ArtReview Asia Spring 2018 by ArtReview

Wolfgang Tillmans What’s on during Art Basel Hong Kong Shanzhai special

MICHAËL BORREMANS DIRK BRAECKMAN ANTON CORBIJN N. DASH RAOUL DE KEYSER JAN DE MAESSCHALCK MARLENE DUMAS KEES GOUDZWAARD SUSAN HARTNETT YUN-FEI JI KIM JONES JOHANNES KAHRS NAOTO KAWAHARA JOHN KÖRMELING MARK MANDERS PHILIP METTEN PAULO MONTEIRO JOCKUM NORDSTRÖM MARINA RHEINGANTZ PIETRO ROCCASALVA GRACE SCHWINDT JENNY SCOBEL HYUN-SOOK SONG BART STOLLE MIRCEA SUCIU LUC TUYMANS PATRICK VAN CAECKENBERGH ANNE-MIE VAN KERCKHOVEN JACK WHITTEN CRISTOF YVORÉ

ZENO X GALLERY GODTSSTRAAT 15 2140 ANTWERP BORGERHOUT BELGIUM +32 3 216 16 26 INFO@ZENO-X.COM WWW.ZENO-X.COM

MIRCEA SUCIU ART BASEL HONG KONG - KABINETT

ZENO X GALLERY GODTSSTRAAT 15 2140 ANTWERP BORGERHOUT BELGIUM +32 3 216 16 26 INFO@ZENO-X.COM WWW.ZENO-X.COM

Art Basel Hong Kong Booth 3C19 March 29–31, 2018

YAEL BARTANA

DANA HOEY

SETH PRICE

WALEAD BESHTY

CHRISTIAN JANKOWSKI

STEPHEN PRINA

COSIMA VON BONIN

ASGER JORN

JON PYLYPCHUK

TROY BRAUNTUCH

SEAN LANDERS

WILLEM DE ROOIJ

SIMON DENNY

REZI VAN LANKVELD

DANA SCHUTZ

KEITH EDMIER

MARIA LASSNIG

DIRK SKREBER

THOMAS EGGERER

ALLAN MCCOLLUM

JOHN STEZAKER

WADE GUYTON

ADAM MCEWEN

HIROKI TSUKUDA

ROBERT HEINECKEN

SARAH MORRIS

NICOLA TYSON

GEORG HEROLD

JORGE PARDO

CORINNE WASMUHT

CHARLINE VON HEYL

JOYCE PENSATO

HEIMO ZOBERNIG

456 W 18th Street New York NY 10011 35 E 67th Street New York NY 10065 Tel 212 680 9467 www.petzel.com

CLC 004, 2017

Wolfgang Tillmans

5–6 / F, H Queen’s 80 Queen’s Road Central Central, Hong Kong hk.davidzwirner.com

香港

中環皇后大道中 80 號

H Queen’s 5 –6 樓 @davidzwirner

Hong Kong

ArtReview Asia vol 6 no 1 Spring 2018

Forks in the Road Does an artwork ‘look’ different when it is viewed in one place rather than another? That’s one of the issues raised in ArtReview Asia’s interview with Wolfgang Tillmans as he prepares for his debut solo exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong; it’s also a pertinent one on the eve of the annual collision of the art markets of the East and the West in Art Basel Hong Kong. Underlying the question are the issues of whether or not our ways of seeing are shaped by the contexts and traditions in which we were raised and, on the flip side, whether or not artworks are shaped by the contexts and traditions in which they were made. In some ways this can boil down to a matter of what’s familiar and what’s strange. Although truth be told everything is strange at some point. Or, as Rabindranath Tagore wrote, ‘Once we dreamt that we were strangers. We wake up to find that we were dear to each other’. (Yes, the somewhat sickly positivity of that statement does take some getting used to.) Anyhow, wrt Tillmans, you’ll have to read the interview to find out what one set of answers to these questions might be – no spoilers here – but the core issue is one with which every edition of ArtReview Asia seeks to engage. And each time, it finds itself torn – by its commitment to the particularities of issues of language, context and tradition, set beside a foundational belief that art has the potential to create an open and universal social dialogue, and an understanding about what’s lost from the former when you insist on the latter. And yep, you can expand that to narratives of globalisation and colonialisation as well. Still, that’s for another time. All in all, ArtReview Asia has realised that thinking about art is perhaps more a negotiation between the directions suggested by multiple readings and understandings than it is a linear process that begins with an artwork and ends with an interpretation. That’s why you look at things more than once, after all. ArtReview Asia

《女士，您的石頭有多重？》（細節圖），2 0 18，混合媒材畫布，182 . 9 × 2 4 3 . 8 厘米 / 72 × 96 英寸，攝影： JOSHUA WHITE

2018 年 3 月 27 日 – 5 月 12 日

豪瑟沃斯香港

MARK BRADFORD

27 MARCH – 12 MAY 2018

HAUSER & WIRTH HONG KONG

HOW MUCH DO YOUR STONES WEIGH LADY? (DETAIL), 2018, MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS, 182 .9 × 243.8 CM / 72 × 96 IN, PHOTO: JOSHUA WHITE

馬克·布拉德福特

Francesco Gennari Greetings from the Moon March 16 – April 14, 2018

Ceal Floyer March 16 – April 14, 2018

Catch me if you can! AA Bronson + General Idea, 1968 – 2018 April 27 – May 26, 2018

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

GEORGE CONDO, LAUGHING AND SCREAMING, 2017; ACRYLIC, METALLIC PAINT, PIGMENT STICK, CHARCOAL AND PASTEL ON LINEN; 203,2 × 188,28 CM; 80 × 74 1/8 INCHES © GEORGE CONDO / ARS (ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY), NEW YORK, 2018; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SKARSTEDT, NEW YORK AND SPRÜTH MAGERS, BERLIN, LONDON, LOS ANGELES

GEORGE CONDO MARITIME MUSEUM, HONG KONG CENTRAL FERRY PIER NO. 8

MARCH 27 – APRIL 6, 2018 PUBLIC RECEPTION: MARCH 26 MAN KWONG STREET, CENTRAL

Paul Kasmin Gallery Presents

MARK RYDEN ART BASEL HONG KONG KABINETT SECTION | BOOTH 3D18 MARCH 27 – 31, 2018 DODECAHEDRON — QUINTESSENCE 132 PRESENTED AT PMQ, HONG KONG MARCH 26 – APRIL 5, 2018

PA U L K A S M I N G A L L E R Y N E W Y O R K | PA U L K A S M I N G A L L E R Y. C O M SWIRL GIRL, 2017, OIL ON CANVAS, 11¼ x 23¼ INCHES, 28.6 x 59.1 CM, FRAMED: 32 x 17¼ x 1⅝ INCHES, 81.28 x 43.8 x 4.1 CM.

Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle / 50

Ma Ke Apr 13 – Jun 2, 2018 Sophie Reinhold Apr 13 – Jun 2, 2018 Amalienstrasse 41 80799 Munich / Art Basel Hong Kong Booth 1D34 Mar 29 – 31, 2018 Stephan Balkenhol Chen Wei Ma Ke Karin Kneffel Thomas Ruff

KAWS, Untitled (detail), 2017. Acrylic on canvas. 183 x 305 cm / 72 x 120 in. Photo: Farzad_Owrang

KAWS

TOKYO | MARCH 22 − MAY 12 HONG KONG | MARCH 26 − MAY 19

NEW YORK LOWER EAST SIDE

PARIS MARAIS

HONG KONG CENTRAL

SEOUL JONGNO-GU

TOKYO ROPPONGI

JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL

LEE BAE

IZUMI KATO

LESLIE HEWITT

KAWS

MARCH 3 – APRIL 15

MARCH 17 – MAY 26

JANUARY 19 – MARCH 17

MARCH 21 – MAY 5

MARCH 22 – MAY 12

ARTIE VIERKANT

MATTHEW RONAY

KAWS

XU ZHEN®

DANIEL ARSHAM

MARCH 3 – APRIL 8

MARCH 17 – MAY 26

MARCH 26 – MAY 19

MAY 10 – JULY 8

MARCH 22 – MAY 12

TAKASHI MURAKAMI

PAUL PFEIFFER

APRIL 28 – JUNE 17

MARCH 17 – MAY 26

Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 29

Points of View by Skye Arundhati Thomas, Charu Nivedita, Prabda Yoon, Mark Rappolt, Adeline Chia 51

Under the Paving Stones: Mumbai by Mark Rappolt 43

Art Featured

Wolfgang Tillmans Interview by Aimee Lin 64

Reflect ARE U READY 4 by The Shanzhai Lyric 74

Photocollage by Wolfgang Tillmans 66

Jakarta by Adeline Chia 80

Shanzhai by Xin Zhou 72

Wang Bing by Benny Schaffer 86

page 86 Wang Bing, Mrs Fang (still), 2017, film, colour, sound, 102 min. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Spring 2018

Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 94

BOOKS 114

NGV Triennial, by Tristen Harwood Tong Kunniao, by Tom Mouna Wu Tsang, by Xin Zhou Hugo Boss Asia Art 2017, by Kang Kang Yin-Ju Chen, by Guo Juan When is Space? An exhibition on contemporary architecture, by Skye Arundhati Thomas Persevering Traditions, by Skye Arundhati Thomas Melati Suryodarmo, by Adeline Chia Between Worlds: Raden Saleh and Juan Luna, by Adeline Chia Danh Vo, by Ben Eastham Hassan Sharif, by Paul Laster Shahpour Pouyan, by Rahel Aima Sahej Rahal, by Fi Churchman From Ear to Ear to Eye, by Nadia Quadmani Jewyo Rhii, by Edward Ball

Marginal Man, by Charu Nivedita The White Book, by Han Kang Russian Cosmism, edited by Boris Groys Djinn City, by Saad Z. Hossain Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary, by David Teh Singapore, by Nguan THE STRIP 118 Off the record 122

page 112 Jumana Manna, A magical substance flows into me (still), 2015, film, colour, sound, 68 min. Courtesy of the artist and CRG Gallery, New York

ArtReview Asia

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel www.fdag.com.br | info@fdag.com.br

Art Basel Hong Kong Stand 3C14 Franz Ackermann Barrão Los Carpinteros Simon Evans™ Beatriz Milhazes Ernesto Neto Rivane Neuenschwander

Los Carpinteros Capa Díptico, 2018 (detail)

Art Previewed

A vowel in Tamil is called uyir = life, a consonant mey = body, and a vowel-consonant (or syllable) uyir mey = body with life 27

OCAT 武汉馆 OCAT Wuhan 当代艺术

OCAT 南京馆

Contemporary art

OCAT Nanjing

筹建中 under construction

Previewed Subodh Gupta Monnaie de Paris 13 April – 26 August Samson Young M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong through 6 May I wish to let you fall out of my hands (Chapter II) Experimenter at Ballygunge Place, Kolkata through 7 April Wolfgang Tillmans David Zwirner, Hong Kong 26 March – 12 May Mark Bradford Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong 26 March – 12 May Ai Weiwei Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong 26 March – 30 April Yoshitomo Nara Pace Gallery, H Queen’s, Hong Kong 26 March – 12 May

Emerald City K11 Art Foundation, Cosco Tower, Hong Kong 27 March – 22 April Chi Art Space, Hong Kong 28 March – 31 May Daido Moriyama Each Modern, Taipei through 28 April Nil Yalter Galerist, Istanbul through 21 April Rafaël Rozendaal Towada Art Center, Aomori through 20 May Phillip Lai Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong 26 March – 5 May OSGEMEOS Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong 26 March – 12 May

Art Basel Hong Kong Hong Kong Convention Centre 29–31 March Harbour Arts Sculpture Park Central Harbourfront, Hong Kong through 11 April 21st Biennale of Sydney Various venues through 11 June Haegue Yang Museum Ludwig, Cologne 18 April – 12 August 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art Various venues through 3 June DIASPORA: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai through 1 October Latif Al Ani Sharjah Art Foundation through 16 June

Dale Chihuly Whitestone Gallery, Hong Kong through 15 April

Anna Boghiguian Sharjah Art Foundation through 16 June

Xiao Xu Galerie Ora-Ora, H Queen’s, Hong Kong 26 March – 12 May

Ryoko Aoki Take Ninagawa, Tokyo through 28 April

Arcangelo Sassolino Pearl Lam, H Queen’s, Hong Kong 27 March – 8 May

Rie Nakajima Ikon, Birmingham through 3 June

Christopher Wool Hill Art Foundation, H Queen’s, Hong Kong, 27 March – 8 April

Performance x 4A Art Central, Hong Kong 27 March – 1 April 11 Christopher Wool, Riot, 1987, enamel on paper, 56 × 35 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

1 New Delhi-based Subodh Gupta has made a career out of rendering the ordinary extraordinary, principally through the way he organises accumulations of everyday cooking vessels and utensils into largescale symbolic structures such as skulls and mushroom clouds. Yet while his works are visually spectacular, they’re more than mere nourishment for follower-hungry Instagram accounts. Atomised, his sculptures evoke histories of individual meals prepared and shared in a manner that at the same time suggests harmony (individual elements coming together to form a bigger picture) and conflict (that picture often suggests violence of one sort or another). Of course, in many respects those poles represent the problem of living with other people: an issue that in a place as culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse as India can often be acute (particularly in light of the recent

rise of Hindu nationalism within the country and attendant beef bans). Although anyone who participated in his Cooking the World project in the Unlimited section of last year’s Art Basel (yeah, yeah, we’ll get to the Asian incarnation of contemporary art’s mammon shortly), in which the artist offered ‘viewers’ food he’d prepared in a kitchen constructed out of his signature materials, will have felt more of the harmony than the conflict. This April sees the opening of Gupta’s first retrospective in France, at the Monnaie de Paris. As well as the monumental works, look out for some of Gupta’s recent experiments with sound and enjoy the delicious irony of his exhibiting in an institution created (way back in 864 CE) to turn metal into objects of desire, worth and economic exchange. Economic exchange of the charitable kind 2 forms the backdrop to Samson Young’s Songs

for Disaster Relief World Tour, which brings the Hong Kong-based artist’s exhibition at the SAR’s pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale back to home soil. The body of work on show at the M+ Pavilion riffs off the fad for charity pop singles aimed at raising awareness of and somehow curing the world’s social and economic ills. Although primarily noted for his use of sound as a medium, here Young uses a variety of media to create a sensory experience that explores the latent political and social structure originally projected during the Thatcher–Reagan era (the heyday of the charity song) and the prejudice and inequality it embodies and perpetuates. More than that he explores the ways in which the medium of song articulates relations between the self and the other, and acts as a medium to express, but also perhaps to suppress, issues of empathy, emotion and social concern.

1 Subodh Gupta,Very Hungry God, 2006, stainless steel, 390 × 320 × 400 cm. © the artist. Photo: Roman Suslov. Courtesy the artist and Garage CCC, Moscow

2 Samson Young, Palazzo Gundane (homage to the myth-maker who fell to earth), 2017, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

3 I wish to let you fall out of my hands (Chapter II), 2017 (installation view). Courtesy Experimenter, Kolkata

4 Wolfgang Tillmans, sections, 2017. © the artist. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York, London & Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York, and Maureen Paley, London 5 Mark Bradford, Rocket, 2018, mixed media on canvas, 183 × 244 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong

experiments with form, and (at the other end While you and I can’t be in two places at of the age scale) Dhaka-based Ayesha Sultana, once, it’s something that’s entirely possible whose hypnotic watercolours follow her for an artist or a gallerist. Hence Kolkata’s interest in material, movement and distance Experimenter gallery is opening a second space (and, fundamentally, form). Young’s offering in the city at Ballygunge Place and inaugurating 3 it with a group show, I wish to let you fall out is in the form of a drawing that explores (and probably devours) the conventions of my hands (Chapter II), that includes work by of musical notation. Young. (Chapter I, in case you were wondering, Back in Hong Kong, contemporary art is on show at the gallery’s Hindustan Road space.) The exhibition’s curatorial premise is currently chewing its way through the revolves around the fall of a thought or emotion H Queen’s building. David Zwirner became to engender a collapse that might result in its the latest gallery to open a space there (on the reexamination or reconstruction. What the hell fifth and sixth floors) at the end of January does that look like? Well, Experimenter has and will open the debut show in the SAR by assembled works in a variety of media by eight 4 superstar photographer Wolfgang Tillmans of the artists it represents to show you. Among (for more on that, see the features section) to the exhibitors are influential nonagenarian coincide with Art Basel Hong Kong. Hauser Indian artist Krishna Reddy, who shows & Wirth meanwhile will open their latest space drawings from the 1950s articulating various (15th and 16th floors) with an exhibition of

Spring 2018

5 work by Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford on 26 March. Like Young, Bradford represented his nation at last year’s Venice Biennale and, in what was something of a monumental year for the American, unveiled Pickett’s Charge, a suitably monumental suite of paintings (collectively measuring more than 100 linear metres) that reinterpreted one of the defining moments of the American Civil War (the subject of an 1883 cyclorama by French painter Paul Philippoteaux, itself reinterpreted in Bradford’s work) in a work of cut, torn and scraped layers that reflects on the complexities of history, its interpretation and its impact upon the present sociopolitical climate in the US. Somewhere along the way he’s found the time to create new works for his Hong Kong debut. Taking things one step further (albeit five floors down) is Pace Gallery, for whom

H Queen’s will be home to its second exhibition A moment of lightness, one assumes, for an concerns, he seeks to push his materials beyond space in Hong Kong, opening with a solo show artist who has recently been newsworthy their physical limitations, building on the as a result of his struggles with bipolarism 6 by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. Last year, legacies of kinetic art and arte povera. at Pace New York, Nara’s exhibition Thinker and litigious former assistants. By now you’ll be traumatised by all the Meanwhile, and not to be outdone by the marked a turn away from the Pop-inspired running up and down the H Queen’s staircase, competition, Tang Contemporary Art (founded cutesy violence (wide-eyed children with so why not relax in the atrium, where a selecin Bangkok, but an early H Queen’s adopter, knives) with which he made his name three tion of works (from the New York-based Hill decades ago to paintings, drawings and sculpwhere it’s comfortably housed on the tenth floor) Art Foundation) by preeminent American 11 painter Christopher Wool are on show. will open a show of work titled Refutation by ture that meditated on process, colour and material. You’ll doubtless be on tenterhooks Billionaire vice-chairman of the Blackstone 8 Chinese big gun and Lego menacer Ai Weiwei, advance details of which, as is often the case to see which Nara will turn up in Hong Kong. Group (a private equity firm), J. Tomlinson with this politically sensitive artist, are thin There will be no such surprises on H Queen’s Hill owns no less than 14 of the artist’s works, on the ground. Heading upwards again, to the seventh and eighth floors, where American and in Hong Kong he’ll be sharing that slice 7 monomedium glass sculptor Dale Chihuly 17th floor, Galerie Ora-Ora’s second exhibition of his life with you. Wool’s signature text in their H Queen’s digs features work by Chinese will be exhibiting various series of works at paintings, such as an untitled work on paper Whitestone Gallery. Among them will be selecfrom 1992 reading HOLE IN YOUR FUCKIN 9 painter Xiao Xu. Down one floor again and tions from Ikebana, which takes Japanese flower Pearl Lam presents work by Italian sculptor HEAD, may well describe what all the scamparranging as an inspiration, appropriate, 10 Arcangelo Sassolino. Working at the juncture ering and art-absorbing has done to you, but perhaps, to a gallery that was founded in Tokyo. of industrial processes and environmental you can lose yourself in some of the master’s

6 Yoshitomo Nara, studio view of sculpture in progress, 2018, ceramic. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery, Hong Kong

10 Arcangelo Sassolino, Untitled, 2018, concrete and steel, 154 × 140 × 22 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong

9 Xiao Xu, Beyond the Sky, 2017, ink on paper, 40 × 60 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Ora-Ora, Hong Kong

7 Dale Chihuly, Zinc Orange Macchia with Turquoise Lip Wrap, 2012, glass, 51 × 76 × 77 cm. Courtesy the artist and Whitestone Gallery, Hong Kong

ArtReview Asia

13 Daido Moriyama, Lightbox: Another Country New York, 1971/2018, painted lightbox with chromogenic transparency face-mounted to acrylic, 155 × 105 × 7 cm. Courtesy the artist, Each Modern, Taipei, and Akio Nagasawa, Tokyo

12 Zhou Siwei, Image Carrier 02, 2015, digital print, 200 × 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

more abstract works, such as Maybe Maybe Not (2003), and perhaps achieve a moment of calm amidst the H Queen’s storm. Suitably refreshed, you’ll be ready to head over to a real Hong Kong powerhouse (and ArtReview Asia’s partner on its Future Greats project – next instalment coming this summer), 12 K11 Art Foundation. Emerald City a two-part show (yes, exhibitions can be in two different places at the same time too) curated by the foundation’s recently installed artistic director, Venus Lau (formerly artistic director of OCAT Shenzhen), offers work by 40 artists in a variety of media exploring the ways in which geometry, geography and its relation to global networks of knowledge-sharing influence our sense of location within the world. As you’d expect from a foundation that has built its reputation on forging networks between China

and the international art scene, as well as developing the careers of young artists within the Greater China region, the works on show span creations by 1980s Neo-Geo stars Ashley Bickerton and Peter Halley through to new commissions by the current generation of Chinese artists, including Shanghai-based sculptor Zhang Ruyi and Guangzhou-based twin-sister duo Mountain River Jump! As importantly, the exhibition marks a new phase in K11’s evolution, being the first of its exhibitions to be internally conceived and curated. While we’re on the subject of ‘the new’, Taipei welcomes a new gallery space this March in the form of Each Modern. Its opening show, Radiation, however, features work by a Japanese artist whose reputation was built during the late 1960s and 1970s and consequently, by the up-to-the-minute standards

ArtReview Asia

of the contemporary artworld, is something of a known entity: something old. Ouch! That cutting edge hurts. During the late 1960s 13 photographer Daido Moriyama (who was, incidentally, the first Japanese photographer to be awarded the International Center of Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Award) was associated with Japan’s cult photography magazine Provoke, whose are-bure-boke aesthetic (grainy/rough) remains a significant influence on young photographers today. The Taipei show will feature eight new lightbox works in which Moriyama reinterprets some of his iconic images, bringing new light to bear on his classic scenes of the darker aspects of urban life. Both old and new, then: everyone should be happy. If the show’s title – Kara Kum – is anything to go by, then the latest exhibition by Paris-based

朱金石 ZHU JINSHI

拒绝河流

Rejecting River Currents

时间的船

The Ship of Time

2018. 3.10 - 4. 30

OPENING 开幕

3.10/16:00 北京市朝阳区酒仙桥路2号798艺术区当代唐人艺术中心 Tang Contemporary Art, 798 Art District, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang Dst. Beijing, China info@tangcontemporary.com +86 10 59789610 www.tangcontemporary.com

