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Guan Xiao Navin Rawanchaikul Douglas Coupland Praneet Soi Cheng Tsun-Shing

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ArtReview Asia vol 4 no 1 2016

Flux and us As each issue of ArtReview Asia goes by, it becomes ever more aware of what a Sisyphean task it is to try to grasp everything that’s happening in contemporary art in the vast territory it covers. That, of course, is how ArtReview Asia likes it. Not because it’s a masochist, but because that’s what makes being an art magazine interesting: the constant discovery of something new. Or received wisdom that is constantly being challenged, adapted and adjusted. It’s not like getting into the Padang Restaurant at the Singapore Cricket Club, where the codes of dress and conduct are clear, or like trying to commission a review of royal dogs in Thailand – you just don’t do it. In a way those are the remnants of a (slowly) dying age. The customs, rules and boundaries of societies across Asia are in a constant state of flux. Once performance art was effectively banned in Singapore; now it’s (sort of) celebrated in its National Gallery (see reviews). As a society changes, so does its art (and vice versa). In this issue you can read about the adaptation of ancient wisdom in theatre director Wang Molin’s account of Confucian and Taoist philosophies, their relevance to the thoughts of Roland Barthes and their role in understanding the photographs of Cheng Tsun-Shing, and the nature of documentary photography in general. The boundaries of lazy convention are also what coverartist Guan Xiao seeks to escape through what many people (not her) would call a post-Internet practice. They are also what the exhibition Don’t Follow the Wind, which takes place in the exclusion zone around Fukushima in Japan, seeks to challenge, and they are what Indian artist Praneet Soi’s latest works seek to challenge. So here’s to difficulty and flux and everything that makes art interesting. ArtReview Asia

In case of flux…

Art Previewed Previews by Mark Rappolt 15

Points of View by Hu Fang, Maria Lind 25

Art Featured Guan Xiao by Li Bowen 30

Navin Rawanchaikul by Adeline Chia 50

Praneet Soi by Niru Ratnam 38

Douglas Coupland by Heman Chong 56

Don’t Follow the Wind by Taro Nettleton 44

Cheng Tsun-Shing by Wong Molin 60

page 50 Navin Rawanchaikul, Places of Rebirth, 2009, acrylic of canvas, 220 × 720 cm. Collection Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

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Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 68

Books 90

Between Declarations and Dreams / Siapa Nama Kamu?, by Mark Rappolt Liu Chuang, by Edward Sanderson Yan Xing, by Kristian Mondrup Nielsen Zheng Bo, by Wu Yan Tsuyoshi Ozawa, by Taro Nettleton David Diao, by Fiona He Nina Canell, by Aimee Lin Kyuchul Ahn, by Tiffany Chae Richard Streitmatter-Tran, by C.A. Xuan Mai Ardia 6th Moscow Biennale, by Sergey Guskov 14th Istanbul Biennial, by Aimee Lin Nguyen Trinh Thi, by Heidi Ballet Jitish Kallat, by Christopher Mooney Survival Is Not Enough, by Ming Lin Ian Cheng, by Ming Lin 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, by Vera Mey

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, by Sonny Liew I Ate Tiong Bahru, by Stephen Black Yu Youhan, by Paul Gladston South: A State of Mind #6, edited by Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk Art in the Anthropocene, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin THE STRIP 94 OFF THE RECORD 98

page 88 Tadanori Yokoo, Swimming at Dawn, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 46 × 53 cm. Photo: Norihiro Ueno. Courtesy the artist and Albertz Benda, New York

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Art Previewed

Not by refraining from action does man attain freedom from action. Not by mere renunciation does he attain supreme perfection 13

Previewed Heman Chong South London Gallery, London Through 28 February

Jane Lee Singapore Tyler Print Institute Through 5 March

Chun Chang-Sup Kukje Gallery, Seoul 26 February – 27 March

Heman Chong Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai 23 January – 3 May

Yutaka Sone David Zwirner, 525 W19 St, New York Through 20 February

Park Seo-Bo White Cube Mason’s Yard, London Through 12 March

Picture This: Contemporary Photography and India Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Through 3 April

Joan Jonas NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore Through 3 April

Zhai Liang White Space Beijing Through 31 January

Time of Others: Contemporary Art from Four Museums across the Asia Pacific Singapore Art Museum Through 28 February

William Kentridge Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea Through 27 March The Paradox of Place: Contemporary Korean Art Seattle Asian Art Museum Through 13 March

Singapore Art Week 16–24 January Art Stage Singapore Marina Bay Sands, Singapore 21–24 January

Minouk Lim PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul Through 14 February

Yoko Ono Faurschou Foundation Beijing Through 3 July Zhang Hongtu Queens Museum, New York Through 28 February Yuichi Inoue 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa Through 21 March Dhaka Art Summit Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Complex 5–8 February

5 Jane Lee, PLAYING I,I (detail), 2015, produced at STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore. © the artist and STPI, Singapore

Recently ArtReview Asia has been rereading Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need Is Kill (2004). It will spare you the details of the invading aliens, the terraforming and the time loops, and merely state that the main protagonist is doomed to relive a fatal battle with the aliens, day after day, until he works out ever more skilful ways of killing them, how not to get killed himself and, as a result, how to win it. Sometimes that’s what it feels like when ArtReview Asia weaves its way through these previews, creating ever more ingenious links and segues from one to the next: each time it thinks it’s all over, people start opening new shows, a new issue is underway and ArtReview Asia has to start all over again. In All You Need Is Kill, our hero’s saviour is someone called the Full Metal Bitch, who

forms that hang on the gallery wall. At the has been through the looping thing before; beginning of this year Chong is on the other ArtReview Asia’s version of her is Heman Chong, side of the world (almost), when ‘everywhere’ who currently seems to be opening an exhibiincludes the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) tion every month. Indeed, it feels as if the in Shanghai, where (having familiarised Singaporean artist has managed to be everyhimself with the premises while judging the where for the past year. Not least in ArtReview (for which he created the cover of last November’s 2015 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award) the conceptual Power 100 issue) and ArtReview Asia (further 2 artist’s solo show Ifs, Ands, or Buts takes up on in this issue you can read his interview with residence throughout the building. Look out Douglas Coupland). At the end of last year, for endless reruns of Mr. Bean and the Road Runner cartoon, and for the theme of constraint 1 Chong’s An Arm, A Leg and Other Stories opened at the South London Gallery, with one million and how to avoid it to be further pursued in slickly blank black business cards littering the the museum gift shop, here transformed into floor of the main exhibition space; if letters a dispensary of legal advice thanks to a selection and numbers are what’s absent from the cards, of law books chosen by Ken Liu (whose biogthey are present in the 66 paintings of spam raphy has him as a science-fiction and fantasy emails, paperback fiction covers (sadly All You writer, poet, lawyer and computer programmer) Need Is Kill is not among them) and abstract and available for sale.

2 Heman Chong, One Thousand And One Nights 2016, light installation on exterior wall. Courtesy the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

1 Heman Chong, An Arm, A Leg and Other Stories, 2015 (installation view, South London Gallery, 2015). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Wilkinson Gallery, London

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3 Max Pinckers, The Horse to be Sacrificed Must be a Stallion, 2014, inkjet print, 133 × 109 cm. Courtesy the artist and Dillon Gallery, New York

4 Vandy Rattana, Monologue, 2014–15. Collection the artist

If Chong gives the impression of being com3 fortable anywhere, the subtitle of Picture This, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s four-person photography exhibition, lays out Contemporary Photography and India as the rather awkward meeting of two distinct concepts. Perhaps, though, it’s simply a reflection of the way in which Gauri Gill (whose work focuses on marginalised communities), Sunil Gupta (queer politics), Max Pinckers (social realities) and Pamela Singh (the experience of women) are connected to India in different ways. Don’t only expect conventional photography (Singh for example often paints and collages her images); do expect issues of gender, sexuality and identity in general (of course) to shape the scene. Otherness is evidently part of the Singapore 4 Art Museum (SAM)’s Time of Others, a survey of

work by 17 artists that explores the vexed issue of how artists can be true to the particularities of their local contexts while at the same time being part of a globalised world. With the enormous 64,000sqm National Gallery Singapore recently opened down the road, home to the largest public collection of Southeast Asian art (these regions are consolidating), the timing couldn’t be better. SAM’s show draws on the collections of four museums in the Asia Pacific region: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT); National Museum of Art, Osaka (NMAO), the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) and, of course, the current host institution. Heman Chong pops up again, and is joined by heavy hitters such as Danh Vō and On Kawara, but look out as well for works by Cambodian Vandy Rattana (also

on show in the recent Hugo Boss Asia Art Award at the RAM; his video Monologue, 2014, picks up on the country’s history of conflict and the effect it has on the land and the people living in it) and Hong Kong’s Tozer Pak (his 2008 A Travel without Visual Experience: Malaysia comprises travel photographs taken when the artist had his eyes (so they’re the product of some extrasensory instinct, perhaps) closed during a fiveday trip to Singapore’s nearest neighbour; here the photographs are on show in a darkened room and only become visible via the camera flashes of viewers’ mobile phones). Of course the natural time to see all that will be Singapore Art Week, when the city-state’s art scene pulls out all the stops. For those of you who are fair addicts, Art Stage Singapore (where away from the sales, Palais de Tokyo

director Jean de Loisy will be discussing whether of capture and release through ostensibly figuor not museums make global citizens) will be rative works involving birds and other forms the place to be; for those of you who are not, drawn from nature. there’s always the infinity pool at the top of the When it comes to pushing around media Marina Bay Sands hotel (but you’ll have to dodge and wrapping that into a fascination with a forest of selfie sticks if you want to get those 6 nature, Yutaka Sone is a past master. On show lengths in) or the casino next door to the fair at roughly the same time as Jane Lee’s display (housed in the MBS basement level). For those at STPI (albeit a continent or so removed), his art-lovers determined to keep it real, Singapore exhibition Day and Night at David Zwirner Tyler Print Institute (STPI) presents a solo exhiNew York goes in exactly the opposite direction 5 bition by local artist Jane Lee. Already known to the Singaporean’s recent moves: turning for pushing the boundaries of painting into the sculptures into paintings. More precisely, the domain of sculpture, expect Lee to take matters Japanese artist mines the iconography of his one step further here by exploiting STPI’s paperlarge-scale white-marble sculptures of, among making and printing expertise to produce other things, the skylines of Manhattan and a series of new works (the result of an earlier Hong Kong to produce paintings of the same residency at the institute) that explore issues scenes illuminated at night, almost in the

manner of an abstract pattern. Expect Sone’s sculptural riffs on artificial light and artificial nature to be on show too. That last jump between Singapore and America isn’t as random as you might be thinking. As ArtReview Asia told you at the start, at the moment it seems like everything repeats. And so on to an American exhibiting in Singapore, as pioneering performance and multimedia 7 artist Joan Jonas’s exhibition at the US Pavilion during last year’s Venice Biennale arrives at the home of its curator, Ute Meta Bauer (director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore). How do you spot a master? Well, one way might be when she produces work that encompasses many of the themes ArtReview Asia has been highlighting elsewhere among

6 Yutaka Sone, Hong Kong, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 122 × 183 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York & London

7 Joan Jonas, They Come to Us without a Word (production still), 2015. Courtesy the artist

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Ye Hongxing, Order No. 2, Mixed media on canvas, 2015

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8 William Kentridge, The Refusal of Time (installation view, Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2014), 2012. Photo: Anthea Pokroy. Courtesy Goodman, Johannesburg & Cape Town 10 The Promise of If, 2015, two-channel video projection, 30 min. Courtesy Korean Broadcasting System

9 Jung Yeondoo, Bewitched #2 Seoul, 2002, digital silver prints, 159 × 131 cm each. Courtesy the artist

these previews (that’s popularly called the zeitgeist, btw) – self-reflection, humanity’s relationship with nature and with place – all woven together in an immersive, intricate but never overwhelming environment that is testament to Jonas’s seventy-nine years of experience. While we’re on the subject of experience, 8 South African William Kentridge is offering a new one to the art lovers of South Korea (assuming they’ve never left the country), where he’s currently in the midst of his first solo exhibition in the republic. In 2015 he produced the staging for a performance of Alban Berg’s Lulu (1937) in New York, showed the drawings for that in a separate exhibition, presented a new animated film (touching on his recent experiences in China) in London and gave a South 9

African premiere to his multimedia performance Refuse the Hour (2013); and there was the trifling matter of solo shows in Mexico City, Amsterdam and Cape Town. Yep, currently Kentridge makes Chong look lazy. In Seoul he’ll be showing work from the past quarter-century, from nine animated films in the Soho Eckstein series (1989– 2011) with which he made his name, to The Refusal of Time (2012), which was a highlight of Documenta 13. Oh yes, in between everything else he also showed these works at Beijing’s UCCA last summer. As Western art stars go East, Eastern art stars go West, and this ever more constant churn sees work by Lee Yongbaek, Minouk Lim, Haegue Yang, Yee Sookyung, Suntag Noh and Jung Yeondoo gathered for The Paradox of Place:

ArtReview Asia

Contemporary Korean Art at the other SAM (you see, you see! – everything repeats, although this time it means the Seattle Art Museum). The show explores the paradoxes inherent in a split nation in preparation for local equivalents following the ascent of Donald Trump. Here Lim builds a TV studio to restage media coverage of the funerals of North Korea’s Kim Jong-il and former South Korean president Park Jung-hee; Noh falsely registered himself and his family as resident in a border village in order to photograph the US military’s radome (radar + dome); Jung exhibits a series of photographs documenting how his subjects actually appear (their day jobs) and how they wish to be; while Lee presents a video of soldiers camouflaging themselves into piles of flowers. Meanwhile,

10 back in Seoul’s PLATEAU, Lim, whose multi-

no particular self-identification with a formal media work of the past couple of decades has grouping during the rise to prominence of focused on the social cost of the Republic of the style during the 1970s) is open to debate, Korea’s modernisation, is bringing some of that although most were under the spell of French Art Informel. But if you want to figure out what’s home, presenting The Promise of If, a new installation that returns to the theme of families 11 behind it all, then work by the late Chung 12 dispersed and separated by Korea’s North–South Chang-Sup, one of the leading practitioners divide, taking its cue from the 1983 KBS live of the style, goes on show at Kukje Gallery in broadcast Finding Dispersed Families to explore February. Chung’s philosophy was that the artist a localised diaspora whose connections are should be one with his materials, and here his fading away over time. ‘unpainted paintings’ will be on show: they’re When it comes to recent Korean art, it’s artists 13 made by moulding traditional Korean papers from the Dansaekhwa (Korean monochrome after soaking them in water – a perfect example painting) movement who are currently riding of Dansaekhwa’s emphasis on process rather the crest of the commercial wave. To what than the achievement of specific results. extent the artists involved were part of a moveOf course there’s something slightly ironic ment in any conscious sense (no manifestos, about the current expansion of interest in a

group of artists whose work was initially concerned with a certain amount of repetition and constraint (at least partly shaped by the aftermath of the Korean War and the military dictatorship that ruled South Korea during the 1970s). Nevertheless Park Seo-Bo’s first solo exhibition in London’s White Cube, which focuses on monochrome works into which repeated pencil lines have been incised, will be an important introduction (and indeed induction) of the movement to another new audience. ‘New York is a Big Liar’! That’s how Zhai Liang introduced himself to New York back in 2014, using the accusation as the title for his debut solo show. Back on home turf, at White Space, the Beijing-based artist, currently among the ‘hottest’ – as ArtReview Asia’s art-fair friends

12 Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture (描法) No. 42–73, 1973, pencil and oil on canvas, 80 × 80 cm. Photo: Ben Westboy/ White Cube, London & Hong Kong. © the artist

11 Chung Chang-Sup, Return one H, 1977, mixed media on canvas, 163 × 112 cm. Photo: Sang-tae Kim. Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul

13 Zhai Liang, The Extensity, 2015, oil on canvas, 180 × 300 cm. Courtesy the artist and White Space, Beijing

put it – Chinese emerging talents, is a little more circumspect. His current show is simply titled Notes. Don’t let that fool you, though: the paintings and watercolour drawings on show here tackle big themes of art and cultural history (both Chinese and international), geometric form and its effect on mood, as well as a cat, a rabbit and a lunar love song. Someone who’s no stranger to love songs 14 is Yoko Ono, currently holding her first solo exhibition in Beijing, at the Faurschou Foundation (hey, have you noticed that ‘first’ is to art exhibitions as ‘sexy’ is to fashion magazines? Check how many times ArtReview Asia has had to repeat the former word in its previews. It’s like Groundhog Day!). Anyway, Ono’s show begins with a garden and an extension of her

Wish Tree project (1996–), in which the audience is invited to write down a wish and hang it from the tree. Because art is part of a global world, the wishes will then be sent to Ono’s Imagine Peace Tower (2006–7) in Reykjavík, which comprises 15 searchlights pointing vertically into the sky, in memory of John Lennon. In a similar escape from the constraints of specific venues, Ono will position a new word (examples given are ‘dream’ and ‘imagine’) on advertising billboards, banners and posters throughout Beijing every 20 days for the duration of the exhibition. For those of you who make it inside the venue, expect a survey of the artist’s work from the Fluxus days 15 and beyond. Ono is a ‘present-day living icon’, Faurschou’s press release squeals. Certainly the artworld is determined to celebrate (and perhaps

to manufacture) her late-attained cult status, with her early Cut Piece (1964, in which she allowed an audience to cut off her clothing) regularly cited by art historians and critics, and both New York’s MoMA and Tokyo’s MOT giving her retrospectives last year (MOT’s is on through 14 February). At this rate it won’t be long before people (right now ArtReview Asia is thinking of you, The Japan Times) stop saying that she’s best known for the Plastic Ono Band and being married to John Lennon. But ArtReview Asia doesn’t like change. That’s why it’s going to carry on with this East– West ping-pong and Zhang Hongtu, a Chinaborn, US-based artist, a retrospective of whose work is on show at the Queens Museum, New York. Zhang, a Muslim, left China to escape

14 Yoko Ono: Golden Ladders, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Jonathan Leijonhufvud. © Faurschou Foundation, Beijing

15 Zhang Hongtu, Quaker Oats Mao, 1987, (from the series Long Live Chairman Mao), acrylic on Quaker Oats box, 25 × 13 cm. Private collection

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16 Yuichi Inoue, from a photo published in Shukan Asahi, 5 February 1956

17 Haroon Mirza, The National Pavilion of Then and Now, 2011. Photo: Omar Mirza. Courtesy hrm199 Ltd and Lisson Gallery, London, Milan & New York

persecution and gain the freedom to say what the Japanese artist comparisons to Jackson he wanted about the regime back there; by 1989 Pollock. More interestingly for all you collectors (he arrived in New York in 1982) this took the out there, Yuichi was such a perfectionist that form of Quaker Oats jars with overpainting he destroyed anything he considered subpar, to suggest Mao’s face where the Quaker’s would meaning that very few of his works survived. be. But equally fascinating are Zhang’s takes Go check out what’s left in an exhibition to mark on immigrant life in New York – notably Soy the centenary of his birth at the 21st Century Sauce Calligraphy (1995), a reproduction of a ‘help Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and wanted’ ad for a local sweatshop painted in expect it to be a mecca (if that’s not a metaphor the titular condiment. too far) for ink-art enthusiasts. And in ArtReview 16 Yuichi Inoue on the other hand is an actual Asia’s humble opinion, everyone should be an calligraphy artist (albeit one who passed away ink-art enthusiast. in 1985), who helped modernise the traditions This spring, opinions less humble will of sho (calligraphy) by introducing a degree of almost certainly be on show at the latest edition 17 of the biennial Dhaka Art Summit, organised free expression to it during the postwar era. His ‘action’ style of painting (sometimes experiby the Samdani Art Foundation, which now lays menting with one-character works) garnered claim to being the largest ‘non-commercial

platform for South Asian Art’. You don’t have to be South Asian to be there, however; the festival will feature major works or new commissions by artists including Lynda Benglis, Tino Sehgal and Shumon Ahmed, Haroon Mirza and the excellent Simryn Gill, among others. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Chus Martínez and Beatrix Ruf will be among the other familiar faces in town. That’s not to say that South Asia isn’t the focus: Mining Warm Data is a group exhibition featuring artists from across the region. Alongside that will be media-specific focuses on film and architecture as well as an extensive array of talks programmes and radio projects. Oh yes, and ArtReview Asia as a media partner. On which note, it’s off to find out why no one invited Heman Chong to that. Mark Rappolt

Sadamasa Motonaga, Untitled, 1966, 45 x 53cm, oil and synthetic resin on canvas

Points of View

Have you ever heard of a world that exists between the natural and the spiritual worlds? One that mediates between sensory reality and the mystical realm of the divine? This intermediate world welcomes imaginative consciousness and allows cognitive imagination to thrive. It is the world of the image, the faculty of perception and of vision; it is the place where imaginative power is at home. No wonder I learn about it from artist Walid Raad and that I keep pondering it as I make a pilgrimage to the Beirut storage space of collector Tony Salamé to see what’s described as Raad’s collaboration with Suha Traboulsi, a work titled Postscript to the Arabic translation and featuring paintings on the sides of storage crates. Rather than fantasy producing ‘the imaginary’, which can be limiting in its insistence on the ‘unreal’, the ‘imaginal’ is analogue to the perceptible, normal world around us but not immediately noticeable to the senses, like a mirror reflecting something without itself partaking in the physical properties of that which is reflected. Does this imaginal world sound muffled and a bit esoteric? It is what theosophers of Islam, specifically Persian mystics, have called ‘mundus imaginalis’. I come across the imaginal in conversation with Raad while trying to figure out how to describe art’s capacity to say something about the future without ending up in futurology, science fiction, techno pessimism, pep-talk utopianism and the other usual stuff. I am searching for a term that accounts for prefiguration, diagnosis and prognosis, and allows for a slightly different, be it ambiguous and conflictual, perspective on how art engages with what lies ahead of us. Raad mentions the late Islam scholar Henri Corbin and his 1964 text ‘Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal’. Corbin contends that the imaginal is far from unreal or nonexistent; instead it establishes real imaginative knowledge and function. And yet it is escaping rationalism as we know it. It is not based on a separation of matter and spirit, history and myth, because the ‘where’ – a concrete location – resides in the soul, and

mundus imaginalis or

In search of real imaginative knowledge and its functions by

Maria Lind the corporeal exists in the spiritual. In fact, the soul encloses and carries the body; the spiritual place is not situated but that which situates. Such active imagination equals a transmutation of internal spiritual states into external ones. It is ontologically real but beyond our ordinary way of perceiving and understanding things. In other words, it is visionary knowledge. In November, during Ashkal Alwan’s seventh edition of Home Works, the multidisciplinary forum on cultural practices held every two or three years at the Lebanese nonprofit organisation, I visit Beirut’s new art-kid-on-the-block: Salamé’s Aïshti Foundation, an exhibition space in the high-end shopping mall he’s just opened, designed by David Adjaye. The generic, strikingly unimaginative collection’s perversion is enhanced by the setting, with glass doors between shops and the exhibition space: both Suha Traboulsi in collaboration with Walid Raad, Postscript to the Arabic Translation, 2015, acrylic on wooden crates. Courtesy the artist and Raymonde Ghossein Gallery, Jerusalem

devoid of people during my visit. Not only is this amassing of artwork utterly boring for being so standard, it looks like an imported shopping cart for art, albeit the kind of art previously not seen in public in Lebanon. This guy has access to one of the most interesting art communities and regions in the world, and yet he appears to focus on the kind of bland trophy art that a certain part of the Western circuit hails. On top of that, while backing mainstream institutions in NYC, he allegedly refrains from supporting the local art-scene, which urgently needs precisely that. His seems to be a base world far away from the imaginal. Agreeing to loan a work to the collector, Raad made a context-sensitive work for him, consisting of paintings on the sides of crates in Salamé’s storage space in a suburb of Beirut, where they will be for the next three years. The story goes like this: between 1952 and 1974 the Lebanese government collected national and international paintings for a future museum. However, political figures and their spouses snuck some of the paintings away from storage belonging to the ministry of culture, and they eventually ended up at MoMA in New York. Unable to stop this trickling, Suha Traboulsi, the collection’s registrar, painted replicas of lost paintings by, among others, Kazimir Malevich, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hélio Oiticica and Ellsworth Kelly on the crates in storage. This is smart, cheeky and imaginal institutional critique of the commercial art sector. In a funny way, Raad’s story is the reverse of Salamé’s: once upon a time there was a fantastic collection of abstract paintings in Lebanon, which in Mondrian’s sense use abstraction to intensify rather than simplify, and which through corruption leave the country bit by bit and end up at MoMA, where they are shown piecemeal. Today, diluted works from numerous New York galleries have found their way to Beirut, where they are presented in an inflated manner. However, in both cases the local dimension of art is missing. It leaves me wondering who the keepers of Salamé’s collection are and what Raad will eventually do with the crates once they return to him.

