song, whose mixed-media work sensitively and claustrophobic, a feeling enhanced by an execution that is part manic, part gothic. engages with major social issues via apparently Cheng Ran’s multivideo work Diary minor social interactions.

16 While you’re at the MMCA, make sure of a Madman is an ongoing project begun last to stop by Gallery Hyundai, where painter year (when the first part of the work, Diary 15 Yoo Geun-Taek presents recent works in an of a Madman – New York, was on show at the exhibition titled Promenade. Trained in tradiNew Museum, New York, as part of the artist’s tional painting methods (applying ink on Hanji K11-sponsored residency there), which takes paper), Yoo mixes these with contemporary its title from Lu Xun’s short story of the same styles and subject matter to create something name, written in vernacular Chinese and pubnew out of something old, often figurative in lished in 1918. The story (which paid tribute to Nikolai Gogol’s 1895 story of the same name) terms of subject and abstract in terms of affect. is often cited as the beginning of modern The Room series, for example, features interiors literature in China (Mao Zedong called Lu covered in mosquito nets: one such work from ‘the saint of Modern China’). Allegedly written 2016 is suffused with an eerie green hue and dominated by the linear geometry of the interior by someone who has now been cured of his floorboards and the hazy grid of the net. ‘madness’, the book’s narrator describes how he read exhortations to cannibalism in between Behind that is the ghost of a couple on a bed;

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ArtReview Asia

the lines of Confucius and began to suspect that his friends and family wished to eat him.

Cheng’s previous work, the nine-hour film In Course of the Miraculous (2015), addressed George Mallory’s disappearance during an ascent of Mount Everest in 1924; Bas Jan Ader’s disappearance in the Atlantic during the performance In Search of the Miraculous in 1975; and the eight-month disappearance of the Chinese fishing trawler Lu Rong Yu no 2682, which eventually returned to port in 2011 minus 22 of its 33 crewmen, the missing ones having been murdered by their crewmates. Diary of a Madman similarly comprises three chapters, set in New York, Hong Kong and Jerusalem, the first two of which, together with excerpts from the ongoing Jerusalem segment, are on show at Galerie Urs Meile Beijing. The work as a whole investigates the nature of language, aspects of psychogeography and nonlinear time

as a means of understanding alienation and ‘otherness’, transformed brilliantly in Cheng’s work into absorbing, bewitching and appropriately befuddling atmospheric sensations.

17 More direct are the photographs of Zhang Hai’er, who celebrates a 30-year career, begun during the mid-1980s with an exhibition, MUSE, at the Shanghai Center of Photography (scop).

Zhang is one of the pioneers of experimental documentary photography in China and one of the first Chinese photographers to be exhibited at the annual Rencontres d’Arles festival, back in 1988 (a moment that is sometimes seen as the beginning of Chinese photography’s international exposure). Women – and the artist’s onetime girlfriend and now wife, Hu Yuanli, in particular – have been a constant subject for Zhang over the course of his career. The Bad Girls series (parts of which will be shown by Hong Kong’s Blindspot Gallery at this year’s Photofairs

Shanghai, 8–10 September) of black-and-white the metabolic process of the universe’? That’s 18 Alice Wang, who’s the subject of a solo exhibiimages feature women in studio or domestic settings, arranging for the camera, looking tion at Capsule Shanghai. A typical work by the out at the viewer in a way that foregrounds Chinese Canadian (in this case Untitled, 2016) both their self-conscious projection of femicould include beeswax, silver, wind and ninity and the (male) photographer’s complicity electricity (Dyson blade-less fan) and take the in that. Not just a celebration of the female form of a monolithic yellow slab with a silver form, the scop show will also focus on the ways hole in it. So, look out for a show that might in which the urban condition has factored as take in everything from the Big Bang to the a muse in Zhang’s oeuvre, which documents metabolic processes of bees.

Animals and nature have played a more freakthe changing lifestyles in cities like Guangzhou, as well as the gritty, tough, at times macho, life 19 ish role in the works of Japanese artist Tabaimo, whose own blend of tradition confronted by of labourers and factory workers in China as a modernity, in the form of paintings, drawings whole over the past three decades (in series such and video, involves a fantastically incongruous as Steam, Steel and the Rail, for example, which updating of the Ukiyo-e woodblock form. Legs features steel factories in Wuhan and train grow out of squids waiting to be prepared as stations in Shahe County, Hubei). Setting the sashimi, giant turtles wander around bathhouses scene for Art and China After 1989, if you like. behind snogging sumo wrestlers, birds crash When it comes to inspiration, how’s this into window panes and flowers grow out of for a statement: ‘I work with by-products from

17 Zhang Hai’er, Joan Chen being made up by William Lee, while Sun Zhou and Zhang Hai’er watching, Longhua Hotel, Shanghai, 1999. Courtesy the artist and SCoP, Shanghai

19 Tabaimo, akunin, 2006–7, illustration for a daily novel in Asahi Shimbun. © the artist. Courtesy IMO studio

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21 Xijing Men, Chapter 4: I love Xijing – The Daily Life of Zijing Presidents, 2009.

Courtesy the artist and Asia Corridor Contemporary Art Exhibition, Kyoto

20 Takashi Murakami, Kiki, 2000–05 mixed media, 160 × 71 × 55 cm. © 2000–05 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co, Ltd. Courtesy Perrotin, Paris

women’s abdomens, while similarly surreal visions unfurl from houses, cities and subway carriages. This autumn she’s bringing all that to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and more precisely to its lobby wall, where she’ll be creating a new site-specific work, her first solo exhibition in the city. Obviously her work will also be present in Japanorama.

Another artist not content with just being 20 in Hasegawa’s megashow is Takashi Murakami, whose first major survey show in Russia is hosted

by Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. The pharaoh of flatness will be using this opportunity to organise his oeuvre as an exploration of contemporary Japanese culture divided into five elements: ‘Geijutsu’, which will explore tradition and Murakami’s training in the

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thousand-year-old Nihonga painting technique; For those of you who are addicted to art ‘The Little Boy and the Fat Man’, which will exhibitions on the grander scale, Kyoto is this explore the legacy of the nuclear bombing of year one of the three ‘culture cities’ of East Asia Japan; ‘Kawaii’ – naturally – which will explore (a scheme run by the governments of Japan, the aesthetics of manga and cuteness; ‘Sutajito’, China and South Korea), the others being which will explore the workings of Murakami’s 21 Changsha (China) and Daegu (South Korea). factorylike studio by housing a part of it in the Kyoto: Asia Corridor takes place under the Garage itself; and ‘Asobi & Kazari’, which will direction of poet and art critic Tatehata Akira explore the artist’s interest in the cultures of (previously commissioner of the Japan Pavilion pattern, play and decoration. As well as his own at the 1990 Venice Biennale and artistic director paintings, drawings and films, Murakami will of the 2001 Yokohama and 2010 Aichi triennales) be displaying historical works borrowed from and features artwork by 25 exhibitors, the majorthe collections of Moscow’s Pushkin State ity of it newly created for the event, which aims Museum of Fine Arts and the State Museum at exploring the diversity and connectedness of the region’s art scenes in order to encourage of Oriental Art. See? You don’t need a biennial ‘a more tolerant and harmonious society’. Right or a major survey show to understand Japanesenow that would seem both a laudable and rather ness today; you just need the king of kawaii.

ArtReview Asia

urgent mission. Among the big-name artists involved are Yayoi Kusama, Kimsooja, mixrice 23 (who won last year’s Korea Artist Prize), Cai Guo-Qiang and Yang Fudong.

Social manipulation is also on the menu at 22 New York-based Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto’s debut exhibition in Brazil. The installation/ performance Wrong Happy Hour (2014) is a bar set up with two opposing, parallel counters (one against each wall of the space), born of the artist’s observations of the New York ritual of postwork drinks. The performance aspect of the work involves the artist navigating the space while wearing periscope glasses (so moving like a semiblind person who is never quite seeing what she is looking at) and then, under the heading ‘Romance’, investigating the binary social interactions (the possibility of knowing another) via a series of Venn diagrams drawn onto the wall.

It’s nearly bar time for us all, so let’s end on something to celebrate: anniversaries: ten years ago, at Documenta 12, Thai artist Sakarin Krue-On created one of the most memorable works in the exhibition: Terraced Rice Field, a working replica of traditional agricultural arrangements common to his homeland, outside of the Schloß Wilhelmshöhe Museum in Kassel. Other works include giant Buddha heads coated in yellow curry powder, giant lead and fibreglass lotus pods, various interpretations of traditional temple paintings and furniture overrun by monkeys. What makes Krue-On’s work particularly interesting is the manner in which he takes a specifically regional, at times personal, language and set of social and historical references to the global art stage in a manner that feels at once confrontational and harmonious. At Tang Contemporary Bangkok, Krue-On presents A Talebearer’s Tale:

The Last Deer, a series of works that build on the installation Monument of an Awakening Era, created five years ago, for the 2012 Busan Biennale. That work comprises a herd of porcelain deer antlers (which notionally belong to Schomburgk’s deer, which was native to Thailand’s swamps, but went extinct, due in part to the environmental changes brought about by the expansion of rice farming, and in part to commercial hunting, during the late 1930s) set against a reflective black liquid floor. The last recorded Schomburgk’s deer was apparently beaten to death at a temple by a drunkard in 1938; the only extant Schomburgk’s deer specimen on display today is in the Natural History Museum in Paris. An encounter with the latter, far removed from the place in which the Schomburgk story takes place, inspired Krue-On to make the work about an animal that, until that moment, had only existed for him as a legend. Nirmala Devi

22 Aki Sasamoto, Wrong Happy Hour, 2017 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo

23 Sakarin Krue-On, Monument of an Awakening Era, 2012 (installation view, Busan Biennale 2012). Courtesy the artist

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ArtReview Asia

Linking East and West

C

M

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CM

MY

CY

2017.09.10 - 2017.10.08 N17 Nicolas Lefeuvre Solo Exhibition

No. 423 Guangfu Road, Shanghai, China

CMY

K

中国上海光复路423号

*** 2017.10.13 - 2017.11.07 Andy Summers Photography Exhibition *** 2017.11.12 - 2017.12.17 Artist in Residence Quentin Derouet First China Exhibition

0086 21 6167 3917 contact@annececilenoique-art.com www.annececilenoique-art.com

NORBERTO ROLDAN RITUALS OF INVASION AND RESISTANCE 1992-2017 (A 25-YEAR SURVEY OF INSTALLATION WORKS) curated by

PATRICK D. FLORES

www.silverlensgalleries.com info@silverlensgalleries.com

2 September - 5 October 2017 Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines, Manila

(image: Rebel, Norberto Roldan, 2015)

Points of View

I arrived in this wasteland teetering, in the midst of a raging storm. I am always too late.

The garden had already become a ruin.

I could, however, still discern the remnants of the herb garden. The garden’s owner had once had the original idea of planting various medicinal peonies. They are concealed to the right of the dried-up pond; even the decorative rocks beside the pond reek of medicine.

Now, the garden itself resembles a decorative stone perforated by erosion and gradually emaciated. The garden can only reflect the weather, whether it is sunny or gloomy. This garden once flourished under its owner’s assiduous care, but beneath its vitality another garden, a negative, decaying version, was festering. The enveloping power of desolation was stronger than the owner’s diligently maintained order. It joined forces with time and made the garden part of its territory. Perhaps, somewhere between the consciousness of time and its natural passage, the garden’s flowers shed their petals during their apex, and desolation and wilderness lurked within the enlightened order of its past.

It is this kind of wasteland in which we may have the good fortune to meet Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ – that angel whose undertaking is the tempestuous baptism of progress. Now that the tempest has subsided, we are left with a tattered contemporary world. Broken walls and debris fill it, but from the outside, it looks like a delightful, brand-new theme park.

Compared to these ruins of progress, I prefer aimlessly to wander the borders of the wasteland.

There, the desolation is laid bare for all to see, and the previously sealed-off garden connects with the vast, bleak world outside. So, the garden may truly become nature: a boundless landscape.

In other moments, I experienced a similar sense of being placed within history. For example, at dusk, standing in front of a window in an artist’s studio, I saw green sprouts bursting forth

Wasteland or

the Angel of History by

Hu Fang

Autumn 2017

from a magnolia tree. That person had lived and worked in front of that window for 20 years as it were a single day. The light sprinkled onto the windowsill, time seemed to stay still, seemed to tolerate the moulded, humanlike shapes scattered therein. Though they were abstract shapes, you could touch a part of them. And even though you were taking the part for the whole, you could feel an intoxicating tactile sensation.

The accumulation of those different moments forms the pattern of the flow of days.

How could its mildness be sustained without drying up and withering? Ernst Gombrich said: ‘There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists.’ At the time, being one of those artists had nothing to do with one’s identity.

It was related to an undertaking: becoming a vessel for the Dao of art, a medium through which to interact with the world and experience the existence of others. The Dao is not apparent; it is emergent. It acts on the world’s myriad things.

If we accept that the experiences encountered through art cannot be communicated in words, then perhaps such ineffable experiences are delights understood only by the heart. Or perhaps they incite within us the desire to share our experiences: the ineffable feeling inspires us to seek methods of expression; the result is some kind of human action. Although these experiences always occur in some apparently random moment, they enter deeply into our lives.

Those memories etched into our bodies impel us to travel here and not there. And I blindly travelled to the borders of the wasteland, where the soil is more intimate and pungent, where it emphatically emits airs from the depths of the earth. Those borderlands are where order begins its exile, where the mindless force of life desperately stretches into distant landscapes. Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

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Once an interviewer asked me about Madras, where I have been living for the past 25 years.

I replied that I loathed to live in this country in the first place, let alone the city, and that I would be happier if the government exiled me. But that’s unlikely, because for Tamils everything revolves around films, not literature.

So whatever I write is like writing in my own personal journal. And why should anybody be concerned about somebody’s journal?

Eventually, if this is the case with the state, why should the Central Government care about an unknown Tamil writer when it gives all vernacular languages a stepmotherly treatment? The government gets psyched up only when someone (like Salman Rushdie or M.F. Hussain) triggers a problem with people’s religious sentiments.

Why so much displeasure against this city and country? I simply couldn’t breathe… our state is ruled by dacoits. It’s a democratic country and people choose their leader, but we in Tamil Nadu have no choice other than the two parties – the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK, a Dravidian party) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) – both replete with Escobars. We are stuck! After the ‘mysterious’ death of the former chief minister and AIADMK chief J. Jayalalithaa, her close aide V.K. Sasikala proclaimed herself party chief.

But when Sasikala wanted to sit in the coveted chief minister’s chair, the supreme court convicted her in an ongoing disproportionate-asset case (concerning the laundering and amassing of illicit wealth) and sentenced her to four years of imprisonment. So Sasikala’s nephew T.T.V. Dhinakaran became the deputy general secretary of AIADMK and wontedly tried for the chief minister’s chair. But he was arrested for trying to inveigle the election commission into

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Notes from Madras Last month India celebrated 70 years since independence, but to Charu Nivedita, the idea of exile has never looked so good

ArtReview Asia

awarding him the party’s ‘twin leaf’ symbol, at a time when it was being contested by a rival faction. Eventually he came out on bail, but his ‘chief minister dream’ was shattered.

I envisaged that the officers of the prison where Sasikala was would become millionaires.

As I had imagined, a few days back, a courageous police officer, D. Roopa, alleged that two crore (20,000,000) rupees had exchanged hands to provide special facilities to Sasikala in Parappana Agrahara Central prison and accused the director general of police (DGP) of being involved. As is the ‘custom’ in India, Roopa was reprimanded for speaking to the media and transferred to an insignificant post (traffic duties). What’s more, she then had a defamation case filed against her by the DGP for 50 crores!

If this is what happens at state level, in central government, Prime Minister Narendra Modi considers himself a perpetual dictator, like Indira Gandhi. The difference between the two is that Modi has an ideology – Hindutva.

(Hindutva, a form of Hindu nationalism, was popularised by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar during the 1920s. An opponent of Mahatma Gandhi, Savarkar was implicated but never convicted in relation to the assassination of his rival.) Modi gifted a Bhagavad Gita to the prime minister of Japan. Though the holy book is poetic – brimming with philosophical insights – in many places it categorises people according to their dining habits – meat eaters are aggressive, for example. How can such a book represent India’s culture?

Beef is the staple food of many Dalits and poor Muslims in this country, but Modi proposed a law that banned the sale of cows

for slaughter. Imagine: you might be killed by a mob that thinks that you are going to kill a cow when you just take it out to the streets! Thanks to some good Samaritans who appealed the act, the Madras High Court ordered a four-week stay, which has since been extended to three months

by India’s Supreme Court. The central government is now reviewing the law. But is it possible to take each and every case to the court? And if I want to talk about the state of the courts… well, I censor it, as I don’t want to be behind bars for insulting the court.

But here is an example of what the elites in this country are like: Mahesh Chandra Sharma, a Rajasthan High Court judge, said, ‘The ten-year imprisonment for cow slaughtering should be augmented to life sentence’. The same judge once remarked, about the virtues of India’s national bird: ‘The peacock is a lifelong celibate. It does not have sex with the peahen.

The peahen gets impregnated with the tears of the peacock and then gives birth to a peacock or a peahen.’

How can one survive in such a country? It’s impossible for me to take off from here, because I’m not a ‘single’ man.

Zoltán Fábri’s Fifth Seal (1976) has a scene like this: the film is set in Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944, towards the end of the Second World War. A few friends are seen sitting in a bar, chatting. One of them is narrating a story that goes something like this: ‘You are going to die and you’ve been given two choices: to be born as a slave or a slave owner in the next birth. The slave thinks of himself as a nice harmless man, but his tongue will be severed, one eye pulled out and his child killed.

