ArtReview Asia Autumn 2018

Maurizio Cattelan realises his dreams in Shanghai What happens when industry becomes art?

A report from Bengaluru The trials and tribulations of ‘decolonising’ Berlin’s museum collections

Zeng Fanzhi on heroes, monks, art histories and contemporaneity

Simon Fujiwara Empathy I August 31 – September 30, 2018 We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette

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ArtReview Asia vol 6 no 3 Autumn 2018

Who am I? If ArtReview Asia were to tell you that the theme of its latest edition was identity and its constraints, you’d probably reply that this was the theme of all its editions. And perhaps you’d be right. After all, when it first launched this magazine ArtReview Asia had spent almost a year arguing with a panel of ‘experts’ about what Asia was and was not (no need to dive too deep into it: ArtReview Asia has told that story many times before). So in this issue you’ll find references to something called Greater Asia (it includes Australia), multiple cities claiming to be the cultural centre of Southeast Asia, Italian hairdressers expounding on Asian ideas of revolution and Chinese painter Zeng Fanzhi arguing that geopolitics has nothing to do with the internal logic of art. It’s all a bit of a mess.

But perhaps, fundamentally, that’s what identity is. ArtReview Asia’s tireless previewer Nirmala Devi can certainly testify to that, having had to read about the villainous ways of her namesake, a troublemaking Hindu fundamentalist, in Charu Nivedita’s column in the Summer issue of this magazine. In this edition Nivedita tries to get to the roots of India’s gender issues and the often-violent consequences of a gendered society (arguing, ultimately, that Hindu mythology provides the basis on which to construct society on an intersex basis). Similarly, but with the opposite results, Liz Kim shows how Korea’s cultural traditions have shaped its society and inform its current spate of #MeToo controversies.

Elsewhere, discussing the proliferation of art biennials, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan suggests that we shouldn’t worry too much because ‘culture can be made even in the smallest and poorest part of the world’. In keeping with that, ArtReview Asia looks at the way in which everyday products, such as the disposable and now almost redundant lithographed cinema posters in Bengaluru, India, are rapidly being commodified and exoticised, and are on their way to attaining the status of artworks. Although their producers retain the status of labourers rather than artists. That’s capitalism for you.

Some things are fixed, but everything is indeterminate. ArtReview Asia

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Art Previewed

Previews

by Nirmala Devi 22

Points of View

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Art Featured

Zeng Fanzhi Interview by Aimee Lin & Mark Rappolt 50

Art House

by Deepa Bhasthi 64

Maurizio Cattelan Interview by Mark Rappolt 60

Art4A.I. Artist project by Gao Jié 70

page 29 Kiluanji Kia Henda, Redefining The Power III, 2011, photographic prints mounted on aluminium, triptych, 120 × 80 cm (each).

Courtesy the artist and Busan Biennale

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Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 78

BOOKS 94

FX Harsono, by Adeline Chia Xu Bing, by Fang Yan Bodies of Power, Power for Bodies, by Vera Mey Borderlines, by Adeline Chua Deathsong, by Pey Chuan Tan Zhao Yang, by Max Crosbie-Jones Prabhavathi Meppayil, by Mark Rappolt Haegue Yang, by Eliza Levinson Yuan Yuan, by Aimee Lin Yahon Chang, by Ben Eastham Daidō Moriyama , by Fi Churchman Liverpool Biennial, by Mark Rappolt John Akomfrah, by Kang Kang

Writing the Modern: Selected Texts on Art & Art History in Singapore, Malaysia & Southeast Asia, by T.K. Sabapathy Walt Disney’s Disneyland, by Chris Nichols Dansaekhwa 1960s-2010s: Primary Documents on Korean Abstract Painting, edited by Koo Jin-Kyung et al Threads, by Sandeep Parmar, Bhanu Kapil and Nisha Ramayyas The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium, by Isabelle Graw Hybrid Child, by Mariko Ōhara

MEANWHILE, IN BRAZIL 100

page 89 Daidō Moriyama, A Silhouette in the Night, 2000, silkscreen on canvas, 120 × 159 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Hamiltons, London

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Art Previewed

Kampung The term kampongs, or kampungs, is often describing dwelling places where Malay migrants live, but are also defined as traditional settlements of various Asian indigenous peoples 19

Previewed Ties of History: Art in Southeast Asia Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Vargas Museum and Yuchengco Museum, Manila Through 6 October 12th Gwangju Biennale Various venues, Gwangju Through 11 November Busan Biennale 2018 Museum of Contemporary Art Busan and the former Bank of Korea building Through 11 November Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018 Seoul Museum of Art Through 18 November Francis Alÿs Artsonje Center, Seoul Through 4 November Michael Joo Artsonje Center, Seoul Through 14 October

Yoo Youngkuk Kukje Gallery, Seoul Through 7 October Norberto Roldan Silverlens, Manila Through 13 October Hito Steyerl National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 28 September – 24 March Revolution Generations Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha 17 October – 16 February Robert Rauschenberg Pace Gallery, Hong Kong Through 2 November Kunié Sugiura Tokyo Photographic Museum Through 24 September

Catastrophe and the Power of Art Roppongi Hills and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 6 October – 20 January Temporary Certainty 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney Through 14 October Cao Fei Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Hong Kong Through 9 December Praneet Soi Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon Through 1 October Ghost: 2561 Various venues, Bangkok 11–28 October Bangkok Art Biennale 2018 Various venues 19 October – 3 February

Yuko Mohri Project Fulfill Space, Taipei 29 September – 3 November

14 Yoko Ono, Add Color Painting (Refugee Boat), 2016, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki

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Maligayang kaarawan. ‘Flabby, directionless and… looking extremely lethargic and tired.’ Welcome to ArtReview Asia’s autumn previews! Heh, heh, heh… Jokes aside, the borrowed words are T.K. Sabapathy’s verdict on the biennial ASEAN exhibitions and symposiums, launched in 1980.

The Singaporean critic was writing on the occasion of the 3rd ASEAN Travelling Exhibition of Painting, Photography and Children’s Art, in 1993, and looking – nervously – forward to where the Association of Southeast Asian Nations might be taking the region’s art in the twenty-first century. ‘Increasingly, the ASEAN exhibitions and symposiums are like cocktail gatherings, filled with pleasantries but impotent and of no consequence,’ he continued, before proposing six actions the event managers could take to increase its potency. Last year marked a key cocktail moment – the 50th anniversary of the founding of ASEAN – and

Manila is staging a tripartite exhibition, curated 1 by Patrick D. Flores and titled Ties of History: Art in Southeast Asia, to mark the conclusion of those celebrations. Alongside the usual stuff about mutuality, commonality, regional diversity and neighbourly solidarity, as well as trade, peace, economic growth and an unstated aim of halting the spread of communism, the Bangkok Declaration (the organisation’s founding document, signed by the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) lists the promotion of Southeast Asian studies as one of ASEAN’s core goals; the association’s first art exhibition was staged in Jakarta one year afterwards.

Half a century later, Flores’s contribution takes one artist from each of the ten current ASEAN member states (Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Brunei have joined since 1967) and presents an example of their work in each of

the exhibition’s three venues. The result is three exhibitions that are the same but different: just the kind of contradictory oneness that a trade confederation like ASEAN is all about. Those artists are Amanda Heng (Singapore), Roberto Feleo (Philippines), Anusapati (Indonesia), Do Hoang Tuong (Vietnam), Chris Chong Chan Fui (Malaysia), Yasmin Jaidin (Brunei), Min Thein Sung (Myanmar), Vuth Lyno (Cambodia), Jedsada Tangtrakulwong (Thailand) and Savanhdary Vongpoothorn (Laos); Flores’s aim is to explore a region and a collection of art practices that is, by necessity, in ‘a condition of constant forming’. Certainly attempts to form the region’s artistic practices into some sort of shape are all the rage with Asia’s art institutions at the moment, if recent exhibitions such as last year’s Sunshower at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and M+’s current In Search of Southeast Asia in Hong Kong are anything to go by, and there’s

1 Ties of History: Art in Southeast Asia, 2018 (installation view).

Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Manila

1 Chris Chong Chan Fui, PIT#1 Hibiscus Rosa Sinensis (BungaRaya), 2013, digital print on paper, 213 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist and Metropolitan Museum of Manila 1 Do Hoang Tuong, Untitled (detail), 2016, acrylic on canvas, triptych. Courtesy the artist and Metropolitan Museum of Manila

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2 Tiffany Chung, Reconstructing an exodus history: flight routes from camps and of ODP cases, 2017, embroidery on fabric, 140 × 350 cm. © and courtesy the artist

2 Kader Attia, Open Your Eyes (detail), 2010, 35mm b/w and colour slides.

Courtesy the artist

no doubt that Southeast Asia offers some of the richest and most intriguing art on the continent right now and is rapidly developing the infrastructure (in the form of public and private art museums) to show it off. Philippine senator Loren Legarda has already stated that she hopes that other ASEAN nations will continue Flores’s project in the form of a biennial exhibition (and acknowledge Manila as the centre of Southeast Asia’s art scene while they are at it). Sabapathy is doubtless sharpening a few pencils, but Flores isn’t one for hanging around and will be the artistic director of the next edition of the great critic’s hometown biennial, which takes place in the city-state next year. In the meantime, those of you who can’t wait for that real biennial fix are spoiled for choice. First stop South 2 Korea and the Gwangju Biennale.

Last year Sunjung Kim (previously director of Seoul’s influential Artsonje Center) was

announced as the new president of the Gwangju among other things – conceived by no less than Biennale Foundation. Her appointment came 11 curators and academics. In addition, Adrián Villar Rojas, Mike Nelson, Kader Attia and in the wake of an evolving scandal involving Apichatpong Weerasethakul have been invited now jailed former South Korean president Park to produced new public projects at historic sites Geun-hye’s administration of a 60-page blackthroughout the city, while three international list of 9,473 cultural figures who were excluded organisations – the Palais de Tokyo, Helsinki from any kind of government support and fundInternational Artist Program and Philippine ing (Gwangju receives government funds), and Contemporary Art Network – will produce consequently marks something of a ‘reset’ for pavilion projects (in a civic centre, a temple a flagship festival that was founded in 1995 to and an art museum respectively), all of which commemorate the pro-democracy civil uprising seem designed to spread the biennial’s focus of 1980 and its brutal repression by government beyond the borders of its traditional home in forces (incidentally the subject of Booker Prizethe bunkerlike Biennial Halls. And, of course, winning and government-blacklisted novelist beyond the borders of South Korea too.

Han Kang’s 2014 Human Acts). The 12th edition Still, you will actually have to go there to see of the biennial, titled Imagined Borders, features it and will probably want to take in another elements – looking at the relations between 3 biennial in the port town of Busan while you’re architecture and nation-building, Southeast at it. It’s on the other end of a three-hour (or so) Asian migration (you were, of course, expectbus or car journey from Gwangju. Once there, ing that one) and the impact of the Internet,

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Paris-based curator Cristina Ricupero (who was involved curatorially in the 2006 Gwangju Biennale) and Berlin-based critic Jörg Heiser will be your artistic directors of an exhibition titled Divided We Stand. Take that, ASEAN! And take this, Gwangju: ‘We think the time of the mega-exhibition, exhausting even the most professional visitor with ever more venues and artworks, is over,’ the dynamic duo state as an opening gambit to their exhibition statement. Their exhibition is going to feature just over 60 artists and focus on the geopolitical and psychological effects of territorial division and secession over the past 70 years or so. Expect Cold War trauma, post-Partition trauma, post-Soviet trauma, post-Yugoslavia trauma, post-9/11 trauma and, somewhere along the way, one presumes, divided-Korea trauma to be addressed. Among those exploring these

particular forms of bipolarity will be Yael Bartana, Hsu Chia-Wei, Minouk Lim, Lars von Trier and Ming Wong.

Ricupero was also an adviser to the SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016, and you’ll want to head to Seoul next in order to check out the current edition of that fandango (take the TKX, Korea’s fastest train, from Busan and you’ll be there in just under three hours).

The first thing you’ll notice is that the event 4 has changed its name and is now the Seoul Mediacity Biennale. The next thing you’ll be aware of is that it’s (controversially) curated by a group of five men (the 2016 edition was devised by an all-women team) drawn from the worlds of dance, literature, environmental protection and economics (that people with expertise in fields other than art are involved is not controversial). And the final thing you’ll remark on

is that, until recently, that group used to contain six men, the disappeared member being Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) director Choi Hyo-jun, who is currently suspended following allegations of sexual harassment (which he denies).

You’ll have focused on those things because precious little information is available ahead of this biennial, other than the fact that the exhibition is titled A Good Life (which must have sounded like a good idea at the time), that philosophers Aristotle and Ernst Bloch, and novelists Albert Camus and Aldous Huxley will be evoked, that the focus is on a range of media and that the exhibition’s curators are, in somewhat sinister fashion, calling themselves ‘the Collective’. But you’ll remain calm because, as you know by now, collective curating is something that’s happening all over South Korea at the moment.

4 Critical Art Ensemble and YoHa, Graveyard of Lost Species, Leigh-On-Sea, 2016 (installation view, Leigh-On-Sea). © the artists

3 Kiluanji Kia Henda, Ilha de Vénus, 2018, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist

3 Henrike Naumann, 2000, 2018 (installation view, Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach). Photo: Achim Kukulies.

Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

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5 Francis Alÿs, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River, 2008, two video projections, 7 min 44 sec (each). Courtesy the artist and Artsonje Center, Seoul

6 Michael Joo, Saltation, Traction, Precipitate (still), 2018.

Courtesy the artist

But that’s not to say it’s happening everywhere in South Korea. While the group of 11 are putting together the current iteration of the Gwangju Biennale, Sunjung Kim has popped back to the Artsonje Center to curate a solo exhibition, titled The Logbook of Gibraltar, by 5 Mexico City-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs.

It opens a few days before Gwangju, so don’t get shirty about Kim needing to be in two places at once. Borders and their sociopolitical effects remain the subject here. The twochannel video Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (2008) examines that between Spain and Morocco via groups of children on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar lining up with toy boats made out of shoes and attempting to meet by walking into the water and towards the horizon. In Bridge/Puente (2006), the tension between Cuban migrants and US immigration

authorities is the subject matter as a group of fishermen from Havana and Key West line up their boats to create a floating bridge. Elsewhere in the exhibition you’ll find some of the artist’s elegant drawings and a reappearance of those ‘shoeboats’, this time as an installation.

Alongside Alÿs, Artsonje will be hosting another solo exhibition, this one featuring 6 the work of American-Korean Michael Joo. Titled Verfremdungseffekt, which translates from the German as ‘alienation effect’ and is a term originated by Bertolt Brecht in his 1936 essay ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’ (involving the notion that the audience should be distanced from rather than absorbed into the action and characters on stage), the exhibition is based around a new public artwork (after which the show is titled) commissioned by the Real DMZ Project for the Peace and Culture Plaza in

Autumn 2018

Cheorwon, on the edge of Korea’s demilitarised zone. That installation centres on the collection and displacement of seven natural volcanic boulders around a cast cement work made up of scanned and enlarged fragments of smaller volcanic material collected along the Hantan River. The work itself is inspired by the Seung-il Bridge (you see – that’s the kind of tight connection, with Alÿs as well as the two sides of the river, that curating is all about), which spans the river and is said to have been begun by North Korea in 1948 before being completed

by South Korea in 1952. The rock fragments of the central sculpture in Cheorwon were collected by South Korean children and used to play a traditional game (땅따먹기) on the bridge itself, before being scanned and enlarged at a robotic craft workshop. Geological age becomes cultural age becomes technological age. The

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processes explored to deliver this mix of natural are the subject of an exhibition titled Colors from Nature at Seoul’s Kukje Gallery and provide and human displacement form the subject of the exhibition and a new videowork titled Saltation, a healthy reminder that there was something Traction, Precipitate (2018). At this stage of your other than the now-ubiquitous Dansaekhwa monochrome painting going on in Korea durtrip it’ll be like a second coming of the Busan ing the second part of the last century.

Biennale: not so flabby now, huh?

While he may not have taken multitasking So let’s ramp it up as we turn to the next 8 quite as far as Yoo, Filipino artist Norberto stage of your Seoul experience and Korean Roldan currently juggles his work as an artist 7 abstractionist Yoo Youngkuk, who studied with his role as artistic director of Manila’s art in Tokyo, returned to Korea during the Second World War, made a living as a fisherman longest-running not-for-profit art space, Green and brewer, returned to art during the 1950s, Papaya Art Projects in Quezon City. Before all that (and founding the group Black Artists working with a variety of avant-garde groups in Asia in 1986, which explored social and (among them New Realism and New Figures) political artistic practice), Roldan studied before ditching the collective thing (take that, Seoul Mediacity Biennial) in 1964 and working philosophy as an undergraduate, and the title and exhibiting solo until his death in 2002. of his latest show at Silverlens – How can you The abstract landscapes-cum-Colour Field-type jump over your shadow when you don’t have one anymore? – certainly conjures Martin Heidegger paintings (a merging of Eastern and Western (a 1935 lecture on Immanuel Kant and the traditions) he produced during the latter period

limitations of being) and Platonic philosophy, but is more immediately borrowed from Jean Baudrillard’s dedication in Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1991–1995 (1997). The Frenchman has provided the impetus for previous Roldan exhibitions, and you’ll be getting the idea by now that readings of texts generally inform the questions he asks when it comes to the reading of objects and images. And knowing that it is eight years since his last solo exhibition is also to know that he has had plenty of time (other activities allowing) to read. Often deploying a variety of media and materials to create assemblages, Roldan once said that that process ‘builds the context for storytelling without giving the whole story’; so, given that, as an artist, he operates in the slippery territory between objects and meanings, shadows and/or the lack of them should be a subject that’s right up his street.

7 Yoo Youngkuk, Work-円A, 1968, oil on canvas, 136 × 136 cm.

Courtesy Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

8 Norberto Roldan, Litany XX, 2018, assemblage with old estampitas, collage and nail polish, 185 × 112 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Silverlens, Manila

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9 Slipperiness is also a theme of Hito Steyerl’s

of a mediated experience of the world (the light throughout the region. The story will be told immersive installation Factory of the Sun (2015), of the screen is the light of our lives), the relation- through works (both on loan and from Mathaf’s collection) by artists ranging from Fahrelnissa ship between individuals and corporate entities, originally shown in the German Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and now, having been and the evolving relationship within all that Zeid and Shirin Neshat, to Walid Raad and on something of a world tour, on show at the between work and play. Or you could simply Hassan Khan.

National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, admire some pretty slick dance moves instead.

When it comes to artists who revolutionised Australia. A videowork presented in an environThese days art’s a serious business and over the practice of art during the twentieth century, 10 at Mathaf in Doha, Revolution Generations, ment that appears as if modelled on a Star Trek 11 few can match Robert Rauschenberg, whose holodeck, Factory of the Sun merges the genres continuously innovative work anticipated curated by the institution’s director, Abdellah Karroum, will seek to place art at the centre Pop art, introduced found objects to painting, of documentary, video game culture (there’s also a distinct Tron aesthetic to the installation), anticipated conceptual art by erasing a drawing of social change in the Arab world. Charting science-fiction, motion-capture technologies,

by Willem de Kooning (part of a wider interest a history roughly spanning from 1950 to the present day, the exhibition will look at art proin creating work by subtraction rather than virtual realities and the aesthetics of remote addition) and more generally sought to erase duced during the independence era in North surveillance. The video’s plot centres around Africa and the Middle East, through to the the ‘gap’ between art and life. This month, the slavelike workers whose actions in motionPan-Arab movements that followed, up to artist American’s Vydock series, originally exhibited capture studios are used to generate artificial sunlight, drawing the viewer into labour’s contributions to the Arab Spring and a more in 1995 and rarely seen since, goes on show changing value in a global economy, the impact general campaign for freedom of expression at Pace Gallery’s Hong Kong outpost. Those

9 Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015 (installation view, Venice Biennale, 2015).

Courtesy the artist

11 Robert Rauschenberg, Easel (Vydock), 1995, acrylic and graphite on bonded aluminium, 246 × 154 cm. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at Artists Rights Society, New York

10 Inji Efflatoun, Textile Workers, c. 1955, oil on canvas, 75 × 89 cm. Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

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12 Kunié Sugiura, Market Front, 1978, photo emulsion, acrylic on canvas.

Courtesy the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

13 Yuko Mohri, Moré Moré Variations, 2018, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Sam Hartnett.

Courtesy the artist and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth

of you who are not into the erasure stuff: don’t worry; the works are very much present in the form of combinations of silkscreened images (of towels, seagulls and brick walls, for example), colourful swathes of acrylic paint and graphite lines (or photography, painting and drawing), that hover between abstraction and figuration all media and none at all. So perhaps some form of erasure in the end.

Equally revolutionary in terms of her work in the field of photography, but far less known than Rauschenberg, is New York-based Japanese 12 Kunié Sugiura, a 50-year survey of whose work is currently on show at the Tokyo Photographic Museum. Born in Nagoya, Sugiura travelled to Chicago in the early 1960s to study photography at the Art Institute (according to her, Japanese art schools at the time focused on drawing skills

one from Rauschenberg to Ellsworth Kelly in as an entry requirement and hers – she had previously studied physics – weren’t up Sugiura’s work, but its quiet beauty and elegance (particularly in tracing time and memory and to it), before arriving in New York in 1967.

