ArtReview Asia Spring & Summer 2014 by ArtReview

Van Cleef.indd 2

02/05/2014 10:43

Van Cleef.indd 3

02/05/2014 10:43

Dior .indd 4 UK_ART REVIEW 470x300_CHER DIOR-MAI_SSCALL.indd 1

02/05/2014 10:44 04/04/14 16:20

UK_ART

04/14 16:20

www.dior.com

CHER DIOR COLLECTION Yellow gold, white gold, pink gold, diamonds, garnets, rubies, tanzanite, sapphires and Paraiba tourmalines.

Dior .indd 5 UK_ART REVIEW 470x300_CHER DIOR-MAI_SSCALL.indd 2

02/05/2014 10:44 04/04/14 16:21

MargaretHowell.indd 6

02/05/2014 10:44

MargaretHowell.indd 7

02/05/2014 10:44

Galleria Continua.indd 8

02/05/2014 10:45

LUCERNE

卢森

BEIJING

Shao Fan

邵北番(邵帆)

Tobias Tobias Rehberger Rehberger

Face to Face 25. 4. – 5. 7. 2014

Ai Weiwei 22. 8. – 1. 11. 2014

25. 4. – 5. 7. 2014

Das Kind muss raus 生 3. 5. – 6. 7. 2014

艾未未

Xia Xiaowan

夏小万

Julia Steiner

我看

22. 8. – 1. 11. 2014

6. 9. – 19. 10. 2014

ARTFAIRS 博览会 Art Basel Hong Kong May 15 – 18 Hall 1, B14 Encounters: Tobias Rehberger, HOMEAWAY (Oppenheimer Drawings II), 2014 Art Basel June 19 – 22 Hall 2.1, P19 Film: Cheng Ran, Before Falling Asleep Part 2 – Two Pigeons, 2013

Urs Meile

6. 9. – 19. 10. 2014

NEWS 新闻 15 Years Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) featuring Ai Weiwei and Yan Xing April 26 – July 20, 2014 Power Station of Art Shanghai, China The 8 of path – Art in Beijing featuring Yan Xing and Cheng Ran April 30 – July 13, 2014 Uferhallen Berlin, Gemany

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

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

Galerie Urs Meile Beijing No. 104 Caochangdi, Chaoyang district, 100015 Beijing, China T +86 (0)10 643 333 93, F +86 (0)10 643 302 03

麦勒画廊北京中国北京朝阳区草场地104号, 邮编100015 电话 +86 (0)10 643 333 93, 传真 +86 (0)10

北京

420 21 69

Ai Weiwei – Evidence April 3 – July 7, 2014 Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Germany AI WEIWEI: ACCORDING TO WHAT? April 18 – August 10, 2014 Brooklyn Museum New York, USA Ai Weiwei in the Chapel May 24 – November 2, 2014 Yorkshire Sculpture Park West Bretton, Wakefield, UK www.galerieursmeile.com galerie @ galerieursmeile.com

643 302 03

02/05/2014 10:43

Ibid. presents at Art Basel Hong Kong, works by Olivier Castel Carsten Nicolai Christoph Weber Christopher Orr Ross Chisholm Rodrigo Matheus Janis Avotinš ‘ David Adamo 15 - 18 May 2014 Booth 3C25, Hall 3 Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre

/ London Alex Ruthner

Unreliable imitation of life 23 May - 28 June 2014 at 37 Albemarle Street London W1S 4JF, UK

Ibid. 37 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4JF +44(0)207 998 7902 info@ibidprojects.com www.ibidprojects.com

IBID.indd 10

02/05/2014 13:57

Hernan Bas Case Studies

May 13 - June 28, 2014

407 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street Central, Hong Kong Telephone 852 2530 0025 lehmannmaupin.com

LEHMANN MAUPIN.indd 11

02/05/2014 10:48

Shanghart.indd 12

02/05/2014 10:50

Shake and bake Hello again. Or khe chare! As they say in Pashto (ArtReview Asia promised to send a shout-out to its fans in northern Balochistan). ArtReview Asia knows you’ve been missing it since the last issue in November. But stop weeping and wailing and gnashing those teeth! It’s been a year since ArtReview Asia was born, and it’s delighted to announce that to celebrate its birthday it will now be bringing you its beautiful magazine confection not two, but three times a year. Rejoice! Look out for issues coming your way in September and January, and don’t say we don’t spoil you. Or save yourself (and your eyes, which you’ll need for reading this bumper edition of ArtReview Asia) the bother of looking out and subscribe, dummies… For those of you who are new to it, ArtReview Asia is the sister magazine of the old lady herself – ArtReview – who has been chugging along since 1949. (Although you’d never guess it to look at her!) But it’s not some ghetto for Asian artists; in fact, while it’s sensitive to the context within which the art it covers is produced, it doesn’t really care where the artists it covers come from. Instead ArtReview Asia is aimed at covering art that people resident on the continent have some chance of seeing for themselves. In the case of cover artist Carsten Nicolai, most people in Hong Kong will get to see his α (Alpha) Pulse lightwork, produced for this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong, as it courses up and down the city’s iconic 490-metre-high International Commerce Centre (ICC) on the Kowloon harbourfront. Of course, with a surname like Asia, ArtReview can’t help but think a lot about issues of identity, each and every issue. Not just when it’s in a Norwegian motorway service station, sprinkling some ‘Hindu’ brand piffi grillkrydder on a pile of fiskeboller – curiously, ArtReview Asia’s mother is Hindu, but she never mentioned how the entire religion was funded by selling condiments to Scandinavians at roughly 68 krone per kilo. Still, religions are nothing if not the spice of life… or something… What ArtReview Asia is trying to get at is that things can mean different things in different contexts: what’s something that you deploy to pep up your balls in one place is one of the oldest guides to life in another.

Hinduism

AR Asia-III-EditorialRESUPPLY P13.indd 13

02/05/2014 12:13

There are those who hanker for the old days in places like Britain, when instead of mentioning a country of origin, imported products were simply stamped ‘foreign’. And if they weren’t stamped, you knew they were British. Those are the kind of people who are about to ‘win’ Britain’s European elections, but they aren’t really connected to the real world. In the latter, we all know that identity is a slippery business – a theme that keeps cropping up in various ways throughout ArtReview Asia’s latest edition. Artists like Zhang Enli, Michael Joo and Nicolai are all interested in the ways in which physical environments can condition our sense of self. Novelist Marie Darrieussecq looks at how an off-the-shelf manga character almost became a ‘real’ person through the magic of art. Tim Crowley investigates how different cultural notions of time can result in different ways of producing and consuming videowork. And a number of critics look at the developing art scene in the Gulf with a view to understanding what (if any) connections it has to the world of the real. Ha ha – ArtReview Asia was just about to throw one of Slavoj Žižek, PhD’s favourite quotes from The Matrix (1999)* in there, but thankfully its Shanghai operative slapped some sense into it before it could do so and then told it to reread Du Qingchun’s analysis of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013, on page 40, readers) before it started bandying around references to sci-fi films willy-nilly. ArtReview Asia sees the magazine as not just a record of and commentary on artworks that have been shown in galleries and institutions but also as a space in which site-specific artworks can be produced and shown in their own right. With that in mind, two projects running through it, one by Japanese artist Koki Tanaka and a flickbook (flick from front to back to operate) by Hong Kong-based artist Nadim Abbas in the top right-hand corner of pages in the Featured and Reviews sections. Right, now pass the grillkrydder… * “Welcome to the desert of the real.” Ouch. Ouch!

ROTW

AR Asia-III-EditorialRESUPPLY.indd 14

02/05/2014 14:15

Art Review FLJ Dec Issue.pdf

24/4/14

6:21 PM

and

CMY

Hanart.indd 15

02/05/2014 10:51

long_placed.indd 16

02/05/2014 10:53

ArtReview Asia vol 2 no 1 May 2014

Art Previewed 23

Previews by Martin Herbert 25

Wang Wei Interview by Aimee Lin 42

Points of View by Bharti Lalwani, Esther Lu, J.J. Charlesworth, Mark Sladen, Du Qingchun 35

page 30 Zhang Hui, Blueprint. Color Field, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 182 × 225 cm. Courtesy Long March Space, Beijing

May 2014

AR Asia-III-Contents.indd 17

02/05/2014 14:17

Art Featured 57

Carsten Nicolai Interview by Mark Rappolt 58

Tatsuo Miyajima Interview by Mark Rappolt 86

Zhang Enli by Aimee Lin 66

About Annlee by Marie Darrieussecq 90

Michael Joo by Mark Rappolt 74

Resistance to Communication Is Essential A conversation between Dieter Roelstraete and Anselm Franke 94

Performance Art in India by Niru Ratnam 76

Koki Tanaka Interview by Aimee Lin 98

Eastern Standard Time: Everything Changes to Remain the Same by Tim Crowley 82

page 85 Ran Huang, Disruptive Desires, Tranquility, and the Loss of Lucidity (film still), 2012. Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London & Hong Kong

AR Asia-III-Contents.indd 18

ArtReview

02/05/2014 14:17

Edouard Malingu.indd 19

02/05/2014 10:54

Art Reviewed 103

Exhibitions 104

books 114

Made in Commons, by Sam Steverlynck Liu Wei, by Wenny Teo Subodh Gupta, by Aimee Lin Naiza Khan, by Zarmeené Shah Liang Yue, by Wang Kaimei Liu Ding, by Mariagrazia Costantino Marrakech Biennale 5, by Kimberly Bradley Florian Pumhösl, by Jonathan T.D. Neil 3rd Colombo Art Biennale, by Josephine Breese Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Cartagena de Indias, by Andrew Berardini

Disobedient Objects, edited by Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon Black Sun, edited by Gerrie van Noord All Art Is Political: Writing on Performative Art, by Sarah Lowndes Book from the Ground: From Point to Point, by Xu Bing The Book About Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground, edited by Mathieu Borysevicz thE stRiP 118 oFF thE RECoRD 122

page 111 Florian Pumhösl, Georgian Letter, 2013–4, stamping with oil paint on ceramic plaster, 146 × 102 cm. Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York

AR Asia-III-Contents.indd 20

ArtReview

01/05/2014 17:13

MICHAEL JOO T R A N S PA R E N C Y E N G I N E

May 14 – August 29, 2014 SCAD Hong Kong

KUKJE GALLERY

54 SAMCHEONG-RO, JONGNO-GU SEOUL KUKJEGALLERY.COM

SCAD Hong Kong | Moot Gallery 292 Tai Po Road, Sham Pui Po scad.edu/exhibitions

P l e x u s , l o w - i r o n g l a s s , s i l v e r n i t r a t e , l i g h t b u l b s , l a c q u e r, 2 0 1 3 Co u r te sy o f t h e a r t i s t a n d Ku k j e G a l l e r y, S e o u l

joo asia art review 021_ARA.indd 21v1.indd 1

5/1/14 8:43 PM 02/05/2014 12:24

FutureGreats Asia

Each March, ArtReview and EFG International present FutureGreats, a guide to young or less-established artists that a panel of leading curators, artists and critics predict will be making it big in the coming year. The September 2014 issue of ArtReview Asia sees the launch of the first Asia-focused list.

coming September 2014 Practitioners of the craft of private banking efginternational.com

EFG ad.indd 22

02/05/2014 10:57

Art Previewed

2. Memorise all the names of the people living in this world 23

AR Asia-III-Dividers-RESUPPLY.indd 23

02/05/2014 14:18

Gazzelli Art House .indd 24

02/05/2014 11:01

Previewed Ashley Bickerton Gajah Gallery, Singapore through 25 May Chen Zhen Galerie Perrotin, Paris through 7 June The 8 of Paths Uferhallen, Berlin through 13 July

Hans van Dijk: 5000 Names Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing 24 May – 10 August Lee Bul Lehmann Maupin, New York through 21 June

Paul Chan Schaulager, Basel through 19 October Toby Ziegler Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong through 1 July

Lee Mingwei Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 20 September – 4 January

Zhang Hui Long March Space, Beijing through 22 June

Kan Yasuda Eykyn Maclean, New York through 27 June

1 Ashley Bickerton, Junk Anthropologies, 2014, mixed media on jute, 203 × 243 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gajah Gallery, Singapore

May 2014

AR Asia-III-Previewed.indd 25

02/05/2014 14:20

If you didn’t know that ‘philosophical funk’ was such: consider these new images of Balinese an artistic genre rather than, say, a particularly women coated in aluminium paint, one of which pensive James Brown record, you clearly haven’t – Junk Anthropologies (2014), where a smiling girl 1 paid enough attention to Ashley Bickerton clutches a piglet – is juxtaposed with a careful (who, Gajah’s PR flacks remind us, is a paragon of copy of the French forebear’s Tahitian Landscape the aforesaid style). Alongside Jeff Koons, Peter (1891). Expect anger wrapped in grotesquery and Halley et al, the Barbados-born American artist sealed in sumptuous aesthetics, then; though if was a stalwart of Neo-Geo in the 1980s, fashthere’s anything here as wholeheartedly bananas ioning deliberately abject works that critiqued as Bickerton’s 2010 graphic-novel collaboration capitalism. But he’s been a resident of Bali since with Hans Ulrich Obrist, we’ll be surprised. Relocation and consumer society were also 1993 and has, in recent years, gravitated to mordant tropics-influenced work lamenting the 2 the twin engines of Chen Zhen’s work. The Chinese artist, who died of hemolytic anemia progressive despoliation of his adopted home. in 2000 in his mid-forties, moved to Paris in the That he’s performed this increasingly in paint1980s and was confronted there with advanced ing sets up Bickerton as a splenetic heir of sorts capitalism, segueing in the process (in an inverse to Gauguin, and evidently he sees himself as

of Bickerton’s approach) from painting to the sculptural object. Here, across Perrotin’s three Paris spaces, in a show organised by Galleria Continua, that trajectory is reprised: from 1980s abstract canvases expiating on the ‘Great Void’, the vaunted equilibrium between humanity and the universe, to sculptures exploring the problems of intercultural dialogue (eg, Round Table – Side by Side, 1997, wooden tables conjoined and accompanied by Eastern and Western chairs), and Beyond the Vulnerability (1999), a cosmopolis of candles made with Bahian children during a residency. Meanwhile a catalogue raisonné of Chen Zhen’s art is being published, which ought to cement his reputation as one of his generation’s most visionary artists.

2 Chen Zhen, Round Table – Side by Side, 1997, wood, metal, chairs, 180 × 630 × 450 cm. Photo: Blaise Adilon. Courtesy ADAC – Association des Amis de Chen Zhen, Paris

3 Utopia Group (Deng Dafei & He Hai), North Korea International Microfilm Festival – Work Collection, 2013, 10 videos by Utopia Group, 10 videos submitted by participants after an open call on the Internet, mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy Utopia Group

AR Asia-III-Previewed.indd 26

ArtReview Asia

02/05/2014 14:20

5 Lee Bul, Via Negativa (detail), 2012, wood, acrylic mirror, two-way mirror, LED lighting, alkyd paint, English and Korean editions of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 290 × 600 × 600 cm. Photo: Kim Sang-tae. Courtesy the artist and Bartleby, Bickel and Mersault, Seoul, and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong

4 Liu Ding, Fuck 2, 2001, nail polish on linen, 150 × 50 cm. Courtesy the artist

And a third tale of transit: The 8 of Paths finds some 20 Beijing-based artists bringing their wares to Berlin in a demonstration of their home city’s fecundity. Some, such as Liu Wei and Sun Xun, are already well known; some, such as Yang Junling, are less so; one, Zhao Zhao, is a former assistant to Ai Weiwei. Cocurator (with Guo Xiaoyan and Thomas Eller) Andreas Schmid, meanwhile, also coorganised the pioneering exhibition China Avant-Garde at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 1993. In the interim, of course, the international reputation of Chinese art has been transformed. Consider this a closing of the circle, then, and, via the exhibition’s showcasing of young artists, the opening of

a new one. (And put one circle on top of another and you’ve got an auspicious 8.) China Avant-Garde was also coordinated by Hans van Dijk, whose shade pops up at UCCA, Beijing (where Guo Xiaoyan was for4 merly curator) with Hans van Dijk: 5000 Names – a show, later to tour to Witte de With in Rotterdam and co-organised with that institution, that explores his curatorial legacy up to his death in 2002. A Dutch-born, Beijing-based curator, scholar and gallerist, van Dijk linked Chinese artists with international collectors and ran the China Art Archives and Warehouse: here he’s memorialised with a huge array of documentary material, works by Chinese artists connected to him and his ‘life’s work’:

May 2014

AR Asia-III-Previewed.indd 27

a 5,000-artist archive comprising a century’s worth of practitioners born since 1880. Formerly best known for cyborgian works like Monster: Black (1998, reconstructed in 2011 and shown here), a multilimbed, threatening 5 biomorphic sculptural tangle, Lee Bul has, in recent years, moved from using prosthesisaccoutred figures to narrate the vaulting modernising of South Korea over the last half-century, and towards considering that which surrounds us, particularly architecture. In recent works, such as Untitled (2014) here, she draws on the ideas of idealist German architect and urban planner Bruno Taut, using the plans within his 1917 book, Alpine Architecture, as the basis for a crystalline suspended structure, a ‘future

02/05/2014 14:20

cityscape’, while Via Negativa (2012) constructs in works including Lee’s The Letter Writing traditions. In his first US show, ideally we’ll get a labyrinth of mirrored corridors for the viewer Project (1998), in which participants are invited to see the range of his work in Carrara marble to navigate. The operating principle here, we’re to write letters and close them up, or leave them and black granite, from modestly scaled pieces for others to read, and The Mending Project (2009–), to sculptures designed to bring a cool, calm told, is the titular ‘negative way’, a philosophical where visitors are invited to bring along a textile principle based on defining divinity through tenor to public space. object that needs mending: the artist or an assiswhat it is not. Expect, then, angst and utopianA Schaulager exhibition is a marker of tant will fix it for you. A mix of cultures also ism in fractious dialogue. ultimate arrival in the artworld (just consider a Relational aesthetics wasn’t just a Western few recent incumbents: Matthew Barney, Robert 7 defines Kan Yasuda’s work, unsurprisingly given that the Japan-born artist has split his Gober, Steve McQueen – on which note, though, 6 project, Lee Mingwei reminds us – though the time between his home country and Italy Taiwanese artist, perhaps most notorious for the place has seemingly never devoted its entire 8 space to one woman artist), and now it’s Paul over the last four decades. You can see it in his his fake ‘male pregnancy’, has been based in variably scaled sculptures, too, which partake New York for some time – but one that interreChan’s turn. The Hong Kong-born artist (and, of European Modernism, their curvatures lates with Eastern thinking too. Here, through in recent years, forward-thinking e-publisher, and geometry recalling Moore, Brancusi and a series of installations, we’re invited to link via his Badlands Unlimited press) here receives Arp while also conveying a tranquillity and Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept with ideas of ‘the his largest show to date. Naturally it includes his simplicity that speaks to Eastern philosophical void’, ‘in-between space’ and the ‘here-and-now’, landmark post-9/11 series The 7 Lights (2005–7),

8 Paul Chan, The Argument: Athens, 2012–3, cords, doors, chairs, cardboard, 211 × 305 × 216 cm. Photo: Jason Mandella McKay. © the artist and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 6 Lee Mingwei, The Letter Writing Project, 1998 (installation view, Chicago Cultural Center, 2007). Photo: Anita Kan. © Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

7 Kan Yasuda, Tenpi, 2014. Photo: Nicola Gnesi. © the artist. Courtesy Eykyn Maclean, New York

AR Asia-III-Previewed.indd 28

ArtReview Asia

02/05/2014 14:21

26 April to 27 July 2014 An exhibition curated and designed by Lélia Wanick Salgado

10am – 6pm, daily National Museum of Singapore Free admission www.nationalmuseum.sg Showcasing 245 black and white images of our planet by world renowned photographer, Sebastião Salgado, Genesis is a culmination of Salgado’s photographic works taken at over 30 different destinations from 2004 to 2011. Presenter

In collaboration with

Supported by

Dramatic, moving and grand, Salgado’s photographs present the powerful images of our fragile planet and the intricate association between Man, animal and the environment that we all have a duty to protect.

Official Magazine Supporters UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre Christensen Fund Marin Community Foundation Wallace Global Fund Tubarao Arcelor Mittal

The National Museum of Singapore is an institution of

Image: Brazil. 2005. © Sebastião Salgado / Amazonas images

Genesis-ArtReviewAdFPFC.indd 1 genesis_placed.indd 29

4/15/14 10:0511:02 AM 02/05/2014

with its melancholy projections of silhouetted, falling figures and objects; but also early videos, painted book covers and new projects such as Arguments, a complex of wiring that references, yes, our heavily wired society, and Nonprojections, whose imageless nature swerves against the rampant image culture we inhabit. How Chan infuses such projects with subtlety will be something to witness. Digitality is the primary pressure on Toby 9 Ziegler’s work also, though the mercurial British artist keeps bending under that pressure in different, graceful ways. Whereas his early paintings interlaced image and computerdriven patterning, and his later sculptures looked semiorganic but were again worked

up in design programmes, now he appears pessimistic one: in the smashing and crushing, to be feeding paintings by the eighteenthfrosty new forms of life arise. And finally, just for fun: an abyss of vertigicentury English artist Thomas Gainsborough nous darkness. Such, at least, is the mindset you’d into his Mac and tinkering with them before 10 infer from Zhang Hui’s Groundless paintings, transferring the images back to paint. The results are silvery and abstracted and have shown at Long March Space two years ago, which, been bluntly smudged with an orbital sander, through disconnected images of people (some the Gainsboroughs becoming mere ghosts decapitated), flowers and other objects, aimed to in the machine. A series of new sculptures, evoke a condition of endless, anxious freefall. The sequel, Plaza, will apparently offer intentional conmeanwhile, apparently again worked up from trast. If the perpetual falling hasn’t ceased, what Gainsborough (and thereby from two dimensions into three), feature variations on the Zhang presents here is, we’re told, the possibility of respite: a miscellany of vibrant images, of same form: one of them crushed flat. What which the most evocative (among those we’ve this comprises, we’re told, is a meditation on the relation between the organic and the indusseen) is a familiar-looking circular form hovering trial, control and abandon, and not a wholly in midair: a lifebelt. Martin Herbert

9 Toby Ziegler, Untitled, 2014, oil on aluminium, 180 × 217 cm. Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London & Hong Kong

10 Zhang Hui, Blueprint. Color Field, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 182 × 225 cm. Courtesy Long March Space, Beijing

AR Asia-III-Previewed.indd 30

ArtReview Asia

02/05/2014 14:21

TKG RHP.indd 31

02/05/2014 12:35

Tang Contemporary.indd 32 ART REVIEW 245x310.indd 2

02/05/2014 11:03 14-4-28 下午8:36

ART REVI

28 下午8:36

Tang Contemporary.indd 33 ART REVIEW 245x310.indd 3

02/05/2014 11:03 14-4-28 下午8:36

CMY

Alisan Fine Arts Limited .indd 34

02/05/2014 11:05

Points of View Bharti Lalwani A point of convergence Esther Lu This year’s March Meeting in Sharjah had something to tell us about the formation and narration of art’s histories

J.J. Charlesworth In Dubai contemporary art is now a driver for the globalised economic system

Mark Sladen The great wave Du Qingchun Snowpiercer, the parable of parables

Bharti Lalwani A point of convergence The wolfish outline of a king in a feathered crown is drawn pulling the trigger at close range. His target: a man bound and blindfolded, his face grim with resolve. This neverbefore-exhibited drawing by Iranian illustrator Ardeshir Mohassess (1938–2008) was showcased in the newly initiated Modern section of Art Dubai this March. That such overtly critical work poking fun at dictators and their regimes can be discovered at a commercial fair in the Gulf keeps one’s faith in the art-fair model as a space for discovery and discourse. In a region in which a commercial gallery infrastructure and public art institutions are still in their formative stages, Art Dubai, now in its eighth edition, has expanded to include this section advised by South Asian expert Savita Apte, curator Catherine David, researcher Kristine Khouri and Iraqi art specialist Nada Shabout. Over the years, growing interest in contemporary art from the Middle East and lesser-known regions has whetted a curiosity for obscure artists from as far In the absence back as the 1940s. As fair director Antonia Carver emphasised, of museums, “Major museums in the West should an art have told the story of modern fair pick up the slack? art predominantly through the works of artists from Europe and America; now it’s increasingly recognised that the narrative was always global.” Eleven galleries exhibited twentiethcentury works by artists from the Middle East and South Asia. Mohassess’s political satirical drawings were brought to Dubai by New York-based Shirin Gallery together with the artist’s trust, and curated by Ava Ansari and Molly Kleiman. Sardonically titled I Am Only

a Reporter, this collection conveyed Mohassess’s critical interpretation of Iran’s social and political upheavals in the twentieth century. Jhaveri Contemporary from Mumbai chose to exhibit the loosely geometric abstraction of Lahore artist Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–85) rather than the predictable members of India’s Progressive Artists’ Group, such as Maqbool Fida Husain or Sayed Haider Raza – whose works are tirelessly flogged at other South Asian fairs and auctions. Being in the UAE, galleries know to selfcensor, bringing works of only a certain aesthetic. Paul Greenaway of Gagprojects was in for a surprise the morning before the fair opened

Paul Greenaway of Gagprojects was in for a surprise the morning before the fair opened to the public. Barricades blocked the entrance to his booth and screened from view a set of 80 sculptures to the public. Barricades blocked the entrance to his booth and screened from view a set of 80 porcelain sculptures mounted on the wall by Australian artist Juz Kitson. Kitson’s exquisitely crafted porcelain flowers that gently morphed into breasts and female genitalia, some surrounded by hair of varying density and length, visibly alternated between beauty and the grotesque. Some of these were taken down after the government received complaints about the sexual nature of the work. Issues of censorship aside, the fair finds its strength in attracting galleries from cities as disparate as Lagos, Jakarta, Singapore and

May 2014

RESUPPLY p35.indd 35

Manama. This year it included a focus on the Caucasus and Central Asia, curated by artist collective Slavs and Tatars, and opened the day after Russia announced its annexation of the Crimea. Adopting the format of a traditional tea salon, the collective exhibition of portraiture and figurative art of the postSoviet sphere offered an intellection on the complexity of national politics, cultural and ethnic hybridity. The Marker programme, as this focus is branded, was initiated in 2011, and has previously invited galleries from Indonesia (2012) and West Africa (2013) in an attempt to expand international networks. Oliver Enwonwu of Omenka Gallery, in Lagos, was inspired to participate this year, although none of the West African Marker galleries were able to return. Some Nigerian collectors In which who had attended the previous year the author reflects also did not return, so, like similar on the initiatives at other art fairs, this eternal programme’s long-term impact nonreturn remains questionable. On the other hand, the Southeast Asian presence has increased. Since participating in Marker, D Gallerie from Jakarta has returned, and Yogyakarta’s recent biennale saw a collaboration of Arabian and Indonesian artists. With a near institution-vacuum in South/ Southeast/Central Asia and the Middle East, Art Dubai is perhaps in a better position than fairs in the more established global art centres to stake a claim to being a serious space in which to contemplate art from those regions. Yet, as the Kitson episode illustrates, it can be hard to achieve that goal in a place where expression is not entirely free.

