ArtReview Asia Autumn 2023 by ArtReview

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Donald Judd

Donald Judd, Untitled (detail), 1990. © Judd Foundation / ARS, New York 2023. Photo: Chunho An.

Seoul September—October 2023

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New York

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Hong Kong

Seoul

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SARAH MORRIS

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SLAPPING PYTHAGORAS ANGELA BULLOCH SEPTEMBER 6 – OCTOBER 28, 2023 ESTHER SCHIPPER, SEOUL 6, NOKSAPYEONG-DAERO 46GA-GIL YONGSAN-GU, SEOUL, REPUBLIC OF KOREA, 04345 WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

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ArtReview Asia vol 11 no 3 Autumn 2023

An electrician! An agenda! A slogan! The last time ArtReview Asia had to discuss a ‘power dynamic’ it was because its sister, ArtReview, complained that it wasn’t pedalling hard enough to turn the generator flywheel that keeps all the lights and computers operational at its offices. Needless to say, ArtReview Asia fixed it so that ArtReview won’t be bothering it about potency or currents anytime soon. She’s only trying to mask her own impotence anyway. Nevertheless, that’s not to say that ArtReview Asia’s done with the dynamics of power; far from it. In fact, it’s wallowing in it. It’s like a fucking electrician. As you’re about to find out. Whether it’s the reversals and questioning of hierarchies (not least those of art itself) in the work of Kim Beom, the attempt to reclaim what colonialism has stripped away in the art of Sancintya Mohini Simpson or the exploration of the power of the powerless in the work of Wang Tuo, ArtReview Asia is going to make you feel that the power business is everywhere. Because it is. That’s the truth. And nothing is more powerful than the truth. Except, as you’ll also find out here, lies. From time to time. Hopefully. In the interest of truth, btw, ArtReview Asia stole that bit about the power of the powerless from a European. Yes! Let payback commence! Or… perhaps… just this once… the European might be something of an inspiration. So here’s how the late Václav Havel introduced the subject (The Power of the Powerless,in case you forgot already) back in 1978. Who are these so-called dissidents? Where does their point of view come from, and what importance does it have? What is the significance of the ‘independent initiatives’ in which ‘dissidents’ collaborate, and what real chances do such initiatives have of success? Is it appropriate to refer to ‘dissidents’ as an opposition? If so, what exactly is such an opposition within the framework of this system? What does it do? What role does it play in society? What are its hopes and on what are they based? Is it within the power of the ‘dissidents’ – as a category of subcitizen outside the power establishment – to have any influence at all on society and the social system? Can they actually change anything? ArtReview Asia knows: so much for progress (a capitalist lie); 45 years and nothing’s changed! (Except in the former Czechoslovakia, where it obviously has. A bit.) If ArtReview Asia is on any kind of mission (its marketing people are constantly pestering it for that), it’s on one to find out. In relation to change and all the other questions the Czech poet-turned-politician posed in the 120 words you just read. (So pester no more, marketing people.) ArtReview Asia

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JASON BOYD KINSELLA 3 October - 4 November 2023

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Art Previewed

Previews by ArtReview Asia 20

The Interview Wang Bing by ArtReview Asia 34 Culture Wars by Deepa Bhasthi 41

In a Dark Wood by Martin Herbert 43 Unhoarding by Max Crosbie-Jones 44

Art Featured

Kim Beom by Andrew Russeth 48

Wang Tuo by Yongwoo Lee 60

Kasimyn by Adeline Chia 72

Sancintya Mohini Simpson by Mark Rappolt 56

Sung Neung Kyung interview by Tyler Coburn 66

Cai Guo-Qiang interview by ArtReview Asia 76

page 70 Sung Neung Kyung, Everyday English 3-84-65, 2003–18, graphite and watercolour on newspaper, 15 × 28 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul

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Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 84 Daido Moriyama, by Martin Herbert Hiwa K, by Mitch Speed Yooyun Yang, by Claudia Ross Law Yuk Mui & Leung Chi Wo, by Stephanie Bailey Back to the Future, by Andrew Russeth China’s hidden century, by Yuwen Jiang Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi, by Fi Churchman ‘Art-Thai-Time’, by Max Crosbie-Jones Memory Palace in Ruins, by Alfonse Chiu Geng Dayou, by Paul Han and land erodes into, by Portia Placino Evaporating Suns, by Mark Rappolt

Toussaint Louverture, by C.L.R. James, Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Magma 1, edited by Paul Olivennes, reviewed by Nirmala Devi The Fabulist, by Uthis Haemamool, reviewed by Max Crosbie-Jones Sleepless, by Marie Darrieussecq, reviewed by David Terrien Bad Infinity, by Aria Dean, reviewed by Mitch Speed Zhang Xiao: Community Fire, by Ilisa Barbash, Zhang Xiao and Ou Ning, reviewed by Yuwen Jiang jon arbuckle ’s amazing adventures in art land 110

page 84 Daido Moriyama, Untitled, 1990, from Letter to St-Loup. © the artist / Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation. Courtesy c/o Berlin

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Art Observed

With holy dread 19

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16 Noguchi Rika, Untitled, 2023. © the artist. Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

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Previewed 1 Singing Mother Earth moca Busan 23 September – 18 February

8 Woosung Lee Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul Through 13 September

16 Noguchi Rika Taka Ishii Gallery (complex 665), Tokyo 12 September – 14 October

2 off-site Art Sonje Center, Seoul Through 8 October

9 Haegue Yang Kukje Gallery, Seoul Through 8 October

17 top Collection: A Genealogy of ‘Peep Media’ and the Gaze Tokyo Photographic Art Museum Through 15 October

3 MeeNa Park One and J. Gallery, Seoul 1 September – 22 October

10 X Museum Triennial X Museum, Beijing Through 26 November

4 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Various venues, Seoul 21 September – 19 November

11 Alice Wang ucca Dune, Beidaihe 29 October – 18 February

5 Chang Ucchin mmca Deoksugung 14 September – 12 February

12 Leelee Chan Capsule, Shanghai 16 September – 28 October

6 Adam Boyd, Chaewon Lee, Rim Park ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul 6 October – 4 November

13 Saitama Triennale Omiya Civic Hall, Saitama City October 7 – December 10

7 Koo Jeong A pkm Gallery, Seoul 6 September – 14 October

14 Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 18 October – 31 March

18 Kazumasa Ogawa Printing Museum, Tokyo 18 November – 12 February 19 In Excess Gajah Gallery, Singapore 21 September – 22 October 20 Hoda Afshar Art Gallery of New South Wales 2 September – 21 January 21 Tarek Atoui Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney 15 September – 4 February 22 The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 Philadelphia Museum of Art 21 October – 11 February

15 Takashi Makino anomaly, Tokyo 7 October – 4 November

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People are a disappointment. That’s why all and the iconic haenyeo culture of Jeju. As for the interest in ‘reconnecting’ with the nonthe art, look out for contributions from Kim human world in recent times. You know where Mijin, Lee Woongryeol, Choi Wonkyoung and Edgar Heap of Birds, among many others. By the you stand with a Penny Bun or a Chicken of the Woods. They’re not going to reinvent their end of it all you’ll be able to see the writing on history or suddenly redraft their geography the wall and the nonwriting not on it at all. (nd) How does spatial environment affect an or tell you they never really liked you and want 1 to get a divorce. Down in Busan, Singing Mother 2 exhibition? Off-site explores this question by Earth aims to (according to the institution) playing with the parameters of what defines ‘flexibly and softly expand our anthropocentric a place – ‘pushing the boundaries’, so to speak, view’. By which it means decentre the anthro bit. between art and its viewing environs. The Here with a focus on language, reframed (after exhibition takes place throughout Art Sonje New Zealand linguist Steven Roger Fischer) as Center’s functional spaces, where six artists any exchange of information, and the ideas of and artist groups present works that respond anthropologist Eduardo Kohn and his studies to its theatre, backstage area, dressing rooms, of indigenous Amazonian cultures. Naturally, garden, stairways, utility rooms and rooftop. graycode, jiiiiin are an electroacoustic in Busan, there will be a focus on other indigenous peoples nearer to home – the Ainu in Japan duo known for visualising sound and data

in immersive light-sculptures; Jong Oh’s delicate geometric spaceframes play with negative space to imply the positive; the pipework lattices of Yona Lee recall the service conduits that make up a building’s bones; Hyun Nahm experiments widely with materials, including recycling failed, abandoned or unexhibited efforts into new sculptures; and Jungyoon Hyen’s visceral sculptures endeavour to put the organic into cartoonish dialogue with the architectural. The tensions between artworks and space have long been explored by artists, but to journey to an institution without entering the actual exhibition space is an interesting turn of events, one that might stretch the possibilities of experience. (mvr) Launching their new gallery space in Gangnam district, One and J. Gallery turns

1 Lee Seung-taek, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Ben Westoby. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube Mason’s Yard, London

2 Yona Lee, Chair, Side Table and Lamp In Transit (detail), 2022, stainless steel, fabric, lamp, 160 × 139 × 131 cm. Courtesy the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney

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4 Agustina Woodgate, The New Times Atlas of the World, 2012, sanded world atlas (515 pages), brass and iron book stand. Photo: Mariano Costa Peuser. Courtesy the artist and Barro, Buenos Aires

3 MeeNa Park, Rabbit Hole, 1999, inkjet print, watercolour on colouring page, 34 × 26 cm. Courtesy the artist and one and j. Gallery, Seoul 5 Chang Ucchin, A Magpie, 1987, oil paint on canvas, 41 × 32cm. Courtesy mmca, Seoul

3 to conceptual painter MeeNa Park. While the Maison Hermès in Seoul displays Park’s Nine Colors & Nine Furniture (2023) series – where the outlines of sofas, armchairs and chaise longues are painted at the bottom of large canvases, the rest of which are filled with bright, colourful stripes – this show seems to portray the houses in which such furniture might sit. Drawing on works from the ongoing House series that has run through over Park’s career of the past few decades, these canvases depict a range of iconic and emblematic abodes, such as the puzzle of Maze House (2002), in which an empty white building sits atop a tangled warren of turquoise passages that dominate the rest of the image, or the hut done up in the manner of the blocky street-markings of %j (2008), all of which beg the question, where do you call home? (cfw)

In medieval Europe, cartographers depicted historical, political and spiritual experiences other places as lands filled with monsters; more of women in Korea, while the biennale’s four other venues, centred around the Seoul Museum recently, Vietnam banned the Barbie film, which included a glimpse of a world map that indiof Art, will present work by artists including Mercedes Azpilicueta, Chan Sook Choi, cated China’s territorial claims over the South Torkwase Dyson, ikkibawiKrrr, Natasha China Sea. The practice of mapping has always Tontey, Jaye Rhee and Bo Wang. (yj) been intertwined in ethnocentric imaginations Like most of the generation of artists who and political interests. this too, is a map, as the came of age under the Japanese occupation of 4 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale is titled, wants to reconceptualise how we think about borders 5 Korea, the late Chang Ucchin (he died in 1990) studied art in Japan (Tokyo) and only learned by focusing on social and ecological networks, about traditional Korean art after liberation, in the nonterritorial and the dispersed. The sema 1945. Like fellow members of the New Realism Bunker gallery, located underground, will Group, Chang then set about modernising include works by Femke Herregraven and the tradition (which in some respects meant looking Lo-Def Film Factory that investigate histories of extraction and pollution of natural resources. both to home and to the West), to no little public Jesse Chun’s solo exhibition at the Seoul Museum acclaim. His work, presented in a retrospective of History includes new work that charts the titled The Most Honest Confession, is characterised

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6 Rim Park, Nymph, 2023, oil, pigment on korean paper, jesmonite, polymer clay, lotus stem, 96 × 108 cm. Courtesy the artist and ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul

6 Chaewon Lee, Sunshine of the Nameless, 2019, oil on canvas, 162 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist and ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul

6 Adam Boyd, Trifurcate, 2022, monotype on taffeta, uv print on polyester, embroidery, cotton duct, thread, bullion fringe and hiking rope, 170 × 58 × 4 cm. Courtesy the artist and ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul

by its simple geometry and pared-back, childlike with photos of parts of urban structures and to expand their notions of what a landscape is, simplicity (comparable, in some instances, to abstracted closeups of roughly sewn-together or rather, reduce it to a microscopic level – since that’s what her wallworks made of paper, the European CoBrA movement), much of it as materials. His work isn’t quite as hack-uppy as metal and wood resemble: mutated plant cells, inspired by Buddhist philosophy as it is by any it sounds, though: in Slipped out of the air (2022), jagged and writhing, the imagined beginnings tendrils of sewn lines that follow the crystallike aesthetic theory. What’s striking about Chang’s of a radioactive landscape. (fc) pattern of a building’s photographed windows work is its playfulness (which also translates into rapid changes in style and form), both when Koo Jeong A is slated to represent South extend from the fabric on which the image is 7 it comes to contrasts of scale and suggestive Korea at next year’s Venice Biennale, but those printed and onto an adjacent silky silver-grey patterning. And, of course, his focus on nature of you who can’t wait until then might want to material. That sense of delicacy also extends (particularly birds and trees) is very firmly back to the outer edges, which are left softly frayed. trek to Seoul, for her latest gallery exhibition, in vogue. (nd) Perhaps more conventionally landscapelike are Levitation, to look for clues as to what she might Is a landscape still a landscape if there be up to. There’s pretty much no medium that 6 Chaewon Lee’s paintings, in which the mysteisn’t any discernible focus on ‘land’ or ‘scape’? rious hulking iceforms that dominate the centre this citizen of the world (her gallery suggests The trio of artists showing work at Seoul’s of many of her works give them a surrealist vibe; she lives ‘across the globe’) doesn’t work in, ThisWeekendRoom will be questioning just that these indeterminate beings erupt out of starlit from urban interventions (skateboard parks) snowy dunes, pose in flower meadows or against to sculpture, so don’t look for clues there (but, 6 via their ‘reinterpretations’ of the genre. Adam Boyd plays Frankenstein with his collaged the backdrop of a mountain range. Out of the spoiler alert, the Venice project looks like it’s wallpieces made up of bits of textile printed 6 three, Rim Park’s style of work requires visitors taking smells as a theme). Koo’s work, however,

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does play with perception and the poetics of space, so perhaps do look out for that. And pay attention too, as she can mix the subtle with the obvious, the real with the imaginary, and she has a penchant for things that appear drawn from the everyday. From what ArtReview Asia can gather, you’ll be seeing drawings and digital animations at pkm. Venice speculators will need to make of that what they will. (nd) Woosung Lee’s precise, studied paintings 8 feel like a kind of archaeology of the present, portraying cryptic messages from an indecipherable moment. Eternal Story (2023) depicts a set of large smooth stones, all of them engraved with runes in the shape of a laptop, an airplane, a fastfood cup. These are immediately recognisable to us, but what will people thousands of years from now make of such iconography?

Other more direct portrait paintings seem to ask a similar question, capturing people in offhand, seemingly blank moments, sitting thinking or just staring at a laptop: is this what will endure of humans? The I Am Still Working series (2023) features a contemporary version of a cave-painting stick figure, yellowed and bent in weariness, going through the motions: trudging tiredly through the snow, hunched over an empty notebook, slouched on a couch in a karaoke booth, singing mournfully. (cfw) 9 Back in 2003, Haegue Yang created Storage Piece, which featured the bits and pieces from various unsold installations packed onto four pallets. (That work, created for pragmatic as much as conceptual reasons, was later sold and unpacked into its constituent parts.) It’s perhaps in the same line of thought that her current

show, featuring sculptures created over the past decade or so, in Kukje’s hanok space in Seoul, takes the idea of ‘hibernation’ as an organising theme. According to the artist that means that visitors will encounter the work in a more ‘natural’ state, scattered across the narrow space rather than staged, as is the way of most gallery shows (this, the gallery suggests, will be an ‘offstage’ encounter). Of course, in reality, this is going to be no more or less staged than any other show, but for the collectors among you, perhaps there will be the added thrill of encountering the work in its ‘natural’ environment. And, presumably, bagging one, like some great game-hunter. (nd) It may have a title that clunks around like a square tyre, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be curious about the latest edition

9 Haegue Yang, Sonic Clotheshorse Dressage #1, 2020, mixed media, 154 × 74 × 59 cm. Photo: Jaewon Choi. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

7 Koo Jeong A, drawing reference for feasibility, 2019, from the Augmented Reality series Prerequisites 7. Courtesy the artist and Acute Art 8 Woosung Lee, Come Sit with Me, 2023, acrylic gouache on canvas, 91 × 91 cm. Courtesy Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul

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10 of the privately funded X Museum Triennial, puppetry) and new (e-textiles and immersive which styles itself as a state-of-the-art-now video installations). Where – and what – might type show for China. Home Is Where the Haunt ‘home’ still be, today? You’ll need to go just to Is focuses on postpandemic China – which find out if it’s time to chuck out that old atlas, immediately followed a period of lockdowns and where exactly you stand. (nd) From the moment our prehistoric ancestors and border closures, nationalism and racial began trying different foods, or wondering what tension – during which increasing attention was beyond the horizon, human brains have has been focused on the fact that being Chinese emitted that neurological gold dust – dopamine. may not mean actually living in China. Of Rewarding curiosity, triggering more questions. course, diasporic identities and the issues that Since then, we’ve been dissecting everything come with them have been around for as long around us, inventing technology so that we can as nations, but this is a show religiously devoted 11 do more poking around. Alice Wang has been to ‘new’ ideas in an institution dedicated to doing some poking of her own: from visiting novelty (when it comes to the X business, it got sites like Arizona’s Biosphere 2 for Oracle (2017) there sometime before Twitter, btw). The idea is – a video about how humans have discovered that the 19 artists (all ‘emerging’) on show here ways to replicate and mediate natural environare reshaping the idea of ‘China’, through old ments – or exploring New Mexico’s Very Large media (Xiang embroidery and Shaanxi shadow

Array (a radio astronomy observatory) and Mayan pyramids on the Yucatán Peninsula for her ‘infinite film’ series Pyramids and Parabolas i & ii (2019 & 2021), which examines ‘how we communicate with the unknown universe through geometric structures’; to creating mysterious (unnamed) sculptures out of moss, fossils, meteorites, microprocessors and more. Wang prods at the meaning of sentience, using various mediums (including photography, print and ceramics) to describe the relationship between the technological, the natural and the spiritual. At ucca Dune, the artist will kick it up a notch, presenting ‘an imaginary world of quantum computers’. And if, like ArtReview Asia, you don’t quite know what quantum mechanics means for the future, you’ll just have to go and discover that for yourself. (fc)

10 Huidi Xiang, Cheese Column, 2019, site-specific kinetic installation. Courtesy the artist

10 Chun Shao, Future Touch (still), 2020, video. Courtesy the artist

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11 Alice Wang, Pyramids and Parabolas ii, 2021, 16mm film transferred to hd video and hd video, 18 min 43 sec. Courtesy the artist and ucca Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

12 Leelee Chan, Lithic Current (detail), 2023, mixed media, 159 × 100 × 100 cm. Commissioned by Para Site, Hong Kong. Courtesy the artist, Capsule Shanghai, and Klemm’s, Berlin

Leelee Chan’s sculptures always look a bit combined fragments of Ming dynasty ceramics like objects that have been dropped by extrawith metal hardware, woods, plastics and resin; terrestrials onto Earth. To be fair, her plastic the collective result looking like a diorama of gridlike, wall-hung sculptures are called things artefacts that ETs might use to educate their like Cipher (Surface Modular) (2022) and Nocturnal offspring about the human species. At Capsule, Encounter (2021). So it’s not a giant leap of the Chan presents new, larger works, including the imagination. The 2020 bmw Art Journey winner freestanding oval-shaped sculpture Lithic Current typically makes these out of found plastic pallets, (2023), which incorporates parts of shipping which she cuts into circles, ovals, squares, etc, pallets and looks like it might be an ancient relic filling gaps with materials like resin, metals, of an alien energy generator. Or is it a prehistoric acrylic and semi-precious stones, so that they time portal? Spacing out is half the fun. (fc) end up looking like an important part has fallen Curated by Japanese art collective mé (artist Haruka Kojin, director Kenji Minamigawa out of a spacecaft, or some kind of celestial timeand production manager Hirofumi Masui), this keeper, or an intergalactic wayfinding device based on Micronesian stick charts or… There’s 13 edition of the Saitama Triennale provides a focused cross-section of film, choreography, a curious collision of the futuristic with the music, art and urban design. Held primarily ancient in Chan’s work, too. In 2021 she made within the city’s former civic hall, the triennale, a series of hand-size sculptures for which she

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say the curators, aims to invoke a festivallike atmosphere: the venue to become an evershifting site of rehearsals and exhibitions by artists including Anya Gallaccio and Makoto Taniguchi. On the programme is an international selection of existing works, including a screening of Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s feature Manta Ray (2018) and a performance by Terry Riley, alongside the premiere of Sha Qing’s documentary of careful observation Lone Existence (2016); and newly commissioned works, such as Mikhail Karikis’s collaborative project developed with local high school students, and responses to the city by photographer Kenji Shiratori and choreographer Midori Kurata. (cfw) How’s this for getting your priorities in order? The Mori Art Museum is marking its 20th anniversary not by celebrating itself, but by

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scrutinising the global ecological devastation into the galaxy, alongside a low-frequency pollution. ‘Return to Earth’ features artists like Koie, Gaho Taniguchi and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, that humanity has wrought. Comprising four soundtrack that can be felt mainly in bodily who engaged with these environmental calam‘chapters’ of works by modern and contempovibrations. These narrative-free films leave rary artists in Japan and from around the world ities and criticised exploitative systems. At it to us to find the connections, a tripped-out – including Ryoji Koie, Agnes Denes and a time when ecological devastation poses an experience suggestive of something between a imminent threat, reckoning with the torrid sun-blasted visit to the seaside and the ‘stargate’ 14 Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living promises to encourage past is an important part of looking to a more sequence created by visual-effects visionary a concerted shift away from anthropocentrism, sustainable future. (mvr) Douglas Trumbull for the climax of Kubrick’s towards ecocentrism. Three of the four sections 15 Takashi Makino has long been a cadet 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Makino’s work consider the Anthropocene more broadly, but exploring the gap between ambient soundscapes promises its own journey into inner space. (cfw) and indefinable, collaged moving images Writing in the catalogue for Noguchi Rika’s ‘Chapter 2: Return to Earth – Art & Ecology 16 – semiabstracted scenes at times resembling recent solo exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic in Japan, 1950s–1980s’ looks to the practices of Art Museum (which closed in January), celeparticles flying through a black void, as if Japanese artists during the postwar era. Since brated novelist Banana Yoshimoto described her moments after the Big Bang, at others an the seventeenth century, Japan’s economic upward gaze at passing clouds. Makino’s short work thus: ‘Maybe what it most resembles is how exploitation of the environment has resulted films manage to be sprawling, epic journeys: the eyes of a boy in primary school look when in extensive devastation, including the Ashio Anti-Cosmos (2022), on show here, sets expansive he’s in the process of building a perfect plastic Copper Mine disaster of 1907 and the ‘Big starry imagery, as if a tie-dye-soaked journey model from a kit. Fitting the pieces in place Four’ diseases caused by industrial waste and

˙ 14 Emilija Škarnulyte, Sunken Cities, 2021, video installation, 9 min 33 sec. Courtesy the artist

