ArtReview Asia Autumn 2024 by ArtReview

Hira Nabi Talk to the Tree

Celebrating 20th Anniversary

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今津景

NANAMI HORI

千葉正也

M A S AYA C H I B A

南川史門

SHIMON MINAMIK AWA

今井麗

ULALA IMAI

杉戸洋

HIROSHI SUGITO

富田正宣

28 September - 27 October 2024 Artspace @ HeluTrans Singapore

KEI IMAZU

掘ななみ

M A S A N O R I T O M I TA

西村有

YU NISHIMURA

八重樫ゆい

Y U I YA E G A S H I

水上恵美

EMI MIZUKAMI

福永大介

DAISUKE FUKUNAGA

杉原玲那

REINA SUGIHARA

竹﨑和征

K A Z U Y U K I TA K E Z A K I

今井俊介

SHUNSUKE IMAI

五月女哲平

TEPPEI SOUTOME

片山真妃

M A K I K ATAYA M A

佐々木健

KEN SASAKI

小西紀行

TOSHIY UKI KONISHI

並行小舟唄

T W I N B O AT S O N G S

UGO RONDINONE the alphabet of my mothers and fathers SEPTEMBER 13 – OCTOBER 19, 2024 ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E, D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

ArtReview Asia vol 12 no 3 Autumn 2024

Wherever I lay my hat… For a while now, artists seem to have been using the word ‘based’ rather than ‘live’ to explain their geographic choices – eg, ‘based in Seoul’, ‘based in Manila’, or the double hitters, ‘based in Tokyo and Amsterdam’. As if these sites are a headquarters for operations, rather than a place to eat, sleep and, well, live. Or to announce their place in what we might describe as the age of contingency (rather than necessity). Being ‘based’ feels more itinerant, shifting, implying that it could change at any point. Which is perhaps more realistic for the way artists, and art and ideas, move: unstable, often with informal and improvised support structures. (In fact, all these symptoms might belong to a more general category than ‘artists’ alone. ArtReview Asia has just gotten into the habit of blaming them ← for everything. But then what is ‘living’ in a place? What’s a ‘home’ anyway? The place you feel comfortable or understood, feel rooted, the place you speak the language (whatever that might be, not just the lumbering behemoth of English), or where you can make a difference, or just are sheltered? ArtReview Asia isn’t one to stick to one definition of things, given that it’s just as at home on a coffee table, or newsstand, a library or delivery box, or wherever it’s read. Oh, and also, given the range of what might qualify as ‘home’ across the continent, wherever you base yourself, there might be some reading in the following pages on different ways to inhabit, intervene in or change a space, if not to make it more your own, then at least to make apparent who or what imagines it is running the place, and how to share space with others, whether that’s a human, a tree or a mutated, unrecognisable lifeform. Or a magazine. ArtReview Asia

Double-hitters

Art Previewed

Previews by ArtReview Asia 16

Hazardous Materials by Deepa Bhasthi 36

Out of the Haze by Pearamon Tulavardhana 42

The Interview Do Ho Suh by Mark Rappolt 26

In Search of the Divine by Yuwen Jiang 38

King Collectors by Adeline Chia 43

Showtime by Max Crosbie-Jones 40

On the Line by Oliver Basciano 45

Hard to Stomach by Suraj Yengde 35

Art Featured

Hira Nabi by Mark Rappolt 48

Tan Zi Hao by Adeline Chia 56

Yoshiaki Kaihatsu by Adeline Chia 70

Mire Lee by Emily McDermott 64

page 56 Tan Zi Hao, The Impossible Self-Portrait (detail), 2024, mixed media, dimensions variable Photo: Kenta Chai. Courtesy a+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 80 Ho Rui An, by Adeline Chia Takeda Yosuke, by Toby Reynolds Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, by Innas Tsuroiya Outside In, by Deepa Bhasthi James Prapaithong, by Max Crosbie-Jones Hoang Duong Cam, by Adeline Chia Steph Huang, by Cindy Ziyun Huang Photography Never Lies, by Max Crosbie-Jones Christine Sun Kim & Thomas Mader, by Xinrong Hu Minoru Nomata, by J.J. Charlesworth

There are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi Provincials, by Sumana Roy, reviewed by Nirmala Devi The Waiting Room, by Choo Yi Feng, reviewed by Alfonse Chiu George Sand, by Séverine Vidal and Kim Consigny, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World, by Roger Crowley, reviewed by Mark Rappolt The Haunted Wood, by Sam Leith, reviewed by Oliver Basciano In This Land We Call Home, by Nusrat F. Jafi, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi An Operational Account of Western Spatio-Temporality, by Miljohn Ruperto, reviewed by Mark Rappolt How To Climb A Tree, by Aparna Nori, reviewed by Pramodha Weerasekera Seeing Further, by Esther Kinsky, reviewed by Yuwen Jiang comic by joseph kelly 106

page 83 Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Tunggang Langgang (still), 2024, video, 16:9, stereo, colour, 22 min. Courtesy the artist and Kohesi Initiatives, Yogyakarta

Art Observed

Not from love, which everybody acknowledges to be a great teacher 15

12 Nikki S. Lee, The Ohio Project (7), 1999, Fujiflex c-print (framed). Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

Previewed 1 Elizabeth Peyton Ryosokuin Temple, Kyoto Through 24 September

5 Forest Festival of the Arts Okayama Various venues, Okayama 28 September – 24 November

2 The Bamiyan Giant Buddhas: Sun God and Maitreya Beliefs from Gandhara to Japan Mitsui Memorial Museum, Tokyo Through 12 November

6 Kim Lim National Gallery Singapore 27 September – 2 February

3 Ryuichi Sakamoto Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo 21 December – 30 March 4 Tintin Wulia Hiroshima moca 21 September – 5 January

7 4th Karachi Biennale Various venues, Karachi 26 October – 10 November 8 Ayesha Sultana Ishara Art Foundation, Bangalore Through 7 December

10 manzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today National Museum of Qatar, Doha 1 November – 31 January 11 Seeing is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha 2 November – 22 February 12 Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City (1969–2001) 80wse, New York Through 20 December

9 Lakshmi Nivas Collective Durbar Hall Art Gallery, Kochi Through 30 September

5 Work by Mika Ninagawa. Courtesy the artist and Forest Festival of the Arts Okayama

Autumn 2024

1 Elizabeth Peyton, First Drawing of Paul (Paul Olivennes), 2023. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

2 Miniature votive stūpa, Gandhara, 2nd – 3rd century. Courtesy Hirayama Ikuo Silk Road Museum, Hokuto

2 Line drawing of the wall painting of the Bamiyan East Giant Buddha niche, Japan, 2022, supervised by Akira Miyaji and illustrated by Shogaki Masako. Courtesy Ryukoku Museum, Kyoto

1 Elizabeth Peyton’s small, intimate canvases depict all manner of pop culture figures, from Kurt Cobain and David Hockney to Michelle Obama and Greta Thunberg. Zooming in on her subjects during solitary moments, the American artist has become widely known for capturing our obsession with youth, fame and glamour. Less known is her interest in showing her works at unusual venues, such as in the toilet of a nowclosed New York restaurant (1992), in a room at the infamous Chelsea Hotel (1993) and at the Prince Albert Pub in Brixton, South London (1995). Her upcoming show daystar hakuro underlines this interest, taking place at the fourteenth-century Ryosokuin Temple, founded by Zen Master Ryuzan Tokken, who inherited the Rinzai school’s Oryo lineage. Referring to a solar term that roughly coincides with the span

the impermanence of the material world. of the exhibition, hakuro is marked by the onset At least, that’s what Buddhism teaches. of autumn and increased moisture in the air, It’s a cycle that’s hard to break and one that’s which in the morning condenses into white seemingly doomed to repeat itself, housed dew – a transitory entity that, placed next to as we are within our material selves. It might ‘daystar’ (a poetic word for the sun), feels even 2 seem counterintuitive, then, that The Bamiyan more flimsy and ephemeral. On view will be Giant Buddhas: Sun God and Maitreya Beliefs Peyton’s paintings of music legend Bob Dylan from Gandhara to Japan is an attempt to and creative director of Magma Journal Paul resurrect the two titular Buddhas and their Olivennes. Daubed in sparse, monochromatic surrounding murals via drawings, paintings, brushworks, they vaguely recall ink painting written records and photographs that were of Buddhist abbots. Surrounded by thousands recorded prior to their destruction by the Talof Kyoto’s temples and tea houses, Peyton’s iban in 2001. A major focus is Maitreya, considRyosokuin show leads one to wonder whether ered to be the ‘future Buddha’ (and sometimes it’s a meditation on impermanence – whether referred to as the ‘Unconquerable’), who, it’s the life being celebrated is no more than a said, will only return to Earth after the teachings momentary reverie. (yj) of the current Buddha, Shakyamuni, are long There’s a sad sort of irony to the idea that we forgotten. This expansive exhibition traces suffer from loss because we’re unable to accept

ArtReview Asia

3 Ryuichi Sakamoto, life – fluid, invisible, inaudible…, 2007/21 (installation view, Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound, hearing time, M Woods Museum, Chengdu, 2023). Courtesy M Woods Museum, Beijing & Chengdu

Tintin Wulia, Fallen (still), 2011, single-channel video, colour, stereo, 18 min 43 sec. Courtesy the artist

the history and movement of Maitreya worship across the Silk Road through artworks and artefacts, from sculptures from Gandhara and India, to statues and paintings that have passed through sacred sites in Japan. A feature of The Bamiyan Giant Buddhas is a series of 1:10 scale drawings (based on research gathered by an international coalition of conservationists that included Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties) that recreate the Bamiyan murals, which are on show for the first time in Japan. Another irony: that this exhibition only adds to the delay of Maitreya’s arrival perhaps means that we’re not quite ready to accept such losses. So, round we go. (fc) A year and a half after musician and composer 3 Ryuichi Sakamoto’s passing comes seeing sound, hearing time, an exhibition of his largescale

installations, initiated later in his life, and the first If you could own any passport, which show in Japan dedicated entirely to these roomcountry would you choose? (According to the size attempts to give space and visibility to sonic World Economic Forum, the most ‘powerful’ processes. Spanning synth-pop, operas, sweeping passports of 2024 are those issued by France, film scores and minimal-glitch (and still touring Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore and Spain, on from beyond the grave with his augmented reality the basis that they allow visa-free access to 194 concert performance kagami, 2023), Sakamoto’s countries.) A decade ago, Indonesian-Australian work now gets the art institution treatment. 4 artist Tintin Wulia started a series of installaThe exhibition shares a name with an exhibition tion-workshops titled Make Your Own Passport of his installation works that toured from Beijing – and took any decision-making out of particiin 2021 and Chengdu in 2023; this iteration of pants’ hands by asking them to choose passports the show includes works like life – fluid, invisible, via lucky dip. Some of them were even given a ‘stateless’ status. If the latter is an example inaudible… (2007/21), created with longtime collaborator Shiro Takani, which remixed elements of how Wulia’s work brings attention to the of his 1999 opera Life into a series of visuals redifferences humans construct between one fracted through a set of suspended water tanks, another, then her first solo exhibition in Japan, alongside newly realised work conceived by titled Things-in Common, might provide a Sakamoto shortly before his death. (cfw) counterpoint to that: drawing on personal

Autumn 2024

5 Aki Inomata, Thinking of Yesterday’s Sky, 2022–. Courtesy the artist

experiences of discrimination, growing up 20 locations across the northern part of the as part of a Chinese-Balinese ethnic minority, Okayama prefecture, in the southern central part of Japan’s Honshu island, the festival bears Wulia’s work, which primarily consists of instalthe subtitle of ‘clear skies country’, promising lations and video, has explored the boundaries considerations of sustainability, biodiversity and the conflicts these differences create. The and landscape, if not good weather. The scope works presented here are based on the shared of the works being displayed over this twoaesthetic value of everyday objects and concepts month period is striking, ranging from performin an attempt to foster connections and highance to architecture, from Tarek Atoui’s sound light commonalities that transcend physical installation The Wind Harvester (2023) and Aki and ideological borders. (fc) Inomata’s Thinking of Yesterday’s Sky (2022–) Ever wanted to see Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work project, where 3d-printed cloud-shaped liquid in a seventeenth-century landscaped garden, is placed in glasses of water that visitors are or an Anri Sala sound installation in the depths invited to drink, to the work of architect Arata of a limestone cave? From forest parks to folk museums, the contexts and locations almost Isozaki and the neon-lit punk-noir photographs outnumber (even take precedence) over the 36 of Mika Ninagawa. (cfw) The Singapore-born British artist Kim Lim 5 artists participating in the Forest Festival of 6 is best known for stone and wood abstract the Arts Okayama. Spread over more than

ArtReview Asia

sculptures, as well as prints, that blend Eastern and Western cultural aesthetics, inspired by her experiences of living in Singapore, Malaysia and the uk. A series of minimalist prints from 1972, Ladder, for example, recalls the hierarchy of consciousness practised in Buddhism. Drawing on natural and manmade forms, Lim’s works place an emphasis on space, texture, rhythm, light and shadow, and were as much informed by patterns produced by nature as they were by traditional genres such as calligraphy and Chinese landscapes. The Space Between will explore ‘the role of Lim’s cultural in-betweenness’ with works that span Lim’s four-decade career. Alongside her sculptures and prints will be displayed maquettes and ‘never-before-seen’ photographs. (fc) For four months in 2022, Pakistan suffered what was estimated to be the worst floods in the

country’s history. The rising waters, caused Breathe in, breathe out; breathe in, breathe out. Such is the rhythm necessary for exisby heavy monsoon rain and melting glaciers tence. This fundamental activity runs through (Pakistan has the most glaciers in the world outside of the Arctic and Antarctic), took 1,739 8 Ayesha Sultana’s exhibition Fragility and Resilience, the Bangladeshi artist tracing lives and caused $14.2 billion of economic loss, breath both as a physiological mechanism acutely felt in the agricultural sector. The fourth and a process that inextricably links each 7 Karachi Biennale, curated by Waheeda Baloch of us with all living beings. Such existential under the title Rizq/Risk, takes the floods as ponderance is introduced by Sultana’s handits starting point, as well as questions of food blown glass sculptures (displayed for the security, culinary tradition and the colonisation of agriculture, culminating in a show that first time) – the artist’s exhalation gives spreads across Karachi’s heritage sites, public each work its final form, resembling droplets parks and public galleries. Among the featured of water. In the Breath Count series (2018–), artists are theatre-making collective Tamasha Sultana has scratched marks of varying size and Farida Batool, whose photographs have onto tablets of clay-coated paper, keeping long explored Pakistan’s political turmoil and count of her inhales and exhales as she makes social unrest, as well as performance artist Tino the work. This tabulation is brought into Sehgal, an international biennial stalwart. (lq) sharp focus in Threshold (2012–13), a series

created to commemorate the death of Sultana’s father in 2008, which features photographs he took during his assignments as an officer of the Bangladesh Air Force, their surfaces scratched and solarised by the artist. (lq) It can be easy to be cynical about today’s multihyphenated artworld, where it’s increasingly rare for someone to just call themselves an artist (as if making art isn’t enough in troubled times). ArtReview Asia is nonetheless very much here for anyone who chooses to describe themselves as an ‘anthropologist/artist duo [and] seasonal goat herders’. Shepherding in a rural 9 village in southern India allows the Lakshmi Nivas Collective, consisting of Namrata Neog and Sunoj D, to cultivate a unique relationship with the nonhuman animals under their care, not to mention the land, which is integral to

7 Basir Mahmood, All Voices Are Mine, 2018 (installation view, 2nd Karachi Biennale, 2019), video, 20 min 22 sec. Courtesy Karachi Biennale Trust

9 Lakshmi Nivas Collective, A solemn passage of an act, 2024, foraged chicken feathers on beeswax, reclaimed wood, 152 × 46 × 46 cm. Photo: Sivakumar. © the artist

8 Ayesha Sultana, Breath Count xxi, xxii, xxiii (detail), 2021, clay-coated paper, 22 × 28 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata

Autumn 2024

this interspecies rapport. It is a bond that the Taj Mahal Hotel (1981) and Finance and Trade they channel into Sentient Beings, a solo show Center (1989), both in Karachi, she left the ego behind and became best known instead for her of the collective’s beguiling films, performance readings and installations that interweave revolutionary social practice, which included the ecological, folk and Indigenous thinking. Angoori Bagh social housing scheme. ApproachOr to quote the pair themselves, ‘As a posting building design in its most plural form is industrial human with tethered and entangled 10 manzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today, an extensive survey of architecstructures of agency in the landscape, Sentient Beings is an attempt of embodying a nonture 60 years on from Partition. So while the country’s famed brutalism is present in projects hierarchical relation with plants, animals, like Habib Fida Ali’s 1976 Shell House in Karachi seasons or the landscape.’ (lq) When Yasmeen Lari, one of Pakistan’s and Nayyar Ali Dada’s 1978 National College most famous architects, was studying during of Arts, in Lahore, the show’s curator, architect the 1960s, the understanding was that her Raza Ali Dada, has collected a rich array of discipline served an elite. ‘You needed a really painting, photography, documentation and ephemera: typical is Nayyar Ali Dada’s Untitled large ego to make the kind of work I could be (81 buildings from the Subcontinent), a series of proud of and my clients to be proud of,’ she watercolours from 1962 showing the traditional later commented. While her credits include

domes of an Islamic city, or Arif Mahmood’s untitled 2008 photograph of a street scene in which scavenging birds alight on a vendor of bananas. (lq) Jean-Léon Gérôme’s paintings can be found in many places, including on the cover of the first edition of Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism – his Snake Charmer (1879) shows a teenage boy performing with a serpent coiled around his naked torso, watched by Islamic tribesmen sitting in front of an ornately tiled wall. Gérôme’s painting is fastidiously – and misleadingly – naturalistic, which would have made his painting look realistic and truthful. But the event is purely imaginary, and (although the architecture is based on a photograph of Topkapi Palace in modern-day Istanbul) the artist took the liberty of making up parts of

10 Arif Mahmood, Untitled, 2008, silver gelatin print, handpainted by Shaukat Mehmood, 48 × 57 cm. Courtesy the artist

11 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Portrait of a Woman (Aiouch), c. 1855–56, pencil on paper, 27 × 16 cm. © and courtesy Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings, London

ArtReview Asia

the Arabic calligraphy depicted on the wall movement and Iraqi modernist work such for aesthetic purposes. In the end Said tells us as Jewad Selim’s A Portrait of Lorna Selim (1948). that Orientalist works show not so much about Together the exhibition sees Orientalism as a product of colonialism – but one that can the Eastern world but were largely about the ‘motivate productive debate about old and West and its desire to fetishise and dominate new power structures and forms of identity’. the ‘Orient’. It is remarkable then that Gérôme It answers a question posed by the Lusail will be showing in Qatar. Comprising three Museum: ‘how can Orientalist art be presented sections that explore the artist’s life, his use today, in a museum in the Arab world?’ (yj) of photography and contemporary reflections Given that this survey of over 90 artists and 11 on his legacy, Seeing is Believing: The Art and collectives of Asian descent is taking place in Influence of Gérôme will be presenting nearly New York City, the ground zero of American 400 works gathered from the large collection identity politics, it is perhaps noteworthy that of Orientalist painting owned by the Lusail 12 the curators of Legacies: Asian American Art Museum (the show’s organiser), as well as Movements in New York City (1969–2001) seem the collections of international museums. uncomfortable with the task of defining what New commissions by Babi Badalov and Nadia Asian American Art might be. ‘Recognizing that Kaabi-Linke will also feature. Gérôme’s paint“identity-based” categories of art are bound to ings will be examined against the Négritude

the dominant racial ideology and political narrative of a nation, the exhibition instead focuses on a multiplicity of subjectivities, political horizons, and artistic expressions to interrogate life in America,’ write Howie Chen, Jayne Cole and christina ong. The evolution of the term ‘Asian American’ is traced from its inception as a progressive political identity in 1968 by uc Berkeley’s Asian American Political Alliance through the studios of artists such as painter and glassblower Arlan Huang, speculative fiction new media maker Mariko Mori and photographer Tseng Kwong Chi, alongside new commissions from the likes of Shu Lea Cheang and Rea Tajiri. (lq) Fi Churchman, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Yuwen Jiang, Luc Querry

11 Jewad Selim, A Portrait of Lorna Selim, 1948, oil on canvas, 76 × 51 cm. Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

12 Hiroshi Sunairi, Chyotto Dake Yo, 1997, c-print. Courtesy 80wse, New York

Autumn 2024

Image: Ki Seul Ki, System_Neptune, 2022, archival pigment print, 100 x 100 cm. (C) Ki Seul Ki.

Photo: Seowon Nam. Courtesy Art Sonje Center, Seoul

ArtReview Asia

The Interview by Mark Rappolt

Do Ho Suh

“We constantly change our built environments. We’re not just passively living in a space”

Korean artist Do Ho Suh held his first solo exhibition at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, in 2003. This autumn he returns there with Speculations, an exhibition that brings together previously existing works with a new series of drawings, models and animations that depict the ideas and

processes informing Suh’s practice. Known for his explorations of place, in particular largescale installations of building interiors made from cloth, in Speculations he gathers unfinished and unrealised works. Alongside new elaborations of The Bridge Project (2010–), in which the artist has

Autumn 2024

collaborated with anthropologists and structural engineers to propose a hypothetical dwelling that locates itself equidistantly between London, New York and Seoul, the three cities he considers home – are sketches and plans from across his career, exploring the many forms an idea might take.

