ArtReview Asia Winter 2018

“There are no questions we won’t ask… there are those we haven’t asked”

Raqs Media Collective

An ‘unofficial’ biennial in Bangkok and the ‘unofficial’ art of Laos

Language, diversity and dictatorship in India

Hong Kong

New York – Chelsea

London

Flavin, Judd, McCracken, Sandback

Diane Arbus Untitled

Kerry James Marshall

15 November–21 December

2 November–15 December

Lisa Yuskavage

Fairs

Babie Brood: Small Paintings 1985–2018 8 November–15 December

West Bund Art & Design

New York – Upper East Side

7–11 November Special presentation of work by Dan Flavin Booth A126

History of Painting 2 October–10 November

Gordon Matta-Clark Works 1970–1978 21 November–21 December

Lisa Yuskavage New Paintings

8 November–15 December

ART021 Shanghai

8–11 November Booth C14

5–6 / F, H Queen’s 80 Queen’s Road Central Central, Hong Kong hk.davidzwirner.com

香港

中 環 皇 后 大 道 中 80 號

H Queen’s 5 –6 樓 @davidzwirner

Hong Kong

Julia Scher Wonderland December 14, 2018 – February 2, 2019

Potsdamer Strasse 81E D – 10785 Berlin www.estherschipper.com

RONI HORN

羅妮·霍恩

27 NOVEMBER 2018 – 2 MARCH 2019

2 0 1 8 年1 1 月2 7 日 – 2 0 1 9 年3 月2 日

HONG KONG WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

香港

U N T IT LE D (“ S O M E T I M E S I T H I N K I R E S E M B LE MYS E LF TO O M U C H . I HAVE ALWAYS B E E N S O M EO N E E L S E … ”), 20 1 0 – 20 1 2 , S O LI D C A S T G L A S S WIT H A S- C A S T S U R FAC E S , 2 PAR T S , U N I Q U E , 5 6 . 2 × 76 . 2 × 9 1 .4 C M / 22 1/8 × 3 0 × 3 6 I N E AC H 《 無 題（“ 有 時 候 我 覺 得 我 太 像自己了。而 我 一直 都 是 別 人⋯ ⋯”） 》，2 0 1 0 – 2 0 1 2 實心 鑄 造 玻 璃 鑄 態 表 面，2 部 分, 獨 一 無 二，每 部 分 5 6 . 2 × 7 6 . 2 × 9 1 . 4 厘 米 / 2 2 1/8 × 3 0 × 3 6 英 寸

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ArtReview Asia vol 6 no 4 Winter 2018

Tum-ko khAna zarur pakA-na chAh-iye “What’s it all about?” That’s what people are constantly asking ArtReview Asia with reference to the entire Asian art scene. Although oooooobviously they mean China in the majority of cases. Particularly if they are from the West. Because they imagine China to be some sort of El Dorado of contemporary culture and its consumption. Mainly its consumption. ArtReview Asia’s answer, after it has folded its hands into its monk’s robes in a particularly Gandalfian manner, and let loose the white dove it normally keeps up its lefthand sleeve in order to make space for its hand, is always to say, “Many, many different things”, before gliding off in such a way that it appears to have floated (fyi, to achieve this you need to make sure your wizard’s robes are long and that you have practised walking without moving your shoulders). The more it discovers about the art that’s popping up in different parts of Asia, the harder it becomes to make pronouncements about Asia as a whole. In fact, it’s both stupid and pointless.

All of which makes it particularly difficult to thematise each issue of ArtReview Asia in this editorial. To be honest, ArtReview Asia doesn’t really want to. It’s just sooo reductive! That’s right! Even more reductive than the 70 pages of editorial in this magazine are in the light of ArtReview Asia’s ongoing attempts to map the comings and goings of contemporary art throughout this vast territory.

(Btw, that’s why you should subscribe to every issue: not because you’re always getting something, but because you’re always missing something.) What’s that?

That’s why you bought it? You want answers? Oh… here’s a haiku: The intertwining yin and yang of artmaking and curating (but not contracts!). What?

Not satisfied? OK, if you’re nice, ArtReview Asia will give you a little treat at the end of its issue. “The last will be the first, the first will be the last”, as ArtReview Asia’s Christian friends keep telling it. “Mere ghar me(n) ek bakri bikri kewAste hai,” is always ArtReview Asia’s reply. ArtReview Asia

In case of fire

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West Bund Art & Design

Blain|Southern Stand N112 Jonas Burgert Lynn Chadwick Jake & Dinos Chapman Francesco Clemente Abdoulaye Konaté Enrique Martinez Celaya Bernar Venet

Enrique Martinez Celaya, The Spellboun, 2017

Shanghai 8 — 11 November 2018

ART021 Shanghai 9 — 11 November 2018

Jake & Dinos Chapman Mat Collishaw Yinka Shonibare MBE Abdoulaye Konaté Harland Miller Chiharu Shiota Michael Simpson Liliane Tomasko Tim Noble and Sue Webster

Abdoulaye Konaté, Vert Touareg 1A, 2017

Blain|Southern Stand E02

Art Previewed

Previews

by Nirmala Devi 21

Points of View

by Deepa Bhasthi, Charu Nivedita 35

Art Featured

Raqs Media Collective Interview by Cleo Roberts 46

Bangkok Biennial

by Max Crosbie-Jones 60

Katharina Grosse

by Mark Rappolt 52

Nicholas Mangan

by Mark Rappolt 66

Cuauhtémoc Medina Interview by Aimee Lin 56

Contemporary Art in Laos

by Anna Koshcheeva 72

page 66 Nicholas Mangan, Limits to Growth (Part 2). Numismatics: A Study of Dead and Dying Currencies and the True Value of Waste (still), 2017, video, colour, sound, 8 min 52 sec. Courtesy the artist; Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland; and Labor, Mexico City

Winter 2018

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Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 78

BOOKS 88

Gwangju Biennale, by Fi Churchman Ronnie van Hout, by Rosemary Forde Roy Dib, by MK Harb Catastrophe and the Power of Art, by Micheal Doh Aditya Novali, by Elaine Chiew Akram Zaatari, by Louise Darblay Steirischer Herbst 18, by Ben Eastham

The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India,

by Zehra Jumabhoy and Boon Hui Tan Performance Histories From East Asia 1960s–1990s: An IAPA Reader, edited by Victor Wang Slum Wolf, by Tadao Tsuge Moving Parts, by Prabda Yoon Eastern Encounters: Four Centuries of Paintings and Manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent, by Emily Hannam Ball Lightning, by Cixin Liu LAST WORDS 94

page 82 Gillian Wearing, from the series Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say, 1992–93, C-print on aluminium, 45 × 30 cm. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

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ArtReview Asia

NOVEMBER 7, 2018 – JANUARY 20, 2019 OPENING: NOVEMBER 7, 12 – 7PM 2018年11月7日 – 2019年1月20日 开幕：2018年11月7日12:00 – 19:00

瑞安·特雷卡丁

RYAN TRECARTIN RE’SEARCH WAIT’S

RYAN TRECARTIN R TRECARTIN CARTIN ECARTIN RYAN TRECARTIN RYAN T TRECARTIN TIN AN TRECARTIN RYAN TRECARTIN RE’SEARCH WAIT’S RYAN EARCH E’SEARCH RE’SEARCH WAIT’S WAIT’S WAIT’S RE’SEARCH WAIT’S RE’SEARCH WAIT’S WAIT’S RYAN T RE’SEARCH WAIT’S RE’SEARCH WAIT’STR 瑞安·特雷卡丁 瑞安·特雷卡丁 瑞安·特雷卡丁 瑞安·特雷卡丁 瑞安·特雷卡丁 瑞安·特雷卡丁 雷卡丁 瑞安·特雷卡丁 瑞安·特雷卡丁 POND SOCIETY SHANGHAI

NOVEMBER 7, 2018 – JANUARY 20, 2019 OPENING: NOVEMBER 7, 12 – 7PM 2018年11月7日 – 2019年1月20日 开幕：2018年11月7日12:00 – 19:00

RE’SEARCH WAIT’S 瑞安·特雷卡丁

NOVEMBER 7, 2018 JANUARY 2019 OPENING: 7, 12 7PM ENING: 19 20, OPENING: 2019 NOVEMBER OPENING: NOVEMBER 7,OPENING: 2018 7,–2018 NOVEMBER 12––JANUARY 7, 1220, –7, 7PM 20, 12 –2019 7PM NOVEMBER 7,7,–2018 12 – 7PM –– JANUARY UARY 2019 NOVEMBER 7, 12 – OPENING: 7PM R 7,NOVEMBER 12 – 7PM 2018 –20, JANUARY 20, 2019 OPENING: NOVEMBER 7, NOVEMBER 12 –NOVEMBER 7PM NOVEMBER 7, –7PM JANUARY 20, 2019 OPENING: NOVEMBER 7, 12 7PM NOV 2018年11月7日 – 2019年1月20日 – 19:00 ：2018年11月7日12:00 月20日 开幕：2018年11月7日12:00 2018年11月7日 开幕：2018年11月7日12:00 ––开幕：2018年11月7日12:00 19:00 2019年1月20日 – 19:00– 开幕：2018年11月7日12:00 19:00 2018年11月7日 – 19:00 2019年1 9年1月20日 开幕：2018年11月7日12:00 –开幕：2018年11月7日12:00 19:00 12:00 19:00 月7日 ––2019年1月20日 – 19:00 2018年11月7日 – 2019年1月20日 开幕：2018年11月7日12:00 – –19:00 NOVEMBER 7, 7, 2018 – JANUARY 20 NOVEMBER 2018 – JANUARY 2018年11月7日 – 2019年1月 2018年11月7日 – 2019年1

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SOCIETY SHANGHAI POND SOCIETY POND SOCIETY POND SHANGHAI SOCIETY SHANGHAI SHANGHAI POND SOCIETY SHANGHAI POND SOCIETY SHANGHAI TY SHANGHAI POND SOCIETYPOND SHANGHAI POND SOCIETY SHANGHAI 池社池社 上海 池社 上海 池社 上海 池社 池社 上海 上海 池社 上海 上海 池社 上海 池社 上海 2018_RYT_

SPECIAL THANKS TOTHANKS SPRÜTH AND REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES NKS ECIAL TH MAGERS TOSPECIAL THANKS SPRÜTH TO MAGERS REGEN SPRÜTH PROJECTS, AND MAGERS REGEN LOS AND PROJECTS, ANGELES REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES SPECIAL LOSAND THANKS ANGELES TO SPRÜTH MAGERS ANDAND REGEN PROJECTS, LOSLOS ANGELES SP THANKS TO SPRÜTH MAGERS REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES OJECTS, LOS AND ANGELES SPECIAL THANKS TO AND SPRÜTH MAGERS REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES SPECIAL TOMAGERS SPRÜTH MAGERS REGEN PROJECTS, ANGELES 特别鸣谢：SPRÜTH MAGERS 施布特 玛格 REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES 睿阁画廊, 洛杉矶 施布特 MAGERS EGEN睿阁画廊, 玛格 PROJECTS, 施布特 REGEN 玛格 LOS PROJECTS, ANGELES REGEN PROJECTS, LOS 睿阁画廊, ANGELES 特别鸣谢：SPRÜTH LOS 洛杉矶 睿阁画廊, ANGELES 洛杉矶 睿阁画廊, MAGERS 施布特 洛杉矶 玛格 REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES 睿阁画廊, 特别鸣谢：SPRÜTH 洛杉矶 SPRÜTH MAGERS 施布特 玛格 REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES 睿阁画廊, 洛杉矶 LES 洛杉矶 特别鸣谢：SPRÜTH MAGERS 施布特 玛格 REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES 睿阁画廊, 洛杉矶 特别鸣谢：SPRÜTH MAGERS 施布特 玛格 REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES 睿阁画廊, 洛杉矶

201 SPECI SP

Art Previewed

You cannot go far without some knowledge of verbs, and for new-comers the most useful part of the verb is the Imperative,—Do this, Go away, Sit down, Look, etc 19

Previewed West Bund Art & Design West Bund Art Center, Shanghai 8–11 November

Heteroglossia How Museum, Shanghai 7 November – 17 February

ART021 Shanghai Exhibition Centre 9–11 November

Cao Fei K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf Through 13 January

Shanghai Biennale Power Station of Art, Shanghai 10 November – 10 March Taipei Biennial 2018 Taipei Fine Art Museum 17 November – 10 March Robert Zhao Renhui Shanghart Singapore Through 23 June After Nature UCCA Dune Art Museum Aranya Gold Coast, Qinhuangdao, Hebei Through 4 April

Marcel Broodthaers Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow Through 3 February On Kawara Arahmaiani Lee Mingwei Museum MACAN, Jakarta 17 November – 10 March Minimalism: Space. Light. Object National Gallery Singapore ArtScience Museum, Singapore 16 November – 14 April

Steadfastly Raise the Standards of Nonconstructive Production Don Gallery, Shanghai 6 November – 30 December Tschabalala Self Yuz Museum, Shanghai Through 9 December Louise Bourgeois Long Museum, West Bund, Shanghai Through 24 February Blak to the Future National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Through 14 July Toby Ziegler MONA, Tasmania Through 25 March Hun Kyu Kim The Approach, London 15 November – 16 December

Mori Junichi Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo Through 24 November

Hyun Gon Parasol Unit, London 23 January – March

Eric Baudart Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong Through 24 December

Wang Haiyang Capsule, Shanghai 21 November – 25 December Kochi-Muziris Biennale Kochi 12 December – 29 March

Samson Young Edouard Malingue Gallery, Shanghai 6 November – 23 December

10 Wang Singsong, The Great Wall?, 2017 (installation view, MdbK, Leipzig, 2017).

Courtesy the artist

Winter 2018

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ArtReview Asia is going to be kicking off its winter season in Shanghai, and naturally, that’s where you’re going too. Hey – that’s how it works: ArtReview Asia leads and you follow. Don’t worry, though, you’re not being Shanghaied in that sense; there are genuine reasons to visit China’s largest city this November. So ultimately you’ll be going of your own free will. As much as such a thing exists. (At this point you might want to refresh your memory of David Lewis’s 1981 essay ‘Are we free to break the laws?’)

Now in its fifth edition, the expanded 1 West Bund Art & Design fair features over 110 international galleries and takes place in over 20,000sqm of exhibition space on the site of Shanghai’s original airfield (you’ll be reminded at this point that it also provides the setting for J.G. Ballard’s 1984 memoir, Empire of the Sun).

Given the amount of space available, the fair

has traditionally (as much as the four previous While ArtReview Asia takes a minute to think editions constitute a tradition) been a site for about the implications of determinism in its more ambitious and experimental presentations soft and hard forms, you might also want to visit than risk-averse commercial galleries might 2 Shanghai’s other art fair, ART021, which takes otherwise try to pull off in China. Working with place in central Shanghai, in the Shanghai Exhithat is ArtReview Asia’s Xiàn Chǎng (you’ll have bition Centre, originally constructed (along with reached for your New Age Chinese–English Dictioits identical Beijing counterpart) as the Sinonary at this point, and having rifled through it, Soviet Friendship Building in 1955. There you’ll worked out that xiàn chǎng might variously be be able to see some old friends from West Bund translated as ‘the setting’, ‘the stage’, ‘the scene (some galleries present at both fairs) as well of the crime’, etc) section of the fair, which as another hundred or so galleries from around features solo projects (in the form of sculpture, the world. Between the two fairs you might even painting, moving image and installation). begin to draw some conclusions as to what’s hot This year you can look forward to 14 presentaand what’s not in China at the moment.

But if you’ve been reading ArtReview Asia tions by Francis Alÿs, Choi Jeong Hwa, Shezad Dawood, Dickon Drury, Sam Falls, Joyce Ho, for a while you won’t be some simple follower Liu Jianhua, Tatsuo Miyajima (offsite), Takashi of fashion. And that’s why, all art-faired out, you’ll be heading off to the Power Station of Art Murakami, Julian Opie, José Patricio, Lawrence 3 and this 12th edition of the Shanghai Biennale, Weiner, Cerith Wyn Evans and Zhang Enli.

1 Francis Alÿs, Untitled, 2016, oil on canvas, 25 × 32 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich

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ArtReview Asia

3 Yang Fudong, Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project (still), 2018, multichannel video installation. Courtesy the artist

4 Zheng Bo, Pteridophilia 2 (still), 2018, single-channel 4K video, colour, sound, 20 min. Courtesy the artist

curated by Mexican art historian Cuauhtémoc Curated by artist Mali Wu (she’s been Medina and titled Proregress – Art in the Age of described as the ‘godmother’ of Taiwan’s Historical Ambivalence. If that sounds a bit clunky, socially engaged art scene) and Francesco its guiding metaphor – the concept of yubu, a Manacorda (he’s the former artistic director Daoist dance step in which the performer seems of Tate Liverpool and now occupies the same to be going backwards and forwards at the same post at the Moscow- and Venice-based V-A-C time – might shed more of a light. Indeed it 4 Foundation), this year’s Taipei Biennial is provides a framework, according to Medina, that titled Post-Nature – Museum as an Ecosystem. will allow him to ‘explore the role of contempoStealing something natural and making it rary art as a means by which the struggles and something cultural is, of course, de rigueur in anxieties of many different latitudes are reflected the museum world these days, as you’re about and turned into subjective experience, training to find out. Naturally, Wu and Manacorda put the contemporary subject in the ambivalence things somewhat differently when describing that allows us to tolerate the contradictory forces the focus of their edition. While there will of contemporary life’. Perhaps it will even help be mentions of catastrophe, responsibility and you to process the experiences you just had in the advent of the Anthropocene, for Manacorda those art fairs. Look out, at the Power Station, the biennial is about art and the infrastructure for works by Nadim Abbas, Kader Attia, Yang around it embracing an ecological consciousness Fudong and Tomoko Yamada among others. rather than describing ecological conditions,

Winter 2018

something with which Wu (many of whose works involve collaborating with special interest groups and communities), talking to the Asia Art Archive’s Larry Shao back in 2010, appears to concur: ‘Environmentalists are focused in making changes; artists, on the other hand, tell the same story with a different medium, they also give the mind an alternative suggestion – this, I think, is the only difference between the two. I think that environmentalists are more proactive than myself, they invest a lot.

I, on the other hand, provide an alternative pathway, platform, as I work towards the same goal.’ What does this mean on an experiential level? Well, at the time of writing the pair are promising an exhibition that goes beyond any ideas of art as a discrete discipline and instead focuses on a holistic approach to the relationship between the natural and the human, along the

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way embracing the work of NGOs, activists, at the inaugural show at UCCA’s newest outfilm- and documentary makers, architects post, 270km east of its Beijing headquarters. and other ‘non-visual artists’. Au Sow-Yee, The venue itself, designed by Beijing-based Futurefarmers, Lucy Davis, Vivian Suter, Jumana OPEN Architecture, has connections to the 5 Manna, Nicholas Mangan and Robert Zhao 6 exhibition theme, After Nature (which will Renhui (whose Trying to Remember a Tree (iii) also conjure, for Anglophones, the title of – The world will surely collapse, 2017, a 14-lightbox an early prose poem by W.G. Sebald; Nach der photographic meditation on the management Natur for Germanophones), given that it is of nature via an image of a fallen tree, is curlocated under a sand dune on a beach in the Aranya Gold Coast Community development rently on long-term display in Singapore’s Gillman Barracks), are some of the contributing in Hebei. Accordingly, the exhibition, organartists you’ll be familiar with, but as ever, the ised by UCCA curator Luan Shixuan, aims fun tends to happen when experiencing the to explore the natural world as it is defined work of those with whom you are not. At least and (increasingly) shaped by humanity. More pressingly, Luan locates the show in the context that’s what ArtReview Asia is constantly telling of a recent UN Climate Change report that itself, otherwise why leave the comforts of forecasts significant climate-related crises home and an array of social media channels?

