Artreview Asia Winter 2024 by ArtReview

Riar Rizaldi

Francis Alÿs, Untitled (Study for ‘Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River’), 2006-2008. © Francis Alÿs:

Francis Alÿs

The Gibraltar Projects

David Zwirner

November 7–December 14, 2024 525 West 19th Street

James Rosenquist, Playmate (detail), 1966 © James Rosenquist Inc. / ARS, New York 2024. Photo: Ulrich Ghezzi

James Rosenquist

Dream World Paintings, drawings, collages 1961-1968 Seoul November 2024 — January 2025

ArtReview Asia vol 12 no 4 Winter 2024

Iron Jaw If you go around art galleries and biennials and read (or hear) the discourse of institutions and curators commenting on the exhibitions they are staging today, then you’d most likely believe that art is the solution to all the world’s ills. It can change the world. It can tackle discrimination, underrepresentation, past and present injustice, the lack of minority rights, systemic violence, institutionalised disadvantage, environmental degradation… the list can go on endlessly. The truth, of course, as brutal conflicts of various kinds unfold across large parts of the continent, is that art on its own can’t solve any of this. Sure, it can raise issues and highlight causes. It can suggest myriad ways in which we might see the world beyond our myopic individual perspectives; but the truth is that realworld issues require real-world solutions, and art galleries and museums are not the real world. (They are a part of it, sure; but they are spaces of privilege and exception too. Perhaps that’s why the best bits of many recent Asian – Korean, really – biennials have happened outside the formal spaces of the biennials themselves.) But it’s also the locus of one of the great problems of art. It sets up communities that appear to be conscious of all the world’s issues, and thus feel markedly superior to the average Joe Biden, while at the same time they are hopelessly ill-equipped to do much about any of those problems because they spend too much time hanging out in art galleries or biennials (art fairs aren’t such a cool look these days, though that doesn’t stop them projecting themselves as zones of inclusion whilst simultaneously catering to their own special fantasy of what constitutes a VIP or a VVIP, or a… you get the idea). ‘Everyone has a plan,’ as Iron Mike once said, ‘until they get punched in the mouth.’ At this point you’re doubtless expecting ArtReview Asia to proudly pronounce that by reading this issue of ArtReview Asia you’ll learn how this problem might be solved. That’s not going to happen though. Not that you won’t be a better person for reading this issue. You will be. But ArtReview Asia is, rather, flagging a problem that’s been bothering it recently. And displaying some of the fat that it’s going to be chewing over the next several months. ArtReview Asia

Quick fix

Art Previewed

Previews by ArtReview Asia 12

Identity Politics by Ilaria Maria Sala 26

Alt-Religion by Nathaniel Budzinski 30

The Interview Mark Bradford by Mark Rappolt 18

Simply the Best by Thu-Huong Ha 28

Art Against Populism by J.J. Charlesworth 32

Art Featured

Riar Rizaldi by Stephanie Bailey 36

Saule Suleimenova by Tyler Coburn 46

Myanmar in Thailand by Max Crosbie-Jones 60

The Doors: In and Out of the Squares Project by Sim Raejung 51

page 36 Riar Rizaldi, Notes from Gog Magog (still), 2022, video, colour, sound, 9 min 32 sec. Courtesy the artist

Art Reviewed

Exhibitions & Books 70 Satoshi Kawata, by Adeline Chia Hu Jiayi, by Xinjie Wang Naoya Hatakeyama, by Toby Reynolds 15th Gwangju Biennale, by Mark Rappolt Udomsak Krisanamis, by Martin Herbert Hyeree Ro, by Emily Chun Sophia Al-Maria & Lydia Ourahmane, by Madeleine Jacobs Jen Liu, by Aaina Bhargava Tao Hui, by Ilaria Maria Sala Homing Instinct, by Max Crosbie-Jones Michael Joo, by Mark Rappolt Black Box, by Adeline Chia Busan Biennale 2024, Mark Rappolt Kenji Ide, by Sofia Hallström

The Sprirt of Hope, by Byung-chul Han, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Book of Games, by Carsten Höller, reviewed by Fi Churchman In Writing, by Hattie Crisell, reviewed by Orit Gat Set My Heart On Fire, by Izumi Suzuki, reviewed by Nirmala Devi The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power, by Amy Sall, reviewed by Sarah Jilani The Use of Photography, by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, reviewed by Yuwen Jiang COMIC by Viktor Hachmang 98

page 88 Cheikh Ndiaye, Badou Boy, 2022, oil on canvas, 154 × 134cm. Courtesy the artist and Busan Biennale

Art Observed

They might have been practising witchcraft 11

4 Damonxart, The other side of the abyss – Oasis from the series To Infinity and Beyond, 2022, metal giclée print, sculpture, video, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

Previewed 1 Korea Artist Prize 2024 MMCA Seoul Through 23 March

4 Future Media Arts Festival C-LAB, Taipei through 15 December

8 Rand Abdul Jabbar Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai 1 November – 4 December

2 Wael Shawky Barakat Contemporary, Seoul 26 February – 27 April

5 Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman M+, Hong Kong 14 December – 5 May

9 目China: A New Generation of Artists Centre Pompidou, Paris through 3 February

3 Machine Love: Video Game, AI and Contemporary Art Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 13 February – 8 June

6 Prabhavathi Meppayil Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai 12 November – 21 December

10 Hamad Butt IMMA, Dublin 6 December – 5 May

7 Kingsley Gunatillake Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo 23 January – 13 February

3 Sato Ryotaro, Dummy Life #11, 2022, inkjet print, 12 × 15 cm. Courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

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1 Like most national accolades, the Korea Artist Prize promises to be a ‘best in show’ type of affair that also incorporates definitive statements about the issues and media dominating contemporary art right now. Whether or not those things change annually is beside the point. Asking whether this is anything more than a PR campaign by the contemporary art marketing board also seems irrelevant. What the award exhibition does offer though is an opportunity to reflect on the practices of four quite different artists – this year Jiyoung Yoon, Hayoun Kwon, Yang Jung-uk and Jane Jin Kaisen – all of them born during the early 1980s. Collectively their work encompasses sculpture (static and kinetic), video, installation, animation and VR. Look out for Jane Jin Kaisen’s Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) (2024), a series of seven video works focusing on Jeju Island (and made in collaboration with local communities), which is being shown here for the first time in its entirety. Not that ArtReview Asia has a favourite, or a tip that would cause you to rush off to your local betting shop in the hope of making your fortune. Although it does quite like Hayoun Kwon’s animation and VR works,

too. And it doesn’t have anything against sculpture either (Jiyoung Yoon and Yang Jung-uk respectively). (ND) This year Egyptian artist Wael Shawky’s 2 latest film Drama 1882 (2024) was on view at his home nation’s pavilion as part of the Venice Biennale, which tells the story of Egyptian revolts leading up to the British colonial conquest that took place in the titular year – the first of his works to employ professional actors, who drift through a theatrelike space with deadpan faces and movements reminiscent of puppets and automatons. In Seoul, Barakat Contemporary will be showing earlier works that similarly explore cultural clashes in history, but which more often make use of children and marionettes to tell their weighty stories. This includes his Telematch Series (2007–09), restaging tense moments of political conflict as if part of a television game show, The Cave (2004–26), and the animation Al Aqsa Park (2006), which casts Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock as a carnival merry-go-round. His use of such child actors and puppetry to tell these violent stories frees his subjects from adult expectations and weighty emotional

responses; the actors, both living and nonliving, are imbued with a mischievous sense of play, trapped somewhere between historical saga and myth. (YJ) As Freddie Mercury once asked, ‘Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?’ Given the steady creep of artificial intelligence into our lives, where we are now is a bit of both. Or at least that’s what is proposed by the works in Mori Art Museum’s international group exhibition 3 Machine Love: Video Game, AI and Contemporary Art. The show brings together 13 artists who make use of machine learning and generative gaming systems to create new, hybrid landscapes and identities. The videos and live-simulation installations here are part-human, part-machine collaborations, as with Anicka Yi’s algorithmic, biomorphic ‘paintings’, or Lu Yang’s videogame avatar journeying through its Buddhist afterlife. Look out for an astronaut in silver spandex stalking a barren terrain, in Beeple’s video installation Human 1 (2021) and the corporate office space in Sato Ryotaro’s video Inorganic Friends (2023), crowded with a menagerie of werewolves, wrestlers, ninjas and aliens – a kind of meeting place for all the videogame characters

2 Wael Shawky, Al Aqsa Park (still), 2006, video animation, b/w, sound, 10 min. Courtesy the artist

1 Jiyoung Yoon, χοροπηδάω [choropēdáō], 2024, single channel video, colour, sound, 21 min. © and courtesy the artist

3 Lu Yang, DOKU the Self, 2022, video, 36 min (music: liiii). Courtesy the artist and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

ArtReview Asia

5 Yasumasa Morimura, Doublonnage (Marcel), 1988, colour photograph, 150 × 120 cm. Courtesy M+ Museum, Hong Kong

4 C-LAB Future Media Arts Festival, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy C-LAB, Taipei

we sometimes inhabit. These entities are who we share this new landscape with, so here’s a chance to spend some quality time getting cozy with them. (CFW) An offshoot of the Ministry of Culture, Taipei’s C-LAB has, since 2018, turned the former military base it occupies into an artand-innovation hub hosting exhibitions, performances and screenings (it also runs programmes relating to education, community service and international cultural exchange). 4 One such exhibition is the annual Future Media Arts Festival, which this year takes the theme Singularity, in reference to mathematician and computer scientist Vernor Vinge’s prediction, back in 1993, that at some point in the future (somewhere between 2005 and 2030 he reckoned) machine intelligence would surpass the computing capacity of our own human noggins. Resulting in an ‘intelligence explosion’. A frightening prospect, then, for any visitors who are afraid of their own obsolescence – but a much more exciting one for those who see these developments as indicative of a future full of potential. Singularity is presented by 23 artists and collectives, and is organised

into four subthemes: ‘Flowing Anchor’ looks at the ‘anchor points of AI development’ and how these have changed the way we perceive society and culture (for instance, Flat World, 2024, by Yuan Goang-Ming tiles together images from Google Street View to create a ‘continuous landscape loop’ that both mimics the way a human eye sees and points to the way technology increasingly shapes human perception); ‘Transformation of Creativity’ explores some of the ways artists have harnessed AI as a tool for artmaking, as well as how it’s being used to redefine the environments in which we look at art; ‘Creator’s Insight’ presents work by artists including Riar Rizaldi, Kim Ayoung and Yuen Hsieh to reflect on how technology can facilitate ‘new perspectives and modes of expression using image generation, motion capture, game engine, and speculative design toolkits’; and ‘AI Ongoing’… well that’s where the infinite possibilities come in – as they say, if you can imagine it, you can achieve it! (FC) Given that the work of both Yasumasa 5 Morimura and Cindy Sherman consists of self-portraits in which each artist assumes the appearance of someone they are not (or what

Winter 2024

M+ call a ‘masquerade’), it’s surprising that no institution has previously presented their work in a two-person show. Particularly given the concrete links between the two: Morimura’s To My Little Sister: For Cindy Sherman (1998) is a staging of the American artist’s iconic Untitled #96 from her Centerfold series of 1981. The work is like a set of Matryoshka dolls, in which Morimura becomes Sherman who was, in the original work, herself becoming a B-movie actress. While both artists were once cast as heralds of the media age, now they appear also to have anticipated the world of deepfakes and the more sinister uses of AI. Each artist uses their work to highlight often-invisible social divisions of class, power and gender, both as they manifest today and through history, with the Japanese artist additionally exploring the interface (or lack of it) between the cultures of the East and the West. Collectively, their work focuses on the superficiality and arbitrariness of identity as it manifests in physical form, as well as the ideologies that go into constructing it. Ultimately, both also spotlight the importance our cultures continue to attach to identity, even if we know it is all made up – unsure whether

8 Rand Abdul Jabbar, Tracing Origins – Untitled (Tapestry), 2022, variation 1, tracings of ceramic objects on embossing foil, 42 × 29 × 1 cm. Photo: Ismail Noor / Seeing Things. Courtesy the artist and Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai

6 Prabhavathi Meppayil, m/fourteen, 2023, gesso on wood, 56 × 56 × 9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

7 Kingsley Gunatillake, Protest II, 2024, used book, copper figures, 7 × 18 × 23 cm. Courtesy the artist and Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo

we are constructing it for ourselves or part of this is the artist’s first solo show in Mumbai the constructions imposed by others. (ND) for 16 years. (ND) Born to a family of goldsmiths spanning For over thirty years, Sri Lankan artist 6 multiple generations, Prabhavathi Meppayil 7 Kingsley Gunatillake has worked across has taken the traditions of her ancestors and put painting, drawing and sculpture, relying on them to use in the construction of something multiple artistic traditions. He is especially known for making paintings that are predomcompletely different: a painterly minimalism. inantly abstract, full of robust gesture and The Bangalore-based artist creates her works monumental forms, as well as for his ‘book by using a traditional thinnam (a goldsmithing art’ sculptures. For these, the artist works into tool), which she presses into white paint to found books, cutting out spaces within the create indents. Sometimes these marks stand layered pages and inserting into them other out; sometimes they are almost imperceptible. found objects, or otherwise binding or encasing But God is very much in the details here. It’s the pages, making works that speak to the long as if a bird or an insect had walked across some history of ethnic conflict and civil war Sri Lanka freshly poured concrete but did so with a sense suffered from 1983 to 2009. These book works of purpose. The results appear both static allude to the human and political costs of the and active, vibrating curiously between their war and its aftermath, subjecting the embodied two- and three-dimensional properties. And knowledge and culture represented by the these properties are only enhanced in works printed book to all kinds of violence: charring (such as m/twenty-three, 2024) that push the the pages, locking them shut in iron cages or sculptural possibilities further with the incluclusters of padlocks, or else embedding spent sion of found objects and white cubes into bullet cases or armies of miniature soldiers. Meppayil’s customary gesso surfaces. It’s proof, Sri Lanka’s precarious democracy is a contrastif you like, that ‘traditional’ doesn’t necessarily ing theme – explored within groups of tiny mean ‘unchanging’. On the subject of which,

ArtReview Asia

placard-waving protestors, or else in the ‘X’ marks of voters that burn through the pages of a work such as Election (2019). This solo show, presenting new paintings and sculptures, will be the artist’s first at Saskia Fernando Gallery since 2020. ( JJC) Memory and heritage loom large in the 8 work of Rand Abdul Jabbar. Born in Baghdad and raised in Abu Dhabi, the artist mines her cultural roots and diasporic experience by seeking out and remodelling material remnants – whether those found in her own family archive or the Mesopotamian collections of London’s British Museum or Berlin’s Pergamon. The quiet, mysterious clay objects from her Earthly Wonders, Celestial Beings series (2019–), augmented with 30 new sculptures for her first solo show at Lawrie Shabibi, could be mistaken for archaeological finds were it not for their delicate, glossy glazes. Installed on plinths, without any labels, they constitute an everexpanding repertoire of shapes that relate to the personal and collective, and perhaps serve as a gesture to ward off the physical destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq – still very much the

artist’s homeland, as this work confirms. Such Chinese character 目 (‘mù’, meaning ‘the eye’), private histories are further explored in Tracing the works explore this generation’s perspective Origins (2022), a series of foil imprints made on the present and their vision for the future, from ceramic reliefs collected from Iraq by her reflecting on the complex legacy of this period: mother, while her latest series, Alphabet (2024), from environmental degradation in Cui Jie’s takes her search for a formal vocabulary one paintings and a new film by Shen Xin, to the step further, creating an iconographic index dramatic transformation of urban landscapes of shapes she’s modelled so far, presented in Chen Wei’s melancholic photographs, and as printed characters on linen sheets. A new the unfiltered impact of rapid technological language, perhaps, to lend a sense of continuity advances explored by aaajiao, Miao Ying and Lu and self-preservation and help face a fragYang. During the show’s opening week, luxury mented past and present. (LD) brand Chanel sponsored the acquisition of It’s been five years since the Centre 21 works from the exhibition for the museum’s Pompidou, in partnership with the West Bund permanent collection – a step toward making Museum, opened its Shanghai outpost on a this cultural exchange a long-lasting one. (LD) five-year temporary lease, which was renewed Three separate rows of glass balls are suslast year – a space that joined Pompidou pended from steel wires in the form of Newton’s satellites in Brussels and Málaga. Now, having Cradle, as if waiting to be knocked together. firmly established this relationship, the The spherical objects have a yellow tinge; museum in Paris presents a new survey show, accompanying information on Familiars part 3: Cradle (1992) will inform you that each one is 9 目 China: A New Generation of Artists, that takes the pulse of China’s art scene through the work filled with lethal chlorine gas. The installation of 21 Gen-X artists whose current realities have sums up a core theme of the sculptures of been shaped by the country’s transformative 10 British artist Hamad Butt (1962–94): an era of economic reform (1978–92). Under the inviting playfulness that is undercut with

precarity and danger. Born in Lahore and raised in Essex, Butt trained as a biochemist before studying art at Goldsmiths where his classmates included those who went on to be recognised as YBAs, after the seminal exhibition Freeze was organised during Butt’s second year at college. His work shares the high-impact visuals of that period: in the kinetic sculpture Familiars part 1: Substance Sublimation Unit (1992) iodine gas makes a ladderlike structure glow bright red. Yet it also contained more subdued references to Butt’s Muslim upbringing and experience as a queer man. This exhibition brings together his installations and roughly figurative paintings, which anticipated current concerns with infection, risk and boundaries – and is reflective of a promising trajectory (Butt passed away in 1994 due to AIDS-related illness). The exhibition marks the first time that Butt’s work has been shown outside of England and is coorganised with London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where it will travel next year. (CFW) J.J. Charlesworth, Fi Churchman, Louise Darblay, Nirmala Devi, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Yuwen Jiang

10 Hamad Butt, Familiars Part 3 Cradle, 1992, chlorine, glass, steel wire, dimensions variable. Courtesy IMMA, Dublin

9 Cui Jie, Sculpture Park et Porcelaine giraffes and China Insurance Tower 2, 2023, oil on canvas. © the artist

Winter 2024

Photo: Sean Shim-Boyle. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

ArtReview Asia

The Interview by Mark Rappolt

Mark Bradford

“If I have a certain amount of power and I’m able to create a platform for some young creative people who don’t feel that they have as much power or value, that’s a conversation I’m very interested in”

Mark Bradford’s exhibition of paintings Exotica is currently on show at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, in its gallery at the heart of the city’s financial district. These new, sometimes brightly layered works feature shadowy imprints on the canvas as well as staining and dyeing, and reference the cataloguing of plants that were deemed ‘exotic’ to Western sensibilities during the 1960s. In parallel, since July of this year, Bradford and the team of Bridge+, a community project centre across the bay in the Sham Shui Po neighbourhood, have been working with young people from the area to create another exhibition. Drawing on

Bradford’s Merchant Poster series (2010–), which began with the artist finding inspiration in the informal signs and posters advertising goods and services made in his neighbourhood in Los Angeles, the participants created a mural in Bridge+ as well as displaying their own versions of merchant posters based on local sources. Such community engagement and outreach have long been a part of Bradford’s practice. In 2013 he cofounded the nonprofit Art + Practice in South Los Angeles to bring art into local neighbourhoods and to explore the ways in which arts education can function to

Winter 2024

build communities and provide a space in which to address more general social issues. The programme more specifically engages with young people and foster children as well as providing free access to institutional art shows. For the past eight years (starting in the leadup to exhibiting at the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2017), the artist has also collaborated with the Venetian nonprofit Rio Terà dei Pensieri, which provides work for people currently or recently incarcerated in the Venice area. Previously Bradford has described this aspect of his practice as belonging to his understanding of ‘the artist as a citizen’.

South Central to Central to Sham Shui Po ArtReview asia How did the community project at Bridge+ come about? Mark Bradford Initially, I just came to Hong Kong to look at the gallery’s space, but I did start looking around the city a little bit and I always look at different neighbourhoods. It is always organic. This neighbourhood was interesting and I met the people that ran Bridge+. You could tell that they were really committed. That’s really how it goes for me. You really have to have a tribe. You have to have everybody in agreement philosophically that this is something that we want to do. ARA The Sham Shui Po neighbourhood is different from Central, where the gallery is. MB Yes, it’s like Beverly Hills and South Central [in Los Angeles]. I’m comfortable in South Central. ARA The project seems like a reversal of the traditional exhibiting tactic, which is that the audience comes to the art; here you’re bringing the art to an audience. Perhaps this is also a reminder that there are some communities that wouldn’t under any circumstance go to a gallery because they don’t feel socially included in gallery spaces; just as much as they might not in high-end fashion stores. MB That’s what I’m trying to break down a little bit. I’m not trying to hide that I’m having a show at Hauser & Wirth in Central, which is a very different thing. You have to acknowledge that power isn’t equal when you move into different spaces. If you make the assumption that we start from equal footing, you’ve lost. It’s not equal. Asking young people to come out of their neighbourhoods and come into Central and art museums, while also asking them to

‘be yourself, be comfortable’, is asking too much, because they just can’t. ARA What are you hoping the project achieves? MB I always want to create a safe space where conversations can go on between young creative people, just to create a conversation between me and them, and the conversations between each other. Some of it takes root, some of it’s just a one-off. Some have no interest in going to art school; sometimes there are other chapters. The young people taking part, they always start very, very quiet and they don’t really own the project. By the end, they’re bringing their parents and their teachers in. I love to see young creative people having the possibility of taking centre stage, owning their voice and owning their possibility and expanding their possibilities. Sometimes the parents will come and I’ll say, “Your daughter was just brilliant in this whole process.” You’ll see the parents sometimes begin to change and listen in a different way. “Really?” I believe in us; I believe in young creators. It’s funny, no matter where I am in the world, there’s always a commonality, a shyness, where creatives seem to fit in with some parts of the family and not sometimes with the other.

