ArtReview Asia Spring 2015 by ArtReview

Ming Wong

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AA BRONSON JANUARY 23 – FEBRUARY 28, 2015 ANN VERONICA JANSSENS MARCH 7 – APRIL18, 2015 DANIEL STEEGMANN MANGRANÉ MAY 1 – JUNE 5, 2015

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MATTI BRAUN AA BRONSON ANGELA BULLOCH NATHAN CARTER THOMAS DEMAND JEAN-PASCAL FLAVIEN CEAL FLOYER THE ESTATE OF GENERAL IDEA LIAM GILLICK DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER GRÖNLUND-NISUNEN PIERRE HUYGHE ANN VERONICA JANSSENS CHRISTOPH KELLER GABRIEL KURI ISA MELSHEIMER ARI BENJAMIN MEYERS PHILIPPE PARRENO UGO RONDINONE CHRISTOPHER ROTH KARIN SANDER TOMÁS SARACENO JULIA SCHER DANIEL STEEGMANN MANGRANÉ

ESTHER SCHIPPER SCHÖNEBERGER UFER 65 D –10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

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卢森

LUCERNE

BEIJING

Mármakos Mármakos Hu Qingyan 27. 2. – 8.5. 2015

27. 2. – 8.5. 2015

Ai Weiwei, Hu Qingyan, Li Zhanyang, Liu Ding, Not Vital

艾未未, 胡庆雁, 李占洋, 刘鼎,

Zhou Siwei

Not Vital

Eternal Glory 6. 2. – 12. 4. 2015

周思维

Cheng Ran

22. 5. – 17. 7. 2015

24. 4. – 12. 7. 2015

北京

胡庆雁永垂不朽

6. 2. – 12. 4. 2015

程然

24. 4. – 12. 7. 2015

ARTISTS 艺术家 Ai Weiwei Chen Hui Chen Fei Cheng Ran Wim Delvoye Andreas Golder Hu Qingyan L/B Li Gang Li Zhanyang Liu Ding Meng Huang Qiu Shihua

艾未未陈卉陈飞程然

胡庆雁李钢李占洋刘鼎孟煌邱世华

Tobias Rehberger Christian Schoeler Shan Fan Shao Fan Anatoly Shuravlev Julia Steiner Not Vital Wang Xingwei Xia Xiaowan Xie Nanxing Yan Xing Zhou Siwei

单凡少番

ARTFAIRS 博览会王兴伟夏小万谢南星鄢醒周思维

Art Basel Hong Kong March 15 – 17 Art Basel June 18 – 21

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

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

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

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Eric Baudart Jeremy Everett Ko Sin Tung Nuri Kuzuçan João Vasco Paiva

15.01 — 07.03.15

edouardmalingue.com

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Sixth ﬂoor 33 Des Voeux Road Central Hong Kong

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Luc Tuymans The Shore 30 January - 2 April 2015

David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street London W1S 4EZ 020 3538 3165 davidzwirner.com

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Kerlin Gallery Art Basel Hong Kong Encounters: Siobhán Hapaska 13 –17 March 2015 www.kerlingallery.com

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Growing pains As it enters its third year of existence, ArtReview Asia is finding out, as many others have before it, that the continent from which it takes its name is a bigger place than it once imagined it to be. Not just because it is the biggest continent, and not just because of the increasingly tough choices it has to make about what, of the many artworks and issues surrounding them it encounters will make it into its pages (although that’s certainly a factor). And it’s certainly not just because it encounters work by Asian artists almost everywhere in the world it goes and that many of the artists and gallerists it meets from the West are constantly talking to it about how they are going to ‘break into’ the Asian market (as though it were some sort of bank or gated community), but also because ArtReview Asia is, over these past two short years, perhaps coming to understand that the Asia it operates in is made up of a series of distinct but (more-orless) interconnected territories with specific as well as shared discourses and dialogues. In some of these ArtReview Asia is involved, in others it is still more of an observer looking in. It would be trite for ArtReview Asia to say that it sees itself as taking you with it on a voyage of discovery, but it does like to think that it’s allowing you to encounter a variety of different perspectives on issues you may be aware of and others that you may not be (by all of which ArtReview Asia really means to confess that it is as much pupil as teacher and to state that that’s a far from bad position to be in). Anyway… So there was ArtReview Asia, sitting with a Western artist in Ngan Lung Restaurant in Hong Kong contemplating what to have for breakfast. “Arse!” the artist sitting opposite it screamed, pointing strangely at the back of the menu. Hiding its bafflement out of a mixture of politeness and embarrassment, ArtReview Asia calmly turned the menu round. All it could see was a photograph of a very unappetising ham and egg sandwich. “Arse!” the artist screeched again, smiling. And then pointed to

The overlooked

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the photograph and at the pile of eggs above the sandwich and the way in which two of those eggs came together in the shape of a set of human buttocks. ArtReview Asia hadn’t noticed it until then. But now the buttock-eggs seemed blatantly obvious to it. That’s one of the reasons ArtReview Asia likes the company of artists – they often look at what’s normally overlooked. And then, more importantly perhaps, share it with other people. In this issue, ArtReview Asia, and the many writers that help it make this magazine, look for that kind of ‘enlightening’ perspective – and occasionally the direct way in which it was delivered back in the restaurant – in the work of artists from a broader range of backgrounds and nationalities than ever before: in features alone we consider practitioners (to use a slightly clinical term) from Singapore, Malaysia, Mexico, the us, Japan and China. We’re committed also not just to seeing art as something that operates in a void (to which we might also add that any such void is generally created by financial, intellectual or political elitism, or – boom, boom – art fairs), but also to track the way in which ideas that are generated or explored within the field of ‘art’ come from or flow out to the wider world. In this issue that means an article on how the signifiers of an artwork’s ‘special’ status are adopted and exploited by the fashion industry, and a personal take, through the eyes of an artist, on the effect of a particular context – Singapore – and how it has changed as its art scene has developed during what some might call the current ‘boom’ years of art (people are buying it, some governments are interested in supporting it because of that and collateral benefits in terms of public relations and tourism). Of course who really benefits from this type of change and who directs it are other questions entirely: something that’s highlighted both in the work of Ming Wong and of Shooshie Sulaiman that try to unpick complex narratives and histories of the Southeast Asian region. ArtReview Asia

The Breaking Bad dumpling factory

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KAZUO SHIRAGA FEBRUARY 10–APRIL 18, 2015

KAZUO SHIRAGA FEBRUARY 10 – APRIL 11, 2015

MNUCHIN GALLERY 45 EAST 78 STREET NEW YORK, NY 10075 T: +1 212.861.0020 MNUCHINGALLERY.COM

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W3, 1994, 64 monitors, dimensions variable with specific installations

NAM JUNE PAIK W3

Jan.21 - Mar.15, 2015

50 Samcheong-ro, Jongnogu, Seoul, Korea

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ArtReview Asia vol 3 no 1 Spring 2015

Art Previewed 23

Previews by Hettie Judah 25

Points of View by Marie Darrieussecq, Rosalyn D’Mello, Xu Ya-Zhu and Paul Gravett 31

page 28 Liu Wei, Jungle No 21, 2013, canvas and wood, 210 × 210 × 20 cm. Photo: Jack Hems. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube, London, Hong Kong & São Paulo

Spring 2015

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Art Featured 39

Ming Wong by Sara Arrhenius 40

Miao Jiaxin by Aimee Lin 68

Shooshie Sulaiman by Mark Rappolt 46

Mika Ninagawa by Mark Rappolt 74

Gabriel Orozco by Christian Viveros-Fauné 52

Strokes for Different Folks by Clara Young 80

Liang Shaoji by Zoe Zhang Bing 58

Singapore: Art in Context by Sherman Sam 85

Shirin Neshat by Hettie Judah 64

page 74 Mika Ninagawa, noir. © the artist. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo

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ArtReview Asia

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Nahem Fine Art ArtBasel HK Print2:1

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37 we st 57 stre et n e w yo r k , ny 10 019 + 1 212 .517 . 2 453 w w w. e t n a h e m .c o m

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Art Reviewed 91

Nam June Paik, by Julia Marsh William Kentridge, by Matthew Blackman Song Dong, by Claire Rigby

exhibitions 92 Wang Jianwei, by Xiaoying Juliette Yuan Busan Biennale 2014: Inhabiting the World, by Aimee Lin 10th Gwangju Biennale: Burning Down the House, by Mark Rappolt Yip Kin Boon, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Voices / Landscapes ( for the eye and ear), by Elaine W. Ho Liang Shuo, by Fiona He apb Foundation Signature Art Prize, by Mark Rappolt Love in the Time of Choleric Capitalism, by Phalguni Desai The Anthropocene Project. A Report, by Mark Prince Laurent Grasso, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel The Inhabitants, by Hettie Judah Serendipity Revealed, by Niru Ratnam Aiko Miyanaga, by Helen Sumpter Korakrit Arunanondchai, by Paul Pieroni

books 110 The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War, by Rohini Mohan Art and Politics Now, by Anthony Downey Ai Weiwei, edited by Hans Werner Holzwarth The Twenty-First Century Art Book, by Phaidon Editors the strip 114 off the record 118

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ArtReview Asia

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A R T C E N T R A L H O N G KO N G C E N T RAL HARBO U RFRO NT HO NG KO NG

14 - 16 MA RCH 20 15

S O LO PRE SE N TAT ION | G IOVA NNI OZZOLA

39 Dover Street London W1S 4NN / +44 (0)20 7491 8816 w w w.gazelliarthouse.com

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Shirin Neshat The Home of My Eyes 23 March – 23 June 2015 Yarat Contemporary Art Space Baku

Shirin Neshat, Javid, from the Home My Eyes series (detail), 2015 Silver gelatin print and ink, 152.4 x 101.4 cm. (60 x 40 in.) Copyright Shirin Neshat, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

www.yarat.az

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Art Previewed

You are not supposed to bear down on the handle when operating an electric floor polisher 23

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Untitled, Acrylic on canvas, signed and dated, 1983, 95 x 95 cm

15D Entertainment Building 30 Queen’s Road Central Hong Kong open Tue-Sat 11am-7pm +852 2503 2220 info@axelvervoordtgallery.com.hk

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JEF VERHEYEN 16 JANUARY - 7 MARCH 2015 opening on January 16 th from 6-8pm

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Previewed Sharjah Biennial Sharjah Art Foundation and additional venues, Sharjah and Kalba 5 March – 5 June Shirin Neshat Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha through 15 February Rainbow in the Dark salt Galata, Istanbul through 18 January

Kishio Suga Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo 24 January – 22 March

Wang Gongxin ocat, Shanghai 16 March – 24 May

Crossover: The Unveiled Collection Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Bangkok 20 February – 14 June

Liu Wei ucca, Beijing 6 February – 3 May

Come to [what] end? Sàn Art Laboratory, Ho Chi Minh City through 5 February

Singapore Art Week Various venues, Singapore 17–25 January

Haegue Yang Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul 12 February – 10 May

2 Shirin Neshat, Offered Eyes, 1993, ink on rc print, 133 × 92 cm.Photo: Plauto. © the artist. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels

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1 Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, The Incidental Insurgents, Part 1: The Part About the Bandits, Chapter 1, 2012 (installation view, 13th Istanbul Biennale, 2013). © iksv Bienal. Courtesy the artists and Carroll / Fletcher, London

3 Paweł Kwiek, Meetings with the Light series (detail), 1991, photograph. Courtesy the artist and the Arton Foundation, Warsaw

4 Kishio Suga, Shachi Jokyo (Left-Behind Situation), 1972/2013, wire rope, wood, stone, steel. Photo: Tsuyoshi Satoh. Courtesy National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul

There have been fervent discussions – at least Mathaf – her first in a Middle East institution excerpts from Zofia Rydet’s Sociological Record concerning the creation and presentation of – though here they are the bitter, heartbroken series (1978–97) – documentation of the traces art – coming from Sharjah since the 2014 March traces of revolutions past or failed. Three major of religious cults visible in Polish homes, here Meeting. If ideas raised in that annual thinksuites of photographs are separated by two large shown for the first time in an art context – the exhibition extends through links between inforathon are anything to go by, the Eungie Joovideo installations, all addressing questions of mass visibility and the role of creativity in the face mal religious movements and the avant-garde 1 curated Sharjah Biennial will invite visitors of oppressive systems. For her most recent series, of the 1980s and 90s, and investigations of to question the authority of the archive, redraw their relationship to history and contemplate Our House Is on Fire (2013), Neshat spent weeks current censorial practices in the Middle East, to conclude with an installation by Walid Raad the responsibility of the art institution to the in Cairo exchanging stories with the parents and grandparents of those who had died young that draws explicit parallels between the rituals wider world. Following curatorial stints at the New Museum in New York and Inhotim in for the revolution – wracked by loss, their faces and totems of organised religion and the reverent Brumadinho, Brazil, Joo’s biennial will gather 50 are shown beneath a fine veil of calligraphy, cultural behaviours surrounding contemporary art institutions. artists and cultural practitioners from 25 countries alongside photographs of the feet of the dead. to present works (the majority new or commisRippling beneath the harmonious surface See our features section for more information. sioned) on the theme of The Past, the Present, the Religion, totalitarianism and power: all key 4 of Kishio Suga’s simple structures is the latent Possible. It sounds like the kind of pragmatic, hint of destruction. Earlier large-scale installa3 concerns of Rainbow in the Dark, a Polish/Turkish coproduction that shows works anchored in measured approach to futurity that we might tions such as Shachi Jokyo (Left-Behind Situation, each region since the 1980s, examining the creahave expected from this contemplative fixture. 1972/2013), in which stones and fragments of Thoughts of actual revolution abound tive response to mission creep between the wood balance delicately on a fine web of wire ropes, or Tabunritsu (Law of Multitude, 1975/2012), personal, political and religious. Kicked off by 2 in Afterwards, Shirin Neshat’s solo outing at

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for which rocks perch on a sheet of transparent providing for art-historical assessment. Crossover at the centre by artists from Vietnam and South draws a distinct line between the judgements Asia; the other two, by Pham Dinh Tien and plastic raised off the floor on breezeblocks, feel of the academic world and the criteria employed Nguyen Tran Nam, both contemplate aspects like room-size booby traps – one enthusiastic sneeze and the carefully balanced melange of by private individuals and institutions that of mortality. Tien with a fleet of mirrored airpurchase art, foregrounding collectors’ status organic and artificial materials would tumble planes, a reflection on the disappearance of as a key component in the artworld. Perhaps for down. This Tokyo exhibition draws threads Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 last March; Nam the first time, modern and contemporary Thai between Suga’s time as a leading light of the with a military decoration shaped as a guilloMono-ha group, which revolutionised the Japaartworks held in private hands will be shown tine – the execution tool of choice during the nese artworld during the late 1960s and through both in their wider art-historical context and 1955–63 regime of South Vietnam president as evidence of individual strategies in collecting. Ngo Dinh Diem. the 1970s and has enjoyed a new(ly commercial) 7 It is a hard to believe that the infinitely In Haegue Yang’s hands, the hard-edged lease of life over the last few years, and his more ephemera of modern domesticity – laundry recent output, focusing on the relationship delicate paper boat sailing through the air at racks, jalousie blinds, tin cans and electric fans – between space and objects. 6 artist-initiated nonprofit Sàn Art was cut are anthropomorphised with loving craft. by the hands of the axeman fronting Indonesian Precarity of a different flavour permeates metal band Sangkakala, but Rudy ‘Atjeh’ D is The rich colours, knitted cosies, stitched covers 5 Crossover: The Unveiled Collection: namely what a rocker with a quiet side, here tracing underand strings of bells that might once have adorned becomes of art history when there is no framework in place for the collection, preservation and lying cultural links along ancient trade routes a treasured animal here bedeck the bland and recording of artworks. Drawing on 18 significant between Vietnam’s Champa Kingdom and his humble objects with which we share home private holdings of Thai art, the exhibition home region of Aceh. It is one of three projects space. With the occasional addition of castors, looks at the role of the collector in shaping and on show produced during six-month residencies such mundane frameworks become dancing

7 Haegue Yang, Boxing Ballet, 2013 (installation view, Follies, Manifold: Gabriel Lester – Haegue Yang, Bonner Kunstverein, 2014). Photo: Studio Yang. Courtesy the artist

6 Pham Dinh Tien, When, 2014, chrome-coated plastic, dimensions variable. Courtesy Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City

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8 Wang Gongxin, Art Studio, 2014. Courtesy the artist

10 Ichwan Noor, Beetle Sphere, 2013, aluminium and original 1953 vw Beetle parts, 180 × 180 × 180 cm. Courtesy the artist

9 Liu Wei, Jungle No 21, 2013, canvas and wood, 210 × 210 × 20 cm. Photo: Jack Hems. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube, London, Hong Kong & São Paulo

objects infused with personality. In the Sonic rippling through stacks of exploding lightbulbs and a flabby stomach filmed fibrillating in Figures series (2013) – which will be shown at Leeum alongside new works – bell-clad characters literally navel-gazing closeup. For this, the first built around rigid suspended or wheeled frames solo exhibition of Wang’s work in mainland take the stiff Bauhaus designs for Triadic Ballet China, ocat will present a major new series 10 (1922) to their ultimate conclusion, performing alongside a retrospective of works from the last two decades. dancing figures in the space within the limits Things likewise get pretty tippy – and indeed of their rigid mechanics. There are aesthetic upsets in the home space 9 trippy – in the work of Liu Wei. The uncompro8 too in the installations of Wang Gongxin – mising Beijing-based artist, who once submitted Looks Like a Landscape (2004) – a five-panel mounthe Chinese video pioneer’s famous Dinner Table (2006) shows the settings of a lavish meal tain range composed of naked bottoms (some proffering impressive reverse-view pubic tufts) sliding, cloth and all, off a tilted dinner table – rather than modify his proposed submission upwards against the force of gravity, accompanied, finally, by the sound of smashing porcelain. to the 2004 Shanghai Biennale, will treat ucca In Relating – It’s About Ya (2010), forceful vibrations to his thoughts on the often uncomfortable – perhaps seismic, perhaps industrial – interfere interplay between humanity and the urban, with the performance of everyday actions, machinic systems to which it has forced itself

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to adapt. Expect large-format paintings created in collaboration with computer software, and complex architectural sculptures composed of urban debris. The nine-day festival of the visual that is Singapore Art Week promises ‘quality art experiences’ including talks, walks and nocturnal shows for nighthawks. Timed to coincide with the city-state’s Art Stage fair, the festivities extend across venues including the Gillman Barracks, Singapore Art Museum (showing works by the 15 finalists of the apb Foundation Signature Art Prize) and the ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands, which is presenting the Prudential Singapore Eye – an exhibition and award that honours emerging contemporary artists, as well as the roles played by institutions and critics across Asia. Hettie Judah

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Points of View Marie Darrieussecq While in South Korea…

Xu Ya-Zhu Social work recasts aesthetics in the art of Huang Sunquan

Rosalyn D’Mello The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is remaking India’s links to the global artworld

Paul Gravett The ‘bad but good’ trailblazing of Yumura Teruhiko

Marie Darrieussecq While in South Korea… While in South Korea in October to launch the Korean edition of my novel All the Way (published in French in 2013), I paid a visit to my publisher, Hong Ji-Woong. His publishing house, Open Books, is located in Paju, a new town an hour to the north of Seoul, at the end of a motorway lined with watchtowers and barbed wire. It’s a town dedicated to book production and constructed directly alongside the 38th parallel: from the top of the Lotte Premium Outlets supermarket one can see North Korea, entirely stripped of its forests, all sacrificed for firewood. Paju Book City was organised by the South Korean minister of culture at the beginning of the 2000s. Its new glass-and-metal buildings have sprouted from the earth not far from the military barracks that more normally populate this part of the world. Ten thousand employees work here, for around 250 companies: behind its disconcerting exterior, this new town is pleasant, well designed and leafy, with hip cafés, art galleries and artist studios. The idea was also that Seoul’s residents would come to this cultural centre to hang out on weekends, but according to locals, that didn’t really happen until after the vast Lotte shopping mall, with over 35,000sqm of floor space, opened in 2011. The website for Paju Book City declares in English that ‘the city aims to recover the lost humanity’ [sic]. Such an ambition might make one smile, but after the Japanese occupation, an atrocious war, the partition of the country and the often-chaotic process of modernisation undergone in South Korea’s major cities, Paju Book City is at the very least an architectural success. Its jewel is the Mimesis Museum, and I was surprised by the scale and ambition of this private museum. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winner Álvaro Siza in collaboration with

Castanheira & Bastai Arquitectos Associados and Jun Sung Kim, at the behest of Hong JiWoong, it houses the offices of Open Books (it is named after the company’s art imprint), a café and an art gallery open to the public. In the garden, two enormous beasts by Park Chan Yong warm their fantastical horns in the sunshine. And inside – light. Hong had considered the architect Tadao Ando as well as Zaha Hadid, but a prospecting trip to Portugal in 2005 convinced him to chose Siza. The 3,663sqm-building was completed in 2009, with Siza given carte blanche. Glass, wood flooring, raw concrete: the undulating white walls slide beneath the natural light as if the

These private enterprises often have greater resources than the local communities that house them, or even the state itself photons no longer arranged themselves in straight lines but in large, calm curves. The staircases seem to produce their own brightness. Indeed, one finds oneself endlessly at crossroads of light, without fully knowing their source. All this extends to the point where, on the day of my visit, the photographs that were on show (a Min Byung-Hun solo exhibition) suffered by comparison to their sublime envelope: this pure and peaceful museum. In Korea, the majority of the museums and galleries showing contemporary art are private. Many industrial conglomerates (such as Samsung Doosan and LG) have their own art

Spring 2015

foundations and several operate museums. In Busan, Korea’s great port town, for example, there is the Goeun Museum – an excellent private institution dedicated to contemporary photography. Opened in 2007, it was dreamed up and commissioned by a private patron who is, among other things, the local distributor for BMW. At the time of my visit it was hosting an exhibition of works by American photographer Ralph Gibson, and had shown the work of Frenchman Bernard Faucon the previous year. Not that the museum is dedicated solely to Western photographers, it’s just that its director, Sangil Yi (himself a photographer), told me he was particularly interested in mise-en-scène photography. These private enterprises often have greater resources than the local communities that house them, or even the state itself. But institutions and public foundations such as ARKO (Arts Council Korea) or SFAC (Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture), attached to provinces or cities, do actively promote contemporary art – and that’s a trend that has increased in force over the past five years: more public funding is now allocated to contemporary art and more public museums are under construction. The Chang Ucchin Museum of Art opened this past April in Yangju, in the province of Gyeonggi. It’s funded by the city. The Lee Ufan Museum, also publicly funded, is on a site in Daegu, Korea’s third city after Seoul and Busan. Much of South Korea’s economic output rests in the hands of family-controlled conglomerates, whose members often have positions of power in the government. It seems to me that in terms of the country’s cultural politics as well, a balance between public and private interests is always in the process of being struck.