02/05/2014 14:23

Esther Lu This year’s March Meeting in Sharjah had something to tell us about the formation and narration of art’s histories If the Sharjah Biennial serves as a vantage point from which to observe the latest developments in the contemporary art and culture of the Arabic world, then this year’s March Meeting in Sharjah was conceived as a departure point from which to contextualise the work-in-progress of the 12th biennial, curated by Eungie Joo, and scheduled to open in March 2015. Attended by a hundred or so art professionals from around the world, the meeting reflected on the current status of diverse artistic investigations and historiography in the region in order to establish the gravity of its cartography and worldview. While it may not have provided any details of what to expect at next year’s biennial, it did shed light on the process of political and cultural transformation through local experiences of modernisation (in many forms of organisation and operation). In this, presentations on and discussions about the role of artist initiatives and institutions in shaping identity and future visions proved key. The programme was described by one of the participants as a review of previous biennials, and indeed, with much reflection on the local history of cultural production, the meeting featured a few artists from those biennials discussing their long-term engagement with Sharjah residents. Egyptian artist Wael Shawky explained how his intervention within the press conference of the 2011 biennial generated a series of transformations over a year of workshops: taking the curator’s speech on that occasion as his raw material, it was first translated into Urdu, interpreted and revised by the Sharjah Art Foundation’s Pakistani technical team, then edited into a poem and then a qawwali song,

AR Asia-III-PoV.indd 36

which turned eventually into an installation in his solo exhibition Horsemen Adore Perfumes and Other Stories, which opened at the foundation concurrently with this year’s meeting. Continuing the retrospective perspective, Beirut-based curators Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti addressed in one session their research into and reenactment of exhibition histories, including The International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine. Inaugurated in Beirut in 1978, the exhibition was organised by the Unified

Diverse reference systems, commenting critically on tensions of multiple narratives and histories, were orchestrated in the symposium to project an engaging zone where art, as a series of intentions and actions, vibrates with forms of life Information Office of the Palestine Liberation Organization and included some 194 works by 197 international artists from approximately 29 countries. The idea was to establish, in exile, a museum of international modern and contemporary art in solidarity with Palestine until the liberation of the country. The fragments of this forgotten history and archival materials have been collected and reenacted, and will be shown in their exhibition The Ghost Archive at MACBA, Barcelona, next year. Fouad Elkoury, Revisiting Tarab, 2013, projected at Mirage City Cinema, 2014. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

Various artist initiatives and institutions from Istanbul, Johannesburg, Cairo, Jeddah, Sharjah and Brumadinho, in Brazil, shared their aspirations of building up local infrastructures or collections. Diverse reference systems were contoured in the symposium to comment critically on tensions of multiple narratives on modernities and histories, and orchestrated to project an engaging zone where art, as a series of intentions and actions, vibrates with forms of life. Such concerns were charged with reviving the oral tradition of history – highlighting the potential of body and songs to enchant an audience and permit the interactive formation of imagery. It was fitting, then, that the four-day marathon ended with a screening of a documentary film, Revisiting Tarab (2013), by Fouad Elkoury and discussion of its subject, a sound project by Tarek Atoui that had been shown in the previous Sharjah Biennial as a night -long performance with over 20 international musicians interpreting elements from Kamal Kassar’s collection of classical Arabic music – the largest such archive in the world. Tarab refers to the audience’s state of mind – somewhere between trance and ecstasy – during performances of traditional Arab music. It is the emotional effect that performers aim to achieve and communicate to their audience – a higher or collective consciousness beyond a personal experience in music, but for which music is a trigger. There is no translation of tarab in Western languages, but the word magically describes my understanding of the Arabic aesthetic tradition throughout the programme.

ArtReview Asia

02/05/2014 14:24

J.J. Charlesworth In Dubai contemporary art is now a driver for the globalised economic system Driving at 130kph on the six-lane Sheikh Zayed freeway through Dubai, calmly tailgating, my taxi driver, a Bangladeshi, tells me he’s been in Dubai for seven years. He has family back at home, a wife, two kids. He makes decent money driving a taxi, by Bangladeshi standards. I explain that I’m here once more for the Art Dubai art fair; yes, he says, it’s getting busier this time of year, business is good, but things are getting more expensive. Rents are going up, he complains, particularly since the UAE won the bidding to host Expo 2020 in Dubai, last November. ‘World Expo’, burbles the Expo 2020 website, ‘is a catalyst for economic, cultural and social transformation and generates important legacies for the host city and nation.’ Here in Dubai, I’m wondering what kind of catalyst art might be for this dusty, busy Emirate city-state. Without a doubt there’s a sort of art scene growing up here. Commercial galleries are developing, and there are one or two nonprofit initiatives. Art Dubai is growing in confidence, along with its sister fair Design Days Dubai and the city-sponsored Sikka emerging-art fair. Effectively, though, these developments of the cultural scene are a government-sanctioned project, part of a systematic attempt by Dubai to transform itself into a hub for finance, trade and expatriate high-living. Art Dubai and its other initiatives are co-owned by the DIFC, DIFC = Dubai Dubai’s financial free zone. International ‘DIFC has been designed Finance Centre, whose ‘vision’ to live up to the expectais ‘to be a global tions of the elite, and financial hub’ strikes the perfect balance between retail, commercial and residential space. Work and play, day and night, the district enhances people’s lifestyles,’ declares the DIFC’s mission statement. Building-

site hoardings advertise endless vistas of luxury villa living… Contemporary art, then, is part of the ‘offer’, and it’s striking how readily art is generated to fill such a context. What’s remarkable – and unnerving – about the invention of an art scene, almost from scratch, in a place like Dubai, is how it bears witness to the expansion of the idea of the ‘contemporary’ as a globally transplantable cultural form, virally reduplicated as a functional part of any self-respecting, modernising, social elite’s image of itself, of how it behaves and how it wants to spend its leisure time and wealth. There may be good art, bad art and indifferent art on show and on sale at Art Dubai, and it is of course interesting to discover artists and works that haven’t yet established their reputations further west. The visual ‘language’ and conventions of contemporary art are present and operating Emiratis smoothly. But this very seammake up lessness and smoothness brings only 15–20 me to consider how contempopercent of the UAE rary art now relates to its population ‘outside’ – to the society in which it operates. ‘Outside’, in a place like Dubai, is a strange place. It’s a place where few have the right to remain, other than the Emiratis themselves, and where everyone else comes and goes, stays for a few years, works, makes money, leaves. If you don’t have a job, if you’re not sponsored, you don’t stay, whether you’re the white Western expat or the taxi driver from Bangladesh. There are strange exceptions, like the young artist I talk to on the drinks terrace who is the fourth generation of his family to live in Dubai without proper citizenship, caught in the various paradoxes of exile and emigration – where others can’t stay in Dubai, he can’t leave, as he’d never be let back in to the country he grew up in.

If contemporary art is Western in origin, then its cultures, discourses and institutions evolved spontaneously, organically, in the historical emergence of the public sphere, in the battles for democracy and free expression, for what it meant to be part of a public and what it meant, as an artist, to address a public, all the while deliberating what art’s role in a society was meant to be. In the world after globalisation, though, it’s as if this Western phenomenon has been carefully emptied of that history, surgically Art has disconnected from its ties to a living, become conflicted social reality, to become a tool an infinitely reduplicable module that can be plugged into the topdown development of the new ‘global city’, where art is no more than a form of lifestyle choice, and in which it is largely indifferent – necessarily so – to the society it inhabits. As the US-based Global Cultural Districts Network argues, the arts have ‘played a major role in defining the identity of established global capitals like London, New York, Berlin, and Paris, but many of the entertainment and arts districts in which they are located have developed organically, often over the course of several centuries, and without formal investment strategies. Today, cultural infrastructure is increasingly planned large-scale and top down.’ And why is that? Because ‘globalization has led to competition between cities and regions for inward investment, knowledge workers, and tourists. Large-scale cultural projects are now an increasingly important driver of competitiveness and are key in branding and differentiating regions and cities.’ Once modern art was hated by the system it challenged from outside. Contemporary art, it seems, is now both the system’s driver, and its brand.

Antonia Carver, HH Sheikh Mohammed at Art Dubai 2014. Courtesy Art Dubai

May 2014

AR Asia-III-PoV.indd 37

02/05/2014 14:24

Mark Sladen The great wave “I am liquidity incorporated… the rainbow… torrent… cloud.” So says a computer-generated voiceover in Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. (2014). This 30-minute video explores catastrophic fluidity, drawing parallels between financial storms and weather systems. And the presiding image is a dazzling animated GIF of Hokusai’s The Great Wave (c. 1831), flashing on a wall of Tumblr blogs. Tumblr is a fascinating phenomenon, and the Berlin-based Steyerl is one of many artists to have been attracted to it. It is a microblogging and social-media service, and allows users to create personalised websites via a collage of photos, videos, music files and textual snippets. Tumblr, like other social-media platforms, is predicated on ‘sharing’ and ‘liking’, and is responsible for a vortex of visual memes. Steyerl’s videowork employs imagery that is recognisably a product of this amateur digital culture, including detourned movie clips, corporate graphics and CGI animations. And as Brian Kuan Wood has said, her films employ the digital image as a means of entry to ‘a world in which a politics of dazzle manifests as collective desire’. If Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. uses Tumblr as a symbol of the popular culture of digital distraction, other artists have chosen to make projects employing the platform itself. One such is the English artist and writer James Bridle, who established a Tumblr blog as the central element of a research project entitled the New Aesthetic. The blog started out as a place to document a trend that Bridle had noticed: pixels and other visual systems originating in the digital world being employed as motifs in the real one. Gradually it widened its focus to feature such things as visualisations by satellites and surveillance devices; antiscanning camouflage; information graphics; visual glitches and

AR Asia-III-PoV.indd 38

corruptions; and street art employing computerrelated imagery. Although the title of the New Aesthetic is something of a misnomer, as the site does not set out to present a unified aesthetic, it is indeed as a record of visualisations that Bridle’s blog has power. The project was founded in 2011 and achieved a higher profile when it was covered the next year by a number of tech bloggers and media theorists. And while there might be large theoretical holes in the web of material being presented, the project nevertheless has great distinctiveness in its marriage of visual material

Hito Steyerl’s videowork employs imagery that is recognisably a product of Tumblr’s amateur digital culture. If she uses Tumblr as a symbol of the popular culture of digital distraction, other artists have chosen to make projects employing the platform itself and platform. As Bridle says, the New Aesthetic ‘is an attempt to “write” critically about the network in the vernacular of the network itself’, in a social-media environment with its language of reblogs, likes and comments. If both Steyerl and Bridle attempt to establish some critical distance between their projects and the dynamics of social media, the same cannot be said of the Jogging. This art collective – founded in 2009 by the American artists Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen – is another project that manifests principally Hito Steyerl, still from Liquidity Inc., 2014. Courtesy the artist

through Tumblr. The first version of their blog was created in 2009, out of a frustration with a conventional artmaking path: make a show; document it; post documentation to social media and watch it disappear. Instead Troemel and Christiansen decided to experiment with images that were ‘born digital’, and the site really started to flourish – and to attract an audience beyond the artworld – when they began to image-dump in quantity. The Jogging’s Tumblr is used to showcase images drawn from regular participants as well as from open submission: including representations of physical artworks or events; films and photos found online; images that have been digitally manipulated. The subjects of the posts include a mix of Internet obsessions: celebrity, porn and drugs; conspiracy theories; animals doing peculiar things; fast food in its more abject aspects; redrawn corporate logos; references to the web and social media itself; surrealist objects and art jokes. One recent post features a photo of a boy posing as the goat in a remake of Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–9); another image shows a gravestone carved with a smiley face (this post received 5,000 ‘notes’ in a month). According to Troemel and Christiansen, ‘Dematerialization is not an oppressive suffocation of art but a possibility for art to flourish in disparate and progressive discourses. The web offers infinite room for expansion and participation unlimited by the more severe constraints of space and finance.’ While this may sound laudable, one can’t help but ask if much art is left once a project folds itself so successfully into socialmedia culture. Or perhaps we should simply take the Jogging as satire, a hyperbolic response to the new ‘speed’ of information and personal expression, and to the great wave of sharing and liking.

ArtReview Asia

02/05/2014 14:24

Aijing Studio FP.indd 39

02/05/2014 11:07

Du Qingchun Snowpiercer, the parable of parables When a filmmaker describes his film as a political allegory, it is difficult to discuss the film’s metaphorical content without feeling a bit like you are imprisoned in that filmmaker’s interpretive work. This is undoubtedly the case with Joon-ho Bong’s science-fiction action film Snowpiercer (2013, based on a French graphic novel), which presents the world contained within a sealed train, powered by a perpetualmotion engine, circling a frozen, postapocalyptic earth. The film marks the cult Korean director’s move towards a more mainstream Western audience, and among its stars are Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Go Ah-sung, Jamie Bell, Ewen Bremner, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer and Ed Harris. To me it seems as if an audience has to choose one of two ways of watching this film: either with the naivety of an old-fashioned, enthusiastic filmgoer, absorbed by the dynamics of the train’s closed social system, which incorporates a ruthless segregation of classes (the elite at the front of the train, the poor at the rear); or with a pretence of enlightened empathy, ‘sharing’ the emotions, for example, of those passengers from carriages in the train’s windowless rear who have not forgotten about the pleasures of the ‘outside’ world and rush, when given the opportunity during an uprising, to inhabit those forward carriages with windows. Could I really appreciate how anxious they are to catch a glimpse of the sun? And could I connect with the perspective of children, born onboard into a dark, closed world, who have developed extrasensory capabilities? You might say that everyone understands on entering a cinema these days that he or she is expected to suspend his or her disbelief, but to do so in the context of a film such as this, so laden with social and political allegory, is also to suspend disbelief when it comes to the filmmaker’s ideas about society and politics – to fall into his trap.

The train is inhabited by all the planet’s surviving humans, and the internal hierarchy onboard is a microcosm of our current global system. Thus emerges a massive paradox: if this train is a complete reflection of the world that once existed outside it, then what is the point of taking leave of the train, as those in the rear wish to do, and going back to the outside world? And if we were unable to destroy or reform the world order that released all that manmade refrigerant into the atmosphere (which, in terms of the film’s plot, saved the earth from global warming but at the same time caused the apocalypse), then what real difference would the revolt make? Bong’s film regrettably stops short of addressing these questions. The now-frozen earth has become a fairytale on the train; when

There is a ruthless system of punishment in which the arms of rebellious types are frozen and then smashed off with hammers two children step outside for the first time, they are greeted by a polar bear that seems to signify nature’s resilience in the face of disaster. The political allegory of Snowpiercer turns out to be a fairytale as well. As with his earlier films Mother (2009) and The Host (2006), Bong cannot help employing a sentimental depiction of family life – as if kinship or the imitation of kinship, which is required by this film’s overtures to a global audience, is sufficient to overcome the desolation that lies behind the political metaphor. Any parable or fairytale requires an oppositional element that obstructs the story’s unifying power. This element might become a true Noah’s Ark of individual attitude, or a seed of diversity within a global system. Though this element will be ultimately absorbed by the universal predicament (in the case of Snowpiercer, the world order that caused the apocalypse), it still preserves

a message of individual choice. In Snowpiercer, Bong concocts an odd fatalism to satisfy the requirements of dramatic structure: the male leader loses one of his well-maintained arms during the final rescue scene in accordance with the principle that revolt always requires sacrifice. Bong’s visceral manifestation of this fatalism is rooted in the mortal body and serves to reinforce Snowpiercer’s brutal and violent nature. Something that also could have been explored further is the condition of the lowest-caste dwellers in the ‘tail’ of the train: they leave behind the moral depravity of their initial ‘law of the jungle’ cannibalism, which involved eating each other’s limbs; however, they retain a ruthless system of punishment in which the arms of rebellious types are frozen and then smashed off with hammers. Thus Boon alludes to symmetry between the barbarity in the tail and the protagonist’s selfless sacrifice. The filmmaker uses violence, predicated on the primitiveness of a direct treatment of the body, to evoke a physical experience that remains a vicarious creative imagination of individual possibility. Of course, the less intense details of Snowpiercer provide opportunities to consider the relationship between global unity and individual revolt. The presence of Marlboro cigarettes and a black person making sushi cannot be ignored. Word has it that the stereotype-defying sushi chef in the film originated from Bong’s personal travel experiences. In the train, there are interpreters associated with ‘Snowpiercer’ authority, but people can also commuis scheduled nicate with handheld translation for release devices. Scientific progress is both the in the US on 27 June source of disaster and also a handy tool of expression for rebels against authority. This dichotomy mirrors the parable of fragmented individuals revolting against the intact world of the train. Here is a parable about the danger of parables: a staunchly fragile film. Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

Snowpiercer, 2013, dir Joon-ho Bong. Courtesy Snowpiercer Ltd

AR Asia-III-PoV.indd 40

ArtReview Asia

02/05/2014 14:24

HK Arts Centre.indd 41

02/05/2014 11:08

Great Collectors and Their Ideas No 6

Wang Wei Interview by Aimee Lin

Wang Wei and her husband, Liu Yiqian, are founders and owners of two private museums in Shanghai – Long Museum Pudong (c. 10,000sqm) and Long Museum West Bund (c. 33,000sqm). Their names top the lists of the biggest-spending Chinese art collectors, and they frequently make the headlines for spending vast amounts to ensure that they get the best of the best at auction. Wang, a housewife and a mother of four, currently works 24/7 as the de facto operations director of the two gigantic museum spaces, both of which were built and opened over the last three years, funded by Wang’s own savings and the financial support of her husband. The museums mainly show the couple’s own collections: Liu’s Chinese ancient art collection includes museum-standard paintings, calligraphy, porcelain and others; Wang’s modern and contemporary collection got its start with oil paintings from the early twentieth century and the ‘red classics’ (socialist realist paintings from the 1950s–70s), and now extends to installations and videoworks by both Chinese and international artists of her children’s generation.

AR Asia-III-Great Minds-Collectors.indd 42

ArtReview Asia

02/05/2014 14:26

When ArtReview Asia began its conversation with Wang Wei three weeks after the West Bund space opened its inaugural show, in March 2013, she was totally occupied with the museum’s most recent general meeting, which had focused on one issue: how to set up a management structure for a great museum. For Wang, it was a time of reflection. Tired but still enthusiastic, she lit a cooker to make her breakfast – a small pot of rice congee – and then started to talk. Artreview AsiA Let’s go back to the very beginning, when you first started to collect art. wAng wei It was 23 years ago. At that time my husband’s career had begun to develop, so he and I started to buy porcelain and boccaro teapots. Then we started to buy some paintings – traditional Chinese ink art – by local artists from a gallery in Chenghuang (City God) Temple district in Shanghai. At the beginning of 1997, when my third child was only six months old, some friends invited me to build up Chenghuang Temple Auction House. I joined them with my pin money, spent ¥50,000 [roughly $6,000 at the time] to put an advertisement in Shanghai Evening Post, and found people who could appraise porcelain, ink paintings and calligraphy. I was in that company for three years, doing everything from collecting consignments to exhibiting them, auctioning them and even delivering them myself. I do think it was from that experience that my husband and I built up our own collecting structure. Our own collection was growing. We started from local auction houses, then

went on to Beijing. About ten years ago, my husband and I had different ideas on what we should buy. It was also at that time we needed to decorate our old villa with old oil paintings, so I started to buy oil paintings. I saw lots of ‘red classic’ [post-1949 socialist-realist works with revolutionary themes] paintings and old paintings from China’s first generation of oil painters, and I liked them so much! I was so devoted that I bought everything I thought was good from whatever auction house. Back at that time I didn’t really have the idea of a collecting system or structure, I just personally liked them. For example, the ‘red classic’ paintings are close to what I remember seeing in textbooks when I was in school. Those old oils were created by painters who studied in France or in the Soviet Union, and they were the first artists who used this Western form of art to record the history of China – I believe they are the pioneers of Chinese contemporary art. Later I got to know old prints from the Yan’an period [1935–48, named after Yan’an, also known as the ‘Red Capital’, a town in the north Shaanxi province that served as Communist China’s capital during that period], which were all dated 1943 or 44, and I couldn’t help imagining how, during those years, the artists used donkeys to carry the platens and pallets everywhere to make the prints… Now I see clearly that I started to pay attention to contemporary art in 2005, because at that above Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai. Photo: Wu Junze facing page Wang Wei

May 2014

RESUPPLY_P43.indd 43

time you still could find good old paintings, but to find good red classics was getting harder. So I started to buy art that was from before the 1980s. As my husband’s business developed, I was able to collect contemporary art. Then, like magic, I opened the first Long Museum, and two years and four months later, I opened the second one. ArA Your contemporary collection also started from the auction market. ww Yes, there are new works in the galleries, which I also buy, but for really good old works, you have to go to the auctions. In 2005 prices were still low, not comparable with today. Prices climaxed in 2009 and we acquired most of the good works then. Lots of people stopped buying because of that year’s economic crises, but it was also in that year that lots of good works appeared in the market. I spent ¥400 million [at the time, roughly $58.5m] in that single year to get those really high-quality works, for example Chen Yifei’s most important piece, Fluteplayer [1987]. It was a lucky year for me. As I look back, it is those works that built the foundation of Long Museum. ArA

Do you have a consultant to help you?

ww No, I just study by myself. I love to study, and when I found my passion in the red classics and the old oils, I just continuously and ‘stupidly’ dug into those directions. When it was difficult to find really good stuff on the market, while at the same time we had more money available to spend on art, I started collecting

02/05/2014 14:26

contemporary art. All the decisions come directly from my own feeling about the works. And I remember when I was buying the red classics I paid a visit to the Louvre, where it struck me that China has its own special history and situation that resulted in the creation of its own very special art – if I could collect those artworks and open a museum, it would be fantastic! So it was in 2003 that I got the idea of the museum, and I told my husband that at the age of fifty, when other people retire, I will start to run a museum. I have kept my promise. I opened the first Long Museum (Pudong) when I was fifty, then I opened Long Museum West Bund at the age of fifty-two. And the name of the museum is also my creation. ARA

So why it is called Long?

WW First, it means ‘dragon’ in Chinese. Then, when it is spelled in English, it means long as in long-lasting. And ‘L’ is the starting letter of my husband’s surname, Liu, while ‘-ong’ is part of the Cantonese spelling [Wong] of my surname, Wang, so it is my husband and me. And there is one more point that I have never told people: the Pudong museum is at Longdong Avenue in Pudong, while the Westbund is at Longteng Avenue and Longhua Road! Did you see those two long-men-jia (gantry cranes) standing outside the building of West Bund? They are two dragons that guide our museum. When the West Bund opened on 28 March, our cherry blossom trees all came into bloom. ARA I hear Dior Homme is leasing your West Bund space for an event and you just had a general meeting in the museum.

