ArtReview Asia Spring 2024 by ArtReview

Aki Sasamoto

Zadie Xa, Tricksters, Mongrels, Beasts (detail), 2023 Oil on canvas. Triptych: 240 x 600 cm © Zadie Xa. Photo: JunHo Lee

Rough hands weave a knife

Zadie Xa Paris Marais April—May 2024

EXHIBITIONS: ETIENNE CHAMBAUD PRISM PRISON FEBRUARY 2 – MARCH 9, 2024 ANRI SALA NOLI ME TANGERE MARCH 21 – MAY 11, 2024 HOUSE ON FIRE CURATED BY JUNGSIK LEE MAY 25 – JUNE 22, 2024 ART FAIRS: ART ONO APRIL 18 – 21, 2024

ESTHER SCHIPPER 6, NOKSAPYEONG-DAERO 46GA-GIL, YONGSAN-GU SEOUL, REPUBLIC OF KOREA, 04345 서울시 용산구 녹사평대로46가길 6

Sea Change (Diptych), 2023 (detail), oil on linen, 375.9 × 243.8 cm © Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning

Sea Change

Hong Kong

pacegallery.com

ArtReview Asia vol 12 no 1 Spring 2024

For every Anthony a Rishi The longer ArtReview Asia keeps on truckin’, the longer it feels as if it’s going round in circles. Always ending up at the starting line. Again. No, it’s not talking about every Sri Lankan’s duty to repeatedly review the work of Lionel Wendt (although… if you turn to page 84…); rather about trying to work out what the tag ‘Asia’ might mean. An existential problem. Although if you’re into Indic religions, perhaps it’s not. Perhaps that’s just the nature of being. Not that that’s of any help to ArtReview Asia right now. Imagine having a name that you’re constantly having to explain, constantly define… What? That’s the experience of many people born in Asia when they end up on some other continent? Oh… Errr… What? And a bit like the sentiment behind the title of a work by Korakrit Arunanondchai? Something about funny names? Look, ArtReview Asia doesn’t have time to be funny. Or maybe the joke is what ArtReview Asia encounters, not what it creates. Yeah. Like the time the other week when someone tried to tell it that Australia was part of Asia, and then ArtReview Asia tried to tell them that there was a continent called Australia (which used to be called, less confusingly, Oceania, although ArtReview Asia is gradually accepting that confusion is a necessary component of contemporary geopolitics) and it was pretty sure Australia was part of it. And then they started saying that Australia had more in common with Asia than it had with Europe. To which ArtReview Asia pointed them towards the colonial history section of the local library and a photograph of Anthony Albanese that it keeps upon itself for just these types of educational moments (nervously awaiting, always, for the Rishi Sunak countermove, although that never seems to happen, probably because people don’t prepare for anything these days). Although it’s not that they didn’t have a point when it comes to deeper histories of trade and migration, and that’s before we even need to go back to when everything was joined up and there was only one continent, Pangaea. But we’d better stop there. Otherwise you might start to think that ArtReview Asia is making everything up. Which it isn’t. Obviously. ArtReview Asia

Invention

sharjahart.org

HENOK MELKAMZER: TELSEM SYMBOLS AND IMAGERY 24 February 16 June 2024 Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

This exhibition is organised by Sharjah Art Foundation, in collaboration with The Africa Institute, Sharjah, and Sharjah Museums Authority.

Art Previewed

Previews by ArtReview Asia 16

No Fun to Be Had by Martin Herbert 37

Meat the Neighbours Deepa Bhasthi 42

The Interview Xuelei Huang by Yuwen Jiang 28

Universal Struggles Suraj Yengde 38

Danse Macabre Prabda Yoon 44

Misreadings Max Crosbie-Jones 40

Art Featured

Aki Sasamoto by Tyler Coburn 50

Heecheon Kim by Harry C.H. Choi 58

Glenn Ligon interview by Jessica Lanay 66

Wang Ya-Hui by Adeline Chia 62

page 44 Min Tanaka in From the Edge, created in collaboration with Kohei Nawa and performed at Yamanashi Prefectural Citizen’s Culture Hall, January 2024. Photo: Yoshikazu Inoue

Art Reviewed

exhibitions, films & books 74 Jonathan Jones, by Tai Mitsuji Mao Yan, by Fi Churchman Yoko Terauchi, by Mark Rappolt 1st Taiwan International Austronesian Art Triennial, by Christopher Whitfield Vidvastha (Devastated), by Arun A.K. Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho, by Aaina Bhargava Sachiko Kazama, by Mark Rappolt Pivot Glide Echo, by Edwin Coomasaru Customised Postures, (De)colonising Gestures, by Stephanie Yeap Thailand Biennale, by Max Crosbie-Jones Flowers of Belau, by Ren Scateni Paul Pfeiffer, by Claudia Ross Evil Does Not Exist, by Yuwen Jiang Taipei Biennial, by Adeline Chia

The Understory, by Saneh Sangsuk, reviewed by Max Crosbie-Jones My grandfather turned into a tiger… and other illusions, by Pao Houa Her, reviewed by David Terrien The Koro Riots, by Faisal Tehrani, reviewed by Alfonse Chiu 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, by Nam Le, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Loot, by Tania James, reviewed by Mark Rappolt The Premonition, by Banana Yoshimoto, reviewed by Fi Churchman Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak The Corporeal Life of Seafaring, by Laleh Khalili, reviewed by Mark Rappolt

page 96 Yang Chi-Chuan, Your tears remind me to cry, 2023 (installation view, Taipei Biennial). Courtesy the artist

from the archives 106

Art Observed

Now 15

10 Pippa Garner, Human-Prototype, 2020 (installation view, Yokohama Triennale, 2024)

ArtReview Asia

Previewed 1 Birdhead ucca Dune, Beidaihe Through 30 June

6 I.M. Pei: Life is Architecture m+, Hong Kong From 29 June

13 Hsu Che-Yu Ilham Gallery, Kuala Lumpur Through 26 May

2 Follow the Feeling Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou Through 23 June

7 Wong Kit Yi phd Group, Hong Kong 23 March – 4 May

14 Arindam Chatterjee Emami Art, Kolkata Through 6 April

8 Xiyadie Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong 26 March – 11 May

15 Iqra Tanveer Grey Noise, Dubai Through 20 Apri

9 Universal / Remote The National Art Center, Tokyo Through 3 June

16 Anna Park Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 20 April – 8 September

10 8th Yokohama Triennale Various venues, Yokohama Through 9 June

17 24th Biennale of Sydney Various venues, Sydney Through 10 June

11 Masterful Attention Seekers Busan Museum of Contemporary Art Through 7 July

18 M.F. Husain Magazzini del Sale, Venice 18 April – 24 November

3 Kazumi Sakata By Art Matters, Hangzhou 21 March – 21 July 4 Factory of Tomorrow chat, Hong Kong Through 14 July 5 Yang Fudong m+, Hong Kong Through 9 June Apichatpong Weerasethakul m+, Hong Kong From 8 March

12 Unsullied, Like a Lotus in Mud Hoam Museum of Art, Yongin 27 March – 16 June

Spring 2024

1 Shanghai-based Birdhead (Song Tao and Ji Weiyu) rose to prominence for their pronounced taste for film photography and the tones and textures produced in a traditional darkroom. Since the early 2000s, the pair have been avidly photographing their hometown and creating gridlike compositions that weave poetic connections between various motifs of urban life. These tend to be elegantly mounted onto lacquered plywood using a traditional wetmounting technique, making them highly aestheticised, fetishistic-looking objects. But at ucca Dune, their new project Yun Yun (literally ‘cloud cloud’, but figuratively ‘et cetera’ – suggesting what’s virtual and ever-expanding) is shifting its focus to cyberspace, exploring another way connections are made and realities pieced together in a world that’s hypermediated by the internet and all things digital. Birdhead plan for the exhibition to look like

an amusement park, with interventions made by online influencers (‘designers, musicians, tech geeks, philosophers and more’) that reflect upon parasocial relationships as well as the links (or the lack thereof?) between on- and offline identities. (yj) After closing down, along with a couple other major institutions, in 2022, during the economic downturn brought about by the covid-19 pandemic (some, like ocat’s multicity museum network, never recovered), the Guangdong Times Museum is set to reopen its doors (shuttered when its benefactor, Times Property, ceased funding it) this month. The reopening follows a successful fundraising auction of donated artworks, and is marked 2 by the cheerfully titled group show Follow the Feeling. Named after a 1988 song by Taiwanese singer Julie Sue that became a hit on the Mainland after its appearance in 1989’s Spring

Festival Gala, the show takes as a point of departure this transformational period during which Chinese society ‘underwent a momentous gearshift from following the Party to following the feelings’. The list of participating artists hasn’t been announced as yet, but you can expect the inclusion of anyone who has mined ‘the discourse of intimacy and love’ in reform and postreform China. Located in what’s known as the Greater Bay Area (consisting of Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau), the private, nonprofit Guangzhou museum has been known as a site for discussions around maritime connections, diasporic living and geopolitical frontiers that have reverberated through regions across the sea. Like the exhortation of its new show’s title, its return feels hopeful. (yj) If By Art Matters’s last show – an ambitious survey of 35 years of Chinese media art – was about how art and life have advanced into the

1 Birdhead, Birdhead World – Yun Yun, 2024, uv printing on acrylic board, 175 × 342 × 8 cm. Courtesy the artist

2 Hui Ye & Qu Chang, Linger in Sounds, 2023–ongoing, video and sound installation. Courtesy the artists

ArtReview Asia

3 Lantern frame from Kazumi Sakata’s collection of ‘things’. Photo: Ichiro Mishima

4 Frog King Kwok and his ‘Frogtopia’, special display coinciding with the exhibition Factory of Tomorrow, 2024. Courtesy chat (Centre for Heritage, Arts & Textile), Hong Kong

5 Yang Fudong, Sparrow on the Sea (still), 2024, b/w film. © and courtesy the artist

realm of the digital (and how media art is about might not be readily clear, but which are the human and the nonhuman worlds. Featuring being able to move, interact and activate social looking decidedly thingly. If you’re into Muji, work from the collection and commissioned engagement), its new project returns to the Toast or anything that gives mono no aware, projects by 19 artists of East and Southeast Asian this is definitely one to see. (yj) more earthly idea of finding the ‘thingness’ heritage (which the institution, like so many of things and what it means for something to Even if you’re one of those rabid fans of the of its Chinese counterparts, figures as more be as it is – or tada , a Buddhist term possibly contemporary, throwing your milk out before broadly ‘Asian’ in its publicity materials) includderiving from tathātā (‘thusness’ in Sanskrit). the expiry date and accustomed to dismissing ing biennial favourites such as Indonesia’s Ade anything with the faintest whiff of the past, Darmawan, Malaysia’s Yee I-Lann, Singapore’s 3 The project is based on Kazumi Sakata’s Hong Kong’s Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile Ho Rui An and Japanese-Samoan New Zealander collection of simple ‘tools’, which in turn is neither as dull nor as irrelevant as its name developed out of his antique store Furudogu Yuki Kihara, the exhibition promises to go way might suggest. Indeed, over the past few years Sakata (1979–2020) and his collection of beyond textile as a medium and heritage as a battered everyday objects. His Museum As It Is it has offered some of the Special Administrative way of life. Proof, if you like, that you should Region’s more intriguing contemporary art (tada!), which he founded in 2006, would curate never judge a book by its cover or an institution exhibitions of used envelopes and seashells; programming, and its fifth anniversary exhiby its name. (nd) What do ubs, Art Basel and m+ have in in 2019 he presented his collection of old cloth 4 bition is no exception. Although Factory of in an exhibition at Tama Art University Museum, Tomorrow is founded on the cliché (of ‘heritage’ 5 common? No, not money; Yang Fudong. Tokyo. At the Hangzhou museum there will enterprises everywhere) that you need to learn In March that intrepid trinity are teaming up be all kinds of stuff, from old dust collectors, from the past in order to plan for the future, to present the Chinese artist and pioneer of funnels and straw hats, to chimney covers and it tackles thematics that range from diversity moving-image’s latest film on the m+ facade some three-legged steel objects whose function to climate change and that are shaping both (the museum’s exterior wall, which doubles

Spring 2024

5 Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ghost Teen ( from the Primitive Project), 2009. © and courtesy the artist

7 Wong Kit Yi, Dial 432 to See the Light (still), 2022–24, single-channel video (colour, sound, 30 min 30 sec). Courtesy the artist; The Chinati Foundation, Marfa; and phd Group, Hong Kong

6 Exterior view of the Museum of Islamic Art Doha, designed by I.M. Pei

as a giant digital display). Shot in Hong Kong in black and white, the film moves between the seaside and the city while referencing classic Hong Kong cinema of the 1970s and 80s, and the history of the sar itself. Titled Sparrow on the Sea (2024), the work is described as an ‘architectural film’, and the artist suggests that the film will offer space to speculate on Hong Kong’s unpredictable future while offering nostalgic glimpses of its past. For moving-image junkies, the interior of m+ is currently hosting Thai 5 filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s multichannel video installation Primitive (2009) – a precursor, of sorts, to his Palme d’Or-winning feature film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). (nd) When the Bank of China Tower was erected in Hong Kong in 1989, it changed the city skyline forever. Designed by pioneering architect 6 I.M. Pei, it was the first supertall skyscraper

outside of the United States, and Asia’s tallest building (for two years). It seems fitting then that m+ will be staging the first largescale exhibition dedicated to Pei’s life and work just across the harbour and in view of the structure. Pei, who was raised in Shanghai and later moved to the United States, is among the twentieth century’s most defining architects, drawing inspiration from Bauhaus (he was friends with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer) and his Chinese heritage to create iconic landmarks that straddle cultures and articulate his own distinctive visual style. His best-known works include the Miho Museum on a Shigaraki mountainside outside Kyoto; Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library, which Pei called ‘the most important commission’ of his life; the National Gallery of Art’s East Building in Washington, dc; the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha; and the initially controversial but now beloved

ArtReview Asia

modernisation of the Louvre and the addition of its glass pyramid. The exhibition promises to elucidate the ‘tapestry of power dynamics, geopolitical complexities, cultural traditions, and the character of cities around the world’ that would come to define Pei’s work, while communicating a sense of who the man was behind all of it. (mvr) Bagpipes, karaoke, televised funerals, immigration and language might seem like disparate subjects, and yet Hong Kong per7 formance and multimedia artist Wong Kit Yi blends these together in the video essay Dial 432 to See the Light (2022–24), which was made during a residency at The Chinati Foundation, Marfa. By connecting – via a mix of found and original footage – the historical narratives of the us–Mexico border, Chinese labourers who built the Transcontinental Railroad between California and Utah and colonial-era Hong

8 Xiyadie, Kaiyang, 2021, papercut with water-based dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper, 140 × 300 cm (work), 161 × 321 × 6 cm (framed). Photo: Daniel Terna. Courtesy the artist; Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong; and The Drawing Center, New York

9 Jeamin Cha, Chroma-key and Labyrinth, 2013, single-channel hd video (colour, sound, 15 min). © and courtesy the artist

Kong, Wong ruminates on burial practices, border control (both in life and death) and the intangible costs of assimilating cultures. The video is featured in her solo exhibition +852 ghost-jpg, alongside what the artist calls ‘screen paintings’; inspired by ‘ghost jpegs’ – the remnants of an image that’s accidentally been burned into a digital screen – Wong presents a series of furniture and other objects onto which she has applied silkscreen prints, as well as canvases painted with karaoke subtitles, reflecting on the way in which certain images come to leave a permanent mark on one’s mind. (fc) 8 Xiyadie’s name refers to a kind of Siberian butterfly, which despite being very fragile and vulnerable, is able to thrive during Siberia’s transient summers. Emerging onto Beijing’s frigid queer scene during the early 2000s, Xiyadie took this pseudonym in the hope for

a freer life. His homoerotic papercut work – begun during the 1980s – is brightly coloured and festive-looking, even if it sometimes depicts scenes that deal with the fear and paranoia that comes with being deep-closeted, rife with the tension inherent in the representation and display of heavily suppressed desires (despite having to hide some of his works under his bed for most of the 1980s, papercuts themselves – a form of folk craft made in northern China, mostly by women – are often attached to windows and visible from both inside and outside the domestic space). Last year, Xiyadie had his first solo since 2012, at New York’s Drawing Center; this year the butterfly will be flying from Hong Kong’s Blindspot Gallery to the Venice Biennale. (yj) Universal/ Remote, as suggested in the title, 9 is an exhibition about controls. But not remote ones. Rather those holding sway during the

Spring 2024

three years of the covid-19 pandemic. Lest we forget, and all that. The show centres on the fact that the twenty-first century is characterised by the furious global circulation of goods and money, and the ability for everyone (in the sense of everyone who is moderately wealthy) to be everywhere all of the time, thanks to the ubiquity of personal devices. And then, during the pandemic, no one could go anywhere and ‘things got real’. The exhibition, then, is caught somewhere between the world of capitalism and the world of disease. Or perhaps that’s the same thing. Anyhow, helping us to work that one out will be artists such as Hito Steyerl, Xu Bing, Maiko Jinushi and Daisuke Ida, among others. (nd) ‘Wild grass strikes no deep roots’, wrote the Chinese writer Lu Xun in the foreword to his collection of prose poems Wild Grass (1924–26). It has ‘no beautiful flowers and leaves, yet it

10 Shiga Lieko, Where that night leads, 2023. Courtesy the artist

11 wonjeong department store, skincare myth, 2022. Courtesy the artist

imbibes dew, water and the blood and flesh of topics via five venues and the work of 94 artists (including Hong Kong musician Xper.xr, the dead… As long as it lives it is trampled upon the late artists Ryuichi Sakamoto and Pope.L, and mown down, until it dies and decays.’ This game-engine artist Heecheon Kim and perforsomewhat macabre thought forms the basis to 10 the theme of this year’s Yokohama Triennale mance/installation artist Puppies Puppies). It’ll be tough to remain on par with such a – curated by artist Liu Ding and art-historian wide range of global problems – let’s hope Carol Yinghua Lu – which broadly centres on Wild Grass doesn’t end up in the rough. (fc) how humanity has continually found ways to Yeah. I know. That’s what all good artists survive major historical crises. And how, from those examples, we might learn to survive 11 are, right? But Masterful Attention Seekers is not present global conditions of political, social just a straightforward excuse to plonk together and ecological turmoil. At least according to works by the likes of Sung Neung Kyung, wonjeong department store, Thomas the press release, which reads more like the manufactured sprawl of an 18-hole golf course Hirschhorn and Juliana Huxtable in the same than a wild meadow – beginning with the room. Although in some ways it obviously is. Rather, the exhibition seeks to explore the ways failure of social infrastructures during the covid-19 pandemic and meandering through in which artists attract and exploit audience climate change, the rise of nationalism, conspiattention. And why that type of attentionracies, war, class inequalities, etc. Still though, seeking is not about following a consistent there’s apparently ample room to explore those set of rules, but about constantly setting out

ArtReview Asia

to surprise. Be prepared to fight your way through the hordes of advertising executives looking for ideas to steal on your way in. (nd) When the Buddha started preaching in the sixth century bce, he made it clear that the inclusion of women in the Buddhist community would lead to Buddhism’s decline sooner than might otherwise be expected. Luckily his disciple Ānanda made the case for women’s inclusion, and the Buddha agreed, as long as women followed additional precepts (called the Eight Garudhammas, in case you want to look them up). Hoam Museum’s 12 Unsullied, Like a Lotus in Mud surveys how women have occupied important roles in the cosmology and history of Buddhism. (Wu Zetian – first and only female emperor of China – made Buddhism the state religion; while as Buddhism spread to East Asia, images of bodhisattvas took on increasingly feminine form to cater to women

devotees.) On view will be 92 works from 27 collections, presenting women as both the subjects of works and as patrons, such as a Joseon dynasty hanging scroll The Birth of Shakyamuni (c. fifteenth century), depicting the Buddha’s birth from his mother’s armpit, and Bhaisajyaguru Buddha Triad (1477) – one of 50 gold-powdered paintings commissioned by Queen Munjeong. (yj) 13 Taiwanese video artist Hsu Che-Yu’s current exhibition reimagines personal and collective memory via a trio of recent works: Gray Room (2022), Blank Photograph (2022) and Zoo Hypothesis (2023). For these, Hsu collaborated with a forensic team trained in 3d crime-scene scanning in order better to understand the ‘politics of death’. And to recreate specific sites at which these last have played out. Gray Room is a homage to the artist’s late grandmother and challenges traditional notions of the soul

and actor discuss how animals might be trained (as ephemeral, immaterial) through the lens of neurological research into the inner, physical to observe mourning rituals, so as to honour workings of human consciousness. Blank zoo creatures killed during the us bombing Photograph revisits the story of Yang Ru-Men: of Taipei in 1944. The pair blend discussions on the performative aspects of grief with between 2003 and 2004, Yang placed 17 explosives in Taipei’s public spaces (most of which historical trauma, all while seated in a taxiderdidn’t detonate) to draw attention to the plight mist’s studio. (fc) of Taiwanese farmers following the state’s Largely featuring works on paper, using accession to the World Trade Organisation a variety of mediums – many of which leave in 2002. Hsu’s video retraces the movements the work with what might best be described of the ‘rice bomber’ (so dubbed by Taiwanese as a scarified feel – and dating from 2017 on14 wards, Arindam Chatterjee’s current show, media because he’d mixed grains into the explosives) and the subsequent personal traNot a Dream, Not Peace, Not Love (the title quotes a verse by early-twentieth-century Bengali poet gedies that befell Yang, underscoring a narraJibanananda Das), is one of his largest to date. tive of protest and highlighting the complex And as that title might suggest, the artist interplay of individual and collective despair. doesn’t necessarily have the most positive (A 3d rendering of Yang returns to two sites: outlook on the human condition. Watercolours the beach where he made the bombs, and the from his Fragile Existence series (2022) depict home where his brother committed suicide.) the human body as just that: abject, tortured, Meanwhile, in Zoo Hypothesis, a scriptwriter

13 Hsu Che-Yu, Zoo Hypothesis, 2023, single-channel video, 31 min 25 sec. Courtesy the artist

12 The Birth of Shakyamuni, Joseon dynasty, fifteenth-century hanging scroll, colours and gold pigment on silk, 145 × 110 cm. Collection Hongaku-ji Temple, Fukuoka

14 Arindam Chatterjee, Mute Longing iii, 2019, watercolour on paper, 86 × 69 cm. Courtesy the artist

Spring 2024

threatening and dehumanised. Which, for photographs are projected onto pieces of fabric, Chatterjee at least, seems to be one way of hung like mourning curtains or shrouds. Among the series of photographic prints arranged seeing the present, with its intolerances and injustices. In another watercolour, Mute Longing on the walls, some of the images’ subjects are iii (2019), a pair of eyeless humans sixty-nine, repeated, such as the recurring motif of a spikey plant or the cresting of waves, which recalls each with the other’s feet halfway down their the ways in which grief, if left unresolved, can throats. Sometimes you just need art to tell become cyclical. Through these varied presenit like it is. (nd) tations, Tanveer invites the viewer to engage Amsterdam-based Pakistani artist Iqra 15 with loss, exploring it through texture and Tanveer explores ideas around collective grief form, and the spaces it inhabits within and and acts of remembrance through the medium around us, in order to enter into an ‘active of photography. She has printed onto lithography stones, deployed overhead projectors and state of remembrance’. (fc) Anna Park has always been preoccupied combined light, still photography and moving 16 with how the American media has manipulated image. In this exhibition, titled Lament of a tree, both actual and perceived reality. When the artist some photographs are projected directly onto moved to the us as a child, she thought her life the gallery’s walls and rendered barely visible by the artificial lighting of the space, invoking would be like the Disney Channel shows she had a quiet, ephemeral quality that reflects the watched from her home in South Korea. Perhaps fleeting nature of memory and loss. Other unsurprisingly, she was disappointed to find

her life didn’t match. So began a fascination with and interrogation of media-cultivated versus lived reality that manifests within Park’s practice as largescale black-and-white drawings. Deriving inspiration from 1950s American advertisements, comic books and Pop culture, works like Now You See Me (2021) or Hero Mentality (2021) are frenetic and sardonic examples characteristic of Park’s visual lexicon. In the former, a blonde woman beams like the Cheshire Cat in the middle of what appears to be a press conference. A blur of microphones and flowers swarm around her, emphasising the irony of the drawing’s title, in which we actually have no sense of what the central protagonist is like. Here, Park spotlights fame, spectacle and expectation with her distinct satirical style. In the show at agwa, Park will be presenting a new series of works in which such interrogations of the media are sure to be rife. (mvr)

