ArtReview Asia Autumn & Winter 2014

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BACK TO ORIGIN LIANG SHAOJI 09.26 10.26 2014

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WEST BUND ART & DESIGN SHANGHAI SEPTEMBER 2014

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Baggage!

ArtReview Asia hopes you’ve got your suitcase packed (and that if you have, it’s not like ArtReview Asia’s Tumi number, from which one zip-tag goes missing every time a baggage handler chucks it into an aeroplane hold). This autumn there are biennials popping up all over the place: Yokohama (OK, that’s a triennial), São Paulo, Gwangju, Taipei, Shanghai… But just in case you’re staying home like normal people, ArtReview Asia has thoughtfully rounded up most of the curators of these events to interrogate them about their plans in the hope of understanding what this fetish for biennials is all about. ArtReview Asia remembers Yasumasa Morimura, director of this year’s Yokohama Triennale, stating in an early press release that ‘since 2000, international exhibitions have sprung up everywhere, both in Japan and abroad, and there is no longer anything special or different about them’. In this issue biennial curators attempt to tell you what is. Whether you believe them or not is your own concern ;) but as a special bonus ArtReview Asia tugged at the sleeve of philosopher Graham Harman until he explained why his theories (and those associated with the gang to which he – willingly or unwillingly – belongs) are having such a big impact on those curators’ thoughts right now. So don’t say that ArtReview Asia doesn’t spoil you!

While ArtReview Asia is pretty excited about the unpacking of cover artist Lee Bul’s artistic baggage, this issue also contains the inaugural collection of FutureGreats, something that ArtReview Asia’s older sibling ArtReview has been doing annually in this format since 2007. In it, ArtReview Asia forces a panel of established artists, curators and critics to name less well-known artists who they think will be making an impact on art over the coming 12 months and then – incredibly – to tell you all about them!

The spoiling never stops… although in the case of FutureGreats it couldn’t have happened without the support of its sponsor EFG International, who ArtReview Asia would like to thank. As one of the signs that ArtReview Asia almost tripped over in a darkened gallery in Yokohama implies, politeness is everything. ArtReview Asia

Everything

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ArtReview Asia vol 2 no 2 Autumn & Winter 2014

Art Previewed 21

Previews

by Martin Herbert 23

Points of View

by Sam Jacob, Du Qingchun, Mike Watson & Andrew Berardini 29

page 26 Babak Golkar, Assisted Reconstruction, 2014, paper cutout from original framed print, straw, plastic water bottle and watercolour, 31 × 25 × 8 cm.

Courtesy Third Line, Dubai

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Art Featured 37

Lee Bul

by Wenny Teo 38

Who Goes, What Are? Alternative Art Practices of China

by Elaine W. Ho and Edward Sanderson 62

What Frame for What Modernism: Notes Towards the Shanghai Biennale

by Anselm Franke 48

Kao Chung-Li

by Yu Wei 68

Charles Esche on the São Paulo Bienal Interview by Oliver Basciano 50

I Asked the River Tonight Artist project by Charwei Tsai and Tsering Tashi Gyalthang 72

Jessica Morgan on the Gwangju Biennale Interview by Helen Sumpter and Louise Darblay 52 Nicolas Bourriaud on the Taipei Biennial Interview by J.J. Charlesworth 54 Graham Harman on Speculative Realism Interview by J.J. Charlesworth 58

FutureGreats Eleven artist to look out for, selected by Karen Archey, Freya Chou, Brian Curtin, Louis Ho, Jeff Leung, Aimee Lin, Laura McLean-Ferris, Naeem Mohaiemen, Park Chan-kyong, Niru Ratnam, Sakarin Krue-On 83

page 38 Lee Bul, Via Negativa II (detail), 2014 (installation view, Lehmann Maupin, New York, 2014), polycarbonate sheet, aluminium frame, acrylic and polycarbonate mirrors, steel, stainless steel, mirror, two-way mirror, LED lighting, silkscreen ink, 275 × 500 × 700 cm. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong

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David Zwirner

525 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 +1 212 727 2070 537 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 +1 212 517 8677 24 Grafton Street London W1S 4EZ +44 20 3538 3165 davidzwirner.com

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Art Reviewed 97

Exhibitions 98

Books 112

8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, by Yung Ma Waheeda Baloch and Schehzad Mughal, by Zarmeené Shah Ten Million Rooms of Yearning. Sex in Hong Kong, by Xiaoyu Weng Hans van Dijk, by Edward Sanderson Lu Yang, by Mariagrazia Costantino Rashid Johnson, by Mark Rappolt Apichatpong Weerasethakul, by Gabriela Jauregui Hiroshi Sugimoto, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel The Permeability of Certain Matters, by Jeanne Gerrity Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks, by Sergey Guskov The St Petersburg Paradox, by David Everitt Howe Sapporo International Art Festival 2014, by Mark Rappolt Manifesta 10, by Gesine Borcherdt

Ways of Looking: How to Experience Contemporary Art, by Ossian Ward 100 Painters of Tomorrow, edited by Kurt Beers Dear Navigator, by Hu Fang Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj,

by Nadya Tolokonnikova and Slavoj Žižek THE STRIP 116 OFF THE RECORD 122

page 102 Lu Yang, C-Baby Trotting Horse Lamp, 2014, video, monitors.

Courtesy the artist and Ren Space, Shanghai

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R O B I N

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having been there September 18–November 8 407 Pedder Building 12 Pedder Street Central, Hong Kong lehmannmaupin.com

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Previewed Yokohama Triennale through 3 November Busan Biennale 20 September – 22 November Mediacity Seoul 2 September – 23 November The Language of Human Consciousness Athr Gallery, Jeddah through 10 October

Wang Jianwei Guggenheim, New York 31 October – 16 February

Tang Dixin Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai 15 November – 10 December

Babak Golkar Third Line, Dubai 10 November – 12 January

Sung Hwan Kim Artsonje Center, Seoul through 30 December

Li Jikai Amy Li Gallery, Beijing 8 September – 27 September

Liang Shaoji ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai 26 September – 26 October

3 Truong Cong Tung, Magical Garden, 2012–14, found photograph taken by the patients at Magical Garden, Long An province, Vietnam. Courtesy the artist

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Kudos to Morimura Yasumasa: invited to steer 1 the latest Yokohama Triennale, the Japanese appropriation artist has not only underscored its coastal location in his frothing title, Art Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the Sea of Oblivion, but simultaneously acknowledged the apparent craziness of handing such a big event’s reins to a mere artist. Inevitable tsunami allusions aside, though, Morimura’s chosen moniker also deliberately points to the risk-taking required to pull biennial culture out of its current stultification. Presumably as per his referencing of Ray Bradbury’s well-known dystopian novel, the artist has invented 11 ‘chapters’ (with two introductions): these, balancing Japanese and non-Japanese artists, include minimalist insularity by 13 figures ranging from Kazimir

Malevich and Agnes Martin to Vija Celmins, Kimura Hiroshi and Felix Gonzalez-Torres (and, somehow, Josh Smith); a show by artists who create borderline-regressive narratives and private worlds, from Gregor Schneider to Joseph Cornell (and, somehow, Andy Warhol); and, as a sendoff, Drifting in a Sea of Oblivion, featuring Danh Vō, Bas Jan Ader, Akram Zaatari, Yanagi Miwa and more. It has promise, and we look forward, in three years, to the event once subtitled Time Crevasse calling itself Apocalypse’s Gaping Maw, or similar.

No such forbiddingness at the Busan 2 Biennale, which is themed around Inhabiting the World and posits artists as, collectively, a kind of speculative think-tank: one imagining the future via, according to French artistic

director Olivier Kaeppelin, ‘the purest spiritual and artistic messages possible’. If that notion rather suggests Ezra Pound’s well-known conception of artists as the ‘antennae of the race’, specifically it breaks down here into seven discrete departments, from ‘Architectural Space’ to ‘Cosmos’ to ‘Animality’, populated by artists including Fabrice Hyber, Huang Yong Ping and Sui Jianguo. And it wouldn’t be a twenty-first-century biennial without also including a welter of auxiliary shows and events, so there’s a 50-year archive of contemporary Korean art, an exhibition organised by four young Asian curators, an academic programme, an international exchange programme and a meet-the-artists public-participation programme.

1 Yanagi Miwa, 1 / 32 Scale Model for Mobile Stage Truck, 2014.

Courtesy the artist

2 Sui Jianguo, Growing, 2013, cast bronze, 57 × 35 × 50 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Scheffel, Bad Homburg

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4 Seckin Pirim, Oyku, 2014, car paint on 80 sheets of 200g Bristol paper cutout. Courtesy the artist

5 Wang Jianwei, Time Temple, 2014, acrylic and oil on canvas, 210 × 301 cm.

Photo: Xu Boxin. Courtesy the artist and the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Hong Kong

And just for the sake of overkill, one more include Haegue Yang, Éric Baudelaire and Lina the atypical, the alternative. Extracted here, Selander; a screening segment, appropriate to then, is Sama Mara’s long-term project to find 3 expo. Mediacity Seoul, whose eighth edition, overseen by Seoul-based artist and film director a cineaste artistic director, includes the Otolith a geometric equivalent to music; and there’s Park Chan-kyong, rivals Yokohama for lively Group and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. a spread of practitioners going back to Josef titling: Ghosts, Spies and Grandmothers. ImpresOn to shows with less than 50 participants, Albers and forward to Sol LeWitt, Rasheed sively, the triple-decker nomenclature does Araeen, Gebran Tarazi, Monir Farmanfarmaian 4 then: The Language of Human Consciousness, actually make sense. ‘Ghosts’ is shorthand for ‘the largest exhibition in Saudi Arabia on arts and Richard Deacon. the show’s interest in ‘silenced spirits whose inspired by the study of geometry’ – fierce Perfection is probably the last thing on 5 Wang Jianwei’s mind when he makes art, since presence has been erased by dominant historical competition for that title, no doubt – nevernarratives’, addressed by artists considering theless sounds sharp, features ‘over 40’ artists for the Beijing-based cross-media artist, art – ambivalently – ritual, mysticism, etc. ‘Spies’ sourced via collaborations with international constitutes a ‘continuous rehearsal’ analogous relates to a second thematic, Asia’s experience galleries such as London’s Lisson, and has to making sense of reality. In his substantial of colonialism and the Cold War, and ‘how a Euclidean arc. It starts with geometry as Guggenheim show, Time Temple – the fruit of an artist can completely reverse the meaning equivalent to perfection, purity and intelligence Wang being the first commissioned artist for the of spy’; and ‘grandmothers’ – tying everything (ie, the historical understanding of the science) institution’s Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation together – refers to living witnesses who’ve and moves into a contemporary usage of Chinese Art Initiative – what’s being rehearsed experienced the ages of ghosts and spies. Artists geometry as a way of exploring imperfection, and never likely to be completed is the human

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attitude to, and experience of, time. Expect conditions of their wholesale environment’. his compatriots in the so-called Ego Generation painting, emphatically improvised and unAdmittedly we’re not entirely sure what that are turning inward, away from the cultural planned sculpture, a film inspired by Kafka’s means, unless the gallery is going to resemble politics of, say, the Cynical Realists, towards Metamorphosis (1915) and live theatre relating to a shelf-filled warehouse. (The image we’ve anxious psychological landscapes, as his delibFrank Lloyd Wright’s ramp, to circle ambiguseen shows a flower in a mineral water bottle.) erately childlike yet beclouded paintings ously around the subject, with a great emphasis The time-related element, though, touches emphasise. Sunset (2014), exemplary of his recent on relativism: every truth, for Wang, undercuts on how the individual experiences time while work, finds slumped, dreamily varisized figures another one. negotiating his emotional distress under the at the edge of a wasteland under a toxic sky.

Time is allegedly fundamental, too, to consistent conditions of advanced capitalism.

Also reflecting a disquiet that doesn’t have 7 6 Babak Golkar’s The Return Project, which Time, time, time: ‘When I grew up,’ Li Jikai a directly politicised outlet, and that is perhaps 8 the more insidious for it, Tang Dixin makes constitutes the Iran-raised, Vancouver-based has said, ‘we mainly struggled to cope with artist’s second show at Dubai’s Third Line life, accept arrangement, become who we are work that gallerists and viewers alike might Gallery. Swerving away from a practice that, now… what I only know is that we seem to approach with a measure of trepidation. His in the past, has involved painting, print and be not really the creator or participant of our work, after all, has involved – among many other ceramics, among other media, Golkar here takes own life, but rather, a spectator, dazed, isolated things – putting plaster casts on gallery visitors readymade consumer items and disassembles from the group, then, time passes by.’ Parallel (in the explanatorily titled Rest Is the Best Way of and reassembles them ‘within the commercial in some ways to a drift towards insularity, Li and Revolution No.1, 2013) and constructing enormous

7 Li Jikai, Sunset, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 200 × 200 cm.

Courtesy Amy Li Gallery, Beijing

6 Babak Golkar, Assisted Reconstruction, 2014, paper cutout from original framed print, straw, plastic water bottle and watercolour, 31 × 25 × 8 cm.

Courtesy Third Line, Dubai

8 Tang Dixin, I Will Be Back Soon, 2008,performance.

Courtesy Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai

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on Seoul’s modern history and that of his mechanised installations. Beyond that, Tang’s family – centred on the city’s Hyundai not an easy artist to pin down. His paintings Apartments, once cheap and now very much feel fretful but unspecific: see, for example, not – allusions to Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Man Was Caught (2009), a figure with his films from the French New Wave, and the head trapped in a long, narrow slot in a wall, ‘tempering’ process that, Sung has written, or the figure being violently pinched in Torment connects cause with effect. Even if you can (2013). In 2010 Tang was arrested for making follow the allusions, what’s there is deliberatevideos while jumping around in the Shanghai ly fragmented, images bouncing off mirrored subway. One wonders what his explanation surfaces, and architectural stage sets interwas, or if he had one. spersed among the films. Though if you can’t, One can cast around for some time trying 9 to explain Temper Clay (2012), Sung Hwan soak up the mood: the whole thing, Sung has said, is effectively a poem.

Kim’s extensive video and installation, which 10 A quarter-century in the making, Liang graced the opening of Tate Modern’s Tanks Shaoji’s proliferating Nature Series has, at its – their sector for film and performance-related core, the Chinese characters ‘Yuan’, which refer art – in 2012. Now bringing the work home, to genesis, the start of everything, and also as it were, the artist rolls together reflections

nirvana but for Liang are synonymous with infinity, while the central thematic is the silkworm and the process of reincarnation.

For Liang this subject has extensive philosophical ramifications (connecting East and West: Heidegger, he notes, who profoundly connected being and time, read closely in the Tao Te Ching). And the silkworm, relatedly, is symbolic of his conception of ‘yuan’, connecting time and space via the literal transformative thread it spins. The result, in any case, ranges from paintings to videos to huge multimedia installations, naturally often using silk. See, for example, Snow Cover (2014), which intersects finely spun silk with – aptly for the mental constructive process that Liang’s art suggests – building supplies. Martin Herbert

9 Sung Hwan Kim (in musical collaboration with dogr), Temper Clay (Fireplace), 2012, HD video, B/W to colour, sound, 23 min 41 sec. © the artist 2012.Courtesy the artist and Wilkinson, London

10 Liang Shaoji, Snow Cover, 2014, silk, metal, brick, plastics, living supplies, 120 × 240 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Points of View Sam Jacob It’s not fantasy but reality that’s kinky…

Mike Watson Football failure may have added to Italy’s woes, but some recent art projects demonstrate the nation’s resilience

Du Qingchun Desire and the imperceptible feminine in Black Coal, Thin Ice

Andrew Berardini Artists run Los Angeles

Sam Jacob It’s not fantasy but reality that’s kinky…

We all have fetishes – things onto which we project our internal desires, objects that take on a significance far beyond their material form.

You art people may think it’s particular to your clique, but we’ve all had it: that moment when we feel a desperate attraction to a thing, an uncontrollable desire for… it. Whatever that ‘it’ might be.

Yet the relationship of our subconscious to the material world – via the fetish object – is more predictable than that. Think of the un­re­constructed Top Gear/Clarksonian lust for fast cars. In it we see – transparently – a shallow sublimation of sex (the lust for aerodynamic curves) and power (the guttural roar of an engine). Everyone from the Beach Boys to Bruce Springsteen has written songs about that kind of thing. But more important than popcultural acceptance is the fact that it’s exactly this sudden rush of desire for stuff that provides the foundation for consumer culture.

Expert consumer psychologists work deep in the military industrial complex employing theoretical psychological approaches that might artificially trigger our temporal lobes. Or at least charge sizeable fees for trying. Design, advertising, packaging and display are all created in 29 of object-lust. the hope of triggering that burst But let’s head to a place where desire, objects and commercialism intersect without any need to sublimate, where sex is sex, not a circuitous set of relationships centred on multinational automobile brands. Sex shops sell something that is in some ways simpler: desire turned into the stuff of desire: fantasy made silicon.

Yet here, where we might expect an unrestrained id-world, we find instead a shallow set of references, a world of strange anachronisms,

of faux-medieval studded leather, of oldhad a 15-minute set, I couldn’t manage four. fashioned classroom discipline, the obscure That’s a severe piece of clothing.’

In Julien Temple’s Sex Pistols documentary world of equestrianism represented in harnesses The Filth and the Fury (2000), Lydon talks more and riding crops, early-twentieth-century warabout the fetishwear. “It’s fascinating how fare in gas masks. I know we live in an achronic people can get themselves into such a predicaworld of mixed-up images cut loose from their ment that the only way they can have sex is origins, but, quite frankly, this is odd. These are in a facemask and a rubber T-shirt… How does references that are almost exclusively fetishit become that way? It becomes like that for you scene-centric, references that are outside the because you just cannot face reality.” languages of nonscene objects. They are, for all But maybe what’s really happening is but the very oldest among us, things from exactly the opposite. Rather than escaping realthe past. But perhaps their fetish status lies in ity, kink’s narrow set of historical references their anachronism; their contemporary redunallows us to engage and act out very real issues. dancy provides the space for fantasy.

Its aesthetic hasn’t emerged from our own subAt the vanilla end of sex-as-object-design is underwear of c­onscious undergrowth. Rather it comes heavily the past recycled as freighted with cultural meaning. It’s a kit of The author channels the high-end fantasy parts that allows us to act out real-world issues his inner Adolf Loos with a comment on of the present. The of politics and power. Maybe that’s why, as an ladies’ undergarments stockings and corsets aesthetic, kink is so dull; it’s not a no-holdsof, say, Agent barred opening-up of our own inner psyche but Provocateur. But the aesthetic of more full-on a set of lowest-common-denominator shared kink is no stranger to the mainstream either. reference points that allows a social dialogue to occur.

From the infamous King’s Road shop Sex, owned by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne If you are looking for real perversity, it’s Westwood, to Rihanna, pop culture is littered in Clarkson’s drooling consumer-lust over the bonnet of an Italian sports car, closer to the with the shock tactic of kink aesthetics. Why? strange phenomenon of objectophilia, which Attention, for sure. But shouldn’t the perversity sees strong sexual and romantic desire towards of this cultural inversion have worn off almost things that are not set up to be desired or de40 years after the furious dawn of punk?

Of course, there are intrinsic qualities embed- sir­able: Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, who ‘married’ ded in kink design: restraint, punishment, the Berlin Wall (‘the best and sexiest wall ever power control and submission. Johnny Rotten existed!’), for example. Of course, the fall of (né Lydon) describes his experience of a McLaren/ the Berlin Wall – celebrated by many – was a Westwood Sex-era rubber top: ‘I wore it, tragedy for Mrs Berliner-Mauer. ‘What they did actually, at one of the first Sex was awful. They mutilated my husband.’

Johnny Rotten: The deeply kinky practice is what’s hidden Pistols gigs, and collapsed from not such dehydration. Even though we only in plain sight.

a tough guy

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Du Qingchun Desire and the imperceptible feminine in Black Coal, Thin Ice The publicity campaign in mainland China for Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014), written and dire­cted by Diao Yinan, began this year following the film’s award-winning showing at the Berlin Inter­ national Film Festival. The selling points of the film, the Chinese title of which, Bai Ri Yan Huo, means daytime fireworks, were determined to be love and suspense – a characterisation that has become something of a joke. In truth the film has nothing to do with true love or genuine suspense; rather, it addresses a specific aspect of the frigid state of love in China.

Strangelove The film follows a hostage, Wu Zhizhen, a young and beautiful laundry worker played by Gwei Lun-Mei, around whom a series of murders occurs.

The principal male role goes to a disgraced excop, Zhang Zili, who hunts for her; other characters include Wu’s husband and various men in her life. The fact that the female prota­gonist in the film is a hostage is not only central to the plot but also to the creative libido of the filmmaker.

Only a filmgoer with a robust imagination capable of filling in the blanks will appreciate the love Wu experiences in the film. From the moment that Strange highs and strange Zhang, played by Liao Fan, lays lows eyes on Wu, she might be understood as his quarry – an opportunity for professional redemption. But she is also a surrogate focal point for his stifled desire.

The repression of Zhang’s sexuality is clearly portrayed from the onset: his wife leaves him, and the filmmaker places a lingering emphasis on the finality of their last sexual encounter, directly after which she gives him his divorce papers. It is also the film’s only complete sex scene – a result of the filmmaker’s psychological approach, not the censorship system.

Zhang’s inhibition is Diao’s projection.

Black Coal, Thin Ice is a film about repression, and the first scene depicts a vividly repressive atmo­ sphere. A coal truck carrying a mysterious package trundles through the foreground; in the background, a military vehicle emits a resounding military song. If this were a film that contained a powerful Strangelove exploration of love (though repressed), then it would start at some later point, perhaps one at which the male protagonist takes a date to ride on a Ferris wheel; a criminal investigation would not be the focus of the subsequent plot. And if love were allowed to develop, then the final scene would not be one of fireworks set off in the daytime.

If Black Coal, Thin Ice were a film about love, then the imprisonment of women by Wu’s husband, Liang Zhijun (played by Wang Xuebing), would be more than an aspect of a criminal case; it would be a labyrinth of male desire and emotion, the counterpoint to the sterile world of the male protagonist. Similarly, if it were a film about love, then Wu would have something of her own initiative, rather than being solely the object of various imprisonments and molestations: from her client, one of the murder victims who had his fur coat washed in the laundry before his death, to her boss, the owner of the laundry, who is completely corrupted by desire; from her husband, who imprisons her through love, to the detective Zhang, who seeks in her the resusci­ tation of his shelved That’s how my sexuality – in short, love goes… to every man in the film.

The emotions and desires in Black Coal, Thin Ice are encapsulated in one scene, a rendezvous on a frozen lake:

the beautiful Wu triggers the impulses of multiple men, spawning in their minds bilateral relationships with her, and their interactions with each other spawn further trilateral imaginings. In the rational mind of the oppressed male, people, in the big picture, become nothing more than dark shadows spun around on a quiet globe. In a libidinous male dark fantasy, desire is as sharp as an ice skate – sharp enough to cut throats. Thus Black Coal, Thin Ice forbids the occurrence of love. Desire is completely repressed throughout, and its distorted or sublimated forms shape the film’s most brilliant moment: in broad daylight, Zhang launches fireworks pell-mell into the sky as a way of bidding farewell to the vanished woman.

The China of the recent past becomes a romantic lament about repression.

While Black Coal, Thin Ice contains symbolic visualisations of desire and its repression, any narrative exploration of the subject is largely sidelined. Instead, we see a filtered version of a Northeast China city become the original source of this visualisation, and the fragmentary images that cannot be authentically incorporated into the dramatic narrative only intensify the repressed atmosphere. Included among these fragments are an obese female bystander during a gunfight, a horse crossing a gloomy street and filmgoers in a shabby cinema, their glasses flickering in the darkness.

This last example, a film within a film, the 1986 classic Lucky 13 (aka Sister Thirteen), contains typical martial-arts-movie fighting sounds that hark back to earlier times, piercing the estranged and filtered contemporary reality, and allowing Black Coal, Thin Ice to become a dirge for its epoch.

Translated from Chinese by Daniel Nieh

Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai Ri Yan Huo), 2014, dir Diao Yinan. Courtesy China Magic Film

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Mike Watson Football failure may have added to Italy’s woes, but some recent art projects demonstrate the nation’s resilience As the summer break nears, a brief tour from Venice through Rome to Naples and on to Palermo confirms a great deal of resignation in a country in which the ignominy of a groupstage exit from the World Cup can now be added to a list of other woes: corruption, financial crisis, mass unemployment, homelessness, lack of strong government, growing irrelevance on the world and European stage, and so on.

Yet there is also a continued resilience and ability to mask the worsening reality of a country in decline with a sense of theatricality and invention that goes to the core of what it is to be Italian.

In Venice, the ‘Art Night’ – held on 21 June – saw museums and foundations across the city host temporary exhibitions and performances. Exhibiting artists included Gli Impresari (The Impresarios), a collective comprising Edoardo Aruta, Marco Di Giuseppe and Rosario Sorbello, who are currently in residence with Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa.

In collaboration with the collective How We Dwell (Andrea Grotto, Adriano Valeri, Cristiano Menchini and Marco Gobbi), they installed their Machina del Tuono (Thunder Machine, 2014).

The thunder ‘machine’ – installed in a courtyard in Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice’s museum of the eighteenth century – comprised a huge opensided pyramid made up of wooden slats that incorporated metal plates horizontally stacked at varying intervals from its base to its pointed top. Derived from machines used in Italian theatre of the seventeenth century, the Machina del Tuono made a periodic thunderous din as its metal plates were dropped one upon

the other via an automated pulley system.

The work is part of preparations to restage Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s stage play L’Impresario (1644) – a work that prefigured modernist self-criticality in the arts – complete with newly built stage props from the era. The use of such props, clunky, mechanical and cumbersome, points to the possibility of spectacle in an age when computer technology hides the mechanisations of illusion. It is perhaps just such a capacity for a physically engaged illusion – involving machinic devices and human performance – that has led to a revived interest in theatre within the contemporary arts in Italy and elsewhere. It is an antidote to the wired-in culture of social media.

