ArtReview Asia Summer 2016 by ArtReview

Maryanto

Nature, culture and politics in Indonesia

SOUS LE SIGNE DU LION BROOCH IN WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS

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KARIN SANDER JUNE 3 – JULY 8, 2016 — MARIENSTRASSE 10 D – 10117 BERLIN WWW.JOHNENGALERIE.DE WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM ART BASEL JUNE 16 –19, 2016 STAND S1 ART UNLIMITED AA BRONSON PRABHAVATHI MEPPAYIL JUNE 16 –19, 2016

RYAN GANDER THE CONNECTIVITY SUITE (AND OTHER PLACES) JUNE 3 – AUGUST 27, 2016 — SCHÖNEBERGER UFER 65 D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM WWW.JOHNENGALERIE.DE ART BASEL JUNE 16 –19, 2016 STAND S1 ART UNLIMITED AA BRONSON PRABHAVATHI MEPPAYIL JUNE 16 –19, 2016

ArtReview Asia vol 4 no 3 2016

350 In case you hadn’t noticed, Asia is a very big place. And rather than risking too many generalisations, ArtReview Asia’s approach is to expand its coverage bit by bit: to gaze at its navel, if you like, before taking in the rest of its body, bit by bit. ‘Don’t be too hasty in trying to find a definition of the town,’ ArtReview Asia’s favourite Frenchman, Georges Perec once wrote, ‘it’s far too big and there’s every chance of getting it wrong.’ With a continent you definitely take your time. And so with each issue it finds itself exploring art and thought produced in new geographies and new contexts (as well as continuing to revisit contexts and art that it has tackled before, but hasn’t yet exhausted). In this issue we look at some (but by no means all) aspects of art in Indonesia. At the way that political and national ideals have shaped public art in Jakarta and how that art and the vision it expresses continue to shape Indonesia’s art today; and at how a contemporary artist such as Maryanto deals with the country’s changing landscape and its significance. ArtReview Asia also welcomes Tamil author Charu Nivedita as a regular columnist; in this issue he begins an exploration of life in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Without life, after all, there’s no art. That’s not to say, as some of you may well be thinking, that ArtReview Asia is totally obsessed by context above all else. Elsewhere it looks at more general issues, including the ways in which labour and bureaucracy have informed and been adopted as a subject matter in the fields of art and design (in the case of the latter, how craftsmanship has become a luxury good). And artist Heman Chong quizzes writer Ken Liu about the newly popular ‘silkpunk’ sci-fi genre. Perhaps, underneath that, ArtReview Asia is conscious of the ways in which various cultural identities are packaged and can be played around with too – as is explored more directly in an analysis of the work of Singaporean comic artist Troy Chin. ArtReview Asia

Fashionable, as opposed to the non-portable ones

YAN PEI-MING, FUNÉRAILLES DU PAPE, 2015, OIL ON CANVAS, 280 X 415 CM

ROB PRUITT, MELTING POT FOUNTAIN, 2009, 152 BOTTLES OF WATER, PLASTIC, PUMP, 115 X 115 CM

YOUTUBE IS FOUNDED IN EUREKA, CALIFORNIA WITH THE SLOGAN ‘BROADCAST YOURSELF’. THE FIRST VIDEO POSTED ONLINE IS ‘ME AT THE ZOO’, LASTING 18 SECONDS.

AFTER RATIFICATION BY RUSSIA THE KYOTO PROTOCOL COMES INTO FORCE, BRINGING TOGETHER 191 COUNTRIES IN THE BATTLE TO REDUCE GREENHOUSE GASES EMISSIONS.

POPE JOHN PAUL II DIES AFTER A 26-YEAR PONTIFICATE, THE THIRD-LONGEST IN HISTORY. OVER 4 MILLION PEOPLE TRAVEL TO THE VATICAN TO MOURN HIM.

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Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 19

Points of View by Hu Fang, Charu Nivedita, Aimee Lin & Maria Lind 31

page 24 Manit Sriwanichpoom, 1 of 5 Generals Who Return Happiness to the People, pigment print on paper, 80 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2016

Art Featured

Maryanto by Aimee Lin 40

Mohammed Kazem by Stephanie Bailey 62

Indonesian Cities by Grace Samboh 46

The Artist as Bureaucrat by Chris Fite-Wassilak 68

Ken Liu interview by Heman Chong 52

Workwear by Clara Young 72

Troy Chin by Joel Tan 56

page 68 Fernando García-Dory, Inland project, 2009 –. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 80

Books 96

Social Fabric: New Work by Marianna Hahn and Kwan Sheung Chi, by Adeline Chia Xue Feng, by Fiona He South by Southeast. A Further Surface, by Zhang Hanlu Koki Tanaka, by Jason Waite Staging Film: the relation of space and image in video art, by Young-jun Tak Under My Skin, by Tiffany Chae Dusadee Huntrakul, by Max Crosbie-Jones The Time is Out of Joint, by Kevin Jones 1497, by Murtaza Vali Keiji Uematsu, by Gabriel Coxhead Cao Fei, by Wu Yan

Provoke: Between Protest and Performance. Photography in Japan 1960 / 1975, edited by Diane Dufour and Matthew S. Witkovsky Man Tiger, by Eka Kurniawan New Thai Style, by Kim Inglis Sar: The Essence of Indian Design, by Swapnaa Tamhane and Rashmi Varma Imran Qureshi: Where the Shadows are so Deep Afterwork Readings, edited by Para Site and KUNCI Cultural Studies Center The New Curator, edited by Natasha Hoare, Coline Milliard, Rafal Niemojewski, Ben Borthwick and Jonathan Watkins A Burglar’s Guide to the City, by Geoff Manaugh Ringier Annual Report 2015, by Helen Marten THE STRIP 102 OFF THE RECORD 106

page 92 Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Main Balcony, 2014, cast iron-balcony, 137 × 160 × 79 cm. Courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai

ArtReview Asia

ART Basel Unlimited 14 – 19 June 2016

Ho Tzu Nyen ‘The Nameless’

ART Basel | Booth E2 16 – 19 June 2016 SAM DURANT CARSTEN HÖLLER SHIRAZEH HOUSHIARY JANE LEE RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA HAEGUE YANG

Art Previewed

No thread emerges from the empty shuttle 17

salons

’art

call for applications

artgenève: 26 – 29 January 2017 artgeneve.ch

artmonte-carlo: 29 – 30 April 2017 artmontecarlo.ch

Previewed Lee Kit S.M.A.K., Ghent Through 4 September Lee Kit Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Through 9 October

Manit Sriwanichpoom Kathmandu Photo Gallery, Bangkok H Gallery, Bangkok Tang Contemporary, Bangkok 23 July – 10 September Yavuz Gallery, Singapore 28 July – 20 September

Yu Honglei Antenna Space, Shanghai 8 July – 2 September

Jimmy Ong Fost Gallery, Singapore through 26 June

A Beautiful Disorder Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, Chichester 2 July – November

Dawn Ng Aloft at Hermès, 541 Orchard Road, Liat Towers, Singapore through 14 August

Andy Warhol M Woods, Beijing 6 August – 7 January

Pio Abad 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, New South Wales through 9 July

Rauschenberg in China Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing through 21 August

Larissa Sansour The Mosaic Rooms, London through 20 August

Apichatpong Weerasethakul Mai Iam Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai 3 July – 10 September Makoto Aida Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo 6 July – 20 August KAWS Galerie Perrotin, Seoul through 27 August Tetsuya Umeda Ota Fine Arts, Singapore through 16 July 2016 Aichi Triennale Various venues, Aichi Prefecture 11 August – 23 October Art Jog 9 Various venues, Yogyakarta through 27 June Art Stage Jakarta Sheraton Grand, Jakarta 5–7 August

The Universe and Art Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 30 July – 9 January

Bazaar Art Jakarta Ritz-Carlton, Jakarta 25–28 August

Superflex 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa Through 27 November

6 Sorayama Hajime, Sexy Robot, 2016, FRP, iron, silver, gold plating air brush paint, LED neon light, 182 × 60 × 60 cm. Photo: Tanaka Shigeru. Courtesy: NANZUKA

Summer 2016

On no less than three occasions during the last ‘no one knows how hard it is to put on exhibitwo weeks, ArtReview Asia has been pinned into tions in these globalised times’. a corner by a desperate curator who has nuzzled So, in the interest of not being pinned up close to it and then, rather alarmingly, hissed: against a wall and gibbered at, if there is one “Which ASIAN ARTIST do you think is HOT right Asian artist who’s having ‘a moment’ right now, now?” Before muttering something mitigating 1 it might well be Lee Kit. Right now, Lee, who about ‘the sponsors’ and ‘diversity’. graced the cover of ArtReview Asia’s inaugural “Still unripened, our breasts barely pucker issue back in 2013 (on the occasion of his repreinto nipple!” ArtReview Asia shrieks back. “Yet senting Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale), has while we shape turrets from fine white sand, just opened his debut solo institutional exhiyou eye us deviously… Spare us our sandcastles!” bitions in both Europe and the US. At S.M.A.K. it concludes whilst frantically fumbling for the we’re told that the Taipei-based artist is going rape alarm it has secreted in the parrot made to be constructing an installation composed of of bamboo sticks, pomegranate flowers and past and present work (which, as you may now banana leaves that it always has strapped to its be realising is tantamount to telling us nothing). wrist. It’s about then that the curator, never More revealingly, the first work in the show is having attended Aadi Pooram, starts running a wall, covered completely by a photograph of away gibbering about how ‘we can’t all be another wall upon which hangs a coat, setting friends with President Bloomberg’ and that up the relationship between image, object,

fantasy, memory and other projections of reality upon which much of Lee’s recent work has turned. Look out for cardboard, teatowels, plenty of projections and a meditation on how the public sphere invades the domestic sphere and, within that, the manifestations of personal and collective desire. Less vague is the Walker’s show, which gathers work from the past five years around I can’t help falling in love (2012), a 13-channel video installation that’s in the American institution’s permanent collection and is focused on everyday household products. An automobile wing-mirror, upon which glassy surface Lawrence Wiener texts and graphics, as well as some inspired by him, appear as they are read out by a digitised voice to a background of ambient electronic music; a desert road; someone who might be David Guetta’s older brother marching around

1 Lee Kit, I can’t help falling in love, 2012 (installation view, Walker Art Center, 2016). Courtesy the artist and Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai

1 Lee Kit, Hand-painted cloth used to cleaning window, 2008, acrylic on fabric, photo document, dimensions variable. Courtesy S.M.A.K., Ghent

ArtReview Asia

2 Yu Honglei, En Route, 2016, double-screen video, colour, sound. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

3 Cheng Ran, Crossroads, 2015, proposal maquette. Photo: JJYPGOTO. Courtesy the artist

impishly in a silver suit; some marlins; a parachutist: that’s just some of the rather hypnotic 2 weirdness we saw in a preview of Yu Honglei’s new two-channel videowork En Route (2016). It seemed like a compelling reappraisal of contemporary art-history (now there’s a contradiction) until Guetta senior turned up. Then ArtReview Asia got the feeling that someone’s tongue might have been in someone’s cheek. (The artist’s, in his own, thank you very much!) Not content with that, Yu is also planning to use his Antenna Space show to turn the gallery into a public bath housing a dozen or so beings – some human, some not – and a cat, standing on ‘futuristic superstore pallets’ (except for the cat which has run away and scratched the floor, mimicking, normalising and undermining the artist’s efforts to incise his own will into his materials). The artist says his work goes beyond

language and can only be experienced in its plastic form – you might have realised a few lines ago that ArtReview Asia agrees: you’ll have to push past it at the opening to see the real thing though, if you’re nice it will let you borrow its towel. 3 A Beautiful Disorder – you might think that’s another attempt to describe Yu’s exhibition, but that’s just the way in which these previews link up. Rather, this is an exhibition of 15 monumental outdoor sculptures at the Cass by a selection of Chinese and Greater Chinese artists including Cheng Ran, MadeIn Company, Wang Wei and Zhao Yao. The show takes its title from an eighteenth-century letter describing the gardens of the Qianlong Emperor’s summer palace near Beijing that later became a profound influence on eighteenth-century English and French landscape design. The letter was written

Summer 2016

by the Jesuit missionary and artist Jean-Denis Attiret, who went to China in 1737, where he became painter to the Qianlong Emperor after adopting a Chinese painting style; the Yuanming Yuan (Gardens of Perfect Brightness) were destroyed by British and French troops in 1860. Ironic in some ways; standard colonial practice in others. ‘Can I do anything to prevent England from calling down on herself God’s curse for brutalities committed on another feeble race? Or are all my exertions to result only in the extension of the area over which Englishmen are to exhibit how hollow and superficial are both their civilisation and Christianity?’ wrote Lord Elgin (the son of the marbles man) shortly before ordering the destruction. What’s going to be exhibited at Goodwood in the twenty-first century? Well, to take just one example, Bi Rongrong, an artist

who trained in classical Chinese painting, will be lifting and folding parts of the Foundation’s lawns and supporting them with sheets of steel painted in fluorescent colours. Revenge vandalism? Or Attiret’s journey in reverse? Go visit and decide. When it comes to Western artists infiltrating today’s Chinese art scene this summer, 4/5 Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg are leading the charge (as much as dead people can), with respective shows by both taking place in private museums in Beijing. Andy Warhol is at M Woods, where his then-game changing takes on portraiture in the form of the Screen Tests of the 1960s and Polariods from the 1970s and 80s will be shown alongside his 1963 film Kiss (which features a series of men kissing women, women kissing women and men kissing men

for three-and-half minutes a go, and sits, in art moment’, the exhibition also includes the epic historical terms, somewhere between Rodin’s 109 parts and 305 metres of the artist’s The 1/4 famous sculpture and Tino Sehgal’s more recent Mile or 2 Furlong Piece (1981–98), which hasn’t been performance piece) and the interactive heatdisplayed to the public since 2000. If ever there sealed pillows of his Silver Clouds (1966), which was an exhibition that truly merited the publicare something of a crossroads of relational ity slogan ‘not to be missed’ then this is it. aesthetics, installation art, eco-art, and convenHow often are you going to be able to write tional sculpture. the names of current artworld luminaries such Meanwhile, UCCA presents Rauschenberg’s as Wolfgang Tillmans, Trevor Paglen, Hiroshi first exhibition in China for three decades. Sugimoto and teamLab next to historical figures Rauschenberg in China includes Studies for such as Charles Darwin, Galileo Galilei, Yuri Chinese Summerhall (1983) a selection of colour Gagarin and Leonardo da Vinci? Never again photographs that the artist took in China on probably. But all of them are represented in a trip made in 1982 alongside archival materials 6 the Mori Art Museum’s The Universe and Art, relating to his 1985 exhibition ROCI CHINA, where science meets fiction and the past meets which took place at what is now the National the future – all in the present of this summer. Art Museum of China. As well as focusing on Focused on art’s engagement with the cosmos, what ArtReview Asia is going to call his ‘Attiret this show pits works like Sorayama Hajime’s

ArtReview Asia

7 Courtesy Superflex and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

8 Manit Sriwanichpoom, Ratchadamnoen Motor Show #3, 2014, pigment print on paper, 67 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist

shiny silver Sexy Robot (2016; its title tells you social systems and financial frameworks, proposes to create artworks that function as everything you need to know) alongside meteorites, fossils and Gagarin’s photographs experimental devices that model and perhaps shape the museum’s relationship to its visitors. and a 1610 edition of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius. There are a whopping 150 items on show In other words, to express the museum’s purpose and function. Among the works on in total, among them an early Edo-period display is The Fermentation Act (2016), an installahandscroll of Japan’s oldest prose narrative Taketori Monogatari (The Tale of the Woodcutter, tion that produces kombucha (a fermented tea aka The Tale of Princess Kaguya), which in this drink said to originate in ancient Mongolia and to have health benefits); the action of visitors context is recast as the country’s first scienceexpelling carbon dioxide through breathing fiction novel. A more strictly scientific motif also provides in turn fuels the microorganisms that ferment the tea. 7 the conceit for Danish collective Superflex’s exhibition, One Year Project – THE LIQUID STATE, Talking of things fermenting, Thai artist over at the 21st Century Museum of Contem8 Manit Sriwanichpoom is best known for porary Art in Kanazawa. Using the keywords his Pink Man series of photographs from the ‘cultivation’, ‘fermentation’ and ‘transformation’, late 1990s and early 2000s, in which the artist, the group, whose work exposes and manipulates dressed in a tasteless pink suit, is photographed

ArtReview Asia

with a pink shopping trolley in various urban and rural locations or backdrops. The artist describes this series, which is almost nauseatingly kitsch, as representing his ‘upset and alienated feeling towards the concept of consumerism which has been accepted simply and without consideration by Thai society’. Spread across three galleries in the Thai capital and one in Singapore (in whose National Gallery Sriwanichpoom features prominently) the ten new photoseries and two new videoworks, all produced between Thailand’s last election (in 2011) and the solar eclipse of 9 March 2016 (visible in parts of Indonesia and the Pacific Ocean), prove that Sriwanichpoom is still upset, if not downright depressed. This time by the increasingly authoritarian inclinations of Thailand’s current military rulership:

Franco Fontana, Sicilia, 2007

June 2 — October 23, 2016

Landscape, institutions, culture and society 40 master photographers describe Italy in 150 images Agosti / Alterazioni Video / Barbieri / Basilico / Battaglia / Berengo Gardin Berruti / Bonaventura, Imbriaco e Severo / Borzoni / Botto / Camporesi Chiaramonte / Cipriano e Donati / Cresci / D’Amico / De Pietri / Fontana Gastel / Ghirri / Guidi / Inside Out Project by JR / F. Jodice / M. Jodice / Leone Lessing / Linke / Mulas / Niedermayr / Noordkamp / Pellegrin / Piersanti Sabbagh / Scianna / Spada / Sugimoto / Vitali / Zizola / Zubero Apodaca

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the photograph Generals Who Return Happiness also a reflection of his own journey as a native to the People no. 1 portrays a uniformed torso Singaporean now living in Yogyakarta. While covered with medals; Ratchadamnoen Motor Ong’s early works (developed during the 1980s) Show # 3 (2014), a wrecked and overturned car treated themes of sexual identity and gender, painted in the colours of the Thai flag. and in 2010 his Sitayana reimagined the Bukit Larangan (Forbidden Hill) is the Ramayana from a female perspective, the new Malay name for Fort Canning, supposedly the drawings take the form of slightly comic history burial site of Sang Nila Utama the founding works (among them Raffles Descends the Seven king of Singapura. Borobudur is a ninthStoried Mountain, 2016) that fuse his interests in century Mahayana Buddhist temple in Central history, myth and gender. The exhibition also Java, Indonesia. What have they got in common marks the launch of a new publication on Ong’s apart from the fact that both are hill-shaped work written by the big daddy of Singaporean and were ‘discovered’ by Thomas Stamford art history, T.K. Sabapathy. Raffles, founder of colonial Singapore? They For those of you who prefer shopping malls 9 are the twin poles between which Jimmy Ong’s to galleries (yes, you Singaporeans – that’s latest exhibition is slung. From Bukit Larangan 10 another one of those links), Dawn Ng’s new to Borobudur is not only a survey show of drawinstallation How to Disappear into a Rainbow (2016) ings made by Ong over the past 16 years but is in one of the former. Aloft at Hermès is one

of the fashion giant’s five art spaces around the world, this one with a programme directed by Singapore Tyler Print Institute director Emi Eu. Ng is best known for Walter (2012) a giant inflatable, if (ironically) depressedlooking, white rabbit that kept popping up at various locations in Singapore before finding a resting place in the collection of the Singapore Art Museum. Walter looks like Miffy might after a night out on the lash. At Aloft, Ng has installed variously pastel-coloured plaster and wood slabs, each of which has a mirror covering its width. ‘I wanted to create an abstract sense of moving through the soft pastel colour planes of an early horizon,’ the artist said. Not quite the rainbow of the title (though perhaps a rainbow as Walter might see it), but absorbing nonetheless.

9 Jimmy Ong, Study for Rampogan, 2014, charcoal on paper, 118 × 128.5 cm. Courtesy Fost Gallery, Singapore

10 Dawn Ng, How to Disappear Into a Rainbow, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Masao Nishikawa. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

11 Pio Abad, Every Tool is a Weapon if You Hold it Right XXXIII, 2015, unique acid dye print on hand stitched silk twill. Courtesy the artist and Silverlens, Manila

12 Larissa Sansour, In the Future, They Ate From The Finest Porcelain (film still), 2015, video, 29min. Courtesy the artist and The Mosaic Rooms, London

Someone who did enjoy shopping more than most, and was also a beauty queen, diplomat, entrepreneur, fashion designer, model, politician, singer, socialite and kleptocrat, is Imelda Marcos, whose ‘conjugal dictatorship’, together with her husband, former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos, has provided a framework 11 for much of London-based Filipino Pio Abad’s 12 multimedia work, which often concerns itself with the social and political significance of objects. At the 4A Centre, however, the artist is opting for a broader base of enquiry: his exhibition 1975–2015 begins with the US evacuation of Saigon in 1975 and covers a range of conflicts spanning the Balkans to the Philippines. Among the works on show will be 105 Degrees and Rising (2015), which takes its title from the radio code used by the US Army to signal the

evacuation of Saigon and incorporates motifs drawn from the camouflage pattern developed by the US for jungle combat in Vietnam and a 1976 pinup photograph of American actress Farrah Fawcett. The result? An intriguing look at the disguise, seduction and sophistication of colonial influence. Back in the heart of darkness and Abad’s current hometown, Larissa Sansour’s In the Future, They Ate From the Finest Porcelain is the first solo exhibition by the Jerusalem-born artist in London. The title work is a 29-minute video from 2015 that combines sci-fi and archival imagery to create a postapocalyptic landscape. In it, a ‘narrative terrorist’ is questioned about a conflict in which decorated porcelain is a weapon, and archaeology (and the planting of fabricated historical artefacts) the frontline.

Summer 2016

The video is accompanied by an installation, Revisionist Production Line (2016), which appears to be a production line producing the plates decorated with the keffiyeh pattern (a symbol of Palestinian nationalism), and extends the motif of archaeology being used as an instrument through which a people justify its presence in a landscape. ArtReview Asia’s going to leave the link to the next show for you to deduce. This July sees the inauguration of the Mai Iam Museum of Contemporary Art in Chiang Mai. The private institution, housed in a 3,000sqm converted warehouse, is based around a collection of contemporary Thai art (including works by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Navin Rawanchaikul and Rirkrit Tiravanija) built up over the past 30 years by Jean Michel Beurdeley and his late

13 Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Primitive (film still), 2009. Courtesy Kick the Machine Films, Bangkok

15 KAWS, Untitled (MBFU8), 2016, acrylic on canvas, 94 × 81 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Perrotin, Paris, New York, Hong Kong & Seoul

14 Makoto Aida, The Natives @ Ogi Island, 2013, video, 48 min. © the artist. Courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery, Singapore

wife Patsri Bunnag, together with their son Eric Bunnag Booth. Its palindromic name means ‘brand new’. Alongside the permanent display, its opening exhibition, titled The Serenity of Madness, is a travelling retrospective of work by local resident and 2010 Cannes Palme d’Or13 winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul, fresh from presenting close to 16 hours (from 10pm to 1.45pm the next day) of filmworks at London’s Tate Modern. In Chiang Mai, look out for rarely seen experimental short films and video installations, alongside photography, paintings, sketches and archival material from one of the world’s leading filmmakers. 15 One of the leading figures of Japanese 13 contemporary art for some time now, Makoto Aida is not only known for his own multimedia art production, but also for incubating

four of the six members of Japanese art collective Chim Pom within his studio. Aida has previously declared that he wants to become ‘a symbolic artist of Japanese strangeness’, and previous works have included a video of the artist masturbating in front of the kanji characters for ‘beautiful young girl’ and paintings of naked schoolgirls being minced in a blender. Needless to say he’s been accused of being a misogynist among other things and is keeping the new work in his upcoming show at Mizuma closely under wraps. Prepare to be shocked, if that’s not becoming predictable. American artist KAWS has been a big hit in Japan thanks, in part, to the limited-edition vinyl art toys he’s created for companies such as Bounty Hunter, Bathing Ape and Medicom.