15 Takashi Makino, Anti-cosmos (still), 2022, 4kdcp, 16min. © Takashi Makino, courtesy of anomaly, Tokyo

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without hurrying, not touching it when it’s not of looking that’s ‘usually through a hole’ – which nozoki megane, an Edo-period optical device makes ArtReview Asia wonder whether its ideas yet dry, slowly and steadily, neither happily nor popular among the upper class, and the street of peeping are shaped by the devices that allow unhappily, with extraordinary concentration.’ peepshows of nozoki karakuri – go and have such sights, from telescopes, camera obscuras Often executed with a visually stunning sense of a look-see! (yj) and raree-shows (all invented in the seventeenth 18 Meiji era photographer Kazumasa Ogawa colour, Noguchi’s photographs are undoubtedly century), to the kinetoscopes and stereoscopes (1860–1929) is better known for his pictures the product of her fixed attention, whether that be directed at the structure of a leaf or a parathat foreshadowed today’s vr glasses, all of which of Tokyo geishas and Japanese flowers, and glider descending from the heavens onto the maybe less so for establishing the first Japanese 17 are on display in top Collection: A Genealogy of open desert. As that suggests, her focus shifts ‘Peep Media’ and the Gaze. A peep, then, can reach company to mechanically reproduce photographs. Gathering around 100 of his collotype from the micro to the macro with particular into the distance, encounter another world or interest in the natural landscape and human and halftone prints (he introduced both techafford private gazes and perhaps voyeuristic intervention and interactions with it – from the pleasure. Alongside work by international photo niques to Japan after travelling to the United creation of artificial islands to the exploration States during the 1880s and 90s), the Printing pioneers like Eadweard Muybridge and Harold of outer space. Or sometimes simply the beauty Museum’s exhibition will focus on Ogawa’s role Eugene Edgerton are works by Japanese photogof a flower. (nd) as a champion of visual media who turned raphers and moving-image artists including The act of peeping may include anything photography in Japan from a smallscale and Onodera Yuki and Ito Ryusuke. And as well as from quick peeks to furtive glimpses, but exclusive technique to the widely accessible international styles of devices, on display here the Cambridge Dictionary defines it as a kind culture enabled by mechanical reproduction. are local iterations of peep media such as the

18 Portrait of Ogawa Kazumasa. Courtesy the Printing Museum, Tokyo

17 Narahara Ikko, Inner Flower: Rose, Tineke, 1991, gelatin silver print. Courtesy Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

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19 Imelda Cajipe Endaya, Bagong Nobena Kay Isidro Labrador, 1988, oil, collage and sawali on canvas, 122 × 365 cm. Photo: Erik Liongoren. Courtesy the artist and Cultural Center of the Philippines Visual Arts and Museum Division

20 Hoda Afshar, Untitled #18, 2015–22, from the series Speak the Wind, pigment photographic print, 80 × 100 cm. © and courtesy the artist

Working at the convergence of new technology multimedia artists Imelda Cajipe-Endaya and and the highpoint of the Meiji era’s imperial Leslie de Chavez – on show here seek to demonambitions, Ogawa help shaped visual culture strate excess’s potential, reinterpreting and in Japan, creating new habits of image consumpreframing it to appreciate or expand upon its tion while becoming the leading advocate for surplus nature. After all, its verb form is ‘to photography as art. (yj) exceed’, which to one strand of thought might Excess isn’t all bad. Sure, we shouldn’t take imply a positive way of thinking: imagining in excess, produce in excess or, some might beyond what already is. (mvr) Ever since ArtReview Asia fell in love with 19 argue, live a life of excess. In Excess, a group exhibition of works by artists from the Philippines, 20 Hoda Afshar’s photobook Speak the Wind (2021) however, suggests that perhaps there’s a time – consisting of a series of photos taken on Iranian islands located in the Strait of Hormuz and place to revel in it. For almost 350 years, the that explore rituals practised by the small popcountry was thought of as ‘excess’ – secondary, ulations who believe certain winds can bring disposable – by its various colonial rulers, yet illness and even possess people – it’s been part of its present independence is an ongoing waiting to see when the photographer would effort at decolonialising and rethinking the be invited to present a major solo show. Since terms of that legacy. The 11 artists – including moving to Melbourne from Tehran in 2007, painters Marina Cruz and Charlie Co, as well as

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Afshar’s work has shifted from a traditional documentary approach towards a more tender and personal style – demonstrated in series of photographs like Behold (2015–16), which depicts men bathing one another in an undisclosed Middle Eastern gay bathhouse. Working between photography and moving image, Afshar considers themes of migration and displacment, gender, social injustice and marginality. At Art Gallery of New South Wales, A Curve is a Broken Line will include her work from the last decade, as a well as a newly commissioned series. (fc) You could say that presenting an exhibition about port cities in an actual port city, at an institution that’s right between a wharf and a quay (and whose neighbour is a certain seashellshaped opera house), all sounds rather apt. ArtReview Asia supposes it’ll never really know

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whether or not those locational logistics played artist from his home city of Beirut to Singapore, Porto, Abu Dhabi, Athens and elsewhere. He a large part in the decision-making process, but makes underwater and coastal recordings of each 21 that’s where Tarek Atoui will be showing his port in order to create a score that’s specific to the next iteration of Waters’ Witness (2015–). While the site. These recordings also serve as inspiration for artist and composer’s work generally upends our more traditional ideas of music and musical instru- musical devices and sound sculptures (mic’d-up ments (for The Reverse Sessions, 2014, for example, slabs of stone or ceramic vessels, or arrangements the artist invited collaborators to reverse-engiof wire coils on tables) – and new, Sydney-specific neer instruments based on the music he had iterations of these will be on show at Sydney’s written and recordings he had made of museum Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. (fc) The year 1989 was a pivotal one for much objects that weren’t intended to be played as of the world – the fall of the Berlin Wall marked instruments), Waters’ Witness is his ongoing the closing chapters of the Cold War, revolutions research project into and documentation of the in the Eastern European bloc pointed to the ‘acoustic identities of port cities’. The findings of which take the form of exhibitions that are impending collapse of the Soviet Union and calls part performance, part sound installation. This 22 for democracy resounded worldwide. The Shape fascination with ports as sites of movement and of Time: Korean Art after 1989 focuses on these global market networks has taken the Lebanese events’ impact on the peninsula, as told by 28

artists born between 1960 and 1986. Oh Jaewoo’s Let’s Do National Gymnastics! (2011), for example, evokes the standardised and almost militarised exercise routine executed in schools throughout Korea between the 1970s, 80s and 90s, emphasising the cultural pressure to conform, as well as the state’s ownership of its citizens’ bodies as part of its mandatory conscription policy. Kyungah Ham’s What you see is the unseen / Chandeliers for Five Cities (2016–17) is a bold series of hand-embroidered chandeliers that were a result of crossborder collaboration between the South Korean artists and artisans in North Korea. The effect is hauntingly beautiful, as it inevitably signals the material complexities of time and space. (mvr) Fi Churchman, Nirmala Devi, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Yuwen Jiang, Marv Recinto

22 Kyungah Ham, What you see is the unseen / Chandeliers for Five Cities, 2016–17, North Korean hand embroidery, silk threads on cotton, middle man, smuggling, bribe, tension, anxiety, censorship, ideology, wooden frame, 195 × 145 cm. Photo: Kim Hyunsoo. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

21 Tarek Atoui, Waters’ Witness recording sessions, Sydney, 2023. Photo: Alexandre Guirkinger. © and courtesy the artist

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The Interview

Wang Bing

“Filmmaking is not that complicated”

The filmic style of Xi’an-born, Paris-based director Wang Bing is characterised by his lengthy, immersive documentary odysseys. Ever the observer, Wang silently follows his protagonists, neither stepping in on the situations he films, nor backing away from them. In 1999 he started his first and bestknown project, Tie Xi Qu (West of the Tracks, 2003), a three-part documentary film that runs more than nine hours and went on to win the Grand Prix at the Marseille International Film Festival in 2003. For the ambitious project, Wang spent hundreds of hours filming the lives of factory workers, loitering teenagers and a single father and his son, all of whom lived in the declining industrial district of Tiexi in Shenyang, northeastern China; each of the three chapters (‘Rust’, ‘Remnants’ and ‘Rails’) traverses the

spaces of socialist ruins, infrastructural decay and the lives that are lived among both. The straight, artless portrayal of the neglected underclass in West of the Tracks can be seen throughout his later works, which zoom in upon those living, like left-behind children, near China’s Sino-Burmese border (San Zimei [Three Sisters, 2012]), patients of a Yunnan mental asylum (Feng Ai [‘Til Madness Do Us Part, 2013]) as well as survivors of pre-Cultural Revolution labour camps in the northwestern Gansu province (Si Ling Hun [Dead Souls, 2018]). Wang Bing’s most recent film, the hourlong Hei Yi Ren (Man in Black, 2023), which screened at the Cannes Film Festival this year, is more concerned with aesthetics, documenting a performance to the camera. The film – shot in Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris – revolves

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around the experience of Chinese symphony composer and conductor Wang Xilin, who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, and who now lives in exile in Germany. Standing naked onstage, Wang Xilin paces the empty theatre, revisiting and reenacting his torture at the hands of Chinese authorities, and for the first time he elaborates on symphonies of his that use different instruments to recreate the sounds of torture – clattering of shackles, splashing whips and hot red iron sizzling on human flesh. As excerpts from his compositions play in the background, at times drowning the voice of Wang Xilin himself, we are thrown into a space inundated by the traumas of history. To mark the new release, Wang Bing took time to reflect on his approaches to filmmaking and documentary practices.

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Careful Planning Meets Sudden Decisions artreview asia How did you meet Wang Xilin and what prompted you to make a film about him? wang bing Before I met Mr Wang Xilin in 2006 I’d done similar portraitesque projects, such as He Fengming [Fengming, a Chinese Memoir, 2007; with interviews recorded in 2003]. I simply had a good personal relationship with Wang. By 2019 I knew that I wanted to make a personal portrait of him. At the time he had just moved from Beijing to Germany. I thought it would be good to make a film about him and it would be quick and easy to do a video portrait in Paris. That was how the plan came into place. ara This work seems more performative than many of your others. wb Most of my other works are more realistic – people were filmed in their natural habitats – and more dialogue-based. But Wang Xilin is a musician and I wanted to portray a psychological space around him via his music. Then the pandemic began, so it wasn’t until 2021 that I actually started preparing for Hei Yi Ren [Man in Black].

ara You have said before that if you do not know enough about the subject you are filming, the work is not going to come out well. Did you study Wang Xilin’s music beforehand or was it based on your familiarity with Wang himself? wb I didn’t think too much about it, I was just familiar with him. Then I thought it would be better to use his body in this way. So I chose to shoot in the nude. ara Why did you decide to do that? wb Filming him in the nude was a very sudden decision. I simply thought that it would be good to focus on his body. I called him to ask if I could film him naked; he was fine with it. I think he had a lot of trust in me, in following my ideas. He probably thought that there must have been a reason behind whatever I wanted to do. ara Was that trust something you developed during the process of filming? wb No. Everything was based on an idea that we had previously worked out: we only had three days to shoot the film. There was not much time to stop to prepare or negotiate during the process. I told Wang Xilin in advance about which part of his music I needed him to sing as well as what I was going to

shoot. As soon as we arrived at the site, we got things rolling. ara He’s very open in this film. Do you think this candidness is related to his nakedness? Do you think it would have made a difference had he been filmed wearing clothes? wb I didn’t think about it. We decided on filming him naked from the beginning, so we didn’t think about how it would be with clothes on. ara How did you select the music for the film? wb I discussed the selections with him, but ultimately there was not much of a theme. It was mainly just that I like some of his works better than others. The passages he sings in the film are all the parts that I like.

Witnessing, Understanding ara The setting for Man in Black is different from that of your previous works, which often feature people in their daily surroundings. Could you talk about your decision to shoot the film in a theatre? wb Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord is very famous. It is also quite unique in that it is a Roman-style amphitheatre but built indoors.

Man in Black (still), 2023, 60 min. Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, London

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In this space, there is very little distance between the stage and the audience. In effect it’s like there is no boundary between the two. In that sense, Wang Xilin is often seen walking between the stage and the auditorium, in a way that suggests that he is both actor in and witness to his memories. ara At the beginning and end of the film, we see Wang Xilin circling around the theatre; when he is standing on the stage, the camera pans around his body. It seems to me that these movements emphasise a feeling of being caught up in a cycle of history. wb Of course. But I’d also say that his and the camera’s movements are the product of what the space affords; and the theatre itself has a circular shape, including the stairs and the stage. Filmmaking happens in real spaces and your camera movements cannot conflict with the space itself. So, of course, the camera lens has to follow a circular motion. ara In a way, the space of Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord could be read as an embodiment of the stage of history, on which Wang Xilin’s accounts of memories are reenacted with bodily movement. His personal history is both retrieved from the mind and recreated by the body. How do you see history as a documentary filmmaker? Do you think history can be objectively recorded?

wb Of course history can be recorded, but it is hard to say what is objective. What standards determine whether it is objective or not? To call it ‘history’ is to define Wang Xilin’s experience as a text. That’s a classification other people might impose and something about which I cannot do a lot. There might be echoes, connections: many people may share similar experiences to those of Wang. But really, he was just talking about his experiences and the inspirations for his music, and that willingness to explain his life and art to the public is a personal decision. For me, I am not trying to show a history. Above everything, I want to pay my respects to Wang Xilin as an individual. ara Do you think that reconnecting with past memories onstage had an effect on the way he looked at them? wb I don’t know, it’s his own business. ara Did you learn anything new about his experience? How did you feel about it? wb I don’t think there are any old or new problems, just a case of getting to know him better. As for any specific understanding, I don’t think I know. It is good that he was

willing to talk about many things and it worked for the film. ara Are you bothered about whether or not your audience understands your subject in the same way as you do? wb For me, filmmaking is not that complicated. If you make a film about Wang Xilin, that will let people know more about his experiences, his thoughts and what he is like now. All my works serve the particular people I am filming, so it’s enough to just figure out and narrate the stories of these people clearly. As for how others think when they rewatch the film, that’s something else.

Narration and Projection ara You often talk about a decentralised form of narrative in interviews. Qingchun [Youth (Spring) (2023); the first three-hour chapter of a documentary trilogy focusing on the lives of young textile workers in a small town Zhili, Zhejiang province, located 130 kilometres from Shanghai], which was recently nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and West of the Tracks both use this technique. What does decentralisation mean to you?

Man in Black (still), 2023, 60 min. Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, London

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Youth (Spring) (stills), 2023, 3 hr 35 min. © the artist. Courtesy Lihong Kong (producer)

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wb Stories can be told in many ways. There are many characters in my films, and they’re the main body of my film. To be true to that, you cannot deliberately focus on a single character; in that instance a decentralised narrative is more appropriate. More than that, it’s more natural and less constructed – it’s closer to how we live our lives. Man in Black explicitly focuses on one person, so it’s not necessary for other characters to get into it. And even though Fang Xiuying [Mrs. Fang, 2017; an 86-minute piece documenting the last ten days of a sixty-eight-year-old bedridden woman suffering from Alzheimer’s] also focuses on one person, it was filmed in her home, where she was surrounded by her daughter, uncle and other neighbours. It is a complex background, and the relationship between the people filmed was freer and more balanced. I wouldn’t deliberately delete all the information and characters passing by. But, in the end, decentralisation is just the word that is sometimes useful when explaining my films. The concept itself is not my goal – my goal is to make films. ara In your works, you are often a quiet observer who almost disappears into the scenes, rather than disrupting what’s happening. Of course, you may choose to create tensions within the space, or certain

effects despite it, but that does not seem to be what you are interested in. wb I think human beings tend to find a corresponding relationship with the environment, or a kind of adaptation, because people generally would not behave in a way contradictory to the space around them. They are both corresponding to each other. ara Generally, you maintain a very calm and compassionate visual language. That being said, do you think there is a kind of cruelty in the camera’s gaze itself? For example, in Mrs. Fang, when you film Fang on her sickbed, the camera and her eyes are trained on each other for a long time, while people in the room talk about her. As a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, filmed after she lost the ability to act and respond, Fang’s stare produces an uncanny distance between the audience and her. The camera’s presence becomes very prominent. Have you ever considered the relationship the camera has with its subjects? wb The camera’s presence is always implicated in any act of recording. It is impossible to assume that the machine is not present; there will be no image if it is not present. It may embody a certain perspective, but at the same time it is a neutral instrument that serves to convey the situation of its subjects. It just records the light, right?

The source of violence is not the act of recording, but its content. And whether or not the content is violent is subject to the judgement of each viewer. Every person would have a different response as well as a different threshold for violence. That standard varies. The ‘violence of the camera lens’ is a psychological projection. If you feel a particular way, that’s your own psychology. But your inner activity can’t represent someone else’s. Just as much as your views on images do not represent my views on images, and I cannot justify or explain the emotions you might have while watching one of my films. ara Have you seen any films that you admired recently? wb Two days ago I watched Adieu Philippine [Farewell, Philippine, 1962] by Jacques Rozier, a director who passed away a few weeks ago. I hadn’t paid attention to it before. When I saw it, I thought it was exactly the same as my style. Of course, I have to say that I am like him, not he like me. ara Do you have any plans for future shoots? wb I still have two films in postproduction, so I don’t have the energy to think about new films right now. ara

Mrs. Fang (still), 2017, 1 hr 26 min. © the artist. Courtesy Lihong Kong (producer)

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The Narendra Modi-led national government in India wants the Mughal Empire (among several other subjects that point to the diverse nature of the country’s past and present) expunged from public consciousness. At least there’s no other way to explain the innumerable arbitrary changes it has recently made to school textbooks. It may have ruled India for around 150 years, but the empire was Islamic. And, these days, that’s not Indian. Naturally you can see the logic: for a government hellbent on imposing a distorted vision of a grand Hindu past as the foundation for a powerful Hindutva (a form of Hindu nationalism, partly inspired by European movements such as the Hitler Youth) future upon India’s complex sociopolitical fabric, these recent attempts to bury, if not eventually erase, the Mughal era can potentially help cultivate future citizens who have no cultural memory of an empire that continues to have an inextricable influence on India’s languages, culture, society and politics. To pick just one example, Hindi, which the government wants to force as the national language onto a nation with over 700 spoken languages, would not have existed in its present incarnation if not for the

Culture Wars

This age of new nationalisms and reformulated identity politics makes it more important than ever, argues Deepa Bhasthi, to have a sense of what culture really is Payag, Jahangir presents Shah-Jahan with a turban ornament in 1617, c. 1635–50, painting, 31 × 21 cm. Courtesy Royal Collection Trust, London

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Mughal Empire, given the extent to which it derives from the former court language of Persian. Indeed, the word ‘Hindi’ itself derives from classical Persian. This brazen act of selectively chipping away at a nation’s culture and history distils, in a new book, down to a larger question of who, if anyone at all, owns culture; and by extension, what parts of culture are nurtured and allowed to be carried forward by a community or by small groups of political leaders that use its powers to make these decisions. Harvardbased literary critic Martin Puchner’s Culture – A New World History (2023) attempts to answer these questions by utilising objects and cultural artefacts from a wide range of times and places, starting with the paintings in the Chauvet Cave from around 35,000 bce to speculating about what British artist Katie Paterson’s Future Library (2014–2114) – a forest of trees grown to supply a library of books, written over 100 years – will look like, if it is ever completed. Along the way, Puchner takes the reader through the fourteenth-century bce story of Queen Nefertiti and her husband Amenhotep IV’s creation of a new city and a new centralised religion; Plato’s invention of an alternative history for

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Tibetan and Chinese traditions; how scripts, the predecessors of the font I use to type this text, came to be standardised; how myths are created and sustained; and how culture thrives

Greece; King Ashoka’s pillar edicts; the Queen of Sheba and the story of fourteenth-century epic the Kebra Nagast, a text that draws a line through the Semitic religions; onward to Sei Shonagon’s eleventh-century journal of Japanese courtly life, The Pillow Book; Tenochtitlan, the ‘floating city’ built by the Aztecs; Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave (1831); Wole Soyinka’s dramas that defined independent Nigeria and so on. This collection of both some of the most iconic and least remembered cultural objects and ideas from around the world are deployed to argue that culture is a messy entanglement between civilisations over time, rather than strictly prescribed ethnic or national identities. Via objects that were particular to the geographical territories and political influence that existed at the time of their making, Puchner endorses the view that culture, both the artefacts and the larger immaterial culture they would go on to influence, is not property to be owned by any one community, government or people, and that what we understand as culture – living, breathing, ever-changing as it is – is sustained by encounters with other cultures.

Culture, in laying bare the severely complicated ways cultural traditions continue to evolve, addresses fascinating questions about how cultural choices are made from the options that are left after being erased, leading to more entangled threads of influence: for instance, how the Buddha and bodhisattvas came to be represented the way they are in Indian,

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from top Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1549, engraving, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Lineage portrait of an abbot, Central Tibet, c. 1350, painting, 77 × 60 cm, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

not on narrow ideas of pure and authentic, but on syncretism and an exchange of ideas, even if such exchange is a result of violence from war, trade or colonialism. Reading the book in India, where culture and history are the sites on which the country’s latest battlelines are being drawn, one is disheartened to be reminded that erasures have always happened, and that ‘it is purists and puritans, those invested in ideas of spotless virtue of whatever stripe, that are most likely to engage in acts of cultural destruction’. What ends up being saved might be random and accidental. Puchner writes, ‘The future is unpredictable, reminding us that culture is, at best, a broken chain that we keep repairing in every generation.’ But he also reminds his readers that culture does survive, however messily and only in part (and even then as something constantly evolving), and that it is through an engagement with cultural past, even when (especially when) it does not align with present-day values, morals and beliefs, that we can hope to repair humanity’s most pressing conflicts. In India, regrettably, this engagement with the past has been highly selective, with the government choosing to view history almost exclusively from a rightwing Hindu lens, and to blot out and sideline the large parts that are inconvenient for its Hindutva narrative. When the regime changes, and change it will (sooner rather than later, one hopes), what parts of India’s syncretic culture survive unscathed remains to be seen. Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Kodagu

ArtReview Asia

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A friend of mine told me some years ago that, in his opinion, the worst thing about getting older was that “you become invisible to women”. He’s approximately fifteen years older than me and thus, where I am concerned, something of an oracle. Catching up with him recently, though, he waxed nostalgic for his invisibility era, having discovered something worse still. He was visible again – but mortifyingly so, because people on public transport were offering him, a perceived codger, their seat. Seen when young, unseen in middle age, seen again as you get older: does that sound familiar? If so, you may be an artist. During the last decade or so, the contemporary artworld has done some very public atoning for former exclusions: it has belatedly spotlighted, if sometimes self-servingly, artists of colour, lgbtq+ artists, women artists – particularly old or deceased ones – and artists in general who don’t hail from Europe or the United States. Superficially at least, the artworld now looks inclusive, everyone welcome. But – and I hear about and witness it regularly, because it’s my age group and a lot of my friends are artists – there’s a missing demographic. When you’re young, attractive, frothing with ideas that appear at least somewhat new, and perhaps posting multiple studio selfies daily to Instagram, the artworld is potentially your oyster. When you’re wrinkly and decrepit, haven’t had a show since the early 1980s but have perhaps been a respected teacher whose students now namecheck you, or your old work looks uncannily like other people’s new work and there’s a lot of it mothballed away, galleries are more likely to come knocking in hopes of snagging your estate when you take your soon-to-come dirt nap. Today’s financialised artworld, in this respect, is a cross between Logan’s Run – that 1970s sci-fi flick wherein the hippie edict that you shouldn’t trust anyone over thirty gets allegorised in a society that offs its citizens at that age – and a predatory pseudo-gerontocracy. But in between there’s a big trench with a lot of artists from their late forties up to their sixties lying dazedly in it. What hit them? Answers aren’t hard to fathom. Many artists map out an aesthetic, or a conceptual territory, in their earlier years, and then proceed to make minor variations on it. Or they make bold stylistic changes, following their instincts and their restlessness, but the market – which today prizes brand recognition – doesn’t really want that. Whichever way they go, anyway, at their heels is another generation

Midcareerism

What’s an artist to do when no longer dewy and not yet long in the tooth? Martin Herbert surveys the options, none of them pretty

Titian, An Allegory of Prudence, c. 1550, oil on canvas, 76 × 69 cm. Courtesy National Gallery, London

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or two with ideas that seem more culturally relevant, sporting the glittering crown of youth. And the artist who’s merely producing variations on ten years ago – or, perhaps, is making what to them feel like large leaps, but to others might look like microscopic advances, such changes being typically more visible to the artist than to others – looks a bit predictable and inert. For the art market – and this part has been true for decades; even now-revered figures like Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman had midlife reputational dips – such artists’ work is both a bit too recent and familiar, and paradoxically not old enough to look fresh again. If they have shows, they’re often not written about. A major but lengthily occluded artist, your Phyllida Barlow, say, needs to be lucky or highly determined to survive this phase, not least if they’ve also picked up a professorship that leaves them less time to innovate in the studio. So many midcareer artists end up being just teachers, at best. Others fall out of the system altogether. This process is particularly hard on women, as they age, due to residual artworld sexism and because looks have become part of the package of being an artist, an element in the selfmarketing that’s come to define twenty-first-century work culture. ’Twas not always thus, of course. Look at the Ab-Ex bros: Willem de Kooning had his first solo show when he was forty-four, Barnett Newman when he was forty-five. (Franz Kline rocketed out of the gates by comparison, debuting at a mere forty.) That is, they were admired in their prime after a hard-won process of arriving at something original, and not before. While susceptible to romanticisation – there’s probably a reason they were all alcoholics – this seems a bit healthier than what we have, not that it’s likely to come back in a hurry. A few substantial, antimeritocratic conditions would have to transform, including the wider cultural obsession with youth and the artworld’s obsession with novelty, short-term signature styles, etc. Or simply one thing: that we run out of worthwhile geriatric-or-dead artists to bring back, every last person included in a yellowing pre-1990s Documenta or Whitney Biennial catalogue having been dragged screaming into the brightly lit white cube, reassessed, reified, prices hiked. Then who’s left? Who’s still invisible? All these people whose work you might remember from 20 years ago, still determinedly working, and at least some of them making better art than in their salad days. Bold tastemakers, the trench is this way.