In Palermo – home to the recently closed occupied theatre Teatro Garibaldi Aperto and the newly occupied Teatro Mediterraneo – Rome-based artist Stefano Canto’s All That Fall, an installation presented in conjunction with cultural association N38E13, addresses the importance of the theatrical stage in times of precarity. The installation comprises a floor made of scaffolding boards measuring 80sqm and installed in the Cappella di Santa Maria dell’ Incoronazione, a building to the north of Palermo’s cathedral, in which successive kings of Sicily were once crowned. Visitors are invited to walk the boards – a proportion of which are deliberately made unstable by the artist – in the chapel’s open-roofed loggia, causing a seesawing Stefano Canto, All That Fall, 2014 (installation view, Cappella di Santa Maria dell’ Incoronazione, Palermo).

Courtesy the artist and N38E13, Palermo

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motion as they walk around the walled courtyard formed by this roofless yet walled structure.

The piece makes reference to the state of Palermo’s infrastructure, with bomb-damaged buildings from the Second World War being a symbol for the stasis caused by corruption.

The name of the work comes from the title of a radio play written by Samuel Beckett and broadcast by the BBC in 1957, which tells of the meeting of two elderly spouses that is held up by a delayed train, the cause of which is unclear. It is this sense of delay, of something yet to arrive and of something unnameable being amiss, that Canto evokes through the laying of a near-perfect yet faulted floor, rendered in scaffolding boards to draw attention to the crisis in building construction and city design across Italy. What was evoked as the public teetered, stumbled and all but fell on 3 July, the installation’s opening night, was the sense that, for all the deceptions that characterise Italian political life, so long as it is possible to create illusions, so long, further, as it is possible to act, it is and will be possible to act differently. In Italy, from north to south, there is hope in the unified sense of theatricality that has historically guided its people through worse times than now. From the recent resignation of Venice’s mayor for siphoning off funds from the MOSE dam project – being built to protect Venice from flooding – to haphazard town planning in Palermo that has left parts of its centre desolate, the public must tread the precarious floor that has been laid for them. It is they who make Italy despite the lack or mismanagement of government spending on infrastructure, welfare and the arts.

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Andrew Berardini Artists run Los Angeles New galleries inaugurate and old ones expand into warehouses or occupy city blocks, art museums roll out billion-dollar building plans and hundred-million-dollar endowments, and collectors, softly loafered and gently tanned, are not without their silky influence – but artists still run Los Angeles. During the short tenure of Jeffrey Deitch at the head of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the damning crack that eventually broke his contested regime occurred when four artist-trustees quit the board in protest following the dismissal of chief curator Paul Schimmel. Though Los Angeles has yet to witness artists opening a museum in the manner in which collectors ever more commonly do (next to open in LA will be a museum set up by Guess founder Maurice Marciano), we’ve seen more than a few significant and/or recently anointed artists opening up their own galleries.

Youngsters hanging a sign on the door and putting out a bucket of beer for a studio gallery happens commonly enough almost anywhere, but these new artist-run galleries in Los Angeles, at their boldest, rival museums in the scope and quality of their programming and, with varying degrees of gentility, challenge traditional commercial models.

Laura Owens (with her New York gallerist, Gavin Brown) opened up the nearly 1900sqm of 356 S. Mission in January 2013 with a massive array of her own paintings. This single show elevated an already respected artist to one of the most important and influential in the city.

Hardly a pop-up, the building stayed open, with artist books and multiples shop Ooga Booga adding a satellite in the foyer, and a series of exhibitions, performances, publication launches, conferences, screenings, talks, meditations and brunches taking place in the first-floor galleries, while a working speakeasy occupied the basement, making 356 S. Mission arguably the most important new gallery in America. The exhibitions included Alex Katz’s

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and Sturtevant’s first shows in LA in over 15 years and a display of Scott Reeder’s epic set for his 2014 lunar feature-film Moon Dust (with pantomime performances from underground heroes Ian Svenonius, No Age, Geneva Jacuzzi, et al); dance from Michael Clark, rare if not unique to the city; and performance art from William Leavitt, Emily Sundblad and Sue Tompkins.

Not a few of these are drawn from Gavin Brown’s programme and are listed as gallery exhibitions on its website, but certainly not all of them are, and the generosity and inclusivity of the space I don’t think would be possible in any squarely conventional commercial venture.

Inspired by Owens’s example perhaps, Canadian artist Jon Pylypchuk has opened a gallery with writer James Bae not far from 356 S. Mission, called Grice Bench. Oscar Tuazon has opened A Corner Door out of one of his studios, also east of the Los Angeles River. Recent market favourite the Brazilian-born, Austria-raised painter Christian Rosa has opened up a space called 1704 Hooper Projects with all the trappings of a blue-chip gallery (high clean white walls, well-apportioned lighting, polished concrete floors, an easy few hundred square metres of exhibition space) in the front of his studio near downtown. And on the other side of town in Santa Monica, artist couple Pentti Monkkonen and Liz Craft have opened what seemed at first like a straight-ahead atelier space called Paradise Garage (yes, out of a garage), but which has since been enthusiastically participating in art fairs and doing international gallery swaps (this summer with Berlin’s Supportico Lopez).

The birth of contemporary art in Los Angeles began with a gallery launched by artist Ed Kienholz and curator Walter Hopps. Their gallery, Ferus, held exhibitions from the first big Chain & the Gang performing at 356 S. Mission Road, 7 January 2014. Photo: Max Schwartz.

Courtesy 356 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles

generation of internationally influential LA artists, including Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha and Wallace Berman. Kienholz left early and Hopps let the dream go commercial under the influence of furniture salesman Irving Blum, but a space initiated by an artist is nevertheless where it all began. The recently ascendant Night Gallery began as an artist project by Davida Nemeroff in a tiny black-painted storefront in a rough part of town. With Mieke Marple partnering with Nemeroff in the venture, the short-run artwork effloresced into an assertive commercial gallery with a 575sqm warehouse in an industrial neighbourhood near the river. It was the first serious gallery to open there, followed quickly

by François Ghebaly Gallery in a building occupied by exhibition spaces and offices from Fahrenheit/FLAX, artist-book publisher 2nd Cannons, the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive and DoPe Press, with trendy nonprofit the Mistake Room opening a building around the corner. New Yorker Michelle Maccarone will return to Los Angeles in 2015 with a new space adjacent to 356 S. Mission, joining Hauser Wirth & Schimmel (serious commercial out-oftowners Hauser & Wirth teaming up with the aforementioned Schimmel), who are opening up a massive space close by.

This hybrid form perhaps can’t last, with the commercial realities of a business eventually trumping the aesthetic and community-minded concerns of the artist gallery. Perhaps 356 S. Mission looks less like a Laura Owens project and increasingly like a Los Angeles satellite of Gavin Brown, though the programming remains no less stellar thus far. Night Gallery is still committed to performances, publishing and events not directly connected to the gallery artists, but it isn’t the cosy experiment of its inception. These newer spaces might be nightblooming flowers that quickly disappear, but for now, artists are still beating out the rest for glory in Los Angeles.

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BEYOND STUFF A group show by :

Ai Weiwei . He Yunchang . Li Mingzhu . Xia Xing . Zhao Zhao

Zhao

29 August 2014 - 5 October 2014 Mizuma Gallery - SINGAPORE “Untitled (Ai Weiwei’s Stools and Sunflower Seeds withdrawn from the “15 Years Chinese Contemporary Art Award” exhibition in Shanghai, China)”, 2014, Installation

22 Lock Road #01-34, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108939 Operating hours : Tuesday - Saturday 11 a.m. - 7 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m. www.mizuma.sg info@mizuma.sg facebook.com/mizumagallery

© Ai Weiwei

Mizuma Gallery is a part of Gillman Barracks For more information visit www.gillmanbarracks.com

THE BREATH OF NASIRUN Metamorphosis of Tradition 10 September 2014 - 11 October 2014 Mizuma Art Gallery - TOKYO 2F Kagura Building, 3-13 Ichigayatamachi, Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 162-0843, Japan.

Operating hours : Tuesday - Saturday 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. www.mizuma-art.co.jp gallery@mizuma-art.co.jp

“Sultan Seni Rupa” (Detail), 2014, Oil on Canvas © Nasirun

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Art Featured

Live It Up in Singapore!

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Lee Bul The Korean artist looks to the failed utopias of the past to present a disturbing vision of the future

by Wenny Teo Portrait and studio by Na seung

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preceeding pages Interior view of Lee Bul’s studio, Seoul, July 2014 Lee Bul photographed at her studio, Seoul, July 2014 above Installation view of work by Lee Bul at Lehmann Maupin, New York, 2014. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong

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Via Negativa II (detail), 2014 (installation view, Lehmann Maupin, New York, 2014), polycarbonate sheet, aluminium frame, acrylic and polycarbonate mirrors, steel, stainless steel, mirror, two-way mirror, LED lighting, silkscreen ink, 275 × 500 × 700 cm. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong

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above After Bruno Taut (Beware the Sweetness of Things) (detail), 2007, crystal, glass and acrylic beads on stainless-steel armature, aluminium and copper mesh, PVC, steel and aluminium chains, 258 × 200 × 250 cm.

Photo: Patrick Gries. Courtesy the artist and Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris. facing page Untitled Sculpture (M4), 2014, PVC foamboard, copper, stainless-steel and aluminium rods, acrylic, acrylic mirror, acrylic paint on stainless-steel armature, 203 × 116 × 47 cm.

Photo: Jeon Byung-cheol. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong

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At the close of the long twentieth century, as humanity prepared to cross the artificial border set up between one millennium and the next, it seemed as if all the ossified boundaries we had so carefully constructed in the past were being violently destabilised by the looming threat of an uncertain future. In an increasingly globalised artworld, questions of identity, difference and otherness were all the rage. Controversial exhibitions like the 1993 Whitney Biennial in New York and Sensation (1997) in London put questions of race, gender, politics and sexuality front and centre of art-historical debate. Critical theory too was seized by an apoplectic proliferation of ‘post-isms’ – postmodernism, poststructuralism, postfeminism, postcolonialism, postsocialism and the posthuman – that apocalyptically intoned the end of all grand narratives.

It was in this context that the Korean artist Lee Bul first emerged onto the New York art scene in 1997, in a joint exhibition with the Japanese artist Chie Matsui, at the Museum of Modern Art, no less. Lee’s offering was a work titled Majestic Splendor (1997) – a glittering installation of freshly caught fish, each meticulously encrusted with sequins, beads and gold flowers; some displayed in deodorised clear-plastic bags, others enshrined in a refrigerator. Despite these sanitising measures, the nauseating miasma of decaying flesh soon permeated MoMA’s hallowed halls, resulting in the exhibition’s premature closure.

In a heady artistic climate primed for divisive displays of cultural difference, Lee’s succès de scandale only served to further her ascent in the global arena. A simulacrum of her MoMA piece was permitted to rot away at Harald Szeemann’s Lyon Biennale the same year, in a group show tellingly titled L’Autre (The Other). Lee was subsequently nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998, and selected to represent South Korea at the 1999 Venice Biennale (having already been included in Szeemann’s curated exhibition) – the year that another East Asian artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, won the coveted Golden Lion award for his controversial Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard (1999), a crumbling, recreated work of socialist realist propaganda. While the failed utopias of the past would similarly return to haunt Lee’s practice, it was initially her evocative visions of the future that made her one of the most prominent non-Western artists of an anxious age.

To date, Lee is still perhaps best known for her Cyborg series (1997– 2011) – robotic, sexualised silicone figures, prosthetically augmented and techno-organically enhanced. Lee’s Cyborgs signposted the

culturally specific influence of manga and anime, while simultaneously embodying the global fantasy of a future perfect, in which genetic engineering, cloning and cosmetic surgery would smooth over all the messy anxieties of the present tense. A companion piece to the Cyborg series was the participatory and populist work Live Forever (2001) – futuristic karaoke capsules that echoed the streamlined aesthetics of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), set in the same year.

Spectators were invited to enter Lee’s snug padded pods one by one and sing themselves into a solitary oblivion, keyed in the soporific tenor of Huxleyesque mass delusion.

At the opposite end of the scale, Lee’s other well-known series of work from the late 1990s gave gruesome shape to our worst biotechnological fears, in a period marked by hysteria over the Y2K bug, the start of the Human Genome Project, the commercialisation of genetically modified crops and the birth of Dolly the sheep. The sculptures and drawings of Monster (1998/2011) and Anagram (1999–2005) consisted of a host of amorphous, densely textured organic forms, overspilling with limblike protrusions, evoking the psychic horror of the uncanny as well as the sci-fi nightmare of alien predation, the nightmarish progeny of Louise Bourgeois and H.R. Giger.

It’s easy to see why Lee’s work from the turn of the millennium has so often been read as the artistic equivalent of Donna Haraway’s seminal ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the late 20th Century’ (1991), a text that Lee has credited as an influence.

For Haraway, and initially for Lee, cyborgs and monsters functioned as powerfully ambivalent metaphors; ciphers of resistance against the traditional limitations of gender, feminism, race, science and politics.

Their hybrid ontology embodied the collapsing distinctions between (wo) man, machine and animal at a time when the boundary between science fiction and social reality appeared to be little more than an ‘optical illusion’. Ironically, Lee found herself pigeonholed as the quintessential ‘Asian woman artist’, just as Haraway’s theories were increasingly ‘co-opted by the spectacle of the techno-sublime, manufactured by the computer and biotech industries’, as Lee lamented in an interview with Kim Seungduk in Art Press in 2002. But the artist has proved herself to be nothing if not adaptable, and her work soon evolved in an unexpected direction. While the cyborg and monster series seemed to embody Jacques Derrida’s proposition that if the future can only be defined as an absolute break with constituted

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normality, then it can only be ‘proclaimed, presented as a sort of monstrosity’, Lee’s more recent works entertain another possibility, proposed by Vladimir Nabokov – that the ‘future is but the obsolete in reverse’.

Beginning in 2005, Lee turned to the past in order to explore the history of imagining the future. The ongoing Mon Grand Récit (2005–) series is an eclectic body of immersive installations, drawings and sculptures that foreground Lee’s intellectual and artistic engagement with literary, philosophical and architectural meditations on utopia and dystopia, state fiction and social reality. Mon Grand Récit: Weep into Stones… (2005) is a surreal assemblage that combines geological and mineral forms with fragmented architectonic structures. A glowing white limestone formation – based on Hugh Ferriss’s otherworldly 1930 description of a skyscraper of the future – emerges from what looks like a chunk of asteroid rock, incongruously suspended on a gridlike scaffold of aluminium rods. This central tower is encircled by a spiralling wooden highway and studded with miniature replicas of bleached architectural icons, including Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920) – that soaring emblem of a socialist new world order that was never realised. In a similar vein, Mon Grand Récit: Because Everything… (2005), consists of fragmented architectural forms haphazardly embedded into a molten surface of white and pink resin, like the ruins of an alien civilisation devastated by some sort of cataclysmic eruption, petrified in a state of collapse.

These large-scale topographical installations chronicle the dreamworlds and catastrophes of utopian desire, focusing particularly on the febrile imaginariums of twentieth-century modernist architecture. One of the most powerful manifestations of this is After Bruno Taut (Beware the Sweetness of Things) (2007) – a suspended, chandelierlike structure, dripping with crystalline beads and overlaid with a dense patina of chainmail. The work is inspired by the expressionist architect Taut’s fantastical visions of an ‘Alpine Architecture’, drawn up just before the end of the First World War and the collapse of the German empire. In dialogue with the science-fiction writer Paul Scheerbart, Taut proposed to divert mankind’s energy and resources away from war and conflict, towards constructing dazzling cities made of crystal and glass that would complement the natural landscape and eventually even extend to the stars. Lee’s opulent homage to Taut’s feverish optimism hovers precariously in midair, as if on the verge of crashing to the ground.

Indeed, as Fredric Jameson observed in his book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), ‘Utopians, whether political, textual or hermeneutic, have always been maniacs and oddballs: a deformation readily enough explained by the fallen societies in which they had to fulfil their vocation.’ And indeed, the same could be said of Lee herself. It is here that the artist’s personal biography intertwines most poignantly with her practice. Lee was born in 1964 to dissident parents in Seoul, during the US-backed military dictatorship of Park Chung-Hee. She graduated

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from Hongik University in 1987, the year of the first democratic elections, which promised to usher in a new era; a dream of the future that was all too often dashed by the traumatic legacy of totalitarianism and the alienating spectacles of rapid urbanisation and economic development. Rejecting the overtly political social realist aesthetics of the Minjoong movement, Lee instead took to the streets in a series of outrageous performances, dressed in a soft-sculpture monster suit that was a precursor of the later posthuman experimentations with corporeality that came to define her practice.

More recently, Lee has begun to make more specific references to the political history of Korea. Thaw (Takaki Masao) (2007), for instance, is a pale pink iceberg formation that, upon closer inspection, reveals an eerily lifelike replica of Park Chung-Hee, cryogenically frozen within its glacial embrace. Park, who also went by the Japanese name parenthetically cited in the work’s title, was a man whose idealistic, socialist dream for a better future mutated into a fascist nightmare for an entire nation. Lee is no doubt fascinated by his fall from grace, and arguably still haunted by his memory. The visual splendour of Lee’s work is always undercut by a latent sense of foreboding, also reflected in their ominous titles – warning, weeping and thawing – the last implying the threat of a brutal dictator slowly defrosting from an icy slumber, with the potential to rise up again at any time.

In our present era, a so-called age of terror, our retinas are permanently imprinted with mass-mediated images of carnage, catastrophe and crisis. A sense of threat is perhaps one we can all identify more easily with in the present than the utopian impulses of the past, which appear to be little more than the foolish dreams of an altogether more innocent epoch.

Perhaps the last of our utopian ambitions did indeed end with the events of 9 /11, and as Franco Berardi put it, ‘the artistic imagination, since that day, seems unable to escape the territory of fear and despair’.

Lee’s work does not offer us any immediate solutions to this predicament. Indeed, Mon Grand Récit translates as ‘my grand narrative’ – a melancholic riff on Jean-François Lyotard’s famous pronouncement that the postmodern era signalled the end of all grand récit – the grand or meta- narratives that characterised modernity. By adding the prefix mon, or ‘my’, into the title of these pieces, Lee attempts to salvage her own history from the ruins of the past. Similarly, her work encourages the viewer to forge critical links between the fallen societies of recent history and the precarity of the present, to question our own grandiose constructions and assume personal responsibility for a shared future we can only ever imagine. ara Lee Bul’s work is featured in the Gwangju Biennale, 5 September – 9 November. Her first UK solo exhibition runs at Ikon in Birmingham, 10 September – 9 November, with an accompanying exhibition at the Korean Cultural Centre in London, 12 September – 1 November.

Lee will present a new large-scale commissioned work at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, on 29 November

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above Live Forever II, 2001, fibreglass capsule with acoustic foam, leather upholstery, electronic equipment, 254 × 152 × 97 cm. Photo: Will Brown.

Courtesy Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong facing page Cyborg Red and Cyborg Blue, 1997–8, cast silicone, paint pigment, steel pipe support and base, 160 × 70 × 110 cm. Photo: Watanabe Osamu.

Courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong

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23/09/2014 16:27

I ♥ Biennials

This autumn it’s going to feel like there’s a biennial opening every week. And that’s because there almost is.

ArtReview Asia tracked down the directors and chief curators of some of the bigger examples and asked them to explain what these events are all about and why there are so many of them… And then, as a special bonus treat, ArtReview Asia cornered philosopher Graham Harman, a man whose ideas are currently influencing many of these directors and chief curators, and asked him to explain what his philosophising has to do with art Autumn & Winter 2014

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Part I Anselm Franke What Frame for What Modernisation?

Notes Towards the Shanghai Biennale

evolve with time, they differentiate or they Part of the sensibility that should be trained wither away, lose their ability to capture and by curators, I believe, is a sensitivity to frames represent a social experience. When a work – to the rules and scripts that are present of art – whether film, literature or visual in a given situation, to the ‘grammar’ that art – quotes genre conventions, it is often structures social interaction and aesthetic funny and sometimes uncanny, and it can form. In social situations, these are cultural conventions and social hierarchies, ideologinspire us to think about the role that certain ical underpinnings and institutional scripts scripts and ideas, but also forms in general, that often have deep-seated roots but are have in structuring our experience. Indeed not always obvious and easy to negotiate. In it is largely impossible to say whether these part, they always just appear as a given, or as experiences are written into existence by ‘natural’, but of course nothing ever is, not these forms or scripts, or whether form and since the sources of authority were placed life-form make up a symbiotic unity. Yet to under question in modernity. It is imporbe modern, I think, means that this unity is never ‘natural’, but subject to permatant to understand these scripts and how they shape situations and people acting in them, and what the field of nent contestation. In Beijing I learn from a friend about the debate accepted and possible operations within them is. Each social space has instilled by party historian Wu Si, and the importance and problem its own scripts: just think of the rules of behaviour and speech that of qian guize, the hidden rules.

I believe that the question today is not whether to drag things into apply to a space like the court, or the university, or the museum. Most people in these places know how to behave in them. What interests the light: we cannot choose obscurantism if we are halfway responme most about these rules and scripts is always the part of them that sible and educated beings (modern obscurantism is always obscuwe understand without quite knowing why, the part that communi- rantism for the other in order to gain power, or it is simply madness cates itself not explicitly but implicitly – and hence implicates us by or ignorance). The question is what we drag and how we drag it, what making us complicit – through gestures, the atmosphere, by common implicit things are made explicit and how this is done, and, in making agreement, by an everyday aesthetics and signs of authority. This something explicit, how it is transformed. The ‘hidden rules’ among implicit zone of the social, where the boundary conditions of sense the powerful are (always) an example: in order for modernisation and behaviour are formed and permanently monitored, is the zone to proceed and not fall victim to the regressive forces it mobilises, where ‘the social’ and aesthetics are always already one. these hidden rules must be made explicit in order for them to be trans­ Aesthetic genres and formats obviously have scripts in this sense, formed. ‘Regression’ in modernity seeks to liberate power from the too. One only needs to think of melodramas or war movies: every very real need to seek legitimisation, by embracing alleged higher gesture in them is coded by the overall structure, which defines how sources of authority, identity, tradition or the auratic. In short, regiswe interpret a certain act by a character and how we ters that lie beyond modern reason – and its chief feel about them. ‘Genres’ reflect the rules of reprefaculty, doubt – but that are, like ‘tradition’, themAnselm Franke. sentation of a given time and cultural context. They Photo: Jakob Hoff selves outcomes or products of modernity.

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Modern and contemporary art, especially the kind of art we refer on the dialectics of modernity, and on its destructive fervour. For to as avant-garde or experimental, has been to a large degree about Shanghai, I think that we need an affirmative, positive definition of breaking with genre conventions, or turning them onto themselves. what modernisation can mean. The socially implicit should not be It is often only possible to learn of the implicit scripts of a social situ- left to the nationalists or the religious obscurantists or the ideologues ation by disruption. The very moment of modernisation in art could of technocracy. be identified with the process of making an implicit script explicit, I think that art can play a role in the modernisation of society’s turning what was previously a background into a foreground, to implicit social scripts. Somehow it seems to me that the very subject expose or exhibit, to turn tools and conditions into a subject matter. matter of large-scale exhibitions in particular is the realm of implicit These scripts, tools and conditions can be rules of convention, ideo- social scripts and their relation to aesthetics, to cognition, expectalogical bias, deep historical structures or material or institutional tions, feelings. Exhibitions invoke the common ‘map’ people have of conditions. Whenever we begin to work on them, we realise to what reality, simply because every piece of art demands from us to make incredible degree they produce what we experience as subjective and sense of it, or to question the very process of making sense, and our collective reality. Moreover, the interesting thing is that breaking own frames of perception. Art throws us always back onto the implicit with certain conventions, such as in narrative form, does not only assumptions we bring with us, individually and collectively. And art produce new forms, it produces new experiences, new possible can make us travel unexpected routes on the map, or question the forms of subjectivity and collectivity as well. In that sense, working map altogether. on aesthetic genres is always, literally, a work on social invention Modernisation in China is, or has been, a quasi-sacred task, against and social engineering, too. The space of art is a social factory, a the backdrop of its historical victimisation by imperial powers and factory of figuration, in which new backgrounds and figures are the resulting ‘wound’, but also against the backdrop of its own impepermanently produced. rial authority. Today, as China aspires to surpass the other world The history of modern avant-gardes has also shown that every such powers in wealth and might, it must be hoped that this ‘sacred task’ is ‘transgression’ quickly becomes a genre itself. This dialectics produces not channelled merely into the imperial scheme, into the restoration new standards, new accepted forms of art, new conventions, which of ‘lost’ power, and the nationalist, heroic identity such an imaginary are often oblivious of their own origins. A case in point is ‘conceptual projects. Modernity, as a condition, demands the relativisation of art’, which is today often associated with an art of ideas rather than collective identities, and embraces pluralism and its contradictions objects, but which has an important and antagonisms. And this demand root in a gesture of negation (not merely Exhibitions invoke the common ‘map’ can only be met if we are able to negotiate the realm of the ‘hidden’ or the of the commodity-object), mimicking people have of reality, simply implicit, as the realm where this relathe negation of the ‘administered life’ because every piece of art demands of modern times through bureaucracy tivisation and ambivalences are cultiand technocracy. When genres become vated. Modernisation happens today from us to make sense of it oblivious to their foundations and can where that which frames our fields of no longer efficiently address and navigate beyond the semantic field actions is questioned, but based on the knowledge that ‘the social’ that was brought into being by them, they lose their mobility and never exhausts itself in any map, or for that matter in anything that agency, they become static ‘systems’, in which all that is left is to play ‘by can be named. the rules’, and qian guize. This is what happens frequently at the tranIn the final pieces filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki completed sition from so-called underground to accepted mainstream and the before his untimely death, he explores how drastically our ‘maps’ market recognition that follows, capitalising on the semiotic surplus of reality are changing through digital technologies. The map is of artistic transgression, but separating a work or works from social becoming an ‘ideal-typical’ image of reality, a map that not only invention, and from the modernist task of putting the implicit up covers the territory as completely as possible, but that monitors it, and produces it through the governance of movements, as happens for negotiation.