Hurray for the great outdoors! And by 2040 unless current carbon emissions are nature is again the subject (told you so!) reduced. Indeed, in some ways any exploration

of this theme is all about context. The new Aranya development bills itself as ‘an innovative art vacation destination’ (the coastal area was previously famous for being the place where China’s leaders went on summer retreats). Beihai, down in southern China, is predicted to be the world’s fastest growing city over the next few years; meanwhile China is seeking to massively reduce the rampant air pollution (which peaked during the early 2010s) that has accompanied its explosive growth since the 1980s. As to the exhibition itself, it features the work of nine Chinese artists born between 1942 and 1988.

Among the works by the older generation, look out for Liang Shaoji’s ongoing collaborations with silkworms (and for more on those, refer to ArtReview Asia’s Spring 2015 edition), while at the other end of the generational spectrum you’ll want to pay attention to Trevor Yeung’s

6 Yu Ji Ta Jama, Green Hair Monster, 2018, installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy UCCA, Beijing

5 Robert Zhao Renhui, Proxy (detail), 2016, nine photographs, 60 × 40 cm (each), from the series Christmas Island, Naturally, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart Singapore

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ArtReview Asia

8 Eric Baudart, Caddie, 2018, mixed media, 96 × 47 × 37 cm. Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong

9 Samson Young, The highway is like a lion’s mouth (stills), 2018.

Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Shanghai

7 Mori Junichi, Portrait of the mountain, 2018, black marble, dimensions variable.

Photo: Miyajima Kei. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist, Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo, and KOW, Berlin

explorations of the acanthus tree as represented of the mountain and the drapery on a pietà he Solo’s bragging in various episodes of the Star had seen. Mori’s own version of the ‘postnatural’ in art and proliferated by colonialism.

Wars movies), so perhaps we can expect a dose From trees to mountains (but still clinging seeks to embody the natural, the human and of equally out-there astronomy to join the to context): Portrait of the mountain, Japanese artist the divine in a single form. geometry. May the force be with him.

7 Mori Junichi’s first solo exhibition in four Playing with form lies at the heart of the Over in Malingue’s Shanghai gallery one of Hong Kong’s favourite sons, artist-musician years, is currently on show at Tokyo’s Mizuma 8 work of Eric Baudart. His Cubikron 3.3 (2017), Art Gallery. The mountain in question is exhibited as part of last year’s edition of Xiàn 9 Samson Young, will display a new work, titled Konpira, located at the centre of the Nagasaki The highway is like a lion’s mouth. Meanwhile, Chǎng, is a grid made up of mattress springs that at various times and from various angles Prefecture. Back in 1945, local residents fled at Shanghai’s How Museum, Young’s work resembles (sometimes separately and sometimes is included in a group show aptly titled (given the atomic fallout following the US bombing simultaneously) a stack of horizontal planes, of the prefecture’s capital for the ‘safety’ of the the artist’s previous work with choirs and mula cuboid whole and a shimmering cloud of mountain, where many of them died of exhaus10 tiple voices) Heteroglossia. Expect the theme tion. Meanwhile, local legend has it that the moun- motion. All in all it looked like an experiment to encompass something beyond issues of multitain deflected some of the nuclear blast, leaving plicity and difference in voices and language, produced by a crazed geometrician. This winter the Frenchman is exhibiting in Hong Kong the towns located at its base (among them the and to expand to articulations of difference with a solo exhibition titled one, maybe two Parsecs and similarity as seen in, for example, the rise artist’s hometown) relatively unscathed. At at Edouard Malingue Gallery. A parsec is a unit the centre of Mori’s exhibition is a new blackof globalism and nationalism. Alongside Young, marble sculpture that articulates the connections of distance roughly equating to 3.26 lightyears look out also for works by Cao Fei, Ho Tzu Nyen, the artist made between the inclined surface (and also the measurement of choice for Han Fiona Tan and Wang Qingsong. And just in case

Winter 2018

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WALTON FORD Barbary

509 West 27th Street UNTIL DECEMBER 22, 2018

BRANCUSI & DUCHAMP The Art of Dialogue

515 West 27th Street UNTIL DECEMBER 22, 2018

Works From The Collection of

JOHN ASHBERY 297 Tenth Avenue UNTIL DECEMBER 22, 2018

JOEL SHAPIRO Kasmin Sculpture Garden, on view from The High Line at 27th Street UNTIL DECEMBER 22, 2018

STUART DAVIS

Lines Thicken: Stuart Davis in Black & White 293 Tenth Avenue UNTIL DECEMBER 22, 2018

you were in Shanghai and somehow managed to through the worlds of digital media and networked society and the increasingly blurry lines miss him, Young also has a work in the Shanghai Biennale, where you can experience the latest between fantasy and reality that it engenders. instalment of his Muted Situation series – No. 22: Some might call that a chronicle of contempoMuted Tchaikovsky’s 5th (2018), for which the artist rary escapism, others might look to the exhibiinvited Cologne’s Flora Sinfonie Orchester tion to chronicle the ways in which digital habits to play Tchaikovsky’s work with the musical and digital technologies have evolved since Cao’s COSPlayers (2004) first hit the scene. What’s notes muted so that the background noise of without doubt is that Cao remains one of the the performance comes to the fore.

There’s nothing muted about Young’s fellow sharpest observers of the impacts of globalism 11 Heteroglossia exhibitor Cao Fei, however, who, and technology on contemporary life.

When it comes to pioneers of the blending even as her first Asian retrospective exhibition of fantasy and reality (in a predigital world), continues at Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts (btw – as you might have 12 Belgian Marcel Broodthaers was something of a master. He was big on embracing nature begun to notice – the same few artists seem to within the arms of culture too. As a Belgian and circulate with increasing frequency through exhibitions of Asian art, which is another reason conscious of his nation’s stereotypes, he used to keep looking for what you don’t know), sees mussels and the cooking of them to demonstrate a new version of her 2016 MoMA PS1 retrospecthis. Of his Casserole with Closed Mussels (1964), tive roll into K21 in Düsseldorf. There you’ll be a pot with a column of (uncooked) mussels about able further to explore her continuing journey to burst through its lid, he said, ‘The bursting

out of the mussels from the casserole does not follow the laws of boiling, it follows the laws of artifice and results in the construction of an abstract form.’ When humans interfere with nature, they abstract it and the results can be justified by an appeal to art. Or something like that.

In any case, Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is marking the tenth anniversary of its founding with a retrospective of Broodthaers’s work. It’s fitting, really, given that the artist (who only began making works of visual art for public consumption as he approached his 40th birthday) spent so much of his time engaged with what would these days be described as forms of institutional critique.

Indeed, in 1968 he created his Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, an institution with neither a venue nor a collection that tended to produce pop-up displays of reproduced artworks, shipping crates and wall labels (the business and infrastructure of a museum

11 Cao Fei (SL: China Tracy), i.Mirror (still), 2007, Second Life documentary film, colour, sound, 28 min. Photo: Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf.

Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

12 Marcel Broodthaers, Parle Ecrit Copie, 1972–73, three typewriters, letterpress on canvas, 34 × 32 × 38 cm (each). © Estate Marcel Broodthaers

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rather than its displays). In 1970 the artist That doesn’t stop them proliferating, howannounced the display of the museum’s ever, and Jakarta’s privately funded Museum MACAN (Museum of Modern and Contemporary ‘Financial Section’ at that year’s Cologne Art in Nusantara), which opened last November, Art Fair, declaring that the institution was is among the latest pillar of the culture indusfor sale ‘on account of bankruptcy’, while also producing an (unlimited) edition of gold try’s establishment. Its one-year anniversary ingots stamped with the museum’s eagle logo. will be marked by three exhibitions of work by some of Asia’s leading conceptualists, No buyer was found for the museum, but the ingots continue to stand for the artist’s explora- 13 On Kawara, Arahmaiani and Lee Mingwei. tion of art’s material and conceptual worth, Taiwanese-American Lee will show seven proand the confusions that result from trying jects in a display branded Seven Stories. Among to measure or equate the two (further explored them is Guernica in Sand (2006–), in which in his Poèmes industriels – a series of plastic volunteers help to construct a reproduction of plaques that mimic both advertising strategies Picasso’s famous painting out of local sands and the grandiose nameplates of institutions, over a three-week period. At the midpoint of while drawing on the artist’s talent for language the exhibition, the audience is invited to walk gained during his former career as a poet and across the already laid-out sand while the artist journalist). Art museums, after all, have a kind carries on completing the work. Ultimately of heteroglossia of their own. the whole thing is swept away. Bandung-born

Arahmaiani established herself during the 1980s as one of the pioneers in the now rapidly expanding field of Southeast Asian performance art. Much of her work (which is not limited to performance) explores the relationship between humans and nature (bingo!) as well as her own identity as a woman and as a Javanese Muslim (although her work is in no way limited by that and also includes explorations of Java’s relationship to Buddhism and Hinduism: her own name derives from the Arabic word for loving and the Hindi word for human being).

Arahmaiani’s social critique has in the past led to accusations of anti-Islamism (which led to a brief imprisonment in 1983 and then death threats that led to a self-imposed exile in Australia a decade later). Her 1994 work Etalase included a copy of the Quran, a statue of the Buddha, a packet of condoms and a Coca-Cola

13 Lee Mingwei, Guernica in Sand, 2006–, mixed-media interactive installation, 1300 × 643 cm.

Courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum

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14 Olafur Eliasson, Room for one colour, 1997 (installation view, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2015), monochromatic light, dimensions variable. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Neugerriemschneider, Berlin, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

15 Feng Junyuan and Zeng Jiahui, Two or Three Kinds of Heat (Chapter One), 2018, HD video, colour, sound. Courtesy the artists

14 bottle, among other things, in a single vitrine; MACAN will be showing over 70 of her works as a well as elements of her archives. By comparison, On Kawara is perhaps a tediously monotonous proposition. MACAN will be offering a reading of the artist’s One Million Years (1970–98), which, in the case of the volume titled One Million Years [Past], lists each year of a millennium, beginning in 998031 BC, and in the case of One Million Years [Future] goes through to 1001997 AD (in each ‘display’ of the project the reader picks up where the last reader – in whatever institution that might have been – left off). Sometimes it’s in the quotidian and the ordinary that you find the extraordinary. Presumably that’s what On Kawara believed in any case.

If MACAN is accumulating years, then across the straits of Singapore they’ve been accumulating works of Minimalism. So much of it, in

fact, that the exhibition Minimalism: Space. Light.

Object is housed in not one but two museums: National Gallery Singapore and the ArtScience Museum. Proof, one assumes, that a minimalist ethos does not extend to the curators of shows about Minimalism. Here there are over 150 works on show, dating from the 1950s to the present day, spread across the two sites. The exhibition aims to trace the history of minimalist art from its roots in the art history of the West – look out for 15 work by Donald Judd, Mark Rothko, Charlotte Posenenske, et al – and to examine how that aesthetic was deployed closer to home, through the work of artists such as Ai Weiwei, Po Po and local heroes Tang Da Wu and Kim Lim. In this last respect, the show promises to be an intriguing one, given the way in which, during the second part of the twentieth century, artists from what had become Southeast Asia often struggled to

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make the uneasy blend of artistic contemporaneity (which took art beyond geography) and contextual specificity (so much a part of nationbuilding at the time) stick. It will also be fun to see how crowd-pleasers teamLab get crowbarred into the ArtScience section of the exhibition.

After all that date chanting and minimalising you’ll be itching to return to Shanghai, where things are always taken to the max. Certainly, Don Gallery’s group exhibition Steadfastly Raise the Standards of Nonconstructive Production easily wins the prize for best exhibition title of the season. The title itself harks back to People’s Daily editorials from the 1950s that campaigned about waste in all its forms (antiformalism, antireactionism and antiwaste went hand in hand at this time) during China’s programme of rapid urban and industrial construction, while the exhibition seeks to place this in the

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18 Brook Andrew, Sexy and dangerous, 1996, computer-generated colour transparency on transparent synthetic polymer resin, 146 × 96 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

16 Tschabalala Self, Bayo, 2017, mixed media, 244 × 213 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

context of China’s current commercial realestate boom (which operates without a modern design tradition that goes beyond the country’s midcentury ‘three-floors-in-three-days’ policy; you’ll be wanting to read some Henri Lefebvre here). Not every show is about nature. Mapping out the architectural terrain will be Fei Yining’s videowork New Clear War (2018), Feng Junyuan and Zeng Jiahui’s documentary work Two or Three Kinds of Heat (Chapter One) (2018) and the minimal elegance of Zhang Ruyi’s sculptures and interventions.

After that you’ll want to pop next door to the Yuz Museum: not for the museum’s nondescript (that’s being generous) architecture; rather, for a display of paintings, sculptures, photographs 16 and videos by Harlem-born Tschabalala Self.

All the works on show explore the context of the 17 bodega (here meaning the generally family-run

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corner shops found in New York) as a social nexus for communities of colour. Such places are ‘a lighthouse in an ocean of gentrification’, according to Self, who also claims that the bodega represents something of the past in a cityscape that is constantly seeking to assert its contemporary presence. Indeed the presence of such works in the rapidly gentrifying West Bund district should make her thoughts even more acutely felt. No less a critic than The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl has described Self’s work (which often centres on representations of the black female body) as being in the vein of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning; here’s a chance to put that theory to the test.

On the subject of American classics, the Long Museum West Bund will host the first Chinese retrospective of the work of Louise Bourgeois (OK – Franco-American classics, but that wouldn’t

ArtReview Asia

have made the transition so smooth). Titled The Eternal Thread (I’m thinking The Bangles now; you shouldn’t), which references both Bourgeois’s family’s involvement in the tapestry industry and the artist’s investment in fabric and sewing (particularly during the last 15 years of her career), from the Personage sculptures of the 1940–50s, through the Cell installations of the 1990–2000s, to various explorations of the relationships between mother and child and those later fabric works. There will, of course, be the giant spider Maman (1999) looming above it all. Despite its current resonance as an extra from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–03), for Bourgeois, the spider represents the nurture and protection afforded her by her mother, a weaver. A psychologist would have (and most probably has had) a field day; you’ll have to choose your interpretation for yourself.

It’s Marty McFly rather than Frodo Baggins Navigating between art’s future and its who is being evoked at the National Gallery of past has been something of an obsession for Victoria this month, although what the puffer- 19 Toby Ziegler, who opens an exhibition of vest-wearing time-traveller from 1985 has to do new work (titled Your Shadow Rising) down at 18 with the ostensible subject of Blak to the Future MONA, Tasmania. Working in painting and is opaque at best. That subject is Australia’s sculpture, the British artist (not the West Wing indigenous art (perhaps the reference, then, is character) models surfaces and spaces on to the more recent 2009 MTV series Black to the a computer, before making his geometric artFuture, which explored Black-American culture works by hand. It’s a means by which to make from the 1970s to the 2000s) and its relationship the familiar alien, to destroy and reinvent, to the nation’s art history (for a long time there in this case via paintings, sculptures (among wasn’t really one), and by implication the them a suspended, transparent tessellated nation’s history (for a long time there… you get hand) and ‘a lump of volcanic rock’.

Back in Ziegler’s hometown, London, the picture). Alongside earth-pigment works artists from South Korea are about to have from the early 1980s by Alec Mingelmanganu, their moment in whatever it is that constitutes you’ll find recent neons and photography by Britain’s winter ‘sun’. In November, KoreanBrook Andrew in a display that locates indige20 born and London-trained painter Hun Kyu nous art firmly in Australia’s present as much Kim will set up stall in The Approach gallery, as its past. And through that, its future too.

while Dangjin-born, New York- and Krakow21 based (never thought I’d be writing that) Hyon Gyon will present a selection of recent works at Parasol Unit. Kim uses traditional silk painting techniques, a manga-esque aesthetic

(think somewhere in the middle of Tabaimo and Takashi Murakami via Hokusai and Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki) and a narrative that belongs to the tradition of fable to tackle contemporary (political) issues (the aftermath of the Sewol Ferry Incident of 2014 among them). Gyon, on the other hand, crosses a similar aesthetic tradition (she studied nine years in Japan) with American-style expressionism and forays into abstraction, while often deriving her subject matter from imagery associated with shamanistic traditions in Korea. Both artists figure their art as a way of exorcising personal and collective demons.

21 Hyon Gyon, Aching Soul, 2017, acrylic, oil and metal leaf on canvas, 243 × 182 cm. Courtesy the artist

20 Hun Kyu Kim, A Crown for the King, 2018, traditional oriental pigment on silk, 40 × 35 cm.

Courtesy FXP Photography

19 Toby Ziegler, The human engine, 2018. Photo: Peter Mallet.

Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London & Hong Kong

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The same might be said of Wang Hiyang, whose explorations of the weird, the erotic and the weirdly erotic continue at Shanghai’s Capsule Gallery this November. There Wang will show three videos and two sets of drawings. One of the new videos, an animation titled Party in the Anus (2018), features an androgynous figure (although if pushed I’d say certain bulges indicate male) in a black bodysuit, high heels (red) and a wig (peroxide-blond) dancing inside a moist anus. The theme of the absurd is further pursued in The City of Dionysus (2018), in which human figures (sometimes with alien heads) force their way through sites of urban destruction and construction. Now there’s someone who is steadfastly raising the standards of nonconstructive production!

On a more serious note, the Indian state of Kerala is slowly being rebuilt following this past August’s monsoon-related floods. These were the worst in the region since 1924: official figures list 483 dead, 15 missing and US$3 billion worth of damage to property. It’s in that context that 23 the latest edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale will open this December. The other context is that set by artist Anita Dube, whose edition of South Asia’s largest art event of this kind (as measured by Kochi-Muziris’s organisers) is titled Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life. Her curatorial statement evinces a fusion of Guy Debord’s relation of capital, spectacle, subjugation and alienation, Jacques Derrida’s later work (channelling Montaigne) on the politics of friendship, with a smattering of Gayatri Spivak (who rose to prominence as a translator of Derrida) for

good measure. ‘At the heart of my curatorial adventure’, says Dube, ‘lies a desire for liberation and comradeship (away from the master and slave model) where the possibilities for a non-alienated life could spill into a “politics of friendship”.

Where pleasure and pedagogy could sit together and share a drink, and where we could dance and sing and celebrate a dream together.’ Among the dreamers will be Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Hassan Khan, the Guerrilla Girls, Brook Andrew, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Akram Zaatari, VALIE EXPORT, KP Krishnakumar, Shilpa Gupta, Nilima Sheikh and Walid Raad. But in the end, and particularly for this biennial, which is so rooted in the specifics of Kerala, it might be nature rather than culture that has the final say in the way it is received and the form it takes. Nirmala Deri

22 Wang Hiyang, Party in the Anus, 2018, single-channel video, 2 min 15 sec, loop.

Courtesy the artist and Capsule, Shanghai

23 Aki Sasamoto, Random Memo Random, 2016, performance.

Courtesy Kochi Biennale Foundation

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For those of us who didn’t live in the Hindi Belt (the region of north-central India in which Hindi and its dialects are widely spoken), Bollywood movies were how we encountered the language. Like many Indians, I learned to read and write Hindi at school, where it was a ‘third language’: the ‘first’ was Kannada, the language of my state, Karnataka; the ‘second language’ was English, also the medium of instruction at my school. We were learning Hindi, we were led to believe, because it was the national language of my country, because it was the language of patriotism and, by association, part of what made us Indian. In fact, even if Hindi and its variants are spoken by the largest number of its citizens, India has no national language.

