and is the name given to traditional Ainu tattooing practices, which were made illegal in 1872, when Westerners started arriving and Japan wanted to appear more civilised. That and the fact that Japan’s rulers didn’t care for the Ainu people’s claim to indigineity (a claim only fully acknowledged in law last year after centuries of repression and various attempts to obliterate their culture). The artists on show, Andrew states, ‘will reflect on the world today, challenging dominant narratives and proposing exciting new futurisms and paths to healing’. And carving. For those of you who’ve got biennial fever, 3 the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art is also up and running (make sure to check out the Art Gallery of South Australia’s permanent collections while you’re there). This one’s titled
Monster Theatres. Pointing out the roots of the first of those two words in the Latin words monere (to warn) and monstrare (to make visible), curator Leigh Robb states, rather cryptically (and firmly grasping the current fad for wilfully confusing curating with etymological studies), that ‘monsters are especially revealing in contemporary Australian art practice because they are the embodiment of a cultural moment’. Horrible (from L. horribilis, from horrere). Artists ranging from Abdul Abdullah to Judith Wright will be putting that to the test. ‘Their urgent works of art are warnings made manifest,’ Robb adds, reliving a childhood experience of Hammer horror trailers no doubt. While you have those on your mind (perhaps 1968’s The Devil Rides Out in particular) you’ll want to redon your mask and head to Hong Kong, where
Blindspot Gallery is due to stage a group exhibition, 4 Anonymous Society for Magick. Featuring works by five artists – Chen Wei, Hao Jingban, Lam Tung Pang, Wang Tuo, Trevor Yeung – the exhibition draws its title from the work of nineteenth-century British occultist Aleister Crowley, a man the popular press of the time labelled ‘the wickedest man in the world’. For the purposes of this exhibition, however, it’s not his so-called wickedness but his attempts to define ‘magick’ as the ‘Science of understanding oneself and one’s conditions’ and ‘the Art of applying that understanding in action’ that provide the inspiration. At least that’s the idea. Lam Tung Pang’s newly commissioned The Great Escape (2020), for example, is based around a carousel lantern’s
existence between science and the imagination, fantasy and reality, and an episode in Japanese
4 Hao Jingban, Opus One, 2019, produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation, Barcelona. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong
4 Chen Wei, Mushroom, 2016, archival inkjet print, 150 × 188 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong
Spring 2020
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