Impossible Projects artreview Given your approach to installation, and your past experience within Art Sonje itself, how does this exhibition make use of the centre? do ho suh It’s on all three floors. The show in 2003 was relatively site-specific; for this time, I think I was more relaxed. I didn’t pay too much attention to the building, I just was able to focus on the contents. ar It’s called Speculations, which provides an umbrella title for the work presented. Do you find it hard for them to remain ‘speculations’ as they become seen and known and written about? dhs I think that a lot of projects or pieces in the show are still ongoing. For example, The Bridge Project I don’t think has an ending. I already have additional contents that I would like to add after the Sonje show, we just couldn’t fit those elements in there. The concept of these Speculations projects probably gelled in around 2003, 2004. That’s the point where I thought, ‘Oh, I think I should visualise these ideas’, which I’d been keeping in my sketchbook. I’ve kept the same format sketchbook since 1991, when I was an undergraduate student at risd [the Rhode Island School of Design]. I have maybe 50 sketchbooks. I actually discovered the beginning of the Speculations projects from one of the oldest sketchbooks, small doodlings here and there. Then I completely forgot about it. The images

keep coming back in later sketchbooks. They kept accumulating, until I realised that up to 15 different ideas were there. By that time, I had been showing my fabric architecture pieces quite extensively. I realised that people thought that the fabric architecture pieces were all I was doing, but that was not the case. The fabric pieces, in my mind, are just the tip of the iceberg. I started to think that maybe I had been focusing more on complete works, and that I should share the process – like in the ways the architects present their works, with drawings and architecture models. A lot of the Speculations ideas are basically impossible to realise. For many reasons: like the scales are just too great, or something that defies gravity, or just too expensive to make. I have to come up with a medium that explains the idea; it just ends up being very much like an architecture exhibition. Then I started to make animations as well.

More Fun to Dream ar There’s the idea of something that might be built and the reality of the built thing itself. Along the way things change, for numerous reasons. Some architects might change their models and their sketches to suit the reality of the end results. After all, a client won’t want a sketch or a model for a building that’s completely different from what they ended up with. Did you do any of that editing when you’re presenting?

dhs The thing is, some of ideas in the Art Sonje show have been realised. Some projects that were not, in my mind, possible to make have happened. For example, one original idea in my sketchbook was a little house sticking onto the side of a tall building. The actual piece is on the rooftop of the building. The concept was pretty much the same. The opportunity came along because I put these ideas into the world. Making this exhibition, I just realised how important it is to visualise your ideas, for my sake as well. That process helps you to hone and develop your ideas further. I think the opportunity has been coming to realise that. ar What is the difference between modelling an idea – as in, making a model – and making the models into, for want of a better word, reality? dhs The reality part is always a pain. That’s something that you don’t want to really deal with. ar Would you be happy if everything just existed as a model? dhs I have to say, the process of formulating my ideas, speculating all the possibilities and daydreaming, that’s the best part of being an artist, in my mind. Because that’s the only place or space that I can have total freedom. No responsibility whatsoever. I really enjoy that part. I think a lot of artists are probably pretty much the same. Even making models from my idea, it instantly changes the mode of my

The Bridge Project, 2024, animation, single-channel video, sound, approx. 24 min. Photo: Jeon Taeg Su. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Lehmann Maupin, New York & Seoul; Victoria Miro, London & Venice; Kolon Sport

ArtReview Asia

Fallen Star (Scale 1/23), 2024, mixed media, 157 × 103 × 66 cm. Photo: Jeon Taeg Su. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Lehmann Maupin, New York & Seoul; Victoria Miro, London & Venice; Kolon Sport

Autumn 2024

In Between Hotel: Model 1 (Scale 1/6), 2015, mixed media, 112 × 59 × 152 cm. Photo: Seowon Nam. Courtesy Art Sonje Center, Seoul

Homesick (Scale 1/80), 2024, mixed media, 120 × 80 × 80 cm. Photo: Seowon Nam. Courtesy Art Sonje Center, Seoul

Perfect Home s.o.s. (Smallest Occupiable Shelter), 2024, prototype i, polyester, polyamide, 200 × 183 × 77 cm. Photo: Jeon Taeg Su. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Lehmann Maupin, New York & Seoul; Victoria Miro, London & Venice; Kolon Sport

ArtReview Asia

behaviour in a way. It’s less fun. Though working on smaller-scale models is fun too, because as a child I used to build a lot of model kits and played with smaller-scale things. I don’t know how to articulate the feeling, but it’s kind of like that childhood experience has given me the skills to continue playing with the modelmaking. ar Do you think that aspect of play is the difference? When you make a model for something, it’s not asserting that this is the absolute and final outcome. Whereas when you make something in the real world, to some degree, that is final. dhs Yes – some of the ideas I have made several different versions of the models, and I’m just playing with that. Now that we have 3d printing, it’s really easy to visualise ideas. Animation is also quite interesting for me, as it adds an element of time. I think my work, ultimately, is about the moment. I always found I’m not 100 percent satisfied with my sculptural installations, because even though it looks like a static or stationary piece, I always see them as moving things, and that the movements of the viewers activate the piece. I don’t think it is as effective as, for example, time-based art. ar It feels that you’ve always seen form as something that’s animate and animated: walking through sculptures or even seeing models is a process, and the form is shifting for various reasons. A lot of your work does work with the atmosphere around it, unlike architecture that’s designed to protect you from the vagaries of the atmosphere of our planet.

dhs The same piece might be shown in different museums, and physically it’s the same. When the surroundings changes, the energy shifts. Especially the translucent fabric pieces. You not only see the work itself, but you see the people who are looking at the piece and at you from the other side of the piece. Still, it’s physically grounded in a way – that’s why I became more interested in making films and animations. ar Does showing in Seoul feel different, as a sort of homecoming? dhs No, not much. The thing is, I never felt that I left Korea, even though I’ve lived longer outside of Korea. I think it’s a part of getting old as well. Though with this exhibition, I feel like I have a totally new audience, because they probably haven’t seen my work in person. That’s really exciting.

The Life of Buildings ar With your work, a lot of it is about a relation between people and buildings. Which do you think shapes which? Do the buildings shape inhabitants or inhabitants shape buildings? dhs I think it goes both ways. We constantly change our built environments as well. We’re not just passively living in a space. Not many people can afford to build their own home, for example. We live in a house that someone

else has built or someone else lived in, but we’re constantly trying to change things to make ourselves comfortable or whatever. ar A fundamental issue that comes up with your work is that of agency, in terms of: what agency we do have to shape the environment around us? And is that through memory or physical actions? Such issues also feel part of the condition of people who migrate from places. dhs As I got older, I started to notice that my parents’ place, where I grew up, was also getting old, especially when my father passed away. I think I experienced a similar thing when my landlord in New York passed away: the building was literally falling apart and it started to release strange sounds and smells that I hadn’t experienced before. At my parents’ place, there are very tall pine trees in the garden. Then I noticed that the roots of the pine trees had started coming up out the surface of the ground. It’s strange why that is happening all of a sudden after my father’s gone. It’s as if they’re angry, not quiet and gentle anymore, because my father used to really look after them. He spent like three hours every day in the garden, picking pine needles. It was a meticulous garden, but then different things started to come out. There’s something about how the energy around the house has shifted. Speculations is on view at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, through 3 November

Bridging Home: Model 1 (Scale 1/16), 2015, Corian, 207 × 119 × 191 cm. Photo: Seowon Nam. Courtesy Art Sonje Center, Seoul

Autumn 2024

When I went to the uk to study law, I was ill-prepared for the autonomy it demanded of me. I had never cooked before. Even though my father had encouraged me to assist my mother in the kitchen, she didn’t allow this. She was territorial. My mother hushed us if we were in the kitchen, the other part of our two-room house. That was the only space where no one interfered, and where she was allowed to be herself. Besides, if an additional person intervened, it added extra work. ‘Too many cooks spoil the food’ was the motto here. She had mastered techniques and was so aware of the kitchen dynamics that others would simply mess up the order of things. And if the food was spoiled, there was no quick remedy: the carefully budgeted and measured ingredients for that meal would already have been used up. We seldom had grains, rice, dal, spices or oil beyond what was needed for the day. One of us siblings had to run to a grocer to fetch 100 grams of oil and other required condiments for under 10 rupees. Each meal was timed and rationed. If an unannounced guest paid a visit, then our mother would ask neighbours for additional food. Thus, even in the face of scarcity, our kitchen sizzled. I can count on my fingers the few times when we had Amul-brand butter or ghee. The memory of eating this is still fresh in my mind. I can picture putting butter on some bread. Since we were used to frugality, the butter applied was the size of a pea. We did not know how to eat the shiny, slimy fat. Even now, many years and affordable luxuries later, I still cannot process the taste of butter or ghee. My mother was a minimalist in the kitchen. The peanut or flaxseed chutney that she made did not have any oil. It was a dry mix with garlic, salt and chilli powder. The jowar roti (bhakari) she made was tasteless and difficult to swallow, as it was baked with flour, water and salt, and no additional flavour-adding ingredients. Chapati, a staple in my region, was a rarity at points in our lives. The masala that my mother created was not readymade but hand-ground. We did not have a blender. The iron pan that acted as a roti maker and sabji sauté was heated on the electric stove. We never had a gas stove; for the earlier part of my life, we had managed on a kerosene stove that had to be pumped until one’s hand grew tired. The plates of food that resulted were carbintensive and protein-supported (thanks to beef, mutton, chicken and eggs). We ate functionally:

Hard to Stomach

Suraj Yengde recalls his childhood horror of mealtimes while growing up in a budgetconscious Dalit household, and how he now looks favourably on a diet that once appalled to get nutrition and energy for the day. And when we sat to eat, the rule was to eat until full. There was, after all, no set time for the next meal. Desserts were a treat that we could afford once a month or fortnightly, on my father’s payday. This lifestyle continues till today. Now that I live in the us and work in academia, I have transitioned to a more sedentary lifestyle. With everyday access to excessively fatty, delicious food, I find myself going back to my mother’s recipes. Once I loathed them for their lack of taste and absence of fried oily things. Now, due to health reasons and for physical fitness, I cannot consume the glistening fatty food that once so appealed. When there is lavish cuisine served to me, on those occasions when I travel

The Yengde kitchen. Photo: Pranali Yengde. Courtesy the author

Autumn 2024

business-class or am invited to a Michelin-starred restaurant, I ask for a healthier option. I keep thinking about my mother’s kitchen. I now recognise that Dalit cuisine is essentially a twentyfirst-century diet. It is a stable and palatable approach to food. We eat as a culture of affection and sharing. Dalit food is a heavy diet that uses both vegetables and meat, and every part of each: even animal connective tissues are consumed in some parts of the country. The ingredients in the food are locally available and handpicked. Even in the face of modern lifestyles and urbanisation, food sourced from the villages is a delicacy to be shared with family and friends. We watched tv shows that made us hungry and desperate to seek the food that they prepared. We could never afford paneer, mushroom or capsicum. Cream, coconut milk and other vegetarian dishes were incomprehensible. We couldn’t have them. Whatever the world thought about Indian food was what a dominant caste, elite class and urban gourmands advertised as ‘Indian food’ – a ‘brand’ that is now popular across the world. But this never reflected our India. Show me any Indian restaurant outside India that serves beef or pork. Both items are consumed by Dalits but loathed by Hindus, Muslims and Sikh privileged castes. You may run into Khatri Punjabi cuisine, or South Indian Brahmin food. But Dalit food is absent from the dictionary of India’s vast gourmet culture. To confront this, writer Shahu Patole set out to inform the world about the Dalit kitchen. His book Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada (2024) brings Dalit culture and cuisine to your kitchen. It is written partly as a cookbook and partly as a cultural history. Artist Rajyashri Goody has also made her art project Eat With Great Delight (2018) intersect with senses of taste and Dalit social history. The project combines family photographs documenting culinary social gatherings with recipes documenting Dalit cuisine. It is a lip-smacking corrective to the dominant-caste history of South Asian food. A start for those who would wish to present Indian food in its true variety and to give an insight into how the vast majority of Indians really eat. After all, food is a digestible relationship – softened by munching crisps and swallowing pride. Suraj Yengde is a writer and academic based in Cambridge, ma

In the opening scene of Anmol Sidhu’s 2022 film Jaggi (currently streaming on Mubi), we see the eponymous young man, played by Ramnish Chaudhary, try to get hard. He fails; erectile dysfunction, we later find out, is the bane of his life. Distressed, he writes a few lines in his notebook and tucks it, along with a pistol, into his waistband. ‘macho’, a brand name, is printed on the broad elastic of his underpants. It seems both to encapsulate Jaggi’s desperate need to be the man society wants him to be and, in retrospect, to forebode the almost banal violence he will perpetrate at the end of the film. Before that, we travel back in time to Jaggi’s throwaway remark to a friend about how he does not get aroused (and hence does not masturbate like the rest of his horny schoolmates). This unleashes its own chain of violence: Jaggi is branded a homosexual; bullied by his peers; and repeatedly sodomised by two older men. Unable to combat his abusers, he drops out of school and tends to farmland owned by his dysfunctional family: a drunken policeman father and a mother intent on pursuing a relationship with his uncle. Nevertheless, the rapes continue until a marriage is arranged to a vivacious girl. But just as a happy ending seems to come into sight, Jaggi is pushed over the edge.

Hazardous Materials

Two films spotlight the toxic nature of South Asian definitions of masculinity, writes Deepa Bhasthi, but also reveal the ways in which they are poisoning its lands

Jaggi (still), 2022, dir Anmol Sidhu

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The film is set in rural Panjab, its quaintness juxtaposed with the state’s many problems: land that has been overfarmed since the 1960s; farmer suicides; a people and their (Sikh) faith ravaged by a regional separatist movement. Drug abuse is a longstanding issue, as are border tensions resulting from the arbitrary division of the state during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. Some of these are acknowledged by Sidhu, but the director’s main critique relates to the expectation that boys and men constantly, relentlessly perform mardangi, or alpha-masculinity. Certainly not restricted to Panjab or even India, patriarchy’s notion of a ‘real’ (heterosexual) man does not allow for any kind of sensitivity or tenderness in interpersonal relationships. Indeed, these expectations, as depicted in traditional songs, films and pop culture, exclude individuals like Jaggi, who is slightly built, gentle with the family cattle, something of a diary writer, un-boisterous – qualities that are deemed effeminate. In his extensively researched book Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines (2019), writer and journalist Amandeep Sandhu quotes a doctor practising in the state who claims that ‘at least 20 per cent of Panjab’s males suffer from some [sexual] problem or the other’. The doctor largely attributes these dysfunctions to a crisis of confidence and a lack of sex education, as well

as to the cultural ‘focus on masculinity measured in fertility and being soldiers and farmers’. He goes on to cite drugs and testosterone injections taken by those in pursuit of a bulkedup physique, and chemicals used in the production of food crops (the large consumption of milk products, a staple in the region, is understood to be a factor in decreased libido, according to the research Sandhu presents). The suggestion in the film that Jaggi’s mother is feeding him and his father sleeping tablets mixed in food every day so that she can spend uninterrupted nights with her paramour might be another reason for his sexual dysfunction. Panjabi culture (and South Asian culture at large) is obsessed with the male child. A son carries on the family lineage and supports parents in old age. A daughter, meanwhile, is a burden, ‘someone else’s wealth’ (to translate a traditional Hindi phrase). While reiterating gender stereotypes, this social conditioning also results in repugnant responses to any deviations from the norm; homosexuality, for example, remains taboo. It is why Jaggi’s alleged queerness makes him a ‘tempo’: a disturbing word that the doctor in Sandhu’s book, speaking about homosexual relationships in Panjab’s villages, says is a ‘gay bottom for public use’.

Faced with queerness or with men like Jaggi who do not constantly fall in line with the demands of hypermasculinity, those who never stop being suffocating caricatures of maleness seem to resort to immediate violence. This is what happens to Jaggi, as well as to Rahat Khawaja (played by Arif Hassan) in Sarmad Khoosat’s Zindagi Tamasha (Circus of Life, 2019), which plays out in the cultural landscape of the other Panjab, the part of the region that is now in Pakistan. A devout Muslim and upstanding member of society, Khawaja entertains a group of friends at a wedding by dancing coquettishly to an old song. What was meant to be a private performance goes viral when a surreptitiously made video is shared. The backlash is immediate. Khawaja is ostracised, taunted and shunned by all but his wife, who is privately amused but feels obliged to not take sides when their daughter also condemns him. Unsurprisingly, the assumption is that he must be gay if he can dance like a woman. At a queer gathering to which he is invited, he falls back on the machismo by which he is culture-bound and betrays them, tipping off the police about those present. As it happens, Khawaja, the caregiver for his sick wife, is the antithesis of hypermasculinity, as demonstrated by the way

he combs her hair, cooks for her and feeds her, among other domestic acts. Like Jaggi, Zindagi Tamasha is about the victim-survivor and perpetrator, and the layers of toxicity that such a dynamic breeds in society. There is enough in the film about blasphemy laws (in Pakistan, this crime is punishable by death) and the hypocrisy of the clergy that does not condemn bacha bazi (a practice in which men buy and keep young boys for entertainment and sex; a custom also said to have been popular in Afghanistan and since banned by the Taliban) yet imposes narrow interpretations of religious law on society. Both films are as much a critique of airtight definitions of gender politics as they are about the cascading effects that this rigidity has on land and culture. India and Pakistan might be political rivals with little interaction allowed between their citizens, but the language and culture, of the Panjab region in particular, are common to the two nations. So too the problems of hypermasculinity and its far-reaching consequences. As such, both Jaggi and Zindagi Tamasha could well have been made in the neighbouring country; their relatability would have remained the same. Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Kodagu

Zindagi Tamasha (still), 2019, dir Sarmad Khoosat

Autumn 2024

Hunsand Space’s new gallery is a remarkable place in an unremarkable location: a formerly abandoned (now restored) Catholic chapel in Beizhangcheng, Jingxing County, Hebei Province. It nestles among the village’s narrow alleyways and courtyard houses, and amid the sounds of the clucking chickens and baaing sheep that occupy its dilapidated, rubbish-filled backyard. The village is poor, and not the type of location in which you’d expect to find a commercial art gallery. Architecturally, the building is integrated with its surroundings: it’s built using familiar blue clay bricks; inside, a simple nave leads to a small altar, under a ceiling constructed of wood beams with interlocking joints that are also characteristic of traditional Chinese carpentry. On the map, the chapel is named ‘The Catholic Chapel’ – it’s perhaps appropriate then that the gallery’s inaugural exhibition is also functionally titled The Opening Exhibition. A gallery text tells us that the works on view were selected ‘in order to gradually build a connection’ to the space’s general atmosphere. On entering, you’re confronted by Hidetaka

In Search of the Divine

It looks like part of the community, but it’s not part of the community. Yuwen Jiang wonders how art connects with nonurban audiences in China. And wonders why she’s going to church to find out

above The Opening Exhibtion, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy Hunsand Space, Beijing, Shijiazhuang & Hangzhou left The Catholic Chapel, Beizhangcheng Village, Jingxing County, Hebei Province. Courtesy the author facing page, top Cultural Revolution-era graffiti ‘long live laosanpian’ on the chapel’s interior wall, 2024. Courtesy the author

ArtReview Asia

Suzuki’s painting Steal Your Voice (2020), which features a menacing parrot. Staring out at us, the bird looks almost demonic, as if declaring the now defunct chapel to be in its possession. In keeping with that, it blocks your view of the nave. Once you get round that, you will find a series of paintings and sculptures by various artists placed around or hung on the chapel’s brick walls. They feature witches, bestiaries, underground raves, fetishistic leather objects and various forms of crucifixes. A sequence of Suzuki’s paintings of farmed fields, village houses and rice sacks is arranged in between. The whole, meanwhile, sits under the pale dappled light entering through the elongated church windows. Like the setting, what we’re presented with is a mixture of the fantastic and the mundane, the sacrilegious and the homely. Neither so Catholic nor so Chinese, it’s a rich but surreal aesthetic experience. Despite its presence amid the village buildings, local residents don’t seem particularly interested in the former church – or the artistic identity it has acquired under Hunsand Space. As I walked around, the only villagers I saw were people filling their water tanks in the alleyway. Water is only available each day around noon, I was told by the gallery staff (which, incidentally, made renovation really hard). Those who do visit tend to be those who had known the gallery at its previous location, in Shijiazhuang, or occasionally, people who come across the exotic space on the internet and swing by to take Xiaohongshu-worthy pictures, then head back to the city or continue their daytrip to the mountains. Coming from Beijing just after its Gallery Weekend, I felt morally obligated to reflect on my position: consuming the art that was presented to me, while knowing it was avoided by the locals. In a sense art feels irrelevant and out of place here, and the chapel-turned-gallery, and I, are something like colonists. Perhaps even more so than the Catholics once were. Jingxing is located in the middle of the Taihang Mountains, where streams and valley breezes cool the air in the summer, and ‘scorching days remain no longer than a few days’, according to a local record published in 1931. It is today part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Zhengding, which encompasses a region surrounding today’s Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei Province. Despite the region continuing to be a Catholic hub even after Qing Emperor Yongzheng’s ban on Catholicism drove devotees out of Beijing in 1724, Jingxing stayed immune to the waves of religious migration well into the second decade of the twentieth century. (During this last period of time, rioters of the anti-imperial, anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion, 1899–1901, roamed northern China; the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911; and during the first

eight years of the ensuing Republic of China, protestant missionaries from France and England were able to convert no more than 30 of Jingxing’s people.) In 1920, a major drought hit the region’s harvests, causing famine. According to Jingxiang’s county records, published in 1934, missionaries from the Catholic and Protestant churches were ordered to bring disaster relief: the Protestant missionaries gave food freely, regardless of affiliation; the Catholic Church prioritised its own converts. This is around the time when Beizhangcheng’s chapel is thought to have been built. By 1930, there were 673 Catholics and 52 Protestants in Jingxing. But they quickly dispersed, which might also reveal the true reasons for their original conversion: they needed food. After the chapel fell out of use (it is unclear when), it was converted first to a school, then to a storage space. On one side of the wall is clumsily graffitied ‘long live laosanpian’ – a Cultural Revolution-era slogan referring to three texts written by Mao Zedong before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 – the revolutionary frenzy of which must have trumped the shortlived Catholic mania of the 1920s. This is not to say that the chapel’s own history should be the only way for the gallery to engage and build connections within its local context. But it’s hard not to question what role the gallery plays in the local cultural scene and to wonder how art can create dialogues with a nonartistic public, in a place far away from urban centres – and in a way that doesn’t entirely fall prey to art’s capitalist, consumerist logic. (For a local example of that, look no further than Hebei’s cultural hub Aranya, developed by a real-estate company in 2013 and now hosting the ucca Dune as well as Aranya Art Center.) From artists and curators working in China’s countryside such as Zuo Jing, initiator of The