The slave owner, with no moral crisis, will have done all these gruesome acts. Now tell me, which would you want to be born as: the suffering good-natured slave or the morally stained slave owner?’ This story is relevant to India’s current situation. The last scene of the same movie goes like this: one of those friends sitting in the bar was a revolutionary. A Nazi soldier wanted to kill him and his friends too. But his chief disapproved: ‘No, I want them to feel ashamed of what they did – morally corrupt – for the rest of their lives. Just watch.’ He then turned to the friends and told them, ‘I’m not going to kill you just because he is your friend.

But my assistant refuses to believe that you are innocent. So I want you to slap this man thrice on the cheek; if you cannot, then it’s proven that you’re a rebel too and we will shoot you.’ Their friend, the revolutionary, had already been tortured by the soldiers and was on the verge of dying. His friends couldn’t slap him at that state, and they were shot. Only one slapped him and returned home staggering.

He had to return home, because he had an orphanage. My state of mind at present is similar to that friend. I have two dogs, Pappu and Zorro.

And two cats, Chintoo and big Chintoo. If I left the country, the cats, I think, would somehow manage, but the dogs, I’m sure, would die.

In a biography (originally written in Malayalam) called Thirudan Maniyan Pillai (Thief Maniyan Pillai), G.R. Indugopan narrates an incident in which his subject goes to loot the house of a Spanish national who lived in Cochin. That man had a dog, but it kept quiet after Maniyan fed him a few fishes. Maniyan was later caught. The Spaniard declared that Maniyan did not steal anything from the house, and he wanted to know what the thief gave his dog to keep him quiet.

Maniyan told him the truth, to which he replied: ‘That was the last food he ate. I kept scolding the dog for eating the food the thief gave and letting him in. He got offended, stopped eating from that day on and died.’

above Varanasi facing page, from top Thanjavur and Chennai all images Photo: Prabhu Kalidas

Autumn 2017

A very short story (translated from the Tamil

by Gayathri. R.): Prince Siddhartha started with Sanna, his servant, and his white horse, Kanthaka. He looked back and saw the palace in which he had lived all these years. It looked as if it was floating in the moon’s light. He reached the bank of the Anoma river. He had to find answers for old age, maladies and death. He removed the ornaments, his princely attire, and asked Sanna to pass them on to the king. Then with his sword he cut his hair and handed over Kanthaka to Sanna. ‘I cannot survive in the palace without you, prince; take me too,’ said Sanna thrice.

Siddhartha refused. Kanthaka declined to move without Siddhartha. Siddhartha sweetly whispered in the ears of Kanthaka: ‘Please return to the palace, darling… Go with Sanna.’ Kanthaka with tears swelling in its eyes understood that he was seeing the last of his master. He couldn’t take it and died on the spot.

Siddhartha continued his journey.

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THE BIG TENt Is Documenta broken? Aimee Lin thinks the problem lies with something larger STILL

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ArtReview Asia

Visiting Documenta 14 is not a pleasant experience. This is partly a consequence of your own greed: you have decided to visit both venues, in Athens and in Kassel – separated by a three-hour flight – over too few days, and immediately realise that you will miss most parts of the show. Those performances, film screenings, appointmentonly tours: you know that some of them will be more interesting than the artworks in the exhibition spaces you insist on walking through, but you just don’t have the time… You are not alone; in fact, due to the insanely massive scale of Documenta and many other international art events, people are coming to accept that missing, or failing to see, is the new norm for the exhibitiongoer.

Then you have to deal with a city (or in the case of Documenta 14, two cities) and what comes wrapped inside it: the traffic, the economy, the histories (the ones written in travel guides, and many others told only to specific audiences), the stories of everyone you meet while there. When Arnold Bode produced the first Documenta exhibition, in 1955, his ambition was to create a ‘Documenta city’ by merging art events into urban space.

This has become doctrine for many curators.

So you have to move, plan, survive the too-cold or too-hot weather, with special bonuses such as the cleaning workers’ strike or overbooked and delayed flights. These all serve to remind people how real the world is. And since you are immersed in this real, you find it extremely easy to spot the fakes: art that pretends it is dealing with reality but is really just a follower of fashion; or even more pathetic, art made by brains that lack wisdom and logic.

But still, you spend most of your time at those art museums or temporary spaces, reading labels to find out the names of the artists – many of them are showing work across various venues, and you can’t help wondering what additional meaning a particular physical space could bring to a piece of art. You are prepared to pay extra attention to newly commissioned works, many of which are just a kind of gesture, because you are interested in seeing how these cultural institutions are spending their funds. A good gesture is like ‘a force of four ounces that deflects a thousand pounds’. But the bad ones are simply stupid. And what is more stupid is that the curatorial team is blind to the stupidity of these works. Or perhaps just chooses to be blind to it.

My major critiques of Documenta 14 include: some works carry intentions that are just too obvious; some are too didactic and can be used to carry a hidden message. Absolutism of this kind is disquieting. There are also many works here whose presence and the ways in which they are highlighted indicate that identity consuming, and the ‘showcasing’ of artists from geographically marginal regions, are still attention-grabbing strategies.

But in the end Documenta 14 is a huge exhibition, so huge that even the most critical person can find good art. Many works are more interesting if you see them separately. Vivian Suter’s painting installations in both cities are perfect examples of how painting can be a carrier of the energy of life. Rumour has it that many proposals were rejected by the curatorial team as not serious enough, but luckily Roee Rosen’s works were not among those. From the short film The Dust Channel (2016), to The Blind Merchant (1989–91), a retelling in drawings and text of The Merchant of Venice, and Live and Die as Eva Braun (1995–97), a set of drawings and collages on paper, his works are dark, in bad taste, vulgar and satiric, and viewers laugh out loud upon seeing them. Although I have had enough political art that is both superficial and opportunistic in recent years, I am inevitably touched by works that carry the smartest strategies. For example in her aggressive, imaginative project Building as unowned property (2017), artist Maria Eichhorn, via research on local laws and a series of legal operations, used €140,000 to turn an empty building in central Athens into a property with a protected-use designation of ‘no use’, meaning noright-to-the-propertyrights had been exercised.

The project at first glance is about proprietorship, negotiation, the legal process and urban development and renewal.

At an aesthetic level, it invokes the value of uselessness, obsolescence and negativity as a critical strategy.

Thanks to Documenta 14, people in the artworld are now thinking about the murder of Turkish immigrant Halit Yozgat in Kassel in May 2006, the ninth committed by extremist group NSU. At the Neue Neue Galerie in Kassel, the Society of Friends of Halit, part of Documenta 14’s Parliament of Bodies public

programme, presented work that included a demonstration in Kassel after the murder, a counter-investigation into testimony given by a witness and a set of conversations with some of those affected by the crime, and provides a way to pursue the truth. This is a project that combines group effort and wisdom, and upholds justice via social gatherings and scientific rationality. However, the fact that it is a highlight of Documenta 14 makes me rethink the boundary of art. When Marcel Duchamp first placed a readymade object in an art exhibition, it was an artistic gesture, but nowadays, when a self-sufficient project is placed in that context, it is seen as a political gesture rather than an artistic one. The key difference is the conception of art developed after Duchamp’s appropriation, but what I see with the insertion of the Society of Friends of Halit into Documenta 14 is how art is now suffering a syndrome of self-deprivation rather than the expanding of its boundary.

I once thought that Learning from Athens, as Documenta 14 has been titled, was a good idea. Compared with a theme that aims to

above Marta Minujín, The Parthenon of Books, 2017 (installation view, Kassel, Documenta 14).

Photo: Roman März facing page top Vivian Suter, Nisyros (Vivian’s bed), 2016–17 (installation view, Glass Pavilions, Kassel, Documenta 14). Photo: Fred Dott facing page bottom Miriam Cahn, Koennteichsein (installation view, Documenta Halle, Kassel, Documenta 14). Photo: Roman März

Autumn 2017

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cover everything but actually covers nothing, it successfully draws people’s attention to modern democracy and geopolitics, and offers to investigate inequality around the world and inside Europe. But after my visit to both Athens and Kassel, I tell myself: be careful of the format of ‘exhibition’, because it is easy to turn to as a means of education, and when political expression dominates artistic ways of thinking and expressing, art becomes propaganda.

Which is a bit ironic when you recall National Socialism’s cultural policies and the fact that when people (including some of the makers of Documenta) trace the history of Documenta, the Nazi era has been taken as its original sin. It is equally important to treat the archival materials as art exhibits, and especially the self-organised archive, prudently.

When dominated by narcissism, the archive is little more than trivia framed for self-reference.

But I also wanted to learn more from Athens.

Looking back to the good old days of the citystate, from the seventh century BC to 322 BC, the story of its economic and cultural achievements derived from its institutional superiority (mainly for inventing what is called Greek democracy), which gave Athens a leading position in the region, strengthened through alliances with other states to repel alien forces.

This story could be seen as a model for looking

above Agnes Denes, The Living Pyramid, 2017 (installation view, Nordstadtpark, Kassel, Documenta 14). Photo: Mathias Völzke below Rasheed Araeen, The Reading Room, 2017 (installation view, Neue Neue Galerie, Kassel, Documenta 14). Photo: Mathias Völzke all images Courtesy Documenta 14, Kassel & Venice

at today’s Germany: with the centre of Europe having moved to the north, Germany is now playing the role of the leader of Europe and the watchman of what are believed to be European values. Yet, Athens, in addition to being resources for the study of Western democracy and core values, is one of the southern portals for immigrants entering Europe, bringing with them massive challenges to the political, institutional and economic systems as well as its core values. So Athens is a puncture in the perfect yet fragile picture of Europe. The artworld, after noticing that politicians cannot efficiently react to this crisis, have devoted themselves to it, but they are not always doing it better than punks fighting against the mainstream culture of their times.

Perhaps today’s European crisis is predestined: that in the setting of a united Europe, there are two contradictory ideas – the belief in universality and the need for self-definition by means of boundary. Once Documenta aimed to define European art to confront the new trend of international art (which was actually led by American art), and now it is aimed to redefine Europe following its recent crises, by examining the division between the north and the south.

But in the end what Documenta 14 has done is just simply too romantic.

Perhaps it is not Documenta 14 but Europe that I am actually disappointed in.

Aimee Lin is editor of ArtReview Asia

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ArtReview Asia

Oh Myung Hee 10-18 October 2017 Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Road, Chelsea, London SW3 4RY ENQUIRIES

CURATED BY

For more information, contact info@metamorphosis-artprojects.com

Tatiana Palinkasev Eva McGaw

PRESENTED BY

Istanbul Biennial

Elmgreen & Dragset “The exhibition becomes a reminder of the political potential within the personal story” Interview by Nicole O’Rourke

Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen. Photo: Muhsin Agkun

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In April 2016 it was announced that Scandinavian artist-duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset had been appointed curators of the 15th Istanbul Biennial. Last December its title was revealed: A Good Neighbour. The artists have done their job in trying circumstances: Turkey has gone through a coup attempt, postcoup crackdowns, several terrorist attacks, a constitutional referendum and a still-operational state of emergency.

Nonetheless, when we met in a café on the European side of Istanbul two weeks before the exhibition opens – comprising work by 55 artists presented across six venues – the pair seemed relaxed.

This year marks both the biennial’s 30th anniversary and the 30th anniversary of Turkey’s first application to become a full member of the European Economic Community – the forerunner to the European Union.

A Good Neighbour seems especially poignant in this context.

ARTREVIEW At the 2009 Venice Biennale you transformed the Danish and Nordic pavilions into the homes of two fictional collectors. It was as much a curatorial venture as an artistic one, featuring works by other artists as well. The two characters were neighbours, but one had died and the other appeared to be in the middle of a divorce. The pavilions provided a voyeuristic fantasy into the private lives of others.

In what ways does this work inform or act as a prelude to A Good Neighbour?

INGAR DRAGSET The Venice project was a gesamtkunstwerk for which we collaborated with 24 other artists to create a narrative. So each artwork became part of a story, which is a very different approach than the one we have used here in Istanbul. Although, of course, the themes of home, domesticity, interior design, identity related to interiors, of how we express ourselves in our close environment, how interiors relate to exteriors and the world at large, these are things that we have been interested in for a very long time. And we felt we wanted to start the biennial’s curatorial process by exploring

something we know about – so we don’t start completely from scratch.

The biennial has given us a chance to travel the world and meet people of different ages and backgrounds, artists involved in many different practices. This has enabled an expansion of our interests into areas that we ourselves are perhaps not able to talk about directly in our own work.

For example, through the biennial we could look at our research interests from a woman’s position: from feminist positions. It’s also difficult for us to talk about domesticity and ‘belonging’ in terms of race in our own work: we’re white Europeans; we’ll always be associated with a privileged part of the world.

MICHAEL ELMGREEN Here we are not working with one story. We are working with multiple stories – from South Africa, Asia, South America and, of course, Turkey. Many of the problems that we face globally today will be dealt with from very personal perspectives, reflecting the artists’ different backgrounds. Many of the stories have a starting point in the artist’s life-experiences, which is really important, I think. At a time when the media dominates our consciousness and our perception of each other as neighbours, as other human beings (when the media determines our coexistence), we forget about our own personal experiences.

The biennial aims to counter this, speaking with multiple voices about how we might live together.

ID The exhibition becomes a reminder of the political potential within the personal story.

“A biennial can be a celebration of togetherness. A biennial can provide a form of gathering in times when that is maybe important, but not so easy.

Art can be a medium that can be part of translating some of the problems and the crises that we face in a different way than the media”

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AR About half the works in the biennial are new commissions. Can you tell me a little bit about how you approached these?

ME It’s been quite symbiotic. It’s been based on very close dialogue, something we’re used to, working as a duo: everything we do happens through an ongoing dialogue, and we just extended that to include other artists. There will be performative pieces too. We have a dance performance by Tuğçe Tuna, which is very important, because we get the impression dance has very reduced conditions in Turkey.

ID We learned a lot from Tuğçe, hearing her speaking about the representation of the body in public space in Turkey, how dance is also almost a political act here. She will be performing in the hammam, and the work will be in dialogue with two installations by Monica Bonvicini installed there that concern the body and human physicality. Tuğçe has worked with dancers who are disabled – one dancer without legs. We discovered that a place like Istanbul isn’t so friendly if you don’t have, in the classical sense, a perfect body: it is so hilly and there is not much done for people who are not fit in that way.

AR The body also features in the work of Candeğer Fürtun, who is perhaps not so well known…

ME We have a sculpture by her featuring nine pairs of mannequin legs – though actually the material is ceramic – in a sitting position, the legs widely spread. It could have been made this year – because of the debate about ‘manspreading’, how macho men sit on the subway like that – yet she’s eighty-two years old and made the work during the mid-1990s.

AR Did you know that work before you started the process?

ME No, it was an amazing discovery from making studio visits all over Turkey. It was very important for us to include artists from Turkey, like Fürtun, who also has been a little bit under the radar for many years. It was

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top One of the billboard posters created for the 15th Istanbul Biennial.

Photo: Lukas Wassmann. Graphic design: Rupert Smyth above Candeğer Fürtun, Untitled, 1994–6, ceramic, 47 × 600 × 48 cm.

Photo: Sahir Uğur Eren all images Courtesy IKSV, Istanbul

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a slow process but obviously rewarding. We live in a time of short-term memory. Everything is snap, snap, snap. You go from one webpage to the other. You change your TV channel all the time. This impatience is everywhere.

People forget about history.

AR Were there any censorship problems, especially in the wake of the attempted coup in July 2016?

Did you have any concerns?

ID We haven’t had any censorship problems, but of course after the coup we were very concerned and really wondered if it even would be the right place to do a biennial. Is it the right time to do such a project? So actually we put the curatorial process on hold and we came here shortly after the event – late July or at the beginning of August – to spend time talking to people outside the artworld. Editors, historians, the statisticians, writers and so on. We wanted to hear from different kinds of people as to how the biennial was perceived. How do they see the cultural landscape in relation to the political landscape? Does it make sense to make the biennial? Through those conversations we came to the understanding that, to many people, the biennial’s even more important than before.

I’m sure there are also people who do not agree; but in general we have a feeling that people, who are not perhaps the best of friends, agreed on this. Because there are so many challenges we need to foster a collaborative attitude.

ME A biennial can be a celebration of togetherness. A biennial can provide a form of gathering in times when that is maybe important, but not so easy. Art can be a medium that can be part of translating some of the problems and the crises that we face in a different way than the media.

The media has a tendency, especially in recent times, to come up with very easy answers to very complicated problems. Art, when it works, can help translate these problems into something we can, as human beings, relate to in a different way. Not in a reductive way, not in a simplified way. It’s very important for art not to just react.

It’s also important for art to show that you have

a worth, a dignity, an urgency in yourself, and not only in relation to what the media dictates.

Because, otherwise, we as artists become completely programmed by the headline news all over the world. We are beholden every day to, say, a new tweet from some kind of politician.

We can react to that, but then we use all our energy on that and forget about the importance of all the other things we have to tell, all the other thoughts and feelings art can mediate and inspire. It is really important to remember that, I think.

AR The billboard project by Lukas Wassmann started months before the actual exhibition opened, but it’s part of the biennial. Can you talk about that in the context of the exhibition as a whole and why you decided to do that in different cities and different languages around the world?

ME Our first press release took the format of 40 questions – such as ‘Is a good neighbour a stranger you don’t fear?’ and ‘Is a good neighbour someone who reads the same newspaper as you?’ – which were also posed at the first press conference by 40 performers. Some of these questions we turned into billboards and combined it with the images by Wassmann.

To show them in different geographical locations shows, from our side, that problems that the questions deal with are not specific to one geographical region. What happens in one place has an impact on what happens in another place. The problems happening in the world are very interconnected at the moment. We are all dealing with the same kind of problems – be they political or environmental – therefore we thought it was important to reach out of the geographical context of the biennial.

“We see ourselves only as providers, not as truth-tellers.

We just come with all the artists’ stories. We don’t come to Istanbul to tell people in Istanbul how Istanbul is. I hate that. I live in Berlin now, and when a curator uses the Berlin Biennale to tell us how Berlin is, I get really annoyed”

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AR Do you think that it’s also a reaction to knowing instinctively that, as white male Westerners, you are locked out of the community and culture of Turkey, so instead you want to talk about more universal issues?

