ArtReview Asia Spring 2019

Richard Lin meets Michael Lin at Art Basel Hong Kong Tishan Hsu and hybrid identities From the archives: F.N. Souza on how London gave him a raw deal

L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h

c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e a v i n g T h e E c h o C h a m b e r L e

Sharjah Biennial 14 • Leaving the Echo Chamber • 7 March–10 June 2019 • Curated by Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif and Claire Tancons. In three unique exhibitions, Sharjah Biennial 14 (SB14) explores the possibilities and purpose of producing art when news is fed by a monopoly of sources, history is increasingly fictionalised, when ideas of ‘society’ are invariably displaced, and when borders and beliefs are dictated by cultural, social and political systems. SB14 is organised

by Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. @sharjahart • sharjahart.org

Neo Rauch Propaganda

Propaganda, 2018. Oil on canvas, 98 3/8 × 118 1/8 inches (250 × 300 cm)

26 March–4 May 2019

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

Lisson Gallery Shanghai opening 2019 March 22 Inaugural exhibition Love is Metaphysical Gravity Marina Abramović Shirazeh Houshiary Richard Long Tatsuo Miyajima

里森画廊

Now entering its second year, each title in the Hong Kong Series from David Zwirner Books features new work by a leading contemporary artist. Produced alongside solo exhibitions at David Zwirner Hong Kong, these books not only showcase never-before-seen works by the gallery’s artists, but also provide invaluable historical context for development of their careers. Available in both English-only and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions, the series makes the work of these important artists accessible to a wider audience.

David Zwirner Books

路易絲·布爾喬亞

WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM.HK

MY OWN VOICE WAKES ME UP 26 MARCH – 11 MAY 2019

我聲喚我心 2019 年 3 月 26 日 –5 月 11 日

HONG KONG WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

豪瑟沃斯香港

U NTITLE D, 19 98 –2 0 14 , H O LO G R AM , 3 3 × 27. 9 C M / 13 × 11 I N , © TH E E A S TO N FO U N DATI O N/ VAG A AT ARS , N Y, PH OTO : MAT TH E W S C H R E I B E R 《無 題》, 1 9 98 –2 0 14 , 全息 影像, 3 3 X 27. 9 厘米 / 13 X 11 英寸, © 伊斯頓基金會/紐約 VAG A(ARS), 攝 影：MAT TH E W S C H R E I B E R

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

ArtReview Asia vol 7 no 1 Spring 2019

It’s complicated As Asia’s art scene braces itself for the glitz and razzamatazz of its biggest art fair, in Hong Kong, this issue focuses on questions of identity in some of the continent’s art scenes in the face of a globalised international art market (we preview the razzamatazz too, of course). More precisely, it’s not so much questions of identity but of how we deal with issues of complex or multiple identities, ideas of belonging and the ways in which we categorise or publicise cultural production. Deepa Bhasthi and Charu Nivedita describe how this plays out through the politics of language and justice respectively in India. An encounter between the work of Michael Lin and Richard Lin at Art Basel Hong Kong provides a platform for a consideration of the ways in which we might deal with art that does not necessarily fall into easy pigeonholes, and the more invisible ways in which intergenerational dialogue can happen. And on a more structural level, Max CrosbieJones looks at what Thailand’s recent spate of biennials and festivals reveal about art’s function and role within broader Thai society. Meanwhile Jeppe Ugelvig looks at the career of Chinese-American Tishan Hsu, which rose and fell and is now on the rise again, as he waited for technology to catch up with ideas (largely concerned with relations between the body and its environment) that were ahead of their time. Talking of time, ArtReview Asia’s very-much-older sister, ArtReview, has just celebrated its 70th birthday, in honour of which ArtReview Asia looks back to an interview with F.N. Souza, first published in 1966, in which the Indian artist describes his struggle for acceptance within the British artworld in terms of its critical, institutional and social circles. ‘My work should be easily understood in any country on the premise that art is universal,’ he barks. Half a century later, and despite the impression that art fairs might give you, it’s far from certain that this premise is correct. But then again, the experiences Souza recounts in swinging London suggest that the facts said otherwise even then. ArtReview Asia

Equivalences

13

RETURN TO NATURE 澡雪含章 MARCH 26 – MAY 18

2019 年 3 月 26 日至 5 月 18 日

L É V Y G O RV Y H O N G KO N G G RO U N D F LO O R, 2 I C E H O U S E ST R E E T, C E N T R A L , H O N G KO N G L E V YG O R V Y.C O M 香港中環雪廠街2號聖佐治大廈地舖 Wu Dayu, Untitled-35 (detail), Oil on canvas.

吳大羽，《無題-35》(局部)，油彩 畫布

Ryan Gander Some Other Life April 26 – June 15, 2019

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

BARBARA KRUGER LOUISE LAWLER JENNY HOLZER CINDY SHERMAN ASTRID KLEIN ROSEMARIE TROCKEL MARLENE DUMAS KARA WALKER MARCH 27 – APRIL 12, 2019 OPENING RECEPTION: MARCH 26, 6 – 8PM

SPRÜTH MAGERS H QUEEN’S 80 QUEEN’S ROAD CENTRAL HONG KONG

D06&B01, 798 Art District, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang Dst, Beijing, China

Art Previewed

Previews

by Nirmala Devi 29

Points of View

by Charu Nivedita, Deepa Bhasthi 49

Venice Pavilions

by Ben Eastham 44

Art Featured

Richard Lin & Michael Lin

by Mark Rappolt 58

Blast from the Past: F.N. Souza (1966)

by Barrie Sturt-Penrose 78

Tishan Hsu

by Jeppe Ugelvig 64

Artist Project

by Shirazeh Houshiary 84

All Thailand’s Biennials

by Max Crosbie-Jones 72

page 64 Tishan Hsu, Interface with Lips, 2002.

Courtesy Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

Spring 2019

23

Art Reviewed

exhibitions 92

books 104

9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, by Adeline Chia Cao Fei, by Wenny Teo Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018, by Emma Sumner Lucy Raven, by Joyce Roque Ng Joon Kiat, by Adeline Chia Minimalism: Space. Light. Object., by Mark Rappolt Taipei Biennial 2018, by Fi Churchman

Towards a Poetics of Opacity and Hauntology, by Im Heung-soon Guantánamo Kid, by Jérôme Tubiana and Alexandre Franc Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation and Criticism, edited by Katya García-Antón The Tempest Society, by Bouchra Khalili Pulp ii: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book, by Shubigi Rao Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–1998, edited by David Teh the tale that wagged the dog 110

page 92 Mao Ishikawa, Miyuki Higa, born in 1985. Distributor, 2012, inkjet print, 22 × 32 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nap Gallery, Tokyo

24

ArtReview Asia

MARY CORSE March 25 – May 11, 2019 2019 年 3 月25日至 5 月11日 12/F, H Queen’s H Queen’s 12 樓 80 Queen’s Road Central 香港中環皇后大道中 80 號

XIAO YU March 25 – May 11, 2019 2019 年 3 月25日至 5 月11日 15C, Entertainment Building 娛樂行 15 樓 C 30 Queen’s Road Central 香港中環皇后大道中 30 號

ART BASEL HONG KONG 香港

March 29 – 31, 2019 2019 年 3月29日至 3月31日 Booth 1C22 展位 1C22 featuring Mary Corse in Kabinett 於巴塞爾「策展角落」展區呈現瑪麗·闊思作品 Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre 香港會議展覽中心 1 Harbour Road 港灣道 1 號

Art Previewed

and mating all the time 27

Previewed Rituals of Signs and Metamorphosis Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing Through 7 Apr

Melbourne Winter Masterpieces National Gallery Victoria 24 May – 13 October

Elmgreen & Dragset Kukje Gallery, Seoul 21 March – 28 April

Ho Tzu Nyen Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong 26 March – 17 May

Navin Rawanchaikul Bangkok CityCity Gallery Through 7 April

Elmgreen & Dragset Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong 26 March – 28 April

Sharjah Biennial 14 Various venues, Sharjah Through 10 June

Backstage SG 2219: A Future Imagined Coda Culture, Singapore Through April

Julio Le Parc Perrotin, Hong Kong 25 March – 11 May

An Opera for Animals Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong 23 March – 9 June Tobias Rehberger Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai 23 March – 26 May

Form Colour Action Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong Through 29 June Performing Society: The Violence of Gender Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong Through 28 April

Jun Yang Kunsthaus Graz Through 19 May

Xu Zhen® Perrotin, Hong Kong 25 March – 11 May Erwin Wurm Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong 25 March – 11 May David Altmejd White Cube, Hong Kong 26 March – 18 May

Awakenings mmca Gwacheon Through 6 May

Neo Rauch David Zwirner, Hong Kong 26 March – 4 May

Radicalism in the Wilderness Japan Society, New York Through 9 June

Louise Bourgeois Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong 26 March – 11 May

Roppongi Crossing 2019 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo Through 26 May

Zhang Enli Galleria Borghese, Rome 9 April – 7 July

The Tale of Genji Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Through 16 June

Zhang Enli Chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai 22 March – 31 May

New Chinese Galleries Philadelphia Museum of Art Through 3 February 2021

Joyce Ho tkg+, Taipei Through 28 April 21 Erwin Wurm, Untitled, 2018, aluminium cast, brushed, 80 × 28 × 32 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong & Seoul

Spring 2019

29

The twelfth-century Kannada poet and saint Mahadeviyakka believed herself to be a woman in name only. She believed herself to be wedded, mind, body and soul, to Lord Shiva and devoted her life to trying to find him via the path to spiritual enlightenment. In the earthly world, however, people had other ideas. She appeared to be a woman and should play a woman’s role.

Under some duress she consented to be married to King Kaushika (although historical records are inconclusive on the matter of whether or not the wedding took place). She did this under a series of conditions, among them that she be allowed to continue her spiritual quest and be the sole arbiter of whether or not she preferred to converse with the gods or her husband in the material world. ‘My body is dirt, my spirit is space,’ she wrote in one of her vachanas, many of which, despite this pronouncement, slip equivocally between physically and spiritually erotic modes (‘O Siva/

when shall I/crush you on my pitcher breasts’). rather than simply by pure reason and received Perhaps, then, another way of asserting her wisdom. Mahadeviyakka would be down with theory of duality might be to say that language that, as would many of the global art instituis prescriptive; interpretation is limitless. tions currently tying themselves into knots in Curated by the Brussels-based Tarek Abou their attempts to construct a culturally relative El Fetouh and featuring ten artists from and art historical narrative. working within Asia (Ho Tzu Nyen, Hu The exhibition also features a new work 2 by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, The Xiaoyuan, Anish Kapoor, Tomoko Kashiki, Jawshing Arthur Liou, Taus Makhacheva, Mysterious Lai Teck (2018), which imagines the Park Chan-Kyong, Walid Raad, Chai Siris, life of the onetime leader of the Communist 1 Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Rituals of Signs Party of Malaya and shadowy triple agent (Teck and Metamorphosis, now entering its last is believed to have worked for the French, British month on view at Beijing’s Red Brick Museum, and Japanese governments) who operated under aims to explore how art can manipulate stana string of pseudonyms in Southeast Asia during the 1940s (Lai Teck, apparently derived from misdard systems of thinking to generate unpredictpronunciations of his party alias Wright, was able patterns of interpretation. For example, certainly not his birth name, which may have Raad’s and Makhacheva’s works explore how been Hoang A Nhac or Phȧm Văn Ðă´c). That different contexts and settings can change the work has evolved from Ho’s ongoing The Critical perception of historical artworks, while Park Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2012–), which looks looks at alternative histories of art as influenced at the history of the region through a series by mysticism, shamanism and hauntology,

1 Anish Kapoor, Descension, 2015, steel, water, motor, 500 × 500 cm.

Photo: Ela Bialkowska. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua, Beijing

2 Ho Tzu Nyen, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (still), 2017–, algorithmically composed video, loop.

Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue, Hong Kong

30

ArtReview Asia

3 Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 2019, multimedia installation in progress. Courtesy the artist and Sharjah Biennial 14

of narratives, characters or mythologies, the of The Critical Dictionary’s G for Gene Z. Hanrahan status of which is ambiguous or ill-defined. appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of the magaThe project as a whole (which is presented as a zine, the artist was on the cover in Spring 2017 series of evolving multimedia displays) interroand featured as a selector in the Future Greats gates the power of shared belief as much as it edition in the summer of that year, and that’s does the uncertain nature of ‘facts’. The latest not to list passing mentions, previews or instalment, Vol. 8: R for Rhombicuboctahedron, reviews). What’s important to note is that this which comprises lenticular prints and video, obsession is not simply a lonely dream about goes on show at Edouard Malingue Gallery, some ‘Lord, white as jasmine’ (as Mahadeviyakka Hong Kong, this March. Famously, Leonardo characterised Shiva, when she wasn’t dreaming da Vinci drew the first printed version of a rhom- of crushing him into her breasts); it’s shared bicuboctahedron (for Lucia Pacioli’s Divina in the real world too. Indeed, in addition to Proportione, c. 1495), a form that has found more the outing at Edouard Malingue, another part recent use in modelling software and the conof The Critical Dictionary, Vol. 4: R for Resonance 3 (2019), is currently on show as part of Sharjah struction of panoramic spheres, although that might be a complete red herring here. But neverBiennial 14. Titled Leaving the Echo Chamber theless appropriate given that red herrings are (a reference to the embedded feedback loop a diet on which Ho (as did Lai Tek) thrives. of contemporary forms of power and their Devotees of ArtReview Asia will have noticed reflection in various media), this edition of the magazine’s somewhat obsessive following the Emirati event falls into three discrete exhiof Ho’s career over the past six years (an iteration bitions, curated by Zoe Butt, artistic director

Spring 2019

of The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Ho Chi Minh City (in whose section Ho’s work can be found) and independent curators Omar Kholeif and Claire Tancons. Linking the three shows, each of which argues, in its own ways and through its own geographies, for exchange and diversity in contemporary culture, are a series of questions: ‘What does it mean to demand alternate images at a time when news is spoonfed to us by a monopoly of sources? How do we expand our narratives by acknowledging what has been hidden or removed? How can we reflect on our own culturally located histories in an era when so many individuals have been forced to believe that they must surrender their own agency to the mainstream forces that exist and govern our world?’ Mahadeviyakka would approve, as, it seems, would the organisers of the majority of exhibitions previewed here.

Not content with the Edouard Malingue exhibition, over at Hong Kong’s leading

31

4 Yee I-Lann, The Ch’i_lin Of Calauit, 2005.

Courtesy the artist and Para Site, Hong Kong

5 Tobias Rehberger, Jorge Pardo, 1995, coloured glass, long-stemmed tiger lily orchids, 54 × 20 cm (diameter).

Courtesy the artist

not-for-profit, Para Site, Ho is part of the group Look out also for contributions by octogenarian 4 exhibition An Opera for Animals. The show Colombian Beatriz González and Russian collective Chto Delat as well as the wayang attempts to combine the artifice of opera (both kulit-influenced work of Indonesian Heri in its Eastern and Western modes) and the Dono. Furthermore, in the spirit of mystery, deployment of animals as bearers of allegorical the exhibition is being trailed as a ‘prelude’ and metaphorical meaning in contemporary to a two-exhibition partnership with the culture (ArtReview Asia doesn’t really need to Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, details develop a conceit to organise these previews of which will be announced at some unspecified any more; for all its insistence on its intrinsic time after this magazine has gone to print. plurality, the artworld is clearly capable of Over at the Rockbund (since Para Site mendoing that for itself). The aim: to expose and tions it and ArtReview Asia has abandoned all move beyond the boundaries that govern our 5 conceits), Tobias Rehberger’s first institutional current reality, whether they be official and solo-show in Asia, titled if you don’t use your eyes unofficial, virtual and real, etc. Naturally given to see, you will use them to cry, is filling the art-deco that much of his recent work, in the form of building. The German’s previous works include video and performance, has explored the portraits of fellow artists in the form of vases traditions of Cantonese Opera (entangled with histories of twentieth-century cinema and sci-fi), (he designs or finds them; the subjects choose the flowers), copies of iconic sports cars from Ho’s fellow Singaporean Ming Wong is a part memory (sketched and then sent to overseas of this, as is Hong Kong’s preeminent sound manufacturers who produce drivable versions), 6 (and sound-inspired) artist, Samson Young.

32

ArtReview Asia

cookery (often with fellow-traveller Rirkrit Tiravanija) and a permanently snow-filled Japanese garden installed in the middle of Manhattan during the summer, so while he’s often described as a ‘sculptor’, that needs to be understood in the most expansive definition (incorporating architecture, design, global economics) of the word possible. Among other things, the Rockbund will feature a groundfloor butcher’s shop complete with a moon globe echoing the lunar phases as witnessed from La Rubia, Santa Fe Province, Argentina (the antipode to the mountain ranges near Shanghai), almost all the portrait vases and a teahouse. Three floors up, and thrust into the bosom of uncertainty, you won’t be sure where you are or who you’re dealing with, but presumably that’s because you’ll be looking rather than weeping, and so it’s a good thing.

How do you take all that a step further?

Ask Jun Yang whose first major solo show

BEXCO EXHIBITION CENTER 1

ART BUSAN 2019 05.31 — 06.02 INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR

VIP PREVIEW 5.30

info@artbusankorea.com www.artbusankorea.com

in Austria is on view at the Kunsthaus Graz.

Graz itself and promote ‘its focus on relating Titled The Artist, the Work and the Exhibition, it Austria to other parts of the world and investisees the artist dealing with the prescriptions gating those cultural interdependencies that of language and how to escape them. Yang was transcend the territorial boundaries of a state born in China, emigrated with his parents to and challenge national boundaries’. Again, Vienna aged four and now lives between the it’s a shame Austria’s government isn’t doing Austrian capital, Taipei and Yokohama. His the same.

If Yang’s show highlights the disconnect work is about stereotypes, the politics of fixed between art (and its institutions) and society, identities (not least those that concern being then the opposite is being explored in Chinese or being Austrian) and how to elude them (something that Austria and its current 7 Awakenings: Art and Society in Asia 1960s– 1990s at the National Museum of Modern and far-right government is finding hard to do Contemporary Art, Korea’s Gwacheon outpost. right now), so naturally the stereotypical idea The exhibition, which is broken down into of a solo exhibition itself becomes the object three chapters (‘Questioning Structures’, of study here. Thus, Yang’s show incorporates ‘Artists and Cities’ and ‘New Solidarities’), a group exhibition featuring other artists with is as large as the subject, featuring 170 artworks whom Yang has a connection, among them by more than 100 artists from 13 countries Lee Kit, Paul McCarthy/Mike Kelley and Koki across East, South and Southeast Asia, and Tanaka, but also Jun Yang, a Korea-born artist examining a period marked by the ideological based in San Francisco (an extension of the 2015 conflicts of the Cold War and the conflicting work Jun Yang Meets Jun Yang, which premiered at the Times Museum in Guangzhou). All of this, pressures of modernisation, nationalism and democratisation (yes, Lai Teck territory). of course, is designed to position the Kunsthaus

Among the featured artists are Kim Kulim, Nalini Malani, Tang Da Wu, Zhang Huan, Matsuzawa Yutaka and Wong Hoi Cheong, as well as collectives such as Korea’s Fourth Group, Japan’s The Play and China’s Beijing East Village (expect them to come into focus in the exhibition’s final chapter). Among the promises of the exhibition are the retelling of art history from a non-Western perspective and the documentation of new emerging senses of subjectivity across the continent at this time. More interesting will be the similarities and differences between the ways in which profound social change (or a lack of it) affected the arts in the countries covered. It’s tempting to see notions of decolonisation only in the context of East versus West, but this exhibition, despite its allusions to various types of pan-Asianism, might also be a chance to explore the ways in which inter-Asian colonisation impacted art. If you don’t manage to see all of it in Korea, the exhibition travels to the National Gallery Singapore in the summer (14 June – 15 September).

6 Jun Yang, sm 01 – 80, 1997, photo booth pictures. © the artist.

Courtesy Museum Joanneum, Graz

7 Kim Kulim, The Meaning of 1 / 24 Second, 1969, film transferred to digital, colour and b/w, silent, 10 min. Courtesy the artist and mmca Gwacheon

34

ArtReview Asia

8 Matsuzawa Yutaka, Invitation to Psi Zashiki Room, 1963, exhibition postcard, 10 × 14 cm. Courtesy Japan Society, New York

10 ‘The Death of Genji’, from The Tale of Genji: Dreams at Dawn by Yamato Waki, 1980–93, ink and colour on paper. © Yamato Waki/Kodansha Ltd

9 Hayashi Chiho, Artificial Lover & True Love, 2016–19, video installation.

Courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

For those of you on the other side of the world, Osaka-based The Play and Buddhisminspired conceptualist Matsuzawa are also part 8 of Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s, now on show at the New York branch of Japan Society. Evolved from New York-based independent scholar and curator Reiko Tomii’s awardwinning book Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (2016), and cocurated by the author and Japan Society’s gallery director, Yukie Kamiya, the exhibition aims to fit the missing pieces between the now prominent (for which read market-successful) Gutai group of the 1950s and Mono-ha of the 1970s. Each of the groups included in this show (among them also Niigata-based gun) worked outside of the artistic mainstream (often literally beyond Japan’s major conurbations) and sought to produce work that was informed by contemporary events. In 1969, for example,

36

gun member Horikawa Michio mailed 11 stones collected along the Shinano River in response to Apollo 11’s moon landing, presumably in an attempt to draw attention to what was going on back on earth (among which one might count the Vietnam War and the student demonstrations that coalesced around the events of May 1968). Matsuzawa on the other hand 10 was more interested in the complete dematerialisation of art and the practice of ‘meditative visualisation’. It’s not clear if he ever used that in an attempt to seduce a god.