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For over half a century, museumgoers and academics in the us have enjoyed unparalleled access to Thailand’s holy bronze men: distinctive standing sculptures from a large cache of seventh- and eighth-century bodhisattvas. Discovered in the vault of a tenth-century temple in 1964, but spirited away before Thai authorities knew about them, these exquisitely cast figures of itinerant ascetics – likely made by a Buddhism-practising Khmer sect that itself roamed northeast Thailand’s Khorat Plateau about 1,300 years ago – have been accumulated by many of America’s foremost institutions. Since 1979, for example, the Asia Society in New York has owned a four-armed, nearly one-metre-tall Maitreya notable for his fountain of braided hair, short waistcloth and enigmatic expression. ‘His face, with its dark inlaid eyes, etched eyebrows and sensuous mouth, has a kind of feral tension, alert and concentrated as if he is listening to a faint, distant sound’, remarked a beguiled Holland Cotter in his New York Times review of the Asia Society’s 1994 exhibition Buddha of the Future: An Early Maitreya from Thailand. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, meanwhile, acquired an even larger Avalokiteshvara, an embodiment of Buddhist compassion, from the collector Ben Heller back in 1967. In the decades since, it has been joined by more pieces from the ‘Prakhon Chai hoard’, as it is internationally known, and appeared in exhibitions such as Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia, 5th to 8th Century. For this 2014 show, curator John Guy placed the Avalokiteshvara – today on display in The Met’s Gallery 246 – alongside the Asia Society’s eighth-century Maitreya and another graciously loaned by the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas. In the Lost Kingdoms catalogue, stylistic and metallurgic similarities between them were teased out, and the trio declared ‘among the most important Southeast Asian bronzes of their age’. Thai audiences and academics, meanwhile, have never had the privilege of such close looking or such detailed analysis – a fact that should give us museums (as well as London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and Paris’s Musée Guimet) in possession of them pause for thought. Yet this lay of the land is, I sense, about to shift: Thai authorities, spurred into action by local activists (notably a vociferous archaeologist called Tanongsak Hanwong) have a robust legal case for their return. Let’s back up: the Prakhon Chai hoard was stolen, not ‘spirited away’… While the facts surrounding its discovery, including exact numbers (reports range from a few dozen to 300), are clouded by decades of conflicting accounts and conjecture, this much is clear:

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Unhoarding

Max Crosbie-Jones has a message for The Met: send Thailand’s holy bronze men home

the archaeological find was not officially documented, and the site – Buriram province’s Prasat Hin Khao Plai Bat II, a tenth-century temple atop an extinct volcano – was looted by local villagers. The Thai government is also firm in its conviction that most sculptures left Thailand illegally, without the required export permits. This is a claim backed up the us Homeland Security Investigations team now subpoenaing and pressuring us museums on Thailand’s behalf. An ‘ad hoc’ Thai government committee has already handed dossiers of evidence over to us federal agents with powers of seizure and forfeiture. Bronze men may soon, as a result, start heading home. But there is also a strong chance, I suspect, that concerted efforts will be made to do this on the quiet: with no mention of culprits or culpability, and few, if any, mea culpas. “The major museums don’t want to be in the newspapers about it,” a senior curator at the Office of National Museums of Thailand, Disapong Netlomwong, told me recently. I’m not convinced, however, that a surreptitious approach is the right one: isn’t the fact the Prakhon Chai hoard was snuck out of Thailand a solid reason for not sneaking it back in? Don’t we atone for and learn from our mistakes by confronting, rather than concealing, them? There is no need to get too carried away with apportioning blame – for the smuggling and laundering half of the Prakhon Chai story at least. The involvement of indicted British dealer-collector Douglas Latchford, who lived in Thailand from the mid-1950s, was rumoured for decades, ever since his friend and accomplice Emma C. Bunker thanked him in a 2002 Arts of Asia article that pinpointed the hoard’s findspot. And, of late, the evidence implicating them both has been piling up. The Denver Post, which has an interest in the story due to Bunker’s former role as a trustee, consultant and donor to the Denver Art Museum, recently spoke to villagers who claim to have been paid life-changing sums by Latchford to strip the site between 1964 and 1965, and also ran excerpts of incriminating private emails. To lay all blame at their doors, however, would be to pretend that Latchford and Bunker, who died within six months of each other, in 2020 and 2021, before they could face charges, were aberrations who acted alone. They were not. As Alice Procter wrote in an Art Newspaper review of Dynamite Doug, journalism studio Project Brazen’s gripping podcast series focused on Latchford’s looting of Cambodia’s Khmer heritage: ‘These were not brilliant criminal masterminds: they were enabled’. The largely overlooked scandal that surrounds the

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Prakhon Chai hoard – the formative heist through which Latchford first connected with auction houses, collectors and curators – is, I believe, a logical place to begin cataloguing this unpalatable reality, to start fleshing out the backstory and postscripts that can help us determine just how deeply entwined museums and the wider artworld were, and remain, in Latchford’s network. Here’s one example: while doing my own research, I was sent a recently unearthed 1975 letter that describes how ‘Latchford made a fortune’ as the bronzes were ‘smuggled out and melted into various museums and private collections’. That is hardly a new or surprising revelation, but it also goes further, describing in detail how the letter’s author, the late Samuel Eilenberg, a Polish-American collector who bequeathed over 400 pieces to The Met, bought a small Prakhon Chai piece when Latchford ‘stopped in New York for a few days’. A piece matching its description was donated by Eilenberg to The Met in 1987 – and it’s still there

today, along with seven others acquired from or donated by different sources, including Latchford. You could argue that Eilenberg merely did what many collectors did back then – acquired with scant regard for provenance or patrimony laws – but this one revelation about a single bronze raises questions pertinent to the ethics of collecting today, as well as yesterday… How many more pieces did Latchford smuggle out in his suitcase? How many did Eilenberg buy? Who else did? Moreover, how did the ethics codes of the 1980s – a period during which American museums had ostensibly aligned with the principles of the unesco 1970 convention designed to prevent the illicit trade in artefacts – allow for the accessioning of such undocumented pieces? facing page Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, c. 725, copper alloy inlaid with silver and glass or obsidian, 142 × 57 cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York above Kuti Reussi No. 1 Temple (c. 1200 ad), Prakhon Chai District, Thailand. Photo: Ddalbiez (cc by-sa 3.0)

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us museums with tainted Prakhon Chai bronzes can either engage with such questions, or disregard them. Some are no doubt staying quiet and doubling down due to the ‘floodgates’ or ‘slippery slope’ argument – out of fear their collection will be hollowed out if they embrace scrutiny. But given the legal climate in the us, they are simply deferring the unavoidable and squandering their chance to engage in an overtly voluntary repatriation process – a more restorative approach that, aside from minimising bad pr and bad blood, could lead to new opportunities with Thailand. In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a divine and practised ascetic, a future Buddha, who delays nirvana to assist humanity. The ornately coiffed, deeply magnetic bronze incarnations that make up the Prakhon Chai hoard clearly have some additional teachings to pass on, lessons gleaned over recent decades that could help enlighten and improve the world in which they find themselves. Which museums will let them speak?

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Kim Beom From portraits without pictures to predatory prey, the South Korean artist’s idionsyncratic work delights in upending established orders and power dynamics by Andrew Russeth

It is a vanishingly rare event, but it does happen: an artist makes a work that is so effective, so potently charismatic – too charismatic, you could even say – that it takes on a life of its own. This is a fraught experience, at once a gift and a curse. The piece may win its creator new fans, but as it circulates, various odd, and sometimes ill-informed, interpretations have been known to accrue. The South Korean artist Kim Beom, who is fifty-nine, has made such an artwork: a spellbinding 2012 video titled Yellow Scream, in which an actor, Choi Kyong-Ho, demonstrates how to make an abstract painting in 30 minutes. Staring straight at the camera, the man counsels his viewers: “You may find it hard to think about something or make decisions” when painting. His advice: “Don’t think; just choose your colours and move your brush as you feel.” And so he proceeds to do just that. As he makes careful horizontal strokes in shades of yellow, he leans towards the canvas and screams. This artist has range. He paints what he terms “some screams of unbearable confusion” and “a short scream expressing a flashing pain”. Each mark, each scream, is a bit different. A quick internet search can yield stories about it on clickbait-y sites with headlines like ‘Try Not to Laugh as This Man Calmly Paints Yellow Lines While Screaming’ and ‘Meet the Anti-Bob Ross of Korea’. That latter characterisation seems particularly misjudged – the actor actually comes across as decidedly pro-Ross, exuding the same earnestness and equanimity as the beloved tv painting-instructor. He is sincere and patient, and he wants you to learn. The issue is just that this painter’s artistic goals (and Kim’s) are a bit more antic than Ross’s. Kim may not be satirising Ross, but he has other targets. Yellow Scream comes across as a sendup of both a certain type of rarefied abstraction and the outrageous claims that are made about its ability to transmit emotions, narratives and ideas. It recalls Tom Wolfe’s indictment in 1975, in his book The Painted Word, that art was no longer about ‘“seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text’. (The emphasis is Wolfe’s.) That is not to say that Kim is some archconservative, lobbying for a return to theory-free visual pleasure. He is no anti-intellectual.

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A piquant scepticism and a zest for invention (frequently camouflaged as nonchalance) define his idiosyncratic practice. Across various mediums, in diverse tones, his artworks prod viewers to consider what they are willing to believe, and what they are willing to accept – aesthetically and politically. A 2010 installation, Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools, enacts an indoctrination session. It places cheap household products – a table fan, a kettle, a nightlight – in tiny chairs in front of a chalkboard and a television, on which a man delivers a tedious lecture. “Some of you use electricity,” he says. “Others use batteries.” You may find yourself feeling sorry for them. Reminding myself that they were only objects, I just felt sorry generally, thinking of all the systems of control we construct and endure. Kim delights in highlighting and upending power dynamics with light touches and deadpan humour. In a 2010 video, Spectacle, he reverses the action of nature documentaries and has a cheetah fleeing a superfast antelope. In other video installations from that year, we encounter A Ship That Was Taught There Is No Sea and A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird. A 2008 canvas called Denial presents a kind of challenge to its viewers, plainly stating in black letters, ‘this is neither a canvas nor a painting’ and ‘there is no such thing here’. As the old saying goes: who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? All works of art ask us to suspend our disbelief – or, at least, to believe in them. (‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’, another trickster, René Magritte, informed his viewers.) Kim makes this moment of decision, this choice, the fulcrum of his art. He ‘emphasizes the internalized action of the viewer to believe or not believe’, as the curator Paola Morsiani has written about Kim’s (sometimes-sinister) pedagogical installations. In 1994 Kim used a pencil to draw a small circle on a piece of paper and wrote, ‘believe this circle is alive’, ‘believe this circle can think’ and a couple other bold imperatives. Are you buying it? Kim started out as a painter, and in his formative works from the 1990s you can see him questioning artistic customs, toying with how a painting should behave, how it should look and how it should address its audience. He cut into a canvas, folding the flaps and attaching buttons to make shirt pockets for Self-Portrait (1994).

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preceding pages Spectacle, 2010 (installation view), eight-channel video, colour, silent, 1 min 7 sec. Photo: Lee Euirock and Choi Yohan

above Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools, 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Lee Euirock and Choi

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top Blue Painting, 1995, ink on canvas, 57 × 77 cm

middle Landscape #1, 1995, marker on canvas, 56 × 82 cm

above Untitled, 1994, marker, cotton on canvas, 61 × 87 cm

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A Draft of a Safe House for a Tyrant, 2009, blueprint, 98 × 68 cm

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A Draft of a Safe House for a Tyrant (Perspective), 2009, pencil on paper, 91 × 60 cm

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He sewed together rectangular slices of canvas to render Brick Wall #1 Taken together, these disparate actions suggest an artist who (1994). And he affixed cotton swatches to a canvas and used a black is endlessly inquisitive about art’s efficacy. Kim has serious doubts marker to draw arrows and lay down some rules: ‘don’t look at about the art enterprise, but he is not a cynic, and he is sceptical only this part’ (too late) or ‘touch this part’. An untitled 1995 piece because he seems to want more from art than our present world bears a rolled-up paper and a note: ‘take this poem with you’. provides. He is also restless. Each new series he starts leaps across At Kim’s current retrospective at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, the aesthetic map. One problem of writing about his art is that it has a gallery attendant at the entrance informs visitors that touching taken so many forms that it is impossible to summarise it all. (Another the works is, in fact, verboten, which makes his pictures both funnier problem is that many of his artworks are very funny, and it is horrible and sad – cut off, alienated. to explain a joke.) That exhibition is titled How to become a rock, which comes from This is a plainspoken art, and an art that is aware of the cruelties writing by Kim that, I think, hints at the abiding conflict within his of the world: where lies are told, where people are repressed and where art, the productive friction that fuels it. In that a ship might be taught that there is no sea. This is a plainspoken art, and an Since 2002, Kim has been creating renderings text, which was part of his 1997 book The Art of Transformation, he advises: ‘Ignore the changes art that is aware of the cruelties for fantastical, occasionally menacing buildof the seasons and the weather, and do not of the world: where lies are told, ings, like A Draft of a Safe House for a Tyrant think at all’. And he says, ‘Even if it happens that (Perspective) (2009), and in 2008 he began where people are repressed a physical force such as a heavy rain will shake a series called Intimate Suffering, which offers you and roll you down, do not be concerned dense mazes on canvas, each a hard-edge, and where a ship might about it. Just keep your original posture.’ Being Op-art abstraction as an exhausting game. be taught that there is no sea One from 2014 is nearly five metres tall, and a rock apparently involves sticking to your beliefs, but it also means a kind of inflexibility, a wilful hermeticism. while I have tried to complete it, gliding my eyes along its passages, Is Kim a rock? In some sense. He has eschewed a signature style I always give up way before the end. Kim rarely consents to interbut charted a singular course, wielded the language of sundry art views, but he has said of those puzzles, ‘Life comes with its share of movements for his own incisive ends: the canonical text-based problems, and solving problems and finding the right way is hard, conceptualism of Robert Barry and Yoko Ono, the research-based but it seems to be human instinct and nature to do so.’ installation art of so many biennials past, and more. From one And so we might ask: amid tough times, is it worth trying to ‘keep vantage point, he is a kind of court jester of contemporary art, your original posture’, like a rock? Sure, that has value in a world that poking at its pretensions, stripping it down to its basics and turning demands conformity. But it is at least as important to keep trying new it into something else (a painting as a shirt, an instructional video things. Like Kim’s puzzles, with their long alleys and distressing dead as a comedy act). In a pivotal early effort, he made a painting of chicken ends, one message of Kim’s whole practice is that the essential thing and sold it for $11.95, the price of a chicken dish he wanted to buy – is to keep looking for solutions, to keep going. ara a painting as actual currency, pure use value. At the 2012 Gwangju Biennale, he sold paper-clay sculptures of whole chickens and used Kim Beom’s solo exhibition How to become a rock is on view at the profits to buy 2,840 vouchers for underprivLeeum Museum of Art, Seoul, through 3 December ileged children to buy chicken. (These are only Spy Ship (Perspective), 2004, Andrew Russeth is an art critic based in Seoul a few of his chicken-related pieces.) colour pencil on paper, 40 × 53 cm

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Yellow Scream (stills), 2012, single-channel video, colour, sound, 31 min 6 sec all images Courtesy the artist and Leeum Museum, Seoul

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Sancintya Mohini Simpson by Mark Rappolt

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Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a first-generation Australian. She’s an is the deepest historical root of the Indian diaspora as it exists today. artist. And a poet. And mixed race (Anglo-Indian). And, on her moth- And the main attraction in bringing Indians to Natal (where over er’s side, a descendant of Indian indentured labourers sent to work on 150,000 indentured laborers ended up) was because their labour was so the sugar plantations of Natal, part of present-day South Africa. Her cheap. When it comes to South Africa, the practice was stopped in 1911 watercolour painting Woman of Indenture no. 3 (2018) features a sari-clad (by the colonial government of India), ostensibly because of the poor woman, alone at the centre of an empty sheet of wasli paper (a tenth- conditions suffered by the workers in Natal, but in practice because it century invention from Mughal India, traditionally used for miniature was suffering from a diminishing profitability and the British were painting). She’s bent almost double, poised to hack into a sugarcane far more concerned about rising Indian nationalism and the consewith a machete. The bottom of her white sari is dirty and stained. She quent threat to the ‘jewel’ in their crown. Everything was played out floats on the page, floats in space. In the middle of nowhere. It’s part of according to colonial logic and colonial rules. Fundamentally that’s a series of paintings executed in the flattened style typical of traditional a way of thinking that shamefully continues to inform the conditions Indian painting that map out the working conditions of labourers in and pathways of much migrant labour today, from East and Southeast Natal and their transportation across the ocean to get there. Asia to the Gulf states and far beyond. Yet for all the apparent and overwhelming abjectness of this Simpson, who is based in Brisbane (or Meanjin as the artist calls it to representation, there are some forceful honour its traditional name) and works countermoves. Where the Rajput and Everything was played out according across a variety of media – from painting Mughal painting styles were slowly and video to performance and poetry – is to colonial logic and colonial rules Europeanised (with appropriate forms of currently (in late July) preparing for her perspective, for example) into a style that that still inform migrant labour today latest exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (pica). “This show is became known as ‘Company Painting’ (because the patrons – the people who then held much of India’s a bit different from my other shows,” she says. “Different in the sense money – driving influences on such works were employees of the East that it’s more personal, in the fact that it’s in the timeline of acknowlIndia Company and its equivalents) during the eighteenth and nine- edgement. It’s looking at apartheid, history, histories, personal family teenth centuries, here traditional Indian techniques are reclaimed. histories of displacement, rather than just looking out more broadly.” Taken back by a descendant of those who were taken away, displaced The show indeed is centred around a creased, black-and-white photofrom their homeland and their culture. Do moves such as Simpson’s graph from a family album featuring its womenfolk sharing a meal outdoors under a mango tree and next to the corrugated-iron wall of redeem what was stolen? Probably not. But perhaps it is a start. Indentured labour became the primary labour source for colo- a house. “It’s thinking more about the distance of displacement, and nial plantation owners once slavery was abolished throughout the multiple places, and memories and materials and places.” Corrugated British colonies ‘around the world’ in 1834. Prior to that, people from iron is the surface onto which the artist has painted a landscape for the southern part of the Indian subcontinent had made up 50 percent the exhibition. of the slaves across the Cape (largely today’s South Africa). And while The show is titled ām / ammā / mā maram – ām and mā maram many Indians ‘agreed’ to become indentured labourers, their main meaning mango and mango tree in Hindi and Tamil respectively; motivation was to escape the poverty and and ammā, the word for mother in Tamil and above The Plantation (detail), 2022, watercolour famine that were widespread in their homemany other languages of the subcontinent. It’s and gouache on handmade wasli paper, land, thanks in the main to the actions of their a kind of diasporic linguistic mishmash. For 6 panels, c. 125 × 95 cm each. Photo: Carl Warner although the history of migrant labour is one colonial rulers. The effect of the colonial era facing page photograph (and image above) courtesy that is told in a multitude of languages, those and the indentured labour that it encouraged the artist and Milani Gallery, Meeanjin / Brisbane

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languages are one of the first things of which labourers arriving in a distant land are stripped. “I’ve realised that my practice has been very much for my mother or for the women in my family,” the artist says. Her mother heard her mother and grandmother speaking Tamil and Telugu, but wasn’t taught it herself. School meant English, meant Afrikaans. “I think there’s a sense of loss about that,” Simpson continues, “especially with identity for her as well.” Simpson’s Tamil pronunciation is, in her words, “terrible”. When she returned to visit South Africa with her mother, the artist recalls that she was told that they would be able to find her mother’s childhood home because of the two mango trees growing in the garden. Mango trees that, like her mother’s ancestors, probably came there from India. But these stories are often hard to trace backwards. Memories are, for the most part, static; places change. Recalling her visit to South Africa, the artist remembers her mother talking about her recollections of beaches that were no longer accessible and markets that have moved. “It’s strange experiencing a place someone’s talked about for so long and then to find it and learn that it’s not still there.” Simpson also recalls that when her mother was trying to prove her ‘Indianness’ in order to claim an overseas citizenship visa (a type of ode to bureaucratic exile), they found a copy of her uncle’s birth certificate (which stated that, even then, in 1954, he was ‘free or indentured’) and used the identification numbers listed on it to trace the ‘ship list’ on which her ancestors were transported. The numbers corresponded to details of caste, village and region. Things that, the artist recalls, weren’t really talked about within the family, for fear of what people might say and how they might be judged. The ship lists were carelessly written by the British and further information was hard to find; the pair eventually made a trip to India to see if they could reconnect to places, but what Simpson was left with was a series of gaps, a lack of representation in the archives and a picture that wasn’t complete. And thoughts about how those gaps might be filled. And most of the gaps with which Simpson is dealing relate to the stories and histories of women. “It’s about acknowledging these histories,” the artist continues, “creating space for discussion, rather than having shame surrounding them. But that acknowledgement also allows current descendants and generations to be able to move

forward in positive ways.” The question, of course, remains how to reconstruct these histories when the traces of them are so faint and absent. How do you get from a lazily created ship list to the voices of these women and the reality of their lives? ‘Women outside the mode of production narrative mark the points of fadeout in the writing of disciplinary history’, the academic and pioneer of subaltern histories Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak begins her celebrated 1985 essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ One way of looking at Simpson’s practice might be as an attempt to create some kind of fade in. And in a language that’s somewhat more immediate than that used by academics. Simpson’s new show comes with a poem written out in English: Are our mothers Mango trees Or fruit Fallen, slashed Are they roots Leaves or sap Or branches we hold onto. In pica’s galleries, the artist continues her exploration of the memories held in materials: black clay pots fired in sugarcane sawdust that marks and textures the vessels; two tables (made from scorched mango wood) measuring the length of her own and her mother’s body, objects that might conjure memories of the spatial arrangements of slave ship holds; scent made from mango leaves from her mother’s garden; paper made from mango fibres from her mother’s garden. All of which both trigger memories and mirror the migration of flora and fauna that was a part of colonial expansion. There are constituent parts of home that ‘travel’ with you. And part of this is a displacement of sorts – what is lost is conjured in objects, objects that might trigger similar memories or compatible sensations in an audience. When words alone, for the reasons previously discussed, might not be able to do the job. ara An exhibition of Sancintya Mohini Simpson’s work, ām / ammā / mā maram, is at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, through 22 October

kotri / barkis, 2023 (installation view, ām / ammā / mā maram, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts). Photo: Dan McCabe. © the artist and pica, Perth

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mā maram, 2023 (installation view, ām / ammā / mā maram, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts). Photo: Dan McCabe. © the artist and pica, Perth

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Wang Tuo’s Artistic Revolution by Yongwoo Lee

Study for Demonstration of A Failure, 2023, charcoal on paper, 55 × 79 cm (paper), 69 × 94 × 3 cm (framed)

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‘Pan-shamanism’, spiritual mediums, hidden histories, deep trauma, time travel – are these the base materials that will reshape contemporary China?

