ArtReview Asia Winter 2017

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and the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

Nalini Malani

M E L AT I S U R Y O D A R M O

Transaction of Hollows ShanghART Singapore is pleased to present a performance and solo exhibition by Melati Suryodarmo in January 2018.

Performance 25 & 26 January 2018 Solo Exhibition 25 January to 25 March 2018

ShanghART Singapore 9 Lock Road, #02-22 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108937 T: +65 6734 9537 info@shanghartsingapore.com www.shanghartsingapore.com

WIEBKE SIEM DAMKENSKULPTUR NOVEMBER 4 – DECEMBER 16, 2017 — ANN VERONICA JANSSENS ICH REDE ZU DIR WIE KINDER REDEN IN DER NACHT NOVEMBER 4 – DECEMBER 16, 2017 — POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

NALINI MALANI The Rebellion of the Dead Retrospective 1969-2018 Part I: Centre Pompidou, Paris October 18, 2017 - January 8, 2018 Part II: Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli-Torino March 27 - July 22, 2018

528 West 26th Street New York, NY 10001 212.315.0470 www.galerielelong.com

13 rue de Téhéran 75008 Paris (33) 1 45 63 13 19 www.galerie-lelong.com

Installation detail: Nalini Malani, Hamletmachine, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2000.

LU SONG, VISIONS, 2017

YAN PEI-MING, NAPOLEON CROWNING HIMSELF EMPEROR (DETAIL), 2017

YAN PEI-MING MASSIMO DE CARLO, LONDON THROUGH DECEMBER 16, 2017

MASSIMO DE CARLO, HONG KONG JANUARY 19, 2018 - MARCH 23, 2018 — OPENING: JANUARY 18, 2018 FROM 6PM

INFO@MASSIMODECARLO.COM

@MDCGALLERY

MASSIMODECARLOGALLERY

LU SONG

WWW.MASSIMODECARLO.COM

ArtReview Asia vol 5 no 4 Winter 2017

The political self Gender rights are on the agenda globally at the moment (the good fight never goes away, but things have really heated up in the last month or so).

It seems fitting then that artist Nalini Malani, who has been fighting the feminist battle in India and beyond since the 1960s, should be ArtReview Asia’s cover artist. Malani has just opened a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, presenting audiences there with her multimedia installations, films, shadow plays and paintings, all of which focus on the treatment of women in a male-dominated society.

It is perhaps ironic then to consider that early on in the career of Toshio Matsumoto, the late Japanese filmmaker and artist was told that his work was not political enough. Contemporary critics, bizarrely, did not notice or acknowledge the political nature of his meditations on gender, identity and queerness. Not so our critic, who writes in his profile of the artist’s work, ‘How prescient he was in understanding that sexuality is political!’

For artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, the political self, such a dominant subject in today’s thinking, lies at the heart of the Russian couple’s work over the past 50 years. Their immersive installations, which often echo domestic spaces, have long highlighted the friction between the performed (public) citizen (not least under autocratic regimes) and the private subject.

ArtReview Asia

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Art Previewed

Previews

by Nirmala Devi 21

Points of View

by Joshua Comaroff, Charu Nivedita, Prabda Yoon 35

Art Featured

Nalini Malani

by Skye Arundhati Thomas 44

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

by Sam Korman 58

Toshio Matsumoto

by Taro Nettleton 52

page 52 Toshio Matsumoto, For the Damaged Right Eye (still), 1968, multiprojection, 16mm transferred to video, colour, sound, 13 min. Photo: Michael Yu. Courtesy The Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

Winter 2017

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Art Reviewed

exhibitions 68

books 82

Yokohama Triennale, by Fi Churchman Cold Nights, by Thomas Mouna Pak Sheung Chuen and Chris Evans, by Morgan Wong The 10 Year Hustle, by Zehra Jumabhoy Tan Pin Pin, by Clarissa Oon Discipline the City, by Bruce Quek Yu Cheng-Ta, by Guo Juan Kirill Savchenkov, by Oliver Basciano Kim Yong-Ik, by Zehra Jumabhoy Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World, by Kang Kang

Mangasia, by Paul Gravett Latif Al Ani, by Tamara Chalabi, Morad Montazami and Shwan Ibrahim Taha Fred Forest’s Utopia: Media Art and Activism, by Michael F. Leruth Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy, by Dave Hickey the strip 86 off the record 90

page 74 Chen Sai Hua Kuan, Something Nothing, 2017, plywood, plaster, paint and light, 600 × 355 × 260 cm (in Discipline the City).

Courtesy the artist and The Substation, Singapore

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ArtReview

Art Previewed

I have never made any concessions to the dominant ideas of my epoch, nor to any powers that be 19

Previewed Hugo Boss Art Award 2017 Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai through 7 January

Art Turns. World Turns Museum macan, Jakarta through 18 March

Rasheed Araeen Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 2 December – 25 March

Yu Youhan Shanghart, Shanghai 10 November – 15 January

Jakarta Biennale 2017 Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem, Jakarta through 10 December

Cai Guo-Qiang Prado Museum, Madrid through 4 March

Cinerama: Art and the Moving Image in Southeast Asia Singapore Art Museum at 8Q , Singapore 17 November – 18 March

Kimsooja Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz through 21 January

ngv Triennial National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne 15 December – 15 April

Michael Joo Kukje Gallery, Seoul 30 November – 31 December Jonas Mekas mmca, Seoul 8 November – 4 March

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian macba, Barcelona through 7 January Jewyo Rhii and Jihyun Jung The Showroom, London 6 December – 27 January

Not Niwe, Not Nieuw, Not Neu 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney through 10 December Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs The Met Breuer, New York through 2 January

page 24 James Rosenquist, The Xenophobic Movie Director or Our Foreign Policy, 2004, oil on canvas, 152 × 412 cm (in Art Turns. World Turns, 2017, Museum macan, Jakarta)

Winter 2017

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China and Singapore Hugo Boss Art Award 2017 Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

Yu Youhan The Representational and The Abstract Shanghart, Shanghai

Li Ming, Straight Line, Landscape (detail), 2014–16, 26-channel hd video, colour, sound, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist The finalists of this year’s Hugo Boss Art Award, Li Ming (China), Tao Hui (China), Yu Ji (China) and Robert Zhao Renhui (Singapore), present their work in an exhibition curated by Li Qi. A concurrent series of public and educational activities including talks, seminars, forums and workshops will take place for the duration of the exhibition.

The winner will be announced in November.

Yu Youhan, Terracotta Army on Yimeng Mountain, 2017, acrylic on cotton, 206 × 269 cm.

Courtesy the artist

Cinerama: Art and the Moving Image in Southeast Asia Singapore Art Museum at 8Q

Ming Wong, Making Chinatown (detail), 2012, seven-channel colour video installation.

Courtesy the artist In this group show, hand-drawn animations, films and mixed-media installations explore individual and collective memory, identity and politics – featuring artists Amy Lee Sanford, Hayati Mokhtar, Jeremy Sharma, Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic, Ming Wong, Narpati Awangga a.k.a oomleo, Sarah Choo Jing, The Propeller Group, Tromarama and Victor Balanon. The exhibition will be accompanied by a film programme and various workshops, with the aim of expanding the discourse surrounding Southeast Asian moving image.

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ArtReview Asia

Yu Youhan’s solo exhibition opens during West Bund Art & Design (conveniently located in the same complex), and will showcase both his latest and rarely seen early works. The Shanghainese artist is typically recognised for his ‘political pop’ aesthetics, as well as his abstract landscape paintings that play with the concepts of time and space by merging historical references with the contemporary, while challenging the style of abstraction by incorporating figurative elements.

Korea

Michael Joo Kukje Gallery, Seoul

Jonas Mekas Again, again it all comes back to me in brief glimpses mmca, Seoul

Michael Joo, Untitled (Pleochroic), 2016, silver nitrate and epoxy on canvas, 147 × 147 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul For his first solo show at Kukje, Korean-American Michael Joo continues his experiment into the aesthetics of identity. Combining his keen interest in biology, the show promises an insight into the artist’s wide-ranging practice, including sculptural installations, prints and paintings made using silver nitrate and sodium, as well as ingredients derived from human secretions such as tears and sweat.

Jonas Mekas, Outtakes from the Life of a Happy Man (still), 2012, 16mm & video, colour, mono, 68 min. Courtesy the artist At ninety-four, Lithuanian-born poet, artist and leading proponent of avant-garde cinema Jonas Mekas is receiving his first retrospective in Asia. Looking back at a 6o-year career, the show presents a vast selection of the artist’s poetic, diaristic yet nonnarrative videos capturing moments of beauty in the everyday, over 700 photographs and film stills printed for the occasion, as well as parallel screenings of some of his seminal feature films.

Winter 2017

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Indonesia Art Turns. World Turns Museum macan, Jakarta

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – Brilliance of the Souls, 2014, mirror, wooden panel, led, metal, acrylic panel, water, 287 × 415 × 415 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo & Singapore The long-awaited Museum macan, Indonesia’s first contemporary art museum, opens its doors with a showcase of modern and contemporary art from Southeast Asia and beyond drawn from its own collection. Aiming to reflect local-global kinds of connections, the show, cocurated by Agung Hujatnika and Charles Esche, features work by over 60 artists, ranging from Heri Dono, fx Harsono and Srihadi Sudarsono to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gerhard Richter and Takashi Murakami.

Jakarta Biennale 2017 Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem, Jakarta

Marintan Sirait, Long Distance Call from Home, 2012, installation and performance.

Photo: Arief Budianto. Courtesy the artist ‘Different, fresh, yet relevant’ is what you can expect from this year’s edition of the biennial, according to its director. Curated by Indonesian performance pioneer Melati Suryodarmo together with four other curators, it takes the word jiwa – conjuring at once the ‘vitality of life, energy, spirit’ and ‘collectivity, society, objects and nature’ – as a catalyst for diving into Indonesia’s art history (both the official and overlooked) and tracing its lineage within today’s practices.

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ArtReview Asia

㩎ᔄᲫ㞧ᱜᆂ

2017.11.27 - 2018.1.28 HEAVEN AND MAN Cai Zhisong Solo Exhibition

Academic Director: Fan Di'an Curator: Peng Feng Opening: 2017.11.26 15:30 Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum

info@leogallery.com.cn

Europe

Kimsooja Weaving the World Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian The Maids macba, Barcelona

Kimsooja, Encounter – Looking into Sewing, 2012. Photo: Aaron Wax. Courtesy Kimsooja Studio, New York The Korean-born artist’s approach to videomaking is akin to that of a weaver: threading and looping disparate cultures and narratives together, creating something far greater than the sum of its parts.

In the fourth chapter of her ongoing work Thread Routes (2010–), premiered in this solo exhibition, subject reflects method as she traces textile traditions through a variety of global cultures.

Kimsooja

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, The Maids (still), 2012, single-channel video slideshow, colour, no sound, 18 min 33 sec.

Photo: Maaziar Sadr. Courtesy the artists This is a family affair in more ways than one. Winners of the 2015 Han Nefkens Foundation and macba Award, the trio of artists have called upon a plethora of friends and peers to contribute. These include Catalan puppet artist and stage director Joan Baixas; artist Niyaz Azadikhah, who has led community-based projects in women’s sewing workshops in Tehran; John Cole, a robotics engineer who specialises in sensors; and an international group of writers, including Mandana Mohit and Sohrab Mahdavi.

Winter 2017

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PRINCIPAL PARTNER

NGV.MELBOURNE

MAJOR PARTNERS

DEC 15 – APR 15 2018

A MAJOR PRESENTATION OF GLOBAL ART AND DESIGN ONLY AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

Europe Rasheed Araeen A Retrospective Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Jewyo Rhii and Jihyun Jung Dawn Breaks The Showroom, London

Rasheed Araeen, Opus F3, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 160 × 160 cm.

Courtesy the artist Jewyo Rhiis and Jihyun Jung, Dawn Breaks, 2017 (installation view).

Photo: Jijyun Jung. Courtesy the artists In this new iteration of an ongoing collaboration between the two Korean artists (initiated in 2015 at the Queens Museum, New York, with versions staged at last year’s Gwangju Biennale and at the Art Sonje Center, Seoul, this year), a series of kinetic sculptures, made of found materials such as wood, wire, sheets of mdf and metal, will be installed in the London not-for-profit gallery. These are mere props for performance, though, the performers being members of the local community invitedin for a series of workshops.

In this (long overdue) retrospective of Araeen’s work, expect to find his early painterly experiments as a young artist in Karachi during the 1950s and 60s and his better-known, pioneering work with minimalist sculpture, made on arrival in London in 1964 (one such work, from the Zero to Infinity series, 1968/2007, opened Christine Macel’s Venice Biennale this year). In later life Araeen’s work became nakedly political; a result not least of his being sidelined by the artworld establishment.

Cai Guo-Qiang The Spirit of Painting Prado Museum, Madrid

Cai Guo-Qiang and volunteers during the creation of gunpowder painting Day and Night in Toledo at the Salón de Reinos (Hall of Realms), Madrid, 2017. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid This solo exhibition by the us-based Chinese artist will concentrate on wall-hung works (the artist is perhaps best known for his firework performances), creating in situ at least 8 of the 30 gunpowder ‘paintings’ on show. Alongside these will be examples of the artist’s paintings in acrylic and oil. Two figures loom large: El Greco, who the artist has long cited as inspiration, and Cai’s father, Ruiquin, whose drawings on matchboxes, which initiated the artist’s love of art, will also be on display.

Winter 2017

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Australia

Not Niwe, Not Nieuw, Not Neu 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney

ngv Triennial National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne

Zanele Muholi, Buzani (Parktown) (from the Somnyama Ngonyama series), 2016, gelatin silver photograph, 80 × 56 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist, Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson, New York

Newell Harry, Circle/s in the Round: white whine, 2010, neon, 135 × 110 × 5 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Featuring more than 100 artists and designers from 32 countries, the inaugural edition of this new triennial promises to be a (welcome!) assault on the senses.

Alongside works by the likes of Uji Handoko Eko Saputro (the Indonesian artist is making three new huge paintings in his graphic style) and the vast, carpetlike sculptures of Argentinian artist Alexandra Kehayoglou, the exhibition features immersive projects by Norwegian ‘smell designer’ Sissel Tolaas, an installation by Yayoi Kusama, in which visitors will be invited to ‘obliterate’ a room with flowers, and a hugely ambitious multimedia work by Japan’s teamLab, in which digital technology mimics the movement of water and the experience of being at sea.

Subverting the colonial gaze is all the rage, and this latest and timely group show promises four artists whose works will present a ‘nuanced telling of the invisible, forces that have shaped… the language we use to describe, categorise and taxonomise nature’. Fiona Pardington, Newell Harry, Daniel Boyd, Michael Parekowhai and James Tylor will present contemporary works, alongside which will be shown copperplate etchings

by British naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, made during the voyage of hms Endeavour between 1768 and 1771.

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ArtReview Asia

usa Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs The Met Breuer, New York

Raghubir Singh, Man Diving, Ganges Floods, Benares, Uttar Pradesh, 1985, chromogenic print.

Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Raghubir Singh, Dhabawallah, or Professional Lunch Distributor, Bombay, Maharashtra, 1992, chromogenic print. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Singh, who died in 1999, lived variously in Hong Kong, Paris, London and New York. Yet it was his native Rajasthan that became his abiding subject. While the West presented little interest as subject for the photographer, its pioneers in the medium, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson (whom he met in Jaipur in 1966), and street photographers William Gedney and Lee Friedlander, as well as Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, inspired the style of Singh’s frozen street scenes, characteristically packed with action and intrigue.