16 Anna Park, Lilli’s Dream House, 2023, mixed media on panel, 152 × 122 × 8 cm. © the artist. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy the artist and Blum, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

15 Iqra Tanveer, Lament of a tree, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

Increasingly, the artworld – and biennial curators in particular – finds itself caught up in the feeling that it should address global, catastrophic issues. The Big Ones. Sometimes that looks a bit like trying to justify why it should take up an audience’s attention (an insecurity, let’s say, about art’s usefulness in addressing social, political and environmental destruction). Often it’s done with a sort of sombre, academic earnestness (see Yokohama Triennial’s Wild Grass: Our Lives). Not so, appar17 ently, this year’s edition of the Biennale of Sydney. Ten Thousand Suns promises to burn through the gloom by focusing on the many ways in which celebration can be as much about joy as about resistance and resilience in the face of disaster and adversity. Drawing on ‘multiple histories, voices and perspectives’, Ten Thousand Suns plans to shine light on First Nations knowledges, rejecting ‘Western

fatalistic constructions of the apocalypse’. (Although: the famed verse that shatterer-ofworlds Robert Oppenheimer borrowed from the Bhagavad Gita – ‘I am become Death…’ – begins, ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst in the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one’, so you could say that the biennial title chimes with Eastern constructions of the apocalypse.) On show will be the work of 88 artists from 47 countries whose practices are ‘firmly rooted in diverse communities and artistic vocabularies’ – including Kaylene Whiskey, Megan Cope, Anne Samat, Serwah Attafuah and Pacific Sisters. (fc) Running in parallel to this year’s Venice Biennale (but unlike that exhibition, this one’s free to enter) is a survey of the life and work 18 of Maqbool Fida Husain (better known by his initials), one of the pioneers of modernism

in Indian painting. Supported by India’s leading collector of contemporary art Kiran Nadar (whose holdings number over 10,000 artworks), The Rooted Nomad is an ‘immersive’ exhibition, which we’re not sure is an invitation or a warning, but is something Husain might well have embraced, having worked on his own immersive-type experiences (and with the glassmakers of Venice) at the time of his death in 2011. By then, the artist was living in Doha and London, effectively exiled from his homeland following a series of religious controversies and allegations of obscenity in relation to his work and a rising tide of Hindutva prejudice. The perfect accompaniment, then, to the biennale’s main theme: Foreigners Everywhere. (nd) Fi Churchman, Nirmala Devi, Yuwen Jiang, Marv Recinto

17 Kaylene Whiskey, Seven Sistas Story, 2021, acrylic on linen, triptych, 122 × 152 cm (each), 122 × 456 cm (overall). Photo: Luis Power. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

17 Adebunmi Gbadebo, k.s. (from the Remains series), 2021, True Blue Cemetery soil, human locs from Aaron Wilson, Kelsey Jackson and Cheryl Person, 43 × 56 × 33 cm. Photo: Aaron Wilson Watson. Courtesy the artist and Museum of Fine Arts Boston 18 M.F. Husain, Karbala, 1990, oil crayon on paper, 208 × 330 cm. Courtesy Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi

Spring 2024

NYU Abu Dhabi United Arab Emirates nyuad-artgallery.org

FEB. 22—JUN. 9, 2024 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the Art Gallery at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). The last decade has seen major artist commissions, book publications, and historic research exhibitions from across the globe, all while training a future generation of cultural practitioners. To mark this decade, the Art Gallery presents an exhibition that tests the mutability of the exhibition format itself. Scan the QR code for developments In Real Time.

Photo: Tiffany Ching

ArtReview Asia

The Interview by Yuwen Jiang

Xuelei Huang

“I very much wanted to highlight that we ignore the strangers – and smells, by nature, are strangers”

Smells are both evocative and nebulous. Embedded in each intake of air, they are at once irresistible (we must breathe, after all) and elusive (when they disperse, or mix with another smell, there’s no way to recapture them). The experience of smelling is equally volatile. Because of the anatomical ties between the olfactory bulb in the frontal lobe and the hippocampus in the limbic lobe, where memory and emotions are processed, smells readily evoke past feelings and nostalgia, easily transporting us back in space and time. And despite scents having a chemical basis, the perception of a scent does not completely depend on its molecular characteristics, but also its density (a flower’s aroma can become off-putting up close), purity (different smells can reinforce or inhibit each other), one’s own genetic

disposition (eproctophilia, anyone?) and past experience (although personally I do like the smell of a dentist’s surgery). When a scent is being processed, all regions of our brain light up, making it impossible for scientists to get a stable, clean visual representation of olfactory perception. Smells are ultimately indefinite and always contaminated. There is no way we could understand the experience as clearly as we do with our visual or auditory senses. Smells also carry a history, a history in which the olfactory sense is inscribed by cultural ideas and finetuned by ideologies. Academic Xuelei Huang’s new book, Scents of China (2023), delves into such a history of encounters – between chemicals and neurons, bodies and spaces, the self and the other, the East and the West – in which the sense of smell becomes a vessel

Spring 2024

to explore ideas of progress, hygiene, sexual attraction, sensory pleasures and revolutionary spirits. The flows of materials and people, as well as the propagation of ideologies, have all played a part in shaping a changing Chinese sensorium. Huang’s book opens with a curious anecdote about a cesspool surrounded by a garden of Irish roses in northern China, planted by a Canadian missionary couple in the early twentieth century. The strange scene – conjuring both delight and repulsion – captured Huang’s attention. What follows is an inquiry into the history of smells that’s infused with ideas of contamination as well as modernity’s dualistic way of disentangling the fragrant and the foul. When her book was released last October, Huang sat down to talk about how smells can be a site of embodied experience and resistance.

Strange Smells artreview How did you come to be interested in the olfactory world? xuelei huang I wasn’t consciously thinking about smells until I read Alain Corbin’s book The Foul and the Fragrant [1986], which traces an olfactory modernity that emerged in eighteenthcentury France. Immediately I thought of some parallels in Chinese history and thought I could do something with this. ar The idea of scents being a ‘stranger’ is central to your study. Could you expand on what this means? xh I begin my book with the story of the cesspool, which is fascinating to me in multiple ways. On the one hand it is a metaphor of Western imperialism and its civilising mission, and the Irish roses represented that process to transform, to deodorise the environment – the ‘Chinese stench’ – according to their own ideas. But on the other hand, just imagine yourself entering a rose garden next to a cesspool – what would be your own olfactory perception? Would the air be foul or fragrant, or a little bit of both? It must have been a very strange mixture. Of course, we do sometimes perceive things as fragrant or foul, but our odour perception is not a dualistic construction, and there are so many other smells that are in between. In Corbin’s book, he tells us how the modern

project – the modern olfactory revolution – attempts to classify smells under the fragrant or the foul for all sorts of sociopolitical reasons. The cesspool-rose garden, however, challenged this kind of dualism. And that is exactly what I mean by ‘the stranger’. It’s a concept raised by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, and refers to this indeterminate state between a friend and an enemy. According to Bauman, we can easily classify friends and enemies – that’s why we have so many wars, and there are ones ongoing, sadly; but strangers – those you can’t define – are very difficult to deal with for our modern institutions. If we can transform them into either friends or enemies, then that’s much easier. For smells either defined as fragrant or as foul, the foul we deodorise, and the fragrant we promote, using politics, capitalism and other means. But I very much wanted to highlight that we ignore the strangers – and smells, by nature, are strangers. ar You discussed this idea of the stranger in relation to a globalising olfactory modernity. What is olfactory modernity? How was China implicated in this process? xh The olfactory modernity is one among many modernising projects in the nineteenth century. At its centre is the idea of deodorisation. For Europe, especially France and Britain, treatment of miasma became an issue of public

sanitation at that time, and people sought to deodorise urban environments on a systematic, institutional level. China also went through a modern olfactory revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Shanghai and other treaty ports opened up to foreign trade, they were quickly industrialised, and as was the case with their European counterparts, the environment deteriorated. In my book, I investigated three projects related to deodorising Shanghai, in which they filled up ditches – commonly seen in the region’s dense water networks – and built a Europeanstyle underground drainage system, which is a key technology during Europe’s own sanitation campaigns. The system embodied the attempt to contain stench – as well as backwardness and the past – all beneath the surface and within those drainpipes. But this narrative obscures two things. One is that the system that sought to contain stench destroyed the local ecosystem maintained through a natural cycle: night soils produced in the city would be transported to the countryside, where they were used to fertilise the land and produce crops. We tend to forget the fact that modern sanitation was actually disruptive in the first place. The second is that we can’t really contain stench: when the central area got deodorised, stench was dispersed to other parts of the city in an unequal way – it’s a stratified redistribution of smells.

‘Among the Junks on River at Shanghai, China’, 1919. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, Washington, dc. Public domain

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Hedda Morrison, Seated man amid baskets of fish and hanging dried fish, Eastern Districts, Hong Kong Island, 1946–47, gelatin silver print, 28 × 36 cm. © President and Fellows of Harvard College

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‘Jinlong pai xiangyan’ (Golden Dragon Cigarettes), published in the pictorial journal Liangyou (The Young Companion), 15 December 1926. Public domain

ArtReview Asia

ar Your book also argues that the sense of smell has mediated historical events. How is the experience of smell a social and historical phenomenon, even though we tend to think of olfactory perception as a personal experience? xh Our olfactory perception is definitely a personal experience, but smell is also decided by many social, political and cultural factors, which we probably are not really aware of most of the time. This is related to the biological features of our olfactory system. In my book I quote Ann-Sophie Barwich’s book Smellosophy [2020], in which she argues that our olfactory system is much messier than our other senses, like vision and hearing, because of the way our brain and the neural system work. In visual perception, we can identify objects more conclusively, but not so much for olfactory perception. In fact, how we identify things through smell is related to the process of memory and learning, which trains our olfactory neurons to recognise things in certain ways. As a result, olfactory perception can be manipulated within sociopolitical contexts. For example, the moralisation of smell is quite common in many cultures – we tend to think of the fragrant as virtuous and the stinky as evil. The political use of smell is built on this concept. The project to deodorise Shanghai was linked to ideas of racial superiority, while the language of smell in Mao-era propaganda – like to ‘stinken /

douchou [ ]’ class enemies or calling intellectuals ‘stinky number nine / chou laojiu [ ]’ – is an extreme example of how smells can be used as ideological tools. This is why I really would like to raise awareness about resistance.

High Culture and Refined Scents ar In Western thought, the sense of smell is often regarded as a ‘lower sense’ in comparison to sight. Do you think this hierarchy of perception has shaped our experience of the world? xh The Enlightenment thinkers and modernity certainly gave importance to vision because that represents the rational mind, and smell is a much more intuitive sense, which tends to be ignored or just taken for granted. And today, in the age of ai, the division between body and mind will perhaps increase further. But the covid-19 pandemic has inadvertently contributed to the public awareness of smell and its importance, because many of us might have experienced the loss of it. I lost mine completely when I caught covid – it was such a weird experience, and the whole world felt ‘Fully “stinken” the Chinese Khrushchev from a political, ideological and theoretical perspective’, 1967. Courtesy International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Public domain

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so bland. Suddenly it makes us realise that we create a relation to the world through our nose. Smells accompany our breath, which makes them a connection between the internal and the external world, and by extension a bridge between our body and our mind. I think in our digital age it becomes more important to have this literacy in the language of smell. ar In many cultures, there are traditions of wine tasting, kōdō or epicurean connoisseurship, in which the ability to detect olfactory nuance is a sign of culture and refinement – it seems like we do have a desire to pin smells down, even as they remain indeterminate and elusive. xh That is very true. Although for Enlightenment philosophers like Immanuel Kant, aesthetics is vision-centred, and he famously claimed that the sense of smell can’t enter the shrine of aesthetics. He gave reasons why this is the case, but it is quite different from Eastern thinking and traditions. We have xiangdao or kōdō in Japanese [ 道, the way of fragrance, in both Chinese and Japanese languages], and there’s a sophisticated perfume culture in China – as I’ve demonstrated in chapter one, where I use the Dream of the Red Chamber [a novel by Cao Xueqin, from the mid-eighteenth century, one of the four ‘great classics’ of Chinese literature] to show how smell is actually part of an aesthetic experience. But with regard to these connoisseurial experiences, I don’t really think of them as a way

to pin smells down. Rather, it’s more about appreciating olfactory richness and ambiguities, and experiencing them in deeper ways. That’s why we develop these rituals in xiangdao or chadao / sadō [茶道, the way of tea] – they help you appreciate the subtleties and nuances.

Towards a Contaminated Sensorium ar Scents of China focuses on a history of scents, but throughout the book you also work with lots of materials from visual and literary culture. In what ways do you think visual culture, texts and the sense of smell interfere with – or contaminate – each other? xh If historians could access an archive of smells, that’d certainly be great. But unfortunately we don’t have that. Some smell historians like William Tullett are actually calling for a more nose-on approach, but it’s not easy for humanities scholars, practically and methodologically – even if we do have this archive, or we do use our nose more, how to analyse the data is another question. Personally, I’m quite happy to be in the comfort zone of using written texts and visual sources to analyse smell. Because these materials can produce an imaginative dimension – words and images evoke smells, and also they indicate judgements. We don’t really have to have the actual smells to study how culture and society have shaped the sensescape.

As for how different senses contaminate each other, this is a great question. I immediately thought of Paris syndrome – the shock Japanese travellers experience when they visit Paris. Because normally in Japan – and same in China – Paris is very much idealised as a dreamlike place for romance, perfume and relishing life. But when they actually visit Paris and notice that the streets are not always fragrant, and not even as clean as those in Japan, many Japanese tourists are shocked and even traumatised. This is how the actual smells of Paris contaminate the projected visual and textual imagery of the city. And that’s also why it’s so important to talk about embodied experience, because what we actually experience in a place are the invisible atmospheric sensations. ar That’s fascinating. Visual culture definitely generates experiences outside our actual way of perception. In what ways can smells disrupt our reliance on our audiovisual senses? xh This is where I think art can intervene. For example, Anicka Yi has done many experiments with odour that challenge some fixed ideas about gender and race [You Can Call Me F, 2015]. She also had a Turbine Hall commission two years ago at Tate Modern, but according to my experience, it didn’t seem to have been well presented because of the technical difficulties involved. The day I visited there were lots of visitors, which perhaps contaminated the

‘Jintou xiangshui’ (Golden cap perfume), published in Liangyou, 15 October 1926. Public domain

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smell she produced – but then maybe this was exactly the result she wanted to produce. And that is exactly why smell can’t really be prescribed; it is always fluid. I’ve also been entertaining an idea of a performance project based on the colonial history of exhibiting humans at world fairs in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I remember coming across the writing of a Western traveller in Shanghai, who remarked on the foul smells of the local soldiers but commented that they would be perfect subjects of display in London, were they to be properly bathed. And in an issue of Illustrated London News, there were two Chinese boys who actually were exhibited in London, looking perfectly cleansed and groomed. So this is my idea for a provocative work of performance art – let’s say we have two Chinese artists who ‘display’ themselves in a Victorian salon setting, without removing the body odours from travelling in a boat or performing manual labour. In this sense smell can be used to provoke – and reveal what an ocularcentric history erases. ar Do you like the smell of your book? xh Let me smell it again… I do like the smell of books. It’s always nice to have a physical copy rather than an odourless e-book. Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell is published by Cambridge University Press

‘A-Shing and A-Yow at the Chinese Collection’, cover of The Illustrated London News, 8 November 1845. © The Illustrated London News Ltd / Mary Evans

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َ ‫ما بعــد‬ ‫ الغـيث‬AFTER

Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024

‫ بينــايل الدرعيـة‬RAIN ‫للف ــن المعاص ــر‬ February ٢٠٢٤ 20 – 24 May 2024

JAX District, Diriyah, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

biennale.org.sa

‘This can’t be art, there’s too much fun!’ So runs the headline of a recent article in The Guardian, paraphrasing the Israeli-born artist Doron Langberg speaking about his hedonistic ‘New Queer Intimist’ paintings, the latest of which compress a big night out: sweaty dancefloors, nude men in bed, beachy comedowns. ‘The only thing missing’, the article’s author asserts, ‘is the music’. Well yes, but also the sex, the drugs, the feeling of sand on skin at sunrise. The paintings are pleasurable as paintings, but the fun was someone else’s. That Langberg’s work is being presented at Victoria Miro, London, made me think in turn of an earlier show there: Elmgreen & Dragset’s installation Too Late (2008), the glittery leftovers of a real party held before the show opened. That Guardian headline was, in a way, on the money, because art has a strange, distanced relationship to ‘fun’. It’s to be refracted, referenced, but not experienced; something, that is, to be taken seriously. I remember, sometime towards the end of the 1990s, being at cross-purposes with an interviewee, the Scottish artist Kerry Stewart – then semifamous for sculptures of pregnant schoolgirls, sleeping nuns, etc. I wasn’t sure what she was up to, we were exasperating each other while trying to do our jobs, and finally she burst out, apropos her art, “But don’t you think it’s funny?” That had not occurred to me, as a golden key to her work or anyone else’s. I quite liked William Wegman’s deadpan photographs of his dressed-up Weimaraners, but the fact that they were amusing – and that he made purchasable calendars of them – seemed to disqualify them as ‘serious’ art, a risk David Shrigley also blithely runs. I liked standup comedians who sneaked seriousness into humour, but I hadn’t noticed it working the other way around. At least not in visual art. Meanwhile, I was talking to Stewart in the heyday of relational aesthetics, and while plenty of artists were concurrently (and derivatively, if you knew your first-wave Conceptualism) presenting art as a sociable situation, these never felt very enjoyable unless there was food involved – and even then it might depend on who was cooking it. Art’s relationship to enjoyment seemed then, and still seems now, primarily to involve bracketing it as a concept and losing something vital in transition: like certain alcoholic drinks crossing water, like an art band trying to make good music. Off the clock – at the bar, at the club, at someone’s flat afterwards – artworld people are very

No Fun to Be Had

Art tends to treat enjoyment as something to be dissected and analysed. Or, more plainly, as something bad. Does that mean, asks Martin Herbert, that it’s a pleasurefree zone? capable of having fun, sometimes notoriously so. In a gallery, not so much. Outside of the famously cringey sight of art folk dancing to djs, which someone should really produce a YouTube supercut of, we’re seemingly chary of a good time because art, pace Langberg, isn’t supposed to dabble in lightness. Also because if we have to do something to have said fun we might get it wrong and embarrass ourselves, lose the circumspect froideur this milieu still prizes as an attitude. (The solemnity of contemporary art has, in recent times, been Doron Langberg, Basement, 2023, oil on linen, diptych, 244 × 203 cm (each panel), 244 × 406 cm (overall). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London & Venice

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capitalised on by the likes of teamLab and Meow Wolf, whose immersive, entertainment-centric installations for larger audiences don’t get the balance right either, tending to displace the art quotient.) When participatory fun is on the table, an artist must make sure it’s near impossible to misinterpret, as in Paola Pivi’s slide for the first Frieze art fair, Untitled (Slope) (2003), or Jeremy Deller’s bouncy-castle Stonehenge, Sacrilege (2012). And then, of course, we should ponder what those works are really saying, about bread and circuses and heritage or whatever, because we’re intellectuals. Like the Bible says, when we become adults, we put away childish things; and if we get them out again, we analyse them, tap their semiotic resonances, put them under glass. In Berlin right now, for example, the American artist Mark Dion has a display up at the Museum Nikolaikirche, Delirious Toys (2023), for which he researched the 70,000-work toy collection of the Berlin City Museum. The resulting installation, though ostensibly inspired by Dion’s own seven-year-old son’s freeform mixing of his dinosaur toys with astronauts, etc, is a plethora of old toys, freed from the usual taxonomies and chronologies of toy museums, that asks us to ‘take a critical look’ at how human attitudes to the world are encoded in the playthings that shape young minds, and how rigid thinking might be escaped. And, of course, these historical artefacts are not to be toyed with, by you or your little ’uns. In April, meanwhile, in the same city, an 11-week ‘artistic amusement park’ entitled Radical Playgrounds opens in the parking lot of the Gropius Bau. This programme, organised by the capable Polish curator Joanna Warsza and German architect Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius – no artist list as yet – appears to draw on highminded theorisations of play as a mode of togetherness that breaks down barriers and conventions, while also sounding highly au courant: ‘You are invited’, the advance blurb reads, ‘to dig in a decolonial sandpit, sit on an indigenous swing or spin on an entropic carousel.’ This will be a place, the organisers say, where we are ‘free to try things out and make mistakes safely’. Perhaps it’ll transpire that, as The Guardian might mistype it, ‘this can’t be fun, there’s too much art!’ But here’s another reminder that contemporary art, having gamely annexed almost everything else, has territory left to claim or to build: a space where art and fun-and-games somehow, miraculously, don’t cancel each other out. Are we having fun yet? If not, there’s still work to do.

There are traditions that are held close by people who draw on their lineage to give themselves meaning in the world. But traditions are not necessarily linear; at times they are built on fictions that represent a grandiose retelling of the past and of the lives of ancestors. Some traditions are built upon people’s fiction; some combine imagination and relative truth. Historian Eric Hobsbawm famously commented on the tenor of what constitutes tradition and how customs are created: he rejected the argument about tradition being a continuing affair with the past; saying instead that it is created frequently, invented, as a sort of memory. Memory in a Proustian doctrine is a playable drama. One recounts and plays the past into a memory, making it relatable and enjoyable in the process. As a consequence, oftentimes, these memories are a recreation of one’s desires. These actions account for the past as we want it to be. As a kind of anecdote or proverb.