14 Turkish artist Nil Yalter will be darker still.

A leading light of the French feminist movement in art during the 1970s, Yalter built her reputation on a series of works (chiefly in the form of drawings, videos, photographic collages and performances) exploring the role of women in society and the plight of migrants and refugees. Kara kum, which means ‘black sand’ in the Turkic languages, refers to Yalter’s observations at a foundry in the Hasköy neighbourhood of Istanbul, where sand is burned to black. Karakum is also the name of a desert in Turkmenistan that has black soil beneath its surface and is home to the Darvaza gas crater, known as the ‘Door to Hell’, which has been burning away for the past 40 years – nature’s foundry, if you like. The exhibition will focus on Yalter’s observations of transformations within the Hasköy neighbourhood

and ‘concepts of production and destruction, largescale animations and tapestries, and chaos-balance, black holes and universe(s)’. present some of the English-language haiku She’s thinking big, as usual, and doubtless he has been working on more recently. Exhibitions by Phillip Lai tend to be masterdeploying her particular skills in making the 16 classes in getting the most out of the least. particular seem universal to carry the whole The Malaysian-born, London-based artist uses thing off. the overly precious setting of the gallery space Thinking big in a different way is New to pull objects – cooking utensils, kitchen fit15 York-based Dutch-Brazilian Rafaël Rozendaal, tings, plastic tubs, sheets of jute, etc – out of whose latest exhibition, Generosity, is on show their utilitarian context in such a way as to force at the Ryue Nishizawa-designed Towada Art viewers to think about them as discrete objects, Center. Rozendaal pioneered the sale of webor things in and of themselves, while in the sites (and the material on them) as artworks as a process challenging the assumptions we make means of creating art that could be private but about their functionality and attendant conremain public: when a collector buys a work cerns such as, for example, the social status (often abstract or geometric moving image), of the person who might own such an object, their name is added to the site’s source code, its role in their lives and that relation in respect but the work remains accessible to general net to one’s own style of living. Such objects might surfers (apparently his sites attract 50 million be a paint- or glue-stained plastic bowl (an visits per year). In Japan, Rozendaal will create

14 Nil Yalter, Hasköy (still), 2018, single-channel video, 25 min. Courtesy the artist and Galerist, Istanbul

16 Phillip Lai, In the Half Life, 2018 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong & Shanghai

15 Rafaël Rozendaal, Generosity, 2015 (installation view, MU Foundation, Eindhoven). Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

17 OSGEMEOS, White Carnival, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Max Yawney. Courtesy the artists and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong & Seoul

19 Michael Craig-Martin, Gardenfork (magenta), 2017. Courtesy the artist

18 Art Basel Hong Kong, 2017. © Art Basel

object from the artist’s studio?) or a similar, mixed pop-cultural influences and folk art but clean, plastic bowl mounted on the wall and traditions, to a highly successful gallery career filled with a small amount of rice (preparation (although that’s not to say that they no longer for cooking?): they’re the same but different, make murals). They’ll be bringing some of and we process the information about these their figurative paintings (many of which feature their signature yellow characters – let’s objects (even if they have material, proportional see how that pans out when transported from and functional equivalence) in a different their native Brazil to East Asia) to Lehmann manner as a result. In the Half Life at Edouard Maupin Hong Kong, as well as a sound instalMalingue Gallery’s Hong Kong space features lation, White Carnival (2016), a collagelike Lai’s latest works, and if you’re tempted to assembly of speakers, each of which is painted think of them as being like Subodh Gupta’s as if it were the widemouthed head of a singer without the polish, don’t: Lai sometimes uses in a choir. polish too. At this point, you’ll probably have noticed While Lai often takes objects we might that you’re back in Hong Kong again, like… associate with the street into the gallery, the art errr… a moth to a flame, and, of course, it’s at practice of identical twin brothers Gustavo and 17 Otavio Pandolfo, better known as OSGEMEOS, the annual illuminations of Asia’s flagship art 18 fair, Art Basel Hong Kong, that your wings has evolved from early days on the streets of will get singed. This year 248 galleries from São Paulo, where they made graffiti art that

Spring 2018

32 countries and territories will be competing to sell you their wares, alongside an extensive talks programme that promises to read like a who’s who of the Asian artworld. There’s no better occasion to measure your own status in the great game of art. Presumably it’s a self-deprecating take on status that has led the Hong Kong Arts Centre to present what’s billed as the SAR’s ‘first international sculpture park’ as being populated by ‘renowned international names as well as the best of home grown talent’, as if the two 19 things were mutually exclusive. The Harbour Arts Sculpture Park stretches through the Central and Western District Promenade and into Wan Chai and is cocurated by Fumio Nanjo (director of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and director of international programmes at Hong Kong Art School) and Tim Marlow

20 Ryan Gander, Upside down Breuer chair after a couple of inches of snowfall, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Roman März. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and GB Agency, Paris

21 Haegue Yang, The Intermediate – Pair Incarnate, Gwynplaine and Ursus, 2015, mixed media, 220 × 110 × 90 cm. Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy the artist

22 Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, Mondo Futuro, 2017, performance still. Courtesy the artists and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

(artistic director at the Royal Academy of Arts, retrospective exhibition at the Museum Ludwig of Sydney, which takes equilibrium and in Cologne. What that means is more than 120 London). The participating artists are: Rasheed engagement as its themes, under the heading works (minus, one assumes, whatever work is Araeen (UK), Michael Craig-Martin (Ireland), Superposition: a term liberated from the jargon in Sydney) in diverse media and formats, rangTracey Emin (UK), Ho Kwun Ting (HKSAR), of quantum mechanics, where it refers to ing from lacquer paintings made during the Jenny Holzer (US), Gimhongsok (South Korea), the principle that the net response caused by early 1990s, through key works such as Storage Antony Gormley (UK), Zheng Guogu (China), two or more stimuli is equal to the sum of the Piece (2004), which features a series of the artist’s Yayoi Kusama (Japan), Tony Oursler (US), responses that would have been caused by each works packed onto shipping palettes – a reflecConrad Shawcross (UK), Bosco Sodi (Mexico), stimulus individually. That translates in art tion on the financial crisis – and VIP’s Union Hank Willis Thomas (US), Matthew Tsang terms into an exhibition looking at how various (2001–), for which local celebrities (or failing (HKSAR), Mark Wallinger (UK), Zhan Wang opposing views of the world can come together that, VIPs) lend their chairs to be used by visi(China), Wong Chi-yung (HKSAR), Kacey Wong in equilibrium. No surprises then that work tors for the duration of the exhibition, as well (HKSAR) and Morgan Wong (HKSAR). Those by Samson Young will be popping up here too, as the artist’s venetian-blind installations and Hong Kong artists, the project’s advance but look out also for projects by ArtReview Asia Medicine Men series (2010). Also on show will be announcement boasts, are allowed ‘to share favourites Nicholas Mangan, Maria Taniguchi, the artist’s acute sensibilities to the staging and a platform with some of the biggest names Prabhavathi Meppayil, Simryn Gill, Ryan crafting of exhibitions. in art’. But don’t let that put you off. Gander and Hsu Chia-Wei. Meanwhile, back in Australia, they can’t get Over in Sydney, Nanjo’s colleague Mami Also presenting work in Sydney is Korean Kataoka (chief curator at the Mori) is directing 21 artist Haegue Yang, who as the 2018 recipient 22 enough of biennials, with the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art also clicking into 20 the 45th anniversary edition of the Biennale of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize will stage her first

ArtReview Asia

23 Nontawat Numbenchapol, Green Canvas Doi Army Combat Boot, 2016–17, two-channel video, colour, sound, 10 min. Courtesy the artist and MAIIAM, Chiang Mai

25 Anna Boghiguian, 2017 (installation view, Castello di Rivoli). Photo: Renato Ghiazza. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

24 Latif Al Ani, Pipe construction for the Darbandikhan water pipeline project, Iraq, 1961, gelatin silver negative on film, 6 × 6 cm. Courtesy the Arab Image Foundation, Lebanon

gear this March. Titled Divided Worlds and, like 24 Sydney, promising to respond to the fact that we live in troubled times, the biennial features 30 Australian artists, but nevertheless thinks outside such narrow constraints by promising to offer ‘an allegory that meditates on the drama of the cosmos and evolution’. So even if the geographical frame of reference seems small, the thinking behind the biennial is big. Testing geographical limitations in a differ23 ent way will be DIASPORA: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia at Thailand’s MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum. The exhibition features work by 18 artists from Southeast Asia (and – note to Adelaide – Australia in the case of Abdul Abdullah), including habitual biennial-botherer Ho Tzu Nyen and Thai filmmaker Nontawat Numbenchapol, that tackles the issue of displacement in both its positive and negative aspects.

Over the past few years, the photographs result of memories of the 1958 military coup of Latif Al Ani have been gaining increasing (which overthrew the country’s Hashemite exposure via a series of exhibitions and publimonarchy and led to the Ba’athist Party’s rise cations around the world. This spring the to power) and subsequent attacks on the Iraqi’s work, which documents the ‘golden age’ cosmopolitanism of Iraq society, Al Ani (who of Iraq from the early 1950s to the advent of stopped taking photographs just prior to the the Iran–Iraq War in 1980, is the subject of a outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War) had a constant retrospective at Sharjah Art Foundation. Al Ani sense of the fragility of the era and society sought to capture all aspects – social, cultural, he was recording: ‘Fear was a major motive political, industrial and agricultural – of his to document everything as it was,’ the phocountry’s then-cosmopolitan and increasingly tographer once said. ‘I did all that I could to urban society. In the process he pioneered document, to safeguard that time.’ It is, then, aerial photography in the country and the use as ironic as it is tragic that a large part of his of colour film; he also founded the photogarchive was destroyed during the US invasion raphy department of Iraq’s Ministry of Inforof Iraq in 2003. At Sharjah Art Foundation, mation and Guidance in 1960 and headed the the exhibition is complemented by an extensive display of four decades of work by same department at the Iraqi News agency during the 1970s. By that time his work was 25 Egyptian-Armenian Anna Boghiguian, which travels from Italy’s Castello di Rivoli. being exhibited worldwide. Yet, in part as a

ArtReview Asia

Like Al Ani, Boghiguian attempts to docuartist’s work, which spans a variety of media ment modern metropolitan life, but the end including animation and more recently waterresults – ranging from two-dimensional works colours, fuses the cutesy, the creepy and the surreal. Or, as in the watercolour Rollergirl (2017), to multimedia installations – are about as a collaged and painted sock. different as you can get. 26 28 Presumably Aoki would appreciate the Kyoto-based Ryoko Aoki wins first prize for best exhibition title of the season with 27 philosophy of fellow Japanese artist Rie Nakajima, who aims at ‘starting from where Notebook forgotten at three party meeting, on show I know and ending up somewhere else’. For at Tokyo’s Take Ninagawa. Previous works have her exhibition Cyclic 2 (I know, boring!) at featured Rorschach-style collaged renderings Birmingham’s Ikon, the London-based artist, of faces in which the eyes, noses and mouths who usually works somewhere near the border are formed of mirrored pairs of women and of sound and sculpture, has gathered concrete animals in a variety of poses, as well as baroque and metal objects found on Birmingham’s ink-drawings featuring masked or bespectaBrindleyplace estate and will combine them cled, Harry-Potter-esque men frolicking on into kinetic assemblages that create sound. In broomsticks amidst the kind of flora and fauna addition to that she’ll be continuing O YAMA O, that an eighteenth-century painter such as her collaborative project with Keiko Yamamoto Jean-Antoine Watteau might have used to decin which the pair explore ‘music with no genre’ orate one of his fêtes galantes. The Japanese

and stage performance events with regular collaborators such as Pierre Berthet and David Toop. Right, almost time for ArtReview Asia to troop off, but before it does, let’s take a final trip to Hong Kong for Performance x 4A, which takes place in Hong Kong’s other art fair, Art Central, and is programmed by Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. During the course of the fair, artists – including Caroline Garcia, FJ Kunting, Sam Lo and Hong Kong-based duo Sampson Wong and Lam Chi Fai – will address two themes that clearly haunt art events across Asia this spring, inequality and dispossession, by pushing the boundaries of performance art. Although presumably not beyond the boundaries of Art Central’s tent. And with that, ArtReview Asia is also drawing the line. Nirmala Devi

27 Rie Nakajima, detail of material for a performance, 2016. Photo: Marie Roux. Courtesy the artist

26 Ryoko Aoki, Notebook forgotten at three party meeting, 2018, watercolour on paper, collage, 26 × 18 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Take Ninagawa, Tokyo

28 Caroline Garcia, The Vitrine of Dancing Cultures, 2018. Courtesy the artist and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney

Spring 2018

Mona Saudi, Growth, 2002. Sharjah Art Foundation Collection | Zineb Sedira, Sugar Silo I, 2014. © Zineb Sedira. Courtesy the artist and the galleries The Third Line, Dubai and Plutschow Gallery, Zürich | Anna Boghiguian,The Salt Traders, 2015. Installation view at the 14th Istanbul Biennial Tuzlu su [Saltwater], 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Foundation for culture and Arts, Istanbul | Mohammed Ibrahim, Primodial, 1988. Sharjah Art Foundation Collection | Latif Al-Ani, Self Portrait in a mirror of Latif Al-Ani (left), standing next to filmmaker Latif Saleh (right) at the Abedeen Palace, Cairo, Egypt, 1964. Latif Al-Ani Collection, Image courtesy of Arab Image Foundation | Raedah Saadeh, Vacuum, 2007. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation

Spring 2018 Exhibitions

Mona Saudi: Poetry and Form

Zineb Sedira: Air Affairs and Maritime NonSense

Anna Boghiguian

Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim: Elements

Latif Al Ani: Through the Lens 1953-1979

Active Forms Selections from Sharjah Art Foundation Collection

16 March – 16 June

16 March – 16 June 16 March – 16 June 7 March – 7 June

sharjahart.org

Under the Paving Stones

Mumbai holds up a mirror by Mark Rappolt

Baggage It’s nighttime when I set out to find the entrance of the Clark House Initiative, an exhibition space and artist residency in the south of Mumbai. Its website coughed up directions rather than an address – ‘Opposite Sahakari Bhandar and Regal Cinema, next to Woodside Inn’ – although I guess its name is its address. Or perhaps that should be the other way around. Indeed, finding the building is no problem; finding the entrance to the bit of the building that houses the art space is less straightforward. I navigate round a roadside cigarette seller, whose lighter, attached by a string to his trolley and free to use, currently seems to be more of a draw to what you could generously call his ‘customers’ than the goods they are supposed to be paying him for – the vibe is as much social club as it is site of trade. For me it’s a curiosity and an obstacle at the same time. From there it’s down a darkened side path next to the run-down but nevertheless imposing Clark House building, which formerly housed a pharmaceutical company, an antiques store and then the storage facility for a shipping company that serviced trade routes east and west of the port town. The entrance turns out to be behind the door I walked past twice. But once I’m there it seems fitting, given the building’s history, that the entrance lobby is decorated with a variety of black rubber handbags and rucksacks, and that someone immediately shouts out that they are all for sale. In fact, the building as a whole turns out to be maintained as a type of palimpsest of its former uses: worn statuettes of various deities decorate niches and

Hamedine Kane’s Salesmen of the Revolt, 2018, at the Clark House Intitiative

Mumbai streetview

shelves on the ground floor; the odd piece of antique-looking furniture pops up in the corner of most rooms; and the peeling walls offer glimpses of decorations and artworks past. It gives the space a certain charm, just about stopping short of something an interior decorator might market as ‘shabby chic’, while at the same time signalling that this is a site of industry in which the residents have no time for superficial activities such as renovating the decor. It turns out the bags are made by a brand called Chamar. The Chamars have their roots in India’s Dalit communities (Dalit comes from the Sanskrit for ‘oppressed’ – and generally refers to what were once called the ‘untouchables’ in India’s caste system) and were known for their leatherwork. Since the recent rise of Hindu nationalism and consequent beef bans, leather is much harder to come by, so the Chamar brand is repurposing the community’s skills to work in other materials. I know that I’d feel good about buying one, but I’ve been in India for two weeks now and I’ve acquired too much baggage already.

Tongues Someone who ostensibly hasn’t is Hamedine Kane, a MauritanianSenegalese artist who, on the evidence of the video projection in front of me as I enter Clark House’s project space (its atrium), has been walking around Mumbai with a stack of 13 books balanced on his head, attempting

to strike up conversation (based around reading or distributing the books) with local people. The books are on a ledge behind me. They’re all in French and include works by Frantz Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, Chester Haines, James Baldwin, Ferdinand Oyono, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Joseph Zobel. The title of each volume contains a reference to the words ‘negre’, ‘negro’ or ‘noir’. I’m told the artist was inspired by young booksellers who would carry their wares this way on the beach in Dakar. Presumably he’s also inspired by the content of the books themselves. The project is titled Salesmen of the Revolt, though there’s not so much of a revolutionary aura coming off the artist as he wanders past various confused-looking people on Mumbai’s streets. But maybe actions always speak louder than words when it comes to revolutionary politics. Because you can never guarantee that other people will understand your words. I’m later told that the project hasn’t gone that smoothly, because English is not Kane’s first language and French isn’t big in Mumbai: consequently, the revolution is a hard sell. Gestures and body language dominate his interactions. While Hindi and English dominate discourse in India, the country’s constitution lists 22 scheduled (or recognised) languages, but as of 2001 there were 122 that are spoken by groups of at least 10,000 people. There are, of course, hundreds more that are spoken by smaller communities than that. I’m not a good enough linguist to have been able to tell when the conversations have switched from being in Tamil, to Hindi or to any other language for that matter as I’ve travelled through India, from south to north. But I am aware that this ignorance is not a good thing. A series of wonderfully raw woodblock prints of the book covers, by Tejswini Sonawane, a fellow artist that Kane met during his residency at Clark House, completes the display: somehow Kane’s project seems to have worked best when it is reduced to an aesthetic. These prints would be the perfect thing to hang in a London apartment and fully impress upon your

One of Tejswini Sonawane’s woodblock covers created for Hamedine Kane’s Salesmen of the Revolt, 2018, at the Clark House Initiative

European friends the seriousness of your commitment to oppressed races and communities, and their attendant revolutionary politics. That’s what art’s for, right? To project your ideal self in the place of your less-than-ideal real self? But then I look back to the video, in which an elderly Bombayite is carefully removing a book from the stack and gesturing excitedly at the artist, who is, in turn, waving his hands back at him. I have no idea what they’re conversing about, but maybe there’s more to this than aesthetics alone. I settle for writing down all the book titles and moving on. I’m still not sure if all that makes me a very shallow person. Maybe the bags were a better idea. It’s easier to explain to the punters down at the Fox & Anchor that you’re giving voice to the voiceless and fighting caste prejudice one wipe-clean rucksack at a time.

Aligning with the nonaligned

above and below Jihan El Tahri’s Forward Then To…?, 2018, at the Clark House Initiative

‘Moving on’ doesn’t take me very far. About five steps, in fact, before I run into curator Sumesh Sharma, one of the founders of the Clark House Initiative (his family used to run the shipping business), who offers me a cup of tea and a chat about the residency-cum-exhibition space. And then a tour of Forward Then To…?, an exhibition by the newly arrived resident, French-Egyptian filmmaker Jihan El Tahri. The exhibition gathers together archive material (film and photographs) relating to the 1955 Bandung Conference and the founding of the nonaligned movement. And then traces this attempt at plotting a path through postcolonialism that was independent of colonialism, and of the received political alignments of the postwar era, through to the assassinations of Anwar Sadat and Indira Ghandi. Stretches of barbed wire and cotton (the industry that linked colonial India and Egypt) form clunky unifying motifs, stretching through the two floors of the building like threads through the Minotaur’s Labyrinth. You might call the work a conversation piece for the way in which it makes certain histories visible and places them in dialogue with each other. Up on the top floor of the exhibition there’s a juxtaposition of actual news footage of the aftermath of Sadat’s assassination, placed next to Bollywood footage of Indira Gandhi’s violent demise (although in a curious way the distinction between the real and the imagined is rather moot given that neither footage shows an actual

ArtReview Asia

Ideal Person Chen Xi 24 March–13 May 2018 Shanghai

apluscontemporary.org

Art Basel Hong Kong Discoveries: Morgan Wong Film: Cai Hui, Chen Xi 29 March–31 March 2018

Mulan River-Voyage Chen Yufan, Chen Yujun 28 April–3 June 2018 Taipei

Hetain Patel’s Don’t Look at the Finger, 2017, at Chatterjee & Lal

bullet hitting an actual body). The two videos are presented on separate screens at right angles to each other, as pages in an open book, revealing histories that I want to learn more about. The abiding sensation is one of watching another reading list being generated, although I’m not completely sure about what’s on it as yet. The Clark House experience also extends to more conversations, and drinks, in a nearby rooftop hotel bar with India beating South Africa (again) at cricket on a jumbo screen on one side of us and a mock colonial facade and balcony on the other (just for show – there’s nothing but a staircase behind it), from which hosts can greet their guests at parties. But we ignore these instances of popular culture (with all the implications that implies with respect to the relative popularity of the culture we’re discussing), and the conversation meanders around the rights and wrongs of various movers and shakers within the Indian art scene and the place of Indian art on the international scene. Which, of course, covers the relatively banal experience of last week’s India Art Fair in Delhi and the attendant whiskey-fuelled social scene that somewhat overwhelms it. Someone mentions that a party of Tate patrons and curators went by the week before muttering that their new ‘strategy’ was going to be about aligning their programme with the member states of the nonaligned movement. There’s no denying that over the past few years Bandung and the kind of antiglobalised global system suggested by nonalignment has been one of the most fashionable things on which to base your curatorial engagement with non-European art histories. It’s much safer that way.

either a betrothal ceremony or mating ritual. And given the African-style setting (mainly conveyed via dress and a dusky lighting setup), I imagine that it’s perhaps the kind of scene that might be included in Marvel’s Black Panther movie, which is just about to come out in cinemas here. (Although perhaps I’m directed to think this by the fact that Patel’s The Jump, 2015, a two-channel video featuring Spider Man leaping off a rooftop and into an Indian family’s living room, is screening at the other end of the room.) It’s beautifully shot, choreographed and produced, but beyond that it seems to fall a bit flat – between a variety of stools, the action speaking of part ceremony, part battle, part courtship and yet seemingly not totally committed to any one of those things, let alone all of them – and I’m not sure what to make of it. It leaves me wondering if beauty alone could or should be enough, and whether or not I have some sort of ‘problem’ or ‘guilty conscience’ about the very notion of pleasure when it comes to art. Or maybe that’s just the case when it comes to art produced or offered up here. I don’t think it should be fun. It should be revelatory and problematic. More like Kane’s failed conversations than this incredibly successful but orchestrated one. The problems, I realise, are all mine. Because for me, flirting with both people and cultures is a clumsy and awkward experience, and nothing like what I’m seeing and enjoying onscreen.

