hk$90
vol 5 no 1 01 >
9 772052 534000
Tigers, modernity and Asia’s subterranean histories
Theaster Gates on labour, community and how Donald Trump makes him work harder
Zhang Ruyi and the alienation of everyday life
Essential exhibitions during Art Basel Hong Kong
Ho Tzu Nyen
ANRI SALA TAKE OVER APRIL 28 – JUNE 17, 2017 — ANGELA BULLOCH HEAVY METAL BODY APRIL 28 – JUNE 17, 2017 — NEW ADDRESS POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM ART BASEL HONG KONG MARCH 23 – 25, 2017 GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN APRIL 28 – 30, 2017 FRIEZE NEW YORK MAY 5 – 7, 2017
Dirk Braeckman Belgian Pavilion 57th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia Represented by Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
Curator Eva Wittocx 13.05—26.11.2017 www.dirkbraeckman.be
ART BASEL HONG KONG
35 years
ZENO X GALLERY MICHAËL BORREMANS DIRK BRAECKMAN ANTON CORBIJN RAOUL DE KEYSER JAN DE MAESSCHALCK MARLENE DUMAS KEES GOUDZWAARD SUSAN HARTNETT YUN-FEI JI KIM JONES JOHANNES KAHRS NAOTO KAWAHARA JOHN KÖRMELING JOCKUM NORDSTRÖM PIETRO ROCCASALVA GRACE SCHWINDT JENNY SCOBEL BART STOLLE MIRCEA SUCIU LUC TUYMANS PATRICK VAN CAECKENBERGH ANNE-MIE VAN KERCKHOVEN JACK WHITTEN CRISTOF YVORÉ
March 23 - 25, 2017 BOOTH 3C18 CONVENTION CENTRE HONG KONG
Marlene Dumas - No Belt - 2016 - 200 x 100 cm - oil on canvas
MARK MANDERS
Luc Tuymans Art Basel Hong Kong 2017
David Zwirner New York & London Opening in Hong Kong 525 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 + 1 212 727 2070 537 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 +1 212 517 8677 24 Grafton Street London W1S 4EZ +44 20 3538 3165 davidzwirner.com
Isabel, 2015 Oil on canvas 57 1/8 x 48 7/8 inches (144.9 x 124 cm)
HA U S E R & W IR T H
Celebrating 25 Years of Hauser & Wirth A NEW DIGITAL TIMELINE TRACING THE JOURNEY OF HAUSER & WIRTH AND THE ARTISTS WHO HAVE SHAPED ITS HISTORY. DISCOVER MORE AT WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.ART LAUNCHING MARCH 2017
庆祝豪瑟沃斯画廊 25周年 一个全新的网上时间轴 追溯豪瑟沃斯的历程 以及成就了画廊的艺术家们 了解更多请登录 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.ART 2017年3月发布
MARTIN CREED AND IWAN WIRTH DURING THE INSTALLATION OF ‘WORK NO. 370: BALLS’ (2004), HAUSER & WIRTH LONDON, PICCADILLY, 2004 伊万·沃斯与马丁·克里德在安装《作品370号：球》（2004）过程中，豪瑟沃斯伦敦空间，皮卡迪利，2004年
WWW.MASSIMODECARLO.COM
MASSIMODECARLOGALLERY
MARCH 21 – MAY 14, 2017 OPENING RECEPTION: MARCH 20, 2017
@MDCGALLERY
MASSIMO DE CARLO HONG KONG (PEDDER BUILDING) PRESENTS: ROLAND FLEXNER AND AI WEIWEI.
INFO@MASSIMODECARLO.COM
MARCH 23 – 25, 2017
CARSTEN HÖLLER, GIANT TRIPLE MUSHROOM, 2012, POLYESTER MUSHROOM REPLICAS, POLYESTER PAINT, SYNTHETIC RESIN, ACRYLIC PAINT, WIRE, PUTTY, POLYURETHANE, RIGID FOAM, STAINLESS STEEL, 280 X 186 X 165 CM
MASSIMO DE CARLO EXHIBITS AT KABINETT SECTION OF ART BASEL HONG KONG WITH A SPECIAL PROJECT BY LEE KIT.
LEE KIT, IT WAS A CINEMA., 2016, ACRYLIC, EMULSION PAINT, INKJET INK AND PENCIL ON PAPER, LOOPED VIDEO, 215 X 285 CM
MARCH 23 – 25, 2017
ROLAND FLEXNER, UNTITLED (W), 2014, GOLD CALLIGRAPHY INK AND SUMI ON PAPER, 102 X 441 CM
MASSIMO DE CARLO PARTICIPATES AT ART BASEL HONG KONG.
ArtReview Asia vol 5 no 1 2017
A failure of amnesia ‘When I was young, I too had many dreams, most of which I later forgot – without the slightest regret. Although remembering the past can bring happiness, it can also bring a feeling of solitude; and where is the pleasure of clinging to lonely times passed? My trouble is that I find myself unable to forget, or at least unable to forget entirely.’ That’s the leftist Chinese author Lu Xun introducing his famous short story collection Outcry (1922). And it might equally serve for this issue of ArtReview Asia too, given that so much of its focus is on what Lu Xun would have termed a ‘failure of amnesia’ (ArtReview Asia can’t speak to the loneliness or otherwise of artists who delve into the past). We look at artists who have failed to forget the complex political histories of Southeast Asia (and its engagement with communism and colonialism), traditions of animism and shamanism in East Asia and beyond, the divisions and horrors of the war in Vietnam, and the role of labour, race and community in shaping America’s political landscape today. That’s not to say, however, that ArtReview Asia is all about looking back. (After all, who would buy a magazine about contemporary art that was about anything other than ideas of progress and the new – ha, ha, ha.) But it is a magazine that believes in the fact that context has a lot to do with the way(s) in which we interpret art. That doesn’t mean that it only looks to art produced in Asia in a way that chimes with the all-too-fashionable isolationist or protectionist policies of today, but it does mean that the particularities of place and time influence the production and consumption of art produced around the world. Moreover, given the extent to which ‘the world’ in which we live is increasingly experienced via mediums and mediation, ArtReview Asia believes that an understanding of the plays with aesthetics and mediation that are the subject of so much contemporary art can also lead to a greater awareness of what’s going on in the world. Although it is possible to take that line of thought too far and to drift out of touch with any sort of reality (Donald). And one thing ArtReview Asia likes to try and do is to keep its discussions grounded. Even if the people on its cover lack any kind of ground at all. ArtReview Asia
Not grounded (amnesia)
17
Art Previewed
Previews by Nirmala Devi 31
Points of View by Hu Fang, Charu Nivedita, Clara Young 43
page 38 A panel from ‘Vishwamitra’, illustrated by Ram Waeerkar, part of Sapatarshi: The Seven Supreme Sages, 2016, published by Amar Chitra Katha, India
Spring 2017
19
Art Featured
Weretigers, Frog Marshals and Other Modern Mediums by Anselm Franke 54
Patricia Perez Eustaquio by Adeline Chia 70 Theaster Gates by Mark Rappolt 74
Ho Tzu Nyen by Mark Rappolt 62
Le Ngoc Thanh and Le Duc Hai by Max Crosbie-Jones 78
Zhang Ruyi by Aimee Lin 64
Pak Sheung Chuen by Aimee Lin 84
page 78 Le Ngoc Thanh and Le Duc Hai, Before ‘86 (detail), 2012, oil on canvas, 145 × 145 cm. Courtesy the artists and New Space Arts Foundation, Hue
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ArtReview Asia
Art Reviewed
Exhibitions 94
Books 112
Busan Biennale, by Aimee Lin He Yida, by Alvin Lee When We Become Us, by Julie Chun Hans-Henning Korb, by Mark Rappolt Interpreting New Art Movement, by Alia Swastika Haig Aivazian, by Gabriel Coxhead The Bizarre Honour, by Tony Godfrey Singapore Biennale, by Adeline Chia Chun Kai Qun, by Sherman Sam Kamin Lertchaiprasert, by Max Crosbie-Jones Kamrooz Aram, by Murtaza Vali Ghislaine Leung, by Ming Lin On the Origin of Art, by Adeline Chia
Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities, by Bettany Hughes Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid The Refugees, by Viet Thanh Nguyen Memoirs of a Polar Bear, by Yoko Tawada Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader In Singapore Contemporary Art, edited by Jeffrey Say and Seng Yu Jin The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir, by Thi Bui THE STRIP 118 OFF THE RECORD 122
page 94 Kim Dong Kyu, Custom, 1982, oil on canvas, 84 × 102 cm. Courtesy the artist and Busan Biennale
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ArtReview Asia
ORANIENBURGER STRASSE 18
10178 BERLIN
CINDY SHERMAN EDWARD & NANCY KIENHOLZ JANUARY – APRIL 2017
A SELECTION OF WORKS FROM THE BETTY AND MONTE FACTOR FAMILY COLLECTION JANUARY – APRIL 2017
PAMELA ROSENKRANZ LUCY DODD APRIL – JUNE 2017
LAKE IN THE SKY APRIL – JUNE 2017
OTTO PIENE LIGHT BALLET APRIL – JUNE 2017
THOMAS RUFF NEW WORKS JULY – SEPTEMBER 2017
ANALIA SABAN PIGMENTE JULY – SEPTEMBER 2017
THEA DJORDJADZE ROSEMARIE TROCKEL
UN SOIR, J’AI ASSIS LA BEAUTÉ SUR MES GENOUX. AND I FOUND HER BITTER. AND I HURT HER. JULY – SEPTEMBER 2017
5900 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD
LOS ANGELES
POWER
CA 90036
WORK BY AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO NOW CURATED BY TODD LEVIN MARCH – JUNE 2017
ANALIA SABAN FOLDS AND FAULTS JUNE – AUGUST 2017
WWW.SPRUETHMAGERS.COM
kurimanzutto
gabriel orozco
haegue yang
until march 16, 2017
april 1 – may 6, 2017
gob. rafael rebollar 94 col. san miguel chapultepec 1 1850 mexico city off-site #sonora1 28
march 1 – may 30, 2017 col. condesa, mexico city
+52 55 52 56 24 08 www.kurimanzutto.com info@ kurimanzutto.com
fair art basel hong kong 2017 booth 3C05 march 21 – 25, 2017
jimmie durham: at the center of the world
anri sala 13th sharjah clocked perspective biennial, 2017 march – september, 2017
allora & calzadilla,
until may 7, 2017
museo jumex,
mariana castillo deball,
hammer museum,
mexico city
monika sosnowska
los angeles
march 12 – june 12, 2017
@kurimanzutto #kurimanzutto #kurimanzuttolibros soil and stones, souls and songs
sharjah, united arab emirates
jimmie durham,
roman ondak history repeats itself
mariana castillo deball,
march 25 – september 17,
tarek atoui…
2017
akram zaatari contra la fotografía. historia anotada de la arab image foundation
march 18 – june 11, 2017
kunsten museum
april 7 – september 24,
para-site, hong kong
of modern art
2017
aalborg, denmark
macba, barcelona
viva arte viva
mariana castillo deball,
carlos amorales life in the folds
nairy baghramian…
mexican pavillion,
gabriel orozco,
athens: april 8 – july 17,
venice biennale, 2017
leonor antunes
2017
may 13 – november 26,
57th international
kassel: june 10 –
2017
art exhibition,
september 17, 2017
arsenale, venice
la biennale di venezia
documenta 14, 2017
anri sala,
may 13 – november 26, 2017
北京
画廊周 北京
BEIJING
卢森
LUCERNE
Gallery Weekend Beijing
程 然
Cheng Ran
17. 3. – 19. 3. 2017
17. 3. – 19. 3. 2017
程然 新古典 表演，3月17日，下午3点
Cheng Ran Neoclassic Performance, March 17, 3pm
演出将会在麦勒画廊位于798 东路，还在施工建设中的新空 间举行，表演场地将于整个画 廊周北京活动期间对外开放。
The performance will be staged at the construction site of Galerie Urs Meile’s additional new space at the 798 East Street. The venue is accessible throughout the entire event.
798 新空间 开幕式： 2017年5月19日，20日
New Space in 798 Inauguration: May 19 & 20, 2017
麦勒画廊北京部将在现有草场 地空间基础上，于798开放新空 间。
Galerie Urs Meile Beijing will expand its current presence in Caochangdi by a new space in 798.
开幕式展览： 邱世华 2017年5月20日至8月6日
Opening Exhibition: Qiu Shihua May 20 – August 6, 2017
17. 2. – 9. 4. 2017
Cheng Ran: Selected Films 17. 2. – 9. 4. 2017
李 钢
Li Gang
28. 4. – 5. 8. 2017
28. 4. – 5. 8. 2017
程然：录像选映
博览会 ARTFAIRS
Art Basel Hong Kong March 23 – 25 Level 1, Booth 1D25
由麦勒画廊和天线空间联合展出
Co-presented by Galerie Urs Meile and Antenna Space
Kabinett: Cao Yu, Queen
周思维 Zhou Siwei 美化了家 BEAUTIFY HOME
Encouters: Hu Qingyan, Go in One Ear and out The Other 3E13
March 4 – April 4, 2017 开幕式 Opening: Saturday, March 11, 2017, 5 – 7pm 展览地点 Exhibition Venue: Antenna Space, Shanghai, China Galerie Urs Meile Lucerne Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Lucerne, Switzerland T +41 (0)41 420 33 18, F +41 (0)41 420 21 69
麦勒画廊 卢森 瑞士卢森 Rosenberghöhe 4号, 邮编 6004 电话 +41 (0)41 420 33 18, 传真+41 (0)41 420 21 69
Galerie Urs Meile Beijing No. 104 Caochangdi, Chaoyang district, 100015 Beijing, China T +86 (0)10 643 333 93, F +86 (0)10 643 302 03
麦勒画廊 北京 中国北京朝阳区草场地104号, 邮编100015 电话 +86 (0)10 643 333 93, 传真 +86 (0)10 643 302 03
www.galerieursmeile.com galerie @ galerieursmeile.com
Photo by Rubén Dario Kleimeer f or morePl at z, Berlin
MICOL ASSAËL, NORBERT BISKY, MONICA BONVICINI, CLAUDIA COMTE, JOSE DÁVILA, ELMGREEN & DRAGSET, TUE GREENFORT, KATHARINA GROSSE, JEPPE HEIN, CAMILLE HENROT, NATHAN HYLDEN, ANNETTE KELM, ALICJA KWADE, HELEN MARTEN, KRIS MARTIN, JUSTIN MATHERLY, MICHAELA MEISE, AMALIA PICA, ANSELM REYLE, NATASCHA SADR HAGHIGHIAN, MICHAEL SAILSTORFER, ANDREAS SCHMITTEN, JOHN SEAL, JEREMY SHAW, TATIANA TROUVÉ, DANIEL TURNER, RINUS VAN DE VELDE, JORINDE VOIGT, CORINNE WASMUHT, MATTHIAS WEISCHER, JOHANNES WOHNSEIFER, ERWIN WURM, DAVID ZINK YI
KÖNIG GALERIE
ST. AGNES ALEXANDRINENSTR. 118–121 D-10969 BERLIN
T +49.30.261 030 80 F +49.30.261 030 811 INFO@KOENIGGALERIE.COM
OPENING HOURS TUE–SUN 11 AM– 6PM KOENIGGALERIE.COM
MEL BOCHNER 21 March – 22 April 2017 Hong Kong
simonleegallery.com
Art Previewed
Lord Shiva is often depicted wearing or seated on a tiger skin. Shiva also bears the name Vyaghranatheshvara (Lord of the tiger), because he once had slain a demon who had taken the form of a tiger 29
Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel www.fdag.com.br | info@fdag.com.br
Art Basel Hong Kong Stand 3C07
With works by Franz Ackermann | Los Carpinteros | Iran do Espírito Santo Jac Leirner | João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva Valeska Soares | Janaina Tschäpe | Erika Verzutti
João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva | Shutter Flicker, 2015 / Photo: Simon Vogel
Previewed Rirkrit Tiravanija Art Basel Hong Kong 23–25 March Julian Schnabel Galerie Templon, Paris 11 March – 13 May Kim Tschang-Yeul Pearl Lam Galleries Hong Kong 21 March – 10 May N.S. Harsha Mori Art Museum, Tokyo through 11 June The National: New Australian Art MCA Australia, Sydney 30 March – 18 June Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 30 March – 16 July Carriageworks, Sydney 30 March – 25 June
.com/.cn K11 Art Foundation Pop-up Space, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong 21 March – 30 April
He An Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne through 23 April
Park, Guangzhou Holly’s Gallery, Guangzhou 15 March – 16 April
Vikram Divecha Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai 9 March – 11 May
Park, Hong Kong G/F 218 Hollywood Road, Hong Kong 20–25 March
Agung Prabowo Mizuma Gallery, Singapore through 26 March
Zhou Li Yuz Museum, Shanghai through 4 June
Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians Aga Khan Museum, Toronto through 4 June
Ambiguously Yours M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong 17 March – 21 May Nguan FOST Gallery, Singapore through 12 April
Stretched Terrains Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi through 31 July
RIVERRUN: dis/continuous writing on history, memory and spirit Taipei Fine Arts Museum 18 March – 4 June Võ Trân Châu Sàn Art / Manzi Art Space, Hanoi through 13 May Line of Times Mill 6 Foundation, Hong Kong 11 March – 2 April
Nalini Malani Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 18 March – 18 June
Fiona Tan Tel Aviv Museum of Art through 24 June
Adrian Wong K11 Art Foundation chi art space, Hong Kong 20 March – 29 April
16 Agung Prabowo, Self-measurements (detail), 2016, linocut reduction print on handmade paper, 30 × 30 cm (each), total of 49 pieces. © the artist. Courtesy Mizuma Gallery, Singapore
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‘I have humbled the Devas but exhausted my In fact, you might want to up your punya spiritual powers.’ That’s the rishi Vishwamitra content by starting your visit to Honkers having selflessly sacrificed his hard-won punya 1 with a trip to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s project in order to raise the maimed King Trishanku in Art Basel Hong Kong’s Encounters section to heaven against the wishes of the Devas. (OK, (largescale works dotted around the fair). he says that in the Amar Chitra Katha comicbook A spiritual affair, Tiravanija’s project comprises a maze constructed of traditional bamboo adaptation of his deeds, which is no guarantee scaffolding within which viewers encounter that he actually said it, but that’s the medium five iterations of a 3D-printed bonsai tree via which ArtReview Asia gets its religious (in varying states of leafiness) placed atop steel knowledge, as it’s basically a visually led entity, plinths that look like wooden geometrical so…). In any case, something similar could be sculptures by the Romanian pioneer of modsaid by ArtReview Asia after it examines its own ernist sculpture Constantin Brancusi. Lost depleted punya once it has received, digested already? Bamboozelled (heh, heh, heh)? Don’t and parsed the ever-increasing litany of events be. Tiravanija is setting up a unique encounter that surround Art Basel’s annual Hong Kong with nature and culture, natural form and jamboree so that you don’t have to sully yourconstructed geometry, reproduction and selves by foolishly going to art exhibitions that singularity, and artforms from East and suck (for let’s face it, much as ArtReview Asia loves West. Which is all rather like the fair itself. anything that has art in its name – itself most But more succinct. of all – and anything done in the name of art, not all of it is good). And yes, it’s that time again. om bhūr bhuvah. svah. Here’s ArtReview Asia’s punya getting chucked tát savitúr váren. (i)yam into the flames (a 12-month yoga retreat gone to . bhárgo devásya dhīmahi waste!), so that whatever meagre store you retain dhíyo yó nah. prachodayāt can remain intact.
