ArtReview Asia Summer 2015 by ArtReview

vol 3 no 2

Charles Lim Venice Biennale. Oh Buoy

CAFÉ SOCIETY COLLECTION RING IN WHITE GOLD, ONYX AND DIAMONDS

www.chanel.com

LUCERNE

◱㭽

BEIJING

▦℻

Zhou Siwei

⛷ ㊬冃

Cheng Ran

䲚䏅

Schematic 22. 5. – 18. 7. 2015

22. 5. – 18. 7. 2015

In Course of the Miraculous 25. 4. – 12. 7. 2015

䲚䏅

Yan Xing

⛷㊬冃

Cheng Ran

18. 9. – 24. 10. 2015

The Thief 29. 8. – 25. 10. 2015

⯖抈㘱悹

25. 4. – 12. 7. 2015

掱搡忋

29. 8. – 25. 10. 2015

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

唍㦹㦹棗◘ 棗歭䲚䏅

印ㄕ楐㧝朱㧝◯㾚 ⒧熝 ⷮ䏛捀₥◝

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

◤⑰ 捄ゕ

䘚␃↮ ⮞⺞ₖ 庱◦㢮掱搡 ⛷㊬冃

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

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

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Claudio Parmiggiani 9 July – 29 August 2015 Hong Kong

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David Zwirner Books New York & London

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»Artist of the Year« 2015

Koki Tanaka

26.3. –––– 25.5. Project title: Painting to the Public (Open Air) Date: March 24, 2012 Format: Collective acts, photo documentation Route: Meguro Museum of Art to Aoyama Meguro, Tokyo Created with Aoyama Meguro, Tokyo Photography: Takashi Fujikawa Participants: Anonymous respondents to SNS announcement © the artist, Vitamin Creative Space, and Aoyama Meguro

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ArtReview Asia vol 3 no 2 Summer 2015

Editorial Who do you think you are? The other day someone asked ArtReview Asia what it was. ‘How rude!’ ArtReview Asia thought to itself, ‘you’re only supposed to ask that of Southeast Asians’, while giving its interrogator the fascinated-yet-deep-in-thought-but-absolutely-not-aboutsomething-more-interesting-than-what-you-just-asked-me face its publisher has been training it to wear. Was it a magazine for Asians? The questioner continued. What does that mean? Asian artists? Artists showing in Asia? People living in Asia? Are you trying to sell Western art to Asians? Are you trying to sell Asian art to Westerners? Isn’t Chinese the language they speak in Asia? Is Australia part of Asia? At this point ArtReview Asia went back to using its normal face and suggested that the by-now-red-faced quizmaster stop and take a breath. So much art produced in recent years has sought to address the question of who people are or who people think they are that it’s only natural that ArtReview Asia should be asked this itself. So here’s the answer: ArtReview Asia was set up in 2013 to cover art that relates to various ideas of ‘Asianness’. Yes, this means art produced in Asia, or by people who come from Asia, but it might also mean art from other parts of the world that is impacting on discourses in Asia, and it means art that is accessible in one form or another to someone living in Asia. And probably visiting Asia as well. And yes, perhaps it is also precisely about the question of what Asia is. Yet the overarching ambition is to cover art that is produced in very speciﬁc contexts, and to examine how those contexts are generated, how they inform art and, if ArtReview Asia is doing its job properly, how that art might then inform or even reﬁgure the context from which it was born. “Ambitious, huh?” ArtReview Asia said in conclusion, before looking up at the interrogater. His eyes had gone blank as he pointed up at the Tokyo skyline to a mysterious billboard displaying the slogan ‘Life is Only Once + Money’. “Art Basel? Here?” he whispered excitedly. “She doesn’t look very Swiss,” ArtReview Asia replied, “but those kind of identity issues haven’t stopped them yet.” ArtReview Asia

Enough said

Art Previewed

Previewed by Hettie Judah 21

Rashid Rana and Shilpa Gupta Interview by Charu Maithani 32

Points of View by Andrew Berardini, Jonathan T. D. Neil & Hu Fang 27

page 27 Genghis Khan (production still), 1950, dir Manuel Conde. Photo: Emmanuel Rojas. Courtesy mc Productions

Summer 2015

Art Featured

Charles Lim by Mark Rappolt 38

Lee Ufan by Wenny Teo 62

Yoshitomo Nara by Aimee Lin 44

Amanda Heng by Vera Mey 68

Nguan by Adeline Chia 48

Someting Rather Girlish About His Manner… by Hettie Judah 72

Liu Wei by Edward Sanderson 56

Scrapbook #66 by Shinro Ohtake 79

page 44 Yoshitomo Nara, “Stars”, 2015 (installation view). © the artist. Courtesy Pace, Hong Kong

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Mobile Architecture

ᅑ㏠eᑄ㣞ᓤᰩ

Yona Friedman

2015.05.16 2015.07.12

⼨ߕᐧま

ౝ౭ ͚ప̷⊤ጯ叱⊓ࡧ㟞చ⍜䌜 200त 㑾౭ www.powerstationofart.org 㖁㈨⩢䄊 +86 21 3110 8550

ゃᆂϧ喟哇ᒓ

Curator : Gong Yan

Address: 200, Huayuangang Rd. Huangpu District, Shanghai, China Web: www.powerstationofart.org Tel: +86 21 3110 8550

Art Reviewed

books 108

exhibitions 94 Parasophia, by David Terrien Leung Chi Wo and Sara Wong, by Mark Rappolt Moving Images, by Stephanie Bailey Hu Zi, by Aimee Lin Liao Guohe, by Wu Yan Rina Banerjee, by Sherman Sam Imply Reply, by Brian Curtin Sharjah Biennial 12, by Aimee Lin Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, by Kevin Jones We Come From the Water, by Helen Sumpter Wu Tsang, by Dean Kissick The Forever Now, by Hanlu Zhang

Hong Kong Parr, by Martin Parr I Am a Script, by Yu Cheng-Ta In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11, edited by Anne Havinga and Anne Nishimura Morse Stationary 1, edited by Christina Li and Heman Chong the strip 112 off the record 118

page 96 Liao Guohe, Banana Duck, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 100 × 200 cm. Courtesy Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing

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May 22 - July 22, 2015 ᐭᎂᬣ䬡 / Openning: 2015.5.22, 15:00 ᫝䬨ࣾጰч / Press Conference: 2015.5.22, 13:00 ႓ᱜ䃧ಈ / Academic Forum : 2015.5.23, 14:00

Art Previewed

Dry land is not just our destination, it is our destiny! 19

Previewed The 56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale runs from 9 May through 22 November in the Giardini, the Arsenale and various other venues throughout Venice moon Kyungwon & jeon Joonho (Korean Pavilion), Heri Dono (Indonesian Pavilion), Tsang Kin-Wah (Hong Kong Pavilion), Chiharu Shiota (Japan Pavilion), Tie a String Around the World (Philippine Pavilion), Wu Tien-chang (Taiwan Pavilion), Sarkis (Pavilion of Turkey), Armenity (Republic of Armenia Pavillion), Kamol Tassananchalee (Thai Pavilion), Enkhbold Togmidshiirev, Unen Enkh (Mongolia Pavilion)

1 moon Kyungwon & jeon Joonho, The Ways of Folding Space & Flying (ﬁlm still), 2015, hd ﬁlm installation, 10 min 30 sec, dimensions variable. © the artists

Summer 2015

2 Heri Dono, Trokomod, 2015, mixed media, 750 × 300 × 350 cm. Collection the artist. Photo: Iori Budhiono. Courtesy Bumi Purnati Indonesia, Jakarta

4 Chiharu Shiota, The Key in the Hand, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Sunhi Mang. Courtesy the artist

3 Tsang Kin-Wah, The Inﬁnite Nothing: 0, 2015, multichannel video and sound installation, 6 min 19 sec, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

You’d think that All the World’s Futures would For those of us still stuck on earth, Heri eighteenth-century costumes complete with 2 be a decently all-encompassing theme for Dono’s Trokomod might offer safe passage across wigs, a prosthetic leg used in the First World War the Venice Biennale, but in anticipation of the planet’s surface and through its cultural and a copy of Karl Marx’s Capital (1867). 1 moon Kyungwon & jeon Joonho’s timeGiven Capital’s central role in Enwezor’s battlefields. The heavily armoured 7.5m-long and-relative-dimensions-in-space-melding international exhibition – which centres on offspring of the Trojan Horse and Indonesia’s multichannel film installation The Ways of Folding Komodo dragon, Trokomod is a terrible lizard with a continuous seven-month reading staged by Isaac Julien – Marx’s critique of political economy Space & Flying, housed in the Korean national a soft heart: the ceiling of the rattan-clad interior is dressed in a batik tapestry decorated with may be a cert as Venice’s hip book of the season pavilion, it’s tempting to ask: why just the one world, Okwui? Developing their News from (pack a sturdy handbag and get working on symbols relating to Indonesian cosmology and religions. This invasion via armoured reptile, Nowhere project for its debut at Documenta 13 those biceps, bookworms), but there are other then, is a friendly one, though Dono is still (2012), moon & jeon worked with fashion 3 texts, and other thinkers, at play here too. Tsang showing his acerbic edge and dark wit: as well Kin-Wah’s nineteenth-century philosopher designers, scientists, artists and product developers to create ‘design fiction’ objects adapted as da Vinci’s tank designs and Chinese tractors, of fetish is Friedrich Nietzsche – the great Trokomod makes pointed reference to Indonesian moustachioed god-burier inspired his Ecce Homo to a world suffering the after-effects of environmental apocalypse, then deployed them in maritime affairs and fisheries minister Susi Trilogy i (2011–12) and will make a return for El Fin del Mundo, a two-screen work imagining The Infinite Nothing, the text-loving artist’s new Pudjiastuti’s policy of blowing up illegal fishing boats. Built out of scrap metal from the junkfour-part video installation. Echoing Tsang’s the need to create art as a still-compelling force yards of Bandung and Yogyakarta, this anthroown soul-searching as he questioned the devout at the end of days. Biennale curator Okwui pomorphic – and apparently amphibious – Enwezor’s theme should be right up their Christian beliefs that he’d carried through his armoured vessel will be studded with teleteenage years, The Infinite Nothing intertwines curious and super-collaborative alley, so long scopes through which can be spied exoticised as their thoughts haven’t long since left this swirling strings of words with found footage, artefacts of European culture, including planet for other, less doomy alternatives. starting with the image of the river, its eddies

ArtReview Asia

5 Genghis Khan (production still), 1950, dir Manuel Conde. Photo: Emmanuel I. Rojas

6 Wu Tien-Chang, Our Hearts Beat as One, 2001–15, laser print, 240 × 343 cm. © the artist

7 Sarkis, Rainbow (Big Bang), 2014 (installation view, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, 2014). Photo: Daniel Mihail Constantinescu. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris & Brussels

symbolising the commencement of a cyclical the world and lead it to the feet of his beloved use the gloss of artifice to reveal multiple layers Li Hu. Genghis Khan (1950) was shown as part of spiritual journey. of constructed human identity. Clad in a ghostNo river will be troubling the two boats the Venice Film Festival in 1952; this year it makes ly latex skin, the seductive central figure in 4 enmeshed in Chiharu Shiota’s The Key in the a return in a newly restored print, anchoring Wu’s Farewell, Spring and Autumn Pavilions video Hand, which the artist’s previous form leads us contemplation of territorial ambition and the installation will embody some of the complex to imagine will be caught within a delicate but fragility of nationhood in threading together struggles of Taiwan’s postwar culture, and nod to the venue’s history as a beautiful site apparently impenetrable mesh of threads, like islands like so many beads. Bringing the subject of incarceration. Wu’s interest in the enduring forcefully into the present, Jose Tence Ruiz is objects just out of grasp in the fog of memory. Last autumn Shiota put out an international call plausibility of the photograph will see him constructing an installation inspired by the push credibility to its limits in a series of for keys no longer needed. She guaranteed that rust-fretted hulk of the brp Sierra Madre, a tactiif sent to her for use in Venice, no names would cally grounded battleship making its presence accompanying pictures showing elaborately be used and no keys would be returned – these staged and digitally transformed tableaux. felt in the disputed West Philippine Sea. Shown And what’s wrong with a spot of maniobjects, symbolising hundreds of locked doors alongside a three-screen installation by Mariano pulation, after all? Even nature gets in on the and abandoned pasts, will be poured into the Montelibano III, which extends the theme of act – have you seen all the multicoloured fuss mix, representing a more intimate, global history the depleting resources and fraught geopolitics than the grand narratives of capital and colony that happens when light meets a raindrop? of the ocean, the staunch sociopolitical engage5 ment of this first Philippine Pavilion since 1964 under discussion elsewhere. Taking his cue from just such a spectral display Genghis Khan had a more ambitious vision hints at Genghis-like ambition. – a phenomenon the Istanbul-born artist refers The sixteenth-century prison at the end for twine, according to Filipino director Manuel 7 to as the ‘magical breaking point of light’– Sarkis is dressing the Turkish Pavilion in mirrors, panels of the Bridge of Sighs is a suitably surreal locaConde’s 1950 biopic, which concludes with the 6 tion for Wu Tien-chang’s beguiling exercises great conqueror surveying far horizons from a of stained glass and works in neon. Accompanied mountaintop and promising to tie a string around in photographic kitsch and manipulation, which by a composition by Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi,

Summer 2015

8 Melik Ohanian, presence – Belongingness to Present – Part ii, Datcha Project – A Zone for No Production, 2005–, colour photograph. © and courtesy the artist

10 Unen Enkh, Untitled (detail), 2015, felt, horsehair, iron wire, lead sheet, 278 × 29 × 22 cm. Courtesy the artist

9 Kamol Tassananchalee, Roller with the World, 2010, stainless steel, 81 × 81 × 46 cm. Courtesy the artist

Sarkis’s installation, titled Respiro, is a reminder of the deeper elemental forces at play beneath all the territorial disputes, the waves of indifferent sound and light, and the rainbows that predate human pugnacity yet have come to symbolise a covenant of peace. Mount Ararat, site of said biblical rainbow, is in the far east of Turkey, in the province now bordering Armenia, where the sacred peak is known as Masis, something that would not have escaped the attention of Sarkis, who this year represents both countries. In the latter case, he forms part of a 16-strong team of artists from the Armenian diaspora – among them Nina Katchadourian, Melik Ohanian and Anna Boghiguian – marking a century since the genocide of 1915. Listed as the ﬁrst genocide of the twentieth century, it is one of the “darker, more ugly periods” alluded to by Enwezor in describing the 120 years since the Biennale’s 8 debut. The titular concept of Armenity reﬂects the sense of disjunction, injustice and rootless

fellow-feeling that is said to characterise the survivors of the genocide and their descendants. This centenary ‘transnational assembly’ will take place in the Venetian lagoon, in the Mekhitarist Monastery on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, where in 1816 Lord Byron studied Armenian to distract himself from a torturous 10 love affair. ‘I found that my mind wanted something craggy to break upon’, wrote the poet at the time: the cultural offering of the island seems no less obdurate some two centuries later. There has been some crackling in the Thai press about the selection of septuagenarian 9 ‘National Artist’ Kamol Tassananchalee for this year’s Biennale, and what now seems an inevitable Facebook ﬁzz over whether any one artist can ‘represent’ a country of 67 million. Dividing his time between Thailand and Southern California, Tassananchalee’s red and earth-toned – sometimes sand- and earth-specked – canvases meld oneiric forms, Buddhist symbolism and cosmology with references to the artist’s own

ArtReview Asia

working practice. Sure, it’s not hip, photogenic performance art, but with All the World’s Futures’ ferocious critique of capitalism, conflict, migration and environmental disaster, is there not still space in Venice for serene, abstract beauty, and possibly even the proagrarian? A point driven home too by Unen Enkh and Enkhbold Togmidshiirev, both of whom draw on the strong material associations of Mongolia’s pastoral heritage, deploying felt, animal skin, horsehair and dung, as well as a building tradition of spare, lightweight structures in their work. For Enkh, these come together in elegant, organic sculptures that perch on spindly legs or hang from near-invisible hairs. Rejecting the safe confines of his nation’s first Venice pavilion, Togmidshiirev will instead carry his ger (yurt) with him as a nomadic pavilion to be erected as a home and personal performance site in the city’s public spaces. A spectacle that should, if nothing else, give the self-pitying ‘nomads’ of the artworld pause. Hettie Judah

AWANG DAMIT AHMAD, JEJAK WAKTU “GARUT DAN AL’ FATIHAH”, MIXED MEDIA, 153cm X 244cm, 2010.

pantauIRAGA

(ART SPACE)

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T +603 3122 9016 HP +6019 227 5469 E awangiraga56@gmail.com F awangdamit.ahmad

Points of View

The blood of the earth. Ochre slathered our bodies for rituals as we invented them, a primeval makeup on simian faces flickering into consciousness, the only paint we can be sure those first sentient ancestors sprayed and spread and loved. Our Adam and Eve likely didn’t figleaf for the father-god, but ochred their junk for the greater glory of the Supreme Mother. Ancient hominids painted their skin and dusted the bones of their dead in this bleeding brown hue that ranges from rusted to jaundiced; whether for worship or a simple aesthetic affection for its tinge, we can never know for sure. From the caves of Altamira to the flesh of Beothuk and Maori warriors, humans everywhere found a beauty in this pigment easily smeared from wet clay, that still crusts the hair and glazes the skin of Himba women in Namibia, and still finds force in wet-paint caking canvases in painters’ studios from Brooklyn to Beijing, though there it stains backgrounds more than features as frontage. The silhouetted hand stencilled in ochre 25,000 years ago in Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc dreams of ancient fathers and mothers, my fingers imagined in theirs on the rough stone, thousands of summers separating our touch. One of the most abundant minerals on earth, iron exposed lends itself to a host of colours, but ochre is certainly its most ancient pigment. Although standardised in laboratories and factories to a definite shade of brown, natural ochre’s hue varies wildly. Hematite and limonite spread throughout clay richly deepens its skin from ruddy red to mellow gold – changing from place to place, it’s a fugitive hue. The iron makes the colour last; organic pigments crushed from plants succumbed to the millennia, disappearing beyond what science and story can discover. Etymologically, ochre comes from an Ancient Greek word for yellow, but it has since settled into a shade between shanty rust and dying sun, a brown we dubbed Indian Clay as sandbox children who dug too deep. European painters used ochre unsparingly, finding a fair hue for the ruddy skin of girls with pearl earrings and martyred saints, but

ochre: the first pigment leaves a lasting stain or

Oh Cur, Oak Her, Oke Ur – what exactly is it? in which

Andrew Berardini traces the stains and smears of this ubiquitous colour, from the skin of ancient hominids to the deserts of California or

From Adam and Eve to Andrea Zittel

Mungo Thomson,The American Desert ( for Chuck Jones) (still), 2002, single-channel video with sound, 34 min. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2015

this sanguinary shade has fallen out of use, reserved for the rutted dirt roads, dusty places and earthen people. Across literature, the word still colours but rarely. Each time the writer fingers an array of colours, in a likely list from a well-thumbed thesaurus, they find in the curl of its colour and the sound of its stutter a perfect poetry: Oh Cur, Oak Her, Oke Ur. Half-choked, it still rolls. I see ochres in old port towns, rust-belted and terminal. Leaked from the wounds of dying iron, not rust but its bleed on weathered wood, dripping down into the cut seams and folds of buildings, the paint flaked and clinging to only the saddest fade of its wet youth. If Serra’s steel monuments could bleed, they’d bleed ochre. Its smear is spotted in stones littering Monument Valley and the American Southwest, the bands of ochre ringing pale rock in dusted desert cathedrals more sublime than humans can ever craft. Ochre colours the arches and buttes where Wile E. Coyote’s technical genius always fails to defeat the Road Runner’s native intelligence and natural grace, never, ever sinking those cartoon canines into his evasive prey. A generation of minimalists and Land artists favoured the American desert: Michael Heizer to cut his city of stone, James Turrell to carve out of a caldera a naked-eye observatory and Noah Purifoy to assemble a junk garden. They found in Coyote country a freedom to act and make far from civilisation and its corruptions, and so do Alma Allen and Andrea Zittel and all the artists in High Desert Test Sites along with countless other freaks and weirdos, visionaries and geniuses still sifting their ideas through the desert dust. In ochre we find our most ancient connections to the land and its colour, where technology reveals itself as that mechanism that not only fails to deliver desire but will likely lead us to our eventual self-destruction. The Road Runner, never caught, always free, again and again leaves his enemy eating dust, tinged just for me with the softest whisper of ancient ochre.

