ArtReview Asia Autumn 2022 by ArtReview

Ho Rui An Why Lectures Are Artworks (And When It Comes To Them He’s The King)

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Top: teamLab, Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity II, 2019 (detail), twelve-channel digital work, 20.3 × 411.5 cm, [12] 139.7 cm monitors © teamLab Bottom: Adrian Ghenie, 2022 (detail), charcoal on paper, 265 × 50 cm © Adrian Ghenie

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ArtReview Asia vol 10 no 3 Autumn 2022

Expert Recently, in the build-up to an art fair, someone (from the West) involved in the ‘business’ of art was asking ArtReview Asia about its thoughts on the ‘expansion’ of the art market in the region (the fair was taking place in East Asia). ArtReview Asia had questions of its own. Did they think that art was fundamentally connected to a marketplace? Yes. How else was it to have a viable existence? Did they say ‘expansion’ because they believed, fundamentally, that the ‘market’ was something invented in the West now being exported to the East? Yes. In fact, despite the best efforts of Art Basel Hong Kong, the East was ‘behind’ the West when it came to all the market and marketing stuff. Did they mean ‘expansion’ in the sense of more people having access to art? No. The idea is that the market becomes so successful that less and less people can afford to buy art. Thus making the job of gallerists easier. Or did they mean ‘expansion’ in terms of turning more art into more cash? Yes. Although the ‘more art’ bit was optional. And did they mean ‘expansion’ in terms of Asian artists having more prominence within the international artworld? That would be great, they said, but again, when it came down to it, that bit is optional. And why were they asking ArtReview Asia about the market in the first place? Err… Surely they knew that it’s constant mantra is that finance was only one way of measuring the value of art? Ummmm… And perhaps not the most enduring way at that… ArtReview Asia

Urchins

Anselm Kiefer, Wer jetzt kein haus hat... (detail), 2016-2022. Emulsion, oil, acrylic and shellac, lead, rope, sediment of an electrolysis and chalk on canvas. 190 x 330 cm. © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat

Anselm Kiefer

Seoul September—October 2022

Art Previewed

Previews by ArtReview Asia 14

Tribal Leaders by Deepa Bhasthi 28

Afrofuturism by John-Baptiste Oduor 30

Art Featured

Ho Rui An by Adeline Chia 34

Thailand’s Nonprofit Spaces by Max Crosbie-Jones 46

Rice Brewing Sisters Club by Annie Jael Kwan 66

Universal Basic Artist by Pierre D’Alaincasez 42

Agus Suwage by Bianca Winataputri 54

Hong Sang-soo by Andrew Russeth 72

Abdias Nascimento by Oliver Basciano 60

page 66 Rice Brewing Sisters Club, Nuruk (rice yeast), indigenous microorganisms, microorganisms from hand, soil, compost, wood, heating mats, stencil on fabric. Art Laboratory Berlin. Photo courtesy Tim Deussen

Art Reviewed

exhibitions 78

books 94

Hew Locke, by Melissa Baksh Hiraki Sawa, by J.J. Charlesworth Mika Ninagawa, by Mark Rappolt nusa, by Lim Sheau Yun Thasnai Sethaseree, by Max Crosbie-Jones Eternal Spring, by Claire Cao Ma Qiusha, by Paul Han Mounira Al Solh, by Mark Rappolt I Loved You, by Neha Kale Farah Al Qasimi, by Yalda Bidshahri

Good Night, by Feng Li, reviewed by Adeline Chia Talk to My Back, by Yamada Murasaki, reviewed by Nirmala Devi The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring, reviewed by Marv Recinto After Institutions, by Karen Archey, reviewed by Alexander Leissle Translating Myself and Others, by Jhumpa Lahiri, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi The Tribe, by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, reviewed by Oliver Basciano Tomb of Sand, by Geetanjali Shree, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Tom’s Day Out, by Lai Yu Tong, reviewed by Adeline Chia

from the archives 102

page 92 Farah Al Qasimi, Dragon Mart led Display, 2018, archival inkjet print, 175 × 127 cm. Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

ROSA BARBA RADIANT EXPOSURES SEPTEMBER 9 – OCTOBER 15, 2022

Rosa Barba, Solar Flux Recording, 2017/2022 (film still)

ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

Michael Lin, Pentachrome THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART 1000 5th Ave NYC on view now Michael Lin and Ching-Ho Cheng THE ARMORY SHOW, Booth 349 Javits Center, NYC September 9 - 11 2022 Michael Lin & Heidi Voet, doublespeak BANK Anfu Lu 298, Shanghai October 2022

Michael Lin, Pentachrome (detail), 2022. Photo: Installation view, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Paul Lachenauer

Art Previewed

founded on 13

2 Gilles Delmas, from the series As long as time will last, Arnhem Land, Australia, 2015. Courtesy the artist

Previewed 1 Singapore Biennale 2022 Various venues, Singapore 16 October – 19 March

6 Mayunkiki Ikon, Birmingham 9 September – 13 November

12 Navjot Altaf Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai 14 September – 9 December

2 Bangkok Art Biennale 2022 Various venues, Bangkok 22 October – 22 February

7 Lee Ufan scai The Bathhouse, Tokyo 13 September – 15 October

13 17th Istanbul Biennial Various venues, Istanbul 17 September – 20 November

3 Matali Crasset West Bund Museum, Shanghai Through 12 February

8 Takashi Murakami × uno Artiste Series

14 Joël Andrianomearisoa Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, Marrakech 24 September – 16 July

4 Gao Xingjian Asia Art Center, Taipei Through 19 October 5 Okayama Art Summit 2022 Various venues, Okoyama 30 September – 27 November

9 Kanishka Raja Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata Through 15 October 10 Pop South Asia: Artistic Explorations in the Popular Sharjah Art Foundation Through 11 December

15 Hrair Sarkissian Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht 27 November – 14 May 16 Cindy Ji Hye Kim Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway 6 October – 15 January

11 Sophia Al Maria Mathaf, Doha 16 September – 21 January

1 Meet Natasha, this year’s Singapore Biennale. Yes, the event is literally named Natasha. Eschewing the typical thematic pronouncements of art events, the Singapore Biennale has christened it instead. Curators Binna Choi, Nida Ghouse, June Yap and Aala Younis want to use the act of naming to inaugurate a more intimate and spontaneous way of encountering art and relating to one another. On the cards are new spaces for interaction and reflection, such as Valentina Desideri’s and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s brand of healing arts that include tarot and astrology. There will also be new readings of traditions and

histories, such as those explored by Natasha Tontey’s performances of Minahasan rituals from her native Indonesia. Natasha will happen over several locations, including the Singapore Art Museum’s new outpost at Tanjong Pagar Distripark and several islands in the south of Singapore. (ac) Over in Bangkok, there are no such plans to anthropomorphise an artistic event. Under the continued artistic direction of Apinan Poshyananda, working for this edition with Nigel Hurst, Loredana Pazzini Paracciani, Jirat Ratthawongjirakul and Chomwan 2 Weeraworawitt, the Bangkok Art Biennale

(now in its third edition) opts for a thematic title: Chaos: Calm. Or should that be thematic titles? A clash of opposites? A dialectic? You won’t know until you go. Particularly given the extent to which the curatorial team is split between the commercial and academic artworlds. For the time being there’s an artistic statement that warns America about flexing its military muscles, China about overhyping its international infrastructure programmes, the whole world about vaccine wars and Thailand… Well, it doesn’t have much to say about that. The proof of this particular pudding will be in the efforts of

1 Natasha handwritten in Hangul on paper held in the air against the crater Lē’ahi on O‘ahu island on 21 February 2022. Courtesy Singapore Biennale

2 Kawita Vatanajyankur, The Scale of Injustice (still), 2021, 4k Video. Courtesy the artist and Nova Contemporary, Bangkok

ArtReview Asia

3 Matali Crasset, Sid and the World Below, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy West Bund Museum, Shanghai

artists ranging from the ubiquitous Marina Abramović (who has been represented in every edition of the event) to locals such as Phitchapha Wangprasertkul. (nd) 3 French designer Matali Crasset has developed a reputation for her different take on the world around us, expressed usually in products ranging from furniture and lighting to spectacles and rings. What’s different about her ‘take’ (other than the fact that she makes strikingly beautiful-but-quirky objects)? It’s (in her words) ‘pragmatic’. Wassat then? It means she tends to work on designing systems rather than objects. Perhaps that comes from five years of working with fellow French

design icon Philippe Starck, whom Crasset admires for his free thinking, but left to set up her own studio ‘to protect herself from him’. At the West Bund Museum in Shanghai the system takes the form of a narrative, titled Sid and the World Below, which looks at the world from the perspective of a seed. On the serious side it’s a chance to reflect on the ecological ‘challenges’ facing humans today; on the less serious side it’s a journey of childlike curiosity, discovery and wonder. Like Cirque du Soleil with a bit of Greta Thunberg thrown in. (nd) While best known as an experimental playwright, Nobel Prize-winning author and poet (many of his verses were written during

Autumn 2022

Gao Xingjian, Miss, 1995, ink on paper, 240 × 119 cm. Courtesy the artist and Asia Art Center, Taipei

his years working as a peasant undergoing ‘reeducation’ during the Cultural Revolution), 4 Gao Xingjian is also a painter. More specifically, of the ink wash-artist variety. Which is why the title of his solo exhibition at Taipei’s Asia Art Center – Where spirit dwells on – seems apt: traditional ink painting isn’t so much about achieving a perfect representation of your subject as it is about capturing the subject’s spirit. Back in 2013, Gao seemed concerned with how noisy politics and media in general had become, asking, during an interview with the bbc, ‘where is the place for solemn art and literature now?’ Well, given that there is noise everywhere, here

6 Mayunkiki with photography by Hiroshi Ikeda, sinuye: Tattoos for Ainu Women (detail), 2020, mixed-media installation. Courtesy the artist

5 Yutaka Sone, Amusement Romana, 2002. Photo: Kioku Keizo. Courtesy 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

(in Taiwan, around which China’s been performing war games for days) and now (like, right now) is as good a place and time as any for his works to be viewed in all their solemn grace. The paintings, made between 1994 and 2018, are in a semiabstract style that resists any conventional narrative. Which is the point, really, because spirit isn’t something you can look at – rather, it’s more of a quality that’s projected outwards, supposing it’s actually inside in the first place. (fc) This year’s the year to be a dreamer, it seems. And this year’s Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, won’t yet have closed by the time that 5 the triennial Okayama Art Summit opens

The Asahikawa-born Ainu artist and with its theme: Do we dream under the same sky. Directed by Rirkrit Tiravanija, 25 ‘itinerant’ 6 musician Mayunkiki centres her practice around her experience as an Indigenous artists (not in the moving-around type, but, acwoman living in Japan – exploring the cording to the Thai artist, the diverse-culturalhistorical marginalisation of Ainu people and and-social-backgrounds type) including Vandy the Japanese government’s banning of their Rattana, Mari Katayama, Jacolby Satterwhite cultural practices. Most notable, perhaps, is and Precious Okoyomon (whose garden instalher work documenting (via a series of photoglation To See the Earth before the End of the World, 2022, appears as the finale to the Venice Biennale’s raphy and interviews) Sinuye, a tradition of main exhibition), are brought together to ‘refacial tattoos practiced by Ainu women that focus our mindset and perspectives’. So, dreaming, was outlawed in 1871 in an attempt to force here, isn’t about escape, but about exploring their assimilation into the dominant Japanese and experiencing multiple narratives that culture and its social expectations of feminine are generally considered to operate outside beauty. This series and her subsequent work on Upopo, a genre of Ainu folk-music and oral of a society’s ‘normative position’. (fc)

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storytelling, looks at the longterm and generational effects of societal and political pressure to forget one’s identity, while reclaiming that heritage in her artworks. At Ikon, in Birmingham, this act of reclamation will be accompanied by a selection of artefacts on loan from Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum relabelled by Mayunkiki with extended captions that ‘reflect her own experience and understandings’ of the objects. (fc) Fresh from inaugurating a three-storey private museum in Arles, France, dedicated to half a century of his work, the Korean 7 artist Lee Ufan returns to Japan, the country

he considers his second home, for this exhibition in Tokyo’s old-town area, Yanaka. His more recent work has grown bolder and more vibrant than the monochromatic minimalism of the Mono-ha movement that made his name. Questioned about this, the eighty-six-year-old (who trained as a philosopher) recently countered that perhaps he was embracing colour only now as a means of feeling young again. Expect a few bold splashes to counter the poetic minimalism. (ob) For those Takashi Murakami fans 8 out there – and the ones that have never

experienced the pernicious joy of dropping a wild-plus-four card on your opponent in a round of uno – this new artist-designed boxset of the popular game (the latest in a series by other artist-brands including the late Keith Haring and Nina Chanel Abney) might be just what you need. Japan’s most popular artist (arguably) has forgone the game’s original blocky design and primary colour system and replaced it with his usual mix of overflowing ecstatic flowers, Mr Dob, the cartoon panda (among a host of other anime-style characters) and graffitied skulls in garish colours. Of course for others, whose

7 Lee Ufan, Push Up, 1972, sumi on paper, 160 × 130 × 6 cm. Courtesy scai The Bathhouse, Tokyo

8 Courtesy Mattel

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allegiance lies with the game more than with Murakami’s signature mix of kitsch-andcreepy pop, this edition, and its changes to the original game’s distinctive styling, might instead be perceived as heresy, perpetrated by someone who, it seems, has never actually played UNO. (ld) In Kolkata, a posthumous exhibition 9 of work by the late Kanishka Raja at Experimenter’s Ballygunge Place is a good place to explore the artist’s exuberant combination of traditional weaving techniques and modern subject matter. The Kolkata-born artist trained as a painter

in New York, but returned regularly to India, and these two poles informed his early interest in formalism and abstraction blended with traditional craft and ornamentation techniques. On show are woven textiles, made in collaboration with masterweaver Dipak Halder in Phulia, Bengal, along with a few oil paintings and drawings depicting geometric patterns in bright colours that evoke the busy patterns of circuit boards and architectural plans. There is also a large cube-shaped structure made from stretched cloth panels, which has been constructed from plans left by Raja. This ‘cloth house’ is inspired

by pandal, or a large open-sided temporary pavilion that is erected during festivals to host music, art and celebrations. As a result, Ground Control (as this show is titled) oscillates between the fundamental grid of weaving, the drawn lines of architecture, the lines delimiting sports fields and the lines of control that still define South Asia. (ac) Across South Asia, truck, bus and autorickshaw drivers get their vehicles decorated with more or less elaborate fantasies that somehow reflect their personalities. Berlinbased, Afghanistan-born artist Jeanno Gaussi came across a man specialised in such

9 Kanishka Raja, Control 8, 2015–16, mixed-media installation. Courtesy the estate of the artist, Juli Raja and Experimenter, Kolkata

9 Kanishka Raja, Control 4, 2015, handwoven double weft cotton thread, 122 × 155 cm. Courtesy the estate of the artist, Juli Raja and Experimenter, Kolkata

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9 Kanishka Raja, Control 10 (detail), 2015, handwoven double weft cotton thread, diptych, 231 × 124 cm (left), 221 × 122 cm (right). Courtesy the estate of the artist, Juli Raja and Experimenter, Kolkata

Autumn 2022

10 Pushpamala N, Returning from the Tank (after oil painting by Raja Ravi Varma), 2004, colour photograph, 56 × 34 cm. Courtesy the artist and Collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi & Noida

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‘truckpainting’ and gave him seven skateboards to decorate. It’s just one of the works 10 in Pop South Asia, currently on show at the Sharjah Art Foundation, which seeks to describe aspects of popular culture that unite and distinguish East and West. Underneath that, the exhibition, which features over 100 works by artists from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and their diasporas, seeks to document artists’ engagement with popular culture and the notion of Pop art as something inherently from the West. On show are classics by the likes of Bhupen Khakhar and M.F. Husain

along with more contemporary works by Pushpamala N, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran and Thukral & Tagra. (nd) It’s the histories and futures of the Gulf and its surrounding area that form the 11 background to Qatari American Sophia Al Maria’s first major exhibition in the Middle East. For the artist, writer and filmmaker, this is a sort of homecoming (although she was born in the us) and naturally the focus of the exhibition will be on storytelling and speculative narratives as a mode of reclaiming truth, visibility and agency. Works on show include installations, videoworks and

soundscapes and is the product of expansive dialogues between Al Maria and a network of other artists, scholars and communities. Buried within all that are the issues of labour and community that play a major role in shaping the local landscape right now, particularly in the build-up to the forthcoming World Cup. (nd) 12 Navjot Altaf (who works between Mumbai and Basar – in the latter of which she cofounded the Dialogue Interactive Artists Association, with indigenous artists Rajkumar Korram, Shantibai and Gessuram Viswakarma, in order to understand and

11 Sophia Al Maria, Black Friday (still), 2016, digital video, colour, sound, 16 min 36 sec. Courtesy Mathaf, Doha

12 Navjot Altaf, Pattern, 2015–16, unmilled rice grains, dimensions variable. Photo: Anil Rane. Courtesy the artist and Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai

Autumn 2022

13 Courtesy Bread and Puppet Theater

14 Joël Andrianomearisoa, Ce qui s’oublie et ce qui reste, 2021 (installation view, Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, Paris). Courtesy of Hakanto Contemporary, Antananarivo and Anne Volery

create sustainable living, advocate justice and highlight the region’s ecological crises) also works in a range of media. At the Ishara Foundation the focus is on the intersection of climate change and feminism, and works created since 2015 (the artist’s practice dates back to the 1970s), the year of the un climate change conference and the Paris Climate Accords. On show in Patterns are six bodies of work, that deal with architecture, urbanism, ecological disaster and the advent of the digital age. The exhibition’s centrepiece, made from unmilled red rice, from which the show derives its title, showcases an indigenous weaving pattern and highlights the ways in

which the interconnectedness of life is threatened by the advent of land passing to mining companies. (nd) Perhaps sensing that grand narratives seem passé in an increasingly fractured and 13 complex world, the curators of the Istanbul Biennial – curator Ute Meta Bauer, artist Amar Kanwar and academic David Teh, a trio whose careers have largely been made east of the Bosphorus in Asia – have eschewed any overarching theme. Instead, a mixture of individuals and artist-run organisations will occupy a range of sites, not least Küçük Mustafa Paşa Hammam, one of the city’s oldest Turkish baths, pursuing an eclectic

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range of interests. Among them: the erstwhile Philippines art-space Green Papaya; Dhakabased Pathshala South Asian Media Institute; the radical American Bread and Puppet Theater and, the biennial-ubiquitous Cooking Sections. (ob) 14 To the people of Marrakech, Joël Andrianomearisoa is going to feel fairly ubiquitous by the time his solo exhibition at The Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden closes in July next year. But then again, our land just like a dream, will be the first solo exhibition to have taken place at the independent not-for-profit. In the past the Madagascan artist has collaborated

with master weavers in his hometown of Antananarivo, as well as weavers in Udaipur and loom-setters in Aubusson; the works here, however, are produced in collaboration with artisans in Marrakech and personal interpretations of Morocco’s cultural heritage framed via memory and its transmission. (nd) The scenes in Hrair Sarkissian’s Last Seen 15 (2018–21), a series of photographs that is one of the more recent works in the Syrian-Armenian artist’s midcareer retrospective in Maastricht, are quotidian: a cramped, windowless bedroom; a stairwell; a domestic garage. Yet as is typical for an artist whose work has dealt

with state brutality, war and displacement, Sarkissian brings out a haunting quality in his apparently banal compositions. People are notably absent, doors stand ajar, lights are left on as if in the wake of a hurried exit, other scenes are cast in gloom. It’s an apt melancholy: each of these locations was the last known whereabouts of various disappeared individuals. (ob) Taking the form of layered theatre-setlike constructions, Korean-born Canadian 16 Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s installations explore both memory and the construction of personal identity, while hinting at the

artificiality of both. The works in Sand in the Hourglass at the Kunsthall Stavanger, have a baroque quality while also deploying monochromatic grisailles that further strand the work in an ambiguous space between the past and the present. Look closely though and her drawings speak of transformation – penises become tails, flowers sprout from groins, girls hide under beds, while behatted figures hold hands and dance around empty beds. Sweetly, elegantly creepy. (nd) Oliver Basciano, Adeline Chia, Fi Churchman, Louise Darblay, Nirmala Devi

Hrair Sarkissian, from the series Last Seen, 2018–21. Courtesy the artist

16 Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Asinus ii: Forgiveness, 2022, graphite and ink on pulp, pressed flowers, artist’s hair, baltic birch. © the artist. Photo: Kyle Knodell. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York

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Marina Abramović

‘ The Current ’ Single channel video (color, no sound), 1 hour, 2017 © Marina Abramović | Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives

bkkartbiennale.com

India’s latest president took up office this past July. In addition to her achievements as a career politician, Droupadi Murmu has many other firsts to her name: the 15th president is the youngest the country has had, and at sixty-four years of age, she is the first born in independent India. She is only the second woman to hold the office. But perhaps it is the fact that she is the first person from a tribal community to become the First Citizen of India that has had the greatest impact on society. In a country shaped brutally, often violently, along caste, class and religious lines, and where, like elsewhere in the world, indigenous people are among the poorest and most oppressed sections of the population, Murmu’s journey from a village in Odisha state, Eastern India, to the highest political office is a monumental achievement. It also smacks of tokenism, albeit part of the shrewd political strategising that has marked the eight years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule in the country. In India’s parliamentary system of politics, executive power is held by the prime minister and a cabinet of ministers. The position of the president remains largely ceremonial, with some limited powers to do with parliamentary bills, mercy petitions in case of capital punishments and suchlike. Yet, in backing and getting a candidate from a tribal community elected as president, the widely held consensus among political analysts in the country is that the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) has gained a foothold in securing tribal support for the upcoming general elections in 2024. It’s a win-win: the brandconscious party gets to be seen as inclusive, particularly given that generally it is seen as a party of increasingly militant Hindu nationalism (or Hindutva), but more especially during the 75th year of Indian independence, an occasion that the bjp is going all out to celebrate as a personal achievement. The nuances of this appointment, however, are much more complicated than issues of symbolic inclusion. Murmu’s election needs to be read in the light of the fact that the rightwing bjp and its allies have not managed to gain stable inroads into several parts of Central

Identity Politics

Tribal peoples are getting some of India’s top governmental jobs, writes Deepa Bhasthi, but does that signal any real change in their status?