As I am asking myself what modernisation can mean in the in urban and dynamic social engineering, and increasingly, through current situation with regard to the Shanghai Biennale, it certainly social media themselves. In the context of the military, complex, is important to address how this task has been connected to great multilayered maps are employed that do not represent a territory violence. Tearing the hidden into the light has all too often simply but that surveil it, by measuring any unusual movements, any deviameant its destruction, especially when a politicised idea of scientific tion from the ‘map’. In one of his very last pieces, shown for the first knowledge destroys so-called beliefs. To be sure, there are ‘beliefs’ time at the Berlin Documentary Forum, he looks at the technology or customs that ought better to be destroyed, but the modern obses- and iconography of digital animation and computer games, and how sion with uprooting has too easily ended in rationalist hybrids, and they produce what we perceive as ‘a world’. One chapter of this work, has neglected the logic of practice, its wisdom and resilience. Yet titled ‘Parallel’, is devoted to the limits of these worlds, to the end of I am tempted to think that it was a general modern disregard and the map, the scripted, programmed field: at such an ‘end of the world’, nonunderstanding of the ‘implicit’ in the social that resulted in this first-person shooters or other heroes either fall into the dark abyss of destruction. In other words, the modern attitude didn’t acknowledge black nothingness or walk against invisible walls. It is the task of art that social life can never be fully ‘positivised’, that it can never be fully exhibitions to show that there is more outside the map, outside the known, understood, scripted, controlled. script of particular ‘genres’, whether fictional or real. ara For the Shanghai Biennale, I think of what modernisation can mean in the current situation. In previous projects I have focused The Shanghai Biennale runs from 9 November through 31 March

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Part II Charles Esche on the São Paulo Bienal Interview by Oliver Basciano

ArtReview You are director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, a former cocurator of the Istanbul and Gwangju biennials and now part of only the second curatorial team from outside Latin America to curate the São Paulo Bienal. How much did you know about Brazilian art beforehand?

Charles Esche I had a superficial knowledge.

I knew the history of Concretism and Neoconcretism. I think, though, that the Bienal Foundation’s idea was to question what someone from the outside could bring to the conversation. So we haven’t been travelling around the world looking at artists. Instead we brought our preexisting international knowledge to the exhibition, and then focused our research on what is going on here in Brazil.

And that’s not just what’s going on in an artistic sense, but also in cultural, sociopolitical, economic senses too.

AR How much responsibility do you think a biennial should have to its local setting?

CE I don’t even know if it’s a responsibility but more an inevitability that the local setting will affect one’s direction. I don’t think there should be a responsibility to represent anything.

Certainly not to represent the locals or to feel

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white space, or whatever we call it. It’s written all over or printed all over. Then you come and you add your little bit.

AR You navigate through the gaps.

like you’re on a diplomatic mission to show how strong the Brazilian culture is. I don’t think that at all, but I think a show becomes clearly shaped by the context. The context is architectural, is historical – São Paulo is the second oldest biennial, going back to 1951. It has a particular history, which we can talk about, that shapes everything that we’re doing. It’s institutional, so there are existing schemes, great schemes in education and production, which allow us to work a certain way. There’s a sociopolitical context too, which is this moment in Brazil, with the World Cup, with the elections, with everything that’s going to happen in the next few months. All of that matters, I mean it’s determining. In a sense, you have a given condition, and you’re reshaping, prodding that a little bit. There’s no blank canvas, or Charles Esche.

Photo: Sofia Colucci

CE Exactly, yes, and try and push things in certain directions or see where the resistances are. You’re working within a given landscape, and that’s a given architectural landscape, it’s a given Brazilian landscape, it’s a given South American landscape, it’s a given global landscape.

AR What were your initial thoughts on the biennial’s direction?

CE We wanted to make it contemporary. If you look at some of the recent São Paulo Bienals, they’re a little more museological, looking at a certain history or trying to develop a trajectory. They have concentrated on art historical narratives. Instead we wanted to take the temperature of the moment. We didn’t feel we had to revisit Brazil’s modernist history or revisit the moves of Hélio Oiticica or Lygia Clark and people like that. That was a very early, important decision.

AR Why the avoidance of Modernism?

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CE I’m not sure it’s so relevant to São Paulo any more. This is very much a contemporary city.

The growth of it, the way that the informal communities developed is not really according to modernist structural thinking. Of course, there’s a modernist legacy, but there’s also a colonial legacy, and many other historical layers, of which Modernism is just one. Maybe it’s the one that’s blocked us from seeing the others or having a more nuanced understanding of history. Modernism doesn’t want to deal with religion, for instance. More generally I think we can say that the modern world is in the past. It’s fulfilled. Our direction has also been made possible of course only by what people have done in the past with the Bienal. The fact that the Bienal dates back to 1951 allows us to do things that would be unimaginable if you were curating the Curitiba Biennial, or the Biennale sul Lago Maggiore, which have less of a history.

You don’t have to start at the beginning; you can assume some kind of legacy.

Previous curators have done the groundwork for us, in a way, and we’re really grateful for that. The last Bienal focused very much on the position of the artists, which means we don’t have to. If that hadn’t happened, then maybe we would have had to deal with the question of who is an artist and what is their position in society. You are standing on the shoulders of giants, in some sense. We’re adding a little bit to a process that has predated my birth and will hopefully succeed my death.

AR You staged a series of open meetings around the country – in areas that have artists who are not perhaps represented within the commercial gallery system that drives São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. What were you looking for from these artists?

CE We had certain questions. For instance, one of the questions we started off with was, ‘What is the Brazilian national narrative?’ That’s what I was interested in, to think about what it means to be Brazilian at the moment. It’s a question shaped by 20 years of apparently social-democratic rule, apparently leftwing governments.

It asks about the change to the country since the military dictatorship and the oppression that was going on up until the 1980s. That question,

however, would become less and less urgent as others would emerge, questions about the rights to a city, how the people negotiate themselves within the city. ‘What is the relationship between transport and rights? What is the relationship between identity and the city?

How do artists negotiate those social and political questions? Which artists are thinking about this? What artists are thinking about some of the peripheral communities? What artists are thinking about the history of immigration?’ Whether it’s the Arab immigration here and how that’s been represented. Whether it’s the Portuguese colonial history. Whether it’s the African immigration through the ports,

AR This perhaps more engaged participation within the country – these ‘alliances’, as you refer to them, the open meetings – seem a reaction against the biennial as a format. The biennial as a site of spectacle: the size of these types of exhibitions, their internationalism and the temporariness of their curatorial structures. In the context of Brazil, dealing with the political and social fallout of other types of capitalist spectacle – the World Cup of course and the Olympics around the corner in 2016 – this seems particularly pertinent.

immigration through slavery. Our questions have changed and they’ve often been led by artists’ projects, or people who are working on the borderlands of art, performance or art becoming activism.

AR Though important, these seem quite specifically Brazilian concerns, though – how do the non-Brazilian artists fit into them?

CE The people we invited came from a particular history of work. Yochai Avrahami, who’s from Israel, has an interest in national narratives, so that fitted with our original question, so it made sense to bring him over for an Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, São Paulo. Photo: Andres Otero

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extended period, to spend a couple of months in Brazil, to travel, to look at some of the museums and representations of the police, of the mining industry.

We also tried to organise alliances between Brazilian artists and artists from elsewhere.

Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal from Decolonising Architecture, for example, have been working with a group called Grupo Contrafilé. Together they’re developing a project at a quilombo in the state of Pernambuco, in the northeast. Originally quilombos were where the freed or escaped slaves set up their own communities. These historic settlements obviously have a relationship with some of the work that Decolonising Architecture has done with the Palestinian camps.

They’re all going up there over the summer, and the results of that visit will be presented at the Bienal.

CE Exactly, and I think that’s a really interesting thing. But we don’t want to remake the biennial format. I have no interest in doing that. The Bienal is an event, it’s a big event, and although there are plenty of things going on behind the scenes, we have nonetheless really tried to make an exhibition here. I don’t think you should do anything else; you should fulfil people’s expectations that they can just walk around and they can see some amazing things.

Then you try and perhaps give it some nuance, add to it. The biennial is a fixed structure that we just shift a tiny little bit. The curator’s agency is very small, but the job is to try and make use of that small space of agency as much as you can. ara The São Paulo Bienal is on view from 2 September through 7 December

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Part III Jessica Morgan on the Gwangju Biennale Interview by Helen Sumpter and Louise Darblay

ArtReview How did you approach your curatorship of the Biennale when deciding on its overall structure, themes and balance of artists? And with this being the tenth edition, how did you look over the history of the event as well as to its future?

course of redundancy and renewal in commercial culture. The Biennale reflects on this process of destruction or self-destruction – burning the home one occupies – followed by the promise of the new and the hope for change.

Jessica Morgan The selection of artists and the structure developed very naturally from the theme, which was conceived in response to my research in Korea. Once the title was established, it acted as a composite of various ideas (it was intentionally broad); the language of the title and the associations it carries allowed for subtly different concepts to emerge. Artists were very much the starting point for the Biennale, so their approach, works and input certainly helped form the exhibition.

The significance of the anniversary is perhaps reflected in the many new works the artists are making specifically for the context of Gwangju, and in the reappearance of a couple of artists who have shown before, such as Allora & Calzadilla and Sung Hwan Kim, whose presence refers to an institutional history.

AR It must be challenging when composing your narrative, as you can never know exactly what the artists will produce, especially considering the impressive number of commissions (more than 30).

Could you explain how you have dealt with this?

AR The title for the Biennale, Burning Down the House, is taken from the 1983 song by the band Talking Heads. Can you explain this reference and the themes the title relates to?

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JM When Talking Heads were debating the title and chorus of Burning Down the House, members of the band remembered being at a Funkadelic concert where George Clinton and the audience swapped calls to ‘burn down the house’. This hedonism by the P-Funk crowd on the dance floor was then turned into an anthem of bourgeois anxieties by the New York-based band. This dual meaning of pleasure and engagement serves as the defining spirit of the Biennale, fusing physical movement with political engagement.

Burning Down the House also explores the process of burning and transformation, a cycle of obliteration and renewal witnessed throughout history, evident in aesthetics, historical events and an increasingly rapid Jessica Morgan.

Photo: Olivia Hemingway / Tate Photography

JM The artists making new works include those I have worked with on previous occasions, though the majority are artists I am working with for the first time. It was important to include some artists familiar to me that I admire enormously and with whom I am able to learn and communicate. These provide a curatorial anchor for the many developing conversations we are in the midst of. Fortunately the artists asked to participate were all keen to think about the many facets offered by the theme and context of the tenth Biennale.

AR It is quite unusual for a biennial to take place in a single location, most of them being spread across different venues in a city. This can be an advantage in maintaining coherence throughout the show;

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conversely, it runs the risk of wearing out the visitor because of its scale. How are you approaching this challenge?

JM In fact the Biennale is always in the Biennale Halls, so the scale of these spaces will not change.

Rather than going out into the city, we are bringing the city to the Biennale, as more than 400 citizens will be involved in the production of the many performance works that animate the exhibition. The spaces of the Biennale also extend into locations in the park surrounding it, offering a good antidote to the interior intensity of the exhibition.

AR There will be something quite theatrical in how you are designing the exhibition, marking the entrance and exit of each room by a performance or installation.

Could you give some examples?

JM The exhibition treats each of the five largescale spaces as connected but independently atmospheric zones, their entrances and exits defined by new commissions and existing works

by Allora & Calzadilla, Jack Goldstein, Dominique GonzalezFoerster, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Koo Jeong-a and Piotr Uklanski that draw attention to the transitional experience of entering into the Biennale through actions, performances and artworks that animate and incite. Koo Jeong-a is making a wall that will move and vibrate, simu­ lating the effect of an earthquake, as you exit Gallery One. As you leave the Biennale Halls, a ghostlike performance by Gonzalez-Foerster will occupy Gallery Five. In the midst of the Biennale, as you enter Gallery Three, the announcement of your presence will be made evident by the performance work of Pierre Huyghe.

AR The Gwangju Biennale has a strong historical and symbolic background, as it was established to commemorate the 1980s pro-democracy uprising against the then government, and as a way to move forward from there. More than other biennials, then, it is rooted in a specific political and local history, while also having the international vocation of a biennial.

How do you produce a show that offers a new resonance on this local history, within a global perspective?

JM The location of Gwangju is of course very different to the touristic centres of other

biennials, such as Berlin, Istanbul or Sydney.

Curatorially it offers a strong framework to work with (and against), and personally I am drawn to limitations or structures that can help to define a project. This exhibition is by no means about the Gwangju Uprising, but the contemporary politics of Korea are such that the region that Gwangju is situated in still occupies a fraught position within the larger geographic landscape. For that reason the site of the Biennale has current resonance for Korean socioeconomic and political reality, and to ignore this would be an omission.

AR Can you talk about some of the works that make reference, either directly or indirectly, to that socioeconomic and political reality – for example South African artist Jane Alexander’s installation that relates to state control and freedom, Minouk Lim’s

new work, the Edward (and Nancy Reddin) Kienholz installation and the inclusion of artists Lee Bul, Young Soo Kim and Neungkyung Sung, whose works from the 1980s were made in direct response to those events?

JM There are a number of works that draw attention to parallel situations in other parts of the world. The works of Kienholz, Alexander and Gülsün Karamustafa reflect on periods of militaristic control and the consequences for civil liberties, Brenda Fajardo’s work is included in part to connect the shared histories of the Philippines and Korea (both experienced Japanese occupation and US military occupation). The works of Lee Bul and Young Soo Kim were crucial for addressing the physical, bodily impact of oppression – not only through torture, Jane Alexander, African Adventure, 1999–2002.

Photo: Paul Hester. Courtesy the artist

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which both works refer to, but also the physiological and psychological impact of living in a time of mistrust and accusation. Minouk Lim is one of a few artists in the exhibition who look to historic moments that have not yet been fully recognised, not so much to archive and document but rather to point to the contemporary relevance of these moments and their continued significance for the present day.

AR In recent years biennials and other major art events have themselves become the site for protest, for example in Sydney in relation to sponsorship, Istanbul in relation to public space and Manifesta in Russia in relation to censorship and human rights. How have you approached this possibility, either in terms of work – such as wanting to include Picasso’s painting Massacre in Korea (1951) – or in other areas?

JM I am still very disappointed that we were not able to bring Picasso’s work – which has never been shown in Korea. This Biennale is not in the public space of the city aside from the Biennale Square, which is a well-used site by the local population.

Unfortunately I think one of the challenges for a curator who does not speak the language is that entering into the urbanscape becomes extremely difficult.

The Gwangju Biennale arose out of protest, and although there may be an aspect of institutionalised memorial around the events that took place, its contemporary position is still one that is marginalised within the country, so perhaps the Biennale occupies a different position that cannot be directly compared to the biennials you mention.

AR What do you see as the local versus global functions of the Biennale in terms of audience? Gwangju, as you say, is not a major tourist destination, and yet it is an increasingly international event.

JM The vast majority of visitors come from Korea, not outside. For that reason it was essential to me that the exhibition speak in some way to this Korean audience. If an international audience comes, that is wonderful, of course, but in reality I think the Biennale is for Korea. ara The Gwangju Biennale runs from 5 September through 9 November

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Part IV Nicolas Bourriaud on the Taipei Biennial Interview by J.J. Charlesworth

ArtReview When you finished working on Altermodern, your edition of the Tate Triennial, in 2009, you said you had no idea if you would curate any more biennials. Since then, you’ve curated the Athens Biennale (in 2011), and you’re now finishing work on the Taipei Biennial. Over that time, globalisation has grown relentlessly as an issue for the artworld. Is there a regional aspect to your Taipei Biennial, or could it take place anywhere?

Nicolas Bourriaud When Roberto Rossellini shoots Stromboli (1950), or when Jean-Luc Godard chooses Capri for the setting of Le Mépris (1963), the location does have an impact on an open screenplay. Conversely, James Cameron starts filming with a complete story­board, in any studio, and it could happen anywhere. Some directors intend to capture the environment they are working in, and some others don’t. Jacques Rivette said that every feature film is a documentary on its conditions of production, and it is also true for art exhibitions. If you take Athens and Taipei, the first was a very collective work with a tragically small budget: besides the artworks, we ended up completing the exhibition with extracts from Fritz Lang, Jean Painlevé and many other stolen images, and lots of historical material documenting the Greek crisis and

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its nineteenth-century roots. I never found the budget to realise the feature film that was part of the exhibition, the story of Walter Benjamin alive in Athens in 2011 – he would have been played by Henry Hopper – but the whole process was a very creative and moving moment: artists and curators were all involved in filling a huge ruined building with strong contents, wherever it came from…

Concerning Taipei, it is another world: of course I included Taiwanese artists in the list, but I also came with a specific idea that triggers a dialogue between Western and Asiatic philosophy, around the notion of the human subject. As always I started with an image, and I picked Karl Marx’s ‘ghost dance’. In Capital, he invents this weird concept in order to explain how the system of industrial production turns Nicolas Bourriaud. © Taipei Fine Arts Museum

products into subjects, and workers into products. Our entering into what scientists call the ‘anthropocene’ challenges this concept, and makes it more complex: today, human beings are involved in a new ‘ghost dance’ not only with industry, but also with our environment and our atmosphere, with animals, domestic technology, bacteria or plants.

AR You’ve titled the biennial The Great Acceleration, centring it on the theme of ‘art and its new ecosystem’. In your notes you draw on recent philosophical debates coming under the rubric of ‘speculative realism’ (you reference philosophers Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman) that have shifted attention away from interhuman relations to the relationship of global human society to other, nonhuman systems, processes and agents.

What turned your attention towards these themes?

It’s a long way from the human-centred days of relational aesthetics!

NB The idea of the exhibition came from an article explaining that the number of robots and programmes operating on the Internet now exceeds the number of human beings using the net. Relational aesthetics directly came from the appearance of the Internet in the early 1990s, so it was time to rethink its premises… (continued on page 56)

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Charles Avery, Untitled (The Qoro-qoros), 2012, 260 × 360 cm, acrylic, pencil, ink and watercolour on paper.

Courtesy of the artist and Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam

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The sphere of interhuman relations cannot be conceived any more without its environmental and technological sides. Since the beginning of this century, contemporary artists have tended to renegotiate their relationships with both the technosphere and biosphere, exploring the knots that link the living and the object, the machine and the body, the tech­ no­logical and the social – and experiencing their interdependence. If we take the anthropo­ cene as a hypothesis, how does it transform our vision of the world? Is there still such a thing as a direct interhuman relation? On the other hand, I am aware that I’m not curating exhibitions for frogs or stones: art is a purely interhuman activity, and when speculative realism assumes that human subjectivity is no more important than a gust of wind, when Levi Bryant tries to ‘think an object for-itself that isn’t an object for the gaze of a subject, representation, or a cultural discourse’, it clearly excludes art. Relational aesthetics is now criti­ cised for being too anthropocentric – I am OK with that. But I stand for it, too: the main political agenda for art consists in rehuman­ ising those spheres from which the human has withdrawn – from the economy to ecology.

I think speculative realism brings an interesting perspective to the Western subject – in those terms, it plays a role that is equivalent to structuralism in the 1950s and 60s. But it also goes in the political direction of global capi­ talism, when it becomes a tribute to reification and a defeat for individuals against the agency of high-frequency trading, for example. We need to expand the presence of the human, not to fight against a so-called anthropocentrism.

The default criticism of any kind of -centrism has become a caricature. What about ‘moneycentrism’? It is far more dangerous.

AR In many respects, your agenda for Taipei is part of an increasingly internationalised critical debate that now seems to transcend any sense of locality.

How do you see the global function of the biennial developing at the moment?

NB Problematics and issues are now global, but you don’t address them in the same way from

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Bogotá or from London. Biennials are meeting points, they even seem to become the only way for a curator to work abroad and engage in a dialogue with other contexts, as museums and art centres are now mainly producing their own content with their regular staff. Back in the 1990s, it was common to be invited to do an exhibition in an art centre, but such institutions are less and less keen to invite guest curators.

I was invited last week to speak during the first International Biennial Association meeting in Berlin, and I tried to remind the audience that a good biennial is in the first instance a good show, that a good show must affirm an aesthetic posi­tion and that the only real issue for a biennial is how to engage in a dialogue with the local scene and its cultural frame, and rethink the parameters of the biennial itself through this dialogue.

AR In 2012 you took over as director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) in Paris. How are your original ambitions for the school working out?

NB I am still developing the same agenda, which consists in affirming the original model of the school as an educational complex, based on its historical ‘DNA’. Beaux-Arts de Paris has

Relational aesthetics is now criticised for being too anthropocentric – I am oK with that.

But I stand for it, too: the main political agenda for art consists in rehumanising those spheres from which the human has withdrawn – from the economy to ecology.

We need to expand the presence of the human, not to fight against a so-called anthropocentrism.

The default criticism of any kind of -centrism has become a caricature. What about ‘money-centrism’? It is far more dangerous

a rich collection, an exhibition building and a publishing company, and its pedagogical model always consisted in confronting the students with artworks and artists, through a triangular system that mixes theoretical classes, the learning of technical skills and the students’ affiliation to a studio run by an artist. We are somewhere in between the German system, totally independent from the university, and the Anglo-Saxon one, which is completely aligned with it. Ten years ago, everybody in France was afraid of the Bologna process [a series of meetings and agreements, from 1999 onwards, between European nations, designed to achieve compatibility in standards of higher education], but the education system has now largely swallowed it; now they are afraid of the artworld, which I somehow embody, but we will swallow the artworld in the same way. An art school should be equidistant from both the academy and the art system.

AR You’re often credited with being a key figure in the process of opening out the French art scene onto the wider world, after a period (in the 1980s) when French art was institutionally inward-looking and substantially supported by the state. From where you stand now, is there still a distinctly French art scene, in terms of its strengths and weaknesses?

NB Back in the 1990s, it was the first question I was asked, but I am quite happy to see that the question is not raised that often any more… Maybe because the French art scene has become much more international than it was when I began to work, around 1990.

The generation of artists I supported at the time, from Pierre Huyghe to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, has proven that French art was not doomed. For the Taipei Biennial, I have invited Neïl Beloufa, David Douard, Gilles Barbier and Camille Henrot. But I never think in national terms, and that might be a good symptom for the French scene, which was always strong when openly international. ara The Taipei Biennial takes place from 13 September to 4 January

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Part V Graham Harman on speculative realism, one of the theories popular with curators today Interview by J.J. Charlesworth

Graham Harman is a philosopher and professor at the American University in Cairo who describes his thinking as an ‘object-oriented ontology’. He is part of a grouping of philosophers (along with Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier) associated with speculative realism, a movement in philosophy that attempts to overturn the dominant strands of post-Kantian thought (in particular the correlation between thinking and being) in favour of a metaphysical realism (in which thinking and the human beings who do it are not at the centre of the universe). More importantly than that, specu­ lative realism has become one of the most referenced philo­sophical movements in contemporary art of the last few years.

ArtReview Looking back at being an art student in the mid-1990s, I recall the shifting influence of theo­ rists and philosophers. Once you’d got to grips with the postmodernist canon – Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida – newer names turned up: Slavoj Žižek was the first big new thinker to be ‘taken up’; then Deleuze began to make waves in more radical circles; for most of the noughties, it seemed that Rancière could do no wrong, but now he’s faded away, along with Žižek.

What do you think has driven the growing interest in speculative realism, and your own work, over the last few years?

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Graham Harman Let’s start by talking about intellectual fashion, an oft-maligned phenomenon that might be viewed positively instead.

Artists, much like their cousins in architecture, are under a great deal of pressure to innovate.

I am not one of those who scoff at the results of this pressure.

There is a tendency to misread philosophical fashion among artists as if it were the symptom of a superficial trendiness. Even artists themselves make this criticism, in sometimes masochistic fashion. But I see nothing wrong with cycling through Heidegger, Barthes, Žižek, Deleuze, Rancière… in search of fresh influences, in an effort to keep the pot stirred. So what if most artists don’t read these figures in depth? It is not the duty of artists to make accurate long-term judgements about the ultimate historic value of Graham Harman.

Photo: Ismail Baydas

specific philosophers. And I would go so far as to say that most professional philosophers do this more poorly than artists anyway.

You asked about speculative realism and why we are now having some influence in the arts.

Anglo-American analytic philosophy has always made room for realism, in large part due to its exces­sive deference to the natural sciences. By contrast, Continental philosophy has always had an unfor­tunate disrespect for realism, thanks to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger’s misguided view that the question of reality existing outside the mind is a pseudo-problem.

Artists, with their sensitive antennae for the new, have correctly detected something new here and embraced speculative realism. By contrast, mainstream Continental philosophy scholars have thrown up confusing makeshift obstacles, clinging to the fashions of their own youthful years while hypocritically mocking those of the present.

As for my own work, object-oriented philo­ sophy, the reason for its influence in the arts and architecture is probably the fact that it gives aesthetics a central place. For me, aesthetics pertains to the breakdown of the bonds between objects and their qualities, which extends well

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beyond the arts to cover such phenomena as physical causation itself. In this way, aesthetics ceases to be a minor annexe of philosophy and sets up camp in the centre of philosophy. My worry is that other types of speculative realism too often remain handmaidens of mathematics and the natural sciences, in a manner typical of Western philosophy since Descartes.

AR ‘Realism’ is a very specific philosophical concept here – some might argue that contemporary art has been full of ‘reality’ since at least the beginning of the 1990s – like the in-your-face materiality of a Damien Hirst sculpture, or the obsession with social and political context in much relational art. But I suspect the ‘disres­ pect for realism’ you note in Continental philosophy has to do with how such approaches are always about the subject’s side of the equation, and their denigration of the possibility of an accessible, objective reality.

Do you see your own work in opposition to that, and what does that mean for specifically artistic questions of subjectivity?

GH ‘Realism’ has different meanings in different fields: philosophy, mathematics, politics, visual art and literature. As for philosophy, the simplest definition of realism here is the view that a world exists outside the mind. I actually think this doesn’t go far enough, and I will explain why in a moment. But it’s a good starting point.

In philosophy as in most fields, general intel­lectual tendencies sometimes have centuries’ worth of momentum before they reverse into their opposites. The general tendency in Continental philosophy since just after Kant has been idealist in flavour. Kant held that there were things-in-themselves outside the mind that could be thought but never known.

With post-Kantian thinkers, there was an anti­ realist way of dealing with Kant’s legacy: ‘If we try to think a thing-in-itself outside thought, we are thinking it, and therefore thought encompasses everything.’