Staying on the spiritual path but leaving Hong Kong for a moment (for who can truly say 2 they left Hong Kong in March), Julian Schnabel will be displaying his ‘Shiva Paintings’ at Paris’s Galerie Templon (the Impasse Beaubourg space, to be precise). The paintings begin with an inkjet print of Shiva, cross-legged, sitting on his tiger skin by the Ganges. Schnabel then garlands, smears and otherwise decorates the image with swoops and splatters of colourful oil paint. If Shiva on his tiger skin is often read as the victory of the spiritual over the animal, then Schnabel’s typically forceful daubs (suitably serpentine or fluvial) appear to bring those animal instincts right back into play. Along with Schnabel’s Brooklyn-based Yoga teacher Eddie Stern (also guru to the likes of Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow and Russell Brand), for whom a number of works in this 2007 series are titled. And there you have it, Shiva as only Schnabel can see him: power, tranquillity, some heavy paint and a light drizzle of celebrity sauce. Of course, at the time he made these works, Schnabel was at the peak of his powers, picking up the best director award for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly at the Cannes Film
2 Julian Schnabel, Untitled (BEZ), 2011, mixed media, 160 × 109 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris & Brussels
1 Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2017 (no water no fire), 2017, bamboo, polyester, structural steel, polymer, dimensions variable. © the artist. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin
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ArtReview Asia
4 N.S. Harsha, Come Give Us a Speech (detail), 2008, acrylic on canvas, 183 × 183 cm. Courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
3 Kim Tschang-Yeul, Recurrence, 2017, acrylic and oil on canvas, 162 × 131 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong
Festival. On the evidence of these paintings, that success is down to the fact that the big man was sitting very uncomfortably during that time, although ultimately everything’s yogic to him: ‘Painting is like breathing to me,’ he hissed at Linda Yablonsky back in 2008. ‘It’s what I do all the time.’ Could it get any more spiritual than Schnabel? Hard to imagine, isn’t it. But perhaps if you’re the subject of a Wikipedia entry that describes you as an artist who ‘has spent most of his career focused on water drops’, and leaves it at that, you’re in with a shout. The artist in 3 question is Kim Tschang-Yeul and, back in Hong Kong, the eighty-seven-year-old Korean painter will be showing off a selection of canvases at Pearl Lam that were created over the past 41 years and feature his subject of preference. The works on show present a mix of blank backgrounds and more-or-less eroded texts, over all of which are patterns created by the artist’s photorealistic rendition of illuminated water drops and the shadows they cast. Kim credits this teary and repetitive practice with helping him erase traumatic
memories of the Korean War, but in formal artworld and the experience of Kim’s artworks terms it has the property of highlighting his is like staring at a wall. Take that, Julian. If museums represent some sort of spiritual paintings as pure surfaces (which has some irony to it – given the fact that it’s the painstak- 4 highpoint for Kim, then N.S. Harsha takes things to a whole other level (and let’s face it, ingly crafted illusion of three-dimensionality someone always will): the Indian artist uses in his water droplets that erases any illusions working temples as museums. Cosmic Orphans, of the same quality in the painting as a whole). his site-specific painting for the 2006 Singapore If Kim’s modus operandi seems self-defeating, Biennale featured a series of sleeping figures then that’s precisely the point: ‘The act of and occupied the city-state’s Sri Krishnan Temple. painting water drops is to dissolve everything Over in Tokyo, however, Harsha is having to inside them and return them to a state of make do with the Mori Art Museum, which nothing,’ the artist says. ‘When everything like hosts Charming Journey, his first major solo anger, anxiety and fear is brought to the point exhibition. The show features 70 major works of nothing, we experience a state of peace and created in a variety of media since 1995 and comfort.’ A museum dedicated to Kim’s acts showcases the artist’s critical eye for the absurd of denial opened on Jeju-do Island in Korea at in clashes between tradition and modernity, the end of last year. ‘The famous monk Dharma and nature and culture that feature in his immemeditated for nine years facing a wall in a diate surroundings in South India, and more cave to achieve spiritual enlightenment,’ Kim generally in the world at large. The installation declared at the time of the opening. ‘I painted Nations (2007), for example, features 192 antiquewater drops for 40 years but wasn’t able to reach looking sewing machines, each of which features dharma’s level of enlightenment. But I earned a painted calico flag representing one of the a museum instead.’ There you have it: in conmember states of the United Nations. The trast to popular logic, something can come out sewing machines are connected by a web of of nothing, museums are the nirvana of the
Spring 2017
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coloured threads, and each bears the legend Art Australia, together with the Art Gallery of 16mm animation Syzygy when it was released ‘Made in the People’s Republic of China’. New South Wales and Carriageworks, is putting in 1969. ‘It depressed me to hear that,’ the artist The work as a whole speaks of issues such as 5 on The National, which draws together work recalls. ‘After that, I decided not to bother nationalism, internationalism, migration, by artists who are based in Australia as well as screening any of my films.’ Thank God then globalism and the outsourcing and exploitaAustralian artists based overseas. You’ve got to that Kiran Nadar does. Syzygy, along with Ashim tion of labour. And if exploring and sometimes have rules, right? And so, in nineteenth-century Ahluwalia’s brilliant collaborative reconstrucridiculing notions of ‘development’ is one Great Exhibition-style, the survey, which seems tion of Padamsee’s lost second film, Events in of Harsha’s key themes, it will only be given to dance on the freshly filled grave of globalisaa Cloud Chamber (1974/2016), are on show as part 6 of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art’s Stretched added poignancy for being exhibited in a tion, billing itself, with rather too many qualmuseum founded by one of Japan’s most powifications, as ‘the only large-scale recurring Terrains, a sprawling survey of postwar Indian erful property developers. Given your current exhibition in the city focused solely on contemart. The adjective ‘sprawling’ might not do this state of enlightenment, you’ll be utterly unporary Australian art’, is delivered with the show justice, however. The museum itself bills surprised to learn that Charming Journey will usual promises regarding ‘the latest ideas and the experience as being one of seven separate feature yoga workshops. And that has nothing forms’. Given that there are around 50 artists but interconnected exhibitions, each of which to do with cultural stereotypes. Harsha is a taking part in the first edition of this sampling features work that unravels or comes to terms native of Mysore, a city that, since ancient times, exercise, you wonder whether any Australian with the impact of Modernism in the Indian has been famed for a school of painting (which artists will have been left out by the time the context (although the museum’s rhetoric, like remains Harsha’s medium of choice) specialised saga comes to an end in 2021. Still, Australians its curatorial concept, is rather more baroque in delicate representations of the divine body. – if you don’t know who you are, you will soon. than that: in one sentence alone of its exhibiEverything runs the opposite way Down That’s what art’s for, right? Holding a mirror tion briefing we are asked to imagine the show Under. Which, presumably, is why, when almost up to society. as a multitude of landforms, a collection of every other art institution is attempting to ‘I would like you to take an aspirin parables and a rewinding, excavation and demonstrate a global outlook (granted, in many before you see this film. It will surely give reexamination of a set of enquiries – now you cases this is linked to the globalised nature you a headache.’ That’s how Jehangir Jean understand where all ArtReview Asia’s punya of finance), Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary goes). Among them are solo outings for the big Bhownagary introduced Akbar Padamsee’s
5 Zanny Begg, City of Ladies (still), 2017, wallpaper, single-channel video, dimensions variable. © and courtesy the artist
6 F.N. Souza, Birth, 1955, oil on canvas, 122 × 244 cm. Courtesy Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
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ArtReview Asia
Adrian Ghenie Charles Darwin as a Young Man signed and dated “Ghenie 2014” on the reverse oil on canvas 20 7⁄8 x 13 3⁄8 in. (53 x 34 cm.) Painted in 2014. To be offered in our New York 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale this May
20th Century. Contemporary. Now. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Spring Sales Phillips is proud to present our Spring 2017 20th Century & Contemporary Art sales, featuring this work by Adrian Ghenie. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York, 16 & 17 May 2017 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design, Hong Kong, 28 May 2017 20th Century & Contemporary Art, London, 26 & 27 June 2017 If you would like to sell a work of art through us in our upcoming auctions please contact: Kate Bryan, Head of Evening Sale, New York kbryan@phillips.com
phillips.com
7 Nalini Malani, Transgressions II, 2000, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
8 Adrian Wong, The Tiger Returns to the Mountain (detail), 2017, computer rendering, fibreglass reinforced concrete, neon, wood, plastic, animatronic elements, sound installation. Courtesy the artist and K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong
guns of the Progressive Artists Group – M.F. Hussein, F.N. Souza and S.H. Raza, who died last year – as well as Interpositions: Replaying the Inventory, which includes more-recent work by Pushpamala and Mithu Sen. There is, of course, an element of nation-building and nationalism to the show with which our Australian friends might empathise, yet what’s on show here provides a rich – if sometimes labyrinthine – journey through Indian contemporary art. The highlight, of course, being the small exhibition focused on the activities of Padamsee (who up to that point was known as a precocious painter) and the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) that he founded and which ran in Bombay between 1969 and 1972. One of the key participants in VIEW was 7 Nalini Malani, and while Kiran Nadar shows a selection of her photograms and extraordinary films from that time, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam will trace the development of her art, which also spans painting, theatre and installation, from those experimental works of the 1960s and 70s through to her output today. At the heart of it all is Transgressions (2001), an
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installation (after which the exhibition is titled) that combines painting, video and the moving shadow theatre that has characterised Malani’s later work, in order to investigate issues such as feminism and the role of women in society, Indian identity, modernity and its relation to the world outside it (and with Pakistan in particular: Malani was born in Karachi and, as an infant, exiled during Partition). For the Stedelijk, the exhibition is the first of seven collection-focused shows highlighting the issue of migration. For the artist, though, creating a work is like creating life: ‘The medium of video/shadow play is used in a manner that the artwork forms before one’s eyes,’ she whispered to The Brooklyn Rail four years ago. ‘It gets completed in your presence and immediately changes. As such no moment of the artwork is repeated. It is like life, in that one unique moment will never come back again. It grows and dies in front of you while you are part of the artwork itself.’ A good introduction then to one of the most innovative and important contemporary artists to come out of the subcontinent, and a timely one too. This October
ArtReview Asia
Malani will become the first Indian artist to have a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Originally trained as a research psycholo8 gist, Chicago-born, Hong Kong-based Adrian Wong is another purveyor of largescale multisensory installations, and while Art Basel Hong Kong bigs-up the city as a global centre for culture and the commerce that now attends it, Wong will be busily taking those same aspirations apart in a new installation presented by the K11 Art Foundation titled The Tiger Returns to the Mountain. Rather than referencing a powerful Qi Gong practice, the work is centred on a concrete tiger, reminiscent of a sculpture that once stood in the Tiger Balm Garden, a complex built in Hong Kong in 1935 by Aw Boon Haw, inventor of the famous ointment (he also had mansions in Singapore and Fujian province). When it opened to the public during the early 1950s, it was as one of the first themeparks in Hong Kong. The statues then evolved into rides, and by the early 2000s the whole thing had been sold to property developers to be recycled as luxury housing. Fairground references aside, Wong’s
Paula Rego, Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ 1995, Pastel on paper, mounted on aluminium, 150 x 150 cm
Stand highlights include works by Frank Auerbach, Victor Pasmore, Pablo Picasso, Paula Rego and George Rickey.
Stand 3E16 www.marlboroughlondon.com basel@marlboroughfineart.com
installation is arranged like a traditional Cao Fei and New York collective DIS will be But enough of all that highfalutin stuff: Chinese garden and evokes traditional philopresent; arguably less naturally, the show, let’s move on to culture that’s actually popular sophies of landscape and ink painting as well curated by PS1’s Klaus Biesenbach and Peter – just like Hong Kong’s always-going-to-openas the tiger as a Taoist symbol of power, all in Eleey, will feature paintings by the likes of any-minute-now museum for visual culture, M+. With a permanent microhome in the form aid of documenting Hong Kong’s struggles to American Laura Owens. of a pavilion in Kowloon (just a short boat ride find its postcolonial feet. ArtReview Asia fondly For a more straightforward celebration from the Hong Kong Convention Centre, home remembers drinking a vodka, duck fat, sugar of international relations, look no further than 10 Park, a two-part encounter between artists to Art Basel Hong Kong), what will one day and bok-choy cocktail while an automated from Dublin’s Kerlin Gallery and Holly’s Gallery, be the autonomous territory’s premier arts mutant-muppet banged the drums at Wong’s Guangzhou – in whose space one part of the institution is taking a look at manifestations Wun Dun art bar a few years ago, and comes show is located. The other part is a pop-up in of local popular culture via representations to this latest display with high hopes of another Hong Kong. Look out for sculptures by Liam of androgyny and gender fluidity in Cantoimmersion into the artist’s provocative world Gillick and Isobel Nolan, as well as paintings pop, fashion, film, photography and graphic of the weird. by Merlin James and Liliane Tomasko. New design. Of course, the only reason to put on Not content with that, K11 is also hosting a show about popular culture is in order for 9 a pop-up space showcasing .com/.cn, a group paintings by Sean Scully are matched by new 11 works by Liu Ke, while Zhou Li contributes it to be popular (for if the culture that you term exhibition, staged as part of the foundation’s two mixed-media works and is also the subject ‘popular’ turns out to be anything but, you’re ongoing research collaboration with New of her first solo museum show in a decade, going to look like a delusional fool), and so York’s MoMA PS1, that looks at the potential Shadow of the Wind, over at Shanghai’s Yuz for regional difference within the universal 12 Ambiguously Yours: Gender in Hong Kong Popular Culture will feature some of the territory’s Museum. That show comprises a survey of fog of digital cloud-culture. Ironically, then, the Shenzhen-based artist’s abstract paintings, big guns. Among the 90-plus exhibits will be for a show that is balanced on a partnership bridging East and West, its focus will be another which seek to harness and then project the a clip from local hero Wong Kar-Wai’s iconic slow tango over neoliberal globalism’s shalChungking Express (1994), as well as the accompapowers of the inner self. The end results nying marketing posters designed by artist low grave: what a twisted world we live in. rest somewhere between the abstractions Naturally, work by China’s multimedia maven Stanley Wong (at the time using the pseudonym of Cy Twombly and those of Zhang Enli.
11 Zhou Li, Shadow of the Wind, 2017, (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Yuz Museum, Shanghai
10 Liam Gillick, NEGOTIATED COLLAPSE, 2010, powder coated aluminium, transparent Plexiglas, 230 × 50 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin 12 anothermountainman (Stanley Wong), Chungking Express, 1994, poster. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong
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13 Nguan, Untitled, 2012, archival pigment print, 100 × 100 cm, from the series How Loneliness Goes. Courtesy the artist and FOST Gallery, Singapore
14 He An, Do You Think That You Can Help Her Brother?, 2008–9 (installation view). Photo: Andrew Curtis. Courtesy the artist and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne
Another Mountain Man), whose Red White Blue series (2001–), based on Hong Kong’s famous checked nylon-canvas laundry bags, was popularised following the artist turning it into a costume for Hong Kong musician Sam Hui for a 2004 concert series. Back in the pavilion, look out for costumes worn by Cantopop legends Roman Tam and Anita Mui, as well as more recent creations modelled by singer and actor Denise Ho. On show too will be Singaporean Ming Wong’s explorations of gender fluidity and various forms of cultural appropriation in popular cinema in an exhibition that promises to be as fascinating for its tracking of the flow of ideas through different media as it is on the more voguish topic of gender fluidity (and needless to say, that kind of fluidity was in fashion among Hindu deities – from the androgynous Ardhanarishvara, to Vishnu’s avatar Mohini, and many more – well before it reached popular status in the contemporary artworld or in Hong Kong). But enough with theology. If Chungking Express is a study of loneliness in one of the world’s most densely populated areas,
13 then photographer Nguan explores a similar theme in another crowded city-state. How
Loneliness Goes, the artist’s first solo show at Singapore’s FOST Gallery, features a series of achingly beautiful photographs first collected under that title in a 2014 publication. A melancholic study of the city and its people, and the frequent disconnect between the two – images feature workers asleep on public benches, empty swings, colourful staircases, a face in a crowd, an elderly lady on a beach, among other things – the photo series, which at FOST will include several new images, constitutes one of the iconic portraits of contemporary urban life. ‘My wish is for this book to wander in my stead, exist as a testament to existence and credibly proffer the possibility of beauty as a balm for everyday sorrow,’ the artist intoned in a postscript to the original publication. The urban landscape, intertwined with the forces of love and desire, also serves as a generative force in the work of Beijing-based 14 He An, whose longstanding practice consists of ‘collecting’ characters from the signs that light up his hometown. ‘In the city, what we
Spring 2017
say in our little apartment is not important,’ he chants. ‘What is important is the words the neon lights project onto us.’ Depressing you might well think. But like Nguan, He An finds a beauty amidst the urban pain, using the characters to create new texts, messages and his own form of concrete urban poetry. His Do You Think That You Can Help Her Brother? (2008–9) is one such text, assembled on the northern facade of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. It features a narrative that loosely translates as: ‘Ye Chang-gui says “Miho Yoshioka’s birthday is only one day before my birthday”. After a long time turning tricks [or whoring] with a young man, they fall in love. […] Do You Think That You Can Help Her, Brother?’, but – and here’s the thing with He’s work – you have to rely on someone else’s word to tell you this unless you are a fluent reader of Mandarin. The artist may have removed his characters from specific sites, but they retain a specificity of context and language nonetheless. Also working with public sites, albeit in a completely different fashion, is Dubai-based,
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15 Vikram Divecha, Sweeping, 2016, remapped sweeper routes on sector map, ballpoint ink on copy paper, 21 × 29 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai
17 Shirin Aliabadi, Miss Hybrid 3, 2008, c-print. © the artist. Courtesy Mohammed Afkhami Foundation
18 Yu-Ping Kuo, Delaying and Cavity, 2013, single-channel video, 13 min 32 sec. Courtesy the artist and Taipei Fine Art Museum
15 Beirut-born, Mumbai-bred artist Vikram
playing with his food: more specifically molasDivecha, whose Minor Works are on show at ses. In general the artist’s work often involves an exploration of his own fears and personal Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde in his current home base. Divecha operates with what he calls history (which is sometimes attributed to ‘found processes’ in institutions, infrastructures the greater freedoms for self-expression in and communities, intervening to introduce postreformation Indonesia). Although the glitches and obstructions to the normal flows. artist’s father cultivated sugar cane in the village where he was raised, Agugn only tasted For his Warehouse Project (2016), with Dubai’s the crop’s viscous byproduct last year, when Alserkal Avenue, for example, he bartered his exhibition space (a former warehouse now it was prescribed as a treatment for a mystededicated to cultural activities) with a trading rious 24-day fever. In his first solo show with company requiring storage facilities, leaving the gallery, he exhibits a set of (often colourful) 18 linocut prints that examine the metaphorical only the boxed goods (toys made in China) and literal properties of the black treacle. and their movements in, within and out of the space on display. Here he exhibits works Expect sweetness. And darkness. And a focus – among them a series of paintings created on the digestive tracts of the human body. with a road-marking crew in Dubai to a map From postreformation to postrevolution and of the daily routes of road-sweepers around 17 Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians, the Sharjah Art Museum – that pay tribute a group exhibition featuring works by 23 artists from the private collection of British-Iranian to the labour of his collaborators on those Mohammed Afkhami, on show at the Aga Khan projects, casting a spotlight on ‘minor’ tasks Museum in Toronto. The artists Afkhami collects that are taken for granted or overlooked. span various generations and media, and include Also fusing cultural and commercial well-known practitioners such as Shirazeh consumption is Bandung-based Indonesian 16 artist Agung Prabowo (aka Agugn). At Houshiary, Y.Z. Kami, Abbas Kiarostami, Farhad Moshiri (who has an October exhibition at the Mizuma Gallery’s outpost in Singapore he’s
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Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh) and Shirin Neshat. All are linked by their quiet subversion of the traditions, conventions and stereotypes that populate the world around them. Moshiri’s Flying Carpet (2007), for example, consists of 32 variously kitsch machine-made Persian rugs stacked in a pile, their centres cut out according to the shape of a jet fighter, these then stacked in a second pile next to the rugs. Iconoclast! A less straightforward reclamation of history is going on at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) in the form of RIVERRUN: dis/continuous writing on history, memory and spirit, although anyone who saw Corinne Diserens’s 2016 Taipei Biennial will know that overly complex discourse and complex exhibitions are becoming something of a staple at TFAM. That wasn’t necessarily all bad in the case of the biennial. RIVERRUN takes its title from a reference in James Joyce’s hilarious comic novel Finnegan’s Wake (1939), proudly remarking that the Irishman ‘used sentence structures that are difficult to understand and no punctuation, but [that] in art and literature, liberating and diverging are all permitted, and can even be raised to the level of inspiration’ – crikey! a lot
of punya needed here then. The exhibition through its present. Or perhaps, indeed, itself looks at the lasting psychological damage that should be the other way around. caused by the White Terror – the 38-year The Mill 6 Foundation is a (‘fund-seeking’) period of martial law following 1947’s February not-for-profit arts organisation housed in 28 Massacre of civilians by the republic’s Hong Kong’s Nan Fung Textile Mills. The Kuomintang-led government – via works (no renovation of this heritage conservation space advance details as to which ones) that reconis due to be completed next year, but in the buildup to that moment the foundation (which struct history and explore the links between spouts the usual niceties about helping creative collective and individual consciousness. Hong Kongers to look out to the world and Psychology and history are also at play in 19 Võ Trân Châu’s first solo exhibition, Lingering their international counterparts to look in) at the Peculiar Pavilion, at the Manzi Art Space is producing a series of warm-up exhibitions. in Hanoi. Originating out of a six-month 20 In March that takes the form of Line of Times, residency at the Sàn Art Laboratory in 2015, an exhibition featuring works by Brooklynbased Aziz + Cucher, Taiwan’s Yin-Ju Chen and the exhibition includes a remaking of the Nguyen emperor’s ritual garment out of patches local boy Morgan Wong. In their distinct ways, of fabric gathered by the artist from descendeach artist (or pair of artists) will be attempting ants of the dynasty (the last emperor, Bao Đai, to investigate time in its linear and nonlinear forms. Aziz + Cucher take inspiration from abdicated in 1945 and died in 1997), offering tapestry, Chen (best known as a video artist) another fusion of collective and individual looks at the influence of the cosmos on human personalities. Patchwork (and indeed mosaic) behaviour and Wong (whose work often takes remains a theme through the rest of the the form of durational performance – such as exhibition, which also features an imaginary the self-explaining Filing Down a Steel Bar Until version of the city of Hue (home to the Nguyen a Needle Is Made, 2013–63: presumably that court) and a general vision of Vietnam’s past
timeline is pure guesswork) looks at the impact of time on moments in his everyday life. All of which chronological foolery leads 21 us triumphantly to Fiona Tan’s Geography of Time, on show at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (having travelled there via Gateshead, Oslo and Frankfurt), which explores similar themes through the medium of video, photography and installation. Born in Indonesia to Australian and Chinese parents, Tan grew up in Australia and currently lives in Amsterdam. And a similarly complex interplay between East and West forms the basis of works such as the video installation A Lapse of Memory (2007), set amidst the chinoiserie (concocted by people who had never seen China) of George IV’s Brighton Pavilion. More than that, however, Tan’s work focuses on memory, archives, collecting and the many ways in which humans represent their pasts and their relationship with the natural world (with marine biology a favourite theme). More even than that, she’s a consummate filmmaker. On which note, time’s up: ArtReview Asia’s off to get some milk for its yagya. Om. Nirmala Devi
20 Morgan Wong, Filing Down a Steel Bar Until a Needle is Made (still), 2013–63, video. Courtesy the artist
19 Võ Trân Châu, Portrait no. 12, 2016, cotton, 60 × 40 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City 21 Fiona Tan, A Lapse of Memory (still), 2007, video, colour, sound, 24 min 35 sec. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London
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Points of View
A park in winter. The snowy earth reflects colourful lights, of the kind that suggest a warm return home. Every pink room appears to be the same. Only between one transaction and the next, only in the perceptible differences in body temperature, can you perceive different scenes. To the newcomers, of course, it is impossible to tell the difference between the places selling Christmas presents and the happy little rooms that appear on this dark snowy night. Naturally, there is no public notice indicating that this park, in the winter, in fact offers illegal sex, its establishment spurred by human curiosity. If I didn’t have this piece of paper tightly grasped in my hand, then I would not be able to tell whether or not it was a dream. But when I awoke, I also found a receipt, left on the pink bedside table: proof that I had been there. When I attempted to open the ice-cold curtains to see if it was still snowing outside, I abruptly discovered that there was someone there in that dimly lit room, monitoring my every move. Even if I lay back down and pretended to sleep I would face further examination. Perhaps these are the facts: out of curiosity alone, I took a few pictures of this homely sex venue. Then I was intercepted and handed over to professionals. There was an implication that my punishment would involve continuous
news of the world by
Hu Fang
Spring 2017
copulation up to the point at which I died of fatigue, but before that began I fainted onto this unknown bed, falling into a dream. Quite possibly I couldn’t take the pressure. If there were a notice of the fine somewhere on the bed, then I’d be certain that all of this had already happened and was now at an end. But the only thing left on the bed is the scrap of paper I’m clutching, bearing the traces of my own handwriting. The tricky part is this: when I was sleeping, I wrote this confession and left it for everyone to discover. These were the circumstances that led to my horrified realisation that I was trapped in a hopeless situation. I once firmly believed that people should enjoy the pleasures of this world right up until they died. In order to enter this pleasure park, I dyed my black hair blond and willingly donated my body to its sexual transactions. I was willing to accept this fate, even if it were a trap planned by others – using, for example, hypnotism to manipulate me. They said, “All immigrants are good for is the sex business.” I already don’t have enough time and evidence to prove to myself, to everybody, the absurdity of that statement. Now, I must read aloud the note in my hand, announcing my own crime, and then promptly perform my own punishment.
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In South India, temples have a history of being more than just places of worship. They used to be important generators for a range of artforms, among them music, dance, painting, sculpture and theatre. The action invariably began predawn, at 4am, with the nagaswaram (a trumpetlike instrument native to South India) performance. The daily festivities, which included every other artform, would only come to an end at around midnight. What place does literature have in all this, you ask? At Shiva temples, the Odhuvaars – members of the families for whom this is an inherited profession – would recite Shaivite poetry such as the Tevaram. At the Vaishnavite temples dedicated to Lord Vishnu, the singing of the nectarlike 4,000 Divya Prabandham would flow unfettered. Who were the people who transformed temples from a mere prayer spot for the faithful into a buzzing nerve centre for the joyous celebration of arts? Today, we cannot identify even one individual responsible for this. The Tamils seem to have a cavalier approach to recording history. Forget ancient or medieval history, the Tamils don’t even have a faint memory of their first celluloid hero, who was very much around a mere 50 years ago. M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar, a singer-actor, was a sensation in the primeval era of Tamil cinema. Now, he is pretty much consigned to the dung heap of history. That being the case, how do you suppose we’d care about genius sculptors and artists who plied their trade a millennium or two ago? Nevertheless, the tradition of some of South India’s greatest sculptors lives on. The Sanskrit term for sculpture and architectural sciences is called Sthapatya Shastra. The Sanskrit root word for this is sthapana, which means the establishment
notes from Madras in which
your guide suggests that a lack of respect for the arts and their propagation is killing Tamil culture by
Charu Nivedita
top Darasuram temple compound bottom Work by Vidyashankar
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of something animate or inanimate in the firmament. That’s why even today architects in India are referred to as sthapathis. During my visit to the Darasuram temple – a site of unimaginably wondrous architectural genius – in the Chola-empire heartland of Thanjavur, I met Vidyashankar Sthapathi, who belongs to the family of traditional sculptors who can trace their heritage back to the Chola era. I spent a whole day in conversation with him. Although, truth be told, he spoke and I made notes. I could feel it wasn’t just him who was talking to me. There was his pet parakeet, the stray dogs and the birds around the place who I felt were conveying to me the temple’s ancient history. The dogs didn’t merely try to transmit civilisational information; through their unconditional love they signalled the supreme Advaita philosophy of love, and the inner and outer cosmos being one and the same. The Tamil word for the all-encompassing cosmos is andam. Humans are only a fractal component of the cosmos, just as are earth, fire, forests, mountains, the sky and stars, earthquakes, oceans and megawaves that destroy all comers. In that sense all that our eyes can survey are cousins – near or distant. That’s exactly what I heard the dogs tell me. Vidyashankar is now seventy-eight years old, clad in saffron veshti and vest. He wears
a long, horizontal strip of sacred vermilion on his forehead. His eyes are serene and large, pretty much like those on the sculptures. He sports a flowing white beard. To my eyes he looked like a column of fire. One thing that stood out in our conversations was the fundamental difference in the Western and South Indian approaches to the art of sculpting. South Indian sculpture is firmly rooted in the tantric mysticism of the land. Someone merely trained in the technique of the craft cannot sculpt the figure of Nataraja, the dancing form of Shiva of the Chidambaram temple. Ergo, a sculptor, or any artist, has to well and truly understand the philosophy of their subject, and the traditions that come with the soil of their homeland. Indian philosophy is braided in its daily life. It is not an esoteric idea that can be grasped by members of the privileged elite. The creators and consumers of South Indian temple art form the evidence. The Nataraja of Chidambram could not have been the handiwork of an oversexed, boozy artist. Those artisans had to live a life dictated by dharma. I’m just a lay connoisseur of sculpture. I attempt to bring to you the traditional wisdom of Vidyashankar. La Sa Ramamirtham (La Sa Ra) was a towering Tamil writer. Each of his sentences has the powerful lyrical quality of vedic mantras. Even today, in Tamil Nadu, when you get bitten by a snake it is common practice to call hymn-chanters to neuter the poison. The words coming out of the mouth of such healers become the mantras; those mantras become the cure. I have personally witnessed the most poisonous of snakebites being cured by shamans who dealt only in mantras. La Sa Ra would say: ‘If you write about the fire, it ought to singe the pages it’s printed on.’ As a more enthusiastic reader of literature than creator, I would dearly like to recommend La Sa Ra’s short story ‘Janani’ to you, which I think is one of the finest in the world. But sadly, I cannot for the simple reason that ‘Janani’ never found a worthy English translator. Vidyashankar’s son Ravishankar joined in the conversation. Ravishankar chose to become a medical doctor, shunning the traditional family trade that went back several centuries. Perplexed and distraught in equal measure, I asked him why. “All his life my father has been working with molten lac and bronze to create statues. To melt the bronze and make it as malleable as clay, you can imagine the heat that he would have to deal with. Fire being his constant companion, he himself seems to have turned into a column of fire. Father would get a call for yet another government-sponsored exhibition in Delhi. Without the money to buy new metal,
above Vidyashankar all photos Prabhu Kalidas
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he would melt his painstakingly created old works of art to make something new. I would hollow out my insides crying quietly at this sight. I decided then that I won’t prolong this pain by taking up his profession.” Ravishankar’s story has parallels in contemporary Tamil literature. Tamil is an ancient and storied language, but today writers who use the language die in penury. This at least can be waved off as destiny, but what’s sad is that the outside world is totally unaware of this because of the fact that we lack good translators.