The Blues

The art of Vikrant Bhise suggests that the Dalit struggle is a universal struggle, writes Suraj Yengde

But the many people who are mindlessly pushed aside into the corners of the ‘developed’ world don’t have the means or the opportunity to turn their memories into literature. They are robbed both of their story and of the means to tell it. Yet while their minds may be colonised, and thus their memories unrecorded, that memory itself cannot be stolen. When memory acquires politics, it is a call against the reactionary tabula rasa. Memory for many of us is an ancestral gift preserved through suttas, poems, epics and orality. For this model to work requires an undaunted faith in the ability of a flexible mind. We rehearse in our minds to add higher, unsimplified meanings to ephemeral realities. The Dalit community in India has persevered against the madness of feudal, Brahminical edicts written down as laws. We narrated our endurance through whispers of art and the actions of the Dalit Panthers or Samata Sainik Dal

Vikrant Bhise, Chaityabhumi: Assembly of Parinibban of Great Being, 2023, oil on canvas, 183 × 244 cm

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(a defence organisation established by Dalit social reformer Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and dedicated to preserving the rights of India’s oppressed peoples). Our social history has been recorded in our memories but has not yet been preserved. Almost every Dalit artist equipped with an anticaste, activist background has made it possible to view Dalit semantics. Among these last is artist Vikrant Bhise, whose figurative painting was on show at Anant Art Gallery in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Vikrant works on large canvases. His choice of subject matter is urbane and limited to his life experiences. His subject is the untouched but you won’t find the segregated squalor of the countryside here. The diverse works in Sense and Sensibilities: A Reflective Realisation were connected by the hope for justice and equality that they express, optimistically and ironically married to the constitutionalist frame and state. Vikrant has curated the social story of contemporary India. Chaityabhumi: Assembly of the Parinibban of Great Being (2023) refers to the site in Mumbai where Ambedkar was cremated and is visited by over a million visitors from across the world over the two days in December that mark the anniversary of his death. At the centre of the painting is the marketplace, a sea of humanity. On the horizon is a verdant forest, as Vikrant replaces concrete jungles with an ecological embrace of the congregation, paying homage to the Sangha of the Buddha, who is pictured, hovering above

Vikrant Bhise, Namantar: Struggle of Transformation, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 305 × 488 cm Vikrant Bhise, Nibbana i, 2023, gouache on paper, 18 × 13 cm all images Courtesy the artist and Anant Art Gallery, Uttar Pradesh

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a stall, centre-right. Like many of his recent works it is suffused with the ambience of a cerulean blue. It’s a guarantee of his politics. Blue is a metaphor of the large, expanding, common sky, roofed over the homeless and destitute. As such it is also a call for the revolution of the oppressed. Indeed Vikrant carries solidarity and struggle as the object of his investigation. His Archival Historicity/Dalit Panthers series (2023; 100 gouache paintings arranged in a pyramid) records the history of the movement, its rise and fall narrativised through adjacent frames. But Vikrant does not only paint the Dalit struggle. His work also spans struggles in America, looking at Martin Luther King Jr and Palestine (Gaza Anarchy: Women & Children, 2023, for example). But ultimately these struggles are all against the casteist feudal state. The Palestinians are aiming at the coloniser. The Kashmiris are left directing that anger towards the militarised zones that occupy their private property. In Africa and elsewhere, civil protests are those of the common people, having to find natural resources. Central to Vikrant’s concern are human beings facing a perilous existence. Buried in the hubris of caste, class, religion, gender and everyday life, Vikrant wants to make them objects of beauty and decorum. Suraj Yengde is a w.e.b. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University and a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Caste Matters (2019)

Try as international book publishers might, Southeast Asia’s literary scenes cannot easily be distilled to a marketable essence – or bound together. Take the S.E.A. Write Award, for example, a prestigious literary accolade that was, until recently, presented annually at Bangkok’s storied Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

Since 1979, novelists from across the asean region have gathered for a ceremony that is arguably as infuriating as it is inspiring: no scheme for translating each country’s winning novel into any other language exists. As a result, an award that seeks to expand readership and foster a sense of literary unity in diversity is, in fact, a recurring reminder of how Southeast Asia’s manifest pluralism, its myriad languages and motley cultural histories, hinders such intraregional exchanges. Southeast Asia in this context is an unedifying construct: a winning Thai or Indonesian novel will still only be read in Thai or Indonesian, and so the literary worlds of participating nations remain siloed from one another. In another interrelated context, however, a strong sense of unity does exist: common among the region’s networked community of literary translators is a sense of grievance at their relative invisibility on the world literature stage. Some of their output is bearing fruit – you could point to the 2016 Man Booker nomination of Eka Kurniawan’s Man Tiger, or 2022’s Out of the Shadows of Angkor, an unprecedented compendium of Cambodian prose and poetry, or the uptick in English translations of sui generis Thai novels, among other releases and milestones – and yet their global footprint remains small. This claim of regional exclusion isn’t just an anecdotal hunch or vague inkling; it’s borne out by readily accessible statistics. Toying with

Misreadings

Why aren’t the literary scenes of Southeast Asia getting more regional and global traction? Max Crosbie-Jones considers what literary translators have to say about this

Writer Eka Kurniawan. Photo: Fredrik Sandberg. Courtesy tt News Agency / Alamy Stock Photo Cover of Saneh Sangsuk’s 2023 novella, Venom

ArtReview Asia

the ‘language’ search parameter on the University of Rochester’s ‘Translation Database’, which is designed to give ‘readers and researchers a clearer sense of what contemporary voices are making their way into English’, reveals that one Burmese, one Khmer, 20 Indonesian, three Malay, three Thai and 14 Vietnamese fiction or poetry books have been released in the United States since 2008. But these figures are dwarfed by East Asia (352 Chinese, 518 Japanese and 191 Korean books), and even India alone (22 Bengali, 14 Hindi, 16 Tamil, etc). Another metric of sorts is starker still: while every other region of the world can lay claim to at least one author who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Southeast Asia cannot. In a 2013 New Left Review article titled ‘The Unrewarded’ (an article prompted by the bestowing of the 2012 prize on the Chinese novelist Mo Yan), the late political scientist Benedict Anderson posited that ‘serious “big-language” loss’ in the region over the twentieth century might be largely to blame for this oversight. Unlike ex-colonial states in Africa, Southeast Asian countries did not, bar Singapore and the Philippines, retain colonial languages as languages of state, so its writers, Anderson claimed, ‘were unlikely to have energetic allies in Europe, the Western hemisphere or even in the Islamic world’. Conversely, the seclusion resulting from the region’s nationalisms has resulted in ‘nationalistphilistine ruling elites’ who ‘rarely think about training really good translators’, and none of its national languages having what he called ‘any transnational aura’. Reeling off us and European metrics disregards the sterling work of local presses and imprints (and plays into dominant strains of linguistic hegemony and colonial violence); it also presupposes that the region’s literary translators (and authors) sit around daydreaming of long-term goals and accolades. Many, preoccupied with getting the next manuscript off the ground and out the door, do not. Yet metrics do throw into sharp relief the contours of the global playing field and power dynamics they navigate. The launch of Thai novelist Uthis Haemamool’s The Fabulist, in Bangkok last August, offered some firsthand seriocomic insights. In a rousing opening speech, the

evening’s host, art writer-translator Judha Su, recalled a recent conversation with a local author who had just been asked by a foreign publisher to use their Thai name instead of the English pen name they had used throughout their career thus far. “The reason: their pen name does not ‘sound Southeast Asian’ enough,” she said. Noting how writers and translators also face pressure to conform to fictious stereotypes within Thailand, Su stated caustically that “we – commoners – are made to feel ‘estranged’ from ourselves both at home and outside”. A few years back, novelist-translator Tiffany Tsao articulated a similar sentiment in response to ‘Where are all the Indonesian writers?’, an article released in the buildup to Indonesia’s ‘Market Focus’ programme at the 2019 London Book Fair. In a March 2019 Twitter thread, she called out the ‘neo-colonialist attitudes of the literary Anglosphere’, and bashed out an irascible reply: ‘right where they have always been, writing amazing literature and existing not for the benefit of the western gaze.’ In a later essay for Electric Literature, she lamented how ‘works have to be sufficiently “Indonesian” to excite interest’, but not too Indonesian – ‘unfamiliar yet comfortable. Orientalising, not disorienting.’ Structurally, not much has changed in the few years since her comments, although there are signs of activity. Southeast Asia may have a dearth of quality, committed translators (a common complaint), and its member states may lack anything akin to the enviable Literature Translation Institute of Korea (South Korea’s state-funded support system for publishing translated Korean literature), but grassroots efforts are circumventing gatekeepers. Online initiatives, such as InterSastra in Indonesia and Sanam Ratsadon in Thailand, are centring voices and historical accounts outside the mainstream. Regional translator collective The Seams recently launched a mentorship programme. Su and another female translator, Palin Ansusinha, have founded a bilingual Thai-English platform, Soi Squad, focused on holistic literary management; they call it “a makeshift structure, an interim scheme in the absence of a support system”.

In June last year, Soi Squad teamed up with nonprofit uk publisher Tilted Axis for The Parameters of Our Stories: a two-day literary symposium in Bangkok that offered a heartening sense of unity in diversity. During a panel talk on ‘navigating linguistic multiplicities’, Tsao – whose translator credits include Happy Stories, Mostly (2021), a collection of queer Indonesian writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s short stories – said she detected a shift, away from translators who are academics or area studies specialists, and towards translators who straddle disciplines, and don’t feel beholden to an entire nation. “You’re not translating the feel of a culture or the exotic components of it,” she said, “but rather you’re translating a particular individual’s expression, experience or point of view… which is where literary production came from, right?”

Book launch for Uthis Haemamool’s The Fabulist at Soho House Bangkok, August 2023

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Mui Poopoksakul, whose Thai–English translations have kindled international interest in novelists such as Duanwad Pimwana and Saneh Sangsuk, touched on this shift in a recent interview with online literary magazine Asymptote. ‘If you translate from a less frequently translated language and a culture that’s not as familiar to Englishlanguage readers,’ she said, ‘there’s this feeling of not wanting to be read as something anthropological. I feel that very acutely.’ Her comment was, of course, mainly directed at the Anglophone reader or critic. But when it comes to misreading Southeast Asia’s auras, the gatekeepers of world literature clearly have the most unlearning, and catching up, to do.

Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food (2023) is, at best, a mediocre Tamil film, the main selling point for which is lead actor Nayanthara, also called ‘Lady Superstar’ for her popularity and ability to deliver hit films in an industry otherwise dependent on the bankability of its male leads. In the film (which was cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification and first given a theatrical release before it began streaming on Netflix), Nayanthara plays the daughter of a devout Hindu temple cook who indulges his child’s love for cooking. Chasing her dream of becoming a world-class chef, she defies her parents and secretly joins a culinary school, where she must learn to cook and eat meat if she wants to pass: something her strict vegetarian upbringing forbids her from doing. Following her heart, and after a pep talk by a male Muslim friend who quotes an ancient Sanskrit verse about the god Rama eating meat, she begins to cook with meat. What follows is a predictable tussle between caste traditions and personal ambitions. Though the film ran in theatres without any trouble, members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (vhp), a hardline organisation, filed a case against the filmmakers for ‘hurting Hindu sentiments’ a few weeks after it began streaming. A catchall phrase without a clearly defined definition, the charge has been frequently used to censor any creative production that does not adhere to the narrow vision

Meat the Neighbours

In today’s India, you really are what you eat. And that’s why, says Deepa Bhasthi, you might sometimes need to lie about it

Poster for Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food, dir. Nilesh Krishnaa, 2023

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of what is acceptable for Hindu ultranationalist forces like the vhp, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss) and others under the Sangh Parivar umbrella. While Nayanthara and the film crew were forced to issue an apology, Netflix chose to be safer and removed the film from its platform. Sentiments were supposedly hurt because a Muslim was quoting in Sanskrit – a language viewed as holy and thus to be used only by caste Hindus, never by minorities – to say that gods in mythological India ate meat, and this influenced a Hindu Brahmin girl to defy the culinary traditions with which she had been raised. The issue touched many of the Hindu right’s favourite issues with minorities in general and Muslims in particular, including an insinuation of ‘love jihad’ (as a Muslim male character had befriended a Brahmin girl), and the larger, perennial debate between vegetarian and nonvegetarian diets in India. The question of what people choose to eat has always been a can of worms in India, rife with complicated rules of caste traditions and socioeconomic status. Rightwing politicians and fundamentalists – there is little difference between the two these days – dip into the can every now and then, manufacturing issues and keeping the embers of othering alive. The ban on beef consumption across most of the country might be old news, even if people continue to be lynched on suspicion of

transporting cattle, but in the last few months alone, Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp)-led state governments have issued numerous orders disfavouring meat eaters. A very incomplete list: eggs, fish and meat are no longer allowed to be sold in the open in Madhya Pradesh; a ban on the sale of meat during most Hindu festivals in most states – notably, minority communities are predominantly employed in the meat industry; eggs are not to be included in midday meals in schools if 40 percent of students vote against it. Eggs are considered nonvegetarian in India; whether to include them in midday meal schemes that benefit economically disadvantaged children – in many cases, this meal is the only one they might eat in a day – has been a contentious issue for years, sparked by charities like the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (iskcon)-run Akshaya Patra Foundation, which insists that eggs not be included in the millions of meals it serves to students every day across the country. Weaponising food may be part of the well-tested processes used to other minorities. At a deeper level, though, the language of food politics in India reiterates processes of social conditioning that may not be new, but are increasingly now in the open, and enthusiastically propounded by those in government. And language, we must remember, matters. A vegetarian, who is almost always upper caste, is seen as pure, superior, mild and good, the ideal to aspire towards. If one was not born in a Brahmin community, the next best thing was to choose to partially, or fully, give up meat,

from top Still from Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food, dir. Nilesh Krishnaa, 2023; restaurant receipt, courtesy the author

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a choice that is often celebrated as a morally right achievement. In everyday practice, some Hindus refrain from eating meat on certain days of the week and during some festivals, as per elaborate rules governing foodways, few of which have any basis in either science or scripture. On the other hand, a nonvegetarian is everything a vegetarian is not. This myth of food being the cause for characteristic traits is extended in popular culture, where Muslim invaders in period films and villains in nationalistic films are often shown devouring chunks of meat to depict their savagery. But it must be noted that though a vast majority of Indians are meat eaters, the very word ‘meat’ is rarely found in public spaces, save for butcher shops – though these too are often ghettoised, and kept far from town centres. Restaurant signboards might mention either ‘pure veg’ or ‘veg and non-veg’, ensuring that caste Hindus are warned against accidentally being polluted by eating in places that also serve meat. In Kerala-style restaurants established outside the state where beef is served, the word is kept off menus. At times the word ‘pothu’, meaning meat but understood as beef, may be written on a specials board in Malayalam. Euphemisms in bills might term it ‘meat fry’ or ‘meat curry’, in a bid to keep those who sell, cook and eat beef safe, and alive. Such erasures help keep the supposedly offending food choices of millions out of public spaces, though not public consumption. This in turn changes a place’s visual language: what is left out and what it is replaced with. It is also an editing of what makes a good Hindu in today’s India: one who is vegetarian, god-fearing, yet hypermasculine and ready to defend the motherland – with weapons, if need be. In other words, a Brahminical lifestyle superimposed on the physicality of a Kshatriya warrior. Something both as personal and private as food, when used by state policies with the sole intention of driving communities further apart, is far more effective and longerlasting than other overt measures. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ardent fans rooting for his party’s vision of a Rama Rajya (a perfect Hindutva-led country) know this only too well. Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Kodagu

From the Edge is the English title of a performance collaboration between Min Tanaka and Kohei Nawa that took place on 10 and 11 January at the Yamanashi Prefectural Citizen’s Culture Hall in Yamanashi, Japan. But this event was not a mere pairing of famous talents. Despite being from different generations and practicing in different artistic fields, Tanaka and Nawa have known each other for three decades, and their artistic affinity began in this mountainous prefecture. Now in his late seventies, in recent years Tanaka has become a highly respected actor within his country’s commercial film industry. But what makes him a true cultural icon in Japan is his unique contribution to the art and philosophy of dance. A veteran of Japan’s avant-garde, he started as a dancer during the early 1970s, quickly gaining recognition for his idiosyncratic and daring experiments, which included shocking his audience by dancing naked or deliberately making his body encounter obstacles in alarming ways. In the 2021 documentary film about him, aptly titled The Unnameable Dance (directed by Isshin Inudo), Tanaka repeatedly implies that, when he dances, his intention is not to dance but to be dance. In 1985, Tanaka and his associates took up farming in the rural town of Hakushu in Yamanashi. The reason was both economic and conceptual. The farm was a way for Tanaka and his workshops to be self-sustainable, while the physical labour of farming would condition the body to perform movements that made dance indistinguishable from living and vice versa. In 1988, it evolved into a summer festival that

Danse Macabre

In Yamanashi, Prabda Yoon finds two of Japan’s most creative minds offering up a dark space of mystery and contemplation

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included participants from around the world. There were no outdoor art festivals in Japan at that time; this one pioneered such events, which now flourish across the country. Art Camp Hakushu focused on giving children and students a chance to experience and explore new ideas about art and life through various activities on the farmland. It was there that the young Nawa first met Tanaka. Nawa, now one of Japan’s most recognisable contemporary artists, volunteered at the camp in 1994, while he was an art student. Known primarily for his perception-bending sculptures and installations, there seems to be little relationship between Nawa’s own work and Tanaka’s explorations in dance, yet Nawa cites his encounter with Tanaka as seminal to his artistic development. In the statement accompanying From the Edge, Nawa relates that the experience at Art Camp Hakushu ‘drastically expanded [his] horizon in seeking [his] own sculptural expression where materiality plays a key role, ranging over perception, phenomena, architecture, theatrical art, and even public art’. The Japanese title for From the Edge, (higan-yori), has significantly more nuance than the English. ‘Higan’ is a Japanese Buddhist term, meaning something like ‘the other realm’ that is both spiritual and literal, as in ‘the afterlife’. It is, therefore, also a phrase that brings to mind allusions to religion and spirituality, a context that is missing in the English translation. Taking inspiration from the classic 1212 , written by the reclusive memoir, Hōjōki monk Kamo no Chōmei, From the Edge is based

on a Buddhist view toward a certain state of life, a threshold-crossing epoch – and not a pleasant one. Hōjōki is a contemplative record of natural disasters, human conflicts, the degeneration of values, old age, self-doubt and death; but in the Buddhist view all of it falls under the law of impermanence. What humans may perceive as morbid is simply a fact of life and nature; yet impermanence remains devastating to most humans. In their collaboration, Tanaka and Nawa explore the theme of impermanence through a metaphorical push and pull between life in this realm and the other realm. The effect is a stunning, albeit inevitably dark, meditation on the violence and pain one must endure on the brink of life and nonlife. The stage gradually lights up, slowly revealing a vertical form that stands slightly off to one side. The tall object is soon recognisable as a vulture standing atop a dead tree trunk. The vulture is entirely covered in transparent glass beads of various sizes, the technique that has become Nawa’s signature since his PixCell series (2002–). For those familiar with his work, it is clear from the start that this was a Nawa set. Moments later, the floor is covered in a flowing sheet of white smoke, giving the impression of mist over a river’s surface. Tanaka emerges from beneath the stage, through a circular opening that resembles a manhole, dressed in a ragged kimono. He begins to move, interacting with the patterns created as he penetrates the mist. Music then starts to join the flow. Composed by Marihiko Hara, this ethereal, subtly haunting soundscape spreads and retracts harmoniously with the general flux of Tanaka and Nawa’s collaboration.

Though Tanaka is clearly playing a character, one affected by the dynamic environment, his identity remains an enigma throughout the performance. He creeps up to the vulture, sometimes seeming to imitate it, at other times appearing to seek connection with it. He spins

all images Min Tanaka in From The Edge, created in collaboration with Kohei Nawa and performed at Yamanashi Prefectural Citizen’s Culture Hall, January 2024. Photos: Yoshikazu Inoue

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the tree trunk around, as if to show the entirety of the landscape to the bird. The vulture is, of course, a symbol of death; but here its meaning seems to be more nuanced. The performance is made up of a similar set of ambivalent, loaded actions. Nawa’s set design was deceptively minimal, with only the vulture-occupied dominant vertical structure, the flowing mist, and a subtle pool of red liquid that, in the dark, is barely visible. But the rhythm and the ‘shape’ of the mist constantly changes throughout the performance, using precise programming based on close studies of air movements. Tanaka retreats toward the back of the stage and, removing his kimono, steps into a pool of red, mudlike liquid. He then goes back toward the manhole from which he came and throws his soiled kimono into it. This is followed by a bulb of glowing light that is lowered directly from above, until it too disappears into the hole. Almost immediately a long, glittery rod shoots straight up from the hole, as if to replace it. Tanaka grabs the rod and begins to move around with it, as if it were an extension of his body. The rod, revolving around the stage, is notably longer in proportion to the other objects on the set, creating an unsettling sight that adds yet another riddle to a mystifying narrative. When the rod is eventually discarded, the ground is set ablaze in red light and the mist recedes. A realm-changing event had just taken place, but what was it? Characteristic of both Tanaka’s dance and Nawa’s art, From the Edge did not provide answers; it provoked contemplation. Towards the show’s final act, Nawa introduced surprises with his clever use of lighting, allowing Tanaka to imply simultaneous engagement with fire, blood, magma and volcanic activities – all of which were consequential in the Hōjōki. From the Edge ends with a sudden burst of terror, a kind of silent scream that is somewhat unexpected. It leaves a lingering sense of chaos and unease, an effect not usually associated with Buddhism or Buddhistinspired contexts. Yet it is a conclusion that felt, abrupt as it was, in keeping with Tanaka and Nawa’s poetic, sensual collaboration inspired by impermanence. Prabda Yoon is a Thai writer, filmmaker and occasional artist based in Bangkok

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To say 49

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Flipping the Switch Aki Sasamoto’s search for the eccentricities of life by Tyler Coburn

“It’s a 4am story,” Aki Sasamoto laughs, which began with a problem: up in the beat to care: these are the eccentrics who join Sasamoto to she wasn’t going to parties and desperately needed to dance. The solu- fête and fight. tion came with an invitation to a drag show, or more specifically, In the performance Point Reflection, set to live music by Alsarah a run-in with a bossy queen at a drag show, who told the Japanese and Matt Bauder, Sasamoto monologues in her characteristically artist that she looked miserable and hit her with a feather boa. “I was deadpan style, blending elements of a confessional and a high-school lecture. The title, which describes the mirroring of a point across like, oh, I think I needed that.” Sasamoto had been researching chirality: the asymmetries an axis, frames her chance encounter with an anticlockwise shell in found throughout nature – for example, in the division of humans a parking lot: “when things you thought were true can be flipped”, into righties and a smaller contingent of lefties. She asked an ento- creating a new reality that “looks almost the same as before”. As with mologist, a dream psychologist and other specialists about the past works like Delicate Cycle (2016) and Yield Point (2017), the details of phenomenon. A biologist told her there must be an evolutionary everyday life – however minute or circumstantial – offer insight into necessity for traits to persist over generations. It surprised him what science, mathematics and philosophy grapple with on various that certain minority traits hadn’t disappeared entirely given their scales. Sasamoto’s childhood memory of bird shit hitting someone’s irrelevance to the reproductive mission of life. The conversation eyebrows, in the former work, is an opportunity to see from the bird’s turned into a fight, Sasamoto arguing that “we need the leftie, we and dung beetle’s perspectives. The attempt to extract every last bit of need the eccentric”. She sensed that science alone couldn’t help toothpaste makes her question the yield point of its tube and if she can go beyond that limit. The comedy and pleasure of these works extends with her question. A trio of recent works – the installation Sink or Float (2022); the to the installations, designed with aids for exploring the matter at performance and installation Point Reflection (2023); and the video hand: from the massive ball of bedsheets Sasamoto rolls as a dung Point Reflection (Video) (2023) – explore chirality with reference to snail beetle would (upside-down, with her feet) to the vertical and horishells, which mainly spiral in a clockwise direction. Snails inhabiting zontal trampolines to test tensile strength. Any surface can become anticlockwise homes both gain and lose from their variance: limited a whiteboard for the artist’s diagrams, which attempt to plot her in viable mates yet resilient to predators accustomed to the rotation topics while hinting at worlds outside their bounds. In Point Reflection, of the common shell. For Sink or Float, Sasamoto turns industrial Sasamoto draws spirals in opposite directions on a cylindrical duct kitchen sinks into the sculptural equivalent of air hockey tables: an then overlays a bell curve. She talks about the onset of her midlife hvac system forces air through the perforated Plexiglas that covers the crisis, wondering if she might push past the “expected surprise”: the basins, setting various objects in motion. What results are dioramas of median, the normal response – aging in its clockwise state. “Why not?” life in a crazy city, where clockwise shells, wall hooks, sugar packets she asks. “A switch for eccentricity is not available until you flip it.” and sponges jostle for space, have meet-cutes and zip on bottlecaps When I spoke with Sasamoto, she observed that many aspects to the next party. On one perforated sheet, a turquoise feather distin- of the built environment are designed for righties, including eleguishes a shell, the trace of the drag queen’s boa enabling it to spin mentary school classrooms with windows on the left so right in the opposite direction from the rest. The bard with a feather in his arms don’t cast shadows on the desks. It’s the lefties who write cap, the misanthrope dancing with herself, anyone in darkness, and it’s in darkness that one learns Aki Sasamoto in her studio. saying no to reproductive futurity or just too caught to flip the switch. Photo: Katharina Poblotzki

