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Birdhead The Great Divide in Thai Art

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ArtReview Asia vol 4 no 5 2016

Time is money; space is the place One of the things about contemporary art is that it’s always reaching out for new means of expression and new ways of interpreting the world around it. That’s how we know it’s contemporary; that’s what separates it from the art of the past. But newness and novelty are shady qualities. We know from mathematics, physics and philosophy that nothing comes from nothing and that therefore absolute newness is a false promise. That’s one of the reasons ArtReview Asia is so intrigued by the recent work of cover artist Birdhead. While its photographic projects are often analysed in terms of representing a new China, marked by an urban context and the contemporary lifestyle, which is networked and public, much of their philosophy and methods of shaping artworks relate to the work and thought of quite traditional calligraphy and ink painting, and ideas that first emerged during the Three Kingdoms era. Is this then new? Or does it simply reveal that a radical third-century-AD politicianpoet such as Cao Zhi was way ahead of his time? One of the themes in this issue is the way in which contemporary art is so often perceived as a means of locating oneself in the world – and that from this vantage point one can better understand the world. In this respect, ArtReview Asia takes a look at how this works in terms of a politically divided art scene in Thailand. And just for good measure, we look at a Thai artist who has nothing to do with that and chooses reticence as a means of expression. Yep, much of what’s happening in the now is riddled with contradiction. That’s why you need magazines such as ArtReview Asia: to guide you through it all as gently as possible. But it’s not just this magazine that ArtReview Asia has been busy with these past months. It’s also looking forward to the launch of its curatorial collaboration with West Bund Art & Design fair in Shanghai. ArtReview Asia Xiàn Chǎng launches on 9 November in Shanghai’s new cultural quarter and features 24 artworks by a range of international artists who produce works that offer differing takes on how an artwork (and by implication a viewer of artworks) occupies time and space. It’s going to be a wild ride, and ArtReview Asia very much hopes you’ll join it on the trip. ArtReview Asia

For gentle guidance and wild rides

Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 19

Points of View by Hu Fang, Charu Nivedita, Alan Oei, Brian Curtin 31

page 20 Wang Qingsong, One World, One Dream, 2014, c-print, picture, 180 × 225 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nanjing Art Festival

Winter 2016

Art Featured

Birdhead by Aimee Lin 44

Udomsak Krisanamis by Max Crosbie-Jones 58

Artist Project by Birdhead 50

Bosco Sodi by Mark Rappolt 64

The Silence in Thai Art by Thanavi Chotpradit 54

Wang Xingwei by Nataline Colonnello 68 Chiang Mai by Adeline Chia 72

page 58 Udomsak Krisanamis’s studio in Chiang Mai. Courtesy the artist

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Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 80

Books 104

Setouchi Triennale, by Adeline Chia Before the Beginning and After the End II, by Guo Juan Why the Performance?, by Zhang Hanlu London Biennale Manila Pollination, by Katrina Stuart Santiago Kenji Yanobe, by Adeline Chia Wook-kyung Choi, by Mark Rappolt Tada Hengsapkul & Chai Siris, by Brian Curtin Apichatpong Weerasethakul, by Adeline Chia Amar Kanwar, by Tan Guo-Liang Tadasu Takamine, by Nirmala Devi The Propeller Group, by Sara Cluggish Nástio Mosquito, by Mike Watson Hiraki Sawa, by Dean Kissick Takuro Kuwata, by Mark Rappolt Candice Lin, by Lynton Talbot Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, by Gabriel Coxhead The Asia-Pacific Centurty: Part One, by Vera Mey

Existence: A Story, by David Hinton Breaking Knees: Sixty-Three Very Short Stories from Syria, by Zakaria Tamer The Exform, by Nicolas Bourriaud [inaudible] A Politics of Listening in 4 Acts, by Lawrence Abu Hamdan The Garden of Foolish Indulgences, by Oh Yong Hwee and Koh Hong Teng Just for the Love of It: Popular Music in Penang 1930s–1960s, by Paul Augustin and James Lochhead THE STRIP 110 OFF THE RECORD 114

page 80 Shinro Ohtake, Mecon, 2013–ongoing. Photo: Osamu Watanabe. Courtesy the artist and Setouchi Triennale

ArtReview Asia

Art Previewed

What word from the trees, what word from the grass 17

Previewed 11th Shanghai Biennale Power Station of Art, Shanghai 12 November – 12 March

Neïl Beloufa Chi K11 Art Space, Shanghai 9 November – 8 December

Kishio Suga Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan Through 29 January

Nanjing International Art Festival Baijia Lake Museum, Nanjing 12 November – 12 February

Holzwege Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai 10 November – 15 February

Koki Tanaka Asian Art Museum, San Francisco 4 November – 14 February

Colombo Art Biennale 2016 Various venue, Colombo 2–20 December

The Dynamics Shanghart Singapore Through 30 November

Tales of Our Time Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 4 November – 10 March

Art 021 Shanghai Exhibition Centre 10–13 November

Patricia Perez Eustaquio Yavuz Gallery, Singapore Through 18 December

West Bund Art & Design Fair West Bund Art Center, Shanghai 9–13 Nov

Heman Chong Fost, Singapore Through 29 December

ArtReview Asia Xiàn Chǎng West Bund Art Center, Shanghai 9–13 November

Jompet Kuswidananto Jendela, Esplanade, Singapore Through 2 January

Alex Katz West Bund Art & Culture Pilot Zone, Shanghai 7–13 November

Kishio Suga Dia: Chelsea, New York 5 November – 30 July

Sopheap Pich H Gallery, Bangkok 1 December – 28 February Lee Kit Wang Yi Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai 9 November – 10 December Xu Zhen MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai 6 November – 31 December Kochi-Muziris Biennale Various venues, Kochi 12 December – 29 March

Guan Xiao Chi K11 Art Space, Shanghai 9 November – 8 December

18 Wang Yi, Hub 2015–17, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 200 × 200 cm. Courtesy the artist and Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai

Winter 2016

In the last issue ArtReview Asia began its previews by wondering what the collective noun for a group of biennials was. Having visited three in the past month, it’s decided that it must be a pestilence. It never ends: six biennials previewed in the last issue and two more opening up in the lifespan of this… What’s that? Well… don’t shoot the messenger and stuff… Oh… sorry. Got it. Apparently this bit of the magazine is supposed to be about enticing you to go and see art, not putting you off. So, let’s start again. For those of you who can’t get enough of the biennial experience, never fear. November sees 1 the launch of the Shanghai Biennale and, continuing the theme of Indian artists curating Chinese jamborees (which starts with the current Yinchuan Biennale, curated by Bose Krishnamachari), Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective has taken the helm for Shanghai’s big contemporary art event, subtitled Why Not Ask

show’s preopening materials, such as: ‘Within Again: Arguments, Counter-arguments, and Stories. the frameworks of the thematic exhibition are Works by 92 artists and artist groups from 40 epiphytically folded the seven layers of the Infracountries will populate three floors of the Power Curatorial Platform’. Which sounds genuinely Station of Art (PSA), grouped around a series like the recipe for some sort of fantastic sevenof ‘terminals’ that aim to recognise the way layer cake. Still, the real proof of the pudding in which artists act as the shapers of discourse is in the eating, and Raqs’s ambition to connect and engineers of the imagination. Alongside art to life is very en vogue (see this summer’s the terminals are four other substructures: the Manifesta in Zürich). More than that, for every Infra-Curatorial Platform (seven subexhibitions Kendell Geers, Christine Sun Kim, SUPERFLEX organised by young curators within the main or Peter Piller included in this biennial, there are thematic display), 51 Personae (created with the two or three artists whose work ArtReview Asia, Dinghai Qiao Mutual Aid Society, and geared at least, has never encountered. And that alone to bringing the spaces of everyday life to the makes this show worth a visit. biennial), Theory Opera (an exploration of the ‘sensuality’ of thoughts) and City Projects (which 2 Over in Nanjing, which this November expands the biennale out of the PSA and into the hosts the third edition of its annual (shortly fabric of the city). If all that – singing theories, to become a more fashionably biennial) Interflights of imagination, etc – sounds a bit Willy national Art Festival, it’s not the language that’s Wonka-ish in the context of the PSA’s factory going to be baffling (this one is called, rather structure – then it’s only enhanced by the nowshoutily, given the capping, HISTORICODE: familiar biennial gibber that constitutes the Scarcity and Supply), but the more-than-400

1 Lantian Xie, The Sidewinder (detail) 2016, installation with Volkswagen Santana, excerpt from Egyptian Jazz by Salah Ragab, excerpt from The Sidewinder by Lee Morgan, LIFE magazine, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy Grey Noise, Dubai

2 Gao Brothers, The Three Narrations about the Death of Chinese Citizen Wang Qingbo, 2010, oil painting on canvas, 300 × 400 × 3 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nanjing International Art Festival

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3 Will Alsop, OCAD University. Photo: Richard Johnson. Courtesy Colombo Art Biennale

4 Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Untitled Curtain 7, 2015 (detail), Kriska aluminium curtain and laser-cut powder-coated steel frame, dimesnsions variable. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

3 artworks (by 315 international and Chinese After all that, this year’s Colombo Art grasped the idea that the work of artists can be artists) that will be crammed into the city’s new Biennale is going to feel like a relatively a conduit for engagement and discourse, and Baijia Lake Museum. One of China’s increasing modest affair. Which, you might say, suits its is looking to get 40 of them, gathered from number of private museums, it’s owned by environment. Moreover, having read the title around the world, to energise the local artistic property magnate and art collector Yan Lugen, and advance information about the Shanghai community in order to make Colombo one who also founded the festival. As you might Biennale, you’ll probably feel that Alnoor of South Asia’s artistic hubs. The community imagine, given their number, the works on show Mitha’s title for this year’s edition of the Sri outreach side of things will have a distinctly during the festival have been assembled by a Lankan extravaganza – Conceiving Space – is artistic flavour, with the inclusion of some of committee (comprising nine curators) under the ludicrously straightforward. It gets worse, architecture’s more unconventional personalidirection of chief curator Lu Peng and cocurator as we’re promised an examination of ‘space as ties, including Assemble, the collective that Letizia Ragaglia (director of Museion in Bolzano, public and private; space as protest; space as won the 2015 Turner Prize; Will Alsop; and Italy), and offer up a definitely intriguing mix tangible and imagined; space as community, Madelon Vriesendorp. Look out also for the featuring the output of many of the best-known memory and legacy; space as architectural, work of Indian artist Mithu Sen. or most innovative figures in modern and conconceptual, performative, temporal, spiritual, But you should go to Shanghai first, where temporary art. From China there’s work by Wang symbolic, intuitive and rhythmic; space as the real excitement’s at this November. There’s Qingsong, Zeng Fanzhi and the Gao Brothers; liminal and ritualistic; space as embodied and the biennial, of course, and its opening coincides from the rest of Asia look out for Thailand’s meditative, virtual and transcendent’. What with not one but two art fairs. Art 021 sees over Pratchaya Phinthong, Japanese collective is the founding artistic director of the Asia 80 international galleries crammed into the 4 Shanghai Exhibition Centre; West Bund Art & Chim↑Pom and South Korea’s Minouk Lim, Triennial Manchester thinking by being so and expect them to be joined by international direct? Doesn’t he know that any self-respecting Design takes a more boutique approach, with colleagues Francesco Vezzoli, Adel Abdessemed, biennial needs to epiphytically enfold things 30 international galleries housed in a cavernous Walid Raad and, naturally, Joseph Beuys. around its terminals? Still, like Raqs, Mitha has aircraft hangar in Shanghai’s up-and-coming

Winter 2016

West Bund arts district (next to the Yuz and But for those of you gluttons who still do, Long museums). Even better, the latter event there’s London’s Timothy Taylor Gallery, who 5 includes ArtReview Asia Xiàn Chǎng. Yes, in addition to exhibiting at West Bund Art we have been busy. Xiàn Chàng, which roughly & Design, and who’ve recently opened a second space in New York, are expanding further translates as ‘site’, ‘scene’ (of a crime) or ‘setting’, features 24 solo presentations by Merlin James, 6 with a popup exhibition of works by Alex Bosco Sodi, Laurent Grasso, Haroon Mirza, Katz. West Broadway and Spring, the largestShanzhai Biennial, Simon Dybbroe Møller, ever presentation of works by the eighty-nineBagus Pandega, Sion Sono, Philippe Parreno, year-old painter in China, promises to bring Yutaka Sone, Imagokinetics, Wang Shang, some of the flavour of Manhattan, rendered in his typically spare yet iconic style, to Zhang Peili, Hao Jingfang & Wang Lingjie, Wang Yi, Zhang Ruyi, Bi Rongrong, Christopher Shanghai’s Art and Culture Pilot Zone. Katz’s Orr, Qiu Xiaofei, Jin Shan, Qiu Anxiong, Lu paintings – portraits of family (most famously Zhengyuan, Sean Scully and Yi Xin Tong. The his wife, Ada) and friends, flowers and landworks, which are collectively focused on occupyscapes – offer a signature mix of the universal ing and manipulating space and/or time are and the personal as part of the artist’s stated, if Sisyphean, ambition of representing housed in a 1,000sqm tent and throughout the the ‘now’. main fair and the West Bund complex. And obviously it will be so amazing that you won’t want Maybe it’s as a result of the fallout from to soil your eyeballs by going to see anything else. Brexit, and the UK capital’s need to compensate

for the country’s referendum debacle by making new international friends, but the London– Shanghai route is one that’s seeing heavy art traffic at the moment, not least in the form 7 of Guan Xiao’s exhibition Elastic Sleep, first staged at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in the spring, which now returns to the artist’s homeland to be showcased at the Chi K11 Art Space in Shanghai. The Beijingbased artist’s output – in the form of mysteriously totemic sculptures and drifting, staccato videoworks – focuses on the emergence of a nonlinear sense of time and space, and the relationship between digital and material realities (a subject that’s more ‘now’, even, than many of Katz’s), as well as the internal and external sense of connectedness therein: a form of relational aesthetics without the cooking or the sliding, but with the search engine and instantly accessible archive as generators instead.

6 Alex Katz, Christy, 2015, oil on linen, 122 × 244 inches. © the artist. Courtesy Timothy Taylor, London & New York

5 Sion Sono, The bridge of ‘the verge of the verge of death’, 2016, dimensions variable, mixed media. Courtesy the artist and Ota Fine Arts, Singapore & Tokyo

7 Guan Xiao, From Unit 3 to Unit 7, 2016, resin, stainless steel, MDF, acrylic, speaker, C-stand, mesh fabric. Courtesy the artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, Antenna Space, Shanghai

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3rd Flr, Golden Place Plaza 153 Rajdamri Rd. Lumphini, Pathumwan Bangkok, 10330, Thailand www.tangcontemporary.com

8 Neïl Beloufa, Superlatives and Resolution, People Passion, Movement and Life, 2014, installation with foam, Plexiglas, metal and HD video, dimensions variable. Photo: Rita Taylor. Courtesy the artist

9 Hu Jieming, 100 Years in 1 Minute (Chaim Soutine, Zhao Wuji), 2014, video installation, 68 × 26 × 15 cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart Singapore 10 Patricia Perez Eustaquio, Flowers For X, IV, 2016, oil on canvas, 154 cm diameter. Courtesy the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

Also at K11 is work by Neïl Beloufa (he showed at the ICA, with whom K11 has a partnership, in late 2014). Besides being a fashionable play on words, Soft(a)ware is the French-Algerian’s first institutional solo show in China and will feature existing and newly commissioned works by an artist who combines technology, sculpture and video in immersive, performative environments, with, like Guan Xiao, a focus on the potential for active agency rather than passive viewership in the mix of them all. Welcome to now. Speaking of now, back at the West Bund, be sure to check out Shanghart’s new space following its move from long-term digs in the gallery cluster at Moganshan Road. The inaugural show, which celebrates the gallery’s 20th anniversary as well as its new home, is titled Holzwege, a term derived by philosopher Martin Heidegger to describe the overgrown,

with being included in the current Singapore rarely trodden paths through forests that only those native to the environment will recognise. 10 Biennale, Filipino artist Patricia Perez The exhibition looks back on the gallery’s Eustaquio is also having a November solo exhibition (Flowers for X) in the city-state’s Yavuz pioneering history through the work of 30 artists, ranging from Chen Xiaoyun to Zhang Gallery. Milking it! Anyway, in Gillman Barracks Enli, via Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jörg (where Yavuz is located) the Manila-based artist will be continuing her meditation on objects Immendorff and Sean Scully. Meanwhile, over that have reached the end of their useful lives, (about six hours south and a little bit west as here via a series of painted tondos featuring the airplane flies) at Shanghart’s Singapore flowers that have just passed their prime. Sound outpost, multimedia art and its representations 9 of the ‘now’ take centre stage. The Dynamics is like something that belongs in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century interior design? That’s part a group exhibition featuring Hu Jieming, one of the point. It’s not just flowers that fade, but of the pioneers of video and multimedia art also artistic styles and tastes. And love, of course, in China, as well as compatriots Jiang Pengyi, Lu Lei, Shao Yi, Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong and if you want to be romantic about things. The Zhang Ding, in an orgy of time-based artworks. antique flavour is enhanced by the fact that Not content with just having had a solo the flowers are rendered in an ‘unfashionable’ manner generally associated with classic Dutch project (which ended in September and apparstill lifes. The result is both a memento to and ently evoked wilted blooms, carcasses and warning about fashion, taste, consumption, crumpled paper) in Paris’s Palais de Tokyo or

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ornament and the inevitable passing of time. wished: most wished not to. Chong’s upcoming Look out, Singapore. show extend this investigation into the nature of intentionality and decision making in art, Also meditating on the vagaries of chance and the general exercise of free will. and deploying art’s ‘old-fashioned medium’ Back in 2013, self-taught Indonesian artist 11 is Singaporean artist Heman Chong (regular readers will know by now that it’s almost 12 Jompet Kuswidananto (he comes from a as compulsory for ArtReview Asia to mention musical and performance background) won Chong in every issue as it is for it to bandy the Prince Claus Award with his theatre group about references to Rirkrit Tiravanija), who has Teater Garasi (a collective with whom he has worked since 1998), and one year later he a hometown solo show, titled Portals, Loopholes 13 picked up the Prudential Asian Eye Award for and Other Transgressions, at Fost. Alongside a his performative installation work, which series of four new large-scale paintings will be generally deploys sound, video, sculpture and NO or ON (2016), a sculpture that comes with the following instruction: ‘You can show the work interactive mechanical parts. Both aspects of as “NO” or “ON”: it’s completely up to you’. Rope, his output will be on show in his solo exhibition Barrier, Boundary (2015) – a sculpture that was at Singapore’s Esplanade. Jompet’s work takes part of Chong’s 2015 exhibition at the South theatre as the stage upon which the swings and London Gallery – featured a rope and stanchions roundabouts of Indonesia’s recent sociopolitical arbitrarily dividing the exhibition space into history (from the colonial to the post-1998 democtwo parts, which visitors could cross if they racy periods) and the conflicts of globalisation

are made manifest. That’s why this show is titled Theatre State. Jompet brings to light frictions of governmentality (the governing and the governed), public and private space, and community dynamics in works that provide a less potentially kitsch alternative to the better-known (and more art-fair friendly) output of Javanese compatriots such as Heri Dono and Entang Wiharso. Talking of the better-known, this November Kishio Suga brings a recreation of his 1973 work Placement of Condition to Dia: Chelsea in New York; almost incredibly it’s the influential Japanese artist’s first solo show at a US institution. Perhaps it’s a sign of contemporary art’s terrifying quest for ‘nowness’ and novelty (though more likely that’s the result of laziness) that The Art Newspaper trialled the work under the headline ‘Kishio Suga’s 70s throwback at Dia: Chelsea’, going on to describe how the artist was ‘resurrecting’ the work, which comprises

12 Jompet Kuswidananto, Reenactment of 1st of March 1949 War (video still), 2016. Courtesy the artist

11 Heman Chong, No Way #1, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 61 × 46 × 4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Fost Gallery, Singapore

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13 Kishio Suga, Diagonal Phase, 1969/2012. Photo: Tsuyoshi Sato. © the artist. Courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

14 from top Koki Tanaka, A Poem Written by 5 Poets at Once (First Attempt) and A Pottery Produced by 5 Potters at Once (Silent Attempt), both 2013, collaborations, video documentation. © and courtesy the artist

a series of marble columns leaning in different directions but linked by wire that coils around the columns so as to fix them in a network of what looks like mutual support, as if this founding member of what became known as Mono-ha (the School of Things) were some sort of modern-day Dr Frankenstein. Other people might say that the work (fitting for Dia: Chelsea, housed as it is in a marble-cutting factory) was an apt material summary of the immaterial connections that bind societies together. But go check it out for yourselves; you should never trust journalists. Simultaneously, Suga has his first European retrospective, titled Situations, at Milan’s Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, the cavernous spaces of which host more than 20 of the artist’s installations. Look out among them for Critical Sections, which has been reconstructed for the first time since 1984 and features strips of black and of white

the lead of some of ArtReview Asia’s colleagues fabric, hung from the ceiling and interwoven at T** A** N********, it might be because the artistic with tree branches found onsite, the whole ‘throwback’ is in fashion – take your pick. connected to zinc plates on the floor. ‘I bring In any case, one of the more prominent figures a variety of things into the gallery, arranging to engage with notions of social sculpture is them and giving them structure so that they 14 Japanese artist Koki Tanaka. This month his occupy the entire space. The installations are projects, which take the social as a central never permanent and can be quickly disassembled or demolished. One might say that I create methodology, will be on show at the Asian Art temporary worlds,’ the artist wrote in 2009. Museum in San Francisco. Including works Earlier on ArtReview Asia mentioned that from a series where people with a shared proJoseph Beuys would make a natural inclusion fession or interest are asked to collaborate to in the Nanjing International Festival. In part produce an artwork, the exhibition, Potters and because his concept of artworks as social sculpPoets, gathers together A Poem Written by 5 Poets tures is having something of a resurgence of at Once (First Attempt) and A Pottery Produced by late (to a greater degree even than the prevalence 5 Potters at Once (Silent Attempt) (both 2013), which it has always had) and partly as a response to will be here represented primarily by video the fact that we live in a time when large parts documentation of the original performances. of the world (Europe, the US and West Asia in In the first project, five Japanese poets who particular) are subject to a politics that seeks write and compose in different styles work to a certain social atomisation. Or, following produce a collaborative poem; in the second,

Winter 2016

16 Sopheap Pich, Seed #4, 2016, found marble, burlap, oil paint, wax, dimensions variable. Photo: the artist. Courtesy H Gallery, Bangkok

15 Kan Xuan, Kū Lüè Er, 2016 (details), 13-channel colour video installation with sound, sandstone and marble. © the artist. Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

17 Lee Kit, ‘You’, Readymade objects, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai

five potters make a series of vessels. The end results are a mixed bag, but that’s the participants’ work, not Tanaka’s. He documents the negotiation (sometimes verbal, sometimes silent) between the participants and the means by which they engineer a final product (sometimes by one participant taking the lead, at other times through more egalitarian cooperation). One show that, despite the most obvious reading of its title, claims to be steering away from memorialising any artistic ‘trends or phe15 nomena’ is Tales of Our Time at the Guggenheim 16 Museum in New York. Moreover, the seven Chinese artists and one artist group (Chia-En Jao, Kan Xuan, Sun Xun, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Tsang Kin-Wah, Yangjiang Group and Zhou Tao) whose work is on show seek to challenge fixed notions of place and the truth of official histories. The exhibition’s title derives from Lu Xun’s last collection of fiction, Gushi xin bian (Old Tales

Retold, 1936). In it, Lu Xun (the pen name of Zhou Shuren), one of the leading figures of Chinese modern literature, recasts ancient fables to critique social norms and highlight the problems of his era. In the exhibition, organised by Xiaoyu Weng and Hou Hanru, the artists will deploy various types of narrative that blur fact and fiction in order to illuminate and investigate social and political tensions worldwide and in particular the notion of China as a fixed identity. Taking his own approach to notions of history and identity is Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich. Pich was born in Battambang, studied in Chicago (his family fled to the US in 1984, during Vietnamese occupation following 17 the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge) and has been based in Phnom Penh since 2002; trained as a painter, he is best known for creating sculpture out of local bamboo. The material qualities of a variety of local and found materials (which