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He began his career as a street artist during the 1990s, when he began subverting public advertisements in New York City. Since then he’s become a cult international artist with an output that spans painting, sculpture and graphic design. At Emmanuel Perrotin’s newly inaugurated Seoul gallery he’ll be showcasing the latest evolutions of his strange (but not in a Makoto Aida-type way) pop-culture-inspired characters. Expect a few friendly Frankensteinian rabbits. It’s not often that you get a press release about a show that describes a series of performances ‘or something by the artist(s)’, but that’s the description that accompanies Japanese 16 artist Tetsuya Umeda’s upcoming show at Ota Fine Arts Singapore. Its title, Almost over, always around, signals a certain provisionality as well as its opposite. What we do know is that the

exhibition will feature a new site-specific Allora & Calzadilla, Giovanni Anselmo, Laura installation drawing on the space of the gallery Lima, Charles Lim, Mark Manders, Oscar and its environment as well as objects encounMurillo and ruangrupa – will aiming to make that true. Alongside all that, the festival also tered during his stay in Singapore. Umeda’s work focuses on sound, light and movement incorporates opera, dance and music. as a means of investigating or exposing the Where better to end than in the place properties of space. But what ArtReview Asia’s this magazine starts: Indonesia. The next few really looking forward to is the experience months see no less than three art fairs taking of those mysterious ‘or somethings’. 18 place in the country. First up is Art Jog in It’s hoping for a few of those moments too Yogyakarta, a fair that operates more like an 17 at the 2016 Aichi Triennale, curated by photoexhibition (privileging artists over galleries, grapher Chihiro Minato and titled Homo Faber: lasting for a month and operating with a A Rainbow Caravan. The exhibition’s concept theme – this year Universal Influence). Among statement aims at ‘tracing humankind’s creative the 72 artists with work in the show are Garin journey into the unknown’ and proposes that Nugroho, F.X. Harsono and Nasirun, and ‘art is capable of creating a time and space reamong the works is an antenna mounted atop moved from the mundane’. An impressive gathera 36m-high tower in order to capture extraing of international visual artists – including terrestrial activity (by Venzha Christiawan,

in collaboration with the Indonesian Space Science Society). Over in Jakarta, and for those of you who like to talk to galleries (there will be 50 of them on hand), look out for the inaugural edition of Art Stage Jakarta, a new venture from the team that operates Art Stage Singapore and who are looking to bring their magic to ‘Southeast Asia’s leading centre of art production and collecting’. And if that’s really floating your boat, then a few weeks later you can check out Jakarta’s longest-running contemporary art fair, Bazaar Art Jakarta. To really get you (and those Singaporeans from across the water) in the mood, it’s located in a shopping centre. Right, ArtReview Asia is off to look after its sandcastles. As Andal writes, ‘Torment us no longer! We have no choice but to surrender to your whim.’ Nirmala Devi

17 Laura Lima, Fuga ( flight), 2008 (installation view, A gentle Carioca, Rio de Janeiro). Photo: Laura Lima /Ana Torres. Courtesy Aichi Triennale

16 Tetsuya Umeda, HOTEL NEW OSOREZAN, 2013 (installation view, 2016). © the artist. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo & Singapore

18 Samsul Arifin, Gunny Cabinets, 2014 (installation view). Courtesy Art Jog, Yogyakarta

Summer 2016

20th EDITION

10.13 NOV 2016 GRAND PALAIS

Points of View When was it, exactly, that I was ushered into the good graces of the Department of Prison Administration to the extent that they invited me to do design work for them? I am not sure I have the answer. Perhaps this question is destined to become a source of unending and worthwhile reflection on my personal history. And I find that I already lack the energy for thorough soul-searching. I should mention that when I received the invitation I felt a deep sense of revulsion. I had had virtually no contact with prisons in my prior professional life: as an architect, you never think that you will become the designer of spaces that imprison your fellow humans. But after I had successfully designed hospitals, factories, schools and art museums, they found me, and forced me to confront thoughts that I had long been avoiding. At first, as an architect – and even more so, as a person – I was unable to persuade myself to design prisons. But then I learned more, particularly from playing the videogame Prison Architect and reading Notes from the Gallows. Compared with Prison Architect, Notes from the Gallows, written by the Czech communist Julius Fučík in Prague’s Pankrác Prison in the spring of 1943, more deeply reflects the brutal class-characteristics that prisons once possessed. Yet the text also locates prisons as a battlefield in the fight for the liberation of humankind. Accordingly, if prisons can be seen as offering insight into how people of different eras have sought human liberation, then it occurred to me that perhaps I should thank the panel members for their invitation. Perhaps I should embrace this opportunity to consider the future prospects of our species. When I accepted their invitation, the architecture world was divided into two camps. One saw my decision as immoral: bowing and scraping at the feet of the regime. The other saw my acceptance of the commission as an example of an architect positively engaging with existing social problems; they praised and supported me. Just like that, I lost some friends while simultaneously winning the enthusiastic support of certain others. Some of my supporters led me around to observe various social phenomena that they considered important, and encouraged me to interview relevant societal personages (of course these interviews included some clandestine meetings). Thus I was provided with all sorts of worthwhile reference material.

Prison Architect by

Hu Fang It may be hard for you to believe, but if the original details of that first commission could be made public (taking into consideration some related national security matters, it is quite easy to understand why it remains classified), you would see that it was in fact a request for a design for an extraordinarily enlightened prison. They hoped for a contemporary prison space that incorporated aspects of schools, hospitals, factories and art museums in order to unite the ‘punitive’ with the ‘rehabilitative’ in an organic fashion. This idea was closely linked to the debate over prisoner rights, which emerged following certain incidents of prisoner abuse early this century. The project was a response to new ways of thinking about the spatial design of prisons. If prisons are the spaces most symbolic of social forms, then my design for the Tancheng Prison was undoubtedly an experiment that transcended the utilitarian prison system. Kant stated that one should treat other people always as ends, and never as means. Looking back, perhaps you will say that the ideas I strived for have not been widely disseminated and accepted in this society of ours. But at least the prisoners who stroll through the gardens that I designed enjoy more sunlight, air and water than do other prisoners. Gardens in prisons have always been a relatively sensitive subject. According to orthodox prison theory, plants can calm the human spirit, but they can also stir it up; thus gardens are both a symbol of order and a threat to it. Moreover, the particular characteristics of gardens broaden the possibilities of breaking out of the prison. When I design a prison, I attempt to persuade the administrators to use contemporary garden design principles. In this way, they can resolve practical problems while also incorporating gardens of greater area into the overall plan. We settled on a version of Japanese-style karesansui gardens in order to reduce the potential problems caused by water features and excessive flora while retaining suggestive landscape elements. When choosing plants, we focused on evergreens and herbs. The fragrances of herbs have therapeutic powers, and their invigorating odours encourage prisoners

Summer 2016

to breathe fresh air. Evergreen plants reduce the susceptibility of prisoners to the vicissitudes and temptations of seasonal fluctuations. For garden paths, the best arrangement is a one-way trail in a geometrical shape, which ensures that prisoners will adhere to an existing order rather than stroll about aimlessly. This layout helps to prevent irregular interactions. Under conditions of strict management and antiescape measures, prisoners can work as gardeners. Their connection to the trees and flowers relieves and opens their minds, and can even lead to vital enlightenment. The most unthinkable conditions of imprisonment in human history did not necessarily occur in prisons. In fact, they often happened in places in which people’s minds were encouraged to run wild: an art museum, for example. This is a story I heard from Mr Zhou Haoshan: a museum employee, responding to an artist’s appeal, imprisoned himself for 25 years (until the year of his retirement) in order to become part of a work of art. Mr Zhou is a member of the first generation of Chinese scholars of prison design. “For anyone in a prison,” he says, “the primary question is how to use one’s inner will to reconstruct severed perceptive pathways.” Here, the requisite theoretical foundation is an understanding of loneliness and the will to act. According to Mr Zhou, loneliness is a specific, sharable state of freedom. The initial objective is for prisoners to attain this specific state of loneliness, in which limited material conditions facilitate the epiphanic realisation of a common human nature. What prisoners realise is not an ideal, but rather a reality. Indeed, it is lamentable that some people go their whole lives without having this moment of realisation. Loneliness is the prerequisite of the will to act. Consequently, I feel that an inner world, complete with the sun, moon and stars, can be established in prison. Another all-nighter. I await the arrival of dawn through my office windows. The night sky is dark blue and especially clear, and a shooting star traces a path through the chilly air. I know that in this moment I cannot sustain a contemptible idea. For example, to betray a good friend. Without a doubt, the spatial design capabilities that I possess seem to have somehow given me the illusion that I have the power to keep people in this space. Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

The political theatre of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India, reminds me of Idi Amin’s Uganda and the grotesque, outlandish stories that emerged out of his dictatorship. In the runup to the provincial elections taking place on 16 May 2016, we have witnessed some truly weird histrionics from the three key combatant parties: the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the challenger, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), and the joker in the pack (quite literally) Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK). M Karunanidhi, ninety-one-year-old patriarch of DMK and five-time former chief minister, aspires to the high office again. My heart goes out to his son and political heir MK Stalin, who’s sixty-three, and still the bridesmaid. His father became chief minister at forty-five! I’m convinced the ancient social practice of kula dharma – or hereditary vocation, where the son of a cobbler remains a cobbler and progenies of a priest pursue the family trade – continues strongly in India, especially in politics and showbiz. Tamil Nadu votes in a yo-yo fashion. The incumbent party is always defeated. Indeed in 2011 AIADMK won 203 seats in an assembly of 234. As soon as Jayalalithaa, a former film actor and now the unchallengeable supremo of the AIADMK, assumed office, she straightened up the administration a bit, and fixed the parlous power-blackout situation. (We had power cuts for 18 hours a day during the DMK rule!) But not much else happened. Roads are still pothole-ridden and our lives are, by and large, stuck in the Middle Ages. A boom in avaricious reclamation of precious wetland for property development has played havoc

300 Charu Nivedita reports from Tamil Nadu where politics is theatre and life is cheap

top TASMAC bar bottom Line of beggars at the Sai Baba Temple, Mylapore, Madras

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with the fragile coastal ecology. It resulted in the biblical floods Tamil Nadu’s capital, Chennai, witnessed last year. The pointer to Tamil Nadu’s biggest shame is something called the Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (TASMAC) – the state-owned firm that has a monopoly on the liquor trade (from procurement to retail). Politicians across parties own distilleries and breweries, so they’ll prosper no matter which party wins. Liquor taxes keep the state’s finances afloat. There is a TASMAC outlet virtually in every street. Young men die of liver failure after quaffing the adulterated, poor-quality alcohol sold by the state. Despicably, the opposition parties now target women whose husbands died consuming TASMAC liquor to bring down the incumbent party. No proper roads, no decent education, no medical facilities for the poor, no good houses to live in; sickeningly, the state’s relief measures fell woefully short during the December 2015 floods. Apparently impervious to these problems, the rivals of the ruling party and the media have created a myth proclaiming that it is the TASMAC that is root cause of all the problems of our society and promise that if elected, their first measure would be to administer prohibition in the state, sadly failing to acknowledge the truth that the local government’s economy heavily relies on TASMAC! The experience of a TASMAC bar is nothing less than macabre. A mere 20 rupees will get you a coffee in an air-conditioned restaurant

with toilets and drinking-water facilities – you would be treated like a king. But the TASMAC bars remind me of the leper’s den of the olden days. When I asked them the way to the toilet, I was gestured to turn and see the amazing view of a man’s derrière as he triumphantly pissed on the wall behind me. Six people died attending present chief minister Jayalalithaa’s election meetings in the scorching summer heat. To save time, the chief minister flies from venue to venue. The local party leaders’ duty is to herd the crowd into the venue at 10am for a 3pm

meeting, luring them with 300 rupees cash (about $5). Three people were reported dead in two meetings after they were made to sit under the scorching sun for nearly six hours, devoid of toilets and drinking-water facilities. In addition to that, the police struggle to make sure that people stay put inside the fence bordering the venue. Despite media reporting the deaths, people continued to flock to

subsequent meetings (which again claimed three lives), cognisant of the dangers, but enticed by the cash prize. All this when the chief minister’s temporary election stage had eight air-conditioners and six air-coolers; and a new helipad was built near the venue. One day when I was on the highway with a friend, we had to stop at the tollbooth. A few men, women and children, all barefoot, came running towards us to sell cucumbers. I asked an old man how much he gets a day. “300 rupees,” he replied...

Tight rope walking: at Kancheepuram, near Madras all images Photo: Prabhu Kalidas

Summer 2016

This spring the UAE suffered unusually high rainfall: flights were delayed by thunderstorms and the highway from Dubai to Abu Dhabi was closed due to flooding. On the evening of 10 March – the opening night of the annual Sharjah March Meeting (a two-day gathering of artists, art professionals and institutions, organised by the Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF), this year focused on engagement with audiences and communities) – the rain even poured into the Mleiha desert area, located to the east of Sharjah on the east of the Arabian Peninsula. The next day, while I was still sweeping the wet sand off my bare feet, Japanese artist Taro Shinoda told me how frightened he had been when trying to install a stage equipped with sound and video devices and a 9 by 12 metre-screen during the heavy rain. Luckily the rain stopped and everything was erected by the evening of 11 March, when a four-wheeldrive car took me to the desert, or more precisely, latitude N25.1163467, longitude E55.826762, to see Shinoda and musician Uriel Barthélémi’s collaborative project Lunar Reflection Transmission Technique (LRTT) (2007–). Since the new century, new developments in outer-space exploration (among them the release of hi-res pictures of Neptune taken by NASA’s New Horizons space probe, and the discovery of Kepler452b, nicknamed ‘Earth 2’, an exoplanet that is 1,400 lightyears beyond the solar system), have aroused a renewed common interest in the cosmos. In popular culture, we’ve seen the release of films such as Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014) and The Martian (2015); while in contemporary art, outer space has become similarly popular. The sci-fi films and the visual styles associated with them during the past century have provided today’s artists plenty of material, some of it nostalgic, some political; while the alreadymentioned fruits of recent technological advances in space exploration have proved particularly inspirational to artists labelled ‘post-Internet’. However, to Shinoda, an artist who was trained in traditional Japanese landscape gardening, the universe offers

everything is connected At this year’s March Meeting in Sharjah, Aimee Lin finds that conferences are really performances and that it’s not only dogs who bark at the moon

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an alternative landscape. Hence his method of approaching the universe is to observe and capture the moon – a big rock (an essential element in the Japanese garden) that accompanies our planet – from various locations on earth: a more classical approach to mapping the cosmos in terms of both technique and perspective. The early iterations of the work, which began nine years ago, are comprised of film footage of the moon shot from locations in Istanbul, Boston and Tokyo. Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, the new edition not only added footage shot in Sharjah, but also turned into a performance when the screening was accompanied by Barthélémi’s live and improvised drum performance. Shinoda has said that he understands ‘the universe (including cosmic space) as a nature in process of evolution, in which nature coexists with human activities’. There was no doubt that as the opening event of this year’s March Meeting, Lunar Reflection Transmission Technique made a statement that was magnificent, spectacular, philosophically inspiring (after all, one of the most popular theories about the origins of philosophy concerns human beings sitting in the desert and looking up the starry sky) and entertaining. While Shinoda’s work set the tone for proceedings, the meeting proper opened with a keynote speech by William Wells, cofounder and executive director of the influential nonprofit artspace Townhouse, in Cairo. Founded in 1998, Townhouse has been the launchpad for many of the artists and spaces that have given shape to the Middle East’s artscene; despite all that it was briefly shutdown by the Egyptian authorities last December. In my eyes there are three major roles that the March Meeting plays: first it serves as an incubator for the Sharjah Biennial (also run under the auspices of the SAF); second as a vehicle through which the SAF might consider its institutional practice and role; and third as a showcase for local art. This year’s theme was Education, Engagement and Participation and in his speech, Wells pointed out, rather sharply, the substantial relationship between education

and power, which, following his logic, suggests that art and art institutions, when they carry out an educational role, are in fact adjusting or re-distributing power. Regrettably, the speakers with Wells at the following panel discussion (Anna Cutler, Tate’s director of learning and Hoor Al-Qasimi, director of the SAF) were given limited time to respond, and only managed to introduce the working practices of their own institutions. Wells’s points were never properly unfolded or discussed. This year’s meeting, as the previous editions, also paid special attention to alternative or independent institutional practice in the Middle East, North Africa and other regions and gathered many practitioners via invitation or open call. For speakers like Toleen Touq from Spring Session (Jordan), Stephan Benchoam from Numu (Guatemala), Yara Bamieh from Riwaq (Palestine) and Zoe Butt from Sán Art (Vietnam), who work in a context where the contemporary art ecosystem is still ‘developing’ and infrastructures are lacking, Wells’s 18 years of experience with Townhouse must be valuable – of particular note was his description of the way in which Townhouse truly engaged with its surroundings: by establishing a relationship via economic activities and bringing income to its neighbours. Although the meeting didn’t provide opportunities of conversations between the more and less experienced practitioners in its official programme, hopefully they had found chance to exchange ideas at the lunches/dinners, coffee breaks and performances during the two-day event. Within the context of this year’s theme, artistic practice was considered on the same level as institutional outreach and academic training. Nsenga Knight’s social project X Speaks (2015), Joe Namy’s series of performances, Oscar Murillo’s Frequencies Project (2015–) and Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses (1993–) were both impressive and inspiring examples. On 14 March, the SAF also organised the ‘Equator Conference 2022 – Yogyakarta – Held in Sharjah in March 2016’, which anticipates a conference due to be held in six years time in Indonesia

above and facing page Taro Shinoda and Uriel Barthélémi, Lunar Reflection Transmission Technique, 2016, performance, Mleiha desert, Sharjah. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation, with support from Institut Français

Summer 2016

under the auspices of the Yogyakarta Biennale Foundation. It seems that these days a conference, as a means to produce content, knowledge and discourse, is at the same time a form of performance. As a creative contribution to the contemporary artworld, the complex of lecture, panel discussion, live performance (music, dance, speech) and history or social research, has become a unique phenomenon in our culture. The ‘Equator Conference’ was part of the recent edition of The Time is Out of Joint [see reviews, p. 90], an ongoing curatorial project by Tarek Abou El Fetouh, who was inspired by the twelfth-century Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi’s idea that time is a fluid space and space a frozen moment in time, and took Baghdad in 1974 (where and when the First Biennial of Arab Arts took place), Beijing in 1989 (the China Avant-Garde exhibition) and Yogyakarta in 2022 as turning points in history and backdrops for present manifestations in today’s art scene. Hosted by Dar Al Nadwa, the Yogyakarta warm-up event revisited the historical moment of the 1955 AsianAfrican Conference in Bandung, to take a look at that alternative vision and practice of globalisation from today’s point of view. This focus, together with Malaysian theatre director Mark Teh’s part-theatre partperformance piece Baling (2015) (which revisits the 1956 Baling Talks – a three-way negotiation intended to resolve a state of emergency declared by the British colonial government that later led to the failure of the Malayan Communist Party, the independence of the Malayan Union, the establishment of Malaysia and its subsequent division) reminded me of the theme of state building, that lay hidden beneath the official theme of the 2014 Sharjah Biennial: The past, the present, the possible (curated by Eungie Joo). And perhaps all the events that have been happening in Sharjah over the past few years – the meetings, biennials, other special exhibitions – function like a set of continuous, hyperlinked texts. That sense of evolution and continuity is what makes Sharjah such a special place on the culture landscape of the region.

On any drive through Tehran, you will inevitably be confronted by an urban feature that is particular to this metropolis: numerous large-scale murals on the sides of buildings. Whether you travel on one of the many flyovers or take a smaller street, there they are. And given the city’s heavy-duty traffic jams, you’ll end up spending a significant amount of time looking at them; that is, when you are not distracted by the striking landscape or trying to catch a glimpse of the postcard-pretty snow-covered mountains to the north. More particularly, the murals are much more intriguing than any commercial billboard – of which there are plenty here too. The first murals I spot are enormous realistic portraits: either martyrs from the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s, surrounded by exploding tanks, helicopters or occasionally cute fluffy clouds, or religious leaders with solemn faces. The second type of mural is a bit more peculiar: trompel’oeil paintings of big holes cut into the facades to reveal scenes of life inside, of flying cars, children holding bundles of balloons and floating through the air, and people biking up the sides of buildings. Most common are imaginary idealised landscapes filled with sunshine and beautiful green vistas. Architectural fantasies are also prevalent, referencing historical buildings built in traditional Persian styles. During one of my studio visits in the Iranian capital I encounter a version of this kind of mural: the one that adds a building to already existing buildings. Nazgol Ansarinia’s series of small sculptures Fabrications (2013; in collaboration with Roozbeh EliasAza) explores the architectural-fantasy murals in space, turning them into monuments in miniature, with an architecturally accurate side and an imaginary side. Depending on how you approach the 3D-printed plaster-and-resin sculptures, you come into contact with one of the two types of buildings, one of which is a vision of what the buildings in the wall paintings would look like if they were indeed realised. If traditional monuments typically represent supposedly enduring values and phenomena, Ansarinia’s maquettes memorialise ordinary houses with temporary applied visual effects, embodying the schizophrenic situation of the current era for many people in the country. Whereas on the surface there is the illusion of openness, of airy vistas and clear skies, everyday life is one of restriction,

NAZGOL ANSARINIA Riffing off a vernacular mural tradition, one artist captures the contrasts and contradictions of life in contemporary Tehran, by

Maria Lind

Nazgol Ansarinia, Residential building / Shah‑neshin and veranda on Satarkhan highway, Fabrications, 2013, in collaboration with Roozbeh Elias-Azar, plaster, resin and paint, 14 × 21 × 16 cm. Courtesy Green Art Gallery, Dubai

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constraint, rapid commercial expansion and heavily polluted air – this last to the point of frequent respiratory problems among its citizens and some days when those snowcovered mountains are completely obscured from view. As the artist has noted, the shift to imaginary landscapes in the city’s murals began in the early 2000s, as urban redevelopment accelerated and intense construction began to significantly shrink public space. Even today the number of construction cranes is impressive (shopping malls appear to be especially popular among planners and builders). In other words, the illusion of access to open landscapes and clean air in Tehran emerged at a moment when the opportunities to experience precisely those things were decreasing rapidly. This was also the time when daily existence in general became harsher and more restricted due to the international sanctions imposed on Iran for its refusal to suspend a uranium-enrichment programme. Since 2004 more than 800 murals have been commissioned by Tehran’s Bureau of Beautification, a scale of production that can be compared with Russia’s immediately after the revolution. But Tehran’s wall paintings have been around much longer than that, with the iconography of different regimes colonising blank facades over the last 50 years, at the beginning the lower parts of houses, and subsequently, after the Islamic revolution, climbing upwards. This attempt to beautify a city whose metropolitan population numbers 16 million has been rather successful among the inhabitants – according to a recent survey, only 5 percent now approve of the still-prevalent propaganda murals, instead favouring the increasing amount of imaginary landscapes. Ansarinia might well comment that the beautiful imaginary landscapes and nostalgic buildings are as ideological, if not more so, than the blatant propaganda of military and religious figures. Michel Foucault reminded us that real power always disguises itself, making the seemingly neutral and ‘normal’ rule. Fabrications insist on actualising the encounter between the existing and the virtual, looking like eerie colourless toys, breaking the slick surface of normality and embodying the stark contrasts and abundant contradictions so palpable in Tehran today.