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ArtReview Asia

Points of View

The sinister elements of ‘defensive architecture’ hide in plain sight, disappearing into the weft of our city fabric. They are ambiguous technologies, both in terms of their sources and their intended effects. Such security measures go well beyond the public-safety guidelines mandated via building codes and infrastructural regulations. Whereas these are meant to guarantee safe inhabitation, ‘unpleasant’ or ‘unkind’ architecture is designed to keep people away, or to prevent modes of use that are considered unappealing. Code is intended to protect people from architecture. In an alarming inversion, defensive architecture defends architecture against the problem of people.

And just as buildings appear to offer public amenities, such as benches and open space, developers and designers are increasingly devising ways to make the use of these feel uncomfortable. Many defensive techniques operate just above the threshold of illegality, creating sensations for the user that – while unpleasant – do not cause lasting bodily harm.

This is often achieved through furniture and ironmongery. Most urbanites are, by now, familiar with the subdivided benches that prevent lying down, or metal knobs and ‘pig’s ear’ rails intended to make skateboarding impossible. Other devices make use of landscape, such as berms and ha-has, or thorny shrubs that overhang railings and low walls to discourage sitting. A third category mimics dysfunctional automation: sprinklers that soak public areas at random intervals, or the ‘mosquito’, a device that repels teenagers by emitting a high-frequency noise inaudible to older adults.

And whereas code is imposed by the state, many of the newer defensive techniques are rolled out privately, in order to control the access to, and uses of, facilities in urban settings. This distinction is likely obscured by the ongoing deployment of physical security measures by state, regional and city-level authorities simultaneously. If visible, the seizure of common spaces by private parties could be contested through public scrutiny and outcry. In the emotionally charged

defensive architecture Seizing public space for private use is all about making what looks good feel bad, writes architect Joshua Comaroff

atmosphere of an ongoing ‘war on terror’, however, the imposition of restricted access to public spaces has also been enabled by the belief that such security measures benefit everyone. This idea carries yet more weight in the era of smaller, more localised terror attacks – which may occur at the supermarket as much as at grand, symbolic targets. At the same time, social-media posts have fuelled controversy over physical measures such as the ‘antihomeless spikes’ implanted to prevent rough sleeping on pavements in front of London’s banks and businesses. Likewise the notorious Camden Bench, a Zaha Hadid-esque sarcophagus designed to discourage almost any form of use.

These technologies, and their broader climates of social control, are explored in two exhibitions in Singapore: The Substation’s Discipline the City (ongoing) and Jason Wee’s Labyrinths at Yavuz Gallery (recently ended).

The former, cocurated by the institution’s artistic director, Alan Oei, and me, is an attempt to study the defensive culture that permeates multiple social spheres, in diverse – and often contradictory – ways. Some works explore boundaries of spatial delimitation, such as Chen

Winter 2017

Sai Hua Kuan’s Something Nothing (2017), a white enclosure without corners or edges that leaves viewers unable to gauge depth or height. Others imagine the opposite – the worlds of behaviour or experience that become possible when the rationality of the city is ignored. In Taiwanese artist Kuang-Yu Tsui’s videoworks, for example, public spaces become the backdrop for bowling, foot massage and vomiting. At the same time, Oei and I attempted to see the architecture of the Substation building itself as an instance of control. To emphasise the complicity of the gallery, the building’s usual access was blocked, with a new path knocked through the walls for visitors to traverse the exhibition spaces.

Architectural technologies such as the maze and the trapdoor offered curatorial subjects as well, as provocations for participating artists.

Jason Wee’s recent work is similarly interested in the materiality of architectural control. In Labyrinths, the artist created a variable motif from the crowd-control barriers and chickenwire grids used to manage public events in Singapore, such as the lgbt-friendly Pink Dot festival, and the queue for Lee Kuan Yew’s lying in state in March 2015. Wee manipulates the form of these, slicing and rearranging them in juxtaposition with other symbolic and physical elements. In one setting, the metal barricades are placed against the architectural notation for a property line, creating a relationship between abstraction and the physical enforcement of limitation and prohibition. Another work, Living Rooms (2017), overlays barriers against the ubiquitous ornamental window screens of older Southeast Asian buildings – in order, perhaps, to underline the similarity between modern security and the charming, ‘homely’ defensive elements of yesteryear. Wee appears to recognise the defensive in the deep code of the familiar; discipline and control have, he suggests, been an intimate part our cities for a very long time.

Discipline the City is on view through 26 November at The Substation, Singapore Joshua Comaroff is an architect, landscape architect and academic geographer based in Singapore

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Tamil Nadu is plagued by a culture of heroworship within which religion and politics are dictated by the red-carpet-and-silver-screen crowd. Here, the Tamil film industry serves as a convenient launch pad into the political arena. This is evident when we consider that five chief ministers of the state started out from film. At present, there are four actors hawk-eyeing the seat of the chief minister: Rajinikanth, Kamal Haasan, Vijay and Vishal.

A few years ago, I went to visit my journalist friend in his office. I almost gasped when I saw on his table a glass bottle with a severed thumb suspended in formaldehyde. My friend showed me the letter that accompanied the curiosity on his table. The letter was a request to present the bottle with the thumb to Vijay ‘as a token of love’. The crazy fan, I was told, was desperate to secure himself a place in the actor’s heart.

If I’ve observed correctly, Tamils would much rather watch a film review than read one. A film review in print gets maybe a thousand readers,

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notes from madras What makes Tamil Nadu film stars think they’re great philosophers and noble politicians?

Charu Nivedita dares ask – and gets death threats in return

ArtReview Asia

but the same review in the form of a video draws watchers by the million. My video-review of the Ajith Kumar starrer Vivegam garnered 240,000 views in two days along with a string of death threats and obscene abuse. Ajith’s fanatical fans openly declared in a very Marquis de Sade fashion that they’d ‘shove a hot iron rod up my daughter’s cunt’ and rape all the women in my family. India’s recent history – the 2002 Gujarat riots where a foetus was cut out of a woman’s stomach with a machete and the 2012 Delhi gang-rape case where Jyoti Singh was penetrated with a rusted implement – tells me that my countrymen are perfectly capable of perpetrating the most ghastly deeds.

The fanatical fans went on to upload a video in which they enacted a mock-hacking, all the while hurling obscenities at me. At the end of the video, they warned me that they’d lop off my head – a direct threat. I wrote an open letter to Ajith about this and am still awaiting his response.

For a week, I didn’t put one toe across my threshold as I feared being cut to pieces.

I refrained from approaching the police because once, when my email was hacked, they summoned me to the station almost 15 times and finally asked me to withdraw my complaint. I had witnessed a police inspector demanding money from cab drivers at around 3pm, standing right in front of the police headquarters. Even when my cab driver was ready to show his documents, the inspector ignored that and ordered him, with great authority, to give 200 rupees to the constable, and leave the place. How can I present a complaint about my issues to such a police force?

There is no reason for them to take me seriously. After all, what is a Tamil writer but lowly scum? Kamal Haasan, an atheist, is our ‘God’ and our ‘Michel Foucault’, and the man has no qualms about being placed in this lofty niche. He hosted a tatty, sensational reality show called Bigg Boss Tamil. At the end of every episode, the participants would make reverence and

prostrate before him. I wrote an open letter to him too, criticising his behaviour. On the hundredth day of the show, he asked that people stop falling at his feet, but they did anyway. However, I was relieved that no fingers, toes or dicks were chopped off for the love of Kamal Haasan.

The state has suffered much under the dmk and the aidmk regime, and more so at present with the clown-rule of aidmk. So, Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan have decided to come to the rescue of the people. When Rajinikanth said “Wait for a war in Tamil Nadu!”, he wanted us to understand that we must expect him to enter politics. Kamal ‘Foucault’ Haasan, on the other hand, has not been as cryptic as ‘Superstar’ Rajinikanth about his intentions of getting into the political domain. Though everyone else thinks Kamal is a class onscreen-act, I think he’s just an Al Pacino wannabe. But all that is of little import when I consider his political ambitiousness.

When Jayalalithaa was in power (the actorturned-politician served six terms between 1991 and her death last year), 30m cutouts of the woman – depicted as Mother Mary and Mariamman – were erected in several places.

But Kamal Haasan, even before his induction into the political scenario, is being hailed like an almighty god. It scares me to think of what might happen if and when he lands his hindquarters on the hot seat of political power.

More than his political aspirations, I am irked by how the man fancies himself a writer and a poet. His ‘poems’, which get featured in pulp magazines, are mere nursery rhymes and slogans.

Kamal, who claims to know literature, introduced a ‘masala’-film (films that mix genres) director as a writer in an episode of Bigg Boss Tamil. Jacques Lacan, who said ‘la femme n’existe pas’, should know that in Tamil Nadu ‘l’écrivain n’existe pas’.

Writers in this state are penniless nobodies who either work clerical jobs to eke out a living or die hungry and unemployed while waiting for their due recognition. In Tamil Nadu, a state with a head count of 80 million, a literary work sells a mere 200 copies. And Kamal Haasan royally sticks his middle finger down every Tamil writer’s throat while he, with his so-called writing skills, sells his hokum to commercial film directors and gets acclaimed as a philosopher.

These actors mention eradicating corruption as their reason for entering politics. How will they do it? In films, when the bullets shower on them, they just swat them aside as if removing the fleas from the body of a dog. They think the same about corruption too. When Mahatma Gandhi fought for freedom, he created thousands of followers who were ready to sacrifice their lives, like him, and were considered the symbol of virtue. An example: the year is 1924.

A village called Kodai Road, near Kodaikkanal.

A village that is devoid of basic amenities, even

above Fans give a milk bath (abhishek) to a poster of film star Rajinikanth on the occasion of the release of his film Kabali (2016). Photo: Prabhu Kalidas facing page, top Promotion for the Bigg Boss Tamil, presented by Kamal Haasan, 2017. Courtesy Star Vijay facing page, bottom A cutout of Jayaram Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu. Photo: afp

Winter 2017

today. How would it have been a hundred years ago? At that moment, a man had come to send off his sixteen-year-old daughter, who was travelling alone, by train, to Madras.

The girl had never travelled by train before.

To whom could he entrust her safety?

There sat four or five youngsters in the same compartment, donning Gandhi caps. The father gained courage. ‘These people will take care of you,’ he said to his daughter.

Those youngsters were followers of Gandhi.

One of them recounted the incident to me in 1980. But the fans of the heroes of today’s cinema are just lumpens and are only fit to erect huge hoardings for their heroes. Even as I write this, I have received a new threat from a hero’s fan…

Translated from the Tamil by Gayathri R. Charu Nivedita is a writer based in Chennai

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There’s a common Thai expression, ‘open your eyes, open your ears’, meaning that one should be receptive to new things. The idea is that doing so will prime the mind for knowledge and sharpen the intellect, or at least broaden one’s worldview. It’s an expression that should be applicable in all kinds of situations. But some Thais, believing that theirs is a developing nation, tend to use it in reference to travelling to ‘developed’ countries, where, in their view, new things worthy of their attention await.

More than a few Thais used to labour under the illusion that they understood their compatriots well enough, but they have had their eyes and ears opened by the conflict between the country’s conservative and liberal factions (the latter often called ‘pro-democracy’ in the context of Thai politics, perhaps because the entrée of liberalism has never officially been recognised in Thailand), and by the coups d’état of 2006 and 2014. These coups were carried out to preserve the conservatives’ hold on power and keep any intellectual awakening at bay, although excuses of peacekeeping and ridding the country of corruption were invoked.

It is clear that many in the middle and upper classes support far-right ideologies and back the dictatorship. They do so to a point that defies logic, ignores justice and disregards human rights. Disdain for freedom – a concept condemned as ‘Western’ and incompatible with the Thai style of coexistence – and rejection of progressive ideas have left many heartbroken and without hope for the future.

The sobering realisation of the situation is a sort of eye- and ear-opening that turns the old expression on its head. People’s ears have tuned into a naive arrogance, and their eyes are seeing an intellectual blindness that holds humanity in disregard.

This reverse opening of the senses is everywhere, including in the arts, where the romantic idea of the artist still pervades: the artist as a contemplative, sensitive being who stands for freedom and integrity. Through his or her creations of beauty and imagination, the artist supposedly polishes away the roughness in people’s minds and leads in the search for truth. In fact, many of Thailand’s prominent contemporary artists were once thought leaders, revolutionaries, challengers of the

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peepholes in happyland Many Thai artists are compromised by their links to the ruling junta. Not so a new generation of filmmakers, Prabda Yoon is heartened to see

ArtReview Asia

establishment, fighters for the people; in the past they had even demonstrated against dictatorship. Now, however, they have turned into microphones and paintbrushes for conservative ideologies. They work in the service of the junta and embrace a regime that lacks transparency and that uses the country’s resources to benefit select groups. Many of these artists played a direct role in ‘inviting’ the military to stage the coup when they joined the People’s Democratic Reform Committee’s cause to drive away an elected government.

Thailand’s artistic circles are now packed with members who are a far cry from the ideal artists they admire and wish to be. These people are attached to the system of patronage, are obedient to and tamed by power, kick the oppressed when they are down, curse those who have been stripped of their freedom of expression and turn a blind eye to the junta’s foolishness and deception. Dressed as eminent creators, they use their positions as artists to propagandise far-right ideologies.

We live in a system that curtails freedom of speech by instilling fear through false accusations and wrongful imprisonments.

It is no wonder that Thailand appears to be in an artistic dark age. Liberal-spirited artists have become bound by fear and shame that bring with them self-censorship. A poet has been murdered. Writers and actors have been imprisoned. The military keeps an eye on art exhibitions and academic seminars, and issues warnings accordingly. This rule-setting for culture by way of pressuring artists to close their eyes and ears in exchange for safety has stifled an art scene that would, under a democracy, be ready to flourish.

Still, even in an era where many of the ‘old-guard’ artists act as wardens of a dictatorship that shows no sign of returning power to the people as it had promised – ‘soon’, it had said three years ago – still, a light has started to emerge in a dark room, on a little oblong screen that gives free rein to a new generation of filmmakers, who are mostly still in university.

Thai university students have shown consistent interest in the short film as a creative form since 2000. It may be the art medium that is exhibiting the greatest variety in terms of form and content right now. A key showcase for the talent in this area is the Thai Short Film and Video Festival, which has been organised annually since 1997 by the Thai Film Foundation. The latest instalment ran from 29 August to 10 September at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, with over 600 films entered for competition this year. A good portion of these commented and reflected on – or vented frustration over – the military’s seizure of power as well as openly questioned conservative ideologies. Expressions of this sort are rare in other branches of the arts and are nonexistent in mainstream media. It appears the Thai short film is shaping up to be a space where, in Walter Benjamin’s words, ‘a new realm of consciousness comes into being’. It is looking to be the artistic machine with the power to wear away the myths and fear created under the junta’s rule and supported by far-right ideologies.

A standout film that picked up a prize at the festival was Bangkok Dystopia (2017), directed by Patipol Teekayuwat. The work was among the most successful at showing this new realm of consciousness. The plot involves a brief friendship between a teen boy and a woman in the sex trade. They meet on the evening of the 2014 coup d’état, when the military-imposed curfew means the two have to get off the bus they’re riding in. Amid an atmosphere of eerie emptiness, they walk together in the night, feeling unsure of their way and distrusting even each other. The boy is going home late because he has a troubled relationship with his father, and earlier his teacher had cropped his hair due to its failure to comply with school rules.

The woman fights with her lover on the phone

above and facing page Patipol Teekayuwat, Bangkok Dystopia (stills), 2017, film, 28 min.

Courtesy the artist and Thai Film Foundation

Winter 2017

and gets into an argument with a soldier they encounter along the way. Riled up by the soldier’s disparagement of her profession, she gives him the middle finger and swears at him. Scenes of conflict like this one are commonplace in contemporary cinema, but in the current climate, where the junta dominates with fear, the scene stuns with its audacity. The almost-half-hour film uses a handheld-shooting technique and the dimness of street lights to create a mood of hazy, aimless disorientation. The film ends with a near-surreal scene in which the boy, crossing the street, has to wade through dozens of dead pigeons that lie fallen, inexplicably, in piles around him. The symbolic scenes employed by Teekayuwat to tie the story together may be obvious, but it is precisely their bluntness that ends up communicating the pain of the times. In a country that holds the record for the highest number of successful military coups in contemporary history (the most recent one, in 2014, was the 12th since Thailand became a constitutional monarchy in 1932) and that, even during periods of supposed democracy, has always been under the obscure rule of the privileged class, clarity and directness are necessary.