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Weather Bar Forecast #2 (still), 2021, video, colour, sound. © the artist. Courtesy Take Ninagawa, Tokyo

Delicate Cycle, 2016 (performance view, Sculpture Center, New York). Photo: Kyle Knodell. Courtesy Take Ninagawa, Tokyo

Point Reflection (Video) (still), 2023, video, colour, sound, 31 min 39 sec. © the artist. Courtesy Take Ninagawa, Tokyo

Aki Sasamoto: Point Reflection, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Hai Zhang. Courtesy Queens Museum, New York

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Sasamoto’s ‘4am story’ is a bit of a red herring, as she’s chosen to draws an hvac duct close. Connected to a centrifugal fan, the duct trade the party circuit for “an in-house party” with her five-year-old blows a steady stream of air that causes the vessel’s contents to spin son Ray. Still, her debt to the nightlife is evident throughout her and clatter. Recalling Sasamoto’s diagrams and structured improvwork. Club dancing and free jazz continue to influence her mode isation, the measured prognoses of the weather forecaster – even of structured improvisation, in which the physical elements of her when accurate – capture neither the force nor strangeness of actual phenomena, whether on the scale of climate change, the intimate installations operate as spatial scores. The bar is an enduring setting for the artist, foremost as a place workings of the body, or an ingenious simulation thereof. to meet friends and strangers to hash out ideas, often inspiring the Sasamoto has likened pregnancy and motherhood in middle terms and diagrams of her pieces. Multiple works have merged this age to a “phase transition”, whereby a liquid, gas or solid can transsite with the gallery. In the performance Wrong Happy Hour (2014), form into another state. In a 2020 performance of the same name, Sasamoto plays barkeep, appearing from behind a moveable wall to she is hemmed in on one side by the needs, curiosity and scrutiny stumble around in 90-degree glasses of younger generations, on the other and clumsily make espressos, naviby the guidance and hauntings of Her debt to the nightlife is evident. elders and ancestors. The hot wind gating the narrow space in a garClub dancing and free jazz continue of youth and the chill of the old risk bage can on wheels. As she reflects on to influence her mode of structured coalescing into a tornado, taking “all her “sort of partner” and the demise the desire out of you”. Still, the artist of a former relationship, her feelings improvisation, in which the will not consign herself to fatalism. literally transform the space. The wall physical elements of her installations advances, shrinking the room and In the performance Point Reflection, operate as spatial scores forcing the assembled audience out Sasamoto imagines a horizon of eccenonto the street – leaving her with a tricity “beyond the gentle diminishwatering hole for one. If romance entails making room for another, ing of the bell curve”. Here, when the “solid desire” of youth has then on this night, selfishness wins out. passed, there remains “an interesting state – supercritical fluid – of When a kidney condition and pregnancy came in quick succes- being at the same time liquid and gas”. With a bit of optimism and a sion during the late 2010s, Sasamoto had to pause her drinking and nimble hand on her markers, Sasamoto can find her way through even live vicariously through the red oak bars and hand-blown whiskey the most constricting weather system or diagram. Living a superglasses that began populating her work. The physical changes she critical life means believing in our capacity to continue to change. ara was undergoing became content for mock-forecast videos like Weather Bar Forecast #1 and Weather Bar Forecast #2 (both 2021), installed on tvs Point Reflection is on show at the Queens Museum, New York, at standard sports-bar height. In the former, Sasamoto’s voiceover through 7 April. Her solo exhibition Sounding Lines is on show describes “the local weather inside your body” where “liquid will at Para Site, Hong Kong, 16 March – 28 July, with performances move against the dry front, against the oesophagus at a rate of on 15 and 18 March 30 miles per hour”. The artist adds cocktail straws and herbs to an Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer and teacher based in New York empty whiskey glass, puts that ‘drink’ inside a rounded vessel, and

Wrong Happy Hour, 2014 (performance view, jtt, New York). Photo: Ben Hagari. Courtesy the artist; jtt, New York; and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo

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Keeping It Real by Harry C.H. Choi

Double Poser (production still), 2023, auto-played game made with Unity, 60fps, 4k, colour, stereo sound, 38 min. Commissioned and produced by Hayward Gallery, London, and Art Sonje Center, Seoul. Courtesy the artist

Heecheon Kim blurs the lines between the real and virtual until we’re no longer sure there’s much of a difference

“Working with a game engine to produce Cutter iii was one of the most Following his breakout solo exhibition Wall Rally Drill at the complicated projects ever,” says Heecheon Kim of his 2023 videowork, now-defunct alternative space Common Center, Seoul, in 2015, Kim speaking in his Seoul studio, which occupies the second floor of a run- became something of a phenomenon among South Korean artists of down building in Mapo, a district that is brimming with youthful his generation, mounting a solo exhibition at Seoul’s Art Sonje Center energy from university students and artists alike. He shares the unit in 2019 and receiving the prestigious Hermès Foundation Missulsang with three other artists, each of whom inhabits a different corner of the in 2023. Over the course of this relatively rapid ascent, his work was room, which is built with a type of nondescript, bland concrete that is collected by the mmca, Kadist and Leeum Museum of Art, among reminiscent of a bygone era. As if illustrating the nature of Kim’s prac- others, and he presented his first institutional solo exhibition in tice, his working area at the centre of the open space is only demar- London, at the Hayward Gallery’s project space, this past December. cated by a couple of plastic tables and Kim’s rise seems to be grounded in the “I’m not as interested in the specific a few hefty hard drives placed on the fact that his work accurately portrays floor; those of his peers are filled with the ways in which technology relentsoftware or applications as much as lessly mediates our everyday life – brushes, sketches and prototypes. the society that is obsessed with them. a facet that is particularly evident in “The moment I shifted a variable, say, These byproducts of technology the brightness of light, in one scene, his deft use of the latest technological breakthroughs, such as face-swap I had to calculate and visualise how it are just a reflection of who we are, applications, image filters, technolomight affect the entire surrounding what we desire and how we think” gies lifted from the cgi industry and environment, because I am quite literally building the entire world from scratch,” Kim remarks, recalling the augmented reality. As much as it is obvious from his frequent recourse sheer magnitude of the tasks that he had to complete for his commis- to the narrative style and overall language of the gaming industry. sion by Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art As such, Kim’s work could be read as continuing the generative (mmca) last year. “It was only by the tail end that I realised that these genealogy of artists such as Hito Steyerl and Cory Arcangel, whose mishaps from the game engine could all be a part of the work.” practices are informed by the ways in which technology fundamentally The technological complications that held Kim hostage for many reshaped every aspect of contemporary life, from cognitive capitalism a sleepless night did not stop him from completing the project. Last to computer games. But Kim insists that his work is not quite ‘about’ May, Cutter iii was shown in the mmca’s Seoul Box, which is arguably technology, despite such historical and curatorial framing. “I’m not one of the most spectacular gallery spaces in South Korea in terms as interested in the specific software or applications as much as the of its architectural scale and grandeur. A lavish led-monitor struc- society that is obsessed with them,” the artist says. “Consider far-right ture displaying the video, at least half a dozen metres in height and internet forums like Ilbe or QAnon, and all the characteristics of the suspended from the ceiling, was surrounded ‘real’ world that prompted people to resort above and facing page Deep in the Forking Tanks, 2019, to these virtual communities. These byprodby numerous triangular grey beanbags on single-channel hd video, colour, stereo sound, which spectators could lie down and take in the ucts of technology are just a reflection of who 42 min. Commissioned and produced work via individual headsets. we are, what we desire and how we think.” by Art Sonje Center, Seoul. Courtesy the artist

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For this reason, Kim suggests, rather surprisingly, that his practice could be interpreted without a particular focus on technology. “A large part of my work deals with the fact that these latest technological developments generate real-time experiences in the first person. From this point of departure, an array of questions follows: ‘Who am I? What is time? How do we make sense of the world?’ Indeed, these are queries that are prompted by and could be answered through the apparatus of technology, and that is precisely what I attempt to do within my work. At the same time, though, these are rather classical questions that extend far back into history and have existed since the beginning of humanity.” In addition to his foray into these ontological questions, which, in conceptual terms, distinguishes his practice from those of his predecessors and contemporaries, Kim’s work is also unique in its unrelenting return to the psychogeography of Seoul. His work has time and again returned to the urban landscape of Seoul, where he was born and raised, even though some of his recent projects are built around virtual, constructed environments without real-world coordinates. Even in these scenarios, however, the metropolis seems to have shaped much of his thinking. And perhaps we should expect that, given that he originally trained as an architect. “I am interested in Seoul, as it is a city where such rudimentary components of the urban environment as roads and partitions are not quite what they are supposed to be in theory,” he says. “In a way, nothing works as expected in this city. It is also a one-of-a-kind city where a 3d rendering of a building can be replicated exactly, in real life, without any modifications whatsoever, at least in what I have seen so far.” However, despite the site-specificity (not unconnected to the sense of a fluid transferal from the digital to the real) that has shaped much of his visual language, when voices are present in his work, the artist always uses a language or a voice other than his own. A signature feature of his earlier work, for instance, were a series of monologues recorded in Spanish, a language that he acquired when he spent a year in Argentina during

his university studies. “Choosing a language is difficult, because it pertains to the mannerisms of the speaker, the cultural connotations implied within certain expressions and the internal logic of the film itself,” confesses Kim. “I first decided to use Spanish because it gave me sufficient distance. When I was reading my monologue in Korean, I could feel myself acting it out, and quite horribly so. If you can sense all its minutiae, there is no way that you can completely let go of control and make it natural.” By commanding his language in the right way, Kim admits, he could ensure that his words did not come across as “pointless lies”. What is surprising, though, is that someone like Kim, whose practice is so obviously predicated upon the blurry boundaries between the real and the virtual in the present moment, would be focused on something so actual, and perhaps so old-fashioned, as the truth value of a statement. But the artist’s take on the so-called phenomenon of ‘gamification’ makes it clear that for him, the two worlds do not, in fact, sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. “There are a lot of games in recent years that are referred to as ‘open worlds’, in which you are quite literally thrown into an empty world and allowed to do anything and everything. But just like in the real world, your behaviours are shaped by a set of constraints, and you cannot move around freely and aimlessly without any sense of direction whatsoever.” Thus, for Kim, what the gamification of art could suggest to the contemporary audience is rather clear-cut. “In the imaginary worlds that are created in games, the task of the players is to create their own narratives as they navigate the ups and downs of their surroundings. But this is no different in the real world: what we are asked to do is make our own stories given the inherent restrictions that are set forth in the beginning of our lives.” Kim’s flippant, zany work reveals that even in the virtual world, the most fundamental questions of human existence may still be downright relevant. ara Harry C. H. Choi is a PhD candidate in art history at Stanford University

Spring 2024

When I look at the moon, 2007, Lambda print, 60 × 93 cm

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Wang Ya-Hui How the late artist’s work demonstrates that you’re not alone by Adeline Chia

In a room, circular pieces of cardboard are falling in slow-motion onto she decided to enrol in the Fine Arts department at National Taiwan the floor, bouncing off lightly before landing, so that you can see the Normal University. There she mostly painted. Later, while pursuing sides are painted in different shades of grey, white and black. This is a master’s degree in New Media Art at Taipei National University of Taiwanese artist Wang Ya-Hui’s 2021 video The Smell of Rice Field. It’s the Arts, she started making short films and video art. Her early work silent, but it finds Wang in an unusually confessional mode. She has was whimsical and tricksterish, and focused on playful visual illurotated the angle of the video by 90 degrees, so that the cardboard sions. The video installation Gap (2002) features a projected image of pieces fall from left to right – a move that invokes the movement of a wall. At regular intervals, one side of that wall swings slightly open, wind rather than gravity. The softly falling circles, as well as the split like a secret door, revealing a sliver of an external landscape, like a busy second of anticipation to see which way each circle lands, conspire street or a park. In the video When I Look at the Moon (2007), a moon darts to induce a state of hypnotic attention. Flashing line by line is a text around erratically in the night sky above a quiet street – an incredible written by Wang about her experience of being assigned to teach in sight, almost like a ufo sighting, yet one to which the odd passerby is a school in the countryside after university. At that time, she’d been oblivious. It’s only when this dancing moon disappears into the right experiencing episodes of depression, but after spending time in a edge of the video’s frame, and a beam of light breaks against a lamprural environment, ‘surrounded by mountains and rice fields’, she felt post in the foreground, that you realise the whole thing is a lighting her mind clear up, ‘like a bottle of clean water with the dust settling trick. The moon is actually a white balloon, attached to a string, onto to the bottom’. ‘Something from nature touched my heart,’ she writes, which Wang shines a high-beam torch and tugs around from the ground. Eventually she cuts the string and the balloon floats higher ‘and now looking back, it was the reason why I became an artist.’ This feeling of tranquil sedimentation and calm authority and higher, disappearing into the dark. A separate photograph of the can typically be found in Wang’s two-decade oeuvre, which spans same title, showing the artist holding the stringed balloon reveals the photography, video and installation. Wang died in 2023 at the age of technical setup. The playful visual rhyme, balloon-moon, makes the fifty. Despite her sizeable body of work, she is more well-known in work even more charming. her native Taiwan, where she established her name by winning the Another iconic early work is Visitor (2007), in which Wang presents, Taipei Art Award in 2002 when still a master’s student, with her first with poignant detachment, the house belonging to her grandparcomputer-animated videowork Falling (2002). It depicted everyday ents, in which she spent her childhood. The film opens with a shot of items floating above a table, with objects randomly smashing clouds in the sky and, through a series of jump cuts and subtle cgi, violently down to the ground. Since then, she has been a key figure one small cloud is shown passing through the front door of the runin the local video-art scene, participating in the Taipei Biennial down two-storey house and gliding serenely through the rooms. This thrice (including posthumously in the latest edition in 2023), as well wispy white puff, about the size of a football, floats past gleaming as internationally in places like the Hors Pistes Film Festival at the darkwood furniture, plastic stools, yellow walls, a barometer, palm grease around light switches, a Chinese landscape painted directly Centre Pompidou in Paris (2008) and the Shanghai Biennale (2006). Originally on track to study law at univeronto a wooden door. In the master bedroom, we Visitor (still), 2007, sity, Wang had no formal training in art when video installation (colour, sound), 7 min 16 sec encounter two separate beds with orange velvet

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coverlets, and in front of them, two separate chairs, heavy as thrones. historied environment indirectly speaks to this thought, but later on, Eventually, the cloud drifts out of a window, past the house’s corru- time as embodied in the flow of abstract forms becomes the subject gated zinc roofs, over the river and into the sky again – finishing its of her work. For the video installation The Book of Time #1 (2019), she leisurely tour of the mundane world. layered light effects to create a mesmerising and rhythmic unfolding In her 2017 essay, ‘Five Dialogues’, Wang articulated her own of shapes: first, she shone a beam of light onto a standing piece of creative philosophy and aspirations, writing about five creators cardboard shaped like an open book, creating shifting lines and whose work had influenced her. Among them were the writings of planes. These effects were recorded on video, which is then projected minimalist Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, whose sentences make onto a wall and other objects, like notebooks and bits of folded cardher ‘think that the most moving things are often pointing out the board, are arranged in front of the wall, creating yet more overlapsimplest facts, but this pointing out must come from a place of vision ping planes of light and shadow. As a result, we experience time as and deep feeling’. A part of her work brings mundane objects together, it unfolds spatially and rhythmically, a slow dance of extensions and in as unaltered a state as possible, to allow the materials to speak for retractions, conjunctions and separations. Time is inseparable from themselves, a gesture reminiscent of the Mono-ha movement. The her ever-evolving lines, planes and angles, constantly extending, video Notebook (2020) was inspired by Wang’s personal practice of breaking and joining. jotting down ideas and impressions on random pieces of notebook Many of Wang’s works operate in a realm of abstract form and paper. In the videowork, differently coloured, lined and gridded papers movement. But the patterns of arising and passing through in her are shown gliding over each other horizontally and vertically, creating work resonate poignantly with the cycles of life and death, which a series of screenwipe effects. At the top right corner of the screen is a Wang’s last work, the video installation [one and one](2022), makes constant rhombus-shaped patch of light, as if someone had opened more explicit. Two small towels are hung on a wall, while moving a window to let the sun in. The smooth and steady parade of these rectangles of light and shadow are projected onto them. The rectanblank notebook pages imbues a grave dignity in them. Meanwhile, gles move downwards, and the visual effect suggests that the towels in the kinetic sculpture I am a branch (2012), she picked up fallen tree are moving upwards. Sometimes, emerging from dark to light, the branches from a construction site and arranged them, upright, in towels resemble little buds bursting out of the soil; when the dark a row. A motor, attached to the bottom of each branch embedded in passes over them, they are buried in the earth. In a tall and narrow a low plinth, rotates them slowly one after the other, so we see the rectangle of light, the towels seem to be ascending jubilantly. Of unique form of each pirouetting broken branch, whether smooth or course, all this time, the towels are completely still. one and one is described by Wang in her notes as being about ‘a dialogue over time’. gnarly, curved or straight. In her later work, she would turn to time as her great theme. Indeed, the work does present an ebb and flow of time poetically, but In her exhibition essay for her 2019 solo exhibition, A Brief History the fact that the towels are a pair suggests a rebuttal of sorts. That desof Time, at Taipei’s Eslite Gallery, Wang wrote: ‘I view time as part pite constant change, there is steadfast companionship that remains of the very texture of things, not as an external resolute even through thick and thin, life and one and one, 2022, video installation, measurement.’ In early works like The Visitor, the death; that something indefinable remains. ara two white towels, 551 × 310 cm

The Smell of Rice Field (stills), 2021, video installation, 2 min all images Courtesy Wang Ya-Hui Studio

Hard Work As Glenn Ligon prepares to open his first exhibition in Hong Kong, he talks about race, place, meaning, legibility and why looking at art should be a form of labour Interview by Jessica Lanay

Stranger (Full Text) #1 (detail), 2020–21, oil stick, gesso and coal dust on canvas, two panels, 305 × 1372 cm (overall). Photo: Jon Etter

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In a public conversation organised at The Church, Sag Harbor (ny), last July, Glenn Ligon was asked about the challenges that viewers face when interpreting his work. In response Ligon said, “Do the same work you do to understand de Kooning.” Ligon demands that viewers be prepared to work when in the company of his projects. Over the past three decades and across multiple continents, the artist has introduced audiences to the prophetic insights and language of Black philosophical thinkers. Ignoring the limited basis through which most people would or could understand the drive and commentary of James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston, Ligon’s everintimate critique and thinking about every facet of their oeuvres is not to issue a corrective or provide a legible monolithic trope of Blackness. Rather, Ligon riddles the texts through material erosion to include all viewers in questioning their personal subjectivity and position in their realities. We are currently in a world bent on waste and expanding extremist beliefs. This state ossifies the human imagination and inhibits our ability to inquire what things do and could mean to us. But Ligon initiates viewers into a process of uncertainty and transformation as a necessary exchange of play and ritual. It is as much about you freeing yourself from a closed system of meaning, especially systems that produce false certainties around race, sexuality and being. Here, ahead of the opening of an exhibition of his work at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, Ligon speaks about how his work is given subjectivity through the interpretations of others, and the new artistic distances to which he is pushing foundational texts. jessica lanay Tell me about the upcoming exhibition. glenn ligon The show features paintings from the Stranger [1997–] series and works from a new series called Static [2023–], which are much more abstracted, text-based paintings. Then there is a series of graphite and carbon

rice-paper drawings that are rubbings of existing paintings. The Static series came out of a whiteon-white Stranger painting that I did seven or eight years ago. For various reasons I felt it was not working and put it away. Around a year ago I pulled it out of the racks and worked on it again by rubbing black oil stick over its surface. The black oil stick didn’t necessarily highlight the text in the painting, so the work became much more about patterns, static. Static is a strange concept for a younger generation. I have a nine-year-old godson who lives in Japan, and I had to explain what static was to him because he doesn’t listen to the radio and has never seen a tv station go off the air at the end of the night. But this idea

there are corrections because they were carved by students and then the master would come in and correct their calligraphy. jl It also resonates with the annotated ‘I Am a Man’ piece [Condition Report, 2000]. gl I was thinking about that too. I’m also doing a show at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge that’s about annotations. I was looking at that ink rubbing in my studio for a long time and trying to figure out how to make one of my own. You see, when you’re producing a rubbing of, say, a tombstone, you’re pressing against an incised flat surface. But my paintings are all impasto – the surfaces are built up. I realised that if the text on the painting was flat enough, I could wet rice paper, put it on the surface of the painting and then press down into the negative space in and around the letters. There are some precedents here, like Jack Whitten, whose work I admire a lot. Sometimes the text that I’m rubbing on top of appears very clear, and sometimes, if the paper’s too wet, the graphite and the carbon smear. It almost becomes like a watercolour. jl Something else that also occurred to me is that the abstract is associated with illegibility and dissociation in the background of the ideas that your work brings up. gl I think one of the things that I was thinking about when I first started making work with texts in the 1980s was how little-known those authors were. I mean, they’re known if you’ve taken AfricanAmerican Literature. jl Or you had a family that was about that life.

of a transmission that’s not getting through, or scrambled information, is interesting to me. The drawings that use rubbing as a technique started because a friend went to Xi’an, China, which has an area where there are very ancient monuments where calligraphy students would be taught. He sent me these incredible rubbings of these stone monuments where Stranger #94, 2022, oil stick and black gesso on canvas, 244 × 183 cm

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gl About that life, exactly… Part of the desire in that early part of my career was to put these authors who I was deeply engaged with into the space of art, so that when one walked into a gallery or museum and my work was there, those were the authors you’d have to engage with. As the work travels farther afield and time has passed, it circulates in very different kinds of ways. Baldwin’s visibility in the 1980s is different from how we view Baldwin now. His presence in contemporary culture is very different from when I first started out. In a way, my original project was about visibility – which I guess was always a bit ironic since

text is mostly illegible in my work. I feel like when I’m using a Baldwin text now, I use it as the ground on which the painting or work on paper is made. Consider my rubbings: if I’m creating a rubbing off of a Baldwin painting, the painting is literally the ground on which I’m making this other artwork. The Static paintings also have Baldwin text underneath them. I’ve absorbed Baldwin’s words, and the artwork gets made on that ground that he has provided for me. jl To what extent do you think your experimentation with the materiality of the impasto of your previous series is like a critique of the text itself? Do you have frustrations with Baldwin or Hurston? gl In Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in the Village’ [1953], he never mentions that the owner of the Swiss chalet he’s staying in is his quasi-lover; his gayness is not apparent in the essay. Though one imagines that, in the village, there must have been questions… Baldwin tries to do everything in that essay. It’s about colonialism. It’s about his relationship to European culture. It’s about his relationship to the villagers. It’s about his exile from America. I think the difficulty that I stage in my paintings means you have to struggle with the text. Baldwin’s aim in writing this essay is

to make things clear. And I think in some ways that’s always going to be a failed project. There’s always going to be a kind of opacity in the essays, because he’s trying to do something so panoramic in nature and tackle topics that are too big. There are always going to be blind spots in his work. In some ways, I feel like the difficulty I stage in my paintings, how hard they are to read

