ArtReview Asia Summer 2020

Kimsooja, ways of being and the new kinds of normal

Lockdowns, crackdowns and freedom of expression in the Philippines

High stakes for vampirism in Hong Kong cinema

Clean Sheets and Dirty Laundry

Liu Xiaodong Spring in New York

DANIEL RICHTER SO LONG, DADDY. SALZBURG JULY 2020

DANIEL RICHTER, HEUTUNGEN (DETAIL), 2020 OIL ON CANVAS, 244 x 186 CM. © DANIEL RICHTER / BILDRECHT, WIEN 2020

David Zwirner Online 卓納線上展廳 On View This Summer 今夏為您呈現

Lucas Arruda 盧卡斯·阿魯達 Philip-Lorca diCorcia 菲利普-洛卡·迪科西亞 Suzan Frecon 蘇珊·弗雷孔 Paul Klee 保羅·克利 Jeff Koons 傑夫·昆斯 Raymond Pettibon 雷蒙德·帕提伯恩 Bridget Riley 布里奇特·賴利 Josh Smith 約什·史密斯 And more 更多 davidzwirner.com/viewingroom

David Zwirner 5-6/F, H Queen’s 80 Queen’s Road Central Hong Kong 卓納畫廊 H Queen’s 5-6樓 中環皇后大道中80號 香港 Gallery now open by appointment Please inquire at hongkong@davidzwirner.com 畫廊觀展預約制 請致函 hongkong@davidzwirner.com

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DAVID NOONAN Stagecraft 1 July – 4 October

ANNA SCHWARTZ GALLERY

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ArtReview Asia vol 8 no 2 Summer 2020

Norm and Form In recent months people around the world have been asked by governments around the world to contemplate a ‘new normal’, as if there were any universal definitions of normal in the first place. Art functions to teach us that last.

Perhaps, indeed, it’s the main purpose art serves. To remind us that it’s possible to think differently, to think for ourselves.

In this issue ArtReview Asia looks at how artists in the Philippines are fighting for the right to do just that. At Kimsooja’s reframing of aspects of life we think of as ‘normal’ through her explorations of the poetry of the ordinary and the everyday. At 1980s Hong Kong cinema’s deployment of the abnormal as a means of claiming a heritage that encompasses various different types of normal.

At Xyza Cruz Bacani’s documentation of people witnessing and resisting the reframing of normal. And at the way in which the recent films of Tuan Andrew Nguyen complicate the very notion that there can be a normal. Along the way you’ll find various interrogations of accepted sexual, social and political hierarchies, deviations in the straight line of history and the odd ill-mannered ghost. By the end of it all you won’t have a clue what normal means. And that, of course, is the point.

Although, just to keep things really confusing, this issue also does some of the things that ArtReview Asia normally does. Like looking forward to some of the exhibitions that are coming up across the region and available to see in real life, and looking back at some of the exhibitions that were on show before people were temporarily stopped from seeing exhibitions in real life. ‘May you live in interesting times!’ as the not-Chinese saying doesn’t go. Although some of you may feel that these times have been more than interesting enough.

Stay safe. ArtReview Asia

Lockdown learning

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Art Previewed

Previews

by Nirmala Devi 16 Points of View Max Crosbie-Jones, Zakir Hossain Khokan 30

Artists in Residence Lee Mingwei & Korakrit Arunanondchai interviews by Adeline Chia 38

Art Featured

Kimsooja

by Mark Rappolt 48

Fear and Laughter in Hong Kong

by Fi Churchman 74

The Bystanders

by Xyza Cruz Bacani 56 Tuan Andrew Nguyen

by Mark Rappolt 66

Censorship and Pandemic in the Philippines

by Marv Recinto 78

page 66 Tuan Andrew Nguyen, A Lotus In A Sea Of Fire, 2019, hand-carved gmelina wood, 17 × 33 × 20 cm. Photo: Dan Bradica. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York

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Art Reviewed

comment & exhibitions 86

books 100

Latiff Mohidin, by Adeline Chia Day Whatever, by Mark Rappolt Meditations in an Emergency, by Sylvia Xue Bai Tulapop Saenjaroen, by Max Crosbie-Jones Week Whatever, by Mark Rappolt Jun Sojung, by Andy St. Louis Billie Zangewa, by Daisy Sainsbury Ida Applebroog, by Tom Denman Week Wherever, by Mark Rappolt Beyond the Black Atlantic, by Emily McDermott Beyond Measure, by Stefanie Hessler Month wtf, by Mark Rappolt

Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire,

by Pankaj Mishra, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, reviewed by Nirmala Devi What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Love, edited by Aveek Sen, reviewed by Oliver Basciano From a History of Exhibitions towards a Future of Exhibition-Making, edited by Biljana Ciric, reviewed by David Terrien Sigg Prize 2019, reviewed by Nirmala Devi

page 92 Jun Sojung, Despair to be reborn, 2020, video, 24 min 45 sec. Photo: Sangtae Kim. Courtesy the artist and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès

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ps 106

Art Previewed

Can we call 15

10 Park Youngsook, A Flower Shakes Her #5, 2005, c-print, 120 × 120 cm. Courtesy the artist and Arario Gallery, Cheonan

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Previewed 1 Us Against You Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, South Korea Through 30 August

Yokohama Triennale 2020 Yokohama Museum of Art & Plot 48, Yokohama Through 11 October

16 Wook-kyung Choi Kukje Gallery, Seoul Through 31 July

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Danh Vō National Museum of Art, Osaka Through 11 October 17

2 My Body Holds Its Shape Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong Through 20 September

9 Perforated City Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei Through 9 August

Garden of Six Seasons Para Site, Hong Kong Through 30 August

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Chulayarnnon Siriphol Bangkok City City Gallery Through 9 August 3

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They Do Not Understand Each Other Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong Through 13 September

Dancing Queen Arario Gallery, Cheonan Through 11 October 10

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New Relics I: Crossing Over Each Modern, Taipei 31 July – 29 August Shida Kuo Eslite Gallery, Taipei 20 June – 26 July

A Little Chance Encounter Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai Through 31 July

Mark Ryden Perrotin, Shanghai 3 July – 22 August

How Do We Begin?

X Museum, Beijing Through 13 September

Cloudy Don Gallery, Shanghai Through 31 August

Copy & Paste Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg Through 30 August

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5 Destiny Deacon National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Through 9 August

Participation Mystique Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai 27 June – 6 September 6

7 Looking for Another Family National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul Through 23 August

19 Lunar Breccia Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City Through 25 July

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Guo Fengyi kmw Art Center, Beijing Through 3 August 15

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There’s been a lot of chat about connections and the lack of them since you and I last spoke.

Most of you have probably experienced lockdowns of one sort or another. And been thinking of connectedness or the lack of it.

As you get used to visiting exhibitions via your computer screens. If you can be bothered to do that. While hearing paeans to the pleasures of experiencing artworks in real life on social media. Like the love songs Andal once composed to Lord Vishnu: lusting after things you cannot attain. (The ninth-century saint demanded, in wonderfully graphic terms, that the god take her as a bride not only in the spirit, but in the flesh.) In part because you cannot attain them immediately. That’s how religion works. And, let’s face it, religion is the guise under which contemporary art has been framed these past few decades. At least the kind of art that’s venerated in art fairs, museum shows

and auction houses. Does that make ArtReview Asia a priest? Don’t be ridiculous.

Still, there’s plenty to get excited about now that cities and exhibitions are starting to open up across the continent. Assuming they’re all opening up safely. The cities and the exhibitions. But what comes after the time of isolation? A time to trust. And time to reaccustom yourselves to pleasures in the flesh.

Although, given that travel is now an issue for health as well as environmental reasons, you might still be inclined to take a trip without ever leaving your screens. It’s good to know though that there is something to these shows beyond a few megabytes in a ‘virtual viewing room’.

Us Against You, at the Gyeonggi Museum 1 of Modern Art, is a group show, featuring 13 artists and collectives from East, South and Southeast Asia, about… yeah, it’s obvious: living with other entities. (But you might

be glad of the obviousness, given all the talk about ‘invisible enemies’ right now.) It’s about difference and connectedness. The things you’ve been thinking about these past few months. Samson Young is represented by We Are the World (2017), which riffs off the 1980s fad for charity records. A fad that has certainly gained potency in light of the situation that’s currently affecting most of us, one that ironically highlights the looming gulfs between ‘us’ and ‘them’, whether the barriers are cultural, economic or racial. Art Labor (a collective based in Ho Chi Minh City) is showing Jrai Dew Hammock Café (2020), which features, well, hammocks and coffee (murals painted with the stuff), as well as kites created by Jrai people (who live in the central highlands of Vietnam) in collaboration with the American artist Joan Jonas. As a whole it’s designed to encourage a meditation on the changes wrought on the Jrai

1 Samson Young, We Are the World, 2017, video, colour, 8-channel sound installation, 5 min 26 sec, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art

1 Jinah Roh, Mater Ex Machina, 2019, interactive robotics, mixed media, 60 × 180 × 50 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art

1 Woosung Lee, Candlelights (still), 2016–17, drawn animation, sound, 4 min 46 sec. Courtesy the artist and Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art

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ArtReview Asia

Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Give Us A Little More Time, 2020, 4-channel animation video, sound, colour, 12 min. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Bangkok City City Gallery 2

2 Pratchaya Phinthong, Fork, 2020, polished lead and tin, 60 × 170 × 2 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong

culture as its relation to the local environment has altered with a move towards industrial (coffee-growing) agriculture. Elsewhere in the show, Korean collective Part-time Suite explores the interactions between ai and surveillance culture, while media artist Jinah Roh’s Mater Ex Machina (2019) travels elsewhere into the realms of ai and its interface with human culture via a creepy robot (a green-eyed bald head with puttylike skin on top of an armour-plated, female-breasted metal torso; limbs absent) that looks like the stuff of nightmares. Definitely not the kind of breasts that Andal was talking about when she was giving Vishnu the come hither (she eventually married him btw).

Similar themes, however, are touched on 2 in My Body Holds Its Shape at Tai Kwun in Hong Kong, which features work by Tap Chan, Thea Djordjadze, Jason Dodge, Eisa Jocson (winner of last year’s Hugo Boss Asia Art prize) and

Pratchaya Phinthong. Come thither. The show explores how limits and constraints can provide a productive, rather than a purely constrictive artistic ground. Jocson, for example, continues her exploration of the relationship between labour and fantasy, using the gestures of exploited Philippine migrant workers alongside research into other displaced peoples and animals (the people, for example, who play animals in themeparks) to launch a theatrical performance work (a new ongoing project titled Zoo). Phinthong uses melted lead from dismantled bombs found in Laos to create a new sculpture (Fork), which is then combined with photographs documenting meteorites (another falling metal) and video surveillance, which in turn integrate with Djordjadze’s installations as one body (of work) merges with another.

Social distancing be damned. ‘He must enter me if only for a day, else I waste away.’ That’s

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Andal, btw, not Djordjadze. Andal was obsessed with someone else holding her body’s shape.

Back in Phinthong’s current hometown, an exhibition of work by locally based filmmaker 3 Chulayarnnon Siriphol marks the postlockdown opening of Bangkok City City Gallery.

Like Jocson, Siriphol takes aim at some of the happiness illusions that permeate Southeast Asia, but here his target is not the joyous Disneylandtype leisure parks staffed by migrant workers selling audiences a good time and an escape from reality (the audience’s, not the workers’, although it’s the someplace-inbetween wherein lies the rub), but rather the ‘Restoration of Happiness’ pr campaign that followed the 2014 military coup d’état in Thailand. It was at that point that Siriphol started making a series of daily collages that aimed at moving past the doublespeak and confronting realities.

Cutting pieces of text from daily newspapers

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4 Ming Wong, In Love for the Mood, 2009, 3-channel hd video, 4 min.

Courtesy the artist and Singapore Art Museum

4 Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex – For the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards, 2001, single-channel video, 13 min. Courtesy the artist and Singapore Art Museum

and layering in kaleidoscopic imagery to make the works that are on show here. The exhibition title, Give Us A Little More Time, is drawn from a particularly jingoistic ditty composed by General Prayut Chan-o-cha, former leader of the National Council for Peace and Order, as the military junta styled itself during its five-year reign. While he was asking the nation for ‘a little more time’ to complete the junta’s ‘reforms’, he also claimed that 99 percent of the population was happy with the government’s performance. ‘Crisis’, screams one of Siriphol’s collages, above a series of explosions and cowering schoolchildren. ‘It saddens me’, Prayut said, following pressure to restore civil liberties from overseas, that ‘the United States does not understand the way we work.’ It does now.

Indeed. The theme of understanding forms the basis of Tai Kwun’s other group exhibition, 4 They Do Not Understand Each Other, copresented

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by the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and Singapore Art Museum (whose premises are currently being renovated). This exhibition takes its inspiration from the title of a video installation by Japanese performance artist Tsubasa Kato, set on an island located between the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago that is claimed by both nations.

The island is called Daemado in Korean and Tsushima in Japanese. The two-channel video features the artist and a Korean man, who are unable to communicate with each other, travelling to the tiny island in order to hammer a sign (displaying a qr code) into the ground. A task that requires the one individual to piggyback the other, while each talks, pointlessly, to the other in his own native tongue. The form is replicated, albeit with more serious rather than humorous intent (at least that’s what curators Yuka Uematsu from Osaka and June Yap from

ArtReview Asia

Singapore are saying), in the exhibition, where 23 works from the two partner institutions’ collections are on show alongside two new commissions. Ming Wong’s much-travelled video In Love for the Mood (2009), a complex rehearsal, reenactment and cultural translocation of Wong Kar-wai’s classic movie In The Mood for Love (2000), sits alongside a newly commissioned instalment of Akira Takayama’s ongoing McDonald’s Radio University (2017–), which aims at exploring the democratic potential of a for-profit multinational by transmitting lectures from within branches with the Golden Arches (ok, there is some humour here). In this case delivered by refugees and migrants. Distancers and disbelievers can livestream using an onsite qr code.

Sojung Jun’s A Day of a Tailor (2012) follows a tailor called ‘Mr Gubo’ (the name borrowed from A Day in the Life of Novelist Gubo, a 1930s novel about the effects of modernisation in Korea by Park

Tae-won), who has worked in machine embroi(Government policy allowed Aboriginal and the Philippines is firmly in the grip of a powercrazed macho strongman. Something with dering in a ten-metre-long shop for the past Torres Strait Island children to be forceably re40 years, while Agnes Arellano’s Haliya Bathing which local visitors as well as those from many moved from their families from the mid 1800s onwards.) Where’s Mickey? (2002) features a Torres (1983) depicts the pregnant lunar goddess (drawn other parts of the world might find resonance.

Talking of slow burners, the National Strait Island man (Luke Captain) dressed up as from Bicol mythology, and cast from the artist’s body) bathing in a pool of crushed marble Minnie Mouse and a colour scheme that evokes 5 Gallery of Victoria is hosting Destiny Deacon’s assembled in a way that recalls Zen rock gardens. first solo show in over 15 years. Titled Deacon, the the Aboriginal flag. It goes without saying that According to myth, Haliya was left stranded Deacon’s darkly comic work is long overdue retrospective features work in a variety of media, on earth (where she and her six sisters came to spanning 30 years of the artist and political this kind of exposure, although I’ve just said it, which would indicate that it doesn’t, but more bathe once a month in terrestrial warm waters), activist’s production. Deacon is a descendant having been wooed by a woodsman (who had of the KuKu (Far North Queensland) and Erub/ interesting still is to imagine it in dialogue with stolen her clothes); the work, originally included Mer (Torres Strait) people and is known for works by younger artists like Jocson, whose her photographs of family and friends posing explorations of Disney fables resonate strongly in an exhibition curated by Philippine conceptualist Roberto Chabet, marked the beginning with black dolls and various kitsch items of with some of Deacon’s darkly comic works. of Arellano’s ongoing exploration (or incarnaDefinitely focused on making interna‘Aboriginalia’, and for works that feature the tion) of female deities from various religions dolls alone. The photograph Melancholy (2000), tional connections is the Ming Contemporary Art Museum (mcam) in Shanghai, where and mythologies. The works evolved from a for example, features a headless black baby doll 6 Participation Mystique draws together 14 interwearing a playsuit stuffed into the skin of a sense of alienation from the Catholic Church watermelon that serves as a homemade crib, national artists or collectives including Hong and the role of women in society at large, but have gained additional poignancy today, when its head perched atop the pink flesh to its side.

Kong-based Leung Chi Wo and Sara Wong,

6 Marianna Simnett, Faint with Light, 2016 (installation view at Copenhagen Contemporary, 2019).

Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy the artist

5 Destiny Deacon, Where’s Mickey?, 2002, lightjet photograph from Polaroid photograph, 80 × 100 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 6 Yuichiro Tamura, Sky Eyes, 2019 (installation view at The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2019).

Courtesy the artist and Yuka Tsuruno Gallery, Tokyo

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7 Dew Kim, Kiss of Chaos, 2020, video, dir Tom Spice Film. Courtesy the artist and mmca, Korea

7 Eisa Jocson, The Filipino Super-ktv-Woman, 2019, live performance.

Courtesy the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

7 resbak, Everyday Impunity, 2018, c-print on paper, 60 × 40 cm. Courtesy the artist

la-based Miljohn Ruperto, Paris-based Kader Attia, ArtReview contributor Gary Zhexi Zhang and local boys Birdhead, for an exhibition of works that reference psychoanalytic theories around collective unconsciousness and human ties to projected fantasies. Although another way of looking at all that is as a fancy construction of ‘us and them’ with art figured as a means by which the one can communicate with the other. The title itself derives from Lucien LévyBruhl’s study How Natives Think (1910) and his sometimes controversial categorisation of thought processes in societies into two types: ‘primitive’, or ‘pre-logical’; and ‘civilized’.

His suggestion was that the first of these does not differentiate between the supernatural and the natural. It’s that that’s apparently being channelled at mcam, although given the range and quality of the artists being summoned to Shanghai, you can safely expect this show to go some way beyond armchair

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sociology. So don’t be put off by the media release that compares a visit to this show to ‘the experience of transference between therapist and patient’. Unless, of course, that’s your bag.

From fancy constructions to family constructions, which provide the theme of this year’s instalment of the mmca’s annual ‘Asia Project’ exhibition, which was initiated in 2017 with the aim (presumably) of placing the Korean institution at the centre of continental discourse about contemporary art. The attentive among you may have noticed that Tai Kwun seems to be playing the same game. And that’s before we’ve come to any of the institutions in Singapore, Manila, Tokyo or Jakarta that are trying to do the same.

Perhaps the point is that these kinds of narratives are very much up for grabs – for definition, or reinterpretation, making anew or just making 7 up. In Seoul, Looking for Another Family is about expressions of social solidarity in which Asia is repurposed as a family unit. Which feels,

ArtReview Asia

ostensibly, like something of an arranged marriage. Or adoption. Eisa Jocson is here again, with SuperWoman ktv, a karaoke room in which visitors can sing along to tracks by the Filipino Superwoman Band (of which Jocson is a member), mouthing lyrics that describe the ‘emotional labor required of female workers’. ArtReview Asia never does karaoke with its family, but it can see how this might provide some sense of solidarity.

Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann’s work primarily takes the form of photography, but here she’s working with a community in Sabah to weave a story of its history and memories in patterned fabrics decorated with iconlike objects, while a trio of collectives, 98b collaBoratory, hub Make Lab and kantina, have teamed up to produce Turo-Turo (2020, which translates as point or teach in English), a café in which visitors can share food and thoughts. Maybe Art Labor and Akira Takayama will pass by.

Connections. Everywhere.

A lack of physical connections has meant that 8 this year’s edition of the Yokohama Triennale, curated by Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective,

has had to adapt to our changed circumstances, with the exhibition, titled Afterglow, now being built up during the course of the event’s run and some of its projected commissions becoming reinterpretations of existing works. (For more on the last, see the interview with Korakrit Arunanondchai later in this issue.) For Raqs, who have curated past editions of Manifesta and the Shanghai Biennale, the current situation has become an opportunity rather than a restraint.

Although the trio who make up the artist collective would say that, wouldn’t they? ‘Contact and a state of awareness about being in contact,’ they stated this past April, ‘is the key to a return to safety, without the fear of banishment of the contagious. It is welcoming of different forms and propensities of life.’ Before going on to say

everyone involved for having the Andal-like that their edition of the triennial will ‘cajole persistence to somehow stay on track. ‘Spare us people to see the world as made of liquid states, our sandcastles.’ (That’s Andal, not Raqs.) dissolving and blurring our hold on fixed certainties, making edges dance as centers, where Talking of which, urbanism and the makeup of cities has never been as interesting a topic as wilderness is not opposed to civilisation, and it is in the age of social distancing. Which makes where there is defiance to the assumed insularity of cultural ethics.’ What that means in practice 9 Perforated City, a group exhibition at moca Taipei themed around (urban) space, a timely is an assembly of 65 artist groups and 67 artists, contribution to a discussion that has (hopefully) which is going to feel like a multitude after these days of isolation. Look out for contributions moved away from densification to its opposite.

As much as that’s possible in the first place.

by Hanoi-based Farming Architects, performance artist Taus Makhacheva, Park Chan-kyong ‘Perforation’ in this case refers to the rise and fall of urban districts (gentrification and degen(whose film Belated Bosal, 2019, on show here, is eration), the increase of surveillance and state something of a belter) and a new work by Naeem control of urban areas (seeing through walls Mohaiemen. Although, as is the case with most and into private space), the threat of epidemics, largescale exhibitions, and particularly those ageing populations and other factors that curated by Raqs, it will be the works you’re not don’t see concrete as a barrier to their spread, looking out for that command the most attention. Otherwise you could just stick to Google. as well as the more positive (until recently) And you’re probably sick of that. Credit too to generation of sociability and community

8 Anton Vidokle, Citizens of the Cosmos (still), 2019, hd video, colour, sound, 30 min.

Courtesy the artist; Asakusa, Tokyo; and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

9 Zhang Xu Zhan, Si So Mi, 2017, video installation, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

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interdependence within shared space. Eighteen and Yin Xiuzhen’s Thought (2009), a bloated artists and collectives investigate. brain made up of old blue clothing (part of a Sprawl of a different kind can be found at series of works in which Yin fashions oversize organs from laundered discarded garments).

10 Arario Gallery’s Cheonan space. Here Dancing Queen: Women Artists from Asia gathers 60 works This last emblematic of the exhibition’s stated by female artists from the continent, drawn aim of collecting individual and collective from the collection of parent company Arario experience, and rethinking the traditional roles of women in societies across the region.