Bishan Project in Anhui, and Mia Yu, who has been devoting her time recently to researching the postindustrial heritage in Fushun – a town in China’s northeastern Rust Belt – we learn that in places that are culturally deprived, artistic interventions are more welcomed than shunned by members of local communities. Although it can take time to truly connect. By bridging art and local customs, initiating education projects and incorporating local communities in the daily running of cultural spaces, Zuo in particular has explored how long-term artistic interventions can mobilise local residents and reactivate rural public life, while also preventing the countryside from being reduced to a tourist attraction or swallowed up or hollowed out by waves of urbanisation. ‘Every time I come to Beizhangcheng Village where the church is located, these curatorial plans and concepts seem contrived and pale in front of this ancient village,’ the founder of Hunsand Space writes in a gallery statement. ‘That kind of natural, primitive health and vitality is unforgettable, and it slowly dissolves our slightly detached cultural imagination of this space.’ It is indeed invigorating when the gallery sees the significance embodied in a piece of Catholic architecture – a heritage that’s often neglected in the official narrative of China’s cultural revival of mostly Han traditions – and faithfully restores it. The result is much more carefully done than many publicly funded renovation projects (such as, for example, the renovation of Beijing’s hutongs in 2019). And there’s no doubt that the immediacy of local features must have been inspiring for a gallery that’s aesthetically finetuned. But the question for Hunsand Space – along with myriad rural investments by China’s artworld – is how these spaces can both be inspired by and serve their locations.

above The Opening Exhibtion, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy Hunsand Space, Beijing, Shijiazhuang & Hangzhou

Autumn 2024

There’s a scene in Censor Must Die (2012), a documentary about film censorship in Thailand, in which an artist-filmmaker gets lost in the corridors of power. After passing through security, Manit Sriwanichpoom enters the vast atrium of Bangkok’s Chaeng Watthana Government Complex – a building that feels oppressive and dehumanising by design – and, after gazing around, hurries to make an appointment at the office of the National Human Rights Commission. “It’s like we’re inside a sci-fi movie,” he says, while catching his breath in a lift. “We’re disorientated, have lost our way in the system of big government.” The meeting goes ahead and Manit, after asking a member of the commission to investigate an abuse of state power committed against Thai cinema, exits the building. But now, 12 years on, he has only just emerged from the real bureaucratic maze at the heart of the documentary. Earlier this year, a longstanding ban on the movie Shakespeare Must Die (2012), an adaption of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedie of Macbeth (1606), was overturned by Thailand’s Supreme Administrative Court. The movie oscillates between parallel versions of the original play: the staging of a minimalist theatre production, performed in period costumes, is being staged in a dictator-led country resembling modernday Thailand. The court ruling essentially spelled out what Manit, its producer, and Ing Kanjanavanit, its director, had been arguing all along – that its content and script are ‘taken almost entirely from the original play’. And that while it does allude to an episode of political unrest in Thailand, this is, contrary to previous judgments, ‘unlikely to cause divisiveness and disunity among the people of the nation’. Manit and Ing’s relief upon being told that the 2012 ban was ‘a restriction of personal freedom’ (as the censorship board could have given the film a 20+ rating but opted not to), that financial damages had been awarded and that the film could finally be released was – and remains – intense. ‘This is a miracle,’ Ing recently told website Exotic Quixotic. ‘I was sure we would lose.’ The unshackling of their sly, intertextual take on Macbeth comes at a time when film industry reform is in the air. Since assuming power in August 2023, a coalition government led by the Pheu Thai Party has been touting creative-economy renewal under the populist banner of job creation and ‘soft power’. These proposals have coincided with some encouraging signals regarding censorship – an issue that dates to the beginnings of cinema in Thailand. ‘Pheu Thai and coalition parties are ready to support freedom of expression,’ said Paetongtarn Shinawatra, chairwoman of the National Committee on Soft Power

Showtime

There’s more than meets the eye in Shakespeare Must Die. Max Crosbie-Jones unpicks the saga of a long-banned Thai film, and what it reveals about the current state of politics in the kingdom

Poster for Shakespeare Must Die, 2012, dir Ing Kanjanavanit. Courtesy Ing Kanjanavanit and Manit Sriwanichpoom

ArtReview Asia

Development, in January. ‘Only movies with content that may affect the monarchy will remain prohibited.’ Since then, the country’s film censorship committees have been pared down and revised, so that people from the private sector now outnumber bureaucrats. A nascent Thailand Creative Culture Agency is also spearheading a push to replace the country’s contentious 2008 Film and Video Act, which allows censors to demand cuts to films they deem ‘contrary to public order or good morals’ or that ‘may affect the security and dignity of Thailand’, or even to issue outright bans. Meanwhile, after a recent run in local cinemas, Shakespeare Must Die is now screening at Cinema Oasis, a cinema in Bangkok owned by Ing and Manit, alongside another previously banned, but recently certified, film directed by Ing: Dog God: My Teacher Eats Biscuits (1997), a low-budget satire about organised religion, centred around the bacchanalian cult worship of a dog. There is a certain irony to this happening now, under a government helmed by Pheu Thai. It was under a previous Pheu Thai administration that Shakespeare Must Die was banned. Back then, however, between 2011 and 2014, the government slogan was ‘national reconciliation’, not ‘soft power’, and the film was deemed to be at odds with this woolly objective. How the censors came to that conclusion is, in one sense, surprising: the vast majority of Shakespeare Must Die’s 172 minutes is a faithful retelling of a centuries-old play about regicide and its fallout, rendered in lilting, if coarse, Thai. A ‘supernatural soliciting’ by three witches leads to dripping daggers, hallucinatory ravings and Macbeth’s famous slide into delirium and madness. But in another sense their decision was not surprising at all: many of the play’s harrowing events take place in a country that looks like Thailand – a ferociously maintained constitutional monarchy with a king as head of state. Moreover, the film’s liberties with its source material and design choices are informed by the colour-coded politics that wracked the country during the early 2010s – a period when royalist Yellow Shirts stood on one side of the ideological divide, and the Pheu Thai-supporting Red Shirts on the other. In particular, there is a scene towards the end when supporters of a fictional ‘dear leader’ with tyrannical aspirations and tendencies (played by Pisarn Pattanapeeradej, the same actor who plays the onstage Macbeth) burst into the theatre where the performance is taking place, drag the actors outside and proceed to cheer, smile and wave their clenched fists after a noose is fastened around a bloodied man’s neck. The event is reminiscent of the real-life massacre of 6 October 1976, when a police

crackdown on leftist students at Bangkok’s Thammasat University led to some being lynched from trees. Ing is far from being the first filmmaker to invoke 6 October, but as she points out in Censor Must Die (which she also made with Manit), the fact that the rioters are wearing red headbands irked the censorship board. Their reaction was also bound up with the paranoia and power plays that characterised the politics of the time. Shakespeare Must Die was one of over 50 film projects to receive culture ministry stimulus funding, between 2008 and 2011, from a coalition government affiliated with the Yellow Shirt movement led by then Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. A few years prior, a wave of street protests was initiated by the Yellow Shirts against Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whom they accused of harbouring republican aspirations and not showing adequate loyality to the monarchy (as well as corruption and abuse of power). This prompted the 2006 military coup d’état that led to his exile. But by the time the movie was finished, Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, was prime minister, having won a decisive election victory as the leader of Pheu Thai: a reincarnation of Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai party, and the political party around which the Red Shirts had mobilised. Against this backdrop, Shakespeare Must Die’s political imagery – its red-cloaked Grim Reaper and diktat-issuing murderous dictator in a business suit, as well as its headbands – preyed on the censors’ priggish attitudes. As a member of the Thai senate says in Censor Must Die, “The manifest fact that’s been linked with the film and reason behind the ban is this: this country happens to have a king and this country has Thaksin.”

Ing Kanjanavanit’s recent claim that the film did not intend to make fun of or draw contrasts with anyone, but solely wanted to help Thai audiences to ‘get into the pleasure of Shakespeare’ rings hollow. Her staunchly

anti-Thaksin political leanings are also evidenced by Bangkok Joyride (2016), a four-part documentary about the Bangkok ‘Shutdown’ street protest movement of 2013–14. This was

top Protest over the banning of Shakespeare Must Die, Thai Government House, Bangkok, 17 April 2012 above Shakespeare Must Die (still), 2012, dir Ing Kanjanavanit. Courtesy Ing Kanjanavanit and Manit Sriwanichpoom

Autumn 2024

led by the People’s Democratic Reform Committee, which has been characterised as a successor to the royalist Yellow Shirts and was accused of helping to bring about yet another military coup – this time in May 2014, against the Yingluck administration. (While Thaksin has returned to Thailand, and his thirty-eight-yearold daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, is the current prime minster, Yingluck remains in exile… for now.) Still, if there’s a takeaway from the Shakespeare Must Die case, it’s that existing film policy leaves too much room for the caprice, squeamishness and biases of censors. Watching it today, when the Red-Yellow rift has given way to a new strain of colour-coded politics (the Orange of the progressive Move Forward Party against a once unthinkable governing Red-Yellow coalition), it is far from being the incendiary propaganda film some made it out to be. Rather, it is a deftly constructed metadrama that, while tracing the rise and fall of megalomaniacs with treacherous political ambitions, also forewarns of creeping state censorship – the very forces to which it, until the court’s recent ruling, fell prey. A proposed new film and videogames act might prevent such injustices from recurring. But with the lines concerning what is taboo in Thailand being redrawn (the Move Forward Party’s call to reform the lèse-majesté law was recently ruled treasonous by Thailand’s constitutional court, leading to the party being dissolved), and with the arc of dynastic power in the country following its own devious, Shakespearean logic, don’t bet on it. Shakespeare Must Die (2012) and Dog God: My Teacher Eats Biscuits (1997) are now playing at Cinema Oasis, Bangkok

In Bangkok’s Chinatown, among shophouses, street vendors and car workshops, can be found an unexpected addition to the neighbourhood: the newly opened Bangkok Kunsthalle. Settled in an old printing house that had been abandoned following a fire, the institution was established by art patron and philanthropist Marisa Chearavanont, wife of the chairman of Thailand’s largest agribusiness, cp Group, with Stefano Rabolli Pansera (formerly of commercial gallery Hauser & Wirth) as director. The newly opened institution devotes itself, as stated in its website, to promoting art, cinema, music, architecture and other creative endeavours. Its first commissioned solo exhibition is Korakrit Arunanondchai’s immersive nostalgia for unity, on view through the end of October. Arunanondchai transformed the ruined printing house into a set for his work, leaving the main hall bare save for a yellow haze settling in the air. The ground looked scorched, and there was text with words like ‘after death’ embossed on it, supposedly a prayer written by the artist. The press release compared Arunanondchai’s ‘resurrection’ of the building through art to the allegory of the phoenix rising from ash. The artist is well known for his performances and videoworks: here it felt like we had walked onto a set, actors in trance, immersed in fog, under an unfolding movie he was directing. Associations kicked in immediately: the ambience of Blade Runner 2049 (2017); or a version of Olafur Eliasson’s Yellow corridor (1997), currently on view in that artist’s Your curious journey retrospective at Singapore Art Museum (it closes on 22 September). It also struck me that the atmosphere bore a striking similarity to the pollution visible in Northern Thailand during haze season, from February to April. Two people suddenly emerged from the mist wearing T-shirts with slogans in all-caps: ‘a place can not be made from thin air’, ‘world class artist, world class gallery, world class corporation, world class exploitation’ and ‘this country is your gallery for exhibiting the art of monopoly’. Later I heard that this was a guerrilla performance by art-activist group artn’t, from Chiang Mai. When I called them to find out more about the performance, one of them told me that “the

Out of the Haze

Will the new Bangkok Kunsthalle deliver on its promises to fire up the art scene? Pearamon Tulavardhana, met by guerrilla art-activists on her first visit, assesses the energy

Korakrit Arunanondchai, nostalgia for unity, 2024 (installation view, Bangkok Kunsthalle). Courtesy the artist and Bangkok Kunsthalle

ArtReview Asia

origins of art funding deserve critical examination”. Another added, “It’s as if the world is divided. Inside, there is fake dust from smoke machines. While outside, people are about to die because they can only breathe ashes.” Air pollution in Northern Thailand has been linked to feed-corn farming, as contract smallholder farmers clear land by burning, and their corn is sold to multinational agriculture corporations’ farms. Over the years, activists have put pressure on companies that benefit from the crop to take greater responsibility for the supply chain. In an interview with Art Basel’s online editorial platform, Chearavanont spoke of how ‘one of (her) friends arrived at the opening in a very glamorous black lace dress but was confused as to where the kunsthalle was, assuming it would be a luxury venue. The kind owner of the noodle shop next door had to show her the way in!’ Her story points to a disconnect between the kunsthalle and its surroundings, no matter how much you try to separate what happens inside the kunsthalle from what is going on outside: after all, this is an art centre with a German name amid Thai-Chinese local businesses operating under the pressure of rising rents caused by gentrification. Despite the uninvited performers, the exhibition was a success. Arunanondchai’s allegory of the phoenix’s rebirth mirrors the fate of the building as it transforms into a space for art and creativity, while distracting us from the reality we will soon face when dust season, beginning in November, reaches Bangkok. Philanthropy is crucial in a country where government funding for the arts is limited. Yet concerns must be raised when an act of philanthropy may end up doing something else entirely. While it is undeniable that art and money often go hand in hand, is it naive to hope that the Bangkok Kunsthalle can start critical conversations about the issues of exploitation and environment? Will it become, as Arunanondchai’s exhibition positioned it, a sort of phoenix that can invigorate the art community of Bangkok and its discourses? It’s early days yet, and only time will tell. Pearamon Tulavardhana is a writer based in Singapore and Bangkok

At its peak, the popular Bersih movement in Malaysia, which has been agitating for cleaner and fairer elections in the country for nearly two decades, saw more than half a million people taking to the streets of Kuala Lumpur in 2015. The Bersih campaign organised four rallies between 2007 and 2011, eventually galvanising Malaysians to vote out the United Malays National Organisation (umno) in the 2018 general election, ending the party’s six decades in power. Malaysian artist Minstrel Kuik’s 2017 charcoal drawing Selamat Datang Ke Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (Welcome to the city of Kuala Lumpur) depicts a scene from a Bersih rally near kl’s Central Market. The artist had taken a photograph and made the drawing from that source image. A row of riot police officers lean on their shields, using them more for support than as a protective device. Even the police are tired. It’s an image not just of law enforcement but suggestive of a general sense of exhaustion resulting from the messiness of Malaysian politics. After all, umno, after a series of twists and turns, is now back in government following 2022’s inconclusive election, when Anwar Ibrahim, now prime minister, formed an alliance with the party. Kuik’s drawing is one of several politically charged works in a recently concluded exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, Not Just in Black and White, which highlighted 76 works from the private collection of retired plastic surgeon Steve Wong. Displayed at gdp Campus, an exhibition space run by the eponymous architecture firm, and curated by cultural agency Rogue Art in conjunction with Wong, the show’s premise – basically, ‘these are all works in black and white’ – doesn’t sound like the most exciting proposition, but the exhibition somehow ended up being a pleasurable and informative journey through Malaysian contemporary art from the 1990s onwards, through the eyes of a politically engaged arts patron. Wong favours bold figurative paintings that offer sociopolitical commentary, and a section of the show focused specifically on Malaysian history and politics. Yee I-Lann’s digital print of a herd of buffaloes trampling over orange traffic cones (the only pops of colour in a darkhued work) can be seen as emblematic of the Bersih movement: a disgruntled citizenry charging through temporary obstacles (Kerbau, 2007). Elsewhere, I enjoyed Ahmad Fuad Osman’s painting of Malaysia’s first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman (Recollections of Long Lost Memories #4, 2007–08). We see Abdul Rahman, known as a great dancer, jiving in his suit with a ‘Joget girl’, a female dancer dressed in the

King Collectors

When it comes to questions about the role of private collections in places like Kuala Lumpur, where public funding for art is scarce, writes Adeline Chia, the answers aren’t all black and white

top Minstrel Kuik, Selamat Datang Ke Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (Welcome to the City of Kuala Lumpur), 2017, charcoal on paper, 100 × 150 cm. Courtesy the artist above Ahmad Fuad Osman, Recollections of Long Lost Memories #4, 20o7–08. Courtesy Adaptus Design System, Kuala Lumpur

Autumn 2024

traditional sarong kebaya – an elegant, close-fitting long-sleeved top and long skirt. Inserted into the middle of this black-and-white scene is a female figure painted in colour, dressed in a skimpy tank top, short skirt and high heels, who alludes to a more contemporary (and seedy) nightlife, one that has been disavowed under the stricter Islamisation of present-day politics. The figurative works on display were a celebratory showcase of Malaysia’s diversity. These included Ahmad Zakii Anwar’s photorealistic charcoal drawings of three Indian Hindus, with their bare and powerful torsos rendered in painstaking detail (Devotees, 2008). Self-portraits also allowed artists to explore different identities. Female artist Nadiah Bamadhaj depicts herself topless and wearing a songkok, a traditional hat donned by Muslim men in Southeast Asia (Landlocked, 2008). Meanwhile, Malaysia’s rich landscapes were portrayed in paintings informed by traditions drawn from the country’s multicultural heritage. Inspired by shanshui, a style of classical Chinese ink painting, Wong Perng Fey’s 12 heroic vistas of the jagged ridges at the peak of Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu were individually drawn alongside clouds that shifted their position slightly in each depiction, overall creating the impression of a time-lapse series (Kinabalu 1–12, 2003). There was also robust evidence of various material investigations. W. Rajaie utilises soil to create unearthly textures in his mixed media work that resemble moonrock (Block, 2021). Paul Nickson Atia’s geometric black and beige patterns formed part of a smattering of abstract works. Starting with a ruler-drawn grid, the artist then paints strokes of different thicknesses along each line using Chinese ink; the result is like a glitched version of Sarawak basketry (Obsession; O, Perpetual, 2019). Although the exhibition, as curator Beverly Yong writes in the catalogue essay, ‘makes no claim to describe a developmental history’, it is nonetheless a survey of the country’s contemporary art over the last 30 years as seen through an individual’s collecting choices. The quality and purposefulness of the collection also highlights some broad differences between the contemporary art ecologies in Singapore and Malaysia. In Singapore, with its established system of issuing artist grants, as well as institutions with deep pockets, the state is the most influential player in the art scene. In Malaysia, collectors with even deeper pockets are king, comparable to other places where art-related infrastructure is less developed, and state institutions have limited budgets. Private collections tell far more

compelling and diverse stories than those found in national museums. This year alone, there have been two other major exhibitions mounted by prominent private collectors showcasing art from the past three decades. In August, landscape architect Ng Sek San staged Strategies of Dissent, which featured 70 works exploring the art of protest and resistance from the 1990s to the present. Meanwhile, in June, 100 works owned by lawyer Pakhruddin Sulaiman were presented in Tubuh. Produced during the 1990s and early 2000s, these works deal with the aftermath of Reformasi, a movement initiated by Anwar Ibrahim in 1998, when he was sacked as deputy prime minister, which launched a massive mobilisation against former mentor Mahathir Mohamad’s government demanding reform. Interestingly, what the shows have in common is a critical engagement with the unfolding turmoil in Malaysian politics from Mahathir-era authoritarianism and Najib Razak’s scandal-plagued administration to former political exile Anwar being elected as prime minister. The works on display speak of the progressive views of their owners and are a way for them to express their political opinions. Like artists, collectors can challenge the cultural and social order of the day. My trip to Kuala Lumpur ended with a visit to Ilham, a privately funded art space that operates as a free public gallery with a regular roster of exhibitions, events and educational outreach programmes – a very different model of support compared to the show of treasures taken from a collector’s storeroom. Over the past nine years, Ilham has established itself as the most important art space in Kuala Lumpur, rolling out a well-researched programme that explores modern and contemporary art in Malaysia and Southeast Asia more generally, and collaborating with regional partners like Singapore Art Museum, Para Site Hong Kong and maiiam Contemporary Art Museum in Thailand. The gallery is located within the Central Business District (cbd), housed in the swanky 60-storey Ilham Tower owned by the family of former finance minister Daim Zainuddin. In December 2023, Ilham Tower was seized by Malaysia’s antigraft agency because of an ongoing probe into controversial transactions by corporate entities previously controlled by umno. Despite the controversy, the building – together with Ilham, which occupies the third and fifth levels – seemed

top Hasanul Isyraf Idris, Quarry (detail), 2022, graphite on cotton paper and fibreglass sculpture, dimensions variable above C C Kua, New Home, 2024, watercolour on paper, 30 × 42 cm both Courtesy Ilham, Kuala Lumpur

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to be operating as usual when I visited. Art philanthropy, like Malaysian politics, can be opaque and messy. The current show, Titik Garis Bentuk: Drawing as Practice, features over 20 contemporary artists from across Malaysia who use drawing in various forms. There was some overlap with Not Just in Black and White, as many artists in both shows used charcoal – but overall the Ilham exhibition embraced a greater diversity of moods, themes and media. For a drawing show, it included videoworks, videogames and sculptures that utilised drawing in the process of their creation. Besides social themes, close attention was given to personal experiences, such as the monument to grief in Hasanul Isyraf Idris’s sculpture Quarry (2022), in which the artist coloured in a huge piece of paper with God knows how many pieces of graphite sticks so that the paper turned completely black, semihardened and able to stand up. Manipulated into the shape of a black mountain, the sculptural material’s surface possessed a metallic, oillike sheen. The work was inspired by the artist’s loss of three family members during the covid-19 pandemic, and while driving back to his hometown of Perak to attend the funerals, he passed by a huge granite hill where his late father used to work as a security guard. There was also strong representation of women and emerging practices, such as the doodly watercolour works of C C Kua that imbue everyday life with woozy, extraordinary elements that work like dream logic. New Home (2024) features a tiny house amid tall grasses, with the human inhabitants sliding out of it horizontally like worms, while in the sky floats a long red fish. Her landscape not only maps the natural environment but a more mysterious, interior one. Overall, I don’t think any art lover could find it in their heart to oppose Ilham, despite its association with potentially shady sources of funding. In a city where public financing for art is scarce, such private initiatives plug an important gap in the cultural scene. Given this, morality, as American writer and historian Henry Adams said, can be a ‘private and costly luxury’. Ilham should therefore be (cautiously) welcomed as a serious platform for contemporary art practices.