Time Travel and Other Powers ARA Are your expanded projects about giving people a sense of agency in situations where they don’t have it? MB I didn’t have a lot of agency growing up. Agency and connection and access and power, I think all these conversations should be more transparent. If I have a certain amount of power and I’m able to create a platform for some young creative people who don’t feel that they have

Students taking part in Mark Bradford’s Merchant Posters education lab in Hong Kong, 2024. Photo: Ivan Chan

ArtReview Asia

as much power or value, that’s a conversation I’m very interested in. What I’m really fascinated with is young people before university. What happens to those young creators from the 9th grade to the 12th grade who are trying to figure it out? Maybe they don’t have the grades to go to university. That was my story. I want them to know that they have value. ARA Do you have a feeling of guilt about the things you have achieved with your life? A psychologist might attribute that to your desire to help others… MB I don’t feel any guilt. I feel in some ways these young creative people are my community. It reminds me of when I was a kid. To have a conversation with a creative community, it’s almost like time travel. It feeds a certain part of me. Not guilt, no. I find it empowering. ARA When you are approaching these social spaces, sometimes as an outsider, how do you negotiate the ‘permissions’ you need to be a part of them? And do you know what people taking part might want? MB I spend a lot of time just listening and almost never talking about what we’re going to do, almost to the point where they say, “Are we going to do something?” Just because it’s really, really important, because I don’t want to make them more uncomfortable than, quite frankly, they already are. I think one difference for me is that I never taught. I never worked inside the university system. I had developed all these strategies for learning how to pay your rent and learning how to do all of these things. It was easier for me to tell young artists these are the strategies that I’ve developed because I know that I’m 100 percent responsible and there’s no cheque coming in the mail. There’s no anything coming in the mail. When I started the educational

Students taking part in Mark Bradford’s Merchant Posters education lab in Hong Kong, 2024. Photo: Ivan Chan

Winter 2024

Exotica, 2024 (installation view, Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong)

Mrs. Pollock double, 2024, mixed media on canvas, 91 × 61 cm (unframed), 110 × 78 × 5 cm (framed). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

ArtReview Asia

projects, it was like, “Nobody’s coming, we have to figure this out. It’s all us. We just got to figure it out. We got to make this happen. We got to build.” That DIY thing I think was something that helped me quite a bit. I never make any assumptions. If it’s not safe, somebody’s got to pay for them to get there. Are they hungry? You have to feed them. What support system is going to allow them to be part of this? Is it their teacher? Is it their mother? You have to ask, because oftentimes they’ll just hide it from you because they’re like, “I want to please you, or I just don’t really want to tell you what I’m going through or how difficult it is.” I know that feeling of hiding parts of yourself to be accepted.

Calling All Artists ARA In some ways you’re operating in a private space, but what you are tackling are public, societal issues for which governments and state infrastructures should have responsibility. Do you think you’re plugging gaps in what society should be providing, or do you think you can act to change broader ways of thinking? Given that the artworld remains stacked against people from lower-class backgrounds. MB If you’re an immigrant or from a lower-class background, if you do go to university and you do have good grades, you’re probably going to go towards something to ‘make money’. Then the second generation maybe or the third generation can be the artist. I don’t believe that. I think that some of the migrant stories are so incredible just now, my God, some of the urgencies and the things that I have. These are the stories of the twenty-first century that should be in the artworld right now. More people should be at the table. They should come from more diverse backgrounds

and economic backgrounds and class backgrounds and whichever how-you-got-here backgrounds. It should be. It shouldn’t be everyone entering in is coming from a good middle-class family. Then you’re able to go to art school, then you’re able to make your work. No, I think it should be more varied. ARA Have you found your interests and experiences in Los Angeles can apply in Hong Kong? Are these general, or even universal issues? MB When I got here and we started working, it turns out that housing is a big conversation in Hong Kong. On every single little piece of area, you had these little merchant posters, these little things stuck everywhere, like Los Angeles. That was just a coincidence, really. But the coincidence did start a conversation about housing and migration and urban spaces and memory. With the Merchant Posters and the students, they kept saying, “Oh, it feels like Hong Kong local.” I said, “Oh, no, all of these spaces, all of these posters came from Los Angeles.” There was a way into a conversation that wasn’t didactic or wasn’t obvious. It came through this idea of public space and housing. I started collecting all the housing posters, and then they translated them and they did a silkscreen project. Silkscreen was the first thing I learned. It has a very physical quality to it and I really liked that. I was very happy about that, when they start to own the project and you’re really just there to work and move in and out of it, zoom in, zoom out, micro, macro. The conversations just come out of that. ARA While you help create space for younger creatives, is there a point that you could identify in your career when you felt accepted, that you felt you belonged within the art system?

parts of your community don’t accept you and part of your family doesn’t accept you, your race, people are telling you they don’t really like it. I’m so over that. I’m just like, OK, the line goes to the left. I know that it’s naive to say, “Oh, I’m exactly the same person as 25 years ago.” No, I’m constantly rethinking how to move my career forward. What are the things that mean what are important to me? What are the traps? Why am I doing certain things and not doing certain things? I ask myself those questions because when you do this type of work, one of the things is time. If I’m going to do it, I had to come here and work. It’s not like I drop in and have a show and a dinner and go. No, the time. You have to give time. If you say something has value but you’re giving it no time, people can see. People aren’t stupid. People have eyes. ARA Do these social projects and conversations inform your work as an artist? In an age when a lot of art is involved in a capitalist circulation of one form or another, the social projects are a way of rerouting some things. Do you separate your gallery work and social work at all? MB At this age, I think it’s just all me. I don’t think I even spend any time trying to dissect myself anymore. I am what I am. These types of projects root me in a different way. That’s just not a conversation about just the gallery and me, ‘Mark Bradford’ with the big M and B. I don’t always like the isolation of everybody working for me, everything me. This grounds me in a much more collective way.

MB I don’t think I was going to ever. I don’t even think I think about that. By that time,

Mark Bradford’s exhibition Exotica is on view at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong through 1 March. Work made by students in Bradford’s Merchant Posters education lab can be seen at Bridge+, Hong Kong, through 20 October

Students working with Mark Bradford in the artist’s Merchant Posters education lab in Hong Kong, 2024. Photo: Ivan Chan

Winter 2024

The whole of China has been busy for months with the celebrations, on 1 October, of the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and Hong Kong has been no exception. What with the numerous red flags decorating the city, the fireworks, various events and special discounts on the day of the anniversary itself, the Hong Kong government has been setting the scene for months. The August opening of the National Security Exhibition Gallery inside the Museum of History (where the Permanent Exhibition is still under renovation) is a case in point. The gallery greets visitors with a large slogan that reads: ‘National Security is the bedrock of national rejuvenation. Social stability is a prerequisite for building a strong and prosperous China.’ Nearby, at the Science Museum, an exhibition titled Glorious Voyage: Splendid Achievements of the People’s Republic of China in Its 75 Years opened just in time for the anniversary celebrations, with sections like ‘Leapfrog Development’, ‘Scientific Breakthroughs’ and ‘Era of Intelligence’ that showcase ‘the patriotic spirit and steadfast beliefs of Chinese scientists, while emphasising the brilliant accomplishments and key technological breakthroughs of the new China’. The language on display is still unusual for Hong Kong, even four years after the passing of the National Security Law (introduced at the end of June 2020). To quote just a few examples: ‘Over the splendid 75 years

Identity Politics

As Hong Kong gets swept up in anniversary celebrations for the People’s Republic of China, Ilaria Maria Sala reports on ‘good days, awkward days’ in museum and gallery programming

ongoing attempt to make Hong Kong people identify more with the mainland, and also feel more pride in its achievements. Other institutions around town are not as explicitly patriotic, but the main shows that can be visited at the moment tend to prioritise artists with strong links to the Chinese mainland: at M+ there is the inaugural museum retrospective of Guo Pei, China’s first haute couture designer, titled Fashioning Imagination, with some of her most famous creations, including the yellow dress that Rihanna wore at the Met Gala in 2015. In the gallery next

to this is Life is Architecture, an exhibition celebrating seven decades of I.M. Pei’s architecture – although Pei was international, and M+ does highlight that. The nearby Palace Museum has inaugurated a 110-object exhibition titled The Origins of Chinese Civilization, a major archaeological exhibition of ancient artefacts from 14 different sites in order to explore ‘the origins and development of Chinese civilisation’. Tai Kwun Contemporary too is showcasing a solo exhibition of a mainland artist,

since the establishment of new China, the nation’s technological endeavours have leaped from non-existence to global prominence,’ it says. The exhibition glorifies a place that is most commonly linked with the Cultural Revolution and its push for heroic industrial advances, the Daqing Oil Field. ‘A Chip-driven Patriotic Heart’, the last part of the exhibition, on the other hand, ‘focuses on the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors’. These highly institutional shows are part of an

top View of the I.M. Pei-designed Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation Centre, Singapore, in a c. 1976 photo from Hong Kong’s M+ exhibition on the Chinese-American architect. © BEP Akitek above Glorious Voyage: Splendid Achievements of the People’s Republic of China in Its 75 Years, 2024 (installation view, Science Museum, Hong Kong) right An object from the 2024 exhibition The Origins of Chinese Civilization, Palace Museum, Hong Kong

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Tao Hui (although no patriotic overtones are to be detected in his rather gloomy vision of contemporary alienation). While all this is ongoing, the local ecosystem has been evolving too, getting more opulent thanks to the opening of the glitzy new Asia Pacific headquarters of Christie’s, now occupying four floors of Zaha Hadid Architects’ latest building, The Henderson. Not far away, at the Landmark Chater, is the new Sotheby’s Maison, designed by MVRDV, with two floors dedicated to rotating exhibitions of pieces from all eras and places – from Banksy’s shredded Girl Without Balloon (2021) to Korean ceramics and prehistoric fossils, to ancient European and Chinese furniture. Both these grand openings are meant to tap into the Chinese collectors’ market and, to some extent, the regional one, in spite of lacklustre sales due to a slowing economy. And while local blue-chip galleries continue with variegated offerings, bringing to Hong Kong international artists like Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (on show at David Zwirner) or Lee Jin Woo (recently exhibited at White Cube), the work of local artists on display elsewhere is stubbornly concentrated on Hong Kong itself, exploring all the possible variations of memory, nostalgia and celebrations of the

city’s uniqueness. Yeung Hok Tak, whose See You There at Kiang Malingue is a solo show of 19 acrylic paintings with street scenes of Hong Kong (pastiches of real and invented landscapes) and cartoonlike portraits of imaginary characters, explains that this obsession with Hong

Kong itself “is a way to cherish our beloved city. Our good days, and our awkward days.” Other established artists, like Chow Chun Fai, are exploring this same theme. His acrylic

top Chow Chun Fai, As Tears Go By 1988 at Mahjong School Portland Street, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 166 × 200 cm. Courtesy Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong

paintings mix past and present street scenes – in a place constantly reshaped by demolition and new construction – adding, in his two most recent shows at Tang Contemporary Art, movie stars picked from the most beloved and successful Hong Kong movies. By reimagining cinematic moments engraved in most Hongkonger’s imaginations in different settings, from iconic movies such as A Better Tomorrow (1986), Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) or Infernal Affairs (2002–03), he creates new stories, like new possibilities, in a city that is still trying to gauge its new reality. These are mostly very large pieces in a bright, slightly acidic palette that recalls the ubiquitous neon signs that used to illuminate Hong Kong, and have now been mostly taken down due to new city regulations. Debe Sham, a multimedia artist who has recently been recreating traditional Hong Kong toys – such as little whistles that used to be found in laundry powder, windmills and the type of seesaw that is common in local housing estates – with soldered metal, explains to me that the rules of any game “are restrictions, of course, yet they force our creativity to develop in spite of them, so it can be an interesting exercise”. Read in this what you will. In many artists’ work, anything too overtly political is better left out entirely, or just hinted at for those who get it. “Everything political that you see in my paintings”, says an artist who requested anonymity, “is what you are seeing. You are free to decide if it is there or not.”

above Yeung Hok Tak, Junior Lion Dancing Club, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 76 × 61 cm. Courtesy Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong

Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer and journalist based in Hong Kong

Winter 2024

As an expat living in Tokyo, I’m expected to provide all kinds of local wisdom when friends (and cousins and former colleagues of former college friends) come to town. There are a number of rote tips I rattle off to well-meaning hipster tourists thirsty for some semblance of an ‘authentic’ experience in this city that’s been thoroughly picked over by influencers and vloggers, but there’s one that takes so much explanation that I sometimes hesitate to give it: never trust the Google reviews. 4.5 stars for conveyer belt sushi in Shibuya? Useless. 4.8 stars for a Tokyo station izakaya with an English menu? Better off just getting in a random line on the street. This is not simply, as it may seem, a comment on the inferior tastes of tourists; it reflects a clash of review cultures. Japanese reviewers do not give 5 out of 5 stars for a service or establishment that is good. If it’s solid, it gets a 3. If it’s really good, it gets a 4. Nothing gets a 5. Japanese reviewers grade harshly on dimensions of service, cleanliness, ‘cosu pa’ or ‘cost performance’, the etiquette of other customers. At a soba shop near my house, low stars are given for the colour of the tempura (black), the smell (ammonia) and the presence of ashtrays (one for

Simply the Best

Why are we so obsessed with five-star ratings, asks Thu-Huong Ha, and how does taste translate across cultures – and online review sites?

top Tabelog review of a restaurant in Shibuya Station, Tokyo

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each table). On Tabelog, a Japanese Yelp for restaurants, if I see 3.49 stars, it gives me a little thrill. A typical review might read something like, ‘Food was super delicious. Perfect night. The server had messy hair. 2 stars.’ It’s why Shake Shack has 4.5 stars on Google and the best udon you’ve ever had in your life has 3.8: tourists love grade inflation. For this Vietnamese–American raised on New York bagels and pizza, further nuances and dialects are required to interpret the language of local reviews. When I moved to my current apartment and needed to find a reliable neighborhood bakery, I looked askance at the mostly Japanese reviews on Google maps. The Japanese palate favours soft and bouncy fuwa fuwa textures – nobody is on the hunt for a crusty sourdough or a crackling baguette. (To my dismay, the search for good bread is still ongoing, six months later.) Similarly, Japanese spice tolerance has got to be one of the lowest in Asia, with employees trained to ask if customers are OK with wasabi, and whether they want their curry ‘spicy’ or ‘Japanese spicy’. Our world of apps, algorithms and e-commerce is heavily saturated with usergenerated reviews. Whether 5-star review

culture symbolises the democratisation of taste or the demise of expertise, it’s too late to turn back to a time before everyone was a critic. But contending with bots, click farms, incentivised reviews, not to mention all those people – like me – who only leave reviews for excellent or awful experiences, how do we make sense of this abundance of text? When criticism is aggregated and flattened to a scale of five yellow stars, meaning breaks down. Every platform has its own internal language and culture. A 2021 study found, for example, that Google Maps restaurant reviews are on average 0.7 stars higher than those on Yelp. Uber and other peer-to-peer rating systems are susceptible to what researchers call ‘reputation inflation’, in which users leave 5 stars by default and dock stars only when something has gone terribly wrong. Meanwhile the review sections for books on Amazon and Goodreads have become hotbeds for cancel culture across the political spectrum, a place where users can quickly organise to bring down books and authors. In 2017, Amazon had to delete at least 900 fake reviews from people leaving one star for Hilary Clinton’s book about the 2016 US presidential election; it got so bad that later the company instated restrictions on select controversial items so that users couldn’t leave reviews at all without a verified purchase. In subsequent years YA novels deemed racist by early reviewers and social media critics were targeted with one-star ratings on Goodreads, and multiple titles have been pulled before they ever hit the shelves. But as one becomes more fluent in any particular system, the culture reveals itself. No longer a tourist in Japan, I find a certain ethnographic delight in plumbing the depths of sub-review cultures that remain relatively homogenous, like neighbourhood pharmacies, laundromats and tailors. I read the usergenerated reviews for a nearby funeral home and crematorium like I would an art show I’ll never see – and like the best criticism, it offers a kind of artwork unto itself. You’d think the appraisals would be full of highly sensitive and emotional reactions to how beloved family members were treated after death. Yet here in the Google reviews for this funeral home, in this very specific sliver of internet, I find a surprising number of things at work: nationalism, pastoral nostalgia, budgetary concerns, hunger, pride, grief. There is of course the requisite ‘It’s very beautiful’ with a picture of a pretty decent looking teishoku set. (3 stars.) ‘It seemed like we were being rushed, like we should hurry up and do it quickly because we have so much to do, without immersing ourselves in the sadness.’ (1 star.) One reviewer is surprised that there is

nowhere to get a drink and you have to use the vending machines outside. (1 star.) There are several complaints about the bones being handled directly by the hands of the staff without gloves, and how rushed it feels, compared to the countryside, where more care and patience are given to the ceremony. A lot of comments are about where the parking is, how much it costs, where the smoking section is, and how hard the roads are to navigate. A couple of reviewers use this opportunity to give screeds against the Chinese, as the for-profit funeral home has been reportedly bought by a Chinese parent company. A few mention that imperial family members and other celebrities have been cremated here. It turns out, once we learn to search the sweep of stars with careful eyes, patterns and stories reveal themselves. One person is only in the Google reviews to say rest in peace to their best friend of half a century. Thu-Huong Ha is a writer based in Tokyo

Google review of a Tokyo funeral home

Winter 2024

“Place your forehead against the tree’s trunk… If the tree wants to interact intimately with you, then ask for consent…” I’m sitting on a bench in Roskilde Hospital’s Sankt Hans Gardens, looking out over the fjord that bounds the small Danish city’s eastern edges. The sun is high and a mild late-summer breeze rustles the woods behind me. Looping on speakers hidden in those trees is Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens and Dann Disciglio’s We Love You Forest (2024): a collaborative, three-part, ten-minute sound work, an arboreal erotics of whispers, moans and giggles. The part I’m listening to is titled ‘How To Make Love To Trees’, an instruction manual of sorts, and the most recent iteration of Sprinkle and Stephens’s ongoing ‘Eco-sex Movement’ project (2008–). We Love You Forest is part of I mørket beder vi solen huske os (In the Darkness, We Ask the Sun to Remember Us), a group exhibition organised by Roskilde’s Museet for Samtidskunst that installs works by 13 artists around the psychiatric hospital’s sprawling gardens. Running from late summer until the winter solstice on 21 December, the show plays with ideas of nature, seasonal transformation and cycles. Maria Finn and Jacob Kamp’s Miracle (after Josef Frank) (2017/24) consists of a tendrillike shape formed by leaving an area of unmown grass to grow from one of the garden’s lawns, allowing it to change with the weather: flattened by rain one day, sun-baked another. Elsewhere, Johanne Hestvold’s sculpture made from a fungi-based composite, Isolation (The Humble Administrator’s Garden) (2021), has already started to decompose into the flowerbed where it was placed a month previous. If you’ve experienced a dark, bone-chilling Danish winter, you might find the exhibition title especially meaningful. It comes from a section in Heksens håndbog (Witch’s Handbook), a 1987 publication by the late self-proclaimed witch Dannie Druehyld. “Most Danish teenage girls in the 1990s would have read this book, or at least heard of it,” the show’s curator, Lotte Løvholm, tells me. In the book, Druehyld, a founder of the 1970s økofeministerne (eco-feminist) movement in Denmark, described her rituals and lifestyle as she tried to live in tandem with nature and its cycles as a practising witch. Heksens håndbog remains in print, and In the Darkness… is just the latest in a number of recent Danish exhibitions and projects looking at the country’s pagan history. In Ribe, in the southwest, there’s the recently opened (and seemingly family-friendly) HEX! Museum of Witch Hunt. In Copenhagen, Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s 2021 group exhibition, Witch Hunt, reassessed

Alt-Religion

Is it the season of the witch? In the face of ‘polycrises’, Nathaniel Budzinski considers whether the cultural turn towards the pagan and the occult is really just escapism

from top Tabita Rezaire & Yussef Agbo-Ola, IKUM – Drying Temple, 2022; Sidsel Bonde, Grødegejster, agerånder (installation view, In the Darkness, We Ask the Sun to Remember Us, 2024), 2022. Photo: Brian Kure / GRAYSC. Courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde

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sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Nordic witchcraft through contemporary art. Beyond obvious ties to 1960s and 70s folklore revivalism and the concurrent ‘Earth Goddess’ strand of second-wave feminism, In the Darkness uses the writings of feminist theorist Silvia Federici – especially Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018) and Caliban and the Witch (2004) – as a critical backdrop, looking at witchhood in terms of “women who were too radical to fit into society”, as Løvholm describes it. All of this, in turn, is part of a broader, international revisiting of pre-Christian and alternative religious traditions: 2023’s The Occult in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections in Madrid and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s 2022 Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity in Venice are just a couple among numerous international exhibitions, conferences and artistrun initiatives in recent years. It’s a cluttered grab-bag of intentions and ideas. But this alt-religious tendency is also a widespread counternarrative to the catastrophist ‘polycrisis’ narrative of climate change, war and chaos – a story so complex it’s disempowering. Back in Roskilde, I walk through Tabita Rezaire and Yussef Agbo-Ola’s IKUM – Drying Temple (2022), a long, tentlike structure of colourful textiles stretched over a wooden frame, like psychedelic animal hides set out to dry. Little loops in the fabric allow visitors to affix bouquets of the weeds and wildflowers that grow around the prospective temple. The dead and drying plants will hang there until winter – whimsical reminders that everything works in cycles; some biological, some cultural. In the Darkness feels fleeting as a Scandinavian summer. But in a broader context, there’s escapism too in all this back-to-nature rhetoric; as if moving to some remote forest to escape modern society (which Druehyld did) and playing witch means anything beyond hiding from the maws of our progress-obsessed world. I put this to Løvholm and she returns to Druehyld: “I think it’s important not to overdefine the whole narrative of what it means to be a witch… It’s maybe a silly example, but I heard from one of Dannie’s friends that she used to drink a tonne of Pepsi Max… I don’t think she thought she was escaping. She created a different way of living in the world, for herself.” Beverage preferences aside, I’m sceptical of this individualism and how it quickly becomes selfregarding and holier-than-thou. But we clearly need new ways to live in our world; and, in that regard, this current cycle of alt-religious revivalism doesn’t lack for novel ideas. Nathaniel Budzinski is a writer based in Copenhagen

Courtesy of MAJO.