“In some ways, I feel like the difficulty I stage in my paintings, how hard they are to read and how you have to struggle to read them, is the struggle to understand anything about race or identity” and how you have to struggle to read them, is the struggle to understand anything about race or identity. The topics are difficult; they are not fully knowable or known. Toni Morrison talks about the idea that Blackness is not already known or fully knowable. It’s reinvented constantly. The idea that Black people as a subject matter are knowable and therefore

Notes for a Poem on the Third World (chapter one), 2018, neon and paint, 213 × 394 cm. Photo: Florian Kleinefenn

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exhaustible means folks can say, ‘We’ve done you, we understand you. We get you…’ jl I think that where you sit in the art-historic landscape is so interesting. You’re influenced by late Impressionism that emerged after the end of slavery in the United States and when Japanese woodblock prints and exposure to non-Western arts are eroding this centuries-long dedication to figuration. At the same time, Black people, despite it being illegal for centuries for them to be literate, are expected to exhaust ourselves through slave narratives. Can you speak to how this moment influences your sense of legibility and opacity in your career? gl I think, just on a kind of formative level, you’re right. When I was in high school, I went to after-school classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. European painting was front and centre with Cézanne, Matisse and Monet’s work hanging in the galleries. The message was, ‘This is the important stuff’. I became interested in those artists, partially, because of the oscillation between figuration and abstraction in their work. But also, I think, because I hadn’t been outside of the United States, so French painting was a way to travel. Also, I’m not a figurative artist. Text is my figuration. The project of a lot of Black American literature, especially in slave narratives, is an insistence on figuration,

Untitled #1, 2023, carbon and graphite on Kozo paper, 46 × 31 cm. Photo: Ronald Amstutz

Spring 2024

Condition Report (detail), 2000, iris print and iris print with serigraph, two parts, 81 × 58 cm (each)

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on ‘representing’. But that focus on representation is a constraint and it implies a certain kind of violence, in that the idea behind those narratives is, ‘We have to convince white folks that we’re human’, which, as a premise for writing one’s autobiography, is deeply problematic. It’s something that Toni Morrison deals with when she is writing Beloved [1987]. She says, ‘I want to pull the veil off of the violence of slavery, that those earlier narratives can’t really do.’ Those narratives are trying to convince folks and garner sympathies, so they can’t really go into the kind of violence that actually happened during slavery. Let’s talk about the scars on Sethe’s back. Let’s talk about why it was more important for Sethe to kill her children than to let them be sent back into slavery.

with language got into me because of the graffiti tagging. The best graffiti was illegible to me. Like, what the fuck is this? It was all about the elaboration of fonts: graphic inventiveness, scale, colour. I don’t think I understood it as valuable in an artistic context, because art, for me, was at places like the Met. But in retrospect, the lessons got absorbed. And someone like [Jean-Michel] Basquiat, when I first saw his work, I realised, ‘Oh, this is a direct connection to things that I grew up with’, but I didn’t know

jl I recall you mentioning hip-hop and graffiti, from your early life, but you also said you weren’t allowed to participate. I just tried to think, what was Glenn Ligon’s commute like from the Bronx down to Walden every day? What did he see? gl I think it was an early influence that I didn’t know was an influence. My family grew up in the Forest Houses in the Bronx near Mount Morris High School. Trinity Avenue and East 165th Street, mid-South Bronx. My mother said, ‘I’m sending you to a private school that’s an hour and a half away from our house because I’m trying to get you up outta here.’ So from 1st grade to 12th grade, I went to Walden, a private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I could understand her desire to keep me off the streets, but I had to go outside to go to school, and I had friends and relatives who lived in the neighbourhood. You could not get on a subway car during that time that wasn’t tagged top to bottom. It was also the beginning of rap and hip-hop… Fat Joe grew up in the housing project I grew up in. I didn’t know him, as he was a little younger than me, but he talked about dj parties in the playgrounds in our neighbourhood. I probably heard them from the windows of the 11th floor apartment we lived in, but I wasn’t allowed to go out. But I think the idea of visually playing

you could use that in the art space that he was inhabiting. So he was an important influence. Not that my work looks anything like his, but… Condition Report (detail), 2000, iris print and iris print with serigraph, two parts, 81 × 58 cm (each) all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Hauser & Wirth, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

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jl The permission… gl The permission to think about text as a primary medium for making one’s work. jl It is hard for me not to think of your work in relation to concrete poets like Nicanor Parra, Guillaume Apollinaire, Dom Sylvester Houédard, for example. I wanted to explore that idea of semiotics as a possible cognitive dissonance with you. You’re asking viewers to search, to ask, to look, through the negation of understanding. And so I wondered, what would Mr Ligon say about such a thing, doing the work that he does? gl There’s the question of opacity, too. Of just recognising that there are things in the work that either you know, or you don’t know, and things that will remain hidden unless you’re deep in. When I first started out, there was a demand for artists of colour to be explicit, to be upfront. It was all about telling folks who we were and what we were doing. Over time, that shifted. Now I feel like folks got to come to us. That’s a super interesting development, which for me is tied to the rise of rap and hip-hop, which was all about inside knowledge. I think culture is so fast now, too. I was on a panel at the Brooklyn Museum recently, and we were talking about slang and how easily it’s co-opted. Someone on the panel said, “But that’s ok, because five minutes later, we’re done with that way of saying something and onto the next.” I also think about the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. Part of the reason why he played so fast was so he couldn’t be imitated. He’s like, ‘Are you trying to do my shit? ok, I’m going to speed it up… play twice as fast. You can’t steal the shit if you can’t keep up.’ In general, Black culture is hard to keep up with, because it moves so quickly. But that is, I think, where its strength and vitality come from: that it’s about constant reinvention, and it’s about constantly moving on. ara An exhibition of work by Glenn Ligon is on show at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, 25 March – 11 May

March 28-30, 2024 Zhang Ruyi, Folding the Distant – 1, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Don Gallery.

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Jonathan Jones untitled (transcriptions of a country) Artspace, Sydney 15 December – 11 February On 19 October 1800, two ships – the Géographe and Naturaliste – set out from Le Havre in France; two years later they landed in Warrang (Port Jackson) in the Eora nation. Led by Nicolas Baudin and ordered by Napoléon, the expedition was propelled by the predictable colonial imperatives: ‘discovery’ and extraction. Aboard the ships were gardeners, mineralogists, botanists and zoologists who would achieve these purposes – which, in reality, meant the ripping of minerals, plants and animals from their homeland. By the time the ships returned to France in 1804, the expedition had amassed more than 200,000 dried and preserved specimens and objects, alongside 1,500 plant species and 3,872 animal species, including emus, dingoes, wombats, kangaroos and black swans. Of the live animals, 72 survived the trip. The specimens that returned to France were spread between the Muséum national d’Histoire

naturelle, Paris, and Joséphine Bonaparte’s Château de Malmaison, west of the capital, and destined to become totemic curios of the South. This event is critically revisited by Jonathan Jones in an exhibition that agitates and unsettles the smooth surface of Australia’s colonial history. The works on show here – which include meticulously embroidered woollen panels, reframed portraits of First Nation peoples, carved emu eggs, and 206 earthenware replicas of cultural objects that were originally taken to France but are now missing – all reach into history in an effort to reclaim what was taken. Indeed, at the heart of the exhibition is both a demand for restitution and act of healing. While it might be impossible to bring home the broad crosssection of living species and heritage objects misappropriated by the French expedition, the route that Jones’s exhibition travels – from its first presentation at the Palais de Tokyo

Study for untitled (transcriptions of country), 2021, historical prints, objects, embroideries by Shabnam Mukhi, Lida Heidari and Rabia Azizi. Courtesy the artist

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to its current showing at Artspace – represents a repatriation of sorts. This reversal finds its strongest expression in untitled (embroidered Eora country) (2021): a work comprised of 308 roughly a3-size wool panels, each of which have a plant species – taken by Baudin from the Eora/Sydney region – embroidered on their surfaces in black thread. Laid out across three tables that fill Artspace’s main exhibition hall, the visual impact is spectacular. The panels were embroidered by Jones’s collaborators for this project – a group of Sydney-based migrant artists and artisans, in dialogue with Elders – who painstakingly attended to the idiosyncrasies of each plant, and whose presence added another layer of diverse cultural history and legacies of movement to the work. Each embroidery is based on photocopied records from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and includes

carefully reproduced notations, barcodes and handwritten descriptions that signal the crude imposition of European knowledge systems onto these plants. The implied violence of this latter practice is exposed by a nearby plaque that explains that ‘The transportation and translation of these plants was done without the consent of Australian Indigenous people, for whom plants are kin.’ Against this declaration, the subtle three-dimensionality and tactility of the sewn plants – which almost seem to grow out of their fabric substrate – suggest a living relationship that moves beyond the flat itemised institutional scan. The materiality of untitled (remembering Eora) (2021) displaces the colonisers’ vision and their assumed position as the privileged representer of historical events. The work consists of engravings based on portraits of local Aboriginal people made by artist Nicolas-Martin Petit in 1802, which are hung on the wall in a row, each framed by a separate wreath composed of either scallop shells, gumnuts, emu eggs, brushtail possum fur or paper daisies. The individual materials reference the collections stockpiled

by Baudin, while the wreaths recall the ancient Greek symbol for victory that Napoléon used to give historical weight to his imperial power. In reappropriating Napoléon’s own coopting of the wreath, untitled (remembering Eora) wrestles the power of narration away from Petit, deploying this symbol of colonial power as a proclamation of Aboriginal identity and reconnecting each of the sitters with the materials of Country. There is a sophistication to this retooling that turns the embedded history of Petit’s series of engravings upon itself, and in doing so centres First Nations perspectives. This strategic reworking of historical material is echoed in Jones’s and Lille Madden’s (an Arrernte, Bundjalung and Kalkadoon woman from Gadigal Country) soundscape, untitled (corroboree) (2021), which reworks a musical score created by the French expedition in response to an Eora corroboree. The soundscape washes over the space, melding the sounds of a harp and piano with the sounds of Country: the lapping of the ocean and the songs of birds. The work finds particular resonance in the newly reopened halls of Artspace, whose

expansive windows and light-filled galleries feel connected to its natural surroundings – a space in a permanent state of exchange with the outside world. People look in and the artworks look out. untitled (transcriptions of country) transacts in a series of beautifully rendered poetic interventions and reparative acts that reach across time, bypass the barriers of the colonial archive and transcend the impossibility of retrieving lost cultural possessions. Coming shortly after the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum – which failed to pass and would have given First Nations Australians constitutional recognition and a new constitutionally enshrined representing body – its stakes could not be higher. The exhibition probes at how we understand the world and its history, but more than that, who gets to narrate this understanding. In direct opposition to the epistemological violence of colonialism, which is built upon singular authority and the unilateral extraction of ‘resources’, we find here a network of voices and hands unpicking and reworking the designs of the past. Tai Mitsuji

untitled (transcription of country), 2021 (installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris). Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy the artist

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Mao Yan New Paintings Pace, London 19 January – 9 March It looks as though boredom has descended upon the figures in Mao Yan’s latest series of paintings. They sit and stare, some off to the side while others gaze directly at the viewer. If ennui has a colour palette, this is it: ashen skin tones and washed-out greyish-blue backdrops. Mostly, we don’t know who these characters are – Young Man with a Hat No.2 (2021), Madam (2022) or Man with Gloves (2023). There is, however, one portrait: Master Hongyi and Mariewicz, (2021). In it, the Chinese artist-turned-Buddhist monk lies peacefully on a cot: perhaps sleeping; perhaps dead. Above him hangs a painting – a black square, a reference to Kazimir Malevich (a contemporary of Hongyi), whose name here is spelled ‘Mariewicz’. It’s not so clear why, but maybe that doesn’t matter, because the square appears to be hung lopsided anyway (assuming that it is actually meant to be Black Square, 1915). Hongyi is named, presumably, because he was known for painting and teaching in the Western style – which sort of draws a connection with the

sfumato technique that’s incorporated into Mao’s paintings. While Malevich, for his part, had previously expressed that he wanted to ‘free art from the ballast of objectivity’ (The Non-Objective World, 1927). So perhaps that’s a clue of how we should look at things here, too; be a bit less prescriptive and more intuitive. There’s a nod to Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (1915), as well: in Young Man with a Hat No.2, three black rectangles – divorced of their original composition that includes other colour rectangles – hover by the figure’s head, like a trinity of angular thought-bubbles, while he slouches in an armchair and gloomily looks away at something outside the canvas. I’d be bored too, if the entire exhibition were made up of those portraits. For ‘new’, albeit more-defined works, they don’t seem all that different to Mao’s older hazier portraits. But it’s the series of abstract geometric paintings, Broken Teeth (2021–22, all roughly a3-sized) and Condensed or Adrift (2022–23, which are much

Broken Teeth No. 7, 2022. © the artist. Courtesy Pace, London

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larger at 1.5m), hung in an adjacent room and in the basement, that add a degree of tension to the exhibition, rescinding the threat of its being merely a basic portrayal of despondency. Despite the two series’ titles, there isn’t a noticeable difference in the formal aspects of the paintings – and both share the same muted washy blueand-grey colour palette as the portraits. But these paintings invite visitors to look closer. They are many layered, each with what looks like hundreds of barely-visible overlapping circles drawn onto the canvas, intersecting sections of which are painted a different colour (usually a grey-black) to the background (usually a grey-blue), which results in paintings that look as though shattered and decayed bits of teeth are slowly sinking through a body of water. Although shown separately from the disinterested figures in the portraits, the shapes also look like they might represent the human psyche; scattered and broken, perhaps these fragments are all that remains of the ballast of a weary mind. Fi Churchman

Yoko Terauchi One is Many Many is One Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo 1 November – 2 December At first glance it appears simple. The white walls of the gallery are decorated by a continuous, head-height, friezelike red band. It’s a roll of paper, bulldog-clipped to the wall. We know it’s a roll of paper because there’s more to it than what’s unfurled, to which a still-rolled section at either end testifies. It’s as if the artist intends to bury any sense of illusion (which is what art is supposed to do) beneath a veneer of honesty (normally the domain of real life). The frieze is decorated by an undulating line of alternating smaller and larger holes that have been cut into the paper and through which the gallery’s whitewashed wall shines. It looks like a chart of the elliptical motion of a star or planet across the night sky, swooping up and down as the paper band traverses the gallery space. Gently suggestive of something without definitively expressing anything. An interior designer’s wet dream.

But it also has the kind of beauty we’re used to associating with minimalist artworks. Assuming you’re into Minimalism, that is. While indisputably elegant, Yoko Terauchi’s art has a way of leaving you feeling slightly off balance. In fact, the multiple ‘holes’ are the product of a single cone cut into the rolled paper. You can see how it works if you stare at the rolled end. And the evidence is in front of you in the form of the cone that was cut out from the roll and that’s also attached to the wall. Like the work of a magician intent on revealing their trick. Except this cone isn’t made up of the discarded paper; rather it’s cast from that but made of plaster. You start to get the feeling that nothing is as it appears even though everything appears to be so straightforward and simple. The truth is that the installation, One is Many Many is One (2023), is at one and the same time

even more simple than it appears to be, and even more complex. Everything you need to know is in the title. And before that it was already in the construction of the work. And yet it makes you rethink the operations of your perception. The installation comes with a poem by the artist just to make absolutely sure: ‘One is Many Many is One / When we count something as “one” / This is the beginning of dividing the world / Which in fact One as a Whole But, can we see whole / of the universe? Can we count one?’ Which, in its apparent contradictions on the subject of oneness, might suggest connections with certain teachings of the Buddha. And yet, what’s in the gallery is material not spiritual. So to veer towards the latter might smack of folly. And it would be fair to say that this extraordinary installation also tests your proclivities for overthinking too. Mark Rappolt

One is Many Many is One, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Ken Kato. Courtesy the artist and Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo

Spring 2024

1st Taiwan International Austronesian Art Triennial RamiS Taiwan Indigenous Culture Park, Pingtung 17 October – 18 February In 2016, at the beginning of her tenure as Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-Wen apologised for the historic mistreatment of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples, offering to consider initial steps towards a discussion of Indigenous sovereignty. Eight years later, and at a pivotal moment in Taiwan’s own tense negotiations around self-determination, many consider little progress on that last to have been made. It is in this context that Pingtung’s Indigenous People Culture Park has inaugurated its Taiwan International Austronesian Art Triennial, an exhibition that articulates the island as a vital point in a network of global exchange that has endured for centuries. The exhibition organisers state that RamiS is named for the proto-Austronesian word for ‘roots’, reflecting on the belief that the Austronesian language family originated in Taiwan. Indigenous Taiwanese cocurators Nakaw Putun and Etan Pavavalung conceived of two thematic wings for the triennial: Putun’s ‘Becoming Spiritual’, an exploration of how a reacquaintance with past knowledge-ways and spiritual convictions might serve as guidance in the global struggle against extractive capitalism, conflict and climate injustice; and Pavavalung’s ‘Why We are Us’, which focuses on the Austronesian gaze as the foundation of a philosophy that champions collectivity, resistance to colonialism and stewardship of the environment. At the entrance to ‘Becoming Spiritual’, located at the park’s Aboriginal Culture Exhibition Center, work by the late Lafin Sawmah – undated and gathered here under the title Building a Canoe – sits like a masthead for these themes. The Amis artist returned to Taitung in 2009, compelled to experiment with the revival of lost shipbuilding practices; the existence of these evidenced by the fleets that scattered Austronesian cultures across the oceans. Sawmah’s ethos is exemplified in the space by two carved wooden heads that sprout towering crowns of tentaclelike tendrils. Flanking a canoe, these faces recall

driftwood, a material itself defined by a transformative encounter with the sea and its journey back to the land. The vessel also appears in a video projected on an adjacent wall, in which the artist invites Hawaiian master shipbuilder Uncle K to Taiwan to participate in a launch ceremony, invigorating the lines of diasporic return and knowledge-sharing along which RamiS stakes its point. While Sawmah’s work celebrates the abstract possibility of return through creative knowledge exchange, ‘Becoming Spiritual’ grapples for the most part with the complexity of homecoming, and other challenges shared by members of the Austronesian diaspora in various locations around the world, on a localised scale. Dondon Houmwm’s bbrbar-2.0 (2018–23) – an installation that sees film projected onto a sculptural base that sprawls across the gallery floor – evokes questions about Indigenous entitlement to their land in Taiwan. The artist weaves a landscape out of plastic packing strips, with soaring peaks reminiscent of the mountain ranges that form the spine of the island; the site of many original Indigenous settlements. From above, a projection maps images of the state’s transport infrastructure onto the knot of hills and valleys of the installation. The work quietly highlights discrepancies in mobility and the Indigenous right to return to, claim and define their land on their own terms. Atayal artist Ciwas Tahos is one of a number of artists who assert Indigenous knowledge by remapping the landscape of Taiwan. Here, she pursues ancestral sites that resonate with and enrich contemporary Taiwanese queer identities. Perhaps She Comes From/To____Alang (2020) takes viewers to the lost mythological site of Temahahoi via a vivid, digitally-rendered video that explores the imagined landscape. Tahos’s Temahahoi is a queer place where rocks erupt from the earth with the soft geography of hips and breasts, bodies subsist on steam, bees whisper conspiratorially and communities of non-conforming people and women live apart from men, able to bear life simply by

facing page, top Dondon Hounwn, concept for bbrbar-2.0, 2018–23. Photo: Jing Dean

opening their bodies to the winds. Taiwan is celebrated as a sanctuary of state-sanctioned queer rights in Asia, and Tahos’s work adds to this mythos by recognising that the land holds an essential queerness, to be rediscovered, rather than bequeathed. Near the culmination of Pavavlung’s curatorial offering hangs Sudipau Tjaruzaljum’s series A Voice (2023), a gathering of imposing portraits printed on strips of photographic paper. In xy xx xx xy (2023), the first work in the series, portraits of her parents and grandparents overlap; Indigenous Taiwanese and Western predecessors are interwoven using techniques repurposed from traditional shellginger crafting. The technique is repeated in Facial Recognition (2023). Here, the vivid colours of living flesh erupt around the mouths and eyes of greyscale studies that document the heads of museological waxworks figures (rescued from the Culture Parks basement). These large matlike prints come together and simultaneously recall cutting-edge aggregations of data – threads of code strung into the semblance of a person – and artefacts of inheritance, in which identity coheres in the dedication to knowledge carried by heritage. Nearby, pacacada (2023), a filmed collaboration with artist Ljaljeqelan Patadalj, plays out on the adjacent walls. Staged on the mountains, in the rivers and by the ocean in Pingtung, the same wax mannequins, dressed in traditional Paiwan regalia, oversee Tjaruzaljum as she weaves together the strands of her identity. Tjatuzaljum’s work reflects a longing to assert agency over the ways Indigenous personhood has been institutionally visualised in the past, and how it may be expressed moving forward. It is an inclination encapsulated in RamiS at large. Rallying the artists of this diaspora in Taiwan at a time of local change with the potential for far-reaching ramifications, RamiS offers a blueprint for a globalised Taiwan that centres on the worldmaking ideas of the original inhabitants of this island. Christopher Whitfield

facing page, bottom Chee Wai Loong, Homesick, 2023, mixed media, 900 × 900 × 500 cm. Photo: Jing Dean

ArtReview Asia

Spring 2024

Vidvastha (Devastated) Feature film directed by Ashish Avikunthak Morality and mortality preoccupy Ashish Avikunthak, as do religiosity and spirituality, temporality and spatiality, and a host of other metaphysical concerns. The iconoclast filmmaker has been exploring the dualities and varying hues of these themes in his cinema for over a quarter century. His 15th film, Vidhvastha (Devastated), had its world premiere earlier this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In it, Avikunthak deconstructs his preoccupations and much more through characters engaged in dialectics. However, instead of arriving at any ‘truth’, their conversations perpetuate dissonance, thereby annihilating any semblance of rationality. “I am merely rupturing the relationality between image and meaning that is generally taken for granted in narrative cinema,” the filmmaker opines as we talk shortly after the film’s launch, “that every conversation or dialogue will have a teleological impact on the narrative of the film. I am definitely shattering this epistemic association.” Vidhvastha is a commentarial film that examines the double life of a middle-aged Hindu policeman (Mainak Dasgupta) in India. In separate confrontational conversations with his wife (Sanghamitra Deb) and lover (Debleena Sen), he opens up about his work

as a state-designated ‘sacrificial assistant’ tasked with the extrajudicial killings of Muslim men. Elsewhere in the wee hours of a sleeping city, the protagonist’s alter ego, Arjuna (the third of five Pandava brothers from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata), seeks the counsel of Lord Krishna, who instructs him to execute his duty as a warrior (Kshatriya) without human considerations of attachment and grief. This enacted commentary forms a parallel narrative thread, drawing from the Samkhya Yoga section (Chapter 2, Verses 1–38) of the Bhagavad Gita, in which Lord Krishna advises Arjuna to look beyond the dualities of life and death. He explains the immutability of the soul and the ephemeral nature of bodily existence, and influences Arjuna to fight against his near and dear ones. The Bhagavad Gita is not just one of the most important philosophical treatises of Hinduism; it also has a wide spectrum of interpretations. More than 200 translations and commentaries have been written, most of which have been published in the last couple of centuries. Avikunthak came across the Gita as a teenager, attending lectures by Swami Chinmayananda, Swami Parthasarathy and others who would regularly visit his hometown,