ME Not universal. I don’t believe in universal: you have to be very white and very male and very square to speak about universal, so I’m not a universalist. We know Istanbul quite well, since we’ve been here since 2001 when we did our first project. We have visited many times.

We know a lot of people from the artworld and have been following developments and circumstances. Of course, yes, we come from another background. Everyone comes from his or her special background. Therefore, we see ourselves only as providers, not as truth-tellers. We just come with all the artists’ stories. Also because we don’t come to Istanbul to tell people in Istanbul how Istanbul is. I hate that. I live in Berlin now, and when a curator uses the Berlin Biennale to tell us how Berlin is, I get really annoyed, because you do not get that kind of knowledge by just being a curator. It’s important for a biennial to come with input from outside.

I mean, it’s more interesting for people in Istanbul to see what’s going on elsewhere in the world than just to hear about what people from outside think about what’s going on in their country.

ID It needs to be an exchange. It is an international biennial, and that is something we’re really trying to underline.

AR What else do you want the typical visitor to take from the exhibition?

ME There are so many things in our everyday life right now that make us so fearful. Art can be a liberation from that.

The 15th Istanbul Biennial takes place in various venues in and around the city, from 16 September to 12 November Nicole O’Rourke is a writer and curator based in Istanbul

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Art Featured

I was left entirely without a say in the matter 53

Park Chan-kyong Ghosts, history and an Asian sublime

by Aimee Lin

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The ghosts of history haunt Park Chan-kyong’s recent works. Of course Park takes this a step further: ‘If there is religion on the other side of this haunting occurs metaphorically. But in Citizen’s Forest (2016) the modern science and technology,’ he writes (again in ‘On Sindoan…’), Seoul-based artist renders them actual: a series of figures processing then ‘there is superstition on the other side of religion.’ In other through a mountain forest. In Kyoto School (2017) they are mere voices, words, folk religion functions as ‘other’ to institutionalised relifrom the diaries of Japanese kamikaze pilots, and in Way to the Seung-ga gion and rational science. In Korea, its primitive, dark, mysterious Temple (2017), they manifest as the items abandoned over the years by characters, and the history of its suppression – particularly after the nameless visitors to Bukhan Mountain. All of these – restless souls, Joseon Dynasty adopted Confucianism as its dominant ideology and fragments of thought and trivial objects – are beings that have been for- during the Japanese occupation – have made its presence a ghostly gotten, or are ignored, beings that do not exist in mainstream observa- one that has restlessly haunted what is called ‘modernity’. tion and discussion. What Park does in his art is to summon them by Significantly, Park’s pursuit of tradition and of critiques of global means of moving images and then, particularly in the case of Citizen’s and Asian modernity are not undertaken from a high-altitude Forest, lay them to rest in quietness and peace (as annyeong – part of the perspective. Instead he walks into real, physical sites of historical title of Park’s recent solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery, Seoul – means activity – Bukhan Mountain, Gyeryong Mountain, Keigo Falls – and depicts what he calls the ‘tradition-real’ via moving image. In Park’s when translated from Korean) with a shamanistic farewell ceremony.

Park is an art critic, film director and visual artist who first came to conception, ‘tradition-real’ is a modification of the narrow meaning of prominence during the 1990s and early 2000s, via works dealing with ‘tradition’, which is often treated as a static symbolic code that needs recent history – the Cold War and the division of the Korean penin- to be preserved and promoted. Instead, when we talk in his basement sula – as well as through a film collaboration with his older brother, studio in Seoul, Park states that tradition “is not a cold language, and Park Chan-wook. Then, in a 2008 essay (‘On Sindoan: Some Scattered it is not culture. It’s not in your brain, not in your heart. It is a longViews on Tradition and “The Sublime”’, translated from the Korean term existence in your body.” Tradition has a physical presence.

by Doryun Chong), the artist described how a change in his attitude But to Park, engaging folk religion as an approach to traditiontowards tradition had led to a shift of interest: to someone ‘who real is about more than offering an ‘other’ to the myths of the West and was born in Seoul and raised as a of modernity. To him, it is also a path Victims have become ghosts, restlessly Catholic in a high-rise apartment towards the sublime, an aesthetic complex,’ he explains, ‘Korean tralingering in Korea’s memory, in the deepest, experience that is commonly said to be triggered by visions of mounditional culture, especially tradidarkest part of its collective consciousness tains, the sun and the moon, and tional religious culture, is unfamiliar from the very start and may be even said to belong more to often represented via graphs of the cosmos in the ideology of Korean the realm of the imagination than to reality.’ Consequently, the artist Shamanism and other folk religions. And it is to this that a series of had long postponed any engagement with traditional culture, until, paintings and drawings – such as Sixteen by Nine and Radiance (both as he puts it, he felt that ‘like a rock that you repeatedly trip over 2010) – and object-based works – such as the Bright Stars series and Seven because you have neglected to move it out of the way, it becomes Stars (both 2017) – that he has produced in recent years relate. something you end up regretting somewhere down the line’.

In his writing, Park describes how his first awareness of the The first result of this shift was Sindoan (2008), a 45-minute film, sublime was triggered by an accidental encounter with Gyeryong also presented as a six-channel video installation, that leads people Mountain: ‘an indescribable shock came over me. Though covered through the past and present of a village by that name on Gyeryong in snow, with reflection from the full moon the mountain revealed Mountain, which was once home to many neotraditional religions itself in its glorious fullness even in the middle of the night.’ Since – or as Park puts it, folk religions. According to local history, when- then, the sublime and its forms and meaning in the East have become ever the nation was threatened, as was the case, for example, during a major part of his art. Park’s theory is that, in the West, the sublime the Japanese occupation and after the Korean War, the population of is generally represented vertically, while in the East, it is normally Sindoan has grown. From 1924 to 1975, 80 different religious organ- presented in the horizontal, and its typical format is a shansu (or shanisations exploded onto the scene in Sindoan alone, including shui in Chinese, meaning, literally, mountain-water, but more generCheondogyo (which grew out of Donghak, the movement behind ally used to refer to landscapes in art), where it might appear at the the Donghak Peasant Revolution of 1894, which later that year led far end of a horizontal scroll. This idea is taken up in Citizen’s Forest, to the First Sino-Japanese War, a conflict that changed the history of a work in which Park’s interests in exploring tradition-real and the Northeast Asia), Korean Shamanism and other variations or hybridi- sublime in Korean landscape painting come together. sations of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity.

Citizen’s Forest is a black comedy, described in a language that is The historian Prasenjit Duara would call these religious prac- at once nightmarelike and humorous. Park believes that, due to the tices ‘dialogical transcendence’, and he would see them as philoso- rapid changes that resulted from the Japanese occupation, the Korean phies of sustainability that arise as alternatives to Western modernity. War and the modernisation of South Korea, in contemporary Korea

preceding pages Citizen’s Forest (production still), 2016, three-channel video, ambisonic 3D sound, 26 min 6 sec

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top Way to the Seung-ga Temple (detail), 2017, multichannel slide projection in loop and installation, dimensions variable

above Park Chan-kyong in collaboration with Sangdon Kim, Bright Stars 2, 2017, Myeongdu (shaman implement used as a spirit mirror), dancheong (traditional multicolored pigments) on a birch plate, 66 × 47 cm

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above and facing page Citizen’s Forest (details), 2016, three-channel video, b/w, ambisonic 3D sound, 26 min 6 sec

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Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (still), 2014, HD video, 104 min

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Sindoan (detail), 2008, mixed-media installation

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many historical issues have never been investigated or resolved, tred around notions of being – some of whom further developed this and that consequently, a continuity of historicity has been lost. The into a narrative of Japanese uniqueness). Titled ‘The Standpoint of costumes worn by the ghostlike figures who march around the moun- World History and Imperial Japan’, the roundtable proposed Kegon tain indicate that they are victims of various events in Korean history: as the symbol of world history, and Japan as a suicidal rock, throwing the Donghak Peasant Revolution, the Korean War (1950–53), the itself into the waterfall and looking forward to the confrontation Gwangju Uprising (1980) and the recent Sewol Ferry Disaster (2014). between the water’s flow and itself.

The victims of the events listed above have become ghosts, restlessly Not surprisingly, during the war, the Kyoto School’s ideas were lingering in Korea’s memory, in the deepest, darkest part of its collec- used by imperial Japan as a philosophical tool to support its militive consciousness. Park describes the projection of moving image as tarist ideology, and many young intellectuals, including kamiarticulating the presence of ‘something’ that at the same time ‘doesn’t kaze pilots, were deeply influenced by the aesthetic attraction of exist’. Consequently it is the perfect medium for depicting a present these ideas. In Park’s eyes, Kegon Falls, as a metaphor, is not only a symbolic image of Japan’s commitment to engage with world that is haunted by the past.

Moreover, the fact that Citizen’s Forest is a three-channel projec- history, but a projection of Japanese, or oriental, aesthetic values: tion, and that at times the images on those three screens synchro- fearlessness, absolute sacrifice, the Zen-ish absolute ‘nothing’. In nise, allows it to occasionally function as if it were a continuous hori- short, the Japanese sublime. Meanwhile, in the diaries of the kamizontal shansu landscape. At the Taipei Biennale in 2016, the work was kaze pilots, he sees young, intelligent people who were passionately installed in a space that lacked sufficient depth for the audience to view attached to world (Western) culture: they loved Western poetry all three screens at once, requiring visitors to move physically in order (Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud), Western philosophy to see one screen or another. This is perhaps the best way to see the (Benedetto Croce, Martin Heidegger), cosmopolitan lifestyles. They work – just as, to see a classical horizontal scroll painting, a landscape were young (mostly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three), produced from multiple perspectives, a viewer must approach it from extremely romantic and sentimental, holding an ambiguous attimultiple points of view. Through the tude to the militarist empire. One The target of Park’s recent filmworks is not common thing in the voices of the movement of the camera in landthe past, but a present haunted by layers kamikaze pilots and those of the scape direction, the zooming-in and intellectuals of the Kyoto School -out, the shift between synchroniof forgotten, ignored, unresolved past is that they were both ambitiously sation and division of three screens, Citizen’s Forest experiments with how to visualise multipoint perspec- looking at the world with a sense that they had put themselves at its tive images in media art. centre. How this commitment to world history, the aesthetic value of The late French philosopher Paul Ricoeur describes narrative as a the Japanese sublime and the passion for Western culture could end tool for capturing time. In this context, Park’s recent works could be in disaster for the country and for those young souls is a question seen as a proof that film is a means of producing historicity, the deep that continuously haunts Park’s mind. Kyoto School captures a historstructure used by the collective and the individual to generate histor- ical moment – the very one in which the Japanese tradition encounical narrative. In recalling the ghosts of history in Citizen’s Forest, Park is tered the world, the intellectuals of a quasi-modern state stated its also recalling, and projecting, layer by layer, historical moments into desire to play an active role in the mainstream of world history – by the contemporary moment. In this sense, the target of Park’s recent bringing voices from the past back to life. These voices were once filmworks is not the past, but the present, a present that is haunted by buried in the deep part of history, obscured by mainstream history. the layers of forgotten, ignored, unresolved past. In order to view the But they never really disappeared; they were always wandering somewhere in the dark, like the ghost of thoughts, carrying within present as a continuous unity, we must first look to the past.

Kyoto School is another example of how the imaginative transfigu- them the complexities of history and, in a way, the potential of the ration of narrative can be used to produce historicity. The work con- time. And this, as Ricoeur would agree, is how historicity, produced sists of 320 slides on two projectors. On one are portrait photographs by individual and collective memory, becomes fundamental to of Kegon Falls (Nikkon, Japan), on the other, in landscape format, reaching such potential. ara are quotations from the journals of Japanese kamikaze pilots who died in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Over the past century, Kegon Falls Work by Park Chan-kyong is on view in Ghosts and Spectres – has become infamous in Japan as a place for committing suicide.

Shadows of History, NTU CCA Singapore, through 19 November; in Asian Diva: The Muse and the Monster, SeMA Buk-Seoul, On 26 November 1941, 11 days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the through 9 October; and in Reenacting History – Collective Actions waterfall was particularly mentioned in a roundtable attended by and Everyday Gestures, MMCA Gwacheon, from 22 September philosophers of the Kyoto School (a group of Japanese intellectuals, through 21 January centred around Kyoto University, who sought to fuse the intellectual and spiritual traditions of East Asia – notionally centred around Aimee Lin is editor of ArtReview Asia notions of nothingness – with Western philosophy – notionally cen-

facing page Kyoto School (detail), 2017, two-channel slide projection all images Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

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Anicka Yi Biological Imperatives

by Ming Lin

Due to its highly associative properties, and the difficulty of any the absence of organic smells that might populate other, more diverse attempt to characterise it using conventional descriptors, smell lends and public arenas indicative of its exclusionary and elitist nature. itself to storytelling. ‘A fresh floral aquatic with a woody trail’, reads In addition to exposing the social structures underpinning the the product description for the perfume L’Eau d’Issey, alluringly perception of smell, Yi creates her own scents, challenging what she beckoning one to follow. Meanwhile, Dior’s J’adore ‘takes flight with has observed to be a regime of perfume-industry snobbery, which a fresh accord of bergamot, opening into a vibrant armful of roses upholds certain conventions defining and conforming to rigid genwith a delicate jasmine dry down’. der binaries – fragrances such as Armani’s Because It’s You, for examConjuring up a narrative in which a scent might be encountered ple, are billed as being ‘unabashedly feminine, full, instinctive can be more evocative than delineating the actual notes contained and passionate… like the addictive and sophisticated rose absolute within it. Compared to those available when it comes to describing scent’ – while appealing to other norms of cleanliness and hygiene. the other senses, our vocabularies for articulating smell are relatively In response to this Yi, along with architect Maggie Peng, created arcane. This has not only to do with the immaterial and dispersive Shigenobu Twilight (2009), a homage to the founder and former leader of the radical Japanese Red nature of scent, but also Exposing the social structures underpinning Army, Fusako Shigenobu, the way in which our senses perceptions of smell, Yi challenges the rigid gender infused with, among other have been colonised and things, accents of cedar and conditioned: as the New binaries perpetuated by the perfume industry black pepper, an organic, York-based artist Anicka Yi woodsy and spicy composition, all of which refute the traditional seeks to demonstrate through her work, smell is extremely coded.

If the bare white cube is paradigmatic of the artworld’s modernist floral and sweet characterisations of what a feminine scent should be. claims to operate in a neutral space, its analogue is an equally prisAnd what if one were able to take on the genome of another sex tine odourlessness. In 2015, for her exhibition at the historic multi- or species, and through this gain access to physical spaces and ontodisciplinary arts and performance space The Kitchen, in New York, logical territories otherwise denied due to a lack of sensorial intelliYi, equipped with a special instrument she described at the time as a gence? Yi’s recent filmwork The Flavor Genome (2016), which screened ‘metal canister that looks like a basketball’, performed an air reading as part of this year’s Whitney Biennial, follows the quixotic journey to capture the imperceptible molecules floating about Gagosian, the of a group of scientists seeking a rare animal-plant hybrid that, if bluechip commercial gallery just five blocks away. Distilled into a captured and its genetic makeup extracted, might enable the melding perfume, these were then pumped into quarantined sections of the and sharing of knowledge between species. The elusive genus, the exhibition. Visitors leaned into vinyl tents to have their noses titillated physical characteristics of which are said to resemble ‘a human nose by a few distinct wafts of cleaning product, and through this were straddling a folded futon’ or ‘a horse’s leg that swallowed a grapemade keenly sensitive to the invisible order of artworld patriarchy: fruit’, is presumably fictional, and yet the lyrical prose that narrates

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preceding pages Grabbing At Newer Vegetables, 2015, Plexiglas, agar, female bacteria, fungus, 215 × 62 cm.

Photo: Jason Mandella. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York

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above You Can Call Me F (installation view), 2015.

Photo: Jason Mandella. Courtesy the artist and the Kitchen, New York above left The Flavor Genome (still) 2016, 3D video, colour, sound, 22 min.

Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York

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above 3rd Movement No. 3 in F Major, 2013, tempura fried flowers, resin, Plexiglas, stainless steel shelves, chrome plated dumbbells, 122 × 81 × 15 cm.

Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York

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right Maybe She’s Born with it., 2015, blower, Mylar, plastic, resin, temper-fried flowers, LED lights, Plexiglas, wood, 152 × 305 cm. Photo: Philipp Hänger.

Courtesy the artist, Kunsthalle Basel, and 47 Canal, New York

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the lush Amazonian imagery gestures at legacies of Western coloni- substance similar to Jello, with bacteria swabbed from Koreatowns alism whose explorations disguised an untameable obsession with and Chinatowns across the US. Situated opposite this work (Force categorising otherness. Throughout its narrative The Flavor Genome Majeure, 2017) was a scintillating blueprint of a data processor whose alludes to the highly subjective nature of scientific description, its mirrored surfaces contained a nebulous expanse of tunnels housing a implicit compulsion to define and hierarchise. If Yi’s work can at times seemingly infinite colony of live ants (Lifestyle Wars, 2017). Overlaying seem blatantly pseudoscientific, it is not for lack of rigour. Rather, it is biological and technological networks, each of these self-contained more likely a consequence of the fact that her experiments confound biospheres could be read as part of a larger project outlining collective normal methodologies or seek unexpected outcomes. In doing so systems. Meanwhile, a strange and barely perceptible smell pervaded they attempt to distinguish new regimes of value, rendering the usual the room. Immigrant Caucus (2017), a perfume created from the pheroprofit-driven and ideologically charged logic of scientific progress mones of carpenter ants and Asian women, was a further attempt by superfluous, and therefore opening up the possibility of exploring the artist to draw parallels between human, animal and technologalternative genealogies. ical systems. Creating synergies between human viewers and the ants, Yi doesn’t claim to be an expert the scent, the exhibition text in the chemical and biological proc- Collapsing the boundaries of fiction and reality, offered, might potentially spur esses she deploys and invokes, but a ‘shared psychic experience’.