I was informed about José Francisco Borges’s death, appropriately enough, via the newspaper. By which I mean a physical newspaper – inky print and paper – which I’d picked up just before descending into São Paulo’s metro on a cold day at the end of July. The Brazilian poet and woodcut artist, the most famous of the literatura de cordel authors, was aged eighty-eight, the report said. Emerging back aboveground and onto the streets 20 minutes later, I thought I’d see if the banco in Praça da República had any of Borges’s folhetos de cordel – little unbound booklets of thin coloured newsprint, almost always 10.1 × 16.5 cm and pegged onto a string (like clothes drying on a line), from which the name is derived, that tell a single story in poetic form. On the front cover would be a black-and-white woodcut illustrating the folk or religious tale, comedy or occasionally, but not in Borges’s case, pornography that would spread across 8, 16, 32 or 64 pages. The kiosk owner shook his head: no, he didn’t sell cordels. You used to, I say, and remind him that I bought some here a few years back: strung down off the racks that were otherwise full of puzzle magazines, gossip and hobbyist titles. The supply dried up, the kiosk owner says; the demand too. It is hard enough selling the mainstream titles, he says, let alone something so old-fashioned. Borges was born in the countryside of Pernambuco state in 1935, long the hotspot for cordel production. His father was a farmer and José helped him on the land as soon as he could walk. He went to school aged twelve, but just for ten months: the teacher moved away and no replacement was found. “In those days, there were no newspapers, magazines or radio where we lived. All we had for distraction were cordel booklets,” Borges would recall. “Stories of romance, of legends, of love, of struggle, of suffering. The news of the region, events, accidents, catastrophes, everything becomes a cordel. It was journalism of the countryside,” he told The New York Times in 2017. Borges sold herbs, became a bricklayer, a farmhand, a carpenter and a potter, and along the way – from cordel of course – learned to read and write. He started selling the booklets himself at the weekly market – just another hustle to survive. In 1964, however, he decided to pen his own tale: The Encounter of Two Cowboys in the Petrolina Hinterland, the cover illustration provided

On the Line

Wandering the squares of São Paulo, Oliver Basciano wonders whether the death of its most celebrated exponent will lead to the demise of a once-popular vernacular artform

José Francisco Borges, A Moça Que Dançou Depois de Morta. Collection Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. cc by-nc-sa 2.0

Autumn 2024

by another artist. He didn’t know it at the time, but the literary history Borges was joining is as hybrid as Brazilian identity itself. Cordel, which became established in Brazil during the nineteenth century, around the time weekly markets became regularised enough to provide a concentrated public, has its roots in the Iberian romanceiro tradition as well as the corridos compositions of Spanish-speaking South America and the African oral tradition of akpalô. The cordel seller was a performer too: reading the story to potential customers as they bought their fruit and vegetables; enticing them to buy the booklets so that they could do the same at home. As a salesman, Borges turned out to be a pro, pausing to comment on the texts, interacting with passersby, often ending the story short to entice a sale from a listener anxious to know how it ended. His first attempt at writing a cordel sold well, but he nonetheless had insufficient funds to pay an artist to illustrate his second story. Consequently, Borges set about learning woodblock printing himself. The True Warning of Frei Damião tells the story of a popular Italian missionary in the northeast of Brazil, the cover emblazoned with a wonky-looking church in the colonial-architecture style. Over 200 stories followed, each selling in their thousands. His best-known, however, The Arrival of the Prostitute in Heaven, published in 1976, sold over 100,000 copies. Readers were lured by the story of a charismatic prostitute who goes to Hell, only to persuade her captors that she should be transferred to Heaven. Once through the pearly gates (the woodcut on the front shows her being given a leg-up by the Devil himself), she seduces a range of holy characters. One lyric goes: ‘One night on St John’s Day, she danced with Saint Expedito, was scorned by Saint Blaise, dated Saint Carlito and at the end of the party went to sleep with Saint Benedict.’ I try a few more kiosks in São Paulo, to no avail, returning instead to the cordels I have already collected. They remain more easily found in the northeast of the country, but elsewhere the vernacular tradition of gossip and jokes has been devoured by social media and memes, and Brazil’s insatiable appetite for these. Perhaps this is just progress – Brazilians are easily the best mememakers out there, displaying a modern-day creativity and adeptness at humour and engagement – but I hope the tactility of cordel isn’t set to die with its most famous proponent.

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Art Featured

But from estrangement 47

We are what we do; and we are what we do to it by Mark Rappolt

ArtReview Asia

In works by the filmmaker Hira Nabi, nonhuman voices direct humans towards a radical shared consciousness

Autumn 2024

What might be the appropriate language in which to talk to trees? choice of language for the work. Perhaps even an impediment. She That’s the subject Pakistani filmmaker Hira Nabi and I are currently reminds me that these forests were planted by the British and that discussing. The context is her three-channel video Wild Encounters “these areas were terraformed, in a way, to look like English country(2023), which is part of a bigger project, How to Love a Tree, launched side”. And to produce cherries, strawberries and raspberries for the in 2019 and manifested in various media (among them, prints, cyano- overcooked colonists; a reminder that the lasting effects of colonisatypes, performances, musical concerts and audio), that explores the tion are felt in the landscape itself as much as they are by inhabitants relationship between people and landscapes in her homeland. Trees of those landscapes, and that colonial British, and their memories of any sort, however, aren’t present as we’re discussing them. It’s just of home, are among the many ghosts that haunt these forests, from the two of us, talking behind their backs, out of time, out of place on their roots up. The forests, the commentary points out, still provide a video call. Not, of course, that it’s totally clear which part of a tree cooling shade, but now it’s from the scorching heat of the metal roads might be its ‘back’ in any case. that dissect them, roads that were then later put in place by the British. Wild Encounters was filmed in the misty pine forests around Murree, ‘The first thing that colonisers do everywhere is saw down trees, build roughly 30km northeast of Islamabad. Murree was originally estab- straight roads right through sovereign wilderness,’ the video commenlished as a hill station by the British during the mid-nineteenth century tary reminds us. Visually we’re reminded that the modern equivalent (and their occupation of what was then ‘India’) as a sanatorium and a is telecommunications towers, a concrete treescape briefly glimpsed, refuge from the oppressive summer heat of the Punjab plains. Nabi’s along with traces of the roads, in the video itself. videowork aims at bringing audiences closer to the forest, to think But language is not the primary vehicle through which Nabi seeks to connect audiences to the forest. “I wanted to move a bit with it and breathe with it, perhaps to meditate with it. ‘Can you sense the forest dreaming?’ begins the subtitle commen- outside of language,” she explains, “which is also why then to start tary. At times, the video, dominated by footage of the forest and the with dreaming, to start with a syncing of energy. Because it starts trees that make it up, features video inset within video, as if we’re with breathing and dreaming, this piece syncs with the temporalities being given access to view this dreaming. The subtitles are in English; of the forest.” At one point these temporalities are listed, as periods for many in the Murree area, the local language is Pahari, while the of climatic change or seasonal growth: monsoon time, lichen time national language of Pakistan is Urdu. Though one might not go so and renewal time. As well as one unnatural one too: ‘tourist time’. far as to describe any human language as natural, either of the last two We see footage of children picking and braiding daisies, stretching their arms, somewhat precariously, through might feel more ‘local’ to this context. I venabove How to Love a Tree iv: Wild Encounters (still), barbed-wire fences (it’s unclear what they ture to Nabi that, given that we don’t know 2023, three-channel expanded projection, 18 min are supposed to keep out or keep in; as far or speak the ‘language’ of trees and that she’s preceding pages How to Love a Tree (prologue) as the video is concerned they’re just there) trying to bring audiences closer to a forest in (still, detail), 2022, four-channel to grasp the white and yellow blooms, while Pakistan, English might be seen as a curious video installation with six-channel audio

ArtReview Asia

the subtitles tell us that daisy season also marks the advent of snake Future Generation Art Prize in Kyiv. “Then I let go of this idea that season. As if, through word and image, to remind us that there is danger I’m taking the viewer there, to that particular forest, and instead in pleasure, or that the natural cycle and the human cycle are not always began to think about how I might bring people closer to forests that in sync. For the artist, however, it’s also a moment of self-consciousness. they know and are intimate with and that they hold in their memory, “Yes, they’re taking all those flowers,” she explains when I mention in their imagination. If I can talk about these forests that I know, that their weaving them into garlands and then selling them might maybe people can also go to the forests that they know.” be viewed as extractive, “but that’s different from cutting down a lot The desire to make connections between the human and nonof trees to build a housing estate or to plough a road through or to human worlds is a feature of Nabi’s work. All That Perishes at the Edge really dig up a mountain because you of Land (2019) is a single-channel video “Sometimes we also make want to put a hotel up there. All these by the artist ‘and the Gadani shipthings are happening, and then there’s breakers’. Gadani is where global trade possible things that we would this timber mafia that exists. I wanted and global dreams go to die. It’s the like to see or like to happen. world’s third biggest shipbreaking to stay with those kids to also show yards, spanning 10km of beachfront, that I’m not trying to be very puritan Those then can become quite real” about it: I know that me going into 40km northwest of Pakistan’s capital, the forest is also disrupting and disturbing things. I’m aware of Karachi. Although the 30-minute duration of Nabi’s film may suggest that.” At other times the video presents the forest as home to a litter it’s a little less than an epic work (by the standards of today’s feature of discarded ceramics, a human-made trash heap. If part of the work, films), it is a kind of Moby-Dick for the twenty-first century. Nabi’s film with scenes of the forest mists, is designed to take us into a leafy might be without the thrill of the chase, but it holds the novel’s fundadreamworld, there are occasional reminders that this is only a dream. mental uncertainty about precisely who is chasing who. The artist is equally realistic about the fact that viewers in Europe The video concerns the breakdown of a giant container ship, will feel at a certain remove from the landscape within which she the Ocean Master, with the (audio) narrative conducted as a dialogue invites them to immerse themselves, framing her work as a cue rather between it and the labourers engaged to tear it apart. The ship is than a direct invitation. “I’m really aware that I’m filming these dragged, by chains, to the shore, revealing its rusting hull, which is forests that are in Pakistan and these galleries or these museum spaces scored in a manner similar to the folds of skin on a rorqual whale’s lower half. What happens to it next is a form [where the work has been shown], they are How to Love a Tree ii, 2022 (performance view, of flensing. The destruction of this metal all, so far, in Europe.” Versions of How to Love The Urgency Intensive, Jan van Eyck Academie, behemoth is carried out by antlike labourers a Tree have been shown in the Netherlands, Maastricht, 2022), lecture performance, climbing wooden ladders, using tiny cutting Germany and, soon, in Ukraine, as part of multimedia audiovisual installation, screenprint torches and brute force, and leaving a lot this year’s edition of the Pinchuk Art Centre’s on fabric, dimensions variable. Photo: Romy Finke

Autumn 2024

How to Love a Tree (prologue), 2022 (installation view, Open Studios, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, 2022), four-channel video installation with six-channel audio. Photo: Romy Finke

All That Perishes at the Edge of Land (stills), 2019, single-channel video, 30 min

ArtReview Asia

of crumbled ruins to the sea. But as the ship speaks to the workers who are tearing it apart, it slowly becomes clear that this process of destruction is part of a cycle of extraction (the workers are extracting scrap metal and reusable components from the ship; the ship was moving goods made from extracted resources of the earth) that kills both machine and man. It becomes apparent as a mutually assured destruction, a symptom of globalised trade, postcolonial politics and an economic system that exists to keep some people eternally poor while making others increasingly wealthy. The Ocean Master (its name, now that it’s beached, riddled with irony), we learn, was built in South Korea and latterly flagged to Panama. The Pakistani workers are convinced that they are performing their hazardous task out of a sense of national duty, to bring wealth to the impoverished economy of their country, while they barely receive enough money to subsist. Although they are equally aware that it’s not necessarily ‘the nation’ that is profiting the most. Rich economies export their trash to poorer economies (and project that they are somehow doing the latter a favour); ships in the shipping industry have ever shorter lifespans, as multinational companies chase profits. While the ship laments the death of its dreams of seeing the world, the workers lament the death of their dreams of making a living. And of course death itself is a factor too. At one point, the workers reference the explosion of the oil-production tanker Aces, at Gadani in 2016, which killed 31 and injured 58. When deconstruction recommenced a year later, authorised by the Pakistani government, another massive fire immediately broke out, as oil residues in the ship had still not been removed. Normally, it would have been dumped into the sea. The toxic materials onboard the ships have also killed off the local fishing industry, further compelling locals to work the gig economy of destroying ships.

If it’s not oil residues coming for the workers, its asbestos from within the ship that will get them in the end – as the ship itself helpfully points out to them. Pollution, it would seem, is a common language of ships, fish and people. And people without money can’t afford to dream. “I some ways, I’m responding to the world around me, which I also see as becoming less hopeful and less optimistic,” the artist says. Which brings us back to speaking to and dreaming with trees. “Here’s the thing, [in the video narrative of Wild Encounters] there’s a bit of ambiguity where you don’t know if maybe those are the trees’ thoughts or the forest’s thoughts.” There’s a moment towards the end of the videowork when the subtitles repeat the refrain, ‘Your memory gets in the way of my history’, when you wonder if this is the singular speaking to the collective or the forest speaking to the human audience or vice versa. “I wanted to leave that there,” the artist continues. “I’ve spoken to people who told me about how they spent some nights in the forest, attuning themselves to a kind of consciousness and then hoping to allow the forest to dream through them. I haven’t done that myself but there are all these ways in which I know that people try to achieve or arrive at some intimacy or familiarity, to find yourself at a place where there can be this synchronicity, where there’s this osmosis.” I wonder if that’s just a human delusion. People seeing or feeling what they want to see or feel. “It can be,” Nabi replies, “but sometimes we also make possible things that we would like to see or like to happen. Those then can become quite real. I don’t have the science behind it. I’m not trained in botany or biology, which is why critical fabulation seems like a very necessary and urgent and lovely concept to play with and to move around with.” ara The exhibition for the 7th edition of the Future Generation Art Prize is on view at Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, from 4 October

How to Love a Tree ii, 2022 (performance view, Forecast Forum 7, Radialsystem, Berlin, 2022), lecture performance, multimedia audiovisual installation, screenprint on fabric, dimensions variable. Photo: Camille Blake all images Courtesy the artist

Autumn 2024

Anthropophagic Strategies ii, 2024, denim jacket, jeans, embroidered patches, plush spikes, wire mesh and dictionary, dimensions variable

ArtReview Asia

Lost (and Found) in Translation Tan Zi Hao’s pronounced linguistic distortions around the subject of race relations in Malaysia pose broader questions about the nature of ‘identity’ in a translingual culture by Adeline Chia

A figure manifested only by a black denim jacket and black jeans is on its knees, bowing down in front of a Malay dictionary that lies open on the floor. Patched onto the back of the jacket are the words delulu, melulu and trululu, rendered in the near-unreadable jagged spikes of a death metal font. This is Anthropophagic Strategies ii (2024), one of Tan Zi Hao’s most recent works. In Gen Z internet-speak ‘delulu’ means delusional (in a positive, self-confident way), ‘melulu’ means reckless in Malay and ‘trululu’ is a derivation of delulu, meaning true. Running down the sleeves of the jacket is a Malaysian-Cantonese phrase, ‘你咪當我lulu’, which was popularised during the 1990s and means ‘don’t treat me like an idiot’. Also painted onto the jacket is the word ‘lulu’, inscribed in Jawi as ‫ولول‬. The morpheme ‘lulu’ takes a translingual journey in this work, its meaning changing through various slangs, slogans and scripts – although all of the word’s significance is centred around misperceptions. You could say that Tan’s multidisciplinary practice as a whole is invested in such crosslinguistic journeys, playing with translations and transliterations, and revelling in the intentional and unintentional mishaps that ensue. For example, Addressing the Institution (2018), a series of minimalist paper works that feature printed text, plays on distortions in the translation of the office address of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute for Language and Literature), which is the government body responsible for coordinating the use of the Malay language and Malay-language literature in Malaysia. The address is translated from its original language (Malay) to English, and then back to Malay. All three versions of the address appear in the work. The Malay address, ‘Balai Pustaka, Bukit Timbalan, Johor Bahru, Malaya’, becomes ‘book hall, deputy hill, new hill, Malay land’ in English. Translated back to Malay, we have ‘Dewan buku, Bukit Timbalan, Bukit Muda, Tanah Melayu’. Multicultural and multilingual ‘Malaya’ has become ‘Tanah Melayu’, the Malay homeland, a politically sensitive term used to

denote the predominance of Malays in the country. What Tan, who is ethnically Chinese, highlights is the weight carried by the Malay language, synonymous with Malay ethnicity and ‘Malaysianness’ in general; an influence that is deeply felt by the country’s minorities. Understanding the history of race relations in Malaysia sheds important light on Tan’s work. The Malays have long claimed a distinct position in Malaysia due to their longer history in the country. The British colonial administration incorporated the Malay monarchy into the independent Federation of Malaya in 1948, and Malays remained politically dominant after Malaysia achieved independence in 1963. Following this transitional moment, as the Chinese became increasingly influential from an economic standpoint, and demanded more political representation, racial tensions within the country began to simmer. When two newly established Chinese opposition parties won seats in the Malaysian Parliament in 1969, the victory sparked a Sino–Malay race riot that took place in Kuala Lumpur. The 13 May incident left as many as 600 dead. An affirmative action programme followed that strongly favoured Malays. The New Economic Policy (nep) was introduced as a means to reduce racial tensions and in place for two decades before being replaced by another comparable policy. Under the nep, Malays and Indigenous peoples are classed as bumiputera (‘sons of the soil’) and have privileges in higher education, public sector employment and equity and property ownership. As of July 2023, 70.1 percent of the Malaysian population were classified as bumiputera, 22.6 percent were classified as ethnically Chinese and 6.6 percent as ethnically Indian. Many of these policies remain in effect. Tan’s entry point into broader discussions about race is through language. First, he interrogates Malaysia’s racialised national language policy, which is inextricably linked to ethnonationalist thinking about how Malaysian national identity is constructed; second, he celebrates the more syncretic, idiosyncratic uses of

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language on the ground. Malay is designated the national language sultanate, marking the initial establishment of Islam in Malaysia and (the medium of instruction in national schools and in which all offi- the region more generally. cial documents are written), while English comes second. Only two Visitors are invited to touch the sculpture, which subsequently main minority languages, Tamil and Chinese, are permitted as the activates the video, and the Jawi inscription on the digital stone medium of instruction in vernacular schools. Tan’s early works deal translates into another language, which is randomly selected from with the exclusion of minority languages in the country’s construc- 13 possibilities, including Arabic, Tamil, Sanskrit, Javanese, Hokkien, tion of national identity. In the video Negaraku. Bukan. My Country. Hakka and Rohinya. To complicate matters, Tan also renders the Is Not. 我的祖国。不是。எனது நாடு. அல்ல. ਮੇਰਾ ਦੇਸ਼. ਨਾ. Menuaku. Ukai. translated text using a script that may not correspond (for example, Pogunku. Au. (2014), he overlays black-and-white footage of the a Hokkien translation in traditional Chinese script). The stone National Day Parade in 1957, the year of Malaya’s indepenence from consequently has the potential to become incomprehensible to the British rule, with translations of the Malaysian national anthem viewer, unless they are a polyglot. in eight languages, including nonTan’s approach alienates us Tan’s view of linguistic communication official languages such as Iban from language and dispels the iland Kadazandusun, dominant in lusion that it is a transparent is anarchic. It is a shifting, unMalaysia’s Borneo states, Sarawak transmitter of meaning. His view governable force that moves between and Sabah. The archival images of of linguistic communication is different languages, scripts, this historic event are almost obanarchic. It is a shifting, ungovernable force that moves between scured by the wall of text. races, nationalities and classes Later, Tan became more interdifferent languages, scripts, races, ested in destabilising essentialist connections between a language nationalities and classes – existing ‘in motion and in multiplicity’, and other identity markers, like ethnicity or nationality (reflective as he describes it in his essay ‘Accursed Tongues: Language in the of a view that many progressive Malaysians share: few people would Throes of Translation and Transliteration’, written for the catalogue oppose Malay as a national language if it wasn’t so closely associated that accompanies his most recent exhibition, The Tongue Has No Bones with the supremacy of any one ethnic group). His installation The (2024), on view during July at a+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur. Mercurial Inscription (2022) comprises a video animation that renders While Tan’s practice examines the issues that arise when a singly a key historical artefact in Malaysia, the 700-year-old Terengganu unifying language governs a polyglot citizenry (ideas that will no Inscription Stone, which can be seen floating in space, as well as doubt resonate with many), what hinders a more direct apprehension an aluminium sculpture that is positioned in front of the screen: of his work is how local its references are: word games are played with an imagined version of the stone’s missing part. Its inscription, languages used in Malaysia, which rely on a detailed understanding acknowledged as the earliest example of Jawi writing in Southeast of the country’s cultural and political histories. I’m from nearby Asia, announces Islam as the state religion of Terengganu, an ancient Singapore, a multilingual and multiracial society with a similar

A Future Imperfect Presumed Dead, 2024, automotive paint on reclaimed woods, and speaker, 198 × 63 × 66 cm. Photo: Hariz Raof

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The Impossible Self-Portrait (detail), 2024, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Dinn Diran

Autumn 2024

Addressing the Institution, 1957, 2018, digital print on acid-free paper, 17 × 86 cm. Photo: Dinn Diran

In The Beginning, R Was Only a Head (still), 2024, single-channel video, 1 min 50 sec (loop)