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also include burlap, stone and rattan) remain central to Pich’s work: ‘They were the stuff of childhood memories,’ he has said in the past. As well as being the vehicles for an exploration of personal identity, these materials are, in this artist’s hands, a means of exploring narratives surrounding the contemporary social and political history of his homeland, while grounding them in the reality of daily life. His solo exhibition at H Space in Bangkok provides an opportunity to review past work and preview new experiments. Next stop for Pich: Christine Macel’s 2017 Venice Biennale. The relationship between art and life also features heavily in the work of Taipei-based Hong Kong artist Lee Kit, whose work, which began with his painting check patterns onto clothes, tablecloths and napkins (which he used) and has evolved into no less intimate installations and conceptual projects, operates on the

borders of domestic/private and public space objects created by the brand: all part of Xu Zhen (the person)’s ongoing investigation into the and confronts broader sociopolitical issues ways in which art circulates in a world domithrough objects that are right in front of him. nated by a digital culture in which, in his words, Look for more of this mixing of the indirect ‘“sharing” provides the starting point for with the direct in his third solo show (along18 side painter Wang Yi’s first solo show at the “owning”’. Look out for African tribal sculpgallery, featuring his colourful, trippy geometric tures fused (at the groin) with manga dolls (new works from the artist’s Evolution series) abstractions) at Aike-Dellarco, who’ve recently and some similarly bizarre paintings from his moved to… yes, you guessed it: Shanghai’s West Bund. Now there’s a place that is beginning Losing Control series (both 2016). And so, to the end of this month’s art tour to have a fixed identity. And just to ram that last point home, and the eternal return of the biennial: this MadeIn Gallery, founded in 2014 by influential 20 time in India, at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 19 multimedia artist Xu Zhen (who also, since curated by Indian artist Sudarshan Shetty and titled forming in the pupil of an eye. Shetty’s 2009, has operated as MadeIn Company, with Xu Zhen as a subbrand), has moved from concept focuses on the location of ‘the contempoMoganshan Road to Longteng Avenue, on the rary’ through an examination of the notion fringe of the West Bund development. This of ‘tradition’ as an evolving rather than a stable November Xu Zhen (the brand) opens Store, motif, and breaking down specialist notions of a show retailing artworks, clothes and other art by featuring contributions by practitioners

from a diverse range of disciplines, from visual artists and musicians, to performers and poets. Central to all this, and to the ethos of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale itself, is the notion that art exists within, rather than apart from, a community. In terms of his own work, Shetty has previously described a tactic of trying ‘to seduce with the familiar’, and to a degree one can see similar tactics in the work of included artists such as Ahmet Öğüt, Stan Douglas, Paweł Althamer, Praneet Soi, T.V. Santhosh, Charles Avery and Yuko Mohri. They’ll be showing alongside a ‘Student’s Biennale’ involving 60 Indian art colleges and ‘Art by Children’, a ‘children only’ event that aims at initiating the young in the appreciation of art, both as artists and as audience. With that kind of indoctrination, it looks like biennale-tourism will be an even bigger thing for generations to come. Nirmala Devi

20 AES+F, Inverso Mundus, Still #1-20, 2015, chromogenic print on fine barite paper, 32 × 57 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kochi-Muziris Biennale

19 Xu Zhen, Evolution series (detail), 2016, wood, pvc. Produced by MadeIn Company. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2016

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Points of View

That day she wore a light blue V-neck sweater over a light grey crew-neck T-shirt. After many years without contact, Jing had taken the initiative and got in touch with me. I remember that we drank some sake while we were eating. She took off her sweater and rolled it up. Her face had gone a little red, and she tipped her chin upwards when she laughed. Her snowwhite teeth shone clearly in the light. What did we talk about? Was it her father, the botany professor, or was it the nouveau riche who were always trying to buy her paintings but did not know a thing about art? She laughed so gladly, and also nodded with extraordinary vigour whenever we agreed, that I almost forgot why she had arranged to meet. I was watching her hungrily, watching her with a hunger unbecoming of a person of my age and status, watching her smile reflect the light of the table lamp. She thoughtlessly raised her eyebrows. I was also watching the continuous comings and goings of people behind her, and I wondered, a bit puzzled: had she changed? Or was it me? I had aged. She had taken good care of her skin, which still looked tender and lovely. Yes, of course, of course, in the end we could not avoid talking about him. ‘Jun never even thought of inciting others to do illegal things. He was framed by petty people who envy him. Do you think there’s anything that can be done? Do you think someone could intervene?’ There is no way she didn’t know the difference between criminal activity and mistakes made by schoolchildren, but that is how she put it, in such an entitled way. And I just sat there, unconditionally absorbing her enchanting voice, imagining sinking my fingernails deep into her lovely skin. In the end, I didn’t tell her that Jun had sent me letters from prison. I thought, I am definitely willing to possess one of Jing’s paintings. I’d hang it on the wall in front of my desk. But in that sensitive moment, I had no way of expressing that sentiment without the possibility of it being understood as a kind of proposition, a kind of transaction. Her paintings contained only abstract colours and lines. You could easily tell that they were works by someone who had not received

Jing’s Painting By

Hu Fang

a formal art-education, and after all, she was a business management major. When we met, she was studying economics, infatuated with art; I was studying law, infatuated with literature. Drawing on a combination of interest and talent, she directly embraced colour and line in her own way, whereas I just became a boring judge. Through her brush, those unpolished colours and lines became a world sometimes dazzling, sometimes tranquil. There was a purity and innocence to her paintings that led one to yearn for the world of children’s stories. But they also hinted at something otherworldly and transcendent. Her paintings had many fans, which was not a surprise to me. The odd thing was, many of these fans seemed to think that there was some correlation between her paintings and the fluctuations of the stock market. People said that the rises and dips of those lines and colours were uncannily similar to the movements of the market, and this interpretation was further supported by the titles she gave the works. Each painting was named after a date, and seemingly every single one of those dates corresponded to some great billow in the market. Whether or not it could be confirmed, the perceived relationship between the flowing lines of her paintings and the candlestick charts and shadow lines of the finance world had won Jing a great deal of popularity. There were some more discriminating collectors who said that the peculiar connection between these paintings and the stock market lay not only in their graphlike appearance but also in the capacity of the colours in the paintings to communicate

Winter 2016

a certain mood. The mood was always a tolerant one, which people found comforting. Without a doubt, most of Jing’s fans simply appreciated the aesthetic beauty of her work. The rumours surrounding her paintings just amplified the demand for them. As for her relationship with Jun, that generated yet more rumours, many of which pertained to his political background. As much as she sought to separate herself from these rumours, it was futile. I didn’t know if Jun’s current predicament would influence Jing’s painting style. As I repeatedly marvelled at the wondrous combinations of line and colour in her art, I wanted to believe that her paintings were innocent, that they existed separately from worldly affairs, that they were genuine works of art. As I was gazing at one painting, everything within it seemed to come to life, to lurch into internal struggle. Then, a moment of calm appeared within the struggle, which only accentuated the bewitching character of its tranquillity. The painting was titled March 4. I didn’t know which year it referred to, but I will always remember that date, March 4, because that was the day she broke up with me. At the time, the stock market had not yet entered our lives, but Jun had, with the bearing of a champion. His speeches were always richly agitating. They stirred up people’s longing for beautiful things. It was as if one person could predict our future using only the resonant, chafing air passing through his lungs and lips. Often, I was just one of many nameless people in front of the stage, unsure of where the future lay, one of the masses with an instinctive distrust of beautiful things. I recalled that it was after Jing and I listened to one of his speeches that I finally lost her. I know that in this moment I must recount this bit of history with great care, because it involves some assumptions, some private feelings, some inexplicable envy and hatred. As for whether or not it is our lives, that is like Jing’s paintings: no matter how intensely the outside world fluctuates, she can remain in her room, experimenting with those colours, those lines. They appear to possess an eternal beauty, but at the moment, they have thoughtlessly touched a sensitive nerve. Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

OK. I give up. One can’t keep up with the everincreasing crime rate in India. As I write this, a middle-aged man in Delhi stabbed a twentytwo-year-old girl 32 times in broad daylight. The reason: she spurned his amorous overtures. The incident, caught on CCTV cameras, has gone viral: millions of Indians have watched it. How much can I write about such gruesomeness. Enough. There are uplifting things to Indian life as well. There are two dogs, and Chintoo, a cat – a more recent addition – in my household. A few days ago, there was a statewide bandh (a consensual lockdown of public and private services as a protest against something or the other). There was no place open to buy fish for Chintoo. Avanthika (my wife) walked down to the nearby Marina beach where an old fisherman in his catamaran was picking out small fish one by one from his net. The fisherman asked Avanthika why she had ventured out even on the day of the bandh to buy fish. She told him about Chintoo’s peculiar dietary habits where he (the cat) deemed only fish kosher. Upon hearing this, the fisherman gave her a large basketful of his fresh catch. For free. Yes: he refused to take money. While on the one hand we have suicide bombers intent on killing fellow humans, on the other we do have compassionate folks like this fisherman in every corner of the world. In the quest for cheerful subjects to write about, I accompanied my photographer friend Prabhu Kalidas to Kumbakonam into the Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu. There’s a place adjoining the town called Darasuram that houses the Airavatesvara temple. The earliest mentions of the Chola dynasty, which ruled southern India (from Thanjavur as their capital) for several centuries, date from the reign of Ashoka (around the third century BC) of the

notes from Madras in which

your guide looks for the uplifting moments India offers to lives lived against a horrifying backdrop of rising crime by

Charu Nivedita

ArtReview Asia

earlier Maurya Empire. As for the Cholas, they were at the peak of their powers between the ninth and the thirteenth century AD. The naval conquests of the Cholas extended their empire to parts of the Andamans, Maldives, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia. Even today, remnants of Chola influence can be found in Southeast Asia. Despite being an Islamic nation, there’s no city in Malaysia in which Hindu temples can’t be found. There’s a giant Ganesha statue in one of Bangkok’s streets. The people who worship the statue may not know anything of its origins. When I quizzed one of the devotees while visiting the place, he thought the elephant figure was one of the Buddha’s manifestations. Additionally, there are hundreds of Tamil words that have found their way into the Thai language. The grandest examples of Chola architecture are the Brihadeeswarar temple at Thanjavur built by Rajaraja Chola I (985–1014 AD), Gangaikonda Cholapuram built by his son Rajendra Chola I (c. 1014–44 AD) and the Darasuram Airavatesvara temple built by Rajaraja Chola II (1146–73 AD). All three temples are veritable wonders of the world. Of course, the Taj Mahal is celebrated as India’s most significant global wonder. And rightly so. But I personally cannot see the Taj as the monument to love in the way that most people do. It is built in memory of Mumtaz Mahal, who was thirty-seven when she died. Mughal emperor Shah Jahan took her as his fourth wife when she was nineteen. She died while delivering her fourteenth child. So it is fair to assume Mumtaz was hardly ever not pregnant in her adult life. Only if Mumtaz and Shah Jahan fornicated the very next day after she delivered a child could she have been so prolific a bearer of Mughal progeny. Given its history, I cannot think of the Taj Mahal without necrophilic imagery popping up in my head.

The Taj Mahal is a mausoleum: erected in memory of someone dead. The three Chola temples I mentioned however are monuments of joy that celebrate life. Temples were the focal points of Tamil life back then. With thousands of people congregating in and around these structures, they became the staging ground for the best music, dance, theatre and every other artform. The three Chola temples represent the apogee of human creativity in the fields of architecture, sculpture and art. My personal favourite in this Chola triad is the temple in Darasuram. Every pillar in that temple tells us the genius of the anonymous Tamil sculptors of the twelfth century.

above The voluptuous Ganga Devi facing page, top Darasuram facing page, bottom A group of students, learning the art and philosophy of the tradition in Darasuram all images Photo: Prabhu Kalidas

Winter 2016

If you go to see Leonardo Da Vinci’s iconic Mona Lisa (c.1503–6) in the Louvre, you’ll encounter a hundred camera flashlights every minute. It is the most seen, photographed, hagiographed painting in the world. In Darasuram, every pillar has a Mona Lisa sculpted in black granite. They are so marvellous that only the gods themselves could have sculpted them to such perfection. There are sculptures ranging from half-an-inch to larger-than-life figures. There is one particularly enchanting sculpture of a woman with a smile more enigmatic than Mona Lisa’s. The guide informed us that the subject of the sculpture was called Ganga Devi. But we do not know anything about the person who created it. Sekkizhar was a poet who lived during the reign of Kulothunga Chola II (1135–50). So impressed was the king’s young son Rajaraja Chola II with Sekkizhar’s epic Periya Puranam that he decided to visually translate the 4,286 songs of the epic and lives of the 63 Shaivite Nayanars in the form of sculptures in the grand Darasuram temple that he would build. These sculptures are made using granite blocks that are about 50cm wide. One scene depicts a man and a woman waist-deep in a pond. They are holding two ends of a bamboo reed. On another side are Shiva and Parvati. All this on a stone of 30cm. The corresponding story in Periya Puranam goes like this: a potter visits a prostitute. On hearing about it, his wife decrees, ‘Swear upon the Neelakanta Shiva that thou shall not touch us.’ And because she employs the word ‘us’ as first person plural, the potter decides to abstain from the pleasures of female company altogether. The couple eschew the pleasure of sex forever. When they both turn old, a mendicant comes to them and deposits his bowl of alms for safekeeping until his return. When the beggar comes back to ask for his bowl, the potter discovers that it’s no longer in his custody. He offers to make a brand new one. The beggar refuses, wants his own and accuses the potter of stealing his property. ‘If you haven’t stolen it, prove it,’ declares the beggar. To prove his innocence the potter was asked to enter a pond holding his wife’s hand. Bound by his earlier vow, he could not touch his wife. The village council gathered and adjudged that the beggar’s demand be fulfilled. The potter and his wife enter the pond holding two ends of a stick. When they reemerge after the dip, they are both youthful again, and can see Shiva and Parvati in front of them. In Darasuram I met a sculptor who is a part of the lineage of the masters of the past. Without the money to buy metal, some are putting in the smelter their old bronze sculptures to create new ones. More on that story in the next issue.

Housed in two handsome colonial buildings that once served as the City Hall and the Supreme Court, the National Gallery of Singapore is an imposing presence in the civic district. Who is the audience for the US$400million gallery? It appears mostly empty on the occasions I’ve visited; and weekend crowds seem to be bused in by grassroots organisers. I’m beginning to wonder if it even needs people. To be a ‘global city for the arts’ – I borrow the terminology from our government – our National Gallery is about historicising Singaporean art to a global audience. Therein lies the problem. Singapore’s art history, like its national history, is an invention necessitated by the fall of the British Empire. In the twentieth-century configuration of nationalism, originary cultures are the mythometres that give the nation-state legitimacy. Our art history – and thus our own cultural legitimacy – is projected outwards, not inwards. Taking a leaf from our borderless economy (built on shipping, logistics and finance), the National Gallery extends its curatorial framework beyond Singapore and to Southeast Asia in particular. The teleological arc of the curating simultaneously desires and constructs the global city-state as the leaderorganiser of a regional Southeast Asian identity. The National Gallery isn’t the issue; it’s only symptomatic of the larger, structural conditions of the cultural economy. The art market and industry repeat the global discourse of inequality. The few, the big and the branded exert outsize gravity. Singapore is especially primed to take advantage in both summoning and signalling its symbolic capital through the arts and culture. Our state is particularly efficient, willing and able. The government invests heavily not only in infrastructure, but also in publicity, through well-greased agents and media junkets. Who knows of anything beyond what the state wants and projects? Smaller art institutions, like the Substation, of which I was recently appointed artistic director, struggle. Founded in 1990, it is Singapore’s first and oldest contemporary and multidisciplinary art space. Many Singaporeans had their first encounter with the arts here. At a time when many Singaporeans were also grappling with our own cultural identities within an authoritarian state that dominated all aspects of our lives, the arts became the perfect way for us, both as artists and as a people, to say, ‘There are other versions of the Singapore story’.

As cities become brands and deploy art to create identity, can culture exist as a contested space? Artist and curator Alan Oei on the difference between a public and an audience

Exterior view of the Substation, Singapore. Courtesy the Substation

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In the contestation and reclamation of cultural authority in Singapore, I would argue that the Substation was a key catalyst to a cluster of new cultural infrastructures in the 1990s: Singapore Art Museum (1996), Asian Civilisation Museum (1997), the Esplanade (2002). Kuo Pao Kun, our founder and theatre doyen, created this space with the tagline ‘a home for the arts’ (italics mine). He envisioned not this pouring of millions into monolithic state institutions, but a more open and plural Singapore that could accommodate and even come to cherish the arts. In such a society, one could have many, many homes for the arts. The truth is the Substation hasn’t quite been able to keep up. People tend to think that our biggest struggle is financial sustainability. In fact, it is the lack of ambition and meaning in the public and cultural sphere. Virtually all the art institutions in Singapore are heavily reliant on government grants. It’s both boon and curse, because money comes with strings attached. Like a driver pulled over by the cops, we’re asked to walk along a straight line. We stumble left and right, because the ‘key performance indicators’ (KPI) keep shifting. The line isn’t about going somewhere; it’s purely performative – have we met our funding guidelines and performance indicators? Have we brought in x number of visitors, and x number in outreach, and x degree of artistic excellence, and x percent of visitors satisfied? That’s why there are no people at the National Gallery. Like our grants system, it’s about keeping up appearances. As British cultural theorist Mark Fisher suggested in Capitalist Realism (2009), funding guidelines and the perpetual circuit of control creates ‘not a direct comparison of… performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output’. As grant recipients, we inevitably become more interested in performing the representation. Our programmes are shaped by the KPI rather than our visions. For instance, both art students (young people who don’t know the Substation’s history) and well-meaning administrators tell me that the Substation is a space for emerging artists. Since when, I ask? Weren’t we about the fringe, the experimental, the countercultural? Working on the margin does not automatically translate to emerging artists. The fringe is like Michel Foucault’s madman or leper, a kind of ‘lost

truth’, once firmly part of heterogeneous public life, now excised for a new kind of disciplined, moral order. Now there is no more fringe. The Substation is normativised, subsumed under the terminology of the administrator: part of the ‘art ecosystem’ and ‘value chain’. In our fear of losing funding, we come up with more programmes for emerging artists, more for outreach, more for this or that KPI. Can you really blame people for calling us an ‘incubator for emerging artists’? Before you know it, the difficulty of keeping up with the grant system has evolved our identity. The Substation’s vision, our history, has always been to be an independent and critical centre for art. Allied to that, in early years when there was once precious little space for civil society, the Substation also supported humanitarian causes: LGBT rights, animal welfare and other issues. When art is set free, it can point to both the topical (like migrant worker rights) or the universal, existential experience. Precisely because art bypasses the binary of the emotive and rational, and because it is irreducibly layered, it is valuable and necessary for the public sphere. In harking back to the Substation of yore, I want to address performance art in the 1990s as a way of thinking about space. The Singaporean pioneers of performance art did not need brickand-mortar institutions – their space was the streets. Their concerns were what mattered to the public. Centred around the body as both an expressive medium and a site of resistance, Singaporean artist Lee Wen became known internationally for his Yellow Man performances (in which he painted himself yellow from head to toe and went on ‘journeys’ in different cities). Coming at a time when postcolonial governments in Southeast Asia were actively proscribing ‘Asian values’ as an alternative to Western-style democracy, with its emphasis on individual rights, Lee Wen’s performance actively inscribed on his body a topos of ethnic and identity politics. Another artist, Amanda Heng, has, in multiple performances, worked again and again with objects stuffed into her mouth. Using, variously, raw meat, high-heeled shoes and mirrors, her performances reference simultaneously the hegemonic silencing of the female subject and the desire to communicate (titles of her performances include Let’s Walk, 1999–2009, and Let’s Chat, 1996–). Moreover, many of these works happened in the interstitial spaces between public and private. The critic Lee Weng Choy argues persuasively for the complex and

Lee Wen, Dream Boat, 1998, performance with bathtub, candles, matches, spoon, raw meat, poster colour and newspaper, at the Werkleitz Biennale, Tornitz and Werkleitz, Germany. Photo: Andrea Costas Otero. Courtesy iPreciation, Singapore

Winter 2016

fluid relationship between art and audiences, between being a participant and a member of the public. Heng and Lee cared tremendously about speaking with the public. They didn’t treat audiences as passive receivers. Set against the backdrop of culture wars and identity politics, their art had incorporated what was really and urgently at stake for the community. Increasingly, it feels like most artists are happy to be image-makers for the global city and audience. By and large, many artists have become defined by the narrow metrics of art fairs and festivals. We care not about the local; we care about the global. When we make art, it’s for the global audience that is in fact narrow: the institution, curator, collector, media. It’s to participate in rhetoric and operation of the global cities most typified by the sprouting up of biennales all over. In S,M,L,XL (1995), Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas identified Singapore as a ‘generic city’, one that effaces its own history and particularities. It was less a critique of Singapore than an attempt to chart how the West was haunted by the ghost city of the future – witness how Western cities are inexorably becoming more like Singapore. It is not only the indignity of Koolhaas’s critique – for this generic city, he chose an image of a blurry, yellow-and-blackpainted bumblebee of traffic light – but also the realisation that ‘local’ and ‘culture’ matters in the global economy. Here, our audience is the global elite – that’s why I said the National Gallery doesn’t even need Singaporeans. Our city’s prestige projects are designed not for the res publica, but for public relations and imaging. In the flatness and contained edges of digital pixels for the media, there are no in-betweens, no contested histories or territories. Let’s begin with local publics, not audiences. The state will do as it does; we artists have to ask how much responsibility we have to the public sphere. Is it enough simply to be cultural producers – and according to whose terms? I ask that artists recognise our complicity in the rhetoric of global city-making; that power is not only asymmetric. What’s at stake isn’t whether independent artists or institutions can survive in the shadow of large, prestigious and often colonial buildings; it’s about how small and irrelevant our dreams for art have become. I remember something Lee Wen once told me: “It is not that artists want to change the world, it is that we won’t let the world change us.”

‘The art world here, already small, shrinks further, divided now by a rift unlikely ever to heal,’ wrote filmmaker Ing Kanjanavanit on her blog Bangkok Love Letter last June. The ‘art world’ is Thailand’s, and she was responding to a public debacle that had emerged the month before about the inclusion of artist Sutee Kunavichayanont in an exhibition that celebrated democracy, human rights and peace in Asia. The exhibition, held at the Gwangju Museum of Art in Korea, was titled The Truth to Turn It Over, and had been organised to mark the 36th anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising. Kanjanavanit’s comment was prescient. Nearly six months later, there have been no signs of any local bridging of the rift between those who complained about and those who defended Kunavichayanont’s inclusion in the exhibition, the former alleging that his ‘anti-democratic’ politics meant that his work was incompatible with an exhibition staged to promote ‘Asian democracy, human rights, and peace’. While the museum, in a concession to the importance of this debate, did agree to post notices of the various accusations and counter-accusations alongside the artist’s installation, factions in Bangkok have not publicly sought common ground. To recap events: a group of more than 200 people in Thailand calling themselves Cultural Activists for Democracy (CAD) circulated an open letter in May this year claiming that Kunavichayanont could be linked to a conservative protest movement, the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), which arguably laid the ground for the 2014 military coup d’état that brought down Yingluck Shinawatra’s democratically elected government. Thailand remains under military rule. Kunavichayanont denied the claims, arguing that he opposed alleged corruption in Shinawatra’s administration, one of the claims of the PDRC. An open letter – eventually joined by hundreds of signatories – by artists Manit Sriwanichpoom and Vasan Sitthiket defended Kunavichayanont and reiterated that corruption breeds its own problems and might legitimately necessitate opposing an elected government. While CAD could gleefully highlight the circumstantial facts of Kunavichayanont’s relationship to the protesters (who did indeed get what they asked for), Sriwanichpoom and Sitthiket pleaded for an understanding of ‘purehearted’ citizens.

no common ground In Thailand, artists need to rethink how art intersects with politics, and who controls what writes

Brian Curtin

The artist’s works are agitprop with slogans such as ‘Reform Now’ and ‘Seize Thailand’. CAD claim that Kunavichayanont contributed to fundraising efforts for PDRC through a commercial venture titled Art Lane. More controversially, the dating of some of his works from 2014 could link him to the ‘Bangkok Shutdown’ protests that paralysed central Bangkok, called for a boycott of a free election and blocked voting booths. If, following Kanjanavanit’s thinking, there is a rift in Thailand’s artworld that is unlikely Sutee Kunavichayanont, Thai Uprising, 2014 (remade in 2016). Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

to be healed, is anyone asking how it could be healed? Sriwanichpoom and Sitthiket’s essential defence of the reputation of Kunavichayanont is relative to the fact that CAD appeared to pursue a personal indictment of the artist, which in turn highlights the absence of an account of how art itself becomes implicated in national politics. Here one could point to the history of Kunavichayanont’s practice – and Sriwanichpoom’s and Sitthiket’s – as participating in the ideologies of historic governments that Shinawatra and her cronies were widely accused of attempting to change. That is, these artists always speak to an ‘everyman’, whether Kunavichayanont’s early melancholic engagement with national symbols through his series of deflated latex elephants and silicone Siamese twins or Sriwanichpoom’s Pink Man imagery about the general problems of consumerism or Sitthiket’s endless rage-againstauthority that could galvanise fascists and liberals alike. Insisting on a unified public, a definable political position, has been the agenda of many of Thailand’s leaders. Shinawatra, as the media story endlessly replays, was seeking to change the profile of that public, that position or that ‘everyman’ to one less beholden to traditional Thai hierarchies of class and privilege. The standoff between CAD and the others points to a certain need in Thailand to learn to parse the relationships of art to political cultures, to trace, for example, how the histories of the practices of Kunavichayanont et al are already embedded within the interests of longstanding elites. But, ultimately, who cares? At issue is not an artist’s personal political affiliations but an understanding of how art can be related to contexts and systems that are not of its making, and how meanings can be shaped that are not reducible to intention. Without this understanding we have the zero sum game, as here, of accusation, denial and counter-accusation providing the order of exchange. In this respect, it is surely the current job of artists in Thailand, and concerned cultural activists, to render contexts and systems anew, or strange. Otherwise we are left with the potential for rifts that, highlighted and reinforced by Kanjanavanit’s observation, cannot be healed, because no one seems to understand how to manage the problems.