According to the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, an ambitious project initiated by Ganesh N. Devy in 2010, India has 780 languages, hundreds of dialects and endless sociolects.

Language, then, is very far from being a national unifier.

Multilingualism, however, is so common as to be barely worth remarking upon. While every state has one predominant language, its people might speak dozens more, further divided into the languages of the communities, tribes or castes to which they belong.

Growing up in a small town in southern India during the 1980s and 90s, I do not recall meeting even a single native Hindi speaker. The language did allow us to understand state-sponsored TV programming, which was all in Hindi; then cable was introduced. Mostly, though, Hindi helped us sing along to the popular songs from the movies. Indeed, such is the popularity of this genre, you might say that a familiarity with film soundtracks is one of the few things that Indian citizens genuinely have in common and the real reason why Hindi is so widely understood. A majority of nonnative Hindi speakers would understand, at the very least, the gist of the songs, if not the meaning of every word.

Given the prolificity of the songs in popular culture, even people in states like Kerala, where

linguistic cleansing

Hindi has very little presence, would be able to recognise the songs, place them in the right social context and hum along.

But for India’s ruling rightwing government, this is not enough.

An end to India’s multilingual status quo and the acceptance of Hindi as the national language is something that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling coalition government headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are trying very hard – and without much subtlety – to effect.

Frighteningly, any rejection of this idea is increasingly being perceived as a rejection of the country and therefore unpatriotic. It’s another instance of the ‘if you are not with us, you are against us’ politics that dominate our times. It is also typical of a political environment within which the space for dissent, debate and freedom of expression is shrinking at an alarming rate.

A lot of Hindi speakers migrated from the north and settled in the south after India’s mid-1990s IT boom, as did migrant labourers from regions that were losing their traditional pool of agricultural and construction workers to other job sectors in bigger cities. Since then, Hindi has gradually become more widely heard in cities, and more familiar to people in smaller towns. For autorickshaw and cab drivers, for shopkeepers, for delivery boys, maids and other service workers, a working knowledge of Hindi is good for business.

It must be noted that English, on the other hand, remains an aspirational currency. The novelist Arundhati Roy, in her 2018 W.G. Sebald Lecture at London’s British Library on literary translation, calls English the language of mobility, of opportunity, of privilege and exclusion, of emancipation.

Only a choice few continue to have access to it.

The politics of language has a violent history in post-Independence India. English and Hindi were both declared official languages to begin with. While the Indian Constitution was written in English in 1949 (and came into effect in 1950), its usage in

The ruling coalition’s attempts to make Hindi the national language of profoundly multilingual, multicultural India strike Deepa Bhasthi as deeply unnerving

The preamble to the Constitution of India, 1949

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official documents in India was scheduled to continue only for 15 years, after which it was to be replaced by Hindi as the official language.

According to Census 2011 figures, 44 percent of India’s population of 1.3 billion are native Hindi speakers. The figure would be higher if speakers of dialects that come under the umbrella of Hindi, like Awadhi, Bhojpuri and Braj, were to be considered as well. As early as in 1895, there were protests in what is now Odisha against the imposition of Hindi, and when it was time to make the official transition there were further demonstrations from non-Hindi speakers, especially in the south.

Protests against the feared subordination to Hindi speakers took place in states including West Bengal, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, but most notably and most violently in Tamil Nadu, and the widespread pressure

Part XVII: Official Language, from the Constitution of India, 1949

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meant that English was retained in perpetuity as an official language along with Hindi.

Given this history of language movements, the Gujarat High Court in 2010 ruled that there was no provision in the Constitution, nor order issued, that made Hindi the national language.

In 2015 the Supreme Court refused to admit a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) that wanted to impose Hindi as a court language. Again, in 2016, a petition seeking a direction to declare Hindi as the national language was withdrawn from the Delhi High Court on the grounds that there was no such provision in the Constitution. But such minor details seem irrelevant to partisan nationalists.

A fresh round of protests erupted as recently as 2014, when a circular from the Home Ministry directed all government departments and national banks to give preference to Hindi over English on their official websites and on social media. Such was the outcry that the order was retracted. The central government drew more flak on 14 September this year, traditionally observed as Hindi Divas, the anniversary of the day in 1949 when Hindi was declared an official language alongside English. Vice President Venkaiah Naidu (himself a south Indian), in a speech at a Hindi Divas event organised by the Home Ministry, suggested that it was not possible to progress without knowing Hindi. Stating (falsely) that Hindi was the main vehicle of communication among India’s colonial-era freedom fighters, he said that the language was a ‘symbol of social, political, religious and linguistic unity of the country’. An attempt to smooth ruffled feathers is sometimes made, with a token acknowledgement to what are termed ‘regional languages’ (any language except Hindi and English, the latter still being perceived as a foreign tongue), but the desire to enforce Hindi as the language of government administration remains consistent.

One need not go too far back into history to see how language politics have drawn new maps in the subcontinent. The separation of the erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) from Pakistan and the long, bloody civil war in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority were caused in large part by attempts to engineer the triumph of one language over the other. Several states in India have had their own language movements as well, spearheaded by writers and artists.

In Karnataka, strong opposition to Hindi in the 1960s and 70s segued into a preference for English. Sanskrit was the dominant language in schools and it had become possible to finish formal high school education without learning Kannada. A widening incompatibility between what was studied and what language was

required for employment in government eventually led to the Gokak agitation during the 1980s. Named after Vinayaka Krishna Gokak, a prominent writer who recommended that Kannada be made the ‘first language’ in state schools in Karnataka, the agitation was supported by other writers including U.R. Ananthamurthy and actors such as Raaj Kumar. Also called the ‘Save Kannada’ movement, it succeeded in instilling pride in the language. A standoff between Punjabi and Hindi during the 1960s eventually led to the carving out of a Punjabi-speaking Punjab state, the Hindi-speaking parts becoming Haryana state. The Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) was established at the state and national level to promote and strengthen vernacular literatures.

One of the arguments made for Hindi’s purported preeminence is its antiquity, because it was birthed by Sanskrit, which is, famously, believed to be the ancient mother of all languages. Factually, Hindi, as it is understood today, is only a little over a hundred years old.

It only became an official language of any of the Indian states in 1881, when Bihar adopted it.

Mohandas Gandhi, one of the leaders of India’s independence movement, wrote his autobiography in Gujarati, from which language he took his nickname, Bapu. Rabindranath Tagore wrote his most famous works in Bengali; India’s national anthem, Jana Gana Mana, is a translation of one of Tagore’s Bengali hymns into Hindi. Moreover Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same language, but the former has been made a tongue of the Hindus (thus making it more Indian to fit into the current Hindutva narrative), while the latter is understood to be a Muslim language. Both borrow copiously from Arabic, Persian and a host of other languages. Even the word ‘Hindi’ is Persian. As late as 1880, the prominent writer Bharatendu Harishchandra considered Hindi suitable at best for prose owing to its status as a pedestrian boli – a spoken language.

It was a popular view among writers until the 1920s that Hindi did not have the grace and nuance needed for poetry. Instead, Braj and Awadhi were seen as the languages for poetic Vizianagaram station board c. 1947, featuring five languages: Telugu, Hindi, English, Urdu and Odia

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expression, until writers like Nirala, Agyeya and Raghuvir Sahay made Hindi gradually more acceptable as a language of creative expression. In the process, Braj and Awadhi, the language in which Bhakti poets like Tulsidas, Surdas and Kabir composed their couplets and poems, were relegated to the status of dialects. To exalt Hindi alone as a reflection of India’s long and rich sociolinguistic history is particularly jarring.

I speak Hindi fluently, but the policies of the central government are autocratic enough for me to have developed a disdain towards it.

Hindi is just one of the hundreds of languages that make up this multiculture. The willingness of people across the country to engage with Hindi because it is more accessible cannot be construed as acceptance of its superiority over the vernaculars. Language is not just a means of communication. It is, too, a reservoir of memory, tradition and culture. To know another language is to unlock a new way of thinking. To prioritise just one language in as linguistically diverse a society as India is not only an unwanted attempt at homogenisation, but a means of erasing other histories.

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11.03 12.15

New Work by

Rodel Tapaya

Myths and Truths 神话与真理

罗德尔·塔帕雅

新作展

Opening: 2018.11.03 16:00

北京市朝阳区酒仙桥路 2 号 798 艺术区当代唐人艺术中心第二空间 2nd Gallery Space: B01, 798 Art District, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang Dst. Beijing, China info@tangcontemporary.com +86 10 59789610 www.tangcontemporary.com

Once upon a time Brahma, overcome with lust for Parvathy, Lord Shiva’s consort, appeared before her. Because like Shiva he possessed five heads, Parvathy assumed her husband had returned home and, without bothering to glance up at his face, performed the ceremonial welcome of washing his feet, as was the custom.

Fearing her curse if she looked up and recognised him, Brahma fled after she had completed the ritual. Upon hearing of this incident, in the version described by Eveline Meyer in Ankalaparamecuvari: A Goddess of Tamilnadu, Her Myths and Cult (1986), an angry Shiva hunted down Brahma, who had taken refuge in a tree hollow, and, catching hold of one of his ears, attempted to pull him out. But he only succeeded in detaching one of Brahma’s five heads, which affixed itself to Shiva’s shoulders.

Try as he might, Shiva was unable to dislodge this extra head from his body. All the food he ingested went straight to this sixth head, causing Shiva slowly to waste away.

He began to wander without rest from one cremation ground to another in the hope of sating the sixth head, going famished and sleepless for 12 long years. Unable to bear her husband’s plight, Parvathy’s rage came to border on madness. So she accompanied Shiva to a cremation ground and prepared offerings of human flesh leavened with blood while performing a frightful dance of death. She fashioned a garland out of skulls littering the ground to wear round her neck and gorged herself on the human carcasses smouldering on the pyres. In the course of her dance, Brahma’s head (also known as Brahmakapalam) slid down from Shiva’s shoulders to devour the offerings of human flesh she had prepared. At which the wildly cavorting Parvathy, invoking all her cosmic powers, crushed the skull under her dancing feet and merged herself with Shiva’s body.

There was once a cruel ruler named Vallalarajan, who, despite his seven wives, had no progeny. As a boon for his severe penances, he had been granted the privilege of having gods such as Brahma and Vishnu protect his palace premises. Because all the gods were at his beck and call in his kingdom, the task of regulating the world became disrupted.

Worried at this state of affairs, a goddess, in the guise of a toothless ninety-year-old crone, appeared at Vallalarajan’s palace claiming to be able to tell the future. She predicted to the eager king that he would be a proud father soon, but that the child would cause the destruction of his lineage and his realm. Enraged at this prophecy, Vallalarajan ordered the old hag be imprisoned, at which she assumed her real form as the goddess Angalamman. With her fearsome fangs, snakes slithering all over her

Notes from Madras Charu Nivedita looks at how Mayana Kollai and rituals like it sustain populations marginalised

by India’s fundamentalist attitudes to sex and gender identity

body, charcoal hue and flowing matted hair, she performed the deadly dance of destruction.

She tore open the pregnant queen’s womb, snatched the child from it and, wearing the intestines as garlands, danced.

Thousands of such folk tales abound in South India and they remain closely intertwined with the ways in which people lead their lives. These stories and the rituals associated with them are not merely dead myths or legends but often help those who lack hope and support structures. There is no town in Tamil Nadu without a temple to Angalamman; in Madras alone almost every street has a temple dedicated to the mother goddess, who is usually worshipped in two forms – as Mariamman and as Angalamman (the former belongs to middleclass folk whereas the latter is worshipped by the lower classes). The myths related above are combined and celebrated as Mayana Kollai (literally ‘looting of the graveyard’) during the

Participant in a Mayana Kollai ritual.

Photo: Prabhu Kalidas

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Tamil month of Maasi (February/March) in Tamil Nadu on a new moon day, a day after Maha Shivaratri. I would estimate that roughly 90 percent of the celebrants this past year were transgender (by which I mean, in this case, people whose sex assignment at birth was male but whose gender identity is female) and men and women belonging to the marginalised, slum-dwelling classes of Madras. Of the latter, women outnumbered the men. While the plight of women in a country like India, where rape is absolutely endemic, is itself pitiable, the pathetic lives that transgender people are forced to live is even more difficult to describe in mere words. It was only in September that the Indian Supreme Court struck down Section 377 from the Indian Penal Code, which stated: ‘Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine’. This section had been used to oppress transgender people, and its repeal has led to anguished cries of ‘Indian culture is under attack’ from rightwing fundamentalists, nationalists and Hindutva extremists. As soon

as any youngster in India experiences a different gender identity, they become isolated – first from their parents and then from society itself. Even today it is common to hear psychiatrists in India characterise homosexuality as a mental disease. This is also their take on transgender people.

This intolerance and reductive attitude towards sex is nothing short of surprising, given that India gave the world the Kama Sutra and that the erotic carvings in Indian temples are known throughout the world for their explicit content. Temples are filled with sculptures depicting group sex, lesbianism, homosexuality, anal sex, cunnilingus, bestiality (queens engaging in sexual intercourse with horses seems to be a recurring theme)… you name it. And yet with such lusty images openly on display at the places of worship, Indian society still considers sex taboo. It was again only in September that the Supreme Court removed Section 497 from the Indian Penal Code, which states that a male engaging in extramarital sex could be punished by imprisonment for up to five years and that the authorities could take up the offence suo motu, even if no complaint had been lodged.

Mayana Kollai celebrants. Photo: Prabhu Kalidas

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As matters stood, if I were to spend some time with my wife in a hotel room, the police had every right to arrest me on the basis of suspicion alone, unless we were able to establish our marital relationship to their satisfaction.

In an environment such as this, when a teenager starts to become aware that their gender identity might not fit the one assigned to them by society, they are typically ostracised by their family and expelled from their home.

At such a traumatic time, the only support is often provided by other members of the transgender community who take them in and offer them shelter. I had occasion to meet several transgender people in connection with my field studies on this subject, and the first lesson I learned was that it is not easy to meet them. Some would never agree to an interview, no matter how hard I tried. I also discovered that transgender people in India often take up one of the three occupations available to them: fortune-tellers, sex workers and mendicants.

I once tried to make contact with a transgender person belonging to the first category, who in addition to being a fortune-teller was also a drug addict and had once tried to commit suicide by dousing herself with petrol and

setting herself on fire. Her sister had committed suicide. Through the intermediary who was trying to set up our meeting, she sent word that she was unable to meet me for this reason: ‘My mother has been bedridden for the past three years and I do not think you can stand the smell of her bodily wastes lingering on the bedding.’ I suggested we meet somewhere else, but she refused, stating that she never ventured outside because of the 80 percent burns her body had sustained.

I have been to meet transgender people and members of the marginalised classes at their places of residence. These slums bring to mind the eighteenth-century leper colonies in Europe, the only difference being that they are right in the middle of Madras, surrounded on all sides by huge malls, cinema halls and high-rise apartment blocks. The buildings are bisected by pathways hardly broad enough for two persons to walk abreast, with open sewers on both sides and smoking stoves at the edges

of the drains beside which women wash their dirty dishes and themselves. Men urinate in the open. A public toilet might be located half a kilometre away. The dwellings are around 6sqm and less than 2m high, into which is crammed a tin bed woven with wires, a small TV perched high on the wall and a tiny fridge (freebies from the government). An uppermiddle-class family in Madras could be expected to live in a three-bedroom apartment measuring 140 sqm, with a toilet attached to each bedroom. The size of one toilet would equal the total living quarters of a family in these slums – where, additionally, with a sheet of asbestos for a roof, there would be not a whisper of wind in the baking hot shed.

A lady named Valarmathi living in one such shed told me that she had been participating in the Mayana Kollai rituals for several years.

One of her daughters had died in childbirth and two others had converted to Pentecostalism.

Her only son had not been able to clear his tenthgrade examination and was earning a meagre living, at age eighteen, doing odd jobs at a mechanic’s workshop. Without basic education, there were no prospects for those belonging to the marginal sector. While I went round the slum, I was repeatedly reminded of Oscar Lewis’s work La Vida (1966) and his concept of ‘Culture of Poverty’. How do children concentrate on studies in an environment such as this?

When Valarmathi proceeds on the Mayana Kollai, she bites off the heads of live roosters and drinks their blood. The ceremony takes place at the cremation ground in each locality and, since it is not possible to feast on human corpses these days, they make do with the raw meat and entrails of goats instead. Those who gorge themselves and dance in a trancelike state, while drummers whip up a storm, are not themselves but are transformed into Angalammans who stuff handfuls of the burnt ashes of corpses into their mouths. This necrophagia of Angalamman is said to take place in a state of frenzy, as Eveline Meyer has stated.

The folk tales that describe this act also specify that indulging in this act, or even just witnessing it, is sufficient to cure any lunacy on the part of the spectators.

If these people, considered untouchable for the past 2,000 years, did not have an outlet through such rituals, wouldn’t they have become extinct? That the marginalised sections of society derive the strength to carry on and a sense of identity through celebrations, fables, music, song, dance or worship is never more evident than in the ritual of the Mayana Kollai.

A Madras slum.

Photo: Courtesy the author

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Several friends have assisted me greatly with this article: Shalin Maria Lawrence, Vijay Balaji, Valarmathi, Gandhi (Minnambalam), Shambavi

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Art Featured

Kya? Ap-ka naukar yaha a-ya hai 45

Raqs Media Collective

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No Manifesto “When we founded Raqs we didn’t make a manifesto – that gave us an open window for what we didn’t even know we could or would do” Interview by Cleo Roberts

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‘Raqs’ in Arabic, Persian and Urdu encompasses various forms of dance including Sufi whirling – a form of meditation based on movement.

Since forming Raqs Media Collective in 1992, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta have taken this ‘kinetic contemplation’ as a model for their own restless curatorial and artistic practice, which extends into historiography, philosophy and sociology.

If their project sounds loosely defined, then that’s how they like it. Working between and across disciplinary boundaries, the New Delhi-based collective has made films, curated exhibitions and edited books; staged public interventions, performed lectures and founded a ‘platform for research and reflection on the transformation of urban space’; collaborated with architects, programmers, historians, writers and theatre directors; and researched and restaged the histories of communities from Shanghai to Manchester.

That resistance to categorisation, and impulse to forge connections, means that each project feeds into the next. Their current exhibition Not Yet At Ease at Firstsite, Colchester (commissioned for the 14–18 NOW programme marking the centenary of the First World War), for example, explores the psychological trauma suffered by Indian soldiers through the format of a ‘Theatre Opera’ developed during Raqs’s curating of the 2016 Shanghai Biennale. In turn, their research into the history of neurology came to inform their curatorial project In the Open or in Stealth at MACBA, Barcelona.

These are just the most easily disentangled threads from Raqs’s cat’s cradle of an oeuvre, which itself expresses the collective’s vision of the world as a complex but always interlinked network of people, ideas, places and histories.

ARTREVIEW ASIA Your practice engages with themes of techno-capitalism, globalisation and Marxist theory. It’s been almost exactly two years since your Shanghai Biennale opened to the public, and now that a new edition is about to open, I wonder if you could describe how you explored those themes in the particular context of Shanghai, and the associated challenges?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE There are always challenges in any curatorial adventure. In Shanghai one of the challenges we set ourselves was to think about art in China in a way that was not consumed or imprisoned by spectacle and glamour. Because a lot of what the world sees from China, in terms of contemporary art production, is a macho presentation of big-scale production, we asked ourselves if it would be possible to create a biennale that was more nuanced, more conscious of itself. For us, the important consideration was to try and create

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a conversation between the kind of work we were bringing to China and that which we were taking from it. It was important for us when a lot of Chinese intellectuals told us that the biennale had made them think about Chinese art anew. We have just curated a show in Barcelona where there have been different and continuing challenges.