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ethnic makeup, so the Malaysian languages are not far off from those used at home. The postcolonial histories of these two countries are also intertwined, Singapore having briefly been part of Malaysia before leaving in 1965 due to irreconcilable differences between the leaderships of each state. Despite this, I still needed to do some serious reading to unpack the meanings of the works I saw. Take A Future Imperfect Presumed Dead (2024), an installation of a wooden coffin that has been printed with stencils of different languages, all phonetic transliterations of ‘keranda 152’. The work is inspired by the 1967 Keranda 152 protest (keranda means ‘coffin’ in Malay), when Malay language supremacists paraded the streets with a coffin to protest what they saw as the death of the National Language Act, which positioned Malay as the official state language. The protesters were aggrieved by the government’s extension of the use of English in legislative and judicial proceedings that year. The extension violated the promise made during independence from the British in 1957, in which English was allowed to be the official language for ten years to ensure a smooth transition; afterwards, Malay would be the sole official language. Tan’s work takes the coffin, a loaded symbol of linguistic protest and ethnonationalism in Malaysia, and inscribes diverse language scripts onto it – Chinese, Tamil and Jawi/Arabic – that spell out what is essentially a narrowly racialised political position. In his catalogue essay, Tan broadens the understanding of translation so that it becomes a necessary condition of all linguistic communication. Writing down a language, for example, is in itself a translation. Tan writes: ‘The script is a language of a language. Not only does it transcribe and transliterate, but it also bleeds into and contorts pronunciation, thus initiating a subtle process of translation that escapes notice.’ I am in favour of the view that language is a constantly mutating agent. But in my encounter with Tan’s work, I found myself pondering another type of translation, which is

the movement from intellectual concept to artwork. Could an idea be too perfectly realised, leaving little to no room for slippages and errant interpretations; for ‘idiosyncrasy and carelessness’, as Tan writes? A recent work leaves greater room for ambiguity and feeling, using language not to convey meaning but rather to create atmosphere. In the video In The Beginning, R Was Only a Head (2024) we first encounter three people, one by one, from behind. The first is a man wearing a Malay baju (long-sleeved shirt) and songkok hat, the second a woman in an Indian saree and lastly a man in a Chinese mandarin jacket. As they each turn around, we see that they are racially ambiguous. Playing in the background is a male voice whispering over and over – “dressed him up like a Malay”, “dressed her up like an Indian”, “dressed him up like a Chinese” – creating an atmosphere of dread and foreboding. The phrase was inspired by a firsthand account of a Chinese man who survived the 13 May incident because a Malay family had ‘dressed him up like a Malay’. The video was filmed at the photogenic Saloma Link Bridge in Kuala Lumpur, which has an led facade that creates a pixelated version of the Malaysian flag at night. In the video we don’t see the flag – only gorgeous jewel tones in the background. In juxtaposition with the magical, almost romantic visuals, the rhythmic chanting in the background is malevolently insistent. “Dressed him up as a Malay dressed him up as a Malay dressed him up as a Malay.” Even as I walked away from the work, the video’s cadences continued to echo in my head. With its rich cinematography, the work is an uplifting story about interracial harmony and human decency. Yet there is something compulsive about the need to blend in for the purpose of survival, which suggests a nervousness not just around racial violence but more subtle forms of racial sublimation. In the end, the work paints a complex picture of Malaysian race relations that we experience more as ambience than argument. ara

The Impossible Self-Portrait (detail), 2024, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Dinn Diran all images Courtesy a+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur

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Uncontainable by Emily McDermott

Korean artist Mire Lee’s haunting, lo-fi kinetic sculptures offer new spins on sensing and thinking, and perhaps new ways of being 64

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Over the past eight or so years, Lee has produced sculptures and As instructed by a sign, I lift a piece of resin-coated burlap attached to a black metal frame. Beneath the flap is the following poem: ‘Poetry that environments that are, indeed, far from containable. Her lo-fi works turns to / shit outside the / body, love that turns / to shit Look, I’m / a – pairing motors, tubes and pumps with silicone, wet and dried clay, foundation of filth / raving mad with love / Let’s sing with a face that’s and viscous liquids – often rumble, bleed, twist or turn, situating their bitten half off / That’s half bitten off / A crazed, lovestruck / song.’ It’s maker in a lineage of kinetic artists and those who have offered unsettling takes on the human body, not least fellow Korean Lee Bul (though written in lead. Four other such poems hang on two freestanding red-stained Lee operates at some distance from Bul’s dark cyborg figures and takes wooden walls. The room stinks – of resin, of dust. Nearby, three concrete on utopian architecture). Indeed, Lee’s artworks can be hard to posimixers turn sporadically, raucously tumbling their contents (which in tion because they change over the course of their lives, sometimes one case includes steel cable and crusty fabric; plaster rocks stuffed into deteriorating altogether. At the 2022 Busan Biennale, she erected a 21-metre-tall scaffolding structure, covered with holey, constructionconstruction gloves in another). I jump every time they turn on. Next to one mixer hangs Untitled (burlap body piece with many holes) site fence mesh; the voids in that mesh are outlined in black by waste Concrete version (2024), a giant looping structure made of burlap stur- oil, as if an inky parasite had been eating away at the fabric, as if the died with concrete and suspended from the ceiling by a metal chain. holes would continue to grow ever larger (Landscape with Many Holes: It’s wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, like a cow’s carcass. Untitled Skins of Young-do Sea, 2022). At the Venice Biennale that same year, Lee (burlap body piece with many holes) i (2024), a similar, smaller sculpture adorned more scaffolding with sinuous ceramic sculptures and hoses – albeit made with dried clay instead of cement – sits atop a wood from which lithium carbonate and iron-oxide glaze spurted, pushed panel. I learn that the poems are written in lead after lifting the burlap out by unseen pumps (Endless House: Holes and Drips, 2022). Dripping with my bare hands; not only are the words poignantly seared into with the deep red liquid, the ceramics and hoses appeared like disemmy brain, the sounds and smells into my body, but so too is a poten- bodied organs, bones and guts, the installation a biomorphic entity tial threat, a poison. (When I visit the gallery a second time, gloves are both beautiful and grotesque, amazing and repulsing. Lee began working with kinetic sculpture in Amsterdam, where sitting on a windowsill next to the instructional sign.) This constellation of works by the Seoul-born, Berlin- and she moved in 2018 for a residency at the Rijksakademie after receiving Amsterdam-based artist Mire Lee consumed a room at Sprüth Magers’s her bfa and mfa from Seoul National University. There, she took an gallery space in Berlin this summer. The poems are by Kim Eon Hee, who Arduino programming course and was immediately drawn to the is known for her unconventional use of language and the grotesque unpredictable results of using motors and machines in her sculptures. “I fear myself being comfortable,” she forms she describes. Lee has worked with Hee explains, “and because a kinetic object is above Prayers: Poetry, 2024, lead on burlap, resin, multiple times, and the two of them are even concrete, metal frame, 60 × 51 × 5 cm (framed). moving, it’s like a translation of that existentranslating a book of Hee’s poetry into English Photo: Timo Ohler. Courtesy the artist tial angst, of wanting to be able to be surprised for the first time. “I love [her poetry] for not and Sprüth Magers, Berlin and to surprise myself.” being fully containable,” Lee says when we facing page Carriers, 2020 (installation view, When beginning something new or movmeet at her studio in Berlin, “and I admire and Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2020). Photo: Yonje Kim. ing from one project to the next, Lee starts aspire to the type of art that is not containable.” Courtesy the artist and Art Sonje Center, Seoul

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above Endless House: Holes and Drips, 2022 (installation view, The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale, 2022). Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Courtesy the artist and Venice Biennale preceding pages Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Young-do Sea, 2022 (installation view, We, on the Rising Wave, Busan Biennale, 2022). Photo: Sang tae Kim. Courtesy the artist and Busan Biennale

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with simple associations, admitting, “I don’t really have a conscious process.” She fluidly follows one thought or material to the next, digesting and instinctively abstracting associations and any additional references as she creates, until she feels, in her gut, that a work is finished. Often, any explicit reference appears only in a work’s title: Veronica Moser (2022) is a found video-interview with the eponymous late pornography actress who specialised in scatology; the title of Lee’s exhibition at the New Museum in New York, Black Sun, was pulled from philosopher Julia Kristeva’s 1987 book Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia; and the aforementioned title of her piece for the Venice Biennale nods to architect Friedrich Kiesler’s 1959 Endless House, an unrealised vision of an orifical building. But beyond such titular hints, references are fully abstracted, a point underlined during my conversation with the artist, when these overt allusions bleed into many others unseen. When Lee speaks about Kiesler’s house, for instance, it gives way to the ‘Josef Fritzl Haus’ (specifically, a part of the cellar that Fritzl, a notorious Austrian sex criminal, built and adjusted over time to imprison his daughter in order to repeatedly rape her, and where she eventually gave birth to seven babies), which gives way to the improvisational and layered nature of certain traditional architectures in South Asia, which then leads to musings on Lee’s own childhood bedroom. Follow the clues Lee gives in her titles (which means a little research) and similar streams of potential references can be discovered. Both the title of the work and a brief text accompanying the work in Busan, for example, indicate that she took as her starting points Yeong-do, or Yeong Island, and the abandoned Songkang Heavy Industrial Co, Ltd factory, where her piece was installed. After a quick google search, it becomes clear that the island was a home for refugees and displaced people after the 1930s, a time during which Japan ruled Korea under a strict military regime and enforced cultural assimilation. I also learn that in 1932 the Japanese military began forcing Korean women from their colonies to become sex slaves. The disused factory, meanwhile,

speaks to a history of failed industrialisation. But this information is neither explicitly detailed in relation to Lee’s work nor aesthetically part of the installation, a conscious choice by the artist to prioritise affect over didacticism. First and foremost, the work made the imposing building feel forlorn, the installation and factory itself both fragile entities on the brink of collapse; in turn, this engendered an acute awareness of the relative smallness of the human body, and of one’s own mortality. When we meet, Lee is preparing for a forthcoming commission at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. For it, she began with basic associations related to the space’s history as part of a power station. She then reckoned with its monumentality and what she describes as its “masculine feeling”. The details of the installation remain a secret, but broadly, as in Busan, Lee aims to undermine the scale of the location by presenting an incredibly large work that simultaneously feels fragile or small: “I really like to make sculptures look sad,” she explains. “If a sculpture is very small compared to the physical environment, or if it’s not erect but on the ground, it’s immediately a bit sad. I have always enjoyed when [a sculpture] can create a certain mood or affect but in a very simplistic way.” Regardless of a sculpture’s location or potential reference points, Lee’s work evokes raw emotion – in herself and, in turn, in the viewer. And this connects directly to her fear of being comfortable, of entering a state of stasis: “I fear that [if I were comfortable] I would become judgemental and exclusionary,” the artist further explains. “I want to feel as many things as possible,” she continues, while discussing the process of creation. In doing so, by creating works that are jarringly uncontainable and unpredictable, Lee likewise pulls the viewer out of their own ordinary – their daily – rhythms, offering instead an experience to see, to smell, to hear – to feel – anew. ara Mire Lee’s Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London, is on view from 9 October to 16 March

Carriers (detail), 2020 (installation view, Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2020). Photo: Yonje Kim. Courtesy the artist and Art Sonje Center, Seoul

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Power Without Crowds How Japanese artist Yoshiaki Kaihatsu is redefining democracy by Adeline Chia

The House of Politicians, 2012– (installation view, Minamisoma City, 2012). Courtesy mot, Tokyo

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On 15 March 2012, one year after the Great East Japan Earthquake Kansai, as well as affiliated galleries in countries such as Canada, caused a major accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, Norway, Mexico and the United States. Japanese artist Yoshiaki Kaihatsu built a small house in Minamisoma, A major survey of Kaihatsu’s prolific practice opened at the Museum a coastal city about 20km from the nuclear reactors, siting it 400m of Contemporary Art Tokyo this summer. Yoshiaki Kaihatsu: art is live outside the official evacuation zone, which by then was known as the – Welcome to One Person Democracy features about 50 works made over 30 exclusion zone. Kaihatsu sent invitations to about 750 members of years. ‘One Person Democracy’ is a phrase first coined by the late arts the Japanese parliament, including the prime minister, to visit the administrator Osamu Ikeda, director of the influential Bankart1929 four-tatami-mat house, with its single window facing in the direc- in Yokohama City, to describe Kaihatsu’s practice. Osamu wrote: tion of the reactor, to experience the desolation of the evacuated local ‘Democracy is not the movement organised by a group of people villages. None showed up. He titled this work The House of Politicians acting under a single motto but the chain reaction where one person’s (2012–). Thirteen years later, battered by the elements and restored specific action causes other people to act.’ Hikari Odaka, a curator at the a few times, the house is continuing to host sporadic activities by Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, has taken up this social-action artists, activists and residents, even though post-Fukushima anti- theme and expanded it to include more personal and idiosyncratic nuclear sentiment among the Japanese public has faded with time. elements. “One of the most distinctive elements of Kaihatsu’s work is In fact in 2022 the government announced a new plan to extend the his ability to engage in solitary activities while embracing the presence lifespan of existing nuclear reactors and build new ones. But The House of others,” she tells me over email. Take his rituals of doodling every of Politicians, looking out at the uninhabited landscape, and beyond morning and evening, or attaching a receipt for a purchase he made that the damaged reactors with 880 tons of melted radioactive nuclear that day to date the drawing (Receipt Diary, 1992–): a receipt marks an fuel (projected to take an unspeciexchange, no matter how brief, with fied number of decades to clean up), another person, the private ritual of is a stark reminder that the consedrawing accompanied by a degree quences of the Fukushima disaster of sociability. “Even large projects involving a wide range of people… have not yet played out, despite polioften derive from his humble and ticians choosing to paper over that. solitary practice that creates a chain Working since the 1990s in a variety of media including drawing, effect on other people’s actions,” photography, installation and perOdaka adds. “This approach embodies the essence of democracy, where formance, Kaihatsu often directly intervenes in social issues and engages we always treasure not only the colwith local communities. His work is lective (society, community, nation) usually relational, frequently taking but also the individual.” the form of events that rely on the To me, there is another element interaction and participation of of democracy that Kaihatsu’s work other people. One of his best-known encourages: an equality of rights works is a travelling art exhibition and status among people. This may that also functioned as a fundraiser mean disrupting all sorts of proprie(Daylily Art Circus, 2011–14), which ties, such as when the artist violated he put together with other artist artworld ‘rules’ by showing his own work at Documenta 9 uninvited: he friends following the earthquake. It toured the disaster-stricken Tohoku region, featuring large inflatable walked into the exhibition hall every day with a small video screen artworks to ‘make people smile’. In 2011 he initiated another project hanging around his neck that displayed a slideshow of photographs that collected disappearing local dialects and folktales from the coastal of Performance at Documenta 9 (Petit Gallery) (1992). Otherwise, his works region evacuated by the earthquake (Cotoba Library [Library of Words], simply create a level playing-field by treating everyone in the same way. 2011–). The project is hosted on Google Maps, where viewers can click (A disavowal of status in the context of Japan is likely more significant on various pins along the Gulf Coast region running from Fukushima than in other places, as Japanese society is traditionally more rigidly in the south to Aomori in the north. In each location, different people structured.) For the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in 2015, he created have been filmed telling local folktales in various temporary shelters, an underground broadcasting station by digging a hole in the garden of an abandoned school and establishing a radio station. He invited such as gyms and community centres. 39 Art Day (Thank You Art Day) is another notable community- various local characters, ranging from famous actors to retirees, to focused work that the artist began in 2001 to mark 9 March as a day participate as guests on an informal talkshow, which was streamed to celebrate and promote art (the pronunciation of the numbers live on YouTube (Mole tv, 2014). The interviews were conducted by the ‘three’ and ‘nine’ in Japanese sounds like ‘thank you’). Every year on artist who dressed in character as a mole, wearing a black furry suit and this day, participating museums and galleries extend opening hours, long white claws, which added to the relaxed and kooky atmosphere, reduce ticket prices and organise special exhibitions to encourage and encouraged a looser, more free-flowing conversation. visitors. From its humble beginnings with 20 galAs Kaihatsu tells me: “Humans have built a lot of architecture – huge buildings and skyscrapers leries taking part in the initiative, the project now Yoshiaki Kaihatsu. are the symbols of authority. I wanted to meet involves more than 145 art spaces in Tokyo and Courtesy mot, Tokyo

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people from all walks of life in a place without authority and without objects endure within the new builds. Their presence and absence can hierarchy. That’s why famous people come to this tv station, as well as be felt. Dust, another form of detritus from daily life, was also a favoured old men in the neighbourhood. I wanted to create a place where you can talk frankly without hierarchy.” material in his early days. For site-specific works, Kaihatsu likes to Born in Yamanashi Prefecture, west of Tokyo, in the landlocked, sweep up all of the dust from the venue and arrange it to create different mountainous Chubu region, Kaihatsu went to art school and origi- effects. In Shadow (1998), he vacuumed the dust from an abandoned nally trained to be a painter. After experiencing a crisis in confidence in house and arranged the particles onto a slanted rectangle on the floor, relation to his technical abilities, he switched to installation art. Aged which resembled a shadow emerging from a cupboard. In Tears Pond eighteen, he encountered the American sculptor Louise Nevelson’s (2002), exhibited in New York, he went to Ground Zero to collect dust works in a book and was inspired by her monochromatic boxy assem- (the area around the World Trade Center was apparently cleaned each blages made from found wood and day, but Kaihatsu found a snowdrift, behind which a lot of debris other salvaged materials. During his “Humans have built a lot of architecture remained). He arranged the dust master’s degree studies at Tama Art – huge buildings and skyscrapers are the into a raked circle, a reference to University, in Tokyo, he started ussymbols of authority. I wanted to meet Japanese karesansui gardens, which ing humble materials in his installations. In 1990 he began handling use raked gravel patterns (samon) people from all walks of life in a place Styrofoam during his part-time to represent the ripples of a pond. without authority and without hierarchy” work at a sculpture-casting comThe artist’s work took a more pany, where it was used to make maquettes for bronze sculptures. social turn in 1995, when, frustrated with the limited opportuniHe consequently turned to making things out of polystyrene foam, ties for exhibiting, he began an ambitious project to mail his sculpand his use of the material evolved into a personal trademark. tural artworks in wooden boxes to places all over Japan. As well as Some of these creations are sculptural objects, whether a centaur to museums and galleries, he sent his work to the houses of friends (Centaure 1.5 times, 2004), a space probe (2011: The Year We Make Contact, or whoever was willing to host (365 Project, 1995–96). The works were 2011) or a horse for a Hermès shop window (Barn, 2023). Others sent after the participants signed an agreement to display Kaihatsu’s are more ambitious architectures, such as a teahouse (Happô-En, artwork for a year, during which time he visited and filmed himself a Styrofoam Teahouse, 2001) and a café (Space White Cafe, 2017). Lit speaking with them about art, politics and whatever else came to from within, these assemblages exude an otherworldly glow with mind. These interactions were later edited and broadcast on the telelight escaping through the cracks between the Styrofoam pieces. vision channel nhk bs. 365 Project aimed to disrupt the usual methods The experience inside is uncanny, too. The oddly shaped blocks used of exhibition-making and expand the conversation about art from to build the architectural structures often began the confines of metropolitan Tokyo to the rest Performance at Documenta 9 (Petit Gallery), of Japan (“a rebellion against the art industry”, life as the protective buffer for boxed house1992.Photo: Kazushiro Namai. he tells me). But this work also became a turning hold appliances; the (negative) shapes of these Courtesy Anomaly, Tokyo

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Mole tv, 2014 (production view, Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2015, Niigata). Photo: Osamu Nakamura. Courtesy Anomaly, Tokyo

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above 2011: The Year We Make Contact (still), 2011, video. Courtesy Anomaly, Tokyo facing page Daylily Art Circus, 2011–14, installation. Courtesy Anomaly, Tokyo

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point that piqued his interest in art’s relevance to society, especially Balancing out the historical material are many interactive works because 1995 was a time of soul-searching for Japan. It was the year that explore various aspects of freedom, with recent works encourof the sarin nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway, which killed aging people to speak up and be heard. This could take the form of 13, severely injured 50 and left almost 1,000 others with temporary responding to various statements by pasting stickers (blue for ‘yes’, red impairments to their vision, and the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake for ‘no’) on a wall (Vote yes/no in mot, 2024). Such statements include: in Kansai, which killed approximately 6,300 people and displaced as ‘I don’t think we should accept immigrants’, ‘I don’t think vaccines are necessary’. Those in a more oratorial mood can stand at a lectern many as 310,000 others. At that time, Kaihatsu felt helpless and didn’t know what he could covered with faux fur to deliver a speech of up to 90 seconds ‘about anything: about your pet, about do. But over a decade later, in 2011, art, about your hobby’ (Speakers’ during the aftermath of the Great “It was an experience that made me realise East Japan Earthquake, he sprang Corner in mot, 2024). Then there is that our [artistic] activities, which we into action with Daylily Art Circus, the space for you to demonstrate always thought were not needed by many which connected the victims of the political solidarity with Ukraine in 1995 Kansai earthquake with those Welcome to Everyday Demonstration people, were needed by someone” of the 2011 earthquake in Tohoku. (2024–). Since the Russian invasion He loaded a truck with various artworks, including inflatable ‘air began in 2022, Kaihatsu has collected images of placards from prodancers’ in the shapes of giant clowns, animals and flowers, which Ukraine demonstrations around the world and posted them on social flapped around and danced like those in front of car shops and petrol networks. In the museum, these images have been made into stickers, stations to beckon customers inside. In the Kansai region, the exhibi- and visitors can place them onto a big wall to make a gigantic collage tion also functioned as a fundraiser, with many people affected by the mural. Interestingly, the pro-Ukraine stance aligns with Japanese 1995 earthquake expressing solidarity by writing messages of hope foreign policy. The notoriously immigration-resistant Japan has so and encouragement, donating cash and other supplies. Kaihatsu far accepted 2,500 Ukrainian refugees. According to figures released then took the exhibits and donations to the Tohoku and Fukushima by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in June, Japan is in sixth region, stopping at gyms where people were sheltering, as well place in terms of countries who have provided Ukraine with finanas community centres and parks, with the straightforward mission cial aid (more than €7 billion has been allocated by the country of spreading good cheer and distributing supplies. so far). The exhibition will also be a place for conversation, exchange and Kaihatsu said the idea came to him out of “a genuine desire to help people in the affected areas in whatever way I could as a human being. fun. A new iteration of Kaihatsu’s popular 100 Teachers project will be I didn’t know if the people who had lost their homes and jobs needed included. This is a programme that he has held in various places in art, but my job was art.” One of the most touching experiences during Japan over the past ten years. During the show’s run, 100 teachers this time, he says, was a remark by a mother in the Tohoku region who who are experts in various fields are invited to give 40-minute lessons attended one of his exhibitions. Her family, which included small chil- to the general public. August’s programme includes lessons by dren, had been affected by the earthquake. Lacking internet access, Gloomy Teacher, a self-identified pessimist who wants to encourage they saw a notice for Daylily Art Circus at the library and the mother a more neutral understanding of ‘darkness’ in the human psyche; subsequently took them to the Heavy Rain Teacher is a river exhibition. The mother then told expert and meteorologist coverKaihatsu that ‘[she] felt the chiling questions such as ‘why does it rain?’, ‘are there different types of dren needed this’. Kaihatsu tells me: “It was an experience that rain?’ and ‘where does rain go?’ made me realise that our activities, Other teachers include: Turningall-Kaihatsu’s-works-into-Dance which we always thought were not needed by many people, were teacher, Nininbaori teacher (Nininneeded by someone.” baori is a Japanese comedic act where two people wear the same In Japanese contemporary art, the 2011 earthquake is often large coat and pretend to be one cited as a critical turning point hunchbacked person) and Yonaguni that brought more social urgency Teacher (Yonaguni is the westernto the sector. There was a turn most inhabited island of Japan). towards more socially engaged The programme’s motto is: ‘Everyand politically critical art, with more artists working in or near the one a teacher, everyone a student’. Indeed, by tapping into our collecregions affected by the disaster, creating experiences that combined tive knowledge and experience, 100 Teachers is yet another instance art, advocacy and disaster relief. Daylily Art Circus, rightly, is often cited of Kaihatsu’s democratic flattening of a society which is guided by as an influential work, bringing food and money to the needy and curiosity, humility and humour. ar providing a bridge between different communities linked by their common experience of disaster, death and displacement. Yoshiaki Kaihatsu: art is live – Welcome to One Person Democracy is on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (mot) As many of Kaihatsu’s works are temporary social interventions, through 10 November they are shown in the form of documentation in his exhibition.