22-25 SEPTEMBER 2016 THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART CHICAGO | NAVY PIER

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Anyone who comprehends this is a dear friend of mine 39

Maryanto Landscape, artifice and the communicative act by Aimee Lin

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Summer 2016

Maryanto’s Brimming in Wonocolo (2015) was first shown at the Jakarta East Java. In 2012 and 2013, during a residency at the Rijksakademie in Biennale 2015. The installation comprises a panoramic wallpainting Amsterdam, Maryanto made Pandora’s Box (2013), depicting the landof a landscape populated by oil derricks and, placed in front of it, scape of a coalmining site drawn directly onto the walls of his studio a collection of oil drums rhythmically spouting crude oil and the in charcoal and carbon powder. In 2015, for Biennale Jogja XIII, after smell that comes with it. Located in East Java, Wonocolo is a region a research trip in Africa, he cocreated, with Victor Ehikhamenor, Sweet in which Dordtsche Petroleum Maatschappij, the Dutch-owned Crude, Black Gold (2015), a multistorey painting on wood in which he pioneer of Indonesia’s oil-mining industry, began drilling in 1893. captured an explosive moment that is often seen at oil-drilling sites After Indonesia won independence in 1949, local and foreign inves- in Nigeria. In his drawings and paintings, he persistently uses black tors started to manage, disputedly, approximately 500 old oil-wells, pigment and a special scratch technique to create highly contrasted and since then, immeasurable environmental damage and related white or light hues. These result in an impressive painterly style that instances of political corruption have occurred. The landscape of the also employs techniques derived from his experience of printmaking region has been dramatically altered. The text that accompanies the and illustration. His sensitivity to the materiality of pigments – from entry on Brimming in Wonocolo in the the density of the monochrome colour His sensitivity to the materiality of biennial catalogue provides a polit(normally black) to their texture to their ical interpretation of the work: ‘These pigments and their economic value has scents (of oil in Brimming in Wonocolo, objects illustrate how Indonesia’s and of coal and charcoal in Pandora’s Box) produced a unique visual language mineral resources have been greatly – and comprehension of their economic exploited by foreign parties, and how it has a direct impact on people’s value has produced a visual language that exploits these aspects as economic and social situation.’ That is one reading. From my perspec- much as it does any aesthetic qualities. tive, Brimming…, and many other of the artist’s works, also offer a The results of all this – first drawn landscape imagery, more recently a complex setting of painting, drawing, installation, sculppowerful image of the world and how we live in it. Within the compartmentalised sorting system of contemporary ture and performance – might best be termed ‘artificial landscapes’, art, it is easy to categorise Maryanto’s art as ‘environmentalist’ and inasmuch as they are the product of the joint action of nature and ‘ecological’, and to say that it is evidence of a ‘research-based meth- humans, both in and of themselves, and in terms of what they repreodology’. And indeed these tags are all very useful for describing and sent. Today’s mainstream narrative takes nature as the provider of understanding his practice. But such definitive categorisations fail to economic resources and humanity’s collection, appropriation – or, recognise Maryanto’s more fundamental pursuit of powerful images, from a ‘rights of nature’ perspective, plundering – of them as altering particularly those that capture double-sided realities – the overlap- nature in a negative way. But from a modernist, anthropocentric ping realities of the international contemporary world, and postcolo- perspective, the changing of nature – often described as its destrucnial, recently neoliberal Indonesia, as well as its localised figurative- tion or pollution – is just the price to pay for economic development art and craftsmanship-dominated art scene – by using his fine-art and progress: a side effect, if you like. Nature (or the world) as an training, personal reflections and resources. As such, Mayanto’s art objective entity is just what it is, but when translated into a landscape needs to be examined in the multiple contexts of his skills and – into a visual representation – it is sorted and constructed from a instincts as a painter, his experience as a social worker and his contem- human perspective according to social, economic and cultural values, porary Indonesian background. or a package of knowledge and ideology that could be called landBorn in Jakarta, Maryanto went to Yogyakarta to study print- scape theory. In short, the notion of landscape is a human construcmaking at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts and has lived and tion – there is no landscape that is not artificial. And inasmuch worked in the Javanese city ever since. After finishing his studies, as it is a human construction, a landscape can be used as a critical and following a short-term residency in Spain, he spent a few years weapon, in Maryanto’s case, as interpreted by the biennale’s curators, doing social work: first organising charity donations and offering addressing this nature/human binary. But perhaps more importantly to Maryanto, to paint a landscape is also his house as a volunteer camp in the The notion of landscape is a human to recognise a form of the world around wake of the 2006 Yogyakarta earthhim, regardless of the division between quake, then working with Anak construction – there is no landscape Wayang Indonesia, a NGO devoted nature and human, and then to visuthat is not artificial to the protection and education of alise it through his artistic language. children. These experiences embedded a deep understanding of the Another example of this practice could be seen in Space of Exception, society around him and of what social engagement might mean to an his 2015 solo exhibition at Yeo Workshop, Singapore. Its centrepiece artistic practice. Perhaps even – although he has never described this was a set of almost monochrome works on paper (using ink, graphite, in public – he formed a critical opinion about the systems and struc- watercolour, acrylic and charcoal) that recorded the aftermath, in tures surrounding social work. Whatever the case, when he returned terms of its effect on nature, of the 2006 and 2010 earthquakes in to a more purely artistic practice, there was a recognisable, if never- Yogyakarta. Through his quiet, meditative observation, Maryanto theless subtle, adjustment in his art: instead of a foregrounding of discovered and created his own postearthquake landscapes: they social-engagement elements, it is imagery with a strong visual char- consist of trees that are sleeping or dead, minerals with economic value (Resources, 2014); artificial objects such as loudspeakers and acter that stands at its core. In light of this, one might simply say that Maryanto created his electrical transformer equipment left in the forest (Adaptive, 2014); a bold installation for the Jakarta Biennale to depict a landscape that was wooden structure that creates an architectural space in the now uninonce rainforest, then destroyed and polluted by disputed oil mining in habited forest (We Were There Beb, 2014); and small details such as new

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above Brimming in Wonocolo, 2015 (installation view, Jakarta Biennale 2015), mixed media preceding pages Pandora’s Box, 2013 (installation view, Rijksakademie, Amsterdam), charcoal, carbon powder on the wall, woodstick

Summer 2016

Sweet Crude, Black Gold, 2015 (installation view, Jogja Biennale XIII Equator 3), acrylic on board

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buds and thick branches from the trees indicating the ecosystem’s revival (Observation Series, 2014). In addition to the paintings, Maryanto created a healing space in the gallery by setting up a symbolic blue tent, of the type commonly used as a temporary space for food distribution and dwelling in postearthquake Yogyakarta. With these landscapes, and a space for people to rest, read and meditate, Maryanto created a theatrical space of exception (a term that riffs on the theories of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben concerning the actions of power in times of crisis, where normal laws no longer apply) that dissolves the nature/human binary. This type of theatrical approach to landscape painting could also be seen in his 2011 show Once Upon a Time in Rawalelatu, at Galeri Semarang in Jakarta, where he created the fictional village of Rawalelatu through a stage set. The same-titled work featured a series of paintings telling the story of Rawalelatu and the changes in the village and its inhabitants’ lives as a result of the process of urbanisation. The series seems to be an assertion of what Homi K. Bhabha calls ‘the right to narrate’. In Bhabha’s view, narrative in art practice is a communicative act in which ‘you renew your very senses of personhood and perspective, and understand something profound about yourself, about your historical moment, about what gives value to a life lived in a particular town, at a particular time, in particular social and political conditions’. It fits Once Upon a Time in Rawalelatu perfectly.

Maryanto’s most recent project, Mineral Desire (2016), was shown at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong. It continued along the path of exploring narrative strategies – woven through two-dimensional canvases and an installation. The canvas presents a classical landscape with mining equipment in the foreground (one might describe it as Romantic-Apocalyptic). The installation presents cabinets of mineral curiosities. By juxtaposing the forms and various life stages of minerals (from nature to cultural and economic fetish object), Maryanto realises a sort of material landscape in which the minerals (and the nature they originally represent) are seen as transforming and being transformed by human society. Maryanto recounts how, when he decided to research coalmining during his residency at the Rijksakademie, he was warned by a senior artist that this idea was ‘out of fashion’. However, for an artist from Indonesia – a nation that was forced to enter the modern age and global market as a consequence of its valuable natural resources (if we agree to take colonialism as an early stage of globalisation) – isn’t it natural to confront the social, economic, political and personal realities that shape your existence? Even in Europe and North America, that (alongside the consequences of our exploitation of natural resources) is surely not an outdated topic. ara Work by Maryanto will be on show at Yeo Workshop at Bazaar Art Jakarta, 25–28 August

Mineral Desire (detail), 2016, mixed media all images Courtesy the artist and Yeo Workshop, Singapore

Summer 2016

Nothing Is the Same, Yet Nothing Has Changed The late president Sukarno’s vision of Indonesia continues to dominate representations of the country to such an extent that even art that critiques that vision is drawn into it by Grace Samboh

Monas (National Monument), Jakarta. Licensed under Creative Commons: Sakurai Midori

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to ride 15mph around the central junctions of the city, among them Nothing is the same, yet nothing has changed. What kind of image pops into your mind when someone the Semanggi Flyover, Hotel Indonesia Roundabout and Pancoran mentions Jakarta or Indonesia? Let me guess: something related to Junction. This is what commuting, on a daily basis, is for Jakarta’s the recent bombing in the Sarinah Mall area? (BTW, did you know middle class; it’s also why they might find a way to do yoga, memorise that Sarinah was the country’s very first shopping mall?) This was the Quran, watch films, sleep or whatever makes sense to them to kill how the BBC reported the social media response to that event on the time spent at a standstill on the streets. Alternatively they might 14 January 2016: ‘A photograph that appeared to show a satay seller become addicted to antidepressants. continuing to work at his stall after blasts were heard was circulated One last guess: Bali! The beaches, the landscapes, the rice fields, widely online. Some Twitter users wrote alongside it: “Fear is not in topless women with traditional textiles wrapped around their hips our dictionary”.’ As with the aftermath of the Paris bombings, where and heads, the dance and, yes, all the things you’d expect of that kind now-iconic images shared in the days of paradise. Of course, there was a When I say the ‘extent’ to which the following the attack often featured bombing there too, way back when, the Eiffel Tower, many of the images but still… That paradisiacal image of uniform imaginary of Indonesia relates Bali endures. shared in the days following the to Sukarno, I mean to say ‘everything’ Jakarta bombing featured one of So where does that leave us? the Indonesian capital’s landmark buildings – Monas (National With the bravery of the Indonesian people that responded to the Monument). While the Eiffel Tower was built to welcome visitors bomb attack, traffic jams in central Jakarta and the beauty of Bali? from around the world to the 1889 World’s Fair, Monas was built in Dare I say it – putting politics aside – for many of those Indonesians 1961 by modern Indonesia’s founder and first president, Sukarno, for who live neither in Jakarta nor in Bali, similar images of the country its native people. It was intended to mark their greatness, bravery and come to mind. One interesting aspect of this ‘uniform’ imaginary long-standing courage, and their role in building up an independent of Indonesia is the extent to which it relates to Sukarno (who was and newly united Indonesia. Yet none of that symbolism means that president from 1945 to 1967). And when I say ‘extent’, I mean to Indonesians are not afraid. Particularly of suicide bombings. say everything. For those of you who are not such keen followers of the media For example, Sarinah Mall, dubbed ‘The Indonesian Emporium’, and politics, perhaps a mention of Jakarta would also prompt you opened in 1966 and was conceived by Sukarno to show off a selecto picture the city’s ‘world class’ traffic jams. After all, for quite some tion of craft goods from all parts of the country. The president even years now Jakarta has been credited with the named it after his childhood nanny. Last year, the Basuki Abdullah, Dr. Ir. Soekarno, worst traffic in the whole wide world, according Jakarta Biennale, a feature of the city’s cultural undated, oil on canvas, 111 × 75 cm. to many surveys. At rush hours, it is impossible landscape for more than four decades, opened in Courtesy Bung Karno Collection

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Basuki Abdullah, Jaka Tarub, undated, oil on canvas, 170 × 255 cm. Photo: Asrini Bambang Widjanarko. Courtesy Indonesian Visual Arts Archive

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the mall’s warehouse, located in a separate area of the city. The Jakarta gantic statue, and it is said that on the way to Halim Perdanakusuma Biennale 2015 was curated by Charles Esche and involved artists from Airport, the entourage taking Sukarno’s body stopped at the site of all over the world (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Japan, the monument, where Sunarso joined the procession. They then flew Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Myanmar, New Zealand, The Philippines, to Blitar, East Java, where the father of modern Indonesia was buried. Romania, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, The Netherlands, Turkey, There’s no doubt that Sukarno was an art enthusiast and played UK, Vietnam). a key role in the construction of modern Indonesian visual taste. Not To direct people to this site, the biennale used an image of the only to the extent that he collected paintings and sculpture, and was Aerospace Monument, one of the city’s most iconic public sculptures the biggest patron of artists of his day, but also in that he constructed and a key meeting point. The Aerospace Monument, completed in the concept and look of modern Indonesia as an expression of his 1966, and also known as Patung Pancoran or Patung Dirgantara in own taste. Of course, one can argue against the merits of that taste, but I guess – for better or for worse Bahasa Indonesia, is an 11m-high, One can argue against the merits – it’s rather too late. Anyone who 11-ton statue of a man, with one arm was born and grew up in Indonesia outstretched towards the sky, standof Sukarno’s taste, but I guess – for better from the 1970s onwards has to take ing on a surging 27m-high base: or for worse – it’s rather too late a symbol of the future. This monuthe facade of Jakarta for granted, not ment, together with the nearby Welcome Monument, was created least because none of them experienced the struggles – social, politby master sculptor Edhi Sunarso (1932–2016), on the direct orders ical or financial – that went with the making of this modern city. The of Sukarno – modernist-art enthusiast and superstylish guy. ‘I am closest one can get to that history is often through conversations with only visualising Sukarno’s ideas!’ Sunarso once said. He explained the parents of the 1970s generation, who were sometimes evicted or that Sukarno wanted to build the monument to commemorate the relocated to different parts of the city when the modernisation of courage of Indonesian pilots during the fight for Indonesia’s inde- Jakarta’s urban planning (and of the country in general) took place. So pendence (1945–9, in which, by the way, Sunarso took part). Bravery, while a younger generation’s contribution of graffiti, murals, street greatness and courage – all values bestowed on the Indonesian people art and street stalls might change the colour of things, Jakarta’s structures remain the same. by their founding president. Not only did Sukarno give his personal order and direction to the Indeed, it is safe to say that, after Sukarno’s death, his ideals of sculptor, but he was also prepared to sell his own car to support the modern Indonesia – as made manifest in thought and visual appearconstruction when it ran short of funds. On 21 ance – have only been amplified. More malls Aerospace Monument (Patung Dirgantara), June 1970, when Sukarno passed away, Sunarso are being built to show off craft from around Indonesia. Licensed under Creative Commons: Jerry Toisa. the country, streets are wider, more and more was still finalising the installation of this gi-

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people come to the city where all their dreams can come true: Jakarta. a few months after the closure of Jakarta Biennale 2015, Sarinah At the same time, in other developing cities of Indonesia, monu- Warehouse has been taken over by local artist collective ruangrupa ments are built with the same ideals that Sarinah memorialised in (of which I used to be a member), along with institutions and platJakarta: each one attempting to become ‘that’ modern city landmark forms such as Forum Lenteng, Serrum, Jakarta 32°C, OK Video and depicting the (local) people’s courage. And many of these monu- Grafis Huru-Hara, who have turned the abandoned space into ments were also made by Sunarso, either on the orders of provin- what is now called Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem (Sarinah Warehouse cial or local governments, or through a recommendation from the Ecosystem), a shared studio complex. In addition to that, a skate park, national government. If you visit Griya Seni Hj. Kustiyah & Edhi a radio station (RURUradio) and an exhibition space are also in the Sunarso in Yogyakarta, a museum planning stages – all of it constituting I am not seriously saying that that shows Sunarso and his wife’s lifea government-sponsored enterprise time works, you will see the miniaoccupying a space of 6,000sqm. Bali looks like this now, but we’re tures and maquettes for monuments When I say that everything is still talking about the image of dotted all over the map of Indonesia. related, I actually mean it. My last the island that was officially described The captions of the monuments speculative offering would be some in Jakarta read: ‘Idea: Ir. Sukarno. images of the imagined paradise, as ‘paradise’ under Sukarno Visualizer: Edhi Sunarso’. And while Bali, created by some established Sukarno’s qualification – ‘lr.’ is now equivalent to a diploma for engi- Indonesian artists. I am not – seriously – saying that Bali looks like neers – is written in the Indonesian style, the rest of the caption is this now, but generally, we’re still talking about the image of the island that was officially described as ‘paradise’ under Sukarno. written in English. Some 30,000 visitors (more than 3.5 percent of the city’s current Indeed, in Sukarno’s personal collection, the paradisiacal Bali is one population) came to see the Jakarta Biennale 2015. I am not saying of the most popular themes, featuring works by painters such as that the visitors were all Jakartans, but numbers can speak their Abdoellah Soeriosoebroto, his son Basuki Abdullah, and Agus Djaya, own language. Compare this to the 1970s, when there were only 30 who are famous for depicting the beautiful landscape that symbolises people coming to art exhibitions, the biennale attendance shows a Bali life. Of course, while these styles or ways of depicting Indonesian 1,000 percent growth in interest towards art. We are getting closer beauty continue to be present, they are nevertheless questioned in to reaching Sukarno’s ideal of the modern Indonesian contemporary art practice. But even Basuki Abdullah, Pemandangan Danau, Indonesian: young-spirited, smart, clear, courawhen they are, we Indonesians are still a living undated, oil on canvas, 99 × 249 cm. geous, brave – and enthusiastic about art. Now, legacy of Sukarno’s ideas and (visual) taste. ara Courtesy Indonesian Visual Arts Archive

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Jumaldi Alfi, Melting Memories – Postcard from Past, 2013, acrylic on linen, 225 × 225 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gajah Gallery, Singapore

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Ken Liu on Paper Interview by Heman Chong

Earlier this year, American sci-fi and fantasy writer Ken Liu conceptualised the Chinese legal tradition as a library of loosely associated books for an exhibition by the artist Heman Chong in Shanghai. Here Liu tells Chong about some of his other interests and activities: poet, translator, lawyer, computer programmer 52

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Heman Chong I’d like to start by talking about a material that you often use in your narratives. This material is paper. Historically, paper has played an important role in the development of certain technologies in China, but in recent years it has been important in numerous developing countries as well. For example, when you talk about paper, I immediately think of the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who has cleverly reused paper tubes as the base material for temporary structures that are built at disaster sites. You talk about your narratives being located between fantasy and a feat of engineering. How has paper, as a material, been used in your stories? Ken Liu Paper is a pretty amazing material. For most of us, it is the closest thing to a two-dimensional surface in real life, and it is intimately tied to our memories of schooling. It’s the surface on which we learned to read, to write, to compute sums, to draw figures and to accept the judgement of others, in the form of grades and scores. Yet the flat sheet can also be given surprising strength and form intricate three-dimensional structures. Indeed, origami is a fascinating branch of contemporary mathematics that has found multiple applications in our high-tech world. For example, astrophysicist Koryo Miura devised the ‘Miura fold’, which is the basis for the design of solar panels for Japanese spacecraft and allows a large flat surface to be folded into a compact form for launch and then to be deployed in space with little assembly or human intervention. The Miura fold also plays a role in the design of modern metamaterials with microscale structures. Because paper is so bound up with notions of literacy, numeracy and construction, it’s a natural metaphor for many of the concepts I like to explore in my fiction. For example, in ‘The Paper Menagerie’, paper is the medium for a mother to speak to her child, both through paper animals that come to life and through words of love written in a language that he cannot read. In ‘The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species’, paper’s presence is felt by its absence from the imaginary books of diverse species. In many of my stories, paper shows up at a critical juncture as the metaphorical portal between dimensions, generations, cultures, ways of thinking and knowing. HC A stack of papers when bound together becomes a book, which is a vessel for information and knowledge, which is later transmitted when read. Have you always been drawn to writing? When did writing enter your life? Your biography puts you down as a science fiction and fantasy writer, but also as a poet, a lawyer and computer programmer. KL Ha. I generally don’t pay much attention to stories about how writers become writers – origin stories tend to have a retrospective

neatness that doesn’t really tell me much. So let me answer this question this way: I think I’ve always written and I also think I’ve never written – both are true. I’ve been telling stories as long as I can remember; yet I’m still striving towards the realisation of the ideal story seen only dimly in my mind. I call myself a speculative fiction writer but I don’t much care about genres – they may be helpful for booksellers, but I don’t think in genres. In some ways, even the name ‘speculative fiction’ is inaccurate, since all fiction is speculative – so called ‘realist’ fiction also privileges the logic of metaphors over the logic of persuasion. I just think that speculative fiction writers tend to be more willing to literalise their metaphors. Just as it is more visceral to work out a mathematical proof in geometry by manipulating compass and straight-edge over a piece of paper, there’s something compelling about

‘I generally don’t pay much attention to stories about how writers become writers – origin stories tend to have a retrospective neatness that doesn’t really tell me much. So let me answer this question this way: I think I’ve always written and I also think I’ve never written – both are true’ working out the implications of a metaphor by literalising it. I think that is a large part of why we’re drawn to fiction marketed as magical realism, science fiction, fantasy, wuxia or other speculative categories. As for my other professions, I think they’re all related. All involve constructing artefacts in symbol systems that adhere to evolving rules. The programmer, the poet and the lawyer are all trying to build objects out of symbols (a programme, a poem, a contract or a brief) that achieve a certain goal (trade stocks, give the reader an emotional experience, facilitate the terms of a collaboration or persuade a judge) within a rule system (the syntax of the programming language, the stock of linguistic tropes and images, the rules of the legal system). They share certain mental patterns and value similar aesthetic qualities: elegance, concision, precision, novelty. And fiction writing, of course, is also a form of symbolic engineering. facing page Ken Liu. Photo: Lisa Tang Liu