Twilight I want to describe a person, a person who sees, every day, in front of the mirror, half of his face on fire. He holds out a trembling hand, as if to grasp a railing suspended in midair, like the railing that served first as an obstacle, then as an aid, to his father’s leap into the abyss – perhaps one’s method of preserving one’s last shred of dignity. Aimed at the moment before one person becomes another person, my description is always too late, always insufficient to save another person’s life, and everyone who once possessed a body with blood racing through it. But I still want to describe a person, a person’s existence in human form, a form compressed and distorted by the pounding of tsunamis, the pressing of transactions, until it wafts away in a fine dust. He always places his hopes on someone else, even though this seems like an increasingly impossible idea, unless the mythic ‘glory of humanity’ shines down on every place on the planet. But in fact, that ounce of courage that compels us to draw free breath is today reserved only for destruction, or if not destruction, then cosmetic surgery that changes one’s face. Nonetheless, I still want to describe a person, since I believe that describing a person is the best method of protecting fragility. And fragility, like the joy (absolute joy!) built of secret contracts between lovers, is almost equal to freedom. Only then will people be able to transcend the oppressive horizon and experience a new geology formed by the unknown straightening-out of the folds of the body. His animal qualities make a counterattack in his later years (memory loss, like tidal waters, inundates the formerly distinct lines of his body). Amid the sounds of the reversing biological clock, mice and humans peacefully coexist, and venomous snakes coil gently around people’s waists, and in the inverted reflection of the high-speed rail line in the pond where the fisherman casts his bait, a train passes into the remote sky like lightning. In a past life, these sloughs were bustling construction sites, a promise to the future of humanity. But now, everything has come to a halt, and wherever they are deep enough, the sloughs become swimming pools for young workers. Cows slowly turn in circles beside the rusting generator, casting their pity-filled gaze upon the distant places that men once scanned from afar. These ruins become so clear and alive only in the rays of twilight, when memories inundated by tidal waters float to the surface, making bubbles. Those vital particulars engender sympathy for life, but also help us move towards a new cycle: we are already so familiar with the manufacturing industry that our belief in human potential is lacking, and so is our belief

Twilight and Dawn by

Hu Fang

in twilight, in our intimate relationship with other species. But when twilight approaches, everything will return to its position, and the limpid greyscale will produce an authoritative dusk, the reversal of the food chain and the sense of direction of particle motion. In faraway places where machines have stopped, the earth will open again and endow to life a kind of distant dream, a remote, alien land; the idle person waiting here for the moonrise – that is the person I want to describe. That is the person I want to describe, a person in the midst of dying who nonetheless calmly accepts the facts of this globe. His death is a preview of my destiny, his life interwoven with my own. Of the two of us, neither is more deserving of fate’s pity. In the dregs of the belly of history, the distorted human form will evolve into an inhuman form. It will stand up quietly and migrate without scruples to the fringes of the swamp, to the distant, deep-sunk city.

Dawn I arrived early in the morning. It was the beginning of spring, and the frigid northern wind remained in the sky, covering the city in a layer of chilly greyness. It seems that I violated our agreement in coming here; for yes, I had promised her that I would stop investigating her history. Like all the cities that promise us the ‘Better Tomorrow’, there was nothing special that caught my eye. It was not until I was pacing around the plaza in front of city hall that I began to feel that something was odd. I didn’t detect it right away, but during the process of my perambulations, I became increasingly aware of the source of this sensation: there was no monument, in the ordinary sense, in the plaza. And as I thought about it, I realised that there were no monuments of any kind at all, anywhere in the city. This was the place where she grew up: a city with no monuments, no weight of memory, a place that might engender her lithe way of walking down the street. Could this lightness explain how she had enchanted me?

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Later, in a museum, I found the only monuments in the city. They were carved of stone or cast in bronze in the tall and upright postures to which we are accustomed. Their eyes, bright and piercing, gazed forward into the distance. What was the future back then is the time we now inhabit. “These heroes gave their lives to defend our city and its peace,” said the female docent in impassioned tones. She made me willing to believe that the city’s memory could, through some method, have been stored in some secret place. It had not disappeared; it had just been stockpiled somewhere we did not know about. Fortunately I found more than sculptures from the past in that museum. I also found the reason the other sculptures had disappeared. Not long ago, enough rare earth metals to supply the world’s electronics manufacturing industry had been discovered in the area around the city. The discovery had changed the way in which its collective memories were stored. History was now stored in the city’s memory stick, the capacity of which was expanding without limit. Naturally, you will sigh with admiration at the fateful transformation of this city. Today, the memories of the entire world rely on the memory sticks made out of rare earth metals that are mined there. But as I saw it, the truly valuable discovery was her sweet voice. Transmitted by optical fibres, it mesmerised me with a heroic temperament that I had never previously experienced. It had intensely shaped our relationship, making me feel that I needed it. My mind needed it, my body needed it. As I continued to walk around this drab city, which no longer possessed a heroic narrative or any further plot elements, the memories in my mind became more vivid than they had ever been before. I began to understand why I was reminded of optical fibres the first time I saw her pale blue veins through her almost transparent skin; why she would always turn her elegant face slightly to one side every time I couldn’t resist asking questions; why I felt something akin to an electrical shock when she said: “If you grew up in that city, you were taught from a young age how to disperse.” In a certain sense, we are all media with extremely low data-transmission rates. We seek to preserve flash memories, but as the speeds accelerate we grow ever more distant from our counterparts. We can never reach them, just as the storage space of this planet silently swells and splinters into the sky and forms uncountable new galaxies, uncountable new counterparts. But the odd thing is, I began blindly to believe that we would never truly lose our counterparts, precisely because we could never reach them. Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

SUSPENDED HORIZON BYTHOMAS CANTO ART CENTRAL HONG KONG PROJECTS SECTION 23 – 26 MARCH 2016 Thomas Canto, Suspended Horizon, 2016, 350 x 500 x 300 cm, Installation

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Flip flops, open-toe footwear (for men), singlets, shorts, bermudas and tee-shirts are not permitted 29

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Guan Xiao Commodification, commercialisation, cultural proliferation – her work covers it all. Just don’t call it post-Internet by Li Bowen

above and preceding pages The Documentary: Geocentric Puncture, 2012 (installation view, Accidental Message – Art Is Not a System, Not a World, 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, 2012)

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Guan Xiao does not care much for the label ‘post-Internet’ – particu- conditions for young artists in China; her own studies took place larly when it is applied, as it often is, to her or her art. Besides a general before that. Indeed, she decided to study film (graduating with a dissatisfaction with lazy acts of labelling that are the result of igno- major in directing) in order to gain a practical education that was rance and an impatient desire to historicise, the Beijing-based artist as broad and multidisciplinary as the ‘fine art’ courses taught in the is also unhappy about the idea of naming a new art movement after West, but that was simply not available at the time in Chinese art a tool or technology. However, as is the case with others of the new schools (in which one has to pick from among media and culturally generation of artists grouped under this label, it is evident that specific disciplines such as Chinese traditional painting, Western oil Guan is interested in this tool and its no-longer-novel-but-ever- painting, print, sculpture and so on). For Guan, film studies offered more-powerful technological advancement. In both her sculptural the possibility of avoiding such strict compartmentalism and creaand video works (which are often also integrated), she frequently tively combining media in a way that might be both comprehensive draws on imagery found on the net, treating it both as a source and and relevant to the times. And these concerns have remained at the a platform. For the 2015 Biennale de Lyon (amusingly themed La Vie core of her output ever since. Moderne), she presented, alongside other works, the ten-screen instalHer work is ambitious in that it occupies both the spatial and lation One and the Rest of Them (2015), which effectively creates an envi- temporal dimensions of a given space, without treating either ronment that offers a virtuality resembling that of the Internet – dimension as representational of the other. In both instances Guan incorporating material representing a variety of time periods and draws on found or readymade materials (footage posted online or cultures, but presenting it in a manner that flattens that out by being objects ranging from alloy wheels and engines to various ancient or tribal artefacts), but not only is the manifest readymade nature at once immediate and simultaneous. Interestingly, Guan, a nominee for last year’s Hugo Boss Asia Art of one different from the other (the footage used in the videoworks Award for emerging Asian artists, claims that it was only in 2010 (four acts in a manner that disturbs the readymade nature of the sculpyears after her graduation), when she took part in the group exhibi- tural objects, returning them in terms of both nature and quality to a tion Mummery, at Art Channel, Beijing, that she definitively thought suspended status); as Guan has it, the two strands in her work depart of herself as ‘an artist’. In part this period of gestation is the product from polar extremes: while the videowork begins from a conceptual basis, Guan’s sculpture is generated of circumstance. To Guan, the 2008 finanOne and the Rest of Them, 2015 by formal concerns. This difference in cial crisis marked the beginning of better (installation view, La Vie Moderne, 13th Biennale de Lyon, 2015)

Sunrise, 2015 (installation view, Hugo Boss Asia Art Award Group Exhibition of Shortlisted Artists, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2015)

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The Sunset, 2012 (installation view, Sunset Vacuum Plug, Taikang Space, Beijing, 2012)

points of departure effectively strips one of its self-present, self-sufficient status, and makes it the external but imperative supplement of the other, such that the presence or absence of one in the other is to be considered no less than constitutive. Take for instance Guan’s 2013 exhibition Survivors’ Hunting at Magician Space, Beijing: found in the 2013 three-channel videowork Cognitive Shape’s narration and juxtaposition of historical and contemporary inscriptions is in effect the production of the sculptural work that was also in the exhibition, Cloud Atlas (2013). And, perhaps more pertinently, Cognitive Shape seemingly is moving towards anticipating the future erasure of Cloud Atlas, an entity that is, contrary to its physical form, as ephemeral as the title of the work suggests. This structural arrangement distances Guan’s artistic practice from that of previous generations and that derived from other cultural backgrounds – her work follows a teleological path that has ‘the abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ as its ends, seeking to reveal an openness within the found or readymade materials with which her artistic process begins. In contrast to the anticipation of newly made, pseudo-messianic virtual reality (allegedly offering a total experience that activates all the senses) that is widely considered to be the shared ambition of ‘post-Internet’ artists, Guan is interested in creatively reactivating discussion about ways of looking by manipulating the environment in which that act occurs. For works such as The Documentary: Geocentric Puncture (2012), Guan recalls the painterly idea of the background by creating in effect a horizon of primitive, tropical, tribal patterns, against which heterogeneous artefacts are presented. This intense arrangement brings out anxiety and urges one to reconsider the nature of things. But as specific as that may sound, it also addresses an idea of expansion that is prevalent in today’s artworld. Transforming the defeatist ‘anything goes’ idea of postmodern art, this kind of contemporary artistic practice reconsiders the ontological and teleological nature of the ‘anything’. In other words, the ontological and teleological nature of the universal raised as a question: what could be meaningfully produced and presented, given that we are first of all tired of chasing after the ‘new’, and second of all sceptical about the emphasis on difference? Used in the formulation of the question is an incredible list of things: from everyday objects such as cans, slippers, car tyres or camera tripods, to literary references such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), to natural phenomena such as snakeskin patterns, and monumental motifs such as the Statue of Liberty, Michelangelo’s David (c. 1501) or the heads on Easter Island. To Guan, identity politics takes up numerous incarnations (the label of ‘post-Internet’ forced onto her being one, ‘Chinese’ and ‘female’ being others), but she is barely interested in any one of them. A postcolonial emphasis on ‘difference’ does not interest her: instead she is dedicated to a further subversion that takes exactly those things that are considered to be universal as her subject: linear narratives, for example. Guan often juxtaposes extremely ancient objects – neolithic artefacts, tribal masks of sacred nature – with the profoundly new – iPhones, touch-screen devices – not for a comparative reading revealing the possible differences between the two as metonyms for grand, political narratives that are obvious and often simplifying, but rather to examine the failure of archaeological endeavours, in a fashion that seemingly deliberately disrespects the genealogical aspect of things: the shared identity in which she is interested is a lack of identity, insufficient contextualisation and dysfunction of the specific objects in both the realm of the artistic and

the social. Provisionally, in the moment of the work, both the ancient and the newly invented are to be treated the same, in terms of our knowledge about these elements, our clumsiness in appropriating them and the inevitable commodification and commercialisation that immediately follows. The pseudo-archaeological and cultural examination in Guan’s videowork David (2013) is a prime example of this. The artist sings along to ubiquitous clips of the famous statue: This is David / But he disappeared / Yes! He is right here / We can see him very close / Or / Very far away / But / We just CANNOT see him / We don’t know WHY we watching / We’re / studying him, shooting him, singing for him / … / We / Cost him / Post him / Eat him / … / We can make him disappear / so e-a-s-i-l-y / To make her disappear / Or make them disappear / … It is made clear that the overwhelming production and misappropriation of David in effect hollows out the masterpiece. The statue is almost treated as a natural resource here: a significant instance of civilisation is presented as a given material that is to be at once consumed and reproduced in all possible ways; and like other natural resources, it is to be exhausted. Our lack of understanding of Michelangelo’s David is considered first of all as not operating solely within the realm of art history, but also in that of the social as a whole; secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it is narrated in Guan’s chanting that this lack – of understanding, knowledge, appreciation and respect – is exactly that which passes today as understanding, knowledge, appreciation and respect. What is presented – to a spectator whose national, social, cultural and gender identity and background are deliberately and a priori suspended – is the contemporary dilemma of ignorance that results from careless proliferations. If, in this work, the statue David is not treated as significant merely within the history of art, then neither is Guan so keen on being an artist within a specific, narrow realm. As with other artists of her generation, she is equally concerned with popular culture, often making nuanced allusions to the mechanisms and systems of global pop culture and its impact on everyday life. It doesn’t stop here: Guan is also concerned with international politics. At the moment Guan is working on her first artist book, provisionally titled Why can’t we see Europe from an armchair?, which will be published to accompany her new videowork Weather Forecast, a presentation in Paris this coming June that aims to reveal the uncanny aspect of the everyday. Just as she refuses to amplify the significance of her national, social, cultural and gender identity, admitting it to be nothing more than an obstacle to fruitful artistic exchange, she considers the present European refugee situation to be embarrassing, testifying to the failure of the nation state and the emergence of a new identity that is marked by a positive and deliberate overcoming of differences. Ultimately, Guan’s work raises questions concerning the notions of background, genealogy, horizon and context through playful manipulations that resemble and mimic modern scholarly, archaeological endeavours. ara Guan Xiao will present a new work in association with k11 Art Foundation at the ICA London, 20 April – 19 June, and will have a solo show as part of the Jeu de Paume’s Satellite programme at Concorde, Paris, 6 June – 25 September

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David, 2013 (installation views, Opening Exhibition, Antenna Space, Shanghai, 2013) all images Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

Praneet Soi Are the Kolkata-born artist’s latest works an expression of hope for a more tolerant future or an expression of sorrow about a lost past? by Niru Ratnam

Towards the end of 2010, Praneet Soi visited Srinagar in the Kashmir of 45 papier-mâché tiles, a slide projection and wall-based works. This Valley, which had earlier suffered a bout of violent protest and polit- time the slide projection was more specific, focusing on the decorative ical unrest initially triggered by a bungled Indian army operation inlaid stonework at Sufi shrines, interspersed with images of buildbut that then widened to a more general protest about Indian rule ings, a sometimes abstracted map of Kashmir and fragments of text and subsequently American geopolitical influence. Srinagar is the including the ‘Instrument of Accession’ (1947), by which Maharajah largest city in the Kashmir Valley and serves as the summer capital Hari Singh agreed to Indian rule after the British departed. The intriof the state of Jammu and Kashmir. It is also the site where the polit- cate geometrical patterning seen in a number of the slides was also ical problems that have bedevilled Kashmir since the end of British depicted on the papier-mâché tiles that were executed by Soi, working occupation and the beginning of Indian rule have regularly surfaced. collaboratively with artisans in Fayaz Jan’s workshop. Different Soi spent ten days exploring the city’s architecture. Subsequently he designs of Islamic patterning appear across tiles, sometimes limited produced a slide projection, SriNagar (2011–), made up of fragments to the space of an individual tile, sometimes layered across a number of text together with images of both old and new buildings, interiors of them. Delicate floral and vegetal imagery is seen in other tiles. In a and architectural detailing from around few tiles the image of the chinar leaf is seen. Bulbul Shah, the Sufi saint, is said A symbol of Kashmiri heritage, the chinar the city. The architecture included the highly patterned interiors of the shrines was brought to Kashmir on a large scale by to have converted the Buddhist of Sufi saints, reflecting the importance of the Mughal emperor Jahangir during his ruler Rinchen Shah to Islam during reign, between 1605 and 1627. Like Sufism Sufism in Kashmir, a detail that particuthe fourteenth century, and papier-mâché, it is something that larly caught his attention. emigrated to Kashmir and subsequently Soi returned to Srinagar in 2014 and and unusually, Sufism became this time worked in the atelier of Fayaz became typical of the region. a dominant influence in Kashmir Jan, a master craftsman whose apprenA smaller suite of papier-mâché tiles, tices work on the type of painted papier-mâché boxes and objects that Srinagar II – Paintings on Papier-Mâché was shown at Frieze London as are found for sale across Kashmir. The art of papier-mâché arrived in part of the artist’s solo presentation with Experimenter. Here, the Kashmir from Iran along with Sufi culture. Bulbul Shah, the Sufi decorative geometrical imagery that was evident in the earlier series saint, is said to have converted the Buddhist ruler Rinchen Shah to was interspersed with free-floating images of Srinigar’s architecture, Islam during the fourteenth century, and unusually, Sufism became such as a meticulously rendered houseboat or the exterior of a fort. a dominant influence on Kashmiri society, in contrast to its more Contemporary aspects of the landscape, such as the detail of a flyover, common status as a minority position in Islamic societies. However also feature. There is no apparent hierarchy to the different motifs its centrality to Kashmir has recently been challenged, as a more in the two series: instead they seem to be unanchored to the backdoctrinaire, Wahhabi-inflected Islam has taken hold, and its ideas of ground, which is a solid colour. This, combined with Soi’s occasional tolerance put under strain by the territorial conflict between India use of different perspectives, contributes to a deliberately disjointed visual effect. It is a technique that recalls earlier figurative works by and Pakistan over the region. The notion of the migration of ideas, religion and the visual culture Soi in which either one or two figures are pictured in the centre of associated with religions is central to the two further bodies of work canvases against an opaque background, as if they had been cut-andthat Soi produced after this second visit: Srinagar (2014), which was pasted in. These figures are based on found images that formed Soi’s exhibited at the Irish contemporary art biennial EVA International, archive – news clippings of war, terrorism and crime. While each in Limerick, in 2014 and at the Experimenter gallery in Kolkata the figure came loaded as a signifier of political unrest, Soi’s handling following spring; and Srinagar II, shown by the same gallery at last of them seemed to be an attempt to distance them from that backautumn’s Frieze London art fair. Srinagar consisted of an installation ground, to isolate the form from the circumstance. Each was depicted

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Srinagar (detail), 2014, 42 papier-mâché tiles; each 30 × 30 cm, acrylic and gouache, paint, protective UV matt varnish