Study for Hunger Strike from Patrick Zachmann, 2023, charcoal on paper, 55 × 79 cm (paper), 69 × 94 × 23 cm (framed)

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Improvisation of Blue iii, 2023, oil on canvas, 64 × 85 cm

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Wang Tuo is an artist interested in the possibility of a democratic the exhibition space in white sheets to demonstrate mourning revolution in China. His art – which spans film, performance, rituals; Wu Shanzhuan set up a makeshift market stall from which painting and drawing – meticulously interweaves his understanding he sold 30kg of shrimp to criticise the commodification of art; Wang of diverse times and spaces with fiction, mythology, archives, memory Lang wandered around the museum dressed as an ancient Chinese and instances of political turmoil. Beginning with historical events, warrior and terrorising visitors; Li Shan washed his feet in a plastic such as the anti-imperialist May Fourth Movement of 1919, he recon- bucket to which he had attached a portrait of Ronald Reagan; Zhang textualises the modern histories that lie concealed behind China’s Nian sat on a ‘nest’ of chicken eggs wearing a placard around his cultural censorship and state control. neck, which bore the pointed message: ‘No theoretical debate during Earlier this year, in The Second Interrogation, Wang’s first solo exhi- my floating egg performance, lest it troubles the next generation’; bition in Hong Kong (at Blindspot Gallery), the artist fed this concept Wang Deren threw condoms and coins at visitors as a comment through the loom of Chinese politics. Accompanied by recent paint- on China’s increasing population; and Xiao Lu fired two bullets at ings and drawings, the titular artwork (a two-part video from 2023) her own installation with a pistol. These performances provoked took the form of a fictional dialogue between an artist and a local controversy and, eventually, retaliation from Chinese authorities. Commissioner for Discipline Inspection, where Wang explores the The artist in The Second Interrogation at one point gives a talk role of art and the artist in contemporary China. At one point, the recounting these performances; the film itself is narrated by an actor artist character poses the question: “Can art actually bring about playing the performer Datong Dazhang, who died by suicide on New Year’s Eve 2000. By retelling change in the real world?” To decide to live is the original power these moments in relation to 1989’s Wang situates his performance within scenarios that are at once Tiananmen incident, Wang quesof the powerless; it is also the weapon scripted and open to interpretation: tions whether there is any value in of the weak in everyone’s hands continuing the task of establishencouraging the actors to tap into their personal experiences, relationships, traumas and imagination. ing the freedom of artistic expression that his predecessors failed Wang presents human bodies as spiritual mediums: pseudo-shamans to achieve over three decades ago. While those ghosts from the past that are trapped in histories doomed to repeat, ritualistically syn- seem almost to roar in the face of their subjugation, in the exhibition chronised across time and space, much like China’s attempts at a series of unfinished portraits of Wang’s compatriot artist-friends governmental reform and managing censorship. The result of all (“Weapons”, as he calls them, during our interview) hung on the wall this is what Wang calls ‘pan-shamanisation’, in which humans are as if to testify to a possible future – one in which freedom of expression conduits of historical consciousness: the living and the dead coexist is not a threat. Says the artist: “To decide to live is the original power to conjure a diachronic narrative that embraces both the passage of of the powerless; it is also the weapon of the weak in everyone’s hands.” By juxtaposing the past and the present in this way, Wang time and the events embedded in it. The radical point of the dialogue in The Second Interrogation lies articulates the ways in which art scrutinises current sociopolitical in the artist’s tribute to the 1989 China / Avant-Garde exhibition at conditions through the lens of history and how an artist might weapBeijing’s National Art Museum of China (curated by Li Xianting, onise their practice for social resistance. Peng De and Gao Minglu), a watershed moment in the history At another point in The Second Interrogation, the artist fires a gunshot of Chinese contemporary art. One of the restrictions placed on the into the air. The gesture acts as a nod to Xiao Lu, who recounts in Wen exhibition was that no performance art be included. Those conse- Pulin’s 1989-2009 documentary, Seven Sins: 7 Performances during 1989 quently affected by this rule staged a series of seven performances: Chinese Avant-Garde Exhibition, the moment she fired two gunshots Datong Dazhang, Zhu Yanguang and Ren Xiaoying’s walked through out of three at a mirror that formed part of her installation Dialogue

The Second Interrogation (still), 2023, single-channel 4k video, colour, sound (part one of a two-part video installation, Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong)

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(a pair of phone booths), after which she was arrested. Wang supplies a glimpse of revolutionary thinking against an authoritarian system in The Second Interrogation, the shot fired into the air by the artist a reincarnation of Xiao Lu’s missing third bullet. A bullet that audiences may or may not interpret as symbolic of the possibility of a gradual revolution in the hands of those who understand what belongs to them and how to own it. In a dimly lit red-wallpapered room at the Taikang Space in Beijing, two leather armchairs sitting on top of decorative carpets welcomed viewers into the artist’s exhibition A Little Violence of Organized Forgetting (2016). Wang arranged the exhibition like a theatrical set to elaborate on the mythology of family bonds and their traumatic ruptures; the result felt more like standing in a living room of phantoms. There he premiered Meditation on Disappointing Reading (2016), a video based on American writer Pearl S. Buck’s 1969 novel, Three Daughters of Madame Liang, long banned in mainland China for depicting a Chinese family tragedy during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). After discovering the book while studying painting at Boston University, Wang tells me that he found Chinese online databases had all but erased its existence, leading him to consider the connotations of ‘absence’ in the writing of history. In this sense, an archive isn’t a mere system of preservation but one that reflects specific regulations about what can and cannot be said. In other words, an archive is never neutral; it is shaped by the sociopolitical order within which it operates. Thus Wang asks whether or not ‘the archive’ ever enables us to look at official narratives without simultaneously requiring us to ignore the possibilities of an alternate historiography. In Meditation on Disappointing Reading, Wang intertwines the lives of two women. Onscreen a female character prepares food in a ritual to summon spirits: a ghost appears to tell a tragic story from a thirdperson perspective, inspired by a chapter of Three Daughters of Madame Liang. As an intertextual way of summoning an absent archive, Wang translates the chapter into Chinese via Google Translate, thus yielding a confused grammar that deliberately obscures the banned source as well as the details of the era during which it was first written. While the translation program’s disjunctured reading leaves the audience disoriented, the gist of Buck’s story remains lucid.

Wang presents a deft metaphor for the archive, with an ambiguous connection between a person who is allowed to read the novel and the person who cannot access it, a story retold by ghosts who represent a haunted narrativisation of collective trauma. A similar kind of “double wounding”, as Wang puts it, of combining disparate moments takes place in his video Tungus (2021). Filmed in Wang’s hometown of Changchun, in Jilin province, which is geographically adjacent to North Korea, Mongolia and northeastern Asia, the video raises questions of ethnocentric nationalism, border crossing and diaspora. Threading together narratives of two soldiers and a scholar attempting to escape from the tangles of the Chinese Civil War (1945–49), the film nods to the contemporaneous Jeju Uprising (a precursor to the Korean War) and the 1919 May Fourth Movement, and also incorporates still images of illustrations of The Peach Blossom Spring (fifth-century author Tao Yuanming’s mythological story of a utopia in which inhabitants have escaped the civil unrest of the Qin dynasty to live oblivious to reality). Blurring time and space, the historical landscapes of Changchun and Jeju Island become a backdrop of collective memory that reveals the commonalities between the civil wars. By interweaving human narratives with the political circumstances of northeastern Asia, Wang uses pan-shamanisation to uncover the ways in which collective memory has been reshaped by ideological hegemonies that seek to revoke historical trauma. The archive – as a system for storing knowledge – is subject to constant mutation, adaptation and manipulation in which cultural memory isn’t guaranteed to be kept intact from past to present, from generation to generation. Wang presents his audience with the possibilities of writing different historical endings that challenge those dictated by authoritarian systems. And in giving space to those underrepresented human stories, Wang demonstrates how one can deploy what anthropologist James C. Scott describes as the ‘weapons of the weak’. ara Wang Tuo is shortlisted for the Sigg Prize 2023 Yongwoo Lee is a curator and assistant professor of cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Rehearsal of A Performative Homage i, 2023, charcoal on paper, 55 × 79 cm (paper), 69 × 94 × 3 cm (framed)

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The Second Interrogation, 2023 (part two of a two-part video installation: single-channel 4k video, colour, sound, Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong) all images Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

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“Art is easy, life is hard” The conceptual and performance artist Sung Neung Kyung on coming of age in a rapidly changing Korea Interview by Tyler Coburn

When Sung Neung Kyung entered college in 1960s South Korea, Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism were all the rage, and the artists associated with Dansaekhwa had begun to come into their own. By the time he finished his studies and military service, the scene was blossoming with alternative groups pursuing conceptual and dematerialised practices, including Space and Time (st), which artist Lee Kun-Yong invited him to join in 1973. Sung would go on to bring newspapers and often prosaic actions into the field of art, slyly responding to the political climate in the country: dictator Park Chung-hee imposed martial law in 1972, and artists had to negotiate a regime at turns surveillant, censorial and supportive (when the overseas artworld showed interest). Like many of his performance- and conceptoriented peers, Sung is late to receive international acclaim. ArtReview Asia was lucky to speak with him as he prepares for solo exhibitions at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (through 8 October), and Lehmann Maupin, New York (2024) – and as many of his early works travel from mmca Seoul to the Guggenheim, New York, in the exhibition Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s (through 7 January). artreview asia One of your significant early works was Newspaper: from June 1, 1974, on [1974]. As your contribution to a weeklong exhibition held by st, you attached parts of the day’s newspaper to panels on the wall, cut out all the articles and deposited the scraps in a blue acrylic box. The following day, the skeletal newspapers went in a clear acrylic box, and new ones were cut. Can you talk about how the project took shape?

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sung neung kyung This was a way for me to provide commentary about the very difficult political situation in South Korea. But if I think back to those actions, they don’t seem that effective. They were more like mosquito sounds: very small noises against brutal political oppression. Maybe I lacked enough courage at the time. As you mentioned, I was creating blank spaces by cutting out newspaper articles – and trying to identify the potential meaning or significance that could have existed there. Only the photographs and advertisements were left. This was the starting point for all of my later work in photography, performance art and installation. ara Your transition to photography was almost immediate! That same year, you purchased a Nikon f2 and began staging actions for the camera, which were later exhibited as sequences of prints. Many of these works depict everyday gestures like eating an apple [Apple, 1976] and smoking a cigarette [Smoking, 1976]. snk Smoking just documents an action, but if you think about it, that action was a common denominator that tied everyone together – working-class folks and higher-ups. At the time, Park Chung-hee was known to smoke five packs of cigarettes a day, and I would also smoke that much sometimes. I guess this was one act of true freedom granted to us, and it was the one act of true freedom we shared with the dictator. That said, I want to emphasise that I have since given up smoking! ara Of your photographic work from this era, I’m particularly curious about Contraction and Expansion [1976], a series of 12 photographs in

which you raise your hands, lie on the ground, then spread them again. snk I had started working with conceptual art and using my own body as a vessel to express myself. Contraction and Expansion really began with asking myself: what is my body? What is this physical being, this mass I have? I think we can broaden the significance of this piece because at the time in South Korea contraction could refer to how political power represses the expression of individuals, whereas expansion allows them to express themselves. These countervailing forces are acting together in this work. ara There’s an interesting play of agency in Contraction and Expansion. While you’ve staged this action for the camera, it looks like you’re following the commands of some external authority. Your hands shoot up, your eyes widen, your body reacts. I’m reminded of stories you’ve told from this period of martial law: that your hands trembled when cutting newspapers in the gallery, and your voice shook during reading performances. Power found subtle ways to reverberate through the body. As Jeff Wall has noted, for photoconceptualists of this era, documenting performances – even when conducted alone in a studio – had the quality of reportage. This link becomes even stronger considering your work with newspapers: the image, beyond its aesthetic merits, is a channel of information and the product of authorial and editorial intent. We can see this in your Venue series, which you commenced in 1979. snk At the time, power was like an omnipotent god. Power existed above everything else. This is to say that other opinions simply could not exist. We could not even think about the

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Contraction and Expansion (detail), 1976, gelatin silver print, 12 prints, 28 × 28 cm (each)

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Newspaper: from June 1, 1974, on (detail), 1974, newspapers on panels, acrylic, performance, dimensions variable. Photo: Kim Tae Dong

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No relationship to a particular person 1 (detail), 1977, gelatin silver print, 110 prints, 25 × 20 cm (each)

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Performance at Chunk of Concept: The Artistic Meanderings of Sung Neung Kyung at Zaha Museum, Seoul, 2023. Photo: Netjjae. © Zaha Museum, Seoul all images Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul & London

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possibility of two-sided communication like the kind we have today. There was only a onesided circuit. The Venue series is tied to this. It was inspired by my reading of newspapers. South Korean newspapers in particular use a lot of symbols – small circles and triangles and lines and dashes – that point and direct the reader’s attention to where the editor wants them to look. I chose to present an alternative opinion to editorial authority – opposition to this unilateral communication circuit. In my mind, editorial power and political power were very similar. ara You’d often double the editorial symbols by applying ink to film. Many of the resulting prints have become part of massive installations. snk I tried to do this for my first solo exhibition in 1985 [Venue, Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul] when I used 1,500 different photographs. I wanted to create a parade for the public: a look at recent history and the contemporary moment through images. Since then, the Venue series has been exhibited about 40 times in different ways. ara I’ve heard that Venue 6 [1981] was inspired by the story of a young North Korean guerrilla. snk Yes, it came from a sense of compassion for the guerrilla. He crossed the border, was shot and killed, then North Korea denied ever sending him. The guerrilla was denied by his own country, and he died on our soil, though he’s not South Korean. We know he’s Korean, but this is a man without citizenship. Venue 6 was an attempt to offer my condolences to this young boy and keep his memory alive. I imagined, if he had safely made it to South Korea, what would be the arc of his travels through the country? What route would he have taken? This is what I tried to express through the dotted line. ara There’s something rather intimate about this work that makes me think of S. at Mid-Life [1977], where you enlarged 15 images from your personal photo albums. This work marked the beginning of several autobiographical projects spanning more than 30 years, including snapshots of your children [S’s Posterity: Botched Art is More Beautiful, 1991] and strobe-lit photographs of your home [The Shadow of Delirium, 2001]. snk I was thirty-five when I worked on S. at Mid-Life, and I thought that maybe I would live to seventy at best. That explains the title. I took images from elementary school, my college days and my period of military service. In the South Korean artworld of the time, people talked about ‘grand narratives’ and ‘world narratives’, but I wanted to create a micronarrative: something personal in nature. I also

wanted to propose the idea that ‘the artist is dead’, which is why my eyes are blacked out. ara You silkscreened bars over them – a convention of some newspapers that you’ve explored in other works like No relationship to a particular person 1 [1977]. It seems you were trying to shift focus to the other characters in the scenes. snk Some audience members used coins to try to scratch the silkscreen off the images. With that, I guess the artist was reborn. The artist returned. ara Cathy Park Hong has observed that ‘English is our ever-expanding neoliberal lingua franca… The more developing the nation, the more in need that nation is of a copy editor.’ I couldn’t help but connect her quote to Everyday English [2004–18]. snk This began as a hobby and slowly evolved into an art piece: learning some English using the ‘English Review’ pages in the daily newspaper

“My methodology involves looking for things that are not yet art and turning them into art. This content is not limited to masturbation, or eating a snack, or picking your teeth, or hitting somebody, or giving a blessing. Anything from my everyday life can be incorporated into my performance art” I subscribed to. You have to bear in mind that this was not business English. There would be conversational, casual, informal words here and there – and maybe some borderline slang. There were times when I was a bit lazy and didn’t complete the reviews, but all in all, there are about 3,000 works, which I curated down to 2,700. One of my objectives was to prove to myself that I was still an artist through this daily activity. Because I’m also a performance artist, I wanted to do something performative every day. ara Though decades have passed since the political climate that informed your first newspaper work, I am struck by some echoes. Everyday English has partly coincided with the presidency of Park Geun-hye [2013–17], whose term included the reinstating of state-issued history textbooks and a notorious cultural blacklist. While the conditions were incomparable to those under her father, Park Chung-hee,

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it’s an example of the potential backslide of even hard-won democracies. I’m happy you mentioned performance, as I wanted to ask about it. Joan Kee has an interesting interpretation of South Korean performance under martial law: works involving ‘daily activities that most people did and could do’ helped ‘viewers think actively and consciously about life as something they practised, rather than as a status or a condition over which they had no control’. Examples could include the aforementioned image sequences of you eating an apple and smoking. Since the 1990s, you’ve developed a new strain of performance work that hybridises various, sometimes everyday activities in totally wild ways. snk My thought process during the 1990s was that I’m going to leverage everything I find interesting from Eastern and Western practices, contemporary and old. For instance, in one performance piece, I used prayer texts that are read aloud during Korean ancestral rites. There’s a way of chanting the texts, and I would shift between that and how Catholic priests chant during mass. Both have a singsong quality, though with different nuance. ara Your performances are also known to have saltier content, like urination and masturbation, and moments when you engage audience members by sharing a snack or slinging ping-pong balls at them. snk My methodology involves looking for things that are not yet art and turning them into art. This content is not limited to masturbation, or eating a snack, or picking your teeth, or hitting somebody, or giving a blessing. Anything from my everyday life can be incorporated into my performance art. It’s almost as if my performances are composed of different joints or modules that connect. Links in a chain. Keys on a piano. Blocks of Legos. Bring them together, and they create a whole. I could describe myself as a ‘module performer’: I own nothing of my work, nothing is originally mine. I’m just building modules. ara In recent performances, you sometimes speak what you call ‘one-line manifestos’. I particularly like your manifesto ‘Art is easy, life is hard’. What does this mean to you? snk Life is very difficult sometimes, and compared to its challenges, thinking about art comes so easily to me. It’s hard paying the bills, putting food on the table. Art is number two – it’s the second priority. ara Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer and teacher based in New York. Interpretation from Korean provided by Amber Hyun Jung Kim

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Enter the Trance Haunted by the imagery of Dutch colonisation, Indonesian musician Kasimyn’s latest album takes listeners on a sonic journey into death, desire, ecstasy and… ‘Javafuturism’? by Adeline Chia

above Kasimyn featured in Björk’s Atopos (still), 2022, music video. Courtesy One Little Independent, London facing page lp front and back covers for Kasimyn’s Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal, 2023. Courtesy the artist

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In the history of difficult concept albums, Indonesian musician Kasimyn’s latest release – the freaky, baffling and totally engrossing Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal (2023) – must surely be given an honourable mention. Amid its sleeve notes, ‘the mixed and inexplicable emotions aroused from browsing the Indonesian war archives from various sources for years’ is cited as one of the major influences on the production. ‘Indonesian war archives’ is a vague term – it could include anything from the history of violence against native populations during the 125-year period of Dutch colonisation that ended in 1942 with the Japanese occupation, to the mass killings of civilians accused of being Communists during the mid-1960s under Suharto’s regime, or the genocide in East Timor that spanned 1975–99. Kasimyn, who has also received mainstream attention for collaborating with Björk on her trippy, mushroom-inspired album Fossora (2022), to which he contributed beats on three tracks and appeared in the music video for the lead single Atopos, doesn’t want to dwell on the topic of any direct historical inspiration – citing reasons of privacy – although he did say (via a telephone conversation) that the album was composed while looking at images of Indonesia under Dutch rule. Since the album’s release in June, the few scattered reviews from the (mostly white) international music press have interpreted it in broad strokes as a form of trauma response to the history of violence in Indonesia. The Quietus says, ‘Though [the album] is a reaction to the legacy of Indonesia’s turbulent relationship with war, there is little concrete reference to that history… In many respects, the album is a sorrowful tribute to the unnamed victims of the war, creating spaces for them that expresses the rage of those who will never get to speak for themselves.’ Meanwhile, online electronic-music magazine Resident Advisor writes: ‘Kasimyn uses gabber, techno and experimental club music as tools to channel, relive and represent the violence of the past. The ultra-fast rhythms overlap, leaving no space for a reprieve, while the brutal snares evoke physical blows and the darkest hours of war.’ You can (sort of) see where these reviewers are coming from. The emotional tenor of the 14-track Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal is generally dark, operating in a horror-movie-soundtrack mode, with sampled human vocals of cries, growls and moans, layered over dread-inducing soundscapes with dark, industrial textures. Programmatically, it could be read as a moody and cathartic response to the sorrows and horrors of war. For example, the track titled Bucur consists of low,

ominous, stomach-churning synths that almost sound like the moans of a large beast, which are layered over eerie scampering drumbeats. In Tungkai a discordant melody is repeated like a broken siren amid drums that crash in a chaotic rhythm. And Budakkawan comprises three minutes of lyrics screamed out by Indonesian poet and vocalist SaintMary, sampled and built up over booming kicks. In Bahasa Indonesia, she shrieks: “Whose name is in history? Who is to blame?” But the album is too strange and slippery to be reduced to the narrative of war alone. For one, it simply generates conflicting impulses that go beyond the expected territory of anger, dread, trauma, etc. There are points where the anxiety in the music is laid on so thick you could scream, but there are also moments in which you just want to dance, whether it is expressed by the helterskelter percussion in Kemuat or the hypnotic trance rhythms of Hitam. Sometimes the sonic atmosphere falls into some unparsable zone between horror and ecstasy. Ultimately, Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal, to my ear, is unmistakably club music. Whether or not it drinks from a well of historical injustices, it also transcends those material determinants to be jubilantly generative, opening up otherworldly vistas of defiance and speed. In his influential 1998 book, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, British writer and filmmaker Kodwo Eshun disparages familiar modes of theorising and historising Black music as a tradition that’s rooted in material conditions of struggle and deprivation, and instead aligns Black music with the tropes of science fiction, relating it to the cyborg and the alien. He explores how jazz, dub, techno, funk and hip-hop musicians used the culture and experiences of the African diaspora to create a sound of the future that is powered by a longing for change. One could argue that Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal occupies an analogous plane, with Kasimyn’s use of local musical elements – such as the seven-note pelog scale used in gamelan music, and traditional instruments – that are processed to such an extent that they seem alien and even futuristic. For example, instead of playing original traditional instruments such as the two-headed gendang drum, he recreates the sound on a synthesiser. The result is a slightly off-kilter, purposefully hollow and mechanistic version that he speeds up, slows down or distorts. The unusual meeting place between analogue and digital, human and machine, is best encapsulated in the track Gendang Ria, which references the serunai, a wind instrument with a reedy, buzzy