Indian President Droupadi Murmu inspecting the Guard of Honour, New Delhi, 25 July 2022. Photo: President’s Secretariat / Government Open Data License – India

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India where indigenous people make up a large chunk of the population and where regional parties, with political identities that are not always in sync with the centre’s Hindutva agenda, govern the states. Notably, these indigenous people live in mineral-rich areas, in relation to which India has been trying to change forest and mining laws so as to make it easier for corporate bodies to extract and exploit natural resources. There could not have been a better candidate than Murmu. Born in a Santhal tribal family, she was one of the first girls from her community to gain a college education. She would go on to work first as a clerk and then as a teacher, before entering politics and slowly climbing the political ladder as a member of the bjp. Murmu is known to back the party line in pushing its Hindutva agenda, designating Hindi as a national language and perpetuating the myth of the holy cow. On the other hand, when she served as the governor of Jharkhand, a state with a high tribal population, she is best remembered for sending back proposed laws that were seen as harmful to the interests of indigenous people for reconsideration by the state assembly. These actions are cited as proof that she could be the strongest advocate for tribal rights that the communities have had yet. While this of course remains to be seen, it is helpful to remember that exploitation of indigenous people continues unabated and has indeed escalated since her party came to power. On the flipside, however, acts of resistance by the resident to extractive policies may actually be encouraged by the bjp in order to ensure that she is not dismissed as a puppet president. Of course, India does have a history of making such ‘strategic’ appointments. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a scientist and a Muslim, was elected president in 2002, the year of the fateful Godhra riots in Gujarat (where the burning of a train resulted in the death of 58 Hindu pilgrims and led to widespread anti-Muslim violence that killed a further 1,000 people), which would

propel the current prime minister into national politics. The outgoing president, Ram Nath Kovind, is a Dalit, among the most severely oppressed of communities. Holding the highest position in the country did not stop Kovind and his wife from briefly being denied entry into a temple in Puri on the grounds of his caste (members of which are traditionally banned from entering and praying at Brahminical temples). In each case, the candidate’s background is emphasised, only to train focus on how they have moved away from the perceived undesirable parts of their religions. Thus, Kalam was a Muslim, but still was vegetarian, could quote from the Vedas, played the veena and prayed to Goddess Saraswati. Murmu, who turned to the Brahmakumari movement after losing much of her family to tragic accidents within a short span of time, is also a vegetarian and lives a simple, almost frugal life. Such dietary choices and austerity sit well with the image of what is sold as the mark of a good Brahminical Hindu, and therefore an ideal citizen of fast-radicalising India. This Hinduisation of India is another reason why Murmu’s presidency is of particular curiosity. Tribes have long demanded a Sarna code in the census that would allow them to self-identify as followers of the Sarna way of life, which revolves not around a god figure, but around the worship of nature. Currently, tribes can only choose between the major religions – a legacy of colonial rule when the British found

it easier to club non-Muslims and non-Christians as Hindus – something tribal leaders say is detrimental to the preservation of their culture and eco-friendly way of life. The bjp has been particularly rattled by the idea of this code because it would drastically reduce the number of those counted as Hindus in the country and work against the illusion of a Hindu majority that it takes great pains to maintain. Thus, this tokenism of having a tribal as president serves a dual purpose – that of appeasing a huge voter base by doing the bare minimum while actively ignoring core issues, and furthering a political message that the tribes will continue to be counted as Hindus and how it is to their advantage to side with the majority. An aside: in the midst of all the selfcongratulatory messages in the country for its own progressiveness, what has barely, if at all, been commented upon is the fact that Droupadi is not even the president’s real name. Named Puti Tudu when she was born, Murmu has talked about how it was changed by a teacher ‘who did not like’ her tribal birth name. The mainstream Hindu name itself was changed several times, from Durpadi to Dorpdi before finally settling as Droupadi. It’s a story that is nothing short of horrifying in its attempt to erase indigenous culture, but nevertheless reminiscent of similar horrors inflicted on indigenous peoples all over the world. Santhal celebration of Baha parab, 2018. Photo: Ramjit Tudu / Wikimedia Commons

Autumn 2022

Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Kodagu

The body of work loosely contained under the label of Afrofuturism exists within two radically distinct but conceptually overlapping timelines. The first encompasses the history of the United States but focuses its attention on slavery and its aftermath, traced all the way into the current century – the longue durée. Consider the paintings assembled for the recently opened In the Black Fantastic exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery. Ellen Gallagher’s canvases, depictions of survivors of the Middle Passage – thrown overboard but living in technologically advanced cities beneath the surface – represent the more radical wing of this first approach. The second extends its focus further still. It exists in cosmic time, beginning in the mythical prehistoric past and reaching out into the farflung future. Between these two points – in place of the events that have created the world of the present day: capitalism, colonialism,

Time Travel

For John-Baptiste Oduor the future of Afrofuturism is located firmly in the present

Lina Iris Viktor, Eleventh, 2018, pure 24-karat gold, acrylic, ink, copolymer resin, print on matte canvas, 165 × 127 cm. Courtesy the artist

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the emergence of the nation-state – there is usually a void, and we are instead given a timeline that jumps back and forth between pyramids and spaceships. For instance, Chris Ofili fuses Homeric and religious myth with celestial fantasies about contact with alien lifeforms. In his sculpture Annunciation (2006) – featured in In the Black Fantastic – a golden Mary and a black pregnant Gabriel (more alien than angel) press their naked bodies up against one another. Both approaches respond to the problem of whether it is possible to imagine something like a black modernity. Standing in the way is the existence of actual modernity, whose defining features the genre usually understands to be racism and slavery (but also, as in the images of greed and consumption in Wangechi Mutu’s animation The End of eating Everything, 2013, the destruction of the environment). Coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in his 1994 essay ‘Black to the Future’, Afrofuturism from the moment of its inception was concerned with understanding how it was possible to enact a break from modernity by imagining what Dery called ‘possible futures’, or paths not taken, as an alternative to our present world, which is so saturated with suffering that little within it seems salvageable. There are of course other visions of the future, but these are, Dery insisted, ‘owned by technocrats, futurologists, streamliners and set-designers’ – a grouping that is ‘white to a man’. The cultural critic’s immediate focus was on fiction – turning to sci-fi novelist Samuel R. Delany or the dc Comics superhero Icon – but the problems emerging from this medium were present across artforms. An instructive intervention came from the critic Greg Tate, writing in 1992, who took issue with the erasure of what he called the ‘affirmative aspects of blackness’ in Delany’s novels. Pushing back against such criticism, Delany insisted that part of what it meant to imagine something beyond modernity was to abandon the idea that one had to fight ‘the fragmentation and multicultural diversity of the world… by constructing something so rigid as an identity’. At his best, Delany is able to present social identities and structures as subordinate to technology and chance, which he uses to explain how this fragmentation occurs in practice. In ‘The Star Pit’, a story from 1965, he describes how the first manned intergalactic voyage became possible: ‘Through some freakish accident, two people had been discovered who didn’t crack up at twenty thousand light years off the galactic rim, who didn’t die at twentyfive thousand’. Inhabitants of Delany’s world entertain emptying the asylums in search of other psychological freaks capable of galactic travel, but to no avail; the chosen are not marked

out by features that overlap with any socially recognisable categories. Rather, technology and chance create these classifications. Where this flight into fantasy leaves the identity of race is left deliberately unclear. In this mode, Afrofuturism seeks merely to leapfrog the present, making our own social categories appear alien in the process. Writing in 2003, the filmmaker and theorist Kodwo Eshun described Afrofuturism as a ‘program for recovering the histories of counterfutures’, a description that gets at both the power and limitations of the genre. What is lost? Through its often-totalising understanding of actual history as endless suffering, the genre, in attempting to break with European modernity, breaks instead with the radicalism of actually-existing Black modernism. In its worst instantiations, invocations of ideas about transcending all social, sexual and racial categories can often come across as cheap mysticism, reliant on supposed connections between Black people and a mythic regal past that is alarmingly similar to the ideology of European fascism. This is a tendency to which Afrofuturism in its more celebratory modes falls victim. Of course, to engage with this oeuvre in such an argumentative way might be to miss the point. All artists rely in some sense on fundamental delusions or misrepresentations as a springboard. The important question

should therefore be, what formal innovations does this playful space open up? Here the symbols of royalty, of premodern notions of a harmony with nature, of an inherent Black spirituality, are so well worn that it is difficult to imagine how one could turn to these themes without relying on cliché. One reason for this might be the fact that Afrofuturism within the visual arts exists within the same representational world as mass-produced popular culture. (The artist Lina Iris Viktor, exhibited at the Hayward, once filed a lawsuit against Kendrick Lamar for allegedly appropriating her work in the music video for the rapper’s Black Panther soundtrack song, from 2018.) The further Afrofuturism has been able to move from this market-dominated vision of culture, the more autonomously it has been able to think about the future. Much of the more interesting work assembled within the Hayward’s exhibition, such as Hew Locke’s sculptures and Kara Walker’s film recreations of racist violence, avoids these cheap solutions. They preoccupy themselves with the work of facing the future with two feet planted firmly in the present, interpreting the complex forms of identity taking shape in the here and now. In doing so, they point forward towards a more possible future. John-Baptiste Oduor is a writer and an editor at Jacobin magazine

Hew Locke, Ambassador 1, 2021, wood, resin, fabric, metal, plastic, 155 × 50 × 137 cm. Photo: Anna Arca. © and courtesy the artist

Autumn 2022

Art Featured

the adoration of the beautiful 33

Ho Rui An Smooth Operators by Adeline Chia

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Autumn 2022

preceding pages The Economy Enters the People, 2021–22 (installation view, Bangkok CityCity Gallery, 2022). Photo: Ketsiree Wongwan. Courtesy Bangkok CityCity Gallery above Asia the Unmiraculous, 2018–20 (performance documentation, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, 2018). Photo: Yasuhiro Tani. Courtesy Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media

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Dressed in a crew-neck jumper and slacks, Ho Rui An is on stage, telling life, including politics, film, art and most chillingly, individual subjecus how during the late 1970s, when China was undergoing historic tivity. Beyond a set of economic policies, neoliberalism has come to be socioeconomic reforms under Deng Xiaoping, Chinese delegates regarded, in its most radical sense, as both the fundamental reframing came to Singapore to get pointers from Lee Kuan Yew’s government of subjectivity as human capital. And Ho’s conclusion is pessimistic: on how to modernise their country. Photos of said delegations flash the expansion of the market did not deliver its promises of individual on screen behind him. The officials are sitting around large, mostly empowerment and freedom, but introduced new and more insidious empty conference tables. Ho says that the tables’ emptiness evokes methods of political control. “an overwhelming sense of lack”, which he associates with another Ho’s body of works span performance, video installations and void: the absence of real people (as opposed to the ideal of “rational, books. In his earlier works, he focused his critique on Singapore. self-possessed individuals”) in the Chinese Communist Party’s dream Because the city-state is known for hyperefficient governance and its business-friendly image as a ‘green’ or of a socialist market-economy. Ho then Beyond a set of economic policies, ‘smart’ city (in its drive to attract transbegins a series of riffs linked by metaphor or image, flitting between modes national capital), Singapore was an ideal neoliberalism has come to be of control deployed by the Singapore example from which to critique the regarded, in its most radical sense, self-replicating methods and technoland Chinese governments. For example, as both the fundamental reframing ogies of a globalised neoliberal state. a look at cinematic tropes centred around The lecture and video installation Dash the factory eventually leads to a discusof subjectivity as human capital (2016–18), which begins with an infasion of the genre he cheekily calls “Workers Never Leaving the Chinese Socialist Factory”, because the mous dashcam-footage clip of a road accident in Singapore, argues factory had expanded to colonise private and mental life. The lecture that the way we interpret an event as an accident – or an aberration ends with a wistful look at the older, revolutionary-themed artworks in a fundamentally sound system – and move on from it can make in the National Gallery Singapore – traces of a tradition of resistance, us complicit with that system. He then explores how the Singapore before Singaporeans had assimilated, lemminglike, into the state’s government adapts to the crises of capitalism without challenging its brand of benign authoritarianism. logic. A prime example of this is the state’s use of ‘horizon scanning’ This is Singaporean artist-writer Ho’s latest lecture-performance, – a form of foresight planning that detects potential future threats – The Economy Enters The People (2021–22). After the live event, viewers to obscure the more banal and current crises of inequality and exploican watch the recorded version on computer screens arranged on a tation of migrant labour that underpin its economy. conference table similar to the ones he has just described. This piece Over the past few years, Ho has looked at Asia more broadly, espeadvances a recurring motif in his work: how cially in relation to the racialised narratives The Economy Enters the People, 2021–22 neoliberal logic – the economic creed that prizes surrounding the region’s position in global capi(installation view, Bangkok CityCity Gallery, free trade and the free movement of capital, talism. Ho argues that Asia has been the canvas 2022). Photo: Ketsiree Wongwan. onto which the West projects its prejudices goods and people – has infiltrated all manner of Courtesy Bangkok CityCity Gallery

Autumn 2022

Asia the Unmiraculous, 2018–20, installation view (The Ends of a Long Boom, Kunsthalle Wien, 2021), detail, digital prints on backlit film mounted on led-illuminated acrylic. Photo: www.kunst-dokumentation.com. Courtesy KunsthalleWien

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– and examines how certain Asian cities or communities have been who make “broad, sprawling arguments about ‘the global economy’ cast, depending on the occasion, as market-spoiling, cheap labour or ‘the liberal international order’, which, unsurprisingly, tend not or embodiments of a debased, cronyistic capitalism. In the lecture- to espouse the most progressive politics”. performance Asia the Unmiraculous (2018–20), he traces the rise, crash From this angle, Ho’s art is often framed as a form of knowledge and regrowth of Asia’s economies, from the postwar period to the production – and rightly so, especially compared to a lot of contem1997 financial crisis, to current times – and the West’s complicity porary art which has an ‘aura’ of critique without much actual wranand hypocrisy with regards to Asia’s economic woes. By marshal- gling with the issues they purport to challenge. The unusual entry ling images from influential Western media including Time maga- points he creates to tackle familiar topics also yield new perspectives zine covers and Hollywood thrillers set in Asian cities, Ho also gives a and conceptual frameworks. The lecture performance Screen Green potted account of the genealogies of Orientalist notions in economic (2015–16), for example, was inspired by a screen capture of Singapore’s and political discourse – including Marx’s problematic phrase ‘Asiatic Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at his National Day Rally speech in mode of production’, which was used to describe a feudal mode of 2014, where he was pictured against a homogenous green backdrop social organisation incapable of achieving class consciousness, and that was incidentally of the shade used in special-effects compositing. the Cold Warrior political scientist Chalmers Johnson’s patronising The lecture is ultimately about Singapore’s state censorship, propaganda and oppression of civil liberties, but Ho skins the cat differdescription of Japan as the ‘star capitalist student of the West’. ‘Intellectual’ and ‘cerebral’ are words often used to describe Ho’s ently: he examines how the manicured gardens of Singapore funcwork, but judging his work against the standards of formal schol- tion as green-screen studios for the government to project desirable arship would be too frustrating. The arguments are unruly, with images of the country, and also as spaces of exception where civil register shifts and non-sequiturs. From Dash: “Faced with the abso- society is allowed. lute unknowability of the future, the task for the analyst is to come Yet sometimes I’m not so much convinced by his arguments as up with metaphors for that which has no metaphor, such that one can impressed by how cleverly and intricately they are stitched together. only turn to the animals. For only with the animal metaphor can one What is more compelling about his work, I would argue, is the pastoralise the monsters. Only by animal can one contain the animus powerful image or idea he harnesses to make his case. The atmosphere of capitalism is naturalised to a degree that it is lived by us all, of a world that has truly gone wild.” Ho says that his lectures are meant to be evocative and not water- but remains largely unlocatable, being everywhere and nowhere. tight. Over an email conversation, he concedes that his arguments Mark Fisher famously called it ‘capitalist realism’. These images “draw upon different modes of observation in a manner that does that Ho selects – even if they don’t quite pierce the veil – provide an not adhere to the standards of empiricism as defined from any one important descriptive truth of it. discipline”. This method allows him to bring One of the most arresting scenes in Asia the Asia the Unmiraculous, 2018–20 speculative propositions into areas like geopolUnmiraculous shows a two-euro coin balancing (performance documentation, Yamaguchi Center itics or macroeconomics, which are usually on the windowsill of a Chinese high-speed train, for Arts and Media, 2018). Photo: Yasuhiro Tani. dominated by economists and policymakers, which was uploaded by a YouTuber to show how Courtesy Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media

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stable these locomotives are. Ho isolated the clip, looped it and hived to communicate”) and the ‘solar domestic’ (where “utopia unfolds it off into a standalone work called ultimate coin test china high- within a supercooled interior like a parallel montage of the meltspeed rail (2018). What the video reveals is that the kind of movement down outside”). capitalism aspires to – a smooth, unfettered circulation of finance, The lecture concludes: “After all, the only common condition goods, labour and ideas – is actually a kind of stasis. It is speed sped that we can possibly share is not love, but sweat. What we share is the up to the point of stillness. This work captures it perfectly: the tran- common suffering of being under the same sun we cannot master, the quillity on bullet trains, bolstered by the lack of anchoring scenery suffering of the primal labour of perspiration that cannot be elimioutside the window – just an anonymous brown-and-green landscape nated, only redistributed. Such is the limit of love. And it is only at this streaking and warping endlessly and impersonally. Meanwhile, the limit where we would find that the only collective life worth living is serene equipoise of the two-euro coin makes for a complacent, quasi- one that is based not upon the sharing of a world but the sharing of malevolent presence. (I couldn’t quite put my finger on why: could it the sweaty condition of being without world. Of being always already be the ‘2’ on the coin signalling some vague division from the whole, exposed to the unworld that is the Solar.” visually reinforced by the solid black line of the window’s rubber seal In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), the anarchist physirunning behind it?) Embodying creepy and contradictory forces of cist Shevek famously says, ‘It is our suffering that brings us together’. motion and paralysis, the work distils the ambiance of capitalism. Sweat, like suffering, could be a basis for a new collectivism. Sweat also In our interview, Ho is explicit in his belief in the revolutionary serves Ho’s more radical argument. He has compared the comforting, potential of art. He says that art should try to get a foot into the maternal, deadening safety of globalised sameness with a sort of evil, discursive spaces of economists and policymakers to “articulate a neverending air-conditioned interior. We need to go outside, where progressive vision for an emancipatory mass politics”, which “can we sweat. And sweat, as a bodily fluid leaving the skin and showing only happen when we start to see each of our local struggles as part of the body’s permeability to the wider environment, dissolves the a more general struggle for equality across the world”. boundaries between inside and outside. The new world, or ‘unworld’, What is this vision, exactly? It has to do with our sweat. Ho comes as he calls it, requires not just a dismantling of categories and hierarclose to a cautiously worded manifesto at the end of Solar: A Meltdown chies, but perhaps even their complete abandonment. The revolution (2014–17), which traces imperial legacies in the avoidance of perspira- needs to go beyond political action to a complete perceptual rehaul, tion from colonial times to our globalised present. The lecture starts for us to be released to the non-binary wildness of immensurable with the idea of the sweat-drenched colonial master in the tropics magnitude (‘the solar’), where our senses are scrambled, disordered and his accessory, a white wife or governess who kept a cool house and completely overwhelmed. How to get there? Well, there’s talking in which he could rest. Starting off with footage from The King And I about sweat, and then there’s really sweating, with all of its inele(1956), about a British governess who teaches English to the Thai royal gance and even helplessness. Yet Ho’s ultimate strength, for which family, Ho sketches out his ideas of the ‘global he is roundly and justly celebrated, is in keeping ultimate coin test china domestic’ (comprising “a compulsive hospihis cool, even while navigating the most inhoshigh-speed rail, tality in which strangers are forced to open up, pitable of terrains. ara 2018, hd video, loop. Courtesy the artist