Island There’s an aura of seduction too in Ghost Lines, an exhibition by Chicagobased Ayesha Singh at the Mumbai Art Room, a small shopfront space around the corner from Chatterjee & Lal. The exhibition takes the form of a tour of the various architectural styles, interpreted through a succession of columns, that have contributed to the makeup of the city. A video documents the artist’s hand (although that’s an assumption born of an art-historical training that privileges painting and sculpture and the stories told by the ‘hand’ of the artist) as it caresses various of these structural supports. Some of which, of course, might be purely

The problem of beauty The next morning I’m left wondering if the reordering and re-presenting of history and social context is what I look to in art at the moment. And the generating of reading lists, of course. I wonder too as to whether or not that’s because I find the present too complex and messy to explain, let alone understand. And because I find my cultural coordinates (one parent from the East, with strong ties to South India, and one from the West) something within which I am constantly relocating myself. Both consciously and unconsciously. All of which makes my first visit of the morning, to Chatterjee & Lal, where Hetain Patel’s new videowork, Don’t Look at the Finger (2017), is screening, complicated. In part because it is undeniably beautiful, with slick Hollywood-style production values and a colourful setting in what one presumes is some unnamed, unspecific African royal court. It shows a beautiful man and a beautiful woman peacocking their way through a martial arts or aggressive dance scene that riffs off The Matrix (1999) and various wing chun films. I decide its

ArtReview Asia

below Ayesha Singh’s Ghost Lines, 2017, at Mumbai Art Room bottom Shreyas Karle’s Unnecessary Alcove, 2018. Courtesy Project 88

ornamental. There’s also a kinetic sculpture of the silhouette of a classical column, photographs and drawings. But while the show certainly shows up the patchwork of cultures that the city has absorbed over the years, and articulates it as a fruitful palette for research, the exhibition space itself seems too small to truly capture what any of this might actually mean in terms of Mumbai being a space in which people have lived, do live and will live in the future. For all the caressing, this Mumbai seems like a dead zone. Similarly Shreyas Karle’s show Unnecessary Alcove at Project 88, which takes the form of a series of discrete, surrealist-inspired formal – often sculptural – experiments and juxtapositions (elements that look like the tensile experiments of bridge-builders, experimental tailoring, mathematical demonstrations, visual puns – drawers and drawings – and the arrangements of the damaged ornaments from a grandmother’s trinket collection) arranged around a series of suspended tabletops creating a quasi-museological setting in the space, seems like something that is about to move somewhere interesting, but doesn’t quite do so. But, then again, perhaps this is because I’m reluctant to be absorbed in art that exists purely on its own terms, as these seem to do. No man nor artwork is an island. Or something like that. Maybe you could call it art-fair blues; at least that issue – of seeing a succession of contextless works in white cubicles in Delhi – had been prominent last night.

Mad curating That seems to be one of the problems that Mithu Sen attempts to address at one of Mumbai’s main commercial spaces, Chemould Prescott Row. UnMYthU: Byproducts of twenty years of performance starts with a series of legal contracts that undermine the commercial status and market performance of the artworks on show, which encompass drawings, painting and an artist book. The first contract asserts that Sen’s mediums are ‘life and

below Youdhisthir Maharjan’s An Unquiet Mind, 2018, at TARQ

above Mithu Sen’s UnMYthU: Byproducts of twenty years of performance, 2018, at Chemould Prescott Row all photographs but one Courtesy the author

human relationships’; visitors are asked to (un)perform her works with the artist – to strip away the myth of the artist, the aura of the artwork and its attendant value as an object, given that it is merely a witness or vessel for a social interaction. To do all this, the gallery is reframed as a ‘(Con) Temporary Museum’, and visitors are given instructions (for example: ‘By the performance of blackening the tactile form of a previously created artwork, a new byproduct is manifests [sic] that has compounded identities and values which all viewers, patrons and buyers are to keep in mind when engaging and/or evaluating these byproducts’). Yet this viewer at least doesn’t feel that he needs any help in complicating an artwork. The wordplay and overt structuring of the show comes across as an unnecessary embellishment to what are at their best strikingly erotic and humorous series of works: Sen’s drawings in particular (some of which incorporate cast shadows from images scratched into their glass or plastic cases that offer a peculiar animation). Maybe it’s a sign of the self-absorbed madness of contemporary curatorial strategising.

Nothing Back at the fair in Delhi I’d seen works by Nepal-born Youdhisthir Maharjan, and in Mumbai’s super-slick TARQ gallery he’s got a solo show titled An Unquiet Mind. It consists of texts or musical scores that the artist has subjected to various transformations that obliterate their meaning while enhancing their formal beauty. Pages of text are blacked out, the type painstakingly cut out or reinterpreted as a series of patterns, structures or constellations. While language, after these transformations, becomes so problematic it’s almost irrelevant, the sheer labour involved marks Maharjan’s process out as a labour of love rather than of vandalism. Indeed, you could argue that the fact that these texts communicate anything at all after Maharjan has finished with them is some sort of triumph. And his repurposing of these objects (which vary from religious to literary tracts) marks some sort of middle ground between the two poles of my Mumbai experience: these works imply meaning and purpose, they are potentially complex in their relation to censorship, repression and linguistic variance, but they resolve into something self-contained, formally beautiful and approachable. They’re something and nothing at the same time. Mark Rappolt is editor-in-chief of ArtReview Asia

Points of View

Khoj International Artists’ Association is situated in the New Delhi neighbourhood commonly referred to as Khirkee Village, caught between Khirki Fort, built in the mid-fourteenth century under the Tughlaq Dynasty, and a vast luxury shopping centre. Khirkee is in transition, both in its rapid gentrification and in the quick turnover of its residential population of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. It is one of many such neighbourhoods across the subcontinent – intensely hybrid areas in which informal economies flourish. Tensions have been on the rise, with Khirkee’s diverse population of Afghan, Somali, Nigerian, Cameroonian, Guyanese (and other) nationals facing daily discrimination. Khirkee Voice, a quarterly newspaper published by the not-for-profit contemporary arts organisation and edited by artists Malini Kochupillai and Mahavir Singh Bisht, exemplifies how it might be possible to build networks and infrastructures in these neighbourhoods. Bringing together writing by and for the community, the artist-run newspaper is a rare instance of migrants being brought into an institutional fold and fairly compensated for their contributions. ‘Throughout the uncertainty, Khirkee’s engine keeps rolling,’ wrote the editors of the Khirkee Voice to frame its fourth issue, focused on ‘local economies’. A survey of the neighbourhood provides fresh insight into the erratic, and often harsh, economic reforms of the current government and their impact on this community. In another project made possible by Khoj, artist Swati Janu attempts to engage with the most successful of Khirkee’s informal economies by setting up a ‘phone recharge shop’ similar to those in which residents refill their phone plans and download the latest music from their home countries. Janu uses the space as an

NOT THE GALLERY SYSTEM Two decades in, does Khoj International Artists’ Association still model a different kind of infrastructure, asks Skye Arundhati Thomas

Spring 2018

opportunity to research the disseminated content, and has also set up a small recording studio for people to make and record music too. Romeo Kiseke Lembisa, a well-known activist singer and poet in his hometown of Kinshasa – mixing political analogies and protest into popular tunes – arrived in India on refugee status in 2017, approached the recording studio and is now something of a local sensation. The project is characteristic of those supported by Khoj in that it looks to build long-term networks within the community that at least attempt to negotiate some of the complexities inherent to the locality in which they are based. The team at Khoj is small: a curatorial and programming group comprising Mario D’Souza, Radha Mahendru and Mila Samdub, overseen by Pooja Sood. Sood has been director of the association since it was founded in 1997, the same year in which it first convened a workshop that has since become the template for its annual ‘PEERS’ residency. The legacy of Khoj is ripe for mythmaking: some of the most famous contemporary artists from India began there. ‘Khoj is an emblem of our vision of working together in difficult situations,’ writes artist Anita Dube in the catalogue for the initial workshop, ‘pushing against the establishment grain… creating sensitising encounters, addressing the binary polarisations that have hardened into unchangeable positions.’ The same difficulties linger in India today as 20 years ago, even though the art scene is more visible on the international stage than ever before. The gallery system breeds competitiveness between younger generations of artists, many of whom remain caught up in finding representation. Institutional support, as ever, is desperately rare. Khoj provides a template for a different type of art infrastructure, operating as an intermediary between artists, artworld and local community.

The following is an excerpt from my recently published novel Marginal Man. It is set in the India of the Indian National Congress. The present Bharatiya Janata Party regime is no better. The riots of Delhi in 1984 and the Gujarat in 2002 have one thing in common – both happened under the surveillance of the police. Now on to Marginal Man: The house in Mayur Vihar, Delhi, was the eighth house I lived in. I was befriended by Rekhi, a twelve-year-old Sikh boy, as soon as we’d arrived. He lived on the other side of the road, near the gurudwara. His house was in Block 27. On Wednesday, at around ten in the morning, the whole country was rocked by the news of the assassination of Indira Gandhi. At first, we thought that the prime minister’s death was just a nasty rumor, but we soon realised that the story was true. When I stepped out of the house, I was confronted with the sight of hordes of charged people in trucks and vans shouting slogans. I was told they were all heading to AIIMS, where Indira Gandhi’s body was. Some frenzied people were torching DTC buses that hadn’t made it to their depots quickly enough. Rekhi didn’t come to our house that day. I thought of going and checking on him, but as I was unwell and tired, I decided to go the next day. I fervently hoped that riots would not break out. The assassins were Sikhs – her own bodyguards. Would the government impose curfews and issue shoot-at-sight orders? I told my wife, Nalini, to lock the doors from the inside and I went to the gurudwara to see for myself. To my horror, I saw that four people had been set ablaze. They were still alive and running frenziedly while the mob pelted them with stones. Some were even hitting them with sticks. Suddenly, Rekhi crossed my mind and I ran to his house but it was locked. I couldn’t sleep that night. At midnight, I watched the new prime minister eulogise Indira Gandhi on television. “The late prime minister was not just my mother; she was mother to the entire nation. In this difficult moment, let us remember the words of our mother, who said ‘Don’t kill other people. Kill the hate you feel towards other people’, and maintain peace and observe patience. Let us show the world what Bharat’s culture is.” This he said calmly and clearly. (However, the very same man, when asked about the riots at a later date, said, “When a big tree falls, the earth shakes”). At daybreak, I got out of bed and made my way to Block 27. Charred bodies lay in front of the gurudwara while hundreds of people shivered inside it in the bitter cold, huddled together. A deathly silence hung over all the houses, most of which were locked.

Notes from Madras Recalling the bloody aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Charu Nivedita observes that in India today tensions run similarly high

ArtReview Asia

The radio news said that army units had been dispatched to places where riots were expected to break out. A curfew had been imposed and the situation was said to be under control. But I saw neither cop nor soldier even after two hours. Some extraordinary slogans were heard by the mob that had come to pay their last respects to the prime minister in Teen Murti Bhavan. “Who murdered India’s daughter? We shall wipe out that race!” “Someone’s at the door. Let’s go see who it is,” Nalini said. It was Rekhi and his mother. As soon as I’d let them in, I closed the door and locked it. The army and the police showed up the next morning but they were no match for the rampaging mobs that kept arriving in jeeps. This time, the mobs didn’t go banging on people’s doors. They went to the ration shop and summoned the owner. They got him to open the shop and take out the register which contained the names of the ration-card holders. They identified all the Sikhs from the register and took down their details. I was standing in the crowd and watching this unfold. Then I realised with a shock what they were planning to do and what was going to happen. The mob made its way to another shop that sold kerosene. They loaded drums and tins onto the jeeps. In the afternoon, the army conducted a march-past. Thirty minutes after it was over, the jeep mob returned to Mayur Vihar. Addresses in hand, they went from house to house, dragging Sikhs out and setting them ablaze. When the people who lived next door to us declared they were Punjabi Hindus, the mobsters refused to believe them. The madmen were still not convinced of their religion even after they were shown the puja room. One of them asked haughtily, “Who is Darbara Singh?” Immediately, the man of the house said, “He is the owner of this house and lives in Tilakpuri.” “You should have mentioned that first, my friend,” he said. They came to our house next. Before they had the chance to say anything, I summoned Rekhi and Harpreet and said, “This is my sister-in-law. Her name is Bindiya. My brother is in the army; he had a love-marriage. This is their son Rakesh. As my brother is in Agra on special duty, they are staying with me and my wife, Nalini, and our daughter.” He turned to me and said, “Madrasi babu, a girl from our village has come to your house. I hope you haven’t lied to me. If I find out you have, you won’t be spared.” With this warning, they left. That night on TV, the commissioner of police announced, “Today, around 15 people have lost their lives, but the situation is under control.”

The BBC reporters reported that on that very day, the worst of the killings had happened. Two hundred bodies were lying in the Tees Hazari police morgue; a thousand Sikhs had been killed in several parts of East Delhi; another thousand had been massacred in West Delhi and almost the entire male Sikh population had been wiped out. Even the trains were full of corpses. Except for New Delhi, there seemed to be no police or army presence anywhere. In the morning, I went to Trilokpuri. The roads were littered with bodies of Sikhs who had been burnt or beaten to death. The remains told me that there were also those who had been hacked to pieces. The houses in Block 27 – Rekhi’s included – had all been burnt black. When I reached Block 28, I saw army trucks driving away with more bodies. It was then that I saw a curious structure that resembled a shed – or did it resemble a tent? I really didn’t know how to describe it to myself or to anyone. It had obviously been constructed with scant resources – wooden boards covered with tarpaulin. Where there were no wooden boards, there were sheets of tin. There was also a barbed wire fence. The thing must have been torched the previous day. The army personnel, who I’d assumed were accustomed to pathetic sights, were themselves staring in shock and disbelief at the fully gutted tent. I walked towards it as I needed a closer look. The tarpaulin had been burnt and the roof was open. Two small children were sitting on a set of planks that was precariously held up by sticks. Their heads were on their knees and they were hugging their legs to their chests. One of the children was around four and the other was probably a little older, six or seven maybe. They were dead, burnt. I was looking at their charred bodies; I was looking at how they died. A young solider covered his face and began to weep while another soldier kicked open the burnt door. Inside stood the charred corpse of a sixty-year-old man looking up at the children with one arm raised. I returned home, numbed by all that I’d seen. I didn’t tell Rekhi or his mother that there was nothing left of Block 27. “The leaders in Teen Murti Bhavan must have dispersed. I think things will be better tomorrow,” I was telling Nalini when we heard a light knock on the door. Wondering who could be knocking so gently, I went to the door and opened it to find the mobsters standing there. “So, Madrasi, you thought you’d take us for a ride, huh?” one of them barked, slapping me hard across the face. “Hey man, leave the madrasi,” said another one. “Where is sardar?” On hearing this commotion, Rekhi and his mother came out of the room. A mobster caught

Rekhi by the neck and threw him with such force that he landed against the wall and broke his nose. “We will celebrate Lohri [festival] here itself!” said one fellow with a tin in his hand. “No brother, we don’t have enough petrol. There are four other people in the street. We don’t want to burn them off one by one and waste the petrol, do we?” Saying this, he picked up Rekhi, who was stuporous, and threw him into the jeep. The rest of the mob hopped onto it. Rekhi’s mother and Nalini tried chasing the jeep. I ran after my daughter who had run out to follow them. I picked her up and we stood there, frozen. A building belonging to Sikhs burns in Daryaganj, the old part of New Delhi, 2 November 1984. Photo: BEDI/AFP/Getty Images

Spring 2018

Marginal Man is published by Zero Degree Publishing

In a parallel universe, in which Thailand transformed fully from absolute monarchy in 1932 and has maintained a thriving democracy ever since, Siburapha would be a national hero. But the newspaper editor and novelist’s reputation as a pioneer of modern literature, mass communication and print media has in this universe been kept alive only by a small group of intellectuals. The relative neglect of this influential political activist and peerless Thai writer is evidence of the fact that, in our reality at least, Thailand has never existed as a true democracy. That most Thais do not realise the influence of Kulap Saipradit (who used the nom de plume Siburapha) on their society and culture might partly be due to the fact that, in order to escape imprisonment after a coup, he went into exile in China in 1958 and passed away there in 1974. With most of his books now out of print, this advocate for human rights and democracy is best remembered by the general public for a single novel, Khang lang phap (translated as Behind the Painting in 1990). It is no surprise that Behind the Painting (written in 1937 and serialised in a newspaper before its publication as a book), the story of a romance across generations and social classes, appeals to a wider readership than Siburapha’s more explicitly political works, such as the outspoken Lae Pai Kang Na (Looking into the Future, 1957). Most of the key scenes take place in the faraway and evocative land of Japan (in Siburapha’s era, only people of high social status, or those who received special work or educational opportunities, travelled abroad), and the novel is filled with sumptuous passages and poignant dialogue. The novel’s tragic heroine is Lady Kirati, a beautiful royal who agrees to marry the older Chao Khun Athikanbodi because, at thirty-five, she fears that her chances of finding love have passed. On honeymoon in Japan, she meets and falls in love with Nopporn, a twenty-two-yearold Thai student asked by Chao Khun to accompany Lady Kirati on some of her outings. The star-crossed lovers nearly die of heartbreak when she boards her ship to return home, but by the time Nopporn has completed his studies, the passion he once felt has been extinguished. He returns to Thailand and marries, unaware that Lady Kirati is still in love with him until she sends a message from her deathbed. Her

Peepholes in Happyland In a better world, says Prabda Yoon, Siburapha would be a household name

Cover of Siburapha’s Behind the Painting, 1937. Courtesy the Saipradit family

ArtReview Asia

confession may be Thai literature’s best-known scene, familiar even to those who have never read Behind the Painting. Siburapha’s progressive convictions manifest in his characters’ points of view more than in the style or structure of his stories. Lady Kirati embodies a person whose worldview is informed by her interest in art: she is a Sunday painter who finds in art some freedom from the monotony of life as a woman in an upper-class family. Proof of her and Nopporn’s past love comes in the form of a watercolour she paints depicting a shared moment on a mountain near Tokyo, and the memory ‘behind the painting’ keeps her love alive. Beyond its romantic appeal, Behind the Painting is also a recommended ‘outside-reading’ book at many high schools and has been made into TV series, plays (including a musical in 2008) and films (in 1985 by director Piak Poster, and in 2001 by Cherd Songsri). The novel has therefore been able to stake its claim as a literary classic in mainstream Thai culture, detached from its author’s politics and even from other of his works that delve more deeply into social issues. While the issue of class in the novel has been the subject of some discussion, it is rarely treated as social critique in the same way as Siburapha’s Pa Nai Cheewit (Forest in Life), also serialised in 1937. The latter is another story of doomed love, but its protagonist is a young soldier who, after a coup, is imprisoned on a charge of treason (the novel wasn’t published in book form until 15 years after the author’s death). The enduring popularity of Behind the Painting might also be attributable to the fact that its success was welcomed even by intellectuals who held opposing political views but acknowledged Siburapha’s literary talent. Because the calls for equality and scathing social critique were more muted than elsewhere, conservative scholars were able to express their admiration for the author of a classic romance without having to dive into the other dimensions of his work. The latest artistic tribute paid to Behind the Painting is the multimedia installation Museum of Kirati by Chulayarnnon Siriphol, which was on view at Bangkok City City Gallery from last November to this January. Museum of Kirati builds on, and plays with, Siburapha’s tale of lovers from different classes, and the lasting beauty of their memories. The installation is set

up as a fictional memorial to Lady Kirati’s love, created by Nopporn, and includes a 50-minute film in which Siriphol plays both Nopporn and Lady Kirati. Tracking the novel’s plot, it alternates between live-action sequences shot as a contemporary low-budget underground film and animation sequences, all interspersed with lines from the book. The drawings used in the animation scenes are framed and hung on the walls to each side of the screen. On the rear wall – ‘behind’ the screen showing the film, which is titled Behind the Painting (2013) – seven large portraits in baroque gold frames loom over viewers. Both the frames and the pictures within them are in fact projected images of Lady Kirati, Nopporn and Chao Khun as played by Siriphol. These pictures wobble slightly (Siriphol calls them ‘non-still pictures’), and if you gaze at them long enough, you will see that the images seem eventually to be scorched and burned. Beside them is a 43cm-tall bronze statue of Lady Kirati seated on a chair; an oil portrait of her painted on a ceramic pin with a gold setting; and a neon light shaped into the English phrase ‘Forget Me Not’, a snatch of dialogue from Chert Songsi’s film. A ‘Kirati Memorial Book’ has also been printed, compiling imaginary posthumous messages to Lady Kirati from her father, friends and Nopporn. The ongoing project, which stretches back to the making of the film in 2013, mixes the creation of a fictional world with film, sculpture, portraiture and performance art (for the opening and closing of the exhibition, Siriphol played host in the role of Nopporn). Siriphol has said he may continue the project, meaning that this may not be the final chapter in his take on the memories of Lady Kirati’s love. In the artist’s statement for Behind the Painting, Siriphol wrote that Lady Kirati symbolises noble life prior to the regime change in 1932, blessed in every way but ‘bereft of the freedom to live life’, whereas Nopporn represents the ‘middle class that would be the key force driving the country in the future’. The act of continuing to imagine the story between the two in the present is ‘to combine the soul of the leading class with the body of the bourgeoisie that does the moving’ in order to maintain Lady Kirati’s world. Or, to put it another way, the middle class embodies customs and traditions, and in doing so moves them into the future. The process preserves the old world instead of dismantling it, as would be predicted

by historical materialism and its postulates that the interaction between classes (in the Thai context, between those of ‘royal blood’ and commoners such as Nopporn) leads inevitably to conflict. Museum of Kirati invites comparisons with Marcel Duchamp, both because of Siriphol’s cross-dressing (which blurs the line between ironic humour and earnestness) and in the concept of creating a fictitious museum that stipulates that art is born of experience rather than of a material object. But while Duchamp’s work challenged traditional art practices and ideas in search of the new, Siriphol’s Museum of Kirati raises questions about the transition between eras in Thailand, even if the installation’s half-facetious and ambiguous message does not entirely shed the novel’s reputation as a popular romance. In this universe, Siburapha’s writing will continue to be a rich source of information and inspiration for anyone seeking to understand modern Thailand. Many of his observations remain valid in a context that has changed too little over the intervening decades. That we have an artist like Siriphol taking up Siburapha’s work, and using his own vision to move it beyond itself, reminds us that there is much more to this great writer than the purely romantic aspects of Behind the Painting for which he is now best known. Still, I can’t help but wonder: which of Siburapha’s works would be most celebrated in that parallel universe? Translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul Prabda Yoon is a Bangkok-based novelist, graphic designer, artist, filmmaker, magazine editor, screenwriter, translator and media personality

both images Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Museum of Kirati, 2017 (installation views). Courtesy the artist and Bangkok City City Gallery

Spring 2018

The Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis was an annual festival held in Iran. Accompanied by seminars and symposia, the multidisciplinary event, each edition of which was composed around themes such as ‘music’ or ‘ritual theatre’, might see musicians such as Sundaram Balachander and Hasan Kassai rubbing shoulders with Yehudi Menuhin and Karlheinz Stockhausen. With significant contributions from Africa and South Asia, the festival aimed at erasing distinctions between periphery and centre. Inaugurated in 1967, the event was cancelled in the run-up to the Iranian Revolution, having cycled through 11 editions. Its archives remain banned in Iran, but at this year’s fourth edition of the biennial Dhaka Art Summit (DAS), where the directors of not-for-profits from Hong Kong, Vietnam and Sydney rub shoulders with the directors of MoMA and Tate, the festival was briefly resurrected in the form of a fascinating documentary exhibition curated by London-based Vali Mahlouji (via his nonprofit Archaeology of the Final Decade) and titled A Utopian Stage. There’s a sense that the 2018 DAS, which takes a hybrid form combining exhibitions, lectures, workshops and conferences that seek to explore local (which here is a concept that expands beyond Bangladesh to encompass South and Southeast Asia) and international issues that circulate around the form, content and distribution of contemporary art and its histories, is entering a reflexive moment, exploring precedents and trying to excavate its own imagined roots. Visitors to the event were greeted by Dhaka-based Reetu Sattar’s Harano Sur (Lost Tune) (2016), a cacophony of harmoniums operated by musicians arranged on a scaffold around the atrium of the Shilpakala Academy (Bangladesh’s national academy of fine and performing arts, in which DAS is housed). It conveys what I’m told is a lost sound of Bangladesh (where harmoniums used to be a household instrument) being resurrected, and a sense of place asserted. But the work also contains a trace of contemporary circulations and art networks. It was originally performed outside the Shilpakala Academy at the 17th Asian Art Biennale in December 2016; the work will travel to the Liverpool Biennial later this year. During DAS (founded by Rajeeb and Nadia Samdani, an industrialist-collector-philanthropist couple based in Dhaka, who are currently constructing a new arts centre in Sylhet, in the northeast of Bangladesh), Shilpakala hosts around ten discrete exhibitions, each unfolding as you ascend the academy tower. The Asian Art Biennale, founded in 1981, was the subject of one of them. Set up following a visit to The Asian Art Show (a predecessor to the Fukuoka Triennale) in Japan, by the then-director of Shilpakala, painter Syed Jahangir, it is addressed here in The Asian Art Biennale in Context, which contained various works from previous editions of the biennale, many

Coming of Age At the Dhaka Art Summit, the ghosts of the past lead the way to the future, says Mark Rappolt

Jakkai Siributr, The Outlaw’s Flags (detail), 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

of them experiments with abstraction (which occasionally make you feel that the past is another country), but the whole indicative of desires for the kind of decolonised internationalism that DAS as a whole seeks to achieve. The figure of Rabindranath Tagore, the white-bearded Nobel Prize-winning pacifist polymath whose compositions were used to create both the Indian and Bangladeshi national anthems, was another ghost strategically resurrected to haunt the opening day of the summit. He was directly invoked in the Otolith Group’s performance lecture (part of Bearing Points, an exhibition curated by DAS Chief Curator Diana Campbell Betancourt), which touched on Santiniketan, the idealistic, syncretic, rural academy-cum-ashram in West Bengal founded by Tagore’s father and vastly expanded by the son, and in a discussion titled ‘Another Asia’ (which I was moderating), via Rustom Bharucha’s analysis of inter-Asia exchange at the turn of the twentieth century, focused on the universalist Tagore’s curious relationship with the influential Japanese curator, art historian and imperialist Okakura Tenshin and the discord between their opposing ideals of Pan-Asianism. All of the above set the platform for a series of exhibitions of contemporary works that track a path from utopianism to decolonisation, while also addressing current concerns about migration, repression and environmental destruction. If you wish to be critical, there is a definite sense in which the Shilpakala Academy is, for the nine days of the summit (full disclosure: I was present for less than half of it), transformed into an ivory tower of culture. While art professionals from around the world trawl through its displays, and its corridors, stairwells and lecture theatre hum with a discourse about migration, integration, egalitarianism, censorship and pan-culturalism, there is poverty, inequality, congestion, a migrant crisis and evidence of the residual effects of ecological disaster outside its walls. Why bother with representation (or the filter of art) when what’s being represented is right there? (Crucially, of course, this is a problem for art in general rather than DAS in particular.) Thai artist Jakkai Siributr’s The Outlaw’s Flag (2017, also part of Bearing Points), for example, is a series of flags created from the debris left behind on beaches in Myanmar and Thailand that are migration points for the Rohingya people, a large number of whom are currently in Bangladesh. What the summit as a whole revealed (particularly via curator Sharmini Pereira’s One Hundred Thousand Small Tales, an incredibly moving exhibition of art produced during and in the wake of Sri Lanka’s civil war-cum-genocide, and Cosmin Costinas’s A Beast, A God, A Line, which traces histories and networks of colonial oppression and their postcolonial unravelling in the Asia Pacific region), is that you can’t know where you are unless you can begin to trace how you got there.