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In preparation for World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, squads of citizens wearing red silk belts began patrolling near the site. The ‘Civilised Dress Persuasion Team’ scolded people who went out wearing pyjamas, telling them to go back home and change into proper clothes. Everywhere, signs read, ‘No Pyjamas in Public — Be Civilised for the Expo.’ The pyjama police had their work cut out for them. Since the late 1970s, Occidental pyjama sets have been an irresistible fashion item. Colourfully patterned, matching satin pjs were the antithesis of work clothes and the sartorial sobriety of the just-ended Cultural Revolution. Intimating a life of leisure or a faintly licentious career in show business, pyjamas were flaunted out of doors. Decades later, the habit remains. The separation of street and home, and the requirement to dress differently for each, are normative values in the West, too. To go out onto the street in what one went to sleep in is viewed by many as an erosion of, if not an outright attack on, polite society. American university professors deplore students who go from dorm to classroom in bedroom slippers and onesies. In Los Angeles, a police commissioner wants ‘moral indigents’ who go out in bedclothes to serve community service sentences. Yet the public pyjama party is growing ever more powerful. The quiet rebellion against the bourgeois separation of street and home has been waged, if wage be not too energetic a verb, by standard-bearers like artist Julian Schnabel and Jeff Bridges’s The Dude in The Big Lebowski (1998). Both wave the plaid, drawstrung flannel flag of nonconformity, as did Playboy’s Hugh Hefner before them. The PJs trend hit fashion in 1992. In February of that year, Kurt Cobain married Courtney Love on a beach in Hawaii in a pair of green pyjamas. Nine months later, the designer Marc Jacobs sent models down the runway with ‘bed head’ hair, Birkenstocks and dressing gowns. By turning grunge into
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sleeping around Sleepwear is enjoying a fashionable renaissance beyond the bedroom. Is that because of cultural difference or because we now have to sleep at work? asks Clara Young
Still from The Big Lebowski, 1998, dir Joel and Ethan Coen, 117 min
ArtReview Asia
mainstream fashion, Jacobs released our inner slacker, and a vogue for shapeless, formless comfort clothing not witnessed since the whole cloth-robes-and-tunics of the early Middle Ages. Pyjamas and soft lounge adjuncts like housecoats, wrappers and dressing gowns are a counterpoint to hard, structured clothing that is tailored, padded, gathered, tucked and steam-pressed to fit the body. “I think there’s the issue of clothes that are relatively body-conscious and clothes where the interest is in the clothes themselves, the volume of the clothes,” says Valerie Steele, director of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “Mostly, really tailored clothes tend to be fitted to the body, and other shapes, like T, loosely hang around the body… Tailored is Western; T-shaped garments are more Eastern tradition – everything from ottoman robes to kimonos in Japan. They are tailored but not tailored close to the body.” Add to this analysis the Chinese government’s equation between civilisation and indoor-only pyjamas, and the boundary between Western tailoring and Eastern looseness begins to take on a Rudyard Kiplingesque cast. If highly seamed, fitted clothing is for going out, and minimally seamed, baggy clothing of pyjamas and dressing gowns for staying in, what colonialist implications can we draw from the Indian kurta, West African pagne, Korean hanbok, Pakistani kandoorah and other such draped or loosefitting garments? Should they too be housebound like the ‘pyjama’– a word of Persian and Urdu origin which the OED defines as loose trousers worn in Turkey, Iran, India etc adopted by Europeans strictly for nightwear? The ‘hardness’ of tailored clothing lies not only in its construction and material, but its history too. Tailors first emerged in Europe in the twelfth century as an extension of linen armourers, who made fitted, padded garments worn under chainmail. This opposition, between hard fightwear and soft nightwear is very visible in collections this Spring. Oversize Schott jackets at Vêtements, the kind that bouncers wear, the rigid patent leathers at Hood by Air – these protective,
Obataimu’s Shibui collection. Photo: Hashim Badani
Spring 2017
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security-inflected clothes perfectly suit the terrorised climate in which we now live. Elsewhere, there is a tantalising fragility to sashed lounge coats for men at Raf Simons, Ann Demeulemeester, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Azzaro, and dressing-gown coats fastened with boudoir tassels at Luella Bartley or in white mink at Alexander Wang. These soft, lying-about clothes seem provocatively outof-step with the times. As do Sacai striped PJs, Stella McCartney’s pyjama shirt and the pyjama pants of Paul Smith, Richard Nicoll, Tommy Hilfiger and AF Vandevorst. Meanwhile, metal toe-capped tartan slippers at Christian Louboutin and furry blue Miu Miu slippers blur the boundaries between both. To Mumbai designer Noorie Sadarangani, pyjamas to wear out are not just a trend but the central concept of her clothing line. ‘Obataimu’, which means ‘overtime’ in Japanese, is inspired by the sleep-deprived. “I was living in New York and working on an architectural project on sleep. And I became fascinated with how the Japanese sleep anywhere and everywhere. It has nothing to do with being homeless, but being overworked,” says Sadarangani. “It says something about our global culture that the basic things that are nourishing to us are being neglected. So I went to Tokyo to think about this. I began to photograph people sleeping in public. And that led me to design outerwear that has the comfort of sleep built into it.”
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Obataimu garments are custom-made by a small team of white lab-coated garmentmakers in a small atelier in Mumbai. The atelier staff is supported by a small factory-school that trains and employs garment-makers as well as dyers. To develop the porous pyjama-comfortable silk cloth, Sadarangani borrowed the ventilation principles of termite architecture: the silk cloth is steam-treated to loosen the weave, enhancing its breathability while creating just enough of a layer on the skin for warmth. It is then reinforced with Japanese doublelayered tailoring. Obataimu is not made for public sleepers. But chronic fatigue from overworking is its conceptual thread. Obataimu clothing suggests that work and life is so acutely unbalanced for some people that they can no longer maintain the boundaries between their public and personal lives. In the ebb and flow between public and private, clothing blurs or hardens the boundary. Burqas partition private from public space while pyjamalike street clothes and dressing-gown overcoats erase the line between the two. The latter puts to us the idea that in dressing exactly as we wish – perfectly comfortably – we are no longer dividing ourselves between our outward self and the inward self the public was not meant to see. That in emancipating ourselves from the clothing conventions of public and private, we are presenting a unified, authentic persona. That this comes from fashion, the mother of multiple selves, makes the statement all the more ingenuous.
top Hillier Bartley SS16 Look 9 Dressing Gown Coat, Hollywood Top and Mum Jeans bottom Obataimu’s Shibui collection. Photo: Hashim Badani
ArtReview Asia
TAMAWUJ SHARJAH BIENNIAL 13 10 MARCH – 12 JUNE 2017
sharjahart.org
. Mandy El Sayegh . İnci Eviner . Em’kal Eyongakpa . Harun Farocki . Futurefarmers . Mario García Torres . Daniele Genadry . Deniz Gül . Shadi Habib Allah . Taloi Havini . Takashi Ishida . Iman Issa . Ali Jabri . Lamia Joreige . Christoph Keller . Samir Khaddaje . Mahmoud Khaled . Nesrine Khodr . Tonico Lemos Auad . Basim Magdy . Raqs Media Collective
tamawuj.org
. A.S.T (Diann Bauer, Felice Grodin, Patricia M. Hernandez, Elite Kedan with Keller Easterling) . Allora & Calzadilla . Lawrence Abu Hamdan . Noor Abuarafeh . Abbas Akhavan . Abdullah Al Saadi . Tamara Al Samerraei . Jonathas de Andrade . Kader Attia . Ismaïl Bahri . Sarnath Banerjee . Yto Barrada . Abdelkader Benchamma . Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares . Mariana Castillo Deball . Roy Dib . Vikram Divecha . Bariş Doğrusöz . Koo Donghee
. Metahaven . Hind Mezaina . Hana Miletić . Mochu . Oscar Murillo . Joe Namy . Uriel Orlow . The Otolith Group . İz Öztat & Fatma Belkıs . Christodoulos Panayiotou . Deborah Poynton . Fehras Publishing Practices . Khalil Rabah . Jon Rafman . Marwan Rechmaoui . Stéphanie Saadé . Natascha Sadr Haghighian with Ashkan Sepahvand . Ghassan Salhab . Roy Samaha . Massinissa Selmani . Dineo Seshee Bopape . Setareh Shahbazi . Ross Simonini . Nida Sinnokrot . Walid Siti . Monika Sosnowska . Zhou Tao . Maria Thereza Alves . Jorinde Voigt . Karine Wahbé . James Webb . Rain Wu and Eric Chen . Paola Yacoub . Fathallah Zamroud
2 oR 3 TiGERs
exhibItIon apRIl 21 – july 3
CURATED By Anselm FRanKe and Hyunjin Kim
Join us at Art Central, Booth E06 Central Harbourfront 9 Lung Wo Rd, Central, Hong Kong
Damien Hirst—Elation—Silkscreen print with glitter—1200 x 1200mm—Edition of 50 © Damien Hirst & Science Ltd, 2017
Elation by Damien Hirst
Art Featured
In northern Bengal the tiger god was worshipped by both Hindus and Muslims. Scroll paintings depict a Muslim holy man riding a tiger, carrying a string of prayer beads and a staff 53
Weretigers, Frog Marshals and Other Modern Mediums by Anselm Franke
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We live in a schizophrenic world that purges societies of ritual in the name of rationality while at the same time proliferating new mediums. How can art make sense of it?
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Hsu Chia-Wei, Spirit-Writing (still), 2016, two-channel video installation, 9 min 45 sec.Producer Le Fresnoy, coproducer Liang Gallery, Taipei. Courtesy the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum
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What, precisely, do we mean when we talk about ‘medium’ and ‘media’? multiple cameras and sensors for the purposes of motion capture. The The answer is far from obvious. In fact there turns out to be consider- story of the displacement of the deity is thus mirrored in the technoable multivalence in the concepts. Art history and media theory, for logical setup, which enables de- and recontextualisation. The sensors example, do not operate with the same understanding of the terms: in and cameras capture the movements of the divination chair, and place art history, ‘medium’ might refer to a genre of art and the materials it in the abstract Cartesian space of a 3D grid. Crucially, the villagers in which it is executed; in media theory, the concept extends variously that carry the structure are left out of this transposition. In the session, Hsu explains the process of making Spirit-Writing to to technological, cultural, social and even psychological phenomena. And yet, in our hypermediated present, the question of media- the deity, and interrogates it about the shape of the destroyed, origtion and what it means is fundamental: mediation is everywhere and inal temple, which the artist then also reconstructs as a wireframe model. This simulation is shown simultaneously with the greenseemingly encompasses everything. At the same time, and in spite of this, it has irretrievably lost any room performance, but on the opposite side of the screen, which is sense of innocence. We are all too aware that all acts of mediation are placed in the centre of the exhibition space. While one side docupotentially fraudulent, as a result of which they are subject to ongoing ments the divination ritual, where the villagers as well as the artist scrutiny and permanent doubt. One might even say that the relation engage with the Marshal, the other side shows the transposition of of modernity to technologies of mediation is schizophrenic: on the deity and temple into a virtual space of digital coordinates. It is as if one hand, modernity purges the world of its manifold rituals of medi- the simulation also presents a quasi-spiritual counterpart, the ‘other ation in the name of rationality and science; on the other, it leads to world’, in which the deity might reside, and in which lost landscapes the proliferation of technologies of mediation, of which our demate- and a lost past can be reconstructed and reclaimed. The digital space rialised digital age is but the latest symptom. here acts as a refuge for the victims of modern forms of iconoclasm in A distinction between ‘human’ and technological media has which they are consequently displaced rather than destroyed. persisted since the latter’s rise to prominence during early modernity. There is, however, in the 3D simulation, a strange conflation of How do we think these poles together? At times there are points of the ‘uncanny’, ghostlike levitation of the spastically moving divinatension between them, and one of these comes in the form of shamans tion chair and the vivid sense of uprootedness and abstraction that and other humans who act as mediums. How such humans, but also the object floating in the 3D rendering transmits. To understand how entire masses, especially under the influence of ‘mass media’, come this conflation both annuls and accelerates the difference between to act as ‘mediums’ themselves has posed a great riddle to modern digital media and spirit media, it is worth looking into the ‘green knowledge, simply because the channels of screen’ technique that is used by Hsu to effect So what does it mean for a transmission – what goes on in such instances the displacement. frog deity to be given a home between bodies and minds – remain someGreen screen is a generic technique used what mysterious and difficult to rationalise. in film to create a homogeneous background in a temple reconstructed Hence the wider phenomena of what could for a scene that, in the editing room, can be as 3D simulation? replaced with a different image. It is thus be called ‘social mediality’ (the fact that our subjectivity is socially mediated) have been relegated to ‘psychol- a technique of extraction, severing a thing from its milieu or enviogy’, to the ‘unconscious’ or to an allegedly ‘primitive’, ‘irrational’ and ronment, a figure (or motif) from its (back)ground. It allows the ‘magic’ past. Mediums such as shamans, and the phenomena they placement of such a figure in whatever desired new context, milieu or environment. It might therefore be referred to as the paradigembody, have become the ghosts of modernity. The recent works of Singaporean Ho Tzu Nyen and Taiwan’s Hsu matic modern image-technology, mirroring modernity’s powers of Chia-Wei endeavour to bring these ghosts back into the present. The displacement. It also renders the relationship between figure and work of both artists demands that art history engage with both the ground inherently problematic. Indeed, it can be elevated to an allecolonial foundations of modernity and the troubled relation between gory of the ontological upheaval that is modernity, an allegory of the modern and nonmodern, human media. Against this backdrop, their broken instrumental link between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’. ‘Ground’ works put forward an expanded notion of media: not only because it ceases to serve as a guarantor of a primordial stability, and loses its encompasses both the material and the immaterial aspects of media- ‘natural given-ness’, which once tied each ‘spirit’ to a certain context tion, but because it looks at how modernity is mediated ideologically. and place. This is perhaps the most fundamental sentiment of moderHsu Chia-Wei’s video installation Spirit-Writing (2016), recently nity: the loss of ground, the alienation from the environment. And it shown in the 10th Taipei Biennial, is the second work that the artist is this broken link that exposes our existence as mediated. To bring has devoted to a frog deity, allegedly born in a small pond more than mediation to the fore – to expose it – is thus the teleology of modernity. 1,400 years ago in Jiangxi, China, and whose original temple, in So what does it mean for a frog deity to be given a home in a temple Wu-Yi, was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, reconstructed as 3D simulation? On the one hand, it appears as if Marshal Tie Jia, as the deity is named, was forced to migrate, eventu- the deity is trapped in a representation that has firmly entrenched ally settling on an island in the Taiwan Strait. There, it has continued modern conceptions of Cartesian, abstract space in which discrete to communicate with local villagers via a divination ritual that bodies move without affecting each other. This Cartesian space is involves the former carrying a divination chair, through which the itself emblematic of modernity and its rationality; itself a form of Marshal makes his declarations both in writing (in Chinese charac- mediation that makes all spaces commensurable, it creates a space that is projected as stripped of mediation. If ters) and through knocking sounds. Hsu’s preceding pages Ho Tzu Nyen, 2 or 3 Tigers, 2015, we understand the 3D simulation as an exile work consists of a performance of this ritual, synchronised two-channel HD (CGI) projection, for the frog deity ‘medium’, then it is also an recorded in a ‘green room’ equipped with 12-channel sound, 18 min 46 sec
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enclosure: the frog deity’s mediality entrapped and neutralised in its ecologies and hierarchies. Groundlessness is the programmatic call a Cartesian grid. This rational grid can be diametrically opposed to of Modernism. The architect Le Corbusier, for instance, demanded an understanding of space as relational and performative, brought that modern architecture discard any of its complicity in the ‘metainto existence by the very bodies that inhabit it. Such is the space that physics of land’s groundedness’, living up instead to the transformaunfolds in the interactions on the documentary side of Hsu’s screen, tion of the land ‘from ground into an equipotential datum’. And the the one on which the artist interacts with the villagers and the deity labour of achieving groundlessness begins with the theodolite. itself. Together, the green screen and the 3D simulation on the respecThe land surveyed in this picture will accommodate plantations tive sides of the screen seem to suggest that spirits have become place- in the future, we learn from the writings of art-historian Kevin Chua less, and hence their figuration, the form in which they might become (writing on Leutemann’s image) that informs the narrative performed articulated, has become uncertain. To understand this uncertainty as in Ho’s work. In the larger historical context, it was around planpotential, as an ontological opening, rather than to mourn its arrival tations – which share roots with the modern factory regime – that and to seek to recover a ‘lost ground’, is perhaps the unique challenge an entire system of measuring and mapping, quantification and standardisation emerged, designed to organise nature and to police of modern aesthetics and politics. Ho Tzu Nyen is similarly concerned with the figuration of spirits humans, ultimately to enshrine a global circulation of goods and and ghosts, and, more particularly, the histories of the tiger in the abstractions (money and information of all kinds – what Bruno Latour Malay world. At the moment tigers are driven to near extinction calls ‘immutable mobiles’ – that can travel any distance without being in nature, they leap into the imaginary of modernity: as symbols transformed themselves). This is a circulation for which Singapore, of national power, military might and economic development. As the original ‘tiger’ state, is now seen as an emblematic hub. a recurring ghost, they bind the hypermodern present to the coloIn One or Several Tigers, the tiger attack from Road Surveying nial and precolonial past. In 2014, Ho produced an acclaimed theatre Interrupted… is projected into a ghostly, stellar constellation rendered piece titled Ten Thousand Tigers and, in the wake of that, several video- in CGI (computer-generated imagery), where both Coleman and the works and installations, in addition to lectures and texts. The latest tiger, like sun and moon, or two complementary celestial ghosts, of these works is a two-screen video installation (which also encom- orbit each other as they transform into each other. The weretiger has passes aspects and props of the theatre piece), titled One or Several Tigers become a transhistorical figure here, through which Ho is conducting (2017), an expansion of the earlier 2 or 3 Tigers (2015). what could be called a counter-survey – a survey within which the In the latter, Ho treats the tiger as a medium that channels histo- mutations of the human-tiger hybrid take measure of history. ries that have been silenced by modernisation, In its early days, animated film came as At the moment tigers are which have been occluded by modern ideoloclose to ‘groundlesness’ as perhaps only moddriven to near extinction gies and rendered unliveable by the dominant ernist literature did. It strived towards a ‘zero logic of national identities. The tiger ‘medium’ in nature, they leap into the point’ of utopian anarchy, the animated lineopens the imagination towards the terrain in drawing being capable of morphing freeimaginary of modernity which society is shaped through its encounly, taking no ontological divisions and frames ters with otherness. Mythology reflects their status as ‘liminal’ for granted. In this, early modernists realised a critique of class animals, closely related to the human community, and yet clearly and paradigms of subjective expression, as they saw nothing less outside of it. Exploring these histories, Ho’s work pays particular than the ‘chance to return to the drawing board of social formatribute to stories of ‘weretigers’. In Malay cosmology, weretigers tion’ (Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and communicated with the world of the ancestors and spirits. For Ho, the the Avant-garde, 2004). But the ability of the animated image to travfigure of the weretiger in the twentieth century comes to mediate the erse the horizon of possible transformations was rather quickly repressed of colonial modernity. It thus allows us to grasp forces that inverted, under pressure of commercialisation, and turned into a shape a society and its cultural imaginary, particularly with respect to tool for surveying normative perception geared towards new standhistories of violence and erasure. ards of mass production. One or Several Tigers takes its cue from a lithographic print titled As forward-looking as the modernity of the animated image Road Surveying Interrupted in Singapore, which dates from the 1860s was, it also looked into an ‘imagined’ past, as it invoked an origiand was executed by German illustrator Heinrich Leutemann. Ho’s nary, archaic animism. Writing on Walt Disney’s early films, Sergei work expands on this image through narrativisation and a transpo- Eisenstein described the animated line as inherently animistic in sition of its iconography into the present. The original print shows character, invoking a mythical animal epos, while behaving like a George Drumgoole Coleman, Government Superintendent of Public primal protoplasm ‘skipping along the rungs of the evolutionary Works and Land Surveyor of Singapore for the British Empire during ladder, attaching itself to any and all forms of animal existence’ the 1830s, and his convict assistants (Coleman was also in charge of (Eisenstein on Disney, 1986, ed. Jay Leyda). Indeed what Eisenstein the island’s prisons and their convict workforce) being attacked by a referred to as attractiveness – the difficulty of resisting being mimettiger, which is leaping onto a theodolite (an instrument used for topo- ically affected and possessed by these images, of becoming their graphic surveying). The lithograph depicts the ‘primal scene’ of colo- medium – lies in the morphological ability of animations to transnialism, the opening up of the ‘wilderness’ and the confrontation gress ontological boundaries, invoking the (animistic) phantasm of a total mediality, a world in which potentially everything can between a savage nature and a rational technology. This scene is the initial step in a chain of abstractions that allow become a medium of everything else. And while indeed in somodern forms of administration to act on local realities at a distance, called animist societies there are multiple medialities along series and thus profoundly transform and ‘unground’ the local along with of actions and reactions, it is important to note that the phantasm
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Heinrich Leutemann, Unterbrochene Strassenmessung aug Singapore (Interrupted Road Surveying in Singapore), c. 1865, wood engraving. Collection National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board
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of such a total mediality allegedly existing in archaic societies was a theodolite as its antithesis, but rather it is the theodolite itself that assembles the image of the tiger from countless data-points. The colonial projection that emerged in the nineteenth century. The genre and technology of animation is also an outcome and difference is not merely between abstraction and flesh, between safe a response to categorisation, mechanisation and industrialisation, distance and threatening proximity, eye-level encounter and actionand the increasing subjection of human and animal bodies to indus- at-a-distance. This is what makes the dominant aesthetics of CGI, and trial regimes of control. In this genre, the ontological partition of its clichés of romantic enchantments and archaic magic, so ambivacolonial modernity is subverted, but also symptomatically displaced. lent: every ‘animated’ movement, every gesture here is inscribed into The fictionalisation of the realm of folk beliefs is thus structurally a matrix of self-learning algorithms, but in this matrix there is actumirrored in the spectacle of the impossible rendered as mass enter- ally nothing possible that defies its logic, and hence, no transformatainment. In animated film, an allegedly lost animism could be recov- tion. What makes CGI images look at us so strangely is that we recogered, just as ontological designations could nise in them this dawn, the last glow of the In CGI images we see the last be transgressed, precisely to the degree that difference between mathematical models glow of difference between this was becoming impossible beyond the and the world of transformatory experience. ‘In films, there is the wind that blows designated terrain of artistic fictions. mathematical models and the and the wind that is produced by a wind The representation of death is impossible world of experience in animation, because everything is reversible, machine. Computer images do not have two as filmmaker Harun Farocki said. And the omnipotence of the disem- kinds of wind’ (Harun Farocki). bodied camera gaze puts ‘ontological anarchy’ into an uncomfortable The CGI animation of One or Several Tigers is an arresting maniaffinity with the militarised gaze. No death, only reconfiguration. It is festation of this dialectics. The synthetic, spectral bodies of human, a projection of a world of immanence, and Ho invokes Leibniz’s idea of animal and human-animal hybrid, literally ungrounded as they animals as divine machines. But CGI might speak as much of a perma- float around sun and moon as if unchained from the earth, plunging backward, sideways, forward, in the cold light of undead time, as if nently reconfiguring capitalism that does not know how to die. Here, the dialectics underlying modern animation is pushed to echoing Nietzsche’s madman, who shudders with his lantern when new heights: computer-generated imagery is no longer a represen- confronted by the breath of empty space. tation that exists in friction with what it represents, but as a dataThe relation between technical and human media has only map, which can also become an ‘operational image’. Animation is not recently begun to be interrogated by researchers, who focus on the achieved as a counter-gesture or line of flight from the fixating grid, nineteenth century and the encounter between emerging mass media but rendered through its finest possible resolution: the moving leaves and various ‘mediumistic’ practices – ranging from spirit possession of a tree are produced by generative algorithms modelling evolution to hypnosis to the dynamics of modern masses under the influence itself. There is, figuratively speaking, no more tiger that attacks the of technological media. But these investigations have touched only
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marginally upon the relation between modern technologies, as introduced by colonialism, and indigenous myth and beliefs. To the colonial (and, later, the modernising) gaze, nonmodern cultures typically presented themselves as a theatre of mysterious, primitive medialities, given the ubiquity of ritual and myth and of ‘wild’ transmissions. Ever since nineteenth-century modernity, ‘personal media’ such as trance or spirit media, however, were increasingly separated from ‘technical media’, just as ‘superstition’ allegedly was from ‘science’, and the phenomena of mediumism were ultimately relegated to psychology or religion. This in turn left a large void in our accounts of culture, in particular with regards to the absence of a critical language for the mediated nature of sociality and subjectivity in relation to history and technology. The degree to which modern technological media exist in continuum with the phenomena of mediumism has hence been obscured. This void could perhaps be filled by envisioning a ‘critical mediumism’ – an interrogation of the transforming vectors and paradoxes of mediality and their embodiment in the present. A critical mediumism focuses on mediality anterior to the divisions between subject and object – through, for instance, the performative and ‘magic’ aspects of images. Contemporary art is a vantage point not only because artists are often regarded, or fashion themselves, as mediums, but also because of its modern institutional history, its position as a reserve for aberrant subject/object relations, which have turned the space of art into a possible laboratory for what I would call ‘architectures of mediality’ – through experimentation with things as signs and vice versa, dynamograms of the active and the passive, and with meta-communication about communicability. For contemporary art speaks of this modern condition, this ontological drift, the groundlessness of creation and the limits of ‘positivist ideological projects’.