Vidhvastha (Devastated), 2024, dir. Ashish Avikunthak. Courtesy International Film Festival Rotterdam

ArtReview Asia

Kolkata (then Calcutta). Over the years, he has read many translations and commentaries. “It has been a significant text in my spiritual journey. However, when I came across [politician, social reformer and Dalit leader] Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s thoughts on the Gita, it unlocked a radical interpretation for me, which is the focus of this film,” says Avikunthak. Criticising the logic of the discourse in the Gita, Ambedkar mounted a brilliant rebuttal in ‘Essays on the Bhagwat Gita: Philosophic Defence of Counter-Revolution: Krishna and His Gita’, written in 1927. In it, he forcefully argues that the Gita provides a metaphysical exoneration of violence, and the guidance that Lord Krishna gives Arjuna justifies violence in Hinduism. Ambedkar demolishes Lord Krishna’s argument that the world is perishable and man is mortal; therefore, it’s ok to kill your friends and relatives because they are essentially souls and will be reborn again. He was of the opinion that the Gita not only justifies caste violence in India but also provides spiritual and religious rationality for perpetuating caste oppression. Avikunthak too makes his stance clear on the revered Hindu text: “In twentieth-century India, the Gita has been used by nationalists like [independence activist] Bal Gangadhar Tilak

to instigate political action against the British, whereas Vinayak Damodar Savarkar [who developed the Hindu nationalist Hindutva movement] interpreted this section of the Gita to use violent means for independence. On the other hand, for Mahatma Gandhi, Samkhya Yoga epitomised selfless action, nonattachment and ethical duty. Whereas Nathuram Godse used the Gita to justify his assassination of Gandhi. So who is right? I leave that for you to decide, but with an addendum that the Bhagavad Gita had a great influence on Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi leader who is largely known for being a chief architect of the Holocaust.” The pathological universe of Vidhvastha oscillates between the policeman’s religious justification of his killings and scenes of ritualistic animal sacrifice, part of the Tantric worship of the Goddess, raising questions about the hierarchy of violence and the nature of divinity – with no easy answers. The animal sacrifice footage was shot during the autumnal Kali Puja in a village where hundreds of goats and sheep are ritually sacrificed. These images are rendered through varying filters: now negative, now prismatic fragments. Their kaleidoscopic impact creates disorienting perspectives. Avikunthak extends his penchant for unsettling the viewer with enacted excerpts from the cia’s Kubark manual, which describes methods of counterintelligence interrogation (electric shock, threats and fear, sensory deprivation and isolation) used widely from the 1960s to

the 1990s. These techniques have been employed in many instances in India, not just against terrorists and Maoists but also against petty criminals. The subjects are also grilled with a series of illogical and unrelated questions, to destabilise them. This often leads to a distortion of identity, causing them to break down. Whereas in some cases, enduring mental and physical torture strengthens their resolve not to submit, evoking in these subjects a feeling of being in the hands of inferiors. Avikunthak draws parallels here with the juxtaposition of various modes of ritual self-mortification. “Numerous body mortification rituals like hook swinging, rolling over fire, walking on fire, jumping on swords, and nailing are undertaken during local festivals that predate organised religions like Hinduism or Buddhism. These are primarily non-Brahmanical and are practised by lower-caste groups that have been subjected to denigration since the advent of the caste system. I have been shooting these rituals for many years. In Vidhvastha, I have sutured them. They act like a meta-narrative injunction.” The perverse desire for self-harm, and masochism, manifests itself in the sexual desires of the policeman’s wife and lover. Their fantasies for violent sex or rape run morally divergent from their condemnation of the protagonist’s act of killing. Avikunthak rigorously dissects the duality and hypocrisy in the beliefs and actions of each character. For instance, the policeman asserts to his wife that, being from

the upper-caste Kshatriya clan, it is imperative for him to follow a vegetarian diet; but we see him devouring meat. Avikunthak furthers the bizarreness by occasionally interspersing the narrative with the classical performance of an Odissi dancer in internal and external locations. He justifies these interjections: “I am trying to suggest that someone might be very well versed in fine arts but can still be ideologically aligned with violence, in the same way that someone can be a vegetarian but still be a murderer. Hitler, as you know, was a vegetarian. He is a good example of such a dichotomous existence.” Vidhvastha, through its complex and probing discourses, grittily examines the nature of violence in its diverse forms. The material for the conversations that the encounter specialist has with the women was mined from various Hindutva online forums over the past decade, with the rise of social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where rightwing handles openly advocate violence against Muslims. “In these calls for the annihilation of Muslims from India, I discovered that justifications were often rooted in Hindu religiosity, both Puranic and Tantric. I have incorporated those rationalities into the film’s dialogical structure,” explains the filmmaker. But by exterminating the ‘other’, can man escape self-annihilation? The protagonist thinks otherwise. He shares with his wife, “I do not kill. I extinguish myself daily, bit by bit.” Avikunthak sums up his film in three words: “Violence begets violence.” Arun A.K.

Vidhvastha (Devastated), 2024, dir. Ashish Avikunthak. Courtesy International Film Festival Rotterdam

Spring 2024

Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho Offerings for Escalante Para Site, Hong Kong 21 October – 8 February On a fundamental level, Offerings for Escalante, an exhibition that comprises a film, works on paper, sculptures and lightworks, is about trying to make sense of the present through an examination of a particular landscape’s layered history. And simultaneously to posit possible visions for its future. In order to do this, artist duo Enzo Camacho and Amy Lien weave together narratives – personal, artistic and historical – that carry the residues of oppression and tragedy. The duo’s interest in Escalante, a town located on Negros, the fourth largest island in the Philippines, is twofold: first, that it was Camacho’s mother’s hometown, and second, that it is home to a little-known seminal artwork with great art-historical value – the charged, magnetic, aggressive mural Angry Christ (1950), by the late queer Filipino-American modernist painter Alfonso Ossorio. Located in a modernist Church on the island, in the midst of a sugar plantation (an industry for which the island is known), the technicolour mural depicts Christ with his arms spread wide and a piercing gaze, and is both literally and conceptually confrontational – as though prompting his congregation to reflect on their sins, those of the people who came before them and those committed on and against the land on which they worship. Lien and Camacho have been regularly visiting Negros since 2017, conducting field research and engaging with local communities. It was

during one of these visits they encountered the mural, which became a portal for the artists to examine the island’s layered past. In a similar vein to the accusatory gaze of Angry Christ, themes of Negros’s sociopolitical context and history, a sense of visual confrontation and the continuation of a long-established feudal system are made evident in Lien and Camacho’s exhibition. The 1985 Escalante Massacre occurred during a peaceful protest against the regime of Ferdinand Marcos and its implementation of martial law. After 5,000 civilians gathered in the town centre and set up barricades to the entrance of the municipal plaza, paramilitary forces fired on the crowd, then continued to pursue and shoot those who ran to hide in the sugarcane fields. A total of 20 people were killed and numerous injured. This tragedy serves as the point of departure for Langit Lupa (2023), a film that is the centrepiece of the show, showcasing the testimony of the massacre’s survivors and revealing how it shaped and impacted the town’s future. Lien and Camacho shot and assembled footage on location, including eyewitness testimonies and accounts of the incident combined with visual material related to the island’s landscape, both natural and urban. The film includes scenes of the massacre site recorded in 2023, with snippets of phytograms (a technique using the internal chemistry

Flame Garden (spring), 2023, mixed media, 119 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artists and Para Site, Hong Kong

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of plants to develop imagery on photographic emulsion) spliced between scenes. It’s neither a documentary nor a piece of investigative journalism: the artists present a localised perspective of the island and its history. Moreover, the way the scenes in the film regularly alternate between testimonies, the present-day site of massacre and the area’s natural landscape brings to mind the concept of history repeating itself. Prompting reflection on the country’s current political landscape, which is becoming a dynastic regime, with ‘Bongbong’ Marcos now the country’s president, and other family members occupying prominent government positions. While the film is the central work of the exhibition, it’s the drawings made on handmade paper that leave a lasting impression. Newly commissioned works such as Sacred Heart (butterfly procession) (2023), Hunger Leaf ( flesh wounds) (2023) and Social Volcano (lava moon) (2023) depict landscapes that are created with a literal salad of banana stalk, cilantro, coconut husk, garlic and onion skin, papaya seeds and numerous other natural materials locally found on Negros. These works intentionally recall and adapt Ossorio’s ‘wax-resist’ technique, which involved drawing in ink over dense layers of wax and watercolour, and integrating iconographies from local folklore – further emphasising reiterations of Negros’s physical and historical identity. Aaina Bhargava

Sachiko Kazama New Matsushima Mujin-to Production, Tokyo 28 October – 3 December Matsushima is a coastal city on Honshu island, famous for the forested islands that populate its bay. For the Edo-era poet Bashō it was one of the most beautiful places in Japan. Sachiko Kazama is known for fusing traditional media (primarily woodblock prints) to investigate contemporary phenomena, using an aesthetic that often incorporates influences from manga and sci-fi, as well as a healthy dose of satire. The (literal) backdrop to this exhibition is formed by 16 simple black-and-white expressionist paintings on aluminium plates, hung on the gallery’s far wall. Inspired by 100-yearold tourist postcards of Matsushima’s scenic islands, these function a little like pictograms or road signs for places of outstanding natural beauty, and include plain, linear depictions of tiny islands popping out of the sea like cupcakes, decorated with mushroom-shaped trees (New Matsushima: Futago Jima; all works 2022 unless specified), islands that look like Hokusai’s famous 1831 woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa (New Matsushima [Hotei jima]), and other islands surrounded by featureless humans at leisure: sailors, rowers,

fishermen and paddleboarders. In short, everyone seems to be having a great time. In front of these, in the centre of the gallery, are three partially unfurled inkworks on small scrolls (Stretching Coast [A, B and C]), arranged like pairs of tiny conjoined toilet rolls (but actually, on closer look, made on till rolls – yes, capital comes into it). They’re displayed museologically, under Perspex cases, and give glimpses of a (presumably – given how much of the works remain in the roll) vast coastline that features excavators and cranes mingling with temples, factories, office blocks and what look like coastal defences constructed of concrete blocks forming a barrier against an agitated ocean. The barrier effect is further enhanced by the fact that the gallery wall behind the scrolls is partially comprised of the remains of an old stone wall. As a sign of the current times, the depicted defences are breached by the odd waste pipe emitting what is doubtless some form of effluent into the churning waters below. Times are changing; the natural and the human are no longer in harmony. Or perhaps

it was ever thus, as in the three largescale black-and-white woodblock prints from 2023 included here. The last of them, flow (Sode no Watari / Namidagawa), is executed from two perspectival points of view: a plan view of a wooden boat in a river; and an elevation view of the boatman, who fills the boat, his face shielded by a conical hat, the eddies created by the boat looking like a form of calligraphy. With this flattened perspective, it appears as if the boatman were in his grave. It also looks like, somewhere under his hat, he sports vampiric fangs. The exhibition is completed by a pair of stereoscopic images (Stereoscopic [Ishinomaki-ishi] and Stereoscopic [Nakase-naka]), each of which shows a respective coastline then and now, their contours changed between one and the other, and the now ‘improved’ by the addition of bridges and carefully reinforced (and reshaped) coastal contours. What we’re left with then is both a record of change and Bashō’s romance unmasked. Or perhaps remade, as wastelands and zombie histories as a backdrop to modern leisure. Mark Rappolt

flow (Sode no watari / Namidagawa), 2023, woodcut block, gesso, woodcut print (Japanese paper, oil ink), wood panel, 182 × 183cm. © the artist

Spring 2024

Pivot Glide Echo Lionel Wendt Art Centre, Colombo 29 January – 25 February Artist, critic, curator, collector, pianist and patron Lionel Wendt pioneered experimental photography in early-twentieth-century Sri Lanka, founding the island’s modernist art movement, the 43 Group, a year before his death in 1944. Wendt set up a photography studio, and insisted that exhibitions should tour the island to reach as wide an audience as possible. A member of Sri Lanka’s social elite, his privileged position – complicit in structures of class, gender and race – certainly complicates him as a potential symbol of national identity. The Lionel Wendt Art Centre opened in 1953; today the institution houses a collection, gallery, archive and theatre. A new group show at the centre, Pivot Glide Echo, curated by kalā, a new platform for South Asian art, uses Wendt’s

life and work as a conceptual framework to display work by 19 modern and contemporary artists from Sri Lanka and its diaspora, covering almost a century of Sri Lankan art from the 1930s to the present. The 43 Group engaged with European modernism while also championing Sri Lankan culture and identity, during the decades before and after independence from British rule in 1948. Their stance has been described as procolonial by some critics, but the group sought to portray the island as a site of creative and intellectual exchange, while also celebrating Sri Lankan heritage at a time of conflicts over nation-building. Various works by members of the 43 Group are on display here: L.T.P. Manjusri’s Erotica Series (1947–62) depicts

Lionel Wendt, The Misery of Balanced Perplexities, n.d., silver gelatin print, photomontage, 57 × 41 cm. Courtesy Lionel Wendt Memorial Fund Collection

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delicate surrealist drawings of composite bodies; Ivan Peries’s collages, such as Space Refigerator (1964), employ blocks of colour and magazine cuttings to represent objects; George Keyt’s acrylic on canvas, Veraheni (1992), presents a portrait of female intimacy; George Claessen’s bright brushstrokes swirl in abstract paintings such as Butterfly of the Prism (1974). Some members of the group lived in Sri Lanka their entire lives. Others did not: Keyt spent time in India, while Peries relocated permanently to London. The contemporary living artists exhibited here are similarly dispersed. Based in New Delhi, Anoli Perera’s photographic series I Let My Hair Loose: Protest Series i–v (2010–11) challenges colonial photography with black-and-white portraits that

conceal her sitters’ faces. Gender and sexuality are recurring themes in the show, which features Wendt’s queer photographs of male nudes in works like Back (undated). Colomboresident Mahen Perera uses an aesthetic of queer recycling in his sculpture Two Hold a Trace (2023): a series of corporeal forms composed of repurposed wood, clothes and upholstery stained with tea suggest an implicit environmental politics connected to histories of desire. Ecology is a consistent concern throughout Wendt’s photographs included in Pivot Glide Echo: a reclining male nude montaged over a ship in Heard a Voice Wailing Where the Ships Went Sailing (undated), a labourer harvesting coconuts in another print (untitled and undated), a male head collaged on a table next to a vase of flowers as part of an absurd stilllife in Nothing Was Further From My Thoughts (undated). Elsewhere, in Moscow-based Rupaneethan Pakiyarajah’s Untitled (2022), ink drawings evoke surreal assemblages of

vegetal forms and bodily organs, referencing the entangled lyricism of Tamilakam poetry. The protagonist of Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2020), a queer photographer in the 1980s, describes photos of naked or seminude men and muses: ‘If the ghost of Lionel Wendt were here, he would peek over… and nod his approval’. Such a sentiment perhaps sums up the aspiration of Pivot Glide Echo. Wendt’s larger vision of Sri Lanka as unbound by exclusionary national or ethnic categories informs the exhibition, which seeks to position Wendt as a catalyst for Sri Lankan modern and contemporary art. Paris resident Cassie Machado, who like Wendt has both Sri Lankan and European ancestry, has created a series of photogram portraits for the show depicting members of the Sri Lankan diaspora. When Colours Return Home to Light (2023) captures their silhouettes in white against pinkish red or grey backgrounds, their posing bodies

brimming with light. Machado playfully describes the project as a fantasy collaboration with Wendt, though very few artworks in the exhibition engage explicitly with his photography – a notable exception being Muhanned Cader’s Lionel Wendt Remixed (2023). Living between Galle and Karachi, Cader collaged together reproduced fragments of Wendt’s photobook Ceylon (1950) on a Moleskine accordion notebook, its pages unfolding like a frieze on a plinth. Cader’s visual quotations pay attention to Wendt’s novel techniques – which included solarisation, brometching, montage and reversal. If Wendt operates as an effective curatorial rational for Pivot Glide Echo it is because his life and work were shaped by artistic experimentation as well as transnational aesthetic exchange, an ability to convene creative practitioners or movements, alongside an open and multiethnic vision of the island’s identity. Edwin Coomasaru

Pivot Glide Echo (installation view), 2024. Courtesy Lionel Wendt Art Centre, Colombo

Spring 2024

Customised Postures, (De)colonising Gestures Gajah Gallery, Singapore 19 January – 18 February Customised Postures, (De)colonising Gestures showcases colonial photographs from the collection of Jasdeep Sandhu, director of Gajah Gallery, alongside contemporary art from Southeast Asia. The exhibition explores how colonial photography shaped representations of the region, and how contemporary practitioners adapt and challenge such tropes. The 52 archival photographs included here, split into several themes such as ‘In Search of (Traditional) Postures’, ‘Ordered Poses’ and ‘(Colonial) Environmental Portraits’, create a framework tracing traditional cultural poses alongside modern – and potentially inauthentic – postures that might have arisen from subjects being staged for the camera. Those subjects range from Indigenous people in traditional costume and Sizang chiefs in British Burma to Rangoon coolies, subjugated by the colonial gaze: many early photographs were produced to promote tourism and investment in colonies. While photography is still generally perceived as a reflection of reality, Singaporean Robert Zhao Renhui highlights how such flawed understandings can distort our understanding of history. The series Singapore Crocodile, 1930s (2023) appears to depict the capture of Singapore’s last crocodile. Each photograph is similarly composed, featuring the body of a dead crocodile against a backdrop of lush, tropical foliage. Some feature male Western hunters, rifles in hand with a leg on top of the dead animal; others feature local assistants peering at the body from the sidelines. Convincing at first glance, only

the wall text reveals that two images are archival, the other three produced with ai, reflecting the dangers of attributing the notion of truth to any single visual medium. Filipino artist and activist Kiri Dalena’s video Felizardo, Taken in 1906 (2023) is an incisive investigation into the life of Cornelio Felizardo. Dalena first learned of Felizardo when she was an artist-in-residence at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, where she encountered postmortem photographs of a mustachioed man with the caption ‘Felizardo, ladrone leader from Bacoor, Cavite’. The video traces Dalena’s journey to identifying the individual as Major General Cornelio Felizardo, who fought in the Caviteño resistance against the American occupation of The Philippines. This gap between the inaccurate information provided by the caption – which can be read as an extension of the museum’s misinformed perspective – and the historic reality of Felizardo’s identity poignantly speaks to how institutional forces continue to shape historical misrepresentation. Foregrounding the gender imbalances in Javanese society, Abednego Trianto Kurniawan’s print series What Am I Going to Be When I Grow Up? Raden Ayoe Of Course (2015) contrasts portrait photographs of Javanese nobles with the writings of late-nineteenth-century Indonesian women’s rights activist Raden Ayu Kartini. Each framed photograph is double-sided: the portraits depict husbands standing confidently upright next to their seated wives, whose faces

have been blanked out; the reverse of each features writings by Kartini, with the faces of these once-faceless wives collaged in. Other highlights include Aris Prabawa’s visually arresting oil painting There is no sugar last forever and charcoal drawing Western Ruined Eastern, History Burned The Debt Return (both 2023), which poignantly point to the violent legacy of the Dutch administration in Java. Composed in soft sepia tones, There is no sugar… depicts Raden Tumenggung Tjondronegoro – a member of the Javanese gentry, who notably took no action as Prince Diponegoro was arrested by Dutch colonial rulers – standing in a body of water. On the other hand, Western Ruined Eastern...’s largescale composition depicts members of the Dutch administration shooting at anguished locals running into battle, while others, in boats and riding on the backs of animals, look on with despair. Suzann Victor’s A Patchwork Tells a Thousand Histories (2023) acts as a summation of the exhibition itself: a tapestry of postcards featuring Southeast Asian subjects from the 1920s and 1960s, overlaid with a screen of lenses that warps any viewer’s attempt to peer closer. To attempt to condense the effects of colonialism on an entire region’s visual history is an ambitious undertaking, but this expansive exhibition nevertheless unravels the numerous methods by which contemporary Southeast Asian artists grapple with and attempt to break free from the historic colonial perspectives that once defined the region. Stephanie Yeap

Aris Prabawa, Western Ruined Eastern, History Burned The Debt Return, 2023, charcoal on canvas, 170 × 300 cm. Courtesy Gajah Gallery, Singapore

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Octora, Recoup 1920: wuorv egnoj, 2023, merino wool, 110 × 90 cm. Courtesy Gajah Gallery, Singapore

Spring 2024

Thailand Biennale The Open World Various venues, Chiang Rai 9 December – 30 April Firsthand accounts of Chiang Rai’s rise as an ‘art city’ often point to the origins of the Haw Kham pavilion: a vaulted repository of northern Thai ‘Lanna’ objects that looms large over the lawns and lotus ponds of the Mae Fah Luang Art and Cultural Park. Raised on stilts, the pavilion itself is a bricolage of 32 salvaged wood structures, while its contents, from sattapan (an ornate candleholder) to Buddha icons, were assembled during an annual festival during the late 1980s that, according to the third Thailand Biennale’s concept statement, ‘sparked a ferment of collaboration between artists, monks, and communities, which has continued to the present day’. Through April, the Haw Kham is also hosting a ‘live theatre’. Concealed among its treasures are makeshift versions of indigenous musical instruments, each mechanically triggered by data points being beamed from a water turbine and underwater microphone installed on a stretch of the Mekong River, near the town of Chiang Khong, about 90 kilometres north.