We had this meeting because we needed to set up a management system. There are lots of problems in the running of a museum. I am also criticising myself, as I always do as I please, which is not OK for a director of a private museum. I never did this job before, so I buy a lot of books to read. And I’ve decided to establish a system to manage the team and the museum. ARA So you are spending all your time on the new museum? WW Except sometimes I have to be with my baby grandson. My home is really a mess now, and I have lots of Asian contemporary works that are still not put in the right places at home. I only wish I could use my next vacation to reorganise everything at home – both our houses. By then, my home will be beautiful and because of the new management system, the museum will be beautiful too. And I will have enough time to bring my baby grandson out, and I will have my weekends back to buy some flowers and arrange them. ARA In the recent spring auction, your husband paid $36m for a ‘Chicken Cup’, an 8.2-centimetretall porcelain cup from the Chenghua period (1465–87) of the Ming Dynasty. How much has he spent on Long Museum? WW It is really hard to tell. Just the building and the construction cost ¥300m (approximately $48.4m). And every year for the regular security we have to pay ¥3m (approximately $484,000).

WW Yes, Dior Homme will help us to get some income to support the museum. And the meeting, you see, our whole team consists of 160 people, including security and cleaners, most of these people have zero experience in museums.

ARA

Do you collect anything else besides Chinese art?

WW I started collecting Asian art in 2006, after visiting Art Fair Tokyo. I am an Asian too, and I have already so much great Chinese art. I also buy some Western art – I have, for example, an installation by Olafur Eliasson. As long as I feel my heart can respond to it, I will buy it. This June I am going to Basel, and I will have a meeting with an artist there. ARA Do you normally have a direct relationship with the artists? WW Not so much. It’s not like you have to make friends if you buy someone’s art. Sometimes a collector loses his or her mind when he or she is too close to the artist. They think they can get a lower price, so they keep buying works from the same artist, like being the banker or the dealer of the artist. I am not like that. I always buy different things. I could also buy many pieces from the same artist, but they must be among the best of his or her works. I only respond to work that is created with real passion. I will buy it if I have money; if I don’t, I will figure out a way to buy it. ARA

Are you a hot-headed person?

WW Absolutely. When I say I am going to do something, I have to do it. And I am always doing it energetically. ARA

So what’s the long-term vision for the museum?

WW When I hired my head of exhibitions, he asked me if my museum would only exist for three or five years and close after that. My reply was this: my museum is called Long, it will last long, there is no plan for closure. As to how we are going to make this happen, as the director, I am developing my thoughts, from very simple thoughts to more complicated, mature thoughts.

Kwon Ki-Soo, Red Forest, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 130 × 162 cm. Courtesy Long Museum Pudong and Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai

AR Asia-III-Great Minds-Collectors.indd 44

ArtReview Asia

02/05/2014 14:26

AJC_.indd 45

02/05/2014 11:11

ap contemporary.indd 46

02/05/2014 11:13

Ink Studio FP.indd 47

02/05/2014 11:14

The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else

Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists

22.05.14 — 17.08.14

Curated by Marianne Brouwer, and developed with Defne Ayas (Director, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art) and Philip Tinari (Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art)

With: A Constructed World, Nadim Abbas, Allora & Calzadilla, Bik Van der Pol, Pierre Bismuth, Chen Zhen, Chu Yun, Ceal Floyer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sharon Hayes, Ho Sin Tung, On Kawara, Kwan Sheung Chi, Lee Kit, Gabriel Lester, Ahmet Ögüt & Cevdet Erek, Koki Tanaka, Adrian Wong, Haegue Yang, Trevor Yeung, and others.

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Witte de Withstraat 50 3012 BR Rotterdam The Netherlands

04.09.14 — 04.01.15 With: Ding Yi, Geng Jianyi, Liu Ding, Wang Xingwei, Zhang Peili, Zhao Bandi, Zheng Guogu, and others.

For more information: www.wdw.nl

Curated by Heman Chong (artist and writer, Singapore) and Samuel Saelemakers (Associate Curator, Witte de With)

inaugural exhibition hong Kong El AnAtsui 13 MaY - 12 august 2014 opening on May 13 th from 5-9pm 15/F entertainment building 30 Queen’s road Central hong Kong open tue-sat 11am-7pm info@axelvervoordtgallery.com.hk

048_ARA.indd 48

02/05/2014 11:17

applications are open

artgeneve.ch Art15_ArtReview2.indd 1 Art Geneve 49

01.05.14 11:18 14:38 02/05/2014

Turon F.indd 50

02/05/2014 11:20

23-26 octobER 2014

grand palais et hors les murs, paris Organised by

Ofﬁcial sponsor

FIAC FP 51

02/05/2014 11:21

TINO I LE VA 12 August 5 September 2014

Torika Bolatagici Eric Bridgeman Tama TK Favell

BODIES IN THE SPACE

Chantal Fraser Kirsten Lyttle Greg Semu Salote Tawale Angela Tiatia Angela Tiatia, Walking the Wall 2014 Still from digital video (duration 7:11mins)

Naup Waup Guest Curator Jacob Tolo

www.alcastongallery.com.au 11 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy VIC 3065, AUSTRALIA T +61 3 9418 6444 E art @alcastongallery.com.au

Alcaston Gallery.indd 52

In conjunction with

02/05/2014 11:22

053_ARA.indd 53

02/05/2014 12:28

Head on Photo festival .indd 54

02/05/2014 11:24

SAVE THE DATE THE DATE SAVE DATE THE SAVE AUGUST 29TH - AUGUST 31ST 2014

A N D E R SEN ’S CO N T E MP O R A RY ( D K ) GA L E R I E A N D E R S O N / S A N D ST RÖ M ( S E ) GAL ER IE ANHAVA (FI) A N N A E L L EG A L L E RY ( S E ) G A L L E R I B O B J E R G G A A R D ( D K ) C H R I ST I A N A N D E R S E N ( D K ) C H R IST I A N L A R S E N ( S E ) D AV I D R I S L E Y G A L L E RY ( D K ) G A L E R I E F O R S B L O M ( F I ) G A L L E R I N I C O L A I WA L L N E R ( D K ) N I E L S B O R C H J E N S E N G A L L E RY A N D E D I T I O N ( D K ) N I L S STÆ R K ( D K ) G A L E R I E N O R D E N H A K E ( S E ) i 8 G A L L E RY ( I S ) G A L L E R I M AG N US K A R L S S O N ( S E ) M A RT I N A S B Æ K G A L L E RY ( D K ) O S L C O N T E M P O R A RY ( N O ) P E D E R LU N D ( N O ) P E T E R L AV G A L L E RY ( D K ) G A L L E R I R I I S ( N O ) G A L L E R I S P EC TA ( D K ) G A L L E R I S U S A N N E O T T E S E N ( D K ) V 1 G A L L E RY ( D K )

MEDIA PARTNER

CHART | ART FAIR KUNSTHAL CHARLOTTENBORG IN COPENHAGEN www.chartartfair.com

055_ARA.indd 55

02/05/2014 12:30

Chi-Wen Gallery_ABHK14_Artreview_ad_outline (L).pdf

14/5/2

��4:42

CMY

056_ARA.indd 56

02/05/2014 12:34

Art Featured

3. Change blue into red 57

AR Asia-III-Dividers-RESUPPLY.indd 57

02/05/2014 14:18

AR Asia-III-Carsten Nicolai.indd 58

4. Recite all the numbers from one to a million in one go

02/05/2014 14:28

Carsten Nicolai Interview by Mark Rappolt Portrait by Andrea Stappert

Artist and electronic musician Carsten Nicolai was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now known as Chemnitz) in East Germany and received his first solo gallery exhibition while studying landscape design in Dresden. Influenced by scientific reference systems and mathematics, Nicolai’s work crosses between visual and sonic media, often making manifest the invisible forces that shape the physical world at both a macro and micro level: magnetic fields, radiation, subfrequency sound and microscopic structures. Under the pseudonym Noto, Nicolai creates experimental soundworks, and as Alva Noto he brings this experimentation into the field of electronic music. During Art Basel Hong Kong this month, Nicolai presents a new work, α (Alpha) Pulse, in which light will course at a synchronised frequency across the facade of the city’s 490-metre-high ICC skyscraper 5. Look at your right eye with your left eye

AR Asia-III-Carsten Nicolai.indd 59

02/05/2014 14:28

opening page Carsten Nicolai with his work Quarz (2008)

AR Asia-III-Carsten Nicolai.indd 60

6. Remember everything that you have forgotten so far

02/05/2014 14:28

above α (Alpha) Pulse, 2014. © Studio Carsten Nicolai, Berlin. Courtesy Galerie Eigen + Art, Leipzig & Berlin, and Pace Gallery, New York, London & Beijing

7. Realise the reason why you are here

AR Asia-III-Carsten Nicolai.indd 61

02/05/2014 14:28

ARTREVIEW ASIA α (Alpha) Pulse, your upcoming installation in Hong Kong, operates on the scale of a city (or at least a section of city proximate to the ICC Tower and Pier 4). Is this the largest visual project you have undertaken? Has the scale of it changed your way of working? CARSTEN NICOLAI You could consider this my biggest outdoor project, but my work ∞ [Infinity, 1997] for Documenta, where I implemented a kind of ‘sound graffiti’, involved the whole city as well, albeit on a very subliminal level. This one, of course, in terms of the impact on the city and on the situation in Hong Kong, seems to be much bigger. But I never see projects isolated from their environmental context. So for me even a small project can have an impact on a macroscopic level. I work pretty much with the concept of micro/macro, where I don’t really distinguish between microscopic (smaller-scale) installations or macroscopic (bigger-scale) ones.

behind it. For me ‘architectural’ means dealing with three major elements: time, space and social relations. The structural engineering of these three elements is always part of a project’s blueprint. Of course, by asking to reduce the light level of the city, I wanted to emphasise the impact of the installation by giving it a greater visibility – the cityscape itself can be a very disturbing distraction. Today a city is no longer primarily defined by its location, landscape and architecture, but by other elements, such as illuminations connected to advertising and infrastructure. Just to give you an example: when I visited Tokyo after Fukushima, I found the impression of the cityscape radically changed. In order to save energy, all unnecessary light sources were switched off. In this moment I was aware of how much the impression of a city depends on ‘additional’ light sources, and how little the classic elements of a city have an impact today.

ARA Do you consider this to some extent to be an architectural project? (You’ve asked for changes in the city environment – that the city reduce its other light sources to a minimum.) What role has architecture played in your work?

ARA You’ve described the project as an ‘experimental construct’ that ‘deals with the effects of stimulation on human perception’ – do all your works (both in the visual arts and in music) operate like this? And is there some sort of ethics involved in experimenting through stimulation (when is it too much)? CN I don’t think it can be too much. I always work on a level of experimentation and modelling. I am very interested in how we perceive our world – what we actually see beyond ourselves. I’m talking about elements or materials that surround us permanently and influence our behaviour. And in order to understand what we are dealing with, I always ask myself: what exactly are these elements or materials – things like light and sound effects, gravity, magnetic fields, radiation, etc? I can only propose individual models that are abstract, temporary and highly blurry, but they give me the basis for moving on. ARA Do you think that working in music has changed your sense of what the public is? CN Perhaps. There is something that I really like with music: in the moment of performing, you work with your audience as well. If the audience gives you positive feedback, you risk more, you get more curious, you get energy to move on. I never had this feeling when presenting a visual work. I really hate openings. One of the most painful situations for me

CN I have a strong background in architecture, and in many of my projects I incorporate that knowledge: even when I compose, for instance, there is a certain kind of architectural feeling or architectural strategy

Tired Light Split Horizontal Eccentric Left, 2008, 180 × 130 cm, acrylic on polyester-covered aluminium frame, print on aluminium. A formal abstraction for decreasing light intensity on a two-dimensional level based on a hypothetical phenomenon theorised by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1929, in which photons lose energy as they travel through the universe. Photo: Uwe Walter. Courtesy Galerie Eigen + Art, Leipzig & Berlin, and Pace Gallery, New York, London & Berlin

AR Asia-III-Carsten Nicolai.indd 62

8. Find the button that you had lost a long time ago

02/05/2014 14:28

is having to explain my work. In music, nobody asks me before or afterwards what attracted me to a certain sound, but in art there’s always that idea of reflection, explanation. I’ve always thought how weird it is that people always want the work again, but this time in words. ARA How much do you think of the audience when you’re making an exhibition, or an individual artwork? Do you consider them, or are you very much within your own personal space? CN No, the process of creation is totally isolated, and I think it has to be: you need to identify with what you do. It would be wrong to think about the audience. I try to ignore it. With a lot of the stuff that I create, the reason I’m doing it is because I don’t find it anywhere else: I compensate for what I’m missing. Later, you’re always surprised that other people can understand it. That makes me very happy – when you feel that it’s quite a radical work that’s not easy to consume and people can share that with you, then you have achieved something beautiful. ARA Do your initial ideas for works already have, from the very beginning, a clear direction to them, that this is going to be audiovisual and this is purely visual, for example, or does it happen as part of a process of developing the project? CN Sometimes it’s part of the process, but most of the time I have a very clear idea of what media I want to work with. In recent years there have been more and more moments where music and audiovisual works have overlapped, even if I try

to separate them. I always develop a very straight, very clear idea about a project, but in the details, in execution, in the process of realisation, ‘unexpected’ moments can always happen. And these unexpected moments become part of the creative process. So many of the details change, but the initial idea doesn’t alter much. There is a kind of masterplan. If too many problems or too many mistakes and errors appear, I have to reconsider the initial idea. ARA

Do you prefer to keep audio and video separate?

I really hate openings. One of the most painful situations for me is having to explain my work. In music, nobody asks me before or afterwards what attracted me to a certain sound CN When I release soundworks, I try to separate them. I want it to be anonymous. I really want to shift the attention to the music/sound without delivering any kind of personal context. I want to be unprejudiced. The name Alva Noto [under which Nicolai makes music] is connected to that. ARA Was that a reaction to anything: did you feel pigeonholed? CN Sometimes – afterwards, people tended to think that it was two different people. Which made me happy – above all because it produces a radical starting-point, in terms of there being

no preconceptions. And I liked the idea of pseudonyms. In art it was once quite common – [A.R.] Penck for instance used a pseudonym. I like the idea of not connecting your real name with something that you create. In the 1990s, in music specifically, it was very common to change names – for almost every release. A friend of mine, Uwe Schmidt, aka AtomTM, has 60 different pseudonyms. It wasn’t a big deal. Of course, information leaked, but I liked the idea of being anonymous: just listen to the music, let the music speak. I think it was a counterreaction to certain industry structures. But in the art context we look for a personalised iconography that allows us to recognise, ‘OK, this is this artist.’ The name is very important. As a visual artist, it is very uncommon to change your name or use pseudonyms. In terms of a career, it’s suicide. In music it was possible, and I think that this was great. You could really feel that it was an anticommercial idea – that you’d countered the commercialisation. ARA Do all ideas end up being commercialised somehow? CN Of course, every pattern that we think is oppositional very quickly gets assimilated by the structure. We all know the strategy of promotion. ARA Do you think that making music changed the way that you approached visual art? CN Yes, very much. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I have a certain attraction to kinetic

Pionier I, 2011, parachute, wind machine, soundproof panels, timer, dimensions variable. A parachute inflated by a wind-machine serves as a methaphor for the interplay of artificially produced objects and natural elements. Photo: Arturas Valiauga. Courtesy Galerie Eigen + Art, Leipzig & Berlin, and Pace Gallery, New York, London & Beijing/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

9. Exchange all of the countries in Europe with all of those in Asia

AR Asia-III-Carsten Nicolai.indd 63

02/05/2014 14:28

art, for instance. I really like artworks that involve processes and trigger a philosophical discourse. I like action and reaction. ARA It seems like you’re also interested, sometimes, in the relationship between cause and effect. CN Yes, there is something of that, of course. It’s a bit like an equation: you have a number of variables, and there’s a result. If you have too many variables, you’re in trouble. ARA Do you think that you generally have an attraction to rules? CN Rules are a part of our lives. But I’d rather not use the word ‘rules’; I have a huge attraction to models, specifically models that explain something. With knowledge as well, models have a lifespan – there is no truth in them, there is only the truth of the moment, and this moment can last for a long or a short time. The only thing that these models give us is a certain stability in order to process or reach another explanation; it’s not the final one. ARA Do you also see your artworks as having an ‘explaining’ function, or at least in terms of a work like Crt Mgn (2013), a sense that it makes the invisible (a magnetic field) visible? CN I am not trying to explain anything. There is no didactical background in my installations. In the case of Crt Mgn, I visualised magnetic fields. My interest is in elements that are fundamental to our lives but difficult to perceive: time, gravity, radiation, frequencies, etc. In many of my works I build ‘visualisers’

or ‘observatories’ where such ephemeral principles become perceptible. That’s one of the reasons I do not think in categories – in order to be able to build such ‘translators’. ARA Let’s say that someone buys a three-dimensional work of yours. On some level, that person is thinking that what they are buying is an eternal, timeless construct… CN That’s quite nice – the idea of an eternal lifespan of art; I think also that this has very much blurred in the last 60 or 70 years. Nobody expected that Joseph Beuys’s Fettecke (1982)

Does mathematics really exist or is it an abstraction that we have invented in order to explain ourselves? I think that this is perfect for how I see art would be preserved. But maybe it’s not necessary to keep all that work in the original condition. I think that there’s a big acceptance that work can age. ARA

But not decompose?

CN For me decomposition is a beautiful process. It’s too little involved in art because of the commercial aspect of selling. I think that the few artists who do it turn out to be in a very radical position, but I think that it is very underexplored. That’s a reason why I use sound. In sound, it is already implied that it has no

lifespan – it is only possible to experience it in this moment, and you cannot preserve that. You can preserve parts of it. You can have, maybe, documentation of it, but you can never preserve the energy of these moments. ARA Do you think that an interest in mathematics underpins everything that you do? CN What I understood from mathematics is that it’s a belief system. Mathematics is a part of our nature, and we always project beauty and harmony inside of it. This belief is a strong belief in a bigger force, something like a mastermind. Mathematics expresses something else that is really important to me. It’s not clear if mathematics really exists. We all know that we can apply it to certain processes in nature and explain what’s happening, but does mathematics really exist or is it an abstraction that we have invented in order to explain ourselves – similar to the idea of the models? I think that this is perfect for how I see art. For me, naturalism is very uninteresting; art needs a level of abstraction. I’m not talking about abstract painting; I’m talking about how we think and how we perceive art; the level of abstraction where you don’t have to reflect one-to-one. It can even occur in realistic painting; there’s still a level of abstraction. This level of abstraction is, for me, incredibly important. ARA You’ve travelled and worked in various cities over the years. Do you find that the work that you might make in New York is very different from work that you might make in Chemnitz, for example? Does the environment really affect you?

Crt Mgn (detail), 2013 (installation view, Galerie Eigen + Art, Berlin, 2013), neon light, cameras, TV, permanent magnets, motorised pendular system, sound system, dimensions variable.Photo: Uwe Walter. Courtesy Galerie Eigen + Art, Leipzig & Beijing

AR Asia-III-Carsten Nicolai.indd 64

10. Convince people to love rainy days rather than sunny days

02/05/2014 14:28

CN I think so. We all know that New York from the late 1980s to the mid-90s was an exciting place, and we all know how much it changed. We all know the transition of Berlin, from a local centre to an international one. People enjoy the city and the roughness of the city or the possibility that the city offers. If you live in such cities, you have different options. ARA Chemnitz, for example, was a controlled environment. CN Yes, but I struggled a lot; for instance, in East Germany it was almost impossible to rent an apartment or a working space. You could squat or could just take over spaces, but only in the knowledge that it would be for a brief moment. This is a strategy that creates a performative situation. Today, specifically in bigger cities, our environment is very regulated. The term ‘public space’ doesn’t make sense any more. ARA Is α (Alpha) Pulse an attempt to create a kind of public space? Particularly in Hong Kong, a city that celebrates private wealth?

this kind of space is really important for how we think. That’s a big difference, for example, between Hong Kong and Berlin. Berlin still has this unlimited free space – because of the political vacuum that existed after the unification, there were many vacant or undefined spaces in the city – which has been a huge inspiration not only for artists living here but also for the residential population as a whole. α (Alpha) Pulse might perhaps show the possibilities of how to engage this idea of ‘public’ space again. ARA α (Alpha) Pulse includes apps. Is this to do with a desire to create (rather than include) a public? CN You have to be aware that the use of an application does not automatically mean that you create a ‘public’, because it is a limited kind of public. What I like to do is to create tools through which people can participate on a very simple, basic level. Most of us own pocket devices that are screens, so why not think about using those screens as a part of an installation?

CN As I said, I grew up in a situation where public space was defined very differently. I can only see that more and more public spaces are disappearing. Basically in very densely populated areas there is no public space any more. Or at least, if they are called public spaces, people cannot use them freely. We are losing free space, and not only in terms of property and ownership;

I think this shows the potential for involving people who don’t necessarily have access to the artworld or to art in the first place. It might provide an understanding of how art works. Art is an important part of our society that should not be restricted. ARA You say you don’t think much about audiences; why do you have exhibitions? CN In order to finish a sentence, you have to make a point. The point can be an exhibition or a finalised project. This is the moment at which you release a work and it has to create its own life. ARA

Do you need friction to make you work?

CN I think that in recent years I have looked for less and less friction, because in one’s private and artistic lives there is already a certain complexity. Friction is never welcome, but in the end it is very much needed. ARA

Do you think that it’s more productive to make work when you’re happy or when you’re sad? CN I’m German, and we are incredibly good when we are depressed. I call it ‘positive nihilism’. ar Carsten Nicolai’s α (Alpha) Pulse will be on view each evening, 15–17 May, between 20.30 and 21.20, at the International Commerce Centre (ICC) on the Kowloon harbourfront, Hong Kong

Polylit, 2006 (installation view, Kleiner Schlossplatz, Stuttgart, 2006), mixed media, 962 × 120 × 120 cm. A detector of electromagnetic fields emitted by devices such as mobile phones and wireless computer networks that transforms them into an audio signal that also modulates a light inside the sculpture. Photo: Uwe Walter. Courtesy Galerie Eigen + Art, Leipzig & Berlin, and Pace Gallery, New York, London & Beijing

11. Give new names to all things

AR Asia-III-Carsten Nicolai.indd 65

02/05/2014 14:28

Zhang Enli

Interview by Aimee Lin

above The Box, 2013 facing page The Wires and Pipes, 2013

AR Asia-III-Zhang Enli.indd 66

12. Designate a day on which there are no struggles, no conflicts and no wars

02/05/2014 14:31

All Things Sentient As Zhang Enli prepares to open a new exhibition in Hong Kong, ArtReview Asia looks at how the painter has focused his recent art on making the ordinary extraordinary

In both figurative and abstract painting, on everything from traditional canvases to entire rooms, his work echoes Buddhist philosophy and the great Chinese painters of the past

13. Call out the name of someone whom you haven’t gotten to know yet

AR Asia-III-Zhang Enli.indd 67

02/05/2014 14:31

The works are a fusion of his immediate feelings, his thoughts on what are often alien surroundings and his experiences in the physical space he paints

The lack of any traditional frame and the large scale of the spaces alters the conventional relationship between the viewer’s body and the ‘body’ of the work

AR Asia-III-Zhang Enli.indd 68

14. Look into every detail of one of the trees in your favourite park

02/05/2014 14:31

It is more than ten years since Zhang Enli stopped painting the subject matter with which he was most associated when he emerged on the art scene, during the 1990s: people. (The climax of that period being a 2004 exhibition at BizArt, Shanghai, titled Human, Too Human.) In the last decade, he has painted an ashtray full of cigarette butts, a half-empty pack of Double Happiness cigarettes, a roll of toilet paper, half an apple, scattered playing cards – ordinary objects that he treats seriously and beautifully. He also paints trees – lots of trees (from a slightly elevated perspective) – and skies in colours that are always different. He paints curling rubber pipes and knots of iron wires in works that suggest a mix of the concrete and the abstract. He draws lots of curly lines in his sketchbook. If he wished, he could make them into hundreds of paintings; that’s what every collector in China would like. At the same time, he travels around the world, painting the walls of various interiors with the marks left by water, colour blocks or tree branches. He identifies everything that he paints as a ‘container’, and as he says so, I wonder if the true challenge of his works lies in figuring out exactly what they contain.Last autumn, on a most literal level, one of those ‘containers’ held me. It was in the theatre of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), in London, where Zhang had spent ten days painting colours on the walls, ceiling and floor – completely covering an area of around 800sqm. Walking into the space, I heard a friend’s voice debating whether or not Zhang had switched from concretion to abstraction; as for myself, I had the physical sensation of becoming a tiny atom flowing in the cosmos of the artist’s numerous evocations of inner images and emotions. In late autumn, after he had finished the London project, Zhang went to Genoa, Italy, where he made contact with the medieval era, and began painting leaves and branches on the dome and walls of the Museo

d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce. Eight days later, the ground floor of the historical villa had been invaded and taken over by nature to the extent that even a section of sky, viewed through a canopy of forest leaves, broke through the ceiling of the dome, thanks to his use of perspective and trompe l’oeil effects. Zhang has produced these types of ‘space paintings’ (as he calls them) since 2010, when, in Gwangju, Korea, he painted directly onto the surfaces of a small room that had been emptied of any objects and their echoes. All that was present when Zhang had finished his work were the walls, floor, traces of water (‘the humidity of the space’ is very important to the artist) and traces left by removed items – but all of them artificial, painted. In 2012 Zhang went to India. Stimulated by the bright colours and strong smells at the spice market in Kochi, he created a space that was full of colours. (Since that point, the colour in his paintings in general has become brighter.) All these space paintings are very different from the works he paints on canvas, balls, terrestrial globes, dartboards and other objects. With the space paintings, the artist has to expose himself to his surroundings and receive a stimulus from the site before he starts to paint. In this sense, the works are a fusion of his immediate feelings, his thoughts on what are often alien surroundings and his experiences in the physical space he paints. When it comes to the viewer, the lack of any traditional frame and the large scale of the spaces alter the conventional relationship between the viewer’s body and the ‘body’ of the work. These works demand that the viewer’s focus move across the surface of painting, tracing the artist’s prior process: just as he moved his body through the space in order to paint it, the viewer, step-by-step, has to do the same to view it.