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Srinagar II (detail), 2015, 24 papier-mâché tiles; 10 tiles 30 × 30 cm each; 6 tiles 46 × 30 each; 2 tiles 46 × 46 cm each; 2 tiles 51 × 51 cm each; 4 tiles of variable dimensions; acrylic and gouache, UV matt varnish

in ‘sometimes impossible conditions of torsion’, as the critic Ranjit Hoskote noted. They were wrapped, moulded or folded around each other – a result, in part, of a working method that involved throwing paper cutouts of figures against a wall and seeing what patterns they made as they landed. The process restaged social disaster and political unrest as something to be articulated through form rather than narrative – albeit at the risk of aestheticising disaster. Soi’s use of the Renaissance technique of anamorphosis – where the figure or object depicted is distorted so that it can only be clearly recognised from a particular angle or by using mirrors – further adds to this decoupling of his figures from their original roles. This move away from the figure as actor towards the figure as sign was made more literal in the slide work Kumartuli Printer, Notes on Labour, Part 1 (2010), which features images of a printer using an old pedal-operated press in Kolkata as well as images of his workshop. Interspersed with the cans of ink, receipts and tools is a sequence in which the operator feeds paper into the machine so that it produces images of his hands. In effect the printer’s manual labour becomes a sign produced by manual labour. The emphasis on this theme, and on the reproduction of signs that are rooted in conflict, are refined in the later Srinagar works. With these the artisanal labour is the making of the papier-mâché decorative objects. The traces of human form have almost entirely disappeared and been replaced by geometric forms depicted floating free against flat backgrounds in the way that the earlier figures did. The imagery is not abstracted from found photographs of unrest and violence: instead it is taken from a way of living that perhaps offered an alternative to societal unrest and regional warfare. Soi’s travels to Srinagar and subsequent research into its Sufi culture have provided the artist with subject matter that fits his ongoing investigation into the spaces that open up when visual signs are prised away from the context in which they were originally meant to be seen. Moreover, the political and social undercurrent to these

works is more nuanced than his earlier use of found images from the aftermath of terrorist atrocities. The patterning on the Srinagar works, the materiality of the papier-mâché and the symbol of the chinar leaf are very deliberate signs of the Sufi culture that migrated to Kashmir from Iran and existed as a highly particular way of life in this pocket of the subcontinent. For not only did Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits (the Hindus native to Kashmir) share a number of customs and beliefs through the shared traditions of Sufism, there was also a broad tolerance of different faith systems. This was a particular characteristic of the Rishi order of Sufism, which evolved in Kashmir indigenously during the fifteenth century and differed from both fundamentalist Islam and other Sufi orders in part through its acceptance of other faiths. The result was, for a time, a composite Hindu-Muslim culture of overlapping religious identities. Thus, Soi’s use of Sufi geometric patterns is not just about the migration of signs from the Middle East to Kashmir but can also be read as invoking a more tolerant, inclusive moment in time where the teachings of Islam were mixed with earlier traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. This was a moment when Muslim and Hindu belief systems overlapped and when the Sufi shrines around Kashmir would attract both Hindus and Muslims. The question that Soi’s works from Srinagar pose is whether or not such a moment is recoverable or whether like the faded, blurred images of the Kumartuli Printer’s hand, these are signs of a moment that has gone. As a new, harsher way of thinking about the world emerges, one where there is less room for signs to migrate and mean something quite different from what they might have originally been invoked for, Soi’s new works pose the question of whether it might be possible to recover ambiguity and how that process might begin. ara Work by Praneet Soi can be seen in the 1st Asian Biennial / 5th Guangzhou Triennial through 10 April and in Praneet Soi – Srinagar, presented as part of The Collection Now, at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 28 January – 10 April

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above Kumartuli Printer, Notes on Labour, Part 1 (details), 2010, 80 slides, rotary carousel projector facing page Praneet Soi, 2009 (installation view, Het Oog (The Eye), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2009) all images Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata

Don’t Follow the Wind: Rumours Overflowing Beyond Number by Taro Nettleton

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above and facing page Nikolaus Hirsch and Jorge Otero-Pailos, Becoming Monument, 2015, pumphouse and contents in built (Fukushima exclusion zone, Japan) and model form, dimensions variable

Don’t Follow the Wind (DFW) is a currently inaccessible group exhibition of works made in response to the nuclear disaster caused by the melt-through of the TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The exhibition opened on 11 March 2015 in the exclusion zone of Fukushima, from which approximately 24,000 residents continue to be displaced by high radiation levels. Besides the exhibition works installed in the spaces provided by former residents, one of the most memorable sights in the zone is the gatelike overhead sign at the entrance of the shopping arcade and one of the main streets of Futaba, the site of the TEPCO power plant, which reads, ‘Nuclear Power: Energy for a Bright Future’. The sign, a product of TEPCO’s PR efforts and a sad and painfully poignant testament to Futaba’s dangerous dependence on the nuclear power industry, is the subject matter of exhibition instigator Chim Pom’s work Drawing a Blueprint (2015–). Billed as a clean and efficient energy source, the promotion of nuclear power falls perfectly within what Heidegger called a ‘technological enframing’; it has ‘the character of calculation’. In his criticism of DFW, art critic Jonathan Jones argued in The Guardian that the exhibition’s highlighting of the manmade nuclear disaster, which has so far killed no one, over the natural earthquake and tsunami disasters, which killed nearly 16,000, is irrational. In fact, in August 2014, a Japanese court determined that TEPCO was responsible for the death of Hamako Watanabe, who suffered depression and committed suicide by self-immolation after the melt-through of the power plant displaced her from her home. Suicide rates remain high in Fukushima, and the physical and psychological effects of long-term exposure to lowlevel internal radiation remain unknown. To ignore this dimension of the disaster is unethical. The safety of Fukushima and nuclear power, which Jones intently defends, is a myth. And it is within this myth that TEPCO announced on 18 April 2011 that radiation from the power plant would be under control in six to nine months. DFW urges us to read such myths generated by the mass media, the state and TEPCO against the grain. Taken from the experience of a collaborator and former Fukushima resident, whose passion for fishing allowed him to see that the winds were blowing north and accordingly evacuate his family south, the title is, on one level, an instruction for survival. It also relates metaphorically to the words for ‘rumour’ (風評) and ‘weathering’ (風化), which in kanji (Chinese characters used in the modern Japanese writing system) both incorporate the character for ‘wind’ (風). The exhibition is then simultaneously survival tactic, counterpropaganda and mnemonic device. It constitutes a transmission of counterintelligence, commanding its audience (not viewers) to remember the present-ness of the disaster against its disappearance from mainstream media. In cocurator Jason Waite’s words, the show simultaneously ‘generates data and activates the imagination’. Nikolaus Hirsch and Jorge Otero-Pailos’s Becoming Monument (2015–), for example, takes a work of vernacular architecture and treats it as a monument and heritage site. Accordingly,

they follow and expand upon UNESCO regulations, periodically metering and publicising radiation levels taken from the surface of the ‘monument’. Ai Weiwei’s A Ray of Hope (2015–) is made of solar-powered lights that turn on for five hours daily – once in the evening and once in the early morning, specifically when no one is in the zone – inside a building on one of the exhibition sites. The lights replace residents and create the semblance of life in a hastily abandoned shell of a town. In the absence of residents, the works will also provide historical testimony once the region is reopened. Meanwhile, DFW tactically mobilises ‘rumours’: a label Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has dismissively applied to various facets of Fukushima’s dangers. As the show is currently on, but unopened, one can only imagine, project and generate discourse on what the effects of the exhibition might be and what the works look like and do. And if thinking about DFW and the nuclear disaster is anxietyprovoking, it is so precisely because they cannot be neatly delineated spatially or temporally. These indeterminacies require us to think about time and space in unfamiliar ways. The fact that an exhibition that has started might not be opened in our lifetime challenges us to consider an extraordinary temporality parallel to that of, say, caesium137, which has a half-life of 30 years. We cannot know when the show will open, and when it does, the pieces will have been transformed by time and exposure to the elements. It is difficult to identify historical signposts to contextualise the exhibition, but one might consider pieces such as John Cage’s composition Organ2/ ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) (1987), a 639-year version of which is currently being performed at St Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, and Yoko Ono’s Conversation Piece (1962), which instructed performers to, ‘Bandage any part of your body… If people forget about it, remind them of it and keep telling. Do not talk about anything else.’ In this light, the works in DFW might best be understood as a kind of durational, and testimonial, social sculpture. As outsiders, we are at once directly involved and not with the Fukushima disaster. Radiation’s invisibility makes its disavowal easy, but its dissemination continues. DFW also propagates fragmentary images, information and rumours, which receivers must actively piece together. The idea of an exclusion zone suggests containment, but both radiation and the idea of DFW defy this logic. The opening of Don't Follow the Wind Non-Visitor Center (NVC), a satellite exhibition of new works by the same artists in DFW at Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, asks us to consider the meanings of site and nonsite, and the role of art in relation to a global disaster. In an obvious metaphor for the inaccessibility of DFW, at NVC visitors must walk up makeshift scaffolding from the second floor to peek through a window into the third floor, where the works are displayed. This distance makes assessment of the works difficult. Some, such as Meiro Koizumi’s Home (all works 2015), a talking-head video of a former Futaba resident shown without audio, is impenetrable. As it turns out, its counterpart, only audible in the main exhibition site,

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above and facing page Ai Weiwei, A Ray of Hope, 2015, solar panel, LED lights, dimensions variable, Fukushima exclusion zone, Japan. Photo this page: Kenji Morita

Trevor Paglen, Trinity Cube, 2015–, irradiated glass from the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, trinitite, 20 × 20 × 20 cm

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is a three-minute loop of the same man’s imaginary conversation with his wife upon returning to his home. The emotional weight of listening to this conversation while viewing the speaker’s dilapidated home is indescribably intense. The exhibited photograph of Trevor Paglen’s sculpture Trinity Cube, a minimalist cube made of trinitite, a radioactive glass produced by the 1945 Trinity nuclear bomb test in New Mexico, boxed by glass formed from broken, irradiated windows found in the exclusion zone, is fairly straightforward. The sculpture intertwines the histories of American nuclear technology and current circumstances in Fukushima, pointing to global capital behind the nuclear power industry: TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was built by the US-based power conglomerate General Electric (GE). For now, however, the effect of seeing it onsite after continued irradiation and weathering can only be imagined. Taryn Simon’s Final Photos is accessible online. The work consists of a growing database of the last images captured and shared on social media by Fukushima residents before the disaster, and transmitted from a solar-powered server housed in the art studio of a former resident in the exclusion zone. The two currently uploaded images are haunting. One shows an out-of-focus footbath, about which the author/photographer writes, ‘¥2,980 at Don Quixote. So cheap!’ The utter mundanity of the post highlights the horror and reveals the uncanny effect of the tragedy that would rupture this homely sense

of being-in-the-world. And through its simultaneous existence in the exclusion site, in cyberspace and on our computer monitors, Final Photos illustrates the difficulty of locating an information-based work geographically. The exhibitions’ organisers similarly reenvision the notion of homelessness as an opportunity for forging temporary horizontal alliances between artists, curators and local residents, whose collaboration was essential in providing homes for the works. Unviewed works cannot be phenomenologically experienced. They remain information. In the exhibition catalogue, critic and participating artist Noi Sawaragi puzzlingly draws a parallel between radioactivity and the ‘true power of art’ that transgresses spatial boundaries. In this he seems to want to evoke a sense of the works’ aura, which requires presence. In their current inaccessibility, I think we need to admit that the artworks’ power is discursively produced. This is precisely why the exhibition remains powerful despite its veritable absence. The time for experiencing the aura of the works will come as areas of varying levels of radiation are reopened in stages, but the poesis of the durational existence of works in the exclusion zone is no less powerful for being imaginary. It is, as Heidegger suggests, poesis, which mobilises an ‘overflow beyond number’. Poesis, he theorised, works in the realm of the invisible, turning us away from technology and towards the open. What else are artists for in a time of darkness such as ours? ara

Taryn Simon, Final Photos, 2015–, website, server, solar panel, battery, Fukushima exclusion zone, Japan all images Courtesy the artists and Don’t Follow the Wind

Navin Rawanchaikul by Adeline Chia

Tales of Navin #1, 2013–15, acrylic on canvas, 160 × 250 cm

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The Thai artist’s latest work pushes on from issues enter of branding identity to confront personal emotions, ghosts of the past and the interconnected histories of South, East and Southeast Asia

In Thailand, there is a ritual involving people paying to lie in a coffin in mercantile heart of town and its biggest bazaar, the sprawling a temple for a few minutes. The thinking is, after five minutes of simu- Warorot Market. For the past 70 years or so, Rawanchaikul’s family has run a textile lated death, you rise again with the past melted away, bad luck dissipated – you’re box-fresh, so to speak. This self-imposed sense of rebirth business called the O.K. Shop, including 45 years in the same groundis in the air at Navin Rawanchaikul’s new studio on the outskirts of floor shophouse it occupies today. Up until 1983, the upper floors had Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he has created a cycle of paintings imag- been their family home. To put on the exhibition A Tale of Two Homes ining his own funeral. Titled Tales of Navin (2013–5), the first work in the (2015), which was spread out across all five floors of the building, series shows a funeral parlour, with all the mourners and attendees Rawanchaikul and his assistants spent two years cleaning out junk being avatars of himself. There’s him as a toddler, a schoolboy, an art- and salvaging key artefacts. Next, he filled the house with paintings, school graduate and a monk (a monastic stint is a customary rite of videos and installations all centred on his family. Private and idiosyncratic, the show was an odd mixture of honesty passage for many young men in Thailand). Other guests are Rawanchaikul’s various fictional ‘selves’, including the goofy recruiter for his and performance. The self-conscious, staged aspects could be seen in Navin Party (2006) project, for which he invited people from around the the scrupulous display of significant heirlooms – his great-grandfather’s walking stick, for example – or the framed letters penned to world who shared his first name to join a pseudo-political party. If Rawanchaikul’s funeral fantasy is a sort of self-reckoning, the various relatives. At points, the memorialisation went one step further final judgement is ambiguous. On the one into theatrical reenactment. His parents’ You felt as if you were attending hand, there is a sense of celebration of a fruitbedroom, for example, was done up as if for ful career, peopled with imaginative creatheir honeymoon night. A painting of the some funeral, though it was tions now gathered round to send off their unclear whose. For Rawanchaikul, newlyweds, in Indian-wedding-card-style, maker. On the other hand there’s a certain hung on the wall, while rose petals were the show was a cause for celebra- scattered on the bed in a heart-shaped pile. sorrow that comes with being the subject of a funeral attended only by versions of yourself. Narrow, rickety and stale-aired the way tion. Several times during our old houses are, and filled with the possesLast year was an important year for meeting last August, he expressed Rawanchaikul, a prominent Thai artist of sions of family members dead and alive, the Punjabi-Indian descent known for playful his satisfaction with the exhibition place coffined the viewer. You felt as if you works exploring issues of cultural idenwere attending some funeral, though it was in his family home, going so far tity. But it was also a year stalked by crisis. unclear whose. But for Rawanchaikul, the as to say: “It is my peak” Navin Production, the workshop-factoryshow was a cause for celebration. Several company based in his hometown, celebrated its twentieth anniver- times during our meeting last August, he expressed his satisfaction sary. To mark the occasion, three venues hosted special exhibitions. with the exhibition in his family home, going so far as to say: “It is The first was at the artist’s 1,500sqm studiok, a tastefully minimalist my peak.” concrete structure that seemed like a good idea in the beginning, Putting aside the morbid considerations, I tend to agree. Despite but the actual building of which, Rawanchaikul said, filled him with its moments of staginess and peculiarity, this show, suffused as it doubt: the financial burden aside, he was also worried that others was with midlife preoccupations with mortality and time, had an might see it as a self-aggrandising ‘Navin Palace’. emotional weight hitherto unseen in Rawanchaikul’s work. Haunting The second exhibition was a small retrospective, also at posh the show were many kinds of ghosts: those of inhabitants now digs, in Thai collector Disaphol Chansiri’s house, which lies on leafy deceased, the memories of an irretrievable past and the absences of grounds shared by a former residence of a Chiang Mai prince. On show loved ones. His art seemed to call them back together, but never quite were key works from Rawanchaikul’s career drawn from Chansiri’s pinned them down. For once, his family and diasporic background private collection, including the Navinland Checkpoint from the Thai became more than just an easy personal brand. There appeared to be Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. some serious grappling with it, and no easy conclusions. The last exhibition, and the most important, took place in the This interestingly unresolved quality could be seen especially humblest venue: a dingy shophouse deep in the tuk-tuk-clogged in the many family portraits. Executed by his team of assistants,

Winter 2016

previous spread Places of Rebirth, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 220 × 720 cm. Collection Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York above Mission Navinland, 2011, painted fibreglass, book and flag, 180 × 180 × 245 cm, edition 1/5. DC Collection, Chiang Mai all images Courtesy the artist

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these paintings attempted to bridge the geographical and cultural border. Thus, a gesture representing historical enmity gets transdistances between his kin. The ‘two homes’ in the title refers to the formed into a joyous game between father and daughter. fact that he shuttles between Chiang Mai and Fukuoka, in Japan, In their manner of presentation, the artist’s fantasies have always where his Japanese wife and daughter have lived for many years. But been exuberant and kitschy, borrowing from comics, cartoons, music the artist’s family history also involves another kind of forced separa- videos and Bollywood billboards. The gigantic composite image tion: more than 60 years ago, his own grandparents and parents had becomes a recurring feature. In SUPER(M)ART (2004), the Thai art glitfled Gujranwala (now in Pakistan) during the India–Pakistan parti- terati are portrayed on a technicolour canvas packed with artists, curators, critics, dealers and collectors. For the Art Stage Singapore tion to settle in Thailand. To create his family portraits, the various subjects were stitched fair in 2012, he created a 12m-long We Are Asia!, a maniacally detailed together from different photos. This no-tech Photoshop became a panorama depicting a who’s who of Asian art. At 2014’s Art Dubai, he stark depiction of his hopes and dreams. Occasionally the dead were turned to the Indian and Pakistani migrant community for inspirapaired with the living, such as in the portrait of his late mother in a tion, posing these construction workers, cab drivers, fishermen and sari standing next to his daughter in a kimono. The two never met in tailors against a patchwork background of the city’s key sights. Cynics can identify a certain formula in his works here – big, brash, real life. Elsewhere, his works travel in time. In one painting he imagined himself the same age as his daughter, both of them as school- busy – which makes the sombre A Tale of Two Homes such a departure children holding hands, as if in some weird Haruki Murakami ghost from Rawanchaikul’s usual style. The circumstances that resulted in story. In another work he united the disparate strands of his family his multicultural family had always been given a shiny makeover, but in tree. Granduncles and -aunts, brothers and sisters, husbands and that exhibition they were left open-ended and tinged with melancholy. wives, cousins, in-laws, all of them brought together, smiling, in one Gone was the uncomplicated optimism; in its place was introspection. place… at least in art. Some works yearned for the past, such as the painting of a singlet These imagined reunions and impossible collages were bitter- and a radio made with dust gathered from the floor. Rawanchaikul told sweet the way Rawanchaikul’s other autobiographical projects me that in his younger days, his father’s routine was to get up before seldom were. There was no space for dawn, put on his vest and go for a run. Upon In one painting he imagined sadness in his earlier work; if anything, it his return, he would blast the morning news had a cheerful entrepreneurship about it: to get the entire house up. The radio and the himself the same age as his old singlet are both gone, but Rawanchaikul that his personal identity was a story worth daughter, both of them as schooltelling and selling. And indeed, it was reconstructed them from memory in this children holding hands, as if in work. Faint and tentative, made from dust convenient for curators interested in crossand water, this painting called back those cultural intersections that his heritage some weird Haruki Murakami was emblematic of the population drifts lost mornings with ashen tenderness. ghost story. In another work he of Southeast Asia, which is sandwiched Despite the wistfulness, there was also between the two great civilisations of India united the disparate strands of his a sense of regeneration here. Hanging in the and China, and permeable to its cultures family tree, brought together in playroom was an intriguing 2008 painting called Mario Sisters. In the foreground, and peoples. one place… at least in art Places of Rebirth (2009), for example, Rawanchaikul’s daughter was shown riding included in No Country (2013), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s on a seesaw with a yellow Super Mario hat – a scene he photographed show of South and Southeast Asian art, animates his family history in Japan while on the other end of the plank. Behind her, he superin the style of a psychedelic movie poster. It shows people from his imposed the train station in Gujranwala. In the background, you parents’ native Gujranwala, historic images of the Partition and could hear a recording of his wife telling his daughter a bedtime story old family photos. Riding down the centre of the painting, along in Japanese. the Wagah border between the two territories, is Rawanchaikul in Flung from Punjab to Thailand and later to Japan, his family is a a tuk-tuk. minor miracle of survival, and the painting captured that. The deparArguably, his outsider status has also contributed to a curator- tures of his ancestors, made under such exigency a generation earlier friendly view of art as a means of individual connection that rises due to the pinballing of fate, have resulted in an arrival of unexpected above political, social or economic categories. From the very start, grace: a girl in Japan, in a jokey hat, on a seesaw; or tucked in bed, his work stressed accessibility and community interventions. One listening to a story. of his first projects was Navin Gallery Bangkok (1995–8), for which he Perhaps the clearest embodiment of hope came in a work that was converted a taxi into a roving art gallery and invited artists to exhibit the most easily missed. Displayed in his parents’ room, and commisin it. Its success prompted several versions of the taxi gallery, which he sioned by the artist, it was a special silver necklace with a flower implemented in places such as Sydney, London and New York. pendant; in the centre, amid the petals, was a cast of his mother’s molar. The artist’s philosophy got its fullest utopian articulation at His daughter’s name, Mari, means ‘jasmine’ in Thai, and the work the Thai Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, for which he created linked the generations beautifully: a flower had sprung from a tooth. Navinland, a new, borderless ‘Friends of Navin’ nation that had its Now that is some rebirth. ara own checkpoint, passport and flag. Part of the exhibit was Mission Navinland, a lifesize sculpture of the artist and his daughter holding Work by Navin Rawanchaikul is included in the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial the Navinland passport and flag, and kicking their legs high in the of Contemporary Art (APT8) at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery ceremonial poses of Indian and Pakistani soldiers on the Wagah of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, Australia, on show through 10 April

Winter 2016

Douglas Coupland ‘We surround ourselves with clues about ourselves’ Interview by Heman Chong

above Douglas Coupland, Bit Rot, 2015 (installation view, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam). Photo: Cassander Eeftinck-Schattenkerk facing page Plaster death mask of David Bowie, purchased on eBay by Douglas Coupland (installation view, Bit Rot, 2015, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam). Photo: Aad Hoogendoorn

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Bit Rot is an exhibition by the artist and novelist Douglas Coupland that took place at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam between 11 September and 3 January. This interview was done via email, a preferred medium when it comes to interviews for Coupland. Spread across eight rooms and a paperback book, Coupland, along with curators, Defne Ayas and Samuel Saelemakers, combines his own paintings, sculptures, photographs and texts as well as works from artists such as Jenny Holzer and James Rosenquist found in his collection. This interview circles the ideas behind a few select works from the exhibition. Heman Chong Let’s begin by talking about a text, specifically a sentence found in your show from Jenny Holzer. You have worked with Defne Ayas and Samuel Saelemakers to include works by other artists within your exhibition, with the result that this is your perspective: we are looking at what you are looking at. Holzer’s sentence, a Truism, cast in steel, says, ‘In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.’ Can you talk about how this work functions within your universe of stuff, and why it’s in your collection? Douglas Coupland To begin with, the words themselves are lovely. They imply that as an artist you can imagine your way in and out of situations that seem, on a conscious level, unfixable. But these words can also apply to all people in all walks of life. They’re universal. Holzer was a catalysing artist for me during the early 1980s. Some friends in art school returned from a trip to New York with ripped sheets of Truisms [1978–87] Holzer had put up around Soho. They really shocked me. This was long before the Internet, and it took ages for information to get from anywhere to anywhere. It was the first time I ever looked at words as raw art supplies. It was as if the ripped paper was dripping with truth. I doubt that I ever would have thought of writing had it not been for that moment. Then in December of 1989 I was in Manhattan and saw Holzer’s Guggenheim show. The main work was very simple, a strip of red LEDs (then quite exotic) that cycled up three-anda-half rungs of the Guggenheim’s helix, along which travelled a seemingly endless stream of Holzer’s Truisms. After about 45 minutes, something freaky happened, and the physical world dematerialised and I was suddenly inside what felt to be a universe of pure text, a perfect hybridisation of space and words – and then it ended. Fortunately I was there with a close friend, and she’d had the exact same experience at the same time – and it remains a strong bond

between us. It wasn’t what I’d expected. It was a cherished moment of life on earth. I wish I could have all of Holzer’s words cast in steel, but they cost money. I could only afford one, so I acquired this one, as it reminded me most about the texture of life during the 1980s. In my house I put it above my front door. It acts as a blessing every time you or me or anyone else walks beneath it. Also in the show is EXIT EVIL, a work located beside the fire escape, and THE FUTURE!, which is above an archway beside that same escape. I had no idea I was so superstitious about exitways until we began placing items, but that’s what collections teach you… tendencies you might have otherwise not seen. HC And your David Bowie Death Mask, what are the relationships between that and the Holzer text?