Yi’s attempts at ‘world building’ call for a she’s an avid learner and takes cues Like the carpenter ant and generation of new vocabularies and typologies other organism groupings that from experts. In 2015, a residency at the arts laboratory at MIT offered her a gateway to the processes of have held her fascination, working collectively, forging alliances cultivating and stabilising strains of distinct bacteria through collab- between different minorities and cultural subgroups, including her oration with the scientists in a lab. With these cultures she produced a peers, has been a key mode of navigating for Yi, and one that can be spectrum of pigments culled from the biological matter of 100 female traced to the early days of her practice. She got her first taste of the friends in her personal and professional circle. The result was Grabbing artworld running around with the downtown faction of artists, at Newer Vegetables (2015), a luminous living portrait of her extended designers and writers of Bernadette Corporation, who sidelined indisocial network in brightly hued and organic florets. More recently, vidualism by assuming a corporate guise, and had her first exhibition similar living organisms dotted her work at the Guggenheim in Life at the then DIY-art-space 47 Canal, where she met many of the artists Is Cheap (2017), an exhibition that followed her being awarded the with whom she would later work. In what was slated to be another Hugo Boss Prize in 2016. Patterned surfaces covered the entirety of solo show at Studiolo, a small gallery in Zürich, Yi responded to the what appeared to be a minimal domestic setting. Yi created this effect, urgent need to address the rampant sexism seen to be proliferating in composed of gelatinous sheets, by inoculating slabs of agar, a plant the artworld. Borrowing the exhibition title – The Politics of Friendship

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above Force Majeure (detail), 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy the artist, 47 Canal, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

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right Lifestyle Wars (detail), 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York

ArtReview Asia

– from a text by Jacques Derrida, in which the poststructuralist philosopher examined the political force and repercussions of friendship, Yi subsumed her role as the sole author of the show and invited several other artists to join her in offering a collective rebuttal. With tongue in cheek, the artists Jordan Lord, Lise Soskolne and Carissa Rodriguez covered entire sections of the gallery’s walls in butter (a reference to the bro-ish insult of ‘buther-face’) and, more sincerely, compiled a publication in which they asked others to respond to the issue. Overturning the individualistic framework of the exhibition, The Politics of Friendship laid bare the interpersonal relations that constitute the success of an individual, garnering the strength of the group and its network of friends and collaborators in the hope of creating a unified whole that might speak more potently than the fractures born of confrontation. Yi had drawn on similar themes of collaboration a few years earlier with fellow 47 Canal artist Josh Kline, when the two staged a performative split in their shared ‘solo show’, bifurcating the space down the middle.

In a previous incarnation, Yi (who is in her mid-forties but began making art just ten years ago) worked as a fashion copywriter, a skill that is often reflected in the seductive narratives that underpin her sculptures and videos. Though they may not always be manifested in the final presentation of the work, Yi creates stories, and within these finds strange and anomalous objects – fake plastic flowers, tempura batter, beeswax, bacteria – brought together through the fusing of the fantastical with events from real life. Yi calls these figments ‘bio-fictions’, and it’s within these that the misshapen and the

smelly, the revolting and beautiful, find a place. For Yi, who was born in Seoul and emigrated to the United States at a young age, the condition of being suspended between two worlds informs a more subtle but consistent strain of her work that parses definitions of hybridity and migrant identity.

Meditations on this position are seen in their greatest strength to date in The Flavor Genome, where the film poses portmanteaus – words that combine the sounds and meanings of others – such as fugly and turducken, or liger (the product of a union between a lion and a tiger) as emblematic of the human desire to splice and synthesise.

The liger, created by human intervention, is a disarming, neutered creature extant only in captivity. As much as Yi locates a desire for and the inevitability of mixing, she knows that being uncategorisable can lead to alienation as well.

Cyborg theorist Donna Haraway defines sympoesis as an act of ‘making-with’, which, contrary to the self-generating laws of autopoesis, can take place only through collaboration. Aligning systems and embracing nonhuman perspectives, Yi attempts a ‘worldbuilding’ in which she and other hybrid objects, animals and plants can be made sense of. Collapsing the boundaries of fiction and reality, the natural and manmade, however, can bring chaos too, and requires a generation of new vocabularies and typologies. But, like the best mad scientist, fortune-teller or expert perfumer, the artist doesn’t shy from indeterminacy. ara Ming Lin is a writer and researcher based in Hong Kong

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Arin Rungjang The Thai artist reveals connections between nations via the stories of individuals, from a final visit with Hitler to a driver working on the Malaysia–Singapore border

by Adeline Chia

246247596248914102516… And then there were none (detail), 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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Golden Teardrop, 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist

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“He was gentle,” the voiceover says. “He was almost the first German his interest is neither in condemnation nor in soliciting apologies.

I had met who was gentle. His kind words contrasted with the image Rather, he aims at teasing out hidden connections – in this case, the we had of him speaking to the crowd. For me, Adolf Hitler, leader of parallels between German and Thai history, and the way private lives the Reich, was a gentleman.” are implicated in wider historical currents by choice or by chance.

Hitler the gentleman – not easy to swallow, particularly not in The use of multilayered narratives is typical of recent work by these dark times of resurgent rightwing, chauvinist nationalist move- the forty-two-year-old Bangkok-based artist. Although his prolific ments worldwide: Brexit xenophobia, neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, career resists easy characterisation, broadly speaking, there is a moveHindutva in India. This cringingly sympathetic account of a meeting ment from formal concerns to – in tandem with his growing international exposure – a more explicit with the Führer is drawn from the Rungjang aims at teasing out hidden engagement with the political and memoirs of Prasat Chutin, Thai connections and the way in which private ambassador to Germany during the historical contexts in which he 1930s. His name in the Reich Chanworks. His early works transformed lives are implicated in wider historical cellery guestbook, on 20 April 1945, gallery architecture: in Emotions As currents by choice or by chance Water (2002) he turned the Bangkok Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday and the day Soviet artillery began shelling Berlin, is the last entry.

University Gallery into a 20cm-deep wading pool, with light reflected What was a Thai diplomat doing visiting Hitler? This is one of off the water dancing on the walls. Or they were conceptually playful: the questions raised in Thai artist Arin Rungjang’s videowork And Installed Neon with my signature signed on the neon tube (2006) saw the then there were none (Tomorrow we will become Thailand) (2017), commis- object described ‘signed’ in various galleries in Paris. sioned for this year’s Documenta in Kassel. Using overlapping narraLater, family and lovers started to appear. The video Russamee tives, including Chutin’s memoirs, the work explores the various Rungjang (2009) featured a night view from the highest floor of afterlives of fascism in Germany and Thailand. Unlike other works Bangkok’s Dusit Thani hotel, where his mother worked as a cleaner. at Documenta that engage with the National Socialist history of When she was feeling sad about her dead husband, she would go to the Germany, such as Maria Eichhorn’s tower of books stolen from top floor and stare out at the streets. Superimposed ticker tape text of Jewish owners (Unlawfully acquired books from Jewish ownership, 2017), her recollections roll over the footage of the quiet nightscape. The Scars

preceding pages Abode of Dignity (View of Johor River), 2017, inkjet print on baryta gold fibre gloss paper, 160 × 90 cm. Courtesy the artist and Esplanade, Singapore

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of Your Love, They Leave Me Breathless (2011), shown that year in Gallery Unlike this tepid visit to faded Thai royalty and regalia, his Biagiotti, Florence, featured photos of Rungjang’s father and two stronger works feel more urgent and complex, a less literal response sculptures of disembodied arms. The arms were enlarged from a Pietà to a host context. He often places stories, both major and minor, paperweight that his father had brought back from Italy to Thailand. past and present, side by side, showing the complicated concurrenFor his projects in the international residency and biennale cies between events and people across time and space. Take Golden circuit, Rungjang likes to draw out the hidden Thai connection with Teardrop (2013), his work for the Thai Pavilion at that year’s Venice the host country. This has mixed results. Some works feel obscure and Biennale, which uses the Thai egg yolk dessert thong yod as a window doggedly academic, such as the Mongkut (2015) exhibition in Paris’s into trade, migration, war and revolution in Asia and Europe. In it are Jeu de Paume, which centred on a stories about the dessert’s origins His art performs an open-minded historical copy of Rama IV’s crown given to (it was a dish made possible only CSI. In differently glancing lights, you the French government in 1861. by the slave trade that fuelled the sugarcane plantations in Brazil) The Thai king, known for his see fingerprints and splatters, traces and in a Portuguese nunnery, as well canny diplomatic parrying during associations, a trail of clues as the way the recipe travelled to a time of rampant Western colonisation of Southeast Asia, had given a replica of his crown to France’s Thailand via the wife of a Greek diplomat to the seventeenth-century Napoleon III as a conciliatory gesture. (The real crown is locked up Siamese court. in the Grand Palace in Bangkok and has been out of sight for years.)

I’ve always thought of Rungjang’s best work as evidence of a The first part of Rungjang’s two-channel video tours the gilded inte- wise and gentle sort of investigator: like Sherlock Holmes crossed riors of Musée Guimet, where the replica is stored, and features a with a Buddhist monk. In these, his art performs an open-minded voiceover on Franco-Thai history by the Southeast Asian collection’s historical CSI. In differently glancing lights, you see fingerprints and curator. The second shows Woralak Sooksawasdi na Ayutthaya, one splatters, traces and associations, a trail of clues, but with no clear of Rama IV’s great-granddaughters, making the crown from the 3D culpability assigned to any party. By being fully vigilant of a karmic scans of the French museum artefact. Her creation, a copy of a copy, network of implication, his work allows the possibility for healing was displayed in the show. and action.

above and facing page Mongkut, 2015, two single-channel HD videos (15 min and 14 min 30 sec), colour, sound. © and courtesy the artist

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above (all images) Unequal exchange / No exchange can be unequal, 2011 (installation views, Singapore Biennale, 2011). Courtesy the artist

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Which brings us back to Hitler. And then there were none (Tomorrow artists, among them Tiravanija). Like many of his compatriots, he is we will become Thailand) toggles between a few stories narrated by also politically and socially aware, but his voice is less strident than, Rungjang. One is about his father, a Thai sailor who was beaten say, the lightning-rod works of photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom up by neo-Nazis in Hamburg in 1977 and died a few months later. or activist-painter Vasan Sitthiket. Finally, the dreamy, languidly Then we switch over to the life of Chutin, who among other things paced storytelling in his videos has echoes of filmmaker Apichatpong called the despot ‘wise’ and ‘misunderstood’, a man who ‘walked Weerasethakul’s hypnotic arthouse meditations. slowly like an elegant lion’. Chutin was captured after the fall of The wide-ranging style and content of his output stems from an Nazi Germany and spent seven cruel months in a Russian prison. intuitive and adaptable working method, a combination of archival research and face-to-face interviews with friends and strangers. In His section ends with a desperate cry for world peace.

Film footage is drawn from two places. The first is Berlin, where person, he is a great listener and talker, endlessly curious, with a good two performers dance a quiet pas de deux in a car park and later in a head for historical nuggets and random associative anecdotes; it’s white, unfurnished apartment. These places are actually part of the easy to see how he can get people to open up. Talking to and learning anonymous-looking residential complex built over the site of the from them, he tells me, “expands my life”. former Führerbunker. The rest of the footage features the metalThe latest expansion of his life takes him to Singapore. Abode of casting process by which a relief sculpture at the base of the Democ- Dignity, commissioned by the Esplanade, Singapore’s largest multiracy Monument in Bangkok is replicated in brass for Documenta as arts centre, explores Singapore-Malaysia ties, as well as a longstanding source of conflict between the two countries – water part of the same work.

The original sculpture has a loaded history. Titled Soldiers Fighting supply. Singapore left the Malaysian Federation in 1965, but both for Democracy, it was commissioned in 1939 by Field Marshal Phibun countries, separated by a narrow body of water called the Straits Songkhram to commemorate the ‘democratic revolution’ that over- of Johor, still enjoy a good flow of trade and labour despite occathrew the Thai monarchy and the establishment of a constitutional sional flareups about water prices. Malaysia thinks the raw water it monarchy. Ironically, Songkhram turned out to be a fascist-leaning supplies to Singapore is too cheap, and the treated water Singanationalist, signing a military pore sells back to it too expenAcknowledging the ideological complicity of alliance with the Japanese and sive. The early noughties were declaring war on the United fraught with political skirGerman and Thai history, his work also opens up States and Britain during the mishes during which Malaya space of regeneration and possibility: the replica sia threatened to cut off the Second World War. of a public monument built on democratic water supply to Singapore.

In its loosely associative Fluid, diaristic and fragmentway, Rungjang’s work sugaspirations gains new meanings in new contexts ed, Rungjang’s show uses stogests that his country’s history of fascism may have survived to the present in a different form of ries from a Singaporean and a Malaysian who often cross the border tyranny. Judging from the current cyclical nature of coups and for their livelihoods as a metaphor for a larger sense of permeability countercoups by juntas ousting elected prime ministers, as well as a between the two territories, including the flow of culture and people. climate of censorship and suppression of dissent in the Kingdom of The resulting videos are demanding – one, featuring a Malaysian Smiles, he has a point. Acknowledging the ideological complicity of driver, is three hours long, filmed in real time as he chats about his German and Thai history, his work also opens up a space of regen- life and drives from Bugis in Singapore to Johor River, whose basin eration and possibility. The replica of a public monument built on and tributaries supply water to Malaysia and Singapore. Also on democratic aspirations gains new meanings in new contexts, and display is an eloquent photograph depicting the river at sunset. allows the viewer to confront the political ideal and the compromised With its silhouetted water houses and transmission towers against reality. His work also asserts the potential of art to expand conversa- a dusky pink sky, the scene is a generic regional coastal zone that tions, or at least transform them in an unexpected way. Like how the could be found anywhere in Singapore or Malaysia’s past or present, site of Hitler’s death, now whitewashed to the point of banality, can signalling a larger history and landscape shared by the two counbecome a point where two people, simultaneously mourning the past tries, from which, despite current differences, their people live in a and celebrating whatever distance we have from it, dance. perpetual downstream. ara In its diversity of output, Rungjang’s oeuvre floats somewhere between the stylistic constellations of his country’s most visible pracDocumenta 14 continues until 14 September; Abode of Dignity is on show at the Jendela Visual Arts Space, Esplanade, Singapore, titioners. With its interest in out-of-gallery personal exchange, his until 15 October work has similarities to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s participatory style of relational aesthetics (in Let’s Make Sense, 2011, he transformed West Den Adeline Chia is associate editor of ArtReview Asia Haag, Netherlands, into a dining space in collaboration with other

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Out 26 October

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Octopus 17 Forever Transformed Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 28 July – 9 September Facing the precarity and emptiness of daily living, it would be nice to believe that all it takes to have a safe and meaningful life is to be resilient. The neoliberalisation of human relationships places all responsibility with individuals, who are urged to adapt to and overcome environmental, social, financial and personal adversity and catastrophe, or else risk a lonely descent into their own devastation.

Curated by Georgie Meagher, Forever Transformed is the 17th instalment of Gertrude Contemporary’s Octopus series, which provides leading Australian curators a platform to develop exhibitions that contribute to curatorial discourse.

Octopus 17 uses the concept of resilience as an entry point for thinking about what preservation might look like in times when the threat of extinction is increasingly salient. Meagher’s curatorial hand subtly points to the fusion of contradictory forces – neoliberalism, illness, decolonising practices and so on – that maintain and shift the concept of resilience, placing works that seemingly embrace resilience alongside those that contest the validity of resilience as a mode of survival.

The ten chromogenic prints that make up Tony Albert’s 2008 photo series Optimism #1–10 show a young man (the artist’s cousin) in different surroundings, carrying a Jawun – a traditional woven basket – that was made by Albert’s aunt, Ninney Murray. The Jawun signifies and is an agent of interconnectedness, weaving ways of knowing and being into life; its symbolism cannot be thought apart from its utility. In the different images, the Jawun carries school stationery, groceries or a beach towel. A sign of Indigenous cultural ingenuity, which resists and persists beyond the violence of colonialism, the Jawun is never an empty vessel or a static form: it is full of the productive potency of memory.

While Albert’s work stages resilience as a decolonising process, using the Jawun as a symbol of hope and strength, Sophie Cassar resists the pressure to perform fortitude. Her installation Little girls love to cry so much that I have known them to cry in front of the mirror in order to double the pleasure (2017) resembles a nightstand displaying several scrapbooks, and Disney and cherub sticker-sets plastered on small glass panes. The scrapbooks contain photographs that reflexively embody a sad/sick girl aesthetic, suggesting the performative nature of being in, and overcoming, pain. The experience of the body in pain can cause the feeling that the world is turning against you, while the demand to perform wellness can itself wear away at the body.

Cassar’s portrayal of the sick girl rejects the self-made-hero narrative of the individual triumphing over adversity – the instrumentalisation of pain – posing the question: who is it that we are being healthy for?

The expectation that bodies overcome pain is also present in Liz Linden’s Damaged Goods (2016), which draws on the trope of female victimhood. Linden reproduces the covers of seven commercial novels as 112 × 183 cm inkjet prints. Each is titled Damaged Goods and features an image of a female protagonist, the work showing there is a market for pain and suffering. Damaged Goods alludes to the double bind of being a victim in a hostile world. The victim must cast off their affliction, becoming ductile; yet this requires reprocessing their suffering into a positive aspect of life. Alternatively, the protagonists may find ways to live with being ‘damaged goods’, scrambling the logic of resilience, a logic that negates different modes of survival, perseverance and flourishing.

facing page, bottom Sophie Cassar, Little girls love to cry so much that I have known them to cry in front of the mirror in order to double the pleasure (detail), 2017, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable.

Photo: Christo Crocker. Courtesy Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne

facing page, top Tony Albert, Optimism #1–10, 2008, chromogenic prints, 80 × 80 cm (each). Photo: Christo Crocker.