By now you’ll have got a sore neck from all that looking backwards. So let’s turn from Japan then to Japan now and the latest iteration of the 9 Mori Art Museum’s Roppongi Crossing series.

Launched in 2004, the triennial exhibition series offers a snapshot of ‘Japan as it is today’, albeit through the eyes of artists. Titled Connexions, this edition offers robot lovers (Hayashi Chiho), a feline Olympics (Takekawa Nobuaki) and cloth-

ArtReview Asia

ing that morphs at body temperature (fashion label anrealage in collaboration with the University of Tokyo’s Kawahara Laboratory), and promises to make Horikawa’s lunarlanding-inspired efforts of the late 1960s truly seem like a relic from the Stone Age. Over in New York, however, more traditionally Japanese culture is all the rage. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated traces the legacy, in terms of the visual arts, of the more than 1,000-year-old story written by Murasaki Shikibu. For Yasunari Kawabata, The Tale was the greatest work of Japanese literature ever written; for Jorge Louis Borges it was the world’s first psychological novel. At the Met it is the source material for over 120 works of art (many of them rarely shown outside Japan), including paintings, calligraphy, lacquerware, costumes, furniture, prints, old and contemporary manga (the latter by Waki Yamato) and

even a palanquin. Sound like an American view 12 National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Winter of the East as a place stuck in the past? Perhaps.

Masterpieces series, the institution will present a largescale display of the Qin Emperor’s But expect the spin at the Met to be on The Tale’s Terracotta Warriors alongside a series of new feminist aspects and to give prominence to the works by Cai Guo-Qiang. The rust-coloured female artists who have interpreted it. Whether soldiers (eight of them, plus two lifesize horses that makes the past contemporary or provides and two half-size replica bronze chariots, so a sorry indictment of what’s happened over the more of a scouting party than an army, albeit past millennium is another question altogether. they will be supported by 150 ‘treasures’ from But while you’re chewing on that, you might Shaanxi) will encounter 10,000 suspended want to pop down to the Philadelphia Museum 11 of Art and visit the New Chinese Galleries, porcelain birds (spiralling to create a threedimensional interpretation of a drawing of where not one millennium, but a mighty four the site of the first Emperor’s tomb on Mount Li) millennia of artworks (including dog cages, and porcelain peonies placed in the middle of snuff boxes, temple guardians, imperial robes, a 360-degree gunpowder drawing. Presumably ink paintings and contemporary landscape phothe trade between these objects, separated by tography) have been newly installed. It’s not two millennia, is that the old are rejuvenated often you can deploy the word ‘new’ in conjuncwhile the new gain deep roots in a tradition. tion with objects that are several thousand years Also paying tribute to his roots, albeit in a old, so let’s make the most of it.

13 more personal fashion, is Navin Rawanchaikul, Down in Melbourne they’re playing the same game by different rules. As part of the whose exhibition Revisited <> Departed at Bangkok

CityCity Gallery is – somewhat incredibly – the Chiang Mai-based artist’s first showing in the Thai capital in over a decade. Rawanchaikul (who is of Punjabi descent) rose to international prominence through a series of works that explored cultural and ethnic stereotypes during the late 1990s. The current exhibition includes elements from Rawanchaikul’s A Tale of Two Homes (2015), a semiarchival investigation (comprising found objects, paintings and videos) of the detritus of his boyhood home, located above his family’s textile business in Chiang Mai (and originally exhibited onsite), together with new works that circle around three letters Rawanchaikul wrote to his teacher, the late Thai artist Montien Boonma, in 2010, 2013 and 2018 (10, 13 and 18 years after the latter’s death respectively). Expect a confluence of ghosts and shells that Mahadeviyakka would appreciate.

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Singapore’s most interesting artist-run space, Coda Culture

13 Navin Rawanchaikul, O.K. Store, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 30 unique pieces, 40 × 55 cm (each).

Courtesy the artist, Navin Production – Studiok and Bangkok CityCity Gallery

12 Armoured official, Qin Dynasty (221–207 bce), earthenware, 190 × 56 × 58 cm. © Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an

11 Zhou Shichen and Cao Xi, Orchids and Rocks, 1606, Wanli Period (1573–1620), ink on paper, mounted as a handscroll, 31 × 222 cm. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

Spring 2019

37

16 Lee Wen, The Land of Oblivion (detail), 1990, sketchbook. © Lee Wen Archive / Asia Art Archive. Courtesy the artist

15 Jeremy Hiah, Renaissance City Mona Lisa, 2012, oil, led lights, audio and electronics on canvas.

Courtesy the artist

(Singaporean artist Seelan Palay is the artist who runs it), is dedicated to showcasing the work of Singapore artists who for one reason or another struggle for visibility on the country’s state-run or commercial art platforms. Located in the Golden Mile Complex (incidentally a meeting point for the city-state’s ethnic Thai population – see? the conceits really are redundant), the space offers monthly exhibitions that in March and April look first backward and then forward (more ghosts and shells). First up in March is 14 Backstage, an exhibition (copresented with another offspace, Your mother Gallery) devoted to the space’s booth-that-wasn’t (paid for by Coda’s benefactors) following the late cancellation of this past January’s edition of Art Stage Singapore. Then, in April, the space 15 will host sg 2219: A Future Imagined, in response to this year’s bicentennial of British colonialist Sir Stamford Raffles’s ‘founding’ of a settlement that eventually became Singapore following

38

a rudimentary treaty with the local chiefs and festivals and archives dedicated to promoting transfer of control of the island to the East India performance in the Southeast Asian region.

Company. The Shah of Jahor got £5,000 per It’s appropriate then that Hong Kong’s Asia year and the local Temenggong, £3,000. EveryArt Archive is currently staging a display of 16 Lee’s own archives, titled Form Colour Action, one won. What’s not to celebrate? At Coda, in the form of sketchbooks and notebooks artists will imagine what Singapore might look like 200 years from now. See the space’s produced between 1978 and 2016.

Facebook page for more details.

And so, seamlessly and without much March saw the passing of one of Singapore’s invocation of older sisters, we’re back in Hong pioneer artists, Lee Wen, best known for his Kong, where, for some time, Art Basel Hong Kong, together with a growing slurry of performances (particularly his Yellow Man persona, for which he painted his body yellow commercial galleries and a sliver of not-forto highlight and explore racial stereotyping profits, was the only game in town at this time and its embedded nature in Singaporean society, of year. Now Tai Kwun Contemporary, which and Orientalism more generally). A former launched last year, has arrived, turning that bank officer, Lee quit his job to devote himself sliver of not-for-profits into a slice. Having presented Cao Fei’s first Asian museum show to art studies after meeting artist Tang Da Wu, (see reviews), in collaboration with ucca eventually moving to the Artists Village, which Beijing, it’s now hosting a group show, the latter had set up in 1988, to provide a space in which members could pursue experimental 17 Performing Society: The Violence of Gender, curated by Susanne Pfeffer and produced art. Beyond his own work, Lee went on to set up

ArtReview Asia

in collaboration with the mmk Frankfurt (which Pfeffer directs). The exhibition includes work

by Dong Jinling, Jana Euler, Anne Imhof, Oliver Laric, Liu Yefu, Ma Qiusha, Julia Phillips, Pamela Rosenkranz, Marianna Simnett, Raphaela Vogel and Wong Ping, and aims at exposing the structural violence caused by the symbolic, cultural and physical boundaries of gender.

The older sister, who had particular views about the deployment of gender as a restriction on spiritual life (despite her obsession with her breasts, she thought that gender was irrelevant), would approve.

Danish and Norwegian respectively, Michael 18 Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have made a career out of subverting norms and stereotypes.

Their debut exhibition at Kukje Gallery, titled Adaptations, will include an expansive array of works, among them their adapted street signs

(Adaptations), which contain no instructional devices, just polished surfaces that reflect (rather than restrict) the surrounding environment, sections of asphalt in which road markings have 19 been replaced with patterns reminiscent of geometric abstraction (Highway Paintings) and the latest in their series of inverted bars (Looped Bars), in which the beer taps face the drinker rather than the server. After this exercise in inverting or subverting accepted boundaries and conventions, Elmgreen & Dragset move on to the Massimo De Carlo gallery in Hong Kong (where evidently subverting norms is all the rage). This third-floor space will be transformed into an underground 20 boiler room via an installation titled Overheated (2019). You could say it’s an apt metaphor for what’s been going on in the upper echelons of the art market (and the globalised financial markets on which Hong Kong has built its current image).

Over at Emmanuel Perrotin’s Hong Kong gallery you can see some genuine geometrical abstraction in the work of France-based Argentinian Julio Le Parc. The nonagenarian won the International Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale back in 1966 and is a pioneer of both Op and kinetic art (often incorporating the two at once). His work deploys light, colour (although black and white constitute his most famous modus operandi) and motion to manipulate the perceptions of viewers, often as they move around the work.

At the other end of the spectrum, the gallery also hosts a solo show by Xu Zhen® (the Shanghaibased artist became the brand MadeIn Company in 2009, launching the sub-brand Xu Zhen® in 2013 – a contemporary interpretation, if you like, of Mahadeviyakka’s attempts to escape from her physical form), featuring his at-once delirious,

17 Wong Ping, Who’s the Daddy, 2017, single-channel animation, 9 min 15 sec.

Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong

18 Elmgreen & Dragset, Adaptations, 2018 (installation view).

Photo: Elmar Vestner. Courtesy the artists and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

40

ArtReview Asia

23 Neo Rauch, Der Aufschneider, 2018, oil on canvas, 40 × 50 cm. © the artist and vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn

22 David Altmejd, Student (detail), 2018, mixed media, 79 × 43 × 46 cm.

Photo: Lance Brewer. © the artist

decayed and glamorous accumulations of culmusic video Can’t Stop. Wurm will also present work that is very much his own in the form tural products in the form of three series of of his equally absurd Abstract Sculptures series, works: Under Heaven, Eternity and Evolution. in which groups of sausages (standard Austrian Around the corner, at Lehmann Maupin diet) are formed into polished metal sculp21 Hong Kong, Austrian Erwin Wurm is bringing his own brand of subversive humour to the tures that mimic human forms and gestures. sar. Naturally the show will include iterations Naturally there’s a phallic reference at play of his One Minute Sculptures, a participatory here too, which might act as a comic counterpoint to the exhibition at Tai Kwun. Then project (here visitors, following the artist’s instructions, will be invited to purposely pose again, and as with most things, this could with domestic goods, their action captured depend on your point of view. on Polaroid so that they become one of his, The body is also the subject of David 22 or their own – it’s ambiguous – sculptures).

Altmejd’s debut exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, which features a new group of As well as playing with traditional notions head and bust sculptures. Altmejd, who repreof art’s purposelessness, the works broadly anticipate the rise of selfie culture (which sented Canada at the 2007 Venice Biennale, is will no doubt be on show among visitors to Art best known for his accumulations of symbolic, Basel Hong Kong) and proved an inspiration natural (rocks and crystals) and mythological objects (werewolf heads have long been a for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in their 2002

Spring 2019

favourite), often exhibited in museum-style vitrines. In general his work questions how we look at and represent the world (bang-on with Hong Kong’s illicit theme, then). His lifesize heads incorporate clumps of hair, pieces of fruit, chunks of mineral and references to art historical movements that disrupt any sense of natural order and is part horror show and part freakshow.

The surreal also plays a role in the paintings 23 of Neo Rauch, on show at David Zwirner’s Hong Kong outpost. Rauch was born in Leipzig (and celebrated as a key figure in what some term the New Leipzig School of painting), and his figurative tableaux suggest a particular fusion of socialist realism and expressionism that in some ways suited the contrasts within a reunified Germany: familiar yet mysterious, significant yet without immediately obvious meaning.

Appropriately the exhibition is titled Propaganda.

41

24

The late Louise Bourgeois has reached the kind of superstar status where she can 25 dispense with any of the last (it’s already exhausted itself). As her touring survey Louise Bourgeois: The Eternal Thread touches down at Beijing’s Song Art Museum, Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong presents My Own Voice Wakes Me Up, a selection of her works from the final 20 years of her life (she died in 2010), including works on paper, fabric sculptures and some rarely seen holograms. Bourgeois’s ceaseless probing of the relation between her psychic and physical states (and the title of the show) is certainly something that would also resonate with Mahadeviyakka: expect more of it here.

To those of you who are beginning to wonder about the invasion of the East Asian art scene by artists from the West, fear not: it works both 26

ways. Sort of. In any case, at the Galleria Borghese in Rome you’ll find the latest iteration of Shanghai-based painter Zhang Enli’s sitespecific painting. Set in the Uccelliera (aviary) and adjacent Giardino segreto di Tramontana, Enli’s works play with notions of historical time, geographical distance, the real and the artificial, and the context of the Galleria’s contents (not least works by Titian, Bellini, Caravaggio and Bernini) and immediate surroundings, to create another hybrid space within the space of the exhibition. Not content with that, Enli also has an exhibition on home turf at the Chi K11 Art Museum in Shanghai, where his work will be side-by-side with a concurrent solo exhibition of work by Oscar Murillo.

We began (assuming you still remember) with language and so we’ll end with it too. Joyce Ho’s

current solo show (at tkg+ in Taipei) is titled no on, inviting a confusion of interpretation: read quickly it might mean noon, deliberately no and on, confusingly no one without an e. Such slippages of symbol and interpretation are what Ho’s work is founded on. For example, Balancing Act (2018), a sculpture comprising two sections of metal fencing atop rocking-horse rockers (last seen as part of ArtReview Asia’s Xiàn Chǎng section at last year’s West Bund Art & Design fair in Shanghai), signals an emphatic end to a path, and an invitation to push forward and play. You might describe it as a performative version of Elmgreen & Dragset’s road signs, but Ho has her own language. Expect more barriers, flickering billboard lights and levitating tablecloths in the total environment she creates in Taipei. Interpret that as you wish. Nirmala Devi

24 Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1998–2014, hologram, 33 × 28 cm. Photo: Matthew Schreiber. © The Easton Foundation/vaga at ars, New York.

Courtesy The Easton Foundation and Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong

25 Zhang Enli, Toilet Copia, 2005, oil on canvas. Courtesy Shanghart, Shanghai & Singapore, and Hauser & Wirth, London

26 Joyce Ho, Reception, 2019, mixed-media kinetic installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and tkg+, Taipei

42

ArtReview Asia

Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle

Thomas Ruff Apr 05 – Jun 01, 2019 Amalienstrasse 41 80799 Munich / Art Basel Hong Kong Booth 1D35 Mar 29 – 31, 2019 Anders Clausen Candida Höfer Ma Ke Goshka Macuga Thomas Struth Thu Van Tran Chen Wei

Venice Previewed

New Zealand Pavilion Dane Mitchell, Post Hoc, 2019, digital preparatory drawing. Courtesy the artist

Republic of Korea Pavilion Jane Jin Kaisen, Community of Parting, 2019, film still. Courtesy the artist

44

ArtReview Asia

As Liz Kim wrote in the last edition of this magazine, ‘nowhere in the world has the #MeToo movement had a more tangible impact than in South Korea’. So it’s apt that curator Hyunjin Kim has selected three female artists to create a pavilion that aims to challenge the hierarchies of gender and power exposed by recent revelations in public life in the country.

Titled History Has Failed Us, but No Matter (taken from Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel Pachinko), Hwayeon Nam, siren eun young jung and Jane Jin Kaisen will use performance, film and video to reimagine East Asia’s historical narratives ‘through the lens of gender diversity’. About time too.

Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 for the Taiwan Pavilion is no less pointedly titled. Situated in the sixteenth-century prison Palazzo delle Prigioni, the project takes its name from the standard metrical volume of cells and uses ten case histories of incarceration ‘due to gender, sexual, and racial nonconformity’, among them Casanova, Foucault and de Sade, to explore histories of confinement and control.

A combination of video, installation and computer programming will create a ‘maze’ of branching narratives through which the visitor will have to navigate their own path aiming, according to curator Paul B. Preciado, to ‘invent new ways of feeling and desiring’

and undermining normative assumptions about what is ‘natural’ and what is constructed.

It is not only in the field of sexuality and gender that such boundaries are being challenged; the meaninglessness of any distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’ disasters in the era of climate change has nowhere been made clearer than in Japan. Reflecting on the series of catastrophes suffered by his country in recent years, Motoyuki Shitamichi’s Cosmo-Eggs takes for a starting point the ‘tsunami stones’ he first encountered in Okinawa in 2015. These rocks are imagined as repositories of memory ‘like public squares or monuments’, according to the artist, who is working with composer Taro Yasuno, anthropologist Toshiaki Ishikura and architect Fuminori Nousaku to create an environment conducive to their contemplation. In his ecstatic prose poems Roger Caillois famously called stones ‘l’orée du songe’ (the shore of dreaming); Shitamichi’s are likely to prompt more sober reflections on the world in which we live.

Disaster also haunts the work of Dane Mitchell for the New Zealand Pavilion.

Having waded through some statements of intent which are vague even by the Biennale’s standards (‘exploring how different forms of knowledge can intersect across the visible and the invisible, the sculptural project will be

simultaneously present whilst hiding in plain sight’) you discover that the project is a soundwork: ‘an automated broadcast of the vast lists of things which have disappeared or become extinct’ transmitted by cell-phone towers positioned across the city and disguised as trees.

Titled Post hoc, the project is (one among many at the Biennale) devoted to what has been lost in ‘a time of afterness: after nature, after extinction, after the Anthropocene’.

How we relate to and imagine our disintegrating physical landscape is also the subject of Mark Justiniani’s project for the Philippines Pavilion. Island Weather will explore the different ways that the island ‘can be perceived and imagined: by evoking its geophysical characteristics, reflecting on how humans regard it as a place of origin, refuge, respite, or a location that may refer to the nation itself’. Shaped by themes of travel, colonialism, acts of seeing and frameworks of truth, the pavilion will showcase the longstanding interest of the artist – who has worked with activist groups and artist initiatives including abay (Artista ng Bayan) and the collective Sanggawa – in how perception shapes our understanding of reality. The histories of maritime exploration, empire and trade also shape Naiza Khan’s project for the Pakistan Pavilion. In a new work titled Manora Field Notes,

Republic of Korea Pavilion Hwayeon Nam, Dancer from the Peninsula (still), 2019, multichannel video installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

Spring 2019

45

Singapore Pavilion Song-Ming Ang, Recorder Rewrite, 2019, film still. Courtesy the artist

the artist will delve into the history of the island of Manora, located off the coast of Karachi.

The role of culture in nation-building, meanwhile, finds a more direct expression in India’s first pavilion since 2011 (and only its second ever), which will be devoted to the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. The artists are yet to be announced, yet the curatorial team from Kiran Nadar Museum of Art promise that Our Time for a Future Caring will use the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth as an opportunity to reflect upon teachings that are ‘difficult to ignore in an increasingly violent and intolerant world’.

Hope and despair might be expected to · commingle in Inci Eviner’s installation for Turkey’s pavilion, which is addressed to the suffering caused by the displacement of populations from their native country. Aspiring to ‘evoke the sense of a search for the missing, the erased and that which is elsewhere’, the artist will fill the space with architectural elements that guide visitors towards encounters with displaced people and objects. Few places in the developed world are as hostile in their policies towards undocumented migrants as Australia, and so Angelica Mesiti’s promises to use harmony, disharmony and polyphony as metaphors for the coexistence of different voices in a civil society might be understood

46

as an oblique form of protest. The artist, who has previously used large-screen videoworks to reflect on nonverbal communication from whistling to dance, describes assembly as a ‘poetic, nuanced’ call for greater tolerance of difference. The pavilion is one of several at the Biennale to use sound as a means of addressing politics (an approach by analogy that is likely to be shared, in lieu of any more information at time of going to press and if her recent work is a guide, by sculptor Shirley Tse’s new site-specific installation for the Hong Kong Pavilion).