Prior to the opening of Opening Day in the Upper Serangoon Shopping Centre, I’d never heard of the mall. The gallery is located on the fourth floor, in a unit with high ceilings and windows without panes. The space was previously occupied by a meditation group: on the floor are the scuffed traces of a mandala and the square outline of the altar for the four-faced Buddha. The pair of curators behind Opening Day are Cheng Jia Yu, assistant curator at National Gallery Singapore, and Selene Yap, former Substation programme manager. From December to January, they mounted four small exhibitions by local artists. The shows ranged from photographer Chua Chye Teck’s series of melancholy landscapes and still lifes (Let the Dust Settle) to Lai Yu Tong’s conceptual installations that play with daily routines (Everything Is Tasteless or Too Sweet). By the time this article is published, Opening Day will be long closed. Ephemeral and DIY, it is the apotheosis of a recent wave of indie art venues opening in the most obscure and un-whitecube-like locations in Singapore. That project is aided by government grants, but another initiative, which is self-funded, is I_S_L_A_N_D_S, located in a passageway between Peninsula Shopping Centre and Excelsior Shopping Centre, two dingy malls in the civic district. Curator Tan Pey Chuan has signed a yearlong lease for eight shop windows and devotes them to young local artists. The programme, which runs until next year, has included Vanessa Lim’s water-themed architectural models and installations, as well as Boedi Widjaja’s drawings inspired by Chinese martial arts films. Then there are the artist studios doubling up as galleries. Every four months, Peninsular, run by artists Tan Guo-Liang and Cheong Kah Kit in the Ubi-Paya Lebar industrial estate, is given over to two individuals, comprising any pairing of artist, curator or writer, to exhibit works, give talks or hold events. The longerrunning soft/WALL/studs, a grungy unit in the red-light district of Geylang, described as a ‘studio-library-project space’, runs a lively programme of sound-art performances, readings and exhibitions. Microgalleries have also popped up in odd places. Gabriel Loy opened 1961 Projects, a 28sqm space in the zero-frills industrial building Oxley Bizhub. Over in Chinatown another boutique, 23sqm gallery, Supernormal, was started in July last year by artist Ong Kian Peng’s design studio Modular Unit.

counternarratives Makeshift art spaces in Singapore are turning bad news into good, Adeline Chia is happy to report

Chua Chye Teck, Let the Dust Settle, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Opening Day, Singapore

Spring 2018

What’s in the air? The diversity of these new platforms (temporary vs permanent; nonprofit vs selling; government-supported vs private) makes it hard to generalise. But most of them have opened during the past year or so. The timing roughly coincides with the end of The Substation as a venue for hire. Set up during the 1990s, the oldest independent arts centre here used to be the go-to space for new art, but now it is being programmed in-house year-round. With the indie mothership closing its doors, the new spaces have risen as alternative platforms. That said, independent galleries are not new in Singapore. During the 1990s and 2000s, when the arts ecology wasn’t as developed, they offered an important alternative to the narratives proffered by commercial galleries and the Singapore Art Museum. Predecessors include Plastique Kinetic Worms (1998–2008), which moved through several places; art collective p-10’s Post-Museum, a social enterprise, cafe, gallery and performance space in Rowell Road (2007–11); as well as Your Mother Gallery, a nonprofit gallery-cumresidency space in Little India (2004–). The difference with the current crop is that they are smaller and have a more stringent curatorial focus, in part because they tend to be run by curators and not by artists. These pop-up activities are signs of resilience and diversity that contradict the recent glut of doom-and-gloom stories about the state of art in the Lion City. Art Stage Singapore, the country’s main art fair, has been steadily declining and shrank to 84 participating galleries, down from 131 last year and 170 in 2016. The government-led gallery cluster Gillman Barracks isn’t doing great either; two years ago, nearly a third of the 17 galleries there decided not to renew their leases, and no new ones have moved in. And resurfacing in media reports is that old chestnut: the ‘Coddled Singapore Versus Entrepreneurial Hong Kong’, with the former losing out to the latter in its bid to be the premier art market in Asia. (I’m beginning to get the feeling that poor Singapore has become the Jennifer Aniston of the art tabloids, in that no matter what it does, it will never win.) This boring monolithic narrative of an arid cultural wasteland being overwatered by public funds isn’t wholly inaccurate, but there are always new shoots sprouting on their own, and often in unlikely places. Adeline Chia is associate editor of ArtReview Asia

miart – international modern and contemporary art fair milan

13 – 15 april, 2018 preview 12 april fieramilanocity – miart.it main partner

under the patronage of

sponsors

partners

miartalks powered by

media partner

official guide

online exclusively on

Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 28-29.04.2018 / artmontecarlo.ch

Art Featured

ழ is not found in English or any other European language. Europeans therefore generally find it difficult to pronounce this letter correctly. Its pronunciation is like the rl in curl with a mixture of sh, something like the s in pleasure; to pronounce it correctly apply the top of the tongue as far back as you can to the palate 63

Wolfgang Tillmans On the limits of seeing in a high-definition world Interview by Aimee Lin Photo collage by Wolfgang Tillmans

ArtReview Asia Do you feel that your work is received differently in Asia than it is in Europe? Wolfgang Tillmans During interviews with Japanese critics in the early to mid-1990s, I noticed that they picked out different and deeper meanings in my work. While Western writers were more interested in the social narrative of clubbing or youth culture, the Japanese accessed my work on a more spiritual level. They were concerned with different states of being and the interplay, or the suspense, between chance and control in my work. That we are all ‘in-between’ is at the heart of what I do. The subject matter is only a means of talking about those overarching philosophical concerns. ARA Your work quickly gained a reputation in Japan, but it took much longer for a show to happen in China. WT I’m a latecomer to Hong Kong and China, because I’ve only shown there once before, as part of a group show at Leo Xu in Shanghai [in 2012]. I’ve only been to China twice. I’m fascinated by how China is, of course, connected via land to Europe: Japan is an island, but you can take the train to China. I’ve always been interested in borders and limits, and the question of when you notice a change. Taking the superficial view, you would think that Europeans and Chinese are very different. But when you look at that shift gradually – you go from Europe to Iran, then to Afghanistan, and you’re neighbouring China – you see that everything is transitional. It’s not clean-cut. We are not as different as we are often taught to think we are. That is what I realised again and again in my relationship with Asia. That Europe and Asia are much closer than we think. Because I am a photographer primarily, there’s the assumption that this needs to show in the work or in the subject matter, but I’m not sure that the photographs I take in Asia are really about Asia. ARA In the catalogue for your Hong Kong exhibition you have reproduced an email conversation with a printing company you contacted in response to a spam email. How did that dialogue start? WT It was just by chance. The email caught my eye because it was so unsophisticated and

innocent. I thought that, rather than malicious phishers, these might be real people. So I wrote back, and their response was quite touching. They explained they were young and sending out random emails to find customers for their printing business. We think of it as spam, but it is no different than a leaflet through the letterbox. They really were trying to find clients, but I naturally assumed that it was some terrible virus or phishing scam. ARA Why did you want to include this in the catalogue? It’s a very beautiful story, very funny, even flirty. WT I see this catalogue as an artist’s book. I like to explore different materialities in books, different ways of thinking. It’s not just a representation of images, it’s a book of poetry. When I was laying out the book, I thought of it as writing. I can’t tell you the story in words, but I feel it in the sequence of pictures. The book is about language, but not necessarily a verbal or literary language. Text is included in my recent pictures, including the works exhibited in this show. And I considered this exchange with [the printer] Klaus as a kind of concrete poetry. ARA The conversation reminded me of Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman [1976]. It’s about two inmates, a political prisoner and a thief, and in each chapter one of the guys tells the story of a film they’ve seen. WT I never understood myself as speaking only through photography. I feel like I can say almost everything I want to with photography, and I still haven’t got tired of it, but on the other hand it is only one medium. More and more, I realise that language is something I care about and have developed more as a medium in the shape of interviews and lectures. The lectures are like 80-minute performances, with language, pictures and silence. This performative element moved into video and finally back into music. Music is a lot about words being spoken and sung. ARA The exhibition at David Zwirner’s Hong Kong space will include images of Shenzhen, Macau and Hong Kong, all of which are political and geographical borders inside China. I’m curious about why you chose to photograph those places.

ArtReview Asia

WT The Macau picture is from 1993, which is the first time I was in Macau and the last time I was in Hong Kong, so there’s been 25 years between my two visits. Back then I wanted to see the border with China. I’m interested in understanding the difference across a border when the earth – the ground, the matter – is the same. I never took borders for granted, and I don’t necessarily want to tear them down, but I do want to understand them in their material reality. To feel them. Clothes also interest me, this thin layer of fabric that conceals plain human bodies that are pretty much the same. The putting on of clothes changes so much. A uniform creates authority and distance, which is in a way ridiculous, because it’s just a piece of fabric, it’s nothing. A pair of ripped jeans is seen by a parent as something that should be thrown away, and by a teenager as the most beloved piece of clothing. ARA Clothes are an artificial border against your natural body. WT Yes. I acknowledge that there are borders between people, language and races. But I think that by looking at them, touching them, smelling them, feeling them, you can also see them for what they are. Strangely, that’s the visible medium of photography. It’s not a scientific way of looking deeper, but it does put me into situations where I can explore those limits, whether that’s being at a border or looking through an extremely large telescope. I spent a weekend in Chile at an observatory, looking at the border of the visible. ARA The far end of the universe. WT Astronomy is located at the limit. Can I see something there? Is that a detail or is it just noise in the camera sensor? By going to the limits, to the borders, I find comfort in being in-between. I always felt held in-between the infinite smallness of subatomic space and the infinite largeness of the cosmos. It gives me comfort to feel infinity. ARA How does that experience, that feeling, relate to your high-resolution digital photographs, which are printed at a very large scale? Those images are so massive, contain so much detailed visual information, that they are overwhelming.

WT I wasn’t originally interested in super-sharp, large format film, because I wanted my photographs to describe how it feels to look through my eyes. For that, 100 ASA 35mm film is close enough to how I feel things look. But since 1995 I have also shown very large photographs, the largest of which is called Wake [2001], recently shown at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin [the inkjet print is 545 × 807 cm]. Those pictures were made with 35mm negatives, but in 2009 I started to work with a high-resolution digital camera. Suddenly I found myself with an instrument in my hand that was as powerful as a large-format camera. It took me three years to learn how to speak with this new language. By 2012, the whole world had become high-definition. Being able to zoom in on a huge print, and still see detail after detail, is how the world feels now, through my eyes. I’m grateful that I was able to make that development from film to highresolution digital, because it opened up a new language in the history of art. One of the pictures, included in the Hong Kong exhibition, showing the texture of wood and an onion [Sections, 2017], is of such shocking clarity that you find yourself facing an idea of infinity. These pictures contain more information than you can ever remember. Only these large-format prints are able to display the full range of detail, colour and scale, and so digital has actually made the objects almost more unique. The object can only be experienced in the full depth of its presence and its material reality in that room at that time. ARA This material reality is only accessible through the picture. The eyes can’t process so much information in one go. WT I find that miraculous. There’s something deeply philosophical in having to learn to let go of information. It’s an analogy for the information age, and the challenge of valuing things at the same time as being prepared to let them go. To understand everything as the same, and yet to decide that some things are more valuable than others. I choose to value certain things, and at the same time to understand that everything is materially equal, if we accept that things are infinite. That’s a strange opposite. ARA Much of your new work, specifically the Neue Welt series [2009–13], is made while travelling. You’ve said that you’re very conscious of your status as an outsider when taking these pictures, so how do you make them relevant to your own world and your own practice? WT It’s a huge challenge, and much of what we’ve talked about is relevant to the Neue Welt series: learning a new language, learning a new subject. ARA What is the connection between yourself and the scene you’ve captured?

WT The main thing is to understand desire. The desire to possess, the desire to own or to control, the desire to interpret: they all make for bad art. Only when I look without this possessive desire is there an understanding or a connection between myself and the subject. The camera is something that I put between myself and the subject; it is not a tool for possession or acquisition, but a recorder of what my mind sees. Desire for beauty or for a person or for longing can, in itself, be a beautiful thing. The moment your art makes a claim to control, or claims sovereignty of interpretation, then it’s just ugly. But if you are genuinely interested in something, it is difficult to go wrong. Your art is only as interesting as your thoughts about the world. If you have a boring mind, if you’re not interested in the world, then you can’t see anything interesting in it. Your pictures would only talk about the desire to see something, without actually seeing it. I find science and news photography inspiring because the takers are really interested in what they’re looking at. They’re not interested in being seen to look at something, but they are interested in looking at something. That’s the danger of our time: that people are only interested in being seen as being interested. People taking pictures because they want to be seen taking pictures. ARA Your most celebrated portraits are of people that you are familiar with, with whom you have a relationship. But Neue Welt includes photos of strangers, and I’m curious about how that feels. You’re not a photojournalist, and so I wonder if that brings its own pressures. WT I can’t answer this straightforwardly because it really is very difficult to overcome or go beyond the circumstances I described: this possessive desire to capture, to own, to grab. A photograph, like other artworks, speaks very clearly about the intentions behind its making. When the intention is just to capture an exotic person, it’s not interesting; when there are two strangers looking at each other without trust, affection or interest, then that is all you get in the picture. I’m not interested in a picture of misunderstanding. In the exhibition in Hong Kong, there are three portraits of strangers. Two took place in the few minutes after the total eclipse in Illinois, and there was maybe this shared experience that connected people. ARA How did you approach the subjects? WT For the portrait of a young woman in Kinshasa, Congo [Patricia, 2018], I came twice to her shop. It took some courage to ask if I could take her portrait. I needed to know that I wasn’t intruding, that she was willing to give me her picture. You have to be given a picture. I don’t take a portrait, I receive a portrait. It’s only what

Spring 2018

people are prepared to give you that you can capture. This cannot happen five times a day. Maybe five times a year; for me it’s a very rare thing. I am respectful of this. If you want more, it looks like you want more. It’s the same with a still life: it is only when I’m really interested in the objects that a good still life happens. In a way, art is so easy. All you have to do is be honest and see what you’re really interested in. As a young artist you think that your desire to express yourself is special, but among artists it is of course not special. The art is to hide your desire to express yourself. That is the single least interesting thing about yourself. We all want to look good, we all want to express ourselves, we all want to be unique, but what are you actually interested in other than yourself? ARA Why did you decide to bring the 25-year-old images that you took on your last visit to Hong Kong back to life for this exhibition? And what did those images mean to you? WT They were alive already. The photographs were first published in a book by Taschen [Wolfgang Tillmans, 1995], which included three pictures from Hong Kong. They were a kind of symbol, a placeholder for something I didn’t understand. Hong Kong TV Reporter (1993) was a placeholder for the many situations that seemed to me staged and absurd, narratives I could never understand. My work up to that point had described communities that I felt close to. So these situations that are so intense and superspecific – the TV reporter in the meat market or the Filipino housemaids [Hong Kong, Filipinas on street, 1993] – were very strange. All I could do was show them as a fascination; as something that I had no power to interpret. I had nothing to say. ARA But these things drew your attention. Why did you take the photo of the same subject 25 years later? WT I’m very happy about the new picture [Playing Cards, Hong Kong, 2018]. Even though it’s this very specific situation in Hong Kong, it really speaks about playing cards: this all-ages activity. The gestures of the hands and the depiction of details – the distribution of colours and fabrics – are almost mannerist. Artists have always understood the moment of play as a metaphor for human activity. A portrait is given but a scene from life has to be taken. And at some point you need the courage to take a picture, you know? Life plays by itself, and you have to recognise that as an artist. When you observe that moment, you have to do something with it. It’s as simple as that. But that moment cannot be forced. ara An exhibition of work by Wolfgang Tillmans can be seen at David Zwirner Hong Kong from 26 March through 12 May Aimee Lin is editor of ArtReview Asia

Chinese leather factory in Ethiopia, 2012

LED Flicker, 2018

Hong Kong, Filipinas on street, 1993

Playing cards, Hong Kong, 2018

Fire Island III, 2017

How likely is it that only I am right in this matter?, 2017

Collage, 2018

Evolution of an Idea Things move fast in Shanzhai Time by Xin Zhou

Packaging for the Iorgane F4, a shanzai version of the Apple iPhone 2G, circa 2008

ArtReview Asia

Jack Ma, founder of the Alibaba Group, Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1893) into recently said in an interview that he could China, points to the act of forgery as the not sleep at night because he was worried reason for the lack of morals. By prioritising that the company would be superseded by truth (against fakes) and morals (against morning. Taobao, Jack Ma’s baby, which shamelessness), this decisive take marks an used to be known as China’s eBay, and is apparent Westernisation of the ‘Chinese ethos’. Even today, to look at news reports where you can source many knockoff prodrelated to fake products, from powdered ucts, has itself emerged as the standard e-commerce model for the rest of Asia. milk to cooking oil, is to find online comments that the reason for the omnipresence Copies of European architectural landmarks are still being constructed in China, of fakes lies in the Chinese character. but Chinese mobile payment systems, such It is here that Han takes a detour, turning as WeChat Wallet and Alipay, have emerged to the history of forgery in Chinese painting as the reference for digital payment innoas an early example of the play between notions of the original and the copy in the vations in the West. Blockchain technolocountry’s culture. For a Chinese painter in gies, Bitmain’s bitcoin miners and even DJI drones have replaced smartphones as the new the premodern era, the ability to get a forgery products that will revive the digital economy of an Old Master into a connoisseur’s collecof Huaqiangbei, known as the Silicon Valley for hardware. Indeed, tion was proof not of his criminality (as it might be in the West) but according to the South China Morning Post, many copycat companies in of his ability – the deconstructive notion being that ‘the Chinese idea China are now leading innovators in the global tech industry. In other of the original is determined not by a unique act of creation, but by unending process, not by definitive identity but by constant change’. words, the cats have become the ones to copy from. Shanzhai, a Chinese neologism that means ‘fake’, has evolved from Many of Han’s points hark back to art historian Wen C. Fong’s 1962 a term to describe knockoff products made in ‘developing’ China to article ‘The Problem of Forgery in Chinese Painting’, in which the become the new buzzword of the prosperous open-source economy. author identifies the four methods of forging as: mo, to trace; lin, ‘Many counterfeit products are now of better quality than the genuine to copy; fang, to imitate; zao, to invent. ‘It should be noted that art articles,’ Jack Ma noted in another interview. In the constantly forgery in China has never carried such dark connotations as it does in changing ecology of shanzhai, originality is not a virtue. the West,’ writes Wen Fong, ‘since the aim of studying art has always Byung-Chul Han’s 2011 book Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, been either aesthetic cultivation or pure enjoyment, rather than recently translated into English, is an audacious attempt to dissect the scientific knowledge, the acquisition of a genuine masterpiece – and concept through a set of cultural, political, art-historical and socio- by the same token, the ability to create a perfect forgery was a matter economical questions. It’s a subject that has long fascinated cultural of virtuosity and pride.’ If this knowledge was more widespread in theorists, but the Korean-born German philosopher takes a different the West, the $80 million forgery case associated with Chinese painter approach to the familiar method of seeing shanzhai as a question Qian Pei-Shen, brought before a New York court in 2013, might not of intellectual-property infringement and the product of economic have been so shocking. globalisation. Instead he studies it within the history of Chinese From paintings to electronics, the question of shanzhai, howthought, beginning, counterintuitively, with Hegel, and the German ever, cannot be reduced to an aesthetic one. In today’s ecosystem, philosopher’s claim that the Chinese are ‘notorious for deceiving the act of shanzhai has shortened the production cycle of consumer whenever they can’. Han reasserts the dualism between Eastern and electronics from years to months. The cruelty of shanzhai speed Western thought, noting that ‘according to Hegel, the opposite of this has made the Chinese market a battleground in which industrial nihilistic nothingness [in the Buddhism of the East] is the god who players are motivated to achieve faster delivery, better affordability and higher quality. A shanzhai iPhone can be released even stands for truth and truthfulness [of the West’]. This bizarrely orientalised note chimes with the essence of shan- before the original. zhai, however, as a self-maintained and -reproducing system. The larger context of shanzhai is the Darwinian, profit-driven As early as the late nineteenth century, a similar rhetoric could economy under the winner-takes-all mentality of Silicon Valley, but be found in Yan Fu’s writing. The Chinese translator and scholar as long as China’s Great Firewall blocks domestic Internet unicorns’ wrote in On Our Salvation (1895) that ‘what is corrupt about the foreign competitors, as long as patent law is not enforced and as long Chinese ethos lies in eight characters [translated as], “It begins with as the hardware tech industry continues to embrace global standards, producing fakes and ends with being shameless.”’ the syndrome of this Chinese forgery will remain. ara Cover image of Byung-Chul Yan Fu, known for introducing Western ideas such Han’s Shanzhai: Deconstruction as Darwin’s natural selection and Thomas Henry Xin Zhou is a researcher, writer and curator based in Shanghai. in Chinese, 2017 (trans)

Spring 2018

Reflect ARE U READY

SA utluise tunducee it

When I was afre ding afriend come on while will be long hugry as machine what do you thinking unber highyer be too afraid so I is bigger from mewyorker “good lucky” someones wad toother When I was afre ding afriend come on while will be long hugry as machine what do you thinking unber highyer be too afraid so I is bigger from mewyorker “good lucky” someones wad toother

thousands of dollars ha stolen from Gulf shores uniploues allegedly soid mes andowner clan s a victim AMY DRBMER cd tunduce it of dollars have been Gulf Shores agercy legally sold bogus owner claims she im se tunduce it dollars have been ulf Shores agency edly sold bogus wner claim s she

ARGRL!

duce it beent f shores agercy s bogus e owner claims she p

Glamour YSTERU

Www.shift , and ctrl tab caps look And So What May Be You re. No.