Countering Time 27 September 2024–1 March 2025 An exhibition about time and archives Asia Art Archive 11/F Hollywood Centre 233 Hollywood Road Sheung Wan, Hong Kong Opens Mon-Sat, 10am-6pm T. +852 2844 1112 E. info@aaa.org.hk AsiaArtArchive aaa.org.hk

With new works by: Lee Weng Choy Simon Leung Gala Porras-Kim Merve Ünsal Supported by Mimi Brown & Alp Erçil, Eunei & Ron Lee, Tracy Li, and Virginia & Wellington Yee. Media Partners: ArtReview and Mousse.

Peering down from the womenswear floor into the atrium of the opulent Graz department store Kastner & Öhler, our tour group sees, in the basement, glimpsed between the escalators, a hardy woodcutter, in stout boots and waistcoat, chopping logs. His axe rings out from the depths, while mountain birdsong and the sound of running streams tinkle via the in-store PA. As we climb each floor, in the menswear, two older men in traditional Styrian hunting garb, rifles poised, are stalking cautiously through the stacked accessories. As we are ushered past them by our guide, a fresh-faced young woman in a feathered hat, with knapsack and hiking gear strides by, on her way to the lederhosen section ahead. This satirical vision of a bucolic, traditionalist Austria, spliced into contemporary Austria’s wealthy (but anxious) present, was Thomas Verstraeten’s performance Wanderlust Warenhaus (2024). It was emblematic of this year’s edition of Steirischer Herbst, Graz’s long-running annual arts festival, this year ominously titled Horror Patriae. Conflating the Latin for ‘homeland’ with ‘horror vacui’ – ‘fear of emptiness’ – the festival, centred on a major exhibition at the Neue Galerie Graz, sought to examine the ‘darker side of patriotism’, and, as chief curator Ekaterina Degot

Art against populism

It’s time for largescale exhibitions to address the realities of general audiences, says J.J. Charlesworth, rather than catering to the interests of the curatorial class

Thomas Verstraeten, Wanderlust Warenhaus, 2024, performance (rehearsal). Photo: Johanna Lamprecht. Courtesy Steirischer Herbst, Graz

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declares in her curatorial introduction, ‘to expose the constructed, artificial character of any national identity’. With this edition, Degot writes, ‘steirischer herbst turns against the normalized mild xenophobia celebrated in the form of roots and traditions,’ while asserting that ‘migration, exile, displacement, dissidence and nonbelonging are cornerstones of human society.’ Degot’s formula for the festival (it started in 1968, she took over in 2018) has been notable for its political responsiveness to current events, chafing against the rise of nationalism in Europe and beyond. (Her first edition was provocatively titled Volksfronten, while in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 2022 took A War in the Distance as its theme.) It’s an approach that doesn’t shy away from using the art exhibition as polemical tool. Horror Patriae’s autumn timing meant that it opened ten days before Austria’s legislative elections, in which the rightwing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) got the most votes. A party founded in the 1950s by former Nazis, in 2024 the FPÖ has been campaigning for curbs on immigration and asylum seekers, as well as pledging to cut taxes on small businesses and scrap environmental levies. Its manifesto was titled Fortress Austria: Fortress of Freedom. So, Horror Patriae was a conscious rebuff to another rightward shift in Austrian politics, but rather than a direct address to contemporary populism, its curatorial approach sought to analyse and dismantle what it saw as the historical roots of a politics often couched in ideas of cultural identity. Historical works that embodied Austrian culture’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fascination with folk culture, the notion of ‘Heimat’ and ideologies of a ‘greater German’ culture, found themselves alongside contemporary works that continually probed the construction of national and nationalist identity. Austrian and Styrian identity, it suggested, was always an evolving creation subject to the political demands of each historical moment: from the grandiose epoch of nineteenth-century nation-building and the end of Austro-Hungarian Empire through to the volkish alignment with Nazi ideas of Germanic culture and the tainted retention of prewar folkloric ideals in the postwar period. That national identities might be ‘confected’ was made literal in Pablo Bronstein’s fantastical confectionary architectural model, a galleryfilling, fantasy museum of disparate historical architectural styles – neoclassical, German Baroque and twenty-first century high-tech. For many of the contemporary works here, the very notion of identity was suspect, an issue entertainingly distilled in Jakub Jansa’s zany video Pumpkinville (2024), depicting a bizarrely

synthetic world inhabited by vegetable-based humanoids and its protagonist Celeriac, a sort of root-vegetable private detective. Celeriac’s investigations satirise contemporary culture’s demand for authentic experience, where individualism and wellness culture intersect with reality TV and atavistic ideas of cultural roots. As Celeriac tails the naïve reality-show celebrity Pumpkin (pumpkins are a big deal in Styria), he concludes that desires for authentic identity are merely the delusion of a commodified culture, nothing more than a vast manipulation by the shadowy forces of globalism and neoliberalism. But although there’s a truth to the argument that national identities are never really the eternal embodiments of an unchanging and rooted ‘people’, Horror Patriae struggled to get beyond the dismissive idea that all national identities are in some way fictive, lacking the authenticity claimed by their adherents. It’s easy to dismiss cultural and national identities as a delusion, but deconstructing the idea of identity as such, into a state of endless hybridity, difference and nonbelonging doesn’t replace it with anything more secure. Such deconstructive views of identity tend to miss the point of how recent identitarian politics aren’t simply backward-looking

fictions but become the forms through which are expressed real divisions and conflicts within and between societies. ‘Identity’ reflects people’s political realities – whether they are people living in the countries of their birth, or migrants far from home, a question with which Horror Patriae had trouble addressing. There were, after all, eloquent works that spoke to the difficulty of the migrant ever really finding their way ‘home’, particularly

top Assaf Gruber, Miraculous Accident (still), 2024, 4K video, b&w, sound, 30 min. Courtesy the artist above Jakub Jansa, Pumpkinville (Club of Opportunities, Episode 9) (detail), 2024, video installation. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2024

poignantly evoked in Assaf Gruber’s subtle and moving film Miraculous Accident (2024), a semifictional story about a Moroccan student, Nadir, who attends a film academy in 1960s Communist Poland and is taught by – and becomes the lover of – a Jewish film professor, Edyta. Switching between past and present, it follows their subsequent separate lives, post-1968, in lonely, disconsolate exile. Here, belonging isn’t a fiction, but something lost, yearned for – and irretrievable. As I walked to Kastner & Öhler – a store founded by Austrian Jews in 1873 and whose descendants fled the Nazis in 1939, following the Nazi annexation of Austria the year before – Graz’s main square was taken up by a large pro-Palestine protest. Identities may be constructed, but they are latched to political realities. In Austria and elsewhere in Europe, voters are siding with parties that have sensed their anxieties about the gradual disintegration of their communities, jobs, public services and economies, while established political parties, often of the centre and left, seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it. As a consequence, secure ideas of collective ‘identity’ are coming apart, while the backlash is often felt by immigrant communities. On this, however, Horror Patriae had little to say, preferring to cling to a sort of abstract morality tale in which everything national, local and rooted is bad – poking fun at the supposed backwardness and absurdity of Styrian traditionalism – while everything hybrid, migratory and ‘nonbelonging’ was good. Discovering in current political frustrations only the zombielike revival of earlier histories of nationalist sentiment may make sense from the point of view of the increasingly internationalised and cosmopolitan culture of curators and artists. But attacking the cultural symptoms of what are more profound social and economic dislocations does little to make sense of the political realities of people – whether they are arriving migrants or people living in the countries of their birth. That kind of art has little to say to other people who, whether they’ve been here for generations, or just arrived, might still need to work out how to live together, and figure out whether living in common together – in something that might be a ‘homeland’ – can ever be possible.

Amy Sherald, Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons) (detail), 2024, oil on linen, each panel: 128 × 68 × 2 ½ in © Amy Sherald.

Issue 11 on sale 2 November

Art Featured

Often they would stop writing, talk to each other 35

ArtReview Asia

Riar Rizaldi’s Theory of Many Worlds The Indonesian artist’s latest videos combine quantum physics and mysticism, opening new portals through which to explore capitalist systems of extraction by Stephanie Bailey

Winter 2024

above Mirage – Metanoia (Prelude) (stills), 2023, animation, colour, sound, 6 min 4 sec. Courtesy the artist preceding pages Mirage – Eigenstate (still), 2024, video, colour, sound, 30 min 2 sec. Photo: Riskya Duavania. Courtesy the artist

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In 2022, as part of the Collide Award programme of artist residencies, shepherd god”; and those who live in humid landscapes “see god the Indonesian artist and filmmaker Riar Rizaldi was invited to CERN. in every droplet – every particle – of dew...” There, at the home of the Large Hadron Collider, an apparatus that Rizaldi’s interest in Tropical Sufism developed while living tests theories relating to particle physics, he began developing Mirage around Merapi (he still resides in the vicinity), the most active volcano – as part of a larger decade-long project – which explores a dialectics in Indonesia and the subject of the short film Pyroclasts Are Eloquent of science and mysticism, modernity and tradition, contemporary Storytellers (2022), a prelude to his 2023 feature film, Monisme. While thought and historical memory, belief and knowledge. the former focuses on the sublime power of the volcano itself, capable Mirage – Metanoia (Prelude) (2023) is the project’s first film: an of destroying and creating life at any moment, Monisme, which oscilanimation that sits somewhere between the styles of a mid-twentieth- lates between documentary, horror and science fiction, explores the century Hanna-Barbera cartoon and a Disney production of an earlier communities that exist around it. There are the volcanologists who era – think The Jetsons (1962–87) meets Fantasia (1940). In it, two cosmol- study the volcano to predict its activity, enthralled and terrified by its ogists drift happily through the Milky Way some 4000 years after the capacity to destroy. (In one scene, they discuss the Toba catastrophe ‘Fansurian Atomist Revolution’, inspired by the writings of Hamzah theory, which hypothesises that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption 74,000 Fansuri, the sixteenth-century Sumatran Sufi poet and philosopher years ago wiped out most humans on Earth and caused climate chaos.) who believed that god exists in everything – that is, in every particle. Then there are the violent, state-sponsored paramilitaries, who bully Gazing at a distant Earth, the cosmonauts talk about wanting to give miners digging for sand around the volcano to service the construction “them” – presumably humans – a new life by teaching them to under- industry, and a documentary filmmaking team led by an artist filming stand “the origin of all” and “encountering god” in particles. One cos- those workers. Finally, there is the Indigenous community, who monaut likens the idea to the Sufi concept of Waḣdat al-wujūd, meaning describe their relationship with Merapi as “direct and inseparable”. the unity of existence or being, and atomism, an ancient philosophy Infused into these works is Rizaldi’s interest in emanation, a theory that sees the universe as an indivisible composition of atoms: two introduced by the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus that considers ideas in which science and philosophy coalesce, given the evolution reality a continuous outflow of things that spring from ‘The One’. of atomism into atomic theory, Rizaldi likens the theory to and the continued discovery of the Big Bang: a conception of smaller particles, including the the universe emerging from a Higgs boson (the so-called ‘god single event and constantly particle’) by CERN in 2012. expanding and contracting. InWhat emerges in these redeed, one encounter can genflections is an archaeology of erate a whole trajectory of works previous futurisms that have for the artist, like his meeting with logistic workers at a shipevolved into present-day possibilities. “I was interested with ping company in Jakarta in 2021, this idea of the archaeology which spawned Notes from Gog of the future when Gunung Magog (2022) and Larung (2024). Padang was discovered,” Rizaldi The former is a film spliced explains over video call – some with AI-generated animations Notes from Gog Magog (still), 2022, video, colour, sound, believe the site in West Java is of nightmarish workplace acci9 min 32 sec. Courtesy the artist one of the most advanced pyradents, inspired by corporate mids ever made, while others assert that these are just volcanic forma- safety videos, that connect blue-collar Indonesian shipworkers handtions. But what struck Rizaldi was how the Indonesian state jumped ling Samsung cargo with white-collar Samsung office staff in Korea at the chance to put Indonesia on the map by promoting the site. “It’s through ghost stories. The latter is a hypnotic tribute to Indonesian actually quite inspiring to think about the past as a way to recontex- cargo ship crews and their burials at sea: a camp, glam-rock lament tualise the future,” the artist muses. “Or to reformulate that slightly, with a candy-coloured tint showing three men holding each other as to think about the future and then work backwards.” they sway on deck. Among the things the cosmonauts discuss in Mirage – Metanoia Ideas for Mirage were likewise triggered by a meeting. While (Prelude) is the ability for Waḣdat al-wujūd to free magical thinking filming around Merapi, Rizaldi met a member of the Indigenous “from the complexity of psychological interpretation” and its community who descended from a Sufi mystic. The artist learned capacity “to observe many things simultaneously and continuously”, that, through the centuries, Sufi mystics in the region retreated to the as well as how it exists as “one among thousands of other scientific mountains after their ideas were deemed heretical to monotheism – by methods”. They describe particles and atoms as a “recursive structure sultanate, coloniser or state – where they interacted with Indigenous of mathematical-geometric objects”, which “replicate in an infinite communities and their animistic beliefs. “Their worldviews somehow number to form the universe we live in today” – just as god “makes collided, and their descendants practice this very syncretic version the entire universe present and continuously recurring – like a cyber- of Sufism with animism,” Rizaldi notes, describing the existence netic machine.” In the end, text on screen outlines perspectives of of graves belonging to Sufi mystics around Merapi dating as far back ‘Tropical Sufi-Atomism’, which emerged in the Indo-Malay archi- as the fifteenth century. pelago during the fifteenth century: agricultural societies see gods “I’m always thinking about evolutions like this in my practice,” in anything affecting the harvest; animal herders “believe in a single Rizaldi explains. “Across my projects, time is always jumping.”

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Larung (still), 2024, song and music video, 4 min 50 sec (music by Riar Rizaldi, Stella Gareth and Wahono; lyrics by Riar Rizaldi; composed, arranged and performed by Stella Gareth and Wahono). Courtesy the artist

Mirage, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Dan Weill. Courtesy the artist and Gasworks, London

Yet everything is connected. The latest episode in the Mirage project, welcomes her to “a different world” and thus “another particle”. Mirage: Eigenstate (2024), referring to the eigenstate in a quantum In the end, Mirage: Eigenstate invites viewers to conceptualise the matesystem where one variable has a fixed value, reflects these connective rial world as a site of inherent pluralism, by describing quantum jumps by situating Sufi mysticism’s tropicalisation within a broader mechanics, the science of matter and light on atomic and subatomic field of atomisms. References include Greek philosopher Democritus, scales, as “the most successful scientific theory ever”. That is, “if you a younger contemporary of Socrates who embraced atomic theory; the simply accept the wave-function collapse”, which theorises that a wave Mu’tazilite atomists of the eighth to tenth centuries; Western thinkers function, a superposition of eigenstates, is “collapsed” into one of from the twelfth century, for whom god was conceived of as “a sphere its many possible outcomes after a measurement or observation is whose centre is everywhere” – “a thought that turns out to be not made. In short, all possible outcomes collapse into a fixed value: much different from mystical an accepted reality. thinkers in the tropics” of the fifIt’s a lot to take in. Even the “My work is about the complexity presenter in the film asks Rizaldi, teenth and sixteenth centuries; of different worldviews existing at John Dalton’s theory of chemical who has just yelled “cut”, if he’s a the same time, especially as it happens genius or if she’s “just completely combination and compound elements; and the Copenhagen interdumb.” But, as Rizaldi has said, in Indonesia, where every island has its pretation of quantum mechanics. every work evolves out of works that own ideas and unifying these many-worlds A cross between a science docucame before it, and there are signinterpretations is almost impossible” posts to be found in earlier films. mentary and science fiction film, Mirage: Eigenstate is set 2500 years Take Kasiterit (2019), a short film set after the Fansurian revolution, and follows a cosmonaut who crashes in Bangka Island in Indonesia, known for producing one third of the into quantum immortality, a thought experiment where someone world’s tin supply together with the neighbouring Belitung Island can survive death by existing across parallel non-interacting realities – a crucial material for smart and renewable technology production. or timelines, referring to the many-worlds interpretation. Amid the Over striking footage of the island’s Kaolin Lake, a former mining site action, rings composing a flashing target periodically cover the screen with toxic, turquoise waters and white mineral banks, the voice of a and invert incessantly to amplify the central circle, creating a constant solar-powered AI entity named Natasha describes this as her ancestral point amid the unstable whole that visualises the eigenstate’s fixed homeland. “I come from here,” Natasha says. “This landscape, which value – which in Mirage: Eigenstate would be the existence of god in is presented to you through projection or screen is made of my body every particle, making god, as the film’s TV presenter points out, reality parts: tin.” But Natasha’s body is also made of capitalism, she says: the itself. Each flashing circle feels purposefully hypnotic: an attempt to most primitive form of animism, in that objects are seen as pure, vital draw audiences into a many-worlds state of mind that is modelled material. She supports that fact as an entity imbued with an animated by the cosmonaut’s arrival in another timeline, where a shaman lifeforce, such that she wonders if she would even exist had tin and

Arda Awigarda’s production illustrations for Mirage – Eigenstate, 2024. Courtesy the artist

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Mirage – Eigenstate (stills), 2024, video, colour, sound, 30 min 2 sec. Photo: Riskya Duavania. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2024