ARA You’re in Colchester for the opening of a new commission, Not Yet At Ease. What is the significance of the images of synapses and neuron pathways, and the snatched phrases such as ‘The strongest nerves…’ that run along the curved wall that welcomes visitors to the show, and the texts running across other walls and windows?

RMC The images echo illustrations of what nerve cells and endings were thought to be like in 1915, 1916 and 1917. A newspaper article we found spoke for the time. It said, ‘The strongest nerves will win the war’, and it has an illustration of what these literal nerves might look like.

There was a lot of discussion at that time about the First World War being ‘the battle of nerves’.

But how are you going to convince hundreds

“What’s exciting about living in this time is that everything is up in the air, you can take nothing for granted. It’s one of those threshold moments” of thousands of men to have strong nerves when they have no investment in fighting?

ARA You found the newspaper articles you mention during the research process for Not Yet At Ease.

Were there any other specific source materials that informed the exhibition?

RMC We were particularly interested in the psychological experiences of Indian soldiers during the First World War. We also used medical reports, and from these stemmed our interest in understanding the mental life of the soldier and others who were called ‘followers’: the workers who cleaned up the mess of the battlefield.

At the time, doctors were trying to understand what was happening to the bodies and minds of these soldiers. We read letters written by soldiers early on in the war, in 1915, the contents of which suggested that something was going wrong with their minds. One of the military censors wrote that the letters display a tendency towards an excess of poetry, which he saw as ‘an ominous sign of mental disquietude’.

For us, that was a clue and an interesting way into this material. While there was an awareness of psychological trauma, the

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authorities didn’t want to give it a name – they denied the diagnosis of shellshock that was widespread among both Indian soldiers and British servicemen. Shellshock assumes that the person who is shocked has a mental life, an inner life, and the army doctors were only willing to give that diagnosis to officers – men like themselves. The common conscripted soldier – the vast mass of the fighting men – was not seen fit to have an inner life.

Apart from the letters and the medical notes and official reports, we have quoted and extensively reworked and interpreted two archival photographs, both from the collection of the Imperial War Museum. We have also used two fragments of archival film from the period, as well as sound recordings of the voices of Indian soldiers made by a German linguist in a prisoner-of-war camp near Berlin.

All of these are starting points for a linked set of artistic and imaginative gestures that render our sense of the moments of poise and lucidity that the soldiers and followers found in the middle of the war. We are particularly interested in bringing the subjectivity of the followers to the foreground. Additionally, there are also readings of brief fragments from literary works that reflect on the period, as well as our own writing. A section on the Berlin–Baghdad Railway – one of the causes of the war – helps write a different sense of ‘worlding’ from one usually ascribed to the war. It also traces continuities between the geopolitical factors of the war a hundred years ago and the routes traced by refugees fleeing from wartorn territories in the Middle East to Europe today.

ARA What were the diagnoses for these common soldiers who weren’t diagnosed as shellshocked?

RMC They would say Indian soldiers had ‘trench spine’, a shock to the spinal cord, which caused nervousness – a similar diagnosis to the nineteenth-century ‘railway spine’ used to describe traumatised railroad accident survivors. The Kitchener Indian Hospital in Brighton had a special annex for a psychiatric ward for soldiers who suffered from what we now identify as PTSD – this categorisation of shock with the cruelties of war as ‘madness’ made us respond with the architecture of the installation, which is a labyrinth of soft-walled cells.

Who is really the insane one? What kind of normalcy is war? We are asking people to be within such structures and look ‘out’ through the viewing slits into a speculative interiority.

ARA Alongside the installations, you have programmed a Theory Opera, a series of live events – readings and performances – in the space.

preceding pages and above Raqs Media Collective: Not Yet At Ease, 2018 (installation views). Photos: Douglas Atfield. Courtesy the artists; Frith Street Gallery, London; and Firstsite, Colchester

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Santiago Ramón y Cajal, undated drawing of biopolar cells the thickness of the vestibular nerve.

Courtesy Instituto Cajal, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Madrid

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Could you explain the ideas behind a format you previously employed at the Shanghai Biennale?

the parts. All sorts of stimuli are brought to our table in the studio and that is where the conversation starts.

With each exhibition, we try and create a picture of the world. The world changes, nuances change. It is a different picture each time. Ultimately, we find a form – and each exhibition finds its own form. The selection of artists is not a singular moment – it is a process of engagement of various kinds of practice, at different times, in different moments of their articulation. The joy for us is this process – to find new and different things, sometimes only because it’s the right time to look at them.

We are a practice that is a quarter-of-a-century old, and by now we know that there is material that we will return to in the future.

the microscope and then make the drawings.

These are also works of art. Obviously, there was something to do with nerves also going on in our minds, because we were working on Not Yet At Ease, looking into nerves, and so we included this great Spanish artist, who is a neuroscientist, in the MACBA exhibition.

RMC First of all, opera literally means ‘work’, and the work of theory is to inform and be informed by the work of practice. It is exciting to do this here [in Colchester]. Here it has the potential to have an intensity of impact, along with the installation and mural. In Britain, ARA In the preview text for In the Open or in as everywhere else, there is a shying away from Stealth you write that the exhibition hopes to ‘gain what military experience is. With a major an understanding of the way we live together and commission like this, where there is a lot of explore possibilities of how we can improve’. To what research and a whole network of conversations issues are you alluding? that are the backbone of the work, it is interRMC Everything. Everything. What’s exciting esting to lay that bare and explore it further. about living in this time is that everything is So, a lot of the people we are inviting to the up in the air, you can take nothing for granted.

Theory Opera are historians and others from It’s one of those threshold moments. One of the whom we have learned in the process. interesting things we found For the Shanghai about researching the First Biennale, our impulse was World War is that in those to create a lattice and web of four years the shape of things of the city of Shanghai transportation changed. itself – to make extendedly In 1914 the world was still communal layers and events largely horse-drawn. By 1918 and encounters within it. it was an automobile world.

This attitude also comes Four years is a very short from our experience of worktime, but think about how ing with Sarai [an experimuch faster things are mental research initiative happening now – there are focused on the transformaprobably things that are tion of urban space] for 12 happening now that we years. Looking back on that know nothing about. It’s time, we understand that possible that within the next a lot of what we were doing two decades, hydrocarbons had a curatorial sensibility. will no longer be used to Sarai’s climax for us was power transport. That will Sarai Reader 09 (2013), a large change everything. The nine-month-long exhibition way we store energy will be that began empty and ended completely different and the full and brought to itself nature of politics will have many kinds of energies. changed. All the relationIt was an experience that ships that constitute the informed the way we think.

John Gerrard, X. laevis (Spacelab), 2017, simulation, dimensions variable material structures are up (as seen in In the Open or in Stealth, 2018, MACBA, Barcelona). Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Making anything, curating for grabs. We are living in Gallery, London, and Simon Preston Gallery, New York anything, is an opportunity a time of great change and to explore the entangletransition where you see new centres of wealth ARA What is the organising principle for the show ments of forces and energies in the world. and power, but the lesson of our time is not to in Barcelona?

There are no questions we won’t ask, try and seek it within the boundaries of physical but there are those which we haven’t asked.

RMC This exhibition is called In the Open or in regions but to see it in terms of networked When we founded Raqs we didn’t make a Stealth. It looks at the ways in which the ‘future’ entity. We are not a mass but are constituted of manifesto – that gave us an open window might already be here – either in the open or in singular sentiences. It is not grand to say that the for what we didn’t even know we could or stealth. It has work by contemporary artists and work of art is open to everybody, not just now would do. Many of the things we are doing also poetry written by a computer during the but in the future. ara now we didn’t know we would be doing then.

1980s. Thinking about poetry and computers, Cleo Roberts writes on contemporary Asian art And I am sure there are things in the future and robots committing suicide, raised the of which we have no comprehension now.

Raqs Media Collective: Not Yet At Ease is on question of the nervous system: so the exhibiview at Firstsite, Colchester, through 31 December; tion also has drawings of the nervous system by ARA You mentioned your forthcoming curatorial In the Open or in Stealth – The Unruly the influential neuroscientist Santiago Ramón project at MACBA. How did you select the artists Presence of an Intimate Future, an exhibition y Cajal, who lived around the time of the First and what is your research process? curated by Raqs Media Collective, will run World War. He was doing studies of the human RMC We take advantage of being three to at MACBA, Barcelona, through 17 March and animal nervous system – he would stare at multiply our vision – the sum is more than

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Katharina Grosse and the origins of art

by Mark Rappolt

Das Bett, 2004, acrylic on wall, floor, and various objects, 280 × 450 × 400 cm. Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn. © the artist, Nic Tenwiggenhorn and VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2018.

Courtesy Gagosian, New York

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Untitled, 2016, acrylic on wall, floor and various objects, 600 × 1500 × 3500 cm, MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! series, New York.

Photo: Pablo Enriquez. © the artist, Nic Tenwiggenhorn and VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2018. Courtesy Gagosian, New York

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Katharina Grosse is a painter and iconoclast. From 2010 until earlier this year she was professor of painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, but is recognised within the wider artworld for pushing painting beyond its traditional definition as a discrete medium confined to a frame. In her works, paint is applied (using a spraygun) as abstract explosions of colour or as stencilled imprints, to all aspects of space and to the extent that Grosse’s work might be described as sculpture, installation and, to a certain degree, interior and exterior architecture (in a series of untitled works on the facades and interiors of corporate headquarters, university buildings and infrastructure hubs). So much for the order of things. On the one hand, Grosse works in her Berlin studio spreading acrylic paint over canvases; on the other, she goes beyond the atelier to spray it over bedrooms (Das Bett, 2004), over the structures and landscape of abandoned military bases (Untitled, 2016, from the Rockaway! series) and even over national coastlines (as is the case with Asphalt Air and Hair, 2017, in Aarhus, Denmark).

She’s part of a tradition and apart from it at one and the same time.

Everyone knows that painting, as it is understood through the history of Western art, was invented sometime around 650 BCE, thanks to an anecdote famously reported by Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History, 77 CE), in which he describes how Kora of Sicyon traced the outline of her lover’s shadow on a wall shortly before he left for battle. Painting was invented by a woman as an expression of love. Shortly afterwards, her father, Butades of Sicyon, who made clay tiles for

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a living, modelled the outline in clay, inventing moulded sculpture and subsequently a new business of moulded tiles. A man then turned it into a commodity and initiated the art market.

The wall was destroyed by fire around 200 years after Kora left her mark on it. And Butades’s relief sculpture vanished in 146 BCE, when Lucius Mummius destroyed the entire city of Corinth (where Butades and Kora had lived) during the Achean War. So we have to take Pliny’s word for it when it comes to all the inventing stuff. And as Pliny wasn’t really into dates, we have to accept that ‘around 650 BCE’ falls somewhat shy of being a fact and is rather the product of later guesswork by historians. Pliny wasn’t really familiar with cave paintings either, which were the kind of thing that later works such as E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950), in which the Austrian invents art history, used to put at the beginning of their histories of painting.

Moreover, earlier this year a group of scientists who subjected the carbon crusts of a number of cave paintings to uranium-thorium dating suggested that painting wasn’t even invented by Homo sapiens at all. Rather, Neanderthals may have painted symbols in caves in Spain more than 64,000 years ago: that’s 20,000 years before prototypical modern humans even bothered to show up in Western Europe.

Pfff… This is art and we shouldn’t let an article published in a magazine titled Science (23 February 2018) get in the way of a romantic tale.

Grosse herself is no stranger to the romantic origin story. Talking to Emily Wasik in Interview magazine back in 2014, the artist described

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the origins of her own drive to make art: ‘As a child, I would play a game with myself where before I got up, I had to first erase the shadows on the wall. I invented an invisible paintbrush to paint over the shadows of the windowsill or the lamp or whatever was there. It became like an obsession.’ Intriguingly, and perhaps typically, while there’s an echo here of Pliny’s originary tale, Grosse locates her own artistic beginnings as being rooted in erasing the very thing that Kora sought to preserve.

This month, Grosse brings her work to the Chi K11 Art Museum in Shanghai, a city in which she lived while her father was teaching at Tongji University in 1981. There she will explore some of the myths about painting’s beginnings and ends via a largescale installation split into five sections, or episodes (the journey takes place over time as well as space), titled Mumbling Mud, which both conjures the origins of pigments and the use to which painters put them, and the Cantonese expression for mumbling or slurring, gwai sik nai, which literally translates as ‘a ghost eating mud’.

The first section, Underground, consists of messy piles of accumulated soil and building materials that have been spraypainted by the artist, a wasteland that is also a site of creative potential, that suggests a dialogue between the building blocks of painting and of the city.

The second, Silk Studio, deploys curtains of silk printed with images of Grosse’s studio complete with works in progress. The third, Ghost, comprises a large, skeletal white Styrofoam sculpture that looks – from the model version at least – like a structure from the set of Alien (1979)

or The Predator (1987), or perhaps like a scholar’s rock incarnated from an early Chinese painting, or like a splash of paint captured midflight.

Or, maybe truer still, it is a blank object onto which audiences will project their own colourful narratives. Stomach is a colonic labyrinth of hundreds of metres of white fabric, hung from the ceiling and sprayed with Grosse’s signature bright colours in such a way that its folds and undulations are highlighted and viewers sucked in. Whether visitors are consuming art in this Gesamtkunstwerk, or whether art is consuming its viewers, remains to be seen. The final stage of the journey, Showroom, comprises a set of living-room furniture (complete with the image of a stacked bookcase, a reminder perhaps of the links between Chinese painting and calligraphy, of painting as a space of signs and symbols) over which Grosse has sprayed paint in a manner that recalls the disruptive and vandalistic nature of graffiti: art projected over life in a scene of order and disorder that equally acknowledges the fact that the K11 galleries are located in a shopping mall, and that it is to this environment that the viewer is about to be returned. And that art is at once apart from and a part of contemporary consumer culture. From Kora to Butades in five easy steps. But then again, China’s painting traditions are thought to have been developed around two centuries before those of Pliny and the West. ara Mumbling Mud is on show at the Chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, from 10 November to 24 February

Mumbling Mud – Silk Studio, 2018, digital print on silk, 350 × 1375 cm. © and courtesy the artist

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Cuauhtémoc Medina The Mexican art historian and chief curator at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City talks about his plans for the 2018 Shanghai Biennale Interview by Aimee Lin

above Cuauhtémoc Medina facing page Yang Fudong, Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project, 2018. Courtesy the artist

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ARTREVIEW ASIA Proregress, the title of the 12th Shanghai Biennale, is taken from E. E. Cummings’s Helves surling out of eakspeasies per (reel) hapsingly (1931) and describes a kind of playfulness in language. Does language play a special role in your thinking?

ARA A friend of mine who is a Daoist priest told me that, rather than having died out as is commonly believed, Yubu is a living tradition still in use. Which suggests that mysticism still survives beneath the surface of modernity. Will you deal with mysticism, or other incomplete forms of modernity, in your biennale?

CUAUHTÉMOC MEDINA Yes. I constantly investigate the etymology and resonance of the concepts I use or find used by others, and I am extremely conscious of the way words produce conditions of social interaction. Proregress is, also, a poetic artefact: a moment of thought that consists in putting into motion the texture of the signifiers.

CM The exhibition does not put a particular emphasis on any ancient tradition. Quite the contrary, it is a reflection of the way contemporary artworks and sensibilities address the ambivalence of the current historical moment.

The accelerated process of modernisation has called into question the idea of a single direction to history.

ARA In Chinese, the biennale’s title is Yubu, the mystic dance step of Daoism ritual as used in ancient China. How did you come to know this word, how does it work as a translation and how does it contribute to the theme of the biennale?

CM The biennale team at the Power Station of Art felt, right from the beginning, that there was no proper way to translate a word made up by a poet in the 1930s without losing its poetic undertones. A direct translation would have felt rough and dogmatic. Thus, we started looking for a possible solution, not so much a translation, but an equivalent concept that could allude to an oscillation back and forth and suggest a combination of positions. The reference to Yubu is suggestive of a nonlinear unfolding.

ARA Eastern philosophies are, in the West, often seen as providing alternatives to established binaries. But in the local context of contemporary China, the invoking of classical rituals, for example the Yubu, can be also seen as a form of cultural conservatism.

CM This exhibition, and the texts that accompany it, carry no illusion of a mystic alternative.

The integration of Asian societies in the global economy and society have provoked a dramatic process of transformation, and an opportunity for critical thought. The title is an attempt on the part of our Chinese colleagues in the organising institution, PSA, to translate a Western concept for an exhibition proposed by a guest curator coming from Latin America in terms

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that could be understood in Chinese. My impression is that the recourse to an ancient idea is in this case very specific, and to a great extent enigmatic. I understand that one of the peculiarities of the current moment of the People’s Republic of China relates to the question of how to engage with a number of traditions, and naturally, as in other societies, such engagement ought to be polemical and complex. I am thinking, for instance, of Taiwanese artist Yao Jui-Chung’s photographic series Incarnation (2016–), in which he photographs sculptures of gods in Taiwanese temples (that are still in use) as a comment on attempts to resuscitate tradition amid a society in a constant state of inventive modernisation.

Contemporary culture is full of examples of ways our engagement with the past is constantly changing meaning. I hope that the metaphor in the title and the project will produce reactions that are contrary to the prejudices you allude to.

ARA Biennales around the world often appoint international curators: there’s an issue of cultural translation, which is related to attitudes towards globalism and localism, and so on. Is this part of your concern in your work?

CM The difficulty of cultural interaction is extremely complex. At times, indeed, cultural hegemony makes it difficult for artists and

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intellectuals coming from the South and non-Western contexts to participate without stereotyping. An important task of contemporary art is to challenge the expectation of cultural purity, and the projections that prevent artworks and ideas coming from outside of NATO being taken in earnest as forms of contemporary thought. One of the subtle ways we perpetuate cultural hegemony is by suggesting that the only traditions we can freely explore for critical and metaphoric purposes are those of Ancient Greece or the Abrahamic religions: the rest of the mythologies and cultures are condemned to be referred to solely as forms of ‘mystic deviation’, which cannot be used by modern cultural producers except to resuscitate some kind of utopian orientalist hallucination.

However, for all of us, the spaces of misunderstanding between cultures, regions, immigrant communities and concepts and ideas mobilised by globalisation are not ‘a problem’ in the sense of an evil to be dispelled, but a significant condition of cultural practice, and a space of opportunity for critical thought and the development of a more complex sensibility.

In other words, the exhibition assumes the need to use biennales as means to encourage the audience towards developing a more complex form of culture that thrives in its complexity. One of the most dangerous traits

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of contemporary politics is the reemergence of a fear for the other, and xenophobia, related to the reactionary assumption that we can regress to a mythical ideal past of purity. The exhibition understands that such regression is part of the moment of cultural confusion between progress and regression that art-works and artists are busy trying to explore and understand.

ARA In your statement for the biennale, you reflect on the idea of historical ambivalence. Can you expand on this in the context of today’s art (and artworld)?

CM The premise of this exhibition, the argument that has guided the curatorial team in the selection of artworks and participants, has been that the key definitions of modern society have reached a point of crisis because of the difficulty in relating the accelerated transformation of global capitalism with a specific sense of history. Therefore, artworks are spaces where we are trying to rethink our relationship to a number of key issues. It is not so much that I understand artworks as ambivalent, but as witnesses of the ambivalence and contradictions of this era.

