ArtReview Asia Spring 2016 by ArtReview

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Tatsuo Miyajima

SOIE DIOR COLLECTION

Yutaka Sone Kishio Suga Elmgreen & Dragset Dénoué Saphir necklace in white and yellow gold, diamonds, sapphire and emeralds.

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SOIE DIOR COLLECTION

Dénoué Saphir necklace in white and yellow gold, diamonds, sapphire and emeralds.

SOUS LE SIGNE DU LION BROOCH IN WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS

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THE ESTATE OF STEFAN BERTALAN MARTIN BOYCE DAVID CLAERBOUT MARTIN CREED RYAN GANDER FRANCESCO GENNARI DAN GRAHAM RODNEY GRAHAM ANDREW GRASSIE CANDIDA HÖFER MARTIN HONERT RAIMER JOCHIMS PRABHAVATHI MEPPAYIL THE ESTATE OF FLORIN MITROI YOSHITOMO NARA ROMAN ONDÁK ANRI SALA WILHELM SASNAL TINO SEHGAL WIEBKE SIEM JEFF WALL LIU YE — JOHNEN GALERIE MARIENSTRASSE 10 D – 10117 BERLIN WWW.JOHNENGALERIE.DE

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

APRIL 2016 MILANO PALAZZO BELGIOIOSO NEW OPENING MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS A SECOND EXHIBITION SPACE IN MILANO.

2009 LONDON

OLIVIER MOSSET, UNTITLED, 1987, ACRILIC ON CANVAS, 132 X 216 CM

ROB PRUITT, SAFE AND WARM, 2009, GLITTER AND ENAMEL ON CANVAS, 183 X 138 CM (DETAIL)

PALAZZO BELGIOIOSO, MILAN0, PHOTO BY GIOVANNA SILVA

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MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS HIS GALLERY IN LONDON WITH AN EXHIBITION BY ROB PRUITT.

1987 MILANO MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS HIS FIRST GALLERY IN MILANO WITH AN EXHIBITION BY OLIVIER MOSSET.

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New York

ParIs

hoNG koNG

909 Madison avenue

76 rue de turenne

50 connaught road central

errÓ “Paintings froM 1959 to 2016” 1 March - 23 aPril

JeNs FÄNGe “the hours Before” 5 March - 16 aPril

Park seo-Bo “ecriture” 21 March - 5 May

BerNard FrIZe “dawn coMes uP so young” 3 May - 1 july

JohN heNdersoN 5 March - 16 aPril

CheN ke 11 May - 18 june

heINZ MaCk curated By Matthieu Poirier 23 aPril - 4 june

klara krIstalova 11 May - 18 june

Park seo-Bo “Ecriture(描法)No.130603”, 2013. Acrylic with Korean Hanji Paper on canvas. 170 x 230 cm / 66 15/16 x 90 9/16 inches

Kerlin Gallery Art Basel Hong Kong

Hall 1C, Booth 11 22–26 March 2016

Dorothy Cross Liam Gillick Isabel Nolan Jan Pleitner Sean Scully

Sean Scully Resistance and Persistence Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts 8 April – 8 May Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou 6 September – 9 October Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan 10 January – 12 March 2017

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MICHAËL BORREMANS MARK MANDERS

ZENO X GALLERY ART BASEL HONG KONG

YAYOI KUSAMA GIVE ME LOVE

Published by David Zwirner Books Text by Akira Tatehata Poem by Yayoi Kusama Hardcover, 10 x 12 in (25 x 30 cm) 120 pages, 50 color plates davidzwirnerbooks.com

ArtReview Asia vol 4 no 2 2016

Time to put up or… Some of you will be in Hong Kong when you’re reading this. And as you leaf through ArtReview Asia’s Previews section, you may well get the impression that right now, all roads in this vast continent lead to the city where the annual Art Basel Hong Kong fair has become something of a sun around which all the Asian art-planets orbit. There’s no denying that a lot is going on in Hong Kong this March. But ultimately art is not something that only exists over a few days of art fair craziness. In this issue we look at what makes the rise of interest in the Japanese artists grouped under the Mono-ha banner an opportunity to reconsider the discourse that surrounds the work of one of its most prominent proponents, Kishio Suga, and to connect it to current anxieties around man’s relationship to the environment. Sticking to the theme of the ways in which contemporary art engages with the word, we also consider the work of Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, which will shortly be on show as part of this year’s Biennale of Sydney, and how it attempts to understand the role of the individual and the collective within the meta-narratives of global socioeconomics. In the end, however, we return to the structure of art fairs, via Elmgreen & Dragset’s project for this issue, an extension of their current exhibition at the UCCA in Beijing, which coopts the installation conventions of the global art fair (art viewed in labelled booths) for the presentation of a survey of their works. If that says something about the ubiquity of the art fair as a condition for viewing new art and marks the decision by a pair of artists to engage with and comment on its structures, ArtReview Asia is excited to announce that later this year it will be doing the same. While ArtReview Asia may, occasionally, complain about the effect of fairs in compressing viewing time and space, and for promoting the business of art over the appreciation and discussion of art, ArtReview Asia is also not unaware of the importance of art fairs in contributing to widening an interest in art and being a structure that’s a part of art’s engagement with the world, as this month’s cover shows. It’s also committed to acting rather than simply criticising from the sidelines. So this November ArtReview Asia will be collaborating with the West Bund Art & Design fair in Shanghai to produce Xiàn Chǎng, a series of special projects by leading artists from around the world located inside and outside the West Bund Art Center. More details will be announced over the coming months. And it looks forward to seeing you there. ArtReview Asia

No more standing on the sidelines

Dexter Dalwood 22 March – 25 April 2016 Hong Kong

simonleegallery.com

Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 27

Points of View by Hu Fang, Dean Kissick, Hyunjin Kim & Mark Rappolt 39

page 36 Liu Chuang, Untitled (Dancing Partner), 2010, video, 5 min 15 sec. Courtesy OCAT Shenzen

Spring 2016

Art Featured

Kishio Suga by Taro Nettleton 50

Picnic in Carrara: Yutaka Sone invites Luc Tuymans and Rirkrit Tiravanija by Donatien Grau 67

Karen Mirza and Brad Butler by Stephanie Bailey 56

The Making of a Fair by Elmgreen & Dragset 79

Adrian Cheng by Aimee Lin 62

page 67 Yutaka Sone, Picnic in Carrara, 2015. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York & London, and Tommy Simoens, Antwerp

ArtReview Asia

Art Reviewed

Tadanori Yokoo, by Joshua Mack Song Yige, by Matthew McLean Maria Taniguchi, by Ming Lin

Exhibitions 96 Sous la Lune, by Adeline Chia Vandy Rattana, by Vera Mey aaajiao, by Edward Sanderson Peepshow, by Li Bowen Yeh Wei-Li, by Stephanie Bailey Thinking Tantra, by Niru Ratnam Discordant Harmony, by Dean Kissick Ken Kagami, by Dean Kissick Seoul Babel, by Tiffany Chae Heri Dono, by Sherman Sam A Fact Has No Appearance: Art Beyond the Object, by Mark Rappolt Ni Youyu, by Aimee Lin White Cube... Literally, by Kevin Jones Corruption: Everybody Knows…, by Ming Lin

Books 114 25 Years of The Substation: Reflections on Singapore’s First Independent Art Centre, edited by Audrey Wong Entry Points: The Vera List Center Field Guide on Art and Social Justice, No. 1, edited by Carin Kuoni and Chelsea Haines Avant-Garde Museology, edited by Arseny Zhilyaev Kathmandu: Lessons of Darkness, by Martino Nicoletti THE STRIP 118 OFF THE RECORD 122

page 102 Claudia Wieser, Untitled, 2015, ink, colour pen on wood, dimensions variable. Courtesy Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

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gallerY arTiSTS anna & bernharD blume Daniel buren laWrence carrOll TOnY cragg The eSTaTe OF marTin DiSler alberTO garuTTi Zaha haDiD raFFi KalenDerian

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WOlFgang laib TaTSuO miYaJima will present

TaTSuO miYaJima

Time Waterfall, a new largescale

Wilhelm munDT

light installation, across the entire

beTTina POuSTTchi

façade of Hong Kong’s 490 meter

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high ICC Tower. Each night from

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21 to 26 March.

William TucKer laWrence Weiner clare WOODS

buchmann galerie berlin charlottenstrasse 13

10969 berlin

www.buchmanngalerie.com

info@buchmanngalerie.com

t+49 (0)30 258 999 29

f+49 (0)30 258 999 39

Art Previewed

This is specially designed auspicious item to rectify the Five Yellow Killings, Tai Sui Killings and Three Killings 25

ART CENTRAL 2016 23 - 26 MAR 2016 Booth C10

Tamen, Three Realms, Oil on canvas,125 x 200 cm, 2016

Art+ Shanghai Gallery, 191 South Suzhou Road 200 002 Shanghai, China +86 21 6333 7223 / contact@artplusshanghai.com www.artplusshanghai.com

Previewed Roppongi Crossing 2016: My Body, Your Voice Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 26 March – 10 July Setouchi Triennale Various venues, Setonaikai, Japan 20 March – 6 November Tatsuo Miyajima ICC Building, Hong Kong 21–26 March Art Basel Hong Kong 24–26 March Wu Tsang Spring Workshop, Hong Kong 12 March – 22 May Afterwork Para Site, Hong Kong 19 March – 29 May Hack Space K11 Art Foundation Pop-up Space, Hong Kong 21 March – 24 April

Guan Xiao Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 20 April – 19 June Bentu: Chinese Artists at a Time of Turbulence and Transformation Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris through 2 May Yan Pei-Ming Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong 22 March – 22 May

Sàn Art Laboratory Session 8 Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City 10 May– 16 July M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art Mobile M+ at ArtisTree, Hong Kong through 5 April Ocean Leung Things That Can Happen, Hong Kong through 17 April Wang Yahui TKG+, Taipei 23 April – 5 June

Shahzia Sikander Asia Society, Hong Kong 16 March – 9 July

Landscape of Events: Another Land Art OCAT Shenzhen 20 March – 26 June

Nasreen Mohamedi Met Breuer, New York 18 March – 5 June Koki Tanaka Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, Japan Through 15 May Shinro Ohtake Take Ninagawa, Tokyo 14 May – 2 July

Ryoichi Kurokawa FACT, Liverpool 11 March – 12 June The Propeller Group Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis through 3 April

Shigeo Anzaï White Rainbow, London 17 May – 18 June

20th Biennale of Sydney Various venues 18 March – 5 June

21 The Propeller Group, Fusion (After a Universe of Collisions) (still), 2015, HD video, colour, silent, 4 min 5 sec. Courtesy the artists and James Cohan, New York

Spring 2016

ArtReview Asia’s name is a bit of a giveaway: it loves anything Asian. That’s why, only a few days ago, during a brief lull between parts two and three of Romance of The Three Kingdoms, it was reading the latest email shot from LondonLovesBusiness.com which pimped its feature on ‘Asia’s top 10 richest billionaires and crazy facts about them’. At number two is Alibaba’s Jack Ma – he was rejected by Harvard University 10 times! Isn’t life crazy? Meanwhile at number four is Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia – he once sued Forbes in London for underestimating his wealth back in 2013. He lost the case. Ker-ay-zeee! Like all the best marketeers, the Mori Art Museum has deployed a photograph of an attractive lady in her underwear (Katayama Mari, you’re mine #001, 2014) to promote their big event: the fifth edition of the triennial weighing up of the latest developments

1 in the Japanese artscene, Roppongi Crossing. The work is a self-portrait in which the paleskinned artist, wearing white undergarments, light-gray stockings and bright-red lipstick, sprawls across a white bed, at once alluring and aloof. Look more closely, however, and you notice that the stockings end rather abruptly. There’s no left foot and nothing beyond Katayama’s right knee. If she were allowed access to its keyboard, this is exactly the point at which ArtReview Asia’s neighbour would interject to say that the photograph summarises all that’s wrong with art today: it never gives you the full picture. She’d be wrong, not just because Roppongi Crossing aims at giving a comprehensive survey of the state of Japanese society and art today (artists from Taiwan and South Korea also feature, courtesy of Kim Sunjung, director of Samuso and curator of Art Sonje Center, Seoul and Wu Dar-Kuen, director

of Taipei Artist Village, who have joined Mori’s Araki Natsumi and Arts Initiative Tokyo’s Ozawa Keisuke to curate the show), but also because its overarching themes of the status of the body and self-identity in the age of proliferating virtual communication are ones that affect image-making everywhere right now. Communication of a different sort also 2 grounds this year’s Setouchi Triennale, which takes place across the 12 islands of Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, long an important transport nexus, and home to a series of unique cultures and lifestyles, many of which are in decline in the face of everyone’s contemporary bête noire – globalisation. No surprise then that cultural exchange forms one of the festival’s key themes. Alongside local foods and celebrations, look out for work by Japanese art and architecture stars such as Tadao Ando, Nobuyoshi Araki, Chiharu Shiota, Kazuyo Sejima, Kohei Nawa, Hiroshi

1 Katayama Mari, you’re mine #001, 2014, lambda print, 105 × 162 cm. Courtesy Traumaris Space, Tokyo

2 Tatsuo Miyajima, Sea of Time’98, 1998. Photo: Kenichi Suzuki. Courtesy Benessee Art Site, Kadoya Art House, Naoshima

ArtReview Asia

4 Wu Tsang, Duilian (production still), 2016. Photo: Ringo Tang. Courtesy the artist; Spring Workshop, Hong Kong; and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

3 ICC Tower, Hong Kong

Sugimoto and Mariko Mori alongside works by Apparently he has one of the world’s fastest Tobias Rehberger, James Turrell, Janet Cardiff elevators to take him up there. And perhaps like and George Bures-Miller, Pipilotti Rist, and a certain celebrated loony confectioner he can Christian Boltanski. additionally press a special button and make This issue’s cover artist Tatsuo Miyajima his lift burst out of the roof and take him to the has taken over a 200-year-old abandoned house Seto Sea. Now that would be crazy… on Naoshima as part of the project, replacing A thirst for profit may have been central its floor with a dark pool of water and 125 of to Li Ka-shing’s rise to the top of both the Asia his trademark digital counters. So you’ll have billionaires list and the Hong Kong skyline, the perfect excuse to indulge in a little ‘compare but when it comes to art it’s the city’s not-forand contrast’ if you pop over to the Japanese profit spaces that tend to lead the way. This 3 islands once you’ve seen his Time Waterfall (2016), March, Spring Workshop presents the premiere which will cover the facade of the Hong Kong 4 of Los Angeles-based Wu Tsang’s film installaConvention Centre with a series of cascading tion Duilian (2016), the culmination of a decadenumbers as part of this year’s Art Basel Hong long research project into Chinese revolutionary Kong. Li Ka-shing, Asia’s fifth richest bonkers poet Qiu Jin (who was beheaded for attempted billionaire will almost certainly be looking out insurrection against the Qing empire at the towards the Convention Centre from the private beginning of the twentieth century) and her pool outside his office on the 70th floor of calligrapher friend Wu Zhiying. Promising to the Cheung Kong Center over in Admiralty. fuse documentary, magical realism and martial

Spring 2016

arts, the film element of Duilian aims at exploring the relationship between Qiu Jin (played by performance-artist boychild) and the community of strong women (‘The Mutual Love Society’) that surrounded her after she had left her husband to study in Japan, all part of Wu Tsang’s ongoing investigation of invisible, historical and mythological queer histories in Asia. Duilian is one result of Spring’s residency programme and this season it’s also hosting Indonesian architect Farid Rakun (education coordinator of artist initiative Ruangrupa) and Filipina street photographer Xyza Cruz Bacani. For almost a decade, Bacani was a domestic worker for a Chinese family in Hong Kong. For the last four years of that period she used her only day off to shoot black-and-white photographs of the city’s streetlife on a digital camera bought with a loan from her employers. Some of those photographs will be on show

5 in Afterwork, a major group exhibition at another

whose K11 Artspace will team up with London’s is going to be interested in that; Xiaomi started of Hong Kong’s not-for-profits – Para Site. Part 6 Serpentine Galleries to present Hack Space, off as a manufacturer of what MIT’s Technology of an ongoing research project into Hong Kong’s an extension of the latter institution’s recent Review described as ‘cut-price Apple’ phones; domestic workers (most often seen occupying exhibition of work by New Zealander Simon now it is one of the leaders in the development the city’s public spaces for communal picnics Denny. The London show, Products for Organising, of an ‘Internet of things’. Crazily, Lei invested on Sundays) the exhibition engages with them featured a variety of media, trade-fair styling, in over 20 start-ups in 2015 and then announced as a means of understanding Hong Kong’s wider and merged a history of hacking and its organiplans to invest in 100 more. No info as yet as to community in the light of issues of migration, sational forms with contemporary management whether or not young artists count as start-ups. representation, discrimination and the generally and marketing practices. The Hong Kong extenWhen it comes to the Chinese artscene, one shifting notion of Hong Kong citizenship. 7 of the more bankable of its young artists, Guan sion, curated by the Serpentine’s Hans Ulrich Alongside Bacani’s photographs, look out for Obrist and Amira Gad, in which Denny will be Xiao (observant readers will have noticed that work by last year’s Hugo Boss Asia Art Awardjoined by 11 Chinese artists, including aaajiao, she graced the cover of the last issue of ArtReview winner Maria Taniguchi and Indonesian perforCao Fei and Zhai Liang, promises to push Asia’s magazine – which is obviously why her mance artist Melati Suryodarmo, as well as Denny’s exploration into the world of shanzhai work is so bankable), will be in London this Chilean artist-architect Alfredo Jaar and the culture (which refers to the Chinese production April, when her first solo show in the UK opens late, great German filmmaker Harun Farocki. of imitation or trademark-infringing products, at the capital’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. It’s all a far cry from the commercial hubbub mainly in the electronics industry). Let’s anticGuan’s work, which revolves primarily around surrounding Art Basel Hong Kong. ipate that China’s Lei Jun (cofounder of Xiaomi sculpture and video, explores digital image One Hong Kong entrepreneur who is Inc, the world’s third-largest smartphone circulation as an increasingly dominant source investing in the local artscene is Adrian Cheng, maker), Asia’s tenth most wealthy billionaire, of knowledge and identity formation, and

5 Xyza Cruz Bacani, keep reaching for your dreams. Courtesy Para Site, Hong Kong

6 Simon Denny, Formalised Org Chart/Architectural Model: GCHQ 1, 2015, mixed media, 200 × 215 × 100 cm. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin & Cologne

7 Guan Xiao, Action, 2014. Courtesy Guan Xiao and Antenna Space, Shanghai

ArtReview Asia

8 Yang Fudong, The Coloured Sky: New Women II, 2014, video installation, 15 min 48 sec. Photo: Aurélien Mole. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London; ACMI, Melbourne; and Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tāmaki

9 Yan Pei-Ming, Young Egon Schiele with palette (detail), 2016, oil on canvas, 130 × 100 cm. © the artist and Adagp, Paris, 2016

10 Shahzia Sikander, Parallax (still), 2013, three-channel HD digital animation with 5.1 surround sound, 15 min. Music by Du Yun. © Shahzia Sikander Studio. Courtesy Asia Society, Hong Kong & New York

the consequent collapse of ideas of new and old, present and past, and less directly hints at the consequences of that. If that sounds like it might be a further extension of the themes of Hack Space, then you won’t be surprised to hear that her show is also supported by Cheng’s K11 Foundation. And Guan isn’t the only Chinese artist making her presence felt in Europe over the next few months. A short train ride beneath the English Channel will lead you to Paris’ Fondation Louis 8 Vuitton, where Bentu: Chinese Artists at a Time of Turbulence and Transformation, the first group show in the French capital to be devoted to contemporary Chinese art in a decade, is currently on view. Featuring 12 artists – among them Cao Fei (see the March issue of ArtReview), Lui Wei and Yang Fudong – representing a range of styles, backgrounds and generations, the exhibition centres on the themes of flux and

of work by Dijon-based Shanghai-born painter change (and oppositions such as technology versus tradition, economy versus ecology and 9 Yan Pei-Ming. Yan (who trained in France) is best-known for his large, mainly monocity versus country), with which, at this stage or duochrome (often black-and-white or red) in the preview, a reader will have started to portraits of key figures from the cultural histobecome rather familiar. In case we forget, the ries of both China and the West (Pablo Picasso, foundation’s description of the show reminds us that ‘questions of identity are also a recurring Barack Obama, Bruce Lee and Mao Zedong) theme’, and while China might be the show’s that, as a result of his deployment of big, ostensible geographic arena for that, there’s gestural brushstrokes (or sometimes broomno escaping the fact that many of these issues strokes), often play with perceptions of are also driving Europe’s present uncertainties abstraction and figuration. about its political and economic future. Different strokes for different folks, and And yet, if Europe in general (and the at the opposite end of the scale when it comes United Kingdom in particular) seems largely 10 to painting technique is Pakistan-born Shahzia to be interested in contracting and reinforcing Sikander, whose work draws on Indo-Persian its borders, one of its bigger commercial galminiature painting. Her exhibition at Asia leries, Massimo De Carlo, is going the other Society’s Hong Kong outpost (last summer she way – adding to its Milan and London outposts won one of the Society’s awards for ‘Significant by opening a new space in Hong Kong’s Pedder Contribution to Asian Art’, in part because she Building, to be inaugurated with an exhibition is credited with reviving interest in miniature

ArtReview Asia

painting in her home country) promises to explore the colonial complexity of Hong Kong in a series of works on paper and animations. Given the subject matter (and title) of the exhibition it’s perhaps fitting that it takes place in a former explosives magazine. From the north of South Asia to the south, and from the miniature to minimalism: the 11 work of the late Nasreen Mohamedi, a pioneer of the move away from figuration and one of the major artistic figures of post-independence India, is the subject of a retrospective exhibition 12 at the new Met Breuer (formerly home to the Whitney Museum of American Art) in New York. Including 130 drawings and photographs as well as the Indian artist’s rarely seen diaries, her first such exhibition in the US aims at revealing the cosmopolitan nature of her source materials and her move into abstraction and explorations of that classic modernist format, the grid. Beyond

the merits of Mohamedi’s work, the show is, instructions being followed), the show also of course, symptomatic of the current obsession includes a new work derived from video footage with internationalising the story of modernism of a six-day communal lodging (of exhibition and, more generally, defining contemporary participants, facilitators and video crews) and art as a truly global phenomenon. Cynics might workshops on an isolated mountain. Activities say that it also reflects the rise of Asian millionincluded reading, cooking and making pottery, aires (potential sponsors and benefactors – this as well as plenty of discussions on social intershow is supported by Nita and Mukesh Ambani; action and communal living. What does all that the latter runs India’s second most valuable mean? ‘I was there, you were there, and none company, going on market valuation). of us know what it means yet,’ says the artist in But ArtReview Asia would never say that! typically cryptic fashion. But what’s clear is that Alternative perspectives also feature in exploring the potentials (and pitfalls) of trust Possibilities of Being Together. Their Praxis, Koki together with an openness to new and looser Tanaka’s survey show at Art Tower Mito. As possibilities of living in post-Fukushima Japan well as featuring the research on collaboration remains among the artist’s ongoing concerns. and social conditioning that preceded and Just as open-minded but arguably less followed his breakthrough exhibition in the abstract are the assemblages, paintings and 13 collages of Shinro Ohtake, who, since his first Japanese Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale (which featured a number of instructional exhibitions during the early 1980s, has become works together with documentation of the one of the key figures in recent Japanese art.