Mirage – Eigenstate (stills), 2024, video, colour, sound, 30 min 2 sec. Photo: Riskya Duavania. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

capitalism never become entangled, and if the material’s value was Misteri Bondowoso, proposes Ghost Like Us, illustrates “how cinema, instead “rooted to the cosmology” of the island’s Indigenous Orang notably horror, in Indonesia never had a chance to understand and build Lom people. connection with the oppressed.” Rather, horror movies perpetuated Not quite a ghost in the machine but a material production of the what Paulo Freire coined as ‘magical consciousness’, where, as stated human-driven industry that has literally reshaped the earth from in the video, “people could not see the relation of their misery with the which it emerged, Natasha induces a kind of wave-function collapse systematic violence in their political and cultural life,” due to the ideoby articulating her reality as part of – not separate from – Bangka logical structuring – or displacement – of the supernatural as a source Island as a material space composed of the lives that inhabit and inter- of their suffering. But Misteri Bondowoso opened up a way through that sect it. There are Indigenous miners, who are descended from ances- impasse. Relating the film to media-theorist Jeffrey Sconce’s concept tors who once considered the tin unearthed from ritual burnings of of the ‘electronic elsewhere’ (which, as Ghost Like Us puts, “is generagricultural land to be deities, answering Natasha’s question about ated and accessed through the wonders of cinematic media and rituwhether an AI entity like her would exist in the worldview of the alistic practice”) and anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s description of Orang Lom (because what is a deity if not an artificial intelligence?); the kyai (the Javanese name for teachers of Islam) as cultural brokers, the state-owned mining firm that evolved out of a company created Ghost Like Us concludes that Misteri Bondowoso created a bridge between by Dutch colonisers who extracted tin to braze their ships and make rural worldviews and urban modern political engagement, traditional tin cans; the tourists who visit the site because of its uncanny beauty; superstitions and metropolitan horror entertainment. Through that and the island itself, which is doomed to sink once its tin reserves are bridging, it offered “a method to rethink the role of cinematic apparatus and media technology in understanding politics, culture, techcompletely extracted. Like Merapi, Bangka Island is an entity that exists as a material nology, magic and social,” circling back to Rizaldi’s ruminations on object, a subject to study and observe, and a metaphysical being in its reality as a composition of intersecting worldviews in Mirage. own right, in Rizaldi’s treatment – an entanglement of conditions that There is a rootedness to Rizaldi’s expansive musings. Growing up reflects the artist’s interest in the lattice of worldviews that shape Indo- he spent a lot of time in a public outdoor cinema in Gedebage market in the suburbs of Bandung, watchnesia, the world’s largest archipelago. “My work is about the ing horror movies while his mother went to work. Formalcomplexity of different worldly, that experience has proven views existing at the same foundational, both in terms of time, especially as it happens in Rizaldi’s engagement with the Indonesia, where every island cinematic form and the immerhas its own ideas and unifying these many-worlds interpretasive experience of cinema ittions is almost impossible,” he self, since he did not experiexplains. Hence the artist’s inence cinema inside a black box. terest in deconstructing cinema “It wasn’t an institutionalised and its genres to make that combuilding, like a theatre. It was plexity legible without reducoutdoor, makeshift. I could ing it to a singular framework. throw peanuts at the screen if Ghost Like Us (still), 2020, film, colour, “My interest in deconstructing I hated the characters,” he reb/w, 20 min. Courtesy the artist genre relates to how we think calls. “It was immersive and you about the world,” he elaborates, “because every genre has its tropes, actually shared a world with others as you experienced it.” That which is similar to a worldview and its belief system.” immersivity is palpable in Mirage: Eigenstate, where the capacity for Ghost Like Us (2020) offers a crucial lens through which to under- moving images to open up portals is defined not only through their stand Rizaldi’s deconstruction. The video essay explores how the New ability to articulate worlds, but through the amplification of the cineOrder regime, from 1966 to 1998, instrumentalised horror movies to matic screen as a gateway to those worlds. Consider the scene where manipulate Indonesian society through an ideology of fear, where the shipwrecked cosmonaut enters another particle, and the shaman victories of good over evil were expressed through movies articulating asks: “Are you ready to head towards the mirage?” Here, the mirage a sharp division between the urban – represented by the military, reli- seems to be the thing that connects the desert, where Sufism origigious institutions and authority figures – and the rural, framed as nated, and the tropics, where humid air makes the concept of the god backwards, without autonomy, and in need of rescue from evil forces. particle palpable as droplets we feel – an instant within which moleEven in the Reformation era, which began following Suharto’s resig- cules combine to produce an image: a world of worlds. ara nation in 1998, horror movies maintained a derogatory gaze over the rural, says Rizaldi, until decentralised film technologies like digital Mirage is on view at Gasworks, London, through 22 December. cameras and VCDs emerged during the mid-2000s, when peripheral Rizaldi’s work is also featured in Dream Screen, Leeum Museum of filmmakers began creating films with rural points of view. Ghost Like Art, Seoul, through 29 December; Your Ghosts Are Mine – Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices, Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti, Venice, Us highlights one movie in particular: Misteri Bondowoso (2005), a paranormal, verité-style production conceived by a group of shamans and and Soils, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, both through 24 November sorcerers in rural East Java, showing people making contact with ghosts, that circulated through VCD. Stephanie Bailey is a writer based in Hong Kong

Winter 2024

Saule Suleimenova Returning again and again to an archival photograph, the Khazakh artist has deployed modest means to write women, as well as others marginalised by patriarchal regimes, into history by Tyler Coburn

In the early 2000s, Saule Suleimenova was browsing a book of archival photographs of Kazakhs compiled by scholar Alkey Margulan. One picture, dating to the pre-Soviet era, shows three brides in traditional attire betraying little emotion about this pivotal moment in their lives. The women stare at the camera, but for Suleimenova, it was as though they were looking directly at her. “The image was a portal, a channel,” the Kazakh artist told me when we spoke in June. “I had the feeling that these girls are also me, my mother, my grandmothers, my ancestors, my daughters, and my future granddaughters.” Suleimenova has recreated this photograph many times over the last two decades, with each successive version marking a new stage in her practice. The artist first captured the figures in 2002 using grattography, a technique in which she coats a sheet of paper with paint, covers it with hot wax, paints other colours on the surface, then engraves with knives and sticks. After 2008, as she started to paint on top of her photographs of contemporary urban spaces, the three brides hovered over bulletin boards and concrete walls streaked with graffiti: ancestral spirits (or aruakhs in Kazakh) keeping a watchful eye over everyday life. From 2014, when Suleimenova began making collages out of salvaged plastic bags – an ingenious, laborious process of cutting and fusing cellophane with silicone glue – the brides’ headdresses and garments hosted logos and modern colours. Created with the help of volunteers, one bride floated like a canopy above the streets of Almaty for the 2015 ARTBAT Fest (Kelin, 2015). When it comes to historical photographs of Kazakhs, Suleimenova observes, “the names of adult men are usually noted, but for women and children, only their region or aul would be written”. The artist searches the State Archives of the East Kazakhstan

Region, the Smithsonian Institution website, and other places for these unknown people marginalised by patriarchal histories. The children and families featured in her series Kazakh Chronicle (2004 – ongoing) could not be further away from Bogenbay Batyr and other historic Kazakh warriors monumentalised in the postSoviet era. Suleimenova characterises these monuments as a “lie”: mythmaking sanctioned by the young independent state. “I’m trying to find a realistic way to show true Kazakhness. For me, it’s a decolonial practice.” Suleimenova’s ‘way’ is also modest, empathetic and at times satirical. The series No Cultural Value (2014) reflects on a common status that contemporary Kazakh artworks receive when exported abroad: in order to leave the country, they are stamped as having ‘no cultural value’. The insult extends, at least in Suleimenova’s case, to the archival photographs she recreates for the series. To stress the absurdity of this situation, she paints the people from these photographs over Photoshop collages of various bureaucratic documents she has been issued in her life – including the export stamps. In effect, she pre-empts the Kazakh state’s devaluation of her art by devaluing it herself. One work in No Cultural Value shows Suleimenova’s own grandmother Mariam with two friends, all of whom were held at ALZHIR – a camp for wives of traitors to the Soviet Union – during Stalin’s repressions in the 1940s. Bimash, the ‘traitor’ in question, was at that point serving 15 years in the KarLag labour camp due to his statistical research into victims of the Asharshylyk. (We now know that this famine, brought on by the sedentarisation and collectivisation of nomadic Kazakhs, took approximately 1.5 million lives from 1930 to 1933.)

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Three Brides, 2014, giclée print and acrylic on canvas, 100 × 140 cm. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2024

Aul at Spring, from the series Somewhere in the Great Steppe, 2017, plastic bags on polycarbonate, 105 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

During her time at ALZHIR, Mariam gave birth to Suleimenova’s Even when subjected to state censorship or historical revisionism, father Timur; upon release, they lived near KarLag alongside other some trace will always persist. families with husbands at the camp. Suleimenova collected parts of Residual Memory into a small book In Suleimenova’s take on this photograph of Mariam and her published earlier this year, which concludes with a piece about the friends, documents lurk in the background. The text of the export 1986 uprising. Protesting the replacement of an ethnic Kazakh party stamp hovers above their heads like a threat. “Authoritarianism,” leader with a Russian stooge, tens of thousands took to the streets she remarks, “is when a piece of paper is more valuable than human of Almaty and beyond. Teenage Suleimenova, defying her mothlife or art.” The original photograph dates to the late 1920s mak- er’s wishes, joined to read her poetry about Kazakh endurance, link arms with fellow demonstrators and ing it both poignant and painful to Plastic bags, which choke the steppe shout ‘Viva Kazakh!’ Though eventuacknowledge: the women have no idea what history has in store for them. ally suppressed by KGB security troops and terraform our oceans, may seem Like the brides, they open portals in and police, the uprising was one of to cheapen the subjects at hand, Suleimenova’s practice, and she has the first in a wave of resistance movebut Suleimenova draws an unsettling visited them many times. ments across the republics that helped Since 2018, Suleimenova has been bring an end to the Soviet Union. The link between them at work on Residual Memory, a series particular events in Almaty, which that explores how “a common history is also a family history”: the largely occurred at what was then called Brezhnev (now Republic) trauma of colonisation and the struggle for self-determination Square, seemed to presage the recent social unrest that Suleimenova are both felt within and across generations. The artist begins with has begun documenting in her work. archival images – including the one of Mariam – then recreates Following the 2019 resignation of Kazakhstan’s first presithem using plastic bags often obtained from friends and colleagues. dent Nursultan Nazarbayev, Suleimenova recalls, “everyday there Echoing her former painting practice, she layers this material to was something important that happened”: an oil worker’s strike in achieve subtle shifts of colour, light and shadow. Plastic bags, which Aktau, the renaming of the capital from Nur-sultan to Astana, the choke the steppe and terraform our oceans, may seem to cheapen the arrest of journalist Svetlana Glushkova, a proposed referendum by subjects at hand, but Suleimenova draws an unsettling link between the incoming president to build a nuclear power plant near Lake Balkhash. With Plastic Diary of Changes (2019), them. “We prefer not to remember someKelin, 2015 (installation view, ARTBAT Fest, Almaty), Suleimenova adapted her slow, demanding thing traumatic,” she reflects. “We’d prefer to plastic bags, polycarbonate sheet, 600 × 400 cm. cellophane technique to meet the moment. throw it away, but like plastic, it remains.” Courtesy the artist

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“I didn’t have time to analyse or choose,” she says. “I was trying to work based on a photograph from this time, shows demonstrators holding impressionistically: one day, one piece.” The results, which capture a banner stating, ‘We are NOT terrorists, we are ordinary people!!!’ these incidents as well as everyday scenes from her surroundings, Set in silhouette on a foggy winter’s day, they could stand in for any of us. According to the artist, this picture was taken just moments have the urgency of journalism and the intimacy of an artist’s touch. Suleimenova soon expanded this ‘socially oriented’ way of before the forces began shooting. working. In the large cellophane triptych One Steppe Forward These days, Republic Square has few traces of the events of (2019), demonstrators from Hong Kong, Ukraine, Turkey, France, Bloody January. On the slope beside the restored City Government Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia and elsewhere gather on one of three Building is a memorial hastily erected by the president – a bid to polyethylene sheets. The words ‘FOREVER’ and ‘AGAIN’ emerge from control the narrative. As visitors ascend, squat steles of black slate and granite give way to slender, white sweeping landscapes on the other One of the demonstrators in marble slabs. Their surfaces present two. Artist Almagul Menlibayeva has quotes by Kazakh luminaries: medidescribed how the steppe ‘is such a big One Steppe Forward holds up a mirror, tations on fear and death mark the and empty space; it forces a dialogue capturing the security forces darker ones, and exhortations about on you’. Its capaciousness allows for lurking just beyond. Suleimenova assembly, which to Suleimenova is the national unity grace the lighter. No first step in building solidarity and mention is made of the hundreds who believes she has a similar role to play practicing civic activism. lost their lives in the fray, or of those In January 2022, a protest in the town of Zhanaozen against since detained, arrested and tortured. rising fuel prices quickly grew in scale and scope. Thousands came One of the demonstrators in One Steppe Forward holds up a mirror, together in Almaty’s Republic Square, scholar Diana T. Kudaibergen capturing the security forces lurking just beyond the edge of the writes in her book The Kazakh Spring (2024), to demand ‘political work. In the face of state repression and obfuscation, Suleimenova changes, the resignation of the government, the return of the demo- believes she has a similar role to play. “My name Saule”, she observes, cratic constitution, and the improvement of economic conditions’. “means a beam of sun that we can see reflected in water. So I’m Kazakh state security forces and CTSO (Collective Security Treaty nothing. I’m just a mirror. I need to polish my soul to reflect this Organization) troops – most of whom Russia sent – were ordered by world in all its beauty and pain. If I don’t, the life goes out of me.” ara President Tokayev to suppress these ‘terrorists’ and ‘shoot without warning’. Suleimenova’s cellophane Tuman. Qandy Qantar (2023), Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer and teacher based in New York

Forever, from the series One Steppe Forward, 2019, plastic bags on polyethylene, 130 × 180 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

The Doors: In and Out of the Squares Artist project by Sim Raejung

Sim Raejung is a Korean artist based in Seoul. Her work, which typically takes the form of drawings, short animations (sometimes made with collaborators, such as the musician KIN) and paintings, as well as sculpture and installations, focuses on moments of mental, physical and social discomfort in everyday life, as well as the more bizarre and fantastical scenarios such episodes trigger. Her work, which oscillates between dark humour and lighter comedy, often highlights the disjuncture between reality and

the imaginary, which is in turn mirrored by the relationship between image and text (both Korean Hangul and English) in recent works. She uses these techniques to highlight the emptiness of cliches and everyday expressions as well as a human tendency to ‘keep calm and carry on’ through life despite the evident obstacles that are placed in our way. Sim’s work often operates around distortions of the body, as well as the more gruesome aspects of dismemberment, murder and even cannibalism. The

Winter 2024

artist has previously attributed this interest to the accidents, illnesses and injuries that affected her parents during her childhood, which, more generally relates to her interest in how what’s going on within the body is reflected without. pp.52–53 Ghosts of Secrets pp.54–55 Silence pp.56–57 Stage of Solitude pp.58–59 Smell all works 2024, ink on paper, 29 × 21 cm

Regroup and Repair

by Max Crosbie-Jones

Displaced creatives from Myanmar are finding solace and relative safety in Thailand’s remote corners and art communities 60

ArtReview Asia

Within the field of responsible exhibition-making and ethical art programming, risk management typically revolves around the elimination of health and safety hazards, background checks on sources of external funding, or perhaps, if the show at hand touches on sensitive topics, strategies to mitigate potential offence. In Thailand, however, another consideration is regularly factored in: the safety of any Myanmar citizens involved and of those close to, or affiliated with them. Since the 1 February 2021 coup in Myanmar created a new generation of fugitive political activists – among them artists, filmmakers, musicians and creative workers – a calculated sense of curatorial care has underpinned numerous shows. In January 2022, the group exhibition Defiant Art: A Year of Resistance to the Myanmar Coup in Images featured several unattributed posters and memes, on the grounds that many artists ‘cannot be named for security reasons’. And, more recently, Trails of Absence & Symbols of Presence: Loss & Protest in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution comprised works by two artists using aliases: ‘Sai’ and ‘Ta Mwe’. Both exhibitions were hung along the curved wall on level four of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) – an unassuming yet high-footfall space – and staged by SEA Junction, a nonprofit that aims to make regional sociocultural and development issues accessible through talks as well as art. At the Trails of Absence panel talk, where speakers including James Rodehaver, the head of the UN human-rights team monitoring the situation in Myanmar, appeared in person, Sai joined via Zoom but kept his camera off – his pseudonym appeared in white font on a black screen as he spoke. Other safeguards are subtler still, yet potentially no less impactful at mitigating conceivable harms. At Bangkok’s Jim Thompson Art Center in late September, a prominent Yangon-based curator gave a talk about the post-COVID-19 and post-coup realities of Yangon’s art market and Myanmar’s contemporary art scene: a period during

which, the blurb teased, ‘the smallest string between the country and the international community was once again torn apart’. But instead of being broadcast live on Facebook, the talk was recorded, the centre’s director Gridthiya Gaweewong revealed in her closing remarks, so it could be edited – expunged of statements that might land him in trouble back in Myanmar – before being uploaded to YouTube. “I appreciate that,” said the curator. Such concessions to the welfare of the Myanmar creative are happening worldwide – post-coup exhibitions and panel discussions of a similarly empathic and circumspect nature have been staged everywhere from Oslo to Sydney and London. But Thailand, which shares a porous 2,416km jungle border with Myanmar, itself has a history of popular uprisings and artivism in response to cycles of thwarted democracy and unchecked dictatorship. A refuge for Burmese migrants and refugees for decades (despite its not being a signatory to the 1951 UN refugee convention), Thailand is proving a hotbed of post-coup responses and solidarity. Some Thai artists have responded to recent events in Myanmar in the way that feels most natural: the painter Ubatsat, for example, has recreated Guernica, Picasso’s cacophonous depiction of Hitler’s 1937 bombing of a village in northern Spain, but infused it with his own uncontained sense of horror and dread. Currently on prominent display at MAIIAM Museum of Contemporary Art in Chiang Mai, as part of the exhibition Living Another Future, Burmica (2022) overlays visual elements drawn from across Burmese political history – such as a sheet of corrugated iron in a bombed out village, and the ‘prodemocracy martyr’ Kyal Sin kneeling on the front lines of the 2021 protests – with mirrored inversions of Picasso’s abstracted cubist forms and figures. Meanwhile, a handful of Thai curators are collaborating with, or training, young Burmese artists with a view to helping

facing page Richie Nath, Bitch better have my democracy, 2021, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist above Ubatsat, Burmica, 2022, industrial lacquer, metallic paint and acrylic on plywood, digital interactive, archival material, seven components, 240 × 840 cm. Courtesy the artist and Suvannabhumi Art Gallery, Chiang Mai

Winter 2024

them bypass the Thai art scene’s gatekeepers, gain exposure or better respects. “Everyone thinks that, with the military coup and COVID, conceptualise their practices. Yet, above all, Thailand is offering space the local art market is gone,” explained the Yangon-based curator for Myanmar creatives of all stripes to self-organise, share experi- during his talk. “No, the money is there, it’s just not in the contempoences, forge connections and, to a degree, make art that speaks to the rary market. It’s in all the traditional paintings, old master’s works, Myanmar military’s assault on their fledgling democracy and dreams auctions.” But any buzz has dissipated. In a March 2020 opinion piece – something that can’t, tragically, be said of the art scene in Yangon, for ArtReview Asia, Myanm/art’s founder, Nathalie Johnston, hailed the many works being produced that probe the country’s complex where self-censorship is now pervasive. An August 2021 post by Myanm/art, a leading Yangon gallery, historical layers, including ‘legacies of colonialism, military dictatoroffers a blunt reminder of the double whammy that hit Yangon’s con- ship, the quest for freedom and democracy, the problematic relations temporary art scene hard. While the relaxation of COVID-19 restric- between the Burmese Buddhist majority and the numerous ethnic tions in January 2021 meant that art spaces could reopen, and spurred minorities in the country’. Yet works of this nature swiftly disapa sense of cautious excitement about the future, ‘Relief was not to peared from Yangon galleries after the coup. And for good reason. come,’ Myanm/art’s directors wrote. ‘On 1 February 2021, the mili- “There are and has always been those who consciously create political tary of Myanmar staged a coup, Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested, along art and those who wish to go beyond or work outside of the purely with several elected officials, activists, filmmakers and musicians. political,” she explains to me. “But they seem to be on opposite sides The result was army personnel entering Yangon in force for the first of the border now, with those inside Myanmar unable to make polittime in nearly a decade. Courageous, stunning, and unifying protests icised art for fear of their safety and that of their families, and those turned deadly after several weeks and Yangon – along with the rest of outside who have the fearlessness to speak out.” the country – descended into chaos.’ This climate of fear has been exacerbated by the introduction, in The net effect of this military crackdown was a hollowing out of the February this year, of a military conscription law that requires men creative sphere, as artists involved in the protests and Civil Disobedience aged eighteen to thirty-five years and women aged eighteen to twentyMovement fled. ‘Some left the country, finding residency opportunities seven to serve a minimum of two years in the military. “The conscripabroad,’ Myanm/art’s post continues. ‘Others left Yangon to shelter in tion law has changed everything,” says Johnston. “Now it seems it’s their hometowns and villages, some of which are safer than the larger not safe for young people to even gather.” Myanm/art is still hosting cities. Many more were imprisoned or disappeared.’ Meanwhile, scores exhibitions, she adds, but “is not what it used to be: an active meeting of Myanmar’s cultural luminaries, including artists, writers, poets, place for young people, artists, researchers and visitors.” In contrast, Thailand, whilst presenting its cartoonists and film stars died in the third wave Nuntana Wongtawee, Border Shipping, own latent risks (especially for undocumented of the pandemic. Sawasdee Ka, 2024 (performance view, Limbo, Nearly four years on from the coup, Yangon’s immigrants, of which there are a growing Some Space Gallery, Chiang Mai), performance number due to the conscription law), offers art scene remains active, even frothy in certain and installation. Photo: Kaung Kaung