Art responds to this condition by inhabiting the gap between actuality and concept, representation and experience, signs and their referents, opening a zone of ontological uncertainty and anarchic withdrawal. If art were to invert the notorious primitivism of Modernism, and were to fold the dream of originary medialities from the archaic into the present, it could account for technologies of mediation having become ubiquitous and distributed in our environment, where mediation is not a question primarily of the content of messages any more, but a question of our living in ‘primordial participation’, anterior to the division that marks our (modern) consciousness, in what Deleuze and Guattari called ‘assemblages’. And it can invoke, on the other hand, a sensibility for histories of the psyche and its transhistorical temporality, so closely linked to aesthetics, as a crossroads of mediations and embodiments. It can espouse the notion that our psyche is a medium about which (to paraphrase Henri Bergson on the body) we do not know what it can do. In a similar fashion we may say that we do not know what kind of media we are. Modernity is therefore also the name given to the quasi-mythical experience: without anchor in any definite, stable reference, the world originates in mediation, as if from the middle. Without understanding this groundlessness, modern art must remain incomprehensible and impenetrable. Contemporary art testifies to this experience, this crisis of sense: we are always already framed by media and yet our mediality is an unstable, open-ended condition. A key to modern knowledge is the realisation that we do not know what kind of media we are and can be. ara Ho Tzu Nyen’s 2015 work 2 or 3 Tigers is the title piece of a group exhibition addressing colonialism, media and modernity in East Asia and beyond, on view at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, from 21 April through 3 July
above and facing page Ho Tzu Nyen, 2 or 3 Tigers, 2015, synchronised two-channel HD (CGI) projection, 12-channel sound, 18 min 46 sec
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Ho Tzu Nyen The Myth of Sisyphus by Mark Rappolt
A quick look at a still from Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Nameless (2015) will tell you that its subject is one of Hong Kong’s most celebrated actors, Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Indeed, Ho’s film includes extracts from the greater part of the actor’s distinguished cinematic career, from A City of Sadness (1988) to The Grandmaster (2015). Along the way we witness various young or middle-aged Leungs thinking, walking, counting, listening, whispering and doing a little stabbing and a lot of smoking. But listen to the voiceover or read the subtitles of Ho’s tribute and it’s clear that the ‘real’ subject of his film is Lai Teck, Secretary-General of the Malayan Communist Party from 1939 to 1947. Although it turns out that this Vietnamese (purportedly half ethnic-Chinese) was also known as Loi Tak, Lai Te, Lai Rac and around 47 other variants (many being the result of Chinese or other transliterations of Lai Teck’s codename within the Party: Wright). Lai Teck’s birth name may have been Truong Phuoc Dat. Unless it was Hoang A Nhac. No one is particularly certain about how and when he died. But he might have been suffocated in 1947 by a party deathsquad while hiding in Thailand. Ho Tzu Nyen is a Singaporean artist who works mainly in film, video installation and performance. He represented his country at the 2011 Venice Biennale, for which he created the multichannel video installation The Cloud of Unknowing (2011), a fusing of fourteenth-century European mysticism with contemporary Singapore, and the art-historical, philosophical and musical history of clouds. He writes, too: his 2004 essay ‘Perpetual Beginnings – Strands of Processes in Painting’, for example, is included in Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Contemporary Singaporean Art (2016), reviewed in the books section of this issue. Back in The Nameless, as the narrative talks about the forming of the Central Committee of the Malayan Communist Party, we see a group shot of grandmasters (among them Leung) from The Grandmaster. When Ho’s narrative speaks of “secret knowledge and the holy motors of history”, we see Leung performing tricks onstage in The Great Magician (2011). I watched the first of those films on an airplane recently. Depending on which ones you have watched, parts of those other narratives will also be very present. Having joined the Communist Party at a young age, Lai Tek went on to become an agent for the French, then the British, who helped him
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get to Singapore and ascend the ranks of the Malay Communist Party (by arresting his rivals). When the Japanese occupied Singapore during the Second World War, he worked for them. In Ho’s narrative Lai Teck is estimated to have been responsible for the arrest and execution of more than a hundred of his comrades. In 1947 a Central Committee meeting was convened in order to challenge the party leader about his reported activities for other parties. He failed to attend and absconded with the party funds. For most of his life Lai Teck was a double, triple and possibly quadruple agent. Leung plays an undercover agent (a policeman infiltrating the triad) in Infernal Affairs (2002) and special agent (working for the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War) in Lust, Caution (2007). Espionage has been a feature of his roles. This was coincidence until Ho made The Nameless, in which, additionally, Leung’s various screen roles seem a match for Lai Teck’s various names. If we’re hearing about Lai Teck not really being Lai Teck, we’re watching Tony Leung not really being Tony Leung. Yet neither Tony Leung nor Lai Teck lies at the true heart of The Nameless. Rather, as is the case in much of Ho’s output as an artist, it is the construction of identity and the related fabrication of history (and within that, art history – both Western and Eastern). Many of Ho’s works relate to his ongoing The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (begun during a 2014 residency at the Asia Art Archive), which explores the fact, fiction, various indigenous and colonial intrigues and ideologies that comprise the modern historical narrative of the subregion. G is for Gene Z. Hanrahan; L is for Lai Teck; T is for Tiger; W is for Weretiger. Many of these entries attempt to trace a series of faceless, nameless shapeshifters – of the kind explored in 2 or 3 Tigers (2015), which you’ll have read about in the previous article – that stand for the identity of Southeast Asia, and perhaps the era of globalisation as a whole. It sounds like a Sisyphean task. But as Albert Camus once said: ‘If the world were clear, art would not exist.’ ara The Nameless will be screened as part of this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong Film programme, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, 23–25 March; The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, Vol 1: G for Ghost(writers) is on show at A Space, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 21 March – 9 August
ArtReview Asia
The Nameless, synchronized double channel HD projections, double 5.1 systems, 21 min 51 sec, 2015
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Zhang Ruyi The concrete uncanny in the sculptures and installations of a young Chinese artist tap into contemporary sensations of isolation, alienation and urban dysfunction by Aimee Lin
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“You’ve really enjoyed playing with the space in Don Gallery,” I suggest. I’m waiting for the water to boil to make coffee in the only two cups in Zhang Ruyi’s new studio. Don Gallery is on the second floor of Blackstone Apartments, an eclectic 1924 residential building located in the heart of Shanghai’s former French Concession. The space retains its domestic configuration and the exhibitions are housed in what was formerly the living room, two smaller rooms and the corridor that connects them all. Last November, these spaces were home to Zhang’s solo exhibition Building Opposite Building. Zhang did not take these spaces as a given. Indeed, she blocked both entrances to one room: one in its entirety, using a cement door featuring a peephole through which people could observe the spines of a cactus, a persistent presence in her two- and three-dimensional works indicating strength, perseverance and a feeling of pain; the other divided into two narrow interspaces by a pair of cement doors, bound face to face with a cactus between them and jammed sideways into the centre of the doorway. Visitors could still enter the room through the spaces left either side, but it was a commitment – removing any bags should they be too big, taking off any heavy overcoats and, if necessary, holding one’s breath and exercising one’s stomach muscles to resize one’s belly… Two years previously, Zhang had conducted a similar assault on the space. For her solo exhibition Cut|Off, the artist blocked one of the doors with a massive cuboid form (which went, wall-like, from one space through to the next) and all the windows with cement. The arrival of these huge, cold, wet- and industrial-smelling blocks within the apartment gave the impression of an alien presence and transformed the art space into the psychological space of a mysterious and closed-off individual; it was subtle and quiet, and every connection
to the outer world, or society at large, appeared severed. Visitors were invited to observe and investigate the reality of this world on the premise of a closure of communications. A child of the 1980s, Zhang Ruyi was born and bred, and is based, in Shanghai. Her training at the Fine Art School of Shanghai University includes printmaking and plastic art using synthetic materials, which explains her persistent passion for organised, process-based reproduction in her art. This, together with her interest in representing the psychology of space, drew her to sculpture. Yet for all that this seems like a logical progression, it was Zhang’s drawings that first brought her to the attention of a wider art audience. Her signature works in this genre are drawn in pencil and watercolour on squared graph-paper and often take a cactus (represented in a three-dimensional space) as their subject. The works on paper are calm, minutely detailed and vivid; between the small, cold, mathematical squares of the grid and the pencil lines you can almost feel the tingling sensation brought about by contact with the cactus spines. Although these works are warmly received by the art market, Zhang’s focus remains primarily on three-dimensional, space-based works or interventions. Back to her most recent exhibition: there was one work that was particularly interesting, for the way in which it linked the artist’s twoand three-dimensional practice. Titled Potted Plants (2016), the work consists of a two-dimensional plane constructed of ceramic tiles fixed to a wall (as if to materialise the squared paper that serves as the base for her drawings), onto which, on the lefthand side, is bolted a plastic pot containing a tall, straight cactus. The plant is then sandwiched between two miniature concrete models of a residential towerblock, bound to it by string. Many works in this show, for example Slow Still
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above Potted Plants, 2016, plant, soil, flower pot, iron, ceramic tiles and concrete, 20 × 15 × 57 cm preceding pages Peep (detail), 2016, concrete, iron, peephole, light and electric wire, 210 × 80 × 5 cm
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Spacing, 2016, plant, iron and concrete, 211 × 76 × 5 cm
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Cleaning, 2016, concrete, fishtank, fish (common pleco) and ceramic tiles, 70 × 36 × 39 cm
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and Pillar (both 2016), use the same pattern to place or bind two or multiple miniature cement models of a building or of an architectural or interior detail together, face to face. In this way Zhang builds up a conversation between the equal component parts of each work, but any real possibility for communication is questioned – because in each example, the front side (or the outward face) of all the components is covered. Another standout work from the show is Cleaning (2016). Here, Zhang puts the cement miniature building parts in a fishtank (lit by a fluorescent tube and the natural light within the space), together with some common pleco, a tropical fish that likes to eat the algae that grows on the sculpture. Thus, the work has produced, on the one hand, a self-contained ecosystem and, on the other, a stage for a longlasting, nonstop performance. The sculpture, if the term can be used to refer to this work as a whole, is not only the stage for the performance but also a performer within it. In understanding Zhang’s art, the two Chinese characters that make up the word zhuāng xiū can be seen as a key. It means to install, construct, decorate and/or repair. Zhang belongs to what is called the post-80s generation (generally born during the first half of the 1980s), who have witnessed China’s rapid economic development since their childhood, and for whom the experience and imaginary of construction, relocation, demolition, renovation and decoration have become a daily experience of their lives and formed an important part of their visual and mental memories. It is these collective memories and social meanings, particularly of interior construction using materials such as electronic plugs and sockets, ceramic tiles and prefabricated doors, that have become an important vocabulary in Zhang’s art. Cement, sometimes used by Zhang as a construction material (particularly in Cut|Off ), is also a material for sculpture, reproducing ordinary buildings in miniature, or lifesize parts of buildings and everyday objects:
doors, sockets, a bath soap (introducing the existence of the human body and adding a sense of intimacy). In the woods surrounding the Cass Sculpture Foundation, in West Sussex, England, Zhang’s Pause (2016) introduces the artist’s reflection on the circumstances of modern life and its environment by installing cement plug-sockets in the trees and on the ground at Goodwood’s New Barn Hill. Zhang Ruyi is one of those artists who refuses simply to quote feminist discourse in their work. However, the repeated presence of certain items in her works, such as the cactus and its prickly spines, the closed (instead of open) or dysfunctional doors, the blocked entries or windows, the sometimes half-used Safeguard bath soap, is revealing, metaphorically, of the artist’s individual feelings or sensations in the context of society: pain, strength, repression, frustration at a lack of communication, expensiveness, a sense of hyperconsumerism. These feelings of course are part of human nature as a whole, but the sensitive and enduring character of her works suggests that the way that Zhang perceives and expresses them is distinctly feminine. And while these types of features could already be found in Zhang’s early works, in her recent practice, the expression of a unique individual has turned towards a description of a universal status. When I try to understand Zhang’s persistent interest in human feelings and their expression in physical space, I find, via the list of artists from which she takes inspiration – among them Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread, Rebecca Horn and Ann Hamilton – a context that consists of female artists who have been exploring the similar fields through material and space-based works. When compared to these older artists, Zhang’s methodology includes reproduction, repetition and an interest in the fabrication process, in which human participation is naturally hidden or diffuse. For that reason, a sense of the uncanny caused by the compression of the individual and the built world is finally revealed. ara
Pause (detail), 2016, concrete, dimensions variable all images Courtesy the artist and Don Gallery, Shanghai
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Patricia Perez Eustaquio by Adeline Chia
With an eye for the beautiful in the midst of decay, the Filipino artist offers a regenerative take on waste and the cycles – both natural and unnatural – that generate it 70
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For her 2017 series Untitled (Millefleurs), Patricia Perez Eustaquio has detail (such as flowers evoking meteorites, and trash evoking driftcreated tapestries portraying an unconventional subject: oily globs wood) create a mixture of the elemental and the everyday. of paint in extreme closeup. The images of paint, which bear the Her scrupulous renderings suggest relationships between beauty, dabs and scrapes of brushes and knives, evoke a range of moods and death and desire but never quite settle into a fixed meaning. On landscapes. From afar, some surfaces, with their arabesque grooves one level, she grants a miniaturist’s attention to what is discarded and whirls, resemble bouquets of shrivelled flowers. Others suggest and decaying, and offers a consolatory gesture in the face of inevicrusty and slightly diseased-looking topographies, like the barnacled table endings. On another, her vanitas-inspired fascination with the underside of an ancient boat. Upon closer inspection, the scenes pixe- voracity of human appetites, evident in the relish with which she late and the material reality of the surface asserts itself: you see the represents the fleshy textures of meat and game (her 2016 Singapore furred grain of the rug. Biennale work showing orchids was titled The Hunters Enter the Woods), As tapestries depicting photographs depicting paint, these works show that these drives are strong, vivid and alive, to be especially expand the Filipino artist’s habitual play with different media as enjoyed because what is desired is always on the verge of spoiling. well as modes of representation and re-representation. In a diptych The openness of her work sets her apart from artists such as Thai called Butcher’s Blossoms (2012), she took photographs of orchids and painter Natee Utarit, who also draws on the still-life tradition in raw meat, blew up the images until they looked semiabstracted, and Western classical art, but whose pictorial language remains heavily then painted them realistically. The final result was a pair symbolic. Eustaquio isn’t interested in symbolism but material realities. The most recurrent flower in her work of unevenly shaped canvases mirroring each other in streaky reds and whites, and it was unclear is the hibiscus because she likes the texture: “Usually I clump them together, and which dappled canvas showed meat and which showed flowers. then they look like they could be fabric Messing around with scale and or the waves in the sea.” It is also a media gives her final creations a flower that, as she saw it, has no visceral new life quite different baggage in Western art-history from their original subject and happens to be common matter. With their intimate to the Philippines. As for the furls and creases magnified other recurrent motif of trash, she says she paints it to monumental scale, the because there are “piles and series Flowers For X (2016) evokes extremes of movepiles of paint” in her studio, ment and stillness, fragility and also, coming from Maand toughness. Some works nila, she is familiar with a show what are still recognisliteral landscape of refuse. Piles of garbage are common ably flowers, but the blooms seem to flow underwater in inin this most densely populated of cities, which generates visible currents (Flowers For X, V). up to a quarter of the country’s In another work, the petals bear a closer resemblance to tree bark, rubbish and stretches waste-disposal pinecones or fossils (Flowers For X, III). capacity to breaking point. And under certain lights, all of them look Born in 1977, Eustaquio studied painting at the University of the Philippines’ Collike bunched-up wads of tissue paper. lege of Fine Arts. Although her output over a 20-year In general, Eustaquio’s practice gravitates uncomplicatedly towards beauty. She is interested in transforming what is career went on to span a variety of media, including installation and “dead or dying” – exhausted flowers, carcasses and sometimes the sculpture, painting continued to be a mainstay. After graduating, detritus in her Manila studio, such as trash and congealed paints on and to pay the rent, she also worked briefly as a costume and producdry cloths – into desirable objects. “Objects need to be beautiful to tion designer on small films and performances, and then went into attract people to want them,” she tells me matter-of-factly. This beauty commercial fashion-design for two years. The technical skills from isn’t just evident in the detailed naturalism of her botanical studies, the job came in handy later. “I started to make shaped canvases only but also her experiments with modernist forms in graphite-on-paper after I learned to make clothes patterns,” she says. “I don’t think drawings, where her fine draughtsmanship never deserts her. In the I would have thought it was possible to stretch canvas into these Figure Babel (2014) drawings, she stacks circles and triangles, some of ornate shapes if I didn’t have more practice with fabrics.” them containing intricate details of crumpled flowers, into totemIn 2007, with the encouragement of the Filipino curator Joselina polelike structures. In the Casting Figures (2014) Cruz, she concentrated on producing art. One above Flowers For X, I, 2016, oil on canvas, of her first experiments was a fabric sculpture series she breaks up the totem formation so that diameter 152 cm. Courtesy the artist the individual elements wander freely around comprising a crocheted sheet hanging as if over and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore the paper surface. The basic shapes (such as an invisible upright piano (Psychogenic Fugue, facing page Untitled (Millefleurs) spheres, triangles and squares) combined with 2008). To create it, she draped a resin-soaked I–III (detail), 2017, tapestry, a variety of still lifes rendered in mind-bending lace crochet over a piano she borrowed from 150 × 90 cm. Courtesy the artist
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happens to be common to the Philippines. As for the other recurrent motif of trash, she says she paints it because there are “piles and piles of paint” in her studio, and also, coming from Manila, she is familiar with a literal landscape of refuse. Piles of garbage are common in this city of 1.78 million residents who generate up to a quarter of the country’s rubbish and stretch the city’s waste-disposal capacity to breaking point. Born in 1977, Eustaquio studied painting at the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts. Although her output over a 20-year career went on to span a variety of media, including installation and sculpture, painting continued to be a mainstay. After graduating, and to pay the rent, she also worked briefly as a costume and production designer on small films and performances, and then went into commercial fashion-design for two years. The technical skills from the job came in handy later. “I started to make shaped canvases only after I learnt to make clothes patterns,” she says. “I don’t think I would have thought it was possible to stretch canvas into these ornate shapes if I didn’t have more practise with fabrics.” In 2007, with the encouragement of the Filipino curator Joselina Cruz, she concentrated on producing art. One of her first experiments was
a fabric sculpture comprising a crocheted sheet hanging as if over an invisible upright piano (Psychogenic Fugue, 2008). To create it, she draped a resin-soaked lace crochet over a piano she borrowed from a friend. After the cloth hardened she removed the piano, leaving a kind of fabric husk that stood stiffly and retained the form of the missing object. Later, she applied this technique to two chairs – The Sprinkling and the Pall (2008) – and a boat – (Sha Naqba Imuru) He Who Saw the Deep (2009). By folding and draping around a shaped absence, the soft fabrics evoked funereal shrouds and the shed skins of snakes. Over the next few years Eustaquio diversified her methods, and her work ripened into the confident multimedia showcase The Future That Was (2013), a travelling exhibition presented at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Manila, and Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York. Notable for the range of her material investigations and the way she incorporated elements of craftwork and product design, the exhibition featured several mannequins made from wire frames, some covered with black solihiya, a traditional Filipino craft of tight rattan weaving often used in furniture. The rest of the show was filled with polygonal canvases depicting flowers, carcasses and shadows, and soft sculptures covered with laser-cut mirrored surfaces. Dead hibiscuses featured in The Future That Was, though Eustaquio cannot recall when she first utilised them in her
Untitled (Carcass), 2016, digital print on silk dupion, printed in England, 136 × 1000 cm. Courtesy Yavuz Gallery, Singapore
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Casting Figures (Black Dust, Gold Leaf ), 2014, graphite and gold leaf on Hahnemühle paper, 150 × 122 cm. Courtesy the artist and Silverlens Gallery, Manila
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Theaster Gates Relative Values by Mark Rappolt
For someone whose work is so closely associated with a particular place – a series of culture-driven urban regeneration projects the artist has masterminded on Chicago’s South Side – Theaster Gates certainly gets around. And not just, as is the case of many of the artworld’s leading lights, because his works circulate from gallery shows to biennales to art fairs to other arts festivals around the world. Over the past few weeks he’s been in Basel, Paris and Nairobi (where he was invited to help a friend conceive a retreat for black artists), and now he is talking on the phone from the streets of Washington, DC (his exhibition The Minor Arts will open at the capital’s National Gallery of Art in March) and discussing his upcoming show at White Cube’s Hong Kong branch. But then again, the creation of a balance between the specific and the universal is arguably one of the keys to his art. As much as is a careful attention to time management. Gates’s second show in Hong Kong opens this March. His first, in 2013, titled My Back, My Wheel, My Will, introduced the Pearl of the Orient to the ‘roofing’ paintings (made using tar and other materials – wood, felt, rubber, etc – associated with the roofing industry) that he has been making since the retirement of his father (a roofer). His new show, Tarry Skies and Psalms for Now, will among other things demonstrate how the series has developed. His father’s life of work, Gates points out, gave him the opportunity to get to where he is today. ‘It’s completely sentimental,’ he has said of the origins of the series in an interview with Carol Becker, ‘the objects are just the things that allow me to continue the relationship with my dad.’ And yet, while the roofing works may have started from the personal and biographical, they end up in a formal dialogue with some of the biggest (white) names of twentieth-century American art – Robert Rauschenberg,
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Frank Stella, Agnes Martin – aided and abetted by titles such as Diagonal bitumen (2014). Of course, Gates’s intrusion into the history of American narratives also has a political and racial agenda. New York and, previously, Chicago may still be absorbing the triumphant retrospective of works by Kerry James Marshall that recently passed through their cities, but “it’s time to acknowledge in a big way the history of black painting”, Gates says now. If the dense reliefs of the tar paintings are, as Gates puts it, “similar” to artworks such as the paint-encrusted canvases produced by Abstract Expressionism (often billed as the first specifically American art movement to achieve widespread international recognition), they distinctly differ from them as well. For what begins as a tribute to the black labour that constructed the housing in his hometown ends with an example of postlabour – the way in which the skills of Gates, his father and the team of roofers with whom the artist creates his roofing works can be repurposed to create poetic artworks in an age in which their contribution to the construction industry no longer has great value. They earn more per hour working for him then they did making roofs, Gates points out, and learn (at times to their amazement) that their work can have a conceptual as well as a practical value. Indeed, during our conversation, the artist often speaks of his role as building a sense of the “poetic”, the “sacred”, and conjuring the “symbolic” in everything he does. On a basic level, Gates and those who write about him tend to cultivate a romantic Robin Hood-image of his activities as an artist. He sells artworks to the rich in order to fund projects – largely administered by the artist’s nonprofit Rebuild Foundation – that boost knowledge production, community building and self-empowerment
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for the overlooked and underresourced. It’s a win-win situation: his collectors are complicit and willing participants in the artist’s system (at this stage a psychiatrist might talk about assuaging various forms of guilt), and the artist gets to work on and fund his larger, urbanscale projects back home. This relationship found its most literal articulation in Gates’s Bank Bond (2013) – which comprised bonds, bearing the slogan ‘In Art We Trust’ and signed by the artist, made from the marble partitions of urinals located in Chicago’s Stoney Island State Savings Bank, that Gates, who had bought the derelict building (for $1) from the city in order to transform it into an arts hub and archive (containing the books of John H. Johnson – founder of Ebony and Jet magazines – the record collection of Frankie Knuckles, godfather of Chicago house music, and a slide collection documenting art and architectural history) sold in an edition of 100 for $5,000 each at that year’s Art Basel. He has said that he and his team spend ‘10 percent of our time making the art that makes 90 percent of the money that’s helping us grow’. And central to all of Gates’s work, which spans painting, sculpture, ceramics, installation, performance and various forms of urban regeneration and planning, is the creation and transfer of value. In this, of course, Gates’s output as a whole points to the heart of current debates about art and the class divisions (intellectual as much as financial) that dominate what we so casually call ‘the artworld’: debates about the economic versus the conceptual value of art. One brief gloss on this divide came during a recent late-night conversation with a curator who pronounced of this year’s upcoming European art jamborees that “Venice is for the collectors and Documenta is for the curators: Venice is for the work of fundraising and seeing art that has been endorsed by the market, and Documenta is for the