Autumn 2024

powering the world of art

Art is identity

Grand Palais October 18 - 20, 2024 Nina Childress, Dalida (tête) (detail), 2023. Courtesy of the Artist; Natalie Karg Gallery, New York; Art : Concept, Paris. © Nina Childress, adagp, 2024.

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To which nobody has attributed the power of reinforcing insight 79

Ho Rui An Post-Production Fever ArtSpace@Helutrans, Singapore 13 July – 11 August Oil is Singapore’s dirty secret. The self-proclaimed image of the city-state as a Garden City belies its extremely un-green status as a petrochemical hub that facilitates the global trade in fossil products. The two faces of the country are captured in Ho Rui An’s installation A Petropolis in a Garden with a Long View (2024), which depicts a corporate office-space brimming with indoor plants, as well as examples of Singapore’s long and little-publicised dependence on oil. On the table is The Art of the Long View (1991) by the influential ‘futurist’ Peter Schwartz, which documents the scenario-planning techniques developed, when he was employed by Shell during the early 1980s, to anticipate the imminent global oil-crisis. His forecasting techniques were adopted by the Singapore government two years after the book’s publication. Various laser-engraved transparent plaques can also be seen on the table, including one that features the then-chairman of Singapore’s central bank, Goh Keng Swee, felling a tree on Pulau Bukom

to mark the construction of a Shell petroleum refinery on the island. On the wall, a tv monitor shows found footage of supertankers (captured from airplanes) entering Singapore – a sight seldom seen in tourist marketing. The message is clear: despite the greenwashing, Singapore’s developmental trajectory is deeply complicit with the petrochemical industry. Ho’s solo exhibition is concerned with two kinds of production: the forces driving the creation of goods and services, and representations of such processes that might clarify or obfuscate the material realities. The exhibition is split into three parts. The first focuses on factory labour; the second on the oil industry; and the third on ai and ethics. Ho makes videos, prints and installations, several of which are included in this exhibition, but the backbone of his practice lies in his deeply researched performance-lectures, which draw from political and economic theory, visual culture and history. Performed as live events in front of an audience,

A Petropolis in a Garden with a Long View, 2024 (installation view, ArtSpace@Helutrans, Singapore), mixed-media video installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Quinn Lum. Courtesy a+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur

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the contents of these lectures are adapted into voiceovers for his longer videoworks. What this exhibition demonstrates is that Ho is first and foremost a conceptual thinker and researcher, rather than a maker. Oil Media Archive (2018–) is a collection of reading materials, comprising books and prints exploring Singapore’s oil industry and the rise of oil as a commodity on the global market. Another work is a printout of an essay that has been placed on the floor like a long carpet. Written by Schwartz and Peter Leyden in 1997, ‘The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020’ is a classic of neoliberal thought that envisages a future of worldwide prosperity, freedom and peace driven by free trade and new technologies – a scenario that we can resolutely say never came to be. The main appeal of this show lies in Ho’s original combinations of political, economic and historical discourses to make seductive arguments that are carried by the associative

qualities prompted by an image or turn of phrase. Pleasure is reached through this movement of thought rather than the veracity of the conclusions proposed by such arguments. In 24 Cinematic Points of View of a Factory Gate in China (2023), Ho explores the genre of the ‘factory film’ by going on a unique trek through representations of industrial labour in European, American and Chinese cinema, from the Lumière brothers’ first picture of workers leaving a factory to Chinese Maoist films portraying worker solidarity, while drawing inferences about the different ideologies that influenced how labour was represented by each filmmaker. Culminating in these representations is surveillance footage of entrance gates to factories owned by Chinese companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, which shows very few people coming in and out, casting doubt on the revenue figures these companies reported. This secret footage sought to expose fraud, but Ho aims to demonstrate ‘a contemporary scenography of late capitalism where there appears to be barely any workers leaving the factory’. (Some of this content has been used in another performance-lecture, The Economy Enters the People, 2021–22.) Ho documents the gates of

these 24 companies through images that have been arranged in a grid, resembling the multiscreen setup in cctv control rooms, capturing the quiet gates of these phoney Chinese firms. This static display is occasionally interspersed with clips from the Lumière film and others; more compelling is the voiceover, which discusses the historical relations between labour, technology and capital. ai is a recurring theme. Ho mostly uses it as an image-generation tool, such as in Fuelling Apocalypse (2024), which tackles Singapore’s war profiteering during the 1960s and 70s (the country supplied oil to both sides in the Vietnam war). He also discusses its broader ramifications for our conceptions of history and society. The video Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence (2024) records a densely packed lecture-performance featuring critical discussions of ‘global villages’, cybernetics, the time-loop movie Edge of Tomorrow (2014), deep-learning models and the apolitical and amoral intelligence that ai embodies. As Ho points out: “The real problem with ai then is not that datasets can be biased, but that the neural network that trains the data is not that inherently biased towards any ethical position

at all, as if one can imagine the future without first making judgements about the events of history.” There are two channels to this video installation. The one on the left shows images prepared by Ho to illustrate his points, while that on the right features ai generating a live transcript and images inspired by Ho’s monologue. When I was there, images that corresponded to the contents of the voiceover included weird leftfield pictures like a mass of conjoined human flesh, as well as long stretches of grey static as the ai caught up with the processing. Although this all demonstrates how precocious and capricious ai can be, the visuals are still less satisfying than Ho’s elegant theorising. Ho speaks of labour and intelligence in this show with the aim of scrutinising the ways neoliberal thought has infiltrated all manner of daily life. As for intelligence, if neoliberalism is the enemy, then Ho’s art is a committed and tireless force against it, gathering information about its strength, capabilities, locations and intentions; unlike ai, his intelligence has a strong ethical bias. Adeline Chia

Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence, 2024 (installation view, ArtSpace@Helutrans, Singapore), lecture and video installation with live ai-generated images, wallpaper and sand, 75 min. Photo: Quinn Lum. Courtesy a+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur

Autumn 2024

Yosuke Takeda Singin’ in the Rain Kosaku Kanechika, Tokyo 6 July – 10 August Yosuke Takeda doesn’t exhibit his work that often: Singin’ in the Rain is his third solo show since 2014, when a series of exhibitions, all titled Stay Gold, also published as a book, were staged in galleries in Tokyo and Paris. In his previous work, the photographer has been inquisitive of light and its relationship to the photographic process, with front light and back light often interrogated to brilliant effect. A memorable pairing in Stay Gold compared the transit of Venus before the sun to an annular solar eclipse – these images startle our perceptions of space and time while also making sharp allusion to the photographic medium and machine in their resemblance to an aperture. Here, presenting a new collection of digital photographs (all dated 2022), Takeda seems more interested in light’s potential as a means of creation. The works appear as abstract, aesthetically beautiful experiments from his disciplined study. The gallery is neatly partitioned, with a main exhibition space to the left and a smaller space shared with an office to the right. A narrow wall at the entrance straddling these spaces confronts the viewer with a picture titled 011801. A great number of water droplets scattered

across a dark surface reflect a cool, ambient blue light. This presentation solidifies the motif of the exhibition, water, which may at first be indiscernible among the other pictures in the show. With ten pictures in distinct, vivid colours and of mostly equal dimensions distributed evenly across the main space’s walls, entering it feels like stepping inside a prism. While most pictures in the exhibition (17 across the whole gallery) present a more abstract appearance of water than 011801, a few in particular, such as 004321, seem stretched almost beyond the medium, with dark blue streaks that flow across the print more closely resembling ink painting than photography. Other images cast illusions by capturing the movement of reflected light, which, in 005625, is almost sewing itself across the image. The aesthetic harmony of the images reflects certain parameters that must have been drawn by Takeda for the sake of this presentation. Although the exact processes behind these photos are not made explicit in any handouts from the gallery, it can be reasonably presumed – either by close observation or a familiarity with the photographer’s work – that the photos

Singin’ in the Rain, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Kosaku Kanechika, Tokyo

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have not been significantly altered after their capture. This is to say that Takeda’s interests are distinct from those of Wolfgang Tillmans, for example, whose abstract pictures are often a result of intervention at various stages of their creation. Light, diffused here by water and transformed into a state sometimes resembling the artificial, is the key to these photographs and the cornerstone of Takeda’s work. No explanation is given for why the titles are presented as numbers, but if one assumes that these photos were taken in sequence – which seems plausible considering the visual similarities of the brushlike 004034 and 004321, for example – a much larger body of work, perhaps as many as 230,000 pictures, casts a shadow over the 17 pictures on display. Images appear curated to reflect a range of colour and texture, repeating a visual effect only once or twice across the exhibition, perhaps to preempt the viewer’s exhaustion. It feels as though Takeda has made an optical shift, from camera obscura to dispersive prism, trading contradiction for something more pure. Perhaps the photographer has made one step closer to light itself. Toby Reynolds

Timoteus Anggawan Kusno Fever Dream Kohesi Initiatives, Yogyakarta 30 June – 25 August Spread across two floors, this exhibition explores the ghosts of Indonesia’s colonial past (highlighting in particular the role played by the Dutch) and the nature of historical memory. Fever Dream gathers paintings, photographs, sculptures and videos made by Timoteus Anggawan Kusno during his decade-plus-long practice; collectively, these works demonstrate the many roles he assumes, from ethnographer and arthouse filmmaker to installation artist. On the first floor, viewers enter what seems to be a disorganised office – perhaps the backroom of an archive – where costumes, printed matter and paintings are haphazardly placed on a shelf, some leaning against the wall or facing backwards. In glass cases standing on a central wooden table are filmstrips that can be viewed through a magnifying glass. They depict rural landscapes and are drawn from the Centre for Tanah Runcuk Studies (ctrs) project, a pseudo-institute that Kusno established in 2012 to generate discourses about a fictional ‘lost island’ in the Dutch East Indies. In this

show, we see artificially aged watercolour maps of the island (Peta Tanah Runcuk, 2016–17) and pencil drawings of its flora and fauna made in the same style as colonial-era botanical illustration (ctrs 3 Sumatera, 2016). ctrs allows Kusno to examine how historical memory is constructed through monocultural sources (codified knowledge, propagandistic photography) that were established under colonial reign and, in turn, which details from the past become sidelined. He uses the archive as a starting point and modifies it to conjure alternative narratives of precolonial agrarian life that merge myth and reality. Take Equus ferus sonitus – Collection of Centre for Tanah Runcuk Studies (2014), a series of archival prints depicting rural activities, such as farming or hunting, that involve a mythical, horselike animal whose head takes the shape of a cone. This creature appears repeatedly in Tanah Runcuk-related artworks, among them a depiction suggestive of a ghost in the relatively recent oil painting Postcard from Tanah Runcuk (2022).

The second-floor display features videos that expand on the concept of hauntings as linked to historical trauma and violence. In the video essay Tunggang Langgang (2024) the narrator begins by querying the untold deaths of Indonesian Independence fighters during the Dutch period of occupation, before wandering into a sugarcane plantation where more bloodshed was made possible, he believes, by the expansion of factories and other industrial infrastructure. The work ends with a Jathilan dance scene in which a spirit trapped in the dancer’s body is finally released. In the room next door, some images and figures that have already been encountered reappear in the three-channel video Fever Dream (2024). Scenes of dancers, plantations and railways play out quickly and hypnotically on big screens; some familiar and some strange. Mixing up scenes of history and fantasy at a delirious pace, the work suggests how repressed and unresolved historical trauma is linked to feverish hallucinations and experienced as a kind of sickness. Innas Tsuroiya

Fever Dream, 2024, three-channel hd video projection, sound, colour & b/w, 12 min. Courtesy the artist and Kohesi Initiatives, Yogyakarta

Autumn 2024

Meera Mukherjee and Jaidev Baghel Outside In Museum of Art and Photography (map), Bengaluru 23 March – 20 October The difference between the perception of an ‘artist’ and of an ‘artisan’ or ‘craftsperson’ perhaps relates to the language used to describe them: while the artist is celebrated through language, the worker is anonymised. Just a worker, typically from a marginalised community, sitting in a dank workshop and unimaginatively producing things the exact way that their ancestors did. This discriminating definition relating to who makes art and who produces objects favours the former, who has a better chance of standing atop a pedestal and receiving praise, money and national or international fame. The artisan, unable to articulate their indigenous idiom in a way that appeals to the fine art market, all too often remains in the village, enjoying fame and financial success rarely, if at all.

These problems of language, which really are synonymous with problems of caste, class and religion in India, preoccupied the practice of sculptor Meera Mukherjee, who brought innovation to ancient Bengali sculpting techniques beginning in the 1950s. This show, more particularly, highlights Mukherjee’s lifelong attempts to bridge the gap between the artist and the artisan, placing her bronze sculptures in conversation with the works of Jaidev Baghel, a traditional master of bronze casting who was born into the community of Gadhwa artisans in Kondagaon, Chhattisgarh. While Mukherjee trained in the arts at college, Baghel had access to traditional knowledge, and learned the techniques of metal casting when he was eight years

Meera Mukherjee, Rain, c. 1980, bronze, dimensions variable. Courtesy Museum of Art and Photography (map), Bengaluru

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old from his father, Sriman Baghel, a famed artisan himself. Supported by government programmes that, in the early post-Independence decades, actively sought to rejuvenate artforms that had suffered from a shortage of much-needed royal patronage, Mukherjee was tasked by the government with researching indigenous sculptural practices in rural India. This would give her a hyphenated identity in later years as an anthropologist, artist and researcher. Mukherjee and Baghel’s work intersected when, as part of her research, she arrived at Kondagaon during the 1960s and was apprenticed with the latter’s father. This, in turn, was thanks to her own growing interest in bronze sculptures in the Dhokra style of central and

east India, especially the lost-wax casting process, one of the oldest known methods of metal casting, which the senior Baghel had perfected. Outside In offers a partial but important view of how this creative exchange allowed artist and artisan to push the boundaries of the material, as well as the themes that they explored. Though Mukherjee and Baghel derived their thematic concerns from wholly different contexts, their experiments made them both outsiders: outsiders who were looking in. Several works, like Mukherjee’s Rath Yatra, Coal Miners and Queuing Before the Passport Office (all circa 1980) are displayed alone and showcase the themes of labour and mass movement, and the everyday activities that she was interested in depicting in her sculptures. Rain (c. 1980) is the most evocative work in the show, depicting a group of people stuck in the rain trying to seek shelter by clustering together. The rains in

India are never not an event; this awareness adds to the way raindrops slide down the faces of the people in the sculpture, their bodies fusing together, trying to stay warm and dry. That Mukherjee was able to cast the imagery of formless water in metal so intricately, no detail on the faces or bodies of people lost, speaks of both skill and experimentation with material and method. Baghel’s standalone works, Seated Madin and Seated Madiya (both 2007), Madiya with His Child (2006), the series of sculptures featuring madins at work (2006) and Prithvi (2006) show people engaged in everyday activities of labour or at leisure. Depicting a woman (madin) and a man (madiya) of the Madia Gond tribe together is now a common theme in Dhokra art, but it was a sharp departure from tradition when Baghel began pushing the scope of his community’s art practice – grounded by jewellery, vessels and votive sculptures – to include largescale figures engaged in the quotidian.

The exhibition includes a textile work by Mukherjee and some kantha embroidery pieces that she created with women from marginalised communities who worked at her foundry near Kolkata, which give a sense of her wider practice. But where the show works best is when the sculptures of each artist are placed alongside each other in a comparative study, limited though such instances are. For instance, in Mother and Child (c. 1990), Mukherjee somewhat abstracts her portrayal of a mother cradling her infant: the forms are minimal, the movement protective, as if keeping the world away. In Baghel’s Madin with Her Child (2007), the posture is pragmatic, suggestive of the everyday, the mother adorned in traditional jewellery. These comparisons especially make it evident that the artist and the artisan were often one and the same when it came to the work they were making, able to skip across barriers constructed due to a faulty usage of language. Deepa Bhasthi

Jaidev Baghel, Seated Madin, 2007, bronze, dimensions variable. Courtesy Museum of Art and Photography (map), Bengaluru

Autumn 2024

James Prapaithong Strange Trails Nova Contemporary, Bangkok 19 July – 5 September James Prapaithong’s paintings are concerned with how we see, not what we see. At least that’s the impression one gets from works such as Quietly Falling (all paintings 2024), a large blueblack rectangle that freezes a thousand twinkling tricks of the light: a complex ballet of shadows, reflections and wave patterns. It appears to explore what happens when low, late afternoon sunlight, after bouncing off rippling water, enters the retina. Hanging next to it, The Night We Met is a fuzzier, soft-focus depiction of what seem to be clouds of smoke pinpricking a night sky, as a lone firework in the top right releases a spherical ball of orange tracers. Prapaithong again seems more interested in the human visual system’s optical quirks than his indistinct subject matter. Is he trying to mimic the fallible vision of a roving eye midway through a saccadic movement, darting away from the action towards a new focal point? Or perhaps the events unfolding are so scattered, chaotic, fast and ephemeral that the mind struggles to process them into a coherent whole, or picture? The seven paintings in Strange Trails, the London-based, Royal College of Arts-trained artist’s first solo show in his homeland, draw upon informal photographs and videos taken by him, or those close to him. Examples of these

appear in Everyday Melancholy (2020–), a video stitching together long takes of the shimmering ocean, waves lapping, sleet falling beside a lamppost, a cobweb blowing in the wind, sunlight penetrating a tree canopy and a passenger’s view from a moving car as it dashes past a touristy beach at dusk. If there’s a message these vignettes telegraph, it is that Prapaithong – who scrubs layers of paint into his canvases to create deep beds of colour, then applies thick white paint to denote specks of light – is primarily concerned with capturing the constancy and intersubjectivity of memory and cognition, not the single moment or isolated event. This is a tried-and-tested modus operandi, in painting and further afield. There is something of Paul Cézanne’s attempt to realise sensations, and the phenomenologists’ fascination with the texture of experience, at play here. Meanwhile, Prapaithong has singled out as an influence the film grammar of Yasujirō Ozu, namely the late Japanese director’s use of the ‘pillow shot’ – still-life shots of everything from empty interiors to passing trains and distant mountains – to divide, and punctuate, his dramatic scenes. To invoke such greatness is, of course, to raise the stakes. But these reference points are not wide of the mark: Prapaithong’s paintings are masterstrokes in economy and ellipsis,

Constellation in the Sand, 2024, oil on canvas, 80 × 120 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nova Contemporary, Bangkok

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wherein the carefully considered composition and play of light is always pregnant with meaning. Be it how a veil of trees creates a frame within our field of vision (Trail of the North Star), how daylight dazzles as it glints off the oscillating shallows of a rocky riverbed (Constellation in the Sand) or how the setting sun, when viewed from within an airplane window, causes awesome refractions at the edge of the earth (Horizon #3), his incidental moments each betray tinges, or trails, of a phenomenal consciousness that we know only too well. And, in so doing, they draw us in. Overwhelmingly, the sensation that attends our looking is one of bittersweetness – perhaps because looking reminds us that our perceptions are altogether private and unknowable by others, while also reaffirming that we are not alone in this regard. Writing about the transcendental style of Ozu’s films back in 1972, the American filmmaker Paul Schrader drew heavily on the first koan of Zen philosophy, which concerns the concept of mu, or emptiness. Like Ozu’s celebrated pillow shots, or the gaps between stones in the artfully raked Japanese rock garden, Prapaithong’s placeless works can also be understood through this prism: emptiness is the active ingredient, and implies a human presence. Max Crosbie-Jones

Quietly Falling, 2024, oil on canvas, 200 × 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nova Contemporary, Bangkok

Autumn 2024

Hoang Duong Cam Light permeates the wounds The Ngee Ann Kongsi Galleries, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore 5 July – 7 August Can you be an abstract and a political painter? Hoang Duong Cam certainly tries to marry nonfigurative art with an investigation into his native Vietnam’s cultural and political history. In this thought-provoking exhibition of recent works, the paintings are, at first glance, dynamic surfaces covered with swirls, strokes and splashes of colour, reminiscent of topological or organic forms: roads, rivers, vines, branches, clouds, (scorched) earth. But in the wall texts, which are written in the first person, Cam tells us about the inspirations behind the paintings, which can be literature, music, philosophy and/or historical events, especially those surrounding the Vietnam War. In this way, the exhibition leans heavily on expositions of authorial intent; almost every painting is accompanied by an account of the artist’s inspirations. Depending on personal tolerance, you will find the captions illuminating or intrusive. It’s a bit of both for me. Sometimes the advisory added a new dimension to my interpretation; at others they foreclosed alternative experiences. Sometimes they were simply not very helpful. For example, for the painting Hanging a Bird Net (2017), Cam writes that the title is that of a short story by Nguyễn Huy Thiê̇p, ‘an author who gained his name during the time of change in Vietnam in the late 1980s’ – information that would mean little to those unfamiliar with Vietnamese literature. What I found most persuasive in this exhibition is when, firstly, the painting is in itself

visually compelling and, secondly, the backstory illuminates it in an unexpected yet strangely apt way. Take Sunlight in the Garden (2021), two delicate works with strokes and dabs rendered in impasto, on compact, framed canvases of about 35 × 35 cm. Because of their small size, these works seem like isolated corners of a larger painting that are magnified to show the details of the artist’s technique. If Impressionism melts away real-life scenes into dots and dabs, these works seem like a further dissolution of that dissolution, into pure mood. The wall text says that the series borrows its title from and was inspired by a 1938 short story by Vietnamese author Thȧch Lam, about a young couple’s doomed relationship and their inevitable parting, a love that the writer likens to sunlight draping a garden in beauty. (Again, as I’m no expert on Vietnamese literature, I’m taking Cam’s word for it.) Cam adds that he names his paintings after sites of violent warfare during the Vietnam War, like Huế and Quang Tri̇, primary sites of the Tet and Easter offensives. In this work, word and image work together to create a sustained mood of ironic melancholy. A close cousin of this strategy is a style of film direction that layers classical music over scenes of extreme violence to create dissonance. Not all of Hoang’s influences dovetail so skilfully. Sometimes the allegory gets too obvious. The Lightings – Ideal Forms Found in the U Minh Forest (2022–24) series of largescale