Corporation, which claims to have the largest Though, as with many exhibitions of this kind, holding of work by women artists from across the continent. Artworks on show include Makati there is equally a sense that the individual parts, City-born nurse-turned-artist Geraldine Javier’s through their responses to particular cultures The Weight of the World (2013), which combines and regional experiences, might be greater painting and sculpture to fashion a Skeksis-like than the sum of the whole. angel of death, holding a string of skulls and The sense that works like Thought seek to formulate the present out of fragments of a past with rocky crags for wings; Indian artist Reena S. Kallat’s grid of individual facial features, is amplified in Each Modern’s similarly ambiRainbow of Refuse – 1 (2006); Lee Bul’s ghostly, 11 tious summer show New Relics I: Crossing Over. floating, polyurethane organ-cum-alien The first in a series of exhibitions that marks Amaryllis (1999, part of the ‘Monsters’ series); the culmination of a two-year research project

(isn’t it good to know that long-term planning still has a place in our world?), New Relics seeks to connect the arts of the past with the art of the present. Naturally, Ai Weiwei is on hand, here with Jointed Tables (2010), in which he has siamesed a pair of Qing dynasty tables in such a way that destruction and construction freakishly become one. The theme of freakishness is extended in Wu Chuan-Lun’s Dogformation – Weave Poles (2019), in which the reclining canine’s white porcelain body takes on an undulating, serpentine form, presumably as a result of the zigzagging exercise that forms part of a demonstration of agility and obedience at a dog show.

Although it might also be an albino relative of the tiangou. But before you worry about that, look out for three sculptures by Shiau-Peng Chen, whose 2018 pamphlet Contemporary Sculpture 20 Steps (available from her website – her name,

10 Geraldine Javier, The Weight of the World, 2013, oil on canvas, resin, papier-mâché, tattling lace, 183 × 152 × 91 cm. Courtesy the artist and Arario Gallery, Cheonan

11 Tseng Chien-Ying, Pyramid Kit, 2019, ceramic, 15 × 12 × 22 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Each Modern, Taipei

10 Yin Xiuzhen, Thought, 2009, clothes and steel, 340 × 510 × 370 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Arario Gallery, Cheonan

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ArtReview Asia

12 Shida Kuo, Untitled 16-05, 2016, fired clay, metallic oxides and wood, 41 × 33 × 27 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Eslite Gallery, Taipei

13 Mark Ryden, Salvator Mundi (#137), 2018, oil on panel and hand-carved wood frame, 88 × 68 × 4 cm.

Courtesy the artist; Perrotin, Shanghai; and Kasmin, New York

14 Chang Ling, 2014.12.6, 2014, oil on canvas, 162 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist and Don Gallery, Shanghai

no spaces, no dots, no dashes, dot com) is an elecontemplate: they’ll work whether you’re from gant visual debunking of some of the mythology the East or the West. Paintings are on show too.

If the tiangou is bothering you, however, that surrounds the religion of contemporary art. and you’re already looking up dog-headed Similarly concerned with cutting the crap 12 is New York-based Taiwanese artist Shida Kuo, creatures in The Classic of the Mountains and who has a solo show at Taipei’s Eslite Gallery. the Seas, then you might want to check out an 13 exhibition by American painter Mark Ryden ‘It is never his intention to ride the wave [of art’s fads and fashions],’ the gallery states, ‘but at Perrotin Shanghai. In the interests of getting to submerge in a solitary quest that reaches deep away from Google and its equivalents at least.

Super Spirit Animals is presented in collaboration into the subconsciousness to the source of creativity.’ We’ve all been trying to do that during with New York’s Kasmin gallery and features 14 the lockdown months. ‘This is where Eastern an array of what the title promises in the form and Western cultures intrinsically differ,’ Kuo of cutesy, sometimes garishly coloured, rosesays. ‘Western culture seeks objectivity through cheeked, doe-eyed portraits of poodles, stags outward expressions, whereas Eastern culture and various other beasts that, the artist states, focuses on subjectivity through inner cultivaexplore the space between the physical and the tion of self.’ Deep. Still, his curious untitled spirit worlds. There’s a degree of humour and clay sculptures, basic in form, are certainly pleasself-awareness in there too: Salvator Mundi (#137) ing to the eye and worth taking some time to (2018) features an aquamarine canine waving and

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grinning while clutching its astral orb. A new new relic. And naturally Ryden comes to Shanghai with an endorsement by Perrotin stablemate Takashi Murakami, the king of kawaii. Look out too for Perrotin’s newest gallery space, launching at the K11 Atelier Victoria Dockside on the Tsim Sha Tsui harbourfront in Hong Kong.

Also on the move is Shanghai’s Don Gallery, which is temporarily occupying a space in the West Bund Art Center’s Hall D. Its summer show is titled Cloudy and features works by 11 artists, among them experimental performance collective a.f.art theatreFangling and sculptor Zhang Ruyi, that focus on the changeability of matter and consciousness in contemporary society.

Back to the space between the physical and spiritual, the kwm Art Center in Beijing is hosting an exhibition of the work of cult

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17 Danh Vō, oV hnaD, 2020 (installation view, National Museum of Art, Osaka). Photo: Kazuo Fukunaga. Courtesy the artist and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo

16 Wook-kyung Choi, Untitled, c. 1960s, 62 × 48 cm. Photo: Chunho An. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

15 Guo Fengyi, Analytical Diagram of the Sun Seen from a Distance in the State of Qigong, 1989, coloured ink on glazed printing paper, 78 × 54 cm. Courtesy Long March Space, Beijing

15 Chinese artist Guo Fengyi. While Guo, who died in 2010, has had solo exhibitions at The

traditional Chinese medicine, which has led to reluctance for her work to be included in the Drawing Center in New York and works includbroad sweep of Chinese contemporary art. While ed in the 2010 Gwangju Biennale and the 2013 that is supposed to deal with changing quotidian Venice Biennale, her status in relation to Chinese realities, her work was often deemed a fantastic contemporary art has always been somewhat escape from the real: ‘indigenous’ or ‘outsider’ liminal. She never trained as an artist and worked art; transgressive only inasmuch as it was a in various factories until being forced to retire throwback to a repressed or redundant past. In a 2007 interview with artist Xu Tan (who began due to ill health in her early forties before his career as a member of the Guangzhou making any art. At the time of the 1989 China/ collective Big Tail Elephant) she said, ‘I’m Avant Garde exhibition at the National Art different from you guys… you people paint after Museum of China (around which many locate you understood, and yet I understand only after the explosion of contemporary art into Chinese I paint.’ For the artist herself she only ever made national consciousness), Guo began to practice contemporary painting and her work certainly qigong, from which her artmaking derived. Her work, often made with ink on scrolls of rice paper fits with art’s current obsession with discovering (sometimes several metres in length), draws on worlds within worlds and placing humans the influence of meditation, her own visions within a greater terrestrial and cosmic whole.

16 (among other things, of hidden subterranean Wook-kyung Choi used to joke about the imperial burial chambers) and the principles of fact that she was outspoken and angry, and

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therefore didn’t fit the expected norms of Korean womanhood. She spent just over a decade of her short career (she died in 1985, aged forty-five) in the us, eventually becoming a citizen. A broadly abstract 1966 painting, featuring what might be flailing limbs and an exposed ribcage, is titled La Femme Fâché. ‘My paintings are about my life but I am not simply telling stories. I am trying to express, visually, my experience of the moment lived,’ she once said. A retrospective survey of this somewhat neglected artist (too often overshadowed by her Dansaekhwa contemporaries) is on show at the newly renovated K1 space at Kukje Gallery in Seoul (following on from a show of works made in the us during the 1960s and 70s, which took place at the unrenovated gallery in 2016). The current exhibition is split into two parts, the one dealing with her expressive, coloured, abstract paintings and collages (often displaying the influence of the American

art scene, from Willem de Kooning to Robert the late politician’s son, a farmer, who then Motherwell) and the other her black-and-white donated timber from his land to the artist for ink paintings (Choi had practised calligraphy use in a work. Other works incorporate a chanwhile in Korea). Neither East nor West; the delier from the Hotel Majestic in Paris, where work sits somewhere in between. the 1973 Paris Peace Accords were signed, Much of Berlin- and Mexico City-based bringing a nominal end to the Vietnam War. The title of Hong Kong-based not-for-profit 17 Danh Vō’s work has dealt with personal Para Site’s current exhibition derives from a histories and their place within grander worldviews. This summer sees his first solo 18 different international exchange. Garden of Six Seasons is named after an English-style garden exhibition in Japan at the National Museum constructed by the king of Nepal a century ago of Art in Osaka. Its title, ōV hnaD, promises it (six being the number of seasons the Kathmandu to be appropriately reflective, featuring works valley was said to have before climate change made by and with his father as well as a colruined it for everyone). The exhibition serves laborative project made with the family of us as a prelude to the Kathmandu Triennale 2020, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, one of scheduled to open in December, curated by the architects of the Vietnam War. Vō, who fled 19 Para Site’s executive director, Cosmin Costinas.

Vietnam as an infant in a boat built by his father, Taking the concept of the garden as something winding up in Denmark, purchased a number geographically and climatically specific, but of the American’s personal belongings at inherently artificial and therefore culturally auction, subsequently becoming friends with

adaptable, the exhibition looks at relations between the specific and the general, through a genealogy of mapmaking, an exploration of artistic traditions (such as paubha painting in Nepal, or ink painting in East Asia) that fall outside the (art-institutionally) dominant Eurocentric canon and contemporary work by artists ranging from Pacita Abad to Trevor Yeung, via Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere and another outing for Arunanondchai.

And that’s to name but a few; another sprawling exhibition, this one has been extended to Hong Kong’s newly opened Soho House.

Over at Ho Chi Minh City’s Galerie Quynh, it’s moon rocks that provide the inspiration for Lunar Breccia, a group show inspired by the classification of concretions created by meteorites that collide with the lunar surface, and by the moon as an instrument for the measurement of time. Working in a variety of media, Hoang

18 Andrew Thomas Huang, Kiss of the Rabbit God (still), 2019, film, 14 min 39 sec. Courtesy the artist

19 Hoang Duong Cam, Inhale exhale the spaces between galaxies (or the secret story between Haydn and his wig), 2019, oil on canvas, 183 × 149 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City

18 Patrizio di Massimo, The Ethiopian Leg, 2020, oil on linen, 80 × 100 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Chert Lüdde, Berlin

Summer 2020

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Duong Cam, Sandrine Llouquet, Keen Souhlal, as to its physical presence. Perhaps its only nod you’ll probably realise that things have changed since you last went out. to the traditional is an X Museum Triennial Vo Tran Chau, Do Thanh Lang, Hoang Nam Award, judged by a panel including the Samdani If you are really looking for the new, you’ll Viet and Nghia Dang provide the fragments want to check out the X Museum in Beijing, Foundation’s Diana Campbell Betancourt, to be assembled. ‘We are a haphazard bundle which this May marked its delayed opening moma ps1 director Kate Fowle, the Serpentine of inconsistent qualities,’ the British writer (it was originally scheduled for March) with Galleries’ Hans Ulrich Obrist and cafa Art Somerset Maugham once wrote. As well the launch of the first X Museum Triennial, Museum’s Zhang Zikang. as providing an alternative description of Lunar Breccia, such sentiments also lie behind If that sounds too scary, however, you might appropriately titled (in more ways than it look for reassurance in Hamburg, where the 20 Chance Encounters, an exhibition of 30 works 21 once might have seemed) How Do We Begin? from the collection of the founders of the Founded by Michael Xufu Huang (formerly 22 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe is hosting Copy Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai. & Paste: Repetition in Japanese Imagery. Featuring of M Woods) and Theresa Tse, the private What with lockdowns and everything, most museum is dedicated to showcasing millennial 100 sketches, colour woodcuts, hanging scrolls, of us might have forgotten what a chance artists and tapping into youth popular culture, books and folding screens from the museum’s East Asian Collection, including prints by encounter is, or at least view them as someand embracing digitisation and the erosion of thing to be avoided at all costs. Divided into Hokusai and Utagawa, and contemporary works discrete disciplinary categorisation. Accordingly, three sections, this show aims to get you back

by Yokoo Tadanori and Higuchi Akihiro (among one of the show’s three sections is titled ‘Artists in the mood, covering the use of animal motifs others), the exhibition aims to demonstrate that and Architects as Narrators’. On show are works and subject matter, the seasons (just four of by artists such as Jes Fan, Guan Xiao, Cui Jie there’s no such thing as an original. Everything and Miao Ying, and the museum has paid is the same as it ever was. Now, where’s that them this time) and works arranged around the music of Ludwig Wittgenstein. After that as much attention to the exhibition’s virtual Vishnu guy got to… Nirmala Devi

21 Li Shuang, T (detail), 2017–18, four-channel video installation.

Courtesy the artist and Peres Projects, Berlin

22 Utagawa Hiroshige, Naruta Whirlpool, Awa Province, 1853–56, woodblock print, ink and colour on paper, 36 × 24 cm. Courtesy Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg

21 Cui Jie, Contessa2ll Chair, 2019, acrylic and spraypaint on canvas, 250 × 180 cm. Courtesy the artist and Start Museum, Shanghai

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Garden of Six Seasons 一園六季 16 May – 30 August, 2020 Garden of Six Seasons is a precursor to the 2020 Kathmandu Triennale Artistic Director: Cosmin Costinaş Curators: Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung

2020 年 展覽「一園六季」為 202 加德滿都三年展的序章 三年展藝術總監：康喆明 Sheelasha Rajbhandari 策展人：Sheelasha 及 Hit Man Gurung

Para Site G/F & 22/F Wing Wah Industrial Building 677 King’s Road Quarry Bay, Hong Kong Soho House Hong Kong 8/F, 33 Des Voeux Road West Sheung Wan, Hong Kong Para Site Art Space is financially supported by the Art Development Matching Grants Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Para Site 藝術空間獲香港特別行政區政府「藝術發展配對資助計劃」的資助

Points of View

My favourite motorcycle taxi driver is easy to spot. His light-red vest immediately marks him out as the rebel among the half-dozen drivers who wait for passengers at the tip of my soi, one of the many thousands of slender backroads branching off Bangkok’s thoroughfares.

In contrast to his colleagues’ hi-vis orange vests – which sport a photo id and queue number on the front and rear, as per municipal law – his is faded, unmistakably his. Written neatly on the back in white Tip-Ex is a slogan that reads: ‘Damri’s Struggle Dictatorial Regime’.

And painted on the shoulders, left and right of this obscure reference to a barely remembered

outrider Max Crosbie-Jones on the road to nowhere in Bangkok

above A moto-sai driver waiting at a taxi rank.

Courtesy the author facing page, top Street scene with motorcycle taxis, Bangkok. Courtesy the author

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figure in Thailand’s defunct Communist Party, are two five-pointed stars – symbols of the awakened proletariat.

Over years of straddling his Honda and sitting close to him, of careening between cars and buses with him, of staring at this vest as we wait for lights to change, I’ve come to think of this sixtysomething man less as an eccentric bit-player in the life of the city and more as the stoic epitome of the proudly provincial ruralto-urban Thai migrant. He is someone both drawn to and repelled by the economic machine of which he is a part, and someone who garners what little social capital he has, on the backstreets of Bangkok’s Sathorn district at least, by projecting an ideological backwardness.

But while his vest is, in my opinion, a badge of honour, a small display of power in the face of the city’s glossy affectations and autocratic edicts, there’s also a hint of the tragic about him. To me, he’ll also forever be the brazen pamphleteer who thrust a printed diatribe in my hand during the bloody denouement of the Red Shirt protests in May 2010, then raced off towards the columns of acrid black smoke, billowing from burning tires on nearby Rama 4 Road. During that convulsive time – broadcast on news networks around the world – he was a small yet spirited cog in a popular, labour-based movement fighting desperately to reinstall a government it believed valued the phrai (commoner) above the ammāt (aristocracy).

A decade on from those ill-fated protests, he cuts a less formidable figure. No material changes to his circumstances are apparent.

The red vest remains, but the exuberant hopefulness of that encounter has dissipated. As before, he continues to deftly navigate this scarred palimpsest of a modern city – but, socially and economically, he is now going nowhere fast.

Today, the kinetic joys of Bangkok’s motorcycle taxis are often extolled. ‘One of the unique experiences in Bangkok is hopping on the back of a motorcycle taxi – called moto-sai by Thais,’ writes one travel blogger. ‘Hop on, hold on and enjoy the ride!’ In popular culture terms, they

are an emblem of the Thai street, up there with truck art, tuk-tuks and longtail boats, as well as a mainstay in sitcoms and even patriotic advertisements, where they now rival farmers and hilltribe people as stolid working-class archetypes. In contrast, however, the collective sense of self-respect, dignity and sociopolitical mobility that swelled among their unruly ranks during the late 2000s and early 2010s, then subsided, is not something to which many writers, filmmakers or artists are drawn. This is surely partly due to the fact that the moto-sai is an ancillary figure, a form of mass transit, about as visible to most middle-class Bangkok denizens as trains or buses – that is to say, only really noticed when they are broken somehow.

Anecdotally, the recent headlines focusing on the turf wars between rival win (motorbike taxi-driver stalls), and the disruptive ridesharing apps that have exacerbated them, bear this out. Then there is the political baggage that weighs this period down – it was Thaksin Shinawatra, the Chiang Mai policeman turned tycoon turned populist prime minister, who legitimised their informal economy and boosted their confidence in the years before and after he was ousted in the coup of 2006. True to form, Thailand is perpetually moulting such inconvenient truths.

Ta Sawang (Il Re di Bangkok, 2020), a melancholic graphic novel written by Claudio Sopranzetti and Chiara Natalucci, and illustrated by Sara Fabbri, is one of the first creative endeavours truly to inhabit that time. Told through fevered flashbacks, the story blends

above Pages from Ta Sawang (Il Re di Bangkok, 2020), written by Claudio Sopranzetti and Chiara Natalucci, translated by Nuntawan Chanprasert and illustrated by Sara Fabbri

Summer 2020

typical comic-strip action with abrupt aboutturns into freewheeling surrealism, all in an attempt to capture the joys and paroxysms of the disenfranchised rural-to-urban migrant trying to make ends meet. In its opening pages, our fictional male protagonist, Nok, arrives at Bangkok’s main train station, Hua Lamphong, from the northeast – the oft-belittled region from which the majority of the capital’s millions of internal migrants hail – only to quickly come a cropper. An amenable relative and a job in a shoe factory prove short-lived, and before long he’s sprawled on a bench, staring up wistfully at a billboard for Luk Isan (Son of the Northeast) as he pines for home.

This fleeting cameo by a social-realist film from 1982 belies the book’s ancestry – Ta Sawang is a similarly unflinching depiction of the struggles of the northeasterner. Against a shadowy backdrop of actual events – the 1997 financial crisis, Full Moon Parties, controversy over social critic Sulak Sivaraksa’s writings – Nok flits from jobs to romance to meth addiction to more destitution before finding, for a while at least, salvation of sorts: a bright orange vest that offers a chance at upward mobility, as well as a certain esprit de corps. Climaxing with a smouldering city and petrol bombs being flung over tire-ringed barricades, the story builds into a blood-flecked parable. Only when Nok is blinded by a bullet, while serving as a member of the Red Shirt movement’s guards-cumcavalry, does he see the folly in putting yourself on the frontline for politicians.

Despite its moralistic tone and composite characters, Ta Sawang – which translates as ‘brighteyed’ but is idiomatically closer to ‘seeing the light’ – has the ring of truth. For this it is indebted to Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi

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Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok (2017): Sopranzetti’s brilliant ethnographic study of their knowledge and awareness of the urban terrain, their political subjectivities and fragilities. In it, his years of assiduous research and oral interviews, partially gathered during the Red Shirt protests, are filtered through the official narratives of siwilai (civilisation) and phatthanā (development) that shaped both twentieth-century Bangkok and the Thais’ imagined spatial hierarchy – a conception that casts cities as aspirational, and regional towns and villages as ‘loci of uncivilized ways of life’, Sopranzetti writes.

Early on, he gives a granular sociohistorical account of the four conditions of possibility that led to the emergence of the moto-sai during the early 1980s. The first was a mode of administration: the manner in which canny officials turned the amnāt (authority) deriving from their role in the state apparatus into itthiphon (influence) over the operations of the urban grey economy.

The second: ‘millions of young and relatively unspecialized migrants from rural Thailand who, from the late 1950s, provided the city with cheap labor’. The third: ‘affordable motor cycles which flooded Thailand in the 1960s’.

And the last: ‘a maze of disconnected and narrow soi that made motorcycle taxis indispensable for public transportation in the city.’

Sopranzetti also traces the heterogeneous forms of mobility unique to them. Through their nimble movement they ‘provide a func-

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Pages from Ta Sawang (Il Re di Bangkok, 2020), written by Claudio Sopranzetti and Chiara Natalucci, translated by Nuntawan Chanprasert and illustrated by Sara Fabbri

ArtReview Asia

tional – yet largely decentralized – infrastructure of transportation and delivery. An infrastructure as forgotten as the electric wires that hang over people’s heads or the pipes below their feet, yet as essential to the everyday life of a city that state-run mass transportation has failed to connect either spatially or socially.’

And even when seemingly idle, sitting not driving, they are building social networks.

‘Waiting’, Sopranzetti writes, ‘is a time for mapping the neighborhood around them, sustaining the channels through which their social relations with local state officials, street workers, and residents are forged, and attempting to make use of them to move up the social ladder.’ Life on the street is latent with transformative potential, both for the city and for themselves, ‘as they get accustomed to urban life, a trip at a time, its marvels and its sorrows, its excitements and its crushing oppression’.

But it is also fraught with a risk that would seem to apply directly to my favourite driver: ‘Much like in their riding, however, taking these roads is always a gamble, one that can project the drivers into another life or keep them stuck in their place.’

Nearly 50 years ago, a similar sentiment was expressed in Prince Chatrichalerm Yukol’s Theptida Rong Raem (Hotel Angel), a classic social-realist film from the politically and socially tumultuous mid-1970s. About midway through it is a humdinger of a scene in which the viewer is tossed back and forth between footage of Malee – a naive country girl – entertaining a brothel customer in Bangkok, and footage of her father showing off the home paid for by her urban remittances. As she moves to unfasten her bra for yet another creepy punter, the camera skips, in the milliseconds before her breasts are revealed, to her father beaming as he proudly flings open the new terrace doors. “This house is what Malee has earned and sent us,” he tells the villagers huddled on the scorched grass outside. “She’s doing well as a dressmaker.” This montage feels comically crass by today’s standards, but it does signpost the tears and tensions that have long existed between Bangkok – the avaricious beneficiary of the country’s internal colonialism – and a countryside that is perpetually feeding and imagining it.