Since 2008 the word ‘derivative’ has taken on a new valence in the discourse of art. Formerly a dismissal of art that smacked too much of other, more important art (or of art that seemed to gain traction through its relationship or proximity to other, more famous art – in this, derivative art is akin to the celebrity’s entourage), today one can’t utter the word without invoking its status as culprit for the global ﬁnancial crisis. Derivatives, as most of us now know, are securities contracts that commit one or more parties to a transaction, the value of which is based upon, or derived from, the value of some underlying asset. Mortgage-backed securities were at the root of the 2008 crisis. Stocks and bonds and currencies can also serve as the underlying to a derivative; so can commodities of various sorts, including art. We don’t see wide use of art as the underlying in the formation of derivatives, however. Art funds come closest to this type of offering, insofar as they give investors the chance to own ‘shares’ of a fund whose value is determined by the portfolio of art that it manages. What any individual investor ‘owns’ in this case is not a work of art but a claim to a certain amount of the value that each work of art in the portfolio contributes to the whole. A more orthodox derivative with art as the underlying could be constructed from the increasing use of art as collateral. Banks, auction houses and other boutique money shops are loaning money against the value of collections of art owned by ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and it’s not too hard to imagine those same ﬁrms packaging those loans into securities and selling them to investors as a means of hedging their own exposure. There are two ways in which derivatives backed by works of art consistently strike defenders of art as odd or unsavoury. First,

derivative work or

Not the worlds of art and ﬁnance coming together again! or

the artwork as ‘portfolio manager’ in which

Jonathan T. D. Neil explains the value of an artwork about value and the post-ﬁnancial crisis meaning of the d-word in art

Real Flow, Art Is the Sublime Asset, 2015 Prospectus for ﬁnancial instruments, 12 pages Photo: Sebastian Bach

ArtReview Asia

conceptually, such instruments strip the work of art down to a single attribute: price. From the perspective of the derivative, everything else that one might say or know about the work of art is irrelevant. The derivative instantiates a complete divorce between discourse and price, and in the faux puritanical world of art’s autonomy, this amounts to some kind of sacrilege. Second, practically, the ownership of works of art is largely organised around commitments to art’s singularity (the work of art as an embodiment of its associated discourse, not its price) and thus to possession of that singularity. Owning a derivative based upon a work of art or a collection of works of art divides ownership from possession and thus from the proximity to singularity that, in this logic, gives ownership meaning. There is a word for such separations (of discourse from price) and divisions (of ownership from possession), and that’s ‘financialization’; though it may be regarded as the categorical undoing of art, it may also present conditions for its formal advancement in the present. Such is the potential of Real Flow, an enterprise of sorts established by Diann Bauer, Victoria Ivanova, Suhail Malik and Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Real Flow debuted at Prem Krishnamurthy’s new Lower East Side space K. (pronounced k-period) at the beginning of March. According to its own Prospectus, Real Flow is a ‘portfolio manager’ that offers art ‘instruments’ modelled on financial instruments. rf1501, Real Flow’s initial offering, includes two series of items: x001 through x004, which, on the occasion of the debut at K., took the form of four mostly monochrome abstractions that fall somewhere between the work of Brad Troemel and Ian Wallace – that is, they signify as absolutely of the contemporary international style in painting; and y001 through y004, the ‘Certificates of Ownership’ for x001–x004. With regard to the paintings x001 through x004, what this structure allows for is one party, be it a museum or collector or anyone, really, to ‘acquire’ the works in order to display them or store them or do with them whatever one would like and is allowable with respect to the moral rights of the artist (which, according to Malik, is Real Flow itself in this case, but it needn’t be in the future). The cost of this acquisition is simply the carrying costs (shipping, insurance, installation, conservation, etc) associated with the work, plus 20 percent, which is the ‘management fee’ charged by Real Flow. A different party is then free to purchase one or more of the certificates of ownership, Y001 through y004, whose value is informally linked to the X-series but the trading of which does not require the physical exchange of those works.

In other words, ownership need not entail possession, and discourse, all that can be said, written and represented about the X-series, need not affect nor be affected by price. As stated in its Prospectus, ‘Real Flow operationalizes ﬁnancialization’s futurity to reconstitute the present of art, its future present and our future.’ Indeed, one of the claims made by Real Flow is that the form of the X-series works – in this case, abstract paintings of the international contemporary style – is arbitrary. Whatever the ‘present of art’ or its ‘future present’ might bring in terms of manifest aesthetic tendencies, whatever tastes prevail, so will go the offerings that Real Flow may ‘operationalize’. A certain amount of this must be taken as tongue-in-cheek, but like the readymade, a certain amount of it is deadly serious. Real Flow’s contribution must be viewed as part of a now century-long strategy on the part of artists to internalise within the form of art the dominant modality of its production, consumption and circulation. In 1915, that modality was the commodity; in 1965, it was administration, or at least conceptual art’s aesthetic fetishisation of it; and in 2015, why not the security, or the derivative? As Malik has pointed out elsewhere (see his ‘Ontology of Finance’ in the most recent issue of Collapse), the global derivatives market is, on one view, nearly ten times as large as global gdp, or, on a less inﬂationary scale, equivalent at least to

the gdp of many of the world’s biggest national economies, such as those of the us and Germany. In this context, it is not at all unreasonable to claim, as Malik does, that capitalism is simply a special case of finance, that finance is in fact the more general or generic concept and holds greater and broader explanatory purchase on the operations of culture and society, let alone the economy. Which brings us to Real Flow’s second offering: 1502_Zn. As described in the Prospectus, the Z-series, potentially infinite in number, operates something like a forward contract on the sales of the Y-series of contracts. Above and beyond the direct trading of Y-series Certificates of Ownership, the Z-series would allow parties to buy and sell claims to the projected profits (or losses) of those trades. For example, owners of a Y-series Certificate could hedge their ownership by entering into a Z-series contract along the lines of a put option, call it z001, giving them the right but not the obligation to sell the Y-series Certificate (the underlying) at a set price on some future date. But of course the counterparty to that Z-series contract could in turn enter into a different Z-series contract, call it z002, with an entirely different party, which takes z001 as its underlying, in essence a speculation on another party’s speculation, the chains of which are in principle endless. Were contract-based artist resale royalties ever to come into wide use, we could see the

institutionalisation of something like the Z-series in the contemporary marketplace. By giving an artist a claim to a share of (potential) profits garnered by the reselling of his or her work, those claims could be sold on by the artist to another party, who could then sell them on to another party, who could sell them on, and so forth. These rights themselves could be bundled into a further security, and a new marketplace for art-backed derivatives could come into being. But what contractbased resale royalties would do externally, the Z-series, and Real Flow, attempt to do internally: to make the derivative a condition of art’s very possibility, to install the derivative financial structure as twenty-first-century art’s operating system. Real Flow’s trademarked tagline is ‘Art is the sublime asset’, which invokes both the aesthetic, adjectival notion of what kind of thing art is as well as the active, verbal notion of what happens to it and, really, all material culture when the environmental conditions of capitalism become ever more financial. Real Flow doesn’t want a sublime art, it wants to sublime art, and not by financializing it, but by offering finance art – that is, finance as a formal resource for art. If the readymade was nothing but the commodity form offered in the place of art, then Real Flow’s instruments are nothing but the finance form offered as art.

Real Flow, 2015 (installation view at K., New York). Photo: Sebastian Bach

Summer 2015

house m I came to House M due to a brief stopover. Travelling, or walking, is less about a certain destination and more about pacing back and forth on some ambiguous quest, searching, for example, for today’s wind and your smile in my memory. I came to this massive, crowded city only to stay in a spacious room with a copy of the Surangama Sutra in it. I flipped through it and the following line leaped out at me: That fresh, vivid consciousness Does it come from what is seen? Or from the external appearances? Does it generate from the void? Or all of a sudden, without a reason? But throughout my time in this strange city, I could not drop into that kind of life. I had something else on my mind. The appearance of House M seemed to be the result of my ambivalence, a subtle resonant reaction to feelings and atmospheres, an attempt to understand certain spatial aspects of the relationship between me and the world. “There are love songs you can listen to here,” the owner of the house proclaimed rather unexpectedly. There are always one or two love songs in my digital memory box. They inexplicably recall fading emotions, providing accompaniment to our journey. But I seem largely to have forgotten them. After that, what I was invited to enter was not merely a room that bore scars left by others, but a world filled with indescribable emotions. The vestiges of emotions flowed throughout the place, soundlessly carving out a tranquil space within the noise of reality. It was a place without superfluous spectacles, and I was there to diminish rather than increase the emotional weight, in order quietly to face my own existence. Just quieting down is sufficient to experience the present moment. You wait as long an amount of time as is necessary – long enough to observe the growth of plants, and listen to your own heartbeat. People may not be entirely willing to accept this kind of inevitable solitude, but it was thousands upon thousands of solitudes that turned House M into this kind of unique shared existence. When you cannot sleep at night, you can always explore more of this world’s secrets: the light across from you, the faint groaning of electronics, the moonlight sprinkled on the floorboards, and you unexpectedly think of the sounds of your family members snoring. I know that is one of the gentle things in life that House M recalls, like a maternal hand soothing away the wrinkles of a calm mind, and a quiet

house m & house n Brief stopovers, the Surangama Sutra, soundless carvings, unclear purposes, massive rugs, unique topographies, secrets, ghosts and endless cycles… Like all the best dramas, this is a tale of two houses by

Hu Fang, ﬁction writer, art critic and curator

whisper in your ear: “Let us be forever young, and never worry.” In the morning light, I calmly lift my water glass and prepare to accept this unknowable day, no matter what happens. house n I once stayed in a room of unclear purpose, and I can still remember the absolutely clear light when I woke up in the morning. There, I had a chance to figure out the pattern of a massive rug. Its only purpose was to hide the floor’s flaws, but it featured a woven pattern from a tropical culture. I once, indeed, encountered an endlessly shaking shadow in one of the corners. It moved hazily to a certain rhythm, as if it were a homemade pendulum specially designed for the room. It helped me realise that the ghost of an old house wouldn’t fade away after the house was redecorated. The only thing you can do is to lean your body against the wall, or, to lean against the wall watching your body. The curtain is to the side, heavy like the wings of a sick bird. Yes, House N has a symbolic skylight that can hold a few hopes. You can also huddle up

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in this room and lift your head to see the grey sky in the window frame. Beneath the skylight there is a desk painted grey. Why is there a desk? Is it so people can sit there and write things? This really makes some people laugh: something that takes up space, just like my life senselessly occupies time. That massive rug seemed like it could accommodate several celebrating friends, but it also seemed like a fathomless riverbed. I walked lightly across the rug to another part of the room. The curtain there attracted me, but I still didn’t have the courage to open it. Like the hesitation before any action: I kept wringing my hands. No matter how clean they were, I rubbed dirt off of them. If I was brave enough to open the curtains, I could have at least seen more clearly a distorted face, or a group of people besieged by obsession. Then, when I returned to the desk, I would not be able to experience that previous tranquillity. The proportions of emotions seem to ﬂicker and ﬂuctuate, changing the shape of the room. In the unique topography of House N, the incandescent light shines in like the sun. I don’t know if it is a sign of nightfall or the arrival of the morning, but you are already thinking, a day ends, just like that. There must have been people cautiously tracking you on your way here. If not, then nobody would have prepared everything for you in advance. After all, people could only learn this place’s secrets once you entered the room. If the image behind the curtain isn’t excessively genuine, then you can do as you please, not say a word, and attain a blank state of temporary unconsciousness. There are no shapes from the past, none of the people I need to remember – those shadowy portraits, those hurt and humiliated histories. You hear only your own echoes, “humph”. In that room, you talk, you laugh, “hee hee”, you feel yourself endlessly circling the original ghost of this room, dancing together in endless cycles. House N, a place that does not provide memories, retains only the light from 1998 and the images from 2014, a suitable temperature, humidity and store of emotions. Later, you can disappear in the tropical jungle. After all, in all that time, we only became a person in a coarse way, a person hiding behind daily salutations, a person whose colours gradually fade in mediocre comedy. I close the door, and my hand rests on the handle as if to preserve the posture of those years. The same words require endless repetition before they can produce new meaning, just like the ghost here must endlessly return in order to occupy my space with increasing clarity, just like writing must endlessly occupy the space of the ghost, or be occupied by the space of the ghost.

MICHAEL MAPES June 18 - July 9, 2015 operagaller y.com G/F - 3/F, W Place, 52 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong T. + 852 2810 1208 hkg@operagallery.com

Artists and Their Ideas No 1

Rashid Rana & Shilpa Gupta My East is Your West, a collateral event of the Venice Biennale to be held in Palazzo Benzon, is a coming together of two contemporary artists – Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana – from India and Pakistan respectively. The project, organised by the Gujral Foundation, which was founded in India in 2008 by Mohit and Feroze Gujral, addresses the lack of a pavilion from India or Pakistan in the Venice Biennale (yet again) Interview by

Charu Maithani

With the rise of artists featuring in pavilions of countries other than their own, the questions of location, positions and viewpoints have become even more relevant. My East is Your West is also a provocation to the national pavilions in the Biennale that deﬁne a certain position depending upon where one is located.

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My East is Your West not only addresses India and Pakistan, but includes other countries of the subcontinent in its programmes. Natasha Ginwala, the curatorial adviser and public programmes curator, has initiated an interdisciplinary travelling platform of events entitled Ancestors. Held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in March and April, it has included seminars, workshops, performances and ﬁlm screenings held in collaboration with art organisations. artreview asia How did the idea of having a collaborative exhibition come about? rashid rana Feroze Gujral and I met at the last Venice Biennale and we mutually sulked over the fact that neither Pakistan nor India had a pavilion. I whimsically ﬂoated the rather idealistic idea of a joint pavilion, and Feroze, being a remarkable doer, has actually gone ahead and made it happen.

Having said that, collaboration is working out for Shilpa and myself, but I wouldn’t claim that it is inevitable for other practitioners. sg The public art project Aar Paar ran for three editions and was conceived after I met Huma Mulji at the Khoj International Artists’ Workshop in Delhi. This organisation has Pooja Sood at its helm, who had previously organised an exhibition of artists from India and Pakistan at Eicher Gallery in Delhi. One thing leads to another, and over the years, the Vasl [Artists’ Collective] in Pakistan and Britto [Arts Trust] in Bangladesh, among other initiatives, have kept networks alive in South Asia. Through these, several friendships have been forged, and today artists from Lahore and Karachi are a part of the art scenes in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. So yes, indeed there have been a few collaborations

ara What is the motivation behind this project? rr A joint pavilion from the subcontinent at an event like Venice, which is so heavily invested in the idea of nation-states, means that it is cleverly subversive of one-dimensional ideas of geography and belonging. Especially because of having both India and Pakistan onboard, just the fact of the pavilion becomes an automatic comment on the arbitrariness of geopolitical borders. shilpa gupta In the absence of any official pavilion from the region, in the specific context of the Venice Biennale, this project presents itself as an ‘unofficial’ presence carrying within itself an ‘unofficial dream’ where two artists from two places that are closer than many would like to believe will be shown together. The project proposes to delve into time, which is not immediate, not so entangled, and to look beyond tense definitions which are not as old as projected. ara In her Aar Paar project (2002–06) Shilpa collaborated with Huma Mulji and several other artists from India and Pakistan. Rashid was also part of the Aar Paar project, and had his first major solo exhibition in Delhi in 2004. Have the shared spaces, histories and networks made the exchange and collaboration between the two countries inevitable? rr I agree that we have a lot in common to build upon, but there are naturally very striking differences between the two countries as well, which make collaborations all the more meaningful.

the former is all knowledge directly amassed through the body functioning as its site and the latter is constituted by all indirect sources of knowing; these may be as diverse as a sitcom on television and a painting from the Renaissance. I don’t distinguish between them and believe that an artist can lay claim to any. Using these ways of knowing, I am taking the viewer on an experiential tour that makes them question their preconceived ideas of location and chronology. sg The title of the project, My East Is Your West, based on an ongoing outdoor light installation, celebrates multiplicity where an individual can function within and beyond and even play with deﬁnitions. Through a series of objects, prints and moving images, my work will deal with the tension between the self, as a citizen, and the surrounding nation; their conﬂicting aspirations and desires for each other and themselves. Perception, time, location and construction of knowledge are overlapping interests that bring both the artists together, but we freely explore it from various tangents. ara What has the process of working together been like – sharing space and common problems? Is there an archiving of the conversations and exchanges between you?

in the worlds of art [and] literature. Several nongovernmental cross-border initiatives have been at work, which are far more open than other tense spaces. One hopes several more will take place in the future. ara Both of you work in the digital medium – photographs, installations, video. The themes too are common, covering urbanisation, geography, boundaries, politics and violence. What can be expected in this project? rr My work in this project is a negotiation between the actual and the remote, where

above Shilpa Gupta, There Is No Border Here, 2005–06 archival print on paper, 107 × 85 cm. Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing & Les Moulins facing page, left Rashid Rana. Photo: Aroosa Rana. Courtesy Gujral Foundation, Delhi facing page, right Shilpa Gupta. Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing & Les Moulins

Summer 2015

sg We started by discussing our overlapping interest and practice over the years and then decided to work on our own projects, which will be shown alongside each other rather than having any overarching theme. rr Shilpa and I are working independently on our separate projects in our respective studios, but we are regularly in touch, mostly over email. It has been very engaging to consider another artist while considering issues such as spatial division, curating, the framing of this joint pavilion and how our works ﬁt into each other. The emails of course are saved, but the real conversation will manifest itself inside the pavilion. ara What role, if any, did Venice curator Okwui Enwezor have in this collaboration? At the same time, were there a lot of discussions between you both and the Gujral Foundation’s Natasha Ginwala? rr Since this is a collateral event, Okwui Enwezor is not so closely involved. Natasha has been an invaluable resource in facilitating this conversation. She is also curating a series of talks and events following the opening of the exhibition.

sg More than a decade ago, Okwui had organised a memorable ‘Platform’ in Delhi as part of Documenta 11. Over the years, he has been constantly engaging with this region, and so we are glad that this project features as a collateral event of his Biennale project in Venice. Otherwise collateral events are independent projects – the curator of the main Biennale has knowledge of them but is not closely involved. Natasha is in the project as an adviser and has been someone with whom I have been in dialogue through the making of the project. As part of it she is curating seminars in Sri Lanka, Dhaka and Lahore, including artists and thinkers from within and beyond the region. ara The Venice Biennale is all about national pavilions. Given the history of relations, to have an IndoPak collateral is quite a statement. What do you think of the Venice Biennale as a location for such a project, as opposed to India or Pakistan, given the reaction that it would draw if it were to take place in either of the two countries? rr I do not see it strictly as an Indo-Pak collateral but a pavilion from the subcontinent that features India and Pakistan. To imagine India and Pakistan as polarities reduces both to their supposedly insurmountable difference. I agree that it is quite a statement, but the statement is that of subversion and not subscription to the idea of their presumed dichotomy. Perhaps if the event were in India or Pakistan it would be more difficult to draw that distinction. sg I would say: why not? Given the projects that have happened elsewhere, one can imagine several interesting locations for it. However, this project rose out of a certain conversation in and around the Venice Biennale, and therefore it holds a very special meaning to be located here. ara The poor or nonexistent representation from the subcontinent in the Venice Biennale is much spoken about. But isn’t a national pavilion outdated in the contemporary world, where one is testament to one’s time more than one’s location? rr I agree that nation-state representation is outdated. One artist cannot claim to sum up the entirety of experience in a country, or perhaps nationality doesn’t feature as a concern in deﬁning one’s identity or practice. It is a false burden. On the other hand, it is important at an event such as Venice, which draws a lot of worldwide attention, that voices from this region are heard. Given the exciting developments here and the very mature practice of artists from the subcontinent, I think it is a real shame that they are not adequately represented because their countries lack a pavilion. So how do we undo this automatic negative consequence of not having a country pavilion,

even if one doesn’t believe in nation-state representation? I think the Gujral Foundation is showing us one way. sg Last year Dayanita Singh, an artist based in Delhi, was one of the four artists representing Germany and showing in the French Pavilion, so we are beginning to see a few reconsiderations of the nation-state paradigm in the Venice Biennale context. And one is glad such propositions come from the world of art, whereas most international assemblies and games continue to follow the structure they ﬁnd themselves embedded in, both in terms of imagination and economics.

I do not see it strictly as an Indo-Pak collateral but a pavilion from the subcontinent that features India and Pakistan. To imagine India and Pakistan as polarities reduces both to their supposedly insurmountable difference. I agree that it is quite a statement, but the statement is that of subversion and not subscription to the idea of their presumed dichotomy ara India and Pakistan might have a shared history, but the political and economic course since independence has been very different. How do the nations compare in creative infrastructure? rr India relatively enjoys more state support than Pakistan. There is a lot of interest within India in roles other than the artist practitioner, such as curator, gallerist, art manager and others. So in that sense, creative infrastructure in India is more sharply defined. In Pakistan, these roles are often taken up by the artist practitioners themselves. Additionally, many artists are involved with teaching, so pedagogy has played a very central role in defining the direction of visual art in Pakistan. sg This is, in fact, what took me to Lahore for the first time – I was invited for a workshop at the art school. Several of the key contemporary art practitioners, like Rashid, Huma [Mulji], Quddus [Mirza], Bani [Abidi], Imran [Qureshi], have or are currently teaching between the Beaconhouse National University (bnu) and the National College of Art, Lahore. This is something we could have more of here! In Mumbai, where I live, as in several other

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cities, there continues to be a large gap between the contemporary artworld and state institutions, be it art schools or even public galleries. Comparatively, here there are far more private/ commercial galleries, independent spaces and artists’ initiatives, and in fact this year was the second edition of the artist-led Kochi [-Muziris] Biennale. ara Shilpa, your work is essentially ‘political of the everyday’ where regular activities are explicated in the ideological structures that they are played in. Rashid, your work is re-imaging everyday imagery and juxtaposing it in a larger context of global politics. Does having similar concerns make a cohesive curatorial thought? rr Absolutely. We are aware of common strands in our respective practices. We are both interested in borders, temporality, geography and authority. While Shilpa deals with these concerns using a sensitive affective vocabulary, I examine the same concerns from a broader perspective. The curating, however, doesn’t just stop at overlapping concerns. The conversation is carried forward and the viewer will see our works maintain their autonomy and yet correspond in subtle, surprising ways. sg We had several interesting conversations discussing overlapping concerns in our practices; we decided to work freely and not restrict ourselves with any overarching theme. ara The digital medium is very much about the user/ audience response and interaction. Shilpa, your work is created with the user in mind – how they interact, feel and respond to the work is very important. How far is it possible to shift their perception? Rashid, your works are like miniature forms, intricately drawn story pieces that are part of a larger narrative. Some work on dualities while others portray the connection with digital technology. How far is it possible to shift the viewer’s perception? rr Perhaps I am not looking as much to shift the perception of a viewer permanently as for them to recognise it is slipping and so ‘undoable’. Signals of a perception in ﬂux would automatically make a viewer uncomfortable and also introspective as to their ﬁxed place in the world in terms of spatial and temporal coordinates. sg There is no intention to shift the perception of the viewer: rather it is for the viewer to realise that perception can shift depending on the context, be it location, knowledge or access. ara You devise ways in which your work implicates the viewer, making them a participant and not a mere bystander. It’s like parts of our lives are exhibited, but just seen in a different way. There is a relationship between the artwork and viewer. Is this a deliberate practice?

rr In previous works such as A Room from Tate Modern (2013–14) I am already exploring how immersion can play with perception and offer visitors a tour of ﬁctional, impossible spaces in a very tangible, enveloped way. I am taking the idea further for this project, where a visitor goes through an experiential tour over a series of rooms. Interaction of a viewer with the work does become necessary, but it is not dictated. I allow myself to be surprised with the possibilities. sg I use everyday devices, as I am surrounded by them and there is a sense of familiarity that they can create. They become entry points into the work to then unfold our conscious or unconscious selves that are carried inside these daily objects or actions. It then seeks to dilute and complicate the spaces shared between different tangents to seek awareness of themselves and each other – something which even Rashid’s work does!

global politics dictates a one-dimensional reading of works from a particular part of the world. sg I think there is no one way of looking at the world and one kind of practice: and different artists can engage or not, with different things at different levels. ara Both of you began expanding your art practice in the mid-1990s – a signiﬁcant decade in politics, technology and economic aspects of not only the subcontinent but the entire world. Do you see that time as signiﬁcant to the kind of aesthetics that you have? rr I wouldn’t pinpoint it particularly to the 1990s, but the ways in which the world is organised today in terms of information has been hugely impactful on my work. Sitting in Lahore, naturally the city informs my practice, but I can remotely access a huge repository of resources across time and space, and I don’t shy away from using that to my advantage.

ara Politics and art: when does it become important to mix the two, and what are the instances where it can be kept apart? rr One cannot deny that in an age of intensive visual stimulation, politics and art are irrevocably intertwined, in the many ways that art is produced, disseminated and received by the world. One cannot eschew politics completely. However, I am uncomfortable with the idea of sermonising through art and, in contrast, when

sg The 1990s was indeed signiﬁcant, and it was a moment of several changes – on one hand changing liberalisation policies led to an opening up of the economy and on the other hand we saw rightwing politics on the rise. On one hand the world was brought closer over high-speed Internet cables, where you could be sitting at a desk and interact with an environment which would be different from your own surroundings; and on the other hand fear

and aggression also grew. The time was dynamic and tense, and perhaps lent an impetus to experimentation and the grasping of doubt; however, in terms of formal aspects, my practice does not really belong to a single time. ara Both of you have exhibited widely all over the world while still raising pertinent local issues. How does one speak to the local and global audience at the same time? rr I do not necessarily preempt an imaginary audience while working, and I don’t believe that an audience is strictly divided between local and global. To reiterate, being based in Lahore, my practice is automatically informed by the city as well as the global ideas I am exposed to. This was particularly obvious in my photographic sculptures, like The Step (2010–11), where a roadside brick structure from Lahore was quoting the object language of Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. sg Geography is hardly a way to split in between the global and local. We must realise that contemporary art as it functions today is in certain hubs, nested within urban environments, which have a lot to share with each other. Having said that, even within these urban spaces there are different kinds of artworlds, and then there are worlds that are rather remote to art though they might technically be close by.