Courtesy Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne

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Tabita Rezaire is also mindful of the flattening out of myriad strategies for survival in her video Peaceful Warrior (2015). The ‘postInternet’ aesthetic of the work evokes the corporate colonisation of the Internet and self-care. There is a naïveté to Rezaire’s explicit proposals of ‘radical self-care’ and a ‘decolonial diet’. In one frame the text ‘decolonial diet’ hovers over a background of marijuana leaves, avocados, kiwifruit and oranges. While there are material benefits to consuming these plants, images of expensive food items may operate to gentrify the concept and practise decolonisation. Rezaire sits within this paradox; although the label ‘decolonial’ is deployed to disrupt dominant economic and power structures, it is at risk of being co-opted by them.

Less sanguine is Rushdi Anwar’s The Circle of Knowing and Unknowing (2012–16).

A large circle consisting of hundreds of pieces of white chalk in one half and mass of black pigment in the other, the sculpture produces a jarring contrast that calls to mind the negative forces that undo worlds and our ability to inhabit them. There’s an obvious reference to the classroom chalkboard, yet here the work evokes epistemic violence inherent in colonisation and displacement.

If, as it suggests, hope is all that exists on the other side of struggle, the future may well be one of pain and dislocation.

Forever Transformed brings together artworks that give form to some of the corporeal, racialised and gendered experiences of loss, suffering and perseverance in our fraught times. As the title suggests, change is a constant, and the work demonstrates that clinging to resilience need not shape our lives when there are so many other ways to think about what a future may look like. Tristen Harwood

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The National: New Australian Art Art Gallery of New South Wales 30 March – 16 July Carriageworks 30 March – 25 June Museum of Contemporary Art Australia 30 March – 18 June Featuring work by 45 artists and uniting a trinity of Sydney’s arts institutions, The National is a sprawling group exhibition that nominally attempts to gloss the discourses and practices that define the state of contemporary art in Australia. Given the title (there will be two further iterations of the project, in 2019 and 2021), identity is its key issue by default, both in terms of how this is articulated (more or less directly) in individual works and by the show as a collective whole. And yet anyone expecting to be presented with a group of works that neatly defines some sort of aesthetic DNA of Australianness is going to be disappointed by a lightly curated exhibition (or three lightly curated exhibitions, depending on how strong is your sense of the whole) that offers a polyphonic celebration of difference as much as anything else. But you won’t really by surprised by that: everyone knows that the general point of an art exhibition these days is to destabilise rather than reinforce received wisdom, and to complicate any notion of that language, particularly the language of art, is a matter of simple definitions, whether they pertain to the art itself or to the context in which it is shown. Archie Moore’s United Neytions (2014–17), centred on the relationship between the inhabitants of Australia and the land they inhabit, and on show in Carriageworks, typifies the way in which this works.

United Neytions comprises a series of 28 flags suspended from the ceiling of the shedlike building, each of which represents one of the ‘28’ Aboriginal ‘nations’ identified by the amateur anthropologist R.H. Mathews on a map of mainland Australia produced in 1900.

At a time when Indigenous peoples were generally assumed, by the country’s colonial invaders, to be nomads who were unattached to any particularities of place, the map offered a counternarrative, albeit one that was no more honest (research was limited: there were certainly more than 28 tribes, etc). Moore’s flags ‘represent’ each of those nations through aspects of the flora and fauna, and dominant constellations native to each territory, and in the process

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construct a system of definitions that is only a little less abstract than Mathews’s map, but certainly one that mocks the very idea of identifying a multicultural society under one aesthetic or flag, let alone an artist’s ability to construct one. An echoing and updating of Moore’s work can be found over at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in which stands Keg De Souza’s Changing Courses (2017), essentially a shed made out of clear plastic panels into which a variety of dry foodstuffs – from pasta and breakfast cereals to fruits and sweets – that make up the preferred diets of various ethnic communities in Sydney have been vacuum-packed.

The structure itself serves as a place for a series of discussions during the course of the exhibition about the country’s changing food culture.

These types of work (and there are many others on show that document – sometimes literally, as is the case with Alex Martinis Roe’s threechannel video installation It was about opening the very notion that there was a particular perspective (2015–17), which looks at cultural movements centred on the General Philosophy Department of the University of Sydney during the 1970s and 80s – links between indigeneity, migration and alterity with suffering, abuse, struggle and oppression, to the point that it becomes a kind of haunting presence in the show) echo French writer Georges Perec’s warning about rushing to describe a city or country: ‘it’s far too big and there’s every chance of getting it wrong’.

If we can remove the sense that The National is a show instrumentalised to set out a stable sense of nation (which is not to say that the exhibition undermines itself, rather that it thrives on destabilising fixed meanings), experiencing it becomes more a question of picking through recent production in Australian art.

And there are some definite highlights. Chief among these is Nicholas Mangan’s Limits to Growth (2016–17), a work that has appeared in various guises in various exhibitions around the world over the past 12 months, but is here on show (at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) in the form of a video with an installation

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(which includes a series of computers engaged in Bitcoin mining). The work explores money as a concrete/material currency and as an abstract/immaterial commodity by telling the history of the currency of the Micronesian island of Yap – rais are hand-carved limestone disks, so large they were often virtually impossible to move, but directly reflecting the value of the labour of which they are evidence – and how it was exploited by colonial traders. To complete the circle, Bitcoins mined by computer software pay to produce large photographic prints of rais.

Equally striking is the film installation City of Ladies (2016), by Zanny Begg and Elise McLeod, housed in the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Inspired by a fifteenth-century novel of the same title by Christine de Pizan that aimed to promote a female view of the world (and in doing so undermine masculine-dominated perspectives), the complex nonsequential video (it recomposes itself, via an algorithm, for each 20-minute iteration) documents the issues that affect the lives of a group of young, ethnically diverse Frenchwomen in Paris, interspersed with interview sessions with prominent contemporary feminist thinkers including Hélène Cixous, Silvia Federici, Sam Bourcier, Fatima Ezzahra Benomar and Sharone Omankoy, in such a way that the whole fuses the historic, contemporary, theoretical and quotidian into a rivetingly poetic whole. And does so in a way that makes no overt references to Australia, other than the coincidence of its makers’ nationality. Indeed, perhaps it’s only on an institutional level, as Alex Gawronski’s three works, each of which displaces an architectural element that might constitute a signature of one the three host venues (the postindustrial Carriageworks, the colonial AGNSW and the contemporary MCA) into another, demonstrate, that The National grounds identity and geography into something approaching a truly local terrain. Certainly art has a habit of waving the bricks and mortar of the institutions that house it like some new tribal flag. But even that’s been complicated. Naturally. Mark Rappolt

top Archie Moore, United Neytions, 2014–17, (installation view, The National, 2017, Carriageworks). Photo: Zan Wimberley

above Nicholas Mangan, Limits to Growth, 2016–17, six hand-printed c-type photographs on Kodak premier, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland, and LABOR, Mexico City

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Patty Chang Re-Configurations Bank, Shanghai 13 May – 2 July Patty Chang’s first gallery solo show in mainland China is at once a (select) retrospective and a showcase of recent works. These last comprise an ambitious two-channel video installation, Configurations (2016), an exploration of the reality of the heroic national act of the South–North Water Diversion Project (the longest and one of the most expensive aqueducts in the world, first proposed by Mao Zedong in 1952 and not expected to be completed until 2050), and a body of photographic, sculptural and readymade works that deal with the same subject matter. The water diversion project has been, at least in contemporary art, the elephant in the room: while most artists working in China today rely heavily on the urban or even the digital for inspiration, semirural realities such as this have been largely ignored.

The historical or social issues raised by this old-fashioned socialist effort – to channel some 44.8 billion cubic metres of water annually from southern China to arid northern China – are addressed brilliantly here

by Chang. The artist manages to frame it as a reality that is neither mundane – only very indirectly can the project be described today

as an essential part of Chinese people’s everyday lives – nor exotic. It certainly isn’t spectacular: unless one were to describe scenes in which the artist urinates into a homemade FUD (female urinary device – a form replicated in a series of glass sculptures) as spectacular.

The device is formed from a plastic water bottle, mirroring a government project that is both grandiose and inhuman in scale, yet designed to cater to one of the most basic human needs. The parallels drawn by the artist between the bodily and the infrastructural (a hip topic today) humorously juxtapose consumption and excretion, and pertain to the ways in which even the biggest of technological projects relates to the individual human body.

These new works are placed in the context of Chang’s oeuvre through a selection of ‘classic’ works from the late 1990s and early 2000s that a good number of local viewers will have heard about (for some time) but seldom get to see.

The video Melons (At a Loss) (1998) records a monologue about breast cancer during which Chang carves open her bra, then scoops out and eats (in a fashion that resembles autocannibalism) a cantaloupe melon held within.

(One does query why a paired work, Shaved (At a Loss), 1998, in which the artist, blindfolded, shaves her pubic hair, is not also present here, though the nudity in this work may have something to do with it). In Untitled (Eels) (2001), the artist moves erotically, almost reaching her climax apparently, embarrassed and humiliated, as the eels in question writhe underneath her wet shirt. Meanwhile, in the two-channel video In Love (2011), the artist appears to be kissing each of her parents, her face pressed against theirs, as all three of them cry. Ultimately the work reveals itself as a record of the artist eating a raw onion with each parent played in reverse.

One can argue that the link between the new and old works is relatively weak here, but as Chang herself put it recently, they are like two sides of the same coin. With this comprehensive exhibition, one gets an understanding of why this is an artist known for being bold and humorous; for dealing with identity and social issues in ways that are not clichéd; and for a renewed struggle that is, although very bodily in nature, much more than a feminist one, one that makes newer, trendy art pale in comparison. Li Bowen

Re-Configurations, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Bank, Shanghai

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Wang Wei, Ko Sin Tung Muse for a Mimeticist Edouard Malingue Gallery, Shanghai 24 June – 20 August The term ‘mimeticism’ was adopted by Wang Wei and Ko Sin Tung as a reaction to the established realist mode in Chinese art used to represent the official socialist ideology. However, each artist approaches the issue differently.

Having trained in China’s academic tradition of Socialist Realism – in particular, that of propaganda murals – Wang Wei is well versed in the vocabulary and logic of the politicisation of art, and turned to mimeticism in order to deconstruct it. For Ko Sin Tung, more than ten years Wang’s junior, the appeal of mimeticism emerged from living in Hong Kong, and the pressures that an individual absorbs from an ever more stringent social mechanism.

While Wang Wei’s What you see is not what you see (all works 2017) is given the dominant position in the gallery (its entire main wall), it appears to blend into its surroundings, almost as if camouflaged. The mosaic mural mirrors the interior of the gallery space: one can make out essential components such as the windows, pillars, a few chairs and a blurred image of one of Ko’s works across the room. The readymade tiles from which it is assembled come in a limited range of colours, giving the image a dim tone, lacking in the kind of colour spectrum that might make it seem truly realistic. The work is completed by a few sections in which the tiles

have been peeled off to create the impression of an aged and worn mural: a step towards its appearing to be an authentic, ‘functioning’ object. What you see is not what you see is a new addition to Wang’s systematic recreations of one space within another, in which he continuously interrupts the given space or setting with modified architectural structures, and challenges the viewer’s perception. Indeed, often, the disturbance of the physical environments is intensified by frictions between individual visitors’ perception and cognition of the space as a whole. Such frictions are further explored in Wang’s Natural History 4 (Portrait), comprising 13 smaller square mosaics. In each a series of sapphire-blue tiles are scattered through an otherwise flesh-coloured grid.

Though the patterns are made randomly, they provoke a tendency to perceive the compositions as human faces. Wang’s two sets of works eliminated the artist’s control of the figurative narrative: imagery is reconstructed in the perception of the viewer, which is itself subject to individual memories and contexts.

While Wang rejects his formal education in realism by avoiding narrative, Hong Kongbased Ko Sin Tung addresses the increasing national pressures faced by the city’s populace with works that reflect on the conflict between

the identities of Hong Kong and Greater China.

She uses everyday materials: shattered pieces of a wide-angle traffic mirror, a fraction of a print advertisement showing sunflowers and a safety helmet, hazard lights used on construction sites and LED street lamps. While these objects originally functioned with the intention of improving efficiency within the urban environment, here they seem to represent the artist’s own anxieties about the intensity of living conditions in Hong Kong.

In response to the city’s current and uncertain political outlook, Sunflower and safety helmet serves as an empathetic nod to the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement held in Taipei.

Each time she modifies, dismembers and reassembles these objects and images, Ko stages a microprotest, dealing with her own frustration with the impotence of art in Hong Kong’s political context, as well as her powerless position in the face of the ongoing social transformation of her city. Ko’s transposition of these objects and images can be read as an attempt to beam a sequence of discreet codes that signal her sociopolitical inclinations. Here, Ko transfers the responsibility of an explicit interpretation to the viewer, while outlining the circumscription of the artist’s own social intervention. Li Qi

Ko Sin Tung, One day, workers replaced the traditional high pressure sodium street lights with the new LED ones, 2017, enamel paint, acrylic, digital print on aluminium plates, 103 × 72 cm. Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Shanghai & Hong Kong

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Canton Express: Art of the Pearl River Delta M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong 23 June – 10 September The original Canton Express was part of curator Hou Hanrou’s Zone of Urgency at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Shedding light on the work of 14 artists and artist groups active in the Pearl River Delta, including Big Tail Elephant (Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui, Lin Yilin, Xu Tan), Jiang Zhi, U-theque (Cao Fei and Ou Ning) and Vitamin Creative Space, the presentation broke the conventional image of Chinese contemporary art held by the world at that time. Apart from showing Canton Express’s legacy in Chinese contemporary art history, the M+ version is a reminder of the important role of museums in conserving contemporary art. The majority of works on display here are reiterations of the originals (many lost or damaged), but it is worth remembering that, given financial constraints at the time, none of these art pieces would have survived if Chinese collector Guan Yi had not stepped in to acquire and ship the exhibition back to China at the end of the Biennale.

Canton Express was donated to M+ in 2013.

Although the show occupies the entire M+ Pavilion, the rectangular layout from

2003 has had to be restaged in a U-shape as a consequence of the reduced space here.

Artist Zheng Guogu, who assisted in the original design, was involved in this decision, and it is a transformation that sharply echoes the quality of adaptability that came alongside the rapid development of Guangdong two decades ago. Zheng’s own work in the show, Sample Room (2003/17), is a complete reconstruction, with help from photographic documentation and email correspondence relating to the original work. Based on a kitchenware showroom in Yangjiang, where the artist lives and works, Sample Room incorporates his conversation with Hou on the wall of the showroom, where similarities between the export of goods and arts through communication between the manufacturer (factory or artist) and the distributor (exporter or curator) can be found.

Lin Yilin’s Hotbed (2003/17) in the M+ Pavilion is not an exact replica of the Venice presentation. Instead, the video installation, which follows the artist’s original proposal, is completed by a bunkbed layered with grey bricks, alluding to those that appear in his perfor-

mance, as well as six monitors showing documented performances. They individually discuss Lin’s sociopolitical perspectives while collectively delivering his ambivalent views about growth in southern China. The 40 surviving fibreglass sculptures from Duan Jianyu’s 100-piece Artistic Chicken (2003/17) are clustered near the entrance of the exhibition rather than spread around the show (free-range chickens) as in the original presentation. This positioning not only reflects the decision to value the authenticity of the original artistpainted artefacts, but also marks the loss embedded in the journey of Canton Express.

M+’s Canton Express is like an allegory in a summer read: the story of alternative practice in southern China at the turn of the twentyfirst century is obvious and epic, but as a result it’s easy to overlook an underlying message about collecting and conserving contemporary art. M+’s Pi Li has stated that ‘people often believe that contemporary art is too recent to require careful maintenance’; M+’s restaging of Canton Express demonstrates why such beliefs are misguided. Morgan Wong

Duan Jianyu, Artistic Chicken (detail), 2003/17, fibreglass, resin, acrylic paint, steel armature, dimensions variable. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong

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Noh Suntag The 4th Wall: The State of Emergency II Art Sonje Center, Seoul 2 June – 6 August On entering this exhibition (The State of Emergency I was first shown in Württembergischer Kunstverein in Germany, 2008), one immediately feels the immense contradiction between the cleanness of the presentation of almost 200 photographs, spread over two floors, and the chaos in Korean social and political issues that Noh records. The bottom storey is staged to examine the borders of South Korea as if it were an imaginary island, while on the upper floor Noh focuses on what he describes as South Korea’s political dark side in the last decade, including the impeachment of president Park Geun-hye.

The exhibition design distinguishes The 4th Wall: The State of Emergency II from Noh’s previous exhibitions (among these, his awardwinning 2014 Korea Artist Prize exhibition at the MMCA in Gwacheon). While the majority of works are mounted on the wall, some are attached to poles and choreographed within the exhibition space. These floating imageries remind us of banners held by protesters, and shields used by police or army units, both of which are subjects that appear in overwhelming quantity as subject matter in these works. However, direct confrontation is not always what Noh captures. In Search of Lost Thermos Bottles (2010) shows details of the aftermath – destroyed vehicles, abandoned

homes, even a pile of samgyupsal (pork belly, which was presumably being prepared for a meal) covered with ashes – of North Korea’s bombardment of Yeonpyeong Island in 2010.

It was South Korean politician Ahn Sang-Soo’s mistaken identification of two burnt thermos bottles as North Korean artillery shells that led Noh on this sarcastically framed journey of foraging.

This wit of Noh’s titling continues in the Drought (2015) series on the upper floor. The works not only depict the violence of water cannons firing at demonstrators demanding justice following the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster, but also picture the jets of water as if Noh is conducting a study of their formal aesthetics.