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HC I think I missed out a role in that previous question, which is of course that of translator. Translation can also be read as a kind of engineering, a transposition between forms. How did the idea of a translation of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem come about? Did you pitch the idea for the translation or were you asked by the publisher? It’s really a great translation, by the way. I can’t read Chinese very well, but I manage, and it’s fascinating to see how you’ve coped with translating terms and conditions that I can imagine might be extremely tricky between the two languages. Words like ‘Trisolarans’, for example. KL Indeed! Translation is an engineering project that involves taking apart a work in its source linguistic community, ferrying it across a cultural divide and reconstructing it in a new target linguistic community. When done well, the work can take on a new life in translation. Much is lost in the process, but even more is gained. William Weaver [who translated modern Italian literature into English] once described translation as a performance art. I think that description is very apt. The kind of creativity demanded of a performer is quite different from the kind of creativity demanded from a composer, and I’ve definitely enjoyed solving the sort of linguistic and cultural negotiation puzzles that are the stock in trade of every translator. I’m glad you enjoyed the translation of The Three-Body Problem! I can’t take credit for ‘Trisolarans’ myself, however, as that was a collaborative effort between me, Joel Martinsen (translator for book two in the Three-Body trilogy) and Eric Abrahamsen (originally the translator for book three, but he had to drop out due to other commitments). The three of us got together and worked out the translations for some terms common between the three books before we started. I got into translation by accident. My friend Chen Qiufan asked me to review an English translation of one of his stories, and after making copious notes, I decided that it was just easier for me to start from scratch. In literary translation, what is said is just as important as how it’s said, and not all translators who are skilled at the translation of technical and business documents have the skills or temperament necessary for fiction. As a writer who is often published in SFF magazines, I have a better sense than most of which techniques work in fiction and which don’t. The Chen Qiufan story, ‘The Fish of Lijiang’, was my first translation, and it received excellent reviews and won the World Science Fiction & Fantasy Award. After that I thought I would try to do more translations, since there is a great deal of interesting SF being written in China, but little of it is

known in the West, mainly due to the lack of quality translations. Sharing works we enjoy with other readers is a great motivator. By the time the owner of the foreign rights in the Three-Body trilogy, China Educational Publications Import & Export Corporation Ltd (CEPIEC), approached me, I had already published more than a dozen translations in some of the top markets in the US and the UK. CEPIEC asked if I would be interested in taking up the translation of book one of the Three-Body trilogy, and I was delighted to do so. I’m a fan of Liu Cixin’s wonderful hard SF, and The Three-Body Problem presented interesting challenges of translation. It’s a book that seamlessly melds Chinese history and Western metaphysics, conundrums in mathematics and tropes from crime thrillers, observations in astrophysics and meditations on political futures – to do the book justice required me to research many subjects and consult experts in various fields, and to communicate with Liu Cixin himself to devise the best way to render the book’s concepts and exciting scenes for an anglophone audience. I very much enjoyed the process of translating the first and third books in Liu Cixin’s masterpiece, and since then I’ve done even more translations of shorter works. I have a collection of translations coming out later this year from Tor Books in the US and Head of Zeus in the UK, which I believe will be the first major commercial English anthology of contemporary Chinese SF. I’m looking forward to introducing more readers in the West to the work of China’s most exciting SF writers. HC Speaking of performance art, or art in general, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the collaboration we made recently for my solo show Ifs, Ands, or Buts at the Rockbund Art Museum [in Shanghai]. So much of contemporary art today deals with ways of altering and translating one object into another. A lot of it is done via specific instructions transmitted between artist and manufacturer, or artist and museum. The work Legal Bookshop (Shanghai) required you to react to an email that I wrote to you about the prospect of hiring you as a lawyer to select books for a functioning bookshop that would allow a visitor to navigate the legal system in China. I wanted to ask about your process regarding the selection of the books for the bookshop. Was there a masterplan in

your head with the selection? If so, what structure did this plan take on? KL Oh, that was such a fun process. Once I got your email, which encouraged me to think about ‘law’ and ‘system’ in nonliteral ways, I knew right away what I wanted to do. I was going to follow the associative tendency of the human mind and approach this project as though I’m constructing a memex. A memex is an imaginary device invented by Vannevar Bush, who imagined it as a device that would help us think by amplifying the

in which the trails are semantically rich and all users are curators and creators rather than mere passive consumers. I wanted to curate the bookshop for your show using the principle of memex associativity. To begin with, I thought about laws (both manmade and natural), code (moral, ethical and even machine-oriented), rules (including the trivial, such as games, and the nontrivial, such as government regulations), customs, principles and so on. I made liberal use of puns and free association, taking into account the rich Chinese tradition of stratagems and cunning in crafting solutions for problems within systems of rules. The resulting selection is only tangentially related to ‘the legal system’ of China, as that term is commonly understood, and yet, I think, may provide more helpful guidance than books literally about laws in China. HC Have you ever attempted to produce a narrative using a memex? What would it look like? Would it even work?

associative potentials of the human mind. The machine would allow the user to build links between disparate texts and to follow associate trails laid down by others. It would weave all human knowledge into a giant web in which the associations are as important as the anchors. Sounds a bit like the web we have, doesn’t it? But our hyperlinked World Wide Web is but a pale imitation of the ideal of the memex, Legal Bookshop (Shanghai), 2016, framed documents, books, display tables, neon light, dimensions variable. Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

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KL I haven’t, and I have not seen attempts at hypertext fiction that really work. Some poetry does work this way, and works well. I sometimes wonder if the best medium for associative narratives isn’t the written word at all, but something more visual or even virtual reality-based. I’m very excited about the potential for virtual reality to transform the way we experience stories. Just as film taught us an entirely new vocabulary for telling and understanding stories, I think virtual reality is poised to do the same. Another possibility is the rise of intelligent machines that either assist human authors or strike out on their own. Machines make associations that would never occur to humans, and I can envision a collaboration between a machine and a human that would lead to truly interesting narratives. For example, what if a machine generated sentences that it found to be semantically or syntactically ‘related’ in some way to a piece of text written by the human author, and the human author was then able to prune and guide this process of machine generation? A great deal of digital art is done in this experimental manner, in which the human artist guides and prunes the effects generated by machines. I’d like to see something similar happen with text.

HC It sounds like a project that I’m totally infatuated with! In 2012, the late Aaron Swartz and the artist Taryn Simon collaboratively produced a work for the New Museum in New York called Image Atlas. The core, the engine of the project, is deceptively simple: to visualise a comparative table of how Google churns out different images in each country for the same term. Let’s play a little game here. Have a look at it, and write me what you think about this work in 300 words or less. KL Fascinating! I love this. To play with the system a bit, I went meta and put in the English term ‘search’ and observed, first, how much the Internet has unified our semantic mapping of this concept. Pretty much everyone has converged on ‘search’ in the search-engine sense, with even the same Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass iconography.

But then you see the rows for India and Korea.

Here is an interesting metaphor shear. In Korea’s case, it seems that the English term ‘search’ has been mapped to something that more narrowly refers to searches conducted by the military (reconnaissance? search-andrescue?), and I don’t understand what happened in India’s case at all. I can imagine myself sitting in front of this for hours, typing in different terms and trying to figure out what these images can tell us about our globalised culture, about persistent localism, about transcultural metaphor shears, about the quirks of machine translation and parsing, and all sorts of other interesting topics. This is very much an art

project for our machine-mediated existence in the village known as earth. HC You’ve recently published your debut novel and a collection of short stories. Perhaps you’d like to talk about the two books, in relation to something that you’ve coined, which is the term ‘silkpunk’? KL Writers love to talk about their books! :) ‘Silkpunk’ is a shorthand to describe the technology aesthetic I wanted for the Dandelion Dynasty series (which starts with The Grace of Kings) as well as the literary approach I used in composing the books. Here’s the tweet-size soundbite: “War and Peace with silk-and-bamboo airships; the Iliad with living books and sentient narwhals; Romance of the Three Kingdoms with U-boats.” If you want to hear more, let me start with what The Grace of Kings is about: it’s the story of two unlikely friends, a bandit and a duke, who grow to be as close as brothers during the fight to overthrow an evil empire, only to find themselves on opposing sides of a struggle for the definition of a just society once the rebellion succeeds. When I describe the novel as a ‘silkpunk epic fantasy’, I mean that I’m writing with and against the tradition of epic fantasy – as begun by Tolkien – by infusing it with an East Asia-inspired aesthetic that embraces, extends and challenges fantasy/historical tropes that are assumed to have medieval European or classical East Asian origins. Epics are foundational narratives for cultures, and I wanted to write a modern foundational narrative that draws as much on Chinese epic traditions like Romance of the Three Kingdoms as on Western traditions like Beowulf and the Aeneid. The tale I tell is a loose reimagining of the historical legends surrounding the rise of the Han Dynasty in a secondary world archipelago setting. This is a world of politics and intrigue, of love purified and corrupted, of rebelling against tyranny and seeing one’s ideals compromised, of friendships forged and sundered by the demands of war and statecraft. There are vain and jealous gods, bamboo airships and biomechanics-inspired submarines, battle kites that evoke the honour and glory of another age, fantastical creatures of the deep and magical tomes that tell the future written in our hearts. In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I’m also influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as a language. The task of the engineer is much like that of a poet, in that the engineer must creatively combine existing elements of Screengrabs from Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz’s 2012 Image Atlas project for the New Museum, New York

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technology to solve novel problems, thereby devising artefacts that are new expressions in the technical language. In the silkpunk world of my novels, this view of technology is dominant. The vocabulary of the technology language relies on materials of historical importance to the people of East Asia and the Pacific Islands: bamboo, shells, coral, paper, silk, feathers, sinew, etc. And the grammar of the language puts more emphasis on biomimetics – the airships regulate their lift by analogy with the swim bladders of fish, and the submarines move like whales through the water. The engineers are celebrated as great artists who transform the existing language and evolve it towards ever more beautiful forms. Indeed, even the fictional system of writing used in the novels embodies this view, for writing is one of our most treasured and important technologies. In writing The Dandelion Dynasty, I devoted as much care to technology as to magic, as much attention to art and writing as to war. The text is consumed with the exercise of power while also imbued with the hope that society is capable of progress. I had such a blast writing it, and I think at least that authorial joy comes through. In March, my debut collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, was published worldwide in English. Though I’ve published 120+ stories, this volume collects only 15. It was not easy to pick those 15, and I ended up choosing stories that I thought showed my range as well as were most ‘Ken Liu’. So the stories encompass a wide variety of marketing genres: hard SF, magical realism, historical fantasy, tech thriller, far-futurism, military, literary, etc. Yet all the stories are unified by my general approach to fiction, which is to make an argument without arguing, to treasure and privilege the human experience while also subjecting it to harsh interrogation. Later this year, in September, my translation of the third volume in the Three-Body series, Death’s End, will be released. I can’t wait to talk about it with Liu Cixin’s anglophone fans. And then October will see the publication of the second novel in the Dandelion Dynasty series, The Wall of Storms. This is a bigger, deeper and better book than the first book in every way, and it builds on the world established in The Grace of Kings as well as interrogates its assumptions. There will be a lot more war, romance and political intrigue, as well as exciting new silkpunk technologies. Finally, I already mentioned Invisible Cities, the collection of contemporary Chinese SF that I edited and translated, which will come out in November. I feel very privileged to work on so many great and fun projects. ara

Prodigal Sunshine Holding up a mirror to daily life in the nation-state in the hopes of showing Singaporeans all that he had learned while away, the cult comic-book author Troy Chin found himself first reviled, then celebrated, then just as bitter and twisted as his fellow citizens had always been. There must be a lesson in here… by Joel Tan

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Summer 2016

Comics set in Singapore are rare. The granddaddy of them all is the long-running The Resident Tourist (2008–) by Troy Chin – wry volumes that manage to be both personal autobiography and a wider critique of life in the city-state. They endlessly pose the question that plagues many of its apathetic citizens: to stay or leave? The series tracks Chin’s life after he left his position as a financial manager with Sony BMG in New York City to return to Singapore. Once back, and mostly as a psychotherapeutic aid, he began detailing his life in drawings that eventually became a web-comic, then a cult book series. It’s part Künstlerroman, part indictment of Singapore society and often both hand in hand. The decision to give up a cushy corporate life for comic-book poverty is bizarre by most standards, but in straitlaced Singapore, especially during the 2000s, when the idea of a Singapore comic-book was a joke category, Chin’s is an almost mythic story of rebellion. Unsurprisingly, the Troy of the comics is constantly faced with irate Singaporeans who lambaste his choices, mock him, decry the creative life. The best part is that with each volume, Troy makes it out alive; in fact he slowly finds success as an artist. Both his comic book and the artist’s real life form a testament to the possibilities outside Singapore’s dogmatic straight-and-narrow, and for the cluedin Singaporean, the wisecracking Troy of the books is an edgy antiestablishment hero for the times, one in a baggy tee and flip-flops. As visual text, what’s interesting about Tourist is the painstaking detail with which Chin, in spare, largely unadorned pen drawings, recreates the cityscape. The artist lets the eye linger over a detailed tableau of a crowded mall, a quiet park or a humdrum HDB apartment, the government-issue public housing that spreads out blandly across the island. It’s the kind of landscape that only the returning émigré notices and tends to like a gardener, lifting and presenting it with obsessive affection. The familiar is brought sharply into relief, and you realise how the flat, uniform texture of this city can sometimes be oddly arresting. Lifting the banal into something worth gazing at is one of Chin’s great gifts. As storyteller, Chin’s most richly melancholy and bittersweet work is in the earlier books. The narrative is episodic, almost formless. It meanders quietly, like the dazed wandering of someone who

only half-recognises his homeland. What haunts these early volumes is a twin nostalgia for both the Singapore of Chin’s growing-up and for the life he found in New York. Unsurprisingly, these early books capture precisely the ambivalence of living in this city, that feeling of wanting to stay and quit at the same time. This is perfectly rendered in a scene from the fifth volume (2011), an exchange between Troy and his girlfriend, Mint (also a Singaporean back from flying the coop). It happens on the Singapore Flyer, Singapore’s reliably gimmicky answer to the London Eye. They are fed up with the country and its tedious, boxed-in way of life; they are debating whether to stay or to leave. The setting is ironic: the émigré lovers have become tourists in their own country. But the conversation is about resident troubles: having children, having a life together in Singapore. At the crest of what becomes an unexpected argument, Troy utters the mantra of every Singaporean with aspirations to leave: “But this city… it’s still beautiful to me. I have to believe that it is.” The conversation is interrupted by an unexpectedly magnificent panorama of the Marina Bay Sands skyline, that new icon of our city, equally gauche and beautiful. The scene ends in a complicated silence. The latest volume – the seventh overall – was published last year, which makes the series almost ten years old now. This issue explores Chin’s time in Singapore’s mandatory military service, told alongside the depressing reality of his becoming an arty establishment-figure. The sense throughout the book is that almost ten years in, Troy, like many Singaporeans, has become jaded and tired. He’s sinking fast into the stew of bitterness, mediocrity and complacency that he’s been documenting for the past decade. With Parts 6 and 7, we seem to have entered a new phase in the series’s trajectory. The wonderfully ambivalent Resident Tourist gradually settles into a wary resident, and now it seems he’s hardened into a full, unhappy native. I first met Chin in 2014, just before the release of Part 6. He talks about being brought up by a single mum who gave him lots of freedom, about his degree at the Wharton School of Business and his time in New York with Sony BMG. If he had stayed in Singapore as a young man, Chin is certain he would have been doomed to an unhappy future, the kind embodied in his books by Troy’s friend Kampong Boy (Kampung Boy, first published

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Summer 2016

ArtReview Asia

in 1979, is a popular autobiographical graphic-novel by Malaysian cartoonist Lat). Constantly caught up in one get-rich scheme after another, corporate drone Kampong Boy vacillates between disdain for and envy of the divergent, artsy path Troy treads. Much of Tourist paints an ugly picture of Singapore, one that seems almost like a caricature of our material greed, helpless corporate culture and struggles with self-actualisation, but that, Chin figures, is simply journalism. On Chin’s return from New York, he found that the dehumanising ethos of the 1980s and 90s in Singapore – social engineering, a toxic fear of failure, punitive rule-following – had, he says, resulted in “really angry people”. There are numerous episodes in the books when Troy finds himself caught in public showdowns with disgruntled Singaporeans who lash out at him, seemingly unprovoked, for trodding an unconventional path, wishing failure and ruin upon him. ‘You people will fail!’ screams one Mercedes-driving man, referring here to arty rebel types, as Troy drives off after a road-rage incident. ‘Why’re you so angry, Singapore?’ the Troy character muses. Chin the artist says that diagnosing this aspect of Singapore society and trying to help it heal is part of what the more recent Tourist volumes are about, evolving through the series from documentation towards critique and commentary. “People don’t want to talk about it, but I want to talk about it,” Chin says, pointing to the choices Singapore society made in pursuit of wealth and development that resulted, inadvertently, in deep-set unhappiness. “Because I think it’s something we need to address. If we can look at it, and realise it’s true, maybe we won’t be so fucking stressed up and pissed-off right now.” Chin calls it a “crusade”, and perhaps that’s the problem with the later volumes, which sweat with the effort of a didact reaching constantly for some crucial takeaway. Parts 6 and 7 delve full-on into an at-times bafflingly dull trek through Chin’s National Service days.

It’s a story that climaxes in the laboriously set-up downfall of an annoying army bunkmate who refuses to accept the army’s double standards, its don’t-get-caught way of life. The bunkmate blows the whistle on his peers and superiors, and in the end gets beaten up and is sent to military prison for trumped-up ‘insubordination’ charges. “The Army is where everything bad about Singapore crystallises in physical form,” Chin explains, and the lesson here about Singapore is, somewhat dully, that you need to play the game or be left behind. Clearly, Chin’s spirit has been steadily broken over the time he’s been back. There’s a newfound bitterness and a hard edge that move the series from its distant but amused documentation to didactic, sometimes trite, lessons about the ugliness of Singapore society. The anger of the later volumes is perhaps the same anger at which all Singaporeans eventually arrive. The evolution of the series is an interesting insight into the problems of representing Singapore in stories: criticism can train itself so intensely on questions of unfreedom that these representations sometimes flatten life in the city, make it feel hopeless. It’s much more interesting to chart the complicated emotional experience of Singapore, something people can gather around to laugh at, cry at, lament. Something like what Chin managed with his earlier comic-book poetry of the city. The early volumes are phased through a protagonist slowly warming up to home, with all its boring familiarity rendered fresh and fascinating. For the jaded Singaporean, it’s an invitation to do the same and see the city with a renewed vision. The later volumes, fully grounded in the unhappy mess of life in Singapore, have, with Troy, grown up and become more serious. The problems we all recognise must be complained about and discussed. For better or for worse, it’s no longer enough to dwell blithely on the unremarkable, undramatic textures of home: bland, benign and comforting. ara

all images Troy Chin, The Resident Tourist, 2008–. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2016

Mohammed Kazem by Stephanie Bailey

Photographs with Flags, 1997, inkjet print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Photo Rag Pearl 320 gsm paper, 50 × 70 cm

ArtReview Asia

The Dubai-based artist wants us to feel what we touch, see, hear and perhaps even taste. His diverse and generous photographic body of work, much of it plumbing memories of growing up in the fledgling emirate, aims to show us how

Directions 2002 (detail), 2002, colour video installation with sound, chromogenic prints and acrylic on wood panels

Summer 2016

above Tongue, 1994, silver gelatin print on mounting board, 42 × 42 cm facing page Legs and Arms, 1995, inkjet colour print on Hahnemühle paper, 46 × 70 cm

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It was 1984 when Mohammed Kazem – fifteen years old, and one of In another series of photos, Wooden Box (1996/2016), we see Kazem six children of a Dubai cab driver – walked into the Fine Arts Society standing behind and engaging with a single shelving unit of roughly in Sharjah (which had been established only four years previously) his dimensions; in one he stretches to his full height, the top compartwith the intent to join. “I’d already learned everything I could at ment framing his head; in others he bends his knees, crouches, looks school,” he tells me with a smile as we sit down in his studio located around. The images are incredibly direct. They capture the essence in the Al Quoz industrial district in Dubai. At the Fine Arts Society, of the encounter Kazem had with that guitar some ten years earlier, Kazem became a student of artist Hassan Sharif (with whom Kazem as he gazed through a glass barrier, wanting to touch an object that maintains a close friendship) as well as poets, writers and journalists, enthralled him. In these images, Kazem implores viewers to feel growing up amid the first wave of a new art in the newly established what they see. In the case of Tongue, a man, like a puppy, tentatively UAE. He describes the experience as like being in an academy or a tastes the things around him. In the case of Legs and Arms (1995), we see salon, where those at the vanguard of the UAE’s artistic scene lived and Kazem’s feet and arms arranged in various configurations, captured in worked together. At the time, the UK-educated Sharif was translating a tight frame against a backdrop of verdant grass. The work refers to manifestos issued by various artistic movements, including Kazimir Kazem’s childhood memory of entertaining himself when he was sent Malevich’s Suprematist manifesto, and publishing them in newspa- to the garden as punishment. In one closeup shot, the composition pers in order to demystify the strangeis abstract enough to create a sense of empathy; a sense, even, of sitting ness of a new language of culture develKazem’s fixation with the guitar oping in this Gulf state, informed by there, on that grass, looking down. was a desire to sense its vibrations knowledge being brought in from elseFundamentally, Kazem has develwhere by those who had gone to study abroad. oped a practice that is fully engaged with the notion of feeling. But Sharif has a memory of Kazem at fifteen, which writer Christopher feeling manifests in different ways, according to different projects. As Lord recounts as part of his catalogue essay for Sound of Objects, Kazem’s Lord has noted in his catalogue text, the artist has approached sound 2015 exhibition at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde: Kazem had fallen as a ‘self-made catch-all term to describe some otherwise hidden, inner in love with a classical guitar on display in a shop window in Dubai kernel of his experience’ – for Kazem, sound is a feeling above all, and and was spending long stretches staring at the coveted instrument it is this hidden, inner kernel of experience that Kazem manifests through the glass (since he could not afford the guitar, the young in his work. His installation for the UAE Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Kazem was not even permitted to enter the store). Apparently his fixa- Biennale was an excellent diagram of how these two notions – sound tion with the guitar was a desire to sense its vibrations; a wish to feel and feeling – come together. Within a small, dark circular space, which things out in the world that reflects an inquisitive approach the artist visitors entered through a circular opening, a 360-degree projection of says has been present since he was a child, when he used to collect the sea circled a round platform upon which viewers could step. The random items he found on the street – what he imagined to be frag- projection offered a silhouette of a ship’s bow in front of this platform, ments of both complete and evolving lives. creating the sensation of standing at the edge of a vessel, gazing out Indeed, it was Sharif who photographed some of Kazem’s most over the sea. On the floor, interchangeable GPS coordinates shone in characteristic actions, many of which took place during a time when blue from a dark screen, itself placed within a pool of water. Kazem was working in the military. These include the well-known The work is immersive and personal. Embedded within the series Tongue (1994), which shows Kazem sticking his tongue into composition is an event that occurred when Kazem was eight years various familiar spaces, from the mouth of a water vessel to a keyhole. old, to which he referred to often in 2013 when discussing his Venice

Summer 2016

participation. As a boy, he fell into the Arabian Gulf while on a fishing the sound disappears; so then it becomes about how to keep the mark trip, lost for some 30 minutes in deep water before a search party found of the sound, and how to keep the sound as an infinite movement.” him. He fell into the water again in his early twenties: he remembers This understanding of sound as an infinite movement is crucial to the disorientation, and his need to know where he was, as he gazed understanding Kazem’s practice as a whole. Reem Fadda, curator of out at the open water around him. (‘I do not want to be lost again,’ Kazem’s Venice pavilion, writes that he ‘became interested in underhe told the writer Noelle Bodick in 2013.) The experience shaped him standing, deconstructing and reconstructing the material element of profoundly, and it informed the space he produced at Venice: an eleva- sound and how it inhabits space’. But of course, we must remember tion of a personal memory into a heightened feeling, tempered by what sound encompasses here – a vibration, and a sense of hearing, the passing of time. As Bodick writes, for Kazem, ‘being lost… is not more than anything. In the case of Sea Escape (1999–2006), for example, without conceptual interest or poetic value. It is, in fact, the theme – Kazem photographs objects washed up on the shore – from a blue the loosening of the self into an environment.’ This notion of loos- plastic container to a yellow fishing net, and pairs them with the GPS ening the self in the world lies at the core of Kazem’s approach to his coordinates that record the location in which these objects were found multifaceted practice. In a 2002 iteration of the project Directions, he – caught against land and sea. Remembering Kazem’s relationship threw ten wooden panels, inscribed with sound, it is in the composition – One memory is of entertaining himself with various GPS coordinates, into the the pairing of location coordinates to a sea, watching as the waves took them when sent into the garden as punishment real place, and their existence out there in different directions – what he conin the world somewhere – that makes a siders a metaphor for a place expanding into the world, beyond its work, no matter what form it takes, resonate beyond language. physical confines, crossing – as Kazem explains – borders. Yet, while the sea offers a concise space within which Kazem There is a simplicity to Kazem’s approach: a minimalism that might explore a landscape in flux, the sense of fluidity water evokes reflects a clarity of intention. In the case of the Directions project, he is not lost when the focus of Kazem’s study is the land. In his 1997 describes using technology and nature as a way to “tell a story of the Photographs with Flags series, Kazem appears with his back to the water”, using “the GPS as a tool to raise social, political, natural and camera next to flags representing sites in the Memzar desert marked environmental issues”. Here, form is key – for Kazem, throwing panels out for development. (“It’s all developed, now,” he tells me.) In each with GPS coordinates that correspond to physical locations into the image, Kazem gazes out to a view of the landscape or the sea, offering sea is a form of abstraction, in that the location recorded by the coordi- a kind of poetry – the story of the UAE expressed through the emblem nates is located elsewhere, always untethered to its permanent site of of its postindependence. In every photograph, he wears a white shirt origin. It is a way of representing the world – and being in it – without tucked into black trousers, holding a stance that recalls, to this writer, using words at all. This of course relates to the way Kazem interprets Tseng Kwong Chi’s own body interventions in landscapes across the his own concepts, sound included. “To me, art is about showing a way world: what Charles Hagen described in a 1984 Artforum review of of thinking,” he tells me. Speaking about the intention behind a series Tseng’s images as a ‘statue-like, and almost architectural presence’. of paperworks in his studio that Kazem began during the 1990s (and Here, Kazem shows a body lost not at sea, but on land, itself formalwhich he further developed during a 2014 residency at the Watermill ised through the abstraction of his own staging – always a back shot. Center in New York), in which scratches have been scored into the The artist becomes anyone and everyone, which corresponds to the paper’s surface with scissors, he says: “The idea behind the series is way Kazem relates to his work today. “I look at my practice as one how to visualise a sound. When you scratch you create a sound, but project,” he says. Kazem views the world as one, too. ara

