GWACHEON National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
AWAKENINGS: ART IN SOCIETY IN ASIA 1960S–1990S Opposite page DENG YUFENG Black Sutra 2014 Mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Installation view at the Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition 2019. Courtesy the artist and Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition. This page LEE KANG-SO Disappearance – Bar in the Gallery (detail) 1973 Six c-prints on paper, 60!×!90!cm each. Courtesy the artist and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon.
On a late October day in 1983, five people wearing identical, nondescript clothing walked single-file through Taipei’s Ximending district, their heads covered with red hoods and eyes blindfolded. Without warning, the group broke formation, falling to the ground of Wuchang Street and clutching at the air while wailing unintelligibly in agony. At a time when public demonstrations in Taiwan were forbidden under martial law, this collective action organized by Chen Chieh-jen served as a wordless cry of resistance against the Kuomintang’s authoritarian regime. Chen’s gesture resonated with the first performative happenings in Asia’s cities, staged in the 1960s and ’70s by collectives such as Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension) and Hi-Red Center in Japan, and Mu (Zero) and Shin Jeon (New Exhibition) in Korea. As the 1980s approached, cities throughout the region transformed into sites of political activism, with artists in Thailand, the Philippines and Korea seeking solidarity in their struggles against systemic injustice and pushing for change. The new cosmopolitan culture that took hold in the region’s rapidly growing centers in the 1980s subsequently became a primary subject of social critique for artists throughout Indonesia, Singapore and India. By the time Premier Li Peng lifted martial law in China in 1990, cities across nearly the entire continent had become testing grounds for experimental collective practices agitating the oppressive realities of the post-colonial era. These approaches, among others, catalyzed the engagement of various public spaces for critical expression in Asia. “Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s–1990s,” presented at Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Gwacheon, foregrounded these sites of awakening, interweaving some 100 artists and collectives activating the continent’s social and political discourse over four decades. Structured
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without any clearly defined center, the exhibition traced and connected movements from this turbulent period across borders and cultures, drawing from three collecting institutions: MMCA, National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and the National Gallery Singapore, which also constitute the three stops of the roving exhibition. In parts of the show at MMCA, the crosscultural connections were clear. Woodblock prints depicting hardships imposed by changing political conditions, for instance, were a shared mode and subject among artists in Singapore and Korea including Lim Yew Kuan, Hong Sungdam and others. Conceptual practices recalibrating art’s referential relationship with reality connected figures such as FX Harsono, Tang Da Wu, Kwok Mang-Ho and Datong Dazhang across Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong and China, blurring the boundaries between art and daily existence. Happenings such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964/1965), Lee Kang-so’s Disappearance – Bar in the Gallery (1973) and Wang Jin’s Ice 96 Central China (1996) implicated their audiences as performers in circumstantial solidarities. Elsewhere, more categorical linkages emerged, such as Chinese-language video works made around 1989 that addressed logical fallacies promulgated by state-sponsored TV news media, including Ellen Pau’s TV Game of the Year (1989), Wang Jin-Jieh’s Face/TV (1989) and Zhang Peili’s Water: Standard Version from Cihai Dictionary (1991). Particularly gratifying inclusions were some of the more unexpected contributions to the regional milieu: Jose Maceda’s relational sound work Cassettes 100 (1971), questioning the modalities of Western music and performance in Manila; Provoke magazine, which probed bold new photographic vocabularies in Japan; and calligraphic works on paper by Tang Chang, who used handwriting to render delicate images of protest, offering a resolute gesture of resistance to military rule in Bangkok. Anchored in “comparative seeing,” an idea advocated by art historian TK Sabapathy, the pluralism manifest in the exhibition’s galleries suggests alternative perspectives on exhibitionmaking and relationship-centric methods for interpreting global narratives of postwar art. Rather than dilute the exhibition’s vision or detract from the distinctiveness of diverse practices, this decentralized approach yielded an insightful and dense constellation of ideas and gestures, awakening viewers to the transformational role of artists and the far-reaching resonances at the intersection of art and society. In “Awakenings,” cultural transfers gave rise to a diachronic polyphony of voices, crying out across the continent and resolving into collective harmony. ANDY ST. LOUIS 127