DC The Holzer piece went above the David Bowie Death Mask. I was worried it might feel somehow sentimental, but I followed Samuel [Saelemakers]’s advice and trust that this isn’t the case. I had now best explain how the Bowie piece came about, which is really convoluted, but I’ll try. I’m doing an ongoing sculpture project called Redheads in which the melanocortin‑1 receptor (MC1R) found on the 16th chromosome becomes a metaphor for small geographical locations to create new and unexpected mutations or even transmutations – think of wine and terroir, and the ability of extreme soil conditions to create

unexpected wines. So I’ve been doing a longterm historical study of redheads, Bowie being one. I began collecting images and 3D approximations (when possible) of redheads through history, and I obtained the Bowie casting from an English makeup artist. That was about a year ago. But between then and now, a wonderful friend of mine, the artist Rex Ray in California, died of a hideous disease caused by smoking called Buerger’s disease. Rex had been David Bowie’s web designer for about a decade, and Rex had told me that it’s very, very hard for David Bowie, as a human being born in 1947, to be getting older – to be ageing within modernity, where every wrinkle and wart is scrutinised by endless cameras. I thought about it, and it has to be true. I remember in 1974, at the age of twelve-and-a-half, going to the Park Royal shopping mall in Vancouver and being scared shitless yet seduced by the huge poster for Diamond Dogs in the front window of a record store. In my mind Bowie will always be an androgynous twenty-four-and-a-half-year-old. And yet he’s not. He’s almost seventy. And this leads us to the great divide of the twenty-first century, which is the theological version of the ‘Jihad versus McWorld’ dichotomy: there’s no known system of thought that I can see that adequately reconciles the fact that with religion you have the afterlife, whereas with modernity, you only have the future. I think if Rex hadn’t died, this piece would never have come about. But Rex did die, and… it’s emotional. I miss him. So to put Holzer’s words above Bowie’s facial casting, which has been proposed as a death mask, is like accelerating time and accelerating history, and laser-pinpoints the disparity between modernity and theology. So… we’re almost at 900 words for one question. We’d best move on. HC A thread that moves through your work, one that is evident in Bit Rot, is the idea that everyone is trying to make sense of the things around them in this completely subjective manner: that it’s impossible to define a kind of empirical way of talking about something like ‘fried chicken’. DC I’m unsure if it’s apples and oranges to say the opposite of the search for personal subjective meaning is the search for empirical universal meaning. I think the opposite of the search for personal meaning is to not search for personal meaning. We all surround ourselves with clues about ourselves everywhere, and if we search for them or think of personal clues as constellations, unexpected meaning will always emerge.

This sounds kind of old- fashioned, but I think it’s actually more about the future, more about pattern recognition. Back to [Marshall] McLuhan, who said that the one way to remain sane and stable in the midst of the maelstrom was to look for patterns. You may not find them, but the search itself will save you. Sometimes we look for personal patterns and sometimes, as with, say, the works about jumpers [Coupland’s Jumper series of World Trade Center works, 2013], it evolves into a universal revelation, and a universal horror, unleashing inside our heads all of those images we never discuss or process. Empiricism is actually something I collect – a category known as ‘generica’ – objects that are the platonic absolutes of their category, sort of like the 3D versions of those supergeneric illustrations from twentieth-century encyclopaedias. I’ve attached a photo.

I also collect their cousin forms, which I’m unsure of the name: objects that look as if to be very precise and specific about what they are – we just don’t know what they are. HC I want to point to the book Search |, which consists of search terms from Google, but also to The Living Internet [both 2015], which you describe as ‘a physical mockup in 3D of what the Internet and online searches actually look like. Can you talk a little about the context in which these two works are produced? DC Since February I’ve been artist-in-residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris. One of the gists of my experience there was to contemplate how human beings search for something – anything – and to contemplate what that searching tells us about ourselves. Search | is derived from all global searches, February 2015, English language. HC Why did you choose to make Search | into a book and The Living Internet as a kinetic sculpture? DC Search |’s introduction explains its methodology, so I won’t go into that. But for The Living Internet (a terrible name, I know; I’m going to title its 2.0 version The Search Rodeo) I wanted to do something that wasn’t data visualisation. No pie charts. No charts of any sort. Just an anarchical, subjective snapshot of the chaos of raw searching, seen through my eyes. I mean, the Internet has no design. It’s not as if Tyler Brûlé came in and said, “There. I pronounce

the Internet designed.” Its fluidity and transience is kind of breathtaking. I wanted the components of the piece to reflect this, so they’re built from trashy online 3D files, printed in a fleeting manner and then hurled into an arena to duke it out. The forms have glitches and damage and are actually evocative of the sloppy, lazy way people search. People rarely seek the meaning of life in Google (sometimes they do); they’re looking for acne cures, urban legends and videogaming cheats. It’s the opposite of noble, and it’s often very, very funny. I don’t know if you could depict the Internet without humour. HC The collages within the Warflowers seem to embrace this sense of a search as well as a sense of placing two sets of misaligned imagery on a single plane; ikebana alongside military insignias. They remind me of flat sheets of stickers that contain diecut graphics you might want to peel off and attach somewhere else. Can you tell us about how you came to think of these two things as a single image? DC These pieces were done in 2006 as part of Toronto’s Contact photography festival. They’re very important to me for a number of reasons. I grew up in a military/air force gun-nut family, just like you see on TV: rifles and weapons on all of the walls that weren’t already covered with photos of my father in his jet. My brother is also a taxidermist, and over all of the flat surfaces were the insides and outsides of birds. My father also kept cattle out in the Fraser Valley [in British Columbia], and so there was an endless parade of meat for all meals and… I can’t believe I didn’t turn out to be Morrissey. Growing up I hated all of this and vowed that when I could escape, I’d live in a place as opposite from it as I could – which is what I thought I’d done until Angela (yes, she of the Guggenheim) told me I’d done no such thing, and pointed out the F-111 piece (air force jet), Vietnam soldier (military + taxidermy), all of the death and disaster pieces, and… basically I’d just taken what I’d grown up with and reiterated it. I was so happy when she pointed this out, because I got rid of most everything that didn’t have to do with death or destruction and I could really focus on it specifically. I think that so much of what we find compelling in later life is what was lurid or frightening between the ages of eight to thirteen. Ikebana: I went to art school in Japan in 1983. Part of it was that students had to take ikebana as part of the curriculum. As a way of learning about form and volume, I can think of few lessons more vital that way than ikebana. Anyway, my father always thought that the worst, most effete things you could have as an adult were vases… and so I took to ikebana like a duck to water, and now also have a collection of about 200 vases. Freud.

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The pieces in the Warflower series are pseudo flat. It’s not really possible to see them as one integrated image. You’re either looking at the photo portion or you’re looking at the graphics, but both at once isn’t possible. Which is like me and my childhood. I hate art as therapy, but art as self-revelation is interesting. Look at Mike Kelley (who I never met; big regret). Placing the soldier in relation to the F-111 is pretty much an embodiment of my relationship to my family and my past and my question of whether it really is possible to move forward or maybe it isn’t. HC I spent last week (on a beach in Sagres, at the southwestern point of continental Europe) reading the new anthology of short stories and essays that you’ve published alongside your exhibition at Witte de With. The first book I read of yours was Microserfs, back in 1996, and reading Bit Rot last week really reminded me so much of how personal your writing is; that there is hardly a barrier to be scaled between the reader and yourself; that in fact you’re speaking to them in this intimate, confronting and gentle manner, much like receiving an email from a friend. I digress. My favourite story in Bit Rot is ‘Wonkr’, perhaps because it’s about an imaginary app (much like Oop!, in Microserfs) and the prospects of it existing in our world. I’m surprised that nobody has taken on what you’ve written in ‘Wonkr’ and made it a real app. DC It’s only been out six weeks or so. Apps take forever to develop, but if someone has the correct assets on hand, they could become very rich very quickly. Minecraft (Oop!) just sold for over a billion dollars. But it’s kind of heartbreaking how many app-development companies there are out there – it’s like all the best-looking kids in high school going to Hollywood to get a screen test and become a star, and the chance is one in a zillion.  HC Have you ever considered making an app (or have you?) as an artwork? DC Yoo [a fictional app, published in Bit Rot] began as an actual app-design art project – unironic and for real. Once I learned more about how search works, I could see why it would be not unfeasible, but… it would traverse too many e‑domains to be practical. HC Or maybe it’s more interesting to think of apps as something else (like a political platform) rather than an artwork? DC No. I’d only like to do art-as-art apps. People who are too political are… well, if people get too political, it’s like when someone puts on country-and-western music and I suddenly feel a deep need to be anywhere on earth except there in the room having to listen to the country-and-western music. I get it, but I’m just not so into it.

Douglas Coupland, Warflower Number Five, 2006, digital print. Courtesy Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto

Cheng Tsun-Shing All Those Places, All Those People Article by Wong Molin Photo commentary by Cheng Tsun-Shing

Photo Studio in Town, Luzhou County, 1973–4, gelatin silver print, 61 × 76 cm

I - 1 Luzhou A small town situated across the walls of the old city of Taipei, Luzhou is separated from the city proper by the Tamsui River, sitting at the foot of Guanyin Mountain. Due to geological changes and the intrusion of seawater, once-fertile farmlands turned into salinated wasteland, and the resulting mass emigration of the local population ended the town’s glory days. Guanyin Mountain turned into a massive wild area filled with graves of the dead, and remaining residents laid

down their farming equipment and took to funeral services for a living. The atmosphere of death permeated, as farmers transformed into communicators with the underworld. In 1975 I used town life in Luzhou as the subject of my photography in my first exhibition; most of the works and negatives were left in Taiwan, cluttered around my home, leaving bugs, mice, time and nature to take their toll. Only a few were left, and these have been brought back to life in a new

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narrative, serving as a prelude for the Won’t Somebody Bring the Light exhibition. The graves on Guanyin Mountain, the photo shops in the town centre, the mansion of the town’s most eminent Li family – all these have fallen into unkempt disarray. Under a new generation, the ghostly images of the past become a night mist: do we hear the shuffling of night travellers, or the whistling of winds in withered branches? In the end, this is not about memory, but possibly about recollection.

In March of last year, four decades after his last exhibition, Cheng the dark night’, then, ‘the youth listens silently as he waits for the Tsun-Shing exhibited some 140 monochrome and colour photo- guest to be seated, after which he repeats the waiting and the guiding’, graphs taken during the early to mid-1970s (while the artist was and lastly, ‘he is not yet a host who receives his guests, but witness to touring Taiwan), in an exhibition titled Won’t Somebody Bring the Light a deferred ethical relationship’. at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Art Museum, Beijing (the show The word ‘torch’ in Cheng’s text signifies the existence of light subsequently toured to the Minsheng Art Museum, in Shanghai). In in a time and space that is dark, which further leads to histories that the years since his 1975 exhibition, The Scenes of the Floating World of are unspoken and places that are unrecognised. This light flickering Luzhou County, the artist’s film had been stored in a dark box. Forty in dark is also the shape of time developed on a negative. In Cheng’s years on, when Cheng finally opened the box, he saw a collection of photographs, the light faintly enlightens a path in the long night, negatives showing people and places that had already been aban- waiting for the ghosts of the unspoken histories (of Taiwan) and of doned by history, but were preserved in those images: a Taoist priest people’s unconscious to present their apparitions in the abyssal darkat Guanyin Mountain, Luzhou County; a Chinese linking-rings ness, seemingly testifying to the death of history via a summoning performer at Bankar, Taipei; sleepers on the dock of Huanlien Ferry; ritual. Cheng first spoke of this haunting two decades ago in ‘On Camera Lucida’: ‘Time has at once been concentrated, fixed, and liberpassengers in the lobby of Taipei Main Station, waiting for a train. A writer, photographer, filmmaker and art critic, Cheng published ated and accelerated; threatened by this transformation, the subject a collection of key essays under the heading Melancholic Documents in (of a person) that has long contented itself with retiring in the dark, is 1992. Among these is a work titled ‘On Camera Lucida’ and subtitled forced to manifest itself.’ A film, a negative, is also ‘forced to manifest ‘some problematics regarding the aesthetics of photography raised by itself’ – in order to be viewed by people. In the torch-bearing youth’s Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980)’. Cheng’s discussion of ‘photog- waiting, all those people that are present are merely late guests; in raphy’s capacity for metaphor and signification’ and his desire to Cheng’s photographs, the people he photographed are also late highlight, through the discourse, a photography that is equiva- guests, or latecomers. They are later than history, because they can lent to metaphor and the mise-en-scène of theatre is particularly rele- never catch up with the changes of history. Therefore, they are never vant to his recently rediscovered photographs. According to Cheng, of their time; they are always memories. Four decades ago Cheng witnessed the presence of those people this approach to aesthetics is not novel; When Cheng finally opened the at those places he visited in Taiwan, and during the nineteenth century, he points out, the ‘high art’ photographers influbox, he saw a collection of negatives by pressing the shutter button of the camera, he transformed himself into enced by the Pre-Raphaelites, such as showing people and places that had the torch-bearing youth – witness to a William Lake Price and Julia Margaret already been abandoned by history, Cameron, had been exploring photogradeferred ethical relationship. phy’s capacity for metaphor in a profound If Cheng is telling us that reflecbut were preserved in those images tion in silence marks the maturation way. However, this capacity was later overshadowed by the modernist fascination with the camera’s rela- of the youth, it is, as quoted by Cheng from Camera Lucida: ‘because tionship to technological progress and then further marginalised each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death’. This bodily path that links one context to another in a ‘deciinto what Cheng terms the ‘dark space of theatre’. That ‘dark space of theatre’, if considered in relation to ‘meta- sive moment’, together with the subject of the maturation, looked phor’, a term that is especially significant in psychoanalysis, leads us at in terms of the Confucian injunction to ‘restrain oneself and back to the title of Cheng’s recent exhibition: Won’t Somebody Bring the return to rites (li)’, reveals a relationship between the ethics (‘ethics’ Light. Here we will be speaking of the overlap between the title’s meta- in Confucian ideology means to cooperate with the existing system, phorical nature and the history of photography found in the chapter normally expressed in Confucian discourse as to practise the rites/ on the ‘darkness of metaphor’ in the catalogue and wall texts that rituals of society) and the subject. This relationship was embodied in accompany the show. The exhibition title is a quotation from a line in Cheng’s youthful practice of photography four decades ago, when he ‘Shaoyi (Smaller Rules of Demeanour)’, the 17th chapter of Confucius’s was shooting all those people and all those places, for example the classic Li-ji (The Book of Rites), which describes the administrative and passengers at Taipei Main Station (photographed in 1976), the soul ceremonial rituals of the Zhou dynasty. Inspired by this line, Cheng callers in a funeral procession (in 1975) or the ethnic minorities living further develops the character in Shaoyi into a torch-bearing youth, an on Lanyu Island (1974–5). In the temporal rift of the ‘decisive moment’ adolescent who waits and guides late guests to a ceremony, and, when when he raised the camera and activated the shutter, Cheng saw formit turns dark, lights a torch to illuminate the way for the guests. Cheng less and shadowless nature, an abstract manifestation of society built uses the torch-bearing youth as a metaphor of the photo-taking youth by and between heaven and earth. Li therefore is the formless and that he once was, to interpret the relationship between him and those shadowless existence, free from men’s creation and manipulation. people and places he photographed 40 years ago. In Cheng’s text, at The li of heaven and earth are always natural, given; and therefore the point of overlap of meanings and images, a number of sentences men’s subjectivity that retires in the dark is also listed among the manage to bring out the ‘différance’ (a term coined by French philos- spectres and the apparitions of the ghosts. opher Jacques Derrida, which is homophonous with différence, from Cheng continues in ‘On Camera Lucida’: ‘the subject of photogdifférer, which can be translated as both deference and difference, raphy becomes an image that could not be reanimated. Without a highlighting the fact that words can never fully articulate what they body, temporality is lost.’ Forty years later, when Cheng opened his mean without qualifiers – their meaning is thus deferred) of meta- archive, those photographs were already faded into fragments. So he phor. For instance, first, ‘the torch-bearing youth stands waiting in took photos of these fragments and titled them Elegy 1975. Indeed, part

Tetraptych IV – Invocation of Spirit, 1975, inkjet print on lead-aluminium composite panel, 200 × 150 cm

I - 3 Mourning Funeral mourning, the remembrance of the living for the dead, serves as a consolation for both the deceased, who is set to embark on a journey with no return, and also the bereaved. In historical, cultural and spiritual terms, the funeral rite symbolises the embodiment of an ethical system, a sort of living fossil-like snapshot of a culture’s customs. Clothes, rituals and ritual instruments are all embodied within a

certain religious act, which both regulates and directs. As I recorded on film the funeral of a relative of a friend, standing close yet still feeling a distance, I might have taken the opportunity to rethink – whether consciously or not – the departure of my father not so long ago. As I followed the bereaved in one ritual after another, I felt a play of the living and the dead unfolding on the stage of daily life. Would these instruments,

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these bodies, these clothes, these gestures touch upon another kind of light, another kind of lament under ordinary daylight? The calling of souls forms four pages of humanity’s call to the gods, and in this mystic otherworldliness, the transcendence of near and far, of heavy dusts and clouds, sees man as a ghostly figure in the wilderness, calling towards the lingering shadows of those who will never return.

Arrival and Departure, Taipei Main Station, 1976,gelatin silver print, 61 × 76 cm

I - 9 Taipei Train Station Travellers slowly making their way downstairs, their leisurely steps and figures captured in slanted light, show a life from a different time with their garments and faces. Nowhere to be seen is the ceaseless and restless urban modernity ushered in by the relentless acceleration of steam trains; what is left now is the noise and chatter broken only by the odd rest, filtering a massive staccato of familiar silence, which is written on the chance encounters and strange faces glancing at one another. We see weariness, anxiety and excitement, as people set out on distant journeys, or begin their adventures in the city of their destination.

Unfolding in the fluidity of this locale is an indoor drama of people from these times: as they enter the station, travellers immediately inhale the air of those journeying far away from their home, as they don costumes of future memories of their travels, and ebb along as they await their turn. The meeting points, the lobby, the platforms, the gates – each of these microcosms, separated yet connected, has its own mysterious refractions of light and space, inviting out naked shadows and every scene of humanity. The station, a public yet secluded place, is much like a bulletin board on which ephemeral private conversations

and feelings flow, yet the bulletin boards in the station itself securely house official documents and orders behind a glass plate. The Taipei Train Station seen here was rebuilt in 1941 as a mixture of Western-style and concrete architecture, and was torn down and rebuilt again during the late 1980s. With the city and its people crossing multiple generations, the fluidity of modernity is seen in these changes. As a digitalised space incorporating multiple, cyclic spaces, and a place where public order is not to be denied, the station is also a vague choice between being active and passive, a theatre of waiting.