Rosalyn D’Mello The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is remaking India’s links to the global artworld

In the coastal state of Kerala, doubt is grist to the evangelical mill; a proposition subtly evoked through mossy twin sculptures on the banks of the River Periyar, within the periphery of Kodungalloor, where Thomas, one of Jesus’s chosen 12 apostles, is believed to have arrived back in 52 ad. This region could have been the destination of the ship he would have journeyed in, sailing along the Spice Route via Syria with the singular mission of bringing the gospel of the risen Christ to the community of Jewish settlers residing in the ancient port of Muziris. The Mar Thoma Orthodox Church, in whose parochial compound these two statues exist, is purportedly one of seven-and-a-half churches constructed by Thomas, supposedly a builder by profession before he heeded Christ’s call. There are no remnants of the original church. The ‘fact’ of its existence is hinged solely on faith – and a skeletal fragment of Thomas’s mortal remains that was gifted to this church in 1952 as a gesture commemorating 19 centuries since Thomas’s alleged arrival. The river-facing statues represent a prostrate Thomas whose fingers reach into the risen Christ’s heart. ‘My Lord and My God’, the inscription reads, a phrase that serves as an architectural motif across Syrian Christian sites in Kerala; a textual reminder of the apostle’s sceptical nature that earned him the monicker ‘Doubting Thomas’; a visual attestation of Christ’s reprimand, recorded

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in John 20:29, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ Muziris was drowned in the great flood of 1341, historians believe. Its coordinates remain a subject of contestation. Proofs of its existence are present, though, in ancient maps and literature. However, until the 2005 excavation in

Doubts about the kmb’s ability to sustain itself and even establish continuity through a second edition have given way to a thriving optimism about the immense possibilities ingrained within its very structure Pattanam, there was little archaeological evidence to support these documents. When artists Riyas Komu and Bose Krishnamachari accepted the leftist state-government’s invitation to conceptualise a biennial in Kerala, they consciously adopted the now nonexistent harbour as the imaginary, hyphenated appendage to Kochi, a port that emerged after Muziris drowned. Under the aegis of the Kochi Biennale Foundation, Nikhil Chopra, La Perle Noire: Le Marais, 2014, 52-hour performance. Courtesy Kochi Biennale Foundation.

the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (kmb) was the first biennial to be realised in India (others have been imagined, but never more than that). In fact, it can also be seen as a long-overdue corrective measure against India’s continual nonparticipation in the prestigious Venice Biennale, other than the sole state-funded pavilion in 2011, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, and the now obsolete Triennale-India, founded by Mulk Raj Anand in 1968, when he was the chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi, the autonomous arts institution set up in New Delhi in 1954 by the Indian Government. ‘By linking the biennial event to the real/ mythical site of Muziris… this Biennale claims a cosmopolitanism of past and present civilizations and thereby gives avant-garde art a historical scope,’ Kapur wrote in a letter of support published in the national weekly, India Today, in 2012. Locating the country’s biggest art event in penninsular India, rather than in its throbbing metropoli, has destabilised any easy notions of centre and periphery, and even how the path of contemporary art in India will be plotted in the future. Komu and Krishnamachari envisioned the kmb as a site rife with evangelical possibilities. “The new convert is the art lover… Biennales are about people and places more than theorising and practice,” Komu said during a seminar held soon after the sucessful inaugural edition in 2012, which had about 400,000 visitors, of which

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at least 30,000 were schoolchildren, and even won the Kerala Government’s Ministry of Tourism award for Most Innovative and Unique Tourism Project in the Country. “Where religious fundamentalism raises its ugly head, the Biennale offers a balm to the present society’s many wounds; art can give voice to many questions silenced over the years.” The accomplishment both he and Krishnamachari felt was about India now having its own Biennale “to criticise, think over”, while conceiving of “different innovative ways to make it better”. It was not conceited arrogance that had led them through the 90-day duration of the kmb. There were “lessons learnt in humility” after suffering through the “stones of accusation, criticism, wide-spread pessimism”, and bearing the brunt of an ambiguous opposition bloc that he then believed was “still out there to malign us”. Two years later, the opposition has mysteriously vanished. Doubts about the kmb’s ability to sustain itself and even establish continuity through a second edition have given way to a thriving optimism about the immense possibilities ingrained within its very structure. The fervour with which artists, gallerists and even collectors are evangelising the cause of art and reaching out to members of the non-artworld is unprecendented. “People taught them,” Bose Krishnamachari stated when I interviewed him about this. “We didn’t respond to the opposition, we thought there’d be debate, but we never expected an imaginative criticism of funds,” he continued, referring to the controversial charges that he and Komu had been slapped with of misappropriation of funds when a new government came into power. They were both eventually exonerated, but the charges left the kmb in a state of financial duress as the money that the state had alotted was held back for several months. While the new government has promised to cover 63 percent of the projected Rs260m budget to finance the 108-day affair that will feature site-specific installations by 94 artists from 30 countries, artist Jitish Kallat, artistic director of the second edition, which kicked off on 12 December, decided to start a first-of-itskind crowdfunding campaign to meet a portion of the deficit and ‘raise the profile of the Biennale worldwide’. The real agenda, however, is to ‘make it participatory, allow people to take ownership of it and feel proud of it’, according to Komu. The tagline for the campaign, ‘Art Needs You Need Art’, confronts the viewer, positioning her as the key link in the nexus between the production and exhibition of art. With 68 days of the 90-day fundraising period left, only 0.35 percent of the targeted Rs50m corpus had been achieved, and purely through anonymous donations, notwithstanding the

Anish Kapoor’s Descension (2014) feeds into this idea of the unbounded infinite. The watervortex whirlpools tempestously, resembling a black hole. Modelled on Descent into Limbo, his 1992 work for Documenta 9, this new work, poised inches away from the River Periyar, emits a cacophonous gurgling sound and a magnetic vibe that seems to lure the viewer into its openmouthed centre, the protective railing serving as a fence protecting her from being swallowed by this portal. Running parallel to the kmb, which is itself spread across about eight venues, is the Student Biennale, a higher-education initiative offering a platform for students from government-run Indian art colleges to exhibit their work and cash in on the global nature of the kmb’s expected audience. A team of 15 young curators was chosen from some 75 applicants to spearhead this initiative under the direction of an advisory committee of artists, art-thinkers and educators. A Children’s Biennale is also underway and will include previsit and postvisit workshops in local schools, guided age-specific tours, as well as interactions with schools for differently Komu and Krishnamachari abled children and web-hosted engagements for schools unable to visit the Biennale. A semenvisioned the kmb as a site rife inar series, titled ‘History Now’, and a range of with evangelical possibilities. partner projects have been designed to further “The new convert is the art lover… extend the kmb’s mission to ‘invoke the latent cosmopolitan spirit of the modern metropolis Biennales are about people of Kochi and its mythical past, Muziris, and and places more than theorising create a platform that will introduce contemporary international visual art theory and practice and practice” to India, showcase and debate new Indian and The 100 artworks on display – created international aesthetics and art experiences, by 94 artists from 30 countries – manage to and enable a dialogue among artists, curators, create a poignant and diverse narrative along and the public.’ this curatorial axis while meditating on the The opening week, a frenetic affair, saw at nature of time, the politics of cartography and least 10,000 visitors and brought together artists the mediation of language and lost histories. from the local and international art community. Intensely poetic and sometimes ambitious Unlike the previous edition, at least 80 percent in terms of scale, the installations at the main of the works had been installed in time for the venue, Aspinwall House, which was once opening, although problems with fluctuating electricity rendered several (including Descena warehouse for spices, do in fact realise Kallat’s initial promise of positioning the site as an sion) temporarily nonfunctional. While the observation deck. The very first work on display, atmosphere lacked the euphoria and naked exuberance that was elemental to the inaugural Charles and Ray Eames’s hypnotic video Powers edition, there was a collective sense of quiet of Ten (1977), a nine-minute film that begins with pride in what the second edition had achieved. an overhead shot of a couple lounging at a picnic No longer obligated to defend the Biennale and moves at a ten-second pace to zoom out by against opposition, the art cognoscenti could the power of ten, moving from one metre away immerse themselves in rigorous debate and to arrive at the boundaries of the known uniconversation, with opinions and critiques being verse before zooming back to the couple and offered at will. While there is no longer any magnifying by the power of minus-ten to finally doubt about continuity, it is perhaps possible arrive at quarks in a single proton of a carbon that between the two editions, the siteatom embedded deep inside specific nature of most installations has one of their hands, sets the The Kochi-Muziris been exhausted. It may be time for the tone for the guided journey Biennale 2014 Kochi-Muziris Biennale to look for inspiraon which the viewer is is on view through tion outside its own historicity. cajoled into embarking. 29 March

unprecedented amounts privately pledged by artists, film directors and other patrons (Geeta Kapur and her artist husband, Vivan Sundaram, recently donated Rs4m). The paucity of funds led to a strain on resources, definitely derailing Kallat’s plans to have everything operational by the opening week. Titled Whorled Explorations, the present edition, which is hoping to attract one million visitors, is curatorially premised on two key chronologically overlapping moments that are integral to Kochi’s historical position; the maritime chapter of the fifteenth-century ‘Age of Discovery’, an era that, according to Kallat’s curatorial note, ‘heralded an age of exchange, conquest, coercive trading, and colonialism, animating the early processes of globalisation’, and altered the cartography of the planet; and the period between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, during which the Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics was making transformative propositions for understanding our planet and locating human existence within the wider cosmos.

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Xu Ya-Zhu Social work recasts aesthetics in the art of Huang Sunquan My knowledge of Huang Sunquan comes from his years of radical practice. The ‘artworks’ in his exhibition u-topophilia: Art in Field and Societal Space at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing are simply byproducts of that. With that I am not saying that contemporary art always needs to manifest itself in new forms. But I am suggesting that by admitting a Huang Sunquan into its ranks, contemporary art reveals its own deficiencies. Huang concerns himself with the potential for change in economic and political processes within a specific historical moment, rather than with the representation of those processes in works of art. If we accept that, then his exhibition unintentionally exposes something false within contemporary art: the ‘marketing Is social art merely a operation’ behind the presmarketing ently popular notion of art campaign? intervening in what is called ‘social space’. Huang studied architecture and urban planning, and, when still a graduate student, joined other activists to establish pots Weekly, an independent newspaper addressing the underground culture and political perception in the time following the March student movement of 1990 in Taiwan. In 1997 he initiated Against the Municipal Bulldozers, the first anti-urbanrenewal movement in the Greater China region. A year later he shot the documentary Our New Homeland (1998), which remains an important reference source in Taiwanese urban-studies departments and which influenced the narrative structure and imagery of later, similar documentaries, such as Lo Chun-Chia’s The Forgotten Corner – A Documentary of Lo-Sheng Sanatorium (2006) and H15 Concern Group and v-artivist’s Home Where the Yellow Banners Fly (2012). In 2004, as the blogging craze began, he established twblog.net, a crucial hub for Taiwanese writers that encouraged activists to use media to reclaim their societal rights. The same year, he established the tw.indymedia.org, part of the global Independent Media Center network born of the Seattle antiglobalisation movement (at the time, 120 cities around the world set up Independent Media Centers as part of the network). In 2004 and 2005 Huang took a visiting-professor position in the Masters of Cultural Studies (mcs) programme at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. While there, he encouraged the formation of Hong Kong’s Independent Media Center, and during the 2005 wto Conference, he joined the students of Hong Kong on the streets. There, he witnessed the fierce protests of South Korean farmers

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and the Hong Kong police force’s use of tear gas and pepper spray against innocent students and citizens for the first time. That international demonstration and what accompanied it has inspired wave upon wave of democratic and socially engaged movements in Hong Kong over the past decade. Huang’s courses on topics such as social movements, cultural action and citizen media have become crucial wellsprings of student activism, just as pots Weekly has deeply influenced Taiwanese youth culture and its political movements for the past 20 years. When Huang subsequently took a teaching position at Making social National Kaohsiung Normal movements, University in Taiwan, he finalthen studying them ly had the opportunity to consider social movements from a purely educational perspective. He led students on fieldwork, the development of projects, the curating of exhibitions and the operation of an actual art space: the MonkeyWrenching Art Center. Huang’s artist statement for u-topophilia, and the artworks on show within it announce a new position: ‘the artist as social scientist’ does not see ‘the field’ as source material, but rather develops concrete, substantive knowledge systems and action plans for field workers and their subjects. Huang repeatedly emphasises that: contemporary art is no longer a historical project; it is just interpretation and more interpretation. In large-scale exhibitions, artworks have become the testimonies of discourses, and the exhibitions per se have become interpretation rather than events. Art-ism in history has a historical task of its own, which fights for aesthetic norms as alleged. Nowadays, art trends belong nowhere and drift along the market. Resistance has become the love of imagery while revolution has become an image; everything could be a commodity, and aesthetics (together with a variety of theories of perceptive distribution) is highly approachable. Huang therefore sees fieldwork and socially active art as key aspects of the true long-term battle (which incorporates various forms of resistance culture) ‘to confront the economic evangelists and physical/moral nurturing of neoliberalism’. This means the artistic Where consideration of everyday life, does art a reflection on the definition of end and art practice and its role in everyday politics life, the reallocation of pleasure

begin?

(according to Huang, pleasure, normally the property of the bourgeoisie, has no revolutionary qualities. The real revolution comes in reallocating pleasure: through art schools or movements, enhanced sensory perception, knowledge sharing and so on) and the abandonment of local sentimentality generated by property rights and ownership. If contemporary art implies the universal convergence of politics and commerce, in which everything from inkwash paintings to conceptual artworks become commodities, then Huang’s approach is the only artistic method of lifting the neoliberal veil: understanding societal, political and economic processes within a historical context. In projects ranging from a student fieldresearch programme conducted in the Cijin Island District of Kaohsiung over the past few years to trips he took with students to the Sichuan earthquake disaster-zone to help build houses or to Shilidian, a village at the centre of China’s agrarian-reform revolution, while serving as a visiting professor at the China Academy of Art, Huang’s field of operations is defined by the initiation of societal understanding. In an era of readily accessible aesthetics, Huang addresses their allocation; in a world of spectacular artifice, he prefers to study alongside fools, poor people and the lower social classes, in order to penetrate its apparent unity of construction and seek the possibility of upheaval. As Huang sees it, social movements and ‘the field’ are opportunities both to reconstruct historicity and to awaken consciousness. At the same time, the capacity for precise perception Huang mastered during his architectural training cannot be overlooked. His works are not located in space – they are space. In A Day (2012–13), the viewer enters a space of perpetually shifting light. Using mobile phones, 20 workers documented an ordinary day in their lives in a demonstration of mechanical reproduction. The work attempts to focus the viewer’s attention upon the labourers hidden in the shadows of glittering metropolises. The Islands series (2012–14) is the result of fieldwork begun by Huang’s team on Cijin Island in 2011. Drawing on workshops and field interviews, the project bridges historical and contemporary landscapes as well as 2d and 3d by utilising Augmented Reality (ar) techniques. Huang’s so-called memo-scape links the fractured landscapes and societal relationships of past and present, while Kaohsiung Jukebox (2014, part Social research of the Islands series) offers becomes artistic a blended auditory

experiences here

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reproduction of historical and contemporary voices. The works in this series connect people with historical sentiments, and offer viewers with their own unique memories the opportunity to recreate connections in the present. They are the history, time, memory and feelings of the island, and the presently reverberating images, sounds and spaces within the gallery – but also resonances within the bodies of individual viewers, creating connections and awakening awareness at the level of historical consciousness. It is an authentic, experimental action aimed at recreating public histories. Come Out! Utopia (2013), Huang writes in the u-topophilia catalogue, offers a rush of anxiety that ‘extracts the utopian ideality of cities and the embers of formalist tragedy’: a lone reflection caught between past ideals and projections of present reality. The viewer faces a colossal tower of mirrors broken up by chinks through which historical ideals are visible within: models for utopian urban plans that were never implemented. By seeing both ourselves in the mirror and also the unrealised practices behind it, we realise that we are not in

fact insiders, or at least that a part of us remains projected outward. Within the ideals of history, people always seem to have opportunities to act as historical subjects, but in the end, they are usually no more than historical objects. During a panel on u-topophilia, the artist Chen Chieh-Jen had this to say about Huang: “The perceptions of each individual are both constructed and cut off, both produced and obstructed… he remains Truths are revealed a certain kind of architect, in the gallery space not an architect who builds houses, but one who disrupts the habits of our mental frameworks, the naturally concealed ways in which we govern ourselves, or are governed. This kind of mapping is displayed by the exhibition space.” Chen went on to say, “Huang Sunquan is always critiquing artists and the art system, but the true target of his critique is always the set of discursive structures, narratives and standards of art history that were imposed upon everyone beginning in the late nineteenth century, constructions that cannot be avoided anytime we try to speak our own language and appropriate

discursive power. Do we truly create our own mental framework and the conditions of our lives, and have we authentically conducted fieldwork, research, face-to-face, body-to-body, searching between one another? If we have not done fieldwork, then our most novel perceptions are the outer walls of Come Out! Utopia, the formal extremes, the external expression of governed, allocated perceptions.” Jacques Rancière states that contemporary art is ordinary art, just as he states that aesthetics must be democratised – but how do we accomplish Huang that? Huang has provided Sunquan’s an answer in his practice. exhibition u-topophilia: This is the reason that the contemporary art museum Art in Field and Societal Space needs Huang Sunquan: is on view at the same reason that Red Brick contemporary art needs Art Museum, his practical expeBeijing, through rience of art in the field 16 January and in societal space. Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

Huang Sunquan, Come Out! Utopia, 2013. Photo: Xing Yu. Courtesy Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing

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Paul Gravett The ‘bad but good’ trailblazing of Yumura Teruhiko

Back in the posthippy, prepunk early 1970s in Japan, Yumura Teruhiko was the trailblazer of a consciously raw, handmade and apparently craftless graphic style, for which he coined the term ‘heta-uma’, broadly ‘unskilled-skilled’, or ‘bad but good’. Rejecting the period’s empty polish and inhuman perfectionism, ‘heta-uma’ was a much-needed injection of Pop art brut. Yumura rejoiced in exuberant scrawling and collage, often embracing yet subverting imported American ideals from romance comics or musclebuilding adverts. Under the mock-Westernised pen names ‘Terry Johnson’ or ‘King Terry’ from ‘Tokyo Funky Studio’, his covers and comics appeared in the monthly manga magazine Garo. Founded in 1964, this peaked at around 80,000 copies (still very modest compared to massmarket titles) as an influential though unpaid outlet for politically and socially engaged comics creators. But by the dawn of the 1970s its role and relevance began to change amid the decline in student activism and Japan’s accelerating economic boom. Yumura’s radical artwork heralded Garo’s shift towards artists eager to express themselves through highly idiosyncratic styles and narratives, like Nemoto Takashi’s delirious ‘ero-guro’ or erotic grotesque faragos, and Shiriagari Kotobuki’s Zen-like absurdism. Nemoto hailed Yumura: “He opened many doors and allowed in artists who were not very strong technically but had a soul to express.” Forty years later, three generations of these artists, all more or less affiliated with the ‘heta-uma’ avant-garde, have found themselves finally brought together for their first two-part group show, oddly not in their homeland but in two arts institutions in France. One reason for this French connection, as Tsuzuki Kyoichi,

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Japanese commentator and collector from Roadsiders’ Weekly, explained at the opening is: “You cannot do this exhibition in Japan, because the Japanese artworld doesn’t care about this kind of popular culture, so they see ‘heta-uma’ is not supposed to be art, this is manga comic business or illustration business, not fine art.” Another factor is that outside of Asia, France is the largest consumer of translated manga. While sales are dominated by commercial hits, many French publishers also release more auteur or underground manga as featured in this double exhibition. It also helps that French artist Hervé Di Rosa, a key figure with his brother Richard and Robert Combas in the ‘Figuration libre’ movement since the 1980s, was hugely inspired by discovering Yumura’s work in 1979. Di Rosa offered to host this exhibition in the Musée International des Arts Modestes (or miam, French for ‘yummy’), in his native Sète on the Mediterranean coast, a repository, showcase and generator that he cofounded in 2000 for works on the peripheries of art brut, Outsider art and popular culture. As cocurators, Di Rosa turned to Pakito Bolino, artist and dynamo behind wild silkscreen publishers Le Dernier Cri, who brought in Ayumi Nakayama from Tokyo bookshop and publisher Taco Ché. Together they expanded the project into two parallel shows, adding Mangaro into gallery space La Friche Belle de Mai, a former Gauloise cigarette factory turned multiarts venue, and Dernier Cri’s base in Marseilles. Godfather Yumura sadly did not attend the opening, but some 30 artists aged between Heta-Uma, 2014 (installation view with work by Imiri Sakabashira, miam, Sète, France). Photo: Pierre Schwartz

twenty-five and sixty came over from Japan, many meeting their peers for the first time, to work on new pieces inside the two spaces, from massive wall paintings to installing crazy, crude structures, part-shed, part-shrine. Kago Shintaro concocted bleakly humorous sex-toys gaudily packaged like joke novelties, while Tanaami Keiichi loaned some of his eye-popping kimonos. Far from being ‘unskilled’, artists like Maruo Suehiro or Hanawa Kazuichi demonstrate dazzling precision, channelling draughtsmanship from past masters, while among the striking young artists are members of graphic magazines Mograg and Erect, and twin sisters Arizono Eru and Emu, who collaborate as Hamadaraka. Contextualising these, hanging from miam’s ceiling, are remarkable relics rescued by Tsuzuki Kyoichi – lurid original banners promoting Japan’s former travelling freakshows, one of which promises a pair of cows with the heads of Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley. Dense, intense and disturbing, much of the contents of these two landmark exhibitions comes from the cultural margins, unmoored from moral conventions or the propriety of Japan’s aestheticised self-image. This is what these fierce, uncompromising creators can bring, in participant Imiri Sakabashira’s view: “Japan has been traumatised by disasters throughout its history: war, nuclear, earthquakes. Consumer society wants to make us forget them, but many of these Heta-Uma is at MIAM, Sète artists are expres(miam.org), and Mangaro sing through is at Friche Belle de Mai, Marseilles (lafriche.org), their work this both through 1 March deep trauma.”

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Grand Palais March 26th-29th, 2015 Singapore & Southeast Asia guests of honour www.artparis.com

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List of galleries by 17th December 2014 | * new participant

Modern + Contemporary Art + Design 10 Chancery Lane Gallery (Hong Kong) | 1st.iKON (Seoul,

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Art Featured

As a food, gelatine is of low nutritive value. If an animal is fed on it exclusively it dies with symptoms of starvation. However, it makes a nice finish for organdy and other fine cottons 39

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Ming Wong Mixing research into the history of science fiction in China and the preservation and adaptation of the traditions of Cantonese opera in Hong Kong, the Singaporean artist’s latest body of work offers an intriguing study of cultural exchange, past futurology and the political and social realities of the present by Sara Arrhenius

Ming Wong at Nadim Abbas’s Apocalypse Postponed, Absolut Art Bar at Art Basel in Hong Kong, May 2014. Photo: Roberto Chamorro. Courtesy Absolut

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Windows on the World (Part 1), 2014, production still. Photo: Glenn Eugen Ellingsen. Courtesy the artist

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‘The future has arrived: the sci-fi inventions that have become pink-legged dog, weeds and psychotropic plants, suggested an apocareality’, boasted the headline on The Guardian’s science page recently. lyptic time after our biotope. The future seemed much closer, but also It is undoubtedly fascinating to think that Marty McFly’s hoverboard messier and more apocalyptic, than the shiny, monumental world that from Back to the Future ii (1989) may soon be an everyday commuter Barney laid out before us. The speculative ecology of Huyghe’s piece vehicle. Nevertheless, when browsing through the article’s list of al- could be read as a renewed interest within contemporary art in formulating the future in a language ready realised or soon-to-appear inspired by science fiction. The sci-fi inventions, it is the power landscape that these time-travelof literature and film to imagine lers pass through is reinventing our future that strikes you most. the boundaries between nature Recognising that the dated and manmade in order to enable technological fantasies of a 1980s survival on a planet where the movie are still inspiring and influencing the work of scientists conditions for life have been radiand engineers ensnares you in a cally altered by the human hand. The current Taipei Biennial, time trap more complicated than the disjointed chronology of the The Great Acceleration, Art in the Anthropocene, curated by Nicolas cult movie itself. Unlike film or literary fiction, Bourriaud, investigates how art interacts with this new situation science fiction has never exactly been a steady current in contemand imagines a very near future in porary art. But sci-fi does appear which we have renegotiated our relationship with machines and to fascinate artists at certain with other living beings so as to moments, when its rhetoric and imagery seem acutely relevant for various reasons. One obvious create new forms of life. In Norwegian artist Ann Lislegaard’s installaexample is, of course, the work of Matthew Barney, who throughout tions, the rich literary tradition of science fiction, in the shape of writers his career has systematically constructed a phantasmagorical future such as Ursula K. Le Guin, J.G. Ballard and Samuel R. Delany, becomes universe that speaks of a new subjectivity beyond the limits of the an imaginative and permissive space in which it is possible to imagine human body. This universe grew up in parallel to new developments new ways of being in the world that transgress the boundaries between in biotechnology and computer science during the 1990s. Develop- life forms and time zones. In Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) (2006), the viewer moves through a 3d ments that, at the end of the millennium, were picked up by animation of a universe that slowart and cultural theory, which, ly crystallises. The sound piece inspired in turn by the increased Science Fiction_3112 (After 2001: A interaction between humans and Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick) advanced computing, as well as (2007) manipulates the listener’s biotechnology, began theorising sense of time and space by coma posthuman subjectivity markpressing the film’s soundtrack to ed by the technophilia of science eight minutes. fiction. The writings of the science Lislegaard’s use of literature historian Donna Haraway were and film recurs in Singaporean influential in constructing this Ming Wong’s work. In his ongodiscourse, which was echoed in ing project Windows on the World the art shown in exhibitions such (2014–), he thinks about the as the Jeffrey Deitch-curated Post future with the aid of science ficHuman (1992), featuring Barney, tion from the past. The work will Sylvie Fleury, Kodai Nakahara develop in several stages, each one elaborating on connecting and others. Haraway’s science-fiction-inspired thinking about a future devel- themes and source materials. The various parts will also be linked to opment of fusions between man, technology and other forms of life and comment on their specific social and political context. The first made a decisive return to contemporary art some two decades later as an stage was a film installation commissioned for Islands off the Shore of important influence for the curatorial concept of Documenta 13 (2012), Asia, a group exhibition jointly presented in September 2014 by Para which also honoured her with an archive made by the Danish artist Site and Spring Workshop in Hong Kong that addressed the geopoliTue Greenfort. It was noticeable how the techno-utopia of the previous tics of the remote and often uninhabited islands off the coast of East millennium had now turned into a dystopia echoing the current and Asia, some of which have recently become the flashpoints for growing coming ecological disaster. Pierre territorial-conflict-fuelled nationStills from Windows on the World (Part 2), alism within the region. Wong Huyghe’s uncanny tableau Untilled 2014, video installation. responded to the theme with a (2011–12), with its cyberpunkish Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing and Guangzhou