Song-Ming Ang’s sound-based Music for Everyone: Variations on a Theme at the Singapore Pavilion, for example, will use music as ‘a platform to explore ideas of public involvement’. The title derives from a series of concerts organised by Singapore’s Ministry of Culture in the 1970s and 1980s to promote wider engagement with ‘high’ art, while a new work entitled Recorder Rewrite will use the educational history of the humble wind instrument in Singaporean schools to reflect upon, you would imagine, the entanglement of culture and national identity in a recently independent country. A new version of the artist’s You and I will require Ang, if ArtReview Asia understands correctly, to create a personalised mix-tape for anyone who takes the time to write him a letter. Which sounds time-consuming.

ArtReview Asia

Talking about national cultures, music and time, E. Jantsankhorol is building an environment entitled (wait for it) a temporality for the Mongolian Pavilion.

A makeshift recording studio, it will allow artists inspired by throat singing – which originated in south Mongolia – to record and install sounds in the space over the course of the Biennale. Among the artists invited to interact is Carsten Nicolai, who has been working with throat singers in Ulaanbaatar.

At time of press, a number of countries were keeping their powder dry – neither China nor Thailand had released any information beyond the names of participating artists – yet the prize for this year’s most difficultto-envision-for-critics-trying-to-write-a-blindpreview pavilion goes to Indonesia on the strength of a press release announcing that Handiwirman Saputra and Syagini Ratna Wulan are creating an immersive installation featuring ‘a functioning Ferris wheel that visitors can ride, a smoking room and 400 lockers’. At the end of days spent traipsing round a sinking city and avoiding eye contact with other members of the artworld, the prospect of a place to drop your bags, a sedate fairground ride and a room in which to smoke unmolested sounds like a dream. Ben Eastham

miart

5 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 7 april 2019 preview 4 april

milan

international modern and contemporary art fair main partners

under the patronage of

sponsors

partners

miartalks powered by

media partner

international media partner

online exclusively on

official guide

Points of View

Enrique Cárdenas, the protagonist in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel The Neighborhood (2018) is a millionaire. In the 1980s, during the tumultuous years of Alberto Fujimori’s presidency of Peru, Enrique ends up in prison, having been charged with murder. As soon as he steps into the murky prison, a figure who can’t be identified in the darkness forces him to perform a blowjob.

“Guard! Guard!” screams the millionaire to no avail.

“You were lucky that I came forward. If those blacks over there get you and take you to their corner, they will pull down your trousers, put a little Vaseline in your asshole, and line up to fuck you for as long as they want. And that wouldn’t be the worst, because at least one of them has aids. But don’t worry, as long as I protect you, nobody will touch you. I’m the law here, white boy,” says the mysterious figure.

This is how the Indian prisons too function.

The only difference would be that in India, if you are rich, you have the luxury of customising the prison according to your convenience. It is expensive, but doable. A similar atmosphere to Llosa’s prison would likely be found in another of India’s merciless places: orphanages that host kids abandoned by their parents.

Rekha grew up in one such orphanage. When she was fourteen years old, she was adopted by a family in Bangalore. After serving as a maid in their house for about two years, she comes to know that she is stuck with a human-trafficking gang that illegally transports women to a brothel in Mumbai. She tries to escape. The gang chases her down and stabs her with a knife. In the resulting altercation, Rekha grabs the knife from her attacker and stabs him in the hollow of his neck.

One of the attackers dies and two others are critically injured. Rekha faints in the sea of blood. Passersby inform the police. The police arrive and look at Rekha lying in a pool of blood.

They conclude that she is dead and send her

notes from madras For Charu Nivedita, the tale of a kidnapperturned-playwright demonstrates why India’s justice system should consider incarceration as a road to reform

Spring 2019

body to the morgue. A medical examiner there discovers that she is still alive and rescues her.

Rekha pleads guilty to the murder. She must have been seventeen years old then. But since she grew up in an orphanage, she does not have a birth certificate to prove her age.

Based on the results of a bone-age test, the court ascertains that she must be eighteen years old.

She is tried in court as an adult and sentenced to life imprisonment. It is in prison that Rekha meets Anburaj during a drama rehearsal.

Who is Anburaj? He was a member of ‘Sandalwood’ Veerappan’s gang. Veerappan (1952–2004) was a dacoit, who was active for nearly 30 years kidnapping, murdering and ivoryand-sandalwood smuggling in the forests of the southern Indian states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. In 2004 he was caught by the police.

Anburaj is arrested for kidnapping forest officers and is sentenced to life imprisonment in 1997.

He marries Rekha in the prison itself. Anburaj is a school dropout, having studied only up to seventh grade. When he walks out of prison in 2016 after his sentence is commuted (because of good behaviour and India’s 70th anniversary celebrations) he had turned thirty-six.

Anburaj cites atrocities committed by the police who came in search of Veerappan as his reason to join the latter’s gang. Even though he was with Veerappan, Anburaj says that he did not approve of all his actions. For instance, in one of Veerappan’s operations, Anburaj comes to know only the next day that a ten-year-old boy was murdered. He gets upset and neither of them talk to each other for a few days. Anburaj states that Veerappan would have murdered at least 70 people during his time in the forests. But when asked if he thought Veerappan was a good man, he says, “When you consider our society’s current moral standards on one hand and compare him with the policeman on the other, I can conveniently say that Veerappan was a good man.”

49

Anburaj describes how criminal investigations and inquiries are conducted in prison.

“As soon as I got arrested, along with three other people, I was taken into police custody for an inquiry after a petition with the court.

There is a torture cell in Madheswaran Malai called ‘The Workshop’, which is under the control of Special Task Force. I was taken to ‘The Workshop’. I was held in the same room and in the same circumstances as a few other men and women who were kept naked for more than 15 days. They tied the prisoners upside down; their finger- and toenails were torn out by pliers. The police officers forced the prisoners to have sex in front of 20 other people even subjecting a father to do it with his daughter, a sister with her brother and a mother with her son. The prisoners were tortured by passing an electric current through wires that were tied to their hands, legs and genitals. They gradually increased the intensity of the electric current.

I was subjected to such tortures too. Unable to bear its intensity, my body and limbs would twist in the opposite direction. It would take hours for my body to come back to normal. They

would just give us water. We all had to urinate and shit in the same room. Even today, you can notice two circular scars on the back of my heel.

Those were mementos from ‘The Workshop’.”

When Anburaj was asked if he thought that his sentence was not justified, he said: “I don’t think like that. I was convicted of kidnapping. But I feel that the length of imprisonment was too long.”

On the subject of his co-inmates, Anburaj had the following to say: “When I was in Salem prison, I met Chako, a prisoner from Kerala. He was convicted for molesting children and murdering them by slamming them against a wall. But he had no guilt about his actions. In fact, he argued his case quite remarkably by himself in the court and never needed a lawyer. Chako was sure that he would be sentenced in both Salem Court and High Court, but would get acquitted in Supreme Court. There was a casualness to his attitude. Events turned out exactly the way he had predicted.

“Similarly there was a mentally challenged prisoner, by the name of Venkatesh. Sometimes

Anburaj performing, alongside other inmates from Mysuru Prison, in theatre group Sankalpa’s production of Anton Chekov’s Ward Number 6, 2012.

Courtesy @Anburaj15215193 / Twitter

50

ArtReview Asia

the officials would keep me in custody along with mentally challenged prisoners. Those prisoners would be given antidepressants and kept sedated for several hours in a day.

The prisoners peed and shat right where they slept. The room smelled really bad all the time.

It was there that I met Venkatesh. He was very affectionate towards me. He force-fed me with his share of morning breakfast too. One day, an officer had bashed me in front of him. The next day he waited with a bowl filled with his faeces mixed with water. When the officer came for his rounds, he threw the contents of the bowl right on his face.

“On cold days, the sunlight entered our room through a window and warmed a particular spot in our room in the shape of a triangle.

We took turns in threes and would stand in that spot to warm up our bodies. Venkatesh didn’t turn up that day. When I went to check on him, he was seated in a corner with his head bent in between his legs and hands over his head. When I tried to wake him up, he just fell on the floor. He had passed away the previous night itself; the ants had eaten up his eyes completely by morning. The empty eye sockets were filled with blood and water. I can’t forget that friendship even today. His death had shaken me beyond words.”

When asked if he still had faith in the presentday government and justice system, he said: “Had I possessed ten lakh rupees, I doubt if I would have had to suffer such a long term of imprisonment. I don’t have any big faith in the present government. Even after the recommendations of the Sadashiva Commission – even after the High Court judgment, compensation has not been disbursed to the ones that were affected in the search operations. None of the guilty police officers have been punished yet. Even in some cases where compensation was awarded, the officers who raped the women in the first place were themselves sent to hand over the money to them. There are instances where the women refused to take the compensation from the hands of those guilty officers.”

Anburaj quotes another incident to show how the judiciary functions in India.

“When I was handed a copy of the charge sheet by the Kollegal Court, I requested a copy in Tamil so that I could read and understand it.

The judge said that it was impossible to give a copy in Tamil. When I said that I must know the reason for charging me, a female magistrate in the courtroom threw a paperweight at me simply because I was Veerappan’s accomplice.

I moved aside to avoid it and the paperweight hit the Asst Commissioner.”

You may know Mohamed Choukri (1935– 2003), who was regarded as the Jean Genet of Morocco for his internationally acclaimed

autobiography, For Bread Alone (1973). From being a pickpocket who ended up in prison he transformed himself into a writer. Choukri began learning Arabic, his mother tongue, at the age of twenty, even as he was prison. He started reading Arabic literature and one day he was able to record his own experiences. Similarly, by the time he was released from prison, Anburaj was transformed from an ordinary prisoner to a trained actor, theatre director and playwright.

He says that the reason for his transformation was Kannada drama, and world literature that he had begun reading inside the prison.

When asked if art had the capability to transform an individual, he said: “I have transformed. Art has the capability to transform anyone. While I was in Mysore prison, there was a prisoner by name Ganesh Nayak there. He was about twenty-five years old. He said that when he got released from the prison, he would get out, avenge his enemies and did not care about returning to the prison.

He was given a character from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to perform in a play. At the end of the play, Lady Macbeth would cry out loud that no matter how she washed her hands, she couldn’t get the blood off her hands. Guilty of her actions, she delivers a long speech in repentance.

Watching that scene, right there onstage, Ganesh vowed that he would let go of his vengeance. He is now leading a normal life after his release.”

I am yet to meet Anburaj. When I do, I am planning to request his permission to understand his experiences and write a novel. I had the chance to read Anburaj’s interview in my friend, Jeyamohan’s blog. I am indebted to Jeyamohan for permitting me to utilise Anburaj’s interview for this article.

Anburaj as he leaves prison on Independence Day, 2016.

Courtesy @Anburaj15215193 / Twitter

Spring 2019

Translated from the Tamil by Srividhya Subash

51

207th Exhibition 3 to 18 April 2019 10am to 5pm daily

Over 400 contemporary works in watercolour FREE to browse and buy ENTRY

with this voucher

The Mall, London SW1 www.mallgalleries.org.uk

‘Then & Now’ a new 170 page hardback book relating the fascinating story of the RI from its inception up to the present day, will be available to buy at the exhibition.

Pacita Abad, Pacita sailing (1983), acrylic, rick rack ribbons, painted cloth on stitched and padded canvas, 106.30h x 55.12w in

Norberto Roldan Patricia Perez Eustaquio Mit Jai Inn Yee I-Lann Gina Osterloh Maria Taniguchi Chati Coronel Pow Martinez Gary-Ross Pastrana

Image: David A Parfitt RI Autumn Water (detail) ArtReview RI.indd 1

GALLERIES

29 - 31 MARCH 2019 Conventions & Exhibition Centre 1 Harbour Road, Wan Chai, HK

BOOTH 1D05

KABINETT Pacita Abad

BOOTH 1D05

ENCOUNTERS www.silverlensgalleries.com info@silverlensgalleries.com

12/02/2019 11:41

Mit Jai Inn

BOOTH EN10

Widely spoken in Dakshina Kannada and other coastal districts of the southern Indian state of Karnataka, where it is an important cultural marker, Tulu is deemed a ‘minor’ language by the national government. It is curious for several reasons that it should not be counted among one of the country’s 22 official languages. With its sophisticated orature and antiquity, stretching by some accounts back to the third century bce, Tulu is among the most cultivated of Dravidian languages. It is also unusual, in a landscape where several languages coexist (though not always peacefully), for one language to inform and influence the everyday so broadly.

Tulu is rooted in Karnataka and Kasaragod, a small district within Kerala’s borders, a collective area once informally known as Tulu Nadu.

Though a movement to formally group these areas under that name gathered strength during the 1940s, the demand had lost steam by the time Indian states were reorganised along different linguistic lines under the States Reorganisation Act in 1956. According to the 2011 census, the language has just under two million native speakers, though scholars think the number might be as high as five million.

A spoken language that is typically transcribed in the Kannada alphabet, Tulu is the language of the folk deities, and popular theatre such as Yakshagana, mass media, community events, politics and everyday commerce are all informed by it. It also gave the region its wide array of semidivine beings and seasonal rituals.

Distinct from folk deities, these spirits traditionally fulfil the role of protector and conservator of the forested lands belonging to them. Trees in these sacred groves – called devara-kadu in Karnataka and kaavu in Kerala – cannot be cut without angering spirits with personalities ranging from polite and benevolent to short-tempered and demanding.

Historically, these protected areas helped to preserve important trees and medicinal plants, and every year, after the harvest, villages arrange for events – called, depending on its purpose, Bhuta Kola, Hulivesha, Nagamandala, Bhootaradhane and so on – where the spirit possesses a member of the community, almost always a man. What follows is a dance-drama during which the spirit answers the villagers’ questions, resolves conflicts and is appeased with alcohol, food and other offerings. Given Tulu’s inescapable presence, scholars grouse that it has not been granted the status it deserves, either in Karnataka or nationally.

In recent years, efforts have intensified to have Tulu recognised in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India, which would make it an official language. The Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy, set up by the Karnataka government in Mangalore in 1994, has made many uncontro-

54

unspoken assumptions Does a language need a script?

Deepa Bhasthi asks what is lost when an oral tradition is bound to a literary one in the pursuit of higher status for its native speakers

Front cover of a Tulu-English dictionary published in 1886 by the Basel Mission Press, Mangalore.

Courtesy Wikimedia/Creative Commons.

ArtReview Asia

versial and commendable contributions to these efforts, but it and other proponents have also put forward a contentious plan to give Tulu a script of its own, something it has not had in many generations. In addition to the politics of binding a rich oral language to a standardised alphabet, such a move raises questions about what a language gains and loses in the process.

B. Surendra Rao and K. Chinnappa Gowda, retired professors in the departments of history and Kannada, respectively, at Mangalore University, are collaborating on a long-term project to translate Tulu works into English.

So far, they have published five books, ranging from novels to anthologies of poetry, folktales and folksongs; a forthcoming translation represents an early form of fiction, what Gowda calls a ‘pre-novel’. There are as many varieties of Tulu as there are communities and socioeconomic classes that speak it. ‘There is nothing like the tyranny of standardised Tulu in operation,’ the academics write in an introduction to one of their books, all of which draw from literature, oral and written, that developed across the social spectrum.

Speaking to me from the United States, which he is currently visiting, Gowda discussed the status of the language and its influence over parts of the Konkan coast of western India.

Interest in the idea of Tulu Nadu and in the lives of its people was renewed during the 1970s, he told me, when subaltern studies, the writing of history from the perspective of the people rather than the elites, was becoming popular as a narrative. Tulu had by then been written in the Kannada script for many decades. “Tulu had a script once but it was sparingly used, mostly to write religious and occult texts on palm leaves, centuries ago, which were not meant for a general audience and needed to be restricted to a choice few. Tulu developed as an oral language, and is very rich because of that,” Gowda continued. Tigalari, or Arya Ezhuthu, as the Tulu script is called, did not get administrative support within Karnataka and was not taught in schools, nor were many popular books in the script in circulation, for which reasons it fell out of use by the mid-nineteenth century.

Even religious texts were no longer written in the script by then. Through a series of sociopolitical and cultural migrations, the script travelled south to Kerala and developed into what is now the Malayalam script.

One version of a new Tulu script – loosely based on Tigalari – is now being taught in schools in the region. While scholars of the language support its teaching in principle, many object to how the script has been formalised and introduced. Writing a few years ago, professor Radhakrishna N. Belluru detailed the organic way in which a script develops,

highlighting this as a means of demonstrating how taking the centuries-old, barely used Tulu script and changing it abruptly to suit modern usage overwrote accumulated meaning in the spoken language, setting it back by decades.

The script now being taught in schools is ridden with flaws and is unscientific, say script researchers, adding that it was approved without the consensus of writers, scholars and cultural practitioners, as is the norm.

The real question, though, is whether a language needs a script in the first place. Taltaje Vasanthakumara, retired professor of Kannada at the University of Mumbai, is from, and now lives in, Dakshina Kannada district. Speaking to me about scripts and languages, he said that if a language already had a script, it should naturally be used, preserved and developed.

“But a script is only complementary to a language. English or Hindi don’t have their own scripts. Konkani uses two scripts – Devanagari or Kannada – depending on whether you are in Goa and Maharashtra or Karnataka. While we have to wonder who we are to pass judgment on whether a new script is needed or not, most Tulu speakers are not aware of the script it once had,” he said.

Gowda too questioned whether a dedicated script was either necessary or inevitable. “With Tulu, it is neither. The language is not endangered, and is well adjusted as a language written in the Kannada script,” he said. Even if a new script is taught in schools, it takes decades to catch on: learning, teaching and developing a script cannot be achieved in one or two generations, both professors agreed. Narrowly

A folio from a Sanskrit manuscript written in Tulu. Courtesy Wikimedia/ Creative Commons

Tantric palm leaf manuscript with Kannada, Nagari and Tigalari scripts. Courtesy Endangered Alphabets and Keladi Museum

Spring 2019

connecting the value of a language to whether or not it has a script is contrary to how linguistic history has been conducted the world over. For Gowda the problem is that language is traditionally taught by a script, to which he said, “Leave the script, teach the language. To say script is necessary is detrimental [to the development of a language]. Orality is where the essence of language exists. Indigenous knowledge is disseminated through speech. In the context of Tulu, it is the language of knowledge and it cannot be separated from life.”

So why is there a hurried drive to introduce a script instead of working on the language itself? These scholars refuse to speculate, but hint at political reasons – the Tulu-speaking business community is a wealthy and influential voter bloc: there is much money involved in the long path to getting a ‘minor’ language nationally recognised.

One of the requirements for being declared an official, classical language is that it should have a long literary tradition. There is no necessity that it be only a written tradition.

The Tulu lexicon has over 100,000 words, meaning that the language is well developed.

“Orature is just as important,” explained Gowda, emphasising that Tulu’s beauty, essence, nuance and thus power to influence lay in its orality. “Tulu is a very rich language. It is a living, breathing thing. While our translation efforts are intended to build a body of work [in English, because it provides wider readership] to help the language be included in the Eighth Schedule, to focus on a discontinued script is doing a disservice to Tulu,” he said.

To confine an otherwise thriving language to a script to which it no longer has an organic connection is counterproductive.

Vasanthakumara equated it to the museumification of the language and, by extension, to arresting the influence it has on the people who keep Tulu alive and thriving.

55

ArtReviewHalfPage_output.pdf

1

31/1/2019

10:12 AM

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

Grand Palais www.artparis.com

4th 7th April 2019

A Gaze at Women Artists in France Southern Stars: An Exploration of Latin American Art

Art Featured

is the pleasure of mating once 57

Distant Relations

by Mark Rappolt

Richard Lin, Kaleidoscope, 2011, aluminium on paper (detail), 39 Ă&#x2014; 55 cm.

Courtesy bank / mab Society, Shanghai

58

ArtReview Asia

Taiwanese artists Richard Lin (d. 2011) and Michael Lin (very much alive) converge in Hong Kong, where a side-by-side showing of their work reveals obvious differences masking a shared interest in the unstable

Michael Lin, Untitled (zhixing), 2016, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas, 150 Ă&#x2014; 112 cm.