They are gestures of courage that cast a glare in the eyes of those in power.

Everybody’s Fine (2017), directed by Thanakrit Duangmaneeporn, is another film from the festival that gives credence

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to the idea that short films could be crucial to the cultivation of a new critical consciousness among a younger generation. The film, a realistic, moving depiction of a small, relatively poor family from Chiang Rai province, in northern Thailand, neatly examines selfreflection in a world layered with questions.

The mother in the story, Ning, is left to care for her elementary-school-age son alone as her husband, although innocent, has been incarcerated for years. But he writes with good news: he could receive a royal pardon and come home by year’s end. In a later scene, Ning brings her son to visit his father at the prison, and they share a meal among other families doing the same. The father makes conversation with his son in good humour, but the boy struggles to come up with things to say to a father he barely knows, even as he is eager to connect with him.

Shortly after their visit, the coup of 2006 takes place, and Ning receives another letter, which she opens while her young son is lying with his head in her lap. The beauty of the scene lies in the fact that the content of the letter is never revealed; it is communicated merely through the trace of his handwriting on the back side of the sheet of paper and through Ning’s tears that fall onto her son’s cheek. The father’s fate takes a turn because of the putsch: in this country, justice is not for the ‘little people’. The repeated history of coups and military dictatorships is a constant reminder that the privileged class will not stand to have the people’s due rights

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both Thanakrit Duangmaneeporn, Everybody’s Fine (stills), 2017.

Courtesy the artist and Thai Film Foundation

returned to them so that they may be the masters of their own destinies. In complete contrast to Bangkok Dystopia, Everybody’s Fine is simply and quietly shot, and tells the story efficiently and without stylistic extravagance. Duangmaneeporn uses realism to express the mood to beautiful effect.

In his hands, all the ‘smallness’ of the film ends up creating a powerful impact, much like the clap of thunder in the film’s final scene.

Commercially, the Thai film industry might be going through a crisis as a result of changes in technology and of the repetitiveness of the movies that come out of the studio system.

But those same factors are allowing the new generation to use filmmaking as a means to find a way out of the dark tunnel in which we find ourselves, and to do so without being hampered by the business side of the industry. These new artists may not take to the streets to protest like the student groups who preceded them.But times have changed, and we cannot expect the mode of calling and fighting for freedom to remain the same. In this iteration of ‘opening your eyes, opening your ears’, what Albert Camus called ‘the flame of lucid courage’ may be burning bright within rectangular frames in the dark.

Translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul Prabda Yoon is a Bangkok-based novelist, graphic designer, artist, filmmaker, magazine editor, screenwriter, translator and media personality

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2–10 FEBRUARY 2018 The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture connected to South Asia.

With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Founded in 2012 by the Samdani Art Foundation, in collaboration with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, DAS is hosted every two years at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.

Rejecting the traditional biennale format to create a more generative space for art and exchange, DAS’s interdisciplinary programme concentrates its endeavours towards the advancement and promotion of South Asia’s contemporary and historic creative communities. Led by Chief Curator Diana Campbell Betancourt, local and international guest curators from leading institutions are commissioned

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Expanding on the success of past editions, DAS 2018’s programme will widen its focus to create new connections between South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean belt, exhibiting artists from Thailand, Malaysia, Madagascar, the Philippines, and several other countries, highlighting the dynamic evolution of art in contemporary South Asia and reviving historical inter-Asian modes of exchange. Over three hundred artists will exhibit across ten curated exhibitions, and over one hundred and twenty speakers from all over the world will participate in sixteen panel discussions and two symposiums. A series of illustrated lectures will strive to ground future developments of art in South Asia within the region’s rich, yet lesser-known, past.

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Art Featured

Nothing of importance has ever been communicated by sparing the audience 43

Nalini Malani

by Skye Arundhati Thomas

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Capturing India’s multiple Modernisms

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preceding pages Cassandra, 2009, polyptych, acrylic, ink and enamel reverse painting on acrylic sheet, 30 panel, 228 × 396 cm (overall). © the artist.

Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, New York & Paris

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above Remembering Toba Tek Singh, 1998, video installation with four projections and 12 monitors in tin trunks, reflecting floor, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, New York & Paris

ArtReview Asia

In 1998 the Indian government carried out a series of underground Independence”, as though the two words are interchangeable. She is nuclear tests in Pokhran, a northern province in the desert state often described as a Pakistani artist, but was born in Karachi in 1946 of Rajasthan. The test site was only 150km from the border with before the country was even formed. In 1947 her family was forced to Pakistan, and by this time India had already engaged in three sepa- leave for Calcutta (now Kolkata). “I have never had the desire to go rate wars with its neighbour. In the same year, artist Nalini Malani back to the cities and villages my parents were from,” she says. “But made a work entitled Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998), based on a my mother, at ninety-six, still talks about it. It is not my trauma, but short story by Sa’adat Hassan Manto, an Urdu author and playwright I have grown up with the smell of those cities. Their aura.” from the new Pakistan. In the short story, Hindu and Sikh patients In the polyptych Cassandra (2009), Malani paints her figures onto from a psychiatric asylum in Pakistan are filled into coaches to make acrylic sheets with ink, enamel and acrylic paint. Malani’s method of the journey over to India, and bizarre circumstances ensue. A patient approaching surfaces is tactile: she will stain figures out over transclimbs a tree and decides to remain there parent sheets or smudge them into shape.

“History does not occur in instead. Others occupy narrow strips of For Roobina Karode, director of the episodes. I am more interested Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi land yet unassigned by cartographers. Pol(which hosted Malani’s 2014 retrospecitics is posturing, and Partition is madness. in how Partition activates itself tive You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag), this In Malani’s four-channel video installain the present moment” is a language that suits “unpaintable and tion, first presented at the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai in 1999, visitors entered a room with a Mylar- sometimes unpalatable themes, such as innards flying across a plane to covered floor and 12 tin trunks stuffed with quilts and small, flickering depict the violence inflicted upon women’s bodies”. In Search of Vanished monitors displaying found footage. A woman’s voice hangs over the Blood (2012), a six-channel video/shadow play with five rotating work as she reads out an extract from the short story, and the figures reverse-painted Mylar cylinders, broken figures float along the work’s of Remembering Toba Tek Singh spill and melt into each other, drifting surrounding walls in a loop. Malani plays with scale, often combining along the installation’s several materials. very large pieces with smaller fragments, and her works may be read “History does not occur in episodes,” Malani declares. When asked as surfaces of assembly, shifting between mediums and materials. about her relationship to Partition, and the narrative of trauma and They are innately theatrical and almost always rely on movement. It displacement that is often applied to her work, she continues, “I am is a clever strategy; “People in India understand the moving image so more interested in how Partition activates itself well”, she says. above Onanism (still), 1969, in the present moment.” When referring to the As a student, Malani received a very traditional 16mm film transferred to video, b/w, events of 15 August 1947, Malani says “Partition/ training in painting at the J.J. School of Arts in sound, 3 min 51 sec. © the artist

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above All We Imagine as Light (detail), 2017, polyptych, acrylic, ink and enamel reverse painting on acrylic sheet, 11 panels, 183 × 100 cm (each). Photo: Anil Rane. © the artist

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facing page In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012, six-channel video/shadow play with five rotating reverse-painted Mylar cylinders, sound, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, New York & Paris

ArtReview Asia

Mumbai. An early introduction to film, however, radically changed reshot these photographs on 8mm. The landscape rendered by this her practice and led to her becoming one of the first female South process is at once one of the modernist architecture it tries to emulate Asian artists to work extensively with the medium. Between 1969 as it is its deconstruction: a series of simple photographic gestures. and 1971 Malani was a member of the Vision Exchange Workshop “For me, abstraction has always been a research material, or a process, (view) convened by Akbar Padamsee, one of India’s better-known that allows me to see further than just the surface,” says Malani, and painters. Padamsee used state funds he had received in the form of in her work, abstraction becomes a useful device with which to negoa Nehru Fellowship, matched by his own money, to set up the initia- tiate the identity-making practices of a new country. tive, a rare piece of artistic infrastructure designed to enable experAs an artist who began making work during the 1960s, in the iments with technology. Set in his Bombay apartment, Padamsee rollout of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision for a new India, brought together painters, printmakers, animators, sculptors, cine- Malani grappled with Modernism – and a ‘Nehruvian Modernism’ matographers and even a psychoanalyst, at that. Modernism was the language “It is not my trauma, but and the workshop aimed for a multidischosen by Nehru for the new India, and ciplinary exchange. Malani and painter Nehruvian Modernism was a narrative of I have grown up with the smell Nasreen Mohamedi, who had a practice progress: decidedly secular and pluralistic. of those cities. Their aura” of geometric abstraction, were the only It was also obsessed with the fashioning of two women to be included in the workshop, where Malani was its the ideal modern subject. Malani was one of very few artists of the time to be cognisant of how South Asia was simultaneously enacting youngest participant.

Malani made a series of 8mm and 16mm films, working with great multiple Modernisms, and that several regions were approaching the speed as she produced three films in the short span of six months. modern subject differently: from the Bombay School to the Bengal, all These three films have only recently been discovered. In Still Life (1969) the way down to Cochin. “We were thinking about the Indian figure, the camera trails the possessions flung over Malani’s bed, giving the and how we could use our different local stories to connect with our viewer an intimate look at her private space. In Onanism (1969) Malani audience, and with each other,” says Malani about her collaborations, uses a ladder to simulate a crane shot to film a woman suffering a series as she worked closely with Nilima Sheikh and Bhupen Khakhar from of violent contortions from above. The third film, one half of what the Baroda School. then became Utopia (1969/76), was a work of pure abstraction. Malani In the summer of 1979 Malani walked down Wooster Street in built an urban landscape from thick black card and photographed it New York to visit the recently opened air Gallery. Ana Mendieta was from erratic angles. She then converted these photographs into large there – as were Nancy Spero and May Stevens, to whom Malani was negatives, filtering in colours onto their grey and black tones. She then introduced. Taken by the gallery’s fierce determination to create a

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above Remembering Mad Meg, 2007–11, three-channel video/shadow play with seven rotating reverse-painted Lexan cylinders, sound, dimensions variable. Photo: Payal Kapadia. © the artist

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facing page Utopia (still), 1969–76, 8mm film animation and 16mm film transferred to video, b/w and colour, sound, 3 min 44 sec. © the artist

space for the work of female artists, in a city whose galleries other- failure is of a different nature – we were, and still are, too reliant on wise almost never showed work by women, let alone women of colour, the West to determine our language.”

Malani returned to India with the aim of extending the formula.

Malani’s 2014 exhibition at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art took Such a space did not exist in India, and Malani speaks often about the the form of a nearly yearlong retrospective and marked the first time patronising treatment she received from her male peers for most of her work was shown on such a scale in South Asia. It was a significant her career. After years of negotiation with various public and private moment in her career – her place in the history of Indian modernity institutions, a show entitled Through the Looking Glass, featuring the was cemented, as was as her continuing contribution to the contemwork of Madhvi Parekh, Nilima Sheikh, Arpita Singh and Malani her- porary discourse in South Asia. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, where self, travelled India between 1986 and 1989. a retrospective of Malani’s work has just opened, has a room especially Malani has always been vocal about her feminism, which is at dedicated to the early films and photographs of 1969–76. Her films first interested in making women visible from 1969, Still Life, Onanism and Taboo, “For me, abstraction has always outside narratives of ‘femininity’. Her which have never been seen before, are been a research material, work often speculates the gestures and the most significant in the show: where voices of women who have been silenced, Malani deftly negotiates the politics of a or a process, that allows me to particularly by ‘great’ works of literature, nation at the brink of a new identity. She see further than just the surface” such as Sita from the Ramayana, whom is also looking forward, and preempts she places alongside the Greeks Cassandra and Medea. In an ongoing how the Nehruvian idealism in which she herself was implicated series entitled Stories Retold (2002–) several paintings look to mutate was to fracture in the years to come. Malani’s practice epitomises singular female myths, most famously Sita/Medea (2006), in which the moment as succinctly as it delivers it – the new India was not both women, painted on Mylar with watercolour, acrylic paint and simply one of idealisms, but also broken, ephemeral and composed enamel, are fused together in many iterations along the same plane. of multiple narratives. ara “I find that we have so many parallels to Greek mythology, but still in the West I am always asked – why are you interested in Greek Nalini Malani: The Rebellion of the Dead, Retrospective 1969– mythology? But I say we have a whole Indo-Hellenic school of sculp2018 Part i is on view at Centre Pompidou, Paris, through 8 January; Part ii can be seen at Castello di Rivoli from 27 March to 22 July; ture all along Afghanistan, and the Bamiyan Buddhas are in the People Come and Go is at Galerie Lelong, Paris, through 25 November Hellenic style.” In Malani’s treatment of the world, nothing happens in isolation, and neither should it be considered as such. “When we’re talking about indigenous Modernism,” says Malani, “I think the Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer and editor based in Mumbai

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Toshio Matsumoto Blurring the boundaries

By Taro Nettleton

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With Toshio Matsumoto’s passing in April (1932–2017), Japan lost narration addressing the villagers’ animist beliefs and Kuniharu one of its most rigorous filmmakers and trenchant film critics. Two Akiyama’s musique concrète soundtrack creates an uncanny effect. recent exhibitions – Toshio Matsumoto: Everything Visible Is Empty at the Through the uncanny, which Freud defined as the resurfacing of Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, and Japanese Expanded Cinema Revisited at once-repressed content, Matsumoto exposes psychological truths the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum – offer a rare and timely oppor- that cannot be captured by neorealist documentation alone. tunity to reexamine the prolific artist-critic’s oeuvre, which encomFor the Damaged Right Eye (1968), faithfully (and very satisfyingly) passes some of the most important moments of postwar Japanese art. reproduced as a triple projection at the Empty Gallery, is intended Matsumoto began his filmmaking career by planning, cowriting as a wakeup call, opening with the sound of a phone being dialled. and assistant-directing Ginrin (1955), an astonishingly experimental Matsumoto saw a paradigmatic shift in the heady, heated, hopeful pr film commissioned by the Japan Bicycle Promotion Institute. moment of simultaneous global uprisings of 1968, and staged his own His collaborators on the project by triggering the first Japanese were Shozo Kitadai and Katsuhiro film expanded to three projections.

In 1968 smoke accompanied the strobes, Yamaguchi, members of Japan’s Designed to dismantle convenpurportedly striking panic in viewers, who postwar collective Jikken Kobo, tional aesthetic values, the film’s would have been accustomed to seeing the composer Toru Takemitsu and dual projection with a third laid the special effects creator Eiji Tsuover the centre of the two juxtaclashes between student radicals and cops posed frames expands filmic space buraya, who would go on to do the same for the Godzilla series. The film presents a simple narrative of to stage an intense visual assault. At one moment in the film, flicka boy daydreaming about bicycles, while crystallising Jikken Kobo’s ering, seizure-inducing strobes fire at the audience. In 1968 smoke incorporation of everyday materials and innovative technologies as accompanied the strobes, purportedly striking panic in viewers, well as its predilection for sci-fi aesthetics and narratives that address who would have been accustomed to seeing clashes between student the unconscious. Placed within Matsumoto’s oeuvre, it announces radicals and cops on television, in photographs and in the streets. what would become his modus operandi – production from the Rapidly cut shots of Tadanori Yokoo’s 1966 paintings of women, interstice. With Ginrin, Matsumoto merged experimental aesthetics go-go dancing, protesting, cross-dressing, riot-policing, motorcycle with commercial filmmaking. He would go on to similarly compli- racing and happenings are juxtaposed, looped, scratched and overcate distinctions between avant-garde and documentary filmmaking, lapped, and accompanied by the sounds of fuzz guitars and anthems, experimental and narrative cinema, and artist and critic. from Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones, to create a mesmerising As much influenced by Luis Buñuel as by seminal ethnographer and appropriately bewildering cacophony capturing the dizzying and folklorist Kunio Yanagita, the black-and-white The Song of Stone velocity and exuberance of the times.