above Landscape, 2013 (installation view, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa). Photo: Anna Positano. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, New York & Zürich facing page Landscape, 2013 (installation view, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa). Photo: Nuvola Ravera. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, New York & Zürich

15. Run to the end of the world

AR Asia-III-Zhang Enli.indd 69

02/05/2014 14:31

If Zhang’s works on canvas animate moments that are neglected, his space paintings reanimate neglected spaces that have been lost in time

above Space Painting, 2013 (installation view, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London), watercolour on wall. Photo: Mark Blower. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, London, New York & Zürich, and Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai facing page Transparent Shelf, 2013. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, New York & Zürich

AR Asia-III-Zhang Enli.indd 70

16. Make all the museums admission-free

02/05/2014 14:31

As I followed the path laid out by such works, I began to find a hierarchy in the art of Zhang Enli, the eyes (seeing) ruling the brain (concept) and the hands (painting) expressing the heart (emotions). While this is shown most vividly and thoroughly in his recent spacepainting projects, it has affected his output as a whole. On canvas, he used to paint lots of ordinary concrete objects or scenes without any ‘special’ qualities (for example, part of a room). Since 2012, his seemingly objective scenes have started to serve more obviously as a portrait of the artist’s own emotions. Where he once sourced content from snapshots or photographs in magazines, now the pipes, iron wires and most recently fruits appear more like fictional creatures: they are not simply designed to make up the tableau but, using the visual vocabulary of curling, knotting, hanging, winding or tangling, also serve as a cipher for a more psychologically grounded subject-matter. When it comes to the latter, it seems that trees are a subject for which Zhang has a particular fondness. It might be said that switching from humans to landscapes is a way of appealing to a wider audience (the switch being from the particular to the general), but the fact is that in Zhang’s hands, painting trees and painting human beings are the same. His favourite artist, Jin Nong (1687–1764), was a painter and a calligrapher, well known for painting strange plum blossoms. Jin’s willow trees and bamboo branches are often waving in the wind, which according to Zhang makes for a set of psychological hints: ‘All things and sceneries are connected with the artist’s emotions’, he once said. Back to the question with which we started: if Zhang’s objects and spaces are all containers, then what is inside them? Or let me put it this way: what kind of world does Zhang create through his art? Looking at his post-2000 object and space paintings, it is easy to conclude that his art is exactly what John Berger called ‘an affirmation of the visible which surrounds us and which continually appears and disappears’ (‘Steps Toward a Small Theory of the Visible’, 1995). This kind of thinking suggests that there is another invisible

subject matter in the work: time. If Zhang’s works on canvas animate moments that are ordinary and neglected (dead time to most people), his space paintings often reanimate neglected spaces, spaces that have been lost in time. However, as I observed earlier, when Zhang is painting, the visual is privileged over the conceptual, and for him painting primarily expresses the emotions. Ultimately, his painting suggests a simple idea: that of a world in which all things are sentient. In Buddhist philosophy there are two categories of ‘world’: the ‘world of sentience’, covering everything that is able to perceive or feel, and the ‘world of material’, covering space and the (spatial) relationship of everything. (‘Sentient beings’ is a term in Buddhist theory that refers to beings with consciousness or sentience – human beings, animals, trees, grass, anything with a life. ‘All things sentient’ is seen as a radical egalitarianism, based on the premise that everything with a life is able to feel, see, hear, smell or taste, and therefore everything contains Buddha-dhātu and is capable of being Buddha.) For Zhang, everything in front of him belongs both to the world of sentience and to the world of material, and in his art, everything feels. Therefore, as he renders his subjects in paint (material), mixing his emotions with his pigments, the complete world is reproduced: the delivery box, the rubber pipe, the wall with a watermark and the trees – all of them rendered sentient through the painter’s eye and brush. That sentience is picked up and transferred to viewers, who feel those emotions or accordingly create their own when they are in front of one of Zhang’s paintings or inside one of his space paintings. At the beginning of this article, I wrote that Zhang Enli hasn’t painted people for almost a decade. Perhaps I was wrong. Everything he paints is sentient, and in this sense his work is always a portrait of sorts. ar Zhang Enli: Space Painting is on show at the K11 Art Foundation’s pop-up space in Hong Kong, 12 May – 13 July

17. Learn to speak all existing languages

AR Asia-III-Zhang Enli.indd 71

02/05/2014 14:31

Michael Joo

AR Asia-III-Michael Joo.indd 72

18. Cook for your friends all the meals that you have had during your past trips

02/05/2014 14:32

Through the looking glass by Mark Rappolt

19. Keep walking in any direction until you find something

AR Asia-III-Michael Joo.indd 73

02/05/2014 14:32

Over the last few years, most people with at least one eye on world monument was eroded by dripping vats of artificial sweat positioned events have become familiar with the aesthetics of oppression, above each column. Each figure was weighed, assessed and measured, protest and revolt: the tear gas canisters, the barricades, the petrol and then slowly dissipated. Subsequent works have involved more bombs, the bullets, the rocks. As I write, a guy on the radio is talking salt, as well as urine, firearms, aeroplane fuselages, lasers, vegetables, about the latest conflict zone in Ukraine. You’ve probably heard minerals, religious icons, and the horns, antlers and skin of a variety about it. For the non-Ukrainian, and probably for most Ukrainians, of animals; and in a number of performance works, Joo himself. This it’s a confusing situation. The talk is now about a local mayor who month, at the Hong Kong branch of the Savannah College of Art and was once pro-Russian but became pro-Ukrainian and has now been Design (SCAD), he will show a series of recent works that derive their shot by people presumed to be pro-Russian, perhaps connected to forms from the stanchions and velvet ropes commonly used to segrethe Russian military, and is being flown to Israel for medical atten- gate public or private spaces, and from the curving carapace of police tion, but the outlook isn’t good. People we’re told are Russian soldiers riot-shields with which we’re all too familiar these days. act as patriots, helping to barricade captured government buildings, Among the works on show is Farmers & Merchants (2012), a series supporting the ‘will’ of the people to assert their preferred national or of mirrored glass ropes supported on mirrored glass stanchions that ethnic identity. Which used to be Ukrainian but isn’t any more. The meander apparently aimlessly (while generally ascending) across the floor and up the wall. The title word ‘dissident’ is used frequently, is one of a number that refer to US but means different things in difbanks (this one Californian) that ferent places and under different were bailed out by the government regimes. There are people who wear during the financial crisis. Death of a the uniform of the Ukrainian police Party (2013) contains a collection of who seem more connected to proRussian nationalists. It’s not quite mirrored glass stanchions, of varying clear who is oppressing whom, or on heights and in various states of disaswhat side democracy lies. Perhaps sembly, together with a collection of the hooks used to attach ropes (if both. Which is weird. Not just because there were any) to the stanchions, most people can’t choose their ethnic some of these hooks mirrored, some identity, but also because in all these clear glass and some stained with recent conflicts – whether it involves various states of silver nitrate (used the various iterations of the Occupy to create the mirroring, and also movement or demonstrations and once a key chemical in the analogue encampments in Tahrir Square or photographic process), the whole lot Gezi Park – we’re conditioned by sitting on a boatlike polished stainthe liberal Western press to think that there’s one side that’s right (you less-steel plinth, and evoking the can identify them because they have kind of debris that survives a fun no uniforms and only homemade party in which the glass was used to defences and weapons) and one side hold alcohol (although that could that’s wrong (you can identify them be because the first time I saw it was at a party involving alcohol in Joo’s because they have uniforms, purposeBrooklyn studio) and the collapse built defences and weapons). But of a party grouping (social or politin Ukraine right now it’s clear that ical) that has dropped its defining that’s an aesthetics that can be easily barriers and ceased to exist. Also manipulated. It’s precisely this kind on show is Plexus (2013), a collecof slippery identity, or perhaps more properly aesthetics of identity and their formation, that Michael Joo, tion of 20 glass riot shields, more or less mirrored with silver nitrate an American artist born to Korean parents (he represented South (in some instances the silver is more of a splatter – as if it had been Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale, in 2001), has been exploring for hurled against the shield like a paint or petrol bomb, although Joo a number of years. uses lightbulbs), lined up and mounted on a wall. One of his earliest works, Saltiness of Greatness (1992), reduced the Most of the works derive from a series that Joo has been develiconic Asian figures of Genghis Khan, Tokyo Rose (the Allied forces’ oping and exploring since the early 2000s. In the past Joo has used nickname for Japanese female propaganda broadcasters during the stanchions to support a chain of plastic casts of salamilike Italian Second World War), Bruce Lee and Mao Tse-tung to a graphlike series sausages (Access/Denial, 2002), and ‘velvet ropes’ made of terracotta of salt pillars, their heights relative to the energy they expended on which plants are growing (Denial, 2000), while the riot shields have appeared in a variety of configurations, (speculatively calculated by the artist, who researched records of their activities, diet and above Farmers & Merchants, 2012, borosilicate glass, as walls or roofs, and in works such as Untitled (Santiago, 7.9.11 – V1) (2012), which deploys the alleged sexual habits – the sum total also meassilver nitrate, lacquer, 216 × 155 × 157 riot shields in reference to specific events ured in calories on the trays supporting each preceding pages Plexus, 2013, low-iron glass, pillar). In an Ozymandian twist, over time the (in this case the Chilean student riots of 2011). silver nitrate, lightbulbs, lacquer, 1433 × 122 × 10

AR Asia-III-Michael Joo-RESUPPLY P74.indd 74

20. Love a friend who has betrayed you many times

02/05/2014 12:20

Both the stanchions and the shields also relate to the artist’s interest in creating Duchamp-style enhanced found objects, most obviously in the Improved Rack series (1999–) of animal horns that are sliced and then extended using metal supports. But while these last focused on objects ‘found’ in nature, there’s nothing natural about the tools of segregation that constitute the ‘found’ objects at SCAD. However, the shields, as Joo has composed them (both materially and organisationally) in Plexus (Latin for a network of vessels or nerves), look more decorative than threatening – perhaps they could be part of an elegant but minimal DIY rococo interior. The mirroring suggests that it’s only yourself on either side of the shield (a related work featuring ten riot shields, Vorpal Dream, 2013, conjures Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass, 1871), while also taking what’s behind the barrier into realms of inscrutability (rather like Paul Valéry’s description of shells, in a 1936 essay on the subject, as creating a perceptual paradox: most obvious to the eye, but most mysterious to the mind intrigued by what’s inside). But Joo’s choice of materials – glass and its association with transparency – both plays with paradox, being materially present yet visually fluid, and removes it by providing encouragement to treat these structures as more mental than physical barriers. Somehow they are empty; it’s only us, as viewers, who can render them substantial, by relying on the conditioning that causes us to view these objects in terms of their familiar usage as tools of exclusion. Of course all this is a bit of a gimme for

both a critic and the viewer: these works provoke you to wander off into essays on the structures of repression and revolt, to treat them as a glib critique of the former and an exhortation to the latter. But there’s a lot more to them than that. In art it’s all too easy to look for a statement and ignore a provocation. But these works are a bit more subtle than that. They force you to think. To think about how space and the artificial divisions imposed on it serve to construct identity (inside/outside; chosen/rejected; and, in Hong Kong, as the artist points out, its history of ‘one country, two systems’, etc). And to make up your own mind. Perhaps to look at Joo’s wall of riot shields is to find oneself sliding into Victor Hugo’s famous description of Quasimodo’s relation to his home, the cathedral of Notre Dame, and how his twisted body mimicked the cathedral’s gothic architecture (a description that is also a key part of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, 1958): ‘It was his home, his hole, his envelope… he adhered to it, as it were, like a turtle to its carapace. This rugged cathedral was his armour.’ The stanchions and the shields are ours. But, Joo suggests, only as long as we want them to be. “They are meant to suggest we look deeper into the distorted looking glass of the works’ surfaces to see there is no ‘other’ without an ‘us’,” the artist says. ar Michael Joo: Transparency Engine is on show at the Moot Gallery, SCAD, Hong Kong, 14 May – 29 August

Death of a Party (detail), 2013, borosilicate glass, silver nitrate, stainless steel, porcelain, lacquer, 183 × 173 × 71 all images Photos: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

21. Swim in every single river in your country

AR Asia-III-Michael Joo.indd 75

02/05/2014 14:32

Performance Art in India Does the subcontinent’s familiarity with the performative in the rituals and customs of everyday life mean that artists who practise it need also to reinvent it? by Niru Ratnam

Sahej Rahal, Bhramana I, 2012, documentation of performance. Courtesy the artist and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai

AR Asia-III-Indian Performance-Resupply 76,77,79,80.indd 76

22. Sing a love song to everyone in your country

02/05/2014 12:16

In February 2012, a shamanic figure appeared in a raised pedestrian walkway in Bandra, Mumbai. Dressed in a robe made from pieces of discarded cloth and a pelt of fake fur that enveloped the figure’s head, it loped around holding a staff fashioned from tree branches. Beneath the costume was artist Sahej Rahal, and the appearance of the faceless figure was his performance, Bhramana I. The location was a place of transit – the first-built walkway in a series of ‘skyways’ designed to lift middle-class commuters above the chaos of the metropolis, and Rahal wanted to introduce a moment to the passersby that was an opening to an alternative reality. Rahal has stated that his look was inspired in part by Navajo shamans, although the result could also be described as a fusion of the Jawas of Star Wars (1977) and artist Joseph Beuys in his own signature shaman guise. But Beuys’s invocation of a shaman in performances such as I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) implicitly invoked alterity through the appearance of a figure, the shaman, who is considered radically different to the norms of Western culture. Rahal’s invocation of a shaman was different. It is arguable that India is a country where performance and, in particular, the performance of rituals have long been codified and then embedded into the fabric of life. Invoking shamans, here, does not hinge quite so much on alterity. Indeed the question might be: what is the status of such performance art when the performance of rituals is an ordinary and everyday phenomenon? The response of one set of Rahal’s audience is instructive: the street urchins enthusiastically broke into spontaneous bursts of breakdancing every time he stood still – an outbreak of performance in response to performance. Rahal’s choice of title for the series of performances is a nod to this specific Indian cultural history. The Brāhmanas are Hindu texts that detail the correct performance of ritual, with specific reference

to rituals around sacrifices but also those that include newand full-moon rites, the rites of the installation of kings, domestic rituals, temple rituals, rituals after death and so on. Another key ancient text is the Natya Shastra, a treatise on the performing arts that was written sometime between 200BC and 200AD (although it was likely to have been based on an older text). Covering theatre, dance and music, the text is wide in scope, detailing things such as stage design, stagecraft, analyses of dance forms and even the correct behaviour while watching a performance (there’s no mention of breakdancing). Performance art in India thus comes with a context that is different to that of, say, performance art on the Lower East Side in the 1970s: one where the performative space is long-established within Indian culture, so that seeing a shaman shamble along a walkway or around a subway station (the location for Rahal’s subsequent performance Bhramana II, 2012) might not be a particularly extraordinary sight to passersby inured to everyday rituals. Indeed a significant amount of Indian performance art foregrounds this. For example, in 1971 the Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar staged an event at the opening of one of his exhibitions, occasions that up until relatively recently in more traditional Indian galleries involved a ritual lighting of candles as part of the exhibition inauguration (private view). Khakhar was not a performance artist, he was a painter, but his aim was to critique the excess of ritual and performance in Indian civil society. Khakhar mimicked the over-the-top ceremony of a wedding procession and governmental inauguration to mock the solemnity of art. Beth Citron, a curator, wrote that ‘in transforming his artist friends like Vivan Sundaram and Nasreen Mohamedi into participants in the event, Khakhar became the first artist in India to challenge the conventional interaction between artist and audience’.

Sahej Rahal, Tandav, 2013, digital photograph, edition of 5 + 2AP. Courtesy the artist and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai

23. Find another door with a lock that your house key fits by coincidence

AR Asia-III-Indian Performance-Resupply 76,77,79,80.indd 77

02/05/2014 12:16

Pushpamala N, Phantom Lady or Kismet (detail), 1998, a photo-romance shot in Mumbai, silver gelatin print, 29 × 42 cm. Photo: Meenal Agarwal. Courtesy Nature Morte, New Delhi

AR Asia-III-Indian Performance-Resupply 76,77,79,80.indd 78

24. Sing your favourite songs on the moon

02/05/2014 14:34

Pushpamala N, Phantom Lady or Kismet (detail), 1998, a photo-romance shot in Mumbai, silver gelatin print, 29 × 42 cm. Photo: Meenal Agarwal. Courtesy Nature Morte, New Delhi

25. Keep driving a car in any direction until it breaks down

AR Asia-III-Indian Performance-Resupply 76,77,79,80.indd 79

02/05/2014 12:16

Subodh Gupta, Pure, 1999, performance at Khoj workshop, Modi Nagar, Uttar Pradesh, India © Subodh Gupta. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

AR Asia-III-Indian Performance-Resupply 76,77,79,80.indd 80

26. Spend a holiday with a hundred dogs in order to get to know each other

02/05/2014 12:16

In 1999 Subodh Gupta performed Pure at a Khoj workshop in New Pure, Chopra’s performances weave together family history Delhi, which explicitly invoked childhood memories of ritual. Gupta and the rituals of everyday life to suggest that those rituals collected objects from villagers, including a hookah and a plough, are not out-of-the-ordinary, but part of an ongoing way of and sunk them into a field that had been covered with a paste of mud being. Chopra was one of Rahal’s teachers, and the latter’s and cow dung. He then anointed himself with the same paste and lay performances might be seen as continuing this concern with in the centre of the field in a posture known in yoga as shavasana, or the enduring position of ritual and performance in Indian culture. the corpse pose. As a child, Gupta had been sent out to gather cowpats One factor that militates against such a reading is Rahal’s invocation for ceremonies, and this series of works using cow dung specifically of the future through his references to science fiction, both in the evoke the artist’s childhood in Bihar and everyday rituals. Gupta Brahmana series and also in subsequent works such as Tandav (2012), has stated: ‘Shit is shit, but belief changes it into something else, it in which, wearing robes (that again cover his head), Rahal wields a becomes something holy in this part of the world.’ Covering yourself light-sabre-type construction made from fluorescent lighting tubes with animal excreta is here not primarily a subversive act, then, but to create the image of a spectral figure encircled by light. A similar one of explicitly referencing the traditional ways of rural life in Bihar. strategy of invoking a deliberately lo-fi future was employed by It is worth noting that the centrality of the piece to Gupta’s oeuvre Abhisek Hazra in his work Cantordust Touring Machine, which took was signalled by the positioning of a related piece, My Mother and Me place as one of the artist-led tours of Art Dubai in 2011. Hazra placed a battered cardboard box over his head (1999), at the beginning of his major solo show at New Delhi’s National Gallery of Covering yourself with animal excreta and used a megaphone to present a humorous, scientifically inflected (cantor Modern Art, which opened in February is here not primarily a subversive act dust is a multidimensional fractal figthis year [see exhibition reviews]. ure of infinite detail) tour of the fair, The artist Pushpamala N was one of the first of a new generation of artists to use performance during the one that referenced the Turing Machine. Rahal imprisoned himself 1990s, and her first foray into the discipline also came with a back- in a similarly absurd way in the video work Saras (2012), which ward look at the history of performance in India, albeit in popular seemed to show a disfigured, headless statue of the Hindu goddess culture rather than rural tradition. She was fascinated with Fearless pulsating and apparently breathing in an overly heavy manner. Nadia, a stuntwoman who worked in the 1930s Hindi film industry, Rahal had wormed his way inside the body of the statue, incidenand in particular one image of Fearless Nadia in a Zorro-like costume. tally the goddess of knowledge, music and the arts. His gentle Pushpamala produced a version of that image and from it generated wiggling might be understood as both an attempt to break free of a series of works, Untitled from the Photo-Romance Phantom Lady or Kismet the prescriptions about ritual and performance, and also, perhaps, a (1996–8) that depict the artist posing in staged sequences that drew gentle nod towards the fact that this desire might be an impossible one in India. At any rate, artists such as Rahal and Hazra point to on Bollywood. India’s best-known performance artist, Nikhil Chopra, has also a future in which the task of negotiating the history of ritual is more largely drawn on both personal and collective cultural history, about getting things wrong rather than following what has been assuming the role of semiautobiographical subjects in durational prescribed by history and texts. Breakdancing might not have been performances where slow, deliberate and ritualised movements such the correct way to respond to a performance, but perhaps that’s the as shaving, washing, eating and dressing form the script. Like Gupta’s best thing about invoking such a response. ar

Nikhil Chopra, Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing X (Part I, 14 min), 2010, digital photograph on archival paper. Courtesy the artist and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai

27. Watch all the movies existing in this world

AR Asia-III-Indian PerformanceRESUPPLY P_81.indd 81

02/05/2014 14:35

Eastern Standard Time: Everything Changes in Order to Remain the Same To answer the question of whether or not time is a relative construct, six films by contemporary Asian artists are considered through their cultural conceptions of time by Tim Crowley

above Almagul Menlibayeva, Steppen Baroque, 2003, single-channel video projection, 11 min. Courtesy Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York facing page Chris Chong Chan Fui, HeavenHell, 2009, six-channel HD audiovisual installation, 10 min. Courtesy the artist

82-85-Time in video art.indd 82

28. Talk to your neighbours about what you know at this point to make them rethink what they know

02/05/2014 14:36

The emergence, since the mid-1990s, of Asian artists producing films and Hinduism. By contrast, the Western world’s concept of time as featuring achronological narrative structures, multilinear plots linear has been the basis of intellectual and religious musings for and the juxtaposition of parallel ontological worlds has attracted many centuries. It has been read as originating in the Judeo-Christian a growing amount of attention. Within these films, time has been worldview, with its sense of time beginning at the creation ex nihilo read as a central and ongoing concern. Chinese artists Yang Fudong, (creation out of nothing) and ending at the Second Coming, or the Zhu Jia and Ran Huang, Kazakhstani artist Almagul Menlibayeva, coming of the Messiah. Western time is often conceived as being direcVietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê and Singaporean artist Chris Chong tional, advancing and nonrepetitive, with a beginning (the past) and Chan Fui have all adapted and experimented with cinematic tech- an end (the future). Between the two is the present, which is always niques to produce a visual language of allegories and interpretations moving forward. of collective memory that present the appearance of change, the ultiMaking further differentiations, American anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher Edward T. Hall famously pronounced the mate marker of time, while suggesting change does not occur. Seeking to articulate the twenty-first-century temporalities of predominant form of modern Western time as ‘monochronic’ time, acceleration, notions of presentism, space-time compression and and Eastern time as ‘polychronic’ (The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension globalisation through the interaction of historical fact, fictitious of Time, 1983). The West saw time as a road stretching from the past into narrative and the medium of cinema, many works have been attrib- the future, segmented into minutes, hours, days, months and years. uted with what historian Michel de For Hall, monochronic time, measured Many of these artists claim not to Certeau (in The Writing of History, 1975) by clocks and watches, was ‘a form of have considered ‘time’ as a theme considers the ‘unthought’ of historiexternal order that originates outside ography: the temporal dimension of of their work and are often surprised the individual, and which is imposed upon the chaotic lives of humanity’. In history. They provoke questions such at the suggestion that it is the East, Hall’s notion of polychronic as: how is this temporality defined? How do these films rearticulate the relationship between past, present time was less linear and less tangible. Here, time was experienced as and future? How illusory are notions of progress in different cultures? ‘a “point” at which relationships, social interactions or events conHowever, many of these artists claim not to have considered ‘time’ verge, rather than a “road”.’ ‘Polychrons’ saw time as a never-ending – that is, not a concept of ‘time’ adhering to a Western model – as a river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, to the infitheme of their work and are often surprised at the suggestion that it is. nite future. Life was experienced as constantly in flux, and not rigid In order to begin to understand the often-divergent interpreta- as in clock time. tions of these films by producer and consumer, it would be useful to It is through these dialectics – East/West, monochronic/polylook, attempting to avoid sweeping civilisational contrasts as much chronic – that many of these works have been and are interpreted, as possible, at the traditional cultural concepts of time in the East and rather than via the interdependent opposites rooted in Confucian West. In the ‘timeless’ East, time is often described as more cyclical, and Taoist texts that may be more appropriate. The approach of or rather spiral, interpreted as slowly advancing and repetitive, describing an Asian concept of time as cyclical derives from a play on a process creating continuous and infinite outcomes. The religions of the Western geometrical metaphor for time, a line. However, although these regions often incorporate a cyclical view of human experience it may be helpful to differentiate the Asian concept from the Western and often include concepts of reincarnation, such as samsara – the concept, it is not an apt metaphor for Asian time. Every culture has endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth found in both Buddhism automatic filters, learned during childhood, that select and colour