Rashid Rana, The step, 2010–11, uv print on aluminium. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London, Milan & New York

Summer 2015

Art Featured

You should have stayed under water 37

Charles Lim by Mark Rappolt

Venice may not have sunk yet, but the Singaporean artist is going to turn it into a waterworld this summer

above sea state 8: The Grid, 2014, prepared gsp1 chart, Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, 2014 preceding pages sea state 5: drift (rope sketch) (digital video still), 2012, single-channel hd digital video, 4 min 59 sec

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‘The Deadly Global War for Sand’, screamed the headline publicising into the water, you only have 15 seconds – or something like that – to a report by Vince Beiser in the March 2015 edition of Wired magazine. live, before hypothermia kicks in. But in the tropics, the temperature It documented the growth of illegal sand mining, the resultant ‘sand of water is near to the temperature of our blood. Water is actually safe; mafias’ and the violence that came with them in India and Southeast it is a space where one may seek refuge in case of a storm.” Asia. It also estimated that around two-dozen Indonesian islands The notion of barriers and barricades is something that has been have disappeared since 2005 because most of the sand that once a part of sea state since the beginning. The first phase of the project, constituted them now constitutes the island of Singapore. The city- sea state 1: inside\outside (2005), saw Lim documenting marker buoys state, which is the world’s largest sand importer (using it for both and other floating objects (various detritus) on Singapore’s nautical construction and land reclamation), had, according to a 2010 Global port limits. Each object was photographed twice, from inside and Witness report, physically grown by a whopping 130 square kilo- outside the limits. As a group, these photographs of objects in apparmetres (adding 22 percent to its former size) in the 45 years since it ently boundless water seem as much a record of the sea state (wave achieved independence from Malaysia during the 1960s. It’s projected conditions) on the days of Lim’s expeditions as they do territorial markers of the authority of Singapore’s port. sea state 4: line in the to grow half that again by 2030. After air and water, sand is the natural resource most consumed by chart (2008) derives from an image of a sea wall, complete with a humans, Beiser points out. And sand mining is a $70-billion industry, sign warning ‘No entry, restricted zone’ in three of the four official with more than 40 billion tons consumed per year. The environ- languages (English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil) of Singapore, which mental consequences of all that (which include changes in water flows Lim discovered at the northeast border of Singapore. When it was first and contamination of fishing grounds) have in part led neighbouring exhibited that same year, as part of And the Difference is, at Singapore’s countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, to ban or limit nus Museum, Lim offered the winner of a lottery a trip to the barrier. sand exports to the Lion City. ‘All that is solid melts into air’, Marx and (Intriguingly, one of the things that Lim’s research reveals is that Engels famously declared in their Communist Manifesto (1848); in this the limits of Singapore’s sovereign waters, unmarked on maps, are much harder to trace than those of the part of the world it melts into Singapore. Those Indonesian islands would most port authority.) “Water is often seen as a barricade. probably still have been around when In sea state 8: The Grid (2014), Lim took Singaporean artist Charles Lim began his But in the tropics, the temperature a nautical ‘gsp1’ chart, published that sprawling, nine-part sea state (2005–15) of water is near to the temperature same year by Maritime and Port Authority project, incorporating photographs, vidof Singapore, and split it into two – one of our blood. Water is actually safe; showing the original landmass, and one eos, documentary material, maps, scans, interviews and sculpture, which will be exshowing land that had been reclaimed, it is a space where one may and the sea around it. The whole reveals hibited in the Singapore Pavilion at this seek refuge in case of a storm” a grid system developed for Singapore year’s Venice Biennale. And if their disapby oceanographer (and trained artist) pearance since then is one more piece of evidence to support the proposed emergence of the geological Wilson Chua, chief hydrographer of the Maritime and Port Authority Anthropocene – the epoch in which human activities alter the global of Singapore, which divides the ocean (and some of what used to be ecosystem to the extent that the fate of human and natural systems is the ocean but is now land) into one-kilometre squares in order to inextricably intertwined – then it’s fitting that one of the things that enable the Port Authority to track shipping. It’s a system that is sea state achieves is to document how the geography and ecology unique to Singapore (given its simplicity and effectiveness, Chua is of Singapore is intricately linked to its less physical characteristics – unsure why that is the case), and in that respect, could be said to form a part of its identity. its history, politics and psychology. Although he is now known for his work as an artist (he graduated Like many of the phases of Lim’s project, the artworks in sea state in fine art from London’s Central Saint Martins in 2001), Lim is 8 are accompanied by interviews (collected as seabook, an archive of a former professional sailor (who competed at the 1996 Summer ‘materials, anecdotes and memories that unravels Singapore’s relaOlympics and in the 2007 America’s Cup). In oceanography the sea tionship with the sea’, shown in part at Singapore’s National Library state is a measure of the condition of the free surface of a large body earlier this year), many of which reveal the sea as a site of myth and of water, on a scale of one to nine (hence the phases of sea state), or legend as much as of history and geopolitics. In an interview, Chua ‘calm’ to ‘phenomenal’. But the title of Lim’s work also brings to mind reveals that according to local Malays, the Sisters Islands (to the south issues of community and governance, the former’s acceptance or lack of Singapore Island) are supposed to come together at high tide and of acceptance of the latter, and the latter’s use of legal, military and separate at low tide, that the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia bureaucratic powers to maintain the integrity of the state. And, of are unconcerned that part of the grid covers their territory and that course, Singapore is an island, and consequently its geopolitics are the British dumped a lot of unused bombs into the sea before abannecessarily shaped by its relation to the sea around it. Although the doning Singapore to the Japanese during the Second World War. sea is something that is often absent, Lim contends, from contempo- ‘They found over 200 bombs on the Indonesian side,’ Chua recalls. rary Singapore’s understanding of itself. Taking that a step further, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa – curator of Lim’s “The project is quite simple,” Lim says in a manner that somewhat pavilion and in effect a co-researcher on the project – recalls an incidownplays the many levels on which it might be received and inter- dent in 1993 when a four-year-old boy visited reclaimed land near preted. “I am inverting the way we look at water. Water is often seen Changi; the sand had been moved from somewhere near Bantam and as a barricade. Somehow, the dominant myth about it is that if you fall contained within it an unexploded bomb. The boy died.

Summer 2015

In February 2015, as part of the sea state project, Lim interviewed cubic metres of undersea rock was excavated in order to create space to Foo Say Juan (published in the sea state catalogue as ‘Sand Man’), hold around 1.47 million cubic metres of oil storage tanks. who worked as a sand surveyor in Singapore during the 1990s. The And yet there is also a sense in which Lim records the labour of the former surveyor reveals that the area around Bantam was a dumping sea itself, articulating the water and what it contains and nurtures ground for ordnance recovered from the seabed. ‘The dumping area is as an active force, rather than simply the passive victim of human always indicated on the charts,’ he says reassuringly. ‘So you can dump exploitation. sea state 5: drift (rope sketch) (2012) is a video of a rope anything there?’ Lim asks. floating on the notional sea border between Singapore and Malaysia, ‘Correct.’ drifting on the sea currents. And those warm equatorial waters ‘Are there a lot of things in the dumping area now?’ around Singapore are known to be particularly conducive to the ‘I have no idea, because we would just drop the object and be off.’ rapid growth of barnacles (the us navy tests barnacle-resistant paint […] in the area). sea state 3: adrift (2013) includes a found flotation device ‘So the dumping ground is not in Singapore?’ that had been colonised by barnacles; a similar, but larger scale work ‘ No. It is around the area that we are surveying. Depending on is due to be shown in Venice. where the location is.’ The origins of sea state can in part be traced back to Lim’s earlier ‘Is it on the charts produced by the Maritime and Port Authority work alongside fellow artist Tien Woon Wei and scientist Melvin Phua in the collective tsunamii.net, whose Alpha project (2001–05, of Singapore?’ ‘No. Because we cannot bring the item back to Singapore,’ the exhibited at Documenta 11) sought to materialise the generally invissurveyor concludes in a manner that serves to further highlight both ible network of cables and servers that allow the Internet to function. Singapore’s curious relation to the sea and some of the obfuscations Lim recalls an incident when an optical submarine telecommunicaand contradictions inherent in the way it seeks to own and possess it. tions cable in the sea (sea-me-we-3, which connects Southeast Asia, Reviewing the various phases of sea state, there’s an inescapable the Middle East and Western Europe) broke, leading to disruptions to sense that one of the threads running through it is an account of the Singapore’s Internet service. “I couldn’t check my email! I was quite sea as a site of labour: Lim’s labour of research, and the labour put into frustrated and wanted to know what was going on!” he recalls. Indeed, a large part of the sea state project involves the accumumapping, excavating, barricading, defining, owning and utilising the sea as a resource. sea state 6: phase 1 (2015), for example, is a film lation of data gathered via investigative research, something in which that records Lim’s expedition to the Jurong Rock Caverns, Southeast Lim clearly delights. And while the project opens up to certain moral Asia’s first underground liquid hydrocarbon storage facility, located and political issues, particularly with regard to mankind’s relation130 metres beneath the Banyan Basin on Jurong ship to nature and the environment, Lim is keen to sea state 6: phase 1 Island. In phase 1 (completed this year), 1.8 million point out that his work is intended to be an index (production still), 2014

ArtReview Asia

of Singapore’s relationship to the sea, and not a judgement upon the middle of the tropics, has 99 percent humidity in its air.” As much it. The cool, detached nature of Lim’s works provides a lot of their as Lim sees one of the key messages of his project to be an acknowlfascination, and more importantly their openness to viewers. There edgement of the fact that “the sea is not infinite”, there’s a sense that are no ‘Deadly Global War for Sand’-type headlines here. Although sea state is a project that could spread out indefinitely. Perhaps too the project will reconfigure the traditional role of the perhaps they are often unnecessary. “I do not dwell in moral positionalities,” Lim says. “Because how would I know I am right? I am also sea in art, where often it becomes a cipher for beauty and sublimity (in not concerned about projecting the future. Often conversations about recent times one might think of the works of an artist such as Bas Jan truthseeking lead one into a conversation about the future. Especially Ader). Where does Lim see such things in his own work? in the state of Singapore, we are constantly saturated with ‘futures’ “I have tried to answer this question in the past, without using the word ‘beauty’,” he replies. “Often, one and talk about the future (its possibilities, “It so happens that water is encounters the approach that positions demands and needs); this is so pervasive that sometimes we find ourselves talking not just in the sea; Southeast Asian the sea as the sublime; it is at the sea that one finds the transcendental; that the sea about the future without even realising region, a space that sits smack is limitless; a flat space onto which one that we are doing so.” in the middle of the tropics, may project all of one’s desires. I feel this We live in a world of sea-me-we-3s, of global interconnection, and while Lim’s has 99 percent humidity in its air” is quite dangerous. What has driven sea project is ostensibly about the nature of state, right from the outset, has been this his homeland, it is fascinating to think how it might resonate when attempt to resist what I call the ‘romanticisation of the sea’. This tends it’s shown 10,000km away, in Venice, where perhaps a more general to operate within many of my conversations about sea state: one of relation to current ideas of ecology and interconnectedness, between the key impulses that drives the desire for sand (the primary medium the natural and the artificial, between culture and environment, will of land reclamation in Singapore), for example, is this assumption come to the fore. ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its that sand is limitless, because the sea is bottomless; but is it? I have products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe,’ this one work that I developed with my friend and fellow artist Takuji Marx and Engels continue in the Manifesto. ‘It must nestle every- Kogo. It is based on a Navy recruitment advertisement I encountered where, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.’ in the Singapore subway – it told me: ‘You do not have to think about “Do you want me to talk about humidity?” the sea anymore’. Imagine that? The sea is so fully sea state 6: phase 1 Lim asks at one point during our conversation. corporatised and militarised that we do not even (digital video still), 2015 “It so happens that water is not just in the sea; the all images Courtesy the artist and Future have to think about it anymore.” And yet visit Southeast Asian region, a space that sits smack in Venice, this summer, and you will. ara Perfect, Singapore

Summer 2015

Yoshitomo Nara Interview by Aimee Lin

A key ﬁgure in bringing ‘Kawaii’ to life and then exporting it to the world speaks about the importance of personal narrative in his art, and why he never sets out to make an artwork 44

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One of the star ﬁgures in the generation of Japanese artists brought together under the banner of ‘Superﬂat’ (the term coined by fellow artist Takashi Murakami at the end of the 1990s), Yoshitomo Nara is an artist whose imagery of bigeyed adolescent girls and little dogs is appreciated by people of all ages, from two to seventy. His most popular images, and their proliferation in all forms of merchandising, have made his art a component element in contemporary visual culture, especially in the Japanesegone-global phenomenon called ‘Kawaii’. In Stars, his recent gallery show at Pace Hong Kong, Nara paints his young girls interacting with or surrounded by sequences of golden four-point stars. In Life Is Only One, Nara’s institutional retrospective at Asia Society Hong Kong Center, curated by Fumio Nanjo, the artist is showing a body of works ranging from the 1980s to more recent pieces, featuring a rich selection of paintings, sketches, photographs, sculptures and mixed-media installations, including a slide presentation of photographs from his recent trip to Karafuto, or Sakhalin Island (the island where his father once worked, when it was held by Japan, until Russia occupied it after the Second World War). ArtReview talks to Nara about an artist’s work and its relation to ‘life’, and how his life experiences, among them travelling to Afghanistan and liking Neil Young, feed his work. ara When did you realise that you wanted to be a painter? yn I never thought of being a painter before I went to study art during the late 1970s, age eighteen. Even when I was studying art in school, I was still not sure if I would become a painter. But I started to participate in some exhibitions, then slowly I knew I wanted to be an artist. ara Did your early experiences – in your hometown of Hirosaki and then studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1988 – play a certain part in that process of ‘being Yoshitomo Nara’?

of the outer world enriched my inner world. Compared with the techniques or the methodology of painting, what is more important to me is the sensibility to nature and the ways to express it. This is something that doesn’t get taught in school. I get lots of inspiration from music. When I was a teenager, music and lp covers were very important to me. But at that time I had no idea that actually some of those covers were made by people like Andy Warhol. And because my English was poor, I couldn’t understand the lyrics, so I looked at the covers and imagined the meaning of the songs; it was quite a good training.

When I was a teenager, music and lp covers were very important to me.Because my English was poor, I couldn’t understand the lyrics, so I looked at the covers and imagined the meaning of the songs; it was quite a good training yn I grew up in a small town in Aomori, Northern Japan. It is in an agriculture area, not like your normal vision of Japan, of a massive city like Tokyo. There was neither art nor friends who you could talk to about art. I was so lonely and only surrounded by apple trees… I could talk to nobody except nature. So I talked to the trees, the dog and the pigs… so I got this special sensibility to nature, which I thought many years later was a good thing. When I went to the school in Germany, I found myself again feeling alone, facing my canvas. Again, the inadequacy

above Fountain of Life, 2001–14, frp, lacquer, urethane, motor and water, 175 × 180 cm, edition of 3, ap1/2. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles facing page Ten stars, 2014, 181 × 161 × 5 cm, acrylic on jute mounted on wood. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Hong Kong

Summer 2015

ara Do you still listen to the same music as you did in your teens? yn Yes, I still do. ara How could you get all those records in a town that so lacked access to culture? yn I purchased them by mail, and spent all my earnings from a part-time job on them. When I left high school and went to Tokyo to study, I met the guy who sold me all the music. He was surprised to ﬁnd that I was a young student. He thought I was an old man. ara So apart from your own experience, did you learn anything from the art education in school? yn You can learn technique anywhere… The sensibility that you learn from where you are from and your own experience is more important. I only started to study painting at eighteen, but at sixteen, when I was in high school, encouraged by my neighbours, I copied a two-metre-long line-drawing of a classical literary ﬁgure for a local festival in my hometown. I even opened a café with an older student, and worked there as a dj so I could decide the selection and purchase of lps. ara Japan during the 1960s and 70s: that was the time of student movements, the time for the anarchists… yn That was true.

help, 2011, acrylic and pen on wood, 31 × 21 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Hong Kong

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ara That’s why the narrative of personal history is so important to your art. The spirit remains. yn I haven’t really thought of that. I don’t paint when I am happy. I only paint when I am angry, lonely, sad, when I am able to talk to the work. So there is a need for storytelling before I paint. ara Are those stories told to a certain person? Or an ideal person? yn There should be someone to talk to. But because such a person is not there in our life, that’s why we need to paint. ara The female ﬁgures in your paintings always have a kid’s face. But through their eyes we can see loneliness, anger, sadness, depression, thoughts of revenge… Most of the time the emotion is negative, although there was a short time when your girl looked like more of a dreamer. It looks as if she has an old soul. Moreover, she looks like she is getting old through the years after experiencing crises like the Fukushima disaster. yn I don’t know how to describe that in words. I guess artists would see techniques in my work and old people would see the ‘old soul’. If it is the very personal emotion that I am expressing, then it is too trivial or insigniﬁcant to mention. But for those who can understand, they will see some serious issues, more than just, “Wow, it’s Kawaii”. ara You paint on canvas, wood board, cardboard, letter-paper or even envelopes, but you don’t really emphasise the painterly difference between materials.

yn Indeed I collect the wood. As a country boy, I never intend to make an artwork, I want to make art from nature or from real life. So I once used the bike that I rode when I was in high school. And I always paint on what I ﬁnd in my life, or collect things that I ﬁnd that have been thrown away. Spirituality is the most important thing. I never wanted to create imagery. What I want to make, or what pushes me, is the moment of “I don’t know what it is, but I am keen to present it through art”. It could be triggered by sound, by music, by what I feel about the world. ara Your generation of artists grew up at a time when society and history was in the process of rapid change. And this generation was very rebellious. On one side you have your very social and political concerns, on the other side your work also leads to a personal, inward-looking world. But today in the younger generation, very few artists feature both. Why? yn I guess maybe because most of them only study art and then make art. I also studied art and make art. But what I learned from other things has become what feeds my art. ara So what are the other things that feed you besides life and music? yn I travel a lot. I always meet people and different things when I am travelling. ara You went to Afghanistan in 2002. Do you have a special interest in remote areas?

yn Afghanistan today is quite like my hometown when I was a kid during the 1960s and 70s. And I guess some remote mountain areas in China are probably the same. Today people in Afghanistan still wear traditional clothes with beautiful patterns. For many people, Japan is Zen, the simplistic beauty, but my memory of Japan in my childhood was people wearing traditional clothes with those beautiful folk pattern prints. It was a very rich visual environment that might surprise today’s Japanese people. I was lucky that I lived through a transition period in Japanese society; a time when, for example, I saw the packaging of apples change from wooden boxes to paper bags, or the way miso-making changed from traditional handwork to modern manufacture. ara Your little girl and small doggy characters somehow indicate that we need to take care of our inner world. How do you balance it with your travel and other ‘worldly’ experience? yn I always keep my studio the same. No matter whether I am in Germany or in Nasu, where my current studio is located, my studio’s interior settings are always arranged in the same way – so I only ﬁnd out where I am when I open the curtain. ara Is there any artist in Japan that you feel very close to you? yn Takashi Murakami. Although our personalities are totally opposite, we are both so serious about art that we can share a lot of conversations.

yn This is like when I was in school, I painted on anything I could ﬁnd, anything around. Painting is something that happens naturally.

ara Is there someone that is of a great importance to you, perhaps in the way that Raymond Carver is to the writer Haruki Murakami?

ara However, the wood on which you painted a girl pointing at a star or carrying ﬂowers doesn’t look like wood you can buy in a material store. It looks more like something found in a forest. There are scars, etched lines, marks of imperfection and traces of time on it, as if the wood has lived a life. Where did you ﬁnd it?

yn Neil Young. He is my all-time favourite. ara Translated from the Japanese by Kwanyi Pan Life is Only One: Yoshitomo Nara is on view at Asia Society Hong Kong Center through 26 July

Yoshitomo Nara as a child. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2015

Nguan

by Adeline Chia

The elusive Singaporean photographer hardly has exhibitions and doesn’t really sell any works, but he has made a difficult place much easier to love

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above Untitled, 2012, 100 × 100 cm, from the How Loneliness Goes series, 2011–14 facing page Untitled, 2011, 100 × 100 cm, from the Singapore series, 2011–14