My favourite driver makes me think about this, too. Sometimes, when riding behind him, I try to picture him back in his home in the northeast, when he’s not rocking that red vest, not breathing the polluted air, not barely surviving due to a faltering economy and mounting competition, not suffering the daily toll of a city that promises so much but surrenders so little. Does he boast of Bangkok, spin yarns, fuel desires? Does he bitterly curse it? And who, if anyone, listens?

#18 GREEN PAPAYA ART PROJECTS 20 YEARS IN 2020 / CLOSING IN MAY 2021

Green Papaya commemorates 20 years with a series of posters sharing its views at this time of pandemic.

From DEATH IS A PORTAL, a series of 20 digital posters, 1 - 15 May 2020. @greenpapayaartprojects

first draft

by Zakir Hossain Khokan

They are afraid.

Afraid that their loved ones at Home might get infected, with covid.

What if they have become carriers, in a faraway land?

They are afraid of huddling together in a single room.

The room is stuffy, with two ceiling fans working overtime.

Their warm breaths suffocate, as if the fans are weeping.

They are crying for help, for someone to save them…

The administration has ordered them to maintain 1 foot’s distance while standing, sitting, eating and sleeping; like lovers over the phone who must also keep apart, not touching.

They are puzzled.

How to keep distance in this crammed space?

Some measure the room with tape and count the number of inmates to obey the government’s orders.

Others measure the dimensions of the wrinkles on their forehead.

The administration has stated, wearing masks is mandatory.

But they do not have masks.

Dormitory, administration, company – who will give them masks?

They are barred from going outside.

If they don’t have masks, how will they wear them!

They gape at themselves.

They cannot understand who is belittling whom, in this race of life.

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They are afraid.

When their throats become dry out of fear, they visit the bathroom to drink water.

The bathroom – dirty, dingy, fetid.

A single bathroom serves more than a hundred.

Nobody has cleaned it for days.

Those who can are afraid.

Afraid of being attacked by the virus.

They swallow water to quench their thirst.

And sing: ‘I’ve turned into a migrant, I roam around the world’…

The song is dramatized, made into videos, and shared.

But they remain scared.

They are afraid of speaking their minds.

Bound by the agent’s fee, their lives are mortgaged to the unknown.

Days and years pass, the beautiful city changes, but not their salary.

They are afraid of speaking their minds.

They have neither commitment nor language, only fear. They are alone.

Company and state feed on each other.

The government tells them to not be afraid.

But, yes, they are!

They are anxious.

They know the High Commission is only there to parcel their corpses back home.

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Summer 2020

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‘Worker brothers’, is what their community leaders from their own soil call them in their fancy enunciations.

Words like ‘bhai’ and ‘dost’ are not meant for them.

Journalists approach them selectively, from time to time with probing questions.

They are too fearful to answer because they know even the journalists are afraid of Someone.

Sometimes literary folks and intellectuals visit them too.

They inspire them to read, speak up, write, draw, take photographs, make films but emphasise that their art should be calm and not explosive.

They are afraid to read.

They are afraid to write.

They are afraid to draw.

They are afraid to take photos.

They are afraid to make films.

They are afraid to learn, to gaze.

They are even afraid of appreciation for their success.

Ssshhhh, they stay silent!

They are afraid of laughing too loud because they are aware of the Ministry receiving complainants about their hearty laughter.

They control themselves.

Laugh less. Sleep and eat even less.

They live outside the city, in the fringes.

Their dreams are lost.

Termites infest their bodies while rats, cockroaches have field days.

This way the state can say migrant workers are resource and just manpower.

Some of them whisper at night ‘Now every moment is depressing Now every afternoon is terrifying Now every evening is endangering Now we are counting the numbers every night The number of infected The number of the dead The number of breaths we take We can’t sleep We read of our own nightmares We draw our faces in the mirror In the hope of a green dawn.’

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They are terrified.

Fear, labour and anguish mar their faces and the state takes photographs of them to claim its success in keeping workers happy, in ensuring workers’ comfort.

The state is applauded for its effort.

They join the state in singing songs of praise: ‘The king and we are comrades in this kingdom.

How can we otherwise work with the same king?’

The news of their coronation spreads wide and far.

To their families and beyond.

But they are panic-stricken. They don’t utter a word.

They are abused but don’t quiver.

They can’t speak.

They lack empathetic ears. They are jittery of rest.

They know rest won’t earn them money.

Work pass and agents’ fees combine with loans to throttle their Existence.

They are petrified.

They hide their diseases from roommates, companies, and friends.

They are afraid of dying.

They know that in this time of gloom, they are just numbers.

Their close compatriots won’t come to shoulder their mortal remains or to see them for one last time.

Who are they?

Are they really surviving with this burden of fear?

Their identity documents carry the seal of ‘Modern-day slaves’.

This has at least saved them from an Identity Crisis while the state, government, citizen, company, agent and dear ones have affixed a date to make them smile for at least a day in the year.

They will laugh. They will laugh out loud.

They will survive without fear. #

Zakir Hossain Khokan was born in Dhaka and lives in Singapore, where he works as a construction supervisor. A graduate of the National University of Bangladesh, he is an award-winning poet and founder of Migrant Writers of Singapore Translated from Bengali by Debabrota Basu

ArtReview Asia

all images Courtesy the author

Summer 2020

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Artists in Residence Lee Mingwei interview by Adeline Chia

“My projects come from a place similar to dreams.

They all existed somewhere in the universe�

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Known for his participatory conceptual performances, Taiwanese-born Lee Mingwei was due to open his first solo exhibition in Europe at the Gropius Bau in Berlin on 27 March, before, in his own words, “the sky fell in”. Plans dashed by the covid-19 pandemic, he created two new “digital activations” that were hosted online prior to the physical opening of the show on 11 May. The first, Invitation for Dawn, scheduled an appointment with an opera singer, who sang to you, one-to-one, via video conference, a song chosen by the singer that signals the coming of a new day. The second was Letter to Oneself, which invited contributors to write letters to themselves and send them to Gropius Bau, where they were displayed in the exhibition.

Lee’s show, 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals, is partly centred around the Confucian idea of li, an overarching framework for human behaviour that includes rites ranging from tea-drinking and table etiquette to mourning and proper governance. Li is also the Chinese word for ‘gift’, which harks back to a pillar of Lee’s practice that treats art as a transformative gift from one person to another.

The show also features a major new installation, Our Peaceable Kingdom (2020), based on American folk-painter (and Quaker minister) Edward Hicks’s 1833 painting Peaceable Kingdom.

Hicks had made over 60 paintings exploring the idea of peace, featuring animals, Native Americans and white people together in a pastoral idyll. Lee invited 11 artists from around the world to copy Hicks’s painting, as well as riff on the idea of peace portrayed in it. Those artists then invited other artists to copy their works. The result is an installation comprising 27 paintings executed in a range of styles, displayed on stands in such a way that they appear to ripple out from the source painting. A sneak peek Lee sent via Skype showed a classically Chinese painting of animal menageries and a work from Afghanistan depicting two men embracing against a gold-leaf sun.

Ahead of the rescheduled exhibition opening, ArtReview Asia caught up with Lee in New York, where he currently lives, and chatted with him about his new work, thoughtful gifts and when he last cried (spoiler: it’s during this interview). artreview asia How’s life in New York? lee mingwei My husband and I live on the 23rd floor of an apartment in the Financial District. I’m literally looking out of my window at the Stock Exchange on Wall Street. I see only two people on the street. And one dog.

John is an it engineer for Microsoft. Because of the high volume of internet usage, Microsoft is a bit overwhelmed, so he is working extremely hard. As for me, I’m talking to museums and thinking of different possibilities.

I usually prepare lunch and dinner, going through different recipe books we bought but never really had the chance to try out. Hopefully we don’t get too fat after two to three months of self-quarantine.

Every day we go out and take a walk for about an hour, of course respecting social distancing.

Then we come home and have dinner. In the evening, we would watch a virtual opera. ara Are you feeling any anxiety during this time? lm Maybe it’s my personality, but I just think, I’m facing this crisis that everyone else is facing.

I’m not alone. Which makes me feel wonderful.

If I’m facing this alone, or part of a small group of people feeling this, and the rest of the world goes on living, then I’d probably feel a bit anxious.

Hopefully [the pandemic] will jolt all of us out of a sense of normality. We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. What we’re doing for a long time is unacceptable to the environment and the inequalities among people. Hopefully this will give us a different view of how we can live together, share resources and help each other. ara Can you walk us through the concept behind Our Peaceable Kingdom?

“Maybe it’s my personality, but I just think, I’m facing this crisis that everyone else is facing. I’m not alone. Which makes me feel wonderful” lm I had an idea about 12, 14 years ago of using Edward Hicks’s painting Peaceable Kingdom as a point of departure to address two different issues. What is peace? And how do we, each of us living in different cultures, heritages and social situations, interpret the idea of peace?

I picked Hicks because, when I was living in Berkeley during the early 1990s, I walked into this amazing bookstore called Pegasus Books and encountered this collection of paintings

by Hicks, all 63, 64 versions of the same painting, called Peaceable Kingdom. It was his idea of what peace was, inspired by a passage in the Bible. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s fascinating’, because at that time I was quite interested in the Quakers’ idea of peace, which advocates nonviolence.

The painting was so amazing, with these animals with big eyes, and children hugging animals, and Indians and white people living

peacefully together. I thought that a way to talk about peace among different people is to take Hicks’s painting and then ask other people to copy, not only in terms of physically copying the painting, but also to learn something about the Quakers’ idea of peace and to interpret it in their own vision of what that could be.

When the show opens, you’ll see the original painting from 1833 in the gallery, surrounded by 32 paintings by different artists. Each artist writes a small statement about the thinking behind their interpretation. They will be all assembled and placed on individual easels.

It will be more of an installation, rather than a series of paintings on the wall.

Every artist’s participation is important.

How do we make it everyone’s artwork, not just Lee Mingwei’s? So there’s a lot of discourse about ownership, about creativity and about us as a group of artists trying to create a work that expresses a similarity, but which comprises elements that are hugely individual.

One artist asked: what if I want to sell the work? I had to explain to him that that probably would not be ideal. My mission is to try to keep these all together, and then hopefully it would be acquired by an institution and therefore all the money will be divided among the artists.

That would be the most egalitarian way of taking care of this work. ara You got the idea for this artwork 12, 14 years ago.

Is it fair to say your ideas take their time? Can you share more about your conceptualisation process? lm I often do not look for ideas. They find me.

It’s almost like, tonight you go to bed, you wake up tomorrow morning, and you had a dream. You didn’t go out to look for the dream. The dream came to you because you’re ready to receive these images and emotions, and in a way they change you slightly. That’s how I see all of my projects.

They come from a place similar to dreams. They all existed somewhere in the universe. ara Your output is slow, about one or two works a year. Do you feel any pressure to create more quickly? lm I know a lot of my dear friends have pressure from galleries to create works so that they can help them place a work at exhibition.

That’s perfectly brave. Luckily the gallery I’m working with, Perrotin, they say, “Have fun, do whatever you want”. That allows a lot of freedom and creativity. ara Is there anything that makes you angry?

Or frustrates you?

[Long silence]

facing page Guernica in Sand, 2006–20 (installation view, Lee Mingwei and His Relations, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2015).

Courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Summer 2020

lm I’m thinking when I last got… flustered. ara Mine was this morning.

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top Our Peaceable Kingdom, 2020 (installation view, 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals, Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2020). Photo: Laura Fiorio

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above Guernica in Sand, 2006/20 (installation view, 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals, Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2020). Photo: Laura Fiorio

ArtReview Asia

lm Oh, ok. When I was installing in Gropius, this was three weeks ago, before the sky fell in.

My team, they were all installing. So how it works is that, at around four, I’d say, “You guys take your time, I’m going home to cook for everyone”. When I went home, I started preparing and realised that I was out of rice. I haphazardly started creating this semi-Taiwanese, semiGerman, semi-Italian dinner. It was horrendous.

Terrible. It was just really horrible. They asked, “Mingwei, what happened?” ara What did you cook? lm It was a blob of grey stuff. That has been the most frustrating and unforgiving moment.

ara When was the last time you cried? lm When I was going through the last few rounds of the installation at Gropius Bau, two weeks ago, and saying goodbye to all the artists… ara Hello? lm Hello, sorry. ara Wait, are you crying right now? lm Yeah. Because the sky is falling outside, but they insisted that they would finish installing and told me to leave. There were 30-plus local artists helping to create Guernica in Sand, installing the work… [trails off]

ara Are you a thoughtful gifter in your personal life? lm I hope I am. Our apartment in Paris is in the Marais, and we have this wonderful older gay couple living on the second floor. Our apartment is on the third floor. The gift I gave them the last time, I brought a small Taiwanese tea for them because they never tasted Taiwanese tea and they always gave us chocolate and homemade croissants. I also brought them Taiwanese wuyuzi [mullet roe].

ara Are you someone who cries easily? lm Yes, unfortunately. Especially when I get older. I’m fifty-six now, as I get older, I get a lot more emotional, and it will be worse when I get to sixty and seventy. Maybe that’s because I never remember crying when I was young and it all got piled up. So it started coming out.

ara How do you spend your time in a year? lm My parents, one of my siblings and her family still live in Taipei, and I go back four or five times a year, each time I stay two to three weeks. I love being back in Taiwan. My parents are in their late eighties, and also still very healthy. They just came back from playing golf. My dad is a physician, he is eighty-nine and still has his own clinic. He starts at seven in the morning and finishes at 12 and goes to play golf with my mum. It’s very beautiful the way he handles his old age.

The rest of the time I’m in New York or Paris or on the airplane flying somewhere. ara What are you reading now? lm I’m reading Dong Jing Meng Hua Lu (The Eastern Capital: A Dream of Splendour), written in tenth-century China. During the Song Dynasty, there’s the Northern Song period and the Southern Song period. The Southern Song period happened after the northern China area was taken over by barbarians (well, they were called barbarians, but they were nomads). So the court went to the south. This book was written by someone who had a very vivid memory of what the Northern Song capital was like. This book includes not only the official layout of the city, the names of the streets, the palaces, the rituals, but also the most important things – the professions, the artists, the singers. Who were the best singers at that time? What were the most interesting restaurants? What food did they sell, on what street – it’s fascinating. It’s almost like having a tour guide of the capital of Northern Song.

ara What’s the best gift you’ve been given? lm I was doing Sonic Blossom in Beijing, a piece where an opera singer comes up to a stranger and gifts him or her a song. It was the last day of Sonic Blossom and I was watching the last song. Surprisingly, the singer came walking toward me, and said, “Lee laoshi [Mandarin for ‘teacher’], may I give you the last song?” I thought, I don’t want to do this.

Because I know I would be in a terrible condition to receive the gift. But ok. So when I sat down, and the singer started singing, I start to tear up.

Suddenly, all six other singers started appearing from different corners and, in unison, continued singing the song. And that was the last straw.

I could not stop crying. In the end, we all came together and started hugging in a circle.

No one could finish the song and it was terrible.

judgement, and if they had any questions they could just give me a call. And they did an absolutely beautiful job.

ara You had to leave the Gropius Bau in a hurry.

They had to take over the installation. lm I only had 12 hours to prepare and to leave.

It was all very sudden. When Trump said we’re going to close the borders, and Merkel said we can’t travel, we already had 90 percent installed.

We had been working for about two weeks. What I had to do with the curator was to share how I envisioned the installation, but of course it was really up to them. I trusted their intuition and Sonic Blossom, 2013/20 (installation view, 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals, Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2020).

Photo: Laura Fiorio

Summer 2020

ara Like a Song Dynasty Lonely Planet? lm Exactly, it’s a thousand-year-old Lonely Planet. You should get ahold of this book.

He even talks about the most famous geisha at that time. It’s like a thousand years from now someone says the most famous singer in New York was Beyoncé. He’s talking about a civilisation that is no longer there. The book is kind of eerie for me to read, because it could be something that could happen to us in the not too far future.

Lee Mingwei: 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals is on view at Gropius Bau, Berlin, to 12 July

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Korakrit Arunanondchai interview by Adeline Chia

“There are different worlds of knowing within the magnitude of being a person�

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ArtReview Asia

The Thai-born artist, who splits his time between Bangkok and New York, has a multidisciplinary practice that embraces video, installation, painting, sculpture and performance. The range of his references is equally expansive, melding techno-animism, the Anthropocene, human cognition, spirituality and Thai hip-hop – an enthusiastic blend of East and West, old and new, that has made his work among the best-circulated on the global art scene in recent years. His ongoing video series With history in a room filled with people with funny names (2012–) has travelled, in various incarnations, from biennales in Sydney to Venice to Singapore, and shortly to the Yokohama Triennale, scheduled, at the time of writing, to open in July. While Arunanondchai’s solo exhibition at Clearing gallery in New York, which was due to take place this past May, has been postponed to “whenever”, another exhibition remains scheduled to take place at the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal, in November and the artist is currently working on a new work to be shown in the Gwangju Biennale and Kunsthall Trondheim, both in early 2021. Lockdowns or not, he is a busy man.

The artist had originally been commissioned to create a new work for Yokohama, but as travel restrictions kicked in it was decided to exhibit an existing work, Wth history… 4 (2017), together with a mural featuring a photo portrait of his grandmother alongside dried local flowers.

Currently in Bangkok, where his ‘isolation’ studio is housed in a previously abandoned shack next to his parents’ house, he tells ArtReview Asia about his newly acquired survival skills, organising the second edition of the Bangkok-based video-art festival Ghost, which he co-initiated two years ago, and his working process. And whether he was really a famous hip-hop artist in Thailand before becoming an artist. artreview asia What are you doing right now? korakrit arunanondchai I’m living in my parents’ house, where I’ve set up a small painting studio and office. I still run a studio in New York, making stuff, so I stay up really late managing that and talking to my assistant. In the morning I help my mum do the gardening.

I’ve also been learning how to drive. My dad takes me out. I leave my house but I don’t

leave the car. I just drive to the mall, park, turn around, go to another place. And then I’m working on a new video that has to be done in January. I have a rough idea of what I want to shoot, but anything I want to do would require me to drive a car. In the new world, it’s better to be self-reliant.

I feel like my life has been pretty crazy for two years. In New York, where I am a third of the year, I’m never home. But now I’m living in a house looking out onto a garden, really enjoying the domestic life. ara Do you get claustrophobic staying at home? ka No. In New York, if I’m in the apartment longer than one day without seeing anyone, I get confused. If I’m alone, I can get crazy.

I feel claustrophobic if I’m stuck in an isolated space without seeing people. Here, I see my parents every day. They still live in a different house. I’m in this shack that my mum renovated two years ago to be a studio.

something very similar, for me at least, to how the Buddha described one part of his search for Nirvana: the part where he starved himself.

The soundscape in the video was created to sound like you’re in the ritual. You hear a lot of breathing. The video gets intense and the breathing gets panicked. There’s a part of it that creates – at least soundscapewise – a meditative psychedelic experience. And then you get to the end of the video and the sound disappears and you… [snaps finger] become nothing. ara How’s the installation in Yokohama coming along? ka I can’t travel there to do the installation [of the mural that accompanies the video], but I’m excited to see it. It’s probably not going to be perfect. I’m communicating with some students from the art university. There’s a way that I usually install the work with pillows [on the floor], but we agreed that in these unsure covid-19 times that we were going to use plastic chairs spaced apart. ara How do you feel about that?

ara Why have you chosen to show With history in a room filled with people with funny names 4 at the forthcoming Yokohoma Triennale? ka Personally, I wanted to show this video because I’ve been thinking a lot about breath.

The invisible has now become very visible.

We’re all thinking about coughing and sneezing. The air in between people is neither a stable nor an invisible agent anymore.

As part of the research for this work, I took part in an Ayahuasca ritual: you take this really strong psychedelic – it’s like putting yourself through trauma and meditating. It’s very similar to Vipassanā meditation, from my culture, where you focus on the breath, and you go through

facing page Korakrit Arunanondchai.

Photo: Benjamin Bechet above No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 (installation view, Carlos / Ishikawa, London), 2018

Summer 2020

ka I want people to be safe, you know? The other thing I’m doing in Thailand is organising a video-art triennial called Ghost. I curated the last one. The next one’s going to happen in a year. The whole thing about Ghost is based on the idea of an artwork possessing a space through installation. Last time, we had a performance where a group of dancers seated in the audience broke out and started to form an organism. They made movements that would suck the audience in, to the point that they were touching strangers’ faces. It was a violation of personal space, but in an amazing way.

Now we’re trying to think about how to keep interesting things like that happening, but in a different way.

In this uncertain reality, because we don’t know what’s allowed, for now, it’s best to tread carefully. In the end, you want art spaces to be safe spaces. You want people to a) be free to express themselves and b) feel physically safe. ara Some of the themes explored in your work include accumulation of data, human cognition and memory, storytelling, ghosts, artists and their self-representation.

Do you ever get overwhelmed by information? ka There are different worlds of knowing within the magnitude of being a person. My art, at least earlier on, involves finding a form that allows these different ways of knowing

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to fit together. Some iterations or pieces are more successful than others. I’m trying to be expansive, emotional and sincere, so that a communication and exchange can be made with the audience.

I write the work as I edit. It’s always an open process. I get really confused in it a lot.

It’s difficult to work with me sometimes, because the process is so open. I’m doing something, my collaborator is doing something, and we don’t know what it is going to become or what precisely is going to be used. ara Would you say your process has got more or less open with experience? Do you embrace randomness more now? ka I understand the process more, and I would like it to be even freer. I would like to have the impulse to let something exist, not just because I feel that it makes sense.

I’ve always tried to paint with my gut feeling. Not do something systematically, but to be expressive and to respond to the moment. But in paintings, I’m not skilled enough to do that, or it’s not the right medium for me to do that.

Eventually my paintings still need to go through some process.

When editing a video, though, on a good day, I can get into that place where I can think about the footage, where the experiences come from,

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what they mean to me and how they connect to one another. My job is to make some kind of invisible connection between all these subjects material and visible.

I feel like I’m able to do that more, because I have been making one project all this time.

It’s not the same video, but it also feels like one continuous body of work. ara Will you be continuing with the With history… series? Will we see a With history… 10? ka I don’t know yet. I feel like I’m committed to it, that I would like to work on it until the end of my life. But not every project I do will be this project. There’s a loose way that some of my videos fit into a series, and there are works that don’t, and I like that.