29. Write a full-length novel before going to bed

82-85-Time in video art.indd 83

02/05/2014 14:36

above Zhu Jia, Zero (video still), 2012, single-channel video installation, 15 min. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai facing page Ran Huang, Disruptive Desires, Tranquility, and the Loss of Lucidity (film still), 2012. Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London & Hong Kong

82-85-Time in video art.indd 84

30. Wash the laundry of everyone living in the town that you visit

02/05/2014 14:36

how its inhabitants perceive time. An understanding of an artist’s time, Yang uses the meeting of time concepts to explore how women, temporal awareness is essential to gaining a clearer understanding and ideas about women, have represented a search for modernity over of their work. Many of these films have their roots in and reflect, the past century. Both artists live and produce work from the intersecconsciously or not, an essentially Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist tion of several different forms of cultural time-distinctions that are comprehension of time, whether it’s the ceaseless passing of things, imposed upon them. events and human nature with a definite past and indefinite future Through restaging and reediting film footage, Chris Chong of Confucianism; the Taoist law of wu-wei, or acting by not acting, Chan Fui’s HeavenHell (2009) and Dinh Q. Lê’s From Father to Son: and its cyclical law of reversion, where when one thing reaches its A Rite of Passage (2009) both suggest the ‘connectedness’ rather than extreme, it reverts to the opposite; or the Buddhist understanding ‘cause-and-effect linearity’ of film sequences. Chong replicates the that the way we experience time, as flowing from past to present to 1963 Akira Kurosawa film High and Low, twice restaging Kurosawa’s future, is an illusion and that in absolute reality time disappears, as depiction of the notorious and violent red light district of 1960s do all other distinctions. And that’s all before we even begin to look Yokohama: first simulating the film as originally shot and then with the current inhabitants, reviving history and memory into at the above ideas’ concern with causality. Let’s take as an example Ran Huang’s Disruptive Desires, Tranquility, the collective consciousness of the audience. Lê deconstructs and and the Loss of Lucidity (2012), where a dialogue between the actors juxtaposes the performances of Martin Sheen and Charlie Sheen as soldiers from Vietnam War movies recounts a childhood both menacing The approach of describing an Asian and naive, within a setting both clinPlatoon (1986) and Apocalypse Now (1979), concept of time as cyclical derives ical and playroom; and Zhu Jia’s 2012 uniting father and son as actors. Both film Zero, where the time continuum is from a play on the Western geometrical films together imply an endless cycle of inverted by depicting a woman whose birth, growth and decay. metaphor for time, a line age and life stages are defined by the In Asian and Central Asian counhistorical era of her dress and where there is a sense of the ageing tries such as those where the artists originate, most individuals live process without sequence or continuity. Evoking visually, at times, at the intersection of several different forms of cultural time-distincthe films of Michelangelo Antonioni, both films expose the potential tions that are imposed upon them. Each of these may have major conflict between subjective and objective time; between an individu- effects on an individual’s physiology and psychology, as well as on al’s own sense of time passing, called kairos by the Ancient Greeks, and his or her behaviour, and these effects are often what the artists claim the external, standardised time frames imposed on them by society, as a dominant starting point for their work. Different cultures think chronos. This is also the point at the heart of the I Ching, the book of of the passing of time in different ways; some resist change and take changes, which systematically attempts to relate subjective and objec- a long-term view of events, some are present-orientated and others tive mental states in an often-contradictory world. are future-orientated, focusing on forward movement. So it stands to Yang Fudong’s recent film New Women (2013) is a five-channel reason that as different artists and critics alike are conditioned with video installation inspired by Shanghai’s swinging 1920s and 30s. different concepts of time from an early age, different works of art The era was defined by hai pai, the East-meets-West culture of the city, are conceived under different time concepts. It is only by looking at where through Hall’s filter the monochronic met the polychronic. As the production of artwork as a product of a particular cultural timein Almagul Menlibayeva’s Transoxiana Dreams (2011), where the artist concept that a further understanding to the conception of the idea juxtaposes a technological society of globalisation with a shamanic for the work can be found. ar

31. Find out the origin and history of your favourite food

82-85-Time in video art.indd 85

02/05/2014 14:36

Tatsuo Miyajima “I think the message I’m trying to deliver, or the concept I’m trying to deliver, is the same thing. It can never be old. It can never be obsolete. It’s all about life rather than death” Interview by Mark Rappolt

AR Asia-III-Miyajima.indd 86

32. Mix up different types of noodle, such as soba, pasta, pho, etc, to create a new noodle menu

02/05/2014 14:38

Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima has been producing sculptures and installations that combine electronic technology and Buddhist philosophy since the late 1980s. During that time, his use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) counting numerals from 1 to 9 (but never 0) has become the central (albeit not exclusive) formal component of his work. ArtReview Asia caught up with him in London at the opening of his exhibition I-Model (2013) at Lisson Gallery to talk about art and technology, but ended up considering the meaning of life. ArtrEviEw AsiA How did you first become attracted to or make a decision to use LEDs as your signature component? tAtsUO MiYAJiMA There are three main concepts that I want to express through my work. The first is ‘keep changing’, the second is ‘connect with everything’ and the third is ‘continue forever’. To use changing LED numbers was just the method for me.

my concept, do I use technology and maybe mathematics. It’s the beauty of mathematical logic or technical logic as the media to express the concept of emotion, perhaps more the concept of humanity. ArA To most people, using mathematical logic is a way of repressing the emotional. tM I think the arts, or the expression of the arts, has to be delivered in a very neutral way to the audience. It shouldn’t impose my opinion or my ideas, but rather inspire in an audience the free will to think by themselves. So, how you accept, or how you receive, is completely under their control. So, yes, maybe you’re right. It might be a kind of self-restriction on my side not to impose too much, but neutrality is very important. In order to express my art in a neutral way, I’m using the mathematical, or physical, or technological logic in my art.

power of the message; it’s more that I have to stick to the fundamentals. I have to stick to the same message again and again. ArA To what extent is that message connected to the fear of death or ending? tM The message, or the concept, I’m trying to deliver is all about a human life itself. So any time – now, in the past, present or future – that is the same message forever. It’s an eternal message, and if you think about the masters of art, like Giotto and Michelangelo, the message they are trying to deliver is this fundamental message towards human beings. I think the message I’m trying to deliver, or the concept I’m trying to deliver, is the same thing. It can never be old. It can never be obsolete. It’s all about life rather than death. ArA But life has a relationship to death… tM Obviously if you think about life, death cannot be separated from life, and death has to be on the same level as life. To live a life, a happy life, and enjoy it, you cannot avoid thinking about death, but then how you think about death determines how you live your life, and how you enjoy your life. So while you are still alive, you have to think about death, and that message is mentioned in all my artworks.

ArA Do you think you use more science and technology than people would normally expect from an artist? tM The word techne [meaning skill in Ancient Greek, and from which the word ‘technology’ evolved] covered both science and art originally. ArA And how much does the evolution of technology influence the development of the work? tM Part of my work definitely has a wider spectrum of expression thanks to that. I use LEDs as my medium, and that obviously has a rather short history as a technology, but those changes that have happened have broadened my expression. Especially the colour blue, which was only introduced as an LED in 1995, which is very recent – since then they developed lots more colours, and that really gave me a much broader way of expressing my art. ArA You use numbers as an expressive form, and your LEDs rely on a mathematical base. Do you think your view of the world is conditioned by mathematics? tM The way I look at the world, my personal view of the world, is rather emotional. How I capture the world is rather emotional, and I try to keep the concept of human emotions, even the narrative one, within me. Then beauty is very important to express that concept in my work; and then only for the method, to express

ArA Is it still possible to be neutral now that your career has moved along and you’re very much associated with the LEDs? Is it still possible in the same way for that to be neutral as it was 10 or 15 years ago? tM What I want to deliver – the message or the concept – stays the same. It has to be repeated again and again. Yes, the media or the material might have been there for 10 or 15 years, but the concept I would like to express through the material, using the media, should stay the same. That’s the fundamental, main concept of the message I would like to deliver. So it’s not the media or the material that starts having the above Life Palace (Tea Room), 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable facing page Life (Corps sans Organes) No. 15, 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable

ArA Do you see art as something that should have a function of helping people in society? tM I think at least art has the power to do that. Unless it had the power to do that, I don’t think art would have had this important position in society for thousands of years. ArA Is it something you have to fight for, this position in society? tM It’s the effort made by artists and by all the supporters of art. ArA When I was looking at the work downstairs at Lisson Gallery (Tatsuo Miyajima: I-Model, 27 September – 2 November 2013) I was struck by a kind of balance between the control in the work, the programming, not having zeros showing connections, but also the idea that the work exists independently. That once the programme is started, it’s away from the control

33. Organise a painter’s conference with all the painters in a region

AR Asia-III-Miyajima.indd 87

02/05/2014 14:38

of the artist, to some degree. Is that balance something that you’re interested in exploring? tM As for the artworks downstairs you mentioned, and about controlling and then being unable to control, actually being unable to control is a very big thing for the group of artworks downstairs, and that is because of my experience, or our experience, of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in 2011. We all thought about so many things, and then I came to the conclusion that nature is uncontrollable by human beings, and then we have to pay respect, or we have to be awed by the power of nature which is uncontrollable. That is very important for human life, and yes, maybe the layout is done by me, but I’m using more like a random system. So it’s more like a design. Yes, I am, to a certain degree, maybe designing it, but it’s more of an organic phenomenon. The wire is also, sort of, automatically placed. So it’s more out of my control and more an organic phenomenon. I would like the audience to enjoy that nature of the works downstairs. ArA Do a lot of the works start with responses to events or situations, or do they come in a more abstract way? tM Well, some of my artworks, yes, do respond to what’s happening in society, in the artworld. For example, like this series at Lisson. I was very influenced by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, so that’s responding directly to that phenomenon. Also, I once made a series in response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. So, yes, maybe 30 to 40 percent of my artworks do respond to the events outside. Then that’s not always the case, 60 to 70 percent would be more about just looking at things in general and thinking about my fundamental concept within me. ArA Is art, for you, a form of self-examination in the first instance? tM Actually, I’m not interested in myself at all, but what I’m interested in is, I feel as if it’s

AR Asia-III-Miyajima.indd 88

my duty to deliver a message to people. A message or a concept about life, about human life, and I’m interested in how I can give out the message. How I can express the concept to the people out there. What I’m really concerned about now, for example, is about what is happening in Syria, or the children in Africa starving to death. I would like my audience to think about those things. Think about the life or death through my works. Each piece of my work is not directly talking about it, but then through my artworks, if people can start thinking about life and then start thinking about what’s happening in those places, that’s what I’m constantly aiming at. ArA To what extent was the choice to work with numbers to do with finding a language that was universal and international? Has that been an important part of it? tM Universality, yes, that is one thing, but numbers are very highly abstract symbols, and that’s very much related to the issue of beauty. The numbers are highly abstract symbols, and the numbers are highly conceptual. So that enables people to think about the main concept, think about the main message more clearly.

Being unable to control is a very big thing for this group of artworks, and that is because of my experience, or our experience, of the Great East Japan Earthquake. We all thought about so many things, and then I came to the conclusion that nature is uncontrollable by human beings, and then we have to pay respect, or we have to be awed by the power of nature. Yes, maybe the layout is done by me, but I’m using more like a random system. I am, to a certain degree, designing it, but it’s more of an organic phenomenon

ArA Do you think there is a different reaction to the works when you show them in Japan, compared to when you show them in Europe or America? tM I’ve never been in the audience to my artworks, so it’s difficult to tell. I do often hear that there are a variety of reactions, a variety of responses to the concept or the message of my artworks. So perhaps it’s the same type of response in the sense of diversity of response from here or America. ArA I also wanted to ask about the context in which the work is shown. A show in a London gallery such as [Lisson] or the Hayward is one experience; when we met in Finland, in a natural setting, it was a very different experience. Do you have a preference for the kind of context in which it’s shown? tM Actually, I have no preference for the context. I don’t exactly have a particular preference as to the context of my shows because I can adapt to the context, or the location. It’s a challenge, of course, because I have to find a new way of delivering the message accordingly, but it can be in a gallery context like this one, or it can be in a desert, or surrounded by ice. Whatever the context or the location that was given to me, I enjoy adapting to the situation. That would be my strength, because I can find a new way of doing it. ArA My last question is about the sound in the installations. There seems to be a slight hum. I guess it’s a transformer, maybe. Is that something that you work with actively as part of it? How loud or how soft it is, or is that just what it is? tM There is actually no sound. It’s strange because people are constantly talking about sound, but there is no sound. I talked with a neuroscientist and he said because the audience are staring at those numbers flickering and changing, then that visual stimulus is changed into a sound somewhere in your brain. So you think that you are hearing sound, but actually there is no sound. ar

34. Exchange the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean

02/05/2014 14:38

above Life (Corps sans Organes) No. 19, 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable all images © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, Milan, New York & Singapore

35. Predict something totally unpredictable, such as disasters of any type

AR Asia-III-Miyajima.indd 89

02/05/2014 14:38

AR Asia-III-AnnLee-RESUPPLY.indd 90

36. Change the world, really

02/05/2014 14:47

About Annlee A novelist considers the potential of a manga character, bought by artists and then hired out to other artists, ‘set’ free as a character in one of her own works by Marie Darrieussecq

I first met Annlee in the year 2000. It was in a group exhibition at Air A ‘working girl’; that’s how she’s qualified by Huyghe and Parreno. de Paris called Anywhere out of the World. She already had that slightly And the simple act of having liberated her confers on her an interior hesitant manner and those big, sombre eyes. She repeated: “My name life, even a destiny. Everyone can identify with her story. Why? Because is… Annlee.” I can still hear that light pause in the middle of the phrase we all have a zone of desolation in us, an uncertain identity, a spectral and her slightly floaty intonation. The fact that she didn’t exist except zone. In short, the first gesture of the two artists and their inventiveon screen didn’t bother me. Could one fall in love with her? Certainly. ness allowed the character to escape them from the outset. She told her story to whomever would listen. She belonged to no one. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Annlee in Anzen Zone (2000) develYet she had been bought: in 1999, for ¥46,000, the price of a smart- oped the character as a sign of emptiness, to a terrifying degree: phone today. Artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno chose her a glacial video in which, battered with rain, Annlee murmurs in from the catalogue of a manga group, the Japanese company K Works. Japanese, “There will be no safety zone [anzen zone in Japanese], you There’s nothing very extravagant about buying a character; in the will disappear into your screen… there is nowhere to go, absolutely animation universe one buys them as ready-to-use drawings. Huyghe nowhere in this completely lost universe… You will all be sent to a and Parreno chose a stereotypical secondary character without scope place of no return, it’s a trip to nowhere.” Annlee rediscovers her for growth. They named her: Annlee. They established a one-page original Japanese identity and detaches herself from her Anglophone contract specifying that in exchange for a single, symbolic euro, double. The duo M/M (Paris), Angela Bulloch and Liam Gillick each they would give Annlee to other artists. From a cultural product she also in their own way – how should one put it? – animated? loved? became a sign, an icon even. An example of this contract, a single typed invented? exploited her? sheet of A4, was attached to the wall of the Pierre Huyghe exhibition Through a letter from their lawyer, Huyghe and Parreno gave the at the Centre Pompidou at the end of 2013. At the same time, another rights back to the character itself; they also celebrated her ‘disparition’ big museum, the Palais de Tokyo, dedicated an exhibition to Philippe with a pyrotechnic installation on Miami Beach in December 2002 Parreno. These two parallel exhibitions (a rare event among the big (A Smile Without a Cat (Celebration of Annlee’s Vanishing) at ArtBasel Miami Parisian institutions) allowed one to approach these major artists via Beach). Boom! But that didn’t stop the pursuit of her singular existence. During Parreno’s exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Tino Sehgal their common projects as well as through their differences. Pierre Huyghe has a discourse on Annlee that makes up a part took possession of her. Nine adolescent girls succeeded one another as of the work: at once a user’s guide and a critical theory. Annlee is an her incarnation, nine actresses with very present bodies, in the midst antiauthorial manifesto and exemplification of ‘copyleft’. Even the of puberty and slightly awkward. In English or French they took up act of their having purchased her together is significant: who created the gestures, the gait and the inflections of the infographic character Annlee? To whom does she belong? The act of using her, of appro- from Parreno’s first video (Anywhere out of the World, 2000). “My name is priating her, returns one also to the feminine condition: something Annlee. Annlee. You can spell it however you want. It doesn’t matter.” that was, perhaps, not the primary intenI had rediscovered my first Annlee. I spent facing page Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, tion of the two artists. The notion of money a number of hours in her company. “Some A Smile Without a Cat (Celebration of Annlee’s Vanishing), 2002, other characters were really expensive. I was is one of the dimensions of authorial culture; fireworks on metallic structure, Art Basel Miami Beach. cheap. Designed to join any kind of story.” Annlee’s prostitution floats like a spectre. © Angel Art Ltd. Courtesy Air de Paris

37. Try to laugh and cry at the same time

AR Asia-III-AnnLee-RESUPPLY.indd 91

02/05/2014 14:47

In French or in English she spoke of her afternoon with the artists, the Don’t confer a universe on her, because she floats without a frame. fact that they were nice but “too busy”. In many textual variations she Don’t lend her pain, because she has no body. Yet Annlee abides, in also addressed questions to the public. “Where do you come from?” her nonresolution. Her existence, brought into being precisely to be After an initial moment of astonishment someone would maybe empty, has created a romantic character. No form that she has taken respond, “I’m from Milan” or “I’m from Rabat”. “I’ve never been”, has diverted Annlee. She remains infinitely melancholic. In itself, the replied Annlee, or perhaps, “I don’t know this town.” fact of being an empty sign seems to imply this immense sadness. The conversation never ‘takes’, of course. Both robotic and A distress. If she is a sign, she is one of disarray. poignant, Annlee’s responses speak of her solitude. We are particiThe novel preexisted Annlee in my head. It’s a science-fiction pating, subjugated and powerless, in a situation of tragic noncom- novel, because it now seems a certainty that she has moved to another munication. “I am no ghost, just a shell.” It seems that phantoms planet or a fictional avatar of the Earth (Huyghe and Gonzalezcan communicate with the living, but Foerster have already gone in this the frame of representation in which direction). But she could come into no I spent a number of hours in her Annlee is enclosed, despite her multiple company. “Some other characters were matter which of my novels. She has for avatars, will never allow her to tip over me exactly the same quality of existence really expensive. I was cheap. into the land of the living. She is ‘the as my characters. The same degree of other’. There is something decidedly penetration into the real. She exists, she Designed to join any kind of story” close to injustice in her inexistence doesn’t exist. She doesn’t exist except itself. “I’ve had enough, I wanted to live in your four dimensions, to be seen and heard, certainly, but she abides also in our memories. to know you.” One of the last questions of this Annlee, in the voice She has dug her little place there. of these very young girls, was, “In your opinion, what is the relation She can, eternally, be the girlfriend left for another, be the cosmobetween a sign and sadness?” I replied, “It’s you, Annlee”, and my naut without a mission, be the girl at the back of the class, the perpetvoice sounded like an echo without address. “Perhaps…” was all she ually replaced, the lonely double, the pioneer without soil to set foot said. Who is the ‘you’ with which we address ourselves to her? on. Annlee has no genius, no ‘personality’, neither does she really have I spoke about her with the architect Philippe Rahm, who partic- charisma, and she is completely lacking in narcissism. Annlee has ipated in the ‘fanzine of fanzines’, COOOOOOOOP, with Philippe nothing of ‘me’. She could be psychotic; she is, at the very least, on the Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Jean-Max Colard. border of the world. She leaves no other imprint beyond her fine trace I told him that I wanted to integrate Annlee into my next novel. We in memories, a singular nostalgia that carries us toward the future. ar debated: don’t psychologise her, because she has no interior life. Translated from the French by Hettie Judah

AR Asia-III-AnnLee-RESUPPLY.indd 92

38. Never follow the dominant opinion; keep plural thoughts in your mind

02/05/2014 14:47

above M/M (Paris), No Ghost Just a Shell, 2000, silkscreened poster, 171 × 117 cm. © the artists. Courtesy Air de Paris facing page Liam Gillick, Annlee You Proposes, 2001, 3D animation movie, video-installation on 3 screens, color, sound, each 2 min 58 sec. © the artist. Courtesy Air de Paris

39. Try to wake up everyone at the same time at an apartment building in the morning

AR Asia-III-AnnLee-RESUPPLY.indd 93

02/05/2014 14:47

Resistance to Communication Is Crucial These days a new generation of curators is treating the exhibition in an essayistic rather than thematic way. ArtReview asked two of the leading proponents of this trend to explain what that’s all about A conversation between Dieter Roelstraete and Anselm Franke

Anselm Franke and Dieter Roelstraete are each, in their own unique way, exploring an essayistic, expansive approach to curating that takes the discipline into uncharted territory. Franke, curator at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt and of the tenth Shanghai Biennale, opening in November (and former director of Extra City, Antwerp, and curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin), has done so via shows such as his landmark touring exhibition Animism (2010–), a self-described ‘collection of artworks exemplifying different ways of achieving the effect of life or the lifelike within a field demarcated by the dialectics of movement and stasis’, which anticipated the artworld’s recent fascination with the speculative life of inanimate objects. And Roelstraete, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (and former curator of MuHKA, Antwerp, and also a writer and poet), through projects such as his recent The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology, which ‘re-imagines the art world as an alternative “History Channel” that is as concerned with remembering histories as it is with challenging their truthfulness’, and developed out of an essay for e-flux journal. Here, the pair exchange thoughts on the relationship between art-making and curating, the questionable need for exhibitions to be ‘about’ something and the ‘anarchic potential’ of their medium. Dieter roelstraete I would like to start with a couple of remarks, posing as questions (or vice versa, depending on how you put them), regarding the relationship between artistic

AR Asia-III-Roel & Franke.indd 94

and curatorial practice, which continues to be something of a source of professional anxiety. I guess it’s fair to say that we are both curators associated or identified with an ‘essayistic’ style of exhibition-making – I, for one, consider the exhibition format to be something like a platform for the development and formulation of certain speculative ideas, or arguments. But I’m obviously also interested in the seductive power of those ideas or arguments as aesthetic experiences – and in that sense I think of what I do in an exhibition – namely the articulation

Curatorial work has to communicate, while art may be at its best when it is resistance to communication of a certain hypothesis – as an artistic undertaking, an artistic enterprise. This does not have anything to do, in my estimation, with the tiresome commonplace of the curator-asartist and/or the exhibition as a work of art, as a gesamtkunstwerk, but still – if the exhibition is to be considered an essay, it should be well-written, stocked with figures of speech of all kinds, poetic and elliptic as well as didactic and informative. What is your take on this whole tangle of interests? How do artistic

and curatorial impulses intersect and converge in your work? anselm Franke The professional anxiety you mention is, in my eyes, a sign of a widespread confusion, a lack of a clear sense of difference between roles, frames and registers of legitimisation. I think the difference between curatorial and artistic work is important but not categorical – I tend to think that such borders and differences are never real, but they produce real spaces and discourses and hence can make all the difference; it all depends to what degree we are committed to these spaces and their culture. To me, curatorial work ought to be responsive to the precarious conditions of consciousness and their dependence on certain forms and their histories, and to a whole set of institutional parameters. Art, to the contrary, may relate to the very same things by being irresponsive. There is an obvious difference in the economy of signification. Curatorial work has to communicate, while art may be at its best when it is, to paraphrase Deleuze, resistance to communication. It is our task to negotiate the relationship between these poles. I think that curating has perhaps yet to develop its own Modernism, in the sense of a developed critique of the medium, and its implicit conditions. I am trying to address, to make explicit, these implicit frames, and hence