Lightnings – Ideal Forms Found in the U Minh Forest No. 10, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 195 × 300 cm. Courtesy the artist

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paintings are filled with brightly coloured strokes of paint, sometimes in geometric shapes or undulating lines, that jump out of the canvas as if illuminated by flashes of lightning. These works are supposedly inspired by the myths surrounding U Minh Forest (‘forest of darkness’) in the southernmost part of Vietnam, an impenetrable jungle that has historically been a hiding place for pirates, smugglers, bandits and the Viet Cong. Hoang adds that ‘U Minh’ can also be used to describe a mental state of uncertainty and not-knowing. Hence, you are invited to relate the paintings’ protean and inchoate forms to the forest’s impenetrability and a psychological state that is like the ‘beginner’s mind’ in Zen philosophy. The paintings may be chaotic and rowdy, but the metaphor they provide is too neat. So, can abstract art have political content? In Hoang’s case, yes, with the supplementary text doing some heavy lifting. People in the ‘if it’s not in the painting, it’s not in the painting’ camp will find this problematic, of course. They might also say that relying on written information is undemocratic, because it assumes literacy, unlike the visual immediacy of painting. But if we allow that an account of the artist’s intentions can provide a friendly, noncompulsory advisory towards interpretation, then Hoang’s work does present an intriguing case study of how abstraction can intersect with politics – even if it’s mostly done by the artist’s own authentication. It’s up to you whether you want to buy his story. Adeline Chia

Steph Huang See, See, Sea Tate Britain, London 12 July – 5 January Jam jars, soft drink bottles, aluminium cans – food containers that are often discarded after being emptied – punctuate sculptures by London-based artist Steph Huang. Between found materials, handcrafted elements and a film, Huang questions the processes of production, trade and consumption underlying the industries of both art and food. Spotted across the air-conditioned, woodenfloored gallery, and on a low curved platform swelling out from one wall, jars that used to hold fruit conserves and gherkins join an elegant composition of handblown glass spheres, slender metal stands and dainty details, such as the glass cherry of Cherry Bakewell Sundae (all works but one 2024) and the bronze-cast scallop shell of Water Puddle. Elsewhere, two stacks of retired seafood crates, one standing in the gallery, the other hanging on a wall, all marked as from Brixham Harbour, form a harmonious minimalist visual rhythm of colours, forms and textures. Although integrated into the exhibition’s landscape of pastel greens and blues, the found objects stick out, reminding visitors of what is rarely seen

in a stylish restaurant or a hushed art gallery: evidence of waste and labour. A similar concern with the invisible cycles of production and trade underpins Huang’s film, the eponymously titled See See Sea, which documents fishing off the coast of Devonshire. Through a series of long takes and closeups, the film zooms in on moments of intimacy between the world of the sea and local fisherfolk during what seem like arduous and slow processes of production. In the film, masterful hands grip slippery fish, weave willow baskets and collect scallops from the seabed. It becomes apparent that such intimacy with the marine environment and its products will be lost on a city gourmet’s dinner table, a culture implied in the classy tablecloth, spotless dinner plate and bite-sized seafood that make up Supper. Perhaps because consumers’ alienation from food and the disappearance of traditional fisheries are familiar topics in public discourse, See, See, Sea at times feels like a journey down a well-trodden path. While its brochure and wall texts do contextualise the exhibition within

the artist’s research and practice, they ultimately allow little space for contemplating anything thornier than ‘our relationship to food consumption’ and ‘another way of life’. However, much like the found objects that lead visitors’ minds to unseen grime and sweat, Huang’s artworks themselves inspire adventures beyond the exhibition’s thematic focus. Visitors drift towards the gallery’s periphery, guided by objects positioned in obscured corners and margins: irregularly shaped glass bubbles atop the projection wall, tiny bronze figs lying under Between Sunrises and Sunsets (2023) and a small wind chime dangling far above anyone’s eye level (Lantern). As a space opens up for wandering minds and imaginative interpretation, the noises of boat motors from the film morph into sporadic bursts of rat-a-tat that might be easily mistaken for a machine gun’s rattle. For those who choose to tune in, these nervous noises hover above the gallery like a vague shadow of the violence associated with maritime trade and migration, both historical and contemporary. Cindy Ziyun Huang

See, See, Sea, 2024 (installation view with Water Puddle and Frankfurt in Brine, both 2024). Photo: Joe Humphrys. © the artist

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Photography Never Lies Bangkok Art and Culture Centre 30 May – 8 September A declarative title sets the stage for a group show that’s concerned with age-old debates about photographic truth. And sure enough, Photography Never Lies wades straight into the most topical of them: mounted on a wall near the entrance is the ai-generated image that, in 2023, won a Sony World Photography Award – until its creator, German photographer Boris Eldagsen, declined the prize on the grounds that his image isn’t ‘a real photograph’. The Electrician (2022), a black-and-white, vintage-looking portrait of a woman cradling another woman from behind, replete with filmlike streaks of leaking light, is one of 19 images shown here from Pseudomnesia (2022–), a series that Eldagsen creates by typing prompts into

Openai’s text-to-image generator dall-e 2. Hung salon-style, these are disquieting images with a Roger Ballen-esque feel: a woman surrounded by ghoulish faces stirs during an experiment (Decision-making for Beginners, 2023); a man presses a daggerlike contraption against his body, as if duty-bound to self-harm (The Memory, 2023). Eldagsen submitted The Electrician to see if the Sony judges could identify how it had been created, as well as to spur a public conversation about the proliferation of ai-generated images. ‘Promptography learnt its look from photography, but it’s different at the same time,’ he told the bbc, deploying a neologism for ai imagery. ‘Do we want to put it into one basket? Or would it be a mistake?’ Photography Never Lies, while

Boris Eldagsen, The Warm-Up, 2023, ‘promptograpy’ print on matte coated paper. Courtesy the artist

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setting out to challenge the belief that ‘photography is a tool that most straightforwardly reflects reality’ through the work of 13 artists, draws us into this debate: it is one big, heaving basket wherein photorealistic ai-generated images and photo-based art practices compete – sometimes jarringly, sometimes fruitfully. Nearby is a luminous suite of mixed-media prints by Greek artist Ioanna Sakellaraki: images of moonlit sea rocks, giant oystershells and oceans frothing with pearls, among other oneiric maritime-themed visions drawing heavily on archival sources. Like Pseudomnesia (which was spurred by Eldagsen’s discovery of old photos owned by his father, a German soldier in the Second World War), The Seven Circuits of a Pearl

(2023) is a visual study triggered by a family connection, namely the seafaring experiences of Sakellaraki’s late father. Moving through the space, you encounter a less cohesive hotchpotch of works, from dreamy sci-fi images of East Asian people in supernaturally tinged urban or rural settings (Napasraphee Apaiwong’s Resonances of the Concealed, 2023) to 36 black-and-white headshots of men (Patrik Budenz and Birte Zellentin’s macht, 2023). Approaching the latter, I recognise some of the faces as past heads of state – Castro, Gaddafi, Mao, etc. Totalling 199 images, the macht series comprises one portrait per country, each created by digitally layering individual headshots of all its different leaders between 1921 and 2021 (“one year in power is one percent of visibility,” Budenz explained at a panel talk). The result is a stark visualisation of the heterogeneity of global political power: Stalin’s features recur in several

images, for example, while other portraits are indistinct amalgams of shorter-serving democratic leaders. Categorically determining what is aigenerated (such as Aphaiwong’s series) and what is not (such as Budenz and Zellentin’s) can only be done by scouring the catalogue or the wall labels’ miniscule fine print; evidently, curator Akkara Naktamna wants the audience to look first and read second – to trawl these images without prejudice in search of critical differences or commonalities. One question that arises from this approach is: Isn’t Naktamna, by presenting ai imagery under a ‘photography’ banner, tacitly advocating for the dissolution of any distinction? And another is more sanguine: couldn’t ‘promptography’ potentially do some of the biographical storytelling and unlocking of memory that the photograph does, or did? At the show’s midpoint, Leslie Shang Zhefeng’s Cypress Slope (2020), a photographic

pilgrimage across four generations of the artist’s family in northwest China, sits across from Maria Mavropoulou’s Imagined Images (2022–23), a series of what appear to be old family photos taken in the Mediterranean. The latter are clearly the ai contribution here: the faces of those depicted are lopsided, blurry, uncanny. And yet these portraits and candid moments are at the same time so cosy, so domestic, that looking at them almost feels intrusive. Later, a glance at the catalogue reveals why. An absence of photos of her grandparents or childhood led Mavropoulou to key into an image generator memories and stories relayed by her relatives. Whether these mendacious yet strangely poignant images belong on a gallery wall or a mantelpiece – and whether or not they possess a kernel of truth that validates their inclusion here – are just some of the ethical and real-world questions this exhibition leaves hanging. Max Crosbie-Jones

Maria Mavropoulou, a young man leaning on a brand new red cabrio car greece 1970, 2022–23, ai-generated image printed on matte coated paper. Courtesy the artist

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Christine Sun Kim & Thomas Mader Lighter Than Air White Space, Beijing 23 May – 27 July The most striking piece in Lighter Than Air is attention (2022), an installation featuring two large red arm-shaped inflatables extending from facing walls towards a torso-sized boulder in the centre. One of the arms flutters up and down, as if waving, while the other – with an index finger sticking out – appears to be anxiously pointing at the stone. Despite the frantically quivering movements caused by the humming inflators, both gestures culminate in abrupt deflation and ultimately fail to make contact with the stone. As the arms droop to the floor in exhaustion, the stone remains undisturbed – almost humorously underscoring its indifference to the arms’ persistent but futile efforts. According to the exhibition text, the movements of the inflatable arms represent two gestures used in American Sign Language (asl)

to attract attention: one involves waving one’s hand or gently patting someone else’s shoulder to draw attention to oneself; the other involves pointing with a finger towards something to then direct the other person’s attention elsewhere. They are gestures used by deaf and hearing people alike, and besides highlighting the ways attention is sought and steered, the work reflects people’s ever-expanding appetite for it – as well as, on the flipside, the frustration felt when such interaction fails. The artists’ own interpretations aside, it’s true that, for a hearing subject, much of the work’s sensory impact stems from a fear of being silenced. After all, in hearing people’s common parlance, ‘to voice’ and ‘to utter’ is often considered the starting point of selfexpression and -assertion. The sense of futility

attention, 2022, inflatable arms, partially polished stone, fans, electronics installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists and White Space, Beijing

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in attention reveals a situation in which such agency is removed. Lighter Than Air treats its titular subject, air, as a kind of benchmark, against which Kim and Mader probe the misunderstandings between deaf and hearing people, highlighting what is implied in expressions or gestures that hearing communities take for granted or overlook. Unlike Kim’s earlier works, which often take asl as the primary subject (for example, in her largescale mural Time Owes Me Rest Again, presented at New York’s Queens Museum in 2022, the hand movements of five asl words are drawn across the museum’s interior walls), her recent collaborations with Mader tend to visualise situations where deaf subjectivities diverge, sidestepping sign language and words themselves.

Noses are a recurring motif, pertaining to the act of inhaling and exhaling. Unlike the mouth and ears, which are more commonly associated with communication, the nose is an overlooked organ, and the exhibition brings attention to its subtler and more peripheral status. For example, a short puff of air exhaled from one’s nose, though a barely noticeable gesture, can represent a dismissive attitude. In the drawing Running Gag (2024), hundreds of cartoonish noses are arranged in a tidy grid and puff dismissive air. The majority of these noses are in black and white, representing, according to exhibition materials, the 164 delegates who attended the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf, held in Milan in 1880. The congress, following Alexander Graham Bell’s opposition to sign language (the inventor of the telephone was also a prominent figure in deaf education), ruled out signing as an option for teaching deaf people, instead advocating for corrective measures such as speech therapy. Such dismissive attitudes

resulted in many countries banning the teaching of sign languages, leading to a century of discrimination for the community. On top of the noses of the 164 delegates are six more rows of noses in hospital green, the idea being that deafness is still widely considered a medical condition as well as a flaw. Tucked away in an adjacent office space is the two-screen video looky looky (2018). Perhaps this sidelined work should be considered the real starting point of the show, its placement outside the conventional exhibition frame serving as another layer of metaphor. In it, Kim and Mader, each occupying a screen, use nonmanual signals (facial expressions, head positions and so on) to make covert comments on other people, as the subtitles tell us. While facial expressions are often seen by hearing people as a means of conveying emotion, they serve a semantically significant role in many sign languages. (More than half of asl is conveyed through facial expressions.) In looky looky, Kim, a native signer, and Mader,

a learner, demonstrate varying degrees of proficiency in nonmanual signals: Kim uses facial signs dynamically and fluently, while Mader with more deliberation. The facial changes are simultaneously emotive and communicative. They seem ambiguous to nonsigners but actually point towards clear and specific meanings. Kim has remarked in interviews that ‘I’m always envious of artists who have the privilege to be misunderstood… but I cannot afford to be misunderstood’. This need for precision mirrors her adept use of charts and memes in the exhibited works; she is well versed in the language of these established formats of communication, and how to efficiently appropriate them and to intervene. Kim issues an ‘Access Rider’ to people she works with for avoiding inappropriate terms. In her work there’s a desire to reveal existing conventions and establish new ones, based on what we get to communicate. Xinrong Hu Translated from Chinese (Simplified) by Yuwen Jiang

Running Gag, 2024, pencil and colour pencil on paper, 110 × 110 cm (unframed), 114 × 114 cm (framed). Courtesy the artists and White Space, Beijing

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Minoru Nomata Continuum White Cube Mason’s Yard, London 10 July – 24 August Although he began painting during the 1980s, Minoru Nomata has only recently started exhibiting outside his native Japan. To style him a painter of ‘fantasy architecture’ would be grossly to undersell the haunting effect of his coldly dreamlike views of sunlit towers, piers, bridges and factories, and other less definable but usually massive structures, often mysteriously fitted with flagstaffs, sails and weathervanes, all of which stand alone against cool blue skies and restless white clouds. Always empty of people, yet too pristine to be derelict, these architectures sometimes offer indications that they’re not quite finished, as if whoever their makers were had, for whatever reason, simply put down their tools and walked away. In these recent paintings, mostly from the series Continuum, begun in 2023, Nomura ups the architectural gargantuanism, while also markedly turning away from the building as his main subject. Some of the works are focused on views of vast, verdant landscapes (mountains, ravines, waterfalls), in which we can still pick out the edifices, but which are now small and vulnerable. In the tall, narrow canvas Continuum-4 (2023), for example, a spindly waterwheel is installed at the top of a sheer cliffside, the mechanism harnessing a stream that then plunges to a river far below, a sunlit valley plain stretching towards the horizon.

There’s a sense of ecological pessimism, not felt in earlier paintings, in which the possibility of human dwelling has been made precarious due to landscapes that are unforgiving and undomesticated; in Continuum-8 (2024), we see primitive constructions, little more than thatched awnings, sheltering the openings to caves in the side of a high crag. The enigma, here, is the large stone sphere, seen at the end of the gulch: something not formed by nature, but a strangely futile product of labour, if indeed it’s the work of the lowly crag-dwellers. The huge manmade sphere reappears elsewhere; a gaunt orb, maybe stone, perched atop a low rocky outcrop, access ramps and scaffolds at its base (Continuum-19, 2024). More absurdly, it appears as the below-the-water part of an iceberg, in Continuum-12 (2024) – the painting an impossible vertical visual cut-through that allows us to see above and below the surface of a frigid ocean – as if some odd society took pleasure in shaping these hidden ice-masses, just for fun. For while the natural environment looms over the world of Continuum, those canvases that hold onto Nomata’s more familiar architectural subjects present structures even more whimsical and absurd than previously; a salmon-pink, seventiered viewing platform (Continuum-2, 2023), or the stone tower of Continuum-3 (2023),

Imagine-1, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 114 × 228 cm. Photo: Theo Christelis. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and White Cube, London

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whose only purpose seems to be to provide stairs up to a gantry giving access to an adjacent sculptural column, again with tiered, balustraded platforms; between these span what look like rickety slides, or maybe an outsized ballrun. Either way, there’s a sense that playful futility may have overcome whatever culture built these. Nomata’s empty world has echoes of artists spanning centuries, of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel paintings, the baroque ruins of Piranesi, the utopian neoclassical visions of Étienne-Louis Boullée or the surrealism of Magritte and M.C. Escher. But these antecedents are harnessed to produce images that are at once allegories for psychological inner-states and a bigger reflection on societies that aspired to a future that might have been, but never was. Here, though, Nomata has added a planetary dimension to his usually hermetic world, and a more tangible intimation of history; of early human societies making their first steps to shape the world to their tastes and needs. And then they are gone: in the thematically standalone Imagine-1 (2018) we see Tokyo Bay from high in the air, the coastal megalopolis rendered as a sand-coloured layer of piers, jetties and road networks, spread across the landscape like a dead coral, while Mount Fuji rises quietly in the distance. J.J. Charlesworth

Continuum-12, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 131 × 81 cm. Photo: Theo Christelis. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and White Cube, London

Autumn 2024

Books There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak Viking, £18.99 (hardcover) ‘…a single drop of rain – no bigger than a bean and lighter than a chickpea.’ The Turkish-British author Elif Shafak’s latest novel begins with a drop of water that will, over the course of the book – journeying across centuries and circumstances – take different forms and portend many beginnings and ends. Reading Shafak is always an immersive experience traversing time, space, mythology, history and science, all of which flow from the metaphor of water and the rivers that carry it. The theory that water retains memories from all the forms it has ever taken and all the events it has been part of was developed by a real-life immunologist called Jacques Benveniste during the 1980s, and remains a contentious subject in scientific circles. Shafak uses this idea of ‘water memory’ as the premise to connect Ashurbanipal, the king ‘in olden times’ of Assyria in the valley of the River Tigris – and his famous library that contained copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh, among the earliest works of literature ever found – with the stories of three people from more recent years. These include the ironically named genius of Victorian London, King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, whose love for the poem of Gilgamesh takes him to Mesopotamia, and leads to a life-changing

friendship with the severely persecuted Yazidi community; Narin, a Yazidi girl in 2014 when isis was gaining ground in Iraq and Syria, and notoriety for their fundamentalism; and Zaleekhah, a hydrologist in 2018 London, who leaves a failed marriage for a houseboat on the River Thames. A single bean-sized drop of rain that falls on Ashurbanipal in Mesopotamia will also land on Arthur, Narin and Zaleekhah, as a snow flake, holy water and a tear, respectively. Shafak is undoubtedly masterly in the way she weaves phrases and quotable lines – ‘Water remembers. It is humans who forget’, already much quoted on social media, posters and other promotions of the book, is the gist of the novel – but perhaps where the novel falters is in just how much the writer tries to cram in. Her reader barely gets time to process the debate around who owns cultural heritage, carted off to museums in the West by colonial archaeologists or looted and sold to private collectors, when the story shifts to the genocide of the Yazidis and their continued oppression. Thrown in is the Arab story of Layla and Majnun; the idea that the gender politics of the time ensured that Nisaba, the powerful Mesopotamian goddess of writing and grain, lost favour and became subordinate to a male god; and lines from the

Epic of Gilgamesh that characters remember, listen to or read to contemplate mortality, success, etc. Also in the mix is a gay tattooist in modernday London who is obsessed with the Ancients, family conflicts, forbidden love, the pressures of the English class system and so on. To this already overwhelming cauldron, Shafak further adds commentary on the plight of rivers, dead, lost or barely alive, around the world. Shafak’s trick is to use real incidents from history to soothsay what awaits humans who pay little heed to the multitudinous climate emergencies of each era. Thus, There are Rivers in the Sky is as much climate fiction as it is a documentation of the genocide of the Yazidis, as it is about the romance of early archaeological excavations, as it is about the complexities of human lives, covering many reader-interest bases. This maximalism in thematic concerns and in descriptive style is typical of Shafak’s works. Yet, somewhere along the way, in what the author describes as her ‘love song to rivers’, the water metaphors become strained and the repeated linking of every other event and story to water often feels forced. It is in the Yazidi sections that Shafak’s metaphors flow most engagingly. One wishes this elegance had extended to the rest of the book. Deepa Bhasthi

Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries by Sumana Roy Yale University Press, £16.99 (hardcover) Reminiscing about her schooldays in provincial India, writer and poet Sumana Roy recalls that her teachers would recommend to their charges the wisdom of writers such as Tennyson, Wordsworth, Nissim Ezekiel and Ruskin Bond as guides to life. That didn’t really work. ‘In the end it was literature by old men,’ she writes. What would they know about the things that mattered to a youth dreaming of being a citizen of the world? So, instead, she and her friends turned to the ‘literature’ of greetings cards, pop songs and Hindi films. ‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ read the entire contents of the first love letter she received. Here, these inauspicious beginnings lead to a compelling, albeit elegantly meandering meditation on the ways in which

place shapes perspectives, vocabulary and world views, in ways more creative than that example of adolescent romantic literature might lead you to believe. ‘When “nothing happens,”’ the author notes of provincial life, ‘invention happens.’ Roy grew up in Siliguri, in Bengal, which, besides memorable views of the Himalayas, gave her questions about whether English (the language of cosmopolitan literature and greetings cards) or Bangla (the language of the locality) was the true language of love, and anxieties over her mispronunciations of English, learned, as it was, by reading rather than hearing. ‘The language came to me like it did to many others in the post-colony: slightly bitten, the severed parts held together by an indigenous glue,’ she