Her experimental use of the medium (in case the relationship of materiality and immaterithat was not clear, her show is titled Aspiring ality) alone suggest that she should be treated Experiments: New York in 50 Years) manifests in, as the equal of any of those American greats.

Over in Taipei, a no less innovative, albeit among other things, a series of photograms somewhat younger, Japanese artist is part of of objects and people (photograms have been the mainstay of her art since the 1980s), the use Project Fulfill Space’s tenth anniversary cele13 brations. Yuko Mohri’s installations, which of fish-eye lenses, the deployment of postcard racks (of the kind you might find in a tourist function more like ecosystems, explore the souvenir shop) as a display medium (in Rack, interface between natural and mechanical 1992/1996, a series of photograms of X-rays of systems, and the transfer of energy across the two. When you factor in that her exhibition anonymous patients) and, most engaging of all, is titled Same As It Ever Was and that it includes works such as Market Front (1978), which juxtapose painted monochrome canvases with those examples from a new series of works titled printed with black-and-white photographs.

Everything Flows, you might start thinking Of course, you can see the influence of everythat the work reflects a certain Buddhist view

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15 Sarker Protick, Disintegration, from the series Exodus, 2015–, photographic installation. Courtesy the artist and 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney

14 Gillian Wearing, Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say, 1992–93 , c-print on aluminium, 45 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Chambers Fine Art, Beijing

14 Chim Pom, Real Times (still), 2011, HD video installation, 11 min 11 sec.

Courtesy the artist and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

of the world, but that would be to ignore the bled to prove the point (the one about tragedy, 14 exhibition Catastrophe and the Power of Art. equal force of the artist’s interest in sound Looking at events such as current refugee crises, not sanity) including Shigeru Ban, Hiwa K, and music (hence the Talking Heads reference), Oliver Laric, Tatsuo Miyajima, Yoko Ono, Koki Japan’s 2011 earthquake, tsunami and the resulwhich recently resulted in a performance in tant nuclear disaster at Fukushima, as well Tanaka, Gillian Wearing and Tomoko Yoneda.

After all that, a return to geopolitics London (part of a residency at Camden Arts as manmade catastrophes such as the events Centre) with electronic music pioneer Ryuichi of 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, the exhibimight seem like something of a relief. Which Sakamoto. Like Sugiura, but via very different tion gathers together artworks that operate in is why you’ll want to get on an aeroplane for means, Mohri plays with the relationship the modes of reportage, memorial, investigation ten hours or so and head over to Sydney, and between the material and the immaterial in 4A Contemporary Art Centre’s group show and surrogate palliative care in order to examine 15 Temporary Certainty. The exhibition brings the role that art can play in times of crisis. a way that makes the viewer conscious of their ‘The energy released as we try to recover [from together the work of three artists, Australians connection to a greater environmental whole catastrophe] can simultaneously park imaginaRushdi Anwar and Alana Hunt, and Bangladeshi made up of electronic, magnetic, atmospheric, tion and boost creative output,’ the exhibition Sarker Protick, to look at issues affecting three aquatic, solar, thermal, kinetic and other forms of energy transmission. announcement barks. Although most sane geographical contexts. Anwar looks at the expeThe subject of what role art can play when people wouldn’t really want to rely on tragedy rience of displaced Iraqi Kurdish peoples via to produce triumph. But then who said art lovers works that revisit the legacies of Saddam Hussein some of those forces become harmful to humans is one of the themes driving Tokyo’s Mori and the disputed territories of the Kurdistan were sane? A formidable group of international artists (and the odd architect) has been assemRegional Government and the Iraqi government; Museum’s rather hysterically titled group

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Hunt examines the damming of the Ord River near her hometown of Kununurra and its effect on the lands of indigenous peoples; while Protick looks to the aftereffects of Partition and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Using the mediums of installation, photography and video, all three artists look to the opposing states of certainty and uncertainty, permanence and ephemerality as a means of navigating some of the more complex politics of contested spaces and the places they call ‘home’.

Colonial and postcolonial history is also 16 the theme of Chinese artist Cao Fei’s latest work, Prison Architect (2018). Tai Kwun is, of course, a former prison and the film, set in Hong Kong’s Central district and commissioned

by Beijing’s UCCA, documents an encounter between a female prison architect and a male 17

prisoner from the past (taking place in a parallel universe, obviously) that inspires the former to design a utopian vision of incarceration. A cynical person might also add that the themes of the film (control versus freedom) might have something to say about current relations between Mainland China and the SAR, before rushing off to look at the rest of this retrospective exhibition (the artist’s first such in Asia, titled A hollow in a world too full) and explore a series of works that deal with labour, play, technology, youth culture, networked culture and the rapid change that Chinese society has undergone over the past few years. Naturally that person might also be thinking about the connections between Cao’s work and Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun. A tile factory lies at the heart of Kolkotaborn, Amsterdam-based Praneet Soi’s latest

installation, Third Factory, on show at Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Museum. The work explores historic relations between Kashmir and central Asia through a blue ceramic tile of unusual design found at the mausoleum of Miran Zain, the mother of Sultan Zain-Ul-Abedin, who ruled Kashmir during the middle period of the fifteenth century. Soi had the tile remade at the Bordallo Pinheiro Ceramic Factory in Caldas, Portugal, and then used it to make a wall to accompany a video (projected onto a pillar) documenting the tiles’ fabrication.

That is accompanied by a jade jar from the Gulbenkian Collection once owned by the Mughal emperor Jahangir, who ruled Kashmir during the sixteenth century, while a set of Kum Kapi rugs and Sassanid coins play roles in the video. If that wasn’t layered enough,

17 Praneet Soi, Third Factory, 2018 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

16 Cao Fei, Prison Architect (still), 2018, film, colour, sound, 60 min.

Courtesy the artist and Tai Kwun, Taipei

Autumn 2018

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the exhibition title derives from a book by and Josh Kline among others, spans galleries and project spaces across the city as well as a series Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky (1893– 1984) reflecting on periods in his life that were of talks, discussions and workshops. “I was trying to think ‘ghosts’ as a body of knowledge important to his growth as a writer. In taking possession of that, Soi transforms it into held together through collective subjectivities a geography spanning Srinagar (Kashmir), that passed through time,” says Arunanondchai.

“I wanted to use the idea of spirits or ghosts Caldas and Lisbon.

With geography in mind, let’s end our little as carriers and containers of information, to tour where it began, in Southeast Asia, and present essentially what the artists in this series 18 more specifically Bangkok, where Ghost: 2561 do; gather bodies of information and process, (the numerals represent the year 2018 in the and hold it together with the medium of Buddhist calendar), a triannual video and storytelling,” he continues by way of a clue performance festival, curated by locally raised as to what shape the festival might take. artist Korakrit Arunanondchai launches this While you’re in town for this spectral event, October. The 18-day event, featuring time-based you’ll want to visit the inaugural edition of the work by Ian Cheng, Rachel Rose, boychild, 19 Bangkok Art Biennale (not least because work Stephanie Comilang, Raqs Media Collective

by Arunanondchai is in that too). Led by artist,

curator, art historian, art-infrastructure builder Apinan Poshyananda (chief executive and artistic director of the biennial), the event aims to place Bangkok at the heart of the region’s art scene. As a result, works by 75 artists from 33 countries will be popping up in the Thai capital’s temples (among them Wat Prayoon, the Temple of the Iron Fence), historic sites and iconic landmarks. Advance details remain err… flabby, but there you’ll be treated to works

by Marina Abramović, Montien Boonma, Elmgreen & Dragset, Ho Tzu Nyen, Sakarin Krue-On, Lee Bul and Yan Pei-Ming among many, many others. Of course there will probably be some cocktails and pleasantries but with any luck some direction, consequences and a low-fat diet too. Nirmala Devi

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13 19 Komkrit Tepthian, work in progress, 2018.

Courtesy the artist and Bangkok Art Biennale

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Nowhere in the world has the #MeToo movement had a more tangible impact than in South Korea. Since the beginning of 2018 the coalition against sexual misconduct has sparked resignations from political office, high-profile prosecutions, popular protests and widespread debate around feminism and female agency in South Korean society.

The country’s counterpart to the Harvey Weinstein scandal occurred in the field of public law, with prosecutor Seo Ji-hyeon coming forward earlier this year to tell the story of being sexually assaulted by her superior Ahn Tae-geun at a funeral in 2010. Her decision to speak out moved the debate into the wider public consciousness and catalysed a dramatic series of revelations, notably in the cultural sector. In cinema, Venice Golden Lion winner Kim Ki-duk, who had earlier been found guilty of assaulting an actress on the set of one of his films, was the subject this year of two episodes by a high-profile TV investigative-journalism programme that aired multiple accusations of rape, sexual assault and sexual misconduct by women he had worked with; soon the renowned theatre director Lee Yoontaek and the poet Ko Un, who was among the favourites for the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, were facing similar charges. In March actor Jo Min-ki committed suicide after being called to trial to face accusations of sexual assault, most of them made by his drama students at Cheongju University. Cases reported in the artworld have so far been more muted than

agents of change In terms of resignations, prosecutions and street protests, Korea’s #MeToo movement has been among the most impactful worldwide.

Its real target though, says Liz Kim, should not only be individuals but a society founded on precepts about gender that are hundreds of years old above left Detail of a 50,000 KRW banknote, featuring a portrait of Shin Saimdang. © Chaowalit407 / Dreamstime above right Detail of a 5,000 KRW banknote, featuring a portrait of Yi I

Autumn 2018

these public denouncements (although at the time of writing, Choi Hyo-jun, director of the Seoul Museum of Art, or SeMA, is suspended pending the results of an investigation into alleged sexual harassment, which he denies), but there is a shared sense of outrage against male perpetrators within its boundaries. The common thread in these reports is that powerful men have exploited their positions to use women as objects for their sexual gratification, and the evening news broadcasts continue to roll off stories of sexual assault, misconduct and its prosecution.

Among the most visible expressions of the #MeToo movement in South Korea have been protests against spycams and the dissemination of their footage on the Internet. The protests not only denounce the culture of spycam porn – known as ‘molka’ – but also the failure of the state to sanction offenders, as less than 10 percent of first-time convictions have resulted in custodial sentences. An exception came in May, when a woman was imprisoned after using a spycam to photograph a male model as he posed nude for students at an art college in Seoul. The strict application of the law in this case angered women who regularly saw such offences by men treated leniently, highlighting the ways in which the law protects and prioritises the privacy of men over women and causing uproar. On 19 May, an estimated 12,000 women marched through the streets of Seoul to protest the unequal application of the law to women and to voice their anger at the violation of women’s bodies.

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By the fourth protest led by the same organisers, which took place on 4 August, the number had grown to over 40,000 women wearing red and white, and carrying protest banners: ‘My life is not your porn’, ‘Discomforting bravery will change the world’. Other gatherings, festivals and protests are taking place across South Korea, signalling a profound sense of change in the air.

Pop culture holds further clues to #MeToo’s significance here. One of the most important symbols of the movement is a novel by Cho Nam-joo, titled Kim Ji-young: Born in 1982 (2016), which preceded the movement’s entry into the popular imagination. The narrative details the life of a contemporary Korean woman, with a husband and a young child, who has a breakdown in the face of accumulated micro- and macroaggressions – from men and older women – of the type traditionally trivialised through and by Korean society. Her illness is a bid for freedom, and the book is held up as a feminist text. But it really made waves in March, when K-Pop idol Irene of the group Red Velvet said that she had read it. After an online backlash, male fans burned Irene’s photos, her group’s albums and its merchandise. Feminism, or ‘femi’ for short, is a dirty word for many in Korea.

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South Korean women protest sexism and hidden-camera pornography on 4 August 2018, in the streets of Seoul.

Photo: Jean Chung / Getty Images

ArtReview Asia

That backlash is shaped by a very particular cultural context, traceable back to the Chinese Confucianism introduced during the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897) and now embedded in Korean society. This system of beliefs teaches that one must know one’s place in society, and it is designed to institute harmony through a strict system of social hierarchies and corresponding behaviours.

Relationships between people are determined by age, gender, education, class and their relative positions in the workplace.

Women’s roles are defined by child-bearing and motherhood, which become synonymous with their responsibilities.

In Korea, the picture of the ideal woman can be found on every 50,000 KRW banknote: Shin Saimdang (1504–51). Her history is tightly bound together with the accomplishments of her son Yi I, the Confucianist scholar whose portrait adorns the 5,000 KRW bill.

Visiting the site of her mansion, I found a quote from one of his texts, Gyukmongyogyul (Essential Keys to Enlightenment, meaning the beginner’s guide to Confucianist moral education, first published in 1577), displayed in one of the rooms. The household is maintained, it says, by ‘assigning tasks to each that fit their personalities so that the household could function efficiently’. The reader is also advised that ‘siblings came from the flesh of the same parents as oneself, so they are no different than my own body. Therefore, one should not think that I am just me, or I am my own person.’

The message is clear: the individual is less important than the collective and her fixed place within it. Yi I’s scholarship and views are often linked with, and attributed to, his mother, a well-known artist and poet who taught her son in his early days, and the quoted text is one of the foundational texts in the Korean history of primary level education. It also describes the role of an ideal Korean woman in the context of this historical house, through the figure of Shin Saimdang: to ‘embody proper behaviour in the home’ and to manage the domestic budgets.

Women are expected to marry. Wives are referred to by their husbands as ansaram (‘interior person’) or jipsaram (‘house person’).

This is an etymological enactment of the

Confucianist social roles that define women as those who stay within the boundaries of the family home. The wife shapes the household from inside the house, while the husband represents it on the outside. In managing the household, the wife must be selfless: she must put everyone else’s needs above her own. This selflessness defines women’s roles in Korea.

Being a woman means losing oneself.

The basis of the #MeToo movement in Korea is the desire to hit back at the invisibility, the inequity, the denial of selfhood that is forced upon women within this society.

Despite Korea’s modernisation, the culturally conservative nation retains many of its deeply rooted Joseon dynasty precepts.

Cho’s novel details what that means for women in Korea. It means women must eat last at the family dinner table. It means women must accept the unequal distribution of money and resources. It means women must take the blame for male violence, for not being modest enough.

It means that society normalises violence against women and allows the violation of their personal boundaries to continue. It means women must be riddled with guilt for the crimes of men. The novel is considered revolutionary in Korea because it describes the accumulation of aggressions, large and small, that women face at every turn and with every interaction.

But the experience of women is only one side of the equation. The #MeToo movement also addresses the role of men in a highly patriarchal, Confucianist society. The placement of men above women in Korean society is exacerbated by the two-year compulsory military service for every male citizen. Women are excluded from an experience that forms a core part of men’s

top Portrait of artist and poet Shin Saimdang, mother of sixteenth-century Confucianist scholar Yi I. © Art Collection 3 / Alamy Stock Photo left Cut-up photo of K-Pop idol Irene from Red Velvet, uploaded by a fan after the singer said she had read a feminist novel

Autumn 2018

social education. In these military bases, women become fantasies and objects of consumption, through the media and the social spaces that they’re allowed to access. Women come to represent escape from duty, and they come to represent pleasure. Idols and celebrities take the place of girlfriends and wives in military life. Irene’s reading of Cho’s novel was controversial because she violated this fantasy of a consumable woman whose job is to be infinitely available to men as the object of their desires.

In this context, female agency is dangerous, because it threatens the male worldview.

The systematic oppression of women in Korea goes beyond individual men: it is enacted through the structures on which the society is built, whether institutional, corporate, educational or cultural. The #MeToo movement in Korea is a bid by women to change all this.

At the very least, young women are learning that they have agency and that gender inequality should not passively be accepted. That gives hope for the future.

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2018年9月21-23日 上海展览中心

photofairs.org

September 21 - 23, 2018 Shanghai Exhibition Center

Points of View

The idiot ‘Don’t be too hasty in trying to find a definition of the town; it’s far too big and there’s every chance of getting it wrong,’ wrote the Frenchman Georges Perec when addressing issues of scale and the human occupation of space. ‘I don’t have a lot to say about the country: the country doesn’t exist,’ he continued, moving things up a notch. ‘What can we know of the world?’ he opined. ‘To cover the world, to crisscross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square metres of it, a few acres, tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small incidental excitements, improbable quests congealed in a mawkish haze a few details of which will remain in our memory… out beyond the panoramas too long anticipated and discovered too late, and the accumulations of stones and the accumulations of works of art, it will be three children perhaps running along a bright white road.’ What an idiot. He should have got out of Paris a bit more; gone to Berlin.

under the Paving stones In Berlin, Mark Rappolt discovers that the past is the present, context is everything and the postcolonial landscape is confused

Down with retrospectives; up with retrospective vision!

There’s something slightly hysterical about the foreword to the catalogue for the Hamburger Bahnhof’s Hello World: Revising a Collection. It’s written by Hortensia Völckers and Alexander Farenholz, artistic director and administrative director respectively, of the German Federal Cultural Foundation: ‘Contra North Atlantic navel-gazing!’ they squeal in the opening paragraph. ‘Out of the hallucinating chambers of Western self-referentiality and into the laboratory of the “Global Museum”!’ they shriek. Before then going on to speculate about what the Nationalgalerie collection (which spans five venues: the Alte Nationalgalerie, home to the collection of nineteenth-century art; the Neue Nationalgalerie, currently being refurbished, but normally home to twentieth-century art; the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, more twentieth-century art; the Hamburger Bahnhof, contemporary art; and the Friedrichswerder Church, currently closed due to structural damage, but previously home to nineteenthcentury sculpture) might have looked like were it not for the Cold War turning its curators’ eyes away from the East, or if those same curators

from top Friedrich Carl Albert Schreuel, Portrait of Raden Saleh, c. 1840, oil on canvas, 107 × 85 cm, courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; portrait of Raden Saleh Sjarif Boestaman, c. 1872, photo: Woodbury & Page. Neither work is included in Hello World: Revising a Collection, 2018, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Autumn 2018

had worked with their counterparts in Cairo, New Delhi and Dakar to mine the seams of multiple modernisms rather than just the one that was being pushed by the Anglocentric artworld. Naturally Croatian conceptualist Mladen Stilinović’s banners bearing the slogan An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist (1992) feature prominently in the show, but despite that, the fact that the dynamic duo from the Federal Cultural Foundation (a funding arm of the German state) has a little trouble translating gedankenexperiment (their term for what Hello World is performing for the national collection, and the one German word in their English-language introduction) as, say, ‘thought experiment’, or anything for that matter, gives one hint as to where the sticking points of this exercise might lie.

Of course, India, as it is currently constituted, gained independence at the beginning of the Cold War and didn’t establish a national gallery until 1954. In the Pacific that same year, the US was running nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll, Nasser was taking over in Egypt and stirring the pot of a wider pan-Islamic movement (while also keeping US interests onside), France was losing battles to the Viet Minh and more generally losing the First Indochina War, Vietnam was being split in two and the US was committing increasing resources to influence conflicts in the region. In short, and as the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s (HKW) hugely impressive Parapolitics exhibition (which traced the global dispersion of CIA funding and interests in the arts during the Cold War era and was on show in Berlin until this past January) demonstrated, the fingers of the West were all over the globe, its south and the east included. One of the underlying questions posed by Parapolitics concerned to what extent art can be truly committed to freedom of expression when it also accommodates (knowingly or not) ideological principles. Underlying Hello World is the fact that museums themselves are the products of ideologies or specific worldviews, and that ideologies glide (or at times crash) in and out of fashion over time (there’s a nod to work in the Nationalgalerie’s collection that was considered ‘degenerate’ by the National Socialists and subsequently expunged, among them a contribution by Rabindranath Tagore), with the result that museums need to review or revise their collections in order to stay relevant to living audiences. There’s no time like the present! Unless it’s the past!

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such questions of time and its relation to place were perhaps more emphatically, but no less problematically, tackled in another of HKW’s wonderfully exhaustive megaproductions, Neolithic Childhood: Art in a False Present c. 1930 (on view following Parapolitics during the spring and summer, it contained over 500 exhibits, many of them books and texts), this time based around the work of the German cultural critic (and anti-Nazi) Carl Einstein. All of which merely adds to the sense that, in Berlin at least, the programme at HKW is what’s leading the way.

The uncertainty principle Joking aside, the exhibition is divided into 13 thematic sections covering a little over two centuries of artist production and incorporates a large number of loans from outside the Nationalgalerie’s holdings. The fact that a number of these come from the collections of Berlin’s ethnographic museums, and that they span not just photographs, as you might expect, but paintings created as recently as the 1990s (by the octogenarian Balinese Kamasanstyle painter Ni Made Suciarmi, for example), highlights some of the ways in which traditional Western museology coalesces artistic modernity around an aesthetics generated by the rise of modernist art in the West. Ethnography is bracketed as culturally and geographically specific, while modern and contemporary art are fundamentally global and nonspecific. It’s a structure that roughly corresponds to the German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s theories of quantum particles: if you know where you are, you can’t know when you are. In the various sections of Hello World, ‘where?’ is often a matter of an artistic heritage (because you need to acknowledge local modernisms) and ‘when?’ is a matter of the specifics of global exchange (within a framework, in this exhibition, of colonial, postcolonial or political ideologies). In the section of the exhibition devoted to Indian modernism and its exchanges with Berlin – which, among other things (of which more later), juxtaposes the works of George Grosz and the Bengali painter and cartoonist Gaganendranath Tagore (Rabindranath’s nephew) – this results in what’s described as a ‘non-linear itinerary’.