Who is she? Ensconced in a sea of rupturous text, mired

signifiers, revelling in the imaginative potential of the

somewhere along the Gulf Shores, where numerous dollars

bootleg encounter.

have been lost to bogus claims, she emerges defiant. Glamorous, even. ‘Reflect’, she says, lowering her

Following Byung-Chul Han’s recent analysis of shanzhai

aviator shades, and ‘ARE U READY 4?’ before trailing

as witnessed extending into ‘all areas of life in China’,

off into an oblivion of keyboard commands and erratic

we here focus on one aspect in particular: the global

punctuation.

proliferation of the language of the shanzhai garment. In its mimicry and mutation of name brands, shanzhai text

In the Pearl River Delta, where an abundance of the world’s goods are made for export, alternate markets circulate counterfeit goods known as shanzhai. As the existing literature notes, in Chinese shanzhai originally referred to a mountain hamlet where outlaws would stockpile their goods, alluding to both a subversive rebelliousness and a playful rejection of the very notion of a single, original owner or author. Consider that these ‘fakes’

purports to consummate a fantasy of luxury, while the material of its fabrics and phrases, interwoven with a seeming nonsense of textual allusions, indicates a more complicated tapestry of relations. The Shanzhai Lyric project is an attempt to situate this errant text within discourses on postcolonialism, pleasure and failure, and to find a place among a constellation of artists and thinkers pursuing liberation from the coercion of capital and joy in might themselves be constructed in the very same factory

the illegible.

as their ‘real’ counterparts – with language more original than the ‘original’.

In The Racial Imaginary (2015) Farid Matuk asks, ‘How might a poet occupying an othered position today use

On this shanzhai T-shirt, a drama of the global supply

such strategies to focus their texts, and us, on “what is

chain unfolds alongside supra-sensical musings on owner-

at issue”?’ and points towards the principle of kairos

ship, victimhood and gossip. In the cacophonous valley

as ‘a visionary strategy in that it requires one to step, if

of the counterfeit, other tales of satisfaction and desire

only slightly, outside of the ideology of dominant modes of

are spun from the webbed tangles of power and produc-

perception in order to make these into tools’. The Greek

tion protocol. Reflect. The shanzhai garment demands

term kairos finds its roots in both weaving and archery,

a moment for floating contemplation amidst swimming

referring to the moment that allows one to effectively make

use of an opening. Just as the shuttle of the loom awaits a

(thereby much higher) pressure of capitalist language is

gap in the threads of a growing textile to slip through, and

not paranoid, systematic, argumentative, articulated: it is

‘the archer cannot aim directly but must instead calcu-

an implacable stickiness, a doxa, a kind of unconscious: in

late an arc that will bend, eventually, to her target’, so

short, the essence of ideology’. The shanzhai lyric makes palpable this implacable stickiness, makes conscious the ideological contradictions of capitalism embedded in its tongues. Further, the synthetic stickiness of the materials used in shanzhai garments betray something of their provenance and the artifice of their heavily manufactured claims. The shanzhai lyric is a poem written out of necessity from an economy of means. The shiny letters that make it so attractive also serve to shield it. A protective gloss both attracts and deflects attention from a content that thwarts sense, in whose fractured words and symbols a ‘mortality resides’. For artist Paul Chan, kairos is not only the will to seize an opportunity for radical imagining, but, vitally, it occurs at a point of utmost vulnerability. For the arrow to enter, it

the shanzhai text(ile) activates the literal material of its

must pass through a space where aliveness is most vibrant

circumstances with finesse to navigate a ‘chaotic accumulation of positions’ towards the completion of its own project. This mode harkens back to an art-historical lineage within Chinese culture rooted in a conception of law as a tactical response to a constantly shifting situation rather than a single, static position. In this way, the shanzhai lyric unsettles Western definitions of authenticity, obsessions with individual authorship and emphasis on the primacy of an original. The strategies of the shanzhai lyric mirror this shared root in both weaving and archery: knitting together strategies of communication with strategies of resistance (à la Robin Hood›s preferred technique of taking down the rich and powerful by arrow from an outlaw hamlet), the kairotic imagination of the shanzhai lyric bends the language of dominant ideologies and modes of perception so as to demonstrate both the appeal and the contradictions of

in its proximity to the end. Drawing attention to the condi-

capitalist production.

tions of labour that are intrinsic to the fabrication of fashion fantasy, shanzhai phrases break through the codes

In contrast to the more audible contradictions of other

of hierarchy, revealing the capacity of language to bend

ideological jargons, Roland Barthes writes that ‘the

and to be reconfigured.

Sustained engagement with the resultant illegibility is a

Barthes writes of taking pleasure in literature where ‘two

practice of radical empathy, of opening towards the seem-

edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing

ingly nonsensical as a guide in new modes of becoming. As

edge (the language is to be copied in its canonical state, as

Gavin Jantjes writes in A Fruitful Incoherence (1999), ‘Art

it has been established by schooling, good usage, literature,

offers an adventure into the unknown, or an engagement with

culture), and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume

the unfamiliar, in order to disclose, discover and dissem-

any contours), which is never anything but the site of its

inate information about the here and now… The harvest we

effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed.

reap from these incoherent encounters is a form of know-

These two edges, the compromise they bring about, are

ledge about, or empathy with, the strange, the different, the

necessary. Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is

new.’ ‘In order to bring colonialism to an end,’ writes

the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes

theorist Jack Halberstam, ‘one must be willing to inhabit

so… everything is attacked, dismantled: ideological struc-

the crazy nonsensical ranting of the other.’

tures, intellectual solidarities, the propriety of idioms, and even the sacred armature of syntax (subject/predicate): the

Shanzhai lyrics often have the quality of crazed love

text no longer has the sentence for its model; often it is a

song crossed with an urgent, manic rant. They express a

powerful gush of words, a ribbon of infra-language.’

devotion to alterity and love for the other, which relies upon maintaining a certain distance and difference to

In the shanzhai lyric we find our kairotic entryway, our

allow for this unceasing reaching. A constant resist-

pleasure is the pleasure of the ever-moving text. What is

ance to crystallisation in a fixed form becomes an anti-

this queer jouissance offered by the gush of words at the

dote to capitalism’s will to commodify. Barthes recog-

seam of culture and its destruction, language and its own

nised mass media’s impulse to narrativise love stories

death, trampling of sacred syntax, bliss in the stumbling,

as an attempt to close the gap between difference and

an erotics of erring? The apparent mistakes of the shan-

distance, ultimately reconciling the lover with his/her

zhai text forge a carnivalesque English where high and

Other, and therefore with society, as a pacifying anti-

low are inextricably intertwined and the jester takes joy in

dote to the madness that being in passionate love truly

aping the self-seriousness of the king. The audience takes

is. In its fragmentary and disordered prose, the shanzhai

joy in the jester’s gibberish, a gibberish that rings more

lyric composes a broken love sonnet of utter madness.

truthful than the king’s static law. Halberstam again:

That we are able to witness in shanzhai garments points

‘While her failure could be the source of misery and

of rupture in language is to get a literal glimpse into the

humiliation… it also leads to a kind of ecstatic exposure

gaping insufficiency of rational meaning.

of the contradictions of a society obsessed with meaningless competition.’ Our shanzhai cover girl plays witness

Shanzhai text imprinted upon shanzhai textile is an accu-

to this ecstatic exposure. Hugry as machine, she navig-

mulation of traces in which design comments on content

ates the detritus of her environment in which consumption,

literally on its content. Continually altering or adding to

corruption, warships and longings linger. Boats splinter on

its appearance, the shanzhai lyric can be understood as

the shores of fast fashion. The floating shards of hysteric

an ever-evolving text that grows and changes over time as

glamour emit a wail that is at once a guttural battle-cry and

numerous voices continually reinscribe the site, refusing

blissful Babel.

the idea of a single author or owner. This collaborative project engenders an experience of pure pleasure in text, a mode of reading that itself becomes a form of authorship by further inscribing meanings from and into the ambiguous cross-section of voices, a productive ambiguity in the space between intention and interpretation.

The Shanzhai Lyric is a theoretical inquiry and curatorial project that takes inspiration from the experimental English of shanzhai T-shirts to pursue a larger aesthetic strategy of apparent nonsense as a way to disrupt the relentless forces of commodification and make space for hybrid, liminal and illegible futures. Subsequent installations in ArtReview Asia will think through shanzhai as a framing device to look at an array of contemporary artists working with an aesthetic, political and philosophical orientation that embraces a commitment to mutation, error and hybridity, refusal of fixed categories, playful subversion and resistance to global hegemony through humour and slipperiness. These works highlight and elaborate different aspects of what we might call shanzhai tactics by subverting hierarchy through exaggerated mimicry, the poetic juxtaposition of distinct aesthetic traditions and devoted irreverence. This project has previously taken the form of poetry-lectures, publications, installation and archive: @shanzhai_lyric

Has Jakarta’s art scene come of age? by Adeline Chia

ArtReview Asia

Spring 2018

Jakarta may be the political capital of Indonesia, but it is certainly With a budget of US$450,000, the event took place across four venues, not the capital of Indonesia’s art scene. At least not when it comes to the main site being a warehouse complex called Gudang Sarinah the production of art; for that you go to the cities of Bandung and Ekosistem in the city’s south. Staffed by an army of volunteers and Yogyakarta, which have the feel of leisurely university towns. Densely occasionally on the verge of chaos, with some installations not ready populated and unhealthily congested, Jakarta is a teeming megacity on the opening day, it had a sense of energy helped by dynamic curahousing roughly ten million people in its centre (over 30 million if you tion and international buzz from the participation of top-drawer take in its outer zones), and a no-nonsense commercial hub dating contemporary artists such as Luc Tuymans and Hito Steyerl. back to its earliest known roots as a Both these events are very different MACAN and the Jakarta Biennale may be in character – MACAN slick and well seventh-century port city. So naturally the city is home to two art fairs – very different in character – the former slick oiled, the biennale grungy and DIY – but they share a belief in improving Art Jakarta, set up in 2009 and previand well oiled, the latter grungy and DIY – public access to art in a city in which ously known as Bazaar Art Jakarta, and the newer Art Stage Jakarta, but both share a belief in improving public state-funded cultural institutions are set up in 2016 as the offshoot of a access to art in a city where state-funded lacking. The only major governmentSingapore fair – as well as a network run art museum in Jakarta is the cultural institutions are lacking of commercial galleries catering to a National Gallery of Indonesia, which houses the national collection, but its facilities, curatorial rigour collector base formed of the country’s metropolitan elite. In November last year, however, two major events marked what and exhibition design fall below the professional standards of most might be a coming-of-age for the city’s art scene. The first was the national museums. opening of the privately funded 2,000sqm Museum MACAN, which is Private museums already play a big part in the cultural landbilled as the country’s first purpose-built contemporary art museum: scape of the city, but none of them are on the scale of MACAN or share a milestone institution in a country with an impoverished public art its ambitions in programming. Instead many are open by appointinfrastructure. The space, located on the fifth floor of a mixed-use ment only or require an introduction for access. Those that are open development in West Jakarta, comprises a gallery, offices, a conserva- to the public are generally static and do not offer a changing exhibition lab and storage areas. The inaugural exhibition is drawn from tion schedule that promotes both local and international art. These the private collection of its owner, Haryanto Adikoesoemo, president include the Akili Museum of Art, which houses the collection of the director of the AKR Group, comprising PT AKR Corporindo Tbk, a chem- family of Rudy Akili, owner of Smailing Tour, one of Indonesia’s ical and energy logistics company, and the luxury property developer largest travel agencies, and the Ciputra Museum, opened in 2014 AKR Land Development. In 2016 he was ranked the 20th most wealthy by property developer Ir. Ciputra as part of a swanky multipurpose man in Indonesia by the Jakarta Globe, with an estimated net worth of development in downtown Jakarta. US$1.7 billion. Following its inauCrucially, MACAN’s conservagural show, the museum plans to tion facilities allow the institustage exhibitions on midcareer tion to take loans from overseas Indonesian artists as well as to host and to show travelling exhibitions – which has been a difficulty for international touring shows. Indonesia because so few of its The second significant event arts centres have the right climate was the 17th edition of the Jakarta controls in place. Accordingly, Biennale, a low-budget, highconcept six-week showcase. FeaMACAN’s director, Aaron Seeto, previously curatorial manager of turing just over 50 Indonesian and international artists, the exhibition Asian and Pacific Art at Queensland took the theme of jiwa, a hard-toArt Gallery in Australia, envisions translate Indonesian word roughly that the opening of his institution meaning soul, spirit or, as its artistic “shifts what audiences in Indonesia can see”. director Melati Suryodarmo tells me, “the energy that moves us, Its inaugural survey, Art Turns. moves our life, that connects us World Turns, gives a taste of the to other beings and substances”. museum’s curatorial standards and

preceding pages Transgender priests from Sulawesi’s Bissu community perform a ritual at the opening of the Jakarta Biennale. Courtesy Jakarta Biennale

above Arahmaiani, Lingga-Yoni, 1994, acrylic on canvas 182 × 140 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Museum MACAN, Jakarta

ArtReview Asia

both images Art Turns. World Turns. Exploring the Collection of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara, 2017 (installation views). Courtesy Museum MACAN, Jakarta

Spring 2018

the nature of the private collection. Put together by Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (and curator of the 2015 Jakarta Biennale), and local curator Agung Hujatnika, the 90-or-so works on show trace the intersecting spheres of art history and world history, with a focus on Indonesia. The Indonesian modern section opens with colonial-era art, with works by masters such as Raden Saleh, who painted in the Western tradition during the Dutch colonial period in the nineteenth century. The exhibition then flows through to the country’s anticolonial and independence movement during the 1940s and early 50s, represented by classical revolutionary works by S. Sudjojono and Dullah, and later, the formal experimentations of Hendra Gunawan and Affandi. As the show moves towards the contemporary, however, the story, and more particularly Indonesia’s place within it, fizzles out with a loose international showcase that is heavy on works by blue-chip internationals. There is a Mark Rothko, a Jean-Michel Basquiat, a Gerhard Richter, two Andy Warhols, a small room for Damien Hirst; and from Asia, Yoshitomo Nara, Lee Ufan, Ai Wei Wei and Liu Ye. There is a smattering of politically challenging works. These include Arahmaiani’s Lingga-Yoni (1994), a painting depicting Hindu iconography of male and female genitalia laid over Arabic script, which provoked censure from Muslim hardliners and forced the artist to flee the country, and FX Harsono’s painting Wipe Out #1 (2011), addressing the erasure of ethnic-Chinese minority identity in Indonesia. MACAN has been generally well received by the local arts community. Private philanthropy is especially important in Indonesia, which, globally, is sixth from bottom in terms of economic equality, according

to a 2017 report from Oxfam Indonesia and the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development. The wealth of the four richest people in Indonesia is equal to the wealth of the country’s poorest 100 million citizens. One of MACAN’s stated priorities, which mimics that of a publicly funded museum, is education. Also championing a more egalitarian, community-focused way of experiencing art is the Jakarta Biennale. Having come a long way since its inception in 1974 as a stuffy, painting-oriented exhibition, it has developed into a key grassroots event. Its recent resurgence has a lot to do with the appointment of influential Jakarta-based artist-curator-impresario Ade Darmawan as artistic director in 2009. Upon his return from a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in 2000, he and some friends set up the artist collective Ruangrupa (meaning ‘visual space’) in Jakarta. Darmawan describes the group as an “arts centre without a building”, and it is now the most important cultural entity in the city, organising exhibitions and workshops, and publishing books. In keeping with that, under his stewardship, the Jakarta Biennale became less constricted by the fine-art paradigm and more directly engaged with the urban environment. The main venue for 2013’s Siasat (meaning ‘tactics’) was an underground car park, for example, and other art projects included installing a futsal court beneath the highways in the crowded Penjaringan area of North Jakarta. Last year, he remained executive director of the event, overseeing fundraising and project and event management. In curatorial terms, the current biennale is lively and layered, with several discernible points of enquiry around the concept of

I Made Djirna, Unsung Heroes (detail), 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Jakarta Biennale

ArtReview Asia

‘soul’. Obviously the jiwa theme encompasses the kinds of knowledge outside rational thought, with artists looking to nature, the body and animistic traditions for inspiration. Connecting spirituality and nature is I Made Djirna’s dramatic work made up of thousands of volcanic rocks (Unsung Heroes, 2017), which he scavenged from a Balinese beach and carved into faces. The cavernous installation has a visceral impact. On one hand, it evokes mysticism and worship, with the rocks arranged in heaps on the ground like religious offerings, or hammered onto the walls like altarpieces; on the other hand, it has echoes of other awe-inspiring organic forms: the ropes of rock dangling from the ceiling form thick curtains reminiscent of the aerial roots of banyan trees. Rooted in another type of prereflective bodily awareness is Chiharu Shiota’s video in which she douses herself with mud in a bathtub over and over (Bathroom, 1999). The dirt and the bathroom setting invite comparisons with excrement, and notions of fouling and purification are suspended in ambiguity as she embraces the corporeal and the earthly. There was also a reparative interest in addressing missing histories, both in the context of Indonesian art history and in terms of a wider social and political narrative. To this end, a special showcase of four radical Indonesian artists, all born during the 1950s but whose work has remained in varying degrees of obscurity, was staged, highlighting both their artworks and archival materials related to their practice. They are sculptor Dolorosa Sinaga, the ceramic artist Hendrawan Riyanto, avant-garde musician I Wayan Sadra and artistactivist Semsar Siahaan. Meanwhile, other artists tackled other aspects of historical amnesia and personal memory. For example,

Arin Rungjang’s seven-channel installation Bengawan Solo (2017), which shows musicians performing the eponymous folksong in the languid keroncong style, features intertwining narratives surrounding the tune. One story is about the artist’s sexual awakening, referencing Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), on which soundtrack Bengawan Solo featured. Another is an interview with the IndonesianDutch singer Anneke Gronlöh, who performed one of the most popular renditions of the song. The last narrative is an investigation into the river Bengawan in Solo, on which the song is based. It is a place where bodies of Chinese people and communists were dumped during a period of ethnic and political violence from 1965 to 1966. Curatorial agility aside, the most recent biennale had another populist achievement: securing a presence in the historic Fatahillah Square at the heart of colonial Batavia and a key destination for tourists and Indonesian out-of-towners on the weekends. Overlooking those crowds were Sinaga’s ten lifesize statues of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, which were placed at one of the grandest colonial-era buildings in the area, the Jakarta History Museum. The expressive sculptures, one with arms flung to the air, another with fists clenched, stood in frozen oratorical poses on an elevated podium. Even in the hectic, noisy environment, the Sukarnos made an impression. When I was there, some teenagers bypassed the ticket booth at the museum’s entrance, scrambled up onto the podium, flung their arms around the statues and took selfies. The guards allowed a few snaps, and then shooed them away. ara Adeline Chia is associate editor of ArtReview Asia

Dolorosa Sinaga, Sukarno (detail), 2017, ten bronze statues, dimensions variable. Photo: Jin Panji. Courtesy Yayasan Jakarta Biennale

Spring 2018

Wang Bing Out of the Shadows by Benny Shaffer

above and facing page 15 Hours (stills), 2017, digital film, colour, sound, 900 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Magician Space, Beijing

ArtReview Asia

Spring 2018

Yizhi (Traces), 2014, single-channel video installation, 35mm film transferred to digital, b/w, sound, 28 min. Courtesy the artist and Magician Space, Beijing

ArtReview Asia

The opening scene of Wang Bing’s directorial debut, the nine-hour decades he has worked to document those who labour precariously documentary Tie Xi Qu (West of the Tracks, 2003), is shot from a slow- against the backdrop of dramatic social transformation. moving train through the snowflake-covered lens of a digital video A 2017 exhibition at Magician Space in Beijing, Experience and camera. Accompanied by the low roar of wheels on frozen, rusted Poverty, marked Wang’s first solo show in China. Transposing his rails, the camera navigates a landscape of dilapidated factory build- cinematic works into the space of the gallery, the opening coincided ings in a once-booming, now rapidly declining industrial zone in with the Beijing government’s campaign to forcibly remove millions northeast China. This point of departure for Wang’s career echoes of the so-called ‘low-end population’ from the city. The resonance the overlapping histories of early cinema and industrial modernity, was eerie: in a 2017 interview in The Brooklyn Rail, Wang stated that intimately tied to trains and the particular forms of visual experience ‘cinema is not about composition or colour, but about balancing that moving images produce. While early cinema often celebrated power dynamics, about continuous change’. For the exhibition, one the magic of the cinematic apparatus and the modern technologies of Magician Space’s white cubes was converted into a black box with rows of theatre seating, inviting the of industrialisation, Wang’s films cast audience into a direct engagement with a melancholy gaze on industry’s decay. Across Wang Bing’s many films, the durational contours of his practice. Over the course of his career, he has his signature observational style has A scheduled programme of daily screendocumented vanishing worlds and lived not merely been a passive mode of ings functioned – at least as a gesture – spaces in their most unadorned forms; yet his investigative and immersive quiet nonintervention, but an active to disrupt the tendency for wandering approach has remained unsentimental members of the fast-paced artworld to witness to the histories of those rocked drift in and out of video installations and understated in its implicit critique by China’s tumultuous waves of change without viewing the works in their of China’s social realities. Born in 1967, Wang Bing grew up entirety. Across his many films, his signaduring the Cultural Revolution and later witnessed how his country’s ture observational style has not merely been a passive mode of quiet reform-era experiments with capitalist production took a toll on citi- nonintervention, but an active witness to the histories of those rocked zens who struggled to adapt to the change. The arc of his career, which by China’s tumultuous waves of change. began during the late 1990s, was closely aligned with the rise of digital The exhibition featured Yizhi (Traces, 2014), Wang’s first work on video as an accessible and mobile technology, one that enabled him celluloid. Using a small stockpile of black-and-white 35mm film – to document the social worlds of marginalised individuals in ways reportedly from the artist Yang Fudong – Wang’s roving, handheld previously unseen in mainstream cinema and broadcast journalism camera surveys the unforgiving desert landscape of the Jiabiangou in China. Wang has long been recognised as a significant director by Labour Camp, where thousands of alleged reactionaries and rightthe international cinema community and is no stranger to the festival ists were sent, and later died, during the Mao era. What remains are circuit, while a recent retrospective of his films as part of Documenta fragments of bones, liquor bottles and hand-carved Chinese characters on the walls of caves counting down the days and 14 illustrated his embrace by the contemporary art San Zimei (Three Sisters) (still), 2012, scrawling out gasps for freedom. The film is projected world. Yet his films have rarely been publicly screened film, 153 min. Courtesy the artist in his home country, where for the better part of two and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris from the ceiling onto the floor, and Wang’s physical