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pro-resistance, antiauthoritarian Myanmar creatives more room for Burma – an ‘ad-hoc community of loosely-connected creatives’ – and free expression – something that Limbo, a festival of ‘Thai-Myanmar also organises a festival of music, food, art and film from Myanmar, creative and cultural events’ held in Chiang Mai in September, proved Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, each February. “As I see things, we’re not just with aplomb. Activities during its three-week duration included a guests. We need to also be growing with the community.” For her, poetry and acoustic music evening, and a buffet where fire-grilled this responsibility entails balancing out the parties and high jinks Burmese and Thai food was served, all of which seemed purpose- with serious issues-based exhibitions, such as When We See the Planes, built to bring disparate groups of people together. But each event was a group show first staged in Bangkok in June, which brought to light framed by trauma-informed discussions, themes, narratives – or, in the junta’s indiscriminate airstrikes on civilian targets (this highly controversial subject matter wasn’t flagged in the title, to minimise the case of those held at Some Space Gallery, art. Documentary photographer Khin Sandar Nyut, for example, the chance of attracting unwelcome attention). Often documented online, such projects constitute “an used mortar-round shells, recovarchive of our revolution,” she says, ered by her friends fighting in an Nearly four years on from the coup, armed insurgent group, the Karenni as well as advocacy tools. Yangon’s art scene remains active, Nationalities Defence Force, to create An Australian citizen, Hnin even frothy in certain respects emigrated to Melbourne aged foursculptures and a printed runway carteen (following Myanmar’s brutally pet (Mortars: Junta’s residuals, 2024). Even the most joyous of Limbo’s activities – a display of Thangyat, suppressed ‘8888 Uprising’ in 1988, her parents fled to a refugee a Burmese performance art that blends traditional drums with satir- camp on the Thai-Burma border and eventually gained asylum in ical verses often directed at the authorities – cut deep, contrasting Australia). But she moved to Yangon to run a bar and art space in the comical asides with digs at corrupt Thai transport police and snarky mid-2010s, at a time when the country was experiencing waves of commentary about Chiang Mai’s changing demographics. “Burmans investment amid democratic reform. Then, after fleeing in the wake coming waves by waves,” they chanted over a driving beat. “Here of events of 2021, travelling aimlessly and spending time in Bangkok, comes next batch, next batch / To the place of better survival / Let’s she eventually settled in Chiang Mai – a city that has historically been keep strong / We must go back home one day.” a refuge for political exiles and economic migrants from Myanmar, Limbo was forged in exactly this pragmatic spirit: in the hope especially nearby Shan State. “The beauty of Chiang Mai is it’s not like of fostering better connections between the exiled Myanmar artist- Bangkok,” she says. “Here we see each other everywhere – when there activist and the Thai equivalent, nurturing new connections and is an event the whole of Chiang Mai goes. And now, Thai artists are keeping strong.“We don’t know how long we’re interacting more with Burmese artists.” Limbo event ‘Playing With Fire’ going to be here,” says cocurator Ma Hnin, who Cultivating these interactions for the purat The Goodcery, poses of Limbo wasn’t easy, for sociopolitical runs the Chiang Mai-based collective A New Chiang Mai, 2024. Photo: Kaung Kaung

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as well as logistical reasons. “What’s happening in Myanmar and what’s express, as a group ideally, the conditions and historical context of happening in Thailand are very different, even though we share and Myanmar on their own terms,” says Johnston, who is now based in live under the same feelings of frustration,” says Hnin. To create Sri Lanka. “Thailand is providing a safe haven for that practice. The co-understanding, she and two Thai curators, Somrak Sila (Limbo’s crowd in Chiang Mai especially is creating their own platforms and project director) and Thawiphat Praengoen, held workshops that keeping the artistic spirit of Myanmar alive.” She also points to the sought to break down barriers and build trust. According to young tense Thai border city of Mae Sot, where filmmakers, poets, artists Thai filmmaker and actor Jakkrapan Sriwichai (who collaborated with and musicians number among the many thousands of Myanmar refua Myanmar artist-activist who goes by the moniker Ants are Always gees, and where Artist’s Shelter, a filmmaker-run nonprofit that seeks Busy), these exercises – especially the playing of an activist-strategy to empower them to continue working safely, is active. card game called ‘Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution’ – Look closely, and you’ll also see an evolution: the protest motifs and slogans widely exhibited in the spurred the participants to think wake of the 2021 coup have made hard “about how to make art that is The protest motifs and slogans widely way for more nuanced, biographical not just an aesthetic thing, but has exhibited in the wake of the 2021 coup and honest works that tap into the a hidden function”. have made way for more nuanced, personal perspectives, diasporic jourNot everyone is complimentary neys and emotional responses of the about such developments. One anonbiographical and honest works displaced. This is art rooted in the ymous observer believes the 2021 coup gave an opening to anyone from Myanmar who wanted to bill them- realisation that the junta were not toppled by street protests, threeselves as a protest artist, resulting in “some fairly mediocre artists” finger salutes or civil disobedience, and that there are new battles now being “taken seriously for the first time”. Comparing the pre-coup being waged both inside and outside the country (including literal literature on Myanmar contemporary art with the tenor of post-coup ones: much of Myanmar is today at war, a broad alliance of ethnic international shows, it is also patently clear that efforts to push back armed groups and a ‘People’s Defence Force’ seeking to overthrow the against foreign curators’ pigeonholing of Myanmar artists as inher- military regime). And in the realisation that psychological pain can, in ently political have fallen by the wayside. (Arguably, Burmese artists fact, be generative. still remain, to quote a 2018 piece by art historian Yin Ker in Afterall, At one extreme, this realisation has resulted in works as blunt and ‘an exhibit of “Myanmar” and a detainee of orientalism 2.0 couched blistering as Annt Hmue Mahr’s Goodbye Rebel! (2024), a photoseries documenting the Mae Sot funeral of FL3XX, a rapper who died from in politicised rhetoric.’) But even for those who voiced such complaints in the past, using kidney failure last January. Shown at Limbo, these stark black-andart to speak out against the coup and hosting events like Limbo are white images of his friends huddling around his coffin and raising important. “At this point, it is about finding a place where artists can three fingers in tribute were accompanied by captions explaining

Maung Phoe, from the series Portrait of Detention: Drawings of Insein Prison. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and SEA Junction, Bangkok

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Sai, ‘She is left behind alone, fighting for my father as his attorney. The junta could kill her at any time. The whole compound is surrounded by soldiers’ from the series Traces of Absence, wallpaper installation, 119 × 84 cm. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2024

Annt Hmue Mahr, from the series Goodbye Rebel!, 2024, photo essay. © and courtesy the artist

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how the young rapper had, prior to his fleeing to Mae Sot, jumped from a five-storey building to escape Myanmar’s military police (he survived, but some of his friends didn’t). And at the other extreme, it has resulted in series as subdued and evocative as Sai’s Trails of Absence (2021–, exhibited at the BACC twice this year), which comprises mixedmedia photographs of he and his mother taken while he was in hiding. In them, they hold pieces of tape between them to denote the resilience of their strained bond. Fabrics smuggled out from Myanmar’s prisons, woven together in the style of Shan carpets, mask their identities. Sai’s trajectory as a contemporary artist, with its origins in persecution, global ties and strong links to Thailand, is illustrative – doubly so given that he never set out to be one. Prior to the coup, he had been working as a curator alongside his wife, and preparing to stage Kalaw Contemporary Arts Festival, a biennale in the hillside town of Kalaw, Shan State, focusing on marginalised artists. “The international community don’t know much about the narratives, cultures or experiences of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities. We intended to fill that gap,” he says. These plans were shelved, however, when the coup happened. Soon Sai was contributing to the protest movement in Yangon by making riot shields and creating infographics about how best to deal with teargas and gunshot wounds. And then came a daring move: he headed back to Taunggyi, the capital of Shan state, where his father – the state’s chief minister – was in prison on trumped-up charges, and his mother under house arrest. The images that comprise Trails of Absence were shot in the spacious rooms of the colonial-era house where his mother was being held – and, to this day, remains.

Since he fled the country (after 244 days in hiding), Sai has been using his autobiographical art as a tool to raise international awareness about political prisoners at large, and the horrors of an often-overlooked conflict. Thus far, this advocacy work – which dovetails with a wider interest in peacebuilding and transitional justice (processes likely to be invaluable if and when a future democratic Myanmar becomes a reality) – has brought him into contact with numerous sympathetic politicians, such as Tulip Saddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate in the UK, and members of the US Congress, where he recently appeared at a congressional briefing about arbitrary detention in Myanmar. But many of his most fruitful connections were forged in Thailand. Forthcoming is a new chapter of Trails of Absence, based on his recent dialogues with survivors of abduction and torture in the border regions. And whilst Sai has encountered prejudice in Thailand (such as a landlord who refused to rent to him simply because he is from Myanmar), and has firm red lines governing what he will and won’t do here (“I choose not to take part in exhibitions where lots of Myanmar people gather, as there’s a risk that Myanmar intelligence could monitor them,” he says), he has felt welcomed by the country’s art community and civil society. “When Thai artists and activists reached out to me, in the form of programming and solidarity, I was touched,” he says. “That was the first step to my feeling closer to this country. Now Thailand is, in a way, the next best thing to home.” ara When We See the Planes will be on view at Some Space Gallery, Chiang Mai, 5–15 December; Can’t Stop Won’t Stop festival will take place 20–22 February

Sai, ‘Portraits of arrested President U Win Myint (left) now held in Taungoo Prison, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s Father, General Aung San (right), This is what the living room looks like after Father was taken hostage. Mother started to packwhile under house arrest’, from the series Trails of Absence, fabric installation, 142 × 213 cm. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2024

Calida Rawles, Thy Name We Praise, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin. © Calida Rawles

powering the world of art

Art is honor

Miami Beach Convention Center December 6 - 8, 2024

Art Reviewed

And then go back to writing 69

Satoshi Kawata Techne for the Public Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art 16 July – 6 October Travellers to Japan are inevitably drawn to the country’s vast metropolitan cities and famed natural attractions, such as its mountains and hot springs; few would think to spend time in the suburbs. From my perspective as a road tripper who likes overnighting in these towns, the experience, one to the next, is almost identical: such areas are dominated by an arterial road lined by signboards for franchises such as McDonald’s and 7-Eleven and local restaurant chains like Gusto, then further out from this thoroughfare can be found quiet residential zones filled with small grey houses and narrow streets. Having become acquainted with this landscape over some time, I was surprised by Satoshi Kawata’s interpretation of Japan’s suburbs in his exhibition at The Triangle, a space that was added to the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art two years ago to showcase emerging artists. Born in Osaka and now based in Kyōtango, Kawata specialises in frescoes and has covered the walls of The Triangle with an abstract painting that, through scale alone, creates an immersive environment of overlapping green and yellow jagged spikes that jab and poke in all directions – a visual that is far from the bland and homogenous topographies that are nicknamed ‘fast-scenery’ by Japanese netizens. Kawata’s forms bring to mind various associations: crystalline shards, proliferating plant growth and soil, and pylons. Overall, the work infuses the gallery with the frenetic energy of a landscape in flux. The wall text explains that Kawata was inspired by the ‘civil engineering technology that shapes the suburban landscape’

– an ongoing preoccupation of his recent works – and mentions artificially sloped terrains and large transmission towers among his visual references; all of which can be glimpsed in the diagonals and sharp angles of Techne for the Public, while fine blue grids in the background suggest electrical circuitry. More salient though than the urban-planning references is the colossal sense of movement, force and vitality. His vision of the suburbs is a shifting, fractured, tectonic reality where land masses slide and overlap, towers grow and break, and plant life runs rife. If suburbs are indeed replicating themselves across Japan, Kawata’s work suggests that this could be due to their own mysterious agency and ability to colonise. That the artist has evolved his practice by focusing on mural painting is notable in itself. Often installed in public spaces, frescoes can be considered a civic artform, which invests Kawata’s work with a certain generosity; an egalitarian quality (he has painted within public baths and schools) that stands in refreshing contrast to the stately presentation of national treasures housed in the main building of the Kyocera complex. As well as this, Kawata’s paintings are a fascinating ‘street’ interpretation of a tradition that is thousands of years old. A highly technical process, frescoes are made by applying plaster on the wall and painting before the material sets. This is usually a very controlled methodology, where the artist works in stages; Kawata has a freer process. He applies plaster in irregularly shaped patches before painting on them. When one patch dries, he might plaster

on another patch that overlaps slightly with the previous one. Looking at the work up-close reveals a wealth of details: the textured surfaces of plaster, still bearing the traces of how it was slapped onto the wall and spread around, alongside the chalky, matte shades of the vibrant pigment that is somewhere between watercolour and pastel. In his hands, frescoes are an active, fluid and expressive artform. Kawata’s frescoes don’t have to stay put, and part of the exhibition shows you how he intends to move them around. In the basement of The Triangle, which has cement walls, paintings were made using the traditional plaster-andpigment technique. But on the ground floor of the building, which has three glass sides, the artist has hung canvases onto which frescoes have been imprinted. These imprints were made using the ‘strappo’ technique by which canvases are pressed onto the painted fresco and then stripped off, resulting in a negative print of the fresco. It is a method typically used to conserve ageing frescoes on crumbling, unsalvageable buildings. At the end of the exhibition, Kawata plans to use this technique to detach the frescoes in the basement and transport them elsewhere, giving them the opportunity of a new life. You could connect this process back to the subject matter – these so-called manufactured suburbs are copied and pasted from place to place by urban planners. But the process also reveals Kawata’s take on the artform, which values flexibility over fixity. His frescoes are not only hard, permanent objects but also soft, detachable skins. Adeline Chia

Kawata Satoshi: Techne for the Public, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Koroda Takeru. Courtesy Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art

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Kawata Satoshi: Techne for the Public, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Koroda Takeru. Courtesy Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art

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Hu Jiayi Her Mustache Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai 12 September – 11 October This is an invitation-only show. It’s tucked away at the back of the gallery’s main space; to get to it, you are led through two thick curtains behind a ‘Staff Only’ sign and hand in your phones and cameras as if you’re at a Berlin nightclub. There’s a similar idea of exclusivity at work here, but more as a means of keeping the casual passersby away from a series of works by Chinese artist Hu Jiayi, whose 18 photographs mainly show her pubic hair, either pictured in or attached to the (mostly) black-and-white compositions. On one wall of the dim maroon space hang seven unframed closeup photographs of Hu’s naked groin (Her Mustache, 2024). Her pubic hair is thick, deliberately styled into sharply pointed locks to look like the titular facial feature, curving upward like a devil’s horns. In one, Hu’s hand wraps around a clump of hair shaped like an imaginary phallus that she’s stimulating. Humorous, sarcastic, unabashed and oblivious to taboos, Hu is almost in love with her own abjection and the part of her body often deemed gross, improper and horrible. Hu’s show would easily be tagged as ‘pornographic’ were it open to the general public. But the works on view go beyond

breaking taboos or embracing the female body. In Dali’s Mustache (2017–22), nine ornately framed replicas of iconic portraits of Salvador Dalí show the artist staring into the camera with his trademark moustache, which, upon a closer look, is revealed to be styled from real pubic hair. Attached carefully in the place of – and masked as – Dalí’s handlebars, they are coarse and unruly, unequivocally sticking out from the picture’s flatness. In the wall text, an imaginary dialogue unfolds between the artist and Dalí, in which Hu explains to the Surrealist her choice of picking his moustache to emulate, rather than, say, Stalin’s, as ‘the cost is too high’ to parrot the facial hair of the political leader (she references the supposed fate of Yevsei Lubytskyi, one of Stalin’s body doubles, cast into a gulag in 1949 for ‘damaging the leader’s image’ after having dressed as Stalin). Hu couldn’t borrow from the more powerful and provocative moustaches, so she picked an easier fight. Dalí’s moustache is lighthearted, eccentric and not politically charged. Dalí, per the dialogue, doesn’t mind: ‘My joy is in knowing you’ve glued pubic hair to my upper lip’. What’s at stake, then, seems to be the political power that she cannot afford to desecrate, and her pubic-hair-turned-moustaches allude

Dali’s Mustache XXII, 2017–22, pubic hair, archival inkjet print, wooden frame, 41 × 35 × 9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai

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to a reality where masculinity and political power intertwines – a reality she and her Chinese audience have to live through. The fact that Hu was born in Xinjiang and is ethnically Han adds another layer of geopolitical complication. In the only colour photograph on view, Juejiang Maimaiti (The Resolute Muhammad, 2020), Hu wears a doppa (Uyghur skullcap) and a large, thick beard, and poses regally in an extravagant living room with the decorative clichés of a well-appointed Uyghur home: gold and silver draperies, intricate Persianate rugs and a tableful of fruits, nuts, Uyghur bread and beer. She sits crosslegged on her glorious throne, her lips tilted upward, looking playful. Starting in 2017, the Chinese government officially implemented a policy dubbed the ‘counter-extremism act’ that restricted facial hair for members of the Muslim community. During the pandemic, such restrictions were momentarily neglected, allowing Hu to walk around Ürümqi with a big beard on her face. For a young girl of Han ethnicity, this would be against both tradition and law. But she casually photographs herself, disrupting the ethnic, gendered and political lines involved. Xinjie Wang

Naoya Hatakeyama Tsunami Trees Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo 31 August – 28 September A lone, ancient tree displaying only half of its leaves stands eerily over a green riverbank. Life was seized from its branches several years before the photo was taken, when a devastating tsunami brought the land surrounding it to zero. Part of a series titled Tsunami Trees, the image is quietly beguiling, with the solitary plant seeming as if it might hold some kind of secret – some memory of a land and time now erased. Naoya Hatakeyama lost his home, as well as his mother, in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which was triggered on 11 March. The anniversary of the most devastating natural disaster in the country’s immediate history looms large over the public imagination, and the consequences of this calamity continue to remain plainly visible along the coastal areas – locations that appear in Tsunami Trees – most affected. The ten pictures exhibited from the series are rendered in large format, allowing the viewer to immerse themselves within each scene. Most of the pictures focus on a single tree, each characterised by irregular dead branches. The postdisaster image has a tendency to fit either within a narrative of grief, photos that document the pure loss of the landscape, or of human resilience, photos that show how, with our unified effort, we can overcome – or at least

rebuild – what was lost. It seems significant that Tsunami Trees does not fit either of these narratives. The settings and conditions selected by Hatakeyama are decidedly tranquil. We are not forced to reckon with the changes in the landscape, but given a single point to consider. In these settings, the trees seem so improbable, so removed from reality, and yet somehow they stand, as sturdy and simple as any other tree you’ve seen before. This is not to say the photos are without tragedy. The last two images show a single group of bare trees subsumed by a body of water, all but three fallen over and ready to be carried away. There is something deeply upsetting about their expendability. A gallery handout frames this disconnect simply: ‘at times the trees are revered as a steadfast presence, and at other times they are inconsiderately cut down and used’. A line can be traced from Tsunami Trees to Hatakeyama’s previous works such as Quarry (1986–91), which documents the lime hills of Japan, and Blast (1995–2010), a series of controlled explosions triggered as part of the industrial mining of lime, to his city photography, such as the River series (1993–94), which finds lime recast in the huge concrete walls surrounding the low rivers of Tokyo. Where these previous works found

conclusion in the transformation of material and established a sort of order by mapping the human-landscape interface, the uncertain fate of the Tsunami Trees leave us with the feeling of something unpunctuated, something unknowable. Perhaps this is the nature of disaster. The final wall of the exhibition houses a related series of photos titled Kochi, taken between 2021 and 2022, which captures temporary tsunami-evacuation towers recently built around the coast of Kochi prefecture. The environments in Kochi exude a similar serenity to the Tsunami Trees, although an explicit, imminent danger is signalled through these built constructions that alludes to the potential loss of the landscape at some point in the future. Multiple shots of each tower give a sense of perspective in relation to their respective settings. Locals have been warned that the Nankai megathrust earthquake anticipated to hit Kochi within the next 30 years will create a wave 34-metres tall. The consequences are inevitable and the Japanese government has persisted in giving public warnings about an earthquake that could devastate the country. And yet, as though nothing else could be more natural, as if dismissing a bad dream, people – and trees – remain. Toby Reynolds

From the series Tsunami Trees, 2019, lambda print, 108 × 127 cm, edition 1/5. © the artist. Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

Winter 2024

15th Gwangju Biennale Pansori – A Soundscape of the 21st Century Various venues, Gwangju 7 September – 1 December Look it up on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage website and you’ll find that pansori is a Korean musical genre. It began as a form of public storytelling during the seventeenth century, having evolved, most likely, from the narrative songs of shamans. The word is also the title of this year’s Gwangju Biennale, under the artistic direction of French curator Nicolas Bourriaud. Its meaning in this context is a little less straightforward. The wall text that welcomes you to the twin bunkers that make up the Biennale Exhibition Hall declares that Pansori, the biennial, is going to be an ‘operatic exhibition about the space we live in’. In one fell swoop, a unique musical performance that originated in Korea has been translated into a theatrical art form that evolved in Europe a hundred years earlier. The space of pansori, we are told, is a ‘relational space’ shared between ‘humans, machines, animals, spirits, and organic life’; a reminder, perhaps, that Bourriaud remains best known for coining the term ‘relational aesthetics’ in the 1990s to describe art production informed by human interaction. Then, before you can blink, the nature of space itself is on the table. The text declares that all landscapes are soundscapes, and that, as a result, the musical and the visual are connected. And that this relationship is also

what the exhibition is really about. At this point, you might have begun to realise that all of this is an extension of that earlier urge to translate (which should also, in turn, trigger questions about the relationship between translation and definition). With this logic in place, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the exhibition has become a space that denies common sense in its entirety. Although that perspective probably gets to the core of what most people think contemporary art is all about. Getting back to the point – even if identifying what that might be has already become a topic of some confusion – the text finally declares that the two hangul characters that make up the word pansori ‘mean “the noise [sori] from the public space [pan]” which might also be translated as the voice of the subalterns’. At this stage of the translation game you might either be thinking that pansori means everything or that it means nothing. Perhaps, after a certain point, the two amount to the same thing here anyway. But there’s no time to quibble over linguistics. Next up is a walk through a dark tunnel and into the bright lights of the exhibition proper. Emeka Ogboh’s Oju 2.0 (2022), an ambient soundtrack made up, I later learn, of interviews and field recordings carried out in Lagos, guides you through the darkness. Or even further into it.