ArtReview Asia Xiàn Chǎng, a new initiative, brings special projects by leading artists from around the world to locations inside and outside the West Bund Art Center, Shanghai, 9–13 November

Merlin James Kerlin Gallery Bosco Sodi Blain | Southern Laurent Grasso Edouard Malingue Gallery Haroon Mirza Lisson Gallery Shanzhai Biennial Project Native Informant Simon Dybbroe Møller Laura Bartlett Gallery Bagus Pandega ROH Projects Sion Sono OTA Fine Arts Philippe Parreno Gladstone Gallery Yutaka Sone Tommy Simoens Imagokinetics Wang Shang Magician Space Zhang Peili Boers-Li Gallery Hao Jingfang & Wang Lingjie M Art Center Wang Yi Aike-Dellarco Zhang Ruyi Don Gallery Bi Rongrong Vanguard Gallery Christopher Orr Ibid Gallery Qiu Xiaofei Pace Gallery Jin Shan Bank Lu Zhengyuan Hive Center for Contemporary Art Qiu Anxiong Boers-Li Gallery Yi Xin Tong Vanguard Gallery Sean Scully Timothy Taylor

West Bund Art Center 2555 Longteng Avenue, Shanghai www.westbundshanghai.com 39 f00% BLACK

トーマスルフ

The exhibition “THOMAS RUFF” will be the first full-fledged retrospective of the artist’s career ever presented in Asia. This exhibition introduces Ruff’s major 18 series, approximately 160 works, stretching from his earliest efforts, Interieurs and Porträts, to his most recent photographs, press ++.

Organized by 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa［Kanazawa Art Promotion and Development Foundation］, The Yomiuri Shimbun Supported by Television Kanazawa Corporation With the cooperation of Lufthansa Cargo AG, All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd.

CLOSED: MONDAYS (EXCEPT JANUARY 2, JANUARY 9, 2017), DECEMBER 29, 2016 ̶ JANUARY 1, 2017, JANUARY 10, 2017 OPENING HOURS: 10:00 – 18:00 *10:00 – 20:00 ON FRIDAYS ＆ SATURDAYS. (LAST ADMISSION 30 MINUTES BEFORE CLOSING)

21ST MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, KANAZAWA (1-2-1 HIROSAKA, KANAZAWA CITY, ISHIKAWA, JAPAN 920-8509) http://www.kanazawa21.jp

THOMAS RUFF DECEMBER 10, 2016 ― MARCH 12, 2017

THOMAS

press++ 11.02, 2016 ©Thomas Ruff / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016

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Art Featured

I walk away, the river stays 43

‘A Bigger Photo’ by Aimee Lin

Passions Bloom Ambitions from Vagina – 23, 2016, photocollage, Tilia plywood, grass cloth, traditional lacquer, gold foil, Chinese traditional wet-mounting technique, 502 × 1502 cm (in 138 pieces)

ArtReview Asia

A continuously reimagined world is unfolding in a series of giant photo matrices by Shanghai-based collective Birdhead. What are they trying to tell us?

Winter 2016

Passions Bloom Ambitions from Vagina – 23 (detail), 2016, photocollage, Tilia plywood, grass cloth, traditional lacquer, gold foil, Chinese traditional wet-mounting technique, 502 × 1502 cm (in 138 pieces)

ArtReview Asia

Passions Bloom Ambitions from Vagina, a new series of works that Birdhead The sheer volume of its output led Birdhead to assemble a succeshas been developing since 2015, comprises large-scale and multilay- sion of self-published photobooks, such as Xin Cun (2007), The End of ered photocollages consisting of grids of photographs overlaid with Mainland (2010) and The Light of Eternity (2013). In one regard, each of other, specially mounted photographs and, sometimes, traditional these projects documents Birdhead’s life journey: departure from Chinese calligraphy. Last June, at Art Basel Unlimited, Birdhead their home (Xin Cun, meaning ‘new village’, refers to the residential presented Passions Bloom Ambitions from Vagina – 23 (2016), the biggest complexes built in big cities during the socialist era in China), travwork from the series to date. The body consists of a 5 × 15m photo elling in a world that is geographically bigger and wider (The End of matrix of 134 black-and-white photographs of natural and urban Mainland), and the spiritual arrival of Chinese classical artists’ free and scenes. At the centre of this is a photograph consisting of four larger romanticist tradition (The Light of Eternity). Now comes the ongoing panels that feature a group of tadpoles swimming in a pond. On top project qing fang zhi dang. of this last are four Chinese characters – qing fang zhi dang (Birdhead’s To a certain degree, the grids of photographs in Birdhead’s latest translation of which provides the title for the work) – written in kai works can be seen as a variation of the photobook adapted to fit a style and covered in gold leaf. The four-panel photograph is mounted contemporary gallery space. After showing these site-specific photo using a traditional wet-mounting technique (normally used in matrices – all of which are titled Welcome to the World of Birdhead Again connection with calligraphy and ink painting), and coated with tradi- – at the 2011 Venice Biennale, the National Art Center, Tokyo (2012), tional lacquer (normally used in connection with furniture), a trans- New York’s MoMA (2012) and many other institutions and galleries, there is a sense that Birdhead has gradually developed a particparent resin extracted from the Chinese lacquer tree. But this is just to describe the work’s outer appearance. Hidden ular photo-editing methodology and aesthetic expression, which between the four-panel photograph and the grid are six other reached its maturity in a 2015 show at Shanghart. In this analysis, I’m photographs featuring fireworks exploding against a dark night going to look at Birdhead’s photo matrices in terms of three technical sky. Beneath them, in the grid, are portraits of the two members of levels: at the first, each photograph in the matrix is carefully refined Birdhead. These three layers of images, together with the Chinese text and transformed into an abstract pictorial unit, and then used to on top of them, make up Birdhead’s most complicated pictorial and compose a bigger photograph. At the second level is a layer of meantextual world yet: one that fuses contemporary shanshui (landscape), ings generated by the content of the images: the artists themselves, traditional calligraphy, romanticism, passion (to look at the fireworks their friends, tree branches, sky, buildings and highways, a contemand tadpoles through Freudian eyes) and a notion of self that rests in porary shanshui in which urbanism overlaps with nature and personal an inner world. ambitions and emotions projected Indeed Birdhead has been cononto it. The third level comes from the There’s a sense in which the viewer is structing a continuous, expanding, special mounting technique Birdhead encouraged to enter the image, to move has developed over the last few years. and incessantly reimagined pictorial or wander through the pictorial scenery Wet mounting is a traditional techworld of its own since its establishment nique used for Chinese classical ink in 2004. Born in Shanghai, Song Tao and Ji Weiyu have spent most of their life in their hometown. Birdhead art and calligraphy; when used on photography, it has the effect began because of their shared passion for collecting (film) cameras and of flattening the printing paper, and involves the use of materials taking photos in the street. Born in the late 1970s and early 80s, the such as precious wood, handmade paper and silk, not only to protect members of Birdhead are part of a generation of artists who grew up the work but also to give it a particular aesthetic (and, by virtue of in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, and connected with each other its connection to historically precious objects, economic) value. via BBS and online blogs, which also became sites for the publication Traditional lacquer was used in ancient China and Japan to protect of their works. Like their contemporaries, early Birdhead was influ- precious interior items such as furniture and tableware by sealing enced by Japanese photography, especially the photo avant-garde from them off from the air. Over time, the colourless coat of lacquer may the 1960s and 70s, and the use of shashin shu (Japanese photobook). By turn yellow, which adds a further aesthetic layer, particularly in the beginning of the 2000s, this generation of grassroots practices China and Japan, where traces of time are considered to be of great had come to be called ‘Chinese New Photography’ (a label used as a aesthetic value. marketing tool during the late 2000s and early 2010s) , a photographic Birdhead’s method is to scan the films and create digital files in expression that is very close to urban photography and shi-shashin which Birdhead refines the tones before laying out the images in (personal photography) in Japan. During that period, as was the case a photo-editing application to make the big picture. So the photoin the work of other artists in this grouping – among them No.223 matrices work is not just a group of smaller pictures, but also one big (Lin Zhipeng), Qing Touyi (Liu Yiqing), Pixy Liao (Liao Yijun) – Song picture. In Chinese, shanshui literally means mountain and water; in Tao and Ji Weiyu’s work comprised records of their private life, close the tradition of Chinese scholar painting, a landscape doesn’t necesfriends and the urban landscape in which they lived. But unlike the sarily involve the actual recording of mountains and water (generally others, Birdhead was particularly obsessed with film cameras and the in the form of a river) and their special relation: the artist can conceptones and textures produced in a traditional darkroom. Looking at the tually invent his own shanshui on paper. Therefore, Birdhead’s art at works from the late 2000s, we can see how these two young men were its first level is very close to the making of conceptual shanshui, and trying to understand themselves and the city and times in which they also, considering their emphasis on photographic tones, very close to were living. Back in those days, they were practising guerrilla photog- Chinese classical calligraphy art in cao (cursive script) or xing (semiraphy, attacking their world with aggressive shoots and provocative cursive script) style, normally considered to articulate an expresflashlighting, and by producing a massive quantity of photographs. sionist consciousness.

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Birdhead once used the expression ‘a bigger photo’ to describe its the aesthetic vocabularies created by the mounting of the works. photo matrices. Indeed this process does overcome the technical diffi- The members of Birdhead believe that the action of pressing down culties of producing a gigantic photograph (in this way Birdhead’s the shutter is to take a slice out of time and space, thus a moment of concept and methodology are very different to that of Andreas Gursky, self-reflection. To refine, edit and lay out those hundreds of photofor example, who focuses on the same end using a single image). For graphs is to study their inner world and to revisit the moments of me, though, the real beauty in the apparently simple description self-reflection, while the mounting of the photographs is the mate‘a bigger photograph’ lies in the fact that the photo matrix helps rialisation of self-reflection. Although Passions Bloom Ambitions from to overcome the limitation of photography as a mechanical way of Vagina is a naughty joke, the characters are a quotation from the seeing, by producing an image that is not governed by single-point third-century poet and scholar Cao Zhi’s Qi Qi, or Seven Ideas (210 AD), perspective, but rather by a scattered perspective. As a result there’s where it is used to express his ideal: to indulge one’s passion and a sense in which the viewer is encouraged to enter the image, to to free one’s ambitions; in other words, it encourages self-expresmove or wander through the pictorial scenery. British painter David sion, as opposed to the Confucian ideology of self-restraint, or the Hockney explored techniques of producing the scattered perspective Taoist ideal of inactivity. But as a member of a family that ruled one of Chinese scroll painting via photography in one of his early photo- of biggest kingdoms at the time (he was one of the sons of Cao Cao, collages, Walking in the Zen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto, Feb, 1983 chancellor of the Eastern Han Dynasty and the man who laid the (1983). In his recent paintings and videos (especially the 18-screen video- foundations of the state of Cao Wei), Cao never could live life as he works from 2010 and 2011, included in the exhibition A Bigger Picture wished, and was murdered by his brother at forty. It could be said that at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, documenting the seasons in throughout his lifetime, Cao was a man who perceived the darkness Woldgate Woods from clips recorded by nine cameras attached to an of his present and grasped, in art, a light that could never reach its SUV), he has explored more possibilities to produce alternative visual destiny. The light is a metaphor of his ideal, qing fang zhi dang, an ideal experiences and pictorial expression via scattered perspective. In a that was too ahead of its time: the country in the next 1800 years was way, Birdhead’s photo matrix and the method of making it are not dominated by the Confucian ideology (and Taoism as an option for only a means to assembling an abstract and conceptual landscape, but individual life). In this regard, he could be seen as the first contemporary artist in the history of China: to follow Giorgio Agamben’s also a development of Hockney’s exploration of landscape. While Hockney’s interest in Chinese classical painting generally definition of ‘the contemporary’ as ‘the one who, dividing and interfocuses on the scientific study of perspective, Birdhead’s practice polating time, is capable of transforming it and putting it in relahas, to a certain extent, inherited the free and romanticist spirit of tion with other times’. Birdhead’s spiritual resonance with Cao is Chinese classical artists. This can be seen at the secnot the result of a gesture of cultural conservatism, Welcome to Birdhead World Again, ond level of their work, the world of meanings made but rather an alternative statement in the context of Shanghai, 2015 (detail), 2015, contemporary art. ara of the content of their photos, and the third level, photographic installation

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For a Bigger Photo 2015 – 5, 2015, photographic installation, wood, British Ilford archival fiber warm cotton gloss photographic paper 335gsm, Chinese lacquer, wet-mounting technique of traditional Chinese painting, Epson UltraGiclee, 250 × 120 × 5 cm

Winter 2016

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Winter 2016

The Silence in Thai Contemporary Art by Thanavi Chotpradit

Fractured, embittered, polarised… these are some of the words that Two months after Imagine Peace, Rirkrit Tiravanija, an internacome to mind when we talk about contemporary Thai politics. The tionally recognised Thai artist, staged (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and same words can be applied to the Thai art scene, too, given how the green) at 100 Tonson Gallery. The centrepiece of the exhibition was spoken or unspoken political positions of artists have caused rifts in the artist’s live cooking of three curries in three colours: red curry the art community. stood for the Red Shirts, yellow curry stood for the Yellow Shirts and How have artists responded to this state of affairs? Disappoint- green curry stood for the army. The cooking performance was accomingly, in general. In the past decade, while there is an evidently ideo- panied by massive wall-drawings of scenes from key moments in logical turn in the work of many artists, many of whom are labelled modern Thai politics. In a local television interview, Tiravanija, who ‘progressive’ or ‘avant-garde’ internationally, the art produced is was also one of the curators for Imagine Peace, said that he would like either blandly reconciliatory or, worse Thai people to love each other, to forgive and forget. still, alarmingly silent on the issues of While most Thai artists stay silent human rights, freedom of expression and These toothless works are feeble on activist causes, Thai activists, political justice. and vague in their desire for ‘peace’, by contrast, have become more and often pandering to the status quo, While most Thai artists stay silent on aka the traditional ruling elite – royalactivist causes, Thai activists, by contrast, ‘artistic’ in their protests ists and the military – who are happy have become more creative and ‘artistic’, incorporating directly theatrical and performative elements into to sweep all political injustices under the carpet, telling everyone to their protests. In this essay, which is excerpted from a lecture I gave at shut up and get along according to their terms. the Gwangju Museum of Art in July, I will give a brief outline of the In stark contrast, the direct theatricality and performativity of the ways artists and activists have responded to Thai politics. actions of protesters are more powerful and invested. While the artists Before I begin, some background on the political situation in are mostly keeping silent, activists are getting artistic. An example Thailand. Broadly speaking, there are two groups. The first is the is Sombat Bunngamanong, aka ‘Bo Ko Lai Jut’ (Polka Dot Editor), Yellow Shirts, a royalist group backing King Bhumibol and hostile a political activist who started an organisation called Red Sunday to towards Thaksin Shinawatra, a business tycoon-turned-politician commemorate the deaths of the Red Shirt demonstrators. He staged who won two landslide elections in 2001 and 2005. He had been a ‘dead body’ performance, comprising a group of people wearing red accused of widespread corruption and is now in exile after a mili- clothes and some wearing ghostly makeup lying down in the street. tary coup in 2006. But his parties, under different names from 2001 Garlands of flowers were placed on their bodies. Appearing on the to 2014, keep winning elections. Yingluck, who won the 2011 election, signs was the message ‘people have died here’. is his sister. Activists have also protested the lèse-majesté law, or Article 112, Many Red Shirts, but not all, are pro-Thaksin and want free and creatively. Article 112 outlaws defaming, insulting or threatening the king, queen, heir apparent or regent. Punishment is up to 15 fair elections. years in prison. It is basically an excuse The first major exhibition that exfor censorship. When the sixty-oneposed the position of Thai artists was Activists have also protested the lèseImagine Peace at the Bangkok Art and majesté law, or Article 112, creatively. year-old Amphon Tangnoppakul, also popularly known as Akong (‘Grandpa’ Culture Centre (BACC) in June 2010. After Article 112 outlaws defaming, in Thai), was sentenced to 20 years in the April–May 2010 crackdown, when insulting or threatening the king, prison for allegedly sending four SMS government troops killed at least 91 messages defaming the queen and the Red Shirt protesters and left thousands queen, heir apparent or regent monarchy to the personal secretary of injured, the ministry of culture organised Imagine Peace as part of the Strong Thailand Operation Project, then Prime Minister Abhisit in late 2011, activists responded quickly featuring more than 50 artists who showed works on the theme of with campaigns and projects. These efforts included an online peace. For example, the performance (on 24 June 2010) Hug by art campaign called Thailand’s Fearlessness: Free Akong, initiated by the collective Slow Motion features a man in a red shirt hugging a man political scientist Pavin Chachavalpongpun in 2011; a public sculpture in a yellow shirt. Sakchai Guy’s Untitled (2010) is an image of red and at the Democracy Monument titled Thaeng Appalak (‘Hideous Bars’), yellow flowers in a harmonious formation. Apinan Poshyananda, by an activist group called We are Akong, in the same year; and the at that time deputy permanent secretary of the ministry of culture, video Loud Silence (2012), by an artist and media-activist group called Nitimon. Thaeng Appalak provided information on the number of stated that the exhibition was intended to ‘heal the mind’.

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As activists become more artistic in response to Thailand’s social and political injustices, should the country’s artists do more to engage with the society around them?

Rirkrit Tiravanija, (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green), 2010 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok

Winter 2016

lèse-majesté cases from 2005 to 2010 to raise awareness of this draco- involvement in the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), nian law. There were also bars that formed the word ‘Akong’ and the the successors to the royalist Yellow Shirts. number ‘112’. Loud Silence showed images of people holding a whiteThai Uprising had been part of fundraising efforts by Art Lane, board with the number 112 written on one side and the opinion of the a network of artists and cultural workers who donated money to a movement in 2013 and 2014 that sought to remove a democratiholder about the lèse-majesté law on the other. Some artists have responded to the lèse-majesté law over the cally elected government led by Yingluck Shinawatra. Their actions, years. A group of seven artists led by Chiang Mai-based Mit Jai-in together with the protests, led to the 22 May 2014 military coup, performed a 112-hour hunger strike called 112 Hunger Strike (2012). which left Thailand with an unelected government run by generals. Bangkok-based artist Prapat Jiwarangsan staged an exhibition called I found the inclusion of Kunavichayanont’s antidemocratic work I will never smile again (2010), addressing censorship and the lèse- in an exhibition surtitled 2016 Asian Democracy, Human Rights, Peace majesté law as conditions and limitations of artistic activities in the Exhibition, purportedly to commemorate the 36th anniversary of the country. During the exhibition period, he organised a talk, ‘Fear in Gwangju Uprising, a popular uprising against military dictatorship Thai Art Community and Thai Society’, to discuss censorship and art, in May 1980 in South Korea, perplexing to say the least. where he invited Wanrug Suwanwattana, a lecturer from Thammasat My letter was followed by a series of open letters issued by both University, and me as speakers. Kunavichayanont’s supporters and the Cultural Activists for Manit Sriwanichpoom, one of Thailand’s leading photographic Democracy (CAD), which involved artists, joined the discussion. He more than 200 artists, activists stated that because artists do not and cultural persons, including wish to end up being unwitting me. tools in politics, they should not In response, Gwangju Mutake sides until the political situseum later displayed their own ation becomes clearer. He said statement, as well as letters from there were also more important both sides, in the gallery. The matters to discuss than the lèsecurator’s statement said that Thai majesté law. Then he mentioned Uprising was included because the that his film Shakespeare Must Die museum was interested in the (2012), an adaptation of William field-readiness of the medium, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, would be and it did not intend to support banned in Thailand. One of the any Thai political faction or leader. main characters in his film was a The museum also invited me, as dictator who bore a resemblance a representative of CAD, to give a to Thaksin; another character, a lecture on 26 July. murderer, wore a red hood cloak. In my lecture, I talked about how Thai politics has been ideoThe censorship board eventulogically polarised for about ten ally banned the film. Many who attended the talk and disagreed years, and how this has spread to with his views on the lèse-majesté the art scene. I also argued that law signed the petition to protest Gwangju Museum’s justification the censorship. – that Kunavichayanont’s ideoAbout a year later, when two logically charged work was chosen theatre activists, Patiwat Saraiyam for its visual qualities – was weak and Pornthip Munkong, who had and insensitive, given the political staged Wolf Bride (2013), a play context. about a fictional monarch, were charged with lèse-majesté, Manit This is a potted and very abbreviated account of Thai art and polikept quiet. The activists were released in August 2016, after nearly tics of the past ten years, which as you can see, is a decade marked by infighting, silence and hypocrisy. And yet it is still one of the most three years in jail. I don’t believe in keeping silent. That’s why I questioned the interesting periods in Thai art history. The Italian neo-Marxist theoinclusion of Sutee Kunavichayanont’s politically themed work in an rist Antonio Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks (1929–35), ‘The exhibition in the Gwangju Museum of Art. The curator, Jong-young crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new Lim, had selected four of Kunavichayanont’s works, including Thai cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid sympUprising (2013–14), an installation comprising posters and T-shirts toms appear.’ Amid its own ‘crisis’ in the face of political conflict, Thai displaying messages such as ‘Reform Now’, ‘Shutdown Bangkok’ and art has raised the question of what it really means to be avant-garde, ‘Seize Thailand’ for the exhibition The Truth To Turn It Over. Two days and what the role of art might be in society. But if art has the potential to hold a mirror up to society, to reflect and after the opening, I wrote an open letter to the Prapat Jiwarangsan, I’ll never smile again, 2010 to criticise, the first thing it might want to look curator, asking if Lim was aware of the current (installation view). Courtesy the artist Thai political situation and Kunavichayanont’s at is itself. ara and WTF Gallery, Bangkok

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Nitimon, Loud Silence (still), 2012. Courtesy the artists

Winter 2016

Udomsak Krisanamis: “There’s nothing to discuss about my work” by Max Crosbie-Jones

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The Thai artist, taciturn when not entirely silent, agrees to a rare interview in his Chiang Mai studio

above and facing page Retrospective, 2016 (installation views, including an installation approximating the setting of Udomsak Krisanamis’s studio). Courtesy the artist and Chiang Mai University Art Center

Winter 2016

“When I stepped off the plane, I didn’t have culture shock or anything. each accompanied by a title, date and some supporting text handI just felt like… this is somewhere really familiar.” It’s Saturday, mid- written in faintly legible Thai on the walls (a printout in typed September, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Udomsak Krisanamis is English and Thai was also available). Among the texts were quotes talking about his first impressions of New York, the city from which (including Frank Stella’s ‘What you see is what you see’), a short story his abstract paintings, cobbled together out of bits of newspaper, about golf and obsession, and a poem by Emily Dickinson. But most paint and noodles, first emerged. We are sitting in the Thai artist’s were penned by Krisanamis himself: colourful anecdotes or diaristic paint-splattered studio, around us is a mix of old works and works- vignettes with a faux-naïf tone. in-progress. On the floor are scraps of the print ephemera he glues to his canvases, and near us is a sideboard full of the records he listens ‘Started selling works. Fell in love for the first time with a Turkish to while doing so. He has just told me: “There’s nothing to discuss woman who had a career as a stylist. Heartbroken and ended up about my work.” So we are skirting around it, outlining the circumdrinking everyday while listening to Snoop Dog’s Doggystyle with stances of its arrival, as one might a gilded box that has just fallen a friend. It took me six months to forget about (sic) her...’ unannounced from the sky. During the mid-1990s, Krisanamis made his name by gluing torn ‘Mad about golf. Hoping to be good at it so I moved to live close to a golf course in an upstate New York town called New Paltz. strips of printed matter to his canvases and systematically blacking Beautiful town. The colors of the spring were magical. I created out the words using paint or felt-tip pen. All he would leave visible a lot of great works there but finally had to move away because were the empty centres of the characters O, 0, 9 and P. Over the years, he disrupted these radiant surfaces by adding fabric, noodles and I couldn’t bare (sic) the cold.’ other found materials, as well as paints and inks, with a mixture of painterly touch and gestural abandon. A search for connections – futile but no less enjoyable for it – was He has always been the reticent and slightly withdrawn sort set in motion by the placement of these quirky texts beside of artist. ‘He refuses to speak, to make noise, to make explanations,’ Krisanamis’s titles, which are often the names of his favourite songs. is how artist-curator Rirkrit Tiravanija Ditto the picture of Miles Davis stuck Each of the 20 works were accompanext to Silver Jungle (2013–16), a brash, describes him in his curatorial statement graffiti scrawl-like painting made of for Retrospective, which ran from June nied by some supporting text handthrough July at Chiang Mai University acrylic paint, fibreglass strips and mesh written in faintly legible Thai on Art Center, and in conjunction with an tape, and also a large boulder on the the walls. Among the texts were exhibition of new work at Bangkok’s floor entitled Stone Cold (1990–2016). Gallery Ver. Krisanamis, a boyish fifty- quotes (including Frank Stella’s ‘What The latter had been rubbed with bread year-old, has given few interviews dough, a clear reference to one of you see is what you see’), a short throughout his career. However, his Jesus’s miracles, and also, possibly, to story about golf and obsession, and agreeing to this one suggests he is, for Krisanamis’s Catholic upbringing. now, open to being better understood. The retrospective was peculiar for a poem by Emily Dickinson another reason: two dates were written This is just a theory, of course, but it’s one backed up by the modestly autobiographical bent of his retro- against each painting. One referred to the original’s creation; the other spective (and a couple of interviews he gave to Thai media outlets to the duplicate’s creation. That the show consisted solely of remade promote it. ‘Finally, we discover why New York loves our boy,’ wrote works only became clear on reading Tiravanija’s pseudo-philosophThe Nation). While his exhibitions are often self-referential, suffused ical statement to its earnest conclusion, where he explained that ‘all with nods to his love of golf and music, the Chiang Mai show offered the paintings in this exhibition have been reconstituted, reformed by us a more intimate portrait of Krisanamis and his output than any the hands of many people’. previous one (or art writer) has ever achieved. According to Krisanamis, the reason for enlisting 12 young artists Exploring almost 30 years of his work, the exhibition revealed to spend nearly four months making replicas, each 1cm smaller than how his process – a serendipitous blend of collage, drawing and the original, was purely logistical. Borrowing them would have been painting – has developed and become all his own, despite clear ances- too torturous, if not impossible, given that many are in private collectral links to the Arte Povera movement, Abstract Expressionism and tions. But Tiravanija has more highfalutin ideas: ‘The paintings we Postconceptualism. It also fired up the imagination. Seen from a see here are an attempt to recollect, recall and remake images that distance, the crude incident, rhythmic skeins of negative and posi- already exist in time and space. Just as words are used over and over tive space, and pentimento typical of his deeply textured and retic- again in different contexts and conditions, giving us, through their ulated surfaces became gorgeously madcap and mesmerising. Some repeated usage, other meanings.’ Krisanamis is dismissive when I ask of the early works evoked rain-streaked windows and spores shuf- him to expand on this: “Those are Rirkrit’s words, not mine, right?” fling under a microscope. Later, I saw Mondrianesque grids, musical Despite having retreated from New York to Bangkok in 2001, and phrases dancing on a stave, billboard posters peeking through paint, then to much sleepier Chiang Mai in 2009, Krisanamis still works a freeze-frame of Man Ray’s ‘rayograph’ shorts and even the scrappy at a fast clip. Typically, he’s at his studio six days a week. Days off he spends with his six-year-old daughter. As for golf, he plays around beauty of Japanese boro patchworks. Besides the intense pleasure and all-round trippiness of three times a year – not as much as before. And what of New York? Krisanamis’s mundane surfaces, there were also autobiographical Does he ever think of moving back? “I don’t think so, but you never titbits to be gleaned. Displayed chronologically, the 20 works were know,” he says.