The Sewol tragedy and its backlash were clearly issues that contributed to the eventual ousting of Park Geun-hye. A Chignon Mountain Raised

by Lies (2017) captures moments between the end of 2016 and early 2017 in Gwanghwamun Square, in the heart of Seoul, where protesters against Park gathered. It was a tough winter, through which candlelight not only brought warmth but symbolised will. Here, the demonstrators’ faces are blurred by long exposure times. Photographic technique becomes a means for Noh to convey his concept, and these images allude to his critical stance on the politics of photography (echoing sentiments expressed

in an earlier series, Criminal Face Collector, 2011 – also present in the exhibition). Furthermore, one can hardly ignore the humanist touch that heightens the second part of the show in the form of a dramatic lighting shift from fluorescent light on the lower floor to warm spotlights here. Not only that, but the long shadows cast by the metal pipes are an awkward reminder of imprisonment, whether of Korean labour leader Han Sang-gyun for his role in organising the protests, or of the six government officials for their role in blacklisting artists, or of Park over allegations of corruption.

Noh uses his lens to guide us through different ways of seeing: from a grand narrative to microscopic discovery; from objective documentation to compassionate expression.

Although his works directly relate to specific events in South Korea, there is a universality and timelessness that resonates with an international audience, allowing us to reflect on the sociopolitical issues faced by other nations.

The pro-democracy Umbrella Movement can be seen as one of the most symbolic gestures in Hong Kong over the past two decades, but it is not an isolated event from the past, nor will it be to the future. And Noh’s multifaceted images of his home country trigger urgent reflections on the entangled situations in my own. Morgan Wong

Drought #CFL1401, 2015, inkjet pigment print, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Art Sonje Center, Seoul

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Tomás Saraceno Our Interplanetary Bodies Asia Culture Center, Gwangju 15 July – 25 March Given its title, it’s a striking fact that human bodies are absent from display in Tomás Saraceno’s debut presentation in South Korea.

Indeed, the only living body formally on show is that of a Nephila spider, which spins its web in a spotlit transparent case, seemingly oblivious to any of the bodies (of viewers or sculptures) that surround it. Elsewhere in the ACC’s vast exhibition hall is a tentlike sleeping pod located near the ceiling of the space (into which single visitors can ascend, once safety-harnessed, via a ladder), a constellation of glowing and apparently floating spheres (giving the darkened space the air of a planetarium), a projection that appears to be tracking objects, and a rumbling soundtrack throughout. All of which leaves the status of that possessive pronoun in the exhibition’s title somewhat open to question: in what sense are the bodies on show ours?

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that in many ways this installation comes across as more a proposition than an exhibition. As if to emphasise that further, the artist opened the show by demonstrating the potential for carbon-free flight using an ‘Aerocene Explorer’: a solarpowered balloon (which achieves buoyancy via the simple process of air being heated by the sun) stored in a backpack that visitors can take outside and try for themselves during the course of the show. (Any flying is tethered, however; this is not an invitation to fly away, except as a leap of imagination.) The backpack is a part of

Saraceno’s ongoing, collaborative Aerocene project, designed to demonstrate the potential of earth’s atmosphere as a site for fossil-fuel-free habitation and transport. The sleeping pod, providing an aerial perspective of the installation, and the glowing, variously scaled planetoid spheres, tethered in threes like so many hot-air balloons, hint at that too. There’s no escaping the fact that the ropes that hold the sphere trios in frozen orbit evoke something of the web being spun by the spider in its case. By now you begin to think that everything is connected.

The final components of the installation comprise the soundtrack, generated by cameras that record dust particles moving through the exhibition space, which are in turn converted via an algorithm into a musical soundtrack, which is transmitted via speakers spread throughout the space; and the projection of the particle trails, which appear on a large screen, scaled so as to resonate with both the spiderweb and the glowing orbs. All in all, the projection gives the space something of the feel of mission control. In every sense the installation appears to make invisible bodies visible, whether their invisibility is a result of their macro (distant planets invisible from earth) or micro (particular) scales, and to weave a web that makes them an active whole.

There is a whiff of the fantastic about the experience, a little akin to the adventures of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, or Voltaire’s Micromégas

(the lead character from an eponymous story, often described as one of the earliest works of science fiction, published in 1752): ‘At length the inhabitant of Saturn saw something imperceptible moving about just beneath the Baltic Sea. It was a whale.’ It’s as if the installation as a whole offers a kind of baroque theatre of particles moved by our bodies, and bodies larger than ours that, well, move us, and each one of the three forced to converse in some sort of equivalent scale. Indeed, there is a hint of something manipulative about the whole thing, in which affect is deployed to create effect. Saraceno aims at demonstrating the interconnectedness of life and the expanded possibilities for harmonious human habitation within the broad sphere of the earth and, in this case, the universe. Our bodies in the space are revealed to be just some among many bodies in space. We’re rendered both large and small, significant and insignificant at the same time. The feeling as a whole is of an atmosphere (as the Situationists might once have put it) rather than a series of specific objects.

But in the context of the Korean peninsula right now, in which payloads are being developed and missiles are undergoing test flights, no one can be unconscious of the fact that humankind has made the atmosphere (the one above our heads) a weaponised space; the invitation to reconsider our relationship with it, the world and the universe comes across as less a utopian dream and more necessary pragmatism. Mark Rappolt

Our Interplanetary Bodies, 2017 (installation view, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju).

Photo: Studio Tomás Saraceno

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Our Interplanetary Bodies, 2017 (installation view, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju) Photo: Andrea Rossetti all images Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen, Pinksummer contemporary art, Genoa, and Esther Schipper, Berlin

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Krzysztof Wodiczko Instruments, Monuments, Projections National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul 5 July – 9 October Over the course of a five-decade career, public space – both in the sense of a space that assembles or constructs a public and in the sense of a space for making things (such as trauma, discrimination and political oppression) public – has become Polish-born, New Yorkbased Krzysztof Wodiczko’s medium. And to some extent the potential of public space, as both a revelatory and healing force for society, has become his message. While his large-scale projects, often involving projections on monuments or the facades of public buildings, have taken place across Europe, Central and North America, Australia and Japan, he has never made such a work in South Korea. On the face of it, then, encountering a comprehensive retrospective of his work in Korea’s national museum might seem a little odd, in that it appears to speak about the problems of everywhere else except here: for example, that of the survivors of nuclear bombing in Hiroshima Projection (1999), and the status of female labourers in The Tijuana Projection (2001), both of which feature projections of local people voicing their personal experiences on iconic buildings rooted in specific geographies and histories.

Organised (as the title suggests) by medium, the exhibition itself documents Wodiczko’s career chronologically from early experiments in the definition of personal space, born out of

the artist’s work in industrial design in Poland and the country’s then totalitarian regime. One of the earliest of these, Personal Instrument (1969), designed to be used by the artist himself (in this case, as with many other works from this period, in the street rather than the gallery), comprises noiseproof headphones which transmit sound picked up by a microphone, isolated and filtered by hand movement through photo-receivers embedded in a pair of gloves – the artist carving out a space for himself. The exhibition display moves on through a series of awkward vehicles aimed at critiquing the easy linkage of technology and progress, before culminating in the series of epic projections (presented via video documentation of the events). Along the way there’s a clear interest in tracing how the psychological projections of individuals find their place within the collective psychology of a social whole.

Clearly, Wodiczko’s interest in what constitutes a democracy chimes with the demonstrations in Seoul that preceded the recent impeachment of Park Geun-hye. With that in mind, the exhibition culminates in a new work, My Wish (2017), which takes the form of a video projection of Koreans from various walks of life (among them the mother of a victim of the Sewol ferry disaster, a recently laid-off worker, and a North Korean defector) 3D-mapped onto

My Wish, 2017, multimedia installation, variable dimensions.

Courtesy the artist and MMCA, Seoul

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a reconstruction of a seated statue of Kim Koo (who led the Korean independence movement against the Japanese and from whose writings the title of the work derives), as they talk about their hopes for the future of the country. That the work is in the museum rather than at the site of the monument, and consequently comes with a more heightened sense of artifice (and self-servience – celebrating the emergence of the art museum as a generator for a ‘public’) than some of Wodiczko’s site-specific work, says something about how open South Korean society is. Moreover, the double simulacrum (of the monument and of the people projected onto it) brings to mind the fact that public space today might be as much virtual as it is physical.

In this respect some of Wodiczko’s techniques seem prescient: in terms, for example, of his work presenting the animated future cityscapes of movies such as Blade Runner (1982) or Ghost in the Shell (2017) made real, and in the way in which his projections offer a sense of community that might be a kind of analogue Facebook.

Other aspects of Wodiczko’s work can seem a little old-fashioned however: in the museum, his instruments and vehicles seem too much like archaeological relics. But perhaps this type of art is always destined to belong as much to the domain of sociology as it is art history.

Mark Rappolt

Chia-En Jao Backseat Boulevard TKG+, Taipei 6 May – 25 June Chia-En Jao’s latest solo exhibition comprises three works, including Taxi (2016), a work commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, in which the Taiwanese artist asks Taipei taxi drivers to take him to various locations of historical significance – for instance, the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall – while he steers their conversations towards politics.

Sometimes the artist is lucky and has a productive dialogue; at other times he is given the cold shoulder. The resulting video looks like a ‘hidden camera’ documentary, revealing the personal memories and ideas of different characters; together these conversations constitute a parallel narrative to the ‘standard’ interpretation of local history. There are also moments in the video when the drivers start to comment on the political and social situation of Taiwan today: one of them vividly recounts his experience with the newly rich tourists from mainland China, through which one can easily sense a mixed feeling regarding cross-Strait relations in Taiwanese society. Like Jao’s previous work REM Sleep (2011, not on show here), in which he invited immigrant workers from Southeast Asia to narrate their dreams

in front of the camera, Taxi is a work based on individual voices and a methodology that has become something of a signature for the artist.

The screen showing Counterclockwise (2017) actually moves counterclockwise: attached to a motorised arm, the projection rotates 360 degrees each hour, transforming a temporal experience into one that, for the audience, is spatial as well. Unsurprisingly, the video itself talks about time, or more precisely, the loss of time. The artist deploys only silent footage to trace the historical backdrop around the 2015 reconstruction of the Kusukusu Jiniya Shinto shrine in Kus Kus Village, Taiwan.

The whole story began in 1871, when a group of shipwrecked Ryukyuan sailors were murdered by Paiwan aborigines near the southwestern tip of Taiwan, in what is known as the Mudan incident, and which gave the Japanese an excuse to later send troops to Taiwan. In the video, we can see the Kusukusu Jiniya Shinto shrine on the mountain’s summit pointing towards Padriyiur Bay, where the Ryukyuan ship foundered, with flashes of light emitting Morse code far away from the bay, giving names and basic records of survivors

of the Mudan incident. The images look calm and poetic, in contrast to the violent and sad stories concealed in the landscape. The reconstruction of the shrine also invokes controversial responses, reflecting different interpretations of this symbolic architecture in Taiwan.

More symbols and icons can be seen in the A Question of Balance series (2017), which comprises 11 watercolours, each depicting a shirtless man balancing a long carrying pole across his shoulders. Strung on either end of the pole are images related to local history and beyond.

The long individual titles of these watercolours offer descriptions of the unusual loads, for example American cartoon in 1882 depicting John Bull as octopus; Skull in Egyptologist George Gliddon and Surgeon Josiah Nott’s Types of Mankind (1854): Fig. 344 Young Chimpanzee; detail of 1910 BritishJapanese exhibition poster; woodcut print by Huang Rong-Can: Children in Hunger; Karl Marx monument in Chemnitz, Germany, designed by Lev Kerbel.

It is not easy to figure out all the details about the artist’s arrangement of these visual elements, but here viewers are invited to produce their own narratives following the artist’s cues.

Like the drivers in Taxi. Guo Juan

Taxi, 2016, video, 79 min 32 sec. Courtesy the artist and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

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Tang Da Wu Hak Tai’s Bow, Brother’s Pool and Our Children The Ngee Ann Kongsi Galleries 1 & 2, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore 4 August – 8 October At the age of seventy-four, Singaporean artist Tang Da Wu, performance-art veteran and founder of Singapore’s first artist collective (The Artist Village), has godfather status in the context of the country’s young art history.

Education remains an important part of his practice. He has been a mentor to many Singaporean artists and has taught art education part-time at the National Institute of Education since 2000. Given his commitment to being a teacher, it is not surprising to see that his latest exhibition takes the relationship between art and pedagogy as its subject.

On the surface, the show is a tribute to two seminal figures in art education in Singapore: the late Lim Hak Tai, a China-born painter and art teacher who in 1938 set up Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Nafa), Singapore’s first art school, and the late Brother Joseph McNally, an Irishborn educator and sculptor who founded Lasalle College of the Arts in 1984. But the exhibition is not a straightforward celebration of their contributions; a sense of deflation, sometimes outright bitterness, stalks the artworks. These bad feelings don’t seem directed at the two men and their schools; rather, Tang seems disappointed by something that goes above and beyond the control of these two institutions.

On the subject of the nature – social, political or cultural – of that failure, his works maintain a teacherly reticence.

The show starts out stridently enough with a handsome installation titled Six horses representing six principles by Lim Hak Tai for art education (2017), comprising six lifesize metal horse skeletons, installed as if galloping from one end of the gallery to the centre. (Looking them up, I found that these old-fashioned

principles include ‘reflection of the needs of the peoples of the Federation of Malaya and Singapore’ and ‘showcasing the scientific spirit and social thinking of the 20th century’.)

Behind the horses is a sculpture depicting the Chinese character gong, or ‘bow’, at the very top of which is an archer’s bow (Hak Tai’s Bow, 2017). Overlooking all this, on a horizontal beam across the gallery’s high ceiling, is a blurred black-and-white photograph of Lim, its top corner left untacked and folding over, obscuring Lim’s right eye.

A bow, six horses, a carelessly pinned portrait… The message is mixed. On one hand, the horses embody the path-beating, martial energies of the guy who started Singapore’s first art school. They draw an invisible carriage on which an invisible archer sits. (And are also, of course, a staple of the traditional anatomy classes that once grounded the study of art.)

On the other hand, there’s a touch of the apocalyptic, as the horses are fashioned out of black industrial steel and stripped of flesh.

Each creature also has a glass panel behind it, suggesting part of a vitrine, a shop window or a museum display, making these animals less straightforwardly heroic or innocent.

Where Lim gets a weapon and an equine posse, McNally gets a dry swimming pool.

Waist-high steel panels that form Brother’s Pool (2013) encircle 15 leftover rocks gathered

by McNally for use in his students’ stonecarving workshops. (Some of these rocks are still scattered around the old LaSalle building in the Mountbatten area, now converted to the government-run arts space Goodman Arts Centre, where Tang has his studio.) Around this rocky landscape are some lights, a small

facing page, top Six horses representing the six principles by Lim Hak Tai for art education, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy NAFA Art Galleries, Singapore

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glass tank half-filled with water, as well as mirrors that Tang and guests smashed in a performance on the opening night. On a high beam hangs a reproduction of Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin (1515–18), a reference to McNally’s Roman Catholic background. (He was part of a teaching order called the De La Salle Brothers, after which the school is named.)

The smashing of the mirrors suggests Tang’s self-effacement and the destruction of illusion. But McNally’s pool looks ruined and sad. No splashy play takes place here.

The rocks evoke the bottom of a polluted riverbed revealed in drought.

Water can be found in a tilted teacup – the size of those used in amusement-park rides – filled to halfway and placed between the two installations. The English and Chinese titles of the work pull in two directions, suggesting both the individual and the collective: the English reads One people (2017); the Chinese translates as ‘A drop of water’.

A teacher from the East, a teacher from the West, both of them memorialised in ways that seem at best ambivalent: is that cup halffull or half-empty? Perhaps it is the last artwork, Untitled (2017), which is situated outside the gallery in a display window, that swings the argument. Next to a haphazard pile of dismantled metal shelves, broken bricks and stones, and an abstract ink drawing hung askew, a text in Chinese reads, ‘In the year 2099, all of you would have passed away, and we will live in your piles of rubbish’. Tang may have smashed mirrors in his earlier performance, but in this last artwork, he seems to demand that, for the sake of our young, we take a long, hard look into one. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom One people, 2017, metal cup, water, 160 × 180 × 155 cm.

Courtesy NAFA Art Galleries, Singapore

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Hiroshi Sugimoto Le Notti Bianche Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin 16 May – 1 October Following a 12-year hiatus in the production of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters series (begun during the late 1970s), Le Notti Bianche showcases 20 photographs of theatres and opera houses produced in Italy over the last three years.

These ‘new’ theatres are in fact old: markers of the country’s history. They include the famous Teatro Carignano in Turin (built in 1752), the private theatre in Villa Mazzacorati, Bologna (inaugurated in 1763), and Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza (Andrea Palladio’s final design, built between 1580 and 1585, it is the oldest surviving enclosed theatre in the world) and Teatro all’Antica in Sabbioneta (constructed between 1588 and 1590, it was the first purpose-built freestanding theatre in the world). Sugimoto sees the theatre as a place for collective ‘religious’ experience, and notes in his essay ‘Image of the Void’ (included in Time Exposed, 1995) that movie theatres in the United States ‘have adopted elements of religious architectures from all over the world without principle’. By visiting classical theatres in Italy – all built before the invention of cinema – he aims at exploring the root of the architectural form and its cultural meaning: the ways in which the architectural features of American movie theatres of the 1920s (which were prominent in the artist’s early Theaters works) derive from the older, palacelike theatres of Europe.

Like those earlier works, the photographs on view here explore the perception of time, of space and the relationship between the two by blending three kinds of time into one: the time of a film screening, the time of a camera exposure and the time of human attention (watching the film). The production of the photographs depends on the length of time of a particular movie, screened on the theatre stage (as Sugimoto previously did on the movie-theatre screens), which determines their exposure times. In the case of the Italian photographs, these films are national classics (selected by Sugimoto) such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975), Luchino Visconti’s Le Notti Bianche (1957) and Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953). But the object (classical theatres in Italy) and the selection of films are not the only features that differentiate these works from the earlier photographs. When Sugimoto rebooted the project in 2014, he added a new gesture: having taken the familiar photograph of the theatres’ stage, he reversed the scenario to photograph the auditorium from the stage.