Untitled, 2011, 100 × 100 cm, from the Singapore series, 2011–14

Untitled, 2012, 100 × 100 cm, from the Singapore series, 2011–14

Untitled, 2012, 100 × 100 cm, from the How Loneliness Goes series, 2011–14

Untitled, 2012, 100 × 100 cm, from the Singapore series, 2011–14

In 2013, thanks to the only positive effect of the haze caused by The photographs on show were drawn from Nguan’s Singapore Indonesian forest fires, the light in Singapore took on a pinkish series (2011–14), which, although included in a republished edition hue. Everything looked slightly blushed and powdered. Wandering of the sold-out How Loneliness Goes, had been on his personal website around the dreamy streets, it suddenly struck me: I’m in Nguan’s for years. To someone new to his work, the exhibition served well world. Nguan: the Singaporean photographer whose works depict the as a ‘best of’ introduction. To the seasoned Nguan viewer, it was an city as a pastel-toned suburbia. In them, the tropical glare is muted encounter with old friends. and poetry found in crumbling blocks, empty corridors and shutPresent and correct was that wonderful picture of two schoolgirls tered shops. Often alone and staring straight at the camera, his human walking down the street, one staring at her phone, the other looking subjects are preoccupied – caught midstep, midbite, midshave. One on with her mouth downturned in a complicated expression of envy man is shown kneeling at an empty bus stop, staring at the camera. and boredom. Another iconic photo also made its appearance: the side He’s caught up in some private, unknowable nightmare. Another profile of an office lady, standing slightly stooped in the sun, while photo shows a guy lying prostrate in a void deck, with his cheek to the out-of-focus ixora flowers bloom drowsily in the background. floor. And falling on every picture, the softest possible light. Besides the consolations of familiarity, there were some new pleaIt’s hard to describe the feeling evoked by this version of Singapore. sures to be had at the show. Previously, Nguan’s images were often Sadness isn’t exactly the word. Neither is loneliness. (The title of experienced in a linear and uniform fashion, by scrolling down on Nguan’s 2015 exhibition and 2013 book, How Loneliness Goes, seems oddly computer screens or turning the pages in books. In the exhibition, Nguan arranged his prints in the longish, inadequate, flattening the complexity Sadness isn’t exactly the word curved gallery at different heights and of his images.) Instead, the photographs groupings, creating new conversations strike a balance between sweetness and for this version of Singapore. brutality, longing and psychosis. His between the pictures. Neither is loneliness pictures present a face of Singapore life For instance, the back view of a woman that is – hard as it is to articulate – familiar and true. More importantly, dressed in a pink sari facing the sea was placed next to a picture of a it’s a face that, before him, had never been so clearly revealed. staircase, glimpsed through a tiny, clover-shaped opening in a pink With his coolly evocative shots, Nguan is one of the most distinc- wall. There were correspondences: the pink of the sari and the pink tive chroniclers of life in the Lion City. People know him, but he of the wall, the crossing diagonals of the coastline and the staircase. prefers to remain low-key, and during the past ten years has attained But there were also juxtapositions: nature versus architecture, the the status of the worst-kept secret of Singapore’s photography scene. openness of sky and water contrasted with the tight, limited views Other than self-publishing two books (the other being 2010’s Shibuya) of peepholes. and exhibiting in the occasional group show, he stays under the radar. It was a well-hung show, the presentation imbued with the prinHe’s not represented by any gallery either, and sales of his prints are ciples that define Nguan’s work: thoughtfulness, subtlety, control. Some people came to see it. And then in less than two weeks, everyvirtually nonexistent (by choice). He had his first ‘proper’ solo in January this year, and this also went thing got taken down. Over the past ten years, Nguan has developed a body of work set in by without great fanfare. And frankly, it was an odd place for the reclusive artist to break his silence. He was exhibiting under the m1 Fringe several of the cities in which he spends his time. In his earlier days, he Festival, which, while including visual arts, has a primary focus on captured Los Angeles and Hollywood in City of Dreams (2004–11) and dance and theatre. The ion Art Gallery venue, while spacious, was Tokyo’s busy streets in Shibuya (2008–10), and demonstrated an ability located on the decidedly unromantic fourth floor of ion Orchard, one to record private moments in urban areas. But Singapore is undoubtof Singapore’s largest malls, accessible by a perpetually crowded lift. edly where his best work is done, with the composition getting sparer,

Untitled, 2006, 100 × 150 cm, from the City of Dreams series, 2004–11

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one or two human subjects, and the depth of field getting shallower, The recurring Edward Hopper-esque individual in his work – the solo giving the scenes an even, anaesthetised look. Yet the most striking diner, the late-night convenience-store worker, the solitary swimmer characteristic of his Singapore work has to be its low-contrast, desat- – they are not zoo exhibits to him, but kindred spirits. urated, slightly pinkish palette, adjusted on the computer after the His unforced affinity with his subjects goes some way in explaining film is scanned. It is a hue I associate with Japan’s springtime light, why his images, even in their anaemic colourations and flat affect, and as mentioned, the glare-diffusing, druggy effects of air pollution. remain so compelling. In a photo, a girl is slumped on a bench near a I have often wondered about Nguan’s decision to diffuse the equa- badminton court, her slippers kicked off, her body as loose and curved torial sun. On the one hand, the trendy, filtered look is reminiscent of as a wet noodle. She fixes the viewer with a wary stare that simultanelifestyle-magazine photography and some of Rinko Kawauchi’s early ously conveys the boredom of empty childhood afternoons and somework, but on the other hand, this watercolour wash is something thing altogether more existentially mysterious. In another image, wholly itself; that is, possessing a Nguan-specific brand of dislocation three people are sitting in the sea, looking at a low aeroplane passing and opiated tenderness. Under this treatment, Singapore’s familiar overhead. The water and sky are almost the same colour: strawberry sights, such as blocks of public housing and their brutalist unifor- milkshake and cataract-blue. mity, are made touchingly vulnerable. The cover image for his website Sea, sky, swimmers, a passing plane… What is it that makes the features a gigantic rainbow painted onto the facade of a block of flats picture generate such a force field of longing, wonder and sadness? – a common motif used by the state to prettify public estates, though The British novelist Jeanette Winterson once wrote: ‘The poem finds the word that finds the feeling.’ Like all the effect is to make things look slightly The photographs strike a balance good art, Nguan’s best pieces have that deranged. But against a lilac sky, the block truth-seeking homing instinct too, the with its broken rainbow, slashed in pieces between sweetness and brutality, subtle ability to excavate and articulate as it spreads out across the parapets of longing and psychosis different floors, never looked as sweet. the ineffable. In Nguan’s gentle theatre of melancholy, playgrounds, with their His work is particularly important in a place that is not always easy to coloured slides and swings, are also frequent settings. Even the empty love. Like all tidy metropolises, Singapore doesn’t tend to inspire candy-coloured plastic chairs, familiar sights in Singapore’s kopitiams, much devotion. But Nguan has made the place a little less difficult, or coffeeshops, are players too, shown having their own silent confer- a little softer. One of my favourite Nguan photos shows a pink ence in one picture. In another shot, tiny fallen leaves collect in a bougainvillea growing out of a pot in a common corridor of a highdrain hole: a hole that, from the angle of the photo, takes the shape of rise. The familiar tangle of leaves had never looked so lovely – the a pink heart. (By the way, I imagine that this picture would be Nguan’s petals papery and delicate, and the barbwire branches twisted but perfect gift for a lover: dead leaves and a Valentine.) straining towards the sky. Of course, rendering everything in the inoffensive colours of Bougainvillea is ubiquitous here, so common that I have almost girls’ stationery runs the risk of tweeness. One possible criticism is stopped seeing it, although this cheap hardy vine is everywhere on that the quiet moodiness of his images can get pretty one-note after the island, blooming on the sides of roads, hanging over bridges a while. Which isn’t quite fair: Nguan has a consistent style but isn’t and spilling out of pots in homes. Yet looking at this picture of the samey. More importantly, there is also the worry that he is a kind of plant being so vividly alive, I remember blurting to a friend once: fey gentleman artist-flaneur, colour-adjusting scenes of lower-income, forget the orchid, the bougainvillea should be the national flower – although in all honesty I cannot say what exactly of Singapore suburban experience for Tumblr-friendly consumption. But Nguan’s anthropological curiosity does not feel exploitative, it embodies. All I can say is that the picture finds a certain feeling, because it has, to use a profoundly unfashionable term, empathy. and it feels right. ara

Untitled, 2010, 100 × 150 cm, from the Shibuya series, 2008–10 all works © and courtesy the artist

Summer 2015

Liu Wei by Edward Sanderson

The Chinese artist’s latest show didn’t feature many representations of the body, but that’s where you come in 56

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Encountering Liu Wei’s output en masse in colors, his solo exhi“This is [the Chinese word] gongcheng, which is often translated bition at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (ucca) in Beijing, into English as ‘project’, but needs to include the understanding there is a weight (or perhaps I should say, density) of intention evident of a program, or construction of some sort; this exhibition is like a in the staged interactions between the forms and materials of the indi- program with a goal, and each work is a part of that program.” The goal being, in this case, the form of the exhibition that we end vidual works, and their arrangement in the specific space of ucca’s foyer and main hall. That is to say that on entering the spaces, it is very up seeing in ucca, and this goal is absolute and approaches perfection clear that you (as the audience) have been expected by the artist – his – it all hangs on a thread for the artist – and from this tense, progrespieces themselves in their forms and arrangements (and in one set of sive relationship between the works a narrative emerges. “This program incorporates a very strong narrative in its progresworks, literally) reflect the audience’s presence as we meander within the collection. The various environments and vistas are purpose- sion. The exhibition is like various attempts: a number of variations fully designed with that expectation – consequently on arriving at an on a somewhat stable theme that take place within this room. There artwork, it’s as if you encounter a vacuum left behind by an audience cannot be more or less; the exhibition is precise – it has to be like this.” whose role you subsequently fulfil. That said, the narrative at ucca begins with an unsettling propoThis concern with the body can be seen to reach back over the sition by the artist. The entrance to the building houses the instalwhole of Liu’s career. Early on, during the late 1990s, he became well lation Love It, Bite It No.3 (2014), a set of Liu’s sagging architectural known for his involvement with the Poststructures constructed out of leathery dogSense Sensibility group in China, and was chew material. These structures represent included in the infamous exhibition Postforms of classical architecture and are inSense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion terpreted by the artist as providing an (curated by Wu Meichun and fellow artist ‘index’ for the show: these dog-chew pieces Qiu Zhijie in Beijing in January 1999). provide the context for the exhibition’s That exhibition’s controversial focus on contents taken as a whole, and that context the body (human or otherwise) arguably is one of subversion, irony and uncertainty. played a part in the government’s move “In a pet shop, sometimes you see the dog chews built like a house. [In this way] in 2001 to pass specific legislation against ‘obscenity’ in art, one of the major periodic someone’s intention has been grafted onto the dog chew material, almost by mistake, impositions of control that have punctuated contemporary art history in China. almost unwillingly or unproductively. Compared to some of the other artists’ There is an analogy between this and the relationship between my intentions with works in that show, Liu’s piece – Hard to the artworks and the audience’s experiRestrain (1999), a multichannel video of naked human bodies scurrying around ence of them; it’s as if there is something like ants – was a relatively restrained resmissing in the delivery of them… In fact, I don’t care very much about the forms of ponse to the show’s focus. Over the years since then, Liu’s work has developed sigthe dog chews; what I care about is a cernificantly, and Hard to Restrain has little tain feeling, or a certain texturality of these formal connection to his current practice, things. In the same way perhaps a dog would care more about the smell and the but it might be possible to see a focus on the body as being somehow consistent, with the current works texture of the dog chew than its form.” Yet it is very difficult to see past the visible structures in front of us. making existential space for the body rather than presenting the body in psychological anxiety, as the early video appears to do. These architectural models are insistent in their evident forms, the Of course that reading is somewhat banal – all exhibitions and buildings appear to be based on significant governmental or reliinstallations are designed to a greater or lesser extent for bodies. gious architectural structures that embody and manifest power But Liu’s current installation at ucca reaches a pitch of organisation structures in the world. But Liu counterpoises this assumed formal that tips over into a narrative experience of the artworks; it estab- and symbolic meaning of the structures with the practical meaning lishes a progressive exploration of the arrangements within the of the material they are made from – the dog-chew material. These rooms in which the pieces are presented. The works’ relationships structures are holding two distinct meanings in balance; to apprewith each other and with the audience become highly systematic ciate this means that we are called upon to criticise our understanding constructions by the artist. As he says: “One of the major aspects of Liu’s work as a whole. of this exhibition is that it pertains to the relationship between This index, then, recognises a gap between the intentions of the the individual and the community. The works are independent in artist and the understandings of the audience, but also an urge by a way, but on the other hand they are closely related to each other… the artist to address the relation between the works and reality, the works as being intimately connected with each work will have an aspect that relates it to the other works.” This is a relationa reality mediated by material. above Puzzle, 2014 (installation view), ship with reality to which Liu ascribes the Liu Wei’s works have settled into a set glass, aluminium alloy, dimensions variable of typologies from which the artist draws word ‘project’, as a way of understanding facing page Love It, Bite It No. 3, 2014 (installation view), to construct his exhibitions. There are the his activity of artmaking. oxhide, wood, steel, dimensions variable

Summer 2015

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Summer 2015

aforementioned works using the dog-chew material, and within the Beyond the ‘islands’ stand four floor-to-ceiling sections of wall, main hall of ucca there are areas featuring tall freestanding scaf- from which hang a series of cut and layered sheet-metal works, folding structures covered in coats of heavy canvas; also simple shapes titled Crucifixion (2014). The artist’s insistence on the relationship to cut from layered books appear among these canvas pieces, and later, reality that he proposes the works embody seems to enter problemmore complex shapes and arrangements of the same books occur as atic areas with the reference to religion in this particular series. The a standalone installation; at times metal bars are used to delineate four towering walls provide the supports for this series of flat works structures and spaces; and interspersed throughout are paintings that make use of layered silver panels of metal sheeting, supported representing abstracted cityscapes. Missing from the current ucca and framed by thin, dark metal bars. In places the sheets are cut and exhibition, but appearing in other exhibitions over the past few folded out to create formations that suggest openings-out from a years, are Liu’s wooden structures. These appear to develop from the central void. The works are predominantly vertical in shape, and the series Outcast (2007–10), in which an enclosed space was created from title Crucifixion suggests that this orientation can be read as related to old windows and doorframes. Subsequently the frames reappeared in the form of the body, although the body is not explicitly present or cut and reassembled form, as geometric and crystalline structures in represented in the works. The title’s reference to Christian religious the Merely a Mistake (2009–12) series. The canvas works can be seen to symbolism makes this a complex work to come to terms with in the develop from these, as if the wooden constructions have been given a context of Liu’s installation (and his work in general). The artist relates canvas skin, softening their contours and creating new forms in the this to a general understanding of the place of religiosity as an imporfolding and fastenings of this heavy cloth. tant aspect of his works’ position in reality and society. A forest of these canvas works has been arranged in the first part of “Although the image of the Crucifixion is more of a Western tradiucca’s main hall, and the whole arrangement, including the clearings tion, I nevertheless feel it’s a necessity for me to include this in society within it, is given the title Enigma (2014). Liu has said of these canvas – if not religion proper, at least religiosity. So the title pertains to the works, “There is certain principle of equality; one piece cannot exceed somatic and to my own attitude. But the form is also about stretching another in any excessive fashion. Among themselves, the canvas works the shapes out and almost tearing them apart in a seemingly brutal must look even, instead of some standing out from the others. For me, fashion, into an almost crosslike shape.” equality and evenness means being ‘natural’.” In the future this emphasis on the works’ relationship with the world will remain, In among these, two ‘clearings’ provide What is particularly evident and Liu sees “reduction” as being the way to space for an arrangement of works made from in this exhibition is the focus the metal bars, and a set of solids made from enable this. the cut books standing on pedestallike struc“For me reduction is the only method [of on border relations tures. Included in the structure of metal bars production] possible here – I would say it’s my is a small, round folding table, the mass-produced and practical nature major method. Rather than adding things to my works, they are about of which marks it out as the only untreated found object in among taking away (or even disintegration), and the forms themselves are the otherwise artist-constructed environment. On the wall above, and always subject to modification by the environment, by the context.” providing a counterpoint to the arrangement of tall canvas works, is a However, one aspect of this “reduction” seems to be that the static projection of a large black rectangle with light spilling out from works have their meanings pared back into mere evocations of forms around its virtual edges. Due to its being projected above the space that avoid direct engagement and statements about social issues (for with the metal rod structures, the lower edge overlaps their shadows, instance). Coincidentally, just around the corner from ucca is the which can be read as supports for the black rectangle – although their show Unlived by What Is Seen (curated by artist duo Sun Yuan and Peng shadows and the projected ’shadow’ exist in different realities. Yu together with curator Cui Cancan), which takes social interventions The intervention of this table and projection into the forest of as its raison d’être, and Liu Wei’s exhibition might be seen to provide a artworks can possibly be read as disturbing anomalies in the exhi- counterpoint to the latter show’s very clear engagements with society. bition. It seems they are important modulators for the installation, Liu’s work nevertheless remains satisfied to leave its engagement with upsetting Liu’s suggested evenness and perhaps preventing any society at the level of the interface of form and material for which complacency in their reading by the audience. explicit references to situations he feels would not be appropriate: What is particularly evident in this exhibition (and which may “I’m very interested to what degree and on what level art can only be possible with an installation of this size and extent) is the focus truly affect life and reality – not as a political event, not as a protest on the border relations between the works in different materials, or demonstration, but really simply the question of how to truly inteand the creation of ‘zones’. As the audience moves beyond the canvas grate art with reality. [This question] could be translated into how to works, the space opens out into two large installations sitting out exhibit this work in an interesting way – it could be as simple as that.” of reach within areas delineated by waist-high sheet-metal barriers, Such a statement implies a reverse of the critique of the white cube suggesting the edges of expanses of water in which the installations gallery space as divorced from the world; Liu seems to highlight that appear as islands. One of these is a series of mirrored structures titled the gallery is as ‘real’ an environment as any, in the sense that social Puzzle (2014) and the other a set of cut-book structures (Look! Books, and political relations play themselves out in this space as effectively 2014). The titles hint at connections running through the exhibition. as outside. One might argue with Liu’s faith in the gallery space as a As Liu points out for Enigma and Puzzle in particular: “The Chinese space of change, but it can at least be said that the central role of the titles [Enigma: mizhongmi / Puzzle: miju] show they have a relation to audience in Liu’s installations – their being cast as active presences in each other: specifically that one has been absorbed by, or is dwelling in, Liu’s constructed narratives – places any assumed ‘purity’ of the white cube into question. ara the other – there’s a progression involved.”

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above Enigma, 2014 (installation view), mixed media, dimensions variable preceding pages Puzzle, 2014 (installation view), glass, aluminium alloy, dimensions variable all images Photos: Dora Tang. Courtesy Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

Summer 2015

Lee Ufan by Wenny Teo

One of the leading lights of both Mono-ha and Dansaekhwa, for the past ﬁve decades the inﬂuential Korean artist has fused Eastern and Western philosophy to make works that concentrate attention on the slowness of experience, the encounter of human and natural orders, and the silent language of things 62

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Summer 2015

above Dialogue, 2014, watercolour, paper, 106 cm × 76 cm opening pages, left Dialogue, 2014, oil on canvas, 218 cm × 291 cm × 6 cm opening pages, right Dialogue, 2014, oil on canvas, 227 × 182 × 6 cm

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On an unusually sunny spring morning in London, I found myself writing, as do references to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. standing in the bright atrium of Lisson Gallery, surrounded by Lee It is tempting to ascribe the elusive power of his work to the subtleUfan’s most recent Dialogue paintings (2006–). In the natural light, ties of Eastern philosophy, or evoke postcolonial notions of hybridthe four large bare canvases on display appeared even more starkly ity, liminality and in-between-ness, and certainly the artist’s own exposed; throwing into sharp relief the solitary tract of graduated cross-cultural biography lends itself to the ever-pertinent questions colour that hovers just below the centre of each. At first glance, these of identity politics. Lee was born in Korea in 1936 under Japanese singular blocks of paint look as though they’d been pressed onto colonial rule and moved to Japan during the 1950s. Despite achieving the canvas with the single stroke of a broad brush. Closer inspection success as an artist, philosopher and theorist, he was always classified reveals an intricate build-up of pigment, glue and crushed stone, somewhat pejoratively, as a zainichi, an ethnic Korean. In his native meticulously applied over an extended period of time. This dense Korea, on the other hand, Lee’s long-term affiliation with Japan was accretion of painterly detail agitates the empty surrounds of first regarded suspiciously, particularly at a time when many artists were canvas, then gallery space, charging both with a palpable energy that seeking to define a unique, national artistic identity. When Lee later exhibited in Europe, he was simply regarded as ‘Asian’, but no less is difficult to describe. Indeed, although I have admired Lee’s work for as long as I can marginalised for it. remember, I still struggle to define his practice in concrete terms, let More recently, however, Lee’s contribution to the expanded field alone articulate the visceral experience of encountering his paint- of global art practices has been stridently acknowledged and openly ings and installations firsthand. Against the sheer horror of blank celebrated. His critically acclaimed retrospective Making Infinity was page and blinking cursor, a familiar litany of art-historical keywords held in the New York Guggenheim in 2011, and last year he became the like ‘materiality’, ‘process’, ‘seriality’, ‘phenomenology’, ‘abstraction’ fourth artist commissioned to produce a spectacular body of work for and, of course, ‘Minimalism’, come to mind, but not necessarily to the gardens of Versailles. There’s even an entire museum dedicated the rescue. While these terms are effective descriptors of Lee’s formal to his oeuvre, designed by Tadao Ando, on the island of Naoshima rigour and stylistic affinities, they also implicitly serve to affix the in Japan, opened in 2010. Lee’s paintings and installations have been included in major museum collections work of this groundbreaking Korean around the world, and his Dialogue paintartist, philosopher and theorist within In order to make each mark, ings appear perfectly at home in the prisa distinctly Euro-American art-historical the artist crouches on a wooden narrative, which is of course problematic. tine white space of Lisson Gallery. plank stretched across the surface This is after all an artist who was at the Or do they? Looking again at one of forefront of the Japanese Mono-ha and his greyscale brushstrokes and observing of the canvas, and holds his Korean Dansaekhwa groups during the their delicately fading patina of crushed breath for the duration of each stone and pigment, I am reminded of a late 1960s and early 70s – two seminal artcarefully applied brushstroke passage in a book, appropriately titled istic developments that challenged the hegemony of Western Modernism and The Emigrants (1992), by the German writer paved the way for so-called ‘global turn’ to come. W.G. Sebald: ‘He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. Of these, Lee is best known as the chief proponent and theorist of There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, Mono-ha, or the ‘School of Things’, that emerged in a period marked and he never felt more at home than in places where things remain by geopolitical tension, student protests and a radical interroga- undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter tion of Japanese identity. The artists associated with Mono-ha did not dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.’ This desire to still time, actively speak out or speak up against the powers that be, but rather let or rather a protracted interest in the accretion, slowing or suspension their ‘things’ speak for themselves. The exhibition includes a signa- of time, might well be a trait shared by those who have never quite ture example of this tendency, tastefully enclosed in a small external been able to settle. This is something that can be seen in Lee’s paintcourtyard. Relatum – A Rest (2013) consists of a large unpolished stone, erly process and methodology as well: in order to make each mark, the cleanly positioned on an obsidian glass-covered steel plate. Moving artist crouches on a wooden plank stretched across the surface of the around this terse juxtaposition of natural and industrial materials, canvas, and holds his breath for the duration of each carefully applied one immediately sees the tropes and technics of Minimalism and brushstroke. Lee waits for each layer to dry before moving on to the Arte Povera, albeit through a glass, darkly. In an early version of this next, and thus, a single canvas sometimes takes months to complete. series from 1968, Lee cracked the steel support, so that it looked as It is curious, then, that it was the work of Jackson Pollock that though the stone had been suddenly dropped from above, or that the provided the catalyst for Lee’s experimentations with the medium smooth, industrially wrought surface had naturally fissured under its in the 1970s. Whereas Pollock’s action paintings are characterised by weight; a metaphor, perhaps, for how Lee’s work exerts pressure on, gestural freedom, as well as the concomitant values of originality, or even shatters, the illusion of art history as a coherent, unified field individualism and ‘genius’ embodied by such spontaneous acts of artistic creation, Lee takes his time. There is a sense of resistance here whose parameters have been sharply defined by the West. Yet, in an effort to circumnavigate the deeply ingrained pitfalls that presents a distinct challenge to both the heroic mythologies of of Eurocentricism in describing Lee’s practice, I find myself gravi- Modernism and the inexorable thrust of modernity itself. Indeed, in tating instead towards the equally riddled terrain of East Asian phil- a period marked by the radical reassessment of capitalist values, as osophical language and their approximate English translations much as an interrogation of Western artistic signification, ‘the canvas – to Japanese words like deai (‘encounter’), soku (‘in-between’) and was a territory’, as Lee phrased it. But while contemporaneous artryôgesei (‘ambiguity’). These terms frequently crop up in Lee’s own istic movements in Japan like Gutai took up the call to arms through