This is not just a problem for historians of philosophy, because roughly the same argument grounds the contemporary work of figures such as Žižek and Quentin Meillassoux, who hold (in different ways) that thinking a thing outside thought is a naive and impossible manoeuvre.

In Kantian terms, the unknowable noumena become a special case of the phenomena, since after all we are thinking them.

But I digress. Simple ideas can have longterm consequences, and the reversal of Kant in the late 1700s is a textbook example of this. A decision was made early on that Kant was a great genius but it’s too bad he still believed in these silly things-in-themselves. But a different reversal of Kant was possible, and that’s the one I’m asking people to consider making belatedly in our own time. What if Kant’s readers in the 1790s had said this: ‘Kant was a great genius

to realise that there is the thing-in-itself beyond our access to anything. His sole mistake was to limit this problem to human beings. Instead, all relations are finite, even those not involving humans. When fire burns cotton, it only makes contact with a minimal number of features of the cotton. The same when any two things touch one another. No relation exhausts its relata, and when things touch each other, they are only touching caricatures of each other.”

If this had happened – and it was quite possible, given the widespread familiarity with G.W. Leibniz in Kant’s Germany – there would have been no German Idealism, no Hegel, no Marx, no Lacan, no Žižek. There would have been instead a form of German Realism in which the real was not just something that exists ‘outside the mind’ (since this implies that the

The reason for its influence in the arts and architecture is probably the fact that it gives aesthetics a central place.

For me, aesthetics pertains to the breakdown of the bonds between objects and their qualities, which extends well beyond the arts to cover such phenomena as physical causation itself. In this way, aesthetics ceases to be a minor annexe of philosophy and sets up camp in the centre of philosophy human mind is the sole relevant yardstick) but outside of any relation between any two things whatsoever.

On that note, let’s turn back to artistic ques­ tions of subjectivity, as you put it. Žižek has made the interesting remark that the traditional roles of science and art have now reversed, in the sense that only scientists now speak of the ‘beauty’ or ‘elegance’ of the universe, while artists sound pathetically naive if they refer to their works as motivated by beauty. Art is now much more likely to give us the brute material reality that used to be the province of science: Hirst is a good example of this, obviously.

Along with Hirst, you mentioned the call to place art in its sociopolitical context, and I think you’re right to mention these trends in the same breath, precisely because I think neither deserves the name ‘realism’. I’ve just defined realism as a philosophy dealing not just with

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what’s outside the human mind, but with what’s outside of relation. To some artists this will sound like the old-fashioned side of an ongoing debate, since art critics like Clement Greenberg and even Michael Fried lost the theoretical upper hand at some point in the 1960s. The same thing happened in literary criticism: the notion of an artwork (in any genre) as a decontextualised, self-contained unity seemed to become the house philosophy of elitist bourgeois white guys.

The supposed remedy to this ‘elitist’ deadlock in which artworks were said to have inherent qualities was to contextualise everything. The artwork was said to be no different in kind from normal physical wares, and the literary work no different from laundry lists and prison registries. Thus the work was radically relationised, and this is still the default ‘progressive’ attitude in all of these fields even now. In order to be authentic, art and literature must be sitespecific, or come from the heart of a challenging personal identity oppressed by someone or other, inserted into a network of calls for justice and revolution, or (the case of Hirst) address itself to the viewer like a slap in the face rather than like a deeper mystery to be deciphered.

For me, then, art is radically nonrelational, the creation of things that are inherently sundered from their qualities. The philosopher David Hume said that there are really no objects, just bundles of qualities: when I say ‘apple’, I really just mean a bundle of red, sweet, hard, juicy and so forth. The great achievement of Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty was to show us that Hume had it backwards: we experience the apple as a unit, and then we experience the qualities of the apple, which constantly shift though the apple remains the same.

Let me just add in passing that if I speak of ‘nonrelational aesthetics’, this is not a veiled dig at Nicolas Bourriaud. What I’m attacking is the attempt to give a contextual definition of art (as Duchamp is read as doing) as well as the attempt to define every object and action ulti­ mately in sociopolitical terms. Before a thing can be political or situational or contextual, it has a manifold reality that no human and indeed no relation at all can ever exhaust. In this sense, I think Greenberg was still too relational.

AR I like the idea that an artwork has a ‘manifold reality that no relation can ever exhaust’, and that it might have a ‘deeper mystery to be deciphered’. These are good ripostes to any reductive, over-instrumental­ ised view of what art might be for. But between the reality and the deciphering, you seem still to imply the process of inquiring, finding out, exploring, that for me is a characteristic of an active, specifically human encounter with reality, which applies to art too.

And yet much of the reception of speculative realism

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tends to celebrate its apparent demotion of human subjectivity and its ‘anthropocentricity’, while critics conversely throw about accusations of ‘misanthro­ pism’. Neither quite rings true, and I wonder where you stand when your work is given these cultural and political interpretations.

GH I’ve always found it strange that when the new realisms say that humans are just one entity among others, many critics gloss this as saying that ‘new realisms think humans are worthless’. When Copernicus removed the earth from the centre of the universe, he was not saying that the earth was ‘worthless’, though he did lead us to reassess our place in the cosmos. When anti-imperialists in America protest the Iraq War and appeal to international law, they are not neces­sarily saying that the United States is ‘worthless’ (though some of them may think so). When Darwin set forth his famous theory, it did not entail that humans are ‘worthless’.

In fact, this line of critique says a lot more about our critics than about us. When they demand that humans remain the transcendental condition of access to the rest of reality, some of them may have professorial reasons for this in some abstruse theory of knowledge.

But I’ve come to see that many of them want humans to stand in the centre of reality because they want human politics to stand there. And it simply doesn’t. It’s a huge, cold universe out there, and the drama of human politics plays as small a part in the universe as every other human thing. Politics is not ‘first philosophy’ (Aristotle’s term for the most basic kind of philosophical inquiry), even though the newly radicalised atmosphere today makes many want to hope so. Nor is ethics first philosophy, despite the claims of Emmanuel Levinas. Whatever first philosophy might be, it needs to cover a lot more terrain than ethics and politics, which pertain primarily to human beings.

Modern philosophy (roughly since Descartes) has so accustomed us to a constant interplay of human and world, nature and spirit, subject and object, Dasein (human being) and Sein (being), that we unconsciously take it for granted that humans should make up 50 percent of the ingredients of philosophy. Human beings take up one half of Descartes’s schema, while all chemicals, particles, plants, animals, fungi, planets, black holes, oceans, moons and supernovae are jammed into the other half.

The unfairness of this should be obvious.

Thus a far broader starting point is needed.

That’s why I start with objects in general, and humans are just one kind of object, though an extremely interesting one for us. This doesn’t mean that humans have no more dignity than garbage or wood chips, it simply means that

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whatever gives humans their dignity is not the starting point of philosophical inquiry. We must begin by talking about everything, including the most contemptible things.

As for the first part of your question, we need to distinguish between humans as observer and as ingredient. The realist philosopher Manuel DeLanda gives a helpful example on the first page of his book A New Philosophy of Society (2006). Obviously, humans are ingredients of human society. In this first sense, you cannot speak intelligibly of ‘human society without humans’. But in a second sense, you can. As DeLanda notes, the fact that humans compose society does not mean that human society is reducible to human conceptions of it.

Sociologists can be wrong or simply stupid in

Some people have made a mistake by literally assuming that a speculative realist theory of arts should lead to an ‘art without humans’.

What on earth would this mean?

That’s like demanding ‘basketball without humans’.

Human observers or participants are necessary ingredients of art, just as they are necessary ingredients of human society. But one can still say that the artwork resists human comprehension just as human society resists human comprehension their theories of society, and I doubt even the leading sociologists would claim to understand all aspects of society thoroughly. In this respect, human society is a surplus beyond any human conception of it, even though society needs humans to exist. This is our basic disagreement with the classic Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who held that humans can understand society and culture since we are the ones who made it. Hardly. I doubt we understand Shakespeare or the European Union better than we understand protons.

The same point holds in the arts. Some people have made a mistake by literally assuming that a speculative realist theory of arts should lead to an ‘art without humans’. What on earth would this mean? As I’ve said elsewhere, that’s like demanding ‘basketball without humans’.

Human observers or participants are necessary ingredients of art, just as they are necessary ingredients of human society. But one can still say that the artwork resists human comprehension just as human society resists human comprehension.

Michael Fried might call it ‘theatrical’ to say that an observer must be there for the artwork to be what it is. But that’s because he seems to conflate theatre with presence, and for this reason he can easily be countered with a variant of DeLanda’s argument about society. The fact that the human spectator is a necessary ingredient of art does not mean that the artwork is thereby transparent to the spectator. Quite the contrary.

But I do agree with Fried on one other point.

He famously says: ‘We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace.’ I don’t care that much for the second sentence – ‘grace’ makes for too easy a target, while ‘presentness’ is a confusing opposite for ‘presence’. But Fried’s basic point here seems right to me. Some of his contemporaries (T.J. Clark for one, and Derrida is another) have been suspicious of any claim to a great ontological rift between the literal and the nonliteral. But a rift is precisely what there is. The literal occurs, in language or the visual arts, when an object is reducible to a bundle of qualities or a bundle of clear propositional statements about it. Natural science in its normal mode is a juggernaut of literalism, and that’s fine. But when an object is severed from its qualities and no longer made fully intelligible by listing them, in that case the object is withheld from us, and we have crossed a line into the aesthetic.

One last point about this. When the object succeeds in withdrawing behind its qualities in this way, it compels interest. There is a certain allure to it, a certain seductive force.

And that’s why sincerity is coming back into style after centuries of increasing criticality, cynicism, snideness and the like. These models only make sense in the modern atmosphere when philosophers thought their job was to separate humans from ‘world’ more and more cleanly, and that humans were less naive than the other animals. But in fact, we are considerably more naive than any other animals. Science has given us a world of greater naivety than ever before: new stars, lichens and comets to believe in, in far greater numbers than all the gods and witches’ spells it exterminated.

Though Oscar Wilde told us that ‘all bad poetry is sincere’, this was one of his least convincing statements. Everything good is sincere. Which is not to say that all sincerity succeeds: it can take a lifetime to formulate what you really believe; our early efforts are bound to end up false or wooden or imitative. ara

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The Recipient of Yanghyun Prize 2014 Apichatpong Weerasethakul_Thailand

Award Ceremony & Art Lecture November 11, 2014, 2:30 – 4:00 pm National Museum of Korea

Jury Chris Dercon Director, Tate Modern

Adam D. Weinberg Alice Pratt Brown Director, The Whitney Museum of American Art

Past Recipients 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

Cameron Jamie (USA) Isa Genzken (Germany) Jewyo Rhii (Korea) Akram Zaatari (Lebanon) Abraham Cruzvillegas (Mexico) Rivane Neuenschwander (Brazil)

The Yanghyun Prize The Yanghyun Prize was established in 2008 by the Yanghyun Foundation, and it continues to promote exceptional artists by providing a global stage through the award and exhibition supports.

The Yanghyun Foundation sponsors the Yanghyun Art Lecture, a yearly public lecture given by the recipient to provide an insight into his/her practice and to further enhance the public’s engagement and experience with contemporary art. www.yanghyunprize.org

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Who Goes, Where Are? [part 4] Documentation as gesture in alternative art practices of contemporary China

by Edward Sanderson and Elaine W. Ho

Collage of photos from The Meeting Room project, organised by Elaine W. Ho and Rania Ho, hosted by the Arrow Factory, Beijing, from November 2012 to January 2013

An intriguing membrane of intimacy is formed by casual banter among friendly acquaintances who happen most often to meet in the context of art events. This membrane, gelled by the knowing exchange of glances, an inside joke or simply ‘catching up’, shields one against other forms of bubbling sociality, piercing the airs of rampant display that make it otherwise difficult to see what would have been the intended object of display – art itself. How classical! Of course, we live in an era of art in which the object of art becomes more and more difficult to pinpoint, no longer so well defined against the mushy pea-soup of the art ‘context’ and its socio­ economic workings as industry and media phenomenon. What Peter Sloterdijk neatly rounds up as a ‘pathology of spheres’ manifests as our sliding upon the surfaces of these micropolitical membranes towards smooth, polished forms; money – so they say – put where the mouth is.

It is thus that our unlikely collaboration begins. This experiment, entitled Who Goes, Where Are? kneads together a series of public dialogues that address independent initiatives in the Chinese context and the reflexivity of one-to-one conversation via a performative play between language and gesture. Each encounter is reworked and recontextualised from the previous – from a joint academic paper to a performance to an audio collage – making the objects of artistic research indistinguishable from their processes and complicating our roles as independent researchers as well as practitioners. The recurrence of old East–West dichotomies is only another aspect of the much-needed reformation of subject and object positions in this dialogue. What follows is an annotated documentation of a documentation, taken from the first two instances of our ongoing encounter:

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He had deftly picked up a technique of knitting with his bare hands. Although bound together, his hands kept moving. She flung the red and grey wool towards and away from him; they had a syncopated conversation.

Elaine W. Ho and Edward Sanderson, Who Goes, Where Are? [part 2], 3 April 2014, ArtReview London.

Photo courtesy Jason Yen

1 Transcribed content taken from Elaine W. Ho and Edward Sanderson, Who Goes, Where Are? [part 2], performance dialogue at the ArtReview Bar (London, 3 April 2014)

Elaine W. Ho Who are you? 1 Edward Sanderson I am Edward Sanderson, an art critic based in Beijing, and I write about contemporary art in China, specifically researching independent artist initiatives and collectives. And who are you?

EWH My name is Elaine W. Ho. I’ve been living in Beijing for the last eight years, working as an artist, freelancer, precarious worker of sorts.

The practice has been mostly grounded in a so-called ‘alternative’ collaborative project space known as HomeShop.

HomeShop series number one: Games 08, closing ceremony, 2008, Beijing.

Photo courtesy HomeShop, Beijing

Research intersects with art intersects with criticism here, in the sense of a field of research organised according to a flow of personal interest, balanced aesthetically upon a precipice also known as a canon, or perhaps an academic standard, or – further – an industry. Work is fettered in constant toil with that certain outside, and this begs the question of representation within artistic research because

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representation always occurs as a mimesis in reference to those external relations: working in a local community, peers within the discipline, the artworld and perhaps even some kind of utopian-not-yet. 2

We hope that you will take keywords like ‘alternative’ and ‘self-organised’ merely as the broaching of questions. 3 There has been some debate about an adequate, nonderogatory sense of the Chinese term for ‘alternative’.

Creative practices deemed ‘alternative’ have a long lineage in China (as elsewhere), but may not be consciously or immediately referred to as such, or only designated as ‘alternative’ ex post facto. 4 To generalise, the ‘alternative’ work exists in a space of lack, but new forms of community, for instance, emerge from such spaces, and what they propose to the ‘mainstream’ are new configurations of social organisation and distributions of power that are both an aesthetic, creative formation and a political proposition.

2 Representation occurs here in its etymological sense, as a calling to mind by description, whereby one could possibly come to serve, show or embody the other – from the late fourteenth century, meaning ‘to bring to mind by description’, also ‘to symbolise, serve as a sign or symbol of; serve as the type or embodiment of’, and from the Old French representer, as in to ‘present, show, portray’ (twelfth century), from Latin repraesentare, as in ‘make present, set in view, show, exhibit, display’, from re-, the intensive prefix, plus praesentare, ‘to present’, literally ‘to place before’.

“Represent”, Online Etymology Dictionary, http://etymonline.com/index. php?term=represent &allowed_in_ frame=0 (Douglas Harper, 2010–14) 3 Content from Elaine W. Ho and Edward Sanderson, Who Goes, Where Are? [part 1], research presentation at Friday Night Salons at Tate Modern (London, 28 March 2014) 4 Wu Hung, ‘Reinventing exhibition spaces in China’, Museum International, No 211, Vol 53, No 3 (2011), and Gao Minglu, ‘Changing Motivations of Chinese Contemporary Art Since the Mid 1990s’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 11:2–3 (2012) 209–219

Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

Photo courtesy Edward Sanderson

The basic idea is that I’ve described these spaces as a kind of image of a certain ‘unmappability’, circumscribing the political, cultural and economic flux that exists in China – perhaps all over the globe – but most affectively, of course, as a personal struggle of positioning (or not wanting to position) oneself too clearly amid the overwhelming forces of socio-capitalistic hegemony.

ES In those hutongs, HomeShop was quite hidden away, but you had a quite specific community that you were working with. Why was that important?

EWH The whole project came out of an interest in those communities, so after moving in…

…the voice of representation…

EWH …there was an interest to understand more. And I think ‘living life’ (so to speak) comes out of that interest in understanding and attempting to react…

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Documentation, in this sense, was an active part of that attempt, both as form of observation but also in acknowledgement of the fact that every form of documentation is a recognition of value, a proposition and a coming towards.

EWH In the beginning we were just making friends.

The points at which the practices of the everyday intersect with one’s identity is a matter of ethical concern for understanding the nature of the relation outside of blind practice.

ES When you’re working with people, especially when they’re not within [existing] institutional structures (the gallery system or museums, say) – you end up getting in much closer relationship to them. So you have to be friends to know what they’re doing, to talk about them, to interview them – that kind of thing.

What is interesting for me to think about is how ‘organisation’ occurs here as an internally binding agent, and ‘representation’ as an external one.

EWH You’re representing these artists and groups, so to speak?

Arrow Factory, Beijing.

Photo courtesy Edward Sanderson

From the perspective of a critic, the review is one level of external representation; for the artist, it could be a website or list of exhibitions. But the degree of cohesion or discrepancy between these forms of representation indicates the complex array of audiences and agendas.

EWH So how does your form of representation of these artists and groups organise a particular aspect of the artworld or the art industry?

ES Well, representation does that by default, really.

But it is perhaps our task here to approach this so-called ‘business of art history’ as a heuristic rather than hermeneutic mode of engagement – documentation as gesture. The ‘academic turn’ in contemporary art reflects back upon art history

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and the discourses that seek to understand and contextualise it. In Simon O’Sullivan’s readings on the ‘Aesthetics of Affect’, art history is reenvisioned ‘as a kind of parallel to the work that art is already doing, rather than as an attempt to fix and interpret art – art history, perhaps, as precisely a kind of creative writing’. 5

…When labour and work are highly confused, as is the case with artist-run spaces, it becomes highly difficult to articulate a position relative to a particular framing of work and the work.

5 Simon O’Sullivan, ‘The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation’, Visual Cultures as Objects and Affects, ed Jorella Andrews (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 21

…This aesthetic understanding of organisation occurs in the tracing of activity towards the realm of representation, and it is here where the power relations and inequalities of organisation, affiliation and collaboration are concealed or revealed. One particular question we must ask is, ‘Where is the work within all of this?’

A Diaodui, Sleeping, (ongoing), Beijing.

Photo courtesy Edward Sanderson

If we are to understand research as a way of speaking about an aesthetico-political work, the means and processes of politics and the community must necessarily be highlighted as workings rather than works.

Images of people gathering say very little about what the work is. Workshops, performances, event-based gatherings and the much-talked-about other variables that have loosely come to be known as ‘social practice’ characterise much of what HomeShop and the other case studies in our research do. Vitamin Creative Space, while commercially operated, organises itself differently from a traditional gallery, and could more aptly be described as an art off-space that happens to be run by a gallerist. 6 Cooking and urban agriculture have been common topics of Vitamin’s events, as is sometimes the case for Arrow Factory in Beijing, whose regular series of installations is interspersed with artist-led bake sales and bar nights. 7 In these examples, not only does the gloss of photography add an extra glow to the mediation of the social, but it disperses as well, such that the spaces between people and the representation of collaboration take on ambiguous meanings.

When looked at from a standpoint outside of China, the political reading is emphasised. However, our focus upon the structures of language, the poetics of translation and the creation of image (or an imaginary) refers primarily to the micropolitical and liminal aspects of self-organised practice.

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6 The homepage of Vitamin Creative Space asserts that ‘in order to operate independently from insti­ tutionalised funding, it is active both as an independent art space and as a “commercial” gallery. Vitamin Creative Space actively challenges preconceptions by merging these two traditionally opposed strategies for supporting and presenting contemporary art, targeting the search for new Chinese contribu­ tions at both the artistic-practice and the institutional level within the new global context.’ http://www. vitamincreativespace.com/en/?page_id=2 7 Arrow Factory is self-described as an ‘independently run alternative art space in Beijing that is located in a small hutong alley in the city centre.

Arrow Factory reclaims an existing storefront and transforms it into a space for site-specific installations and projects that are designed to be viewed from the street 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.’ www.arrowfactory.org.cn

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This is an artistic environment where lack of public funds for culture obviates the need to justify work as per the speculative tallies required by governmentsupported models. ‘Open platforms’ are actually seldom tolerated, as effective results most often need to be speculatively generated before projects even begin.

The Beijing-based group A Diaodui’s lighthearted approach stems precisely from the contradictions of being together within an atmosphere of intense production. In a series of informal performances, members visit temples and sleep in little tents on their grounds. To be ‘open’ then comes to encompass the possibility of doing nothing at all.

ES I think this an interesting ploy even – that you might deliberately and precariously set that up.

EWH And is that precariousness a particular trait of their effectiveness?

ES Well, I think if you look at precarity as a response to institution­ alisation, then yes.

Artist and curator Ma Yongfeng’s Dragon Fountain Bathhouse project (2010) is such an intentionally risky ploy. In this example, the artist embraced the temporality and invisibility of a small public bathhouse in a village on the outskirts of Beijing by encouraging interventions that subtly enjoined with the space.

For the eight-hour span in which the show lasted, failure and frustration became part of the game of viewing.

…these practices work in places and in ways that create their own conditions of existence on-the-fly, as it were. One might even argue that this precariousness is a constituent feature of these practices.

These are fluid subjectivities, of course. But performativity, we feel, is part of the (re)presentation of activities, to oneself and to the public.

This is an ongoing script. Further developments of Who Goes, Where Are? will appear imminently. ara

Ma Yongfeng, Dragon Fountain Bathhouse, 2010, Beijing.

Photo courtesy Edward Sanderson

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Kao Chung-Li Cinema Lucida

by Yu Wei

A handheld and manually operated projector, modified from an old cassette by the artist, to play an 8mm film. Courtesy the artist

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Beginning with an unusual voice-over – ‘I am a bullet...’ – Kao ChungLi’s The Taste of Human Flesh (2010) comprises 80 slides projected on a wall, a jumble of photography: a portrait of his father, old works, sketches, readymades, 3D computer models, and so on. The subject of the narrative is a People’s Liberation Army bullet that lodged in the body of the artist’s father, a soldier in the Republic of China Armed Forces, during the Battle of Xu-Beng (or Huaihai Campaign, 1948–9) and was never removed. Kao adopts the perspective of the bullet to narrate his father’s life story. The result is a mingling of family history, the construction of a personal identity and national identification.

The grand narrative disintegrates into fragments, and history takes the guise of fossils. Examining his father’s body is Kao’s way of reflecting on history. He gave his own account of this process in 2010: ‘If we compare the times in which my father lived to a language, I think we ought to learn that language, at least enough to comprehend it. If not, it will be very difficult to live properly.’

I Born in 1958, Kao is part of the first postwar generation of Taiwanese artists and one of few practitioners to straddle the realms of experimental film and contemporary art. In his youth he sought to attend art school in defiance of his parents’ objections. Due to a strange combination of circumstances, he ended up studying printing, which ignited his interest in various types of visual reproduction: film, still photography and second-hand archives. As he became increasingly engaged in photography, he began experimenting with the 8mm film format and the work he executed in this medium between 1984 and 1988 garnered attention in experimental film circles after receiving honours at five consecutive editions of Taiwan’s most prominent short film award, the Golden Harvest Awards (credited with discovering directors such as Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang).

One of his short films, That Photograph (1984), took as its subject a famous photograph from Josef Koudelka’s series Cikáni (Gypsies), which is a metaphorical consideration of death – one of the key subjects of Kao’s explorations in film. Kao converted the photograph to film dimensions and then used more than 20 different methods of filming to capture the static image. The different versions of the image inspire differing interpretations; Kao went beyond an experiment in formal transformation to use film as a means of reading a photograph.

In 1984, Kao took a job as a press photographer and started to contribute occasional satirical political cartoons to China Times Weekly. At the time, civic society was bursting at the seams with latent energy after nearly 40 years of political oppression. Rather than hiding behind the camera to record the turmoil, Kao became a participant. In 1986, one year before the lifting of martial law in Taiwan, he joined Chen Chieh-jen, Lin Ju and Wang Jun-Jieh to form the group Living Clay. It organised an exhibition at an abandoned apartment building in east Taipei, flaunting an underground vitality and directly critiquing the culture industry and art system.

Living Clay is now regarded as one of the most radical avant-garde art groups of its time.

II During the 1990s Kao had a day job as an editor for the weekly cartoon periodicals published by China Times. Largely inactive on the art scene beyond the occasional Living Clay exhibition, Kao had little to do with the increasing trendiness of video art in Taiwan. Nonetheless, he continued to shoot amateur 8mm home-movies in his spare time. At times he even gave his equipment to others and bade them to shoot whatever they pleased. Most of these films had only been screened in private to families and friends. A few were shown publicly at artist’s talks, or were later used as materials for other works. He also collected broken 8mm cameras and projectors, which he disassembled and refurbished. Amateur-style filming and the home-movie idiom would eventually play an important role in his work.

Like many Taiwanese intellectuals of his time, Kao’s understanding of Leftist thought was inspired by the Chinese translation of Marx and Engels: Selected Works, the literature of Chen Yingzhen, and his participation in book clubs during the late 1980s organised by Ren Jian magazine (founded by Chen in November 1984 and discontinued because of financial crisis in 1989). This exposure to Leftist thought shaped the attitudes he adopted in his subsequent work, which focused on capitalism, cultural hegemony, American imperialism and the general dominance of the First World in the audio-visual industry. Considering film production from a materialist perspective, Kao became profoundly aware of the historical reality of two major shortcomings in the audiovisual culture of postwar Taiwan: first, the collapse of the film industry and second, the role of Taiwanese as substitute workers for the First World entertainment industry (particularly in the field of animation).