work of discovering new artists and new practices”. What is so interesting about Gates’s practice as a whole is the way that it recognises and exposes the existence of such divisions while at the same time exploiting them in order to mobilise the resources of communities as a whole. Something similar was certainly at work in 2015, when Gates famously announced, on winning the £40,000 Artes Mundi Prize, “Let’s split this motherfucker.” Although it’s also a reminder of the role that generosity and a general interest in and curiosity about what other people are doing plays in Gates’s output. As to his latest adventure in Hong Kong, Gates is fascinated by the hyperrapid spread of private museums and other urban developments on the mainland. He hints at discussions begun – concerning the development of community involvement, neighbourliness and sacredness in such projects as well as the problems of neighbourhood displacement and “underpreserved spaces” – and ready to be followed up. But more than that, he’s interested in reaching out to new audiences on the basis that they open up new possibilities for dialogue: “I’m starting conversations,” he says. And given his presence in Washington, it seems only fair to end by asking him whether his country’s new president has changed the nature of any of his conversations back home. “I don’t think he really cares about what happens on the South Side of Chicago,” says Gates, laughing. “But it makes me work harder.” ara Theaster Gates’s Tarry Skies and Psalms for Now will be on view at White Cube, Hong Kong, 21 March – 20 May; Theaster Gates: The Minor Arts is at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, through 4 September
all images Courtesy Theaster Gates Studio, Chicago
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Brothers in Arms by Max Crosbie-Jones
For Le Ngoc Thanh and Le Duc Hai, the divisions and splits within their native Vietnam are both a core subject and something from which to flee 78
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above and facing page 365 Days (details), 2013, c-print, 100 × 100 cm
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At the opening talk for The Game | Vietnam – an exhibition comprising and starved prior to August 1945, when the Viet Minh’s August sculptural installations, photos, a 24-channel video, war history Revolution freed the country from French colonial rule. In Before ‘86 books and old family photographs – in December 2016, one of the (2012), they revisited the boundaries and limits in life, culture and Le Brothers did something unexpected: distanced himself from the art prior to 1986, the year the government embarked on the socialistshow’s sociopolitical overtones. “From today I don’t work for Vietnam oriented market-economy Đoi Moi reforms, with a series of oil paintany more,” said Le Ngoc Thanh, the more outspoken of the flam- ings based on pre-1986 photos of friends and relatives, as well as boyant artist twins, as the audience and panel, including his identical old fatigues embroidered with symbols of war and peace. And for the brother Le Duc Hai, laughed nervously. “The Game is our last work Red Project (2013), a performance piece staged at a nightclub in Ho Chi about Vietnam… We want to do something for everyone. Western Minh City, they covered communist-family keepsakes – and their people focus on which country artists are from too much; it’s not owners – in viscous red paint. good for us… If people ask me where I come from, I’ll say I’m not from If those descriptions suggest to you a conceptual palette rooted Vietnam. I’ll say that I’m from the moon.” in Cold War iconography, even a cursory Thanh’s delivery, combative yet playful, survey of The Game | Vietnam, which was held The guns broached the strife left the audience guessing. Maybe his stateat Bangkok’s Jim Thompson Art Center, that contributed to Vietnam’s ment was an attempt to deflect attention would have reinforced it. Standing out was bifurcation, while the uniforms AR-15 (2016), a 2.4m-high wooden sculpture from themselves, this just in case Vietnam’s of the predecessor to the M16, the US miliprickly Ministry of Culture, which issues mirrored and erased it licenses for every exhibition back in their tary’s assault rifle of choice, and its similarly homeland and blocks the opening of those not to its taste, were giant twin, AK-47 (2016), the Soviet Union’s equivalent. Both weapons listening in. Maybe it was a pugnacious reaction against the artworld’s rested butt-to-the-ground, their surfaces covered with an ostentatendency to cherrypick and celebrate artists from non-Western coun- tious mix of fine red lacquer and intricate Nguyen Dynasty-style tries by virtue of their sociological or exotic qualities. Or maybe – just gold filigree. In the next room, meanwhile, two army uniforms, one representing North Vietnam, the other the South, were displayed on maybe – Thanh really meant it. What is clear is that over the past six years, the duo, both now mannequins. Hearts, flowers, tanks and bombs, among other motifs forty-one – who, in addition to working together, run the Hue-based of war and peace, had been embroidered onto each one, rendering art residency and exhibition platform New Space Arts Foundation – them barely distinguishable. have consistently broached the modern history of their fast-changing There was well-aimed commentary here; the guns clearly country. In Bowls and Chopsticks (1945) (2011) – an installation of 1,945 broached the geopolitical strife that contributed to Vietnam’s bifurbowls and chopsticks aligned in a geometric grid across a floor – they cation, while the uniforms at once mirrored and erased the North– honoured the two million ‘abandoned souls’ alleged to have suffered South divide – psychological, cultural, political – that remains over
The Game | Vietnam, 2016, 24-channel video installation
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Before ‘86 (detail), 2012, oil on canvas, 145 × 145 cm
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40 years after Vietnam’s reunification. But for all their skilful crafts- country heal from the wounds of war, just like how mother healed our manship and optimistic gesturing, both seemed overly familiar, torn shirts,” said Thanh when asked about this. obvious even, particularly when viewed from within the Southeast In its use of visual euphemism and channelling of everyday objects Asian context, in which a recent surfeit of strident sociopolitical art that link back to war, but reveal none of its violence, The Game | Vietnam that unironically deploys the paraphernalia and iconography of mili- bears comparisons with the droll, flat screenprints of Vietnam War-era tarism and war seems to augur a paucity of imagination and fresh magazines and quotidian knickknacks by American artist Matthew thinking (see, by way of example, Anon Pairot’s fabric toy-gun instal- Brannon (Concerning Vietnam, 2016). Only here the objects are more lation Weapons for the Citizen, 2016, and Bùi Công Khánh’s jackfruit- intimate and personal. Born to communist parents on 3 April 1975, wood installation Dislocate, 2014–16, with its carvings of American GI 27 days before the end of the Vietnam War, the brothers grew up in helmets and barbed-wire fretwork). Quang Bình province, just north of the 17th parallel that had divided The same can’t be said for The Game, the Bangkok show’s epon- Vietnam following the Geneva accords of 1954. Their early years were, ymous video installation. Playing out on they write in the exhibition catalogue, ‘very a wall, this immersive 24-channel video difficult, both materially and mentally’, but “They can’t copy if I put not devoid of earthly pleasures: they found display had a surreal and disquieting surveilmy face in my artwork,” Hai solace in nature – the bomb-scarred mounlance-room quality about it. It also had the says. The spectre of censorship tains, plains, beaches and caves – and the two brothers exploring their physicality and twinhood in a poetic manner that invoked games that children played. ‘The weapons surely plays its part too the country’s past and present, its pain and on both sides were wooden guns or [made of] its progress. On each self-contained monitor a unique hour of lush banana tree bark,’ they add. footage – of the fatigue-clad pair nonchalantly riding Russian-made Whether the Le Brothers will continue drawing from the politics of motorbikes around Hue, calmly performing martial drills, doing tai the small and domestic – their own personal lives – to tackle national chi moves, paddling through water while holding flowers and toy trauma and social histories remains to be seen. Thanh’s public stateguns, etc – played on rotation. String folk-music served as evocatively ment of intent aside, the brothers are nothing if not adept at reinventing shrill accompaniment. The effect was disorienting yet also calming. themselves. After moving to Hue, in Central Vietnam, aged seventeen, And there was something not-of-this-realm about it too. In partic- they studied drawing and graphic design at the local university and, in ular, the wrapping of sheer, brightly coloured fabric around crates, 1994, began eking out a living as lacquer painters. Growing up in the old bricks or each other lent the work a distinctly cabalistic feel. It was post-Đoi Moi era, they had patchy exposure to Western culture, but as if the brothers were possessed, some benign land-spirit controlling only in 2008, after an exhibition in New York led them to spend time them from afar. “The image of mothers sewing and patching fabric taking in its art scene, did they begin grappling with contemporary art has been imprinted in us. Using it to wrap objects is a way to help the practices and working together. Up until this point, art for them had
Bowls and Chopsticks (1945) (detail), 2011, 1,945 lacquered bowls and chopsticks, dimensions variable
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served, as per Vietnam’s fine-art tradition, a largely decorative function. Around this time they also set up the New Space Art Foundation. One of the reasons they took up performance and video art was, according to Hai, simply to stop other artists from copying their artworks, a chronic problem in a country where tourist-art-shops selling imitations of contemporary and modern paintings are a common sight. “They can’t copy if I put my face in my artwork,” he said at the talk. The spectre of censorship surely played its part too. As an artist explains anonymously in Samantha Libby’s ‘The Art of Censorship in Vietnam’ (Journal of International Affairs, vol 65, no 1, 2011): ‘The most important thing for Vietnamese visual artists is to know where to push against boundaries and where [to] hold back. So sneaking is an important skill for the provocative artist in Vietnam. Many of us create artwork with multiple layers of meanings so we can explain it reasonably and differently to different audiences. It is a dangerous but also exciting game for us.’ But according to the brothers, it was the response to an early video piece that sealed the decision to incorporate video, performance and photography into their practice. “After finishing our first videowork, The Bridge, the reactions of our friends struck us,” said Thanh. “It got them very emotional and they cried. We never got those reactions with our paintings; people either liked it or not. These mediums help us express ourselves better and make better connections with the audience. They just suit us.” Asked to shed light on the direction their practice will take next, Thanh replied succinctly, and seemingly without a shred of guile: “Nature and people and love.” Should he be taken seriously? The Game | Vietnam’s curator Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani didn’t seem sure. “I believe they will continue tackling the Vietnam War and history at some point, but it’s for them to come to this conclusion,” she said diplomatically. However, other series by the brothers do indeed
suggest an evolving preoccupation with more universal themes than the push-and-pull between North and South, capitalism and communist traditionalism. In Into the Sea (2011/2013), a hypnotic three-channel videowork presented at the 2013 edition of the Singapore Biennale, we see the brothers performing their flowing rituals topless in shallow streams, undulating sand dunes and rickety wooden boats. Here they are barefoot children of the earth – not toy-gun-toting Vietnamese peaceniks. A similar, if more spectral and anxious, tone is also struck by the trailer for the 60-minute videowork Moon drops (2016), where they, alongside Finnish artist (and former New Space Arts Foundation-resident) Willem Wilhelmus, perform on a wind-battered mountain plain while clad in white áo dàis. Here we’re just a couple of scene changes from the romantic expressionism of a mountain scene by Bùi Xuân Phái or the cine-sumptuousness of an early Tran Anh Hùng movie. But neither of the Le Brothers’ works can be written off as idealised odes to pastoral beauty or appeals to the Western imagination; through their mirrored gestures, they also rub at the bonds of brotherhood. Perhaps the most emphatic exploration of this bond so far is 365 Days (2014), a series of 365 photos of the pair, shot one per day in sundry locations over a full year. While not devoid of national symbolism – in some photos they juxtapose all red and all yellow suits, for example – the main takeaway from these images is the siblings’ unforced synchronicity in both art and life. Despite their slipperiness, Thanh and Hai know that this tight, intimate connection is where their strength – an enigmatic weave of meanings and feelings and memories – lies. “We are very fortunate to have a mutual understanding of each other’s bodies,” Thanh said. “We understand and can predict the movements of each other. That helps our performances flow. Our interactions seem effortless. Two in one, you know?” ara
Moon drops, 2016, 3-channel video, 12 min all images Courtesy the artists and New Space Arts Foundation, Hue
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Pak Sheung Chuen by Aimee Lin
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Before That Light, which recently finished its run at Vitamin Creative bottles of seawater in a row and made a horizontal line at water level. Space in Guangzhou, Pak Sheung Chuen had not presented a major For years this piece was placed within a constellation of other Allan solo show in quite some time. During that interval, Hong Kong, like Kaprowesque works that Pak had made using maps, for example The many other places in the world, has seen great historical changes. To me Alternative Tokyo Travel Project (2007), a walk through that city along the – an observer of contemporary art from outside the territory – Pak is an middle foldline of the map he was carrying. But since the Umbrella artist who most closely represents contemporary Hong Kong. Unlike Movement, the work has become a starting point for Pak’s reflections others of his contemporaries who have recently gained regional atten- on the history of Hong Kong and the boundaries/borders that define it. tion due in part to Hong Kong’s increasingly prominent position on Flowing Boundary: The Western Border (113°52´E) I (2016), is a reference the international art map, Pak’s Hong Kong-ness appears as a result of to the line drawn by a Chinese officer with a brush on a map that was his consciousness that his cultural output relates to his activities as a later attached to the Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong local citizen. Between 2003 and 2007, Pak authored a regular column Territory, signed by Great Britain and China on 9 June 1898. in Ming Pao Weekly. And naturally, after the failure of the Umbrella The work consists of two parts: a video playing on an LED screen Movement in 2013, the artist, like many of his immediate circle of leaning against a wall, in which the horizon captured by the artist friends (who would define themselves, broadly speaking, as ‘cultural exactly overlaps the borderline on the map; and beside it the largest workers’) and other people in Hong Kong, has to reflect what they have and most material work Pak has ever produced, a monumental sculpexperienced in the recent history-changing years. Fortunately, Pak has ture accommodating 330 litres of seawater collected north to south an outlet for his feelings in his art. along Hong Kong’s western border. The seawater runs from the top Living and thinking as an artist (and a Christian) allowed him fully of the 3m-high monument in a straight line, like a flowing boundary to immerse himself in the hurt experienced by lowly individuals as a of Hong Kong. After the territory was returned to China in 1997, this result of the grand narratives of history. With That Light, Pak was not frontier, a symbol of Hong Kong’s colonial past, has continued to be only showing 19 works made over the past few years, but also a personal used as the border between Mainland China and Hong Kong, and journey and its public result. And that’s not to mention the fact that is the geographical origin of conflicts caused by the clash of ideolthe artist arrived at Vitamin’s Mirrored Gardens in Guangzhou with ogies and interests. Just like the artistic horizon made in 2004, the 330 litres of seawater that he had collected along longitude 113°52’E: work articulates in physical form the flowing western border that is a configuration of a conceptual line on a map. It brings a Romantic, the western border of Hong Kong. One of the earliest works on show was The Horizon Placed at Home artistic action to a history-based question, and its installation on the (2004-9-8) (2004), which illustrates an action conducted by the artist far side of the border, in Mainland China, has perhaps made the quesat that time: after drawing a horizontal line tions it raises even bolder. above Nightmare Wallpaper (No. ESC2615-15/h): through a map of Victoria Harbour, Pak went Living a Christian life has helped Pak to Picture of the Slumbering Horse, 2016, wallpaper to the five spots at which it intersected coastdevelop a deep understanding of the symbolic facing page The Horizon Placed at Home (2004-9-8), power of an image, or sign, and its influence on lines, collecting seawater at each spot and filling 2004 (installation view, Pak Sheung Chuen: five bottles to the same level. Then he placed the That Light, Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, 2016) human mentality. The Nightmare Wallpaper series
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(2016), for example, provides an approach for investigating the relationship between public political events and the individual, and then conducting an artistic intervention using the symbolic power of images. The series consists of outputs from various media: decorative wallpaper featuring repetitive patterns; handwritten sketches and notes; paintings; and objects made of steel. In each of these a sketch he drew while listening to court hearings from the public gallery is transformed into Rorschach-inkblot-like patterns. Thus an apparently random, meaningless image triggers two kinds of powers: psychological healing from the action of drawing; and psychological suggestion and intervention by de- and reconstructing the image in his studio and incorporating the newly made pattern as a visual element into seemingly innocent interior decoration, which becomes an agent to carry the issues raised in the cases to which he had listened. The Mr. Bus series (2005–15) comes from a column Pak wrote in 2005 for Ming Pao Weekly. At a bus stop the artist often passed, he noticed that the four routes indicated there read as a telephone number. He then dialled the number and spoke with the man who answered – Pak called him Mr. Bus – publishing the story alongside a photo of the bus stop and releasing the three-minute recording of their conversation as an art piece titled Familiar Numbers, Unknown Telephone, 2005-5-16 (13:15-13:18). Years later he called Mr. Bus again, invited him to meet at the bus stop, interviewed him and researched his personal story and family history in the context of the grand history of Hong Kong. The related documentation, archives and objects were released as the artwork Meeting with Mr. Bus After Ten Years. Later still, Pak reviewed his video recordings of the day of his encounter with Mr. Bus. Both had travelled to their rendezvous by subway and the recordings revealed that Mr. Bus had passed by Pak at the subway station before their official encounter (a scenario recalling one of Pak’s earlier works: Waiting for a Friend (without Appointment), 2006-12-29). This led to the latest episode
in the series, The Moment of Encounter with Mr. Bus, 2015-12-12 (11:10:39), a text and short video excerpted from the original documentation. Pak’s study of Mr. Bus contains many details or coincidences that could be seen by a mystic as ‘written’ or designed by the most unbelievable power. According to Pak’s narrative, the Mr. Bus series shows how an incidental happening may eventually become an inevitable event, a fateful connection between two people or, in his words, ‘the evidence of the divinity’. In my eyes, the most interesting part of this work is the way in which a multiple-episode story weaves the lives of two small individuals into each other, revealing fragments of Hong Kong’s history in the process, while the work grows organically from a linear text to a multilayered, internally crossed hypertext to, eventually, a carrier of meaning. Pak is often described as an artist whose practice has blurred the boundary between art and life. At a time when control of the human being permeates every level of life – via lifestyle propaganda, education, the media, consumer dynamics, the manipulation of desire, the narration of history, urban planning, the tax and medical system – nothing is more political than ordinary life. In this sense, it is not difficult to find the political dimension in Pak’s works, from the role that Hong Kong’s modern history and local geography played in the Mr. Bus series, to the legal cases featuring public concerns used to summon the power of the image in the Nightmare Wallpaper series, to the geographical invention of Hong Kong and the transfiguration of its manmade, conceptual boundary in the Flowing Boundary series. Pak once wrote in his journal: ‘When an artist takes part in political activities, in addition to his political position, his main role is to stimulate people’s imagination, to attain the biggest achievement by the lightest and most elegant means.’ I wonder if the artist still holds that belief after the Umbrella Movement. However, looking at the complete presentation of the Mr. Bus series at Vitamin’s Mirrored Gardens, I believe that if art’s meaning is determined by the specific place and time of its creation, then doing art is also a way of doing politics. ara
Meeting with Mr. Bus After Ten Years (detail), 2005–2015, newspaper, books, photos, documents
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Flowing Boundary: The Western Border (113°52´E), 2016 (installation view, Pak Sheung Chuen: That Light, Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, 2016) all images Courtesy Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou
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Postgraduate Diploma in
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Object-based study of the arts of China, Japan & Korea, India, Southeast Asia and the Islamic world including access to the reserve collections in the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum Short courses also available Further details from: Dr Heather Elgood Phone: +44 (0) 20 7898 4445 Email: asianart@soas.ac.uk SOAS, University of London Thornhaugh Street Russell Square London WC1H OXG www.soas.ac.uk/art
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Art Reviewed
While Durga is the destroyer of evil, her tiger mount represents power and immortality. The more ferocious forms of Durga – Shakti and Kali – ride the tiger 93
Busan Biennale Project I An/Other Avant-Garde China/Japan/Korea Busan Art Museum 3 September – 30 November An/Other Avant-Garde China/Japan/Korea, one of three projects that formed last year’s Busan Biennale (titled Hybridizing Earth, Discussing Multitude), sought to revisit the history of experimental art in those countries for whom the avant-garde is an imported concept. And indeed, the varying degrees of social and economic development, as well as democratic progress, in these countries renders the histories and features of avant-garde art in each quite distinct. It’s because of this that the project takes the form of three parallel exhibitions rather than one comparative study. Curated by Guo Xiaoyan, the China section focuses on the period of the 1980s to the mid-1990s. Following the end of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, in 1976, Western ideas such as structuralism, poststructuralism and postmodernism, and cultures such as rock music and Pop art were introduced to China, leading to a more liberal turn among the country’s intellectuals. But in the face of global political change at the end of the 1980s, China clamped down on the intellectual Westernisation of its people, and chose instead to focus on its economy by developing an open market and boosting industrial production. Guo’s curatorial strategy is to return the artworks and art practices she shows to their historical context, via texts and detailed caption labels. The artists shown in this section collectively describe the social and political climate of the country through style, subject and form: Fang Lijun’s paintings portray characters from this critical historical moment in the style of cynical realism; Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan’s performance art represents the extreme body states during the time of radical social changes; Wang Guangyi’s Political Pop deconstructs the aesthetics of socialism with consumerism; Ding Yi’s
abstract paintings reflect the urbanisation of China; Gu Wenda and Xu Bing execute an experimental updating of traditional cultural production (such as calligraphy and poetry); and Wu Shanzhuan and Zhou Tiehai bring a conceptual art practice. Before it was accepted as a luxury consumer product, or identified as a means to exert cultural soft power (these changes are marked by the appointment of Cai Guo-Qiang as artistic director of the 2008 Beijing Olympics), the Chinese authorities considered contemporary art to be culturally and politically provocative. And even today, there are works in this exhibition that cannot easily be seen by the public in Mainland China, making it a valuable textbook on the early development of the country’s contemporary art. The Japanese section of the project (curated by Sawaragi Noi, Tatehata Akira and Ueda Yuzo) focuses on the country’s postwar era. Sawaragi’s curatorial statement references artist Okamoto Taro, who, during the US occupation of Japan, described being radical as daring ‘to do something different from others’. That became fertile ground for the early shoots of groups Gutai, Kyushu and Anti-Art, as well as Mono-ha, during the 1950s and 60s. In a sense, what was vaguely called ‘avant-garde’ was a denial of postwar Japan. After the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the Osaka International Fair in 1970, Sawaragi’s narrative continues, nihilism took the place of radicalism, until, in recent years, in the face of constitutional revision (in particular of Article 9, Japan’s ‘peace clause’) and the rise of Japan’s antinuclear movement, the notion of the avant-garde as the art of resistance returned to centre-stage. This curatorial narrative is particularly interesting because it takes avant-garde or radical art as a fluid concept, its definition and shape changed according to current circumstance.
facing page, top Aida Makoto, MONUMENT FOR NOTHING, 2008–16, corrugated cardboard, dimensions variable. Courtesy Busan Biennale
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As a result, in this show, works that carry very different political messages are grouped together as avant-garde: for example Akasegawa Genpei’s radical leftist poster Red Army-P.F.L.P World War Declaration (1971), Aida Makoto’s Monument For Nothing II (2008–), a work reflecting on religion and modern life, and Chim↑Pom’s Pavilion (2016), which carries a strong antinuclear message. Kim Chan-Dong’s Korea section also starts from the perspective that avant-garde art is the art of rebels and those who want to deny or overcome the establishment. This section features art from the 1960s to the 1980s, during which, Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) and Minjung Art (people’s art), or so to speak, formalist modernism and social realism, became the mainstream of Korean art. What Kim wants to show in this exhibition are the artworks or practices that try to explore the space between these two ends, such as Kim Ku-Lim’s conceptual art from the 1970s, news footage of Korean Young Artists Association Exhibition in 1967, Kim Young-Jin’s installations from the late 1970s and Ha Chong-Hyun – whose work is normally considered to be representative of Dansaekhwa, but who here, in works using newspaper (Work 71-11, 1971) and barbed wire (Untitled 72-D, 1972), seems to have reached a certain kind of balance between content and form. Until a few years ago, group shows featuring art from China, Japan and South Korea were regular occurrences; recently, however, and perhaps due to changes in their respective geopolitical outlooks, this kind of comparative survey show has ceased to exist. And that makes the Busan Biennale’s Project I special. It also shows the possibilities or potentials for art in China, Japan and Korea, by revisiting the artworks that once took place but discontinued, which then naturally raises a question: what if some of these potentials are realised? Aimee Lin
facing page, bottom Xu Bing, A Case Study of Transference 1, 1993–4, c-print, 42 × 30 cm. Courtesy Busan Biennale
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Ho King Man, Cici Wu, Wang Xu Mosquitoes, Dusts, and Thieves 47 Canal, New York 12 January – 12 February How can we work together? This question will be urgent, if not existential, to those of us seeking, over the next four years, to build a coherent opposition to America’s hard-right and xenophobic turn. Modelling new forms of collectivity, at once sufficiently flexible and intrepid, is no straightforward project for seasoned activists, let alone contemporary artists. In their group show at 47 Canal, Mosquitoes, Dusts and Thieves, New York-based Chinese artists Ho King Man, Cici Wu and Wang Xu present an exhibition about forming relationships between things, humans and each other. Ho, Wu and Wang are no strangers to working together. In 2015 they founded Practice, an exhibition space, studio and residency project on the top floor of a building in New York’s Chinatown, a rare vestige of an alternative space in Manhattan. While preserving a distinct sense of autonomy, accord shines through this visually and conceptually tight exhibition that is dense with feeling, but never saccharine. Wu smuggled a device that records ambient light into a screening of the film Moonlight (2016) and then projected her collected light-data through a suspended strip of Plexiglas; the light flickers occasionally like a dysfunctional strobe. The viewer watches this installation, titled Closer, Closer, Says Love (2017), unfold while sitting in a movie-theatre chair bolted to the gallery floor.