Indian Anish

Leading the way It’s a conundrum that’s elegantly and poetically, if not exactly conclusively, explored in extracts from Indonesian painter S. Sudjojono’s 1948 text ‘We Know Where We Will Be Taking Indonesian Art’, excerpted in Hello World’s catalogue. It begins: ‘As Indonesians, we admit that the art we make here nowadays has a Western style. Nevertheless, to say that this is not also an Indonesian style is not accurate…’ before going on to suggest that fundamentally artforms develop in relation to changing worldviews, rather than via processes of formal inheritance or imitation.

In the context of the wider Berlin art scene,

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Carl Einstein, theses for Art Reference Book, 1930s, paper fragments on a flag. © Carl Einstein Archiv.

Courtesy Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

ArtReview Asia

So, as opposed to the kind of concrete fixes the Federal Cultural Foundation presumably envisioned when it launched the initiative, Hello World is interesting more for the way in which it highlights the problems inherent in attempting a retroactive global-art narrative. It wants to acknowledge the ongoing efforts of artists, critics and curators in, say, the various countries that make up East and Southeast Asia, to establish national or regional narratives of modernity over the past few decades, while at the same time reabsorbing these into an expanded canon.

The result is that while trying to disinvest itself of its own sense of nationalism, the display at the Bahnhof admits others.

In one peculiar example, 1000 Names (1980–84) by Anish Kapoor (born, as it happens, in 1954), who left India as a teenager, going on to train and work as an artist in Britain, but who is here unequivocally listed as an Indian artist in the wall caption beside the work, is included in a section of the show titled Arrival, Incision: Indian Modernism as Peripatetic Itinerary.

When chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990, Kapoor stated, ‘I am Indian but to see everything in terms of nationality is limiting. I don’t see myself as an Indian artist; neither do I see myself as a British artist. I am an artist who works in Britain’, and while Hello World is certainly an exhibition about international exchange and discourse, its thrusting desire to ‘be’ global means that the nuances of such positions are sometimes lost in its rush to map out a territory.

Although given the speculative nature of this show, that’s not to say that Nationalgalerie director Udo Kittelmann and the various internal and external curators involved in its production are, on the basis of the catalogue more than the exhibition itself, unaware of this.

histories and traditions (advising, for example, filmmaker F.W. Murnau, whose heavily exoticised, Spies-influenced Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, 1931, is included here), but in doing so masked Dutch atrocities behind the facade of a happy eternal idyll, and retarded wider developments in Balinese art by imprisoning it in its past (‘museumifying’ it, to use the curators’ words).

That’s how quickly celebration can turn into self-flagellation; bad Raden, bad Germans (decades after Spies’s death, in 1942, accusations that his love of Bali was connected with predatory homosexuality and paedophilia also surfaced), bad colonialism: as to the Dutch, who were actually occupying the place… well, in this show they seem to be little more than travel agents and get off scot-free. Perhaps that’s because Germany barely had enough Asian colonies to feel properly guilty about; it’s ok for it to borrow one or two.

Bad Raden The nineteenth-century Arab-Javanese painter Raden Saleh, whose work is included in a section titled Making Paradise: Places of Longing, From Paul Gauguin to Tito Salina (the latter is a contemporary Indonesian artist, here given an equivalence to… while reclaiming… yeah, you get it) travelled from the Dutch East Indies to study in Europe in 1829 (going on to live in Dresden for a time).

He arrived wearing the clothes of a Western dandy, but by the time he left he had transformed his outfit into that of a stereotypical Oriental in order, it is presumed, to better market his paintings of stereotypical Oriental scenes (Arab Horseman Attacked by a Lion, 1877, is included here).

As the first non-European artist to study in the European academies (and paint in that manner), he is considered a founding figure of modern Indonesian painting and, at the same time and for the same reasons, as a colonial lackey and imitator and all-round sellout (obliquely, for example, in S. Sudjojono’s 1948 essay and more notably by the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer writing in 1988 about the buildup to Indonesian independence). That contradiction is why he’s included in this section of the show. Raden is a title indicating that Saleh was a Javanese aristocrat of the class that the Dutch bolstered in order to rule their colony more conveniently; it was the Dutch who sent Saleh to Europe.

Conversely, the Russia-born German artist Walter Spies (who was educated in Dresden) travelled to Indonesia in 1923, hooked up first with Javanese aristocracy before swapping that refinement for the more ‘real’ landscape of Bali.

There he became a supporter and preserver of Balinese culture, dabbling in ethnology, photographing local customs and traditions, helping the development of Balinese painting (founding groups like Pita Maha, which are still active today), promoting the art trade, introducing Western artists, filmmakers and writers to local

Heroes

top Osman Hamdy Bey, Türkische Straßenszene, 1888, oil on canvas, 60 × 122 cm. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie above Walter Spies, Rehjagd (Deerhunt), 1932, oil on canvas, 60 × 50 cm.

Courtesy Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

Autumn 2018

But enough about problems! (Albeit still a firm ‘no’ to solutions.) Perhaps the most intriguing effect of the exhibition is that of constructing ‘globalisation’ and international exchange among artists as something that is not a contemporary development, but rather part of an ongoing process. That Joseph Beuys’s engagement with Argentine Land artist Nicolás García Uriburu (a collaborative and an intellectual exchange) seems like old hat; that Neue Slowenische Kunst was the dominant force in art during the 1980s is natural; Barnett Newman? Totally about Native American art.

For this (the debunking of globalisation, not the heavy promotion of NSK) Hello World does seem like a breath of fresh air. Still, you can’t help wondering whether or not the curators of this summer’s Berlin Biennale, We don’t need another hero, directed by Gabi Ngcobo, played down the biographical and geographical contextualisation

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of its exhibits (generally leaving viewers to make of it what they would) because this was a subject on which other parts of the city’s art scene had so thoroughly gone to town.

When it comes to rethinking an institution, Philippe Parreno’s stunning solo exhibition (which closed early August) at the Gropius Bau takes a totally different form. Influence is presented to the viewer as a matter of atmosphere, light, movement and sound (as those elements are influenced by architecture, visitors and exhibits).

Window blinds open and close seemingly at random, inflatable fish float around the gallery (chased by a man with a pole whose job seems to be to make sure they do not leave their designated room). The entire building becomes a strangely animate form. The whole thing is seamless. Inside der Bau, as part of a more conventional exhibition component of the show, fireflies have been drawn by the artist because they are beautiful, ephemeral and a physical manifestation of most of the environmental forces listed above. Everything is connected! Again. But this time it doesn’t come accompanied by a massive thesis; it doesn’t need one. Maybe some things seem logical while others do not; either you feel it or you don’t.

is fascinating: to some extent it’s collectively a revealing portrait of our times and contemporary attitudes to the history, distribution and ideologies of art. And more so of how we seek to assert our present on the past (and cities are always built on their pasts, both literally and metaphorically). Writing this from the point of view of someone who is from more than one culture (a British citizen of Asian origin who’s currently applying for German citizenship on the grounds that one set of grandparents were exiled German Jews), perhaps none of it is as much under the paving stones as it is under the skin.

Frenchman The French idiot (Perec not Parreno) concluded his advice about measuring the world like this: ‘And with these [the accumulation of a few remembered details of the world], the sense of the world’s concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible, of something clear and something closer to us: of the world, no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade, not as a race without end, a challenge having constantly to be met, not as one pretext for a despairing acquisitiveness, nor as the illusion of a conquest, but as a rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors’.

Potential German All of this is to say that what’s been happening in the Berlin art scene over the past six months

top Lene Berg, Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of Woman with Moustache, 2008, facade banner. Courtesy the artist above Philippe Parreno, 2018 (VR installation view, Gropius Bau, Berlin). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist; Pilar Corrias, London; Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels; and Esther Schipper, Berlin

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ArtReview Asia

Imagine that one day you wake up to find that everyone around you is naked, jerking off in public, and killing and eating each other. I feel that way every day living in Tamil Nadu.

Here is a story I came across recently: in a village near Katpadi, which is 140km from Chennai, a man who worked as a day-labourer on a farm was in the habit of coming home drunk and fighting with his wife. The couple had a daughter and two sons. One evening, the man caught his wife red-handed with her paramour, and in the fight that followed, the wife bit off a part of her husband’s penis.

If this were an unusual story, it could be dismissed, but in recent times such incidents have occurred quite frequently in India, especially in Tamil Nadu. When problems within marital relationships escalate, getting a divorce seems like the decent solution, but this is unthinkable in India, even among its upper classes.

An incident that took place in Delhi when I lived there 25 years ago is still etched in my memory.

A female friend employed in the top echelons of the police force knocked at my door during the wee hours. I opened it to find her covered in blood, because her husband (also a government employee, in the vaunted Indian Administrative Service) had hit her in the face with whatever he could grab hold of. When I asked my friend why she had not yet divorced him, she responded that the thought of being

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Notes from Madras Daily reports of maleon-female violence can make living in India feel like being in a horror movie, says Charu Nivedita. Yet older tales in which gender is anything but binary suggest another way

ArtReview Asia

single in a sex-starved society was worse than the reality of being with an abusive husband.

Generally, Indian men seem to labour under the impression that women who live alone are erotically hypercharged and that the male genital organ was bestowed upon them by God to satiate their appetites. As I am typing this essay, a new story is doing the rounds in the media: a man has stabbed a woman, in her mid-forties, who lived on her own. He’d been following her for the past ten years, and when she continued to reject his advances, he stabbed her. There is no end to such incidents in the nooks and crannies of Tamil Nadu, where women continue to be stabbed by men whose offers have been rejected. When there is no knife to hand, they throw acid on their ladyloves.

Another story: I went to meet a friend living in a gated community made up of mammoth apartment blocks that house hundreds. I remember wondering whether such large developments could be viable in India. The monthly salary of unskilled labourers (watchmen, employees at petrol bunks, sweepers) is around Rs5,000.

Their children study in pathetic government schools and grow up to work in the same jobs as their parents, provided they do not become alcoholics before that! Meanwhile, the monthly remuneration of a government school teacher is Rs70,000. With such a glaring inequality of incomes, is it surprising that tensions between

wealthy residents and impoverished workers come out in horrible ways? During the previous seven months, a thirteen-year-old girl had been repeatedly raped by the watchman, liftman, plumber and a dozen other people employed in the aforementioned apartment block. The assailants had threatened to publish nude pictures of the girl, who is hearing-impaired.

The main culprit in these sexual crimes was sixty years old. His wife and daughter subsequently hanged themselves in shame.

There are several reasons for the attacks perpetuated on women in India. One is the patriarchy governing all levels of society. Others include society’s restriction on and strict monitoring of sex. If an unmarried man wants to have sex, he is left with no alternative but masturbation. Men generally don’t get married before the age of thirty, and most women stop having sex after the age of forty, whether because they begin to lose their libido or for other reasons. Most Indian men above the age of forty are diagnosed with high levels of blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol; they take medication to prevent such ailments, which can cause erectile dysfunction. Beyond all this, if these men still desire to have sex with their wives, the wives are likely to be unwilling. When a fifty-year-old friend of mine tried to kiss his wife, she brought the roof down and told her son that his father was insane and asked him to take her husband to a psychiatrist. This may sound comic, but it is not. We ended up packing the husband off to Thailand.

Ironically, sex has become anathema in the home of the Kama Sutra. Even if you and your partner go to a respectable hotel (thus avoiding the possibility of police raids), the very next day a picture of the two of you will be splashed across the newspapers under the headline ‘Prostitution at star hotel’. One day I was sitting in my hotel room with a lady friend, the door to my room ajar even though it was air-conditioned. My friend asked me why and I told her that otherwise the hotel staff would assume we were fucking. I’d barely completed my sentence when there was a call from reception saying that female visitors were not permitted inside rooms. When I told the caller that I had left the door open, she politely insisted that hotel policy must be enforced nonetheless.

Men who are unable to quench their sexual urges are like animals straying into villages in search of prey and water after the latest bout of deforestation. I’m not sure if the ‘moral police’ will allow it, but unless laws allow for consensual sex between adults, or some form of prostitution is legalised, rape will continue to be a huge problem in India.

The savage oppression of women has been chronicled elaborately in contemporary Tamil literature. In a short story by A. Madhavan from

above and facing page The annual Koovagam festival in Tamil Nadu draws transgender and transvestite people to the Koothandavar Temple in honour of Araavan’s sacrifice following his marriage to Lord Krishna, who had assumed the female form of Mohini. Photos: Prabhu Kalidas

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the late 1960s or early 70s, a madwoman comes to the bazaar – her body unwashed for several months, her sticky hair pasted to her head and the stench of her body overwhelming anyone who goes near her. She doesn’t wear even a shred of clothing; when given something to wear, she hurls it back. The police officials drive her away with great difficulty. She is not spotted for several months, and then one day she comes back to the bazaar with a pregnant belly.

In Na. Muthuswamy’s book Neermai (1995), a girl becomes a widow at the age of ten. She dies at the age of ninety-five, and in this long span of time she has to suppress/surpass her body’s sexual urges without the touch of a man.

For several hundred years, the Tamil Brahmin community forced widows to abstain from sex.

Until relatively recently, boys and girls in India often married before the age of ten. Many died young, and girls who lost their husbands at an

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early age were forced to tonsure their hair and remain celibate for the rest of their lives. The same did not apply to boys who lost their wives.

Today relations between men and women are in crisis. I spoke with six of my closest female readers about this. All six are divorced, and the common characteristic I’ve observed is that their partners used violence against them: they burnt them with cigarette stubs, they hit them till they bled. One woman told me that her husband made her crawl around the room while he hit her on her buttocks with his belt. When she reported this to her mother, her mother said that things would change in a few days. She repeated the story to her father, and he said, ‘You’re on Facebook all day. Even I feel like hitting you.’ Please note that all six of these women are upper class and were married to educated men! When I heard all this, it felt like I was reading Marquis de Sade or watching a Catherine Breillat movie. Raising money-minded, unknowledgeable youngsters could be viperous to our future.

In the Mahabharata, Arjuna’s son Aravaan is offered as a sacrifice so that the Pandavas can win the battle. Only a married man can be offered as a sacrifice but Aravaan has yet

to wed. What girl would agree to marry a man who is bound to be killed? To solve this problem, Lord Krishna transmogrifies into a woman (Mohini) and marries Aravaan. Ever since, transgenders have been considered a symbol of Lord Krishna and Aravaan a patron god of transgender communities.

As this story might suggest, most Indians have necrophilic tendencies: we are inclined to kill things, purify them by death and then worship them.

For example, the poet and women’s rights activist Bharathi suffered severe poverty and neglect while alive; following his death in 1921 only 14 people attended his funeral.

Today he is a hero in Tamil Nadu and acknowledged as one of the greatest figures in Tamil literature.

Similarly, transgenders (ThiruNangais or Aravani) are generally ignored by local society, but that doesn’t seem to bother them. In a little village called Koovagam, in Tamil Nadu, Aravaan’s sacrifice is celebrated as a festival in a temple each year. At the moment Aravaan’s head is severed, the transgenders wail, remove their mangalsutra (the necklace that the groom ties around a bride’s neck) and break their wedding bangles. They move on. Around Koovagam you can find thousands of condoms in the rice fields.

top and above The Koovagam festival, Tamil Nadu. Photos: Prabhu Kalidas

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ArtReview Asia

THE INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

8.11 NOV 2018 GRAND PALAIS FAIR SECTORS GALLERIES / BOOK / PRISMES / CURIOSA / FILM PROGRAMMING EXHIBITIONS / CONVERSATIONS / AWARDS / BOOK SIGNINGS

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December 6 – 9, 2018 The Wolfsonian–FIU, Miami Beach

Art Featured

Campon These habitations are generally lacking in electricity, water, and gas. Kampongs also refer to city slums inhabited by rural peoples who have migrated into the city in search of better employment.

Some define Kampongs as a backwards, traditionalist way of living 49

Zeng Fanzhi on Painting Interview by Aimee Lin & Mark Rappolt

Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 80 × 80 cm. © the artist

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“It’s like a monk’s daily ritual”

Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 250 × 350 cm. © the artist

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Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 180 × 260 cm. © the artist

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Victor Hugo, 2018, oil on canvas, 180 × 180 cm. © the artist

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Lucian Freud, 2017, oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm. © the artist

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Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm. © the artist

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This autumn, one of China’s best-known and most successful painters, Beijing-based Zeng Fanzhi, opens an exhibition of his work across three branches of Hauser & Wirth. ArtReview Asia caught up with him to ask about this strategy of simultaneously showing different aspects of his production, mixing Chinese and Western painting techniques, his relationship to art history (Zeng himself is a significant collector) and his artistic inspirations.

ARTREVIEW ASIA Have your artistic influences changed as your career has progressed?

Zeng Fanzhi I draw inspiration from many different artists, some of them have my lasting admiration, some influenced me only briefly.

Basically, I first received an education in the Socialist Realism painting style while in college, but I also began to expose myself to Expressionism. Since then, Romanticism, Cubism and other schools of painting have shaped me during specific stages of my life.

In comparison, I think my greatest influence comes from the roots of painting – Western classical paintings and sculptures, as well as traditional Eastern paintings – and is built on aesthetics.

ARA Your upcoming exhibition takes place in three different locations simultaneously…

ZF This exhibition illustrates my working process – I create different types of paintings

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simultaneously. When I initially discussed the exhibition with the gallery, they agreed to provide three venues, which presented a challenge. So we decided to divide the show into three sections.

The series of abstract landscape paintings being exhibited in Zürich represents my current work and shows the general direction I’ve been exploring. The collection in London demonstrates my everyday portrait-painting practice – from this perspective, it also provides a brief retrospective of my work, from the early days through to the present. The part in Hong Kong represents my thought process and the means by which I find new inspiration.

ARA In recent years, your landscape paintings have taken a turn from representation to abstraction.

Why and how did this happen? How did your visual language evolve during the course of this process?

ZF This was more or less a transition from the external to the internal. I’ve been painting abstract landscapes since 2002, but the meaning of these lines has changed numerous times since the beginning. It’s like a monk’s daily ritual of tolling the bell. Others won’t notice any difference from one iteration to the next, but I experience the varied nuances every day.

Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 100 × 330 cm. © the artist

ArtReview Asia

This process alternates between what is called in Buddhist discourse ‘obeying the rules’ and being free from them. Through practice, I gradually become skilful in mastering new techniques, clearing obstacles and achieving a state of ‘unity of mind and body’. Yet every time I reach this state, I need to exercise caution, in order not to slide down the slippery slope of familiarity, so I often change the subject or experiment with something new on the canvas.

ARA How do you balance the art traditions that belong to a specific local geopolitics with those that aspire to something more universal? During the last century it was thought by many that abstraction could be a universal language, while figuration was an art about specific places/people/etc.

ZF I don’t know how to answer this question, and I don’t really agree with its premise. Isn’t it a bit crude to forcefully differentiate abstraction and representation, geopolitics and universality, in artwork? On this matter, I do want to say that the creation of art has its own logic. Every piece should be considered under its actual circumstances. As long as the logic of the painting is complete, it is valid. For me personally, I learned abstraction through representation, and vice versa. I’m used to experimenting with different aspects at the periphery of my painting.

ARA Portraits have always been an important genre in your body of work. How do you choose your subjects?

Many of your portraits are profiles of painters such

as Lucian Freud and Vincent van Gogh. Do you consider painting portraits of them in your own visual language as akin to having a dialogue with these important figures in art history?

ZF For me, the intention of painting these figures was not to engage in any ‘dialogue’ with them as artists. I am always more interested in the process of painting than the resulting images. In other words, painting is my way to stay in touch with the world. Many of my inexplicable encounters in life would go on to become subjects of my paintings. Let’s go back to these figures, such as Van Gogh, Francis Bacon and Freud. First, they are all artists I love.

Second, I feel they have very unique looks or demeanours, and I’m inclined to paint these compelling visual elements.

ARA I think painting is one of the most challenging artforms today. Many distinguished painters are also researchers of painting and its history. In your opinion, what are the most interesting differences and the most neglected similarities between traditional Eastern paintings and Western paintings?

ZF The most obvious difference is probably the materials used. Besides, traditional Eastern paintings do not separate the abstract from the representational, but focus more on expressing feelings through form wherein the artist’s disposition permeates the artwork and a viewer ‘sees’ the artist’s ideal through the work. On the other hand, the evolution of Western painting is more

straightforward – the form of a painting mainly reflects the artist’s understanding of the objective world, and a viewer connects with the painting more than with the painter.

As for their similarities, I think a good work must be lively and appealing, regardless of whether it’s from the East or the West.

ARA In the interview that we did three years ago, you mentioned that you always had a special interest in Paul Cézanne. Why is he so special to you?

ZF I think Cézanne’s originality in the history of painting was revolutionary and unprecedented. He saw the world as made up of geometric models; it’s through that that he constructed his painting logic and altered how others viewed the world. It was distinctly symbolic. Moreover, this technique is present in both his early and his later works: in a way it’s his own language. In my opinion, finding a distinct creative language and logic is a crucial platform for any artist wishing to build a career.