An inconstant yet poignant presence, the ensuing ensemble recital by unseen wooden xylophones and whining flutes more closely resembles a cardiograph reading than notes on a stave: it tracks the pace and rhythm of a contested riverscape imperiled by hydropower development and rapids-blasting projects. And yet, Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s somber sound sculpture in hallowed space, Sound-Less (Ri s̄eīyng, 2023), is also emblematic of this exhibition’s core mode of intervention: how sites of social, spiritual or museological significance are meaningfully disturbed. The Open World, the 17 main venues and 13 pavilions of which are scattered like airborne seeds across two of Chiang Rai’s 18 districts, its provincial capital and its ancient city, doesn’t have a theme per se. Rather, it draws its stance from a Buddha posture unique to the region: standing on a lotus, arms down his sides, hands fully open, he faces out to, as the all-Thai curatorial team led by Gridthiya Gaweewong and Rirkrit Tiravanija put it, open ‘the three

Ryusuke Kido, Inner Light -Chiang Rai Rice Barn-, 2023, wooden rice barn sculpture, 500 × 500 × 400 cm. Photo: Amnart Kankunthod. Courtesy Thailand Biennale

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worlds – the heavenly world, the underworld, and the human world – so that their inhabitants could behold one another’. Roaming at the Cherntawan International Meditation Centre, I spot a literal depiction: a banner by local artist Songdej Thipthong, draped down a steeply pitched meditation hall (Open World, 2023). But a spirit of open sociability – between Chiang Rai’s diverse ethnocultural ferment and 60 artists from across the Global South – is everywhere. On the lawn beyond the pond at Mae Fah Luang Art & Cultural Park, Ernesto Neto’s Chantdance (2023) – a biomorphic woven canopy tethered to the ground by ceramic jars – encourages gatherings and offers a space to still minds (and speaks to a Tiravanija-esque fostering of spaces and interactions in-between works). Nearby, Ryusuke Kido’s Inner Light -Chiang Rai Rice Barn- (2023) is a salvaged rice barn pockmarked with arabesques of amoebalike forms, an emblem of declining vernacular architecture and agrarian lifestyles carved with the help of local craftsmen. Elsewhere, the region’s syncretic

spirit world is embraced. At the Black House, the museum-studio of late painter Thawan Duchanee, for example, works by four female artists respond to his sought-after depictions of beefy mythical beings and gothic, hornstudded architecture. Self-taught local artist Busui Ajaw’s eight gestural paintings on strung-up buffalo hide – shamanistic portals into the animist afterlife of the Akha, a nomadic tribe – are a highlight: more lived-in and disturbing than anything Duchanee produced. Other takeaways emerge from venue hopping in this manner. For the first time in this travelling biennale’s history, the synergistic interaction and shared passion among local stakeholders is clear – to the extent that the centralised government culture ministry bankrolling it appears to be benefiting from the host province’s largesse and expertise, rather than vice versa. From the new private Chiang Rai International Art Museum (housing 14 artworks; built by Chiang Rai’s most famous living painter, Chalermchai Kositpipat) to the glut of artist studios (62!) and collateral events, a sense of Chiang Rai putting its best foot forward is unmistakable. With knotty debates and yelps of dissent also surfacing here and there, this edition also

feels more inclusive – and feistier. Located in a former bookstore, maiiam Contemporary Art Museum’s Point of No Concern pavilion, for example, uses the province’s territorial peripherality as a springboard for exploring how ‘colonization and intrusions of the modern nation-state draw dividing lines between individuals’. One work is a shelf of bottled ‘shan Spirit’ liquor (‘Shan’ being one of the region’s core ethnic groups), produced by a group calling itself the Phrae Pro-Democracy Network. Some bottles have been defaced; others depict the Shan rebels who, in 1902, led a failed uprising against Siamese rule in nearby Phrae province. Meanwhile, on a stretch of road bordering the Mekong, in the heart of the still-notorious Golden Triangle area, The Open World’s intertextual plays with the spatial and geopolitical dimensions of this porous context feel at their most hard-edged. At one end, Navin Rawanchaikul & studiok’s community billboard portrait exploring legacies of crossborder trade and migration, Once Within Borders (2023), towers above the river just across from one of neighbouring Laos’s Special Economic Zones, a quasi-autonomous gambling and crime playground known as Kings Romans.

The billboard’s beaming faces and cute vignettes are lifted from an accompanying video diary, in which documentary footage of Rawanchaikul meeting minority groups is coupled with a narration that, while expressing his thoughts, alternates between their marginal dialects and voices. In a warehouse nearby, the region’s tangled cartography and long-standing role in organised drug trafficking, among other prickly themes, are broached in works such as Nipan Oranniwesna’s Silent Traces (2023), an aerial-perspective map made from baby powder, and Ho Tzu Nyen’s woozy reimagining of opium trade archive footage in his film The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia: O for Opium (2022). From there it’s only a short drive to old Chiang Saen’s crumbling city walls, temple ruins and museum, where Chitti Kasemkitvatana’s Kala Ensemble (2023) – a study of Buddhism’s ancient cosmologies, centred on stone iterations of the Kala demon god and drumheads used in Lanna rituals – flanks the thirteenth-century Buddha statue that inspired this rambling event’s allembracing posture. He looks beatific and, understandably I think, a little bit pleased with himself. Max Crosbie-Jones

Navin Rawanchaikul & studiok, Displaced, Whose Land?, 2023, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Supported by National Center for Art Research, Japan

Spring 2024

Flowers of Belau Feature film directed by Chikako Yamashiro In artist and filmmaker Chikako Yamashiro’s latest film, we follow an elderly man who strolls, then rides by bus, through lush rural landscapes before entering an urban area in Okinawa. Sounds innocent enough. But his journey soon unlocks memories of his past. At least that’s what we are encouraged to think via a formal and material shift from the crystalline clarity of digital photography to the grainy, nostalgic world of analogue footage. To those familiar with the artist’s work, this process will come as no surprise. For the last two decades, Yamashiro has used performance, photography and video to explore historical memory and its relational articulations in response to war trauma and the geopolitical situation of her homeland, Okinawa. The largest of a group of islands that were known as the Ryūkyū Kingdom before being annexed to Japan in 1879, Okinawa was transferred to us military occupation from 1945 to 1972. Suffering double colonisation by Japan and the usa, Okinawa’s complicated war and postwar history – explored by the artist in seminal works such as I Like Okinawa Sweet (2004), Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat (2009) and the influential Mud Man (2016) – translated into an equally complex present. Ryūkyūan people (the island’s Indigenous community) are not

officially recognised as an ethnic and linguistic minority by the Japanese government, which consistently advocates for its monocultural identity. In contrast, Yamashiro’s 2019 cultural mashup Chinbin Western: Representation of the Family, whose title alludes to both the traditional pancakelike Okinawan sweet ‘chinbin’ and the film genre of ‘spaghetti western’, while also placing Okinawa as a porous frontier, contributes to the preservation of the Okinawan language and folklore by including tsurane ryuka, a genre of narrative song particular to the island, and a play within the film narrated in Uchināguchi, the autochthonous language. Numerous land reclamation projects also pose a serious environmental threat to the island’s landscape and spark heated public debates, most recently in the case of the relocation of an American marine base to Henoko. Okinawa’s sociopolitical tensions find their way into Flowers of Belau. In the film’s opening sequence, at the beginning of the old man’s bus ride, we see loader machines scooping up mounds of rock and gravel in a distant quarry, immediately reminding the viewer of the brutalised Okinawan landscape. One of Yamashiro’s most characteristic trademarks is a truthful and unadorned representation of the island in contrast to the glossy, touristic image of Okinawa in mainstream media. This is often

Flowers of Belau (still), 2023, dir. Chikako Yamashiro

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coupled with lyrical, enigmatic narratives exploring themes of memory and heritage. In Flowers of Belau the soundscape hints at a possible mnemonic exercise too: sounds of the bus’s engine and of cars passing by begin to dissipate as soon as we glimpse the ocean through the windows; a chorus of voices singing vibrato heralds an array of disarticulated images of a crying child, a couple of deigo flowers lying on the ground, and a man climbing a palm tree. The most evocative moments of Flowers of Belau play out during the film’s central section. Here, sequences of the tropical environment of the Republic of Palau (historically known as Belau) – where part of the film was shot – and of the same child playing on the seashore are accompanied by increasingly muffled sounds of lulling waves and footsteps on the sand creating a multilayered and visually dissonant narrative. However, Yamashiro deliberately avoids suggesting a clearcut interpretation, leaving it to the viewer to make their own assumptions about the relationship between the child and the old man in a film completely devoid of dialogue. What it seems to offer instead is a reflection on the human body seen as a permeable vessel in which memories percolate and are stored, until they can be inherited to overcome mortality. Ren Scatini

Flowers of Belau (still), 2023, dir. Chikako Yamashiro

Spring 2024

Paul Pfeiffer Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 12 November – 16 June Paul Pfeiffer is not afraid of grandiosity. Neither was Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille, who, introducing a screening of his 1956 biblical epic, The Ten Commandments (which dramatised Moses leading the enslaved Jews out of Egypt), informed the audience that they were about to view ‘the story of the birth of freedom’. At first glance, the sweeping title may seem out of step with Pfeiffer’s multimedia artwork, which investigates mass culture – particularly spectator sports – and its subsequent mediation in film, television and advertising. But Pfeiffer’s artworks tell a tale of spiritual bondage, one both created and witnessed by the camera’s lens. In video, photography and sculpture, Pfeiffer reveals

the eerie religiosity of contemporary media, unveiling the structures that sustain spectacular entertainment today. Editing techniques lend Pfeiffer’s found footage a mystical air, resulting in artworks that both replicate and critique the thrall of mass culture. In Caryatid (2003), Pfeiffer alters a video of an nhl Stanley Cup celebration by erasing the athlete holding the silver trophy aloft, so that the award defies gravity as it bobs in front of a crowd. The floating trophy matches the colour of Pfeiffer’s chosen display: a 23cm silver-plated television. The film series The Long Count (2000–01) employs a similar trick, transforming the bodies of Muhammad Ali and three famous opponents – Sonny

Liston, George Foreman and Joe Frazier – into transparent plasmalike spectres that swirl within a boxing ring surrounded by a large audience. Pfeiffer presents these films on small screens that protrude on silver rods wallmounted just above head height, demanding that the viewer strain and bend to discern the action onscreen. Here, television subordinates its spectators and athletes: both must physically change in order to see – or be (partially) seen by – its screens. Mechanisms of image reproduction are fateful devices, ones that simultaneously exalt and destroy their original subjects. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse photographic series (2001–18) shows solitary basketball players

The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle), 2001, video (colour, silent, 2 min 51 sec), painted 5.6-inch lcd monitor and metal armature, 13 × 16 × 91 cm. Photo: Luke A. Walker. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Carlier / Gebauer, Berlin & Madrid; Perrotin, Paris; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

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in monumental form, their often-airborne bodies adopting the postures of worshippers ascending to meet the divine. The large colour photographs’ titling refers them to the New Testament’s Book of Revelations, making them both signifiers of oncoming death – the ‘horsemen’ – and faceless victims of its wrath. Media technology creates this apocalyptic scenario: Pfeiffer edits out the numbers and names on players’ jerseys, turning athletes into symbols of biblical proportion; tv monitors, flashbulbs and stadium lights further excise their individuality. In Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (07) (2002), a basketballer raises his hands as though receiving the Last Judgment – but where his face should be is only the blown-out brightness of an arena’s big screen. Sporting events are also a global export, the product of an invisible system of labour and trade that fuels its power. The Saints (2007) explores this international supply chain:

the 17-channel audio installation features the reactions of 1,000 Filipinos hired to watch a recording of England’s defeat of Germany in the 1966 World Cup final. The sound of their emphatic cheers echoes throughout the museum; when I arrived at the installation’s entryway, the noise was so loud I was halfexpecting to find a live match – instead, a huge empty room greets the visitor, wall-mounted white speakers projecting the audio across the vacant space. Pfeiffer, who was raised between the Philippines and the us, uses The Saints to reveal the illusions associated with fandom: the homogeneity of team devotees, for example, and their nationalist investments in the World Cup. The emotionality of Pfeiffer’s audience shows both the unseen work behind mass cultural entertainment and how the drama of such events is – or can be – manufactured. Following the awe of the aural installation, Pfeiffer shows its secret source: in an adjacent

space, a two-channel video projection displays the original game alongside the paid, roaring crowd, sitting inside a movie theatre in Manila. What is absent from Pfeiffer’s work is often just as important as what is present. His remixed examinations of mass culture have that in common with other theological enquiries: these installations, films and photographs explore communal events that, with television’s help, adopt a near-religious character. In this context, the artist’s overlarge gestures – a title referencing biblical descriptions of Jesus’s birth, for example, for a video of an nba game edited to remove all players (John 3:16, 2000) – seem appropriate, not ironic. Pfeiffer’s dissections of entertainment illuminate the ways spectacles come to feel magical, a process that obscures or eliminates the people that form their images. When Pfeiffer pulls back the curtain, a camera lies in wait. Claudia Ross

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (07), 2002, digital duraflex print, 122 × 152 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Carlier / Gebauer, Berlin & Madrid; Perrotin, Paris; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Spring 2024

Evil Does Not Exist Feature film directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi The latest feature by Ryusuke Hamaguchi – director of the critically-acclaimed, awardwinning Drive My Car (2021) – starts with meditative, long shots of peaceful mountain living, the camera lens panning forest canopies and following protagonist Takumi as he goes about his daily chores. A rather taciturn character, he saws and cuts logs, collects stream-water for a local restaurant and teaches his daughter Hana to identify trees and spot traces left by deer. Not much happens besides the wholesome activities of what anthropologist Anna L. Tsing would call ‘the arts of noticing’ the interconnections between the multispecies world that surrounds us. At the end of the day Hana falls asleep. A montage replays or reinvents scenes she sees in the woods. She witnesses deer in her dream. Hana’s search for deer brackets the entire film, but alongside this idyllic quest is a more

unsettling story turning on a proposal to develop a glamping site nearby Takumi’s hut. This business venture – hastily put together by a talent agency in order to claim post-pandemic project funds – is adamantly opposed by the mountain’s villagers. At a presentation by two of the company staff, Takahashi and Mayuzimi, the villagers raise concerns about water pollution and campfires, and poke holes in the proposal’s flawed logistics. The staff – being mere talent agents – get nervous when questioned over decisions they neither have the knowledge to defend nor the power to influence, and Takahashi’s jaunty, business-like manner of speech starts to be characterised by stumbles and fumbles. Here, Hamaguchi masterfully captures the tensions between the company staff and the locals through his characters’ seemingly

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banal handling of objects like microphones – passed among the audience, eagerly picked up or fretfully put down by the company staff, or avoided altogether by one resolute cynic. On the one hand, these subtleties embed the clashes of two value systems in the formalities of dialogues and performance of authority; on the other they set out how such formalities can be resisted by refusing to engage in the designated way. Evil Does Not Exist feels like a fable recording the clash between capitalist extraction and ecological wellbeing, where a local morality – valuing the purity of water, ecological balance and a social pact that holds upstreamers accountable for their environmental impacts – meets competition over resources, scalability and the transformation of ‘empty spaces’ into raw materials for economic progress.

With camerawork that zooms in on the traces of nuanced desires and the pushes and pulls within and between people, as well as on how thoughts manifest as bodily reactions and habitual reflexes, Hamaguchi breaks down the myth of capitalist progress. He shows the individual, modular interactions that maintain the capitalist machine on a daily basis, but also how easily it breaks apart because of that. Despite wanting to finish her task, Mayuzimi sympathises with the locals and challenges her colleagues (“the locals are not so stupid as you think”, she warns at one point); meanwhile, after spending time in the forest helping Takumi collect water, Takahashi decides to quit the job and take a break from his urban life altogether. Towards the end Hana disappears into the woods and, after an anxious search by the villagers that sees a switch of gears and genres (the movie becomes more like a thriller), she is found, by Takumi and Takahashi, sitting in the middle of a meadow next to two deer. The ending has echoes of the tale of Princess

Kaguya in the medieval Japanese story The Tale of Bamboo Cutter, who ascends to the moon and forgets about any attachments to the earthly world and its greed and corruption. In this sense, the plot’s sudden, abrupt abandonment of the glamping storyline and Hana’s Kaguyalike departure speaks to the larger sense of unease and pathos – outside of capitalism’s expansionist mission – of those who remain. We might say Hamaguchi presents a capitalism that’s provincialised rather than hegemonic, and that the pitfalls of life belie our precarious existence on a deeper level. But the larger sense of enigma in the film remains unexplained. Takumi’s guarding of forest ethics, Takahashi’s soul searching and Hana’s dedicated quest for deer feel like disconnected dots, arbitrary and haphazard. Nor does the film reveal the story behind Hana’s absent mother, who seems to have passed away but whose pictures are seen around Hana and her dad’s woodside cabin. Despite its didactic title, Evil Does Not Exist sustains a feeling of indeterminacy. The film

developed out of a musical collaboration with Eiko Ishibashi, with whom Hamaguchi worked for Drive My Car, which perhaps explains some of the plot’s disassembled feeling. Some of the footage was initially shot as a short (Gift, 2023), to accompany Ishibashi’s live performances. Here, Ishibashi’s score lingers eerily over Hamaguchi’s forests scenes like a spectre, and is often dissonant, which perhaps echoes the idea of a contaminated symbiosis. But such an abstract, experimental method does not necessarily work when Hamaguchi’s scripts are often so specific and grounded in concrete, daily matters. In this sense the film’s evocation of music and ecological drama feel manneristic. What it does present is a picture, of how forest lives and urban lives are finely entangled, how the ideological margins of each remain fluid, and how, by examining the everyday practices of being with nature and capitalism, we might escape monolithic, linear thinking – be it preaching of progress or doom – over a deeply confusing and precarious world. Yuwen Jiang

Spring 2024

Taipei Biennial 2023 Small World Taipei Fine Arts Museum 18 November – 24 March During the late 1950s and through the 1960s, French architect and philosopher Paul Virilio travelled his country’s northwestern coast, photographing the derelict bunkers of the Nazi fortification system known as the Atlantic Wall. Built to repel Allied forces attacking Germanoccupied Europe, these ‘heavy grey masses with sad angles and no openings’ became the subject of a book, Bunker Archaeology (1975), which theorised the phenomenological aspects and territorial impact of these monuments. Virilio also exhibited his photographs, and a few of these giclee prints are included in the Taipei Biennial. The hulking Third Reich monuments, lying half-obscured in the ground, slanting into the sand or overtaken by rising grass, are reminiscent of another type of bunker: those of doomsday preppers who build secret vaults against the apocalypse. Taiwan knows something about living precariously. The territory has been bracing itself for a Mainland Chinese attack for decades, and purportedly has more than 100,000 air raid shelters. Amid this longstanding local mood of insecurity, as well as more general global anxieties of social division, this edition of the biennial is themed around Small World, the curators writing that the phrase ‘suggests both a promise and a threat: a promise of greater control over one’s own life, and a threat of isolation from a larger community’. They add: ‘Our world can become smaller as we grow closer to one another, but also as we grow apart. This “Small World” takes place within such a suspended state.’ Is the urge to shelter in place from the big, scary world necessarily in tension with connecting with it? They are not mutually exclusive, and the biennial quite easily overcomes this artificial dichotomy by invoking various independent music scenes as examples of self-organising safe spaces that welcome difference and diversity. Take nonprofit record label Yes No Wave Music from Yogyakarta – which ran several listening sessions in November – and the inspiring and generous

variety of music in its roster. During one such session, the label’s owner, Woto Wibowo (aka Wok the Rock), played a mix of doom folk, trance and heavy metal, as well as ballads by Dialita, an all-women choir comprising survivors of Indonesia’s anticommunist purges of 1965, who performed the songs they had composed in jail to encourage each other or to celebrate special occasions. Putting the Small World theme aside, what the biennial consistently manages to do, through the work of over 58 artists, is to refresh our limited, habitual perceptions of the world through the subversion of various opposites and dialectics: this can play out in manipulations of scale – for example in Nadim Abbas’s installation of rectangular blocks of sand and steel arranged in connected pathways, which looks like a microchip or circuit board blown up very big, or a miniature of a secret underground military facility (Pilgrim in the Microworld, 2023). Sometimes, the ‘natural order’ is inverted: Kim Beom reverses nature documentary footage of a cheetah chasing an antelope, so that the prey is now in fierce pursuit of the predator (Spectacle, 2010). Meanwhile, gender binaries are rejected in Terre Thaemlitz’s sharing session, in which the transgender artist plays Rosary Novena for Gender Transitioning (2012), a videoessay that draws parallels between religious dogma and binary classifications of gender categories. The work also questions essentialisms underlying sexual reassignment surgeries, and ends with toe-curling, uncensored footage of a real vaginoplasty operation. This ontological slipperiness also extends to the boundaries between human and machine. The usual grievances against smart technologies and algorithms rationalising us into flat, inhuman cyborgs, defined by our monetisable user habits, get overturned in What Is Your Favourite Primitive? (2023) by Li Yi-Fan. In the manically paced video, the artist uses 3danimated figures to create larger-than-life avatars of himself to discuss the nature of animation, time and space in videogames,

facing page, top Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is), 2017–, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum

and the possibility of extending our lives through cryonics. All characters are versions of the same figure – a bald, gurning man voiced by the artist in lisping Mandarin – who gets shot, beaten, resuscitated, sodomised by a flying hammer and so on, all the while waxing lyrical about technical, existential and libidinous problems (‘Can you get sexually assaulted in the virtual world?’). But Li’s work strikes a rare note of rebellious glee in this biennial. Overall, amid all the subversions of scale and orders, the energy is muted and melancholic, which seems like an honest admission of what facing the world at large feels like for everyone. Yang Yooyun’s hazy triptych of paintings – depicting a cratered moon looming absurdly low and huge behind a satellite tower (Tower, 2013), a malign black orb crushing an old brick building due for demolition and redevelopment (Fantasy, 2012), a sleeping woman with an arm thrown over her eyes (Censorship, 2021) – captures the mood of dread and indifference towards the evils of capitalism. In Riar Rizaldi’s soporific radio play The Right to Do Nothing (2021), sleep and trance provide escape from exploitative labour arrangements. In this work, an Indonesian migrant domestic worker in Hong Kong conveys in asmr-level whispers her experience of a strange world where you got paid to do nothing. It is later revealed that she had entered into a trance state induced by Jathilan dance, a form of ritualistic Javanese movement. While those anaesthetised feelings of exhaustion and escapism are true, I find a lighter truth in Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s sonic installation, a maze made of inflatable pvc walls that blow up and collapse at different times (Not Exactly [Whatever the New Key Is], 2017–). Resembling a living organism, the black bouncy walls enact a cycle of buoyancy and deflation but settle in neither; you feel empathy for both the alternating states of softness and tautness, relaxation and strength. These walls, unlike the Atlantic Wall, are designed to be collapsible. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Arthur Ou, Viewfinder (Emmanuelle), 2021, gelatin silver print, 36 × 28 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Spring 2024

Books The Understory by Saneh Sangsuk, translated by Mui Poopoksakul Peirene, £12.99 (softcover) The ninety-three-year-old protagonist of The Understory is both a raconteur and a Buddhist abbot. Its opening pages introduce us to Luang Paw Tien and his talent for spinning yarn after yarn – as well as the ambivalence with which the inhabitants of Praeknamdang, a Thai village from a bygone past teetering on the precipice of modernisation, treat both storytellers and monks. ‘To the serious-minded adults’, writes Saneh Sangsuk, ‘he was a teller of tall tales who breached the precept concerning monks and untruthful speech, but to the children he was a trove of magical stories.’ After learning the full, obsessive extent of the latter group’s love for his storytelling – they ‘mimicked all his mannerisms: the way he sipped his bael juice, the raspy sound he made when he cleared his throat, the way he paused intermittently to scan his audience’ – the reader then gets to judge for themselves when Luang Paw Tien launches into the astonishing story of his own life. ‘This land has changed so much. The people, too, have changed so much,’ he begins. According to the book’s translator, Sangsuk has likewise been on quite a journey. In her translator’s note for Venom – an awardwinning novella also recently published in English by Peirene – Mui Poopoksakul sketches his emergence as a ‘literary renegade back in 1994 when

his debut, White Shadow, incensed conservatives because it ‘ran counter to Thailand’s propagandaimposed self-image as a good and beautiful society’. But while that novel drew on his experiences of living in Bangkok from the late 1970s to mid-1990s, Sangsuk’s followups are bound up with the exploration of oral storytelling traditions that dovetailed with his subsequent physical and literary return to his rural birthplace. ‘The self-absorbedness of youth has given way to something more communal, more connected to his heritage,’ Poopoksakul writes. What unfurls over the course of the monk’s narration is part parable, part paean to the ‘forest ethics’ and natural world of Sangsuk’s youth – a world of latent threats as well as promise. Luang Paw Tien, his young wife, and Old Man Junpa, his perpetually inebriated hunter father, leave Praeknamdang behind with a view to building a new outpost in the middle of the jungle. ‘I’d become a well-to-do farmer,’ he reminisces, ‘the owner of a twin pair of Thaistyle houses built from timber, a big barn full of rice, a large herd of cattle, a fine dugout dory and a handsome ox-cart.’ But a ravenous tiger with emerald eyes has other plans. First to vanish into the night is Din (the working buffalo have both names and personalities), and then… well, you can guess where this is heading.