(1963) fuses documentary with surrealist strategies. Made contemIn the following year, Matsumoto produced his most remarkable poraneously with Chris Marker’s better-known La Jetée (1962), it also work, Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) – a narrative feature retelling the comprises nearly exclusively still photographs, which in Matsumoto’s Oedipal tale as a love affair between a beautiful trans woman (‘Eddy’ film were shot by Ernest Satow. For Matsumoto, it was an interroga- played by Peter in his debut role) who works at a gay bar and her boss, who also turns out to be her father. tion of the film medium itself. If film is constituted by still images, At a time when contemporaries Matsumoto was criticised for privileging what better subject to explore such as Nagisa Oshima, with whom sexual minorities over real politics. this nature of the medium than Matsumoto also had an ongoing How prescient he was in understanding stone, which in the village of Aji debate in the film journal Eiga in Kagawa by the Seto Inland Sea Hihyo, were unquestioningly phalthat sexuality is political! had sustained, taken and marked, locentric, repeatedly using scenes as tombstones, the lives of local miners for hundreds of years? If of women being raped by men as metaphors for male political impomotion and life can be created by suturing still images, the film effec- tence, Matsumoto was criticised for privileging sexual minorities tively proposes, inanimate minerals can be brought to life through over real politics. How prescient he was in understanding that sexufilmic poesis. “When a stone breaks unexpectedly,” the film tells us, ality is political! Though most frequently noted for its queer narra“the men [of the village] mumble ‘stones are living things, stones tive, the film might also be described as formally queer, as it incorpoare living things.’” Matsumoto insisted that film needed to address rates animation, documentary, found footage and other experimental both external and internal realities. The combination of the solemn filmmaking techniques into its feature-length narrative framework. images of villagers working in the stone processing plants, the sombre In this sense, For the Damaged Right Eye is also a study for Funeral

opening pages Everything Visible Is Empty, 1975, 16mm transferred to video, colour, sound (by Toshi Ichiyanagi), 8 min (installation view, Everything Visible Is Empty, 2017, The Empty Gallery, Hong Kong). Photo: Michael Yu

facing page, top White Hole (still), 1979, 16mm transferred to video, colour, sound, 7 min

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facing page, bottom The Song of Stone (still), 1963, 16mm transferred to video, b/w, sound, 25 min

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above For the Damaged Right Eye, 1968, 16mm transferred to video, multiprojection, colour, sound (by Akiyama Kuniharu), 13 min (installation view, Everything Visible Is Empty, 2017, The Empty Gallery, Hong Kong). Photo: Michael Yu

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facing page Atman (still), 1975, 16mm transferred to video, colour, sound (by Toshi Ichiyanagi), 11 min

ArtReview Asia

all images Courtesy The Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

Parade of Roses, with which it shares many visual tropes. For example, while the former documents an event orchestrated by Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver in Shinjuku Station’s West Exit Plaza, which briefly served as an agora for artists and protesters before being renamed West Exit Passage, after antiwar ‘folk guerrillas’ clashed with riot police in 1969, the latter shows the performance art group Zero Jigen carrying out the titular procession in the streets of Shinjuku.

Crucially, both For the Damaged Right Eye and Funeral Parade of Roses show young people negotiating their right to the city. If the 1960s were marked by efferent articulations in both art and politics with both avant-garde artists and political radicals taking to the streets, the failure to stop the renewal of the Japan–us Security Treaty in 1960 and again in 1970, and the institutionalisation of avant-garde art, marked by the 1970 Tokyo Biennale and Expo 70 in Osaka (where Matsumoto showed another multiprojection film, Space Projection Ako, from 1970) caused a deep sense of frustration for many on the left. Not coincidentally, Masumoto’s films of this autumnal decade turn to the subjective interior via structural experimentations. While the subject is approached critically and psychoanalytically, and through the matrices of gender and sexuality in Funeral Parade of Roses, it is addressed ecstatically and psychedelically in his works of the subsequent decade.

Matsumoto’s most successful films of this period are the relentlessly pulsating Atman (1975), shot on infrared film primarily through stop-motion, as the camera revolves around and zooms in and out on a seated figure in a noh-theatre hanya mask in a flux of exposures and colours; and Everything Visible Is Empty (1975), which rapidly and spellbindingly intercuts Chinese characters constituting the heart sutra (called hannya shingyo in Japanese) and images of Hindu deities and mandalas shot in contrasting acidic colours.

Both films are set to soundtracks composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi

– Atman’s is electronically composed and eerie, while Everything Visible Is Empty’s combines a relentlessly driving rhythm with the sounds of a meandering sitar. Aesthetically, the latter film resonates closely with contemporaneous musical output by Takehisa Kosugi and his Taj Mahal Travellers as well as the collaged album covers Tadanori Yokoo made for Santana (especially Lotus in 1974): all of them looked to India for Eastern spiritualism and a way to overcome the overbearing influence of Western Modernism.

While aesthetically compelling, it’s hard not to see these and Matsumoto’s subsequent output of the 1980s as a retreat, respectively, into the interior and into purely formal experimentations. In this context, Atman’s rapid zooms metaphorically represent the difficult negotiation of interior and exterior engagement. While Matsumoto strove to express both, the coincidence of formal, political and subjective experimentation was only realised momentarily at the end of the 1960s. The explosive, radical energy captured in For the Damaged Right Eye and Funeral Parade of Roses are regrettably viewed nostalgically in Japan. It may have more contemporary relevance in Hong Kong, where – as poetically remembered by Pak Sheung Chuen at his current exhibition at Para Site (reviewed in this issue) – in February 2016, citizens in the Mong Kok clashes expressed their right to the city by freeing bricks from the pavement and throwing them at the authorities, performatively realising a popular slogan of May 68, ‘beneath the pavement, the beach,’ and precisely the kind of overturn of values Matsumoto had in mind when he made those films. ara Toshio Matsumoto: Everything Visible Is Empty is on view at the Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, through 18 November Taro Nettleton is a writer and critic based in Tokyo

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A Civilisation of Flies Ilya and Emilia Kabakov on Long Island

by Sam Korman

By the 1992 edition of Documenta, citizens of Kassel, Germany, would Ilya had belonged to a group that would be dubbed the Moscow have already been exposed to a few decades of provocative public Conceptualists, and the relationship between image and text would art. But we can still wonder what they thought when a pair of rustic motivate his early critiques of Soviet culture. His approach was literary, public toilets were erected next to the Fridericianum, a landmark and indebted to nineteenth-century metaphysics and postwar exisinstitution of Western historical thought, and the quinquennial exhi- tentialism. A macabre dread and preoccupation with eternity dovebition’s primary venue. The lavatory facades were inscribed with the tailed with the punishing state intervention in Soviet-era Russia, and Cyrillic initials for ‘Male’ and ‘Female’, and the provincial character of would contribute to a constant suspicion of life’s illusory reality; an its grimy stucco walls and visible wooden beams made an unmistak- afterlife, for the Kabakovs, was to be found in material culture, and art able invitation for its most basic use. But to add to its surreal appear- was the highest provision of this task. ‘I created my works, thinking ance in the midst of such stately surroundings, entry to the building about what a Western curator would say about them,’ Ilya recounted actually disclosed a fully furnished apartment incorporated into the of his time in Moscow during a 2012 interview with e-flux founder toilets. Visitors found a cabinet, a bed, a table and kitchen setup, books, Anton Vidokle. By his own account, his eventual turn towards instalclothes and clocks; a make-do homeliness was brought to the stalls by lation, and its narrative underpinnings, was in the model of the a collection of choice Soviet-era knickknacks – the men’s side was the Renaissance polymath. living room and the women’s side was the bedroom. That there was “You can’t live without utopia,” Emilia explained to me in a recent clearly some tidying up to do was uncannily transporting, but it hardly interview. The Kabakovs subscribe to the transhumanist philosophy hid the fact that the apartment was housed in a toilet. Even considered of Russian Cosmism. Though considered esoteric when it originated today, it reeks of an invariable human need: free rent is free rent. at the end of the nineteenth century, its radical reimagination of time The installation is called The Toilet in terms of a material present would A macabre dread and preoccupation with prove influential to the Russian liter(1992), and it belongs to Ilya Kabakov, whose career, by then already 40 years ary and artistic avant-garde; it prometernity dovetailed with the punishing underway, was only gaining speed in ised technological immortality, and state intervention in Soviet-era Russia seeing in space travel and colonisathe West. It was around this time that Ilya began working with his soon-to-be-wife, Emilia, and the couple tion the possibility of a noble afterlife, it would inspire the Soviet would go on to collaborate on all their work. They were both born in space programme. As an outcropping of Marxism, which foretold a Ukraine to distantly related families, though Ilya was raised by his utopia achieved by multigenerational struggle, Cosmism promised mother in Russia. He was educated in wartime exile in Samarkand, a just future that included everyone’s sacrifice for the cause. During Uzbekistan (where the cosmopolitan art schools had also relocated), this time, Kabakov never enjoyed an art market, and technically there lived and worked in Moscow from the 1950s to the late 80s, and by was no art outside of what the state officially sanctioned. He nonethe1992 had moved to New York. Emilia, 12 years his junior, grew up less earned his living illustrating children’s books, and one season’s in Ukraine, and her family were neighbours to Ilya’s father. In Enter worth of work was lucrative enough to subsidise another year of Here (2013), critic Amei Wallach’s documentary about the pair, Emilia obscurity in the studio. recounts a particular visit from the early 1950s. “Ilya would ask me Ilya recounts a dual life in 1960s and 70s Moscow, one in which to play piano,” she remembers. “And I’d always refuse. Because my public life was the state’s diktat, while ‘“human” life… transpired in policy was I don’t play for common people.” Emilia emigrated in the kitchen’. Madness would be a feature of his humour, and multiple her mid-twenties, abandoning her citizenship, and thus the connec- disparate yet simultaneous realities would form the basis of early, tion to her family. She lived in Israel before eventually settling in proto-installation works, such as Ten Characters (1972–75), a suite of New York, where she became a curator and Fabergé egg expert. They documents strung together into long, zigzagging accordions that would reconnect in the 1980s, start working together in the early 90s, give fractured, disparate accounts by ten different characters, all of whom describe the autobiography of one man. The figure of the marry shortly thereafter and, by 1997, sign their work together.

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Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment, 1985, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. © Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Courtesy Tate, London

following pages Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Toilet, 1992 (installation view, Documenta 9, Kassel).

Photo: Dirk Pauwels. © and courtesy the artists

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schizophrenic artist would later appear in He Lost His Mind, Undressed, scene is schmaltzy, bordering on a circus sideshow and preposterous in and Ran Away Naked (1990), a seemingly abandoned artist’s studio. the extreme; it was also the first of Ilya’s installations to be seen in the Kabakov only publicly exhibited his work a handful of times West. It bordered on magic, Groys asserts, that the work was installed during the 30-plus years he lived in Moscow. It’s rumoured that he in New York at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1988. deliberately made his paintings too large to fit through the door of his Inside a Kabakov installation, language will corrupt the familiar studio to prevent the kgb from ever confiscating them. This half-truth with a literary sleight of hand. And in numerous installations, text describes the era’s pervasive paranoia: interiority would offer succour provides an archival apparatus: small labels incise every bit of detritus to the wretched entanglement between ideology and belief. It is also a with a memory in The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (The Garbage fitting story about how his work was only ever seen by his immediate Man) (1998). It reproduces an apartment that has been converted into an peers and in context with the longstanding conversation they had archive with flat files and cabinets; as the story goes, it’s a secret, second fostered. If anyone from the West ever saw them in person before the apartment, and fastidiously archives an entire life’s worth of one man’s early 1980s, it was the occasional bored diplomat who would drop in trash. The fly would be a career-spanning preoccupation, too, and looking for something more fun than state-sanctioned entertainments. would symbolically amalgamate vanity, dissolution and even detached Never do the stories of either Kabakov feel like ones of fear or despera- observation. It turns up in Concert for a Fly (1993), another toilet-based tion, though one can see a preferinstallation, where an original score Never do the stories of either Kabakov feel like appears to orchestrate a swarm of ence to reside in the imaginary, or ones of fear or desperation, though one can flies; and in the 1992 installation whatever reality that translated to.

For Emilia, it is important to The Life of Flies in Cologne, where the see a preference to reside in the imaginary note the differences in how the two insects are tagged to the entirety of artists left the Soviet Union. Ilya was invited as an artist. In practical Soviet culture by a system of comic superlatives. terms, people had been surviving the oppressive regime by microImages have a dumbfounding presence in the Kabakovs’ work. They dosing corruption and recalibrating to a scandalous double-speak. It’s are by and large reproductions of Soviet-era imagery, the kind of Social true that the Soviet Union would soon fall, but being an artist granted Realist agitprop full of buxom farmers or productive families that him a voluntary passage to the West. Philosopher and critic Boris Groys never quite square with reality. Any of Nikolai Gogol’s streetwalkers makes poignant use of Ilya’s flight in his study of the artist’s The Man would feel comfortable in a Kabakov installation. What their narratives Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1985). Viewers were only able to do is coerce us into taking these social surfaces seriously, making them peak through the door of the facsimile Soviet housing-block apart- appear plausible. The penchant for irony and absurdism through the ment. Inside they would see walls lined with drawings, schematics and combination of pop culture images and punchy captions feels familiar Soviet propaganda posters, a scale model of the apartment block posi- today, similar to online meme culture. A byproduct of image overflow, tioned on a table; at the centre of the room a spring-loaded, human-size memes are microdoses of satire, mundane though effectively political, slingshot had been jerry-rigged, cascading with light from a skylight that ensnare cultural detritus and reroute its meaning. that, the scene would suggest, had been blasted open by the apart‘They decipher the blind self-satisfaction of the Soviet Regime,’ ment’s former occupant. Like many of the Kabakovs’ installations, the writes Jean-Hubert Martin, the curator who staged Ilya’s first insti-

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, An Alternative History of Art, 2008 (installation view, The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow). © and courtesy the artists

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above Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Not Everyone Will Be Taken into The Future, 2001, wooden construction, railway car fragment, running-text display and paintings. © the artists. Courtesy Tate, London

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Ilya Kabakov, Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album) 1990, wooden construction, nine doors, wooden ceiling props, 24 light bulbs, detritus, audio and 76 works on paper, photographs, ink and printed papers. © the artists. Courtesy Tate, London

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tutional solo exhibition in the West, at Kunsthalle Bern, in 1985. himself would act as the exhibition’s keystone, able to stabilise the Their style is inalienable from Ilya’s education in highly regulated poles between the contemporary artworld of the Garage Museum Stalinist-era art academies, and pervades their work with the innocence and the fraught historical narratives at the preeminent Pushkin State of a childlike encounter. School No. 6 (1993) is well suited to the Chinati Museum, two of the three venues for their work; The Alternative History Foundation, the museum Donald Judd built as a ‘strict measure for of Art (2005), an installation component hosted at Garage, would build the art of this time and place’. The Kabakovs arrayed one of the insti- a fictional museum that connected the work of three fictional artists, tution’s former military barracks with dusty classroom effects – sports including a Kabakov doppelganger, and walk spectators through equipment, musical instruments, textbooks and pictures of Lenin – a labyrinth of galleries that critiqued the history of Soviet art. that would be indistinguishable from a dilapidated Russian schoolThe Toilet was reinstalled for the retrospective, and is in part based house were it not located in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert in on a story from the life of Ilya’s mother, who spent a miserable stint far west Texas. One suspects a practical side to their grandiloquence, residing in a former lavatory while they lived in Samarkand (he lived considering the sheer volume of projects they undertook throughout in the art school dormitory). His mother’s life story would be incorthe 1990s especially. Projects would echo others. Not Everyone Will Be porated into other works, including Labyrinth: My Mother’s Album Taken into the Future, originally staged at the 2001 Venice Biennale, (1990). Wallach’s documentary chronicles the Moscow retrospective; in one scene, a middle-aged man hints at their shrewdness. Behind “Don’t tell them I served you borscht. appears to walk into a gag, when what appears to be a recently deIt was an accident that I made it today,” he steps towards the outhouse parted train lay a grip of broken and is stopped by a young guard and discarded paintings that had Emilia joked after serving me a bowl dressed in military fatigues. The been left behind. They resemble others from the oeuvre, and abandoned artwork is a persistent motif guard’s response is polite to the point of obscurity, when he tells the man it is not an actual restroom. Wouldn’t the man have noticed the across projects. They self-identify with the loser.