40. Share one simple idea with everyone in your country

02/05/2014 14:48

to challenge and renarrate the framing in which certain aesthetic products have been perceived, canonically, mostly without challenging the frame as such. Much of this implicitness has to do with the history of media in modernity (my curatorial projects Animism [various venues] and Mimétisme [Extra City, Antwerp, 2008], for example, dealt with this question). I am trying to challenge the institutional, even ontological designations underlying ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’ and their place within modern media. This was of course already a holy task of the avant-gardes, but I think that it is now absolutely necessary in the realm of curating, where it is a question of narratives and spaces of signification and their historical becoming and conditioning and relation to larger cultural imaginaries. In my own work, liminal concepts and liminal aesthetics play a major role to this end. It is about unbounding and delimiting, but not towards some expanded field with an indeterminate play of signifiers, but to the end of mapping the imaginary onto concrete spaces and histories. To me, the essay exhibition is the negation of a certain kind of positivism, a certain kind of obscene, antirelational objectivism that is inscribed into the medium. Against the reifying machine of the exhibition, the essay exhibition is an exemplary dialogical space, a testing ground of ‘media-conditions’, in which subject–object

relations can be tested, experienced, scrutinised, deconstructed. My aim is to bring this historical conditioning into a condition of ‘tripping’, which simply means to mobilise and destabilise its certainties. So when I do ‘essayistic’ exhibitions, it is towards this end. But what is for you the difference between a thematic exhibition and an essay-exhibition? And another important question: your recent

The ‘thematic’, which is another notion you brought up in your string of questions, is too self-assured for my taste, too monolithic, too confident in the solidity of its ‘theme’. I don’t believe in ‘themes’ show on the artist-as-archaeologist, The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology began as a critical, polemical essay, and was then turned into a template for an exhibition. How did you deal with the critical and polemical dimension top left Dieter Roelstraete. Photo: Nathan Keay. © Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago top right Anselm Franke at the Animism conference at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2012. Photo: Jakob Hoff

in this transition? Was it necessary to give it up, because we tend to think that we can only exhibit things affirmatively? Dr I’d like to answer this series of questions by going back, firstly, to your distinction between curatorial work as essentially communicative and art work – both artistic practice and the artwork – as anticommunicative at best, which I think is quite useful: curating as the articulation of a type of discourse – this one material, perceptual, phenomenological, physical – that does not revolve, in essence, around the direct communication or relaying of content. Nice one. An exhibition is necessarily a rather direct form of communicating: no matter how abstruse or oblique the underlying curatorial premise, a concatenation, a stringing-together of objects, images and events, inevitably makes for a type of immediacy that cannot help but be experienced with a kind of physical directness that is unavailable to, say, an essay that tries to make the same point. In that sense the very notion of the essayexhibition is a bit of a contradiction in terms, although I do try to think of exhibitions as spatial constructs that can accommodate footnotes and parentheses much like an essay can. As for your question with regards to The Way of the Shovel: indeed, that project originally started its life as an essay that was quite critical of a certain cultural ambience

41. Replace all the ice in the Arctic with all that in the Antarctic

AR Asia-III-Roel & Franke.indd 95

02/05/2014 14:48

in twenty-first-century art production, and ended its life (for now at least) as an exhibition that cannot be other, in the end, than a form of endorsement of the very developments and symptoms and trends of which the original essay was somewhat critical. An exhibition, I think, is by definition a type of celebration – affirmation. No matter how critical or polemical the underlying premise… And that’s fine – that’s where and why curating and writing differ in my personal professional practice, that’s why I keep doing both. I keep trying – just to remind ourselves of the etymological root of the word ‘essay’ in the French verb for trying, attempting, speculating, guessing. The ‘thematic’, which is another notion you brought up in your string of questions, is too self-assured for my taste, too monolithic, too confident in the solidity of its ‘theme’. I don’t believe in ‘themes’. Do I like exhibitions (just like artworks) to be ‘about’ something, I wonder – which often makes me feel like a bit of a Philistine, actually. What do you think about this particular pressure – that both exhibitions and artworks, and indeed writing as well, should be ‘about’ something? And what do you think about the relationship between writing and curating more generally? aF Are you really sure exhibitions are necessarily affirmative celebrations? I’d like to return

AR Asia-III-Roel & Franke.indd 96

to this. But first, do exhibitions and works of art always have to be ‘about’ something? I think of it in exactly the terms you mention, namely as a ‘pressure’ only.Underneath it, the cultural frontiers move into this or that direction, never quite left to chance. To understand this pressure and its relation to the drifts and trends of cultural spaces is, I think, our task to diagnose and articulate. The pressure furthermore lies obviously in society and the order of things itself, and is entirely historical and political,

Within this form, the fact that all exhibitions ought to be affirmative and celebrative of what they exhibit can perhaps be challenged and art acts as a potentially anarchic (some would prefer the tired word ‘subversive’) force in relation to it. One of the curatorial questions is what direction we give to this anarchic potential. This is where history and politics kicks in. I understand this pressure to be a principal condition of the institution and medium that is the ‘exhibition’. It weighs upon every Animism conference at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2012. Photo: Jakob Hoff

exhibition space, and art has to wrench its spaces of mental sovereignty from it. It produces a certain reified facticity (which is why museums have so frequently been compared to mausoleums), but also a desire and demand for unambiguous meaning and identity. To conform to it means to equate the gaze with the act of identification and the act of naming, which in turn produces a very specific kind of ‘understanding’. This regime of representation, of course, has undergone several historical transformations. It used to be more about objectification and control, but is now more about animation, affect and subjectification, producing a certain kind of hypervisibility and the phantasm that everything can be communicated (and perhaps that everything is communication). The kind of ‘understanding’ that is possible within this regime of hypervisibility is highly specific; it’s similar to a kind of nontransformative, ideally real-time availability. I think that art is about the ever-renewed assurance that a different kind of ‘understanding’ is possible. For this experience, resistance to communication is crucial, or as Adorno would have it, mimesis without the compulsion to identify. The pressure has to be lifted, reflected, turned against itself, made to speak about its own conditions of production: this is what good exhibitions achieve.

42. Show your support to the democratic movement in one area by eating the food from there

02/05/2014 14:48

It doesn’t matter whether they do this through a more ‘poetic’ approach that desynchronises signifiers from signified and dissects the collective sign and body-space thus opened, or through a narrative that defies this sort of reifying positivism and the pacification of art through academic histories, etc. There must be narratives that are dangerous in their very implications on the order of things, that make us ‘trip’ in a certain sense, by which I mean that the aesthetic – between the sensory and the cognitive – itself is being put at risk, or denaturalised. How do we have to frame a work, in terms of narrative and space, such that the very existence of both subjective and objective reality hinges on it? I spend most of my time trying to find the right angle for the curatorial frame or narrative in this sense, a historically qualified ‘grounding’ that is capable of putting the implicit background assumptions that bear upon art to the fore, putting its parameters at disposition. To me, the essay exhibition would be a form that first of all is qualified as a matrix, that sets a dynamic of feedback in motion, of self-reference and self-monitoring. And within this form, the fact that all exhibitions ought to be affirmative and celebrative of what they exhibit can perhaps be challenged. This seems important to me. In Animism, I have tried something like this, perhaps successfully to a certain degree. To open up a terrain of ambiguity, in

which things exist precisely as symptomatic. That would mean to translate from the written essay the analysis of symptoms into an experiential format, which inscribes ourselves into the workings of the symptom, but also creates a distance from it, both at the same time. In The Whole Earth (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2013) Diedrich Diederichsen and I tried to create an analytical parcours of images and discourses around the counterculture of California towards networked neoliberalism, as a way to narrate a whole set of transformations through which we are still living right now, by taking measure of cultural imaginaries, their narrative logic and expectational horizons. It was crucial for us to make the entire exhibition with a diagnostic gaze, tracing certain movements and working with the collapse of dialectical constellations, of outlived oppositions if you will. A last note on writing/reading and exhibiting: I find the difference stunning, in terms of experience. I always find the fact curious that, while reading, we tend to think we

are smarter than we are, while in exhibitions, we are usually much duller. This difference can be exploited, I think! Dr There is much more to pick apart in these last remarks of yours than I fear we have time and/or space for here, but I do want to conclude – and invite this conversation to continue beyond the pages of this interview – by picking up on your remarks regarding the exhibition’s ‘reified facticity’, your reservations concerning the exhibition as affirmation and your closing intimation that ‘in exhibitions, we are usually much duller’. This is precisely what constitutes the difference, for me, between the essay as text and the essay as exhibition, and why I enjoy the difference between both: I like the fact that the exhibition is made up of hardheaded, wilful things (‘facts’, moments of reification); I like the dullness and firmness of these things, and the immediacy of my experience of it. In an exhibition, there’s only so much you can do in the way of (what, as a curator, you might think of as) bracketing, footnotes, interjections, parentheses, tangents. As a writer who is always using these tools in the formulation of long-winded, pathologically self-reflexive arguments, I find the irreversible linearity and directness of the exhibition… well, liberating. ar

Tony Tasset, Robert Smithson (Las Vegas), 1995. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. © the artist. Courtesy Kavi Gupta, Chicago & Berlin

43. Establish a day on which artists can cancel whatever art activities they wish

AR Asia-III-Roel & Franke.indd 97

02/05/2014 14:48

Koki Tanaka on the Impossible Project Interview by Aimee Lin

AR Asia-III-Koki Tanaka.indd 98

44. Take a minute every day to consider a future for democracy

02/05/2014 14:49

A Japanese artist who represented his country at last year’s Venice Biennale discusses a project that runs through the very fabric of this magazine (but not to the immediate right of these words) in terms of an experiment that might reveal potentials and possibilities and help broaden your narrow horizons… You never knew you needed his help, but you do

ARTREVIEW ASIA Your Impossible Project features in this issue of ArtReview Asia, running on the spine and across all the pages of the features section [readers – look at the bottom of the pages]. When did you start to develop this project? KOKI TANAKA I started to write the first instructions in 2008, but I don’t really remember why I started this text-based project. One thing that I remember is thinking that if I only plan ‘realistic’ or ‘realisable’ projects, then I might also be placing a limit on my imagination. I mean, we are surrounded by conditions that constrain us – economic or political situations, but also the laws of physics. Instead of allowing ourselves to be constrained by such things, we might be able to free ourselves through imaginative ideas. They could perhaps be unspecific, ridiculous, idealistic, wildly optimistic, but at the same time spoken without fear. ARA When I first heard about the Impossible Project, I thought it would be something very conceptual, but actually some of the instructions are quite practical (albeit impossible to complete). Why do you want to initiate (even if only in your audience’s imagination) these actions? KT It all reflects my personal experience – everyday awareness, conversations with my friends and my wife, reading – and it is based on the present social situation. It’s an archive of the random directions my thoughts follow, in a way. And I turn that into a more abstract sentence to make it more accessible, and I guess in that way, some people may recognise similar ideas that they might have in their minds in

daily life but never have a chance to focus on. I try to connect my reality to another’s. ARA Some of the instructions are completely impossible, such as ‘replace one colour with another’ or ‘exchange waters from different oceans’. But perhaps they are more suggestive of a change of perspective. What interests you about this? Does it reflect your own desires – perhaps to change your social identity (Japanese, male, artist) or physical features?

I’d like to present possibility – a possibility that we overlook even if it’s in our hands. We are somehow too lazy to realise or think it’s wierd to do certain things. However, if we are given an example (even if it is only text), we might be able to explore that potential. I want my project to be a sort of experiment in possibility… I am neither a creator of artwork nor an inventor of new things KT We have a tendency to categorise, label or name things in the world. We are all labelled, as you said. But is it permanent? I claim it’s temporary, because names, categories and labels change over time. Several hundred years ago what we now call Japan was not ‘Japan’, and the structure of the country was different. We stick

the label that we have now onto things in the past to create history and tradition, but it’s only a projected image of what we want to see. I am interested in examining this. It leads us to question why we interpret the world in a particular way, and suggests that there may be alternatives. ARA Some of the instructions seem more possible than impossible. Like to eat the food from a particular region to support the democratic movement that is happening there (instruction no 42). Perhaps this kind of action belongs to a different level of ‘impossible’: not ‘impossible’, but more like ‘we don’t do it because it is weird’. Some of your old works are begun from this point too. For example when you asked a group of people to perform actions, as in Precarious Task #2: Talking About Your Name While Eating Emergency Food (2012), or when you asked five people to play one piano at the same time (A Piano Played by Five Pianists at Once, 2012). How do you look at ‘the normal’ (or ‘the regular’), and ‘the abnormal’ (or ‘the irregular’)? KT I think I’d like to present possibility – a possibility that we overlook even if it’s in our hands. We are somehow lazy to realise or think it’s weird to do certain things. However, if we are given an example (even if it’s only in the text), we might be able to explore that potential. I want my project to be a sort of experiment in possibility. I would say I have been influenced by someone who opened a door before me. What I am doing since then is to keep the door open and try to open another door for someone else. In this sense, I am neither a creator of artwork

45. Participate in a social movement that you have never participated in

AR Asia-III-Koki Tanaka.indd 99

02/05/2014 14:49

above Take an Orange and Throw It Away Without Thinking Too Much, 2006, HD video, 7 min 12 sec. Created in a residency programme with Le Pavillon, the art research laboratory of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. preceding pages A Haircut By Nine Hairdressers At Once (Second Attempt), 2010, HD video, 28 min, Zindågi Salon, San Francisco. Production and Commission: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

100

AR Asia-III-Koki Tanaka.indd 100

48. Call all your friends before you give up something

02/05/2014 14:49

nor an inventor of new things. But that is the way that a chain of actions happens – one after another, so then later we could be far from where we started, at a place that we never thought we could be. It’s only at the end that we realise that we have opened so many doors to reach somewhere unknown. ARA Back to the instructions in the Impossible Project: have you ever followed any of these instructions and practised them? Could this project also become what you call a ‘collective act’? (And by the way, what is a ‘collective act’?) KT Yes, I tried ‘Love a friend who has betrayed you many times’. But actually it is quite difficult, I still couldn’t meet him. So this is a very personal instruction for myself. And of course, ‘46. Wear black clothes to support the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan’ and ‘47. Wear yellow clothes to support the antinuclear movement’ are both related to recent social movements in Taiwan and Japan, and as you see, that is what people do now. But I see these instructions existing for a longer period of time; ideally an artwork should exist for a long time. So if it lasts 100 years or so, people might not understand the context. However, they could join the antinuclear movement, for example, in the distant future. The project could be remembered and keep going in the relevant time and place. As for a ‘collective act’, I define it as people doing things collectively together. Like voting in an election, joining open-source software groups, having a drink together, protesters demonstrating and so on. I didn’t consider before that the Impossible Project could read as a ‘collective act’, but yes, instructions are basically open to anyone, so it could be collective. Maybe not

at the same time, but accumulating a sense of collectivity over a longer duration. ARA It’s interesting that you use the word ‘instruction’ to refer to the entries in this project. I think ‘instruction’ is part of your methodology – we could take your past works as examples, in which you gave instructions to an audience or to participants in your work to ‘act’, and the whole process as well as the result becomes the artwork. What is the role that you are playing in this? Why do you need to be the ‘instructor’?

I see these instructions as existing for a longer period of time; ideally an artwork should exist for a long time. If it lasts 100 years or so, people might not understand the context, but might end up joining the antinuclear movement KT I am interested in creating a framework. Even though I use the word ‘instruction’, I couldn’t instruct all the detail. That is why the end result of acting on the instructions can be various. And I don’t think the end result is my work. If you look at the previous project you mentioned, A Piano Played by Five Pianists at Once, is the end result of the music my work? It is their contribution, their work. I gave them the simple instruction ‘to play a piano together’ and a theme for the music – ‘soundtrack for collective engagement’. It affects the entire process. Usually the ‘instructor’ has a certain skill and knowledge of what they instruct – they teach – but I couldn’t. I could say I am an ignorant instructor. My

instruction requires total dependence on participants and their skills and thoughts. And this forces all of us (including me) to be able to come to terms with a sense of uncertainty, because no one knows how to realise the work. I am curious about how people react at such moments. ARA Text plays a special role in your art, but it can be difficult to present in the context of an artworld (at least the commercial part of it) that favours the spectacular. Here it’s presented throughout the magazine, but how else do you like to present the Impossible Project? KT It’s a good question. I have presented this project as printed text a few times, but I am currently rethinking how to present it in line with the way my practice has evolved. I am curious about open-ended discussion with the participants, and I want to develop that. So in my current thinking, the work needs several rooms, in each of which there is an instructor who has in his or her mind one of the instructions. Once an audience enters the room, the instructor reveals that instruction and starts to discuss how it might be realised. There is very little distinction between the ‘instructors’ and the audience, since the former have not been briefed on how to make it happen (because, of course, the realisation of the instruction is often impossible). Both parties face difficulty and potential failure. But everyone rethinks their conceptions of possibility and impossibility, and travels to a place they (and me) can’t envisage in advance. That outcome might be beautiful or humorous or a total failure. ar Koki Tanaka is taking part in Journal, 25 June – 7 September, ICA, London

above A Piano Played By Five Pianists At Once (First Attempt), 2012, video installation, HD video, two drawings (61 × 48 cm each), temporary walls, 57 min, dimensions variable. Created with University Art Galleries, University of California, Irvine, Claire Trevor School of the Arts all images Courtesy the artist

49. Write letters to a historical figure whom you respect

AR Asia-III-Koki Tanaka.indd 101

101

02/05/2014 14:49

prepare for the best…

VERNISSAGE Wednesday 13 August 6pm - 10pm For tickets and further information visit: www.melbourneartfair.com.au Melbourne Art Fair is presented by the Melbourne Art Foundation, a not for profit organisation benefiting living artists.

Venue Partner

MAF_art_review_ad_001.indd 1 102_ARA.indd 102

Government Partners

Major Partners

Hotel Partner

04/04/2014 12:37 10:05 02/05/2014

Art Reviewed

50. Reflect how humanity’s ethical thought changes within a timeframe of 10,000 years 103

AR Asia-III-Dividers-RESUPPLY.indd 103

02/05/2014 14:19

Made in Commons Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam 30 November – 26 January Over the years, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam has developed something of a tradition of staging exhibitions with a postcolonial focus, including this one, realised together with the KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Together, both institutions selected ten artists whose work revolves around the notion of the commons – a loaded term vis-à-vis the relationship between a coloniser and its former colony – tackling themes like collaboration, sharing of resources, labour, ownership, authorship, etc. The work of the artist Maryanto, for example, involves a table with a red tablecloth and empty mugs, the remains of an intervention during the opening. Next to it, a video displays footage from Dutch families living in Indonesia during the 1930s. Selametan (2013) takes its name from a Javanese term for a community gathering over food and drinks. At the opening, Maryanto invited people from both countries to discuss that period; a typical and somehow predictable relational-aesthetics gig with a postcolonial sauce. The same could be said about the contribution of Jatiwangi Art Factory, though the collective managed to refer to an interesting local practice. A decade ago, any elected head of the

village in Jatiwangi would allow a villager to take all the head’s belongings to their home, with the idea that the property of the head of the village belongs to the public. Jatiwangi Art Factory set up a pasar kaget, a kind of stock market, in which the villagers could come and claim what they wanted. In return, the artists went to the homes of the receivers to take some of their personal belongings. The result of this last step is shown in a video and a display of objects, both exotic (local currency, traditional cutlery, etc) and Westernised (a Barbie rucksack). Papermoon Puppet Theatre, best known for its staging of dark historical events, presents dolls with which the visitor can play, take pictures and write a commentary on Post-it notes. That endeavour is described in the press text as ‘an attempt to establish co-production, shared authorship, and an emancipated audience’, which is one of the best examples of how fancy terms can be used to spice up a childish, weak and ridiculous concept. One of the few clever works in the show dealing with the notion of exchange, power relationships and outsourcing is 7 Nights (2013), a contribution by Vincent Vulsma. The artist uses seven different latex mattresses made from rubber in tropical regions in Southeast Asia.

Expensive, ergonomic mattresses for Western consumers are the product of a very labourintensive, nocturnal process on the part of the local workers. The shape of the foam-latex sculptures on display is based on the sleep patterns of one of the curators established with sleep-recording data. The duration of sleep dictated the number of hours of work carried out by a plantation worker, hence elaborating an interesting relationship between two worlds: the manual labour of the developing countries and the white-collar labour of the first world. Though quite a lot of contributions are disappointing, the majority have been combined in a coherent manner, fitting to the general theme that is tackled from various angles – while also presenting more internationally widespread examples of exchange and collaboration. Hence, at its best – as in Maryanto’s work and that of Papermoon Puppet Theatre – the exhibition offers an insight into some interesting local Indonesian practices while establishing a connection between Indonesia and Holland. But those moments are unfortunately rare, as the majority of the show soaks in easy relational aesthetics with good intentions but all too obvious content. Sam Steverlynck

Vincent Vulsma, 7 Nights, 2013 (installation view). Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam

104

AR Asia-III-Reviewed-RESUPPLY

ArtReview Asia

.indd 104

02/05/2014 14:52

Liu Wei Density White Cube Mason’s Yard, London 29 January – 15 March It’s hard to imagine that the elegant, contemplative and unapologetically minimalist sculptural forms on display at White Cube are by the very same artist who first sputtered onto the London art scene in the chokehold of the 2008 Saatchi Gallery exhibition The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art. Liu Wei’s contributions to the latter consisted of a sagging, sepia-toned cityscape constructed entirely out of dog chews, and a two-metre-long pile of excrement made of tar, studded with plastic toy soldiers. While both works memorably dramatised the uneasy affinities between base materiality and materialism, consumerism and conflict, they were by and large all bark and no bite: contemporary Chinese art ‘lite’, made to order. Just six years later and at the opposite end of the spectrum, Density, as the title suggests, is a virtuoso display of substance over style. Liu has clearly and cleanly stripped all traces of abject histrionics from his practice in favour of a terse, architectonic vocabulary of form. White Cube’s ground floor space is sparsely populated by a series of geometric panels consisting of salvaged

steel that look as though they have been cleanly sliced from the smooth flanks of skyscrapers. From a different angle, they resemble empty billboards, still waiting to fulfil their clamorous function. In their formal rigour and stark objecthood, they give very little away. Appropriately, perhaps, it is only when one descends into the lower-ground-floor atrium that the exhibition as a whole gains gravitas. Here the viewer is greeted by a looming cluster of seemingly perfect primary forms – a pyramid, a sphere and neatly incised variations of the two – surrounded by tactile wall pieces teased out of rigidly folded canvas. So far, so formal. On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that each of the large sculptural units is actually crafted from thousands of densely packed books. The titles on their spines are turned away from us and orientated towards an unseen centre, so that all we see is a blank strata of tightly compressed pages rendered into a smooth surface of muted, gradient shades. The contents of the books remain hidden. Although these imposing

structures are deliberately unreadable, there is a curious sensuousness to this elegant play on ‘volumes’, matched by the haptic folds of canvas tamed into geometric shapes on the walls. The latter series, enigmatically entitled Jungle (2013–4), is an intriguing contrast to the polished steel scaffolds one first encountered on the ground floor. Both are acutely pareddown variations on Liu’s longstanding interest in the built environment, the ‘urban jungle’, inviting us to explore the visible as well as invisible structures that shape our experience of the everyday. Density I (2013), the group of book sculptures, is no doubt the strongest work in Liu’s commanding solo exhibition. Text dissolves into texture, meaning into matter. We are invited to perform an archaeology of knowledge if we so wish, to guess at the hidden contents and question the ideological ties and discursive formations that bind us as individuals in society. Or we can simply marvel at the sheer power of these imposing forms. Liu provides the scaffold, but we are left to construct our own meanings. Wenny Teo

May 2014

AR Asia-III-Reviewed-RESUPPLY

.indd 105

105

02/05/2014 14:52

Subodh Gupta Everything Is Inside National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi 17 January – 16 March Subodh Gupta’s midcareer retrospective could only have been realised in India; his recent large-scale installations would be much more difficult and expensive to fabricate without the work of his local studio staff and resources. But more than that, his more personal, rurally inspired early works are also more approachable and appealing in the context of the ‘real’ (at the same time surreal) soil of the country. In New Delhi, which provides a domestic perspective from which to read the show, distracting discussions about nationalism and cultural symbolism are neutralised: here we can pay attention to the artworks. Curated by Germano Celant, the show occupies both the new and the old buildings of the National Gallery of Modern Art. The huge mirrorpolished steel tree Dada (2010–4) located in the centre of the garden is visible from the street; in the evening, the tree reflects the lights of New Delhi through the city’s damp and foul air. A constellation of Gupta’s huge installations – many now familiar from international exhibitions – have been arranged in the museum’s spectacular modern extension, together with recent large paintings of dishes

carrying leftover food, and well-known sculptures from earlier in his career. The sitespecific Thōsa Pani (Solid Water, 2013) is a huge curly structure made of stainless steel kitchenware that flushes from the wall of the museum towards the centre of the building, like a typical South Asian flood in the rainy season. It sets up a conversation with its neighbour, the suspended wooden ship of All in the Same Boat (2012–3), which is filled with pots and pans and spinning ceiling fans, reminiscent of news footage of people loading small boats after a flood. Saving everything one owns and values in a single carefully packed, transportable unit – literally ‘everything is inside’ – is a recurring image in Gupta’s works; here at the National Gallery, which was built by workers who came to the city with their packaged possessions and carry their lunches in stainless-steel lunchboxes, these installations and sculptures seem like monuments to the lives of ordinary people in India. The old building of the National Gallery, the historic Jaipur House, is filled with sculptures, early video, performance works and painting. Gobar (cow dung), kitchenware and patlas (low wooden seats) are the objects Gupta

chooses to translate the daily life of rural India into ritual practice for modern life. The former lobby space houses a reconstruction of My Mother and Me (1997), a cylindrical architectural structure composed of layered cowpats. Used as fuel, architectural material, floor covering and even articles of worship, gobar is the materialised symbol of traditional India and still plays an important role today. Gupta buried himself in it to purify his body and soul in Pure (1999) and used it to paint handmade paper in Bihari (1999; Bihar is Gupta’s hometown). His material exploration extends further; in workers’ sacks he finds the transfer from heaviness to lightness; via brass he makes mundane or abandoned objects monumental and sacred; through marble and stainless steel, the most popular materials in modern India, he draws the picture of its people’s desires and their materialised realisation. If the monumental works installed in the garden and the modern extension cement Gupta’s international position and achievements as India’s leading contemporary artist, the Jaipur House is more like a journey back home, and touching for it. Aimee Lin