At once here (Gwangju) and there (Lagos). Perhaps ultimately nowhere? Traffic is alluded to along with the general hubbub that results from urban saturation, but, as a whole, it’s a kind of white noise: ultimately unidentifiable. Is this what the voice of the subalterns sounds like to those in power? You are left to wonder. The bright lights at the end of the tunnel belong to Cinthia Marcelle’s Não existe mais lugar neste lugar [There Is No More Space In This Place] (2019–24), which is an empty carpeted office-type space in which the ceiling tiles are precariously displaced in a manner that might be reflective of the passing of a natural disaster – or an individual who violently objected to standardisation in the construction industry. On a rainy day, such as the one on which I visited, the dark industrial carpeting picks up the mud from visitors’ shoes in a manner that only enhances the sense of despoilation. After that, Peter Buggenhout’s assemblies of what look like bombed out or decaying architecture – pipes, reinforcement bars and dust-covered, leathery skins – feel like overkill and more than a little redundant, given that any news channel right now is going to give you plentiful imagery of similar desolation in the ‘real’ world. More effective are a collection of collages by Kandis Williams from a series titled gods and

Cinthia Marcelle, Não existe mais lugar neste lugar [There Is No More Place in This Place], 2019–24, carpet, metal, foam, lamps, 796 × 1,101 × 230 cm (space design: Flora Simon Gurgel). Adapted commission by the 15th Gwangju Biennale. Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo

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monsters that white people make up to kill us all (2024) that feature (white) pop-cultural horror characters such as Patrick Bateman, Freddy Krueger, Ghostface and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, intermixed with images of Black bodies working sugar plantations and Black boxers, soldiers, revolutionaries and movie stars. Williams does this in such a way that fact and fiction blend into some sort of Frankensteinian whole, as do the performed and the real, both of which speak to the ongoing legacy of the colonial imagination and the colonising effects of the entertainment industry. The work finds echoes in Choi Haneyl’s sculptural installa tion Crying Uncle’s Room (2024), which is something of a horror show itself. Featuring body sections and body parts that are packed onto what look like giant circuit boards or the equally large versions of the white polystyrene trays you might find in a butcher’s shop, at times they rise up, suspended as a cacophony of arms and intestines and legs that nevertheless feel recognisably disembodied as much as they are obvious embodiments. The aura is of something that has been alienated from itself. Sung Tieu’s sonic and sculptural installation System’s Void (2024) incorporates large black pipes that have been inserted into a sandy desert landscape suggesting that what the body is being subjected to in Haneyl’s work is also being faced by the land (it’s not quite clear if the pipes relate to extraction or insertion, but to do the one thing you generally have to perform the other). Tieu’s work later finds an aesthetic echo in that of Bianca Bondi, an installation, The Long Dark Swim

(2024), featuring a stagelike space carved out of white sand dunes, featuring a swimming-poollike hole (complete with swimming-pool ladder) out of which emerge a ring of green fronds. Meanwhile, another installation, by Düsseldorf-based Mira Mann, objects of the wind (2024), centres around a horizontal landscape of illuminated makeup mirrors and photographs of pungmul performances. On top of a stainless steel shelf has been placed novels, photographs, empty tea cups, nurses’ hats, feather headdresses, gongs and various references to nursing schools and medicine: taken as a whole, the work is a meditation on the Korean nurses who took up jobs in West Germany during the 1960s and 70s, both to earn money and to escape the strictures of the oppressive regime in their homeland. But it’s the feeling of self-reflection and of the identities we maintain or construct that pervades here. It’s in these types of echoes (in this case with the work of Williams), or moments of calls and responses, work to work, that the exhibition is at its strongest. But the fact that none of the works on show have been offered much in the way of contextual labelling means that viewers, for the most part, are left to work things out through formal or aesthetic analysis alone. And while this might place a greater emphasis on the artist’s skills as a storytellers, it also tends to feel a little disconcerting, leaving unclear too many questions regarding the artist’s intentions and motivations, as well as more layered meanings. On the one hand this can mean that you wander around

the show wondering if it’s presenting a theory that is looking to be proven; on the other, you wonder whether it might be the facts of the works themselves that are in search of a theory. There is, of course, the rare moment when a body of work stands out on its own, in this case a pair of videos by Hyeongsuk Kim, in an offsite space in the Yangnim district. New Home (2018) and The House is Black (2024) explore the changing identity of the artist’s hometown of Nanju (while the Korean artist was living in Berlin) as original residents were replaced by wealthy newcomers and government planning transformed the town’s fabric. And there are times when haziness isn’t necessarily a bad thing; indeed, it’s a feature of works such as Netta Laufer’s 35cm (2017–18), a series of surveillance photographs documenting small mammals that pass through passages in the border walls of the West Bank, obtaining a level of freedom that humans on the ‘wrong’ side don’t have, while making themselves more vulnerable to predation. Perhaps, in the end, the overriding vagueness is a close approximation to what it’s like to look at things in the world outside of exhibition halls, reinforced by the blurring boundaries here as sounds bleed from one artwork into the space of another (most of the works noted above are from a section titled ‘Feedback Effect’ that talks about a world that is ‘contiguous, contagious and immediate’). But that’s the ‘real’ world; why would anyone go to an exhibition to experience that? Mark Rappolt

Hyeongsuk Kim, The House Is Black (still), 2018, single-channel video, colour, sound, 5 min. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2024

Udomsak Krisanamis light my way Neugerriemschneider, Berlin 11 September – 9 November Udomsak Krisanamis’s origin story is well rehearsed by now, but since it continues to inflect his art, let’s spell it out again. In 1991, when the Thai artist arrived at the Art Institute of Chicago in his mid-twenties, after studying in his home city of Bangkok, he barely spoke a word of English. Krisanamis began to learn the language by reading American newspapers, pencilling out the words he knew and looking up the remaining mysteries. This meticulous process, which led to pagefuls of darkness glimmering with luminous unknowns, led in turn to the redaction aesthetic of his early works. These collage-paintings, reminiscent of a star field, featured crisscrossing blacked-out strips of newsprint stippled with white dots, underneath all of which lay another, legible language. This stylistic undergirding has lingered in Krisanamis’s practice even as he’s overlaid it with different compositional structures, whether grids, wobbly verticals and oceanic horizontal ripples, clear-cut circles or nearmonochromes. Perhaps not surprisingly, a baseline of newsprint collage structures several of the 14 paintings in the artist’s first show with Neugerriemschneider. In the eponymous, horizontal-format Light My Way (2024), for example, a tactile expanse of pasted-down, dotted black stripes is intricately divided by wavering white lines that, together, suggest flaking tree-bark or painterly craquelure, flecked with flashes of primary colour and interrupted here and there by waveformlike regions of unpainted newsprint,

rhythmically pulsing with printed sixes and nines. A faint row of largish outlined black circles, or zeroes, marches across the canvas’s upper half. Step right back and you could be looking at something organic. Or perhaps be reminded of a painting by Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still – references to whom, seemingly as a shorthand for the history of abstraction, are more explicit elsewhere. See, for instance, the jagged contours within 2023’s Too Fast to Handle, painted on a surface that has been crisscrossed with heavyweight packing tape. Move in on Krisanamis’s work and the sense of abstraction all but dissolves, leaving you in a matrix of numbers and codification. Numbers, in our world (and maybe beyond it), underlie everything. This sustained tension or would-be rapprochement between abstraction and information flows has been Krisanamis’s basecamp for a long time, likely because it’s an unplumbable well: the viewer receives the high-end pleasures of art without feeling cut off from quotidian reality, as well as recognising that painting still has the potential to develop through material innovations. You can construe, here, a narrative of creative immigrant adaptation in the approach to language learning, language bending; or enjoy the febrile pleasures of modernist aesthetics updated and globalised. In I Wish I Knew (2024), Krisanamis paints overlapping, Pop-flavoured black ovals – with callbacks, in the handling, to both Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein – on a doorlike side of an art transit case, outlining and

light my way, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Jens Ziehe. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin

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highlighting the ‘FRAGILE’ warnings. Bright painted swathes of tomato red and cerulean have been added, and, for good measure, the phrase ‘POCAHONTAS + ZARATHUSTRA’ is stencilled next to a Venn diagram at the bottom. You might, here, get caught up in trying to connect Native American land rights and Friedrich Nietzsche, though only if you’re not aware of the eponymous, wackily named art-handling company. In the back room, perhaps in a nod to the art-design-architecture hybrids of longtime gallery artist Jorge Pardo, Krisanamis further blurs painting with everything else. He drapes the walls with Warhol-ish silvery material and suspends a sculptural cluster of lamps from the ceiling, below which are a trio of hand-painted checkers sets – decorated with Thai script, with bottlecaps for pieces – sat on German beer crates and ringed by little chairs cheerily and cheaply patterned with striped tape. It all suggests a modest but quite cool bar, perhaps serving Thais here in Berlin. Two more dark-toned tickertape paintings hang on the rumpled walls; a third, full of scruffy Cubist patterning and with a pattern of colourful, circular plastic plates attached, is casually propped. This scenario, taken in sum, suggests an analogue to Krisanamis’s painting practice: a convocation of competing energies and still-circulating ghosts, and a reminder that for him abstract painting never stops, dreaming of formalist autonomy, at its edges. It moves through the world while the world moves through it. Martin Herbert

Too Fast to Handle, 2023, acrylic and mesh tape on lacquered metal, 137 × 97 cm. Photo: Jens Ziehe. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin

Winter 2024

Hyeree Ro Niro Canal Projects, New York 27 September – 7 December When the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard visited the United States in the 1980s, he was both alarmed and mesmerised by the cars that crammed the freeways of Los Angeles: ‘All you need to know about American society can be gleaned from an anthropology of its driving behaviour,’ he declared in his book America (1986). The automobile is central to American life, of course, understood as a practical necessity in a vast country with poor public transit systems, and consequently functioning as a symbol of freedom and mobility. Perhaps with this in mind, New York-based artist Hyeree Ro makes the car the focal point of Niro (2024), using it to unravel a deeply personal narrative. In a gallery about the size of a carport sits the skeleton of a Kia Niro, the car model driven by the artist’s late father, from whom she was estranged for 13 years. The intricate structure is made of wood and aluminium and attached to a metal base on ball castors. Placed precariously inside the scaffolding of Niro (2024) is an assortment of smaller sculptures and objects, such as stones, shells and cone-shaped mounds of clay, which are initially difficult to make out within all the intersecting beams. Wispy pieces

of white paper hang limply from some of the beams like laundry, lending a skinlike quality, and a delicate touch to an otherwise rigid armature. Projected onto the gallery’s back wall is a video of various bodies of water – waterfalls, ocean waves – that includes audio recordings of interviews Ro conducted with friends about their experiences of crossing the Pacific Ocean (the artist herself grew up between Seoul and LA). Alongside this is another soundscape of the artist’s reflections recorded during a 14-hour road trip to Niagara Falls this summer. Roughly scaled to a Kia Niro’s actual proportions, Niro looks more like a raft than an automobile, devoid of polish and pretension. It looks to have been constructed in segments and indeed can be easily disassembled thanks to a series of metal latches, as the artist demonstrated during a series of performances than ran alongside the show. During the first of these, Ro painstakingly moved the wooden car and its accompanying objects around the gallery – sometimes sundered in thirds, sometimes intact – while she narrated the aftermath of her father’s unexpected passing. Oscillating between clipped English and Korean words and phrases, Ro’s splintered monologue rehashed

Niro, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Issy Leung. Courtesy the artist and Canal Projects, New York

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previous conversations with her father, as well as her phone calls with various administrators to close his bank accounts, clear his apartment and retrieve his Niro. The screeches made by the metal castors as the structure was moved around by Ro added to the overriding impression of the difficulty of it all – of the unwillingness of the sculpture to be moved, and, by extension, of Ro’s burdened relationship with her father. Once activated through such a performance, though, Niro becomes autonomous, with the sculpture disregarding the viewer, who must scurry out of its way. Cars, like any technology, can serve a prosthetic purpose, by compensating for the natural limitations of the human body. In the case of Niro, the car also functions as a sort of psychological prosthetics, a site for some of the artist’s most meaningful experiences with her father and thus a temporary substitution of a home they never shared. As an intensely private and enclosed space that is situated in the impersonal, public realm, the car here analogises the dynamics of closeness and distance between Ro and her father, reincarnating these dynamics as gestures, as force, as hiccuped movement. Emily Chun

Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane Grey Unpleasant Land Spike Island, Bristol 28 September – 19 January Tattered, tired, just about salvageable, ignoring the faint stains in the chamber pot. This is England, as conjured in Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane’s set of collaborative multimedia works. Both artists have previously used research-based approaches to critique Middle Eastern cultures and colonial histories; here, they examine ‘the myth of England as a nation’. The colossal critical purview stretches the show thin, but with English nationalism rife it’s a crucial subject to broach. Al-Maria and Ourahmane’s allusive works conjure a variety of down-and-out Englishnesses, but these are not convincing exegetes and their ambition doesn’t extend to proposals for reform or repair. The artists invoke an England dressed in folkloric, medieval(ish) historical costume. In the ceiling-hung stained-glass installation A Blessing and A Betrayal (2024), the panes are crowded with gothic blackletter and mock marginalia. A Blessing’s AI-generated ‘scriptural’ verse produces a visionary dream for the biblical Esau, passed over by God in favour of his nationfounding brother Jacob in Genesis 28. Framing Device I and II (2024) display the National

Gallery’s archival frames and wall text for the late-fourteenth-century Wilton Diptych, a portable altarpiece depicting Richard II with angels bearing St George’s Cross. The National Gallery’s curatorial text glosses the absent work’s symbolism. But the artists aren’t particularly interested in the history of English self-fashioning. Instead, they’re after the present-day processes that delimit national histories. Elsewhere we find the literally, prosaically English: Fly Tip (2024) is furniture salvaged by the artists from Bristol’s skips, vacuumpacked in crimp-sealed silver-foil pouches. Discernible inside the plastic: a mattress and loveseat. The work’s label indicates that dirt and hair are also concealed within. As emblems of Englishness, they exaggerate a culture of ‘sweeping things under the rug’. The artists pair these salvaged things with the inherited, intimating their equivalence: Job Lot (1750– 1799/2024), which contains an inheritance of 240 chamber pots, neighbours Curtains (2024), a lush, mauve pair of velvet drapes retrieved from a Belgravia skip. It’s a faintly pejorative

connection. And perhaps we deserve it – for the mind-numbing merriness of low-budget terrestrial TV programmes involving nostalgia, antique trinkets and minor celebrities, at least. The artists do take aim at the economic structures that shape English self-conception. Terra Nullius (2024) is an advert taken out in an issue of the politically conservative Spectator magazine: ‘Seeking English landowners burdened by carrying costs to participate in an endeavour of artistic significance.’ The work’s seductive euphemisms, and its title – meaning ‘nobody’s land’ – suggest a desire to catfish the English landowning class for redistributive purposes. As the gallery assistant tells me when I ring the listed number, the artists are looking for someone to give them some land for free. Suddenly, the show seems more like an acquisitive project than a fully-fanged critique. In Grey Unpleasant Land Al-Maria and Ourahmane act as the artist-radicals against a regressive tradition, but alternative versions of English identity and history, crowded as it is with utopian thinkers and social reformers, are disappointingly absent. Madeleine Jacob

Fly Tip, 2024, scavenged possessions, loose fibres, latent prints, trace evidence (hair, paint chips, insects, etc), miscellaneous residues (cigarette ash, arsenic contaminants, urine, etc), aluminium bag, impulse seal, vacuum pack. Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy Spike Island, Bristol

Winter 2024

Jen Liu I Am Cloud Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong 17 September – 2 November Constructed in 1770 for the Austrian royal court, the Mechanical Turk was presented as an automaton that could play chess. But this machine, it turned out, was merely a box that concealed a person who moved pieces from underneath the board, creating the illusion of an appliance that could think and act independently. This notion of a fabricated reality forms the crux of Jen Liu’s first solo show in Hong Kong. Through a series of paintings, sculptures and videos, the artist alludes to those employed by Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as the invisible, exploited labour force that labels data used to train AI models. These workers receive minimal compensation, sometimes below minimum wage, for annotating images using bounding boxes, which define the location and size of an object within a 2D or 3D space. Curious to put herself in their shoes, Liu signed up to be an ‘AI trainer’ on clickworker.com. She carried out the role for 30 hours, barely earning $15. This experience informs the work presented here. I Am Cloud (2024), a new videowork that gives the show its title, focuses on three figures – an Amazon MTurk worker, a microscopic Xenobot (a synthetic lifeform made from African frog stem cells and built by computers) and a nineteenth-century Chinese migrant sex worker living in the US – connected through their unseen role in society and, in the video, through their physical compression into increasingly small spaces. In one striking scene, a young girl is seen working inside a small, boxlike pod,

when suddenly, a phallic, wormlike limb enters the space. With her body contorted to adjust to the pod’s interior and the intrusive presence, she types on a keyboard mounted on one wall. Her existence is barely acknowledged by the worm limb, which is there, presumably, only to check that she continues to work. Liu makes further reference to invisible labour via a sculpture consisting of two white, cubic boxes: Describe a Product Based on an Image: A Versatile Soft Body Living Machine with Practical Applications Hidden Inside an Algorithmic Fantasy / Describe a Product Based on an Image: A Hyper Ecstasy that Celebrates Speed While Being Haunted by the Anxiety of Not Being There (2024). Seemingly normal bubbles are emitted from one of the units, but are in fact incorporated with pulverised MTurk documents that once contained information about data-entry tasks (a detail only gleaned from the exhibition text). The other unit includes a pair of animatronic eyes and emits robotic sounds derived from an audio chip extracted from a sex doll. Boxes are a central theme within the exhibition, both visually and conceptually – whether boundary boxes that data labellers place on images, Amazon’s shipping boxes or those that frame the artist’s acrylic paintings. It’s in her paintings on paper that Liu makes the invisible visible (that is, the robotic and human labour behind the capitalist system on which the world runs), illuminating the interconnectivity between seemingly disparate

entities. Packed with motifs and references, Liu’s images are replete with symbolic imagery such as skeletons bearing the weight of cloudlike formations; one of the first AI assistants, Microsoft’s Clippy (an animated paper clip that was universally derided for intrusively popping up onscreen with advice for users), makes repeated appearances such as in If the Clouds are Thick, Many Things May be Hiding Within (2024), through which Liu probes technology’s adeptness, competence and eventual obsolescence; and anthropomorphised industrial structures donning wigs, high heels and thongs intertwine with wires and plugs in What a Street-Walking Broad: All Dolled Up Like a Charming Young Lass (2024). The eye-catching, glimmering sheen in these paintings is made from pulverised e-waste – defunct digital devices that have been discarded and crushed, and seemingly applied here as references to both the physical machines that are the facades of new technology and a socialmedia culture that masks reality. Peer behind the veil, and you’ll find a vast workforce of humans toiling to create the gleaming interface of contemporary digital platforms. Liu positions herself much like the man inside the Mechanical Turk, but unlike him she focuses on revealing the mechanics rather than concealing them, shaping the revelations and connections that prompt us to rethink the way we comprehend the virtualisation and mechanics of labour systems – and those working within them. Aaina Bhargava