ArtReview Asia

above Wooden Box (detail), 1996/2016, 24 gelatin silver prints mounted on paper board, each print 17 × 12 cm facing page Directions (Walking on Water, UAE Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale, 2013), 2005–13 (installation view) all images Courtesy the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai

Summer 2016

Loving the Inbox The artist as bureaucrat by Chris Fite-Wassilak

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‘She spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, an exhibition – such as Art & Language’s Index 01, holding all of their but what she said’ – the line remains unfinished, and the novel ends writings to date in 1972’s Documenta 5 – references cubicle culture there. Published two years after his death, Franz Kafka’s The Castle and asks the audience to enact the tedium of paper shuffling, but (1926) is the infamously circular, frustrating tale of a newcomer to a it also remains an installed, aestheticised object. The artist-bureaufeudal village who fruitlessly attempts to gain the recognition of the crat differs, too, from the simple fact of how most artists now spend faceless authorities who run the place. Kafka had apparently planned a majority of their time: a desk jockey sat in front of a computer, the novel to end with the protagonist finally receiving, on his sending countless emails and applications. The artist-bureaucrat, deathbed, a formal notification from the castle bureaucracy that he instead, deliberately takes on the role of the administrator, the was granted permission to stay. The very existence of the unfinished systems operator, putting themselves forward to be the one filing, story is telling. Written in his spare time as a clerk for an insurance filling in affidavits, agendas and instructions, to be the one actually firm, published posthumously against his express wishes, the manu- making more paperwork. In a postindustrial society, with the spread script itself heavily manipulated by his self-appointed literary exec- of corporate culture and the increased ‘professionalisation’ of the utor – like the story within The Castle, any paper trail has a life of its arts, what the artist is, or aspires to be, has changed drastically. The own. Since the rise of the modern office in the eighteenth century, our artist is no longer a wayward artisan, messing around with paint and obsession with the entrapments of organisational systems has only metal, or even a go-to idea generator, popping out crazy concepts. grown; almost a century after The Castle was written, it continues to The artist is a freelance project manager. feel increasingly relevant, and when confronted with innumerable, The arguable origins of this as an artistic strategy are dispersed, seemingly senseless regulations, incessant forms and questionnaires, but find their roots in the 1960s and 70s, in projects that are highly we can simply use the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’. The contemporary repetitive, and heavily reliant on print media. We might look back protagonist, though, is no longer an outsider subjected to the whims to lone workers, like Tehching Hsieh punching-in to a clock-card of the system, but a worker inside the structure of the castle itself machine in his own apartment on the hour, every hour, for his One – think of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), The Office (2001–03 in its orig- Year Performance in New York in 1980–81 (that’s 8,760 times). Earlier, in inal UK incarnation) or the structural negotiations of The Wire (2002– 1965, California performance artist Barbara T. Smith decided to rent 2008): we have stepped ever inwards into the expanding reach of the a Xerox photocopier and place it in her dining room: ‘the print media procedural hoops of a bureaucratic paradigm. of our era would be the business machine!’ she proclaimed. Making With the office as a dominant cultural trope, and its anodyne collages and abstract designs with whatever she could get her hands worker the model of our time, it should come as no surprise, then, on to place on the machine’s glass, including herself, she signed off a handwritten introduction to In Self Defense, that artists have consciously taken on the above Government offices in Brazil, 1985, dir Terry a short book she had made at that time, as the role of the bureaucrat, where administration Gilliam. Photo: ZUMA Press, Inc / Alamy Stock Photo ‘resident manager’. But we can also look to systems are both their primary source and facing page Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance those who willingly immersed themselves in medium. It should be noted that this adoption 1980–1981, 1980–81, New York. Photo: Michael Shen. the uncomfortable dynamics of group organis, firstly, different from the office as aesthetic; © the artist. Courtesy: the artist and isations: Mierle Laderman Ukeles declared Sean Kelly, New York something like, say, using filing cabinets in

Summer 2016

herself the unofficial artist in residence of the New York Sanitation work of art.” García-Dory becomes an almost federal figure, locating Department in 1977, meeting every employee and documenting a politics in connecting the negotiation of legislative parameters with their conversations. In the UK, Stephen Willats had begun inter- the relative permissiveness of artistic channels, and to see what might viewing participants for his West London Social Resource Project in 1972, grow in between. asking them to draw or describe their sitting-room mantelpieces and Artist Ellie Harrison has described herself as ‘a number cruncher, ‘issues in their social environment’ before turning their responses a paper pusher, the perfect post-Fordist worker’, creating events, into gridded display boards of photographs and text. Perhaps most talks and campaigns that gleefully pick apart notions of democracy, telling is the corporate self-styling of the Artist Placement Group, labour and ethics. By now it’s fairly public knowledge that Harrison is instigated by Barbara Steveni from 1965, fashioning themselves as an Glasgow-based, her current, publicly funded The Glasgow Effect project ‘industrial liaison and consultant service’, embedding artists tempo- – in which she won’t leave the city for a year – coming under tabloid and rarily in companies such as Esso and the UK Department of Health. social media flak at the start of 2016. The criticisms ignored Harrison’s The artist as coordinator is a now-familiar role, particularly with body of work, which wears its politics, and its doubts, on its sleeve; those involved with the exigencies of social or ‘collaborative’ practice; plagued by a ‘guilt of production’ as an artist, she has chosen instead whether the ‘social sculptures’ of Paweł Althamer, the choreographed to act as a mischievous, doubtful and provocative rabble-rouser. This actions of Jeremy Deller, the town-wide interventions of Kateřina includes events that highlight working conditions through group Šedá or the social-consultancy interventions of WochenKlausur, actions, such as Desk Chair Disco, the dance floor rumbling with plush artists have long needed to act as overseers and directors. The works rolling office chairs, and Work-a-thon for the Self-Employed, which set the of these groups and artists, however, are often project-based and record for the most self-employed people working in one room at one outcome-led, temporary incursions time (70), both staged in Newcastle with results that are designed to in 2011. Many of her projects have be visible, exhibited. What potena zany edge to their social probing, such as the seven-person bike roamtially differentiates a younger set of ing the Olympic Park in Stratford in artist-bureaucrat practitioners from those preceding them is what we July 2015, This Is What Democracy Looks might call immersion. The artistLike!, letting people hop onboard bureaucrat is both a knowing and and discuss the issues of their choosnonironic adoption of the profesing with their fellow passengers: a set sional role, a critical occupation of newly elected, fresh-faced young councillors from London’s eastern where the system itself is the work, where its processes might take over boroughs. But this is also alongand within which the artist might side straight-up activism for saving aspects of the UK’s floundering sodisappear. I first encountered Spanish artcial democracy, in founding the camist Fernando García-Dory at a 2010 paigns Bring Back British Rail and Power For the People, calling for conference in Madrid he had orthe UK’s energy to be renationalganised around his Inland project ised. She has also just launched the (2009–); on a pleasant Sunday in the Retiro park, on a lane where traditionally only books are allowed to Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund, which aims to set up a wind be sold, García-Dory had used his role to allow the market that day turbine, or other renewable energy source, to create the means to to instead be taken over by a set of Asturian cheesemakers; decades fund a grant scheme for artists. Harrison’s version of the bureaucrat is of strict convention had been bent under the name of an art project, a colourful, determined advocate for advocacy. the lane filled with wizened farmers and the heavy whiff of hut-aged In The Soul at Work (2009), theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi writes cheeses. García-Dory’s focus is on food, agriculture and the rural; but about the loss of solidarity that resulted from digital technology: his approach is administrative, his medium being organisations, sitting at our computers, phones always by our side, ‘time is made meetings and presentations. Inland has included a set of residencies cellular’. The work of these artist-bureaucrats is idealistic, large-scale, in rural Spain, as well as a yearly shepherd school, in the attempt long-term organisations that become an expanded site of working, to keep the dying lifestyle of mountain shepherds in the north of where the art, if we want to call it that, is in the meetings, the verbal Spain alive, with mixed results in terms of retention. García-Dory’s communications and exchanges, independent of any exhibition globe-hopping, such as medium-term projects exploring land use method and the artist themselves. It’s an attempt to use the means of and food in Finland and this autumn’s Gwangju Biennale, setting a cellular society to counteract its individualistic, alienating effects. up edible gardens and discussion groups, is countered by the larger, The work of García-Dory, Harrison and others, such as Can Altay and long-term span of the systems he’s helped to found or initiate, such Jonathan Hoskins, suggests an attempt to dissolve the artist-ego in as the European Shepherds Network, or a nomadic people’s meeting a communal entity, to create an entity that engenders its own solithat later became the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples. darity, one that can develop its own, new paper trails. Implicit in their García-Dory once told me he found that “states, as a kind of corpora- creations is the suggestion that, yes, we are all desk jockeys now, but change is still possible; just after that next tion, have the capacity to convert an idea into Ellie Harrison, Work-a-thon for the Self-Employed, 2011. an operative object or system. That is the total email… ara Photo: Toby Smith. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

from top Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1977–80, handshake ritual with worker of New York City Department of Sanitation; talking with worker of New York City Department of Sanitation. Both courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Summer 2016

Workwear by Clara Young

As the blue-collar worker goes the way of the dinosaur, never has the aesthetic been more heralded in fashion. So have labour and craft now become a luxury good? 72

ArtReview Asia

Though I was not there, one of the most titillating fashion venues of Courier and The Mechanic constitute a curiosity cabinet of nearly last year was the basement of a gay bar in Paris. A secretive Paris collec- extinct proletariat garb. Each carries a tag that gives the names of the tive called Vetements showed security-personnel T-shirts, yellow designer and finishers who made the garment. The coats, made of leather washing-up gloves and puckered French firemen’s jumpers variously treated artist canvas, conjure up the spirit of the profession that were very suggestive. Not of in flagrante delicto, but rather of – a gleaming black rubberised coat evokes the oilrigger, for example, workaday man. and a papery, white-hooded coat, a beekeeper. The Toogoods followed That workers of the world were uniting was the backdrop during this with other worker paeans, such as plumber onesies, big-pocketed Fashion Week that early spring: as models marched up and down photographer’s jackets, long fishmonger’s coats and loose, paintedrunways in Paris, Milan, New York and London showcasing novel- pyjama-like ensembles in the manner of the curator. ties of Autumn/Winter 2015, fastfood workers, bus drivers, secu“A lot of our friends, artists, designers, architects, didn’t necesrity guards and other low-wage, zero-hour-contract earners were sarily want to be wearing fashion-led, heavily branded seasonal marching to a tune from a very different soundtrack. In 2014, in the clothes,” says Toogood. “They wanted a timeless quality to them, US, the UK, Brazil, Japan, Ireland and Finland, they were fighting for and they couldn’t find them, and we couldn’t find them.” Like the higher minimum wage and, in the case of the fast-food industry, the Toogoods and their friends, we are turning to workwear for its right to unionise. quality and Jeremy Corbyn-like durability. Its stoic anonymity in the Eight months after its sex-bar collection, Vetements drew face of logos and labels. Its hearty cotton drills and twills, its bonded wardrobe ideas once again from the lumpenproletariat. seams, its generous and comfortable cut, so in-tune with the de rigueur unisex trend. Workwear is a stalwart Masterminded by Georgian designer Demna Gvasalia, it opened with a scoundrel in black leather and alternative in a world of fatally cheap knockoffs. a yellow DHL T-shirt. Then followed a succesWorkwear ascends, but those who traditionsion of oversize workshirts in Guantánamoally wore it have seen their fortunes decline. orange and Rothko-blue that floated open Blue-collar jobs in the US plummeted from in the back, and plastic floral-patterned 28 percent of the economy in 1970 to 17 butcher aprons. The latter, which hinted percent in 2010. The collective-bargaining at extant apron springs between Gvasalia power of this group has similarly weakened, with trade-union membership and his mother, may not, in fact, have sliding from a high of one-third of been a labour reference, but it did join a slew of other aprons that seemed the American population during the too fashionable for the kitchen or 1950s to just over 11 percent today. workbench. They ranged from the Since 1989, the wealth of blue-collar supplest black leather apron dress at and service-sector workers has Hermès last spring to a short, rigid fallen between 26 percent and 35 percent. The working have become caramel one at Fendi two years ago. stiff indeed, and their fall has been In menswear, fashion has sourced its references from Northern English as fast and as hard as that of the ariscoalminers, splendidly handsome tocracy when the First World War before their fall from Thatcherite hit. There is so little danger today of grace, and fishermen with beard, apron, being mistaken for a longshoreman, pail and sou’wester. The excessively or, for that matter, a duke, that this is priced and now defunct label Band of Outsiders set the look book for exactly how we want to dress – because they are exotic. And so rapid its last menswear collection in front of a workbench garnished with has been the rapprochement between work clothes and luxury goods an assortment of tools. For a recent women’s resort and cruisewear that one can simultaneously hit the two – duke and longshoreman – collection JW Anderson accessorised with utility belts. Last autumn, with a single well-chosen overcoat. Céline populated its wardrobe with snap-buttoned work smocks. The thing that yokes together the clothing of the slave and the As the blue-collar worker goes the way of the dinosaur, never have clothing of the master is something those in the field of marketing he and she been more heralded in fashion. We cannot get enough of like to call ‘heritage’. On the one hand, there is Hermès, Gucci, Louis overalls, boiler suits, lab coats and construction boots. “We’re trying Vuitton, which themselves rose from artisan trades as makers of to grapple with the old world and the new world,” said Faye Toogood, boxes and horse bits. On the other, there are the venerable factory “and workwear has a sense of retro. Of looking back nostalgically at brands like France’s VETRA (established in 1927) and America’s L.C. some aspects of work because it’s physical, which we’ve lost.” King Manufacturing Co (founded in 1913). For those who rarely do an honest day’s work, but want to dress like We associate luxury with rare, expensive, handcrafted things; one who does, designer Faye Toogood and her sister, Erica Toogood, what is new is to associate it with industrially manufactured ones. a pattern cutter, produce a British clothing label called Master Edit. And therein lies the meaning of workwear’s ascendance. A piece I read Master Edit is a sartorial elegy to the humble in The Wall Street Journal reported that the epiabove MHL by Margaret Howell, tradesman. It debuted in 2014 with seven coats. centre of cheap clothing manufacturing has Spring/Summer 2016 All unisex, The Roadsweeper, The Beekeeper, moved this year from Southeast Asia, whose facing page Vetements, Spring/Summer 2016 The Oilrigger, The Chemist, The Milkman, The workers now command sumptuous fees of US$67 show: DHL T-shirt. Photo: Gio Staiano

Summer 2016

Toogood’s 2014 Master Edit collection: The Beekeeper. Photo: Marius W. Hansen

ArtReview Asia

a month, to Africa, where, in Ethiopia for example, the average is $21. London, but her classic shirts were so popular that it required opening The same report noted that China, hitherto considered a producer of a small factory to meet demand. “When we took over every room in the garments whose buttons pop off like Mexican beans as soon as they flat with production, we found a workshop,” she says. “Well, it was an are put on, was now the place for ‘sophisticated production while old shop actually, we converted it to a place where we could actually basic cutting and sewing goes to countries with lower wages’. employ more machinists, and we built up a workroom of about a dozen There is such a thing as high-quality manufacturing, and just skilled shirt machinists, and used to produce the shirts from there.” as China, once the capital of cheap factory labour, has upgraded to If you spend any amount of time with Howell talking about the premium, skilled-labour category, there is a revived interest in shirts and skirts and coats, you are bound to get very wonkishly into what remains of the garment industry in Europe and North America. the details with which workwear abounds. Howell loves to delve Textile factories in Scotland are a case in point. Chanel bought Barrie into the miniature world of reinforcings, looped buttonholes, crossKnitwear in Hawick in 2012, when the century-old firm was about to stitched buttons and buckled tabs. They are the details that were once foreclose. Since then, they have added 60 people to their workforce relevant, but which Howell now transposes into, if not clothing for and still cannot keep up with orders. manual labourers, then active people Luxury is about process. It doesn’t have at least. She muses, “In England, we Barrie Knitwear is illustrative of the produced beautiful, sturdy clothes, ‘semimanufactured’ luxury Scotland to be restricted to hands and fingers, but is putting in place. The Scots are fusing and we moved away from that, didn’t can include machinery and computers we, really, with central heating and all new technology with their archives, their knitting needles, their sheep, their water, their turn-of-the- the rest of it, and travel and everything.” century machinery and their centuries-old skills in the production ‘All the rest of it’ is coming back to bite us in the bum. On the of Harris tweed, wool, cashmere and lace. Pringle of Scotland incor- radio last week, I heard a report that white working-class American porates nubby 3D-printed fabric into its argyle sweaters. Lacemaker men are dying in droves. Princeton researchers discovered that while Morton Young and Borland wired up their old Nottingham lace mortality rates have fallen for everyone else, they have risen by 22 looms with CAD programs. Garments are frequently factory-made but percent for this group since 1999, mostly due to suicide and/or drug hand-finished or finished with special machines that need to be set up and alcohol abuse. Only AIDS and the collapse of the Soviet Union has each time they are used. had this kind of demographic effect in the modern world. Luxury is about process. It doesn’t have to be restricted to hands White blue-collar males are killing themselves and unskilled and fingers, but can include machinery and computers as well, if it’s workers are marching for a decent living wage because their work done right. Nobody understands this better than Margaret Howell. is valued little more than the clothes on their backs. The workwear Howell has made workwear-inspired clothing since the early 1970s, industry, once moribund, has dusted itself off and spiffed itself up. long before it became trendy. She started out in a flat in Blackheath, Would that those who once wore it can do the same. ara

CAD modified Vamatex looms at Morton Young & Borland, Newmilns, Ayrshire

Summer 2016

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Art Reviewed

When I tell the truth, people run to beat me up – when I tell lies, they believe me 79

Social Fabric: New Work by Marianna Hahn and Kwan Sheung Chi MILL6 Pop-up Space, The Annex, Nan Fung Place, Hong Kong 22 March – 21 April A sense of beauty and cool subversion are found in this intriguing show that excavates Hong Kong’s past and dissects its present. Presented by MILL6, formerly known as the Mills Gallery, the exhibition brings together new work by German artist Marianna Hahn and Hong Kong conceptual artist Kwan Sheung Chi. On paper, the two are not an obvious match. Hahn’s performance-centric work involves straightfaced explorations of myth, ritual and poetry centred on female bodies and identities. Kwan, winner of the inaugural Hugo Boss Asia Art prize in 2013, is a conceptual prankster whose puckish back-catalogue takes on anything from the vicissitudes of his personal life to sociopolitical commentary. And yet their contrasting approaches reveal different faces of Hong Kong. As the outsider doing virgin research into the territory, Hahn zeroes in on vanishing communities and ways of life. The resultant objects – sculptures, drawings and videos – are elliptical, meditative responses to these stories. Together, they have an elegiac romance that relies on old-fashioned handicraft and markmaking, with scrupulous attention to the material possibilities of silk, dye and paper. The artist had several sources of inspiration, the first being women silk-workers on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island, many of whom renounce marriage in order to retain their personal independence. They are, like many other female workers in China and the Chinese diaspora, called zishunü in Mandarin (literally ‘self-combed women’, because they take their vow of chastity during a traditional hair-combing ceremony). Hahn also references tankas, historic boatdwelling folk from the ethnic minorities in Southern China, some of whom drifted further south to live in and around the waters of Hong Kong. These histories are shadowy elements in Hahn’s wider mood board exploring a universal representation of womanhood and its connection to the sea. Most of the works look like they have been dredged from the ocean and hung up to dry. In the state of grace (all works 2016), ‘frozen’ dyed silk dresses, stiff as scarecrows, hang from walls and the ceiling. Twisted and ossified, these garments are closer to sculpture than cloth, and one is frosted over with salt

crystals, like the accidental leavings of an ancient sea goddess. While the female body is absent in these works, it appears, in various iterations (among them kneeling figures with heavy breasts and hips, and earth-mother types with branches growing out of their heads), in a set of charcoal drawings. They are executed on flimsy yellow paper glazed with shellac, the effect of which is to objectify the drawings in the manner of brittle, water-crinkled relics. A different kind of ephemerality appears in four silk paintings of blue circles, two of which are burnt away in the centre, leaving charred edges like the remnants of a half-burnt Taoist paper amulet. While Hahn mines fragile histories on the margins of Hong Kong’s official narratives, Kwan explores a different kind of boundary: where does Hong Kong end and China begin? Following the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule, a ‘one country, two systems’ constitutional principle secures a certain level of autonomy for the Special Administrative Region. That’s on paper. In practice, things are murkier, given Beijing’s interventions in Hong Kong politics, as well as blatant violations of civil liberties, most recently seen in the notorious disappearances of five Hong Kong booksellers associated with publications critical of the Communist government. Kwan channels the contradictions into an ambivalent installation that plays on the notion, familiar to anyone who has worked or lived in Hong Kong, that the place is simultaneously China and not China. The show begins with Hong Kongese (all works 2016), comprising thousands of red, metal lapel-badges lying like a pile of autumn leaves on the ground. All of them depict the Hong Kong regional flag, a close cousin of the PRC flag. Both have the same shade of red; the difference between the two being that instead of a gold star (and four satellite stars) in the corner, the Hong Kong flag has a white five-petalled flower, a native orchid, at its centre. Kwan’s badges were sourced from the online seller Taobao – China’s super-cheap equivalent of Amazon – and in addition to representing the HK flag, they have the Chinese characters meaning ‘Hong Konger’ written on them. Here’s another difference between the PRC and Hong

facing page, top Marianna Hahn, i divided myself thousands of time, 2016, silk and shellac, 160 × 60 cm. Courtesy MILL6, Hong Kong