Ray, 2012 (installation view, Everything Is Inside, 2014, National Gallery of Modern Art). Photo: Graham Crouch/Getty. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, New York & Zürich

106

AR Asia-III-Reviewed-RESUPPLY

ArtReview Asia

.indd 106

02/05/2014 14:52

Naiza Khan The Weight of Things Koel Gallery, Karachi 23 January – 10 February Naiza Khan’s exhibition of new works continues her intense and ongoing investigation of the city of Karachi and the island of Manora within its harbour. Addressing the intimate interrelation of the artist as she moves and locates herself between these spaces, this work also thrusts Khan’s practice out of the space of the studio and into the urban landscape of her often violent and ever-changing city, where she becomes almost a wandering archivist, collecting, documenting and plotting sites that exist between the personal and the public, and speak of shared histories and memories. The two videoworks on display address these multifaceted layers of place and space, events and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity. Homage (2010) documents a quiet intervention: a day spent at Manora, painting a pile of discarded school furniture blue, at the site where a wall fell due to neglect and disrepair, crushing four small children under it. The blue is the same as their gravestones. Hanging nearby, The Scattering (2013), a large screenprint on paper, sets these objects into violent motion, fragmented blue debris exploding across the surface. The second video, The Observatory (2012), maps the disintegrating internal structure of the Manora weather observatory, its audio a narrative of weather reports across British India from 1939, found among the debris lying in the ruins, referencing boundaries, broken and whole, and movements, effects and affects across geographies and terrains. The videoworks

become as memorial sites, constructed from historical narratives and subjective experience, where memory and forgetfulness stand faceto-face with each other. Secrets from the Nautical Almanac, a series of delicate and complex prints, present visuals of 1960s advertisements found in the nautical almanacs of the Manora weather observatory. Laser-cut with minute text from the speeches of General Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s second president, they mimic the bookworms that had already gotten to the original documents when they were found. The large-scale drawings and oil paintings push forward through this documentary process to one of assimilation and absorption, resulting in the creation of spaces that seem rooted in the real, but are simultaneously imagined and deeply personal. In the charcoal How We Mark the Land Becomes Part of Its History (2014), a distant urban landscape is seen through a pulsing sandstorm, the large expanse of water in the foreground evoking voyages to and from the metropolis and the islands – voyages through time and space, scored with gestural marks that inhabit the interstitial spaces and textual elements, lending both an immediate and an internal intimacy. Composed of layers, fragments and movements, this subjective sense also pervades the two large oil paintings. Between the land and the sea, the remembered and forgotten, also exist small objects of personal use and public waste, the debris of human bodies that curator Nada Raza describes

as ‘bronze accumulations of toys and quotidian objects, flotsam and jetsam’. These small sculptures (Constellations Adrift, 2014) are mounted onto a wall that is painted the deep blue of the endless ocean, forming an imaginary constellation of islands, spaces formed between the discarded and the found, the valueless that is monumentalised and immortalised. In an interview with Iftikhar Dadi, Khan cites a ‘wonderful text’ about how space has been measured and ‘hierarchies have been disrupted’, referring to Foucault’s ‘Of Other Spaces’ (from a 1967 lecture, published in English in 1984). In this essay he also speaks of heterotopias, saying ‘probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.’ In the juxtaposition of Manora, this tiny island of 3,000 residents and under the heavy control of the navy, that exists as a microcosm of memory, loss, history, capitalism and culture, migration and immigration, and the swarming urban metropolis that is the city of Karachi, Khan is not only able to touch upon exactly such spaces that Foucault refers to as counter-sites, but also to bring the intimacy of her own subjective experience to them. Zarmeené Shah

The Scattering, 2013, screenprint on Magnani paper, 70 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR Asia-III-Reviewed-RESUPPLY

.indd 107

107

02/05/2014 14:52

Liang Yue The Quiet Rooms Shanghart H-Space, Shanghai 5 December – 7 January A quiet space is not the first thing you expect when you think of Shanghai. The hustling, bustling city with endless traffic, jam-packed pedestrians and nonstop, ongoing demolishing and constructing, offers everything but quietness. So the title of Shanghai-based artist Liang Yue’s second solo exhibition at Shanghart H-Space already creates a confrontation with its context. The moment I enter the gallery, darkness and quietness embrace me. Moon Moon (2012), a silent, closeup video of a cold moon shot through an astronomical telescope glimmers on the gallery wall. The image hardly changes over the 20 minutes of looped footage, yet the soft edge of the moon image created by the telescope’s enormous lens wiggles in a strangely suggestive way. For reasons I can’t tell, the soundtrack from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) starts to echo in my ears. Space images bring the fantastical from near to far,

yet it is through looking inward that Liang started her odyssey as an artist. For many years she has focused her camera lens on herself and the city that shaped her. Favouring static images infused with unexpected blurry focus, she has recorded the triviality of her daily life and segments of emotional upheaval, turning boredom into excellence. (Bear in mind that Liang used to be a member of a renowned underground punk band in Shanghai.) But in her latest works, as shown here, Liang has shifted her focus beyond the city borders. The Quiet Rooms is about encountering nature through Liang’s camera lens. In one room, three screens show three different natural scenes: plants in fog, fish in water and leaves lying on the ground, scarcely moving at all. The room turns even quieter as I walk soundlessly on the soft carpet specially installed for the show (several inviting mats are casually spread in front of the screens); watching turns

into a meditative process, in which the entire body participates. The longer I gaze at the seemingly motionless pictures, the more things start to happen in them: a spider weaving a net, a person walking, a thread of sunray reflecting on a lively brook… If we only allow ourselves time and patience to see, nature will reveal wonders. Alas, time and patience have become among the most precious things in our modern lives. A three-channel video installation opens the door towards A Quiet Room (2012). We see snowy lakes, ocean waves and a crystal blue sky over a winter landscape; all look so foreign under a Shanghai gaze. Just as the tranquillity of nature is evoked by Liang’s extremely static but beautiful cinematography, a sharp sound of a car dashing on a highway pierces through the serenity. Liang Yue’s quiet rooms have become a metaphor for longing. They reach the limit of the void and behold it in deep quietness. Wang Kaimei

Moon Moon, 2012, HD, 16:9, colour, no sound, 20 min

108

AR Asia-III-Reviewed-RESUPPLY

ArtReview Asia

.indd 108

02/05/2014 14:52

Liu Ding Lake Washington Antenna Space, Shanghai 29 March – 15 May On the one hand, Liu Ding’s exhibition is an anthology of apparently heterogeneous works; on the other it’s evidence of the research with which the artist has been engaged over the past two years. Liu’s conceptual approach explores and challenges the boundaries of authorship, the absurd constitution of both prior and experiential knowledge and traditional ways of exhibiting art. At Antenna Space, Liu examines the phenomenology of socialist realism by reproducing stylistic conventions and subjects associated with it, most of them heavily shaped by political thought. The works realised in more traditional media expose the permanence of cultural and ideological habits within a – he argues – superficially mutating world. As a young conceptual artist from China, Liu is at the nerve centre of this mutation; but having grown up in a cultural context – the Chinese one – that remains in the thrall of strict canons, he clearly perceives the paradox of dealing with different yet simultaneous articulations and outcomes of the same ideology, and the varying ideas of ‘progress’ that this generates within the artworld and society as a whole. The show is roughly divided into two main bodies of work: the one might be defined as ‘formalist’ and includes those ‘traditional’ works (paintings and a sculpture) made according to the tenets of Soviet (and Chinese) socialist realism; the other, related to the artist’s personal experience and re-elaboration of socialism, is composed of documentary material including photographs, prints and reproductions of artworks that have been very influential in the implantation of modern art in China. Lake Washington (2013), to which the show owes its

title, comprises a photograph taken by the artist during a trip to the US, depicting a young blonde woman and a dog sitting on a yacht on the eponymous lake. In the gallery, the photograph becomes the basis for an installation made of two small prints hanging next to each other – one the right way up and the other turned upside down – and a wallpaper printed with the same photograph and applied over the entrance space. The image is at once familiar and alien: it might look like a highly stylised commercial, or one of those paparazzi snaps familiar from the pages of tabloid newspapers, but it is actually the enigmatic record of a moment in time, crystallised for its capacity to evoke something that is outside and beyond time. Yet, above all, it is the firsthand record of a misunderstanding (the artist has always erroneously thought the lake to be located near the city of Washington, DC, while it is actually near Seattle), which functions as a paradigm for the whole show. Works such as Evidence (2012), Absolute Relationship (2014) and Risk-taker (2012) assemble found photographic materials from the 1960s to the 1990s, whose self-evident truth is a shortcut to the illustration of the ways in which ideology moulds not only the content of images, but also the arrangement of the various elements in it. The occasional reversal of images further reveals the manipulative power behind aesthetic ideology/ies. Karl Marx in 2013 (2014) is an installation taking centre stage in the main hall and including all sorts of documentary material (including a video) related to the artist’s trip to Marx’s grave in London, a site that is visited by hordes of Chinese tourists every year: the complete documentation of this space

becomes an effective way to illustrate how Marxism is buried with Marx, and what is left of it is the romantic, nostalgic quest for an ideal. The diptych A Message (2013) is composed of two paintings commissioned from a professional painter: re-presenting the strategy by which subjects were paralysed in a static, flattened and nonhierarchical composition in the heyday of socialist realism is a way to point out the permanence of a similar attitude, despite the apparent renewal of visual language and tools. One possible way to understand the real meaning of the word ‘change’, or even more significantly a missed promise of change, is for Liu to ‘haunt’ the past and its models, illustrating the mechanism through which ideology becomes operational, as in For the Sake of Ten Thousand (2014), a sculpture that presents the perfect prototype of the chiselled face of the socialist-realist ‘hero’. In its cold, systematic setup, Lake Washington and its interconnected – yet autonomous – parts still manage to convey the artist’s thorough research into the ‘phenomenology of politics’, and to demonstrate how, within a system in which everything is political, ideology affects the way we understand and represent the world. The unifying gallery space makes it hard to recreate an optimal interpretative pathway; however, this can be fully built only by a careful evaluation of the narratives behind each work. The risk implied in a show like Lake Washington is that it blurs (or erases) the boundaries between ‘art narratives’ and art itself. But because ‘what constitutes art’ in still not clear to many, this can be also seen as its quality. Mariagrazia Costantino

Absolute Relationship, 2014, collage, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

May 2014

AR Asia-III-Reviewed-RESUPPLY

.indd 109

109

02/05/2014 14:52

Marrakech Biennale 5 Various venues, Marrakech 26 February – 31 March Biennials sprout from diverse seeds planted by artists, politicians or patrons, but their vision and tenor often only become clear after they’ve grown beyond the sapling stage. In its fifth edition, the Marrakech Biennale – launched in 2005 by British entrepreneur Vanessa Branson – seemed at last to fully connect to its location, with work that dealt with postcolonialism, migration and identity; as well as, in the words of the event’s visual arts curator, Hicham Khalidi, “fictional spaces”. In the visual arts (the biennale also included cinema, literature and performance, each discipline’s curator working under artistic director Alya Sebti), this edition was also far more integrated into the fabric of the city than in years past, asking ‘Where Are We Now?’ as both slogan and curatorial leitmotif. Khalidi, a Holland-bred Moroccan now based in Belgium, assembled a mix of 43 Moroccan and foreign artists whose crisscrossing themes created an exhibition that meandered through locations in Marrakech’s old city (the sixteenthcentury El Badi Palace; the hauntingly beautiful Dar Si Said municipal museum; the empty former Bank al Maghrib on Jemaa el Fna square) and parts of the new (the Théâtre Royal and L’Blassa, an abandoned Art Deco building ‘squatted’ by emerging artists and a ground-floor café by artist-designer Hassan Hajjaj). It’s worth noting that the venues themselves are liminal spaces: buildings that are ruins, unfinished, abandoned, unused or, in the case of Dar Si Said, financially endangered. This biennale was about understatement – or better put, statements made softly. The

huge palace grounds were sparsely installed with only ten works, including Cevdet Erek’s subtle but powerful sound installation, Courtyard Ornamentation with Sounding Dots and a Prison (2014), which emits clicking sounds from hidden loudspeakers, mimicking the storks tsk-tsking each other while nesting on the ruin’s ramparts. At Dar Si Said, Walid Raad inserted ‘remakes’ of panels from Western museums into the exhibition spaces, putting Eastern and Western museum architecture into dialogue in just one of many intriguing interventions (another was Pamela Rosenkranz dyeing the courtyard fountain’s water blue). Some works fell short or raised unsettling questions: The Khamlichi sisters, three Moroccan teenagers who paint and perform, felt dramatically out of place. Éric van Hove’s highly anticipated V12 Laraki (2013), displayed on an altarlike plinth, was a beautifully crafted replica of a Mercedes motor; yet as an object it felt fetishised and opened a postcolonial can of worms. What does it mean when a Belgian (although one with an African past; he was born in Algeria and raised in Cameroon) has Moroccan artisans spend nearly a year creating a replica of a German motor in bone, metal, leather and wood, even if the artisans now run an art-production studio? But pleasant surprises abounded, including a disproportionate amount of good video: Burak Arikan’s Monovacation (2013) was a hypnotic multiscreen riff on how the tourism industry idealises destinations, Tala Madani’s short video animations of men behaving badly (including Pipedreams, 2014) were transfixing

and Katarina Zdjelar’s Into the Interior (The Last Day of the Permanent Exhibition) (2014) elegantly meditated on Belgium’s last colonial museum. Hamza Halloubi’s To Leave (2011–2) – nearly four unedited minutes of a departure on a Tangier road, starting with a closeup of his brother’s face and slowly moving away as twilight falls – was pure poetry. Grounding the event was an emphasis on sound and performance, much of it in public space (Jemaa el Fna is a ‘UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’, and Khalidi’s background is in sound art). In the Théâtre Royal was a series of soundworks – a single eerie piece for the half-hour I spent in the space – by the collective Freq_Out. Saout Radio’s 97 curated sound art pieces playing in ten designated taxis worked remarkably well for both biennale visitors and surprised locals. Performances like Saâdane Afif’s twilight geometry lessons, delivered by an Arabic speaker on the square, attracted huge and tenaciously curious local crowds. Here, though, there was simply too much on, and ephemeral work is by nature hard to capture; Berlin-based curator Clara Meister’s Singing Maps and Underlying Melodies outdoor performances with local musicians were much discussed, but so often double-booked with other events that I missed them (a documentation video is apparently being produced). Where were we? This time, right there. The fifth Marrakech Biennale wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t have to be. It was more mature, and above all present, and relevant on local, regional and global levels. Kimberly Bradley

Can & Aslı Altay, An Archipelago from the Mediterranean, 2014. Commissioned by Marrakech Biennale 5. Photo: Pierre Antoine

110

AR Asia-III-Reviewed-RESUPPLY

ArtReview Asia

.indd 110

02/05/2014 14:52

Florian Pumhösl Miguel Abreu Gallery, Eldridge and Orchard streets, New York 2 March – 27 April Florian Pumhösl’s first solo exhibition in the US also inaugurates Miguel Abreu’s new fourth-floor showrooms at 88 Eldridge Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, just around the corner from Abreu’s original storefront on Orchard Street. The older space has been updated. Gone is the old linoleum grid on the floor, an artefact from a previous tenant, which has been replaced with what look like smart, sand-coloured limestone paving stones – a bit of the outside on the inside, as Abreu describes it. The concrete floors of the Eldridge Street space are notable too. They have been painted grey, but otherwise retain their seams and uneven spots, as well as the gridded walk that belies the wet work that must have been a staple of whatever sweatshop was once there. Rather than hide all of the building’s hundred-year-old construction, such as the pipe-reinforced beams and solid-wood floor joists, Abreu has left them exposed – cleaned up and painted white, of course. Formerly-bricked-up windows

now look out over the rooftops of the Lower East Side. Sun floods the long entry hall. Why the digression on gallery aesthetics? Because there is meaning in such details. Lines, alignments, angles, junctions, planes, patterns, rhythms, echoes – these things are important. They are evidence of layered intelligence at work, of engineering, labour, planning and contingency. Call them marks of decision. And because Pumhösl, according to Abreu, “had some crucial ideas that he contributed to the design phase of the project”, they are equally central to the works on the walls – a bit of the outside on the inside, one could say. Those insides are all composed of oilpaint lines in dark terracotta red that have been individually ‘stamped’ onto ceramic plaster panels. One series, at the Orchard Street space, abstracts from letterforms of the Georgian Mkhedruli alphabet; the other, at Eldridge Street, abstracts from a nineteenthcentury rabbinical map of Israel. These sources are mere pretexts, however; their

import has less to do with the contexts and histories they may evoke for the audience (who are unlikely to recognise the source forms in any of Pumhösl’s abstractions) than with the fact that there are pretexts for the works at all: that the lines and angles and, in the case of the letterforms, curves that we are offered bear the weight of decision itself. Duchamp called it inframince – ‘infrathin’ – this decisive border that separates what is meaningful from what is not. Pumhösl’s panels are like antennae for the inframince, tuning one’s attention to the layered intelligence at work both inside and outside the art. In this Pumhösl is surprisingly close to Agnes Martin, whose canvases always exceeded the unnerving sense of their self-referentiality. But Pumhösl is less enamoured of the subject, of the subject’s own perceptions of ‘landscape’, which was always Martin’s ‘outside’. Pumhösl’s outside, at least in these works, is the ‘map’ and ‘language’. The view is from nowhere, but it still looks good. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Florian Pumhösl, 2014 (installation view, Miguel Abreu Gallery, Eldridge Street, New York). Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York

May 2014

AR Asia-III-Reviewed-RESUPPLY

.indd 111

111

02/05/2014 14:52

3rd Colombo Art Biennale: Making History Various venues, Colombo 31 January – 9 February In front of a colonial bungalow, a circle of breezeblocks is grouped under the shady canopy of a kitul tree as makeshift stools and the setting for The Speakers – A Gathering of More Than 5 Voices (2014). Thor McIntyre-Burnie’s mellow gathering is well equipped for lingering visitors, with tartly brewed green tea handed out when one joins the circle. Spoken Twitter feeds emanate from stripped-down speakers swinging from suspended umbrellas in the branches. An accompanying board cites the spoken ‘Hashtags of the Day’, ‘#Water, Weliveriya, Sri Lanka, Jan 25, Tahrir, Gezi Park’. These debated subjects and sites of protest feel a long way from the quiet of the Goethe-Institut’s garden in Colombo. The third Colombo Art Biennale (CAB) is set across eight main venues this year. Established in 2009 to promote Sri Lankan contemporary art and culture, the biennale presents local and international artists, chosen by the CAB board, directors and curators. McIntyre-Burnie’s installation at the Goethe-Institut is located in Colombo 7, the neighbourhood of most CAB venues. Round the corner, the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute hosts an interactive arm of CAB’s ongoing international artist programme. Tristan Al-Haddad worked with 17 local bricklayers to create Womb/Tomb (2014) in the institute’s manicured gardens. A central raised platform is enclosed by a high-sided oval of oscillating clay bricks, with a slice of sky framed above Al-Haddad’s intended-tobe-supine visitors, offering unusual waves of meditative solitude. The understatement of the neutral orange space sits happily at odds with the institute’s imposing architecture. Much of CAB’s 2014 theme, Making History, recalls the format and thematic threads of its two predecessors, Imagining Peace (2009) and

Becoming (2012). However, the seven satellite exhibitions, such as McIntyre-Burnie’s and Al-Haddad’s, benefit from their physical separation from the central exhibition’s three floors at the J.D.A. Perera Gallery. The alternative spaces are more manageable in their scale and self-contained format. While the main show introduces some new inclusions, a familiar group of local artists and curators is endorsed once again. The Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology (PGIAR) is a welcome addition to the usual venues. Cause, effect and the cycles of historymaking are familiar topics of CAB exhibitions, but effective within the PGIAR’s environment. Susanta Mandal’s How Long Does It Take to Complete a Circle? (2010), a painfully slow wall-mounted loop of cogs and pulleys, demands a patient audience. Its trundling rig implies an unassuming parallel to current Sri Lankan politics. Rakhi Peswani’s calico and cotton pendulums pick up on the focus of unresolved conflict. Coffee and cloth dye stains the oversize hanging kitbags of Inside the Melancholic Object (An Elegy for a Migrant Worker) (2012). The bulky presences share CAB’s space in the Park Street Mews warehouse complex with Tagged (2009), Khalifa Al-Obaidly’s mugshots of workers in Qatar, their foreheads branded with painted barcodes. The series points to the adverse conditions of the wider South Asian workforce of the Emirates in this context. A collection of drawings at Theertha Artists’ Collective’s new gallery presents the result of a three-year collaboration with 1 Shanthi Road, Bangalore. Sethusamudram envisions the mythical bridge between Sri Lanka and India. A surreal vision of unity is arranged in a lo-fi display of unframed, untitled and unattributed drawings. Mohan Kumar T’s small watercolour is

a utopian view of two landmasses separated by a gap just wide enough for tiny naked men to leap across with bundles of possessions and a flotilla of elephants lassoed to clouds. Other works share recurrent motifs of guns, knives and bloodshed, revealing the reality stacked up against the concept. Sethusamudram is one of several preexisting projects brought into CAB’s programming around the city. Travelling exhibitions of Rosemarie Trockel’s work and Homelands are autonomous shows with tangential contributions to the body of the biennale. Nearby, Barefoot Gallery opened its doors for a greatesthits retrospective of its programme, which began in 1967. Although the content of each is enticing, it’s distant from the curatorial vision of promoting young artists or engaging with this moment in Sri Lankan art. With daily events and performances throughout its woefully short ten-day run, the biennale is a substantial undertaking and promotes a tangible artistic community. As CAB regional curator Amit Kumar Jain puts it, this is ‘Sri Lanka’s biggest art event’: an accurate description of an eccentric biennale structure. While this year’s CAB engages with more international and local artists, there is an air of needless expansion. Hopefully time will allow for transparency and a fresh curatorial theme. A biennale designed to showcase the Sri Lankan art community globally has a responsibility to ensure a balanced overview of the scene in all its diversity. CAB has the capacity to contribute to nationwide and regional conversations begun by other young initiatives such as the Dhaka Art Summit and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. It is important that it grows in that direction and doesn’t rest on its laurels. Josephine Breese

Rakhi Peswani, Inside the Melancholic Object (An Elegy for a Migrant Worker), 2012, cotton calico, handloom cotton, coffee, synthetic wool, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

112

AR Asia-III-Reviewed-RESUPPLY

ArtReview Asia

.indd 112

02/05/2014 14:52

Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Cartagena de Indias Various venues, Cartagena de Indias 7 February – 7 April The white rocking chairs dance, empty, in the sea breeze on the chipped marble of the hotel patio. Footing it through the narrow streets under long balconies and past chubby magnolias, I try not to think about Pirates of the Caribbean (2003); a mention of New Orleans feels safe, cocaine does not. With diminished political violence and an economic bounce in Colombia, the sultry port and resort town of Cartagena de Indias inaugurated its first international art biennial with a cheerful shimmer of local pride and, even as a few wounds still weep, 101 international and 34 Colombian artists and collectives. Cartagena hoards a few centuries of pirates, ex-slaves, colonial casualties and cocaine cowboys ghosting its streets, and though Colombia isn’t any longer common with violence, you can still spot its stain. Curated by Berta Sichel with a handful of collaborators, and scattered around the Centro Histórico, the biennial sneaks into converted convents and conditional chapels, ancient tunnels and abandoned dance halls, dank shacks and the odd torture museum. Explicitly stated to be a somewhat literal ‘issues-oriented project’,

this nascent exhibition is probably too young really to do anything but reconnoitre its own territory and try to let a few cool winds blow in from across the sea, but it does this convincingly enough. The show is mainly quartered into four museums (ranging from the Palace of the Inquisition to the Caribbean Naval Museum), each rooted in a different story that creeps like a vine from the legends and horrors of the tropical town. Tiles snaking with colour and pattern vibe into a trio of Philip Taaffe’s imaginary landscape paintings; the nomadic witchcraft of Anna Boghiguian fills a chapel in the church in the old freed-slaves district; the delicate sands collected from the junked and poverty-bombed Cartagena hinterlands by Miguel Ángel Rojas sieve into delicate patterns of Arabic-style tiles, one of the many farflung immigrant groups to settle in this port of call. Much of the exhibition (like the city) comes together like the scrapped-together books of Hassan Sharif, tough and fragile, bearing many scars of its trashy fragments and Odyssean stories. (A few works had to be moved between venues, limited by the humidity.)