Steeped in redolent detail (the hunting guns have names too!), the story draws on a trove of supernatural folk legends, a samut khoi (foldingbook manuscript) listing medicinal herbs, even the bloodlust of Greek tragedy. And with both the predatory tiger and Praeknamdang – a village ‘falling into the hands of people from elsewhere’ – occupying a liminal space, each threatened by extinction, it also has an environmental, and perhaps anticapitalist, moral to impart. But the overriding sense is that Sangsuk is less a master of colour or allegory than he is a disciple of atmosphere and delivery; Poopoksakul must be commended for preserving his style and panache in a grammatically alien language. The prosody of the English prose – and mood and tension it creates – is consistently arresting, right from the smarting opening lines: ‘The season’s chilly winds had arrived, but were yet to launch a full assault; for now, they were only a persistent trickle, a constant waft, chappingdry and soundless, an insinuation of the coming brutality, a nascent harshness lurking in the cool air that slithered through the trees.’ Like the jungle encircling Praeknamdang, The Understory’s finest sentences quiver with sensual menace and beauty, and draw us in, vigilantly, ever deeper. Max Crosbie-Jones

My grandfather turned into a tiger… and other illusions by Pao Houa Her Aperture, $60 / £50 (softcover) The photographs collected in this monograph by Minnesota-based Hmong-American artist Pao Houa Her are drawn from six series of works, 80 photos in all, made between 2012 and 2022 (the title series is from 2016–17). Assembled here interleaved with one another and at varying scales, in full colour and in black-and-white, they resonate in ways that are no doubt more nuanced than within each individual series, and yet in the wholeness of the combined works perhaps also more summary: a portrait of uprootedness and the measures taken to survive in new soil.

The photos shift between formal and candid portraits, and scenes in which nature – forced to pose as well – appears to protest and fidget. The settings recall family photographs: aunts and sisters, nephews, cousins, grandmothers and uncles dressed in uniform, traditional dress, positioned before lurid photo-studio backdrops or natural beauty spots in both the us and Laos and elsewhere; or posed more casually, some in North American gardens, lounges and utility rooms, where nature, both real and imitation (plastic flowers, plants), is roped into the frame, frequently dominating the image, or promising

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to. Landscapes from the Mount Shasta series (2021–21) read as images of saplings being prepared for a reforesting project (they are in fact marijuana plants, a crop often cultivated by Hmong immigrants in California). Many of the portraits occupy an in-between space: the subject is sitting for a third party, for a different photographer or intention, captured by Her, for her purposes. One pores over the details in the background: for clues as to where these photos were taken; as to what is natural and what is illusion; and as to how the two combine in the same space. David Terrien

Spring 2024

The Koro Riots by Faisal Tehrani, translated by Brigitte Bresson Penguin Random House SEA, £13.95 (softcover) A strange plague afflicts many men across the (imaginary) country of Hujung Manani: their penises have retracted, diminished, disappeared. The result, whether you’re the head honcho (‘the Dictator’), generic motorcycle-riding ruffians (‘mat rempits’), a closeted, retiring police detective or a spymaster, is terror. What starts as a cramp in the lower belly swiftly morphs into a void where your prized manhood once was. The etiology is uncertain: some blame the local lgbt population and swiftly enact vigilante justice; others blame contaminated pork and castigate Chinese pig farmers. Chaos abounds. The only constant is the lack of any cure. Faisal Tehrani’s latest novel alludes to Malaysia’s messy political landscape in a manner that will be deliciously and thinly veiled to those in the know. Kickstarted by the brutal murder of Sistine – a fictionalised version of Shaariibuugiin Altantuyaa, the murdered Mongolian national allegedly involved with former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak – the generative incident of the novel is one of a karmic nature: a sudden cascade of incidents during which men lose their penises right after committing racist and sexist acts, ostensibly due to a hex that Sistine issued with her dying breath. Named after the real-life illness koro (which in Malay means ‘head of a turtle’ and here specifically references its retraction into the shell), a culture-bound delusion of penis shrinkage, the mass panic

caused by Sistine’s curse lays bare both the moral hypocrisy and corruption that runs through Hujung Manani. From religious leaders guilty of sodomising their young charges to racist bureaucrats surreptitiously calculating the most expedient ways of consolidating power, the gradual onset of koro uncovers the extent to which patriarchy, religiosity and hypocrisy undergird local society. A former French colony, Hujung Manani shares borders with in-universe versions of Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, and boasts an economy centred around plastics – much like how real-world Malaysia was built upon petrocapital and served as the largest importer of global plastic waste in 2018. Deploying a whirlwind, almost breathless narrative pace, scattered with a colourful cast of characters, the fractured style of the novel with its rapid perspectival shifts highlights the complexity of a postcolonial nation’s political reckoning. The novel also highlights the violently simple tactics that nascent nation-states and their leaders revert to after revolutions: immediate cronyism and despotism enshrined through weaponised ideology, in this case Islamic fundamentalism. While the language is generally crude and descriptions so frequently vulgar that they push the boundaries of even a reflexive parody, the sardonic tone and the elegant inclusion of real historical analysis through

poetic allusion serve to emphasise the earthiness of everyday political posturing within a culture of racist machismo. Central to the novel is an astute sense of humour and absurdity that identifies specific social phenomena and microaggressions within present Malaysian society with an almost documentarian clarity: the public disavowals of folk magic but also its private usage within elite circles; the casual performance of religious piety while defying, in other activities, its moral tenets; blaming minority communities for structural and social failures of the state. Against this exhausting backdrop, the emergence of heroic, though quirky, figures such as a young forensic scientist who sought the truth of Sistine’s death, an elderly female politician with the moniker ‘True Patriot’ and a general who has rediscovered his moral compass owing to his love for his daughter curtails the fatalism inherent in dystopian political satires and offers moments of hope. Tehrani’s parting shot is a quote from history: ‘I see nothing but beauty’. Attributed to Sayyida Zaynab bint Ali, granddaughter of prophet Muhammad, in response, after being subjected to unspeakable atrocities, to a despot’s questioning her faith. In this moment, the author lets slip of the parody to reveal a fierce, sincere conviction for the possibility of political reform as an act of divine will – made manifest through love, courage and the people. Alfonse Chiu

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le Canongate, £12.99 (hardcover) ‘Whatever I write is / Vietnamese. I can never not – / You won’t let me not –’, writes Nam Le early on in this collection of poems. From then on in it’s not clear who’s projecting identity. The writer or the reader. And it makes for uncomfortable reading. Melbourne-based Le came to Australia from Vietnam as a boat refugee when he was less than a year old: ‘picked on, picked last, left out / looked through looked at, looked at too long / called a slant or chink or nip or ching chong’. It’s been 16 years since his awardwinning debut collection of short stories The Boat hit the shelves. This, his subsequent book, has had time to brew. This collection is driven by rage and violence. Anger against the violence of the English

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language with its rules that, in effect, force users to make categorisations. ‘“Which is the subject, which object?”/ Whose tongue? How many? What gender or case?… But Vietnamese answers: “I am all these things. / Or any.”’ And so this collection is peppered by references to literary and political figures from both East and West; by bits of Latin and bits of Vietnamese. Just as much as the rage is punctuated by bursts of humour: ‘So You don’t know Vietnamese. / Did Pound know Chinese? Did Rexroth? Snyder? / Fenollosa? (Do I either? Ha ha!)’; Poem 26 ‘Erasive’, subtitled ‘Erasure rhymes with Asia’ (each poem has a theme), is greyed- and blacked-out so that the unmarked letters spell ‘No archive is safe but is this

ArtReview Asia

all there is to it’ (each poem also takes a different form). While the title of this collection may suggest otherwise, the freedom Le is driving towards is a freedom from representation. ‘What’s Vietnamese in me / Could fit in a poem’ he writes. To escape being categorised for how they look, to escape the constraints of their body as much as the constraints of language. To be their own person; to express their own truth (without renouncing their ancestry or history – the violence of war, for example, haunts this collection). And for anyone who has felt lost in the sea of identity, ‘never fully anything’ as Le puts it, this extraordinary collection points a way to how you might feel found. Nirmala Devi

Loot by Tania James Harvill Secker, £18.99 (hardcover) Tipu’s Tiger is a late eighteenth-century automaton, made for Tipu Sultan, the Muslim ruler of Mysore, presumably in celebration of his victories over the forces of the British East India Company during the Second Anglo-Mysore War (1780–84). Its makers’ names have been lost. When ‘played’, it depicts a near-lifesize European struggling and howling as a tiger mauls his neck. When the East India Company defeated and killed Tipu in 1799, it carted the automaton back to London as part of its extensive booty, describing it as a ‘memorial of the arrogance and barbarous cruelty of Tippoo [sic] Sultan’. Tipu would later feature in the original copy of the Constitution of India (1949) as one of the nation’s early freedom fighters; the automaton lies within a glass case in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. It’s also the fulcrum around which American author Tania James’s latest novel turns. Loot is part historical novel, part gesture towards colonial redress, part adventure story, part romance, part exposé of English attitudes to race and class. Part of its problem is that because of the overlapping thematics it never goes into any theme in any depth. But this messiness might also be its central truth, for the stories that are read into the Tiger are different depending on who’s telling them. Although we know that the reality of the Tiger’s tale remains that it’s told by the victors.

As for the novel, it follows the fates of the imagined creators of the automaton, French clockwork specialist Lucien Du Leze and his local apprentice, the woodcarver Abbas. Lucien is ‘trapped’ in Mysore as his homeland is transformed by revolution making it impossible for him to return. Abbas comes from a lowly background and has been rapidly elevated thanks to his skill with the lathe. Their patron, Tipu, is in the last phase of his reign as the British noose tightens around his neck. All three are fighting for agency in a world that denies it to them. Their stories animate the Tiger in a way that goes beyond the historical object’s mechanical crankshaft and bellows. Lucien makes it back to France; Tipu dies; the people inhabiting his fort at Srirangapatna are slaughtered; the city is looted; ‘prizes’ are distributed to soldiers (the Tiger goes to an English officer and aristocrat who chose it over gold and jewels to better satisfy the orientalist tastes of his wife); Abbas barely survives and follows his creation to England, managing also to fall in love with Lucien’s adopted daughter, the mixed-race, but white-passing Jehan; the officer’s wife, it later turns out, has a sideline in erotic and exotic literature, having churned out her own, semiautobiographical version of Aladdin; she’s having a (necessarily) secret relationship with her husband’s sepoy assistant, his master having died before he left India;

while Abbas, aided by Jehan, is determined to repossess his creation as proof of his skill and existence. ‘Behind each imperfection’ in the Tiger, we are told, ‘is a story only he [Abbas] would know, a story interwoven with his own.’ The problem, of course, is that almost every character that encounters the Tiger has a story of their own to tell too. Even an apparently simple word like that of the book’s title has multiple interpretations. To the British aristocracy, ‘loot’ is a card game (a version of ‘snap’), while to people like Abbas it’s a form of theft, and to organisations like the East India Company Tipu’s Tiger is both a reward and a helpful form of justification for violence and exploitation. What we learn in the course of James’s narrative is that, in the battle of who gets to tell their story, class trumps truth, and race – ‘the final ranking’ – trumps class. In this, the author is self-consciously indebted to the twentiethcentury Sri Lankan leftwing intellectual Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who was director of the London-based Institute of Race Relations between 1973 and 2013. Towards the end of the novel, she deploys an adapted version of his celebrated statement about postcolonial migration – ‘we are here because you were there’ – although perhaps the truer summary of the novel is contained in another of Sivanandan’s catchphrases: ‘If those who have do not give, those who haven’t must take’. Mark Rappolt

The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto Faber, £12.99 (softcover) It’s unsurprising, by now, that in Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto’s latest novella, The Premonition, nothing much happens. It’s like this with most of her stories. (Still, the most heartbreaking is her first, Moonlight Shadow, 1986 – about coming to terms with a world in which a soul has to move on without its mate.) But that’s also where a lot of the beauty of her writing lies – in these short crystalline narratives that follow anomalous characters who find themselves having to navigate ordinary Japanese society and its expectations (be a good child, study hard, enter a steady job, marry well, raise a family, rinse and repeat) into which they don’t ever quite fit. The Premonition’s protagonist is nineteenyear-old Yayoi. She has a loving family, they’ve

moved into a newly renovated house, and they’re about to buy a puppy – ‘We were the picture of a happy middle-class family, like in that Spielberg movie’. But if a Spielberg film is one to measure a family by, then it’s safe to assume that something is amiss. Yayoi discovers that she is missing some of her childhood memories, and, as forewarned by the novella’s title, she has the gift of premonition. This ability lies dormant following a tragedy while Yayoi is very young, save for certain conditions. ‘When I was outdoors, on nights the moon shone especially bright, things often felt unbearable.’ Looking for answers, Yayoi reconnects with her estranged aunt Yukino, and finds that their relationship contains the missing pieces of her life. When

Spring 2024

Yukino suddenly ups and leaves without a word (a trait that Yayoi shares), Yayoi is accompanied by her brother Tetsuo in her quest to find her aunt and the answers she holds. As truths and revelations are quietly admitted to one another under a dusk-touched tree, their relationship deepens. Yoshimoto has always had this extraordinary ability to convey the ephemeral natures of her main characters in plain yet diaphanous language: ‘she harboured something vast, lost, and familiar, and it was like a siren call to those of us who were missing parts of our childhoods. It was something deeper than night, longer than eternity, out of reach.’ Yoshimoto’s writing could be described the same way. Fi Churchman

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Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton To get behind the defences of any foodie in your life, there’s a simple trick: ask them how to make a certain dish. Food lovers, claims one character in Butter, ‘are so delighted when someone asks them for a recipe that they’ll tell you all kinds of things you haven’t asked for along with it’. This tactic drives the plot of the novel, when a journalist, Rika Machida, asks for a beef-stew recipe from Manako Kajii, a hedonistic gourmand recently convicted of scamming and murdering a series of men. Kajii, in overpublicised court hearings, maintained she was innocent, but has since refused to tell her story to anyone. Thus begins the correspondence that drives this slow-burn thriller, based on a true story, in which Machida attempts to get the scoop on Kajii, ‘whose days were spent shopping and eating’. When, that is, she was not allegedly scamming money from and killing off older men. Under the ruse of seeking cooking tips, Machida tries to figure out the truth. As Kajii’s simple tips, like making rice with soy sauce and butter, advance to more specific, and peculiar, dining instructions – such as eating noodles from a specific ramen shop after having sex – you start to wonder who is leading on whom. What follows is a game of cat and mouse, enacted through hungrily wetted lips

4th Estate, £14.99 (softcover)

and told with the kind of eager, searching language used to recount a favourite meal. To use Western analogies, it’s like The Martha Stewart Show meets The Silence of the Lambs. The book oozes with descriptions of taste and how ways of seeing the world can become imbued with food. Machida’s first bite of the buttered rice is ‘a shining golden wave, with an astounding depth of flavour and a faint yet full and rounded aroma’, all of which ‘wrapped itself around the rice and washed Rika’s body far away’. We follow as she begins to taste more and more, progressing from a professional too busy to think about food to a hungry sensavore eager to try everything. Her revelations and insights into understanding the convict, as well as her own body and her relationships to those around her, come through preparing and sharing food: making spaghetti with roe or a quatre-quarts for her on-off boyfriend, a macaroni gratin for her friend’s estranged husband, a roasted turkey for the extended, improvised family she has managed to gather around her through the butter-laced journey in the book. We know how deeply she has immersed herself in this new food-oriented world when, later in the book, she describes seeing Kajii in a courtroom, facing retrial, as looking ‘like a giant blancmange’, and the

magazine’s gossip-hungry readership as ‘starved of calorific substances. They’re super responsive to anything with a whiff of crunch or excess about it.’ Written in 2017, but newly published in English, Yuzuki’s narrative is based in part on the real-life ‘Konkatsu Killer’. The woman was convicted of fraud and the murder of men she had met on dating sites; despite some of the evidence being inconclusive, she was put to death. In the book, the media frenzy around Kajii’s case focuses on her unashamed dedication to both pleasing men and pleasing herself: ‘what the public found most alarming, evening more than Kajii’s lack of beauty, was the fact that she was not thin’. At times Butter dresses itself up as a whodunnit thriller, and at others a friendship novel, delivered in even, earnestly narrated episodes that feel cookie-cutter ready for an eight-part television adaptation. But it’s the uneasy, persistent social misogyny, and how it polices social norms and expectations, that is the novel’s true focus. Simmering through the book is the refrain that each of us has to learn to listen to our own tastes, desires and sense of satiation to find what constitutes a ‘good amount’. Butter gives a healthy, easy-reading serving of social commentary, where only the gluttonous are innocent. Chris Fite-Wassilak

The Corporeal Life of Seafaring by Laleh Khalili Mack, £14 (softcover) It’s currently estimated that around 80 percent of the world’s goods by tonnage are transported by sea. In her last book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (2020), Laleh Khalili argued that shipping is central to the fabric of global capitalism; in this new essay-length publication she seeks to move from systems to people and bodies as a measurement of the economic, social, racial, political and ultimately human implications of all this. Bodies that often go unnoticed because, weirdly, as the amount of goods being transported by boat has risen, the number of humans required to keep those goods flowing has fallen. The Titanic, the largest steamship of its era (it sunk in 1912), had 280 engineers alone working in shifts belowdecks; a supertanker today might have 20 to 35 crew in total.

Writing a decade ago, academic Vivek Bald defined early-twentieth-century seamen as ‘semicaptive and hyperexploited but globally mobile’. Khalili, drawing on both research and her own experience of commercial seafaring, suggests that today any real sense of that mobility has evaporated. Ports are now further away from city centres and offer nothing to do; unloading and loading times are shorter; ‘periods of liberty’ have consequently been reduced. All of which, combined with a splash of internet sociability (replacing maritime companionship), has led ship’s crews into more effective states of confinement. Boredom, loneliness, depression and suicide are some of the ways in which this affects the human face of maritime capitalism. Khalili asserts that the recent history of seafaring has anticipated not just the sweatshop of today

Spring 2024

but the gig economy, the normalisation of extractivism and other tenets of our current phase of capitalism. To that can be added ingrained colonial hierarchies and racial prejudice; open registers through which ships can be registered to a country without having any connection to that country; and, related to both, ‘relational inequalities’ in working conditions (‘European workers’, writes Khalili, ‘form an aristocracy of labour’, with better working and general rights than non-European colleagues). All this is not to say that no one enjoys seafaring or that it does not come with moments of solidarity and companionship; Khalili is careful to point out that, at times, it does. Rather, this book shines a light on how, as ever, the bodies of some are consumed in order to fulfil the desires of others. Mark Rappolt

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on the cover Aki Sasamoto, photographed by Katharina Poblotzki in New York, February 2024

Words on the spine and on pages 15, 49 and 73 are by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, from the poem ‘Running Orders’, published in Water and Salt (2017)

Spring 2024

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from the archives David Whittaker on the networked revolution The year is 1997, and the internet has commenced its infiltration into every aspect of human life. Writing in these pages back then, artist David Whittaker set out to ‘surf the cyberspace’ and take stock of art’s entanglement with this newly ubiquitous technology… ok, so it’s the new sensation, something that will change the way we work, rest and play. People have said it may become the 20th century’s most important legacy, more influential even than electricity and printing. It’s unhealthy for your kids because they spend too much time with it and unhealthy for you because you don’t spend enough. So what has the internet got to do with art? Can you exhibit art on this thing? Can it be used for selling? Can it become a museum, a gallery, a talking shop? Since about 1993, when the net’s rate of growth went ballistic, it’s been used for all these things and more. What everyman still wants to know, however, is whether all this stuff is any good. Or is it just another trendy technology dreamed up by the eggheads? Well, the answer’s yes. On both counts. Sorry, but stick with me. Contradictory though such a statement may appear, the net is already big enough to encompass the dichotomy. Within 20 minutes, no less, you realise why directories and search mechanisms are the most important tools for getting any benefit from being online, simply because there’s so much garbage out there that finding what you need is a proper needle-in-a-haystack job. With this haystack, though, even if you’re only interested in 1% of what’s available, that’s more than you can read in the rest of your life. Bearing in mind the 1% ratio also applies to web sites ostensibly about art, most major museums now have an online presence, so do a lot of the larger dealers and galleries. Academic institutions are also part of the net’s backbone while magazines and journals originating in print have quickly been pasted-up, being careful not to undermine the cover price of the handheld version. One of the most innovative areas is that of new organisations born on the net, and designed from the outset to exploit its characteristics: ‘e-zines’ are magazines that never existed in print, and as well as offering some acute and intelligent writing, they’re less likely to suffer from the ‘lets-just-hang-the-paper-pagesonline’ problem of bad layout. Mailing lists are basically loose communities scattered over many countries, swapping ideas and comments; global brainstorming if you like. Artists’ ‘homepages’

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are an increasing, quite competitive sector, though it’s not surprising quality varies when most of them are created by lecture-avoiding students, on their universities’ sites, rather than the artists themselves. Mind you, it’s easy to imagine cantankerous old daubers like Cézanne and Van Gogh having trouble grappling with a pc. There’s also a multitude of specialist interest projects, from Roman art to Renaissance literature, the relationship between Picasso and Jungian psychology, and the connection between commercial British tv and a notoriously controversial annual art prize. By now a certain thought might have occurred: there’s not much talk about paintings here. Very true. It’s not that representation of all the classics aren’t there somewhere, from Primaticcio to Pollock, Hockney to Hirst. Or even that the ‘death of painting’ really has happened this time, from a combination of smart installations and electronic data. No, if there’s one unquestionable fact about the net, it’s that it does for paintings what Mad Cow Disease did for the Sunday roast. The beautiful and life-affirming can be reduced to something with no more consequence, layers of meaning or magic than a road sign: a pointer to help decide if you’re going in the right direction. Besides, when it comes to buying art, who’s daft enough to fork out for a 6 × 4 in acrylic-on-linen they’ve only ever seen as a 6 × 4 cm fuzzy-light-on-glass? Hence ‘online galleries’ are little more than catalogues. Give me oil! Rough canvas! Brushstrokes, pentimenti, impasto, drips and splatters, cigarette butts and elephant dung! Any sign of life, ambiguity, anything but these oh-so-flat, oh-so-regular pixels! The net may be good for a million different things, but if there’s one benefit of every ‘user’, it’s to make them go to a real-life gallery, or their real-life front room, and look at some real-life art as soon as possible! This text was originally published in the October 1997 issue of Art Review

Lee Ka-sing, photograph from A Floral Transformation, 1996, 12 x 14 in, as published in A Floral Transformation, 2024. Courtesy of Lee Ka-sing.

ANOTHER DAY IN HONG KONG 18 MAR–31 AUG 2024 ASIA ART ARCHIVE An exhibition that reconstructs one day from Hong Kong’s art history, with new works by six groups of artists and art collectives.

Asia Art Archive 11/F Hollywood Centre 233 Hollywood Road Sheung Wan, Hong Kong T. +852 2844 1112 E. info@aaa.org.hk

AsiaArtArchive aaa.org.hk Opening hours Monday-Saturday, 10am-6pm