ARA When did you develop an interest in Zhao Gan [a Chinese painter, active in the second half of the tenth century]? What do you see in his paintings? What is it about his images or techniques that most fascinates you, a contemporary painter, working more than a thousand years after him?

ZF I’ve been interested in traditional Chinese paintings for a long time. I study them mainly by observing the works in person – I try to look

Autumn 2018

at the original works – and read the traditional painting theory. Then I try the methods myself through hands-on experimentation. About three or four years ago I discovered modern and contemporary elements in parts of Zhao Gan’s paintings, such as the bamboo grove – when magnified, it almost looked like a cubist piece.

But he painted them more than a thousand years ago; and unlike the Cubist, who could refer to abundant works from the history of Western art, his creations were largely original.

I think this is very interesting. It makes me consider how to extract a simple shape from firsthand observation of nature. This transformation is a direct outcome of a simple visual relationship, omitting many irrelevant details through ‘gazing’. On the other hand, in the West, only Cézanne found his way of making images through the method of ‘nature gazing’. Thus, in my opinion, Zhao Gan was a ‘Chinese Cézanne’ while Cézanne was a ‘Western Zhao Gan’.

As a contemporary artist, these observations remind me to explore new possibilities. In Western art history, art was inspired by religion, social politics, industry, psychology and other fields. What if we begin with a simple visual perception? I wonder if it is still possible. If it is, then, as the Tang-dynasty painter Zhang Zao put it, the approach of ‘combining realistic representation of form with internalised expression of substance’ as practised in traditional Eastern paintings might be a source of inspiration for us.

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Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 80 × 80 cm. © the artist. all images except facing page Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

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ArtReview Asia

ARA When I am looking at certain parts of Zhao Gan’s painting Early Snow on the River (c. 961–75, the only existing work by Zhao, now in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei), I would think of your abstract landscapes. In traditional Chinese literati paintings, a scene often reflects the inner state or mood of the painter, but this is different from the notion of ‘projection’ in Western psychology. I often describe this mechanism that triggers the relationship between the subjective emotion and objective scenery with a Buddhist term: ‘all things are sentient’. Do your landscape paintings reveal your inner self in this way?

ZF Your description of ‘all things are sentient’ sums up the spirit of Eastern literati paintings, as well as my creative state for a period of time.

But recently I feel my abstract landscapes have gone through a big change, which is difficult for me to articulate in words right now, but I’ll try my best: In short, I believe my artistic logic has become more refined in my recent abstract landscapes.

I no longer need to lodge my feelings in images, resulting in a more abstract visual effect. My approach to composition and expression has also changed significantly.

When I hold my brush, I let go of all thoughts, and only express my state of mind in the moment; my inner thoughts also regulate when to pause my brush. Compared with ‘form’ and ‘feeling’, my latest abstract landscapes reflect more of my ‘spirit’. I really enjoy this status because it makes me feel closer to painting, while also experiencing a freer and purer process.

These recent abstract paintings will be presented in Zürich. I’m not sure how a Western audience will receive them, but I think they require a higher faculty from the viewer, who ideally would have substantial visual experience and be more sensitive in perception. For me, the different reactions from the audience might as well be part of my work.

ARA Can art engage with its own history and speak to a wide audience and the current situation of the world at large?

ZF I believe it is the artist’s choice – how he views his art and what role he hopes his art will play. Of course, it is uncertain whether or not these wishes can be realised; this depends on many complicated factors. I don’t think there is a standard answer to any of these questions.

Every artist can make his/her own choice.

For me, thinking about these questions can affect my work. (Perhaps the day I can finally

articulate a good answer will also be the day I can no longer paint.) This is not the thinking process I’m used to, and I would like to leave this job to you – reviewers, critics or art historians.

I think my work is primarily a conversation with myself; I stay in contact with and understand the world through painting. If relevant political, historical or social factors influence me, I will express this through my paintings. Compared with language, I am more skilled in this way.

Besides, I disapprove of artists attempting to ‘indoctrinate’ viewers with specific ideas, which I think is naive from an aesthetic standpoint.

ARA In Hong Kong, you will show works in which you have used tools and techniques drawn from traditional Western oil painting to create ancient Chinese landscape themes. What were the challenges and rewards of creating these works?

ARA Are you a believer in multiple histories of art, or is it, for you, one continuous thing?

ZF From a global perspective, I’d say there is only one art history, and it comprises different art histories, a few of which are not yet taken seriously by the majority of people.

Additionally, I agree that the issue of art history should be discussed in retrospect, because biases are unavoidable in the contemporary context.

ARA I always remember one of your early paintings, a still life of a slice of watermelon. The pulp looks like the fresh flesh of an animal, while the details remind me of a scholar’s stone [gongshi] in a traditional painter’s stone catalogue [shipu – collection of different types of stone used as a training exercise of painting skills and aesthetics appreciation].

Can you talk about this work? Also, how important are these modestly sized still-life paintings to your overall painting practice?

ZF In that piece, I combined abstract and representational styles. As for my still-life paintings, they are not very special in my overall painting practice.

This type of painting does not signal the main direction of my creative thinking and exploration.

For me, they provide small daily exercises, or satisfy my everyday interests, or solve specific problems relating to my larger pieces.

ARA Do you feel an obligation to search for something ‘new’ in your work, or are your concerns when painting much the same as they were when you began?

ZF The painting of these works was a smooth process. I simply used the medium to demonstrate my observations and research, and there is also little challenge in their technique.

During my daily practice, I’m used to thinking for long periods of time before I begin to paint. For example, I often ponder a single problem for a whole day. It seems I paint very fast every time, but only because I have first brainstormed very well and it is easy to master the methods once I begin painting. Therefore, I need to be in my studio every day, even when I’m not painting – time is a valuable component of my work.

Watermelon, 2003, oil on canvas, 50 × 50 cm. © and courtesy the artist

Autumn 2018

ZF I’ve always believed that familiarity is dangerous and can discourage the artist from exploring new ideas.

I try to avoid this risk by doing different types of practices at the same time. Besides, it is very interesting – and effective – to experiment on new thoughts from time to time, which helps me maintain a sense of freshness and mystery towards artmaking. When I look back after a period of time, I often realise I’ve improved a lot. What’s most important is that this progress can only be achieved through hands-on practice – mere thinking won’t work. ara The three-part exhibition Zeng Fanzhi: In the Studio will take place at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, 22 September – 10 November, Hauser & Wirth London, 2 October – 10 November, and Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, 8 October – 10 November

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Maurizio Cattelan Interview by Mark Rappolt

There’s nothing new here, so pay close attention to what I may or may not be saying, says art’s great counterfeiter 60

To lovers of art, The Artist Is Present is famously the title of performance artist Marina Abramović’s groundbreaking 2010 retrospective exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

As of this October it will also be the title of an exhibition by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan for Gucci (and its creative director, Alessandro Michele) at Shanghai’s Yuz Museum. When the time came for his own New York retrospective, at the Guggenheim in 2011, Cattelan chose to announce his retirement from making art.

Five years later he unretired to unveil a new work, America, a solid-gold, fully functional toilet in a public restroom of the same museum.

Cattelan’s latest adventure is preceded by an iPhone film shot by Yuri Ancarani and featuring the artist meandering though Shanghai’s art scene, its exhibition halls and its shops, as well as a press release, heavy on metaphor, that styles Cattelan as a modern-day Virgil and Michele as its Dante, suggesting that their shared dreamworld, in which ‘the copy is the original’, exists in Shanghai. In the spirit of that sentiment, the exhibition, details of which are still hush-hush at the time of going to press, is promoted by a copy of Abramović’s 2010 publicity poster and will be launched on 10/10.

ARTREVIEW ASIA How did this collaboration with Alessandro Michele begin?

Maurizio Cattelan A collaboration is very rarely natural, more often it happens that one needs something that the other has and vice versa. You attract each other without being able to explain it. It’s like when you feel happy and suddenly somebody turns on the radio next to you with your favourite song: it’s just magical. The best result we can achieve is that some of this magical feeling will flow into the exhibition.

ARA In Shanghai you visited a former slaughterhouse that’s being turned into a centre for creatives: many people would say its ramps contain a very bad karma.

Do you believe in reincarnation? And can the present ever escape the past?

MC I believe in a world where credit and debit cards are useless, in a life where the ambition isn’t to service the ego or false ideals. I do believe in religion. Human beings are religious animals, and such a characteristic feature of human behaviour cannot be ignored or dismissed. And I believe in telekinesis: if you believe in it too, raise my hand.

ARA Gucci or Guggenheim: which is best?

MC There’s a book for kids that I love by Roald Dahl, its title in Italian is Il GGG, which means ‘The Great Gentle Giant’ or something like that [The BFG or ‘Big Friendly Giant’]. It talks about a giant different from the others, that instead

of eating kids is vegetarian and helps them to dream beautiful dreams. Every single ‘G’ of the title is important in the story, I won’t accept any ‘G’ to be erased. Maybe we can work on a rebranding between the two… what about Gucciheim?

ARA Copy, repetition, reinterpretation in culture is something that today (particularly in relation to China and shanzhai culture) is sometimes referred to as ‘decreation’, in which there is no beginning or end, just endless process and iteration. Do you think that the act of creation is overrated? The last vestige of a series of particular religious hangups or God delusions?

MC Religions that made it to our days gleaned many of their uses and beliefs from older religions and the older religions drew fully from even older faiths. This doesn’t make them less original or strong. It is another way to see what always happened: artists have stolen from everywhere since the beginning of time. Now we are just declaring it. So, in a way, we could say that the act of creation never began, or it will never be overrated.

“I try to read as much as I can, to look at what’s up right now on the Internet, TV series on chefs, Instagram kittens, interior design magazines, cartoons and extreme sports.

Then I throw everything away and start again. Somewhere between the moment I get tired and the place I get hungry, sometimes I find something” ARA Repetition and imitation are also features of various Eastern religions and mystic movements (as well as traditions in ink painting and calligraphy) as means of approaching states of revelation or pure thought and expression. Do you believe in that?

MC Every single morning I wake up and I go swimming for a couple of hours: the repetition of the gesture works in a meditative way for me and it saves me. I believe you could see that as a religious approach but, for me, it’s just a matter of order, which allows my following disorder.

ARA Is the image always better than the reality?

MC The image is the reality, even just the image we keep in our head after seeing something beautiful: after a while, our memory will start to distort the reality we saw but we will continue facing page Maurizio Cattelan.

Photo: Pierpaolo Ferrari

to have a strong feeling about it. So, in the end, the image that’s in our mind will have nothing to do with the real thing, it’ll continue to transform into something different from the expected.

ARA In many ways both art and fashion share what many people would call an irrational obsession with newness: the new look, the new trend, the new movement, the new direction, the shock of the new, etc.

Can anything be new? We know that in mathematical and philosophical terms this is an impossibility in any absolute sense: nothing comes from nothing… So why do you think we chase novelty through creative acts?

MC I think what’s new and what we look at as new are the technologies and the points of view: we use mathematical and philosophical discoveries to look at the same old things in other ways. Man is a technological animal, philosophers say, so this sense of newness comes from science. Creative fields should try to interpret their times, not to express originality.

ARA Do you believe that art is contextually and culturally specific or that it’s part of a universal language? How important, say, was it to recognise John Paul II [in La Nona Ora, 1999] rather than an old man in a funny outfit?

MC I believe there are many different possible layers in reading a work of art and every single one of them is valid and important: we can come from the same part of the world but have a totally different background and we will see two different things. The most interesting accidents happen when somebody tells you something you would have never thought about, and this happens with people coming from another place on Earth, but also with grandmas, simply coming from another time.

ARA What’s going to be in the exhibition? It looks ( from the video) like you saw work by Lu Pingyuan as well as Li Ming and the others in the Hugo Boss Asia Art award… Was there art that intrigued you in Shanghai, and if so, why?

MC The city and the ancient Chinese culture, of course, were a great source of inspiration, especially the concept of reincarnation. We grew up in a world where private property and authorship progressively lost their battles, in favour of a different conception of life based on the power of sharing: ideas, images, houses and much more. In this new world, more and more people believe that to copy is the best way to express admiration, in a very similar way to the antique reincarnation idea.

ARA It might be said that fashion aspires towards art’s aura of permanence, while art aspires towards fashion’s aura of popularity. Do you think that’s true?

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Yuri Ancarani, The Artist is Present: Maurizio Cattelan and Gucci (stills), 2018, video, 5 min 18 sec. Courtesy Gucci

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ArtReview Asia

MC Well, you know that saying, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

I think there are pieces and names in the fashion world that will remain (they already are in museums worldwide) as well as names and pieces in the artworld that will be replaced next Spring.

ARA In the era of fake news and alternative facts there’s a sense that fact and fiction are more blurred today than they were before; or do you think we’re just more aware of something that has always been the case?

MC Knowledge has always been the strongest weapon of the people. If you think about the Middle Ages, especially in Italy, people didn’t have any access to autonomous culture; even with the arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press the Church denied the people the possibility to read the Bible themselves (it was a Protestant revolution, in fact). Compared to that we should be very aware of what is true and what is not, but in the end, we are not. Probably because humanity needs unbelievable stories to have faith in.

magazines, cartoons and extreme sports.

Then I throw everything away and start again.

Somewhere between the moment I get tired and the place I get hungry, sometimes I find something.

scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When the frog asks the scorpion why, the scorpion replies that it was in its nature to do so: it’s in our nature to imitate and pretend to be someone else since we’ve been kids.

ARA The idea of revolution is something that has been present through your work, whether in references to the Brigate Rosse or the story of the town musicians of Bremen… Do you think all revolutions are doomed to fail? And what’s your take on this in the context of China’s current oscillations between communism and capitalism: a place where land cannot be privately owned, but the market for luxury goods is booming?

ARA If you take, for example, a Chinese legend such as the story of Sun Wukong/the Monkey King, there’s a suggestion that imitation, trickery and fakery – traditionally negative qualities in a person – can be heroic assets that expose certain truths and contradictions. Do you think this is the case?

MC My hairdresser says that our Western idea of ‘revolution’ is weird; as strange as the idea of the timeline drawn as an arrow. He affirms that seeing things like that would be like saying

ARA Once everyone refers to you as a ‘prankster’ or ‘provocateur’ does that make it harder to deploy irony or to be provocative? Do you worry about playing to a stereotype?

ARA What was retirement like?

MC An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing, even if he or she is pretending to tell a joke. My retirement has been a great chance to get rid of the ‘prankster’ character that overshadows my works. Once all the rumours around my persona have gone quiet, I’m confident that the silence will allow the audience to go deeper into aspects of my works that have rarely been analysed until now.

MC I couldn’t tell the difference very much, but now I’m a chess champion under a false name.

ARA Do you approach curating differently from artmaking? Should you?

MC I do believe in role-playing, but I don’t believe in this game as if it should change you completely: I’m always myself, and I always approach a work from my point of view, even within much more diverse fields.

ARA The interrelated issues of authorship, ownership and intellectual property rights have become prominent in China, both in relation to trade in general and art in particular. Its title suggests that this is something your exhibition might address. Where do you stand on the ownership of ideas, concepts and designs?

MC We temporarily abdicated this vision in favour of a culture where property and copyrighting were the essential feature for a capitalist society, and where reproduction represents only a technique for conservation. It all started during the Industrial Revolution, but we are witnessing a change of culture, and we’ll probably soon see the end of this era. Today, you can feel this change under your thumb every time you click on the share icon. That’s the starting point for the show.

ARA Is there an artist whose work you find particularly interesting right now? More generally, what’s inspiring you at the moment?

MC I try to read as much as I can, to look at what’s up right now on the Internet, TV series on chefs, Instagram kittens, interior design

MC There is an interpretation of that story that says Wu Cheng’en wrote of Sun Wukong trying to depict the perfect antihero, to prove that even a very bad Buddhist can reach enlightenment.

If we try to suspend judgement on what’s good and what’s evil, we will probably end up seeing something totally different from the categories we are tied to.

ARA Is the spectacle the reality today? If that’s the case, what can art do other than add to that sense?

that once in a while our history gets a cut that subverts everything as it was before. If you think about it, that doesn’t seem possible: revolutions are cultivated inside what happens for years and everything prepares for a change that probably wouldn’t be revolutionary but would flow into the flux of everything. If you see it in that way, probably the word revolution is not totally correct.

ARA Is art always about ‘faking it’ in some ways?

MC A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river. The frog hesitates, afraid of being stung, but the scorpion argues that if it did so, they would both drown. Considering this, the frog agrees, but midway across the river the Exhibition poster for Maurizio Cattelan: The Artist is Present, 2018. Photo: Ronan Gallagher (from an image by Marco Anelli © 2010)

Autumn 2018

MC Sometimes we forget imagination. When I was a kid I used to build entire worlds in my mind. I used to begin with reality and then add flaming dragons and magical rainbows to it. I used to end up with something that had nothing to do with the reality I started with.

And if today flaming dragons and magical rainbows are the reality, we will invent something else. Art is about being able to do so even if we are not kids any more.

ARA China’s on its way to becoming one of the biggest markets for designer goods, football clubs and art museums: does culture today always follow the money?

MC New biennials and exhibitions are rising all over the world. It is natural that the biggest part of the market follows the money, but culture can be made even in the smallest and poorest part of the world. The difficulty is getting to see it. ara The Artist is Present, a collaboration between Maurizio Cattelan and Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, opens on 10 October at the Yuz Museum, in Shanghai

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Art House

by Deepa Bhasthi

above A Kannada film poster stuck on a wall at Gandhinagar, Bengaluru. The poster says the film has been running for 42 days

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Can the art market save India’s lithographic film posters from obsolescence? Would that be a good thing?

above The maintenance person at Shri Balaji Litho. He travels from Chennai, about 350 kilometres away, to spend two days each week in Bengaluru, when the print orders keep the press particularly busy

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In the crowded landscape of excessive visual stimulation that is the While some of these small, outlying theatres screen mainstream streets of Bengaluru, the capital of Karnataka in southern India, one films, several others show the type of film that might never make it set of posters occupies a curious space: these posters are among the into larger theatres: C-grade productions, or films in the Bhojpuri easiest to spot because they are so brightly coloured; and yet they are language, aimed at the migrant men from northern parts of the counalso some of the most often missed, a feature of sections of the city try who labour on construction sites, or soft-porn films. In a way, these from which ‘respectable’ people avert their eyes or walk by at speed. theatres support an entire industry, of which, up until now, lithoYou’ll find the posters pasted in, on, above or around garbage bins graphic printing has been a part. For films that are dramatic, overor dirty walls that enclose places of solicitation or drug use, and you the-top, bombastic affairs, the lithograph poster – printed on very probably won’t want to linger. But it is true also that these are largely thin fluorescent orange, pink, yellow or dull white paper sheets with working-class neighbourhoods with dingy alley markets and single- hand-drawn images and thick, black lettering – once offered the screen cinema halls. The posters that promote their offerings are nearly perfect low-budget marketing tool. Now the very qualities that made always for movies with highly dramatic plots or in the desi-Indiana such posters economically viable – their limited colours and equally Jones genre; otherwise they promote what are known as ‘XXX’ movies, limited scope for design – coupled with newer, faster technologies which range from soft- to hardcore for printing and a diminishing prefporn. That too is an indication of the The very qualities that made such posters erence for the aesthetic these posters tastes of this part of the city. economically viable – their limited colours present have made the lithograph Bengaluru has a long history an anachronism. and equally limited scope for design – have with lithograph posters. Home to A few decades ago there were the modestly sized Kannada film inwell over a dozen lithographic print made the lithograph an anachronism workshops in Bengaluru; now just dustry, it also offers substantial markets for films in languages – Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu – that are one or two presses remain, and even those only operate a few days prevalent in neighbouring states, as well as for Hindi and English a week. It is a commonplace story of obsolescence in which a oncemovies. While the last decade in Bengaluru has seen a profusion of thriving industry is now wheezing through the last few years of its multiplexes with plush seating and air-conditioned halls, single- existence. Gopalakrishna, in his mid-fifties, and Narayana, in his late screen theatres (which in India are traditionally called ‘talkies’) are forties, both of whom have been hand-drawing images and inking still in demand, albeit mostly with lower-income groups. Beyond in names of theatres, showtimes and so on for 35 years, know that the city limits, where smaller cities and towns have no multiplexes, the market for their skills is in decline. Even when orders do come the talkies are more plentiful and the demography of their patrons in, quantities that would have numbered between 500 and 1,000 per mixed. Here, the ticket prices are low enough to attract the workers batch a decade ago are now limited to runs of 100 to 200 copies. The and the halls decent enough in terms of sanitation and decor to attract process, however, remains simple. The ‘matter’ – the information that middle-class patrons to the same place. Such theatres once ordered is to be printed – is transmitted by phone call. These days, a reusable polymer sheet is first printed elsewhere with the name of the movie new sets of lithographed posters every week.

above Polymer sheets that will be painted with the current week’s theatres and showtimes are hung to dry in an anteroom at Shri Balaji Litho

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ArtReview Asia

above Theatre and showtimes for a new Tamil film are hand-painted by Narayana

Autumn 2018

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top The first copy of each poster order is affixed to a wall at Shri Balaji Litho. It serves both as a test copy before the lot is printed and as a record of the orders taken

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ArtReview Asia

above Polymer sheets hang to dry in an anteroom at Shri Balaji Litho all images but facing page Courtesy the author

and photos of the stars. One corner is left blank. There the painter, either Gopalakrishna or Narayana, fills in showtimes, the name of the theatre and other details, using black marker ink. Then the process is as follows: dip the filled-in polymer sheet in water to ‘fix’ the ink, let it dry, sometimes using a hairdryer if the weather is damp, fit it into the lithograph printing machine, take out the first smudged copy to hang on a nail to keep a record, then print 100 to 200 copies within minutes.