Meiro Koizumi, The New Breath just after the Tempest / Seven Deadly Sins, 2018 (installation view, Le nouveau souffle après la tempête, MacVal, Val-de-Marne, 2018). Courtesy the artist

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Specific works in the exhibition attest to that. When Amalia Pica explores the attempts made to communicate with anthropoids, and when Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares reflect on the consequences of a jungle in Brazil, and not its inhabitants alone, being granted legal representation, both of them are looking at ways the distinction between nature and culture – a key binary concept of modern society – is crumbling. A recent work by Meiro Koizumi, made with young immigrants in France, reflects on her subject’s concerns and hopes through bodily expression, and Venezuelan artist Alexander Apostol underscores the way revolutions have become soap opera-like in their representation: through their works they are both looking at the ways contemporary politics are constantly producing new forms of oppression. Each artist attempts to discuss the way cultural production must always address its impure state, and the need for developing a new critique of culture. It’s a sign of the urgency of looking into the ambivalence of this era.

ARA Recently, people have been questioning the validity of biennales and art institutions. Some people wonder if they play a role that really matters.

How do you respond to this with your work at the Shanghai Biennale?

CM I do not share those complaints. Some of them are forms of reactionary nostalgia for the apparent simplicity and purism of the modern studio and gallery art situation, which of course involves the exclusion of artists and concepts of art coming from 90 percent of the world, and confines the ‘history of art’ to the production of male modern artists in the north Atlantic.

Even people organising biennials disparage what they call ‘biennial art’, as if the fact that exhibitions based on a global scale and a structure of commissioning that tends to favour artists and artworks concerned with global issues are more easily criticised than the interaction between the artist working in his or her studio and the happy collectors. On the contrary, the role of biennales seems to me extremely sharp: they still force artists, curators, audiences, governments and organisers outside of their comfort zones – they have to make the effort to understand and appreciate other forms of cultural production than those they are used to, and this in turn relates to learning to handle complex forms of culture within a complex world.

Similarly, in some cases, such complexity involves dealing with specific limits of discourse: for example, the open or implicit ways certain societies repress and control artworks and ideas – as if by imposing those controls they can control the challenges and transformations of their societies.

Biennales and art institutions are central to the project of creating and recreating societies that include critical thinking as key in their social goals, beyond the accommodation of consensus and stability, and the pursuit of the production of capital.

ARA The organising of a biennale is a long-term process during which one might change one’s mind due to practical operations or self-reflection. Have there been any alterations to your original concept?

CM The Shanghai Biennale has only one year to be developed, so maybe there is not too much time for self-reflection, partly because the experience of working in China is so interesting in many different directions. However, as a curatorial team (together with Yukie Kamiya, Maria Belen Saez and Weiwei Wang ) we did decide to change the structure of the exhibition.

Originally we thought of fixed sections with specific groupings related to four very explicit questions and issues. Although some of that structure remains, we decided to change the titles of those lines of research and instead use images and phrases borrowed from poems by E. E. Cummings. This not only allows the power of the poetry to incite the concept of the whole project, but also helps to prevent the questions from dominating the attention of both the audience and the authorities during their screening process. We have created a more

ARA Are there many newly commissioned or produced works/projects? What kind of role do they play, respectively, in your structure?

CM Given the short time in which the biennale is developed, we have been lucky to have a combination of works that were in the process of being created that fit perfectly into our project, existing works that we felt absolutely necessary to include, and a number of new commissions that developed from the thinking of the artists on the basis of the project. The commissioned works are central especially in terms of setting the tone of the exhibition in relation to the encounter of the audience and the show: for instance, a new sculpture

by Spanish artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Swing theory (2018), looks at the model of the commemorative statue; a text-based monumental work by Enrique Ježik departing from the title of a book by Lenin, One Step forward and two steps backward (1904), provides an allegorical reading of the idea of ‘proregress’ in terms of political leftist traditions; there is a new project by Yan Fudong related to the space of visibility on the cinema stage, and a new installation by Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa about censored documents in intelligence archives.

The biennale also provides some artists with a chance to continue certain long-term projects: Clara & Gum from Hong Kong have extended the methodology for their Not as Trivial as You Think (2014) art quiz to Shanghai’s art history, and Pablo Vargas Lugo will produce one of his Eclipse works in relation to the eclipses visible from Shanghai in the next millennium.

ARA Apart from the works in the exhibition, are there any other events, or other forms of work that are planned for this biennial?

fluid structure of texts and arguments that intervene throughout the show. Certainly, having to work in a context where artworks and ideas must be licensed by authorities is new to me, and has presented great challenges to the curatorial team and the artists participating from all around the world.

But in essence, the project of the biennale we proposed originally has been effected.

Voluspa Jarpa, Monumenta, 2018 (pictured here in an earlier version, MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2016).

Photo: Guyot Mendoza. Courtesy the artist

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CM There are some exhibitions that will take place in other venues in Shanghai, as part of the biennale extending into the city. We will also host a symposium with participating artists and scholars for the opening weekend, in collaboration with the School of Philosophy of the Fudan University, where they will discuss the issues raised by the premise of the exhibition. ara The 12th Shanghai Biennale runs from 10 November through 10 January, at the Power Station of Art and various other venues throughout Shanghai

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The Dark Horse Biennial Seen as an insurgent by many, the Bangkok Biennial shows signs of life in an often tired-looking format

by Max Crosbie-Jones

It began with a few simple squats and a gentle, back-and-forth swaying of the arms. At dusk on 1 July, the first of three biennials to take place on Thai soil this year (the state-backed and splashier Bangkok Art Biennale and the Thailand Biennale opening on 19 October and 2 November, respectively) kicked off with a free aerobics session beneath Bangkok’s Rama VIII bridge. To shrill techno remixes of Thai and foreign pop music, attendees of the opening ceremony for the inaugural Bangkok Biennial struggled, along with members of the wider public, to keep up with the instructor’s hip-swinging steps.

Taking place in public parks and dusty municipal spaces, mass workouts are a cacophonous daily feature of Thai life, not to mention a leitmotif in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s movies. Clearly also cognizant of their symbolic qualities (within the context of Thailand’s hierarchical and deferential society), the anonymous founders of the Bangkok Biennial devised an inclusive ceremony that felt part Dadaist in-joke, part institutional critique. Not only was this loosely choreographed display of jolly togetherness a world away from the billowing curator-speak, arse-kissing of headline sponsors and other stale formalities that normally mark the opening of a commercially underwritten art event, it also hinted at the gritty localism and egalitarian idealism of what was to follow: an inclusive biennial aimed at marginal members of Thailand’s flourishing yet factional art scene.

A free, pocket-size pavilion guide succinctly set out the antiestablishment mission. ‘The Bangkok Biennial has been set up as a challenge to the authority of access to representation in art and curatorial practices… [it] has no central curators, no dispersion of resources and does not take place only in the city of Bangkok. It is an open-access event.’ And so, loosely speaking, things transpired. Agile and discursive, this was a biennial that cartwheeled its way around the city (and, in some cases, the country), as members of Thailand’s artistic community – emerging artists and curators for the most part, both Thais and expatriates – responded to the rallying cry of its ‘open-source platform’ (and utilised its modest marketing machine: a Facebook page, app and barebones Wiki page).

The net result – an unruly swarm of 69 ‘autonomous’ and ‘selforganised’ pavilions – reimagined what it means to situate a biennial across time and space. A handful of pavilions were staged out-

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side Bangkok (Re/form/ing Patani, a broad survey of sociopolitical art at Patani Artspace in Thailand’s deep south, was perhaps the most memorable); others existed only online (such as the Taoism-inspired mind-and-body-cultivation platform Lololol.net) or shapeshifted over the duration from real-world to virtual platform (including Coming Soon, a series of research-based interviews in which Thai and Hong Kong artists opine on the ‘biennialisation’ of contemporary art). The vast majority, however, were held in noninstitutional venues across the Thai capital and ran for between two and four weeks, rather than the biennial’s full three-month duration. As well as existing galleries, venues included shophouses (both derelict and functioning), artist studios, markets, cafés, public toilets and private homes. A large percentage of pavilions in these non-gallery spaces were appointment-only and hard to find, requiring phone calls, text messages with their respective artists or curators and a schlep into some remote or unprepossessing corner of the city.

As it turned out, this was not a biennial that drew large crowds.

The planning and travel asked of audiences, as well as some spotty marketing, resulted in modest footfall at many pavilions, which is a shame – typically, your efforts were rewarded with an experience that felt more gratifying than your average museum-based biennial encounter. Often I was greeted by an artist or curator eager to chew the fat, to talk about their work or to give their take on the Bangkok Biennial’s stated ‘reclamation of access’ (a principled aim that, it became patently clear over the duration, was more about freeing up movement within an art network than about making that network more accessible to outsiders). It struck me, after a couple of these encounters, that the shows often felt less important than the social aspects surrounding them. That said, a sense of camaraderie wasn’t the only thing felt. With no overarching theme or conceptual framework to square, and no overarticulating star curator or director steering the ship, the viewer – or I, at least – also felt liberated, free to judge each pavilion on its own merits.

PostScripts, a group show at Bangkok’s first postal building, the Praisaneeyakarn, was one of the first pavilions I saw and is one of the few I’m still thinking about. Originally built in 1871, demolished, then rebuilt in 2010, this half-finished simulacrum – which today

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preceding page Charoen Contemporaries, A Monument to Heritage.

A Monument to Taste, 2018, in the Postscripts Pavilion

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top Entrance to House of Flowing Reflections Pavilion, 2018

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above left and right House of Flowing Reflections Pavilion, 2018 (installation views)

top Chiharu Shinoda, Tiger Tiger, 2018, performance at The Supernatural Pavilion

above Performance at Khonkaen Manifesto Pavilion, 2018

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following page Leo Fernekes, 2018, photograph included in The American Pavilion

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cuts a forlorn figure beside the city’s main river, the Chao Phraya – was the stage for an ‘opening up, reconsideration and supplementation of the complex history of Thai modernism’. Among the works cleverly configured in and around the building was Babel 1 (2007–11), Wolfgang Bellwinkel’s sculptural photos of Thailand’s ghost towers from the 1997 Asian financial crisis, here mounted on steel scaffolding outside the building’s whitewashed facade. Near the gated entrance, meanwhile, stood Miti Ruangkritya’s sardonic and self-explanatory lightbox, Excerpts taken from Bangkok Real Estate Advertising (2018); while seeping from beneath the front door were the mournful murmurings of Nattapon Sawaasdee’s sound installation เพลงของเธอ (2018), a plaintive song of ‘love and longing’ performed by the artist’s mother, that appeared to embody the building’s own pained existence.

Few pavilions were as full of ideas, or as carefully conceived, but many made a similarly bold attempt at site-specific dialogue with the city’s architectural legacies, many of which are threatened either by dereliction or the capital’s real estate developers. Among these was Moom Mong Collective’s House of Flowing Reflection, where hypnotic videos of Thai street and river life, by Jeanne Penjan Lassus, ebbed and flowed against the walls of the gloriously dilapidated Eah Seng building, a small period storehouse in Chinatown. Another, A/PART, featuring deranged sculptures by Burmese dissident artist Sawangwongse Yawnghwe and Thai counterparts Prasert Yodkaew, Torwong Wutthiwong and Phornphop Sittirak, began at Bridge Art Space’s rear door, where you stepped outside into a 3 × 8 × 2.5 m steel mesh cage and into the rubble-strewn site occupied by the 47-storey Sathorn Unique, Bangkok’s most infamous abandoned tower.

These and other pavilions got me thinking about the ‘duck test’: if each one looks and quacks like a standalone exhibition, then it probably is a standalone exhibition, right? Beyond the Bangkok Biennial’s gonzo branding, antielitist overtones and discernible drift towards the old quarters and dereliction (particularly in the Charoenkrung area), there was nothing binding together, say, Justin Mills’s encoded abstract paintings with Taweeksak Molsawat’s politically tinged performance art, or Naraphat Sakarnthonsap’s staged photos of funeral flowers with Chiharu Shinoda’s entrancing nighttime performance of Ann Halplin’s score The Five Legged Stool (1962) in the courtyard of an

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old city temple, and this raised questions about what higher purpose the whole endeavour serves. But then a conversation would ensue, a striking work or collective make itself known, or a new corner of the city unfurl, and my misgivings would be forgotten – here was a framework that brought disparate artists, curators and grassroots groups together, that refused to co-opt art for the purposes of city marketing or a curatorial agenda, and which found inspiration, stories and histories in corners of Bangkok the tourist guides would never dare show you. Uneven? Most definitely: a fair bit of the art looked rushed and half-baked, and some of pavilions added up to little more than teeth-cutting exercises. Transformative? Perhaps not, but here, at least, was an event that tapped into the dynamics of its host community.

How quickly things change. When news of it first broke, the Bangkok Biennial was seen by many as disruptive, an insurgent challenge to the public- and private-sector-backed Bangkok Art Biennale (which has biennial circuit stalwarts such as Elmgreen & Dragset and Marina Abramović on its list of artists), something the organisers of the former flatly denied. ‘Battle of the Biennials’ headlines and laments about all the confusion that this would create followed. As the weeks passed and they kept a low profile, however, the organisers’ stated determination to create a ‘level playing field for creative experimentation and social installation’ soon came to seem sincere, less about artworld politics and caustic provocations than about making a valuable contribution to the global debate on the scope and shape of future biennials. For it to be truly inclusive, the next edition will need to pique the interest of wider audiences, but for those who came, took part or looked on askance, the Bangkok Biennial’s role as a facilitator of collaborations between new-generation Thai artists and freewheeling curatorial experiments will not soon be forgotten. ara Max Crosbie-Jones is a writer and editor based in Bangkok The Bangkok Biennial closed on 30 September following a three-month run.

This autumn the Bangkok Art Biennale (19 October – 3 February) is being staged in venues across Bangkok, while the Thailand Biennale (2 November – 28 February) takes place at outdoor sites in the province of Krabi

ArtReview Asia

top Chiharu Shinoda, The 5×5 legged stool, 2018, performance at The Supernatural Pavilion.

above Khonkaen Manifesto Pavilion, 2018, installation view

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all images Courtesy the artists and Bangkok Biennial

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Nicholas Mangan The Price of Everything

by Mark Rappolt

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Here’s a typical description of the recent output of Melbourne-based debut at the Sutton Gallery in Melbourne, earlier this autumn) – that Nicholas Mangan: ‘Artist Nicholas Mangan masterfully balances are not, in the first instance, crafted or produced for the purposes of a number of complex narratives in his immersive moving-image display as art. installations. In his works, micro and macro worldviews spin around The subject of Limits to Growth (the artwork) is both the disclike one another, creating new forms of knowledge and experience.’ It’s Rai limestones, which vary in size but can measure up to three metres from the introduction to a catalogue that accompanied Mangan’s in diameter and a pretty much immovable tonnage in weight, and the 2017 exhibition Limits to Growth, at Kunst-Werke Berlin; and it’s intangible bitcoin. As Mangan’s video tells us, Rai stones were mined pretty accurate. Since 2009, Mangan’s artwork has largely taken the 400km away from Yap in the islands of Palauan, and were valued form of expansive video installations that explore, among other according to a combination of the lives lost in their production and things, subjects such as geology, economics, belief systems, geolog- transport, the status of the chief who had ordered their mining, and ical processes, mineral values, labour values and humanity’s relation the vintage and physical properties of the stone itself. Even Rai stones to the environment (although that last that were lost at sea maintained a value could equally be rephrased in reverse). and their ownership was traced through Mangan’s work represents a studied And they examine the interconnections an oral record. Once Yap was ‘discovexamination of the deconstruction between all that. Yet from another point ered’ and bound into a global system of of the art object and the values, auras production and commerce during the of view you might say that Mangan’s late nineteenth century, the Rai (in the work represents a studied examination and mythologies invested in it of the deconstruction of the art object first instance by using modern tools and and the values, auras and mythologies invested in it. technologies to ease the price of its manufacture and transport and Knowing that the narratives embedded in Mangan’s work are then via the defacement or destruction of older stones) was used to complex, you won’t be surprised to learn that his recent works rarely coerce Yap’s indigenous people into labouring in the colonial trade comprise anything (other than one coral coffee table) an audience system. The end result was inflation: technology rather than the might readily identify as a discrete objet d’art. And yet those works are, weather eroded the value of the Rai; trust in its value was destroyed. in many ways, entirely about discrete objects, albeit objects – such as The bitcoin ‘cryptocurrency’ was founded in the wake of the global the coral formations of Nauru (in Nauru – Notes from a Cretaceous World, financial crisis of 2007–8, on the notion that banks and other guard2009–10), the Rai stone currency of the Western Pacific island of Yap ians of the global economy cannot be trusted to safeguard the value (Limits to Growth, 2016) or termite architecture (in Termite Ecologies, of state-backed or ‘fiat’ currencies (to prevent what also happened to 2018, which is inspired by an idea that termite burrowing might be the Rai). It works on a decentralised peer-to-peer basis and its transharnessed for use in Australia’s goldmining industry and made its actions are numerically encoded. At its inception it was stated that,

preceding pages Dowiyogo’s Ancient Coral Coffee Table, 2010, coral limestone from the island of Nauru, 120 × 80 × 45 cm

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above Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World (still), 2010, HD video, colour, sound, 14 min 50 sec

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Limits to Growth (Part 1), 2016, 9 terrahash Bitcoin/Dragon ASIC mining rig installed in the basement boiler-room of Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne

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above Termite Economies, (PHASE 1), 2018, 3D-printed plaster, dirt, synthetic polymer paint, plywood, painted mild steel, fluorescent bay lights, video (looped), four-channel, surround sound, dimensions variable

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ArtReview Asia

all images Courtesy the artist; Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland; and Labor, Mexico City

mirroring a natural resource, bitcoins would be issued to a finite in the forecourt of Nauru House in Melbourne, the latter a 52-storey number of 21 million units. Their release is controlled, dropping monument to the wealth gained by the tiny island state (which once, by half every four years until all coins are in circulation. In various following independence in 1968, boasted the world’s highest GDP per iterations of Limits to Growth a bitcoin ‘rig’ whirrs away to mine capita) through aggressive phosphate mining (which produced the that currency, which is then used to fund the printing of largescale pinnacles). Anticipating the end of this finite resource, the country photographic images of the Rai stones that Mangan encoun- used the money gained from exploiting its mineral resources to invest tered on a visit to Yap. The immaterial currency is used to remate- in trust funds and various foreign investments (Nauru House among rialise the material currency, in itself a them), the mismanagement of which Limits to Growth is not about the reminder that bitcoins come at a price has now led it to virtual bankruptcy. (in another currency) of the energy used object itself, but about what has been Nauru is infamous today for housing an 800-person refugee detention centre by computer processors to mine them invested in the object (material or founded in 2001 by the Australian and by the ventilation systems used to immaterial), whether that investment government and an important source of cool the processors (Mangan states that income to Nauruans. But in 2003, as the he acquired the rig at a reduced price is human or natural, and how we Nauruan president Bernard Dowiyogo because its previous owners couldn’t extract value from that investment lay dying in Washington, DC, he is said maintain a sufficient price-to-value ratio to make bitcoin extraction viable). One currency loops into to have proposed an income-generating scheme to transform the coral another currency and the issue of what that currency materially or rock that had been revealed by the phosphate mining into coffee tables effectually ‘represents’ becomes giddying. Just as Mangan produces to be sold to the US market. A land repurposed and sold as a collection a print representing a material currency that has a value in crypto- of cultural artefacts (no less finite than the guano from which Nauru’s currency, that is derived from a fiat currency, but that may or not have phosphates were extracted) designed to solve the problems of that any ‘real’ relation to the cost in energy and materials of the manufac- land. Culture inextricable from global economics; material and immature of the print itself. Let alone the ‘intangible’ value of the print as terial value consistently intertwined. an artwork (that may be made tangible by its sale).