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Paint It Black, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Gallery Ver, Bangkok

Winter 2016

Paint It Black, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Gallery Ver, Bangkok

ArtReview Asia

Most appraisals of Krisanamis tend to foreground his time there, and rightly so. It was there that the method for which he is best known – the aforementioned reduction of words to what writer Steve Stern calls ‘atomic units’ – and the prevalent reading of it – that it’s umbilically linked to his taciturn nature – were forged. As an art student struggling to learn English, he began crossing out the words he knew in newspapers, mapping out the gaps in his understanding. After submitting some drawings inspired by this technique to his conceptual art class in 1990, things began to develop. He still painstakingly blots out words, just as he did back then. Writ large in his retrospective was a clear evolution in the sorts of found materials he deploys, from vermicelli noodles through to old curtain, bubble wrap and wooden shims picked up at the local hardware store. Meanwhile, the Gallery Ver exhibition, Paint It Black, appeared to signal a shift towards calmer, more conventionally

abstract pieces dominated by large hollow circles and oblongs that repeat against flat beds of colour. But a glance around Krisanamis’s studio makes it clear that he’s not one for drawing lines in the sand. Beneath his works-in-progress sit shredded strips of Korean and local newspapers, and second-generation photocopies of the figure 8 sourced from an old Chinese calendar. These word-based canvases are throwbacks, yes, but also as dense, complicated and gleefully savage as anything that’s come before. One in particular looks positively cosmic, like a star-clogged night sky torn asunder. Writing for Contemporary magazine in 2004, writer Kirsty Bell posited that Krisanamis’s habit of erasing words, of denying their function as vehicles of meaning and of coercing them into playing a mute role in his paintings, ‘seemed to manifest his own refusal to speak’. He’s clearly still drawn to the strange world of silence he has created for himself. I suspect he always will be. ara

Paint It Black, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Gallery Ver, Bangkok

Winter 2016

Bosco Sodi The Mexican artist brings something of a chemistry experiment to works that evoke the continental and the planetary by Mark Rappolt

‘You will take the photographed surface of Mars for an abstract painting,’ the artist Kurt Schwitters pronounced in 1926, ‘maybe by Kandinsky’, he added. Had the great German collagist been writing 90 years later, there’s a fair chance he would have found that artistic equivalent to the surface of the red planet in the work of Mexican Bosco Sodi. Particularly if he had seen the massive, six-panel painting Pangaea (2010), created for an exhibition in New York’s Bronx Museum. The title of that work derives from Alfred Wegener, who formulated the theory of continental drift at around the time of Schwitters’s text. It describes a unified supercontinent of the carboniferous period. As with most of the paintings Sodi has created over the past decade, Pangaea features a dense, cracked surface constructed of layers of pure pigment (in this case a deep red and orange), sawdust, wood pulp, natural fibres and glue. Much like recent images of the surface of Mars, the work is something that offers up an impression of an easygoing and essential familiarity, simultaneously tinged with a certain alien exoticism and sense of the unknown. Overall, it appears like some sort of spongey, volcanic landscape-in-formation, coloured (presumably) by derivatives of cinnabar or iron ore. Sodi’s father, as it happens, is a chemical engineer. Schwitters was writing about Martian imagery (in a text titled ‘Kunst und Zeiten’) in the context of his developing an argument that art is something innately around us, a creation of nature and chance, waiting only to be uncovered and framed by the artist: ‘The task of the artist is to recognise and limit, to limit and recognise,’ the German continued rather remorselessly. Like a developer of Las Vegas casinos, an artist should focus on their ‘vision’; like a movie director, they needed to train themselves to know precisely where and when to make a cut. (OK, perhaps Schwitters himself would have chosen examples that did less to imply that art was part of the entertainment industry; but hey – he lived then and we live now.) The German was also writing in the buildup to a dispute with Wassily Kandinsky about whether it was a theoretical or natural approach to form that should be the basis of art. Form, Schwitters argued in i-Zeichnungen (1926) is ‘the frozen instantaneous picture of a process’. And in an age in which most art is held up tight within the grip of theoretical supports, one of

the pleasures of Sodi’s work derives from the fact that, when it comes to form, his thinking lies firmly within the Schwitters camp. Indeed, by anyone’s standards, Sodi is disarmingly casual when it comes to describing his own painterly process. “It’s not about control,” he often says; rather it’s about celebrating ‘chance’ and ‘randomness’. “It’s much more about the process than the outcome,” he told critic Jennifer Parker earlier this year. In keeping with the concept of Pangaea, Sodi operates a multicontinental practice. He has created work in studios in Brooklyn, Mexico, Berlin and Madrid. More recently he has been spending time in Japan. Work created in each location (these days primarily Brooklyn and Mexico) is completely different as a result of specific local atmospheric conditions, in a way that combines the particular (or site-specificity) and the universal without subjecting those qualities to the debates about colonialism, postcolonialism or national or identity politics in which most art today tends to dress itself. In that sense, Sodi’s works are truly an effect of nature, rather than culture. Of course, what Sodi doesn’t make clear in a statement like the one above is that the process that allows the operations of chance to occur in his work is the result of a certain amount of discipline. Various concentrations of water within the layers of Sodi’s painting can affect the degrees of cracking, even if the precise detail of that cracking is by its nature unpredictable; decisions with regard to pigment (both in terms of quantity and quality) are also conscious decisions. The artist provides a chemical framework, the reactions that happen take care of themselves. In that regard, each work has something of the nature of a chemical experiment. Perhaps, even, given the way his works appear, it would be truer to describe them as geochemical experiments. “I wanted the viewer to feel like they’d entered a cave,” the artist told writer Lowenna Waters when describing the sensation he was aiming at when installing a spring show of iridescent paintings and gilded sculptures at London’s Blain / Southern gallery. In addition to the paintings, Sodi had installed a series of variously sized rocks gathered, by hand (owing to the size, weight and awkward shape of some of the stones, in practice they were hauled by around 20 hands) from the Ceboruco volcano in Mexico. The rocks were then fired for

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Winter 2016

above Yūgen, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Peter Mallet. Courtesy the artist and Blain / Southern, London & Berlin preceding pages The artist at work in his studio, Red Hook, New York. Courtesy Bosco Sodi Studio

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three days (causing a number to explode) and the survivors covered in 18-carat gold. He’d painted the gallery walls a deep, mineral purple to synthesise that cavelike effect. Yet the purple also had an imperial feel, and combined with the gold, it created the kind of heavy atmosphere of an environment that might be the equivalent of entering, say, Nero’s rock garden. If the Roman emperor had been a student of Zen philosophy and karesansui. The Blain / Southern exhibition, titled Yūgen (a somewhat untranslatable Japanese expression evoking the deep emotional response to aesthetic creation), pointed also to one of the more intriguing developments in Sodi’s recent work: a self-conscious awareness of the (high) commodity value of the objects he creates, and of the market that exploits that value. As much as they are expressions of (relatively) chance natural processes, in the very human environments in which they are displayed, his rocks and his paintings are objects of desire. And certainly in the overheated art market that preceded the adjustments of this year, that desire has been intense. But if there is a sense of humour in the artist’s exposure of this dichotomy (Sodi will talk about his pleasure in sharing beers and fried chicken with the labourers who haul his rocks, even while sharing a formal gallery dinner in a fancy urban restaurant with a bunch of urban collectors; and while on the one hand he is gilding natural forms, on the other he is exploiting natural materials to produce unnatural forms in the shape of simple sculptures composed of 50cm-high cubes of fired Mexican clay), there is a serious side to it too.

In 2014, the artist invested some of the proceeds from his artistic endeavours in the establishment of the Casa Wabi Foundation (its name derived from another Japanese concept, wabi-sabi, centred on humility, which sees in the appreciation of beauty an acceptance of the impermanent and incomplete), located near the town of Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca, Mexico. Housed in a complex designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the foundation’s programme includes an artist residency programme, outreach projects with the local community (which until now has had a relatively limited contact with art, particularly in its contemporary manifestations) and an investment in sustainable living (much like Sodi’s artworks, and perhaps the clay cubes in particular, this is best described as the promotion of a symbiotic relationship between nature, its resources and social and cultural living). In keeping with his pan-continental influences, the artist is currently developing a new residency programme located in Tokyo. After all the previous talk about natural form, it will seem contradictory (if not ridiculous) to locate Sodi’s work within any kind of theory. And yet in terms of his activities, both as an artist and as someone attempting to add his voice, and point of view, to the way in which art is institutionalised in its relations to society and culture, it would be true to say that Sodi’s output is the result of exercising a strong philosophy of practice. And without any Heideggerian overtones, that philosophy pertains to art as a being rather than merely a presence in the world. ara

Clay cubes in the artist’s studio, Casa Wabi, Oaxaca, 2015. Courtesy Bosco Sodi Studio

Winter 2016

Wang Xingwei by Nataline Colonnello

Borrowed revolutionary imagery and ahistorical mashups feed the witty oddness of this provocateur’s experiments in painting 68

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Right from the beginning of a career that took off during the mid- artworks, often deprived of their original subjects – see, for instance, 1990s, Wang Xingwei’s work has been characterised by a pungent The Oriental Way: The Road to Anyuan (1995), where Wang’s alter ego sarcasm, chameleonic stylistic appropriations and clever manipula- treads the deserted stage of Liu Chunhua’s oleographic painting tions of revered and less-known art-historical references. It earned President Mao en route to Anyuan (1967). On other canvases, the same him a reputation as an enfant terrible of Chinese contemporary male figure is represented in even more bewildering scenarios: in painting, and his work has been puzzling, amusing and captivating Mein Kampf – Wang Xingwei in 1936 (1996) he tries to convert a contrite Adolf Hitler to Gandhism; in Still No A-Mark (1998), he scolds a young a growing international host of passionate connoisseurs ever since. Wang’s early works on canvas are indebted to Marcel Duchamp, boy – presumably his son – on his poor performance at school while treating works by other artists as readymades to be appropriated and sitting on a chair reminiscent of the fetishist woman-as-furniture transformed, all of which demands a profound knowledge of both works of British Pop artist Allen Jones. Chinese and Western art history. With remarkable impudence, Wang In 2001, Wang began to introduce a new, growing multitude of figuratively peeps into the innermost recesses of fellow artists’ minds characters – sailors, golfers, painters, nurses, hostesses, penguins, and draws inspiration from their artistic creations. In Thomas (1997), for pandas, etc – which periodically reappear in his canvases. Always example, Wang depicts his own alter ego stealthily pushing his head caught in the middle of awkward and paradoxical situations – for through a breached wooden door reminiscent of that in Duchamp’s example a nurse and a hostess adrift on a raft, a sailor emerging final masterpiece, Étant donnés (1946–66). In Wang’s painting, a screw- from a manhole, a golfer in a field of watermelons – these characdriver and scraps of wood lie on the floor as the evidence of the ‘break ters and their paraphernalia become part of a visual dictionary made in’. Standing to the left of the unknowing intruder, two policemen of codified pictorial entries to which Wang resorts ad hoc for his provocatively bearing the features of Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol artistic creations. defiantly observe the act of profanation while it is being committed. In the ‘Large Rowboat’ series, the male and female types underIt is with the same apparent nonchalance that in The Dust of the went a further formal simplification: volumes were flattened, Romantic History of Male Heroism (1995) Wang operates one of his typical colours applied in even patches, figures stylistically simplified, conceptual juggling acts by means of the decontextualisation and outlines sharp-edged and facial features reduced to essential strokes. a juxtaposition of elements and styles Influenced by the Shanghai comic tradiThe woman is holding a vacuum deriving from various celebrated histortion of the 1920s, most of the paintical artworks. Silhouetted against a dark ings executed between 2006 and 2007 cleaner while absentmindedly focus on the theme of life as a couple background, the main character openly removing the dust of centuries-old and are pervaded by a sense of witty draws upon the smoking lady with hair in curlers from Duane Hanson’s playfulness. romantic history from what looks hyperrealist sculpture Supermarket Lady The full three-dimensionality of like the scene of Jean-Paul Marat’s solids reappeared later, when Wang’s (1969–70). Instead of pushing the shopassassination in Jacques-Louis David’s attention increasingly shifted to the ping cart, here the woman is holding a vacuum cleaner while absentmindvolumetric rendering of the shapes and iconic painting The Death of Marat edly removing the dust of centuries-old the formal relations among different romantic history from what looks like the scene of Jean-Paul Marat’s compositional elements. In works like untitled (Small Recycling the assassination in Jacques-Louis David’s iconic painting The Death Old Computer), 2007, the subject’s individual identity is obliterated in favour of a growing interest in the transmutation of forms – for of Marat (1793). In contrast to other early works, Red East (1995) represents the local example the shape of a computer screen recalls that of the person’s counterpart to Wang’s practice of integrating readymade models into head, which concurrently implies orchestrated shifts of meaning. his works. This time the inspirational sources derive not from Western Wang’s search for new formal and conceptual solutions was culture and its past; rather, they find their roots within contemporary further developed in the so-called ‘old lady’ series (2010–12), in which Chinese art discourse. Unanimously acknowledged as the godfather Wang systematically removed, exchanged, substituted and rearof Chinese contemporary art, here independent art critic and curator ranged selected compositional details. Similar to an absurd multiLi Xianting is portrayed driving a sputtering red tractor decorated panel narration, the nature of the subject and the original meaning with a ribbon in the shape of a Chinese cabbage. Behind Li, pioneers of the work are increasingly distorted in variously comic ways – the of the Cynical Realist movement Liu Wei and Fang Lijun, and the puzzling figure in untitled (Flowerpot Old Lady), 2001, for example, is precursor to Political Pop, Wang Guangyi, are depicted by means of generated by the replacement of the lady’s head with a potted plant, figures painted in the pictorial styles they adopted at the time. Set in and by the omission of the needle and stitching thread she used to a rural landscape (with undertones of Van Gogh) and bathed in hold in her hands, leaving her gesture nonsensical. a warm light coming from the right, Red East humorously suggests the Wang’s most representative artistic production from the period idea of advancement through the expressive visual language of revo- between 2013 and 2016 recently featured in his controversial solo exhibition Honor and Disgrace at Platform China, Beijing (the show lutionary propaganda imagery. Between 1994 and 2000 Wang realised a series of paintings char- was organised by Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing and Lucerne). The show’s acterised by the repeated appearance of a lanky male figure wearing title is inspired by the famous anticorruption speech ‘Eight Honors a yellow shirt. This character embodies the artist’s and Eight Disgraces’ (also translated as ‘Eight facing page pictorial double and, as in the case of Thomas, is Virtues and Eight Shames’) delivered in 2006 by Comrade Xiao He No. 1, 2008, former Chinese President Hu Jintao. Intended as portrayed while revisiting the settings of historical oil on canvas, 130 × 90 cm

Winter 2016

a ‘new moral yardstick to measure the work, conduct and attitude Notable in the first room were the examples of heroic figures, of Communist Party officials’, the slogan campaign, redolent of the be they real (Canadian communist doctor Norman Bethune, who Confucian ethical principles, aroused contrasting reactions among served with the Eighth Route Army during the Second Sinothe Chinese, including various parodies on social media. Japanese War), or fabricated (Comrade Xiao He, a character inspired The tone of the exhibition was set by two introductory verses: by an art student’s sketch Wang found in a bookstall), portrayed a couplet by legendary Tang dynasty poet Hanshan about the destruc- in a faithful manner (southern Song Dynasty eccentric Buddhist tive fire of anger, and a poetic statement by Yuan dynasty painter and monk Ji Gong) or emblematised by the fruits of their achievements calligrapher Zhao Mengfu on the intrinsic relation between callig- (Peter the Great, here represented by a panoramic view on the spit of raphy and painting. Vasilievsky Island by the river Neva, in the centre of St Petersburg). In Besides a room dedicated to the display of Wang’s exquisite the works By the River Neva in St Petersburg (2014) and By the River Neva preparatory studies and sketchbooks, the main exhibition space was in St Petersburg No. 2 (2013–15) one can detect a masterly rendering of divided in two communicating rooms, seemingly the ‘honour’ and volumes, motion and the sense of speed in relation to the mirrorthe ‘disgrace’ sections. Dealing with different topics and styles drawn like character of the two almost identical images. In paintings like from various cultural and subcultural sources, each painting was Ji Gong and Norman Bethune (both 2015), the chromatic selection, the accompanied by an explanatory poem hand-painted by Wang and asymmetric and elongated compositions and the adoption of the mounted on a traditional Chinese scroll. The artist’s verses are open figura serpentinata movement reveal the consummate use of techto multiple interpretations and carry overtones of praise or mockery, niques that, as the artist has stated, are inspired by Mannerism and or both. As with the paintings, the poems were often made up of the Baroque. excerpts from different sources and include calcuIn the second room, Wang Xingwei tackled the lated misquotations ranging from Mao Zedong’s much-discussed topic of the anti-Japanese feeling Ji Gong, 2015, oil on canvas, pervading part of the Chinese population; this 240 × 200 cm poems to popular children’s songs.

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sentiment, originally a consequence of unacknowledged war atroci- anthropomorphic huts and haystacks embodying an old couple and ties perpetrated against the Chinese by the Japanese during the Sino- children witness the misdeeds with a nervous giggle: “Mine is a cariJapanese Wars, has been recently rekindled by China’s renewed terri- catured rendering of an anti-Japanese feeling,” Wang Xingwei states, torial claims on the disputed Senkaku Islands. Beginning in 2015 “and this allows me to personify anything.” – the 70th anniversary of China’s victory in the Second Sino-Japanese In many of Wang’s most recent paintings, the main theme serves as War – the group of paintings known as ‘the anti-Japanese series’ was an expedient for the artist’s linear and volumetric experimentations. created to satirise the profusion of largely biased TV costume dramas Wang employs exaggerated shapes and movements to render pictothat have been recently broadcast on Chinese television. The series is rially the exaggerated and ridiculous treatment of historical events painted in a cartoonish fashion and borrows visual elements from, by Chinese media. This is particularly evident in Traitors, in which among others, Chinese opera and emoji. Apart from two black- the two main characters are depicted falling to the ground and flying clothed pro-Japanese figures appearing in Traitors (2015), the paint- in the air after an improbable bike accident in the barnyard. But this ings are essentially inhabited by two typified Japanese soldier char- direction is already present in older works – for example, the ‘old lady’ acters: the delicate young woman – Comrade Xiao He reappears series – in which the critique of the Chinese art-education system that here in the enemy’s uniform (see Japanese Devil, 2015, and The Divine originally inspired the series is overshadowed, almost erased, by the Anti-Japanese Goose No. 1–3, 2015–16) – and the greedy chubby man formal metamorphosis of the subject. “The main topic constitutes (Watermelon Landmine and The Divine Anti-Japanese Cock, both 2016). only one aspect of my new works,” the artist says. “It brings into play The unlikely scenes in which the subjects are some elements, while others go beyond the specific either about to be blown up (Watermelon Landmine) theme: the modelling of the lines, the perception of The Divine Anti-Japanese Cock, 2016, or sexually assaulted by farm poultry (The Divine volumes suspended in midair, the sense of speed, oil on canvas, 200 × 240 cm Anti-Japanese Goose No. 1–3) take place in the farmthe body, the feeling of pain… the most important all images Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing & Lucerne yard of a deserted rural village. In the background, thing is the feeling.” ara

Winter 2016

Chiang Mai Thailand’s colder, wetter, buzzier answer to Bangkok is where all the artists go. Until now the only thing missing from this ancient city (whose name in fact means ‘new city’) was a high-profile contemporary art institution. Is Maiiam the answer? by Adeline Chia

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Winter 2016

Dynamic, hectic Bangkok, with its network of private galleries and his show is advertised with a much-Instagrammed two-storey-high public institutions, is often seen as the nexus of Thailand’s art scene, vinyl poster of a man wearing a demon’s mask, one of the key stills in but the recent opening of Thailand’s first private museum, Maiiam Primitive, some aspects of which appear in his most famous film, Uncle Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chiang Mai, has drawn attention Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). The show is put together to the quieter, wetter city up north. Never mind that the museum’s by his longtime friend Gridthiya ‘Jeab’ Gaweewong, who is one of location isn’t even in the city centre, but half an hour’s drive away, in Thailand’s most influential curators and the museum’s consultant. the Sankampaeng district, which is better known for therapeutic hot And Weerasethakul devotees take note: The Serenity of Madness is travsprings than contemporary art; or that little information about the elling to Hong Kong’s Para Site next. new arrival was out there until a press release that came only a few The combination of a reticent A-lister’s retrospective and the weeks before the official opening on 3 July: hundreds still scrambled open-door showcase of an expensive private collection has galvanised the local art scene. “This museum has a huge impact in Thailand, not for an invite and flocked to its opening party. There are two major shows in the 3,000sqm premises, which is just Chiang Mai. It is the first museum with a permanent showcase fronted by a disco-ball facade that refracts the busy roadside traffic of of Thai contemporary art,” says art dealer Lyla Phimanrat. She owns trucks and tuk-tuks into slivers of colour. The first exhibition is semi- Lyla Gallery in Chiang Mai, which closed in July due to landlord permanent, showing the collection of contemporary Thai art owned disputes, though she plans to reopen the gallery in Bangkok next year. by a genteel family comprising the late Patsri Bunnag, her son Eric In Thailand, private initiative trumps government involvement in Bunnag Booth and her French husband, Jean-Michel Beurdeley, who the arts, and Maiiam is the most glamorous and significant example have decided to share their collection with the wider public. Bunnag of the former. Its cofounder Jean-Michel Beurdeley says the family was from an aristocratic Thai-Persian family whose ancestors played spent a seven-figure sum in US dollars on acquiring and renovating important roles in Siamese politics and public life. Her son is the assis- the warehouse in which it is housed. “If we can break even, we will tant managing director of Jim Thompson – The Thai Silk Company, a be the happiest people in the world,” he says. The museum charges historic Thai textiles firm. He is also a trustee of the nonprofit James a 150-baht entry fee (about £3). HW Thompson Foundation, which among several things oversees Thailand has no national collection of contemporary art, and the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, an important contempo- most of the country’s most important artworks are in private hands rary art space. About 70 works from the Bunnag family collection, – in the holdings of banks and local and regional collectors, as well as amassed over 30 years, are on show on overseas museums. Besides Maiiam, Maiiam’s second floor. They include the only domestic public space to The combination of a reticent A-lister’s works from pioneers such as Montien retrospective and the open-door showcase see a permanent show of Thai art is Boonma, Kamin Lertchaiprasert and the Museum of Contemporary Art in of an expensive private collection Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, as well as Bangkok, which as Thai artists note the top rung of the country’s contemisn’t really contemporary but more has galvanised the local art scene modern in focus. In Phimanrat’s charporary practitioners, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pinaree Sanpitak and Navin Rawanchaikul. acterisation, “It’s all neo-Buddhist, neo-Thai stuff.” The second show – buzzier – is the first major Thai retrospective of Why choose Chiang Mai as the location for such an important video installations and short films by the Palme d’Or-winning director, museum? Beurdeley points out that the city, Thailand’s second largest, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who is based in Chiang Mai. Lauded has a rich and long cultural heritage. The palindromic Maiiam means abroad, the international arthouse film hero and artist has been histor- ‘brand new’ in Thai, and also refers to Chiang Mai’s name, which ically averse to showing in his home country due to censorship. His means ‘new city’. And yet Chiang Mai is actually old – older indeed previous feature films, such as Blissfully Yours (2002) and Syndromes and than Bangkok, which rose up during the eighteenth century. Chiang a Century (2006), had cuts; the former for explicit sex, and the latter Mai was built in 1296 as the capital city of the Lanna Kingdom, an for scenes of ‘improper’ conduct by monks, such as playing with a ancient empire that covered most of what we now know as northern Frisbee and guitar. Little surprise that he has point-blank refused to Thailand. Historic moats and walls surrounding this old capital still submit his latest work, Cemetery of Splendour (2015), to the censor board, survive in the city. After centuries of fighting, the Lanna Kingdom which resulted in the film having no domestic release. It has been was dissolved and condensed into a 20,000sqkm area centred around warmly received overseas. In England, Weerasethakul is also having Chiang Mai. It was only in 1932 that the Chiang Mai area became a moment: Tate Modern is showing his eight-channel video installa- a province of Siam, which became known as Thailand in 1949. tion Primitive (2009) in the Tanks’ display, and also honoured him with More than that, Chiang Mai, cooler in climate, rich in artistry dating an all-night miniretrospective showing of his films. Back in Chiang back to the temples, textiles and woodworking of the ancient Lanna Mai, his latest exhibition, The Serenity of Madness, is a full-scale career years, cheaper to live (and play) in, is also home to many Thai artists, survey and a glorious homecoming, and it has accordingly provoked who, according to Serenity of Madness curator Gaweewong, are also “the the kind of hyperventilation that only the return of a glamorous most interesting ones”. Proud Chiang Mai-ers include Weerasethakul, prodigal son can excite (see the exhibition review in the Art Reviewed who settled here from Khon Kaen in Northeast Thailand. Others are section of this issue). The exhibition features early experimental Rawanchaikul, whose Bollywood billboard-influenced works explore shorts from his student days in the School of the his Thai-Indian identity; New York-based relapreceding pages Facade of Maiiam Contemporary Art Institute of Chicago, scripts, video diaries, as tional aesthetics king Tiravanija, probably best Art Museum, designed by Allzone, Bangkok, well as newer, ghostly hologrammic video instalknown for converting a gallery into a kitchen and and inspired by mirror-mosaic temple walls lations projected on glass screens. In Maiiam, giving away rice and Thai curry for free (Untitled in Chiang Mai. Courtesy Maiiam, Chiang Mai