Spring 2018

presence at the site – the same place that inspired his narrative feature of contemporary art, though Wang’s films have rarely aligned with Jiabiangou (The Ditch, 2010) – is apparent in the trembling of the camera the trends of the moment. While the audience for Wang’s work in his hands and the sound of heavy breathing. This is a stylistic echo has extended beyond film festivals, his recent validation by the of earlier works such as San Zimei (Three Sisters, 2012) and Feng Ai (’Til contemporary art establishment points to a broader shift in the Madness Do Us Part, 2013), in which an embodied camera also travels role that everyday happenings and their representations play in through the disorderly terrain of everyday life, framing worlds with the artworld. As Hal Foster writes, ‘Despite rumors of its disapan unwavering desire to record and understand the lives of those pearance, the real remains with us.’ Excavating the real has always been central to Wang’s films, and his formal style has, in large part, excluded from power. Fang Xiuying (Mrs Fang, 2017), which was awarded the Golden remained unchanged throughout his career, to the extent that his Leopard at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival, documents the final week cinematic approach flirts with aesthetic conservatism. What has of the protagonist’s life with an intimacy that borders on voyeurism. changed is the increased visibility that the gallery context and the Her days are confined to bed in a bewildered, speechless silence as network of art biennials offer him. There has always been a risk Alzheimer’s lays claim to her body and mind. The contrast between of his films being decontextualised and exoticised when the family members who crowd busily shown to audiences in the West, who around their matriarch and her powerless might view Wang’s China with disWang’s physical presence at the paralysis creates a tense, harsh portrait of site is apparent in the trembling tanced and fetishised curiosity (though a a domestic space. Beyond the bare walls of large community of spectators has never of the camera in his hands and the bedroom, we see vignettes from a local existed for his work in China, where his world where the pastimes include electrofilms lack approval from the censors). the sound of heavy breathing fishing and long rides on dirt roads through The fact that Wang been so enthuendless fields. This patience and attention to detail is equally apparent siastically received by the Western artworld, and only afterwards in 15 Hours (2017), which witnesses the daily rhythms of work in a textile exhibited in Chinese galleries, reflects a move by the art estabfactory in Zhejiang Province. This gruelling work recalls Wang’s West lishment to confront social phenomena in ways that documenof the Tracks in making its main protagonist the factory itself, however tary cinema has been doing for decades (the case of Documenta 14 many individuals we see working in it. The single-shot, 15-hour and its attempts – however limited – to intervene in the discusvideo accumulates raw poetic fragments: a glimpse of the English sion around vulnerable populations of migrants in Europe is an word ‘MADNESS’ on a worker’s T-shirt; the simultaneously deft and obvious example). Across his body of work, Wang has tested the mechanical handiwork that pieces together hundreds of pairs of jeans limits of cinema and explored the possibilities opened up through in a single day; the way that light changes over several hours in spaces the extreme duration of his works and their unflinching confrontaso vast that their limits vanish. The work extends Wang’s preoccupation tion with social suffering. From its start, cinema sought to document with the labourers who make possible the nation’s economic boom, and labour and industrialisation; Wang’s work can be seen as a timely who might be left behind by it. return to that sensibility. ara Fang Xiuying (Mrs Fang) (still), 2017, 16:9 film, In recent years, documentary practices have colour, sound, 102 min. © the artist. Courtesy gained prominence across the expansive field Benny Schaffer is a writer based in Shanghai the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

ArtReview Asia

Antonia Pia Gordon My TIME ICON No.I

CHINA

PAST PRESENT FUTURE The Evolution of Man & Machines

My Time Icon No. I: Polyptych Past – Present – Future Diptych Outer Gates: Terracotta Army Triptych Inner Gates: Hong Kong Stock Exchange Interior: 30 Robots in front of the Chinese flag Sculpture: H 235 cm x W 200 cm x D 80 cm

Hong Kong 27th March – 3rd April 2018 By Appointment Only Private view with the artist + 971501478316 info@antoniapiagordon.com www.antoniapiagordon.com

ANTON IA PIA G O R DON F

DUBAI

HONG KONG

www.silverlensgalleries.com info@silverlensgalleries.com 2263 Don Chino Roces Ave Ext Makati City 1231 Philippines

Gabriel Barredo Chati Coronel Gregory Halili Pow Martinez Wawi Navarroza Manuel Ocampo Norberto Roldan Maria Taniguchi Yee I-Lann 27 - 31 March 2018 Booth 1D05 HKCEC, Hong Kong

image: Chief Celebrity, Pow Martinez, 2018

Applications Now Open

September 21-23, 2018 Shanghai Exhibition Center © YANG FUDONG, The Light That I Feel 8, 2014. Courtesy of YANG Fudong and ShanghART Gallery (Shanghai, Beijing & Singapore)

Art Reviewed

Finally, accent in Tamil is always phrasal and initial and never strong – a fact generally forgotten by English speakers of Tamil. This fault should be carefully avoided 93

NGV Triennial NGV International, Melbourne 15 December – 15 April The first NGV Triennial in Melbourne is a blockbusting attempt to compete in the global entertainment industry. Opening in the same week as the latest instalment of Star Wars, the exhibition, like the film franchise, encompasses abundant paraphernalia, videogames and other interactive media. The aim is to stage an exhibition – numbering over 100 artists – that is more than simply spectatorial, featuring such participatory novelties as artist-designed cafés, bars and bedrooms. Whether through posts shared on Instagram or the Ron Mueckdesigned skateboards available for purchase in the gift shop, this triennial aspires to move out of the museum. Xu Zhen’s spectacular 18m-long sculpture Eternity-Buddha in Nirvana (2016–17) welcomes visitors into the museum foyer. One of 20 monumental works commissioned for the triennial, Xu’s massive replica of a High Tang Dynasty (705–781 CE) reclining Buddha supports 15 imitation Greco-Roman sculptures, including the Farnese Hercules and the Dancing Faun. The work levels divergent cultural histories, making a statement about the possibility of reciprocity across cultures and presenting monumental sculpture as a form invested with historical meaning. While Eternity-Buddha in Nirvana might serve to stimulate visitors’ engagement with the NGV’s substantial Asian art collection, exhibiting this vast Buddharupa amid the commotion of the triennial also evokes the precarious foundations on which globalised culture stands. This impulse to spectacularise means that visitors are urged to participate in immersive experiences created by artists whose brands eclipse their work. In a room on the ground floor, Yayoi Kusama’s Flower Obsession (2017) invites visitors into a domestic space where

they can plaster cloth flowers over household furniture and walls. In giddy acquiescence, members of the audience coproduce NGV’s marketing campaign by Instagramming their experience. Next to Xu’s centrepiece, visitors can make purchases at a café decorated in a vibrant geometric pattern by British-Moroccan photographer Hassan Hajjaj. A frenetic simulation of a Moroccan teahouse, complete with colourful ottomans and plywood Tayfour tables, Hajjaj’s café redesign is titled Noss Noss (2017). The term denotes coffee with milk, and ‘half-and-half’ makes an apt metaphor for the triennial’s melange of gift shop and gallery, viewer and consumer. There are moments of reprieve. Yamagami Yukihiro’s installation Shinjuku Calling (2014) uses pencil on painted plywood to depict the streetscape around Shinjuku Station (the world’s busiest train station), including pedestrians and neon signs. The carefully detailed drawing and metallic colour gradient are reminiscent of a distilled image from an anime film, while a video-projection overlay produces a compelling, spectral movement of people, light and vehicles across the scene. The feeling of calm the work induces is like that of emerging onto the street having been hurried through a railway concourse. Also on the ground floor are four untitled (2015) collages by Kay Hassan. The works are made from torn shreds of billboard posters and other media images reconfigured as largescale portraits of people from Johannesburg. Combining slick media imagery with portraiture, these collages articulate a fragmentation of subjectivity that is typical of our hypernetworked, globalised era. Among the clamour of the triennial they are a useful reminder that the spectacular can distort perspective.

facing page top Yayoi Kusama, Flower Obsession, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Eugene Hylanda. Courtesy the artist and NGV Triennial, Melbourne

On the museum’s first floor, the ornate extravagance of Guo Pei’s couture comes with a celebrity accreditation: Rihanna wore a magnificent canary-yellow gown to the 2015 Met Gala in New York. Guo’s costumes allude to the convergence of high fashion across different cultural histories, a reminder that part of the allure of clothing – as with art as spectacle – is its unaffordability or impracticality. Issues of (in)accessibility are underscored on level three with Candice Breitz’s Wilson Must Go (2017), a seven-channel HD video installation that grapples with the parameters of empathy. The work draws on the personal narratives of six people seeking refuge (two in Berlin, two in Cape Town and two in New York). Their traumatic stories are told twice: in the first instance, voiced in fragments by Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore, shown seated in front of green screens; in the second, by the victims themselves. Rather than producing empathy, Wilson Must Go’s celebrity recoding of persecution reinscribes inequality, presenting Hollywood celebrities as arbiters of affect. Breitz changed the name of her work, formerly titled Love Story (2016), as a tepid response to ongoing protests by the local arts community against NGV’s contract with Wilson Security, the company that violently enforces the imprisonment of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia’s offshore detention centres. The NGV Triennial is a blockbuster, buttressed by spectacle and driven by the assumption that the public demands to be awed. What was an opportunity to engage critically with increasing global demand for market-driven cultural production functions as a perpetuation of those forces, forgoing critique in favour of participation. Tristen Harwood

facing page bottom Xu Zhen, Eternity-Buddha in Nirvana, 2016–17 (installation view). Photo: John Gollings. Courtesy the artist and NGV Triennial, Melbourne

ArtReview Asia

Spring 2018

Tong Kunniao Art Trash Platform China, dRoom Project Space, Beijing 24 December – 31 March Artists often find themselves having to weather the disparaging judgment that their work is ‘trash’. With this in mind, Tong Kunniao has installed a 3.5m-high silver metal dustbin overflowing with stuff outside Platform China, in the middle of Beijing’s 798 Art District. The piece serves not as a vehicle for tired comments on contemporary art writ large, the artist states, but rather as a projection of his anxieties about the quality, validity and raison d’être of his own work. An insecurity surely not uncommon in young artists looking for a foothold in the Colosseum of the artworld. On entering the trashcan (simply titled Art Trash, 2017) through a small door, visitors are confronted by an overwhelming volume of objects, noises, colours and movement. Most of the haphazardly arranged stuff – from miniature cardboard sculptures and reams of shan shui-style painted toilet paper, to tubes of fluorescent lighting and noisy mechanised harmonica constructions – was salvaged by Tong from dumps and secondhand markets or, more recently, with the wholesale government-led

sprucing-up of Beijing, ordered from the depths of the Internet. Space on the walls and other partitions was left free for visitors to graffiti: unsurprisingly, rude and raunchy messages were most common, a fitting partner to the animated video projections showing poo falling as if chucked into the bin. Both serve to remind us that this container might be added to at any moment. The work is constantly supplemented by new objects, meaning that it is always unfinished. Not just the cardboard coffee cups and bicycle frame that the artist told me had been mysteriously affixed to the outside of the bin in the dead of night, but also objects created in an adjacent workshop. In that room a series of yellow surgical waste bins are filled with bits and pieces arranged in ascending order of price from RMB5 to RMB50. The artist invites visitors to purchase items, a glue gun and whatever else you can find lying around to create a miniature work of your own, which they can then install anywhere in Tong’s existential-art-crisis bin.

Art Trash, 2017, mixed media, 400 × 400 × 500 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

And yet despite this, the work is fun, refusing to take itself seriously, a characteristic of the waste-object creations Tong has been making since his student days. It’s also not the first time that Tong has temporarily associated himself with a dustbin: in an earlier show, he climbed into a can and had himself wheeled around the exhibition opening, culminating with him delivering a speech from inside it. It’s an entertaining way to actualise his self-doubt as an artist, and for the viewer it’s a refreshing reminder of how anxiety-laden the self-presentation and self-exploration of artmaking can be. There’s not much new or original in all of this: artists were recycling rubbish long before Tong. The best thing about Art Trash is the sense of exuberant excitement that it transmits, the feeling of the artist presiding over the creation of a kind of trashy wunderkammer. And just as Renaissance collectors were exploring their roles in the world through cabinets of curiosities, so is it exciting to watch a young artist like Tong consider his own role as an artist and the functions and sources of his art. Tom Mouna

Wu Tsang Sustained Glass Antenna Space, Shanghai 23 September – 15 November ‘Contact improvisation is how we survive genocide.’ This phrase from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s ‘Leave Our Mikes Alone’, and more broadly the entire 2017 essay, is the primary point of exchange between the two authors and filmmaker and visual artist Wu Tsang, as realised in the latter’s solo exhibition Sustained Glass. In the context of logistical capitalism, or ‘democratic despotism’, as W.E.B. Du Bois coined it in The African Roots of War (1915), Moten and Harney’s essay traces back to the early death of Jamaican dub poet Mikey Smith, through the recent police brutality in the United States and many other names in the ‘undercommons’ histories of black resistance. Tsang’s exhibition is an elegy, or as the artist put it in an interview with Alvin Li, “an enactment”, that dances with the essay by asking how we endure social life in this planetary ‘socio-ecological crisis’. The show opened with an essay performance, Spooky Distancing II, the first chapter of which was performed at a private salon in a Swiss church in June 2017. The work starts

with the voice of the artist narrating a text written in collaboration with Moten and entitled Sudden Rise at a Given Tune, accompanying the mesmerising movements of her long-term collaborator, the performance artist boychild. At the centre of this open installation is We Hold Where Study (2017), a 20-minute, twochannel video projection that takes a choreographic approach to image-making and mourning. The video begins with a voiceover by Moten and slowly evolves into a series of duets via contact improvisation, a technique in which the performers improvise in response to moments of physical touch. Its four chapters – the assembly line; the consultant; the algorithm; the state of war – take their structure from the subtitles of Moten and Harney’s essay. A series of stained glass and lightbox installations are placed around the video projection and are attached to the windows in the back. By taking the medium of stained glass out of churches and mosques, the artist transforms the gallery into a space both divine and radical. Displacing this devotional medium

into the secular space of contemporary art and performance connects but also queers it: echoing the exhibition title’s ‘sustained glass’. Moten and Harney’s words, incorporated in the video and inscribed onto the installations, integrate the moving image and the installation. One line stands out, translated into Chinese from the original English text of Leave Our Mikes Alone: ‘they can’t see our hands, and this is demonic to them’. Perhaps ironically, leftist Chinese intellectuals first voiced support for black resistance in the then-called ‘imperialist capitalist state’ across the Pacific back in the 1950s (and it’s notable that Du Bois met Chinese delegates during the Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent in 1958). That old campaign might have found support in the space now devoted to Tsang’s show, which was then the warehouse of a workers commune (a history it shares with many creative spaces in China today). A different form of internationalism, if not transcontinental solidarity, has taken over. That is the conundrum that we face today. Xin Zhou

Untitled (Window #3), 2017, stained glass, lightbox, 200 × 150 × 40 cm. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

Spring 2018

Hugo Boss Asia Art 2017 Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai 27 October – 11 February Each of the four nominees for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award – Yu Ji, Tao Hui, Robert Zhao Renhui and Li Ming – has been given an entire floor of Rockbund Art Museum’s narrow, five-storey art deco building. Unlike in previous exhibitions, this enables the artists to create solo exhibitions with minimal interference from the others. However, it also introduces a sense of progression, as the audience is likely to encounter the artists in a prescribed sequence that comes to bear on the artists’ play with linearity, finitude and repetition. Stepping into Tao Hui’s Hello, Finale! (2017) feels like entering a futuristic matrix with an otherworldly tenor. In a white box gallery lit by fluorescent bulbs and blue-stained windows, nine monitors stand like headstones on an elevated platform, each facing a black armchair: on the screens, solitary characters in familiar atmospheric settings – the mourning mother, the brooding intellectual, the schoolgirl in love, the disillusioned aspiring actress, the videogame-addicted child – perform short, dramatic monologues while speaking into a telephone. Tao Hui transforms well-worn narratives and pictorial tropes into self-reflexive, lyrical vignettes that, viewed collectively, come close to the uncanny. They strike a delicate balance between wistful existential angst, reflection on the nature of performativity and a growing sense of doom. All this is offset by the absurdity of desynchronised looping – stories start over as soon as they end, the sole protagonists alienated even from their own repetition. Two more videos complement the main installation by revealing and collapsing layers of artifice and authenticity: in The Acting Tutorial, a group of women’s exaggerated performance of archetypal emotions precipitates violence, while The Dusk of Tehran (both 2014) stages Hong Kong diva Anita Mui’s intimate final address to her fans with an Iranian actress in a taxi. Under the framework of the fictional Institute of Critical Zoologists, an online project devoted to understanding human and animal relations that doubles as an artistic persona, Singaporean artist Robert Zhao Renhui’s take on the natural history museum is an encyclopaedic collection of curiosities both found and fabricated. Artefacts, archival photographs and colonial paraphernalia overflow the walls and tables, surrounded by collections of plants,

taxidermy animals and insects enclosed in specimen bottles. Throwing the artist’s intervention into relief are works that play deliberately with audience perception, such as Eskimo Wolf Trap Often Quoted in Sermons (2013), where the blade of a bloodstained knife pokes out of a snowscape made of baking soda, accompanied by text describing a wolf licking the blade until it bleeds to death. While the interrogation of humans’ relationship with nature is central to any critique of modernity, the Institute of Critical Zoologists shows little interest in indicting the study of natural history as a fundamentally colonialist and anthropocentric mode of inquiry. Rather, it appropriates the language of natural science to create an imaginary system of knowledge production at the juncture of critique and fiction. Another made-up trap appears as a mysterious blue emanating from the middle of a dark forest in the photograph Bee Trap (2013), where the caption claims faux-earnestly that bees’ favourite colour makes them prey to an easy trompe l’oeil. Li Ming’s immersive video installations reconfigure the smallest of the four spaces into a circuitous one-way passage. Spread across dozens of different-sized screens in a narrow, darkened corridor, Rendering the Mind (2017) invites the viewer to meditate on the individual’s position in virtual and physical environments, with a heightened awareness of the body’s negotiations of architectural space. Devoid of human figures other than clip-art silhouettes, video snippets shot in and outside the art-deco hotel Broadway Mansions, an old Shanghai landmark built in the 1930s, are arranged into a series of Structural film-inspired montages and digital renderings, set against a charged soundscape of screeching doors, the white noise of rain and a low steady drone. A parody of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) and Bruce Nauman’s Walk with Contrapposto (1968) – classic works about men in confinement – Li Ming’s own neon-green exit sign looms over the images as an amusing yet alarming cue for a break. The dark passage then opens up to a sunlit U-shaped corridor, where one-sided projections of architectural fragments direct foot traffic into the next gallery. Awaiting the viewer is a set of drone videos of the artist walking languidly but determinedly across mountains.

facing page top Li Ming, Rendering the Mind (still), 2017, multichannel HD video installation, colour, sound. Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

Seen from afar, the body, forever moving from left to right, is so small that it almost disappears into a pool of pixels, never able to reach the edge of the frame; leaving the screen now appears as a Sisyphean gesture, to be viewed alongside the comical pose of the man who cannot escape. It is rewarding to turn to Yu Ji’s exhibition after Li Ming’s intense orchestration of attention and movement, as the open floorplan and dispersed placement of works provide space in which to roam and reconnect to one’s tactile perception. Her heavy-duty sculptural installations, seemingly from disparate times and geographies, combine materials of various masses, textures and transparencies. Quoting Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1976 Topology of a Phantom City, Yu Ji’s Passage (2017) pairs tracking shots of passages couverts from pre-Haussmann Paris with further footage of workers building support structures for her site-specific sculpture in a two-channel projection on wood. Nearby, clear vinyl sheets with black-and-white prints of Western classical architecture lie flat, folded, overlapped on the ground, or wrapped around columns. The fragility, or literal ruination, of flesh in her figurative sculptures in cement, steel and clay, like the fractured body parts in Rema-Rema (2017), contrasts with Etudes – Lento IV (2017), where colossal, resin-covered iron chains hanging from the ceiling take on organic forms, recalling Eva Hesse’s unsettling rope piece from 1970. The power and subtlety with which Yu Ji sustains such formal and material tension arise from embodied performance. Alluding to indigenous Taiwanese lore and the early history of sulphur mining in Pataauw Stone (2015), she drags a large composite rock sculpture through dense wilderness before deserting it in a valley: myth, nature and industry joined together in the futility of human toil. This is an exceptional presentation of four young artists. Yet it remains to be seen how this fulfils Hugo Boss Asia Art’s mission to foster more nuanced and diverse geopolitical representations in art: three of the four artists this year are embedded in a decidedly Sino-centric artworld. While past iterations of the award have made efforts to reach beyond Greater China and its immediate neighbours, the observer is left wondering how far this Shanghai-based institution is willing to go. Kang Kang

facing page bottom Yu Ji, Diary of Sulfur Mining – Pataauw, 2015, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

ArtReview Asia

Spring 2018

Yin-Ju Chen Extrastellar Evaluations III: Entropy: 25800 TKG+ Projects, Taipei 6 January – 14 February Yin-Ju Chen’s latest solo exhibition is the third and final chapter of her Extrastellar Evaluations series. Like the previous two iterations, based on the legend of the ‘lost continent’ of Lemuria and Galileo Galilei’s A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), Entropy: 25800 takes for its starting point a text, in this case a series of five philosophical monographs ‘channelled’ between 1981 and 1984 and known collectively as The Law of One. Using video, drawings and animation, Chen constructs a narrative exploring the end of the universe as described in prophecy. Entropy: 25800 revolves around an eponymous 16 min 47 sec single-channel videowork (2018), in which a computersynthesised voice introduces itself: “I am Ra, I greet you in the love and light of the infinite Creator, I will now communicate…” Ra is the unified consciousness of extraterrestrial beings who, in The Law of One, communicates with humanity through three authors known collectively as L/L Research. Here

he delivers the message that the death of the universe, brought about by humankind, will occur after the Age of Iron. The video, projected on a screen in a dark room, mixes landscape shots with animations and archive footage of thermal and nuclear phenomena, while terms borrowed from thermodynamics and astronomy, such as entropy and Great Year (the period of one complete cycle of the equinoxes), rush in along with the subtitles. The rapid edits and psychedelic effects obscure any theoretical interpretation of the work. The viewer is asked to make a decision between laboriously deciphering these unfamiliar concepts or treating the video as a speculative fiction that does not intend to educate or convince, or even to communicate on a discursive level, but to point out alternative ways of perceiving and reflecting on the future of human society. The objective perspective on earth provided by Ra seems, despite the farfetched premise, useful in the context of current existential threats to humanity, ecological and military.