Autumn 2022

Universal Basic Artist by Pierre d’Alancaisez

The concept of state-provided incomes for artists may be hiding a whole bunch of consequences – unintended and otherwise 42

ArtReview Asia

The pandemic has had many detrimental effects on the arts, but forever. A trial run by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (ybca), recently the Western artworld has developed a peculiar form of in San Francisco, makes a virtue of its ideological bias and boasts of ‘long covid’, whose key symptom is the demand for a special form ‘randomly’ allocating 95 percent of payments to individuals from of income for artists, with a plethora of initiatives cropping up that marginalised groups. single out artists as uniquely deserving of support in the postpanIn many ways these schemes are no different to traditional grants, demic reconstruction. In 2021, for example, the New York City Artists fellowships or residency programmes, which continue to abound. Corps promised to employ artists in droves to restore the creative and And like the earlier formats, these guaranteed-income projects have tourist economies. Ireland is poised to launch a €25 million guaran- their political motivations. Ireland’s artist gi pilot ostensibly aims to teed income (gi) pilot for artists. And numerous programmes, such as resurrect the country’s minuscule visual art scene while dispensing Creatives Rebuild New York(crny), are currently trialling versions of with the Irish government’s manifesto commitment to trial ubi. universal basic income (ubi) targeted at artists. For the 2,400 creatives ybca pays race reparations despite such positive discrimination likely selected by crny, who are now a cool $1,000 a month closer to making being illegal when public funds are involved. Others are straightforrent, such initiatives may be a blessing. But are states and philanthro- ward, if modest, investments in socially ameliorative art practices pists truly interested in paying artists for ‘doing what they love’? Or accompanied by stricter-than-ever evaluation criteria. What’s new is does this proliferation of quasi-ubi programmes point to a future of the all-encompassing nature of these schemes. Whereas previously even lower artist incomes and increased control over who gets to be anyone could have been an artist in Ireland so long as they were happy an artist? to declare themselves as such on the census, the Irish state has now Blueprints for Universal Basic Income date as far back as Thomas decided that it ‘needs’ no more than 10,000 artists. crny turned away More’s Utopia (1516). The aims of the spate of recent trials of ubi in some 19,000 applicants. countries ranging from Namibia to South Korea have included What will the excess artists do? Here lies the artworld’s biggest reducing child malnutrition and promoting local businesses, while taboo: how many artists are ‘enough’ and who gets to decide? Past a programme launched this spring in Wales is directed at young decades have seen a meteoric rise in the supply of arts graduates, only people leaving social care. Figures as far apart on the political spec- a fraction of whom have been able to find employment in the creative trum as Britain’s former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Tesla’s industries. Despite also rapidly growing, the artworld has become Elon Musk have advocated much wider applications of ubi that accustomed to an overabundance of available labour, and this has would see living-wage-level payments contributed to the suppression of pay for art workers. Campaigns by the likes of the distributed to entire populations. Here lies the artworld’s biggest For all its appeal, ubi is a neoliberal con us’s w.a.g.e. highlight that unpaid labour taboo: how many artists are designed to disenfranchise vast parts of remains commonplace in the artworld. ‘enough’ and who gets to decide? However, hardly anyone entertains the society and undermine the earning power of idea that a mural artist would attract a all but the capital-owning elites. In a world where human labour is rendered obsolete to the extent that a signifi- higher honorarium if they didn’t compete with ten others for the cant portion of the workforce would be paid to stay idle, the human same commission, despite the inverse situation currently driving up itself will become surplus to requirement. This is not because work wages elsewhere, such as in the hospitality sector. Artworld dogma is intrinsically necessary to human dignity but because when the is that there must always be more art and more artists, at whatever worker has been stripped of their ability to produce, it won’t be long consequence and whoever’s cost. before they are also deprived of the means of democratic participaIf, as reports consistently show, the artworld is plagued by in-work tion. We are already seeing the beginnings of this process: American poverty, is welfare the answer? Artists’ gi makes a mockery of the ‘art commentator Joel Kotkin observes the millennial generation’s lack of work is work’ slogan, whose double-edge confusion was illustrated interest in the world of work or political participation. Add to this by art-writer duo The White Pube’s 2021 poster campaign demanding the so-called ‘great resignation’ (the phenomenon of rising rates the introduction of ubi ‘so that everyone, including artists, can make of workers quitting their jobs in recent years) and a future where, a living’. How does anyone make a living on a state handout? Shouldn’t in Kotkin’s words, a ‘managerial elite delivers food, housing, and we be rewarding artists for the work they do within the labour market, pleasure to unemployed and demotivated plebs’ is on the horizon. in which artists are subject to the same supply and demand mechaDespite this, polling in Britain suggests that more than half of the uk nisms as nurses or lawyers? We already have state and private funders public support the introduction of ubi, a figure only set to rise as the to correct for market failures, but when is enough enough? population is battered by yet another cost-of-living crisis. Cue arguments for art’s exceptionalism: ybca reminds us that artists But a guaranteed income for artists is neither universal nor basic. ‘shoulder the difficult work of making meaning from life in our world Some of the over 30 trials currently underway in the us – whose today’, while crny proposes a ‘too big to fail’ catch-22, claiming that collective price tag is, according to the Financial Times, $150m – are ‘improving the lives of artists is paramount to the vitality of New York committed to selecting recipients at random in the vein of earlier State’s collective social and economic wellbeing’. Add to this the selfexperiments. Others, however, expect artists to contribute to commu- satisfied praise for the creativity and critical thinking ostensibly unique nities in return for payments. A scheme in Minnesota perversely asks to artists and one could almost forget that the very same artists serve artists to make work that ‘demonstrates the need for guaranteed the capitalist structures of the university, the museum and the auction income’, as though to prove that a person forced house they were a moment ago protesting. facing page Comedian Harry Enfield to labour for the $500 a month this scheme That guaranteed income won’t solve the in the music video for Loadsamoney, 1988. provides will remain dependent on handouts underlying problem is made evident by the art © itv / Shutterstock

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market’s present detachment from the material realities of the resulting exhibition’s impotence in the face of political challenges majority of artists. The megagallery, paradoxically one of the few indicate where all this may be going. spaces in the artworld where high earnings are commonplace, already What is the case for prioritising art-school graduates for gi when thrives on the oversupply of talent by simply turning most of it away. uk hospitals are opening food banks to support their struggling With gi, the blue-chip gallery would have the state’s collaboration in nursing staff? Is it the thinly veiled cartel protectionism that saw the branding of its roster as even more elevated from the grey mass Serpentine Galleries artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist register the of ‘Universal Basic Artists’, whose work is deemed worthy of only arts’ claim on the public purse just four days into the uk’s first coronathe minimum wage. And it is unlikely that any income guarantee virus lockdown in March 2020? Is it the erroneous conviction that the would be significantly higher, because the state suspects that artists arts are the key economic driver of the creative industries that was at perversely enjoy their work and that the occasional declarations of the heart of the #artisessential campaign that proposed fast-tracking public gratitude, in the form of those poster campaigns that artists the arts for investment? Or the ridiculous claim that the art school contributes vitally to the medical industry, are already happy to design for themselves, as put forward by the vice-chancellor of should be enough. Artworld dogma is that there Not only will the gi artist be limited London’s Royal College of Art? must always be more art and by the generosity of the public and philBetween such demagoguery, false conmore artists, at whatever anthropic funding institutions, they are sciousness and genuine economic hardalso unlikely to see the creative freedoms ship, the arts became the unlikely site for consequence and whoever’s cost promised by ubi. As is the case today, the this latest round of basic-income experiartist will have to choose between trying to climb the art-market ments. The inconclusive results of the recent Finnish ubi trial and ladder or complying with the politics of the institution. Failure to the failure of us presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s platform in break through the closely watched gates of either will render the 2020 should have given pause to ubi’s staunchest advocates. When artist an outsider, except that there will be little glamour in this, even the socialist journal Jacobin has understood that the short-term since a multitude of other outsiders will be making the same bid for effectiveness of pandemic support schemes is no promise of ubi’s relevance. This has happened before: the official artworld’s desire glorious future outcomes, we might wonder what makes artists into for control over independent artistic activity saw the uk’s politi- such compliant guinea pigs. The answer lies, as ever, in art’s excepcally vibrant community-arts movement of the 1980s neutered and tionalism: income guarantees will work for me, or for us, but they co-opted into the trend for publicly funded ‘participatory art’ since mustn’t become universal any more than the practice of art itself. ara the 90s. Documenta’s recent unironic inclusion of a Dutch ngo in its list of artists, the per-head allocation of production budgets and the Pierre d’Alancaisez is a curator, critic and researcher based in London

Tech entrepreneur and universal basic income advocate Elon Musk. Photo: David Branson / Alamy Stock Photo

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The White Pube, ideas for a new art world, 2021, part of the Your Space Or Mine billboard and poster project in the uk. Courtesy Buildhollywood

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Socially Conscious by Max Crosbie-Jones

this and facing page Reproductions of Artists’ Front of Thailand billboards displayed along Bangkok’s Ratchadamnoen Avenue in 1975 (2009). Courtesy Sinsawat Yodbangtoey

ArtReview Asia

Collective practice in Thailand is currently under threat – but is the real truth that it is as innocuous as it is important?

Autumn 2022

Churning Politics forum between Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture and Thalay Association at Documenta 15, Fridericianum, Kassel. Courtesy Elaine W. Ho

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On Saturday 23 July, an event broadcast live from an echoing hall at left-of-centre perspectives, where allegiances lay. Rightly or wrongly, Documenta 15 brought two Thai nonprofit groups together for two us-versus-them is the default position in critical art discourses in the hours of dialogue. Members and friends of the Thalay Association, country – exhibitions or events where opposing camps engage are an independent platform promoting and supporting Thai society almost nonexistent. abroad, particularly in Europe, joined Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts Thirdly, the event’s analysis of the oppressive mechanisms of & Culture, an artist-run initiative from Thailand’s Ratchaburi prov- one form of state power was, as part of Documenta 15, facilitated and smoothed by another form: German largesse (in the guise of the ince, for Churning Politics. And churn – in the stir-the-pot sense of the word – they did. city of Kassel, the state of Hesse and the German Federal Cultural Conducted mostly in English, the talk staged at Baan Noorg’s Foundation). In recent years, agonistic artists, groups and curators Documenta contribution – a three-part installation centred around within Thailand, where government support for the arts and grassa dairy farm exchange-programme, displays of nang yai (Thai shadow roots civil-society is scant, have increasingly looked to tap grants and puppetry) and a skateboard ramp – used an intertextual approach to relief funds from foreign sources. Some of these financial lifelines are accessibly trace Thai crises through the arts. Bookending the guest hush-hush; others are paraded publicly in the belief that they offer speeches and frank discussions on patriarchy, state persecution of a kind of protection. youth activists, Article 112 (the country’s morally repugnant lèseTugging any one of these threads would lead you closer to the majesté law) and the history of popular protest in the country was genealogical roots of Thai art activism, socially engaged practices the host’s invocation of the Ramayana. Allegorical links were drawn and critical exhibition-making, but fringe activities at Baan Noorg’s between the Hindu-Buddhist epic’s narrative arc, which sees the Documenta outing offer just one entry point into collectives and cosmic forces of good crushing evil, and the semifeudal power struc- collective work in the country. Back in Thailand, for example, a trend tures and hierarchies that prevail in the nation as of mid-2022. “The for archiving and contextualising the latest street-protest movement Ramayana is one of the ideas used to support the monarchy system,” – as though it were a movement singular in Thai modern history for the audacious breadth of its taboo demands – through exhibitions explained Baan Noorg cofounder Jiradej Meemalai. For those sitting cross-legged on the floor, ambling through the of protest objects has emerged. room or watching online (as I was), the event was a discursive introMuseum of Popular History (2021) is one such collection of protest duction to Thai sociopolitics spectacuartefacts – everything from banners to The trend for valorising protest wirecutters, whistles and hand-clappers larised by both the graffiti tags on the skate ramp (khon taow gun – ‘we are all the ephemera as art speaks of a widely – spanning from 1932, the year the Khana same’ – says one) and the shadow puppets Ratsadon (People’s Party) revolt brought an felt urge to periodise a chapter arrayed along one wall. But the event end to absolute monarchy, through to the of collectivity that may otherwise was also more than that: its collaborative youth-driven 2020–21 Ratsadon protests. dynamics arguably an illustrative proxy be lost or erased… as so much brutal The archive, run by young historian Anon for the collective spirit at play in the counChawalawan, an employee at iLaw, an ngo modern history has been try’s art scene and all it now touches. promoting public participation in social Firstly, there was the character of the hosts. While artist collectives and legislative reform, first appeared at Bangkok CityCity Gallery in, say, the Philippines or Indonesia are often alliances or fellowships during the space’s Art Book Fair last December, then a new Bangkok with equitable power dynamics between members, the Thai equiva- gallery, Kinjai Contemporary, in March. Meanwhile, Cartel Artspace, lent are “houses of friends where people come and go”, as independent a nonprofit project space at Bangkok’s n22 complex run by dissident curator Vipash Purichanont puts it. Baan Noorg is of this accommo- painter Mit Jai Inn, has put on two shows in recent months. The Battle dating, if carefully maintained and somewhat impervious, build. Wound of Thalufah! (2022) featured artefacts belonging to RatsadonSince founding it in 2011, Jiradej and his wife, Pornpilai Meemalai – affiliate group Thalufah, while #Post 2010 (2022) presented photojoura multidisciplinary artist duo known as jiandyin – have worked with nalist Karnt Thassanaphak’s documentation of protests from the 2010 many collaborators across myriad disciplines and regions, including Red Shirt movement onwards. Taiwan and Nong Pho, the rural subdistrict in Thailand’s Ratchaburi It could be argued that the valorisation of protest ephemera as art province where they are based. But each community-orientated Baan is a regressive development: participatory and relational aesthetics Noorg project – their room at Documenta featuring input from a – so integral to the story of Thai contemporary art and the practices of clutch of invited project members being the latest example – is acti- prominent internationally established Thai art-scene figures such as vated by them, not the mercurial output of a horizontal ‘collective’ Rirkrit Tiravanija and Surasi Kusolwong – seek to bring everyday life and relationships into the gallery, not decontextualise the quotidian devoid of hierarchy. Secondly, there was the discussion’s polemical tone. A conviv- object. And inanimate agitprop and protective gear hung on clean iality and sanguine introduction (“The expected outcome is to find white walls is a pale imitation for the sensorial overload of a streetout the possibility of living together and achieving better commu- protest movement, especially one that so dynamically deployed caricanity,” declared the excitable host) quickly faded to reveal the ideolog- tures, sarcasm, cartoons, graffiti, placards, fashion shows, live theatre ical ruptures and acrimony that have, in recent years, cleaved Thai civil and music performances. Yet the trend speaks of a widely felt urge to society into binary groups of warring factions: Red and Yellow, phrai periodise a chapter of collectivity that may otherwise be lost or erased… (commoner) and ammat (aristocracy), sam-kib (three-finger-saluting as so much brutal modern history has been. pro-reform protesters) and salim (pro-regime conservatives), democThe art scene’s commitment to indexing protest also makes sense racy and dictatorship. And it was clear, in listening to the strident when you trace, as art historians such as Claire Veal and Seng Yu Jin

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have done, critical exhibition-making and collective art practices in Thailand back to their leftist origins. Out of the student-led Bangkok uprising of 1973 sprung radical artist-groups who used modernist idioms to articulate anger at authoritarian rule. When the 14 October 1973 protest led to the collapse of Thanom Kittikachorn’s anticommunist military dictatorship, but left 77 student and civilian demonstrators dead, a nascent collective comprising pacifist Buddhist artists, the Dharma Group, responded. For an exhibition shortly after the brutal massacre, its leader, Pratuang Emjaroen, produced The Days of Disaster (1973–74), a transcendent six-metre-long oil painting stippled with bruising iconography: frightened faces; a crushed Dhamma wheel; the face of Buddha pocked with bullet holes. Another fantasy space, Red Morning Glory and Rotten Gun (1976) – in the collection of the National Gallery Singapore – renounces the actions of the military and its betrayal of Buddhism by depicting a pair of biomorphic rifles oozing blood, pus and maggots near a decapitated Buddha statue. In October 1974 another group, the Artists’ Front of Thailand, commemorated the student’s victory a year earlier with a display of over a thousand paintings and posters strewn along the city’s prestigious Ratchadamnoen Avenue. And in October 1975, a group calling themselves the Coalition of Thai Artists presented ‘people’s art’ and banners along Ratchadamnoen Avenue – a symbolic gesture of democracy and reaction against the bombing of Vietnam by American military based on Thai soil. Such artists’ groups were part of a larger, ground-up ‘Art For Life’ movement that spanned music and theatre as well as art, and which drew ideological guidance and inspiration from earlier Thai socialist discourse, such as Marxist historian Jit Phumisak’s Art for Life and Art for the People (1957). This blooming of democratic free expression withered, however, when the student and civilian massacre of 6 October

1976 heralded the return of dictatorship, leading many radicals to flee to the jungle. The modernist grounding of many ‘October Generation’ artists, meanwhile, particularly their working in Surrealism and Expressionism – styles largely accepted by the establishment – led to some of their membership being easily reabsorbed into official arts systems during the 1980s. The aims of these groups were also, as Veal writes, ‘filtered through a populist, though not self-conscious, nationalist idiom’. Today, the influence of these groups is evinced not just by the symbolic use of sites such as Rachadamnoen, Thammasat University and the Democracy Monument in contemporary protests. More pivotally to the art scene, the artistic strategies they deployed to subvert the ideologically conservative, Silpakorn University-dominated gallery system and better integrate artistic practice with practical, political concerns – such as social engagement, the conceptual and the manifesto – have been a feature of many an artist-initiated group, event or space since. Notable in this regard were experimental art festival WethiSamai and Chiang Mai artist and activist co-op Tap Root Society, both founded by performance artist Chumpon Apisuk during the late 1980s. A decade later, nonprofit spaces like Project 304 and About Café, as well as events like the Bangkok edition of Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru’s travelling exhibition Cities on the Move (1997–99), performance art festival Asiatopia (also founded by Apisuk) and Womanifesto – a biennial hosted in Thailand that, during a decadeplus of spirited activity, gave a much-needed platform to women artists and women’s themes – began to spur new modes of globally networked cultural work. Yet most of these groupings struggled to achieve longevity or consistency, or never aspired to. While in Indonesia, socially embedded concepts such as sanggar (creative communities) ‘prepared’,

Pratuang Emjaroen, Red Morning Glory and Rotten Gun, 1976, oil on canvas, 133 × 174 cm. Courtesy National Gallery Singapore and National Heritage Board

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as noted by artist and writer Elly Kent, ‘the climate for the abiding importance of dual attention to collectivity and the individual in Indonesian art’, horizontal systems of mutual cooperation within Thailand – such as long khaek (the tradition of labour sharing among rice farmers in the northeast) – appear not to have had an analogous symbolic or structural impact. Why this is the case is a question for future art-historians, although scant funding is clearly a constant barrier. In some cases, the fleeting artists’ initiative may well have been a response to local needs, a strategy designed to suit the ecosystem in which it existed. Some observers have also hypothesised that collective impulses or tendencies are routinely superseded by private concerns, such as the unforgiving schedule or careerism of the internationally mobile artist or curator. Or egos. “I’ve been thinking about this for many years: why no one wants to work together – like really commit and move forwards together,” says Penwadee Nophaket Manont, a curator focused on multidisciplinary community and civil-society engagements. “We are too individualistic. People often expect benefits from being together.” Others have speculated that artist-led events and initiatives have often been ideologically thin or fragile. In the book Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–1998 (2018), the Thai-Indian artist Navin Rawanchaikul recalls Chiang Mai Social Installation – a much-mythologised artist-led street festival series strongly informed by Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture – becoming ‘more like a party or a get-together than a social intervention’ in its chaotic final years. Another artist with a praxis centred on community art, Jay Koh, complains that the organiser’s ‘critical position had no cohering value’ and the festival at large ‘no continuum’. Reflecting in 2019 on the underground Thai art movement of the 1990s and 2000s, one of the principal figures in the Thai art-activism scene – the late curator-critic Thanom Chapakdee – stated that ‘there

was not really a strong sense of ideology of an art resistance. We just joined in for the pleasure of doing activities and exhibiting together in the public arena. Deep down no one was really talking about how we could go against mainstream culture or what was happening politically.’ Chapakdee, who passed away suddenly on 27 June, was speaking from firsthand experience. During the mid-1980s, the Ruang Pung Art Community – an avant-garde space at Bangkok’s Chatuchak Weekend Market free from official or government influence that drew artists, musicians, cultural activists and art lovers – spurred the emergence of several collectives. With strong ties to a vibrant civil society and thriving ngo sector, these motley groups ‘afforded their members a place to learn from each other outside of institutional structures, providing a forum for collective action,’ as Koh later recalled. They included Ukabat, a public protest-art and blues-music collective consisting of, among others, the visual artist Vasan Sitthiket, performance art duo the Plienbangchang Brothers and Chapakdee. In his version of events, art-activist groups like Ukabat bonded around a spirit of ‘Thainess’ that appealed to and assuaged the anticapitalist, anti-imf and antiglobalisation instincts of members but did nothing to address society’s structural deficiencies and injustices. Members were aware of this moral slippage or shortfall but didn’t address it in the interests of preservation, out of a fear that an internal struggle of ideas would split the group – which is what eventually happened. ‘When the political climate grew more and more tense between right wing and left wing, yellow shirts and red shirts, artists started taking sides and the whole scene split into two,’ he recalled. For Veal, the emergence of this split in around 2010 was a watershed moment for Thai art as well as politics, corresponding with the expansion of ‘the Thai social imaginary associated with the contemporary turn’. Innovations like the online circulation of images and