Summer 2015

expressive, performative acts of destruction, Lee pared down his work to its most basic components, entering instead into what he calls ‘a dialogue with practices of not-producing and not-creating’. Lee is genial and avuncular in person, and at the age of seventynine, he shows no sign of slowing down whatsoever. He divides his time between studios in Japan and France when not overseeing the installation of his pieces in various galleries and museums throughout the world. In these numerous exhibitions, his work is often described as ‘an art of emptiness’ – a reference to the concept of yohaku, which traditionally refers to the voluminous negative space most often seen in classical East Asian painting. To the artist, however, yohaku is more than an emptiness that signiﬁes. He describes it as ‘an open site of power in which things and space interact vividly’. There is no doubt a politics in this, as well as a sense of immediacy that acts against the sedimentation of time in his painterly practice. I wonder if more recent events, like the Fukushima disaster, for example, have affected Lee’s views on the agency of ‘things’ and the urgency of artistic action. “Art in its deepest places is always about politics,” Lee says, “but art is not a weapon. Demonstrating and making noise isn’t the only form that politics takes.” The only tool that artists have at their disposal, Lee suggests, is the ability to express images and emotions, in the hope of triggering questions related to the larger structures of power in contemporary society – questions of rampant consumerism, the forces of industrialisation and capitalism, and the constant pressure we feel continually to perform under these conditions. This critical investigation of the relationship between subjects and objects lies at the heart of Lee’s practice. There is a clear antihumanist thread that runs through both his paintings and installations – an eco-aesthetic critique of how manmade forces gradually violate the natural world, deforming our shared environment. At the same time, one detects a socially engaged concern with the often unseen forces of power

exerted upon us in everyday life, manipulating, objectifying and even dehumanising us as a result. We might draw a productive comparison between Lee’s artistic endeavours and the well-known idea, proposed by Bruno Latour, that ‘we have never been modern’. Rather than perpetuate the modernist opposition between nature and culture, subject and object, we should instead reconsider the agency of human and nonhuman actors alike, moving towards a hybridised structure that forces us to acknowledge what he calls a ‘parliament of things’. As the art historian Joan Kee argues in her book Contemporary Korean Art: Tansekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013), Lee was not simply attempting to refute Western ideas of signification. Rather, Lee ambitiously sought to ‘bring forth a different kind of world, one brought together by a desire for parity, rather than hierarchy, among its constituents’. Shortly before I leave the exhibition, I take one final look around, and find myself in small, darkened room where Lee’s paradoxically titled work Dialogue – Silence (2013) has been installed. It consists of a single boulder placed in front of an empty canvas. There is an interesting spatial relationship established here between these inanimate objects that is somehow touchingly human. Lee obligingly stands in front of the flock of photographers summoned for the press preview and eager to capture the artist in front of his work. He obliges their requests for him to stand this way and that, shuffling uncomfortably towards the spotlight. I find myself recollecting snippets from another piece of writing by Sebald, fragments from a poem also written in the 1960s, and published in an anthology entitled Across the Land and the Water (2011): ‘Irony it is said/Is a form of humility… Time measures/Nothing but itself… One leaves behind one’s portrait/Without intent.’ ara An exhibition of work by Lee Ufan is at Lisson Gallery, London, through 9 May

Relatum – Rest, 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable

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Dialogue – Silence, 2013, virgin canvas, stone, dimensions variable all images © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, Milan & New York

Summer 2015

Amanda Heng by Vera Mey

A pioneering artist documents the effects of nation-building on the lives of ordinary Singaporeans

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Amanda Heng’s most recent work, Twenty Years Later (2014), depicts an until their dissolution in 1946 as the Straits Settlements, were phased embrace between two women. It had its public debut in January 2015 out in favour of standard Mandarin. As a result, it is not uncommon as part of the exhibition Conditions of Production, at the nus Museum in to have family members – for example, grandmother and grandSingapore, but is perhaps best seen in the context of two major events child – who cannot properly communicate with each other. This shift that effectively bookend that exhibition. The first is the nationally was endorsed by social campaigns discouraging the use of dialect. branded historical moment ‘sg50’ – marking the 50-year anniversary The widening gulf of misunderstanding extended beyond Heng’s of Singapore becoming an independent nation. mother’s language of Teochew dialect into her uncertainty around Heng has been making art since the late 1980s, and her work gener- the position of the artist and what it means to make artworks. For ally takes a two-pronged approach. On the one hand are the introverted Heng, Another Woman was an avenue to address this. During the Lee investigations into the private spheres of humanity that constitute Kuan Yew years, Singapore’s arts policy was infamously guided by the many of her museum shows, and on the other are performances in prime minister’s maxim that ‘poetry is a luxury we cannot afford’ in public spaces, such as Walking the Stool (2000). But she also traverses more a new nation-state with no natural resources. extroverted questions concerning the public image of women and the It truly is remarkable to think that only 50 years ago Singapore chameleon roles and expectations placed on us in multireligious and was a colonial and equatorial outpost viewed as little more than a multiracial contemporary Singapore. The diversity of Heng’s prac- humble fishing village. Aggressive image-building followed the tice was on obvious display in Speak to Me, Walk with Me (Singapore island narrative of colonisation and corporatisation. For example, Art Museum, 2011), a survey show in which it became clear that des- the country is synonymous with its national air carrier and its image pite the variety of media she deploys, Heng always seeks to champion of a woman, the ‘Singapore Girl’ (a depiction of Singapore Airlines’ the underrepresented: in the case of Twenty Years Later, women. sarong-wearing flight attendants), who marries civic duty with the Twenty Years Later is a follow-up to Heng’s earlier series Another interests of the nation. This petite and hospitable lady is the embodiWoman (1996–7); both depict an embrace between two women who ment of – using the airline’s terms – ‘exotic Southeast Asia’. She has – intuitively – we identify as the artist and her mother. The elder of multiple faces representative of the three main ethnicities that constithe two women faces us, her eyes closed, while the other woman, the tute Singapore (Chinese, Indian and Malay), but at a remove from the rest of Southeast Asia she tours. She artist, has her back to us. We see them at remains immaculate and clean while the close range as if occupying the artist’s posiOnly 50 years ago Singapore tion, and there is a sense of facing the past people she meets in advertising campaigns was a colonial and equatorial from a position of maturity. The hug itself are the salt of the earth and engaged in activities like labouring in tea plantasimultaneously suggests a number of outpost viewed as little more contradictory actions: holding on, letting tions. The juxtaposition between develthan a humble fishing village. oping land and civilised body is marked go, greeting and goodbye. Aggressive image-building through her comfort in her iconic sarong Another Woman (a photo series and kebaya. She goes beyond the boundaries mixed-media installation that included followed the island narrative of starched garments, found objects, centuof the nation and embodies Asian values. colonisation and corporatisation ry eggs, birdcages and hair) outlines the She is Southeast Asia. fissures in another relationship between Heng’s Singirl (2000–) is herself: the the two women and the complicated relationship of mother and woman, the artist. In the Singirl online project (2011), the artist asked daughter. Heng’s photographs document a progression: from the two others to join her as an online community of women baring their women standing stoically next to each other, an empty space of nego- bottoms on a public website. In a gesture that was intended to ease tiation between them, to a cathartic but choreographed embrace. the intense curiosity of the exotic, she propositions us with the truth But they also suggest a metaphorical reading for the growing about its appeal. Instead of the Singapore Girl being distanced from distance that characterises many familial relationships shaped by kampong (the village) through her immaculate image, Heng’s Singirl is social structures informed – dictated even – by state cultural policies. embedded within it. Within the Singirl Revisits (2011) photo series she In Singapore at the time, family relationships were strained by the is seen smiling, candid and hands on, visiting sites – such as thieves’ changing position of women, as they moved from family bedrock markets or local coffeeshops (kopitiam) – that are underrepresented to economic resource, undoubtedly influenced by a predominantly in projections of the national consciousness. Heng’s re-imaging of Chinese population continuing the Maoist legacy of ‘women hold Singapore Girl asserts the claim that she herself is the Singapore Girl, up half the sky’. The effort of ‘nation-building’ required women to be but also the fact that she is not the only Singapore girl. In a context an active part of the country’s economy, and was a pragmatic rather where physical public space is dissolving (through aggressive privatithan emotional affair. The heightened emotional distance shown sation and the fact that an organised outdoor gathering of more than through Another Woman can be seen in the two staring pensively over three people is considered a protest only permissible through permit), the kitchen table. the online community, exposed and naked, serves as an informal yet Further alienation was fuelled by state language-policies, where, progressive site of affinity. despite four very different official mother tongues, English domiThe more recent series Singirl – Objects 1, 2, 3 (2009–11) comment on nates as the lingua franca. Singapore’s very diverse and character- the archetypes of local, gendered culture by morphing the Peranakan istic Chinese dialects, inherited from centuries batik pattern of the Singapore Airlines unifacing page, top Another Woman, 1996 of migration to the colonial trading posts scatform (with all its symbolism of female national service) with military camouflage referencing tered across the Malay Peninsula and known facing page, bottom Twenty Years Later, 2015

Summer 2015

the compulsory national service for all Singaporean men. Even Heng’s champion the representation of women in exhibitions, as subjects title Singirl suggests an alternative to the conventional reference point of and collaborators in her work. She believed this to be part of – saying it aloud sounds more like an answer to a relationship status the process of modernisation, running concurrent to the nation’s (singirl – single), or a statement of individuality rather than surrender own aggressive prosperity measures (which included cultural initito and absorption within the national mass. Seeing the title in print, atives) aimed at maintaining Singapore’s economic status as one of of course, suggests a more obviously deviant alternative. the Four Asian Tigers. Heng’s work, using herself as material and the question of selfhood Taking an individual approach to history – such as through her as content, relates to the issues that concerned a generation of artists project Between Women (1999–2000), in which she asked women to working during the late 1980s and early 90s, many of whom coalesced reflect on their own maternal relationships – was a stance against into a group that Heng helped establish, known as The Artists Village the manufacture of a meta-narrative. She noticed how public space (tav). Founded by Tang Da Wu, who returned to Singapore in 1979, was increasingly privatised, dissolving a physical sense of commuhaving studied art at a number of uk institutions, to engage in per- nity as a result. Most public activity now centred on commerce – in formance art, tav included leading figures Lee Wen and Zai Kuning, the form of gathering in malls. As part of the generation that directwho used their work to address the seemingly evergreen but contested ly experienced the shift when government-sponsored apartments terrain of identity politics in this heavily culturally regulated nation. replaced kampongs as the centres of community living, Heng began These artists channelled conditions unique to the Singapore context to question how public space might exist when the notion of a public and materialised this through their bodies – Kuning through his body as a cohesive force was either unstable or contrived due to racial shamanlike performances evoking the Orang Laut (Malay-origin quotas within public housing blocks. In her work Let’s chat (1996–), peoples living on islands off Indonesia and in the Andaman Sea), and Heng invited people to do exactly that – talk and commune over Wen through his Journey of a Yellow Man (1992–) series. Heng would the laboured task of cleaning beansprouts, an activity conventionlater move on from the male-dominated tav to create artworks that ally orchestrated for the sake of family meals by a matriarchal figure convened women to participate in simple actions questioning their in Chinese homes. own position in relation to the legacies of other women. Heng’s inquiry into our position as women is continued by a After tav, Heng began working intensely on a series of perfor- younger generation, such as Singapore-based Lina Adam, who remances that enlisted public participation. performs an art history of Singapore by looking Establishing the group witas (Women in the at notions of communing, hospitality and food; Singirl Revisits 6 – Arts Singapore) in 1999–2000, she continued to or by Shubigi Rao working on the legacy of Ch.medical shop, 2012

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S. Raoul, a fictitious and gender-ambiguous character in the style of a Renaissance man devoted to gathering an encyclopaedic knowledge of inventions and cultural myths. Working in parallel to Heng is Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, whose more recent work draws attention to pedagogical structures by investigating the teaching of Western art history in rural Thai settings (paddy fields or Buddhist monasteries) and herself offering lessons to corpses. Each of these artists has an understanding of history through its fragilities. Their approach is not only to assert their ego or rewrite history, but rather to go beyond using the language and reference points of the coloniser, and the cultural import of history formed by a Western formula. The other major historical event in Singapore that bookends the exhibition of Twenty Years Later is the very recent passing of Lee Kuan Yew, the former leader of the People’s Action Party, Singapore’s founding father and father of the current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. He is the man attributed with strenuously transforming this swampland, briefly a part of Malaysia, into a ‘first world’ metropolis and one of the world’s most expensive cities, all within a single lifetime. But Singapore’s coming of age has gone hand in hand with a sense of cultural amnesia. With that in mind, Heng’s construction of tourist consumption through Worthy Tour Co (s) pte ltd (2006) attempted to resuscitate a cultural memory of Singapore’s wares that had been exported

overseas. Heng simulated the role of the tourguide selling culture, drawing attention to many of the country’s national treasures that had been sent offshore. Singirl Revists 5 – Bukit Brown Cemetery (Lornie/ Sime Road) (2011) is additionally poignant as the historic cemetery (the biggest Chinese graveyard outside of China) is currently due to be exhumed for the sake of a new motorway. This contemporary moment of both mourning and maturing offers the opportunity of looking back while moving forward, a gesture Heng created through the action of holding a woman’s shoe in her mouth while staring into a mirror and walking backward through the streets of Singapore in her artwork Let’s Walk (1999). Throughout her work Heng has commented on the particular situation of women and their relationship to building the nation-state within the conﬁnes of the city as a civilising presence and more general expectations of female civility. Clearly committed to a feminist sense of responsibility and enquiry, this moment can also offer introspection into the particularities of not only Asian values, as the nation’s founding father or the Singapore Girl suggests, but also the question and articulation of an Asian feminism – what this is and what this might look like. During the week of national mourning for Lee Kuan Yew, the Speakers’ Corner (the only space in which Singaporeans are legally permitted to protest and publicly speak out), located within Hong Lim Park, was closed. ara

Another Woman, 1996–7 (installation view, Classic Contemporary, Singapore Art Museum, 2010) all images Courtesy the artist

Summer 2015

Something Rather Girlish About His Manner How a freethinking generation of Chinese menswear designers is redrawing gender lines in fashion by Hettie Judah

What does it signify when a man wears a skirt? Or a pink bouclé jacket? Or carries a handbag? For Jean Paul Gaultier, Walter Van Beirendonck and other sexually provocative fashion designers who emerged in Europe during the late twentieth century, the deployment of totemic elements of women’s fashion in menswear has been an abiding rejection of heteronormatively-coded dress. Their velvetfrocked or rubber-skirted models perform as queer harbingers of a dreamed-of, sexually ﬂexible future. The deployment of skirts and genderneutral garments has recently emerged as a unifying feature in a new wave of Chinese menswear designers whose otherwise diverse house styles range from neon punk through streetwear to cerebral elegance. Rather than womenswear worn by men, the silhouettes created by Xiamen-based Shangguan Zhe, Ziggy Chen from Shanghai, Xander Zhou in Beijing and London-based Yang Li occupy a culturally hybrid space, melding character fantasy, the gloss and curiously de-eroticised gender play of K-pop, vernacular and historical costume, and an approach to gender quite alien to the binary separation of men’s and women’s garb that currently dominates ‘international’ fashion. These younger designers are not part of Gaultier and Van Beirendonck’s battle: they are less interested in exploring the territory of ﬁerce sexuality than of gender, and gendered dress, and drawing on sources ancient and modern, classical and quotidian, as they do so. “I don’t think my skirts or robes are feminine, nor do they have feminine shapes,” says Ziggy Chen, whose recent silhouettes are

constructed from graduated layers in sobertoned, rumpled cloth: among them tilted cocoon coats, and skirt lengths ranging from knee to ankle. Drawing on traditional garments from Burma and Mongolia as well as seventeenth-century European jacket shapes, Chen’s aesthetic also makes explicit reference to ancient Chinese garments in which gender difference was expressed through surface decoration rather than shape. Far from being an outré comment on sexuality, these enveloping designs evince a conservative urge to conceal the body: “If anything,”, the designer continues, “I have never really given a thought about the concept of unisex or gender. In my opinion, garments I make don’t really fit the idea of ‘sexy’.” Noting that “masculine men and saucy women are less championed in Chinese culture, because they suggest barbaric behaviours and a lack of refinement”, fashion writer Tianlei Han identifies the abiding influence of nonbinary gender roles depicted in the classical novel Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1750). “The male leading character Jia Baoyu has a feminine appearance and personality; according to Western values in the twenty-first century, he could be considered as a homosexual, but in fact, he has a wonderfully platonic ménage à trois with two women; one is vulnerable and pitiful, which raises his amour, and the other is witty and fun and perfectly fulfils the role of a fag-hag.” Han sees Dream of the Red Chamber filtering down to the plotlines of South Korean soap operas, the popularity of which in China he attributes in part to “the effeminate grooming and fashion style” of the romantic leads.

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above Ziggy Chen, Autumn/Winter 2015 facing page Gai Qi, illustration of Jia Baoyu from Dream of the Red Chamber, c. 1750

Summer 2015

Sankuanz, Spring / Summer 2015

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Sankuanz,Spring / Summer 2015

Summer 2015

In her book Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption about them – the knee-length robes softening the assault of graphics (2011), Sun Jung identifies a trait among male K-pop idols that she inspired by South Park or prison tattoos. terms ‘manufactured versatile masculinity’: a ‘flexible, transformSince 2010, Shanghai-based blogger Timothy Parent has docuable and hybrid’ male image designed for mass pan-Asian appeal mented the emergence of homegrown Chinese fashion on the street that allows a single performer to display by turns feminine beauty and the catwalk in ‘chinesepeopledoyou Ϯstyle’. Through strands and emotional availability, the cute but obnoxious behaviour associ- such as ‘The Murse Project’ he has explored stylistic phenomena that ated with teenage boys, and a post-adolescent ‘beastlike’ masculinity. might offer a particular gendered or sexual statement in a European Populating soap operas and quiz shows as well as the music charts, or North American context (such as men carrying women’s handbags) these stars are alluring but nonthreatening, engendering the roles of but another on the streets of Shanghai. “Men like carrying women’s child, lover and even fashion-loving girlfriend: ‘multi-layered, cultur- purses as a way of being chivalrous and showing masculinity,” explains ally mixed, simultaneously contradictory and most of all strategi- Parent. “Their identity goes through the female to become more cally manufactured’. Thus such (to a European observer) culturally masculine.” In a domestic fashion industry that dates back less than confusing gender performance as the picture-pretty, rosebud-lipped 20 years, Parent sees the emerging generation of designers as “very idol G-Dragon attending the Chanel fashion show in Paris decked in free” in the way they design, rejecting not only “their own geographic boundary” but also the “constructed boundary” of gender. a cherry-blossom-pink bouclé jacket and gamine ringlets. Han considers South Korean pop culture to be an inescapable “I subscribe to the idea that commonly perceived gender difinfluence among the younger generation ferences are largely social constructs,” in China – “too trashy and seductive to explains Xander Zhou, whose menswear “The body of man, the body loves resist” – whether designers care to admit collections centre instead on subcultural woman, but inside he is a woman, codes associated with the beach, scout hut to it or not, and sees its impact (together with the wide-eyed androgyny of Japanese a lesbian playing the role of man” or street corner. “It’s not about making manga) in Shangguan Zhe’s Sankuanz my menswear androgynous. As a designer, label. In recent seasons this theatrically inclined designer has worked I just choose not to be bound by social conventions on what ‘is’ manly closely with Tianzhuo Chen on collections distinguished by lurid or masculine. I think most of the people who wear my designs do not motifs of penises, latex s&m masks and cartoon images of mastur- rely on clothes to define their sexuality.” But sexuality is an abiding fascination in European menswear: bation: his K-pop-bright Autumn / Winter 2015 collection produced with Ningning Jin was inspired by the fantasy of a man who falls in this next season’s collections from Milan were distinguished by the love with a dolphin. Sea mammal-crushes aside, Shangguan describes resurgence of ‘feminine’ styles for men, while in London unabashedly the “youth gender” explored in his work as “subtle” and “complex” queer designs by J.W. Anderson and Sibling still have the ability to rather than anything easily defined by “physiology and sexual orien- provoke. The impact of a Chinese menswear aesthetic can already be tation”. In this recent collection he imagines the Sankuanz man as felt in the cut and drape of work by European and North American having “the body of man, the body loves woman, but inside he is a designers including Craig Green and Rick Owens, but in their hands woman, a lesbian playing the role of man”. This feminine interior the once gender-neutral becomes eroticised through the use of tight comfortable in a masculine body explains the nonchalance with which silhouettes that emphasise body shape, and flesh-displaying aperthe Sankuanz man wears a jersey dress, as if he might just be popping tures (which in Owens’s case even partially exposed the penises of off for a spot of skateboarding, or a cup of coffee. Using traditional his models). What a skirt (or a handbag, or a Chanel jacket) implies garment shapes as a calming offset to more avant-garde elements, the on a chap in Paris is still very different from what it signifies ungendered quality of Shangguan’s clothes is often the quietest thing in Shanghai. ara

Xander Zhou, Spring / Summer 2015. Photo: Trunk Xu

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April 24 – June 21, 2015

Josef Strau Kristin Oppenheim July 2 – August 30, 2015

Laura Owens Cao Fei

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Shinro Ohtake

Japanese artist Shinro Ohtake began making what would become an ongoing series of Scrapbooks in 1977. In them are found objects and materials, comics, personal mementos and the artist’s own painting and drawing. To date he has completed well over 60 books, many of them several hundred pages long and existing as part sketchbook, part journal, part sculpture. A number of them were exhibited in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 2013 Venice Biennale. An extract from Scrapbook #66 (2010–12) is reproduced on the pages that follow.