The project recalls the artist’s previous Liquidation Maps series (2014), which links astrology and astronomy to historical massacres in history, a concept that is surprisingly impactful. The exhibition also features a sanctuarylike space with five charcoal and pencil on paper drawings on the wall, representing the flower and tree of life (Flower of Life, 2017) and basic elements of nature (Fire, Earth, Air, Water, 2017); lying on the floor is a form of planetary sun gear made from a sheet of steel. As with the video, these can be read as occult symbols with ritual significance, as artistic studies of pattern and form, or as something in between. A small-scale diagram of Pisces and Aquarius is projected on the wall opposite the video, perhaps indicating a farewell to the Age of Pisces and the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, a period during which humankind will supposedly put more emphasis on the spiritual side of life. If we are now in a phase of transition, it calls for inventive new ways of speculating on our very existence. Guo Juan

Extrastellar Evaluations III: Entropy: 25800 (still), 2018, single-channel video, 16 min 47 sec. Courtesy the artist and Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei

100

ArtReview Asia

When is Space? An exhibition on contemporary architecture Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur 21 January – 31 March This sprawling group show – which brings together the work of architects, artists, designers and urbanists in a variety of media – is less invested in the question its title asks than in showing us how space works and how we interact with it. A series by the architectural photographer Randhir Singh, titled CPWD (2017) and showing a social housing project in New Delhi built by the Central Public Works Department in the years after independence, perfectly summarises this focus: these modernist buildings reveal the ways in which they are inhabited and the ways in which they are vulnerable to wear. It’s an unusual aesthetic approach to the canon of Indian modernist architecture, which is typically photographed in a dramatic monochrome, separated from its surroundings and emptied of inhabitants. Designed by the preeminent Indian architects of the time, these projects sprang up in metropolises across the country in the middle of the last century but are increasingly threatened by demolition. This investigation into time and space is timely because the precarious existence of India’s architectural modernist heritage is the subject of much discussion on the subcontinent today. Recently, the facade of the beloved Paras

Cinema in New Delhi was demolished without warning, revealing that its interior had already been torn down without public knowledge. That architectural facades can deceive, yet are nevertheless expressions of the aspirations of a society at a certain time, is among the concerns played out in When is Space? The show’s strongest suit is its delivery of the encounters between art and architecture: there is no need to force the relationship. Artist Teja Gavankar’s Story of Cubes (2018) is a subtle addition to the JKK courtyard. Jutting out almost imperceptibly from the contours of the courtyard wall, this camouflaged sculpture in red stone matches the wall’s brick colour and deconstructs its angles. Given that the title articulates a relation between time and space, it is no surprise that the concerns of When is Space? are formal. With the installation 5/8 (2018), artist Mark Prime energises a space through a simple but exacting gesture: the room is filled by a sharp red neon light, briskly reflected by staggered black acrylic sheets. To enter is to be overwhelmed not just by the light, but by the space in which it is held. ‘To invent a new future and to rediscover the past is one gesture,’ claims a plaque at the

entrance to the JKK. The architectural history of the complex fulfils this maxim: designed by the late Charles Correa and completed in 1991, the eight blocks of this multipurpose arts centre are steeped in a secular Nehruvian ideology (it was initially commissioned by the Rajasthani government with the aim of providing a home for local arts and crafts). A series of Spatial Puzzles (2018) by Milind Mahale offer a refreshing take on Correa’s work: several finely designed steel and wood puzzles allow viewers to play with, and infinitely reinvent, maquette-sized versions of Correa’s iconic architectural forms. In a section devoted more straightforwardly to the history of architecture, photographs and plans from a brutalist crematorium in Coimbatore, developed by Mancini Design from Chennai, offer a regional modernism. The complex includes sympathetic and well-designed spaces in which families can observe the many different rituals pertaining to death. It is a clever inclusion: even though the show is itself presented in Jaipur, a city close to the ‘centre’ of New Delhi, the heart of Nehruvian modernism, it reminds us that the architecture of the ‘peripheries’ retains the capacity to surprise. Skye Arundhati Thomas

Teja Gavankar, Story of Cubes, 2018, red stone, paint, steel frame, dimensions variable. Courtesy Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur

Spring 2018

101

Persevering Traditions: The weft and the warp Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai 21 December – 19 January The question of whether contemporary art from the Indian subcontinent must reconcile with the region’s artistic traditions continues to haunt its artists, curators and critics. One side of the argument is that art must remain connected to its ‘roots’; the other is that the burden of tradition is best left behind. Persevering Traditions: The weft and the warp, curated by Veer Munshi at Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai, brings together the work of 14 Indian artists, from revered modernists to younger practitioners, who have ‘borrowed from, been inspired by, negotiated with, or plainly imitated traditional forms’. This is a useful cue: the ‘persevering’ of tradition is here achieved through sampling and referring to symbolic forms with a specific cultural history. These paintings and sculptures were hung in a tight formation that, given the exhibition’s premise, encouraged the viewer to look closely for historical precedents in the formal properties of each work. Anju Dodiya’s acrylic and gouache paintings on wallpaper, showing brooding figures floating in and out of decorative scenes, can be seen to reference Indian

traditions of miniature painting, but the artist also cites seventeenth-century Flemish painting, the films of Ingmar Bergman and nineteenth-century French medical manuals as influences. Also working across different cultural histories, Surendran Nair, a painter from the Kerala school, references both Greek mythology – in particular the hybrid bodies of his ‘Cuckoonebulopolis’ series, set in a utopia based on Aristophanes’s The Birds (414 BCE) – and the formal compositions of the body that are particular to Kathakali, the seventeenthcentury dance tradition of his native state. K.G. Subramanyam, represented in the show by an untitled watercolour, was a teacher on the fine arts course at Baroda University, in Gujarat, where several artists in the show trained, and a founding father of Baroda modernism. When Subramanyam moved to the university after a split with Santiniketan and the Bengal school, the Baroda School became associated with a style that combined narrative figurative painting with European modernism. This is reflected in Subramanyam’s

Surendran Nair, Alibis of the Cognates IX, 2015, digital inkjet print on archival paper, 76 × 56 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai

102

ArtReview Asia

own work: he sourced figures from Kalighat and Santhal paintings, textile patuas, puppetry traditions and court painting. Seen through the lens of regional Indian art history, the techniques and language employed by many of the artists in the show, including Gulammohammed Sheikh and Madhvi Parekh, continue modernist preoccupations (particularly in the formalised use of traditional motifs). But these symbols are themselves ambiguous, and to identify single historical influences in the works is reductive. Different art histories are specific to each region of the subcontinent: even the tradition of Mughal miniature painting shifts radically between different locales. In attempting to find broad precedents, these histories risk being flattened out, symptomatic of a tendency to neatly reduce complexity to trope. Perhaps there is a greater need to revisit the ways in which history has narrativised early modernist interactions with tradition than to investigate whether the traditions themselves persevere. Skye Arundhati Thomas

Melati Suryodarmo Timoribus Shanghart Singapore 25 January – 25 March Melati Suryodarmo’s greatest asset is her Javanese dance- and butoh-trained body, the limits of which she explores in durational performances. The latter range from fullsprint displays of power (as in her best-known work, Exegie – Butter Dance, 2000, in which she dances and skids on blocks of butter), to periods of deep meditative surrender (in I’m a Ghost in My Own House, 2012, she grinds down hundreds of kilograms of charcoal over two days). Born in Solo and at one point living and working in Germany for almost 20 years, she mines material that interrogates crosscultural identities and the female body – although unlike some of her performanceart compatriots, such as the artist-activist Arahmaiani and Heri Dono, her references tend to be abstract, inviting a variety of interpretations in different contexts. However, this exhibition, gathering her works in performance, photography and video from the past ten years or so to constitute her first solo showcase in Singapore, does not exactly play to her strengths. If it highlights the multidisciplinary nature of her practice, it also reveals that the quality of the art is uneven, with her live performance and performance videos overshadowing the rest. Casting an unconvincing pall over this seemingly random selection of works is the portentous

title Timoribus, which translates as ‘fears’ (specifically in the dative case) from the Latin. Her short films and photography featuring people other than herself range from selfconsciously cerebral to inoffensively bland. Take the title work, Timoribus (2018), which tackles the fear and paranoia propagated by mass media. Its belaboured solution to our appetite for live-streaming HD news images is to present deliberately blurred footage of a group of people running around and fighting. Meanwhile, her photography is moody but forgettable. One work is a series of doubleexposed photographs capturing Suryodarmo in motion (Self Portraits, 2018) – falling from a chair, standing up and yelling, twisting her head. The careful compositions and elaborate styling make for pretty studio portraits, but they ring hollow, especially when you learn that to achieve a satisfactory photo, Suryodarmo apparently tumbled out of her seat more than 50 times. But somewhere between the scrupulous art direction and editing, the truth of this punishing performance got lost, and along with it, a vital sense of risk and danger. Performance art is her strongest suit, and the four videos included in this show demonstrate her ability to create striking, charismatic images that translate well to photographs and edited videos. Her best pieces are drawn from

personal experience but open out into a wider resonant space. In 24,901 Miles (2015) she drags a mattress and a spade around a roomful of red clay over ten hours in two days. The work, which speaks of her cultural and physical nomadism and her search for home, alludes to other forms of disenfranchisement, such as the experience of refugees. The only live performance she did in Singapore was Transaction of Hollows (2018), which took place on the first two nights of the exhibition and featured the artist firing 400 arrows every evening, over four hours, in a white room. Alert but relaxed, she takes her time nocking, aiming and shooting them. Every arrow slams against the facing wall like a gunshot. The piece bears no easy exegesis, but is compelling in a formal way, with its repetitive actions starting out innocuously in a soothing pattern of tension and release, and then escalating to a darker ending. On the second day, the skin on her fingers starts to tear. Blood twangs off the bowstring and speckles her face and clothes. When the last of the 400 arrows for the day is shot, she collapses to the floor in tears. The end product of the performance, with the artist on her knees and the four walls completely hedgehogged, conjures a more pessimistic vision of war and siege, one in which the executioner becomes the victim. Adeline Chia

Transaction of Hollows, 2018, performance by the artist at the opening of Timoribus. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart Singapore

Spring 2018

103

Between Worlds: Raden Saleh and Juan Luna National Gallery Singapore 16 November – 11 March Two women are going up a flower-strewn staircase. The taller, fair-skinned one is leading the other woman, who is darker and smaller, with a hand on her waist. Together they ascend the steps towards golden rays bursting from behind a cloud. The title of this painting is Spain and the Philippines (1884). Couched in materteral affection between colonial master and subject, this cloyingly benevolent portrait of colonialism is one of several moments of uncomfortable viewing in this survey of two ‘national hero’-status artists from nineteenth-century Southeast Asia: Indonesia’s Raden Saleh (1811–80) and Juan Luna from the Philippines (1857–99). The exhibition, with more than a hundred works drawn from collections all over the world, is the most comprehensive showcase of either artist to date. While exhaustive and educational, it also feels blandly laudatory and slightly parochial, because it reinforces a well-worn art-historical narrative in Southeast Asia in which the beginnings of modernity are traced to art produced during the colonial period using Western idioms.

Given their parallels, Saleh and Luna are a natural pairing. Both were adept at Western painting and recognised in European salons as geniuses from the far reaches of the Dutch and Spanish empires. Both are also often seen as the ‘fathers’ of modern art in their respective countries, and some of their paintings have become iconic anticolonial images in the national consciousness. Overall, the show does little to destabilise the mythical status of these artists. It is split into two parts, one for each artist, and traces their individual developments over time, drawing out major themes and styles. The narrative is picaresque, one of colonial cosmopolitans infiltrating European art academies, impressing the white guys and eventually returning to their homelands as heroes. In canvas after canvas, Saleh’s and Luna’s fluency and versatility are on full display. Saleh’s keen observation skills can be seen in early watercolour studies of Javanese peasants in traditional dress, and later, the quietness develops into more ambitious compositions of churning maritime scenes and animal fight

Juan Luna, The Death of Cleopatra, 1881, oil on canvas, 250 × 340 cm. Courtesy Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

104

ArtReview Asia

sequences. Meanwhile, Luna’s trademark is the grand style of largescale history painting. His most famous painting, Spoliarium (1884), isn’t here, but in its place is a close cousin, yet another neoclassical work, The Death of Cleopatra (1881), which took silver medal at the Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes in Madrid that same year. Featuring Cleopatra together with two servants in operatic throes of death, you can see why it made an impact in Spain, being filled with a kind of unembarrassed showmanship. Luna’s style grew itinerant afterwards, branching out to proto-Manet portraits with stark black panes in Lady at the Racetrack and Woman with Manton (both 1889), and later, grim realism depicting the working classes (The Unknown Ones, 1890–91). So we know they are good. Skilled in a competent, dexterous way, with flashes of exotic content. And if you cover the captions, you might think you’re looking at the work of – dare we say it? – some minor European artists in some respectable yet obscure provincial museum. This is where things get a bit sensitive. While Saleh and Luna are titans in

Southeast Asia, they are not significant figures in Western art history. The National Gallery of Singapore, however, is keen to do some reparative work by plugging them both into European traditions: Dutch maritime scenes and Delacroix-inspired animal hunts for Saleh, for instance, and history paintings for Luna. But that is a counterproductive strategy, for all it leads to is the same dead end in which they become technically proficient but minor footnotes in Dutch and Spanish art histories. There must be a more compelling story to be told, something less diffident, more reflective and that speaks more to our times. Something that adopts a less retiring and more critical position on the politics of colonial subjects working in the loaded medium of oil painting during the nineteenth century, which came to the region as a result of the expansion of European power, settlement and exploitation. Something that acknowledges and dramatises the complexity of Saleh’s and Luna’s positions. Politically, they considered themselves nationalists, but culturally, they were conservative. They believed, like their nineteenthcentury colonial masters, that Western art traditions were a universal measure of talent and civilisation. Without unpacking this belief more rigorously, the National Gallery, some 150 years on, risks drinking the same Kool-Aid.

By more obviously highlighting the tensions and contradictions in their art, you draw attention to the elements that make them unique and fascinating products of their time. For one, the exhibition doesn’t do justice to the slipperiness of their identity politicking. For example, Saleh, who adopted the persona of a Javanese prince when mixing around in the European courts, was a genius at self-branding. Some of his Orientalist animal fight scenes – filled with gnashing predators and thrashing prey in different permutations methodically described in their titles – are performatively ‘Javanese’ and smack of shrewd self-exoticisation. Later, some art historians would argue that these works are subversive, appropriating a colonially coded form to smuggle in messages of resistance, such as by using native creatures like the tiger to represent a fighting Indonesia. But these violent menageries get only a bland wall text saying where and when Saleh could have seen these animals. Nobody wants a judgemental or didactic show. But Between Worlds, like its noncommittal, neither-here-nor-there title, suffers from the lack of a point of view on something that is becoming a pet topic at the institution: empire. The last exhibition there was Artist and Empire: (En)Countering Colonial Legacies. Organised in collaboration with Tate Britain, that exhibition

contained a degree of curatorial intervention on the Singaporean side, with a fresh segment dedicated to the rise of modern art movements as the colonies fought for independence. There were also contemporary artworks questioning the colonial legacy in Southeast Asia. Despite these measures, there was criticism that the show did not go far enough to develop a stand. Yet compared to the current Saleh/Luna show, it was positively radical. By choosing a risk-averse neutrality and avoiding any flashpoints, Between Worlds is a missed opportunity for the National Gallery to author new narratives and to spark conversation. But there will be plenty of other chances for it to try again. Next year, Singapore will celebrate the bicentennial of its founding by Sir Stamford Raffles as a British colony. A whole parade of colonial-themed art events will predictably roll out across the island. Hopefully, the National Gallery, itself housed in two key colonial buildings, the former City Hall and Supreme Court, and having greater autonomy to tackle its own country’s history instead of those of its neighbours, will lose the quietism and nostalgia. Otherwise, it risks positioning itself in a manner akin to the subject of Spain and the Philippines, and linking arms with forces with which its relationship has historically been anything but romantic. Adeline Chia

Raden Saleh, Lion Hunt, 1841, oil on canvas, 88 × 142 cm. Courtesy Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga

Spring 2018

105

Danh Vo Take My Breath Away Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 9 February – 9 May In the opening gallery of Danh Vo’s retrospective sits the wooden skeleton of a chair. This is the stripped wooden frame of one of the two Chippendale-style armchairs on which John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara sat when formulating their strategy in Vietnam, and which were gifted by Jackie to the secretary of defense after her husband’s murder. The sentimentalism of that gesture – and the chairs’ status as keepsakes of a fondly remembered time – jars with their implication in the horror resulting from the decision to escalate the US military campaign, to which these luxury furnishings were not only witnesses but (literally) supports. By stripping the chairs of their leather upholstery, which hangs like flayed skin on a nearby wall, Vo introduces the central theme of his 15-year career: the conflicting histories embodied, and functions served, by the objects we treasure. The curved wall around the museum’s cavernous atrium is lined with framed letters from Henry Kissinger. In them he thanks the New York Post’s theatre critic for having supplied tickets to ballets, plays and musicals that he regrets being unable to attend because matters of foreign policy – the names Saigon, Ho Chi Minh and Cambodia are boastfully dropped – have detained him. Like Lot 20. Two Kennedy Administration Cabinet Room Chairs (2013), these historical artefacts were acquired at auction and are exhibited here on the assumption that their juxtaposition with works referencing Vo’s personal narrative (born in Vietnam in 1975, his family fled the country following the fall of Saigon and, after being rescued at sea, eventually settled in Denmark) serves to entwine private and public histories, the fate of the individual as a body with the abstract exercise of power. The function of ornaments like a glittering chandelier (08:03, 28.05, 2009) that takes up all but a few centimetres of the space separating the Guggenheim’s walkway from a low ceiling

is, according to an accompanying statement by Vo, to ‘make you forget, to make you leave your sorrows behind’. This chimes with Kissinger’s expressed desire to leave behind the responsibilities of power by spending a night at the theatre, and with the image of Kennedy and McNamara settling comfortably into their luxury armchairs while pushing pieces around an imagined battlefield. The implication is that art’s ultimate purpose is to detach its powerful consumers from the consequences of their actions on the real world. It is troubling to consider that culture creates the conditions under which violence flourishes – that Kissinger was a more relaxed, more effective and perhaps even a more brilliant warmonger because he was a connoisseur. The obvious incompatibility of the chandelier with the space in which it is installed causes the visitor to dwell on its function. The same is true of the various mongrel statuaries – such as Ο Θεός μαύρο (2015), which combines a second-century marble sarcophagus with a medieval wooden statue of the Virgin – whose incoherence interrupts the suspension of disbelief upon which devotional objects depend. Yet they also represent a combination of forms, materials and cultures that should be celebrated as beautiful rather than condemned as disfigured. 06.03.1965 (2010), a silver cross taken into space on Gemini 4, is charged by its talismanic value to those who carried it, yet its status as a witness to Cold War politics, its currency as a religious object and its simple extraterrestrial aura suffers here – like many other works – as a result of its installation on a clattering pedestrian walkway that doesn’t lend itself to close contemplation of objects. Their nuanced and fragmented take on history, furthermore, feels ill-suited to the museum’s inexorable spiral, which lures you ever onwards and upwards. While much of Vo’s work is underpinned by the anger that Kissinger’s unctuous tone excites, this fraught vision of human culture

facing page top 2.2.1861 (detail), 2009–, ink on paper, writing by Phung Vo, 30 × 21 cm. Photo: Kristopher McKay. © and courtesy the artist and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

106

is counterweighted by a humanistic faith in the individual. 2.2.1861 (2009–) reproduces, in a beautiful calligraphic script drawn by the artist’s father, the last letter of a French missionary, Théophane Vénard, prior to his execution by the Vietnamese authorities. The work elevates Vénard’s elegant prose and courageous resignation (‘A slight sabre-cut will separate my head from my body, like the spring flower which the Master of the garden gathers for His pleasure’) without irony or rancour. That it is possible to admire an individual while at the same time objecting to the power structures of which he is a representative is reinforced by the nearby placement of a postcard-set titled Société des missions-étrangères – Les Martyrs (2009), a reminder that the word ‘propaganda’ derives from the in-house publishing press at the Vatican. Vo’s distrust of the conventional distinctions – among them those of coloniser and colonised, self and other – is most poignantly expressed in the found photographic series Good Life (2007), which comprises images, taken by an American anthropologist during the war, of young Vietnamese men holding hands. The pictures are ostensibly studies of the casual physical intimacy between men that is part of the local culture, but they carry an erotic charge for Western viewers liable to (mis)read the gesture as a public statement of sexual orientation. Desire is here figured as an impulse behind the othering or orientalising of other cultures but also, and ambiguously, as breaking down the boundaries separating perceiver from perceived (the wider archive includes letters and diaries detailing relationships between American soldiers and Vietnamese men). The artist’s description of the work as a ‘mediated self-portrait’ (on the grounds that he identifies with both the maker and the subjects of the work) might serve as an alternative title for a retrospective that dramatises the complex artifice of Vo’s own identity, and the histories it embodies. Ben Eastham

facing page bottom 08:03, 28.05, 2009, late nineteenth-century chandelier, dimensions variable. Photo: David Heald. © and courtesy the artist and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

ArtReview Asia

Spring 2018

107

Hassan Sharif: I Am The Single Work Artist Sharjah Art Foundation 4 November – 3 February Hassan Sharif’s status as a pioneer of conceptual art in the Middle East, and arguably the most important artist working in the United Arab Emirates when he died in 2016, was recently honoured with a major retrospective at the Sharjah Art Foundation. Encompassing more than 40 years of production, the wideranging exhibition included everything from the cartoons and caricatures Sharif made for local news publications in the mid-1970s to works left unfinished in his studio upon his death, just as he was achieving wider international recognition. Imaginatively titled after a 1989 quote from the artist’s writings about the durational and repetitive way in which he worked, I Am The Single Work Artist was curated by Hoor Al Qasimi and divided into seven chapters, whose names were also inspired by Sharif’s own words. In the first gallery dedicated to the exhibition at the foundation’s Al Mureijah Square complex (the show also spills over into the nineteenthcentury Bait Al Serkal townhouse), ‘Hassan’s Atelier’ replicates the artist’s studio at the time of his death. Sketches, works in progress, pieces he kept on view (including a 1981 portrait of his brother Hussain), instructions that served as the starting point for most of his works, and cardboard and metal assemblages hang on the walls. A big worktable, with open storage areas underneath, reveals the wide array of objects and materials – including fabric and wire – that Sharif employed. The presentation for ‘I’m an object maker’ in Gallery 5 features many of the largest-scale works in the show. These include an installation of interlinked whisk brooms (Broom, 2016) covering a whole wall, an accumulation of bent aluminium cookie sheets (555, 2016) wired together and displayed like a waterfall cascading onto the floor and thousands of Sharif’s diaristic photographs of ordinary things, strung together and suspended above the digital printer that had produced the dangling prints. Related to the strategies of the Nouveaux Réalistes in the 1960s, and

particularly the working methods of the French artist Arman, these works exemplify Sharif’s interest in repetition. Cotton (2013), a glued-together glob of cotton and the accompanying video of the artist making it, speaks to the durational aspect of his creative process. The section ‘Performance is good’ reveals Sharif’s roots in conceptual and performance art. Created from the late-1970s through to the mid-1980s, the performance pieces are documented by mostly black-and-white photographs laid out in grids, similar to the way that Gilbert & George and Vito Acconci presented their actions. My Body in the Store (1983) capture the artist’s movement through a souk, while the four photographs of One Day Exhibition (1984) record a temporary show of Sharif’s drawings on a city wall. Conceptual pieces like Reading Newspaper in Taxi (1985) document Sharif’s daily activities with written notes and sketches, which he then mounted and framed as art. Piles of tied-together plastic cups, wads of paper bundled in fabric and broken toys connected with wire fill the gallery titled ‘I’m loyal to colour’. An accumulation of readymade plastic combs (Combs, 2016) hung en bloc look like an abstract painting, while also echoing Annette Messager’s constellations of photos. Nearby, cut-up and wire-hung pink bath towels (Towel 3, 2013) provide a new take on monochrome painting, while a mound of cut and wire-bound plastic slippers (Slippers and Wire, 2009) brings to mind Mario Merz’s igloos constructed with found materials, and more broadly the arte povera strategy of employing everyday objects to simple ends. A permanently sealed box dating from 1983, My Little Tiny Box, lends its name to Gallery 2, where it is included alongside scores of other boxed and bound sculptural pieces resembling crudely assembled books and packages. My Little Tiny Box relates to the enigmatic sculptural object With Hidden Noise (1916) by Marcel Duchamp, one of Sharif’s artistic heroes and whose texts he translated into Arabic for the

facing page Hassan Sharif: I Am The Single Work Artist, 2017 (installation views). Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