I Am Cloud (still), 2024, 4K single-channel video, 15 min, edition of 5 + AP. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

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If a Cloud Forms Around You, You May Feel a Tingling All Over Your Body, 2024, acrylic ink, handmade mica-based acrylic paint, acrylic gouache, pulverised e-waste and gesso on paper, 135 × 88 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

Winter 2024

Tao Hui In the Land Beyond Living Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong 26 September – 2 February Tao Hui’s first institutional solo show in Hong Kong comprises a fairly small selection of the artist’s most recent multimedia works. Relying heavily on video and constructed architectural spaces, these rather cold, standalone, largescale compositions explore various kinds of loneliness and displacement within the framework of life in China: from the isolation experienced by those who inhabit alienating cities, to the hardship faced by migrant workers as well as the millions of people who make an income as live streamers. To call these works sad beyond words would be an understatement. We enter the show through a threshold: an installation called Money Grab Hand (2024)

consisting of hanging strings to which are attached chicken feet made from coloured glass. Functioning as a curtain, it is a rather chilling introduction, like a chain of choppedoff hands. Chicken feet are often eaten in China (to start with, consider boiling them in water with ginger and star anise, for up to two hours, before braising them), but in some regions they are also understood as a symbol of good luck or as a divination tool. Following this gateway of sorts, we are faced with wooden forms that have been slotted together on the floor and mimic undulating hills, if such an environment was geometric and sharp-angled. A ceramic toilet has been placed on top of one mound, breaking under the pressure of a stone

snake coiled around it – titled, rather playfully, Cuddle (2021). The allusion to pressure, as well as longed-for relief, can be deciphered through this scatological reference. Tao’s video and multimedia works explore feelings of loss, disconnection and desire, navigating the constantly changing Chinese landscape, both physical and social. Hardworking (2023–24), a video that plays on a curved vertical screen, offers an insight into the life of a live streamer, who positions herself in front of her phone to sing to faraway followers. Jostling for space among countless other live streamers, she leads an unglamourous, lonely life. Behind the curved screen in the gallery is a wooden sculpture of a melting man who

Money Grab Hand (detail), 2024, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong

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props up the unit with his weary shoulders. The centrepiece of the exhibition, Chilling Terror Sweeps the North (2024), is a two-channel video installation housed within a plexiglass structure. In the 26-minute video, two lovers, one from the northwest and one from the south, try to navigate a gap of regional and social disparities between them that seems impossible to breach. Their differences are represented by the settings in which we see them: the lush humidity of the south of China, where the guy in the story comes from, or the harsh, inhospitable dryness of the Hexi Corridor in the western province of Gansu, the family home of the young woman. The couple barely communicate, verbally at least, and when they do, they are hindered by their very different accents and dialects. Their strong attachment to each other is instead revealed through moments of physical and emotional tension – both lovers look desperate and

anguished, physically unable to stand or to speak. During this heartbreaking film, both protagonists wear strange accessories that have been planted right into their skull, adding a level of palpable physical pain to their psychological despair (a sickle traverses the woman’s temples, and a small wooden stool is stuck to the man’s forehead, together referencing xue shehuo, or ‘blood shehuo’, a type of theatrical performance still common in the Chinese countryside in the north that belongs to the horror genre, a nod to some of the most popular gory ghost stories in Chinese literature). The LED screen is housed inside a plexiglass structure that, from the outside, could recall a Chinese temple, while from the inside it might recall a Chinese mosque – again, Tao plays on cultural difference, citing Islamic presence in the western regions of the country and the more predominant Chinese folk religion in the south. A second long and

narrow vertical screen next to the main one shows a musician, dressed in a traditional silk robe, playing a sanxian, a long-necked southern Chinese lute with three strings. The solo musical accompaniment furthers the sense of there being no possible resolution to the lover’s anguish – a constant of Tao’s works, especially in this show, in which problems are exposed without there being any visible, or possible, resolution. In this show, class divides, alienation and an ever more fragile connection to one’s roots are all handled rather darkly, holding up a very bleak mirror of Chinese society. As if after the go-go years of extraordinary economic growth, what remains most tangible is the enormous sacrifices made by the working class and by those who seemed to have reached a more comfortable level of economic stability; and the deep feeling of loneliness and sadness these have created. Ilaria Maria Sala

Chilling Terror Sweeps the North, 2024, video installation, 26 min 52 sec. Courtesy Tai Kwun Contemporary , Hong Kong

Winter 2024

Homing Instinct Storage, Bangkok 8 October – 2 December Dieneke Jansen’s relationship with housing is complicated, as her video essay This Housing Thing (2021) makes clear. Footage of family photo albums supplement a voiceover in which the New Zealand-based artist recounts living during her student days in a “major health hazard” of a flat, back when “seventy-one percent of households were in home ownership”. Her oral account, which is accompanied by an unspoken internal dialogue that appears as onscreen text, then cuts to Amsterdam, where she resided in a squat and became involved in “negotiating anti-capitalist ways of living”. These accounts of privation are juxtaposed with temporal shifts that raise the spectre of inherited privilege – we learn of an ancestor who, whilst working for the Dutch East India Company in the 1700s, owned land in Jakarta, for example, and that, after emigrating to New Zealand from Rotterdam, Jansen grew up in a series of “big privately owned houses” in Auckland. These are intriguing, genealogical plot points. Yet Jansen’s history with property seems less important than the fact that she introspectively cross-examines it through this arresting video: she confronts her own hypocrisy (‘Did the squalor give me some sort of kudos?’), wrestles with guilt (‘I apologise for taking up a place in a squat that I need not have’), and points to the absurdity of land ownership in New Zealand (‘What is public on colonised land?’). This considered evaluation of her position as a nonPolynesian New Zealander forms a counterpoint for thinking more widely about this exhibition

about home and belonging, which also includes commissioned moving image works by three other artists. All ‘sparked’ by Jansen’s film, and spanning the Asia-Pacific region, these foreground a range of subaltern, diasporic and postcolonial perspectives. Most rooted within the local context of Bangkok is Ananta Thitanat’s pencil-drawn animation Siam (2024), in which her father recounts his decades spent working in one of the city’s last standalone cinemas. Prior to it burning down in 2010, the Siam was more than just a movie palace, he explains, as its corridors, auditoriums and projection rooms doubled up as free lodgings for the thrifty staff, most of them migrants hailing from the countryside. Crashing on folding beds set up in corners of the cinema allowed them to save on rent and travel costs; and the boss was happy with this arrangement, too, as the staff kept an eye out for thieves or petty criminals. “It’s like having someone at home looking after things. It became a home,” he says. Aside from her father’s testimony, the pathos of Thitanat’s understated work lies in her stark, expressive pencil drawings of the Siam’s interiors, which fade in and fade out of the animation – and the poignant realisation that this typology of Thai cinema, and the makeshift social housing and support network it offered employees, is now extinct. The satirical tone of Ari Angkasa’s twochannel Quantum Leap (2024) offers a striking contrast. Deploying footage centered on Indonesia’s aviation industry, it includes clips

Dieneke Jansen, This Housing Thing, 2021, video, sound, 18 min 37 sec. Courtesy Storage, Bangkok

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related to the EU’s 2007 ban on flights from the country, due to lax safety standards. Angkasa pokes fun at this period of national humiliation by performing dual, often competing, versions of a kebaya-clad air hostess delivering an in-flight safety briefing – she is sometimes alert and professional, sometimes clumsy and distracted. These vignettes generate the exhibition’s most tenuous and cynical link to the theme of belonging: a sense that it can be shaped by, or in reaction to, civilising strains of neoimperialism, including airline safety inspectors. Drawing us back to lived experiences in Aotearoa (New Zealand) is Kahurangiariki Smith’s Mā te Moana (2024), which takes what feels like the exhibition’s guiding impulse – a search for what Jansen calls “an at-homeness” – in a decidedly abstract and spiritual direction. Smith’s phone footage documenting the journey of Buntheun Oung, a Khmer tattooist she met at art school in Auckland, back to rural Cambodia, is bookended by animated Māori forms, and invocations of the ancestors of her Te Arawa tribe, who migrated in canoes to Aotearoa from their islands in the Pacific. “This is his return to his homeland. This is my return to the moana (ocean),” she says. As she invokes Māori seafaring folklore and wonders how mankind split the open seas, one senses a subtext of resistance to settler colonialism, but also that, in her worldview, home and belonging has more to do with the mobility and stewardship of intergenerational knowledge than it does the politics of housing, possession or dry land. Max Crosbie-Jones

Michael Joo Soft Skills and Underground Whispers Kukje Gallery, Seoul 30 August – 3 November Michael Joo is a man obsessed with cross sections. That would be a reasonable conclusion to draw, on panning around the American-born Korean artist’s latest exhibition of two- and three-dimensional works. In it he appears to be dissecting everything: from genetic to biological structures; from the display systems of cultish modernist architects and the animal collaborations of cultish postwar artists, to the scientific legacy of the artist’s recently deceased mother. Accordingly, at various points of your amble through it, this show appears to be geological, archaeological, biological, deeply personal and broadly metaphysical. With respect to these last, Mediator (Redux) (2024) features a pink embroidered quilt that the artist’s mother had imported from Korea to the US during the 1980s, hung and folded in such a way that it echoes the silhouette of the German artist Joseph Beuys (his staff replaced by a cascade of rainbow coloured stone beads that spread across the floor like an octopus’s arms), huddled under a blanket during his celebrated performance I Like America and America Likes Me. The latter co-starred a coyote and reached the fifty-year anniversary of its staging earlier this year, when Joo’s mother also passed away. You’d most likely be an art historian if you knew the first reference off the bat, and a close personal friend of the artist if you knew about the second. But this is the kind

of intersectionality with which Joo’s work is occupied, concerned with how identity is formed. Which, as everyone knows, is never a simple process. Revider for Ganoderms (Yeongjiboseot 3) (2024) comprises two intersecting plexiglass planes with three carbonised mushrooms balancing on and around them (the specific fungi, referenced using its Latin name in the title, is often used in traditional medicine across East Asia). Perhaps the carbonisation speaks both to consumption and to the effects of deep time. The effect of the whole, however, is like watching a giant, exploded glass microscope slide, or a slide from which the subject has escaped, leaving us to inspect the material of the oversized slide itself. Such works also riff off Italo-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s glass easel display system, originally developed for Sao Paulo’s Museum of Art (MASP) during the 1960s, rekindled for this year’s Venice Biennale and here, by Joo, in Untitled (after LBB) (2024). In another work from the Revider series – Revider with Carbon Doppelganger (2024) – the clear panels have merged with a carbon boulder on the floor in such a way that you’re left wondering which came first, or grew around which – the glass or the carbon. That the form of the 3D-printed rock is based on samples collected from Korea’s Demilitarized Zone

(for one of Joo’s earlier projects) adds a whole new layer of narrative. If you want it. In sculptural terms, it remains an encounter between a transparent material and a dark material – something that denies its physical presence and something that insists on it. At certain points in this show, you might begin to wonder whether it’s the artist obsessing about things such as intersections, incisions and cross sections or whether it’s you, the viewer, obsessing about reading a narrative into everything that provides the show with its undeniable momentum. What with all the carbon and charcoal on show here, Joo’s materials certainly speak to a certain amount of embedded exhaustion from the off. The colours in the Mediator stone beads are reflected in the large EP Print (v. 2) (2024) that hangs on a wall and scrolls down over the floor and appears as though a giant litmus test gone slightly awry. It is in fact an image that originates in electrophoresis (a technique of genetic imaging practised by Joo’s plant-physiologist mother), here given a few AI tweaks. Though you and I might struggle to work out what those tweaks were. Instead it hovers between a zone of information, a zone of aesthetics and a zone of artistic and scientific discovery. As if it were the intersecting cross-sections of each. At once the language of both and of neither. Mark Rappolt

Soft Skills and Underground Whispers, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul

Winter 2024

Black Box Ames Yavuz Gallery, Singapore 29 August – 19 October In Yang Xiao’s video Goodbye Language (2023), the artist has filmed rare – and, in the Chinese mainland, probably banned – footage of Chinese officials in protective suits walking through the empty streets of Shanghai during the city’s lockdown in 2022, when the Chinese government was stubbornly pursuing its zero-COVID-19 policy, even while other countries were opening up. Slogans blare in Mandarin through the neighbourhoods: ‘Strictly implement new progress functions, be cohesive and adhere to core consciousness, demonstrate focus on aligning awareness…’, and so on, nonsensically. The propagandistic, Newspeak-ish text was generated by an AI programme with words inputted by Yang,

which he then played on a speaker from his apartment window. Empty bureaucratese is not new to the Chinese and cynicism towards China’s authoritarian regime informs this important and fascinating exhibition of work by 12 Chinese artists that was mostly created during the pandemic. Due to the nature of the content most of it would be impossible to show at home. The show is a record of the psychological and physical toll of living through the pandemic and how it intensified a longstanding mood of distrust of and disappointment with those in power. This jadedness can be traced back to the post-Tiananmen, 1990s avant-garde art movement described as ‘cynical realism’ and those

artists disillusioned by Deng Xiaoping’s promises of modernisation and liberalisation. Now, the CCP, with even more sophisticated organs of control and discipline, disappoints a new generation of artists. But while Black Box is bleak, it is also funny, cruel, sad, sweet and defiant. It looks at power and its abuses unflinchingly, while acknowledging our yearning for pleasure and connection. In fact, the more brutal the abuse, the more beautiful is the work. In Tong Tianqing’s large, mural-sized ink painting Wrest (2022), two greyhounds fight over a rabbit, recalling a bloodsport that was popular during the pandemic in the outskirts of Beijing. Its graceful lines, with the greyhounds’ bodies and tails joined together

Xiyadie, Sewn, 1999, papercut with water-based dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper, 119 × 140 cm (artwork); 175 × 175 × 5 cm (framed). Courtesy Ames Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

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to form the shape of a heart, only brings the sadism into greater relief. Meanwhile, Wu Chen’s Gold, Flies, Gems, Bowling Ball (2024) depicts a symbol of power – a crown – in gilded vulgarity. Painted in the flat, stylised graphic style of a crest or insignia, it is studded with jewels, skulls, houseflies and disembodied female legs, parted to expose the genitals. Some works evoke profound grief and pain. Liu Sheng’s incredible painting Noon Haze (2024) portrays a funerary custom in rural Guangdong, where after a death, village women would cut up a and share a pig among different families. A woman holding a pig’s head, her mouth open in lamentation, looks to the sky. The rest of the carcass is splayed on the ground atop a flattened cardboard box. A row of women, presumably mourners, sit on yellow stools with their hands on their laps. The scene has the frozen, overbright quality of an overexposed photo – the background is nearly white and the human figures

appear to be floating – and the unreality of a waking nightmare, in which roles and meanings are slippery: the animal body stands in for the human corpse, while the shadowed faces of the mourners suggest other malevolent entities. But human expression finds a way in the most restricted of circumstances. Hu Jiayi‘s video Boxing (2020) shows the artist dancing in an abandoned shopping mall with boxing gloves on her hands and feet. Punching the ground on all fours convulsively, and scuttling up and down stationary escalators, her movements strain between frustration and freedom. Executed in the style of extravagantly filigreed traditional Chinese paper cuttings, Xiyadie’s elaborate paper cutouts express queer desire in a society where homosexuality is decriminalised but gay communities are still persecuted. Sewn (1999) is a self-portrait of the artist reclining in a house with his pants down, gazing at his male lover, while stitching the tip of his penis with

needle and thread. The needle also pierces the ceiling of the house – a motif expressing a longing to break through the structures of social orthodoxy. The most moving work suggests that despite periods of isolation, we find ways to communicate. Jiang Zhi’s video Name (Aranya), (2024) is filmed in Aranya, an exclusive beach resort area in northeast China, that is empty of people in winter. Actors are seen in deserted brutalist concrete buildings, green hills and a beach. One by one, they hold a leaf to their lips and blow out a long thin note into the wind. China’s early COVID-19 whistleblowers, who have died or been jailed, come to mind. Melancholic as it is, this can also be read as a work expressing hope and resistance in a society where information is highly controlled, and celebrating ingenious systems of codes, signals and messages – whether expressed online, on the streets or in art – that show solidarity and support. Adeline Chia

Jiang Zhi, Name (Aranya), 2024, single-channel video, sound, 4 min 44 sec. Courtesy Ames Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

Winter 2024

Busan Biennale Seeing in the Dark Various venues, Busan 17 August – 10 October The titular thematic of this biennial appears to manifest both as an interest in confronting the darkness of our current times and the darkness of that which occurs at a distance from the illuminated centres of our current society: that’s to say the bits of that society that aren’t the ‘highlights’ of capitalism and globalisation. This, of course is what curators are expected to do these days. In fact, you could say that it’s become something of a cliché in artistic circles. So it’s a credit to the artistic directors of this biennial, New Zealander Vera Mey and Belgian Philipp Pirotte, that their show rises above this norm. In the lobby of the Biennale’s main venue – the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art – you’re welcomed by Omar Chowdhury’s video BAN♡ITS (2024). It’s installed on an LED wall flanked by two portable speakers, the whole housed in an aluminium pavilion that looks like something you’d find at an outdoor wedding or a low-budget festival. In the museum it naturally exudes a guerrilla vibe, disrupting the overwhelming sense that you’re about to enter a bunker filled with the kind of weaponsgrade ‘Culture’ that’s going to make you a more socially responsible individual. Selfimprovement, after all, is why people visit biennials. They’re (generally) cheaper than therapy and less hassle than a yoga retreat. Chowdhury’s video documents a group of bandits somewhere on the border between India and Bangladesh who describe themselves as ‘agents of chaos’ (before stating, perversely, that order needs chaos) and ‘a symbol of defiance for the dreams of the ultrapoor’, promise that they are going to throw a party with the money the artist gave them and are obsessed with actor Heath Ledger (‘he died for his art’) and the latter’s depiction of the Joker character in the Hollywood movie, The Dark Night (2008). At one point a ‘bandit’ (there’s no real evidence of actual banditry on offer, leaving the ‘bandits’ to occupy a symbolic space) asks the filmmaker if there’s a reason he is making the film.The reply: “Uh, not really, I’m just interested I guess.”