Summer 2015

#66 Scrapbook #66 was produced over three years, between 2010 and 2012. In 2010 I participated in the 8th Gwangju Biennale, and then the following year, in 2011, the 3/11 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck just as I was about to begin preparing a new work for Documenta 13. This explains why the materials pasted into #66 were obtained primarily in Japan and during stays in Korea and Germany. In the latter half of production on the work, I was preoccupied by a sense of life’s transience that was deeper than anything I had ever felt before and that had to do with the unprecedented events happening in Japan one after the other following the 3/11 disasters, from radiation issues to nuclear energy issues, threats from nature, considerations of the earth and universe, and relations between families and homes affected by the disaster, all of which tied to concerns about the basis for my practice. I feel that during those days, when just thinking about that made the work seem pointless, #66 in particular played a strong, anchoring role in guiding me back to the possibilities for ‘new work’. Shinro Ohtake

above and preceding pages Shinro Ohtake, Scrapbook #66, 2010–12, mixed media artist book, 27kg, 830pp, 72 × 96 × 129 cm. Photo: Kei Okano. © the artist. Courtesy Take Ninagawa, Tokyo

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You’re a fool to believe in something you’ve never seen 93

Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015 Various venues, Kyoto 7 March – 10 May Parasophia, a new large-scale, biennial-format contemporary art exhibition staged primarily in the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, is loosely organised around the idea of presenting multiple takes on history and, more specifically, art history. The museum, an otherwise empty space hired out to blockbuster exhibitions (this may soon change – there is talk of finding new uses for the 1933 Imperial Crown Style building), is a suitably blank vessel for the display of works that question memory formation and collective histories, and that propose alternate narratives and systems for organising thought, drawing inspiration from psychoanalysis, science fiction, archaeology and the natural sciences along the way. Though Parasophia runs for two months, it was conceived with a much longer timeframe in mind, both for its gestation and its anticipated benefits, among them, says artistic director (and former curator of Kyoto’s National Museum of Modern Art) Shinji Kohmoto, ‘a renewed cultural heritage for Kyoto ten or twenty years from now’. Included in this ambitious civic – cultural undertaking – organised by local artistic, business and government leaders – was the decision to invite most of the 36 participating artists to spend time in the city in the two years preceding the festival’s launch. The results of these visits are not always immediately apparent in the artworks shown here, but in most instances it is possible to find strong links to Parasophia’s central themes of interrogating and undermining received wisdom and (art) historical assumptions. In the vast central gallery on the ground floor, a suite of works by Cai Guo-Qiang, including a seven-storey bamboo pagoda surrounded by more or less lifesize, mechanised,

Tinguely-esque robots (‘Yves Klein’ swinging a blue-painted mannequin in a wide circle on the floor, ‘Jackson Pollock’ flicking paint onto canvas), present a gentle start to this sprawling, well-paced exhibition, which alternates playful, crowd-pleasing installations with more difficult works as the visitor is drawn in and up. Café Little Boy (2002/15), reprised from an earlier work by French artist Jean-Luc Vilmouth, recreates a school wall in Hiroshima that, as one of the few vertical surfaces to survive the bomb blast, became a message board for survivors trying to find each other; in Kyoto, viewers are invited to leave messages, the texts soon overlapping and merging into colourful illegibility. Hong-Kai Wang, a Taiwanese artist whose research-based practice incorporates recordings of labourers at work, contributes one of the most opaque – to a non-Taiwanese speaker – and complex projects, Dancers of the Millions (2015): a series of audio recordings of workers in a Taiwanese sugar factory built during the Japanese occupation, presented via headphones from components arrayed alongside binders of documents and reference books on simple metal tables and shelving of the kind one might find in an archive or research centre. Quite apart from the difficulty in determining the scope of this meticulous documentation, I was struck by the time that would have been required truly to absorb it – an observation that applies to many other projects in Parasophia, including its dozens of hours of film and video. And yet Hong-Kai Wang’s work is followed almost immediately by Saudi artist Ahmed Mater’s 11-minute Leaves Fall in All Seasons (2013), an affecting compilation of personal videos – most shot on mobile telephones by construction workers as messages to be sent home to distant families – that captures

facing page, top Ahmed Mater, Leaves Fall in All Seasons, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Athr Gallery, Jeddah

the headlong pace of demolition and construction in another ancient, sacred city: Mecca. Some of these works have been around for a while – Joost Conijn’s films documenting attempts to fly a hand-built aeroplane (it is briefly airborne after hitting bumps in the desert ‘runway’) and drive through Europe in a charcoal-powered car come to mind). Others, such as Koki Tanaka’s investigation of the building itself, specifically the museum’s largest gallery, which is said to have been used as a basketball court by the us 58th Signal Battalion in the years immediately following the Second World War, make detailed, concrete use of context to address history’s short and unreliable memory. Five or six other venues (depending on whether you include the display window of a local bookshop) are dispersed throughout Kyoto, from a sort of guerrilla sculpture park by Berlin artists Hoefner/Sachs near Kyoto Station (Suujin Park, 2015), to a sound installation by Scottish artist Susan Philipsz on the Kamo River Delta, near the site of the first Kabuki theatre, performed on the Kamo’s dry riverbed (The Three Songs, 2015). Aki Sasamoto has adapted a work previously staged in New York (where she is based), a combination of performance and installation titled The Last Call, Wrong Happy Hour (2015), in which she moves about a space, sometimes among her audience, at other times hidden, speaking, telling stories, as the walls close in (and push the audience out). So will Parasophia become a regular event? On the basis of this impressive exhibition, it certainly deserves to. And will this ancient city experience a cultural renewal over the coming decade or two? That, only time will tell. David Terrien

facing page, bottom Koki Tanaka, Provisional Studies: Workshop #1 “1946–52 Occupation Era, and 1970 Between Man and Matter”, 2015, workshop held on 6 December 2014. Photo: Kahoru Tachi. Courtesy the artist and Parasophia, Kyoto

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Summer 2015

Leung Chi Wo & Sarah Wong Museum of the Lost Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong 7 March – 2 May The Museum of the Lost centres around the photographs He was lost yesterday and we found him today (2010–14), a series of 28 large-scale (150 × 100 cm) self-portraits in which Leung Chi Wo and Sarah Wong (despite the title, it’s not always a ‘he’) record themselves in the clothes and poses of various anonymous figures who stand at one remove from the main action in images culled from newspapers, books, postcards and magazines. These people, to some degree, serve as the forgotten or unconscious witnesses to history. In Leung and Wong’s versions, the faceless figures (those selected either have their backs to us or have obscured heads) appear against monochrome backgrounds, further emphasising their lostness (here, of context) – despite Leung and Wong’s ostensible claim to have ‘found’ them. The effect, in a way, is like watching a sci-fi film – Species (1995), say – in which an alien lifeform has donned a human skin. French Voter with One Foot Lifted Off the Ground (2013), for example, shows a man with his back to us in black trousers and a beige coat performing an awkward hop. In the original image he might be mounting a step, or climbing into a car, but

here he looks to be both lifeless and performing some bizarre and meaningless dance – a puppet, if you will. Even the fact that the title proclaims that this person is a voter seems to tell us less rather than more: how do the artists know he is a voter? And are there any visual clues by which they might communicate his voter status to us? In other images we might understand that someone is a sailor because of their uniform, but here, when it comes to such clues, evidently there are none. And perhaps that’s why He was lost yesterday and we found him today is only truly activated when it’s exhibited, as here, alongside The Museum of the Lost, Leung and Wong’s ongoing archive of found materials, from which these 28 ‘characters’ are extracted. The archive – which offers a fascinating visual history of riots, protests, celebrations and everyday life from around the world – is displayed in table-mounted vitrines, organised as a separate display, rather than matched to each of Leung and Wong’s reproductions, which gives it a suitably trustworthy museological feel. And so we learn that Japanese Housewife Scratching Her Back (2010) is based on an image in a Japanese

French Voter With One Foot Lifted Off The Ground, 2014, archival inkjet print, 150 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artists and Blindspot Gallery

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book (published in 2008) documenting the Ōta Ward between 1952 and 1967; or that Young Diplomat in Beijing (2010) originally appeared in a 1973 Souvenir Book of Asia-Africa-Latin America Table Tennis Invitational Competition, published in Beijing. How do we know she was married? How do we know he was in the diplomatic service? We don’t. Except through a series of short, speculative, captionlike explanations, written by the artists, based on research into the original picture, and attempting to add character to the image of what, by now, one is tempted to call their victim. What we end up with, then, is a thoughtfully provocative whole, and a body of work that is not just about looking at the overlooked, or reclaiming some notes from the margins of historical events, but is also about what constitutes a person, their uniqueness, or lack of it, their ability to be substituted or replaced (identity theft being the crime of the moment), the extent to which they can be reproduced by a camera or cloned by some other technique, and the ways in which the past bears down on the present. Mark Rappolt

Mobile M+: Moving Images Various sites, Hong Kong 13 March – 26 April Mobile M+: Moving Images – a two-part exhibition (at the Cattle Depot Artist Village and Midtown pop) and screening programme (at the Broadway Cinematheque) produced by M+ – explores the concept of migration by using Hong Kong as a prism that encourages a more expansive view. One that considers, borrowing the words of M+ curator Yung Ma, how the ‘the broader experience’ of ‘borders, movement, mobility, transformation and transition’ have been ‘communicated through different visual languages and forms of image production.’ This expanded focus is best described through a transition from the screening programme to the exhibition itself, which is composed mostly of moving image (paintings by Firenze Lai and photographs by Simryn Gill are also included). Take the ﬁlm that informed the frame of the exhibition itself and which launched the screening programme – Floating Life, Clara Law’s 1996 story about a Hong Kong family’s journey to an Australian suburb. Then consider one of the more abstract works in the exhibition: wa’ad (2014) by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (yhchi): a ﬂash animation in which the text of a fantastical

and absurd correspondence between yhchi (apparently located on Mars) and two friends, Yazan and Lara (apparently located in Marfa, Texas), plays out over a beautiful star-clustered image of space, accompanied by a minimal, jazz soundtrack. The movement from ﬁlm to artwork articulates the vast spectrums that are drawn within this sensitive – but dynamic – curatorial. About Floating Life, Yung Ma describes the opening scene – a scene of a family emerging through a mist into a noodle shop that soon fades into the sky of an Australian suburb – as a ‘highly controlled representation of the beginning of the migrant experience, one that is romantic and nostalgic, or even slightly mystical’. Indeed, the journey is everything in the moving image: the fading out of one thing only for it to materialise elsewhere, as something else, or as something changed. It is the basic way moving images are produced, after all; from one still comes another and another until a story is told. Likewise, in this exhibition, every journey is an act of becoming. Consider Wong Ping’s two-channel video installation The Other Side (2015) – a wonderfully strange animation that tells the story of a soul that

travels from one life into another via the birth canal; a supernatural human tale that mixes chance with choice. Yet in this exhibition the journey is not conﬁned to those articulated in the works on view. Consider the trip from Midtown pop in Causeway Bay to Cattle Depot in To Kwa Wan, where the three-screen version of Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2010) is shown alongside Zhang Peili’s epic, 26-channel installation Broadcast at the Same Time (2000), which presents newscasts from around the world that were recorded simultaneously via the Internet. Part of the exhibition experience is the movement the viewer makes through the city itself: a world similarly alive with moving images on the facades of its buildings, within its stores, on the screens of the hoardings. It is a city captured in Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Central (2001): a short ﬁlm shot on Super 8 and 35mm in which the camera lurks at the Kowloon promenade as a woman narrates her thoughts. “We’ll pass in the street without recognising each other,” she says. “In the meantime, you and me, we’ll have seen thousands of people.” Stephanie Bailey

Clara Law, Floating Life (still), 1996, 96 min. Courtesy Hibiscus Films

Summer 2015

Hu Zi Flesh Don Gallery, Shanghai 13 December – 7 January This is Hu Zi’s second gallery solo show in the past year. For an artist who uses the strengths and weaknesses of her own character as the fuel for her work, the present challenge is whether she can meet the expectations of her audience, and especially the market, while not being overly consumed. These days there is an expectation that ‘progress’ or ‘breakthroughs’ push an artist on, which at worst can often lead to slightly altered repetitions of previous works. But here Hu Zi has not done that. Usually recognised for her gouache portraits on paper, she is now working in oil paint, on the surface of prefabricated panels sourced from a diy store. The ﬁne, smooth quality of the panel works perfectly with Hu Zi’s sensitive and exquisite painterly language. Painting in oil, she makes it plain and wet, a style popular among some painters in recent years. But in Hu Zi’s work, this quality adds a special expression to the work, of a fragile but uncompromising person who has lost an earlier energy and become sentimental. Like many young artists (or artists who were once young), Hu Zi and her art has had a long ‘adolescence’ and maturation; unlike many of that kind who develop rather complicated presentation and techniques as they mature, she still keeps her painterly language simple and immediate.

But of course, portraits painted with gouache are that at which she is expert. In contrast to oil, gouache is quick and immediate, the work becoming a snapshot of her emotional status at the moment when she creates it. Hu Zi’s subjects are her close friends, herself, and the characters from music, literature and art that occupy her spiritual life, such as Patti Smith, Kurt Cobain, David Bowie and Robert Mapplethorpe. In real life, of course, Hu Zi has no social connection with those cultural ‘celebrities’, but on the spiritual level, Hu Zi thinks of those people as her closest companions, her soulmates. She believes that a portrait is something that she can pour lives into, and that a body is just the ﬂesh that covers the soul. Her spiritualist view has added a unique charm to the portraits that she makes. Artist Francesco Clemente once wrote in a catalogue of her work: ‘she has created an imagery family, she has created her own ancestors, who can guide her to the fulﬁlment of her art and of her dream’. Indeed, as a member of China’s ‘one-child generation’, unlike the others who bear the burden of being the only kid, she sets herself free from the expectation and desire of family, society and even the artworld, by indulging in her self-built spiritual world.

Flesh ii, 2014, oil on board, 45 × 50 cm. Courtesy Don Gallery, Shanghai

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She constructs a world for herself with her close friends and iconic people from elsewhere, thus creating a new self she can inhabit as an artist. That also partially explains why there is no acknowledgement or reference here to her time in Scotland, where she stayed for 16 weeks on an artist-in-residence program and created many of the works in this show. Even the natural light of the northeast of Scotland hasn’t affected the colour that she uses. But is there no sign of the inﬂuence of place? Maybe there is, but only in an indirect way. Normally most of Hu Zi’s ‘imaginary family’ members are people who lived in New York during the 1970s (or more precisely, who lived in the Chelsea Hotel). But here, in this show, there are portraits of Amy Winehouse, Sarah Lucas and Marina Abramović (during her residency in Scotland, she ﬂew to London and went to the star artist’s Serpentine Gallery show in the summer of 2014 and saw her performing 512 Hours). One could speculate that Hu Zi is expanding the territory of her spiritual world, while thinking of what an artist is and how an artist’s life endures. But it will take a very long time for Hu Zi to get her enlightenment. Her sluggishness probably is a rebellion to the so-called ‘Asia speed’ of our time. Aimee Lin

Liao Guohe Satisfaction Guaranteed! Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing 14 November – 15 March The Sifang Art Museum commits to a programme of one exhibition a year. Let’s hope that commitment to scarcity is a promise of excellence in production rather than another trick to bolster markets. Thankfully Sifang’s latest exhibition – a survey show of Changsha-based artist Liao Guohe, evidently rising to mid-career status – suggests it’s the former. For his debut museum appearance, Liao has handled the pressure well and harnessed the opportunity. The show makes a full account of his visual experimentations over the last ten years, including large-scale works on canvas dating from 2007 to the present, accompanied by earlier works on paper that are shown in public for the first time – a feast of raw jokes in Liao style, rough but delightful. Liao’s work – ostensibly painting is his primary artistic medium, the ambition in fact ranges further and broader – is language-specific. To be more precise, it is Chinese character-specific, a hybrid system of logographic, semantic, and

phonetic. Any attempt to wholly paraphrase his work beyond its mother tongue is doomed to a fragmented ‘lost-in-translation’ situation. For example ‘fart’ (fangpi) – a word which seems to be one of his favourites – frequently appears in his paintings: quite apart from the pictorial quality of the characters and various embedded social connotations, you need the sound effect of pronouncing it to capture the experience in full swing – the instant satisfaction of alleviation and empowerment. And if you cannot locate any character in the pictorial space, it will be embedded in the title. For those incapable of such multitasking and who are conﬁned to a non-linguistic experience, at least Liao is a good painter – one who pays great attention to a picture’s physical character and immediate impact, but hides the effort behind a surface ﬁlled with relentless letters and cartoons as well as sketchy forms. To appreciate the exhibition, you have to be there in person. The bodily scale of Liao’s

gestural marks is crucial, making us witness to a battle between artwork and architecture. The Sifang Art Museum is a sober postmodern exercise by Steven Holl, designed to look out at its natural surroundings (the museum is located in the Laoshan national forest park on the outskirts of Nanjing) as much as attend to its contents. Yet while I enjoy the labyrinthine movement of the space and the superb panorama of the City of Nanjing, it does act as a distraction to the exhibition. Liao’s counterattacking strategy is simple and effective and reminds me of the game of go. He has surrounded the museum site with installations constructed with cheap ready-mades, a live performance of pole dancers titled Justice (zheng yi) (2014) and, most importantly, slogans made up of more Chinese characters including the title of the exhibition – ‘(Chinese good painter) Satisfaction Guaranteed!’ (Zhong guo hao hua jia zhu ni shuang!) I think we have a winner. Wu Yan

Quality’s sliding down become a monster, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 50 × 60 cm. Courtesy Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing

Summer 2015

Rina Banerjee Migration’s Breath Ota Fine Arts, Singapore 23 January – 21 March As the exhibition’s title Migration’s Breath suggests, Rina Banerjee’s life and art seem very much a part of a certain Asian diaspora. Born in Kolkata, India, but raised in the United Kingdom and Queens, New York, then trained in America and now based in Manhattan, via an education that included a study of the chemical sciences, Banerjee and consequently her work embodies a certain internationalism. However her oeuvre seems to embrace the material tactility of a particular tradition of American artmaking with the potent expressive mythology of India. The result is a very visceral ﬁguration, albeit one with a veiled suggestion of narrative: while Banerjee’s art carries a great feel for the poetic – her titles alone convey this sensibility. On display are four sculptures, six works on paper and two lithographs. The most spectacular of these is a sculpture set on the back wall, by itself, as the exhibition’s highpoint: She drew a premature prick, in a ﬂuster of transgressions, abject by birth she new not what else to do with this untouchable reach, unknowable body as she was an ancient savage towed into his modern present (2011), consists of a female mannequin form – a ‘14 years tall girl’ we are reminded – with a Banarasi Indian wedding-sari trim, a Victorian replica doll head, Indian jewellery (22kt gold-plated)

and bangles from the Congo, among other objects. Its appearance is that of a multi-limbed female form, with eight black epoxy American buffalo horns for arms, arranged in an almost wavelike rhythm sprouting from feathers along its side. It has the quality of an alien or monster, but with a glammed-up exotic femininity that is at once enticing and forbidding. Here the multi-limbed deities of Indian mythology seem a potent inspiration for her visual language. Her works on paper, with their coloured-skinned, multi-limbed beings, are very much evidence of this, but then turn those into assemblage, and that is where she departs from American artists like Edward Kienholz or Robert Rauschenberg. These bric-a-brac constructions of Banerjee’s could be construed as exotic but her work reaches towards something more downto-earth: ‘I collect things that really reference that sense of being in the world,’ she has said, ‘what does that mean – and how one sees oneself as part of an international community – understanding whether this is possible as one coming out of one culture, and not really participating with the variety that exists within the world.’ That would explain why Banerjee is so keen to keep the origin of the objects in her assemblage

at the forefront. In some ways it acts as a reminder of the multicultural make-up of many lives today (Africans who speak Mandarin and eat noodles, Chinese wearing fancy Italian clothes, or Americans who wear Chinese clothes and use Korean phones), and yet folklore, religion and cultural identity all still play a part in these people’s individual makeup as they do in Banerjee’s art. What makes the work powerful, in particular the sculpture, is her sense for things and bringing them together. For example, Ethnic and Race braided long hairs and coiled and entwined. Oh how it made and made, ate, ate in shade, slumbered and soiled her reﬂection to see this faked-nations make me small sweet cakes (2014) is like a larger-than-life Native American Kachina doll, albeit with intense – even evil – eyes and horns for arms. Is she deity or devil? Toy or representation? Evolving from one culture or many? The result is a sense of the poetic, but instead of migration, each work really offers a sense of cosmopolitan myth that is to be found in most urban places. In his 2005 book The World is Flat Thomas Friedman described a ﬂat earth where globalisation and the Internet levelled things. Perhaps Banerjee’s art offers a rounder alternative. Sherman Sam