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work evoking the ambiguous territory of outer space and comprising The hybrid, mutable character of cultural tradition is a recura tunnel built out of wood and fabric that resembles a sci-fi film set, ring motif in Wong’s art. It is often linked to a discussion about the at the end of which is a film projected onto a circular screen showing complex construction of identity, and about ways that tradition the artist (in a silvery space suit) moving around in zero gravity can be stretched and challenged. Another strand in Windows on the amid futuristic architecture to the sound of Cantonese opera. Solaris World is the tradition of Cantonese opera, and how it survived and flourished outside mainland – both the 1961 novel by Stanisław Lem and the 1972 film adaptation China. When doing his research, by Andrei Tarkovsky – is an imporWong noticed that, in Hong tant reference here. The setting of Kong, Cantonese opera kept its traditional ritualistic roots, at this seminal sci-fi work, a planet the same time as managing to covered by an ocean whose secrets renew itself by incorporating the space-travelling scientists are elements from the Chinese trying to discover, links into the film industry, as well as influexhibition’s archipelago theme. ences from Western music. In Added to that, another important this malleable identity, and in theme of Solaris is the inability of the space travellers to commuits openess to including novelty, nicate with nonhuman species while at the same time keeping because of humanity’s limited the tradition alive out of ritual perceptual capabilities (it turns necessity, the artist found an interesting correspondence with out that the ocean is, in fact, probthe history of Chinese science ing the humans who think they are probing it). fiction. Both artforms combined The choice of Solaris as a starting point takes us to the tradition strands from contemporary and ancient Chinese culture with of science fiction developed east of the Iron Curtain. For Wong, outside influences. The third and final part of Windows on the World turning to science fiction as source material was motivated by an will thus be a science-fiction inspired Cantonese opera performance interest in seeing how science fiction thinks about the future, and commissioned by m+. As part of the work, Wong is also filming interhow that thinking is imprinted with the social and political devel- views with the young actors, students at the Hong Kong Academy opments of its time. In the next part of Windows on the World, of Performing Arts, in which he asks them to talk about the future made for the Shanghai Biennial, at this pivotal moment in the island’s history. By giving the Wong shifts the focus to the science-fiction tradition in China. voice of the future to the singers The installation looks like a sci-fi of this ancient operatic form, movie mission control, with its Wong is bringing the future and panels of television monitors. the past together in a dynamic and politically urgent here and The screens show clips from the now. The introduction of the Solaris-inspired film, but also futuristic language of science excerpts from Chinese sciencefiction to the age-old format of fiction films, as well as documentary material about the Chinese Cantonese opera makes the tradition grow and gain cultural space programme. relevance by absorbing contemIn contrast to its strong posiporary cultural expressions. tion in the Soviet Union, science The key to this cultural relefiction didn’t achieve great popuvance – and this is a recurring larity in China during the twenmotif in Wong’s work – is an tieth century. After it was introopenness in traditional artduced there in the early 1900s, through translations of writers such as Jules Verne, Chinese science- forms, such as opera, to the influence of contemporary popular fiction writers gained some influence, but in the wake of the Cultural culture. Energised with the vital language of contemporary Chinese Revolution, the genre came to be regarded as marginal or as chil- science fiction, the Cantonese opera can speak not only of the past dren’s literature. The social and political changes of the late 1990s, but also of the future. ara and access to digital technology, allowed new writers to emerge, who also gained widespread public recognition. The new generation The second part of Ming Wong’s Windows on the World (2014–) can be seen at the 10th Shanghai Biennial, titled Social Factory, through 31 March; is influenced by the Western cyberpunk movement, as well as traditional Chinese literature. It was his first solo show in Beijing will Stills from Windows on the World (Part 2), this crossbreed nature that made be on view at ucca next summer, 2014, video installation. from 12 June through 9 August it interesting to Wong. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing & Guangzhou

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Windows on the World (Part 1), 2014, production still. Photo: Glenn Eugen Ellingsen. Courtesy the artist

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Shooshie Sulaiman by Mark Rappolt

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“The Malaysian public sees contemporary art as an entertainment which the art fair was located (Singapore sits at the tip of the Malay and commodity,” says Shooshie Sulaiman when asked to describe the Peninsula and was formerly a part of its northern neighbour), both cultural scene in her home country. “Shopping malls are the new art articulated a sense of pleasure (offering local people local foodstuffs at spaces,” she continues. “Art institutions are irrelevant.” Patrons act as local prices or the thrill of a fantasy photo) and both were made with a group of friends under the ‘12’ umbrella – the gallery space Sulaiman “owners of our contemporary myth factory”. It’s a bleak portrait. But perhaps a familiar one, even to those opened in 2007. Although Sulaiman describes being an artist as a involved in art scenes to the east and west (and Far West, from where “responsibility”, she doesn’t necessarily articulate that as a burden. I am emailing her) of the Malay Peninsula. But it’s not a hopeless one. Her work isn’t just about finding a place for art in a contempoParticularly for Sulaiman, an artist whose openness to the experience rary world (that seeks to turn it into either an empty commodity or a of life often leads to work that allows positives to manifest themselves propaganda tool), but also about understanding the place of people – in apparent negatives. While by no means overexposed, her work as not least herself – in that world. Multiethnic, postcolonial Malaysia, an artist has been recognised internationally in some of the largest of course, has its fair share of complications, with any sense of nationof the ‘artworld’s’ group extravaganzas, such as Documenta 12 (2007) hood having to compete with or incorporate the country’s different and last year’s Gwangju Biennale. A doer as much as a thinker, she has ethnic groupings (primarily people of Chinese, Indian or Malay also established a series of independent art spaces in her hometown origin). And it’s a politics that has played out in art either via a polite of Kuala Lumpur, and remains in active dialogue with artist groups silence or, with Malay Muslims who make work about their idenaround Southeast Asia on subjects of artistic and personal freedom. tity, is often seen as necessarily pursuing racist or nationalist agendas “Making art is like drinking water when you are thirsty, or eating (added to all this, Islam is established as the official religion – and the when you are hungry,” she says with characteristic straightforward- religion of all ethnic Malays – in Malaysia’s constitution, although ness. “It’s nonexclusive to me. It doesn’t matter what you call art.” almost 40 percent of the population practices other forms of reliConsequently her work operates in an expanded field (and media gion). After the 1969 race riots in Kuala Lumpur, the artist explains, ranging from drawing and portraiture, to installation and archi- “freedom of individual expression was given up, in exchange for tecture, via performance, archives, libraries and writing). Two site- national security… our silence dilemma started”. specific installations – Kedai Runcit No. 12 (Sundry Shop No. 12, 2011) and Sulaiman can claim to sit somewhat in the middle of this. She Kedai Gambar Goldie No. 12 (Goldie Photo Shop No. 12, 2012) – took the was born to a Chinese mother and a Malay father, both of whom she form of, respectively, a traditional Malaysian general store (selling lost when she was relatively young – her mother when she was three, food and art objects) and a 1960s/70s-style photography studio her father when she was twenty-two – a situation that led to her own (offering portraits against backdrops of a sunset over water or the ‘silence dilemma’ and a feeling that she needed to block a lot of memMalaysian Houses of Parliament). Neither looks like a conventional ories of her parents because they were so inevitably connected to tragartwork, both were exhibited at Art Stage edy. She describes studying art (at itm above Sundry Shop No. 12, 2011 (installation view, Singapore, both offered a critique of the in Selangor, Malaysia) as being “a healArt Stage Singapore). Courtesy the artist market environment in which they were ing mechanism” rather than anything facing page Indian Father + Indian Mother = Chinese Daughter, 2009, placed but simultaneously grounded it in centred around notions of the production lily petal, ink and old photograph, 24 × 18 cm. of objects, and although she does produce something of the history of the place in Courtesy the artist

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works that are shown in commercial galleries and art fairs (she has and the possibility of its adaptation and reconfiguration. “My work worked with Tomio Koyama Gallery in Singapore since 2012, a rela- explores the possibilities of a Malay identity,” the artist says. “Not as tionship that she feels has made her more aware of “being” an artist), something fixed! What I often argue for is an understanding of how that spirit remains ever present in her work. No more so than in an nuanced, ambiguously complicated Malay identity is… a lifetime of debate might not also solve any position of self-identity, but will epic series titled Sulaiman itu Melayu (Sulaiman Was Malay, 2013). ‘Sulaiman refers to me, my father, but also to what it means to be perhaps give chances to imaginary horizons.” Perhaps most imporMalay,’ the artist said in conversation with curator Melanie Pocock tantly of all, the work, and Sulaiman’s art in general, explores how we and artist Hasnul J. Saidon at the time. ‘It’s what I would describe as relate to particular situations, and how that particular relation might “inverted overlapping”, a process through which I explore seemingly be shared through art. “We are our consciousness,” Sulaiman says, opposite ideas within the same entity.’ The work itself comprises a “and art is related to a higher consciousness that gives more underseries of drawings and writings; Sulaiman bought a home, a replica of her standing in coping with the nature of reality.” parents’ wooden house in Muar, Johor, featuring an inscription from This past August, Sulaiman set up a maix (Malaysian Artist Intention Experiment), a new collective the Quran recited when someone passes “Making art is like drinking water artist platform offering research, exhiaway; and Sulaiman is a rubber tapper (a collaboration with I Wayan Darmadi), bition and discussion facilities in Kuala when you are thirsty, or eating when for which four portraits of the artist’s Lumpur. For January’s edition of Art you are hungry,” she says with Stage Singapore, she will continue such father were carved into four rubber trees characteristic straightforwardness. explorations by organising another (one facing Mecca, the others facing artists’ initiative platform titled sea east, south and north) planted by the “It’s nonexclusive to me. It doesn’t (South East Asia/Social Engagement artist’s father on his one-acre plantamatter what you call art” Artists) with Thai artist Arin Runjang tion in Segamat, Johor, the sap that bled from the trees collected and placed in moulds bearing a portrait of the and Indonesian Ucap, of collective Taring Padi, which will launch elder Sulaiman within a border featuring the flowery motif of what with a roundtable talk. Its goal, however, lies beyond the scope of any she terms the Muqaddam, a small Quran, and the sheets then exhib- fair: to initiate a bigger and wider discussion about Southeast Asian ited. The final component is a patchwork Malaysian flag made up of art, culture and social engagement, and to try to initiate interest and flags from various Malaysian political parties and suitably coloured understanding about the inside perspective of assimilation within what Sulaiman calls “the overlapping Kingdom”. “When I was in fabrics donated by friends. The suite of works is as complex as its subject matter (and I say school, I was always proud to have a name that sounded Indian, and this conscious of the fact that I am the product of a union between my face Chinese, and Malay by law,” she says of her own overlapping an ethnic Sri Lankan Tamil who was born in Kuala Lumpur and identity. “Human beings dislike stability or harmony, this doesn’t stir an Englishman of German-Jewish origin), nodding towards both good knowledge, some say. Strangely, I miss harmony. Why not?” ara personal and universal identity, evoking both tangible and intangible knowledge, the location of the self in relation to the past and Shooshie Sulaiman’s sea artists’ initiative launches at Art Stage the present, a respect for tradition (incorporating forms of animism) Singapore, 22–25 January

Sulaiman bought a home (detail), 2013, wood house, nine rubber sheets, table, painting. Photo: Wong Jing Wei. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo & Singapore

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Sulaiman bought a home, 2013, wood house, nine rubber sheets, table, painting. Photo: Wong Jing Wei. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo & Singapore

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End Note(s)

Moderation(s) 2012 – 2014

Over the course of two years Moderation(s) saw a sprawling ecology of artists, curators, and writers gather around different formats of inhabitation, production, and exhibition making. Essays were viewed as works of fiction, language as image, sculpture as situation. End Note(s) focuses on interpretations of and reflections on what has been said and what has been done during Moderation(s).

Contributors: A Constructed World, Nadim Abbas, Defne Ayas, Oscar van den Boogaard, Mimi Brown, Heman Chong, Chris Fitzpatrick, Amira Gad, Travis Jeppesen, Latitudes, Christina Li, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Samuel Saelemakers, and Aaron Schuster. Moderation(s) was initiated by Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong.

For more information about this publication please visit www.wdw.nl.

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Gabriel Orozco by Christian Viveros-Fauné

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With a major exhibition opening in Tokyo, the Mexican artist has been revisiting earlier work, and in some cases remaking it

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above La ds (Cornaline), 2013, modified Citroën, 150 × 490 × 120 cm preceding pages Inner Cut, 2014, wood and graphite, dimensions variable (installation view, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2014)

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On an unseasonably warm night last November, the creative jugger- snake that bites its own tail. Starting with his no-frills presentation at naut that is the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco enacted a small part of the 2012 Havana Biennial, his subsequent survey exhibition Natural a larger public comeback at New York’s Americas Society, surrounded Motion (it was organised by the Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Moderna by his wife, his friends and his dealers. The occasion was the presen- Museet) and an expansive 2014 autumn show at Marian Goodman in tation of the Americas Society Cultural Achievement Award, of which New York, Orozco’s mood can be said to have turned intensely selfhe is the first recipient. The ceremony helped publicise a typically reflexive. Like no other contemporary artist of the first rank, he has circular aspect of the artist’s legacy, which has languished somewhat responded to new cultural and technological shifts with what can since the heyday of 1990s-style globalisation. During yet another justly be called circular innovation. An approach based on profound period of sweeping cultural change, Orozco’s artistic-philosophical stocktaking, it’s also fundamentally linked to the ideal of variation insights have returned – like certain enduring ideas and all great art – and repetition in the natural world. razor-sharp as ever. A sculptor without a medium, Orozco has long used photogAn artist who regularly pits looking against thinking, Orozco raphy, video, drawing, collage, painting and what others call installation (he does not) to make art whose has evolved a deliberatively recursive visual forms and motifs act as trigworldview from a set of shifting concepSome 21 years after he exhibited gers for seemingly ordinary surprises tual binaries. There’s craft and the readyan empty shoebox at the 1993 and deep philosophical reflections. As made, the organic and the manufacVenice Biennale and first showed he once advised his friend and fellow tured, the natural and the industrial, the artist Damián Ortega to do in the late practical and the high-flown. Together, a cut-up and reassembled Citroën ds 1980s, he often prefers to let ideas these and other oppositions have illusat Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, mature and percolate, so that they can trated Orozco’s way of understanding Orozco’s finished works continue emerge as fully formed artworks later. the world through the steady force of Unsurprisingly, Ortega’s observations dialectical drift. For a quarter century, to toggle between two poles: the fifty-two-year-old has turned these about the work Orozco executed for the perfectly crafted objects and highly contraries into a singular approach Havana Biennial fully document this metaphysical propositions to artmaking. Some 21 years after he trend. As transcribed in a 2012 interview they conducted with each other in exhibited an empty shoebox at the 1993 Venice Biennale and first showed a cut-up and reassembled Citroën the pages of Art in America, the younger Ortega saw the mostly circular ds at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, his finished works continue to drawings and paintings Orozco executed in mud and debris on the toggle between two poles: perfectly crafted objects and highly meta- walls and floors of Havana’s abandoned Escuela de Ballet building physical propositions. Increasingly, they do so to reinforce a vision of and instantly recalled paintings the older artist had shown him over forward thinking that is both propulsive and circular. 20 years earlier, in Mexico City. To quote Ann Temkin, the curator of Orozco’s celebrated moma History records that for approximately four years starting in retrospective in 2009, ‘There is no way to identify a work by Orozco 1987 Ortega, along with artists Gabriel Kuri, Abraham Cruzvillegas in terms of physical product.’ Instead, there is a creative through-line and Jerónimo López Ramírez, alias Dr Lakra, met weekly at Orozco’s that organises his oeuvre contextually, from artwork to artwork, and house in the Tlalpan neighbourhood of Mexico City to conduct what from exhibition to exhibition. Lately, that line has begun looping they informally called the Taller de los Viernes. This ‘Friday Workshop’ back on itself in the imitation of the Greek Ouroboros – the mythical – initiated to provide an outlet for a group of young artists who felt

Empty Shoe Box, 1993, silver dye bleach print, 41 × 51 cm

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alienated from the traditionalist local scene – changed the landscape the more interesting it will be’. Animated by other interests, like his of Mexican art forever, and eventually helped launch Orozco’s career wish to deliberately problematise existing aspects of artistic origias a pioneer of global conceptualism. Two and a half decades later, nality and allow for greater circulation of his art, this second unique his workshop collaboration with Cuban art students recycled the car sculpture launches a new artistic symbol into the world, while Mexican artist’s earlier motifs to create a site-specific intervention. invariably modifying the nature of the first. It’s a decision the artist The implications of Orozco’s loaded adaptation are not to be under- says he came to, like many, ‘slowly, and then at some point I decided to estimated. As Ortega properly put it: ‘After all that time, the idea has do it’. For Orozco, the choice is an affirmative creative step taken in the reached maturity, only now it is transformed into a political, collabo- face of an art game played increasingly according to financial calculus. rative effort.’ He, of course, prefers less predictable games like chess, or the unstable What was once a series of early geometrical paintings became, results garnered by throwing his many boomerangs. In their wide-ranging 2012 conversation, Orozco also told Ortega: in Orozco’s own words, ‘a workshop or a seminar about light, dust and architecture’. In turn, the adaptive nature of Orozco’s process ‘Art-as-spectacle… erodes social consciousness by avoiding critical ensured that the untitled installation – while being very much ‘about issues, such as the exploitation of cheap labor, the prioritization of money over creativity and an institunature, open air and the body’ – also There is a creative through-line effectively dealt with far-reaching ideas tional reverence for all that is technoof ‘public art and the crisis of public logical, as if that were synonymous that organises Orozco’s oeuvre education’. In this way, the artist’s signawith vanguard ideas. Some of us are contextually, from artwork to artwork, not obsessed with videos, or specture circular and semicircular shapes were transformed utterly – thanks to his tacular photography, or with great and from exhibition to exhibition. canny use of context and repetition. No factory-type artistic productions.’ Lately, that line has begun looping doubt, Orozco’s experience in Havana Consider, in this light, Orozco’s back on itself in imitation of the 2014 New York gallery exhibition also strongly affected his unique decision of handmade boomerangs. A group to undertake another species of remake: mythical snake that bites its own tail of crude wooden cutouts based on namely, a second version of the iconic La ds (1993), far and away his most recognisable sculpture. Made for Orozco’s personal collection of Oceanic hunting implements, their Orozco’s 2013–14 Northern European retrospective (the artist has friezelike arrangement represented, among other things, both expressed to this critic the idea that he currently prefers exhibiting the flight of an ancient manmade tool and its changing nature. An his work in places where it has not previously travelled), the artist’s unlikely sculpture rendered in everyday materials, it riffs on a state second cut-up car replicates the making of the original to arrive at a of play that, like art, is both constant and changing. Which leads one different, bullet-shaped object that, appropriately, triggers an alter- to an inevitable conclusion about the identity of the author of this work and others discussed here: the Gabriel Orozco we see in this nate set of fulsome meanings. As the artist explains to curator Yilmaz Dziewior in the catalogue and other recent international shows is intimately related to Gabriel that accompanies Natural Motion, the new sculpture, which he titled Orozco, the justly acclaimed artist of the late 1990s, but he is not at La ds (Cornaline) (2013) after its gemlike red colour, does not share in all the same. ara what he describes as the ‘phenomenon of overproduction’ – by which Orozco means both the spectacular nature of contemporary art today Gabriel Orozco: Inner Cycles is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, from 24 January through 10 May and the ‘materialist dogma that the more expensive a production is

Natural Motion, 2014 (installation view, Moderna Museet, Stockholm)

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Inner Sections Alpha, 2014, gold leaf and tempera on linen on wood stretchers, 91 × 91 × 3 cm all images Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

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Liang Shaoji by Zoe Zhang Bing

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Last October, when Liang Shaoji’s exhibition Back to Origin was on and ephemeral. In the Snow Cover series (2014), silkworms are placed show at Shanghart Gallery in Shanghai, I was coincidentally reading either in the everyday objects such as wine bottles, coffee boxes, Catching the Big Fish (2006), David Lynch’s book on meditation and plastic cups, poster papers, high-heeled shoes and electronic compocreativity. In it, the American film director says: ‘Ideas are like fish… if nents, or in relics of ancient architecture, stone carving, broken porceyou want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.’ Over the past lain and withered twigs. The silkworms spin continuously so that 25 years, Liang has spent his life living in a temple on Mount Tiantai the silk wraps around the objects, making them look almost snowin central Zhejiang Province, leading a life as simple as a monk’s: capped. Walking among the works, viewers feel as if they have entered reading, meditating and searching for spiritual enlightenment. But a cemetery in which time and space are stationary, and where the past he has also devoted himself to the study and practice of silkworm and present are juxtaposed. The world we’re familiar with seems to farming. And rooted in this real-life – as opposed to artistic – disci- have faded away. And so has the warmth of life. What’s left is only the pline, his art (which often deploys silkvestige of fragility, struggle, entangleLiang’s art practice has centred on silk ment, suffering and death. worms as a medium) manages both to describe a relationship between manIt somehow dragged me back to a farming and the silkworm – a creature typical David Lynch movie, Mulholland kind and nature, and to reflect a cultural normally seen as the symbol of rebirth and historical understanding of ‘life’ Drive (2001), in which reality and dream, and reincarnation. From its habits through a personal perspective. truth and illusion, the spiritual and Lynch was born in 1946, in Montana, to its life cycle, Liang knows everything the physical, are intertwined, tearing each other apart, where men wander usa; Liang was born in 1945, in there is to know about the creature around the multiple dimensions of Shanghai, China. Despite their similar ages, the two artists’ lives are as distant as their birthplaces: as with time and space, and look forward to the redemption of the soul as parallel lines, there are no obvious intersections. And yet, just as their life approaches its end. In today’s China, after the prevalence Lynch’s movies generally come across as not easy to access for the of idealism during the 1980s, the market-economy boom during the uninitiated, any true understanding of Liang’s work requires some 90s and the so-called globalisation that has taken off in the twentyinsight into traditional Eastern philosophies. Still, Lynch is widely first century, all the old rules have been broken, and values such as hailed as a wizard of filmmaking, just as, in the Chinese contempo- sincerity, honesty and mutual trust have been sabotaged. As a result, rary art scene, Liang has a similar reputation: often described as the it seems as if Chinese people have become easily irritated, twisted and ‘holy hermit’ or ‘reclusive master’. fretful. In Liang’s work, fragile bodies are intertwined with cold metal In his younger years, Liang studied traditional weaving techniques wires, architectural relics that look like detritus from earthquakes or and design, and was subsequently influenced by Marin Varbanov, industrial waste. Has the silkworm become a symbol, indicating the a Bulgarian textile artist who studied at the Central Academy of violence, cruelty and sorrow of life? In his introduction to the exhiArt and Design in Beijing (graduating in 1959) and who combined bition, Liang wrote that by resorting to the silkworm, he wanted to Western and Chinese techniques to introduce modern art tapestry fulfil his wish of ‘returning home’, or in other words, going ‘back to to China. During the 1980s Varbanov, together with his Chinese origin’. In this regard, does his work also allude to the sense of helpfollowers, established the ‘Soft Sculpture’ movement. Since 1988, lessness, distress and suffering felt while searching for the path to ‘go deploying a combination of biology, sociology, traditional eremitic back to the origin’ in darkness? culture and Zen philosophy, Liang has managed to integrate silk Time and life constitute the core of Liang’s work. According to the spinning with contemporary artforms like installation, perfor- artist, time imbues space with life. Silk is the vestige of a silkworm’s mance, video and sound art. More precisely, Liang’s art practice has life, the accumulation of power before silkworm metamorphoses centred on silk farming and the silkinto moth, and the index between the Viewers feel as if they have entered worm – a creature normally seen as existent and existence. Objects wrapthe symbol of rebirth and reincarnaped by the silk are the sculpture of a cemetery in which time and space tion. From its living habits to its life are stationary, and where the past and time, life and nature. In other words, cycle, Liang knows everything there they are examples of destiny. The influpresent are juxtaposed. The world is to know about the creature and has ence of Chinese traditional philosoeven developed a unique technique that we’re familiar with seems to have faded phies and the doctrine of the Buddhist Tiantai school, especially its core docallows him to ‘direct’ silkworms to spin away. And so has the warmth of life trine zhiguan (cessation and insight), silk on and around a variety of surfaces and objects, rather than producing their usual cocoons. Through the can be clearly perceived in Liang’s work. In Sanskrit, ‘cessation and manipulation of sound, music, light, temperature, manmade mate- insight’ can be translated as ‘void and stillness’. ‘Stillness’ means rials and smell, he manages to guide, alter and even transform the the nurturing of quietude and tranquillity, and ‘void’ refers to the paths by which silkworms spin, and create the sculptural forms he nurturing of viewing and intelligence. The artist mentioned that he envisages by twining and piling up their threads. once talked to the abbot of Guoqing Temple on Mount Tiantai, asking Destiny (2012–14), a monumental installation, features rusty iron for the direction by which he might obtain a deeper meaning of ‘cessahoops, muddy oil drums and broken iron plates. It seems like a frag- tion and insight’. The abbot gave him the Lotus Sutra, one of the most ment of a huge disaster, a portrait of doomsday. In contrast to the popular and influential Mahāyāna sūtras, the basis upon which the overwhelmingly giant and weighty industrial products, the white Tiantai and Nichiren schools of Buddhism were established, and told silk wrapped around them and corpses of silkworm moths are light him to ‘read it and then you’d realise “cessation and insight” doesn’t

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opening page Snow Cover No. 1 (detail), 2013, detail, silk, cocoons, paper cup, plastic cup, metal, board, 17 × 122 × 244 cm

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above and facing page Destiny, 2012–14, silk, cocoons, iron plate, iron powder, oil barrel, polyurethane colophony, acrylic, yellow ground, 180 × 1250 × 350 cm