My goal in five years is to make a feature film that can be shown at festivals. Currently, my videos, if they are shown in festivals, fit as experimental shorts. I might try to use my next project as a stepladder towards being able to be confident enough to make a feature. ara Your work has often been described as a mix of sincerity and irony. Are you getting more sincere with age? above No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 (detail), 2018, installation facing page With history in a room filled with people with funny names 4 (detail), 2017, installation

ArtReview Asia

ka Yes. In the beginning I started with building a character called the Denim Painter, which was essentially myself. As I grow older, my artmaking process is not about going into my own head and my own feelings anymore. Now it’s about going outside, trying to find things in the past, present or future, and finding connections between people.

I’m interested in ancient human beings, evolution, prehistoric stuff, human beings as a species, because this stuff connects all of us in a wider sphere of existence. I’m an artist, a person, a point in an economic system and a part of a bigger continuation of life on the planet.

My work can go outwards in all these directions.

It creates an emotional magnitude that comes from being able to travel through these worlds. ara How important do you think marketing and packaging are for an artist? ka It’s important to understand the reality of how the world communicates and makes meanings of things.

I don’t think the exhibition is the only frame of being for an artist. There are a lot of other things. In the beginning of my career, in New York, I was making paintings. The works looked like they fit into the framework and discourse of Western painting. But there was an attitude from the audience where the

baggage or otherness attached to the work was just this… extra stuff. Being Thai has a bit of novelty value, but they don’t care about it. They care about the sacredness of abstract painting, this sacred white space.

But I don’t want to have a separation between the life lived and the work. The places that formed these ideas are important. ara While we’re on the topic, I want to clear something up. Were you really a hip-hop artist? ka It was something my friend made up.

In the beginning of my career, I needed press because I needed an artist visa, so my friend had to pitch my story to Interview magazine in an interesting way.

In a way, the story helped me, because the artworld is very into mythmaking. A curator, after I told him, ‘This is not true, you can’t put it on a wall text’, still decided not to take it down. He says, ‘It’s subjective and I choose to believe that it’s true.’

Personally, I feel that my work is more interesting because I wasn’t a professional musician before this. I used to be in a highschool band, I rapped and made mixtapes, but I wasn’t a famous musician. In fact, the closest I ever got to being in any way a public performer in Thailand is through my art practice. With history… 3 is a deconstructed

rap video by someone who has not edited a [conventional] music video before.

Some people believe this story to make sense of the work. They say, ‘There’s music in the work, therefore he’s a rapper.’ I am constantly trying to correct this fact, because it makes too much sense. ara It’s convenient. ka I did a talk with my friend Oscar Murillo yesterday, and we were talking about this similar issue. Both of us felt like when we started our careers, there was pressure from many people to simplify and exclude certain parts of our story. At the gate, you’re supposed to say who you are, what you’re about, and you’re not supposed to change that much.

But both of us weren’t just conceptual artists, filmmakers or painters. These are false categories. An artist is allowed to engage in different worlds of making meaning within art. ara How important is spirituality to you personally? ka I believe in spirits because many people in Thailand believe in them. I can’t deny the reality of the belief. But I’m actually not that spiritual. all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Carlos / Ishikawa, London; Clearing, New York & Brussels; Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok

Summer 2020

My fascination with spirituality, particularly with the idea of spirits and ghosts, is in deconstructing it and allowing it to be a form of knowledge without taking a Western approach, which says, ‘This is the opposite of science’. Even within Thailand, if you’re a city person, you’re less likely to have animistic beliefs than a rural person. The mentality of the city people is, ‘These people are dumb, they believe in all these things that are not true’. I want to find a way to deconstruct these mentalities to talk about them in a sociohistorical way.

Anyway, there are so many different ways to approach the topic. There are people interested in the history of spirituality, and then there are people in Los Angeles being New Age-y spiritual.

Maybe the question is, ‘Do you believe in something that is immaterial, bigger than all of us and unites us?’ If you deconstruct that, you realise that maybe it’s also a story. Some people find spirituality in capitalism, because it’s a bigger thing that makes sense to them.

For me, it’s more important to see spirituality as a product of history and from the perspective of anthropology.

The 2020 Yokohama Triennale: Afterglow is scheduled to take place 3 July – 11 October

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Art Featured

A house 47

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Kimsooja The New Normal

by Mark Rappolt

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While most people were locking down this May, Korean artist thinking that it was simply evidence of a routine interrupted by, say, Kimsooja was hanging out laundry, in a wood northeast of Malmö, a sudden global health emergency meaning that no one was around to not too far from the border between Sweden and Denmark, on the take it in. On the other hand, A Laundry Field is a development of earlier site of a medieval castle and an organic farm. Between the trees, 100 works by Kimsooja, such as Mumbai: A Laundry Field (2007–08), a multipristine white bedsheets are pinned to clotheslines and flap, like channel video that uses footage of the city to cast the overcrowded so many captured cartoon ghosts, in the wind. They give an idea of Maharashtra port as a field inhabited by people wearing clothes and stains removed, fresh starts, new beginnings, extreme hygiene and people cleaning or drying clothes. Both works play with their ‘matterslates wiped clean. And, with their embroidered trims (an example of of-fact’ nature and are evocative in their banality, their normality and local craftspersonship), of old traditions of manufacture and house- the ways in which they accept – but do not insist on – projection and work, which to a lot of us might seem anachronistic in a world of interpretation on the part of the viewer. You want to see garments urbanised living, rapid manufacture, household convenience and as embodying the history and traces of human bodies? Fine. You just see ordinary life? That’s a truth too. washing machines. White: the mark It’s a form of equivocation that lies at of mourning, purity and rebirth.

You see garments as embodying the the heart of much of Kimsooja’s work.

Or perhaps all this is to overthink history and traces of humans? Fine. You And, you might say, at the heart of what is simply evidence of an easily just see ordinary life? That’s a truth too comprehensible, quotidian routine. much good art. ‘I saw art in life and life But overthinking is a pastime in as art,’ the artist said in a 2008 interwhich many of us have had an opportunity to indulge over the past view with Susan Sollins. ‘I couldn’t separate one from another. So my few months. Locked down, changing our routines, afraid of other gaze to the world and my questions were always related to life itself.’ people, afraid of going out, conjuring profundity out of banality and, Kimsooja’s best known works feature bottari, a traditional Korean egged on by politicians around the world, constantly redefining what cloth bundle used to wrap goods in preparation for transport by we mean by ‘normal’. As if the term was anything other than subjec- hand. While such fabrics (bottari are often recycled from colourful tive in the first place. bedspreads) have acquired links over time to the gendering of labour, The sheets make up an artwork titled A Laundry Field (2020). If that the dynamics of domestic and civic power and the segregation of ‘A’ before ‘laundry field’ suggests that it is one of many, it is. And in more public and private space, bottari bundles are also evocative of displaceways than one. On the one hand, because what ment and migration (frequently, and particuwe see is nothing new: many people around the preceding pages Meta-Painting, 2020, mixed media, larly in terms of Korea’s modern history, as dimensions variable. Photo: Mattias Givell. a result of war and famine), symbolic of both world hang out their washing to dry; they’ve been Courtesy the artist and Wanås Konst, Sweden doing it since they had things to wash, and things the home and a lack of one. above A Laundry Field, 2020 (installation to hang them on. If you stumbled across the wash- view, Wanås Konst, Sweden). Photo: Mattias Givell.

Although this interest is born of the artist’s Courtesy the artist and Wanås Konst, Sweden Korean cultural heritage – her own ‘reality’, ables here, at Wanås Konst, you’d be forgiven for

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ArtReview Asia

as she puts it – it developed as a medium to be used in more than just practices to create a body of work that further evokes relationships two-dimensional works (the artist trained as a painter) when she was between the particular and the universal, and brings to mind the poetry displaced from that heritage, during a 1992 residency at moma ps1 of mystics such as Kabir. A fifteenth-century Muslim weaver from in New York. There, the museum became a space in which to accept India, Kabir linked the process of textile manufacture to meditation the bottari’s cultural baggage and to subvert it. In the resultant instal- on and exploration of the divine in his verses. Indeed, they proved to be lation, Deductive Object, she inserted fragments of Korean bedcovers so successful and easily comprehensible that his influence spans both into gaps in the gallery’s brick wall and made static sculptures out Islam and Hinduism, and the practices of Bhakti and yoga. Works by of a series of everyday objects covered in bottari cloth. Over the years Kimsooja such as To Breathe: A Mirror Woman and the interactive instalthe bottari works have developed simultaneously as a reality and lation Archive of Mind (2016) have featured recordings of the artist’s own an abstraction, similar to the way in which civic and social culture breathing as components of the installation, while she refers to the across the world has drifted these past few months. Cities on the Move videos that make up Thread Routes as a form of “visual poetry”.

– 2727 Kilometers Bottari Truck (1997, “The reality of myself and my culture first shown in the group exhibition has constantly and gradually evolved, “A Laundry Field gives an experience Cities on the Move, from which the and rather dramatically since I moved that blurs the boundary between work’s title derives) was a perforto New York,” the artist writes as we daily life and the museum context” exchange emails between London and mance and video documenting the artist’s 11-day journey across South Korea and their respective lockdowns.

Korea, visiting places with which she had a personal connection, on “This move gave me the perspective of my own culture as part of a the back of a truck overloaded with tied bottari bundles; To Breathe: multi-cultural context. Yet, I held the string of my particular personal A Mirror Woman (2006) saw her clad Madrid’s Crystal Palace in translu- life as a continuum that questions fundamental and existential cent, light-refracting film in such a way that the building itself and the problems: what Zen Buddhism describes as ‘Wha Du (in Korean, Gong An in Chinese)’. This might have given me the consistency and atmosphere within it became a colourful wrapping, a type of bottari.

At the same time Kimsooja has expanded such interests beyond long breath in my career.” She’s referring to the practice in which her own cultural inheritance in works like the ongoing Thread Routes a story, statement or question is used to provoke a crisis of doubt in (2010–), a series of videos inspired after witnessing traditional lace- the mind of a student of Zen on their pathway to enlightenment. making in Bruges in 2002. Taking the performative elements of local And perhaps nowhere in her work is such a crisis evoked more than textile cultures as its subject, the first focuses on Peruvian weaving and in the video series A Needle Woman (1999–2001). In it the artist, clad the relationship it has with issues of tradition, gender, historic and in grey, is recorded, standing motionless, her back to camera, generally against the flow of traffic, in some of the vernacular architecture, and local landscapes. above Thread Routes – Chapter ii (still), 2011, Further chapters have explored European, busiest pedestrian junctions in some of the most single-channel video, 16mm film transferred to hd video, 23 min 40 sec. Courtesy the artist Indian, Chinese, Native American and Moroccan densely populated metropolises in the world

Summer 2020

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Cities on the Move – 2727 Kilometers Bottari Truck (still), 1997, single-channel video, 7 min 3 sec, loop. Courtesy the artist

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ArtReview Asia

A Needle Woman (stills), 1999–2001, eight-channel video, 6 min 33 sec, loop. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2020

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above Archive of Mind, 2016 (installation view, mmca, Seoul). Photo: Jeon Byung-Cheol.

Courtesy the artist, mmca, Seoul, and Hyundai Motor Co

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facing page Sowing into Painting, 2020, two planted varieties of flaxseed at WanĂĽs Konst, Sweden. Photo: Mattias Givell.

Courtesy the artist and WanĂĽs Konst, Sweden

ArtReview Asia

(Shanghai, Tokyo, Mexico City and Delhi). It’s a work that explores exceptions. “In museum spaces,” she writes, “I used fans, lights, and the ways in which losing yourself is linked to finding yourself, about sounds to give a vibration to it and bring sensation to the audiences as the individual and the collective, and one that has added resonance they encounter the persona of the fabrics. When situated within nature, now that crowds are a source of added fear. The last is something the such as Wanås sculpture park [the Swedish foundation is located in Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti described as ‘the touch of a natural landscape], the wind, light, cast shadows of trees, and bird the unknown’ in his 1960 analysis of relations between the self and sounds paint the laundered bedcovers and evoke the memories and others, Crowds and Power. Although one of Canetti’s assertions – ‘It poetics of the bedcovers. I find A Laundry Field installed at Wanås sculpis only in a crowd that a man can become free of this fear of being ture park gives an experience that blurs the boundary between daily touched. That is the only situation in which fear turns into its oppo- life and the museum context that maximises the audience’s imagination and experience.” Reading this, it’s hard not to think of the new site’ – is looking a bit shaky right now.

“Artists often discover the art in daily life,” the artist writes, “and work as an attack on the exceptionalism of the museum context. bring daily life to the museum to contextualise it within art history.”

In that, the exhibition at Wanås, titled Sowing into Painting, goes a little further than other works by Indeed, even before the intrusions of Kimsooja. It traces a circle through her urinals and readymades and the age The more Kimsooja has sought of modern art museums, attempts varied output (it contains chapters one, to introduce the ordinary, the more her by the authors of poetry (whether two and four of Thread Routes, a series work is celebrated as extraordinary of the Deductive Objects (1993–2020), visual or written) to engage with the Meta-Painting (2020, which comprises unauthored poetics of everyday life have enjoyed a rich history, not least in painting, and works by Joseon stretched and frame linen canvases as well as bottaris made of linen artists such as Danwon, or the seventeenth-century Dutch masters. canvas and used clothes) and To Breathe (2020, an evolution of the work Yet on the site of the museum there is often a question about what – shown in Madrid). And it traces a circle through the manufacture between daily life and art history – is contextualising or responding of painting in the title work Sowing into Painting, a field sown with to what. And an anxiety about whether it is the artworks in a museum two types of flax that are harvested to produce canvas and other or the circumstances of lived experience that gets audiences closer to fabrics as well as the linseed oil that is classically used as a binding truths about the world. All of which responds to a more general para- agent in Western painting. It returns the exceptional to the normal, noia that what enters the museum is removed from lived life. And culture to nature, and a life observed (not least in the types of paintperhaps it’s a paradox of museum culture for artists like Kimsooja ings of ‘everyday’ life that populate museums and other archives) that the more she has sought to introduce the ordinary, the more her to a life lived. ara work is celebrated as extraordinary.

As we discuss A Laundry Field, Kimsooja explains that her works Kimsooja’s exhibition Sowing into Painting is on show at Wanås Konst, have been shown mostly within the museum context, but for a few Sweden, until 1 November

Summer 2020

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Xyza Cruz Bacani

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The Bystanders, 2019

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What does it mean to be a Hong Konger? In the past years, this has become a glaring question. Does being a Hong Konger mean to be a pro-government or antigovernment?

I have been in love with Hong Kong since 2006. It is where I found my love for photography and it is where I have developed a relationship with a complex city that I still call home after 14 years. It is where I found the strength to document the historic events that I might not be part of, just an observer with a camera.

In a city divided by scenes of violence and info wars, whose side are we on?

In between these two sides are the bystanders, the people who are caught in between. Photographing the protest since 2014, I’ve turned my lens to bystanders watching the revolution unfold. At first glance they seem to be just watching with their phones, recording everything, but these people have played an important role. They became citizen journalists, and continue to live and hold on in Hong Kong, even when the world says that the city is burning. They often end up as casualties as well, with the teargas not choosing its victims.

The act of documenting the city I love is a heartbreaking experience. I remember the smell of teargas in 2014, and last year was no different. The sight of the orange tinge of sunset, softened by smog. The warmth of the blue gas that stings when it touches your skin, and the agonising smell of teargas that I can taste in my mouth. It’s almost reliving the 79 days of the Umbrella Revolution, but we can all sense the urgency, we can taste the violence and we can hear Hong Kong sing its glory. The heartache also brings hope. That despite all the heartache, the courage and energy of the Hong Kong people, especially the youth, is contagious, and we can all learn from them. I will never know what side the bystanders are with, as I failed to ask them, but do we need to choose sides?

Or do we all need to take a stand together, for the city we call home?

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Tuan Andrew Nguyen Death and memory haunt a postapocalyptic landscape in the artist’s latest film, The Boat People

by Mark Rappolt

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“If you could talk to your ancestors and old people, what would peoples were six times more likely to commit suicide than nonAboriginal peoples; 80 percent of those who committed suicide in you say?”

“I’d ask them about how they grew up in the desert and how 2011 were aged between eighteen and twenty-four) have taken their they lived out there, and ask them about all the old stories about the toll, often have no memory. “I didn’t know we came from the desert,” country and all the old songs and the meanings behind the songs and says another interviewee. “See, I grew up in a town.” the stories.”

Nguyen’s film goes on to trace the often-fragile operations of That’s a conversation between two generations of the Ngurrara memory and belonging, and their opposites, and to explore the ways people that comes near the beginning of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s in which a country and a culture might be recovered, rebuilt and 35-minute film We Were Lost in Our Country (2019), which made its reclaimed. And, of course, it’s about the role that art – both his own debut at last year’s inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial. The and that of the Ngurrara Canvas painters – can play in making these film revolves around the creation of the Ngurrara Canvas ii (1997), a col- things visible. “To people it may look as if it’s a piece of very good art,” says one of the Ngurrara people, laborative artwork made by Ngurrara “but it is also more than a painting, Elders that functions as a map, made In some respects The Boat People, which from memory, of the territories, in it’s our life.” made its debut in New York just as the what is now known as the Great Nguyen was born in Sài Gòn city shut down due to the pandemic, is Sandy Desert, that had been taken (as it was then named), grew up from their peoples, and from which and studied in the us (graduating a follow-up to We Were Lost in Our Country they had largely been displaced, with an mfa from Cal Arts) and is during the extended colonisation of Australia. “Crown land?” one currently based back in Ho Chi Minh City. In some respects, his latest of the Aboriginal interviewees says at one point during the film. film, The Boat People, which made its debut at James Cohan gallery in “The Queen never fucking walked round here.” The painting was New York this March, shortly before the gallery and the rest of the subsequently used as evidence in a successful Native Title claim that city shut down as a result of the covid-19 pandemic, is a follow-up restored the territory to the Ngurrara people ten years later. (Ngurrara to We Were Lost in Our Country. Created as part of a residency at Bellas means ‘country’ in Walmajarri.) But it’s a territory about which Artes Projects in Bataan, a province on the Philippine island of younger generations, on whom a lifetime of displacement, poverty, Luzon, it brings together a collection of existing ruins, monuments, alcoholism and suicide (in 2014 it was reported that Aboriginal museum displays and memorials from the area and asks what they

preceding pages and above The Boat People (stills), 2020, single-channel video, 4k, Super 16mm transferred to digital, colour, 5.1 surround sound. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York

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Mile 00 Everywhere OR Replica of Bataan Death March Marker Mile 00, 2019, hand-carved gmelina wood, 151 × 42 ×42 cm. Photo: Dan Bradica. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York

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might tell future generations. In it, a group of five young children, Buddhas, a broken-fingered Guan Yin and numerous statues of possibly the last survivors of the human race, sail the world looking the Virgin Mary littering the landscape. And a lifesize monument for objects that might tell them about a world that has been lost to Pope John Paul II commemorating his visit to the refugee centre in the wake of an unspecified cataclysm. What they find, when they in 1981, unveiled shortly after his canonisation in 2011. During the come ashore in Bataan are commemorations of migration, death and mid-1990s the Philippine government designated Morong a special variously framed promises of an afterlife. A place where past, present economic zone and founded the Bataan Technology Park as they tried to reclaim the former processing centre from the jungle. But and future are one.

The children arrive on the island dressed in the kind of home- the context surrounding the sculptures, temples and monuments made costumes that are reminiscent of postapocalyptic movies are something of which the children and the viewers who follow such as Mad Max (1979) or Waterworld them are unaware.

(1995). In a line that could have come They pass street signs – Plutonium Their leader, the only girl straight out of We Were Lost in Our Avenue, Krypton Street – from the in the group, explains that they Country, their leader, the only girl Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, the are “seeking the stories of our in the group, explains that they are controversial construction of which “seeking the stories of our ancestors, began in 1976 and was abandoned, ancestors, of who we once were” after completion (at a cost of more of who we once were”.

They enter the Philippine Refugee Processing Center, near than $2.3 billion) but before fuelling, in 1986, following the overMorong, which opened in 1980 to prepare refugees from Cambodia, throw of President Ferdinand Marcos and the Chernobyl nuclear Laos and Vietnam for life in Europe, North America and Australia, disaster. Among other things, the plant has been mired in corruption and was gradually abandoned during the early 1990s due to a lack claims, was built near a geological fault line and what was thought to of funding and a decline in refugees. They pass a broken memo- be a dormant volcano, Mount Pinatubo, which erupted in 1991. Plans rial constructed by Lao refugees in 1988, a Khmer monument in to revive the plant are ongoing. But while the street signs may express the form of an overgrown miniature Angkor Wat marking the elements of Bataan’s past, present and future, here the signs, like the four cardinal points and crumbing reconstructions of the twelfth- monuments, merely add to the postapocalyptic feel. It’s a set for a century Bayon face-towers from Angkor Thom. There are seated movie that no one can quite recall.

preceding pages A Lotus in a Sea of Fire, 2020, pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper, 69 × 122 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York

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“I’ve found many places,” says the girl as the group passes, by boat, is also home to a lot of graves. As the monuments and memorials pile through a system of canals that evoke Venice. It’s not clear whether up, it becomes hard to untangle them all, to trace a single particular she means just here or while voyaging around the world. The canals heritage, other than death. Even for those who know the history of are part of Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar (where the Belles Artes resi- this place. The memorials collectively grow but are singly incomplete. dency is located), a 400-hectare heritage resort in Bataan. They linger At a certain point the girl comes across the head of a statue lying on at the Mount Samat National Shrine, the site of the last stronghold of a sandy beach and begins to converse with it. She is speaking Tagalog, Philippine and us forces during the 1942 Battle of Bataan before they and the head, oscillating between its carved-wood state and that of surrendered to the Japanese, marking the largest single surrender an actual human head, as if flickering in and out of life, is speaking of soldiers in us history. Although the us preferred to remember the English. As if to suggest that monuments need people and can neither events surrounding and following the stand alone or completely in their place. The conversation drifts into defeat rather differently, as a glorious As the monuments and memorials existential territory and, prompted tale of redemption and liberation in pile up, it becomes hard to untangle the form of a 1945 John Wayne vehicle by the girl, the head, which resembles them all, to trace a single particular titled Back to Bataan. They pass a that of a Buddha, describes its function: “I’m at the service of human memorial to the Bataan Death March, heritage, other than death memory, a stand-in for someone, during which 500–650 us and 5,000– 18,000 Filipino prisoners are estimated to have died. It looks like little that in turn was a stand-in for something else.” As the conversations more than a mile marker. Part of a bewildering landscape that remem- turn to the nature of gods (a human invention), it goes on to expand bers the invasions, incursions and forced migration of people from “Unlike humans, I was made to serve a purpose, but I am also dead.” other lands. Whose museum displays include Japanese and guerrilla The girl explains that the boat people don’t take the objects they find, armaments, a fishing boat that crashed onto the shore of Bataan in but recreate them in wood in order to burn them, “to set them free”.