As a filmmaker disadvantaged by the status quo in the globalised age, Kao attempted to develop his own film production possibilities within the context of his meagre circumstances.

During the late 1990s, Kao began building his own 8mm projectors out of spare parts and made-to-order components in order to screen his films. These blended handdrawn animation with live film photography. Some of his projectors employed a praxinoscope.

Many of the animations featured unending fisticuffs, a metaphor for conflict between the individual and the environment or the social system. Kao described these projectors, which have the look of homemade technology from the early twentieth-century, in flat descriptive terms: ‘8mm photochemical mechanical mobile image devices’ and ‘Palm-sized physical mobile imaging devices’.

‘Watching by itself is careless. You think you are only using your optic nerves, only seeing the flickering pixels, but in fact there is a written structure contained within,’ Kao said in a 2005 interview (on the occasion of his inclusion in the Taiwan Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale). How should the politics of this kind of ‘watching’ be approached? His tactic is to disassemble illusions and turn film production from magic into science. Film, animation and dynamic images are all technically based in the creation of illusion through visual fragments. Kao liberates the black-box production of illusion and transforms it into an animation machine that oscillates between static and dynamic images. He exposes the mechanisms of turning light and shadow into image in what he calls ‘camera lucida cinema’.

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Slideshow Cinema series, 2010 – .

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The resulting films stand in stark opposition to both the popular current digital technologies and the darkroom projections that populate galleries of contemporary art. Kao demystifies the production of dynamic images and thus reveals their hidden political nature.

III For years, Kao has all but forsworn television, newspapers and computers. He finally opened an email account, which his friends check for him, and he recently acquired a digital camera. He seems beyond the influence of popular art trends; it is as if he possesses a completely different sense of time from the rest of us. While others might find his approach to be surrealistic, Kao insists that his actions are completely driven by pragmatism. He once stated that he uses the 8mm format not due to nostalgia but simply because it is cheap.

However, in recent years, Kao has felt his eyesight gradually become inadequate to the task of working in the format. At the same time, his experience as a part-time lecturer impelled him to develop a series of slide-projection works. Using obsolete Kodak Ektagraphic AudioViewer projectors, he pairs a slideshow with a prerecorded audiotape. The series, which adopts the format of what was called ‘slide-tape’ in the pre-digital image era, is described by Kao as Slideshow Cinema. The first such work, The Taste of Human Flesh, was originally shown in his 2010 solo exhibition Watch Time Watching at Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei. Since then Kao has made another five ‘slideshow cinema’ works. The projection-slide as a medium has a special significance to Kao: ‘the continuous switching-over between slides maintains an intensity of image, time, and stasis,’ he said. On the one hand, it conjures the aura of photography; on the other hand, it preserves the sense of time created by film.

Amid the mechanical sounds of the slide projector, Kao creates a unique form of essay film. The films feature off-screen voiceover as well as text interwoven into the series of images – not unlike the captions of early silent films. Kao applies the tone of an essay to parsing his own film ontology. The slides themselves include both his photography and pictures taken by unnamed amateurs.

As a self-taught filmmaker, Kao holds a special regard for amateur photography. In 2011, he independently published a book titled

Unconscious Light Theory and Xiaoshi of Photography: Off-Screen Sound and Off-Sound Image, an anthology of his collection of amateur photographs, each accompanied by a short interpretation written by Kao. The original Chinese form of the book’s title includes a homophone of the Chinese translation of the title of Walter Benjamin’s A Short History of Photography (1931). Kao traded the characters for ‘a short history’ for this homophone, xiaoshi, that is itself part of words such as user, messenger and angel. It is an affectionate moniker Kao applies to amateur photographers. But why amateur?

‘The true meaning of an image is, “this once existed”’, Kao writes in this book. ‘And the closest thing to this true meaning is an amateur photograph.’

IV In terms of viewing, Kao’s images are not intended for lighthearted perusal. Rather, their depth and complexity demand repeated consideration. Dialectical, critical sensory activity replaces the classic unidirectional reception of information. On this subject, Kao’s works summon both meanings of the word ‘apparatus’: through the various cinema contraptions that he has produced, such as a hand operated 8mm film projector modified from an old cassette, he redesigns the formal visual apparatus, the machine; and through the alternative cinema formats that he has introduced into the artistic viewing mechanism, such as slide-tape and the amateur movie, he reforms the implicit mode of producing and circulating an artistic text. By demystifying technology, Kao reveals to us the political nature of contemporary images, and he also creates the possibility of a new narrative. He ultimately seeks a clear, self-reflexive, dynamic image free of magical overtones.

In the end, Kao’s films have not become fully structural/materialist films, nor are they purely metalinguistic visual art. Kao’s dialectical consideration of image may approach the Marxian notion of scientific aesthetics, but history – a theme of increasing prominence in his work – is only faintly discernible as a sombre, mythic, ghostly presence within the sanctuaries of his essay films: a single thread of magic in these scientific images. ara Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

The Taste of Human Flesh, 2010, sound, 80 slides, slideshow on one slide machine. Courtesy Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei

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I Asked the River Tonight

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I Asked the River Tonight

by Charwei Tsai & Tsering Tashi Gyalthang

As we are now both living in Saigon, we wanted to create an artwork dedicated to the Mekong River, a waterway that connects where we live now back to where Tsering is originally from – the Tibetan Plateau. For the first part of this project, which you can see on the preceding pages, we selected a poem written by Tsering about a love story between the river and the moon, and put it in dialogue with some images that he captured during the last ten years of living here. As Tsering puts it: “Just the moon and the river, lost in each other’s company, guiding and inspiring each other. Civilisations were born around rivers, while poets were born under the moon. I wonder how dull the civilisations would be without poetry.”

Tsering moved to Vietnam in his early twenties. Since then, his films and writings have always been related to the people, culture and natural environment alongside the Mekong area, as can be seen in early works such as The River (2010) and Canh Ba Ba (Turtle Soup, 2012). As a traveller, I always get my inspiration from the places through which I travel, the people that I meet and the stories that impress me. Now that I have a new home in this foreign place, Vietnam, it feels natural to make this local project with Tsering, who has introduced me to this new culture and its natural beauty.

Last but not the least important, one theme that ties the project more specifically with my own work is the Buddhist concept of interdependence between the river, the moon, the land and the people, and the impermanence of this relationship, which actually connects everyone and everything in the world. Charwei Tsai The second part of this project, a short film under the same title, will be released on artreview.com in September 2014

Charwei Tsai is an artist. Born in Taipei, she currently lives and works in Taipei, Saigon and Paris. Tsai graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence (2002) and the postgraduate programme at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (2010). She utilises a variety of media in a politically engaged, performative practice with geographical, social and spiritual concerns.

Tsering Tashi Gyalthang is a Tibetan filmmaker and artist. He spent most of his childhood in a monastery in Dharamsala, a small hill town in Northern India, where he was groomed to become a monk. He escaped from the monastic life after he was sponsored to join a Tibetan boarding school, which eventually led to his further studies in the United States. In 2003, after seeing a Vietnamese film, he moved to Vietnam and has been based there ever since.

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GALLERY EAST galleryeast.com.au

Tattoos and Beautiful Women

images from 200 years of Japanese prints from the Forrest/Nedéla Collection and the ceramics of Amanda Shelsher

27 September – 19 June 2014 Kidogo Arthouse Bathers Beach Fremantle Western Australia

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KIAF/14

The 13th Korea International Art Fair 25-29 Sep. 2014 COEX Hall A&B, Seoul Guest Country Southeast Asia

Organized by

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Alan Tsz-wai Kwan

Practitioners of the craft of private banking efginternational.com

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Sponsor’s statement Having been associated with ArtReview’s FutureGreats issue since 2011, EFG International is pleased to be part of ArtReview Asia’s inaugural FutureGreats. Over the four years that the partnership with ArtReview has been running, the process of asking established artists, curators and critics to select less well-known artists who they think will be shaping future artistic discourse has produced intriguing insights into the state of contemporary art. Indeed, it has been a pleasure to witness the rise to prominence of many of the artists championed early on in these pages.

Artists such as Ed Atkins and Helen Marten (both 2011) are now well known on the international circuit, while Elizabeth Price (also selected in 2011, and a selector in 2013) has gone on to win the Turner Prize. Of those selected in 2012, Wael Shawky has just closed his first major London exhibition, at the Serpentine Galleries, while Petrit Halilaj has completed a major exhibition at Wiels, Brussels. As the FutureGreats programme expands into Asia, we look forward to being introduced to an array of new artistic talent from across the region.

In many ways, each new edition of FutureGreats is a record of a successive generation’s take on the rapidly changing world in which we live. And the themes that characterise the artists presented on these pages are ones that resonate strongly with us at EFG International: the development of emerging new talent, an ever more comprehensive global scope and the expression of a consequently diverse range of interests and passions.

Keith Gapp Head of Strategy and Marketing, EFG International Practitioners of the craft of private banking efginternational.com

Introduction FutureGreats has been running in ArtReview in its current form since 2007. And now it comes to ArtReview Asia for the first time. ‘What is it?’ we hear you cry excitedly. Well, each year we ask a group of artists, curators and writers that we respect (NB: an artist, curator or writer not asked to take part is not necessarily someone we don’t respect) to tell us which artists they think are going to be shaping the direction of contemporary art over the coming 12 months. Easy, you think? Just look up which ones are selling the most at art fairs? Bah! That’s not the ArtReview Asia way! We prefer the way of pain!

So, we insist that the artists selected be somewhat under the radar. Or at least not household names across every continent (given that ArtReview Asia understands that the radar is set to different levels and that artists fly at various altitudes depending on where you and they are). But ArtReview Asia is not without mercy. For every restriction it imposes on its contributors, it’s prepared to offer an equal freedom. So in this case our selectors are not restricted to selecting youth. FutureGreats can be any age. After all, the future is always ahead of you. Finally, we ask our respected colleagues not simply to whisper the name of their pick in ArtReview Asia’s ear, but also to stick their necks out and tell the rest of the world (or you) too. ArtReview Asia

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Boedi Widjaja

Being an outsider has defined Boedi Widjaja’s life and his practice. Born in 1975 in Surakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese immigrant parents at the height of the Sinophobic policies of President Suharto’s New Order, he arrived in Singapore as a child, fleeing the ethnic tensions of his native Java. He was trained as an architect in Australia, spent his young adulthood in graphic design, and turned to art only in his thirties. His approach is at once autobiographical and oblique: the effects of displacement – its trauma, anxieties and melancholy – are channelled through materially-oriented explorations of the immigrant’s estrangement and experience, works that often feature an intensely corporeal, processual dimension as well. As Widjaja observes, his chief ‘method’ is the use of the techniques and tools of drawing, but ‘outcomes range from two-dimensional objects to installations to live art.’

Path. 1, The White City (2012) was staged at the Substation, Singapore’s oldest independent arts space, in 2012. The work, which took the form of live art sessions and an ongoing exhibition of the resulting visual objects, was triggered by fundamental changes in the artist’s life.

Widjaja took on Singapore citizenship that year, during a particularly fraught juncture in the country’s history when an emotionally-charged national conversation on the rights of immigrants was taking place. Audience members were invited to draw together with the artist, throwing rubber balls coated with graphite powder at the paper-lined walls of the gallery; meanwhile, dodging flying projectiles, the artist recorded the viewer’s movements in linear marks on the same surfaces. This communal act of drawing enabled conversations between artist Path. 1, The White City, 2012, performance.

Photo: Matthew G. Johnson. Courtesy the artist

and audience on an individual level, utilising the abstract as an expression of inarticulate, un-articulable disquietude and apprehension.

Drawing Cage (2013) emerged from the artist’s failed attempt to draw a portrait of avant-garde composer John Cage. In the series, the act of drawing is used to complicate historical and socio-cultural gulfs. Widjaja travelled to his grandfather’s hometown in Xiamen, China, where he documented the city’s terrain with a camera, using these photographs as raw material. Pigment was applied to the images using a Chinese ink brush – an instrument freighted with millennia of significance, but rendered void of meaning in the context of the uninitiated making arbitrary marks.

Tracings of stones sourced from the Yellow River were then imprinted on these compositions, reinforcing the notion of hollowness through the (ultimately meaningless) gesture of random cultural appropriation.

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Seher Shah

Pakistan-born, New York-based artist Seher Shah has been making a name for herself recently via her meditations on brutalist architecture in solo shows at Jhaveri Contemporary (Mumbai, India), The Contemporary Austin (USA) and Green Art Gallery (Dubai, UAE) amongst others. She is best known for her graphic, often monochromatic drawings that take individual features of brutalist buildings and present them as abstract fragments, although she also works in photography and, more recently, sculpture. Her favoured mode of working sees forms of unforgiving modernist architecture flattened and abstracted into simple motifs which are then contrasted with more chaotic backgrounds that often depict buildings or landscapes in a state of flux.

It is possible to read her work as a critique of the heavy-handed assumptions behind modernist architecture – for example her works Mammoth: Aerial Landscape Proposals (2012) and Object Relic (Unite d’Habitation) (2011) superimpose flattened modernist structures

by Le Corbusier on digital photographs and drawn renderings of an urban landscape.

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juxtaposes them with, evokes the dominating effect that brutalist buildings often had over the surrounding landscape. It arguably also gestures at the hubris of modernist architects’ assumptions about how those in low-cost or public housing would like to live.

Shah’s practice picks apart those highminded assumptions. She initially trained in architecture and her practice reverses the architectural process whereby idealised designs on pieces of paper translate into buildings.

Instead her works take those modernist buildings back towards drawings that are deliberately idiosyncratic and cheerfully dysfunctional.

Occasionally there’s a grudging nod of respect towards the brutalist desire to shoehorn the chaos of urban life into a more refined modernist sensibility. For instance, the sculptural shape in her recent work Landscape Object Vista I (2013) (in her solo show at Jhaveri Contemporary) Landscape Object Vista I, 2013, painted wood, plexi and acetate, 36 × 20 × 8 cm.

Mammoth: Aerial Landscape Proposals (untitled 3), 2012, 21 archival digital prints photographed by Randhir Singh, 33 × 45 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

acts rather neatly to frame the delicate drawing on Plexiglas of a modernist high-rise incongruously surrounded by what looks like fluttering bunting. Here the modernist motif (the sculptural element) is not overly dominating or threatening but works harmoniously with the more freewheeling element – which is certainly consistent with the aims of brutalist architects such as Alison and Peter Smithson.

Yet it is worth noting that Shah, in an interview with Asif Akhtar, for Naked Punch in January of this year, has pinpointed a scene out of Wong Kar-Wai’s film Chungking Express (1994) – in which a character runs through Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong – as one where a building works well as an object. The Mansions not only teems with an estimated 4,000 residents, but is the gathering place for minority groups in Hong Kong who use the food stalls, sari stores and clothing shops, backpackers who are drawn to the budget guest-houses, petty criminals, drug-pushers, sex-workers and illegal immigrants. It is reputedly host to people from at least 120 different countries. It is the opposite of the ordered, rational space that architects like Le Corbusier dreamed of. One rather suspects it is Shah’s ideal building.

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Chou Yu-Cheng At first sight, Chou Yu-Cheng’s artwork is like the quietest person at a party: it speaks slowly in a feeble voice and you don’t usually notice it immediately; it is invisible in a suspicious way.

But when you look closer or open a conversation with it, you will find there are unexpectedly intriguing and fascinating things waiting for you. Chou’s work doesn’t surprise you with razzle-dazzle installations or beat the drums to call for dancing; rather, he designs minimal but deliberately orchestrated ‘tricks’ that hold a special attraction.

Chou positions himself as a pivot point, creating a centrifuge for the mechanisms and operation of a space. He intervenes in this system through language and techniques, suggesting an advanced improvement or modification. In the works TOA Lighting (2010) and Rainbow Paint (2011), he proposes to exchange the art object with the structural components of the institutional facilities that house it,

challenging the economic system of patronage.

Exhibition lighting equipment or wall paint of a specific colour derive status and meaning from the constant reproduction of their context and function; they become recontextualised through Chou’s play with the relation between source and product.

Chou seeks slits and unveils invisibility in the chain of events behind an exhibition.

How is value produced? Who is engaging with the evaluation of value? These questions are further enhanced in his recent work, A Working History – Lu Chieh-te (2012). The work divides into two phases: at the first stage, Chou implemented the hidden economic realities of working conditions by employing a near sixty-year-old A Working History – Lu Chieh Te, 2012, (installation view, Taipei Fine Arts Museum), a temporary worker named Mr Lu, 210-page booklets in Chinese and English, painted wood deck, newspaper adverts, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

temp worker, Lu Chieh-te, and conducting interviews with him together with a ghostwriter. They wrote down Lu’s working history through the past 45 years and published the booklet as part of the final artwork. It is at this stage that A Working History won the Grand Prize at the Taipei Arts Awards, which made Lu an unexpected overnight superstar due to the massive media exposure. In the second phase of the work, Chou employed Lu as a security guard at the exhibition space.

The physical presence of Lu guarding his own autobiography, added to his sudden fame, suggests implicit contradictions and uncertainties.

Chou uses strategies of ‘tricks of design’ to achieve subtle displacements of meaning, and questions and reflects the definition of what we see and conceive in particular milieus. In a sense it is the moment of ‘unexpected intrigue’ that produces a dialectical intervention.

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Pisitakun Kuantalaeng

Pisitakun Kuantalaeng’s practice is restless and expansive, subversively defying its handcrafted, unique qualities in order to bring the audience into a network of insights about the social life of images and the means by which art can accrue different values. Doubling and repetition are the artist’s key methods as he painstakingly transcribes found imagery, asking where the world ends and the strange realities of representation begin.

In The Unfinished History project, a long-term artwork begun in 2012, Pisitakun links drawings of official images from the political histories of different countries with related but more randomly selected images from the Internet and invites viewers to decide upon the connections and assert their own authority and experience.

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Art’s capacity to disrupt naturalised ideologies is further explored in We Need To Talk About Money (2012), where the value of the artist’s fabricated currency is equal to its declared cost and there­ fore refutes the possibility of a fluctuating economy according to the arbitrary attribution of value. In Useless Art-Exhibition: Ratchaburi Journey (2010), potential buyers were asked to purchase lots for a fixed price before knowing which artwork they would acquire: here Pisitakun played with taste and desire through the ‘risk’ that the artwork could provoke abso­ lute disinterest from its new owner.

The Unfinished History, 2012–13, carbon paper drawings on paper, pencil on paper, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist

A graduate in sculpture from one of Thailand’s more experimental art colleges, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, the young artist has completed residencies in Japan and South Korea and exhibits regularly, most recently in the epic Concept Context Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre during 2014. As Thai history currently unfolds under martial law following the military coup d’état on 22 May 2014 – the thirteenth since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932 – Pisitakun’s practice represents a decisive break from many of his Thai peers: he questions fundamental and increasingly universal values without merely decrying the fact of corruption or offering neat palliatives.

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Alan Tsz-wai Kwan Alan Tsz-wai Kwan began making experimental sci-fi films in primary school. His fascination with memory and consciousness continued in university, where he produced works in various media exploring the relationship between memory and reality.

In 2011, before Google Glass was available to the public, Kwan started a ‘lifelogging’ practice by constructing his own video glasses and documenting one and a half years of his daily life. He then digitised and transferred the content into a video game system that enabled viewers to explore and experience his life. In addition to winning the Gold Award at the Incubator for Film & Visual Media in Asia

(ifva) in Hong Kong, 2013, the piece, Bad Trip (2012), was also exhibited at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, and at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, in 2013. His work Wake (2014) attempts to transcend the visual, audio and interactive bounds of the motion picture theatre with a device that stimulates the viewer’s nervous system during horror films.

He is currently working on a new lifelogging series in which his memories and daily activities are divided into different stocks and sold in Wake, 2014, (installation view), immersive cinema installation. Courtesy the artist

an online stock market. Through this system, the relationship between memory and future activities generates gains and losses in the market.

Like two of his favourite films, Being John Malkovich (1999) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Kwan’s works explore how personal memories play out in the realities of others. Kwan’s work displays daily life and personal memory in the format of video games and films to show the threat of commercialisation posed to ‘behaviour’ and ‘privacy’ in the context of contemporary culture, in which reality television and paparazzi are as ubiquitous as mental health treatment.

Translated from Chinese by Philana Woo

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Rho Jae Oon Rho Jae Oon’s works deal with the general methods through which visual cultures might be recognised and accommodated within society in the digital era. It seems that Rho attempts to narrow down any possible gaps between the contents of his work and the actual perceptions of viewers by using websites, such as his vimalaki.net, as a platform through which to show his creative output. When making actual exhibitions he tends to bring the virtual forms of his own mind or formats that resemble hard disks into the physical gallery space. Interestingly, the contents of his output bear a close relation to memories of warfare or recollected anecdotes about a divided country, as well

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as resembling movies and digital media in terms of form.

In contrast to ‘new media art’, which is more likely to be fallacious by virtue of its fetishising of the machine, Rho’s works are of note in terms of the way in which they deal with types of media that condition the social imagination while at the same time liberating it. Using methods that range from obscuring obvious cultural connotations to considering the ‘recognition’ of historical incidents as relating to the Cold War or terrorism, as an Asian artist 3 Men Questioning Time, 2011, car paint on steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

Rho seems to focus on his ultimately ambivalent feelings towards traditional cultures.

In so doing, he also tries to mark a critical feature of technical media that might possibly be located between the two main issues surrounding media-centered discourse, namely ‘the expansion of the visual’ and ‘the reduction of individual experiences’ of the visual.

His works may serve to represent ‘medianirvana’, ‘Buddhist nihilism’ or be seen as striving to deliver the existential depths that might have occurred in young people who pass most of their time sitting in front of a computer monitor.

Translated from Korean by Hyo Gyoung Jeon

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Zhou Tao

Born in the inland city of Changsha, Zhou Tao currently lives and works in China’s third largest city Guangzhou, where he got his BFA degree in oil painting and MFA in mixed media studies from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

Since 2003 he has mainly worked with video. His art transforms real surroundings into a theatre, subject to a series of invented plotless events that are rooted in physical senses, evoked by environments and time, and expressed in a seemingly documentary language.

Zhou’s earlier works were usually body-based performances that explored human behaviour in public or private spaces. In Power Here (2008), he successfully ran four household appliances – an electronic fan, an infrared heater, a speaker and a floor lamp – on electric power obtained from various public facilities (such as traffic lights and streetlamps), and then in the exhibition space, showed video recordings of these events on monitors powered in the same way: obtaining power directly from the gallery facilities (rather than plugging them into power

sockets). In Time in New York (2009), he puts a ball of string into his hip pocket, which unwinds as he moves around his apartment (and tacks it to walls, etc to leave a ‘map’ of his activities) until the string runs out and the apartment is home to the labyrinthine structure it created.

In his latest works, Zhou uses editing techniques to combine footage of two spaces into one – for example, in Blue and Red (2014), public squares in Guangzhou and in Bangkok, or in After Reality (2013), wastelands in Guangzhou and in Paris – and thus creates a third space where a fictional narrative unfolds. In this new, unidentified space, Zhou’s camera starts to ‘write’ from an uncertain spot, eventually describing a new, unpredictable event that the artist describes as a ‘moving image occurrence’ – something generated by the moving image itself. Meanwhile, the intervention into that fictional space Blue and Red, 2014 single channel HDV, 16:9, colour, with sound 24min 25sec

is some moderated performance normally developed from his observation on the living creatures (or traces of them) in those environments, such as animals (the elephant in Collector, 2012), inanimate objects (human waste floating in the river in South Stone, 2010–11) and human beings (Dragon Boat rowers training on the river in After Reality). In Blue and Red, a series of lowangle shots show people in the respective public squares stained with a blue ray refracted from nowhere, the earth’s crust appears like a human skin and a series of tents appears like an epidermis under a microscope. As time goes by, a weird and nearly sexy feel arises in the viewer’s mind: as if what the artist terms this ‘epidermal touch’ has become a physical sensation.

In addition to performance (space intervention) and video recording (visual writing), Zhou also drills into the space he works on for what he calls the ‘volume of time’ via painting, photography and writing. All these practices have formed an undivided whole, expressing the core of Zhou’s art: the sense and sensation of time.

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Anupong Charoenmitr

Born in Bangkok in 1981, Anupong Charoenmitr finished his BA in fine art photography at Rangsit University, Bangkok and is now pursuing his MA in fine art at the Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts, Silpakorn University. He was selected for Cross Stitch, an exhibition for young artists initiated by the Bangkok Art and Culture Center (BACC) in 2013, and was selected as one of 10 finalists in the video section of the international Arte Laguna Prize 2013/14 (Venice, Italy).

Although he is a new face in the arena of photography and video art, his works express sharp ideas and reflect an impressive perspective, as well as skillful photographic technique.

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He has turned to video art to demonstrate and expatiate his surroundings through plain, simple but romantic methods. Meanwhile, his language induces viewers to follow through what he intends to communicate.

Anupong loves to photograph a person, following a single life to capture the individual identity. In 2007, he took a very interesting set of black-and-white photographs of a female Thai boxer. In 2012 he turned to video art using his skill to seize a moment in the life of an Just Dance,2013, HD video, colour, 3 min 50 sec (loop) Unprepare, 2013, 3-channel HD video, 3 min 54 sec (loop) Courtesy the artist

animal, especially in the last moment of its life: the struggles of a dying pigeon on the street in Bangkok, a cow being forced to the slaughterhouse, and the cleaning process of a dead pig on a butcher’s grate.

The scene is realistic and yet desperately beautiful. Still it looks like a play – the viewers can’t help but feel as if it is not real, as if we are the audience watching a perfect scene on stage. It is not showing the situation directly but poetically revealing the truth about life: the truth that will linger in our memory. Anupong’s works have developed through time; the interesting point is to observe, in the future, what his simple but poetic method will lead us to.

selected by Sakarin Krue-On, artist, Bangkok 23/09/2014 15:42

Jaret Vadera In Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986–7), the jailed vigilante Rorschach is shown his namesake inkblot test by a psychiatrist trying to probe his ‘demented’ mind. As Moore’s antihero visualises dead children, dismembered limbs and a dog’s split-open head, he tells his interrogator, with the smoothest of poker faces, that he sees flowers, birds and beauty.