One hundred copies are priced at Rs450 (USD6.50). For a new breed of collector, however, such productions have an increasingly high value.

When placed alongside other movie announcements, publicity materials and memorabilia, lithograph posters have a woefully short shelf-life – both in terms of utility and in terms of the durability of the delicate paper on which they are printed. As art objects, this naturally adds to their desirability. Doubtless their kitschy nature and Pop-art aesthetic also appeal. There is an interest too for those fascinated by the history of printing, while the urban language these posters represent attracts a more globally aware audience in a market still dominated by the kind of Indian prints and designs that might appear framed on a wall because of their bohemian appeal: stereotypical mango motifs, elephants and suchlike.

Increasingly, the lithograph movie posters are being taken to Europe and the US and sold at prices that are a hundred times or more than the cost of production, the value dictated both by the perceived craft in making these posters and the kind of films they advertise.

For a lot of people, both within India and outside, the titles of most of these films would be unfamiliar; rarely, if ever, would a Karan Johar film be advertised thus. These factors – being from a space that is outside the mainstream, yet is popular in unfamiliar social circles; representing an increasingly archaic process of printing; offering a sharp pop of colour without being in the realm of religious and/ or traditional prints – grant these posters a sheen of exoticism. It is a fate shared by the colourful wooden toys once traditionally made with natural colours and a handheld lathe in the small village of Channapatna in Karnataka. While there were a few stock designs for the toys, and generations of children in the state (including this writer) grew up with them, a renewed interest in their handmadeness and traditional techniques have made these toys objects for display rather than a child’s entertainment. As a result of their popularity, the colours used are now synthetic, the toys are often mass-produced in factories and the designs have morphed to suit a perceived urban aesthetic. Yet as with the posters, the perception of the processes involved in their manufacture (being artisanal) and a certain backstory of ‘authenticity’ is assumed.

As these humble artefacts transition from useful objects to art objects, there arise a number of uncomfortable questions: despite falling within a consumer language that enables identitarian politics based on free choices of purchasing products that are labelled ‘organic’, ‘handmade’, ‘ethical’ (and all the other latest buzzwords), lithograph posters these days are no longer start-to-finish handmade. But they do fall into a pattern described by Arthur Danto, in his seminal essay ‘The Artworld’ (1964), that suggested that it was not possible to understand (Conceptual) art without the help of what he termed the artworld – a community of interpreters within art circles that included critics, gallerists, collectors, museums and the artists themselves, all working in tandem to determine what is art and what is not.

Yet it is hard to escape the feeling that these posters are highly prized outside of India for their exotic appearance above all else, especially when hung on white walls that are sanitised and divorced from the dirty streets for which they were made. There, surrounded as they are by newer kinds of posters, graffiti and job notices, set in the context that they were meant for, these litho posters blend in, becoming easy to ignore. On the walls of a New York apartment, however, the physiognomy of the Indian actors and foreign scripts that spell out the name of a film nearly no one would have heard of in the West (the poster text is rarely written in English; phrases like ‘full drama’ or ‘mass scenes’ might be included to suggest that there are elaborate fighting scenes in the film) both contribute to a strikingly exotic feel.

This decontextualisation obviously does not pause to consider what these objects might mean for the people who inhabit their worlds. Both Gopalakrishna and Narayana have learned not to be nostalgic for the good old days. The former’s children are all grown up and in good jobs, so he will retire quite easily. Narayana and others in the press, all of them now middleaged or older men with a lifetime of litho printing behind them, are unsure what they will do if and when the last of these presses close.

They will find some other printing job in one of the newer presses, they reckon, but are not too concerned about job prospects just yet.

It is tempting to wonder if traditional lithographers will find a way to enter the art market directly. But without the theatre owners phoning in with the matter, they can peddle only old information, old film titles, or endeavour to make up such information. Whether fictionalised titles and images will hold the same appeal as actual film information for a consumer, and if the posters then will be valued only for the process of poster-making, is debatable. ara Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Bengaluru, India

above Elgin Talkies cinema hall courtyard, Bengaluru.

Courtesy Sara Kolster / Flickr

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Art4A.I. A Project by Gao Jié

What does a three-year-old know about art?

This project takes a child’s view of beauty and programs it into ‘The Kid’, an AI that responds to inputs – existing artworks and other visual stimuli – with a rating. Exploring and charting The Kid’s aesthetic sense over time, the artist makes artworks he thinks the AI will find pleasing.

See the process and results of this experiment on the following pages, and participate in the ‘conversation’ via the QR code overleaf

above Gao Jié, Art4A.I. 2.03, 2018, digital photo print, 80 × 45 cm

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pages 74–75 Gao Jié, Art4A.I. 2.02, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 130 × 100 cm

ART4 A.I

ART FOR A.I

MUSIC

WHAT IS ART?

Music is a kind of art: the sense of hearing is a survival instinct. Music integrates different perceptions that result in an emotional experience

CUISINE PAINTING

COLOUR

IMAGE

Different colours produce different stimuli, and these signals cause humans to feel

For example: red is the colour of ripened fruit.

Ripened fruit is good for human health, good for reproduction and thus good for the continuation of genes

Genes regulate the endocrine system, which secretes human hormones, which in turn give humans pleasure to find ripened fruit

For example: blue is the colour of good weather.

Good weather is good for the body, suitable for hunting and gathering, and thus good for reproduction.

Therefore it is good for the continuation of genes

Genes regulate the endocrine system, secreting hormones that make humans excited to start their daily activities.

(During bad weather, low hormone levels encourage humans to stay in their caves and sleep all day.)

Composition and form are stimulating.

Landscape

THEME

Cuisine is a kind of art: the sense of taste is a survival instinct for absorbing nutrients. Culinary art mixes different tastes to deceive the taste buds, resulting in an ‘illusional-emotional experience’

CONCEPTION

Some pictures may be scenes from a story. People can learn about the background story of a picture, and this story and scene can mobilise the social instinct of human beings: empathy. Through the experience of various exciting moments, intense feelings and emotions, the audience secretes hormones

For example, good weather.

Because of the hormonal reward produced in good weather, a feeling of ‘light’ in an image can trigger a hormonal reward and result in the feeling of ‘pleasure’

For example, the face and nude of the opposite sex. A large number of famous paintings derive from the erotic impulse of artists. High levels of hormones are exciting. However, if an image simply arouses a biological emotion in a direct way, a work of art will be regarded as not elegant enough. Since even uneducated people will be aroused by these images, ‘cultivated people’ will consider it not ‘artistic’ enough. If the communication of information is more abstruse and requires some kind of qualification for its appreciation, it is more likely to be considered as artistic

Thought experiment

Challenge thinking inertia

Challenge cognitive limits

Religious stories

Myths, love stories

Historical stories

The challenge of thinking puts human beings into a condition of competition.

Competition is a state of war, hunting, fighting for food and mates, which stimulates lots of hormones.

This is also the reason why sports competitions make both the players and audience feel extremely excited. Surpassing others makes one feel satisfied, while winning means even greater amounts of hormonal reward.

(Meanwhile, Conceptual art also implies a competition between different cultural classes.)

Art experience: feelings of pleasure are the body’s hormonal rewards (dopamine, adrenaline, testosterone, etc). Humans do not necessarily understand the reasons for their excitement. Some neural information makes humans feel ‘excited’, ‘pleased’, ‘sad’ or ‘refreshed’

The physiological principles of neural perception (how to ‘sense’ and ‘know’)

Genes and human beings determine the priority of different sensory information in neural responses

The hybrid of feeling and experience

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ART4 A.I The physiological principles of neural perception (how to ‘sense’ and ‘know’)

The algorithm of A.I. – Principle of perception

ART FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Genes and human beings determine the priority of different sensory information in neural responses

The hybrid of feeling and experience

Human beings are the genes of A.I.

Human beings and A.I. determine the priority of different information in A.I.’s reactions

Creation

Art does not refer to any absolute principle

nor is it a truth of absolute correctness

‘Hybrid’

Art is a game with no limitations

A medium that is suitable for A.I. to watch

The artwork has a built-in self-operative artworld (including virtual figures from the artworld and six art museums)

Creation

AN ARTWORK THAT IS MADE FOR A.I.

Ask three kids ages three to six years old what they think the A.I. would like. Use the kids’ answers to set the ‘hybrid desires’ as the rules of the game

In April 2017 the North American beta version goes online and is exhibited in the gallery of the University of Rhode Island, USA

An online interactive mobile game

With gratitude to A.I. expert Zeng Weicheng, for his support of this experimental art project. Zeng provides a powerful A.I.

Similar to the A.I. of other deep-learning neural networks (such as plant-recognition and doodle-recognition programs), Zeng has developed an A.I. that can recognise protected animal species through images.

This A.I. has a market value of tens of millions of dollars, and the price of each open port is over $10m. Zeng agreed to loan one open port for Art4A.I.

I try my best to understand the aesthetic interests of The Kid and to create three artworks that he will appreciate

Paintings, photos, screenshots, etc

I ask a three-year-old kid what he thinks is ‘beautiful’ in order to train the aesthetic logic of the A.I.

He likes flowers because his mother has a flower tattoo on her arm. He likes trains because there is a cartoon show on TV whose main characters are trains.

I name this A.I. character ‘The Kid’

http://isrc.cjxxjs.com/upload

The Kid

You can upload any random images, and The Kid will tell you whether he thinks this image is ‘beautiful’ or not

In November 2018 the official version of the mobile game (the artwork) goes online in China, launched in Shanghai Art4A.I. 1.0

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AN A.I. THAT CAN APPRECIATE ART

Art4A.I. 2.0

Art4A.I. 2.0 The Kid

The Kid ‘perceives’ pictures in a multidimensional, complex and mathematical way, and learns the ‘priority’ of ‘aesthetic appreciation’ through complex algorithms. These perceptions are ‘mixed’ in the neural network of the A.I. and thus his aesthetic values are very rigorous

The Kid thinks very highly of many of Pablo Picasso’s works. His fondness towards Picasso is obvious, although not for all works.

Half of the works by Picasso The Kid considers not good-looking Quite a few of the works by Egon Schiele are liked by The Kid Art4A.I. 2.0 acrylic on canvas 80cm x 80cm This water-lily painting by Monet is highly rated by The Kid

The works of Mondrian get quite a low rating.

It appears that ordered bright colours are not enough

The Parasaurolophus evaluated by The Kid in Art4A.I. 1.0

Only very few of the works

by Vincent van Gogh (for example the sunflower paintings) are regarded as good-looking by The Kid. The general evaluation is quite low compared to works by Édouard Manet and Claude Monet

MAGNIFICIENT

(less than one in a hundred)

ADORE BEAUTIFUL GOOD-LOOKING

The thinking of A.I. imitates the neural network of human beings

A large number of the works by Jackson Pollock are considered good-looking by The Kid

NOT BAD INDIFFERENT

The Kid makes a fairly low evaluation of most of the works of Van Gogh, and regards many of the paintings as ‘ugly’, especially the self-portraits. Is the old man ugly?

The Kid thinks very poorly of this painting too – he does not seem to like plants

DISLIKE

Art4A.I. 1.0 game screenshot Screenshot from Art4A.I. 2.0; Art4A.I. 2.03, digital photoprint, 80cm x 45cm

BAD-LOOKING UGLY INTOLERABLY UGLY (one in a hundred)

Is research into A.I. also research into humans?

Is discussing art for A.I. also to discuss art for humans?

Game screenshot of the background environment of Art4A.I. 1.0

PLEASING TO THE EYE

LOOKING UNCOMFORTABLE

Like going deep into layers of consciousness (eg the algorithms of restricted Boltzmann machines)

My acrylic painting made for The Kid. I tried my best to approach the highest standards of The Kid’s aesthetic values

The evaluation of the works of Manet is polarising. Manet made many paintings of flowers, some of which are highly rated by The Kid, some of which are disliked, whereas most of the figure paintings are disliked

Art4A.I. 1.0 game screenshot

Most of the works by Leonardo da Vinci are disliked by The Kid. His evaluation of this painting is particularly low

Art4A.I. 1.0 game screenshot

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Drawing by Ronan Bouroullec.

London Regent’s Park 4–7 October 2018

Art Reviewed

Compound Essentially, kampung is a Malay word that means settlement or village. It is also possible that the word Kampong later evolved into the English word compound, as in an area composed of many houses in an enclosed area 77

FX Harsono Reminiscence Sullivan + Strumpf, Singapore 25 August – 23 September During the Indonesian National Revolution, the struggle for independence from 1945 to 1949, there was an undocumented genocide of ethnic Chinese-Indonesians in Java, alongside acts of extortion, looting and rape. The full scale of the violence has never been properly acknowledged, with Indonesian history books attributing these crimes to a power vacuum and glossing over the episode as a necessary stage in the revolutionary struggle. The perpetrators have never been brought to justice, and a culture of fear and silence still enshrouds the victims.

In 1951, FX Harsono’s father photographed the exhumation of a mass grave filled with the bodies of Chinese people in their hometown of Blitar, East Java. His black-and-white photographs led his son to investigate other such mass graves in Java, and so, since the early 2000s, the artist has interviewed survivors of the violence, collected photographs and reports, and developed a large body of work on the subject. Five works made over the last two years, including installations, videos and prints, are included in this show.

Reminiscence is an exhibition with a clear and direct cause. ‘I want you to know what happened,’ goes one of the artist’s open declarations of intent written on the wall. Another one: ‘No one should forget, so that these acts are not repeated again.’ Echoing these unequivocal statements are the artworks.

In Memorandum of Inhumane Act No. 3 (2017), damning historical material speaks for itself.

The work comprises 33 photocopied sheets of a report Harsono found in a Dutch archive, titled Memorandum: Outlining acts of violence and inhumanity perpetrated by Indonesian bands on innocent Chinese before and after the Dutch Police Action was enforced on July 21, 1947. Drawn in charcoal over these detailed pages of violent crime is an image based on a 1950s photograph

by Harsono’s father, depicting a team posing with exhumed bones – an incriminating image layered onto an incriminating document.

The show bears witness to the victims, and also mourns them. The Light of Spirit (2016) is a huge chandelier made of red plastic candles (the kind used in Chinese altars dedicated to the ancestral dead) suspended over a concrete cast of a gravestone used to mark a mass grave in Muntilan, Java.

One might argue that an art gallery, with its limited and liberal audiences, may not be the most effective platform to lobby such issues.

Yet, while it is staged in a safe space for political and artistic expression, there is no doubt that this exhibition is an act of courage, its messages especially resonant when nationalism and rightwing ideologies are on the rise. By speaking truth to power, Harsono seeks redress for an episode in the long history of trauma and erasure faced by generations of Chinese Indonesians. Besides sporadic episodes of violence, Chinese Indonesians were subject to state-sponsored discriminatory policies, which were at their height in Suharto’s Assimilation Programme in the 1960s. During the period, any expression of Chineseness, such as the use of the Chinese language, was outlawed. Like many Chinese Indonesians, Harsono’s family was also pressured to give up their Chinese names; FX stands for Francisco Xavier, the name of the saint his mother chose when he was baptised.

There are moments in which it is hard to see beyond the work as a blunt means to an end, a painful history lesson dressed up in striking visual packaging. Yet there is room for nuance, as in Memory of the Survivor (2016), the poignant and meditative installation in the centre of the gallery. With an empty wheelchair, period furniture and old photographs, the installation mimics a domestic interior. Whose house is it?

facing page, top The Light of Spirit, 2016, plastic electric candles, LED bulbs, sand, casted, cement, wood, 220 × 210 × 300 cm. Photo: Ng Wu Gang.

Courtesy the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf, Singapore

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Maybe it belongs to the subject of the video interview projected onto the wheelchair, a ninety-three-year-old survivor of the 1940s genocide. Or perhaps it’s a replica of Harsono’s family home, because portraits of his grandparents are on the wall. (The artist tells me his grandfather was Chinese and grandmother Javanese.) Displayed on a separate wall are two further sets of images that suggest other families, other memories. The first is the collection of black-and-white photographs from Harsono’s father, showing an exhumation of a Chinese mass grave. The second set, taken by a photographer from another village, is of a Chinese ceremony to reinter the exhumed human remains, a busy event with flags, banners and a line of hearses piled high with flowers.

What eventually becomes clear is that this isn’t the house of any single survivor, but one constructed, dreamlike, out of the composite memories of a decimated community. Since the revolution, modern Indonesia has seen other outbreaks of violence and mass killings of ethnic Chinese. ‘Survivor’ refers not just to the victims of the 1940s massacres, but to generations of Chinese Indonesians who have been the target of violence and systemic discrimination.

Harsono juxtaposes evidence of the experiences of the Chinese diaspora with symbols of Indonesia, questioning how the constructs of nationhood and national identity have been predicated on the suffering and othering of a community. On a side table, an antique radio plays a Dutch broadcast declaring Indonesia’s independence. Above his grandparents’ portraits is suspended a plaque of the mythical birdlike Garuda, the Indonesian national emblem, whose legs grip a ribbon with the national motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika. ‘Unity in Diversity’. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Reminiscence, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Ng Wu Gang.

Courtesy the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf, Singapore

ArtReview Asia

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Xu Bing Thought and Method Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing 21 July – 18 October The exhibition is Xu Bing’s first largescale retrospective in Beijing. His practice is characterised by research into language and Chinese identity, as well as his concern with the possibility of universal artistic expression in an era of critical reactions to Western hegemony, as in the 1994 performance and subsequent video documentation A Case Study of Transference (controversially pulled from the Guggenheim New York’s 2017 exhibition Art and China After 1989) and the installation Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?

(2004–18), consisting of matter swept off the streets of New York’s Chinatown just after September 11, 2001 .

Although Xu has been exploring art with materials including paper, wood, ash, cigarettes, plants and animals, the key to understanding his artistic universe – rooted in the interrelation of diverse materials, the complicity between text and image, not to mention his teaching activities and explanatory discourses – is to be found less in the finished works themselves than in the logic of their production.

As art historian Lothar Ledderose describes it, the ancient Chinese devised production

systems to assemble objects from standardised parts, which can then be put into different combinations, creating a variety of units from a limited repertoire of components that could be considered modules. This modular approach is apparent in paintings, drawings of architectural structures, scripts, rubbings and prints such as Five Series of Repetition (1986– 88), Landscript (1999–2013) and The Character of Characters (2012); the exhibition’s scenography is also set up, in a roughly chronological way, like an integrated circuit connecting different separated modules, as the central walkway descends into several open sections that neither are absolutely isolated from each other nor can be simplistically categorised.

It is no surprise to learn that the artist was fascinated by book design and typography during his early years, even more so since he contributed to the reworking of communist publications intended to encourage productivity during his days sent down to the countryside during the 1970s. The artist, that is the intellectual labourer, integrated different linguistic and iconographic elements in Brilliant

Mountain Flowers Magazine (1975–77), the woodcut of Shattered Jade (1977–83) and the later Book from the Sky (1987–91) to illustrate shifts in the traditional Chinese identity, away from the narrow communist imagination towards an acceptance of a more heterogeneous society with a place on an international stage during the 1990s. Xu Bing’s conceptual and austere approach, more or less representative of a zero-conflict Confucian philosophy as well as a quasi-Chan Buddhist vision, found a natural home amid the Western aesthetics of Duchampian ‘indifference’ and Derridean deconstruction and decentralisation.

An artist who succeeded in moving beyond a simple dualism between West and East has earned the right to pursue his own approach, yet the increased glory attached to his name raises questions. Retrospectives such as these aim to provide the context that raises the public profile and confirms the place in posterity of an established artist. But, without rejecting the creative process developed over the course of his career, what more can that artist tell us about the new realities of an anxious society? Fang Yan

Square Word Calligraphy Classroom, 1997, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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Bodies of Power/Power for Bodies Cemeti – Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta 24 August – 19 September What happened to power in Indonesia when President Suharto’s regime fell in 1998, his New Order became the old order and the country entered an era of transition known as Reformasi?

In a discursive exhibition comprising collectives and artists at Cemeti, Indonesia’s oldest alternative art space, the distribution and abuse of power is under scrutiny. Rather than focusing on interpersonal dynamics of power, the work shows the value of perseverance and solidarity against hegemonic forces through shared effort.

Inaugurating the exhibition is a procession of flags alongside a performance of contemporary Dangdut dance at the public Minggirang Field. The colourful banners of the Nusantara Flag Project (2018), made by members of a youth group in collaboration with veteran performance artist Arahmaiani and artist group Tritura, carried words from the many ethnic languages of the Indonesian archipelago such as wareh, signifiying brotherhood/sisterhood in Acehnese, and cai, meaning water in Sundanese. The march was carefully escorted through the street by local police, showing how power relations are further complicated in the public space. The respectful behaviour of the police in this case serves as reminder that professional positions do not necessarily define personal politics, and that solidarities

are possible even across the widest divides.