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from top Gallery Seescape café and exhibition space, Chiang Mai

Winter 2016

top Enlighten in the dark, a printing collection by various artists at C.A.P Studio, on view during Galleries Night Chiang Mai, January 2016. Courtesy Thailand Creative and Design Center, Chiang Mai above Structures at the Land Foundation, Chiang Mai. Courtesy the Land Foundation

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(Free), 1993); and Lertchaiprasert, an established artist and art teacher Small, wall-less houses built by visiting artists and architects form a who creates Buddhist-inflected sculpture and painting in a repetitive, shabby, mismatched eco-resort, but over the years most of these strucritualistic mode. He is next in line for the solo treatment in Maiiam. tures have been overtaken by termites, and only a very intrepid artist What Chiang Mai has lacked, Gaweewong adds, is an institution, would consider serious residence in any of them. Other props of past and Maiiam is the answer. “That’s why Maiiam is important. It’s a place projects include an undulating steel structure from Philippe Parreno’s for them [Chiang Mai artists] to show at home before they go abroad.” 11-minute video filmed in Chiang Mai called The Boy from Mars (2003), The city itself is filled with artist studios and small galleries, many now functioning as a shed, as well as Danish collective SUPERFLEX’s of which are hybrid hipster hangouts with cutesy cafés and shops Supergas structure, designed to convert cow dung into cooking gas, attached. A landmark is the six-year-old Gallery Seescape, owned by which broke down after one year. The Land Foundation is still going artist Torlarp Larpjaroensook. His gallery, situated in the fashionable strong, though: at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong, it organised a fundNimman neighbourhood, sells his own work and shows local and raiser to support the next ten years of activities. And artists who want to international artists, and includes a shop and café. Last year he also look for inspiration, meditate and/or work with local farming commuopened Hern Gallery, which focuses on more affordable and accessible nities are always welcome to apply to stay on the premises. “We almost never say no,” says the manager, Sephapong Kirativonokamchon. pieces aimed at the new collector. Disaphol Chansiri, a Bangkok-based law professor and one of Whether the opening of Maiiam will unify Chiang Mai’s scattered Thailand’s most important private collectors, finds Chiang Mai’s art energies remains to be seen. But it has given some other private collecscene “very interesting, very charming”, despite its lack of big-name tors an incentive to build their own museums, says Chiang Mai-borngalleries. “When I go, I visit the student shows, artist studios and local and-bred artist Sutthirat Supaparinya. Together with three other galleries. You won’t be able to find these works in Bangkok. Personally artists, she runs Chiang Mai Art Conversation (CAC), a three-year-old I love it.” Most of the art students come from Chiang Mai University’s collective that aims to consolidate information about the city’s art fine arts faculty, and the university also has its own art museum. The spaces into a central database. Besides operating a website, the voluncurrent show is a retrospective of painter Udomsak Krisanamis, who teer-run CAC issued the first Chiang Mai Art Map and coordinated the is known for dense, abstract canvases that recall twinkling cityscapes first gallery crawl, Galleries Night Chiang Mai, in January this year. at night, and mixed-media collages that utilise anything from Thai Supaparinya says that a Thai hotelier wants to build a museum to noodles to bubble wrap. Based in New York during the 1990s, the showcase his print collection, and a Thai-American couple based in Bangkok-born artist had attained a degree of international recog- Bangkok is constructing a museum in the mountains to feature their nition, and this is yet another homeThai and Southeast Asian art collection. Details remain sketchy, and coming show, as it is the artist’s first ‘When I go, I visit the student shows, artexhibition in Thailand in ten years. ist studios and local galleries. You won’t both parties are reticent on contact. Chansiri, who has been collecting for By Supaparinya’s count, the numbe able to find these works in Bangkok’ 20 years, owns two private boutique art ber of art spaces, including residency spaces in Bangkok and Chiang Mai to showcase parts of his collection; programmes, has grown over the years, despite a few closures, and these are open by appointment only. The Chiang Mai space, called DC totals about 60 today. “Even two or three of the hotels have galleries Collection Chiang Mai, is housed in a former royal residence – the inside now. In Chiang Mai, this never used to happen.” most recent show was of work by Rawanchaikul. Recently Chansiri Maiiam may have provided a shot of adrenaline to the private has bought up some shop-houses in front of his current property, and museum scene, but what about its impact on artists? Artist Paphonsak is in discussions to turn the ground-floor area of these houses, where La-or, who is the vice-chairman of the Land Foundation, says the musethe ceilings are high, into a sculpture space. um’s future direction is unclear. “Will it focus on established Thai Besides local galleries, Chiang Mai has an organic though skittish artists only, or will the younger generation have a chance?” he asks. history of nonprofit community projects that have come and gone, Maiiam’s other cofounder, Booth, says that beyond the led by several senior influencer artists. In the early 1990s, there was Lertchaiprasert show, there are no plans, although several interthe Chiang Mai Social Installation Project, led by Montien Boonma, national curators have approached him during the opening with Uthit Atimana and Mit Jai Inn. With the help of art students at Chiang enquiries. He wants to dedicate the temporary gallery downstairs Mai University (among them most notably Rawanchaikul and Kosit to Thai and international artists, while the showcase of his private Juntaratip), the group initiated many outdoor projects in unconven- collection upstairs will remain semipermanent. He adds that Maiiam tional spaces as a response to the lack of proper gallery infrastructure. will not hire an in-house curator or programme director, but will They held talks, performances and events in temples, in cemeteries work with different parties on a project-by-project basis. and on streets along canals. During the early 2000s, key figures were But the mood is definitely sanguine so far. The museum is, without Lertchaiprasert and Tiravanija. Lertchaiprasert ran the experimental doing much PR, receiving interest from a wide spectrum of parties. art space Umong Sippadhamma from 2002 to 2005, and for five years, “I just hosted a team from a magazine called Honeymoon + Travel,” until 2015, he ran the 31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit, Booth says with a chuckle. a gallery featuring his own work and his art collection housed in Supaparinya says she saw another unexpected visitor: a monk. seven shipping containers. In 2004, together with Tiravanija and “He bought a ticket! I was so excited, I had to take a picture.” ara Uthit Atimana, he also founded the Land Foundation, a 12,800sqm utopic rural retreat for artists 20 minutes outside of Chiang Mai. Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness, When ArtReview visited, the idyllic spot, filled with rice fields, vegethe inaugural exhibition of Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, is on view at Para Site, Hong Kong, through 27 November table farms and several ponds, was peaceful and mostly deserted.

Winter 2016

Art Reviewed

Today I drink and wake up late Tomorrow I regret the springtime I’ve lost 79

Setouchi Triennale Various island venues around the Seto Inland Sea, Japan 18 July – 4 September The Setouchi Triennale, spread out over 12 sparsely populated islands in the Seto Inland Sea, has, since its first edition in 2010, grown in reputation as one of the most beautiful and remote settings to see art. Most visitors use the mainland port city of Takamatsu as a base and take ferries out to the various island sites, with the difficulty of the logistics contributing to the charm of the visit. Because of the triennale’s success in attracting visitors, and the subsequent measured rejuvenation of certain islands, several other ageing, rural areas in Japan have adopted its template, and over the years new art festivals have sprung up, such as the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, also led by Setouchi’s general director, Fram Kitagawa. In its third edition, the triennale is working hard to stay ahead of the pack. About half of the 200-plus exhibits are new additions, which gives pilgrims a reason for a repeat visit. I was there for this year’s summer edition, which meant 34-degree heat and a fortune spent at drink vending machines, but also fewer visitors than the more popular spring and autumn seasons. Although it has no theme besides the utopian aim of using art to reenergise a declining region, the triennale has a fundamental

personality split: between high and low, the monumental and the scrappy, the expensive and the cheap. This could be due to the event’s origins. Eighteen years before the triennale began, billionaire publisher Soichiro Fukutake had a dream of setting up an art island in Naoshima. He commissioned three museums designed by architect Tadao Ando: the Benesse House Museum, the Chichu Art Museum and the Lee Ufan Museum. Populating them are works from Fukutake’s art collection, including commissioned permanent installations by international A-listers such as James Turrell and Yayoi Kusama. These big guns continue to draw the crowds. There are queues everywhere to get in. At some places, you have to queue for the right to queue later – like in Disneyland. The Benesse House Museum, which contains works by Land artist Richard Long and horizon photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto lined up to eye level with the Seto Inland Sea, also doubles as a hotel, where the most expensive room can go for over £700 a night. Fukutake went on to back the triennale, which spread to the other neighbouring islands that are suffering from environmental damage from industrial waste, low birth rates and

isolated, ageing populations. By this time, the approach had evolved to become more grassroots, local and conversational, with the commissions being hit-and-miss. At their worst, they were amateur, mawkish or literal, such as Choi Jeong Hwa’s Gift of the Sun (2015) on Shodoshima, an island known for olive cultivation. The Korean artist created a huge golden olive wreath and inscribed the island children’s hopes and dreams on the leaves. Despite the mixed quality, I prefer the ‘minor’ works. They seem more honest, less helicoptered in. Even the failures point truthfully to the limitations of art, especially in this depressed archipelago where abandoned schools and houses have become familiar and irreversible sights. In these places, art becomes humble. It is cheesy to speak of art being a gift to the community, but in some cases in Setouchi, that’s just what it is. Two new works in Megijima (population 200) stand out in this respect. New York-based Japanese artist Yoichiro Yoda turned a warehouse into a movie theatre, complete with a box office and ‘poorly’ rendered paintings of movie stars inside, but their wonkiness becomes somehow touching and filled with pathos (Island Theatre Megi, 2016).

Navin Rawanchaikul + Navin Production, The Tower of Nishiura (OK Tower), 2016. Photo: Yasushi Ichikawa. Courtesy the artist and Setouchi Triennale

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In the island’s southern village of Nishiura, Thai artist Navin Rawanchaikul made a colourful three-storey tower plastered with movie billboard-type paintings of the last few elderly residents on the island and their old photographs (Nishiura OK Tower, 2016). Among those depicted are an old lady on an electric scooter with her pet dog in the basket and an octopus fisherman pulling in his haul. They appear alongside several cartoon ogres in loincloths wielding iron clubs (Megijima’s biggest tourist attraction is a cave supposedly housing the ogres who attacked Momotaro, a hero in Japanese folklore). To be fair, Nishiura OK Tower doesn’t deviate far from Navin’s practices when it comes to community engagement. Whether it’s in Dubai or the US, he collects stories and photographs and plonks them all in a huge collage. But against this landscape – a grey, abandoned town on a grey sea – the pop accessibility of this work and its uncomplicated sense of celebration came across as an act of generosity. Many of the indoor artworks are housed in vacant, neglected houses and buildings, or grow out of them. A familiar strategy is to go loud and brash, as if to defibrillate the depressed settings into life. On Teshima, German artist Tobias Rehberger transformed an old house into a psychedelic café with crazy lines and dots all over the floor, ceiling, walls and tables (Was du liebst, bringt dich auch zum weinen/What you love also makes you cry) (2010); on Megijima, Shinro Ohtake

turned a defunct primary school into a neoncoloured steampunk playground, stacking items he found around the island into new free-associative formations, such as a huge palm tree growing from a shocking pink buoy (Mecon, 2013–). Another approach is to infuse a sense of melancholy dignity into the surroundings, such as Korean artist Minouk Lim’s work in a house on Ogijima (Lighthouse Keeper – Times of Joy and Sorrow, 2016). The house was one of the locations for a 1957 weepie directed by Keisuke Kinoshita called Times of Joy and Sorrow, following the trials and tribulations of a lighthouse keeper and his wife. Lim kitted out the interiors with an installation of lamps found around the island and a diorama of lighthouses on a sea of broken glass. Much simpler and more powerful is her work outside the house, where she installed a round mirror to face the ocean – you can see it flashing as you approach in a boat. Despite the island’s disparate histories and characters, spend a few days travelling among them and they inevitably start to blur together as one eerily tranquil village filled with broken boats and houses and old people. There are no young people, no children. All of them have left for the cities. Then again, does it have to be so? On Shodoshima, Taiwanese artist Lin Shuen Long has an interesting response. His installation, Beyond the Border – Tide (2016) features 196

sculptures of children on the beach. Made from a mixture comprising sand, brown sugar, glutinous rice, flour and hemp, the figures are in various states of corrosion caused by the sea. At first glance, they seem to refer to the islands’ lack of a new generation, but on closer inspection you realise these children wear a piece of driftwood inscribed with coordinates around their necks. A text informs that Lin means to commemorate child refugees lost at sea: 196 is the number of states recognised by the Japanese government and the coordinates mark the capital cities. Japan has an appalling refugee acceptance record, rejecting more than 99 percent of applications last year. The sculptures, standing on the beach, the border between sea and land, become a statement against insularity. In closing, a final word for the Teshima Art Museum. After Naoshima, Teshima is often cited as the must-visit island for its monumental, dramatic artworks. But the museum is the only thing you really need to see there. Commissioned by Fukutake, and designed by architect Ryue Nishizawa and artist Rei Naito, the structure is shell-like, one continuous curve of concrete above the viewer, with an opening to the sky. Inside, there is a surprise, and I won’t provide a spoiler. Suffice to say, I knew someone who walked in and wept. Someone else said a prayer to God. Me? I lay down on the cave-cool floor, closed my eyes and felt myself dissolve. The rest of the island is just gravy. Adeline Chia

Lin Shuen Long, Beyond the Borders – Tide, 2016. Photo:Yasushi Ichikawa. Courtesy the artist and Setouchi Triennale

Winter 2016

Before the Beginning and After the End II Long March Space, Beijing 17 September – 6 November As an exhibition title, Before the Beginning and After the End II offers no indication of any clearcut curatorial direction, but it does allude to the process of artistic creation, which is generally considered to be experimental, ambiguous and often transitional. Take Zhang Hui’s My Former Lovers Have All Grown Old (2008), an installation that marks a departure from work based on a theatrical practice and an engagement with painting. Such turning points usually define artists’ careers, but as their practice unfolds, and with numerous exhibitions rushing in, these moments are often lost in the ongoing action. Just like Zhang, and Liu Wei, whose work is also on show here, Zhu Yu was an active player in the ‘PostSense Sensibility’ movement during the early 2000s who later abandoned performance for painting. Zhu’s earlier works often took actual human body parts as part of their materials, but here the lower arm that was once part of a corpse in his Pocket Theology (1999/2016) is replaced by a model made of fibrereinforced plastic. It is a particularly interesting show since all the artists are represented by Long March

Space, once a nonprofit art foundation whose early activities were initiated by founder Lu Jie and founding director Qiu Zhijie’s radical curatorial project the Long March Project, then transformed into a commercial gallery around 2006 and 2007 when the art market in China boomed. Like Long March Space itself, the practices of many artists represented by it have transformed over the years. And this show provides a chance to revisit their old works and the defining moments in their careers. Zhan Wang’s Shell of Mao Suit series (1993–4) of bronze sculptures serves as an excellent example: on the one hand we are reminded that his commercially successful Artificial Rock series (2001–) actually came out of more radical actions, while on the other, the power of success within the art market is exposed in a reverse, ironic manner. Yet what interests me most about this show are the works of the younger generation – artists signed to the gallery over the past few years – which suggest how a gallery looks for the new voices, and how working with a gallery may in turn affect a young artist’s career and practice. Both Hu Xiangqian and Tianzhuo

Chen adopt performance as their primary means of expression, with the former’s highly flexible, bodily engagement and the latter’s employment of professional performers and complex stage settings indicating two very different approaches. Watching Hu trying to ‘sail’ an island (I Will Surely Sail You into the Pacific Ocean, 2005 – the effect comes as a result of a camera trick) forces one to recall experiences of fighting with the corporeal world, while Chen’s sculptural work Dear (2016), a half-girl, half-skeleton prop from his solo exhibition Ishvara, reveals a world that seems to have little connection to ‘reality’. Ran Huang’s new painting series is the most surprising. While previous works have taken the form of quasimovie productions, installations and prints, over the past year, the artist has been using painting to negotiate his own relationship with art history. Inspired by Martin Kippenberger’s paintings, Huang’s transformation or recreation of Kippenberger’s original works is, according to the gallery, ‘akin to a performance based in the passage of time’, which makes one wonder: is all the painting on show here actually ‘performance’ at heart? Guo Juan

Zhang Hui, My Former Lovers Have All Grown Old, 2008, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Long March Space, Beijing

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Why the Performance? Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai 18 September – 20 November By the time of the opening of WHY the PERFORMANCE?, the Ming Contemporary Art Museum had already gained a large and appreciative audience. Its two previous shows, solo exhibitions by performance group (and creators of absurd instruments) Maywa Denki and artist Jan Lauwers (with his Needcompany), both received an extraordinary reception among the local art-goers and beyond. Both presentations widened one’s understanding of performance and its creative interaction with a rich range of other media. However, WHY the PERFORMANCE?, promoted as a defining presentation of this oneyear-old private museum, barely meets the expectations built up by what has come before. This group exhibition includes more than 50 artists – a mix of international superstars (Hito Steyerl, Jon Rafman, Katarzyna Kozyra) and local emerging artists (Zhang Yue, Zhao Jingyan, No Survivors) – with work spread throughout the paper-mill-turned-museum. A programme of seven live performances was staged during the opening. The fact that there were at least two performances happening

simultaneously the whole time, but with different levels of thoughtfulness and maturity, made the space feel rather like a circus. Indeed, there was a strong sense that the exhibition’s ambition to present all facets of performance had exceeded the museum’s infrastructural capacities. However, away from some of the bombastic performances, at the end of the second floor, Sunteck Yao’s participatory happening Be My Guest (2016) was a hidden gem. A self-reflective live work that investigates the performer–audience dynamic, it features the artist and members of the audience engaging in a spontaneous roleplay of host–guest relationships in a domestic setting. That the chaos of the opening overshadowed much of the programme was a shame, because the curatorial intent behind the show is intriguing, promising to tackle issues such as how performance is perceived and reiterated in what the curators call a ‘pan-performance era’, affected by contemporary politics and technology. While the show does contain discussions of performance against a highly technologised sociopolitical backdrop, such as Zhang Qing’s

video investigation into the psychology of surveillance (Sideway Peak, 2014), it takes effort to situate works that address these issues among the ocean of screens and projections that make up the show. (Is this really the only way to mediate performance?) In a section of the exhibition that seems dedicated to net art, Payne Zhu’s quirky video installation Doppelganger (2015) stands out as a vernacular contribution to this highly homogenised international trend. Zhu’s provocative work juxtaposes ‘performances’ by a semipornographic livestreamer and a Tibetan Rinpoche (living Buddha), both of whom turn themselves into circulatable images and live upon the support of their fans/followers. Hao Jingban’s research-based four-channel projection I Can’t Dance (2015) explores the pre-People’s Republic ballroom-dance culture through interviews with seniors who were once involved in the culture and explores the profound contrast with their mundane retired life. Hao’s melancholic, slow-paced video installation feels like a shelter in this cacophonous pan-performance hodgepodge. Zhang Hanlu

Hao Jingban, I Can’t Dance, 2015, four-channel HD video installation, 34 mins 2 sec. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2016

London Biennale Manila Pollination Various venues, Manila 15 September – 17 October Filipino artist David Medalla founded the London Biennale in 1998 and is cocurator of this Manila ‘Pollination’. In his curatorial note he says that this biennale is about ‘challenging and transforming the notion of the art world “biennale” as a large state or corporatesponsored event… by throwing open borders and encouraging a more intimate and community-based dialogue between the artists and audiences’. Originally based in London, this project has evolved to include various communities in other countries through what are labelled ‘pollinations’, which have previously occurred in places like Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Belgium and Rome. The idea of an art biennial in Manila is reason enough to get excited about the Manila Pollination. The dominant mainstream, market-oriented gallery system and the annual celebratory art fairs in the city have generally meant a lack of critical rigour and artistic vision – two elements art-goers hope a biennale can make up for. Although it cuts across seven sites (in three of Manila’s cities plus one province, with two talks and four minor parallel exhibits taking place as well), the impact of the Manila event is more modest than its geographical stretch. Parallel events also run for too short a time – a few days – to make any deep impression. Still, the centrepiece of the biennial, and the focus of this review, is the main exhibition at the Manila Metropolitan Theatre. Built in 1931 by Juan Arellano, the art-deco structure, a National Cultural Treasure and National Historical Landmark, was recently reacquired by the government from private ownership after the Marcos dictatorship had used it as collateral for a loan. The Met had slowly fallen into decay and been closed for two decades. Following its hosting of the London Biennale, the theatre will close for renovations. Curated by Manila-based interdisciplinary artist Josephine Turalba, the Met exhibition aims at working with the space ‘to explore built, temporary, and imagined architecture for understanding shared histories, culture, and

interconnectedness’. Yet there is little in the show that works with a sense of architecture and space, and few site-specific pieces. There is also an unexplained title – Synchronisation/Syncopation – that comes across as little more than a convenient umbrella for a generally inexplicable gathering of works. The exhibits are mostly out of sync with each other, cutting across themes of faith and Catholicism, protest and gender, nature and the environment, the indigenous and the personal creative processes of artists, and so on. Amid the mixed bag, one work stands out: Azra Akšamija’s Memory Matrix (2016), installed in front of the theatre. Up close, it is a matrix of fluorescent Plexiglas pieces, laser-cut with symbols of vanishing heritage sites across the world. Mounted on heavy iron frames, the pieces are used to form an image of two jeepneys, colourfully decorated vehicles that are an iconic mode of transportation in the Philippines but are being phased out in favour of a modern, streamlined transport system. Light and fragile, they look like they might blow off in the wind – perhaps symbolic, in an age when cultural destruction is widespread enough to be considered a war crime, of the crises facing cultural sites and symbols across the world. What stands out as well are works that do choose to speak of the history of the space. Toym Imao’s White Lady (2016) is a white papiermâché installation featuring a sculpted female figure accoutred with traditional Filipino wear, including butterfly sleeves reminiscent of the late Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos. Consequently the work serves as a reminder of the ghosts that exist within the halls of the Met, including the two-faced Marcos dictatorship that on the one hand championed culture and on the other used it as propaganda tool to mask violence and repression. Imelda herself, as governor of Manila, had restored the Met in 1978, bringing it back as a venue for awards and performances during the martial-law period. Imao captures this in his admittedly rather literal-minded sculpture: from the front she appears to hold an image of three reconfigured humanlike little pigheads, mouths agape

facing page, top Azra Akšamija, Memory Matrix (detail), 2016, 10,000 neon acrylic elements, two fences, 245 × 390 cm each (245 × 780 cm total). Courtesy London Biennale Manila Pollination

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as if in song, looking up at her. From behind it is revealed to be a skull-faced figure holding human heads as torches. Another notable work is Leo Abaya’s Bottometer (2009), a white chair and cushionlike footrest in a dark room, imprinted in black paint by the body of the last person who used them, a reminder of the mark we leave at each historical moment, deliberately or not. Art collective Para://Site’s In Demand (2016), meanwhile, is an installation of an old Metropolitan Theatre sign with bubble wrap, stamped with the word ‘sale’, highlighting the fragility of heritage and its entrapment in commerce. Two works in the first-floor lobby, by Turalba and Agnes Arellano, are unexciting, despite their eye-catching use of bullets. Heart of Dionysus (2016) is supposedly inspired by the myth of Dionysus and his resurrection from his own heart. But the resultant work is bizarre: a tapestry made of bullet shells and a shotgun that are arranged to depict a gigantic bullet. This is purportedly a symbol of the Met’s rebirth. More head-scratching goes on at Angel of Death and Six Bullets (2009), which also works with the myth of creation and destruction, bringing in a cold-cast marble work that was previously exhibited in Fukuoka, Japan. Carved into the marble is the Angel of Death, standing guard above doors and a smoky haze of destruction, flanked by six human-size bronze bullets, three on each side. Maybe the work made more sense in Japan’s nuclear context. Because under the original Angel of Death, ‘smoke’ allegedly came out from a ‘nuclear explosion’, but in the context of Manila, it’s just dry ice, or maybe pollution. Which does make you wonder why the Met was chosen as this biennial’s main venue at all. Is it just a matter of romanticising the site of heritage and all that it stands for – history and decay, neglect and reminiscence – by using it as an art space? If so, the biennial has missed an opportunity to exhibit a more representative set of contemporary works and concerns, marginal practices included, and to start a real conversation about art, heritage and cultural practice in the Philippines. Katrina Stuart Santiago

facing page, bottom Leo Abaya, Bottometer, 2009 (installation view). © the artist. Courtesy London Biennale Manila Pollination