Certain elements of Jaret Vadera’s recent work play a similar game. But instead of the Rorschach test, he offers us search engines as a new form of memory, in which unemotional algorithms take over from the human mind but prove just as adept at refraction, distortion and deception. In All We See Is Vision (2014), the results of image searches are layered in the computer

to create a new aggregate image that is then outputted as a single vinyl form and mounted onto the gallery wall, annotated with the file names, IP addresses and server locations of the original source files. In a site-specific installation for the 2010 Ballard Estate Project at Religare Arts Initiative, New Delhi; J.G. Ballard and a colonial port in Mumbai are linked through search words common to both.

These works are only a fragment of Vadera’s large body of experiments in form, most of which have remained unseen by curators and critics. The people who have followed his work All We See Is Vision, 2014, vinyl on wall, 23 × 10 cm.

Courtesy the artist

consistently for the last decade are fellow artists, especially those in the South Asian diaspora.

Vadera cites Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris (1961) as an influence, but I think of other dreamscapes, where night visions are rendered nightmares much faster than they are in Tarkovsky’s film of the book: the murderous superheroes of Moore, for example, or the conniving dream players of Neil Gaiman’s plots. The search-engine games also seem akin to the moment in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) in which one of the protagonists picks up a remote control and ‘rewinds’ the film in order to prevent his colleague from being shot. A person may choose what to remember and what to forget, but Palo Alto databases ensure you never escape.

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Guan Xiao

I may get murdered by a self-righteous museologist for saying this, but what else mimics the uncanny anachronism of rifling through the many centuries’ and civilisations’ worth of artefacts in a museum than noodling around online? Where, other than at the Met and on Contemporary Art Daily, can you come across an Easter Island moai and a few minutes later find a Matthew Monahan that looks pretty damn similar? Such works’ near-imperceptible but exceedingly vast differences and the culture industry that prescribes them is the interest of young Chinese artist Guan Xiao. Her 2013 installation Cloud Atlas (which I saw at Magician Space in Beijing) convenes acrid-coloured resin and wood totems festooned with ornaments

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that appear plucked off an Olmec colossal head.

The installation borrows its title from the 2004 David Mitchell book, or for nonreaders, the 2012 Wachowskis movie, and if you’ve experienced either, you’ll guess that Guan’s Cloud Atlas is basically a sci-fi mind-screwing experiment in antilinear storytelling, evincing the artist’s interest in aesthetics that span space and time.

Similarly, Guan’s video Cognitive Shape (2013) presents an archive of video clips mostly found on the Internet, presented in three channels, with footage of the artist narrating their significance in a culture in which the image, rather Cloud Atlas, 2013, mixed media. 270 × 120 × 50 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Magician Space, Beijing

than context, is paramount. The humorous video David (2013) combines footage of Michelangelo’s David (1501­–4) shot at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence with images of David merchandise and a cheesy soundtrack performed by Guan and the artist Yu Honglei. “We cook with him!

Drink with him! Shop with him!” sing Guan and Yu, against images of a David apron, mug and tote bag. As a whole, the video pokes fun at Western culture’s fetishisation and commodification of ancient artefacts – and implicitly, its lack of interest in contemporary art.

An exhibition of work by Guan Xiao will take place at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin from 17 September through 30 October

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Jewyo Rhii

In 2008, following a period of itinerant existence during which she made her home wherever she was exhibiting, Jewyo Rhii decided to settle in a studio in the Itaewon area of Seoul. The artist, selected for the UK’s New Contemporaries in 2000 and included in the Korean Pavilion’s group show at the 2005 Venice Biennale, quickly realised that her newfound existence seemed somehow no less precarious, struggling to negotiate the neighborhood and various oppressive conditions of her studio.

This tension, eventually productive, became the focus of a series of evening exhibitions (titled Night Studio) that she began to host in the space, which she opened to the public on several occasions in the course of around three years, showing works that subtly dramatised her struggles to exist there. These interventions became sculptures that have since moved to more traditional exhibition spaces, and formed the basis of her 2013 exhibition Walls

To Talk To at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Jewyo’s Cooling System works (2009 –) are air-conditioning sculptures created by using domestic fans to blow air across blocks of ice, improvisations deemed necessary for thinking in the sultry heat, whilst Fence (Itaewon) (2010 – 11) is a made from a collection of threatening, spiky materials initially attached to her balcony to protect the studio from intruders. The smudgy wall texts created by Jewyo’s handmade, oversized typewriting machines, which she began making in 2010 (the year she was awarded the Yanghyun Prize) translate such forms of everyday strife into a wavering form of speech.

Made using a makeshift pendular devices constructed with materials such as wood, rocks, and string to rubberstamp words onto gallery walls, some of the machines resemble a sets of Walls To Talk To, 2013 (installation view).

Photo: Peter Cox. Courtesy Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

oversized piano hammers, whilst others are smaller, more mobile units on trolleys. Each ‘key’, usually bearing a single word, is pulled back by the artist before it is released to smash against the wall, kissing its flat target with inconsistent success. Arranged so that they can only ever tell one tale, these blurry, stuttering texts tell stories from her environs of the studio – ‘in the morning a man scream and cried’, for example, in Fish Peddler (2010) in which the artist describes being woken up every day by a trader calling out the names of various fish outside her window. After requesting that he makes less noise he explains that she will limit his ability to survive by doing so. His shouts are transformed to flickering murmurs on the walls, evidence of a spectral presence trying to speak.

An exhibition of work by Jewyo Rhii will take place at Wilkinson Gallery, London, from 7 September to 16 November

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8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale We Have Never Participated OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen 16 May − 31 August Whenever the term ‘participation’ is associated with artistic practice, the intrinsic response – however romantic – is to feel that it revolves around ideas of inclusion, democracy and perhaps even resistance. In a country in which participation in the public sphere is largely prohibited, the title of the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale is, to say the least, suggestive. Curated by Marko Daniel with Lu Pei-Yi, Claire Shea and Wenny Teo, this exhibition takes its lead from Joseph Beuys’s notion of social sculpture and contextualises it with what the curators refer to as ‘postparticipation’ – a statement of how participatory art has evolved from its radical and marginal status to its current position as a mainstay in contemporary art exhibitions.

The selection of some 30 artworks, many of which take the form of installations and moving images, by a mix of international artists and collectives, across all three factory-turnedexhibition spaces of the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT), certainly reinforces the Biennale’s move away from the more traditional forms of sculpture, as cemented by its predecessor Accidental Message: Art Is Not a System, Not a World, curated by Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu and Su Wei in 2012. Taking into account the current trend for megastructural formats at biennials, the modest scale of this one is definitely refreshing. Nevertheless, as a result of the curators’ decision to underscore the notion of how participatory practices have entered into the postparticipation era and

thus have become a norm in recent years, its outcome ultimately feels rather predictable, leaving surprises few and far between. Indeed, despite the fact that there are 14 new works on show here, one cannot escape the overall feeling of déjà vu.

On the other hand, ideas and aspects of sociopolitical engagement are evidently present in the exhibition, which includes a number of works that connect international subjects with local everyday realities to resounding effect. In Production Line – Made in China (2014), by Taiwanese artist Huang Po-Chih, a worker, a sewing station and 40 wardrobelike structures form a small production line producing blue shirts for the duration of the exhibition. With the shirts being made and hung inside the wardrobelike structures by the worker, this performance-turnedinstallation evokes issues surrounding the relocation of manufacturing industries and its impacts, with Shenzhen being within the large manufacturing hub that is Guangdong; the project also makes visible the complex (economic) dynamics between mainland China and Taiwan with its planned reappearance as Production Line – Made in Taiwan at the Taipei Biennial later this year.

Known for his obsessive, detectivelike investigatory works, Chinese artist Song Ta’s Civil Servants (2009) is a monumental exercise in implication, illustrating a web of state power through hundreds of loosely wall-tacked cartoonlike drawings of every employee from

his hometown’s municipal government, including personal details from some of these officials, such as mobile and license plate numbers. The biggest, and best, surprise comes in the form of an offsite lightbox display by the now disbanded New York AIDS activist /artist collective Gran Fury. Their famous 1989 poster image, Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do, a campaign and retaliation against the US governmental and institutional inaction towards the AIDS crisis, is reproduced as an advertising lightbox, showing three kissing couples of different races and sexualities side-by-side under the Chinese translation of the work’s title. While public opinion has progressed, homosexuality and undoubtedly its graphic representation remain taboo in many parts of this region. Though it is partially censored (the sentence ‘Corporate Greed, Government Inaction and Public Indifference Make AIDS a Political Crisis’, which appeared on the back of the work’s first outing as postcards and apparently redacted in its subsequent incarnation as posters on New York City buses, is nowhere to be seen in China) and has been threatened with removal due to complaints, the inclusion and, more importantly, decision to exhibit the work in a predominantly public space (metro stations) indicates a degree of subversiveness that recalls Beuys’s belief in the potential of art to transform society. Had more of the Biennale displayed this attitude, it could have been a more expectation-defying experience. Yung Ma

Cheng Ran, Always I Trust, 2014, HD video, lightboxes.

Courtesy OCAT Shenzhen

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Waheeda Baloch and Schehzad Mughal The ‘Left’ to Choose ArtChowk Gallery, Karachi 7–9 July In the central space of the gallery, backlit by the sun pouring in through large windows behind him, a man sits on a chair strumming a seemingly random strain on an electric guitar.

In a black T-shirt, dark blue jeans and traditional Peshawari chappals – not the £300 Paul Smith version that created a bit of controversy earlier this year – he is the archetypal contemporary Pakistani pop/rock artist. This man, we are told, is Schehzad Mughal, a fairly well known local musician and also husband to the artist Waheeda Baloch. As he plays, Baloch walks to and from a mound of baked bricks stacked against the wall of the gallery, laying them down around him in a circle. She is barefoot and moves with a focused energy, creating a kind of dance around this ritualistic act of labour as she lays brick after brick, layer after layer, encircling him, enclosing him within this growing wall behind which he is ultimately hidden. As Mughal continues to play (seemingly unbothered by this act), he is closed in, while the rest of the world is closed out. The other is created.

Baloch’s accompanying artist statement refers to childhood memories, the rich heritage of Mohenjo-daro (the Mound of the Dead archeological site in Sindh) to which the bricks allude and the disenfranchisement felt by musicians in Pakistan. However, perhaps another lens (read: elephant in the room), highly relevant to the larger state of being in a contemporary Pakistan, is that through which postcolonial and Continental philosophy has viewed the concept of ‘othering’ and the discourse surrounding the creation and representations of the other in a

sociopolitical, economic and ethno-religious context that attempts to deconstruct modes of effectuating imperialism and power.

In Pakistan today, the process of ‘othering’ is firmly rooted in the manipulation of distributed ‘truths’ that identify the other as outside, difference as hostile. Grouping – ie, confining – separating from the self into a contained other, then becomes a critical lens through which to view the current situation. In the case of Baloch’s performance, a wall is built; a wall that keeps in an individual that one assumes to identify as ‘liberal’ (or ‘Westernised’), and the rest of the world out; a wall that contains and repels at the same time.

Boundaries and classifications become increasingly significant in defending oneself from those who do not fall into a ‘norm’, that which is familiar to us. In a country where the state fails to provide security, these walls become higher and higher – whole systems of protection are put into place that in turn produce walls of armed bodies that separate us and defend us, should the physical walls fail. A set of norms is created, one that perceives the slightest anomaly as a transgression – a threat deserving of punishment by being established to be so – ie, different, other, outside. That which is not familiar is a threat.

In Pakistan, artists are often critiqued for the focus on politics and violence as a point of manipulation – they deliver what is expected of them by a world that sees Pakistan with the singular vision of a Talibanised, oppressive, strife-ridden country. However, should artists then simply stop speaking of the reality

that surrounds them? Where the discussion on such issues may seem too much at times, the dialogue remains relevant as long as the circumstances prevail, and to speak the truth of these circumstances remains the duty of thinking individuals. On the other hand, in a country whose warring mechanisms make it such that speaking these truths conceivably earns one a bullet in the head, is it not then reasonable simply to raise our walls higher and distinguish ourselves more clearly against the other who threatens us?

In the context of this work, then, the language that is used to ‘speak the truth’ – performance art, and its limited reach and accessibility – becomes significant. Where Pakistan’s history is rich with a culture of theatre, the fairly Western expression of performance art still evades many. The tools with which to decode this language are not built into our history, which still carries forward a legacy of traditionalism. This is not to say that such work has not seen a sudden spurt in production in Pakistan recently. The idea seems to be that repetition and time will allow the tools of interpretation to be built and learned, and it is a logical one. Where artists are often critiqued for emulating Western models of knowledge and production, it is also just as important to understand the validity of the growing global dialogue in which we find ourselves immersed, and the different modes of expression that this takes on. In the case of Baloch, perhaps the reach and understanding of her audience is limited, but this does not diminish the validity of her discourse. Zarmeené Shah

The ‘Left’ to Choose, 2014, collaborative performance.

Courtesy the artists and ArtChowk, Karachi

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Ten Million Rooms of Yearning. Sex in Hong Kong Para/Site and offsite venues, Hong Kong 10 May – 10 August Juxtaposing archive materials, pop-cultural artefacts, objects and artworks (by 39 artists or artist groups from around the world), Ten Million Rooms of Yearning. Sex in Hong Kong continues Para/Site’s research- and narrative-based approach to exhibition-making. As implied by its title, this show is both sensual and provocative.

The decision to spread it through five different venues is both an obvious solution to Para/Site’s limited exhibition space and a thoughtful curatorial strategy to weave the fabric of the city’s urban characteristics into the viewing experience. Many of the sites, such as the Civic Centre Exhibition Hall and a private flat in Sheung Wan, are not the ‘usual’ contemporary art venues. Indeed, during the monsoon season (generally June to October in Hong Kong), the experience is further enhanced by the feverish, moist and sticky sensations on one’s skin as it is enveloped by the extra-humid air when walking up and down the hilly and narrow alleyways from venue to venue, entering highrises via often-claustrophobic stairways or elevators.

The representation of sexuality and eroticism serves as a starting point for an examination of the transformation of historical, social and urban conditions in Hong Kong and how they challenge the understanding of identity, human interactions and humanity

in general. The late Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s 1970s studio-apartment in New York City is restaged in the private flat. During his self-imposed exile in New York, living in precarity, Oiticica spent a substantial amount of time reflecting, writing and producing in this intimate yet oppressive domestic setting, which he referred to as ‘Babylonests’. The reconstruction of the ‘Babylonests’, on the one hand, reinterprets Oiticica’s complex attitudes towards sexual politics, reflected by his rejection of the heteronormative mainstream and suspicion about the liberal narrations of social progress constructed by the metropolitan bourgeois bohemians; on the other hand, it proposes to draw a connection between the social conditions of two distinct cities in two different eras through these propositions and a consequent sense of alienation.

Despite the artist’s eerie depiction, sexual and reproductive acts are demystified and reduced to the most basic animal instincts in Zhou Tao’s series of untitled drawings, shown at Para/Site’s main space. With sex placed alongside breathing, digesting and excreting, viewers are left to consider themselves as equal to any other ordinary living entity and its struggle to survive. Together with his video Collector (2012), the artist invites a nonanthropocentric perspective that directs us to seek new

forms of relations between animals, human things and places. From a feminist perspective, Ines Doujak’s series of untitled photographic and collage works place queer sexuality against historical backgrounds to investigate the norms of human behaviour as structural and constituent elements of society. Appropriating footage from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism, The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), by William E. Jones, captures a moment when different ideologies collapsed, leading to a commentary on desire, the commodification of sex, vulnerability and power relationships.

In the context of the show, popular culture influences such as filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai’s alluring footage of Hong Kong (excerpts from In the Mood for Love, 2010) and novelist Eileen Chang’s witty sketches of quintessential modern women are juxtaposed with artworks by historical and contemporary artists. In doing this, the exhibition is able to transform a body of rich visual materials, in a wide range of media, into an idiosyncratic system of image-text.

The making of the exhibition therefore creates horizontal connections, from site to site, across social space and time, to broaden the reading and presentation of artworks from a singular art-historical discourse to a visual culture multiplicity. Xiaoyu Weng

Richard Fung, Chinese Characters, 1986 , video, 20 min 30 sec.

Courtesy Vtape, Toronto

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Hans van Dijk 5000 Names Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing 24 May – 10 August The 5000 Names of the title refers to a computer file being drafted by the curator, dealer and collector Hans van Dijk at the time of his death, in 2002, and only recently rediscovered by curator Marianne Brouwer during her research for this exhibition. Van Dijk, who moved from his native country of the Netherlands and took up residence in Beijing in the early 1990s, is credited as being a pivotal figure in the local and international development of contemporary art in China. This document was designed to be some sort of magnum opus, bringing together all of van Dijk’s research on the artworld in China from the 1980s onwards.

The current exhibition in UCCA’s Grand Hall divides van Dijk’s life into periods, beginning with his birth in 1946 in Deventer in the Nether­ lands and his formal education at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. Van Dijk was drawn to the systematic constructive techniques of Ming dynasty furniture, eventually travelling to Nanjing in 1986 to research this subject.

Arriving in the volatile artistic environment in this city seems to have been somewhat

distracting for him, and his attention was soon diverted away from furniture and to the nascent contemporary art system in China.

5000 Names tells van Dijk’s story via a series of spaces that loop around the large hall, presenting documents, statements on specific subjects and events, and artworks produced at the time of his presence in China by artists with whom he came into contact. Small selections of works by Cang Xin, Chen Shaoxiong, Duan Jianyu, Gu Dexin, Hong Hao, Liu Ding, Shi Yong, Wang Shilong, Yan Lei, Zhang Hai’er, Zhao Bandi, Zhou Tiehai, Zhu Fadong, etc attest to the breadth of van Dijk’s contacts. A minor complaint would be that this arrangement of rooms creates a somewhat meandering journey, which could have been served better by a more compact presentation.

However, it is in the details that this exhibition proves its worth. The centrality of documentation to van Dijk’s own thinking and practice is in clear evidence, including displays of folders filled with snapshots, sketches and ephemera by artists; the sketched

plans, flyers and catalogues of van Dijk’s exhibitions in China and abroad; personal letters to and from artists; and his writings published in Chinese and international publications.

All this material effectively demonstrates the significance of van Dijk’s work in building a framework for understanding many of these then relatively unknown artists in their context.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, when the story of contemporary art in China was being framed by work for which critic Li Xianting coined the term ‘cynical realism’, van Dijk instead brought a sensibility of Western conceptual art practices to the table. It is difficult to overstate the importance of his openness to new forms of art in the Chinese context, as this openness can be said to have been instrumental in the current polymorphous contemporary art scene in China.

Although van Dijk is not an unknown figure in the contemporary art world in China, it is entirely appropriate to widen appreciation of his influence on a whole generation of Chinese artists by means of this impressive exhibition.

Edward Sanderson

5000 Names, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Eric Gregory Powell.

Courtesy Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

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Lu Yang Kimokawa Cancer Baby Ren Space, Shanghai 12 April – 11 June Lu Yang’s solo show at Ren Space is an uneasy trip that violates taboos of disease in modern culture and more particularly challenges the audience’s perception of cancer. Kimokawa is a Japanese term combining different and apparently incompatible concepts: while kimo, short for kimochi warui, means ‘disgusting’, kawa is a short version for kawaii – cute. This incongruous notion is legitimated by an approach that integrates contradictions, and is integral to the work of Lu. Influenced by medical science and Japanese pop culture, Lu converts both into something oddly cultural and grotesque.

The show has turned the three-storey building into a Pop-art clinic with a slick array of works in different media: handpainted 3D-printed resin sculptures and accessories (rings and brooches), puppets, neons, graffiti, video installations, a projected animation in which the acid colours and electronic sound­ track simulate videogames of the 1980s, and a series of 8-bit drawings shown as lightboxes, prints and wallpaper. The key characters that Lu has created in these multimedia works are a set of humanised, cancer-infected organ

figures called ‘Kimo Kawa Babies’, and cancer cells called ‘Cancer Baby Plastic Kaiju’, or ‘C-Babies’.

Lu Yang’s cancer characters and her mani­ festations of the disease itself certainly have a destabilising effect on spectators from different cultural backgrounds, as the disease and the discourse surrounding it are rarely discussed without a shudder at best. In her early works – among them Reanimation! Underwater Zombie frog ballet! (2009–12), which features dissected frogs ‘dancing’ in response to the microstimulation of neurons and muscles, and The Project of KRAFTTREMOR (2011), which orchestrates the involuntary movements of patients with Parkinson’s disease into electronic rhythms – Lu transforms scientific and medical facts into an absurd circus where the disruptive potential of the primary subject matter is kept, even enhanced, by the recourse to captivating aesthetic codes. In Kimokawa Cancer Baby she turns cancer-infected organs into beautiful objects of design with glowing surfaces, or funny manga characters, all ‘cutified’ to an almost outrageous extent. For some people outrage is

going to be the instant response this exhibi­ tion, and whatever her intentions, Lu certainly stirs up controversy.

In The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), Michel Foucault explains how, from the end of the eighteenth century, medical science became an assessed field of knowledge and the clinic became a place for the seclusion and control of the sick and the ill.

A passage from the introduction is particularly striking: ‘This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze.’ In a way, Kimokawa Cancer Baby is an illustration of this, albeit with its own take on the manifestation of sickness, sharing the same focus on secluded environments and their peculiar visual apparatuses. There is an intrinsic cuteness in the ‘clinic’ and the Cancer Baby figures that Lu creates: her ‘affection’ for cancer may be horrifying, but it certainly ‘normalises’ the disease by ‘beautifying’ it. Lu has converted cancer, a biological, medical fact and a sociocultural phenomenon, into an aesthetic object and a product of cultural consumption.

Mariagrazia Costantino

C-Baby Trotting Horse Lamp, 2014, video, monitors.

Courtesy the artist and Ren Space, Shanghai

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Rashid Johnson Magic Numbers George Economou Collection, Athens 23 June – 28 August There are private museums that look like public museums and then there are private museums that look like private museums. Greek collector George Economou has one of the latter, tucked away behind (or perhaps part of) an office building in Athens. In some ways it feels like a bit of an incongruous setting for an exhibition by Chicago-born Rashid Johnson. But perhaps this is fitting. Even the exhibition title is suggestive of, severally, a De La Soul track, the winning post in various season-long sporting events and the number of molecules it takes to form the perfect atomic structure.

The exhibition itself is constructed around a short film, The New Black Yoga (2011), installed on the second floor and featuring a group of five African Americans performing a fusion of yoga, various martial arts, gymnastic moves and a music-promo dance routine on a beach decorated with five carpets that have been subsequently imported into the exhibition space (although the ones on which you sit or tread while watching the film may simply be similar to those in it). The film begins and ends with a crosshairs (also branded on the carpets in the installation and which has become something of a signature in Johnson’s work) carved into the sand, suggestive both of the logo of 1980s rappers Public Enemy and the guidance system

that makes a projectile weapon more focused and precise, and perhaps we’re tickled into following the latter interpretation as the five protagonists begin their routine with a variety of meditative poses. In short, we’re encouraged to make sense of this movie and their moves.

Perhaps we think of various scenes from Enter the Dragon (1973) or combat sequences from blaxploitation films of the 1970s or films of capoeira performances, or perhaps we think of racial stereotypes equating skin colour with athleticism and violence.If we’ve overdosed on Jacques Lacan and social studies courses, perhaps we’re playing with implications of otherness and sameness (depending on your point of view), and then perhaps we counter all that with the passivity (or even impotence) associated with yogic practice. I could go on.

The fact is, however, that as much as this film invites these kinds of readings, there are points at which making any real sense of them becomes impossible amid the cacophony of potential references and interpretations, rendering it simply footage of five good-looking guys showing off in front of a picturesque ocean sunset. Speaking as someone of mixed race, it’s this very duality (one that’s not without a certain comedy) that emphasises the precarity of any identity formation in a multicultural world.

In Johnson’s own mythology, he was inspired to make the work having attended and failed to follow a yoga class in Berlin.

There’s more of that mythology downstairs, where Good King (2013), a typically altarlike collection of mirror-tiled shelves set against a black-splattered mirror-tiled background, filled with found objects (twinned George Benson album covers – 1975’s Good King Bad – arranged to create a potentially significant swastikalike S-pattern out of Benson’s heads, forearms and fists, a couple of potted plants and some shea butter). Next to it is Shea Butter Landscape (2014), a mahogany table-cum-trough of the fat extracted from the nut of the African shea tree (used as both a skin moisturiser and in food preparation), into which the artist has carved more runic symbols. There’s a sense in both these works of Johnson carving out an identity in art as much as in life, with the references to Marcel Broodthaers (the potted plants) and Joseph Beuys (the fat) pushed to the fore and then infiltrated or embraced by materials that resonate with Johnson’s personal associations.

On the third floor, that sense of focus is inescapable – a huge black powder-coated steel crosshairs (Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, 2012) presides over a room of Johnson’s black soap and wax paintings. Mark Rappolt

The New Black Yoga (video still), 2011, video, 16mm film transferred to DVD, sound, 10 min 57 sec.

Photo: Martin Parsekian. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Hausen & Wirth, London, New York and Zürich

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Apichatpong Weerasethakul Fireworks Kurimanzutto, Mexico City 20 May – 14 June Now that he is an acclaimed filmmaker, most people have probably forgotten that Apichatpong Weerasethakul initially trained as an architect. But the layout of Fireworks, his first solo show at Kurimanzutto, reminds us of this.

On entering the gallery, one encounters a print, mounted on a lightbox, displaying fireworks and, on the exact opposite side of the same wall, another lightbox, The Vapor of Melancholy (2014), which features the sleeping figure of Weerasethakul’s boyfriend with fireworks superimposed over his head and upper body. It looks as if he is exhaling smoke and light to create the universe, or as if the universe were inside him as he sleeps. This sets the mood perfectly.