Ukkabat art collective public action ‘tv:Murderer’ in Silom area of Bangkok, 1995. Courtesy Vasan Sitthiket

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top Project Pry 02, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy wtf Gallery, Bangkok above Soifa Saenkhamkon and Tippawan Narintorn, RasaDrums: A Beat Of The Defiant (still), 2022, single-channel video installation, 17 min 58 sec. Courtesy wtf Gallery, Bangkok

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videos and the use of street-art strategies ‘shifted understandings of festival up in Isaan, the country’s northeast. ‘May the victorious drums collectivity as well as the aesthetic structures used to trace or facilitate of the common people and artistic practices thrive!’ he signed off. the collective’. Writing in 2012, she posited that these new imaginaToday, postlockdowns, postprotests and post-Chapakdee, the tive constructions and articulations of collective identity were distinct prospects for art activism and collectivism in Thailand are nothing for their ‘temporary, network-like structure’ and ‘strategic expansion if not precarious. Recent months have seen lawmakers legalise marijuana and draft an antitorture act, but, in a worrying development, beyond national boundaries’. This shift from a modernist collective form to a contempo- a law bill that could restrict forms of public assembly and allow for rary postnational form has only accelerated in the hyperconnected closer state scrutiny of civil society organisations and their funding present. Throughout 2020, just as the covid-19 prevention restric- is also in the legislative pipeline. This npo Bill appears to be less of tions and emergency decrees began to bite, hundreds of antigovern- a looming threat to, say, the nonprofit gallery that taps the budgets ment protests erupted. The first wave, in Bangkok schools, colleges and relief funds dispersed by cultural attachés and embassies than it and universities, was student-led and triggered by the Constitutional does to, say, the nonprofit human-rights advocacy charity. Although, Court’s dissolution of a progressive political party supported by many having said that, the patronage networks supporting a handful of young voters, the Future Forward Party. But subsequent waves saw agonistic galleries and events – the likes of wtf and Khon Kaen a much broader coalition of activist groups all over the country coalesce Manifesto and even Churning Politics – leave them exposed to the very around a laundry list of gripes and goals. same pro-regime charges that face agonistic facets of civil society: that This rhizomatic ‘mob’ movement was unique in history both of collusion with, and co-option by, foreign powers. Moreover, crossovers between the nonprofit art scene and the wider for its aims – fresh elections, a new constitution, abolition of the military-appointed Senate and a restriction of both royal preroga- nonprofit sector are not without risks. Last November, for example, a tive and lèse-majesté laws – and its methods. Street protests, flash live painting event in the alley outside wtf ended with the whole area mobs and sit-ins were fluidly mobilised via Twitter, and the imag- being cordoned off by police. Hosted by the Cross Cultural Foundation, ination of a global as well as local public captured by the strategic a human rights ngo, the event initially attracted a noise complaint, but deployment of pop culture. The #LetsRunHamtaro protest on 26 the police shut it down after spotting graffiti that they deemed to have July 2020, for example, drew young activists dressed as the Japanese crossed the indistinct line imposed by the lèse-majesté law. “We’ve been manga hamster Hamtaro to the capital’s marked by the authorities. Usually we get Today, postlockdowns, postDemocracy Monument (‘The people are someone coming to check each show,” says like a hamster locked in a cage, a social Somrak Sila, wtf’s well-connected director, protests and post-Chapakdee, structure that oppresses and exploits,’ of the aftermath of this sorry episode. For the prospects for art activism said its leaders). Other forms of cultureher, having the logo of the Goethe-Institut and collectivism in Thailand are jamming and détournement were brainThailand or some other Western cultural institute or embassy appear prominently stormed using the hashtag #Mobidea. nothing if not precarious on the brochure for each socially engaged These Situationist forms of online and offline action inspired many a visual artist, even as fatigue set in and project – including Project Pry 02 – is a talisman that helps to ward off dreams faded (all of the movement’s demands failed, the proposal state harassment. Back in Europe, the Thalay Assocation recently to reform the monarchy was ruled seditious and many of its de issued an open letter to the Royal Thai Embassy in Berlin accusing the facto leaders now languish in jail). As during the 1970s, many artists Thai government of dispatching an undercover agent to film their Baan and curators tracked the movement. Some, such as Apichatpong Noorg forum collaboration at Documenta 15. ‘Upon seeing the man,’ Weerasethakul and Taiki Sakpisit, discreetly documented; others they wrote, ‘we could immediately notice – which every Thai activist performed. Others still saw, in activist groups such as FreeArts, Human would do, too – that his appearance resembled that of Thai soldiers, ร้าย Human Wrong and Thalufah, a reflection of their as-yet-unreal- policemen or undercover government officers, who frequently turn up ised better selves, detecting forms of collectivity or artmaking they in disguise at protests or political activities.’ have long admired: a lack of status or pecking order; a retreat from the Meanwhile, the glut of temporary, networklike aesthetic strucrealm of the object; an engagement with social life both as the site of tures centred on Thai political activism – theatre performances, production and the medium of expression; and a nimble capacity for satirical memes and publications, as well as exhibitions – is striking. Disorientating, even. On the face of it, these provisional and symbiresource movement and exchanges of all kinds. In his statement for Project Pry 02 (2022) at Bangkok’s wtf Gallery, otic forms of collaborative solidarity appear as innocuous as they are a recent exhibition about the movement curated by Penwadee Nophaket important in respect of basic human rights and crisis response: these Manont, Chapakdee wrote passionately about how the ‘drum roll are houses of friends where people can safely come and go. But with of Rasadrum’ – a protest-movement percussion group consisting of their owners and guests – not to mention audiences – clearly in league young activists, many of them women – ‘united with the sounds of or in sympathy with the emancipatory politics and counterhegemcommoners joined in the fight against capitalists, warlords, feudal- onic strategies of the latest crushed protest movement, one is often ists and dictators who sieged the country since the Siamese revolu- left with a nagging question: how to bring in and accommodate those tion of 1932’. For him, these and other forms of artistic presentation members of Thai society left on the outside? In that sense, you could were beyond anything official visual artists ever achieved: pure expres- argue that their cliquishness and partisanship make them a crude sions of the democratic, artistic ideal, the ‘Plebian Aesthetics’ and yet useful barometer: this is a question the entire country, not just ‘Aesthetics of Resistance’ he had advocated for vociferously in recent a loosely networked yet deeply split art scene, seems ill-equipped years through his cultural activism and Khon Kaen Manifesto art to answer. For another generation at least. ara

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Indonesia’s Deadly Serious Irony Artist by Bianca Winataputri

Penentang Arus (The Dissident), 1987, acrylic on paper mounted on board, 75 × 55 cm

Though famed for his self-portraits, Agus Suwage is also – and perhaps primarily – relating the recent history of his homeland

Circus of Democracy i, 1997, oil on canvas, 200 × 288 cm

Agus Suwage, one of Indonesia’s leading artists, is known for self- a chameleon, continuously shapeshifting and adapting to changing portraits that are imbued with social and political commentaries. environments. In its mix of humour and satire, the installation can Working in painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, he started be read as a critical commentary on the ways in which figures such as to include himself in his art during the mid-1990s, using self-portraits, politicians and other prominent members of society quickly change he tells me when we speak in late July, as a way to critique himself their personas and identities. The work also invites us to reflect on before critiquing everyone else. The self-portrait, he continues, also the multiplicity and performativity of identity, and what we choose to became a space for him to make sense of the world around him, and hide or display, especially in the age of selfies and social media. to project and overcome his personal concerns, responses and fears in The many facets of the artist’s self are used to dramatise wider a rapidly changing society. His practice over the last 40 years has grap- societal changes. One of Suwage’s earliest self-portraits included in pled with the political changes in Indonesia’s modern history, often the exhibition is Circus of Democracy i (1997). In this work the artist with humour, satire and irony. Tumultuous events skewered in his drew himself in four parts: as a baby (presented as a shadow); a child; works include the days of living under a fire-breathing performer; and standing Most striking are the portraits in Suharto’s New Order regime, the fall of that in a bath shielding himself against the fire. regime and the riots that followed in 1998, which he replaces/obscures his face As outlined in the exhibition materials, the work depicts the cycle and transforglobalisation, the rise of the internet and with various objects – a gas tank, social media, economic crises, demonstramation of the artist from boy to man, with a pig, a papaya, his French bulldog, the flames, a recurring motif in the artist’s tions, corruption, racism and oppression of practice, representing both danger and an minority communities. a poop emoji, a cloud of smoke In Agus Suwage: The Theater of Me, a survey act of cleansing, growth and change. In of his works over the past 35 years at Jakarta’s Museum macan, one sees 1997 student protests broke out on the streets of Jakarta with demands the changing sociopolitical climate in Indonesia through the artist’s for democratic reform. This was also the beginning of the Asian finaneyes. On show are such early works as Penentang Arus (The Dissident) (1987) cial crisis, when ballooning foreign debt led to the collapse of busiand Selalu Waspada (Invariably Vigilant) (1989), made when the artist was nesses and industries, the intervention of the imf and eventually living in Jakarta and experiencing the dangers and limited freedom of riots and the fall of the Suharto regime. That period in Indonesian society under the New Order, to more recent largescale works like Potret history is captured here as a kind of circus, in which the artist is at once Diri dan Panggung Sandiwara (Self-portrait and the Theater Stage) (2019), performer, participant, victim, perpetrator and bystander. The many which comprises 60 painted zinc metal sheet cutouts of the artist in versions of the artist also allude to the many players within this landdifferent poses – smiling, laughing, being playful. Most striking in scape – students, protesters, the government, military and citizens. this last work are the portraits in which he replaces/obscures his face At the back of the painting is a seated man (George from the Englishwith various objects – a gas tank, a pig, a papaya, his French bulldog, artist duo Gilbert & George, we’re told), suggesting that the world a poop emoji, a cloud of smoke. Suwage has described himself as being is watching as this social and political transformation unfolds.

Toys ‘S’ Us #14, 2003, photo and zinc plate, 8 × 20 × 7 cm

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Potret Diri dan Panggung Sandiwara (Self-Portrait and The Theater Stage) (detail), 2019, oil and mixed media on zinc, mounted on aluminium, dimensions variable

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Daughter of Democracy, 1996, charcoal, ink and colour pencil on paper, 75 × 58 cm

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Agus Suwage was born and raised in Yogyakarta, later moving to Bandung to study graphic design at the Bandung Institute of Technology (popularly known as itb). From his early days as a graphic designer, he was interested in fine art and art history, reading and collecting exhibition catalogues for shows primarily staged outside Indonesia, he tells me – adding that one must look as much outside one’s country as within. By the late 1980s he had focused solely on his art practice and became well-known in Indonesia and internationally for his provocative and satirical works, especially the self-portraits. In addition to depicting himself, he often referenced works from Western art history, such as those by Édouard Manet, Gilbert & George and René Magritte, as though claiming a place within the broader arthistorical narrative. Suwage recalls that at the time, during the midto-late 90s, he wasn’t sure whether his self-portraits would be well received or even of interest to the public. To his surprise, they became career-defining, when a 2001 exhibition of such works, i&i&i, at Nadi Gallery, Jakarta, sold out. Self-representation in Suwage’s practice is not necessarily restricted to playful, chameleonlike self-portraiture. He also draws from biographical material that includes family members and personal experiences. In Daughter of Democracy (1996), the artist featured his baby daughter, born at a time of political turmoil. Signalling a new hope, the child could be read as a kind of homage to the student demonstrators leading the way for change. The multimedia installation Tembok Toleransi (Tolerance Wall) (2012), Suwage says, was created after the artist’s experience of listening to a call to prayer in his residence/studio in Yogyakarta, a sound that transcends walls and other physical barriers. The work is an approximately three-by-five-metre wall composed of small zinc bricks and embedded golden ears. Each ear, concealing a speaker playing a call to prayer, invites viewers to press their own ear to the wall and listen more closely. The installation

could be interpreted in response to the diversity of cultures, religions and ethnicities in Indonesia, and, in extension, to the ideas of religious tolerance and mutual respect in building an inclusive society. Suwage’s interrogation of the self in his practice demonstrates how our identities are constructed on both individual and collective levels, often overlapping with one another, allowing viewers to connect and find resonance when experiencing his works. When thinking about the self, mortality often also comes to mind. Death is a recurring theme in Suwage’s practice, appearing most famously in his gold skeleton sculpture Luxury Crime (2009). The artist describes life and death like a cycle – where death is a part of life and they both exist simultaneously and in paradox. His interest in skeletons also speaks to notions of decay and what remains after our passing life, saying, “Skeletons are eternal… I find it fascinating that even after our existence has left this world, our physical remains, our skeletons, continue to exist and slowly persist and decay over time.” At a more intimate level, the artist says, his interest in death and mortality also projects his desire to create a legacy inspired by the Latin aphorism Ars longa, vita brevis (Art is long, life is short). Cycle in the context of the artist’s practice also relates to the repetition/reuse of materials (zinc, gold, paint, watercolour) and visual motifs, figures and themes across the breadth of his practice. The past, present and future are simultaneously present in each of his works, inviting us to think about time in relation to self, what has or has not changed, what remains visible and invisible, and our belonging to this moment in time and into the future. ara Agus Suwage: The Theater of Me is on view at Museum macan, Jakarta, through 15 October Bianca Winataputri is a writer and curator based in Melbourne

above Tembok Toleransi (Tolerance Wall), 2012, zinc, gold-plated brass, led lights and sound, 318 × 468 cm all images © the artist. Courtesy Museum macan, Jakarta

Autumn 2022

Abdias Nascimento The continuing struggle for racial equality in Brazil by Oliver Basciano

Okê Oxóssi, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 92 × 61 cm. Courtesy masp, São Paulo

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‘You have my permission to produce The Emperor Jones without ‘whitening’ the population through selective immigration in which payment to me and I want to wish you all the success you hope for white workers from abroad were given financial incentives to come with your Teatro Experimental do Negro. I know very well the condi- and make a new life. Or as Law Decree 7967 declared, ‘the necessity tions you describe in Brazilian theatre. We had exactly the same… to preserve and develop in the ethnic composition of the population the more desirable characteristics of its European ancestry’. parts of any consequence were played by blacked-up white actors.’ So goes a letter, dated 6 December 1944, from the American play- In prison Nascimento pondered further the staging of The Emperor wright Eugene O’Neill to Abdias Nascimento, shown in a recent exhibi- Jones he had seen. From his cell he set about organising a convict’s tion at Instituto Inhotim of work by the Brazilian artist, theatre maker, theatre group, which on his release became the nucleus of the Teatro poet and activist. Nascimento had asked O’Neill if his tale of murder Experimental do Negro. Performed at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de and power, written in 1920, might be the first work performed by his Janeiro on 8 May 1945, O’Neill’s work was the group’s first production newly formed Teatro Experimental do Negro – the Black Experimental in a programme that opened with a recital by the Black Cuban poet Theatre. Nascimento, then in his late twenties, had been part of a group Regino Pedroso, and with Nascimento himself taking the stage to read of six Brazilian and Argentinian poets who had burned all their previous Langston Hughes’s ‘Always the Same’ (1932). The choices were telling. writing and embarked on a lengthy journey across South America in Nascimento was not interested in merely fighting prejudice at home, search of what they termed original but in tapping into the Pan-Africanist American poetry. That is, writing that movement gaining traction in both North and South America, and across ignored the European tradition. In Lima they had come across a staging the Atlantic. of The Emperor Jones, and while blown The group went on to stage many away by the pioneering spirit of the more performances across Brazil story, Nascimento, the only Black (including further works by O’Neill and Hughes, Nascimento’s own plays member of the group, bemoaned the and Afro-Brazilian interpretations of fact the play’s Black lead was played by classics such as Hamlet and Macbeth). a white actor. The sets were invariably sparse, After the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the widespread intermarwith questions of race, power and riage between races in Brazil, with no economic hardship delivered in what were praised as sharp, visceral perforus-style segregation laws intact, the mances. Yet theatre was just one part country was held up as a beacon of of the group’s activities: they pubracial progress. In his 1933 book Casagrande & Senzala (commonly translished a newspaper, Quilombo; organised protests against racial discrimilated as ‘The Masters and the Slaves’) nation both at home and in solidarthe Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto ity with Black liberation abroad Freyre describes an além-raça (a meta(notably apartheid South Africa); and race) more resilient than the sum of staged talks and conferences. In 1950 its parts. This was not however the day-to-day lived experience of darkNascimento and his colleagues opened skinned Brazilians. Nascimento had the 1º Congresso do Negro Brasileiro started to strike out against racism, (the First Congress of Brazilian Blacks), and the myth of Brazil’s ‘racial democat which the group resolved to broaden racy’, from the age of sixteen. In its activities even further by opening 1930 the teenager moved from his the Museu de Arte Negra (the Black Art home city of Franca to São Paulo to Museum), an institution that operated serve as a corporal in the army. In without a permanent home. the state capital he got involved in As well as delving deep into the the Brazilian Black Front, a radical activist group. One night during theatre group’s archive of production photographs, scripts, posters and the Carnival of 1935 Nascimento and a friend were abused as they correspondence, the exhibition at Inhotim, an arts centre and sculptried to enter a nightclub. A scuffle broke out. The police inevitably ture park in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, displays rotating hightook the doorman’s side and the pair were arrested. Nascimento was lights of the Museu de Arte Negra’s collection in a pavilion that, with discharged from the military and further convicted by a civilian court. the blessing of Nascimento’s widow, takes its name. Despite never His poetry pilgrimage took place while he was out on bail, and on his possessing a physical space, the museum collected art by Black artists return he was arrested again. It was then that he began to formulate who were, at the time, underrepresented in the country’s museums and his thinking of what he called quilombismo: a mode of militant, collec- art galleries (a problem that has persisted until very recently, the institive Black autonomy, the name referencing the tutional reappreciation of Nascimento being part Abdias Nascimento and Léa Garcia quilombos, remote communities historically set of this correction). In 1955 the museum organised in Nascimento’s Sortilégio, 1957, at Teatro Municipal, up by escaped slaves. Multiethnic Brazil was a Black Christ Contest, in which artists competed Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Carlos Moskovics. a front, after all, for a deeply racist policy of for the best depiction of Jesus with dark skin. At © ipeafro, Rio de Janeiro

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Inhotim Cleo Navarro’s semi-Cubist oil on canvas, painted the same first painting exhibitions (he didn’t exhibit in Brazil until 1974, the year, depicts the Son of God doleful and square jawed; likewise in Ecce end of the so-called Years of Lead), and then to Nigeria. Painting Homo (1955), a reimagined Jesus by Quirino Campofiorito has his eyes was also conducive to his circumstances. ‘Inhibited by my poor closed in prayer and beard braided into two points. The new exhibition grasp of English, I developed a new form of communication,’ he includes later works added to Museu de Arte Negra’s collection along said. Nascimento never liked speaking English, having already been the same theme: American LeRoi Callwell Johnson’s The Crucifixion (1996) colonised, he said, by Portuguese. ‘I could paint, and by painting is a fantastic Afrofuturist vision of Jesus on the cross against a strange I would be able to say what no words could say.’ His 1969 exhibition supernatural vista. A semiabstract nude Black woman kneeling in at New York’s Harlem Art House was titled Teogonia afro-brasileira, prayer and an African Bakota mask (a motif used by Picasso) also figure. a perhaps contradictorily European-centred reference to ‘Theogony’ (c. 730–700 bc), a poem by Hesiod describThe competition inspired Nascimento’s As Nascimento started to paint, ing the origins and genealogies of the first forays into painting too. The medium Greek gods. For Nascimento it was the provided him with a means to escape the the national congress was orishas deities of Candomblé that were his oppression of Brazil’s burgeoning dictadisbanded, newspaper offices subject matter. Another recent exhibition, torship: though still subject to censorship, were raided, musicians and this time at masp in São Paulo and dedithe visual arts enjoyed far more freedom than other creative mediums. He made cated to the artist’s paintings, opened with filmmakers went into exile his first major body of work in 1968 – one such work: in flat blocks of uniform symbolism-heavy canvases, largely in acrylic, that intoxicatingly tones an orange peacock is shown, sharing the canvas with a large mix modernist abstraction and African figuration – just as new laws butterfly in similarly warm tones. A woman with the lower body of a of Brazil’s four-year-old dictatorship imposed widespread repression. fish lies to the bottom of the frame, while to the right of her a bull-like As Nascimento started to paint, the national congress was disbanded, head (but odder, more alien) stares straight ahead. The title of the 1972 newspaper offices were raided, musicians and filmmakers went into painting names several Afro-Brazilian gods: Iansã, Obatala, Oxum, exile. All scripts were censored, with cuts and bans meted out on the Oxossi, Yemanjá, Ogum, Ossaim, Xangô and Exu. Iansã, mother of basis of politics or morality. A production of African-American writer storms, also appears in another work of the same year, conjuring LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman (1964) was banned, along with four scripts by up a great wind and holding a decapitated head aloft. Meditation Brazilian playwrights that year. The industry went on a two-day strike no 1 and Meditation no 2 (both 1973) feature Apis, the sacred bull, his after key lines of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) eyes dilating respectively pink and green, each rendition featuring a burning sun emanating from the animalwere cut by the censor. god’s temple. In the second work the bull’s Within the year Nascimento too had gone Bay of Blood (Luanda), 1996, acrylic on canvas, features are more angular; both are strange and into exile, first to the us, where he staged his 80 × 100 cm. © ipeafro, Rio de Janeiro