12 Koki Tanaka, Provisional Studies: Workshop #4 Possibilities for being together. Their configuration (production still), 2015–16, six-day communal retreat with workshops, video documentation. Courtesy Art Tower Mito

11 Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, c. 1975, ink and graphite on paper, 51 × 71 cm. Sikander and Hydari Collection. Courtesy Met Breuer, New York

13 Shinro Ohtake, Time Memory 11, 2011, oil, tar, ink, pencil, glue, printed matter, rice paper, wrapping paper, recycled paper, brown paper and cardboard, 100 × 70 cm. Courtesy Take Ninagawa, Tokyo

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15 Dara Kong, 2016, sketch. Courtesy the artist and Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City

14 Shigeo Anzaï, Yayoi Kusama, Okhurayama, Yokohama, October 1986, 1986. Courtesy the artist, Zeit-Foto and White Rainbow, London

Ohtake began making a series of scrapbooks in 1977, which incorporate found objects, comics, personal mementos and the artist’s own drawings into books that can be hundreds of glue- and paint-encrusted pages long and that, like diaries, reflect the artist’s thoughts, emotions and geographical location over time. At Take Ninagawa he’ll be showing new works from his related Time Memory (2011–15) series, for which the artist collages and weaves the letters, leaflets and other printed matter that flops through his letterbox as, in his words, a ‘material substitute for time’: appropriately then the results often echo the abstract grids of modernist architectures. Are they becoming smaller or less dense as the world switches to DMS and email? This is your chance to find out. Time past is also the focus of Index II, photo14 grapher Shigeo Anzaï’s second exhibition with London’s White Rainbow. The first focused on

his documentation of the 10th Tokyo Biennale residency ‘Laboratory’ programme, which (which took place in 1970 and has also been offered a non-commercial environment for the subject of works by Koki Tanaka, displayed experimentation to artists who were under at last year’s Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival 40 and from the Southeast Asia region, while of Contemporary Art); this exhibition moves the promoting international exchange along story on by featuring Anzaï’s portraits of artists the way. The announcement comes after three he had met during the biennial and the years proposed exhibitions were not able to gain a that followed when he travelled in Europe license and a warning from the Cultural Police and the US. His subjects range from Bridget not to host an artist talk ‘due to foreign attend15 ance’. All of that means that the Laboratory Riley and Andy Warhol to Yayoi Kusama and Damien Hirst, but more importantly trace Session 8 exhibition, which features new a network of relationships across the internawork by Questal Tay (Singapore), Nguyen tional artscene of the late twentieth century, Quoc Dung (Daklak, Vietnam) and Dara Kong and the importance of major art events (such (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), explores issues of as Documenta or the Venice Biennale) as transgenderism and the preservation of mema forum in which artists can exchange ideas. ory, and connects William Blake to the environThat sort of behaviour, however, is not ment around Sàn Art, will be the last. currently encouraged in Vietnam, where What with its recent case of disappearing Ho Chi Minh City nonprofit Sàn Art recently booksellers, it seems as if things are getting announced the cessation of its studio and tougher in the freedom-of-speech stakes in

Spring 2016

17 Courtesy Ocean Leung and Things That Can Happen, Hong Kong

16 Zhang Huan, To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, 1995, chromogenic colour print, 69 × 104 cm. M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. Courtesy the artist and West Kowloon Cultural District Authority

18 Wang Yahui, Through the Deep Woods, the Slanting Sunlight Casts, 2016, digital print on paper, 90 × 90 cm. Courtesy the artist and TKG+, Taiwan

Hong Kong as well. There, M+, the city’s much and a government’s desire for sociopolitical anticipated museum of visual culture, also control to be on view. seems to be having a few issues following the It’s precisely art’s place in that equation 19 decision of director Lars Nittve not to renew his that Kowloon not-for-profit Things That Can contract at the end of last year. That doesn’t stop Happen has set out to explore over its projected the museum’s pre-opening programming from two-year programme. Currently in residence rolling on though and the tenth edition of its 17 is Ocean Leung, whose previous works explore Mobile M+ programme (on show at the Artis agriculture and activism through the medium Tree space – its website explains the pun – at of film, and who will use Things That Can Taikoo Place) celebrates one of the institution’s Happen as a residence and workshop further most important benefactors, Swiss collector to explore Hong Kong’s socioeconomic realities. Uli Sigg, part of whose comprehensive collecReality of a different sort is explored in the 18 work of Taiwanese artist Wang Yahui, whose tion of Chinese art is now in the museum’s 16 holdings. The M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades often achingly beautiful kinetic installations, of Chinese Contemporary Art covers the past 40 projections and digital prints are on show at years of Chinese art arranged in three chapters TKG+, the Taipei-based contemporary platform and features everyone from Ai Weiwei to of Tina Keng Gallery. Her work aims at explorZheng Ziyan – expect further evidence of art’s ing the dimensions of time and space, and 20 position in the relationship between freedom the relationship between human and natural

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existence in their manifestations through light and shadow. Landscape too plays a role in OCAT Shenzhen’s The Landscape of Events: Another Land Art, curated by its recently appointed artistic director Venus Lau, which takes as a starting point the emergence of Land Art in the US and simultaneous invocation of the land as the class-flattening ‘capital’ of China’s Cultural Revolution. The exhibition includes works by the ubiquitous Cao Fei, as well as Colin Siyuan Chinnery, Li Jinghu, Lin Yilin, Liu Chuang, Liu Wei, Wang Jianwei, Xu Qu, Xu Tan, Zhang Liaoyuan, Zheng Guogu and, Zhuang Hui, and will undoubtedly touch on issues of the anthropocene and current understandings of ‘the land’ in China. From the earth to the skies and Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa who takes things to an even more fundamental level in unfold,

a new commission for Liverpool-based FACT. fired from a Russian AK-47 and an American An audio-visual installation that uses 3D M16 using high speed cameras. Set against representations of space to explore how stars a black background, the event, which looks are formed in a molecular cloud, unfold exploits something like what one might imagine the Kurokawa’s background in both electronic Big Bang to have been, is posed as a memory music and art to offer an immersive environof the Vietnam War and the ideological conment that operates somewhere between artistic frontation of Communism and Capitalism, production and scientific demonstration. complete with lingering shots of the debris Physics and cosmic imagery also plays going everywhere. It’s completed by the text 21 a role in The Propeller Group’s first public of a poem by Kansas-City-based José Faus that’s art commission, a video (drawn from the superimposed over the footage of the collision. multipart 2015 project A Universe of Collisions) Finally, and talking of going everywhere, that is currently on view on the facade of the March sees the opening of Australia’s largest Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, from 22 contemporary art event, the 20th Biennale dusk until midnight. Inspired by an artefact of Sydney. It’s titled The Future is Already Here – two bullets that had collided mid-air – – It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed, a quotation of discovered on a US Civil War battlefield, the a phrase coined by 1990s sci-fi superstar William Vietnamese cross-disciplinary group have Gibson, so you won’t be surprised to know filmed the moment of impact between bullets that one of the primary points of engagement

for the show is the interface between the real and the digital and its effects. Indeed, if you’ve read through the rest of ArtReview Asia’s previews, you’ll be well aware that this is one of the issues du jour. Curated by Hayward Gallery chief curator Stephanie Rosenthal, the event is spread across seven ‘Embassies of Thought’, boasts 13 curatorial ‘Attachés’ and works by over 80 artists, many of which – including Heman Chong, Lee Mingwei, Charles Lim, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, and Chim Pom’s Don’t Follow the Wind project – you’ll be awesomely familiar with from recent issues of ArtReview Asia. So, if you’re not a billionaire, get saving for the ticket to Australia, in any case get packing, as you’ll want to exploit this opportunity to showoff your amazing art knowledge. Boychild will be there to perform on the opening night. Nirmala Devi

20 Ryoichi Kurokawa, galaxy collision image based on scientific data from CEA Paris-Saclay. Courtesy the artist

19 Zheng Guogu, Unfinished Garden, 2004–, video installation. Courtesy the artist

22 boychild, Untitled, 2013, performance. Photo: Michael Moser. Courtesy Biennale of Sydney

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Points of View

How can I attest to you, at this point of complete despair, that the light of the world once beckoned to me? The Beheaded (1744–94) This is what historians call ‘a decisive moment’, or ‘humanity turning a new page of history’. At present, his head is in my hand, the crowd is cheering, each wave of sound is crashing louder than the last, a sweet smell is spreading through the air, and the noon sun is dazzling peoples’ eyes. I do as the crowd around the stage desires, once again thrusting the head towards them, and their screams grow more frenzied, pounding against my eardrums. Prior to the execution, I was notified that they had bound his long hair into a ponytail so that once the blade severed his neck I could quickly snatch up his head to show the crowd, bringing the victorious cheers to a climax. The great weight of unemployment has long since driven these young people to desperation. Now, looking up at this little head, they begin to turn, to sing, to dance, exploding with rare vitality, as if all the unfairness that suppresses this world had vanished into thin air the moment this person’s skull was separated from his spine. When we drew lots to see who would do it, I didn’t want it to be me; after all, we were still a little afraid of him. But after many years as a professional, I know enough to see it as a job that transcends my individual preferences. The people of this country who love him or hate him all knew that, when this moment came, there would be someone who had to do the job. All disembodied heads lower their eyes and rest in peace in the end, leaving behind us luckless bastards as we rush around the guillotine. Five minutes ago, I was still arranging his head so that the falling blade would cut his neck cleanly. When his head was resting tractably in my hand, it was hard to believe that it contained

head At the calm centre of a frenzied public execution, a new world is born by

Hu Fang thoughts of harming and enslaving people. I was afraid that he would cry out in fear, which would have been awkward. But he remained silent throughout, which may be the greatest show of respect to an executioner. Or was it a show of disdain? Yet the crowd continues to cheer, their deafening chants magnifying their discontent, their countless heads undulating like grass floating on the surface of a river, rippling against the stage where I stand. The head in my hand seems to shake with the motion of the crowd – or perhaps it is simply my hand that is shaking. Surely there is some sort of mutually reactive, mutually attractive force between a knife edge and a person’s head. Just in the moment he attempted to lift his head, the blade leapt toward him, and in an instant, his head left his body. I am certain that only a mutual attraction of such strength and speed ensures that the blade causes no pain, and allows no slight hesitation that would freeze the facial expression of the head’s owner in anguish. Suddenly, I feel an extraordinary sense of emptiness, the way you might feel as you looked at one’s pallid limbs after the blood had stopped flowing. The emptiness joins the increasingly scorching noon heat to sink my mind into chaos

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and anxiety: perhaps such a joyous crowd will no longer require such consummate beheading skill. As they see it, the moment of his decapitation marked the birth of a new world, and other than that, there’s nothing else that they need. In order to better satisfy their needs, I fling the head into the air. The solitary head traces a graceful arc through the sky like a meteor before falling into the dense crowd of people. Countless hands reach up to catch it and toss it back into the air. It flies from one corner of the square to another as they toss it back and forth. It rises and falls, as if, prior to smashing this container of so many evil desires, everybody wants to fully enjoy its last moment of completeness. Finally, as the head once again falls towards the earth, the crowd around it coincidentally disperses. It crashes inevitably to the ground with a blunt sound that fills the momentary silence, and blood sprays out from it, just like the creature in Alien, which, on the brink of death, sprays corrosive acid out at the world. Then the world returns to its ordinary rhythms, and nobody in the crowd has any further interest in his remains. As they tread through his brains, they are already hoisting a new leader aloft. All the muscles of my body tense up as if to warn me against jumping down to join their alluring revelry. I feel glad for my cloak and mask, which make me look like someone who doesn’t exist, someone nobody would want to know or be close to. I turn away and meticulously clean the slightly worn, slanted blade. I store it away to await its next use. I carefully retain the remaining blood for clients who might want it. There will always be plenty of market demand, enough to help me pay some family expenses, help me get back to normal. Although my hands have held countless heads aloft, they can still embrace my wife, feel the warmth and softness of her skin, her head pressed tightly against my chest like God’s greatest gift. Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

At the beginning of this year I travelled to Japan for my grandfather’s 100-Day Ceremony (a remembrance service that occurs according to Buddhist custom 100 days after a cremation), which took place in a nondescript building, of the type that would usually be filled with offices, close to the centre of Yokohama. On the first floor was a reception and a shop selling funerary accessories, on the second was a hall and on the third, contained within one large room, was a traditionally decorated Buddhist temple where the prayers took place. On the fourth and fifth floors (and also underneath the building, but that part was hidden) was a mechanised columbarium: a structure used to house urns of funerary ashes. In Japan these places are known as nokotsudo (‘bone-receiving hall’) or, more recently, ohaka no manshon (‘house of ghosts’). After the ceremony, the urn containing my grandfather’s bones was brought into a room on the fourth floor of the columbarium, a modern space with white marble-effect walls and polished black granite surfaces, and two rows of five mourning spaces, each partitioned off by a curved sheet of opaque glass engraved with flowers. Behind one of these the priest placed my grandfather’s urn inside its tomb – a small, rectangular steel box lined with foam, with space for my grandmother one day too – and with the push of a button he sent it through the wall and down into the underground vault where it will hopefully reside, intermittently, for eternity. Intermittently because we can return to this room anytime, to any of its ten mourning spaces, and with a swipe of our contactless identification card the tomb will be conveyed back up to us. Hidden behind the walls of this building is a sort of vast automated hearse, interring and disinterring these miniature tombs with the same ease that the robots of the Amazon warehouse move around consumer electronics. The mechanised columbarium, like the modern museum, is a well-lit repository of carefully preserved memories. Visitors come to see only one object each, but will return to see it many times during their lives. Unless somebody has summoned your remains up from the ground to be remembered, they stay down there,

House of Ghosts Visiting his grandfather’s ashes in a mechanised columbarium in Yokohama, Dean Kissick finds a repository for metaphors of modern life (and museum-making)

Nokotsudo, Yokohama. Photo: the author

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inaccessible and out of sight, so there is privacy with this shared space; in the temple downstairs my grandmother mentioned how in Europe strangers are always walking over your grave – she was thinking of tombstones incorporated into the floors of cathedrals – and that she wouldn’t like that very much. Here the pristine spaces of commemoration resemble a sci-fi Mariko Mori installation, the shiny mourning spaces portals into the spirit world and the past. Thousands of strangers will come to reconnect with their personal histories and specific emotions – happiness, sadness, shame, regret – in a communal space serviced by robots. It really is an extraordinary setting. Hanging above four of its mourning spaces at a respectful remove are four white video cameras, allowing you to remotely summon your family tomb out of the ground and live-stream it to your computer. Thus the private act of commemoration can be performed virtually, which seems fitting for the age of assassination by drone, mass online outpourings of public grief over the death of a famous person and globalised video sex. So this is a building with an unusual relationship to different sorts of space. It has its architecture within architecture: the Buddhist temple in a room, where the company’s clean minimalism is dramatically abandoned in favour of a transcendent, spiritual atmosphere of golden walls, burning incense, ringing gongs and chanting. It has its thousands of tombs moving around one building, which is a neat solution to the conundrum of where to bury the dead in a country that lacks space, and has an ageing population and an enduring passion for technological innovation; the first mechanised columbarium was opened here in Yokohama, and others have followed across Japan and also in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Hong Kong has investigated following suit. Everything is so physically compact and yet because it is a moving columbarium and because its premises can be accessed virtually, the architecture allows the bridging of vast distances between the living and the spirit world, both literally and metaphorically. This really is a house of ghosts, and a glimpse of one possible future for death in our crowded cities.

That there is a degree of censorship (or a pressure not to show politically critical works) in the public art institutions of many Asian countries is no secret. Neither is this state of affairs only prevalent in developing countries whose systems of government fall short of democracy. In South Korea, a country that achieved enduring democracy about 25 years ago, following revolts against dictatorship and authoritarian regimes on several occasions in the latter part of the twentieth century (the April Revolution in 1960, the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and the June Democratic Uprising in 1987, to name a few), strong and irrational pressure is now brought to bear on the country’s museums and public institutions. During the autumn of 2014, following the April sinking of the Sewol ferry, Hong Sung-Dam, who had been a prominent member of the Minjung art movement during the 1980s, turned in a painting satirising the current president for an exhibition commemorating the 20th anniversary of Gwangju Biennale. Subsequently, the Biennale Foundation decided not to show the work, and both the curator in charge of the exhibition and the Biennale Foundation president, Lee Yong-woo, resigned. (In fact, there was another controversy around Hong Sung-Dam’s painting: politically radical artists and curators had hesitated to support him because they found it hard to defend his aesthetics and didactics. Yet when we hesitate to defend such obvious cases of censorship, it becomes harder to defend ourselves in more complicated circumstances.) In the past couple of years, cases of direct censorship or pressures of indirect censorship have drastically increased in Korea’s art and culture sectors. But an even greater problem is that recent cases of censorship have evolved to take on a preventive form, perhaps because the direct censorship of an artwork is more easily picked up by the media and the public, thus putting more strain on bureaucrats. Over the past several years the means of censorship of artworks have, broadly speaking, taken three forms: 1) direct censorship of the artwork, 2) sponsorship and funding, and 3) personnel. While the first case is a post-event procedure carried out normally by a conservative government or the bureaucrats governing public institutions in which the grounds for censorship are laid out clearly, the second and third cases are preventive, designed to eradicate controversial elements in advance of any ‘selection’ process. After the incident of censorship in Gwangju, the ‘preventive’ measures within art and culture funding organisations with a very strong affiliation with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST), including Arts Council Korea (ARKO), have come under

Self-censored Anticipating the government’s response to what art they plan to show is undermining rather than protecting South Korean museums, writes |curator Hyunjin Kim

above Hong Sung-Dam, Sewol Owol, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 250 × 1050 cm. facing page, bottom Ines Doujak, Not Dressed for Conquering, 2014 (installation view, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2015). Photo: Hans D. Christ. Courtesy the artist

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increasing scrutiny. Last autumn it was revealed, following widespread media coverage and a National Assembly inspection of ARKO, that a blacklist of artists, directors and writers who incorporate elements of, or metaphors for, a political agenda had been handed to the juries for selecting candidates for funding in the theatre and literature sectors. While the case of Hong Sung-Dam was an obvious instance of censorship, the blacklisting reveals that in reality the situation is even more critical. And the problem reaches yet another level when people decline to resist such pressures. The truth is that there are more curators and artists who make compromises or ‘practical’ decisions in the face of censorship and in full awareness of their colleagues’ difficult situations – which include recent cases of hardship, bullying, exclusion and even dismissal – than there are those who express solidarity with them. All of which gives more space for bureaucrats to see artists and curators as people who can be managed, ruled and tamed. Last November, at the annual conference of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM), held in Tokyo, three board members (Van Abbemuseum director Charles Esche; SALT director of exhibitions and programs Vasif Kortun; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art director Abdellah Karroum) resigned from the board, pointing out the inadequacies of CIMAM’s current president, Bartomeu Marí. In March, Marí had cancelled the exhibition The Beast and the Sovereign at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA, of which he was then the director), having deemed Austrian artist Ines Doujak’s work, which ridiculed former Spanish king Juan Carlos I, obscene. Following a worldwide controversy, he reopened the show and resigned from his post. This is what the three board members had to say: ‘We believe CIMAM’s main task today is to defend as much as is possible this space for debate and to set ethical standards of behaviour towards artists, curators and the public. The recent course of events at MACBA

and within the board at CIMAM have led us to doubt whether our current president can defend those values credibly. We therefore feel we have no option but to resign from the board as we no longer have confidence in how it represents the interests of CIMAM members.’ This happened right around the time when the news of Marí’s strong candidacy as director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul started to circulate. Artists and professionals in the field had issued a statement under the name of ‘Petition4Art’, expressing opposition to the appointment procedure and demanding that the MCST investigate the censorship controversy of its strongest candidate before going ahead with the appointment. The petition, which launched last November, garnered a total of 830 signatures; a second, started after Marí was appointed director, gained 550 (myself among the signees of both). Parallel to the petitions, individual artists organised an open forum, a series of one-man protests and a ‘poster relay’ (in which artists and designers collaborated on creating a series of protest posters), all of which drew a kind of attention to Korea’s normally reserved art scene that had not been present since the 1980s. As much as anything, this was surely a strong response to an accumulation of censorship issues and a communal objection to a bureaucracy that has managed and ruled, according to its own agendas, the field. The issue has also become a hot potato because the government’s operation of indirect censorship has been closely coupled with its management of major appointments in the art and culture fields. In mid-February, Yong-kwan Lee, director of the internationally acclaimed Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), was finally fired by Busan’s centre-right mayor after the BIFF team had rejected any censorship of screenings of Diving Bell: The Truth Shall Not Sink with Sewol (2014), a documentary film investigating the Korean government’s dysfunctional rescue attempts in the wake of a ferry disaster in which over 300 people died. Lee was under heavy

pressure to resign his position for a year before this dismissal, and his team faced prosecution on charges brought by Busan’s party. Recent appointments in other branches of visual art had also featured pro-government figures. Of course, Marí has worked for the past decades in the international art scene and is far from a conservative character. However, there were dubious points in the censorship controversy and the appointment process that resonate with other nominations of MCST figures. Out of ten or so applicants from the first round, Marí advanced to the second round alongside two relatively weak Korean candidates, and he was the only foreign candidate who went on to the final interview, despite the government’s full knowledge of his censorship issues. While there have been some artists from the older generation who expressed discontent at the prospect of a foreign director for the national museum, the majority consider the Korean art scene part of an international field. Suspicions have been further fuelled, however, by the revelation of a modification to the museum’s regulations, which now require MCST’s consent in a number of sectors that used to be the director’s domain. MCST did not respond to Petition4Art’s request for clarification on this point, but Marí sent an email in mid-November to explain it himself. Among the many points he offered in his defence, I found one especially perplexing: he argued that what had happened at MACBA had not been a case of censorship but of ‘a decision to protect the institution as a director’. Yet his explanation of the complicated local politics of Catalonia and the political tensions between the central and local governments sounds very familiar in the context of Seoul’s public institutions, which face a catch-22 situation between a conservative rightist central government and Seoul’s leftist local government. Over the past year, SeMA, the city museum in Seoul, has also suffered controversial cases of interference, modification or even withdrawal of work prior to exhibition openings. What we understood was that such cases mostly had occurred in order to avoid any kind of noise or bad attention to the city, as well as to protect the mayor’s next election run. Is it possible that the protection of the institution takes place

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without the close collaboration of governments or any power in politically precarious societies? What does the notion of the protection of the institution mean in a country or region where censorship is commonplace? Where does this kind of cooperation eventually end up? And does this way of protecting an institution help to sustain and develop a long-term artistic vision? Isn’t it nothing more than professional self-preservation? Unfortunately, as a result of the gap between current artistic practice and most Korean public institutions, many Korean artists do not consider such institutions as guardians of the art scene. There have only been a few cases over the past ten years or so in which field-friendly curators were appointed to direct such institutions, and when such cases did occur, the directors were mostly shunned, interrupted or even punished by bureaucrats. In our local context, an institution never gets ruined, and it never protects the vigorous artistic present in the sense of protecting the institution. But history does strive from time to time to remember those who have resisted. Bartomeu Marí also promised at the inauguration of his directorship to play an original and responsible role in the Korean art scene, emphasising that he won’t help any censorship, and I believe that his words and commitment will help him work with the local art community during his tenure. Considering the individuality and incompatibility of perspectives among different groups and generations, the unprecedented solidarity of more than 830 petitioners is, to say the least, significant to the scene. At the time of writing, Petition4Art is preparing a symposium scheduled for mid-March, as its final stage of activity.