Kong: most mainlanders would read the words as xiānggǎnggrén in Mandarin. In Cantonese, it’s hēunggóngyàhn. Crunching through these fork-tongued badges, you enter a dark room that flickers to life when an LED pillar lights up. This is the part that gets tiresome. To enter or leave, you have to wait for a set of prissy automated doors that open when they please according to some secret timer. Eventually you enter a final room and reach the pièce de résistance: a city map of Hong Kong, folded into a globe and set on a plinth. Planet Hong Kong, arrived at only after wading through a sea of lamely derivative flags, produced by cheap labour of the PRC. Is this Kwan’s arch version of the ‘one country, two systems’ principle? It is a work pulled in two directions: on one hand, it suggests a merged Hong Kong/China identity driven by economic complicity and intersecting national symbols; on the other hand, it posits territorial sovereignty so extreme that Hong Kong has its own planetary separation. I’m not quite sure if it all adds up – and I hate the doors – but this is arguably the most elaborate articulation of a complicated patriotism for an artist who, so far, has stuck mainly to creating interesting one-offs about local politics. In 2007, on the tenth anniversary of the historic handover, he made a video called A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s clothes drying rack, where three flags – Hong Kong’s regional flag, the British flag and the Chinese flag – were raised and lowered arbitrarily by his parents outside their flat. Then, his vision of Hong Kong identity was of harmless schizophrenia, but over the years his stance has hardened to a more active, socially conscious pushback. In 2008’s Ask the Hong Kong Museum of Art to borrow ‘Iron Horse’ barriers: I want to collect all of the ‘Iron Horse’ barriers in Hong Kong here, he exhibited 100 ‘iron horses’, the metal barriers police use to contain protest routes; and in 2013 he made Water Barrier (Maotai: Water, 1:999), comprising heavy, plastic, liquidfilled antiriot barriers that visitors were encouraged to push over. In his latest exhibition, he seems to have kicked down some of his own barricades, progressing from short riffs to a sustained construction of a fuller, braver new world. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Kwan Sheung Chi, Hong Kongese, 2016, metal badges, dimensions variable. Courtesy MILL6, Hong Kong

ArtReview Asia

Summer 2016

Xue Feng The Tranquility Series – New Paintings Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing 19 March – 17 April It is not entirely accurate to categorise Xue Feng as an abstract painter. In his own words, his paintings have been undergoing a process of negotiation between the attempt to create space on two-dimensional canvases and to render a space that projects the artist’s state of mind, and between his artistic practice and the physical reality in which he lives. His new Tranquility series conjures and condenses the various outcomes of these negotiations of the last few years. Xue Feng is known for brightly coloured freehand brushstrokes and Rococo-style patterns that are often associated with the lush vegetation of the town in which he lives: Hangzhou. It was by coincidence that he discovered another technique that later became his trademark. While attempting to mitigate an overuse of turpentine, he applied a thin white line of paint to contour his brushstrokes. The effect was to highlight the top ones and separate them from those underneath, thus adding depth to the image while isolating each brushstroke as a unit, and emphasising a relationship between parts and a whole (and

the social implications therein). Additionally, by contouring his brushstrokes, Xue Feng makes their abstraction apparent, even when the whole of a painting might be figurative, while pointing to their material presence as dabs of paint. This lush visual style can be seen in the series Transform (2011), into which Xue Feng introduced openings (such as doors and hallways) and everyday objects (such as television sets, books and maps) onto canvases covered entirely in chaotic, brightly coloured brushstrokes that seem to melt any divisions between public and private space. In the intervening years, more and more of the canvas has been engulfed by those brushstrokes, as the artist has embraced a more vigorous sense of abstraction. Which is why his newest works are something of a surprise. In these, Xue Feng seems to have tired of the homogeneity of both the singular texture on his canvases and the last vestiges of figuration. In the works Prosperous carnival profusion 2016-1 and Prosperous carnival profusion 2016-4 (both 2016), the busy brushstrokes from the top and bottom of the canvas appear to be working towards joining

Quiet quiescent tranquility, 2016-10, 2016, oil on canvas, 200 × 280 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

at a middle that is, in fact, relatively empty. For the viewer, the composition seems designed to engender a meditative trance. Whereas Gray, Black Symbolic 2016-1 (2016) foreshadows Xue Feng’s final step towards sublimation, a single scraped stroke from the top corner of a canvas almost covered in black tones of brushstrokes renders a Richteresque blur over the texture, leaving a glimpse of brightness beneath. Quiet quiescent tranquility (2016) sees the artist squeegeeing paint horizontally across the canvas in single or multiple colour schemes, with a tonal pattern that resonates with the excessively encroaching brushworks found at the bottom and rims of the canvas. Up close, one sees that these panoramic gradations of colour are divided by painted lines, giving rhythmic pauses across the canvas. Unlike Mark Rothko’s colour blocks, which aspire to provoke a spiritual resonance with the viewer, these are, in Xue Feng’s words, fragmentations of his states of mind. And perhaps in the end, tranquillity is only possible when one experiences all the parts of a whole. Fiona He

South by Southeast. A Further Surface Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou 20 March – 8 May In this group exhibition, two seemingly unrelated geopolitical subjects address a similar problem: how to remain identifiable and vocal when confronting the double threat of global capitalism and regional hegemony. Its curatorial concept, by Patrick D. Flores and Anca Verona Mihuleț, is developed around what is called a ‘double negation’ of the world’s geopolitical centre, and gathers together artists from Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe: two regions that are relatively unfamiliar to a contemporary art audience in China. It’s an alliance that is more often the product of international politics than found in an art show. One of the clearest themes in the show is the presentation of a microscopic perspective as a contrast to the grand narratives of history. There are a lot of depictions of everyday life and specific individuals, as well as an emphasis on the marginalised and forgotten. In We Need a Title (2014), Slovenian artist Maja Hodošček asks members of a high-school debating group to write a collective poem after discussions about the current world order, communism and domestic and societal mechanics. Ana Hušman’s research project Almost Nothing (2016) focuses on smell, sound and closeup views of plants on an island in Croatia, and seeks to challenge the concept of landscape as ‘natural’, by suggesting that this one is the result of planned

afforestation and planting. Other artists shed light on people on the fringes of society, such as homosexuals in Cambodia (Lyno Vuth’s series Thoamada II, 2012–13), adult performers in Thailand (Eisa Jocson’s Macho Dancer, 2013) and a homeless gleaner working in the middle of a surrealist desert (Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s Intransit, 2011). Among the works that explore the disenfranchised, the work of Zhou Tao, one of two local Cantonese artists included in this touring exhibition, stands out. His video Blue and Red (2014) captures a vulnerable but enduring condition of common people – whether during their leisure time or in the middle of a riot – silently engulfed by the light and shadow of urban life. Shot in public squares in Guangzhou and Bangkok, this video poetically epitomises the reality that the curatorial statement addresses, in the meantime developing a unique artistic language. Most works exhibited in the indoor half of the museum space are videos, photographs and moderately scaled installations. Larger and participatory pieces fill the other half: a semiopen-air terrace, where art collective Art Labor’s hammock café and DIY Vietnamese coffee are the highlights. Sitting or lying on one of the colourful hammocks, which are styled the same way as those commonly seen along the highways

in Vietnam, one has a beautiful view of the industrial district of Huangbian through the 19th-floor terrace windows. The Huangbian neighbourhood, which is a couple stations away from the city airport, is not an obvious choice for a museum. Moreover, it is built on top of a middle-class apartment complex, which sticks out awkwardly in an area dominated by factories and warehouses. The real estate developer of the complex owns and funds Times Museum and another smaller educational institution called Huangbian Station, and together these two spaces host almost half of the contemporary art exhibitions and events in Guangzhou. Thus the local art scene is nothing in comparison to that of Beijing or Shanghai. Conversely, the condition discussed in South by Southeast is not unlike the place of Guangzhou in the Chinese artworld. During my short stay in the city I encountered young artists and art workers expressing anxiety about not being in the centre of things. The city only just got its second commercial gallery (after the internationally established Vitamin Creative Space) six months ago: Guangzhou Gallery, which is co-run by several young artists. With this background in mind, one easily sees why staging South by Southeast here makes sense. Hanlu Zhang

Zhou Tao, Blue and Red (video still), 2014, video, 25 min 14 sec. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

Summer 2016

Staging Film: the relation of space and image in video art Busan Museum of Art 29 January – 17 April When it comes to moving image in South Korea, audience encounters tend to be framed by two prevalent activities: first, the active search for and playing of videos on the Internet, accessible anytime and anywhere; second, going to see movies on a more passive basis in the cinema (figures released by Korea Film Council in 2014 show that South Koreans are the world’s most frequent cinemagoers). And it is these two approaches to moving image as a medium that effectively function as the poles between which Staging Film allows viewers to analyse aesthetic and political strategies in video art. The exhibition places the viewer into the middle of a series of grey-walled hallways leading to 12 rooms, each of which contains a single videowork. Apart from a floor plan and captions, no information about the works is offered prior to your encounter with them. The viewer explores the room in which a videowork is ‘staged’, comes back to the thoughtprovoking grey zone and repeats the process. Without explicit contextualisation, the viewer experiences and engages with the works directly. For example, it is not mentioned that Anri Sala’s two-channel video installation UNRAVEL (2013), presenting a DJ’s attempt to synchronise two different recordings of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major

(1929–30), was originally filmed and shown in the German Pavilion (although Sala was representing France, with whom Germany had swapped pavilions) at the 2013 Venice Biennale. However, the theme of dissonance is still fully rendered here by the audiovisual combination of a subtle frown and a distorted-sounding harmony. Likewise, without knowing about the British experimental musician Bryn Jones (1961–99), to whom Hassan Khan’s single-channel video Muslimgauze R.I.P. (2010) pays homage, the viewer can enjoy the purely sensuous quality of the delicate sounds caused by a curious boy’s rubbing and touching of items in a room. This type of experience is amplified in Mikhail Karikis’s SeaWomen (2012–13), which explores the daily life of female divers (haenyeo) who harvest marine products without any underwater breathing equipment in the Korean province of Jeju. The installation immerses the viewer in a two-channel video and 12-channel soundtrack that approximates the divers’ multidimensional experience in and out of the sea. Gender is a recurring topic in several works, though the strategies used to address it are very different. In her two-channel video installation Rapture (1999), Shirin Neshat places two screens on opposite walls, showing respectively men with white shirts and women in black chadors.

Hassan Khan, Muslimgauze R.I.P., 2010, HD video, sound, 8 min 7 sec. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

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Meanwhile, Siren Eun Young Jung’s Act of Affect (2013) questions a gender dichotomy still rampant in South Korean society by focusing on yeosung gukguek, a Korean classical opera form that swept the nation during the 1960s and was known for an all-female cast that performed the roles of both genders. Taking things a step further, Wu Tsang addresses gender fluidity and genderlessness in the two-channel video The Looks (2015). The work records a performance by an androgynous singer – played by performance artist Boychild – whose body is covered with glittering spangles in a way that seems to refract and diffuse the light reflected off the performer’s glittering skin, through the screen, to be absorbed into the totally white room in which the work is installed. Ultimately, as a result of its avoidance of a chronological or themed organisation, Staging Film encourages the viewer to contemplate the characteristics of each work and draw analogous and/or disparate correlations between them. At a moment when many South Korean artlovers are commemorating the tenth anniversary of video-art pioneer Nam June Paik’s passing, this exhibition reminds us of the importance and pleasure of an experiential approach that often seems lost amidst the cacophony of contemporary visual culture. Young-jun Tak

Mikhail Karikis, SeaWomen, 2012–13, 2-channel video & 12-channel sound installation, 25 min. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2016

Under My Skin Hite Collection, Seoul 26 February – 21 May In recent years, Seoul has witnessed a number of exhibitions of post-Internet art that feature a reference to ‘skin’ prominently in their titles: last year’s New Skin at Ilmin Museum of Art has been followed this year by Under My Skin at Hite Collection and Silky Navy Skin at Insa Art Space. That ‘skin’ crops up as a recurring motif in all of these shows suggests something about how young artists’ obsession with surface is inextricably linked to their use of the digital screen. Under My Skin is the third in Hite Collection’s annual selections of young artists. Using the theme of ‘storytelling’ as a starting point, the eight exhibiting artists have been selected by five established artists who are known for narrative-driven work: Yang Ah Ham (who selected Hyekyung Ham and Ji Hye Yeom), Kim Beom (Heeah Yang and Hyung-Min Yoon), Sunghwan Kim (Hyein Lee), Jina Park (DongGeun Lee and Hyerim Jun) and Haegue Yang (Aesop). Perhaps as a result of this, the selected artists do not seem to share concepts, thematics or techniques. Rather, they look like they are competing with each other to establish which

of them offers the strongest story in his or her work. That each artist’s work is shown in an isolated section only enhances the feeling that this is a series of eight small-scale shows. Aesop’s Showcase for Megalopolis (2010/2016) is made of glass containers stacked up to resemble skyscrapers in a city. Each container in turn contains an object or objects – among them beads, plants, models of human body parts and parts of a dinosaur’s skeleton. As you give a closer look, the effect is vertiginous – a result of so many miscellaneous incidents taking place at the same time. An upside-down photograph of a statue of the Virgin Mary is accompanied at the rear of one fish tank in which an octopus is coiled around a cross. For me, it precisely captures Seoul, a city crowded with churches. Another story related to postmodern cities is narrated through an artificially colourful serpent in Ji Hye Yeom’s immersive video installation Where We Met Genius (2015). A ‘genius loci’, in classical Roman tradition, is the protective spirit of a place, but how is that present in a place constructed not by

Ji Hye Yeom, Where We Met Genius, 2015, HD video, 14 min 44 sec. Courtesy the artist

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nature but of identical skyscrapers and their replaceable component parts? Following the artists’ animated 3D renderings, we’re led to believe that it is only in natural constructions like the Himalayas that such enduring genius still resides. And the work is probably the best in the show, by virtue of the way in which it successfully navigates the different surfaces of actual and virtual images via its 3D graphics. In the end, the different artworks blend well. One reason for that may be the shared strategy of many of these post-Internet artists, who are at ease with fragments of images and with objects floating from context to context. And yet the work on show here should be distinguished from that of other players in the field of post-Internet art: without a fundamental narrative structure, much of the reproduced imagery deployed is no more than a reference to reference, with the consequent risk of an emptiness of meaning. But perhaps such work – as does the work on show here – only highlights the value of singularities in the age of digital reproduction. Tiffany Chae

Koki Tanaka Possibilities for being together. Their Praxis. Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, Tokyo 20 February – 15 May The first major solo show in Japan by the formerly Los Angeles-based Japanese artist Koki Tanaka, curated by Yuu Takehisa, confronts the ongoing effects of the 11 March 2011 tsunami on Japan’s northeastern coast, including the nuclear disaster in Fukushima that brought with it the experience of life exposed and unprotected, and broke an essential trust in the state, leading to temporary forms of selforganisation that have been a focus of Tanaka’s recent work. The show operates in the shadow of the invisible contamination that has revealed a new world – one defined by caring for our fragile bodies and each other in the absence of codified ways of being – and principally consists of a new work documenting an intensive workshop with participants who have lived in cities or countries other than where they were born, evoking displacement after the meltdown as well as the artist’s own extended experience abroad. Over six days, the film crew, artist, curator and collaborators lived together in a retreat outside the city of Mito to form a provisional community, choreographing a programme of living – cooking, walking, hanging out – and study – reading, sharing, performing. Arrayed in the galleries are objects apparently used in the community, largescale photo prints and videos of the collaborative activities

skilfully filmed by artist Hikaru Fujii and edited by Tanaka. Ranging from the poetic – walking with flashlights at night, or ‘turning the body into a pipe’, in which those involved twirled different lengths of tubing to produce different tones, then read aloud selected critical texts with attention given to the sounds produced – to the discursive – unpacking the notion of ‘native cuisines’ or historical social movements – collectively the actions raise the question of how we want to live together in these uncertain times. Tanaka has built into the exhibition its own feedback to gauge if the workshop has produced any transformations in the participants. In the last room here, a sea of monitors show individual participants and film crew – including the artist – probingly interviewed by writer Andrew Maerkle (who is in turn questioned himself). The installation of interviews weaves together a complex portrait of what one of the participants, Han Tong-hyon, speculates is “fictionalized nonfiction”. On numerous occasions, the participants acknowledge that direction of the community lay with the director – that the head of the leviathan remains the artist. While in his interview Fujii contends that there is a limit to “abstracting the experience” in respect to the larger society, perhaps any actual transformation from this short

period needs to be assessed over a longer time. Transformation unfolds in reengagement following a time of withdrawal, and even then maybe only in small moments. Hopefully Tanaka will revisit the group in the future to see if these small moments had any collective effect. The exhibition transforms the museum into a school, functioning as an essential course in social practice, grappling with what this time together meant – or can mean – while exposing its methodology, vulnerabilities, power structure and limitations. As an audience, we listen to these informative, at times moving scenes. While the process on view is collaborative – and even the ‘invigilators’, mainly female (referred to as ‘Faces’ at Mito Art Tower, according to notes in an exhibition text) are invited by the artist to read a book by feminist and activist Raicho Hiratsuka during the exhibition – the public is not asked to enact the work or participate in any direct way; rather like formal education, the hope here seems to be that meaning gleaned from the work can be utilised outside the classroom, in the ‘real’ world. This highwater mark in Tanaka’s practice presents a new threshold of possibilities. While the work’s ‘effects’ may remain unknown, what seems certain is the continuing urgency of the questions posed. Jason Waite

Possibilities for being together. Their praxis., 2016 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito, Tokyo

Summer 2016

Dusadee Huntrakul Dusadee + Dusit + Lovers + Dead Ones The Art Center, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 16 February – 9 April Some of the mystery surrounding Dusadee Huntrakul’s first solo show is dispelled by the statement that accompanies it. Dusadee + Dusit + Lovers + Dead Ones is an exhibition, it reveals, about ‘storing the memories and relationships that the artist has with his artist friends and loved ones’, and that it features works ‘either created by him or traded for’ which ‘together offer a glimpse into the artist’s personal life as well as his artistic journey’. It also features contributions from his uncle Dusit, ‘the first maker I have ever met’, he writes, and ‘drawings of dreams I had of my dead younger brother’. And yet, armed even with this knowledge, and a floor plan attributing all the different works – ceramics, pencil drawings, printed materials, paintings, basalt sculptures, etc – to a 20-strong list of contributors that includes fellow artists, friends, family members, mystery lovers and Huntrakul himself, this show leaves you feeling untethered and adrift. Sitting on a chipboard plinth by the entrance is a clay sculpture made by his uncle. Beyond this are yet more plinths on which sit yet more ceramic sculptures, as well as collections of objects. They’re spread scattershot across the gallery, like mushrooms across a damp forest floor. The arbitrary formation is discombobulating, because deep down you suspect it isn’t arbitrary at all, that the clustering follows some underlying yet unrevealed logic. There are also sketches, illustrations and papers on the walls. Again: no apparent rhyme or reason. A thirty-eight-year-old lecturer at Bangkok and Mahidol universities, Huntrakul’s protean practice has evolved steadily during stints spent living in Los Angeles, San Francisco and his

hometown, Bangkok. Until now, his work has been confined to group shows in these cities, as well as Singapore. For the 2013 Singapore Biennale, he meticulously traced page after page of Buddha is Hiding (2003), Aihwa Ong’s ethnographic study of Cambodian refugees who fled the murderous Pol Pot regime and started a new life in America, then strung the framed pages along a wall. It was a disquieting and sombre meditation on postcolonial migration, but also something much more personal than that, born of his own experiences in the USA. More recently, some of his clay works – gleefully scatalogical, enigmatically titled – appeared in Khairuddin Hori’s group show of 11 emerging talents from France and Southeast Asia at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (reviewed in ArtReview Asia, vol 4, no 2, published in March 2016). Here, though, is a total Huntrakul environment, one that reveals the ‘curious depths’ that the Bangkok-based Irish curator and critic Brian Curtin spoke of in nominating him for the 2015 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. The internal questions come thick and fast. Why are Thitibodee Rungteerawattanon’s photos of urinals sprawled on the floor near a page lifted from Huntrakul’s aforementioned biennale work? Were they created at the same time? Did one artist inspire or spur on the other? Similarly, we could just as feasibly posit that the idea for the A3-size 3016 calendar that also sits on the floor, credited to Huntrakul and Adam Machacek, was dreamt up after a night of hot, sticky passion (I’m not being prurient: judging by the title, there are some lovers in here somewhere). Moving over to the wall

Adam Machacek and Dusadee Huntrakul, 3016, 2016, digital print. Photo: Lek Kiatsirikajorn. Courtesy the artists and the Art Center, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok

ArtReview Asia

lined with childlike sketches based on dreams of his late brother, we are left wondering what connection there is, if any, between them and the Michael Shaowanasai calendar, as well as drawings and paintings by Alicia McCarthy, Katherine Sherwood and Craig Nagasawa interspersed with them. In turning the gallery into what appears to be a three-dimensional memory map, the constellations of which represent relationships that are a mystery to us, Huntrakul has effaced the original meaning of these objects and left us to form new ones. It also struck me as being a show about the diaristic nature of artistic life; about muses and inspiration (a topic that could be naff, but here is made to seem nuanced and ultimately irreducible); and the fragmentary, misremembering mind. What it does best, though, is signpost his direction of travel. Dotted around the show are five new Huntrakul works in clay, the medium he’s currently exploring the materiality and malleability of with vigour. Untitled, like most of the works in the show, these are enthralling creations: small, abstracted, finely worked worlds fashioned out of excrementlike lumps, tangles of thick licoricelike string, oval balls and smooth cylindrical columns. Appearing here alongside works by some of those who inspired him to incorporate clay into his practice, including his uncle and the American ceramicist Richard Shaw, they are playful, comical and very weird. Alas, as to their significance, they remain cheekily reticent. Like every work in Dusadee + Dusit + Lovers + Dead Ones, they are each pieces in a very personal sort of puzzle. Max Crosbie-Jones

Dusadee + Dusit + Lovers + Dead Ones, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Lek Kiatsirikajorn. Courtesy the Art Center, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok

Summer 2016

The Time is Out of Joint Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah 12 March – 12 June The first artwork the viewer encounters in this exhibition is Palestinian Khalil Rabah’s Art Exhibition (2011–) – a mise en abyme photorealist painting of archival photos depicting people looking at art. Layering images of Palestinian art shows held worldwide since 1954, the wallpaperlike installation tugs at questions of boundaries and containment across time and space by reactivating the past in the present. As the opening salvo of curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh’s exhibition, a new iteration of a thenuntitled 2013 show at Home Works 6 in Beirut, this work is instantly illustrative. Like Rabah’s work, this show is an art event looking at other art events. Two of these are in the past – the First Biennale of Arab Art in Baghdad in 1974 and Beijing’s China/Avant-Garde exhibition in 1989 – and one has yet to occur – the Equator Conference 2022, as part of the artist-run Yogyakarta Biennale Foundation’s ten-year project to work with countries located along the equator. The curator says his is an ‘on-going curatorial project’ that aims to ‘challenge the constraints of conditions and locations’. The space dedicated to the ‘Baghdad’ component within

The Time is Out of Joint rounds up works by Chinese, Singaporean, Japanese, Polish and Arab artists in a way that destabilises the reading of the exhibition as a simple rehash of a historical art event and ideas about what would have constituted ‘Arab’ art in 1974. Instead, the show is like a spatiotemporal palimpsest: past political strata condition our present readings of the assembled works. The reenacted spaces of the Baghdad and Beijing art events are shapeshifting sites, as much hinged to the past as projected into the future. Cordoned into buildings onto which are emblazoned the names of the original 1974 and 1989 exhibitions, the Baghdad and China sections are less echoes of their pivotal predecessors than confluences of then-and-now currents. Of the two, the Baghdad component is more bleak. For example, in Meiro Koizumi’s four-channel video Portrait of a Young Samurai (2009), an offscreen director urges a young actor to muster more ‘samurai spirit’ as he rehearses a kamikaze’s farewell speech to his family. Foregrounding how nationalism is manipulated – notably the pan-Arab nationalism under which the First Biennale of Arab Arts artists

would have mobilised – the work evokes orthodoxies that have decimated much of Iraq and Syria today. Elsewhere in the Baghdad pavilion, dictators and postapocalyptic devastation reign. Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s four-channel video Pythagoras (2013) probes the ventriloquism of power – a disembodied voice speaks behind a curtain on one screen, while another shows a debris-littered, body-strewn postdisaster scene, artfully crafted to mimic the palette and composition of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819), with all the post-Revolution, post-Napoleonic dynamics that implies. Lebanese Ali Cherri’s video installation Pipe Dreams (2012) overlaps two moments – a conversation between the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad and a Syrian military aviator who was part of a Soviet space run in 1987, and the government’s cautionary removal of monuments of President al-Assad in 2011 as the Arab Spring gained ground – in an examination of the illusion of the nation-state through its fabricated heroes and protectors. Performances throughout the opening week linked to the Baghdad segment further developed the theme of power. Mark Teh’s