Winter 2016

Kenji Yanobe Cinematize Takamatsu Art Museum, Japan 16 July – 4 September Art may make all sorts of consolatory claims about getting you through hard times, but how many artworks can help you survive a proper nuclear fallout? For this, look no further than the output of Osaka-born Kenji Yanobe, who has channelled a very Japanese sense of nuclear paranoia into an impressive line of products for the end times. Yellow Suit (1991), for example, is an lead-plated antiradiation suit that looks like a fat man, the belly swelling out like an oil drum and sturdy enough to withstand bullets. Connected to the suit by a rubber tube is a wheeled trolley containing a plant, or ‘oxygen generation device’. Other survival tools include a junior suit for kids (Mini Atom Suit, 2003); a ¥100 coin-operated car that can detect radiation (Atom Car (White), 1998); and another Mad Max-style shelter/military tank that comes with its own water distillation system (Survival System Train, 1992). Everything’s supposed to work, and their serious design and industrial finish give off an air of credibility – though I am slightly worried about the efficacy of a ‘ladies’ suit (Radiation Suit Uran, 1996), given that the legs are ‘protected’ only by a transparent rubber crinoline skirt and red patentleather hooker-boots underneath. But fear not, Yanobe has included other handy items, such as an extendable makeup mirror and a portable shower, which – priorities! – are surely indispensable to the female survivor during a nuclear apocalypse. At times ridiculous, politically incorrect and driven by the logic of comic-book pseudoscience, Yanobe’s work is on the whole weird and gleeful enough that you don’t resent his occasional retrograde tendencies. This midcareer survey of the fifty-one-year-old artist is split into seven parts, tracing a personal journey where his nuclear obsessions grow, over 30 years, from fearful to cautiously hopeful. His career began when the Kyoto City University of Arts graduate made the first prototypes for his atomic suits after a small leak at the Mihama nuclear power

plant in 1991. Gradually, his inventions became more ambitious and drew from various popcultural sources, such as incorporating the double-‘horned’ hairstyle of the classic cyborg manga character Astroboy, Mickey Mouse’s ears and the rubbery designs of fetishwear. This is the phase that best corresponds to the Cinematize in the title, as the suits – dramatic, stylish, visionary – are great works of character design. The cinematic connection is brought even closer to home as Yanobe is now art directing a new nuclear disaster film called Bolt, parts of which are still being shot in a room of the gallery specially set aside for a film set. There then followed an ethically questionable period where Yanobe put on one of his suits and went to Chernobyl, taking a series of photographs with elderly survivors in the former Soviet city and exploring its deserted spaces (Atom Suit Project: Antenna of the Earth, 2000). Because it came across as exploitative, he regretted this project, and his subsequent work took a more uncomplicatedly inspirational and less interesting turn. In response to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, which also caused the Fukushima nuclear accident, he created a cutesy doe-eyed character called Sun Child (2011) – a boy in a hazmat suit with his helmet removed. Three years later he created a companion piece called Sun Sister (2014), a girl in a sleeveless silver dress with her arms outstretched. Both statues are 6m tall and stand in the lobby of the museum. For me, Yanobe is at his best when he allows a tension between dark and light to exist in his work: on the one hand, the fear of nuclear contamination or warfare, on the other hand, a stubbornly optimistic, pop appearance. On the whole, his earlier work, where postapocalyptic visions are packaged in objects of modern industrial finish, remain the most powerful, because he never quite tips his hand as to whether the entire business is deadly serious or an elaborate joke. All the outfits in

facing page, top Yellow Suit, 1991, lead, steel, Geiger counter, plants, 230 × 300 × 300 cm. Courtesy Takamatsu Art Museum

the Atom Suit Project (1997–2003), for example, feature funnel-shaped Geiger counters made of glass, positioned over the privates to (according to wall text) protect ‘delicate organs of the human body’. The effect is exaggerated nipples and dicks that flash and bleep, a kind of Jetsons-themed sex-club getup. In contrast, the post-Fukushima works with the Sun children are straightforwardly kawaii, like Takashi Murakami’s Superflat cartoons or wholesome illustrations in children’s picture books. Maybe Yanobe found it impossible to remain snarky in the face of one of the world’s worst nuclear catastrophes. As the world slips into irrevocable ruin, his response to the horror was to offer up simple symbols of hope. But it is notable that in recent years, the most recurrent character in his oeuvre is a new one called Torayan. The character – a ventriloquist’s dummy in a spacesuit – was inspired by his father’s postretirement pastime. The older man had taken up ventriloquism as a hobby, and once dressed his dummy in a borrowed Mini Atom Suit (2003). From this, Yanobe was inspired to create a new hero for his own work: a doll in a hazmat suit with a combover and a funny Hitler-like moustache. Among other things, Torayan stars in a picture book (Torayan’s Great Adventure, 2007–8), has his own mini action-figures (Mini Torayan, 2007) and operates a mobile theatre (Blue Cinema in the Woods, 2004). Torayan also has a particular resonance in the exhibition venue. Takamatsu is a nononsense port city many people use as a base to explore the Setouchi Triennale, which is spread out over islands in the Seto Inland Sea and aims to rejuvenate these depopulated places. These islands are often filled with older people and abandoned schools, houses and farms – and art can only do so much to jumpstart these dead towns. In this context Torayan is a cheerful presence. He’s basically a childsize old-man doll singing and dancing at the end of the world. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Kenji Yanobe and Sebastian Masuda, Flora, 2015 (installation view, Kyoto Botanical Garden). Courtesy Takamatsu Art Museum and Kyoto University of Art

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Winter 2016

Wook-kyung Choi American Years 1960s–1970s Kukje Gallery, Seoul 31 August – 30 October Wook-Kyung Choi died young: aged forty-five in 1985. And yet she was prolific during her brief career, much of which coincides with an era the art history of which is now dominated by South Korea’s male Dansaekhwa monochrome painters. To some extent comparisons between that and Choi’s often colourful and always expressive paintings are inevitable. But to do that is to do Choi the kind of disservice that so often reduces Asian art to types and countertypes. Indeed, the title of one of the first works in this survey, This Is What You See (1975), is perhaps a cue to leave such comparisons aside. The acrylic on canvas is an unsettling balance of frantic calligraphic energy (Choi practiced this last artform) and blank emptiness, executed in a relatively monochromatic black, white and various shades of grey. Stare at it for a while and the swirling, swooping brushstrokes, often harnessed by black outlines or planes, seem to coalesce into a series of human and animal heads. But as is the case with her most successful works, the restless and frenetic

movements of Choi’s brush seem to dance free, escaping any constraints of clear form or subject matter. In 1963 Choi moved from Seoul to the US to study at the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit, and on the evidence here, fell under the influence of Abstract Expressionism (of the Willem de Kooning type) and Pop art. She remained in the US until 1978, marking the end of the period covered in this show. Her friend the artist Michael Aakhus (with whom she was at a residency at the Roswell Museum of Art in New Mexico in 1976–77, which was also the year she became an American citizen) recalls that she used to joke about that fact that she was an outspoken, angry woman who didn’t fit the expected norms of Korean womanhood, a fact that’s abundantly clear in La Femme Fâché (1966), a colourful oil painting that appears to show a contorted tangle of yellow flailing limbs, an exposed ribcage and various scything planes of colour. A later, more monochromatic acrylic work, Reject (1974), appears to show a female

La Femme Fâché, 1966, oil on canvas, 137 × 174 cm. Courtesy the artist’s estate and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

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figure contorting herself to fit within the canvas. And yet Choi’s work is far more than an expression of personal pain and rage. Paintings, works on paper (such as the pastel Who is the Winner in this Bloody Battle?, 1968, which has the title crudely stencilled onto the top lefthand corner, above an equally crude image of a kneeling, wounded US military policeman) and collages (such as The Letter for Peace from a Poet, 1967, which features the aforementioned letter cut into six pieces and attached to gridded, shaped graph-paper) speak of her connection as well to broader social conflicts beyond those that immediately concerned her. While not all of Choi’s experiments are entirely convincing or successful, her ongoing quest to express the effects of personal and societal suffering, alongside her attempts to merge (sometimes conflicting) artistic traditions of the East with the postwar art of the West, make this exhibition an intriguing portrait of one woman’s attempt to assert her identity and locate it within her times. Mark Rappolt

Tada Hengsapkul & Chai Siris Under the Same Sky Nova Contemporary, Bangkok 30 September – 15 December This pairing of Tada Hengsapkul, a Thai artist whose career has yet to achieve international recognition, and Chai Siris, a slightly older, more seasoned professional who has shown at Documenta 13 (2012) and the Venice International Film Festival (2010) – among other high-profile platforms – arguably raises questions about the politics of why some artists ‘make it’ (and others don’t). For the specific context of Thailand, Under the Same Sky is acutely interesting in this respect, in the main because this is a context in which the politics of those works (and their makers) that do rise to the surface, so to speak, is either carried lightly or deeply conservative. In keeping with that, Under the Same Sky gently probes historic political cultures in Thailand. Hengsapkul and Siris layer artefacts with ideas of memory as it operates on personal and collective registers. There is much for both to draw on: Hengsapkul is interested in the American military presence in the northeast of Thailand, from where it bombed North Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1960s and

early 70s; Siris’s works were centrally inspired by his mother’s crossing of the Salween River into Thailand in order to escape a coup d’état in Myanmar. While Hengsapkul’s photography, video and objects dance between the literal and symbolic, arranging what are described as mortar tailfins from the war to spell ‘bliss’ – also the title of the work (all 2016) – Siris is strictly metaphoric. His film Day for Night (2016) explores the very impact and condition of memory, dust appears to float across the screen and images of a torch searching a dilapidated cinema emerge from darkness. A large sign that dominates the downstairs space, by Siris, declares, in French, ‘Love Is Dead. Long Live Love’. This sentimental paradox haunts the exhibition as a whole: both artists attempt to give shape to relations between the individual and the collective within political histories of Thailand and the region. An aesthetic of nostalgia pervades the exhibition (the works foreground memorabilia, old photographs, imagery in decay), but the personal pushes against the collective

– individual experience vies with more generalised structural insights. Hengsapkul, however, stages the very relationship between experience and insight. In the video projection Future Loop Foundation (2016), two naked and blindfolded figures conduct an arm wrestle amidst a circle of the mortar tails that evoke markers for an ancient ritual site rather than, as the area is, a place of modern violence. However, the nakedness of the figures, their combat and hidden faces, push us towards murky truths. A murkiness that Siris, comparatively, appears to distract from with more ethereal and abstracted forms. The authoritarianism of contemporary Thailand, with a military-drafted constitution recently passed, seems cemented for the future, and one might wonder about the value of radical and less radical gestures made by artists in terms of their attempts to help us think through the problems of history and their current resonances. This comes to mind while looking over Under the Same Sky: thoughts about what is signalled and not, and what is shrouded and why. Brian Curtin

Tada Hengsapkul & Chai Siris, Under the Same Sky, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy the artists

Winter 2016

Apichatpong Weerasethakul The Serenity of Madness Maiiam Museum of Contemporary Art, Chiang Mai 4 July – 10 September If anyone can make you lose your mind in a relaxing way, it’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Memories, ghosts, reincarnation, Thai history and a reality-loosening, faculty-scrambling sense of joy and wonderment come together so sweetly in this midcareer survey of the critically acclaimed filmmaker’s short films and video installations that the experience is, as the title suggests, a kind of safe letting go. Cynics would look at the content and say that it’s more of the same, but when the same’s so good, can you bring yourself to complain? The Serenity of Madness brings together the ‘gallery work’ of the Thai auteur best known for the Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Over the years, he’s built up a reputation on both the film-festival and biennial circuits, but his output for the latter remains scattered and unconsolidated, and often portrayed as the interesting but poorer cousin of his movie career. Hopefully, this exhibition will provide some corrective reimagining of the relationship between the two halves of his life. Another artist-filmmaker, Steve McQueen, once said his work was ‘all one thing, as if film was the novel and visual art is poetry’; Weerasethakul’s pieces have a similar kinship. The shorter ones are koans.

Made before, during and after his films, his videos and installations may be spinoffs, sketches or one-off commissions, but most of them stand alone quite proudly. Curator Gridthiya Gaweewong designed the exhibition to show the breadth of Weerasethakul’s practice, and so there is a necessary amount of excerpting and chronological jumps, which creates an easygoing environment consistent with the genial, free-flowing genealogy of his methods. Primitive (2009), originally a sevenvideo installation at Haus der Kunst, Munich, receives three video extracts here, spread out across the exhibition grounds as recurrent, free-associative echoes. A ‘lite’ version of the infrared dogs in Taipei’s National Palace Museum’s 2007 installation The Palace (Pipittapan Tee Taipei) appears too. The projections have been released from their original glass cases and left to pace the walls like the ghostly guards of another video, Sakda (Rousseau) (2012), in the same room. There are a couple of patchy spots. Some of Weerasethakul’s photography is up on the walls, but the still images, after you have savoured the richness of his moving ones, are weak tea. They are either formal experiments with prettified technical effects, such as the digitally painted explosion in Mr Electrico (For Ray

The Serenity of Madness, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy Maiiam, Chiang Mai

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Bradbury) (2014), or thin collectable stand-ins for larger projects, such as the stills for those in the sprawling multidisciplinary For Tomorrow For Tonight (2011), first shown in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Thankfully, the meat of the exhibition is in the short films and video installations. Many of them incubate tropes that would be seeded into feature-length work. Seen in isolation, they have the punch of the single image or idea. For example, the six-minute, haiku-esque Sakda (Rousseau) (2012) could well have been a deleted scene from the doodly and meandering hourlong feature Mekong Hotel (2012). Standing alone, the short film has a sharper, more decisive outline. This has something to do with the brief: the short was commissioned for the centennial celebrations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s birth, and Weerasethakul, with a mix of practicality and wryness, has made his regular gay Thai actor a reincarnation of the French philosopher. “I used to be a man called Rousseau,” Sakda Kaewbuadee says while a guitar strums tenderly in the background, “but today my name is Sakda.” He goes on to talk about his boyfriend Laurent, and about his body not belonging to anyone, not even him. Abrupt cut to a riverside veranda, from which a radio broadcasts the same recorded

message to the dusky pink of the Mekong River. “Will I remember the freedom?” the fuzzy voice asks. The melancholy resignation of this piece, combined with its keen attentiveness to beauty, seems to float, in the gentlest of ways, a challenge to Rousseau: could man be everywhere in chains and free? It is notable that this is Weerasethakul’s first major retrospective in his homeland. His long tussle with the authorities has culminated in his refusal to submit his latest film, Cemetery of Splendour (2015) to the censor board, and the film has had no domestic release as a result. Why did he put this show on? Do censors close one eye to art exhibitions? Who knows? Judging by Serenity…, politics runs through Weerasethakul’s nervous system, either as a kind of muscle memory or surfacing like hives. The exhibition is not so much a critique of Thai politics as a description of a state of mind under the regime, a negative-capability zone between submission and rebellion, between Sakda and Rousseau. For example, in Ashes (2012), gently diaristic images of daily life – friends walking a dog, Weerasethakul calling his lover for dinner – are interrupted by a sequence showing protesters outside Thailand’s political prisons. The film then circles back to the everyday, with a dislocating sequence showing the funeral pyre of a monk in a temple. Two videoworks in the exhibition, though, suggest a growing sense of urgency and subversion. One of Weerasethakul’s central

preoccupations is light in all its forms: the sun, fire, lightning, fluorescent tubes – not to mention that witness, mediator and reproducer of all the photo phenomena, the bright eye of the film projector. Light is often associated with joy and life, but increasingly, Weerasethakul is paying attention to its other face: that of terror and death. This tension can be traced back to Phantoms of Nabua (2009). The 11-minute video was part of the larger Primitive project, for which he collaborated with teenagers in Nabua, a village in the north of Thailand where the massacre of a generation of farmers accused of being communists was buried and forgotten. Weerasethakul took a mildly interventionist approach with the sons of these dead farmers: making them roleplay their elders, write songs and tell stories. From these activities, he made short films and installations. Phantoms is the strongest of the lot. It has a pyromaniac’s sense of liberation. In the video, the boys kick a burning ball around a dark field. At the back of the field is a white screen, showing a film about a simulated lightning strike. After several passes, the ball hits the screen. For a while we are uncertain if the screen is showing flames, or actually on fire, until the cloth burns away to nothing, and reveals a sputtering, spitting ball of light. It is the projector still going strong. This is the kind of totalitarian culminating shot he has deployed before, in Syndromes and a Century (2006). There, the camera lingered on a ventilator slowly inhaling smoke into its cavernous mouth;

but here, calm suction turns to feverish repulsion, a black hole into a death star. The tension between life- and death-giving forces of light reappears in another retina-burn of an installation, called Fireworks (Archive) (2014). In flares of light accompanied by sharp cracks of gunfire, the camera strobes images of a temple’s stone statues: a monkey with a gun, a pack of dogs on scooters and human skeletons embracing on a bench. Through the pyrotechnics, a pair of spectral lovers stroll. One of them is regular actress Jenjira Pongpas on crutches, dragging her bad leg, once memorably described by Thai critic Kong Rithdee as ‘the saddest leg in all cinema’. On one level, you could read this as a film about political persecution and resistance. There is the militarised bestiary, the explosive soundtrack and the location: the video was filmed in a temple in Nong Khai, built by a Thai mystic-cum-sculptor who, accused of being a communist during the Cold War, fled to Laos. But as with all of Weerasethakul’s works, the political reading is just one of its many lives. The man himself calls Fireworks a ‘hallucinatory memory machine’. If so, its technology is so alien and advanced that I can only describe it in the most ‘primitive’ of vocabularies: visitations by ghosts and gods. For I found it more like a powerful haunting, a jolt of lucid sympathy I imagine a medium would get at a scene of a violent event. And for a long time after leaving the room, I was still blinking the blaze out of my eyes. Adeline Chia

Phantoms of Nabua, 2009, single-channel video, colour, sound, 10 min 43 sec. Photo: Soopakorn Srisakul. Courtesy Maiiam, Chiang Mai

Winter 2016

Amar Kanwar The Sovereign Forest NTU Centre For Contemporary Art Singapore 30 July – 9 October Amar Kanwar’s The Sovereign Forest is a rich and densely woven tapestry of intimate personal stories and larger geopolitical narratives set against the Odisha region in east India. This latest presentation at NTU CCA Singapore marks the project’s debut showing in Southeast Asia, after its various iterations including Documenta 13 (2012), Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013) and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2012–13). Created in collaboration with independent media activist Sudhir Pattnaik and designer and filmmaker Sherna Dastur, the exhibition stages a vast body of videos, texts, photographs and archival materials that have emerged over a decade-long engagement with ongoing conflicts between local communities, private industries and the government over issues of land ownership and its underlying regime of violence. To present such diverse media, the entire exhibition hall has been dimmed and split into a succession of open rooms that unfold like chapters in a book, beginning with its centrepiece, a large video projection titled The Scene of Crime (2011). In it, we follow an unseen female protagonist as she recounts the disappearance of a beloved via a series of texts overlaying slow-paced shots of Odisha’s luscious landscape. Kanwar’s controlled cinematography captures the natural settings in exquisite detail and charges each frame with a feeling of awe and grief. Divided into ten visual ‘maps’ that loosely structure the fragmented narration, the film charts the history of violence and injustice that has engulfed these territories in recent times. In one such map, we are brought to a green field with memorial stones – a shrine to those who died protesting the forcible acquisition of their lands for industrialisation in the town of Kalinganagar. By focusing on the site of trauma and keeping human presence at the periphery, there is a sense that nature itself acts as a central character, like the title of the exhibition implies,

providing its own testimonies through the persistent soundtrack of crushing waves and leaves rustling in the wind. In its companion piece, A Love Story (2010), the camera turns its lens to the outskirts of the expanding Indian city, where an industrial wasteland provides a harsh backdrop to the eventual displacement of communities. Delivered in a similar fashion to The Scene of Crime, it offers an abstract account of dislocation and longing by a male character in four acts. With each film shown in a separate room, the overall effect of experiencing the two is of a conversation happening at a distance, suggesting an emotional and geographical gap that is bridged by the space of language. Kanwar is a masterful storyteller who is able to shape fictional spaces around his research materials, much of which is gathered here in the form of ‘The Seed Room’ and Selections from the Evidence Archive (2012–15). Using specimens collected by a former schoolteacher turned rice farmer and seed activist, Natabar Sarangi, ‘The Seed Room’ houses 272 varieties of indigenous rice seeds, along with six small books that recount the different facets of local resistances against corporations and the state. From the suicide of local farmers due to debt and bondage in In Memory Of (2012) to the historical vote against mining by tribal village councils in The Referendum (2015), these stories frame Sarangi’s extensive archive to speak of an urgency to recover lost knowledge. Beyond the room, Selections from the Evidence Archive gathers documents from local communities and visitors to the region. Working with the Samadrusti media activist group, which has been hosting the collective archive in its campus in Odisha, photographs, lands records, maps, tax receipts and poems come together to paint a local history of the land. In lesser hands, this labyrinth of materials would have been difficult to navigate, but

facing page, top The Scene of Crime, 2011 (installation view, The Sovereign Forest, Documenta 13, Kassel, 2012). Photo: Henrik Stromberg. Courtesy the artist

Kanwar’s fluid handling of the archive sets up a productive tension between documentation and fiction, allowing information to translate into subjective experience. The three large hand-sewn books that punctuate Selections from the Evidence Archive perhaps best illustrate this open-ended approach. In one of these books, The Counting Sisters and Other Stories (2011), we are invited to flip and read a collection of stories written by the artist about six mourners who sing of the dead and the missing as corporations and state try to legally rewrite the ownership of their land. Screen-printed on banana-fibre paper with embedded ‘evidences’ such as fishing nets, newspaper and rice seeds, the fablelike tales are presented alongside a different edit of The Scene of Crime, projected on the adjacent pages. Freed from the original narrative, the sequence of images acquires new meaning in the context of another story, questioning the generally accepted authority of documentary over the poetic form as a generator of legitimate evidence. As one walks through the exhibition, Kanwar’s archive, much like his cast of characters and stories, appears to be constantly shifting grounds and finding new forms. It is not implausible, for example, to find parallels between the female protagonists in The Scene of Crime and The Counting Sisters…, or the male character in A Love Story and Sarangi, the seed activist. In evoking these overlapping voices, the whole installation is at once a repository, a memorial and a public trial in which the artist makes an impassioned plea on behalf of his invisible subjects. By presenting feelings as facts, Kanwar invites the viewer to look and listen, and to perform the affective labour of bearing witness. To this end, The Sovereign Forest is a haunting of the silent unrest, still waiting for their stories to be heard. Tan Guo-Liang

facing page, bottom The Seed Room, 2016 (installation view), 272 varieties of indigenous organic rice seeds. Courtesy NTU CCA, Singapore

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Winter 2016

Tadasu Takamine Brothers TKG+, Taipei 16 July – 11 Septemberr Brothers – Synesthesia (2016) is a kinetic light and sound installation housed in a darkened room, one of two new works at the centre of TKG+’s miniretrospective of Japanese artist Tadasu Takamine’s work. In Brothers – Synesthesia, two luminous spheres, tethered by their flexes to motors on the ceiling, spin in synchronised circles to a soundtrack, rising from ankleto knee-height as they spin faster and faster, revealing a floor covered with ash evocative of a lunar or volcanic surface. It’s unclear whether the spheres spin to the soundtrack or the soundtrack follows their motion, but the overall impression is of elements that are forced by programming to behave according to a defined pattern (at one point the paired lights create an infinity loop or figure of eight). On the one hand this gives the work the quality of a ballet; on the other it makes it come across as something akin to a fairground amusement. Ultimately it is neither one of these nor the other, just trapped awkwardly in between. This sense of restriction or forced cooperation carries through to a series of three new photographic works titled Brothers – Solicitude (2016). Each features the same pair of sweaty wrestlers, stripped to their underpants, their arms locked in combat by plaster casts that stretch from the elbow of one to the elbow of the other. So while they are literally locked in combat, they are unable to do anything; win, for example. The loss of control of one’s body and the dependence on another’s renders them little more than living sculptures, in a way that makes the avoidance of any potential violence (at the expense of things like liberty and freedom) an ethically complex issue. And that’s a complexity that’s ever-present in Takamine’s work.