Now in its third edition, which took place over a packed weekend this past February, the biennial Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) operates according to an unusual structure. Part biennale, part conference, part art fair, part research report, part collection of museumstyle exhibitions, part awards ceremony and yet at the same time not exactly any of those things, it took place in the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, the state-sponsored national academy of fine and performing arts, which for the four days of DAS’s occupation was transformed into something of a South Asian tower of art power. All that in a country that has only existed in its present configuration since 1971, following numerous massacres, widespread population displacement and a guerrilla war waged against the Pakistan Army. And in a city where poverty is evident, the roads are often gridlocked, certain trips around the city involve an armed escort and the local English-language newspaper suggests that you subscribe via your hawker, it can be hard for the visitor to understand how the development of a contemporary art scene is its inhabitants’ most pressing need. But if you wanted a reminder of the potential power of art, and of the political tensions still present in the country and the region that surrounds it, then the Chinese ambassador’s much-publicised opening-day ‘explosion’ at the sight of Dharamshala-based filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam’s Last Words (2015, part of a larger ongoing multimedia work titled Burning Against the Dying of the Light), featuring the last letters of five Tibetans (freely available online) who had self-immolated in protest against Chinese occupation of their country, gave an indication of that. Bangladesh is China’s third largest trade partner in South Asia and the latter a major supplier to the former’s military; the offending letters remained, but were subsequently covered by sheets of blank paper following the ambassador’s request for their removal. Perhaps the incident was also a reminder of the limits within which art operates. Ultimately though, most of art’s more interesting adventures involve a leap of faith. In this case, the jump has been taken by Nadia and Rajeed Samdani under the auspices of their privately run Samdani Art Foundation (founded in 2011), which spearheads the event and is working towards the opening of a permanent art centre in Sylhet, in the northeast of the country. Almost incredibly, DAS hosted six curated exhibitions, 13 new commissions, four artworks that had been reworked for the site, plus a constant stream of talks, conferences and film screenings over the course of the long weekend. Among the highlights were Rewind,

the power of art The biennial Dhaka Art Summit is widely hailed as one of the most important art events in South Asia. It certainly draws the crowds – of international art professionals and locals – but is it building a sustainable local art scene? As it grows in stature, Mark Rappolt takes a measure of its ambitions a show of rarely seen works produced by South Asian artists before 1980 and broadly reflecting the international spread and local adaptation of Modernism: a voguish theme right now that exposes the shared concerns of artists adopting a modernist language and the different reasons for their doing so. By way of example, the show featured one of two films (transferred to video) by Mumbai-based painter Akbar Padamsee. Syzygy (1969–70) is an extraordinary 11-minute black-and-white animation inspired by Paul Klee’s pedagogical drawings in which the Indian artist sets out a series of quasi-mathematical propositions that lie behind a series of geometrical line drawings, reflecting his notion that ‘you need the mind of a mathematician and poet put together to be a painter’. Next to Syzygy, Nalini Malani’s remarkable Utopia (1969–76) is a dual projection that features a woman silhouetted against a window looking out over Bombay and a series of colour studies of models of blocky modernist houses, capturing themes of isolation, aspiration, dreams and disillusionment in a haunting way. That work found an echo in Aurélien Lemonier’s beautifully curated and intelligent survey of Architecture in Bangladesh, which

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charted the country’s journey from modern to contemporary architecture with a focus on its role in nation-building and related struggles between regionalism and internationalism. Such debates in turn had an effect on the experience of viewing the Solo Projects section, curated by DAS artistic director Diana Campbell Betancourt (whose group exhibition, Mining Warm Data, featured Memento Mori, 2016, an incredibly moving installation by Indian photographer Pablo Bartholomew that revolved around his response to the accidental destruction of one of his photographic archives). While the projects included absorbing works such as Shumon Ahmed’s Guantánamo-inspired interactive installation and Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu’s fusion of traditional theatre sets and documentary videos to chart environmental change in their native Myanmar, the focus on individual artists, their projects isolated one from the next (bookended by a version of Tino Sehgal’s 2011 Ann Lee performance and phosphorescent paintings by Lynda Benglis), seemed slightly discordant with the notion of dialogue and historical and geographical location established in the other exhibitions. Perhaps it was also a reminder that this type of art tends to operate in a privileged space (which, once you’ve walked Dhaka’s streets, DAS undoubtedly is). That said, it’s also true that the Solo Projects simply articulate the desire to provide a ‘something for everyone’ experience at DAS. They were certainly packed with extraordinary numbers of students, families and schoolchildren. Some of the irony of the ‘VIP treatment’ was captured in a photographic and film project by Myanmar-based Po Po, which (following on from a similar 2010 VIP Project in Yangon) explored the prevalence of and deferential reaction to VIP signs in Bangladesh. It was, of course, located next to DAS’s VIP lounge. Amidst the art and the crowds of visitors, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that many of the things that made their way into the Shilpakala Academy are the product of ongoing workshops and dialogues with local and international artists, and museums around the world. Behind the exhibition spaces are passionate summits and conversations (one gathering a ‘Critical Writing Ensemble’) that debate the pathways that South Asian art (and art in general) might follow and the structures it might build to support that, both within the region and internationally. And it’s the initiation and facilitation of such discourse that is, in many ways, the really lasting effect of the DAS initiative – and one of the paths by which it can truly contribute to the establishment of a vibrant art scene in Bangladesh.

Art Featured

The specialty of this Money Roller is the Lion biting the Sword on one side of the pendant and the other side is the Five Direction Magnetizing Wealth cum Ba Gua. Suitable for car and the effects are the same as in the premises 49

Kishio Suga by Taro Nettleton

Recent work by the Japanese artist suggests a way of rethinking the legacy of Mono-ha and connecting it to some of the most pressing issues of today 50

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above Left-Behind Situation, 1972/2012, wood, stone, steel, wire rope, 152 × 596 × 789 cm overall facing page Law of Multitude, 1975/2012, plastic sheet, stone, concrete, 84 × 655 × 887 cm overall both images Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

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Born in 1944 in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, Kishio Suga is one of the internal and impermanent condition already presents great difficulty most important artists of postwar Japan and a leading proponent of to the mind accustomed to a Western, modernist mode of thought, the Mono-ha (literally ‘school of things’) movement of the late 1960s it is easier to understand this attitude contextualised as a critique and 70s, which has received increasingly international critical and of anthropocentrism. market attention. In addition to Suga’s art, Mono-ha has been used to Given that Mono-ha, like Gutai, which preceded it, is now being describe the work of artists Nobuo Sekine, Shingo Honda, Katsuhiko reevaluated in the Western world as a part of its project to compliNarita, Katsurō Yoshida, Susumu Koshimizu and Lee Ufan, who cate its idea of Modernism and to account for its multiplicity, in both used natural and manmade materials, in relatively unprocessed chronologies and sites, it is important to refrain from drawing easy states, to reveal the essence of ‘things’. Minimally altered materials parallels to Western counterparts. At the same time, describing the make Mono-ha works simple in appearance, yet difficult to fathom work too hastily in nativist terms is also reductive and risky for its in terms of what the ‘essence’ they potential to exoticise. Describing the work too hastily in manifest might be. As often noted by Suga’s two 2015 exhibitions with the artist himself, Suga’s works too are nativist terms is reductive and risky for Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo comfrequently characterised as difficult to prised new works produced in 2014 its potential to exoticise and 2015. That same year, in addition understand. This difficulty is primarily a product of the gap between, on the one hand, the seeming ease of to the MOT show, he was the subject of a major retrospective at the the works (a result of something that might be called the artist’s grace) Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum in Shizuoka. The simultaneity of – Suga’s most oft employed strategies include juxtaposition and these shows reveals the interest in and urgency for reconsidering houchi, or ‘abandonment’ of materials – and, on the other, the density Suga’s works today. of the artist’s own writings regarding his work and process. On a purely formal and stylistic level, a resurgence of interest in His most representative historical works, such as those included in the idioms of Arte Povera and scatter art does suggest a fresh framehis retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT), Tokyo, work for considering Suga’s practice. And at odds with the perceived last year, tend to be large-scale installations. Take, for example, Law recalcitrance of his historical works, there is something very playful, of Multitude, a work first exhibited in 1975. A room in the museum is and even humorous, about Suga’s new output. In part, these works feel filled with concrete pedestals placed roughly equidistant from each more accessible due to the flatly applied bright colours that the artist other. A stone is placed atop each pedestal with a single large sheet of has deployed since the early 2000s (marking a significant shift in his vinyl encompassing the entire space sandwiched waterlike between oeuvre). The works also tend to be smaller and hung on the wall. In the the stones and pedestals. 48 × 35 cm Circuit in Space (2014), for example, a wooden frame mounted Here is Suga’s description of his practice at the time the work on an otherwise untreated sheet of wood encloses a painted blue was made: ‘The early 1970s was a period in which I consciously recre- rectangle. In a slight visual pun, the bottom right corner of the frame ated the world and recalibrated the state in which “mono” depended is opened by a rock, and the blue rectangle appears to have spilled out upon each other. In terms of production, my efforts were focused on to the bottom right edge of the wooden support. And yet the lightness removing the conventional concept of recognition associated with a and humour, evident in his latest offerings, have tended to be obscured “mono” that I intended to use, and placed it in a state of namelessness by the heady language used to discuss his works in the past. so that it may acquire a reality within the present.’ Theoretically, what makes Suga’s works – both the historical and And below, MOT chief curator Yuko Hasegawa’s explanation, the new – feel so contemporary is their embodiment and articulation which follows a warning against unquestioningly applying his of contingency. As his project starts by questioning the privileging writings to his works: ‘Suga’s sozaishugi (his ideas of elemental exis- of a subject as an agent that uses ‘mono’ – things – as materials to be tentialism) is not simple existentialism – while his stance toward shaped into works that articulate the subject’s perspective, it questions existence is straightforward, his ideas are based on an extremely the coherence of both subject and object, and treats them as radically sophisticated cognizance. It is a zen-like, philosophical cognizance contingent. Moreover, the production of ‘situations’ brings ‘mono’ that explores the furthermost depths and space and the human viewer into The lightness and humour have tended new relations that make previously of existence, transcending the physical unseen and unnoticed characteristics existence of its objects.’ to be obscured by the heady language But how do we access this ‘sophistiused to discuss Suga’s works in the past of all three manifest. cated zen-like cognizance’ through his To avoid thinking in terms of a works? Moreover, how might we square the artist’s emphasis on the subject that precedes its materials, it is helpful to draw from philosreality of ‘mono’ with the ‘sophisticated cognizance’ that transcends opher Bruno Latour’s idea of the ‘actant’, which he defines in Politics the objects’ existence? Much of the writing on Suga’s works, and on of Nature (2004) as any entity, both human and nonhuman, that Mono-ha, the vocabulary of which Suga has continued to work with modifies another entity. ‘Their competence’, he argues, ‘is deduced since the 1960s, is variously metaphysical, philosophical and spir- from their performances.’ In Suga’s works as well, the ‘competence’ itual. Suga’s focus, however, on ‘removing the conventional concept of of ‘mono’ cannot be known a priori, but must be deduced from its recognition associated with a “mono”’ also has much more practical performance. This is precisely why trial and error are such central and political implications, which relate to Mono-ha’s fundamental components of his practice. Moreover, Latour’s ‘actant’ brings out the interest in moving away from the subject in its relation to creation, sense that Suga’s live performances, which he has staged outside of expression and representation. While the idea of an art movement gallery and museum spaces since the 1970s and referred to as ‘activadevoted to refraining from making ‘art’ and instead expressing some tion’, are not intended to underscore the role of the artist in activating.

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Intentional Scenic Space, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Kenji Takahashi. © the artist. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo

Spring 2016

above Circuit in Space, 2014, wood, stone, acrylic, 48 × 35 × 10 cm. Photo: Kenji Takahashi. © the artist. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo facing page Kairitsu (Space-Order), 1974, silver gelatin print, five parts: 53 × 36 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

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Right from his first solo show, Colombo created works that required activation on the part of the viewer: environments,

In fact, the artist and audience are reciprocally activated by the situaSuga’s works resonate so strongly with us today because he tion resulting from Suga’s actions. The artist is not purely active, and treats both things and people seriously as actants in ‘situations’, the material is not purely passive. in the artist’s words (and ‘trials’, in Latour’s), the outcomes of which In what sense might we consider the activation documented in cannot be known in advance. This philosophy of advocating, in his black-and-white photographic series Kairitsu (Space-Order) (1974)? a sense, that things too are alive, is extremely relevant to our contemGiven the importance of experimentation in Suga’s works, it may be porary concerns. As Jane Bennett writes, drawing from Latour, useful to consider his practice in relation to a contemporaneously in Vibrant Matter (2010): ‘The image of dead or thoroughly instruproduced work by a very different artist: John Baldessari’s Throwing mentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us Four Balls in the Air to Get a Square (1972–3). In Kairitsu, Suga, pointing his camera to the sky, captures from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller a line drawn by a rope as it’s thrown into the air tied to a rock. range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within The highly contrasted print resemhuman bodies.’ Suga captures a line drawn by a rope bles a quickly drawn ink line on paper. Perhaps the exposure of Suga’s more recent output can occasion a reLike Baldessari’s colour photographs as it’s thrown into the air tied to a rock framing of his oeuvre in a truly matedocumenting the titular action, Suga’s work humorously and playfully critiques the artist’s intention rialist, rather than spiritual, context to recover the openness and and exertion of control. In both artists’ works, the same action is contingency of this important body of work, which has otherwise repeated to produce differing results. Importantly, the absurdity of been couched in obdurate language that has rendered it hermetithe labour invested in trying to achieve the arbitrary goal of creating cally sealed. Through the newer works, we might recover the sense a square and the element of failure make Baldessari’s work funny. of play and vibrancy of objects in an oeuvre that is too often seen as In contrast, there is no preestablished goal in Suga’s work. Viewed solemn. Looking back to the 1970s photographic documentation in relation to Baldessari’s piece, Suga’s work does indicate, however, of his modest and often humorous outdoor activations, one can see the importance of humour and play in the contingency and radical the liveliness of the inanimate has been there all along, but that it’s openness articulated through his oeuvre. The precarious balance also better articulated inside the gallery through the newer, smaller, struck in many of the historical works, such as Shachi Jokyo (Left- brightly coloured works than by their historic, larger and more Behind Situation) (1972), in which numerous wires are strung across austere counterparts. ara each other between the walls of a room with variously shaped pieces of wood balanced on them, also expresses a sense of improvisation A two-person exhibition featuring work by Kishio Suga and Robert Morris is on view at Blum & Poe, Tokyo, through 7 May and impermanence.

Spring 2016

Deep Matters by Stephanie Bailey

Karen Mirza and Brad Butler create work that exposes the power of the ‘deep state’ so as to counter it

The Unreliable Narrator, 2014, video, two-channel video installation, sound, 16 min 20 sec

ArtReview Asia

In August 2007, during their residency at the Vasl Artists’ Collective being in the world from a multipoint perspective. The Autonomous in Karachi, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler visited the inaugural exhibi- Object? exemplifies this formal logic by underpinning the treatment tion of the National Art Gallery in Islamabad, which included work by of the image – or the act of representation – as a social composition. Vasl’s founding members, Naiza Khan and Adeela Suleman, as well as The intention, it seems, appears to be the search for a common ground the participation of colleagues supportive of and associated with the from which real politics might push forth. collective in the form of curated rooms and thematic sections. Mirza/ These terms have since been explored in another ongoing project Butler arrived in Islamabad months after the Lawyers’ Movement that evolved from that 2007 residency in Karachi: The Museum of Non erupted – a response to the events of 9 March that year, when General Participation, which has manifested as an ongoing body of work that is Pervez Musharraf sacked the chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar indexed as ‘Acts’. In many ways, the project is a study of what it means to Muhammad Chaudhry. On the day of their visit, as well as seeing the engage politically with the world through art. Supported by London’s exhibition, the British-based artists witnessed demonstrations and Artangel and developed during the two residencies the artists underthe state-sponsored violence that followed. Mirza remembers it as took at Vasl (the second was in December 2008), the first iteration was a profound moment: one that instigated a distinctive shift in their a free English and Urdu language class in September 2008 between practice towards “a deep interrogation” into how the aesthetic, social native speakers of Urdu and English, culminating in a public perforand political might come together in art. mance at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Later examples include a One of the works that resulted from this experience was The series that came out of two residencies at Cairo’s Townhouse Galley, Exception and the Rule (2009), which responds to the question of how in 2010 and 2011, just before Tahrir Square was occupied. (It is someto make a political film. (This in turn relates to the artists’ relation- thing of a cosmic joke that Butler and Mirza tend to find themselves ship with video activism; that is, activists who use video as a way to in places where political events are just about to kick off.) These were communicate political ideas.) Through an artful weaving of image, organised as part of the Centre for Possible Studies at the Serpentine text and sound, the screen is turned into a web of narrative, perfor- Gallery’s Edgware Road Project in London: a short residency that mance, recollection and observation that draws in the artists’ debt turned into a four-year project. Out of this connection with Cairo, the to a vast array of influences, from avant-garde modernisms to work artists created a series that drew from a pamphlet offering instrucwith activist video and theatre. (They later staged a two-hour perfor- tions for pro-democracy demonstrators found in the city titled ‘How mance with the same name in 2015, at the Temple of Peace, in Cardiff, to Protest Intelligently’. Hold Your Ground explores the semantics of crowd behaviour by combining film ‘co-devised with 10 local community of a woman performing actions and members that combined the techA new work, Butler says, will investigate sounds extracted from protests, niques drawn from the analyses and a car crash that killed ‘the deputy chief spliced with corresponding clips of critiques developed by Augusto Boal of the Istanbul Police Department; the protests themselves. The work during the 1950s as part of his notion was installed in London’s Canary of a “Theatre of the Oppressed” with the leader of the terrorist group the Grey Wharf Underground station in a learning play by Brecht’ and which Wolves; a contract killer on Interpol’s 2012 – an artful insertion into what was developed with live audience red list; and a former beauty queen’ might either be described as a total participation.) Mirza reveals in the voiceover that The Exception and the neoliberal space, or the other City of Rule comprises both film and video footage – a formal constraint that London, where HSBC has its current headquarters. reflects two points of view: that of the artists and of Pakistani video The study of power deeply informs The Museum of Non Participation. activist Raj Kumar. (Mirza was introduced to Kumar by Swiss video The form the project takes is a consideration of the institution not activist group Videoladen Zürich, whose 1980 film Zurich is Burning only as a modern frame of distraction that must be subverted, given stated: ‘choosing a point of view, a take, means choosing a perspective the museum’s connection to wider infrastructures of power (from on the cause’. Or as Mirza paraphrases in the film: “To position the state bodies to multinational corporations), but also as a productive site of study: a site within which the dynamics of power and its relacamera is to choose sides.”) The idea behind The Exception and the Rule, Butler explained in a tions with culture are at their most visible, and malleable. Deep State 2010 interview with Gemma Sharpe, was to express the communal (2012), a film coscripted with British science-fiction author China relationship we have to other places in the world, even if we haven’t Miéville, takes this investigation into institutional power further, been there. Exemplary of this approach, perhaps, is the 2008 film The dissecting the Turkish term derin devlet, or the state within the state Autonomous Object?, in which 35 scenes were filmed in India, Pakistan, – the shadow infrastructures that drive national and global politics, New York and London. In each, a participant holds a box that offers and which become visible during moments of civil unrest. Following a screen within the screen, in which other scenes from other places are this train of thought is an upcoming three-screen installation work, inserted. Taking the questions put forward in Robert Morris’s Mirror to be presented in 2018 at a solo exhibition at Home in Manchester, Film (1969), which, as the artists see it, ‘problematise[s] the location of which explores the so-called Susurluk scandal – a car crash involving, the performance and the issue of authorship’, the work proposes ‘new as Butler informs me, “the deputy chief of the Istanbul Police ways of positioning structural film within revisionist anthropology’. Department; the leader of the terrorist group the Grey Wolves, also As Butler continued in his reply to Sharpe, the composition of The a contract killer on Interpol’s red list; a former beauty queen; and Exception and the Rule ‘is where we begin to think about the terms and a high-ranking Parliamentary MP, who was the only survivor.” conditions of (non) participation’ – that is, how one might perceive, The shadowy world of global politics is reflected, too, in its or indeed communicate, the geopolitical and geocultural effects of counter-effects. In 2014, the artists staged an exhibition at London’s