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wail, used in Indonesian rituals including death rites. The track in this field is Yogyakarta-based Senyawa, comprising singer Rully starts off sounding like a chiptune soundtrack to a computer game Shabara and instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi. The band’s unique and gradually picks up in speed and volume. Meanwhile, the artifi- doom-folk sound is formed by a wide array of vocal gymnastics, heavy cially created serunai drags out long, foreboding synths that alter- metal, drone and self-built instruments. Their epic musical stylnately rise and fall in Shepard tones, generating a windswept, cosmic ings and lyrics (always in native Indonesian Sulawesi languages, as soundscape – and leaving listeners to imagine a kind of joyful-horrific well as Javanese and Bahasa Indonesia) are ambitious feats of worldritual taking place in outer space. building, providing doomsday visions of a civilisation built on greed Musicologists Sanne Krogh Groth and Nils Bubandt might call and power. Sample lyric from Istana, a track from their fourth album this a form of ‘Javafuturism’. In their Alkisah (2021): ‘black pond / saturated The album is too strange and slippery with the remains of war and conflict ongoing research project on experi/ scattered bloodstains / the blood of mental music in Indonesia, they have to be reduced to the narrative of war picked up on Eshun’s Afrofuturist line alone… There are points where the anxiety nameless humans’. of thinking. On their website, they Collaboration and decentralisain the music is laid on so thick you could tion are also key to their distribution write: ‘“Java-Futurism” is a term method: Alkisah was coreleased by 44 coined by Lintang Raditya, an instruscream, but there are also moments record labels over four continents, to ment-builder and noise musician from in which you just want to dance which the band provided graphics Yogyakarta. The term plays on the political and temporal aesthetics of the concept “Afro-futurism” and and audio files, inviting them to create their own cover art, packaging refers to the contemporary practices of sound art and sound activism and format. The labels can also commission remixes and interpretaemployed by experimental musicians in Indonesia who seek to investi- tions of the source material, to which Senyawa will have no rights. gate a past that might have been, in order to imagine and define a future Meanwhile, another Yogyakarta-based duo, Raja Kirik, compristhat could be. The “Java” of Java-Futurism is not so much a place as an ing Yennu Ariendra and J. ‘Mo’ong’ Santoso Pribadi, updates the hypnotic sounds from Javanese trance dance performances, which imaginary that is at once political, aesthetic, and cosmological.’ Their argument is especially amicable to a subset of Indonesian feature repetitive phrases of gamelan playing layered with interbands that blend folk traditions with noise, metal, drone and improv- locking drumbeats. Such performances have different names in isation, and whose methods for music-making, performance and different locations, such as jaranan, jathilan, kuda kepang or kuda living offer nonexploitative alternatives to the music industry. These lumping, and are performed for ceremonial purposes to mark events bands make their own instruments, blend precolonial sounds – such like birth, marriage and death, as well as for entertainment. Flat wooden horses made from bamboo and decoas music from local trance or ecstatic tradiSenyawa performing Istana during a recording tions that have eluded colonial discipline – rated with colourful fabric and paint are the props session for the album Alkisah, 2021. with electro-industrial styles. The trailblazer for the dance. Performers enter into a trance Photo: Reza Darwin. Couresy the artists

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state during which spirits are believed to enter them, making them of a specific group for the benefit of others. But Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal is eat, drink and dance, but also perform various feats like walking over less clearcut than that, with varied and nuanced textures and moods hot coals and eating glass. The dance’s history is unclear, but some that are not so easily surmisable or even legible within a single intelscholars say it developed from the Java War (fought between Javanese lectual framework, or for that matter, any framework at all, because rebels and the colonial Dutch empire from 1825 to 1830) to cele- to position it within such parameters would be to flatten the album’s brate the local horsemen. Raja Kirik’s three albums, Raja Kirik (2018), complexity and the unique paralogical patterns of feeling it captures. Rampokan (2020) and Phantasmagoria of Jathilan (2023), draw from For one, there’s eros and dark humour in it. For example, in Sayat, Indonesian musical traditions and combine them with experimental every first beat is accented with an earsplitting laser sound. Yet amid electronica, rave music and homemade instruments. this abrasive landscape, the sampled human vocals that repeat ‘Ohhh!’ While Senyawa and Raja Kirit lean towards avant-garde and noise and ‘Ahhh!’ evoke lasciviousness rather than pain. Then there’s how music, Kasimyn’s dna is rooted in dance music with a more commer- the songs in the album make us dance. Hitam begins with a jaunty cial bent. Kasimyn – his real name is Aditya Surya Taruna – is one half swinging rhythm that escalates to urgent industrial percussion of the electronic dance-music duo Gabber Modus Operandi (gmo), (hammers? Some sort of piling machine?) that operates at a propulwhose Indonesian-flavoured club music has gained a cult following sive, ecstatic tempo. Kemuat is filled with the intricate and skittering in the global dance-music circuit. Unlike Senyawa and gang, gmo are rhythm of drums that possess the power to drive us all into spasnot based in the arty university town of Yogyakarta but in touristy modic, jerking footwork. Bali, where they used to work as djs. (Kasimyn says that a good part Eshun might call this power the ‘Rhythmachine’, his slippery term of Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal was actually composed by 2017, while he was that describes the sonic capture of our senses and through which bodies working “a very boring job”: “I was a dj in a fancy lounge”.) can be collectively mobilised. Or we may call it a form of ‘trance’: not According to the record label Drowned By Locals, the official only the clubby kind, but also those of folk traditions involving altered translation of Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal is ‘Synthetic feeling for anonymous states of consciousness aided by song, dance and movement. sacrifice’. Literally, Bunyi bunyi means ‘sound’ in Indonesian, but Ultimately, the album offers its listeners a powerful and defamiltumbal means sacrifice. In our interview, Kasimyn says: “In the past, iarising experience by opening up an unruly matrix of resistance, tumbal could mean the virgin that villagers threw into a volcano. Now death, desire, freedom and vitality that invites linguistic analysis in Indonesia, when we build a mall and a construction worker dies, and decoding as much as it resists it. If music has the potential to be we say, ‘Oh the spirits of the land needed a tumbal’. The feeling is, this transportive, Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal takes you to an underworld, dimly lit and filled with the faraway, metabolised strains of sounds you is totally ok, because it’s for the greater good.” Again, one could, like the foreign music press, read the work as think you know, with the driving, insistent rhythms of ecstatic dance a protest against Omelasian systems, like colothat seem to exist outside of time; it is a place Jaranan performance at Kesambi Trees Park, one can only understand with the body, not nialism, racialised capitalism and other ideologMaliran, Blitar, 2020. Photo: Suhendro Winarso ical power structures that justify the suffering the mind. ara (Wikimedia Commons / cc by-sa 4.o)

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Cai Guo-Qiang on social realities and his ongoing conversations with the universe

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Cai Guo-Qiang is one of China’s best-known artists. While he is celebrated for his day- and nighttime firework performances (not least as part of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing), and related gunpowder drawings, his work also explores China’s historical past (exhibitions of his have been made in conjunction with figures from the ancient terracotta warriors; or in Beijing’s Forbidden City) and technological future (via virtual reality and the development of nfts). In June the artist returned to Japan, where he had lived from 1986 to 1994 (before moving to New York), for a retrospective exhibition of his work at the National Art Center, Tokyo (nact), titled Ramble in the Cosmos – From Primeval Fireball Onward, which was coorganised by Saint Laurent. The exhibition explores the constructive and destructive potential of explosions as well as the artist’s broader concerns with the nature of the universe in both its observable and unseen forms. It launched with a new daytime firework event titled When the Sky Blooms with Sakura, which was commissioned by the luxury fashion house and its creative director, Anthony Vaccarello. ArtReview Asia caught up with the artist shortly after the event.

[disasters’] tenth anniversary, I had the idea to work with the local people again on an explosion project, to make the sky blossom with cherry flowers, as a continuation of the previous project, which had ‘planted’ them. But because of the pandemic, it didn’t happen. This time, with the support of [fashion house] Saint Laurent, I went back to Iwaki’s Yotsukura coast – where I had realised The Horizon… – and once again cultivated my work there, producing Japan’s first daytime fireworks. The change in this work also relates to my experience in the past few years. The 9/11 attack made me notice how daytime fireworks can be superimposed on nature and social reality, which allows the work greater conceptual potential. Nighttime fireworks realise various effects through light; they bloom brilliantly and then return to darkness. Daytime fireworks rely on smoke to take shape, and although they also pursue a certain poetics, they directly

artreview asia Your explosion event When the Sky Blooms with Sakura revisits a coastline where you conducted a similar event 29 years ago. What has changed both in your work and in your relationship to fireworks in the years in between? cai guo-qiang There have been changes in the way I use gunpowder. In The Horizon from the Pan-Pacific: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 14 – an explosion event that was realised in Iwaki, Japan, almost 30 years ago – I twisted together six gunpowder fuses each measuring 5,000 metres, and the glaring flames of the gunpowder explosion outlined the contour of the Earth on the pitch-black sea. At that time, the work had a more extended dialogue with the public: local people responded to its spirit as a conversation with the universe, and they participated by purchasing fuses – which were selling for 1,000 yen per metre – as well as urging everyone to turn off the lights at home to collectively join the artwork. When the Sky Blooms with Sakura was not directly based on the previous project but emerged after Project to Plant Ten Thousand Cherry Blossom Trees, which supported our friends in Iwaki after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident. When it got to 2021, the

confront the naked social realities by superimposing on them. ara When the Sky Blooms in Sakura refers to a natural phenomenon, whereas fireworks are manmade. To what extent are you reflecting on these two worlds? cgq Cherry blossoms and fireworks have something in common: they are both shortlived. Of course, cherry blossoms last about a week or two, while fireworks last only a few seconds. In nature, although cherry blossoms are poetic, they are after all real objects, whereas fireworks can be more iconographical. In When the Sky Blooms with Sakura, whether it’s the white tsunami, facing page When the Sky Blooms with Sakura (detail), 26 June 2023, daytime fireworks event, Iwaki, Japan. Courtesy the artist and Saint Laurent above Cai Guo-Qiang during the creation of Fetus Movement ii: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 9, 1991. Courtesy Cai Studio

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the black waves, the monument or the cherry blossoms themselves, they all convey meanings conceptually through iconographies. ara Your current exhibition at the nact is titled Ramble in the Cosmos – From Primeval Fireball Onward, which suggests a universal outlook and a relation to deep time. Can you explain what has influenced your thoughts on these subjects and how it manifests itself in your art? How does the explosive moment of the Big Bang relate to the use of explosives today? How does your work, and indeed your personal take on things, fit into the cosmic scale (the small – relatively – and the large)? cgq During the pandemic, I revisited my sketchbooks from the 1980s and 90s to connect with the state of mind I was in at that time. During my ‘Japan era’, I thought a lot about the human and global problems of the twentieth century, including material prosperity, the degradation of human nature, environmental destruction and the future of the cosmos – I pondered these issues as if I was an extraterrestrial. At that time, I was very close to the universe, and I often thought on cosmological scales and expressed myself in such terms. Based on the plans in my sketchbooks, I created several new gunpowder drawings and picked up on the Project for Extraterrestrials series again, which had been halted for many years – I returned to the embrace of the universe, which foreshadowed the Ramble in the Cosmos exhibition at the nact this time. The title Primeval Fireball [原初火球] reflects my interpretation of Laozi’s ancient cosmology: ‘There was something nebulous yet complete, born before heaven and earth’ – a notion that perhaps also alluded to my emergence into the artworld? ara How have you grouped the works in the exhibition? Do you set out at the start of planning a show with a narrative in mind? Is that narrative internal or external to your art practice? And what is it that guides you to work in one medium over another? cgq The nact exhibition traces my dialogues with the universe and the unseen world, from my creations and reflections during my early days in China, to Japan – which was an important formative stage in my artistic career – to my works in the United States and on the world stage. It posits my 1991 exhibition Primeval Fireball at p3 Art and Environment in Tokyo as a starting point, posing the questions: what

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triggered my ‘big bang’? What has occurred since then? Is the spirit of Primeval Fireball still alive? Regarding the use of different mediums in my practice, it relates to the changes in my environment. The works from my ‘Chinese era’ were more ‘primitive’; they contain dialogues with the ancient times, as well as a universalist view on cosmology and the Earth, such as in The Earth is Our Common Home [1985]. When I got to Japan, I was influenced by the development of astrophysics and began preparing for the series Project for Extraterrestrials and Project for Humankind towards the end of the 1980s. At the same time, having observed Japanese society’s reflection upon its own Westernisation as a result of its century-long efforts into modernisation and globalisation, which brought about an overly polarised East vs West dichotomy, I put emphasis on thinking and creating works from the broader perspective of the universe and mankind. After I went to New York in 1995, I naturally created more works on the themes of international politics and social problems. The same gunpowder gave rise to the ‘mushroom clouds’ I ignited at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site [in The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century, 1996]. My other installations, such as Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot at the 1995 Venice Biennale, Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1998, Head On at Berlin’s Deutsche Guggenheim in 2006 and Heritage at Brisbane’s qagoma in 2013 – to name but a few – are all based on the themes of human destiny and social history. They reflected how my practice changed as I was nurtured in the Western cultural landscape.

ara What’s it like to look back over your practice? Do you feel as close to the works you did in the past as you do to the works you’re making today? Do you think your influences have changed over time? cgq We have to accept our own changes with an honest and open mind. Indeed, you can’t always live in your childhood, as life will bring you more experience. But the main challenge is how to protect that childlike curiosity. It’s unnecessary and impossible for me to create a folding screen like the Primeval Fireball again, but today I can blast gunpowder on glass and mirrors, and work with ai. In the gallery, the three new folding

Today, what’s important is not what ai can help humans with. What’s important with ai is what defines humanity? What ought humans to do? screens made of glass and mirrors are a kind of continuation of my exploration of spirituality and illusion, as well as a continuation of the spirit of the Primeval Fireball. ara Do you see the ‘explosive moment’ as destructive or creative? There is a sense in which it wipes the slate clean, but also one in which it produces something new. Can it be both? cgq Actually both sides are present. The emergence of any energy is related to the principles of explosion. The energy of the explosion, from that of the Big Bang to that at the creation of

particles, is all very similar. It is pure, and it represents an instantaneous spacetime. In my fireworks, what I really like are the explosions, with their abstract energy, unexpectedness, uncontrollability and sense of unease. In fact, for the daytime fireworks this time, as beautiful as they looked, they were also unsettling. Between the sunny sky and the ocean, the sound and energy generated by the explosion were so shocking… the unease and excitement brought emotions and memories. The energy of art often contains an intrusiveness to people as well, so it is important for artists to gauge that ‘degree’ and distance. ara While this exhibition points to an originary moment in the past, much of your recent work has explored ‘new’ technology, from nfts to vr. Are new technologies a way of expanding your audience or do they offer other new possibilities as well? cgq Since 2017 I have been continuously exploring the new possibilities of contemporary art through cutting-edge technologies such as ai, ar, vr, blockchain and nft. The internet is driving the globalisation, digitalisation and intelligent revolution, including ai, at an unprecedented speed, triggering rapid changes in social forms and lifestyles. In 1990 I wrote in my diary, ‘Being in the beginning of the computer and information age, I am excited as an artist to be part of this great transformation. Compared to the Impressionists facing the development of human industrial civilisation, we are facing a more essential and magnificent era of humanity. This self-awareness makes me feel the need to strive hard.’ Now, advanced

The Annunciation of cai ™, 2023, gunpowder on glass and mirror, mounted on wood as a seven-panel folding screen, 200 × 560 cm. Photo: Mengjia Zhao. Courtesy Cai Studio

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Primeval Fireball: The Project for Projects, 1991 (installation view, p3 Art and Environment, Tokyo, 1991). Photo: Yoshihiro Hagiwara. Courtesy Cai Studio

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Ramble in the Cosmos – From Primeval Fireball Onward, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy National Art Center, Tokyo

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technologies like ai once again excite me, and I always feel fortunate to be living in such an era! The emergence of various digital tools and ai excites me, as it might serve as a catalyst for embracing a brand-new artistic methodology. It compels artists to contemplate fresh creative directions. Reflecting upon the progression of human society, we can observe that whenever humanity faces significant conceptual and technological breakthroughs, be it during the era of religious reform, the Industrial Revolution, the early days of photography or the advent of television, each of these epochs has fostered new artistic possibilities. However, I remain ambivalent: is this metaphor an exaggeration or an understatement? Today, what’s important is not what ai can help humans with. What’s important with ai is what defines humanity? What ought humans to do? ara You’ve lived within and engaged with the histories of many cultures around the world, and during that time there has been much talk about a global artworld, where works can be transported from one end of the world to the other, and somehow remain the same (in terms of meaning and affect). Do you believe that’s true or even desirable? And to what extent do you intend to carry a certain ‘Chineseness’ with you as you show around the world, and what might that ‘Chineseness’ be? cgq I am like a seed sprinkled in the soil of different cultures, but I don’t avoid the fact that, as an artist of Chinese origin, there are cultural constants in my methodology. Although these constants are not the purpose or content of what I set out to show, they can flow out naturally.

In the runup to the Doha project in 2011, I was nervous that I didn’t know much about Arab culture, nor did I know where to start. Eventually I decided to start with the Muslim cemeteries in my hometown of Quanzhou. I used the opportunity to learn about the texts written on these tombstones that I could not read, many of which were extracts from the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings. Feeling the spiritual connection of the Muslim community – who have lived in Quanzhou for over a thousand years – to their homeland, I made the installation Homecoming [2011], which consisted of 60 boulders. On these boulders found in my hometown, I engraved the words from the Muslim tombstones that touched my heart. I transported the stones to Doha, where I performed a homecoming ceremony for these ‘Fellows from Quanzhou’ who died in a foreign land. As for Chinese culture, I was mostly left with the many memories of my hometown, and I think of them at different times. These things are inseparable from my childhood curiosity and the customs of my hometown. While I’m not trying to show my home culture, I don’t have to shy away from it either. Based on my artmaking in different lands, I transformed the customs of my hometown into dialogues with the local cultures. I’m attracted to this kind of creative process, and it is more natural and honest. ara What’s influencing you at the moment? What issues most concern you, and what’s next for you? cgq Curiosity about the unknown and a playful attitude towards art are my motivations. New challenges unsettle me and bring me

uncontrollability, but they also bring surprise and excitement. New ideas and technologies do the same to human civilisation. Humans discovered the use of fire and our civilisation made a great leap; humans invented gunpowder and then nuclear energy… and now humans face the same fear and anxiety with ai. But still, humankind doesn’t put the brakes on, but instead faces those challenges. I usually spend a lot of time setting up an exhibition before the opening. I also hope to go back before it closes and walk from the entrance to the exit to have a grasp of the energy of the gallery as a spectator in search of new feelings that are bred inside the exhibition. This process will be good for my next steps, because in a way all the works and exhibitions are the preparation sketches for the next ones. I remember Francesca Bellettini, the ceo of Saint Laurent, telling me that Japanese culture had also deeply influenced Mr Saint Laurent, so the collaboration with the brand here is somehow appropriate. With that in mind, I would like to express my gratitude to Anthony Vaccarello, Saint Laurent’s creative director, who has not only continued the brand’s tradition of collaborating with a diverse range of artists, but has also initiated a revolutionary commitment to creative excellence that crosses over from fashion to film, music and beyond. ara Cai Guo-Qiang, Ramble in the Cosmos – From Primeval Fireball Onward, was on view at the National Art Center, Tokyo (nact) through 21 August. It was organised by the nact and Saint Laurent

When the Sky Blooms with Sakura (detail), 26 June 2023, daytime fireworks event, Iwaki, Japan. Courtesy the artist and Saint Laurent

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Daido Moriyama Retrospective c/o Berlin 13 May – 7 September Now eighty-four, Daido Moriyama has a good claim to being postwar Japan’s greatest photographer. It might, then, seem like a surprisingly cheapskate move on c/o Berlin’s part that many of the images included in his circa-250-work Retrospective aren’t photographic prints at all, but reproductions pasted to the walls. Still, given that the Osakan lensman founded his reputation via widely circulating, gritty photostories for Japanese photography magazines like Camera Mainichi during the mid-1960s, it makes formal sense. (His first major project, for Gendai no Me, in 1965: glimmering chiaroscuro images of preserved human foetuses in a former gynaecological hospital.) Inspired early on by William Klein’s hypercontrasty metropolitan reportage and by Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster silkscreens – see Moriyama’s fondness for photocopied images as well as his gravitation towards death scenes – he has always been a street-level observer, keen on obliterating layers of decorum or concealment to present modern-day Japan in its most insalubrious light. Here, that’s established by the time we reach the second room, through a bevy of works from the series Accident: Premeditated or Not (1969) that Moriyama unfurled in monthly ‘chapters’ in Asahi Camera. Rephotographed media images of Robert F. Kennedy, whose ambiguous shooting inaugurated the series, are so murky and lossy that they question their own claim to any kind of truth. Trying to get past media obfuscation, Moriyama went on to accompany police officers

on patrol around Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, but only saw minor incidents and so, fortuitously, came back with not much; a month or two later he repeatedly returned to the scene of a shipwreck, and he visited ‘ghost villages’ abandoned in the country’s rush towards industrialisation. A potentially upbeat exception in terms of subject matter, Zushi Beach near where Moriyama lived in Tokyo, begets a dank image of figures sardined together on what the artist, referencing high levels of pollution, called ‘a sea equivalent to a sewer’. What’s there instead of detail, in many of these grainy, near abstract yet muscular images, is a depressive sense of slow-motion omnidirectional catastrophe that can barely be grappled with or pictured. Evidently restless by nature, Moriyama next hit the road for several years, inspired by Jack Kerouac and the disconnected narrative episodes that constitute On the Road (1957). Across Japan, he established a variable poetics of threat: he photographed biker gangs, bears, rain-smeared windshields, soldiers, terrifying rows of strungup cephalopods – the show, though, mostly steers away from this. After going to America itself during the early 1970s and photographing, like Klein, directly on the sidewalks – a body of work that feels a bit of an indulgence and to be in the American photographer’s shadow – Moriyama said a premature goodbye to his medium with 1972’s Farewell Photography, a breathtakingly incoherent book-length collage of scratched negatives and near-abstract

leftovers that outwardly abandons all belief in photography having the ability to say anything worthwhile at all. The rest of his 1970s are a blur; he seems to have been beset by anxiety and, relatedly, to have developed a sleepingpill addiction. The last major work of his prime years is Memories of a Dog (1981–82), in which Moriyama returned to his childhood haunts, trying to repossess his past. Since then, he’s attended to his legacy in bodies of work like Labyrinth (2012), which uses his old contact sheets to scramble chronology, and – especially in the ongoing series Cities (1980; but again passed over here) – reestablished himself as a city photographer, expanding his remit to places like São Paulo. Moriyama asserts that metropolises are inexhaustible to someone with a keen semiotic eye and the stomach for constant change, sometimes zooming in on one aspect of the urban texture in a way that hives off into another body of work. Pretty Woman (2017), for example, tots up instances of images of the titular subject – youthful and fulsome and distracting, both in reality and in reproduction – and while there’s the lineaments of a critique of seductive distraction in there somewhere, it smacks of old man’s art. No matter. Having reached this point, and admired the guy’s stamina, you can then return to the show’s early phases, wherein Moriyama repeatedly uses photography to demonstrate that photography can’t tell you much – that the real world is much scarier than can be wholly depicted – and thrills you as he does it. Martin Herbert