“Don’t tell them I served you borscht. It was an accident that I made gritty toilet’s incongruity with the surrounding industrial architecit today,” Emilia joked after serving me a bowl. Later, she would bat me ture (or a row of neighbouring porta-potties)? “What is it? Some kind away when I tried to talk about perestroika, and Ilya mostly wanted of fantasy, huh?” the man concedes to the guard, distilling the gist. to talk about his theory of museums – the Kabakovs seemed oddly Yes, the Kabakovs build worlds for those who will step inside. ara preoccupied with an artworld that they perceive as unable to grasp painting’s significance to their interdisciplinary world-building. This Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will Be Taken into the Future is on view at Tate Modern, London, through 28 January, year boasts a retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern, London, and a and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Utopian Projects can be seen thematic survey at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, dc, though at the Hirshhorn, Washington, dc, through 4 March we might find clues for how the couple has already positioned themselves for the past decade in their 2008 dual-retrospective in Moscow.

Sam Korman is associate editor of ArtReview It was Ilya’s first return trip to his former home in 20 years, and he

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, School No. 6 , 1993 (installation view, The Chinati Foundation, Marfa).Photo: Todd Eberle. © and courtesy the artists

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2–10 FEBRUARY 2018 PARTICIPATING ARTISTS AS OF OCTOBER 2017 Planetary Planning curated by Devika Singh Amie Siegel Ayesha Sultana Buckminster Fuller Desmond Lazaro Hera Buyuktascian Isamu Noguchi Lala Rukh Mohammad Kibria Muzharul Islam Novera Ahmed Seher Shah Zarina Hashmi

Samdani Art Award 2018 curated by Simon Castets Ahmed Rasel Aprita Singh Lopa Asfika Rahman Debasish Shom Marzia Farhana Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury Opper Zaman Palash Bhattacharjee Rakib Ahmed Reetu Sattar Shikh Sabbir Alam

Volcano Extravaganza curated by Milovan Farranato Runa Islam (Artistic Leader) Core group (amongst others): Alex Cecchetti Cecilia Bengolea Haroon Mirza Osman Yousefzada (/ OSMAN) Patrizio Di Massimo Tobias Putfih

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Bearing Points curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt Amin Taasha Andrew Ananda Voogel Anoka Faruqee Ayesha Jatoi Charles Lim Yi Yong Gan Chin Lee Gauri Gill Hitman Gurung Ho Tzu Nyen Htein Lin Jakkai Siributr Joydeb Roaja Kamruzzaman Shahdin Kanak Chanpa Chakma Khadim Ali Liu Xiaodong Lucy Raven Minam Apang Munem Wasif Nabil Rahman Neha Choksi Nilima Sheikh Omer Wasim and Saira Sheikh Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) Pablo Bartholomew Prabhakar Pachpute Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Randhir Singh and Seher Shah Rasheed Araeen Raqib Shaw Sabih-ul-Alam, Tajul Islam, Syed Enayet Hossain, Abul Mansur, Chandra Shekhar Dey and Mohammad Shawkat Haider Shahid Sajjad Soe Yu Nwe Sonia Jabbar Subas Tamang Ursula Biemann Veer Munshi Yasmin Jahan Nupur Yona Friedman Zihan Karim Zuleikha Chaudhari

A beast, a god, and a line curated by Cosmin Costinas Ampannee Satoh Anida Yoeu Ali Apichatpong Weerasethakul Celestine Fadul, RJ Camacho and Simon Soon Chai Siris Charles Lim Yi Yong Cian Dayrit Daniel Boyd Dilara Begum Jolly Garima Gupta Ines Doujak Jakrawal Nilthamrong Jarai Dew Collective (curated by art labor) Jiun-Yang Li Joël Andrianomearisoa Joydeb Roaja Lantian Xie Lavanya Mani Malala Andrialavidrazana Manish Nai Ming Wong Moelyono Mrinalini Mukherjee Munem Wasif Nabil Ahmed Nguyen Trinh Thi Nontawat Numbenchapol Norberto Roldan Paul Pfeiffer Praneet Soi Raja Umbu Rashid Choudhury Sarat Mala Chakma Sawangwongse Yawnghwe Sheela Gowda Sheelasha Rajbhandari Simryn Gill Su Yu Hsien Taloi Havini Thao-Nguyen Phan Trevor Yeung Truong Công Tùng Tuguldur Yondonjamts Zamthingla Ruivah

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One Hundred Thousand Small Tales curated by Sharmini Pereira A. Mark Anoli Perera Arjuna Gunarathne Aubrey Collette Bandu Manamperi Cassie Machado Chandraguptha Amarasingha Chandraguptha Thenuwara Channa Daswatte, Asanga Welikala and Sanjana Hattotuwa G. Samvarthini Godwin Constantine Ieuan Weinman Jagath Weerasinghe Kannan Arunasalam Kingsley Gunatillake Kusal Gunasekara Laki Senanayake Lalene Jayamanne Lionel Wendt M. Vijitharan Manori Jayasinghe Muhanned Cader Nayanananda Wijayakulathilake Nilani Joseph Nillanthan Pradeep Thalawatte Ruhanie Perera S. H. Sarath Sarath Kumarasiri Stephen Champion Sujeewa Kumari Sumudu Athukorala, Sumedha Kelegama and Irushi Tennekoon T. Krishnapriya T. Shanaathanan T. P. G. Amarajeewa Tilak Samarawickrema Tissa De Alwis Tissa Ranasinghe W. J. G. Beling

Artist-Led Initiatives Akaliko Artpro Back Art Charupith Daagi Art Garage Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts Hill Artists’ Group Jog Art Space Jothashilpa ‘Shako’- Women Artist Association of Bangladesh Shoni Mongol Adda Uronto Artist Community

Curatorial Team Diana Campbell Betancourt (Chief Curator) Amara Antilla Beth Citron Cosmin Costinas Devika Singh Katya García-Antón Md. Muniruzzaman Milovan Farronato Shabbir Hussain Mustafa Sharmini Pereira Simon Castets Vali Mahlouji

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Yokohama Triennale: Islands, Constellations & Galapagos Various venues, Yokohama 4 August – 5 November The sixth edition of the Yokohama Triennale, Islands, Constellations & Galapagos, ostensibly makes reference to a wide range of issues, from data overload, online communities, ‘island mentality’ and the rise of populism, to Brexit, the refugee crisis and public disillusionment with centralised political systems, throwing the whole theme open to ‘thinking about the world through “‘connectivity” and “isolation”’.

But reading the exhibition instead through geography and human relationships, with each other as well as with nature, both softens the visual chaos of the group show and lets one seek out something more than instant visual gratification. Politics is popular and the digital realm affords escapism, but our natural environment is bigger than us, and provides a more profound lens through which to make sense of the 40 artists and artist groups involved in this year’s triennale.

The entire Japanese archipelago consists of 6,852 islands. One of the first works encountered in the Yokohama Art Museum (one of the three sites for the triennale), by Hong Kongbased duo map Office, directly addresses this, making miniature islands out of objects found on the shoreline, such as seashells, and populated by little plastic figurines of people, palm trees and dinosaurs. Each kitschy island, displayed in a Perspex box, comes with a title denoting its theme: fantasy, time, war, love. But it’s a work on the floor beside one of the islands – a circle filled with white sand and broken coral – that, while easily overlooked amid the gaudy dioramas, delivers the most affecting message. Coral Island (2017) looks like a Micronesian stick chart (a form of seafaring map of the islands made using sticks, coconut fibre and shells), only this map is made of pieces of dead, bleached coral from the waters of Oahu, Hawaii, where a temperature spike in 2014 made a significant impact on its marine ecology.

Against the surrounding vibrant works, Coral Island offers a sad, muted message, charting the course of marine ecosystems: our reefs are dying.

After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011, Seo Natsumi volunteered with relief efforts in badly affected areas of the Tōhoku coastline. Her ongoing project Voices from the landscape – a town beside the sea (2011–) is formed of interviews with survivors of the tsunami, whose memories are translated visually through bright colour-pencil drawings and paintings, forming a collective narrative and experience of the natural disaster. Elsewhere, Tatiana Trouvé’s knee-high, shacklike cardboard structures The Great Atlas of Disorientation (2017) call to mind the wreckage of human settlements in the wake of natural disasters, while Anne Samat’s Tribal Chief Series (2015–16) wall hangings, made with traditional Malaysian weaving techniques and brightly coloured threads, incorporate everyday household items like spoons and sieves, as well as metal washers, screws and circuit boards: small things we use and think nothing more of that eventually become litter. Each work here presents a kind of careful, conscious salvaging of memories, livelihoods and banal manmade objects that are otherwise at threat of being lost or thrown away.

‘Fossil Necklace is a string of worlds,’ explains the pamphlet accompanying Katie Paterson’s work. Understated but utterly captivating, the 2013 necklace, suspended from the ceiling by two nearly-invisible strings, is made of 170 beads of fossils spanning the beginning of life on Earth – from a sphere of single-cell organic matter (Archean Eon stromatolite in butterstone) to the carved fossil of a Cyprian hippo in the Holocene Epoch – and charts human evolution alongside plants and other animals. Each unique bead is both planetlike and otherworldly, an aeon of time made physical and turned into an item of jewellery to be worn and treated with care.

A parallel form of perspective is provided by Kathy Prendergast’s Atlas (2016) at Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse No 1. A hundred road maps of Europe are laid open on trestle tables filling an entire room, each spread inked-out black except for the cities and towns, forming a new

facing page, top Dong Yuan, Grandmother’s House – Ancestors’ Layer, 2013 (installation view).Photo: Eric.

Courtesy the Organizing Committee for the Yokohama Triennale

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kind cartography that rejects notions of borderlines and territory. The volume of atlases becomes a night sky that encourages visitors to search through the tiny specks of civilisation like we would the stars on a clear evening.

Both works remind us, through a macroperspective, of our place in Earth’s history.

A room away and the perspective immediately returns to the human scale. Dong Yuan recreates a domestic household with Grandmother’s House (2013), carefully constructed from layers of different-size oil paintings, depicting an altar table and cupboards on which stand more paintings of thermos flasks, trinkets and a fish tank, a fully stocked pantry, stacks of laundry, a radiator and flowerpots leaning against a backdrop painting of the window.

Nearby, Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel video projection The Visitors (2012) is playing, in which musicians each inhabit a different room of the same house, relying on the sounds of each other’s instruments to play a single musical score; each individual plays in solitude, highlighting not only the physical strain between the ear and sound, but also the condition of being alone.

In the basement of Yokohama Port Opening Memorial Hall, Yanagi Yukinori’s Project God-zilla (2017) forces us out of these lulling scenes of domesticity. The installation, largely situated in the dark, consists of a heap of rubble under which a giant projected eyeball (presumably that of the radiation-mutated lizard Godzilla) glares around the room, while mirrors etched with the names and dates of nuclear weapons tests carried out in the Pacific Ocean stand like monuments in smaller piles of debris. The mirrors lead visitors down a path towards a final room: red light emanating from led screens cuts through the gloom as words – the text of Article 9 from the Japanese constitution, which outlawed war in 1947 – stream past. The work’s lack of subtlety can be forgiven; it sends us away with a reminder of our impact on the environment and the responsibilities we hold towards the planet and each other. Fi Churchman

facing page, bottom Seo Natsumi, Voices from the landscape – a town beside the sea, 2011– (installation view). Photo: Tanaka Yuichiro.

Courtesy the Organizing Committee for the Yokohama Triennale

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Cold Nights Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing 15 September – 17 December As a conceptual frame for the newly produced artworks in Cold Nights, each of the four artists was assigned a character from Ba Jin’s novel Cold Nights (1947) – the wife, husband, wife’s lover or husband’s mother. Ba’s story describes the disintegration of a family in 1940s Chongqing and is commonly read as a metaphor for that period’s brutally felt sociopolitical shifts.

The curators, Boliang Shen and Zhanglun Dai, have two guiding intentions: to collaboratively rewrite Ba’s work, creating a new text within the exhibition space, and to get the artists to utilise the novel as a model for reflecting on contemporary social realities.

Nabuqi, ‘performing’ the mother, installed a line of mirrors on the spaces’ outer walls at eye level, meaning it is always possible to see at least one of the exhibition’s works; a flashing light intermittently fills the otherwise dimly lit space, highlighting the works’ reflection in the mirrors.

With the conservative mother character in mind, the continuous, almost invasive presence of these works throughout the space seems like a reminder of the weight of tradition.

Liu Shiyuan’s complex video includes bees pollinating plants, mid-twentieth-century

cartoons of young girls admiring boys’ biceps, ticking clocks and a group eating free oysters on a Danish beach (part of a government scheme to quell invading foreign oysters). Liu highlights the changing nature of value and our constantly shifting control over meaning. The video is paired to the novel’s wife: a foil to the antiquated mother, she is a relatively modern character, seemingly in control of her destiny, who elopes with her lover. Yet Liu’s video seems to suggest that in contemporary society our roles, specifically those of women, remain constrained. As the video’s title suggests, The Best Is Yet To Come (2017).

Li Ran’s black-and-white video Night of Patmos (2017) represents the wife’s lover, whose depiction in the novel is less direct, often represented by comments from others, his existence composed of multiple fragments.

Li’s video similarly weaves disparate elements together – improvised scenes from biblical plays; a voiceover recounting a mountaineering trip in which the participants turn fanatical; and photographs of 1950s and 1980s theatre plays – to reflect the lover’s narrative presence. Yet beyond disunity, the motivation for Li’s choice of video content is not evident.

Chen Zhou, Blue Hole (still), 2017, hd video, 26 min 3 sec.

Courtesy the artist and ucca, Beijing

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Chen Zhou’s video Blue Hole (2017), interpreting the husband, follows two fashionably dressed actors fruitlessly searching for their companion in a deserted forest. The lonely husband’s inability to communicate with his wife and mother in the novel is transposed into a contemporary moment. The atemporal environments the characters evolve in also seem to reference videogames, pointing to the virtual world as a melancholic hole that Chen sees us turning to for companionship.

In an accompanying text the artist describes living in Shanghai, emphasising that the latest technologies and urban fashions cannot inhibit loneliness within one of the world’s most populated cities.

The exhibition relies too heavily on the novel while offering very little information on its content: without fuller knowledge of it, the viewer finds it difficult to conjecture the extent to which the artworks are connected to each character, and to what extent they comment on contemporary society. As these two poles are the show’s curatorial foundation, I was left grappling for meaning somewhere between them. Tom Mouna

Chris Evans, Pak Sheung Chuen Two Exhibitions Para Site, Hong Kong 23 September – 3 December An imaginary line seems to have been drawn across the gallery space to separate Chris Evans’s and Pak Sheung Chuen’s works in this duo-solo setting. However, this segregation seems to paradoxically connect what both artists are discussing in their works: the dilemmas between authority and its subjects, society and its citizens. One enters the exhibition with an audiovisual experience, offered jointly by Pak’s Nightmare Wallpaper series and Evans’s Jingle (all works 2017); apart from that, on no other occasion is one ‘obliged’ to encounter both artists’ works at the same time.