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O barco solitário, 1970, acrylic on canvas. © Museu de Arte Negra – ipeafro, Rio de Janeiro

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Xangô on, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 91 × 61 cm. © ipeafro, Rio de Janeiro

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unsettling compositions. Other works might be mistakenly labelled Garvey’s 1920 Pan-African flag: most obviously in Quilombismo (Exu abstractions, but are in fact amalgams of religious symbols. In Eshu e Ogum) (1980), which features the symbols of the two gods painted and Three Tempos of Purple (1980) two tridents curve inwards encasing in black over the red and green of Garvey’s earlier liberatory banner. three floating purple orbs – an ode, the title suggests, to the trickster Nascimento was not a marginal figure: he rose up through the god inherited from the Yoruba people. The use of such symbols is part ranks of academia in the us before, on his return to Brazil in 1983, of a strategy, Nascimento wrote in 1980, to address ‘the urgent need becoming first a federal deputy and then senator for Rio de Janeiro. of the Brazilian Black people to win back their memory’. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1978, and a year For Nascimento spiritual liberation and social freedom were inex- before his death in 2011. The Brazilian artworld is increasingly and tricably linked. The works were political gestures despite their cosmo- belatedly investing time and resources into Black-made contempological subject matter: they asserted Black culture as foundational rary art (though the internationalism that Nascimento strove for despite, as he explained in a 1976 speech in Senegal, the fact that ‘we are remains scarce) and his work provides part of the foundations from which to build that lineage. Blackface is dealing with the more or less violent impoNascimento’s painting can be no longer acceptable in the theatre. Yet his sition or superimposition of white Western institutional reappraisal comes as so much cultural norms and values in a systematic read as establishing a Black of what he strived for in wider society attempt to undermine the African spiritual homeland that operates remains unfinished business. Recently, flyand philosophical modes. Such a process beyond the nation-state borders posters featuring cheap reproductions of can only be described as forced syncretization.’ A series of paintings from the 1990s Okê Oxóssi and Quilombismo (Exu e Ogum) defined by colonialism incorporate the Adinkra symbols, ideostarted appearing beneath flyovers and on grams originating in Ghana that communicated various philosoph- the cluttered concrete walls of downtown São Paulo. They aren’t adverical ideas (and were also used as code language by Black African slaves tising any exhibition, however. Above the work is printed the rallyto communicate clandestinely). Living abroad, Nascimento consid- ing cry, made as the country goes to the polls for the presidential ered himself to be in double exile: both from Brazil and ancestrally elections in October: ‘vote na preta’ and ‘voto antirracista’ from Africa. Much of his painting, in exploring African cultures that (‘Vote for Black’ and ‘Antiracist Vote’). No specific political group migrated and mutated, can be read therefore as establishing a Black or candidate is referenced; it is a call to action that transcends party homeland that operates beyond the nation-state borders defined by politics. They do suggest however that, far from disappearing into colonialism. In a pair of paintings Nascimento plays on flag insignias, art history, Nascimento’s message continues to empower the fight refiguring them using Candomblé symbols. In Okê Oxóssi (1970) an against oppression. ara arrow shoots through the central blue orb of the Brazilian flag; while in Xangô Sobre (Shango take over, 1970) an axe divides the us Stars Instituto Inhotim is hosting a changing programme of exhibitions and Stripes. These works are made in conscious allusion to Marcus relating to Abdias Nascimento’s work through December 2023

Political posters featuring works by Nascimento, plastered in the streets of São Paulo. Photo: Oliver Basciano

Autumn 2022

Rice Brewing Sisters Club by Annie Jael Kwan

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The wide-open community-building (and sensuality) of a South Korean collective’s experiments in ‘social fermentation’

Autumn 2022

above terrestrial-celestial, 2022, nuruk (rice yeast), indigenous microorganisms, microorganisms from hand, soil, compost, wood, heating mats, stencil on fabric. Photo: Tim Deussen. Courtesy Art Laboratory Berlin preceding pages Chew Chew Spit Spit, 2019, rice-wine brewing workshop at 98b, Manila. Courtesy the artist

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The Rice Brewing Sisters Club (informally the ‘Sisters’) was formed in healing and growth, and is named and prepared according to dif2018 by Hyemin Son, Aletheia Hyun-Jin Shin and Soyoon Ryu. I first ferent cultural contexts. experienced their work in Manila a year later at the workshop 꼭꼭 The Sisters experiment with the conceptual ideas of brewing 씹어뱉기 (Kkokkkok Ssibeobaetgi; Chew Chew Spit Spit), which draws and fermenting, such as what it means to ‘nurture bacteria’ while upon the processes named in the title, as well as various cultural prac- creating open-ended sensorial and relational processes with human/ tices including miinju (an ancient Korean brewing custom that utilises nonhuman entities that utilise drawing, writing, performance, salivary amylase enzymes as a starter for breaking down starch into image and filmmaking, ecological thinking, storytelling and what sugar). These references acknowledge the different customs of inges- they call ‘auntie wisdoms’. tion and expulsion, nourishment and abjection, that are metoThe Sisters have extended their methodology to working with nymic of unconscious transformation. multiple independent producers (farmWorkshop participants were first iners, brewers, writers, artists, theorists) I recall vividly both the camaraderie vited to wash their feet, and then share and community organisations both and the uncanny eroticism of the texts and drawings scribbled on ricewithin and outside South Korea. This inmixture oozing between my toes paper skins, after which the Sisters cluded feminist-farmer Sister’s Garden, poured out, onto a large tarpaulin sheet an independent rice and seasonal proas sweet fragrance was released, on the ground, jars of prepared nuruk ducer that sells directly to consumers along with shouting and laughter (a traditional Korean rice yeast used as and recommits a portion of native rice as a group of former strangers a starter for the fermentation of alcoharvest to their seed farm for preserholic drinks such as soju) dotted with vation of species and the next cycle. began to move in coordination colourful slices of dragon fruit, calaAs part of the 13th Gwangju Biennale, mansi and rambutan. For the next hour participants were invited in 2021, the Sisters organised an online kkureomi workshop aimed at to hop, dance and stomp on this sticky mash to help its process of highlighting and supporting economic independence among women. fermentation. Two weeks later the Sisters invited other artists and They had previously sent out to invited workshop participants packart collectives based locally to celebrate together by drinking, eating ages that they were invited to unbox together, to discover packs of rice and performing karaoke. I recall vividly both the camaraderie and the cakes and jars of rice from Sister’s Garden, along with the minipubliuncanny eroticism of the mixture oozing between my toes as sweet cation Soil-Soil Land, a manual for soil care and maintenance. During fragrance was released, along with shouting and laughter as a group a period of restricted travel, the gifts reached across borders to provide of former strangers began to move in coordination. physical and intellectual nourishment from the fruits of ecologically Indeed, the Sisters’ critical methodology engages with the concept sustainable farming and feminist collaboration. Similarly, a year of ‘social fermentation’ via the medium of rice – a dietary staple eaten earlier, working closely with the residents, lifeforms and objects of by large populations across South, Southeast and East Asia and their the village of Deokgeo-ri, Bongpyeong, the Sisters produced their diasporas – while materially embodying historical, cultural and first film, 첩첩담담 疊疊談談 이야기극 (Cheopcheopdamdam Iyagigeuk, political narratives that are entangled with agricultural practices loosely translated as Mountain Storytellers, Storytelling Mountains: and import/export economies, as well as intergenerational traditions A Tale Theatre). Depicting indigenous and spiritual motifs of percusof food preparation and consumption. For example, rice porridge sion music, masks and rural landscapes, the film interweaves scenes of (also known as juk, jook, muay, zhou, congee etc across the global human/nonhuman actors prancing in the forest and fields with oral Asias) is considered a simple everyday food that is also used for histories, coimagined folktales and humorous Korean wordplay.

Mountain Storytellers, Storytelling Mountains: A Tale Theatre (still), 2020, single channel video (colour, sound), 15 min 37 sec. Courtesy the artist

Autumn 2022

Social Fermentation Archive (detail), 2021, mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy Asia Cultural Center, Gwangju

ArtReview Asia

The Sisters formed at the height of #MeToo virality and during a time that included the highly politicised banning of Yemeni refugees from Jeju Island. Their commitment to intensive collective labour for transforming social relations is arguably an evolved form of relational and dialogic aesthetics that is influenced by the development of community-driven practices and discourses around the genre of ‘public art’ in South Korea during the 2010s. While the Sisters cite as predecessors the work of established artists such as mixrice and Okin Collective, and earlier 1980s feminist models such as artist Jung Jungyeob and the Korean Women Peasants’ Association (formed in 1989 to support women farmers and resist neoliberal agricultural policies in South Korea), there is a lineage that could be traced to the revolutionary spirit of the minjung movement, a grassroots social movement that emerged in the 1970s in response to years of political dictatorship and an economic crisis. Demonstrations by workers, students and intellectuals expressed deep resentment of the regime and remained undeterred by the military’s deadly response in Gwangju in May 1980. Minjung art, first termed in 1983 and developed during the mid-1980s, propelled discussions on the function of art and social role of artists, and championed art as an everyday tool for engaging with social and political issues and articulating possibilities for a better life. The Sisters expand this ethos to conceptually include the microbial in both human/nonhuman entities, and address the urgencies of retrieval and recovery necessary in the face of environmental crisis and extinction. The Sisters have just spent five months researching a new mixed-media installation, 어 (Sea Plants, Bare Hands, Entangled Gaetbawi), which will be presented at the Busan Biennale this autumn. The project attends to Busan’s coastal topography of geological outcrops that are exposed to waves and the ongoing process of ‘blanching’ caused by industrialisation, land reclamation and rising water temperature, such that only creatures such as Jichungee (Sargassum thunbergii), black barnacles and sea urchins survive in the crevices. Gaetbawi engages with the stories, folklore and spiritual beliefs of the last generation of barehanded female divers (haenyeo) and workers in fishing villages who are forced to relocate due to the largescale aquaculture industry, and celebrates the survival

narratives of indigenous seaweed that is part-harvested and part left in the sea by the haenyeo to protect the endangered food chain. I recently ran into the Sisters at Documenta 15, the Kassel-based exhibition art-directed by Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa. It was the first in-person meeting since the workshop in Manila, along with many other reunions with colleagues in the euphoric days before the furore intensified around anti-Semitism claims that have somewhat hijacked this edition’s central narrative and operational structure of lumbung, and its world-making possibilities via collectivity. Catching up then, and also when we spoke for this article, we shared experiences of the challenges of living and working together that inevitably includes the emotional labour of having to deal with conflict that manifests as part of coexisting. The ongoing tension between the self and the collective, and how we draw boundaries around the individual and multiple groupings, can be expressed by the Korean collective consciousness of woori, where woori frequently features in Korean language, and embraces ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘I’ and ‘mine’ (see Hee An Choi, A Postcolonial Self: Korean Immigrant Theology and Church, 2015). This ambivalent fluidity was encapsulated by a historical work staged in Busan, by Korean artist Bahc Yiso, whom Soyoon Ryu researched for her master’s thesis at soas in London. Bahc had submitted his proposal to the 2004 Busan Biennale but passed away shortly after; his work was realised posthumously by friends and colleagues. Written in bold against the monumental billboard’s bright orange background are the words Woori nun haengbok hayeo (‘We are happy’). As the contemporary art scene and institutions in South Korea continues to grapple with how to respond to recent high-profile #MeToo revelations in relation to established artists, and the changing social mores that make these possible, the Sisters’ work echoes and affirms a commitment to the belief that community and solidarity make possible social resilience and the healing of historical trauma and loss. ara The Rice Brewing Sisters Club’s installation 어 (Sea Plants, Bare Hands, Entangled Gaetbawi) is being presented at Busan Biennale, through 6 November Annie Jael Kwan is a curator, researcher and writer based in London

Mountain Storytellers, Storytelling Mountains: A Tale Theatre (still), 2020, single channel video (colour, sound), 15 min 37 sec. Courtesy the artist

Autumn 2022

Hong Sang-soo and the Pleasure of the Repeat by Andrew Russeth

Is the South Korean filmmaker’s vast and ever-growing catalogue of subtle, emotionally complex films the most potent conceptual-art project around? 72

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So much keeps recurring across the intimate, wry and enigmatic fast-growing body of work, Hong has made the repetition of his films that Seoul-born director Hong Sang-soo has made over the past habits and obsessions into a structural foundation, especially over the quarter-century: plot points, actors, characters’ biographies, loca- past decade or so, as he has streamlined his process and approached it tions in South Korea, even props. So much so that when watching his as a kind of conceptual-art project. He now does a great deal himself: movies, you may be overtaken by déjà vu. The effect is similar to that he directs, produces, handles cinematography, sometimes composes which Sturtevant referred to when she described her art of repetition: music. Some films run only slightly over an hour, the length of an episode of prestige television, but made with a fraction of those ‘I create vertigo’. The majestic Kim Min-hee, Hong’s romantic partner, has appeared budgets. (The modest draw from each production pays for the next in nine of his 28 features. In Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) she stars as a one, he has said.) His plots are spare but charged. He writes early fledgling painter, and tells the awkward film director striving to sleep each morning, before the day’s shoot. A single shot can go well over with her that she is “just someone who paints” (though apparently ten minutes, with his camera zooming in suddenly on an actor at one who visits her studio every day). In Introduction (2021) Kim is a more a meaningful moment. established and vaguely pretentious artist in a minor role. “Painting Hong has cited Paul Cézanne – another master of close looking every day keeps me healthy,” she tells an old friend. The characters from varied angles – as his favourite artist. “Maybe his way of proporthat Kim plays are constantly falling asleep at odd moments. She tionalizing the abstract and the concrete is just right for me,” he told passes out at a friend’s café after soju and sushi in Right Now, Wrong The New Yorker this year. But because of the plainspokenness of his films, Then (2015), on a beach in On the Beach at Night Alone (2017) and again their bracing candour, I think of him as more akin to Giorgio Morandi, at a friend’s café, after plenty of makgeolli with a poet and friends, who like Hong worked in his own hometown for most of his life, using the same basic materials, repeatedly, towards beguiling new ends. in Hong’s superb The Novelist’s Film (2022). One could go on for a long while. Drinking bouts regularly lead Hong’s nimble method has resulted in a rare and thrilling run of to revelations, or ruptures. Beach trips do, too. People are constantly films that allude to his life, form an evolving portrait of South Korean discussing suicide. A director – self-obsessed, incompetent, humbled, society and ultimately amount to an extended meditation on artistic horny or all of the above – often figures. creation – its frustrations, its social roots, its long odds, its mystery. In Grass (2018), one of Hong’s most concise and effective efforts, Kim One could also begin to sound like a conspiracy theorist, seeing connections everywhere and significance in everything. In 2000’s bipar- plays Areum (also her character’s name in The Day After, 2017), who sits tite Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, which seems to tell the tale of a with her laptop in a café (just east of Gyeongbok Palace) throughout the love triangle from two diverging perspectives, actor Lee Eun-ju finds day, eavesdropping on fraught conversations and apparently incorpogloves at Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul that belong to an art dealer who is rating what she hears into her writing. A man asks what she’s working lusting after her. In Hotel by the River (2018) a woman steals gloves from on. “It’s just sort of a diary,” she says. “But not a diary. Something unusual, for now.” At a nearby table, an ageing a car resembling one that she previously owned. above and facing page actor, talking about retirement and a suicide Every filmmaker – every artist – has their Kim Min-hee in On The Beach at Night Alone, 2017. own motifs and tics, of course. But in his vast, attempt, asks an acquaintance for a place to stay. Courtesy Cinema Guild

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above Kim Ju-hyuk, Kim Eui-sung and Lee You-Young in Yourself and Yours, 2016. Courtesy Cinema Guild facing page Kim Min-hee and Kwon Hae-hyo in The Day After, 2017. Courtesy of Cinema Guild

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Such types – people nearing the end of their art careers or taking they forget about them as they hatch plans to make art. (It doesn’t a break – have become common sights in Hong’s recent films (to the always work out.) extent that, were he not so consistently prolific, one might worry Sitting in the café, Areum watches that defeated actor catch up with about him). The novelist in The Novelist’s Film, Junhee, has been unable his friends as they sip liquor they brought into the shop. (Permissive to write recently (“Maybe I’m all done,” she says). She visits a former shop owners are noble catalysts in Hong’s universe.) “And so people colleague, Sewon, who left Seoul, and the writing world, to open gather together,” she says in a touching, only slightly overwrought a bookstore-café (“[Now] I only read what I really like,” Sewon says). voiceover that seems to come from her writing. “Their emotions In Front of Your Face (2021) features a former actor with a terminal illness combine and give each other strength. Their lives become intertwined, mulling one last role. In On the Beach… Kim is an actor who has been and now they stand side by side. Why does that smuggled soju look abroad and is currently not working, following scrutiny over her rela- so good? I’d like to steal a sip too. When will my chance come?” Right tionship with a married director. (Hong now: they invite her over. An actor delivers an unforgettable was married when he and Kim began The beleaguered Junhee is also buoyed by some artistic camaraderie in The dating, around 2015.) Over a boozy dinner pep talk, losing his temper and outside the capital, she tells a friend that Novelist’s Film, shot in black-and-white, as screaming: “Whether sincere or just she convinces Gil-soo, an actor on hiatus “everyone’s moving here from Seoul”. playing around, it’s all love!” “They can’t survive in Seoul,” comes the (played by Kim) to appear with her husband reply. “Same with me.” (Hong and Kim, in a short that she has long hoped to make. as it happens, have decamped from the capital for Hanam, just to It won’t be documentary, she says, but “everything has to be real”. It the east.) sounds like a peculiar endeavour. Near the end of Hong’s film, we catch It is not only older artists who are wracked by doubt. A young a glimpse of hers, black and white giving way to colour. It is achingly man in Introduction has quit acting because he felt bad about doing a raw and tender. Describing it here feels improper, but watching it kissing scene when he had a girlfriend. This exasperates his mother, brought to mind a showstopping scene at the start of Hong’s effort. who tasks her boyfriend, an experienced actor played by a capti- Junhee is at Sewon’s bookstore, talking with a young employee who vating Hong veteran, Ki Joo-bong, to provide counsel (at a beachside is learning Korean Sign Language. Junhee asks her to sign a sentence: restaurant, naturally). Ki delivers an unforgettable pep talk, losing “The day is still bright, but soon it will grow dark. While the day his temper and screaming as he provides a curious (and perhaps not lingers, let’s enjoy a nice walk.” The young woman shows her how entirely helpful) viewpoint: “Whether sincere or just playing around, to say it, and they proceed to practise it – again, again and again. ara it’s all love!” As he has honed his unusual process of making it up each morning, Hong Sang-soo’s latest feature, Wake Up (2022), is premiering at Toronto International Film Festival in September Hong has increasingly blurred that distinction between sincerity and play, life and art. People have lengthy, intricate discussions, in long deadpan shots. They talk about the weather and their hardships, and Andrew Russeth is an art critic based in Seoul

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19—23 OCTOBER 2022 PREVIEW: 18 OCTOBER

After 8 Books, Paris Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan Amanda Wilkinson, London APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia Artbeat, Tbilisi BQ, Berlin Bureau, New York Ciaccia Levi, Paris/Milan Champ Lacombe, Biarritz Chapter NY, New York Crèvecoeur, Paris Croy Nielsen, Vienna Deborah Schamoni, Munich Delgosha, Teheran Derosia, New York Entrée, Bergen Ermes Ermes, Rome Fanta-MLN, Milan FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna Femtensesse, Oslo

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First Floor Gallery, Harare Foxy Production, New York Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna Ginsberg Galeria, Lima Good Weather, Little Rock/Chicago greengrassi, London The Green Gallery, Milwaukee Gregor Staiger, Zurich/Milan Grey Noise, Dubai Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo Higher Pictures Generation, New York Hot Wheels, Athens Iragui, Moscow Jacqueline Martins, São Paulo/Brussels Kayokoyuki, Tokyo Kendall Koppe, Glasgow KOW, Berlin Lars Friedrich, Berlin Lefebvre & Fils, Paris Lodos, Mexico City