Performers by a Crumbling Wall, 1978, gelatin silver print, 61 × 76 cm

II - 2 Traditional opera troupe Wandering opera troupes perform on open-air platforms in religious festivals; these folk music groups are the nomads of society, wandering the country with their craft. Platforms are crude and hastily set up, and the transformation of ordinary people into the kaleidoscope of characters onstage occurs in plain sight, with no distinction between front stage and backstage. The bare platform, rising high above the sight of the audience, is not an alienating theatre where the focus is drawn away; the

magic and transformations are well known, but at the same time unpredictable, just like the light of night and day. The audience is free to come and go as they please; the performers onstage now put their characters on and then take them off, knowing that a particular musician is playing out of key, and he has only two more blank verse lines before he can leave the stage. These wandering musicians have their entire lives packed in a single iron chest, living off what is stashed away in these boxes.

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Homeless and penniless, the troupe becomes their family, and their lives are spent either on the stage or squatting behind it. These are the last roaming gypsies who go from town to town, living off the grace of the gods; life for them is not a journey, but the road itself. Any and all ornaments are merely illusory: as they wait through the brightness of day and shadows of night to perform, the transitory fantasy of wandering disappears through the scenes.

of the deferred ethical relationship is that as Cheng, the photographer the image – Cheng engraves this dangerous implication in the words and the witness, ages, his memory fails to distinguish clearly between ‘gelatin silver print’. We, as viewers gazing at the images, truly feel the the past and the present, therefore the images that developed from witness of that deferred ethical relationship, suspended here gazing the dark (or unspoken history) become only a trace, the remains of the at all those places and people, which uncannily places the viewer back image. Look at these remains of images: if light comes from the living, into a shiny and fluid dizziness. Just as Barthes, viewing his mother’s and shadow comes from the ghosts, our gaze upon the images seems photograph, painfully reacted with an unfamiliarity of death! to signify a summoning of the alienated other: where do the late Unfamiliarity as such is recorded in Cheng’s ‘On Camera Lucida’: guests come from? Where will they leave for? Just as in Ancient China, since the ‘photograph is literally an emanation of the referent’, when all rituals (li) were considered ethical (li), dwelling in Cheng’s Barthes addresses the summoned death from the photo of his mother. images – between the witnessed impression and the trace that is now, This ‘emanation of the referent’ is the ‘double death’ narrated by between himself and the other – is a blank distance created by and for the photo and by the film; it makes our gazes mysteriously atmosdeath, where photography shows its nature. pheric, and this is what Walter Benjamin famously called the ‘aura’. If li (ethics/ritual) pertains indeed to spiritual and religious rituals, However, presently we can only feel profoundly from Cheng’s then the question addressed to the viewer by the places and people in 40-year-old photographs that the places and people are nothing more Cheng’s photographs is: in what way can one structure an ethical rela- than silhouettes, products of silver salt: they are born here once, and tionship with the photographer’s memory of the bodies and spaces in die there once – photographed 40 years ago, kept for 40 years, viewed the images? In between impression and trace, time and time, space again after 40 years. The torch-bearing youth ‘listens silently as he and space, people and people – this in-between that houses every- waits for the guest to be seated, after which he repeats the waiting and thing is the ‘decisive moment’ of the act of the shutter opening and the guiding’. Yet now witnessed in his journal of oblivion among the closing, the interval of the scattered spectres is the ethical torch-bearing youth’s silent position of ‘the perfect man reflection and the interval cares for no self’ (as the Taoist when the body connects thinker Zhuangzi (c. 369–286 with memory. For the body, BC) writes in Free and Easy this interval has stopped its Wandering, a guide to freeing activity, has stunned it; it’s oneself from power structures a moment where the body and self-interest). In a transcenthat once lived dies. But this dental fashion, restructured interval also freezes everymemory haunts the realm of thing in a negative. What has the living and the dead, and he the young Cheng Tsun-Shing who is summoned recurs as a seen? Why did he capture subjective unity. everything and then leave it Examining this excavation all on the negatives? Maybe, of images, the emotion that as Cheng says in ‘On Camera allures us is the mourning for Lucida’: ‘Photography is a melancholic act that is purely nostalgic.’ the bodiless in the image, and the history of these 40 years of turbuMaybe this is to remind us that forgetting is a sign of memory? lence. Globalisation has brought everything into the capitalist tempFour decades later, in the exhibition Won’t Somebody Bring the Light, tation, and an island as insubstantial as Taiwan couldn’t escape either. we enter into a space where death, oblivion and silence tangle, and Cheng showed his weighty concern for the defeat of ethics in his the fading of everything is like the erosion of the shape of time – what collected works On Not Being Able to Ouster Morality (2006), and, with a forsaken land of melancholy! Twenty-five-hundred years ago, as the exhibition Won’t Somebody Bring the Light, prompts us to think anew Confucius said by the river: ‘It [time] passes through like the flow of concerning what is said in ‘Shaoyi’: ‘If one came late and yet arrived water, which goes on day and night.’ The flow of water indicates that before the torches were lighted, it was announced to him that the the memory of the past, present and future are indistinguishable, all guests were all there.’ ara placed on a linear timeline. This eroded time seemingly ruins all by suspending all. The ‘anxiety of silver salt’ raised by Cheng in his monoTranslated from the Chinese by Li Bowen graph on photography Silver Salt Fever (2011) pertains to the fact that nobody would treat a negative as memory. Even though the photo, Cheng Tsun-Shing is the founder of Flaneur Cultural Lab. He taught at damaged and ruined, is to be kept, collected and conserved, what is National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and was the recipient of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Officier) in 2012. Cheng writes extensively deemed to be forgotten will ‘pass through like the flow of water’. on aesthetics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and moving image. His key Negatives and silver salt speak of two kinds of death respecpublications include Melancholic Documents (1992), Silver Salt tively: negatives guarantee that memory will not disappear into the Fever (2011), Measure the Length of a Tree and an Evening (2009) void; silver salt, on the other hand, crystallises time into a substance and On Not Being Able to Ouster Morality (2006). He also superof deadly form by removing an instant of it from its continuous vised, among many other works, the translation of flow. Hence in the descriptions of photos in Won’t Somebody Bring the Light, the double death indeed above Elegy4-4 1975, inkjet print, 61 × 76 cm The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1973) by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis implies a curse of ‘metaphorical darkness’ cast on all images Courtesy the artist

Grand Palais 31st March - 3rd April, 2016 South Korea guest of honour www.artparis.com

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Clothes which are torn, ripped (whether for fashion or otherwise) or soiled, overalls, boilersuits and combat clothing are not allowed 67

Between Declarations and Dreams / Siapa Nama Kamu? Inaugural exhibitions, National Gallery Singapore from 24 November In a country that has four national languages (English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese and Tamil), is just 50 years old, has aspirations to assert itself as the beating heart of Southeast Asia and has been governed by representatives of a single party (the People’s Action Party) for the entire period of its independent existence, it’s easy to see the very idea of a National Gallery as a project that has political motivations at its core. And that’s not the only reason you might be encouraged to think as much. The SG$532-million ($375m) project to convert two of the country’s landmark government buildings – formerly home to its Supreme Court and the city-state’s City Hall, where the Japanese surrender in 1945 officially marked the end of the Second World War in Southeast Asia – into an art gallery was first announced by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (whose party has often seen the arts as playing a secondary role to the economic priorities of nation building) in 2005 and opened by him ten years later. Notably, the former functions of the gallery’s buildings are memorialised within it almost to the same extent as the newly installed art, which comprises over 800 works in the permanent galleries. It’s a confusion of purpose only enhanced by signs peppered around newly restored former offices and courtrooms warning visitors not to touch desks and chairs because they are ‘part of the exhibit’. This, after all, is a country in which Lim Nang Seng’s Dancing Girl (1970), a public sculpture in Tiong Bahru, was accompanied by a plaque that mentioned a politician rather than the artist (who would go on to sculpt the bestknown, 8.6m-high embodiment of Singapore’s national symbol, the Merlion). But perhaps all this simply provides a context in which to view works such as Matthew Ngui’s anamorphic chair, a part of You can order and eat delicious poh-piah (an interactive installation originally made for Documenta X, 1997), in which a series of wooden blocks coalesce into a chair only when viewed from a particular perspective. Context, perhaps even a search for it, is to an extent what the National Gallery is all about.

Converted by Studio Milou Architecture, the National Gallery is home to the world’s largest public collection of Southeast Asian art. And it has 64,000sqm in which to show off these works – and more specifically the national treasures of the Singaporean part of Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is a region whose identity is almost as patchy as its public art collecting, and it will be no surprise that ‘long overdue’ would be most people’s initial reaction to the gallery’s permanent display of art from the region, despite the fact that the title of the gallery’s permanent display of Southeast Asian art, Between Declarations and Dreams, still, and perhaps honestly, hints at certain vagaries. To an extent these are set up at the beginning of the exhibition, which starts in the nineteenth century with a series of broadly ethnographic photographs and then Indonesian Raden Saleh’s large, Western-style oil paintings exploring his (and perhaps a more general) fetish for lions and tigers. What’s curious about this is that it announces the beginning of ‘art’ in the modern sense within the region as something specifically Western and essentially two-dimensional, with the added implication that whatever else was going on in Southeast Asia at the time wasn’t art. Although a more generous interpretation (the one that the National Gallery seems determined to pursue) might be that in the years that followed, this kind of art was something that artists from the region went on to infiltrate, claim and subvert, just as Singaporeans did to the buildings in which all this is housed. Indeed, with the corridorlike structure of the roomto-room displays (echoing, perhaps, the former corridors of power in the building), it’s hard not to see progress as one of the underlying themes of the National Gallery’s approach to the cacophony of styles, media and subject matter that make up the region’s recent art history. In that respect, Gerardo Tan’s The End (1995), a red velvet rope stretched between two brass stanchions placed in front of a painting of the same, might be emblematic in its foregrounding of reality before image and both real and psychological restraint.

facing page, top Chua Mia Tee, National Language Class, 1959, oil on canvas, 112 × 153 cm. Collection National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy National Heritage Board, Singapore

The permanent display of Singaporean art goes under the heading Siapa Nama Kamu? (What is your name? in Malay – a line written on a blackboard in Chua Mia Tee’s painting National Language Class, 1959, part of the collection), overtly placing a struggle for identity at the heart of its narrative. Indeed, questions of ‘Who am I?’ ‘What am I?’ and ‘Where am I?’ dominate all the displays here: in the Singapore section beginning with some rather odd nineteenth-century natural-history illustrations of flora and fauna, and culminating in a slightly patchy contemporary display of relics of performances (jackets, artists talking about what they did) by practitioners such as Tang Da Wu and Vincent Leow. Back in 1994, the National Arts Council (NAC) stopped funding unscripted performance art following a controversy surrounding Brother Cane, a performance by artist Josef Ng. For the next ten years public performance art was effectively banned in Singapore, and artists such as Tang Da Wu mainly practised overseas. After all that, the inclusion of Tan’s two velvet ropes seems particularly poignant. And yet all of this should take nothing away from the fact that the new National Gallery is a magnificent resource (at the opening, the first of its temporary exhibitions showcases ink artists Chua Ek Kay and Wu Guanzhong). For everything you do know or recognise about art from the region, the museum’s displays throw up many more works and issues about which you know little or nothing. In the end it’s one of the smallest works on paper, Untitled (Can we be ironic) (1996), by Simryn Gill, that perhaps best encapsulates what the National Gallery might really be about – the yellowing A4 sheet simply has the four words of the parenthetic title typed out four times in its centre – and, more than anything, the National Gallery in which it sits will be a testing place for the limits and possibilities of art in a region that hasn’t had a platform like this before. Here, undoubtedly, is a place where such debates can begin. Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom DBS Singapore Gallery, National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy National Gallery Singapore

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Liu Chuang Live Remnants Magician Space, Beijing 27 October – 6 December Despite some nice source ideas, Liu Chuang’s solo show at Magician Space is an example of a situation in which the curator’s gentle hand appears to have struggled to clarify a set of works between which relations remain tenuous at best. Live Remnants touches on three unevenly overlapping aspects of urban existence: the diffusion of cultural design elements over time and across formats, as they reappear in the contemporary urban fabric; the marks left behind by humans on cultural artefacts, as evidence of the urge to assert continuing existence; and the synergism and/or antagonism between the natural and human presences in the manipulated environment. What is a Screen? (all works 2015) stands facing us upon our entry into the gallery: a temporary wall pierced by a gap into which an iron screen has been inserted. This combines elements from the elaborate metal security screens that are a ubiquitous feature of apartments in China. Liu has already produced a series of these that present intact examples in the gallery space and add a net curtain that billows out in the breeze created by a fan. But this is a bastardised version, the various design elements cut and reassembled into a Frankenstein’s-monster-like structure, painted sections further breaking up the forms, and the curtain printed with a pale chequerboard pattern suggesting the background layer

in photo-manipulation software. The overall effect is of a highly disjointed process of collage taking place in a virtual space. The bars take shapes adapted from remnants of Chinese cultural memory, shapes originally appearing in the weave of a cloth, or as an element on the mounts of antique copper mirrors. The tenaciousness of these design elements perhaps points to some autonomous nature they may possess, as they resurface again and again at appropriate moments in a multitude of forms. Such an urge for existence to transcend the instant of being is also suggested by the marginal glosses left behind by borrowers of paperback fiction, examples of which the artist has collected over the years. Images of one of these books appear on the gallery wall (Love Story No.11), its extensive message to no one in particular reinscribed by the artist beside it. Between these, two light fittings hang from the ceiling on long cables (both Untitled), one of which in cross-section follows a diamond form seen in the iron screens. The other light fitting is made from two smashed glass beer-bottles. Their shared function as lights means that these two works apparently relate to each other, and Liu suggests that there is a visual contrast between a traditional and a modern/industrial production technique (the crackle-glazed porcelain and moulded glass respectively); however, this idea seems to take an unwarranted tangent

from the strong narrative of ever-recurring design elements that the other works have drawn upon. Similarly, the video BBR1 (No.1 of Blossom Bud Restrainer) No.2 takes yet another diversion. In this piece the artist has created a semidocumentary film about the Beijing authorities’ attempts to scientifically manage the vagaries of nature in the urban environment. A perennial problem in the city stems from earlier efforts to rapidly ‘green’ the city by planting thousands of quickgrowing poplar and willow trees. The unplanned consequence of this is that every year these trees produce vast quantities of fluffy catkins, in a ‘snowstorm’ that collects in highly flammable drifts. To combat this, a chemical has been developed that is injected into the trees to inhibit the seeds’ development, but with the (again unplanned) consequence of diverting the energy usually used for developing the seeds into increasing the growth of the tree itself, ipso facto producing even more catkins. The artwork seems to contrast the futility of official practices with the joy of the general public as they set light to the collected seeds. Live Remnants is perhaps best appreciated as a set of discrete works, each of which touches lightly on the tribulations of urban life. Collected as an exhibition, however, the works struggle to build a coherent message that might hint at greater things. Edward Sanderson

BBR1 (No.1 of Blossom Bud Restrainer) No.2, 2015 (installation view, Live Remnants). Courtesy the artist and Magician Space, Beijing

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Yan Xing Thief Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing 29 August – 25 October Over the past few years, Yan Xing has become known for disrupting and obscuring narratives drawn from classical Western art-history as a means of deterritorialising his artistic practice; his latest exhibition elaborates this cornerstone of his production. The exhibition is divided into four rooms, each with its own title and theme. In The Aesthetics of Resistance (all works 2015), the centre stage is occupied by a wooden writing desk, arrayed with various personal items: a pair of reading glasses, two books, a bottle of sleeping pills. A couple of chicken bones along with a pencil is carefully placed around a set of photographs of Ancient Greek sculptures. In a few carefully choreographed photographs, two persons are leaning over the same table, as if they are in the process of deciding the final placement of the objects. On another wall, a large sheet of transparent plastic is stretched out like canvas on a wooden frame, masking the photographs hanging on two of the walls. The third corner of the room looks like a paint job in progress, left behind with all the necessary tools needed to finish. As a whole, this miseen-scène brings to mind the atmosphere of a European film-noir crime-scene riddle. Throughout the exhibition, the Chinese character ‘shòu’ is to be found on various artefacts. It is a character that is often used

at Chinese funerals to honour the life of the deceased. For the reader of Chinese, this character adds a sense of tension; when encountered, it conveys a subtle notion of mortality – a feeling that permeates the entire exhibition. In the space titled Tendon, ‘shòu’ is engraved on a bronze plate that is placed together with a chrome block. The sculpture rests against the wall, evoking associations with a gravestone. On the wall Yan elaborates on his past photographic series American Art (2013) by displaying a selection of nude photographs of posing black men. It is a series that clearly talks to Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial 1986 exhibition, Black Males. A floor sculpture occupying a third of the ground space references American minimalist Carl Andre. The character ‘shòu’ appears again, woven in black into the corners of white silk handkerchiefs. An old picture of Yan’s mother hangs at the entrance to the exhibition room. Juxtaposed with the aforementioned references to the collective history of Western contemporary art, it opens up a whole array of inquiries into the notion of personal and cultural identity. In the third room, titled The Story of Shame, two photographs half hidden behind their own fake walls immediately catch the eye. As in the first room, objects used in the sculptural constellations on the floor leap into the hands

and feet of unknown individuals portrayed in photographs on the walls. We are pushed into an aesthetic dilemma since the photographs are purposely hidden, thus obscuring the grounds for judgement of the single works. It is clear that what is at stake here is everything that is not there. In the last room is the work Thief, a silent video consisting of three scenes: two young men at the scene of a theft, closeups of the flexing muscles of a real horse and slow-motion footage portraying a young gymnast practising on a pommel horse. The short closeups of flexing muscles, the sweating and spitting when the gymnast gasps for air or the erect penis of a horse conveys a strong homoerotic sensibility. Yan Xing aims at taking his practice beyond notions of cultural categorisation, not by neglecting culture specificities, but rather by juxtaposing references across both cultural and historical barriers, often via the personal. It is this aim at deterritorialising contemporary art that makes his artistic practice, along with a few others from his generation, a political statement; an attempt to liberate artistic practice from the regional segregation and regional identification that still prevails in writings about contemporary art and its histories. Kristian Mondrup Nielsen

The Aesthetics of Resistance (detail), 2015, inkjet print, dimensions variable. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing & Lucerne

Zheng Bo Weed Party Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai 18 July – 23 August Zheng Bo gave up studio-based art-making in 2003 and ever since has been making work on the move, from one location to the next, as part of a practice that engages both the site-specific and the mobile. His latest exhibition, in a three-storey art gallery housed in a former residential building in the former French Concession, frames this as a pause in a process that is in motion. On the one hand, it constructs a research interface predicated on the local context, not necessarily to encapsulate, but rather to give nuance to the differences between formal and informal, aesthetic and scientific, in his continuous research on plants and experiments with form. On the other hand, it negotiates with the inevitable consequence of commodification when moving a field-oriented practice charged with a specific ideological stance into a commercial white-cube, where the ephemeral, critical nature of the work will inevitably be neutralised by the potential fact of its purchase. Threaded through by diverse appearances of weeds (or by the relationship between the cultivated and the unwanted) – in character, image or live – the seemingly random presentation comprises an assemblage of found objects, historic photographs, propaganda posters, hand drawings, photo documentation and multimedia installations that turn out to be

meticulously associated with distinct time periods in the history and ‘growth’ of the Chinese Communist Party (from its founding moment to the recent opening and reform of the economy). Beyond simply placing the found and made objects in the exhibition space (mostly on the second floor), Zheng Bo stages two live scenes in the gallery, offering an interplay of the real and the metaphorical, to embed a temporal and spatial dimension of the working process that is unspoken in the more static presentation. On entering the gallery, visitors are confronted with an abandoned tiled wall, featuring a barred and broken window, with a planter in front, covered with cheap ads and garbage. It’s a view of a supposed garden Zheng Bo encountered at Lane 62, Zhaojiabang Road (also the title of the work: Garden (Lane 62 Zhaojiabang Road), all works 2015) when he first started his weed project. The lifesize mockup captures the roughness of the site and its obvious status of neglect (dirt, broken tiles), which is further enhanced by the sleekly designed, freshly painted gallery walls. The only living elements in the scene are a few scattered weeds in the planter, struggling through the garbage. By contrast, when one climbs to the top floor of the gallery, highly invasive horseweed dominates the entire space (Weed Party), having grown to half the

Weed Party, 2015 (installation view). Photo: JJY Photo. Courtesy Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai

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height of the gallery walls, and leaving visitors to find their way through via a manmade path. Looking above the plants and into the gallery’s mirror-covered outer walls, one is reminded of one’s own existence, surrounded by the weeds. Here, one feels, where weeds dominate the scene, they are to be admired and appreciated. Weed Party is the third public manifestation of the exchange between Zheng Bo and weeds. The first was Plants Living in Shanghai (2013), a found botanical garden of weeds and a series of online public lectures about plants and Shanghai, produced in collaboration with his friends from multidisciplinary backgrounds in the context of the first West Bund Architecture and Contemporary Art Biennale. The second was an audio tour, titled Plants Occupy Shenzhen (2014), for the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale. In contrast to the current production, the previous projects were site-specific, participatory, pedagogical and immaterial. The shifting context and form of the projects to the current setting highlights an interesting discourse on the complicity between politics and commerce, material and product. Sitting on a bench in Weed Party is a handwritten Application to Join the Party. In a casual conversation with the artist, he hinted to me that the letter was a threshold to his next collaboration with weeds. Wu Yan

Tsuyoshi Ozawa The Return of Painter F Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo 23 October – 27 December Tsuyoshi Ozawa, best known for his Vegetable Weapon series (2001–), in which women are photographed holding weapons made of vegetables, has recently employed fictional narratives to explore art’s potential to engage historical and contemporary social situations in a series of humanist works. In The Return of Dr. N, his 2013 solo show at the Yokohama Creative City Center, he explored the connections between Ghana and Japan through the figure of microbiologist Hideyo Noguchi (‘Dr. N’). In the current exhibition, a response to the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Ozawa uses another transnational Japanese figure from the Meiji period – Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita – as a model for a postcolonial reimagining of history. The timing is impeccable: war paintings, with which Foujita is so strongly associated and that domestically have been long considered the product of a shameful period of modern Japanese art, have gained renewed currency and become the subject of much recent scholarship. Ozawa forges complicated connections between Japan and Indonesia to avoid a one-directional narrative about an aspect of the Japanese colonisation of Indonesia.