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deny movement’. It was at that point that he was enlightened: ‘cessa- have to go through that yourself. You are the orchestrator of it, but tion and insight’ actually implied movement in stillness. Only by you’re not in it. Let your characters do the suffering.’ In Liang’s work, taking time could one see and read the world with rapt attention. the silkworm has taken the place of the artist himself and becomes the Liang’s work constantly pursues the mystery of life’s origins, hoping witness, sufferer and martyr of life. that a comprehensive dissection will remove the surface of traditional The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben was a big influence on culture that covers the contemporary era and allow one to probe Liang’s desire ‘to keep his eyes firmly on our current era, and to write about the obscurity we are currently experiencing’. According to deeper beneath its skin. Mending Sky (2011) is an example of that. It makes viewers feel Liang, the ‘obscurity’ doesn’t mean a ‘hopeless abyss. On the contrary, upset and uneasy. The single-channel videowork features silkworms obscurity is light, the kind that attempts to reach us but finally crawling on broken mirrors and spinning. In Stephen Bayley’s Ugly: fails to’. In Liang’s recent catalogue, he establishes a link between The Aesthetics of Everything (2011), the author puts forward the bold Agamben’s notion of ‘obscurity’ and the ‘void and stillness’ advocated question: who drew the conclusion that nature is beautiful? The by the Tiantai school of Buddhism. In his practice and exploration of title, Mending Sky, originated from the philosophies, religions, social studies, When people put on the headset Chinese myth of the Goddess Nüwa history and human civilisations, the mending the sky. Such a legend is obvitwo converge, accompanying the artist and listen to the sound of silkworms as he goes forward along his journey ously enlightening, encouraging peocrawling, spinning and wiggling in art. Apart from being an artist, it is ple to pursue the spirit of heroism and on broken glass, it is the piercing sense more appropriate to define Liang as a to make sacrifices for the sake of the silkworm farmer, a Zen practitioner integrity of nature and the beauty of of pain given out by glass cutting the world. But the result is probably meditating on the relationship between silkworms that comes across destructive. When people put on the himself and the work as well as the headset and listen to the sound of silkworms crawling, spinning and interplay between life and its origin. The magnificence and modesty wiggling on broken glass, it is the piercing sense of pain given out lying in ‘void and stillness’ and the warmth and lustre of the ‘obscure by glass cutting silkworms that comes across, rather than the beau- light’ imbue Liang with the courage and strength to carry on the lonely tiful sky view reflected in the glass. The beautiful natural scene shown journey in the exploration of art. In the context of Asian cultures, the in this work is somewhat sarcastic. Indeed, when power is hidden silkworm is taken as a poetic symbol – symbolising ephemeral beauty beneath a pleasing appearance, how might we define beauty and ugli- and the devotion of life. In the meantime, cocooning is a metaphor ness? As there is no blood or wound seen on the corpses of the silk- for samsara, the repeating cycle of birth, life and death. Liang Shaoji worms, do our souls tremble? Lynch wrote: ‘In stories, in the worlds has devoted most of his time to the silkworm, to art and to his vision. that we can go into, there’s suffering, confusion, darkness, tension He is the witness of life, maker of art, and sufferer of the spiritual. ara and anger. There are murders; there’s all kinds of stuff. But the filmmaker doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering… You can show Work by Liang Shaoji is on view in the group show v&p, the human condition, show conflicts and contrasts, but you don’t at Shanghart, Beijing, through 26 February

Snow Cover – Faint Aroma, 2014, silk, cocoons, china, vine, board, 28 × 52 × 82 cm

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Liang Shaoji with Chains: The Unbearable Lightness of Being / Nature Series No 79, 2003, photographed in 2002 as a work in progress all images Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai, Singapore & Beijing

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Shirin Neshat

Souad, from Our House Is on Fire series, 2013, ink on digital c-print, 158 × 102 cm. Photo: Larry Barns

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The filmmaker and artist examines what revolution looks like behind the frontlines by Hettie Judah

Hossein, from Our House Is on Fire series, 2013, ink on digital c-print, 152 × 122 cm. Photo: Larry Barns

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Early in the feature film Women Without Men (2009), set in Tehran – a pro-democracy uprising that she had supported from her homeduring the 1953 coup d’état, a young woman visits a friend who is town of New York. Cast using other Iranian activists she had encounhousebound but desperate to participate in the political actions tered in the American city, the 58 portraits of The Book of Kings divide out on the streets. “But why? It’s just a lot of idiots making trouble a population – the actors in a history – into Masses, Patriots and outside!” chides the woman. In the work of the film’s director, Shirin Villains. Stripped to the waist and painted with the bloodied battle Neshat, the courage to engage in political action is closely linked to scenes that illustrate Ferdowsi’s poem, the Villains literally embody an understanding of the creative act as a counterpoint to oppression: their own violence; portrayed in a uniform stance with hand on heart the melancholy legato of the singer soaring against the snap of jack- and the fixed, wide-eyed expression of the true believer, the Patriots boots on flagstone; poetry in the law courts; the will to become visible are likewise defined by their role and beliefs, the text of the poem and audible when comfort and security rest in remaining silent and painted across their forms in regimented verse; it is instead in the unseen. “I don’t want to make ‘political art’,” explains Neshat, who irresolute and heterogeneous Masses – presented in a crowded grid of intense headshots, many depicting returns to these themes over and apparently traumatised subjects – over again in both her artwork and her feature-film projects, “but I can’t that Neshat shows the less easily dehelp it.” In part this is involuntary: fined face of history’s witnesses. her work investigates areas – religion, In Our House Is on Fire, a work comgender, the recent history of the missioned by the Robert RauschenMiddle East – in which any form of berg Foundation, Neshat portrays expression will be identified as politthe postrevolutionary condition of Cairo through its margins – those ical, for better or worse, whether she desires it or not. In part it is because stooped and withered by illness, povfor Neshat the ‘political’ is not someerty, loss and the weight of years who thing abstract and apart, but somestood around the edges of Tahrir thing intertwined with every aspect Square as the young pushed to the of life; you may set out looking forefront. Over two weeks, Neshat for family, for cultural identity, for and longtime collaborator Larry Barns love, but eventually you will always tracked down appropriate subjects find politics. from the neighbourhood surroundNeshat does not create lightly, or ing Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery, bringfast, and is “not drawn to the celebing them into the gallery’s studio rity world of art fairs”. During the to share stories and to mourn the ten years after completing her mfa dead (Barns’s daughter Teal had also at uc Berkeley, she produced almost recently died). The tears seen in the no artwork, only recommencing in subsequent portraits are real, though 1993, following her first trip back to the barely visible veil of calligraphy Iran, a country she had left some 19 that sits like dust on the images is years previously as a seventeen-yearrevolutionary poetry, rather than the old student, and to which – following sitters’ stories; Neshat “never wrote the Islamic Revolution of 1979 – she down what they said, I just listened had until then been unable to return. to them”. When shown as a series, She came to wider attention with the the pictures of the living are hung subsequent Women of Allah (1993–7) alongside similarly sized portraits of – a series of photographs of Iranian the feet of the ‘dead’ as illustrations women inscribed with calligraphic of absence. Farsi text that now forms the first Unlike Women of Allah, these part in an informal trilogy currently recent projects are comparatively on show at Mathaf: Arab Museum of hermetic – they have a tight internal Modern Art in Doha. In common with structure more suggestive of narraWomen of Allah, The Book of Kings (2012) and Our House Is on Fire (2013) tive. Carefully cast, and with a strong narrative tension between portray the hidden faces of revolution – not the heroes of the front- the individual images, Neshat’s approach to photography is more cinematic since she became a feature filmmaker. Such interdeline, but those who endure its aftermath. Ferdowsi’s epic poem Shahnameh (The Book of Kings, c. 977–1010 ad) pendent image suites are alas ill-adapted to this era of image anarchy combines myth and history in telling the story of Persia. In its – in which individual pictures habitually float free first of their themes of patriotism, violence, sacrifice and conquest, Neshat found series companions, then of their artistic context, and even authorechoes of her own interest in the struggles of the present day; her ship – particularly since an overwhelming proportion of Neshat’s geographically farflung audience sees her Book of Kings was started after the sup-presBahram (Villains), from The Book of Kings series, 2012, work online via migrating gallery images sion of Iran’s Green Movement in 2010 acrylic on le silver gelatin print, 252 × 126 cm

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and YouTube clips. The Mathaf show is her first solo exhibition in the dc, later this year, that will include her notes and research materials Middle East, but the number of young women who came to hear her – from newspaper clippings to interview notes to her original copy speak at an event for students the morning after the opening in Doha, of the ancient Book of Kings – as well as historical footage, alongside and the size of the audience and the heated debate about her repre- the finished works: a provision of geopolitical and cultural-historical sentation of women and the Middle East accompanying her recent context unnecessary at Mathaf, but one that brings with it perhaps screening and talks at the American University of Beirut give a sense troublesome hints of historicity. Neshat is no documentarian; like Ferdowsi she celebrates the dimension that fiction has to add to of a public already engaged with her work via the Internet. The popular reach of Women Without Men, which was screened history: “To me, imagination is emotion: I need to make art that is more widely than Neshat has ever exhibited, combined with the faithful to that rawness.” fact that, unlike a migrating suite of photographs, even online it This autumn, Neshat hopes to start shooting a long-planned has an emphatic totality, has firmed up Neshat’s resolve to continue feature film inspired by the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, whose working in feature films. “To be honest, you reach a much bigger soulful voice bewitched the Arabic-speaking world for some five audience with cinema. I work within the reality of the artworld, and decades during the middle of the last century. The figure of the singer I feel there’s a limit to how far you can push the boundary of political is a familiar one in her work – in both Women Without Men and the art – but with the film world I feel there is the space for me.” Largely double-screen videowork Turbulent (1998), song springs forth like an unmediated expression of the funded by governmental and soul. Yet in researching Kulthum, private European foundations as the power of whose voice was well as Middle Eastern institutes such that she apparently raised that support films, Neshat’s movie audiences to states of near-sexual projects are consciously geared arousal, Neshat found evidence towards a more general audience: of an inner life to be fugitive: the more narrative, less enigmatic than her artwork, though sharmore she researched, the more ing its aesthetic and intellectual Kulthum seemed to fragment. Stretched thin between the ressensibility. The slow pace of Neshat’s ponsibilities she feels towards her working process evidences the subject, her audience and her own constant self-questioning and the creativity, Neshat has, after six years’ work on the project, opted weight of responsibility she feels towards both her subjects and for an idiosyncratic, somewhat her audience (and the point of surreal movie rather than a straight biopic. “No fiction film overlap between those): currently has ever been made about her she is working on a new series of Azeri portraits for the open[Kulthum] – how dare I make a film ing exhibition of the Yarat Conin a lighthearted way?” she says passionately. “There are people temporary Art Space, in Baku (a not-for-profit founded by Aida waiting for this film – I have to Mahmudova, an artist and niece take responsibility. And I think of Azerbaijan’s president), and is in the end making a film that is concerned to ensure that “people personal saves my ass from people without any art education can saying ‘that’s not true’ or ‘this is enter the room and feel moved”. not authentic’.” While the artworks remain the Describing her as a public figsame whether she is showing ure without a private world of in Doha or New York, and she is as committed to keep treading love, who had essentially desexualised herself so that she could work new ground, formally, conceptually and thematically, as she is in the world of men, it seems that at this point in the project, what to connect with fresh audiences, context has an unquestionable Kulthum represents for Neshat is not the glory of the creative spirit impact on the reading of her work; she feels simultaneously of but a cautionary tale about the loss of emotion, and with it, the loss New York’s artworld and alien to it, both of the Middle East and of imagination. ar an outsider to it. Presenting Our House Is on Fire earlier this year at the Rauschenberg Foundation, she worried about how sad the Shirin Neshat: Afterwards is on view at Mathaf: Arab Museum work was, that it might be too “Eastern and emotional” for New of Modern Art, Doha, through 15 February; her exhibition The Home York, that it was the kind of work that would never be purchased of My Eyes is at Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku, from 23 March through 23 June; and later this year, Shirin for a collection. Nida (Patriots), from The Book of Kings series, 2012, Neshat: Facing History can be seen Neshat’s depth of consideration will be ink on le silver gelatin print, 152 × 114 cm materially evidenced in Facing History, a show at the Hirshhorn Gallery, Washington, dc, all images © the artist. at the Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington, 19 May – 20 September Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels

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Miao Jiaxin by Aimee Lin

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The past year has seen an evolution in the work of the New York-based performance artist

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Towards the end of November 2014, having announced the concluJail’s Seeking Prisoners opened with a performance by Miao – his sion of his Jail’s Seeking Prisoners project, Miao Jiaxin described him- ‘suggestion’ to future ‘prisoners’ of what they might want to do in his self as physically and mentally exhausted. Then he announced the jail. It lasted three hours, every ten minutes of which the artist repeated launch of two new projects during the following two weeks: Blind the boring routine of daily life: getting up, washing and dressing, Meeting in Bushwick and We Share Possible. The odd English expression going around in circles and going back to bed. The idea of the ‘cage’, he explained later, came because when he of the second of these floods onto the Miao first left China for United States, he felt as Jiaxin Studio Facebook page, is ‘liked’ by if he had left a cage. However, in the us, people connected to him and ‘shared’ to after completing his mfa in Chicago, he even more. Originally from Shanghai, moved to New York, where he now holds Miao has lived in the United States for down three jobs simultaneously: a fullthe past ten years. And in case you hadn’t time job as a commercial photographer guessed, he believes that the future of art at a furniture company, running a shortis online. Having performed at several term apartment-rental business through art fairs and gallery openings, and in the wake of a solo gallery project that died on Airbnb and being an artist. In fact, all three the vine last year, Miao decided to initiate are fulltime occupations for Miao, and in a new practice that would operate outthat respect he’s still confined to a cage (he side the conventional gallery and institucan never take a vacation, for example), this time an existential cage: perhaps life tional systems. Jail’s Seeking Prisoners was announced itself is a cage. on Miao’s newly created studio Facebook When the first photograph of Miao’s page on 30 June 2014. Adopting the busicage was circulated, people immediately ness model of short-term rental on the oncompared Jail’s Seeking Prisoners to Tehline platform Airbnb, the artist converted a ching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1978– small room in the hipster Bushwick neigh1979 (Cage Piece), in which the Taiwan-born, New York-based artist locked himself in a bourhood in Brooklyn into a jail, complete 3.5 by 2.7 by 2.4m wooden cage for a whole with a 1.83 by 2.44 by 1.83m cage, advertised year with nothing more than the essenit for rent at a rate of $1 per night, but in extial furnishings. During that time he was change required the lessees to be ‘prisoners’ not allowed to talk, to read, to write, or to in his jail: they must remain in the cage listen to radio or watch tv. Once a day a for three hours a day and be monitored friend would come to photograph the artby a camera in the room, with the footage ist, take away his waste and deposit his broadcast online in real time. The plan food, while a lawyer notarised the entire was first published on Airbnb (where Miao performance. There are a few similarities had a very good reputation as an apartbetween the works, among them the use ment host), but the site excluded the room, and Miao shifted to Facebook. of a legal tool (in Miao’s case, the contract signed by the participants), and the use of The notice was widely circulated via social media, eventually gaining the atphotographic documentary. And of course, tention of the mass media, and the ‘jail’ the design of Miao’s cage is a tribute by a was almost instantly booked for three fellow artist to his ‘master’ (a word that Marina Abramović also uses when talking months solid. It was listed on a local lifeabout Hsieh). But there is an important style website, and became a ‘New York or Brooklyn experience’ for tourists. difference between the two works. But this was not the first time that Miao While Hsieh arrived in New York as used social media and live broadcastan illegal immigrant in 1974, was granted ing as part of an artwork. While studyamnesty and eventually obtained his us ing at the School of the Art Institute of citizenship in 1988, Miao got his green card, then his us passport, just a few Chicago and working on his Collaboration series (2010–11), he opened a live channel on an interactive amateur- years after he began working and studying in the country. Moreover pornographic website in order to achieve a wider audience for his Miao’s project is fundamentally based on social media (Airbnb and work. In Collaboration #3 (2010), Miao and his collaborator Ei Jane Facebook) and the economic and broadcasting opportunities that it offers – viewing (live streaming) and Janet Lin conducted each other (baton in above Report by Elliott Bottoms, hand) ‘singing’ sex moans. The audience propagation (‘shares’ and ‘likes’, as well as a participant in Jail’s Seeking Prisoners, 2014 knew that the performance was a fabricamore conventional interviews on televipreceding pages Tuition Laundering, 2011, in collaboration tion – the noise was live but the video, a sion, newspaper and online media) – while with Heeran Lee, performance, 19,909 $1 bills, Hsieh’s work is an extreme representation facial closeup of Lin, was recorded. bathtub, clotheslines, ironing board

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above Jail’s Seeking Prisoners, 2014

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Blind Meeting in Bushwick – A Tribute to Barbara DeGenevieve, 2014

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of the confinement that was a feature of daily life during the period take action to reveal the individual being and to test social relations, of martial law in Taiwan (1948–87). In Miao’s case, the artist builds up rather than to practise performative activities. All this foretells antithe structure by establishing a regulation that he is not required to performativity, a genetic mutation in his performance artist’s body. follow (after the project finished, Miao claimed that the time he spent From the view of ‘participatory art’, the participants called by Miao in the cage marked the only time it was used as a venue rather than as through social media are not ‘contributive receivers’, but the ‘subject a ‘jail’). It’s the participants who follow the rules and thus provide the of content making’. Therefore, what is created in Miao’s work is not content of the work. These days, performance art is normally inter- the relation of performative art expression and its receiver, but the preted as a form of autobiography, which is something Miao sought social relation that is established in real or imitative economic activito distance himself from last year, when he started crediting projects ties defined by regulations. as being authored by his studio rather than himself. And so we come to Miao’s latest projects, again promoted via his In 110 days, 42 people from a variety of backgrounds participated in advertising (which he studied in China) and commercial photography Jail’s Seeking Prisoners. Among them skills. In Blind Meeting in Bushwick: were artists who wanted to use it as A Tribute to Barbara DeGenevieve, a stage to conduct their own perforMiao promises to provide two strangers – who must only be mances, art critics and journalists known to each other through soconducting fieldwork for articles, an anonymous New Yorker who cial media – three days of free acwished to fulfil his prison fantasy commodation in Bushwick, and in and tourists wanting to add it to return they must spend 24 hours their New York experience. But the together in a single room. They can majority of people stayed in the do anything in this room, but are cage, sitting still – which partially not allowed to leave the room, or explains why only one third of sleep, and not surprisingly, every the dozen or so interviews that minute will be broadcast in real Miao did for television were ever time on livestream.com. (The projbroadcast: the scene was just too ect is a tribute to artist Barbara boring. However it was precisely DeGenevieve, who during her these moments of boredom that cancer treatment invited Miao for a 24-hour nonsleep project, but distinguished the project from the average tv reality show. There were sadly passed away before they could times when the live stream looked realise it.) We Share Possible, meanlike a still image in which the clock while, takes the form of contemin the background was the only porary consumer marketing camthing moving. To Miao, this kind paigns, in which five street artists of moment allowed online viewers from around the world will receive to project their own imagination sneaker sponsorship from Miao into the scene, to imagine themJiaxin Studio for a year. Brooklyn selves in the jail. If Hsieh’s Cage Piece artist Matthew Silver, a local street reveals the human body’s confined icon, is the first to get his white, noand mute status under martial law, brand, $25, amazon.com-bought then Miao’s live-streaming videos sneakers. Miao has subsequently made a series of photography adshow the antiperformativity (or vertisements featuring Matthew deadness) of the human body in the era of media, image, exposure, Silver wearing the sneakers on the voyeurism and instant fame. street, then rendered the images on Jail’s Seeking Prisoners was originally planned to last one year, but street billboards, even investing in a banner ad on New York hipsters’ soon after it started, Miao switched to a conceptual position, telling favourite art website hyperallergic.com. himself that the project was actually realised at the moment the At the time of writing, Blind Meeting in Bushwick and We Share idea was announced. His addiction to regulations, or in his own Possible had just been announced and were in the process of starting word, ‘rules’, is ironically a strategy by which he seeks to replace the up. A prudent art critic requires at least a few more months before numerous written and unwritten rules of everyday life with a few commenting or coming to any conclusions about Miao’s antigallery, simple rules – rules that unburden rather than burden participants in anti-institution practice, and his autonomous practice under the a work such as Jail’s Seeking Prisoners. As an existentialist, though main- name of ‘Miao Jiaxin Studio’ and its mask of agency (apartment taining a positive attitude towards Internet technology and mobilisa- host and advertisement agent). For now, all we can do is to observe a tion via social media, Miao believes life itself moment of change, as Miao’s art practice aims Collaboration #4, 2010, live webfeed stills, is art and, crucially, that art is action rather at writing a personal art history on the scale of in collaboration with Ei Jane Janet Lin than presentation. Therefore, to perform is to human life, in a contemporary context. ara all images Courtesy the artist

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Self-image

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Mika Ninagawa by Mark Rappolt

Recent work by Tokyo-born filmmaker and photographer Mika Ninagawa has ranged from the intimate black-and-white self-portraits of Self-image, to sinister flirtations with mortality in the noir photo series, through to the lush plasticised glamour of her 2012 feature film Helter Skelter. A celebrated fashion photographer and director of music videos – including AKB48’s YouTube-slaying Heavy Rotation (2010) – Ninagawa’s interest in artificiality and self-invention are informed in part by her earlier immersion in the world of commercial imagemaking. Her work has been the subject of numerous books and exhibitions worldwide, most recently at the Viborg Kunsthal in Denmark and Fridericianum, Kassel, in Germany. Last year she was appointed to one of the organising committees for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. This spring, her work will be the subject of a major survey at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art and a trio of exhibitions organised by Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo. Spring 2015

artreview asia What was the first photograph or artwork that you made? mika ninagawa When I was still in primary school, I placed my Barbie doll on a rock of consolidated lava and took a photo of it. I considered this my first artwork. ara To what extent are your photographs (in general, but in the noir [2010] series especially) about your own emotions rather than any particular subject? mn I would say besides my own emotions there is nothing else in my mind during the moment I press the shutter. Desires such as thinking how to take a good photograph would only disturb the creation. The best would be when nothing lies between my real emotion and the shutter. I use the same approach when I take portraits. However when it comes to commercial works the difficulty is higher, but that is still the ideal way. ara Many of the people you photograph seek to mutate or change themselves (with makeup, costume, gender neutrality, etc – this is partly a theme in your film Helter Skelter [2012]). Why are you attracted to that? mn I might not be able to fully express in words, but these people represent one side of Tokyo. Tokyo is conservative but has its capacity for accepting diversities. Taking photos of these people who mutate themselves is similar to photographing Tokyo itself. An ukiyo-e print [a colour print during the Edo period in Japan] was in my mind and I emphasised the visual elements, trying to appeal to the audience. ara Did you learn anything about yourself from the Self-image [1995–2013] series? Was that even your intention? They seem, unlike some of the other photographs, to be stripped bare of the more obvious mutations. Self-image includes the image of a spider pinned down and displayed – it made me wonder about a fear of change (the spider, preserved and displayed, cannot) and an equal fear of not changing (it can’t change because it’s dead)… mn My debut work was black-and-white selfportraits, so the Self-image series has a major sense of going back to basics. The number of projects that involve numerous staff – such as directing a movie, among other things – have increased throughout the years, and it’s as if my mind was occupied by excessive mental cholesterol. This makes me want to grab my camera and work on something alone, something that is exactly opposite. When it comes to Self-image, rather than talking about change, I would say the series makes me feel like I am diving through myself, a self of which I have never been conscious of before. We look into the mirror to look at our faces. In that way, as much as we are conscious of ourselves, we only see ourselves from a single

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side. But in taking self-portraits where one cannot see oneself during the process, logically one can find out different aspects of ourselves that are otherwise never known. ara Tell me about your interest in taxidermy. mn Not only taxidermy, but also goldfish and real flowers that are artificially coloured: I can feel a scent of death from them. Taxidermies are dead bodies. So it is with meat and sausages sold in markets: they are also dead bodies. When we change our perspective a little bit, we find out that there are innumerable subjects that relate to death surrounding us in our daily lives. Take goldfish, for example, they are kept in people’s homes in Asia for observational purposes. They are bred with other species and genetically modified to create more beautiful ones with various shapes, just to suit our observational needs. The consequence of this is that they are dying much quicker than they used to. I think goldfish somehow symbolise the desires of human beings. ara To what extent is your subject matter a challenge to or a highlighting of the cultural roles expected of women and other people in Japanese/East Asian society? mn First of all, I am not challenging the traditional image and role of Japanese women. Say, for example, mika (2004) the photograph I took of a Japanese girl wearing a ten-gallon hat in a swimsuit, holding a traditional Japanese sword with a Japanese flag as background. It is not in any aspects challenging or highlighting anything. At that time, a lot of fashion shoots would use national flags of Britain and the United States, but no one was using any of those from Japan. I was thinking about whether or not it was one of the symbols of the not-fully-recovered Japan after the Second World War. However I was not trying to convey how strong my country is. It’s just that for me, the Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes and the Circle of the Sun are somehow equivalent, so a simple idea came into my mind, which was incorporating these Japanese elements into my fashion shoots. And on the other hand, I would say my works towards the contemporary roles expected of women are challenging but also highlighting. ara What is it about Tokyo that makes it such an interesting provider of subject matter to you?

mn I do not take inspiration directly or greatly from any particular artists or photographers. Instead I am inspired a lot by what is happening in the city. When it comes to the philosophy of creation, my father [Yukio Ninagawa, a renowned theatre director] inspired me greatly. He did not teach me anything directly, but by looking at the way he works, I realised that being prepared and being determined are the most important factors in creating new things. ara You’re best known for your photographs of colourful flowers. Is it hard to make new work when people expect you to produce a certain thing? Is noir a reaction against that? mn Probably, as you have said, it is one of the reasons: to rebel against the impression that people already have of me. I want to move forward from the point where people think I am. But for me, no matter that the artwork appears to be bright and colourful or the opposite, they connect with each other in some sense fundamentally. Therefore, personally I do not make any big difference between the colourful flowers I shot and the noir series. That is a good thing that people have their own impression of my works. On the other hand I think it is good that I can produce something that goes in line with or opposes that impression. ara You’ve worked in the fashion industry and collaborated with fashion houses. Do you see that work as different from the things you might show in an exhibition… mn It is different, but I enjoy both. And both of them are important to me. When a photo turns into a product, it becomes something that connects with people’s daily lives. It is another kind of satisfaction when my artworks can play a role in people’s daily lives. ara To what extent are your photographs about the projection or rejection of desire? mn Personally, I believe it is important to have desire towards different things. I love taking photographs of objects that link or remind us about desire. But as I mentioned, I do not have the desire for a good photo in mind when I press the shutter. ara What do you desire from your work?

mn I was born and raised in Tokyo, and this place gives birth to all my creation. Tokyo is said to be a special place with its unique sense of beauty. It is also home to a mixture of traditional history and contemporary pop culture that I like so much.

mn All of my works are first-person. The subject ‘I’ is really important in them. The more I confront this subject seriously, the stronger my artworks will be. ara

ara What artists inspire you? You’ve said you rarely look at books of work by other photographers… Did your parents have an influence on what you do now?