Lomex, New York Lucas Hirsch, Dusseldorf Lyles & King, New York Max Mayer, Dusseldorf Misako & Rosen, Tokyo Galeri Nev, Ankara/Istanbul P420, Bologna Project Native Informant, London Rhizome, Algiers ROH Projects, Jakarta Schiefe Zähne, Berlin Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna Sperling, Munich Stereo, Warsaw Sweetwater, Berlin Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn Theta, New York Three Star Books, Paris von ammon co, Washington DC What Pipeline, Detroit

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among the sordid facts of everyday existence 77

Hew Locke Foreign Exchange Victoria Square, Birmingham 14 June – 15 August During the 2021 Policy Exchange’s History Matters Conference, organised in the wake of the toppling of Bristol’s statue of slave trader William Colston and the wider wave of reckoning with public statues, former Secretary of State for dcms Oliver Dowden equated the removal of statues with “a tendency to rewrite chunks of history”: a statement that entertains the nonsensical notion that monuments are neutral, and that history is fixed, and never rewritten. However, as GuyaneseBritish artist Hew Locke’s public sculpture Foreign Exchange demonstrates so deftly, history is not stagnant but an ever-evolving, dynamic process, and Britain’s colonial-era monuments could do with some redressing. Despite Locke’s long-standing interest in the power of historical statues, Foreign Exchange is his first public artwork, commissioned by Ikon Gallery to commemorate the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games (the majority of the Commonwealth’s member states are former territories of the British Empire). Rather than creating an entirely new work, Locke has boldly reimagined a largely overlooked seven-metrehigh monument to Queen Victoria that has stood in Birmingham’s Victoria Square since 1901 – the original marble statue replaced with a bronze replica in 1951. Locke not only offers a revived, contemporary dialogue between past and present, but provides an alternative to the debate around public statues, which typically consists of ‘keep’ vs ‘topple’. Victoria, who oversaw the expansion of the British Empire, stands within a crate added by the artist. Around it, and the rectangular plinth on which the whole sits, Locke has built a large boat, a recurring motif in his work. The boat here evokes foreign trade and exchange, the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent

indentured servitude, a system of bonded labour that saw over two million people transported from India to work in British colonies. On the boat’s deck, five smaller replica Victorias are positioned before and behind the original statue, 3d-printed in resin but appearing like patinated bronze. Together, they look as if they are about to be shipped off around the world, reminding us of how ubiquitous Victoria’s image was across the Empire. (Indeed, in some parts of the territories she governed she existed as no more than an image: she was, for example, granted the title of Empress of India in 1877, without ever having physically set foot on its soil.) Growing up in Guyana, Locke himself was no stranger to this ubiquity: at the work’s inauguration, the artist explained how he passed by a statue of Queen Victoria every day on his way to school; her head even adorned his exercise books. At a certain point such imagery is so ubiquitous one ceases to notice it. Foreign Exchange, by contrast, is so conspicuous that it cannot be ignored. Locke has dressed the original Victoria with a Roman gladiator-helmet, her face partially covered by a visor, hinting at how historical figures are obscured and choreographed for political purposes. That she is indeed almost always represented as an older woman in public space, for example, reflects that it was during the latter part of her reign that the British Empire was at its peak. Each of the replicas meanwhile are wearing a martial helmet or mask of sorts, made in cardboard, cast in resin and painted gold. Golden spikes protrude from two helmets, like the rays of light on a halo adorning an Early Northern Renaissance Madonna, reminding the viewer of how society elevates powerful people to a saintly – and even

facing page Foreign Exchange, 2022 (installation view, Victoria Square, Birmingham). Photo: Shaun Fellows. Courtesy Birmingham 2022 Festival and Ikon, Birmingham

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godly – rank. They also recall the Statue of Liberty, a possible ode to New York’s Guyanese population – the fifth-largest foreign-born population in the city. Foreign Exchange also discerningly points to the darker realities of Britain’s colonial history. Each Victoria carries an oversized medallion commemorating battles fought by the Empire, including the Battle of Seringapatam (1799), the Second Afghan War (1878–80) and the Capture of Trinidad from Spain (1797). By reviving the memory of these brutal conflicts in public space, Locke challenges the favoured representations of Empire that still dominate in film and tv. During the History Matters conference, Dowden argued that “strong societies don’t try to airbrush their past, they don’t try to hide it away. They preserve and they cherish their heritage”. Locke – who does not advocate for the tearing down of statues – is holding Dowden to his word. With the utmost respect to the monument as a historical object, the artist’s embellishment richly enhances, and in doing so, presents multiple sides of Britain’s history, in all its messiness and complexity. Foreign Exchange is quiet radicalism at its best. It does not pander to a particular point of view, or draw upon polarising opinions – nor does it impose ideology. Instead, it prompts the viewer to dig deeper – exactly what public art should do – and empowers people to ask questions around not only history, but the power and purpose of monuments. Locke’s playful commission deals with dark and painful histories with wit and grace, by casting what has always been, but carefully concealed, into plain view. Melissa Baksh

Autumn 2022

Hiraki Sawa flown Parafin, London 8 July – 10 September Homes accrete memories. So the story of Hiraki Sawa’s eviction from a studio he’d long held in London’s arty but gentrifying East End makes a poignant backstory for work by an artist who has been dedicated to staging interior and domestic space as metaphors for interiority and imagination. It’s also, in this case, a literal backdrop; several years of Sawa’s intricate, surreal animations are shown on little screens, tucked onto various shelves and nooks of the three jerry-built, shedlike rooms installed in the gallery, each one full of different accumulations of junk, studio kit, books and other oddball paraphernalia. It’s a neat gesture, since Sawa’s meticulous animations are always about pushing the everyday world out, its mundane temporality and its prosaic objects warped by Sawa’s quirky, diminutive acts of displacement and fantasy. The tiny jetliners of Sawa’s early gem Dwelling (2002) quietly take off, cruise gently through

the halls and land on the cheap carpets of the modest apartment that looms around them. In Elsewhere (2003) objects grow legs and wander around – a teapot gets up off the stove, a soap strides around the edge of a sink. What raises Sawa’s little worlds to something more than whimsy is the attention to tone and atmosphere – a sense of distanced observation and perplexity that is intimately bound up with the nature of their technique. Sawa’s stop-motion photocollages are antique forms, untouched by cgi slickness, and many are presented on little lcd screens mounted in small wooden cabinets, as if harking back to the precinematic age of zoetropes and magic lanterns. What this performs is moving-image time becoming a sort of material thing, something alluded to in the various images of cogs and clock mechanisms found in the more recent Platter (2018), a video diptych in which opulent interiors of an old-fashioned doll’s house are

flown, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Peter Mallet. © the artist. Courtesy Parafin, London

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contrasted with an arid, rocky landscape through which sphere-headed quadrupeds roam. Timebecoming-stuff is spelt out in the series of drawings on black paper of metronomes behind thickets of crisscrossed lines, or of a vintage gramophone playing records, from which sound is registered as a cloud of recordlike discs. Anchoring the transience of memory and place in the material of drawing and animation might be Sawa’s ongoing project; the loss of place – both studio eviction and the earlier departure of his parents from his childhood home in Japan – haunts the back-to-back projection of /home and /home (absent rooms) (both 2017–21). On one side, the jetliners have returned to an empty home. The other is a facsimile of its twin, but for the absence of the aircrafts, only faintly heard from the other projection. Sawa might have had to move on, but his self-sufficient, mechanical worlds are hymns to perpetuity. J.J. Charlesworth

Mika Ninagawa Flowers, Shimmering Light Tomio Koyama Gallery, Roppongi, Tokyo 16 July – 13 August It would be easy to dismiss photographer and filmmaker Mika Ninagawa’s c-prints of flowers (shot in Japan and chronicling the changing seasons during the recent pandemic) mounted on plexiglass with slogans (after which the works are titled) spelled out in neon tubing with heart-shaped curlicues, as ‘cute’. If you were into cliches you might even use the Japanese word for that. But while cuteness is certainly a factor in works such as And eternity in a moment or In shimmering light with you (both 2022), to leave it at that does them a disservice and misses the strange overlapping of language and symbolism, natural and urban, that is at play here. The glowing neon makes the words stand out, just as it serves to obscure (or darken) the surface of the photograph

beneath. Although you might say that articulates what symbolism really is: a translation of sorts. But ultimately, it’s a form of excess in which you’re not sure which part – the slogans or the symbols – is advertising the other. Everything is a form of competing eye candy. Which is one way of summarising the urban condition today. And both a nod to and play with Ninagawa’s roots in fashion photography. In a sense though, these works are just the warm-up act for the main event: a whole other kind of light show. In the gallery’s second, darkened room stands a five-sided, humansized glowing cube. An eternity in a moment (2022) is made up of led grids and meshes for projections, but looks like a throbbing alien presence as you enter. Kaleidoscopic patterns

of colour flash across (and out from) all sides as they collectively display a sequence of three of Ninagawa’s films: Seasons: Flight of Butterflies; An eternity in a moment; and Flashing Before Our Eyes. Their themes are broadly those of the c-prints, but their intensity is far greater. During the course of the sequence, images of flowers meet fireworks (hana-bi in Japanese, which translates as ‘fire flowers’), commuters traverse the landmark Roppongi Crossing like so many ants, cells and plankton meet clouds and sunrises. You can sit inside and be immersed or stand outside and be bathed in waves of reflected light. What you can’t do is refuse to be a part of it. It’s as if Ninagawa has put the world on a stage. Mark Rappolt

Flowers, Shimmering Light, installation view (Tomio Koyama Gallery, 2022). © Mika Ninagawa. Photo: Kenji Takahashi

Autumn 2022

nusa National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur 21 June 2022 – 2025 Malaysia’s National Art Gallery (Balai Seni Negara, colloquially shortened to Balai) has reopened, following two years of renovations, with nusa, an exhibition of its permanent collection. Nusa, Sanskrit for ‘homeland’, and its derivative Javanese word Nusantara, are often used as shorthand for the Malay Archipelago. With over 400 artworks on display, the exhibition attempts to plot the history of Malaysia’s modern art and its regional connections from the twentieth century to the present. According to the wall text, this is a way of ‘highlighting the validity, the interpretation, and the fiction, as well as tracing the essence of social and cultural

structures that form the tapestry of the region’. Taking a nonchronological approach, the show succeeds in subverting the usual linear narratives of modern art’s ‘progression’ to contemporary art. But it is an ultimately feeble attempt to tell a regional history, due in part to some bewildering curatorial choices and – more perniciously – lightly veiled regurgitations of state propaganda. The show is divided into eight themes (among them ‘Solicitude Culture’ and ‘Sowing Inner Characteristic’) and two media (‘New Media Art’ and ‘Works on Paper’), creating a total of ten sections. Refreshingly, nusa includes indigenous carving practices within

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the story of modern art in Malaysia. Tradition and modernity are conceived not as opposing poles but entangled realities. In the New Media Art gallery, masks from the indigenous Mah Meri tribe dating from the 1950s to 1970s are placed alongside When you are not your body… Life, death and in-between (2008), a multimedia installation by Lim Kok Yoong. Though drawing on radically dissimilar epistemologies, both sets of works explore the body’s afterlife: while Lim’s work considers the body of information we leave online, Mah Meri masks represent the spirits of ancestors and are used in ceremonial worship. Elsewhere, however, arguments become less focused.

How a work of graffiti representing an engine by SnakeTwo, statues by indigenous Orang Ulu groups and a prayer mat made of nails by Shahrul Jamili Miskon relate to each other seems more like free association than considered selection. More alarming than the weak curating is its implicit nationalism. While the exhibition includes the works of Southeast Asian artists, such as Thailand’s Thawan Duchanee and Indonesia’s Ristyo Eko Hartanto, it is grounded in a fundamentally simplistic view of history. In a section titled ‘Vibe the Verve, Escalating Geist’ – a perplexing translation of ‘Menyebar Semangat’, literally ‘Expanding Spirit’ – the curators seem to pitch Western art against Southeast Asian art, stating in the wall text that the former ‘changed the meaning of art in the Southeast context to become a craft and later “functional art”, ripping off their

craft values’. Yet elsewhere in the text, the Malay world is seemingly exempted from this formulation, heralded for its ‘unique and authentic monuments, artifacts, and cultures’. Not even Ahmad Fuad Osman’s Enrique de Malacca Memorial Project (2016), and its exploration of the veracity of national and colonial histories, could erase one’s distaste. Caught between current curatorial trends towards fluid, networked, regional histories and an imperious, unprogressive state, Balai unfortunately tends toward the latter. Perhaps the curating needed to pander to certain narratives to secure the underfunded institution’s survival. The reopening of Balai follows extensive repairs to a perpetually leaking roof, yet the institution continues to be plagued by logistical issues: one of the five galleries hosting nusa remains closed due to problems with temperature and humidity

control. As early as 1989, art writer Antares Maitreya was commenting on the situation at Balai, ‘When the walls start tumbling down, who cares what you’ve got hanging on them!’ One could see Roslisham Ismail (Ise)’s installation chronological (2015) as a metaphor for the exhibition. Using animations and videos on small screens, ancient and kitschy artefacts, cartoon drawings and small paintings, Ise tells the story of his family ancestry and the history of the Sultanate of Kelantan, in the northeast of Malaysia. On proud display are the things that are usually concealed, the ‘practical’ tools making sure the artwork can ‘work’: electrical wires, extension cords and screws, nails and pedestals. chronological, like nusa, reveals the conditions of state exhibition-making in Malaysia and the makeshift infrastructure that holds it all together. Lim Sheau Yun

Roslisham Ismail, chronological, 2015, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur

Autumn 2022

Thasnai Sethaseree Cold War: the mysterious maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai 12 March – 14 February The dazzling giant in this display of over 60 collages by Chiang Mai-based artist and university lecturer Thasnai Sethaseree is not as spontaneous as it first appears. With each step closer, the billboard-size Cold War: the mysterious (2019–22) seems a little less indebted to the wild, improvisational gestures of action painting and a little more grounded in a particular time and place: the Cold War period in dictatorial Thailand. By the time you’ve reached the ‘do not cross’ line, layer upon layer of figurative elements – strips of shredded history books, comic book covers, the faces of political figures – can be seen floating amid a vast technicolour cosmos of blobs, orbs and scribbles. A democracy activist and vocal firebrand in the Thai art scene, Sethaseree and his studio team layer thin strips of coloured paper over canvases thick with various materials, from Buddhist monk robes to digital prints, copper wire and dried rice paddy. This humble process is painstakingly deployed to achieve an ambitious end: capturing, through cacophonous blends of representational and nonrepresentational elements, something of the felt plebeian texture of Thai political history. Within this context, Sethaseree’s biggest and most audacious show to date is a multichapter simulation of the obscurantism, violence and white noise of the Thai theatre-state since the Cold War – or more precisely, a multichapter simulation of the subjective, conscious experience of living under such alienating conditions. Cast in this somewhat joyless light, Cold War: the mysterious, through its incessant spectacle and colossal scale reminiscent of neoclassical art,

transports us into the chaos of the period rather than glorifying it. Many smaller works, meanwhile, meld nebulous Cold War imagery – from students and citizens killed in the 6 October 1976 massacre to children’s toys and newspaper headlines – with malignant colour splotches or swirling military camo patterns. In doing so, they reify the nature of official historiography, how the facts surrounding certain despotic episodes or traits have been distorted or hidden by pseudojournalists and state propaganda. Short audio commentaries accessed via qr codes relate the episodes, from the 1976 return from exile of dictator Thanom Kittikachorn to the 2017 military checkpoint shooting of Lahu youth activist Chaiyaphum Pasae, around which works are arranged. This raises a danger of them being reduced to mere thematic signposts or placeholders, although one could argue that the situation in Thailand warrants didacticism. Many of the authoritarian tactics invoked here – the neutralisation of political opponents through both legal and extrajudicial means, the misleading of the public by an acquiescent media, the charges of communist or republican ambitions – are still in the counterinsurgentright’s toolbox today. More importantly, the interaction of materiality and image gives these works a participatory quality that is itself a form of commentary. From a few metres back, Untitled (His code name is Pluto) (2021) consists of two cleverly halftoned images of Tiang Sirikhanth, a mid-twentiethcentury democracy icon and founding member of the Free Thai Movement that agitated against Imperial Japan during the Second World War.

On one side he is palpably alive; on the other, evidently dead, lying alongside four associates also brutally slain in 1949 by state officers. But up close we lose sight of this horrific incident: our attention shifts to the repeating spirals of coloured paper, reminiscent of ammonite fossils, stretching out friskily before us. The critical payload of Sethaseree’s works depends upon this duality. Pricking our political consciousness from certain angles, dazzling us with their vitality from others, they invite unease about the spectacles that obscure certain truths, or versions of it, from view. And they also arguably indict the people as well as critique the Thai state – could it be that his effacement of trauma with doodles and razzle-dazzle echoes how blithely the Thai public switch off, unquestioningly and obediently compartmentalise or gloss over life’s crudely camouflaged injustices? To parse these headstrong collages only in such moralistic terms, though, would be to deny both their craft origins and multidimensional energy. Drawing upon Northern Thailand’s traditional papercutting techniques, his excitable and often euphoric canvases and sculptures can also be read as playful ripostes to the state-sanctioned branding of the Lanna region – a former kingdom with Chiang Mai at its dynamic centre – as a land of decorous crafts, from sedate hanging paper lanterns to polite wood carvings. Impulsive and unstable, each effervescent surface refutes this tourist-friendly make-believe, screams out for us to hear, ‘In the North, our forms are as uncontainable and uncontrollable as we are’. Max Crosbie-Jones

Untitled (His code name is Pluto), 2021, paper collage, Buddhist monk robes, digital print, urethane, metal, 219 × 699 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Untitled (Propaganda Through Media 02), 2021, paper collage, Buddhist monkrobes, digital print, urethane, metal, 175 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist

Autumn 2022

Sketchy Memories Jason Loftus’s Eternal Spring How do you capture something as slippery as memory? And especially memory that is affected by trauma, which obliterates the mind, scrambling the order of events and incurring crucial lapses? Some moving-image documentarians have turned to animation – an impressionistic medium that can match the visceral and fragmented emotions of their subjects. Ari Folman’s Oscarnominated Waltz with Bashir (2008) depicted the director’s experiences as an Israeli soldier during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, his harrowing wartime recollections enhanced by the animation’s use of dramatic graphic shadows. More recently, Danish documentary Flee (2021, also Oscar-nominated, directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen) fused real archival footage with expressive animation, injecting a sense of immediacy into a gay refugee’s account of fleeing Afghanistan. This hybrid form is a perfect fit for Jason Loftus’s Eternal Spring (2022), a political documentary that orbits around Daxiong, a Chinese illustrator grappling with a thorny past. Daxiong hails from the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun, the titular ‘Eternal Spring’ and the birthplace of Falun Gong – a oncepopular religious group founded in 1992 that has been decimated following ongoing government crackdowns, propaganda and mass imprisonments since 1999. Daxiong, like many fellow Falun Gong practitioners, was forced to flee the country in the aftermath of a 2002 event during which a guerrilla group of Falun Gong members hijacked an evening news broadcast, replacing it with footage that challenged the government’s vitriolic claims about the religion. The film largely follows Daxiong, now based in North America, as he attempts to disentangle his own memories of the execution and impact of this unprecedented event. He interviews other Falun Gong members scattered around the world, including a man known as Mr White – the only hijacking organiser to escape China. “We’re creating art based on shared memory,” Daxiong states, laying bare the tactile, laborious process of reconstruction. The interview scenes slide between live-action footage and an animated style modelled on Daxiong’s ink illustrations. In a key scene, Mr White describes where he and other Falun Gong members devised the hijacking plan: at a local kfc in Changchun. As we watch Daxiong

listening to the organiser, the rough outlines of the fastfood joint appear, the spindly streaks melting into a fully realised, animated world. Loftus lingers over the artmaking process, elegantly displaying the difficulty and catharsis that comes with reconstructing memory. The animation is computer-generated, yet mirrors the hand-drawn aesthetic of print comics: scribbles of ink, watercolour textures, the use of panelling to reenact key events. At times it feels uncanny, skewing closer to a Grand Theft Autostyle cutscene. But for the most part it successfully evokes both Daxiong’s own voice (and illustration style) and the frisson of sensationalism underlying the hijacking – presented as a thrilling heist story, filled with prison escapes, clandestine meetings and quirky characters with nicknames like ‘Big Truck’. This is both a strength and weakness: on one hand we begin to understand Daxiong’s growing admiration for this scrappy band of insurgents and their bravery in the face of oppression. On the other, haloing these figures in the glow of comic book super-heroism renders Eternal Spring an opaque viewing experience. Indeed, viewers searching for deeper insight into Falun Gong itself – both as a belief system and institution – will stumble upon chasms in the film’s depiction of the practice. Loftus has notably codirected a previous documentary about Falun Gong, Ask No Questions (2020), and produced Human Harvest (2014), a film investigating the impact of China’s organ-harvesting Eternal Spring (stills), dir Jason Loftus, 2022. © Lofty Sky Pictures