After the procession, the Yogyakarta youth from targeted areas of high unemployment, invited by the artists, performed a myriad of beats and raps, showing how hip hop persists as a music of resistance, even far from its origins.

Within the gallery itself, protest imagery is abundant, particularly in the mural by Kerjasama 59 and banners by Anang Septoto, both of which carry bold graphic imagery of violence against the people, downloadable as open-source images to be used in protest against land-grabbing efforts from the central government. The city-dwelling urbanite, contrasted with the agrarian farmer, prevails as the archetypal image of power. Power in its more insidious form is delivered by Tolerating the Intolerance (2018) by Julian Abraham ‘Togar’, a soundpiece of feedback emitting from the slight turn of a metal roof ventilator, the mechanism that enables a building to breathe. Echoing through the exhibition, grating against your ears like white noise, it serves as a constant reminder of the more indirect means by which systemic oppression works.

Togar’s Tepung Tayammum (2015/2018) shows how symbols of spiritual power are subject to corruption and commercialisation. The Islamic act of purification before prayer, a ritual wash-

ing or wudu, can also be performed through tayammum, dry ablution. Taking the purified grains with which dry ablutions are performed from the newly built airport in West Java, the artist packaged them in beautiful vials that could be marketed to those needing to maintain their spiritual obligation without wanting to compromise their ability to travel. Thus these spiritual materials become symbols of status, markers of the power in a globalised society to move frictionlessly between countries.

A makeshift clinic by collective Lifepatch offers power in liquid form, as a fuel for the body. Using the traditional medicinal drink of jamu, Lifepatch acts as a local healer, something close to a kind of shaman with the power to cure through the potion. Here power is to be consumed as a tonic. Ranging from visible images of resistance to more embodied forms, power is figured in this exhibition as both a means of oppression and as necessary to keep fighting it. Though the proletariat now encompasses the precariat as well as the farmer, the same weapons are used against them. The show is a reminder that, however much the class system has changed since the fall of Suharto, the structures of power remain the same, and solidarity among the oppressed is the only viable form of resistance. Vera Mey

Arahmaiani & Tritura in collaboration with young people from Yogyakarta, Nusantara Flag Project, 2018, flag performance.

Courtesy Cemeti – Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta

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Borderlines Islands, Singapore 4 August – 7 September Timed to open a few days before Singapore’s National Day celebrations, this small but thought-provoking show features two new works by Green Zeng and Anthony Chin, installed in a space that comprises eight display windows (the regular Islands space) in a passageway between two malls. And it delves into less comfortable aspects of the country’s history and identity: among these communism and race relations. So far, the ten-month-old project space has focused on new work by young Singaporean artists, which has often been whimsical and apolitical. Borderlines, which is research-based and politically engaged, marks a change in tone.

Gatekeeper/Gatecrasher (all works 2018), by artist-filmmaker Zeng, is a series of photocopied Singapore newspaper pages from the 1970s with selected articles whited out, leaving only the headlines behind. Cold War-themed, alarmist and open tools of government propaganda, these headlines include: ‘How Ho first became a Marxist and accepted the idea of armed struggle’, ‘Letter from a comrade in Thailand’ and ‘EXPOSED! I was a Red agent’. These are copies of actual newspaper articles the artist accessed for an ongoing work called Television Confessions (2017–) about the public confessions made by individuals from the 1960s to the 1980s accused of being Marxists with sinister plans.

It might be tough associating Singapore – squeaky-clean billionaire’s playground, glitzy setting of Crazy, Rich Asians (2018), host of the Trump-Kim summit, the safest and most boring place on earth – with armed socialist struggle. But during the period Zeng

references, hundreds of alleged Communists were detained without trial under the country’s controversial Internal Security Act (ISA). The ruling party remains sensitive about insinuations that the ISA was used to stifle dissidents and opponents, and many documents about covert operations remain classified.

Gatekeeper/Gatecrasher continues Zeng’s interest in marginal or personal histories distorted or suppressed in service of state narratives. In this work, he mirrors the role of state censor or archivist by blanking out certain articles. Over the exhibition’s run, he removes more and more newsprint until all that remains are white pieces of paper. White, incidentally, is also the uniform of the People’s Action Party (which has dominated every election since Singapore was granted self-government), representing incorruptibility.

One might say Zeng’s method of literal erasure is a tad heavy-handed, but the clarity and directness of his strategy suits the openaccess site. The work grabs one’s attention and is immediately intelligible. Requiring more patient perusal is Chin’s conceptually denser work, The Campongs, which at first glance is a series of architectural drawings and a scale model. Closer inspection reveals that these documents detail a proposal to suspend three differently sized cubes made of asphalt at Fort Canning, a historical site at which Singapore’s colonial governors once lived. Each cube, weighing a few hundred tons, corresponds in size to the volume of roads used in the respective ethnic enclaves, or ‘campongs’, in the racially segregated Raffles Town Plan for Singapore,

which was drawn up by the British in 1828. (‘Campongs’ is the Anglicised spelling of the Malay word for village, kampung.)

The Campongs aims to represent, in physical form, the legacy of colonial urban planning, which includes racial segregation as an instrument of social control. But its background story is overcomplicated. If Chin’s proposal ever came to fruition, although there are no current plans, he would have formidably oppressive sculptures: heavy black structures the size of buildings suspended two metres off the ground.

But viewers would be hard-pressed to say how he arrived at these hulking, abstract forms, and what they signify, without swotting up on some heavy background. Even at this planning stage, the number of leaps from Raffles Town Plan, to calculating the volume of roads, to making the equivalent amount into big black cubes, takes time to digest. And even then, some decisions remain opaque. (Why cubes, for instance?)

But you can’t fault this work for lack of ambition. In general, Borderlines starts conversations more urgent than the ones raised at, say, the National Gallery of Singapore, where the National Day-themed exhibition is an anodyne solo of a local watercolourist. In contrast, this show is a sensitive attempt to bring to light hidden aspects of national history and state control that have ramifications for the present: for Zeng, the suppression of leftist historiography, for Chin, race-based classification still living on in the controversial CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) model that guides government policy in areas such as public housing and military recruitment. Adeline Chia

Anthony Chin, The Campongs (detail), 2018, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Islands, Singapore

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Deathsong The Substation, Singapore 21 August – 23 September Taking place during the seventh lunar month, a time when spirits are said to be released from hell to wander the earth, Deathsong explores rapid modernisation and the ghosts it leaves behind. It is particularly interested in the cultural and human costs of urban redevelopment, as seen through films and installations

by Singapore artist Min-Wei Ting, researcher Raymond Goh and nonprofit organisation Post-Museum, as well as Malaysian artist and filmmaker Hayati Mokhtar.

Singapore’s Bukit Brown Cemetery, which has been the subject of much debate surrounding the opposing forces of relentless urban construction and heritage conservation in the country, is the focus of several works here and in recent programming at The Substation.

More than 3,000 of the 100,000 tombs have been exhumed to make way for a new road so far. Min-Wei Ting’s dreamlike video You’re Dead to Me (2014) suggests that an important, elusive part of Singapore’s identity might be lost with the destruction of Bukit Brown. The video depicts the artist waking up over a grave, travelling through dense forests and coming to terms with the spirits of his forebears in split-second flashbacks. Next to this, there are Chinese gravestones and funerary objects loaned from

the collection of ‘tomb hunters’ Raymond and Charles Goh, founders of the research project Asian Paranormal Investigators. These artefacts lend a further connection to the lives of Singapore’s earliest pioneers, whose memories are kept alive by the persistent efforts of heritage groups and walking-trail guides.

To experience the debates surrounding Bukit Brown, visitors can watch a play presented in virtual reality by Post-Museum (Bukit Brown Index #132: Triptych of the Unseen, 2018).

In The Substation’s theatre, the group has set up a typical Hungry Ghost Festival stage used in getai, public performances offered to wandering spirits. The stage backdrop is adorned with construction notices for grave exhumation and protest signs by heritage conservationists. Wearing different VR headsets, one witnesses the performances by different individuals – a displaced female spirit shares her poignant story, activists march in solidarity; and through it all, bureaucrats are seen packing away the ceremonial stage set. Shifting between life, death and the afterlife, the work is arresting for its earnestness in capturing fragmented sentiments.

While the Singaporean works fret about an inevitable wrecking ball, another work by

a Malaysian artist highlights resistance to it. Hayati Mokhtar’s three-channel video No. 55, Main Road (2010) features the house of eighty-seven-year-old Chang Ching in Ipoh, Malaysia, the last one standing in a row of abandoned units. The viewer observes the elderly man in his dwelling, as old songs in the background merge with the sound of endless traffic passing by. These shots are interspersed with slow-moving footage of abandoned and dilapidated homes in the neighbourhood and closeup views of Chang Ching’s personal keepsakes.

Deathsong revives and conjures alternative views of placemaking but is all too aware of the complexity of forces at play. The exhibition circles back to another video by Ting. I’m Coming Up (2016) is an 89-minute piece that takes the viewer on a steady ascent through the looping corridors of a 21-storey public housing complex, culminating at the rooftop, where the sun is rising. The monotonous design of Singapore’s public housing units is often taken as a metaphor for the nation’s pragmatic outlook, and here it becomes a more ambiguous symbol, with the repeated corridors representing not stasis but relentless renewal, the never-ending cycles of change and modernisation. Pey Chuan Tan

Post-Museum, Bukit Brown Index #132: Triptych of the Unseen, 2018, installation, performance, VR experience. Courtesy The Substation, Singapore

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Zhao Yang Leave Far Away Nova Contemporary, Bangkok 27 July – 23 September Prior to becoming a painter, Zhao Yang was an illustrator and publisher of children’s books, and his first exhibition on Thai soil betrays this important biographical detail. Scattered along the soft grey walls of Nova Contemporary’s boxy ground floor, this small selection of boldly expressive landscapes – all muted autumnal pastels, barren expanses, alienated humans and severe painterly gestures – reveals him to be something of an open book: an artist who occupies a world of myths, fairytales, dreams and unfettered imagination.

Inhabiting an ominous liminal zone that sits somewhere between postindustrial wasteland and primordial wilderness, day and night, dream and nightmare, these ten works are, for the most part, as beguiling as they are chilling.

In the square titular work, a lone gangly figure with oversize legs, threadbare rags for clothes and a bulging sack slung over his shoulder walks through an ashen forest. He plunges forwards, but his dead eyes are cast backwards, to the path along which he just came and two similarly clad characters plunging into the distance. One of them is pointing towards the land of promise – or peril – that lies just beyond the top-right of the canvas.

These same three hunters – for that is what you intuit them to be – also appear in the work mounted next to it, Scavenger (2017), only here they are traipsing together through thick, heavy streaks of inky black rain. They do so stoically,

begrudgingly almost, with backs turned, shoulders slumped and faces obscured by wide-brim hats. Life is not so much brutish, say their defeated gaits, as a battle for survival.

Envy, isolation and ennui are routinely hinted at in Zhao’s crepuscular, borderingon-postapocalyptic hinterlands, and their close cousin – violence – never seems far off either. Black Swan (2017) depicts a voluptuous woman skating balletically across an ice lake as a man in a black overcoat looks on. Here, the male gaze appears threatening, dangerous even, merely by virtue of its unchallenged directness.

Opposite it, Good Life begins from now on (2017) finds three ghoulish men in long coats and (René Magritte’s?) bowler hats staring, from a small boat, up at a shimmering, dirt-clogged horizon punctuated by three bleached suns.

The exhibition text tells us that these paintings ‘serve as an allegory for subordinated individuals who dare to resist societal norms’, and that his work ‘confronts us with the possibility of humanity’s collective return to its primordial state – free from superficial criterions and social constructs’. Be this as it may, the emotional pull and uncanniness of Zhao’s work arguably owes more to his lyrical brushwork than his slightly derivative subject matter. That he returns to his paintings, much like a good writer returns to his prose, pays off: in the melting greys and translucent, thick-lined half-human figures of Airstrike Manual (2017) and in the blotchy fissures

Black Swan, 2017, oil on canvas, 85 × 105 cm.

Courtesy the artist

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and scorched, sickly earth of Action of Wood Frog (2017), to name just two examples.

Something in Zhao’s constitution or history – his upbringing in northeast China’s forestcovered Jilin province, his training in traditional Chinese ink painting or his stint in publishing – has gifted him with a capacity for using a minimum of colour to create landscapes that are at once implacable and poignant. Wherever the root of this gift lies, his muted palette and reworked surfaces give his open-ended fables their tangible sense of dread, make his work feel remote yet lived-in.

Traces of Zhao’s faux-naive sensibilities and appeal can be found in many directions, by looking West as well as East. There are, for example, hints of Giorgio de Chirico and Henri Rousseau, namely their adventures in scale, flatness, dark humour and symbolism, scattered throughout his output to date. Here at Nova though, Zhao’s washed-out grey skies and crestfallen drifters seem to channel something of L.S. Lowry, the oft-maligned ‘Sunday painter’ whose depictions of matchstick figures ambling through scarred mid-twentiethcentury England achieve a similarly detached air of gloom and elegiac quietude. These loose similarities notwithstanding, each of Zhao’s paintings is its own strange poetry, a melancholic world unto itself – and while we shiver in sympathy with Lowry’s characters, we shiver in fear of Zhao’s. Max Crosbie-Jones

Prabhavathi Meppayil b/seven eighths Esther Schipper, Berlin 8 June – 11 August At first glance Prabhavathi Meppayil’s artworks (which primarily take the form of uncoloured gesso panels) look like the kind of rigorous, monotonous displays of repetitive geometric abstraction that would slot neatly into place alongside those created by the icons of American Minimalism, such as Agnes Martin or Robert Ryman. And yet the Bangalore-based artist’s productions are also from someplace else altogether.

That’s not simply to say that one can find precedents for her work in twentieth-century Indian art (although one could). In se/hundred and five (2017), for example, the chalky gesso bears the regular, repeated imprint of a tool.

The marks differ according to the relative pressure and angle of application, and each successive imprint varies, albeit slightly, from what would be the (imagined) line of an absolutely precise grid. We know then that the marks are applied by hand, and we are told in the exhibition text that the tool is called a thinnam, traditionally used to apply decoration to bangles. I’d never heard of it either; it exists to me only as the trace it has left. We know from the same source that the hereditary profession of Meppayil’s family is artisanal goldsmithery,

a now dying trade (as industrial manufacture undercuts and outproduces more traditional methods) once prevalent in the Avenue Road area of Bangalore in which the artist’s studio is located. It may look like Minimalism, but it’s feeling rather more loaded than that now. se/hundred and twelve (2018) is a grid of 441 found steel moulds, also used in jewellery production, attached to the wall. Each is a cube on each face of which is a collection of variously sized circular indentations in arrangements of one, two or four indents. The whole gives the impression of some quaternion calculator, or perhaps a collection of thrown dice giving up numerous mathematical combinations.

This last might also be an analogy of how an audience is invited to interpret Meppayil’s works: one toss and it’s in dialogue with Martin, Ryman, Lucio Fontana and a history of Western abstraction; another toss and it’s the traditions and histories of South Indian manufacturing; one more and it’s about the economic and social impact of capitalism and attendant industrialisation across the subcontinent; one more still and what we’re witnessing is some form of upcycling.

Ultimately, there’s a sense in which to say

all that is simply to rehash a question that gripped the postcolonial artworlds of South and Southeast Asia around half a century ago: is it possible to produce an artwork that adopts the placeless, timeless languages of modernity (abstraction, conceptualism) but remains locally or regionally specific? And, in that her work opportunistically transforms tradition into flexibility, Meppayil can be seen to be replying with an elegant ‘yes’.

Such statements are, of course, what an artworld chasing after multiple or alternative modernisms and global rather than Western reflections on its products wants to hear right now. Yet one can’t help thinking that Meppayil offers something more simple, further reduced.

Perhaps she’d concur with what Ryman once offered: ‘I am not a picture painter. I work with real light and space’. For to take what’s really in front of us, rather than texts handed out by the gallery, is indeed to study rhythmic manipulations of the effects of light and space, and the material qualities of gesso too (particularly in the 12-part installation of horizontal gesso panels on plinths, se/one half, 2017–18). Everything else is no more than a projection, even if to project is what we’re invited to do. Mark Rappolt

twenty six one five-0830, 2018, concrete, copper, 30 × 30 × 30 cm.

Photo: Manoj Sudhakaran. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

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Haegue Yang ETA 1994–2018 Museum Ludwig, Cologne 18 April – 12 August An oversize plaster rendering of a sink stands on four squat wooden legs, filled to the brim with a twisted clump of thin black wire, a flat square suggesting a drying board jutting out on one side. If a child were to draw a sink, it would look like Sink with Wire (1995/2017): stripped to the basics and still, somehow, absurd – the shape too large, the legs too short, the (rounded) edges much too soft. Around the room are similarly dysfunctional models: a wall clock with numbers spun out of order; plaster cupcakes swirled into colourful crinkled-paper cups; a porcelain-plate mobile dangling from the ceiling on a gold chain. There’s something in this simultaneous recognition and implausibility, these cartoonish imitations of household objects, making details like the soft corners of the sink feel worn down with memory, like cracked totems owned by the homesick.

Haegue Yang’s retrospective at the Museum Ludwig is aptly titled after the acronym for Estimated Time of Arrival: it suggests the peculiar state of being out of both time and place that only movement can bring. In one work, Storage Piece (2004), a mountain of packed boxes and bubblewrap-swaddled artworks

addressed to the artist are clustered at the far end of an otherwise empty wall. Where, and when, were these boxes packed? Where, and when, are they intended to go? As with many of the Seoul-born, Berlin-based artist’s other works here, we are given no resolution, just fragments and traces; one woman’s living fossils of the mundane, frozen in transit from one home to the next. According to the catalogue raisonné published by the Museum Ludwig for this exhibition, Yang’s impressive oeuvre spans nearly 1,500 artworks, of which about 120 pieces are shown here, ranging from paintings and photographs to light sculptures, wearable objects and room-size installations. ETA resultantly highlights Yang’s masterful use of material – lights, origami paper, venetian blinds, security envelopes, bells, wigs, dust and knitting yarn, to name a few – and emphasises themes of migration, myth and memory.

In one particularly arresting installation, Mountains of Encounter (2008), a cluster of nearly 20 rust-coloured and half-open venetian blinds floats down into the gallery space from on high, rising and falling in partially transparent peaks.

Like Sink with Wire, these Mountains serve as an ambivalent outline, accomplishing more than what the title claims: the domesticity of the venetian blind blurs steep peaks into roofs; the centre of the installation forms four walls like an ersatz house, the blinds themselves hinting at and creating windows – both privacy and openness – simultaneously. Swivelling spotlights crisscross the room, casting installation and viewer alike in fragmented shadow. Inside the fragile walls of these Mountains you will always be seen. You will never feel privacy. You will never have a home.

This is what lies at the heart of ETA: the patchwork temporality of the migrant, vibrating in pregnant pauses like stacks of unpacked boxes. Yang’s approach to readymades and assemblage captures the weak-kneed sensation of grasping for what is untranslatable: when what is felt flutters out of familiarity into foreignness, hovering, taunting and tantalising like a forgotten word, just beyond reach.

Given that so many around the world have found themselves in search of a new home, this show couldn’t have come at a better time. Eliza Levinson

Mountains of Encounter, 2008, aluminium venetian blinds, powder-coated aluminium hanging structure, steel wire rope, moving spotlights, floodlights, cable, dimensions variable. Photo: Šaša Fuis. © the artist. Courtesy Museum Ludwig, Cologne

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Yuan Yuan Alternative Realities Palazzo Terzi, Bergamo Città Alta 9 June – 23 July Palazzo Terzi, situated in Bergamo’s Città Alta, is a late-Baroque residential mansion famous for its architecture, for its interiors and for artworks spread throughout. Sited on the remains of an ancient Roman road and medieval and sixteenthcentury houses, the current structure was built by the Terzi family in two phases, dating from the 1640s through to the middle of the eighteenth century. The palazzo is known – in many travel books – for its beautiful entrance portal, which leads to a large panoramic terrace, with Giovanni Antonio Sanz’s statues of ‘Painting’ and ‘Sculpture’ standing on its balustrade, overlooking the Venetian Walls and the Città Bassa. One of the most iconic views in Italy, it combines architectural beauty and the scenery of the Lombardy region. This, together with Bergamo’s rich heritage of Renaissance paintings on display at Accademia Carrara, gives Chinese painter Yuan Yuan a challenging context to work with, for his first solo show in Italy.

Each of Yuan’s works at the Palazzo Terzi is made precisely for a specific position. Given

that the ceilings are covered in frescoes and the walls are decorated with old paintings, family pictures, framed mirrors and other objects from the collection, Yuan had to search for space among the existing works, in some cases replacing what was on the wall with his own paintings, or putting larger-scale paintings in the middle of the room, or even, in the case of a couple of works, Canteen of Duck and A Tour (all works 2018), in fireplaces, using the hearths’ decorated surrounds as frames (while also deploying antique books to support A Tour).