Wu’s small light recorder sits on the armrest. The latter is a separate work, titled Foreign Object #1 Fluffy Light (prototype) (2017). A bubble of opalescent glass crowns the recorder as a soothing orange light blinks inside, a gentle reminder that this device’s power remains on. There’s a mesmeric wonder to Wu’s art, which is reinforced by the contraption attached to the Plexiglas strip: a motor and pulley system that would operate an automatic door. In irregular spurts, it pulls two silicone-coated sleeves closer and then apart, like the material ghosts of two unknown individuals, brought together and separated by forces larger than them. If the human element in Wu’s work is presented as an absence, then Wang places an interpersonal relationship centre stage. The video Summer Wind Before Rain (2017) follows Wang during a residency at Storm King Art Center as he makes the clay that will become a portrait of the sculpture park’s gardener. The video splices empty shots of the lush upstate landscape, spectacular God’s-eye footage of the gardener mowing crop circles and an intimate moment as Wang sits with and sculpts his subject. A head is conspicuously absent from Wang’s A Stand (2017), a slightly larger-than-life kouros-like figure made from the same Storm King clay. Several coat hooks are embedded into the dried, gruff surface – a gesture that suggests sculpture can carry physical, and emotional, weight.
Mosquitoes, Dusts, and Thieves, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artists and 47 Canal, New York
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Peppery notes of chilli sauce – the recipe of Ho’s grandfather – waft through the gallery. Breathing in the garlicky scent, coming from a multifaceted work titled Bloody Flavour Won’t Go Away, Squeezing Juices Out of the Time (2017), viewers can appreciate the quiet theatricality to Ho’s translation of Beijing photographer Ren Hang’s poems, printed out and stacked in a wood and silk-lined case on a spot-lit pedestal, which also underscores human relationships. Several of the poems contained in those pages, such as ‘I’m lonely’, are crass and irreverent: ‘still make your mama tell you / that is shit / don’t eat it’. In a work titled (having thai takeout during christmas eve) (2017), wateringcan roses, cleaved in half, dot the gallery walls and seem to grow like brass fungus. Ho positions himself as mediator here, as a translator with privileged access to original sources of knowledge, be they his grandfather’s or fellow artist’s. Wu, Wang and Ho conclude their poetic and ambiguous exhibition text with a Foucault quote. ‘They have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship,’ says the French theorist in a 1981 interview. ‘That is to say, the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure.’ The sum of Mosquitoes, Dusts, and Thieves is a collective statement of empathy between people and things. Owen Duffy
He Yida Right Misplacement A+ Contemporary, Shanghai 29 October – 11 December He Yida’s latest exhibition is decidedly quiet and measured. Prima facie, with almost all works untitled and not a trace of wall texts, it seems to entice us into the sole contemplation of He’s deft play of sculptural language and spatial arrangement. At opposite ends of the main gallery are two sculptural installations (all works 2016) composed of the same set of materials: a coarsely plastered sponge cuboid sitting atop a piece of frosted glass. Besides the different dimensions of the two sculptures, only a close look would reveal another slight variation: in one installation a piece of the glass has its frosted side facing upward, while in the other this is inverted to show a matt finish. Another work, comprising two separate structures, features a concrete block wrapped in a nylon net placed next to a slim but steady metal-frame stand that holds a roughly plastered piece of chicken wire at eye level. The artist is adept at arranging materials into subtle formal balance, and such playful manoeuvring runs throughout the show.
That the exhibition is titled Right Misplacement, however, begs us to look beyond form for what exactly has been misplaced, and the value of – or reasons behind – its misplacement. In our interview, He admits she is particularly drawn to three kinds of things: ‘poor’ things, kitsch objects and ‘extravagant’ things. Ostensibly contradictory signifiers, the antagonism and dynamics embedded in this triangular nexus are inflected in the exhibition on a more conceptual plane. In another untitled work, a wooden structure, with its four legs clumsily covered in spray foam, stands in an anthropomorphic pose. On the floor next to it rests an ordinary ornamental vase topped with a piece of Styrofoam, both objects scavenged from the streets by the artist. Here, the poor Styrofoam, the kitschy vase and the wooden structure marked by its apparent sculptural excess flirt with each other as well as the space that houses them. This awkward juxtaposition of an intently
– if crudely – sculpted structure and an assemblage of found objects within a single work solicits us to reflect on how ‘context’ usually always affects, sometimes even dominates, our assessment of a work, and the possibility of decontextualisation. This impression intensifies in the side gallery, where a piece of chicken wire supported by a twig stands next to a comparatively large piece of inverted carpet, both objects leaning against the wall on one side. This calculated placement gives a visual impression of being on the verge of sliding: a muted pas de deux between two objects stripped of their origin. In the face of a nebulous contemporary aesthetics in which mass-indie, Ikea-chic and minimalist penchants float amok along a capitalist axis, He holds on to recontextualising street junk in a white cube, preserving insignificance and intuition with an attitude. The exhibition title has been placed on the far right of the wall by the entrance: right doesn’t mean correct, it’s just right. Alvin Li
Untitled, 2016, wood, styrofoam, ceramic, 103 × 70 × 182 cm. Courtesy the artist
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When We Become Us Capsule Shanghai 15 October – 27 November The inaugural exhibition at Capsule Shanghai might prove instructional for Americans still wrangling with the issue of who ought to be admitted to which bathrooms. Despite the complex rhetorics of sex and gender, people are still humans with basic needs. It is this shared ethos and pathos that is eloquently articulated in the group exhibition that binds the works of eight artists in the welcoming space of this expansive lane-house gallery on the historic Anfu Road. Like her potent video Men’s Bathhouse (1999), presented at the Polish Pavilion of the 48th Venice Biennale, Katarzyna Kozyra’s Faces (2005–6) reveals yet another dimension of her subtle yet powerful challenge to accepted social norms. The one-hour-and-28-minute singlechannel video of contorted faces, fraught with distress and agony, becomes the focal point of raw emotions revealed by acclaimed dancers performing in various genres from
ballet to hip-hop. The dramatic enunciations inscribed on each visage illuminate the tenuous divide that separates pain from pleasure. Hauntingly poetic, the heightened moments evoking the dancers’ interior reflection are enacted upon their faces as if that itself were the stage. In the gallery’s largest space, which overlooks an idyllic garden, painted canvases of reposing male figures by the Israeli-born American artist Doron Langberg adorn the pristine white walls. Each languid body offers up a sense of arresting vulnerability (enhanced by the paintings’ vibrant hues) that solicits a voyeuristic gaze. It takes the eyes a moment to adjust before recognising that the figure in the works in the Bent series (2012–13) is portrayed in a contorted enigmatic pose alluding to self-lust. In a similar manner, it takes another few seconds to register that the abstract forms in the paintings by American artist Sarah Faux belong to what she describes as the ‘fugue state’,
Doron Langberg, Bent 2, 2012, oil and acrylic on paper, 56 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist and Capsule Shanghai
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or the slippery zone between figuration and abstraction. She utilises the incongruent viewpoint of multiple perspectives and flattened human forms through compositional overlap to make ambiguous the sexual referent of her figures. The element of naughtiness is playfully employed in the painting The MET #3 (2015) by Huang Hai-Hsin, which represents a group of gentrified elderly ladies on a museum visit as they appreciate the frontal details of a sculptural god fully exposed in the nude for their viewing pleasure. The formidable opening exhibition at Capsule Shanghai allows us to transcend the constraints of our physical bodies by allowing our sentiments to take flight. As we momentarily take leave of our physical selves, the doors and walls of segregation become meaningless in a shared community of mutually inclusive exchange. Julie Chun
Hans-Henning Korb Kaya Cynara Empty Gallery, Hong Kong 13 December – 17 February The experience of walking into Hans-Henning Korb’s tripartite installation at Empty Gallery is, in the first instance, bizarre. But perhaps bizarre is what you should expect from a mainly black-walled gallery (an alternative to the proliferation of white cubes that are littering the north side of Hong Kong) that’s dedicated to showcasing experimental and unorthodox art. Empty Space is located on the 19th floor of a building tucked around the corner from Aberdeen Harbour’s fish market. All of that is rendered irrelevant once you enter the gallery space and stumble down a flight of stairs (the young German artist’s exhibition marks the galley’s expansion to the 18th floor) into the first of Korb’s installation spaces. The atmosphere is cavelike, a pile of earth covering the floor as well as the dried remains of artichoke plants (they don’t sell this Mediterranean flower in the fish market). Despite being 18 floors up, you might as well be at an equivalent distance below ground. There’s a hint of dankness as well as darkness in the air. In case it wasn’t becoming obvious, Korb’s work relies primarily on sensory manipulation. If the darkness is one of the hallmarks of the gallery then the dankness comes from the artist
and the fact that he (during the opening days at least) is boiling globe artichokes (which belong to the Cynara, or thistle family) in industrial-size pots in a second superterranean/subterranean space. The boiling liquor is then served to visitors (in a ritualistic fashion, as though this were the bastardised northern European equivalent of a tea ceremony) in a series of irregular ceramic cups (made by collaborator Jonas Wendelin Kesseler) out of which it is impossible to drink unless your lips find the sipping spot on the vessels’ tricksy and uneven lips. Despite several attempts to attain that particular nirvana – which other visitors appeared to do – I ended up pouring the soup all over my arms before giving up. Perhaps this was a symptom of a more general failure karmically to engage with the shamanistic aspects of the work. Perhaps it’s also due to a failure to embrace what’s immediately around me and isolate myself from the greater space of Hong Kong as a whole (where/why did they get the artichokes? keeps running through my head like a Jenny Holzer tickertape). Within the rooms there are also videos showing naked (alternately male and female) bodies interacting with artichokes and other
matter, presented on flatscreens and produced using the super-slick, super-clean aesthetics of cosmetic or wellness advertisements, as well as equally glossy (albeit in another sense) writhing slugs. In this way a dialogue emerges between the virtual and the real, the dirty and the clean, the sensed and the experienced, the natural and the technological. The latter is further explored in the final room, a solitary experience into which you are led clutching one of the boiled artichokes (“You can eat it if you like,” the guide explains) before being seated in an artichoke-shaped cave and having an Oculus Rift VR set strapped onto your head. (Kaya – does that refer to the Sanskrit word for the attributes of the Buddha or am I being pointed towards the 1978 album of that name by Bob Marley and the Wailers?) As I’m staring into a morphing mercurial VR cloud, either seems plausible. But somehow I think I’m ‘supposed’ to be thinking about something else, or about nothing at all. Perhaps something or nothing sums this show up. And while that may not be exactly the response that the artist or the gallery expect, the risky and unorthodox nature of this show is precisely why it will be worth coming to see whatever Empty Gallery has on show next. Mark Rappolt
Kaya Cynara / Trailer (still), 2016. Courtesy the artist
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Interpreting New Art Movement: Re-reading the historical journey of Indonesian New Art Movement (1975–87) R.J. Katamsi Gallery, Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta 1–15 December Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB), or the New Art Movement, was a loose collective of artists active during the 1970s and 1980s that arguably kickstarted Indonesia’s contemporary art scene by making readymades and site-specific installations. It was set up by a group of students from the fine arts faculty at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta (known before as Sekolah Tinggi Seni Rupa Indonesia) and the Bandung Institute of Technology. The core members included artists who have become senior statesmen in Indonesian contemporary art, such as FX Harsono and seminal curator-sculptor Jim Supangkat, as well as other pioneer artists such as social realist painter Dede Eri Supria and installation artist Nanik Mirna. Harsono himself organised this exhibition and, with help from the gallery staff, borrowed about 35 works by his contemporaries. The personal involvement of a key member of GSRB may account for loans of works of old-timers such as KP Hardi Danuwijoyo, Bonyong Munni Ardhi and Ronald Manulang. Works by other less active artists who have slipped from the pages of history, such as Siti Adiyati, Muryoto Hartoyo and Satyagraha, have also come out of private collections for public viewing. In this sense, this is an important occasion for a younger generation of artists, curators, critics and researchers to access this period of art history and its lesser known figures.
Overall, this exhibition illustrates the resourcefulness of the art scene during the years covered by the show. The creations are economical and made with simple materials, as well as interested in formal experimentations and juxtaposing Indonesia’s traditional crafts with more contemporary currents. There are works by Muryoto Hartoyo that play with media and categorisation, such as Main-main I (1975), where the artist places a frame around a section of a bamboo-woven wall as if it were a work of fine art. Meanwhile, Siti Adiyati’s Dolanan (Toys, 1977) is a pavilion made of bamboo and fabric, and paper toys dangling from the ceiling. The work can be read as an argument for a simpler and more local way of life in the face of the encroachments of capitalism in the developing Indonesian economy. Another characteristic of the show is a certain level of political reticence, which could be attributed to the stringent censorship under the regime of President Suharto, who ruled the country after the 1965 revolution. Nonetheless, politics does enter the exhibition in one work, Wanted (1977), by Mirna, which was a direct if blunt response to the kidnapping of student activists by the government for protesting Suharto’s ‘New Order’. Her installation takes the form of a prison cell where she places pictures of the kidnapped activists with the word ‘Wanted’ over each photo. FX Harsono displays his Pistol Krupuk (1977), an installation
of hundreds of guns made out of food cracker materials, referring to the drastic militarisation of the country at that time. What is lacking in the show is adequate contextualisation of the history of GSRB. There is an area to showcase archive materials, but these documents are poorly curated and reconstructed, with scant evidence in the form of notes or photographs on how the artists gathered as a collective or a movement. A room is dedicated to the 1987 exhibition Pasaraya Dunia Fantasi (The Grand Market Fantasy World), which was GSRB’s last show. But the section is poorly displayed, with too many artworks crammed to the sides, and no wall texts to provide context – which is hardly a fitting tribute to what was supposedly one of the most cutting-edge shows of its time. At a talk to accompany the show, Harsono said GSRB’s members were interested in formal questions, exploring new possibilities in the use of readymades, collage and installations. This set GSRB apart from other art collectives in Indonesian history, which were usually overtly related to political movements. Founded in 1938, Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia (Persagi) was an anti-colonialism art group, and in the 1950s, Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat (Lekra) was affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party. So it’s possible to see GSRB, in a way, as heralding a paradigm shift in art practices in the country. Alia Swastika
FX Harsono, Pistol Krupuk, 1977, pistol crackers, wooden table and stool, notebook, pen, dimensions variable. Courtesy Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta
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Haig Aivazian I am sick but I am alive Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut 1 September – 30 December The ‘Sick Man of Europe’ was an epithet originally applied to the Ottoman Empire, as it threatened to fall apart during the final decades of the nineteenth century. And there are shades of that phrase in the title Haig Aivazian has given this exhibition, in which he explores how Ottoman culture, after the empire’s eventual collapse, fed into a new sense of Turkish nationhood. Specifically, the title’s words are a quote from the late Hrant Kenkulian, a Turkish-Armenian musician who, despite being born blind, became one of the modern masters of that quintessentially Middle Eastern instrument, the oud, and helped transform Ottoman classical music into a more popular, Western-influenced style dubbed Turkish Art Music – the development of which was central to the sort of secular, culturally progressive state that emerged in Turkey, and that may currently be experiencing its own final days. Not that Udi (‘oud player’) Hrant, as he’s commonly known, is the sole subject of Aivazian’s work – indeed, there are numerous musical elements. In the main film-projection, Not Every Day is Spring (2016), six pieces of music are performed to camera at various locations across Istanbul, and each one is utterly captivating. There’s a contemporary oudist, playing an intricate, semi-improvised work made famous by Hrant; a four-piece Syrian
band performing a rollicking, gypsyish number; a medical doctor-cum-melodica-player, whose haunting Azerbaijani tune is tootled for his patients’ benefit; a plangent piece of liturgical singing from two Armenian Orthodox priests; an oddly halting, balladeering lounge act; and finally a crackly old 45 recording of Hrant himself, played in the musical instrument shop where he largely earned his living. Cumulatively, the sense is of the magnificent diversity of post-Ottoman musical forms, of a common cultural inheritance proceeding along disparate, yet intertwining, trajectories. Bookending each performance, however, are other sequences that complicate this straightforward reading. Buildings or civic spaces in central Istanbul are depicted: Taksim Square, Gezi Park, the headquarters of Radio Istanbul (where Art Music was championed) – places intrinsically associated with the new republican values of 1930s Turkey, but whose construction, according to detailed texts at the film’s end, required the city’s sprawling Pangaltı Armenian cemetery to be razed. Other footage, grainy and handheld, unlike most of the film’s fixed-position shots, shows the mountainous and forested borders that Turkey shares with its eight neighbouring states – all, of course, once part of the Ottoman Empire. As such, Aivazian’s film becomes impossible to reduce to a single, unambiguous perspective
– that’s what makes it so enjoyably complex and contradictory. On one hand, there’s the palpable contrast between rigid national boundaries and the music’s feeling of communality and togetherness – yet, on the other, the performances are intrinsically bound up with these same ideas of nationalism, reflecting the post-Ottoman drive to establish a distinctive musical repertoire for each country. In that sense, musical development becomes a metaphor, within the film, for the paradoxes of history in general – for the way that processes of destruction and creation occur simultaneously, as cultural traditions and institutions fragment and form themselves from remnants, always both living and dying. Aivazian’s drawings and sculptures, throughout the rest of the show, are less rich but still interesting. Elongated oud bodies evoke coffins or canoes; oud necks, similarly extended and double-ended, hang from instrument hooks on a wall; charcoal patterns on paper resemble the marble removed from the Pangaltı cemetery and repurposed across numerous Istanbul edifices. The works’ corporeal dimensions and effects, their overtly handmade manufacture, all seem to suggest a sense of bringing grand, abstract theories of historical change back to something more relatably, concretely human. Gabriel Coxhead
Face, 2016, walnut, leather case, steel, 97 × 221 × 55 cm. Courtesy Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg & Beirut
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The Bizarre Honour OH! Open House, Singapore 14 January – 26 February You could be led to a two-storey house in a residential area of Singapore by either of two misleading press releases: the first tells you that this is the new museum of one of Singapore’s most important natural history societies; the second, that it is ‘a fictional institution with no guides, labels or explanations, and no distinction between art and artefacts’. Before entering the house, you encounter a tricycle, a ‘mobile expedition unit’ that belonged to a missing member of the society, according to exhibition materials. Affixed to it is a wooden box big enough for a person to sit in, lined with shelves for cameras, microscopes and specimen jars – presumably useful equipment for an itinerant zoologist. But here suspicions are raised: though the tricycle is old, it is in pristine condition, and the box looks brand new. Only two visitors (allotted half an hour to peruse the displays) are allowed in at any one time. A dossier full of printed texts and images is given to each visitor, which behaves as a guide to unlocking ‘the mysteries of the museum’. Most of the texts are numbered and dated like scientific or historical documents, for example: ‘Looking for nature in Singapore: all the flies in Holland Village
15/06/2015, no. 001-592-11, 2016’. Again, there is an incongruity between these records and other, more touristic elements of the dossier – a set of ten postcards of Singapore, for example. Inside the house is a clutter of outdated scientific equipment, books, glass cases containing animal skulls and other curiosities, such as stuffed mynah birds staring at a plate of hokkien mee (a popular noodle dish). Wooden partitions and large pot-plants divide the rooms, rendering the house a claustrophobic little labyrinth; small though it is, you can easily get lost. On one partition, a map of Singapore displays farms that grow coconut pearls – precious stones found between the flesh and shell of the fruit. There are photographs of coconut plantations from the colonial period, and nearby a cabinet contains what purports to be a coconut pearl. Once more, the visitor is duped: there is no evidence of their existence. Old photo albums containing a Singapore past lie around. A slide projector clicks faded images of white people, presumably British, posing against tropical plants. Once you notice how many things in this exhibition portray or belonged to the British (with the addition of the instantly recognisable voice of David Attenborough emitting from a hidden television set), you begin to realise that although this
diverse collection is all about Singapore, it is a Singapore seen through the eyes of its colonisers: British, Chinese and Japanese alike. The Bizarre Honour reflects on Singapore as both a site for scientific analysis and a place in which the visionary dreams of its colonisers were realised. Enough. Here’s the spoiler: this museum has neither been created by a natural history society nor by a fictional institute of artists. Instead it is the work of Zhao Renhui (also known as Robert Zhao), who for several years has gone by the pseudonym The Institute of Critical Zoologists. In many of his exhibitions it is hard to pin down exactly what we are looking at and what it means; his photographs have always looked scientific but have often been clearly faked, such as images of wild animals in places they would not be found: swans in the Arctic, for example. In the series included in this exhibition, only two photographs were taken by Zhao – the rest he has collected over the last 15 years, often finding such material on eBay. Though the exhibition may be read as a rumination on our attitudes towards nature, the act of collecting, and the desire to document history, it is perhaps richest in its revealing of the multilayered dreams and memories that constitute Singapore. Tony Godfrey
The Bizarre Honour, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy OH! Open House, Singapore
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The Bizarre Honour, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy OH! Open House, Singapore
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Singapore Biennale: An Atlas of Mirrors Various venues, Singapore 27 October – 26 February For Treasure Islands (2012), Balinese artist Made Wianta sticks sheets of buffalo leather to the walls. The skins seem hastily dried and dyed, giving them an uneven, burnt colour. With their jagged edges, they look like charred landmasses from an old map. These sheets are adorned with pretty little mirrors and nails, the latter piercing the hides like safety pins to hold a garment together. Filling up two walls of a gallery, the work has a certain violent charm. In another setting, I might have found it quaint and subtly ironic, like Buffalo Bill’s surprisingly flouncy wall decoration. Encountering it in this year’s Singapore Biennale, I can barely suppress a groan. This is because the biennale’s title is An Atlas of Mirrors, and Wianta’s work, being maplike and having reflective surfaces, is a literal transcription of the theme. It is not the only on-the-nose work in this show, which focuses on Southeast Asian art. There are works with atlases, works with mirrors and works with atlases and mirrors. Sharing the last double-bingo category with Wianta’s work is MAP Office’s roomful of mirrors embossed with the coordinates of overlooked islands (Desert Islands, 2009/2016).