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trade on Falun Gong practitioners. Eternal Spring leans into subjectivity, bolstered by the animated format, spending much of its runtime showcasing statements from proselytising followers. Daxiong states that Falun Gong “points out a clear path to elevating yourself step by step”. A clip promoting Falun Gong is shown, where the spiritual practice is said to promote “truthfulness, compassion and tolerance”. The one-note tone of these interviews may be frustrating for audiences in the West, where the group has a more complicated presence. There’s no exploration of the allegations of racism against Falun Gong from lapsed members, or their far-reaching pr affiliates Shen Yun and The Epoch Times, the latter of which has allegedly spread alt-right misinformation to further the Trump campaign (most prominently the ‘Spygate’ conspiracy theory). Nor are there mentions of founder Li Hongzhi’s infamous views on alien invasion and modern science. These omissions are stark, particularly in a film about the insidiousness of propaganda, and about a group whose influence is undoubtedly contentious and multilayered. And it’s odd to watch scenes of hard-hitting suffering while also sensing that you may be watching a commercial. Despite these blind spots, Eternal Spring has moments of real emotional power. For me, the most searing scenes come early on, when Daxiong shows Mr White an animated recreation of scenes from his childhood Changchun. This montage is tinged with dreamy winter nostalgia, from the pastel smudge of yellow sky to the slow drifts of snow. There’s a fairytale quality to the sight of a young Daxiong wandering through an idyllic neighbourhood filled with lion dancing and birch forests, each trunk covered in blinking human eyes. It’s as if the artist, forever cut off from his home by persecution, cannot help but slather each remembered detail in whimsical reverence. Mr White, also from Changchun, provides voiceover commentary, delighted by the sight of the iconic No 52 streetcar and a recognisable bookstore where the local kids rented comics. When the animation cuts back to the live-action footage, the men are crying. You may not find illumination in Eternal Spring, but you’ll find a palpable sense of loss, which occasionally pierces the smokescreen of platitudes. Claire Cao

Ma Qiusha The Mirror(scape) of Your Skin Longlati Foundation, Shanghai 15 July – 21 August In the single-channel video All My Sharpness Comes from Your Hardness (2011), a pair of feet shod in ice skates dangle from the back of a moving bicycle. The rest of the body is out of shot; the blades of the skates scrape the road surface, sometimes creating sparks as if they are being sharpened. This is one of Ma Qiusha’s earlier works included in an exhibition that brings together videos, paintings and photography made between 2011 and 2022. All My Sharpness… reminds me of another work of Ma’s that isn’t included in the exhibition: From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili (2007), in which the artist talks to camera about her mother; she holds a shaving blade in her mouth while she speaks, causing blood to drip past her lips. Ma’s reflections on her upbringing and the kind of ‘tough love’ meted out by Chinese parents isn’t exactly a strange concept here – at least not to many audiences with Asian heritage – but by using such graphic visuals

and incisive language, repressed emotions burst forth in unnerving and violent confrontation. During this early period of her practice, Ma took an almost savage approach to translating her personal relationships and experiences of conflict. Ma’s most recent works could be described as just as emotionally fuelled, yet more restrained in their aesthetic. Three installations from the series Wonderland (2019–22) occupy most of the exhibition space. Broken shards of cement, each shattered piece wrapped with nylon stocking material, are assembled into jigsawlike compositions installed on the wall and floor. While stockings are often worn for modesty, they are also associated with the fetishisation and objectification of women. Here the artist nods to that last while also winking (in part thanks to the installation’s monumental scale) towards the patriarchal, concrete jungles that increasingly make up the landscape

of contemporary China. Wonderland appears to fill the room in silent protest. Ma’s more visceral rage, however, seems to resurface in one corner of the exhibition space, in the two-channel video Take a Walk (2016). Each channel appears (almost) to mirror the other: a naked woman walks on a lawn, a metal chain dangling like a leash from her neck and held by an invisible hand. The women are anonymous, their heads and necks out of the frame. The question of who is being taken for a walk by whom goes unanswered (though one can infer from the visuals alone that there are power dynamics at play) and becomes more chilling when seen in light of the ‘Xuzhou chained woman incident’, a case of abuse and humantrafficking that came to public attention in January this year. While Ma’s work speaks to the universal experience of abuse against women, it is at its most potent when its metaphorical messages reflect actual experience. Paul Han

Wonderland–Lolita 5, 2021–22, cement board, nylon stocking, plywood, resin, steel, 210 × 210 cm. Courtesy the artist and Beijing Commune

Autumn 2022

Mounira Al Solh A day is as long as a year Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 9 April – 2 October At the centre of Lebanese-born, Netherlandsbased Mounira Al Solh’s exhibition is a circular, embroidered red tent (a new work from which the exhibition as a whole takes its title). It is of the type that one can imagine speaks to a nomadic tradition. And while the exterior is ‘decorative’, featuring relatively elaborate floral patterns and depictions of birds, there are other types of memories of other types of nomadism preserved within. The tent’s form and decor is based on an Iranian Qajar-era tent (created for Muhammad Shah during the mid-nineteenth century) in the collection of the Cleveland Museum in Ohio. This one

is embroidered in collaboration with 31 women from Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, the Netherlands and South Africa. You might see it as an act of repossession. Or restitution. Or reanimation. Although it’s not. A clue comes in the form of the Arabic words articulating notions of the sadness and happiness of female contributors on the interior of those decorated panels. And since we’re on the subject of language (which is important in Al Solh’s work), one might begin to think too about the fact that the word chador, used to describe the cloak worn by many women in Iran and other Persianate countries, derives from the classical

A day is as long as a year, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

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Persian word for ‘tent’. What’s pretty on the outside is more complex once you go inside. From the central tentpole itself hang printed stories (in Arabic and English, with keywords embroidered in red) of migrant lives. Like leaves on the branches of a tree. These highly personal narratives (also present in audio form) include stories of lost cats, the loss of mentally-disabled brothers, the perils of long-distance relationships, lives lived under patriarchal power systems, the problems of providing care across continents and of living with bombing and conflict, and cycles of violence that seem destined

to persist. And at its heart is an exploration of what is possible when you have agency and what is impossible when you do not. In some ways this work speaks to a solidarity of suffering as much as it does to a solidarity of women. (‘Maybe suffering is the key to growth’, concludes one of the texts on display.) And, at times, of how that suffering can be overcome. As you circle the tentpole, the stories appear to circulate with you. If that sense of solidarity comes in part because these women’s stories are literally woven together, then a series of painted portraits from the ongoing series I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (2012–) returns us to individual experiences. While still suggesting what they have in common. The portraits relate to the artist’s conversations with women who have been

displaced by conflicts in the Middle East and Syria (Al Solh’s parents are Lebanese and Syrian) and are now facing the transition from refugee to citizen in their new homes. The images, the equivalent of painted snapshots (sometimes with the face and text obscured), are executed on yellow ruledpaper from a legal pad (which, assuming you get the reference, adds to the sense of these portraits being ‘snatched’, while also referencing the bureaucracy within which the subjects of the paintings are ensnared). As with A day is as long as a year, there’s an extent to which you need to follow the threads, or read between the lines, or, perhaps most accurately of all, translate what you see. Although on the other hand the whole project could be boiled down (as the artist has when discussing it previously) to the

following cliché: every face tells a story. Although it certainly helps if you know how to read them (and Arabic). The exhibition is completed by doublesided patchwork curtains (of the type used in Lebanon to shade houses from the sun) from another ongoing series, Sama’/Ma’as (2014–), which feature pairs of three-letter Arabic root words in which the letter order of one is shifted to generate a new word to form pairs such as ‘Desire/Dust’ or ‘Shovel/Dignity’. While they articulate a form of play with the slipperiness of language and meaning, they also suggest the enduring migrant conundrum of being a part of something and apart from something – the same but different. Collectively the works on show here articulate a powerful sense of what makes communities, and of the forces that break them apart. Mark Rappolt

A day is as long as a year (detail), 2022, mixed-media installation. Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

Autumn 2022

I Loved You White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney 2 July – 21 November Neat rows of Chinese characters erupt like flowers from a field of gently sloping orange flooring. Rendered in neon lighting and arranged in a rectangular block, the installation appears memoriallike. Visitors who mill around the foyer, or browse aimlessly in the giftshop, can’t help but bask in its unearthly glow. But the illusion of a tribute quickly dissipates when the work’s trickery is discovered: the characters are upside-down. They spell out a poem, ‘Roses Made from Water’, written by the artist’s friend while (according to the exhibition text) high on drugs. Shi Yong’s installation, A Bunch of Happy Fantasies (2009), part of a group exhibition that brings together 47 works from White Rabbit Gallery’s 2,500-strong collection, calls into

question whether our most sentimental actions and responses are just projections based on social conditioning. We’re sold versions of romantic love that can only be sustained by fantasy. Delusions that – in the cold light of sobriety – might just fade. The Ancient Greeks famously believed in six types of love. There was eros, of course, the passion that can bloom between couples, intense but nearly always unsustainable. I Loved You charts the obsessiveness of romantic love. For instance, in 14 Minutes (2013), one of the show’s strongest works, Hu Weiyi chronicles the way a necklace, a waistband, a sock, emboss his girlfriend’s skin. It’s a study of intimacy that’s also the work of an artist mapping the topography of a lover’s body.

Shi Yong, A Bunch of Happy Fantasies, 2009. Photo: Hamish McIntosh. Courtesy the artist

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But there is also storge, or the bond that exists between families, and philia, the sense of closeness that draws friends together. The highest form was agape, a universal empathy extended to other people, a compassion that’s also reserved for strangers whose circumstances may be a world away from your own. I Loved You is interested in the many permutations of love, with the works on show complicating the picture of who – and what – we choose to love, and the many ways that affection can take form. On the first floor, Pixy Liao challenges the rules of heteronormativity, a reflection on China’s veneration of the nuclear family. She and her partner, Moro, pose in a group of striking photographs – part of her Experimental Relationship series (2007–) – that overturn

the terms of gendered roleplay. In one image, Holding (2014), she sits in an armchair cradling her naked lover across her lap, gazing at his face intently. His expression is soft, registering a quiet vulnerability. In another photo, Homemade Sushi (2010), Moro poses on a bed, lying atop a roll of towels, his torso encircled by makeshift seaweed, reimagined as lunch. The tenderness with which Liao’s photographs are made is evident, too, in other artists’ works: for the photographic series Fairy Tales in Red Times (2003–07), husband-and-wife artistic duo Shao Yinong and Muchen borrow the aesthetic of propaganda posters that were popular during Mao Zedong’s political reign, and which were often used to promote and depict ‘ideal’ citizens, to portray children from a Beijing special-needs school. In these photographs – which are handcoloured – their social status is elevated, the details of their faces highlighted: a boy’s rosy cheeks are smattered with brown freckles, a girl’s rose-tinted glasses

are pushed high on her nose, slightly askew. Four largescale paintings by Zhou Zixi, Classmates – Four Policemen (2017), presents four of the artist’s former classmates naked from the chest up. Stripped of their police uniforms, they appear gentle and vulnerable. He evokes their fleshiness in delicate taupe and grey. Bodies abound in the work of the late Ren Hang, known for his intimate and erotic photographs of friends and collaborators. In one work, a woman is submerged in a bathtub; holding a straw between her crimson-red lips, her expression is blissful. In another, a man lies in a similar tub, head underwater; a school of goldfish swims a halo around his face. Hang’s work reflects an erotics of looking: one that sees love not as possession or consumption, but as a lifeforce that animates ordinary moments. Elsewhere, I Loved You looks towards humble attempts to transcend circumstance. On the second floor, Jin Shi’s Small Business – Karoake

(2009) is an ode to the street stalls that dot Hangzhou and Henan, where market workers play pornographic videos and hawk counterfeit goods. The brightly coloured installation – a shop-cum-karaoke-bar, strung with lights, in the back of a rickshaw – casts worldly pleasures, however illegal, as a glittering escape from the endless routine of labour. It also seems to be a commemoration of a working community that’s overlooked. Love is also work, this show reminds us. In The Static Eternity (2012), Gao Rong painstakingly embroiders a full-scale replica of her grandparents’ apartment in Inner Mongolia, a home that’s since been demolished. A pair of cups sit upside-down on a sideboard. Their bed is immaculate. The peeling wall, the texture of the bricks, emerge from the artist’s memory. Love, here, is the labour of attention, which takes form in the slow accretion of details. A fantasy that doesn’t fade away to nothing but can be rebuilt in reverse. Neha Kale

Gao Rong, The Static Eternity, 2012, cloth, cotton thread, foam, steel, plywood, 270 × 516 × 460 cm. Photo: Hamish McIntosh. Courtesy the artist

Autumn 2022

Farah Al Qasimi General Behaviour Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi 11 March – 20 September Modular corniced walls stand in the atrium of Abu Dhabi’s Cultural Foundation. Some are painted pale pink, blue, yellow or green; others are covered in vinyl wallpaper depicting flashy commercial spaces, ornate home interiors or paradisiacal landscapes. These are the backdrops to a series of photographs, including: a wellknown fastfood chain’s golden arches appears like a tanline against splotchy beige tiles; sweet sentiments intricately carved, in English, into the rind of a watermelon, exposing its pink flesh; and henna-covered hands holding a smartphone that shows a WhatsApp greeting blending in harmony with the colours and motifs of fleece blankets in the background. Contrast and harmony are what this show – a chronological, four-chapter presentation of works made by us-based Emirati artist Farah Al Qasimi

between 2012 and 2021 – is all about. Within that, multiculturalism, consumerism and gender are explored by navigating public and private spaces between Al Qasimi’s two homes. In her photo installations, the artist uses a layering method to simulate the permeation of different cultures; here, the kaleidoscopic images leak into the grand and formal environment of the atrium to jarring effect. The lush beach in Sunset Wallpaper (2012) pulls you into the exhibition and acts as a backdrop for variously sized photographs of surfaces and facades representing idealistic ambition, such as Sandcastles (2014), in which a crowd of skyscrapers made of sand foreground real high-rises. As a comedown from the whirlwind of Al Qasimi’s maximalist aesthetic, the reverse of that same wall is used to present photographs of men who subvert stereotypes of aggressive masculinity

Lady Lady, 2019, archival inkjet print, 76 × 53 cm. Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

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in the region by revealing a sense of vulnerability. In Ghaith at Home (2016), for example, a man wearing a matching white kandura and ghotra reclines, eyes closed, into a soft, white-sheeted bed; the shadow of a rose just out of view on the bedside table appears so vividly against the white wall I can almost smell it. The next section of photographs highlights Al Qasimi’s interest in what occupies a space and what doesn’t. In Orange Soap in Orange Bathroom (2018), a used peach-coloured soap-bar on a bathtub ledge stands in for the absent human body. Meanwhile, Dragon Mart led Display (2018) captures a shop window at night filled with fake flowers and glowing multicoloured string lights, situated at Dragon Mart – the largest marketplace for Chinese products outside China and the centre for kitsch commodities in the Emirates.

The third section features photographs that echo Al Qasimi’s experience of cultural in-betweenness. Lady Lady (2019) shows a pair of hands holding a smartphone displaying an anime of the same title that was released in the Gulf during the 1980s, and in which a young Japanese girl, upon discovering her father is a British viscount, goes to live with him in his palace with hopes of becoming a real ‘Lady’. Wallpapered behind that photograph is Hall of Mirrors (2020), which shows a neon maze with blurry bodies moving through confusing passages, as if a metaphor for navigating multiple cultures. Al Qasimi’s interest in constructed surroundings and compositions that distort perception is most evident in the final collection of photographs. Many of the radiant and colourful spaces depicted here communicate a commercialised notion of being ‘out in public’ that is so prevalent in the Emirates, where the sweltering climate drives you, more often than not, to seek cool shelter in shops and restaurants. Plastered on one wall, Furniture Store (2020) depicts a shop

selling furniture in the baroque aesthetic that has become a staple of domestic decor in the Gulf. Once a marker of wealth and social status in eighteenth-century Europe, here in the uae the style is made accessible to a wider range of economic groups. This highly ornamented aesthetic forms much of the exhibition scenography and carries on into the screening rooms. You can take a seat on lavish sofa chairs to watch Dream Soup (2019), a short video documenting the uae’s perfume industry (which was valued at $914 million in 2021). While being a signifier of cleanliness, scents can also be a mode of self-expression. Among flashing shots of rippling hot-pink silk fabric, claustrophobic perfume stores and shoppers testing scents, labels like ‘Feminism’, ‘Extreme Happiness’ and ‘Macho Man’ appear on bottles as well as on the screen, signalling the wearer’s often gendered aspirations within a society in which traditional roles are reinforced. There is humour, too, in the cliché upon which Dream Soup riffs: perfume is so much a part of the Emirates

that at times it seems impossible to make art drawn from the place without referring to it. To date, Al Qasimi’s depictions of the uae have largely been shown in the West. And in some ways her work seems more attuned to audiences from there. To a lifelong resident of the Emirates like myself, many of the images, like those bright and varicoloured commercial spaces, feel less seductive than they seem to be to those who are unfamiliar with the place. Indeed, they seem banal. Some of the works, however, contain snapshots that are very particular to the Emirati experience – like the depiction of sacred household interiors – rare portrayals in a culture that values the boundaries of privacy. Returning these moments to their original context allows the work to escape the problematic position it finds itself in when presented in the West. And while the works are not uncritical, for local audiences not used to seeing themselves or their surroundings being reflected in contemporary art in this way, it might also be familiar and validating. Yalda Bidshahri

Perfume (Obama, Lovable, Flawless), 2018, inkjet print, 76 × 53 cm. Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

Autumn 2022

Books Good Night by Feng Li Jiazazhi, €50 (hardcover) Gritty, filled with arresting scenes of amputees, gangsters and madmen, Feng Li’s debut photobook White Night (2017) made his name as a distinctive chronicler of the streets of his native Chengdu. The capital city of China’s southwestern Sichuan province is often ranked as one of the most liveable and business-friendly cities on the mainland, a wholesome reputation bolstered by such attractions as its famous panda-breeding centre. Feng’s interest in Chengdu’s feral side, rather than its ‘official’ version, can be summed up in the single panda image he includes in the book: two poorly stuffed specimens, one with its teeth bared in a ferrety grimace. The images in White Night are as compelling as the first-line hooks of detective novels: a man swings what seems like a decapitated head by a lock of hair (it might be a wig); another one lights a cigarette, cupping the flame with a hand covered in blood; in another picture, the leather-clad haunches of a row of women, whips in hand, march down the street. Feng has always worked in colour, but he also has a sizable backlog of black-and-white images, taken from 2005 to the present, from which this, his second book, is produced. There are characters and scenes that overlap with his first

– eagle-eyed readers will spot the man in a fur coat who was the subject of the first and last image of White Night – but the tone is different. Good Night is calmer and more visionary, less concerned with capturing discrete events of the outlandish or surreal, than in building a sustained atmosphere of melancholic wonder. This more contemplative mood might be down to the fact that there are fewer humans in these photos. Instead, landscapes and objects predominate, infused with a beauty previously absent. Before he became a fulltime artist, Feng had worked as a photographer for a provincial state department. His assignments at official events provided him with ample fodder for White Night: discarded props, tawdry costumes and tired actors. Here, the unreality of such occasions provokes wonder, not clinical curiosity. A light festival in a deserted suburb ends up being accidentally futuristic; the image shows gigantic light sculptures of lotuses, several storeys high, rise up from a lake, looking like wonky, leaning satellite towers. What’s informing this newfound wonder could be a sense of mortality. Feng has mentioned in interviews that between both books, he lost both his mother and his beloved pet parrot.