1981, carrying 65 Vietnamese men, women and children, a reconstruc- As if memory can be both a trap and a release. ‘I wonder if we are stuck tion of the processing centre’s prison (dubbed ‘The Monkey House’) in bad movie plots we make ourselves,’ wrote Filipina novelist Gina and traces of the English lessons it used to provide to its residents Apostol in Insurrecto, a 2018 novel about history and its reenactment in (among them a sign reading, ‘I’m Sorry I Can’t Cash Your Check’). It her native country. The girl, it seems, agrees. ara

facing page and above The Boat People (stills), 2020, single-channel video, 4k, Super 16mm transferred to digital, colour, 5.1 surround sound. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York

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Fear and Laughter in Hong Kong The embattled island’s horror-comedy-Kungfu flicks reveal both a sense of humour and a statement of intent

by Fi Churchman

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Mr. Vampire is a classic Hong Kong horror comedy set in Republican-era flick to become a standard of Hong Kong cinema. Directed by Lau China. Released in 1985, it launched the career of director Ricky Lau, and produced by Sammo Hung, Mr. Vampire (rereleased this year on who by the early 1990s had produced four sequels, and sparked a slew Blu-ray) nods to Seven Golden Vampires and Encounters of the Spooky Kind of other similarly themed productions out of the then-British colony. (directed by Hung, 1980), blending Kungfu sequences with mo lei tau, In the opening scene, Man-choi, a student of Taoist priest Master Kau, a type of slapstick humour developed in Hong Kong film and tv lights a bundle of joss sticks inside a funeral home. “Dinner’s ready!” during the 1970s. he shouts in Cantonese, and proceeds to offer it to a line of standing In an instance of the latter, the main character of Encounters… corpses dressed in the robes of Qing dynasty officials. The corpses, made is instructed to throw chicken eggs at the vampire to ward him off, compliant by paper talismans stuck to their foreheads, are ‘customers’ but an egg-seller adds duck eggs to the basket, which fail to do the of another priest. The flame of an oil lamp flickers, the corpses quiver. trick. In Mr. Vampire, Chau-sang is told to fetch lo mai (glutinous rice, Man-choi steadies the flame and they fall still. He turns to ‘feed’ other which counteracts vampire venom), only for the rice-seller to spot a customers who are enclosed within coffins, jamming a few joss sticks profit and cut the bag with ordinary rice. Such apotropaics, while used into the joints of each traditional-style casket. One of the coffins spits for comedic effect, also parody Western vampire films in which garlic out its incense. He pries open the lid and, to his horror, a pale hand is used to repel the creatures. While references to the protective qualishoots out and grasps at Man-choi, causing him to fall. Meanwhile his ties of garlic and other pungent ingredients can be traced back to ancient folk traditions and early-Abrahamic attacker jumps from the coffin and scuttles The flame of an oil lamp flickers, religions from around the world, the use out of view. Man-choi grabs a bagua mirror of garlic was popularised by Stoker’s ninefrom the wall and turns to see a vampire – its the corpses quiver. Man-choi teenth-century Dracula, whose gaunt, pale trademark snarl revealing its fangs, its hands steadies the flame and they fall and sexualised depiction would become raised and fingers curled into claws – that still. He pries open a coffin lid canonical of the vampire genre. But these he attempts to ward off with the octagonframed amulet. In the ensuing scuffle the are not Western vampires. These are geongsi. and a pale hand shoots out… oil lamp is knocked over and the talismans Commonly translated as ‘Chinese hopflutter from the standing corpses. Unnoticed, they begin to hop. ping vampires’, but actually meaning ‘stiff corpses’, geongsi (jiangshi As the vampire corners Man-choi, the soundtrack reaches a climax, in Mandarin) are more akin to the revenants found in classical Chinese his hands close around the student’s neck, he chomps down, and literature, most notably in Qing dynasty writer Pu Songling’s Strange then… his teeth fall out. It’s Chau-sang. Master Kau’s other student. Stories from a Chinese Studio (1740), a collection of supernatural tales.

“Don’t be so scared,” he says, laughing. But the corpses close in.

Indeed, it has been noted that Mr. Vampire takes inspiration from these The Hong Kong film industry has been responsible for its fair share stories, and perhaps more specifically from ‘The Resuscitated Corpse’, of vampire movies, starting in 1936 with Yeung Kung-leung’s Midnight in which the corpse of a woman attacks a group of travellers, one Vampire (just five years after Universal’s Dracula hit Hollywood as the of whom escapes by holding his breath so she can’t hear him breathe first licensed cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel). While (an escape tactic also deployed by the characters in Mr. Vampire), and The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1972), coproduced by British the tale of ‘Miss Lien-Hsiang’, which is mirrored in the side story horror specialists Hammer Film Productions and Hong Kong’s The of Chau-sang being seduced by a female ghost named Siu Juk (or Jade).

Shaw Brothers, who popularised the Kungfu genre, was, according The concept of reanimated corpses comes from the tradition of ‘corpse to its tagline, ‘The first martial arts horror spectacular ever filmed!’, driving’. The population of China exploded during the Qing dynasty, it would take until the mid-1980s for the horror-comedy-Kungfu between 1700 and 1850, growing from 150 to 450 million people,

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which, coupled with the geographical expansion of the empire, meant tity and their future were sparked by Margaret Thatcher’s 1982 visit that people often worked and died far from their hometowns. Taoist to discuss the reunification. priests would be charged with transporting the bodies back to their The geongsi genre hybridises Western vampire and Chinese revetowns and villages, and so popular stories emerged that the priests nant lore, hopping between the cultures by recalling the vampire’s would reanimate the corpses and, using talismans to control their popularity as a Western analogy for crisis (particularly in relation to plagues and epidemics, a reference that perhaps finds echoes in the movements, help them hop their way home.

That the geongsi costume adopted in Hong Kong cinema is derived current Covid-19 pandemic, which purportedly originated in bats) from the Qing dynasty is less a reference to the era in which Pu and Chinese practices of filial piety. Geongsi films, however, also make Songling’s stories were written than a motif reflecting the anti-Qing a habit of poking fun at tradition. sentiment that resulted in the overthrow of the dynasty in 1912 and In Mr. Vampire, Master Kau meets with Mr. Yam, a rich businessman the establishment of the Republic of China. Which also heralded the who is looking to disinter his father and rebury him in a more auspireturn to power of the Han Chinese. The Qing dynasty, established by cious plot in order to attract even more wealth to his family. Yam the Manchurians of now northwestern China and known for its sub- insists that the existing plot is a good one, but Yam deduces from the jugation of the Han people, were considered oppressors. For the size of the grave that something might be wrong. “We’ll bury him the Republic (and later the People’s Republic correct way,” he says, frowning, which then The geongsi genre hybridises of China), then, the geongsi represented prompts some quick Cantonese wordplay a monstrous manifestation of that impewherein Man-choi sidles up to Kau, asking, Western vampire and Chinese rial rulership that consumed the spirit “What’s the French way?” Kau rebukes him revenant lore, hopping between with something that roughly translates to of its people. But the geongsi of Hong Kong a Western analogy for crisis and “I’ll punish your head!” In another example cinema is a creature trapped in limbo, a hybrid stuck not just between two states of mo lei tau, puns are frequently employed Chinese practices of filial piety – living and dead – but also metaphoriin this film, but the nuances in tonal differcally, with the Handover imminent, between two ideologies: that of ence are lost in the subtitles. The coffin, it turns out, is buried vertithe British Overseas Territory and the prc. cally instead of laid flat. Bad burial equals bad vampire.

While the reference to anti-Qing attitudes might have directly Geongsi films, as a hybridisation of cultures, occupied a specific appealed to Mainland Chinese audiences (as it certainly did to position within the Hong Kong film industry’s history of forging Taiwanese fans), strict film censorship inaugurated during the its twentieth-century identity. Against the backdrop of its complex Republic of China and continued by the prc after 1949 meant historical relationship with Britain and Mainland China, the genre that films produced on the Mainland that included supernatural was less about defining what was and is uniquely ‘Hong Kong’ and superstitious elements, as well as those in the wuxia genre (which appeared shortly after as romanticised and nostalgia-fuelled (which depicted martial arts heroes of the flying kind, believed to depictions in Wong Kar-wai’s dramas, produced on the cusp of reuniinstil rebellious instincts among audiences), were banned outside fication and thereafter) as it was about claiming autonomy over its Hong Kong. One can’t help but consider whether the conflation mixed heritage. With tongue firmly in cheek. History, one might say, of horror, Kungfu and comedy (particularly of the irreverent kind) has a way of coming back to bite. ara in geongsi films reflected local sentiment during the decade in which Hong Kongers’ anxieties about the Handover, local idenMr. Vampire is being rereleased in July on Blu-ray, by Eureka Entertainment

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all images Mr. Vampire, dir Ricky Lau, 1985, 96 min

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Censorship and Pandemic in the Philippines

by Marv Recinto

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On 5 May, the Philippines’ National Telecommunications Commis- established checkpoints at entrances to Manila, halted public transsion ordered abs-cbn off the air. Amid the global covid-19 pandemic portation and imposed an 8pm–5am curfew. He dubbed this measure millions of Filipinos were left without access to the vital information ‘Enhanced Community Quarantine’, which was largely viewed by the broadcasts on television and radio from the country’s largest media public as a necessary action. But when abs-cbn was silenced, critics conglomerate. (abs-cbn web platforms were not covered by the order, viewed the action as personal rather than civic: Duterte’s animosity and at the time of writing are still operating.) The shock of the chan- towards the network can be traced to the 2016 presidential election, nel’s closure prompted Filipino artists – both young and those who during which abs-cbn refused to air his ad campaigns; after his eleclived through Ferdinand Marcos’s military dictatorship – to accuse tion to office, the network maintained critical coverage of his deadly Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s government of censorship war on drugs. Last December the president warned the broadcaster, and exploiting the health crisis for political gain. Artist and chairman “Your franchise will end next year. If you expect it to be renewed, of Concerned Artists of the Philippines (cap) Leonilo ‘Neil’ Doloricon I’m sorry. I will see to it that you’re out.” publicly stated that the manoeuvre, the most recent in an ongoing During the pandemic, Neil Doloricon, who in addition to his work confrontation between Duterte and abs-cbn, goes beyond the threat with cap is a founding member of Kaisahan, has continuously posted to press freedom: ‘It also poses a serious threat to the independence new prints and digital cartoons to his Facebook page. Though the of cultural institutions, including the mass media, where artists and means by which he exhibits his practice have changed over the past cultural workers are supposed to enjoy creative expression free of state 45 years, there are significant consistencies in the work itself, which, along with the artist’s other activities, intimidation. What this shows is that the are worth examining in the light of this Duterte regime is not only dead set at new era of governmental overreach. controlling the flow of information but On 6 April Doloricon posted Pila (Queue), also culture and the arts.’ Indeed, echoes a linocut print that harkens back to his of historic artistic suppression are reversocial-realist roots. Five rows of indiberating within the community, triggering national trauma from the violence vidual men and women are crammed into and oppression of the Marcos era. the image, with each section of the queue This is the second time the network facing a different side of the frame. Four has been forced off the air, the first being ominous figures stand in the background, in 1972 when Marcos declared martial holding machine guns and surveying law. His first Letter of Instruction, issued the scene before them. Each civilian has that September, directed officials to requidonned the mandatory facemask, yet they sition privately owned newspapers, magare so tightly packed that their bodies azines, radio stations, television facilinearly touch – too close to abide by socialties and all other news media – effecdistancing guidelines. Figural repetition tively imposing blanket censorship in an is a motif of Doloricon’s oeuvre – in his attempt to prevent the dissemination of 1981 painting Welga (Strike), featuring a typically social-realist aesthetic, six male antigovernment views. The Marcos-allied jeepney drivers are huddled over a newsmedia company Kanlaon Broadcasting Systems occupied and broadcast from print collage filled with headlines about abs-cbn facilities until its reclamation strike action, over which the artist has boldly painted, in blood-red, a Tagalog during the 1986 People Power Revolution.

As the realities of martial law settled over text by writer and labour leader Amado V. the country in 1972, the visual arts community initially went quiet, Hernandez that repeats the word ‘Welga’ twice. The leftmost member with many of its members fearing for their lives. A few arts-activist of the group raises his right fist to claim the viewer’s attention, while groups began to form by the late 1970s and explore forms of artistic the rightmost member, his head bandaged, stretches his arm out resilience. Kaisahan (Solidarity), a group of social-realists that had across his companions to point an accusatory finger at something banded together in 1976, was committed to putting up political resist- off-canvas. The only one among the group who looks out to acknowlance and forging a national identity while also depicting the true edge the viewer seems to be standing behind the others, little more conditions of society and democratising art. By the early 1980s, orga- than a head gazing unsettlingly from between other bodies. What is nisations opposing the dictatorship, such as cap (formed in 1983), clear from comparing these artworks is that Doloricon has retained began to surge and mobilise campaigns against the government. a visual style. The angular features of Welga’s figures are present in In 1986, the peaceful protest of the People Power Revolution finally the artist’s latest group of prints. Such aesthetic consistency demonstrates his desire to uphold the original intentions of the social realoverthrew the Marcos regime.

The covid-19 quarantine began in Manila on 15 March and was ists: to reflect the present conditions of the country and unify the populace. And yet, where Welga exudes rebellious subsequently expanded to the rest of the country, preceding pages Neil Doloricon, Pila, fervour, Pila appears Kafkaesque – an incredulous with some of the toughest restrictions in Asia.

2020, relief print, 40 × 61 cm In addition to implementing who-mandated reaction to the Philippines’ current reality. above Neil Doloricon, social-distancing guidelines, Duterte closed all Meanwhile, Green Papaya Art Projects, an art enhanced community quarantine, 2020, airports in Luzon (the Philippines’ largest island), collective and Manila’s oldest artist-run space, relief print, 12 × 16 cm

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above Neil Doloricon, Welga, 1981, acrylic on collage newspaper and canvas Works by Neil Doloricon are courtesy the artist and Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila

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is commemorating its 20th anniversary with a series of 20 black- As it happens, an accidental fire ripped through Green Papaya on 3 June, and-white posters that reflect upon the Philippines’ response to magnifying an obvious purpose for social media as a digital record. the pandemic, among them one that reads, ‘a lockdown is not (The collective was in the midst of digitising its extensive catalogue martial law. no to fascism.’ Norberto ‘Peewee’ Roldan, cofounder of ephemera for Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive, following the Manilaof Green Papaya, is notably the former creative director of abs-cbn based organisation’s decision to close its doors in 2021.) Green Papaya (1994–98; 2002–07). The posters are created digitally, printed, then shared the devastating news on its Facebook page, opening with an uploaded and shared via Facebook and Instagram. Each mechanical update on the Philippines’ current crisis and including an apology to lag made by the printer is visible in the skips on the black-ink back- all the artists who had entrusted their materials to the archive. ‘We are ground, endowing them with a temporal specificity. When quar- safe for now,’ the post ends. ‘But the house is still burning.’ The double antine restrictions are lifted, Green Papaya intends to print a bill- entendre haunts the reader, ensuring the artistic community’s brief board-format zine and produce a limited edition of the posters. sigh of relief while still bracing for further disaster.

The first reads ‘death is a portal’, At the time of writing, the Philipbased on Arundhati Roy’s recent essay The actual nuber of covid-19-related pine government is in the midst of ‘The Pandemic Is a Portal’, in which Roy fatalities in the archipelago is presently approving an antiterrorism bill that grants the government extensive powreflects on the Indian government’s undetermined, but over 30,000 ers to detain suspected terrorists response to the pandemic – emphasising how the health crisis has revealed Philippine citizens have been arrested without arrest warrants. Critics have denounced the bill as another move both the country’s social inequalities and an opportunity for reform. Green Papaya’s modified declaration, to silence dissent, infringing the 1987 Constitution’s Article iii, ‘death is a portal’, goes beyond the indexical suggestions of pandemic which protects free speech that largely manifests today online in a to its undeniable consequence – death. On one hand, the axiom refers country ranked the heaviest internet users in the world (97 percent to the casualties claimed by the disease; on the other, it marks the of Filipinos online have a Facebook account, according to Bloomberg). augmented number of deaths from the Philippines’ militant conduct Already prior to the bill’s passing, private citizens, among them a salesman, a teacher and a writer, had been arrested as a result of their and lack of preparedness.

The actual number of covid-19-related fatalities in the archi- social-media posts. When news broke the government was expediting pelago is presently undetermined, but over 30,000 Philippine citizens the antiterrorism bill, activists found ways around the internet’s have been arrested for violating lockdown restrictions. On the day of authorial risk – augmented by the tyranny of martial censorship – abs-cbn’s broadcast cessation, Green Papaya shared another poster: through the use of vpns and fake email addresses. But these acts of ‘shutting down a major broadcasting network during digital guerrilla warfare have been met with an unsettling response: a pandemic is madness. it is a disservice to the filipino.’ thousands of fake Facebook accounts stealing the names of journalWhile many of the posters take poetic tones, this one exudes urgency ists and students to send threatening messages. Though social media and fury. During the 1970s, after martial law was first imposed, visual has been the primary means of communication and protest during ephemera such as protest graffiti, wall periodicals and sticker-posters the pandemic, many commentators have pointed to the internet as were disseminated discreetly, as Jose Maria Sison, founding chairman essential to Duterte’s presidential election victory, whose campaign of the Communist Party of the Philippines, recalls in his 2015 essay organised groups according to geographic zone (including one for ‘Revolutionary Literature and Art in the Philippines: From the 1960s overseas workers) to distribute daily campaign messages and propto the Present’. However, as this oppression continued into the 80s, aganda presented as news on real and inauthentic accounts across rage swelled against the government social media. and protest visuals erupted into mass The internet has always been an The internet has always been an movements. A 1985 poster-work by the ideological battleground but the closure ideological battleground, but the cloartist Anna Fer, Oppose State Terrorism, sure of abs-cbn and passing of the of abs-cbn and the passing of the antiterrorism bill elevate the stakes in was created towards the end of Marcos’s a country where the additional threat reign, as the public seethed in response antiterrorism bill elevate the stakes to his demand for a snap election. Here, of government intervention looms over around a central image of flames, Fer depicts scenes of violence against that posed by the pandemic. Still, within these respective artmakers’ civilians. With the country again confronting tyranny, Green Papaya’s bodies of quarantine works are the prevailing sense of solidarity and posters acknowledge past visuals of dissent but forgo imagery, taking nationalism – ideologies that have previously facilitated the country’s instead a simple and stark graphic approach that suggests a primary historic liberation from oppressive powers. In Doloricon’s Pila, civilurgency to respond to current events and invigorate the viewer ians outnumber the armed authorities, just as Green Papaya’s posters plainly take the side of the Filipino people against various adversarial against injustice.

The primary aim with Doloricon’s and Green Papaya’s quarantine forces. While confronting the challenges at hand, these artists mainworks seems to be widespread digital distribution, given that – for tain glimmers of hope for their country. The final poster in Green many – social media has become the sole means of news and commu- Papaya’s pandemic series once again quotes Roy: ‘it is a portal, nication beyond one’s immediate surroundings. a gateway between one world and the next. facing page Artists can find a haven and permanence here we can choose to walk through it…’ ara Nos 1 and 5–7 in the Green Papaya (though with this permanence comes the risk series of 20th anniversary posters. of unwanted government attention; see below). Courtesy Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila Marv Recinto is a writer based in New York

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Latiff Mohidin Pago Pago National Gallery Singapore 27 March – 27 September ‘Pago Pago’ is a term coined by Malaysian artist-poet Latiff Mohidin during the late 1950s to describe the cosmopolitan yet regionally rooted spirit with which he made art. For the next decade or so, as he travelled through Southeast Asia, his style coalesced around a signature motif – paintings showing one or more columns whose details are inspired by plant life and architecture. This exhibition, which features over 80 artworks as well as texts and archival documents, explores Pago Pago’s incarnations over the years. It positions Pago Pago as a Southeast Asian brand of modernism, described by the curators as ‘a way of thinking and working that sought to challenge the dominance of Western modernism at that time’.

Rehabilitating Asian modernisms into global art-history, as well as discovering intraregional connections, are pet projects at the National Gallery Singapore. Indeed, elements of Latiff’s work fit into such a narrative, as there is some decolonial pushback to his art, especially after his exposure to European modernart movements in Germany, where he studied during the 1960s. One of his driving questions was, ‘How does one advance the mediums of painting, drawing and writing to suit local milieus outside Europe and America?’ A sense of friendly regionalism is also present, given his acquaintances with other Southeast Asian artists. No doubt, the ‘sea modernism’ angle on Pago Pago is a worthy one, but it is not the only story to be told. What strikes me more forcefully about Pago Pago is that it is a sustained feat of self-fashioning. Pago Pago is less a neatly conceived series than a snowballing of ideas and experiences of a young man moving through the world, and a project driven by an eccentric but compelling personal philosophy, as evidenced by the selection of Latiff’s writing on display.

Born in 1941, in Seremban, Malaysia, and displaying talent from a young age, Latiff gained a scholarship to study art at the Hochschule für

Bildende Künste in West Berlin in his late teens.

There he was exposed to art movements like Cubism and Futurism, which imprinted on his paintings a bold, flat and graphic style.

His early poststudent works, such as Karam (Shipwreck, 1964), showing the capsized bows of tongkangs sticking out of the water like horns, demonstrate his predilection for curved shapes.

As he travelled through Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, that basic shape would take on other connotations – the ‘flying eaves’ of temples, the voluptuous outlines of apsaras, the tender buds of ginger roots and bamboo shoots.

The term Pago Pago came out of a fusion of East and West. During a visit to an ethnological museum in Berlin, he saw ancient artefacts from Asia and South America. One of his drawings of the displays is titled Pagoden (1961), German for pagodas. He dropped the ‘den’. As for the repeated ‘pago’, his Minangkabau roots come into play: the traditional houses of this community in West Sumatra are adorned with carvings called pagar pagar, pronounced as ‘pago pago’.

Pago Pago evolved with Latiff’s travels.

Generally, the works before 1965 include more recognisable totemic structures. They depict templelike buildings made up of stacked blocks rendered in cheerful pastels, as seen in Pagoda ii (1964), or a single grey brutalist tower in Pago Pago ii (1965). Or they could be weird monsters. provoke (1965) depicts a confrontation between three totems. Two have hooks and curved blades coming out of them, evoking complicated weaponry and ‘primitive’ art, motifs that could be drawn from his own cultural ancestry or a byproduct of his exposure to Western modernism – which speaks to the cheerful syncretism of his style. During the late 1960s the totems soften and open up into looser, sinuous forms, such as the arterial tubes intertwining in Two Standing Figures (1968) and the juicy stems crisscrossing in Tropical Growth (1968).

facing page, top Pagoda ii, 1964, oil on canvas, 99 × 99 cm.