The works are placed in such a way as to make visual connections between components of the paintings and the rooms’ interiors. For example, the twisted scarlet canvas of a destroyed pop-up gazebo that occupies the centre of Dancing Hall is a response to a red cloak worn by the subject of a historical painting hung on the wall; A Tour, featuring empty picture frames hanging on a salon’s walls, with three red velvet-upholstered chairs

placed in front of the wall, is a seemingly serious but more likely playful echo of its surroundings.

In these last works, the connection is mainly on the visual level, responding to the architectural and aesthetic features of Palazzo Terzi. But reflecting the continued evolution of Yuan’s painting practice, many works here also illustrate an extremely figurative but conceptually constructed world that exists in parallel to (and sometimes intersects with) the actual world. To the Hall of Soprarizzo, for example, a room sumptuously decorated with a fresco by Carpoforo Tencalla, a wallsize mirror, a chandelier and soprarizzo velvet wallpaper, Yuan has added a largescale painting. Titled Mandarin Duck II, it depicts a shabby Cantonese canteen, now inserted into a magnificent Baroque room that once hosted the doppelkaiser Francis, so-named for having been emperor twice: as Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, and as Francis I, the first Emperor of Austria. Aimee Lin

Alternative Realities, 2018 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong

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Yahon Chang Poetry of the Flow Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri, Palermo 17 June – 19 August The brutish architecture of Palermo’s fourteenth-century Palazzo ChiaramonteSteri – Romanesque windows framed by Arabic patterns, walls graffitied by inmates of the Spanish Inquisition – bears witness to the history of a city defined by the (intermittently harmonious) meeting of ideas and civilisations. Having outlived its purpose as a stronghold and later prison, the building’s armoury has been repurposed as an exhibition space: one half displays a collection of religious frescoes, wooden crucifixes and chipped marble capitals; the other a new site-specific commission by Taiwanese artist Yahon Chang.

The first impression is of monochrome paintings dangled limply over racks and from the room’s walls like washing put out to dry.

On the long sides of the narrow gallery, rudimentary wooden structures (all works Untitled, 2018) are draped in unstitched, white cloth strips of uneven size and marked with black lines, regular patterns and jagged shapes resembling pictograms; a semi-enclosed room at the far end of the space from the entrance is ringed by fabrics that billow from the walls like windblown curtains. If it’s not initially clear how this exhibition should be read – as an interlinking arrangement of individual

works on linen and paper, a series of discrete sculptural assemblages or a unified and immersive installation – then its success or failure depends ultimately on the viewer’s willingness to suspend the urge to classify and segregate.

As much is clear from a press release stating that Yahon Chang is seeking to ‘create a new language’ that integrates, and presumably by doing so moves beyond, the Eastern and Western formal elements on which he draws.

If each painted fabric in the patchwork is to be read as an expression of this synthesis, reconciling traditional Chinese inkwash techniques with the spattered gestural freedom of Expressionism, then their aggregation into these sculptural forms suggests a palimpsest, with different visual languages roughly overlapping in their description of a disputed and overwritten history.

Perhaps because it depends on the impression of something having been partially effaced, the work is least convincing when straightforwardly figurative, as when smiling faces can be discerned amidst the black swoops and swirls, and most interesting when teasing the viewer with the implication that a hidden meaning hovers just out of reach. On top of black sheets stretched over a wide frame like

Untitled (Poem #1), 2018, Chinese ink on paper, wood, 230 × 510 × 54 cm. Photo: Lane 216, East. Courtesy the artist

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a theatrical backdrop, a long band of white fabric marked with black curlicues unfurls to the floor, its end wrapped around a scroll stick.

The allusion to a manuscript reinforces the implication – introduced elsewhere by the calligraphic brushwork and repeated painted lines resembling handwritten pages – that these works are texts to be deciphered. Moreover, because a manuscript unfolds its information over the time it takes to read, that they could be pieced together to discover an intelligible (albeit fractured and elliptical) narrative. Yet the difficulty in relating the show’s parts to its whole, and of identifying threads or patterns that run through it, mean that any such search is liable to be frustrated.

By moving beyond conventional signifiers towards more inchoate forms – cursive scribbles and rudimentary symbols – the inference is that the artist is moving towards something like the universal Chomskian grammar that underpins all world cultures, however great their superficial differences. If this approach is to be understood as a poetics, as the exhibition’s title implies, then it sometimes slips into incoherence. In attempting to find a common language, the artist risks failing to make himself understood. Ben Eastham

Daidō Moriyama Scene Hamiltons, London 15 May – 17 August Daidō Moriyama uses a compact digital Ricoh camera. He walks and clicks, weaving through crowds, documenting the scenes that unfold along his routes through the city, any city.

But, he has said in essays and interviews, he likes Shinjuku, a ward in Tokyo, the best: ‘I see Shinjuku as a stadium of people’s desires’, it ‘hides its true nature like a chimera’ and is, at the same time, ‘imbued with a mystifying narcotic essence’. He photographs scraps of human life and urban debris, and though he writes sentimentally of his subjects and his relationship to the city, its inhabitants, and its shadows – ‘I can’t photograph anything without a city’ – he is also highly attentive to the material reproduction of the images he takes, as illustrated by the bookmaking workshops he has held at institutions including London’s Tate Modern. A printer as well as a photographer, Moriyama has said that when he wants to produce an object, he makes a silkscreen.

And so, at Hamiltons, Moriyama shows a series of silkscreens of images from throughout his career in an exhibition titled Scene

(now on its third rehang). There is an immediate difference between what one expects to see in a ‘Moriyama photograph’ as reproduced on paper – perhaps that aforementioned essence – and these works on canvas. The faces of passersby in Shinjuku Day & Night (2000/2018) appear flattened, the nuances of light and shadow, so integral to black-and-white photography, blocked out by the process. The heavier fabric foregrounds the prints’ materiality: there is a lack of depth to the image, and the ink blobs together in ways that erase the fine graininess and snapshot aesthetic that one associates with the kind of street photography produced by a member of the avant-garde Japanese photography magazine Provoke (1968–69). One expects to find secret corners and small truths; to see the exact imprint of the world as it was, in that moment, through the eyes of the photographer.

Scene does not offer this. Instead, it presents photographs that lend themselves to the silkscreen: those that can afford to lose some of their essences in return for a few traces.

Moriyama leaves traces of himself in his silkscreen prints in a different way than in

his traditionally printed photographs. As the images are produced by forcing ink through mesh, there’s an energetic, tactile quality – or perhaps memory – to the prints, a movement that’s unlike those used to develop photographs in a darkroom. In fact, works like Tights (1987), On the Road (1969) and the iconic Smash-Up (1969) work particularly well in this format. The ink enhances the mesh of the women’s tights, making the lines appear ever so slightly raised; the geometric shape and clean lines of the plane wing captured from the roadside are printed with precision, yet the medium also highlights the original’s pleasing abstraction; and the silkscreen version of Smash-Up, a grainy carcrash scene, conveys perfectly the sense of distancing – between the subjects (whose faces are rendered flat masks) and the wrecked cars either side of them, between the photographer and the scene before him, and between the audience in the gallery and the original photograph. And although this viewer will always want to see the world through the eyes of the photographer, here she has learned to appreciate the blindspots. Fi Churchman

Tights, 1987, silkscreen on canvas, 150 × 100 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Hamiltons, London

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Liverpool Biennial Beautiful world, where are you?

Various venues, Liverpool 14 July – 28 October It seems ridiculous to say that it was only when I encountered a freakish display of teeth (human and nonhuman), together with historic tools and implements associated with them, alongside a no-less-weird but perhaps more banal display of objects from the National Pipe Archive (that’s the smoking type of pipe), that any overall sense of the 2018 Liverpool Biennial began to coalesce.

Ridiculous because neither the teeth nor the pipes were part of the biennial itself; rather they are among the permanent displays at Liverpool University’s Victoria Gallery & Museum. And ridiculous because the Victoria Gallery was one of the last stops of my tour through the venues hosting this tenth edition of the UK’s ‘largest festival of contemporary visual art’.

Until that point, my experience had been marked by what felt like a series of disparate encounters with individual artworks (made by 40 different artists, hailing from 22 different countries): something from everywhere that made their surroundings feel like nowhere.

That’s not to say that I didn’t see any works that stuck in the mind or were affective in their own right. At Tate Liverpool, a micro-exhibition of Annie Pootoogook’s stark, direct drawings of everyday life in the Inuit community of Kinngait (it’s in Cape Dorset, Canada: I had to look that up) compare the bleak hostility of the landscape with the bleak emptiness of the domestic interiors (which often appear as little more than minimally decorated boxes with all the permanence of a stage set) and the struggles of the people who inhabit both. There’s an undertone of violence and struggle lurking beneath the apparent banality of almost every image. In Bringing Home Food (2003–04), for example, the groceries include a box of Lipton tea and a dead seal; Memory of My Life: Breaking Bottles (2001–02) features a woman energetically smashing glass bottles on the rocky ground by the back of a plasterboard house – to what end is not clear; other works show liquor stores, threatening polar bears, arguments and attempts to recuperate the excitement of daytime TV. Indeed, the sense of mundanity that Pootoogook conveys through her images – via their basis on narrative and their simple execution and geometry – overcomes a sense of their being intrinsically remote or exotic. That the artist died in unresolved circumstances in 2016 only increases the

poignancy (and perceived honesty) of what we’re encouraged to see as autobiographical works.

At Open Eye Gallery, Madiha Aijaz’s These Silences Are All The Words (2017–18) is a subtle and moving videowork that documents the decline of the public libraries of Karachi, and the rich heritage of Urdu textbooks and literature they hold, as a means of describing the decline of Urdu in Pakistan as a whole. Although it’s the national language of Pakistan (Hindi, the rival Hindustani language, is the national language of India and both relate to religious identity) Urdu is one of two official languages of the country (English is the other); by 2006, it was a first language for less than ten percent of the population. Underlying the work is a record of a shift in identity (from religious to secular and from tradition to some form of modernity), a shift in aspiration (from the local to the global) and a decoupling of language and geography.

But that only emphasises the degree to which parts of this biennial seem decoupled from Liverpool itself (at a little below 14 percent, the proportion of people who identify as other than ‘white British or Irish’ in the city is lower than the national average, and at least half of that 14 percent speak English as their first language).

Similarly, Retu Sattar’s Harano Sur (Lost Tune) (2017–18), a video recording of a performance by harmonium players (intended to highlight a disappearing culture in Bangladesh) that originally took place at this year’s Dhaka Art Summit (having previously been staged at the 2017 Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan) and is now on show in The Playhouse Theatre, comes across as little more than a record of something that happened (albeit effectively) at another time and in another place.

Meanwhile, back at Tate Liverpool, Haegue Yang’s fusion of Korean and British folk traditions – maypole and Morris dancing, harvest festivals, indications of various forms of animist practice – in an installation that adapts her ongoing The Intermediates (2015–) series, appears to be as direct an attempt as there is here to bridge those kinds of gaps, and something upon which other, less sitespecific works in the same venue that attempt to deal with the confrontation of local custom and global capital, including Kevin Beasley’s adaptation of NATO-issued gas masks and

facing page, top Madiha Aijaz, These Silences Are All The Words (still), 2017–18, video, colour, sound, 5 min. Courtesy the artist

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Brian Jungen’s Cheyenne-style headdresses made from chopped-up Nike trainers, depend.

Where Yang seeks to explore some sort of convergence, Beasley’s and Jungen’s efforts never escape from their literal approach and spectacular oddness. While works by Ryan Gander and Rehana Zaman and to a point Ari Benjamin Meyers, whose somewhat overlong film Four Liverpool Musicians (2018) presents portraits of local heroes Bette Bright, Budgie, Ken Owen and Louisa Roach (pushing a more general theme of music and sound that pervades the biennial), feature a direct form of community engagement, this biennial never gives you a fixed sense of where you are. Which is ironic given the extent to which geography and identity form the overarching theme of so many of the works on show. But perhaps that’s the condition of the contemporary global biennial: its ability to turn a specific place into a nonplace.

Back at the Victoria Museum, artworks on display as part of the biennial include Aslan Gaisumov’s film People of No Consequence (2016), a portrait of a group of elderly men and women, survivors of the 1944 Soviet deportation of Chechen and Ingush peoples to Central Asia, who shuffle into a room and sit, facing the viewer, before leaving again; a selection from Francis Alÿs’s ongoing series of paintings Age Piece (1982–), comprising delicate postcardsize depictions of more-or-less banal landscape scenes painted on his travels (while scouting locations for film projects, some of them in zones of contemporary conflict or political unrest); and Songs without Words (2018), Joseph Grigley’s collection of photographs of musicians and singers from the pages of The New York Times, their captions erased. If these are works that reveal something extraordinary beneath the ordinary, they resonate strongly with the museum’s more bizarre displays of quotidian objects from the past rendered surreal in the present, to the extent that the whole place seems rigged to prove L.P. Hartley’s famous quip: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’. In the biennial itself difference is something that remains unresolved and perhaps unbridgeable too. There’s a sense in which it never moves beyond repeatedly reiterating the second part of the question it posed itself: where are you? Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom Annie Pootoogook, Eating Seal at Home, 2001, wax pastel and ink on paper. Courtesy Feheley Fine Arts, Toronto

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John Akomfrah Signs of Empire New Museum, New York 20 June – 2 September John Akomfrah’s first US museum survey features three recent video installations and an early work, Expeditions 1 – Signs of Empire (1983), from which the exhibition derives its title. As the first work of the Black Audio Film Collective (founded in 1982 and active until 1998, BAFC comprised seven black British and diaspora multimedia artists and filmmakers), Expeditions 1 marks the beginning of a lifelong inquiry into the legacies of colonialism and the radical potential of interplay between image, sound and text.

Of Akomfrah’s earlier single-channel works, only Expeditions 1 is given gallery space as part of the exhibition, although several others, including the famous Handsworth Songs (1986), are screened once a week in the theatre on the New Museum’s lower level. Playing on Roland Barthes’s 1970 text on Japanese semiotics and cultural codes, Empire of Signs, the filmmakers reject the Western writer’s self-proclaimed indifference to the ‘essence’ of a symbolic system of alterity. The film uses a tape-slide machine to overlay fragments from the colonial and ethnographic archive – from oblique shots of classical European statues and architecture to imagery depicting the subjugation of colonised people – with texts like ‘the anxieties of colonial rhetoric’ and ‘the black girl made a wry face’ set in Letraset transfer typefaces.

Using a gesture comparable to the erratic superimposition of handwritten texts (presumed to be by Jean-Luc Godard) onto still images in the agitprop Cinétracts made during May 1968, BAFC’s handmade experiment in decolonisation deploys semiotics to undermine European constructions of power.

At the heart of the exhibition is The Unfinished Conversation (2012), a three-channel video installation on the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall, made two years before he died.

Forsaking the conventions of biography, Akomfrah’s tribute echoes Hall’s own conception of identity as ‘formed at the unstable point where the “unspeakable” stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history’. Against an essentialist take on identity, Akomfrah challenges the viewer to fathom a bricolage of Hall’s public appearances and family albums, archival news clips of war and turmoil, meditative landscapes, footage of a baby being born, and Mao swimming in the Yangtze River. Riots in Britain, racial violence and mass protests in the American South are set to the music of Miles Davis, Mahalia Jackson and the words of English authors like William Blake, Charles Dickens, Mervyn Peake and Virginia Woolf.

In Akomfrah’s immersive widescreen installation – each of the four works occupies a separate black box gallery – images and sound have no beginning or end, no stable montage or clear narrative sequence; every combination suggests the imminent breaking down and formation of new possibilities – an impression of urgency that captures how radical change might have felt in the making.

Where those works embody the exhilaration of revolution, Transfigured Night (2013/18) is a two-channel reflection on the promise and disillusionment of decolonisation in Africa.

Subtitled ‘five allegories on the narcoleptic state’, the video juxtaposes period newsreel footage of the celebrations attending African nations’ independence in the mid-century with Akomfrah’s slow, meditative takes on monuments to American imperial power, as observed by solitary figures or a silent group.

An older man staring through the plate glass window of a metropolitan office tower is set against Ghana’s pan-Africanist President Kwame Nkruma’s resounding statement, ‘We face neither East or West; we face For-

facing page, top Expeditions 1 – Signs of Empire (still), 1983, single-channel 35mm colour Ektachrome slides transferred to video, sound, 26 min. © Smoking Dogs Films, London.

Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London & New York

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ward’ – a stark reminder of neocolonial global capital’s role in these nations’ struggles to fulfil the promise of prosperity and security.

Postcolonial history takes on an ecological dimension in Vertigo Sea (2015), first shown in Okwui Enwezor’s 2015 Venice Biennale All the World’s Futures. The three-channel installation indulges in a spectacular poetics and politics of the ocean, traversing histories of colonial conquest, commercial whaling, the transatlantic slave trade, migration and climate change. Walking into the dark gallery illuminated by three long, horizontal screens, the viewer is immediately overwhelmed by ultrahigh-definition images from the natural world made with the BBC Natural History Unit. These are interspersed with footage of ethnographic expeditions, the murder of African slaves, polar bear hunting and a string of Dalí-esque tableaux depicting a free man travelling to the end of the world in eighteenth-century costume. The work illustrates Western modernity’s brutalisation of nature and all that it considers ‘other’.

If the Burkean sublime elicits a pleasurable terror, what Akomfrah offers here is a numbing excess of both beauty and violence – magnificent, yet uncomfortably close to a big-ticket commercial production. Part of the unease may be attributed to the slippage between sublime lyricism and the reenactment of certain Romantic tropes that cannot be rid of their kitschy associations. Moreover, the assault of pristine images, blown up to epic scale, makes both the sublime and the abject almost unbearable. But to what end? Invoking ethical questions of looking and spectacle, Vertigo Sea invites us to stay with this entrancing devastation of the world, to take temporary sanctuary between our divided past and shared future, both catastrophic. Kang Kang

facing page, bottom The Unfinished Conversation, 2012, three-channel HD video installation, colour, sound, 45 min 48 sec. © Smoking Dogs Films, London.

Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London & New York

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Books Writing the Modern: Selected Texts on Art & Art History in Singapore, Malaysia & Southeast Asia, 1973–2015

by T.K. Sabapathy NUS Press, SGD56 (softcover)

It’s rare for an art critic to be the subject of an institutional exhibition, but such was the case with T.K. Sabapathy, who in 2015 was included in the Singapore Art Museum’s 5 Stars exhibition, themed around the five stars on Singapore’s flag and celebrating the nation’s 50th anniversary. Unsurprisingly, the relation between nation-building and artmaking lies at the heart of Sabapathy’s writing, much of which revolves around a conundrum: if, in Southeast Asia, being a self-determining nation state is part of the modern condition, what role does art have to play in that, particularly when the writer recognises that, in art, the contemporary condition involves ‘being in a place, but not being defined by that place’?

Sabapathy was born in 1938, the same year Malaya’s first art school (the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts) was founded. Malaya gained independence and became Malaysia when the writer was twenty-five. Two years later Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia and became a sovereign state. Two years after that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was founded by five of the region’s member states (it now comprises ten). Sabapathy trained as an art historian, studying in Malaya, California and London, where he went on to teach at St Martin’s

School of Art. By the time he sought to return to Singapore during the early 1970s, its universities were dismissing the study of art history as ‘unproductive’ in a nation set on establishing itself as the region’s primary economic power.

The 40-plus years of writing collected here, in the form of reviews, catalogue essays, interviews and surveys of art scenes, document Sabapathy’s mission to make audiences understand art as an essential productive force.

In the catalogue essay ‘Sculptors and Sculpture in Singapore: An Introduction’ (1991), the writer sets out the scale of this task: ‘Artists are woefully neglectful in documenting their practices and productions; institutions such as museums and academies have not developed archival facilities and systems by which materials, dates and documents on art can be stored systematically and retrieved efficiently. Methodologies related to art history and criticism appropriate to activities here have yet to be proposed and tested. In these circumstances any and every attempt to ascertain or explain a body of work appears to be a fresh beginning with little or no relationship to past or current endeavours.’

Undaunted, Sabapathy sets out to tackle it all.

He gets angry: as in a letter lambasting an editor of The Straits Times (for which he was the

art critic) about the lack of space given over to the obituary of artist Cheong Soo Pieng. Meanwhile, the 4th ASEAN Exhibition of Paintings and Photography (1985) is so polite and limited that it causes him to wonder why people exhibit works of art in the first place. But he is constructive too. We need exhibitions, he states, because they propose new ways of seeing (and implicitly new nations need this). Hence (channelling the thought of artist Tang Da Wu) we should not be put off by art that provokes thought but does not please the eye. He sets out to explain conceptual art to a general audience, introduces Rosalind Krauss’s ideas about sculpture in the expanded field and, in the introduction to Modern Artists of Malaysia (1983), seeks to calm any fears his readers might have that a failure to understand such artforms is a sign of backwardness (all while implying that a sophisticated appreciation of art is a means by which newly independent nations can be on an equal footing with their former colonial masters): ‘It is true that modern art in this country does not have a long history.