Untitled, Tokyo, 1970 (from the series A Hunter). © the artist/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation. Courtesy c/o Berlin

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Untitled, Tokyo, 1967 (from the series Japan, A Photo Theater). © the artist / Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation. Courtesy c/o Berlin

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Hiwa K Like a Good, Good, Good Boy kow, Berlin 28 April – 22 July Like everyone’s, my attitudes to art are shaped by unspoken shibboleths. Among the most egregious: that didactically intentioned artworks are, when it comes down to it, not really art at all. The title work of Hiwa K’s show, Like a Good, Good, Good Boy (2023), puts one more crack in this silly idea, reminding us that not even love is safe from the corrupting force of state violence. A projection flanked by two monitors, this three-channel video documents a social sculpture, whereby the artist – born in Iraqi Kurdistan, and long based in Berlin – and several other men string a rope between K’s childhood home in Sulaymaniyah, his elementary school and the Amna Suraka prison, a favourite torture site of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party. In the video, K walks through the school and recollects his experience there, including beatings and indoctrinations into the Arabic language. One day, after confronting his sadistic teacher, K fled home, only to be betrayed by his family and sent back. The video also shows interviews with other students and with community members that are no less stomach-turning. In one scene K falls into conversation with an older man, who lives near Amna Suraka. By and by this gentleman explains that his wife’s sanity was nearly broken by the cries of rape victims emitting from the prison. K is at his best when using a light touch, to give his viewer access to barbarous subject matter. The video Walk-Over (1973, 2014/2023)

opens charmingly, with several older men playing soccer. They have paunches, and top-notch dribbling skills. These are the members of the 1973 Chilean national team, which once partook in a strange and historically pregnant spectacle. Following the us-backed overthrow of Chile’s democracy, the Soviet national team refused to play Chile in a World Cup qualifying match. In Walk-Over, the Chilean players reenact the game, in which they nevertheless took the field, cruising to victory on a streak of empty-netters. Throughout the video, the players give oral testimony to the spectacles of torture that took place in their national stadium under dictator Augusto Pinochet, who took power following the 1973 coup. The projected video View from Above (2017) – created for Documenta 14 – roves over a spooky miniature model of Kassel, one of the German cities destroyed by Allied bombs during the Second World War. A narrator describes the partition of Iraq following the 1991 Kurdish revolution, and the un’s subsequent designation of Kurdistan as a ‘safe zone’. In Europe, refugees from this region were refused asylum. A tragic breakdown of sympathy is evoked; European bureaucrats, clearly aware of history, should know better. For good reason, K is at pains to drive home the fact that the un-designated safe zones were anything but safe. His narrative therefore cycles between the terms ‘safe zone’

and ‘unsafe zone’ in a way that evokes an absurdist screenplay. As an attempt to underline the inane thought processes of dislocated bureaucrats, this strategy almost works. It strikes a too-clever note, confusing the work’s effect, though thankfully without derailing it completely. A carpet laid in front of the View from Above projection, separately titled Destruction in Common (2020), portrays an aerial view of Baghdad. America’s decades-long evisceration of the Middle East obviously merits the most severe critical attention – but this carpet feels gimmicky. Ostensibly immersing viewers in the Iraqi capital, it seems tailored to a misguided conception of audience interactivity. A more effective loveliness comes through in a series of collages (Ball ballat Babel, 2023) made by overlaying translucent abstract shapes, colourful rudimentary images and printouts of Kurdish script. I enjoy the glowing collages for their light juxtaposition of languages: abstract, pictorial, linguistic, childish, adult. After reading their origin story, I like them even more. When K was a child, Kurdish Iraqis were granted black-andwhite televisions, while their Arabic compatriots relished full colour. As a stopgap measure, K’s father taped coloured gels to the family’s tv screen. To surprisingly incisive effect, the cheery collages illustrate this story about the petty cruelties of persecution. Mitch Speed

Ball ballat Babel 2, 2023, lightbox, inkjet print, colour foil. Photo: Ladislav Zajac. Courtesy Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani, Milan, and kow, Berlin

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Yooyun Yang Stranger Night Gallery, Los Angeles 8 July – 9 September Yooyun Yang’s paintings seem otherworldly: an emergency exit sign becomes an alien lifeform, a ray of light bisects a woman’s face. Their sources, though, remain close to home: the artist transforms photographs – some taken on her phone by accident, some from popular Korean news programmes, some of friends in Seoul – into visceral, uncanny visions. These are paintings enabled by the near-terrifying ease of technology; descendants of a lineage that began with exhaustive studio setups and long exposures, phone cameras might now, in a fluke, take a picture of the back of a user’s hand or the curve of her elbow. In Stranger, the South Korean artist’s solo debut in the United States, Yang composes a haunting view of a mediated landscape defined by the coexistence of intimacy and estrangement. Painted on jangi, a Korean mulberry-bark paper, Yang’s artwork creates images of presentday urban environments using ancient technique. In Midnight (all works 2023) a woman’s eye dissolves into a stripe of artificial red light, each brushstroke melting into a background striated by the paper’s veiny fibres. Yang uses the highly

absorptive material to disorienting effect: though each painting often features markers of contemporary life – many include bright flashbulbs and bluish glows reminiscent of computer screens – the artworks themselves are eerily matt. Modernity’s sheen becomes muted and bodily on jangi’s skinlike surface; in Butterfly an emergency exit sign emits a moody indigo halo, the shape and feel of which indeed resemble a butterfly’s open wings. Under Yang’s hand, the boundaries between human life and digital artifice are porous, each overlaid on the next. Yang’s compositions morph photographic snapshots into scenes of intense, confusing disconnection. The artist paints closely cropped versions of her original images to emphasise their unfamiliarity: in A Deflected Gaze a man stares past a woman who closes her eyes; Stranger shows a hand covering a face with a folded white cloth. Obscuring access to her subjects’ stories, Yang instead offers highly emotional, disjointed excerpts that evade understanding. Ring features an outstretched hand with a flash bouncing off a finger, but both the light’s source and its

reflection resist logic: there is no such ring apparent on the hand that would produce a sharp glare, and the painting does not reveal a flashbulb. In Child a dark shadow shields the infant’s face from view entirely, its origin concealed to similarly unnerving results. Yang renders everyday sights through a discomfiting gaze, contorting fragmented media into unsettling dramas. Jangi has been used for centuries by groundbreaking Korean printmakers: both the world’s oldest known woodblock print and the oldest known metal-type print were produced on the fibrous paper in provinces near Yang’s Seoul hometown. The material’s organic texture renders Yang’s alienated, cosmopolitan scenes in a uniquely tactile way, capturing the odd intimacy of contemporary experiences with technology. These works evoke the surreal familiarity of late-night doomscrolls and early commutes, of solitary walks under a billboard’s light. You should see Yang’s paintings in person – but viewing them online might be more aligned with their ethos. Claudia Ross

Stranger, 2023, acrylic on jangi paper, 91 × 73 cm. Courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles

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Law Yuk Mui Take me to the River, Draw me a Star (The Year 1963) Tomorrow Maybe, Hong Kong 3 June – 2 July Leung Chi Wo Past-Future Tense Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong 23 May – 8 July In 1963 Hong Kong endured its driest year on record. Extending existing policies based on endemic shortages, tap water was rationed to four hours every fourth day at the peak of the crisis. Eventually, the colonial government struck a deal to extend an ongoing trade in water with Guangdong, but not before it considered ferrying water from Japan. This was the Cold War, after all, and Hong Kong’s dependence on China for water was – and is – an important political tool. That some Hongkongers took matters into their own hands at the time is something to which Law Yuk Mui’s most recent exhibition refers: Take me to the River, Draw me a Star is anchored to a rainmaking ritual performed on 2 June 1963 by Sheung Shui villagers on Wa Shan, next to the Ng Tung River. Divided into three sections, Law’s show portrays elements of that ritual at one end of the gallery titled ‘1963’. There, the three-channel

looped video Bugang Tadou (2023) comprises a vertical green-screen leaning against one wall emitting ambient sounds of a hike to Wa Shan, next to a reedited cut of Law’s two-channel video Rainmaking (2021). One vertical display shows a rotating 3d animation of a stone altar, while a horizontal monitor depicts a figure arranging pebbles on the floor – a reference to ‘Bu Gang Ta Dou’ or ‘Pacing the Big Dipper’, in which the seven brightest stars within Ursa Major guide the footwork of Daoist rituals. That celestial framing extends to the show’s middle section, titled ‘1963/2023’ after the fact that these are both Water Rabbit years, hence the two ink and gold-leaf on paper star-charts on view, based on the longitude and latitude of Wa Shan at 2pm on 2 June 1963 and 2023 respectively. Props for a performance are arranged in the area, with a video showing Law hammering holes into a circular black tarp that’s raised at one end so

that light projects constellations onto the floor through its punctures. Star Score (2023) extends this astral cartography: holes punched into a black-card scroll laid on two music stands mimic, according to exhibition materials, formations of the eighth-century Dunhuang Star Chart. These references to astronomy, divination and navigation seep into the show’s simultaneous introduction and conclusion at the gallery’s entrance, titled ‘2023’ yet featuring hand-drawn copies of world maps from 1888, 1898 and 1901. With no guiding information, working out each year’s significance starts with 1898, when the Qing government signed a 99-year lease granting the British control of Hong Kong’s New Territories. In protest, local clans fought a six-day war, highlighting the lease’s connection to the unequal treaties that defined Hong Kong’s colonisation. This theme of unequal treaties continues in 1888 with the

Law Yuk Mui, Star Score, 2023, punched holes on paper, 13 pieces, 21 × 29 cm (each). Courtesy the artist and Tomorrow Maybe, Hong Kong

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Sino-us Bayard-Zhang Treaty, prohibiting Chinese migration and the right of return of Chinese living in the us for 20 years, and the 1901 Boxer Protocol, which forced the Qing to submit to an international assault against the Boxer Rebellion’s failed attempt at expelling colonialists and missionaries from China. Presenting these dates without accompanying details speaks to the overlooked geopolitical enmeshments that have shaped Hong Kong and China for centuries, with star maps functioning as allegorical diagrams that invite the kind of wayfinding approach required to discern the spectres of history today. That act of connecting historical dots extends to Leung Chi Wo’s exhibition at Blindspot Gallery, whose title, Past-Future Tense, invokes the tensions charging Hong Kong’s present, sandwiched between a contentious history and an equally contentious future. Extending Law’s historical constellations, Past-Future Tense departs from Margaret Thatcher’s visit to China in 1982, which led to the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984. The declaration terminated the 1898 lease and confirmed the terms of Hong Kong’s handover, some of which appear in Leung’s Gather the Tears (2023). Craft knives composing a crown adorned with glass beads stab the open pages of Thatcher’s memoir, poised on a stand, with Hong Kong-related text from the book

cut into strips to form dangling paper trails. One line mentions the ‘One Country Two Systems’ policy that the National Security Law effectively ended prematurely in 2020. With two photos printed on canvas that zoom in on Thatcher’s pen-wielding hand, Past-Future Tense highlights the insidious violence that charges those geopolitical agreements that seal a people’s fate once signed into reality, like events dictated by the heavens. This comes across in One Day Too Early (2021), a multimedia installation departing from a 1970 news story about the stabbing of a journalist by gangsters, which includes a photo of Hong Kong pierced with a fountain pen with black ink bleeding down the image. Here, the acts of stabbing people and signing become loosely aligned, with Date Series (2017–) probing those links in a project that began when Leung started photographing the sky from sites where protesters planted bombs during Hong Kong’s 1967 riots. Preceded by demonstrations against fare hikes on the Star Ferry, which prompted a government inquiry into the social and economic grievances of Hong Kong people, the 1967 riots began when a labour dispute escalated into a communist-leaning rebellion against colonial rule, fuelled by China’s Cultural Revolution and anticolonial protests in nearby Macau. Presented in two rows, black-and-white

photos focus on the cloudy and cloudless textures of different skies, each titled with the date of an event (such as the first Festival of Hong Kong in 1969) that occurred between 1967 and 1972. The single-channel video My Random Diary (2020) reveals where each photo was taken. One image is connected to a bomb that injured a lift serviceman at the former Hilton on 22 August 1967, two days after a blast in North Point killed two children, which apparently turned the public against the movement. Sites of violence beyond 1967 are also named in My Random Diary, creating a timeline of people attacking people that continues to 1972 in the video My Random Diary 0 (2023). Subtitles describe crimes of passion and theft, mostly perpetrated with knives, which recall the connection that One Day Too Early makes between officials signing legal documents and civilians stabbing each other. That link expanded just after Law’s and Leung’s shows both opened, when Hong Kong witnessed two murders in succession, including a ferocious and random knife attack by a person with schizophrenia that highlighted a deep-rooted mentalhealth crisis compounded by socioeconomic disparities and exacerbated by years of Zerocovid policies. Because when decisions related to people’s autonomy are made from above, it’s those on the ground who have to make sense out of their scattered effects. Stephanie Bailey

Leung Chi Wo, My Random Diary (still), 2020, single-channel 4k video installation, b/w, sound, 18 min 5 sec. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

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Back to the Future: An Exploration of Contemporaneity in Korean Contemporary Art mmca, Seoul 16 June – 26 May Spare a thought for every curator tasked with organising a coherent exhibition out of art that a museum has recently added to its collection. The recent-acquisitions show gets even trickier to do when the institution’s budget for purchases is modest and when there are not juicy tax breaks to encourage collectors to donate treasures: the state of play for the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (mmca). Reading the pamphlet that accompanies the mmca’s current entry in this genre, which covers additions it made from 2018 through 2022, you get the sense that the curators are struggling to come up with a legitimate conceit for what they have to work with. The text explains that ‘a large number’ of the acquisitions are by ‘artists who demonstrate the

contemporaneity of Korean contemporary art’ – a fairly capacious premise for a show, but particularly one at a place with contemporary in its name. And ‘while the chronological emphasis may be on the 1990s’ here, as the text says a bit defensively, the roughly three dozen pieces span from the late 1980s into the deep 2010s. Some of the 20 or so artists did make pioneering work during the 90s – the great Choi Jeonghwa, for one, who is oddly represented by a more-recent effort – but others were still teenagers at the time. And yet! Despite its built-in limitations and baggy theme, Back to the Future: An Exploration of Contemporaneity in Korean Contemporary Art is a surprisingly satisfying affair – even, at times, as crowd-pleasing as the film from which it takes its name. It has artists responding to

seismic political and social developments that occurred as the twentieth century wound down, democracy emerged in Korea, the economy boomed and faltered, and digital technologies arrived – and it has artists looking back at those shifts, charting their reverberations into the present. An Jungju sliced and diced the official songs for the 1988 and 1992 Summer Olympics – and footage from the Games (held respectively in Seoul and Barcelona) – into a 16-channel video installation entitled Hand in Hand with Amigos para Siempre (2016). An’s sharp, disjointed editing gives those celebrations of global comity a foreboding air, underscoring their artificiality and the disruption they can cause in a city. (The 1988 Games were a milestone for South Korea, the occasion for displacement-inducing

An Jungju, Hand in Hand with Amigos para Siempre, 2016, 16-channel video, colour, sound, 8 min 30 sec. Courtesy mmca, Seoul

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construction and overdue reforms, like the lifting of an overnight curfew.) Seo Hyun-Suk’s lucid feature-length documentary The Lost Voyage (2011–18) gazes even further back, to the 1960s and architect Kim Swoo-geun’s creation of Sewoon Sangga, an approximately kilometre-long residential and commercial complex in the heart of Seoul informed by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, during the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee. (It was celebrated, then neglected, and is now a bit of a hipster destination, with craft beers on tap: nature taking its course.) President Park, one interviewee relays, liked to survey the capital from a helicopter as he mulled real-estate projects. As it happens, an enormous 2018 painting on paper – about 4 by 4.5 metres – by Jung Jaeho provides a meticulous aerial view of the city from Sewoon Sangga, replete with tiny homes, old factories and sleek skyscrapers. Meanwhile, Kim Beom is cruising the nearby Cheonggye highway in a short video from 1997, filming

a taxi’s rearview mirror. A few years later, that once-modern elevated roadway would be ripped out to restore a stream that it had covered. Evidence of quicksilver change – that cornerstone of contemporaneity – permeates the show. It is there in Bahc Yiso’s 2003 installation World’s Top Ten Tallest Structures in 2010, which presents rickety plasticine models of what its title promises, based on the artist’s research into construction plans. These grand structures already look outmoded. It is there, too, in the room devoted to Kong Sunghun, whose manifold creations include a punchy abstraction made of mass-produced window blinds, mysterious twilight paintings and a kind of satirical augmented-reality device comprising a motorcycle helmet and a kaleidoscope. As artists abandoned fixed commitments to mediums, Kong led the way in high style. The mood is topsy-turvy but also joyous, even pleasantly unhinged, as artists toy with new technologies and modes of making. In a short 2002–03 video, Ham Yangah captures

a film shoot where she was working as an art director as it all began to fall apart, disaster unfolding both in front of the movie camera and behind it. In a 1991 work, Untitled (Cooking Chicken), the aforementioned Kim Beom goes about drawing a chicken by following the instructions of tv chef Julia Child. He outlines a real chicken on paper and bastes it at one point with a brush. At the end, we see it emerging from a copier as Child cries, “And that, ladies and gentleman, is what broiled chicken should look like!” Kim’s is a scrappy, improbable, winning little production. Something similar could be said of Back to the Future, which offers a very concise portrait of both contemporary Seoul and contemporary Korean art. It is necessarily incomplete, and it is curiously apolitical, but before too long there will no doubt be further attempts to historicise this period, via morerobust shows – and, one hopes, many more museum acquisitions. This is a start. Andrew Russeth

Jung Jaeho, A Ball of Dwarf, 2018, acrylic on paper, 400 × 444 cm. Courtesy mmca, Seoul

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China’s hidden century British Museum, London 18 May – 8 October This expansive exhibition begins with the ‘All-under-heaven complete map of the everlasting unified Qing empire’. At 2.3m wide, the map, an 1800 copy of a 1767 original rendered in monochromatic blue hues, depicts the expanse of Eurasia, from Korea to England and from Russia to a misplaced Indonesian archipelago, all of it viewed from a southerly, aerial perspective. This last makes it feel as if we (or the Qing emperor himself) were hovering, godlike, above what is currently the South China Sea. And perhaps the emperor did have more-thanhis-usual reasons to feel godlike: the 1759 conquest of the Dzungar Mongols allowed the Qing to claim Xinjiang as its territory. The map speaks of the Qing’s sense of identity, pride and ownership, as well as its ambitions and apprehensions. Closer along the eastern coastline, topographic details, administrative divisions, province borders and the Great Wall are painstakingly delineated. Yet such cartographic precision frays into unspecified deserts and mythological mountains as the map approaches its distant, mysterious western frontiers, where the vast regions of Central Asia and Europe, as well as the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, all conflate into one small area. More than anything the map poses the territory as an abstract graph, ready to be occupied by the empire’s geopolitical imaginations and desires – all of which would be shattered during the coming century, when a combination of state corruption, military defeats, imperialism and ethnic unrest would render them to dust. The Qing was in decline; people suffered – that is what normative histories say about this period in China. This show challenges that: focused less on the gloom, it highlights the signs of resilience in culture, which found creative ways of adaptation and regeneration at times of crisis. For this was also a century of new ideas, including new forms of publication – illustrated newspapers such as Dianshizhai

Pictorial visualised urban gossip, civic affairs and European technological spectacles; an early-nineteenth-century fascination with taking rubbings of ancient structures became the cornerstone of China’s evidence-based archaeology. We see the emergence of a fully fledged Peking opera; new designs of toys, street advertisements and new year’s prints. Throughout the exhibition, in which court life and warfare are only two of six cultural themes (the others being artistic circles, vernacular life, cross-cultural encounters and the revolution), you learn that the state and the army do not determine all of China’s nineteenth-century experience. The ways people lived their lives were far more diverse. A luxurious folding screen made of kingfisher feathers; a hyperrealistic portrait made through Suzhou embroidery after a studio photograph; miniaturised furniture for tomb decor; and Chinese-styled ecclesiastical textiles offer a quite exotic visual pleasure even to a Chinese eye – even in China these are rare. In glass cabinets in which peculiar-looking objects like these accumulate, there is an uncanny reminder of the kind of displays that began to dominate middleclass Victorian homes and British curiosity stores, where such foreign treasures became markers of cosmopolitan taste as well as signals of Britain’s global presence. Here that kind of post-export afterlife is hidden. With the result that you end up feeling that the visual satisfaction on offer here is not so different from the type enjoyed by a nineteenth-century Westerner, who gazed at the Orient to find peculiar designs, strange customs and exotic pleasures. Equally unaddressed are the problems of collecting itself and the roles played by collectors, soldiers, British imperial officers – all of whom present as ‘donors’ in the labels that accompany the objects on show here. Victor Sassoon, for example, whose vast

facing page, top ‘All-under-heaven complete map of the everlasting unified Qing empire’, c. 1800. © British Library, London

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collection of Chinese ivory was donated to the British Museum in 2018 via The Sir Victor Sassoon Chinese Ivories Trust, developed his wealth through the Sassoon family’s opium trade and once owned over 1,800 properties in Shanghai. The British Museum’s labels and website, however, mention nothing about who Victor Sassoon was (or that his descendant James Sassoon is deputy chair of the museum’s board of trustees). The kingfisherfeathered folding screen was purchased by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum after it mysteriously ended up in Paris’s 1867 International Exposition, in which the Qing themselves did not participate. The label states that, at the time, ‘a committee of French businessmen, scholars and soldiers selected Qing artefacts’ and organised a display ‘reflecting Chinese culture’, as if the objects at the exposition are a celebration of global friendship, when nineteenth-century world’s fairs were known to have celebrated colonial triumphs and white supremacy, and when the attempt to ‘reflect Chinese culture’ came just six years after the Qing’s Imperial Summer Palace was looted by Franco-British soldiers. This bad habit of unclear or evasive provenance research is echoed by the exhibition’s recent scandal, when poet and translator Yilin Wang found that her translation of a poem by nineteenth-century proto-feminist Qiu Jin was printed on a gallery wall without due acknowledgment. Resilience and precarious living have been hot concepts in recent years (as we see through the continuing impact of Anna Tsing’s 2015 book, The Mushroom at the End of the World), but the endeavour here looks unintentionally ironic. Elsewhere the British Museum is displaying numerous objects, such as a sculpted Rapa Nui (Easter Island) head and ancient Buddhist śarīra, dislocated and decontextualised, that are more dead than resiliently clinging to life. Yuwen Jiang

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Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 9 June – 8 October ‘Painting must above all be decorative,’ opined the Post-Impressionist French painter and prominent member of the artist group Les Nabis, Pierre Bonnard in an 1891 issue of L’Écho de Paris. That belief goes some way towards explaining why the decision was made to commission the contemporary Paris-based architect and designer India Mahdavi (who’s known for creating plush, colourful interiors of spaces like London’s restaurant Sketch and the hotel Villa Medici in Rome) to create the scenography for the artist’s exhibition. What’s interesting is that it’s the first of National Gallery of Victoria’s annual ‘Melbourne Winter Masterpieces’ programme to place as significant an emphasis on the designer of its exhibition as on the actual artist themself.