Photo: jjy. Courtesy the artist

Spring 2019

59

On 1 August 1970 Arts Review (as it was then called) published a review London galleries were exhibiting his art, and in subsequent years of Richard Lin’s latest exhibition at the Marlborough New London his work was included in numerous exhibitions of British art, at Gallery written by one of its leading (if conservative) critics, Peter Documenta III in Kassel (1964) and at successive editions of the Fuller. ‘Richard Lin’s pictures do not offer the observer much visual Carnegie International (in 1964 and 1967). More international shows information,’ Fuller began, before launching into a doomed attempt followed but a fixed place in contemporary art discourse did not, at giving the work some sort of context. ‘His work is particularly particularly after he split with Marlborough Gallery during the 1970s. difficult to orientate historically. He seems to have roots in [Charles] From 1985 to 2009 his work appeared in only a handful of shows. In Biederman-type constructivism (but without any similar obsession 2002, after more than half a century living primarily in the uk, he with colour), the specifically English tradition of abstract relief which moved permanently back to Taichung in his native Taiwan. He died revolves around [Ben] Nicholson and [Victor] Pasmore, Bauhaus in 2011, leaving a sense that, as nobody could conveniently categorise design, at its “less is more” epitome, [Piet] Mondrian’s later aesthetic his work or clearly explain where it came from, his reputation and consequently his market had never theories, and of course, there is a Contemporary reviews of his work tangential relationship with some quite taken off. of the discoveries of Minimalism – That last has changed – in range from the lame and the lazy to September 2018, painting relief though it would be foolish to accenFulleresque conglomerations of Chinese tuate excessively this particular re12.12.63 (1963) raised hk$9,120,000 at semblance.’ Bravely, he continued: philosophy, Chinese ink-painting, Japanese Sotheby’s Hong Kong – but the ques‘It is tempting to add to this alreadytion endures about which context Mono-ha and American Minimalism confusing list the influence of an Lin’s work should be placed. A news early education in Japan, and subsequently China, which undoubtedly report on Lin’s increasing popularity in the art market, published last effected his strict, stylistic self-discipline and his evident obsession June in The Daily Telegraph, was headlined ‘Asian buyers compete for with technical perfection.’ Before ultimately concluding that Lin’s Millfield-educated artist’ (a reference to the private school that Lin work was cerebral without being excessively so (ie elitist) and almost attended in Somerset). Depending on which catalogue or review you so subtle in appearance that many viewers might pass it by, dismissing read, Lin is described as Taiwan-born, Taiwanese, Chinese or British. the work as ‘elegant design or ‘unobtrusive décor’ and totally missing Contemporary reviews of or statements about his work range from what was going on. What was going on, then? According to Fuller, the lame and the lazy – stating that he was shown ‘alongside Francis Lin’s work functioned like jazz rhythms. It’s not at all clear – other Bacon at the Carnegie International’ – to Fulleresque conglomerathan pointing to the fact that Lin’s apparently simple work was in fact tions of Chinese philosophy (Zhuangzi, Laozi), Chinese ink-painting, a complex form grown of multicultural roots – what Fuller meant.

Japanese Mono-ha and American Minimalism (Donald Judd and Lin was born in Taiwan in 1933. He moved to Robert Morris). The more adventurous texts may also Richard Lin, So with the universe England in 1949, completed his secondary educapoint to the relevance of then-contemporary architecwhich is a finger, 2010, work on paper, tion in Somerset and studied architecture in London tural discourse to Lin’s work (although aesthetically 39 × 55 cm. Courtesy bank / during the 1950s. By the end of that decade various disconnected, one might look to the conglomerative mab Society, Shanghai

60

ArtReview Asia

Richard Lin, Shaping, 2011, iron on powder coating, 274 Ă&#x2014; 244 Ă&#x2014; 184 cm. Courtesy bank / mab Society, Shanghai

Spring 2019

61

above Michael Lin, Forever (ornament), 2016, emulsion and gold leaf on wall, 541 × 532 cm.

Photo: jjy. Courtesy the artist

62

top Michael Lin, Huashan Road, 2016, reassembled Forever bicycle, 94 × 175 × 46 cm.

Photo: jjy. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

tendencies of Alison and Peter Smithson’s Patio and Pavilion display (relatively) mass air-travel, an everyday mass-produced bicycle, once of 1956 and other postwar ideas about building a new world, in the an essential means of transport, is a ‘craft’ object (Time Out Shanghai context of constructive techniques such as seriality, repetition, inter- alerts hipsters as to where to purchase classic models). Forever doesn’t ruption, disruption and the interplay of light and shade). But natu- mean what it did yesterday. rally the newfound interest in Lin also comes at a time when the linear Although their work is born out of different times and different narratives of art-historical movements (and Minimalism in particular contexts, and explores distinctly different concerns and sensibili– see reviews) are being internationalised and complexified to unpick ties (albeit Fuller’s concern that people might dismiss Richard’s work as decoration is a risk Michael consciously plays with), it’s in universals that transcend cultural specificities.

Michael Lin is a contemporary artist based in Taiwan and Brussels. the way they embody unstable connections between tradition and His work, generally, bears no evident visual similarity to that of his contemporaneity, regional and global vernaculars, and identity as a namesake. Born in Tokyo in 1964, raised in Taiwan, educated in the whole that Lin and Lin connect. That and the fact that the two are us and until 2016 a longtime resident of Shanghai, he is best known joined by blood: Richard is Michael’s father’s second cousin. Michael for a series of works that expand returned to Taiwan after college in and interrogate the nature of the 1993, and recalls that Richard acted ‘readymade’ and the social and as a “kind of mentor” when he was economic histories concealed within working (initially in the bar) at the it the fabric of everyday life. Since the Park space in Taipei during the early 1990s, he has exhibited series of 1990s (it would be the site of his first works incorporating busily colourful solo exhibition in 1994) and later floral patterns, drawn from those travelled abroad to see the younger that would (until recently) typiartist’s shows, but concedes that “if you only look at the work from the cally have adorned soft furnish1970s against mine then it looks ings in Taiwanese homes, often like the other end of the spectrum”. enlarged and applied to architectural At bank’s stand at Art Basel Hong surfaces (most recently Enjoy, 2017, Kong, the two Lins will exhibit side on the courtyard of the Chiostro del Bramante in Rome, and, in the same by side. Richard’s work following his year, Federation for the entry lobby return to Taiwan will be on display of the National Gallery of Victoria in Hong Kong, as Michael explains: in Melbourne), with the aim of using “The sculptural works from the a common language of everyday late period look like ikea cabinets: domesticity to question notions of minimalist assemblages arranged public and private space (particuand stacked. He really stepped out larly within a gallery or museum of his zone and pushed his work to context and embedded expectations somewhere else. He had gone back of high-cultural audiences). And to to Taiwan and said he wouldn’t do explore the vernacular language(s) any more painting and made a lot of a globalised artworld that is no of models [for largescale sculptures] longer defined by what were once because he couldn’t realise his work distinguished as centres (New York, on the scale he wanted. He didn’t Paris, London) versus peripheries have the means so he went to ready(everywhere else). Similarly, A Tale mades. I was fascinated by that.” For of Today, his 2016 exhibition at Leo Michael this copresentation is part Xu Projects Shanghai, explored the of a bigger process of exploration iconography and aspirational value following his latest return to Taiwan of Shanghai’s iconic Forever bicycle brand (produced by one of the in 2016. He recalls that while teaching at Tainan National University so-called Famous Four manufacturers of Maoist China) in the context of the Arts he noticed that the students struggled to situate their of a contemporary reality in which international air travel now consti- work in the context of Taiwanese contemporary art, and that while tutes ‘the dream’. Reconditioned Forever bicycles were on sale in the he looked back through two decades of work in the process of exhibition; gold and pink paintings of the Forever logos and Shanghai thinking about largescale institutional exhibitions in his homeland branding hung on the walls: object and ideal were separated and he, too, had become more interested in cross-generational dialogue, made whole, before being obliterated in a final room featuring a list art history and points of intersection. Art Basel Hong Kong is just of flights and departure times from Shanghai’s Pudong airport. While the start. ara an exhibition like this might seem nostalgic (and Lin certainly exploits a sense of aesthetic Work by Michael Lin and Richard Lin will be Michael Lin, Untitled (zhixing), 2016, nostalgia in his work), it more properly casts on show at bank’s stand at Art Basel Hong Kong, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas, 150 × 112 cm.

Photo: jjy. Courtesy the artist identity as an unstable construct: in the age of 29–31 March

Spring 2019

63

Tishan Hsu

by Jeppe Ugelvig

Double Ring, 2019, uv prints on Dibond, silicone, 97 Ã&#x2014; 284 cm

64

ArtReview Asia

Technology figures as tool, site and condition in the paintings and sculptures of Tishan Hsu. Since emerging in 1980s New York, the Chinese-American artist has pioneered new ways of representing the interface between physical and virtual worlds

Spring 2019

65

Boating Scene green 1, 2019, uv prints on Dibond, silicone, 170 Ă&#x2014; 229 cm

66

ArtReview Asia

qmh 1, 2019, uv prints on Dibond, silicone, 102 Ă&#x2014; 135 cm

Spring 2019

67

Tishan Hsu’s early work provokes a strange corporeal response that Hsu’s emphasis on affect, indeed, couldn’t be further from the speaks directly to the particular experience of inhabiting a body in cold simulationism of his contemporaries: the work is intimate, a digital age. The unidentifiable orifices, limbs and proxy-organs personal and in continuous dialogue with the body. As a graduate, in his paintings of the 1980s and 90s fuse seamlessly with glitchy Hsu worked as a word processor at one of the city’s earliest office cybernetic grids, while the sleek ergonomic curvature of his sculp- jobs involving a computer, and it is this now-ubiquitous experience tures evokes body parts, computer screens and office furniture. – existing in front of a monitor – that would produce the conceptual Hsu’s works could be considered bodies in their own right, but also basis for much of his work. Bodies morphing into hardware can be assert an almost corporate objectseen in works such as Lip Service (1997), hood when you encounter them in in which tv screens become a part of Hsu proposes a radically alternative person (that corporate and corporeal a larger corporeal entity. Inversely, in Virtual Flow (1990–2018), bodies are cognate only makes the status of approach to the body and its politics, appear as silkscreened medical imthese objects as physical things – to beyond the boundaries of what we ages (sourced from hospitals) within be sold or inhabited – more ambivunderstand as ‘physical’ and ‘virtual’, clinical glass boxes on a steel cart, alent). By rendering technology as mutated by skin-toned craters and the interface where representation carbon and silicone, flesh and soul lumps. That the unsettling strucand abstraction intersect in both art and life, Hsu proposes a radically ture – half medical cabinet, half body alternative approach to the body and its politics, beyond the bound- – extends to a standard electrical socket brings the trope of being aries of what we understand as ‘physical’ and ‘virtual’, carbon and ‘plugged in’ to an abject extreme. silicone, flesh and soul. This perspective makes 1980s works such as The appearance of white noise, glitches and dislodged body parts aHead (1984) – an eerie flesh-toned, wall-based landscape of bodily adrift in the grid is reminiscent of the ‘cyberpunk’ aesthetics of the holes rendered in lumpy Styrofoam and acrylic – and Ooze (1987) – early 1990s, which similarly worked to articulate anxieties and fantaan imposing and alien interior rendered in turquoise tiles – seem sies about an uncertain digital future. But while much cybernetic hyper-contemporary more than three decades after their comple- thinking from this era imagined the web as a form of life privileging tion, at a time when digital systems have encroached further into the immaterial mind (and thus doing away with the body), Hsu’s the experience of being human, and techno-bodies such as cyborgs, work insists on the fundamental corporeality of our encounter with robots and avatars are being created, debated and politicised with such virtual systems. The body figures here not as some disposable prosthetic, but as a kind of interface, a place that connects various ever greater speed.

While echoing the historical preoccupations of much cyber- systems of reality. “I have always had certain doubts about the ‘trannetic art of the past 30 years, Tishan Hsu has remained outside its sition’ from the body to the virtual,” Hsu tells me in his Brooklyn canon. Born in Boston and raised in Switzerland and Wisconsin to studio. “There is a tendency to default to the image of the body we Shanghainese immigrant parents, he started making art in his teens have inherited, but what we experience ontologically and cognitively but chose to study architecture at mit before moving to New York opposes that quite directly.” In the Interface series of inkjet prints in 1975. There he encountered Pat from 2002, for example, Hsu began Hearn, the Boston ex-punk and to present body parts in warping grid The body figures here not as some emerging gallerist, who had just systems, forming a kind of skin that set up shop in the East Village. As resembled a digital screensaver. He disposable prosthetic, but as a kind part of a programme including describes it as an attempt to “explore of interface. “I have always had certain Milan Kunc, Peter Schuyff and a different kind of ‘embodiment’ doubts about the ‘transition’ from Philip Taaffe, he inevitably became than art, Western or non-Western, affiliated with the resurgence of had portrayed” that could reflect “the the body to the virtual,” Hsu tells me painting of the 1980s variously impact of technology on how the known as neo-geo, neo-pop or postbody located itself in the world”. abstraction – genres generally shunned by the critical art establishThis bodily discourse – stripped of markers such as gender, sexument, who saw them as cynically reducing abstraction to pure decor, ality and race – is a far cry from the representational identity politics to kitsch. But while evoking a politics of simulation similar to that of the 1990s. Hsu’s posthuman approach to the body echoes the work of, say, Taaffe, Hsu’s work aligns more closely with predecessors such of more recent scholarship by theorists including Rachel C. Lee, who as Bridget Riley, concerned with examining the effect of the body in her 2014 book The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America veers away from a moving through and across optical planes – such as paintings, for conventional biological understanding of race to explore a more fragexample, or computer screens. mented and distributed material sense of Asian American identity,

facing page, top Virtual Flow, 1990–2018, ceramic tile, silkscreen on glass, wood, plastic, silicone, dimensions variable

68

facing page, bottom Lip Service, 1997, solkscreen on canvas, 122 × 89 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Domus Collection, Beijing

ArtReview Asia

Spring 2019

69

above Head, 1984, acrylic, concrete, Styrofoam, oil, enamel on wood, 91 Ă&#x2014; 61 cm

70

all images but one Courtesy the artist and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

ArtReview Asia

informed by chemical, informatic and cybernetic flows. While one of work simulated a digitisation of the image, his new work emerges the few successful Chinese-American artists of his time, Hsu never directly from it. “The whole reason I could do this project is because joined its roster of names in the canon of American art-history, in of technology, because of the Internet,” he points out. By mining a part, perhaps, because his art did not foreground his ethnic iden- lost experience of familial trauma through digital communication – tity (one could think of Simon Leung, for example, a contemporary email, Skype and Whatsapp exchanges with his Shanghai family – and of Hsu, who also started at Pat Hearn Gallery). In fact, his prophetic by processing the material remnants through digital image-making biocybernetic perspective struggled to find its audience. After a few and editing, Hsu again renders technology as a space in which to years in Cologne during the late negotiate identity, the body and his1980s, Hsu, disillusioned, retreated tory. “Somewhat ironically, it is the While his early work simulated a digfrom the commercial artworld and technology of photography in the acquired tenure as a professor in twenty-first century that is not only itisation of the image, his new work fine arts at Sarah Lawrence College enabling me to make any connection emerges directly from it. “The whole outside New York City. to but in fact has made me aware of reason I could do this project is because the absence in the first place.” This The death of his mother in 2013 absence – this personal data loss caused Hsu to reconsider his heritage of technology, because of the Internet” – speaks to how cultural memory and its relevance to his artistic praclives, dies and recoups itself, even in tice. Perusing her possessions, Hsu discovered a collection of letters between his mother and her family in today’s photo-saturated, digital and seemingly ‘connected’ culture.

China dating back to the 1950s and 60s. Separated by the communist Through the suggestive aesthetic of tech, familiar diaspora themes revolution of 1949, which prohibited Hsu’s parents from returning such as cultural memory, trauma and social histories are rethought to Shanghai, the letters spoke of persecution, suicide and survival as through digital and technological metaphors. “It’s kind of about well as the more mundane aspects of everyday life; a winding social information and the personal,” he adds. “And how the personal regishistory of which Hsu had been totally unaware. So he set out to track ters through technology; what is coded, stored, and what is not.” down and reconnect with the extended families of his late parents.

While evoking the critical strategies of quintessential identityTaking up residence in Shanghai for three, then five, then six months based art practice – memory, trauma, personal archaeology – Hsu at a time, Hsu became absorbed by this newly discovered social and regards The Shanghai Project as an extension of his life’s practice, historical context and spent several years examining its material although its reference to Asian bodies is, he acknowledges, a ‘radical remnants, particularly the family’s rich image archive (a result of his step’. After consulting its local artworld, Hsu estimated that showing this more personal body of work in Shanghai would be too politically great uncle’s passion for photography).

Elements of this archive appear in Hsu’s rounded aluminium risky due to the contentious status of the history of the revolution. print Boating Scene – Delete (2019), part of a new body of work Hsu believed that first showing the work in the us would entail its referred to simply as The Shanghai Project, featuring a bucolic boating being read, against the artist’s wishes, as a statement bound up in idenscene with an impeccably dressed family, a rare document of pre- tity politics, so for some time it seemed likely that the project would revolution Shanghai from the 1930s. remain permanently in storage. But Double Ring – Absence (2016), also an when an opportunity arose in Hong By mining a lost experience of aluminium print, features scanned Kong, it seemed to make sense. pages of a photo album, with many The Chinese Civil War of the 1940s familial trauma through digital of its images seemingly ripped out. resulted in mass immigration from communication, Hsu again renders This pictorial absence speaks to China to the then-British colony; technology as a space in which to negothe rigorous governmental censoreven now a third of the city’s popuship of the time, as any representalation is of Shanghainese origin. tiate identity, the body and history tion of bourgeois life was carefully “This resonates with my own posiand systematically erased by the tion as an Asian American who is city’s Red Guards, as well as the absence of this family history from showing work for the first time in Asia,” he concludes. “I am an Hsu’s own life. Hsu labours these images or absent spaces through in-between, a hybrid of being inside of the outside in China and a variety of present-day scanning, editing and digital reproduction outside of the inside in America, if you will.” ara techniques, accentuating their eeriness as alien historical documents: the layers of affect, lost and retrieved over time.

Tishan Hsu: Delete is on view at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, from 26 March through 25 May How does genealogy and family history translate into data?

As always, it is the circulated information embedded in the virtual Jeppe Ugelvig is an independent curator and critic that constitutes the actual ‘material’ of Hsu’s practice. While his early

Spring 2019

71

All Thailandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Biennials Too much of a good thing?

by Max Crosbie-Jones

Ghost:2561 Hito Steyerl, Liquidity Inc., 2014, single-channel hd video (colour sound, 30 min) and mixed-media installation.

Courtesy the artist, 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok, and Ghost Foundation, Bangkok

Thailand Biennale Chulayarnnon Siriphol, golden spiral (still), 2018, video, sound, colour, 18 min.

Courtesy the artist, Doxza art lab and Ghost Foundation, Bangkok

72

ArtReview Asia

Thailand’s biennial epidemic of 2018 – during which the rootsy the Thailand Biennale was not so well advertised and the first of many Bangkok Biennial paved the way for two more largescale bien- hunts through forests, mangroves or across islands ensued. nials and a brief triennial towards the year’s end – seemed to many Wang Yuyang’s Gone with Wind (all works 2018 unless otherwise like a serendipitous collision of competing missions. So what if stated), an installation of led-filled balloons, wilting in the sun; Mella the Bangkok Art Biennale (bab), helmed by art historian Apinan Jaarsma’s batik-inspired fishing rods, Silver Souls, flailing forlornly off a Poshyananda and backed by Thai drinks giant ThaiBev, and the pier; Félix Blume’s bamboo-flute orchestra, Rumors from the Sea, reduced nomadic Thailand Biennale, programmed by Chinese curator Jiang to silence by still seas: quite a number of the site-specific commisJiehong and funded by the Thai Ministry of Culture and host prov- sions I encountered were thwarted – some permanently, some temince Krabi, arrived amid military porarily – by the tropical conditions.

Others, including works by Oliver rule and in the runup to long-delayed Laric, Lucy Beech, Alicja Kwade and elections? But for the instigator of the Before long, the endless Thailand Li Wei, were never realised (but pithiest – and most formally invenBiennale advertisements and towerwere still listed in catalogues and on tive – of these dovetailing events, the ing limestone karsts flanking the websites). Meanwhile, Chulayarnnon new video and performance art trienSiriphol’s Birth of Golden Snail, a videnial Ghost:2561, it was no accident. ‘I roads had taken on the comical owork organisers requested be cut on wanted this to happen at the same monotony of a Flintstones backdrop account of its brief nudity and depictime as the Bangkok Art Biennale,’ tions of Japanese soldiers, was withKorakrit Arunanondchai told Garage magazine a few days in advance of its launch on 11 October. ‘The drawn when the Thai artist refused to do so. An official sign announcing [Bangkok Art] Biennale is a standard exhibition model, and I feel like its fate greeted you outside the cave that was all set to host it. one kind of art or event always provides a context for another to exist.’