The semifictional narrative, collaboratively produced with Indonesian curator Leonhard Bartolomeus, street painters Acho Karisma and Sobirin, and the experimental band Senyawa, hinges on the reassessment of the colonial-Japan-established Institute for People’s Education and Cultural Guidance in Indonesia as influencing Indonesian art and promoting an exchange of cultural influences. Hung chronologically, each of the eight exhibited tableaux, based on Ozawa’s pencil sketches, shows F in various settings representing a chapter of F’s life. Accompanied by brief texts, the first four sepia-toned paintings, executed by Karisma, are more factual, and the last four full-colour paintings, by Sobirin, are more fantastical. These eight chapters are also represented in a video, in which the texts are sung. F is presented as an artist, as Senyawa’s refrain asserts in the video centrepiece, “unprecedentedly… at the mercy of an era”. The real Foujita, however, was president of the Army Art Association and never commented on his war responsibilities. In the fictional portion of the biography, F finds himself in Bali, not Paris, after the war. Many decades later, F returns to Japan, where a fictional war soon erupts. F is now two

artists – one escapes to revive his old peaceful life in a new place, and the other seeks to use art as a way to achieve world peace. The latter seems to be a stand-in for Ozawa, who also plays F in the video. The song/text laments that the second F’s aim failed, but insists that “F will return, and he will show us magical paintings”. Ozawa’s faith in the power of art to heal and his efforts towards ethical and translocal production are commendable. Pardoning Foujita for his involvement in the war, however, is in keeping with Japanese art professionals’ ‘resurrection’ of Foujita as a tragically scapegoated, benevolent modernist during the early 2000s, which conservatively and metonymically promoted the image of a victimised Japan. Thus, despite the very contemporary methods used, the show unfortunately fails to construct a ‘minor history’ of Indonesia (in the way that, say, Joshua Oppenheimer’s film Act of Killing, 2012, has). A less humanist and more rigorously genealogical assessment of ‘Painter F’ would be better suited critically to imagine history under the current Abe administration, which continues to refuse to take full responsibility for Japan’s colonialist aggressions in Asia. Taro Nettleton

The Return of Painter F – Chapter 5, 2015, oil on canvas, 150 × 250 cm. Courtesy Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo

David Diao Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing 19 September – 15 November Placed at the entrance of David Diao’s exhibition at UCCA, Retrospective (Chinese) (1995) is part of a series of paintings depicting invitations to fictional exhibitions by the artist at internationally acclaimed institutions such as MoMA, New York, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Two decades since it was executed, against a burgundy base, a column of Chinese characters painted in faux cursive-calligraphic style, this work seems to prophesy what is Diao’s most comprehensive solo exhibition to date, taking place at China’s most celebrated contemporary art institution (this despite his initial conflicting goals of formulating institutional critique and being accepted). Arranged in chronological order, the 115 works of art (borrowed from collections in North America, Europe and Asia) span the last five decades of the septuagenarian Chinese-American artist’s practice. They not only provide the viewer with an index of Diao’s various experiments with painting, but also with an intellectual history of painting and visual art of the last half century. The tone is set by a series of small paintings from the series Little Suprematist Prisons (1986), which fuse the formal qualities of works by Kazimir Malevich and Robert Motherwell in single compositions. Malevich was a pioneer of Russian abstraction; Motherwell, a central figure of the New York School, was championed by Clement Greenberg as the best of the Abstract Expressionist painters. Diao’s matchmaking of these two central figures reflects competing discourses in the history of modern art while siding with neither. It is that same postmodern attitude that emancipated Diao from his creative hiatus during the late 1970s and early 80s, when, disillusioned with abstraction, his appropriation of works by his predecessors freed him from the restrictions of their art-historically established conventions.

In Glissement (1984), a work central to this exhibition, Diao takes his cue from a famous photograph of Malevich’s exhibition The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (1951) and reproduces its spatial arrangement and the rough forms of Malevich’s paintings on a flat canvas. While the work seems to flatten its subject matter, it also acts in contrast to the Russian’s rejection of figurative reproduction. Both homage and negation, this work steals the master’s thunder in order to open up new boundaries of conceptual practice. But Diao has never been a purist concerning abstraction. His lack of interest in presenting an aura is shown through the invention of artistic devices that focus on the spiritual quality of the image. See, for example, Wealth of Nations (1972), for which he repurposed cardboard tubes as a tool to apply paint, until arriving at an arbitrary yet satisfactory state for the bilateral canvas. From the 1990s onwards, two parallel lines run through Diao’s artistic practice. One addresses social and institutional aspects – whether in Résumé (1991), in which the artist lists his complete exhibition history by year; Sales 2 (1991), in which sale records are depicted as variously sized circles; Plus and Minus (both 1991), featuring silkscreen prints of positive and negative reviews in reputable art magazines; or Synecdoche (1993), in which the name ‘Gerhard Richter’ has been humorously crossed out and replaced with his own in a text written by art historian and critic Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, to draw comparison with the works of the master or even suggest an equal importance. In these ways Diao reveals the reality of an artist’s career through the symbolic or literal appropriation of information. This approach is inseparable from his introspective investigations into the state of being an artist, particularly a racially conspicuous one.

facing page, top Glissement, 1984, acrylic on canvas, 178 × 254 cm. Courtesy the artist and Postmasters Gallery, New York

When identity politics became a prominent issue in the artworld of the 1990s, the complexity of Diao’s circumstances propelled him wryly to incorporate his experience into his work, while expanding the boundary of painting. In 1993, when Chinese artists were first exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Diao, long a resident in the US, responded to a French curator’s comment during a studio visit – ‘You are not really a Chinese artist’ – with the painted text Pardon me, Your Chinoiserie is Showing (1993) and Carton d’Invitation (1994), a work using a photograph of Bruce Lee, the most recognised Chinese icon in the West, in the format of an invitation card for a Joseph Beuys exhibition. While the artist does not deny his roots and personal life experiences, as the exhibition draws to the end, a series of works constructed from his relatives’ memories of his childhood home, the Da Heng Li house in Chengdu, and of the years of living in Hong Kong pieces these gathered fragments together through formal icons, such as writings superimposed over the floor plan of a tennis court his father used to frequent in his hometown Chongqing, in Death on Tennis Court (2007), or maps of two locations where the artist has lived, in Kowloon and Lower Manhattan (2014). It is indisputable that Diao’s alert, critical and uncompromising attitude towards the complexity of the postmodern condition unveiled through such a wide spectrum of artworks offers the viewers in his ‘home country’ a parallel vision of an artist who had been on the frontlines of negotiating his own position as an artist. While the world today is becoming increasing global, and communication more efficient, perhaps the case of David Diao offers inspiration to aspiring young Chinese artists. Fiona He

facing page, bottom Synecdoche, 1993, collage and silkscreen on canvas, 57 × 97 cm. Courtesy the artist and Postmasters Gallery, New York

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Nina Canell Satin Ions Arko Art Center, Seoul 29 May – 9 August All the works featured in Nina Canell’s first solo exhibition in Asia were produced between 2014 and 2015, except Perpetuum Mobile (40kg), an ongoing project that she started in 2009. Placed not in any of the three rooms in which the exhibition takes place, but at the main entry to the space, as if to mark the start of the exhibition, Perpetuum Mobile consists of an ultrasonic generator placed in a basin of water next to a paper sack of cement powder. As the water is atomised by the ultrasonic waves, it forms a mist that the cement powder continuously absorbs during the course of the exhibition, causing the material to solidify. In effect, the work creates a performance out of the laws of chemistry and physics: the form of matter (cement) is quietly transformed over time, its mass increasing (due to the absorption of the water), while energy (from the ultrasonic wave) is consumed. It is a sculpture that is always in the process of being made, in which the form of matter on show is sensitive to the conditions of its exhibition: the humidity of the environment and the timeframe of its exposure to it. In a certain sense Perpetuum Mobile provides viewers with ‘training’ before they enter the exhibition proper – drawing their attention to artificial matters, forms, the durational nature

of forms, forms that are ‘formless’ (in this work, mist and ultrasound waves) and the transformation of forms and energy. On entering the galleries you see perfect examples of Canell’s sculptural methodology: to change the forms of things and highlight their material ‘reality’ by inputting a certain amount of specific energy or some essential actions. For example, in Brief Syllables (Weak) and in Brief Syllables (Saturated) (both 2015), she uses a synthetic resin to mould a transparent cube around a section of cable. The cable, as carrier of digital information or electronic current, functions as the blood vessel and nerve fibre of our digital and electrically powered age. The section of cable that is beautifully imprisoned in the transparent acrylic cube is just like an organ immersed in formaldehyde; underneath its neutral, scientific appearance is a unique complex of beauty and vulnerability. Cables also play an important role in many other works in this show. Shedding Sheaths (2015), a series of sculptures newly made for this show after a research trip in South Korea, takes the outer sheaths of fibre-optic cables (collected from cable-recycling factories on the outskirts of Seoul, a city known for having the fastest Internet speeds in the world) as its raw material. When the sheaths are gathered in the recycling

Shedding Sheaths (detail), 2015, fibre-optic cable sheaths, concrete, dimensions variable. Photo: Robin Watkins. Courtesy the artist

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factories, they are sorted by colour; after being collected by Canell, they are heated, melted, deformed and finally reformed into sculpturelike lumps. In the third room of the exhibition, where these lumps are placed in a constellation on the cement floor, they look like intestines just cut out of some digital monster. The smell of heated plastic lingers and reminds one of Roland Barthes’s description of the material in Mythologies (1957): ‘more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation’. Like Perpetuum Mobile, Shedding Sheaths also highlights Canell’s obvious use of energy in the process of transforming her materials, to the extent that energy itself becomes a sculptural material. In Thins (2015) there is the magnetic force used to form a few thin nails into the shape of a tree branch; in Near Here (1 Microsecond) (2014), a 1-million-volt electric current has been passed over a carpet tile (for one microsecond) to create the burned-out image of its passing; and in Tracing a Curve in Passing (2015), energy is the soundwave produced by a waveform generator (the last two works are collaborations with Robin Watkins). In this sense, just as the exhibition title, Satin Ions, suggests, the show is indeed a compound of the sensual and the formless. Aimee Lin

Kyuchul Ahn Invisible Land of Love MMCA, Seoul 15 September – 14 February If I were to imagine this exhibition as a poetry anthology, its cover would be a stiff piece of paper in icily pure white, with Kyuchul Ahn’s handwritten title resembling calligraphy. All this is not as fanciful as it at first seems. The exhibition begins with a poetic artist’s note at the entrance, and its title is borrowed from a 1980 poem by Mah Chonggi, whose lines Ahn reinterprets as follows: ‘Longing for the place not existing yet real at the same time, urges us to be a refugee of our mind and a self-exile. In here where love is overused, we now reminisce about the invisible land of love and call out names in whisper.’ Ahn, a member of Reality and Utterance – the artist group of the realist Minjung cultural movement that was active during the early 1980s – and an art journalist at Quarterly Art for seven years during the same era, decided to become a full-time artist during the mid-1980s when he moved to Stuttgart for further study. Since his return to Korea in 1995, Ahn has consistently pursued a minimal aesthetics via conceptual drawings and sculptures. He often experiments with found objects and the manufacture of

situations in which the viewer might earn experiential knowledge, with the solitary room a key trope in his work. If, at times, the artist seems to be seeking self-purification, like a Theravada Buddhist, he never forgets to open the door for the guests. This show contains eight new works, among them several of those solitary rooms. Nine Goldfish is a pond divided into nine concentric tanks, each containing a single goldfish that is consequently isolated from the rest (the work can be seen as a reinterpretation of the motif used in Ahn’s early-1990s work Water in the Distance, an installation comprising a tablecloth and two bowls of water: nine goldfish embroidered on the cloth look as though they are swimming towards the bowls). In the meantime, 64 Rooms is reminiscent of 49 Rooms, the artist’s 2004 show at Rodin Gallery, Seoul; the doors of the latter have been replaced with heavy, dark blue velvet curtains. A Room with 112 Doors (2003–4) is a mazelike block with 112 wooden doors that visitors can close behind them as they enter; if they wish, they can even hold the handles so that others can’t easily follow. The most evident change here, however,

is in Room of Silence, a white spherical open space of a relatively larger scale than in Ahn’s previous works. The viewer cannot be alone in it for long and is soon interrupted by another. Another quiet but different gesture appears in two participatory projects. In 1,000 Scribes, a thousand applicants can work shifts transcribing Korean and other literary works throughout the exhibition period. The participant sits in a small room with his or her back to gallery visitors, completing the transcriptions by hand for one hour. A book compiling the writings will be published after the project is complete and will be distributed among the participants. In Walls of Memories, visitors can write the names of whatever they miss the most on the coloured index cards provided. The list of ‘something you love but is not here, disappeared or unforgettable’ is hung on the wall. Some are specific moments or places, such as ‘January 19th‘ or ‘the yard’, while others are words related to personal feelings or relationships, such as ‘tears’ or ‘my Lord’. The words, which derive from viewers’ personal memories, form a public poem depicting a solidarity of yearning. Tiffany Chae

Nine Goldfish, 2015, stainless steel, blower, water pump, motor, water, goldfish, 400 × 400 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist

Richard Streitmatter-Tran A Material History of Man and Animal Dia Projects Dong Khoi, Ho Chi Minh City 11–25 September An alchemist’s laboratory, an inventor’s studio, a natural-history museum and an anthropological study simultaneously coexist in Richard Streitmatter-Tran’s first solo exhibition in Vietnam, where he settled more than ten years ago. In one small space, there are disparate artworks and ‘artefacts’, from paintings to sculptures made of edible rice paper, beeswax, wood, unfired clay and metal. Streitmatter-Tran’s use of both organic and manmade materials subtly embodies the exhibition’s underlying theme: the multifaceted relationship between man and animal, which ultimately leads to an interrogation of the human condition in the Anthropocene – the ‘Age of Man’. The very concept of the Anthropocene – the beginning of which is still moot – is based on humankind’s relentless conquest of the natural world. Through the course of evolution, man has gradually managed to ignite a parallel process of devolution – or destruction – in the natural environment, affecting animal life in irreversible ways, and at the same time leaving himself not entirely able to understand and help his own imploding condition. The monkey in Primateriality (2015) seems to remind us where we come from, where we have arrived – with the ability to ‘envision the future and create complex patterns’ as

Streitmatter-Tran writes in a brochure that accompanies the exhibition – and where we might go back to if we do not take full responsibility for our actions. Recalling a hybrid creature, A Short History of Man and Animal (2015) literally juxtaposes a manmade invention with its inspiration from the natural world. ‘Just as Leonardo da Vinci’s early designs for flight were adaptations of bat-like wings’, according to Streitmatter-Tran, the fishing boat reveals its inspiration as a creature of the sea. Inside the boat, a model of a whale’s spine sits perfectly, and it is rather fitting that the whale is, like man, a mammal. The Cerumen Strata (2015) furthers our relationship to whales, albeit less innocently, by representing science’s discovery of whale’s cerumen (earwax) as a means to not only measure the animal’s lifespan, but also to track the physiological changes induced by (damaging) human activities in the sea throughout the centuries. As the exhibition unfolds, our connections to animals intensify and yet dissipate: we are similar, as Corpus Callosum (2015) means to demonstrate with its representation of the neural band in the brain that we share with all placental mammals. Yet there is a darker, more violent nature to humankind – a desire to create in order to destroy.

Primateriality (detail), 2015, unfired porcelain, terra cotta, white clay, charcoal powder, coconut husk fibre, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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A weight bench and a bar fitted with traditional Buddha heads as weights, De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) (2012) reflects upon the ‘weight of religion’, reminding us of the horrific power that religious extremism, or even just superstition and religious bigotry, can wield. The work borrows its title from a poem by Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, in which he explains Epicurean philosophy’s condemnation of superstition and divine intervention. In The Human Trap (2013), Streitmatter-Tran lays bare the process by which man is the master of his own grim destiny – or death – by bloating a rat trap to human dimensions, and substituting the cheese with gold. Greed and possessions form a vicious circle, from which man cannot escape. Man’s ideas of evolution and progress have often determined his own demise, as the installation of translucent skulls Fragile Matter (2013) reminds us as we first enter and then finally exit the gallery. Our beliefs and obsessions, like religion, superstition or greed, drive us to thoughtless and careless acts of violence towards our own kind. Referencing the Cambodian genocide, the softly lit, delicate skulls made of edible rice paper remind us of our own ephemeral nature and make us ponder the fragility of the human condition. C.A. Xuan Mai Ardia

6th Moscow Biennale: How to Gather? Acting in a Center in a City in the Heart of the Island of Eurasia VDNKh, Pavilion No.1, Moscow 22 September – 11 October The 6th Moscow Biennale is a show of inconvenience: its budget was cut repeatedly by the Ministry of Culture; the location of the main project was moved from Manege, near the Kremlin, to the less central VDNKh; what was initially a solo curatorial project by M HKA’s Bart de Baere became the collaborative work of a curatorial team (de Baere, Defne Ayas, Nicolaus Schafhausen) later joined by an autonomous fourth curator, the interdisciplinary group The Unbound, whereupon the number of venues used at VDNKh went down from three pavilions to only one – the Central Pavilion. Yet while the biennale’s longer title, Acting in a Center in a City in the Heart of the Island of Eurasia, was perhaps phrased in an extremely Putinist way, its shorter version, How to Gather?, is in the current Russian context rather an opportune one. The audience in Moscow might think of ‘gathering’ in the sense of war between Russia and the Ukraine, which was represented in daily news broadcasts by Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze. The typical internal Russian conflict of conservative vs liberal or government vs opposition was reenacted by ‘rally-workers’ (who can be easily found and hired by anyone for any political action via a special website) in a work by Vienna-

based Russian artist Anna Jermolaewa, who staged a mixed pro- and contra-biennales rally. The first ten days of the biennale were devoted to producing artworks. For instance Honoré d’O from Belgium gave out respirators and made installations with them (Untitled, 2015); Li Mu from China refused to call himself an artist and started working as an assistant to other participants, recording everything he saw in a diary (The Labourer, 2015); Russian artist Anatoly Osmolovsky, one of the leaders of the Moscow Actionism movement of the 1990s, made a sculptural version of a postmortem photo of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the famous revolutionary poet who was rumoured to have committed suicide when he understood the true nature of the political turn that was taken in the late 1920s in the USSR (Dead Mayakovsky, 2015) – while behind a special glass wall in the pavilion the recently rediscovered relief Glory to Soviet people – Peace-banner bearers! (1954), by Soviet sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich and dedicated to the exultant masses marching towards Communism, was being professionally restored. VDNKh – a Stalin-era exhibition centre – turned out to be the best place for a biennale that has returned to the basics and to a format

that was abandoned during the preparation of the first edition, in 2005. Back then, the initial commissioner and founder of the biennale, Joseph Backstein, forced cofounder Viktor Misiano to leave the board because he wanted just a big regular exhibition, while Backstein stood for an assemblylike, process-oriented event. So now, after five editions marked as more or less spectacular (sometimes glamorous, as in Jean-Hubert Martin’s third biennale, which took place at Dasha Zhukova’s Garage), we were offered a ten-day nonstop interactive process of presentations, discussions, happenings and performances crowned by a crowded lecture by Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek minister of finance who almost split the Eurozone. For the next ten days the show was empty, no actions, only documentation – literally the regular exhibition, about which nobody was excited. There are some comments circulating among the professional community that, now that it has returned to its originary ideals, the Moscow Biennale should be concluded with this sixth edition. And in a certain sense that seems fair enough. This edition looks like a swansong – brilliant but impossible to continue in an appropriate manner. Sergey Guskov

Honore d’O performance, 2015. Courtesy the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art