Spring 2016

The Exception and the Rule, 2009, video, 37 min

ArtReview Asia

The Exception and the Rule, 2009, video, 37 min

Spring 2016

Waterside Contemporary, The Unreliable Narrator, which divided the gallery in two using a red curtain. The entrance space became a classroom complete with three school desks that presented a genuine 2011 paper for the Eton College King’s Scholarship entrance examination in which students must write a speech as the prime minister supporting the use of state violence in response to protests in the UK in the year 2040. The question implies that violence is a necessary political act that, under certain conditions, can be justified. It’s a point that was inverted on the other side of the curtain, where a video installation presented a heady mix of documentation – real and fictional – depicting the horrific 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai. Over this, a woman narrates and reflects on the situation, and in doing so offers the observation that terrorists use the same technologies as those they are fighting – among them narratives of propaganda and the historical relationships between nation-states and their discontents. In this logic, terror and the state are presented as if in a mirror, in that both sides offer equal justification for the use of violence. The composition was so perfectly paradoxical and complete that it felt like a telos. The finality of expressing such a dialectical totality has characterised Mirza and Butler’s investigations thus far, which have sought to uncover the invisible infrastructures that govern us in order to explore ways of subverting them. Quoting Mirza, “It’s about making work that struggles, and that doesn’t simply represent a struggle.” Thinking about this in 2016, I ask how they make sense of their practice today. The Museum of Non Participation is, after all, a dense and complex study into how geopolitics enacts itself from the affective to the state level. Looking back, they didn’t know that 2007 was going to bring a major shift in their practice, nor has their relationship with the museum remained the same. (Mirza views it as a conversation, while Butler is wary of the project defining their practice too much.) Yet, as the years have gone by, the artists admit to becoming more conscious about the work they are doing, and why. The journey has been long: it started in 1998, when the two met as students at Royal College of Art, brought together by an assignment that produced a black-and-white film, Asylum. In 2004, the artists established no.w.here: a nonprofit,

artist-run organisation that explores political and aesthetic questions surrounding the contemporary image, and the systems within which images are produced and disseminated. No.w.here operates like a counter-institution of sorts, organising workshops, discussions, performances, screenings, residencies, publications, events and exhibitions, albeit with increasing difficulty. An active space that supports independent thought on images and their political, social and cultural functions, you might call no.w.here a kind of asylum, too, or sanctuary: a work that struggles in its active form, like an autonomous object. In fact, recent experiences with no.w.here have been informing their practice more intensively, the artists tell me. In 2015, no.w.here faced eviction along with three local businesses when its East London building was put up for sale just as they were renewing their nineyear lease. (In response, no.w.here applied for and was granted legal status as an Asset of Community Value, which has since been appealed by the landlord.) As a result, the artists mention a deepening interest in, ‘the conditions’ or ‘dark matter’ under which workers operate, and the relations of power and self-organisation for common ownership that exist within the contemporary global paradigm. “The question of how to withdraw from certain systems and how to engage – that’s the paradoxical condition of making sense of this,” Mirza responds. “This” of course relating to that 2007 experience in Pakistan, and the question that arose out of it: how the aesthetic, political and social might be brought together in active formation. When elaborating on the subject, Butler talks about a developing thought surrounding the idea of a ‘political intimacy’, or a politics that emerges from within – a ‘deep’ politics that perhaps might counter the deep state itself. This development makes sense: their work has always been designed to engage viewers with the political contradictions they make visible in their studies. Having come this far, Butler admits a need to shed the institution altogether “in order to find something else”. For them, the only way forward is to go deeper. ara Karen Mirza and Brad Butler are presenting work at the 20th Biennale of Sydney, 18 March – 5 June

The Museum of Non Participation – Barber Shop, 2008 (installation view, Bethnal Green, London)

ArtReview Asia

You Are the Prime Minister (neon sign), 2014, installation, neon sign, 220 × 12 cm all images Courtesy Waterside Contemporary, London

Spring 2016

Adrian Cheng As the artworld descends on Hong Kong for Art Basel, ArtReview Asia catches up with the collector, businessman and founder of the K11 Art Foundation and K11 brand. Cheng’s initiatives have seen him combine art and retail in the form of concept art shopping malls in Hong Kong and Shanghai, artist villages and a collaborative programme of exhibitions and events with major institutions worldwide Interview by Mark Rappolt & Aimee Lin

ArtReview Asia So maybe we should start at the beginning with how you first got into contemporary art? Adrian Cheng When I was in the States, studying at boarding school, I had a classical voice training and trained as a tenor, for four years. Then after, at Harvard, I majored in humanities. I didn’t receive any formal art training until I studied Japanese culture, performing arts and art in Kyoto. In Japan I immersed myself in performing arts, temples, history and all forms of culture. Then I basically stopped for three years when I was working in an investment bank. It was in 2006, during the two years that I lived in Beijing, that I started to do studio visits and was exposed to the contemporary Chinese art landscape. That was really the heyday, the ‘Great Gatsby’, if you like, of China’s contemporary art scene. Between 2005 and 2008 were the years when everyone was talking about all the star artists and auction markets, but it was still all emerging, with no museums or private collection spaces, and no one was really laying foundations for that.

AC I loved living in Beijing. Everyone was anticipating the Olympics, having fun, making a lot of money, and then everyone’s talking about art, and because I was always interested in art, I became involved in an almost nonchalant way. I think the crucial thing is that because I had an understanding of China’s ecosystem, it allowed me to really focus on the projects of building an artist village and incubating young Chinese artists.

ARA Had you already started collecting? AC I started to collect in 2006. A lot of people ask me what I collected back then, but I don’t really remember (I don’t think much of it was good quality). The good thing was getting to know the artists and then doing a lot of studio visits and immersing myself in the artworld. ARA Was there something specific that attracted you to it? Adrian Cheng. Courtesy K11 Art Foundation

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ARA Was there a specific moment when you decided to do something quite public? AC Yes, in 2008, before the K11 Art Foundation. I’ve always thought that art education is very important and needs people. So I thought, where’s the most number of people? In shopping malls and commercial projects. I launched the first project, the ‘Art C Mall Concept’, or ‘Museum Retail Concept’, in Hong Kong, in 2009. It was like an experimental laboratory and I really wanted to see whether I could gauge interest from the public in art, creativity and design.

ARA How do you measure that? AC Because I tried it out in Hong Kong I focused on design more than contemporary art, but when I launched in Shanghai in 2014, I focused more on contemporary art. It was harder to promote contemporary art in Hong Kong because I think people were too busy to really spend time on understanding art, it was much easier for them to look at design. Slowly, as I pushed design, I decided to also promote contemporary art students, to incubate them and give them a chance. I was working with all the universities in Hong Kong. During 2009 and 2010 our foundation started getting formal. It’s an artist village in Wuhan with 11 studios for young Chinese artists.

ARA So the curatorial vision also encompasses the business? AC Exactly. The shop is part of the curatorial tool. It can be difficult to place, but it’s not only challenging, it’s fun and pioneering. ARA So how different is your personal collecting to what K11 does in public? AC My personal collection is more global young artists. I like abstract and installation video. This is my passion. The Art Foundation tends to have more museum-scale, bigger pieces: a lot of installation. ARA What are the plans for the foundation collection?

ARA How do you select the artists? AC We have two selection committees. Eight studios are for local Chinese, meaning anyone from mainland China or Hong Kong. Three studios are for international artists, which we started in 2014. In order to choose the young Chinese artists, we have our team – a city-level curator, a regional curator and a national curator, and a guest curator for the international artists. ARA Have the projects you’ve done in the shopping centres affected the retail side of things? AC Of course, because the brands feel like it’s not just a commercial activity. It’s a way for people to engage in a more artistic, spiritual experience. So the brands become much more original, with multibrand stores, gadget stores, limited editions, more crafted things, or following museum retail. ARA Is that partly to do with the promotion of artists as individuals? AC It’s more like there’s a new generation of customers, who want personalisation and specificity. They don’t want experience; they want emotional engagement with you, your history and your entire DNA. It’s like going to an art show and immersing yourself completely into the artist’s world. The customers want to be immersed in the K11 artworld: whether it’s going to a mall, an office or in a pop-up store, it doesn’t matter because it’s all curatorship. The shops become part of the curatorial vision.

AC I’m building a small museum space. It will open in Beijing in 2018. I think the Art Foundation focuses more on the art village than the collections. ARA How did the art-village idea first come up? AC I think I looked at the ecosystem and thought: ‘How do I support the artists?’ Back then, the 798 Art Zone in Beijing was not very ICA and K11 Art Foundation present Zhang Ding: Enter the Dragon, 2015 (installation view, ICA, London). © K11 Art Foundation

Spring 2016

touristy. There were a lot of artist villages where artists stayed, so I thought – why don’t I just do an artist village in the middle of China for free, for these people, and build an exhibition space for them, so they can do whatever they want for one year and have art exhibition workshops and bring people to them. ARA I’m wondering then what sort of ecosystem is developing now for art in China. Does it have to be like the Western system or will it evolve in a different way? AC Some people think that we need the ‘software’ of the West, because it’s been there for a long time and has evolved in a very institutional, very professional way. Whatever space you want to manage, you always do it this way. But you adjust locally with how you fund it. But the ecosystem is not about the space, it’s about education. We have a lot of seminars because it’s not in the education system to nurture the audience. There are art schools, but there are no curators. That’s why I work with CAFA [Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; with whom K11 signed a three-year partnership in February 2015]. They will have a space in which young curators can experiment.There are so many artists in China, but there are not enough curators or galleries or museums that can pick them up. As a result, the artists are doing their own thing at home in little studios. We want to help these young artists, to have open submissions so that everyone has a chance. I think that is very, very important. Another thing that we’re not doing yet, but that I think is very important, is art management. I have heard that a lot of institutions in the West want to do art management in China. To be able to do a blockbuster show or to import a show or co-create a show, you need to self-fund through ticketing, art shops and things like that. No one knows how to do that, not at all. ARA What role does the artist or art in general play in society in China right now? AC A lot of people are going to art school. They’re hopeful because since the 2000s it’s much easier to be picked up by galleries and be in shows around the world. But the competition is high and you still need the people to incubate young artists. That’s what I want to really push. We need more players, we need the stage, we

Performance at the opening of Tianzhuo Chen’s exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2015. Courtesy the artist and K11 Art Foundation

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need more private people to do more than just collect. In the West, if you’re not in a gallery and you’re young, you may be picked up by curators or you’re picked up by a museum or referred by friends. That kind of network is very important. ARA So how long do you think that process will take? AC Five years. ARA That’s quick. AC China’s quick. I popped up at number 100, on ArtReview’s Power 100 list [in 2014], from nowhere. Then number 76, right? If there’s not that kind of force then it takes probably five to seven years. I think everyone in China needs to understand the ecosystem first. People have to come together, do a conference and help each other. That’s important, then it will grow. It’s no good if I’m the only one doing it, as a collector, a patron, an art pioneer, an art entrepreneur. ARA You don’t really have a category for that skill, do you? AC I want to build a community, that’s why I’m converting the entire 56th floor in my K11 overlooking the whole of Shanghai. There I’m going to have a dining area, a lounge and an art collection space. It’s a space where I want everyone to come. So I’ll host Tate Modern’s committee when they come to Shanghai: everyone comes with artists and collectors and curators, exchanges cards and talks about things. China is big, you know? When people come from Beijing and Shanghai it’s like the difference between Spain and Italy in Europe. ARA Let’s get back to the K11 Art Foundation. What did it do in the last two years and how do you look at those practices? AC K11 Art Foundation (KAF) has been very much focused on our mission to incubate young contemporary Chinese artists and curators, and to promote public art education. Through our own programmes as well as collaboration with international museums and institutions, KAF has made very good progress in promoting Chinese artists and curators to the global audience, and in helping them develop their careers. Unlike our past projects, our long-term collaborative project with the Pompidou Centre in Paris [a three-year partnership, signed last summer] does not only focus on bringing individual artists and their works to the global audience via shows and exhibitions. Instead, we try to establish a deeper understanding of the development of contemporary Chinese art through academic research in a much broader perspective. Through the documentation of contemporary art’s development in China we help establish a complete and sustainable art ecosystem.

Our collaborations with ICA in London and Palais de Tokyo in Paris provide us with a very good platform to showcase young talents from China. Not only were we able to bring Chinese artists to the attention of the global art scene, but these were also great opportunities for young artists to learn and grow during the process. We are effectively a bridge between the West and the East, facilitating these crosscultural dialogues through international partnerships and collaborations. We also started the international Future of Museum and Gallery Design Conference, in Hong Kong in November 2015, which drew together museum professionals, museum, gallery and exhibition designers and museumdesign researchers to explore new approaches to and future developments in design for the cultural sector. The feedback was very good and we are thinking of making it a core programme under KAF.

I want to build a community, that’s why I’m converting the entire 56th floor in my K11 overlooking the whole of Shanghai. It’s a space where I want everyone to come. So I’ll host Tate Modern’s committee when they come to Shanghai: everyone comes with artists and collectors and curators, exchanges cards and talks about things. China is big, you know? ARA How do you choose which institutions to partner with? What do you and the foundation get out of the relationship? AC We always work with partners who have the same vision as KAF. We hope that the learning process and the results will benefit KAF and our partners. For example, with all the tours we host for museum directors and curators, our goal is to introduce new talents we have identified in China to important institutions. Artists gain a lot from these studio visits, as they will be able to get comments and feedback from well-regarded figures within the global art scene. At the same time, we provide a fuller picture of the development of contemporary Chinese art, such that our partners will have a better understanding of this as part of the global art scene, and be able to see

Spring 2016

the best talents from the East. Apart from fulfilling our mission and goals in incubating Chinese artists and curators, our KAF team can also learn much from these partnerships. ARA: How does it work in this relationship? Who makes the decisions about the shows and what role does the foundation play? AC We usually work together with the museums in terms of the higher-level direction of the projects. Once we have a clear objective, and since all of our projects include Chinese artists, our team will come up with a list of artists who we think are suitable to be proposed to the curators. We then try to visit these artists together and speak with them; this helps curators to make their decision. It would then be the curators’ choice in terms of which artists to include. KAF very seldom does pure sponsorships. We prefer working closely with our partners on KAF projects. We contribute our expertise and knowledge, and all our shows come out as a result of concerted efforts between ourselves and our partners. ARA What are KAF’s major plans for 2016? AC 2016 will be a big year. During Art Basel Hong Kong I will present our collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries. Hans Ulrich Obrist is curating for us and the show will feature Simon Denny and 11 Chinese artists [see Previews]. Cheng Ran’s nine-hour-film project, In Course of the Miraculous, will be shown during Art Basel Hong Kong. At ICA London in April I will present Guan Xiao’s first institutional solo project abroad. With New Museum in New York I will start an artist exchange residency programme and present an exhibition. The show will rotate back to China. At the Pompidou Centre I will announce the appointment of the Chinese curator. At K11Shanghai, WE, a group show featuring over 50 contemporary Chinese artists, runs from 4 March to 2 May. Zhang Ding’s ICA London show and Chen Tianzhuo’s Palais de Tokyo show, both from 2015, will also rotate to Shanghai. At chi Art Space in Hong Kong we will present a series of shows featuring local Hong Kong artists, curated by local curators. ARA Will there be any sort of changes in terms of your vision and strategy? AC We have more completed K11 sites coming up in the next five years, and through these spaces we will be able to nurture local audiences and to build stronger regional hubs and communities. K11 in Guangzhou, Wuhan and Shenyang will all open in 2017. Together with our future projects, they will form a network of art and cultural communities in China. ara

Picnic in Carrara Yutaka Sone invites Luc Tuymans and Rirkrit Tiravanija

Creating Space In late March 2015, three of the world’s most eminent artists met for a picnic in the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy. During the meal, served out of the spotlight, away from public attention, Yutaka Sone, Luc Tuymans and Rirkrit Tiravanija spoke about their lives, their endeavours, their aspirations by Donatien Grau

A situation and its relevance Yutaka Sone called Luc Tuymans: he was upset that they did not speak any more, did not have any real personal contact; furthermore, he felt that no one really spoke about art these days from the point of view of the artist. There was a need for discourse, conversation, dialogue, he said; there should be some statement, and the two of them, alongside fellow artist and friend Rirkrit Tiravanija, should make it. Then came the idea of presenting this statement in the form of a picnic. So the three of them went into the quarries to eat, drink and talk; to have a good time. It may seem absurdly simple. The pictures, the film and the sculpture that came out of it present a situation in which the three artists seem to be asking themselves what they are doing. In their behaviour, in their words and in their body language, we can sense a great ambition as well as a feeling of doing something that may seem gratuitous to some. At the heart of the situation lies a problem. Why would we commoners care about three guys having a picnic in a wonderful setting, drinking fine wine and eating what seems to be very tasty food? Here’s why the public should care: this is a statement; it is a proposition, an offer made to the world, in consideration of what art is. Every detail of it is a sign from a discourse presented to the public, in order to reengage with the thinking of the positioning of art. It is a gesture and it is an initiative. It breaks the flow of meaninglessness that governs so much of the integration of artists’ participation within the artworld. A network of meaning Everything has been constructed to make this situation mean much more than a private encounter: it is an elaborate network of meaning. Firstly, it is a picnic: something that seems to be lighthearted and friendly. It is a moment that artists share as a consequence of their personal affinities. Here we find a counterpart to the functioning of the separating structures of the artworld: artists can still be friends; they can see each other; the friendliness of their connection is not only a private matter. It can express itself in a constructive discussion on art. The ethics of the picnic also counters the structures of the artworld: the opening, the dinner, public events involving a large number of people that become a mass unable to confront actual

issues. This gathering involves three individuals, together to confront the reasons behind their very practice. Art lovers, living in the dream of the continuation of the avantgarde, would tend to consider such an encounter – such a conversation – natural. After all, artists used to speak to each other all the time – or at least this is how we see the avant-garde. Whether their art was similar or different, whether they were of the same generation or of different generations (but particularly if they came from the same generation), they would talk, collaborate, discuss their works and lives, and, together, move the project of art forward. We cannot help but be reminded of the perpetual dialogue in which Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, André Breton, Pablo Picasso and so many others engaged, in order to redefine the formats of art. But it says a lot about our world today – and the place art has in it – that such a dialogue does not appear natural. The situation has changed: artists, from the moment they are successful, become part of a conditioning process in which money, power and productivity play the crucial roles. When they emerge and are not yet successful, they are required, as part of their training as artists, to think of success as a goal – even sometimes the ultimate goal. And when they are not successful, or not successful enough, they are induced to look at these flows of power, money and art with contempt and envy. Refocusing the art Part of the nature of art has changed. Because of the flows of the market, it has taken on some of the characteristics of an industry, designed to serve the needs of a global culture in which art remains one of the few forms of belief left to humans – and one of the few (money is another) that is universally shared. This industry functions according to an integrated model, in which artists play a role that is certainly important but is to be included in a chain with multiple entries. The artworld is not fundamentally focused exclusively on artists: curators, collectors and dealers have become as influential – and perhaps more influential – than artists. Artists have lost some of their power through isolation from each other, rendering them unable to constitute an actual force. What Yutaka Sone, Luc Tuymans and Rirkrit Tiravanija have initiated is a move to regain that power.