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recalls, with a typically apt turn of phrase. The glue here spans the literature of Rabindranath Tagore, Bhuwaneshwar, John Clare and Annie Ernaux, among others, along with the anonymous private tutors trapped in localities their education was supposed to enable them to escape, the life lessons of Tinkle comics, and the deconstructivist philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Part autobiographic memoir, part literary criticism, part history of overlooked or neglected talent (Bhuwaneshwar, for example, was born into poverty, declared the future of Indian literature and died anonymously while living as a beggar), Provincials is an extraordinary love letter in its own right; to the power of places that aren’t quite on the map. Nirmala Devi

Autumn 2024

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The Waiting Room by Choo Yi Feng Epigram Books, sgd 20.90 (softcover) Purgatories abound in Choo Yi Feng’s distinctively fantastic take on Singapore and Southeast Asia, in which humans and nonhumans alike yearn for love in worlds that are as unbearably polluted (to apocalyptic levels) as they are banal. From a gay man’s crisis of faith when he begins to be haunted by the ghost of his hell-bound mother, to a sea witch seeking to assemble and birth a new incarnation from the dying body of an unfortunate soldier, to the struggles of a sex worker in Bangkok as she weighs the benefits of taking up with a smitten Australian suitor, the earthy tales of Choo’s short story collection offer a cohesive, though occasionally bloated, vision of how society and the ecologies with which it is entangled are necessarily queer. Finding a certain resonance with weird fiction, the somewhat loosely defined literary genre that often crosses transgressive materials with the registers of speculative and horror fiction, Choo’s stories swap sex for scares with a surprisingly delicate touch that highlights the corporeality of desire without being vulgar or maudlin. Two main modes structure the collection’s 13 stories: character studies set within parallel but not radically different versions of Singapore and Southeast Asia, in which the same general social conservatism and liberal economic context remain; and more experimental explorations of

places and entities set after unspecified crises have altered the environment beyond recognition. In stories such as ‘Spider Hunters’, ‘The Waiting Room’ and ‘Paper Beats Stone’, regular Janes and Joes wrestle with the forces of society and crushing existentialist realisations in fantastic encounters that may be magical or mundane. In ‘Spider Hunters’, the brutal interruption of a young lesbian’s romantic and sexual encounter with her neighbour and childhood friend by her partner’s parent triggers the appearance of a mysterious, eldritch spider figure that offers her a Faustian bargain for love; in the title story, a young man’s ghost lingers after his suicide, in order to accompany his halfbrother, who is awaiting sentencing after murdering his ex-girlfriend’s current beau, and begins a journey of self-discovery and meditation on grief from beyond the grave. In ‘Paper Beats Stone’, a poignant study of the pathology of guilt and shame in the formation of queer self-identities, the relationship between two men slowly deteriorates when one of them suddenly develops a severe skin illness. Meanwhile, stories such as ‘Sentosa Forever’, ‘An Investor’s Guide to Abyssal Burial’ and ‘Plastic Bag Girl’ wade into stranger territories, with characters less recognisably human or even organic. In the first, the mutated survivor of

a viruslike pollutant hungers to escape the quarantined police state of Singapore island to the nearby island of Sentosa after rising sea levels and the spread of mutagens have rendered most places inhospitable; in the second, the lingering memories of errant souls who have been buried in the deep sea are interwoven with corporate sales copy for the same burial service to create a contrasting study of what biological death and the end of consciousness could entail in the larger ecosystem; in the third, a mysterious mute busker who can manipulate and animate plastic seeks to become a fully petrochemical being. Serving as parables of the sort that challenge the primacy of human subjectivity and offer different possibilities of being, these stories highlight both Choo’s meticulous world-building capacity and the limitations (of language) when it comes to making the alien legible. A promising entry in an emergent local and regional literary landscape of strange, speculative visions that challenge traditional structures and subject matters, Choo’s debut astutely excavates the undercurrents of our collective subconscious in order to ask the simple question of what it means to be human in a world in which the boundary between what is and what is not human is dissolving more rapidly and subtly than we realise. Alfonse Chiu

George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal & Kim Consigny, translated by Edward Gauvin Self Made Hero, £18.99 (softcover) Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil is someone about whom you’ve most likely never heard. Her pseudonym, George Sand, is another case altogether. Assuming you’re into bestselling nineteenth-century European literature. Or women who fought the social conventions of gender. As this graphic biography (Consigny is the illustrator) makes clear, Dupin/Sand was pioneering in relation to both. Although these days there’s more interest in the second. Particularly here, where the visible signs of her play with gender norms (tying up or hiding her hair, smoking and wearing men’s clothes in public – the last, at the time, illegal – and generally living like a man) are most easily reproduced. But despite that, and to its credit, this book suggests that we shouldn’t separate the writer from the writing in this way. Sand’s written works appear or are referenced almost

as often as her lovers (of which there were so many, it at times seems as if Consigny has run out of sufficiently distinct male types to easily separate one from the next; although such confusions in turn might simply reflect how things were at the time). Sand’s politics are formed at an early age. Her father died when she was young and consequently she was raised by the females of the family. Her father’s family was rich; her mother’s poor. She was brought up by her paternal grandmother, who believed in education; her mother, despite her poverty, believed in fashion. They, for the most part, hated each other. Sand’s belief in equal rights began at an early age and survived (or perhaps blossomed as result of) both a convent education and an abusive marriage. Life, for Sands, was lived physically (riding, travelling)

Autumn 2024

and intellectually, just as love was always physical as much as intellectual. Even Charles Baudelaire, a poet and contemporary whose life was famously dedicated to intoxication and pleasure, found Sand shocking: ‘that there are men who could become enamoured of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation’, he wrote. Writers like Prosper Mérimée and musicians such as Frédéric Chopin, on the other hand, chose to be enamoured and to become Sand’s lovers; as, according to this biography, did the actress Marie Dorval. At least they did until Sand moved on to the next thing, which might not mean the end of the old thing. Whether that thing was a lover, a text or a political cause. Given this mix, the graphic format proves particularly appropriate to capturing this unusual, revolutionary life. Nirmala Devi

Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World by Roger Crowley Yale University Press, £20 (hardcover) This is a history of the rivalry between Spain and Portugal. But it is set a world away from Europe (or ‘two monsoons and 9,000 miles’, as historian Roger Crowley puts it) in the archipelagos of Southeast Asia. Today we’d characterise that rivalry as ‘colonial’, but for a long time Europe preferred to frame it in terms of ‘science’ and ‘exploration’. The book focuses on a period of 60 years, from the Portuguese ‘discovery’ of the Maluku Islands (at that time the only known source for cloves, nutmeg and mace – goods that would have a 1,000 percent markup when sold in Europe) in 1511, to Spain’s capture of Manila in 1571. While the book provides plenty of opportunity for displays of bravery and stupidity, curiosity and greed, it’s also about how easily the human mind can deceive itself into thinking all of those things to be the same. Such perverse logics punctuate Crowley’s narrative history. ‘Trade’, for Europeans, inevitably means conquest. As does ‘discovery’. Maps, when they are not state secrets, are designed to tell you that you can’t get to places (to protect the secret of where the ‘spice islands’ actually were, the Portuguese ignored the Pacific Ocean and surrounded the islands with imaginary reefs). The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which divided the world outside of Europe between the Iberian powers along a line drawn from pole to pole in one hemisphere, but was randomly interpreted in the other: at its most ludicrous, anything encountered while sailing west belonged to

Spain; anything encountered while sailing east to Portugal. And while the kings of Spain and Portugal issued detailed edicts about what was supposed to be happening on the other side of the world, in practice they had neither the capability nor the willpower to micromanage their remote subjects. Indeed, in 1530, needing some cash and not needing the hassle, the Spanish king sold his ‘claim’ to the Maluku Islands to the king of Portugal, although it took some time for that news to reach baffled combatants on the ground. Along the way, both sides engaged in illconsidered alliances with various local rulers that led to the Europeans’ often disastrous involvement in conflicts that they barely understood. In 1521 Ferdinand Magellan (a Portuguese in the employ of the king of Spain), having located the Pacific by circumnavigating South America, led 49 Spaniards dressed in full-plate armour in one such venture designed to destroy his ally’s arch-rival. He marched them through half a mile of tidal sea to face an army of 1,500, who constantly pelted their opponents’ unprotected legs with arrows, spears and hardened wood stakes. Needless to say, contemporary European accounts portrayed this mode of attack as a form of cheating; equally needless to say, the Europeans never made it out of the sea and Magellan was killed. But as we all know, despite the high attrition rate of Europeans exposed to disease, starvation or their own arrogance and

stupidity, in the end it was the local peoples who generally got killed. Throughout, the author’s gripping narrative allows the boy’sown-adventure aspect of contemporary European perspectives to jostle with the often absurd reality of what Magellan & co were actually up to, relying as it did on a volatile mixture of luck and violence. Equally, Crowley never lets us forget what this was really about: money. While Europe may choose to remember Magellan as a great explorer, his contract, Crowley reminds us, granted him the right to exploit a certain proportion of any islands he ‘discovered’ on the way. Indeed, this period, he persuasively argues, marked the beginning point of globalisation and multinational corporations. Silver mined in the Bolivian Andes by tens of thousands of forced local labourers (thus guaranteeing its cheapness) was used to feed China’s endless demand for the metal (where it was worth twice its value anywhere else). In exchange, merchants could export an equal supply of manufactured goods made in China (during the sixteenth century, home to one quarter of the world’s population, so labour was cheap) that were highly valued in Europe. At the beginning of the next century the Dutch and British East India companies would be founded and the true pillaging of much of the rest of the non-European world would begin. It continues to this day. The past, it seems, isn’t a foreign country after all. Mark Rappolt

The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith Oneworld, £30 (hardcover) Before he gets to children’s literature, Sam Leith must grapple with what a child is, tracing the development of ‘childhood’ as a concept. This adeptly introduces a fascinating and often moving account of human fears and hopes – in the company of talking rabbits, wardrobes and looking glasses, crime-solving posh kids and boarding-school wizards. Prior to the eighteenth century, with stratospheric infant mortality rates, children ‘weren’t, as they are now, seen as something intrinsically precious’ and were told the same stories as their parents. When literature did begin to address the

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young, it was a vehicle for moral education. Adult authors were less interested in the child per se: Rousseau’s criticism that society was ‘always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man’. By the midnineteenth century, however, the child had become a precious thing, and it marked the ‘golden age’ of children’s literature. In the best stories, however, this hierarchy of the protector and protected is turned upside down: ‘relentlessly’, in the case of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which to read as an adult provides ‘a way of entering into a childlike mode of apprehending the world’.

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Leith, a critic, is an archly humorous guide, sliding between biographies of the authors (Roald Dahl ‘was not an especially nice guy, [which] may have been part and parcel of what made him so effective a writer for children. He had a child’s id’) and the milieu of their young readers (mandatory schooling, the rise and fall of the British Empire, immigration and racism). The child with whom we enter Leith’s ‘Haunted Wood’ is a blank; by the end it has its own agency (from Matilda, 1988, to Sephy and Callum of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses, 2001), veracious to the absurdity of the adult world. Oliver Basciano

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This Land We Call Home: The Story of a Family, Caste, Conversions and Modern India by Nusrat F. Jafri Penguin Random House India, ₹ 699 (hardcover) The complex family lineage to which Nusrat F. Jafri belongs is illustrative of the various social systems that are used to shape the identity of India’s citizens: from caste, class and religion to language and ethnography. Her paternal ancestors trace their origins to Iran and Iraq, while her maternal ancestors were, Jafri says, ‘perhaps one of the original inhabitants of India’. Even more intriguingly, in this memoir, her first book, the author discusses how conversion gave her relatives education and employment opportunities, and in turn the social mobility inaccessible to them if they had remained Bhantu, one of the many tribes once classified as ‘criminal’ by the British. Alongside this personal narrative runs a bigger story, that of India’s growth as a nation, and it’s unfortunate that this overshadows the more intriguing elements of Jafri’s own story. Historical accounts are related in great detail, from the participation of Indian soldiers in the First World War, the 1918 flu pandemic and Independence, to the Emergency years (1975– 77), the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque (1992) and the rise of the right wing and more general intolerance within India marked by the Modi years. Landmarks in popular culture, such as the Binaca Geetmala radio show (on air from 1952 to 1994) and Ramanand Sagar’s cult 1987 tv series Ramayan, are also thrown into the mix. While these were all important events in India’s history, and Jafri’s relatives were no doubt

affected by having lived through these decades, the detail she goes into feels unnecessary. Jafri’s great-grandfather Hardayal Singh was born a Bhantu, making him part of a nomadic pastoral tribe that would go on to be designated, in 1871, along with 149 other tribal communities, as ‘criminal tribes’ by the British government. The categorisation of castes at the lowest rung of the social ladder as ‘inherently criminal’ was as much to bring nomads under colonial rule as it was a continuation of the Hindu varna system, where professions were assigned to people at birth, depending on the father’s caste and subcaste. ‘Caste is unforgiving,’ Jafri writes – the Bhantus, though they claim to have Rajput warrior origins, are considered a ‘low caste’. This designation often results in abject poverty because of social ostracisation (access to opportunities that would allow for a livelihood to be secured are withheld by those higher up), which leads to some of these ‘untouchable’ tribes resorting to robbery. Those targeted by the government (‘suspicious tribes and inherently criminal individuals’) are forcefully encamped in reformatory colonies on the outskirts of villages and towns. The initial Criminal Tribes Act was repealed only to be replaced by the equally discriminatory Habitual Offenders (Control and Reform) Act in 1952, and members of former ‘criminal tribes’ continue to face systemic oppression by the police and judiciary.

Discrimination led Singh to convert to Christianity along with his wife and daughters. Jafri writes of how early missionary movements in British India focused on the intolerance and inequality in the Hindu caste system to evangelise and get vast numbers of oppressed peoples to convert, promising them a casteless new identity, education and, above all, respect and equality. Large parts of the book are dedicated to a Wikipedia-like history of Evangelical and Methodist Church missions started in India, the many schools and hospitals they would go on to found, the architecture of the churches they built and so on. This rosy portrait – and, to be fair, Jafri clearly acknowledges this favourable view – does not factor in later criticisms of missions: that they actively sought to disparage local customs, languages and Indigenous traditions. Jafri admits that the promise of castelessness, which her family went on to discover is far from true, came at a hefty price for those who chose to convert. And yet, while the caste system is traditionally linked to India’s Hindu society, Jafri rightly acknowledges that it is deeply embedded in Islam and Christianity as well. The author reminds us of the grim reality that how one looks or what one wears or eats is hardly about personal choice in India; that her family, despite their journey through religions, social mobility and urban lifestyles, is still bound by ancient systems of oppression and historic bonds of caste and community that remain inescapable. Deepa Bhasthi

An Operational Account of Western Spatio-Temporality by Miljohn Ruperto X Artist’s Books, $35 (3 boxed flipbooks and a booklet) The title essay of this little box of tricks (around 12 × 8 cm), a limited-edition artist book by Los Angeles-based, Manila-born Miljohn Ruperto, is printed in an accordion-folded format. And it performs what it describes: it’s about space and time, and it unfolds (literally) across space and time. The essay itself is a discourse on how three Ancient Greek ‘types’ of time – aion (eternal time, figured as premodern), chronos (linear time, modernity) and kairos (the time of action, the emerging present) – have determined how the Western subject has historically located itself in the world. (In Ancient Greece, Aion and Chronos were personified as deities, kairos remained an idea.) And how, in locating itself, that subject shapes the world around it – the body as

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measure of space, individual mortality as measure of time – as an operation of the ego, if you want to put a twentieth-century slant on it. As the world is reshaped, the process repeats itself, fuelled by the desire to stabilise a world that is inherently contingent. Ruperto can’t help but quip about how even the decision to use linear language is a form of capitulation to this impulse, while conceding that such concessions are unavoidable. And you can’t help but wonder how all this mirrors the desire to categorise and standardise that underlies both the colonial project and its decolonising corrective. Accompanying this are three flipbooks, free of language but filled with art historical reference (obviously, art is one of the vehicles

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through which the reshaping of the word occurs) via images of disembodied heads rotating (as you flick through) in an otherwise empty space. The Baroque Is a Geometric Imposition Upon Wild Nature features the head of Medusa, snakes writhing, head rolling, tongue lolling; History Awaits Immanence presents what might be the head of John the Baptist doing something similar. The third, Western Temporalities Incline Towards a Tripartite Structure, offers a calmly rotating three-faced Christ (an embodiment of the Trinity). So, what’s the point? Like Ruperto’s work in general, there’s an intriguing play between an apparent sense of control, or purpose, and the actual lack of it. And between what’s in the mind and in the world. Mark Rappolt

How To Climb A Tree by Aparna Nori Editions jojo, ₹ 4,500 / sgd 80 (softcover) It’s appropriate that this artist book’s boards are covered in the plain off-white calico cloth used to make India Post’s mailbags; the national postal service played an integral part in enabling the correspondence that forms the core of this book – between Bangalore- and Singapore-based artist Aparna Nori and her son Ved, while the latter was at the Rishi Valley School, a boarding school in Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh. Their deeply personal relationship comes across through epistolary exchanges during time spent apart and photographs taken by Nori during intermittent moments of geographical closeness. No digital devices are permitted at the school (unless in emergencies or during visits by parents), and students are kept occupied with nearby forestry activities. Every Monday Nori would send Ved a letter and every Friday she would receive his response. Nori fills the ‘absences’ between sending or receiving correspondence with photographs of Ved at home and school during their occasional in-person visits, with watercolour and pencil drawings, and her interpretations of anecdotes sent by Ved. His voice is amplified by her voice in this effort of collaboration. For example, Ved’s notes about a kingfisher feather, which marks his first step on the path to developing interests in birdwatching and feather collecting, are accompanied by Nori’s photograph of the sky with an unfocused image of a feather.

In the main, How To Climb A Tree attempts a linear narrative. Each visual, textual and empty layer (see below) communicates the passage of time, but also ensures that the reader retains a sense that what is happening is connected to what has happened, meaning that you often flip back to a previous page to engage better with the current page. For example, on one page the reader encounters a black-and-white photograph of a toy train set. That photograph spills over to the next page, where it becomes a drawing – the whole representing the three-hour train ride from Madanapalle to Bangalore that Nori and her husband undertook every few weeks to see Ved. Subtle yet deliberate visual and textual hints in and between pages map a chronology of Nori’s and Ved’s relationship over a decade. It begins with an image of the sunrise amid greenery, which could be interpreted as Ved’s search for a rootedness in nature at his boarding school. A few months into their exchange, Ved becomes lazy and probably preoccupied with his studies and opts to draw quick sketches, rather than writing his letters. Nori captures this laziness in a photograph of him lying on a fallen tree branch and another of him wearing a Spiderman mask. The title How To Climb A Tree is taken from an initial note Nori had sent Ved during his first few months at the school with step-by-step instructions on how to climb a tree. After ten years of epistolary exchange, by making their personal narrative public, Nori

accepts that her son can now ‘climb a tree’ and is ready for adulthood. A portrait of Ved with unruly hair and a serious expression ends the photobook – signalling to the reader that he is now ‘a young man full of empathy, sense of independence and humour that is uniquely [his] own’, as Nori puts it in her final letter to him. As this narrative unfolds, any stereotypical expectations of the power dynamics of mother– son relationships slowly wither away. In her final letter to Ved, Nori also writes, ‘We struggled with the decision to send our fiercely independent 10 year old boy to live away from us. What we hoped for you is a gentler, slower childhood amidst nature and more importantly to have the freedom and courage to think, explore and understand who you are.’ Despite the wealth of material it contains, the book has empty pages that allow the reader to pause, reflect and imagine the happenings of a gap in time not captured by Nori’s images or her son’s letters. These are absences on top of absences, which also indicate that memories have been lost over time in spite of deliberate attempts to capture them. This is another reason why the book is worth picking up – to tune into one’s own emotions and relationships while having the chance to escape into Nori and Ved’s story, and to be inspired to record one’s own memories before they too are lost. Pramodha Weerasekera

Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, translated by Caroline Schmidt Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) For German translator and novelist Esther Kinsky, the cinema was a social space in which ‘seeing was a collective experience, where wit, terror, dismay and relief found a communal expression’. Her book, part meditation on cinema and its demise, part travelogue, takes us through the lowlands of southeastern Hungary and the nation’s capital, Budapest, formerly the author’s home. Cinemas were once the centre of people’s daily life: ‘market, cinema, cemetery: these were the three points of orientation in the places where I went’, the author writes.During the 1920s Budapest had over 100 cinemas, and practically every Eastern European town Kinsky visited had one up until the Soviet

Union disintegrated during the early 1990s. Even train stations had cinemas attached to their waiting rooms, while ‘theatres on wheels’ would travel to the most distant villages. Today, cinema-going as a regular activity is in decline, as film has become – due to the economics of the industry and the abundance of personal screens – a private matter and a luxury good. An act of seeing that’s ‘withdrawn from the public, estranged from subversion’ as it retreats to isolated realms. According to Kinsky, cinema was a place of refuge, ‘a shelter with a view’ where one could see further than one’s immediate surroundings and into a vast ‘scope of possibilities’. She links this view to the Great Hungarian Plain, in whose

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towns ‘you could see from one end of a street to the other and even farther, to the horizon’. But if this book is about broader horizons, it is equally about developing a practice of looking closely. Throughout Seeing Further Kinsky chronicles prolonged, painstaking gazes into the acacias, the cornfields, the rail tracks and the distant sky arching over the heat and dust. In the process, memories, vistas and speculations coalesce, and her long, meandering sentences become an enactment of a meditative vision, to the point at which you begin to believe that seeing takes time, as well as space. Ultimately, Kinsky tells us, seeing is ‘a proficiency you acquire. A competence you slowly become aware of. Should you desire.’ Yuwen Jiang

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Photo credit

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on the cover Hira Nabi, photographed by Diana Pfammatter in Berlin, August 2024

Words on the spine and on pages 15, 47 and 79 are from Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, 1951

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