Making an often-frustrating trip worthwhile, though, were There was an element of pragmatism at play here – the interna- thoughtful interventions that resonated with their surroundtional media flown in for bab’s opening a week later, on 19 October, ings. Hidden amid the babbling brooks and ancient dipterocarps arrived to find Ghost:2561 in full flow. And, just as the garrulous artist- of Thanbok Khoranee National Park, Le Musée du Grand Dehors – a curator hoped, the more traditional biennial format threw his exhi- collaboration between Sara Black, Amber Ginsburg and Charlie bition into sharper relief. Conceived in collaboration with the team Vinz – was a fey meditation on the carbon cycle centring around a from Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Arunanondchai’s Ghost:2561 brought felled tree, one end of which had been burnt, then poked sideways a lean selection of video and performance works to ten Bangkok through an ominous rubber-cloaked hut. In Football Field for Buffalo, galleries and, like his own busy and sometimes overwrought Takafumi Fukasawa unsettled the human-nature dynamics of Koh Gesamtkunstwerks, arrived overflowing with philosophical musings Klang, a Muslim-majority island that ekes out a living through ecoon the contemporary condition. Its curatorial binding agent was tourism near Krabi town, by creating a football pitch, replete with animism – a metaphor he said ‘felt local and somehow naturalised’ footballs, for the local buffaloes and a spectator stand for villagers – and articulating it were talks, screenings, performances and ‘story- (this only yards from the daily rooster singing contest). Visible tellers’ – Thai students who had attended a series of workshops led by for miles, Map Office’s Ghost Island, three porous 6m × 6m islands, Arunanondchai and served as ‘mediums for the work’. Heightening woven from old fishing nets and salvaged sticks and looking every the spectral quality of videoworks by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, bit like giant fish traps, rose from the shallow waters of Nopphrat Hito Steyerl and Ian Cheng, among half a dozen others, was their slick Thara beach, disrupting the local topography and subverting tourist and immersive staging within each white cube: emerging from the paradise. Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s and Suriya Umpansiriratana’s No space, you would find yourself in a loose conversation with a ‘story- Sunrise No Sunset was a hollow aluminium container perched on the edge of a headland and filled with teller’ about what you had just seen. primitive drawings and a lifelike Then, very quickly, the tenor Ghost:2561’s brevity and lack of political standing figure of an old woman. changed. On 2 November, only five The contents of this makeshift cave days after Ghost:2561 finished, the baggage set it apart as both uncomproThailand Biennale – works for which were as bamboozling as the mirrored mised and uncompromising: a succinct exterior was dazzling. were clustered, treasure map-like, in show about the mobility and ephemeroutdoor sites across the Andaman In some respects, bab, staged Sea-straddling southern province of 800km north, had similar contours. ality of video art and performances Krabi – launched with an ostentaIt too was a commodious biennial of uncomplicated mass appeal rather tious and nationally televised ceremony. When I travelled to see it in early December, I found the biennial than exclusively academic interest. Nor was it, thankfully, a tribute to marketed ad nauseam within the province, poorly promoted without. kwampenthai (Thainess) or a survey of provincial culture. Both it and The barrage of billboards began as soon as I turned right out of Krabi the Thailand Biennale ceded curatorial control to one man with the airport – a hire car was a must – and, before long, the endless Thailand cachet to bring an impressive roster of artists and advisers into the Biennale advertisements and towering limestone karsts flanking the fold. Both secured rare access to precious (manmade or natural) sites roads had taken on the comical monotony of a Flintstones backdrop. and courted locations of unbridled consumerism. Both were an unfoAfter being cajoled by my guide for the trip, Google Maps, I eventu- cused mix of the meditative and the mindless, the swaggering and the ally found myself parking up at one of the venues, where suddenly camera-shy. And both threw together Thai and international artists, a

Spring 2019

73

Thailand Biennale Kamin Lertchaiprasert and Suriya Umpansiriratana, No Sunrise No Sunset, 2018, aluminium container on Ao Nang beach. Courtesy the artist and Thailand Biennale, Krabi

Thailand Biennale Map Office, Ghost Island, 2018, wood and ghost fishing nets on Noppharat Thara Beach. Courtesy the artists and Thailand Biennale, Krabi

Thailand Biennale Takafumi Fukasawa, Football Field for Buffalo, 2018, mixed-media and participatory based project, Koh Klang island. Courtesy the artist and Thailand Biennale, Krabi

74

ArtReview Asia

Bangkok Art Biennale Chumpon Apisuk and Sornchai Phongsa, I Have Dreams (still), 2018, video installation. Courtesy the artist and Bangkok Art Biennale 2018

Bangkok Art Biennale Eisa Jocson, Becoming White (detail), 2018, mixed-media installation and performance. Courtesy the artist and Bangkok Art Biennale 2018

Spring 2019

75

move that disrupts the construct of Southeast Asian regionalism that right under their noses. Similarly, The New York Times hailed the bab has held curatorial sway of late and echoes the international mobility as having redefined ‘what it means to be racy and taboo in Bangkok’ and celebrated the fact that ‘there has been virtually no backlash and trajectories of many Thai artists.

A selection of Yayoi Kusama’s pumpkins and other largescale from the military junta’ – appearing blissfully unaware of the legitisculptures were arrayed around the city’s shopping malls, the own- mising and tolerant glow that assenting to such an event (as the junta ers of which, along with main sponsor ThaiBev, footed the bill. Mean- did) might confer upon it and its leader (who, at the time of writing, while, some of the works discreetly concealed in Bangkok’s temples looks likely to perpetuate his power in forthcoming elections). felt lost, while others were among bab’s indisputable highlights. For The more I pricked the surface of Thailand’s public exhibition What Will You Leave Behind?, a new iterepidemic, the more complicated – and unsettling – things became. ation of a 2012 work, Thai artist Nino The more I pricked the surface of There was no shortage of uncomSarabutra paved the circular columbarium beneath the piercing white fortable moments to reinforce the Thailand’s public exhibition epidemic, chedi of Wat Prayoon with 100,000 impression: branded sponsor’s the more complicated things became. tiny white ceramic skulls. Visitors tents erected in hallowed temples, There was no shortage of uncomfortable video artist Siriphol documenting winced and giggled and pondered the his censorship battle with the weight of existence as they crunched moments to reinforce the impression Ministry of Culture via a Facebook under their bare feet. A few kilometres away, Patrick D. Flores’s tight diary and – most jarring of all – the curating of works by the likes of Eisa Jocson and Ho Tzu Nyen at bab’s takeover of the main galleries at the capital’s beleaguered bacc venerable antique mall op Place rewarded exploration. Likewise, as a feud between the independent foundation that administers this deep in the bowels of the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre (bacc), visi- publicly funded facility and the junta-appointed Bangkok governor, tors with time to spare saw everything from piquant articulations of Aswin Kwanmuang, was playing out. Annual public budgets and taboo themes (Chumpon Apisuk and Sornchai Phongsa’s forays into opening hours had been cut. Utility bills had gone unpaid. Concerns the lives and dreams of Thai sex- and migrant-workers were espe- of a takeover by city-hall bureaucrats and junta members lingered. cially memorable) to a live broadcast of Taweesak Molsawat – one While the bab was bankrolled by corporate Thailand, not governof eight performers in the Marina Abramovic Institute’s three-week ment, and Poshyananda feigned a distance from the authorities durational performance art showcase A Possible Island? – clutching in interviews, the perversity of the situation was hard to shake. plastic flowers while on his daily ambulation through the city.

Shouldn’t the public art centre with a decade of programming under Announced well in advance, the paradoxical titles of both the its belt, not some biennial upstart, be the one swimming in cash and Thailand Biennale and Bangkok Art Biennale – Edge of the Wonderland experiencing a semblance of untroubled autonomy? and Beyond Bliss respectively – seemed to hint at a sly, self-conscious Against this opaque backdrop, Ghost:2561’s brevity and lack urge to distance themselves from the hamfisted ‘Bring Happiness to of political baggage set it apart. It was both uncompromised and the People’ campaigns and top-down ministrations of military rule. uncompromising: a succinct show about the mobility and ephemYet, neither will be remembered for their rambling articulations erality of video art and performances, and about how today’s storyof rather asinine themes, nor their mostly superficial engagement telling mediums ‘give form and presence to invisible systems’, only with cherrypicked, tourist-friendly sites. The Thailand Biennale, more accessible and enjoyable than all that sounds. With its curatofor all its moments of visual enchantment and admirable efforts rial conceit developed from a historical and culturally specific set of at decentralisation and engagement (all commissions were locally beliefs to which the work responded, it was also radically local in a made), felt precision-tooled to have way that the competition emphatically wasn’t. In short, Ghost:2561 you travel – and spend – as much as A selection of Yayoi Kusama’s pumpwas everything the Bangkok Art possible (you could almost picture the Biennale and Thailand Biennale tourist revenue projections scribbled kins and other sculptures were proved, in the weeks and months on flip boards in provincial governarrayed around the city’s shopping that proceeded it, not to be: tenament offices). And the bab was no ciously intellectual, grounded in less unsophisticated in its appeal to malls, the owners of which, along with holidaymakers: ‘to position Bangkok notions and concepts that rewarded main sponsor ThaiBev, footed the bill as a Venice of the East with an event concentration and stood up to that would give the Chao Phraya sustained scrutiny, untainted by the [River] a feeling of the Grand Canal’ was an aim trumpeted early on instrumentalising forces of state power and corporate strategy.

It will be another five years before these three unlikely bedfellows

by Poshyananda.

Criticisms such as these ebbed and flowed in my mind as the are reunited, and any number of variables could derail one of them weeks passed and as I revisited parts of the bab and sought out some in the meantime. However, I hope it happens: the contexts these of the 20 locations I’d missed, yet overwhelmingly the media assess- inaugural events provided one another were arguably their most ments emerging were positive. The Guardian, for example, singled striking feature. ara out Poshyananda’s ‘spirit of defiance’, the implication being that he had got one over the authorities by sneaking in ‘risk-taking artists’ Max Crosbie-Jones is a writer and editor based in Bangkok

76

ArtReview Asia

Bangkok Art Biennale Yayoi Kusama, 14 Pumpkins, 2017. Courtesy Bangkok Art Biennale 2018

Bangkok Art Biennale Nino Sarabutra, What Will You Leave Behind? (detail), 2012, unglazed porcelain, 125,000 pieces, dimensions variable. Courtesy Bangkok Art Biennale 2018

Spring 2019

77

Blast from the Past: F.N. Souza interview by Barrie Sturt-Penrose, first published 14 May 1966

Last month ArtReview Asia’s sister magazine, ArtReview, celebrated its 70th anniversary. Coverage of art from across the Asian continent has formed a key part of the magazine’s identity since its founding. Over the coming year, as part of a celebration of this history, the pages of ArtReview Asia will feature key texts from the past seven decades, in part to look at what’s changed, and in part to look at what has stayed the same. In the first of these articles, Indian painter F.N. Souza (1924–2002) recounts how his career developed (or didn’t) following his move from Mumbai to London in 1949 78

ArtReview Asia

barrie sturt-penrose You are widely known in this country and abroad. There is usually some confusion about your background. Perhaps you would sketch in some of your background as an artist. f.n. souza I’m surprised there’s confusion as I am not an Eskimo of African descent. Nor do I claim parthenogenesis. A lot has been written on my background, and there exists a biography as well as an autobiography. bsp When you first arrived in this country you were unknown and poor. How long was it before you came to the notice of gallery owners, collectors and the critics?

Perhaps you could say something about your early years in Britain leading to the present time. fns I came to this country in 1949 and lived in dire poverty for six years, until 1954. Six years of starvation, rags and cigarettes picked up from the gutters. But somehow I kept on painting and never took a job. Then a chance meeting with Victor Musgrave led to a sell-out show in his gallery, Gallery One, in 1955. I made a good bit of money from subsequent shows in the following years, and, during this time, I was lucky to meet an American businessman in Paris who became my patron until 1960. He bought everything I cared to send him, often before it was painted. I used to call him the Pope. Unfortunately, during these years, I took to drink. A bug craving for alcohol got into me and I couldn’t stop drinking. I squandered some £10,000, drinking myself to death in Paris, Majorca, Rome, Bombay and London – in Bombay despite the Prohibition. By the end of 1960, I got the shakes so bad, I couldn’t hold a brush. I asked myself a simple question one terrible hangover morning: ‘Do you wish to become a famous drunkard or a famous painter?’ I decided to take a cure for alcoholism, and I did, though not through Alcoholics Anonymous. Between 1962 and 1964 I bought a large house, a new car and some more property.

I mention this not for its achievement, but as contrast, in a short time, to the destitution of alcoholism. I travelled widely, to the amazement of my friends abroad who couldn’t believe I had changed to a chronic teetotaller. I got divorced in 1964, and married a young girl of 17 the following year, thereupon, my past has begun to lay claims through various litigations which can mean scrapping the lot and starting from scratch: a prerogative artists must use from time to time to maintain complete freedom. bsp Following your outstanding success at Gallery One you became known as a controversial painter.

Although few could ignore your work, people either grouped for you or against you. Do you still find that people are partisan in the way they look at your paintings?

fns I never realised they were. Thanks for telling me. Success among painters largely depends on the dealers who handle their work.

Gallery One, as you know, during the decade of its art dealing, was the most controversial gallery in London. Robert Fraser’s and Kasmin’s galleries have benefited from the existence of Gallery One: Kasmin, in fact, began on its staff.

But to answer the question, I’m not really aware of people grouped for or against me.

My independent cast of character will never admit that dealers and critics can make or break a painter. Roger Berthoud wrote this about my work: ‘His canvases are very strong meat indeed. I confess it has taken me a year or two to acquire a taste for his work.’ If an art critic took that long, people in general would take longer to digest my stuff. And the ones against me, I should think, are the ones without guts to hang strong meat in their homes.

“I came to this country in 1949 and lived in dire poverty for six years, until 1954. Six years of starvation, rags and cigarettes picked up from the gutters. But somehow I kept on painting and never took a job” bsp How do you like living in England? Is it very different from living (say) in India where you have recently enjoyed considerable success in exhibitions?

You have lived in Paris but you keep coming back to Britain. Is it because your work is understood more easily in this country? fns My work should be easily understood in any country on the premise that art is universal.

Of course, I like England, but I haven’t tried Mexico or New York yet. History shows that artists migrate to find a market if there isn’t one at home. At first I tried Paris not knowing the market there had flagged, whereas in London it had started to flag. There’s no place for the artist in India. The hungry can’t eat pictures. People there need bread. Even strong meat will not do: they’ll bring it up. Tourists and American diplomats in India buy paintings. Wealthy Indians are devoid of culture.

Only recently, one or two from the wealthy class have begun collecting modern art. I keep coming back to Britain for personal reasons.

I would find no difficulty in communicating

facing page Arts Review (as it was then called), 14 May 1966

Spring 2019

with anyone in the world who has some knowledge and liking for art. bsp A painting of yours was recently included in the Tate’s collection. Have you had a raw deal from the Art Establishment in this country? fns Bloody raw! Where’s my M.B.E.? Where’s the retrospective at the Whitechapel? And ever since I crashed into the Guggenheim Award as one of five painters to represent this country, I’ve been consistently kept out of all the national and international exhibitions. Native jealousy in an effort to dampen a trailblazer who is not English. People say: no, no, it can’t happen in England: people are much too civilised here. In fact, I used to think it could happen in every field except art. I am mistaken.

The Coventry Cathedral architect has revealed that the City officials wanted to keep Epstein out of the list of commissioned artists because he was a Jew. That painting of mine formerly belonging to Penelope Mortimer was forced into the Tate, a shot-gun presentation no sooner had Rothenstein retired. Before we met, I believe Rothenstein did recommend my pictures for prizes and purchases whenever they appeared in competitions and exhibitions in which he had a say. It was probably on his recommendation I won a prize in the first John Moores Exhibition; and I know for sure the Contemporary Art Society bought my painting acting on his advice. But I met him the first time at an opening of a new night club among naked girls and free sparkling booze. Already drunk well before I arrived at the party, I may have said or done something so obnoxious, I can’t remember what, for as you know the brain does its own censorship. But since that night, Rothenstein and I never got together even if we were in the same room. As for Bryan Robertson of the Whitechapel, I met him also at a nightclub, the Gargoyle, where Victor Musgrave was throwing a party. Robertson told him my work was ‘anti-pathetic to British taste’. As I wasn’t very drunk, I remember saying, ‘British taste being pathetic, I am glad to be anti-pathetic!’ As I have now given up smoking as well, there’s no doubt I’ll be kept out of the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation on which I believe Robertson is a big smoke without fire. Wild people like me continually live on the optimism that fuddyduddies are bound to retire one day or drop dead. I am told

by Denis Bowen that the British Council will never buy or include in their exhibitions abroad any artist who is not British by birth. This ‘British’ stuff and nonsense is a laugh when you think of Leslie Howard, the most English of actors who was Hungarian by birth. And all those Polish grandmothers hanging in the family trees of Englishmen!

79

80

ArtReview Asia

bsp I know that you feel strongly about art critics.

You once said to me that whereas painters were at the constant mercy of critics they rarely had the opportunity to hit back. What is your view of British art critics’? fns I’ll take a bash at the question by quoting a few words from a paper, ‘Notes on Analytic Philosophy and Aesthetics’ by Jerome Stolnitz which was printed in the 1963 July issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics: ‘Unless the critic’s judgement reflects an authentically aesthetic encounter with the work, he forfeits his authority over us. If his ostensibly aesthetic judgement is in fact an evaluation in other terms – economic, moral, snob-appeal – then he is guilty of vulgarity.’ p.218. On the strength of this indictment almost all the critics in London are guilty, but some are more guilty than others.

John Russell of the Sunday Times for instance, reviewing the Tate Gallery Exhibition of American painting, wrote in 1956 that Jackson Pollock should be slapped. But no sooner had Marlborough put on a posthumous Pollock show in 1961 than Russell came out with banner headlines: ‘The Agony of Jackson Pollock’ and a blah of praises, without mentioning his earlier insulting remarks about this artist. I am well aware one can reverse one’s evaluation logically, the classic example being T.S. Eliot’s revaluation of Milton after eleven years. Then there is Terence Mullaly of the Daily Telegraph. Robert Wraight the saleroom correspondent of the Arts Review wrote to the Telegraph that Terence Mullaly went out of his way to point out that a painting of mine had fetched only £18, without mentioning that a ‘second Souza, of considerably smaller size had fetched £100.

This letter was not published’ says Wraight in his column in the Arts Review last year.

John Berger gave me a long review in the New Statesman as long ago as 1955. But after I met him over dinner the same year and told him about my own Marxist theories, he never wrote another line on me; Stolnitz could have added ‘Political’ vulgarity. But we are getting something more absurd from critics like Alan Bowness, who ‘reviews’ the work of other

critics, usually American ones like Clement Greenberg. Greenberg apparently names the qualities a painting ‘ought’ to have and then sets out to ‘pick’ the artists as his examples as a reaction to something Greenberg had himself picked before. If this seems confusing let me put it this way: Mr Greenberg is now busy on the lookout to pick some painters who ought to be reacting against the Hard Edge painters he picked, as a reaction to the Painterly Abstractionists he had picked before that!

Get it? And the latest pride and joy among art critics, Alan Bowness is bitten by Greenberg, as could be gathered from his contribution in the Observer colour magazine a few weeks ago. bsp During the last three years there is evidence in the work you have produced (e.g. the Black Art) that you are still searching for the ‘ideal’ style to get your ideas across. Why did you stop producing paintings (e.g. ’55–62) which were very successful? fns I don’t get this one. Someone knowing my work so well as you do. I’m glad you think I am searching for the ‘Ideal’ style. Some people probably think I’m stuck. In fact, I am neither stuck nor am I searching. I am a compulsive painter. I am geared to an ever-changing cosmos. I can vividly imagine being a gilled embryo which forms and transforms into many forms, from a miniature dinosaur to a hideous ape. My art is a daily activity. Like Evolution itself, I am neither searching nor stuck. The ’55–62 paintings took some two to five years to become successful and Black Art should take that long to become integrated with the bulk

“Some people probably think I’m stuck. In fact, I am neither stuck nor am I searching. I am a compulsive painter. I am geared to an ever-changing cosmos. I can vividly imagine being a gilled embryo which forms and transforms into many forms, from a miniature dinosaur to a hideous ape”

of my art. I never stopped producing successful paintings, but unlike pop art or pop songs, my art is not an ‘instant’ success today and a yesterday’s ‘has been’ tomorrow. I am a born painter: in the tradition of great painters, my greatest work will come as I get older: Michelangelo kept hacking away at 90 on what is probably the greatest work of art, the Rondanini Pieta. bsp Can you tell me what your basic aim is as a painter? fns To paint. bsp You have said that you paint for yourself.

Do you think that the main reason why you are unpopular in certain quarters is the controversial pictures that you paint? Or are there other reasons? fns I also said that I painted for angels to show them what men and women really look like. I didn’t know I was unpopular in certain quarters, although I am aware of being unpopular in certain camps. An intransigent individual like me is bound to be unpopular.

I don’t belong to any group and I am proud of it. The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone, to quote An Enemy of the People. A recent book, Private View, shows the most clannish grouping of artists in this country and the authors can’t dismiss what I say as sour grapes because I don’t like grapes, what I’m saying is grapeshot!