Courtesy National Gallery Singapore

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Besides the art, another pleasure of the show is encountering Latiff’s writing, abstracted and printed on the wall texts, not least for its insights into his paintings.

After his visit to Angkor Wat, where many of the temples have tree roots growing out of walls, he noted two basic forces in the world: ‘One is the venture of man, ever desiring to claim the sky. The other God’s own creation, ever spreading, establishing, sinking deep into the ground (looking for water).’ This war between the up and down, civilisation and nature, can be seen in his sketches of the Angkor temples, but they also reflect a general quality in his Pago Pago paintings: their lively sense of movement and an interplay between the manmade and the organic.

Part of the exhibition attempts to map Pago Pago’s evolution alongside historical events.

Malam Merah (Red Night) (1968), which features angry brushstrokes and a central subject being riven against a red background, was allegedly inspired by his experiences travelling through Northern Thailand during the Vietnam War. But as with most art, while external events may shape the output, an inner logic is probably also at work. Take the ending of the series: Latiff puts the date at 1969, the year Sino-Malay riots broke out in Kuala Lumpur, on 13 May. It is also the year he went to study printmaking at Pratt Institute in New York. ‘Some say Pago Pago froze in America,’ he writes. ‘Maybe. But I knew something else was emerging.’ The last painting in the show, Untitled (Neo Pago Pago) (1971), can be read as a transition work. It still has the central subject, this time suggestive of a figure holding an easel and wearing a tie.

But the edges are smooth, with none of the serrated contours of the early works, and the clean, flat colouration has a sense of stillness.

The palette of sand, red and turquoise is warm and sun-drenched – the effect of light from a different place. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom provoke, 1965, oil on board, 90 × 120 cm.

Courtesy the artist and National Gallery Singapore

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Day Whatever Notes on the self and others, from a state of suspended animation I find that now, as much as my attention has turned to the profound, it has also turned to the trivial. I was going to talk here about following Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems – the mathematical proof that some things cannot be proved. And proof, of course, has a relation to truth. I’ve been reading about and around the theorems this past week. Distracted as much by details relating to the Austrian’s appalling life (it made me feel better) as by any of his mathematical or philosophical achievements (the idea was that they might make me feel better about facing the unknown). As a kind of therapy (obviously). It began with Janna Levin’s surprisingly good (surprising because the cover was so bad) A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. A novel that creates a relationship between Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, who in reality never actually met.

Although they were aware of each other’s theories. And the being aware but never meeting bit seemed appropriate to our times.

Things escalated in the Gödel direction from there. Thanks to Google. And people who upload pdfs of books. Reflections on Kurt Gödel, by Hao Wang, a collection of facts, notes and quotes, was particularly good among the latter. Wang, a logician, ‘was in close contact with Gödel in his last years’ (Gödel’s not Wang’s).

I learned that Gödel had ‘eaten mostly eggs’ when his wife took a trip back to Vienna in 1960, by which time the Gödels were living in Princeton. The notes for 1961 begin, ‘According to G… his health was exceptionally poor this year. I do not know what the health problems were.’ It’s in a section of the book titled ‘Facts’.

But really the most exciting thing that happened to me last week was a text from a friend sharing recipes posted online by the British bakery chain Greggs and the us fastfood joint McDonald’s, c/o The Daily Mail. I feel guilty saying that. Not the Daily Mail bit; the food bit. Kurt died of starvation for his art. Or science. Sometimes that line is fine. He weighed 29kg at the end. By then he would only eat food prepared by his wife.

Sausage, Bean & Cheese Melts and Sausage & Egg

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McMuffins were out. He had an obsessive fear of being poisoned. She had been hospitalised for several months when he died. He had stopped eating. So perhaps food excitement is a subconscious reaction. Although, clearly, it’s not subconscious anymore. That’s the price of writing things down: words make you tell lies.

Or maybe that’s an art-critic syndrome: always having to justify things. Or blame something.

I should point out that my period of social distancing, isolation or quarantine (I’m not sure what I’m practising at the moment) has become a period of jogging, eating healthily and keeping a disciplined routine of writing and editing.

And, while I like to think this is a choice (and congratulate myself for that), it might also be a perceived necessity (a subconscious result of the bombardment by various news channels and unsolicited emails telling me how to live – literally). At times this becomes a kind of Kurt Gödel as a student, 1925.

Courtesy Creative Commons

ArtReview Asia

mania – people promised me I would have time to read while stuck at home, and now I worry that I’m not reading enough. Not getting the ‘benefit’ of being stuck at home.

Consequently, I have subtracted one hour from my sleeping time. That hour is now reading time. Even though other hours in the day are also reading time. With additional periods of reading time for moments of stress. In fact, I’m probably reading a lot. I’m probably getting that so-called benefit. And more. This, I know, is a privileged position in which to be. Most people are probably in far worse positions than this.

Although perhaps I’m acknowledging that because I feel I have to and not because I mean it.

I worry that I’m developing a problem with empathy the longer I stay inside. I’m starting to treat unsolicited emails about solidarity ‘in these troubled times’ with a degree of cynicism that borders on hostility. They don’t really mean it: it’s form without substance, just a symptom of the hollow language of these times. And, while we’re at it, I’m clearly resorting to blaming my subconscious for decisions that are more conscious than I would care to believe.

Junkfood has previously been a guilty pleasure to be indulged in when abroad. Or when in a rush.

Or subject to a craving. Perhaps the truth is that I love it. But it’s never a product that should come near the homely hearth of health.

Is a Sausage & Egg McMuffin more healthy if I make it, knowing what went into it? Does following the recipe make it a Sausage & Egg McMuffin? Will I have taken the Mc out? Did McDonald’s deliberately leave something out of the recipe it supplied?

In any case, should I try to replicate or to improve? And, armed with my newfound Gödel knowledge, could I write a formula to get to the bottom of all that? But I’m supposed to be saving myself so that I can save the nhs. Eating a fry-up of eggs, burgerised sausages and cheese seems to run counter to that. It would definitely invalidate the jogging. So I’ve forwarded the recipe to other friends. As a gesture of solidarity.

In these troubled times. Mark Rappolt

Meditations in an Emergency ucca, Beijing 21 May – 30 August In some parts of the globe, it seems, one can prudently resume life in a post-covid-19 world.

In May, ucca Beijing opened its first show of 2020, Meditations in an Emergency, inviting viewers to ‘meditate’ here. Wearing masks makes me hear my breathing distinctly, and the rhythm already puts me into a premeditative state. In Taipei/Berlin-based artist Musquiqui Chihying’s three-channel videowork The Alp (2014), a single bed appears raised five metres up on a wooden frame, while an even taller streetlamp illuminates it. The bed (this time with a metal frame) is also present in the gallery, installed next to the video. In the video, a man suffering from insomnia attempts to sleep, and adopts a bed in three acts, each shown on a separate channel: first, on a mattress installed in a large chest freezer at a supermarket stacked with packaged food; then on the open land of a meadow under the Alps, where a rifle fitted with a bayonet hovers above him; and finally, he is seated on the bed, possibly in a stable, with a horse pacing around. Once something that busy metropolites had to fight for, peaceful sleeping time is now plentifully available to us – perhaps in an isolation ward or here, on this high bed. What is rare and what is in excess have been subverted during the pandemic, and the first part of the show, ‘The Fragile Everyday’, calls into question the obsession with normality or the attempt to bring back normal order of any kind.

In the second part, ‘Vital Signs’, we are forced to confront the biological signs of life – after all,

expensive ecmo machines, now frequently mentioned in the press, have become part of our everyday vocabulary. Such a machine’s purpose is to keep humans alive. Li Liao, however, wants to accomplish more in life than just breathing.

He takes it to the ironic extreme in his video To Be a Better Man (2019), in which he exercises his core muscles while reciting English every day. After a year his perfect six-pack abs are overlaid by the sound and text of his English reading, pounding (his abs and the superimposed text) in front of our eyes. The self-motived middle-class can do more than just breathe.

‘Beyond Animality’ and ‘Othered Movements’ reconsider the condition of interactions between humans and animals. Last Cat on Christmas Island (2016) charts Robert Renhui Zhao’s quasiphotographic documentary and quasi-sciencefictional annotations of his natural-research project, in response to the use of feral-cat trapping devices on the island. In the form of digital prints of variable sizes, he portrays the peculiar biological populations, natural phenomena and topographical landmarks of Christmas Island. Human habitation introduced many invasive species to the island, yet to protect the local ecology now, humans need to hunt down the very cats that they once ‘brought in’. What a paradox (but these days a far from uncommon one). Humans dictate the lifespan of a species, just because they can. Zhao’s matter-of-fact layout resembles a trusted scientific source.

It is a quiet work, and meditative.

Hsu Chia-Wei’s four-channel video installation Black and White – Malayan Tapir (2018) is nothing if not loud, both aurally and visually.

It is full of overlapping images, competing captions and encyclopaedic illustrations, yet is also reflective: even the naming of a species is an entanglement between politics, colonialist history and art-historical categorisation – all forms of human footprint. More familiar names like Wolfgang Tillmans, Pierre Huyghe, Mika Rottenberg, Zhang Hui, Zhang Peili and Yang Fudong also offer their angles on meditation.

In Section 5, ‘Out of Focus’, Tillmans’s 34 laser prints Time/Mirrored Installation Beijing (2020) is the newest iteration of his ‘Time/Mirrored’ series, made specifically for this exhibition.

Texts and images are printed with an ordinary office printer in A3 and A4 pages, and are affixed to the wall with tape. The smaller arrangements of this work accentuate the connections between images and texts, and even appear a little bit makeshift, perhaps resembling one of Tillmans’s thinking boards. But the texts he shares can also be astonishing: ‘Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech was 27 years prior to 1990. 27 years past 1990, Donald J Trump was sworn in as the President of the United States.’ The lightness of the papers and the weight of the stated facts offer another paradox. And these ‘mirrored’ historical events serve to recontextualise both the past and the present. Postquarantine (in Beijing for now), we meditate on meditations made by others during their quarantine. Sylvia Xue Bai

Mika Rottenberg, NoNoseKnows (50 Kilos variant), 2015, digital video, 21 min 58 sec.

Courtesy the artist and ucca, Beijing

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Tulapop Saenjaroen People on Sunday 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok 19 December – 26 April (online screening 6–28 June) ‘Leisure,’ wrote German philosopher Josef Pieper, is not the attitude of ‘someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go, and “go under”, almost as someone who falls asleep must let himself go.’ In the serene opening section of Tulapop Saenjaroen’s trifurcated videowork, someone tries to ‘go under’ but fails.

Birds chirp and cicadas drone as a young woman lies on a sun-dappled forest floor, one arm artfully arranged above her head. She is framed in meticulous repose, her body still, yet her eyes – refusing to sit still – tell us she is struggling to relax. The full minute that the camera lingers on this painterly scene is a chore, not a reverie.

And there’s more wooden am-dram where that came from. Soon she and three friends are sitting beside a stream in a Thai national park, randomly repeating hackneyed life-hacks between themselves: “Spend time with people important to you”; “Improve your abilities and knowledge”; “Set your weekly goals for future success”. This offbeat scene is followed by behind-the-scenes footage and a voiceover in which the actress explains that she feels “positive about” this “little vacation”-cum-film shoot, mainly because it is a chance to make “connections that might be useful in the future”.

The central conceit here – a reinterpretation, a response and a homage to Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer’s pioneering

silent film Menschen Am Sonntag (1930) – is very on the nose. In the original, the nonactors, a group of ordinary Berliners playing themselves, fritter and frolic away their weekend in parks and streets with libertine abandon and unselfconscious naturalism. By contrast, the mechanical performances in this making of a remake are a clear sendup of workaholism in these hypercompetitive, productivityfetishising times of ours. While the Berliners of the 1930s knew how to play at being at leisure in the wholly uncommodified and unmediated sense that Pieper so eloquently wrote about, Saenjaroen’s compulsively busy Bangkokians are too far gone. Real, replenishing downtime is so alien to these gigeconomy workers that, for them to pass as the titular people on Sunday, they need to be manhandled like props, given stock phrases or plonked in front of colour meditation videos.

As with A Room with a Coconut View (2018), his Thai Short Film and Video Festival-winning sideswipe at the Kingdom’s tourist marketingmachine, Saenjaroen’s episodic structure, mordant caricatures and formal quirks – lurid visuals, jaunty Muzak, warbling sound effects – keep us in thrall and onside. Another segment features the inner ramblings of a scopophobic cameraman on behind-the-scenes duties. As the crew refuels and rests, he explains (in a disguised

voice à la gangland documentary) how his fear of being watched has left him in a transactional work relationship with his own self.

Later, a world-weary freelance graphic artist explains how she likes to soak up random imagery in spare moments. She sits there in a Korean facemask, clutching a cuddly toy, worrying that “everything will drain out” if she ever stops gazing. It transpires, finally, that she gives online tutorials in editing meditation videos – this solitary figure so estranged from leisure is, paradoxically, a paid-up member of the leisure industry.

People on Sunday possesses none of the elusive or oneiric qualities for which Thai video artists have become best known. But beneath that cheeky and restless veneer lurk intriguing depths: Saenjaroen loosely sketches the dangers of not habitually reappraising our relationship with free time as we submit to the chase of extreme careerism. Squeezing the weekendsonly online screening of it into my work-fromhome schedule of recent weeks left me reflecting on my own hit-and-miss attempts to ‘go under’ – and grinning. If ‘work-life balance’ is, as poet-philosopher David Whyte has written, a ‘phrase that often becomes a lash with which we punish ourselves’, then Saenjaroen has succeeded at comically amplifying the painful thwacking sound. Max Crosbie-Jones

Tulapop Saenjaroen, People on Sunday (still), 2019, video, 20 min 53 sec. Courtesy the artist and 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok

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ArtReview Asia

Week Whatever Drinking with Cesare Pavese + moments of intensity, extended emptiness This week I’ve been spending some time with Cesare Pavese in the hills outside Turin. To get away from Gödel and his incompleteness theorems. He’s hiding. (Cesare, not Kurt.)

Everyone round here is in hiding. Although they seem to be managing quite the number of secret parties at night. Drinking, dancing, conversing, flirting – that kind of stuff. After all, the hotels are shut and who else is going to drink the wine? Obviously everyone is keeping a watchful eye out for the authorities. It’s all on the qt. Having been something of a womaniser in his youth, Cesare has mellowed out a bit. He seems to be finding a sort of contentment in the hiding and the solitude. He probably has to, in order to stay sane. Except that he’s a frequent attendee at the parties.

Where he’s chasing an old flame.

He’s working as a teacher (although school’s closed at the moment) and goes on solitary walks with a dog that he found.

That bit’s important. The relationship between man and beast is contingent rather than necessary.

Cesare never has to take complete responsibility for its care. Because it’s both his and not his. (The dog and the responsibility that comes with it.) Later he finds out that the old flame has a son that may or may not be his. No one’s telling, so no one knows. Moreover, no one knows if it’s important to know. The dog wanders in and out of his life. The potential son too. Like everyone and everything else.

I remember talking with the artist and former Situationist Constant during the very early 2000s about what it was like to be a single-parent artist when he left Amsterdam (after his then-wife had left him) to live among the bohemians and courtesans of Paris in Pigalle.

“Having a son was rather like having a dog now,” he boldly replied. As if on cue his dog scampered around his feet. “You always knew there was someone to give you affection when you needed it.” At least I think that’s how it happened. The conversation took place a long time ago. And he wasn’t so keen on my recording anything.

He said that if I recorded our conversation, then I’d only really listen to him afterwards on tape. And that my actual conversation would be with the recording rather than with him.

This would make things boring for him. But on reflection I’m beginning to think that this process might have made him say what I wanted him to say. Because it relied on what I remembered. And while he was confident that what he said would definitely be memorable, I was sceptical. I would only remember what I wanted to remember. Although the few conversations we did record shortly before the end of his life indicated that he might have been saying what I wanted him to say anyway.

For a couple of years we saw each other every few months. He wandered in and out of my life. As much as you can wander on a route from London to Amsterdam that goes train, plane, train, train, plane train. Like most relationships, it was characterised by moments of intensity followed by longer moments of emptiness. He had once had a vision for changing the world and its way of life. I wanted to know why it hadn’t come to pass and what Cesare Pavese, The House on the Hill (1948), Digit Books edition, 1960

Summer 2020

bits of it might be salvageable now. Or then.

My then, not his then. In any case, the intensity and emptiness seem now to be much like the experience of the narrator in Cesare’s account of Italy at the end of the Second World War. Everyone tries to get to know everyone else, but no one knows what their companions have done, are doing (there are resistance activities, a consequent need for secrecy and a variety of trust issues) or will do in times to come. All they know of each other exists in the moment. Which mainly serves to remind them of all the things they don’t know. In the book (The House on the Hill), relationships are empirical rather than metaphysical. A distinction of which we’re constantly reminded now.

But the last was really a subconscious connection. (Ha, ha!) The book consciously reminded me of Gertrude Stein’s statement (in her brilliantly titled memoir Everybody’s Autobiography) about her childhood home in Oakland, California: ‘there is no there there’. Which seems to be what everyone who’s not fighting for their life is starting to worry about now. Although the Stein quotation is also referenced in the account of Kurt Gödel’s life that I’m reading at the moment. So presumably that’s what’s reminding me. Perhaps the rest is just a product of the desire to join dots – to assert a logic where there is none. That’s a product of writing, not viruses btw. And art writing in particular.

But it (logical explanations of things that lie beyond logic) is also part of the paradox that Gödel was tackling when he published his incompleteness theory. So maybe what I want to say is that it goes a bit beyond art writing too. And that the idea of a getaway I proposed at the beginning of all this is a lie. Obviously. I’m still stuck at home. And still stuck on Gödel.

A friend called me the other day. They’re stuck (on their own) on the other side of London.

They asked me how social distancing and being cooped up inside was for me. “I have a large balcony,” I replied. “So I can get outside while technically being inside.” “You have a partner too,” they replied. “You’re not living on your own.” I think they were just trying to hide their jealousy of the balcony. Mark Rappolt

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Jun Sojung Au Magasin de Nouveautés Atelier Hermès, Seoul 8 May – 5 July Amid the dimly lit environs of the underground exhibition hall at Atelier Hermès, Jun Sojung’s compact exhibition takes shape around a central video that traverses time and space in jumps and skips. Jun is the current recipient of the biennial Hermès Foundation Missulsang, which ranks among the nation’s most prestigious art prizes and is awarded to a promising Korean artist whose work reflects the contemporary condition. Her narrative videos typically deconstruct storytelling conventions and thematise the transference of individual agency; in recent years, Jun’s works have presented character studies of a range of individuals in specialised skill-based occupations, including a tightrope walker, a piano tuner, a sign painter and a shellfish diver.

Despair to be reborn (2020) is a 25-minute single-channel video that considers the psychogeography of modern cities by tracing literal passageways and routes that link distinct physical sites in the urban landscape as well as the cognitive shortcuts and detours that collectively map the cosmopolitan consciousness. In so doing, Jun interweaves imagery and voices from Korea, Japan and France in a fragmented trajectory that alternates between

archival footage from the 1930s and present-day scenes in each country’s capital city.

Looming large in all this is the complex figure of early modernist author Yi Sang, enfant terrible of the nascent avant-garde scene of the 1930s, when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Yi’s presence here can be traced to his 1932 poem ‘au magasin de nouveautes’, which serves as an index of visual motifs for the videowork. The poem is composed as a linguistic collage that contains montages of grotesque modernity and capitalist spectacle as experienced by the author during his visits to the recently built Mitsukoshi department store in downtown Seoul. In Jun’s video, the iconic form of the Graf Zeppelin serves a similar purpose, recalling its circumnavigation of the globe in 1929, when it became an instant sensation in Tokyo en route to transiting the Pacific Ocean. Symbolising the overwhelming dominance of Western technology and the shortening of the perceived distance between opposite sides of the planet, the Graf Zeppelin is an apt archetype manifesting the modernist attributes of mechanisation, mobility and multiple perspectives at the heart of Despair to be reborn.

Published to coincide with Jun’s exhibition is an ambitious and wide-ranging editorial project that presents diverse writings by 11 international contributors from various fields – including science, mathematics, music, film, architecture and literature – who reflect on Yi’s legacy and the historical context that gave rise to his radical vision. Jun’s own contribution to this volume emulates Yi’s surrealist propensity to subvert literary conventions, resulting in a work of experimental fiction that operates as a set of footnotes to Despair to be reborn. Less germane to the exhibition’s theme are supplementary sculptures from Jun’s Organ series (2020), a new body of work consisting of amorphous illuminated masses of translucent melted plastics.

While aesthetically intriguing, their primary function seems to be as lighting elements in the otherwise darkened gallery, and they never quite succeed in asserting themselves as integrated additions to the self-contained universe of Jun’s video and publishing work. Notwithstanding, Au Magasin de Nouveautés triumphs in linking radical sensibilities that define generations separated by decades and distance, channelling Yi’s voice to engage modern perceptions of place critically. Andy St. Louis

Jun Sojung, Organ_Pelvis, 2020, plastic, 80 × 51 × 54 cm. Photo: Sangtae Kim. Courtesy the artist and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès

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ArtReview Asia

Billie Zangewa Soldier of Love Galerie Templon, Paris 14 March – 6 June As the opening day of Billie Zangewa’s show drew to a close, few would have anticipated the circumstances that would soon engulf it, nor the new resonances her work would find in light of them. While visitors trickled out of Galerie Templon, Emmanuel Macron announced new measures to combat covid-19.

In the days that followed, the country went into lockdown: the gallery closed its doors; daily life changed for everyone.

Born in Malawi and based in Johannesburg, Zangewa creates embroidered silk works that celebrate those aspects of the day-to-day that pass unnoticed until they are gone: a school run, a swimming lesson, a birthday party with friends. The importance of the everyday is embedded in the choice of her medium. In interviews she has described how the appeal of textile lies in the way it constitutes a universal, sensory experience that punctuates all our daily lives. In a show that focuses on love, touch is also the point of contact between the individual and the external world, the physical encounter between self and other. This is nowhere more apparent than in Soldier of Love (2020), which depicts the artist walking her young son to school, his hand in hers. Her body leans towards

his, the viewer can almost feel his weight pulling on her. The work’s title evokes the show’s central theme: the duality of love and struggle that underpins existence. It would be easy to dismiss as a cliché, but sometimes the most well-worn phrases contain the greatest truths.