Khalil Rabah, Art Exhibition, 2011– (installation view, 2016). Photo: Alfredo Rubio. Courtesy the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation

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performance Baling (2015) recreated, word-byword, the 1956 Baling Talks, mixing trained actors and political activists to question powerbehind-the-curtain dynamics in the very creation of nations, in this case Malaysia and Singapore. Konrad Smoleński toyed with stealth power in B (2016) – unmarked, black-tintedwindow BMWs, throbbing from high-volume bass tracks within, were parked surreptitiously around the Sharjah Art Foundation site. If Baghdad is a grim site of flux, paranoia and loss, the China hall seems almost optimistic in its evocation of new strategies of resistance. In 1989, whatever hopes the watershed China/ Avant-Garde show raised were swiftly levelled by the Tiananmen Square massacre a few months later. Yet there is more Tahrir than Tiananmen in this part of the show, as it explores various means of critique and opposition. Performativity is a leitmotif, bolstered by a Judith Butler essay in the first of the twovolume publication accompanying the exhibition, in which the philosopher discusses the ‘space of appearance’ of Tahrir and how the media embodied and extended this performative space. In his video The Nameless (‘L for Lai Teck’ from the Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia) (2015), Ho Tzu Nyen hijacks the famous Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai by folding found footage of his scenes into a spy-flick-meets-documentary narrative about the Secretary General

of the Malayan Communist Party and his gripping capers as a triple agent. Shapeshifting-as-strategy seems to be the point of much of the work here. Cairo-based Maha Maamoun’s film Dear Animal (2016) toggles between an exiled Egyptian director/activist Azza Shaaban, who is heard reading her letters, and the story of a Cairo drug dealer who metamorphoses into a goat-zebra. Meanwhile, Smoleński’s Baritone Missile aka The Bomb (2015) is a missile-cum-string-instrument the artist played as part of his band BNNT. In Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif’s performance Doppelgänger (2014), an onslaught of personal tales and video clips, foreground the artist’s preoccupation with bilocation, or inhabiting multiple ‘heres’ at once. The irony of this unbridled spatial movement for a Palestinian is lost on no one. The Equator Conference 2022, held in Sharjah in March, was a one-day conference that preenacted the eponymous session to be held in Jogjakarta six years hence. The event actually harks back to the Bandung Conference of 1955, which united 29 newly independent African and Asian states in the Indonesian town, under the banner of cultural and economic cooperation, and neocolonial opposition. In the same spirit, the Equator Conference 2022 rallies thinkers and generates ideas from the bottom up. Besides conference talks and screenings, there is a lecture-performance by Lebanese

artist Raed Yassin conjuring a 1969 international festival masterminded by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in Lebanon’s Jaita Grotto, a curated reading room and a digitised archive by Asia Art Archive. The idea of ‘cosmopolitanism’ rose as an alternative solution to the overwhelming Third World-ist, postcolonial and Global South narratives. A presentation by collective Rimini Protokoll of their film 100% World – a documentary of the 26 worldwide 100% City performances in which they question how cross-sections of societies can be ‘portrayed’ – seemed to imply that a cosmopolitanism could fight head-tohead with culture-bound national ethnos. Taken on its own, The Time is Out of Joint may seem a bit meagre: a scant 30 pieces are tasked with fulfilling an elaborate curatorial ambition spanning the bankruptcy of nationalism, the aftermath of revolutionary defeat and a potential yet dysfunctional cosmopolitanism. The performances, talks and the sheer heft of the publications (edited by artist-curator Ala Younis, who commissioned content or republished archival articles) put substantial meat on the show’s bones. Yet for all its economy, The Time is Out of Joint succeeds in enlisting artists and thinkers into a curatorial enterprise that seemingly grapples with the past and the future, only to confront us with the state of the present. Kevin Jones

Maha Maamoun, Dear Animal (video still), 2016, video, 25 min. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

Summer 2016

1497 Green Art Gallery, Dubai 18 January – 6 March Matheus Rocha Pitta’s Stone Soup (2012) consists of cardboard stencilled with black text and two rows of assorted vegetables, one real and the other carved of stone. The text recounts a parable: a hungry itinerant stranger whose initial pleas for food go unheard begins to cook a soup of stones in the city’s main square. Vegetables donated by curious passersby gradually replace the stones, resulting in a hearty soup that is eventually shared. Pitta’s work poignantly illustrates a well-known truth: cooking and eating are important ways of building community, of enacting belonging, of making a home. Home is most commonly understood as a private space of comfort and refuge, of memory and nostalgia. However, the works in 1497, curated by artist Lantian Xie, reveal how ideas of home and belonging are implicated in and complicated by historical narratives of power and politics. Of particular interest is the lingering impact of European colonialism, as the cryptic title suggests, a reference to the year that explorers Amerigo Vespucci and Vasco da Gama made their initial voyages in search of the new worlds. To wit, Jacob Lawrence’s The Burning (1997) depicts a key moment during the lateeighteenth-and-early-nineteenth-century Haitian Revolution, the first successful antislavery/ anticolonial struggle, when the capital was

torched rather than surrendered. Home becomes a site of resistance, its cherished comforts sacrificed for freedom and independence. The print’s restraint is startling: flames appear as delicate, almost ornamental red and yellow spikes atop each burning building. Xie carefully forgoes direct representations of conflict and oppression, instead assembling a sparse constellation of suggestive objects. Bodies are mostly absent; instead, their ghosts haunt the space, filling it with subtle intonations of violence. Danh Vo’s 2.2.1861 (2009) is a copy of a letter written by a French missionary in Vietnam to the latter’s father on the eve of the missionary’s execution. Carefully transcribed by the artist’s own father, who has no access to French, this archival trace of a colonial encounter becomes a drawing exercise. And in Raja’a Khalid’s Useful Tropical Plants (2014), an industrial diffuser periodically fills the gallery with a synthetic scent that approximates the smell of a greenhouse in Berlin that began as a repository for tropical plants collected from Germany’s colonies. This scent is paired with a print of a 1950s Vogue cover shot of American model, actress and socialite Liz Pringle in a pose of rapturous abandon on a pristine white beach. Pringle was a pioneer of luxury resort tourism in the Caribbean, and the diptych sets up a dialogue between two discrete moments that

both demonstrate the colonial impulse to possess the far away and instrumentalise it as exotic. This rhetoric of marketing the manufactured exotic is familiar in Dubai, where luxury tourism is big business. Conflicted national borders, a common residue of colonialism, are also addressed. In each of Shilpa Gupta’s Tree Drawings (2013), white thread – its length proportional to that of the fence separating two neighbouring countries – is used to draw a tree native to both, its natural habitat stubbornly transgressing the arbitrary border between them. And Hera Büyüktasçiyan’s Main Balcony (2014), a lifesize replica of a wrought-iron balcony, serves as a bittersweet monument to the lost Istanbul childhood of an elderly Greek-Armenian woman forcibly repatriated to Greece. Above this balcony, suspended from a thread pulled taut across the gallery, are three hooks that comprise UBIK’s tongue-in-cheek Support System (2015). In the absence of a path to naturalisation or even permanent residency, home is not something that can be taken for granted by Dubai’s many long-term expatriate residents. Dangling delicately, UBIK’s modest found objects serve as apt metaphors for a type of attachment symptomatic of this city, one that is tentative and precarious, that is always a balancing act. Murtaza Vali

Raja’a Khalid, Useful Tropical Plants, 2014, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai

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Keiji Uematsu Invisible Force Simon Lee Gallery, London 8 April – 5 May Mono-ha, the Japanese art movement with which Keiji Uematsu is most closely associated, is typically translated as ‘school of things’. And yet, as Uematsu’s first UK show reveals, the concept isn’t actually that great a fit for the sixtynine-year-old: mainly because his practice just doesn’t seem particularly ‘thingy’. His 1970s work, especially, encompasses photography and performance to a much greater extent than most of his Mono-ha contemporaries, who principally or exclusively worked in sculpture, which is perhaps why he’s been slightly left out of the current revival of interest in the movement. And even his actual sculptural works – which in this exhibition date from only the past few years – don’t emphasise their own materiality and objecthood the way core Mono-ha works do. Instead, Uematsu’s primary focus has always been on forces – on the invisible interplay of tension and balance – rather than actual matter itself. Two sculptures encapsulate this. Floating form – invisible axis (2015) consists of a two-metrelong copper cylinder suspended just above the floor by a steel cable that loops up through a ceiling-tie and tethers at the other end to a craggy rock on the ground, the cable being so

thin that for a moment it seems like the sideways cylinder is hovering in space. Not that you’re meant permanently to be taken in. Rather, the point is to generate an atmosphere of artifice and contrivance – with the gently swaying weight resembling some strange, otherworldly prop, and even the anchoring rock looking somehow unreal – so that the physical facts of the work seem to pale before the greater, eternal truths of the forces being invoked: the downward pull of gravity, and the counteracting tension in the wire. And there’s a similar sense to Cutting – triangle (2016), where two unequal sections of wooden beam are hung horizontally by an inverted ‘V’ of rope that’s hooked to the wall, with the beams’ touching ends not quite sitting square – this misalignment being, of course, a measure of the imbalance between their respective lengths and thus their weights. The piece becomes like a mathematical illustration, its outward form a mere accident, its physical arrangement the result, indeed, of physics. This illustrative ethos extends to Uematsu’s photographs from 1973 – two years before he left Japan and moved to Düsseldorf, where he still resides. The works are all pairs of sequential

shots: a long plank of wood lying on the ground with a slack rope attached, in the first frame of Board/Man/Rope, followed by Uematsu leaning back on the tilting plank while supporting himself with the taut rope; or, in Vertical Position, an upright wooden block within an empty doorway that, once Uematsu lifts it aloft in the subsequent image, is precisely the right height to reach the lintel. The same basic, inherent forces and dimensions, these images seem to state, were present all along – it just took the artist dynamically to complete the composition and make you realise it. Sometimes, though, an idea doesn’t even have to be literally realised. That’s the message, presumably, behind his hugely tall charcoal drawings, all titled Situation – gravity axis (2016), which represent side-on views of oblong shapes – perhaps more long planks or cylinders – stacked and balanced in precarious positions. The accurate, two-dimensional modelling acts almost like a rebuttal of mainstream Mono-ha ideology: a statement that, as long as the fundamental rules of physics are honourably observed, the final form of a work can be as unreal or whimsical as you like. Gabriel Coxhead

Tree/Man I, 1973, two vintage gelatin silver prints, each 76 × 55 cm. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy the artist; Simon Lee Gallery, London & Hong Kong; and Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo

Summer 2016

Cao Fei MoMA PS1, New York 3 April – 31 August Chinese artist Cao Fei’s first US museum retrospective comes to her at the age of thirty-seven. Curator Hou Hanru, who enthusiastically introduced Cao’s videowork Imbalance 257 (1999) to the Western contemporary art scene, once called her ‘a kind of prodigy’. Since then, the artist has been tied to aspirations concerning ‘the new’: the new generation, the new China and the new digital sphere (aka the online virtual world Second Life). Which brings us a question: when the new has aged – the college girl has grown into a mother of two, China has transformed from an open-and-reform market to the world’s second largest economy and Second Life has become a database archive – is it time to rebrand, not only the artist’s sensitivity, but also interpretations of the zeitgeist captured in her works? Showcasing highlights from Cao’s oeuvre, the exhibition is spread out over eight rooms in which the viewer is offered a rare glimpse into the early days of the artist’s career, as well as blockbuster hits such as the RMB City series (2007–11), a multimedia production that documents and manipulates Cao’s anthropological curiosity about Second Life as an extended field of reality on the Internet. The selected excerpts on display from this massive production, such as i Mirror by China Tracy (AKA: Cao Fei) (2007) and RMB City: A Second Life Planning (2007), seemingly dwell on yesterday’s promises, in juxtaposition to the quiet fact that her failed attempt to turn RMB City into a citizen town with autonomous government and a selfelection mechanisms has become a set of cold images sitting on a hard drive. The first room the viewer enters is filled with displays of the models Cao crafted for her latest work, La Town (2014), an odyssey through a postapocalyptic city. These handmade and readymade miniature models and figurines are assembled in standard museum-style vitrines, and are reminiscent of a museum of civilisation,

an urban-planning exhibition centre or a three-dimensional reproduction of cropped moments from a theatrical performance. It’s hard to tell whether this room of ‘representations’ serves as a beginning or an end in the sequence: to its left is the screening room of the actual film; in the room to its right, seven early videos, dating from 1995 to 2002, are lined in a circle – a literal reference to the late-night museum in La Town, a temporary place to house authenticity, memory, meaning and utopia. The exhibition chronicles how the use of moving images has evolved in Cao’s work, growing from archival documentation of early performances to a more committed and sustained exploration of the medium, including documentaries of social experiments, video installations of new-media experience and film essays. The pieces on show include a video documentation of the first experimental-theatre piece Cao made, for a high-school New Year celebration gala, and the hilarious and brilliant The Little Spark (1995), a play on Cultural Revolution theatre, in which the artist played a leading role. Yet the lines between different media are deliberately blurred. Photographs and installations are staged in juxtaposition with the videos to either contextualise or dramatise the production process of these videos, or to amplify the visual resonances of the subject matters. But for those unfamiliar with Cao’s work, it can be a lot to take in – the total length of the videos adds up to over three hours. Her work in the late 1990s/early 2000s, so often lauded in its time for being the voice of China’s disaffected youth, is also beginning to seem a bit staged. At first glance, her early videoworks visualising the topsy-turvy world of self-exploration, such as Imbalance 257 (1999), Chain Reaction (2000) and Burners (2002), are encouraged by a dramaturgical revolt against conservatism. Reflecting on Cao’s early works, Hu Fang, writer and cofounder of Vitamin

facing page, bottom Whose Utopia Series: My Future is Not a Dream 03, 2006, c-print, 120 × 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

facing page, top Cosplayers Series: Tussle, 2004, c-print, 75 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

Creative Space, a Guangzhou-based gallery that represents the artist, confesses in one of his essays that he ‘suspected the performance in the video was overwrought and theatrically exaggerated, resulting in the ease in pigeonholing them as some sort of “spectacle” depicting the youth of New China’. In fact, Cao’s cultural outlook at the time was largely shaped by a mixed bag of influences imported from outside mainland China: films of Shuji Terayama, MTV, Hong Kong movies, etc. Her early work can hence be read more as the representation of the influence itself – a privileged access to a wider cultural exposure and the politically peripheral status of Guangzhou – than an embodiment of new China in general. Only in her later works, the justly celebrated Cosplayers (2004) and Whose Utopia (2006), equally personal but better measured, does Cao seem to have progressed from just playing with genre to a more nuanced meditation on her young subjects, which is an interplay of fantasy, utopia and reality. Different from the void of context in some of her earlier work and the exaggerated nihilism, the characters in Cosplayers and Whose Utopia are grounded in the kind of social contracts (family and workplace) to which one can relate. Suddenly, we are able to experience the emotion of human conditions in this generation of youth and the layers of the reality they tried to cope with. In retrospect, perhaps this conception of ‘new’ around Cao Fei was invented as an internal resistance from her backers in order to dodge the framework of Western-centric art-history, or maybe it can be read as a symptom of temporary aphasia that happens when one encounters foreign things – the manifestation of external resistance by her Western readers. Where that leaves us then is considering the issue of whether or not, when the artist’s own creative expression is marching forward, interpretations of it need a makeover as well. Wu Yan

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Summer 2016

Books

ArtReview Asia

Provoke: Between Protest and Performance. Photography in Japan 1960 / 1975 edited by Diane Dufour and Matthew S. Witkovsky Steidl, €60 (softcover) The period between the late 1960s through the 70s – the last decade of large-scale political movements in Japan – is usually considered to be the golden age of Japanese photography. One of the most influential publications during that time was Provoke, which featured new work by photographers and writers. Although it ran for only two years and three issues (plus a compilation) it was such a seminal magazine that the ‘Provoke era’ is now used to describe the postwar avant-garde, defined by their experimental attitude and Are-Bure-Boke style, which is blurry, grainy and out-of-focus black-and-white photography. Since then, the work of many former Provoke members such as Daido Moriyama and the late Takuma Nakahira have been widely exhibited and, in Vienna this January, the first major touring exhibition of Provoke opened, accompanied by a book, Provoke: Between Protest and Performance, which not only reproduces pages from the magazine, but provides it with a historical context. Provoke was launched in 1968 by photographers Takuma Nakahira and Yutaka Takanashi, critic Koji Taki and poet Takahiko Okada. As seen from the diversity of its participants’ occupations, the magazine did not restrict itself to showcasing photography, but aimed to create, as stated in the inaugural editorial, ‘provocative materials for thought’. Moriyama joined the collective from the second issue, but after

publishing the third issue, and a final compilation, the group broke up. Provoke’s iconic status, both at home and internationally, is a result of the experimental nature of the artwork it featured and the unique approach of allowing photography to bump into thoughts and politics, and generally mix together. Or, as explained in the introduction to this book, Provoke arguably bound photography to political and social protest on the one hand, and to avant-garde performance on the other. It was not a photography magazine nor a photography critique, but rather a radical act of defiance against dominant forms of art, politics, philosophy and criticism, and against society of that time. This volume’s three sections (‘Protest’, ‘Provoke’, and ‘Performance’) draw a picture of the historical and intellectual backdrop against which Provoke was born. The first chapter, ‘Protest’, contains images and texts from other protest photography books from the 1960s and 1970s, and maps the intellectual territory for Japanese protest photography. In ‘Provoke’, most of the pages from the first three issues of Provoke magazine are reproduced. Moreover, this extends to spreads from important photobooks subsequently published by the original Provoke photographers: among them, For a Language to Come (1970) by Nakahira, Farewell Photography (1972) by Moriyama, and Towards the City (1974) by Yutaka Takanashi. The final

chapter ‘Performance’ attempts to link protest photography to performance by focusing on performance groups active from the 1960s onwards and the use of photography in performance art. As is mentioned in the preface to the book, protest is not performance, but under certain circumstances the two activities are closely analogous and so is Provoke. The present volume is a must-read for those who study Japanese photography and avantgarde art movements. Provoke-era fans will be especially satisfied, as this is the first book that includes so many images of important, but hard-to-get photobooks with translations of crucial texts and interviews. However, this volume will also appeal to those who have never heard of the movement, for the way it simultaneously captures the movement in overview and zooms in on interesting details. However, it must be said that, especially in Western countries, the movement has been somewhat idealised over time. As Koji Taki said in 1993, it was iconic but not the only movement in play during that period of transition; additionally we need to look at the movement in terms of societal change since then. What might be more interesting still is a reconsideration of the movement from a contemporary point of view, in order to investigate what kind of legacy has been left to subsequent generations. Yukihito Kono

Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan Verso Books, £9.99 (softcover) Few crime novels reveal the identity of both the killer and the victim in the first sentence. But then, Man Tiger isn’t really a crime novel in the traditional sense. Set in an unspecified village on the coast of Java, it opens with the brutal murder of Anwar Sadat, a failed painter and known womaniser, by young Margio, a normally calm boy, who, when interrogated by the police confesses that he did so under the influence of a tigress who has been living inside his body. From there, the narrator takes us on a journey back to the genesis of this crime: into Margio’s childhood, his growing hate for his abusive father and confusion about his longsuffering mother, the ties with the village neighbours, and his encounter with the tigress. The lack of evident motive and suspense do not

detract from the tension of this well-constructed novel. The rhythm may feel slow, even repetitive sometimes (the book is written like a folktale as one long flow with barely any dialogue, and with multiple overlapping narratives), but the unraveling of the complex psychology of the characters and the relationships between them is so spellbinding that it keeps the reader engaged until the final chapter. Through its depiction of everyday life in the village, the novel immerses the reader in the social reality of a rural Indonesia that is also infused with Islam and Hindu-Buddhist beliefs as well as traditions of animism and spiritualism (these last particularly rooted in Java). Therefore, the irruption of the supernatural – be it the encounter with the white tigress, both a spirit

Summer 2016

and physical animal inherited from his grandfather, or a magically narrowing grave that seems to reject the body it’s meant to welcome – comes as no surprise to the characters, and by virtue of that, to the reader, like in folktales and, more specifically, the epics told in wayang, the ancestral and popular art of Indonesian shadow puppet theatre, where supernatural creatures fight alongside queens and kings until the invariable triumph of good over evil. Except the story here is far less simplistic: at once humorous and bleak, mundane and thrilling (with the right amount of bawdy), Man Tiger draws its force and inspiration from many sources (crime novel, wayang, magical realism, social critique) and, as is generally the case with great writing, escapes easy categorisation. Louise Darblay

New Thai Style

Sar: The Essence of Indian Design

by Kim Inglis Laurence King, £29.95 (hardcover)

by Swapnaa Tamhane and Rashmi Varma Phaidon, £49.95 (hardcover)

New Thai Style is a trawl through a selection of private homes, hotels and resorts in a search of some perfect fusion of tradition and innovation that apparently constitutes luxury living in Thailand today. Sar (which means ‘essence’ in Hindi) is an index of 200 relatively everyday objects (most of them new, but a few of them a century or so old) that tell us about the nature of Indian design and Indian life. Both picturebooks (the objects in Sar are photographed through the kind of lascivious lens that normally captures food porn for cookbooks), you might say, are throwaway publications. The kind of thing you buy as a present for someone you don’t know or as a holiday souvenir to get rid of your last bits of currency at the airport (although you’d need a lot of leftover currency to buy Sar). So why review them? Because in many ways both books are founded on a contradictory ‘methodology’ that is creeping into global art culture. At the same time as they propose to offer an insight into something that is innate (to the Thai-ness or Indian-ness of buildings or objects), both books seek to offer something that is transferrable (the point of these books – presumably – is that the reader too can acquire the essential components of Thai-ness or Indianness). In both books therefore (or in an exhibition), every object has a meaning that is inherently related to the context of its production (which is why you need an expert – an author or curator – to guide you through it), but a meaning that it can nevertheless carry with it, regardless of the context in which it is displayed

(otherwise why would you be interested in the book or exhibition). Hence, in New Thai Style we get a peek into a garden with some unspecified (but seemingly temple-style) ‘reproduction stone carving’, or a living room full of similarly unspecified scatter rugs accompanied by sofa sets and cushions ‘sourced from Jim Thompson’. The last is a company set up by the eponymous American entrepreneur who (except for the fact that he is long dead) perhaps represents the New Thai Style dream: his former home, assembled from six traditional Thai houses bought from around the country and then assembled into a new whole during the late 1950s, is now a museum. Out of the dream and back in the book, we end up with sentences like this one: ‘Thai style has always been permeable to outside influences and it may be this combination of time-honoured traditions and new styles… that makes contemporary Thai design so attractive.’ So, the essence of ‘new’ Thai style is attractive because it doesn’t have to be Thai style? Hey, I can achieve that! Meanwhile, in Sar, we learn that ‘new’ Indian design is about the opposite: ‘a new confidence to look inside the country for inspiration rather than outside it’. None of which explains what a relatively standard pressure cooker is doing here. Or a roti press (which looks exactly the same as a hamburger press), accompanied by a text that claims that the press ‘means’ that you no longer need to use a rolling pin for roti or chapatti-making, and looks forward to the release of the fully automated Rotimatic which will take care of the whole roti-making business

from bag of flour to finished product on plate. OK, perhaps I’m being unfair to the pressure cooker here. The authors of Sar do hint at the fact that it might represent something important about how India was exploited (first as a result of compulsion, then of addiction) during the colonial era and beyond as a market for British-made goods: indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century Indians were the biggest purchasers of the stuff. But that story has very little to do with the ostensible subject here: the pressure cooker’s design – even if, as the authors, an artist/curator and a fashion designer, presumably do, you consider it to be the result of an act of appropriation. The problem here is that if you claim, as the authors of Sar do (and as many curators of international art exhibitions also do), to be looking at these objects ‘free of an ethnographic lens’ and in terms of their aesthetics alone (that which makes these objects transferable) you are either forced to abandon some of what made them essential or significant in the first place (as is the case with New Thai Style’s mysterious ‘reproduction’ sculptures); or to resort to the ethnography you proposed to abandon – for the authors of Sar the function of the Damroo stool (named for its drum-shape) ‘is integral to the Indian way of life of spontaneous gatherings’. In the end, I’m not saying that either of these books pretends to be anything that it is not. But both, in different ways, highlight the inherent tensions surrounding the (re)presentation of distinct cultures in a globalised world. Nirmala Devi

Imran Qureshi: Where the Shadows are so Deep Ridinghouse and Barbican Art Gallery, £9.95 (hardcover) The dark red vines that entwine the trunks of the trees that populate Imran Qureshi’s miniature landscape paintings end in sprays of similarly-coloured foliage, but the visual association is as much anatomical as botanical. The vines are equally veins, the sprays not leaves but spurts of fresh blood, echoes of the carnage created by bomb blasts in the artist’s native Lahore, and a patterning that recurs in his work. There’s unsettling gore (or what resembles it) everywhere in Qureshi’s commission for London’s Barbican Curve gallery – up the walls, across the floor and spattered

across the 35 paintings themselves, which hang in a snaking line along the wall of the darkened space, illuminated by spotlights that bounce back light from areas of gold leaf within the work. There’s destruction too in the way that some trees appear snapped off at their base or torn up by their roots, or in the way that the earth, with its curved horizon line mirroring the curve of the gallery, may appear gashed or ruptured. Rebirth comes in the white peony-like painted blooms that Qureshi skilfully suggests, growing out of the rivulets of red.