A cynic, Oscar Wilde famously wrote, is someone who knows the In a way, despite the method by which Mangan entertainingly ‘price of everything but the value of nothing’. Or someone who knows entangles the history of the Rai and the bitcoin, Limits to Growth is what they spend, but not what they gain and never its immaterial costs. not about the object itself, but about what has been invested in the Limits to Growth borrows its title from a 1972 report commissioned by object (material or immaterial), whether that investment is human the Club of Rome (which comprises current and former heads of state or natural, and how we extract value from that investment, be it as well as hereditary rulers and various other politicians and bureaulabour, materials, trust or faith. To crats) based on a computer simulawhich the value we attribute to art as tion that examined the consequences it has transitioned from material to of increased population and economic conceptual form might be a corollary: growth in the face of the earth’s finite put crudely, the question of market supply of raw materials. Its concluvalue vs intellectual, social, historical sion: that the consequences of business carrying on as usual would be a ‘sudden or cultural value and the ways in which and uncontrollable decline in both those two measures are established and population and industrial capacity’. maintained. In contemporary culture, On the one hand, Mangan’s narratives of course, things like ‘cognitive value’, ‘brand value’ and ‘design value’ have suggest that there really is no escape. On the other hand, they suggest that a more all become forms of rarity over material value, which, despite its finitude, is all complex and nuanced understanding of too often associated with abundance. the world and our place in it may help us to avoid our fate. ara Such issues come to a head in Dowiyogo’s Ancient Coral Coffee Table (2009–10, a work that accompanies Work by Nicholas Mangan is on show a bigger video installation, Nauru – as part of the 2018 Taipei Biennial, Notes from a Cretaceous World), an object Post-Nature – A Museum as an carved out of half of one of three limeEcosystem, at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 17 November – 10 March stone coral pinnacles that once stood

Prototype for Dowiyogo’s Ancient Coral Coffee Table, 2010, coral limestone from the island of Nauru, wooden travel crate, dimensions variable

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High Season New platforms for contemporary art in Laos

by Anna Koshcheeva

facing page Souliya Phoumivong, Flow (production image), 2018, stop-motion animation, colour, sound.

Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

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This autumn presents Laotian artists with long-awaited oppor- rural beauty and innocence, yet international curators seek out his tunities to reach new audiences at home and abroad. Three will more critical collage works because they address the vulnerability of be included in the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art the country’s cultures and values at a time of rapid social change. The (APT9) when it opens at the Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of daily news of that change is literally an artistic medium for Hongsa, Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, in late November: Tcheu Siong who shreds newspapers into strips to produce collages that record will present her largescale textile applications, inspired by dreams the ruptures between past and present in Laos. The commercialisaand Hmong folk patterns; Bounpaul Phothyzan is, literally, showing tion of heritage and the preservation of high courtly and Buddhist a bombshell – a relic of the ‘Secret War’ bombings of Laos by US forces artistic traditions are issues close to the heart of Tiao David (Nith) during the Vietnam War – planted with flowers and titled Lie of Somsanith, who lives in Luang Prabang in Northen Laos. Trained the Land (2017); and Souliya Phoumivong is assembling an instal- in royal gold-and-silver-thread embroidery, Tiao David’s works lation featuring his signature clay buffaloes, an animal that refer- contemplate the link between cultural traditions and personal values. “Each of us will perish, leaves ences the stereotype about Laotians are like human bodies – fragile and as ‘country bumpkins’.

“I made two children on this bed,” Back in Laos, two contemporary Saylom tells me, introducing Love (2017), a temporal,” he tells me, by way of inart events will kick off in Vientiane troduction to his ongoing Leaves series, never-exhibited piece constructed out of “it is our ancestral beliefs and tradialmost simultaneously with APT9.

The first is the inaugural edition of the bedframe and its wires that deals di- tions, the values we absorb and pracElevations Laos, an exhibition of conrectly with the private life – an anomaly in tise, that give us a strength. The pretemporary Southeast Asian art and ciousness of gold is an embodiment of Laos, where discussions pertaining art prize funded by Spellbrook the culture we inherited, this is what Foundation and organised by Erin gives us structure and will remain to sexuality are not encouraged Gleeson, a well-known curator in the after us.” His ongoing embroidery region. The second is Lao Art Season, curated by the Laotian Misouda series Humility: From Nature to Nature (2016–), featuring classical Heuangsoukkhoun. Where the former seeks to foster exchange Sangha motifs, is made from natural fibres grown in the vicinity of between Laotian artists and those elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Luang Prabang. Upon completion, these artworks are donated to latter facilitates connections between artists in Laos as well as the temples in Laos and Isaan.

Isaan region of Northern Thailand. Both are highly anticipated Although it might seem slow to an outsider, social change in Laos events for the Laotian art community, providing much-needed nevertheless affects every family there. In Vientiane, Mick Saylom opportunities for international dialogue and exchange, but also for examines taboos surrounding body politics, the growing purilocal audiences to see the domestically produced, socially engaged tanism of ‘official’ art and an increasing divorce rate that he attributes to the financial pressures on partners. “I made two children on contemporary art that is more often showcased elsewhere.

The ‘official’ art exhibited in Laos’s state-run cultural institutions this bed,” Saylom tells me, introducing Love (2017), a never-exhibited focuses on the glorification of Laotian culture. It features portraits of piece constructed out of the bedframe and its wires that deals Lao beauties and ethnic minorities, highlights the elegance of tradi- directly with the private life – an anomaly in Laos, where discustional dance and the authenticity of ritual celebrations, and pleases sions pertaining to sexuality are not encouraged. Even nudity has the eye with endless vistas, elephants and mythical Nagas. These barely been seen at public exhibitions in recent years, less because paintings are executed in oil and ocof any official diktat than because artists know how the wind is blowcasionally watercolour, extending traAn authoritarian state’s tight control ditions of French modernism and ing. Through his installation, Saylom over communication, together a gentle mode of socialist realism. bypasses the taboo on the exposed with its dominance of the country’s Retrospective and introspective, this body, rendering his silhouettes in wire to celebrate the sensuality of a neotraditional art satisfies authorities meagre cultural infrastructure, couple’s embrace. He believes that by driving the public’s gaze towards explains why artists in Laos operate a distant ‘golden age of Lao culture’ silence about social issues does not and away from the pressing issues help to solve them. simultaneously on two circuits of today.

Social change in Laos is being An authoritarian state’s tight control over communication, driven by the economic boom of recent years. The dark undertogether with its dominance of the country’s meagre cultural infra- belly of this growth is land concessions to foreign companies and structure, explains why artists in Laos operate simultaneously on the threat of debt dependency to China. The intricacies of striking two circuits. To be recognised as artists domestically they produce a balance between welcoming foreign investment and suffering neotraditional works that are accepted into national exhibitions; to financial occupation are hot topics in Laos, and these as well as express themselves creatively and critically, they produce contempo- broader considerations around the responsible use of land and rary art that occasionally finds its way to a biennale abroad. In these sustainable coexistence with nature underpin the artistic produc‘unofficial’ artworks are reflected the dissenting views and innova- tion of Bounpaul Phothyzan. His mixed-media installation We Live (2013), a giant fish skeleton assembled from dead trees and tive strategies of contemporary Laotian art.

At home, for example, Hongsa Khotsouvanh is regarded as a presented at the 4th Singapore Biennale, reflected on the damage to leading watercolourist whose work is full of sweet nostalgia for Lao local landscapes caused by the construction of dams in Laos, while

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the planted bombshell he will show at APT9 presents the landscape as simultaneously dangerous and healing. With millions of tons of unexploded ordnance remaining in Lao fields since the war, the natural environment is at once a daily threat to life and a force for regeneration and new life.

The horrors of the ‘Secret War’ are generally unknown to the outside world. The stereotypical image of the country is of rural romance, sleepy backwaters populated by a cheerful and simple people, and many buffaloes. Souliya Phoumivong adopts that animal as representative of an agrarian lifestyle to challenge preconceptions. In his installations small buffaloes, deprived of eyes and ears, follow compliantly behind mighty buffaloes leading the herd in what can easily be read as a commentary on the social order in Laos. Hidden in his innocent-looking clay figures are messages about the struggle for power, control of information and social conformity.

Unlike the country’s ‘official’ art, which strives to define Laotian identity through its past and in the process pacify social concerns, these collages, embroideries, installations and performances are innovative in their use of different media and critical in their address to the issues facing Lao society. Until now, Laotian contemporary art was accessible mainly to international audiences and failed to attract attention. In Brisbane and in Vientiane, the country’s artists have the chance to change that. ara Anna Koshcheeva is an independent researcher and writer on the art of Southeast Asia APt9 is on view from 24 November to 28 April at QAGOMA, Brisbane; Elevations Laos runs from 9 November to 16 January at i:an Gallery, Vientiane; Lao Art Season takes place from 18 October to 18 December across multiple venues in Vientiane

Bounpaul Phothyzan, Lie of the Land, 2017, aluminium, wood, soil, seeds, 2 parts: 80 × 400 × 80 cm (each).

Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

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March 29 – 31, 2019 Photograph taken at Asia Society Hong Kong Center

8–11 November West Bund Art Center Shanghai Solo presentations of work by artists in and around the West Bund Art Center on the occasion of West Bund Art & Design 2018

Francis Alÿs Galerie Peter Kilchmann

Choi Jeong Hwa P21

Shezad Dawood Timothy Taylor

Dickon Drury Koppe Astner

Sam Falls Galleria Franco Noero

Joyce Ho TKG+

Liu Jianhua Pace Gallery Tatsuo Miyajima Gagosian Julian Opie Kukje Gallery

José Patrício Galeria Nara Roesler

Lawrence Weiner Marian Goodman Gallery

Cerith Wyn Evans Marian Goodman Gallery

Zhang Enli ShanghART Gallery

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We are sorry to worry our readers with more verbs, but they will agree one cannot go far without the future tense, – that this, that or other WILL be done 77

Gwangju Biennale Imagined Borders Various venues, Gwangju 7 September – 11 November South Korea’s Jeju Island is best known as a holiday and honeymoon destination, welcoming both domestic and international tourists (who do not require a visa). That changed in July 2018, when the hostility that greeted the arrival of fewer than 600 Yemeni refugees threw a spotlight onto the rise of rightwing nationalism in South Korea. Other locals were sympathetic, pointing out that many South Koreans found themselves in the same situation during the Korean War and under Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship, and resisted calls to withdraw the island’s visa-free status. In a video interview, the CEO of Jeju-based Global Inner Peace, one of the aid organisations supporting the refugees, said, “In today’s global age, where everything’s connected, we can’t pretend these issues aren’t our problem any more”.

Just over a hundred miles north of the island, those issues are one of the themes tying together the 2018 edition of Gwangju Biennale, 23 years after it was established to commemorate the atrocities of the 18 May 1980 Gwangju Uprising (known locally as 5.18). Walking through the biennale, it’s difficult not to think of the global currents that have and are carrying people away from their homes and families into unknown territories. Displacements in time and geography offer one way of processing its seven sections, located across the sites of the main biennale hall and the Asia Culture Center and organised by 11 curators who present a total of 165 artists from 43 countries.

The memory of what is past or has been lost, then, acts as an Ariadne’s thread when navigating this biennale. It helps when weaving between more allusive works, such as Tanya Goel’s Vanishing Sites (2012–), in which the artist documents the impact on civic life of demolished government housing projects in New Delhi by collecting their fragments, here arranged on the floor of the exhibition space in Clara Kim’s section, ‘Imagined Nations/ Modern Utopias’; and more direct addresses to the plight of asylum seekers, as in Agnieszka Kalinowska’s single-channel film Draughty House (2009). Cordoned off by an accompanying rope-and-paper sculpture, The Fence (2009),

and shown in curator Gridthiya Gaweewong’s ‘Facing Phantom Borders’, Draughty House was made in collaboration with displaced people from the Eastern Bloc, Africa and the Middle East who had sought refuge in Vienna.

How do you hold the experiences of refugees and crises of war in remembrance when these global events are continuing to play out? This collapsing of past and present is dramatised in works that incorporate archival elements, including found documents and footage, artwork as well as filmed interviews and recollections. Vietnamese-born Tiffany Chung presents several works centred around her research into the history of Vietnamese refugees, among them reconstructing an exodus history: flight routes from camps and of ODP cases (2017), a large fabric map of the world onto which Chung has handstitched the routes taken by those fleeing persecution between 1975 and 1996, following the end of the Vietnam War; the unwanted population: a pilgrimage to the offshore islands (2014–), a collection of found footage displayed on tablets hung beside Chung’s map, showing children dragged off boats and separated from parents, protests against the arrivals and the water-hosing of refugees who refuse to climb down off roofs. Played on loops, these works present back to the viewer scenes that have become familiar in today’s media – a different time and place, the same injustices.

Archival documentation and artworks come together in ‘Returns’, a section dedicated to the biennale’s history and conceived as a space in which to reflect on its role in the city. Alongside material dating back to the first Gwangju Biennale, in 1995, there are newly commissioned artworks and works first exhibited at previous editions. Rather than confining these to a single space, curator David Teh has positioned them throughout the other sections, offering moments of pause – points from which to find your way again.

There is irony in the title of ‘The Art of Survival’, curated by Man seok Kim, Sung woo Kim and Chong-Ok Paek, by far the largest exhibition of the seven (it contains 82 artworks).

Amidst its overwhelming size, Kang Yeongyun’s

facing page, top Tiffany Chung, reconstructing an exodus history: flight routes from camps and of ODP cases, 2017, embroidery on fabric, 140 × 350 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gwangju Biennale

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brightly coloured manjang (Korean funeral streamers), titled Between sky and land 4 (1995), presents one of those moments of respite and recollection. The banners were originally installed during the Anti-Biennale of 1995 at Mangwol-dong Cemetery, intended to honour the victims of 5.18 and to protest what the organisers believed to be a state-funded project insensitive to the city’s traumatic history.

Teh tells me he had intended for the banners to be distributed across the city, to be shared by everyone. We talk about how the legacy of the Gwangju Uprising has shaped the biennale and the perception of the city more widely, and whether the biennale could or should separate itself. To which he replies, “How can you not talk about 5.18?”

Kader Attia’s deeply affecting contribution to the Gwangju Biennale Commission – a new section by four artists distributed across the main venues and two external sites – comprises two works. At the dilapidated former Armed Forces Hospital, wooden sleepers punctured with silver staples are installed in the recovery rooms; in the biennale hall, pairs of prosthetic legs are seated on wooden chairs, between which four monitors play the same video at different points. For this latter work, Shifting Borders (2018), Attia visited countries in East and Southeast Asia to record interviews with shamans, priests, victims of trauma, psychologists and academics that engage with the role of animism and shamanism in processing loss and trauma.

A doctor announces, “I don’t think a psychiatrist is the only one who can heal”; a shaman channels the spirit of the father of two grieving daughters and gently wipes away their tears with a white cloth; the video cuts to found footage of a mass funeral at Mangwol-dong Cemetery.

Teh is right, in that 5.18 carries significance beyond its particular location in time and place.

The phrase represents victims of war and the importance of memorialising not only their individual lives but the struggle for freedom and democracy. 5.18 is still happening. The psychiatrist isn’t wholly right: trauma can’t be healed, but it can be acknowledged by acts of remembrance. Fi Churchman

facing page, bottom Kader Attia, Shifting Borders, 2018, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Gwangju Biennale

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No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne 12 July – 21 October A pair of lo-fi videos reveal a commitment to the gag, the ‘existential knock-knock joke’ as curator Justin Paton has described it, that has endured through Ronnie van Hout’s work in sculpture, video and photography across three decades. In Backdoorman (1996) and Backdoorman II (2003) the New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist takes a familiar comedy setup and stretches it into an endlessly looping game of near misses and disappearing acts. In the first, shot from inside a suburban house, van Hout is seen on the far side of the front door, knocking, but no one lets him in.

In the sequel, shot seven years later from a camera positioned outside the house, we see van Hout knock and wait. Again, no one’s home. After he gives up and walks away, the door is opened by another Ronnie van Hout, who peers out, looks around and shrugs.

The artist’s face appears in many different guises throughout this retrospective at Buxton Contemporary: as a zombie pecked at by owls (in D.E.A.D pronounced dead, 2004); in miniature and inserted into anthropomorphised bananas and sausages (such as Bad traveller, 2010, Bananaman ( fallen), 2010, and Sausageman, 2010); bald and disembodied, as if Bruce Nauman’s Hanging Heads (1989) were attached to basketballs (All said, all done, 2012). These sculpted van Hout faces are flanked by a supporting cast of aliens,

robots, men in chimp- and dog-masks, and empty, embroidered thought-bubbles arranged across two floors of installations in loosely thematic groupings.

But perhaps the most unsettling use of van Hout’s ageing face, cast in latex and painted in the exaggerated fleshtones of stage makeup, is attached to a series of pyjama-clad, childsize figures. In works such as Doom and gloom (2008), Sick child (2016) and Sitting figure II (2016) these men-children crawl across the floor, levitate above shaky furniture and sit on a toilet with cigarette in hand. Until now, van Hout’s work has most often been seen in largescale public sculptures or in group exhibitions with themes such as art and humour, self-portraiture and the uncanny. The significance of this retrospective (curated by Melissa Keys) is to see van Hout’s work on its own terms: as using the strategies of comedy, horror and the self to address uncomfortable experiences and the formation of identity.

In several videoworks van Hout plays the parts of comic, filmmaker or actor as if trying them on for size. In Stand Up (2016) the artist performs routines by Woody Allen, Ellen DeGeneres, Richard Pryor and Andy Kaufman word-for-word and with little expression across a screen split four ways; in Brett and Michelle (2014), van Hout plays both central characters in a

No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Christian Capurro.

Courtesy Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne

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distilled version of Rowan Woods’s The Boys (1998).

Van Hout’s amateurish delivery of the excruciating interactions between Brett and Michelle casts them in a new and more vulnerable light.

In the installation Bad Fathers (2018), van Hout presents a collection of lifesize sculptures of nude and crude male figures. These nine doomed archetypes of masculinity – the rock star, the soldier, the prophet, the drunk, the depressive… – are set on top and among plinths that take the form of domestic objects, such as ovens and washing machines, reduced to grey minimalist blocks. Acting as a backdrop is the video King Vader (2018), in which van Hout brings the stories of King Lear and Darth Vader – the ultimate bad fathers – together.

As ever, the artist plays each character himself, appropriating dramatic scenes and tense dialogue in a no-frills production that cuts footage from the videogame Minecraft (2009) with shots of a lone van Hout walking through parklands. With its focus on the characters’ psychology, the video-installation conveys the exhibition’s prevailing sense of familial fragility and the inescapability of intergenerational inheritance. That is only made endurable by van Hout’s fondness for absurdity and slapstick, empathy with the dysfunctional and apparent faith in art and humour as modes of survival. Rosemary Forde

Roy Dib Revisiting Hesitation Galerie Tanit, Beirut 17 September – 10 November “You can’t drink. You are dead,” proclaims a woman as she administers funerary rites to a man’s naked body. The setting is Roy Dib’s video installation Revisiting Hesitation (2018), the latest in a series of three works – it follows the theatrical performance Close to Here (2017), commissioned by the 13th Sharjah Biennial and situated, like Revisiting Hesitation, in a fictional Middle Eastern city, and the installation Here and There (2017) – that address loss, grief and war.

When the washing is completed, various women in their mid-thirties, dressed in yellow and red silks, enter the room to take photos with the body to keep as souvenirs. The manner of their interactions is almost hallucinatory: one woman takes a selfie with the man on her iPhone. Projected onto the floor between two columns of the gallery’s brutalist interior, the video’s heavy chiaroscuro works with the

darkness of the space, occasionally interrupted by bright silhouettes and a shimmering light, to help situate the audience within the ritual.