But then it does not have a long history anywhere else,’ he writes. For anyone wanting to understand the development of that short history in Singapore, Malaysia and Southeast Asia, this book is an essential read. Nirmala Devi

Walt Disney’s Disneyland

by Chris Nichols Taschen, £40 (hardcover) Disney is famously protective of its brand, particularly when it comes to researchers and writers sniffing around the enterprise: access to archives and permission to reproduce images are reflexively withheld from these types. One indication that Walt Disney’s Disneyland got a big green light from the corporate guardians is that there’s more illustration than it knows what to do with – pages upon pages of Technicolor photographs, drawings and plans, alongside portraits of a smiling, industrious Uncle Walt, overwhelm the nine accompanying short essays.

Another indication: it’s difficult to find a critical or even ironic line here (‘Walt’s attention to detail did not extend to the unpleasant’ is about the extent of it). This instinct to control is a defining

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characteristic of both the company’s founder and the ‘happiest place on earth’, 45 hectares of idealised lands, delineated by the names Main Street U.S.A., Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland – a resetting of the American narrative following 40 years of national traumas, writes author Chris Nichols – enclosed behind a six-metre berm that blocked out the messy, complicated chaos of the real world from the day it opened in 1955. Walt Disney’s Disneyland reads in places like a fanboy’s archaeology, charting the circumstances of its creation, and its layers of reuse and renewal as new attractions pushed out old, while making anodyne, propagandistic stabs at articulating the larger cultural significance of man and -land.

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That said, those nine short texts distil a huge amount of research, pointing the reader, through endnotes and a selected bibliography, to a fuller picture, which is perhaps the best way to view this 325-page work: as the visual accompaniment to all those studies that fail to get clearance from the company. A note about Tomorrowland: despite a cursory mention of more recent adventures in theme-park imperialism (Shanghai Disney, the seventh resort, opened in 2016, on a scale 11 times as large as the original) so as to argue for the continued relevance of the Disneyland vision, the generally nostalgic tone and entirely rearview imagery evoke nothing so much as a eulogy to the American Century. David Terrien

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Dansaekhwa 1960s–2010s: Primary Documents on Korean Abstract Painting Edited by Koo Jin-Kyung, Yoon Jin Sup, Lee Phil, Chung Moojeong Korea Arts Management Service, £31/$37 (softcover) Dansaekhwa emerged during the 1960s as an avant-garde style practised by a small number of South Korean artists who experimented with the representational possibility of twodimensional space. Literally meaning ‘monochrome painting’ in Korean, it was a philosophical and spiritual attempt to find a way to represent selflessness and highlight the limits of verbal expression. Decades after it became a dominant art trend in Korea during the mid1970s, it has recently resurfaced as the subject of commercial and institutional interest around the world. After a successful exhibition in Venice, organised by Kukje and Tina Kim galleries in collaboration with the Boghossian Foundation to coincide with the 2015 biennale, many Dansaekhwa exhibitions have been organised internationally: a late-2015 exhibition of Yun Hyong-keun at Blum & Poe, New York, and, in 2017, Park Seo-Bo at White Cube, London, are two recent examples, while the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Museum of Modern Art, New York, have expanded their collections of Dansaekhwa paintings (although this has not yet been reflected in major institutional shows devoted to the movement). But while Dansaekhwa has entered the international art lexicon, the understanding of its historical and sociopolitical contexts remains at an early stage in Western academia. A number of publications have specialised in the topic since Joan Kee published Contemporary Korean Art:

Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013), the first English-language book dedicated to the study of Dansaekhwa (alternatively Romanised with a T), but the scarcity of primary sources in translation has continued to be an obstacle for Anglophone academics.

As the title suggests, Dansaekhwa 1960s–2010s: Primary Documents on Korean Abstract Painting is designed to address this shortcoming. The introduction explains its focus on the decadeslong evolution of the movement, asserting that ‘Dansaekhwa did not emerge overnight, nor did it disappear’. The book charts a history spanning nearly 60 years, from the regime of Park Chunghee to the present day. Ranging from a 1973 interview with Park Seo-Bo to an excerpt from Japanese critic Chiba Shigeo’s seminar on the aesthetics of Korean Mono-chrome paintings and Japanese Mono-ha, the book covers diverse critical discussions as well as a wide period.

Each of the four chapters opens with a short text outlining the following documents. The first covers discussions during the formative years of Dansaekhwa, showing ways in which critics and artists approached this new style, focusing on its materiality, spirituality and performativity. It also reveals that the style received some criticism at the time. For example, Lee Gu-Yeol’s 1966 newspaper article compares Kwon Young-Woo with Robert Rauschenberg, and dismisses his paintings as appropriations of American art.

Chapter two comprises texts from the 1970s to the 1980s, the period in which two landmark exhibitions in Tokyo – Five Korean Artists, Five Kinds of White (1975) and Korea: Facet of Contemporary Art (1977) – introduced Dansaekhwa to the international artworld. The forewords to the catalogues of those exhibitions are highlights of a chapter introduced by performance artist and writer Yoon Jin-Sup. It is worth underlining that the turbulent political conditions after martial law was declared by Park Chung-hee in 1972 brought about a polarisation of the country’s art scene into two contrasting groups, namely Dansaekhwa and Minjung artists. The third chapter highlights the period between the 1980s and 1999, and is thus especially relevant for those who want to understand the ways in which Dansaekhwa artists pursued ‘art for art’s sake’ while others joined the politically engaged Minjung art movement.

Chapter four is composed of texts written since 2000, reflecting on new and diverse approaches to Dansaekhwa, as evinced by Yun Nanjie’s key text on women’s position under the movement’s rubrics. The text also hints that there are still facets of the movement to be interrogated – its treatment of gender and its relationship with contemporary practices across the globe. This book lays the foundations for further exploration, thus providing a more stable ground for the rise of Dansaekhwa in the international artworld. Nayun Jang

Threads

by Sandeep Parmar, Nisha Ramayya, Bhanu Kapil Clinic, £5 (softcover) Calls to diversify the curriculum, decolonise the museum and dismantle what Sandeep Parmar calls the Western canon’s ‘inherent premise of universality, its coded whiteness’ raise the question of whether a work of art or literature can ever transcend the set of local historical circumstances in which it was produced. In this publication by independent poetry press Clinic, three experimental texts suggest that this is, if not the wrong question, at least not the only one. In a globalised world, how is it possible to formulate a new concept of place that doesn’t entail localism or nationalism, and what might that look like? Less an exclusionary ‘where’, Parmar suggests, than a parliament of overlapping voices or a pattern of interwoven histories.

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That identity might be constructed globally and in relation is hardly a new idea – and postcolonial thinkers including Édouard Glissant are acknowledged in Threads’ pages – but this pamphlet offers new models for how such a construction might shape a creative practice. Growing out of a richly poetic email correspondence between Parmar and Bhanu Kapil, whose family lived close to each other near Lahore before Partition, the opening essay deconstructs the universal human subject presupposed in Romantic poetry by the ‘lyric I’ (which presumes that the individual narrator can transcend the specific; ‘white male artist’ works too) in both form and subject matter. Drawing on post-humanist theorist Rosi Braidotti, the essay posits a ‘nomadic I’ that, by moving across boundaries and binaries (resident/

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foreigner or self/other), can begin to represent identities formed through migration, loss, intergenerational trauma and shared resistance.

Picking up the question of what such a fluid and polyphonic subject might look and sound like, Nisha Ramayya’s essay ‘Threads’ proposes a Tantric poetics (the Sanskrit root of tantra means ‘to weave’) that accommodates ‘multiple ways of being, ways of seeing, and ways of thinking and writing’. Yet the most affecting expression of these experiences is Bhanu Kapil’s quietly heartbreaking and angry ‘Avert the Icy Feeling’, a cycle of prose poems that lay bare what Parmar had earlier called the ‘inherently, inescapably othered’ experience of the diaspora writer. ‘Sorry,’ these notes on race and creative writing conclude, ‘trauma loop.’ Ben Eastham

The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium

by Isabelle Graw Sternberg Press, €25 (softcover)

The title of Isabelle Graw’s essential new book scatters anachronisms (‘love’, ‘success’) like mousetraps. While her definitions of such terms are both historically contingent and only ever cautiously meant, that wilful dissonance with the standard critical language of art is characteristic of her book’s unorthodox proposals on what painting might mean today. Even more striking is the cover itself, a wraparound reproduction of Antoine Watteau’s 1720 The Shop Sign of Gersaint, details of which are studded through the book, choruslike, as chapter divisions.

Graw’s book situates painting as a nexus of commercial and conceptual interests, just as Watteau’s painting-as-shop-sign served as both representation of the picture trade and its embodiment. The eighteenth century, during which both ‘painting’ and ‘love’ became institutionalised through art academies and Romantic discourses respectively, serves as one of the book’s historical touchstones. For Graw, it’s the portability of the painted canvas that makes it an ideal commodity, though of a special kind, whose uniqueness finds a perverse echo in the market for luxury goods.

Structurally, The Love of Painting embodies its own discursive strategy. Citing the significance of social networks for the authors of the medium’s ur-texts – from Leon Battista Alberti to Giorgio Vasari and André Félibien

– Graw’s book intersperses interviews with prominent living artists (among others Charline von Heyl, Merlin Carpenter and Jutta Koether), previously published reviews and new essays. The implication of all this is to restage Renaissance notions of painting as a distinctively intellectual practice. There’s no chance, however, of Graw being taken for a traditionalist. The term ‘painting’, here, is framed as a Foucauldian formation, in other words a historical structure that changes over time, despite retaining certain essential and unchanging characteristics. Painting’s ability to absorb itself into elements of the very media that get blamed for its murder (photography, installation, Conceptualism and so on) makes it both definitionally slippery and culturally and commercially vital. For Graw, it’s a two-way street, with ‘painting’ turning up, Zelig-like, as a rhetorical device in other media, whether it’s a tableau format in a video, or applied colour in three-dimensional work

by Isa Genzken or Rachel Harrison. That this somewhat belies the term ‘medium’ in the title is of a piece with her positioning of painting as gathering force through contradiction.

All of which begs a question that Graw herself repeatedly addresses to her interlocutors: what exactly is painting? Central to her analysis is her discussion of the medium’s ‘vitalistic fantasies’ from which its singular commercial and conceptual powers derive.

This ‘impression of animation’ is, as Graw argues, the real reason for painting’s regenerative abilities. From the quality of liveliness strived for by painters of the Renaissance, to the high modernist trope of the painting that paints itself, these effects of life force are, in a way, just that: mere effects that impute liveliness into dead matter. Yet Graw goes further, asking the ‘yes, but’ question that is the book’s crucial divergence from orthodoxy. Given that painting’s liveliness is mere effect, what accounts for its success?

It’s in her analyses of ostensibly affectless painting practices, such as Wade Guyton’s and Gerhard Richter’s, that Graw’s argument is teased out most compellingly, as paintings tend to trigger vitalistic projections regardless of the artist’s intentions. Attempts to point up the deadness of the medium are, in other words, doomed to fail, due to the pesky viewer and her vitalistic fantasies. These, of course, are especially helpful in the market, and it’s a credit to this book that the lessons of commerce are brought to bear on Graw’s analysis, since the medium’s history is unthinkable without them. Painting’s illusions of vitality illustrate the capitalist fantasy of a commodity’s intrinsic value: that it is somehow alive. After all, it’s not a painting you’re buying, it’s ‘a Richter’. It’s love, I suppose, that makes it feel that way.

Ben Street

Hybrid Child

by Mariko Ōhara, translated by Jodie Beck University of Minnesota Press, $19.95 (softcover) What happens when the machines we create set out to destroy their makers? This question is so deeply embedded in the genre of science fiction that it has become almost banal. And yet the fact that we ask it over and again is testament to the endless interpretations and speculations that answers to it can generate.

Mariko Ōhara’s 1990 novel Hybrid Child engages these speculations by blurring the line between humankind and robot, between maker and machine. Translated into English this year, it seems, nearly two decades on, more relevant than ever. With the proliferation of AI into realms of life and death, from healthcare to warfare, the question of machine morality is no longer theoretical: instead it signals a nottoo-distant future when consciousness itself

will need redefining. Ideas around ethics and belief systems weave throughout this speculative fiction-cum-fairytale, but at its core lies the question of what it means to be alive, a subject approached across complex, discursive plotlines.

The protagonist is a girl named Jonah, a ‘hybrid child’ whose consciousness and DNA have been fused to an AI military weapon, making her nominally immortal; nonetheless, when she escapes her creators, they attempt to destroy her.

Two centuries later, she finds herself on a planet called Caritas, which is governed and cared for by a mentally deteriorating ‘mother’ machine.

There she meets a gravely ill young man, who is encased, against his wishes, in a life-supporting robot provided by the planet’s mother; he would have preferred to die. In one short, thought-

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provoking chapter, Jonah’s ‘nanny’ robot tries to commit suicide, only to find herself unable to find peace. There are long, abstract passages of the novel that slip through timelines, with a distracting preoccupation with the notion of ‘God’ and religion, which makes the (albeit translated) prose and plot seem at times longwinded. The real charm of this book lies in the way Ōhara manages to turn the ‘destructive machines’ trope on its head by creating complex characters, humans and robots alike, through their actions, interactions and motivations, and, in particular, through the capacity of conscious beings to love one another. As for what it means to be alive – existentially rather than physically – Ōhara posits that ‘living things are only truly alive when they love something’. Fi Churchman

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ArtReview Asia is printed in the United Kingdom and China.Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview Asia (ISSN No: 2052-5346) is published four times per year by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London EC1Y OTH, England, United Kingdom.

Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover Zeng Fanzhi, Van Gogh I, 2017, oil on canvas, 100 × 100 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London

Words on the spine and on pages 19, 49 and 77 come from a worldatlas.com entry on kampongs

on pages 95 and 98 photography by Mikael Gregorsky correction Three works by the artist Cui Jie published on pages 50–52 of ArtReview Asia’s Summer edition are courtesy the artist and a private collection

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Meanwhile, on the other side of the world…

Art and politics in Brazil

by Oliver Basciano

facing page, both images 10 Bienal de São Paulo, 1969. © Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

above Protesters picket a talk by theorist Judith Butler at Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo, on 7 November 2017.

Photo: Fernando Bizerra Jr. Courtesy EFE/Alamy

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In 1967, on the eve of the opening of the 9th Bienal de São Paulo, police entered the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Ibirapuera Parque and removed a box sculpture by Cybele Varela, inside of which was a map of Brazil and a picture of a military general, and a series of paintings

by Quissak Jr that featured the Brazilian flag. Both were deemed unpatriotic; both were eventually destroyed. Varela was questioned by the DOPS, the secret police, narrowly avoiding arrest. The move by Brazil’s military government, then in its infancy, caused an outcry in the local press. Three years prior, generals from the army and navy (with a nod from the CIA) had overthrown the democratically elected government of João Goulart, and the incursion on the biennial was a small but early sign of how increasingly despotic the regime would become. By the end of 1968, censorship had become enshrined in the constitution through Institutional Act No. 5 (the most infamous of 17 such decrees that were issued by the military dictatorship, overruling the constitution and denying any recourse to judicial review), and in December, the month this new edict was delivered, authorities stormed the Bienal de Bahia to remove work deemed politically offensive or immoral. In May the following year police closed down an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, which was showing selected works from the 6th Biennale de Jeunes in Paris, deeming the art overly erotic in nature. The curators of the 1969 edition of São Paulo’s biennial were warned in writing that there would be trouble if they showed anything the regime deemed unacceptable: with many of Brazil’s artists now in exile, word spread internationally, and over 80 percent of the artists invited, both Brazilian and international, refused to take part in the tenth edition.

The Brazilian association of art critics went on strike around the same time, and by 1970 the American curator Kynaston McShine (who died earlier this year) was lamenting, ‘If you are an artist in Brazil, you know at least one friend who is being tortured’. In August, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and other international luminaries wrote an open letter protesting an arrest warrant issued for the critic Mário Pedrosa.

This historic attack on artistic rights was the canary in the coal mine for the far greater crimes committed by the regime afterwards.

Institutional Act No. 5 ushered in the so-called Years of Lead. Congress was disbanded and arbitrary arrests, imprisonment without trial, kidnapping and torture (which included rape and castration) dramatically increased.

This year’s edition of the biennial comes at a particularly nervous time for liberal and/or left-leaning citizens of Brazil (to which politics the majority of the country’s artworld subscribes). The past two years have seen a resurgence in rightwing activism, the latest wave of which has repeatedly targeted the country’s art scenes, in part emboldened by the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the new presidency of conservative Michel Temer. In October, artist Wagner Schwartz was forced to flee the country after threats on his life following a nude performance that took place at the MAM de São Paulo. The work, La Bête (2017), called for audience participation, and Schwartz caught the attention of social conservatives (particularly members of the Movimento Brasil Livre, a rightwing pressure group run by charismatic twenty-two-yearold Kim Kataguiri) after an online video documented the presence of children among the crowd. When it was picketed by conservative and religious activists in October, Santander Cultural closed Queermuseu: Cartografias da Diferença na Arte Brasileira, an exhibition at the bank’s cultural centre in Porto Alegre that surveyed work by the country’s LGBT artists. In November a crowd gathered outside a lecture given by Judith Butler and burned an effigy of the American theorist.

It is in this climate, which exists alongside Operation Car Wash, a massive corruption scandal that has led to indictments of politicians from all parties, and rising inequality as the economy tumbles, that the country will go to the polls on 7 October for a general election (exactly a month after the doors to the biennial pavilion open).

With former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in prison for corruption (but still running for election), Jair Bolsonaro, a candidate on the far right, is predicted to pick up between 19 and 22 percent of the votes, perhaps more following the attempt on his life while he was campaigning in early September, making him a favourite for the highest office (Temer, whose popularity is at an unprecedented low, ruled himself out of the race in February). Last year the controversy surrounding Queermuseu was brought up on a talkshow on which Bolsonaro appeared. Repeating his point three times, the candidate said he thought it “necessary to shoot” those involved in the exhibition.

Bolsonaro is a politician who knows how to gain and game attention (in August his son was photographed meeting Steve Bannon in New York, and there is a suggestion that he might hold Donald Trump as a role model in this respect). He definitely plans to disband the Ministry of Culture, moving some of its responsibilities to the

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education department. At a campaign meeting in Curitiba, in front of 2,000 supporters, many uniformed and armed, he railed against “big-time artists” and promised to reform the Rouanet Law, through which companies can pay some of their taxes into cultural initiatives, a mechanism without which most of Brazil’s public museums and theatres would be unlikely to survive. This is a minor worry, of course, compared to what else a Bolsonaro presidency might bring. The politician has claimed Portuguese slave-traders “never set foot in Africa” and has vowed to cancel affirmative-action laws designed to help black and indigenous Brazilians in a country that is already racially divided. He is antiabortion, anti-gay rights and in favour of loosening gun-control laws. In August he appointed Antônio Hamilton Mourão as his running mate, an army general who has previously claimed the military should seize power if Brazil’s courts do not root out corruption or deal with a murder rate that in 2017 was the highest ever recorded in the country.

In his statements trailing this year’s biennial, the curator of the 2018 edition, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, the director of the New York and Caracas-based Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, has eschewed direct commentary on Brazil’s politics, although he does note that he hopes the show will investigate ideas of ‘presence, attention and the way that the environment influences our experience’. What is obvious however is his desire to widen the conversation beyond the domestic situation, with the Spaniard inviting five international artists – Alejandro Cesarco (born in Uruguay), Antonio Ballester Moreno (Spain), Claudia Fontes (Argentina), Mamma Andersson (Sweden) and Wura-Natasha Ogunji (US) – as well as Brazilians Waltércio Caldas and Sofia Borges to each curate their own mini-exhibition under the biennial title Affective Affinities. There is no reason why Pérez-Barreiro should necessarily engage in local politics, and indeed the exhibition

might prove a welcome respite for its domestic visitors during an intense time for the Brazilian public (Ariane Roder, a political scientist at the Rio de Janeiro Federal University’s business school told Bloomberg News that, for whoever won the presidential election, ‘bringing calm to society will be the challenge’).

It will however be a biennial whose success is to be measured, at least in Brazil, against the backdrop of the country’s current troubles. You might deem it naive to think, in times of trouble, that art, however political its message, can be anything but the victim of autocratic regimes, but the Bienal de São Paulo is not a niche affair: the 2016 edition saw a footfall of 900,000; it is the second oldest biennial in the world and commands international attention. These factors give it a certain amount of power. Pérez-Barreiro’s exhibition should not illustrate the news, but it could offer a space in which the artworld, both at home and abroad, can mobilise for battles ahead.

Much work has already been done. Artists, gallerists and curators from the country issued an open letter in October last year calling on ‘all democratic forces’ to mobilise against the looming threats to social and cultural freedom ‘in the streets, in the legislative houses, in the courts of justice and in all the available means of communication’.

The biennial offers one such platform for action.

Writing in 1973, recalling Brazil’s first dictatorship under Getúlio Vargas during the 1930s and 40s, Mário Pedrosa wrote: ‘A tepid mood set in. The monotonous, suffocating days of the dictatorship were prolonged. Exhibitions of this or that by greater or lesser talents opened and closed, only to disappear without leaving behind so much as an echo.’ Pedrosa’s point was that there are moments at which the types of exhibitions we are making matter more than they do at others. Not even necessarily for the present, but for the art history of the future.

Still from an online video documenting La Bête

by Wagner Schwartz performed at MAM São Paulo in October 2017. Courtesy Paulo Sergio / YouTube

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