Mahdavi’s contributions include explosive wallpapered backdrops (the patterns of which are ‘sampled’ from Bonnard’s paintings), as well as slightly more pared-back block-colour painted walls (which complement the artist’s palette), as well as items of furniture (stools, chairs, tables, rugs, sofas), which are dotted throughout the four main gallery spaces. The first thought that occurs is: did the curators of this exhibition worry that no one would visit unless they felt enticed by bright wallpaper and Insta-friendly backgrounds? But perhaps that’s too cynical a question. We won’t ever know the answer, anyway. The second question is: do Bonnard’s works really need to be pepped up by what looks like a stage set?

Perhaps. There are a lot of works on show (more than 100). And the pops of colour that spread throughout the rooms do help to break up the weight of the vast exhibition (split into 16 sections). I have to confess at this point that I’m not a particular fan of Bonnard’s paintings. Especially paintings in which other people’s faces are involved. The ghastly children’s faces in In a Boat (1907), for example; and the many, many portraits of his wife and muse, Marthe de Méligny, on show here, whose face is often reduced to looking like a peach that’s been sat upon (Man and Woman, 1900). (Bonnard’s friend, Édouard Vuillard, some of whose paintings are shown in the section tiled ‘Les Nabis’, painted her better in Madame Bonnard and a dog, 1907.)

Pierre Bonnard, The checkered tablecloth, 1939, oil on canvas, 58 × 58 cm. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, ny. Courtesy ngv International, Melbourne

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Before anyone screams philistine at me, I’ll argue that Bonnard knew it too. Seeing as by around 1919’s Pink Nude, Head in Shadow, he seemed to have given up trying to paint faces properly anyway. So yeah, having something like an attractive long blue-and-yellow Mahdavi rug (on which several plush pink armchairs sit) does help to divert the eye. (I should mention that while Bonnard’s painted faces are abominable, he was pretty good at photographing his family and friends; there’s a pleasantly surprising series of black-and-white photographs shot in a garden, which includes the photo La Baignade: Vivette in the foreground, Robert in the background and two other children, 1903–05 / 2023, that captures a scene of children splashing in a river that manages to convey the essence of pure joy.) Where Bonnard does excel at painting is in still lifes and landscapes. His ability to evoke light, warmth and natural elements through colour is quite astonishing and – it sounds trite – you really

do have to see it in person. Banks of the Seine (c. 1918) depicts a twilit river flowing in front of a dusky forest and foregrounded by bright bullrushes; it’s all passionate purply-blues and deep romantic greens. Then there’s The checkered tablecloth (1939), a still life of a basket of fruit and what looks like a pot of honey, in front of which is a plate with two round red fruits placed close together; it’s hard to tell what those fruits are, and to be honest I become distracted by the idea that they’ve started to look like a bottom spanked raw. The trouble with hanging paintings of such robust colour against wallpapers of pixelated flowers is that the effect of them is slightly dulled. Most of my annoyance with this, however, is tempered by the quite wholesome scenes of visiting families with small children in the galleries who are busy trying to identify from which paintings the sampled patterns are sourced. Stopping to watch other visitors using Mahdavi’s furniture – kids crammed onto a long

golden yellow sofa, elderly folk taking a pause on the upholstered chairs – offers a different perspective on why making a fuss over scenography might matter with huge survey exhibitions like this. The space, which felt like a weirdly stretched out facsimile of a domestic interior during the press walkthrough, feels lived in during public opening hours. The space is warm and comfortable to spend time in, inviting a meandering back-and-forth pace, which complements the best of Bonnard’s still lifes and paintings of domestic spaces. I return to Dining room overlooking the garden (1930–31), a painting of a table in front of a wood-framed window that overlooks a purple and green garden; the blue-and-white tablecloth is covered with breakfast items – a pot of tea, a basket of bread, fruit and a paper box that might be hiding pastries or a tart. It all looks idyllic. If you can ignore Madame Bonnard lurking just inside the frame. Fi Churchman

Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Lillie Thompson. Courtesy ngv International, Melbourne

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‘Art-Thai-Time’: Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art Revisited Bangkok Art & Culture Centre 9 May – 20 August The grainy footage, playing on a small screen near the entrance, draws me in: Silpa Bhirasri – the Italian sculptor-for-hire almost universally credited as being the father of Thai modern art – is putting the finishing touches to one of the 18 propagandist monuments he made at the behest of the state. Still punctuating the Thai capital today, they range from relief sculptures venerating the Thai armed forces to a towering freestanding Buddha. But the one being worked on here was his bread and butter: a larger-than-life king. In the short video he inspects a statue that still dominates Bangkok’s Wongwian Yai roundabout today: a sword-wielding, battle-ready King Taksin atop a muscular horse. In real time, we glimpse the work ethic – not only his grasp of classical artistry (Corrado Feroci, as he was named before he adopted Thai nationality in 1944, studied and taught in Florence) but also his eagerness to create something that ennobles and endures –

that elevated Bhirasri to figurehead status in a foreign land. Something of that dutiful attention to municipal detail also informs ‘Bhirasri’s vision for cultural infrastructure’, dryly listed as bullet points on a text-heavy wall nearby. ‘Create the art school’? Job done: Silpakorn University, founded by him in 1943, is still going. ‘Create the National Exhibition of Art’? Job also done: since 1949, honourable jurors have handpicked winners across four stultifying categories (painting, sculpture, prints, mixed media). So far, so good, yet the main impetus for this sprawling archival show commemorating the centenary of Bhirasri’s 1923 arrival in Siam is not the unalloyed successes of his multifaceted vision, but rather the teething issues surrounding a still thorny aspect of it: ‘Push for the first Public Art Gallery’. Appearing near the bullet points is an illustrative quote from 1961, the year before

his death, in which Bhirasri reprises his response to foreigners asking where Thailand’s public art gallery is: ‘“Sorry, very sorry, but we have no gallery of modern art.” The answer is so painful to anyone who understands the value of the query,’ he lamented. Grounded by a whistlestop survey of Bhirasri’s life and early-twentieth-century-Thailand’s strategic cozying-up to the West, Art-Thai-Time traces how a clique of prominent patrons (nobility such as Princess Chumbhot and bankers such as Puey Ungphakorn) eventually quelled the pain by opening Bangkok’s Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art (bima) – a sleek modern edifice designed by architect M.L. Tridhosyuth Devakul – in 1974. Funded through an unexplored web of public and private financing, bima’s salad days were, if the art on display near a timeline of key events and archival displays is to be believed, disorienting. Two large abstract paintings flank

‘Art-Thai-Time’: Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art Revisited, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy Bangkok Art & Culture Centre

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a busy room in which lambent paintings of moonlit temple architecture, such as Viboon Purissutiron’s Banyakard khong karm mued (Dark Atmosphere) (1978), vie for attention with semiabstractions such as Parinya Tantisuk’s Pink (Self ) (1981) – wherein a cheeky centipede emerges from the bottom of a graph paperlike grid – as well as agitprop woodcuts and cutouts populated with Soviet-style images of sickles, flags and clenched fists, courtesy of proto art-activist group the Artists’ Front of Thailand. A valiant attempt is made here to telegraph the advent of new modes of expression that represented a challenge or affront to old values (most glaringly, Bhirasri’s own belief that modern art should exalt the Thai nation and its past), and to cement bima’s legacy as a facilitator and catalyst in these turning points. This attempt plays out even more emphatically in the adjacent room: a mini-exhibition restaging works by Wethi-Samai, a folk-art collective spurred by sociopolitical activism and new media that used bima as a staging post during its short history. Exhibition copies of Vasan Sitthiket’s fucking wood stick men and women

(Making Love in the Crowd, 1985), among other works, join videos and a text explaining how Folk-Thai-Time (1986) was ‘the first official conceptual art exhibit’ in Thailand. The spectre of selective revisionism looms, however. Surveying the rest of the show – peering at catalogues for recitals and watercolour competitions, surreal oil fantasias by princesses, photos of packed orchestra performances – I am led to conclude that bima’s ambassador-friendly programming was only sporadically disrupted or challenged by the postmodern or collectivist likes of Wethi-Samai. A convincing case for bima’s own progressive credentials is not convincingly made here: it appears to have been more wedded to the polite and decorous end of the art scene – as per Bhirasri’s somewhat neutered idea of art – than its fringe. These thoughts resonate with the current state of the host venue – the budget-constrained civic battlefield where Bhirasri’s ‘Push for the first Public Art Gallery’ continues. Modelled, according to the exhibition text, on bima’s interdisciplinary approach, the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre also came about after years of campaign ing, and also appears most comfortable when

staging modern art (retrospectives of national artists are what it’s inhouse team arguably does best). While these and other parallels are not articulated, the natural question to infer is: where did bima go wrong and what can the bacc learn from its mistakes? The answers likely lie in the interplay of patrons, artists’ networks and public, and building of a sense of ownership and community among them. Or, more accurately, bima’s apparent failure in this regard: the timeline ends by stating that when its former ceo, Misiem Yipintsoi, died in 1988, it closed without an outcry. Art-Thai-Time mimics this unceremonious train of events by ending about as abruptly and politely as bima did: with a wall of works of which Bhirasri would have approved, namely more tepid paintings of temple scenes and Fua Haripitak’s 1962 oil portrait of the man himself. Arm cocked, hand on hip, the father of Thai modern art stares back at us expectantly, as if to say ‘My vision is now in your hands’ – yet also seemingly unaware that his dogmatic, pro-establishment teachings about art’s role in Thai society may, somewhat ironically, have held that vision back. Max Crosbie-Jones

‘Art-Thai-Time’: Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art Revisited, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy Bangkok Art & Culture Centre

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Memory Palace in Ruins Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (c-lab), Taipei 9 June – 13 August In his 2009 essay ‘The Anxiety of Silver Halides’, Taiwanese artist Tsun-shing Cheng ventures that the advent of digital photography has fundamentally shifted our relationship to the visual representation of reality. He argues that the turn away from the physical process of developing film to abstract manipulations of electronic data has cost photographs their integrity as tangible documents of specific moments. ‘From the deteriorating wreckages of the mechanical image,’ he wrote, ‘the wraith of the virtual image has slowly risen atop the ruins of the memory palace birthed by the industrial revolution.’ Titled after Cheng’s quote, Memory Palace in Ruins probes at the relationship between physical media, the immaterial narratives and cultures they contain and reproduce, and the possibilities of art to subvert ideologies that have been ensconced in everyday environments. Comprising 27 works from 11 countries, this sprawling exhibition is an expansive, though somewhat uneven, attempt to position mainstream culture as a form of collective mythology. Kuo Che-Hsi’s Colonial Pine (2023), a series of wall-mounted photographic prints, reveals how even the trees planted in our urban landscape contain historical layers of political messaging. Depicting unassuming, mundane scenery surrounding public buildings in Taiwan, Kuo’s sly compositions address the subtle presence of the same type of tall pine tree present in many locations. Native to Australia, the robust hoop pine was originally introduced to Taiwan by

the Japanese colonial government to symbolise Japanese political might. After the Chinese Nationalist government took over, the pine was repurposed as a symbol of state power, leading to robust planting around public institutions. History can also be captured acoustically. Performing a form of sonic archaeology is dj sniff’s sound installation The Inverted Listening of ‘Explosive Enemy Aircraft Sounds’ (2023), which explores the 1942 Japanese propaganda record Tekki Bakuon-shū, ostensibly meant to train visually impaired Japanese youth to distinguish enemy aircrafts by sound. dj sniff worked with saxophonist Masanori Oishi to transcribe and rerecord the original aircraft sounds within a Japanese bunker. His low, droning soundscape conjures a visceral unease for the air raids they represented – an anxiety uncannily refracted through c-lab’s own history as a former air force base and Taiwan’s current geopolitical tensions. Two works further contemplate the mechanics of political theatre. Polina Kanis’s video Formal Portrait (2014) shows two figures rehearsing a series of aerial gymnastics akin to circus acrobatics on a tall pole. The pole is in turn mounted to a military motorcycle, whose presence suggests parades and processions. Captivating and alienating in turn, the peak physicality of these nameless figures and the rote vacuity of their technically competent performance evoke the empty bravura of military spectacle and its gestural vocabulary. Meanwhile, Hsieh Yung-Cheng’s Hong-ye Juvenile Baseball Team and Teen Images (2023)

unpacks how youth athletics can be mobilised as a political tool. During the late 1960s, the eponymous Taiwanese youth baseball team, which was from an impoverished aboriginal village in Taitung County, rose to fame by winning local leagues and eventually beating Japan’s Wakayama team, the reigning world champion. However, this win was eventually plagued by controversies, including accusations that the team used older players who falsified their ages. Within a multimedia installation, Hsieh presents two ways to examine this story. The first, a wall-mounted video essay with his own voiceover narration, analyses the image economy of the Hong-ye’s meteoric rise and fall as an attempt at political projection by the then martial government; the second, a television set within a baseball mound on the floor, plays back archival footage of the team participating in various celebratory ceremonies alongside politicians and state officials. Hsieh’s calm, almost detached, tone belies the incredible violence visited upon indigenous teenagers who had no agency in what happens in their mediatised afterlives. Picking at the seams of where normative ideals are encoded into everyday culture, Memory Palace in Ruins considers that our shared memories are never really our own to begin with – and that maybe it is time for the memory palaces of yonder to fall into ruins so that another may take its place: this time, something a little closer to life, a little more mundane. Alfonse Chiu

Polina Kanis, Formal Portrait, 2014 (installation view), video, 9 min 32 sec. Photo: Lu Guo-Wei (One Work). © c-lab. Courtesy Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Taipei

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Geng Dayou When No One Is Around, Dance Gracefully Shanghart, Shanghai 15 July – 2 September There is something nihilistic about Geng Dayou’s five sculptural assemblages, each spotlit in an otherwise dimly lit room. There’s also something playful, empty, humorous and melancholic about them. In one corner of the exhibition space is Centipede (all works 2023): a row of cast iron handles (that could also double as steps) twists its way up from the floor, then the wall, to the ceiling, like a giant version of the titular insect. Normally used on emergency exits, and now presented in this winding configuration, the handles also resemble a set of monkey bars. Geng introduces tension into Centipede by casting the handles with indentations shaped like the grip of fingers, offering the unsettling suggestion that someone might previously have desperately clung to the rungs; and at some point let go. That, combined with the fact that these handles are attached to no

doors, leaves the work an abiding aura of futility and purposelessness. In Continued Recursion six metal bowling balls, each pierced with a more-than-useful amount of finger holes, are scattered in front of a white slope. At the top of the slope sits another ball, looking as though it’s ready to be rolled. If one were to do that, one might in turn find out whether or not its many holes would catch exactly onto the metal pegs arranged like miniature, immobile skittles at the slope’s end. Then again, judging by the ball’s scattered friends, the chances of that seem slim. Like Centipede, Continued Recursion offers action without an actor; games without players; perhaps they gave up and walked away. A pervasive loneliness haunts the objects on show. You might also see this as a meditation on withdrawal, a method of dealing with trauma.

Made in the wake of the pandemic and Shanghai’s stringent lockdown rules, it’s hard not to make this connection with the psychological impact of forced isolation and withdrawal from physical society. And if we don’t resolve a trauma, it persists. We are living in a world, Geng (who studied psychology at university) suggests, of eternal melancholia. In a darkly humorous twist, Gear is a pair of electricity pylons, interlinked as their support poles arch around one another: the graceful dance of the exhibition title. With the work dramatically spotlit, the charge is undeniably erotic as much as it is electric. Like two people leaning out from a tangled kiss, the wires that link them looking like sloppy strands of saliva. But that’s what happens when you’re isolated and lonely; you seek and see intimacy everywhere. Paul Han

Centipede, 2023, cast aluminium, painted, dimensions variable. Courtesy Shanghart, Shanghai

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and land erodes into Calle Wright, Manila 15 July – 13 October These days, any attempt to imagine humanity’s future is likely to be a depressing exercise: there is little to look forward to. The effects of climate change and political and economic crises have left human destiny at a tipping point; the impacts of the internet, social media and artificial intelligence call into question humanity’s necessary significance. This two-artist show combining the work of Singaporean Fyerool Darma and Filipino Nice Buenaventura captures this uncomfortable precipice. and land erodes into utilises Calle Wright’s space, a two-level townhouse, to allow for intimate pockets of viewing. At the entrance, Darma’s Screenshot 11-03-2023 at 03:03 pm (philhuat 2go) (2023) installation, featuring collaborators rawanXberdenyut, lks, Lé Luhur, interrupts a clean white wall with a scattering of seven amorphous black stickers and six small framed digital prints featuring colourful geometric patterns, similar to those that appear in computer delays and disruptions. Perpendicular to Darma’s wall piece is Buenaventura’s Gaian Assembly xv (2023), a laser-engraved plywood sheet. Buenaventura took a map from Dean C. Worcester’s The Philippine Islands and Their People (1898), an American colonial documentation of the country, and reinterprets it using flowing shapes and vague representations of islands to do away with any sense of cartographic and mathematical precision. Cutting out the islands in the multiple-layered plywood, the work reveals different grain patterns, highlighting strata in the muted and unpainted

material, perhaps alluding to the different characters in the archipelago. Border-making was always a defining point in the Philippines’ 350-year colonial history – with Spain, Britain, the United States and Japan creating and detailing its geographies. Now the nation is in an ongoing conflict with China, as the latter intrudes into the territorial waters of the West Philippine Sea. Buenaventura’s decolonial attempt at distorting Worcester’s colonial framing is a subtle interrogation of the idea of land, territories and borders. A pair of video installations, one by each artist, offers a chance to contrast their works: Darma’s Poietics of Pantun/pantoum/tuntun/tanaga (2021–), featuring collaborators b*ntang786, berukera, jaleejalee, ToNewEntities, @sgmuseummemes, aiden and Lé Luhur from Autaspace on the ground level, and Buenaventura’s Rocks scattered by the last breaths of the Pacific (2023) on the first. Darma’s video plays out on a vertical hd screen, mimicking a gigantic smartphone or tablet, an effect enhanced by digital prints of blurred computer-screen composites and recreated screenshots on the wall, and an assemblage of real and epoxy resin phones to the side. Watching the videowork feels like walking into a digital realm in which multiple applications are open – reinterpretations of social-media sites Spotify, Zoom, YouTube, Google, TikTok and Facebook flash across the screen – overwhelming the viewer, as is the case in real life when spending time on a gadget. Online disruptions in the form of loading screens, advertisements and files failing to load interrupt the video itself,

enhancing that real-life feel. Darma also leans into the uncanny, using robotic and artificiallooking people referencing the Malay verse form pantun and Filipino tanaga in their speech. The dreary and plastic feel of the videowork and installation appeal to the technological immersion of dreary contemporary culture. Where Darma presents disconnectedness (in technologies designed for online socialisation), Buenaventura’s tranquil installation explores the connection between the Pacific islands. Rocks scattered… captures Pacific waters crashing on rocks – or bato/batu/patu and its numerous iterations in the archipelagos’ many languages. The video, culled from various sources, shows how the ocean acts, particularly during devastating typhoons. Pacific islands, linguistically and ideologically tied together, as with similar iterations of the word ‘rocks’, share vulnerabilities to climate change. They are at the forefront of rising ocean waters, higher water temperatures and increasingly powerful typhoons. Bringing together such disparate views of the contemporary landscape – from Darma’s digital sphere and Buenaventura’s natural world – feels awkward and disjointed on the surface. Yet both parts constitute the reality of contemporary life. The Philippines, after all, had the world’s highest social-media-usage rate per citizen, per day, back in 2021. Away from the screen it is trapped on the frontline of some of the strongest typhoons in history. If this show is anything to go by, a tempestuous future awaits. Portia Placino

Nice Buenaventura, Gaian Assembly xv, 2023, laser-engraved plywood. Courtesy Calle Wright, Manila

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Fyerool Darma, (featuring b*ntang786, berukera, jaleejalee, ToNewEntities, @sgmuseummemes, aiden and Lé Luhur from Autaspace), Poietics of Pantun / pantoum / tuntun / tanaga, 2021–, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Calle Wright, Manila

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Evaporating Suns: Contemporary Myths from the Arabian Gulf Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger 12 May – 16 July What’s the purpose of an exhibition that seeks to blend the old and the new in order to introduce cutting-edge Khaliji culture? A cynic might say that this show, which opened days after a bilateral conference on increased economic cooperation between Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates (from where the vast majority of artists on show here come or to which they are connected) took place in Bern, simply follows the prevailing wind in international economics. Over the past two decades, Switzerland’s exports to the uae have increased by roughly ten percent per annum. Of course, those with a less twisted mind (and an mfa) might pause, scratch their chins and say that all this ancient and contemporary business was simply a consequence of realpolitik. Using what we, in Europe, do know about the Gulf – the types of tales and fantasies collected in popular anthologies such as One Thousand and One Nights, many of which may or may not be from the region – to make an introduction to what we generally don’t know – the Gulf’s contemporary art – more digestible.

And on the evidence here, you – chin scratched, mfa burnished – might well be right. Although according to Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger’s director, Raphael Suter, writing in his introductory walltext to the show, its purpose is to destroy the myth that contemporary art from the Arabian context is somehow ‘behind’ or not up to date when compared to its Anglo-European cousins. The implication, in his text, is that the ignorant suppose that art in the Gulf is trapped within another type of realpolitik – a consequence of religious or political restriction. Even though, in 2009, a referendum in Switzerland led to a constitutional ban on the construction of minarets on mosques within its borders. That institutional framing is, however, a little distinct from the curatorial framing (the curators are Munira Al Sayegh and Verena Formanek) of the show itself. Here a focus on mythological context, as much as geographic or linguistic context, is, fundamentally, what links the work by 13 contemporary artists on show. All of which are made by artists living in or with a diasporic relationship to the Gulf. For a visitor,

all that, in turn, might seem like an invitation to take a Jungian approach and read the artworks as a series of conscious individual actions that pick their way towards a collective Arab unconscious that’s embodied in the traditions of mythological storytelling. The drive to ‘see’ the show as a gateway to an Arab unconscious is further encouraged by the presence of map (a curatorial intervention) on which the various myths at play are located at various points around the Gulf. Which gives off a whiff, as is the case with many shows grounded in a geographical context, of the notion that here the individual agency of each work is both celebrated and denied. That, and the play between the clichés surrounding traditional and modern, is something to which Saif Mhaisen’s largescale Self Portrait 11 & 12 (2015–16) certainly nods. In it, the artist features twice, each of him sitting either side of a white table against a white background. To the left he is shaven-headed and bearded, dressed in a white thobe, demonstratively pointing at some invisible spot on

Alaa Edris, Al Kursi (The Chair) (detail), 2023, seven Iroko wood chairs, dimensions variable. Courtesy Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, Basel

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the blank table. He looks angry. To the left he is shaven-faced, dressed in a shirt and waistcoat, leaning casually on the table and staring confidently out at the viewer as if to show off his well-groomed hair. He looks charming. We’ve no idea what either character is performing, but in that absence, we run with the stereotypes. Part of the general art-lover’s desperation to attach meaning to form. That becomes a little problematic in Maitha Abdalla’s The Dancer’s Skin (2022–23), which transforms the museum’s entrance into a theatre stage, bringing the idea of storytelling to the fore. Three lifesize bronze and ceramic figures, fusing human and animal (pig, donkey and rooster) forms, are frozen mid-dance between a pair of leafless trees. Behind them, on the wall, is Alluring Silence (2023), a largescale oil-andcharcoal painting (or backdrop to the sculptures) of humans dancing in an equally sparse wood, while observed by another cackling rooster. There’s the vague feeling of some kind of ritual at work, or some kind of truth being revealed, but ultimately the work remains opaque and obscure (albeit with echoes of tales like ‘The Town Musicians of Bremen’, and an invitation to read the braying of donkeys as warning of the presence of the devil, the pigs symbolising gluttony and so on) in terms of a narrative,

which reduces it to some sort of atmospheric backdrop in and of itself. So, it’s a sense of the theatrical and the performed that we take into Alaa Edris’s Al Kursi (The Chair) (2023), a series of seven carved wooden thronelike chairs, one for each of the states that make up the uae. They’re arranged in a councillike v-formation; each has a face, carved into the backrest, that continues the fusion of animal and human, while the chairs themselves metamorphose to feature sickle armrests, human feet, bird claws, rock paws and so on. In a way the chairs, designed to elevate their occupants, also bring them to the realm of beasts. In this way the chairs ground the Emirates (in popular fable and story) and give them a specific nonhuman identity; which given that the uae was only formed as a nation-state in 1971 might be a necessary task. But even that nod to the powers behind the throne can’t hide the fact that, whichever way you want to dress it up, there are seven of them, each of which is designed to seat a single person – an emir. They’re not for everyone. A fact that their being clothed in the mythology of a nation seems designed to mitigate or conceal. It’s reality that’s being avoided here, you begin to think. Which is, presumably, part of the artist’s conceit.