Translated from the Japanese by Keith Kong. Mika Ninagawa: Self-image is at the Hara Museum, Tokyo, from 24 January through 10 May

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Strokes for Different Folks by Clara Young

The handmade and the handsigned are making a comeback in fashion. Is it a reaction against the anonymity of so much digital design, or an attempt to reintroduce the signature as a mark of fashion’s aspirations towards attaining the status of artwork? 80

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Late one night in November 2013, Belgian fashion designer Ann “What I am thoroughly bored of is the digital mirror-image Demeulemeester sent out an email saying she was leaving her clothing trickery of print,” says Julie Verhoeven, a London-based artist and line after 27 years. Though the fashion world was surprised and, of illustrator who has created prints for Peter Jensen, Versace and course, saddened by her departure, the chatter was not so much about Louis Vuitton. “I think that’s what designers are currently rebelling her resignation as about how it was announced. Demeulemeester had against, and seeking a print which has more textural, gestural qualisent out a pdf of a letter she had written in hand with a fountain pen, ties with a sense of the artist’s hand and emotive force at work.” This ending her missive with an affectionate ‘x’ – a virtually blown kiss to was what Raf Simons was trying to get at when he enlisted Warhol the industry – and her signature, unexpectedly prim. for Dior. In the collection notes, Simons writes, ‘For me Warhol made The handwrought signature, whether it is an illegible scrawl or a so much sense. I was interested in the delicacy and sensitivity in the wildman brushstroke, is a glimpse into the personality (read: genius) early work he did, I was drawn to that graphic style naturally in this of its maker. This is exactly what Roy Lichtenstein was mocking when collection. It was that notion of hand work and personal signature he composed nothing but a giant brushmark in Brushstroke with Splatter that fitted throughout.’ (1966): he was sending up the Pollocks and Klines and their superThe handwriting of each designer used to manifest itself in the annuated heart-on-sleeve paint marks. But the intervening years way they engineered their clothes: the way a gown looked on the of concept-driven art, together with sleek, ubiquitous, bloodmannequin as she swished past you down the runway; the less, depthless digital pictures, have made us desire handway a suit fit the moment you tried it on in the dressing executed strokes and lines and scribbles again. The room. Yves Saint Laurent’s signature was a lithe gestural has clawed back, and it is doing so not just and tailored line. Chanel’s was boxy and unhamon gallery and museum walls, but on unexpectpered. Balenciaga’s was sculptural. Vionnet’s was fluid. But in the Internet age, a designer ed canvases, like the torso of a shift dress and the smooth leather surface of a handbag. It is just the must make his or her mark on virtual observers thing that fashion brands crave, and that they borwho are nowhere near the clothes. What grabs eyeballs is not the subtlety of silhourow, periodically, from the plastic arts. ette but things that show up best on a Designer Paul Poiret, who most fasmall screen – colour, pattern, image – mously got Raoul Dufy to create woodand which lend themselves readily to cuts for his opera coats in 1910, wrote, ‘Am I a fool when I dream of putting art digital production. into my dresses, a fool when I say dress“It’s a very impersonal thing, digital. You can’t see a hand. There’s making is an art? For I have always loved painters, and felt on an equal no real identification, no sense of who did this drawing,” says Tangye. “In footing with them. It seems to be that the Dior use of Warhol, you know we practice the same craft, and that straightaway who did it, which gives they are my fellow workers.’ The art of putting art on dresses it huge cachet. But if you see an image, is not one that is done easily. Often, pattern and colour done in a mechanit is too much of a good thing, just ical way, you feel less connected to it. as eating in a restaurant with a specIt takes away all the sensitivity that a tacular revolving view seldom yields real drawing has, and a real work of art in which you can see the brusha good dinner. Art on clothing tends to detract from, or worse, subtract the need for a garment that can marks. I find that interesting and sensual and exciting. But a flat stand on its own without surface decoration, whose cutting, tailoring, coloured image doesn’t have the same power as the real thing. Like draping and volume constitute sculptural gorgeousness enough. multiples, it becomes a facsimile, not the real thing.” And, yet, there were those early Andy Warhol drawings at ChrisWith the exception of haute couture, it is meaningless to talk tian Dior last winter. Demure, fragilely rendered pumps and languid about the real thing in ready-to-wear; nonetheless, Phoebe Philo ladies were embroidered onto handbags and sewn into bustier panels. created some very compelling facsimiles for Spring/Summer 2014 at “I saw those drawings at the Serpentine in the 80s,” says Howard Céline. The collection was blithely calligraphic, featuring abstract Tangye, artist and head of womenswear design at Central Saint brushwork that was all but painted on the clothes. Printed onto Martins, London, “and the way Dior put them on the clothes was with tank tops, silk blouses and long pleated skirts, and jacquard-woven into coats and dresses, the inky ragged marks stoked our hunger great respect, like they were beautiful, valuable jewellery.” The preciousness of embellishment executed by human hands – for texture and human agency. Philo pushed texture even further, not even necessarily those as hallowed as Warhol’s – has been conspic- outlining paint dabs and whorls on a butter-yellow coat in frayed uous in fashion in the last few seasons. Behind it is the belief that even blue frill to give them relief, and mimicking dripping black squiggles of paint on a white dress with swags of when produced in unnumbered multiples, above a/w 2013 Lady Dior and Andy Warhol bag. hanging threads. A white tunic top festooned clothing consecrated by someone’s patte – the Courtesy Christian Dior, Paris wobbly line or dribbled paint of an artistic with rivulets of white thread gives the distant facing page Design for the Prada s/s 2014 show by 2 × 4, paw – possesses the aura of rarity, and the effect of a painted white canvas. The dribNew York.Photo: Attilio Maranzano. bles and dashes of this collection came from authority of skill. Courtesy Prada, Milan, Art Resource and Scala, Florence

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Brassaï’s postwar photographs of painted black-and-white graffiti in Paris, which he called ‘The Language of the Wall’. Though at double remove – a meditation on a meditation on street art – Philo showed her hand in this collection, as well as Brassaï’s, as well as that of Paris’s sidewalk vandals. Miuccia Prada also drew energy from the streets that season by commissioning four artists and two illustrators to graffiti the ‘walls’ of the runway. To create a streetscape inside the Fondazione Prada that had something of an authentic urban throb required the real thing: murals were composed and painted in situ rather than digitally reproduced in large-scale wallpapers, the way Prada does in their Manhattan and Beverly Hills stores. The artists, Stinkfish, Miles ‘El Mac’ Gregor, Gabriel Specter and Mesa, worked the old-fashioned way: in the same space at the same time. Even the work produced by the two illustrators, Jeanne Detallante and Pierre Mornet, was blown up and painted by, respectively, muralists Luca Zamoc and Gionata ‘Ozmo’ Gesi. “The idea here was to create an environment where the work would happen collaboratively between several artists working simultaneously,” says Michael Rock, founder of design consultancy firm 2 × 4, who helped curate the show, and with whom Prada works regularly. “There is something that happens when creative people are working together that cannot be reproduced in the digital space. In addition, as the work was happening over a period of time in Milan, Mrs Prada could be involved as it emerged. This facilitates communication about everything from palette and composition to

content.” Using spraypaint, stencil and freehand, the artists populated the canted walls of the outside-in runway with women. Floating in an ambience of feminism, their faces peer out at us as well from purses, coats and bejewelled dresses. According to the Prada press release, ‘This project contradicts the prevailing cultural condition of disembodied, networked communication.’ Real paintings – a hands-on act – were transposed onto clothing, layering it with the personality of the artist, but the Prada collection went further, building texture into the art-production process itself: the ‘rough’ disruptiveness of artists physically displacing themselves to a foreign city to work in a room with other artists, a process laden with inconveniences, serendipities, clashes and, perhaps, epiphanies. Not really a happening, but with something of the rude, rough reciprocus of artists performing together, the making of the Prada collection rebuffed the ‘smooth’ ease of artists who, left alone, would have worked as they are accustomed to, and uploaded their images away. It is not that the digital medium necessarily deprives imagery of effort and feeling – designer Mary Katrantzou’s digital placement prints are complex, lush and intricately integrated into her garment design – but it lacks the autographic nature of the handmade mark, even when it is reproduced over and over again, as it is in fashion. We imagine these taches to be textured with thought and meaning, imbued with the emotion, intention and personality of, if not genius, then, at least, of somebody. We imagine that this makes the clothes look so much better. ara

above Paul Poiret with textile design by Raoul Dufy, La Perse, 1911. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Art Resource and Scala, Florence facing page Ann Demeulemeester’s handwritten letter, sent to the press as a pdf, in which she announced her departure from the world of fashion, November 2013

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Art in Context: Singapore

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From Singapore with Asia on My Mind by Sherman Sam

The annual Prudential Eye Awards were launched last year to recognise and celebrate emerging Asian artists and the structures and individuals that support them. The aim is simple: to shine a spotlight on artists working across Asia who are starting to gain international recognition. These artists are often at the moment where the context in which their work is seen shifts from local to global, with all the rewards and challenges that brings. The awards are part of the Prudential Eye Programme, which comprises survey exhibitions, educational initiatives and an art fair in addition to the awards. Over the past two decades, Asia’s contemporary art scene has been articulated through biennials, major exhibitions, prizes and publications like ArtReview Asia that together offer a crucial noncommercial space in which to look at and think about contemporary Asian art. We’re delighted that the Prudential Eye Awards have become an established part of this important ecosystem. As much as we seek to shine a light on individual artists through initiatives such as the Prudential Eye Awards, which this year will conclude with an exhibition of work by the finalists at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum and the announcement of the winners at a ceremony in the city-state on 20 January, we’re also conscious that platforms like ours are crucial in bringing out the specific and varied local contexts in which those artists operate. Which is why we’re happy to support features like the one you are about to read. David Ciclitira, Co-Founder, Prudential Eye Programme

Song-Ming Ang, Yesterday Mobile Karaoke, 2011. Photo: Tan Wee Kwang. Courtesy the artist and Fost Gallery, Singapore

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In How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983), the historian Serge as do America’s institutions, on well-heeled trustees who help secure Guilbaut documents how a unique historical circumstance, the private funding and a very lively commercial market. Both systems Second World War, allowed Manhattan to become not just a major have advantages and disadvantages, creating different kinds of art as centre for art, but to be eventually transformed into the biggest inter- a result. In 1989, the Singaporean government began a programme to national marketplace for contemporary art. Even today, when you can improve the arts, seeing it as an undervalued commodity and imporcasually dismiss more art per hour there than in any other place on tant social glue. At that point it was more about putting in infrastructhe planet, New York is not the rule but the exception. Singapore, ture than exhibition programmes. For the visual arts, the second the country in which I was born, also lays claim to being one of the stage came in 2000, when funds were allocated towards building world’s most culturally sophisticated places. However its sophisti- not just a commercial hub but also increasing the country’s internacation lies in each Singaporean’s palate, and its culture is expressed tional profile – this was manifested with moves towards founding the in its being one of the best places to eat in the world. The question Singapore Biennale and the nation’s participation in Venice. Over the I’ve often asked myself is what would it take to transform Singapore last few years the small commercial scene has been revitalised with the into the Manhattan of Asian art? After all, in Singapore, everyone is arrival of a group of international galleries situated at a former milialready a food critic. Can that oral sensitivity be transformed into a tary site, Gillman Barracks. Tomio Koyama from Tokyo, Arndt and greater visual awareness so they can be Michael Janssen from Germany, and galleries representing Asian interests art critics too? My country is only a year older than (Equator Arts Projects – with whom I am. When I was a student, the only ‘art I showed this summer – from Indogallery’ to be found there was in a twonesia, Shanghart and Pearl Lam room subsection of the National Musefrom China or Silverlens from the um that otherwise contained bigger Philippines) join the Singaporeandisplays on history, anthropology and owned Fost and Yeo Workshop. natural history. The ‘commercial galThe highpoint of the commercial leries’ were really a handful of framing calendar occurs in January, during the shops that hung some paintings on week of Art Stage Singapore, located at the glamorous Marina Bay Sands their walls. So what sort of circumstance Hotel (the Southeast Asian outpost would it take for a small but important of the famous Las Vegas casino). Run international trading port, with a popuby the eccentric and larger-than-life lation just smaller than that of Ireland’s but with a landmass only slightly former Art Basel director Lorenzo bigger than the Isle of Man, to gestate Rudolf, it is the main competition to an art scene? Fast-forward 25 years, and Art Basel hk in the region and has Charles Lim will represent Singapore at led to the establishment of Singapore this year’s Venice Biennale, where the Art Week, a visual arts festival initicountry has consistently maintained a ated and led by the National Arts national pavilion since 2001 (except for Council in partnership with the Singapore Tourism Board and Singapore 2013, when it took a hiatus – much to the dismay of the local art scene), while our Economic Development Board. The own Singapore Biennale is now in its Art Week is now so big it occupies the space of more than a week (nine fifth edition. The Singapore Art Museum (sam), located in an old school building, days) and encompasses the concluand which held sway over both the modern and contemporary scenes, sion of significant Asian art prizes such as the Prudential Eye Awards will soon be joined by the long-gestating National Gallery – itself and its accompanying exhibition, Prudential Singapore Eye (a survey located in the former city hall and supreme court. With a mandate to show of 17 Singaporean artists). The remit of the awards is to focus on show the cultural history of Singapore and Southeast Asia from the emerging art from Greater Asia, with shortlisted artists in this edition nineteenth century to the present day (albeit its collection will focus from Japan, Indonesia, India and Turkey among other countries. The primarily on the modern period), it will allow sam to take on a role consciousness of a wider art scene has an impact on the fair as well, that is closer to a kunsthalle, and challenge the smaller, more locally which in its 2014 edition devoted a large chunk of space to sections – oriented Institute of Contemporary Arts (ica, technically the cura- ‘Platforms’ – curated by invited guests and focused on artists selected torial division of Lasalle College of the Arts), and the international from commercial galleries within specific regions (Southeast Asia, outlook of the newly opened Center for Contemporary Art (cca, part Japan, etc). This was an unusual way of combining an expanded geogof Nanyang Technological University). raphy, the public sector and the private, but for a smallish art fair it How is all this possible? Singapore is very well known for being a proved an effective way to show art to a less savvy general public and to nanny state. Its cultural scene is closer to the British model than it is to international visitors with limited knowledge of the region. The selection of Charles Merewether, former director the American one. That’s to say that the governNguyen Tran Nam, We Never Fell, 2010 ment funds museums and other public projects of the ica Singapore, for example, consisted (installation view, Singapore Biennale 2013), through the Arts Council, rather than relying, entirely of videos from Central Asia; not very composite fibreglass. Courtesy the artist

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commercial, but very interesting. ‘We are not a fair that wants to copy a Western fair,’ Rudolf, who is Swiss, told the South China Morning Post recently. ‘People need to see the strengths of Asia.’ The greatest impediment to a young artist anywhere is developing sensibility and awareness of what’s going on in the wider world. If you’re a young student in Singapore today, leaving the country – as I once did – is not necessarily the only option: not only is there a more vibrant local scene, but the presence of the Gillman Barracks galleries as well as Art Stage allows every artist to have a glimpse of what’s happening within the rich and diverse cultures of Southeast Asia, Asia Pacific and beyond. If there is one contemporary artform that’s ahead here, it would be film. Directors like Eric Khoo, Royston Tan (whose short film was included in the last Singapore Biennale) and even documentary-maker Tan Pin Pin (a regular on the international short-film and biennial circuit) have developed fast because distribution and viewing happen very easily in comparison to the physically specific and temporal nature of displaying art. At the last Art Stage, you could peruse the cutest Singaporean bijou conceptualism (Southeast Asia section), works from the 1960s French Supports/Surfaces movement (Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Paris) or the intensity of a Yayoi Kusama (Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo). Over the various Singapore Biennales, bigger international stars like Mark Wallinger or Mike Nelson have exhibited with younger artists from the region. The 2013 edition was predominantly a Southeast Asian affair – itself a brave move. Even going to art school does not require moving away from home comforts – there is now an art school (Lasalle) affiliated with Goldsmiths – although that’s not to say the overseas study has stopped; every year there are a handful of young Singaporeans who pitch up at Goldsmiths in New Cross, London. Some are funded by the state, while others are helped by their parents – but this is in itself a big change in familial mindsets.

What is the state of Singaporean art then? The proof, in the end, is in the pudding; it is the artists that create the scene. Ming Wong, Heman Chong and Ian Woo are now midcareer artists, and in the case of the first two have represented the country at Venice, and show with Carlier/Gebauer in Berlin, Wilkinson in London and Tomio Koyama in Tokyo and Singapore, respectively – all good international galleries. Chong even had a project in the Extinction Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, London, while a younger artist, Song-Ming Ang, will this year have a residency at London’s Camden Arts Centre. Charles Lim will be in this year’s Venice Biennale, while Ho Tzu Nyen, who represented Singapore at the Biennale in 2011, is on a residency in Berlin (both are showing in Prudential Singapore Eye). The Singaporean art scene, in short, is not confined by its geographical boundaries. Back in 1993, William Gibson described Singapore as ‘an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.’ He obviously didn’t spend enough time sampling the best carrot cakes (a savoury white radish omelette) or arguing with his taxi driver over the best place to find a nonya meal. Zurich is perhaps a good point of comparison, however – a city with a small but strong international collection, various kunsthalles that any decent artist would want to launch his career with and a small but vibrant gallery scene. Singapore may not steal the idea of contemporary art anytime soon, but next time Gibson’s in town, he might find that comparing Song-Ming Ang’s Backwards Bach (2013) over the Joan Jonas videos at the cca pops into his mind rather than the death penalty. ara Prudential Singapore Eye is on show at the ArtScience Museum Singapore from 17 January. The winners of the Prudential Eye Awards will be announced at a ceremony in Singapore on 20 January

Heman Chong, Cover (Versions), 2014. Courtesy Fost Gallery, Singapore

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Song-Ming Ang, Backwards Bach, 2013, 2-channel hd video, 5 min. Courtesy the artist and Fost Gallery, Singapore

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Wang Jianwei Time Temple Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 31 October – 16 February Some may have thought Thomas J. Berghuis, the Guggenheim’s new curator of Chinese art, was audacious to mark his debut in New York with a solo show of work by a Beijing-based artist with meagre exposure in North America – even if that artist has the credentials of Wang Jianwei, whose career spans 30 years. With Time Temple, Berghuis clearly announces his ambition to redefine and reposition Chinese contemporary art within the globalised context. The central work on show, the monumental four-panel painting Time Temple (all works 2014), fills an entire wall, creating, along with the two gallery columns that stand in front of it, a stagelike space. Rather than confronting a still image, the whole setup suggests an animated theatrical scene. Moving through the painting from one end to another, you notice the varying depth of each panel, repeated characters sitting or standing in what looks like a brightly lit committee room and abstract yellow stripes angling down like the beams of stage lights from the top righthand corner of each panel towards the protagonists. Across the gallery, on the opposite wall, another painting, also titled Time Temple, shows what looks like the cross-section

of an archaeological site within a geometric form, reminding the viewer of the world seen through a microscope: complex, mysterious and slightly bewildering. In between the paintings, a series of sculptures flow poetically like a river throughout the gallery, guiding the viewer to move around the components, to imagine each moment that the artist has to come through to produce the artworks. Moving from the gallery to the theatre, the artist’s Kafka-inspired film, The Morning Time Disappeared, tells the story of a young man who moved from the countryside to Beijing, and found that a series of bodily transformations had occurred to him overnight. Apart from the show and the screening, the live-performance component Spiral Ramp Library – inspired by the museum’s architecture and Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941) – gathers and circulates people and ideas within the museum space, aiming to show the artist’s interpretation of the role of the contemporary art museum and the spaces within it Wang, who posits the truth of his existence as the ultimate ‘object’ of creation, has pursued a trajectory of work encompassing painting,

sculpture, video, performance and theatre, but is generally placed by critics among the new media art pioneers in China. The artist himself, however, seems less concerned with discussions of ‘media’ or how he is labelled. Rather, with Time Temple, it is the artist’s creative process that is on display. Every detail is supposed to recall the artist’s presence in the ongoing process – of creation as well as of life. In reality, the viewer may have to spend hours (if not days) reflecting on each object’s particulars, connecting with the truth that the artist proposes: the varied mounting depths of the monumental, four-panel painting with its graphic yellow lines superimposed at the junctures of each panel; the painting across the gallery with its abstraction of scientific form; the singular yet refined shapes and forms of the sculptures; the film and the live performance – with its layered soliloquies on ten philosophical topics – are even more challenging to customary perceptions. The curator and the artist encourage open and multiple interpretations, but cognitively processing these works may nonetheless tax even the most dedicated viewer. Xiaoying Juliette Yuan

Time Temple, 2014, acrylic and oil on canvas, four panels: 259 × 206 cm each, 259 × 822 cm overall. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. Photo: Xu Boxin. © and courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

Busan Biennale 2014: Inhabiting the World Busan Museum of Art and various other venues, Busan 20 September – 22 November Busan is the second biggest city in Korea, and the recent edition of its Biennale, titled Inhabiting the World, is focused on the role of art in today’s world. According to artistic director Olivier Kaeppelin, our world is facing a wideranging and multilayered crisis, involving the disappearance of subjectivity, the failure of sensibility and the loss of harmony between humankind with its personal and intimate dimension. Therefore, he proposes that only through art – the multiple perspectives provided by the artists or the frontal confrontation with an artwork – will people be able to act as researchers or experiencers, to discover differences, to test the forms, to return to personal experience, thus to participate in the comprehension of the world, to ‘inhabit the world’. To realise his aim, Kaeppelin encourages the viewer to take the attitude of a walker and an explorer, to encounter artworks that fill the three-level space of Busan Museum of Art, divided by seven subthemes or subsections: ‘Movement’, ‘The Cosmos and the Sky’, ‘Architecture and Object’s Mobility’, ‘Identities Represented’, ‘Animal’s Dialogue’, ‘The History, The War’ and ‘Nature As Witness’. Indeed, each subtheme sounds worthy of exploration, but as a whole it just lacks a certain focus, or an indepth logical connection, and can’t save the Biennale’s theme from being too generalised. Moreover, it is a biennial inside a multigallery museum building, and apparently the curatorial team has no ambition to challenge or play with the existing structure of space. Most subsections obtain their own gallery hall, and some invade the lobby, passage or other ‘in-between’ spaces. The visual aesthetics of the biennial is nearly ‘old-fashioned’, with a large amount of paintings

hanging on the white walls and sculptures placed on the wood floors. However, there are indeed a few works that are relatively arresting. For example French artist duo Art Orienté Objet’s May the Horse Live in Me (2011), in which one of the artist wears prosthetic horse legs and takes a few steps and injects horse blood into her body. It is an interesting, crazy experiment on making a new kind of being, a ‘trans-human’, which explores intersections of ethology, genetics and hybridisation from a scientific rather than a mythological perspective. It is also interesting to connect Indian artist Jitish Kallat’s work with Korean artist Kimsooja’s, as they both showcase some sort of ‘Asian taste’ via ingenious lighting. Kallat’s Breathe (2012) is an installation of seven videos, each showcasing an Indian bread slowly vanishing, simulating different phases of the moon, and creating a connection between everyday routine and universal rule. Kimsooja’s To Breathe: Mandala (2010) provides an immersive space, a bodhimanda (place of enlightenment) or ritual room that allows religious and cultural symbols to affect the viewer’s inner energy – an old oriental nonmaterial power reintroduced to today’s world by the New Age movement. At the preview there were many Frenchspeaking artists and only a few Korean artists, which revealed the dark shade clouded over the Biennale: it is said that the local art scene was protesting because the artistic director was chosen by the organiser through an improper procedure. It was more ironic when people recalled the fact that the Busan Youth Biennale – the precursor of the Busan Biennale – was founded in 1981 by local artists. And it also reveals the crisis of some city biennials in Asia

(sadly not the minority): the growing gaps between the organiser (normally the city government or the official institution under its structure), the commissioned Western curator or artistic director and the local art scene that has developed in the last decades. And it is those gaps, each caused by specific historical and actual reasons, that cause the biggest problem for the biennials in this region. Apart from the theme show in Busan Museum of Art, the Biennale also extends to other places in the town, with an archive exhibition, Voyage to Biennale, and an Asian curatorial project, Going, Going, Until I Meet the Tide. Voyage to Biennale, which takes place in Busan Cultural Center, looks back on the 50-year history of Korean contemporary art in overseas biennials. For viewers who are interested in Korean art, the show does provide a brief history and image, and a fertile resource for research, with plenty of text and picture materials and interviews (unfortunately most of which are in Korean only). However, the historical narrative provided in this show is full of a nationalist sense of pride, which also proves the fact that the Westernoriented biennial mechanism is serving, in this region, as a recognition system and hence a new tool of culture colonisation. Going, Going, Until I Meet the Tide, titled after a line from English poet John Masefield’s ‘A Wanderer’s Song’ (1902), is located at the old storehouse in kiswire Sooyoung Factory and curated by four young curators from Korea, Japan, China and Singapore. The show, with its booth-based, art-fair-like layout, has produced a vigorous atmosphere and some freshness, with works by 36 young artists – a beautiful tribute to the old Busan Youth Biennale! Aimee Lin

Adrian Paci, Column, 2013 (installation view), colour, sound, 25 min 40 sec. Photo: Chansoo Kim. Courtesy Busan Biennale

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Gwangju Biennale 2014: Burning Down the House Biennale Hall, Gwangju 5 September – 9 November Forgotten what artistic director Jessica Morgan has titled this biennial? There’s a chance you might in an exhibition that contains the works of over 100 artists or artist groups. But don’t worry. Help is at hand. Three cover versions (by French musician Joakim) of the 1983 Talking Heads song from which the show gets its title blast from speakers outside the exhibition halls; a wallpaper of pixelated flame and smoke by London-based design studio El Ultimo Grito covers what might otherwise be white gallery walls inside; there’s an Yves Klein fire painting, Jack Goldstein’s Burning Window installation (1977), Eduardo Basualdo’s The Island (2009), a claustrophobic house constructed out of the burnt remains of a building in Buenos Aires, Camille Henrot’s tar-soaked collection of Augmented Objects (2010) and the charcoal remains of a forest fire in Cornelia Parker’s Heart of Darkness (2004); meanwhile, outside again, the Biennale Square features two shipping containers containing remains of Korean War massacre victims (you can see the fragments of bone and skulls, ordered in plastic tubs, through the container windows) discovered down a mine in 1992 – a work (although it seems wrong to call it that) by South Korean Minouk Lim titled Navigation ID (2014), and Stirling Ruby’s smoking Stoves (2014), working wood-burning stoves inspired by the artist’s childhood memories of life on a Pennsylvania farm. Although next to the shipping containers and their contents, they, and their tall chimneys and plumes of smoke, suggest something else entirely.