Now, a certain type of high-minded aes‑ thete would sniff at such illustrative curating. She would say, What’s the first rule of having a curatorial theme? Do not illustrate the curatorial theme. But my standards are not so strict. To me, illustrative works are like the cayenne pepper of the curator’s spice rack. Used sparingly, a little goes a long way. Yet even by this measure, the Singapore Biennale is overseasoned – the viewer can’t walk two steps without getting a nudge-wink from a mirror or an atlas. This isn’t the only way the biennale bugs the viewer. It also keeps trying to explain itself. The 59 artworks are divided into nine ‘conceptual subzones’, whose titles nag you at every turn – ‘a presence of pasts’, ‘a past of absences’, ‘an endlessness of beginnings’, ‘an everywhere of mirrorings’ and so on. As if this wasn’t enough, each subzone contains more sub-bullet-points. For example, the ‘a breath of wills’ section is elaborated with ‘agency & the limits of representation’, ‘sites & voices of resistance’, ‘self & other’. Airlessly curated and avidly explained, the fifth edition of the Singapore Biennale is the one most eager to please, but ends up being the most needy and hectoring. It tries so hard
it ticks you off. There is a reason why it seems so belaboured: by choosing to have a Southeast Asian focus, the organisers have sipped from a poisoned chalice. This is the second edition running that the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) has organised the event around a regional theme. I don’t envy its job. Over the years, Singapore and its art institutions have benefited from branding themselves as the gateway to the region’s various delights. But it’s a tough job to survey and make sense of the art practices of what is essentially an unstable grouping of diverse territories whose collective cultural identity has to be endlessly justified and maintained. The biennale is to some extent aware of the challenges of its self-appointed leadership role and its responsibilities of local representation. Unfortunately, its strategy to tackle these complexities is incoherent. It ping-pongs between extremes of laissez-faire inclusiveness and anal retentiveness. For the last edition, in 2013, in a radical show of collaboration, the biennale roped in 27 curators from the region – resulting in a celebratory but messy show, sometimes with dubious cultural-expo
MAP Office, Desert Islands, 2009/2016, engraved mirrors, cardboard, aquarium and media player with sound, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists and the Singapore Biennale
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components. In this edition, SAM dialled down on the external help, calling in only four curators from outside. The five others were in-house. You may think nine curators for a show of 59 artworks is still excessive, but their efforts seem centralised and controlled by creative director and former SAM head Susie Lingham. Where the 2013 edition was like an outing featuring unruly siblings, this year’s is parentally disciplined, uptight and PC to a fault – and in strict adherence to a theme that seems algorithmically designed to cause the least offence. Where maps and mirrors aren’t actually involved, the preference is for a type of sanitised Cliff Notes-style exhibit that makes dutiful references to regional myth, history or politics but does not hazard an insight or make an imaginative leap. Reverse-engineered and tirelessly self-explaining exhibits appear over and over, often lecturing about the past. For example, The Covenant (2016), by Malaysian Sharmiza Abu Hassan, is inspired by a story from the Malay Annals (composed sometime between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) about a boy who saves Singapore from predatory swordfish by erecting a barrier of banana-tree trunks. Fearful of his clever subject, the king executes the boy. Sharmiza’s work is a virtuous reenactment of the tale, comprising a school of metal swordfish, a royal throne and a Jawi text about the sacred bonds between
a ruler and his subject. This installation belongs in a classroom, not a biennale. Another tedious work is Balinese artist Eddy Susanto’s The Journey of Panji (2016). The title refers to the Panji Cycle, a collection of fourteenth-century stories of a Javanese prince that have spread to other Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia and Thailand. To show this ‘journey’, the artist makes a huge book with letters of the alphabet overflowing from its pages onto the floor. Make no mistake, there are no real stinkers in this biennale. But people also won’t remember much from it, because so little feels urgent and contemporary. The few works that leave a bit of an impression don’t even come from Southeast Asia. As part of the genealogical mapping impulse, the biennale has included some works from the influencer civilisations of East and South Asia – so, India, China, Japan and the like. One highlight is Pakistani artist Adeela Suleman’s portraits and landscapes on ceramic plates (from the series Dread of Not Night, 2015–16; and Blood Stains the Soil, 2016). Courtly and reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts, her technique is inspired by a historical style of miniature painting from the Mughal Empire, an Islamic dynasty in the Indian subcontinent. In contrast to the elegant style, her scenes are B-movie orgies of violence: people are beheaded, stabbed in the back or cut into two, and blood erupts geyserlike out of their bodies. In a world
where bodies are blown apart in terrorist attacks in the name of Islam, this work could be in bad taste. But at least it provokes some kind of reaction – which can’t be said of the rest of the show. Back to the subject of maps and mirrors, there is one work that stands out: Taiwanese artist Chou Shih Hsiung’s Good Boy, Bad Boy (2016). Resembling two pure-black flat planes, it seems as if they are very on-message ‘black mirrors’. These are not paintings but clear boxes each filled with 250kg of petroleum. The wall text says the artist comes from a ‘family with an oil supply business that goes back more than 50 years’. Although he claims to, among other things, explore ‘the materiality of petroleum’, the smooth Perspex surfaces of this work betray very little of the origins, processes and circulation of this useful poison. The artist has, in essence, repackaged oil as a high-end cultural product. I can’t say if it’s good or bad art, but it’s definitely a great way to continue the family business. Good Boy, Bad Boy is also an ideal mascot for the biennale. Its blithe entrepreneurial air and scrupulous cleanliness echo something disturbing about the event’s own impulses: it deals with a messy subject by boxing it up behind thick plastic and charging people to see it. The more responsible, and satisfying, thing to do would be to take a hammer to the work and let the dark stuff pour out. Adeline Chia
Adeela Suleman, Dread of Not Night 1, 2016, hand-carved wood, found vintage ceramic plate with enamel paint, hardener and lacquer, 40 × 40 cm. Courtesy the artist and the Singapore Biennale
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Chun Kai Qun Solid Prayers Fost Gallery, Singapore 10 January – 19 February Neatly divided into two groups over two gallery spaces, Chun Kai Qun’s first solo show offers many different perspectives and retrospectives, not just in collecting different ideas but also in displaying a range of approaches to sculpture itself. In the front gallery, Chun presents mostly absurd structures, ranging from a freestanding tower constructed from folded newspapers to assemblages such as a group of black bin-bags dangling from a black rectangular frame protruding from the wall – Are You Ready to Rejoin Society (Version 2), all works 2016 – or a wall-mounted whirring fan, which on close view has no blades – Windless Streak. Another kind of sculpture, these days more often found within the purview model-kit hobbyists than artists, is the diorama. Like Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935–41), Storage #1 offers a kind of miniaturised summation. It is a model of a metal shed in miniature depicting two earlier works: bundled cut-up newspapers hanging from the ceiling (The Paper, Some Paper, 2015) and fried eggs on the roof (Sunny-side
up, 2013). The latter, a performative piece originally made in Glasgow, consisted of laying out real fried eggs as ‘bird repellent’, because, he explains in an accompanying essay, ‘the birds would be seeing a form of their offspring’ – while also perhaps playing on the question of what comes first, bird or egg? Dioramas also predominate in Stoned another 50 years (2016), a series of works imagining a future National Day parade that inhabits the entire second gallery. Aside from these large maquettes are ink drawings and photocopy prints, playfully and roughly depicting freeze-framed moments in the celebratory parade 50 years from now. The centrepiece, Act 4 Scene 2 (Episode 1 Finale): The Mistakes I Made While Building The Joe Schooling Swimming School Diorama, humorously depicts a swimming pool scene referring to Singapore’s first Olympic gold medallist. As its subtitle suggests, various self-deprecating written notes around the piece wittily signpost the flaws in Chun’s technical ability. For the Singaporean artist there is ironic
One People One Nation : Component 5 ‘Green Day’, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist
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humour in creating dioramas that depart so sharply from the usual obsessive attention to detail of a hobby concerned with highly accurate renderings of minutiae. These models were also partly inspired by Haw Par Villa – a 1930s themepark in Singapore filled with lifesize dioramas displaying hellish scenes – where Chun and his brother once had a project space called Latent Spaces. Though varied in subjects, iconography and form – fried eggs, parades, swimming pools, horror imagery in miniature, drawings and sculptures – the exhibition is really Duchampian in spirit. Not in terms of conceptual intent, but rather in that it is rife with humour and mischievousness. By invoking Singapore’s National Day, Chun may be construed as making political commentary or – worse – mocking with his raw imagery. But it is in this tightrope walk of material craft (eg badly cast manga figurines), jokey provocation and word play (each deliriously long title adds another layer of representation) that the charm of Chun’s art lies. Sherman Sam
Kamin Lertchaiprasert The Timeless Present Moment Maiiam Museum of Contemporary Art, Chiang Mai 25 September – 6 February The waxwork figure of Thai artist Kamin Lertchaiprasert – naked while seated in the zazen posture – might not be the first work to catch your eye in this memorable and often searingly soulful retrospective, but it might well be the most instructive. Legs crossed, hands cupped and eyes locked tightly shut, this lifelike rendering of the fifty-one-year-old artist occupies a pedestal in a corner of Maiiam’s main hall. No Past, No Present, No Future (2015) is, of course, a literal depiction of the Zen meditation Lertchaiprasert practises (when it appeared at Palais de Toyko it had a performance element in which he sat in for the sculpture), but it’s also more than that. Together with two large-scale installations that dominate the room, Nothing Special (2014–15) and Drawing (2008–16), the work reveals, in spectacular fashion, the artist’s place in the universe. The former consists of 364 raku tea-bowls, arranged in a thin oblong formation along a 20-metre long table; the latter is a giant wall collage made up of 1,264 mixed-media drawings. Over an uneven yet distinctive thirty-fiveyear career, Lertchaiprasert has fused his art practice with his spiritual practice, and so tenaciously that one appears to have now merged into the other. Recent years have found the cofounder (along with Rirkrit Tiravanija) of the Chiang Mai-based art commune the Land Foundation exploring Zen Buddhism (in addition to Theravada Buddhism), and launching a quixotic participatory art project, the 31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit (soon to reopen in a new location). Setting him apart more than anything else, though, is the earnestness with which he’s explored the meditative properties of different
mediums, and adopted the role of an outspoken artist-cum-mystic-cum-philosopher (type his name into YouTube and watch him fly). This rambling show touches all these bases – and also, arguably, by dint of its lack of a curator, reveals a certain recalcitrance on his part (not to mention Maiiam’s ad hoc approach to programming). Lertchaiprasert’s dogged dedication to ritualistic, repetitive acts of creation has to be admired. On most of the tea bowls in Nothing Special, each wrought with unique imperfections, gnomic phrases gleaned from his daily meditation have been handcarved on the exterior in thick, curlicued Thai script. The wall drawings, meanwhile, create a crypto-philosophical diary of sorts. Most are collages of printed flotsam (train tickets, exhibition flyers, receipts for Nike shoes, etc) onto which drawings of skulls and yet more hard-to-decipher phrases have been scrawled. Other splashy works stand out too – including a two-metre-high skull and a row of busts in which Lertchaiprasert appears as Mozart, a monk, a punk and Hitler (We are all the same, 2012–16) – but, for me, it’s the quieter works scattered throughout Maiiam’s side galleries that get closest to profundity. For example, Pressure No. 4 (1983), one of many elegiac black-and-white photographs made during the artist’s student years, shows a mottled clay face resting on a wall, its face reflected in a puddle. The spires of a Thai temple complex pierce the scene. Mean clouds conspire overhead. This tortured image, and others like it, crystalise Lertchaiprasert’s existential leitmotifs (suffering, mortality, transcendence) in a way that feels less overcooked and selfaggrandising than many later works.
There are also bold acrylic paintings that showcase – in large 140 × 220 cm format – the mixed-media techniques honed in his drawings. Scattered along walls, their fey power has room to flex. In Have in Everywhere – in us (2008), a thick, black, calligraphic scrawl forms a skull on a blue poster for the Kanazawa Art Platform 2008. It has a question mark for a nose and sunken, heartshaped eyes that circle cutesy children’s stickers. Deeper in things get even more austere. In rooms that alternate between black and white walls, stark Zen paintings representing abstract concepts such as time, freedom and emptiness come paired with short, haikulike poems. And further still, there are paintings of everyday scenes that appear unfinished. Among them is Apologize and forgiveness (2013), a group portrait in which Lertchaiprasert is merely sketched out, everyone else painted in. He’s out of focus (like Robin Williams in 1997’s Deconstructing Harry), the odd one out, perhaps lost in thought or, maybe, the ‘timeless present moment’ of the title. Reentering the main hall, my eyes are drawn to a waxwork I initially missed. Living Kindness (2016) depicts Lertchaiprasert’s assistant holding a baby rat in hand. But by this stage, it’s hard to process a lesson on compassion, especially one so didactic. Surveying 66 works, each one a koanlike attempt to inch us closer to satori (a moment of Zen clarity) is engrossing – but also tiring. No, much more appealing is Tea House (2016), a mirrored metal cube-cum-chillout room that Lertchaiprasert has stationed beside a young tree in Maiiam’s courtyard. Inside it, there is just enough room to sit quietly or chat with a friend. He appears to realise that, having let him clear his head, we need to clear ours. Max Crosbie-Jones
Living Kindness, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Maiiam, Chiang Mai
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Kamrooz Aram Recollections for a Room Green Art Gallery, Dubai 13 November – 8 January Over the last few years, Kamrooz Aram’s paintings have sought to rehabilitate the status of ornament and pattern within modernist aesthetics. Challenging the epithet ‘decorative’, Aram uses ornament conceptually, orchestrating encounters in paint between two distinct types – a repeated floral motif isolated from a Persian carpet, and simple geometric shapes and patterns that recall key moments in modernist abstraction. These canvases simultaneously engage various tropes of modernist painting, like the all-over composition, the grid as structure, the collapse of figure/ground distinction and the mark as gesture. A previous set of canvases functioned as palimpsests, collecting traces of the various additive and subtractive marks that generated them. Less concerned with process, Aram’s new work is more pared down and restrained. The grid, which he uses to orient the repeated ornamental motifs and which was previously buried under paint, is emphasised. Delicately drawn in coloured pencils, and elaborated with crisscrossing diagonals to create a pattern of squat isosceles triangles, it functions as both a formal and a structural device, as in an Agnes Martin painting. The largely monochromatic Ornament for a Quiet Room (all works 2016) features stacks of white triangles against a soft
foggy ground. The floral motif, sketched using green and red oil-sticks, fills the gaps in the pattern, its colours subtly echoed in the visible grid lines. Ornamental Composition for Social Spaces (1-3) repeat the same basic composition, but the addition of black triangles and a painted frame, a few inches in from the edge of the canvas, makes them livelier. In each, the black is subtly different, varyingly tinted with green and/or blue, the colour echoed in the muddy ground. Visually prominent, the triangles function like vectors, pushing against the top and bottom edges of the frame, introducing tension and movement. These canvases achieve an uncanny balance between control and chance, structure and play, design and accident; they seem to exemplify Igor Stravinsky’s famous adage: ‘Composition is selective improvisation’. In a series of related sculptural installations, Aram challenges painting’s privileged status by relegating it to the role of decorative backdrop, one component of precisely composed and crafted assemblages of display that take cues from architect Carlo Scarpa’s modernist midcentury exhibition designs. A minimal composition of four white triangles in a misty green expanse sets off what appear to be two marble sculptural fragments in A Monument for Living in Defeat. The objects are propped up on short rods
attached to the top of display pedestals made of walnut with polished brass fittings. These are bolted into a small, square platform of alternating black-and-white rows of triangular terrazzo tiles, echoing and extending the pattern implied in the canvas onto the floor. Carved from soapstone and alabaster, and purposely left unfinished, the sculptures evoke antiquities, while keeping their status as such in question. Two smaller works feature other artefacts of similarly uncertain provenance – a tiny ceramic vase, its patterned surface obscured by white paint; a pair of metal objects that vaguely resemble each other, one patinated bronze and the other rusty iron – displayed on tall pedestals against painted backdrops. Featuring a few drawn lines and one or more painted geometric shapes, these spare compositions are executed on the sort of drab brown linen often used to line the inside of display cabinets at most universal museums. In each of these installations, Aram’s understated aesthetic interventions introduce unexpected whimsy into otherwise neutral modes of display, subtly critiquing their power to influence interpretation and establish value. Rife with ambiguities, these assemblages put questions of origin and authenticity, be it of artefact or artist, into play. Murtaza Vali
A Monument for Living in Defeat, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai
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Ghislaine Leung The Moves Cell Project Space, London 1 February – 19 March Among the artist Ghislaine Leung’s multifarious activities – artist, writer, curator – is her work as distribution manager at the London art-film production organisation LUX. Not surprisingly, the circulation of materials, and the ways that they transmute across screens, pages and tongues, make up a vast epistemological inquiry for the artist, her chief interest being the study of what constitutes the art object today. Circulation, Leung wrote in 2012, ‘is not a result of keeping the work moving but because we move with and against it’. In keeping with that, her latest exhibition alludes to the migrant and dialectical nature of meaning through works that speak of fluidity, yet remain decidedly grounded and even obstinate in character. Almost-full-height glass panels lining the wall contain casual SMS prose in vinyl, with small nail decals serving as unexpected floral blemishes. Overhead, the skylight, normally a homely feature of the space, has been covered up, creating a greenish hue that bathes the viewer in a chilled light. In combination
with the officelike materials – steel rivets, glass, carpeting – that have been chosen to furnish the space, the clinical tones risk association with current fetishes for corporate aesthetics that have proliferated in the artworld of late. This impression, however, is offset by the placement of small glowing mushrooms around the gallery that serve as pale guides as you pass through. These are actually nightlights plugged into electrical sockets along the wall, and while they create a whimsical illusion of metaphorical, fairytalelike totems, they also point directly to literal confines (the placement of electricity sockets). For Leung, an interest that shifts away from the art object proper towards the means of production and distribution does not signal material dissolution. Rather, it drives a reconceptualisation of the context in its entirety. This manifests as the distinct consideration of all architectural and interior features – walls, floor, lighting, typefaces, sound and ambience – those attributes that condition ways of seeing and moving through a space. The accompanying
exhibition text reads fastidiously: ‘Ten large double pane glass panels’, ‘Medium pile grey green carpet’, skirting any didacticism or theorising. This fixation on materials forms a pragmatic poetry that veers towards some form of domestic mysticism. Enhancing this effect is the soundtrack, which has a Disneyesque tone and is constantly on the verge of peaking but somehow never reaches the desired apex. There is the sense that lyrics should emerge, but instead one is left grasping, and it is this sustained absence that binds the various elements in the room together in a pleasant suspension. Up two steps at the back of the room, a rubberised black floor elicits a kinky sort of desire to get down on one’s knees, cheek to floor, and peer into what seems to be a dollhouse-size replica of the gallery. You can view it in more ways than one, but this meta-representation is revealing of the artist’s structural approach, a rehearsal of space and the ways in which materials and people move through and are inhibited by it. Ming Lin
Pictures, 2017, raised floor with sunken recess, black rubber. Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy Cell Project Space, London
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On the Origin of Art Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania 5 November – 17 April In Hungarian-born artist Balint Zsako’s Untitled drawing (2006), two washes of watercolour flow up the page. Nothing marks these two undefined smudges as human save the details of tiny genitals drawn on their edges. The pink blob on the left has a blood-red penis, and the yellow mist on the right has a single pink breast and a vagina. This work is in the section curated by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, who argues that the fundamental imperative behind artmaking is sexual display. “Beyond sex,” he says in the audio track on the iPod guide, “almost everything else is hot air.” This type of interpretation – hardnosed, totalitarian, unapologetically reductive – is representative of this refreshing and ambitious show where the arguments are more provocative than the art on the walls. Borrowing its title from Charles Darwin’s seminal text On the Origin of Species (1859), On the Origin of Art explores the idea that art has an evolutionary purpose, not just a cultural one, and that human beings make and appreciate art for reasons hardwired into our biology. Curating the show are four nonart experts – the aforementioned Miller, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, literature professor Brian Boyd and neurobiologist
Mark Changizi – who then put up a case for their theories in different sections. You begin by facing four doors in a row. Whichever you choose will lead to an exposition of the respective theses, narrated through the iPod, which are then supported by examples of artworks. The 230 or so exhibits – of which 46 are from the Mona collection – are akin to visual aids in a science article, tapped for a narrow band of relevant information. PierreAuguste Renoir’s Jeune Femme Se Baigne (Young Woman Bathing, 1888), for example, is rolled out to illustrate desirable waist–hip ratios in women. It is of course possible to turn off the background audio and view the pieces on their own terms, but the literal displays, where similarly themed subject matters are scrupulously and repetitively bunched together, don’t make this type of exploration much less prescriptive. Pinker’s argument is that art is a “pleasure technology”, not an adaptation itself but a supernormal concentration of other adaptive features. What our reptile brains find attractive – symmetrical faces, healthy bodies, resourceful landscapes, data-rich visuals – are concentrated in art to create “bombs of pure pleasure”.
Balint Zsako, Untitled, 2006, watercolour on paper, 40 × 30 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Mona, Hobart
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One such bomb is dropped in the first room: Aspassio Haronitaki’s joyous Who Says Your Feelings Have to Make Sense (2016), a psychedelic explosion of colours and lines both abstract and representative that makes all the lights in your brain switch on. In Miller’s section, the argument turns away from why people appreciate art to why we make it. The answer is sex. His hypothesis is that art is a way of attracting mates because it showcases skill and creativity, and signifies the creator’s biological superiority. The simple argument is matched with histrionically hormonal content. The works range from Marc Quinn’s sexy orchids and Georgia O’Keeffe’s suggestive seashells, to Ryan McGinley’s nubile nudes and Japanese prints of interspecies smut, culminating in an ejaculatory moment with Takeshi Murakami’s My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), a sculpture of a blue-haired manga-inspired character holding his outsize penis and shooting a huge load that forms a lasso above his head. After this juicy showcase, Boyd’s section is considerably more austere. His argument is that art is largely adaptive, grown out of our love for cognitive play with patterns. Monkishly professorial and au fait with the formal analyses
in traditional art-criticism, his show is filled with art-ethnographic artefacts such as African butterfly masks and Islamic architecture, a dutiful Yayoi Kusama installation and a section devoted to the history of comics, a discipline combining various modes of cognitive play: verbal, visual and narrative. Finally, Changizi presents the most speculative thesis: art is a form of “nature-harnessing”. He says we take readily to music because it mimics human movement, and goes one step further to posit that art and design are similar kinds of “stimulus artefacts”, gaining power by evoking human forms and expressions – skin, bodies, emotions. Biophilia by Patricia Piccinini gets good play here, whether it is grossly lumpen organic sculptures (Sphinx, 2012) or deerlike Vespa scooters (The Lovers, 2011). All four experts give their best shots at covering what they have agreed is a diverse field. But all their arguments have a common weakness: they don’t do a good job of explaining postmodern and conceptual art. Pinker says postmodernists subvert “sources of easy pleasure”, and that the exceptions in fact prove the rule; Miller thinks that “more pretentious and counterintuitive forms of elite contemporary art” are blips in an otherwise long and more biologically honest lineage of conventionally pretty and sexy things. His theory, he gamely admits, “can’t account for why almost one percent of educated
urban adults claim to enjoy abstract art, installation art, art-speak or Artforum”. Sniffy, but I take his point. But although the Darwinian perspective is a long way away from traditional art criticism, the two are not necessarily at odds. In Pinker’s section, there is an early colonial Australian painting by English-born artist John Glover depicting aboriginal bathers in a Tasmanian landscape of sinuous eucalyptus trees and gold-green grass (The Bath of Diana, Van Diemen’s Land, 1837). Conventional postcolonial discourse may point out that this painting was done after most of the aboriginals had been slaughtered or exiled, and say how it is an anachronistic, even wilfully naive vision. Or note that this work, together with others from Glover’s oeuvre, would go on to be appropriated by Australian contemporary artist Joan Ross, who superimposes trash, graffiti and fluorescent fences onto the paintings in a playful interrogation of European occupation and other forms of capitalistic trespassing. But Pinker is not concerned with such analyses. He uses the work to make a point about our cognitive preference for certain landscapes and their representations. His take is that like many other landscape artists, Glover here depicts a habitat with grassland and bodies of water, a prototype originating from the African savannah in which our ancestors thrived.