Ethnic and race braided long hairs and coiled and entwined. Oh how it made and made, ate, ate in shade, slumbered and soiled her reﬂection to see this faked-nations make me small sweet cakes (detail), 2014, mixed media, 180 × 102 × 61 cm. Courtesy the artist and Ota Fine Arts, Singapore

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Huang Yong Ping and Sakarin Krue-on Imply Reply Bangkok Art and Culture Centre 11 February – 26 April For this exhibition, the two opposite entrances to the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre’s gallery ﬂoor were partially blocked by Huang Yong Ping’s installation Passage (1993/2005). Beneath signage that declared a choice of ‘eu Nationals’ or ‘Others’, two large cages contained bloodied animal bones. Inspired by a trip the artist made to Europe during the 1990s, here the inconsequentiality of choosing either is a nice conceit for the exhibition as a whole: official categories of difference rendered benign. And, of course, the recognition of corporeality is the recognition of mortality that binds us all: human, animal and nature. Imply Reply consists of mostly older works by both artists and the visible absence of wall texts immediately prevents recognition of individual authorship. Many of these large-scale sculptures and assemblages possess an epic quality and the artists share an attention to the haptic through the use of materials such as animal skins and methods such as embroidery. Rich mythological symbolism is pronounced, as is the mixing of diverse materials and the play between found and unique objects. In Imply Reply, however,

there is little sense of contrast and the potential for distinct resonances is exchanged for a continuum of qualities that seduce and fascinate. In this respect the core interest of relating Huang and Krue-on comes to the fore: both artists merge and transform traditions. Huang is based in Paris and took part in the famous Magiciens de la Terre, the highly inﬂuential 1989 survey of art and related practices from around the world at the Pompidou Centre. His practice has been based in forms of avant-gardism since his days as part of Xiamen Dada Group in China (formed in 1986). His artwork The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987) not included here, consists of the blended detritus of two canonical texts on Chinese and Western art-history and succinctly demonstrates his concern for destroying the idea of essential differences. In Imply Reply his use of a variety of animal imagery suggests a number of relationships, allegiances and forms of difference, sometimes antagonistic. Krue-on comparably draws on a local vernacular in order to render the very idea of ‘the local’

irrelevant. While the artist has a background in Thai arts from Thailand’s famed Silpakorn University, he has an assured understanding of the symbolic promiscuity of materials and forms. His brilliant Yellow Simple (2001), is an enormous Buddha-head laid on its side. Made from fiberglass and covered in yellowcoloured dust, the sculpture’s positioning on a yellow-dusted palette claims a poignancy beyond the conventions of Thai Buddhist sculpture, while the profound sense of materiality of the work suggests less transcendental interests. This recognition of the fragile nature of cultural divisions is further reinforced by Huang’s La Pêche (2006) in which a string of small sculptures of laughing Buddhas and a crucified Christ are dangled on a fishing rod held by a figure hung just below the ceiling, above the open jaws of a fearsome Leviathan with the head of a wolf and a crocodile tail and a few other species of animal mixed up inbetween. Between the retrieving and devouring of cultural differences, we are left wondering about possibilities beyond such a polarity. Brian Curtin

Huang Yong Ping, The Nightmare of George V, 2002, mixed media, 244 × 356 × 168 cm. Courtesy collection Guan Yi

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Sharjah Biennial 12 Various venues, Sharjah 5 March – 5 June Titled The Past, the Present, the Possible, Sharjah Biennial 12 is curated by Eungie Joo, whose curatorial tactic is to investigate the artistic, cultural and social qualities of Sharjah and the region by placing them into history – seen as an on-going process – and to show the results, including some historical discoveries, experiment results and a few discussions, at a variety of venues. Each of these displays has a unique architectural, aesthetic, cultural or historical character. For example, at the Sharjah Art Foundation’s Art Spaces – new white cube-galleries that neighbour old Arabic residential buildings – a variety of sculptural objects and simplisticlooking paintings and drawings are on display while a few newly commissioned site-speciﬁc works are built up on the sites of the ‘old’ Arabic baits. Close by, at the Calligraphy Square, and with an exquisite beauty, Rirkrit Tiravanija has built a rose garden and open kitchen that provides rosewater beverages and cookies. Titled Untitled 2015 (Eau de RRose of Damascus) it draws from the design for a fourteenth century rosewater distillery that is on show at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization. Also in this area is Lee Kit’s multimedia installation Is it

always there? (2015), showing his recent study in ‘blackness’ and ‘heaviness’. Ahmad Ghossein’s The Fourth Stage (2015) uses cinematic language to connect magic and public sculptures in South Lebanon (both featuring the theme of creation from nothing), in order to investigate the ﬁctional, visionary character of the collective imaginary of a nation. The multivenue design of the biennial affords every artist enough space to enable the viewer to get a sense of the completeness of their work, while works by some artists – Byron Kim, Rayyane Tabet, mixrice, Abdullah Al Saadi, Abraham Cruzvillegas and Beom Kim – are present at two or more venues, in a manner that helps gather the various sites into one organic map. Joo has made a special effort to connect art from the past to the present, and to examine how art (especially in this region) has travelled from what is called the ‘modern’ to the ‘contemporary’. Consequently, in the Sharjah Art Museum the curator has gathered a number of older artists: Lebanese Saloua Raouda Choucair’s wood sculptures reference ancient Suﬁ poetry; the pioneer of contemporary art in Sharjah, Hassan Sharif shows two classic works,

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2015 (Eau de RRose of Damascus), 2015, mixed-media. Photo: Jamal Shanavas. Courtesy the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation

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Wooden Column and Table (both 1985), and two recent installations made of collected construction materials. Korean Beom Kim is a pleasant personal discovery in this biennial. His rich and varied output covers conceptual works-onpaper and canvas, installations and videoworks that examine the human condition with humour, wisdom and wit, examples of which are spread across three different venues. Through the twists and turns of its last few editions, the Sharjah Biennial and its organiser Sharjah Art Foundation have developed their own methodology and character: here that is made manifest in the special support of performance and music projects, and ﬁlm screenings, and the large number of ambitious commissioned works (over two-thirds of the artists in this year’s edition are presenting new works or commissions), many of which are the result of an intense process of ﬁeldwork. Beyond the biannual exhibition the Sharjah Art Foundation also holds an annual March Meeting, at which the Foundation and the biennial curators begin each cycle of research, gather ideas and build up a social network. Consequently Sharjah Biennial 12 can also be seen as the result of March Meeting 2014.

Then, Beirut-based curators Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti presented research on the undocumented International art exhibition for Palestine (1978), a show organised by the Uniﬁed Information Office of the Palestine Liberation Organization (plo) to mark international support for the Palestinian cause through art. That’s why I don’t ﬁnd it ‘strange’ or ‘irrelevant’ (as other commentators do) when I see Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara’s works in the Sharjah Art Museum. Born in 1933 in Palestine, Zarara was an active member of the plo during the 1970s, and his art embodies his personal commitment to the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The exhibition of his work in this particular museum is a form of recognition by the biennial and the institutional mechanism that supports it, of this certain chapter in the Middle East’s modern history, and that this has an impact on the art and cultural activities in the Islamic world. The patriotic narrative constructed by the public sculptures in Lebanon (documented in the work of Ahmad Ghossein), the Palestinian desire for national independence (Zarara), and migrant workers’ dreams (and lives) that are invested in and yet also consumed by the foreign economic entities they build, all contribute to a hidden theme of the biennial: the building of a nation. In Sharjah, a young modern nation run by leaders from ancient clans, people are actively

organising ideas about their histories, cultures and national identities in the context of contemporary art. Artists around the world are invited to conduct survey and research here. Among them is Haegue Yang, whose vent installations (An Opaque Wind, 2015) on an old residential site have placed architectural and cultural ‘styles’ into a cityscape that features a contrast between the old and the modern. She also builds up a private interior space with local elements such as an areesh roof, newspapers, a soundwork on the theme of ‘neighbour (as the closest stranger)’, and a television playing a Korean Broadcasting System variety show. In doing this, she recalls Korean workers’ contribution to the modernisation of the Gulf: in Korea, to Yang’s generation, it also recalls the memory of the absent male ﬁgure (fathers and uncles) in the family. The same theme of ‘nation building’ also lies in Abkhazia, located on the black sea in the Caucasus region, once a member of the former Soviet Union, now a disputed territory and partially recognised state, described by artist Eric Baudelaire as the world’s youngest and least recognisable nation. During the opening week of the biennial Baudelaire’s Anembassy of Abkhazia (2012) was staffed by his friend, Maxim Gvinjia, the former foreign minister of the state, as part of the artist’s The Secession Sessions (2014–15) alongside a showcase of 74 letters written from Baudelaire to Gvinjia, and daily screenings

of Letters to Max (2014), a film unfolding between the artist’s sentimental, almost narcissist monologue and his former diplomat friend’s practical and passionate narrative. Baudelaire’s Sharjah Sessions, a discursive programme of public events with scholars and artists, is scheduled to take place in May as part of the March Meeting 2015. I have some reservations about biennial components that appear to end up as a kind of performance of ‘discourse production’ – is it true that today’s biennial must rely on making scenes and performing in order to prove its cool? And yet there’s no denying that chief among the biennial’s contributions to the global art scene is the provision of a meeting point and communication space for people (more than just artists) from different geographical, cultural and political backgrounds. Moreover, if we look at it in the long term, this continuous practice seeks to build up a new ‘subject’ out of what was formerly objectified as ‘the oriental’, ‘the Middle Easten’ or ‘the Asian’. But if, in the recent years, people in the artworld have become very skilled at demonstrating that the narratives of history are multiple – it’s important to recognise that this is just the first step – the desire and capability to tell a unique perspective on history cannot replace a clear and definite overall historical view. And this view will only become evident when an adequate range of narratives collected and examined. Aimee Lin

Rayyane Tabet, Cyprus, 2015, wooden boat, steel anchor, pulleys, rope and hardware. Photo: Alfredo Rubio and Sharjah Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut & Hamburg

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Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck Modern Entanglements Green Art Gallery, Dubai 16 March – 5 May The instrumentalisation of art by politics has long been fertile ground for intellectual digging. Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1984) is one of many texts spotlighting how American abstractionists were drafted as Cold Warriors, brandishing the banner of individualism in the face of Soviet collectivism. Venezuelan artist Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck mines this familiar territory in new ways, using strategic appropriation and a crafty ‘stand-backand-let-facts-speak-for-themselves’ posture to tinker with the communication dynamics behind two burning issues – the Israeli nuclear arsenal and our increasingly virtual monetary system. Three 250 × 350 cm billboards constituting the Israeli Nuclear Arsenal series (2004–13) corner the viewer in an onslaught of bellowing graphics appropriating visual cues from the 1960s to the 80s. Here, advertising has been enlisted to literally broadcast the nuclear arms Israel and the us worked hard to keep secret. Waldorf Astoria, 1961 displays excerpts from a conversation between us president John F. Kennedy and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion at the New York hotel, the text cradled in the cloudlike forms of Rothko’s Number 14 (1960), made ‘grainy’ – a nod to the cia pr machine that paid

magazines to amplify interest in American abstractionists. The layered references – the nuclear-esque clouds, Rothko’s Jewish heritage, the Waldorf Astoria’s proximity to moma (home of Rothko’s solo show that same year) – conspire in a potent mini-narrative, like a Situationist dérive ravelling history up in advertising. If the Israeli Nuclear Arsenal shouts about a stockpile intended to remain under wraps, Eames-Derivative (Small Version), part of the sprawling Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect series (2006–13), whispers a twisted propagandist tale. In Balteo Yazbecks’s hands, Charles and Ray Eames – husband-and-wife darlings of American design – are embroiled in nothing less than our teetering global ﬁnancial system. Feisty marketeers for corporate giants like ibm, the Eameses devoted their talent to humanising the conquering techno-capitalist message. Balteo Yazbeck (aided by co-conspirator, Iranian art historian Media Farzin) pairs a recreation of the Eameses’ Computer House of Cards – sets of interlocking picture cards sporting close-ups of ibm computers, designed for the company’s 1970 Osaka World’s Fair pavilion – with a walltext timeline. The text, voicing some invisible institutional authority, matter-of-factly plots,

from 1944 to 1971, the twin rise of the computer and a monetary system newly untethered by Richard Nixon’s curtailing of the gold standard. The shaky house of cards nearby spells out the looming word ‘derivatives’, leaving little doubt as to the Eameses’ complicity. Balteo Yazbeck may not be an artist for everyone. His work reads both fast and slow: it starts with an instant impact – a throbbing Israeli Nuclear Arsenal logo at the core of a James Turrell-like billboard, the imposing yet precarious house of cards – yet there is a density to his entangled stories that takes some fathoming. His deft rehistoricising of such heavy issues oddly magniﬁes their relevance. To wit: a curious entry in the list of works in the Dubai show details a mixed media work titled Israeli Nuclear Arsenal, dated 1967, of variable dimensions, from the Israeli Defence Forces collection, appearing courtesy of nuclear technician– cum-whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu who, in 1986, leaked information about the Jewish state’s nuclear weapons program to the British press. Of course, no such work appears in the show. But one gallery-goer on opening night disagreed: “Of course the work is here. It’s invisible, but around us.” Kevin Jones

Eames-Derivative (small version) (detail), 2006–13, collaboration with Media Farzin, 1,242 custom-made slotted cards, silk thread with metal ﬁxtures, 5 framed vintage magazine advertisments, three narrative wall labels, vinyl wall lettering, glass and wood platform, dimensions variable. Courtesy Green Art Gallery, Dubai

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We Come from the Water Lychee One, London 14 March – 11 April A mood of languid, liquid, bodily sensuality pervades this show of film, painting, photography and text by Chantal Faust, Carol Mavor and Esther Teichmann. With their barely-there bodies and wafting tentacles, the jellyfish in Faust’s monochrome prints set an appropriately enigmatic tone. This frond-like visual motif is echoed in a second series of prints, four colour photographs of plantlife, titled Plantlife One, Two, Four and Five ( flatbed) (all 2014–15). As if lit by a flash the foliage emerges from black backgrounds, Caravaggio-like, in bright, jewel-like colours. In places the images fracture and stretch, the distortions mimicking the painterly effects of light reflecting on water. But the technology here is modern rather than old master, the result of manipulating the images under a scanner. Mavor’s four black-and-white photographs accompany a printed publication of her short story Like a Lake (2015), a poetic, sparely written

family tale of veiled seduction. Recounted by a boy, Nico, who lives on the shores of Lake Tahoe and whose dad is obsessed with his 1950s Triumph Thunderbird bike, he tells of meeting a man, an artist, walking his dog by the lake, who becomes part of their lives. There are three males in the story (the dog may even be a fourth?) but the focus is on Nico’s descriptions of his mother, illustrated by the photographs. ‘My mother had a slow breezy voice, as if it had just blown off the lake. I wanted to ﬂoat on her. I wanted to drift on her. I was not the only one who felt this way.’ From here things get really wet and swampy with Teichmann’s billboard-size mixed media work, Untitled from Fractal Scars, Salt Water and Tears (2015). Printed on canvas in a muted palette of washed out browns and greens, a photograph of forest trees overhanging a stream has been overlaid with sploshes and running dribbles of paint. On top of this are placed two, smaller

framed photos, one showing an expanded view of the same image, in which an older woman is seen emerging from, or sinking into the water, the other an aged image of a piece of seaweed. On the floor beside, two monitors, one atop the other, show film clips of bodies much younger than the woman in the photo above, energetically and joyfully diving into and swimming under water. That Teichmann, Mavor and Faust are academics as well as artists shows in the conceptual and narrative rigour to all these works, and the reflective, emotive mood is a welcome one. If at times the psychology and symbolism feels over-explicit – Mavor’s story, for example, would work equally well without the photographs – seems a lesser issue. Given the option between the emotional shallowness of much manipulated photographic imagery around at the moment and the work here, I know which I’d choose. Helen Sumpter

Chantal Faust, Plantlife One ( ﬂatbed), 2014–15, c-print. Courtesy Lychee One, London

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Wu Tsang Not in my language Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich 22 November – 8 February A blue neon nightclub sign declaring that ‘the fist is still up’ invites us into the first room. This sculpture is titled Safe Space (2014) and sets the tone for a show about safe spaces for trans, queer and immigrant communities – both imagined and real – that moves from the Salvadoran Civil War during the 1980s, to an underground nightclub in Los Angeles, to an autocratic, sci-fi future Berlin. Let’s begin with the latter. A day in the life of bliss (2014) is a video installation starring androgynous performance artist boychild. On a stage in a club boychild vibrates, messily, her muscles smeared in paint. Mid-choreography she is marched away by riot police, but later completes her performance on her own in an apartment. The story suggests a path of resistance through dance, present in much of Tsang's art. He is interested in the ways identity is constructed through imagination and performance, and in the spaces and communities that allow this to happen. At the heart of his exhibition Tsang has constructed a louche setting for another theatrical film, Damelo Todo // Odot Olemad (2010/2014), which we watch reflected in three mirrors whilst slouched on red velvet sofas, as if backstage at the now-closed nightspot that this tale revolves around: the Silver Platter, a Los Angeles bar

frequented by the Latino lgbtq scene. Passages from a short story about a fifteen-year-old refugee from El Salvador who has an adolescent sexual awakening at the Silver Platter are narrated to camera, interspersed with footage of a knife dance inside the club and performers chatting in their dressing room. A compelling mixture of documentary and fiction, the film is a magical realist portrait of a trans scene that itself celebrates fantasy as a form of escapism. The subject of Tsang’s artistic responsibility is raised in his 16mm film For how we perceived a life (2012) in which five performers, himself included, act out lines from Paris is Burning (1990), Jennie Livingston’s cult documentary about ballroom culture in New York. At one point the five huddle together on the warehouse floor and talk about what they want (“I want my sex change”), at another they speak in choral unison (“That is everybody's dream and ambition as a minority – to live and look as well as a white person is pictured as being in America”), but all the while they are only appropriating quotes from Paris is Burning, word for word. Though they might feel the same, are these their dreams to take? Is it even possible to make art about a safe space without somehow eroding its sanctity?

The Silver Platter was not only a meeting place for the Latino lgbtq community that congregated there, it was also where Tsang, alongside DJs Nguzunguzu and Total Freedom, hosted the performance art parties that launched their careers. Nguzunguzu has since soundtracked an inﬁnity of art and fashion parties, Total Freedom has an installation throughout the stairwell of the New Museum Triennial, and Tsang has his show in shiny Zurich. However, the local community with whom they were, in their own words, entwined in a ‘collaboration and tenuous coalition’, is unlikely to have ﬂourished so much since the Silver Platter was shut down in 2010. While Tsang shares a lot of common interests with his subjects – a celebration of trans and queer culture, a love of performance – he is still an artist operating in a very different realm. By speaking in the voice of a historic New York documentary of which he was never a part, by building an installation evoking the architecture of a Los Angeles club that its regulars can no longer visit, he highlights the extent to which subcultures have been appropriated by artists in order to further themselves, and in so doing heightens our own self-doubt about how we consume the worlds of others. Dean Kissick

damelo todo // odot olemad, 2010/2014, single-channel video on rear projection foil, wood, mirrors, carpet, bench, 25 min. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, and Clifton Benevento, New York

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The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World moma, New York 14 December – 5 April Laura Hoptman, curator of painting and sculpture at moma, provides an intriguing and articulate curatorial foreword introducing the concept of ‘atemporality’ both to the visitors of the group show The Forever Now and to the continuing scripting of art history. Atemporality is a status where there are no latest trends or frontiers that dominate present time. All past styles, techniques, and ideas are in the same pool with contemporary artists and available for the latter to pick and choose for the sake of their own practice. Atemporality is a condition in which, as Hoptman explains, ‘all eras seem to exist at once’. Enough has been said by other reviewers regarding the show's inclusion of only marketapproved artists and their artfair-appropriate works, as well as the lack of diversity (13 American, three German, one Colombian/London-based). In addition, the conceptualisation of the exhibition does not seem to match the outcome. It is obviously an exhibition of paintings about painting, and to talk about paintings about painting is not really ‘atemporal’, but very speciﬁc to one stream of artists and writers

in Western art history. It might be true that contemporary painting is looking backwards more often than forwards, but an emphasis on the retrospective gaze alone is not equivalent to a survey of a ‘now’ which a group presentation about contemporary painting at moma might be expected to present. Kerstin Brätsch’s eccentrically framed paper paintings are stacked and propped against the walls at the entrance of the show. Her laborious rendering of dark, sprawling tentacular forms are simultaneously gruesome and ludicrous. This uncanny presentation, which the audience has to look at, pass, and be crept-out by, is easily the most electrifying yet profound moment in the entire show. Further on, one is confronted with walls of abstract- or abstraction-inspired ﬁgurative oil paintings. Although Hoptman argues that atemporality is in part a consequence of the post-Internet digitalisation of culture, we hardly see any thoughtful remarks relating the show to a digitalised reality. Oscar Murillo’s piles of unstretched canvases (alongside a few conventionally framed and

hung ones from the same series) are the most sculptural pieces in the show. In the wall text, they are ‘participatory installations’ that are meant to be touched and played around with by the audience. However, the only visitors who go ahead and unfold or flip through the canvases are those who have just read the label and, when asked by others whether they are allowed to do so, point to the label for their source of permission – it is as if the grandiose moment in history when audience participation and painting finally cross paths needs repeatedly restaging. Is it possible for the artist to be perennially looking back and ‘forever now’ at the same time? The exhibition is an adept demonstration of the former yet an antithesis of the latter. The bustling, mesmerising, dangerous, enigmatic contemporary world is intentionally prevented from shedding its light on the ‘atemporal’ – here a synonym of ‘acultural’ – island on the sixth floor of moma. When contemporaneity is exempted from the ‘now’, the now is little more than here today, and gone tomorrow. Hanlu Zhang

The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, 2015 (installation view). Photo: John Wronn. Courtesy moma, New York

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Books

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Hong Kong Parr by Martin Parr gost Books/Blindspot Gallery hk$450/£35/€44/$57 (softcover)