Zangewa is the protagonist in all but three of the ten tapestries exhibited, where identity is conveyed as multiple, contradictory and above all constructed through its everyday expression.

The serene domestic scenes of Sunday Morning Pursuits (2020) – browsing the newspaper – or Cold Shower (2019) contrast with the more anguished self-portrait Am I Enough? (2020). In this simple composition, stripped of background noise, the artist confronts the viewer, naked.

The title’s question reverberates in the hesitancy of her pose, at once defiant as she presents her body to the viewer, but also uncomfortable, as she looks away, refusing to meet that gaze. The artist uses her medium to full advantage: her body is sewn from fragments of silk that reflect the way the light hits her skin, but also evoke a self in construction, assembled and reassembled. The torn sections in the tapestry are a frequent feature of Zangewa’s work, and speak, as the artist has described, to the darker, more

traumatic aspects of experience, present but never fully revealed to the viewer. This practice reappears in The Swimming Lesson (2020), the largest and perhaps most emotionally charged work in the exhibition. Here, the artist’s son sits alone on the side of a swimming pool; vast swathes of cloth missing from the foreground indicate the absence of figures from the original scene – the swimming instructor and Zangewa herself. The work captures the simultaneous distress of a parent forced to relinquish control, and the joy of seeing that child grow into an autonomous adult.

One of the exhibition’s most striking works is Birthday Party (2020), a bright, busy composition where friends and family gather around a table. Unlike the other works on show, the characters are depicted without facial features, the traits of individuality suppressed to accentuate the collective energy of the scene and to mark the passage from the particular to the universal. Zangewa’s works don’t need a pandemic to be appreciated, but perhaps now more than ever we understand why it is the minutiae of the everyday, and the relationships that play out within it, that we should all be celebrating.

Daisy Sainsbury

Birthday Party, 2020, embroidered silk, 141 × 137 cm.

Courtesy Templon, Paris & Brussels

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Ida Applebroog Mercy Hospital Freud Museum, London 28 February – 7 June ‘But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads,’ says the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’. Text from Gilman’s story, along with passages from Sigmund Freud’s case studies and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), accompany the drawings by Ida Applebroog currently being exhibited at the Freud Museum. The American artist chose the texts herself, and we can understand why. The drawings – which she made in 1969–70 in San Diego’s Mercy Hospital, where, struck with severe depression, she interned herself for six weeks – are fraught with psychological angst, questioning what it is to be human.

Of these texts, Gilman’s story bears the most direct resemblance to Applebroog’s drawings, not least for its protofeminist overtones, being about a woman’s domestic isolation as she undergoes a nervous breakdown (at the climax of which she identifies with a colony of imaginary women living within the wallpaper, trapped and trying to escape) and her subjection to her more ‘rational’ physician husband.

Like Gilman’s wallpaper, the drawings are inhabited by amorphous, seemingly animate forms that hover between emergence and obscuration – you can’t tell if they’re coming or going. Scribbled in the bottom corner of one such drawing are the words this way… no that way… Come this way… no that way… repeated over and over, aligned vertically and scrawling from the bottom of the sheet to about halfway up, continuing for ten lines until she runs out of room. The last four of these lines

are compressed, crammed in; we are left with the impression that if it were not for the arbitrary border of the page, she’d have carried on repeating these words forever.

To the left of this marginalia is a humanoid form jaggedly outlined in black pastel – and yet there is nothing really to signify that this is a human being or meant to be a figure at all, human, anthropomorphic, animal or otherwise. The ‘head’ is like the head of a turtle, but its ‘mouth’ could also be an estuary, just as the withered ‘breast’ could be a promontory or the ‘arm’ a peninsula. Then again, is it anything?

Is it not just an abstraction? Like many of the ‘figures’ in the Mercy Hospital series, it plays on our own inclination to recognise the familiar in the strange. We automatically see a figure – I see a ragged old man with a walking stick, but there is nothing really to signify that this is what is being represented. Nor is there anything to say that the faint squiggle behind it is necessarily a tail, or an imaginary tail, or if in fact there are two figures overlapping, one the devilish alter ego of the other, and so on… In this sense, the drawings play on our own inherent madness. We are all like Gilman’s heroine to a certain degree, we all see ourselves in the pattern on the wall.

The boldness of outline, variance of linear texture and professionalism with which each line is marked (which itself is demonstrative of her training as a graphic designer), and the context of hospitalisation in which Applebroog made these drawings, lends them an organic cellularity that is no less than menacing. “I am more interested in doing something to the

Drawing from the Mercy Hospital series, 1969. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

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viewer than saying something to the viewer,” Applebroog would say later, in a documentary film made by Beth B, her daughter, in 2016. They resemble at once the cellular forms seen through a microscope and geographic formations seen macroscopically from a great height or outer space. Indeed, it cannot be ignored in the midst of a pandemic that they bear an uncanny resemblance to magnified (and viral) photographic images of the coronavirus, which takes its name from the pricked, crownlike circumference of its membrane. This is especially the case in those drawings in which ‘wet’ media like ink and watercolour predominate, as the clouds of colour, and the black boundaries that seem to be trying to contain or exclude them, smudge and bleed.

At a symposium held at University College London in 2011, Applebroog talked about the years 1969 and 1970 – just after she had moved from Chicago to San Diego – as a time in which she craved sanctuary. The lines in these drawings are indeed boundaries, topographical in both the geographic and biological senses of the word. They are barriers within and outside of our bodies, which, for Applebroog – a self-described feminist who has often said that at a young age she learned ‘how power works’ – amount to the same thing. Her biology, as a woman, has proven to be restrictive, and yet the walls society has built to restrict her are not of her own body or her own will. At the same time, walls, boundaries, isolation, when it is her choice to be isolated, are conducive to introspection, sanctuary and – in the case of Mercy Hospital – recuperation. Tom Denman

Week Wherever Resisting the stampede towards the virtual Well, this week has been a write-off. I read a slightly disappointing novel about fatalism and love during the Sri Lankan Civil War. I thought that an intense account of the suffering of others would help with my empathy problem. (Like it had when I’d read an account of Kurt Gödel starving himself to death a few weeks ago.) And that I’d somehow be connecting with my Sri Lankan ancestors. From an apartment in London. Sporadically decorated with some of their religious knickknacks. It didn’t and I didn’t. Although in some respects I was reminded that I do share aspects of their faith. And, like them, I don’t like being bombed.I watched a documentary about Philip Larkin presented by A.N. Wilson, a very English newspaper columnist ‘known for his biographies’. For the next day I couldn’t stop imitating Wilson’s clipped British accent, while I talked to myself (obviously – although podcasts did begin to seem like an option), having somehow morphed from colonised to coloniser in the space of 24 hours. And I could not stop staring out of my high windows and dreaming up the poems Larkin might have written about our shitty new world: ‘An air of baffled absence, trying to be there / Yet being here…’ Yep. It turns out he had already written them. Parody potential denied. Like I said, the week was a write-off. Rather like Wilson’s attempts to deal with Larkin’s racism in the documentary.

And to think that at some point I thought that these columns were going to be uplifting in a dark sort of way. Now I was going to have to give in to the barrage of emails exhorting me to ‘experience’ art online. So I would have something ‘new’ to say. Not, as the whole Larkin fiasco reminds me, that such a thing is possible.

That’s when I moved from the definite racist to the possible paedophile. (Isn’t that the history of British literature?) Discovering, while avoiding the online art shows, an old ArtReview article written by an architect friend in which he mentioned an episode from Lewis Carroll’s obscure, unpopular and final novel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. (For the record, it’s Carroll, not the architect friend, who’s the possible paedophile.)

It’s the sequel to his (Carroll’s, not the architect’s) penultimate unpopular novel, Sylvie and Bruno.

Carroll had originally planned that they should be one popular novel, but his publisher worried

that it was too long to be popular. It turns out people had developed short attentionspans even in the age of Victorian verbosity and Dickens. Nothing is new.

With the benefit of hindsight, people today say that it was the lack of humour rather than the length of Carroll’s ramblings that the publisher should have been worried about. And, to be fair, it’s not like I could bring myself to read every page of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. Although that might be because I don’t have part one of the project to hand. So the characters never seemed to develop. They arrived at the beginning of the book fully formed. Somewhere else.

Doubters: this is how the preface begins – ‘I must begin with the same announcement as

in the previous Volume (which I shall henceforward refer to as “Vol. I,” calling the present Volume “Vol. II”), viz that the Locket, at p. 405, was drawn by “Miss. Alice Havers.”’ Carroll goes on to thank his ‘many’ reviewers for their bad reviews of ‘Vol. I’, before continuing thus: ‘In the Preface to Vol. I were two puzzles, on which my readers might exercise their ingenuity. One was to detect the 3 lines of “padding,” which I had found it necessary to supply in the passage extending from the top of p. 35 to the middle of p. 38. They are the 14th, 15th and 16th lines of p. 37.’ Old fool. fyi there is no locket on p. 405.

There’s an engraving of a locketless woman in bed on p. 404. Although maybe he was referring to ‘Vol I’. In case ‘Miss. Alice Havers’ sued. The need for the ‘padding’, beyond puzzling his Illustration by Harry Furniss from Lewis Carroll, Bruno and Sylvie Concluded (1893)

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readers, is never explained. Still, a life in pieces is what we all have to deal with these days.

And, in that sense, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded isn’t all bad.

The passage in question concerns cartography. And it somehow seems to encapsulate what our new lives are like. And why certain aspects of them – online or virtual art shows, for example – are worthy of a certain scepticism: “What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”

“About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr [although he seems German, he’s supposed to be a visitor from another planet, btw – presumably these amounted to the same thing to English people in the late nineteenth century]. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile.

And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?”

I enquired.

“It has never been spread out yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

It’s not that I don’t look at artworks online. I do. But I want to resist the stampede towards the virtual, the arms race of the digital and any move to exchange the virtual for the real or to pretend that they are somehow equivalent.

Because, as the extraterrestrial German says, the country itself does nearly as well.

In my mind, the passage by Lewis Carroll will always be read to me by someone impersonating A.N. Wilson. I’ve got enough fuzzy edges and unstable connections already. I like them.

And no screen can mimic them. Even if this week was a bust.

Coda: as I write this, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has just announced the release of ‘the largest and most detailed ever photograph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, a 4.8-gigapixel image that will allow viewers to see ‘individual brushstrokes’ and ‘even particles of pigment in the painting’. Whatever.

Mark Rappolt

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Beyond the Black Atlantic Kunstverein Hannover 15 February – 1 June In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Paul Gilroy describes ‘the Black Atlantic’ as a shared culture rooted in the convergence of cultures from Africa, the Americas, Britain and the Caribbean produced by the transatlantic slave trade. Twentyseven years later, Beyond the Black Atlantic seeks to expand and even redefine this shared culture in bringing together four young artists: Sandra Mujinga, Paulo Nazareth, Tschabalala Self and Kemang Wa Lehulere.

Gilroy’s book uses the ship as a recurring motif to focus on the Middle Passage and to act as a vessel of ideological and cultural exchange.

Appropriately, then, this show opens with Wa Lehulere’s installation Matric 2015 (2018), with its glass bottles containing sand and scrolls of paper, guarded by porcelain dogs painted black. Wa Lehulere’s oeuvre often addresses the apartheid era, and these protected documents act as a reminder of inaccessible education. Here, however, the bottled messages – perhaps found floating, sunken or about to be cast out to sea – recall humans being forced through the Door of No Return, packed tightly into the hold and shipped from one place to the next as chattel.

In the following room the mood shifts to one of protection and fear. Under green light are three towering humanoid figures made

of black faux-leather (Mujinga’s Camouflage Waves 1–3, 2018), hoods concealing where there should be faces, gangly fabric arms sagging past equally lanky legs and knees. This green light appears in another room, overtaken by Mujinga’s video installation Re-Imagining Things iv (2020).

Two monitors – hung behind a curved black wall – display YouTube videos of fireworks altered with a liquid-effect filter and isolated in a green background. Here the green takes on new associations: rather than suggesting theatre or questioning whether the hooded figures are actually protecting themselves, it harkens to a filmic greenscreen as a place of alteration and transformation – a place where anything can be made manifest.

Digital manipulation and representation are again referenced in a room of Self’s textile assemblages and paintings. Her colourful, oversize portraits exaggerate women’s thighs and butts, and men’s phalluses and afros, pointing towards stereotypical media portrayals of black bodies. Self’s work gives way to Nazareth’s Anthropology of the Black ii (2014), a film in which he lies on the ground at a museum for psychiatric patients in Salvador da Bahia and covers his head with skulls of the deceased. Elsewhere, 34 televisions host videos of waving flags, filmed by the artist during a two-year walk from Horizonte to New York City (Bandera Rotas

(Broken Flags), 2014/2020). Placed on wooden pallets, the monitors are ready for immediate relocation, questioning the idea of a flag’s ‘fixed’ representation. Throughout their works, Self and Nazareth address the idea of malleable identities – in relation to nationalism, history and the current world order.

The breadth of positions here evidence the fact that black identities and communities cannot be summated by a singular term like the Black Atlantic; that there is no singular ‘African diaspora’. Diasporas are wide-ranging, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean to intra-Africa, so we should indeed be thinking beyond the Black Atlantic.

The exhibition’s informational handout suggests one reason, among many, for this shift in understanding: ‘Social conflicts in Western societies that were long thought to have been overcome… have sparked new awareness among members of the Black community’.

But this begs the question, who has ever thought social issues like racism or inequality have been overcome? Perhaps this ‘new awareness’ results not from the realisation that such social issues continue to pervade everyday life, but rather from a global move towards an existence beyond the Black Atlantic – from finding seats at the table for everyone.

Emily McDermott

Sandra Mujinga, Re-Imagining Things iv, 2020, two-channel video installation. Photo: Raimund Zakowski. Courtesy the artist

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Beyond Measure Trondheim Kunstmuseum 29 February – 9 August Times of crisis turn normality oblique, even unrecognisable. They expose the habitual as a fragile construction. Beyond Measure scrutinises the standards and parameters on which notions of normalcy hinge. Extending the lineage of artists such as On Kawara, who, from the 1960s onward, created extreme yet ostensibly objective rules for his work and followed them rigorously, the show turns to eight contemporary artists’ takes on measurability and, notably, its failures.

Humour is present throughout the exhibition, for instance in Vida Lavén’s sculptures Non Record Attempts II – World’s Second Largest Teddy Bear (2019) and Non Record Attempts iii (2019), supposedly the world’s second-largest and second-smallest toy teddies displayed side by side, neither of which will ever make it into any Guinness World Records. Oddvar I.N. Daren’s Measuring the Depth of Snow (1981), meanwhile, depicts the artist in eight succeeding photographs sinking deeper into a snow mound, as displaced blocks of snow, their height apparently equivalent to the depth of his body, stack up in front of him.

The sinister consequences of attempts to measure the unquantifiable are evident in Meriç Algün’s Billboards (2012) pasted onto

the museum walls. Each features a question concerning a person’s relationship status and mental health, permitting only binary answers of yes and no, and taken from standardised forms Algün had to submit when applying for European citizenship. Forms such as these encode bias disguised as objectivity into decisions deeply affecting people’s lives, and in some cases preside over life and death.

Approaching objectivity from another angle, Toril Johannessen’s series of silkscreen prints, Words and Years (2010–16), scrutinises the language and methodologies of science. Counting how often a particular word, for instance ‘feminism’, is published in journals, the findings are presented in convincing diagrams that seem to tell us something about the world but are ultimately meaningless. The pointlessness of numbers without content is present also in Alexander Gutke’s installation Singularity (2010–16). The work consists of a 16mm film of a tape measure projected onto the wall in a corner, which appears to measure the size of the room, but remains a pseudo-scientific gesture.

Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel video installation Scenes from Western Culture (2015) is arguably the centrepiece of the show. The individually titled videos, lasting from one-and-a-

half minutes to over three hours, expose the absurdity of standards of normalcy, or rather what is considered normal in Western societies.

Dog and Clock depicts a well-groomed canine lounging on a carpet in a domestic space decorated with midcentury furniture. A pendulum clock is ticking relentlessly, African sculptures on the ledge of a fireplace complement the bourgeois scene, evoking the ennui of comfort.

Rich German Children shows a group of wholesome-looking kids playing in a spruced-up garden, and Dinner follows a couple, played by musicians Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran, dining at an upscale New York restaurant while half-engaged in trivial conversations.

As Kjartansson’s durational videos push ‘normal’ situations from Western societies to their absurdist extremes, the work delivers a funny and scathing critique of the standards of a culture whose short-sightedness of its own conventions dictates profoundly flawed notions of the ordinary. At a time when science is key to grappling with the climate crisis or a virus spreading around the world, Beyond Measure reminds us of the limitations of numbers no matter how vital they are, insisting convincingly on the unquantifiable power of art.

Stefanie Hessler

Oddvar I.N. Daren, Measuring the Depth of the Snow, 1981, photography, 170 × 880 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Month wtf More notes, from not-so-splendid isolation After the success, a few weeks ago, of reading about an Austrian genius with evident mentalhealth issues who eventually starved himself to death, I returned to the scene of the ‘crime’ and picked up a Stefan Zweig novella. (The first Austrian was Kurt Gödel, for those of you who missed it: the genius revolved around his incompleteness theorems; the starving was a result of his inability to deal with daily life. Both were comforting to me in different ways, hence the success.) Zweig’s work is frequently cited

by Gödel scholars attempting to describe the ‘atmosphere’ in Vienna at the time when the logician was studying there. The novella is about a man who has been imprisoned and interrogated by the Nazis, but who manages to steal a book, build an alternative mental universe and then disappear into it. You don’t need to know the details, really. Except that the book is about chess, which initially seems a curse, because the man isn’t that interested in the ‘sport’. But it becomes a blessing once he realises that he can play the whole game in his head. The man slowly develops a split personality that allows him to play himself. Even though he recognises that this is both a ‘logical absurdity’ and the road to madness. Because, as with Gödel, his imaginary world is too complete (even if for Gödel that completeness involved it being incomplete). It leaves him too far removed from reality to ever go back. In 1942 Zweig and his wife killed themselves while in exile in Brazil. ‘My inner crisis consists in that I am not able to identify myself with the me of passport, the self of exile,’ he wrote shortly before the end.

It took a new reality – a Zoom panel discussion – to remind me that what’s important now might be what I’m not seeing rather than what I am seeing. And that the whole seeing and not seeing thing might be part of the empathy problem I keep returning to. The seeing business was one of the subjects of the discussion, between the writers Kiese Laymon, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Arundhati Roy, hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Although the fact that Crenshaw was using a Zoom background into which parts of her head kept disappearing made the ‘what we see/what we don’t see’ stuff come even more to the fore.

The writers talked about various issues – broadly concerning race, class and poverty – that were being buried amid the current crisis. It served as a reminder of how, now that I’m being bombarded by other types of lectures about all other bodies being potentially toxic, I’m slowly being trained to avoid them. The bodies, not the lectures. Although I tend to avoid those too.

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Live bodies are obstacles; the bodies of the dead are hidden. Behind numbers and statistics, graphs and comparative studies. (I’m fortunate enough not to know anyone who has died of covid-19.) I’m also being trained to accept, not to enquire. And, in a way, to avoid the very thing that an art critic is supposed to do.

Assuming that you consider the visual, and the act of seeing and then the interrogation of what you see to be something essential to the role of the critic, that is. Sinister stuff.

When you think about it. I worry that, generally, I don’t. Unless it’s got something to do with my Sri Lankan or Jewish ancestors being marginalised in or omitted from an image or account of an episode from the inglorious colonial past.

Which, in any case, perhaps serves my own narrative more than it does theirs.

I watched a three-part documentary about wildlife in Arabia. It started off innocently enough. Birds, snakes, lizards, oryx, dromedaries, the odd scorpion – that kind of stuff. The general vibe seemed to be about showing how the desert actually contained so much, despite appearing to contain so little. In that sense it worked like a media briefing by the uk government (that’s where I’m hiding for the moment, btw; in the uk, not the government) or a press release for an exhibition. Naturally, there was a subcurrent about how life carries on even in the harshest of environments. I wondered if that was why the bbc was broadcasting it now.

(It originally aired in 2015.) And then I wondered if that was why I was watching it. Then the mood began to switch. Because of the programme’s content; not because of me.

It gradually emerged that the documentary was, in fact, something of a propaganda vehicle for Dubai. About how people who consumed quite a lot (of water and energy) were in fact helping creatures used to surviving on not a lot.

What looked like greed was in fact generosity.

Suddenly oil rigs in the Gulf had been reframed (for the purposes of the nature documentary) as sites of ecological splendour. They were breeding grounds for fish and thus magnets for whale sharks hoovering up eggs and plankton.

And, in that way, they were helpful to scientists studying marine giants. Scientists who, one presumes, are environmentalists of some sort.

The oil-rig workers were reimagined as helpful whale-shark spotters. Suddenly the waterintensive crop farms (so water-intensive that facing page Stefan Zweig (standing), Vienna, c. 1900.

Courtesy Fundo Correio da Manhã

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they have a limited lifespan) that had popped up in the middle of the desert were nature parks.

Luxury stopovers that gave tired birds a break and a bath on their migratory flights. Like the way stations that were rapidly constructed by switched-on entrepreneurs when the Silk Road became an actual road. Did the people who funded the programme only show the nature people what they wanted them to see? Did the nature people only see what they wanted to see?

I followed that up with Zhao Liang’s Behemoth, a surreal documentary about the environmental, societal and personal damage effected by coalmining and related industries in northeast China. In it, horror is mixed with a certain poetry – gently riffing off Dante’s Inferno. Most of it comprises footage of people doing what they are forced to do to exist. And the effect on the landscape of what they are forced to do in order to exist. But then I felt a creeping annoyance at the way in which the poetic interludes (often accompanied by a nude male body curled up in the scarred landscape) kept interrupting the unrelenting misery of watching miners dodging explosions in claustrophobic hells, families foraging for coal scraps on slag heaps under the cover of darkness, shepherds rounding up flocks while a constant stream of trucks poured out rubble and dust to create the heaps, and people who were now hooked up to oxygen tanks because of the rubble, the dust, the chemicals and the heat. One of the things seemed real. The other did not. Although ‘real’ takes on a totally different meaning when all you’re really doing is wearing out a sofa in a relatively spacious London flat. The ‘heaven’ in Behemoth, by the way, is a new-build city in which no one actually lives; but about which people can dream while they live, hand-to-mouth, somewhere else. If you’re someone like me, watching Zhao Liang’s movie elicits a healthy dose of guilt. Which is, I guess, a form of empathy that cancels itself out. A zero-sum game.