Pak describes the making of the Nightmare Wallpaper series as derived from the automatic drawings or Chinese ‘planchette writing’ (fuji) made while he was attending court proceedings of cases involving political activists associated with the Umbrella Movement (Drawings from Notebooks, also presented here; the failure of the movement had plunged Pak into a state of depression, which led him to sit through the hearings). In Pak’s debut presentation of the Nightmare Wallpaper series, at Vitamin Creative Space’s Mirrored Gardens, in Guangzhou, earlier this year, each type of wallpaper overwhelmingly covered a separate exhibition wall in its entirety. Here, instead, six different patterns from the series are mounted on a folding-screen-like wall, in the fashion

of a manufacturer’s sample room display. This modest setup resonates with Pak’s intention that the wallpapers be mass-produced – to remove them from the art market and slip them into our everyday life. Considering the fear and uneasiness that went into the making of these patterns, one might be wary of these negative connotations invading her home. However, for Pak, the act of drawing after such a traumatic experience helped him regain energy and focus, thus these colourful yet gloomy patterns are actually seals of such energy – and he seems to be obscurely offering his blessing to us.

The Seal series features five more patterns derived from his courtroom sketches, which are blown up to a larger-than-life scale and then handdrawn by the artist. Although the prominent presence of a vitrine presenting archival materials looks apparently unusual to Pak’s aesthetics, this allows one to discover not only contextual information on the Umbrella Movement but also remnants from his performances as well as newspaper clippings of his own articles – which is one of the outlets of his diversified practice.

A calm aura also emanates from Evans’s works, both in his fairly pale-toned sculptures (the Cowlick series) and paintings (the Untitled series). The sculptures include either Jesmonite or wax casted with a cowlick relief incorporated into a transaction window. Evans extends this

play-on-words – a cowlick originally refers to the odd direction of hair growth against the rest – to a metaphor for odd situations that happen at those windows in governmental institutions.

The reference feels particularly timely when one can easily associate us President Donald Trump and uk Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, whose respective foreign policies have caused distress for countless people, with their hairstyles.

By making the sculpture freestanding, Evans breaks the power dynamic between the two sides of a normal transaction window by allowing viewers to be fluid in their positioning. These sculptures, with their pedestals spread across the exhibition space, could also appear as barricades that Evans set up to prevent the possibility of the Hong Kong police force seizing an art space that has an outspoken pro-democratic stance. Although none of the commissioned writings in Job Interviews, a new publication illustrated by Evans with paintings from Untitled series, prophesy such a scenario, Heman Chong, one of the invited contributors, wittily wrote a metafiction that set its backdrop 80 years from now. In Chong’s story, Hong Kong has been literally stripped down to a group of islands called Isle+, touching on the disappearance of the city-state’s identity, a core concern of the city over the years that subtly connects with Pak’s nightmare. Morgan Wong

Pak Sheung Chuen, Drawings from Notebooks (detail), 2017, ink on paper, 15 × 21 cm (each). Courtesy the artist

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The 10 Year Hustle Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai 11 August – 2 September On 10 August 2017, Chatterjee & Lal was ten years old. Birthday festivities did not include cake or champagne, and no one blew out any candles at the commemorative do, but artworks were plentiful, spilling over the floor to mark the occasion. The celebration was fitting: after all, Chatterjee & Lal is one of Mumbai’s bestknown commercial galleries.

Established by husband-and-wife Mort Chatterjee and Tara Lal, the gallery is well loved for giving fledgling new media practitioners a boost. Its birthday exhibition – The 10 Year Hustle – peddles this line, quirkily putting C & L’s own stable of talent in dialogue with more venerable artists (and historical artefacts).

There are some unexpected guests: see the mysterious-looking Post-Gupta era stone apsara (angel) huddled high up on a wall? The gallery makes much of its own brood too. Offerings by its rising stars – for instance, Minam Apang’s Moon Mirrors Mountains Series (2013), moody, monochrome landscapes (created with a fusion of tea and charcoal) – socialise with contributions from the gallery’s superstars: among them Rashid Rana’s gridlike photomontages, Delhi-duo Thukral & Tagra’s logo-filled pastel

painting and performance artist Nikhil Chopra’s inky watercolours of a silvery landscape, Rehearsal Act I–II (2014). Chopra’s tiny watercolours anticipate – somewhat like preparatory sketches – the vast charcoal drawings of his surroundings that he makes during his performances – in which he assumes the guise of personages from bygone epochs (a Raj-era gentleman; a Victorian damsel; a queen). His dark drawings are repositories of remembrance: since they are made during his performance, they serve as aides-memoire afterwards. So, Chopra’s Rehearsal Acts, which look forward to looking back, are perfect conceits for this time-sensitive show.

The display is cunningly divided into two sections: one tackles the earth, the other speaks to the sky. Each ruminates on the past in its own way. The first concentrates on modern and contemporary artists’ depictions of landscape.

Clever placement of artworks demonstrates how golden oldies continue to influence (relatively) new kids on the block: we notice that Apang’s fragile mountainscapes, with their minute geometric forms, resemble the mini-triangular structures in Zarina Hashmi’s celebrated etching

Shelter (1982). In turn, Hashmi’s miniscule shapes recall long-deceased Pilloo Pochkhanawala’s Untitled and undated pen-and-ink drawings of featherlike structures on tracing paper.

Meanwhile, behind some pillars, the second part of the exhibition unfolds. Here, contemporary artworks dealing with air and angels are juxtaposed with celestially preoccupied antiquities. Fabien Charuau’s rainbow-hued untitled digital print (from the series A Thousand Kisses Deep, 2015) is paired with a nineteenthcentury Madrasi stained-glass window, its opulent peacock-feather pattern allegedly commissioned by the Maharaja of Travancore.

Both print and pane appear suffused with a magical, multicoloured radiance.

Even as they take off, the gallery’s artists remain rooted in India’s age-old traditions, gallerists Chatterjee and Lal subtly stress with this show. No doubt this argument is an attempt

by C & L to stake its claim; to ‘hustle’ the artists it represents into Indian art history. A discreet kind of boasting, perhaps? Still, for a contemporary art gallery to have survived for a decade in Mumbai is no mean feat. Surely, this merits a toast – even a gentle boast – or two? Zehra Jumabhoy

Fabien Charuau, Untitled (From the Series, A Thousand Kisses Deep), 2015, digital print on canvas, 76 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai

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ArtReview Asia

Tan Pin Pin in time to come Filmgarde Bugis +, Singapore 28 September – 11 October For over 15 years, Singaporean filmmaker Tan Pin Pin has been a meditative, pointed and courageous documentarian of the submerged histories and bittersweet textures of the ultramodern, authoritarian city-state she calls home. Much of the power of her work comes from her unearthing and drawing out of compelling personalities, from the ragtag buskers, entertainers and public announcers who make up the soundtrack of everyday life in Singapore GaGa (2005), to the political exiles scattered across the globe in To Singapore, with Love (2013), a feature that has won awards at film festivals in Busan and Dubai but remains banned from public screenings at home. Think layered narratives, offset by unembellished camerawork and a reliance on diegetic or natural sounds.

In her latest documentary feature, in time to come (2017), Tan shifts her focus from characterisation to crowds, in search of an alternative cinematic language. A depiction of mundane, easily overlooked rituals of Singaporean life – from mosquito fogging at a condominium to the shutters of a big Japanese-owned bookstore coming up in the morning and its staff bowing to greet the first customers – in time to come is a general wash of crowd and group scenes shot in very long, still takes, the camera keeping its distance and rarely picking out specific individuals or moments.

Initially underwhelming and seemingly devoid of the narrative urgency underscoring

Tan’s best work, the film grew on me. It becomes clear, from the scenes of time capsules being packed and sealed, or dug up and opened, that this footage of present-day Singapore constitutes an archive of sorts for future generations.

In a question-and-answer session following the screening I attend, Tan reveals that the film was shot over the period of the country’s Golden Jubilee in 2015, when there was no shortage of ceremonies and unveiling of time capsules, but that she chose to capture the most banal aspects of these.

The 62-minute film settles into a rhythm, by turns predictable and quietly illuminating.

At an appreciation dinner marking sg50 (the ubiquitous official shorthand for that Jubilee year), it quickly becomes apparent that Tan will show people waiting for the guest of honour though not the guest’s actual arrival.

But the camera stays trained on this group long enough for a civil servant to drop her staff pass and for the viewer to notice it before she does.

Accidents are minor; there are no major disruptions. The viewer of in time to come alternates between crying out for a little drama to finding pathos or strangeness in the ordinary. South Asian construction workers stare at the stump of a huge banyan tree, the chopping of which has been a major operation, with all the chainsaws and bulldozers assembled. At a fire drill in a school, a disembodied voice blares over a klaxon: “It could happen anywhere, not just in a school”.

One frame is filled entirely with fog, before it clears and the outlines of cars in a carpark being fumigated slowly become visible. Tan makes these wry asides on the machinery of containment in a city obsessed with order and hygiene, as well as the humanity that courses beneath the surface.

It is one closeup, however, that for me provided the most poignant moment of the film.

In a scene where objects from a time capsule from the year 1990 are laid out, the gloved hands of a museum worker are shown thumbing through the crisp pages of a phone directory. I realised with a jolt that I hadn’t seen one of those in years, but it was a sight so well-worn and familiar.

In the public postfilm conversation, Tan said her inspiration was the extraordinary archive of the late Ivan Polunin, who, together with his reels of film footage of pre-independence Singapore, featured as one of the makers and seekers of the country’s past in her riveting feature Invisible City (2007). Out of his more-than30 hours of footage, what stayed with her was a scene in a wet market of policemen chasing illegal hawkers. She made the telling observation that, correspondingly, what could strike someone 50 years from now about Singapore today could be just as personal and unexpected.

Seen in that light, hers is ultimately a film for the future. Like the visceral reaction I got from the sight of a 25-year-old phonebook, perhaps this is a work best savoured in time to come, rather than in the here and now. Clarissa Oon

in time to come (still), 2017, dir Tan Pin Pin. Courtesy bfg Media

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Discipline the City The Substation, Singapore 23 August – 26 November Disciplinary architecture enforces conventions and prohibitions by moulding, through architectural elements and urban design, human behaviour. Perhaps the best known are measures to passively keep the homeless from public view, or high-pitched tones to deter teenage loitering.

Yet the design of our urban environment includes countless other subtle cues, which seem set to explode with the convergence of the Internet of Things and machine learning.

Discipline the City is split into three distinct acts, with a number of artworks (and the punksin-residence) changing with each act. The physical space of the building has been noticeably altered (a callback to conceptual artist Lim Tzay Chuen’s intervention Space Alteration #7 in 2001): influenced by both punk’s diy ethos and the spirit of disciplinary architecture, the alterations include new passageways hacked through walls, antihomeless floor-studs and an incredibly narrow ‘fat-shaming’ corridor that restricts access to some work. Artist Debbie Ding’s A Brief History of the Trap Door (2017) also takes visitors through the basement, which is usually off-limits.

Parallel to themes of spatial control, Discipline the City can also be linked to Alan Oei’s appointment as artistic director of The Substation, the changes he wanted to implement and the outcry that ensued. The gist of this agonistic process is that Oei would have stopped renting out space for external exhibitions and events, the capacity of which had led The Substation to become a focal point for the punk community.

The discussions that followed – detailed documentation is available in the space – led to the development of the punk residency, with a portion of the gallery being used as its studio/

exhibition space, and a stipend being provided, much like a regular artist residency. In keeping – farcically – with the disciplinary theme, the residents are asked to maintain detailed timesheets, and the space is surveilled by livestreamed video. Based on a number of visits to The Substation, I would say that Act I’s resident, Angjingsial, busied himself with the production of agitprop graffiti, working in the same punk aesthetic as Stevphen Shukaitis’s installation in the show, Stop the City… Revisited (2017).

Shukaitis’s installation is rather odd, consisting of a tiny room plastered with graffiti, flyers and other iconography of the protests that blockaded London’s financial district in 1983–84, in a manner reminiscent of a votivestrewn shrine. It is, of course, a seminal moment in punk history – and also a forerunner to the antiglobalisation movement of the 1990s and the Occupy movement of recent times – but its inclusion in this context could also be taken as situating the punk subculture squarely in the past, casting punks in Singapore as the inheritors of a tradition.

Like Stop the City… Revisited, both Ding’s installation and Chen Sai Hua Kuan’s Something Nothing (2017) are permanent works in the exhibition, and engage with spatial discipline obliquely. Where these last two differ, however, is in being intense, immersive experiences on different ends of a spectrum. Something Nothing is but a right-angled tunnel a few metres deep, but by dint of some clever lighting, the experience is one of a weightless void free of shadow, stretching into infinity for want of any cues of depth. Ding’s installation, conversely, is a mostly lightless traversal of The Substation’s basement, groping along a length of rope

facing page, top Discipline the City, 2017 (installation view).

Courtesy the artists and The Substation, Singapore

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to find the way, intermittently bumping into or squeezing past unseen foam obstacles, leavened at the end by a projected loop of animated gifs of trapdoors, set to the sound of the artist discussing trapdoors.

This last info-dump aside, both of these permanent installations suggest the significance of experientiality over conveying or evoking information and emotion. It’s a quality shared with literal disciplinary architecture, such as those antihomeless floor studs, which find themselves turned on their head in Invisible City: Liverpool Top 9 (2006) by Kuang-Yu Tsui. In this sardonic pseudodocumentary, which 'pataphysically reimagines hostile or disciplinary architecture in Liverpool as marvels of civic-spiritedness.

For instance, a poorly designed highway off-ramp that obliges pedestrians to jaywalk and vault a fence is described as a thoughtful, time-saving measure, while cobbles designed to deter the homeless are enthusiastically praised as providing free foot massages to tired Liverpudlians. This and other videos by Tsui engage directly with disciplinary architecture, bringing to light the unnoticed absurdities and hostilities in urban environments.

As the exhibition transitions to its second act, one does wonder if more work engaging specifically with disciplinary architecture and urban design might have been apropos, perhaps finding common ground with stories of how Singapore’s punks have persevered in the face of hostile police, landlords and so on. The upside, of course, is an expanded field of spatial experience, a breadth that seems particularly valuable in the face of the insidious, amorphous disciplinary possibilities that ‘smart cities’ might allow. Bruce Quek

facing page, bottom Debbie Ding, A Brief History of the Trap Door, 2017 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and The Substation, Singapore

ArtReview Asia

Winter 2017

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Yu Cheng-Ta Tell Me What You Want Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei 29 July – 17 September Orange seems to be the colour when it comes to the representation of exoticism and desire.

Taiwanese artist Yu Cheng-Ta’s solo exhibition Tell Me What You Want is covered in it: the banner, the brochure (with the Chinese and the English version in two different shades of orange), the partition walls, as well as the plastic stool-chairs that are typical of everyday life in Southeast Asia scattered in the exhibition space. And if you walk into the show at the right moment, when all the screens are synced to the very beginning, you will find yourself suddenly immersed in this shamelessly blunt colour, which does not, however, indicate any honesty in the narrative that’s about to unfold. The four videos, titled Malate, David, Joara and The Shop (all 2017), adopt the form of the mockumentary, offering a fictional framework for the exhibition that I think also echoes the ambiguous nature of the relationship between the artist and the subject of his research: the marketing boys in Manila. It is around this relationship that the whole project revolves.