It’s a huge shift in context, and I admit I rolled my eyes at this explanation, but Pinker’s point doesn’t necessarily invalidate the cultural reading, nor is it interested in doing so. Unlike regular critical discourse that trades in consciously apprehended reasons for liking certain types of art, he is talking about the ‘ultimate’ reasons, the deep, subconscious biological drives behind survival and reproduction. The question that remains is: would an understanding of these brain processes change the way art is made and appreciated? An optimistic possibility could be that if artists understand what goes on in people’s brains when responding to art, they can use these ideas to create new forms of expression or find ways to more effectively influence the viewer’s emotional states. (But would they? Isn’t that mechanistic and kind of lame?) As for the viewer, a biological insight into why certain works affect her may, arguably, enrich the aesthetic experience by giving her a fuller appreciation of how deeper parts of her brain are tickled. (Subjectively, I wouldn’t say the knowledge gleaned from the exhibition had a huge impact on me beyond inducing a mild and polite curiosity.) At this point, I have to concede that a full-fledged discussion of how receiver neuro-psychology can be usefully incorporated into aesthetics is beyond the scope of this review. For interested converts though, the catalogue points to some useful reading. Adeline Chia
On the Origin of Art, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Rémi Chauvin. Courtesy Mona, Hobart
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Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25 (hardcover) The decrepit Greek Orthodox church in Istanbul’s waterfront Kurucesme neighbourhood was invisible to me until I learned that its Byzantine-era water tunnel ended up in my garden. The mysterious hole that had served many childhood games suddenly reminded me of the city’s secrets; Bettany Hughes embraces the familiarity of such encounters in Istanbul, peppering them into her Herculean attempt to cover three empires spanning over 6,400 years in 600 pages. Research takes this historian and BBC documentarian from Greece to Rome, Syria to China; she finds traces of ByzantiumConstantinople-Istanbul everywhere. The city, in this way, feels ‘connected to many worlds’; as remnants of the three empires are often simultaneously present, it also ‘lives outside time’. Whenever I peer down that damp, millennia-old tunnel, it is hard to disagree. These seven hills between the Black and Marmara seas seduced pillaging Thracians to settle around 4500 BC, a time by which the region had already known human settlement (the remains of a Stone Age woman dating to 6300 BC were found in 2011). Its geo-strategic potential was soon realised by Athenians, Spartans and Persians, who squabbled over it for several centuries. By 200 AD, when the Via Egnatia from the West and the new Silk Road from the East both led to Byzantium, it was already a critical Roman station in a global network of goods, people and ideas. Even when the city snubbed the Roman Emperor Septimus Severus, or broke with the Roman Catholic
Church in 1054 to establish Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Byzantium always seduced its conquerors to stay, instead of raze. Mehmed the Conqueror, the 13th Muslim ruler to attack the city, finally took this ‘diamond mounted between two sapphires and two emeralds’ in May 1453; over the next five centuries, the Ottoman Empire spread across the Middle East, the Balkans and North Africa, with Istanbul its capital of trade, craftsmanship, governance and Islam. Yet its racial, ethnic and religious identity was protean: non-Muslim women, brought captive to the harem, rose to become mothers to the Sultan; black eunuchs wielded political influence as harem guards; bright boys from Macedonian villages, brought to the capital for education, could and did end up Grand Vizier. Hughes also rifles through familiar Orientalist fantasies, tongue-in-cheek (observing Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1839 Odalisque with Slave, Hughes is unsurprised, as ‘from the sixteenth century onwards, Circassian women were as close as the world got to international pin-ups’). Istanbul, still, is not averse to overlaying fantasy and reality. Just last May, the ‘1453 Conquest Celebrations’ saw Mehmed's decisive battle reenacted while Istanbul’s hard-pressed merchant and working classes, bewildered by a year of rock-bottom tourism, cheered their fivecenturies-gone victory politely. Hughes shows how people make the history of a place – and by people she means not just the Byrons, Lady Montagus and Suleiman the
Magnificents (though all feature here) but the misremembered, the unknown and the migrant too. Emperor Justinian’s courtesan-turnedstateswoman wife Theodora; the Turkic tribesman Osman, who planted Constantinople in his nomadic people’s imagination; Turhan Hatice Sultan, the first woman to commission an imperial mosque; these and other Byzantine, Constantinopolitan and Istanbullu characters all shape the city with their resilience, imagination and, certainly, hubris. After all, Istanbul can boast of overcoming many ills: Goths, Vikings, tuberculosis, Crusaders and the Department of Transport (who, extending the subway in 2004, merely lamented the delay upon discovering Theodosius’s Harbour), to name a few. Whether it is the old caretaker of an Armenian church in Kadikoy who waits for hours on end for visitors to welcome, or students sitting-in to salvage green spaces, Istanbul has many inhabitants yearning to nurture their grand but asphyxiated city. In this tome – which begs a Turkish translation – Hughes gives them the time that Istanbul’s pace, developers and officials do not. Her quiet confidence in the city’s hard-earned cosmopolitanism soothes this concerned Istanbullu; time has shown that this metropole’s topography resists rhyme and rule, while its demos has always had a healthy discordance. It has seen enough empirebuilding to know totalising narratives for what they are: intertwined, half-mythic, mongrel. Sarah Jilani
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid Penguin, £12.99 (softcover) When, in British Pakistani Mohsin Hamid’s fourth novel, Exit West, Nadia and Saeed find themselves forced to flee their country (which is unnamed but that we can assume is somewhere in the ‘East’) as a result of civil war, they do so not by air, foot or sea, but rather through a special ‘door’ that, for a fee, teleports them to Mykonos. Nadia, a fierce, young, nonpractising Muslim woman who lives alone and wears a burka ‘so men don’t fuck with me’, meets Saeed, a soft-spoken and gentle young man, son of two middle-class intellectuals, at an evening class. The beginning of their relationship consists of a lot of texting and sporadic meetings in Nadia’s apartment – where they take shrooms, smoke
weed and listen to music – to hide away from the spiralling violence taking over their city. But as the bombs get closer, their burgeoning romance takes a premature turn and they find themselves going into exile together. The wrench of abandoning their country – ‘when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind’, as Hamid poignantly puts it, perhaps informed by his own migration from Lahore to London and then California – is followed by their striving to find a sense of belonging in the places they settle. While Nadia finds unexpected comfort alongside a Nigerian community, with whom they live in a squatted mansion in London, and later amidst a female-run cooperative in
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California, Saeed grows more and more religious and nostalgic for his country, constantly looking for fellow Muslims with whom to pray or reminisce. Hamid’s use of fiction and its metaphorical ‘doors’ allows him to avoid the gritty realism of migrant journeys that journalistic accounts tend to highlight, and instead to focus on what happens next: the ordeal of rebuilding a sense of ‘home’ in an often-unwelcoming new world. Beyond making for a gripping read, this short book manages to imagine the responses of the ‘West’ to increasing waves of migration in a way that, despite its overall dystopian feel, is not without hope. Louise Darblay
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The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen Corsair, £12.99 (hardcover) Hard on the heels of his 2016 Pulitzer Prizewinning first novel, The Sympathizer (2015), comes Nguyen’s collection of eight stories (original versions of which first appeared in a variety of magazines over the last decade) either about people who’ve had to flee their homeland and be accepted by – and come to accept – another, or the children of those people, who are ethnically and culturally connected to a place they know little about. Most of these stories feature both – examples of lives shaped by the push and pull of estrangement and belonging. What with the glow of that award and our feverishly anti-immigrant times, the appearance of this publication might be the realisation of a publicist’s wet dream. (Assuming that the publicist is, broadly speaking, liberal.) And perhaps this sense of urgency explains the thematics of alienation, displacement and belonging that are repeated from one tale to the next, with the workmanlike rhythm of a hammer striking a nail. As a child, Nguyen fled Vietnam by boat, ending up in the US, and it’s that Vietnam–US trajectory, or variations on and reversals of it,
that lies at the heart of each tale. Also in the mix are water crossings, and the terrors associated with them, former lives and past wives, parents who don’t understand their children, children who don’t understand their parents and a general sense that people who feel that they live out of place also live out of time. (On a granular level, the last is present in the author’s persistence in referring to Saigon rather than to Ho Chi Minh City.) Along the way Nguyen does much to capture the complexities of cultural identity in a networked, connected world. ‘You’re not a native… You’re an American,’ a father spits at his half-Japanese, half-African-American daughter, currently a resident, alongside her ‘Asian-looking’ boyfriend, in what her father considers to be a substandard dwelling in Quang Tri, Vietnam. ‘That’s a problem I’m trying to correct,’ she replies. This type of anxiety propels most of Nguyen’s plots. What enlivens his tales, and gives the author’s worthy hammering a richer, more syncopated beat, is his repeated examination of the way in which his refugees react to new
displacements that are a consequence not of geography and war, but of life in general – divorce, being blackmailed, conned or deceived, discovering you’re gay and that some people have sex just for fun, or encountering a ghost, literally as opposed to metaphorically. That and the fact that he does all this with a great deal of unflashy wit. In ‘The Transplant’, Arthur, an American who has recently discovered that his transplanted liver was previously part of a man of Vietnamese origin, has recently developed a taste for Vietnamese cuisine, thanks to an indebted friendship with the man he presumes to be the organ donor’s son. This last turns out neither to be the son of an organ donor, nor to be ‘genuinely’ Vietnamese (he was born in Vietnam to Chinese parents). ‘So what does that make me?’ he squeals at Arthur, ‘Chinese or Vietnamese? Both? Neither?’ And what, we are left wondering, does the whole experience make Arthur and his refugee liver? The broader appeal of these tales comes from the fact that beneath many there lurks a subtle probing of how hosts adapt to their guests. Nirmala Devi
Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada Portobello Books, £12.99 (softcover) Memoirs of a Polar Bear charts the lives of three generations of polar bears: the first a Russian circus bear who becomes a celebrated memoirist; the second her daughter Tosca, who becomes the star of an artistic circus act and is later moved to a Berlin zoo where she gives birth to her son, Knut, the third bear, who falls in love with his keeper. There is a deadpan literalness to this novel that can be confounding. These stories of artist bears living amongst humans strike a fable-like tonality, and yet the novel resists any attempts at reading it as satire or allegory. Quickly shorn of easy interpretive footholds, it creates a gentle, often charming dream-state that asks, with considerable philosophical weight, diverse questions about phenomenology, women’s writing and human–animal relationships. ‘I can smell whether a person smokes, likes to eat onions, has on new leather shoes, or is menstruating,’ writes the first, unnamed, bear. There are many such lengthy passages
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that detail hunger and the sensation of movement in a bear’s body, forming a meditation on how animals might express knowledge of the world in language if given the chance. Indeed, Tawada, who moved to Germany from Japan in her twenties and writes in both German and Japanese, seems to recreate in these moments the strangeness of translating experience across languages. She asks of our inescapable anthropocentrism: why shouldn’t this memoir of a polar bear, who knows the world in different ways, be perplexing, absurd, delightfully weird? Tawada is conscious of her own anthropomorphic project, reflected in references to animal-themed children’s stories and circus settings in which bears are made to ape humans. But she suggests that interspecies relationships can be mutually transformative. Much of the second chapter is told from the perspective of Barbara, Tosca’s trainer, who develops a strong emotional bond with the
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bear. Later, in one of Tawada’s many whimsical turns, Barbara starts composing Tosca’s memoir on her behalf, an imaginative act that sees Barbara inhabiting, through writing, Tosca’s bodily experience of the world. In one passage, Barbara depicts polar bear motherhood, nursing and child-rearing with stirring, visceral detail. It’s a realisation for both Barbara and the reader of a shared primal femaleness. Tawada here composes what might be described as an affecting, universal women’s writing. That man and beast aren’t so different after all is the novel’s great theme, one that Tawada explores even on a formal level, constantly toggling with narrative voice: Barbara and Tosca are eventually revealed to speak to each other through dreams, and thereafter the first person voice begins to blur: who is speaking, human or bear? And does it matter? All in all, it’s a bizarre but frequently rewarding read. Joel Tan
Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art Edited by Jeffrey Say and Seng Yu Jin Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, SG$45 (softcover) Selected from a range of journals, exhibition catalogues and magazines published between 1972 and 2012, the 33 essays and articles collected here offer a formally and tonally diverse range of commentary on Singapore’s contemporary art scene. Academic Gunalan Nadarajan’s wideranging critical inquiry into the term ‘contemporary’ is followed by artist Lee Wen’s impassioned firsthand account of the ideals and processes of The Artists Village (TAV) art collective. Art historian TK Sabapathy’s interview with Artists Village founder Tang Da Wu tackles art and the environment. This in turn is followed by a conference paper by former Singapore Art Museum director Tan Boon Hui. Yet such stylistic diversity is not reflected by the chronology represented in the collection, which includes only two texts from the 1970s and none from the 80s. No reason is offered. Perhaps it can be inferred from the editors’ legitimate explanation that there is a ‘significant body of writing’ in Chinese (particularly during the early years of Singapore’s art scene) that they are unable to include (two seminal texts aside). The editors’ omission of that significant historical context is interesting in light of their focus on the paucity of art discourse in Singapore. They lament the ‘lack of multiple voices and perspectives on the same subject or theme’. That lack is a consequence of absences – chiefly of art journals and scholarly publications, but perhaps most glaringly of all, the absence of art-history courses in Singaporean university curricula. Indeed, considering the substantial resources currently being poured
into the National Gallery Singapore and other performance-driven art infrastructures, and the comparatively few resources being directed towards nurturing art education and discourse, the publication of this collection might be considered timely. What is art discourse? The question troubles the editors enough to include a hairsplitting contention in their introductory essay: ‘This anthology brings together art writing that indicates an emergent art discourse that has yet to coalesce into a robust, rigorous and critical discourse. Writing becomes discourse when texts make references to critically engage with other texts.’ Yet one cannot help but see, upon reading this anthology, that the book’s very contribution to artistic discourse resides in the heteroglossia it makes evident. There is discursive density then, just not in the form sought by the editors. Their selection criteria focuses on three areas that generate discourse: ‘the proliferation of exhibition spaces and other art infrastructure’, ‘negotiations between the state and the field of cultural production’ and ‘the social, cultural and political conditions of the production of art theories, histories and practices in Singapore’. The state is mentioned in the second characteristic, but is a dominant presence in all three. Singapore’s government has been dominated by the People’s Action Party, and its ideology of economic survival and gains-driven pragmatism, since it came to power in 1959. It isn’t hard to picture Singapore as an artwork-in-progress, given the ruling party’s propensity to go back constantly and vigilantly to the drawing board
in attempts to make Singapore better. So, what possibilities remain for artists (the ones who are actually making art) within a superstructure in which the state is Master Artist? That’s a question addressed by many of the essays. The density of such discourse can be seen in the different perspectives on the same subject, whether it is the banning of certain types of art (the 1990s ban on performance art and forum theatre is robustly protested in a number of essays, the late playwright Kuo Pao Kun’s fiery response among them), censorship (see Alfian Sa’at’s witty essay ‘A Censorship Manifesto’) or social conditioning through architecture (see C.J. W.-L. Wee’s acerbic essay on kitsch). And it is to the editors’ credit that those scattered texts, which reflect cogently upon negotiations for artmaking in Singapore, are now easily accessible. The decentring of the state from art discourse happens most convincingly in the essays by artists, however, such as Chua Ek Kay’s text on the development of Chinese ink painting, which highlights the distinguishing features of different generations of painters, those who see it as a continuation of Chinese ink history and those who use it as a noncontextual medium; and Ho Tzu Nyen’s exploration of artmaking in a postcolonial and multicultural context in his essay ‘Perpetual Beginnings – Strands of Processes in Painting’. These begin as explorations of form and medium, opening up into reflections on how art is a way of thinking through Singaporeans’ negotiations with histories, place and the pluralities of the postcolonial self. Yeo Wei Wei
The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui Abrams Comic Arts, US$24.95 / £15.99 (hardcover)
Thi Bui’s family emigrated to the US – via Malaysia’s Pulau Besar refugee camp – in 1978. She was then aged three. It’s this transition – from a Vietnam Bui doesn’t remember to her own childhood in California – that is the subject of this graphic memoir, itself triggered by the birth of her own child 27 years later. In search of a lost history, she journeys through her family’s collective memories of the years preceding their departure from Vietnam, threading her parents’ childhood stories with her own growing-up in a Californian suburb in an attempt to reconcile an ‘origin story’ with her experience as an ‘other’ to both cultures. Recalling her fourteen-year-
old-self’s reaction to a house fire, she writes: ‘This – not any particular piece of Vietnamese culture – is my inheritance: the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to RUN when the shit hits the fan. My Refugee Reflex.’ Though they are initially reluctant to talk of their past traumas, Bui persists with trying to understand better her parents’ characters. Eventually, their accounts of life in Vietnam pour from the pages in two-colour illustrations. Almost every page feels visually weighty, with detailed panels (up to 12 per page) and captions, speech bubbles and onomatopoeia filling the spaces between the drawings.
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Though the compositions don’t leave much room for the reader’s imagination, Bui strikes a fine balance between moments that are given space to breathe, where her hand lingers a little longer over the roots of a lily pad, on the creases of an eye or on a thought that carries across a spread; and others that are chaotic, dark and almost aggressive, of memories fiercely scratched into paper. Drawn in black and washed throughout with a rusty red that at once evokes blood ties and stained histories, Bui’s memoir is a reflection on parental love and inherited sorrow – that which cannot be escaped, and that which can. Fi Churchman
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For more on Alfe RM (Alfeo Sanches Pereira), see overleaf
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Contributors
Anselm Franke
Alvin Li
is a curator and writer based in Berlin, and currently head of the Department of Visual Art and Film at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. At HKW he has curated, among others, Nervous Systems: Quantified Life and the Social Question (2016), Ape Culture (2015), Forensis (2014), The Anthropocene Project and The Observatory of the Anthropocene (2013–14). He was curator of the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and the 2012 Taipei Biennial. His project Animism was presented in Antwerp, Bern, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Shenzhen, Seoul and Beirut in various collaborations from 2009 to 2014. In this issue he writes about Asian modernity.
is a writer, translator and queer activist splitting his time between Shanghai and Beijing, where he is currently English editor at Ullens Center of Contemporary Art. He has cocurated the group exhibition The New Normal: Art and China in 2017, on view at UCCA from 19 March to 9 July. He is the cofounder of an unrefined queer underground collective named CINEMQ , known for hopping around clubs in Shanghai to screen queer films and throw badass parties. Here he reviews the work of He Yida at A+ Contemporary, Shanghai.
Murtaza Vali
is a curator, researcher and writer based in Yogyakarta. She has been running Ark Galerie, a hub for contemporary art practices, for the past ten years. She was one of the cocurators for Gwangju Biennale 9: roundtable, and curator of Biennale Jogja in Indonesia 2011, which she directed from 2013 to 2016. She is now director of ‘Study on Art Practices’, a research platform for Indonesian art, and an editor for its journal, SKRIPTA. Here she reviews Interpreting New Art Movement at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta.
is an independent critic and curator, and visiting instructor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. A recipient of a 2011 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, he contributes to various art periodicals and to publications for nonprofit institutions and commercial galleries around the world. Curator of the 2013 Abraaj Group Art Prize, he recently organised Between Structure and Matter: Other Minimal Futures at Aicon Gallery (2016) and Formal Relations at Taymour Grahne Gallery (2015), both in New York. Currently based in Sharjah, he is a lead tutor of Campus Art Dubai 5.0. In this issue he reviews Kamrooz Aram at Green Art Gallery, Dubai.
Advisory Board Defne Ayas, Richard Chang, Anselm Franke, Claire Hsu, Pi Li, Eugene Tan, Koki Tanaka, Wenny Teo, Philip Tinari, Chang Tsong-zung Contributing Writers Julie Chun, Gabriel Coxhead, Max Crosbie-Jones, Nirmala Devi, Anselm Franke, Gallery Girl, Tony Godfrey, Paul Gravett, Hu Fang, Sarah Jilani, Alvin Li, Ming Lin, Charu Nivedita, Sherman Sam, Alia Swastika, Joel Tan, Murtaza Vali, Yeo Wei Wei, Clara Young
Alia Swastika Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Ho Tzu Nyen, Alfe RM, Matthew Teo
Alfe RM (preceding pages)
“I think it’s time to change the weapon,” says Timorese artist-activist Alfeo Sanches Pereira (alias Alfe RM). “Beforehand, you smashed it with a stone. But now we’re getting independent, you don’t need to force people to follow. With time, slowly, people will understand.” The path to independence was long and difficult for East Timor (or Timor-Leste, as it is also known). Sanches Pereira was born in 1984 in Tutuala and grew up in a nation wracked by violent conflict between separatist groups and the Indonesian military, which invaded (and eventually annexed) the country in November 1975, just nine days after the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor had declared itself free of five centuries of Portuguese colonial rule. As a teenager with growing political awareness, Sanches Pereira experienced the departure of Indonesia in 1999 and East Timor’s achievement of self-rule in 2002, the new sovereign state of the current century, as a momentous development. It came at a terrible price – “we lost 200,000 people in massacres, punishments, torture and famine”, the artist says – but by 2004, hope was in the air, and Sanches Pereira joined the Arte
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Moris Free Art School in the capital Dili. “This was the place where I appreciated art for the first time”, he recalls. “I thought drawing was just a kid’s hobby and that I wouldn’t still be doing it today. But through art you learn how to be confident in your own life – that’s what I understood from Arte Moris.” The school’s engaged, encouraging attitude led him to train and experiment constantly in a wide range of techniques and styles, and to produce paintings, murals, posters, banners, graffiti, comics, photography and moving image. Much of his output was focused on social, environmental and human rights issues, often funded by organisations like Care International or USAID. In 2006 his artworks toured the country to promote an ‘Alternative Resistance Peace Campaign’ backed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Art, Sanches Pereira realised, “is a peaceful way to express yourself – not physically expressing like violence, but you can send a message”. The urgent message about East Timor’s ongoing maritime border dispute with Australia over natural resources in the Timor Sea underpins both his 2016 painting exhibition Missing Threads in Macau and
ArtReview Asia
his new Strip for ArtReview Asia. Since the 1960s, Sanches Pereira says, “Australia has had its eye on these oil and gas deposits. Australia supported Indonesia’s invasion, because it believed it could get a greater share of the oil and gas if Indonesia was in charge, than if we were independent. In 1999 Australia finally agreed that the Indonesian invasion was illegal and sent troops to keep the peace, but it was too late. We dragged ourselves to our Independence Day in 2002, our country broken and burned. And in that weakness, Australia forced us to agree to give them half our resources. We accepted this for 15 years, even though our children are malnourished and our population uneducated – until this year, when we tore up the treaty after taking Australia to the UN and demanding justice. Now we will negotiate for a new and permanent maritime boundary, which will finally give us a full country and honour the sacrifice of our dead.” Sanches Pereira’s oil-stealing kangaroo has become a potent awareness-raising symbol, used in the press and online, as well as spraypainted and stencilled on the streets. Paul Gravett
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ArtReview is printed by The Westdale Press Ltd. 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 four times per year by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London EC1Y OTH, England, United Kingdom
Photo credits
Text credits
on the cover and on page 116 photography by Matthew Teo
Quotations on the spine and on pages 29, 53 and 93 are from Sacred Animals of India, by Nanditha Krishna (Penguin, 2010)
on pages 112 and 122 photography by Mikael Gregorsky
Spring 2017
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Off the Record ‘The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.’ As I watch Zheng cry I think of that line by Ezra Pound. Actually, that’s not quite correct. When I say ‘by’ Pound, it’s actually from Cathay, a collection of Chinese poems that he ‘translated’. Pound couldn’t actually read Chinese so he cribbed the whole thing. But I’m thinking – and here’s the point – that there’s definitely something to be said for making things up as you go along. Zheng doesn’t stop crying while I ponder this. Which is weird because he’s a reserved, rugged art-technician. Now he’s blubbering while staring at the bloodstained screwdriver beside him on the floor. Pathetic. If the plan had worked, none of this would have happened. Zheng wouldn’t be crying and you wouldn’t be reading about Pound. All we needed was for our boss (and ‘king of Gillman Barracks’), gallerist Kenny Ho, to get down on his knees and inspect the dent I pretended to have found in one of Ichwan Noor’s spherical collections of crushed carparts. All Zheng then had to do was roll the Noor on top of Kenny. Leaving me, finally, in charge. But King Kenny refused to kneel. If anyone was going to get down and “evaluate the jade”, he said, it should be Zheng. But by this point Zheng was on the other side of the sculpture and rolled it anyway. All he crushed were Kenny’s blue Tod loafers. And Kenny’s feet. Kenny was furious and in his desire to ‘take Zheng down a peg or three’, he suggested that our technician had put on so much weight that his chest looked like two large steamed buns. Zheng was upset. He’s really been trying hard with the Oh She Glows Everyday super-energising plant-based diet. And then Zheng totally lost it with the screwdriver. So, not the cleanest ascent to the top of Singapore’s gallery tree, but at least it did the job: Kenny is dead and both my hands and my conscience are clean. Of course, as soon as the letter arrived a few weeks ago informing us that the gallery had finally scraped into Art Basel Hong Kong, thanks to a couple of fatalities and an unfortunate customs seizure, I knew that I needed to get rid of Kenny and had begun to curate and choreograph all the details of his fatal ‘car accident’. What a waste. Still, all’s well that ends well, so as Zheng continues to sob, I compose an Andrea Rosen-style valedictory email and send it out through the gallery’s MailChimp account. In it I write that Kenny decided to go the full Monty in a He Yunchang performance, with fatal consequences, and so, albeit with deep sadness, it is I who has to take up the baton and become Southeast Asia’s leading gallerist. It’s what Kenny would have wanted. And in keeping with local tradition, I also issue a short statement of regret about Kenny’s death on WeChat: a gif of a comedy fat man in a rabbit suit hitting himself repeatedly. ‘LOL’ I add for those of my clients in North Korea.Now for the real kingmakers! I poke the redial button on Kenny’s phone and get through to Art Basel Hong Kong’s mysterious ‘fair management’. At first they try to fob me off with some random Gallery Relations intern, but I refuse and hold out for either Adeline Ooi or the Spiegler himself. I mention that my call concerns the matter of an important gallerist’s demise. There is shouting on the end and I hear someone scream, “Not Marian! Tell
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me it’s not Marian! Why is it always the good ones?” When they calm down I explain that it’s Kenny. There’s muttering on the end of the phone and then a chap who introduces himself as ‘Junior Vice-President for Business Initiatives’ gets on the line. I explain that Kenny is dead and that in honour of his memory it is vital that the gallery be upgraded and swap booth locations in the fair with White Cube. He mentions offhandedly that the fair maps are already printed and robotically describes the advantages of our having a booth located next to the toilets, despite the fact that Kenny’s bladder is no longer an issue. “Colonialists!” I scream before hanging up. As I’m doing so another line from Pound’s Asian compilation pops into my head: ‘A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn’. I take the screwdriver from Zheng and wipe the blood very carefully on my old Rick Owens wool and silk lace-up coat before handing it to Zheng. “Burn it.” He stops crying. I reach for the Huishan Zhang Organza Floral Gilet I purchased in readiness for this moment. It’s time to spank some monkeys. Gallery Girl
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