Born in Goa, Francis Newton Souza was a founding member of the Bombay-based Progressive Artists’ Group. He supported the Quit India Movement ( for which he was expelled from art school) and became a member of the Communist Party of India. He moved to London in 1949, where he struggled for recognition until the mid-1950s and a soldout show at Victor Musgrave’s Gallery. A painting from the Gallery One exhibition sold for £3.1 million at auction in New York in 2015 Barrie Sturt-Penrose was an art critic and broadcaster who contributed to publications in the us and the uk

facing page F.N. Souza, Self-Portrait, 1961, oil on board, 61 × 76 cm. Courtesy The Ruth Borchard Collection and Piano Nobile, London

Spring 2019

81

70th Anniversary Issue out now

Get a slice of art history artreview.com/subscribe Spring 2019

82

Artist Project by Shirazeh Houshiary

Shirazeh Houshiary is presenting work in Love is Metaphysical Gravity, Lisson Gallery, Shanghai, 22 March â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 11 May 83

Textures on the Edge of the Gobi Text and images by Shirazeh Houshiary

We are born from this rocky earth and our arts are born from the landscape we inherit and inhabit.

Between the deserts of the Gobi and Taklamakan in northwest China lies Dunhuang, or ‘City of Sand’. The city was a vital resting point for merchants and pilgrims travelling through the region and played a key role in the passage of Silk Road trade to and from China. An ancient site of Buddhist activity and learning, Dunhuang is surrounded by numerous grottoes and caves, including those at Mogao and Yulin.

The most famous is the small oasis at Mogao, where east-facing cliffs overlook a flowing river and rolling sand dunes that extend beyond like ocean waves.

Between the fourth and fourteenth centuries several hundred hand-carved caves and grottoes were created at Mogao. Many reveal exquisite wall paintings and sculptures that depict the multiculturalism and multiethnicity of the Silk Road during the 1,000 years that Dunhuang remained a vibrant hub of exchange. The location would eventually become known in China and beyond as a place of unrivalled beauty, sanctity and knowledge. It is a most magnificent experience to encounter these frescoes where one can transcend time and space.

The subtle colours and shifting textures of desert sands, the glacial waters flowing from the surrounding mountains and the flora of the oasis intensify the experience that is Mogao. Water becomes liquid light at midday and blue to turquoise by dusk, and the vegetation of the oasis oscillates between jade and malachite. These colours had a significant impact on the artists who painted the frescoes.

The Mogao caves also contained thousands of scrolls and religious texts, including the jewel that is the Diamond Sutra, the world’s first printed book. One of its poetic verses reveals the experience of the desert landscape poignantly.

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world: A star at dawn, A bubble in a stream, A flash of lightning in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream.

一切有为法， 如梦、幻、泡、影； 如露，亦如电， 应作如是观。 Translated by Kumārajīva from Sanskrit to Chinese in the fourth century

84

Yulin Grottoes

Yadan landform

85

Gobi Desert

Mogao Grottoes (Dunhaung Cave 220)

86

Fragment of great wall (Western Han Dynasty)

The Mingsha Temple

87

Brick with dragon design (Five Dynasties)

Taklamakan Desert

88

Yadan landform

Mogao Grottoes (Dunhaung Meditation Cave 285)

89

Photograph taken at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein

Participating Galleries # 303 Gallery 47 Canal A A Gentil Carioca Miguel Abreu Acquavella Air de Paris Juana de Aizpuru Helga de Alvear Andréhn-Schiptjenko Applicat-Prazan The Approach Art : Concept Alfonso Artiaco B von Bartha Guido W. Baudach elba benítez Bergamin & Gomide Berinson Bernier/Eliades Fondation Beyeler Daniel Blau Blum & Poe Marianne Boesky Tanya Bonakdar Bortolami Isabella Bortolozzi BQ Gavin Brown Buchholz Buchmann C Cabinet Campoli Presti Canada Gisela Capitain carlier gebauer Carzaniga Casas Riegner Pedro Cera Cheim & Read Chemould Prescott Road Mehdi Chouakri Sadie Coles HQ Contemporary Fine Arts Continua Paula Cooper Pilar Corrias Chantal Crousel

D Thomas Dane Massimo De Carlo dépendance Di Donna E Ecart Eigen + Art F Konrad Fischer Foksal Fortes D‘Aloia & Gabriel Fraenkel Peter Freeman Stephen Friedman Frith Street G Gagosian Galerie 1900-2000 Galleria dello Scudo gb agency Annet Gelink Gladstone Gmurzynska Elvira González Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Bärbel Grässlin Alexander Gray Richard Gray Howard Greenberg Greene Naftali greengrassi Karsten Greve Cristina Guerra H Michael Haas Hauser & Wirth Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Herald St Max Hetzler Hollybush Gardens Hopkins Edwynn Houk Xavier Hufkens I Invernizzi Taka Ishii J Bernard Jacobson Alison Jacques Martin Janda Catriona Jeffries Annely Juda

K Kadel Willborn Casey Kaplan Karma International kaufmann repetto Sean Kelly Kerlin Anton Kern Kewenig Kicken Peter Kilchmann König Galerie David Kordansky KOW Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Andrew Kreps Krinzinger Nicolas Krupp Kukje / Tina Kim kurimanzutto L Lahumière Landau Simon Lee Lehmann Maupin Tanya Leighton Lelong Lévy Gorvy Gisèle Linder Lisson Long March Luhring Augustine Luxembourg & Dayan M Jörg Maass Kate MacGarry Magazzino Mai 36 Gió Marconi Matthew Marks Marlborough Mayor Fergus McCaffrey Greta Meert Anthony Meier Urs Meile Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Massimo Minini Victoria Miro Mitchell-Innes & Nash

June 13 – 16, 2019

Mnuchin Modern Art The Modern Institute Jan Mot mother‘s tankstation Vera Munro N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Nagel Draxler Richard Nagy Edward Tyler Nahem Helly Nahmad Neu neugerriemschneider Franco Noero David Nolan Nordenhake Georg Nothelfer Nathalie Obadia O OMR P P.P.O.W Pace Pace/MacGill Maureen Paley Alice Pauli Peres Projects Perrotin Petzel Francesca Pia Plan B Gregor Podnar Eva Presenhuber ProjecteSD R Almine Rech Reena Spaulings Regen Projects Rodeo Thaddaeus Ropac S Salon 94 Esther Schipper Rüdiger Schöttle Thomas Schulte Natalie Seroussi Sfeir-Semler Jack Shainman ShanghART Sies + Höke Sikkema Jenkins Skarstedt

SKE Skopia / P.-H. Jaccaud Société Pietro Spartà Sperone Westwater Sprovieri Sprüth Magers St. Etienne Nils Stærk Stampa Standard (Oslo) Starmach Christian Stein Stevenson Luisa Strina T Take Ninagawa Tega Templon Thomas Tokyo Gallery + BTAP Tornabuoni Travesía Cuatro Tschudi Tucci Russo V Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois Van de Weghe Annemarie Verna Susanne Vielmetter Vitamin W Waddington Custot Nicolai Wallner Barbara Weiss Wentrup Michael Werner White Cube Barbara Wien Jocelyn Wolff Z Thomas Zander Zeno X ZERO...

David Zwirner Feature The Breeder Bureau Corbett vs. Dempsey Raffaella Cortese Croy Nielsen frank elbaz Essex Street

Christophe Gaillard Hales Jahn und Jahn Klemm’s Knoell Kohn David Lewis Philip Martin Jaqueline Martins Daniel Marzona Parra & Romero Project Native Informant Tommy Simoens Sommer Stereo Vadehra Isabelle van den Eynde Vedovi Kate Werble Statements Balice Hertling Barro Carlos/Ishikawa Chapter NY ChertLüdde Commonwealth and Council Crèvecoeur Experimenter Freedman Fitzpatrick JTT Jan Kaps Marfa‘ Max Mayer Neue Alte Brücke Dawid Radziszewski SpazioA Temnikova & Kasela The Third Line Edition Niels Borch Jensen Alan Cristea mfc - michèle didier Durham Press Fanal Gemini G.E.L. Sabine Knust Lelong Editions Carolina Nitsch Paragon Polígrafa Susan Sheehan STPI Two Palms

Art Reviewed

after being apart 91

9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 24 November – 28 April It would be easy to miss them: a windmillshaped sculpture not much bigger than a clothing hook suspended from a high corner of the gallery; small metal balls balanced on narrow ledges, visible only if you lean over a parapet; under a flight of stairs, a pile of purple sticks.

Slight, light as air and near invisible, Peter Robinson’s 18 metal sculptures (This place displaced, 2018) are scattered throughout the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, which hosts the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (apt).

They are subtle either in form or placement.

Those in plain sight are so slender that it takes a moment to figure out if they are wires leaning against walls or painted black lines. Others draw attention to forgotten nooks: a mezzanine, a corner, a window ledge. At first glance, these works resemble purely formal concerns with perception and activating new relationships with space. But given their subtle takeover of a state institution, and Robinson’s background as a New Zealander artist of Maori descent interested in bicultural identity, they also carry a more political message: how the minimal and marginal can reframe, disrupt or resist.

Unobtrusive, even self-effacing, these artworks could be a metaphor for apt’s curatorial ethos. The event historically forsakes a theme and aims, simply, to create ‘a space for engagement with the contemporary art of the region’, according to the catalogue’s lead essay, by head curator Zara Stanhope. This is a vague, low-key formulation. Retiring, even. But not entirely directionless.

The first apt was launched in 1993 to foster economic and cultural ties between Australia and the Asia Pacific, and its geographical reach remains broad, featuring more than 400 works by 82 artists and artist collectives from more than 30 countries. These include abstract paintings by Mongolian artist Enkhbold Togmidshiirev incorporating horse dung and sheepskin; largescale woodcut prints from a punk-rock-loving art collective based in Sabah, West Malaysia, called Pangrok Sulap; and from Arnhem Land, in North Australia, we have Margaret Rarru’s bathi mul, sooty woven baskets coloured with a rare black dye.

To an extent, the absence of an explicit theme is refreshing. Its hands-off humility marks a change from the flashy, high-concept curatorial auteurship that seeks to characterise a period or a region in a certain way. Audiences

92

may feel freer to interpret the artworks free of an overarching theoretical framework, and at its best the show generates its own leitmotifs.

For example, Zahra Imani’s handstitched fabric portraits and Aisha Khalid’s depiction of the Quran’s gardens of paradise showcase the subversive potential of textile art. Imani captures funky, private moments with female protagonists that upend conservative mores in Iran, such as a panel showing a woman dancing in front of blindfolded male musicians (Raqs No. 2, 2016), in apparent defiance of the country’s Islamic laws. Suspended from the ceiling, Khalid’s Water has never feared the fire (2018) looks, from the front, like an exquisite five-metrehigh, three-panel tapestry with elaborate gold embroidery of dragons and phoenixes. Yet its verso reveals that the motifs are not made by gold thread but rather by the heads of thousands of long gold-plated pins that pierce the fabric, creating rugs at once sculptural and dangerous.

The show interrogates its own position without ever being incendiary. Contemporary power structures are interrogated in Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s oil-on-linen mind map exposing political and financial flows between the military, state agencies and corporations in his native Myanmar (Myanmar Peace Industrial Complex No. iii, 2018); Vincent Namatjira’s portraits of the seven richest people in Australia (The Richest, 2016), the seven past prime ministers (Prime Ministers, 2016) and seven elders from the Aboriginal local government area where he lives, Anangu ¯ Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (Seven Leaders, 2016), expose the place of Australia’s First Peoples in these hierarchies.

It niggles that some of the selections are conservative, perhaps because the museum has one eye on acquiring its commissions. How many people, I wonder, want to see another Qiu Zhijie map, a series so long-running and institutionally adaptable each iteration seems generated by algorithm? Another issue is apt’s strong sense of centralised control and a lack of bold strokes, compared to the edgier, roving, multivenue, grassroots biennales that have sprung up in the region (Jakarta Biennale and Bangkok Biennale, for example). The perception that the triennial is more interested in fair representation and diplomacy than making provocative statements isn’t helped by the clean-cut, World Expo-type display of artefacts.

ArtReview Asia

But the event is saved from piety by its spirit of discovery. Gems include joyful and racy photographs by Okinawa’s Mao Ishikawa, now in her sixties, documenting the postwar American occupation of the Japanese island.

Her boldest subjects are the local women working in the segregated bars for black us servicemen during the 1970s, captured in bed with their African-American boyfriends, dancing or cheerfully flashing a boob or two. South Korean dancer and choreographer Jeong Geumhyung, meanwhile, crosses fitness or rehabilitation machines with humanlike forms to create uncanny hybrids: these become her partners in videos in which she performs as nurse, trainer or sexual partner.

Nor is apt’s inclusion of crafts and aesthetic expressions from diverse locales dutiful, sentimental or tokenistic. Instead, it often engages meaningfully with underrepresented regions.

Take the multifaceted spotlight on Bougainville, an autonomous region in Papua New Guinea ravaged by a ten-year civil war and with barely any cultural infrastructure. Part of the more conventional country showcase is on notable artists from the islands: Herman Somuk (1901–65) and Gregory Dausi Moah (1911–88), whose paintings capture the experiences of indigenous rituals, colonialism and social change. But another prong of the engagement is the collaborative Women’s Wealth project with women from Bougainville and some Solomon Islands. In workshops starting in 2017, the participants created ceremonial hoods, mats, bags and baskets, and the final display is a show of cultural resilience and the outcome of a sustained process of engagement with the community.

Credit should be given to apt’s long-term vision of a free exchange of ideas, culture and community; a certain old-fashioned neighbourly spirit. As the pioneering largescale regular event to focus on Asian art and to group it with the Pacific, it lacks eye-catching flourishes such as an immoderate number of curators or a novelty theme – but who knows? This old venerable might undergo a snazzy makeover in future.

For now, at the risk of sounding kumbaya, during these shouty, fractious times of rising nationalisms and trade wars, I appreciate its attempt to connect to different communities and practices, and to bring them under one roof in an atmosphere of quiet hospitality. Adeline Chia

top Peter Robinson, This place displaced (detail), 2018, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Natasha Harth.

Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

above Mao Ishikawa, Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa (detail), 1975â&#x20AC;&#x201C;77, gelatin silver print, 15 Ă&#x2014; 23 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Nap Gallery, Tokyo

Spring 2019

93

Cao Fei A hollow in a world too full Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong 8 September – 4 January Upon entering A hollow in a world too full, one immediately encounters a violently green cascade of plastic mangoes. Hanging in the central void of a spiralling concrete stairwell, this incongruous faux-vegetal totem offers a garish contrast to the restrained, arch-industrial aesthetic of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Tai Kwun Contemporary. Before its much-publicised conversion, this imposing compound of 16 colonial-era buildings was once the Hong Kong Central Police Station and Victoria Prison, the stronghold of the disciplinary state apparatus and the city’s longest-running penitentiary.

Given the grim history of the site, the choice of Cao to be the first Mainland Chinese artist to have an expansive solo exhibition at Tai Kwun (this is also her first major solo exhibition in Asia) seems rather odd initially. After all, few other artists have so effectively emblematised the newfound freedoms ushered in by China’s ‘open door’ policy, the economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the year the artist was born. While the previous generation struggled against the political, social and artistic constraints of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, centring their artistic experimentations on the more traditional lexicon of sculpture, installation and painting, Cao was an early adopter of the global language of new media technologies – not only chronicling the capricious spectacle of everyday life in the ‘new’ China but also emphasising its increasingly porous interface with the rest of the globe.

Indeed, a preternatural ability to tap into contemporary vernaculars of virtual, filmic and digital imaginaries has made Cao’s colourful oeuvre particularly accessible to wider audiences. This also cemented her status as the darling of the global biennale circuit since the 1990s, and the posterchild of groundbreaking travelling exhibitions like Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Cities on the Move (1997).

In recent years, Cao has had solo exhibitions across the world, from the Secession in Vienna to moma ps1 in New York.

A hollow in a world too full, a terse presentation coproduced by ucca in Beijing and curated by Philip Tinari and Xue Tan, comprising just five previous works and a new commission, puts into focus the flipside of this ostensible artistic freedom. In the context of Tai Kwun, it becomes evident that the politics of capture has been a recurring thematic of Cao’s practice over the last

94

two decades. In the first gallery, four ‘Roomba’ discs (commercially available automatic vacuums) skitter across the raised ramparts of a large Ikea-like pinewood structure, occasionally bumping into and repelling one another in an oddly touching ballet mécanique, dutifully cleaning the lengths of this empty surface within the already sanitised space of the gallery.

Elsewhere, we find Cao’s widely shown i.Mirror and RMB City (both 2007), two works created on the online virtual platform Second Life, in which the artist’s avatar China Tracy navigates a dystopic, machinima cityscape that satirically echoes the all-too-real restructuring of Chinese cities in the buildup to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and Expo Shanghai 2010. In a similar vein, Cao’s postapocalyptic animation La Town (2014), screened in full cinematic glory, is a study in the compulsive attempt to exercise control over every minute detail of a thoroughly artificial and already decrepit world.

Interspersed throughout these pieces from Cao’s oeuvre are enigmatic mise-en-scènes that allude to the discomfiting history of Tai Kwun itself, ranging from a wall-mounted architectural model of the former prison to a theatrical restaging of the prison warden’s office, complete with a desk strewn with paperwork and halfsmoked cigarettes, a crookedly hanging portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on damp-stained walls and an overturned basket of mangoes spilling onto a bare concrete floor. So, the mangoes first encountered in the stairwell are a recurring motif. Do they symbolise the immoral and illicit in a Judeo-Christian reference to the biblical forbidden fruit? Or are they a nod to the absurd symbolism of mangoes in the iconography of Maoist propaganda following a gift of the fruit by a visiting Pakistani delegation in 1968?

It is not until the viewer reaches the third and final floor of the exhibition that the symbolism of the fruit is revealed in the last few minutes of the exhibition’s pièce de résistance: a newly commissioned 57-minute video that squarely focuses on the history of Tai Kwun.

Prison Architect (2018), filmed onsite a few months prior to the opening of the exhibition, centres on two fictional characters existing in two different moments of the prison’s history. One is an inmate jailed for writing seditious poetry, incarcerated at some point in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and the other an architect grappling with the ethics of converting

ArtReview Asia

the art space back into a prison, presumably in a parallel present or an implicit future. The spectator is invited to view the film – projected simultaneously at two ends of a vast room – while reclining on a concatenation of dormitory bunkbeds arranged between them. It marks the first time that Cao has worked with a professional cinematographer, the critically acclaimed Kwan Pun Leung, who has imbued the work with a polished aesthetic that visually coheres the fragmented narrative sequences.

It is also marked by Cao’s penchant for poetic dialogue between two estranged protagonists (as is the case in La Town and i.Mirror), beautifully shot dreamlike sequences and bursts of unexpected humour, which has become the artist’s trademark style. Yet the lengthy piece is interrupted by awkward moments that erratically swing from the jejune to the didactic, leading some critics to unfairly dismiss the work as a gauche ‘promotional video’ for Tai Kwun.

At one point in the film, the architect delivers a lecture detailing an art-historical genealogy of artworks centred on the thematics of art and captivity, from Joseph Beuys to Tehching Hsieh, and snippets from the Elvis Presley film Jailhouse Rock (1957) are interspersed with elegantly filmed shots of the two protagonists drifting through the architectural wonder of the newly renovated space. The prisoner’s narrative musings gloss the existential ruminations of Hegel and Sartre, while the architect’s reverie ponders Foucault and the notion of the Panopticon.

Ultimately, however, Cao’s film draws attention to its own artifice and constructedness – whether it is a ratiocinative exploration of the dynamics of art and captivity or a postmodernist metacritique of this same dynamic. In the thrall of these largescale immersive installations, the viewer is also made to interrogate our own willingness to be captivated by such spectacles in the first place, putting into focus questions of manufactured consent as well as the disruptive potential of counterhegemonic forces.

In Prison Architect we find out that the mangoes first encountered in the transitory space of the stairwell are a direct reference to a 60-year-old mango tree that still stands in the courtyard of Tai Kwun, whose fruit was reserved for the highest-ranking officers. The final scene of the video shows the prisoners released from their confines, tearing at the fruit with unbridled, anarchistic delight. Wenny Teo

A hollow in a world too full, 2018 (installation views).

Courtesy the artist and Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong

Spring 2019

95

Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life Various venues, Kochi 12 December – 29 March As an artist-curated event since its first edition in 2012, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (kmb) has thrived, albeit that the invited artist was always Indian, established and male. An overdue shake-up sees Anita Dube at the helm for the fourth edition, which brings over 130 artists from 32 countries to ten venues around Fort Kochi: over 50 percent of them are women.

In a curatorial statement explaining that she is drawing on Guy Debord’s ‘warnings of a world mediated primarily through images’, Dube challenges her audience and artists to ask ‘questions, critical questions, in the hope of dialogue’.