As an enthusiast of photography books, especially Japanese shashin books, I was once particularly fond of the kind of that not only let people view a massive amount of images, but also enjoy the ‘physicality’ of the book itself. Martin Parr’s publication Hong Kong Parr belongs to this type and perfectly fulfils the needs of both my eyes and my fingers. The photographer himself claims that this book can be viewed in four ways. It is realised via a smart design trick that uses different widths for left- and righthand pages. If you thumb through it from the front, it is an uninterrupted record of the people of Hong Kong, and if you do the same in reverse, it documents local food and minor commodities alone. Turn the pages one by one, of course, and you merge the two. Finally, there is a 24-page insert with eight portraits of Hong Kong people plus a photograph of a pair of what in Cantonese are called yaujagwai, or fritters – a local food made of fried flour, normally to accompany congee for breakfast or as a late-night snack. I must admit that the full-length portrait of the fritters is my favourite image. They look

like a couple of young lovers leaning against the wall, their arms embracing each other’s bodies. The ‘couple’ is sweet and pleased with themselves – a separate entity slightly outside Parr’s chaotic Hong Kong. Just like all the small fries, they provide the kind of apparently unexceptional moment that is both funny and sentimental. Parr is perhaps best known for his photographs of people at leisure (often on the beach) around the world. But in Hong Kong, a miniempire of commodities, quantities and signs, half of his attention seems to have been occupied by local food and other groceries. Indeed, food that seems organised and orderly, and people who build up a chaotic life, are the essential components of Parr’s Hong Kong. And perhaps even he wouldn’t deny that all the photographs are from a tourist’s perspective, offering a full set of visual clichés. But it’s his unique sense of humour, deployed as a method, that provides an alternative way to examine the clichés of this ‘metropolis’: most of the ‘people’ scenes encourage viewers to laugh, while most food

and groceries appear alien and mysterious to visitors from other cultures. If these photographs can be seen as a certain kind of propaganda (as president of Magnum, Parr would probably laugh at this), then this book, coated with an oversaturated orange vinyl fabric, sets out to portray a fresh and vibrant city, a capital of consumption, full of energy. But in today’s world, that oversaturated orange colour and the vinyl fabric could hardly be seen as cool or contemporary; this retro design strategy belongs to the past and seems more cruel than sentimental. It was in 2013, one year before the Occupy Central movement, that Parr spent two weeks taking these photographs. Since then and the events of autumn 2014, Hong Kong has gone through a special period. It may appear as if nothing has dramatically changed, but actually everything has changed. The goods that make the materialscape of Hong Kong are still in good order, but people in this city need to be aware that they should no longer live in a costume drama. Aimee Lin

I Am a Script by Freya Zhou and Yu Cheng-Ta Taipei Fine Arts Museum, TW$500 (softcover)

One way of reading I Am a Script is as the script of Practicing LIVE (2014), a play and a three-channel film created by Taiwanese artist Yu Cheng-Ta. The script documents Taiwan soapopera-style conversations at a family get-together at which the characters additionally act out different artworld roles. The film is not only a record of the performance, but also a documentary of the production in which the crew, the sets and even the large-character scripts held by a prompter are visible. Even more is revealed in intercut interviews with selected actors/actresses (extracts from which are included in the book): 10 minutes, 42 seconds in, Esther Lu, a curator in real life, but playing the role of a gallerist and the youngest daughter in the family, here states, ‘This group of so-called “actors” are actually professionals in the art field. To a degree, there was an element of each of us mimicking another’s role in this, so actually I didn’t feel that it was necessary to put too much effort into acting as someone.’ There is, then, a blurring of ‘acting’ and real life, and a sense in which the play seeks to reveal institutional structures in the artworld.

With all that in mind, reading I Am a Script page by page allows another truth of the tale to come into focus: that it’s a detective story focused on the absent artist David Yu, a good-for-nothing child to the family. Although he never appears in the play itself, as you trace the conversations among his museum-director mother (institution/rigid system) and art-critic father (theory/ boredom), gallerist aunt (commercial practice), obsolescent-artist uncle (rubbish star artist) and retired art-historian grandfather (also a failed art collector), two other absent characters start to draw the attention of readers: David X, an emerging star artist, and Skyban, a mysterious collector who supports David Yu’s aunt and mother. It’s no massive surprise when the truth is revealed (by two ‘outsider’ characters) in the ﬁnal scene: Nicholas, a curator and a ‘friend’ of his uncle, reveals that David Yu is David X; and Mary, the domestic helper, that David is also Skyban. The real climax comes when Mary asks the family: ‘Have any of you been truly concerned about him?’ At that very moment, a broadcast comes wafting from the tv set announcing that David X has been shortlisted

Summer 2015

for the Turner Prize. The ﬁlm doesn’t end here, but after reﬂections, from director Yu Cheng-Ta and all the art practitioners serving as actors and actresses, on the complex structural networks of the artworld, and questioning the substantiation of art itself. As the title of the book indicates, Yu allocates a subjectivity to the script. Given the artist’s interest in playing with different viewpoints, the real and the represented, and with language itself, there’s an inherent humour to be detected in the family name Yu – that of the artist Cheng-Ta himself, and phonetically an English language ‘you’. Further complications along these lines are also demonstrated via a ‘stone’, which is carried around by the failed art collector, and proves to be an artwork by David X. If, in this sense, the ‘stone’ plays the role of evidence of the artist’s presence, it also refers to Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century Qing Dynasty masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber (a family drama in which one of the central narrators is a sentient stone) and the materialisation of the storyteller. Notably, it is Mary again who discovers the truth of the stone. Gu Ling

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In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11 by Anne Nishimura Morse and Anne E. Havinga Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, £40/$60/€59 (hardcover)

What can you do if, like Masato Seto, you feel you’ve seen ‘something that should never have been seen’? If you’re an artist, as this remarkable book shows, you can at least make images that capture some of that anguish and bafflement. Seto is describing Japan’s ‘triple disaster’ – the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck on 11 March 2011, and the ensuing Fukushima meltdown. He is one of the many Japanese photographers who have been making visible, in all sorts of unexpected ways, the invisible fear, grief, anger, sadness – and the invisible fallout – produced by the catastrophe. Fifteen photographers, including Seto, are represented in In the Wake, published to accompany an exhibition running at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston until 12 July. It’s not that images were in short supply when the disaster struck: much of the world saw the terrifying footage shot from tv helicopters of that black slab of sea smashing its way inland, and the aftermath of towns and villages reduced to shards and rubble. But then the news cycle moved on, leaving Japan somehow to cope (or not) with ‘something that should never have been seen’. In the Wake starts at that point of struggling to record what happened. Kōzō Miyoshi, known for his large-format black-and-white images, picks out the chaos in almost painful detail: the insane geometry of the ruins, of torn-up rail

tracks and ships rammed far inland. Keizō Kitajima steps in closer to capture in colour the uncanny anarchy of the aftermath – the insolence of an untouched building, for example, and its perfect reflection in a shred of seawater left behind by the tsunami. Naoya Hatakeyama’s picture of a rainbow over Rikuzentakata, his devastated hometown, seems absurdly hopeful until you find out that his mother lived here and lost her life to the disaster. If pictures by these three are as close as this work comes to documentary, that’s because In the Wake is also testimony to the degree to which Japan’s photographers have long pushed the boundaries of the form. Nobuyoshi Araki, one of the figureheads of Japanese photography represented here, responded to the drama of ‘3/11’ by gouging scratches into some of his negatives. The results speak not only of deep emotion but also of frustration at the limits of what photography can do: he scratches across classic Araki images and even a self-portrait. Lieko Shiga, born 40 years after Araki, had been working since 2008 as ‘village photographer’ in Kitakama, which felt the full force of the tsunami: she narrowly escaped, losing her house, her studio and a year’s work. Her 2013 book Rasen kaigan (Spiral Shore), which won her wide international acclaim, alludes only obliquely to the disaster, but seems to delve deep into

the places it might have touched. Its puzzling, beautiful, highly manipulated images of the villagers engaged in nocturnal rituals, a selection of which have been reproduced here, are unforgettable. (If In the Wake has one major fault, it is that its cover is almost identical to that of Rasen kaigan.) Some of the photographers respond principally to the Fukushima nuclear crisis – and its nightmarish reopening of the wounds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ghostly traces of radiation haunt many photographs – Shimpei Takeda’s radiographs of contaminated soil, Kikuji Kawada’s tv screenshot of caesium cancer cells, Takashi Arai’s mysterious blue and gold daguerreotypes and Seto’s iconic negative of vip visitors to the Fukushima site, stumbling around in protective suits and gas masks. Amid such formal experiments, the most powerful photographs here – like Hatakeyama’s rainbow – are not only the riskiest but also the simplest. Rinko Kawauchi visited the disaster zone not expecting to take photographs. But then she spotted two pigeons – one white, one black – and followed them with her camera as they swooped and strutted amid the rubble. Her stunning pictures leave many questions open. Is it wrong to ‘aestheticise’ such experience? Or is it actually what we need? As she says in her note in the book, ‘Creation awaits us after destruction.’ Andrew Johnston

Stationary 1 Edited by Christina Li and Heman Chong Spring Workshop, free (softcover)

Reviewing a book distributed free of charge and promoted via recommendation – you hear about the book, then email to request one of the 2,000 copies from Spring Workshop, and they post it to you, which gives the book itself something of the character of an ‘insider’ conversation – presents some problems. Any critique of what is in effect an act of generosity (leaving aside print and production, five hk$3.70 and five hk$1.70 stamps decorated the transparent packaging of the copy that reached London) is bound to sound somewhat churlish and mean-spirited. And yet, offering a response that bows to the grateful politenesses that accompany gift reception seems pointless and to render redundant the notion of Stationary as a generator of any kind of dialogue. And, after all, the reader does pay one price for this book: the time spent reading it. Stationary 1 is the first instalment of a five-year annual publication project produced by Hong

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Kong-based nonproﬁt Spring Workshop and led by artist Heman Chong, Spring’s now-director Christina Li, writer Janine Armin and designer Julie Peeters. A collection of short stories, it’s intended as ‘a literary space for contemplation’, with the publication itself a ‘suspended moment’ in which contributors – in this ﬁrst example, writers such as Quinn Latimer and Sean O’Toole, artists such as Sharon Hayes and Adrian Wong, and curators including Rosemary Heather and Chris Fitzpatrick – share a thought or concern that might not otherwise emerge as part of their own creative practice. Sound a bit indulgent? It is. But if art is there to afford anything, it’s space for alternative thinking. And, for the most part, the stories collected here amount to more than a collection of daydreams. Indeed conversation is where Stationary 1 is strongest. Not in the sense of Nav Haq and James Langdon’s closing conversation about art

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and book production, but rather in the way that various themes – recording, filing, migration, protest, groups of animals and mourning, to name a few – echo through the various contributions. There are ups and there are downs, and only occasionally the feeling that what you are reading would not get published except as an act of generosity. Perhaps it’s a testament to Stationary 1’s strengths that the most overtly art and related theory-based texts (by writer Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and writer-artist Ho Rui An) in the final third seem like something of a letdown. Where does that leave us, then? Wanting to know more about Frank Chu (a professional protester who is the subject of Fitzpatrick’s contribution), dipping into Amazon to find out what else Clifford Irving has written and, thanks to Wong, looking awkwardly at other people’s pets. A definitive conclusion doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that Stationary 1 is about. Mark Rappolt

Charles Lim, Singapore, April 2015. Photo: Lim Kok Boon

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For more on Sonny Liew, see overleaf

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Contributors

Hu Fang

Adeline Chia

is a fiction writer, cofounder and artistic director of Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou and the Pavilion in Beijing. His recent books include Dear Navigator (2014) and Towards a Non-intentional Space (2015). For this issue he starts the first in a new series of fiction columns. He is currently reading – and would recommend – The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present (2015), by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist, and is listening to guqin player Wu Na’s 2012 album Deform from Within.

is an arts writer based in Singapore, writing primarily on visual arts and theatre. She was formerly Southeast Asian bureau chief of Artinfo.com and arts correspondent at The Straits Times, Singapore’s largest English daily. For this issue she writes a feature on the reclusive Singaporean photographer Nguan. For further reference, she recommends (of course) Nguan’s book How Loneliness Goes (2013), as well as Rinko Kawauchi’s Aila (2005), a Japanese photographer who, like Nguan, uses a pastel palette on a square format, but in her case to capture hallucinatory and beautiful scenes of birth and death.

Vera Arunee Camindo Mey is currently the curator of residencies at the ntu Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. In 2013 she was curator in residence at Arts Initiative Tokyo and cocurated the nomadic residency fields: An itinerant inquiry across the Kingdom of Cambodia with Erin Gleeson of Sa Sa Bassac, Phnom Penh. From 2011 to 13 she was assistant director of St Paul St Gallery, Auckland University of Technology. For this issue she proﬁles artist Amanda Heng. She is currently reading Ashley Thompson’s 2008 essay on narrative, the female voice and Cambodia, ‘Performative Realities: Nobody’s Possession’.

Brian Curtin is an Irish-born art writer, curator and academic based in Bangkok. He lectures at Bangkok University and publishes regularly on contemporary art in Southeast Asia in a variety of journalistic and academic contexts. He is currently writing a book on contemporary art in Thailand for Reaktion Books. For this issue he reviews Imply Reply at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. He is currently reading the American ﬁlm theorist and art historian Kaja Silverman’s 2009 book Flesh of My Flesh.

Advisory Board Defne Ayas, Richard Chang, Anselm Franke, Claire Hsu, Pi Li, Eugene Tan, Koki Tanaka, Wenny Teo, Philip Tinari, Chang Tsong-zung, Yao Jui-Chung Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Writers Vera Arunee Camindo Mey, Stephanie Bailey, Andrew Berardini, Adeline Chia, Brian Curtin, Gallery Girl, Gu Ling, Hu Fang, Andrew Johnston, Kevin Jones, Dean Kissick, Anthony Leung Po Shan, Charu Maithani, Edward Sanderson, Sherman Sam, Wenny Teo, Yan Wu, Zhang Hanlu Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Sonny Liew, Lim Kok Boon, Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Shinro Ohtake, Wee Li Lin

Sonny Liew (preceding pages)

Singapore gained its independence in 1965. Without doubt the most surprising and perceptive account of the ﬁve subsequent decades comes as a graphic biography of one extraordinary comics artist, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Tye (2015). At over 300 pages, this metatextual memoir is the most ambitious project yet by Sonny Liew, a ‘Causeway Child’ of a Malaysian father and Singaporean mother, who converted to Singapore citizenship amid the new excitement in the air after the 2011 elections. “I felt I needed to do this book as a Singaporean, rather than a foreigner or as someone on the outside looking in. It took a lot research, talking to publishers, writers, historians, reading all sorts of books on Singaporean history. It’s been a real education, one that has helped me understand a little better this country’s past.” Liew parallels the island nation’s turbulent history with Chan’s life and career, resonating with his personal sketches, photos, accomplished paintings and the ever-shifting subjects, styles and formats of his comics, shot from fading print or original art, some of it previously unpublished. Our guide, an elderly Chan, is not lacking in modesty: “Maybe I always destined to become Singapore’s greatest comics artist.” The seed was planted from

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Chan’s boyhood reading in ‘Pavement’ or ‘Five Foot Way’ street rental libraries. He always wore his influences on his sleeve; from Ah Huat’s Giant Robot saviour, his teen debut imitating Osamu Tezuka’s robot manga; or Dragon, his 1957 copy of British weekly Eagle; to his funny animal fable close to Pogo and localised superhero Roachman. Throughout Liew annotates the topical politics implied or explicit in Chan’s series, while recreating key turning points in the artist’s life. The reader is pulled inside this double-edged history, pulsing with the tensions and wonders of lived experience. The versatile Liew likes to mix personal solo pieces with collaborations ranging from adapting Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to reviving, with writer Gene Luen Yang, The Green Turtle, the first Asian superhero in American comic books. Last year, for the National Gallery of Singapore, Liew compiled another graphic biography, Warm Nights, Deathless Days: The Life of Georgette Chen (1906–93), about one of Singapore’s most prominent pioneer painters. Liew distils key moments, big and small, into single strips that build to a whole page, as in the cycle of newspaper comics. Reading Chen’s letters and studying her paintings, he discovers “her art, her friends; her worries about finances, the troubles

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that filled her second marriage; chores, Malay lessons, illnesses and hair dyes. A life, I guess we’d call it, with all its contradictory density and fleetingness.” With the benefit of hindsight, Liew views Singapore’s first half-century as “a marvel. Since his passing on March 23rd 2015,” Liew continues, “there’s been no escaping the eulogies for President Lee Kuan Yew. It’s clear he helped to create a Singapore where low corruption and pragmatism have resulted in a very unlikely success. But in this world of complexities and contradictions, in Singapore especially, we’ll always have to contest official historical narratives. That pushback, that resistance, through political means, creative enterprises or other channels, is essential to maintain good governance.” In the vein of the Situationists’ détournement, Liew’s new strip Beauty World repurposes the manga Doraemon, about a robot cat who can produce anything from his pocket for his pal Nobita, to revisit a left-wing politician’s contested speech from 1956. With much recent news in Singapore of yet more communal places of memory being slated for removal and destruction, Liew’s comics of recovery and discovery can connect us to pasts that may become forgotten or perhaps were never remembered. Paul Gravett

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Reprographics by phmedia. Copyright of all editorial content in the uk and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview Ltd cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview Asia (issn No: 2052-5346) is published three times per year by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London ec1y oth, England, United Kingdom. Due to an editing error in the Winter 2015 issue of ArtReview Asia, a review of Wang Jianwei: Time Temple, 2014, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, was published alongside a photo of works from another exhibition, Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Art of Participation – Seeing, Conversing, Gift-Giving, Writing, Dining and Getting Connected to the World, 2014, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Lee Mingwei’s exhibition was subsequently reviewed in the March 2015 issue of ArtReview.

Photo credits on the cover photography by Wee Li Lin on page 108 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 111 photography by Lim Kok Boon on page 118 photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam

Summer 2015

Text credits Phrases on the spine and on pages 19, 37 and 93 are from Waterworld, directed by Kevin Reynolds and released in 1995 by Universal Pictures

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Off the Record Summer 2015 The boat taking me across Lake Pichola is going at a nonchalant pace. Too nonchalant for a leading artworld personality, I reckon, so I tap impatiently on the shoulder of the boatman, who rather improbably is sporting a Mohican. “Faster, Babu, faster!” “Relax, lady, and enjoy the view of Udaipur’s domed lakefront palaces, that is if you can see anything out of your Victoria Beckham aviator-style gold-tone mirrored sunglasses.” I pause, surprised. “You’ve got remarkably good English for a simple Indian ferryman, and a good grip on current trends,” I remark perhaps a tad archly. “Ah, I spent some time in Manchester and Liverpool,” says the man sadly. I get out my Smythson Panama Luck Be A Lady textured leather notebook, in which I’m keeping a journal that ultimately I expect Manifesta might publish. ‘Natives have jolly good English language skills ;)’, I ﬁnally write before the boat gently docks. I step out and am ushered quickly to a traditional Kashmiri ‘gondola’ parked in one of the courtyards outside the Oberoi Udaivilas. “Welcome, Miss Gallery Girl. My name is Kapil Dev, and as you know, I advise the Ministry of Culture. Now tell me, what is this socalled Venice Biennale that everyone says India should be a part of and which we’ve only taken part in a couple of times in the last 40 years, because we think contemporary art is a ﬁlthy Western invention?” I take a swig of the glass of champagne that the waiter offers me. “Well, Kapil, it’s a bit late for that. You’re in it.” There’s a pause. Mr Dev looks confused. “In what? Where? Here? This is Udaipur, not Italy! This is exactly the sort of misrepresentation by the bbc that us Indian officials are very angry about.” “I’m not from the bbc, I’m from ArtReview Asia. And it’s the Venice Biennale that you’re in.” I get out a press release and assorted photocopies from my Deer Nubuck Python Marylebone Tote bag by Aspinal. “Here, look,” I continue, gesturing at the papers. “The press is delighted by the groundbreaking collaboration between India and Pakistan for the Venice Biennale. It’s called My East Is Your West.” “What?” thunders Kapil. “I know nothing about this! What collaboration? Pakistan? You’ve got to be kidding me. We would never collaborate with that bunch of chuckers! Look how they screwed over Carrie Mathison in season four of Homeland! How could you trust them after that, let alone the years of aggression and posturing that’s been going on between us?” “Did you say ‘fuckers’?” “Chuckers. They chuck their cricket balls. Saeed Ajmal. Don’t you follow cricket?”

I shrug nonchalantly and silently pass him the papers. In the middistance I see deer frolicking in the hotel’s wildlife sanctuary. “Good God! What is this? Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana to present a new series of works in a shared exhibition! We didn’t commission this!” “You’re correct, you didn’t. It’s the brainchild of Feroze Gujral.” “Not Feroze Gujral who founded Outset India, the subcontinental offshoot of the famous ladies-only society who take lunch, look at art and lovingly foist their purchases on Sir Nicholas Serota? Jolly hockey-sticks at dawn!” “The very same. Although Outset India funds, um… Indians.” Kapil’s eyes narrow. He picks up a cricket ball, sets off about 30 metres towards the wildlife sanctuary and then thunders back. With a grunt and a windmill of his arms, Kapil launches the ball at around 130kph through the windows of the Udai Mahal Restaurant. There is a scream and a tinkle of broken crockery. He sits down again. “But you mean to say that anyone can put together a national pavilion?” he asks. “Well, if you put it that way, yes.” “But I could do something really crazy in that case and claim I’m Germany but ask someone like Liam Gillick to show. Ahahahahaha!” Kapil tosses back his proud mane and laughs madly. I squirm awkwardly. “Look, as Okwui Enwezor has said, an exhibition is a project that will be located in a dialectical ﬁeld of references and artistic practices.” “What does that mean?” “Basically, anything goes. Look, you’re lucky. The Kenyans have been foisted with a pavilion stuffed full of Chinese artists curated by a couple of Italians.” Kapil relaxes a bit. “I see, I see. Well, fair enough. Good luck to Feroze. I mean, in some ways thank God it’s not just the usual thing where you mention contemporary art and India in the same sentence and automatically there’s bloody Raqs Media Collective.” I pause, holding the artist list for the Arsenale that I was going to give to Kapil, think better of it and chuck it far over the hedge into the beautifully still waters of Lake Pichola. Gallery Girl