While these works were commissioned for the show, it’s one of the two works that weren’t (Mhaisen’s is the other) that provides its standout moment. Farah Al Qasimi’s 42-minute feature film Um Al Naar (2019) is a first-person confessional account of a depressed, millennia-old jinn (its name, the title of the film, translates as ‘Mother of Fire’) who, in recent centuries, has found itself increasingly out of place and out of time in the uae. “As people believe in us less and less and we lose our power”, the jinn says, dressed in a Halloween-style ghost-outfit, homemade out of a collection of floral tablecloths. (When it is powerful, it informs us, it possesses the bodies of believers; in the current state of things, it’s stuck with the pathetic tablecloth arrangement.) Before detailing how colonialisation, modernity and museology have combined over recent centuries to force their diminution. (And, naturally, the fact that the jinn is using one of modernity’s prime communication tools – handheld camera, moving image – only adds to the sense of irony that suffuses the work as a whole.) The tragicomic film is witty, pointed and offers something of an alternative insight into the state of myth within contemporary Khaliji culture: irrelevant, ignored, crushed in a clash of the old and the new. Mark Rappolt

Farah Al Qasimi, Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire), 2019, video installation, 42 min 7 sec. Photo: Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, Basel. Courtesy Third Line, Dubai

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Books Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History by C.L.R. James, adapted by Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee Verso, £14.99 (softcover) Toussaint Louverture wasn’t a part of the history I was taught at school. (In Britain during the 1980s, in case you were wondering.) Instead, I came across him, and the history of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) later, through the works of painters such as Jacob Lawrence, Kimathi Donkor and Lubaina Himid. In that sense (that of my ignorance) this graphic-novel adaptation of C.L.R. James’s 1934 three-act play (the script for which was recently rediscovered) is part of a welcome addition to a wider reconsideration of colonial and postcolonial histories. It’s notable that the vast majority of books cited in the endnotes to this volume were published after 2000. Born in Trinidad, James was a lifelong Marxist, a pioneer of postcolonial literature and, in 1936, the first Black West Indian to have a novel (Minty Alley) published in Britain. Toussaint was born a slave in French Haiti (then Saint-Domingue) towards the end of the first part of the eighteenth century, when the island was split between the French and the Spanish. He became a freeman, was the best-known leader of the Haitian Revolution, fought with the French following their revolution, but died in a French jail in 1803, just under a year before Haiti became independent. ‘Surely it [the French Revolution] puts ideas into their heads’, remarks one French officer

of what might be suggested to Haiti’s slave populations early in the play. And much of what follows suggests that Toussaint understood the true meaning of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité far better than Napoleon. In the graphic-novel version, comprising tight black-and-white line drawings (complete with caricatured, moustachioed Frenchmen and viciously scarified slaves), mosquitoes and the yellow fever they bring to the European colonisers become a recurring motif that further asserts the naturalness of Toussaint’s emancipatory cause. But while the illustrations are black and white, Toussaint’s story is not. Early on our hero is less than prominent. (‘They, the Negro slaves, are the most important characters in the play. Toussaint did not make the revolt. It was the revolt that made Toussaint,’ James is quoted as saying in the epigraph to this book.) Indeed, in the moments at which he does feature he comes across as a moderate and a pragmatist. Emancipation need not be absolute. Not every slave is ready for freedom. His loyalty to the king of France is not in question. As things progress, the king of France, the king of Spain (who will support the revolt against France and with whom Toussaint’s forces are briefly allied) and the king of Congo (as king of all Africans) come into play; then, two thirds of the way through, the

king of England offers to make Toussaint a king too. As various powers try to shape Toussaint’s revolt, it turns out that the colonial world is one of constant temptation. And constant lies and misdirection. As he resists the temptations, Toussaint discovers that you can never be liberated by a third party; the only liberation is self-liberation. And without self-liberation, you can hardly liberate others. In one memorable, cell-free single page, depicting his moment of revelation, Toussaint is portrayed reading vehemently antislavery Enlightenment philosopher Guillaume Thomas Raynal’s Philosophical and Political History of the Two Indies, which was published in French in 1770. Those who support slavery, Raynal once said, should be ignored by philosophers and stabbed, with a dagger (rather than a theory), in the back. Nevertheless, while Toussaint grew happy to do the stabbing, his tale, as told here, is more about how he refined and purified his ideology and thinking around the subjects of race and freedom, to the point at which the revolution could be completed even after his death. The comic book format, constantly zooming out to the big picture and in on the details, proves immensely suited to the complex parallels between personal and universal struggles around which James’s play revolves. Mark Rappolt

Magma 1 edited by Paul Olivennes Documents Publishing, €60 (hardcover) To say that Magma is a lavish publication is an understatement. Clothbound, hardbacked, supported by Bottega Veneta, each (numbered) edition comes with a 7-inch single (etched on a medical X-ray) and a facsimile letter, folded in quarters and in its own envelope. It’s like the full-package multimedia experience of the predigital age. Indeed, editor-in-chief and creative director Paul Olivennes claims it’s inspired by old-fashioned revues d’art such as Surrealist journal Minotaure (1933) and Andy Warhol’s Interview (1969). The cover says that it’s ‘a forum for artistic expression’; the manifesto (by

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Olivennes) asserts that it is a (yearly) journal without qualities: ‘magma has no theme. magma takes no position. magma adheres to no principle.’ One page later a foreword by Hans Ulrich Obrist (in the form of a handwritten note, which mainly reveals that he needs to improve his handwriting) says that it’s about Édouard Glissant’s ideal of mondialité and resisting the homogenising force of globalism. Although, when it comes to the artworld, Obrist is arguably that force. Elsewhere there are photographic portfolios by Frida Orupabo (collaged in her case), Luigi Ghirri and

wonderfully beautiful-creepy images of cakes and space (in Cairo) by French architect India Mahdavi. The 7-inch features Andra Ursuța; the letter is by René Char. Sophie Calle, Lucas Arruda, Agnès Varda and some guy called J.W. von Goethe are among the contributors. The layout is generous, suited to largescale imagery. But the extent to which one thing in this compendium is really in conversation with the next is debateable – it can, at times, feel like diving into someone else’s very neat handbag. And yet somehow this works. Part cabinet of curiosities, part gallery of nice things. Nirmala Devi

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The Fabulist by Uthis Haemamool, translated by Palin Ansusinha and Ploy Kingchatchaval Penguin Books, B| 1,053 (softcover) Who is the titular yarn spinner in Uthis Haemamool’s episodic and propulsive novel? Our first candidate is the cantankerous old woman who recounts the journey of her immortal spirit – its transmigration from a thlok tree to a naga, a tiger, a deer, a stone statue and a human – to her great-grandchildren in ‘Act 1’. The next to emerge is one of her two sons, Dr Siam: a stroke victim who, in ‘Part 2’, is pursued through the afterlife by an ‘albino buffalo lord’-cum-‘karmic creditor’. He’s followed by the soap-opera-obsessed wife to a mean husband of ‘Episode 3’, the male ghostwriter of family drama of ‘Book 4’ and, finally, the sage twentysomething great-granddaughter (to the old woman) of ‘Folder 5’. None, however, quite fit the bill. With their divergent accounts and conflicting histories, these five storytellers – members of a single, small-town Thai family, it slowly transpires – are unreliable narrators. Yet over the course of the novel, their palimpsestic stories come to feel like truths of a sort; the untidy seams and obscure gaps of their sprawling cross-generational chronicles are more honest, more true to life, we come to sense, than the fabulist that loiters on the novel’s periphery: the nation-state that peddles a single, neat, unifying legend. Haemamool, the fortysomething author of seven novels, is one of a generation of Thai creatives incensed at their homeland’s backsliding into authoritarianism, all in the name

of preserving religion, state and monarchy. ‘Thailand’, he said in a 2020 interview, ‘is strangulated into having one voice and one story… there is one narrative that didn’t ask to be included, but keeps getting fatter and fatter, taking over more and more space, like a balloon expanding inside a tight one square metre.’ The Fabulist, a translation of the third novel in his acclaimed Kaeng Khoi trilogy (Kaeng Khoi being the district in central Thailand’s Saraburi province where it is set and Haemamool was born), doesn’t so much burst the balloon as create a nebulous body – a composite of origin myths, recorded history, religious fables and domestic highdrama – that itself gets fatter and fatter over the book’s duration, pushes back against the hegemony and erasure of official Thai historiography. Its Gramscian centring of the subaltern consciousness, its writing into history of those written out, is well-traversed literary terrain, but Haemamool does it singularly by fleshing out about as many fictional modes as he does characters (an approach telegraphed by the jarring eclecticism of the chapter names). In Act 1 the old woman echoes Thai storytelling traditions by reciting a folkloric tale that blends her rebirths with the birth of the nation, recounts the domain of creatures (of which she is part) becoming the domain of Kings. “It doesn’t matter who you were before,

because now, everything belongs to Siam: the mountains, the trees, the streams, the ancient places of worship, and the lives of all peoples”, a hermit tells her at one point. Yet the uninterrupted storybook oratory of this section contrasts, somewhat abrasively, with everything that follows: Part 2’s extensive use of footnotes – longer than the main narrative, they seize and violate Dr Siam’s story – as well as the family soap-opera of Episode 3 and the postmodern pyrotechnics of Book 4.These metafictional approaches bewilder at certain points and dazzle at others. Far from just an earnest gathering of marginal figures, or an exercise in counternarratives that fluctuates wildly between liberating and thwarting Haemamool’s characters, The Fabulist culminates with a satisfying frame story and coda steeped in pungent, Buddhism-inflected thought (the Thai title, , or ‘Juti’, means both death and rebirth) and sociological ambivalence. Towards the end, the wise-beyond-heryears great-granddaughter tries to make sense – as we have – of all the splayed narrative threads before her. ‘In a world full of dotted lines and incoherence, I want beginnings and continuity,’ she remarks, ‘so I bind myself to them. That is how we pave our course, our time, our place, our stories.’ In doing so, she implicates all of us – not just an individual or a particular country – in the latent tyranny of the tale. Max Crosbie-Jones

Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) I want to say, right up front, that I sleep easily and deeply, which according to the philosopher Emil Cioran, who is cited in the opening pages of this by-turns breezy and harrowing account of the insomniac’s immiserated nights and ghostly days, disqualifies me for any comprehension of ‘the most profound experience one can have in life’. (There is the implication here, offered nonjudgmentally, that those who sleep are simple.) Sleeplessness came for Darrieussecq – a Paris-based novelist, journalist, art writer (including contributions to this magazine) and sometime psychoanalyst – with the birth of her first child, 22 years ago (Sleepless was originally published in French, in 2021), and has gripped her in its unequal embrace to varying degrees

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ever since. ‘The insomniac’, she writes, ‘is not so much in dialogue with sleep as with the apocalypse.’ This book is her quest to get the bottom of sleeplessness, to solve it, by digging up the history and literature of its sufferers, tracking down references in film, music and art, and feeding these through her own story so as to provoke a sort of immune response and return her to the lost paradise of untroubled sleep. For the author the witching hour is 4:04am, “Too late to end it now/Too early to start again”, as Charlotte Gainsbourg sings in (the slightly later) 5:55 (2006). The intimation of death is apt: a ‘defective form of sleep… a simple error of dosage’, Darrieussecq writes as she takes us through treatments (wine, pills), rituals (counting lovers)

and other practices (burrowing, gravity blankets). As her investigation expands it pulls in psychiatry, sorcery, genocide, street lighting, first husbands, lobotomies, the despoliation of nature. Drawing on her journals, previously published works, travels, personal photographs and memories of the pandemic years, the result is itself a bit like a sleepless night: hypnagogic, discursive and goes on too long. But I’m hazarding this was Darrieussecq’s intention, a mirroring of insomnia so as to release its power over her, while extending a generous hand to sleepers and nonsleepers alike to enter a night-time churn of thoughts so that we might all have at least a passing familiarity with life’s most profound experience. David Terrien

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Bad Infinity: Selected Writings by Aria Dean Essays should make you think new thoughts about things you’ve either never considered, or only examined with a deceptive, false certainty. The ten texts in Aria Dean’s collection do this, with a complexity often spilling into convolution. This dynamic can be appreciated as an inherent vice of the large goal that the Los Angeles-based artist/ writer sets herself. Not content to understand how the best artworks function, she wants to intertwine this understanding with a deeper perception of Americanness and Blackness. Dean’s ‘Acknowledgements’ prep us for chaos: each text ‘is a creative writing exercise… more interested in experimenting with whether it is itself possible than with being correct’. The title Bad Infinity is a phrase from Hegel, which she thought ‘sounded cool’. Her near-cocky nonchalance elicits certain unflattering comparisons between the populist disdain for truth and an approach to art theory often heavy on rhetoric and reference but light on clear argument. This concern, however, is counterbalanced by the effort of Dean’s thinking, and her complex demeanour on the page. A one-way penpal exchange with the sculptor Robert Morris is characterised by tenderness and subtle self-deprecating humour. The reader is in turn presented with a challenge, experiencing this lightness only pages away from expositions on the

Sternberg Press, $23 / €19 (softcover)

dehumanisation of Black people, a subject so grave as to render humour unspeakable. ‘Channel Zero’, for example, winds through the phenomenon of police brutality videos. Ostensibly serving justice, these clips have also become ‘vernacular cinema’. Dean demonstrates how certain artists – John Akomfrah, American Artist, Harun Farocki, Peter Friedl – can help us to understand the broader social, technological and perceptual mechanisms through which both police brutality and its documentation are carried out. This important task, Dean explains, coexists uncomfortably with the urgent action that state violence demands. ‘Black Bataille’ sketches a theory of art. Dean senses resonance between Georges Bataille’s idea of ‘base matter’, which describes things that are ‘the low, the lumpen, and the inhuman’, and the position that to be Black – as articulated in Afropessimist thought, particularly via American writer/dramatist Frank B. Wilderson III, interviewed at length elsewhere – is to have been dehumanised by white American society. Following a conviction that art should fundamentally embody reality, Dean posits that the debasement of Black people, being central to Western society, must also be essential to any broadly applicable conception of art. To the extent that I’m reading between the lines, it’s because those lines are laced with so many energised, provocative, sometimes

contradictory thoughts that any summary requires abstractions and deductions. ‘Trauma and Virtuality’ (2018) asks what constitutes actual and virtual experience in the internet age. A voracious quote-hunter, Dean primes us for the complicating of such distinctions with an epigraph from academic Susan Willis: ‘The real is not a kernel, conveniently rock hard and discernible through the veil of fiction; it is instead the very structure, the warp and weft of the veils’. Dean then exhaustively reads two violence-fixated artworks: Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence (2017) and Arthur Jafa’s Cassowary: Mechanics of Empathy (2017). By way of these artworks, Dean retrains her focus from the massive question of the place of virtuality in actual experience to that of how our experience of violence figures into this equation. Having seen the discussed works, I’m not quite ready to buy her thesis that they ‘force a critical awareness of the spectator’. This kind of critical and reflective viewing presupposes a set of tools for interpreting art, which – it is easy to forget – tend to be available to people educated in American mfa programmes of the sort Dean (like myself) attended. All the same, the idea that art might be capable of advancing our society’s deeply confused relationship to screenmediated reality and violence is hopeful, and it is this spirit – variously marked by comedy, gutting realism and unimpeachable curiosity – that characterises Dean’s writing. Mitch Speed

Zhang Xiao: Community Fire by Ilisa Barbash, Zhang Xiao and Ou Ning Aperture / Peabody Museum Press, £50 / $65 (hardcover) In the Shaanxi series (2007), which opens this photobook, murky photographs take us to a moody, mythical realm in rural China. Captured in sepia tones and darkened vignettes, theatre performers wander through a drab winter village in flamboyant makeup and fantastic costumes, looking like deities from ancient folklore. These are the days of shehuo (‘community fire’) – Spring Festival carnivals held in rural northern China – where you might find lion dances, opera shows, acrobatics and community rituals on the streets. It’s an event that evolved from the totem worship of the gods of earth, who drive away demons and ensure good harvests for the year ahead. That’s the nostalgic recollection. Zhang Xiao explores another side of the ‘tradition’ – its economies.

Cut to sleek screenshots of Taobao pages, China’s most popular online shopping platform. Shehuo costumes and props – once handmade and passed down through generations – are now available online. As internet access and delivery services spread, these items began to be massproduced in previously impoverished rural areas of Xuchang in Henan Province, where annual shehuo-related sales now amount to $13.8 million. In Huozhuang – where ‘over eighty percent of the villagers were engaged in the production of shehuo supplies’, as artist and curator Ou Ning points out in an accompanying essay – Zhang photographed newly produced items in wheatfields and on dirt roads.They look like surreal cult objects when juxtaposed with a mundane

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rural reality. Polyester costumes, painted headgear as well as parcel boxes and packaging are piled up in local warehouses – another spectacle of shehuo culture. These are gaudily designed and poorly executed; the facemasks and zodiacanimal onesies are ugly, repetitious – making them even more uncanny – and comic. Zhang’s last series takes us to shehuo events that took place in Shaanxi and Henan in 2018, where performers sit in languor, ornament their hair with blownup condoms and doodle (a fluttering rooster, for example) on each other’s faces. In the last photograph, a line of spectators stand on top of a slope, backs to camera, while a woman walks away with a child in her arms, looking tired. Yuwen Jiang

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jon arbuckle ’ s amazing adventures in art land Episode 2: Monstrous Times Filet gallery, Hoxton. The opening of a show by Colombian artist Sergio Bonilla Pinzón. At which he presented paintings depicting a somewhat Medieval underworld of monstrous bodies doing symbolic battle with religious men (or vice versa). As well as unveiling, and performing, a manifesto on a scroll which rambled poetically around (I think) the liberation of Queer bodies, sexualities and persons, from the strictures of Cis-Religious (and in particular Catholic) repression. Having made an initial perusal of the paintings I wandered outside with a (not quite free) beer and I found myself discussing the show with an indie artscene pal, a kooky, Gen Z recent London Art College grad who reminds me of one of Neo’s sidekicks from The Matrix, happens to be an Eastern Mediterranean convert to Islam and spends much of the day in bed, subsidised by her wealthy father. She’d been fasting and praying over Ramadan. And she said, when pressed, that she was a bit allergic to all this in-your-face ‘Queer expression’ around the London art scene (such as this show), as she found it all rather narcissistic, tedious and unenlightening. And she couldn’t help but feel, following some philosopher or other, that ‘too much freedom becomes its own slavery’. Although she didn’t want to say these things in public as one risked being labelled ‘a Nazi’ or ‘a homophobe’ or some such. Her take being that the monstrous, oppressive, ‘religion’ of our times – at least amongst her London Art College cohort – wasn’t ‘Cis-Culture’ nor established religion but a cultish ‘identity politics’ of the Alt-Left, sometimes summarised as ‘Woke’. Indeed, she noted, a classmate of hers had recently been thrown out of a ‘top’ London art college for deigning to even question this apparently allpervasive ideology. We then came to discuss the fact that the ‘Alt-Left’ and the ‘Alt-Right’ (having emerged chiefly via social media out of the cracks of the ‘Financial Crisis’), whilst supposedly diametrically opposed, also have a lot in common. Chiefly an unwavering faith in the moral purity of certain ideas. The Alt-Right’s tenets being a confused, diffused version of the Nazi ‘blood and soil’ ethnonationalist mythology of a pure Aryan race oppressed by a nebulous variety of corrupted, alien ‘others’. The Alt-Left’s ideology could, she thought, be seen as an inversion of that peculiar fiction. Namely, that there is a morally pure people, a kind of imagined nation, of the eternally and essentially oppressed. The great oppressor of this downtrodden volk being a nebulous entity called ‘White, Straight, Patriarchal, Colonial-Capitalism’. All of which, and whom, must be attacked, silenced, marginalised and ultimately destroyed, on the road towards the Promised Land. Having reached what felt like an important conversational waypoint we then moved back inside to experience the artist’s rather theatrical (indeed Bard-like) manifesto-reading. At the beginning of which, to gain our attention, he utilised a metal knife to smash a wine glass he was holding, which shattered all over the floor. Afterwards, crunching the odd bit of glass beneath our feet as we ambled around the gallery, we returned to our consideration of ‘Woke’, as manifested in inner-London-Art-College-land. Which is,

on the whole, a playground for the ‘diverse’ offspring of the global rich. There being something absurd about being lectured (as one often is) about the oppressive nature of (White, Straight) Patriarchal Capitalism by (vaguely Queer and sometimes ‘Non-White’) twentysomethings who, it turns out, happen to be lavishly subsided in their distinctly hedonistic Art Land adventures by their wealthy parents. ‘Woke’, in their hands, becoming little more than a fashion statement and moral cudgel with which to bully people. As the light dimmed outside Filet and I supped on another (by now free) beer, our final thoughts related to the ‘purity’ of ‘monstrous bodies’. After all, the Alt-Left and Alt-Right don’t just want to control your mind, and what you can say (or read), but ultimately, want to control your body (or at least the ideology around it). The most obvious example on the Alt-Right being abortion; while on the Alt-Left, the apparent zeal for chopping off body parts, and chemical castration, even of minors, in the name of the God of one’s ‘true identity’. And if you question either doctrine then you are either a genocidal ‘baby murderer’ or a genocidal peddler of ‘transphobic hatred’. The monstrous Alt-Left and Alt-Right are thereby ultimately united, we concluded (for my part by now only slightly pissed), in wanting to draw black and white symbolic lines through the mess of bodily material reality. Which is to say that they both exhibit a strong whiff of Manichaeism, and the idea that the dirty, messy, body can be separated from (and ruled over by) the purity of one’s ideals: the Alt-Right feeling that the Lord knows you, your purpose and your body, better than you do. And the Alt-Left feeling that its ideas about identity should take certain, brutal and everlasting primacy over your body, its organs and its reproductive capacity. However, dear reader, out of the crooked timber of mankind nothing straight was ever made, and rather than paradise, both cults are most probably leading us towards a monstrous, puritanical netherworld. Amen.

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