Then come the dark wooden screens, creating a room-within-a-room, where you can sit and watch the stunning main projection, Fireworks (Archives) (2014). This archival research and footage for a forthcoming feature-length film, Cemetery of Kings, works perfectly as a short onechannel video installation, shot in Sala Keoku, a beautifully strange temple and sculp­ture park in northeastern Thailand created by a rogue monk. The sound is edited in such a way that one can interpret the pyrotechnic crackling in

different ways (even as bullets), and the imagery is dreamlike in its alternation of very real and mundane shots of an elderly couple (actors seen before in his film Tropical Malady, 2004) moving around the compound as if they were visiting family or friends in a cemetery, and surreal shots of the statues themselves (including dogs riding motorcycles, obese frogs, humanlike monkeys, skeletons and the like), all lit by sparklers or flashes. Or perhaps the shots of the illuminated statues are real and it’s the couple who seem dreamlike in their slow walkabout. Not surprisingly the work fits well in the Mexican context, the statues seeming akin to many Aztec figures and celebratory Day-of-the-Dead scenes in which skeletons do mundane things. Indeed, the work feels as if it could be Mexican as much as it is Thai. A shorter single-channel video, Fireworks Sketch (Frog) (2014), might not be as eerie yet is no less poetic, and a further reflection of the artist’s need to take visual ‘notes’ (there is even handwriting at the end) in the buildup to a larger project.

On the perimeter of the screens are three other videos, ranging from Father (2014), which features extremely personal documentary

footage of Weerasethakul’s sick father receiving his medical treatment (perhaps dialysis?) at home, to the dreamy One Water (2013), a beautiful aquarellelike sequence of images of Tilda Swinton’s face, eyes shut, at the beach, as if she were dreaming of being teleported there (or as if we were dreaming it ourselves), a fitting companion piece to the Vapor of Melancholy.

The other short video surrounding the main Fireworks, titled Tone (2004), might remind us of Tropical Malady and could be seen as its archival research, just as the two Fireworks pieces are part of a larger film project.

In a manner that is not often the case with other filmmaking visual-artists, Weerasethakul’s work translates aptly and poetically from film to video installation: his artworks work independently, but also articulate a much larger vision and aesthetic bridging of themes that have to do with reality (its harshness, poverty, violence, but also sexuality and desire), together with the question of dreams, memories and sleep. They all work as visual essays, as a new kind of note­ taking, as an archive. They ignite a meditation, spark up memories and end up as short poems zinged into our cortex. Gabriela Jauregui

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Fireworks (Archives), 2014. single-channel HD video installation, 6 min 40 sec.

Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City

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Hiroshi Sugimoto Aujourd’hui, le Monde Est Mort [Lost Human Genetic Archive] Palais de Tokyo, Paris 25 April – 7 September Mayday, mayday, mayday. ‘The world died today!… Imagining the worst conceivable tomorrows gives me tremendous pleasure,’ Hiroshi Sugimoto exults in the wall text that opens Aujourd’hui, le Monde Est Mort [Lost Human Genetic Archive] at the Palais de Tokyo. This is the largest exhibition the acclaimed photographer has ever staged in Europe. Prophesying the imminent collapse of human civilisation, with only decaying capitalism, the last surviving ideology, still holding us up, he presents 33 apocalyptic scenarios narrating fictitious ends to the world from the points of view of their last witnesses, imaginary specialists (each with a name such as the Aesthete, the Escapist, etc) at the crossroads of art, science and religion. Scribbled on parchments or directly onto the walls (sometimes with such apparent haste that they are hard to decrypt), the tragic reports are chaotically scattered all over the exhibition space within a serpentine display of old relics and contemporary curios that the artist has gathered throughout his life.

These range from million-year-old fossils and Neanderthal tools to Japanese antiquities and modern collectibles, such as 1960s cosmonauts’ hygiene kits, or ‘Space Fountains’, as he likes to call them – one of many references that Sugimoto makes to Marcel Duchamp within the show (in this instance via the latter’s Fountain, 1917).

With this unexpected ensemble of heteroclite objects, all of which materialise testimonies to fabled lost worlds, Sugimoto becomes the

demiurge of a theatre that goes way beyond the frame of his photographs. Actually, just a tiny few of the latter are exhibited: some from his ongoing series Seascapes (1980–), which capture, in black-and-white, pure linear marine horizons; others from his series Lightning Fields (2009), which weren’t produced with a camera but by a Van de Graaff generator that was used to apply an electrical charge directly onto film. While the dusty basement of the immense Palais de Tokyo already looks like a kind of ruin, the artist has installed his dark prophecies amid a maze of rusted metal sheeting and climbing ivy, which only adds to the sense that nature has reclaimed its territory from mankind. To add to the drama, no artificial light is used in the scenography. Rays of sunshine come into the exhibition through a glass roof supposedly shattered by a passing meteor that has left a gaping hole in the floor.

It’s around this hole that the whole exhibition is orchestrated. If you dare risk your life and bend over it, you’ll see deep down into the Palais’s entrails a real fragment of the Gibeon meteorite from Namibia, which appears to have landed here and broken a toilet in half (yet another Fountain). At dusk visitors are handed torches.

Absolutely thrilling.

Back to the memorandums left by the last men on earth: they are in fact entirely satirical, reflecting plausible concerns about current social and geopolitical issues – gender, virtual reality, wellbeing, authority, environment and so forth.

Next to an eighteenth-century illustration of a hermaphrodite, the Aesthete reports that homoerotic love became the ultimate corrective to overpopulation; next to a 1952 edition of The Zen Doctrine of No Mind, by D.T. Suzuki, the Escapist recalls that while totally immersed in video gaming, the youngest generation reached satori (Buddhist enlightenment) and could no longer be bothered to make babies; next to a stuffed and prepared parrot, which sporadically transmits a computer-generated voice repeating “Rien de plus agréable que la mort” (“Nothing more enjoyable than death”), the Euthanasia Association Chairman reveals that the poor were urged to opt out by suicide, with governments providing a supply of lethal hallucinogenic drugs until, of course, everyone disappeared; next to a few tabloids headlining the Bill Clinton and Dominique Strauss-Kahn sex scandals, the Journalist deplores that after all political abuses had been exposed, no competent leader was left to govern, which precipitated the downfall of civilisation. Finally, after settling on the moon to escape life-threatening pollution, the Astronaut suffers depression and agonises over his fellow humans’ shit, which orbits the earth like Saturn’s rings. Having come full circle, I’d like to reassure you that the best is still to come – although Sugimoto’s sarcasms, as hilarious and grotesque as they are, don’t really seem that improbable, do they? After all, they only exaggerate everyday headlines… Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Aujourd’hui, le Monde Est Mort, 2014 (installation view).

Photo: André Morin. Courtesy Palais de Tokyo, Paris

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The Permeability of Certain Matters Spring Workshop, Hong Kong 3 May – 13 July The Permeability of Certain Matters offers an elegant, spare environment far removed from the grit and bustle of the surrounding industrial neighbourhood. Framed photographs of flawless flower arrangements against monochrome backgrounds hang on walls papered with a refined pomegranate-coloured pattern.

At first glance the exhibition – a collaboration between Christodoulos Panayiotou and Philip Wiegard – appears merely ornamental, but closer observation reveals slight irregularities in the neoclassical-inspired wallpaper, and the vivid flowers seem almost too perfect to be authentic. Within these two elements are a host of complex binaries, including the real and the artificial, mass production and craftsmanship, preindustrial labour and globalisation.

Cypriot artist Panayiotou arrived for a three-month residency at Spring with the intention of investigating the world’s largest concentration of artificial flower factories in China’s nearby Guangdong province.

Surprised to discover that the vast majority of plastic flowers are exported, he meticulously composed still lifes using second-tier flowers in a photographic studio in Hong Kong, and

invited German artist Wiegard to collaborate.

For his part, Wiegard organised an 11-day workshop attended by 32 children from around Hong Kong, at which they worked for slightly more than minimum wage to handcraft Festoons (2014), a wallpaper based on a German design featuring geometric elements and intertwined flowers from the 1770s.

Panayiotou’s series – removed of any signifiers of time or location – references art-historical precedents but is also very much a reflection on our contemporary condition.

For centuries, flowers in still lifes have served a symbolic purpose, and floral compositions continue to provide fodder, both personal and political, for artists. For example, Willem de Rooij’s Bouquet works (2002–) combine natural and fake flowers to blur the line between what is seen and what is perceived, while Ori Gersht’s Blow Up (2007), photographs of exploding still lifes, suggests the intersection of beauty and violence in today’s world.

Like de Rooij, Panayiotou alludes to the recent impulse towards artificial perfection over natural beauty, and he joins artists such as Gersht in referencing global issues through altered still lifes. In his case, Panayiotou’s

inability to access the highest-quality specimens because they are exported indirectly speaks to international trade.

The two disparate modes of creation attached to the flowers and the wallpaper not only address different methods of commodity production but also allude to the child labour situation in the area. Panayiotou’s photographs are devoid of human presence, unblemished and impersonal. The wallpaper, on the other hand, shows a similar impulse towards the decorative, but whorls shrink and expand, and straight lines bend in places.

The hand of the (youthful) maker is evident in Festoons, suggestive of an earlier era of factory work, while the pristine artificial flowers, with the mark of the individual hidden from view, represent mass production today.

The Permeability of Certain Matters is much more than an aesthetic respite from the clamour of city life. The exhibition speaks to our specific moment, in which generically beautiful photographs of flowers have the potential to comment on increasing artificiality and even global trade, and imperfect wallpaper appears charming but also obliquely points to current labour conditions. Jeanne Gerrity

The Permeability of Certain Matters, 2014 (installation view).

Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi. Courtesy the artists; Rodeo, Istanbul; and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong

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Meeting Points 7: Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks Institute for African Studies, Moscow 8 July – 22 August Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks, the seventh edition of the nomadic project Meeting Points, is curated by Croatian collective WHW (What How & for Whom: Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Nataša Ilic and Sabina Sabolovic) in collaboration with V-A-C Foundation and Young Arab Theatre Fund. It held its earlier editions in Zagreb, Antwerp, Cairo, Hong Kong, Beirut and Vienna. And as the exhibition travelled from one city to another, the list of participants changed.

The first editions of Meeting Points were ‘more Arabian’, and the initial references to the Arab Spring have lost their timeliness, but the key thread of the project – centred on the postcolonial narrative of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) – remains effective, regardless of the changing participation of local artists, curators and hic et nunc context.

On the occasion of the Moscow edition’s opening, the topic of postimperial relations between Russia and other former USSR members became popular with its participants, especially Russian and Ukrainian artists. The exhibition itself responded to this issue through its setting: the Institute for African Studies and its interior is a visualisation of colonialist logic and Orientalist imagination. As it spreads through the labyrinth of rooms, corridors, stairs and patio of the palazzolike building, the exhibition is immersed in an atmosphere of the objectification and eroticisation of

non-Western cultures. The institution also gives Russian artist Vladislav Kruchinsky his inspiration. In On Not Being White and Other Stories from the Institute for African Studies (2014), Kruchinsky creates a series of cartoon-styled portraits of researchers on African studies, all captioned with satirical lines such as, ‘Are we exotic by ourselves, or is it because we study Africa?’

In the video Common Assembly (2011–13), group DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) represents a Palestinian refugee camp as a potential site for direct democracy. In his book Hollow Land (2007), Israeli theorist Eyal Weizman, a member of DAAR, wrote about how traditional urban structures of the Middle East had been transformed by contemporary warfare. Common Assembly follows the book’s logic and then goes further to explore the mechanics of urban structure in the peace era. Egyptian artist Maha Maamoun’s Night Visitor: The Night of Counting the Years (2011) consists of a series of photographs and videos found on YouTube, submitted by protesters on the occasion of the occupation of the State Security office in Cairo on 5 March 2011. Through this work, the artist projects her wish for social change by illustrating the mysterious emotional atmosphere of an ‘open’ future.

A recent work by London-based Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Double-Take: Officer Leader of the Chasseurs Syrian Revolution Commanding a Charge (2014), is a parody of Théodore Géricault’s

Officer of the Chasseurs Commanding a Charge (1812) – a well-known Orientalist painting aimed at demonstrating European domination over colonised nations. The historical painting’s contemporary variation is the result of a commission by a wealthy Syrian businessman, executed in 2010 by an anonymous artist, in which the French imperial officer in Géricault’s original piece is replaced with Sultan Pasha al-Atrash (1891–1982), the leader of the Syrian uprising against the French (1925–7). As the artist exposes the flexibility of historical narration, the narrative of art history is proved to be of equal flexibility: as history can be rewritten, art can be reinterpreted and reappropriated.

And yet, the unfortunate truth is that this exhibition can’t really reach a general audience in Moscow. Not simply because the Institute for African Studies is closed off and hermetic or because contemporary art isn’t so popular in Russia (which in both instances is the reality).

Rather, it’s because almost all the questions raised by the works on show run counter to Russian society’s general refusal to admit that its government’s current foreign policy is inherently colonialist. Which, in the circular way of these things, is precisely why people should go and see this show. Sergey Guskov

Anton Kannemeyer, Super Rich Man, 2011, six-colour lithograph, 51 × 51 cm.

Courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg

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The St. Petersburg Paradox Swiss Institute, New York 28 May – 17 August The Swiss Institute’s engrossing group show The St. Petersburg Paradox is premised upon an old gambling scheme where you flip a coin until it comes up heads. You bet only a few dollars, even though you could conceivably win a lot, and…

Does anyone really care about this? I don’t know anything about gambling and don’t really give a shit. But under this pretence, the exhibition corrals artists engaged in risk and chance operations à la John Cage – though by the look of it, it’s John Cage as the star of Beetlejuice (1988), in some vaguely creepy casino scenario – ie, the gallery’s bold geometric architecture and abstract 1980s inflections make everything a bit tacky (read: awesome).

The low wall demarcating the main gallery space from the elevated platform has been painted an ugly green, with two matching ugly green chairs facing Tabor Robak’s 14-channel mass of wall-mounted monitors, A* (2014), which plays with the schlocky danger narratives of videogames. Normally in galleries you see very elegant, minimal furniture, like something Mies

van der Rohe or George Nelson would fashion, but this fantastic pair of seats look like they were purchased from Rooms to Go in 1987. They perfectly complement Sarah Ortmeyer’s Sankt Petersburg Paradox (2014), which also, coincidentally, looks like Rooms to Go as scattered by Barry Le Va, with boldly geometric chessboards and tables strewn across the floor, the unkempt and tipped-over objects interspersed seemingly randomly with goose, mallard, quail and emu eggs placed unassumingly on the floor. The installation covers almost the whole gallery, such that the two very relevant, early avant-garde nods, Marcel Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bond (1938) and Jean (Hans) Arp’s Collage Géométrique (1916), get lost in the fray. This is a shame, as it’s so rare to see a nonreadymade, nonsculptural Duchamp.

But here it is, swallowed in a sea of green: two fake bonds emblazoned with the artist’s face covered in shaving cream, meant, in Duchamp’s words, ‘to break the Monte Carlo bank’.

Walk up the platform and John Miller’s Labyrinth I (1999) proffers a closeup shot of

The Price Is Right. That US television show’s manically coloured set piece is a perfect match for Cayetano Ferrer’s Remnant Recomposition (2014), which looks as if all the tacky carpets from sad, rundown casinos everywhere magically found their way to SoHo and were assembled by a team of colourblind assistants. Spots, stripes and fluorescent colours mash up garishly, not so unlike the stack of chaotic prints spread on top of Kaspar Müller’s table, Tropic of Cancer (2014), which juxtaposes the cover of Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (2000) with images of little ceramic pumpkins and stackable garden chairs that can be purchased by phone – a cacophony of items for sale, mostly shit.

All of this may sound denigrating to the work at hand, though it’s not. Rarely do artists so critical of commodification handle it with such tongue-in-cheek, kitschy pizzazz.

Personally, I’d like to turn Ferrer’s carpet into swimming briefs, and that’s saying something.

David Everitt Howe

The St. Petersburg Paradox, 2014 (installation view).

Photo: Daniel Perez. Courtesy Swiss Institute, New York

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Sapporo International Art Festival 2014 Various venues, Sapporo 19 July – 28 September Guest-directed by musician and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, the inaugural Sapporo International Art Festival operates under an umbrella theme that characterises his thinking of the past few years: ‘City and Nature’. The former reflecting his interest in collective responsibility (he has often advocated a ‘return to more tribal times when music belonged to everybody’), the latter reflecting his ongoing commitment to environmentalism, all of which finds material form in Forest Symphony (2013), a collaboration between Sakamoto and YCAM Interlab in which bioelectric data collected from various trees around the world is transmitted to an installation (in Sapporo’s Moerenuma Park), where it is displayed as visual data and as audio through a ‘canopy of speakers’.

The fourth largest city in Japan, Sapporo is the capital of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and was colonised during the midnineteenth century. Until the 1960s its largest industry was mining, but as a result of cheap mineral imports, these days it’s dominated by tertiary-sector industries such as IT. That history has a large part to play throughout the festival, from a documentary exhibition at the Former Hokkaido Government Office Buil­ding titled Two Great Men from Hokkaido, focused on photographer Genichiro Kakegawa and composer Akira Ifukube, both of whom have strong connections with Hokkaido’s indigenous Ainu

population (the former documented Ainu festivals and culture, the latter grew up around that culture, which in part influenced his compo­ sitions), to Shimabuku’s Stone from Nibutani (2014), which was rolled from an area sacred to the Ainu into the centre of Sapporo and will be returned at the end of the festival. Meanwhile, the relatively conventional gallery exhibition at Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art (works by Gerhard Richter and Subodh Gupta feel somewhat crow­ barred in as big names for a museum show) features Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Zeche Westfalen I/II Ahlen (2003), which documents a former coalmining site in Germany, and Terrils (2009), which documents the mining area of Nord-Pas de Calais, France (which itself looks like a distant relative to Moerenuma Park, a former garbage dump whose reclamation as parkscape was masterplanned by Isamu Noguchi). The anarchic Internet Yami-Ichi (black market), perched high up on the Sapporo TV Tower, is a ‘flea market for “browsing” face-to-face’ run by an ‘online secret society’, links the virtual to the real (via people offering blessings combined with a kind of semaphore, others dressed up as if they were going to a Comic Con, to the point of slight incomprehensibility to the non-Japanese speaker), and brings things bang up-to-date.

In comparison to that, the exhibitions in the two main museum venues for the festival (the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art and

the Sapporo Art Museum) are bound to feel somewhat tame. Yet that’s not to say that they don’t feature some standout works – the combination of physicist Ukichiro Nakaya’s photographs of natural and artificial snowflakes, and frequent Sakamoto collaborator Carsten Nicolai’s installation Snow Noise (2001), which features the sight and sound of snowflakes forming, chief among them.

Yet it’s the cacophony of artworks housed in two underground walkways, Sapporo Odori and Sapporo Ekimae-dori – the former containing the permanent 500m Underground Walkway Gallery (a series of glass vitrines housed on a 500m stretch of wall), the latter home to a series of temporary exhibitions, titled Sensing Streams – that make the festival really come alive. The walkways sit on the paths of ancient underground spring-water channels (Mems) along Sapporo’s Toyohira River around which the Ainu settled, and are now, having been destroyed by urbanisation, the paths through which streams of people (70,000 per day) flow down the city.

Alongside a number of multimedia and automated artworks, performance artist Fuyuki Yamakawa’s River Run Practice (2014), exhibited as a work in progress, involved him constructing a canoe out of urban detritus and then attempting to follow a watercourse from the sea to the walkway – perhaps the most authentic investigation of city and nature on show. Mark Rappolt

Naoya Hatakeyama, Terrils, 2009.

Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

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Manifesta 10 State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg 28 June – 31 October It stinks. Visitors to the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg hold their sleeves and tissues in front of their noses, even though the rickety windows are already letting in the summer air.

Conservation requirements for Old Masters aside, what this metal shelf with rusty cans of tomato paste, yellowed flour bags and canning jars from the GDR is doing here – in front of it a plaster block lubricated with pork grease – is not clear, neither to the visitors nor the attendants.

Even the chief curator of this section doesn’t know what to do with Joseph Beuys’s installation, Wirtschaftswerte (Economic Values, 1980), especially considering that it is placed in the middle of Biedermeier motifs from the nineteenth century. Passing by the work, he asserts that it is not in fact art, and asks whether the lenders from S.M.A.K. in Ghent read the Bible.

Now he wants to know whether the grease vapour damages the paintings – and hopes for a yes so that this foreign object quickly disappears again. However, in 1980 Beuys made it a prerequisite for his work to be shown surrounded by paintings that were created during the lifetime of Karl Marx (1813–83).

The seventy-year-old German curator Kasper König came up with a similar concept for this Manifesta. This year the nomadic biennial celebrates its 20th anniversary – parallel to the Hermitage’s 250th – which is why König placed works by Susan Philipsz, Karla Black and Gerhard Richter between Flemish still-lifes, Greek statues and the tsar’s throne. However, not only are the tourists confused, but Manifesta’s audience also wanders around aimlessly as the museum refuses to put up direction signs or explanations. Manifesta wasn’t even allowed to specify the room numbers in its catalogue. And this despite the director of the Hermitage having approved König as curator and pushed the city to pay more than €3 million for a show that aims to focus on ‘Europe’s changing cultural DNA’ since the Cold War. St Petersburg had been chosen before Russia established new cultural guidelines in April 2014, in which there is talk

of ‘global competition’: ‘Russia… should be viewed as a unique and independent civilization that leans neither toward the “West” (“Europe”) nor the “East”.’ Yet it has been clear ever since the imprisonment of members of Pussy Riot in summer 2012 that artistic freedom is defined somewhat differently here. The ink on his contract had just dried, says König, when last summer the antigay law was enacted – which was joined by the anti-curse-word law shortly thereafter. Artists and curators worldwide pleaded for withdrawal, however König remained firm: now more than ever, he suggested, artists should not walk away from oppression.

In this respect it is astounding that this Manifesta is even inaugurating new exhibition spaces in the Hermitage – in the General Staff Building across from the Winter Palace, where contemporary art will probably be shown in the future, whereupon one asks how this will look when those critical of the Kremlin end up in jail.

However, here, of all places, queer art by Henrik Olesen, Klara Lidén and Wolfgang Tillmans is now displayed, and a transvestite film by Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe couldn’t be more explicit. The Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov was allowed to arrange his moving photographs from the Maidan demonstrations on the walls and in the display cases. For Erik van Lieshout, however, enough was enough; he had to remove the ‘fucks’ from the subtitles of his film installation (The Basement, 2014): for six months, as the work documents, he provided the famous cats in the catacombs of the Hermitage with sleeping places and medicine. Unquestionably a lot of what is here not only cleverly reacts to the sociopolitical situation but is also of excellent quality, yet it does not result in the ‘Research Biennale’ that Manifesta wants it to be.

König mainly relies on established ‘NATO artists’, as the Russian-born Elena Kovylina states it.

With her film documentation of a performance, Egalite (Equality, 2014), she addresses the longstanding desire for equality that drives revolutions: a line of people stand on

facing page, top Lara Favaretto, 2014 (installation view, Winter Palace, State Hermitage Museum), concrete, iron.

Courtesy the artist and Galleria Franco Noero, Turin

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stools of different heights so that they all appear to be the same height. One can become engrossed in such images, as in Rineke Dijkstra’s film (Study with Marianna at Children’s Ballet School of Ilya Kuznetsov, 2014) about a small, increasingly weary ballet dancer.

However, strung together in two statesupportive institutions – one of which resembles a sterile conference building wrapped in luxurious historical clothing, the other an ornate casket from the era of Catherine the Great – the course remains oddly soulless. Although König stresses that he is just a guest in this country, there is no dialogue between him and his environment, but rather a monologue. Only the Lada car that Francis Alÿs drove into a tree in the courtyard of the Winter Palace evokes interaction: cheering teenagers squeeze themselves inside, as if into a time capsule.

It seems as if Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky gave his colleague König the runaround with this – using him to show the public that contemporary art is not so dangerous, that it can even look merely strange or funny if not explained or pointed out – at the very least to avoid any trouble after the departure of the Manifesta team. After all, he had already stood up to the Kremlin many times, as when Putin wanted to bring Rembrandts from the Hermitage to Moscow.

The show includes some very fine, subtly political works; others – like Marlene Dumas’s watercolours of gay cultural figures, including Tchaikovsky – are just didactic. On the whole, though, one might get the impression – reinforced by the audience seeming to move blithely through, untouched – that Western contemporary art, in this context, is just harmless or annoying. And this thought might give one goose bumps: Manifesta began when the ‘wind of change’ was blowing through Europe and curators started looking at previously hidden young artists from Eastern Europe. Today, Russia itself takes the wind out of Joseph Beuys’s sails.

Gesine Borcherdt

facing page, bottom Francis Alÿs, Lada Kopeika Project (video still), 2014, video, 9 min, in collaboration with Frédéric Alÿs, Constantin Felker and Julien Devaux. Courtesy Manifesta 10, St Petersburg

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Ways of Looking

by Ossian Ward Lawrence King, £9.95 (softcover) In 1990s Glasgow, a local restaurant ran an advertising campaign on the city’s metro describing a catastrophic dining experience: a sneering maître d’, flirtatious waiters, baffling foreign food, a bill full of hidden charges. For those who toyed with the idea of eating out, but dreaded making a fool of themselves, the restaurant conversely marketed itself as a haven of reassurance. It’s a sales approach echoed by Ways of Looking, in which Ossian Ward evokes an artworld full of ‘bad encounters’ in which art may superficially appear ‘crass and grating’, promoted by a system characterised by its ‘obfuscatory tendencies’, ‘clever-clever writing’ and ‘verbose overcompensation’, and then proffers an escape route.

Ward, who was the visual arts editor at Time Out London before moving into the commercial gallery system with a senior role at Lisson, is an affable fellow-traveller; his jocular, confessional prose touches, variously, on his family, a childhood fear of high slides, his lack of coordination and his struggles to conquer his own art prejudices. That latter is rather the crux of the book, which, in the face of art, advocates a radical unlearning and a dedication to second chances.

Ways of Looking follows Ward on his journey as he attempts to practise what he preaches out in the field. Sometimes one might wish he wasn’t so successful in his efforts to give everything a

second chance: encountering Adel Abdessemed’s Décor (2011–12) – a quadruple crucifixion rendered in razorwire – he initially reads the piece as a ‘gratuitous and… clunkingly obvious statement’, but after taking himself in hand, he comes to ‘[realise] that there was some merit in these grotesque, tortured effigies’.