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This does not mean that they are trying to take it from others – the picnic is not directed against curators, gallerists or collectors. Rather than displaying negative energy, it is a constructive proposition, a manifesto stating that artists today can still get together, and together articulate a proposition. This event was not open to the public. In the same way as Marcel Duchamp with Étant Donnés (1946–66) only allowed the viewer to peep into his imaginary world, we are only allowed into the picnic through a video, drawings, traces. We were not there to watch it at the moment it took place. This disconnection from the public space is a crucial part of the project: not everything needs to be public at the moment it happens. When an event takes place secretly, it gains mystery; and from gaining mystery, it is granted the potential to enter history. This event performs the tension between what is private and what is public: it was private, but designed to be public. Therefore, it carries within itself an emphasis, the possibility of attracting attention. The artists are aware of the strategies needed to gain attention at an age in which losing track has become a rule. They are using those strategies in order to appeal to the public’s attention. Articulation Scale is one of the very resources at hand. The film shows the contrast between the height of the quarries and the small space inhabited by the three artists. They seem tiny, in a grand decor. In that sense, the

spatiality of the scene functions as a metaphor for the intervention itself: that these three tiny figures can intervene in a space of that size conveys the sense of possibility given to individuals who accept existing within their space and seizing what is at hand. There is no attempt to negate the limitations of the space devoted to each, but from this acknowledgement comes the possibility of fully inhabiting the space they find themselves in. By sharing it, they also increase their own importance, their own relevance, their own power. In order to have a full grasp of this initiative, the question of power also needs to be raised. These three artists seem to be looking for power – for a visibility to their initiate, while using mystery with considerable skills. But what is the point? What power are they seeking? Here the topic of the conversations they are engaged in is particularly relevant. It is art. The choice of this topic is highly significant – they could have chosen to discuss politics, the world order, their respective work. What they decided to devote themselves to instead was art. As such, they are using the methodology of propaganda and using it for what they truly believe in. The political nature of the endeavour is evident. They are ready to fight for the idiosyncrasy of art, and of the word and vision of artists; they are seeking power for art, attempting to reestablish its centrality rather than the status of a link in a chain; describing a solar system in which the artwork, the artist, are the stars that everything else circles around. The artists are the initiators, and what comes

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after them is secondary – both chronologically and ethically. This is the fundamental reminder the very structure of the picnic provides to the public. Time and space This statement of artistic preeminence is at once local – the Carrara marble quarries – and global – these three artists encircle the globe. Yutaka Sone is Japanese-born and has been living in Los Angeles for decades while keeping studios in Mexico, Belgium and China; Rirkrit Tiravanija, of Thai descent, was born in Buenos Aires and lives in Chiang Mai, Berlin and New York; Luc Tuymans, Belgian, has spent an important part of his life and work engaging with the countries of the world. Not only do they cover large parts of the world biographically, but their work too deals with the nothing of worldliness: Tuymans has been very engaged, since his early work, with the imagery of the world’s culture and politics, from local to global, from Flemish politicians to American leaders, to narratives of power. Tiravanija has ceaselessly been opening up spaces for the public to rediscover itself, for people to enter in a community. Yutaka Sone, too, reflects on spaces, dreamlike and real, placing civilisations in visual dialogue. These three artists share a deep interest in the fabric of communities, how they interact, how elements are shared across all communities. Where the conversation occurred is, of course, of considerable symbolic value: a place where nature offers itself as a resource for art.

Looking at the images of the picnic, one cannot help but be strongly impressed by the presence of the marble. Not only do the artists appear as tiny creatures, but they find themselves in a landscape of whiteness. Carrara, for millennia now the source of the most sacred sculptures – those of the gods and the saints – adds another layer to that narrative of time. Setting the picnic here manifests a desire to reconnect with that sacredness, and to the history of art as a continuum. It also relates to the genesis of the figure of the artist: Michelangelo, one of the major models for the modern artist, took his marble from here. Opening up time is the corollary of opening up space: the picnic is a moment of leisure, designed for the participants to enjoy themselves. It is not a time for work. Today, being an artist is a profession: many more students go to art school than ever before, and as they leave art school they go looking for galleries as if they were workers seeking jobs. The gold standard of art sometimes gets lost in all this. In organising the picnic, the artists have proved that, as humans, they can enjoy themselves; they also prove that art functions on a different temporality than the one usually in effect in the world of business and efficiency. Being an artist is a mission, and it is also something you truly express yourself in. The very idea of a picnic represents free time: art is a space of freedom, and that freedom manifests itself in many different forms, time being the most immediate. In that sense, these artists are challenging conceptions that increasingly prevail in the artworld.

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In this construction of time, food plays an important role: the artists are sharing bread, they are in each other’s company. The fact that the food and wine are of great quality – we can see bottles of Ornellaia in the video – is a statement in its own right: the artists are acknowledging the possibilities offered by money. In this gesture lies a revolution: for a long time, money was not seen as a positive value for an artist. An artist whose work sold for considerable amounts was suspicious – notably to other artists – of having sold his or her soul to the capital. As a consequence, the world was divided between the ‘haves’, whose artistic seriousness could be questioned from the point of view of artists, and the ‘have-nots’, who would be ‘artist’s artists’ and embody the stuff of legend. The quality of the food, the drinks and the service – there are waiters serving the meals – is a statement: it signifies that it is not bad for artists to make money, as long as they pour it back into the energy of artmaking, and of reflecting on what it is exactly they do. Besides, the excellence of the food and drink relates to another tradition in the figure of the artist: throwing great dinners, governed by conviviality. Who is the artist? This conviviality consecrates the conception of the artist as a human being. Sometimes, artists are considered in a sort of disembodied fashion. The documentation of the picnic shows them as deeply human beings. Tuymans smokes continuously and laughs intensely;

Tiravanija is shyer, and more reflective; Sone is a dreamer and talks with great enthusiasm about the necessity of this gathering. The three of them are very different, and we get to see them in a sort of public intimacy, which gives us entry into the point of view – the existence – of artists as they spend time with peers. We should not be entirely naive: there is, in the format chosen for this encounter, something slightly tongue-in-cheek, at the same time as quite extraordinary in its understated quality. A picnic to change the way we look at art? Really? What does that even mean? There is certainly something lighthearted about the time they spent together: when we look at the videos, they clearly seem to be enjoying themselves. And one might wonder: is it that often that artists enjoy themselves together? Get some free time? Create a space for themselves to reflect, and therefore renegotiate their relation to their practice and to the world? What seems to be the most mundane is actually filled with meaning and possibilities. Their gesture very clearly signifies that art can come from anywhere, and take any form, from the moment it is initiated by artists, who can make a picnic the most metaphysical form of interrogation possible. Artists, in order to get somewhere, are required to accept the limitations of their endeavour: art is a joke. A deadly serious one. From the moment that its quality as a joke is accepted, it becomes even more serious, because it is a joke that has the possibility of making the most intense impact upon the world. In that

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sense, the picnic signals the status of art as a whole. It also reveals that artists can have a picnic just like any other human, but that they often take it further than what others would do. With the picnic, we see art’s membership in the society of humans, and at the same time its distinction from that very society. The event

to weave a new network of interactions between artists and everything that surrounds them. They are to be joined by other artists, and the dynamic initiated in Carrara is to expand and take many forms. This is just the beginning. The artworld, because it has opened such a safe haven for people coming from everywhere, from all disciplines, from all countries, has absorbed everything and therefore become – or considers itself to have become – self-sufficient. It is an island where many have arrived, and sometimes they have forgotten that there once was a continent. The contribution made by these three artists marks a wakeup call: there is a continent; there is a society; there is a world at large. And if the artists manage to leave their island and go back to the continent, while staying as close to each other as they were on their island, perhaps they will get even closer, and they will actually fulfil the great modernist mission of art, which is to change the world. Yes, a picnic can change everything. And if it can, then the many possibilities artists embrace can enable them to be truly themselves, and to truly change the lives of others.

The picnic is an event. An event is something that happens, and dramatically changes the fabric of reality. It disrupts a certain monotony and unveils the realities that have been prepared by time. It proves that action is possible, and that there is no such thing as simple fate. Therefore, while we understand the picnic’s status, we should not underestimate its potential as a space for conversation between artists, where they can discuss their status – their lives; their work; their positions in the world at large; their place in the history of humans and outside the existence of humans. All these issues are raised through the minimal gesture of a picnic. As all three artists have stated, this is not an ending. It is a starting point, leading to a process of opening up a space for art and artists within the public sphere at large. Yutaka Sone, Rirkrit Tiravanija The project Picnic in Carrara by Yutaka Sone was realised in the and Luc Tuymans are undoubtedly three major framework of Ornellaia Vendemmia d’Artista, all images figures of the arts. But they have decided not to an annual art commission curated by Maria Yutaka Sone, Picnic in Carrara, 2015. stay on their own: they are initiators, and their Alicata and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, and will be Courtesy David Zwirner, New York & London, and Tommy Simoens, Antwerp ultimate purpose is to create new connections, presented at the Hammer Museum in LA in May

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Fernando B ote ro

G a l l e r y a t 2 7 O l d B a i l e y S t r e e t, C e n t r a l, H o n g Ko n g - ( 8 5 2 ) 2 4 1 3 0 0 2 8

xiàn [verb] to appear; present; now; existing; current chǎ ng [noun] large place used for a specific purpose; stage; scene (of a play); measuring word for sporting or recreational activities xiàn chǎ ng the scene (of a crime, accident etc); (on) the spot; (at) the site

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Elmgreen & Dragset – The Making of a Fair

From: Elmgreen & Dragset <ed@elmgreenanddragset.net> Subject: Concept for UCCA Date: April 16, 2014 at 3:28:17 PM To: Philip Tinari <pt@ullenscenterforcontemporaryart.org.cn>

Hi Phil, Thanks for being such a nice host during our research trip to Beijing! After seeing the Great Hall at the UCCA, we’ve been discussing the option of creating a fictional art fair in this vast space – you know, with the generic fish bone grid structure of most art fairs – and plenty of booths, each containing a special narrative and atmosphere. This would be a mix of our new and already existing works including performances, sculptures and installations, and in that way, would create an exhibition consisting of multiple small solo shows. It would be interesting to investigate what this rather rigid display structure will do to the perception of our works, and how it will influence the behavioral patterns of the audience. We also like the fact that this would reverse the power relationship between artist and fair, so that the fair would be shaped according to our needs, instead of our works having to adjust to or accept the standardized fair environment, which is the usual situation. We still need to come up with a title… x Michael & Ingar

From: Elmgreen & Dragset <ed@elmgreenanddragset.net> Subject: Seoul / Beijing Date: July 23, 2015 at 11:08:51 AM To: Philip Tinari <pt@ullenscenterforcontemporaryart.org.cn>

Hi Phil, thanks for coming to Seoul for the opening of our Aéroport Mille Plateaux :-) We will come to Beijing tomorrow since it is such a short trip from here. We have a list of around 80 works we thought of including in the show and also a preliminary floor plan showing how we could imagine the overall layout to function. We have added several installations for the communal areas of the fair, such as an info desk, a dysfunctional café, an inaccessible VIP lounge, a bookstore and toilets. Great that you are there on Wednesday. x Michael & Ingar

From: Elmgreen & Dragset <ed@elmgreenanddragset.net> Subject: Re: Update Date: October 24, 2015 at 4:27:13 PM To: Lotus Zhang <lz@ullenscenterforcontemporaryart.org.cn>

Hi Lotus, Looking forward to our collaboration and thanks for your update. We plan the publication to be sort of a reader on art fairs and we’ve got some interesting contributors lined up already: Matthew Slotover, Frieze Co-Founder; Carlos Urroz, ARCOmadrid Director; Roberta Sassatelli, cultural sociologist, University of Milan; George E. Newman, psychology and marketing specialist, Yale University; Christine Mehring, Chair of Art History at the University of Chicago; and Stefan Kobel, award-winning art critic. There’ll probably also be the intro by Phil, an interview with us, and a dialogue in the format of a WhatsApp conversation between Art Basel Directors Marc Spiegler, Noah Horowitz, and Adeline Ooi, moderated by Phil. Happy to hear that we got the installation period extended - it’s a rather big baby this show, isn’t it ? x Michael & Ingar

From: Elmgreen & Dragset <ed@elmgreenanddragset.net> Subject: Title? Date: October 21, 2015 at 12:02:13 PM To: Philip Tinari <pt@ullenscenterforcontemporaryart.org.cn>

Hi Phil, Do you remember our “The Welfare Show” at the Serpentine Gallery in 2006? What about naming our faux fair at UCCA “The Well Fair”? It is after all a fact that the boom of fairs has coincided with the decline of the welfare state model and a global increase in economic inequality. However, would it work in Chinese? Does the general public know the term “welfare”? Just a thought… x Michael & Ingar

From: Elmgreen & Dragset <ed@elmgreenanddragset.net> Subject: Sunday Date: January 15, 2016 at 9:37:04 AM To: Lotus Zhang <lz@ullenscenterforcontemporaryart.org.cn>

Hi Lotus, let the crew get Sunday off this week. Everybody has been working so hard and the guys are all pretty exhausted, we think. It’s better to re-load a day and then continue with full energy on Monday. And it also gives us an option to go out and be stupid on Saturday night ;-) Seems like everything is on schedule yay. x Michael & Ingar

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The Whirlpool of Multi-Source is Exquisite Treasure Pot, inside it there is a talisman specially blessed by Master Chang Jue. Place it in the Wealth or auspicious position of the premises will bring enormous wealth to the owner. One can also accumulate money everyday into this Exquisite Treasure Pot until it full then deposit the money into the bank 95

Sous La Lune / Beneath the Moon Institue of Contemporary Arts Singapore Lasalle College of the Arts 11 December – 3 February At the entrance to this exhibition, a burnt picnic table by Burmese artist Aung Ko greets the viewer. Standing out like raised scars on its charred surface are different slogans in sinuous Burmese script, the most prominent of which are four snail-shell-like characters on the tabletop that translate to 8888. The numbers refer to a bloody government clampdown on a civil protest in Yangon on 8 August 1988. Exiting the show you see French artist Emmanuelle Lainé’s Le plaisir dans la confusion des frontières (Taking pleasure in the confusion of boundaries, 2014), which does what it says on the tin: playing with spatial effects using photography and installation, and blurring the line between process and finished product. You stumble into a messy room of indeterminate function – black sofa, a rack of white jumpsuits, soil smeared over the floor. On the wall, you see a lifesize photograph of a similar scene. The key difference is that the photograph shows a roughly hewn ∞-shaped object hoisted up on chains – a work in progress? An abandoned sculpture? – rising from real and virtual dirt. The first piece is a neat if obvious ‘lest we forget’ message-bearer. The second is an expansive 3D mind spill, made of half-formed images and objects tumbling out of the artist’s imagination, hastily reassembled, pinned and photographed in a pseudo studio-gallery, a paean to chaos, creation and failure. Different much? Tone, register and content often whizz past each other in this show of French and Southeast Asian artists curated by Khairuddin Hori, the Singaporean deputy director of artistic programming at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris. In his exhibition introduction, he writes that the show was conceived as ‘an encounter between art and artists from opposite sides of the world’. ‘Through the

symbolic and poetic gesture of the title,’ he continues, ‘viewers are invited to remember that we all hail from “beneath the moon”.’ That I remember. I also remember that we are sous le soleil, les étoiles, beaucoup d’autres planètes, etc. Frankly, any of those titles could fit, since the MO here is to bung together emerging artists from the two hemispheres and hope for the best. The crowd’s pretty decent, but lacking any unifying texture and interesting pings among the participants, this admittedly good-looking and well-meaning show is full of the feet-shuffling, floor-staring, tumbleweed-gathering awkwardness of an ill-conceived secondary-school exchange programme. Split down geographical lines, there could be two passable if skeletal shows in here. The French contingent has an urbane, techie internationalism – they speak the language of scientists and builders. The best of the lot is up-andcoming artist Marguerite Humeau, who has created biotronic machines in white polystyrene that combine futurism with a fetishistic interest in the ancients and their obsession with poisons and elixirs. Taweret milk (2015) is a womblike sculpture with the ergonomic plastic smoothness of advanced medical equipment, where tubes are dangling and linked to a vat of antibody-rich liquid comprising hippopotamus milk, human breast milk and alligator blood – a pink superslush, possibly coming to a hypermart near you. The DIY spirit continues in Vivien Roubaud’s steampunk techno-baubles, made of huge inflatable balloons spinning from the ceiling, powered by discarded scooter engines and linked to motorcycle chains, while Hicham Berrada’s Mesk ellil (2015) stimulates night-blooming jasmines from his native Morocco to emit their nocturnal scents by bathing them in a room of deep blue light.

facing page, top Marguerite Humeau, Taweret, 2015, polystyrene, white paint, artificial prosthetics, plastic container, water pumps, water, rapamycin, resvetarol, 180 × 230 × 90 cm. © and courtesy the artist and Duve Berlin

In contrast to European wizardry, the Southeast Asians come across as demure in gesture, their subject and media conscientiously weighted with regional history and social conditions. These could be blah, like American-Vietnamese Oanh Phi Phi’s Mapa mundi (2015), a lacquer painting of the world with Asia placed in the centre; or righteously moving, such as Rasa sayang chapter two (2014), by Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann, in which she Photoshopped embracing people out of photos, leaving only their arms. These disembodied appendages, orange against a cobalt-blue background, clasping each other and curled protectively around absent bodies, create a gestural hieroglyphic of solidarity and hope. Roughly meaning ‘loving feeling’, Rasa sayang is the name of a Malay folksong popular in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Sayang is a hard-totranslate Southeast Asian word, parsed rather purplely by Singapore novelist Gopal Baratham as ‘a love bound to sadness, a tenderness trembling on the edge of tears, a passion from which pity could not be detached’ – you get the idea. Rasa sayang was the phrase Yee painted across a 12m banner as she marched with the Bersih rallies in Kuala Lumpur, the largest democratic protest by Malaysians calling for free and fair elections. Exempting himself from the Asian duty of addressing his circumstances is Thai artist Dusadee Huntrakul, who presents a set of gleefully anarchic clay sculptures made up of noodley strings and recurring elements of eggs, phalluses, turds and rocks with smiley faces. All these have the fuzzy logic and goofy humour of sugar-rushing children let loose with PlayDoh – though if pressed to say what it has got to do with anything else in the show, I can only give a Gallic shrug. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Oanh Phi Phi, Mapa mundi (detail), 2015, ̦ so n mài (lacquer) on wood panel. © and courtesy the artist

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Vandy Rattana Landscape of time Sa Sa Bassac, Phnom Penh 17 December – 6 February Landscape of time (2015) is the second instalment of Cambodian-born Vandy Rattana’s trilogy of video-based work exploring personal and collective memory in his country. Inevitably, this intersects with an abyss of uncertainty on how to represent, understand and remember the period otherwise known as Year Zero in Cambodia’s history and its continued presence in the contemporary context. It follows from MONOLOGUE (2015), which was a conversation with the artist’s deceased sister, a casualty of the Khmer Rouge regime, in a piece that seemingly attempted to trace her body to an unmarked mass grave. Persisting in Landscape of time are similar scenes: a rice field and patches of tropical jungle, at times yellowing from the intense sun. The work presents speculative and reenacted instances of violence and forced labour as would have occurred in these fields – currently occupied by agricultural plantations – during the Khmer Rouge regime. Rattana was a finalist for the 2015 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award, and the video is a commissioned piece for the exhibition. It has a sobering and cinematic quality that marks

a shift from his best-known body of work, Bomb Ponds (2009), which recorded in photography and video the bomb craters left in Cambodia’s agrarian landscape from the mid-1960s to the mid-70s, during the American phase of the Indochina Wars. This piece retains the artist’s journalistic eye but also introduces surreal and fictional elements. Picturesque views of rice paddies are depicted with the signature backdrop of pomegranate-red sky, common enough placeholders for the romantic concept of Cambodia in the minds of international travellers. Avoiding overt visual references to either the Khmer Rouge or their violence, Landscape of time has a sleepy dreaminess. At times the camera is blurred and unfocused, as if we were looking through just-awakened eyes. The effect is to suggest a sleepwalking state, or being in the grip of a noonday hallucination in the tropics. Any suggestion of violence happens quickly and abruptly. Actors suddenly fall into graves, while present-day farmers stare back at us. The landscape here – dry, full of insistent life – becomes a plague, unforgiving and

relentless in its indifference, retaining its sickness and amnesia. The first sighting of a figure is a body in the night, lying down, the most visible aspect being white teeth. His position oscillates between death and tranquillity in a way that is reminiscent of French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s 1870 poem ‘Le Dormeur du val’, where the poet sees what appears to be a sleeping soldier in a beautiful valley. The poem reveals how a peaceful landscape is actually the backdrop for violent battle and tragedy. The contradiction of representation – where beauty goes hand-in-hand with violence and death – continues in other details: a spade that farms but also digs graves, a gesture of prayer that could also be surrender, people carrying bundles of what could be food or babies’ bodies. These flipping states of representation, between real landscape and reenactment and conundrum of representation, plays to Vandy’s strengths, where details are revealed in a stoically harrowing manner contradicting the inevitable beauty and intense silence that betrays this setting. Vera Mey

Landscape of time, 2016, single-channel HD video, colour, sound, 18 min 42 sec. Courtesy the artist and Sa Sa Bassac, Phnom Penh

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aaajiao Untitled Gallery Yang, Beijing 12 December – 29 February Aaajiao is the nom de plume of Shanghai-based Xu Wenkai, an artist who is heavily influenced by technology and frequently works at the intersection of computer programming, visualisations and life in relation to these. Often exhibited under the umbrella term of ‘new media’ art, his work tends to suffer from its associations with this label. New media, as a genre, has developed an autonomous space of operations that sometimes lapses into a fetishisation of technology. While aaajiao is certainly an accomplished programmer and technologist, and his works have not always avoided the pitfalls of ‘technology for technology’s sake’, over the years he has worked with aspects of computer and Internet culture, and its attendant systems, to reveal a deeper awareness of the human subject and its relationship with technology. The current show displays sophistication in both ideas and execution that develops his ongoing preoccupation with existences across the boundaries of flesh, the mechanical and electronic media. In previous exhibitions, the artist has proposed the term ‘Screen Generation’ to refer to a contemporary community so embedded in technology mediated by the screen that we must recognise them as new subjects in an expanded world that exists across this threshold of the real and the virtual. On the one hand, aaajiao posits the screen as fundamentally representational, like a mirror – it relates more or less directly to the world we feel we exist

within – but on the other hand, he suggests other modes of existence behind these screens. These new ways of being are explored in three computer-generated animations (Untitled, Untitled 0 and 2, all works 2015) that represent various human body parts that seem to have evolved into uncanny forms within their digital environments. On the nape of a pale figure a developing tessellated structure appears as an animated tattoo emerging from its skin; the fingers of an attenuated handlike form twitch intermittently; and a stylised skull floats in midair, with wavering black-tipped stalks protruding from its empty eye-sockets. In the second room, aaajiao translates these digital figures to the other side of the screen and into physical reality. On one side of the room he has made use of the ubiquitous 3D printing process to translate the electronic data of the animated skull into an object, eyestalks and all (Existence). Alongside this, four thin figures hang from the ceiling, revealing the full body shapes from the other animations (Totem). Applied to the far wall is a large composition of latticed forms made from flat copper strips, representing what appears to be a mountainous landscape made up of these blocky facets (Bits of Information). The spectre of fetishism surfaces in this exhibition in aaajiao’s use of an anachronistic wireframe style of rendering in the animations and the copper lattice work, a style akin to old-school computer animations. It might be

said that the artist uses this form of rendering to prevent the images from being mistaken for reality. This might be the case, but the artist has suggested that these lattices embody selfgenerative traits, to produce complex forms from such simple shapes, and there seems to be a further suggestion that this process is inherent in the shapes as a life force. Unfortunately, both for the lattices and the figures themselves, their translation into reality strip them of the uncanny vitality of the animations. The skull, however, is a potentially inspired element in the exhibition, as a rude reminder of existence and a fascinating development of the artist’s propositions regarding the nature of the screen and our relation to it as human beings. Although the hints of a fetishisation of technology in some of these works can appear to place a limit on a deep understanding of them, it might be countered that fetishism’s focus on the object qua object, and its positing of technology’s distance from humanity, in fact reveals an awareness of other forms of being beyond humanity. In particular the skull provides a clue to this – as a digital memento mori, the skull holds a cultural as well as a visceral significance that adjusts and deepens the other works in the show. In this exhibition the meaning of aaajiao’s Screen Generation expands through this representation of life and death, to reinforce understanding of technology and biology as being parallel spaces of existence. Edward Sanderson