‘Marketing’ is a profession on the street of Malate, Manila. Guys sit on their motorcycles, waiting for the next customer – most of them are foreigners – to show up. ‘Tell me what you want,’ they say. Their services include taking you to all the clubs in the city’s red-light district, promising that you will have a great time, and of course you have to pay for their services.

In the past two years or so, Yu frequently visited Manila, as a traveller and a film producer.

He made friends with these local ‘marketings’.

They knew him as ‘David’. But as you can see in the videos’ narrative, David then became a sort of alter ego of the artist in the sense that he’s always referred to in the third person – as if David had already fled the scene when the artist and his crew came to Malate and conducted the documentary-style interviews.

“How did you know David?” they are asked, turning their encounter with him into something close to an investigation.

Four screens are placed in a semi-open space where you can hear all the soundtracks at the same time. It’s a little disturbing, but it helps recreate an acoustic field of the real Malate nightlife, a sensual experience crucial for the show. The structure that brings the four independent videos onto the same page reminds me of the composition of a novel: Malate sets up the stage, giving a sketch of the background city and luring you into the fictional world; David introduces the alleged protagonist, who’s the intersection point of all the storylines, while he himself enjoys a mysterious Jay Gatsby kind of role; Joara (the name of a club they visited) is a closeup of Malate’s nightlife, where you can see faces, relationships and exchanges of desire rather intimately. The final chapter, The Shop, is different from the other three.

For starters, it is installed in a separate and more private space, where you can sit and watch the whole thing without getting too distracted.

Secondly, there’s more daylight in this piece,

both literally and metaphorically, because it takes you away from the nightlife and leads you into the real life of one of the main characters, Junio. Junio wanted to have his own shop because he thought he had to consider his future after retirement from the marketing business.

Junio turns to David for financial assistance, with the amount of money he demands increasing due to various reasons. Will David (the artist) continue to help Junio in real life now his film project is done? You wonder.

Yu makes it quite clear that he’s interested in the concepts of exchange that are fundamental elements of both the marketing business and this film project. He doesn’t try to sweep this intention under the rug, instead acknowledging and exposing the twisted desire to look into other people’s sometimes miserable lives.

Furthermore, by asking two of the marketing boys to pose for his photography (two largescale portraits hang in the exhibition space as a dividing curtain; they posed for him for free because “David is a friend”) and promising the owner of Joara that he would produce a commercial for him in exchange for shooting in the club, Yu further complicates an already complicated network of transactions, pointing to the mechanism behind all kinds of human relations, artistic production included, and showing that you cannot neatly draw a line between friendship and pure exchange of interests, and consequently between the real and otherwise. Guo Juan

Tell Me What You Want, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Thousand Bird Arts.

Courtesy the artist and Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei

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ArtReview Asia

Kirill Savchenkov Office of Sensitive Activities / Applications Group Moscow Museum of Modern Art (mmoma) 9 September – 5 November The theorist Simon O’Sullivan likens the tool of the diagram to speculative fiction – that is, it’s not an illustration of how things are, but of how things might be. O’Sullivan’s notion comes to mind as one walks around this solo exhibition by Kirill Savchenkov, commissioned by the v-a-c Foundation over three rooms and two floors of mmoma, in which the young Muscovite artist presents a series of enigmatic architectural and text installations that visualise otherwise invisible phenomena and abstract notions.

An almost mazelike series of chipboard partitions spreads throughout the ground floor. On one, neat vinyl lettering reads, ‘The Military Decision Making Process’.

This is followed by a series of jagged bubbles containing field-command options with arrows leading from one to the next.

‘Algorithm 5: Priorities, Realities, Options, Ways’, reads one option (in Russian). Such flow charts, all couched in management speak,

proliferate along the rough walls, leading would-be soldiers through their options on the combat field. Interrupting the texts are several metallic armatures, attached to which are items of military paraphernalia, including masks the sas in Britain or Special Forces in the us might wear, Perspex sheets onto which are etched what might be maps or charts, and objects less obviously connected to the military theme: bits of foliage and alien figurines.

A floor work in the upper gallery, surrounded by vases of wilting flowers, attests to the often dire, and material, consequences of bad decisions. Again diagrammatical, white texts printed in Russian on grey matting catalogue the errors of the Chernobyl catastrophe. ‘Telegram messages not read’, reads one. ‘Flammable materials in the roof’ and ‘The lack of protective gear for radioactive fire’, read others. Decision-making is an abstract process, the work implies,

but its effects are not: the former residents of the irradiated ghost town Pripyat can attest to that. Evolution, the subject of a second installation in the upper gallery, is similarly invisible, its effects recognisable only over thousands of years. Metal racks with glass shelves contain a vast array of what appear to be museum artefacts – plaster casts of monkeys, bones – each neatly labelled with an accession number. Among these, which together tell the scientific story of Darwin and Linnaeus, are stranger objects: the bust of a yeti, more aliens.

The final gallery, bathed in a pink light, is empty bar a loudspeaker, from which Simon & Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound (1966) plays on repeat. It is a strange, dislocating experience.

On exiting the pink room and returning, blinking, to the gallery containing the artist’s alternative history of evolution, the light appears to have a green tinge. Everything is the same, but different. Oliver Basciano

Office of Sensitive Activities / Applications Group, 2017 (installation view).Photo: Ivan Erofeev.

Courtesy mmoma and v-a-c Foundation, Moscow

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Kim Yong-Ik I Believe My Works Are Still Valid Spike Island, Bristol 30 September – 17 December Utopia Korean Cultural Centre, London 26 September – 4 November Walking into Spike Island, for the opening of one of Kim Yong-Ik’s two shows in the uk, is an unnerving experience. I scratch my head perplexedly: have I arrived too early or much too late? Are Kim’s artworks still to be unpacked or are they in the process of being shipped away again? Cardboard boxes lie neatly stacked in the middle of the gallery’s floor; artworks dangle from the ceiling, encased in wooden cartons; vast paintings neatly packaged in plastic bubble-wrap lean against the wall, alongside pencilled scribbles that look like the artist’s instructions. Since they are in Korean (a language I do not read), I surmise that they are notes to the curators. Instructions, I guess, that have yet to be followed in this in-transit display. I am wrong. Kim’s show is completely ready to be viewed – or as ready as one of Korea’s foremost artists, activists and teachers is ever likely to be. Kim’s artwork is not about achieving aesthetic full stops; it is never finished; and hence it has never quite begun.

Unlike Kim himself, though, it is important for a review to start at the ‘beginning’ before it reaches the end (however inconclusively circular this finale maybe). My own aesthetic adventure into the mind of Kim Yong-Ik began with the inauguration of Kim’s two major solos in the uk. I Believe My Works Are Still Valid is a retrospective that overruns the warehouselike spaces of Bristol’s Spike Island; meanwhile, in London, the Korean Cultural Centre uk is exhibiting Utopia. Both shows marked the 1947-born, Seoulbased artist’s British debut. While Spike Island presents the seminal moments in Kim’s 40-year career, containing artworks from the 1970s onwards, kccuk houses a site-specific installation, which uses the gallery itself as a canvas.

Both exhibitions, baffling and bewitching in turns, keep curators and critics on their toes.

Kim graduated with an mfa in painting from Hongik University in 1980, where he was

taught by Park Seo-Bo, a master of Dansaekhwa (monochrome) painting, which dominated South Korean art from the mid-70s onwards.

Associated with subtly layered textures and geometric abstraction, Dansaekhwa artworks are thought to signpost Korea’s coming of age; its entry into the story of Western Modernism.

After all, Korean monochrome painting visually resonates with American Minimalism from the 1960s – they are both preoccupied with sparsely hued, gridded forms. However, unlike American Minimalism, Dansaekhwa often expands the idea of painting itself. Kim’s debt to Dansaekhwa is visually evident in his two solos. For instance, strong-coloured polka dots – red, blue, green – achieve gridlike formations on the canvases at Spike Island. At kccuk’s Utopia, polka dots migrate from canvases onto the walls – sometimes morphing from vibrant, painted spots of colour to barely perceptible pencilled walldrawings. Since Utopia’s numerous canvases all count as one work, Kim’s travelling dots appear to convert the barrier between painting and architecture into a moving target. A classic Dansaekhwa tactic or an unconventional hoax?

For, if the investigation of utopia is usually considered a straightforwardly modernist preoccupation, there is nothing clear-cut about Kim’s relationship to Korean Modernism, which is singularly tempestuous. In 1981 Kim was invited by an admiring Park to exhibit his Dansaekhwa-inspired unstretched canvases at the Young Artists Biennial. He took up the challenge. Upon arriving at the exhibition venue, however, he was reluctant to unpack his work, displaying a pile of stacked cardboard boxes in their stead. He called this new work his ‘Duchampian manoeuvre’. Some critics interpreted Kim’s gesture as a protest against Korea’s military dictatorship of the 1980s; as Kim’s rebuttal of the ‘art for art’s sake’ doctrine of Modernism. Yet Kim’s critique could hardly be

facing page, bottom I Believe My Works Are Still Valid, 2017 (installation view, Spike Island, Bristol). Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

facing page, top Utopia, 2017 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Korean Cultural Centre uk, London

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classified as wholly antimodernist: Duchamp is the father of Western Modernism, is he not?

Where does Kim’s art end and his social commentary begin? Thus, if Kim’s ‘manoeuvre’ angered Park – who never invited him to show his works again – it also foxed Korea’s Minjung art movement, a populist aesthetic that staged its protest against the brutal rule of General Chun Doo-hwan via figurative paintings and prints glorifying nature and the labouring body.

The impossibility of ‘placing’ Kim neatly within either of the Korean artworld’s governing dialogues led to his sidelining: from 1991 to 2012, Kim was professor of painting at Kyungwon University, celebrated for his teaching – not his artworks. If that seems poised to change, the tightrope Kim walks between working and joking is a permanent feature of his purposefully impermanent art.

At kccuk, curator Je Yun Moon relates that Kim was quite happy to manhandle his paintings with charcoal-stained fingers. “He kept telling me that things should not be too perfect,” she says ruefully. The last room we enter in Utopia has tiny turquoise stars nestled within Kim’s signature polka-dot motifs. Little spots of colour, they seem to glow like a vision of celestial completion. Then again, as we get closer we notice the little stars are stickers: the irreverent viewer can just as easily remove them.

And who has the right to halt such vandalism, given Kim’s devil-may-care attitude? “Kim’s unorthodox relationship to his own artworks allows him to ask questions that ultimately disturb the ground on which his practice is based,” reveals Moon. Hence, Utopia’s brochure tells us that the culmination of Kim’s aesthetic endeavour is… the blank canvas. The end is in the beginning; the commencement predicts the conclusion. If that is not a tautology worthy of high art and (yes – let us admit it) low humour, what is? Zehra Jumabhoy

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Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 6 October – 7 January Bracketed between the spectacle of cruelty of Tiananmen Square and the pageant of soft power that was the Beijing Olympics, Art and China After 1989’s complex curatorial propositions most readily coalesce around a teleological reading of China’s ascension to global power, where its art and artists alternately witness, critique, appropriate, subvert and collaborate with ever-evolving technologies of capitalist growth and governance. Qiu Zhijie’s scroll-like Map of ‘Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World’ (2017) traces this period as dark, volatile reservoirs of creativity channel into a steady, well-delineated canal of art history flowing West to East before joining the ocean of speculation and uncertainty. Organised in six chronological and thematic parts and encompassing 71 artists competing in monumentality, the exhibition chronicles radical gestures of the 1989 avantgarde; political conceptualism of the 1980s and 90s; the resurgence of ‘realism’ in response

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to the capitalist turn as well as accelerated and uneven development; the East Village and Post-Sense Sensibility commitment to the real and the sentient; power asymmetry and identity crisis in an ever-globalising world; and finally, the nascent empire and its discontents.

While certain conceptual strategies may feel archaic in 2017 (consider the East–West dualism in Xu Bing’s A Study of Transference (1994), one of the three works removed from the exhibition, in which two pigs copulate, the male inscribed with the artist’s self-invented Roman script and the female with Xu’s hallmark faux Chinese characters), their relevance is not entirely lost.

Even though we’ve come to accept the existence of multiple modernities, what cocurator Philip Tinari describes in the show’s catalogue as the desire to ‘recover from the jet lag’ between local time and an imagined centre has all but subsided from the logic of neoliberalism. In this regard, the first half of the show is exceptionally

ArtReview Asia

sensitive to artists’ individual ambiguities vis-à-vis collective trajectories faced with calamity and seismic change. Beginning in mid-1980s Hangzhou and completed in mid90s Hamburg, Wu Shanzhuan’s performative writing and visual collage Today No Water (1986–96) stands out as an endlessly playful rehearsal and evacuation of overdetermined socialist/postsocialist semiotics.

Other microscopic yet salient connections emerge from the negotiation of multiple contexts and temporalities. Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing’s hoax work Wu Street (1993) – in which the two young émigrés hacked a prestigious Chinese art magazine by publishing the translation of a hijacked article in English, where the original artist’s name and work were replaced by Jason Jones, a fictional painter of their creation, and paintings salvaged from the East Village street – highlights the Western dominance of knowledge production

over the unsuspecting Chinese, and the impact of 1980s Asian-American political consciousness on the diasporic identity politics of early émigré artists Zhang Hongtu, David Diao and Tseng Kwong Chi. Zhao Gang’s Harlem Socialism – Kitchen Talk (2002) makes an unexpected case for internationalism, while Yan Lei and Zhou Tiehai’s witty exposés of international art power’s seemingly unilateral authority over the Chinese artworld in the paintings Are You in the Exhibition Going to Germany? (1996) and There Came a Mr. Solomon to China (1994) continues to amuse and provoke.

The year 2008 marked both the official apotheosis of the artist and popularisation of the figure of artist-as-dissident – as Zhang Yimou, Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang orchestrated China’s show of pride (‘gone is the sick man of Asia!’), Ai’s social media mass-mobilisation for his Citizen’s Investigation project (2009– 10) to uncover anthropogenic casualties of the Sichuan earthquake, which landed him in jail, was part of emergent social movements of the late 2000s enabled by new modes of information transmission and relationality. We only get an oblique peak into the quotidian,

dystopian undercurrents of that period from Sarah Morris’s mesmerising film Beijing (2008).

What happens after 2008? Gu Dexin’s Lu Xun-inflected indictment ‘we’ve eaten people’ hardly speaks to the general tenor of Chinese cultural production postcrisis.

It is telling that Qiu maps the last chapter of the exhibition, ‘Whose Utopia?’, as an island adrift at sea, its position inconvenient and impact yet to be determined. Among the antispectacular, yet no less monumental in scale, are Long March Project’s attempt at recuperation and praxis of leftist models of artistic production, as well as Bishan Commune’s reactivation of the Chinese intellectual tradition of rural construction in dialogue with international autonomist and anarchist traditions. In Guangdong, Liberia Borges and the Yangjiang Group, like their friends and predecessors the Big Tail Elephant Group, are radical in their emphasis on regionality, flexibility and autonomy.

In this theatrum mundi, the artists occupy a position no more privileged than their subjects. Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World (1993), where a Hobbesian game of all against all unfolds in a miniature panopticon, is now

an empty cage still bearing traces of the lives it once held in captivity. However, the discursive framework of freedom of speech versus censorship, which has dictated much of the debate surrounding animal-rights activists’ protest and the Guggenheim’s withdrawal of key exhibits, casts this ambitious exhibition in a shadow of inopportune irony. These exhausted tropes in the Western imaginary of China – the artist as freedom fighter, the art as expression of systemic power and excess – that the curators seek to disavow or, as Hou Hanru describes it, to be ‘unthought incessantly’, come to serve as a backdrop of the liberal art institution’s anxieties over its own incapacity to address political and ethical questions as a powerful broker of culture. Challenged by black and indigenous-led protests, the Whitney’s defence of Dana Schutz and Sam Durant’s removal of his own work from the Walker Art Center tell us nothing about what ‘difficult art’ can do to the public and everything about the upending of the sanctity of the art object and the moral supremacy of individual expression. And all the better: this has enabled us to vacate the theatre. Kang Kang

Qiu Zhijie, Map of ‘Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World’, 2017, ink on paper, mounted on silk, six panels, 240 × 720 cm (overall).