A few works attempt, both directly and indirectly, to feel through a half-century of violence in the country. In a heartbreaker of a video, Réquiem NN (2006–13) by Juan Manuel Echavarría, that is included in the stellar section of the biennial devoted to Colombian artists, a gardener carefully clips a topiary cross into the grass of a fresh grave. A bend in the Magdalena River near the town of Puerto Berrío catches all the dead bodies placed there by the soldiers and drugrunners who meant them to be washed away and disappeared. The townspeople ‘adopt’ the bodies, often lending their family names even, some doing diligence to the dead in burial and care of their graves in order to receive blessings from the unknowns’ souls (no names – hence the ‘NN’ of the title). Another video in the biennial, Dana Levy’s The Wake (2011), features a hallway packed with vitrines of dead butterflies, pinned, columned and labelled, while a hundred of their living cousins flutter over the cases. Elsewhere this video would mean something different, softer even; but here, as with many other works across the biennial, the living alongside the dead and a history of violence still echoing off the Andes, it’s haunting. Andrew Berardini

Miguel Ángel Rojas, Unas de Cal y Otras de Arena (detail), 2014. Photo: Oscar Monsalve. © Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Cartagena de Indias

May 2014

AR Asia-III-Reviewed-RESUPPLY

.indd 113

113

02/05/2014 14:52

Books

114

AR Asia-III-Books.indd 114

ArtReview Asia

02/05/2014 14:54

Disobedient Objects edited by Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon V&A Publishing, £19.99 (softcover) Disobedient Objects broadcasts its fetish for subversion even before the text kicks off – the imprint page notes that the book is typeset in a font called Doctrine, ‘inspired by the livery and branding of Air Koryo, North Korea’s flag carrier’. Published to coincide with a Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition of the same name, this is a celebration of ‘making from below… organised disobedience against the world as it is’. The disobedient objects are material manifestations of social struggle, everything from improvised teargas masks, to beaten pans used as noisemakers during cacerolazo protests in Buenos Aires, to barricades, puppets, banners and locking-on devices. The virtuoso craftsmanship and aesthetic refinement displayed in the V&A’s permanent galleries has a scrappy flipside in the world beyond, and Disobedient Objects makes a point of exploring its most furious edge. These are objects potent with the urgency generated by oppression, their materials reclaimed from mundane functionality, and the very lack of skill required in their confection a key to their success. In their extended introduction, Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon discuss the figure of Hercules as a popular symbol of colonial and industrial might during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly the image of him, from his second labour, slashing at the multiplying heads of insurrection, irreligion

and indigenous culture that beset the passage of progress. If Hercules represented the will to systematise and subject that characterised the founding ethos of the V&A, Disobedient Objects is, they write, ‘one for the Hydra’. The book is a recalcitrant ragbag of photographic and text essays driven by the discrete specialities of their authors – among them Mark Traugott on the history of Parisian street barricades, Nicholas Thoburn on the Unpopular Books imprint and David Graeber on giant puppets – united by a common zeal rather than the aim of forming a comprehensive overview. This approach results in a roster of contributors who make no bones of partisanship within their subject. In discussing puppets as tools of protest, Graeber raises the question of why they are so hated by the police. Writer and activist Max Uhlenbeck’s suggestion that ‘obviously, [the police] hate to be reminded that they’re puppets themselves’ is quoted without comment, and later in the essay Graeber writes that ‘police are, essentially, bureaucrats with guns’. This is not an apolitical document; the contributors write with fire in the belly, often dipping into piquant antiestablishment rhetoric unfamiliar to the average museum catalogue. Laced through its pages are handy cut-outand-keep guides to assembling the tools of protest in your own home, including clandestine stencils, book-shaped shields and pamphlet

bombs. While the meat of Disobedient Objects covers protest movements since the 1980s, the graphic style and sentiment of these guides hark back to the alternative presses of the early 1970s and publications such as The Anarchist Cookbook (1971) or Nicholas Saunders’s Alternative London (1970), and betray a certain romantic yearning for the uninhibited, object-based protest practice of the pre-Internet era. The timing of the book and exhibition – planned in the years during which WikiLeaks, Anonymous and the NSA revelations jostled for headlines with Tahrir Square, Occupy and Gezi Park – seems in itself to mark a teetering point in the relative hierarchy of activism and hacktivism, objects and information, and the control of physical and virtual space. For the V&A itself, Disobedient Objects marks a turning point, one first indicated by senior curator Kieran Long’s assertion in Dezeen magazine last year that ‘ugly and sinister objects demand the museum’s attention just as much as beautiful and beneficial ones do’. For those not deeply invested in the curatorial strategies of major museums, the repeated pontificating as to the wider impact and significance of Disobedient Objects being a V&A production is perhaps the book’s one signal flaw. Though such agitated self-interrogation will no doubt be justified as sibling institutions around the world watch the museum’s purgative repentance for its imperial past with a gimlet eye. Hettie Judah

Black Sun: Alchemy, Diaspora and Heterotopia edited by Gerrie van Noord Ridinghouse, £25/$39.95 (hardcover) Black Sun is the (aggravated) catalogue for a touring exhibition curated by artist Shezad Dawood and curator Tom Trevor, and recently on show at the Devi Art Foundation, Delhi, and the Arnolfini, Bristol. Taking the concept of the diaspora as its subject matter and various iterations (scientific, alchemic, poetic, philosophical, psychological, etc) of the ‘black sun’ as its motif, the book revolves around the issue of whether identity is something that is contingent or immanent, created or imposed. It contains a lengthy essay by Dawood, interspersed with essays by Trevor and curator Megha Ralapati, and a conversation between Dawood and the Otolith Group’s Kodwo Eshun. The book starts at its strong point, an account of Dawood’s

personal ‘diasporic’ experience as a British citizen born of parents themselves born in India and Pakistan. A few pages later, all that’s out the window, as painter Lucio Fontana, sci-fi writer William Gibson, Tibetan art, the relation of Chinese and Japanese characters, and quantum mechanics are slammed together at a velocity that would make even the operators of the Large Hadron Collider wince. There’s little real analys is of or justification for most of this (no Higgs bosons pop up), just a lot of juxtaposition (at its worst in Trevor’s essay, which is little more than a collage of references and quotations). While both the crazy design (each essay designed in a different manner, with the interruptions to Dawood’s main text making it difficult to read)

May 2014

AR Asia-III-Books.indd 115

and the machine-gun-style referencing might somehow fall under the rubric of the heterotopia (a notion proposed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe nonhegemonic spaces that are disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory and transforming) of the subtitle, it generally leaves the reader with more questions than answers. But let’s not despair. Despite the fact that much of it appears to be a monument to wasted hours of Googling, this book is worth struggling through for that spasmodic analysis of Dawood’s identity and its formation (including a comic description of his discovery of Freddie Mercury’s ‘Indian-ness’) and for his insightful analysis of similar experiences in the lives of other artists. Mark Rappolt

115

02/05/2014 14:54

All Art Is Political: Writings on Performative Art by Sarah Lowndes Luath Press, £9.99 (softcover) In this short collection of five texts by Sarah Lowndes, four of which are on single artists, and one of which puts the musicians Mayo Thompson and Keith Rowe in conversation, the Glasgow-based critic and academic foregrounds the process of making – of performing the role of the artist for the benefit of the viewer – as an intrinsically social, and therefore perhaps political, action. Dieter Roth’s cataloguing of his life – as diaries, installations of his belongings and detritus from everyday life, and the hours of footage shot from a CCTV network in the artist’s home and made available through various videoworks – which Lowndes details in an essay originally written in 2012, is the most obvious example of her point. Roth’s work is about

AR Asia-III-Books.indd 116

of society – in our lives. This is hinted at by the inclusion of the longest individual text of the collection, an essay on the work of Richard Wright, who is also the author’s husband. While the text concentrates on Richard Wright the professional artist known particularly for his wall-based painting, Lowndes refers to Wright by his first name and suggests their relationship ‘opens the possibility of writing about his work in a different way’. While that may be the most personal essay of the collection, it is Lowndes’s 2009 text on Thea Djordjadze that is the best of the book. In it she talks about the Georgian artist’s work in terms of translation and the attempts – ultimately impossible – to bridge the gap between self and the social collective. Oliver Basciano

Book from the Ground: From Point to Point

The Book About Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground

by Xu Bing

edited by Mathieu Borysevicz

MIT Press, £17.95/£24.95 (hardcover)

From Point to Point, part of Xu Bing’s wider project Book from the Ground, is a 112-page novel depicting 24 hours in the life of an ordinary office worker, Mr Black, from seven one morning to seven the next, as he wakes, eats breakfast, goes to work, meets friends, looks for love online and goes out on a date. The book has punctuation marks, but no text; in place of words there are pictograms, logos, illustrative signs and emoticons, all taken from real symbols in use around the world. The artist has collated these over a period of seven years and used them to devise a universal ideographic language, in theory understandable by anyone engaged with modern life. On one level Xu achieves his goal: it doesn’t take too much effort for the reader – ‘interpreter’ might be more appropriate – to decipher the central character’s day. Mr Black decides what shoes to wear (Lacoste, Adidas, Nike logos) and what to have for lunch (McDonald’s arches, illustration of a steaming steak/bowl of noodles/ sushi). He becomes increasingly stressed (series of anxious-face emoticons, each shedding an increasing number of drops of sweat) preparing for a work presentation. There’s humour, too, some of it slightly odd and scatological, as when Mr Black is straining on the toilet (coiled turd with a red line through it, more sweat-shedding

116

‘recognised and coded patterns [that] demonstrate the distance between self and behaviour’, she writes. Thompson and Rowe, in a transcript of a 2008 panel discussion the author chaired, likewise agree on the intrinsic role the audience plays in giving their performance an ‘excuse’ to happen. Susan Hiller in a 2011 interview speaks of embracing misunderstanding between an artist and her audience. She discusses how overexplanation of an artwork, be it by the artists themselves, a curator or an educator, is a ‘big mistake’. Hiller says she relishes the ‘gap between intention and interpretation’. Addressing the relationship between artist and viewer has wider resonance in that it’s a relationship that feels analogous to the way in which we all relate to an audience – the rest

emoticon faces). But perhaps this merely reflects the universality of toilet-related symbols. The accompanying explanatory book, The Book About Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground, includes documentation of the wider project when it has been presented in the context of an exhibition, and includes its development as a software program that translates Chinese and English text into pictograms and symbols. Essays and an interview with the artist put the novel in context, both in terms of Xu’s previous work and in terms of historical and more recently devised pictographic languages – not forgetting that the Chinese also retains pictographic roots. In relation to Xu’s previous work, Book from the Ground is a companion piece to one of his best-known works, Book from the Sky (1987–91), the four-year project in which he created 4,000 ‘fake’ Chinese characters, which he hand-cut into wooden blocks and printed within books and on scrolls. Instead of attempting a language understandable to everyone, here he created a language that was understandable by no one. When considering the implications of a global language for an increasingly global world, Xu’s project is a highly relevant one. But when considered within the context of language and literature, the arguments become more problematic,

particularly when, in his introductory essay, Mathieu Borysevicz discusses From Point to Point alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). As an overarching narrative, both books may be the story of a day in the life of one man, told over 24 hours, but pushing the literary possibilities of an existing language, as Joyce was doing, is not the same as attempting to tell a story through simplified signs and symbols. The artist himself is the first to acknowledge the limitations of his project by stating, in his interview in The Book About…, that the desire to ‘pursue a dream that all humans can communicate freely without difficulty is a dream too big to realise’. The limitations of From Point to Point as literature are particularly highlighted when reading its English translation, given in The Book About… Here’s an excerpt: ‘Mr Black gets up, shuffles over to the bathroom and sits on the toilet for a long time. “En…er… ugh…en…” as much as he tries nothing comes out. “What’s wrong down there?” He ponders.’ Compare that to a few lines from Ulysses. ‘Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space.’ Try expressing that in pictograms and smiley faces. Helen Sumpter

ArtReview Asia

02/05/2014 14:54

artreview.com/subscribe Also online at artreview.com and through the iTunes Store

AR Asia-III-Subs ad-RESUPPLY.indd 117

02/05/2014 14:56

118

AR Asia-III-Strip.indd 118

02/05/2014 14:55

119

AR Asia-III-Strip.indd 119

For more on artist Coco Wang, see overleaf

02/05/2014 14:55

Contributors

Marie Darrieussecq is the author of 12 novels, a number of short stories and a play. Her first novel, Pig Tales (1996), was published in 45 countries. She won the Prix Médicis in 2013. She mainly lives in Paris. This month she writes on Annlee, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno’s manga avatar. For further reading she suggests Pierre Rannou’s French-language essay ‘Pas une coquille, juste une signature’ on esse.ca and a conversation between Huyghe and filmmakers Vincent Dieutre and Christian Merlhiot titled ‘Ann Lee en quête d’auteurs’ on pointligneplan.com, also in French.

Wenny Teo 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 and networked forms of resistance in East Asian artistic practice. In this issue she reviews Density, Liu Wei’s recent exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London. Nadim Abbas

Andrea Stappert is a self-taught analogue photographer based in Berlin. She has been working with the international art scene since the early 1990s. In March 2013 she photographed Simon Starling – whom she has worked with for a number of years – for the cover of ArtReview. This month she photographs Carsten Nicolai, her first commission for ArtReview Asia. 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

Tim Crowley is the Beijing-based chief curator of Kino der Kunst Asia and professor of history and theory of art and design at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is also the curator of the video art project currently titled 53 Reasons We Still Need Superman. In this issue he writes an essay titled Eastern Standard Time: Everything Changes in Order to Remain the Same. For further reference he recommends watching Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark, Barbet Schroeder’s La Vallée (1972) and Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert), the 1964 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. He also recommends reading Li-Chen Lin’s 1995 essay ‘The Concepts of Time and Position in The Book of Change and Their Development’.

is a Hong Kong-based artist. After studying art in London, he took a masters in philosophy in comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong. He has exhibited installation works extensively in Hong Kong – including a solo show during Hong Kong Arts Centre Open House in 2013 – and at galleries in Shanghai, London and Edinburgh. He has recently collaborated with artists Angela Su and Mary Lee on a Kickstarter-funded artist book, Berty. For ArtReview Asia Abbas has created a flipbook, which can be found in the upper-right-hand corner of pages in the magazine’s Featured and Reviewed sections. During this year’s edition of Art Basel Hong Kong he will present Apocalypse Postponed, an Absolut Art Bar installation with conceptual cocktails located in Soundwill Plaza II – Midtown. The bar will be open daily, 13–17 May, 5pm – 2am.

Contributing Writers Andrew Berardini, Kimberly Bradley, Josephine Breese, Mariagrazia Costantino, Tim Crowley, Marie Darrieussecq, Du Qingchun, Gallery Girl, Paul Gravett, Bharti Lalwani, Esther Lu, Zarmeené Shah, Mark Sladen, Sam Steverlynck, Wenny Teo, Wang Kaimei Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Nadim Abbas, Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Mikael Gregorsky, Andrea Stappert, Koki Tanaka, Coco Wang

Coco Wang (preceding pages)

Based between Beijing, Hong Kong and London, Coco Wang thrives as an extraordinary fusion of Chinese and British culture, and as a bridge between the two. Having received a thoroughly British education, starting at Queen Ethelburga’s Collegiate in North Yorkshire, Wang translated her experiences into a ‘TuWen’, or autobiographical diary-style comic, Coco Goes to Study in England (2007), published in both Hong Kong and Mainland China. For the 2008 exhibition Manhua! China Comics Now in London, part of Britain’s China Now festival ahead of the Beijing Olympics, and the first of its kind in the UK, Wang was an ambassador for her upcoming generation of experimental, underground Chinese comics creators, several in collectives like Special Comix and Cult Youth. She also edited, translated, published and contributed to an impressive anthology of these innovators’ stories entitled Freedom. Some of her most deeply moving and widely seen work appears in a series of documentary webcomics

120

AR Asia-III-Contributors2NDRESUPPLY2.indd 120

telling the underreported human stories of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (they are still online at earthquakestrips.blogspot.com). Wang’s talents have crossed over into a variety of fields, from assisting theatre director and writer Robert Wilson on his 2004 musical production The Black Rider at the Barbican to developing acclaimed projects in animation and children’s books. Most recently, she has been completing Meet William, a sophisticated graphic novel set partly in London and serialised in Vista FengHui, a Chinese magazine that endeavoured to build on the popularity of imported manga or Japanese comics among the young to develop an older readership for locally originated manga-inspired comics. For her new Strip, ‘Old & New’, overleaf, Coco Wang was inspired by her visit in 2008 to an exhibition of work that came out of Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS), once the most famous animation studio in China. “Early Chinese animation was such a triumph,” she says. It proved that

Chinese artists possessed incredible creativity and originality that can shine on any stage in the world. As a respectful, curious fan, she was lucky enough to meet some of the animation artists who were founding members of SAFS, now aged between seventy and ninety. “These artists went through so many conflicts,” she continues. “One day they would be praised as the ‘Disney of China’, the next they would be forced to kneel on the ground, their arms bound behind their back, because of accusations of subversive political messages, for example in their animation of a snail. The rapid-changing cultures and values of the Chinese Cultural Revolution turned their achievements into something shameful.” Wang’s dream is to gather more information, ideally firsthand from China’s great veteran animators, to tell their story in a full-length graphic novel. “I want to show the truth that was twisted and buried and celebrate their achievements.” Paul Gravett

ArtReview Asia

02/05/2014 14:57

ArtReview Asia

Editorial

Publishing

Production

ArtReview Ltd

Editors Mark Rappolt David Terrien

Publisher Patrick Kelly patrickkelly@artreview.com

Production Director Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com

Editorial Director (Asia) Aimee Lin

Galleries

Operations Executive Letizia Resta letiziaresta@artreview.com

ArtReview is published by ArtReview Ltd 1 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH T 44 (0)20 7490 8138

Art Direction John Morgan studio Design Pedro Cid ProenÇa Maël Fournier-Comte Associate Editors J.J. Charlesworth Martin Herbert Jonathan T.D. Neil Senior Editor, Web Editor Helen Sumpter Managing Editor Oliver Basciano Copy Editor Hettie Judah Trainee Louise Darblay

UK and Australasia Jenny Rushton jennyrushton@artreview.com Benelux, France, Southern Europe and Latin America Moky May mokymay@artreview.com Northern Europe Indra Moroder indramoroder@artreview.com North America and South Africa Debbie Shorten debbieshorten@artreview.com

Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam.ican@btinternet.com

Managing Director Debbie Shorten

Finance

Personal Assistant Lulu Nunn

Finance Director Lynn Woodward lynnwoodward@artreview.com Financial Controller Errol Kennedy Smith errolkennedysmith@artreview.com Trainee Georgie Brinkman

Asia, Middle East and Russia Florence Dinar florencedinar@artreview.com

Chairman Dennis Hotz

Subscriptions To subscribe online, visit artreview.com/subscribe ArtReview Subscriptions 3rd Floor North Chancery Exchange 10 Furnival Street London EC4A 1YH T 44 (0)20 8955 7069 E artreview@abacusemedia.com

Lifestyle

office@artreview.com

Stacey Langham staceylangham@artreview.com Charlotte Regan charlotteregan@artreview.com

Reprographics by PHMEDIA. Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview (ISSN No: 1745-9303, USPS No: 021-034) is published monthly except in the months July, August and February by ArtReview Ltd and is distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe Nj 08831 and additional mailing offices. Periodicals postage paid at New Brunswick Nj. POSTMASTER: send address changes to ArtReview, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe Nj 08831

Photo credits on the cover and on page 58 Carsten Nicolai, photographed by Andrea Stappert on pages 114 and 122 Photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam on page 117 Photography by Mikael Gregorsky

May 2014

AR Asia-III-Contributors2NDRESUPPLY2.indd 121

121

02/05/2014 14:57

Off the Record May 2014 To be honest, I haven’t really been listening to what the rest of the panel has been saying. And to be more honest, I hate these panel discussions at art fairs. But when Art Phnom Penh – Cambodia’s new art fair – phoned up, I was the only one in the office; the rest of ArtReview Asia were away on a team-building event based on the popular 1990s television programme The Crystal Maze, organised by leading West London events company Chillisauce. The same evening I found myself onboard a Qatar Airways flight with a cheeky stopoff at Doha to hang out with some badly paid Bangladeshi builders. The panel I am on is titled ‘Phnom Phenomenon Phnom?’ and features various past and future directors of Documenta looking at Cambodia’s new art scene while thinking about Harald Szeemann’s contention that the exhibition-maker is always an outsider. They’ve been droning on for 20 minutes, and as yet I haven’t contributed. I am idly flicking away the exaggerated collars of my black Don Protasio ‘Monks in Riot’ vest when I realise that the moderator is vigorously motioning at me. I immediately interrupt Catherine David, although I have little idea what she has been saying. “This is ridiculous, Catherine. What can we teach Asia? What can we teach Phnom Penh? It is truly phenomenal – just check out the vest I’m wearing, for instance. The West is decadent. There we have collectors like Stefan Simchowitz hoovering up young artists and spitting them out at auction barely weeks later. Here in Asia we have Budi Tek. Yes, he totally freaked out when the Daily Telegraph’s art correspondent, Colin Gleadell, waved a printed-out list of artists from Tek’s collection in Tek’s face. Yes, he might have yelled, “Where did you get that?” at Gleadell. Yes, Gleadell did point out that it was on Tek’s own website so perhaps he shouldn’t have been quite so surprised at the existence of the list. But what’s suspicious about that? Nothing, I say!”

AR Asia-III-GG.indd 122

The rest of the panel looks totally baffled. “And what about that top Indian collector, Kiran Nadar, who has located her collection in a shopping mall? Take that, Selfridges!” I bellow. “But we were talking about how Glissant’s idea of multiple temporalities might lead us to rethink the notion of quality in relation to the art scene here in Cambodia and the surrounding regions,” interjects a thoughtful-looking Adam Szymczyk. “Oh, fuck off, Adam,” I reply jauntily. “Anyhow, what’s with this neocolonialist shit of flying in big Western curators for these panels? Didn’t I see all you lot doing exactly the same thing at Art Dubai in March?” The panel look at me with hatred. “It’s just you who are Europe’s filth!” someone from the audience shouts out. He seems to be wearing a paper sculptural mask on his head and looks like a futuristic shaman. “Bollocks!” I shout back. “This lot are worse than me. At least I have this ethnically appropriate vest on! Anyhow, what’s with the mask? Who do you think you are? You look like someone wearing bits of leading Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho’s show We Are What We Mask, which was at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute last year. Oh…” I trail off as ‘Catherine David’, ‘Okwui Enwezor’ and ‘Adam Szymczyk’ wriggle out of their masks and the artist himself bounds onstage and takes photographs. “Not more masks!” I yell “Didn’t this happen in my last column? This is like Groundhog Day!” “You’ve been found out, Gallery Girl,” shouts ‘Enwezor’, who turns out to be a pleasant elderly Indonesian gentleman. “You and your patronising columns about Asia. We knew we could get you here to expose your essentially ethnocentric viewpoint. These masks reference wayang kulit, traditional Indonesian shadow puppetry, not Groundhog Day.” “Hold on,” I argue back. “Isn’t ethnocentrism exactly what Benjamin Buchloh accused Jean-Hubert Martin of 25 years ago in a much-cited interview following the opening of the seminal global exhibition Magiciens de la Terre?” “See?!” shouts the elderly Indonesian gentleman. “Always turning it back to the West and exhibitions that happened in the canonical centres of art. Or Bill Murray films. Check your privilege!” It looks like it’s going to turn nasty when the moderator runs onstage holding her Sony Xperia Z1 phone. “It’s your team, Gallery Girl, they’re in trouble! Something about a misunderstanding with crystal meth and chilli sauce!” I seize the futuristic-shaman mask and put it on. “Right, come with me, masked warriors! I might be Eurocentric, but right now ArtReview Asia’s team needs your Asian-style help! Charter a plane, we’re going to rescue my trainees from this crack-den in West London! And perhaps the editor, too. And the other people in the office! Let’s get Hong Kong Phooey on their ass!” They all shake their heads at me. Some shake their masks and fists. I don’t care. I’m out of there as fast as possible, commanding my driver to take me straight to the airport and the welcoming arms of Duty Free. The team needs me. Gallery Girl

02/05/2014 14:58

Art_Review_235w_x_300h_Gallery_EN_ol.indd 1 Art Basel H.indd 123

4/29/2014 6:57:59 11:29 PM 02/05/2014

Hermes FP 124

02/05/2014 11:30