The Biennale, now in its tenth edition and one of the best-attended art events in the world, was famously founded back in 1995 in memory of the spirit of the city’s 1980 pro-democracy uprising and its brutal repression. It’s a history that seems consumed with such a gluttonous abandonment by Minouk Lim’s work, which opened with a ceremony in which the relatives of the massacre victims were greeted by the mothers of those who died in the Gwangju Uprising, that a notion of clearing out the cupboard (another form of burning down the house) is almost overwhelming. It continues early into the interior show, where a retrospective of videos and reconstructed costumes document South Korean Lee Bul’s quite brilliant early performances, many of them attacking prejudice against women, from the late 1980s and early 1990s, among them Abortion (1989), in which the artist is suspended upside-down, in pain and naked, while reciting a monologue. Together the works establish the Biennale’s guiding theme of destruction, memorial and reconstruction. If, like me, you read the right kind of science fiction on the flight into Gwangju, you might be reminded of Solaris, the planet from Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel (of the same title) that mirrors its visitors’ subconscious memories and expectations back to them. That’s a feeling that’s enhanced by a series of works including Carsten Höller’s Sliding Doors (2014), a reworking of a 2003 work in which objects (the doors) reflect and react to subjects (the viewers), Allora & Calzadilla’s Temperament and the Wolf (2014),

in which a tunnel of around 30 people each offer a handshake to (or ignore) the incoming Biennale visitor, Pierre Huyghe’s Name Announcer (2011/14), in which your name gets announced as you enter the gallery, and to a lesser extent, Koo Jeong A’s Its Soul (2014), a gallery wall that moves and shakes at set times during the day. While that pixelated wallpaper, and a work by Urs Fischer, 38 E. 1st St. (2014), featuring a suite of rooms and photographic wallpaper that constitute a 1:1 reproduction of the interior of the artist’s New York apartment, serves to give you the impression that the exhibition is also somehow conscious of its own eventual mediation. But if there’s a definite sense of recoil from the Biennale’s bombastic curating (and the presence of so many biennial favourites, many of whom reiterate older works), Burning Down the House also offers a number of quieter moments, worth spending extended time with, that linger long in the conscious memory. Among them are Sri Lankan Lionel Wendt’s early-twentieth-century modernist photographs, Anand Patwardhan’s We Are Not Your Monkeys (1993), a stunningly rich video meditation on the theory of Aryan conquest and the caste system in India, and A.A. Bronson and friends’ AA Bronson’s House of Shame (2014), a dreamy reflection on sexuality and spirituality, effectively a group show in the Spiral Pavilion, just outside the Biennale Hall. In the end, then, this biennial offers a little something for everyone: curators, viewers and artists alike. Mark Rappolt

Carsten Höller, Sliding Doors, 2003 (installation view, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseilles). Photo: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy the artist

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Yip Kin Bon Almost black, the white terror Almost White, the black humor 1a Space, Hong Kong 6–27 September In what’s become an oft-cited 2013 speech, the then-chairman of the Hong Kong sar Basic Law Committee, Qiao Xiaoyang, stated that any future heads of hk’s government ‘must be persons who love the country and love Hong Kong’. China, he implied, should be on an emotional par with any feelings for hk itself. In response, three days later the prodemocratic movement that had recently been known as ‘Occupy Central’ added the specification ‘with Love and Peace’ to their full official name. Love, both parties seemed to agree, is definitely the main issue, while also bolstering the truism that the more vague the language and big words getting bandied about, the touchier the subject being discussed. Hong Kong artist Yip Kin Bon has responded to the relentless blather by editing it out altogether. A blocky newspaper rack made out of wood sits in the middle of the gallery, in it five wispy newspaper pages billowing lightly in the wind. Every single word has been obsessively removed from

the pages of Blank (2014), leaving precise, delicate strips of space and thin ribbons of remaining paper. Another similarly dissected newspaper page, sitting framed on the wall, has left one phrase across the top: ‘I’m a Hongkonger.’ Yip undoubtedly loves his city, but this portrait of his home depicts it as gagged or, like the show’s title, ‘almost black, the white terror / almost white, the black humour’, bound in a nonsense trap. A series of photographic collages titled Stuck in There (2014) captures people on the city’s streets, strips cut from the image filling the outline of their bodies; the effect is as if each is tied up from head to foot, by their own car, or by a shop’s ‘Sale’ signs, or by the city itself. Yip’s method to cut his way out of this, though, only seems to replicate the problem: half of the exhibition is taken up by his interpretation of Qiao’s infamous speech. Speech from Qiao Xiao Yang, 24 March 2013 (2013–14) comprises 250 small newspaper clippings, each

held in a small plastic zipper bag. Isolated Cantonese characters from headlines, political figures and the occasional Egg McMuffin dot the two walls, as if, in an attempt to parse the news and its boringly hyperbolic language, Yip has exploded it into fragments and forensically isolated each component. He doesn’t quite manage to find a new vocabulary, though it becomes a looser, but no less loaded, nonsense, where through the gaps we can at least examine more closely the linguistic trap in which the artist finds his city mired. While the censorial implications of his work are its most obvious connotations (picking up further layers of political melodrama during the show’s run, as the lateSeptember demonstrations spread in Hong Kong and the Chinese media took measures to stop its images spreading over the border), Yip also hints that the double bind is implicit in the ‘Hongkongers’ self-representation, a mundane self-censorship. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Self-Portrait, 2014, digital print on paper. Courtesy 1a Space, Hong Kong

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Voices/Landscapes ( for the eye and ear) Kwun Tong ferry pier & Connecting Space, Hong Kong 26 September – 2 October The ‘(around)’ of sound art inevitably points to context: that against which sound reverberates in order to take shape. Thus, what emerges from Voices/Landscapes ( for the eye and ear) is a deep resonance with the local context, but one with an ‘(around)ness’ that cannot be conceptually reducible. Rather, it echoes as a range of hearing and an aural landscape, and as part of the (Around) Sound Art Festival that journeyed from Kyoto to Hong Kong in the summer of 2014, Voices/ Landscapes makes a beautiful fermata to a score involving film screenings, listening exchanges and a sound workshop/retreat. Hosted by the quiet but well-respected organisation Soundpocket, dedicated to ‘aesthetically meaningful, culturally-grounded and publicly relevant sonic practices’, Voices/ Landscapes took place on the Kwun Tong ferry pier in West Kowloon, with video screenings hosted at a venue near the other end of the ferry route on Hong Kong island. The ferry is a nostalgic remainder of Hong Kong’s history; it is a slow route from Kowloon Peninsula to Hong Kong Island and back, less and less affordable in Hong Kong terms – because time is money, of course. But here, far away from the noise of Hong Kong’s known business and tourist centres, the exhibition is visually quiet – a bare concrete structure jutting out from another bit of reclaimed land, where for a mere hk$5 (£0.40), one is able to see another side of the city, enjoy a sea-salted sunset and experience a leisurely boatride from one skyline to another. In the open spaces of the Kwun Tong ferry pier, curator Carlo Fossati remained loyal to the ‘(around)ness’ of the festival, leaving plenty of space to take in four works, at the same time igniting the sense of curiosity that emerges

from exploring a nontraditional art space that finds itself intervened with and interrupted by art. Not ironically, the most straightforward of the four pieces, a video projection by Phill Niblock, works the least well in the space. But this is also a likely reason why the other video pieces in the exhibition were given a dedicated screening at Connecting Space a few days later. At the other end of the pier, one large storage space filled with the material detritus of previous occupants (a supermarket was once located here, as well as a biennial) becomes another nostalgic environment for the installation by Michael Graeve, whose second-hand electronics (record players, speakers and old amplifiers) blend seamlessly with the dust of storage. The click and hum of antiquated ‘mechanical stress’ seems to make the dust dance in this still disco. Moving forward to the open-air part of the pier, the landscape features a bored middle-aged ferry attendant who, with his knee propped on an unwieldy chair, listlessly stares past the few commuters who pass through the turnstile. A clock hangs on the wall, part of a site-specific installation by Paolo Piscitelli, and depending upon your nature, you are reminded either of the methodic ticking of commuter time, the time to get off work, the time to catch the boat – or perhaps something slower, like the quizzical wonder of a clock marking real time as art piece. Next to the clock hangs a speaker, and a few garbled, unintelligible sounds revealed as recordings from the artist’s studio in 2008 tell us that this way of counting time is actually about experiencing time, not deadlines. Walking ‘(around)’ sound, we move further into the waves gently slapping against the pier and a landscape shaded pink-lemonade from the

sunset outside. Tetsuya Umeda has created a site-specific performance and installation using an apocalyptic-looking series of diy rigs with an industrial water tank, plastic tubing, gallon-size Ovaltine tins and gas burners. There is no apparent logic to the arrangement, but its careful precision, like Umeda’s deliberate movements throughout the space, lends a ceremonious seriousness to the salty air. Hollow drones emerge to envelop the entire space, and the mysterious physics creates an (around)ness that allows viewers consecutively to submit to the ritual and extend to the beyond of a passing seagull’s cry, the departing ferry horn – and if we think about it, the not-so-distant shouts of students filling the grounds of Hong Kong’s legislative headquarters. It is the first day of occupation in the Admiralty district, not too far from where the Kwun Tong ferry docks on the island side. Though there is no direct link of the sound festival to current political events, it is exactly a certain politics of listening that has become so crucial to Hong Kong at this time. To be able to speak and listen to an (around) insinuates a degree of silence necessary for opinions to be voiced and heard. And perhaps Voices/Landscapes has inadvertently become the calm before a great storm, but it is one with a great deal to offer in the way of thinking through the noise of material and human presence. It is relevant, therefore, to engage Voices/Landscapes ( for the eye and ear) not as an exhibition in and of itself, but as part of a sensorium enabled by attentiveness to context, where, as Soundpocket director Yeung Yang notes, such presence is a gesture, a ‘reaching out to multiple pockets of the city left open or closed by choice or exigency’. Elaine W. Ho

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Liang Shuo The Story of Beginning Space Station, Beijing 26 September – 2 November According to Qu Yuan, author of the Songs of Chu, the goddess Nüwa ‘moulded figures from the yellow earth, giving them life and the ability to bear children. After demons fought and broke the pillars of the heavens, Nüwa worked unceasingly to repair the damage, melting down the five-coloured stones to mend the heavens.’ The Story of Beginning traces this mythological creation tale through the figure of Nüwa. Within Space Station’s white walls, Liang Shuo has created a ‘garden’ with a winding mud path that takes the viewer past several ‘episodes’, each of which features a scene made of yellow clay sculptures. The goddess herself first appears in the form of a (lifesize) girl sitting on the ground, hand-moulding clay figurines. Elsewhere she sits on a pillar, throwing mud at a wall opposite her, where human figures start to take shape amidst the accumulated mud, and the cosmos comes into being. As a result of their short lifespan, it’s not long before evidence of these human beings fornicating and procreating can be found in this earthy fresco. At the back of the gallery, under a kind of rocky arch, the god of fire battles with the god of water, turning the world to chaos in a scattering of fragments across the back wall. Figures are dismembered and spattered along the path. Eventually, everything collapses. Nüwa then reappears, transformed into a snake-tailed heroine goddess, one hand pushing a stone upwards to patch the sky. From that point onwards, peace is restored in the world, suggested by a Chinese Literati-style painted backdrop of distant mountains smudged in mud on the wall above the tranquil waters

of a modelled lake: a familiar composition to those with a knowledge of Chinese painting. While this singular narrative orients the viewer in her journey through the exhibition, its various representations of Nüwa suggest an alignment of different artistic genres. Liang’s use of clay, one of the most rudimentary media for artistic expression, may, on the surface, seem the most appropriate for this story of genesis, but its engagement with various artistic traditions (for example the Western fresco tradition combined with motifs from Chinese landscape painting), rhythmically shifting from one to the other, is not intended to establish a new artistic form. Instead, the artist connects the dots of what has been established and perhaps conveniently forgotten (so many artists in China are busily chasing new forms and techniques). Through this process, the artist ultimately wishes to awaken certain creative impulses. Trained as a sculptor, Liang won many national awards upon graduation for his series of lifesize depictions of Migrant Workers (2000–4). As much as his early success drew attention to his practice, Liang felt the constraints of academic standards. Even his graduation work and the ensuing series, such as I Am Fucking Beautiful (2009) and Dreg Note Series (2013), showed very little conformity to clichéd institutional aesthetics and technical standards. His use of clay suggests a work of art that is in the making, and one that avoids extravagance and polish. And in terms of the story of creation on show here, perhaps the different perspectives offered upon it reflect a similar avoidance of the conventional viewpoint. Liang’s presentation doesn’t produce a refined project, or a ‘purchasable’

object, but emphasises a process of making something intuitively, and thus ties in to the artist’s rejection of elite culture. For him, the latter is essentially a mind game, where people compete via intelligence honed through knowledge and experiences. As a result, such intelligence tends to jade people’s creative instincts. For the artist, it is important to act upon his creative impulse. His initial interest in venturing into contemporary art was provoked by the endless possibilities it offered, allowing him to experiment with ‘tabooed’ techniques, genres and media. Over time, this freedom caused the same type of fatigue as being subjected to academic constraints. In his Art Pedlar (2011–4) and What-thing Series (2006), the artist turned to traditional forms: ink painting and clay sculpture. Whether it was this type of interest in Chinese painting or sculpture that provided the momentum for The Story of Beginning, the exhibition itself operates within an originary cosmos: visible fingerprints, plastic grass plugged into mud, plastic eyes added to clay animals, pink ambient lighting and dollops of mud on the refined surface of Nüwa suggest the work remains in a transient or unfinished state, despite the fact that the exhibition took over five weeks to install. In particular, the path, and what the viewers pass by and step on as they traverse the exhibition, reinforces the artist’s intent: as Lu Xun wrote in the short story ‘Hometown’ (1921), ‘Initially, there was no path in the world, as more people walked on it, the paths come into being.’ A path is neither built nor naturally formed, but is a process that people have to undergo in order to reach a destination. Fiona He

The Story of Beginning, Liang Shuo Solo Exhibition, installation view, Clay Sculptures, 2014

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apb Foundation Signature Art Prize Singapore Art Museum 14 November – 15 March As far as exhibitions go, those organised around prizes or awards generally don’t. Their conceptual foundations, if they exist at all, are too soft: any exhibition atomises as soon as you’re asked to look at works, because they are competing with, rather than complementing, one another; even worse, perhaps you’re not really considering the works at all – they’re merely a cipher for your eventual judgement of the taste, or lack of it, of a panel of ‘officials’ doling out the prizes. At the Singapore Art Museum, that last line of thinking is made evident by a bank of computers in the museum’s foyer, to allow online voting for a ‘People’s Choice Award’ that further pits the common against the learned sense. Competition, some wags tell us, is the soul of commerce; it’s inevitably about the construction of class systems (and classrooms) too. And it’s a shortcut to the heart of media attention, which, for the artists and museum involved, is often the real prize. Now in its third edition and held every three years, the Signature Art Prize claims a sense of coherence by showcasing artists who happen to come from a somewhat nebulous economic territory called Asia Pacific (in which this prize is the richest). Here, that means an exhibition comprising 15 finalist artworks (out of 105 nominated) by artists who were born in 13 (Australia, Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand) out of the 50 or so countries that fall into the many definitions of the regional grouping. So perhaps it’s a sign of success that this exhibition embraces its shortcomings (in part by giving each artist a clearly differentiated space in which to exhibit)

and offers a selection of works that utilise a wide range of media (albeit with video to the fore and traditional painting almost absent) and subject matter; among these, issues of censorship and freedom of expression, the fragile and subjective nature of history and mythology, and related issues of identity construction and the power relations that shape it. Much of this, of course, might be used to deconstruct the nature of a prize such as this one (sponsored by the regional arm of a Dutch brewing conglomerate), with its more-or-less artificial sense of metanationalism. Competition aside, what you’re left with is a sense of the complexity, diversity and, to a certain degree, urgency of the social and cultural issues affecting individuals and groups within the region. Standout examples include Vietnamese Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Unsubtitled (2013), a series of video projections onto lifesize wooden cutouts of artists, curators, writers and other members of the Hanoi art scene eating. Each states their name and that of the foodstuff (of their choice) they are consuming, which serves to reduce the participants to data even while the viewer focuses on their individual physiognomy and choices, as those participants take part in an activity that’s generally thought of as communal (and a cover for gatherings that may be otherwise frowned upon by less liberalminded authorities). Unsubtitled finds a distant echo in Thai Arin Rungjang’s Golden Teardrop (2013), first shown at the last Venice Biennale, which incorporates a sculpture and video with their roots in the 500-year history of a traditional egg-yolk dessert, invented in medieval Portugal and now a staple of Thai cuisine.

facing page, top Arin Rungjang, Golden Teardrop, 2013. Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

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Meanwhile South Korean Choe U-Ram’s sculpture Custos Cavum (Guardian of the Hole) (2011), a biomorphic sluglike creature sprouting golden leaves, topped by a (dino)saurian skull and animated by a mechanical mechanism that engages its metal ribs in synthesised breathing, embraces origin myths (a text written by the artist) and technological development as well as the need to anthropomorphise it. Ultimately it’s a collaboration between Yao Jui-Chung and a group of students going under the name Lost Society Document, titled Mirage – Disused Public Property in Taiwan (2010–14) that best sums up what makes this show worth visiting. It’s displayed in a room covered with black-and-white photographs of 124 offices and public buildings. All of them were built as part of Taiwan’s push towards modernisation and as the result of investments awarded to business groups by local authorities looking for support at elections; all of them were unmaintained and unused (except as a breeding ground for pests, which led to them being dubbed ‘mosquito buildings’). The work, which also incorporates books and videos, and is reminiscent of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographic documentation of the disappearing architecture of industrial Germany during the 1960s and 70s, raised awareness of the scandalous situation and led to calls for a government review. If the publicity an award show such as this one generates is a cover for raising awareness of the usefulness of art to society at large, then the argument doesn’t get any clearer than that offered by this work. For those interested in competition, you can still vote: the winner is announced at an awards ceremony on 22 January. Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom Nguyen Trinh Thi, Unsubtitled, 2013. Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

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Love in the Time of Choleric Capitalism What About Art?, Bombay 19 September – 18 October During the Indian general elections that took place four months before Love in the Time of Choleric Capitalism opened, the wrongness of love was discussed on a national stage with conversations concerning everything from the prevalence of love jihad to the recent recriminalisation of homosexuality. Indeed, that’s often been a focus of Indian political and moral conservators, for love brings with it things such as sexual discourse and Western tradition, which is what the guardians of Indian culture reduce the idea of love to. Taking into account this perpetual atmosphere on the one hand and a world of neverending Facebook relationship updates on the other, the exhibition, curated by Gitanjali Dang (under the aegis of her self-founded art lab Khanabadosh) and its exploration of love feels vast and astute, even as it fits into little more than a room and half. In it, Dang proposes to draw out the economies of love, in a capitalistic nation driven to enlarge, expand and maximise, through content and installation. The exhibition begins with a mis-titling upon entry – the name of the show written by Dang on a chalkboard by the entrance, but articulating Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s title (of his 1985 novel Love in the Time of Cholera) instead of its intended extension – and then takes us to Dibai (Uttar Pradesh, India), often mistaken by Google for Dubai. The hamlet, only 150km from Delhi, has become the site of a poor man’s attempt to build a monument – his version of the Taj Mahal – to his late wife, whose greatest regret about being childless was the lack of

visitors this would bring to her grave once she (and her husband) were gone. Photographer Raul Irani documents this endeavour (by Dibai’s postmaster Saidul Hasan Qadri) in his series of photographs Untitled (2014). It’s clever of Dang to place these images on fragile, cheap metal nettings, bringing out the fiscal extravagance of a grand love story the likes of which are never seen in epic Bollywood romances. The notion of economy-size monuments to ‘love’ continues further in architect Simit Raveshia’s Good Night, Love (2014), in which he excavates sections of his old mattress, plugging the wounds with polyps of earth and seed and fertiliser, as a home and final resting place for the intimacies shared with the mattress through its years of use. Filmmaker Kush Badhwar’s Work Starts Now (2014) makes you wonder about monumentmaking, and what it means. The work derives from his ongoing documentation of the separation of Telangana from Andhra Pradesh in southeast India, and features workers deconstructing an ostentatious standee of India’s newest state’s first chief minister after his swearing-in ceremony. Their chatter reveals nothing about the gravity of the moment they are in, almost as if it doesn’t concern them at all. On the other hand, Anand and M.K. Raina’s Zohra Sehgal on Zohra Sehgal (2012) documents the late actress Zohra Sehgal (who died last summer, age one hundred and two), in which she recites Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ‘Mujhse Pehli Si Mohabbat Mere Mehboob Na Maang’ (‘Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again’), an Urdu poem written in 1943 lamenting the many social injustices

of the times, which demand the poet’s attention at the expense of his enchantment with his lover. Across the room from the beloved actress are Mona Gandhi’s replications of Sahir Ludhianvi’s poem ‘Taj Mahal’ (1945), also in Urdu, a language the Mumbai-based Gandhi learned during her time in Kashmir some years after the Kargil War (1999), which was fraught with memories of conflict. Together the two poems and their presentations weave an invisible thread, like two people conversing from opposite banks while a river of meaning flows between them. Amidst the poems are pictures of the Taj Mahal. From those taken by John Murray, who was appointed civil surgeon for Agora in 1849 and whose legacy as a researcher into cures for cholera has been sidelined by the fame of his photographic images of the Taj but is celebrated here with yellow paper boats to suggest coloured boats that carried choleric patients; to Felice Beato (1832–1909), whose stint in India produced memorable photographs all around; to those taken by anonymous individuals, of their Princess Di moment on that bench strategically placed for memory making. Somewhere between the ageing actress reciting poetry and those paper boats, you begin thinking about what it means to love, and start remembering silly things like the starter English grammar book conjugating love ten different ways, as if it were chicken dishes on a restaurant menu. I can’t help but draw parallels between Qadri’s tomb to Dang’s efforts in a mostly white-cube art industry, and somehow understand love in its greater depths. Phalguni Desai

Raul Irani, Untitled, 2014. Courtesy the artist

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The Anthropocene Project. A Report Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 16 October – 8 December Walter Benjamin’s useful distinction between ‘information’ and ‘experience’ appears ever more prescient. According to Benjamin, ‘information’ is ‘news’, ‘data’, ‘brevity’, ‘comprehensibility’; it ‘does not enter tradition’. Art, however, should be assimilated as ‘experience’. And yet contemporary art often proffers an informational facade as a fail-safe narrative structure that can be registered by viewers who are not willing or able to put in the work to discover less literal content. The Anthropocene Project. A Report is information masquerading as experience, or, to put it another way, information studded with weak metaphors for experience. In the jargon of the project, the ‘Anthropocene’ is the period in which ‘world systems’ have overridden ‘earth systems’, that is, in which human activity has been capable of influencing natural ecosystems. Three concurrent and interconnected exhibitions work a binary of rhetorics: factual objectivity alongside naive wonderment, both spurious. Bernd M. Scherer, in his introduction to the catalogue, fatuously and tautologically writes, ‘A new sense of amazement at the wonder of planet earth is required.’ #4 The Dark Abyss of Time, by Armin Linke, Territorial Agency and Anselm Franke, consists, first, of a foyer full of information boards and tableau photographs: the images, of twilit landscapes, thronging stock exchanges and sci-fi-slick computer graphics, are melodramatic kitsch. In the main gallery, meanwhile, ‘experts’ hold forth in clips short enough to keep them to the level of tv soundbites. There

are interesting snippets of information. The philosopher / sociologist Bruno Latour, here classed as “an anthropologist”, says that “space has disappeared” since our obsession with its possibilities during the 1960s. Martin Frick (“Bonn, Germany”) tells us that it takes 100 years for nature to accrete 10cm of topsoil, and that an area of earth the size of Switzerland is being claimed by the sea every year, polluting it. But apocalyptic prognostications do not make information into art, nor make it less superficial as documentary. Adam Avikainen’s csi Department of Natural Resources (2014) connects an archive of what appear to be iPhone shots – their scattershot randomness signifying global diversity – with short letter-poems, written by the artist, from an international range of business addresses. ‘Earth’ is a word that keeps cropping up in these farflung addresses, its addition presumably conforming to the curatorial emphasis on global ‘wonder’. You are supposed to pick a numbered photograph off a hook, place it on one of two upright lightboxes, and match the number to one of the letters in a series of folders. All the accoutrements – the lightboxes, the folders – are plush, but the images are flat (even if lit seductively from behind), the poems facetious. Walls are hung with mural-size watercolourish abstract paintings, which also feature numbers intimating that these undiscriminating, decorative textures should also be seen as metaphors for global magnitude, instead of merely as wishy-washy paintings.