The mildly erotic character of Brothers – Solicitude is ramped up several levels in the artist’s most famous, most controversial and least-shown (for reasons that will become clear) videowork, Kimura-san (1998). The Kimura of the title was a victim of the 1955 Morinaga poisoned baby-formula incident, which left him unable to control his limbs or talk. The video portrays the artist (who, at the time of the video, had been one of Kimura’s voluntary carers for five years) talking to Kimura, caressing his body, lifting his pyjamas to tweak his nipples and finally jerking him off to a closeup, slow-motion climax. Along the way Takamine muses on Kimura’s (enforced) acceptance of his lack of control of his body (and of what others do to it) and claims, a little disturbingly, that he wants to make him a star. The artist also explains, somewhat hesitantly, that the noises Kimura makes and his eye movements indicate his consent to the public display of the video. But it’s hard to know whether the artist is celebrating his friend’s assertion of his free will or whether it’s the artist’s will that’s really on display. Neither he nor Kimura are gay, Takamine asserts at one point in his monologue rather defensively, somewhat undermining confidence in the overarching narrative about him giving sexual pleasure to someone who cannot pleasure himself. The Kimura-san video on display here is in fact split between the original recording of the artist and Kimura, and the documentation of a performance in which the artist sits in front of a two-screen projection of the same, his head in a cage that he uses to smash and grind panes of glass at key moments in the video. It’s unclear as to whether this is some weird form of personal atonement or a symbolic breaking of barriers. It’s debatable whether the artist is (however briefly) taking possession of his friend’s body

facing page, top Brothers – Solicitude II, 2016, laser print, 76 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist

(for the purpose of making a shocking artwork) or whether the artist imagines that his intimate relationship with his passive friend is in some ways an utterly stripped down and fundamental description of what it means to be social (and an advocacy of disabled people’s right to pleasure). Ultimately it’s the fact that you’re never quite certain who has the power in the relationship between artist and ‘star’ that makes the video so disturbing and, consequently, so powerful. It also, in turn, makes one wonder if we are capable of judging any relationship in terms other than those that suggest a powerful and a powerless party. For one viewpoint on the work might certainly be that it records everyone getting what everyone wants. Even if, at the end of it all, the artist indicates that he wishes he could have done better. Read that how you like. After watching Kimura-san, you certainly feel that Takamine might have done better with To the Sea (2005), a video of the face of the artist’s wife as she goes into labour. At times it comes across as tender, at others simply voyeuristic, but ultimately its public screening seems to take the intimacy out of an intimate relationship, perhaps because the relationship between subject and recorder does seem to be an uneven one in terms of power dynamics (and who, but a voyeur, wants to watch someone else’s home videos, however well-crafted and sensual they are?). Similarly, the widely exhibited stopmotion video God Bless America (2002), in which the artist and his partner spend 17 days in a red, womblike studio apartment watching tv, canoodling in bed and all the while shaping two tons of clay into a succession of giant heads, culminating in a caricature of George Bush that sings the titular song, seems like, well, just messing around. Nirmala Devi

facing page, bottom Kimura-san, 1998, single-channel video, 9 min 37 sec. Courtesy the artist

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Winter 2016

The Propeller Group Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 4 June – 13 November Based between Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles, The Propeller Group is both a threeperson art collective and production company who use their dual status to investigate the porous boundaries between advertising and art. While the group’s hybrid contemporaries the Bernadette Corporation and K-Hole focus on individual, marketable versions of identity by incorporating high-end fashion or trend forecasting into their art practice, The Propeller Group harnesses the language of advertising to explore its effect on large political projects and nation building. Specifically, their work unpacks Vietnam’s dominant sociopolitical narratives in the transformational decades following the Vietnam-American War. The Propeller Group at MCA Chicago is the collective’s first museum survey, showcasing work from the past five years. The exhibition includes seven moving-image works and a variety of related sculptures, all of which also appear on screen. The show opens with Television Commercial for Communism (2011), in which actors dressed head to toe in white, nondescript clothes are cast as the protagonists of amicable, everyday scenarios – a family sharing a meal, workers on a construction site or young creatives playing music together. A soothing voiceover reads lines from Manifesto for the New Communism (2011–16), a wall-mounted bolt of silk and hand-

embroidered text that offers the affable invitation to ‘live as one and speak the language of smiles’. This utopic yet unsettling series of tableaux is a collaboration between The Propeller Group and the Vietnamese branch of TBWA, an advertising agency most widely known for its 1984 Super Bowl commercial that introduced Apple’s Macintosh computer. Television Commercial for Communism ironically employs a capitalist strategy to deliver a communist message, succinctly highlighting the complexities of present day Vietnam’s coexisting ideologies. Vietnam was one of the last countries to pivot towards global capitalism, and yet in the years since its 2007 entrance into the World Trade Organization (one year after the formation of The Propeller Group), it has become a fast-growing emergent economy, experiencing an influx of foreign brands. This East–West ideological clash is underscored in AK-47 vs. M16 (2015–), an ongoing body of research into the Soviet AK-47 and Americanmade M16, two nearly identical rifles that first saw battle in the Vietnam-American War. The AK-47 vs. the M16: Gel Blocks (2015) is a visuallystunning series of six cubed gelatin sculptures, each the size of an elongated cinderblock, displayed within six custom-built chest-height vitrines. To create the sculptures, opposing rifles were each fired into either end of a gelatin

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block, a material that mimics the density of human tissue and is commonly used to study wound ballistics. The ammunition meets at a central collision point creating a radiating cloud of flaked shrapnel and bullet paths preserved like jagged cracks splitting ice. Despite their forensic and clinical appearance, the sculptures serve as visceral memorials to those wounded and killed during the Cold War. The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music (2014) is a vivid moving-image work that likens South Vietnamese funerary processions to the celebratory jazz funerals of New Orleans. The camera floats seamlessly through Vietnam’s wooded forests, tight urban passageways and the Mekong Delta, a landscape conflated with the Mississippi River Delta. Set to the bright, mellow sounds of a brass band, the film reaches its peak in a series of death-defying performances by a sword swallower, fire breather and snake charmer. Borrowing its slick overcrank camera technique from music videos, the work captures an ecstatic funeral in celebratory slow-motion. The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music takes its title from a Vietnamese Buddhist proverb calling for the playing of music for the dead. It depicts death not as an endpoint but a joyful transition – an act of reincarnation in a society that venerates its ancestors and the afterlife. Sara Cluggish

Nástio Mosquito T.T.T.–Template Temples of Tenacity Fondazione Prada, Milan 7 July – 25 September Nástio Mosquito’s T.T.T.–Template Temples of Tenacity sees the Angolan artist collaborating once again with fellow artist Vic Pereiró under the name Nastivicious. The duo, founded in 2008 and here working alongside illustrator Ada Diez, have produced a multimedia installation for the ground floor of Fondazione Prada’s Podium. The work, titled WEorNOT (Nativicious’ Temple #01) (2016), turns the space into a kind of secular sanctuary, primarily via large-scale stained-glass windows depicting scenes influenced by proverbs chosen from Spain, Kenya and Angola, alongside more general universal sayings. These proverbs and sayings are written on two sets of long black wooden benches that evoke the aesthetic of modern pews and include, among others, the phrase (apparently by the gay Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos): ‘They tried to bury us – they did not know we were seeds.’ Among the images making up the stainedglass window, the viewer can see a man, a woman and a child standing wearing life jackets and facing a firing squad. The trio, which read as a family, stand on top of two books: Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Other books surrounding them (and the soldiers poised to fire upon them)

include Plato’s Republic (c. 380 BC), Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949), the Bible and Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320). Aside from narrative depictions such as this, other references within the stained glass window include Duchamp’s Fountain (1917, situated above the entrance to the ‘temple’), a figure wearing a virtual reality mask, Viagra pills and a number of boxers, one of whom bears the face of Ronald McDonald. When I spoke to Mosquito, the artist strongly emphasised the personal aspect of the show, as viewers were asked to reflect for themselves on the imagery and its possible meanings. The work, he said, is intended to represent some fundamental behavioural traits of humanity, albeit without passing judgement. Continuing in this vein, visitors are invited to don headphone sets, placed around a podium area (consisting of three steps descending into a central square), and featuring a looped voice recording by Mosquito. The audio starts: “I begin by asking you what is wisdom, what is knowledge, whose wisdom? Whose knowledge? Life, are you contemplating? Are you honouring?” Later, the recording invites the visitor to draw, in books placed alongside the headsets, “whatever you feel this moment celebrates”.

WEorNOT (Nativicious’ Temple #01) appears, perhaps like the religious venues it appropriates, to tread a fine line between a celebration of humanity in all its facets and a condemnation of its worst excesses (seen reflected in images of violence). The flipside of the amoral approach expressed by Mosquito in interviews is of course a condoning of all aspects of human behaviour. During the show’s run, Mosquito collaborated with musician Dijf Sanders and the Golden Guys choir on the performance I Make Love To You. You Make Love To Me. Let Love Have Sex With The Both Of Us (Part 1 – The Gregorian Gospel Vomit) (2016). The performance consisted of two groups of choir singers dressed in white T-shirts, jeans and pumps, converging from opposite sides of the Fondazione Prada’s grounds and singing “Jesus loves me, of this I know / Jesus loves me for the Bible tells me so.” The appropriation of Christian songs within a secular contemporary art context demonstrates Mosquito’s capacity to ask open and genuinely thoughtprovoking questions about the human state in both contradictory and confrontational ways, and without passing specific judgement. Such an approach invites failure, in that it seems impossible to avoid judgement in reality. However, the attempt is bold. Mike Watson

Nastivicious in collaboration with Ada Diez, WEorNOT (Nastivicious’ Temple #01) (detail), 2016, site-specific, mixed-media installation. Courtesy the artists

Winter 2016

Hiraki Sawa Man in Camera Parafin, London 15 July – 17 September Hiraki Sawa’s film Man in Camera (2015–16) comprises footage of a nondescript room, in which the artist can at times be observed working, and onto which have been superimposed animations: ink drawings of ladders spin around on the walls and sticks fall from the ceiling and down between the floorboards. There is a minimal, repetitive soundtrack too: a sparse percussive melody that sounds as though it’s coming from a music box. All in all, one could go a little mad listening to these notes chiming over and over again and watching these visualisations floating around the otherwise unremarkable domestic space of the film. ‘In camera’ means ‘in private’ in Latin legalese, and this work, and the exhibition as a whole, evokes the slight mania and obsession that comes with spending far too much time indoors and on your own, mulling things over. An animated figure attempts to climb a wooden ladder but, though he goes through all the motions, never moves any higher; his line-drawn body is unable to connect with the solid rungs and is caught, like the soundtrack, in a loop that’s going nowhere. Perhaps he is the ‘man in camera’ of the exhibition’s title,

his plight suggesting the difficulty of climbing the ladder to success, the sometimes-illusory nature of progress and the passing of time. Or perhaps the man in camera is the artist, interfering with its workings by drawing onto the images it produces. The 17 works on display from Sawa’s IOTA series (2016) comprise old family photographs as well as found photographs, scanned and reprinted in the size and format of stamps, with perforated edges, then worked over obsessively and meticulously with white ink. Some of the figures from these scenes of everyday life in the past have had their faces crosshatched or their silhouettes filled in with dots; others have been left untouched. Stamps are linked to their places of origin and, for stamp collectors, to particular times, and in these works Sawa returns to former places and times and inks out parts of them. These gestures seem intended to visualise the operation of memory: how we have forgotten the faces and stories of people from our past, or how we can no longer access them because we have lost touch or they are no longer with us. Grasping hands, and more ladders, are sketched over some of these

Man in Camera, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Peter Mallet. Courtesy Parafin, London

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photographs, suggesting the desire to reach towards the past or climb back down into it. It is hard to move backward as well as forward; maybe the animated figure in Man in Camera is trying to climb down the ladder rather than up it. Some of Sawa’s older works are exhibited downstairs – where another percussive melody cycles around to the point of distraction – such as the films Sleeping Machine I and II (2011), which show, respectively, a machine counting numbers down and nighttime footage of East London’s Ridley Road Market. Superimposed onto the latter are animations of cogs rotating and goats trotting along the poles of the market stands, referencing the goat meat sold at the market but, presumably, also operating as stand-ins for the sheep we count to calm our whirring minds and fall asleep. Here, again using loops of music and animation, the artist evokes the feeling of falling asleep and dreaming, just as upstairs he evokes the feeling of daydreaming at work or trying to recollect the past, and suggests how these activities seem to take us to another time and place but then return us right back where we began. Dean Kissick

Takuro Kuwata From Tea Bowl Alison Jacques Gallery, London 7 October – 5 November To see some of Takuro Kuwata’s large, colourful untitled ceramic works (all 2016) in Alison Jacques’s main gallery space, you’d hardly imagine that they are rooted in the traditional techniques of Japanese tea-bowl manufacture. The melting, exploding and often phallic forms look more like something a Shaivite nightclub owner with a lingam fetish might have littering his house. One such work, its surface pitted with fingermarks, features a bright blue tublike base topped by a shining gold protuberance, the whole spotted by pustules, from which has oozed a red-brown chocolaty excrement. Despite the evidence of handcrafting offered by the fingermarks, the overall impression is that the artist’s materials have exerted a control over their final form. Smaller, often candy-coloured works dotted around these almost three-metrehigh totems, in a kind of rock-garden arrangement, look like the experiments of a cake decorator gone mad – thick glazes that have

cracked and fallen down the sides of objects, applied droplets of glaze that appear like so many sprinkles, or seeds on a fruit, or drips of sweat. And all are sensual in the extreme: they make you want to caress, lick and fondle their glazed surfaces. The gallery’s side space, however, contains a series of more conventionally palm-size cuplike works – at least cuplike in the sense that they offer some sort of obvious functionality, however wonky or collapsing their overall form – presented in a museological display in two neat rows on chest-high shelves. Each of these demonstrates an aesthetic or technique found in the generally larger works displayed in the main space. Among those techniques are kairagi, a means of introducing imperfections caused by the shrinking and cracking of the glaze, and ishihaze, in which stones are overheated in the kiln until they melt or rupture. Importantly such techniques originally evolved as a result

of knowledge gained through accidents, before becoming part of a codified tradition of tea-bowl making. And Kuwata’s works as a whole are self-evidently a mixture of nature and manufacture, planning and accident, and the acceptance, and perhaps overcoming, of the latter. Within all that, of course, is a strong element of wabi-sabi, the sense of a beauty that is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. Yet ultimately a sense of any particular philosophy is not the overwhelming impression with which these works leave you. The artist talks about how he found that his early work in traditional ceramics didn’t really communicate with friends he had met on the hip-hop street-dance scene of which he was a part. His decision to take his work to a material and aesthetic extreme did. And it’s those extreme sensual pleasures, an unthinking feeling of fun, that make Kuwata’s work linger in the mind. Mark Rappolt

Untitled (detail), 2016, porcelain, glaze, pigment, steel, platinum, 83 × 75 × 70 cm. Photo: Michael Brzezinski. © the artist. Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London

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Candice Lin A Body Reduced to Brilliant Colour Gasworks, London 22 September – 11 December Candice Lin’s determination to engage the senses is apparent from the minute you enter this solo exhibition. Visitors are invited, through touch, sight, sound and smell, to understand a complex movement of material and ideas through structured systems of control and exchange. As a result, one’s consciousness of the body and its ability to ‘digest’ such a display is heightened. An invitation to leaf through a fleshcoloured book, containing text written in an unidentifiable language and faux-historical drawings that catalogue culturally loaded colonial trade goods foregrounds the centrepiece to the exhibition: an imposing yet precariously assembled structure supporting a complicated system of tubes and pumps that carry a bloodied red liquid through the space. Traversing and penetrating porcelain vases, glass jars and modified household objects as it goes, it also passes through a copper still, which seems to confirm this object’s status as an active apparatus of some sort. More alarming, however, is the putrid aroma emanating from a shallow pool of the dark red liquid at the installation’s core. A working kettle and a multitude of tools and substances (also depicted in the book illustrations), such as sugar, tea and unrecognisable

earthy materials, litter the structure. Detritus, perhaps, from the ‘feeding’ of this machine? This is a circulatory system as sculpture, a failing body, its waste collecting in a glossy pool, while an additional network of tubes siphon and expedite the excess out of view. An audible monologue draws your attention next door, wherein lies the final excretion of fluid onto the floor of the faux-marbled second gallery. Titled System for a Stain (all works 2016), the immersive work that traverses both sites finally collides with the sound piece, A Memory Blushing with Innocence, and the transformation of goods into liquid waste is framed by a female voice. It describes the body in abstract terms, relaying childhood memories as the daughter of a plantation owner: a description of a life whose privilege is rooted in the slave trade – a voice that speaks for collective guilt, for America (the artist was born in Massachusetts), for the Western world perhaps? Piecing these works together, the exhibition reveals a significant research enquiry. The translation of the book, available as a gallery handout, reveals the original to be written in Formosan, a language invented by George Psalmanazar, a self-styled mythic figure of the eighteenth century who claimed to be from the fictional state of Formosa.

System for a Stain, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Andy Keate

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The exhibition itself becomes an act of translation, from research project to visual metaphor. Vitrines containing living cockroaches and silkworms, forced to choose between sugar (familiar as trap bait) or sugar paste replicas of Chinese porcelain vases for sustenance, alongside faux-historical etchings and paintings that unearth the consequences of exploitation, describe the toll these loaded objects have taken on communities. Encountering the insects in these additional works suggests the ambiguous substance to be carmine, a natural dye extracted from the cochineal and highly prized across historic colonial routes. This is the red colour we see in the fluid. The transformation of goods such as tea, sugar and cochineal, and the journey they take through the body of the sculpture, turning into ‘blood’, becomes a visual metaphor for the materialist urges at the root of colonial violence and echoes the flow of bodies and matter through colonial trade. While all the works in the show are powerfully reiterative, the exhibition’s poignancy and success can be found in System for a Stain’s singular visual poetry and the erudite suggestion that the marks left behind when people and culture are commodified are somehow indelible. Lynton Talbot

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook Selfhood’s Garden Gimpel Fils, London 8 September – 5 November The act of staring out to sea is an iconic trope of human behaviour – one of our most elemental and archaic vehicles for reverie, along with gazing into campfires or watching passing clouds. So it’s clever of Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook to turn that experience of contemplation back on itself, in a work that functions as a kind of meditation on the very act of looking. Lai Lee Ya (2015) is a two-channel, 12-minute video, in which nothing much happens. Yet somehow its stately monotony is captivating. On the left is a fixed-position shot of the back of a woman’s head – presumably the artist’s – as she observes the sea before her. Occasionally, the coastal breeze ruffles her hair. The righthand shot, meanwhile, focuses on the empty ocean, with small waves endlessly cresting and breaking. A single, unified soundtrack plays noises of wind and surf. And it’s natural, given the conventions of cinema, to assume that the righthand shot represents the point-of-view of the woman on the left. Yet actually there’s no evidence for this. You can’t tell whether the parallel scenes depict the same, simultaneous waves, visible over the woman’s shoulder and then closer up; or whether they’re even filmed at the same location, for that matter. Small

breaking waves, it turns out, tend to look pretty much identical – though of course each one is really unique. And from a certain perspective, you could say the same about the back of people’s heads – whether it’s the watching woman’s, or yours as a viewer, watching her watching. In this way, then, you yourself become an essential component of the work, implicated within its framework of viewpoints, its constant assessment of distance and difference. The other works in the show are presumably also meant to stir deep realisations within us – the exhibition is titled Selfhood’s Garden – but unfortunately aren’t quite as clear or concise. Same Sea (2015) is a larger, three-channel video projection, depicting a Thai waterway and three sorts of aquatic edifice: a concrete, quayside dwelling; a fisherman’s shack, built on stilts and resembling nothing so much as a sagging jumble of sticks; and a moored yacht. The idea, perhaps, is to portray progressive states of transience and mobility, but also to make the point that such distinctions appear somehow irrelevant when set against the eternal, indifferent vastness of sky and sea. The problem is, it’s impossible to think in such abstract terms when confronted with

a more obvious and pernicious type of human hierarchy – namely, the economic conditions being portrayed, especially the grinding poverty of the fisherman. Even more oblique is Cuckoo (2016), another two-channel work, where a slow-motion shot of a dog padding around an unseen sleeper’s bed is paired with a succession of dogs, shot from above, eating meals from various floors (dogs are a recurring motif for Rasdjarmrearnsook, who frequently takes in strays). Sounds of slobbery mastication are overlaid with a female voice softly singing and keening – so there’s a contrast between something animal, vital, even sexual, on one hand, and a kind of hiddenness, a mournful ethereality, on the other. And that’s a reading echoed by a sequence of small photographs, An Artist with Six Dead Dogs’ Spirits (2015), where it’s Rasdjarmrearnsook, standing on a beach, whose body is depicted as vaporous and transparent, while the spectral dogs themselves are solid. It’s just a shame that the photographs, presumably in order to emphasise such shifts in materiality, have themselves been digitally manipulated to resemble heavily worked oil paintings – ones whose moody, spiritualist imagery, then, unfortunately brings to mind bad-taste hippy art. Gabriel Coxhead

Lai Lee Ya, 2015, HD video, 12 min. Courtesy the artist and Gimpel Fils, London

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The Asia-Pacific Century: Part One Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington 6–20 August Walking into The Asia-Pacific Century: Part One, the visitor is greeted by The Parallel City Picture Show (2012), by Chinese-Kiwi artist Kerry Ann Lee, as a part of which viewers are invited to don mock X-ray glasses to view her accumulation of manipulated slides – largely showing touristic and kitsch imagery collected during a residency in Taipei. It is not the first time the artist has used this kind of visual language – one which cements a vision of Chinatown as an imaginary construct that rests on the edge of reality as it is fabricated and templated throughout the world. Like many works in this exhibition, The Parallel City Picture Show makes connections between communities in different places. In this case, the Chinese diaspora in New Zealand with Chinese in Taiwan. Part of a series of activities presented by experimental art space Enjoy Public Art Gallery, this exhibition explores the surprising, sometimes subaltern, allegiances between Asia and the Pacific – though its presentation in New Zealand in an artist-run project space rather than a more formalised institution might come as a surprise. But in this context, New Zealand is an interesting territory to explore: on the one hand, it is enveloped within the Pacific Rim but has never been firmly part of more significant global decolonisation moments such as the Non-Aligned movement or the positioning of the Global South; on the other hand, this former British colonial outpost also has an active indigenous position through Māori, which provides a link to Asia’s ongoing negotiations of sovereignty. There is also a significant diasporic population of Asians in New Zealand.

Indeed, the exhibition reveals that in 2038, Asians and Pacific Islanders will make up 52 percent of the total Kiwi population, demographics that are hardly represented in art. These connections are further revealed in a work by Lana Lopesi as she gives a different take on what unites both colonised islanded nations of Taiwan and Aotearoa (Māori for New Zealand). ADMIXTURE Issues 001–004 (2016) is a colourful newspaper about the intersecting histories and economies of the two territories. Presented in English, Mandarin, Chamorro (Guam) and Samoan, the publication carries articles, infographics and posters, and is part investigative journalism and part biography. There is a serious writeup on migration dating from the 1870s from China to the Pacific, as well as details of intermarriage between the groups resulting in a 1931 ban on Chinese men socialising with Samoan women – enforced by the colonial (German) administration. There’s a personal connection, too. Lopesi, who is of Samoan descent, has a Chinese ancestor who likely came from this indentured coolie background. Elsewhere there are infographics about and recipes for the overlapping staple foods of the two places, such as coconut and taro. The exhibition also includes a series of discussions orbiting around a central archive of material put together by cocurators Emma Ng, who is an Asian New Zealander, and Ioana Gordon-Smith, who is of Pacific Island heritage. Last year, both of them initiated discussions at the 2015 Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane to link both Asia and the Pacific through art, and to provide a humbler gesture than the grandiose diplomatic display many biennial

enterprises have to undertake. A particular discovery within the archive was the catalogue of an exhibition called The Maui Dynasty (2008), curated by Anna-Marie White, former curator at the Suter Art Gallery in the small town of Nelson on the South Island of New Zealand. Using Edward Said’s concept of entanglement, The Maui Dynasty shows a clear visionary direction for Asian, Maori and Pacific artistic communities to bypass the conduit of the West for artistic dialogue. For a project whose title focuses on visions of the future through thinking about New Zealand’s demographics becoming more Asian and more Pacific, Ng and Gordon-Smith do not have a blatantly speculative approach. Rather than cherry-picking artworks as representative of the politics on display, they turn to the somewhat safer realm of research. As if in recognition of the difficulty that artists might face in materialising this enquiry and in moving beyond the rhetoric of 1990s identity politics, the exhibition follows a well-worn pattern of privileging discursivity, presenting research and talking about works-in-progress. The second part of the exhibition, scheduled for Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, in Auckland, the world’s most populous Polynesian city, promises a more concrete visual discussion. But all in all, this initiative and the future premonition from the archive materials such as those relating to The Maui Dynasty still reveal how more established state-run institutions have inherited too much from their colonial forbears, including a bureaucratic resistance to keeping up with current conversation. Vera Mey

facing page, top and bottom The Asia-Pacific Century: Part One, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy Shaun Matthews and Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington

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Books

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Existence: A Story by David Hinton Shambhala, £17.99 / US$18.95 (softcover) On the face of it, it would be easy to dismiss this book as a translator’s meditation on the impossibility of translation, and more specifically on the impossibility of rendering classical Chinese into English. ‘To translate a Chinese poem into English is to fundamentally misrepresent it,’ the author boldly claims. For Hinton the problem lies not in translating the meanings of Chinese characters (although, given that they can have more than one meaning, preserving their ambiguity is an issue), but in rendering the silence between them: the things they don’t say. On this the author is an expert, having previously translated the five masterworks of classical Chinese philosophy: I Ching (late ninth century BC), Tao Te Ching (sixth century BC), Chuang Tzu (fourth century BC), Confucius’s Analects (fifth century BC) and the writings of Mencius (fourth and third century BC). Consequently it is equally easy to say that the existence that is the subject of this book is his own: a man whose profession involves creating equivalence here insisting on the philosophical and perhaps even existential difference between two languages and cultures. Inevitably, the person who comes out looking best in all that is Hinton himself, a man who makes the impossible possible. But while at times Existence can seem self-indulgent, perhaps even a little perverse, it does, on many levels, drive towards what lies at the heart of acts of creation. Central to Hinton’s study is a painting: Shih T’ao’s Broad-Distance Pavilion, from the collection Illustrations to the poems of Huang Yan-lü (1701–02).