Untitled, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy Gallery Yang, Beijing

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Peepshow Long March Space, Beijing 12 December – 31 January Showcasing work by six Chinese artists born during the 1980s, Peepshow celebrates a sense of mischievousness, and an irreverent, playful attitude towards what is ‘proper’ content and form. These young artists – Chen Tianzhuo, He Yida, Hu Qingtai, Lin Ke, Tang Dixin and Trevor Yeung (among whom Chen and Lin are the most hyped) – have been relatively well known within the Chinese art scene for some time now, which leads to a feeling that this exhibition isn’t so much about glimpsing a future that is yet to be revealed as it is about crowning some of the stars of their generation. In the videowork that kicks off the exhibition Act of God (2010), Tang records himself jumping off a metro platform in Shanghai, lying down on the track (and surviving): the dangerously performative nature and even the allusion to religious motifs corresponds with that found in Chen’s doodles on Chinese ghost money. Lin’s videoworks, Helmsman and Watch (both 2015) – which show respectively two feeds, one of him playing on the computer and the other of his screen activities – feature free play in a literal sense. As mundane as it is (the artist is not even chatting or browsing, but simply killing time), the videos allude to an idea of the digital sublime without losing a sense

of humour. ‘Digital paintings’ by the same artist, such as his signature avatar (Untitled, 2015), along with the pixelated and ghostly Mother and Son (both 2015), revisit in an amusing and profane fashion the profound traditions of self-portraiture and religious painting. In Hu’s series of ribbon works Curvilinear Motion (2015), excuses he made to friends who invited him to parties and events are printed repeatedly on polyester ribbons that run to thousands of metres. Confessional but certainly unapologetic, the work is literary in essence – just like, one is tempted to say, the same artist’s LED Outdoors, Untitled, No. 15524 and neon work 102–103 Leftward Stroke and Rightward Stroke (both 2015). The works speak directly of an idea of literacy and learning/reading that is sacred in the Chinese tradition, and operate beautifully with its peculiar form. The only female artist in the show, He Yida, uses found objects such as small Ikea furniture and strips it bare of its identity as contemporary furniture and design. As objects that can no longer be casually recognised and categorised, the scattered works remind us of ruins and mildly bring the spatial arrangement of the exhibition to an unstable state. Lastly, bidding farewell to spectators is Yeung’s couple of

Peepshow, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy Long March Space, Beijing

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tropical plants constantly rotating and ‘making out’ using their leaves (Initial Ritual of Mr. Butterflies, 2015). While Tang’s Act of God at the beginning of the exhibition calls actively for a sense of danger that is associated with the notion of lack, in turn, the other installation of Yeung’s, I am fine but please don’t disturb me (2014) – a fish tank filled so full that seemingly it will pour over any second – towards the end of the exhibition speaks of a danger that is linked with excess and precipitation. The exhibition is all over the place. One sees videos, paintings, digital paintings, employment of traditional ink painting techniques, use of found objects, various sources of sounds, noises, pop songs, minimalist installations, conceptual configurations. These could be indeed viewed as rich developments of great diversity and a sign of the moving on from grand narratives to a moment of politics during which the political and the everyday are no longer separable. But the old question regarding young artists remains unanswered: at a time when artistic practice is no longer necessarily associated with political, social or personal struggle, what sincerity are we facing? To what extent is what is at stake here a matter of faith? Or simply something disposable, superfluous? Li Bowen

Yeh Wei-Li Antiquity-like Rubbish Research & Development Syndicate – Selected Works, 2010 to Present Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong 22 January – 5 March Antiquity-like Rubbish Research & Development Syndicate is a fictional art factory established in 2010 by Taipei-born Yeh Wei-Li to produce work made by recycling found materials into works of art. This exhibition, which spreads out over two rooms, opens with a cluttered scene standing somewhere between a factory showroom and an ethnographic museum. Covering a large chunk of the gallery floor is a series of sculptures made from found shoes combined with various other found objects: Wooden Box Shoe Collection (2010–12). Among a series of photographic works on the wall are a series of melted plastic forms found on a beach, framed in a work titled Beach Plastic Curls (2010–11). In here, Yeh has constructed his own idiosyncratic corporate universe, with its processes and products: ‘Antiquity Employee Name Tags’ hang on a hook near to a series of wooden signs from 2010, also hung on the wall, that state the ‘Antiquity Core Values and Production’ of the syndicate. Nearby, a small production operation for the manufacture of backscratchers from wooden sticks and bottle

caps is set up on what is apparently the CEO’s desk. On a sheet of A4 paper we see various versions of ‘backscratcher’ translated from English into Chinese, which basically becomes: ‘man who does not beg’. Above the desk are real signs taken from a decommissioned factory in Taiwan, earnest employee reminders in Chinese, such as ‘quality is the insurance of our livelihood’ or ‘quality will determine our company going forward’. The second room opens with photographs featuring previous presentations of the syndicate’s work, and a series of vitrines containing found items discovered along the beach: from a piece of metal intertwined with stones, to a series of balls presented in their own dedicated display case. On one wall, the wooden characters making up the text Yeh amazingly found in 2009 at the defunct headquarters of the Kuomintang in Taipei have been reassembled – it is a quotation from Confucius about his idea of a commonwealth, written in the calligraphy of China’s first president, Sun Yat-sen. Next to this is an image of the same characters spread

out over a staircase as part of a residency the artist undertook in Cologne, The World of Da-Tong in Cologne #2 (2012). The transferral of such a historic sign from artefact to artwork, coupled with the ease with which the artist obtained the relic, makes this a remarkable inclusion in this exhibition. History becomes a found and repurposed object that is revived and protected by the artist, who salvages what society leaves behind. This sense of recovery was expressed in bodily terms in a photograph hung directly opposite Sun’s sign: an image of Number 22 Public Cemetery in Dayuan (2012), which shows a stone wall made up of fragments from burial plots that had been dug up and discarded after the family lease on a public grave is up. Three fragments taken from the site are positioned on the floor – haunting insertions that touch on the impact capitalism has on our lives, even in death. This latter group of works reflects the concept inherent to Yeh’s practice: a material study into how culture, capital and nature shape who we are over natural time, treating the fragments of capitalist consumption with both value and care. Stephanie Bailey

The World of Da-Tong in Cologne #2, 2012, c-print, acrylic face mount, 107 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Thinking Tantra Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai 24 January – 5 March During the mid-1960s a number of Indian painters turned towards Tantric philosophies to explore abstraction. Biren De (b. 1926) and G.R. Santosh (b. 1929) were the best known of this small group, with an exhibition in 1965 by the former marking the emergence of a ‘Neo-Tantric’ movement. Tantra appealed to these artists in part because it was a vernacular set of beliefs that had inspired imagery that could be adapted to contemporary abstraction. Up until that point, Tantric art had been largely carried out by anonymous artisans and used as part of the meditative rituals associated with Tantra. The Neo-Tantric artists’ transformation of that visual tradition was an answer to the conundrum of how to make abstract paintings without being seen as derivative of European and American modernist art. However by the turn of the twenty-first century, the moment at which postwar Indian painting began to enjoy a revival, the NeoTantric movement had been largely forgotten. The auction-house-driven revival favoured dreary figurative work of artists such as F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain and Tyeb Mehta. Indian abstract painters did not feature that much in this revival aside from figures such as V.S. Gaitonde, whose work owes more to

Rothko than Indian visual culture. So the exhibition Thinking Tantra, curated by Rebecca Heald, is a welcome intervention that juxtaposes a small number of paintings from artists associated with the Neo-Tantric movement with contemporary Indian and Western artists whose works reference the large, slightly disparate body of thought that is understood as Tantra. The older material is both the most fascinating and, conversely, frustrating because of its scarcity. Biren De’s End (1963) slightly predates that artist’s engagement with Tantra, hinting at the direction that his oeuvre would take a couple of years later using geometric patterns and creating luminous effects by techniques such as grading the edge of his images in lighter colours and using spots of intense white or black paint as the focal point of his images. A small, untitled oil-and-chalk work from 1973 by Sohan Qadri is enough to demonstrate why this Indian artist who settled in Denmark is worthy of a serious revival. Qadri, like Biren De and G.R. Santosh (who is not included in the exhibition), stumbled across a form of painting that explored modernist abstraction from an intellectually coherent Indian viewpoint. At their best these artists produced works incorporating imagery that

Jagdish Swaminathan, Untitled, c. 1964, oil on canvas, 60 × 91 cm. Courtesy Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

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was simultaneously culturally specific and legible to viewers not versed in Tantra as resonant abstract forms. Somewhat startlingly, Invocation (1991), an ink-on-paper work by another underrated artist, Prafulla Mohanti, looks as contemporary as much current process-based abstraction. This tantalising reframing of these three artists through a contemporary lens makes this exhibition a worthwhile endeavour. The contemporary takes on Tantra further elucidate this balance between a culturally specific set of visual and intellectual references with the international language of abstraction. Some of the artists, such as Nicola Durvasula and Tom Chamberlain, have very specifically engaged with Tantric drawings (to quite different ends). Others, such as Prem Sahib, have a more casual relationship with Tantra, which in Sahib’s case vaguely circles around Sahib’s and Tantra’s mutual celebration of abstraction and sexuality. Still, the yoking together of artists such as Biren De and Sahib is a worthy intellectual leap of faith that is rarely seen in exhibitions on Indian modern and contemporary art. This small but intellectually suggestive exhibition suggests that more curatorial work waits to be done. Niru Ratnam

Discordant Harmony Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art 19 December – 6 March Among the 34 works on show in this exhibition is a photograph by Yoneda Tomoko of a remembrance ceremony at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on the other side of town, taken on the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing, 6 August 2015. Visiting that park’s Peace Memorial Museum in early 2016 I read a sign at the entrance strongly condemning North Korea’s (alleged) underground detonation of a hydrogen bomb the week before. East Asia is stereotypically associated with the notion of a ‘harmonious’ worldview, yet is a profoundly inharmonious region, one riven by historical and ongoing disputes over territory, history and ideology; this show (commissioned by the Goethe-Institut and first staged in Seoul, it travels to Taipei this summer) highlights that in its title, its texts and the selection of works on show. However, as a pan-Asian collaborative effort between curators Huang Chien-Hung (Taipei), Kamiya Yukie (Hiroshima), Carol Yinghua Lu (Beijing) and Kim Sunjung (Seoul), it also suggests how connections might be made between individuals; indeed, in her catalogue essay the last compares this curatorial process, in which the exhibition concept was developed together at meetings and then each curator individually selected or commissioned artworks

accordingly, to the sort of noise music ‘that forms a discordant harmony through different sounds’. At the exhibition’s beginning and end, this idea is expressed literally: in the first room Koki Tanaka’s video A Piano Played by Five Pianists at Once (First Attempt) (2012) provides an entertaining documentary about music students attempting to play together and afterward discussing what went wrong; in the darkened last room Kwon Byung Jun’s The Bell (2015) combines a ring of eight speakers playing intermingling recordings of Japanese and Korean Buddhist bells – the latter renowned for their unusually long resonance – with the actual mechanical ringing of a Korean bell hanging in the space. At times the installation is beautiful to listen to, at others it feeds back into itself and seems to howl at us in anguish. But the most emotionally resonant works are those that begin with the immensely personal and open up into stories about East Asia during the years following the Second World War. Chen Chieh-Jen’s gorgeously dour monochrome film Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprises, Inc. (2010) sees him retracing his father’s secret past as a member of the CIAtrained Anti-Communist National Salvation Army in Taiwan during the 1950s. Wearing

his dead father’s uniform, the artist traipses through the gloomy, long-abandoned warehouse in which the Anti-Communists were trained, as though hunting for the ghosts of the Cold War. Also looking back to the 1950s in China, in order to visualise another hidden history is Hao Jingban’s documentary I Can’t Dance (2015), which puts together an oral history of ballroom dancing in Beijing from interviews with those who used to attend the dances. They tell stories of waltzes with Soviet girls in hotels, of American sailors teaching the jitterbug, of dances with Premier Zhou Enlai: “It was January 5th, we danced ’til sunrise. Premier Zhou really liked dancing. He said many times, ‘Just three more songs, just three more songs…’” During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), ballroom dancing was suppressed for a long while, but now the elderly interviewees are filmed twirling and pirouetting through their old haunts, bringing the once-forbidden back to life. Seventy-one years after the first atomic bombing, Discordant Harmony shows us an East Asia that continues to evade any lasting tranquillity or contemplative calm, but offers in its place a many-tongued cacophony of different, competing cultures. Dean Kissick

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Ken Kagami Dog Misako & Rosen, Tokyo 10 January – 7 February A small, official-looking printout taped to the gallery door cautions, in both Japanese and English, ‘Please be sure to watch your step; a dog has urinated on the floor in the three spots.’ Inside, hung on the wall, are three squares of white paper towel stained with yellow pigment and individually framed (Training Pad (1–3), all works 2015). Scattered around the floor is a turd (Dog Poo), some dog treats (Dog Food) and an abandoned chew-toy (Doggie Bone), each of them cast in bronze. Ken Kagami’s sparse installation suggests that the artist has been channelling a dog’s point of view. Because if a dog wants to make its mark on the world, it mostly just pisses and shits on things. Sometimes dogs eat other dogs’ faeces too, and on the counter of Misako & Rosen, for visitors to help themselves from, is a jar labelled ‘dog poo’ – in fact excrementshaped Japanese rice crackers, coated in a dark caramel glaze and tied up in transparent sandwich bags as actual dog poo might be gathered up by a responsible dog owner. This is like a bad practical joke: while a fried egg made

of rubber is an inedible representation of something you would want to eat, here is an edible representation of something you would not want to eat. However it is so obviously a fake that it is not intended to fool anybody. The rice crackers taste good, sweet and moreish. Kagami’s thing is deliberately childish humour – for his project at Frieze London last year he drew comic portraits of how he imagined fair-visitors’ penises (men) or breasts (women) to look – but nothing is ever intended really to leave a bad taste in your mouth. He seems to relish the juxtaposition of infantile subject matter with the seriousness of the art space, and heightens the absurdity of these situations by rendering this subject matter with an exaggerated cartoon artifice. A camera following a dog’s nose probably would just record footage of another dog’s arse, similar to Kagami’s short video, shot in the gallery space (Wagging (1)) and showing only the rear quarters and wagging tail of an animatronic dog (a fairly realistic animatronic dog covered in fluffy white fur, rather than one of those cold

Dog, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy Misako & Rosen, Tokyo

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metallic Japanese robo-dogs such as Sony’s recently discontinued Aibo). There is a theme of artifice running through the entire installation. Tied to the illuminated sign outside the gallery is a silver chain, and on the end of that chain a burst-open leather collar, which suggests that a dog was here but has since escaped. However the video implies that it was not a real dog but rather a canine automaton, which was made by the artist just like the sculptures and paintings of dog mess left behind. Perhaps these traces are supposed to evoke a dog’s presence and suggest how dogs might perform some of the same functions as artists in society: they can leave their marks on a surface and their found objects in a space, they can be an entertainment, they can sometimes disgust us with their actions. Or perhaps these traces are so clearly inauthentic because they are not intended to convey any sort of presence, but rather to make the absence of a real dog palpable in a space where one would not normally expect to find one anyway. Dean Kissick

Seoul Babel Seoul Museum of Art 19 January – 5 April Survival has become a key issue for young South Koreans, thanks to the country’s economic recession as well as numerous social pressures, heightened by the difficulties of getting married and raising children in a high-cost, hypercompetitive society stratified by class and connections, where unemployment among the young runs high. In 2015, this collective unhappiness spawned a ‘Hell Chosun’ meme, referring to the country as an imaginary feudal kingdom, where wealthy scions prosper while the lower classes are enslaved. The Korean artworld is not exempt from this atmosphere, although there are enterprising and resilient artists in Seoul reacting to the gloom. This is most notable in the spate of new artist-run spaces that opened last year. Spread out in the industrial zones of the old downtown or on the city’s outskirts, sometimes opening and closing within a few months, they are guerrillalike and evolved to suit each owner’s needs. Their collective energy culminated in the surprising success of Goods, the one-off art fair organised by 15 new art spaces in 2015. Seoul Babel attempts to gather these indie players in one place again, having invited 17 art platforms and 70 participants, from painters to sculptors

and video artists, plus collectives including independent small design studios and bookstores, to take part in the exhibition. At first glance, what’s on show is indeed something like a Tower of Babel, in which none of the participants speaks a common language in terms of the thematic. So perhaps it makes more sense to see this as 17 independent exhibitions going on inside a single white cube. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, organised by Nowhere, a space dedicated to photographic artworks, includes photos that capture lesser-known places in Seoul and sculptures made from lumps of concrete. All are installed on the ground instead of on walls or plinths, in consideration of changing viewpoints when switching exhibition spaces from a former garage up on a hill to an art museum in the city centre. Similarly, Archive Bomm’s NEWS NOWS represents its identity of encouraging self-organisation by artists via a solo exhibition of Nomadic Drift, a collective consisting of a choreographer, a musician and a video artist that stages a performance that is rather like spontaneous generation. Meanwhile, the props are made from cheap goods – the movable booths are constructed with iron bars, and upside-down plastic beer crates are

used as chairs. A wooden panel becomes a video screen for a ‘temporary playlist’, where artists closely involved with the newborn spaces present their work. Viewers cannot see the images clearly, though, as the screen stands near the entrance, where natural light often penetrates. One can assume this is a strategy for representing the humble environs of the artist-run spaces, but the whole concept of empowering young art platforms at the public museum feels somewhat like “vain efforts”, as a young rapper says in one of the temporary playlist videos. Perhaps the most thoughtful curatorial concept of this show lies in its weaving together of the precious blooming moments in young art spaces whose work is almost invisible to the major art scene. These spaces won’t live long; they have no such goal, and more than that, many are not able to afford their rent for long – the current condition for many young Koreans. Nevertheless, these young artists’ proactive approach to organising themselves can inspire peer artists and younger generations to survive more creatively. It will also hopefully encourage more diverse and even radical drives from the existing system in and out of the artworld. Tiffany Chae

Seoul Babel, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy Seoul Museum of Art

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Heri Dono Joy/Fear Mizuma Gallery, Singapore 14 November – 10 January In his latest exhibition, Joy/Fear, Heri Dono continues to draw inspiration from traditional Indonesian artforms for his work. Wayang kulit, or Javanese shadow-puppet theatre, in particular, provides a rich wellspring for the Indonesian’s brand of spirited iconography rife with subversive political references. Curated by Hermanto Soerjanto, this show consists of paintings, large sculptures and a recording of a performance that were made between 2004 and 2015, which together create a sense of an inventive and amusing critique of his country’s corrupt leaders, balanced by an anarchic personal vision that is rich in a weird hybrid of human, mechanical and mythic creatures. In a gallery filled with large-scale paintings, the most striking works are the moving floorbased sculptures, which act like old mechanical toys and are activated by a simple pedal switch. The largest grouping, Riding a Scapegoat (2013), comprises ten brown goat bodies with wings and human faces. All of them have machine guns protruding from their bellies and a smaller

figure of a man standing on their backs. When the foot pedal is depressed, the heads start to turn and the wings flap. The man on their backs is Suharto, the second president of Indonesia, whose three-decade regime was marked by genocide and corruption. Scapegoat, like most of Heri Dono’s oeuvre, is both menacing and absurdly humorous: perhaps people do flap their wings when The Man stands on their backs. The power of authority is also lampooned in the video Nobody’s Land (2015), where Heri Dono in military garb – like Chaplin’s Great Dictator but without the wild gesticulations and with the more amusing headgear of plastic horned animal heads – speaks authoritatively in Indonesian while chickens and other animals walk around his feet. While these works lean more closely towards agitprop in spirit, it is in painting where Heri Dono’s work becomes imaginatively expansive and opens up to different readings, integrating the representational, fantastical and personal to create a politically infused mytho-absurd spirit.