“What a privilege,” the bandit answers. It’s this kind of self-awareness that is one of the defining and refreshing aspects of this exhibition. One floor up, Section 69ZD Employment Relations Act 2000 (2019) by Tongan artist John Vea, is a tea-break station that is only ‘activated’ at standardised break times as defined by New Zealand labour law. Meanwhile, at one of the biennial’s offsite spaces, the Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum, in Cha Ji Ryang’s extraordinary Like everything being seen has a bow (2024), a video and journal (the latter, on paper, exploded over a labyrinthine structure of walls) exploring an individual’s attempts to fit into the social systems of the world and the artworld, while moving between North America and Korea, and navigating a mixture of dreams and reality, the sentiment of Chowdhury’s bandit finds an echo: ‘When everything collapsed in a disaster,’ the journal entry for 1 May 2020 reads, ‘I felt that as an artist, I was indulging in luxury and pleasure for myself.’ The biennial as a whole draws consciously and heavily on Buddhist ideals of displacement and unassertiveness (although Han Mengyun’s video Night Sutras, 2024, does this by focusing on some of the negative implications of its assertiveness) and pirate assertiveness. Or, more precisely with regard to the latter, with anthropologist David Graeber’s posthumously published book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (2023), which deals with the ways in which pirates from Madagascar infected the local polity in a way that encouraged freedom and equality. Indeed a recording of Graeber himself surfaces at another of the biennial’s offsite spaces, Hansung1918 (also home to an installation by cultural theorist Fred Moten, with longtime collaborator and scholar Stefano Harney, and ‘visual storyteller’ Zun Lee), in his widow Nika Dubrovsky’s video triptych, Fight Club (2022), which serves to foreground the philosopher’s belief in dialogic methods of thinking, but comes across as a somewhat more worthy (or weapons-grade biennialish) than Chowdhury’s more humorous jaunt.

facing page, top Eugene Jung, Two-panel Observatory, 2022, broken plexiglass, lacquer spray, steel structure, 180 × 190 × 90cm. Photo: Sang Tae Kim. Courtesy the artist and Museumhead, Seoul

Back at the museum, the biennial (which features work by 62 artists or artist groups) is anchored throughout by generous displays of bodies of work by individual artists, rather than one-off displays. Yun Suknam’s Women of Resistance Series (2020–23), comprises paintings (in the traditional Chaesaekwa court-style) and drawings that memorialise generations of often forgotten female independence activists. Indonesian collective Taring Padi present Scarecrow Installation (2024), an archive of banners and prints made in solidarity with various peasant movements (among them, anti-sandmining, anti-industrialisation, fair incomes for farmers) in their homecountry. (Pirotte was on the selection committee for the controversial documenta 15, in which Taring Padi’s use of anti-Semitic tropes caused a scandal.) Palestinian collective, Subversive Film present another archival project, An Exercise in Assembling (2023–), a silent, subtitled collage of clips that document the power of coming together via numerous filmmakers’ recordings of historical liberation movements (among them Paul Seban’s Pourqoi la Grève, 1970, Gerard Guillaume’s Ho Chi Minh: Esquisse Pour un Portrait Politique, 1973; Mustafa Abu Ali, Jean Chamoun and Pino Adriano’s Tall Al-Zaatar, 1977) and the power of cinema, more generally in spreading the word. Such works also highlight solidarity as a subtheme of the exhibition, and to some degree its structuring element. All of the above, for example, find echoes in the work of Cambodian figurative painter Theanly Chov, whose portraits of individuals and groups, draw from life taking place around him, in moments of crisis or celebration. It’s these moments, particularly present in those bodies of work mentioned above, where artistic privilege is to some degree suspended, that both ground this biennial and provide viewers with both a way in to and, more crucially, a way onwards from the issues it raises. It’s rare for any biennial exhibition to pull off this last. Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom Yun Suknam, Portrait of Park Cha-jeong, 2020, colour pigment on Hanji, 210 × 94cm. Courtesy the artist and Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul

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Winter 2024

Kenji Ide Some other times Władysław Broniewski Museum of Literature, Warsaw 26 September – 26 October In the modest, state-assigned two-bedroom home in which Władysław Broniewski lived with his wife from 1951 until his death in 1962, the poet’s bedroom remains untouched, preserved exactly as it was. Now the house is his museum. A dark-wood walking stick still leans against his single bed, beside a chair and a simple bedside cabinet. The setting is utilitarian, a space marked by pragmatism and restraint. On his cushioned chair rests a book, A Fool’s Life (1927) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, open to a passage titled ‘Self’, which reads: ‘Seated with his elder at a café table, he was smoking roll-ups non-stop. He hardly opened

his mouth. But he listened to his elder’s words.’ This page is not randomly open; it’s an intentional choice by Tokyo-based artist Kenji Ide, whose small sculptures discreetly inhabit Broniewski’s space in the exhibition Some other times, forging a dialogue that transcends the time that separates the artist from the poet. Ide’s works invite a slow, meticulous viewing. His sculptures, often small enough to be mistaken for found objects, are subtly integrated into the house’s corners and ledges, placed under tables, stairwells and on windowsills. They are primarily made of hand-carved lauan wood, a type of plywood typically found

Some other times, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Władysław Broniewski Museum of Literature, Warsaw

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in Japan, subtly hinting at his Japanese heritage, and creating a presence that suffuses Broniewski’s home. On the dining room table, the exhibition’s titular piece (all works 2024) is composed of thin pinewood strips forming three delicate rectangular posts, each capped with tiny spheres. Suspended between two of the posts are two carved shapes gently sloping downwards, resembling inverted crescent moons. Reading Ide’s notes in the accompanying gallery text about his sense of relationship to Broniewski, one might imagine one moon representing Ide, the other Broniewski, bridging cultural and temporal distances,

inviting viewers to reflect on the fluidity of time, history and memory. Each of Ide’s sculptures crystallises fragments of personal memory and experience; the forms are whimsical, with small boots, collections of found objects – coins, plastic wrapping, leaves and tiny gathered fabric balls – scattered across different surfaces. Driving in shape, a square wooden block with a carvedin pathway, lies flat on the hallway side-table, the channel a meditation on the artist’s long drives and walks that inspire much of his work. Here, the pathway embodies the reflective slowness that pervades the exhibition. This work, like others, slows down our perception of time. Rather than capturing a single moment, it suggests an ongoing process. Ide’s work reflects a commitment to documenting the intimate, the microcosmic,

in a time that feels marked by global rupture. Tangential dam, a small, varnished wooden L-shaped sculpture placed on a window ledge, is supported by two slender wedges and features a single match-thin pole topped with a white sphere. It reads as a figure, delicate and vulnerable, standing alone in a larger, indifferent universe. Our experience of physical time is refracted through memory, a process at once entropic and generative. Ide’s work seeks to crystallise this inherent chaos, and by doing so, charting how memory reshapes and reproduces our understanding of the world. As Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space (1957), a home is more than shelter; it is a ‘topography of our intimate being’. Ide’s works extend this notion to Broniewski’s home as quiet, reverent interventions that respond to the emotional

resonance of a place marked by memory. Rather than adorning Broniewski’s house, Ide’s sculptures engage with it, transforming each surface into a site of reflection. Through this quiet dialogue, Ide’s work heightens our awareness of space and memory, tracing the contours of lives – those of Broniewski, Ide and the viewer – through gestures that are both intimately personal and universally resonant. The simple elegance of Ide’s work – its unadorned quality and humble materials – evokes a sense of immediacy. Ide’s delicate engagement with time, memory and life’s impermanence, produces an experience that draws viewers away from their daily rhythms and immerses them in a sensory, introspective world. Here, time unfolds quietly, allowing for contemplation and an invitation to feel, to notice anew. Sofia Hallström

Some other times, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Władysław Broniewski Museum of Literature, Warsaw

Winter 2024

Books

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The Spirit of Hope by Byung-Chul Han, translated by Daniel Steuer Polity, £14.99 (hardcover) Burnout, depression, ADHD – not to mention the various ways in which we voluntarily enslave ourselves to capitalist culture by believing that we need, above all else, to be creative, productive citizens, all of the time: Byung-Chul Han’s reflections on these subjects have made him one of the most popular philosophers of the current era. That and a writing style that machine-guns aphorisms at a fully automatic rate (the perfect mode of thinking for the social media age, even if that age is one that Han frequently decries). It is something of a surprise, then, to see the Berlin-based philosopher moving into a more positive gear with the latest of his books to be translated into English: a brief sermon on the benefits of hope. He does start off, though, by painting a bleak picture of our current times, suggesting that our society is founded on fear, whether of raging pandemics, all-out war or climate apocalypse. Still, the picture conjured by Han is not nearly as bleak as the dumbly lumpen accumulations of paint, straw and clay by Anselm Kiefer that decorate the book throughout (it’s never made clear why the illustrations have been included, the first of which Kiefer has dedicated to Han, though it’s presumably an effort to make his own work, by some sort of osmotic alchemy, seem ‘deep’). Han justifies his overriding tone of bummery by arguing that ‘the more hopeless the situation, the firmer the hope’. He arrives at the even more self-serving

conclusion that only those who are negative can be hopeful. Hope, he contends, is the ability to imagine possible (rather than necessary) futures. ‘Poetry is a language of hope,’ he fires. ‘In the information society, language loses all auratic distance and becomes shallow information. Digital hyper-communication makes us speechless.’ That doesn’t stop Han presenting his own information, citing other people’s thoughts on hope as recorded in literature and philosophy, from Ingeborg Bachmann and Hannah Arendt to Franz Kafka and Gilles Deleuze, which in turn might alert you to the fact that, unlike some of his recent publications (notably Absence, 2023), the Korean-born philosopher’s focus here is exclusively on Western ideas. By buttressing his thoughts on the present by citing the past, Han plays a similar game to Kiefer, manufacturing authority by collaging himself in among ‘established’ wisdoms. Han cartwheels through three centuries of (largely) hopeful (and mostly dead) thinkers across three breathless pages touching on Czech poet and dissident Václav Havel, German philosophers Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, Romanian–French poet Paul Celan, Marxist thinker Ernst Bloch, German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the British philosopher and literary critic Terry Eagleton. Hope is a faith, a quasi-religious experience, as Han has it. And so on to Anselm of Canterbury

(a Benedictine monk) and Martin Luther. Faith means trusting others, yet ‘in our narcissistic society, the movement of blood is, in fact, limited to the narrow circulation within our egos. It no longer flows out into the world.’ Resist! Trust! Hope is how society might be healed. Along the way Han takes an unconvincing sideswipe at AI (thinking has a bodily dimension – the blood gets stirred, the flesh goosebumps – without which there can be no real knowledge) and a slightly more convincing big-up for art (more than making up for the Kiefer debacle). He quotes philosopher Theodor Adorno: ‘art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth’, implying that art has the capacity to embrace thought without limit, the kind of thinking that leads to hope, freed from the logic of a world that the philosopher has already established as being pretty shitty anyway. There’s just space left for Han to establish that, contrary to popular opinion (which has them all down as bores), philosophers are in fact great eroticists (in that they are lovers of truth), and to pick a quick fight with Heidegger, who was, according to Han, obsessed by death (the root cause of the world’s anxiety) when he should have been focused on birth (of new, hopeful ideas). All this leaves you wondering why Han has been so obsessed with accounting for ideas of the past when he claims to be addressing the present, via a boundless event horizon of hope. Mark Rappolt

Book of Games by Carsten Höller Taschen, £40 (hardcover) Perhaps you’re bored, waiting at the bus stop. ‘Bring your two outstretched index fingers together in front of your eyes until the fingertips touch. Focus on the background. You will see a sausage between your fingertips. Make the sausage float by moving your fingers apart.’ The sausage does indeed float. This is the sort of brief – if to others slightly nutty-looking – respite from the tedium of the everyday that this second, expanded edition of Carsten Höller’s Book of Games offers. (The first, a pocket-sized book, was published 25 years ago as a result of the artist having to attend his own gallery dinner, which turned out to be terribly dull.) The compact tome comprises 336 games that are

accompanied by images from varying sources including the artist himself and works by other artists such as Rachel Rose, Julien Creuzet and Wolfgang Tillmans. The book is divided into six sections featuring games to play alone and to play with others, games for two to play and two to play with others, and games for multiple players and multiple players to play with others. The ‘others’, here, are the unwitting participants and observers of a series of games that might variously be considered pranks, or ‘sport’, or performance, etc. So, while with one other player you might decide to ‘without touching each other make your shadows interact in sexual positions,’ you may also choose, with that same person, to streak

Winter 2024

through a crowded public space. And see what happens. You might also read the entire book as a series of social experiments, perhaps guided by the fact that Höller’s work frequently explores how people think, behave and interact with their surroundings. Book of Games continues this enquiry by inviting players to explore their everyday experiences via sensory and psychological manipulation. A personal favourite, a game for one, ‘Dead Beetle’ (or, how to escape from an excruciating social interaction or event such as post-Christmas family lunch, once safe topics of conversation have run dry and intrusive questioning begins): ‘Play dead. Don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t blink.’ Fi Churchman

In Writing: Conversations on Inspiration, Perspiration and Creative Desperation by Hattie Crisell Granta Books, £16.99 (hardcover) So many interviews with writers dwell on the mythical props and settings of a writer’s life: their legal pads and fountain pens, writing sheds in gardens or cafés where jittery laptop dwellers order multiple drinks. Hattie Crisell’s In Writing is an edited volume of conversations with writers talking about where ideas come from, their successes and failures, and a general overview of a writing life. Early on, novelist Meg Mason describes how anyone who could have their desk under a window and chooses not to is ‘slightly sociopathic’. The next interviewee, newspaper columnist Hugo Rifkind, describes the glorious view out of his home office. He sits with his back to it. For the record, I’m writing this at a desk in front of a window overlooking the quaint street on which I live. But who reads books about writing? The first (the obvious) answer would be, well, other writers. Those who will nod at comments about agents and readers, and who will smile at screenwriter Georgia Pritchett describing how she always wanted to write, how her first ‘book’ (scare-quotes in the original) was a biography of her hamster. Then there are would-be writers who, too, may have written biographies of their pets but have yet to be published and want to learn about other writers’ processes. Why do books about writing keep getting published? Stephen King’s On Writing (2000) is a classic; critic James Wood wrote the

almost-guide How Fiction Works (2008); Annie Dillard reflected on The Writing Life (1989). They’re very different books about writing and reading, but books on the subject keep getting published because they promise that view through the window and insight into the lore around the writer’s oh-so-quiet world. But I would like to suggest another reason to read them: that against the legend and myth of typewriters and fountain pens, is novelist Anna Hope telling Crisell how, ‘9:47 a.m. is a perfectly good time to start writing’. That is to say, thinking about writing as not some ideal flight of fancy, but as a job. Not an especially easy or hard one, compared to driving a train or teaching children or any other job. But a job nonetheless. In Writing draws on a podcast of the same name featuring longform conversations with writers. In the book version, Crisell poses the same ten questions to more than 50 writers, then picks and organises their responses. She also introduces each theme – on language, on rewrites, where ideas come from and what’s hard and so joyous about it all – with a short essay of her own. None of it feels particularly revelatory, perhaps because Crisell talks to writers about their practice rather than what they have produced, and the revelation is often in the work itself. Still, it’s a nice reminder of just how normal a writing career

can get, beyond the lore and those desks-bywindows. (Crisell herself on receiving edits: ‘Although some of the experiences here might fill the aspiring writer with dread, the important point is that everyone survived and kept on writing.’) My favourite book about writing is actually a book about reading: George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), in which Saunders analyses short stories by four Russian writers. It’s a loving and warm account of a lifetime of engaging with work that came before you. Crisell includes Saunders here as an interviewee, and cites A Swim in a Pond in her conclusion, which is no surprise: it’s the kind of book that reasserts the idea that we read in the hopes of finding something that lasts, that we want books to endure over time, that we look to our contemporaries, and to our predecessors, too. That we learn from other people. Crisell’s book is meant to give a view behind the veil, combined with advice; something you wouldn’t get from only reading someone’s work. Its assertion that writing is a job breaks through the typewriters and mythology. And it reflects the simple challenge of writing, of creative work – that it takes a whole lot of faith to put something in the world that no one has ever asked for. But what I take from Crisell’s conversations are those simple facts of the work itself: it’s 9:47 am and everyone survives. Orit Gat

Set My Heart On Fire by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Helen O’Horan Verso, £11.99 (softcover) ‘You’re pretty fucking weird.’ That’s how the narrator of this book, twentysomething Izumi, is described by her friend Etsuko. And she is. Izumi Suzuki’s first novel to be translated into English (the Japanese original was published posthumously in 1996, following the author’s suicide, at the age of thirty-six, in 1986) is about the people and culture that made up Tokyo’s alternative club and music scenes during the 1970s. And it’s about a central character, only in her twenties but by midway through the novel struggling to hold on to what she perceives of as youth, whose own desires only surface gradually from a fog of casual sex, drunkenness, apathy and ennui. And a more general measuring-up of the differences between deep love and superficial attractions.

Suzuki is best known as a writer of sci-fi stories. A pop-cultural icon, she had previously been a model and actress, featuring in photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki. Her life has been the subject of novels and films but her work has lingered in the shadows, only appearing in English in recent years. The book is divided into 13 chapters, each named after a song of the time (among them, The Moody Blues’s Nights in White Satin and Brenton Wood’s Gimme Little Sign, both 1967). She encounters rebels and oddballs who are into Western music but can’t get hard unless the girl is at least half Japanese. Indeed, in a reversal of the gender stereotypes of the time, her men are sensual, occasionally sexually freakish, but not much beyond that.

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‘Most of what Landi said made little sense,’ she writes of one. ‘But so what? His penetrating, metallic voice and clear-cut pronunciation alone had a powerful enough effect.’ Izumi (the character, although there are biographical overlaps with the author) is attracted to musicians who are thin, beautiful, creative and famous, but is nevertheless conscious of wanting to be more than an appendage hidden in the shadow of their genius. ‘Who needs love if it means losing yourself inside it?’ she remarks. What follows is a remarkable quest for love and agency in a world that seems to dictate that achieving the former requires a woman to surrender the latter. Nirmala Devi

The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power by Amy Sall Thames & Hudson, £45 (hardcover) The 1983 documentary Caméra d’Afrique includes an interview with Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, often called the father of African cinema. Leaning forward, pipe in hand, he looks confident yet impatient. “Are your films understood in Europe?” asks someone off camera. “Let’s be very clear,” Sembène replies, exasperated. “Europe is not my centre. Europe is on the outskirts.” The Cannes glitterati to whom Sembène was indirectly speaking must have clutched their pearls. How could a burgeoning African filmmaker be indifferent to Western accolades? Sembène’s words did not merely impart a personal perspective but were grounded in reality. African filmmakers have never had to play catch-up with their counterparts in Europe or the US in terms of creativity and cultural impact, even establishing themselves while facing significant obstacles, ranging from the 1934 Laval Decree that prohibited Africans in French colonies from making films, to the censorship exercised by postcolonial nation-states. Amy Sall’s new book examines this history of African lens-based practices from the 1930s to the current day, presenting a picture of projects that are autonomous, poetic and pluralistic in character. Sall is a researcher and collector-archivist of Senegalese heritage based in New York. Guided by a ‘pan-African intent’ and an ‘ethic of care’, the photographs and films cited in the book defy the derogatory imagery found in both colonial

ethnography and genres relating to ‘humanitarian appeal’. Materials were sourced by Sall from artists or their families, and the book includes original interviews conducted with Nigerian-Cameroonian photographer Samuel Fosso and Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé. It is, foremost, Sall’s sensitive, intentional scholarship that stands in stark opposition to the extractive violence often felt in previous attempts to visually record Africa. African photographers were active before the mid-twentieth century. Among them were Solomon Osagie Alonge, the only commercial photographer working in Benin City during the 1930–40s (he developed his glass plate negatives under kerosene lamps), and the Senegalese pioneer Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, the first sub-Saharan African to make a film (Afrique-surSeine, a 1955 feature about the diaspora in Paris). The arresting portraiture of the Bamako school, whose members included Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, also features, while those who Sall designates as ‘ambulatory’ photographers, such as Sanlé Sory and Philippe Koudjina, vivaciously capture the heady days of independence. Although Sall emphasises that we cannot speak of one ‘type’ of African cinema, there are affinities between its practitioners, including a desire to depict the realities of African life and draw from oral storytelling traditions, while excavating ideas of cultural identity

and nationhood. From the anti-imperialist stance of directors like Sarah Maldoror, Ahmed Bouanani, Haile Gerima and Flora Gomes, who dramatise decolonisation struggles, to canonical names like Sembène, Med Hondo and Cissé, who question the future of African sovereignty, many cineastes understood that ‘making film is a political act’, in the words of Burkinabé director Fanta Régina Nacro (one of the few prominent women in African filmmaking – like all global film industries, Sall acknowledges the dominance of men in the African context, too). Yet political consciousness never comes at the expense of experimentation, beauty, drama and intimacy – attributes that are abundant in the films of Idrissa Ouédraogo, Abderrahmane Sissako and Youssef Chahine, and in the photography of Jean Depara, Lazhar Mansouri and Adama Sylla. This mutual interdependence, in what may be called an aesthetics of liberation, bolsters Sall’s argument that getting behind and in front of the lens is ‘a collective claiming of a right to look as a right to be, and to be seen’. The African Gaze goes beyond charting how Africans have resisted the fetishisation and othering of their continent by the West. Instead, it chooses to illustrate what that resistance has created: powerful modes of visual storytelling that are up to the world-changing task of helping people to be certain of who they are and from where they wish to speak. Sarah Jilani

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, translated by Alison L. Strayer Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) ‘I realize that I am fascinated by photos in the same way I’ve been fascinated, since childhood, by blood, semen and urine stains on sheets, or old mattresses, discarded on pavements; by the stains of wine or food embedded in the wood of sideboards, the stains of coffee or greasy fingers on old letters – the most material and organic kinds of stains.’ So writes Annie Ernaux in her recently translated memoir, The Use of Photography, coauthored with her then lover Marc Marie in 2003 (and first published in French in 2005), when Ernaux was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. Comprising 14 analogue photographs of thrown-off clothes in the different places where the couple met during their affair, along with their written reflections on each

image, the resulting book meditates on the material traces of love and endurance. In the snapshots, clothes are metonyms for bodies. At times, they encode and narrate the actions and movements of desires: a photograph of a crushed cigarette and a pair of glasses on the kitchen counter preserves ‘the first gestures of a myopic smoker who is about to make love’; the distance between a pair of overturned boots reflects ‘the force with which they were flung off’. In others, clothes are eerily human. When the couple went to clear the house of Marie’s late mother, it was her clothes that ‘remained suffused with the smell of the eau de cologne she used to excess’ and preserved the humanity that was otherwise lost. Shed from the bodies

Winter 2024

on whose shapes it is modelled, an item of clothing lingers between phantom and carcass, an artefact of impermanence, a memento mori to our vulnerable, corporeal being. ‘I don’t expect life to bring me subjects but rather unknown structures for writing,’ Ernaux writes. The book’s format is informed by a period of time in which passion and mortality are like two sides of the same coin – or the positive and negative of a photograph. Here, taking a photograph reads like an aspiration to preserve, and, written retrospectively, the text bears witness to that act of preservation – the time bracketed in between the two kinds of recordkeeping is a testament to her survival, when death loiters just around the corner. Yuwen Jiang

Photo: Lewis Ronald

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Photo credit

Text credit

on the cover Riar Rizaldi, photographed by Lewis Ronald in London, October 2024

Words on the spine and on pages 11, 35 and 71 are from Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, 1987, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, p.44

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