As with much classical painting (particularly of mountain scenes), it’s largely empty save for a depiction of the artist and his travelling companion (the poet Huang Yan-lü) standing on an outcrop to the left of the painting and contemplating a mountain range that stretches out in the background towards the right. In between, there is a cloudy nothingness and the characters of Huang’s four-line poem, which describes a landscape, most of which is not visible in the painting. In chapter after chapter (in a form of meditation), Hinton retranslates and expands the poem and with it interpretations of the painting. First in an atomised way, character by character, then gradually filling in possible pronouns (not present in the Chinese) and conjunctions. Along the way he delves into Taoist and Ch’an spirituality (Shih T’ao, the last survivor of the Ming dynasty, which fell in 1644 to Manchurian invaders, was at the time of the painting a Ch’an Buddhist monk), the pictographic origins of Chinese characters (the concrete connection between Chinese words and things in the world) and the connected nature of absence and presence in language, philosophy and lived experience. ‘Much like the moment of thought arising and then falling silent in Ch’an meditation,’ Hinton writes, ‘a classical Chinese poem is a glancing gesture that returns us promptly to that generative field of silent Absence.’ ‘The cosmology of Absence and Presence structures everything in ancient China,’

he continues, and part of his project is to demonstrate the ways in which classical Chinese painting and poetry, with its shifting, fluid and unstable interpretations, is a part of, rather than separate from, lived existence and thus offers a return to a primal experience of being. Where the language and art of the West portray the world from the outside (a product of Cartesian dualism, among other things), Chinese classical painting, poetry and calligraphy (between which, Hinton asserts, there is no difference) seek to be part of the changing world they ostensibly represent. Or as much a part of it as any constructed language can be. For those of you who are so contemporary that you think that all this is only of relevance to worshippers of the art of the past, you’ll find similar issues explicitly at play in a work such as The Dark Forest (2008), the second volume in awardwinning sciencefiction writer Cixin Liu’s trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past. The book may at times feel slightly hippyish, repetitious and written with an occasional inelegance that is the opposite of the work and concepts it describes (a concept such as the universal connectedness of existence, here rendered as ‘existence-tissue’, inevitably calls to mind Kleenex advertisements), yet in Hinton’s study there is the basis of why people bother to create works of art and why those works hold a continuing fascination for those who view them. Nirmala Devi

Breaking Knees: Sixty-three Very Short Stories from Syria by Zakaria Tamer, trans Ibrahim Muhawi Periscope Books, £9.99 softcover The Arabic term qissah refers to a narrative, its etymological root – qassa, meaning to recount a story – found in the Quran. In the past it has been used to describe a short, dramatically penned nonfictional account, but in its modern interpretation (propelled by the development of presses during the nineteenth century, and subsequent frequency of publishing in magazines and newspapers), the Arabic fictional short story has gained popularity as a means by which to place particular sociopolitical and religious aspects of life in the Arab world under scrutiny. The very short story, al-qissa al-qasira jiddan, has been favoured by the writer Zakaria Tamer since 1960 (when his first collection, Neighing of the White Stallion, was published), for the literary form’s ability

to present a prism of specific themes through which the refracted tales of many different characters shed light on contemporary Syrian culture. Although the stories in Breaking Knees (first published in Arabic in 2002, almost a decade before the Arab Spring) can be read individually, they work best, in the way Tamer intended, as a whole, presenting back to the reader a microcosm of Syrian society, one that Tamer treats with an elegant cynicism. Once the editor of al-Ma’rifa, the culture ministry’s magazine, Tamer was fired from this role in 1980 for publishing pro-freedom (from Hafez al-Assad’s regime) content. Story 54, a mere paragraph, is about a statue whose stony presence (undeniably that of Assad) cows an old bent-backed, grieving widow, and

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which, according to Tamer, is worth only seven sentences and ‘the birds whose pleasure it was to crap upon it’. Political dissent is evident in the later tales, but it is a focus on the defiance of women that threads its way through the collection: their subversive acts and reclamation of their own sexuality delivered with a derisive jab to the rib of a traditionally male-dominated society. A woman frightens away a rapist’s attempt with her enthusiasm; some wives mock their husbands’ lack of natural ‘gifts’, finding comfort (and pleasure) in other men’s beds; and other women are puppeteers, manipulating family ties. In short, Breaking Knees is a compelling collection, at points hideous and hysterical, leaving no doubt as to who exactly is being kneecapped. Fi Churchman

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The Exform by Nicolas Bourriaud Verso, £9.99 (softcover) Nicolas Bourriaud’s new book is a hundredpage addition to Verso Futures: a series that ‘addresses the outer limits of political and social possibility’. You can see why Bourriaud might still have seemed a thinker (dread word, for sure) with some purchase on aesthetico-political things to come. Since the well-timed publication of his Relational Aesthetics in 1998, he has continued floating new concepts tethered to his curatorial activities, notably ‘altermodern’ and ‘the radicant’. But each of these has been vaguer, more abstracted, less plausible than the last, and The Exform surely marks a giddy limit of sorts. The book and its central concept court such flummoxing banality that one wonders if Bourriaud is not pursuing a type of scurrilous theory-fiction, a satire of vacuous curatorial guff and artworld aspiration to philosophical acuity. No such luck. The ‘exform’ itself is actually a conceptual McGuffin, dispatched in a few sentences and then mostly ignored. The term appears to describe those privileged moments when art explicitly stages a judgment about what or who is to be excluded from its purview and thus – it’s quite a ‘thus’ – also from the realm of the political. The exform is a point of contact between art and politics, but exactly how or where this ‘plug’ or ‘socket’ (these have different functions, no?) may be discovered, Bourriaud feels little compulsion to say.

Instead his book devolves into accounts of theoretical allies and analogues to his otherwise evanescent project. Far, far too much of The Exform is devoted to assertive but textually inattentive explication of Louis Althusser’s late writings on psychoanalysis, and Bourriaud includes a tonally heedless retelling of the Marxist theorist’s murder of his partner in 1980 – Althusser, we’re told, ‘wound up’ killing Hélène Rytmann. There is something to be said for the turn back to Althusser, a philosopher who was not just out of style but ‘completely inaudible’ among young French intellectuals when Bourriaud was first introduced to his work in the 1980s. In part, The Exform is a coy personal narrative, somewhat delayed and displaced, about how a generation raised on the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, the ‘weak thought’ of Gianni Vattimo and Paul Virilio’s ‘aesthetics of disappearance’, had subsequently to admit the force and presence of a certain real, which was not so amenable to theoretical finesse. But really, so far so familiar: this is the stuff of paneldiscussion precis and consensus, not serious theoretical work, which would have to concede that things were more complex. Much of The Exform sees Bourriaud flicking lightly through an unsurprising syllabus – Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, Deleuze and Guattari – in search

of fleeting metaphors that accord with his nebulous ideas. It all reads like the work of a talented but rambling graduate student, and in the spirit of cult-studs past, it even arrives littered with capriciously deployed italics. And what news does The Exform bring about contemporary art? Well, in ‘the era of the internet’ (yes, really) and ‘communication happening in real time’ (say, what?), it seems artists and the artworld are thrilled skinny with ‘network structures and their derivatives’. That is, when they are not (Jeremy Deller, Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Hirschhorn) redirecting scraps of cultural garbage or (David Noonan, Tacita Dean, Olivia Plender) doing some things in black and white. In other words, Bourriaud has no governing thesis whatever about contemporary art, but remains addicted to formulations that begin with ‘our epoch is characterised by…’ or ‘the art of our day is wholly…’ One can only guess that the exigencies of a certain kind of exhibition-making seem to demand constructions of this type, conceptual snapshots of what a whole generation or culture seems to want from art now. It simply doesn’t work – what exactly is an artistic ‘epoch’? – and it’s remarkable that Bourriaud thinks a few cursory paragraphs name-checking (and in no other way engaging with) well-known artists will describe the present, never mind a future. Brian Dillon

[inaudible] A Politics of Listening in 4 Acts by Lawrence Abu Hamdan Sternberg Press, Portikus and Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, €12 (softcover) “I became interested in the legal space as an acoustic space because it’s filled with many different types of listening,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan told me when I interviewed him several years ago. “It’s called a hearing, more often than not. I’ve been thinking about what the voice is and what the voice does and its politics, because [in that space] it’s really where speech acts.”Abu Hamdan, an artist whose material and subject is sound, but who works in a variety of media, from photography and graphic works to audiovisual illustration and performance, has been researching the politics of speech since 2010. Looking at the ways in which a person’s voice can be turned against them, Abu Hamdan has produced works that highlight such instances: through lie detection software; through the Miranda warning, given by police to suspects informing them of their right to silence;

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or through the Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin program, which is deployed by many Western countries to ascertain whether refugees’ language use matches their claimed countries of origin. [inaudible] A Politics of Listening in 4 Acts is the first artist book he has produced, following his exhibition (Taqiyya) – The Right to Duplicity (Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, 2015) and published alongside his most recent show, Earshot, at Portikus, Frankfurt / Main, 2016. The book offers insight into specific instances of Abu Hamdan’s artistic practice and research, presenting concepts as scripted ‘acts’ in a play. Each concept (linked to an existing work) is given context as a ‘scenario’ (written by Abu Hamdan and his collaborators), which functions as an introduction to the different acts, engaging with and guiding the reader through the slim volume.

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The form of the book is cleverly conceived. Given that Abu Hamdan works with sound – and considering that three of the four acts are specifically about speech – scripting the research in the form of a play is an obvious choice of format. But this literary form makes evident that speech is not just everyday and automatic; it is also performed: acted. Reading the monologue of an asylum seeker straining to talk for 15 uninterrupted minutes, or a conversation about the right to silence and the pronunciation of the Arabic letter qāf (‫)ق‬, or a fictional court session, or the sermon of a Muslim cleric (complete with tonal cues) allows you almost to hear these voices in your head. The best moments are when you find yourself testing the ‫ ق‬at the back of your throat, breathing between words, and letting vowels slip aloud. Fi Churchman

The Garden of Foolish Indulgences by Oh Yong Hwee and Koh Hong Teng Pause Narratives, SG$24.50 (softcover) The garden in question in Oh Yong Hwee and Koh Hong Teng’s new graphic novel is Singapore. More precisely, it’s the multiple ways in which people have imagined the island over the years; how generations of immigrants have cultivated this land – both real and imaginary – and continue to do so today. Of course, there is also a literal garden: an orchard that thrived in early-twentieth-century Singapore. Owned and tended to by Han Wai Toon, a Chinese immigrant who came to Singapore to seek his fortune in 1915, the orchard attracts the attention of a present-day migrant, Ye Feng’an, a journalist with a Chinese-language magazine targeted at other recent migrants like himself. He and his wife, Yuxuan, have moved to Singapore’s English-speaking environment to give their young son a leg-up in the world. These two parallel stories of migration, set almost a century apart, bring into relief the stark differences, and some resonances, between various waves of Chinese migration to the city-state. Han’s garden became a cultural institution for an emigré scene of Chinese artists and writers, drawn to Han’s cultivation of a refined, genteel space in the middle of the harsh tropics. As Feng’an digs into Han’s life and times, his own family is facing a minor crisis. Singapore isn’t turning out quite as they’ve expected: their son is picking up more Singlish than English; every

day they face xenophobic microaggression; and they’re not crazy about the food. This is where the novel is at its weakest: as a depiction of migrant realities. Poorly developed, the present-day characters drift blandly through their lives, and the reader, too, watches them passively, with little insight into their struggles and personal crises. Often, Feng’an and Yuxuan are rhetorical mouthpieces for the questions the novel is asking about migration. And that’s the main problem here: the novel lulls the reader into a bland social-realist drama, when it is really an exquisitely poetic meditation on the shifting meanings of Singapore over several generations. Through a complex series of motifs and metaphors, both literary and visual, the novel reaches a layered understanding of the island as an ongoing, constantly shifting patchwork of personal projects of nostalgia, homemaking and private aspiration. This web of ideas resists the easy nostalgia that attends to cultural production around Singapore’s lost heritage. You’re reminded that even as we lament the passing of this rich space, the orchard was in itself a nostalgic, ultimately hollow reproduction of another way of life. A century later, Feng’an treks into the heart of the jungle, only to find a single, fruitless rambutan tree and a latrine. There’s a similar critical intelligence to the artwork. Koh’s strategy is a clear and

deliberate stylistic contrast between the presentday and twentieth-century narratives. For the most part, he opts for a simple, ‘talking heads’ style for the contemporary passages. It’s in the Han sections where the artwork blooms – the panels become richer, each frame filled with painterly strokes and details. It seems a predictable pattern at first: something about the past feels richer, feels more real. But near the novel’s end, after Feng’an concludes his investigation into Han’s life, and deep uncertainty sets in about whether or not his family will remain in Singapore, Koh flips the script. There's a sublime, silent series of panels set in a cold Singapore subway station. Angular escalators and stairways spread out like cold, grey foliage, with odd bursts of colour – a mural, a colour-coded subway map – catching the eye. Here, progress and development, the big enemies of nostalgia and heritage, melt into the same meaning-making exercises that have, the novel suggests, for a long time now, worked like complex algorithms at the heart of the city. There’s something moving in these moments: all change is part of a human impulse to work the land, to make it arable. Whether it’s Han’s tilling of the soil to give birth to poetry, or Feng’an’s family seizing on the opportunities of Westernised modernity, or the government’s relentless urban development, Singapore is an empty cipher to be constantly repurposed and rewritten. Joel Tan

Just for the Love of It: Popular Music in Penang, 1930s–1960s by Paul Augustin and James Lochhead Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, RM68 (hardcover) Having previously been under the control of the sultan of Kedah (one of the earliest sultanates on the Malay Peninsula), the sparsely populated island of Penang was colonised by the British (under the auspices of the East India Company) in 1786. It quickly became a major free port and trading centre with legislated freedom of religion, all of which contributed to the fact that by the twentieth century its population included a mix of residents who traced their roots to the earliest indigenous Malays, nonindigenous Malays, Chinese, Baba Nyonya (descendants of early Chinese settlers who integrated some Malay customs into their heritage), Indians, Eurasians and Europeans. Compiled by the founder of Penang Island Jazz Festival (Augustin) and a locally based arts advocate and journalist (Lochhead), Just for the Love of It uses a history of Penang’s music as both

a nostalgic trip into the island’s recent past and an enjoyable (as in, nonacademic) index of its cosmopolitan, multiethnic culture. Illustrated with ads, newspaper cuttings and photographs, it’s even designed in a way that replicates midtwentieth-century aesthetics. Early on we’re introduced to ronggeng (a musical style and social dance said to have originated in Malacca as a fusion of influences brought by Portuguese settlers and Malay traditions, as well as Western popular songs), boria (which originated in Persia) and bangsawan (which originated in Bombay), and the general rise of the leisure industry during the first few decades of the twentieth century. At this point the focus switches to the distribution of music and the emergence of radio stations and their role in keeping the Second World War at a distance (Penang’s economy boomed at the beginning of the war,

Winter 2016

until the British deserted in December 1941 and the Japanese arrived with the following opening broadcast: ‘Hello, Singapore, this is Penang calling. How do you like our bombing?’). And radio’s role in the distribution of propaganda in Penang really began. All of these themes (plus the emergence of cinema as the most important distributor of music) are drawn together in the sections documenting the postwar years and the rise of the modern entertainment industry together with the influence and adaptation of Western popular music (and the rise of Beatlesstyle kugiran bands) and the rampant commercialisation associated with it. The twist and the mashed potato replaced ronggeng in popular affection and boria became part of heritage culture. If you want a lighthearted guide to a Southeast Asian encounter with modernity, this is it. It comes with a CD too! Nirmala Devi

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For more on Sa-ard, see overleaf

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Contributors

Thanavi Chotpradit is a lecturer in modern and contemporary Thai art history at Silpakorn University in Thailand. She completed her PhD in art history at Birkbeck College, London. Her areas of interest include Thai modern and contemporary art in relation to memory studies, war commemoration and Thai politics, and in this issue she examines why contemporary Thai artists are not engaging more with their socio-political context. Brian Curtin is an Irish-born art critic, curator and lecturer based in Bangkok since 2000. His writings have been published in numerous international publications and he is currently completing a monograph on contemporary art in Thailand for Reaktion Books. Since 2011 he has directed the experimental venue H Project Space in Bangkok. Here he writes about political division among artists in Thailand. Max Crosbie-Jones is managing editor of the fashion, arts and lifestyle magazine, Bangkok Post The Magazine, and was previously the Thailand correspondent for Artinfo. He collects retro Thai print ephemera, especially movie posters. For this issue he interviews Thai artist Udomsak Krisanamis in his studio.

Nataline Colonnello is a sinologist and contemporary art professional based in China since 2001. After working as editor and critic at chinese-art.com, she was the Beijing artistic director of Galerie Urs Meile, and in 2012 joined Ink Studio. Her critical essays and interviews have appeared in numerous international publications and she currently works as an art advisor, curator and writer. In this issue, she writes about Wang Xingwei. Alan Oei is an artist-curator interested in the workings between art history, politics and community. Huang Wei, a fictional postwar painter of maimed children, is the alter-ego Oei uses to present his paintings. His work has been shown in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Melbourne and New York. Aside from this, Oei’s curatorial projects include the OH! Open House, an annual art walkabout inside local neighbourhoods and residences. Currently, he is also artistic director of the Substation, Singapore’s first contemporary art space. This month he writes about the role and responsibility of art institutions in Singapore.

Advisory Board Defne Ayas, Richard Chang, Anselm Franke, Claire Hsu, Pi Li, Eugene Tan, Koki Tanaka, Wenny Teo, Philip Tinari, Chang Tsong-zung, Yao Jui-Chung Contributing Writers Thanavi Chotpradit, Nataline Colonnello, Gabriel Coxhead, Max Crosbie-Jones, Brian Curtin, Nirmala Devi, Gallery Girl, Paul Gravett, Guo Juan, Hu Fang, Gu Ling, Hyo Gyoung Jeon, Ming Lin, Vera Mey, Charu Nivedita, Alan Oei, Niru Ratnam, Katrina Stuart Santiago, Lynton Talbot, Tan Guo-Liang, Joel Tan, Zhang Hanlu Contributing Artists / Photographers Birdhead, Mikael Gregorsky, Sa-ard

Sa-ard (preceding pages)

Manga has exerted a vital influence on the young throughout most of Asia. The rising Thai cartoonist Tanis Werasakwong, who publishes his work under the name Sa-ard, is no exception, citing popular translations of serials that he lapped up as a boy – Takehiko Inoue’s Slam Dunk (1990–96), Mitsuru Adachi’s Touch (1981–86) and Yusuke Murata’s Eyeshield 21 (2002–09) – as formative for his character design and art style. Closer to home, another influence would be the popular magazines Kai Hua Roh and Maha Sanook, put out by Thai publisher Banluesarn, whose humour strips have been spun off into animation, movies and merchandising. Spurred on by his elder sister’s laughter, Werasakwong began posting his early comics on the Internet at the age of fourteen. Of the name ‘Sa-ard’, he explains, “I wanted a word that signifies simplicity, so I chose the word for ‘clean’, as it’s simple and easy to remember.” His comics were easy to read as well, especially the ‘silent’ or wordless ones. Followers of Sa-ard’s crisply drawn online humour multiplied, and publishers took notice. He made his print debut in 2011, with The Man Who Follows His Own Voice (Let’s Comics, Bangkok), compiling five endearing short comedy-dramas about people striving to realise their dreams.

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His comics compendium went on to win him a Silver prize in in Japan’s prestigious 5th International Manga Award (2012). As more doors opened, his parents’ concerns about his risky career choice gradually subsided. Matichon newspaper hired him in 2014 to create the weekly domestic gag strip ‘The Jengpeng Family’, which has been collected, along with travel journal comics and other short pieces, into seven paperbacks so far, the latest self-published. Maturing into a perceptive commentator on his culture, Sa-ard was given a regular slot in Giraffe, a trendy free Thai magazine also published by Banluesarn, and tasked with developing the topic of city living in Thailand. The observational skills he’s honed are reflected in his new Strip for ArtReview Asia. “A lot of Thai people believe in fortune-telling, whose influence from Buddhism combines with Brahman religions,” he says. “So we see a lot of fortune-tellers on the streets, in shopping malls, on television. The media call them ‘Professors’.” Sa-ard has combined his passion for nonfiction or documentary literature with cartooning in graphic reportages, or what he calls ‘Drawcumentaries’. “The way I research these topics is similar to any documentarian. I read articles, conduct interviews, summarise key points, separate the facts, visit

ArtReview Asia

locations and convey them on the basis of truth and accuracy. Comics have the power to make serious, heavy topics more easily digestible.” He has worked, for example, with NGOs to cover issues like coal mining in the south of Thailand and the forced relocation of tribal people in the north. “Other subjects I want to tackle include the problem of slavery, the local war in the south of Thailand and the dark history of Thailand when the government slaughtered the public in the Thammasat University massacre,” he says, referring to the 1976 suppression of student protests. Sensitive issues like these may not go down well under Thailand’s dictatorship. “It is not only out of fear that if I say something wrong, I or my family will get arrested,” he says, “but also that society will not accept me. Thailand does not have a lot of space for difference in opinion.” Partly with this in mind, Sa-ard has recently relocated to Australia. Having grown up mainly on manga, he realised, “I wanted to leave the country I am familiar with and find new experiences and new comics cultures. It wasn’t until I discovered work like Maus or Persepolis that I understood the world of comics is much bigger than I imagined.” Sa-ard is currently researching a ‘Drawcumentary’ about Australia’s Aborigine history. His horizons are widening. Paul Gravett

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Photo credits

Text credits

on the cover and on page 108 photography by Birdhead

Lyrics on the spine and on pages 17, 43 and 79 come from the song Mot Cõi Đi Ve / A Place to Leave From and Return To, by Trinh Công Son, translated by Cao Thi Nhu-Quynh and John C. Schafer

on pages 104 and 114 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Winter 2016

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Off the Record It’s another humid afternoon in the Pedder Building when Kenny Lee appears in his office doorway. He waves at me. I put down the lobster I’m holding and struggle back into my Uma Wang oversize shirt. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of the fish-bra selfie, Kenny?” I ask. “It’s an Internet sensation! I thought I’d try one with this large crustacean to get the gallery all over Insta.” You’d think a posh gay Asian gallerist would love this sort of guerrilla marketing, but Kenny looks horrified. Somewhat frantically he beckons me over while pointing to his office. By the time I saunter in, he is sitting next to the Zhang Zhoujie Digital Tornado table. He’s with Wai Linpeng, one of the gallery’s top artists, who stares glumly at the table’s mirror finish. “What’s up, boys?” I shout. “I hope you’re not using that mirror to snort the Peruvian dancing dust!” My jocularity falls flat. “Linpeng is here to ask why sales of his work have… erm… plateaued. None of his suite of dramatic paintings sold at KIAF. So, given that you were in charge of that stand, I thought I should bring you in to explain our exciting strategy for him!” I give Kenny a level stare. He was the one who persuaded Linpeng to invest huge amounts of his own cash producing a space of otherness for the Gwangju Biennale that involved a hundred actors behaving in a nonhegemonic fashion in an architecture of failure, with the promise that we could recoup money from a related set of terrible realist paintings of heterotopias at KIAF. Unsurprisingly the plan failed. But I feel pity for Kenny. Also, I have a great idea for a holiday. “Look, Linnie. It’s time to leave making art behind for a moment,” I begin. “When I saw your space of otherness, I realised that you are more than an artist. You’re an artist-curator! It’s time for you to direct a biennial! Lots of other artists whose markets have totally stalled are doing it, and it’s working for them. We’ve even got a space for you. Pack your Fendi travel trollies, boys, and let’s head to Negombo. Those Indians might be curating every biennial in China, but it’s time to strike back!” Kenny clears his throat. “But Negombo isn’t in India.” “Obvs! Freedom! Let’s roll!” Two weeks later we’re holed up in the Rodeo Pub in Negombo on our third round of Arrack Sours of the day.

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“It’s not going to happen, is it?” Linpeng slurs. Kenny smiles broadly, knocks back the Arrack and takes off his Phillip Lim white shirt. He holds two chilli crabs across his chest like they are a pair of trannie bolt-ons and shakes his hips provocatively. It’s a joke that’s kept us going for days. I crack up laughing and take photos with my Samsung Galaxy Note 7 until it starts emitting smoke. “Enough!” shouts Linpeng. “This is all a charade, isn’t it? You two have dragged me out here with promises of curating a medium-size biennial around the urgent issue of spaces of otherness with some ecological politics thrown in, but there’s nothing here. No venue, no artists! We’re just holed up in this beach-bar day after day while you pretend to make calls to artist. ‘Oh, let me call Jitesh. Let me call Korakrit.’ There’s nothing! Just this miserable stipend you give me every day that strangely no one will even accept.” He flings some notes at the bartender and weeps. “That’s Bangladeshi currency. We’re in Sri Lanka,” Kenny whispers at me. I shrug. It’s the only foreign cash I could find in the gallery, leftover from my factfinding trip to the Dhaka Art Summit that ended in embarrassment all around when I got into a scuffle with Lynda Benglis over a latex sculpture. I quietly slip the barman the gallery credit card and gesture that he take Linpeng’s Bangladeshi currency as well. The barman discreetly places three new drinks and a two fresh mackerel on the bar. “Don’t be silly, Pengy,” I say, stroking his head. “See? They took the cash. It’s all genuine. We just have to be patient. This is how Kochi started. TBH what I think might be really revolutionary is if you moved on from this whole group-show thing that biennials are predicated on. Why even have other artists here? Who needs Korakrit? Why don’t you just make something yourself involving 500 locals, this beach bar and a liminal space that is postconflict but preresolution? Remember what M.I.A. sings: ‘I’dom, ‘Me’dom! Where’s your ‘We’dom?” I can see he loves it. “Come on.” I prod him gently and hold up the Samsung. He smiles shyly and then with a whoop knocks back the Arrack, rips off his Alexander Wang T-shirt and sportingly holds up the mackerel across his moobies. I reach for the Samsung and capture the moment as the phone explodes, taking our happy memories and one of the mackerels with it. Gallery Girl