An explicit nod to John Berger’s TV series and book Ways of Seeing (1972), Ways of Looking shares the earlier volume’s populist approach and mistrust of ponderous critical discourse, as well as its attempt to sharpen the gaze in a world of rapidly proliferating images. The similarities rather end there – there is none of the overarching political fervour here that ensured Berger’s book enduring cult status among the left-leaning student population. Instead Ways of Looking reads somewhere between etiquette manual – contemporary art addressed as a vexing hurdle of modern life – and self-help guide.

Ward offers a methodology that he refers to as the tabula rasa approach; tabula being a mnemonic for a set of art-proximate actions – give it Time, feel for Associations, find out some Background and so on – and the whole being an exhortation to approach work with an open mind. To the recalcitrant, the conceit of ticking through a behavioural checklist may feel a distraction or even irritant – Ward’s intention however is to boost his readers’ confidence,

to allow them to feel that their assessment of a work is valid because it is the result of their own open-minded and careful consideration.

Ways of Looking is as much a snapshot of the present art moment as Ways of Seeing was of the early 1970s and as Matthew Collings’s Blimey!

(1997) was of the mid-90s. Collings’s book gave a glimpse through the studio door into a boisterous, resourceful and personality-driven local scene – by contrast the art that Ward parses is slick, polymorphous and deracinated; fodder for ex-industrial exhibition halls, yawning art fairs and encyclopaedic ‘-iennials’.

Ward has a tendency to second-guess his audience – to the extent that one imagines that he has a specific reader in mind. While, for the sake of familial harmony, one hopes that imagined reader is not his father, to whom the book is dedicated, it certainly feels to be aimed at an audience of a certain age. It’s a quick read – a sprinting overview of key events in recent art – and reassuring with it. Surely perfect fodder for incoming ministers of culture? Ultra-highnet-worth individuals feeling the urge to join the collectors club could also do worse than investing first in Ward’s reasonably priced volume; it may arm them against dubious ‘art advisers’ peddling second-rate Basquiats and might even give them the courage to steer into waters new. Hettie Judah

100 Painters of Tomorrow Edited by Kurt Beers Thames & Hudson (hardcover, £35) In June of this year Jerry Saltz, writing in New York Magazine, let out a well-constructed moan about the state of painting and the art market.

Saltz was putting into words what anyone walking around an art fair (not just the big ones, it should be noted; the worst offenders seemed to be hipster galleries showing at the likes of Independent, New York, or Liste, Basel) during the last couple of years might have noticed: an abundance of abstract painting that seems to have no value other than a decorative one. A type of painting – typified by a pale washiness, with planes of colour akin to sub-Rothko – the sole

purpose of which seems to be to broadcast the ‘good taste’ of its purchaser.

The panel that judged the open call for inclusion in 100 Painters of Tomorrow – which included Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; artist Cecily Brown; and the critic Barry Schwabsky, among others – seems equally tired of this type of ‘crapstraction’. The artists who made the cut and are profiled in this weighty hardback, each with a generous amount of illustration, either work

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figuratively or use a laden, refreshingly heavily worked abstraction that seems to have fallen out of favour with the market. Few, thankfully, are of the splash-and-pattern school. Gems include Leipzig-based Portuguese artist Ivana de Vivanco and Hong Kong-based Malaysian Wong Xiang Yi, both of whom use staged tableaux drenched in psychosexual tension. The mutually apocalyptic and sci-fi-influenced work of Shahryar Hatami (from Tehran) and Sze Yang Boo (from Singapore) is also of note, as are the more conceptually minded, playful paintings of Oliver Osborne and Shaan Syed (both London-based). Oliver Basciano

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Dear Navigator

by Hu Fang Sternberg Press, £12 (softcover) When you are, as I am, someone who spends the majority of their time writing or talking about art, you are often nagged by the fear that how you think and talk within the context of art and the introspective circle that attends to it, is in no way related to how you think and talk in the world at large. Granted, for many ‘professionals’ this would not be a problem, merely the distinction between what the design critic Reyner Banham once termed ‘learned’ and ‘common’ sense, but if you want to believe, as I do, that art has some sort of role to play in society and the world at large, and therefore must speak to that world at large, it is. And so when a book that explodes those divisions arrives on your desk, it’s something to celebrate.

Indeed, it’s exactly this theme that’s picked up in the title story of Dear Navigator, which comprises a series of letters by Vladimir Xie, written while on a simulated voyage to Mars: ‘I’m entirely unsure whether my perseverance here is for the sake of finding my inner voice,’ the character writes, ‘or for the sake of my performance before the instruments.’ On the one hand, it’s an observation that gets to the heart of current concerns about the performance of art

and artists before the art market, but on the other hand it speaks of a more general concern related to how each of us lives our lives.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First the facts. Hu Fang is a writer, curator and co-founder of Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou, China.

Dear Navigator is a collection of ten short stories, the majority of which explore the intersection between culture and ‘real life’, and return on several occasions to the problem of what in the West, would be termed Cartesian mind–body dualism, or, in art, the concept–object conundrum. Along the way, the author touches on the exploration of other worlds, contemporary urbanism, the effects of market forces on art, the male escort industry, the relationship between the observed and the unobserved, the 24 points of the Chinese lunisolar calendar, the responsibilities of art to society, the molecular structure of glass, the problem of free will, Zen Buddhism and the Chinese microblogging site Weibo.

Second, a register of interest. One of the stories, ‘The Shame of Participation’, about two artists who rip off the citizens of a city by asking them to donate objects to be included in a public artwork and then sell the objects to a collector,

first appeared in a special edition of ArtReview Asia published earlier this year.

Although some of the stories respond to artworks (the first, ‘A Letter from Tropical Metropolis’ is a response to an artwork by Danh Vō), or have been included in artist’s monographs (‘Notes From The Glass House’ was published in a catalogue for Ming Wong), or relate to Hu’s own art projects (‘This Is The Last Film’) or, on a number of occasions, spring from an instance of performance art, they are never restrained by the context of art. Instead, Hu’s stories push forward a vision in which the entire world is alive – aeroplanes have consciousness, glass is moving – and able to offer a dizzying series of potential realities (perhaps more precisely other points of view) waiting to be explored.

And all of it connected through the very human filter of desire – the desire for sex, for furniture and other commodities – but ultimately the desire for knowledge and, perhaps more urgently still, for self-knowledge. You’re not going to find a more beautiful, more generous, or better-written book in the art section of your local bookstore for some time to come.

Mark Rappolt

Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj

by Nadya Tolokonnikova and Slavoj Žižek Verso Books, £5.99 (softcover) Comradely Greetings is the product of an almosttwo-year-long correspondence between Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek and Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova, dating from the latter’s imprisonment in August 2012 for performing a ‘punk prayer’ against Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s largest Orthodox church, to a few months after her release, in March 2014.

Contrary to expectations, however, these prison letters barely make reference to the Gulag-like conditions in which Tolokonnikova was held. Rather, the exchange features political debates on issues such as the limits and dangers of global capitalism and the future of liberal

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democracy, the value of protest and the power of artistic subversion.

Referencing everything from Nietzsche and Hegel to Alain Badiou and Russian folkloric songs, this short compilation sheds light on the sharp philosophical reflections behind Pussy Riot’s activism, and Tolokonnikova proves capable of challenging the discourse of the sexagenarian philosopher. But despite her passion and undeniable erudition, it is Žižek’s more nuanced and pragmatic discourse, which emerges from an in-depth analysis of contemporary politics and events, that most often appears to set the tone of the discussion. Particularly

impressive is his worldview of protest phenomena and their aftermaths: from the Arab Spring and the Gezi Park protests, to the Ukranian uprisings and diverse forms of the Occupy movement.

The dynamic of the epistolary format allows the writers to analyse their arguments in a structured way while nevertheless maintaining a personal and lively tone. Thought-provoking and exhilaratingly radical in discourse, Comradely Greetings communicates a stimulating sense of urgency, calling for the reader to, as Žižek puts it, ‘think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as the ultimate framework of our lives’. Louise Darblay

ArtReview Asia

23/09/2014 15:55

Lee Bul, Seoul, July 2014. Photo: Na seung

artreview.com/subscribe ArtReview Asia is also online at artreview.com and through the iTunes Store

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23/09/2014 15:56

The Strip Keiichi Tanaami

The most vivid childhood experiences can implant indelible impressions. In the case of Keiichi Tanaami, born in 1936 in Tokyo, they were enough to fuel a lifetime of diverse, determined self-expression in a wide range of media, from psychedelic Pop art paintings and experimental animation to designing the Japanese editions of Playboy and album covers for records by Jefferson Airplane and the Monkees. Some of Tanaami’s sharpest memories have haunted him since the Second World War. As a boy he witnessed and survived the American air raids that decimated the Japanese capital, their firebombs lighting up the night sky and shimmering through his grandfather’s goldfish tank. These distorted, brightly coloured creatures have become one of his recurrent symbols.

Equally potent influences were the manga that the young Tanaami eagerly consumed and imitated. Launched in January 1948, the monthly boys’ magazine Manga Shōnen was a particular favourite. “I couldn’t stay calm on the day it was coming out, so I’d wait for hours in front of the bookstore for the new issue to arrive,” Tanaami says. Among the fresh postwar talent to blossom in its pages was Osamu Tezuka, who would be later hailed as Japan’s ‘God of manga’. Tanaami was absorbed by the techniques in Tezuka’s first full-length maga­ zine serial, Jungle Emperor (1950–4): “His panel

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layouts adopted the way of developing the scenes in a film and resembled real motion pictures.

I made lots of my own manga, but lost them all.

Due to food shortages and the lack of entertainment after the war, the world of manga became a kind of safe shelter for me.”

Tanaami was also captivated by the period’s vigorous text-driven picture stories, or emonogatari. A favourite was Shōnen Ōja (Boy King) by Sōji Yamakawa. This courageous junior Tarzan was originally conceived for a prewar kamishibai, or illustrated storytelling show performed for children by touring confectionery vendors.

In 1946 it was released in book form and became the genre’s first postwar bestseller. Tanaami recalls, “The techniques of Yamakawa’s pen drawing overwhelmed me. The main character is a Japanese boy brought up by a gorilla. I was so into sketching animals that I wouldn’t do my homework, so my mother was always telling me off.” In 2008, Tanaami paid tribute to Yamakawa, as part of the artist’s centenary retrospective, through a series of limited-edition silkscreen prints.

Despite his obsession with comics and his monthly lessons from his father’s friend Kazushi Hara, a successful manga professional, Tanaami went on to study at art school. Bored with classes, he made frequent visits to the Jena-shoten store in Ginza, the one place where he could buy 1960s American comic books and

find out through magazines about the Pop art they inspired. His discovery of R. Crumb’s LSD-triggered underground comics was another epiphany: “Crumb’s ‘comix’ all communicated strong messages about breaking down social order. They totally changed my understanding of manga. With his themes of antisociety, sex, violence, etc, every panel was permeated with a visceral smell and completely devastated my weak mind.”

Still very active as he approaches eighty, Tanaami showed again at Art Basel Hong Kong this year and is working on new animated films.

He is also halfway through a book of paintings based on Shozo Numa’s Kachikujin Yapoo (Yapoo the Human Cattle, 1956/70/71/99), “the best weird novel of modern times”. His new piece for ArtReview Asia starts from “a big spider, ghastly and smiling above my head when I was recovering in bed from catarrh of the colon.” The Laughing Spider pulses like some feverish brain scan of Tanaami’s synapses firing and mapping a web of flashbacks, from Mickey Mouse cartoons in a seedy cinema or a Shōwa-period red-arched bridge to Lichtenstein-style bombers, burning skin, and those goldfish.

“All these memories came up into my mind so clearly, as though they happened yesterday.

Manga-ish conception, manga-ish composition, manga-ish thought – I love them all!”

Paul Gravett

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Contributors

Edward Sanderson

Wenny Teo

Yu Wei

is the Manuela and Iwan Wirth Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She received her PhD from University College London in 2011 and has worked in various curatorial roles at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, and Tate Modern, London. Her research focuses on the politics of spectacle, post-Internet art and networked forms of resistance in East Asian artistic practice. She was associate curator of the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial (2014) and is currently working with the Cass Sculpture Foundation on an exhibition of 15 new large-scale outdoor sculptures by emerging Chinese contemporary artists, which will open in 2016. For further reading on Lee Bul, Teo suggests After the Future (2011), edited by Franco Bifo Berardi, Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1997); Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991); Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005); Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Lance’ (1952), in his posthumous Collected Stories (1995).

is a Taiwan-based art critic and PhD candidate in humanities and cultural studies (London Consortium) at Birkbeck, University of London.

Yu has written articles for various exhibition catalogues and art journals, and from 2005 to 2007 he was an editor for the Taipei-based Artco magazine.

In this issue Yu writes about Kao Chung-Li’s 8mm films, DIY projectors and ‘slideshow cinema’. For further reference, he recommends Kao’s exhibition catalogue Watch Time Watching (2010); and Larry Shao’s 2012 interview with the artist, on Asia Art Archive’s website.

is a Beijing-based art critic and curator with a particular interest in alternative cultural practices in China and contemporary artists working outside the gallery system. This month he is in dialogue with Elaine W. Ho on artist-run spaces in China.

For further reading he suggests Donna J. Haraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991).

Du Qingchun

is a photographer based in Seoul. He works with various Korean fashion labels. In 2007 he started Nathing Studio with his twin brother. In 2009 he founded Nazine, a contemporary fashion magazine.

His photography can be seen on nazine.com.

is a Beijing-based filmmaker, curator and writer, as well as associate professor of literature at Beijing Film Academy. In this issue he assesses Diao Yinan’s new film, Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014). For further viewing he recommends Conjugation (2001), written and directed by Emily Tang Xiao-Bai. Elaine W. Ho

Anselm Franke is a curator and writer based in Berlin. He is head of visual art and film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where he is currently working as cocurator of The Anthropocene Project 2013–14. He is chief curator of the Shanghai Biennale 2014 and curated the Taipei Biennial in 2012. His project Animism was presented in Antwerp, Bern, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Shenzhen, Seoul and Beirut in various collaborations from 2010 to 2014 and will have its final iteration in São Paulo in 2015. At the Haus der Kulturen der Welt he cocurated The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (2013, with Diedrich Diederichsen), After Year Zero: Geographies of Collaboration (2013), Forensis (2014, with Eyal Weizman) and projects like the Anthropocene Observatory. He is editor of several books and author of numerous articles. He is currently completing his PhD at Goldsmiths, London.

works between the realms of time-based art, urban practice and design. She is the initiator of Beijing artist-run space HomeShop (2008–13) and was most recently a fellow at the Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin (2013–14). This month she is in dialogue with Edward Sanderson on artist-run spaces in China.

For further reading she recommends Bao Dong’s ‘Rethinking and Practices Within the Art System: The Self-Organization of Contemporary Art in China, 2001–2012’, in Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol 1, no 1; and Self-Organised (2013), edited by Stine Hebert and Anne Szefer Karlsen. She also suggests readers might like Karina Haczek’s design for a ‘30 Minute Infinity Scarf’, accessible at handimania.com/ knit/30-minute-infinity-scarf.

Na seung

Advisory Board Defne Ayas, Richard Chang, Anselm Franke, Claire Hsu, Pi Li, Eugene Tan, Koki Tanaka, Wenny Teo, Philip Tinari, Chang Tsong-zung, Yao Jui-Chung Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Writers Karen Archey, Andrew Berardini, Gesine Borcherdt, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Freya Chou, Mariagrazia Costantino, Brian Curtin, Du Qingchun, David Everitt Howe, Anselm Franke, Gallery Girl, Jeanne Gerrity, Paul Gravett, Sergey Guskov, Elaine W. Ho, Louis Ho, Sam Jacob, Gabriela Jauregui, Sakarin Krue-On, Jeff Leung, Yung Ma, Naeem Mohaiemen, Park Chan-Kyong, Edward Sanderson, Zarmeené Shah, Wenny Teo, Mike Watson, Xiaoyu Weng, Yu Wei Contributing Translators Hyo Gyoung Jeon, Daniel Nieh, Philana Woo Contributing Artists / Photographers Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Na seung, Tanaami Keiichi, Charwei Tsai & Tsering Tashi Gyalthang

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Photo credits

Text credits

on the cover and on pages 38 and 115 Lee Bul, photographed by Na seung on page 39 Photography by Na seung on pages 112 and 122 Photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam

Phrases on the spine and on pages 21, 37 and 97 are marketing slogans used by the tourist boards of Korea, India, Singapore and Indonesia respectively

Autumn & Winter 2014

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Off the Record Autumn 2014 I reach over and play with another Mutton Chop Namkeen, a specialty of Kolachi – Spirit of Karachi restaurant. Past a small wooden barrier next to our table I can see the late evening sky over the sea. Fishermen in traditional boats bob about.

“So how do they do this big group show thing in the rest of Asia?

This is why I’ve employed a leading British artworld figure like you to be my consultant,” says Safraz, the handsome middle-aged Pakistani gentleman opposite me. “I want a show with the gravitas of a biennial but that I can name after myself and stage across the foyers of my portfolio of commercial property.”

I pull gently on the sleeves of my Aamna Aqeel printed kurta to avoid smearing them in the plate of mutton ribs between us.

The quick line I’ve just snorted has sorted out my opium daze but destroyed my appetite.

“Well, there are many ways. But to show you, we must hire a private plane from Princely Jets from Karachi airport and go and talk to some art technicians.”

Safraz looks puzzled and slightly pained.

“Look, these guys are the eyes and ears of these big events,” I explain. “And I like to dominate their sinewy physiques.”

He still looks pained.

“OK, OK, normal planes, but I’m not turning right on any of these aircraft.”

The following day we’re in Delhi talking to a technician who worked on Insert 2014, a sort-of-biennial in Delhi that styled itself as ‘the Sharp Edge of the Global Contemporary’.

“So what’s the secret of setting up a biennial-style exhibition in Asia?” I ask, edgy after a quick toot upon landing. There is a long pause as the man stares back at Safraz and me.

“Who are you?” he hisses.

“Erm, we are researchers from Tate Modern,” I lie. “This is Massimiliano Enwezor, the Stelios Haji-Ioannou Curator of the East Indies. Now answer my question.” I turn the pliers that I have inserted into his testicles as he swivels from the hook in the disused butchery.

“Raqs Media Collective,” he gasps. “Put them in everything. Or call Chris Dercon.”

On the way to the airport, Safraz turns to me.

“Was the torture really necessary? Are you sure this is how you go about researching biennials and related not-for-profit events?”

“You think they managed to set up a so-called ‘Summit’ in Dhaka without a bit of twisty-twisty?” I scream at him, eager for another hit.

A few hours later we are indeed in Dhaka, this time in the back room of a heavily overstaffed garment factory. I’m feeling crazy. A technician lies impaled on an industrial sewing machine. I approach him with my knitting needles.

“What was that Dhaka Art Summit about? Was it an art fair? Was it a biennial? How much did you have to pay Raqs Media Collective to do their city-wide art project?” I yell.

“Why are you torturing me? I’m just a technician who worked on this great bit of art philanthropy which had respectable partners like the Goethe-Institut and British Council” “What about Raqs?” I scream, sending 200 volts through the wired-up needles.

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Safraz pulls me off. “What’s wrong with you, Gallery Girl? I hired you to brainstorm about putting together a biennial that glorifies my spirit of giving, and all you can do is torture gallery technicians. Are you high? Is that why you came to my glorious country?”

“Come off it, Safraz, it’s either guns or drugs with you lot.”

“That’s exactly the type of derogatory preconception that the Karachi Biennial Summit Stage will dispel!” counters Safraz.

The journey to Gwangju is a silent one, in part because Safraz forces me to bin my stash before getting on the Korean Air flight. I’m in a sullen mood at the opening, which is not helped when it turns out that there’s no sign of Raqs Media Collective or any technicians to stub cigarettes out on. Safraz, though, is in his element.

“This is it! A proper biennial! A real Tate curator in charge! A Talking Heads song as a title! A sprinkling of local artists both old and new! Jeremy Deller!”

“Look, Safraz, forget it. This has been going for years. Way out of your league. You want to set up a dodgy group show across various buildings to drive up the value of some third-rate office blocks you’ve invested in. I’m your lady for that type of thing, shield your eyes from this!”

Safraz finally snaps. “That’s it, Gallery Girl – you just do me down!

Not to mention the technicians and Raqs Media Collective. We don’t deserve this!” He fiddles with his mobile phone. “You’re fired! I’m going to get in Chris Dercon!” Gallery Girl

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Galerie 1900-2000, Paris • 303 Gallery, New York • Miguel Abreu, New York • Air de Paris, Paris • Algus Greenspon, New York • Christian Andersen, Copenhagen • Applicat-Prazan, Paris • Raquel Arnaud, São Paulo • Art: Concept, Paris • Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli • Athr Gallery, Jeddah • Balice Hertling, Paris • Catherine Bastide, Brussels • Baudach, Berlin • Bortolami, New York • Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin • Luciana Brito, São Paulo • Broadway 1602, New York • Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York • Bugada & Cargnel, Paris • Shane Campbell, Chicago • Campoli Presti, London, Paris • Canada, New York • Capitain Petzel, Berlin • carlier | gebauer, Berlin • Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles • Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin • C L E A R I N G, New York, Brussels • Sadie Coles HQ, London • Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Boissy-le-Châtel • Paula Cooper, New York • Vera Cortês Art Agency, Lisboa • Cortex Athletico, Bordeaux, Paris • Crèvecoeur, Paris • CRG, New York • Chantal Crousel, Paris • Croy Nielsen, Berlin • Ellen De Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam • Massimo De Carlo, Milano, London • Elizabeth Dee, New York • Dependance, Brussels • Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv • Eigen+Art, Berlin, Leipzig • Frank Elbaz, Paris • Essex Street, New York • Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo • Peter Freeman, Inc., Paris, New York • House of Gaga, México D.F. • Gagosian Gallery, Paris, Le Bourget, New York, London, Beverly Hills, Hong Kong, Roma • Gaudel de Stampa, Paris • gb agency, Paris • GDM, Paris • François Ghebaly, Los Angeles • Gladstone Gallery, New York, Brussels • Marian Goodman, Paris, New York • Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt • Greene Naftali, New York • Karsten Greve, Paris, Köln, St. Moritz • Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, London, New York • Max Hetzler, Berlin, Paris • Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles • Xavier Hufkens, Brussels • In Situ - Fabienne Leclerc, Paris • Taka Ishii, Tokyo • Johnen Galerie, Berlin • Jousse Entreprise, Paris • Annely Juda Fine Art, London • Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf • Karma International, Zürich • kaufmann repetto, Milano • Anton Kern, New York • Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles • David Kordansky, Los Angeles • Tomio Koyama, Tokyo • Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin • Krinzinger, Wien • Kukje Gallery / Tina Kim Gallery, Seoul, New York • kurimanzutto, México D.F. • Labor, México D.F. • Yvon Lambert, Paris • Le Minotaure, Paris • Simon Lee, London, Hong Kong • Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong • Lelong, Paris, New York • Lisson, London, New York, Milano • Loevenbruck, Paris • Florence Loewy, Paris • Luhring Augustine, New York •

Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich • Marcelle Alix, Paris • Matthew Marks, New York, Los Angeles • Gabrielle Maubrie, Paris • Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf • McKee Gallery, New York • Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo • kamel mennour, Paris • Metro Pictures, New York • Meyer Riegger, Berlin • mfc-michèle didier, Brussels, Paris • Francesca Minini, Milano • Massimo Minini, Brescia • Victoria Miro, London • Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York • Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London • Monitor, Roma • mor.charpentier, Paris • Jan Mot, Brussels, México D.F. • Mother’s tankstation, Dublin • MOTINTERNATIONAL, London, Brussels • Murray Guy, New York • Nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Wien • Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Köln • Nahmad Contemporary / Helly Nahmad Gallery, New York • Nature Morte, New Dehli • Neu, Berlin • Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt • neugerriemschneider, Berlin • New Galerie, Paris • Franco Noero, Torino • Nathalie Obadia, Paris, Brussels • Office Baroque, Brussels • On Stellar Rays, New York • Guillermo de Osma, Madrid • Overduin & Co., Los Angeles • Pace, New York, London, Beijing • Parra & Romero, Madrid, Ibiza • Françoise Paviot, Paris • Peres Projects, Berlin • Galerie Perrotin, Paris, New York, Hong Kong • Plan B, Cluj, Berlin • Praz-Delavallade, Paris • Eva Presenhuber, Zürich • ProjecteSD, Barcelona • Proyectos Monclova, México D.F. • Almine Rech, Paris, Brussels • Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York • Michel Rein, Paris, Brussels • Rodeo, Istanbul • Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, Salzburg • Andrea Rosen, New York • Tucci Russo, Torre Pellice (Torino) • Sophie Scheidecker, Paris • Esther Schipper, Berlin • Micky Schubert, Berlin • Gabriele Senn, Wien • Natalie Seroussi, Paris • Sfeir-Semler, Beirut, Hamburg • ShanghART, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore • Jessica Silverman, San Francisco • VI, VII, Oslo • Skarstedt, New York, London • Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv • Pietro Sparta,

Chagny • Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London • Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp • Daniel Templon, Paris, Brussels • The Approach, London • The Third Line, Dubai • Galerie Thomas, München • Tilton, New York • Tornabuoni Arte, Paris, Firenze, Milano • UBU Gallery, New York • Valentin, Paris • Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris • Van de Weghe, New York • Vedovi, Brussels • Anne de Villepoix, Paris • Vilma Gold, London • Jonathan Viner, London • Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, Beijing • Waddington Custot, London • Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen • Wallspace, New York • Michael Werner, New York, London • White Cube, London, Hong Kong, São Paulo • Jocelyn Wolff, Paris • Xippas, Paris, Genève, Montevideo, Punta del Este • Thomas Zander, Köln • Zeno X, Antwerp • Galerie Zlotowski, Paris • David Zwirner, New York, London •

LAFAYETTE SECTOR WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE GALERIES LAFAYETTE GROUP Laura Bartlett, London • Chert, Berlin • Thomas Duncan, Los Angeles • High Art, Paris • Antoine Levi, Paris • Parisa Kind, Frankfurt • RaebervonStenglin, Zürich • Real Fine Arts, New York • SpazioA, Pistoia • Triple V, Paris •

Index 07/21/2014 Information — info@fiac.com www.fiac.com

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