Indeed, death stalks these pages: a woman lies in a hospital bed, pointing at something out of frame; a half-decomposed skeleton of a cat lies on the ground, encircled by a carpet of fur that has dropped off. Touched by the knowledge of death, Feng seems more tender towards the world. The black-and-white format, which Feng often allows to be so grainy that substances seem to transmute into one another, lends itself to further otherworldliness. Good Night has its fair share of broken people too, but it presents a more hopeful and hospitable vision of the world, cracked and strange as it is, by introducing glimpses of another stranger, perhaps more whole, reality under its surface. Occasionally, you can peek through the veil, as seen in the recurrent motif of someone looking through a tiny slit in a heavy cloth, shade or curtain. Other times, you can be suddenly drenched in eternity. The book’s most haunting image depicts a huge Christmas tree in the middle of nowhere: a tall cone for a tree, a star casting a fuzzy halo into the night, a ground made of sheets of rolling fog. Its details are as gauzy as a remembered dream; but its powerful imagery, a light in the dark, is elemental and cosmic Adeline Chia

Talk To My Back by Yamada Murasaki, translated by Ryan Holmberg Drawn & Quarterly, us$29.95 (softcover) When you think manga you almost instantly think of an exciting and colourful world populated by schoolgirls, martial artists, robots, demons, and other fantastic beasts. You don’t think of the drudgery, banality, insecurity, claustrophobia and oppression of being a housewife, a servant to two daughters and a husband. But that’s what Talk To My Back is all about, collecting strips that were originally published in the manga anthology magazine Garo during the 1980s. Yamada Murasaki’s style is sparse and minimal. Some characters don’t have a face until they need one; backgrounds are only filled with things that are necessary to narrative. ‘Eventually

I come to realise that I’m hardly here,’ our heroine Chiharu says to herself. She’s constantly worrying about the moment when her daughters won’t need her, while willing them the independence that she’s constantly searching for at the same time. ‘I’d rather have a job than be someone’s wife anyway,’ she says. Yet for all that she resents her family’s demands to be cared for and the rigid, patriarchal gender rules that define, shape and determine her role as a woman – ‘Husbands talk down to their wives to assuage their manly egos. While wives; they compensate by trying to make daily life pleasant. But that they’re trapped inside this flesh called the

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“family”, which exists simply so the man has a woman to protect his ego. What’s lonely is not that their husbands don’t recognise and respect them… Why is that?’, runs one central stream of thought – her primary confrontation is often her own sense of worth, her sense of freedom and her sense of independent purpose. And while Talk To My Back has historic value as one of the first strips in Japan to put ordinary female domestic life centre-stage, and as the product of a pioneering female alt-manga artist in what was largely a man’s world, it’s message and the medium through which it is conveyed continues (sadly perhaps) to have a deep resonance today. Nirmala Devi

Autumn 2022

The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State by Philip Bowring Bloomsbury Academic, £20 (hardcover) I knew I was in for a rough ride when I opened the dust jacket of this book and read the second sentence on the flap, which informs the reader that the author will demonstrate how the Philippines,‘[k]nown mostly for natural disasters, migrant labour and dictatorial presidents’, is in fact ‘much, much more’. Though I tried not to let this condescending tone put me off, further reading only indicates that these words accurately foreshadow the author’s white-saviourcomplex approach to enlightening the world on the mysteries of the Philippines. Bowring is an English journalist, born during the Second World War. He is the former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and has contributed to titles including the South China Morning Post and Wall Street Journal, and founded The Asia Sentinel. Though clearly competent and in-touch with current events, Bowring maintains some sort of delusional and colonial superiority in his ambition to solve the puzzle of the Philippines, despite never having lived there. While there is some merit in consolidating research across the field into a single resource, Bowring offers backhanded compliments to those from whom he learns: ‘It is a puzzle to reflect on the contrast between the intelligence and civility of people… and the poor standard of government of the nation’. While anyone who has ever read anything about the Philippines can recognise the country’s corrupt government,

to indicate surprise at its people’s manners is another obsolescent jab. Bowring’s preface and introduction indicate he wrote this book during the pandemic and relied heavily on original research by Filipinos, such as Patricio Abinales and Donna Amoros’s State and Society within the Philippines (2017) and Luis Francia’s A History of the Philippines (2010), to develop his text; yet he misses important works like Richard Manapat’s landmark text Some Are Smarter than Others (1991) that exposed Marcos’s crony kleptocracy. Even his ultimate thesis – that the country needs better infrastructure, a more honest government and less dynastic politics to improve itself – is glaringly obvious. The book offers nothing not already written elsewhere, while still suffusing this information with patronising prejudices from another era, such as, ‘As a nation, the Philippines needs to be taken more seriously by itself as well as outsiders’. The implication here is that Bowring’s book intends to galvanise this seriousness, but the fellow Filipinos I’ve encountered – from across the political spectrum –have generally been serious about themselves as a nation. Bowring’s armchair-research presentation further betrays his naivete, missing important nuance largely for the sake of remaining journalistically impartial. It oscillates between regurgitated historical revisions (largely uncovered by Filipinos), harmful canonical

understandings and occasionally convoluted facts – all while lacking cultural precision and real sympathy. In Chapter 6, Bowring writes that Ferdinand Marcos’s ‘failure is best defined not by his democratic or elite critics, but by comparison with his autocratic peers’, and proceeds to contemplate the economics of Indonesia’s Suharto and South Korea’s Park Chung-hee against that of the Philippines. Bizarre comparison of who was the better dictator aside, this equating of Marcos’s ultimate failure to an economic one – which I might see some merit in, had it been better qualified – callously ignores his crimes against humanity. Bowring barely mentions them at all, saying only that ‘extrajudicial killings during the Marcos dictatorship were few, quiet and targeted’ in relation to Rodrigo Duterte’s apparent spree during his presidency. While Marcos’s 3,257 murdered victims across 21 years is about a quarter of Duterte’s 12,000 across six (according to Human Rights Watch), Bowring’s brief mention makes it seem like Marcos’s killings were covert operations, when in reality they were blatant villainies with bodies dropped in the streets to incite fear and intimidation. The omission of these facts is either suspicious (particularly following the success of current Philippines president and son of Ferdinand Marcos’s revisionist campaign) or downright obtuse; either way, this text is not one I trust. Marv Recinto

After Institutions by Karen Archey Floating Opera Press, €17 (softcover) In March 2020, Stedelijk Museum curator Karen Archey was six months away from opening After Institutions, a show ‘about the failure of institutions’ that ‘was itself canceled’. This book expands on her research to imagine the phantom exhibition and share her vision for a third wave of institutional critique in art. Archey’s more-writerly introduction soon settles into the meat-and-potatoes of academic prose, beginning with an almost glossarial overview of Western art-institutions as they exist in a postpandemic world, while addressing touchpoints such as artwashing, the blockbuster show and deaccessioning. Her overarching sentiment is somewhat revisionary, but mostly expansionist in nature: to untether the practice of institutional critique from the often-adjacent

canon of conceptual art and reposition it around care – as a sensibility and an institution. But what to make of the artworks? Institutional critique has historically evaded aesthetics in favour of works that are thinking rather than feeling in nature, something Archey seeks to rebalance in her selection. Casting artists like Zoe Leonard and Derek Jarman into this light, united by their responses to the aids crisis, proves successful: the former’s Strange Fruit (1992–97), consisting of fresh fruit ripped open, sewn back together and scattered across a gallery floor as metaphor for the ravaged body, challenges healthcare institutions’ failure of care and subtly mocks in its ephemeral form the museum’s instinct to collect and preserve. Aesthetics and critique, then – a point well made.

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Expanding institutional critique also means confronting the whiteness and Eurocentrism of its tradition, something brought about by Liu Ding’s The Orchid Room (2018), which intersperses orchids (a reference to Mao Zedong’s orchid room) with photographs of the artist’s private conversations with contemporaries about the challenges facing art in China today. It’s a shame that it takes us so long to get here, though, Archey’s prose so regularly and arthritically doubling back on itself as she builds her case. One also wonders why discussion of collective practices in art remains absent, which would develop her otherwise formulaic outlining of whether to read artist biography into institutional-critique art – and help elevate Archey’s sturdy work into a genuine intervention. Alexander Leissle

Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri Princeton University Press, us$21.95 (hardcover) The architecture of a writer’s career rests as much on her particular use of language as it does on her storytelling prowess. And a writing practice is essentially a learning of how to bend a reluctant language, sometimes two, in very rare, and deeply admirable cases, three or more languages to will. Thus, around 2013, when Jhumpa Lahiri set aside writing in English, in which she had a thriving career as a writer, to write in and eventually translate from Italian, a language she fell in love with while on holiday decades ago, it seemed a curious move. Her newest book, Translating Myself and Others, draws out the consequences of this linguistic migration. The essays collected in the book, written originally in English and Italian over the last seven years, and translated by Lahiri and others, are a celebration of the intimacies of language/s and a class in the craft and practice of translation. After she wrote her first book in Italian, rendered in English by Ann Goldstein as In Other Words (2017), Lahiri went on to translate three novels of Domenico Starnone into English, as well as an anthology of Italian short stories. More recently she translated her second book in Italian, a novel, into English, as Whereabouts (2022). And it’s these practices of and in language that Lahiri uses as fodder for her essays. They range from the technical, in the essays that served as Introductions or Afterwords to her

Starnone translations, dissecting Italian words and their etymology to spell out the reasons for her choice of English equivalents, to the more personal, where she is the most reflective. It is in the latter that Lahiri offers the reader a chance to go deeper into why and how translations work. Her thoughts on self-translation in the essay ‘Where I Find Myself’ and reflections on the meaning of translation in ‘In Praise of Echo’ (for me the richest of her essays in terms of a study of the craft of translation) show how fulfilling a complete immersion into the worlds that a new language opens up can be. She suggests that, for a writer, practising the art of translation alongside can open up entire realms of possibilities that could newly guide, inspire, even transform their work: ‘For to translate is to look into a mirror and see someone other than oneself’. In ‘Why Italian?’ Lahiri tries to explain why she decided to pursue a writing life in Italian, a language with which she had no connection. After her work in that language came out, several Italian readers perceived her act as transgressive, even a betrayal, as if she had no right to ‘their’ language, leading her to wonder what it must mean to belong to a language and who gets to claim ownership of it. In her introduction to the book, Lahiri recounts an old memory that is very telling of language and culture in multilingual former

British colonies where English is used as a bridge language. At age five, the Indian-origin, London-born and American-raised Lahiri was asked to address her handmade Mother’s Day card in kindergarten to ‘Mom’ and not ‘Ma’, as she called her mother. As a Bengali speaker at home in an Anglophone country, she writes of intuiting early on ‘the central and complex role that translation was to play’. This ‘translation dilemma’ is likely to be all too familiar to those of us in countries like India where most people speak, at the very least, two languages. Thanks to sociopolitical histories of migration, conflict and other factors, we are all constantly translating between the language spoken at home, the one/s spoken on the streets and the one we live in, perhaps for work. This multilinguality in lived experience is so commonplace and deep-rooted that it is hard to grasp just how much of our interactions with cultural articles, be it literature or cinema or something else, are via translation. In that sense, we are all constantly practising translators. Read with this perspective of multilingualism in place, the essays in Translating Myself… become more than an instructive, illuminating handbook on the craft of translation. The book transforms into a meditation on how living closely with language/s can enrich experiences and build bridges of connection, an act perhaps urgently needed in this polarised world. Deepa Bhasthi

The Tribe by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Frank Wynne with Rahul Bery Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) The titular tribe of Álvarez’s first book are Cubans. With his guidance, the reader travels the Caribbean island over three years from 2014 (the book was first published in Spanish in 2017), taking in events including Fidel Castro’s death and the San Isidro democracy protests. More than history, however, this is a compendium of ordinary Cuban life delivered by a journalist in a sonorous crónica form, privileging absorbing, informative colour over hard facts. The interlacing tales are populated with a vast array of characters, from a butcher siphoning off state rations and a couple scouring Havana’s largest rubbish dump as a means of survival, to a mother fighting for the repatriation of her daughter’s body from Miami, the artist Tania Bruguera resisting state persecution and the

poet Rafael Alcides retreating into seclusion. Through these portraits, each incisive and sympathetic, we’re introduced to a paradise in the late stages of self-destruction. Corruption in all its forms – economic, political, psychological, spiritual – has become ‘the unheroic driving force of a cunning society’, Álvarez laments. While the stories Álvarez tells condemn the mismanagement and repression catalysed by the Communist government, he has no sympathy either for rightwing forces calling for counterrevolution from across the Straits of Florida: ‘the genuine pain of Cuban exiles in Miami is all too frequently disparaged and squandered on shrill rhetoric’, he writes (paging Marco Rubio). Despite the beguiling lyricism of Álvarez’s prose, which makes the pages joyously fly by (and, for

Autumn 2022

this reader, evoked pangs, whatever the politics, to return to the country), it is a despairing critique of Cuba, with only the rare glimmer of hope. From the loneliness of his self-exile, Alcides (who died in 2018) offered one such moment of redemption. A hero of the revolution, the poet fell into a black hole of literary purges in 1970, and for the remainder of his life rarely strayed from his home. ‘He looks like a God but he is a heretic,’ Álvarez writes – his heresy is to write the truth, away from the rotten society that surrounds him. ‘Political lackeys, a population consumed with cynicism and cowardice, wasted, fruitless lives heading nowhere, shot through with bitterness or fear – and then Alcides. Thanks to Alcides our country will be forgiven.’ Oliver Basciano

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell Tilted Axis, £12 (softcover) Tomb of Sand is an epic tale of unity and division. And how the one follows the other to suggest, at times, that both are in some ways illusory. It begins in India, with an octogenarian widow who lies on her bed, back to the world for most of the first section of this 700+ page novel. It ends in Pakistan with the same octogenarian’s shadow, after she has risen from the bed and performed a bewildering series of identity shifts, creeping into the bedroom of her longlost, paralysed first love. (The cycle from ghost to shade one of the many Buddhist-inspired returns upon which the novel, which on the surface focused on the Hindu-Muslim divide, is structured.) Along the way, her tale is told by humans, crows, doors, dogs and partridges, with each narrative layer peeling away a new truth of who she is, like so many skins of an onion. And all that without the shedding of too many tears. Initially the tale explores the dynamics of a middle-class Indian family: a civil-servant son, Bade, obsessed with proper behaviour, his impending retirement and the state of his inheritance, his jealous, clothing-obsessed wife, a rebellious journalist daughter, Beti, who lives alone (visited by a lover who has the keys to her apartment) and some increasingly Westernised grandchildren. As the book evolves and the octogenarian leaves her bed (and Bade’s house) to become a person (Ma)

rather than object (‘the bundle’), these dynamics (and the broad patriarchy they represent) are thrown into disarray. Particularly as Ma begins increasingly to hang out with a hirja (one of the subcontinent’s intersex or transgender people), who, as the story progresses, features as both a woman and a man. And more particularly still as Ma ceases to perform her designated function as an old, invisible woman – ‘a shadow’ – and instead adopts ‘an authentic life’. ‘Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself’, Shree writes at the opening of the novel. If the borders in question begin as those of established social convention and gender roles, by the second half of the novel the focus is on a border that’s geographical, separating India and Pakistan. And as the story leads to the effects of Partition, Shree paves the way through a ringing critique of ‘foreigners’ or ‘White people’ or ‘the West’ and the impact of colonialism and its legacies: ‘If you have them around it becomes all about them, because the world is their oyster. They are the ones creating it and destroying it, but everyone sees them as the Creators; the Rest are perceived as the Destroyers, because they, the West are the Centre, and the origin story is set by the Centre.’ Whether or not the decimal point, tea, gunpowder, the concept of zero and the legacies of Ancient Greece were taken

from other parts of the world. But, generally, Shree does not have them around. Other than in the form of the line of Partition and ubiquitous Reebok trainers. And once Ma crosses that line (a religious divide too), rediscovers her original name and a past she has concealed from her children (to the extent that her daughter assumes she is recounting tales about people and places that the hirja shared with her) the fun, in the form of a tangled knot of remembering and forgetting, really starts. Throughout, Shree contrasts the ways in which the past shapes the present and how people (more particularly women) can escape their pasts. And the consequences of both: ‘I feel as though a bullet was fired in some other century but didn’t stay in that century. It keeps hitting people who come later,’ one of the characters Ma meets in Pakistan says. Ultimately Tomb of Sand weaves a tangled web. At times, like a child’s chemistry experiment, it seems to have gone everywhere. But perhaps that’s also one of the book’s strengths; one of the ways in which it approaches the sensation of real life (constantly contrasted with life as set out by academics and historians, for whom memory is a ‘hot topic’). Above all, Shree’s stunning work wraps tragedy in humour in a way that, as she puts it, suggests that ‘literature is a source of hope and life’. Mark Rappolt

Tom’s Day Out by Lai Yu Tong Thumb Books, s$25 (hardcover) For his recent exhibition Tom’s Day Out, Singaporean artist Lai Yu Tong showed a series of colour-pencil-on-paper drawings of cars. Inspired by children’s art, the shapes are simple and blocky, but repeatedly scratched over with black pencil so that the cars are glimpsed through a dense thicket of strokes. Rendered in bright colours, the cars pop out of the darkness. Some are woozy, unmoored presences, wheelless and floating in midair. Others are anthropomorphic, with glaring headlights and sneering bumpers. Then there are intimations of an unspecified disaster, with cars upended in floods. These images have been incorporated into Lai’s dark children’s storybook, Tom’s Day Out,

published by Thumb Books, a new local indie press that ‘aims to make children’s books for both adult children and adults’. It tells of the titular little boy venturing out with his Uncle Choon into a postapocalyptic landscape. Details of the how and when and where are sketchy. (‘Something happened to Earth ten years ago, and it wasn’t something good. Everywhere the world is covered in smoke.’) Along the way, the duo discover abandoned cars, which are described through the boy’s eyes. A Toyota Alphard ‘wears black sunglasses and has many sharp teeth’. A Toyota Vios has ‘the smile of a devil and eyes of pure evil’. After we go through several car models, in the end, without giving

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anything away, the story fizzles out in a vague anticapitalist direction. The faux-naive text isn’t as interesting as the images – Tom’s perspective is flat and not sufficiently unpredictable to render the standard postcapitalist dystopia new. But still, it’s a serviceable narrative that manages to string together a series of mysterious images, which paint a more ambiguous and suggestive atmosphere of unspeakable disaster and emotional derangement. Then again, this is an adult reader talking. So, just to be fair, I road-tested the book with my three-year-old son. Cars! Bad cars! Dirty cars! For what it’s worth, my audience was rapt. Adeline Chia

10-13 NOV 2022 GRAND PALAIS éPHéMèRE

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on the cover Ho Rui An. Photo: Eike Walkenhorst. Courtesy the artist

Words on the spine and on pages 13, 33 and 77 are by Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea, 1906

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from the archives John Berger on what the West can learn from Indonesian art Apart from the 1945 Picasso show, this is the most important contemporary exhibition seen in London since the war: important not only because Affandi, who was born in Java in 1910, is a painter of genius, but also because it indicates the type of work and the attitude which lie behind the new emerging culture of Asia, and because we in Europe will finally have to learn from that attitude. But first a warning: about a dozen of Affandi’s fifty canvases are badly erratic and incoherent; also, all of them suffer the disadvantage of being unstretched and unframed. Personally, I believe both these facts to be constructively significant. They must, however, be allowed for when most of us in our present situation tend to be negatively critical and conservative. Nor do I wish to imply that I am above such faults. If I feel and write decisively about Affandi’s work, it is only because during the last two months I have had time to study it. Most of the pictures are fairly large and are painted on coarse canvas. The pigment itself is usually thick and often applied in line strokes which literally appear to have hit the canvas, and, having hit it, to have been drawn irresistibly into the orbit of the forms and spaces portrayed. Or more accurately, the magnetic process appears to work both ways:

the tension of the paintings is dependent on the lines and colours both attracting and being attracted by the development of the presented forms. Or again, to put it in an abstract way: the form and content of these works is indivisible. Their colour is bright, but violent and dignified rather than gay. Their subjects range from landscapes of rice fields, cities and mountains to portraits of the artist’s family; from paintings of animals – buffaloes, horses, boars, to paintings of the people to whom the artist has a complete, unselfconscious loyalty – rickshaw drivers, street musicians, republican soldiers, beggars, serious students. There are also on show a number of extraordinary drawings whose calligraphic quality is oriental, but whose grasp of particular form and expression is more reminiscent of Rembrandt or Goya. Yet what makes any description of these works inadequate (Expressionist is the only label that appears to fit, but doesn’t) is that they are different in kind from anything we are accustomed to seeing. Not because of their exotic content – far from it: looking down one of these street scenes, one has no feeling of being on an unfamiliar set of values. Broadly speaking, ‘Art’ in the West has become inflated at the expense of life. Aesthetics have triumphed over vitality. These paintings redress the balance. They are the result of participation rather than contemplation, action rather than introspection. They are not concerned with Taste, for Taste completes and isolates. (This, I think, is the significance of the canvases being unframed and of a few being badly organised and uncorrected.) Instead, they are concerned with the continuity of life, the necessary continuity of being able to risk achievements. One could argue that such an attitude means the destruction of art, that a work of art must always be complete in itself. This is true. But such completeness is only achieved by an artist who resolves his continuous, otherthan-aesthetic responsibilities, never by one who rejects them. Affandi, working during historic and heroic events (the resistance to the Jap occupation and the war against the Dutch for Indonesian independence) has a profound sense of active solidarity. The public, to whom he accepts responsibility, are not those who may happen to look at his paintings, but those who make, or are implied by his subjects. It is for this reason that his pictures do not present themselves to the spectator, but turning him into a witness, confront him. Looking at one of Affandi’s pictures, one feels that the canvas and pigment, neither cherished nor despised for their own sake, were simply the ground on which the particular situation was fought out: the lines and colours somehow miraculously expressive tracks of the fight. Yet the proof that Affandi has resolved his responsibilities is that his work never appears to be either moralistic (in the narrow sense) or sentimental. On the contrary, its predominant quality is one of tolerance and exhilaration. Finally, the obvious: Go to this exhibition. What I have said may be irrelevant to many readers. The only thing of which I am absolutely certain is that this exhibition is a supremely important challenge. Originally published 31 May 1952, Art News and Review, Vol iv No 9

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