Courtesy the artist and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

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Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics

by Paul Gravett Thames & Hudson, £29.95 (softcover)

If Western audiences think they know about manga, they’re probably most familiar with tropes of the Japanese form of comic art: the cute girls with big eyes and spindly legs, the bouncy, anthropomorphised animals of not-alwaysdeterminate species, the power-loaded armoured sci-fi superheroes and the extreme imaginings of monsters and physical mutability laced with fantastical sexualisation. Mangasia may not be the most elegant neologism, but it at least serves notice that there’s more to Asian comic art than this.

Mangasia is about the greater history and culture of comics art in the Asia region, which as Paul Gravett defines it, goes ‘no further west than Pakistan and no further north than Mongolia and the very top of Japan’. Gravett’s 300-page survey (it accompanies a big touring show organised by the London’s Barbican Centre and curated by the author) is ambitious, attempting to capture the historical origins of comics in cultural spheres as different as India and China. It’s a complex undertaking. Gravett divides the book into six broad thematic sections, shifting between historical, geopolitical and cultural contexts – taking in the reinvention of religious and mythological traditions, the working conditions of the manga industry and its artists, the changing face of censorship and manga’s entry into moving image and digital culture – to acknowledge how exchange with the West, colonialism, Asian nationalism,

postwar rebuilding and limits on free expression have all influenced the development of this emblem of twentieth-century visual culture.

It’s clear from the outset that though Mangasia’s intention is to offer a contemporary window onto a wider Asian geography of comics art, Japan still looms large. Japanese manga forms the largest part of the material collected, followed by Korean manhwa and Chinese manhua. This emphasis on Japan tends to highlight the conditions necessary for a vibrant comics culture to develop – a mixture of economic development and mass-cultural production, social mores and the artistic resources already available in a country’s cultural traditions.

Here, Gravett makes a big play for tracing manga’s origins to the golden age of woodblock printing in the Japan of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with luminaries such as Hokusai figuring as the precursors not only of high stylistic technique but also as pioneers of the mass production of images that themselves begin to perform a newly emerging role of social observation, satire and criticism.

One of Mangasia’s most interesting aspects is the way it offers a historical narrative for how style and technique evolve in a mass-culture artform. Whether Mangasia’s sample of material from different countries in Asia is truly representative is up for debate, as it’s noticeable that the works featured from the Philippines,

Indonesia, India, Thailand and Taiwan tend to be limited to less recent examples; and among these, styles and techniques appear more limited, more beholden to illustrative traditions shared with Western comics and Western visual conventions of classical naturalism. The shift from a sensationalist ‘pulp’ form targeted at children and young adults, to one that allowed for more complex narrative and aesthetic innovations – the book, for example, devotes its third chapter to works that revisit the painful experiences of the Second World War and its aftermath – appears here heavily dependent on the mix of a mass market, a substantial urbanised readership and a (relatively) liberal political context. Japanese manga’s extremities – Mangasia revels in some of the more bizarre examples of Japanese manga sci-fi, pornography and pathological cuteness – comes off here as the hyperactive product of extraordinary circumstances. The artistic and stylistic forms that emerged from that have been absorbed and repurposed as the mass-cultural markets of Asia have grown and evolved, particularly in Korea, Mainland China and Hong Kong.

Whether the ‘Asia’ region can sensibly extend to the Indian subcontinent seems tenuous, in both artistic and cultural terms. Nevertheless, Mangasia’s historical breadth offers a rich overview of the evolution of a distinct and vital visual culture and its origins. J.J. Charlesworth

Latif Al Ani

by Tamara Chalabi, Morad Montazami and Shwan Ibrahim Taha

In 1965 an American couple visited the Taq Kasra monument in Ctesiphon, the ruined city that lies approximately 15 miles south of Baghdad. It’s hot; their shadows stretch out before them. He has taken off his jacket, but his tie stays on. His white shirt seems pristine. He stares out of the frame. She wears a dark dress, clutches her purse and stares at a musician sitting cross-legged before her and playing the rababeh, a single-string violin.

This is one of many enigmatic moments of public life in 1950s and 60s Iraq, captured in black and white (and occasionally colour)

by Latif Al Ani and brought together in this welcome monograph. Al Ani’s photographs are typified by contrast, in which shadows are accentuated and patches of light are

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Hatje Cantz, €45 (hardcover)

rendered an almost bleached white. This technique reflects the way the photographer captures the modern, forward-looking Iraq of the mid-twentieth century against the backdrop of an ancient civilisation. Al Ani started his career as a photographer in the employment of the Iraqi Petroleum Company, before moving to the Ministry of Information and Guidance in 1960, and becoming the head of the photography at the Iraqi News Agency during the early 1970s. Pictures of ambitious infrastructure projects (often taken from the air) mix with intimate portraits of ordinary citizens. The subject matter is undoubtedly buffeted by politics: photos of heroic workers (a date factory pictured in 1959, a steelworker constructing the

ArtReview Asia

Darbandikhan Dam during the early 1960s) proliferate after the 1958 revolution brought in what was initially a socialist leadership.

These images, which are so full of hope in their creation, brim with sadness in retrospection. Al Ani’s work was subject to increasing censorship after 1968, and in 1977 he moved to Kuwait. He returned in 1983, but the Iran–Iraq War made it too dangerous to work.

In an interview with patron Tamara Chalabi contained in the publication (alongside an essay by curator Morad Montazami), Al Ani, now eighty-five, says his photography career is over.

‘I just can’t see beauty anymore… I’m just in shock. I don’t understand, the killing of children and the raping of women. There is nowhere to see beauty in this region.’ Oliver Basciano

Winter 2017

83

Fred Forest’s Utopia: Media Art and Activism

by Michael F. Leruth mit Press, $29.95/£24.95 (hardcover)

In 1975 Fred Forest turned up to the São Paulo Bienal (in which he had not been invited to take part) in order to stage an alternative biennial of his own. In a hall by the side of the official exhibition galleries, Forest displayed his own photographs, video interviews with Bienal participants and related ephemera as if they were anthropological discoveries from another time entirely. He called it The Biennial of the Year 2000, and the effect was a thoroughgoing estrangement of the whole event, with its quotidian effects and events appearing as curious artefacts from some foreign (future) society.

The stunt was typical of Forest – not just in its playful détournement of artworld rituals, its indeterminate place between public spectacle and public art or its use of video (then, still, an unfamiliar new media) to turn the public gaze back upon itself.

But also in the way it positions Forest himself as some vagrant visitor from another time or place. There are moments while reading this oftenfascinating monograph when Forest’s antics with Portapaks, telephone systems and tv networks reminds one of that old science-fiction trope of the time traveller trapped in the past, desperately trying to marshal the technology of the era in which he finds himself in order to jerry-rig the future technology he requires to get home.

We might recall the Simple Net Art Diagram (1997) by artist group mtaa, in which two

simply rendered computer terminals are joined by a snaking black line with a red lightning strike in the centre bearing the caption ‘The art happens here’; Forest’s work, from his first ‘sociological art’ experiments in 1967 to his most recent work in the virtual environment of Second Life, seem to have always taken place in this liminal space between networked terminals.

Fred Forest’s Utopia is a first book for Leruth, the artist’s friend, sometime collaborator and associate professor of French and Francophone studies at the College of William & Mary in the us. It is dry in places (though certainly nowhere near the Sahara levels of aridity to be found in much academic writing), but for the most part this doesn’t matter, since Forest’s own antics – inserting blank squares into newspaper front pages, waging highly publicised legal battles against the Centre Pompidou, running for president of Bulgarian state television – are themselves so lively. One might compare Leruth’s text with Stanisław Lem’s dense, fictitious reviews of imaginary books in A Perfect Vacuum (1971) and One Human Minute (1986); indeed, there were times while reading this book when I started to doubt the reality of Forest himself.

Certainly if Forest hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary for someone to invent him.

He is, in some ways, the perfect late-twentiethcentury artist: born French, but with an American-

sounding name; equal parts huckster, prankster and social scientist; marked by the influence of John Cage, Yves Klein, Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan while seeming to anticipate later developments in relational aesthetics and net art. And yet you will search in vain for Forest’s name in Rhizome’s online Net Art Anthology (2016–) or Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter’s anthology of ‘art and the Internet’, Mass Effect (2015). Nor is Forest’s work held in any major national collections – except, significantly, that of the French Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, which is not an art museum but a radio and television archive.

The artworld seems constitutively incapable of taking Forest seriously (no doubt his relentless publicity stunts, lawsuits and all round mischiefmaking haven’t helped).

This is to be regretted, since Forest’s work has much to tell us about the transformations of time and space wreaked by our contemporary media environment, the slippery nature of reality online and the enduring possibilities for transcendence in a demystified contemporary world.

While Klein may have introduced the void into contemporary art, Forest, born just five years later, was the void’s first native citizen. Of course he was an old fraud, an egotist and a publicity-seeker.

He may also have been the first artist to raise these qualities to the level of the sublime. Robert Barry

Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy

by Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press, $25 (hardcover)

For a decade or so after publishing his essay collection Air Guitar (1997), Dave Hickey was among the most esteemed of American art critics. More recently, though, sexist outbursts, a bogus retirement and the general sense that his anti-institutional stance equates to promarket conservatism have threatened to undo his rep. Perfect Wave, the long-gestating sequel to Air Guitar, might then be seen as an attempt at restitution – particularly after the typically beautifully written but problematically predicated 25 Women: Essays on their Art (2015) – though one suspects Hickey has another agenda. He’s published three books in four years compared to two in the preceding twenty, giving him, at seventy-six, the air of someone in a hurry. Perfect Wave, mostly examining his fascinations outside art, feels like a ritzy clearinghouse, maybe even a valediction.

84

Once a music writer (and musician), Hickey reminds us he can still do that, launching into a rhapsodic bar-by-bar breakdown of The Carpenters’ 1972 ballad Goodbye to Love. He goes to Disneyland and stubbornly adores it, seeing in the animism of everything from teacups upwards a species of American paganism. Consistently he treats mainstream – or ‘democratic’ – experience as seriously as high art; and he brings high art down to gossip level, an essay on art fairs devolving into anecdotes about his good friend, Frieze’s Matthew Slotover. Elsewhere Hickey covers the waterfront, asserting he’s a cineaste (on Michelangelo Antonioni, pointing up the Italian director’s unique approach to framing), a literary critic (on scholars Terry Castle and Susan Sontag), even a political bloodhound, going on the campaign trail in Nevada – the results arid in comparison to similar assignments by David

ArtReview Asia

Foster Wallace and Hunter S. Thompson. Also, nobody wants to read about Bush-era politics given the current state of the us.

You keep waiting for the chauvinism.

Instead the vexation factor comes from Hickey’s mentions of his ‘genius brain’, his God-given ability to understand this or that. He’s pleased with himself, for sure: for his smarts, his versatility and something else. While the book opens with a vivid memoir of his days as a preteen California surfer – ending with a rib-cracking wipeout – the ‘wave’ of the title refers, you might think, to something else: the fortunate arc of Hickey’s life, the ride he caught. He was around for jazz, rock-and-roll, Robert Mitchum, Antonioni and Andy Warhol, all gone now except for the writing-up; he’s probably getting out before the shit really hits the fan; and now he’s waving to us. Martin Herbert

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For more on Hong Kong artist Lai Tat Tat Wing, read Paul Gravett’s text at artreview/thestrip

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover Nalini Malani during the execution of Traces, 2017, a 25m site-specific wall drawing/erasure performance at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, October 2017.

The text is from T.S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, 1941.

Photography by Guillaume Belvèze

The words on the spine and on pages 19, 43 and 67 come from Guy Debord’s In Girum imus and consumimur igni (1991, translated by Lucy Forsyth)

on page 83 photography by Luke Walker on pages 88 and 90 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Winter 2017

89

Off the Record “Dansaekhwa? I mean, what exactly is that?”

Zheng looks out the window of the gallery office. I notice that he has taken to wearing blue Tod’s loafers in the way that our dear departed boss Kenny used to.

“Korean monochrome painting,” he answers distractedly. He is reading Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s ‘Rashōmon’. He has been reading it for weeks, despite the book being only 13 pages long. “The question is, Gallery Girl,” he continues, “at this moment when the Western artworld is self-destructing, riven by the corrupting effects of power, should we in Asia starve to death with it or become thieves? This is the central question that underpins ‘Rashōmon’.”

I ignore him and try to loosen the bow ribbon of my Tokuko Maeda Polish-peasant-style floral dress.

“Zheng, these Dansaekhwa guys aren’t a movement. They hardly knew each other – there was no manifesto, no shared ideas. But, you know, stick them together and suddenly the West is all over them.

This is what we need to do! We need to discover a movement! And then we must gather it and persuade Jay Jopling or Iwan Wirth to show a selection and give us a hefty cut!”

“Why this obsession with European galleries showing our wares?

Don’t you know the capital is falling apart. Robbers live there.”

“Oh, for god’s sake, stop quoting ‘Rashōmon’. Just because the Western artworld is tearing itself apart over gropers and perverts doesn’t mean we should be distracted from our mission to become Asia’s Gagosian…”

Zheng puts down the book. “Okay. So you mean something like Gutai? A group whose work cannot be defined by reference to Western avant-garde movements because in fact their actions anticipated those so-called avant-gardes, which were premised on the crimes of colonialism in the first place?”

“Gutai? Have you lost your mind? You try selling some bloke flinging himself into a pile of clay and see how far that gets you. You might have been promoted to Director of Life Enrichment here at Kenny Ho Gallery, but you have much to learn!”

“The Myanmar Performance movement – including the intense and personal works of Htein Lin and Nge Lay?” I clear my throat and make a subtle gesture towards a corkboard carrying the heading ‘Off limits to humour’ and a sad-face emoji: photos of Aung San Suu Kyi; the dress Nicki Minaj wore to the mtv Video Music Awards; Dove’s recent black-woman-morphing-intowhite-woman campaign; and Knight Landesman.

“What about the Lahore Art Group? A bit like the Progressive Art Movement in India but with Pakistani artists? No one knows about them or the 43 Movement formed in Colombo in Sri Lanka.”

“I like this, I like this!” I enthuse at Zheng. “You’ve clearly been studying those textbooks hard!” I gesture at his pile of auction house catalogues. “But you know, if we go down that road, we limit ourselves to the collectors from those countries.”

Zheng looks confused.

“We need something more inclusive,” I continue. “Something that will bring in both Asian and Western collectors who like nice and unthreatening. You know, in these global tough times, we need to lighten the mood. Think of the choice of quirky Japanese pop star Pikotaro to entertain Donald Trump on his state visit to Japan.”

“You mean that while Trump and Shinzo Abe are discussing Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile development, the musical interlude will be provided by the fake mustachioed singer of the ‘PenPineapple-Apple-Pen’ song fame who wears leopard-print scarves?”

“I have a pen! I have an apple! Uh! Apple-pen!” I sing while doing the Pikotaro dance.

“Are you trying to dance like Klaus Biesenbach?” Zheng asks.

“Oh, for god’s sake!” I snap. I grab a random private-view card from my desk and scrawl out its title.

Zheng picks it up and studies it.

“Old Asians? Is that it?”

“Yes, Zheng! Give them what they want! The Western artworld is wallowing in its own filth. They need reassurance! They need elderly Asians offering them mindfulness and safe spaces for contemplation.

They need East–West. They need our apple-pen-pineapple segues.”

And with that, Zheng finally smiles.

“I have a pen,” we both sing triumphantly. “I have a pineapple!

Uh! Pineapple pen! Apple. Pineapple. Uh! Pen-pineapple-apple-pen!”

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