This sense of the real crossing over into the fictional is reinforced by the fact that the photos taken by the women during the ritual hang in an adjacent room in the gallery. One photo in particular, Roueida 36, named after the woman who took the photo, stands out for its disquieting iconography. Clad in a yellow shirt, she is pictured holding the warrior after his washing, with an iPhone placed to his body’s left – a tableau with echoes of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793). The exaggerated tilt of the man’s head, similar to that of the executed Marat in the bathtub, reinforces the idea of the militant sacrificed for a higher ideological calling.

The video’s power lies in the fact that the man in the video is not, in fact, dead, or at least

not literally, or not yet. Instead, an interior monologue delivered as a voiceover reveals that these rituals are in preparation for battle, and that this is a mock funeral being administered preemptively in the event that he falls on the battlefield and his body is not returned.

Halfway through the ritual, when a woman refuses him water, the warrior proclaims, “I am not dead yet”. He is playing dead.

The cool female voice, neutral and pragmatic in the voiceover, works in contrast to that of the anxious male protagonist (“You have to get used to the idea that time is no longer important,” she says. “Where you are, time does not exist”). Their dialogue reflects on the inescapability of death and the impact on those left behind; the looping of the video speaks to the endless cycle of conflict that haunts the Middle East and those who suffer the consequences of warfare. MK Harb

Roueida 36, 2018, inkjet print on enhanced photo paper mounted on wood, 60 × 80 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Tanit, Beirut

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Catastrophe and the Power of Art Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 6 October – 20 January Catastrophe and the Power of Art offers a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit in these bewildering, vertiginous times. Addressing events ranging from 9/11 and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster to the global financial crisis, the exhibition serves up a series of provocations and dilemmas about what it means for art – and the visitors to this exhibition – to bear witness to disaster.

So it makes sense for the exhibition to open with a section titled ‘How Does Art Depict Disaster?’ Using his signature palette of cardboard, aluminium foil and packing tape, Thomas Hirschhorn has hewn Collapse (2014), an architectural installation representing the ruined interior of a disintegrating building.

Within the debris are buried quotes from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille, the collision of abstract theories of deconstruction and its real-world expression typical of Hirschhorn’s mode of inquiry, and setting the tone for the show.

Immersive installations are presented as offering one means of recreating the emotional and intellectual experience of disaster. Among the most powerful is Miroslaw Balka’s Soap Corridor (1993/2018), a black metal structure through which visitors can walk. Its interior walls are lined with soap, a reference to the practice by guards in Nazi concentration camps of handing soap to prisoners as they entered gas chambers in order to prolong the deception that they were showers. Balancing this horrendous image with the material’s association with cleansing and restoring, the hallway offers a powerful memorial to historical trauma.

That history exists so that we can apply its lessons to the present informs Wolfgang

Staehle’s framed toy puzzles of postdisaster scenes (Untitled (09–11–2001), 2001) and Japaneseborn Hirakawa Kota’s painted portraits of Fukushima plant workers (Black colour timer, 2016–17). Yet these works jar against the inclusion of Gillian Wearing’s Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say (1992–93).

For all the delicately drawn irony of these confessional photographs, and their depiction of peoples’ public/private lives, their presence here prompts the question ‘how does Gillian Wearing depict disaster?’

Takeda Shimpei’s mesmerising photographs are altogether more directly engaged with the subject. His Trace (2012) series is suffused with narrative inventiveness, subtle brilliance and psychological depth. In the works exhibited here, the artist provides an intimate and nuanced examination of the Fukushima Daiichi accident by laying contaminated soil samples collected from nearby sites onto photographic film. They leave radioactive residues that read as inky and disconcerting star-speckled skies, conjuring the emptiness and unease of a nation that continues to grapple with the traumas of nuclear disaster.

The possibility of rebuilding after catastrophe is the theme of the exhibition’s second half, presented under the heading ‘Creation from Destruction – The Power of Art’. Among the collective responses are HYGO AID ‘95 by art, a fundraising initiative in which 25 artists responded to the 1995 Kobe earthquake with artworks and paintings that then toured 60 feepaying exhibition spaces in Japan, the proceeds from which went towards aid and reconstruction. This extends to the work of Japanese-born architect Shigeru Ban, who is best known for

facing page, top Takeda Shimpei, Trace #7, Nihonmatsu Castle, 2012, gelatin silver print, 51 × 60 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Amana Collection, Tokyo

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constructing emergency shelters made from cardboard. Scale Model of Transitional Cathedral, Christchurch, New Zealand (2011) offers a refreshing example of how radical experiment in contemporary art, architecture and design can yield practical results. The exhibition would have benefited from more such examples.

Elsewhere, Japanese-born Hikaru Fuji’s The Primary Fact (2018), a three-channel video installation, combines fact with fiction in an analysis of an ancient burial site containing the remains of 80 young men that was discovered near Athens in 2016. The video splices expert interviews with choreographed actors in a film that gives light and shade to historical records.

Yoko Ono’s startlingly timely mixed-media installation Add Color Painting (Refugee Boat) (1960/2016) presents a desolate and abandoned rowing boat adrift on a sea of words painted in blue onto the walls and floor, among which stands out the phrase ‘THIS ISN’T ART’. Koki Tanaka’s Provisional Studies: Action #8 Rewriting a Song for Zwentendorf (2017) and Tatsuo Miyajima’s Sea of Time – TOHOKU (2017 Ishinomaki) (2017), meanwhile, offer reminders that the best means of avoiding future catastrophes is to cherish and respect our relationship to other people, species and lifeforms.

Comprising 40 artists and collectives, this sprawling exhibition occasionally feels bloated and is guilty of overreaching in its determination to shoehorn in ideas, geographies and aesthetics related to the broad theme of disaster. Yet numerous of its works hint at mankind’s resolute ability to mend, reconstruct and rebuild in the face of adversity. In the current context, that alone is worth the price of admission.

Micheal Do

facing page, bottom Yoko Ono: Installations and Performances, 2016 (installation view, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 2016). Courtesy the artist

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Aditya Novali Significant Other Shanghart Singapore 9 August – 21 November At the heart of Indonesian artist Aditya Novali’s new abstract paintings for Significant Other is a clever technological intervention: an app called Artivive that plays an augmented-reality video and reveals scores of his sister’s childlike drawings, interrupting our encounter with Aditya’s artwork like a game of peekaboo.Aditya’s sister, Ade, is a thirty-two-year-old whose developmental stage is comparable to a five-year-old’s.

Their parallel expressionism here interacts only through the app, which has to be downloaded and positioned in front of the painting in order to view Ade’s drawings, becoming a metaphor for the frustration and pressures of coexistence and the levels of disconnect experienced with mental disability.

There are two groups of works. The first, the ten abstract paintings with the embedded app, demonstrate Aditya’s dense, forceful brushwork that contains an underlying horizontal, sometimes gridlike leaning. His strokes allow hues to condense and amass as a hovering mirage, providing an illusion of depth that is further augmented by shadows within the paint. The second group comprises three works arranged in groupings, each a 10or 11-piece installation of Aditya’s monochromatic geometrical shapes created with Plexiglas,

over which images of Ade’s colourful drawings slide through in continuous projection.

The term ‘significant other’, as the exhibition text notes, carries parallel definitions: more commonly ‘partner’ or ‘loved one’, as well as the psychological definition of someone bearing great influence or importance to another in formation of self-concept or identity. Parallelism between brother and sister thus unearths uncanny points of contact and mutual influence, a relationship more symbiotic than Aditya, as the catalogue attests, realised. However, the relationship also shows up uncomfortable, stark differences.

Ade’s influence on Aditya is traceable in his choice of colour fields for this series of paintings, particularly red, purple and green, colours Ade abundantly employs in her drawings. Many of the works reveal Aditya’s usual deployment of mathematical logic and gridlines underneath the paint layers, striking a similar chord to Ade’s obsessive row upon row of uniform shapes that connote but never coalesce into tree or house or fish. While Aditya’s mathematical lines are precise and technically sophisticated, Ade’s drawings, her colouring that often spills over the edges, reveal the mental age that she’s stuck at.

This disparity is most evident in the second group of works, (dis)connected geometry 1, 2 and 3

(all works 2018), where their stark stylistic differences but similar artistic inclinations towards geometric shapes are presented almost as one artwork; their works overlap but do not intertwine. The disconnect has an introspective aspect because it is Aditya’s geometric shapes that appear separate, unconnected and thoroughly logical, while the projection shows his sister’s drawings as a continuous run of indeterminate shapes, fluid in their vibrant washes.

Ade’s reluctance to submit her drawings to a wider audience spurred Aditya’s search for a technological solution and inspired this new series, which Aditya bills not as collaboration but as a ‘juxtaposition of works’. It is unclear how much agency Ade had in this project, and while the warp and woof of the sibling relationship as glimpsed through their art has its points of interest, occasionally her works come across as a decorative foil to her brother’s. A more robust treatment of her contributions – in terms of her process, for example – might make for more comfortable and illuminating viewing.

In its current form, the exhibition raises a number of issues surrounding artistic partnership with a mentally disabled person in terms of capacity and consent. Elaine Chiew

( focus icon | bank notebook) blue and white, 2018, ink, paint on Plexiglas, wood, zinc plate, single-channel video in augmented reality, 73 × 109 × 5 cm (painting).

Courtesy the artist and Shanghart Singapore

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Akram Zaatari The Script New Art Exchange, Nottingham 13 July – 9 September It seems fitting that a show surveying the work of Akram Zaatari, with its particular attention to regional identity and practices, is receiving this lengthy tour of UK institutions (it will next travel to Margate’s Turner Contemporary and Modern Art Oxford). Featuring two older installation works and a new film commission, The Script reflects on the artist’s exploration of methods of display, both literally, by locating his practice between art and archive work, and conceptually, tracking and identifying patterns in forms of self-expression and -representation in the Arab world.

Object of Studies, an ongoing project updated for this show, introduces Zaatari’s long-term engagement with the work of studio photographer Hashem el Madani (1928–2017), who portrayed young Lebanese people throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Zaatari originally acquired this archive through the Arab Image Foundation (an organisation he cofounded in 1997 in Beirut to collect, preserve and study photography practices in the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora) and interestingly brought el Madani to international recognition by displaying his prints in Zaatari’s own artwork. The apparent objectivity of the original arrangements, however – grouping prints typologically, eg couples, men dressed as soldiers, men posing with cardboard cutouts of women – is here diluted by an unusual transformation: pasted onto the walls of the gallery

via print transfer, the images resemble incomplete temporary tattoos, their contours dissolved and partially painted over in shades of white and grey. While the work renounces the initial display’s fruitful ambiguity between artwork and archive, it attests to Zaatari’s desire to experiment with and rethink the conventional treatment and presentation of archive material.

The most compelling installation here is the immersive four-channel video Dance to the end of love (2011), an edited compilation of excerpts from amateur YouTube videos created by young men from Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Using juxtaposition, Zaatari reveals some defining tropes in the subjects’ online selfrepresentation, capturing the men throwing balls of fire (in animated montages), lifting weights, ‘skiing’ (a driving stunt in which a car is driven while balanced on only two wheels), but also playing guitar or posing with friends and family on holiday. Zaatari treats these videos like el Madani’s photographs, as alternative forms of evidence for a generation of young Muslims, sharing a similar deployment of theatrics (el Madani’s photographs feature both props and backdrop settings). Except here the potential for exposure is dramatically heightened in publicly shared videos, producing even more controlled narratives of selfrepresentation. While underlining the narrow definitions of masculinity on display here (and in the pop-music videos that preceded them),

Zaatari most importantly points to the problematically closed circuit of platforms like YouTube, on which those representations are shared and sustained via endless copycat reenactments.

The staging element materialises in the artist’s latest film, which shows a Muslim father attempting to perform Salah, the daily prayer, while his two young sons clamber over him.

In one cinematic 8-minute video reenactment, Zaatari distils the essential features of what he has identified as a strange YouTube subgenre (after hours of scrolling through content, we’re told in the exhibition handout): cluttered domestic settings jarring with a spiritual moment, the amusing, seemingly choreographed dance routines of children challenging their fathers’ (almost) unshakeable concentration. But what the work emphasises, via an overly dramatic mise en abyme, is the apparent paradox of broadcasting such an intimate and sacred ritual on YouTube: in the last minutes of the film, the characters are transposed onto a theatre stage, the camera then turning to reveal rows of empty seats – perhaps a metaphor for the many anonymous viewers intruding onto the scene.

From el Madani’s photographs to his appropriation of YouTube material, what this succinct survey highlights is Zaatari’s anthropological ability to navigate the specific and the universal, in turn revealing that although modes of display might change, the scripts of self remain essentially the same. Louise Darblay

The Script (still), 2018, HD video, colour, sound, 8 min. © and courtesy the artist

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Steirischer Herbst Volksfronten Various venues, Graz 20 September – 14 October “Home is where the hatred is,” sang Gil ScottHeron in his 1971 song of the same name, built out of “white power dreams”. The sentiment runs through Ekaterina Degot’s first edition of this annual interdisciplinary arts festival in Graz, which explores the blood-and-soil constructs of identity underpinning the farright resurgence. That you need a brass neck to use a state-funded festival to critique the recent trend towards identitarian politics (Austria’s national coalition includes the Freedom Party, founded by former members of the Nazi Party) was made clear by an entertaining speech in which, standing in the bustling Europaplatz and backed by a parping brass band, Degot explained the title’s explicit allusions to National Socialism beside a line of stony-faced politicians.

The unification of a supposedly ethnically homogenous Volk was the pretext for the annexation of Austria by Germany, a point hammered home by the first performance of a festival that has historically been rooted in avant-garde and politically engaged performance. The Bread and Puppet Theater led a crowd along the route taken by Hitler during his valedictory tour of the country after the Anschluss, stopping to stage allegorical scenes in support of migrants and those otherwise excluded from society before breaking bread with the audience. The Brechtian approach was shared by Roman Osminkin’s spectacular Putsch (After D.A. Prigov) (2018), in which volunteers carrying signs with letters of the alphabet shuffled up and down a flight of floodlit mountain steps to spell out garbled revolutionary phrases. It concluded with an opera singer making familiar dictatorial gestures as he bellowed out “Es Ist Zeit” (it is time), a phrase beloved of Austria’s thirty-two-year-old prime minister. In both performances the combination of agitprop with vaudeville engages a crowd composed in roughly equal parts of festival devotees and curious bystanders without seeking to alienate parts or sermonise to the whole.

Later on the opening night, amidst the ruins of Graz’s hilltop castle, the aforementioned local dignitaries found themselves sitting through a concert by Laibach of which the same couldn’t be said. After a grandstanding lecture calling out the recently elected Austrian government as fascists, the veteran Slovenian industrial band proceeded to desecrate the soundtrack of The Sound of Music (1965) while a giant screen spliced doctored images from the film with footage of

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ants clambering over each other. The invitation to Laibach to perform these cover versions was designed to expose, Degot explains in an accompanying publication, how closely the feelgood film’s infusion of the Austrian landscape with mystical power (“the hills are alive”, and so on) resembles the Nazis’ own invocation of a mystical Heimat to which the Volk is bound.

That a purportedly antifascist narrative is driven by one of the insidious ‘little fascisms’ that structure national identity is a more complex idea than the bombast of Laibach allows, and indeed subtlety was a frequent victim of the festival’s political commitment. Whether this is a necessary sacrifice in the current political climate, or whether it risks entrenching the divisions in Western society, was foremost among the discussions it prompted.

The relationship between constructs of home and identity was explored with greater nuance at the Kulturzentrum bei den Minoriten in a group show that – alongside other artistic projects installed in local institutions, abandoned bars and, in the case of Tony Chakar and Nadim Mishlawi’s narrative soundpiece Hum (2018), on a hotel rooftop – complements the performances and theatrical events that are the festival’s focus. In kozek horlonski’s 16mm homage to silent cinema Uninvited (2017) a character signs a contract with a Nosferatuesque character who, in a beautifully realised scene, then enters his bedroom to steal away his reflection. The home is the first and recurring site of trauma, and this silent horror offers the most concise visual expression of Freud’s description of the Unheimlich (normally translated as the uncanny, but literally ‘unhomely’) that haunts the show through doubled, distorted or otherwise twisted representations of the domestic. At Haus der Architektur, t.o.

German-born artist Henrike Naumann’s Anschluss ‘90 (2018) imagines a scenario in which German unification had extended (once again) to Austria by constructing a creepy showroom out of kitschy furniture dating from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Included among the melting wall clocks and sofa-beds with inbuilt FM t.o. is a selection of fascist reading material, unsettling the nostalgia and suggesting that the current resurgence of the far right had its seeds in the triumph of capitalist consumerism.

This play on estrangement from one’s own past is taken up in different ways: Christoph Szalay creates a fractured and polyphonic visual poem (Heimat, 2018) by embroidering found

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texts into strips of fabric through which the reader walks; Michiel Vandevelde’s Human Landscapes – Book I (2018) adapts Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet’s epic of displacement for a cast who deliver excerpts while tracing a delicate choreography around an audience laid out on the floor of a darkened room. That a supposedly shared past can mean different things to citizens of the present is most eloquently demonstrated

by Ekaterina Muromtseva’s short film In This Country (2017), which sets stories about the Soviet Union, written by young children who had no personal experience of it, to shadow play.

The irreverence and creativity of children is, suggests Roee Rosen’s Kafka for Kids (2018), inherently opposed to the logics on which fascism depends. Commissioned as a featurelength film for the 2019 edition of Steirischer Herbst, the work-in-progress is presented in three parts: a musical performance, an excerpt from the unfinished film and a monologue.

Reasoning that comedy in Kafka’s novels is not an escape from the realities of life but the most effective expression of their absurdity, the Israeli artist adapts passages from The Metamorphosis (1915) – a horror story in a home infested by vermin – into ditties performed by Igor Krutogolov’s Toy Orchestra using instruments including a Hello Kitty drumkit and squeaky rubber chickens. It’s a reminder that in all great literature, as in life, the comic can never entirely be separated from the tragic, nor the beautiful from the ugly.

Kafka for Kids concludes with a disastrous standup routine by a hyperactive Jewish comedian, hilariously played by Hani Furstenberg to the accompaniment of drumrolls and ill-timed audience prompts to laughter and applause.

Disintegrating jokes about 9/11, Jewish doctors and Barack Obama brilliantly deconstruct the form, exposing the simple narratives and inbuilt prejudices on which comedy depends.

It is often deeply uncomfortable. “You can’t compare the Israeli occupation with the Holocaust,” the comic berates the audience after it has been instructed to laugh against its own inclinations. “They’re not the same at all…

Whatever you think of the Israeli occupation, it is much, much better than the Holocaust.”

This astonishing performance delivers the most enduring lesson of the festival: that resistance to the seductive certainties and scapegoating of rightwing populism requires that we embrace contradiction, ambiguity and complexity.

Ben Eastham

Roman Osminkin, Putsch (After D. A. Prigov), 2018.