Waiting for Ratu Adil II, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 160 × 200 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Mizuma Gallery, Singapore

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For example, in Waiting for Ratu Adil I and its companion, Waiting for Ratu Adil II (2010), the roles of artist and political messiah are enmeshed in an exuberant nightmare of crazy hybrid creatures. In the first painting, there’s a dog with a hat and green wings sitting on a self-portrait of Heri Dono as a young man next to a horselike animal with wheels instead of back legs. In the second, there’s a robot with Suharto’s face on its monitor-face that engages in fisticuffs with another multilimbed monster with Heri Dono sitting at the controls. In Indonesian, ratu adil literally means ‘just king’ and is a King Arthur-like prophecy of a returning monarch, who rises from poverty and leads the people to prosperity; a claim to which many leaders including Suharto have alluded. Is Heri Dono, Beckett-like, awaiting the return of a king? Or is he suggesting that he is the king returning? But just maybe, given the gusto of his painting, this moment has already arrived for Heri Dono: that is, there is more joy than fear. This is something that art and culture can offer as respite to politics. Sherman Sam

A Fact Has No Appearance: Art Beyond the Object National Gallery Singapore 22 January – 19 June A relatively modest exhibition in National Gallery’s Concourse galleries, A Fact Has No Appearance sets out, using a large amount of original documentary texts and images, as well as extant artworks, to introduce the work of three key figures whose activities during the 1970s introduced new ideas and a conceptual turn to the Southeast Asian art scene: Johnny Manahan from the Philippines, Redza Piyadasa from Malaysia and Malaysian-Singaporean Tan Teng-Kee. Collectively their works seek to challenge, undermine and reconfigure the status of the art object. This is most directly felt in the paintings of Piyadasa, which often comprise acrylic renderings of self-evident instructional texts (1976’s A Non-Visual Art Situation, for example, is a white canvas with the words ‘This art situation is not to be interpreted visually’ stencilled at the bottom). The same artist’s Entry Points (1978) goes a step further, however, incorporating second-generation Nanyang School artist Chia Yu Chian’s oil painting Riverside Scene (1958; Chia was the first Straits artist to receive a scholarship to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris), within a blackpainted frame above a stencilled text reading, ‘Art works never exist in time, they have “entry points”’. At once playful and cheeky, it indicates a discourse with and reaction

to the past, the changing status of artworks within that discourse and a sense of disruption within the narratives of art history. In effect, by seemingly disowning the existence of artworks in time, Entry Points raises questions of how they do indeed exist in time, and, perhaps more importantly, who owns or lays claim to the authorship of artworks over time – issues that cut straight to the heart of an exhibition such as this one, which is seeking to use the artworks on show to build a narrative of regional arts development. From Piyadasa, then, self-consciousness – for artist, curator, viewer and a public institution that’s working to establish its raison d’être. These days Manahan is something of a celebrity in the world of Philippine television, where, since 1982 (when he quit artmaking), he has largely worked as a director. Much of his work is missing or lost, and the display of his work is bolstered by copies of contemporary texts and publications, giving it the air of an ongoing research project (in which the audience, invited to do a lot of reading, is complicit – a further exposure perhaps of the museum’s self-consciousness). He is known today as ‘the starmaker’, and there is a sense of showmanship evident in his work, for example Vision (1973, with Ray Albano), a comic strip detailing how Manahan gave up basketball

for art (which served as an invitation to an exhibition). Like Piyadasa, Manahan, who experimented with film and photography, was interested in moving art away from the object, preferring to describe his work as a ‘recording of the manifestation of ideas’, often, as in the partially destroyed Evidences (1974) series of self-portraits, documenting himself. Best-known as a sculptor, Tan first trained as a painter before studying sculpture in Düsseldorf and is credited with creating the first ‘happening’ in Singapore: The Picnic (1979), which included the burning of a large wood and metal sculpture, was essentially an outdoor exhibition of works too big to store (among them a 100m-long painting titled Lonely Road, which was sold in sections). It was the only such event the artist created; much of the rest of his work comprises industrial-looking metal works that explore ideas of movement and gesture connected to Tan’s early training in calligraphy combined with a Germanic industrial chic, as well as the more general formal and spatial effects of line and plane. Even though he left Singapore in 1987 (and now lives in Australia), Tan’s inclusion in this exhibition seems, to a certain extent, to be the result of his being the hometown hero. But this is the National Gallery, and that’s undoubtedly a self-conscious decision too. Mark Rappolt

A Fact Has No Appearance: Art Beyond the Object, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy National Gallery Singapore

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Ni Youyu Constant Dropping Wears Away A Stone Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei 26 December – 14 February Constant Dropping Wears Away A Stone is Ni Youyu’s first major institutional exhibition since 2012. So it’s surprising that the space the artist has been given here – two small rooms connected by an arched door, and a corridor, all formerly the MoCA’s project space – is not a particularly good fit for an exhibition that seeks to look at the development of Ni’s multidimensional practice over the past few years. And yet, to his credit, Ni has filled these limited spaces very effectively, with two-dimensional or threedimensional works that are relatively ‘flat’ or ‘wall-friendly’, designed to be hung on or placed by the wall. By using the existing walls of the rooms and the corridor, Ni has created a simple, explicit visual narrative for the show, which can be regarded by viewers as a complete, refined and engaging presentation of the artist’s recent output. Most works in the show are arranged by series and many reveal the artist’s preference for traditional literati aesthetics. For example Garden Pool (2014–15), the most eye-catching work in the show and the only one that is not placed on or by a wall, is a mixed-media installation that combines the rocks from a potted landscape, or bonsai, a miniature landscape and Chinese scholar’s garden,

with a series of miniature diving boards and swimming lanes from a competition swimming pool. The bottom of the pool is filled with water and the container is used as a fish tank. This small, lively aquatic world made by the swimming fish has created a beautiful state that was aestheticised by Chinese scholars in classical times. In Freewheeling Trip (2011–15), Ni juxtaposes vintage photographs of people and houses on a lake or river into one fictitious image that takes the form of a landscape-format classical Chinese hand-scroll. Indeed, this kind of collage is one of Ni’s signature techniques, seen also in Star Tower (2010–14), an image of a skyscraperlike structure made up of elements that the artist collected from catalogues of Chinese towers and pagodas. In the sculpture Pagoda II (2013–14), he builds up a pagodalike tower by balancing a series of the lotus seats (which would once have supported a series of decreasing-in-size Buddha statues) one on top of the other. In the Shrine Series (2014–15), the artist transforms vintage wooden pinball games into shrines for ‘things’, or groups of objects and imageries that produce themes or meanings, by using mixed materials including painting, drawing and found objects. All the works mentioned above demonstrate Ni’s outstanding ability to produce art that is

Constant Dropping Wears Away A Stone, 2015 (installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei). Courtesy the artist

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both materialistic and harmoniously cooperative with the walls. He also has a quality, like that of a master craftsman, of believing that through repeated practice he will reach or reveal the spiritual messages carried by his materials. This quality could be found in many of Ni’s time-consuming projects. For example in Galaxy Plan (2012–15), a videowork played on an LED screen outside the museum building, Ni hammers hundreds of coins into flattened round shapes, paints on each of them a microscopic landscape and arranges these coins into a starry sky. With Inches of Time (2013–14), Ni produces a series of subjective or intuitive rulers by carving measuring marks judged according to his own estimates on various materials. Among Chinese artists of his age, Ni Youyu is particularly rational and accurate, and has a strong character of self-contextualisation. And yet the works in this exhibition reveal that under the surface of this cool self-discipline, there is an internal driving force to his art: his intention to search for contradiction (of subjectivity and objectivity, classical and contemporary, accuracy and aberration) and errors, and to seek out the potential meanings created by those. Aimee Lin

White Cube… Literally: On form and convention of display Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai 18 January – 3 March Beirut-based curator Amanda Abi Khalil’s latest show in Dubai features nearly 30 works that are all, quite literally, white cubes ensconced in a space that most people would describe as a ‘white cube’. The title of the exhibition, then, becomes all about that play of meanings. Whether by regional stalwarts like Lebanese Saloua Radoua Choucair and Emirati Hassan Sharif, contemporary mainstays such as Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, or selected early-career artists, the works on show share the formalist merit of conforming to the required colour and shape, but are almost impossibly tasked, by both show title and various references in the press release, with (re)igniting Brian O’Doherty’s critique of the widely unloved yet persistent spatial construct, developed in his 1976 Artforum articles, and later published as a book. Wilfully playful, White Cube… Literally seems to unfold at two different speeds: a whimsical celebration of the form itself via material variations – sugar cubes, soap cubes, rubber, cotton and neon cubes – and a shy needling of the aesthetic conventions of the gallery through occasional works that, either directly

or indirectly, evoke the white cube’s entropy. Beyond the purely formalist exercise, though, most of the works are unrelated to O’Doherty’s institutional critique: they feel more like tangents than pillars of the curatorial edifice. Iraqi artist Adel Abidin, for instance, raises questions about religion and sustenance in Tasty (2007), a video of a sugar cube mosque slowly devoured by ants (projected in this show, formalism oblige, on a white cube of sugar cubes). Similarly, White Cube No. 2 (2015), a newly commissioned sculpture by Hassan Sharif, comprises tiny rubber cubes whirled into a sphere of copper wire. Firmly in the lineage of Sharif’s previous ‘objects’ formed of the flotsam and jetsam of industry, the work is wholly unconcerned with the ideology of spatial display. In the white cube, O’Doherty warns, context becomes content: the space itself overpowers the artworks, dominating them. Dubai-based artist Vikram Divecha’s Casting Failure (2016) is a lineup of six cast-iron cube moulds into which white paint has been poured. The would-be white cubes shrivel and wither,

peeling away from the mould edges. The paint’s resistance to being cast as a cube illustrates the unattainability of this ‘ideal’ shape more generally; its transformation into hardened, wrinkled lumps in the space itself is testament to O’Doherty’s premonition. To make this point perfectly clear, Casting Failure will remain in the gallery, beyond the show’s closure, until the paint masses are fully shrunken. Like Divecha, other artists tug at the dynamics of the white cube convention. The Kabakovs’s The White Cube (2005) is sketched from their 1993 installation in which an intrusive oversize cube ‘victimised’ viewers in a gallery. Gilbert Hage toys with viewer dynamics too, in his And Yet, to Me, What a Piece of work is a Man! (2015), a mirrored cube inserted in a rectangular, open-topped box. Perhaps less successful is Yann Sérandour’s Inside the White Cube (2008) – 18 copies of O’Doherty’s famous tome encased in a white cube-shaped box. Much like the show itself, of which it is perhaps the most emblematic work, Inside the White Cube is formally intriguing, but perhaps just a bit too, well, literal. Kevin Jones

White Cube… Literally: On form and convention of display, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai

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Corruption: Everybody Knows… e-flux, New York 11 November – 23 December Corruption: Everybody Knows… is an addendum to the myriad activities of SUPERCOMMUNITY, the virtual publishing platform that was e-flux’s contribution to the 56th Venice Biennale last year. For the six-and-a-half-month duration of the biennale, daily texts with themes such as planetary computing, cosmos and the art of work were deposited into subscriber inboxes and simultaneously archived on a dedicated website where they could be reread, downloaded or otherwise discussed in one of the guided ‘e-flux conversations’ threads. One of the discussion’s themes, corruption, now finds its extension in an exhibition at e-flux’s physical site on New York’s Lower East Side. Berlin-based curator Natasha Ginwala has brought together a dozen artists, writers, curators and cultural commentators who offer their own takes on the topic as it persists in the political, moral and ideological realms. Together the works posit corruption as something fluid and insidious, pervading multiple registers of perception. Following this nonlinear assertion, visitors are made to meander without prescribed route among various stations – artefacts under Plexiglas vitrines, videoworks, documents – flanked with excerpts from the related editorial entries, with further inquiry being directed back online. While corruption as a theme is both pertinent and pressing, the exhibition itself is often too bogged down by text to speak to its other, more sensory parameters. E-flux began in the form of a press release and has since expanded

into an interdisciplinary artistic and editorial enterprise (whose offices and library are housed right above the gallery), and therefore it is perhaps understandable that artworks in the show appear more as footnotes to a preceding text. For those who may have had prior engagement with the SUPERCOMMUNITY editorial, the contents of the exhibition would appear redundant, with excerpts of articles literally transposed from their online premises to the gallery context. Where supporting objects are presented, these fail to stand on their own, hovering somewhere between art and artefact. For example, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s spread of documents describing the moment when Pope Benedict XVI stepped down, which he cites within his essay ruminations as an act of pure faith, is heavily annotated but none the more revealing of notions of futility within a capitalist system that he discusses. In this atmosphere, the objects feel reduced. They form a shy supporting cast to the text. For example, Yin-Ju Chen and James T. Hong’s scripted dialogue between four interlocutors – a resentful artist, a compromised drunk, a New Age guru and an embattled narcissist – is illustrated by different objects, most notably a mouldy portion of pomegranate around which a cluster of flies hovers. Rather than allowing objects to speak for themselves, however, they serve more as props. Speaking referentially also undermines the viewer’s ability to draw his or her own associations about the objects’ relations to one another.

Susanne M. Winterling, Vertex, 2015, CGI animation, 4 min 22 sec. Courtesy the artist

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Free-floating works that don’t rely on written justification are much more compelling, such as Susanne M. Winterling’s Vertex (2015), which shows a CGI animation of economist Adam Smith’s invisible hand – made playfully visible as a Mickey Mouse glove – gently providing guidance through the free market and then emitting an ominous clamour every ten minutes or so. In his essay contribution, curator and cultural critic Jan Verwoert, in tracing the perverse etymology of corruption, observes that ‘corruption is a splitting that conjoins forcefully… if many things in life tear us apart, corruption will tear us together.’ Corruption is not easily seen. According to Verwoert, this is because it relies on consensus when it is in every party’s interest to be discreet. Operating at the level of infrastructure allows it to remain largely invisible. If highlighted, however, corruption can provide evidence of a legitimate system’s failings, and therefore be extremely productive. The exhibition attempts to place emphasis on the various ways by which corruption seeps into the system, allowing things to run smoothly until they don’t any more. While a broad and rhizomatic exhibition format seems fitting, the objects and ideas get lost in the attempt to tie them too heavily to words. Stations and videos, however, make for an expanded field of engagement, suggesting that this format of exhibition as index, and its subject matter, are worth revisiting. Ming Lin

Tadanori Yokoo 49 Years Later Albertz Benda, New York 12 November – 19 December Forty-nine years ago Tadanori Yokoo produced a painting of a bather, her eyes bloodshot and her armpits unshaven, swimming through surf that resembled both a wave from a classic woodblock print and a partial outline of the Japanese coast. The canvas belonged to the ‘Pink Girls’, a group of paintings in which flushed women – in various settings and poses – confronted viewers with lascivious glances and gaping, tooth-ringed mouths. Yokoo was then – along with designers like Awazu Kiyoshi and Aquirax Uno – the poster boy for a creative underground, creating graphics for, among others, the author Yukio Mishima, the Butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi and the dramatist Terayama Shuji. Like their work, Yokoo’s combined the traditional and the contemporary, the refined and the vulgar; like theirs, it stood at the nexus of a nascent critical understanding of kitsch as an expression of collective, often sublimated desire; and like theirs, it played with violence and transgressive sexuality as an outlet for that repressed emotion.

Riffing on Tom Wesselmann’s nudes, Roger Vadim’s 1960 vampire flick Et mourir de plaisir (Le sang et la rose) and, perhaps, Koga Harue’s 1929 canvas Sea, a celebration of modern Japan anchored by a swimsuit-clad woman pointing skyward, the ‘Pink Girls’ are, in one interpretation, allegorical portraits of Japanese society as it was overwhelmed by American-style consumerism and popular culture. Since then the bather has been a recurrent theme in the artist’s oeuvre, and 49 years on it is the subject of a series of 22 paintings (all works but one, 2015). In these the figure, her arm raised and her mouth, which is spewing water as in those first iterations, appears singly and in groups, swimming through settings ranging from a flotsam-strewn sea to a wooden floor. The group is complemented by nine works of a dancing couple, based on a 1920s Rudolph Valentino film, that are pixelated in patterns ranging from cubist geometry to Picabian abstraction and Pop psychedelia, stylistic devices the artist has used before.

Yokoo has often cribbed from his past work, and the sense of autobiographical stock-taking implicit in the show’s title is heightened both by this recycling and by introspective phrases like ‘Incomplete Life, Incomplete Art’, ‘Collaboration between Self and Beyond Self’ and ‘Don't Fight, Do not Compete’, which appear in several of the paintings. But where the campy Freudian force and outré content of his 1960s work reflected a culture under stress and posited the indulgence of desire as a possible defence against the dampening effects of commercialism and conformity, this current work lacks edge. In it, the past has become deadweight that allows only for permutation and combination – mix-and-match pastiches that lack formal and emotional vigour. Like the bathers in the recent series who seem to founder in heavy surf – which might be the wake of their own desperate strokes – Yokoo’s work now suggests an artist and a nation truly at sea. Joshua Mack

49 Years Later, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 46 × 53 cm. Photo: Norihiro Ueno. Courtesy the artist and Albertz Benda, New York

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Song Yige Marlborough Fine Art, London 27 January – 27 February Many of the pictures in the first solo exhibition of Beijing-based Song Yige outside of Asia compel for a moment, but then their individual elements jar and ultimately the whole picture becomes estranged from appreciation. Take the confident figure in a heatproof mask and rubber gear (Diamond Miner, 2014): why is he or she standing amidst a small scattering of cacti? Are the six figures of Dance Party (2015) wearing coats or dressing gowns? And never mind that each of their faces is covered by a floating balloon – why are they on a stage? I can countenance the weighty-looking parrots of Backyard Garden (2015), the nest of thick, corallike branches on which they perch, but why is the whole scene framed by an improbably large hole in a brick wall? Here are some other things that, on the basis of the 26 works executed between 2010 and 2015 in this show, recur in Yige’s imaginary: bandages, birds, dead things, dead birds, foodstuffs, antique sculptures, odd costumes, dirt. The ripe mixture of material feels drawn in equal measure from the waste heap and the attic, both sites of childhood exploration. An essay in the accompanying catalogue relates Yige’s imagery to the ‘infantilizing experience’ of being in a large, unfamiliar city, noting the painter’s childhood memory of the wide roads of Harbin

in northeast China. The seemingly vertiginous angles of the floor in Twins (2015), in which two classical sculptures bound in ribbon stand in a room, or of the floorboards Platonic Honeymoon (2015) do suggest such movement, while luggage appears in the latter, as it does in Life Journey (2014), each time evocative of an itinerant, temporary lifestyle. The same essay also notes that as a child, Yige would forgo sweets for painting materials. As an adult painter she shows similar restraint, never bingeing; the paint is thin, carefully applied, made to stretch (at times it appears as dry as cracked plaster); when in Male Star (2014), Yige depicts the back of a man’s bald head, covered in a layer of shaving foam out of which a single, thick stroke has been razored, she could almost be offering an emblem of her own dry, measured style. That work is one of three here depicting the backs of heads, a motif that, along with the expansive presence of grey throughout this show, suggests the influence of Gerhard Richter (though that colour might be equally read as an evocation of the northeast’s drab industrial landscape). There are even a couple of skulls – another Richter favourite – including one (Reborn, 2013) with the mistily streaked quality, figuring blurred historical vision, that is another

Male Star, 2014, oil on canvas, 44 × 53 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marlborough Fine Art, London

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of the German’s hallmarks. Yet it’s a different forebear whose presence is even more palpable here: celebrated Chinese painter Zeng Fanzhi, who curated this show. The older and the younger painter’s oeuvres each feature obscured human faces, passages of scratchy background and visual quotations from Albrecht Dürer (in Yige’s case, see Her Hands, 2015, which quotes Dürer’s c. 1508 ink study), but while Fanzhi mines elements of the surreal for an explicit but pointed cultural commentary, Yige feels moodily ensconced in it, wrapped up in dreams like the sculptures in Twins are bandaged. Six of the works in the show feature self-conscious splatters of garish colour – powder-blue, candy-pink – dribbling down a stack of luggage, or marking an alleyway, or applied, as it were, to the surface of the image as an afterthought. Undermining the work’s claim on reality, they give the paintings an abandoned, apathetic quality – like a story that breaks off for its narrator to wake and find ‘it was all a dream’. The impression of Yige’s promise – her assured handling of paint, moments of glowing colour and a memorable, or at least creepy, way with composition – is tempered with a sense that she has yet to find herself subject matter that really, well, matters. Matthew McLean

Maria Taniguchi Ibid, London 12 February – 2 April Maria Taniguchi, who won the Hugo Boss Asia Art Prize last year, has been creating a series of untitled paintings of bricks since 2008. At varying dimensions, each dark, monochromatic canvas is finely detailed with miniscule bricks outlined in graphite and filled with acrylic. As such, the Manila-based artist considers them one continuous work: the surfaces and walls of an ever-expanding, elusive architecture. At London’s Ibid gallery, eight newly minted can vases – three larger ones standing at 274 × 122 cm and five smaller at 229 × 114 cm – are lightly propped, facing one another against four walls. The first of these works, set up at the gallery’s entryway, sets a tone that is authoritative and commanding, but the power of these paintings seems to lie equally in their ability to subtly divert attention elsewhere. On the one hand, you could think of the untitled brick-works (all 2016) as evidence of a methodical practice, or more broadly as traces of artistic labour. But it is more interesting to think of them as structural elements that intervene in the spaces they inhabit and further as allusions to bodies in themselves.