Each theatre is now represented by two images that, here, are hung face-to-face on opposing walls, so that visitors, standing in between, can only see one of them at a time.

While this new mode of representation obviously provides a more complete repre-

sentation of the actual space of the theatres, it also inspires further reflection on the space of theatre in more general terms. The theatre as a place for focused cultural activities where comprehensive art appreciation becomes collective quasi-religious experience, a space that, despite being a social space, has one absolute centre: the screen/stage. In his new series of works, by turning the camera around and looking back to the rows of seats, Sugimoto has captured two spaces that face each other, bound in an antithetical relationship – the ‘Look at me’ of the stage is now complemented by the ‘We were here’ of the auditorium.

In the pictures of the stages, the space of the screen onto which the films were projected becomes, due to overexposure, a void across the space: as if a spirit (or as Sugimoto puts it in ‘Image of the Void’, ‘the kami [god] of film’) has just arrived, or the soul of a movie-watcher has disappeared in the act of losing oneself while watching the film. In the auditorium images, the functional facilities, such as the seats and the main entrance, may appear quiet and empty, yet their hidden message is one of fullness: of numerous ghosts speaking in a low voice: ‘I was once here, watching’. Indeed, the antithetical structure of the spaces and the images reminds me of a classical Zen metaphor: the void is a consequence of fullness. Aimee Lin

Teatro Comunale di Ferrara, Ferrara, 2015, II Conformista (Screenside), 2015, gelatin silver print.

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

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Rehearsals from the Korean Avant-Garde Performance Archive Korean Cultural Centre, London 27 June – 19 August A man lies on the floor, face-up. As he stares at the ceiling, another man plants himself gut-to-gut across his torso. They begin speaking in Korean, and then shifting. Limbs tangling, they roll, gently flopping one way then the other, like ragdolls in a slow-motion washing machine. Despite this, their voices remain even, giving the impression of being detached from the movement of the two bodies.

Hyun Joon Chang’s A Conversation between Generations Deprived of Generations, A Conversation without a Counterpart (2017) is a performancedialogue based on Chang’s first encounter with Neung-Kyung Sung. Sung’s early works, shown in this group exhibition of historical performance works and contemporary responses, were primarily concerned with the Korean state’s methods of propagandistic communication. Most of the artists featured here (barring Chang, Zadie Xa, who also presents a new performance, Christine Sun Kim and Lee Bul) were from a generation that emerged as Korea slid into dictatorship during the early 1970s.

Attempting to navigate the boundaries of state surveillance and censorship, at a time when political dissent couldn’t be communicated explicitly, these artists turned to the body and gesture as a means of expression. In this sense, Chang’s A Conversation… demonstrates a kind of visceral reaction elicited by movement and gesture that can only be experienced in its immediacy, but it’s also a sympathetic

response to the works in Rehearsals…, the connections between which also call to mind a more contemporary context of cultural censorship – the illegal blacklisting of artists and cultural figures.

In 1972 such activities were legal. In that year, the then government passed the Cultural and Arts Promotion Law. Artists who appeared to endorse national identity and the incumbent regime were given funding, as long as they worked in ‘recognised’ forms of media (such as ink painting, sculpture, Western-style realism).

Everything else was deemed ‘unsound’ and ignored or, worse, subject to police surveillance.

On the opening night of Rehearsals…

Kun-Yong Lee, a member of the long disbanded and subversively ‘unsound’ Space and Time and Avant-Garde groups, reenacted two of his performances, The Method of Drawing 76-2 (1976) and Snail’s Gallop (1979). The painting that resulted from the first is displayed in the exhibition, a silhouette of the artist formed by radiating lines of paint. The latter featured the artist drawing a long row of elongated 1s and 0s in charcoal as he crawled across a large sheet of paper, smudging it as he shuffled along the surface. The idea of ‘returning to’ – reenacting, representing – runs like a taut thread between the older works and the contemporary, a fine line that seems to flatten time between generations.

Seung-Taek Lee, another member of the Avant-Garde Group, re-presents a version

of Paper Tree (1980s), a cluster of branches tied with strips of pristine white paper that hang still, like a ghost of the original outdoor installation that relied on breeze to give the work form, and a collection of stones that look like flesh bound with wire from the Tied Stone series (1957). These are the only sculptures in the exhibition, and while first appearing incongruous, they later offer the viewer a tangible connection to the wall of photographs documenting Lee’s performative environmental art from the 1960s onwards.

Other exhibits range from archival photographs of ‘happenings’ during the late 1960s and interviews with artists displayed on screens, to sculpture, video and drawings.

There’s a lot to take in. From an art-historical perspective, Rehearsals… is rich with context, giving this viewer at least some insight on the recent history of Korean politics and its lasting impact on the country’s culture and arts. But its real impact lies in those live performances, which drag the archived works into the present, at once acknowledging the previous generation of artists for paving the way for contemporary Korean performance today and highlighting the sense that this history is not so very far removed. In the final scene of Chang’s performance, two figures stand behind a curtain with only their legs visible, their last exchange: “Sir, I have to go now.” “I’m sorry, but you cannot go alone.” Fi Churchman

Hyun Joon Chang, A Conversation between Generations Deprived of Generations, A Conversation without a Counterpart, 2017, performance.

Courtesy the artist and Korean Cultural Centre, London

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Jennifer Tee Structures of Recollection and Perseverance Kunstraum, London 1 July – 9 September At Camden Arts Centre, where an exhibition of Jennifer Tee’s work runs in parallel with her show at Kunstraum, a young man is reading a poem out loud. Two ribbed oval carpets are spread out on the floor in front of him like the patchwork wings of some handicraft flying machine, while the facing wall is lined with tulip petals arranged on paper to resemble a Sumatran textile design. The poem is by Mai Der Vang, whose collection Afterland (2016) brings to light the persecution of the Hmong people during the Secret War in Laos, and is included alongside works on the subject of resistance by Maggie Nelson, James Baldwin and Anne Carson in regular readings in the gallery.

The scene is a potted introduction to Tee’s practice, which combines an interest in esoteric knowledge with a lyrical sensibility in the production of works that critique dogmatic thinking. She has described her work as an exploration of ‘the soul in limbo’, which sounds alarmingly New Age but is in fact derived from André Breton’s illustrated novel Nadja (1928). As Breton portrays a woman whose perspective on the world is exhilarating because it defies reason,

so Tee proposes that we must learn to think and feel independently if we are to be liberated. This two-part exhibition explores the possibility that liminal states – between life and death, waking and dreaming – might offer a means of resisting the repressions and unconscious biases embedded in the structures of our thought.

At Kunstraum, Tee has created an environmental installation inspired by the exhibition design of Hélio Oiticica, combining her own works with ethnographic objects, artefacts, books, plants and pieces by other artists. The gallery is painted in a basking orange, a tropical theme developed and complicated by the Upside down palm tree (Trachycarpus Fortunei) (2017) that hangs from the ceiling. The piece pays homage to installations such as Oiticica’s Tropicália (1967) at the same time as the theatricality of Tee’s gesture, and the obvious incongruity of a palm tree with the industrial architecture, draws attention to the violence inherent in removing objects and ideas from their original contexts.

Tempering playfulness with respect, Tee is careful to mark out the space between creative exchange and cultural appropriation.

Hanging on a painted fabric screen dividing the space in two, a framed photograph by Fritz Lemaire shows the CoBrA painter Eugène Brands wearing a primitivist mask of his own design, inviting the question of what it means to remove symbols from the systems of knowledge that legitimise them. The mask as agent of transformation between identities and states is a recurring motif, notably in the inclusion in the exhibition of a fin-de-siècle French death mask and Gillian Wearing’s wax Sleeping Mask (2004).

The most impressive of these props is a red and green cape, made by Oiticica in 1964, which hangs from the ceiling. Visitors are invited to wear and thus ‘activate’ the costume ‘through movement and dance’ (I didn’t dare). That is of a piece with the exhibition’s wider focus on preserving heterogeneous forms, beliefs and ideologies without segregating one from the other or preserving them in aspic. Tee aims to establish a space in which it is possible to make new connections across cultures and build relationships between communities.

Right now, that feels like an act of defiance.

Ben Eastham

Structures of Recollection and Perseverance, 2017 (installation view, Kunstraum, London).

Photo: Tim Bowditch. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

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Kazuko Miyamoto & Lydia Okumura Minimalist Anyway White Rainbow, London 3 May – 10 June ‘Being Japanese, you are minimalist anyway,’ quipped artist Kazuko Miyamoto one day.

Her witticism was taken seriously at White Rainbow gallery: it formed the premise of an exhibition in which Miyamoto’s spare artworks are paired with those of Lydia Okumura. The cool, white cube showcased work the two friends each made in New York, from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s – prints, drawings, paintings and sculptures flirting with the simplest of forms, sometimes in the prettiest of pinkypurple shades. In Miyamoto’s pencil-and-inkon-paper Box (1975), a faint rectangular structure appears to shift, generating the illusion of depth.

Okumura has similarly fetching fun with Untitled I (1980) – in which geometric purple shapes are painted onto a white wall, their edges attached to tautly suspended sections of cotton string. Blurring the lines between a twodimensional image and a three-dimensional offering is the hallmark of both Okumura and Miyamoto’s oeuvres. Hence, if discerning where painting ends and sculpture begins is difficult here, Miyamoto and Okumura’s crossreferencing styles are just as tricky to prise apart.

While the exhibition marks the first time Okumura (born 1948, Brazil) and Miyamoto (born 1942, Japan) have shown together, they have more in common than their Japanese ancestry. Both were assistants to the founding father of Minimalism, Sol LeWitt. Both (covertly) made their own work in his studio. Miyamoto’s Stunt (181 Chrystie Street, 1981) (1982) is a vast blackand-white photographic reproduction of a performance: Miyamoto’s naked, contorted body juxtaposed against one of LeWitt’s signature giant cagelike ‘structures’. Minimalist Anyway keeps viewers guessing about the artists’ ‘real’ attitude to American art-history and LeWitt’s towering legacy. Minimalists set out to contest the heroic, subjective lone-wolf personas of their predecessors, the Abstract Expressionists, bestowing pride of place on the objective and the viewer instead. Yet, LeWitt’s mythic status in the all-male canon of 1960s American Minimalism puts paid to such aspirations.

If LeWitt’s female assistants are ‘minimalist anyway’ because they are Japanese (and Minimalism is presumed to be part of their culture), where does that leave LeWitt?

After all, LeWitt served in the Korean War and was stationed in Japan for a time. Are Okumura and Miyamoto’s fabrications – inspired by Japanese calligraphy and shibori (an ancient dyeing technique) respectively – reclaiming an aesthetic that was always their own? Perhaps their feminine, craft-inspired art is a sly send-up of their master’s manly, industrial-looking style?

Miyamoto’s sculptural Male I (1974) plays havoc with notions of origins – and originality.

Here, dark shapes strain against a white background. Upon approaching the work, we realise that its crisscrossing network of black lines, similar to LeWitt’s pencil-and-ink drawings, are made up of pieces of string, their tips nailed to a wall. Meanwhile, what seems to be a fanlike convergence of thread is merely a crosshatch of shadows, each one as fine as a strand of hair.

Does Male I symbolise a bewildering maze or an enabling network? If LeWitt casts a long shadow, does his influence represent a doorway to creativity or an aesthetic dead-end? In this doubling, troubling two-woman display, such questions remain teasingly, pleasingly unanswered. Zehra Jumabhoy

Minimalist Anyway, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Damian Griffiths.

Courtesy the artists and White Rainbow, London

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Jia Aili CAC Málaga 17 March – 18 June One of the more insidious aspects of contemporary life is the way it forces you to see the world through the eyes of its unruliest leaders (this used to be easier to resist). Jia Aili’s paintings of barren, wrecked landscapes populated by solitary stunned survivors would at first seem to fit right in with today’s worst-case scenarios: the threats currently being tossed around between nuclear-armed states. But ‘postapocalyptic’ is too banal a description for the Beijingbased artist’s giant depictions of life after ‘fire and fury’. For all their alien bleakness, these worlds give off an air of disaster-nostalgia.

The appearance of familiar themes and images – a post-typhoon wasteland, toppled statues of Lenin, Dolly the sheep, burning oil fields, Yuri Gagarin in his flight suit – place these visions of an apocalyptic endgame in a recent and more distant past, and sometimes both at once. Not so much dated as looking backward, the works consider the technological achievements of a heroic age (and their consequences) from a place slightly outside of time.

The chronological disruption and sense of historical scenes set in the future mirrors the ambivalence that is reflected to varying degrees in everything on show here. The opening work, an untitled painting from 2007–8 (roughly 20 of the 28 paintings in the exhibition are untitled, the remainder given names that invoke disaster, the elements, religion and mythology, entrenched conflict), shows

a man wearing nothing but an antiquated gas mask, arms held tightly to his sides, head bowed in a posture of humility before the turbine of a jet engine. Rendered in blues, greens and greys cut through with the gleaming silver and white of polished metal and hydraulic and electrical lines, the work combines impressionistic murk with hyperrealist definition to convey a reverence for the power humans have harnessed with a horror for what it can do. This mix of veneration and woe is more explicit still in a roughly 3-by-3m work from 2012 and its near-identical reiteration from 2015: the upper body of a man in naval uniform emerges from and rises above a surface on which an atomic bomb has been detonated, its miniature mushroom-cloud looking like a miracle, a magician’s act or a lab-top science experiment. The figure holds his hands out in a gesture that says ‘behold’ even as it echoes Mary’s posture in the pièta, with upturned palms and a bottomless sorrow visible on his partially averted face; in the later reworking, a black disc in the upper lefthand corner of the canvas reinforces the message of men playing at God or performing magic, and in the process eclipsing the sun.

Jia works and reworks a fairly restricted set of images, shapes and colours, returning to the same figures and scenarios in painting after painting. Orbs float through the works: the glass helmet of a spacesuit, gaseous bubbles, a comically inflated uniformed figure. Figures

Untitled, 2016, oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm

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stand calmly, often clutching a small sphere in their hands, as their heads are engulfed in flames; others are struck by lightning, or emanate beams of light from their eye sockets. Bright colours are largely absent, though dashes of red – an epaulet or the tie on a child’s school-uniform, a nuclear sunset – make appearances in most works.

The range of painting styles deployed here compounds the sense of temporal dislocation.

References to space and arms races jostle with scenes of ideological and ecological collapse painted in ways that reference the Old Masters, socialist realism and Romantic landscape painting. Even the vast Boschian tableau We Come from the Century (2008–11), a five-panel work featuring shitting, fornicating and otherwise lost naked figures wandering in the foreground, and the vapour trail of a rocket rising above a colossal toppled statue in the background, pulls its punches: a wrecked airplane appears disassembled rather than crushed and incinerated, as though Jia is intent on showing us the marvel of the machinery even in its ruination.

As accumulations of apparently conflicted views on the consequences of technological and military development, conveyed in visually hyperbolic fashion, the effect of these works is a simultaneous confronting of worst fears and a containing of them in a confused but discrete past. As a model for these tense times, it is an aestheticised, paradoxical horror that gives the viewer room to breathe. David Terrien

top Untitled, 2015, oil on canvas, 132 × 93 cm above Untitled, 2011, oil on canvas, 290 × 400 cm all images Courtesy the artist and CAC Málaga

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Books

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SouthEastAsia: Spaces of the Curatorial Edited by Ute Meta Bauer and Brigitte Oetker Sternberg Press, €28/£24 (softcover) ‘Diverse’, ‘vibrant’, ‘lively’, ‘heterogeneous’, ‘multilayered’, ‘hybrid’ – these words are often associated with the art of Southeast Asia, a geographically inexact region of ten or so countries. Any survey of the scene would run into the volumes, as editor Ute Meta Bauer writes in the introduction to this book.

She has narrowed the field by focusing not on Southeast Asian art and artists per se, but on the more critically modish concept of ‘the curatorial’. First used in the 1990s, ‘the curatorial’ is an elastic term not applied to the professional practicalities of curating – the staging of exhibitions – but the ways in which such activities operate within a broader cultural field. While there are different views on the definitions and aims of ‘the curatorial’, it includes critiquing the status quo (curator Maria Lind) and being ‘an event of knowledge’ (visual-cultures lecturers Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff).

Bauer does not linger long in delineating her own parameters. Going by her selection, the curatorial is a broad church, encompassing all the discursive spaces opened up by artists, curators, cultural workers and academics using a wide range of methods and processes.

Accordingly, the texts collected here occupy various registers. On the one hand, you have Singaporean art-historian Seng Yu Jin’s no-nonsense prac crit of the exhibition texts of three seminal Southeast Asian shows, thereby analysing how the region’s contemporary art has been framed and understood over the years.

This text would not be out of place in a conventional academic journal concerned with art history. On the other hand, there are highly

personalised and informal field reports, such as the musing and avuncular weekly emails British critic-curator Tony Godfrey fires to his friends abroad about his experiences within Southeast Asia. Quaintly titled ‘Tuesday in the Tropics’, the letters include everything from reviews to photographs of interesting local meals.

Despite the variety of tones and textures, a recurring question emerges: what is the role of the curator in Southeast Asia? The issue is addressed to varying degrees of granularity and self-awareness. Curator Zoe Butt’s point, boiled down to its simplest terms, is that the job is about taking the time to cultivate friendships with artists, in contrast to the visiting curator helicoptered in from abroad.

Writing about Myanmar, Yin Ker suggests curators need to learn how to ‘play’, using humour and improvisation to escape the gridlock of clichéd politicised narratives about the country. Turning away from writing from personal experience, David Teh studies Jakarta’s prolific art collective Ruangrupa instead.

He argues that the group’s wide range of activities – from staging exhibitions to publishing journals – forms ‘a spirit of curatorship’ that is concerned with artists and audiences rather than the artworks themselves.