Photo: Jasper Kettner. Courtesy Steirischer Herbst, Graz

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Books Moving Parts

by Prabda Yoon, translated by Mui Poopoksakul Tilted Axis Press, £9.99 (softcover) There’s a sense in which the experience of reading Pradba Yoon’s second English-language collection of stories (translated from the Thai, as was the first, by Mui Poopoksakul) is like playing the game Operation – the one in which you’re tasked with removing an Adam’s apple that is an apple, butterflies from a stomach and a wrench from a ‘wrenched ankle’. This is partly because each of the stories in this collection revolves, in one way or another, around the animation or manipulation of organs or body parts. And partly because these tales, which often walk a tightrope between the playful and the grotesque, are driven by plays on the literal rather than metaphorical meanings of corporeal euphemisms (as is the case with stories such as ‘Mock Tail’, ‘New Hand’ and ‘Belly Up’). Which, in turn, makes Poopoksakul’s achievement in holding these plays on words from one language to another all the more impressive (her translation of Yoon’s 2017 collection, The Sad Part Was, won the English PEN award).

Even to a non-Thai speaker.

Following the variously bizarre lives of a series of Bangkok residents of all ages – from adolescents to centenarians – and social classes – from prostitutes to corporate executives – the 11 stories here unfold like a surreal anatomy class: in one tale of neurotic adolescent romance, hands are detachable; asking to hold someone’s hand means them literally delivering it (minus the rest of their body) into your custody for safekeeping and amorous pampering overnight. In another tale, a man’s finger expresses its disapproval of its owner’s life choices (by making a ‘yucking’ sound), manifesting his subconscious doubts and anxieties.

Consequently, at the heart of a collection that appears to be all about delighting on plays with the meaning and form of the written word, it is actually the body, as opposed to language, that is highlighted as a medium for expressing truth. Or, more bluntly, what words cannot.

This is just the kind of delicious irony on which Yoon thrives.

Yet even as he has proposed the notion of the body as a site of truth and commonality, Yoon chooses, with typical perversity, to highlight that fact by documenting its inverse.

In ‘Long Heart’, the central character, BC (whose father owned an antiques shop and named him to signal his interest in antiquity), has been instrumental in prolonging human life via the development of artificial hearts. At a certain point he encounters a taxi driver who looks at him ‘to guess BC’s age from his complexion’, we are told. ‘But in this day and age [when rich people with the right connections could prolong their lives indefinitely], it was difficult to discern merely from external appearance the true state of one’s core.’ What you see is what you get is the rule in every other tale. Except here, when it is not. When we’re not deceiving ourselves, we busy ourselves with deceiving others. And, whether you’re in Bangkok or beyond, this wonderful collection implies that there’s something honestly human about that. Mark Rappolt

The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India

by Zehra Jumabhoy and Boon Hui Tan Asia Society, US$65/£49.99 (hardcover)

The issue of how a desire for contemporaneity of form fits together with the traditions of place is a hot topic in art history right now. In this, the work of the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG), founded in Bombay shortly after India’s independence (and the subcontinent’s partition) in 1947 with the goal of promoting a new art for a new country is certainly relevant. Although the work of its six founding members (male artists F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza, K.H. Ara, M.F. Husain, S.K. Bakre and H.A. Gade) and the wider group of artists associated with the project has been (to the disdain of some) anything but lurking in the dustbin of history over the past several years.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Asia Society’s New York outpost (on view through 20 January), this book fits the standard catalogue format: thanks to supporters, introductions from managers, essays, plates and

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chronology. The design is pedestrian, which wouldn’t be a problem were it not for the fact that this book costs a staggering $65 and almost £50 and leads you to wonder who such publications are aimed at (other than libraries).

Still, if you can get hold of a copy, the catalogue’s efforts to locate the work of the PAG in equal (as opposed to derivative) dialogue with modern movements in Europe and America (in this respect, a sidenote in Jumabhoy’s essay concerning Asia Society founder John D. Rockefeller’s decision to fund Indian artists during the 1950s so that the USSR and China didn’t get there first, seems worthy of further exploration) is certainly of interest, as are the efforts it makes to place the work of painters such as Husain and Akbar Padamasee (the latter was a student when the PAG was formed, but later became associated with it) with traditional cultural

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artefacts (a tenth-century copper statue of Shiva and Parvati, for example, is placed alongside Padamsee’s Lovers, 1952 and Husain’s Eternal Lovers, 1988). So too are the initial efforts made to trace the career of the PAG’s one female member, Bhanu Rajopadhye. Given the rise of Hindutva in contemporary India and the trials and tribulations of the Muslim Husain in relation to complaints and lawsuits concerning his representations of naked Hindu deities (he eventually went into self-imposed exile in Qatar) during the mid-2000s, the PAG’s status as a religiously and ethnically inclusive group (gender, though, is a whole other issue) that envisioned a new secular India built on those terms also has a particular resonance today.

Ultimately, however, this catalogue is less a definitive summary of the PAG and more a stimulus for further research. Nirmala Devi

Winter 2018

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Performance Histories from East Asia 1960s–1990s: An IAPA Reader Edited by Victor Wang DRAF Curators’ Series, free (softcover) In this reader accompanying the latest exhibition in the David Roberts Art Foundation’s Curators’ Series, Institution of Asian Performance Art (IAPA), editor Victor Wang puts forward a narrative for the development of performance art in Asia as distinct from the history of its Western equivalent.

Each of the four chapters (organised geographically, and presenting photographic documentation of the works alongside one or two previously published essays) makes clear that artists working within the sociopolitical contexts of their own countries engaged in performance for different reasons. In Japan, the Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group (made up of artist collectives including Zero Jigen and Kokuin) took to the streets in protest at the Westernisation of the country’s artistic culture; in China, Ma Liuming presented a body that transgressed Chinese society’s strict gender binaries; in Korea, artists recognised their bodies as sites of political conflict under the oppressive regime of Park Chung-hee; in Taiwan, performance was used as a means of expressing and exploring a national identity.

There are, however, aspects of performance history in East Asia that are shared across the countries. The reader brings to attention the importance of documenting performances

(particularly in Reiko Tomii’s essay on Japanese photographer Hirata Minoru, and Joan Kee on performance in South Korea), and the ways in which we might consider this to be as important as the performance itself. While the act, in front of an audience, conveys a sense of urgency because it happens in a specific moment (and cannot be reenacted in the same context), it’s the recording of the performance, through photography, that brings it to a wider audience. This is explored in Tomii’s text, which presents the performances (by groups like Hi-Red Center, or individuals such as Yoko Ono and Ushio Shinohara) and Minoru’s photo-documentation as existing symbiotically.

The performances allowed Minoru to make ‘Photo Art’ that was then published in the Japanese mass-media, which led to a greater awareness of performance art.

There are also other key insights into the specific political tensions surrounding performance in East Asia. In South Korea, under the rule of Park Chung-hee following his military coup in 1961, state-sanctioned art extended to media such as ink painting or sculpture and forms such as minjung (‘people’s art’), all produced within government-approved institutions. That artists working outside of these were subject to surveillance or imprisonment is fairly well known, but Joan Kee

illustrates a much more complex environment.

In her 2015 essay ‘Why Performance in Authoritarian Korea?’, she writes that Park’s government was also keen to ‘improve its international standing’, and thus allowed those ‘transgressive’ artists to exhibit work abroad at biennials, creating a situation that was ‘confusing and often dangerous’.

While he rightly justifies the importance of research into the form from a non-Western perspective, Wang’s introductory essay would benefit from providing a little more explanation of, and context to, his references. For example, he mentions influences from Buddhism, Taosim and the I Ching, but doesn’t go on to set out examples of how their concepts of ‘ephemerality, emptiness, chance, rituals…’ inform performance history in East Asia. In this sense, the introduction to Performance Histories glosses over cultural influences, and this is compounded by his vague references to historical events, dictatorships and authoritarian governments, all of which would profit from a simple timeline, if only to locate these in time and place. Nevertheless, the collection of texts presented here offer interesting snapshots into various stages of the development of East Asian performance art, and benefits from a thematic rather than chronological approach to its history. Fi Churchman

Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu, translated by Joel Martinsen Head of Zeus, £18.99 (hardcover) Originally published in 2005, Ball Lightning is the first work by Cixin Liu to appear in English translation since his Three-Body Problem trilogy (the first volume of which appeared in Chinese three years after Ball Lightning) propelled him to superstar status in the world of international science-fiction writing. While Ball Lightning was written at approximately the same time as the Three-Body Problem trilogy, Liu states in an afterword that it appeared first because he felt that the standalone novel would be more readily accepted by a Chinese audience. And indeed Ball Lightning is a less ambitious proposition.

The plot follows a character named Chen who, having witnessed his parents’ death as a result of a ball-lightning strike (an unexplained and only relatively recently acknowledged phenomenon), obsessively devotes his life to the scientific study of that mysterious phenomenon

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in the hope that it might eventually be predicted and controlled. All the while he is pursued by the ghosts of his progenitors, just as his academic mentor is motivated by a similarly haunting experience. Along the way, as Chen furthers his research by collaborating with the militaryindustrial complex (to develop ball lightning as a weapon), Liu touches on the proximity and complicity of militarised and nonmilitarised scientific research, although he stops short of chasing the issues that arise in terms of their moral, social and political ends. Aside from some relatively loose Spider Man-ish thoughts about great power and great responsibility.

More interesting, perhaps, is the way in which Liu uses this book and the mysteries surrounding ball lightning to conjure science as something of a creative act. A part of scientific research, the author writes in his afterword,

ArtReview Asia

is the ability to ‘convince people to accept strange looking ideas’, an activity to which Chen and his colleagues, like many in the artworld, devote much of their time. Moreover, as the uncertainty principle and quantum mechanics come into play with regard to ball-lightning theory, notions of viewers, their agency and the necessity of their presence or absence with regard to the predictability or verification of natural phenomena come increasingly into play (and yes, allow the potential presence of alien observers to float into the text as well). And it’s here, in teasing out contingencies within questions of how the world is shaped in the mind and eye as much as the hands of its beholders, that Ball Lightning really comes to life. Although you could simply read it as a largely riveting and fast-paced journey through contemporary science and its future potentials too. Nirmala Devi

Eastern Encounters: Four Centuries of Paintings and Manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent

by Emily Hannam Royal Collection Trust, £45 (hardcover) At first glance this book, which documents the South Asian collection in The Royal Library at Windsor Castle, is the kind of illustrated coffee-table affair that does not need much thinking about. Fling some adjectives at the assorted folio paintings, ink drawing, manuscripts and Qurans – sumptuous, beautiful, luscious, vibrant – and be done. Here are pages from a nineteenth-century folio that recounts the ‘Gita Govinda’, a Sanskrit devotional poem. In opaque watercolour with gold and silver metallic paints, a throned Vishnu and Lakshmi are shown.

Evocative, mesmerising. Here is a nineteenthcentury architectural plan for the Temple at Srirangam. Detailed, exquisite. Here is a sixteenth-century painting in which the Muslim theologian Fakhr al-Din al-Razi discusses the Day of Judgement. Come that time, ‘rich and poor will be alike in their nakedness’, notes an explanatory paragraph. Moving, breathtaking.

It is sensible then that author Emily Hannam, a curator at the Royal Collection, moves beyond fetishism to instead chart an unflinching history of British involvement in South Asia, as told through the objects that have ended up c/o The Queen. It is easy to imagine that most of this stuff was plundered – and a lot was, the looting of Seringapatam in 1799 being a particularly bleak example – but what transpires is how much gifting was involved in Anglo-Indian relations (relations at the top, of course, this is a history of the elite; those dying in the wars

or starving in the various famines don’t get much of a look-in in a history of gold gilt and fine brushwork). Hannam narrates with an eye for a good anecdote. When the first ship belonging to the East Indian Company reached the shores of Surat in the early seventeenth century the British were in need of the protection of the Mughal emperor Jahangir and brought an odd assortment of telescopes and tapestries to curry favour.

Sir Thomas Roe, the official envoy to India appointed by James I, wrote back to London, ‘Here are nothing esteemed but of the best sorts: good Cloth and fine, and rich pictures… soe they laugh at us for such wee bring.’ To compound poor Roe’s embarrassment, the Iranian ambassador arrived during his trip with 27 horses, seven camels, a mass of embroidered velvets and silk carpets to give to the emperor as tokens of the Shah’s support. For shame, for shame.

The East India Company grew in strength, however, becoming a law unto itself. (Robert Clive – ‘Clive of India’ – proved adept in knowing how to grease the right palms – and when presents didn’t work, violence did.) Much of the royal collection acquired during the eighteenth century, for example, arrived as presents from local rulers, accompanied with missives pleading that British royals rein in the excesses of their mercantile subjects. By 1833 the Company had become de facto rulers of South Asia – their military might far exceeding that of a private enterprise – to the extent that London felt it

exigent to confer legislative powers onto a newly created position of Governor General of India.

Aware of this development Nasir-ud-Din Haidar, who governed the state of Awadh, thought a huge shipment addressed to William IV might be beneficent. A bejewelled sword, furniture, hookahs, shawls, bracelets, a pair of horses and two elephants were swiftly dispatched. All of which proved diplomatically awkward – given the British were about to relieve this man of his land – and it was instructed the gifts be returned (bar the animals, ‘which might be unable to bear a second voyage’), much to the humiliation of the Indian ruler (though he died – his sherbet poisoned by a courtier – before the gifts were returned). Such a decision was the sign of things to come: Queen Victoria would take against such ostentatious displays and instructed that only token gifts should be exchanged. Nonetheless, the Empress of India loved the place from afar, learning Hindustani and collecting and commissioning work for her residences in Britain.

The treasures illustrated in this book are beautiful, mesmerising and all the rest. Yet that Hindu artefacts make up the majority is evidence of the British Empire’s dark legacy, in which a policy of divide and rule played Hindu off Muslim, often to the detriment of the latter.

These objects tell a story of oppression and bloodshed, a narrative that is still being played out far from the refined galleries of Windsor today.

Oliver Basciano

Slum Wolf

by Tadao Tsuge New York Review Comics, $22.95 (softcover)

Tadao Tsuge’s gekiga stories (the term describes a genre of comic distinguished from manga by its hardboiled realism) are populated by rebels, dropouts and misfits who drift through the margins of a Japan still recovering, during the late-1960s and 70s, from the social and psychological crisis occasioned by the bomb and the surrender. The interlinking shorts gathered together in this collection, many of which were first published in the legendary avant-garde manga magazine Garo, describe a world in which the established order has broken down and the only values worth preserving are those of Tokyo’s meanest streets.

The prevailing atmosphere of postapocalyptic beatnik existentialism is summed up by a scene

in ‘The Death of Ryokichi Aogishi’, one of several stories set in a shantytown founded after the war by a man who had ‘no particular aim’ and ‘nothing better to do’ than build a hut out of pampas grass and look out over the river. In it, the denizens of a dosshouse gather at the bar after learning that one of their number, a traumatised war veteran, has killed himself with the bullet he had intended for his ex-commanding officer. ‘What’s an odyssey?’, a stripper asks an artist reduced to painting erotic scenes for Tokyo nightclubs. ‘It means to drift, on and on… west, east… it’s like wandering,’ the artist replies. In the ensuing silence a mysterious shogi hustler knocks down the king piece on his board in a blunt symbolic gesture, and they all resolve to dance.

Winter 2018

The influence on the artist of Hollywood Westerns, widely shown in Japanese movie theatres during the country’s occupation, is apparent in these stories’ glorification of lonely, violent men – notably the recurring character Sabu, an ex-kamikaze pilot nicknamed ‘the Wolf’ – and the vigilante justice they enforce. Tsuge’s loose, expressionist style also conjures the murky ethics expressed in hardboiled noir through equally murky lighting: prostitutes’ beds overhung by a single bare bulb; street fights illuminated by the neon signs of sleazy nightclubs. These are not stories of great psychological depth, but their combination of fragmentary influences to tell the story of a devastated society is frequently thrilling. Ben Eastham

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Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview Asia (ISSN No: 20525346) is published four times per year by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London EC1Y 0TH, England, United Kingdom.

Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta in their office, New Delhi, 2012.

Photo: Pradeep Gaur / Mint via Getty Images

Words on the spine and on pages 19, 45 and 77 come from R. Johnston, Pass That Urdu Test!, Thacker & Company, Bombay, 1944

on pages 89 and 92 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Winter 2018

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Last Words Winter 2018

Words travel. Across time, through space, between people. By now – by which I mean the now of your reading, not the now of the ArtReview Asia office clock, which, for what it’s worth, shows 3.48pm – these words will have journeyed through several dimensions (ArtReview Asia isn’t sure of exactly how many, having always struggled with multidimensional cosmologies, but let’s say four). The words on this screen will have been wired to a printer and stamped onto pages conveyed across time zones via a warehouse to your door and then finally, perhaps, carried by your own hand to the porch on which you are sitting in the late afternoon sun sipping an iced drink, or to the early morning train on which you are commuting to work, or… actually, you can fill in this bit yourself. And now your mind, an infinitely complex system shaped by a unique set of experiences of which ArtReview Asia can have no knowledge, is trying to ascribe meaning to this afterword, the prospect of which is, back in the office-clock now, making ArtReview Asia anxious.

Because ArtReview Asia can’t control what you think. It can only smuggle impressions into your consciousness via language – hello from 4.43pm and a narrow desk swept right-to-left by a chill breeze from an open window – while praying that you are prepared to make the imaginative leap across time and space. That ArtReview Asia has faith in your willingness to do so is illustrated by the diversity of subjects it has seen fit to cram into this issue. It is unlikely that you can draw on firsthand knowledge of the social histories encoded into contemporary Laotian art, the traumatised prose of Indian soldiers fighting during the First World War and the economic systems of ancient Micronesian societies. But that’s why you are here, presumably. Because you too – like those artists in Laos who continue in secret to make works that they hope may someday be seen; like Raqs Media Collective, whose work is committed to promoting subaltern histories suppressed by power; like Charu Nivedita, who gives voice to the slums of Madras – believe that works of art are vehicles capable of

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transporting ideas and experiences across time and space. And that, in good art at least, those ideas and experiences are accessible (which isn’t the same as entirely transferable) to anyone willing to put in the effort of interpreting them.

Which might be why translation – literally, in one of the many imported languages from which English has been cobbled together, the act of carrying across – is so frequently cited in these pages. It might also explain why it is such a preoccupation of ArtReview Asia, for whom the willingness to translate represents a basic acknowledgement of the heterogeneity not just of languages but additionally of the cultures, ways of thinking and histories embedded in them. And, ultimately, of people. In that translation isn’t only the shifting of meanings from one language into another, but is also – as Deepa Bhasthi states in her text on the instrumentalisation of language by Hindu nationalists – symptomatic of the basic empathy and willingness to accommodate the different voices that must underpin any society that wishes to define itself as inclusive. The ideal is a space in which a variety of different ways of thinking can be gathered together and, while retaining their identities, inform and interact with each other.

It’s a bit like putting together a group exhibition. Or a magazine.

That act of translation is always difficult and often fraught with danger – the dangers of misunderstanding, of accidental offence, of cultural insensitivity – as the quotes running through this issue playfully suggest and as any art critic can tell you. The greater the cultural, historical or political distance separating the interpreter from the circumstances in which the work was made and from those that shaped the mind of its maker, the harder translation becomes.

But also, perhaps, the more rewarding it becomes as well. Art consists in pioneering intellectual and affective strategies that, hovering between the symbolic and the real, communicate the experience of living in the world. The office clock was a literary device, as was the chill breeze. Let’s call it artistic licence. ArtReview Asia

E DG E O F 02.11.2018 - 28.02.2019 T H E W ON D ER LAND Sites | Ao Nang Beach, Khao Khanab Nam Caves, Klong Muang, Ko Klang, Krabi Town, Nopparat Thara Beach, Poda Island, Railay Beach, Tha Pom Khlong Song Nam and Than Bok Khorani National Park Host | Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Ministry of Culture and Krabi Province

Opening Ceremony 02.11.2018 Professional Private View 20.12.2018 and Catalogue Launch

Image | AyŞe Erkmen, PD/MGRTT, Krabi, Thailand, 2018