To that end Dube has invited artists including valie export, Martha Rosler and the Guerrilla Girls, a new series of whose posters protesting the representation of women in the artworld line the streets of Kochi in both English (one of Kerala’s official languages) and Malayalam. Commissioned for the biennale, the posters list gender stereotypes used against women in Kerala, while the collective also presented a lecture– performance as part of kmb’s ‘Let’s Talk’ programme during which they promised to share a statement formulated by a group of artists, writers and curators. The subject was the continuing revelations on the Indian art scene related to the #MeToo movement, a reminder that they include accusations made against kmb’s cofounder Riyas Komu.

Goshka Macuga’s large printed canvas You Made Me a Communist (2018), which unscrolls from the wall onto the floor, engages directly

with the state’s communist history, knitting images of Karl Marx’s tombstone and portraits of women significant to Keralan history into Kochi’s natural landscape. Chief among them is a bare-breasted woman representing the Ezhava woman.

Nangeli, who, in protest at the ‘breast tax’ imposed on lower caste Hindu women who wished to cover their breasts in nineteenth-century southern Kerala, chopped off her breasts and presented them to the village officer on a plantain leaf. Her martyrdom spurred a number of popular movements that eventually caused the tax to be annulled.

Also giving a voice to those silenced by oppressive regimes, Shilpa Gupta’s immersive installation For, In Your Tongue, I Can Not Fit – 100 Jailed Poets (2017–18) allows visitors to amble among 100 metal microphones that dangle precariously above single, printed pages of poetry suspended on the tips of pointed stakes. The work gives a platform to writers imprisoned or executed for their practice, while at the same time illustrating how controversial voices are silenced. Among these feminist messages are references to the devastating flood that hit Kerala in August by artists including Monica Meyer. Yet it is Bangladeshi artist Marzia Farhana’s dizzying multimedia installation Ecocide and the Rise of Free Fall (2018) that has the most powerful impact. A freezeframe of the turmoil experienced by many households, the work repurposed flood-damaged property into a chaotic

facing page, top Sue Williamson, One Hundred and Nineteen Deeds for Sale, 2018, cotton clothing, mud, printing ink, Indian ink, rope, dimensions variable.

Courtesy Kochi Biennale Foundation

96

ArtReview Asia

installation – rusted fridges hang upsidedown spilling their contents, and broken toys float in midair – as if still underwater.

In a Dutch colonial bungalow, Norwegian artist Vanessa Baird’s watercolours depict disturbing moments of madness amidst the banality of home life. The contents of a woman’s handbag are spilled out – incontinence pads, a mobile phone, a half-used tube of cream – while other members of the family, clustered around the dinner table, vomit.

Commenting on the everyday psychological torture that patriarchy imposes on women, the works prompt reflection on recent reports that the rates of suicide numbers in India are highest among housewives. The colonial histories of many of the biennale’s venues are the subject of commissioned works including Sue Williamson’s One Hundred and Nineteen Deeds for Sale (2018). Installed along the waterfront of Aspinwall House – the biennale’s main venue and originally the premises of a nineteenth-century English trader – a stretch of linen garments pinned to a clothesline comment on the colonial connection between Kochi and her home city of Cape Town. On each fluttering banian (a loose flannel undergarment worn in India) are listed details such as name and date of birth, discovered in Cape Town’s Deeds Office, of an Indian slave brought to South Africa to work on the Dutch East India company’s estates and gardens. The bare statistics of these individuals speak for many others displaced from their native lands, in the past and in the present. Emma Sumner

facing page, bottom Goshka Macuga, You Made Me a Communist, 2018, printed tapestry, dimensions variable.

Courtesy Kochi Biennale Foundation

Spring 2019

97

Lucy Raven Internal Properties of the Earth Bellas Artes Projects Outpost, Manila 30 January – 13 April Lucy Raven’s first solo show in Asia combines analogue filmmaking techniques with geological metaphors to consider the hidden labour that underpins the production of images.

A new photographic series made by the New York-based artist during a recent residency at Bellas Artes Projects, in the Philippine province of Bataan, is shown here alongside video essays spanning a decade.

The history of filmmaking informs all of the work on display. In Fire and Mud (2018–19) 12 mounted images on two shelves lean against the gallery wall, resembling the lobby cards, popular during the golden age of cinema, that displayed scenes from movies as teasers. In this set, colour stills of televised news footage of the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo are juxtaposed with scenes from the artist’s ongoing film project Kongkreto, in which lahar – a mix of ash, rock and

water – flows down a replica volcano, destroying everything in its way. Continuing on the adjacent wall are six larger photographs on pvc board repeating scenes from Kongkreto: an erupting volcano, lahar engulfing vehicles and streets.

Raven is known for recreating the laborious production techniques used by early cinema.

In the case of Kongkreto this includes the production of model sets for her disaster movie, and the effect is unsettling for those of us who still remember the trauma of Mount Pinatubo’s eruption. The natural disaster – during which lahar killed hundreds of people – also had wide political and social repercussions, leading eventually to the withdrawal of forces from the nearby Clark Air Force Base, ending 470 years of foreign military presence in the Philippines.

The artists’ interest in geological events also extends to The Deccan Trap (2015), a collage

The Deccan Trap, 2015, photographic animation, colour, sound, 4 min 19 sec. Courtesy the artist

98

ArtReview Asia

animation film named after a vast basalt plateau stretching over Maharashtra and parts of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh in India.

The video starts in a postproduction studio in Chennai that creates visual effects for the Hollywood film industry, and then cuts to bas-relief carvings in the ancient temples in Madhya Pradesh. In a separate room, China Town (2009) bears witness to the manufacture of copper wire from its origins in an open pit mine in Nevada to a smelter in China. Composed of still photographs, the video is so lacking in narrative drive as to be meditative. In the act of looking, the camera harvests images of material extraction while the viewer mines them for meaning. In Raven’s work, the transformation of physical material into images offers a new way of thinking about how images relate to the world. Josephine V. Roque

Ng Joon Kiat Searching Operations: Bodies of Paintings adm Gallery, ntu-adm School of Design, Singapore 18 January – 6 April Ng Joon Kiat’s recent paintings are covered with thick coats of acrylic resembling doughy flesh or subcutaneous fat. These layers have been sliced, peeled, folded or stabbed to reveal underlying colours – gummy pinks, pale blues and beige – evoking the fake, plasticky tones of anatomical models. Some of these works look melted, some violently churned. Others are staked with sharp wooden pegs.

Surgery, butchery, even zombie references: the Autopsy Paintings (2017–18) mark a gleeful, visceral turn for Singaporean artist Ng, hitherto better-known for conceptual paintings of maps and landscapes exploring issues of home, identity, land and the homogenisation of cities. This exhibition, which brings together five bodies of work from the past six years, contains an iddriven immediacy rarely expressed in his earlier practice. He seems to be taking something out on these works, and in a good way.

Maps have been Ng’s pet topic since he started showing more than a decade ago, exploring the correspondences between cartography and painting, both of which demarcate a zone with its own rules, hierarchies and meanings.

In these self-consciously cerebral works, Ng’s treatment of paint has always been sensual, with thick impasto often providing topograph-

ical texture. Blobs of paint evoked land, and tube-applied squiggles stood in as roads and planning grids in urban blueprints.

Making a return in this exhibition at adm Gallery are his bird’s-eye views of cities, but the paintings are more abstracted and freer in composition. In the Numerical Cities series, light expressionist strokes of paint dance over the pencil gridlines of urban planning, creating scratchy interferences. The works grouped under the title Plastic Remains (2015–18) feature creamy smears of pastel-coloured paint resembling melted plastic or bubble gum. Thinner lines zigzag up and down, evoking financial graphs or the irregular jumps of an excitable cardiograph.

That interest in the body and its mysteries frees the works from Ng’s cartographical gridlock into more unpredictable territory. The Cosmeticised Corpse (2014–15) paintings feature an all-white, textured surface that combines the creepy and the innocent. On the one hand, they recall shrouds and the bloodless skin of cadavers; on the other hand, these slightly crumpled surfaces evoke something clean and nostalgic: the sticky film that dries on top of milk. But these paintings have hidden histories.

Go to the side of the canvases and you will see a cross-section of colourful strata. The

works were made by letting layer after layer of different-coloured paint dry over one another.

The Autopsy series develops the lasagne concept by using thicker blankets of paint and messing with them more drastically. Performing the artist as surgeon or serial killer, Ng peels the layers apart to wedge something in between, sometimes taking a knife to fold and churn the layers, creating molten, mottled surfaces.

Two large works measuring a little over a metre by a metre, Autopsy Landscape and Bloody Landscape: Waiting For An Autopsy (both 2018), combine imageries of body and landscape: but not in any romantic or gendered sense of the trope. Ng treats land as bloody meat; or maybe the other way round. In Autopsy Landscape, islands are arranged on the whitish background like pieces of a charcuterie board. They are streaky red, made from slicing ‘sausages’ of solidified paint, and arranged in an archipelago, as if Hannibal Lecter had created his own boardgame from ingredients in his kitchen. Meanwhile Bloody Landscape, made from acrylic paint layered thickly to create a sculptural, volcanic terrain, evokes flayed or diseased flesh. As with pathological specimens, the work is both repelling and inviting – the way a tumour anticipates a lance. Adeline Chia

Autopsy Painting, 2017, acrylic on linen, 41 × 49 cm.

Courtesy the artist and adm Gallery, Singapore

Spring 2019

99

Minimalism: Space. Light. Object.

National Gallery Singapore 16 November – 14 April ArtScience Museum Singapore 16 November – 14 April By the time I left this enormous, double-venue exhibition featuring over 150 works, I no longer had the faintest clue as to what ‘Minimalism’ means. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Art can be at its most powerful when it unsettles rather than affirms. Particularly in the context of the current fetish for retelling art’s histories and reexamining old tales from different points of view, a trend of which this – billed as the first survey of minimalist art to be staged in Southeast Asia, and the first exhibition on the subject to incorporate art from the region under the Minimalism brand – is selfconsciously a part.

The exhibition at the National Gallery (where around 120 works are housed) begins traditionally enough, with some of the precursors to the heyday of New York Minimalism during the 1960s, albeit paintings (variations on the theme of black, largely from the late 1950s) by Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Frank Stella are grouped together in the opening corridor of the show in such a cramped way that the ultimate sensation is that the curators simply wanted to dispense with art-historical givens as quickly as possible. Further in we come across works by the stars of the gang – Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris – but by then the territory has been expanded, both geographically and temporally. We start to encounter works by Tang Da Wu, Lee Seungtaek, Lee Ufan (and a section on Mono-ha), Roberto Chabet, Rasheed Araeen, Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, Richard Long, Mona Hatoum and Olafur Eliasson. Some, such as three works from Haegue Yang’s Sol LeWitt Upside Down series (2017), made up of white mass-produced Venetian blinds and riffing off LeWitt’s concerns with linearity, seriality and modularity, make self-conscious reference to precedents from the Western canon. (Although the fact that the South Korean’s works are supported by walls or ceilings, rather than freestanding as are LeWitt’s structures, and hung upside down might be seen as an oblique insistence on some form of contextual difference.) Others, such

as self-taught Myanmar artist Po Po’s Red Cube (1986), come from somewhere else altogether.

The work comprises a red oil painting that might, given its tonal variations, suggest two faces of a cube, the one face with a hole in it, hung at an angle above a pile of gneiss rocks.

It’s informed by an interest in subverting the traditional viewing of paintings as portrait or landscape as well as Zen and Theravada Buddhism (Buddhist monks are known to retire to the jungle and build stone pagodas to focus the attention). In the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, the artist asserts that he had never even heard of Minimalism when he created the work (until late 1988 the country was relatively isolated). At moments like this (and there are several), you wonder whether the New York version of Minimalism needed to be addressed at all. But other works in the exhibition build on and complicate such ambiguities.

A selection from Simryn Gill’s photographic series My Own Private Angkor (2007–09) documents a compound of abandoned houses, built during the 1980s, in Port Dickson on Malaysia’s west coast. Each image features rectangular panes of glass, bright when the sun shines on or through them, dark when it does not, that have been removed from their window settings so that they could be stripped of their valuable aluminium frames. Apparently without value, they are carefully rested against walls or balconies. To a degree, the panes of glass and their bare architectural setting offer a formal echo of the opening hang of Newmans and Reinhardts, but the situation Gill documents is found, rather than constructed (albeit the photographs are), and speaks to the passage of time, economics, recycling and ruination in an equatorial context: the kind of factors that Minimalism of the hardcore 1960s variety would see as external to the artwork. While the exhibition might be arguing for Minimalism as a global movement, Gill’s work insists that regional specificity has a role to play. If New York Minimalism was about pulling down the blinds on anything external to the work of art, this kind of Minimalism is open to the world.

facing page, top Po Po, Red Cube, 1986, oil on canvas, paper collage and gneiss, 218 × 154 × 50 cm. © Hla Oo and Po Po. Courtesy the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

100

Within the context of both parts of the exhibition, but in the display in the ArtScience museum in particular, that notion is further pursued by the staging of Minimalism as something grounded in Asian spirituality and religion. The Rig Veda is quoted in wall texts, the teachings of the Buddha more openly evoked. Again, the fact that such philosophies have a much deeper history than Minimalism itself somewhat begs the question of why Minimalism (rather than, say, Asian mysticism, which also had an influence on many minimalists in the us and Europe) provides the framework for the show. More successful is a direct attempt to document the historic contribution of women artists (among them Simone Forti, Mary Miss, Carmen Herrera) into the expanded narrative of what is largely a male preserve.

As is an expansive mini-exhibition of soundworks: an important reminder that Minimalism, as displayed here, was operative across disciplines (dance and performance are included in the National Gallery) as well as across time and space.

There’s a sense, given the expanded chronology, geography and substance of the works in both institutions, that this show fits into a wider theme of destabilising the past (in terms of its accepted narratives and geography) in order better to understand our unstable present. On the other hand, its sheer inclusivity can at times mean that Minimalism seems to mean nothing because it seems to mean everything. To the extent that you wonder if all this ‘blockbuster exhibition’ really demonstrates is Minimalism’s brand value. No more so than in an iteration of Martin Creed’s Work no. 1343 (2012) installed in the National Gallery café.

The work incorporates a mishmash of furniture, utensils and receptacles (‘visitors are invited to contribute their own wares to the artwork as long as they are in good condition’) within the framework of the existing refectory.

On the menu: a Pu’er Mousse Cake inspired

by Ai Weiwei’s Ton of Tea (2008) and the Infinity Drink – ‘an invigorating blend of ginger flower, lemon, mint and soda’. Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom 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

ArtReview Asia

Spring 2019

101

Taipei Biennial Post-Nature – A Museum as an Ecosystem Taipei Fine Arts Museum 17 November – 10 March It comes as no surprise – given that it is cocurated by Wu Mali, best known for her socially engaged projects on subjects ranging from gender politics to the role of art institutions and environmental protection – that this year’s Taipei Biennial takes as its theme humankind’s ecological impact on the planet. If Post-Nature is part of a zeitgeist in which art biennials tackle bewilderingly complex real-world issues, it also shows an awareness of art’s limitations, reflecting the same reasoning expressed by Wu of her own work as an artist: ‘Environmentalists are focused in making changes; artists, on the other hand, tell the same story with a different medium’. Post-Nature doesn’t pretend art can save the planet, but does maintain that it is a useful means of re-presenting environmental issues through a perspective different from those offered by scientists, environmentalists or government agencies. This approach is evident in the biennial’s inclusion of environmental and social research groups (from Taiwan and abroad), which acknowledges that art and science are discrete disciplines even as it offers the museum as a space in which they might form a symbiotic relationship.

The science-fair aesthetic of the research projects is offset by the sobering reality they reveal: the effects of pollution and industry on Taiwan and its surrounding ecosystems. Bottled samples of seawater washed along the east coast by the warm Kuroshio current are presented

by Kuroshio Ocean Education Foundation to highlight the effects of toxic waste and pollution; barriers are presented as sculptures and tents are occupied by a series of talks and workshops given by the Indigenous Justice Classroom (a group that charges itself with the safeguarding of Taiwan’s environment against big corporations); and Jui-Kuang Chao + Tainan Community University’s presentation uses a combination of maps and photography that show Taiwan’s topography riddled with the cysts and scars of land made toxic by industrial waste.

These issues are addressed in works including Ting-Tong Chang’s installation Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains (2018),

for which she collected samples of air from Taipei and distilled the particles of pollution into inks used in an accompanying painting workshop with asthma sufferers. A number of artworks by non-Taiwanese participants also engage with the island’s current environmental crises, among them Ruangsak Anuwatwimon’s Anthropocene (2018), a series of what appear to be sections of stratified rock made out of compacted dust and debris collected by the artist from ten sites of toxic land throughout Taiwan. Another installation permeates Anuwatwimon’s room with a low-frequency throbbing – beyond a partitioning wall that divides the room, Henrik Håkansson’s film Blinded by the Light (2018) plays out. Made in collaboration with Taiwan’s Endemic Species Research Institute in Wushinkeng, the film (soundtracked by the bass – which turns out to be an edited recording of ultrasound signals from bats) shows a whisper of moths swarming around a glowing mercury lightbulb in an understated comment on the impact of manmade technologies on native species.

Elsewhere, artists reimagine the boundaries separating human from nonhuman life. Jeffrey Hou and Dorothy Tang’s video installation Plant’s-Eye Views of Taipei (2018), a series of small screens attached to haphazardly assembled scaffolding, positions the viewer as different species of the city’s trees, shrubs and water plants: from a first-person perspective, we watch people, cars and wildlife pass by; we are watered or chopped down. Rather more uncomfortable to watch is Zheng Bo’s trilogy of films Pteridophilia (2016–18) – filmed in Taiwan’s woodlands – in which a group of actors engage in foreplay and then intercourse with the island’s native plants in a disturbing manifestation of human domination and control over an nonconsenting landscape.

In Rubber Man (2014), a three-channel film by Khvay Samnang, the artist is shown dumping buckets of fresh rubber sap over his naked body in protest at the exploitation and destruction of forestland and indigenous communities and species in Cambodia; in a basement room next to Zheng Bo’s work, Candice Lin has transformed

top Rachel Sussman, Llareta 0308-2B33 (Atacama Desert, Chile), 2008, digital c-print, 119 × 145 × 6 cm. © the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum

102

ArtReview Asia

the space into an altar room-cum-drug den with cracked-clay floor, foil walls and magenta lighting for La Charada China (2018) – titled after a system for picking lottery numbers inspired

by Chinese, Spanish and African folk-magic. In the centre of the space is a mud-baked bed on top of which the shape of a person is indented, while an assortment of bottles, charms and ingredients is carefully arranged at its end. This work, first shown earlier in 2018 at the Hammer Museum as part of Made in L.A., reflects on the use of drugs in colonial conquests – specifically the Opium Wars, as a result of which Europeans were able to force hundreds of thousands of Chinese labourers into work on plantations in the Caribbean and the us. Accompanying the installation is a collection of unnamed and undated texts that allude to the ways in which labourers would use plants to make medicines, drugs and poisons for the purpose of abortion, suicide or murder.

Operating within the broader discourse of climate-change activism are Rachel Sussman’s The Oldest Living Things in the World (2004–14).

Depicting some of the world’s oldest living organisms – including a 44,000-year-old, self-propagating Tasmanian shrub – the wall-mounted photographic series highlights flora, fauna and ecosystems that, having survived extreme environments, are now under threat. Acoustic Ocean (2018), a video by Ursula Biemann, combines scientific research with a lyrical text spoken by an aquanaut who, from the shores of the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway, ruminates on the effects of climate change on the landscape. Mesmeric sound effects are produced by hydrophones that the narrator throws offshore, echoing back acoustics from the deep and plunging the viewer back into the era when water first gave life to the planet, through a land- and soundscape that is raw and harsh yet teeming with unseen potential. Resurfacing from this oneiric state, one can’t help but wonder whether history will come full circle, whether this is, in fact, a premonition of the flooded world we are heading towards. Fi Churchman

above Candice Lin, La Charada China, 2018, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. © the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Spring 2019

103

Books Im Heung-soon: Toward a Poetics of Opacity and Hauntology edited by Lee Jungmin National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, krw 20,000 / €20 (softcover) In ‘learning to live’ we must ‘learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship… To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. But with-them,’ explains Jacques Derrida in the lecture that would come to define the concept of hauntology. ‘Being-with spectres’ is about paying respects to ‘a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’, and taking the responsibility of ‘those who are not there, of those who are no longer’.

Filmmaker Im Heung-soon weaves together the experiences and stories, recollections and ghosts, of a contemporary Korean society defined by its commitment to ‘being-with’ its collective past traumas of war, colonisation, uprising and dictatorship. For Im, this state of perpetual mourning, this preoccupation with memory and the payment of respect to Korea’s ghosts (the dead, whose histories have been buried, and the living, who are unseen or forgotten), is a symptom of the unresolved divide between North and South. And so hauntology has become a way for the filmmaker to understand and record this trauma through ruptures in time: interviews with survivors of war are set along-

side dreamlike reenactments by actors (often women), as in his latest film, Things That Do Us Part (2017), which tells the story of four grandmothers who lived through the 1945 partition.