In the gallery, the black brick-works stand in stark contrast to the well-lit surroundings. Spanning the length and width of each work, the viewer’s gaze – moving up, down, side-toside – extends further, to the walls, floor and, finally, ceiling: an impressive vaulted glass skylight. Below, iron studs dotting the floor bind worn wooden floorboards. What is revealed, therefore, are vestiges: a bygone, Victorian-era architecture. As physical implements, the brick paintings suggest that our notions of space are both constructed and subjective. Through them the environs of the gallery are highlighted along with the viewer’s place within them. Bricks, the foundation of industrial civilisation, are defiantly physical. ‘Brick and mortar’ evokes the actual, gritty and authentic, something that exists in the flesh. The composition of bricks is also revealing. Comprising whatever resources are currently found in abundance (glass, concrete, clay), they reflect an economy. These bricks, painted on supple cloth, are illusionistic, their substance referential. They embody ideas of solidity, impermeability and opacity, while existing in vulnerable

materials of fibre and synthetic. More than anything, perhaps, these bricks index a porous and evolving body. Taniguchi’s work has been noted for its inscrutability. Much has been said about labour and the artist’s devoted, rigorous hand, and while it is true that such endurance and attention should be commended, it is worth considering how these paintings become objects upon leaving the site of their creation. They are monumental, yet resist the resolution of monuments. Their rational form mimics architecture while falling shy of illusions of permanence. Acting like props, they make literal Minimalism’s fear of theatricality, unabashedly claiming their status as support structures in an event that results in an acute sense of self-awareness. The brick paintings can be seen to trace disparate points of contact, through which the body comes to know space and its place within it. The duration and span of the work suggests an eventual whole, but the parts never get summed up. Ming Lin

Untitled, 2016, acrylic, canvas, wood support, 229 × 114 cm. Photo: Oskar Proctor. Courtesy the artist

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Books

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25 Years of The Substation: Reflections on Singapore’s First Independent Art Centre edited by Audrey Wong The Substation and Ethos Books, SG$25 (softcover) An experimental art institution crosses the quarter-century mark in a landscape where it has no precedent. Yet the first book documenting its history, through the personal musings of 25 individuals close to it, is suffused not with a sense of celebration, but pensiveness, nostalgia and an unmistakable anxiety over its future. The significance of The Substation, a power station-turned-art centre in a quiet corner of downtown Singapore, cannot be overstated. In a city-state where most of the gleaming museums and arts venues have sprung up in the fat years of the last two decades, The Substation came into being in an almost unthinkable fashion: one man, the late, influential dramatist Kuo Pao Kun, saw potential in a derelict building, submitted a proposal to the relevant authority to turn it into an arts centre and was then invited to run it. This collection fleshes out its history from various perspectives, through text, images and illustrations. What could have been repetitive and solipsistic is lifted by moments of impassioned storytelling, striking imagery and sharp insight into the development of the arts in technocratic, heavily conformist Singapore. Kuo’s foresight, idealism and ability to rally others haunts this volume like a ghost, beginning with architect Tay Kheng Soon’s account of exploring the abandoned Armenian Street power station with the playwright. Tay writes: ‘My scepticism stood in stark contrast to Pao Kun’s evident enthusiasm. What about planning

and building permits? What about funding? Pao Kun said all these questions could be solved.’ Kuo secured a small amount of government and corporate funding, but most importantly, established its openness to raw and fringe energies and letting different worlds coexist on the same plane. Theatre director Kok Heng Leun, who started out as a programming executive at The Substation, recalls a night during the early 1990s when Chinese folk performers sang exquisitely in the black box theatre while a punk band set up for a concert in the garden outside. This polyphonic vision was often upheld in the face of ‘financial challenges, as well as interventions from various agencies when works are challenging and provocative’, Kok notes. The boldness and generosity of The Substation’s leadership dovetailed with the hunger of 1990s artists and audiences, breeding spontaneous artist networks and a sense of community. Another major theatre director, Alvin Tan, writes of how the centre’s café and the nearby hawker-centre and coffee shop – all now gone – served as informal artist salons. Multidisciplinary artist Zai Kuning unabashedly took The Substation’s tagline of ‘a home for the arts’ literally, sleeping in its garden during his residency at the art centre during the early 1990s: ‘My real home seemed empty to me, and it was here, the garden, which became my “soul home”’. By the next decade, The Substation would establish itself not just as a haven for

experimental live performances and art exhibitions but also indie film-screenings. The problem today is that newer and better-funded venues for all these have emerged. More than one account speaks of The Substation today as characterised by absence – of its garden and banyan tree (one rented out to a commercial live-music venue, the other cut down to make way for an expanding university) – shorn of much of its vitality. Hence a pall of gloom hangs over this book, with numerous voices questioning how the centre can remain relevant. For some, such as Zai, it must continue to keep its doors open and remain accepting of failure. Others, such as dance artist Daniel Kok, argue for a greater critical rigour, while performance artist Loo Zihan ends this volume with a plea for a radical transformation of its artistic direction. Loo’s account of purchasing a cutting from the banyan tree as part of a crowdfunding campaign, and then trying to grow it in a pot on the balcony of his 12th-floor flat, is particularly poignant. Harrison, as the sapling has been named (after the former Beatle), is described as having grown to a tree of more than 2m tall, its roots tunnelling out from beneath the pot and sprawling across the floor, ‘desperately seeking something to attach itself to’. It is an apt analogy for Kuo’s legacy, for the strong feelings The Substation inspires in many Singapore artists, as well as for the futility of keeping the art centre exactly as it was. Clarissa Oon

Entry Points: The Vera List Center Field Guide on Art and Social Justice, No. 1 edited by Carin Kuoni and Chelsea Haines Duke University Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, $25 (softcover)

Of late, art’s engagement with politics has got a bad rap, from the controversy that followed Ai Weiwei’s recreation of a press photograph showing a young Syrian refugee dead on a Turkish beach, to the criticism levelled at Okwui Enwezor over his attempts to engage politics in his Venice Biennale last year. This reader is timely. The format is simple enough: a couple of essays plus a wider selection of short artist profiles written by various curators and critics, who were invited by the editors to recommend a person or group working in the ‘activist-art’ field. Published alongside these profiles are statements by the relevant artists or collectives themselves. The book closes with a larger focus on Theaster Gates’s community-building Dorchester Projects.

Of the two essays, the best is Sharon Sliwinski’s attempt to isolate the cause of so much of the trouble surrounding art’s involvement in politics, adeptly pointing to the fact that traditionally art has been a solitary mode of expression and even self-discovery, while politics is by definition a social, multiplicitous concern. From these profiles it is clear that the best work starts personal and grows to say something on a more universal level (though one can argue that for studio-based art, too). Take, for example, Shahidul Alam, one of the most inspirational figures included here (a pat turn of phrase, but presumably inspiration is the purpose of this book). His formation, in 1989, of the first South Asian photo agency, Drik, which had the specific

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aim of enabling Bangladeshi photographers and their regional peers to tell their own stories, grew from personal frustration with Western media’s indifference to his pictures. Similarly, Tenzing Rigdol’s Our Land, Our People (2011) began as a simple desire to fulfil (posthumously) his exiled father’s wish to touch Tibetan soil again. It ended with a poignant, self-evidently political installation of earth smuggled from the disputed region across the border to India, which attracted thousands of displaced Tibetans in pilgrimage. There perhaps exists in these projects, and many of the others documented in this worthy publication, the ultimate personal embodiment of, to invoke another cliché, acting locally, thinking globally. Oliver Basciano

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Avant-Garde Museology edited by Arseny Zhilyaev e-flux, $35 (softcover) Avant-Garde Museology is the first book in a new series called ‘e-flux Classics’, which, according to the editor, aims to question the existing art historical canon by revisiting and complicating it. This bulky publication carries that mantle as a recuperating study in English-language academia of Communist Russia led by several members of the e-flux community. Edited by artist Arseny Zhilyaev, AvantGarde Museology is a collection of texts ranging from philosophical and artist writings to conference documents and governmental reports. Together they summon the landscape of Soviet revolutionary museology, illuminating a short yet extremely idea-dense period between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War. It is surprising to learn that in the space of just a couple of decades so many discussions were addressing the role the museum should play in both a citizen’s daily life and in a violently transforming society. In classic Euro-American art history, this period is often epitomised thinly by Tatlin’s Tower and Malevich’s squares. By comparison, the art scene of the Weimar Republic, which developed over roughly the same period, has been the subject of countless anthologies, conferences and exhibitions.

There is a great diversity of voices on the place of art in contemporary life and politics. Malevich appears with a manifestolike piece stating his museological view that museums not solely exhibiting contemporary life are ‘the former debauched houses of Rubens and the Greeks’. Art critic and historian Natalya Kovalenskaya, in a text titled ‘An Experiment in Marxist Exhibition-making at the State Tretyakov Gallery’, has a slightly different opinion: ‘We had to juxtapose the art of the ruling classes with the art of the oppressed. It is only possible to fully understand the ideological character of art of the landowners when the entire system of exploitation that produced it is exposed.’ Other interesting moments in the book include those indicating the change in ideological tone after Stalin came to power, differentiations between the perspectives of amateurs (often workers) and museum professionals, and the mesmerising symbiosis and interactions of the mysticist Cosmism, Marxist doctrines and real social conditions. In a 630-page book about historical museums and exhibitions, we would expect to see more illustrations and visual documents than just 16 small black-and-white plates. This makes one wonder about the nature and intention of the

project. For me, it is less a collection of primary art historical resources than a mixture of literary anthology and theoretical reference for current museum practice. It is not difficult to find in the book the prototypes of some of the newest tendencies in recent museological and curatorial development, such as the museum-in-transit, the dematerialisation of the exhibition, the increasing display of the bigger cultural environment (supplemental materials) and so forth. The astonishing insight and foresight expressed by writers from some 80 years ago are truly ‘avant-garde’. But do not forget, these views are expressed in the omnipresent discourse of a unilateral ideology that advocates a closed end in art. Another e-flux writer, Hito Steyerl, in her recently published essay ‘A Tank on a Pedestal: Museums in an Age of Planetary Civil War’, argues that museums of all kinds ‘have less to do with the past than with the future’. A crucial purpose of museological preservation work is to prevent history from repeating itself. Some of the revolutionaries whose texts are included here may disagree, but this book, with its abundant visionary remarks, seems to have aims similar to the preservation work Steyerl refers to. Hanlu Zhang

Kathmandu: Lessons of Darkness by Martino Nicoletti Mimesis International, £12.50 (softcover) This 186-page evocation of Kathmandu as place (including as a destination for Western visitors on spiritual journeys) and state of being is a collection of photographic and textual impressions that scan alternately breezy and precise, anecdotal and poetic. Not quite an artist’s book (though it was originally published as such, in 2009, in an Italian edition of 108 copies), nor travelogue, it presumes a knowledge of this ancient city, ‘built on the pattern of a great sword… now disappeared from all eyes’ and a willingness to stick with the author (an ethnologist and artist) even when his observations are hard to follow – ‘Advancing in the battlefields and cemeteries is splendour, believe me! The tongue shown with pride and the penis proudly erect’ – or too easy – ‘When a storm is coming, dogs usually seek the company of men. When they are close to death, they shun it.’ In places this is presuming too much.

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The texts, roughly 90 in all, range from a single sentence to several pages, organised under headings like ‘Thirteenth day of curfew’, ‘Back to the airport’, ‘The caress’, ‘Your hands aren’t biscuits’. Nicoletti intersperses these texts with artful black-and-white photographs he has taken or found: children at play, stray dogs, a hunk of meat at the butcher’s. There is no overt connection between the writing and the images, though both are powerfully atmospheric. Given the author’s long publishing history and professional interest in visual anthropology and the visual arts of southern and southeastern Asia, the fragmentary nature of Kathmandu suggests that it is best read alongside some of his other works – or, less generously, that these are leftovers poured into a book still seeking a concept. The longer texts are the stronger, particularly one titled ‘The response’, an account of a nine-month drought that gradually saps the

ArtReview Asia

land and its people: ‘In this world with its throat ripped, life continued to make inroads with the semblance of normality, trying to fill, higgledypiggledy, every crevice that the passing days, in the meantime, opened.’ Nicoletti recounts the small and then larger ways that life changes, the increasingly drastic measures taken to get out from under the sun, the muezzin’s dogged repetition of his call to prayer, and then, shockingly, the village elders’ turn to human sacrifice. ‘Power, sometimes, is just: waiting,’ the author concludes, in a passage that skilfully ties together all the humanity and horror witnessed along the path from birth to death. But the work as a whole is oddly bloodless, given the material, and suffers, to my mind, from an absence of sensuality, of connection with others, as though participant (poet, artist) and observer (anthropologist) have fought to a standstill for control of the project. David Terrien

ArtReview Asia Xiàn Chǎng, a new initiative, brings special projects by leading artists from around the world to locations inside and outside the West Bund Art Center, 9–13 November Curated by ArtReview Asia for West Bund Art & Design West Bund Art Center 2555 Longteng Avenue, Shanghai www.westbundshanghai.com

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For more on Nguyen Thàng Phong, see overleaf

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Contributors Tatsuo Miyajima Yutaka Sone is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had solo and two-person exhibitions at David Zwirner, London and New York; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; Parasol Unit, London; Kunsthalle Bern; and MOCA, Los Angeles. His work has also been included in biennials around the world. For this issue of ArtReview Asia he presents Picnic in Carrara. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have worked together as an artist duo since 1995 and have had numerous solo and group exhibitions in art institutions worldwide. Recent solo shows include Aéroport Mille Plateaux at Plateau, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Biography at Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (2014); and Tomorrow at Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013). The artists were shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2000 and won the Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2002. In 2009 they received a special mention for their exhibition The Collectors in the Nordic and Danish Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale, and in 2012 they were selected for London’s Fourth Plinth Commission. For this issue of ArtReview Asia, they present The Making of a Fair, an artist’s project developed in relation to The Well Fair, currently on show at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

(artist intervention: cover) Tatsuo Miyajima, who lives and works in Ibaraki, Japan, has, since the 1980s, been producing sculptures and installations that combine electronic technology and the teachings of Buddhist philosophy. His use of LED numerals 1 to 9 as a representation of the journey through life (where 0, or death, never appears) has become the central (though not exclusive) formal component of his work. For this issue, ArtReview Asia asked Miyajima to follow up a statement he made during an interview published in the magazine in May 2014 (vol 2, no 1) with an intervention in the fabric of the magazine itself. ‘I don’t have a particular preference as to the context of my shows because I can adapt to the context, or the location,’ he said at the time. ‘It’s a challenge, of course, because I have to find a new way of delivering the message accordingly, but it can be in a gallery context… or it can be a desert, or surrounded by ice. Whatever the context or location that was given to me, I enjoy adapting to the situation.’ For the context of ArtReview Asia, the artist has created cover artwork comprising one of his signature numerals. The intervention also marks the unveiling of a new public installation by the artist. Titled Time Waterfall, and featuring a cascade of the numerals 1 to 9, it will be on view on the exterior of Hong Kong’s ICC Tower every night from 21 to 26 March as part of this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong.

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 Writers Stephanie Bailey, Tiffany Chae, Gallery Girl, Donatien Grau, Paul Gravett, Hanlu Zhang, Hu Fang, Kevin Jones, Hyunjin Kim, Dean Kissick, Li Bowen, Ming Lin, Joshua Mack, Matthew McLean, Vera Mey, Taro Nettleton, Clarissa Oon, Niru Ratnam, Sherman Sam, Edward Sanderson Contributing Artists / Photographers Elmgreen & Dragset, Mikael Gregorsky, Tatsuo Miyajima, Nguyen Thành Phong, Yutaka Sone

Nguyen Thành Phong (preceding pages)

Born in 1986, Phong grew up during the Doi Moi, or ‘renewal campaign’, which by the 1990s saw the so-called socialist-oriented market economy grow, the controls of the ‘subsidy period’ relax and poverty nearly halve. In his comics, Phong captures Vietnamese life both recent and ancient, often harking back to the leaner times immediately after the war, as in his new Strip for ArtReview Asia. “Cartoons and comics like this were commonly used by everyone, unofficially, for fun and stress-relief back then,” says the artist. “This story forms part of an illustrated book project containing comics about common slang, idioms and jokes from the period.” Phong’s parents, both art lecturers, encouraged his drawing; his father had served in the North Vietnamese Army as a sketch artist and propagandaposter designer. Phong’s generation was raised on manga, introduced when the Japanese comic Doraemon arrived in Vietnam in the early 1990s, initially in unlicensed translations but eventually reaching sales of over 50 million copies. While studying painting at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts, Hanoi, Phong was already getting published

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by local magazines and book publishers. “I experimented with different drawing and storytelling styles for each project,” Phong recalls. “The market was dominated by manga and Korean manhwa. As there weren’t many comics creators in Vietnam back then, and the quantity and quality of the domestic comics were not high, this made people pay more attention to my work.” Although today the status of Vietnamese comics has much improved, the government still controls print publication by withholding permits. In Phong’s experience, “The censorship system has been a huge barrier for authors in Vietnam who want to experiment with more unconventional, sensitive stories.” In 2011, Phong’s satirical cartoon book Sat thu dau mung mu (Killer with a Soft Head) was declared illegal. “The real reason for the ban was never revealed, but it was probably because it was the first of its kind and contained controversial images of the police and army, taboos if you portray them differently to the Communist Party line. The publishing house was forced to withdraw copies from the market, which they failed to do, because most were already sold out.

ArtReview Asia

Later we republished it, but they did not allow us to keep the old title and brutally removed or reedited some illustrations.” One way for comics to develop may lie in appealing directly online to a crowdfunding community. Through Comicola, a website supporting Vietnamese creators set up by Phong’s collaborator, writer Nguyen Khanh Duong, the duo raised enough in 2014 to reboot Long Than Tuong (The Dragon General), their series from Young Comics Magazine, which had been dropped in 2004 after only 13 chapters. Their fictionalised slice-of-life history became the first Vietnamese graphic novel ever honoured by the International Manga Awards, organised since 2007 by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And following its example, crowdfunding has financed a further dozen local comics into print. Phong and Duong’s projected five-volume epic follows a magically powered hero during the reign of the Tran Dynasty (1225–1400) who is resisting the second Mongolian invasion. Lessons can be learned from the past. As the artist, speaking to the BBC, has said, “We want something that relates to our life.” Paul Gravett

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

Art and photo credits on the cover artwork by Tatsuo Miyajima on pages 92, 93, 114 and 122 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Spring 2016

Text credits Phrases on the spine and on pages 25, 49 and 95 are from Fortune Year of The Monkey 2016, by Master Chang Jue, published by People s Publishing Pte Ltd, Singapore, in 2016

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Off the Record It’s unreasonably dark and hot in here. Paintings are stacked precariously along the walls enclosing the space around me. I’m squeezed between a packing crate and what looks like an Ai Weiwei sculpture salvaged from the boats of unfortunate refugees. There’s no airconditioning in this stockroom of a gallery booth at Art Basel Hong Kong, which is a problem for any works-on-paper in here, as well as for my balayage-done hairstyle that paints highlights subtly in with lowlights. I’m worried that the batwing sleeves of the delicate Ong Shunmugam calf-length fitted-dress I am wearing are going to catch on the crate. It’s getting difficult to both breathe and keep the dress pristine. After I while, I give up the struggle and lie in the salvaged boat, hoping that if it all ends here at least Ai can make an incredibly moving and powerful artwork from my demise. Perhaps he could pose facedown in the boat itself and recreate the moment for history. I’m woken by a spray of liquid to my face. “Is that a cold-pressed Yin-Yang smoothie?” I splutter. “Erm, no, it’s 40 percent DEET spray,” replies a familiar voice. Strong arms lift me out of the refugee boat. “What are you doing here in our storeroom? Are you part of the refugee-boat work? If so you better sort your costume out. Refugees don’t wear batwings… or perhaps they do at Cologne Carnival, but we’re in Hong Kong now. Let’s get you out of the storeroom and onto the booth and conditioncheck you. I reckon I can find a crack in your frame!” “Put me down, Christoph, you German pervert,” I whisper before darting back into the doorway of the storeroom. “Hold on,” says Christoph, the once legendary German gallerist who now for reasons best known to himself operates only out of Southeast Asia. “I heard about your sister. The incident in Brooklyn [see the March issue of ArtReview]. Christ, I’m sorry…” “Christoph. Look, it’s fine,” I say. “She had it coming. The most important thing is that I’m still around to carry the torch of working the front desks of galleries, being incredibly rude to new collectors and wondering why the gallery’s business-model is defunct.” Christoph looks blank. “Anyhow, enough of that. Remember our chat last year? Three in the morning at the Kee Club? You were incredibly eloquent about the terrible beauty of contemporary Indonesian art. You also mentioned that your favourite collector was incredibly dodgy, had three private museums and could get hold of false passports.” “Is that why you’re here?” He says excitedly. “To get first dibs on the new Eko Nugroho? I mean I’ve heard of collectors sneaking into Art Basel Hong Kong early, but lurking in the crates is pure genius!” “Not quite, Christoph. I need a passport. And an exhibitor’s pass. Long story, but the positive takeaway for all of us is that I’m coming to work for you here in our Asian outpost.” “Look, you can’t do that…” “Christoph, I know two things: firstly the incredibly complex Ponzi scheme of your favourite collector that you carefully explained to me that night at the Kee Club. And also that you were the driving force in the thriving e-commerce business of fake Yue Minjuns. That sort of shit might impress Doug Fishbone, but it does nothing for me. Now meet me at the Kee tonight with the goods. And while you’re at it, do you mind carrying me out of here in an empty crate?”

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Some hours later I’m sitting sipping a Vermouth Cocktail Cobbler when Christoph bounds in with a pile of battered passports. “What the hell is this?” “Well, they’re from Alfredo Jaar’s legendary 1995 work One Million Finnish Passports. I kept a few for myself on the basis that no one would miss them. It’s from when I had the big gallery in Munich.” He looks mournful. “They’re out of date! And look, your days of being somebody in the Rhineland are over. You’re Asian now and so will I be when you produce the right type of passport for me!” “OK, OK. Here’s one. It’s Austrian. Will that do?” “Austria? The land of Heimo Zobernig, VALIE EXPORT and Gottfried Helnwein? Excellent. No one has heard of any of those artists in Asia, so this new identity as a serious Austrian gallery assistant who fell in love with Southeast Asia will work out perfectly. After all, Christoph, those goons who got my unfortunate sister could be after me next! Now where’s the exhibitor’s pass?” Christoph hands the pass over sadly. “You know, I thought the next person I employed would be a bit more… well, you know, someone perhaps from the Asian auction-house scene or a curator…” I narrow my eyes at him. “Do you mean Asian like Ute Meta Bauer, perhaps? Or Magnus Renfrew? Or Phil Tinari? Or Lars Nittve? Or Michael Lynch? Or Tobias Berger?” Christoph lowers his eyes. “Exactly. I’m your future, Christoph. Now get me another Vermouth Cobbler!” Gallery Girl

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