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If the reproductions of the paintings in this slim publication that accompanies the show don’t quite capture either the darkness or the luminosity of Qureshi’s work, then the words of Mohsin Hamid do. Curator Eleanor Nairne’s text provides context but author Hamid paints a picture of the artist and the work in a more poetic way. Through 35, beautifully paced, numbered paragraphs – the same number as paintings in the show – Hamid describes a meeting with Qureshi and his journey from child to artist, to the creation of these paintings. It’s a perfectly pitched piece of prose. Helen Sumpter

Afterwork Readings edited by Para Site and KUNCI Cultural Studies Center Para Site/KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, free (hardcover) In July 2015, Para Site launched the yearlong Hong Kong’s Migrant Domestic Workers Project in order to ‘build connections between the artistic community, the city’s wider public sphere, and the domestic worker community’. Although they make up 4 percent of Hong Kong’s population, domestic workers are largely underrepresented in its politics. In 2013 the Hong Kong government ruled against granting Foreign Domestic Helpers (FDHs) the right of abode, regardless of the number of years they had been in service. Foreigners working in other professional sectors are allowed to apply after seven years of employment. Not having any base outside of their employers’ residences (in which they are legally required to live), the mass Sunday-picnics below the HSBC headquarters and in the financial district’s surrounding parks are a visible reminder of their presence and status. The idea behind the initiative, therefore, was to raise awareness of the issues facing the city’s largest minority group by setting up the subproject A Room of Their Own, in collaboration with KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, which had begun research into the lives of Indonesian migrant workers, and which set in motion The Afterwork Reading Club/ Klub Baca Selepas Kerja. Between 2015 and 2016, the reading club ran six sessions for Indonesian domestic migrant

workers (some of whom are also writers) and resulted in an agreement that Para Site would fund rental spaces for a mobile library (the subject of a text by migrant worker Aiyu Nara) at which FDHs of different nationalities could share a cross-cultural literary space as well as learn about their legal rights. Concurrent with Para Site’s spring exhibition of works by both artists and domestic workers, and developed following the series of reading-group sessions, Afterwork Readings is an anthology of migrant and domesticworker literature. Published in four languages (Indonesian, English, Tagalog and Cantonese), the book is formed of poems and short stories: aware of the dangers of marking this as an exclusively Indonesian concern, the editors have been careful to expand its geographical range. The foreword stresses that these stories intend to give a voice, without being patronising, to the community of workers. But here it starts to get confusing: which community of workers are Para Site and KUNCI referring to? Migrant domestic workers or migrant workers in general? And I can’t help wondering about the implications of having other writers pen the experiences of these workers: is an autobiographical text about the successful writing career of Nh. Dini, a well-educated former flight attendant who married a French diplomat,

really something a domestic worker who has had very little opportunity in life to begin with can relate to? Neither is there an explanation given for the number of texts (16 in total) written by Ruth Elynia S. Mabanglo, a retired professor of Filipino literature at University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Xu Lizhi, a poet and factory worker at Foxconn (a technology manufacturer) who came to prominence after his suicide at the age of twenty-four. Xu’s words are poignant and painful – ‘A space of ten square meters/Cramped and damp, no sunlight all year/Here I eat, sleep, shit, and think/Cough, get headaches, grow old, get sick but still fail to die’ – but these poems are the terrible story of a factory worker from mainland China, in mainland China. In the effort to record (to use Para Site and KUNCI’s words) a ‘pluri-singular’ migrant experience, whereby the participants of the reading club are reminded that they are people, and not defined by or confined to the term ‘domestic’, Afterwork Readings seems to have tried to be inclusive, but at the same time neglected to dedicate a decent percentage of its 156 pages (out of the 24 authors, four are presently domestic workers) to the current reality of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong – regardless of nationality. In short, Afterwork Readings loses a bit of focus and, in the end, leaves you asking who it is really for? Fi Churchman

The New Curator by Natasha Hoare, Coline Milliard, Rafal Niemojewski, Ben Borthwick and Jonathan Watkins Laurence King, £30 (softcover) Read the introduction to this book and you’ll probably end up chucking it in the bin. And not just because it’s symptomatic of contemporary art’s obsession with novelty; more because it expresses curating’s desperate desire for acknowledgement as an essential, specialist and discreet profession. Which always makes these books seem suspicious. Right from the off you’re told that a contemporary artworld is almost impossible to imagine without curators. People imagine it all the time. That Obrist, Biesenbach and Enwezor (none of whom are in this book – presumably because they are old curators) are household names. My mum would disagree. That new curating was invented by ‘legendary figures’. Like King Arthur? And, for the final kiss-off: ‘Let this book call the attention of all self-proclaimed curators to the methodologies and complexities of curatorial practice’. Let’s start a guild!

But stay your hand. This book is for the shelf not the bin. The interviews with 26 curators that are gathered in this volume make for a surprisingly fascinating read; not least because of the varied methodologies, backgrounds and even notions about what a curator does (Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy: ‘The word “urgency” makes me uneasy. I do not consider my or anyone’s curatorial practice akin to the work of a paramedic’). Among the interviewees are artists – Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin; gallerists – Chang Tsong-Zung; theorists – Chus Martínez; agencies – Artangel; as well as curators of biennials or festivals around the world. The interviews themselves provide an insightful mix of the personal (how did the interviewee become a curator) and the professional and give the impression that curating is a refreshingly diverse and location-specific business.

Summer 2016

That introduction aside, there’s only one other gripe. While the editors of the book boast that they have gathered together curators ‘from the four corners of the globe’, in reality it is shamelessly Eurocentric. Almost every time a curator not from Europe or the Americas is introduced we are told something about their connection to the West: that Chang introduced many of China’s leading contemporary artists to Europe; that India’s Clark House Initiative has an ongoing collaboration with the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris; that the artists at the heart of the 2013 Ghetto Biennale in Haiti were later featured in the Venice Biennale; and that the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Japan collaborates with Grizedale Arts in England’s Lake District. Perhaps that’s something that can be revised when the new new curators come around. Mark Rappolt

A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $16/£10.99 (softcover) Geoff Manaugh is best known as the creator of BLDGBLOG, for more than a decade one of the best architecture sites on the Internet, possibly the outright best. Blogging was (is) a fine vehicle for Manaugh’s talents: his manic energy, his magpie eye, his ability to put together the weirdest and wildest topics in terms of architecture and urbanism, and take them on journeys of imagination. ‘So what if…’ was a signature phrase, indicating the author was about to embark on a speculative dérive, which would often only be laying the groundwork for an even more fanciful scenario. Every BLDGBLOG post felt like it could be the germ of a longer essay, a book or a novel. But The BLDGBLOG Book (2009) stayed faithful to the experience of the blog: creativity sparking off in all directions, consistent only in its diversity of subjects and the glue of Manaugh’s charm. If only all that energy could be focused into a coherent beam and trained on one subject for a full 300 pages. What would that look like? A Burglar’s Guide to the City is that book, and it is a delight. None of the blog’s inventiveness or eye for twinkling minutiae has been lost, but at last a topic is given exhaustive attention. And it’s an excellent topic – burglary, the art of covertly entering buildings to take things that do not belong to you. It’s perfect territory for Manaugh, with his longstanding fascination with hidden doors and passages, and enthusiasm for transgressive uses of buildings and the city. Cracking open this vault, he finds the whole

universe. ‘Burglary is the original sin of the metropolis,’ Manaugh writes. ‘Indeed, you cannot tell the story of buildings without telling the story of the people who want to break into them: burglars are a necessary part of the tale, a deviant counternarrative as old as the built environment itself.’ Not strictly true – plenty have told that tale, of course. But Manaugh will make you wonder how they did without mentioning the masked rascal. The burglar is halfway between architecture critic and ghost, and spans a spectrum from lazy opportunism to patient technical genius. ‘Burglars explore,’ Manaugh says. ‘They might not live in a city full of secret passages and trapdoors, but they make it look as if they do.’ They tunnel up from beneath and descend through skylights. They are masters of materiality, taking professional interest in what walls, doors and ceilings are made of. They draft and build: George Leonidas Leslie, the greatest burglar of nineteenth-century New York, was a lapsed architect who turned his skills to crime, reconstructing bank vaults in detail in order to plan heists. A dumpster can be adapted to conceal someone cutting through a wall, and hide the debris. There are also plenty of idiots, the ones who get wedged in ducts and cat flaps. But all have something to say about buildings, on a fundamental level. ‘Burglary’, Manaugh writes, ‘requires architecture: without an inside and an outside, there is no such thing as burglary.’ This means the law

must define what constitutes a building, and therefore what architecture is. In a dizzying sequence, Manaugh looks at the foreverproliferating categories of objects regarded as buildings by different US state codes, and thus as venues for the crime of burglary: from railway cars to fishing boats, from telephone booths to tents, from potteries to cargo containers. A small excavation in a hillside, used for storage, is considered a building, ripe for the burglar. ‘Because of burglary law, architecture is suddenly everywhere,’ Manaugh writes. ‘We are surrounded by invisible buildings.’ Minton T. Wright III, an attorney who in 1951 laid out some of the problems entailed, put it differently: architecture is ‘magic’. Now the game is played in a large part online, making vastly more audacious heists possible. The entire source code for New Songdo, a ‘smart city’ in Korea, is kept in a safe-deposit box somewhere. You could steal a city – or at least the wherewithal to seize command of the entirety of its infrastructure. Another city, Bradbury in California, has tried to reduce its vulnerability to burglary by limiting its media profile, covering its tracks like, well, a burglar. A Burglar’s Guide to the City is a hugely entertaining and stimulating book, a treat on every level. With one caveat: it is not a relaxing holiday read, unless you want to spend your time on the beach imagining armies of depraved geniuses boring, rappelling, picking and hacking their way into your home. Will Wiles

Ringier Annual Report 2015 by Helen Marten JRP / Ringier, free (boxed) Who says accounting and art don’t go well together? Certainly not Switzerland’s largest media company, Ringier. For almost 20 years (under the directorship of art-collector Michael Ringier) it has given carte blanche to high-profile artists such as Fischli & Weiss, Richard Prince and, more recently, Laura Owens, to design its annual report, turning a traditionally dull exercise into collectable artist books. Better still, thanks to stock-market rules, it’s free to order online. This year’s report is designed by British artist Helen Marten and themed around sausages (the company data is included as a small booklet), which are treated with all the seriousness

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accorded to Ringier’s statements of profit and loss. This begins with a visit to two Swiss butchers, documented in 15 photographic plates; an accompanying text compares sausage manufacture – from the grinding, mixing and filling to the display of the final product on the butcher’s counter – to the publishing industry – the collecting, processing and redistributing of information (there’s a nod here to Dieter Roth’s ironic Literature Sausage, or Literaturwurst, 1961–70). With her usual flair for changing the way we look at everyday objects, Marten playfully magnifies her meaty subjects as aesthetic objects. The cold, extreme lighting of the photographs

ArtReview Asia

turns a potentially repulsive industrial process into a series of overaestheticised clinical compositions, where soaking intestines, ground meat, buckets of blood and raw sausages hanging off racks in the antiseptic meat-processing plant take on a decorative, even sculptural aspect. The metaphor filters through to the packaging of the book, wrapped in glassine (a traditional book covering, but also suggestive of butcher paper) and accompanied by two large, empty sheaths. Are they sausage cases waiting to be filled by readers inspired by the photographs? Or maybe they’re simply there to distract investors from the data report. Louise Darblay

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

f00% BLACK

To be read from the top right of facing page

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For more on Rokudenashiko, see overleaf

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Contributors

Grace Samboh is a curator based in Yogyakarta and Medan. She questions (a little bit) too many things all at the same time and believes that every person needs at least three copies of themselves. In 2010 she was the editor for Indonesian artist Edhi Sunarso’s monograph, and now she is compiling documents and photographs of Sunarso’s more than 30 diorama projects. Recent curatorial work includes #banyakbanyak – The Independence Project (2014–15), at Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, and Tahun Tanah 2015 (The Earth Year 2015), with Jatiwangi Art Factory, Majalengka, West Java. With research and curatorial group Hyphen, her partners in curiosity, she is unravelling facts and stories about Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia (Indonesia New Art Movement, 1975–89). For this issue she writes about the weight of Sukarno’s visual legacy on Indonesian cities. Joel Tan is a playwright, director and performer based in Singapore. Outside his work in theatre, he contributes essays and criticism to journals and magazines. This month, he writes about cult Singaporean comic-book author Troy Chin.

Charu Nivedita is an exile in his own country; there is an invisible ban on his writings in the Tamil milieu, whereas he is widely translated into Malayalam in nearby Kerala. Since his writings are transgressive in nature, he is branded as a pornographic writer and disliked by many. For a long time he was writing clandestinely under the pseudonym ‘Muniyandi’. He was born and raised in a slum until the age of eighteen, worked in the government services and survived as a pickpocket and catamite for a few years. He lives a reclusive life in Chennai, with his wife and two huge dogs. He notes: “There is not much difference between my life and my writings. I see my life as a text.” Here he writes about the political situation in Tamil Nadu.

Advisory Board Defne Ayas, Richard Chang, Anselm Franke, Claire Hsu, Pi Li, Eugene Tan, Koki Tanaka, Wenny Teo, Philip Tinari, Chang Tsong-zung, Yao Jui-Chung Contributing Writers Stephanie Bailey, Tiffany Chae, Heman Chong, Gabriel Coxhead, Max Crosbie-Jones, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Gallery Girl, Fiona He, Hu Fang, Kevin Jones, Yukihito Kono, Charu Nivedita, Grace Samboh, Young-jun Tak, Joel Tan, Murtaza Vali, Jason Waite, Wu Yan, Clara Young, Hanlu Zhang Contributing Artists / Photographers

Sari Handayani

Mikael Gregorsky, Sari Handayani, Rokudenashiko

is a photographer and graphic designer, currently studying photography at the Indonesian Institute of the Art (ISI), Yogyakarta. Her work was included in Jogja Biennale IX (2007), and she was commissioned to design books for several Indonesian artists, such as Uji Handoko and Eko Nugroho. In 2008 she cofounded the contemporary art fair Art Jog with Heri Pemad and Bambang Toko, where she works as brand manager.

Rokudenashiko (preceding pages)

A culture’s definition of obscenity is slippery and forever changing. Japan is no exception, shifting from the shameless celebration of sex in shunga prints from the Edo period (c. 1603–1867) to the establishment in 1907 of Article 175 of the Penal Code, outlawing the distribution of ‘obscene materials’, their imprecise definition left to local authorities to interpret and enforce. This was the law that the Tokyo-based sculptor and manga author Rokudenashiko (rokuden meaning ‘good for nothing’, the satirical alias of Megumi Igarashi) was arrested for breaking on 14 July 2014. Her mission is to contest what she calls the “discrimination and ignorant treatment of the vagina” in Japan, even if the price for this is being shunned by family and friends, and her husband of ten years ending their marriage. Rokudenashiko had made liberating but scarcely titillating ‘decoman’ (decorated manko, or ‘pussy’, art) pieces for a women-only sex shop and gallery based on a 3D mould of her own sex organ. Then,

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to raise money to turn her digitised vagina into a three-metre-long kayak, she offered the vector data in a downloadable file and on CD-ROM as a reward to 30 crowd-funders of her successful project. This was all too much for the Tokyo police, who detained and interrogated her for a week, before freeing her on appeal, only to arrest her again on 3 December 2014, along with the gallery owner, and hold them for over 20 days. Officially and in the mass media, Rokudenashiko was referred to as a ‘so-called artist’. Defiant, she refused to stay silent. As a regular cartoonist for the leftist Shukan Kinyobi (Weekly Friday) magazine, she had previously published diary-style ‘reality manga’ based on her personal experiences. Now she began a new comic about her treatment by the authorities and on social media, her indictment in 2015 and the ¥800,000 (about $7,000) fine sought by police in February 2016. Her serialised graphic reportage, she says, provided a means for coping with the absurd and alarming injustices she was

ArtReview Asia

enduring and to build support for her case in Japan and worldwide. On 9 May 2016, the court reached a verdict: she was found guilty of distributing obscene materials, namely the digital file of her vagina, and fined. Her defence team argued that providing this file was part of a larger artistic project, but the court considered that it had no artistic value, as it had not been modified. The court found her not guilty of public display of obscenity for her decoman works, partly because of their artistic value and partly because they were in a venue for women only, so no men risked being aroused. (By this logic, only men can be aroused by a vagina.) Shortly after the trial ended, Rokudenashiko flew to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival to launch the English edition of her manga from Koyama Press, What Is Obscenity? The Story of a Good For Nothing Artist and her Pussy. She and her lawyers intend to appeal her guilty verdict all the way to the highest court in Japan. Her fight against male-centric oppression of the female body is not over yet… 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 four times per year by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London EC1Y OTH, England, United Kingdom

Photo credits

Text credits

on the cover and on page 76 photography by Sari Handayani

Phrases on the spine and on pages 17, 39 and 79 are from The Weaver’s Song, by Kabir (1398–1448), published by Penguin Books India in 2003

on pages 96 and 106 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Summer 2016

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Off the Record

“Just look at this!” I gesture expansively around me. There is a total lack of reaction from the gathering of representatives from leading Asian galleries. I’m initially disappointed. I would have thought that at least the Printed Letter Press Maxi Dress that I’m wearing by Thaiborn, Central Saint Martins-educated Disaya Sorakraikitikul would have got some whoops. Then I realise that none of them can actually hear me above the din in Strikers Sports Pub, which not only boasts large screens but, being a premier bar in Bangkok, features dancing ladies doing ‘the Bangkok shuffle’. I grab the megaphone I’ve thoughtfully stuffed into my Alexander Wang Prisma Skeletal textured-leather backpack. “Asian gallerists! Yes, you there representing galleries that include but are not delimited to Hakgojae Gallery, Antenna Space, Hanart TZ, Take Ninagawa, White Cube, Nature Morte…” There’s some shouting. “Samong Kee Leauy!” “They’re not Asian!” “Aey Bah Garm!” Chaos has erupted. The representative from White Cube is bundled out of the bar. But the shouting hasn’t stopped. It seems I’ve also upset football fans at neighbouring tables, who have started throwing snacks seemingly made of dried shrimps, roasted peanuts and chilli wrapped in banana leaves at me. I gesture towards both the gallerists and various Thai football fans. I realise this could degenerate badly. “Ranieri! Oh-oh-oh! Ranieri! Oh-oh-oh! He came from Italy! To man-age the Cit-eee!” I warble into the megaphone. The gallerists look puzzled, but at least the football fans stop throwing savoury snacks. “Gallerists! Let’s learn from these football fans surrounding us and the way they are celebrating the greatest story ever told – the unlikely rise of Leicester City FC from serial losers to champions of the English Premier League!” The gallerists turn around and look at the Thai football fans, who are all dressed in the blue kit of the hitherto entirely unfashionable and unsuccessful British football club. The fans start singing a song about the club’s burly defender Danny Drinkwater to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s ‘I Love You Baby!” “We love you Danny, and if it’s quite alright, we love you Danny, we’ll let you shag our wives…” The representatives from Take Ninagawa join in enthusiastically but the rest still look nonplussed.

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“And what’s Leicester City?” I continue, booming into the microphone. “It’s Asian! It’s owned by Thais! Us Asians have taken over a small, hitherto unsuccessful and somewhat anonymous element of the postpopular manifestation of Western capitalism, secretly taught the hitherto mediocre players ‘the Asian way’, installed a genial elderly Italian gentleman to front up and then pulled off what’s agreed to be the most unlikely victory in sporting history. And now we get to use our cheap labour costs to churn out lots of replica shirts that we can sell back to the filthy Westerners! What can we learn as Asian gallerists?” Suddenly I see lights go on in the gallerists’ heads. A chap who I think could well be from Hakgojae pipes up: “We should quietly take over an unobtrusively failing mediumsize Western art commercial venture or noncommercial but intellectually decent venture, install a charismatic but dim elderly Italian as the public face of the organisation while secretly entirely changing the model of said organisation in preparation for totally unanticipated global success. And then when we dominate the artworld, we sell them all sorts of rubbish whether object or idea-based?” “Got it in one!” I reply. Meanwhile the Thai Leicester City fans start doing the conga around the bar while serenading their Algerian star winger and playmaker. “Du du du du derr du du du, Riyad Mahrez,” they sing. The gallerists have excitedly started talking among themselves. Somebody has ordered a round of Chang beer and Mekhong whisky. I hear ideas being shouted out. “The Lyon Biennale!” “Acquavella Galleries!” “Manifesta!” “Max Hetzler!” I’m absolutely loving this thought-shower. “Let’s think about outputs!” I yell. “Let’s think about consensus-building over conflict, practical solutions over lofty principles. Let’s think about our avuncular Italian frontman!” “Francesco Bonami!” they all shout back in unison. “Jamie Vardy is having a party! Bring your vodka and your charlie!” sing the fans about their charismatic striker. The fans are now freely intermingling with the gallerists, and even the dancing girls have joined in, all contributing to the ever-expanding discussion. I proudly look at my new squad united in this quest for artworld domination, and I know that they are going to give 110 percent. Gallery Girl

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