14th Istanbul Biennial Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms Various venues, Istanbul 5 September – 1 November Although there are many biennials in Asia that are organised and commissioned by local governments and thus become part of the cities’ branding, interestingly, it is the Istanbul Biennial – one that is initiated by local clans and mainly supported by private money – that really makes a positive contribution to the city’s image. Istanbul Biennial has a tradition of having a deep relationship with the city’s geography, history and culture. In this edition, due to curator (or self-proclaimed ‘drafter’) Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s ambitious plan, the locations span not only the centre and old town of Istanbul, but also both the European and Asian sides of the Bosporus, from the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea. The curator uses the chemistry of saltwater – or more precisely, the sodium ions in the solution that are essential to the functioning of our neurological system – to explain forms of thought. She is also inspired by waves and knots, taking them not only as visual forms but also as metaphors, and applying them to her theory of human activities. It is not easy to talk about this biennial properly. Indeed it is not possible to see all the works: some are located separately in remote locations, like Lawrence Weiner’s wall-text painted on the northwestern end of the Bosporus Strait, or were unfinished on the preview day, like Pierre Huyghe’s Abyssal Plain (2015–), or impossible to visit, like another presentation of Weiner’s pieces, which is painted in a 130-year-old building that has been deemed unsafe to visitors because it doesn’t have an emergency exit (both works titled On the Verge (Ramak Kala), 2015). But the real obstacle is that for an ‘ordinary art tourist’, it is difficult to find a proper standpoint to talk about a biennial that is rooted so deeply in a city while that city itself is facing a critical moment – at the time when the biennial opened, the Syria refugee crisis was just expanding from Turkey to Europe. Actually

it was on the morning of the preview day that a three-year-old Syrian boy was found drowned on a Turkish beach. But we must return to the art-critic fairy land safely ensconced within the contemporary art snowglobe. The group show at Istanbul Modern is quite institutional. However, it is at its entrance, where the walls are painted blue, that the visitor can see one of the highlights of the biennial: The Channel. This exhibition, functioning as the ‘neurological centre’ of the biennial, brings together a selection of references that marked Christov-Bakargiev’s own intelligent creation – indeed, perhaps it’s art, if gathering, grouping and sorting knowledge could be equally seen as art. The Channel is inspired by the form of a Klein bottle, a container made of a single surface with no outside nor inside. In this section, Christov-Bakargiev provides a set of references relating to the Bosporus, and to the sodium channel that links human neurons together. To do so, she presents scientist Charles Darwin’s study on the transmutation of species; psychologist Jacques Lacan’s topology of knots from the 1970s; botanist and designer Émile Gallé’s late-nineteenth-century Art Nouveau vases; novelist Orhan Pamuk’s drawings of the Bosporus in the sketchbook that he uses to express himself when he can’t write (Eight Notebooks, 2008–13), to name a few. This assembled dream team of knowledge and concepts, alongside the curator’s discourse, shows the refined quality of the biennial. Many commissioned works in this biennial are quite ingenious and ambitious. Huyghe’s Abyssal Plain aims at building up an underwater concrete stage around the existing rock foundation of the island of Sivriada. Over time it will become a live field of marine life, with natural phenomena and human activities feeding the system and sculpting its form. Francis Alÿs’s video installation The Silence of Ani (2015) sees

facing page, top Adrián Villar Rojas, The Most Beautiful of All Mothers, 2015 (installation view, 14th Istanbul Biennial). Photo: Sahir Ugur Eren. Courtesy ISKV, Istanbul

kids creating a chorus and bringing life back to the ruins of Ani – a site that witnessed the conflict between the Turkish and Armenian peoples – by playing birdcalls. William Kentridge’s humorous five-channel video O Sentimental Machine (2015) reflects the utopian thinking of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Anna Boghiguian’s epic installation The Salt Traders (2015) is a reexamination of human civilisation though time travel. Indeed this is a delicate, intelligent biennial. It runs in a city that everyone should fall in love with, and is founded on a selection of outstanding artists. Its curatorial concept promised thoughts (in the form of essays, anthologies and drawings that make up a 540-page reader), poetic sentiments, dramas and a slice of romanticism (Theaster Gates organised boat trips across the Bosporus at dawn). And one should probably still think that if the artists and curator are outstanding, then the artworks and the biennial should be outstanding too. But here there is still something missing. After repeatedly questioning myself, I finally find the answer: perhaps what is missed is something unpredictable that really causes conflict. Perhaps the biennial would be more ‘real’ if it were not so tolerant but more sensitive to conditions and situations. For example, what if the failure to realise Huyghe’s project underneath the Marmara Sea is not so elegantly absorbed by the beautiful preset of the biennial? Or what if the frustration when one loses one’s way while looking for the abandoned house on Büyükada Island is not so easily melted away, and the ‘wow’ when one walks through the ruins of a house once lived in by Leon Trotsky (when he exiled himself from 1929 to 1933) and sees Adrián Villar Rojas’s spectacular sculpture The Most Beautiful of All Mothers (2015) is not so minutely designed? Aimee Lin

facing page, bottom Orhan Pamuk, Eight Notebooks, 2008–13, watercolour, lead pencil, felt-tip pen, fountain pen, acrylic, pen and pastel on paper. Photo: Sahir Ugur Eren. Courtesy ISKV, Istanbul

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Nguyen Trinh Thi Letters from Panduranga Jeu de Paume, Paris 20 October – 24 January One of the images of the Vietnam War that is deeply engraved in the collective conscience of the West is ‘Napalm Girl’, in which a nine-yearold Vietnamese girl is seen running towards the camera with a terrified expression on her face. More often than not, the photograph is reproduced in a cropped format; in the original an American soldier is walking on the girl’s left, his attention totally focused on changing the film in his own camera. These two images together offer an interesting panorama of the war of images that is at stake, in which the machine that makes, edits and distributes the image has a decisive power in shaping public opinion. Nguyen Trinh Thi touches upon the complexity of imagemaking in her new video, Letters from Panduranga (2015), by using a multitude of perspectives to navigate and form a representative picture. The work documents a journey to the site of Panduranga (where a new city called Phan Rang now sits), in South Vietnam, once the spiritual centre of Champa, an ancient kingdom

dating back nearly 2,000 years. The matriarchal Champa culture was considered impure by French archaeologists because of inconsistencies in its iconography, and as a consequence it was labelled a culture in decline and scarcely recorded in archaeological history. To find leftovers of Panduranga, Nguyen spent two years travelling in the area, where she encountered the Cham people, the sole cultural descendants of the Champa civilisation. The video includes imagery of dreamy landscapes, more or less random gatherings of people posing for the camera and mundane moments that show cows bathing in a mud pool or women singing karaoke. The hesitant zooming-in of the camera seems to reflect the filmmaker’s personal experience of relative proximity to the subjects she portrays. The narrative arc is formed by letters exchanged between a male and a female character and read in voiceover. Their voices mingle with the soft sounds of the video footage. The female figure,

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perhaps speaking for the filmmaker herself, describes how she is searching for traces of Panduranga and shares her frustrations and struggles to capture the Cham in a truthful way. The unidentified male figure acts as the receptor of her doubts, replying generously with his own reflections, which constitute a monologue about the power of images and the gaze. In the oscillation between past and present, the Western presence in Vietnam appears in the video as a phantom of French colonialism mixed with images of present-day tourism. But it is even more harmful when Western judgement is perpetrated by the Vietnamese themselves. Champa culture remains ignored even now that Vietnamese archaeologists have replaced their Western predecessors in writing the history of this land. In this sense, Nguyen’s Letters from Panduranga creates an image that bypasses the colonial gaze and speaks for the Cham. It is a subtle demonstration of framing and giving voice. Heidi Ballet

Jitish Kallat The Infinite Episode Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris 5 September – 31 October For artists working in an intentionally poetic or allusive register – however this is meant – the words describing their art are constitutive elements, as integral as the objects produced or the concepts conceived. Titles, interviews, press releases, catalogue texts: without these, the artwork loses quiddity and returns to that mundane mute form that Duchamp rolled his eyes at – the purely perceptual. In Jitish Kallat’s case, however, the purely perceptual is mostly enough. His works please the eye, even as their word-driven elements push us off in more ambitious and ambiguous directions. The Infinite Episode, for example, an eye-catching collection of mostly new video, sculpture and works on paper, is bookended, one assumes, by an infinite number of other episodes, each limitless in its finitude. At the centre is a work sharing the show title: The Infinite Episode (2015), a sculptural sequence of ten animals, arranged side by side on a low white plinth. The piece delights eye and mind – plaster-cast animals frozen in positions of deep sleep, identically sized, and cute, like toy figurines. Why the title? Not sure. In a recorded riff in the catalogue the philosopher Homi Bhabha poses these questions to the artist: ‘Is sleep a shared condition that establishes a commonality of “size”? I wonder? Does the posture of sleep provide a kind of “zero degree”

of the measure of living beings? Is sleep the surrender of agency?’ The artist responds to this query of size (or, rather, ‘size’) by saying, ‘I began with an intuitive scale.’ Fair enough. Agency presents itself again in the series Wind Study (The Hour of the Day of the Month of the Season) (2015), five large works on paper. These were produced on a table in Kallat’s garden in Mumbai – the artist covered the paper ‘intuitively’ with graphite lines, covered the lines with combustible liquid and lit them on fire, one at a time. The direction of the wind produced sepia-toned shadows from the carbonised residues, turning the webs of lines into multimasted abstractions, like tall ships in the background of a Turner sketch. Fired drawings, drawing fire – nature-borne exhibitions of chance. Smart, pretty. Sightings D9M4Y2015 (2015) is a series of double-image photos, like novelty postcards, where the images change depending on the viewing angle. Here the images are positive and negative images of the surfaces of fruits, photographed in extreme closeup. They look like planets or starscapes, abstract, psychedelic cosmologies. The title comes from the day last April that Kallat bought the fruit in his local market. On its own, this is not particularly interesting – I’ve seen similar things on the

walls of hotel restaurants. But it resonates differently here because of the show’s other ‘evocations of the celestial’. Like the video Infinitum (here after here) (2014), an animated moon phase chart on which 30 Indian roti breads wane and wax, ‘connecting notions of the body, sustenance, the astral and the sky’, according to the exhibition text. Food appears in another video, and in another form, also linked to the astral: some 700 X-ray scans of food – chapatis, cauliflower, you name it – flashing across a dark cosmos. Without the title – Forensic Trail of the Grand Banquet (2009) – viewers are likely to read the X-rayed foodstuffs as ersatz spaceships in a low-budget Star Trek credit sequence, not as a scientific investigation into a crime. Flowchart (2015) aestheticises the conventions of science in another manner. It is a museological vitrine, elegantly filled with a just-so scattering of pseudoscientific drawings, architectural sketches and maquettes, nicely rendered in the same earthy tones as the other works in the show. A purposeless display of studies for projects real, imagined or contrived, capturing the flow of art, and representing – or mimicking, or citing, or theatrically staging – the creative process, and encased in a very attractive box. If that’s not a metaphor for something, I don’t know what is. Christopher Mooney

The Infinite Episode, 2015, dental plaster, ten elements. Courtesy Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris

Survival Is Not Enough Rodeo, London 1 September – 31 October Surplus generates capital. Objects must circulate in order to retain their value. At its London location, a two-floor enterprise with the layout of an enviable apartment, the Istanbul gallery Rodeo has assembled a series of works that mostly take the warp and weft of fashion as their substance, yet also look towards other forms of economy and exchange. Beginning at the landing, A.K. Burns’s two Untitled (t-shirt)s (2014) are folded, pressed flat and then cast in aluminium, Ian Law’s tote bags (With John Law, 2015) take to their canvas material literally, budding with painted watercolour florets, and Andrea Zittel’s Parallel Planar Panel (black, maroon, white, grey) (2014) is a geometric woven textile hanging luxuriantly against a far wall. These useless garments and accessories demonstrate the futility of fashion in today’s culture of excess (who needs more stuff?), yet conversely elevate the notion of a use-value for art: that of play. ‘Play is not a luxury nor a necessity’, the exhibition’s text proffers, and consequently the works within it put forth play as superfluous, that quality being precisely that which allows it to go against the logic

of commerce. Contrary to mass-production’s repetition and redundancy, play is creation. It is through its scenarios that we test out our hypotheses about the outer world. On the second floor of the gallery, BLESS’s fur-lined hammock looks to be something culled from a bohemian fantasy. BLESS, a fashion-cumlifestyle-cum-art initiative, has set the precedent for straddling the line of art and fashion. Out of their Berlin studio-apartment-showroom come a variety of objects – a desk that flips over to form a bed, wallpaper depicting a Victorian flat – that appear to prove the fact that nothing is useful or necessary any more, but that doesn’t mean that we should cease to dream (if anything, this may be the only thing that saves us). On the floor veteran clothing designer-artist Susan Cianciolo offers a survival kit for such anxieties containing tangible, nostalgic objects, such as childlike drawings, archival books including Small Things & Games and Museum for Moderne Kunst Costumes (Briefcase Kit, 1997–2015) and a handmade quilt. Perhaps one of the reasons that fashion objects have come to assume a prominent place within the realm of art of late is precisely

A.K. Burns, Untitled (t-shirt), 2014, aluminium, 39 × 51 cm. Photo: Plastiques. Courtesy Callicoon Fine Arts, New York

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because of their claims towards usefulness. As a wearable item, clothing can absolve art from its highbrow aims of transcendence. However, fashion itself is purely metaphysical. It is through its donning that we hope to become something – an identity that is just as easily disposed. That the exhibition text begins with a Chinese proverb, calling on the mystique and wisdom of an ancient civilisation, seems a telltale sign that a certain point of irreconcilability has been reached. It’s ‘a moment in history when time has stopped flowing’, muses the text. But rather than lamenting this, Survival Is Not Enough acknowledges that things have never been easy or clear-cut. Our concern in this stage of late capitalism is surviving survival itself, and in this light, things inevitably become oddly convoluted. There’s another Chinese proverb that goes: ‘A jade stone is useless before it is processed’, which alludes to our unceasing drive to refine and make shine. With its various clothes, surfaces and implements, this exhibition is about degeneration, and the last bid for decadence that attends it. It’s fashion for art’s sake. Ming Lin

Ian Cheng Emissary Forks at Perception Pilar Corrias, London 13 October – 14 November Rambling, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote, exists as an absolute challenge to narrative. Rather than telling of the world, it produces its equivalent in form and duration – everything is said, without anything being reported. Thus an explosion of bouncing durian or a lone pack of Shiba Inu traversing a psychedelic tundra, as seen in Ian Cheng’s live animation Emissary Forks at Perception (2015), may themselves lack explicit meaning or relation. Yet, coded to repeat themselves over and over again, in infinitely variable configurations – sometimes simultaneous, always unpredictable – they effectively characterise the world as we know it as expansive, engrossing and, ultimately, actually unknowable, while foregoing any moralistic or authoritative claims. Cheng’s real-time simulation and story abides by the logic of continuity and constraint. Two opposing narratives collide, one of evolution and the other a burgeoning consciousness, and consequently the stream requires two if not more viewings. This work is the second in

an episodic series, preceded by Emissary the Squat of the Gods (2015), which was shown in Turin earlier this year. In this iteration we follow the artificial intelligence Talus 29 as it attempts, in its management of some postapocalyptic landscape, to create an ‘atavistic human’, and deploys its canine emissary to introduce the resurrected creature to its new environment. A poster at the entrance of the gallery charts the various courses of action available to Talus 29, containing, among others, the actions of ‘play’ and ‘repose’, but also emotions of ‘fear’ and ‘boredom’. These variables are undergirded by VUCA, the ‘Horizon of Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguity’, a technical and psychological mapping informing the scripts and modules from which the narrative derives. Cheng, a former software programmer at George Lucas’s visual-effects firm, crafts renderings that take on a roughly hewn aesthetic which reads as an intentional fracturing of those smooth contours of CGI that animate popular imagery.

A fork in the road presents two paths, from which we can choose just one. In the case of Ts’ui Pên, the protagonist in Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (1941), rather than implying a spatial division, a forking indicates a bifurcation in time (and this ultimately results in the character’s sticky end). Similarly, Cheng’s work depicts a world in which multiple temporalities exist at once – diverging, converging and running parallel to one another – and the results too are sometimes messy. In some instances, the subjectavatar exists; in others he does not. Each fork is a point of departure for other forkings. This could go on forever. An explosion of durians, therefore, may beget several options: the forming of a marsh, harsh winds, a pineapple or all three at once. Speaking to life, death, determinacy and indeterminacy, Cheng’s Emissary Forks at Perception illustrates this expansive network of unfolding, discreetly charting both a new narrative genre and its attending aesthetic form. Ming Lin

Emissary Forks at Perfection, 2015, live simulation and story, infinite duration. Courtesy the artist; Pilar Corrias, London; and Standard (Oslo)

8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT8) Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 21 November – 10 April One of the consistent features of the Asia Pacific Triennial has been its lack of a singular identifiable curatorial manifesto to guide the exhibition; instead its organisers have opted for the in-house expertise of collection-based curators operating according to geographical remits rather than a thematic narrative. A particularly striking effect of this – and in this, the current edition is no exception – is an insistence on inclusion. Particular care is taken to include artworks considered ‘vernacular’ (the institution’s description, not mine) and to show them confidently alongside works derived from the accelerated contemporaneity experienced in highly developed or rapidly developing nations. And yet, that APT8 proudly expands its scope to cover the art of newer territories is not only a reflection of its somewhat outdated model, but also of the diversification of what we currently understand as Asia. While previous editions shied away from an overt thematic, APT8 opts for an energetic review of practices that canvas the human body as a subject through its complex materialities, mobilities, sexualities or transformations, or its eerie absence. This, together with the territorialexpansion theme, is poignantly displayed through two layered and lengthy videoworks: siren eun young jung’s Act of Affect (2013) and Köken Ergun’s Ashura (2011). Jung’s work gives insight into the Korean art of theatrical and operatic all-female drama – yeosong gukgeuk – by documenting moments of transformation including voice training, costume and performance. Ashura reveals a kind of reverse – theatrical reenactment and an intimate weeping ceremony performed solely by male Caferi Shiites to acknowledge the atrocities committed during the Battle of Karbala more than 1,300 years ago. This gendered performance of grief was a new discovery in viewing conventional rituals of men and their emotional catharsis, here seen through the lens of religious ritual.

Throughout the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art there are opportune moments for large architectural works. The centrepiece within GOMA is made of timber remnants from demolition sites (including the local 130-year-old Shorncliffe pier) collected by Asim Waqif from a nearby construction company, whose corporate slogan is poetically and poignantly retained in the work’s title: All we leave behind are the memories (2015). It is in these new commissions that the marriage between amorphous continent and an artist’s body is at its most obvious, as seen again in Ming Wong’s performance Aku Akan Bertahan / I Will Survive (2015), part of a performance series designed to inject a renewed sense of vigour into the APT. Wong’s work, a new commission, references iconic moments from Australian cinema: scenes from Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994) are reimagined by Wong’s pan-Asian drag dancers amidst a lush Javanese landscape accompanied by an Indo-pop Dangdut-inspired rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s eponymous hit. The ongoing activities of Rosanna Raymond’s installation SaVAge K’lub (2010–), which is activated by a variety of participants and blends the forms of a nineteenth-century English gentleman’s club with Samoan and Pacific Island philosophies about community and social space, also injects vitality into the exhibition space. There are other moments where the political aspect of the artworks’ content seems released from the inevitable sterility of the Western-style museum context, perhaps most in the space between Khvay Samnang’s Rubber Man (2014), a series of photographs looking at the psychogeographic change rubber has had on his homeland Cambodia, which was, until 1975, the world’s largest producer of the material and is now facing renewed government interest in producing the product. Opposite is Taloi Havini and Stuart Miller’s photographic series

facing page, top Khvay Samnang, Rubber Man, 2014, inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper 308 gsm, 80 × 120 cm. Collection Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

detailing an ominous view of landscapes within the autonomous region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, that have been damaged by the mining industry. Meanwhile, Another Realm (horses) (2015), a sculpture and installation by Min Thein Sung, includes cartoons from Burma wallpapering a corner of the gallery behind a giant sculpture of a toy horse – timely given the recent elections in the artist’s native Myanmar. And while such works are perhaps less loaded when removed from their local context, one cannot help but wonder whether or not they could even be displayed in a public forum in their place of creation. At times the museum framework and inevitable sense of displacement surrounding some artworks restrict attempts to tie the selected works together, most obviously at Queensland Art Gallery, where, as if it were another show entirely, an area has been devoted to groupings of Kalpa Vriksha, Contemporary Indigenous and Vernacular Art of India. However, APT8 does rewrite presumptions: Kalam Patua’s figurative watercolours in the Gond tradition, for example, seem to follow tradition, until closer inspection reveals that one of the scenes depicted is reminiscent of the 2013 Delhi bus rape. There’s a certain power in a globally significant event presented in a local idiom. During APT8’s opening weekend, a rally organised by Brisbane Reclaim Australia, a group of conservative nationalists, took place close to QAGOMA. Racist slogans against immigration and Islam were drowned out by a more vocal counter-group reflecting the echoes of dialogue and diversity evident throughout the entire exhibition. A painting by Thai artist Paphonsak La-Or depicts an empty rural road in the Fukushima region after the disaster. There’s a caution written on the foreground: ‘Power would be a poor thing if all it did was to oppress.’ Vera Mey

facing page, bottom Ming Wong, Aku Akan Bertahan / I Will Survive (production still) 2015, mixed-media installation. Courtesy the artist; Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou; and Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin

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ART STAGE SINGAPORE 21– 24 JAN ’16

WE ARE ASIA. Be a part of Southeast Asia’s Flagship Art Fair www.artstagesingapore.com artstagesingapore

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Books

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew Epigram Books, SG$34.90 (softcover) Ballsily drawn, exhaustively researched and carrying some of the most radioactively critical material of the ruling government and its former leader Lee Kuan Yew (LKY), The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye is without a doubt a milestone graphic novel from Singapore. Blood, sweat and tears are steaming off its 324 pages. I read it in a kind of stupefied trance. The book celebrates the work of a Charlie Chan, ‘Singapore’s greatest comic artist’, who produced cartoons skewering political events from the 1950s to the 1990s. He satirises key episodes such as the Hock Lee bus riots and the short-lived Singapore–Malaysia merger, and presents a less-than-flattering view of the rise of the now-ruling People’s Action Party. As such, he’s Singapore’s sharpest, fiercest political critic. Now, lest you be scouring eBay for his out-of-print masterpieces, let’s be clear: no such person exists. The character is the creation of Sonny Liew, an Eisner-nominated graphic novelist whose previous work includes the oddball Malinky Robot: Collected Stories and Other Bits, comprising sweet, meandering tales about two street kids in a gentle dystopia. For Charlie Chan, he has ditched the whimsy and upped the ante both in style and content. Compressed in this book is a geektastic lifetime of work that cycles through different styles of comics, including Osamu ‘Astroboy’ Tezuya, Mad magazine, Winsor McCay and Walt Kelly. For all its ‘found’ material and postmodern trickery, this work is following in an age-old tradition, which is the business of slaughtering sacred cows. Singapore’s first prime minister, LKY, whose death caused nationwide mourning last year (2015), is caricatured variously as an

opportunistic mousedeer, an evil ghost and a dictator-boss of a stationery company called Sinkapor Inks. In terms of subversion, Charlie Chan is no Charlie Hebdo. What it has is a healthy scepticism of official narratives and unapologetic takedowns of authority figures. Still, this was enough for the local arts council to pull the book’s publishing grant for ‘undermining government authority’. Needless to say I rushed out to get a copy. There are a lot of things to admire in Charlie Chan. The ambitious layering of narratives. The heroic historical revisionism. The affirmation of artmaking as freedom and possibility. The love for its characters, for comics, for Singapore. So it is with a heavy heart that I admit this: I was exhausted by it. In fact, I felt a bit – dare I say it – hectored. After a great deal of soul-searching, I conclude that fundamentally I don’t buy Charlie as a character. He’s too well behaved. Hyperengineered to serve Liew’s political critiques, most of Charlie’s edges are filed away, and his output is often thin and schematic, merely the vessel for his creator’s messages. A telltale symptom of this, which some critics have singled out as the only flaw in an otherwise faultless magnum opus, is the book’s overreliance on footnotes and explanatory texts. For me, the reams of supporting material aren’t niggles. They are the key to my ambivalence. Charlie’s strips, despite their strenuous transpositions of settings and characters, don’t stand on their own as meaningful artworks, because, well, they aren’t. Instead, they are all servants to an uber-text, which is Liew’s Version Of Singapore History. Take Bukit Chapalang, a strip about the hidden machinations behind the Singapore–