The Otolith Group contributes a series of reproduced faxes from various wackos, paranoiacs, psychics and ‘sensitives’, predicting earthquake activity. Earth fights back! Many of these missives are entertaining. ‘First of all, I want to say that I am of sound mind… I feel there is going to be a massive tragic event… The event is strongly connected to Bob Hope.’ They are certainly more diverting than Medium Earth (2013), the group’s 45-minute film of slow pans across vast desert landscapes, with a soundtrack of foreboding ambient music and a pretentious ‘literary-style’ voiceover. Typical of the exhibition as a whole, the production is top-notch but the content desperately thin, the metaphors crude and predictable: a crack in an underground car park equals an earthquake; a legion of worker ants equals a busy freeway, etc. The film is resonant, not with a sense of vulnerable, natural grandeur, but with the kind of paranoia that rumbles through the faxes. William Burroughs once memorably defined paranoia as ‘having all the facts’. The Anthropocene Project. A Report mistakes facts for experience. Its emphasis on scientific objectivity harks back to early Conceptualism, but whereas that was an attempt to reinvent what constituted artistic language, in order to create a more relevant medium for conveying experience, here the language is bland, conventional; even, absurdly enough given the theme of climate-change, corporate; and the ideas it conveys mostly – in the words of one of Linke’s experts – “incontrovertible”. Where’s the wonder in that? Mark Prince

Armin Linke, onu, Organisation des Nations Unies, conference room, Geneva, Switzerland, 2001, from Anthropocene Observatory: #4 The Dark Abyss of Time. © the artist

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Laurent Grasso Soleil Double Galerie Perrotin, Paris 6 September – 31 October Seemingly an adept of the occult arts, Laurent Grasso deploys a wealth of imagination to trigger our sense of the mystical and open up the possibility of hidden knowledge, hidden wonders, beyond the realms of empiricism or rationalism, and at the crossroads of astronomy, religion and divination. Magic happens at the far edges of comprehension, the better to defy it, and Grasso noted during a conference held at Galerie Perrotin that string theory inspired him to believe in the existence of multiple uncharted dimensions to the universe (in addition to the four we know). He conjures them at the outset of Soleil Double, his first solo show in the gallery, introducing us to the hypothesis of Nemesis – an undetected star supposedly orbiting the sun and disturbing comets – with two large brushed-brass discs hanging on the wall. Neophytes should be warned that the exhibition, which revolves around two new films (Soleil Double and Soleil Noir, both 2014), also immerses the viewer in an eclectic display of over 50 objects: neon pieces, sculptures, paintings, photographs, old books and antiquities. Whether the artist made them, borrowed them, purchased them or had them fabricated, you won’t know. No wall text informs their nature and provenance, so that your interpretation remains unbiased, the rite of passage all your own. The initiation

takes you on a journey throughout no less than eight showrooms over the gallery’s two floors. Back to fathoming the potentiality of new dimensions: the 11-minute film Soleil Double is a pompous crescendo of light beams upon the deserted Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana – an icon of fascist architecture in Rome – at dawn. While long static shots present different points of view over the grandiose coliseum and its arches and statues, double shadows emerge here and there, and a growing sense of unsettling strangeness keeps us in suspense until the very end: the rise of two stars, which, rather than bringing more light to the surrealistic scene, somehow makes the shadiness twice as great. But this eerie duality is only the first of numerous uncanny perspectives to unfold, as the 18 accompanying paintings of Studies into the Past (circa 2009–) suggest. This series, strategically undated, revisits the oil-on-oak techniques and pictorial style of fifteenth and sixteenth century Flemish and Italian painters. One of them depicts a parhelion in the sky above a medieval town. This is an actual atmospheric phenomenon, also known as a ‘sundog’, which causes two golden halos, looking like the sun, to form on opposite sides of the solar star: talk about our naked eyes challenging our belief! Or to quote an aphorism

of Michel Foucault, to whom the artist often refers, ‘visibility is a trap’. The other paintings focus on more or less plausible disasters and miracles: earthquakes, deluges, blood and fire rains, passages of comets, (double) solar eclipses, ash falls and volcanic eruptions, hinting at the apocalypse or the unknown, like promises of new, unimaginable horizons. This brings us to the second film, as surrealistic as the first, yet immeasurably more sublime: the 11-minute Soleil Noir, shot partly with a drone in Stromboli, over the greyish slopes and incandescent ash bursts of its active volcano, and in the ruins of Pompeii, with a wandering dog as the sole guide, and an unrelenting, haunting electronic lament as the soundtrack. The sun only shows briefly at the very end, in an accelerated shot that makes it appear to be crashing rather than setting right below the volcano’s crater. A quick meteor shower follows and the image slowly fades to total darkness. This ‘black sun’ brings us back to Nemesis, which is actually said in the scientific literature to be a black dwarf star, meaning that it emits no light. In other words, you can’t see it, but does it mean that it doesn’t exist? After all, if anything feels definite amid Grasso’s obscurantism, it’s that truth is stranger than fiction. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

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The Inhabitants Fondation Cartier, Paris 25 October – 22 February Luxury-goods houses are popping out namesake art foundations faster than they do starchitectdesigned handbags these days, but Cartier were ahead of the field, and lest we forget, they’ve laid on a 30th-anniversary jamboree with their artworld friends. Diller Scofidio + Renfro have used robotics, sensors and controllable glass film to coolly interfere with Jean Nouvel’s glassbox ground-floor gallery, making the otherwise empty space leak from the ceiling and mist up. The lower galleries are, by contrast, all oneiric sensory overload: The Inhabitants is a highly personal mise-en-scène of works, selected and designed by Guillermo Kuitca, which extends the Argentine artist’s investigations into theatricality and jarring disjunctions between the apparent and the actual. Kuitca’s point of departure was a ‘domestic’ interior David Lynch constructed for the Fondation in 2006 after an earlier sketch. Built around a zebra-morphic two-piece suite, the decor reproduces the skewed perspective of the 2d original – a collision of image and object that chimes with Kuitca’s studies of compressed dimensions in maps and schemas.

Here the interior is reproduced with Kuitca’s cubist-inspired topographical murals as its wallpaper, and with the addition of Patti Smith’s voice in Falling Backwards Once Again (2011), her spoken-word riff on a murderous Lynch text. Objects are tugged between depiction and ‘real’ space throughout. Vija Celmins’s To Fix the Image in Memory xiii (1977–82) presents two identical rocks in a vitrine: one real, the other a painted bronze reproduction. Loungers portrayed in the Pina Bausch-esque scenario of Kuitca’s Untitled (1996) are fabricated as Chaise Longues Antilopes (2014): functional recliners from which to watch Artavazd Pelechian’s The Inhabitants (1970) projected on a grand scale. If Lynch was the departure point, then Armenian filmmaker Pelechian is the heart of Kuitca’s exhibition. A mesmerising collage of appropriated wildlife footage homogenised into gritty-textured monochrome, The Inhabitants cuts the movement of animals to music like choreography, from anthropomorphic studies of monkey faces to aerial shots of mass migration. Beating wings and plunging herds dissolve

into grainy abstraction that reaches out to a trio of Celmins’s constellation paintings in the adjacent space. As with Kuitca’s canvases, humans are absent from Pelechian’s film, though their presence is suggested by an echoed gunshot at the work’s crescendo. Two paintings stand in loco parentis – Tarsila do Amaral’s Urutu (1928) showing a venomous snake coiled between an egg and a penile spike, and Francis Bacon’s Head (Man in Blue) (1961) – the former a nod to Kuitca’s Latin American roots and Brazil’s ‘anthropophagic’ Modernism, the latter acknowledging a likewise key influence for Lynch. In a dark show, and even sharing space with Bacon, Lynch stands apart. Well… I Can Dream, Can’t I? (2004) offers the coarse impasto figure of a woman with the gaping mouth and distended vulva of a sex toy, seeping resin blood onto an inkjet-printed suburban couch from a gunshot wound to the head; resin-soaked knickers tethered at half mast. It’s an illustration, if nothing else, of where the line lies between the dark and the grotesque. Hettie Judah

The Inhabitants, 2013 (installation view). Photo: Olivier Ouadah. Courtesy Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris

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Serendipity Revealed: Contemporary Sri Lankan Art Brunei Gallery, London 10 October – 20 December The civil war in Sri Lanka ended in 2009 with Sinhalese government forces defeating the separatist Tamil Tigers. In 2011, a un enquiry stated that the deaths of up to 40,000 Tamil civilians could conceivably have taken place during the last months of the war but that no one could know the exact figure for sure – estimates have ranged from 7,000 to 147,000. No credible international investigation of what actually happened has been allowed – at the time of writing, the United Nations human-rights chief has just publicly rebuked the Sri Lankan government for ‘unacceptable conduct’ in obstructing an investigation into possible war crimes, adding that the government had created a ‘wall of fear’ intended to deter people from submitting evidence. In the face of such a context, what can a survey exhibition of art from Sri Lanka offer? As Annoushka Hempel, curator of Serendipity Revealed, notes: ‘When looking at the contemporary art of a country like Sri Lanka, it is impossible to do so without engaging with the island’s recent history.’ Hempel’s approach is not an overtly didactic one – she has selected the work of nine Sinhalese Sri Lankan artists, four diasporic Sri Lankans (including two with Tamil cultural heritage) and one other to offer a series of overlapping, related perspectives. Some of the works have an explicit link to the history of the civil war, such as Bullet Book Series (2014), Kingsley Gunatilleke’s collection of books that have bullet cartridges embedded in their open, worn pages. Gunatilleke’s juxtaposition of a site of knowledge with a stark visual signifier of conflict is a simple but effective testament to a history of violence that became embedded in the everyday. Other works problematise the Sri Lankan government’s attempts to construct a postconflict narrative of national harmony. Bandu Manamperi’s Iron Man (2014)

is a series of photographs documenting the artist’s performances in public places in Colombo, ironing clothes he has seemingly just removed. The locations include Colombo’s town hall, the war memorial and Galle Face Green. Manamperi’s photographs could be taken at face value – that of simply taking a domestic chore into the open – but are also suggestive of the ‘ironing out’ of the recent complexities of civil war that the Sri Lankan government and a passive media seem so keen to move on from. A similar sentiment is seen in Danushka Marasinghe’s video Conceal of Marks (2014), which documents the simple act of a man with a broom methodically brushing away footprints, treading carefully to cover his own tracks. Pradeep Thalawatta’s large-scale panoramic photograph Roadscape (2012) shows the artist, dressed in a red-and-white-striped vest (the colours allude to the walls of Tamil Hindu temples) positioned at several points over a streetscape of Jaffna. The artist’s own hair blocks his mouth, eyes and ears, while behind him the rebuilding of the former Tamil capital goes on. From the government’s point of view, this rebuilding attests to their postconflict commitment to the northern, Tamil part of the country. However, another viewpoint suggests that the rebuilding is a not particularly discreet erasure of the region’s distinctive Tamil identity. Thalawatta is the only artist to make work explicitly located in the former stronghold of the Tamil Tigers, and his work is observational and self-aware of his position as a Sinhalese artist who was invited to teach at the University of Jaffna. Both of the artists in the show with a Tamil cultural background come, perhaps unsurprisingly given the history of the civil war, from the diaspora. Nina Mangalanayagam’s photographs from the 2008 series The folds of the fabric

fall differently each time focus on the signifiers of the lingering persistence of tradition in the diaspora – in one work a suited man’s hand polishes off a plate of rice that is balanced on his other supporting hand, a persistence of cultural tradition despite the geographical upheaval that the cuff of the man’s suit jacket suggests. Meanwhile London-based Reginald Aloysius makes detailed, dark works of Dravidian temples emerging out of undergrowth with brightly coloured splotches of enamel and oil paint lighting up the gloom of the graphite drawings underneath. Both artists cast an eye backward on Tamil cultural history and identity, perhaps something that might survive more strongly in diaspora imaginings than in the grim realities for many Tamils in postwar Sri Lanka. What can survey exhibitions based on national categories achieve? On a straightforward level, they are a curatorial strategy to shine a spotlight on new centres of art production. They can also highlight particular trends coming out of a locality. In this case, though, there is more at stake – there is no particular reason to believe that the wounds of a civil war, which in its latest phase raged on and off since 1983, will be smoothed over into a narrative of national unity, despite the myopic vision of the Sri Lankan government. Their ongoing attempt to construct an ideal of national unity based on victory over separatists is at best an unstable narrative. Pala Pothupitiye’s ornate maps, one of which won the Sovereign Art Prize in 2011, are tucked away downstairs in the Brunei Gallery. The artist uses pen and coloured pencils to transform old maps of Sri Lanka with the lion of the Sri Lankan flag and the fangs of tigers rising out of swirls of ink meticulously layered onto maps. Different dreams of different nations that are equally beyond reach. Niru Ratnam

Bandu Manamperi, Iron Man – In Front of Town Hall, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2014, performance still. Courtesy the artist

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Aiko Miyanaga Strata: Origins White Rainbow, London 7 October – 22 November There’s a whiff of entomology in Aiko Miyanaga’s sculptures. Not only in her use of white crystalline naphthalene (the insect repellent in old-fashioned mothballs), in which she casts everyday objects, and which is a signature material in her work. But also in her decision to encase these cast objects in layers of clear resin within which air bubbles are allowed to form. The effect is reminiscent of insects trapped millions of years ago, and preserved through time, in amber. Miyanaga’s choice of objects – keys, shoes, clocks, books – may add up to simple visual metaphors, but these are poetic works that foreground more complex ideas about the constant flux of both time and materials, and also the stability of matter, in that it neither increases nor decreases, but is simply changed or rearranged. Naphthalene is a substance that transitions directly from solid to gas and back again, depending on fluctuations in normal atmospheric temperature and humidity.

Encased in their resin tombs, Miyanaga’s cast objects remain relatively stable, but if air is allowed in, they will gradually sublimate. In some works the addition of a wax seal over a hole left in the resin is an invitation to break the seal and allow that process to occur. In other works Miyanaga shows it in action. Strata: Night Voyage – Clock (2014) is a naphthalene cast of an alarm clock displayed in a glass box. The clock is gradually disintegrating as the naphthalene sublimates, but the gas is also recrystallising on the inside of the glass. I’m drawn to another insect image here – that of atoms disintegrating and reintegrating (but not in the same form) in George Langelaan’s 1957 sci-fi short story ‘The Fly’. The central work in this exhibition, the inaugural show at London’s White Rainbow gallery and an introduction to the Japanese artist’s work, is a reworking of Strata: Slumbering on the Shore (2014), an installation Miyanaga created earlier in 2014 at Liverpool Central

Library, as part of the Liverpool Biennial. There she cast naphthalene keys inside resin books and placed them on lightboxes. Installed within the library’s wood-panelled surrounds, these works would have appeared luminous and ghostly, a mood not quite possible to replicate in the gallery. The artist has also created a new iteration of another signature series, Soramimimisora (2014). Here a different process governed by subtle atmospheric shifts is underway. Simple ceramic bowls are decorated inside with crackle glazing that the artist has altered compositionally so that the cracking, which is usually stabilised shortly after it occurs, becomes an intermittent but ongoing and audible process, like the high-pitched warning crack of ice. Miyanaga’s work may employ a cool sculptural aesthetic, but one shouldn’t be too lulled by its beauty. Present in exhaust emissions and cigarette smoke, naphthalene is potentially as toxic to humans as it is to moths. Helen Sumpter

Strata: Night Voyage – Clock, 2014, casted naphthalene and mixed media. Photo: Trent Bates. Courtesy the artist and White Rainbow, London

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Korakrit Arunanondchai (with Korapat Arunanondchai) 2557 (Painting with history in a room filled with men with funny names 2) Carlos / Ishikawa Gallery, London 18 September – 1 November “How do I explain to you what happened this summer?” asks Korakrit Arunanondchai at the start of 2557 (Painting with history in a room filled with men with funny names 2) (all works 2014), the film at the centre of his uk debut at East London gallery Carlos / Ishikawa. It turns out to be an unwittingly revealing question, one that exposes a nascent – you could even say stymied – quality to this exhibition and Arunanondchai’s practice at large. For it’s clear that the Bangkok-born, us-educated twentyeight-year-old isn’t very good at explanation. Rather, he’s more of a shower. Composed of short vignettes and accompanied by a lush soundtrack that shifts from Thai shoegaze to droney slabs of chillwave, 2557 follows the artist and his twin brother on a summer-long quasi-spiritual journey around Thailand. A packet of Marlboro Reds is crushed underfoot as the brothers visit an ornate temple. Cultish-looking white-clad model types waft about gallery spaces. A fire burns in slow motion on a beach at sunset. A televangelist rants and gesticulates. An iPhone is peed on. Interspersed

is documentation from various live performances, Arunanondchai appearing in neoActionist guise: blood and carcass swapped for acrylic paint and teen bodies; existential tumult flipped for a nod and wink to the history of occidental painting. It should be noted that one could watch 2557 from the comfort of a $3,000 maddiamond massage chair, one of two decked out in denim and bleach tie-dye as part of an installation that accompanied the videowork. There are beanbags too, also clad in denim tie-dye, but additionally featuring flames, distorted Manchester United emblems and archaic smears of gold paint. Along the back wall 16 canvases (more fire, denim, United logos and paint) are positioned in one continual sweep. Some mannequins are dotted about also, their garb fitting the seating and paintings on display, with an additional narcissistic touch: black and bleach-blonde long-hair wigs, the artist’s own haircut no less. Surrounded by all of this, I realise: it’s Arunanondchai’s seemingly effortless capacity to show (perhaps even show off) that has catalysed

his international reputation (in two years he’s gone from grad school at Columbia, studying under fellow Thai Rirkrit Tiravanija, to a string of attention-grabbing museum and commercial gallery shows). He’s mastered a way of distilling circuitous ideas regarding Thai identity and its relation to global consumerism, technocracy, pop culture, art history and spirituality into bold visual arrangements that eschew any succinct meaning for broader, expressionistic strokes heavy with self-aware cool. This is no mean feat. And with his output right on trend, privileging abstract painting, hd video and performance, his meteoric rise makes even more sense. However, the superficiality of Arunanondchai’s work remains a big issue. Is there sustainability in a practice so unburdened by complexity, so unwilling to push towards a more thoughtful engagement with its own cultural specificity? I’m not sure. There’s potential here, certainly. The risk is Arunanondchai will be wrecked and ruined on the fickle shores of his own accelerated hype before getting anywhere near reaching it. Paul Pieroni

2557 (Painting with history in a room filled with men with funny names 2) (with Korapat Arunanondchai), 2014 (installation view). © the artist. Courtesy Carlos / Ishikawa, London

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Nam June Paik Becoming Robot Asia Society, New York 5 September – 5 January Thirty years ago Nam June Paik staged Good Morning, Mr Orwell (1984), a live satellite broadcast from New York and Paris that is exemplary of his effort to make art with popular media. Although the exhibition Becoming Robot culminates with this work, the central theme, as the title suggests, is the development or trajectory of Paik’s use of technology as robotic or technological prosthesis. For both fans and novices, this show gives more than an overview. The curators have brought together a group of artworks that frame the times in which Paik operated, while reflecting the intersection of possibility and fantasy that is ever-present in his works. Mounted in all its failed, but glorious imagining, is Paik’s first robot: k-456 (1962). The subsequent exhibits in this main gallery include the later tv-type personifications known as Family of Robot (1986). And inasmuch as Mother Father and Baby each show Paik’s shift towards irony, the tv bodies of each, with their mesmerising video loops, illustrate the universal and simplistic need

to make technology look like us. In contrast to these static figures is the interactive videowork Three Camera Participation / Participation tv (1969/2001), which reasserts Paik’s focused engagement with the televisual. More than his other object-oriented works, this one, which allows viewers to be both the producers and subjects (when you walk in front of one of the cameras, your image appears on the wall), embodies Paik’s early and continuing influence on how video can be used. On the top floor, in the last room, where the show concludes, we are brought again to that moment in 1984 when Paik’s video and television experiment Good Morning, Mr. Orwell made tv into art, and art on tv. In hindsight, this work shows tv up as having never truly reached its potential, let alone become a real conduit for visual or sound art. A sidebar to this exhibition is the standalone installation Room for Charlotte Moorman (1993), which features framed newspapers and posters, a loose display of Moorman’s performance wardrobe and a 30-minute documentary

describing her as a great musician, if not a great artist, in her own right. However true, the room is a sad gesture from one great influence towards another, and further proof that the tv bra and plastic cello Moorman famously performed behind overshadows her own achievements. If there is one thing Becoming Robot demonstrates, it is Paik’s technological foresight. So even though many of his innovations now look silly – some even ludicrous – his works are signposts, symbolising, among other things, the inventive and creative spirit of technology developed by individual users. Furthermore, the show marks out just how much room there was to explore when Paik began. Clearly he was way out front, so far ahead of us that he seems to always be moving just out of sight. How much his use of technology has shaped artmaking is a question viewers will undoubtedly ponder. One certainty is that the impact of Paik’s contribution outstrips the innumerable works his practice inspired and influenced. Julia Marsh

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William Kentridge The Refusal of Time Johannesburg Art Gallery 9 November – 1 February Despite the fact that it has been exhibited across most of the developed world, William Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time (2012), on show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (jag), is about the building in which it is now shown. Or at least it expresses something that is known and held intimately, deep within this municipal building’s dry ochre bricks. jag is a gallery that time has ravaged with roof leaks, sewage floodings and funding problems. It’s also been ravaged by its location – which has, for many years, excluded patrons fearful of Johannesburg’s inner-city crime. Indeed, I know of no gallery in the world that, on entering its unkempt halls, emits a greater echo of Shelley’s famous words – ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ However, Kentridge is one of Johannesburg’s most assiduous burghers. For not only is his work informed by the place that he once called the ‘second greatest city after Paris’ but he is also one of its most dedicated servants. In this regard he has refused to allow its greatest, if shattered, municipal gallery to lose its

relevance. By allowing his work to be exhibited in the gallery Kentridge is, as Yeats said (writing of his own municipal gallery in Dublin), giving the ‘right twigs for an eagle’s nest’. The Refusal of Time, with its five-channel video projected onto propped-up canvases and its mockups of antiquated megaphones and an old industrial machine, is nominally an exploration of nineteenth-century science’s failed attempt to refuse – or at least to control – time by acts of standardisation. (Of course this attempt to establish universals goes back to Plato’s theory of ideal forms, which in turn responded to Heraclitus’s maxim that ‘all is flux’.) In one of the sequences, we see Kentridge’s own idiosyncratic versions of ‘ideal form’: the coffeepot and the megaphone. These shapes are formed out of ashes on the pages of a book and then swept away. Throughout the work, movement and form are momentarily stable and then broken, metamorphosing. There are dances, silhouetted processions, whirling bodies, showerheads, old taps, industrial machines and metronomes that are either real or drawn

or collaged. His own figure appears in acts of Dada-esque absurdity and his distinctive voice calls out a montage of quotes, times and aphorisms. Of course much of this may seem very remote, even alien, to those who engage with our wireless and digital contemporary world. But perhaps that is why Refusal makes so much sense in Johannesburg, rather than in the cities of the developed world that it has been shown in previously. Because Johannesburg is very much a city caught between a postindustrial and a preindustrial world – a city where Kentridge’s Modernism is still a lived experience. If one were to pinpoint just where this world is, one wouldn’t have to look far from the gates of jag to find it. And although Refusal seems overtly a rejection of Platonic idealism, by the very act of exhibiting the work in this broken and badly maintained gallery, Kentridge goes some way towards asserting an artistic and social ideal. And this is, in fact, the kind of irony that lies subtly within the work itself. Matthew Blackman