Another pet topic in this volume is how the curatorial produces knowledge. Academic Kevin Chua posits that artist Charles Lim’s maritimethemed, research-heavy, theory-suffused SEA STATE exhibition (2016) at Singapore’s NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA, which Bauer directs), ‘in pushing at the limits of exhibitional [sic] practice and knowledge, necessarily opens up history, allows the past to face the present’.

Meanwhile, Nora A. Taylor gives a valorising account of Singaporean artist Koh Nguang How’s archive of newspaper clippings, photographs and paraphernalia as an idiosyncratic take on art history outside of official narratives.

Are there limits to these forms of knowledge produced by the curatorial? Simon Soon remains sceptical that curatorial practices can be socially transformative, especially if their subject is political; instead, by subsuming urgent social issues into critical discourse, the art intelligentsia risks defanging real-world activism.

The volume closes with a soul-searching essay by Philippines-based educator and critic Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez about how the region’s ‘curatorium’ are, wittingly or not, complicit in perpetuating national or transnational economic or political agendas. They are working in a ‘crawl space’, and she urges them to ‘at least attempt to account for how the predatory structures for making art have forged [their] contaminated existences within the layered skirts of critical practice’.

And so these layered skirts must part to welcome a newcomer in the form of this anthology, which, in the sophistication and self-reflexivity of its aims, is a path beater in Southeast Asia. Overall, it reflects not only the diversity of contemporary curating and curatorial discourses in the region – but in a few texts, the maturity, self-awareness and nimbleness at negotiating larger contemporary critical currents and local contexts. As such, it is useful to anyone with a specialist interest in curatorial practices in Southeast Asia, and in a more incidental way, those interested in the art and artists. Adeline Chia

Black – An Artist’s Tribute

by Santosh Kumar Das Tara Books, IND₹1200, £27, US$35, €32 (hardcover) Taking the largescale picture-and-caption format typically associated with illustrated children’s books, Black (which is handmade and limited to 2,000 numbered copies) is a memoir of the inspirations that have driven Santosh Kumar Das’s artistic career. Das is a Mithila artist: a form that takes its name from a region in Bihar (a state on the northeastern edge of India, best known as the birthplace of the Buddha) and features the deployment of natural inks and dyes, using a variety

of implements – from fingers to brushes and pens – to depict figurative scenes and geometric patterns (often both). It is traditionally practised by women. Not surprisingly then, Das’s autobiographical litany of the inspirations behind his artistic career starts with a woman: the artist’s mother, a chronic asthmatic who would pass her time in a semidarkened room (no electricity), in which she used the soot of an oil lamp to make black pigment for her paintings.

It ends in darkness too – a pot of black ink:

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‘I believe it contains all the magic, all the forms, everything that human beings can imagine,’ Das writes. Along the way he is also inspired by tales from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, cinema, clay icon-making and beauty wherever he can find it. And that last, memorialised here in screenprints of Das’s intricate ink drawings, each describing the transformation of thought or experience into pictorial form, is the real reason to buy this book. Here a picture is worth a thousand words. Nirmala Devi

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The Battle for Home: The Memoir of a Syrian Architect

by Marwa al-Sabouni Thames & Hudson, £8.99/$25.95 (softcover) This story begins with the dream of a house that turns into the dream of a homeland.

This is not a trajectory of yearning exclusive to Syrians, but Syria is currently in dire need of the safety, infrastructure and civil cohesion – a homeland – that good architecture, in areas like housing, can facilitate. This memoir, written out of Homs but now republished in light of the destruction of Aleppo, attempts to chart and understand both the recent devastation of war, and the preceding, more gradual unravelling of Syria’s social fabric, through urbanism. Architecture’s ability to perform a humanising role by creating conditions that assure cultural identity, coexistence and dignity are most especially needed where architecture has, as in Syrian cities, been weaponised in its capacities to divide and entrap. Marwa al-Sabouni, a Syrian architect living in Homs, undertakes this examination of urbanism rooted in an understanding of the multiethnic history of Syria’s cities, and, as a lifelong resident herself, with an eye on the needs of its inhabitants.

How to justify dreaming of a better built environment when residents just want to block the holes in their walls and survive the night?

Al-Sabouni’s starting question to herself is

uncompromising, but vitally sets up her argument that architectural choices and their related socioeconomic systems can indeed inspire the moral code of a place.

Compartmentalise living, or leave be the sprawl of centuries? Rapidly technologise, or prioritise the natural environment? Look to the local cultural fabric, or to model global cities for inspiration? Though relating to urbanism, such choices can affect the identity of a place and its people. Granting the Syrian war its many causes, al-Sabouni convincingly argues that urbanistic plans imposed on Syrian cities including Damascus and Homs nonetheless became major contributors to the conflicts that have now destroyed them.

Civil war can be enhanced, perpetuated and maintained via the built environment.

Tracing poor planning and endemic corruption, al-Sabouni contrasts the resultant ghettoisation, sham renovation and homogeneous development in Syrian cities with their traditional urbanism and architecture, which once assured identity not by separation but by interwovenness. The Church of St Mary of the Girdle and the adjacent Khalid ibn al-Walid Mosque in Old Homs did more than reassure inhabitants that their faiths were represented;

the commonality fostered by the two buildings’ shared environment in the centre of Homs’s mercantile hub helped avoid tensions between Christians and Muslims, as there was equal economic and social profit to be made from sustaining the area’s historically diverse welcome. Meanwhile, where urbanisation divides people into separate sectors, religious and ethnic differences can crystallise, especially if (as was the case in Syria) exacerbated by the unequal distribution of urban infrastructure, ecological neglect and heritage-blind megaprojects. After all, Homs’s district of Baba Amr – once so civically mature that a neighbourhood’s local children were considered its residents’ collective responsibility – saw a real-estate upturn that lined official pockets and weakened community bonds well before war.

Al-Sabouni’s incisive memoir, enhanced by her empathetic sketches, speaks with that particular mix of solicitude and sharp criticism born of true belonging married to broadness of perspective. Building from an understanding of inhabitants’ needs is small effort compared to redressing the consequences of doing otherwise – as Syria, here, devastatingly illustrates. Sarah Jilani

Abandon

by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay Tilted Axis Press, £8.99 (softcover)

‘This narrative will continue to shriek as its characters claw their way between the poles of extreme humanity and extreme art,’ Bengali writer Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay declares midway through her tale of one woman’s attempt to navigate between the two. Art is a form of freedom. Freedom comes without constraints.

Such as children. A lover. Morality. Or the rigid restrictions that govern distinctions of gender or class in Indian society. So naturally, when the subjects of life and art clash, as they do here, what results is something of a horror story.

Bandyopadhyay’s tale concerns Ishwari and her sickly son Roo, who she once abandoned, having fled an undefined, but uncomfortable marriage, and has now retrieved. Ishwari travels the streets of Kolkata looking for shelter, employment and personal fulfilment. And the

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time and money to fulfil her son’s emotional and medical needs. The narrative unfolds on two levels: a conventional story in which Ishwari is a character to whom things happen (however much she seeks to shape her own destiny); and the story as viewed through an authorial voice, which attempts to guide the narrative in a ‘realistic’ rather than a poetic direction, and thus seeks to assert its own creative control. The novel itself examines the moments when these two gears work together and when they grind (chiefly when Ishwari’s attempts to take control threaten the author’s ambition for realism).

At times, this effect is, to use Bandyopadhyay’s word, ‘unseemly’, as when the authorial voice oh-so-self-consciously intrudes to inform us that Ishwari ‘speaks like written sentences… in this case too she followed Derrida’s prescription

ArtReview Asia

that “speech is writing”’. As the novel becomes a subject, as much as are Ishwari and Roo, there’s a lingering feeling that the whole performs like an ouroboros, constantly chewing on its own tail. ‘In a state of emergency what is needed is not art, but humane behaviour,’ the author writes, before going on, seemingly, to demonstrate just that: Ishwari and Roo proceed, via a series of ups followed by downs (reminiscent as much of a nineteenth-century novel as any Sam . sāra), to meet their seemingly inevitable fate. And yet ultimately, while there are times when Bandyopadhyay’s conceit is irritating, she nevertheless manages, perhaps because of that, to produce a remarkable portrait of both a woman’s and an artist’s struggle for agency in a society that does all it can to deny it.

Mark Rappolt

Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader

by Ch’ae Manshik, edited and translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton Columbia University Press, $30/£24.95 (softcover)

This is the first English-language anthology of Ch’ae Manshik’s writings (produced between 1924 and 1948), and spans short stories, plays and a children’s fable, essays, roundtable discussions and the 1948 novella that lends its name to the collection. The introduction sheds some light on the political and social climate in which Manshik (whose serialised novel Peace Under Heaven, 1938, earned him his literary reputation as a satirist during Japan’s occupation of Korea) was writing, and provides context for the author’s concerns over the production of national literature, a subject that is debated in A Three-way Conversation on Kungmin Literature with writer Yi T’aejun and educator Yu Chino.

It is unclear whether the term kungmin, which literally means ‘people (min) of a country/nation/ state (kuk)’, was specific to the kind of pro-Japanese (or as Manshik, Yi and Yu put it, ‘cheerful’) literature produced under the cultural policy enforced by the Japanese New Order during the late 1930s. Manshik’s assessment in the conversation, though, that ‘literature has gone sour’, reflects his views on the complex nature of writing at a time when what was considered to be ‘national’ meant being part of a larger kuk – that is, the imperial empire.

Manshik’s preoccupations regarding this larger kuk manifest themselves in his literary characters. True to the realist technique for

portraying ‘things as they are’, his plots are often unremarkable, even banal, with vague or unresolved endings: arguments over extramarital affairs, a day in the life of a bus girl, an old man who shuffles along a road, eventually undone by his good-naturedness.

Manshik’s ability to create forceful, frustrating or farcical characters and introduce them like old friends makes this collection an addictive read. Everyone is flawed. The author spares no one in his sharp critique of society, both during Japanese occupation and after liberation. And although one might expect him to cast Korea’s oppressors as the ‘villains’, Manshik turns his harshest gaze on Koreans themselves.

Intellectuals, educators and writers sit back passively and let events unfold around them: the narrator of Sunset, a teacher at a local school, who admits to being ‘shallow and lacking in get-up-and-go’; and later, ‘a simpleton who took as an article of faith the pronouncements from Japanese imperial headquarters’.

Businessmen and officials become wealthy and successful by embracing Japan’s, and then the US’s, authority over the country: the narrator’s cousin, in the same novella, adopts a Japanese name and rises through the ranks at a police station, blackmailing or stealing his way to a wealthy lifestyle at the expense of others; and Mister Pang (in a 1946 short story of the same

name), formerly a lazy cobbler, spots an opportunity to make his fortune as a translator for an American officer and extorts other Koreans who seek his linguistic help.

But the most interesting works are those in which Manshik leaves out overt references to colonial rule, or US involvement – where the characters become subtle metaphors for the complexities of supplanted culture and traditions. In Whatever Possessed Me? (1937), a play in one act, a wife battles with the desire to attack her husband’s live-in mistress and her will to adhere to her newfound devout ‘goodness’ (which demands she ‘love her enemy’), resulting in a swift mental decline.

The protagonist in A Man Called Hŭngbo (1939) appears to have no control over the events of his day, during which he attempts to deliver a leftover bento box of treats to his young daughter. The stronger and more imposing personalities of other characters he meets along the way lead him to losing the bento box, letting his daughter down and sleeping in the cold outside the gate of his house. It’s in these kinds of examples that Manshik is able to explore the national psyche and pick apart the conflicts felt by ordinary Koreans, satirising them as self-deprecating, moralistic and, because of this, ultimately powerless.

Fi Churchman

The Art Museum (revised edition) Phaidon, £39.95 (hardcover) Like chimeras and ch’ou-t’is, The Art Museum is the kind of fantastical creature that wouldn’t look out of place in Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings (1957). It is a ‘museum’ (in book form) housing a collection of the world’s ‘best’ art, from the dawn of time to the present day. At least that’s the conceit: it has a floorplan where the table of contents would normally be and a pictogram of a classical museum facade instead of an image of an actual museum on the cover. As if this brick of a book were an app (the publishers insistently describe it as a ‘virtual museum’). The Art Museum first appeared in 2011 and, although promoted as ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘revolutionary’ at the time, was already something of an anachronism then – both ‘museum’ and ‘collection’

reduced to two dimensions at a moment when museums and collections were exploring physical and nonphysical expansion into the realms of the megastructural, the digital and the virtual. Now, like anything with a messiah complex, it’s back, for a second coming, this time as a compact (576 as opposed to 994 pages), revised edition retailing at less than half the price of the original. But it remains something singularly out of place and out of time.

Of course the anonymous Phaidon editors who put this publication together promote their offer of ‘the museum experience without the boundaries of space and time’ to be a virtue. Ironic then that the whole thing begins with that floorplan and proceeds to tell its

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tale in roughly chronological order. Indeed, rather than take the idea of the museum to a new level The Art Museum merely replicates the mistakes of its institutional history. The art of Asia, Persia and Africa is marooned in the past under titles such as ‘Tropical Splendour’ (Costa Rica, Amazonia and the Caribbean) or ‘Strange New World’ (the age of Pharaoh Akhenaten). Only ten non-Western artists appear in the 73-page ‘contemporary wing’ of this booseum, three in the spread titled ‘Identity Art: Race in a Post-Colonial World’.

There are times when it’s as if the whole project had been put together by H.G. Wells.

Indeed, the only thing that’s up-to-date about The Museum Book is its confusion over its virtual–physical existence. Mark Rappolt

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For more on Cambodian artist Séra (Phoussera Ing), read Paul Gravett’s text at artreview.com/thestrip

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on the cover photography by Keith Park

The words on the spine and on pages 19, 53 and 81 come from Midnight’s Children (1981),

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Autumn 2017

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Off the Record ‘Life was idyllic at first, a gap-year student’s dream. My new home was beautiful and I made close friendships with the local Bemba people.’ I finish reading the paragraph, close the book and put down my copy of Louise Linton’s In Congo’s Shadow, a moving account of the adventures of a Scottish teenager in Africa – a teenager who would go on to become no less than US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s wife. I tug distractedly at the collar of my Lalalove shirt, a garment that references the tradition of Thai loincloths in a fun way. I reflect on how Louise so skilfully shows Europeans what they’re getting wrong when it comes to Africa, and it gets me thinking about how Western art-folk might be making similar mistakes in Asia. With all these galleries looking to move here, I wonder if I should offer funny stories, homilies and downright warnings to them in the way that Louise has done for me about ‘the dark continent’. I look lovingly at my gallery technician Nakarin Hardkam, who is pulling his white socks and underwear back on, and I realise that, in a very real sense, as a European art-person who has gone native in Asia, I could be the artworld’s Louise Linton.

So I pick up a sheet of Smythson letter paper and my Montblanc Blue Hour LeGrand fountain pen. ‘Dear gallerist thinking about opening a branch in Asia,’ I begin. ‘It’s not easy becoming accepted by the Asian artworld – but help is at hand with these pithy points about how to behave. I arrived in Chengdu a couple of years ago with just knee-high beige tights, a battery-powered handheld fan and a portable microwave to my name, all key accessories in this part of the world. I immediately sought out a series of Chinese private museum owners who Philip Dodd had kindly put me in touch with. The Doddster’s instructions were to argue with them vigorously about absolutely everything, as there’s nothing a Chinese person loves more than a good ding-dong. For instance, they would say that they like the work of Birdhead, and I would scream back “Birdwho?” and laugh uproariously. They’d gently point out that the Western system of artist representation doesn’t work straightforwardly in China, and I’d yell, “No taxation without representation!” and announce that the only gallerist I’d personally buy Zeng Fanzhi from is Larry, as he really understands what artist representation is about.

This wilfully confrontational attitude has stood me in good stead.

‘The Asians are wildly proud of their art fairs, but remember: they’re new to this game. Make it clear that you’ve done Aqua Art Miami a couple of times and you’ll be on the ground floor of Art Basel Hong Kong pretty sharpish. Anyhow, all the art fairs are managed

by Europeans, which is pretty handy. For instance Lorenzo and his family basically run the whole of Singapore. India is filled with snakecharmers and elephants, and the gallery scene was entirely started

by Peter Nagy from New York, so that’s easy to navigate as well – as long as you only talk to him. The rest of them sound like Raj from The Big Bang Theory and used to work in convenience stores or call centres, so it’s tricky trying to get them to understand the legacy of zombie abstraction. They have decent English, but it’s really useful to learn a couple of words of Indian, which they speak everywhere. But if you can’t get your head round that, my advice is to avoid talking about art and just wobble your head at them. They love that.’

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I think it’s all getting a bit heavy, so I decide to throw in some lighthearted stuff about how to behave in Asia. ‘Be reserved with your drinking at private views and the like. The Chinese are modest. When they shout “Ganbei!”, knock your glass gently against your host’s mug, have a sip and then chuck the rest into the nearest pot plant.

They will try and toast people. Ignore this entirely or just sit down in a corner. If you do agree to go to dinner, expect to eat some really weird stuff, like xiao long bao. Remember to pierce these slippery buggers (I’m talking about the dumplings here!!!) with your fork and drain the weird liquid from within before popping them in your mouth and politely spitting the remnants onto a side plate. In India just drink as much Johnnie Walker scotch as you can at any social event before passing out at the feet of Subodh Gupta.’

I am tired of all this writing, but I know I’m not finished. I pick up Mrs Mnuchin’s book again. As she writes, ‘Africa is rife with hidden danger… I try to remember a smiling gap-tooted child with HIV whose greatest joy was to sit on my lap and drink from a bottle of Coca-Cola.’

I cross out Africa and scribble Asia over it, tear out the page and append it to my letter. I smile secure in the knowledge that gallerists across the Western world will take my advice to heart in the way that the warm reaction to Louise’s book has propelled her all the way to the White House.

Gallery Girl

International Art FAIR 19-22 octobER 2017 paris

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