Malaysia merger. In it, Malaysians are portrayed as Mouseketeers; their prime minister is an orangutan; LKY is a mousedeer; his political opponent is a cat; his followers are ants; and then a water buffalo turns up… To make sense of all this, Liew gives a running commentary under the comic explaining who’s who and what transpired when. Which begs the question, why bother with the animals? Why not just write an essay? The problem is that no one wants to be lectured. Liew seems to know this, but only to an extent, because he responds by generating more narrative middlemen in the form of Charlie, Charlie’s comics, their explanations and comics explaining the explanations. But a lecture is a lecture, no matter how elaborately disguised. Just to be clear, politically #jesuis100%CharlieChan. Unfortunately, he rarely comes to life, except for the few moments he goes off-script. His most successful comic is Days of August, a complicated what-if scenario involving alternate worlds, time travel and Lim Chin Siong, a charismatic leftwing leader who ends up imprisoned without trial and exiled. Without my going into plot details, the story basically raises a question whose answer, for once, isn’t predetermined by Liew’s agenda. The question is: if you’ve seen the future and it’s crap for you, then given a chance to do it everything over again, would you do it the same way, chasing the same dreams? Both Lim and Charlie, with full knowledge of their tragic fates, say yes. Just like that, I was stabbed in the heart. There was no need for commentary. Adeline Chia

I Ate Tiong Bahru by Stephen Black Book Mehra, $30 (softcover), £1.99 (Kindle edition) It’s not normal for this magazine to review books that were published two years ago (how would you know that its editors were so totally into the ‘now’ if it did?), but occasionally works slip, unnoticed, under the radar of its contemporary-watching that are worthy of attention nonetheless. I Ate Tiong Bahru is one such case. Written by an American artist, writer, computergame producer (let’s settle for polymath) who lived for three years in the district of Singapore that forms his subject, this is a book small enough to fit into the palm of your hand

(hey – perhaps that’s why it slipped ArtReview Asia’s attention at the time!) that opens up to reveal a world of seemingly infinite possibilities – both for dining and for cultural studies. Once an area known for its cemeteries, Tiong Bahru (the name is a bastardisation of the Hokkien word for ‘cemetery’ and the Malay word for ‘new’) was redeveloped as a colonial-era, artdeco style (Streamline Moderne, to be precise) upper-class housing estate during the interwar period. Over the postwar years the community diversified and the villagelike area became

famous for its cosmopolitanism and infinitely varied street food. Weaving Singapore’s history, politics and sociology with Calvin Trillin-style eating advice (with an explanation as to why people like making fuat kueh), the highlights of Documenta 12 and Johnny Cash’s relationship to soy milk, Black’s brief love-letter to his now former home is one of the best introductions to a country and a state of mind that you might read. Hey! After reading this, even I want to live there. For those of you less adventurous, make do with the book. Nirmala Devi

Yu Youhan by Paul Gladston 3030 Press, $76 (hardcover) Surprisingly, this recently published monograph is the first on Yu Youhan, one of the most important figures coming from the avant-garde 85 New Wave movement, whose achievement is mainly associated with Political Pop in China. In its rich image selection the book provides an unprecedentedly comprehensive overview of the seventy-two-year-old artist’s oeuvre. Paul Gladston’s ‘Yu Youhan: The (Dis-)placed Literatus in Revolutionary and Post-revolutionary China’ serves as the central text. That it contains a lot of self-wrestling is evident. On the one hand, he repeatedly mentions or attempts at a natural read of Yu’s work as ‘deconstructively re-motivational allegorical postmodernism’, which the author demonstrates via a comparison between Yu and Gerhard Richter at the beginning of the book; on the other hand, he offers nothing to back up such analyses, leaving any connection Yu has to his Western postmodernist counterparts existing on nothing more than an aesthetic level. A thoughtful recovery of the historical and personal contexts within which these ‘poststructuralist’ paintings were created would prove that these ‘post-’ aspects of Yu’s work and their respective discourses are rather insignificant. And yet, this methodological wrestling, unnecessary and distracting, seems to have set the tone of the writing.

The biographical accounts, from Yu’s childhood memories to his most recent exhibitions, offer a fuller view and more reasonable support when it comes to comprehending Yu’s prolific and sharply shifting painterly practice than the other analyses in this book. The author pays full attention to Yu as an individual case, but some remarks on Yu’s contemporaries, especially those who also pursued a practice involving Political Pop, might provide a better background for understanding Yu’s career. That such a horizontal comparison is absent leaves the author’s references to Western modernists seeming even more superficial. Gladston could have gone a step further by taking Yu’s subjectivity for granted and claiming that not only is Yu’s art reflective of discussions about cultural exceptionalism and Western imperialist influence, but it is also the very battleground for the two. The struggle, reified by Yu, for instance, between his selftaught oil-painting practice and the ideologically oriented and therefore constantly shifting subject matter, is symptomatic of the early practice of contemporary Chinese art. The discussions about hybridity and avant-garde belatedness neglect the subjectivity and initiatives of the artist in his practice, the latter of which is simplified as the pursuit of

Daoist ideals and traditional culture. Why is the ‘poststructuralist’ approach or Pop art available and applicable to Yu at the time? Are there any proven relations between Yu’s shifts of interest and the local responses to his works? The answers to these questions are worth proving, for they provide perspectives on the artist’s side. Once the artist becomes the initiator in the analysis, the methodological struggle of the critic can be reduced. The author acknowledges the complexity of the production and reception of Yu’s practice, yet fails to demonstrate such complexity in his writing. In addition, in a retrospective survey, one would also expect to read about the legacy of the artist, which in this case is a phenomenon in itself. His colourful Mao has become the most stereotypical image of Chinese art, and that has an indigenous affect as well. In some sense, the all-of-a-sudden success and soon excess of Political Pop in the international scene and market have partially caused a rebound in later generations of artists who consciously distance themselves from explicit political subject matter. Unarguably, the historical status of Political Pop and Yu Youhan are registered not only by what they are but also by what they have left behind. But these are unfortunately out of sight of this author. Hanlu Zhang

South as a State of Mind # 6 (Documenta 14 # 1) edited by Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk Documenta und Museum Fridericanium Veranstaltungs-GmbH, €10 (softcover) The next edition of Documenta, arguably (and particularly since its hugely successful previous edition) the world’s most significant recurring art event, is scheduled to open in Athens in April 2017 and in Kassel two months later. The first is a site of Europe’s current economic and humanitarian crisis; the second is Documenta’s regular home. The split aims at reconfiguring Documenta as an exhibition that connects art to the reality of the world (largely the realms of suffering and injustice) and, according to the editors of this publication (the first in a fourissue takeover of South as a State of Mind, a biannual journal founded in Athens in 2012), to move the process of exhibition-making beyond the normative artworld structure of curator–exhibi-

tion–audience, in part by promoting actions over politics. As well as drawing on key historical texts (by writers like Hannah Arendt and Stefan Zweig) from the spheres of history and fiction, South contains discussions, artist projects, poetry, the reframing of history, diaries and critical texts. Crucially, while it reveals something of the thinking and framing behind Documenta’s next edition, it is evidently a self-contained project that is independent of the traditional catalogue, promotional publication, theoretical framework or press release. Indeed it’s a well-written and fascinating attempt to shift thinking about the role of art in commenting on and perhaps ultimately shaping society in the past, present and future. That’s not to say that it isn’t

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sometimes a little cringingly self-conscious: for example, when Documenta’s artistic director, Adam Szymczyk, discusses his plans to show all 1,500 items from the recently uncovered, but unseen Gurlitt estate (comprising artworks amassed by Hildebrand Gurlitt when he was one of four art dealers officially authorised to buy and sell work for the profit of the Nazis) and figures that as ‘an allegory’ of the process of the revealing and concealing truth in the history of art. But despite such incidents, the next four issues of South are certainly going to be an important forum for debates about how art can reposition itself as a necessity rather than a luxury (brand). Documenta as a state of mind? Get with the programme. Mark Rappolt

Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin Open Humanities Press, $18 (softcover) If the world’s climate was warming at the speed that fashions in art theory change, I’d be keeping afloat on the dead body of a polar bear somewhere above the submerged Sahara by now. Cheap jokes and cynicism aside, however, the ‘Anthropocene’ is a an apt term for concentrating the mind – and the artworld’s collective voice – on the pressing problem of humaninduced global warming. ‘In the guise of scientific neutrality,’ philosopher Peter Sloterdijk writes in his essay for this comprehensive reader on the topic, ‘it transmits a message of nearly unpassable moralist-political urgency.’ A quick primer for those not up to speed, paraphrased from Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin’s introduction: in a 2002 paper for the journal Nature, Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen posited the idea that such was the extent of man’s (almost entirely negative) effect on the environment – in the form of fossil fuel extraction, the change in atmosphere brought about by carbon combustion, soil degradation and the acceleration in the number of nonhuman species becoming extinct – that a new geological epoch could be identified. Since then the idea of the Anthropocene has filtered and mutated beyond the sciences, gradually spreading in wider parlance, to become the darling of many theorists operating within the arts and humanities. All of which has complicated the definition of the Anthropocene – albeit productively. There are debates for example as to when this period can be dated, with prime contenders being the move into agrarian society (which would signal an approximate coexistence with the Holocene, the geological epoch we are more traditionally held to be in); 1789, the year of James Watt’s invention of the steam engine; or post-Second World War, after Hiroshima and during the massive, and continuing, population boom (we are estimated to reach an almost ungraspable 11 billion by the end of the current century,

from the approximate 2.5 billion in 1945, a growth that biologist E.O. Wilson is quoted as decrying astutely as ‘more bacterial than primate’). There are also counter-terms being bandied about that seek nuance to the definition of the epoch, specifically as to where blame should apportioned. In a conversation between theorists Donna Haraway and Martha Kenney, Haraway suggests the ‘Capitalocene’ as an alternative moniker for the epoch. ‘The mass extinction events are related to the resourcing of the earth for commodity production,’ she notes. ‘To call it the Anthropocene… treats it as if it’s a species act.’ Which is where the Anthropocene as a concept can really be seen as a mutation of the object-oriented ontology line of thinking (Homo sapiens are just one part of a nonhierarchical plane of things, none having greater consciousness or import than the other). Bruno Latour points out that ‘there is no human able to play the role of anthropos’, and placing blame on a species treats us as a singular ‘super-organism’, in the fashion of a troop of ants. To what extent all this is an environmental problem and how much it is just a danger to our species and those nonhuman species unfortunate enough to be swept along the death path with us is up for debate. There is, at heart, a contradiction to the thinking behind the Anthropocene in that it is both apocalyptic (mass human extinction) and utopic (the earth will probably recover and thrive once what Polish writer Bolesław Prus has called , in his titular 1884 short story, the ‘mold of the world’ – us – has disappeared). While this last perspective quashes the anthropocentric sense of hierarchy (which, to be fair, is what got us into this polluted mess in the first place), and can perhaps find parity, as Latour again points out, with how the cosmos in various Amerindian cultures is organised, from a Western (JudeoChristian) point of view, the vision of a posthuman earth possesses a demotivating sense

of laissez-faire fatalism through an almost psychotic process of silver-lining identification. The largely ecological, philosophical arguments continue to be batted back and forth by a variety of the book’s contributors. As a textbook of theory, and to some extent a future manual for navigating Spaceship Earth towards its as-yet-unwritten fate, Art in the Anthropocene excels (almost inevitably Richard Buckminster Fuller gets a look in, though in mentioning the architect, Sloterdijk shamefully doesn’t counter that it was the ultimate individualism of Bucky’s generation of baby-booming, techno-obsessive, wide-eyed hippies that really put the foot on the Anthropocene’s accelerator). The bits that address the first part of the title’s conjunction are not so great, however. There are some interesting artists addressing these topics (recent works by Tue Greenfort, Chuan-Lun Wu, Lai Chih-Sheng and the Otolith Group spring to mind), but they’re not present here. In their place are the sort of self-consciously worthy projects, more often totally devoid of nuance, that have traditionally ushered ecologically minded art into a ghetto: the book’s cover artwork documents Mary Mattingly’s House and Universe (2013), a performance in which the artist lies curled, naked, under a huge ball of meshed rubbish, for example; likewise Tomás Saraceno reports on his theoretically interesting, though formally dull Museo Aero Solar project, in which the artist created an airborne ‘museum’ (a giant balloon made up to old plastic bags). Ditto the plodding fictive contribution by Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson, a purported history of the world from a cow’s point of view. Skip these, though, and you’ve got something informative to read while we, as a species, work out whether we want to march, lemming, like into oblivion (and leave what’s left of the world to its own ends) or take the trickier, less Homo sapien-centric path to life on earth. Oliver Basciano

Man Eat Fish – Fish Eat Man by Vannak Anan Prum

When I see fish, I return to my memory of the boat. I think about all the people working hard trapped out at sea.

There was always heavy rain and huge waves. People died in this immense sea. But there was no escape. There was no land and nowhere to go. This is my true story.

Translated from the Cambodian by Jocelyn Pederick For more on Vannak Anan Prum, see overleaf

Contributors

Wang Molin is a theatre director, performance artist and critic, as well as a pioneer in the small-theatre movement in Taiwan. He is the founder and organiser of Taipei International Performance Art Festival. Ming Lin is a writer-researcher whose work centres on themes of production, distribution and consumer culture. Further texts can be found in Leap, ArtAsiaPacific, Art-Agenda and Art in America. She is currently pursuing an MA in research architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. C. A. Xuan Mai Ardia is a Vietnamese-Italian currently residing in Ho Chi Minh City and Padua. She holds an MA in Chinese studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, as well as an MSc in development studies, conservation of cultural heritage from the School of Development, Innovation and Change (SDIC), Bologna. She has worked in contemporary art galleries in London, Shanghai and Ho Chi Minh City. She is managing editor and writer for Art Radar.

Heman Chong is an artist and writer whose work is located at the intersection between image, performance, situations and writing. His current solo exhibitions, An Arm, A Leg and Other Stories at South London Gallery and If, Ands, or Buts at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, are the latest of many. He has participated in numerous international biennales, including the 20th Sydney Biennale (2016), 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014), 7th Asia Pacific Triennale (2012), Performa 11 (2011), Momentum 6 (2011), Manifesta 8 (2010), 2nd Singapore Biennale (2008), SCAPE Christchurch Biennale (2006), Busan Biennale (2004) and 10th India Triennale (2000), and represented Singapore in the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Li Bowen based in Beijing, is a history of art graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London. He previously trained for eight years as a classical ballet dancer; reads Slavoj Žižek, Michel Serres and Simon Critchley; and wants to receive Glas (1974), by Jacques Derrida, as a Christmas gift next year.

Advisory Board Defne Ayas, Richard Chang, Anselm Franke, Claire Hsu, Pi Li, Eugene Tan, Koki Tanaka, Wenny Teo, Philip Tinari, Chang Tsong-zung, Yao Jui-Chung Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Writers Heidi Ballet, Li Bowen, Tiffany Chae, Heman Chong, Gallery Girl, Sergey Guskov, Hanlu Zhang, Fiona He, Hu Fang, Maria Lind, Vera Mey, Ming Lin, Kristian Mondrup Nielsen, Taro Nettleton, Edward Sanderson, Wong Molin, C.A. Xuan Mai Ardia, Wu Yan Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Vannak Anan Prum, Wenjei Cheng

Vannak Anan Prum (preceding pages)

In 2005, former Cambodian soldier and monk Vannak Anan Prum, newly married and expecting his first child found himself unable to afford the hospital bill for his wife. Leaving his village on the promise of well-paid work from a bogus ‘job agent’, Prum was relocated to Thailand, where human-smuggling syndicates sold him to a Thai fishing boat owner, a common occurrence among unscrupulous captains facing chronic shortages of able-bodied seamen. Held captive for the next three years and seven months, Prum endured dangerous working conditions and inhumane treatment at sea, granted as little as three hours’ sleep per night and two meals a day of cold rice. The crew barely survived, supplementing their diet with coffee, cigarettes and in some cases an addictive, destructive amphetamine. Their backbreaking labour was unpaid, their only currency seahorses caught up in the nets and dried, which they would trade with workers on the fishing boat’s supply ship, for use as a bone strengthener

in Chinese medicine. Ten men would share one bucket of precious fresh water to wash themselves in. Taking a shit one day while suspended over the stern in a rope harness, Prum was almost bitten by a shark. Worse still, men unable to work were beaten or killed. Prum saw one crew member decapitated and his body thrown overboard. Eventually he escaped, swimming ashore one night when the boat anchored close enough to the Malaysian coast. Arrested as an illegal immigrant, Prum hoped the police would deport him back to Cambodia. Instead they sold him to a palm oil plantation, where he was forced to work for four months, his only pay a packet of cigarettes. After being injured in a fight with fellow workers and hospitalised for a month, Prum was imprisoned for eight months. Word reached a friend’s mother, who contacted a Cambodian human rights organisation. On 5 May 2010, five years after his abduction, Prum finally returned home, and finally met his daughter.

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Prum wanted to alert others and raise awareness about this human trafficking, so he began recording his experiences in words and pictures. A self-taught artist, he had drawn in the dirt as a boy. Raised amid the scarcity of the Cambodian civil war, he used dried clay on wooden boards, before graduating to pencil on paper, gifts from a Vietnamese soldier. Prum developed his draughtsmanship further by tattooing shipmates during his years of forced labour. The result is the graphic memoir The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea: The World of Slavery at Sea (out in April), in collaboration with Australian brother-and-sister filmmaking team Jocelyn and Ben Pederick, who, like the artist, are based in Phnom Penh. Prum handcolours his wide half-page panels, dividing several in two with a single, often diagonal line and placing his first-person-narrative captions on the bottom left. His vivid testimony serves as an urgent warning about the largely undocumented maritime trade in slave labour. Which as his new Strip for ArtReview Asia shows has never left his memories. Paul Gravett

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Photo credits on the cover photography by Wenjei Cheng on pages 90 and 98 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Text credits Phrases on the spine and on pages 29 and 67 are rules and dress codes for the Padang Restaurant, Singapore Cricket Club; the phrase on page 13 is from The Bhagavad Gita, c. 500 BC, translated by Juan Mascaró and published by Penguin Books, London, in 1962

Off the Record “What’s that wonderful line from Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence? ‘For a fellow who’s not too much to look at, you have the instincts of a champion?’” Vijay looks at the cover of the book I have just handed him, a copy of Donald Trump’s Think Big. “I thought you would like it, Vijay. I felt it would be an appropriate gift for a gallerist with great vision such as yourself,” I say, bowing generously and getting in something of a tangle in the folds of my Anita Dongre sari. “I have no doubt that Vijay Joshi will be the first art dealer from Bangalore to turn down a large ground-floor booth at Art Basel because he rightly feels no need to be validated by the filthy Europeans!” Vijay smiles enigmatically at me. He presses the space bar on his 27-inch 5k iMac, and the Retina 4k display flashes into action. I momentarily wince as the image of Marc Spiegler frozen mid-lecture appears onscreen. “Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!” I mutter almost inaudibly. “What was that?” Vijay asks. “T.S. Eliot. Well, Baudelaire quoted by Eliot, if you’re being pedantic.” The anger is growing in my voice. “But what’s he doing on your screen? I didn’t leave Basel under cover of darkness and cross continents to come and work here for you, where nobody would know me after what happened at the Kunsthalle Bar, only to have Spiegler rammed in my face!” I start sobbing. “Calm, Gallery Girl. Remember what Krishna said: ‘When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place.’” “Right,” I reply, unconvinced. Vijay hits the play button on the YouTube film and Spiegler’s voice resonates in the gallery. “Enough please! Every moment is a terrible reminder. What’s your point here, Vijay?” He looks at me evenly. “This rare footage is of a secret briefing to European gallerists that took place in Barcelona last November. My agents managed to intercept it. It is called ‘10 questions every gallerist should be asking themself now.’” “How do you know this was secret and just for Europeans?” “I wasn’t invited!” Vijay replies, appalled. “And look at the audience!” he hisses. “Erm…” “And also listen to his message. It is a plot against the Indians! Against the Chinese! He says that the so-called connoisseur-collector is dead and they have to sell to tech guys who know nothing about art.”

“What’s the big deal? That’s what we do. Why do you think we are here in Bangalore? I mean, we’re not here for the cycle lanes and nightlife.” “Then he says that they have to stop being so snooty, stop waiting-lists for collectors, make pricing transparent and get rid of the terrifying desk-wallahs dressed in Dior.” I cough uneasily. “But we offered prices per the square inch when we first opened!” Vijay continues. “We are friendly and smiley, and you think that Dior is something that you push open at the front of a house!” Vijay laughs uproariously and I manage a thin smile. “And then would you believe it,” Vijay says, “Guru Spiegler goes on to tell this bloody European gallerists that they should not expect their artists to stick with them. Do one thing as an Indian gallerist and that is expect your artists to move through your rival gallerists like Hrithik Roshan in his prime.” “Hold on, Vijay, so in this top-secret talk, Spiegler is telling these European gallerists to become more like us? Surely this is a good thing? Surely this vindicates all the postcolonial theory that the coloniser will eventually become the colonised? As Homi Bhabha memorably wrote, ‘Minority discourse sets the act of emergence in the antagonistic in-between of image and sign, the accumulative and the adjunct, presence and proxy!’” “Ha! You too have fallen for Spiegler. Again! But think, Gallery Girl, or as Donald Trump says – think big! They’ve been telling us for years that our ways are wrong. That we need to represent artists exclusively on a longterm basis. That we should stop pricing by the square inch and be more opaque. That we should stop selling to tech kids who dump works when they get bored. And now, after all that crap, when they’ve got us to behave like dancing bears to their so-called European ‘way’ of being an art dealer, they’re stealing all our clothes!” I glance uneasily at my Dongre. “They want us to be them while they become us. It’s like Mission: Impossible ii!” I reply. “But we know what they’re up to this time. Give me that!” Vijay grabs a price list for the exhibition, tears it up and produces a measuring tape. “Now get these paintings off the wall, Gallery Girl. Let’s get pricing by the square inch!” Gallery Girl