The Refusal of Time, 2012 (installation view, Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2014). Photo: Anthea Pokroy. Courtesy Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg & Cape Town

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Song Dong Regenerate Baró Galeria, São Paulo 30 August – 11 October Soaring into the immense space that is Baró Galeria’s main room, My City (2014), the largest work in this substantial exhibition, brings a vivid flavour of the lost, razed hutongs of Beijing into the São Paulo gallery, and speaks directly to this sprawling Brazilian city too, gripped in its own cycle of demolition and reconstruction. A towering structure made from dozens of salvaged doors and windows fitted together like a huge 3d jigsaw, My City’s striking exterior gives way to a warmly lit, carpeted interior. There, inside the matrix of frames, panes of glass have been replaced by mirrors, creating an infinitely reflective space, reminiscent in its cosy atmosphere of the countless front-rooms demolished as part of the ceaseless drive to construct ever upwards, and the houses and alleyways scrapped and replaced by thrusting towers. The installation – made entirely from locally salvaged materials, with the exception of one red door from Song Dong’s own now-demolished Beijing hutong home – is the centrepiece of an

assured show featuring more than 30 artworks, including videos, photographs and sculptures dating back as far as 1995. In Chinese, the exhibition’s title, Chongsheng, means ‘second life’ or ‘rebirth’; and besides the remixed construction detritus, other materials take on new life here, too. In the photo series Edible Penjing 1–4 (2000), fish heads and piles of beef or chicken are arranged like craggy landscapes. Those forms are echoed in Song Dong’s Edible City installations (2013), shown here as photographs, in which cities are constructed in biscuits and cake before being devoured; and in a quartet of videos, A Blot on the Landscape (2010), where broccoli forests, mashed-potato mountains and smoked-salmon dunes comprise bucolic if unlikely tableaux, before being destroyed in a hail of calamities from above – buried in a storm of rice grains, hacked to pieces by a chopper and snipped to shreds by a pair of sharp scissors. In Edible Mandala (2014), a huge wooden disc covered with a tight-packed pattern of dried

fruits, nuts and sweets, the passively comestible bites back, with a profusion of wickedly polished knife-blades protruding from the mandala. Aromatic snacks laced with knives; images of boiling soup, swirling urine and flaming alcohol in the video installation I Don’t Understand (2009); and in the photo series A Pot of Boiling Water (1995), Song Dong himself, marching grimly along a Beijing alleyway towards the camera, pouring a steaming trail of boiling water as he approaches: there is menace in the work of this mild-mannered artist. In the video Broken Mirror (1999), the quiet of the gallery is shattered again and again as a series of unremarkable city scenes are revealed to be reflections in a mirror. A hammer appears, smashing the glass and revealing a new, equally mundane city scene behind, as bystanders start at the noise, concerned, moving as if to assist, then quickly going back about their business. Demolition, regeneration, lament, resumption: the wheel turns on, spiked with hidden blades. Claire Rigby

My City, 2014 (installation view). Baró Galeria, Sâo Paulo. Photo: Edouard Fraipont. Courtesy the artist

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The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War by Rohini Mohan Verso, £16.99 (hardcover) About halfway through her 368-page study of the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s devastating civil war, Rohini Mohan writes about the problems of quantifying its effects: ‘In the cacophony of different accounts, attempts to measure the cost of the conflict – the counting of the dead, lost, disappeared, raped or displaced… became fraught with motives and desired ends. Propaganda eclipsed facts, denial extinguished compassion. The war’s end produced two aggressive parallel narratives, which ran fast and strong, never meeting.’ She’s right, of course: five-and-a-half years after the end of the war, the account offered by the victorious Sinhalese government is as distant as it could be from the account offered by the defeated Tamil minority. On the one side is a government narrative of hard-won victory over one of the world’s most notorious terrorist organisations, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (commonly known as the ltte or Tamil Tigers), with minimal civilian casualties. On the other is a counternarrative, held by many Tamils and observers in the West, of a win-at-all-costs strategy that saw Sri Lankan government forces slaughter some 40,000 Tamil civilians and commit numerous war crimes during their final push to victory. Recent years have seen significant challenges to the Sri Lankan government’s narrative, among them Frances Harrison’s powerful book Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War (2012) and Callum Macrae’s influential 2013 documentary No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka. However, the government’s response has been anger at perceived external meddling

and a denial that is consistent with its refusal to cooperate with a recent United Nations investigation into the possibility of war crimes having occurred. Mohan takes a very different approach to Harrison’s and Macrae’s exposés, instead focusing on the personal stories of two former Tigers, Sarva and Mugil (and to a lesser extent Sarva’s mother, Indra). The Bangalore-based author first met her subjects in 2009, lived in Sri Lanka for ten months and then kept in touch with them through weekly phone calls when she was not there, in order to produce an account of the end of the war and its aftermath in the form of narrative (or creative) nonfiction, rather than documentary. So Mohan confidently restages her characters’ motives, thoughts and conversations even when they might be hazy recollections in the minds of her very real subjects. It is a brave move – one that puts an element of creative writing into the most fraught of arenas. But if the ‘facts’ are so contested by both sides as to form a block to any dialogue, perhaps this is not as unlikely a strategy as it might first seem. This choice of form gives The Seasons of Trouble a very different tone to more detached accounts. Mugil and her family’s journey to Manik Farm, the government’s controversial civilian displacement camp, shifts focus between the experience of being cluster-bombed by government forces, accounts of family arguments on the road and reflections on the difficulties of finding sanitary napkins while holed up in a bunker (‘every time battle broke out, Mugil felt the world forgot about menstrual cycles’). A second consequence is that Mohan is able to generate a highly

nuanced account of the relationship between Tamil civilians and the Tamil Tigers. We first meet Mugil hiding in a mango tree, listening as government soldiers below sexually assault and then kill five young female Tiger recruits. Paradoxically this is the moment at which she loses faith in the Tigers, guessing that, unlike herself, the girls who are raped and killed beneath the tree are most likely forced recruits, with no particular belief in the cause for which they are dying. Despite being a former Tiger, Mugil’s feelings about them are complex and conflicted throughout the book. She tries to shed her Tiger identity and attempts to blend back into civilian society to escape government retribution – a process the government would then use to justify subsequent actions that Western commentators saw as direct attacks on civilians. Highlighting the difficulties of determining the just and the unjust, Mohan at one point rhetorically asks, ‘How far back would the army go in the twenty-six years of conflict, how broad a brush would they apply? The children conscripted in the final hour… the women pretending to take part to deter sexual predators; the men posing as fighters to get rations… were they so dangerous as to warrant shelling them in a safe zone, along with those who were unarguably civilians?’ The answer, of course, is that the government would apply the broadest brush imaginable and claim justification for doing so through their success in ending the war. The narratives of victor and vanquished will likely never be reconciled. Niru Ratnam

Art and Politics Now by Anthony Downey Thames & Hudson, £29.95 (hardcover)

The use of the zxx typeface (designed to disrupt text-scanning software) for the chapter headings and the acid-yellow colour of the pages (favoured in eye-catching flyers) may be slightly gimmicky, but academic and writer Anthony Downey’s illustrated, themed analysis of political artworks from the past 15 years provides an accessible snapshot of the different ways in which artists are currently engaging with and responding to socioeconomic issues. Grouped under 11 broad chapter headings, including ‘Globalisation’, ‘Labour’, ‘Terror’ and ‘Economies’, analysis is succinct (with over 200 artworks included, it’s difficult to be otherwise),

but Downey’s ability to contextualise a range of artistic approaches within such a pacey format makes this both a useful reference and an enjoyable read. Examples of works featured include Ai Weiwei’s populist installation Sunflower Seeds (2010); Theaster Gates’s proactive architectural urban-regeneration project Dorchester Projects (2009) and Regina José Galindo’s bloody performance Who Can Erase the Footprints? (2003), in protest against the presidential candidacy of José Efraín Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan ruler under whose leadership during the early 1980s thousands of citizens were persecuted and killed.

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It’s perhaps fitting that the book closes with Trevor Paglen’s project The Last Pictures (2012), for which the artist oversaw the selection of 100 images highlighting some of the global issues to which the artists in this book are drawing attention. The images were etched onto a disk designed to last billions of years, attached to a satellite and sent into orbit. When life on earth is no more, the disk could be one of the last human-made objects in existence. Whether that’s when our sun expands into a red giant, in about five billion years’ time, or much sooner, hastened by our own actions, will be for us to decide. Helen Sumpter

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Ai Weiwei edited by Hans Werner Holzwarth Taschen, £900/€1,000/$1,500 (hardcover); £9,000/€10,000/$12,500 (art edition) Much can been read into the politics of Ai Weiwei’s name in China over the last few years, the rate at which it is omitted from exhibitions, catalogues and the public sphere in general corresponding inversely to the level of hearsay and idle chatter about him. Taschen’s eponymous book offers two editions: the hardcover edition is a 724-page coffee table (33 by 44 cm) clothbound book wrapped in a Habotai silk scarf (the design is based on a detail from Ai’s work Straight, a reference to the Sichuan earthquake of 2008); the art edition – sold out by the time of writing – adds an 18.2 by 76.3 by 52.2 cm marble lectern. The book features a chronological account of the artist’s career from 1983 to the present, juxtaposing artworks with Ai’s running commentary on their context and production, and on his authorial intentions. In addition, it features articles by curator Roger M. Buergel, international relations professor William A. Callahan, oriental art dealer James J. Lally, Chinese cultural studies professor Carlos Rojas and collector Uli Sigg. While each contributes a different perspective to the discussion, collectively they offer little beyond established commentaries, and either overtly or covertly support the book’s apparent

aim of perpetuating the now iconic image of Ai as the singular personality shining out amidst the menacing and faceless background of China’s ruling regime and its docile subjects. It should be evident that Ai is no longer interested in making art. It can be argued that Ai, by abolishing the border between art and activism, simply mirrors the mechanisms of control that collapse discourse into proclamation, rather than reflecting on what has made them possible. His constant provocation that demands social injustice to show itself as such creates the opposite effect of concealment and trivialisation; the countering face of power summoned forth by Ai’s work is brutal and unrelenting, but it is also tailored neatly to construct the required interpretation of the authoritarian condition. By becoming a recording machine of dueling forces, Ai retrogrades into a redundant object of an experiment whose results have long been translated into axioms of good and evil, thus cornering his methodology into a process of self-victimisation that threatens to collapse unless simultaneously transformed into a global spectacle. This logic of confrontation has recently reached its ideal form: the absence or removal

of the name now becomes a sign of something substantial or authentic, constituting a narrative of the underground that has, from the beginning, fuelled the marketisation of Chinese contemporary art, serving Western collectors’ expectation for a Chinese art that critiques authoritarian control from the shadows. The politics of the name ultimately degenerates into an economy of the signature. Thus in response to Sigg’s determination of Ai’s identity as an ‘activist-artist’, Rojas’s comment on his strategy as ‘making visible the state’s politics of visibility’ and Buergel’s assertion of his political status as homo sacer, the most problematic aspect of Ai’s work is not that it is bad, but the extent to which it relies on an intellectual framework that allows even incompetent forms of activism, including daily tweets constantly reminding the world of his disenfranchisement, to be sanctioned or even celebrated in the name of art. Undermining both the art of activism and activist potential of art at the same time, the purported direct social critique that characterises his production falls prey to one of the most ancient criticisms of art: that it’s a form of imitation without insight. Xiao Ouyang

The Twenty-First Century Art Book by Phaidon Editors According to the anonymous author of its introduction, The Twenty-First Century Art Book is ‘a fascinating overview of what has been a hugely prolific period for the visual arts since the start of the new millennium’. In reality it’s a 304-page celebration of the mindless consumption of images. Who cares why the visual arts have been so ‘prolific’ during this period? Apparently not the producers of this book, who’ve simply arranged more-or-less random examples of this proliferation (one per artist included) into an A-to-Z of art’s ‘best known names’ as well as ‘many of the rising stars of the next generation’ – whatever generation that is. Who selected these artists? Phaidon doesn’t give us any clues, merely listing two editors and four authors in the credits, and allowing the latter not much more than 150 words per artist to explain what’s going on. Thus we get a single photograph of Laurie Anderson reading a letter above a text describing ‘a sprawling installation’ [Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself, 2007]

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Phaidon, £24.95 (hardcover)

featuring ‘contributions from 107 women’ and a two-sentence summary of Calle’s career since the 1970s (as if what happened before 2000 has little bearing on what happened since). Were it not for the fact that I’m holding this book in my hands, it would beggar belief that such an illconsidered exercise in publishing could even exist. It gets worse. In that moronically worded introduction, they-who-shan’t-be-named marvel at ‘the alphabetical arrangement [of the entries, which] allows a performance by Marina Abramović to be studied next to a painting by Tomma Abts’. Did you hear that, directors of Europe’s cash-strapped museums? Why are you wasting your money on people when the alphabet is the ultimate curator? It’s free too! Let’s leave aside the fact that studying a performance from a single photograph is nigh-on impossible, and that none of the non-Western artists (most from China) included here could exactly be called emerging, and that no explanation is offered as to why one work rather than

another by the same artist has been selected, and that the pathetic three-page ‘glossary’ tacked on to the end is entirely populated by the terminology of the late twentieth century (postmodernism, but not post-Internet – an omission that’s ironic given the extent to which this book is geared to an audience used to the picture + caption + link aesthetic), and… ah, screw it. How is it possible to leave any of that aside in the way that Phaidon has? I imagine that the publishers might say that all this is as it is in order to make their book accessible to a general audience, but that’s no reason to assume that audience is stupid. Indeed it’s The Twenty-First Century Art Book that is just that. And lazy, vacuous and a total and utter insult to trees. At this point I’d apologise for wasting your time, were it not for the fact that there are too many of these brainless picture books, not all published by Phaidon, going round at the moment. But perhaps if you stop buying them, publishers will finally stop making them. Mark Rappolt

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Ming Wong, Berlin, November 2014. Photo: Till Janz

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For more on Vishwajyoti Ghosh, see overleaf

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Contributors

Xu Ya-Zhu

Zoe Zhang Bing

is a cultural activist, artist and transdisciplined worker in contemporary art and the underground art domain based in Taipei and Shanghai. This month she writes about the work of social activist Huang Sunquan. For further reference she recommends Chen Chieh-Jen’s 2012 film Happiness Building I and the 2014 sound and moving-image installation Realm of Reverberations, Minkoku Hyakunen’s 2011 album Project Integration / Intervention into Tenryu City and Blackbird (8)’s compilation Body of Work 1984–2004, as well as reading Huang Sunquan’s own Green Bulldozer: The Squatters, Parks, Nature Estate and Institutionalized Landscape in 90’ Taipei (2012).

is a curator and critic. In 2008 she partnered with the Goethe Institute to curate Reincarnated Flesh at Art Berlin Contemporary. Her work with the United Nations Development Programme, curating the Touch Without Danger series of AIDS-awareness-andeducation art exhibitions, saw her named as one of Marie Claire’s 30 Most Influential Women in 2005 and awarded a 2010 UN Certificate of Merit. In 2011 she curated an exhibition of new Chinese contemporary video art at the Rennes Video Art Festival in France, titled Cold Fairyland. In 2012 she curated the Kwandu Biennale in Taipei. She also participated the 1st World Biennale Forum in Gwangju, South Korea. She has been appointed curator of the 2013/2014 Goethe Open Space in Shanghai. This month she writes about the work of Liang Shaoji.

Rosalyn D’Mello is a New Delhi-based critic. Her writing has appeared in ArtReview, Art + Auction, Modern Painters, Art India and Take on Art, among others. She was the editor-in-chief of Artinfo India and a 2014 nominee for the Forbes Emerging Art Writer of the Year award and the Prudential Eye Award for Best Writing on Asian Contemporary Art. A forthcoming work of nonfiction, A Handbook for My Lover, is being published by HarperCollins. This month she reports back from the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. For further reference she recommends F.N. Souza’s Words and Lines, a collection of the painter’s autobiographical essays written when he lived in London in 1959, republished by the Delhi-based art collector Nitin Bhayana. The thin but forceful book contains Souza’s classic 1955 essay ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’, first published in Stephen Spender’s Encounter magazine.

Sara Arrhenius is a curator and writer. She is the director of Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, where she most recently curated The Naked Magician, a solo show with Brazilian artist Laura Lima. Among her most recent publications are Andreas Eriksson (2014) and Art of Memory (2014). Currently she is working on a solo show with Swedish artist Ylva Ogland and keeps an eye on preparations for the group show City Walks, with, among others Carlos Garacoia, Hala Elkoussy and Sophie Calle, which opens at Bonniers Konsthall in February. This month she profiles Ming Wong. For further reading she suggests The Three Body Trilogy (2008, published in English in 2014) by Liu Cixin, which is the first bestseller sci-fi novel in China.

Advisory Board Defne Ayas, Richard Chang, Anselm Franke, Claire Hsu, Pi Li, Eugene Tan, Koki Tanaka, Wenny Teo, Philip Tinari, Chang Tsong-zung, Yao Jui-Chung Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Writers Sara Arrhenius, Matthew Blackman, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Marie Darrieussecq, Phalguni Desai, Rosalyn D’Mello, Chris Fite-Wassilak , Gallery Girl, Paul Gravett, Fiona He, Elaine W. Ho, Julia Marsh, Xiao Ouyang, Paul Pieroni, Mark Prince, Claire Rigby, Sherman Sam, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Xu Ya-Zhu, Clara Young, Xiaoying Juliette Yuan, Zoe Zhang Bing Contributing Artists / Photographers Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Till Janz

Vishwajyoti Ghosh (preceding pages)

A culture rooted in tradition as well as a rapidly growing economic power, India is facing many changes and challenges as it opens up to the modern world. As a political cartoonist based in New Delhi, producing until recently the weekly ‘Full Toss’ column in Hindustan Times, and as an acclaimed graphic novelist, Vishwajyoti Ghosh confronts these issues by engaging head-on with his nation’s history and society, past and present. In his most daring long-form project, Delhi Calm (2010), Ghosh blends more realistic reportage with incisive commentary and flights of surreal fantasy to capture those extraordinary 21 months (1975–7) of ‘the Emergency’, when the Indian government suspended citizens’ basic civil-rights and had many dissidents arrested. What motivated Ghosh was “precisely how little I knew about this important chapter”, and so it became his quest to decipher it. Delhi Calm reanimates this controversial period for those Indians who may have forgotten it, misremembered it or were simply too young to

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experience it, partly as a documentary about the past, partly as a warning about threats to freedoms today. In Ghosh’s view, “The world is leaning more towards the tight and cocooned conservatism, and India is no different.” Looking further back to learn from the past, for This Side That Side: Restorying Partition (2013) he selected 48 authors and artists from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to share their diverse perspectives about the traumatising and ongoing consequences of the partition of former British India into independent states. In choosing the participants, Ghosh’s goal was to “listen to the subsequent generations and the grandchildren and how they have negotiated maps that never got drawn”. The award-winning comics journalist Joe Sacco hailed the collection for the way it ‘dwells on the human yearning for something other than what history and its makers dictate’. Among Ghosh’s other projects are ‘Lingua Comica’ (of which I am artistic director), matchmaking seven Asian and seven European comics creators

into pairs to take part in a residency, cultural exchange and anthology; the Pao Collective, a group of five New Delhi cartoonists whose first anthology was released in 2012 by Penguin Books India; and Inverted Commas, an initiative to use comics as free publications or training materials in social campaigns, such as an Oxfam programme about domestic violence. India’s recent conservative furore over the morality of kissing in public was the target of the comic Miss the Kiss in The Indian Express. “This nonissue has become a national one, as if one’s social fabric is under threat,” comments Ghosh. “In a nation of a million problems, are these really issues worth fretting over?” More pressing, yet underreported, is the targeting by India’s liberal economy of the countryside’s untapped potential. In The Offer, his new strip for ArtReview Asia, Ghosh highlights how “brands are moving in deeper, connecting the rural masses to the global world. The word ‘rural’ now has sex appeal and the chase is on to corner this emerging market.” Paul Gravett

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Photo credits

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on the covers and on page 113 Ming Wong, photographed by Till Janz on pages 110 and 118 Photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam

Phrases on the spine and on pages 23, 39 and 91 are from How to Clean Everything, written by Alma Chesnut Moore and published in 1954 by T. Werner Laurie Ltd, London

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Off the Record Spring 2015 “Welcome to Kyzyl!” I shout out to the conference delegates ranged in front of me, adjusting the Katya Rozhdestvenskaya dress that a local supplier sorted me out with. “You might well ask… ermm…”, I continue, looking down at the scrap of paper I’ve torn out of The Moscow Times and trying desperately to remember where we are, “what are we doing here in the wide steppe of the Tuva Republic, surrounded by the taiga fauna of the Sayan Mountains to the north and deserts inhabited by camels to the south?” For a moment it looks like one of the Indigenous Australian artists who has come with the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art delegation is going to answer me, but it turns out he’s just fiddling with some sort of mechanical device he is holding. “Yes, is that Yang Fudong with his hand up for a question…?” I signal into the crowd, pretending to have seen the great artist. I nod at my imaginary questioner before answering, “Precisely, Mr Dong. We are here at the National Museum of the Republic of Tuva because Kyzyl has a strong claim to be the centre of Asia and we are all here for ‘Asia(?)’ the ArtReview Asia symposium sponsored by lvmh and Lidl…” But before I can finish my plenary speech, I realise far too late that the Indigenous Australian had in fact been preparing to fire a woomera, a traditional spear-throwing device. I black out from the impact. I start to come to, feeling distinctly groggy. It seems definitely warmer. “Take it easy, Gallery Girl,” a voice next to me intones. “You’ve been out for the count for 12 hours now. I thought spraying this fine mist of vodka and coconut water over you might wake you up. The crowd is awaiting your next thoughts on ‘Asia(?)’” My pleasant drift out of a semiconscious haze is rudely accelerated by the handsome bespectacled man with long sideburns tipping the rest of his drink over my head, before grabbing a fresh one from a passing waiter. “Phil Tinari?” I ask, but before the man can reply, an immaculately dressed Indian wearing Jimmy Choo crocodile-embossed leather high-top sneakers pokes me in the side. “Come on, Gallery Girl. So what is Asia? Jitish and I put together the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and it had nothing to do with Tuva and the ridiculous pissed-up Russian-Mongolian steppes scene that you insisted on taking us all to. That’s why we had to get the Aussie to knock you out and fly all of us over here.” I get up. “Where was I? And indeed, where am I? How did I get here?” The entire conference seems to have decamped to an infinity pool overlooking Singapore’s skyscrapers. “Asia. Yes, Asia!” I am seamlessly back in my stride. “Well of course, as the academic Benedict Anderson said, all communities are imagined, and I should imagine that basically we can lose Russia, because naughty Vlad isn’t the type of progressive Asian that we want.” Towards the shallow end of the infinity pool I see Kasper König and Maria Baibakova haul themselves out. König grabs his towel,

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flicks me what looks like a rude sign and strolls off wearing a pair of Vilebrequin mid-length printed swim shorts. The rest of the delegates whoop and jeer at them. Led by Jessica Morgan, the team from the Gwangju Biennale start up a football chant, “He’s big, he’s bad, he dances like my dad! Kasper König! Kasper König!” “And let’s get rid of Laos!” I yell, now back fully into the swing of things. The cheering dies down and is replaced by angry stares in my direction. Pearl Lam shouts at me: “Shame!” I realise I’ve put a foot wrong and need to make good. I form the Tony Blair two-hand gesture of compassion and forgiveness, holding both out in front of me with palms turned inwards. The crowd calms down. They still love Big Tony in these parts. “Let’s not talk about what we’re going to lose. Let’s talk about what Asia truly is.” I’ve won them back. Nicolas Bourriaud, his Taipei Biennial team and the staff of Scai the Bathhouse signal their approval with vigorous head nods and murmurs of assent. “As Rudyard Kipling said,” I continue, “‘Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is much too old.’ So let’s get this pool party started!” And with that I leap into the infinity pool and do two quick laps of butterfly before downing both mine and Phil Tinari’s coconut water confections in one swoop. G-Dragon’s Crayon is unleashed on the sound system. “Get your cray on!” I yell, and the delegates burst into wild applause and start dancing wildly. I’ve nailed it. The next speaker, Hans Ulrich Obrist, stares at me aggressively and I know he has realised that I’ve set the bar almost impossibly high. Gallery Girl

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35 Years of Art Travel www.turontravel.com 212.925.5453 / 800.952.7646

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