This monograph is the first in a series of ‘Artist Studies’ published by the Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, in which academics, artists and curators contribute essays and interviews on a single artist’s oeuvre.

Addressing his influences, academic Moon Young Min identifies Im as a ‘Post-Minjung’ artist – that is, positioned somewhere between the socially engaged Minjung Movement’s two offshoots: that which glorified the common people and gained institutional recognition, and that which criticised the first as naive and complicit. Seo Dongjin characterises the films as a combination of mnemonic and historical documentary, and notes, pertinently, the function of two Korean words related to memory: gyeongheom, the function of retrieving data stored in the unconscious; and cheheom, memory triggered by the senses.

The concept of opacity describes, in relation to Im’s works, the scenes in which memory fails or is distorted and things remain unclear.

The failure of fragments of interviews, shots of landscapes and objects, reenactments and found footage to resolve in a coherent narrative requires that the viewer piece them together. But as artist and curator George Clark paraphrases Édouard Glissant, ‘to understand a thing is not to make it transparent’, and Im’s commitment to the opacity of personal memory is also noted by Osaka Koichiro, for whom the artist ‘assumes the role of a careful listener to his subjects’.

But isn’t the opacity that Im’s films maintain threatened by such a comprehensive study of his work? A fictional interview with the artist sees filmmaker Park Chan-kyong not only ventriloquise Im’s answers to his questions but also speculate on what he must be thinking in the course of the interview: ‘The artist thinks that this talk has gotten too conceptual.’ It’s a satisfying way to treat an artist who inhabits the voices of those who are forgotten as a way of ‘being-with’ them, and to reveal his anxieties over whether his work is seen to use ‘moral authenticity’ as a means of justification: ‘All at once, the artist can forgive all of those inhospitable questions. He is sincerely thankful. He feels a sense of relief.’ Fi Churchman

Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani

by Jérôme Tubiana and Alexandre Franc Self Made Hero, £14.99 (softcover) What stays with the reader of this prison journal presented in graphic form are the friendships, contacts and brief connections made among people fighting for survival.

These details anchor Mohammed El-Gharani’s story (told to Jérôme Tubiana, a journalist and researcher, in 2011 and published that year as a diary piece in the London Review of Books) in a world we’ve heard about to the point of no longer fully seeing. Guantánamo Kid (endorsed

by Amnesty International, its logo prominent on the front cover) is an effective reminder of what took place there, and how the repercussions continue to be felt around the world.

El-Gharani, a Chadian street trader previously scraping out a living in Medina, was arrested shortly after 9/11 as he came out of

104

a mosque in Karachi, where he had travelled under a false name. Turned over to the us as an Al Qaeda member for a $5,000 bounty, this first-wave detainee was sent, along with others, to Afghanistan while a prison camp was thrown together in Guantánamo. El-Gharani arrived in Cuba as one of the youngest men (a boy, really, just fourteen at the time) caught up in the us government’s panicky, vengeful sweep for terrorists in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Fortunately for him, he was able to absorb inhuman levels of punishment without losing his spirit or humour; if anything he became stronger, his outrage stoking resistance and bolstering his moral standing. This earned him further beatings, segregation, starvation and then a fickle respect from some of his

ArtReview Asia

captors. Eventually he was found innocent, though he has remained essentially stateless since his release.

Drawn in a style that embraces caricature – Americans are bucktoothed country boys or chiselled, dimple-chinned steroid freaks; human rights lawyers wear rumpled clothing and gentle smiles; and I’ve seen Africans presented more naturalistically in Tintin – Guantánamo Kid nevertheless maintains a measured tone in its writing, setting up unusual contrasts between comic-book underdog heroism and an eyewitness account to atrocity. Stereotypes – what we know or think we know – are addressed and recede into the background, leaving relationships, small kindnesses and simple perseverance in the fore. David Terrien

Spring 2019

105

Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation and Criticism edited by Katya García-Antón oca/Valiz, €22.50 (softcover) George Orwell once wrote that autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful: ‘A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats’. The same could be said of any attempt to document a global history of modern and contemporary art; disgrace and defeat are what frames the long history of colonisation to globalisation. And it’s precisely that narrative that major museums of art around the world are frantically reconstructing their displays and collections to describe. This is not the happy art-history of intellectual, societal and technological progress that has been celebrated by so many institutions in the West for so long.

Because this is not simply a question of being more inclusive or encyclopaedic.

Sovereign Words is born out of a gathering of 16 ‘indigenous peers’ from three continents, organised by Norway’s Office for Contemporary Art at last year’s Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh. The book’s preface counts 370 million indigenous peoples worldwide, belonging to 5,000 different communities, located in 90 nation states, the majority of them in Asia. The common sense of indigenous peoples as outsiders and throwbacks who cannot enter the present because their traditions trap them in the past has been used, for most of modern history, to lock them

into a remote, if not invisible, cultural space.

Which in turn makes it seem ‘easy’ to uproot them from their lands. This book argues both for a learned sense of what it means to be indigenous and for an acknowledgement of the problematics of accommodating indigenous artefacts and artworks into global (even national) narratives and the institutions that purport to tell them. Ánde Somby, a specialist in indigenous rights law offers a summary of the current legal characterisation of indigenous peoples: marginalisation within the nation states in which they reside; historical presence within a territory; distinctiveness (that for any number of reasons, among them history, language or clothing, indigenous people are different from the general population of a nation state); and the fact that they self-identify as a people. For Somby this means that any encounter between indigenous peoples and the nation state exists on three levels: the ontological (do the same rights apply to everybody or are indigenous peoples a special case?), the epistemological (what knowledge does a society consider valid or invalid?) and the axiological (how can two communities share time and space in a manner that can be seen as fair?). It’s on one or all of these levels that the majority of the texts here operate.

The questions raised are myriad. To have a learned sense of indigenous art, do you need

to be an indigenous person? Who has the right to speak on whose behalf? What language should that speech occur in given that language is one of the tools by which repression has happened and continues to happen? To what extent can artworks or artefacts stand in for a discussion of human rights?

Discussing the European encounter with Australia’s first peoples, Aboriginal journalist Daniel Browning cites the argument that the latter ‘did not express their dominion over the land (in codes that Europeans could identify)’ as one of the old excuses for colonial brutality. Is that excuse still in play today?

Anthropologist Prashanta Tripura points out that ‘the separation between art and other domains of social life may not have existed traditionally’. Is a culture ever static? At times it can seem like the entire field is mined. But if you believe that one of the fundamental qualities of art is that it opens up alternative ways of seeing, then David Garneau, who is Metis and a professor of visual arts at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, offers a way out: ‘What [indigenous art] hopes to stop is a reproduction of the colonial, and the misguided, idea that art, criticism, and identities are forms of revealed and universal truth, rather than agreements among similarly trained elites’. Perhaps multiple elites are better than just the one. Mark Rappolt

The Tempest Society

by Bouchra Khalili Bookworks, £25 (softcover) Created for Documenta 14, Bouchra Khalili’s video installation The Tempest Society (2017) took the history of the radical French theatre company Al Assifa (‘The Tempest’) as a means of reflecting on the relationship between art and activism.

This publication compiles archive material, interviews and contextualising essays to consider the value of emulating historical models, what it means to bear witness and the expression of solidarity through culture.

Touring between 1972 and 1978, Al Assifa practised a street theatre more closely related to the participatory Arabic tradition of ‘al halqa’.

Sociologist Abdellali Hajjat introduces the company as an outgrowth of the Movement for Arab Workers, a labour organisation distinguished by its independence from those bastions

106

of the French left: the bourgeois intelligentsia and trade unions whose version of class struggle did not extend to antiracism. The essay captures the tensions in Khalili’s work: how to draw attention to radical histories without preserving them in aspic, and how to establish solidarities without overwriting difference. Or as Philippe Tancelin, the only surviving cofounder of Al Assifa, says in an interview with the artist: ‘What is my right to speak?’

When I saw Khalili’s video two years ago it was installed on a freestanding screen in Athens’s School of Fine Art, and I read it as attempting to establish connections between post-1968 theatre and art in Greece after the recent crises. But it’s hard to ignore how the discrepancy between content and form – Al Assifa’s raucous live per-

ArtReview Asia

formances revisited in a hushed room on a static screen in a video with high production values – is reproduced by the elegant design and eyewatering retail price of a book that declares its opposition to such bourgeois fetishes as refinement and exclusivity. When Tancelin speaks about a spectator leaping onto Al Assifa’s stage in order to correct – from his own experience – a representation of police brutality, that gap feels uncomfortably wide. For all that this project revitalises an important historical precedent, and that Khalili has thought seriously about her responsibilities as a speaker – she also cites Pasolini’s ‘civic poetry’ as a model – it raises more questions than it answers about how art can participate in a genuinely popular resistance. Which might be its most important legacy. Ben Eastham

Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–1998 edited by David Teh Afterall Books, £14.95 (softcover) Amid the febrile politics and full-throttle consumerism of 1990s Thailand, a group of likeminded friends dreamt up an art festival with a difference. Taking its cue from Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture, but privileging interactions rather than individual artists or works, Chiang Mai Social Installation (cmsi) was a series of ephemeral artist-run exhibitions held in public venues across the northern Thai city. It began quietly: only 16 artists, all Thai men, took part in the first edition, in 1992, and most of the work in four temples and two cemeteries was transplanted from the studios of nearby Chiang Mai University. In 1993 things picked up: the number of participants doubled, a few foreign and female artists entered, venues expanded to include canals and streets. In 1995 there was further expansion and ‘a dramatic internationalisation’; and in 1996 the use of nonart spaces was ramped up further. Then, silence – just as cmsi seemed set to become part of the country’s institutional furniture, it (to quote Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook) ‘quietly disappeared from the town’s future’.

This book gamely tries to illuminate this defunct art project, only ever a blip on the international artworld radar, but one that the book’s editor, David Teh, nevertheless believes can stake a robust claim to art-historical importance. Ostensibly, it is an attempt to redress some of the imbalances that surround ‘Asian

contemporary art’, with its spotty literature and archival resources yet breakneck pace of institutional and infrastructural development. Yet it also stands as an exemplary lesson in resourceful scholarship: faced with a paucity of critical literature and scant material traces, Teh, alongside David Morris, has used nontraditional research methods to create a revealing, if unfixed, picture of ‘an unruly object of study’.

Artist-to-Artist is anchored in cmsi’s principal surviving element: word-of-mouth. ‘If the study of art has too long privileged individuals and their tangible collectible products, these festivals lend themselves to another kind of history,’ chimes Teh. What follows is an oral history through which something of the original spirit and lived experience of the festival emerges. No one recollects a single work of art, but everyone has an amusing anecdote or gossipy take on what cmsi was or should have been. Theories for its demise are also offered, most centred on the drifting away of certain members, an overemphasis on artistic beauty and the failure to become more proactive when cmsi’s interventionist aim of public engagement fell short.

Artist-to-Artist’s midsection features photographs taken by participants and bystanders (here we do get a lively sense of cmsi’s artmaking universe – the risqué performances, the late-night processions, the fresh-faced artists hollering into microphones outside city gates

– along with captions drawn from media reports at the time), and bookending things are essays that adopt a range of critical distances. Teh posits that cmsi’s historical importance, its status as a cornerstone of Thai art history, may ultimately lie in its synchronicity with other kindred artists’ gatherings and that their unifying ethos was an ‘affirmative localism that did not limit their broader, international outlook’. In her contribution to this richly rewarding book, anthropologist Rosalind C. Morris paints the festival as a form of democratically minded resistance to the ‘reduction of Chiang Mai to a venue for the staging (and selling) of authenticity’ (the city was newly in thrall to tourist dollars).

May Adadol Ingawanij attempts a feminist, nostalgia-free counternarrative by examining the ‘wittily pointed vignettes’ and late style of Rasdjarmrearnsook. And Patrick D. Flores offers a regional genealogy of the ‘installative’.

However, it is the book’s attempt at cathartic, truth commission-esque communion – a problematic yet appealing complication of art-history convention that dovetails with the loose and extemporised nature of cmsi itself – that impresses most. Here, amid the partial memories, damaged egos and sense of disappointment and opportunities lost, we find a Buddhist detachment from the art object, and even the tantalising suggestion ‘that cmsi should be renewed once more’. Max Crosbie-Jones

Pulp ii: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book

by Shubigi Rao Rock Paper Fire, sgd 50 (softcover) The second part of this epic, five-volume, ten-year project (which also manifests in artworks and films) by writer and artist Shubigi Rao continues her investigation into the history of library and book destruction.

Where the first volume rooted the project in her own experience (via the story of her family library), this one focuses on the personal stories of librarians, publishers and artists, as recounted in interviews and conversations that take place everywhere from Antwerp to Delhi (via an extensive study of various forms of ethnic and cultural cleansing during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s). This volume as a whole focuses on the book as a site for resistance and activism (bootleg versions of The Satanic Verses, 1988, banned books inserted

into library collections) as much as one of repression. Or, as Rao puts it, she is looking at books and libraries as sites in which to explore ‘the possibilities of living after abuse’.

The spectres of the #MeToo movement, increasing divides between rich and poor, and the current rise of populist politics around the world haunt this work.

Throughout, the book is considered a physical object as much as a container of content (particularly evident in a discussion about the effects and consequences of library digitisation). Graffiti, excision and marginalia are introduced into the discussion both as an act of oppression (the scoring out of passages) and as part of a process of accumulating knowledge (third languages added

Spring 2019

to bilingual dictionaries). And form follows content through Rao’s ‘handwritten’ side notes, scribbled deletions and drawings.

More interesting is the way in which Rao traces the dynamics of ownership, censorship and rebellion from the context of family libraries (sibling rivalry), through to the fates of national libraries and collections. The idea, then, is to consider the largescale effects of wars, populist politics and the politics of cultural purity and appropriation through the lens of personal experience. ‘I consider that it is the particular and specific, the subjective, that punctures any apathetic diminution of vivid, diverse struggles and forms,’ Rao writes in her introduction. The rest of the book is a consistent demonstration of why that should be the case. Nirmala Devi

107

Sat nav for contemporary art

ArtReview Asia â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a driving force since 2013 artreview.com/subscribe 108

ArtReview Asia

ArtReview Asia

Editorial

Publishing

Advertising

Production & Circulation

Editor-in-Chief Mark Rappolt

Associate Publisher Fan Ni fanni@artreview.com

Asia Fan Ni fanni@artreview.com

Associate Publisher Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com

Finance

uk, Ireland and Australasia Jenny Rushton jennyrushton@artreview.com

Production Manager Alex Wheelhouse production@artreview.com

North America and Africa Debbie Hotz debbiehotz@artreview.com

Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam.ican@btinternet.com

Editor David Terrien Editor (International) Oliver Basciano Senior Editor J.J. Charlesworth Associate Editors Adeline Chia Ben Eastham Martin Herbert

Finance Director Lynn Woodward lynnwoodward@artreview.com Financial Controller Errol Kennedy-Smith errolkennedysmith@artreview.com

Assistant Editor Louise Darblay Editorial Assistant Fi Churchman Design

Benelux, France, Southern Europe and Latin America Moky May mokymay@artreview.com Northern and Eastern Europe Francesca von Zedtwitz-Arnim francesca@artreview.com Fashion and Luxury Charlotte Regan charlotte@cultureshockmedia.co.uk

Art Direction John Morgan studio

Subscriptions To subscribe online, visit artreview.com/subscribe ArtReview Subscriptions Warners Group Publications The Maltings, West Street Bourne, Lincolnshire pe10 9ph t 44 (0)1778 392038 e art.review@warnersgroup.co.uk ArtReview Ltd

Designer Isabel Duarte

ArtReview Asia is published

by ArtReview Ltd 1 Honduras Street London ec1y oth t 44 (0)20 7490 8138

office@artreview.com Advisory Board

Chairman Dennis Hotz

Defne Ayas Richard Chang Anselm Franke Claire Hsu Pi Li Eugene Tan Koki Tanaka Wenny Teo Philip Tinari Chang Tsong-zung

Managing Director Debbie Hotz

ArtReview Asia is printed in the United Kingdom and China.

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: 2052-5346) 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 Cover by Michael Lin, featuring his painting 005, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 200 Ă&#x2014; 200 cm, courtesy the artist; and portrait of Richard Lin, courtesy Artist Publishing, Singapore

Words on the spine and on pages 27, 57 and 91 come from Mahadeviyakka, vachana 324, from Speaking of Siva, trans A.K. Ramanujan, 1973

on pages 105 and 108 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Spring 2019

109

The tale that wagged the dog The confluence of ArtReview’s 70th anniversary and the bicentennial of the ‘founding’ of Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles makes this an opportune moment to revisit a curious treasure from ArtReview’s archives. In 1953 Art News and Review – as ArtReview Asia’s sister magazine was then styled – celebrated the recently completed production of a ceremonial mace for Singapore City Council by publishing the designs, by the Scottish sculptor Charles d’Orville Pilkington Jackson, for the decoration of its shaft. ArtReview’s erstwhile, anonymous and presumably deceased colleagues note that the nine facets of the mace were covered with depictions of typically Malayan flora, including orchids, rambutans, peppers and betel nuts, and that it was fabricated by Hamilton & Inches, an Edinburgh-based silversmith.

The silver and gilt mace, sponsored to the tune of $15,000 by local philanthropist Loke Wan Tho, was commissioned to mark the Royal Charter issued by George VI that had elevated Singapore to city status two years previously. The botanical motifs on the mace’s shaft were suggested by a committee in Singapore comprising Loke, university professors and the staff of Raffles Museum, which later became the National Museum of Singapore.

Although the story of the mace became more turbulent – and thus perhaps more newsworthy – as time went on, the magazine didn’t follow up. Until now.

At a ceremony in April 1954 Loke presented the mace to T.P.F. McNeice, the president of what was now established as a city council.

McNeice (who was Loke’s brother-in-law), a sombre individual with a taste for double-breasted suits, took possession of the almost-twometre-long staff; a photo shows that he was watched over by a portrait of the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth ii. He hoped, The Straits Times reported, that the treasure would come to symbolise the authority of the council and ‘inspire that enthusiasm and loyalty which is the most essential ingredient to the well-being of any city’. Loke agreed that the mace ‘is a signpost in our recorded history pointing, I hope, to a greater and nobler Singapore’.

A greater and nobler Singapore was indeed on its way: Ong Eng Guan, an anti communist, anti-British, Chinese-educated politician and founding member (and treasurer) of the People’s Action Party (which won a landslide election in 1959 and remains Singapore’s governing party today) was beginning to draw attention with his denunciations of colonial rule. On 21 December 1957, following the first city council elections (after Britain had agreed to Singapore’s self-rule), Ong was elected mayor. Following his arrest (after a scuffle over firecrackers and the appropriateness of their use on such occasions) during an aborted inauguration ceremony on 23 December, a large rambunctious public (strategically packed with pap supporters) turned out to see his official elevation to the post the following day. They booed loudly when Lee Bah Chee congratulated Ong in English alone. Speaking in Malay, Chinese and English, Ong declared that he would serve ‘those sections [of society] which have been neglected for so long in the past’.

From commitments to sewage systems and housing, he moved on to the matter of the mace that stood before him, declaring it ‘a relic of colonialism’ and calling for a motion declaring that it

110

‘be hereby disposed of’. Excluding abstentions, the council backed the proposed action unanimously, to great applause from the public galleries. ‘We are living in a revolutionary Asia,’ Ong said, ‘and we, the people of Singapore, are part of the Asian revolution. We do not want to follow the centuries-old tradition of the British mayors. We do not want to live or dress differently from our people. We do not want to see the chains of colonialism and the mantle of despotism worn by representatives on this city council.’ The British conservative mp Sir John Barlow, then visiting Singapore, offered to buy the mace as a souvenir of colonialism. His father, also called John, had made the family fortune (via offices in Calcutta, Shanghai, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur) trading the kind of crops depicted on the mace. ara After a brief, tumultuous merger with Malaya, Singapore became independent in 1965.

Having disposed of his mayoral robes and mayoral residence, Ong went on to reject a request for special lighting for a visit to Singapore

by Prince Philip in 1959. He later lost a pap election to decide who should be Singapore’s first prime minister by one vote to Lee Kuan Yew. One year later he was expelled from the pap. He retired from public life in 1965, and in 2012 it was reported that he had died in 2008.

Ironically, Pilkington Jackson’s best-known works commemorate icons of Scottish nationalism, chief among them his equestrian statue of Robert the Bruce, installed at Bannockburn in 1964 to mark the 650th anniversary of victory of the King of the Scots over the English.

The mace itself escaped destruction and now sits in the collection of the National Museum of Singapore.

Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 26-28.04.2019 / artmontecarlo.ch