For the record, both the nature documentaries and Behemoth were ‘research’. Not the fruits of an idle channel surf. For ongoing ‘projects’.

Which is to say that it’s not without purpose that I’m watching these things. It’s important to hold on to your agency. Although it’s important too not to delude yourself about that. Increasingly the watching and the reading that these columns encompass seem to be a way of looking sideways at what’s really going on. I’m starting to think that it’s not having a sense of empathy but doing something with it that counts. Mark Rappolt

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Books Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire

by Pankaj Mishra Verso, £14.99 (hardcover) It may have seemed otherwise at the time, but the populist xenophobic and isolationist movements that climaxed during Brexit and the election of Donald Trump didn’t explode out of nowhere. They were always already there.

So Pankaj Mishra argues in this collection of essays, written over the past decade, that traces ‘Anglo-American delusions’ from the age of empire, via the Cold War, to neoliberalism and our embattled present. And argues that they are consistently the same.

In this, the fanatics are us (Anglo-Americans), not them (variously, Muslims, minorities and the nationals of formally colonised countries).

‘The British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers,’ he argues in a 2019 essay on Brexit titled ‘Bumbling Chumocrats’. Before getting stuck into the public intellectuals and media organs who, actively or passively, have allowed the chummy bumblers (and their American equivalents), with their baggy ideas and exceptionalist ideologies, to get to where they are now. Niall Ferguson, Salman Rushdie, Jordan Peterson, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic are just a few of the targets of Mishra’s ire. While his damning deconstructions of the perversions of the West include capitalism, ‘Anglobalisation’, white supremacy, institutionalised poverty and the problematics faced by ‘the very few writers from formerly colonised countries or historically disadvantaged minorities in the West who are embraced by “legacy” periodicals’.

Much of Mishra’s work, in both article and book form, has sought to trace the ways in which ideas affect realities. Bland Fanatics – its title borrowed from a term concocted by the American theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr (an influence on Barack Obama, among many others) – is a continuation of this project, with an additional focus on the ways in which ideas can also be deployed to obscure reality. Mishra traces his awakening to this last to his native India, where the idea of constructing the world’s largest democracy was used to mask the deployment of martial law, state-sanctioned massacre and rape (the things from which India had apparently liberated itself in 1947), most evidently in Kashmir, which the author visited and reported from (for The Hindu) at the end of the last century. ‘India’s own bland

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fanatics, who seemed determined to nail their cherished “idea of India” into Kashmiri hearts and minds, prepared me for the spectacle of a liberal intelligentsia cheerleading the war for “human rights” in Iraq, with the kind of humanitarian rhetoric about freedom, democracy and progress that was originally heard from European imperialists in the nineteenth century,’ he writes in his introduction, preparing us for the autopsy that’s about to commence.

Accordingly, though perhaps a little disappointingly, only one of the essays collected here directly tackles the country of his birth, a 2012 review of New Yorker staff writer Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which tells the tale of a garbage trader in Mumbai.

The collection begins with Mishra’s infamous 2011 evisceration of historian Niall Ferguson and his book Civilisation: The West and the Rest (following which Ferguson threatened to sue for libel over allegations of racism).

It remains a dazzling display of what close analysis and precise polemic can achieve. While also setting the stage for some of this collection’s persistent themes: how the language of imperialism remains the language that is deployed by both left and right today, and how Asian and other voices are erased from or suppressed within global political discourse as it is reported in liberal as well as illiberal discussion in the West. ‘Sane thinking’, he writes in relation to the first theme, in a 2017 article titled ‘The Religion of Whiteness’, ‘would require, at the very least, an examination of the history – and stubborn persistence – of racist imperialism.’

By the time you get to that line, of course, you already know that this collection is beginning to do just that. In relation to the second theme, Mishra leaves a lengthy trail of breadcrumbs that includes, among others, the Indonesian intellectual Soedjatmoko, Indian-born novelist Kamala Markandaya, grand mufti of Egypt Muhammad Abduh, Indian reformist B.R. Ambedkar, Muslim activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao (these last two the foundations of Mishra’s 2012 book, From the Ruins of Empire).

Indeed, the full list can seem so comprehensive that you wonder when Mishra has time to write.

Along the way, however, there’s a sense that Mishra’s carefully crafted pose of the Indian writer unmasking Anglo-American delusions about global power and national progress from

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the point of view of an outsider (perhaps even a victim) has, alongside his success (most recently with 2017’s The Age of Anger) and his considerable investment in the detail of these delusions, become somewhat difficult to maintain. This comes particularly to the fore in a 2018 review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2017 essay collection, We Were Eight Years in Power (although, as others have pointed out, Mishra doesn’t really review individual publications so much as their authors’ entire careers), titled ‘Why Do White People Like What I Write?’. In part, the text attempts to parse how liberal commentators could embrace the use of torture and bombing as part of various ‘wars on terror’, while simultaneously supporting Coates’s project to deconstruct and acknowledge ‘the historical legacy of institutionalised racial cruelty, inequality and division’ in the us. To embrace one sin (brutal imperialism), while acknowledging another (slavery), as if the two things were not ideologically and practically linked. While Mishra conceeds that ‘amid this hectic laundering of reputations, and a turnover of “woke” white men, Coates has seized the opportunity to describe American power from the rare standpoint of its victims’, he also points out that the American writer is particularly vulnerable to the charge that he ‘is popular among white liberals since he assuages their guilt about racism’. And has a dig at Coates (a writer he evidently, if somewhat begrudgingly, admires) for describing The Atlantic (for which the essays included in We Were Eight Years in Power were originally written) as ‘prestigious’. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests in the us and the uk, Mishra’s essay on Niall Ferguson was redeployed in a newsletter sent out by London Review of Books. He also writes for, among other publications, The Guardian, Bloomberg and The New York Times. All of which leads one to think that at least some of what Mishra has to say about Coates might be the result of a degree of self-reflection on the dangers he faces himself.

And yet this collection does a whole lot more than kick against the pricks. It’s an extraordinarly powerful argument, by a writer of powerful and perhaps even remorseless conviction, for the case that we need first to rethink our past in order to reshape our future. And never more so than in times of present stress.

Mark Rappolt

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Minor Detail

by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette Fitzcarraldo Editions, £10.99 (softcover) This is a novel, translated from the original Arabic, about helplessness, a sensation that, for a variety of reasons, many of us may feel we have had to get used to over the past several months. Here however is a calculated description of helplessness in the extreme, in which all roads towards agency and action, change or transformation, are revealed to be dead ends.

And it’s a journey rendered all the more moving by the subtlety of the story’s form and the elegance of its craft. Whether that is in any way redemptive or only something that serves to heighten a sense of loss is for readers to decide.

Split into two parts, Minor Detail begins with an account of the events leading up to the rape and murder of a young Arab woman by a platoon of Israeli soldiers in the Negev desert in 1949. The action is set following the creation of the state of Israel a year earlier, its further conquest of Arab lands and the flight or expulsion of 726,000 Palestinians from its territory. The narrative is told in the third person, often coldly analytic in tone, and focused on the platoon leader. His body is rotting, infected following an insect bite. He obsessively searches for and exterminates any stray arachnids in his hut. He obsessively patrols the desert for any stray Arabs. Those he finds, he and his platoon kill. He is appalled by the stench of the young woman. He goes through endless bars of soap. Whatever she says he cannot understand. The only emotional presence in the narrative comes in the shape of the victim’s dog. And no one can understand it either.

The second part is told from the first-person perspective of a Palestinian woman living in Ramallah today. Having read an account of the earlier incident in a newspaper, she becomes obsessed with tracing its detail. Which, following a conversation with the seemingly uninterested author of the newspaper account, proves not so easy to find. She seems embarrassed by her obsession. ‘Incidents like that aren’t out of the ordinary,’ she says apologetically, referring primarily, it seems, to the normalisation of such horrors in the years since 1949. Before justifying her interest on the coincidental basis that the life of the unnamed victim of part one was ended on a morning exactly 25 years before hers began.

And apologising, again, for any awkwardness caused by her incidental revelations about the quotidian detail – soldiers, checkpoints and curfews – of her life under Israeli occupation.

As a result of which she is, among other things, used to guns and scared of dogs. As for the rest, she seems to want to resensitise herself. To return the new ordinary to the extraordinary.

To what it really is.

It’s in the least significant details that art historians can discern the genuine from the fake, she points out. As her need to justify herself increases. ‘Others claim, based on the same idea, that it is possible to reconstruct something’s appearance or an incident one has never witnessed, simply by noticing various little details which others claim to be insignificant,’ she continues, seeking further to explain her

actions. She’s anxious (whether by nature or nurture remains unclear), obsessed with dusting (particularly after the bombing of neighbouring buildings leaves detritus on her workstation) and can’t sleep. So she takes a roadtrip to the site of the 1949 incident. After hiring a car in someone else’s name. And travelling (illegally) past checkpoints using someone else’s photo id. Only by not being herself can she travel, only by not being herself can she access the past. Even when it appears as if she has gained agency, her expedition will ultimately demonstrate that she has not.

In both parts of the book, we’re reminded of the novel’s opening line: ‘Nothing moved except the mirage’. As the ‘I’s in her narrative tick over like the miles on her car’s odometer, her name is never revealed. Just as the Arabic place names have been removed (Arab bodies having been removed following the massacres and murders in 1949) from the landscape through which she travels. And yes, that does lead to an additional sense of awkwardness when reading this book in translation, as the connections between form and meaning become all-consuming. But that only serves to enhance this book’s power. While this is ostensibly a tale about the banality of brutality and the ability of the powerful to erase the powerless, Adania Shibli’s novel, and Elisabeth Jaquette’s translation, are an extraordinary masterclass in how to do things with words and the lacunae in between. Nirmala Devi

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Love Edited by Aveek Sen Experimenter Books, free Reactions to the isolation forced on people around the world during the covid-19 pandemic tend to have fallen into one of two camps. The first sees, in horror, the destruction of any sense of productivity and a collapse into apathy; the second assumes that the period of quarantine provided a unique moment for creativity and self-improvement as professional projects, trips and obligations were put on hold. Aveek Sen is in the latter camp. Working with Kolkata gallery Experimenter, the writer and curator convened a series of Zoom-based seminars – ‘critical but candid discussions’ – around the theme of love.

This digital publication, a riposte to Raymond Carver’s celebrated 1981 short-story collection,

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gathers the texts that served as references during those conferences – canonical literature such as Aristophanes’s eulogy to love from Plato’s Symposium (c. 385–320 bce) and the sometimes controversial poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan’s 1971 ‘Love Poem for a Wife’ – as well as films and music, embedded as hyperlinks. An essay by Sen on Björk’s song ‘Hyperballad’, for example, features the cover art for the album on which it appears and a link to Michel Gondry’s promotional video. When life is lived online, this erasure of geography and genre seems fitting.

This is not just a useful resource for the romantically inclined. It tackles the concept of love as a dangerous and damaging feeling

ArtReview Asia

too. A text by Sen, originally published in 2008 in The Telegraph India, concerning the bizarre story that a British judge had annulled a marriage after it was discovered that the couple were separatedat-birth twins, introduces a series of texts by the seminar’s participants reacting to this seemingly tabloid story. Of the assortment of poems and prose replicated here, Priya Thakur’s short fictional letter is the most affecting – given the pains of isolation under which this book was produced, the emotion is presented as a doubleedged sword. ‘Life gets in the way of love,’ she writes. ‘I don’t know what shape my love remains in anymore. But I know that I love you, always and forever.’ Oliver Basciano

From a History of Exhibitions towards a Future of Exhibition-Making: China and Southeast Asia Edited by Biljana Ciric Sternberg Press, €25 (softcover) This selection of case studies, assembled with the stated intention of establishing a baseline for the exchange of curatorial knowledge and exhibition histories across China and Southeast Asia, drills deep into the region’s locales and art scenes, from Ho Chi Minh City to Taipei, Yangon to Manila, Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou to Singapore and Jakarta. The texts emerged from a generously defined – and opportunistically redefined (in the sense that exhibition discourse is a field without deep roots and has needed to find its institutional nourishment where it can) – research platform put together by the volume’s editor, Biljana Ciric, following a first meeting in New Zealand in 2013. Commissioned and assembled over a period of time that has seen rapid growth in the creation of private museums and institution-based exhibitions across the region, this project is well positioned to shape a nascent discourse as well as serve as a calling card for those involved in its production. Given that it started out as a series of conferences, two of them hosted by private museums – the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai and the Times Museum in Guangzhou – seeking to establish themselves in a robust, professionalised ecosystem centring on the production and display of contemporary art, it is worth considering the extent to which this is a land-grab, at once justifying the need for this discourse and at the same time taking control of it.

Written by a mix of independent and institutionally affiliated curators, some big

names among them, in registers ranging from narrative-based social history to academic, theory-heavy art-historical analysis, the texts in this nearly 500-page publication are clearly intended for a specialist readership, if not the very museums to which its authors might offer their services. Among the 19 included here: a standout study of Taiwan’s underground cultural scenes during the early 1990s and the influence of a nomadic figure named Wu Chung-wei, written by Wei Yu; an analysis of the unintended consequences of establishing a museum to preserve cultural traditions associated with swidden agriculture in Yunnan, southwestern China, by Maggie J. Zheng; the editor’s own contribution, a history of smallscale, artist-organised events and exhibitions in 1980s China presented as a means of commenting on how to preserve the vitality and diversity of artistic production despite the narrowing of exhibition typologies in the intervening years; Nikita Yingqian Cai’s investigation into the legacy of the members of the Big Tail Elephant collective and their meticulous strategic evasions of the market’s reach and corruptions; two texts by Patrick D. Flores, one positing the ‘exhibition as a problematic’ in the development of a ‘dislocal’ via the figure of Filipino artist Roberto Feleo, another focused on the emergence of abstraction in a 1953 Manila exhibition; an incisive recounting, by Di Liu, of artist collective ruangrupa’s first foray into Mainland China, a 2018 visit to Guangzhou, Shenzhen

and Chengdu; an analysis, by Julia Hartmann, of differing approaches to organising exhibitions of ‘women’s art’ in 1990s China and how they reflect and respond to emerging female consciousness in both the artists and society; and so much more.

Ciric has divided the project into three loosely defined time periods, aiming to trace the ways in which exhibition-making has evolved in the region over the past half-century, from artist-organised exhibitions and events during the 1970s and 80s, to the effects of accelerating internationalisation and standardisation during the 1990s, the rise of institutions as the locus for contemporary art discourse, the proliferation of biennales, the influx of Western institutions, the legacy of colonialism in exhibition rituals and the growth in the art market from the 2000s, all with consequences for how art, in turn, is created.

There is surely an undersold and invaluable aspect to this project: the gathering of texts that serve to archive exhibitions mounted in ways, places and times that have made such histories scattered and fragile, for presentation to a global audience of art historians, curators and critics.

But in their very diversity of locales and subjects, and in their highly detailed focus, these same texts struggle to work together to provide a comprehensive view of the region. As a pretext for gathering these histories, the promotion of exhibition discourse in the region makes perfect sense, but it begs the question of whether it is possible or even desirable to marshal such diversity into singularity. David Terrien

Sigg Prize 2019 M+ HK$365 (softcover with slipcase) In the post-covid-19 age of solidarity, prizes and competition are supposed to be out. This is a book about six artists competing for a prize.

A newly established biennial one, hosted by M+ and evolved from the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (ccaa) established by megacollector Uli Sigg in 1998. Sigg ‘transferred’ (by a mix of sale and donation) 1,500 works from his collection of Chinese contemporary art to M+ back in 2012. Now he’s transferred the prize.

This is a very beautiful book, designed by Hei Shing Book Design, deploying what’s generally known as ‘Japanese’ folding (here styled as a riff on traditional Chinese book design) set in English and traditional Chinese, and featuring

interviews with each of the shortlisted artists (Hu Xiaoyuan, Liang Shuo, Lin Yilin, Shen Xin, Tao Hui and Samson Young). And while its purpose is most certainly to promote the prize and record the existence of the group exhibition that builds up to the announcement of the winner, it goes easy on the usual fluff.

This book serves as a document of the works that a nascent museum found interesting in art practices of the ‘Greater China’ region. The kind of art that institutions on the eve of the pandemic endorsed. While the bit of fluff here includes talks about recording the diversity of practice across the region, for Sigg Curator (at M+) Pi Li, the work of all the shortlisted artists

Summer 2020

is linked by a single shared interest: identity politics, responding to contemporary desires for cultural fluidity and an ‘identity oriented around oneself and one’s social circle’. Which, depending on how you look at it, might either be a poignant comment on the current political situation in Hong Kong, or the root cause of much of the social unrest experienced around the world right now. And perhaps that’s fitting for an exhibition that began before the current pandemic and everything else that covid-19 has gradually unveiled, and that announced its winner at the height of global lockdown, when old worlds seemed to fade and new dawns seemed possible. Nirmala Devi

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Distance, but don’t be distant

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Art credit

Text credits

on the cover Kimsooja, A Laundry Field, 2020 (installation view, Sowing into Painting, Wanås Konst).

Photo: Mattias Givell. Courtesy the artist and Wanås Konst, Knislinge, Sweden

Words on the spine and on pages 15, 47 and 85 are by Kabir, in ‘Birth and Light’, from The Weaver’s Songs (2003), translated by Vinay Dharwadker

Summer 2020

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“God knows I want to break free! I want to break free from your lies…”

Sorry, you caught me having a singalong with my good friend Freddie Mercury. He’s famous for his singalongs here in the afterlife. Before you ask, I’m not going to get into the ‘But where are you: heaven or hell?’ business. There have to be some mysteries about what happens next.

Word reached me that the editors of ArtReview had that clown Columbus writing in these pages last issue. A man who couldn’t tell east from west. All he introduced to his so-called New World were new diseases. And bizarre ideas of ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’. You call those people colonialists, I believe. In my day ‘colonialism’ hadn’t been invented. I wasn’t interested in ‘discovering’ or ‘recognising’ diversity and then exploiting it and wiping it out under the ethos of some sort of universalism. The ummah doesn’t make distinctions on the basis of race or ethnicity. My army was one of the most ethnically diverse there has ever been. I’m not going to pretend I did no wrong. But I do know that good deeds wipe out bad deeds.

If you opposed me, I wiped you out. I did it in the name of security, not some myth of ‘betterment’ or sense of cultural superiority. ‘If they keep out of your way and do not fight you, and offer you peace, then Allah does not allow you any course [of action] against them.’ I liked to roam, of course, so a fair number of people did cross my path. (Most of them Muslim btw, so it wasn’t much to do with spreading the faith.)

But that’s not my fault. My people were nomads.

Your historians reckon my campaigns resulted in the death of five percent of the world’s population. Seventeen million people, they say, give or take. But they miss the point.

I was bringing glory to the Dar al-Islam. ok, so I cemented 2,000 people into the towers of Isfizar.

Alive. And then there were the 70,000 people or so I had executed in Isfahan. A few more in Delhi.

But I hear that you are now protecting yourselves in order to protect society at large. It was a bit like that with me (ok, maybe not quite that fucked up). I killed a few people early on so I wouldn’t have to kill a lot more later on. And I did it with style. With aesthetics.

When the people of Baghdad rose up against me, I taught them about architecture by building 120 towers made out of 90,000 heads. That was my signature, you see. Architecture and the head thing.

People called my capital, Samarkand, the Pearl of the East, its architecture – palaces,

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Post Script

In an ongoing series in which the great colonialists justify themselves, Timur says he’s different

mosques, madrassas – was the envy of the world.

Mainly because I was a details guy (yeah, I think Mies stole that one from me). If the builders fucked up, they rebuilt. I personally made sure of it. When they were building the Cathedral Mosque, for example, I popped by and found out that they had made the portal too small.

Despite them telling me everything was super a-ok in their daily reports! I had them tear it down on the spot. If I hadn’t made the surprise visit, the whole hobbit-door thing would have made me lose face.

So I tore the face off one of the supervisors, Mohammed Jalad, for good measure. ‘Let he who doubt our power look upon our buildings,’ I used to say. My style inspired the Taj Mahal. And the Kremlin.

As for the head thing, when I took Smyrna I bombarded the fleeing Christian knights with the severed heads of their mates. But I always spared the artists and the intellectuals. The heads with something in them, as I used to joke. You might well think of me as a collector. Those serial looters at the Met in New York do (they have

some of the stuff I inspired). They don’t get hung up on the killings or the heads. They don’t even mention it on their website. They call me the founder of ‘one of the most brilliant periods in Islamic art’. Most people called me Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction, Conqueror of the World, Emperor of the Age. Personally, I favoured ‘Sword of Islam’. In any case, the point is that it’s the art that endures.

You guys should look on the bright side.

I did. Out of my campaigns came great beauty.

I even invented my own form of chess. And given that I never lost a battle, who better than me to do that? It’s more elaborate than the one you know today – 110 squares on the board and more than twice as many pieces. But that’s just another example of the dumbing down that’s gone on since I left. And to think that some of my contemporaries thought of me as a barbarian.

To them I say: ‘The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.’ That’s Claude LéviStrauss. I’ve been looking into his work recently. As I think you probably guessed back at the beginning of all this.

Back in my day, I used to converse with Ibn Khaldun (we met when I was besieging Damascus – at my invitation, they lowered him by rope over the city walls so we could ‘hang’ – ha, ha). He invented sociology before it was invented. Not that any of you people remember his name. His theory was that the group solidarity – we call it as˛abiyya – that I generated among my armies and followers was the secret to my success. I think that some of your governments now are trying to encourage this kind of ‘spirit’ as you battle the ‘invisible enemy’. The self-interested ones, they die. In my time I made sure of that. In your time, well… you’re sheep.

Even my greatest critics, like that shit Ahmad ibn Arabshah, had to give in to beauty: ‘Timur gathered from all sides and collected at Samarkand the fruits of everything; and that place accordingly had in every wonderful craft and rare art someone who excelled in wonderful skill and was famous beyond his rivals in his craft’. He wrote that in Tamerlan: The Life of the Great Amir. A ‘history’ in which chapter headings include ‘This Bastard Begins to Lay Waste Azerbaijan and the Kingdoms of Irak’. What can you do? I was dead when it came out.Otherwise he would have been. Players gonna play; haters gonna hate. (I can’t wait until Taylor gets here – big fan.)

VI, VII, Oslo The Breeder, Athens Christian Andersen, Copenhagen Croy Nielsen, Vienna Document, Chicago Embajada, San Juan Empty Gallery, Hong Kong Green Art Gallery, Dubai The Green Gallery, Milwaukee Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna Misako & Rosen, Tokyo Neue Alte BrĂźcke, Frankfurt Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam XYZ collective, Tokyo