108

ArtReview Asia

benefit of his peers. Adopting more recent conceptual art strategies, the section ‘…so I created a semi system’ focused on Sharif’s obsessive use of mathematics and chance in works from 1983 to 2015. He analysed the handwriting in letters using grids, points of which were connected by lines to create random geometric forms that were then fabricated as paintings and wooden sculptures. Other instructional pieces from the same period, rendered as paintings and works on paper, evoke the experimental work of such American minimalist artists as Sol LeWitt and Fred Sandback. Sharif was among the first regional artists to explore the conceptual strategies of the European and American avant-garde. In doing so, he opened doors through which others followed: in 1980 he cofounded The Emirates Fine Art Society, whose role was recognised in 2002 when Sharif, his brother Hussain and his protégés Mohammed Kazem, Abdullah Al Saadi and Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim were shown together in the exhibition 5 UAE at the Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen. Yet for all that the artworld is still catching up with Sharif’s influence and the significance of his dialogue with Modernism and Postmodernism, this retrospective makes clear that, regardless of the style in which he worked, Sharif made work that was always his own. The final part of the expansive exhibition, ‘Things in my room’ at Bait Al Serkal, brings together a number of themes under one roof. The figurative method of his early drawings, including introspective self-portraits and caricatures of friends, and later paintings of everyday objects, rendered in loose, expressive painted brushstrokes, are contrasted with more organic accumulations of materials. Displayed in intimate rooms, down long corridors and in shelflike nooks, his marvellous creations turn the former residence into a cabinet of curiosities. It is a fitting setting in which to display a lifetime’s worth of work both personal and experimental. Paul Laster

Spring 2018

109

Shahpour Pouyan My Place is the Placeless Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai 6 November – 15 January Left hook. “Where are you from?” Right cross. “No, where are you really from?” There are many ways to answer this one–two punch of a microaggression, familiar to minorities everywhere. Perhaps you moved there for college; perhaps you were born there, and your parents were too. Shahpour Pouyan chose to respond forensically. Four years ago, the Iranian artist took a DNA ancestry test to reveal a personal genetic makeup that spanned 33 countries, from Norway to Bhutan. The results, which have been parlayed into the ceramics, sculptures and altered images of My Place is the Placeless, suggest the perfect clapback. Implicit in this kind of diaspora art is the search for origins, and who can argue with science? Anchoring the exhibition is an open steel cube upon which are arrayed 33 colourful ceramic sculptures. Each one showcases, in exquisite miniature, a dome characteristic of one of Pouyan’s countries of origin. Some of these sculptures are immediately recognisable, like the sharply pitched roofs of a Viking-era stave church, the distinctive terraced nipple of an Iranian icehouse or yakhchāl, or the studded

beehives of early Syrian earth architecture. Lacking a robust architectural literacy myself, my reading of the geographical origin of less distinctive forms turns on my assumptions about the genetic makeup of Iranians as much as on any visual cues. Certain architectural elements seem to point to Byzantine, Ottoman, Mughal or Roman origin, and if DNA is essentially a document of conquests past, shouldn’t there be a showing from Central Asia and the Caucasus too? (There is.) Taken as a whole, the installation suggests an architectural chromatogram, separated out from a single drop of blood. Leaning on shelves on the walls facing this installation is a series of photographs depicting manuscripts, currency, busts of great leaders and other historical artefacts from the same ancient civilisations: instruments of cultural might that are no less potent for their small scale. A snapshot of murdered Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad nods to these artefacts’ vulnerability in the present, however. One such photograph in particular casts the show in an even more ominous light. It depicts a man from the front and in profile typifying the ‘Classic

My Place is the Placeless, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Musthafa Aboobacker. Courtesy the artist and Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai

110

ArtReview Asia

Mediterranean, convex nose, Dulaimi, Iraq’ of the image’s caption as well as the scientific racism that underwrote both biological anthropology and genetic research for much of both disciplines’ histories. Another kind of dome measuring comes to mind, the kind that uses calipers and emphasises genetic purity. Framed in muted teal and, in contrast to the beautifully finished sculptures, somewhat haphazardly covered in protective plastic, the photographs resemble the kind of massproduced patriotic paraphernalia you find gracing many a family home. The kind a father or uncle might look up from the dinner table and nod at in quiet satisfaction. Look at the grandeur and beauty of our heritage; we were really magnificent once. Yet a closer look reveals that all the faces in the backgrounds of these images are suspiciously similar: the artist has Photoshopped their features to resemble his own, as if to say, ‘I was there, and there, and there, too’. Much as the modern nationstate builds its mythology on a scaffolding of civilisational genealogy, Pouyan has inserted himself into his own heritage. Rahel Aima

Sahej Rahal The Dekkan Trap Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham 17 February – 22 April The Deccan Traps are one of the world’s largest volcanic features, covering some 500,000 sqkm of west-central India. With visible layers of igneous rock (basalt, to be precise), the ‘traps’ are so-called for the way their steplike structure shapes the landscape. Situated off the west coast of India lies the Shiva Crater, formed 65 million years ago by an asteroid, the progenitor of the Deccan Traps. Shiva, the ‘destroyer of evil’, along with Brahma (‘the creator’) and Vishnu (‘the preserver’, whose avatar Krishna is known as the ‘Trickster’), make up the Hindu trinity, or trimurti, together keeping the world in balance (and to whom several cave temples are carved into the Traps). Roughly 7,250km west (as the crow flies), six largescale sculptures (all works 2016–18 and untitled) punctuate the rectangular exhibition space of the Midlands Art Centre, five of which look as if, at some point, they were petrified by lava and then dug up to be presented here as fossils or relics. Instead of stone-grey, however, they are postbox-red, black or off-white. Some of them have earth or clay compacted into crevices, while others have more visible components under what is in fact a lumpy covering of resin – a mannequin’s leg protrudes from

the bottom of one totemlike sculpture, black wig-hair tufts out of another. Together they form a kind of desolate landscape. Adding to this, the Mumbai-based artist has hung seven large pencil and ink drawings on the walls depicting different scenes and figures, from the gods Kali and Shiva (the latter looming over a set of decks) to industrial cityscapes of unknown places; a collection of smaller unfired clay sculptures; and a video projection. This last opens with a treetop scene and slides into footage of activists singing at the Faslane Peace Camp in Argyll and Bute, near the military site of the Trident nuclear deterrent, reaching its apex at an EDM gig, where the climactic throbbing soundtrack and strobe-lighting seem to signal the end of the world: one has to wonder, is it Shiva the DJ playing the tune of destruction? In a more obvious reference to nuclear warfare, the video ends with a recording of a bomb flying through the air, slowly sinking into its final descent. Laid down the middle of the floorspace on a white shaggy carpet are what appear to be artefacts recovered from an ancient civilisation. Looking more closely, one can pick out alienlike skulls among bits of debris, and

looking at the debris more closely still, one can make out the broken fragments of machine technology: it’s impossible to tell whether we are looking at the ancient past or the far future. There are well-defined bones and broken bits of hardware, a small Earth Mother sculpture and a spaceman’s helmet; dotted throughout are tattily gold-sprayed clumps of clay that suggest a farcical grandiosity – through these, the entire exhibition’s self-knowing fakery is revealed. While the works are formally intriguing in their own right, there’s also a prevailing critique of warmongering and nationalistic supremacism here, looking towards the mythological narratives that facilitate both. One doesn’t necessarily need to know all about Shiva or the trimurti, but it’s not too much of a leap on seeing Rahel’s approximation of an ancient landscape, a tangled conflation of myths and facts, to be reminded of India’s far-right nationalists’ current penchant for rewriting the country’s history and presenting archaeological finds alongside ancient scripture to prove that today’s Hindus are directly related to India’s first inhabitants. After all, there are gods, and then there are monsters. Fi Churchman

The Dekkan Trap, 2018 (installation view). Photo: David Rowan. Courtesy Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham

Spring 2018

111

From Ear to Ear to Eye: Sounds and Stories from Across the Arab World Nottingham Contemporary 16 December – 4 March The idiomatic English expression ‘from ear to ear’ can be used to describe a wide smile or a slit throat. At Nottingham Contemporary, From Ear to Ear to Eye attempts to map an alternative cartography of the Arab world by exploring sound, music and listening. Much like the ear and the eye – organs that link us to the audible and visible external world – the show’s title solicits more attentive observation to lineages, narratives and histories that meander and converge. Featuring 17 artists of different generations from across the Arab world, this discussion across time and space is exemplified by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s videowork ISMYRNE (2016), in which Hadjithomas exchanges family histories with the LebaneseAmerican poet and painter Etel Adnan, meditating on the transmission of memory as they imagine their shared ancestral hometown of Smyrna (the city now known as Izmir on the coast of Turkey). Nearby, Adnan’s series Leporellos (1999–2012) is presented in display cabinets: pleated panoramic, accordion-folded booklets feature fragments of hand-painted Arabic poetry and reach a width of five metres when fully extended. Though not in explicit accompaniment to the video, Adnan’s writing and paintings consider the making of history by focusing on writing as a means of recording

memory, an alternative or complement to the oral tradition demonstrated in ISMYRNE. If we consider that the Leporellos might represent space and time as folded, then we see how they extend the show’s preoccupation with how the past might be bound up in the present. A similar reflexivity occurs in Raed Yassin’s Ruins in Space (2014), a speculative fiction based on the imagined meeting of two cultural icons, Egypt’s Umm Kulthum and Korea’s Lee Nan-Young. A printed photograph of the Egyptian singer is perforated at the mouth to reveal a small speaker, through which plays a recording of Kulthum’s famous 1967 performance of al-Atlal (The Ruins) at the Olympia music hall in Paris. In Yassin’s reimagining, the song plays from outer space, a cultural crossover from the age of the space race. The singer’s voice, warbled and distorted, troubles her status as the attested ‘voice of Egypt’. In Joe Namy’s installation Purple Bodies in Translation – Part II of A Yellow Memory from the Yellow Age (2017), the colour purple is projected onto a subtitled mirrored screen, while fragments of poetry and essays that contemplate the intricacies of translation are recounted. In one of these, translator Stefan Tarnowski describes subtitling as a form of condensed translation that often fails to capture ‘the embryonic moment that occurs within the frame’.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan turns ear-witness in Earshot (2016), which investigates the fatal shooting of two Palestinian teenagers through detailed acoustic analysis of the shots that killed them. The evidence against the accused Israeli soldiers is presented as testimony to a silent tribunal on a subtitled video screen. In front of the screen, spectrograms visualising the sound frequencies of rubber bullets against live ammunition when fired from a gun are suspended from the ceiling in the style of target practice sheets at a shooting range (the soldiers’ defence was that they were using rubber bullets). In this video installation, the aural is made visual and tangible. From Ear to Ear to Eye listens and looks to the intricate connections between places, generations, histories and mediums through sound, music and aural history. It does this by redirecting the visitor’s perception of the Arab world away from the desensitising and flattened imagery propagated by Western media, and by focusing on the transmission of the aural to the visual. In doing so it offers a different means of documenting places and events that cannot be comprehended through images alone, adding a new dimension to accounts of regional identity and shared histories. Nadia Quadmani

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, ISMYRNE, 2016, HD video, colour, sound, 50 min. Photo: Stuart Whipps. Courtesy the artists and In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc, Paris

112

ArtReview Asia

Jewyo Rhii The Day 3, Walls and Barbed Amanda Wilkinson, London 21 November – 21 January Jewyo Rhii doesn’t stay put for long. The inaugural exhibition at Amanda Wilkinson gallery presents a selection of the Korean artist’s enigmatic, provisional sculptures and installations comprising found objects, quickly realised drawings and makeshift devices for writing. Rhii’s purposely nomadic, restless life – never settling in any city or apartment – informs her work and process. The exhibition evolves from Rhii’s project Night Studio (2013), in which the artist briefly opened her Seoul studio to visitors, collapsing her own perception of public and private space. The resulting compositions – extemporary sculptures and installations adapted from its interior – informed Rhii’s exhibition Walls to Talk to at the Van Abbemuseum in 2013, to which the artist invited writer Irene Veenstra to respond in diaristic, experiential style. Veenstra’s journal entry for day three focused on the metaphorical resonance of a barrierlike sculpture consisting of scraps of wood and barbed wire. Rhii, in turn, configured her show at Amanda Wilkinson around Veenstra’s narrated encounter.

The Day 3, Walls and Barbed evokes hostile architecture: the subtle reconfiguration of public spaces through architectural elements to deter unlawful occupiers. The horizontal sculpture DRAWING TABLE – outside the comfort zone, day 3 (2016) recalls a battered fence or temporary blockade. The aluminium support structure, intersected by a curve of spiked metal wire, cradles textual works and scraps of wood spraypainted graffitilike. The aggression of each component sits curiously within the fragile frame. The work, in its distorted scale – occupying much of the Soho gallery’s small footprint – itches to escape its confines. The ramshackle appearance of Stone typing machine (2017) also betrays the violence it encodes. Four rudimentary pendular devices, fashioned from stones, wood and string, function as a typewriter, printing words and slogans onto the wall. The resulting smudged markings reveal the force of contact. Thrown Stones (2017) utilises the same technique, but instead of text, leaves an abstract

mark produced by the action of throwing a rock at a wall. Rhii’s conception of the body as a ‘third language’ – beyond visual or verbal means – is more potently staged by this gesture of distress than by text itself. Concurrent with this exhibition, Rhii presents a collaborative project with Jihyun Jung at London’s The Showroom. Rhii’s writing devices now have performative potential: the two artists worked with local participants to construct objects and machines for use as storytelling devices. Rhii and Jung have since entrusted the participants with the care of these objects, allowing further significations to develop outside of their control. Rhii’s exhibitions mutate and drift as response builds upon response, action upon action. Yet this accumulation of experience remains conditional and incomplete. Like her life, Rhii subjects her work to constant relocations and displacements. Coupled with the poetic fragility of her display methods, meanings have no time to gather dust. Edward Ball

The Day 3, Walls and Barbed, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Ari King. Courtesy the artist and Amanda Wilkinson, London

Spring 2018

113

Books Marginal Man by Charu Nivedita Zero Degree Publishing, INR600 (softcover) Marginal Man, a translation of the Tamil novel Exile (2011), is a sprawling, kaleidoscopic tale documenting the adventures of the writer Udhaya and his expansive circle of friends and acquaintances. During the course of Marginal Man, Udhaya recounts his travels through India, France, Thailand and Morocco, and along the way we learn about a person shaped by his literary tastes (predominantly French and Latin American, mixed in with Indian classics), his love of cinema, his sexuality, his heritage and his language (Tamil bookshops are a hotspot for diasporic encounters). Marginal Man is a series of vignettes, short stories and episodes of reportage that assume the written forms of the list, the letter, the spoken interjection, the diary, autobiography, biography, romance, journalism, gossip, travelogue and a series of direct addresses to the reader by the author. Or perhaps that should be the author’s avatar. In this autofiction it’s sometimes hard to decide whose voice you’re hearing. As you might have guessed by now, Marginal Man is a novel that’s hard to define. Although Charu Nivedita is a prolific writer in his native language (and with a large audience for translated writings in Malayalam), his works tend not to make it to English language translation. And that’s despite the fact that Nivedita’s last translated novel, the experimental – in the sense of its experiments with form, from

the lipogram and mathematical constraints to an idiosyncratic rejection of punctuation – Zero Degree (which appeared in English in 2008, a decade after it was published in Tamil) attracted widespread international acclaim. (Although other opinions persist in the realm of Tamil literature: the late author Sujatha called it a ‘piece of shit’.) In part this (the lack of translations and the mixed opinion) is due to the atypical nature of Nivedita’s writing, which, beyond the formal experiments, blends classical and slang registers, and his subject matter, which tends to touch on issues of caste, religion and race, and the violence associated with all of them. The registers are presumably a nightmare to translate, while the subject matter, in an age of Hindu nationalism, can be dangerous. Of course, that lack of translation is probably also due to the fact that Tamil is a marginal language on the world stage. Although, according to Nivedita, it’s marginal to Tamils as well: ‘Being a writer in Tamil Nadu is like being a musician in the Taliban,’ the author once told The Economic Times. ‘The powerful and influential sections of Tamil society can’t distinguish between eroticism and pornography or sexuality and vulgarity.’ Perhaps in recognition of all of the above, the author offers a yantra (a diagram designed to assist meditation or worship) as a gift to readers who have bothered to open the book,

while simultaneously explaining that he’s not going to explain too much about the yantra’s origins in case Marginal Man becomes a novel about spirituality, a subject that is ‘frowned upon’ these days. The feeling you’re left with is of a gift extended and retracted at one and the same time. Naturally, alongside everything else, Marginal Man covers aspects of spirituality. Albeit in a particular way. In one passage, sandwiched between a discussion of an episode from the epic poem the Ramayana and some musings on his own impotence (‘How the fuck could you expect me to fuck with a trembling dick the size of an areca nut?’), the narrator wonders: ‘How many kinds of human beings have we tried to write out of history? We have banished so many people from society just because they are slightly different from the rest of us and we relegate them to the margins.’ It’s for those people that Nivedita writes: if he uses language to destroy the conventions or distinctions between art perceived as ‘high’ and ‘low’, his subject matter is similarly arranged to attack the constraints of politeness and convention. (Albeit with humour too: as when he posits the G-string as a postmodern version of the Indian loincloth.) At a time when the issue of how art relates to life is the primary subject of cultural debate, you’ll find few writers who manage that collision more skilfully or dramatically than the author of Marginal Man. Mark Rappolt

The White Book by Han Kang Portobello Books, £10 (softcover) Grief is protean: cognitive and yet knitted to the flesh, difficult to contain and even harder to define through words. So Han Kang binds a loose collection of memories, observations and reveries through the colour of mourning and celebration: white. Han arranges this fragmentary writing in three chapters – ‘I’, ‘She’ and ‘All Whiteness’ – and it is when writing in the first person (in the first and the last) that the author is at her most lucid, focusing

114

directly on the object of grief: the author’s sister (her mother’s firstborn), who died less than two hours after birth. Han candidly translates her parents’ memories of her older sister, and the pain of a lost future, though her words are at their most powerful when they speak honestly of her own illogical sense of guilt: ‘My life means yours is impossible.’ Though there are passages in the middle chapter that seem disconnected and wandering, and that threaten to unmoor

ArtReview Asia

the reader (causing one to question whether such shortform writing is suited to Han’s style), the book nevertheless holds together, moving clearly between first and third person. A narrative tic also deployed in the Korean writer’s 2007 novella, The Vegetarian, it here alludes to the author’s attempts to transpose events from her own life onto that of her lost sister. This, in turn, suggests that through writing a kind of resurrection might be achieved. Fi Churchman

Spring 2018

115

Russian Cosmism Edited by Boris Groys MIT Press, $27.95/£22.95 (hardcover) The Biocosmist-Immortalist manifesto of 1922 proclaimed the ‘essential and real rights of man’ to be ‘the right to exist (immortality, resurrection, rejuvenation) and the freedom to move in cosmic space’. Immortalism could not be separated from interplanetarianism: as the ‘grandfather of Soviet rocket science’ Konstantin Tsiolkovsky argued, space would need to be colonised in order to accommodate the resurrection of everyone who had ever lived. Thinkers such as Alexander Svyatogor, the founder of Biocosmism, were convinced that assumptions about the inevitability of death were not only mistaken but at the root of ‘social injustice, monstrous private ownership, and the antagonism between individuals, nationalities, and classes’. A key inspiration for the ambition to overcome death was the posthumous publication of The Philosophy of the Common Task (1906), by Nikolai Fedorov – a philosopher and librarian very much in vogue with the late-nineteenth-century Moscow intelligentsia, who proposed using a ‘massive configuration of lightning rod-aerostats’ to turn the planet into a giant ‘Earth Ship’. The new anthology Russian Cosmism presents an eclectic series of outrageous proposals devised by pre- and postrevolutionary thinkers. Boris Groys’s introduction draws parallels between those tumultuous times and our own, claiming that ‘corporeal immortality remains the only chance of life after death. The promise of technology substitutes for the promise of divine grace. Russian Cosmism was one of the earliest and most radical manifestations of this substitution.’ Focusing on the scientific cosmists rather than their Orthodox Christian counterparts, Groys’s collection of texts by theorists including Fedorov and Tsiolkovsky is a secular manifesto

of sorts: a fascinating, if absurd, authorial project bordering on a deadpan work of art. The publication’s structure is more intuitive than chronological, foregrounding surprising new approaches to the political chaos we have seen around the world in recent years. Groys opens with Alexander Chizhevsky’s interwar treatise on the Cosmic pulse of life: Earth in the Sun’s embrace, which offered a ‘science of mass movements’ demonstrating that the ‘neuropsychic tone’ of the masses spikes in accordance with the increased activity of the sun, causing ‘revolutions, wars, and mass movements’ that ‘peak in moments of the most intensive solar activity’. He showed, for example, that solar activity was 155.6 percent more intense during Liberal than Conservative British governments. Whether or not one finds this a comforting notion (change is inevitable, our common task may be to wait for favourable conditions for its fruition) depends on one’s political perspective. Groys edited the Russian-language anthology Russian Cosmism, published by Garage, Moscow, in 2015; the new volume of translations is a collaboration with e-flux and MIT Press. E-flux’s Anton Vidokle and Brian Kuan Wood propose in their foreword that ‘non-Western avant-gardes summoned technology to serve cultural practices or spiritual cosmologies beyond the steamroller of Western industrial modernity’, arguing that early Russian utopianism was more ‘humane and spiritually far more encompassing than the mechanistic functionalism or free expression of its Western artistic or architectural contemporaries’. The Soviet authorities’ treatment of its authors was in many cases far from humane. Several of these ascetics who devoted their lives to scientific explorations

for the common good of mankind were also supporters of Trotsky: philosopher Valerian Muravyev and Svyatogor were among those to perish in the labour camps. Cosmism first made a comeback in Russian intellectual life during the 1990s. George M. Young’s The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and his Followers (2012) offers eight reasons why: the cosmists did ‘not favour half solutions’; their thinking was thoroughly Russian; it was also anti-Western; it had been prohibited in Soviet times; its authors were polymaths; it legitimised the study of the occult; its authors offered an answer to the perennial question Chto delat? (What is to be done?); they did not ‘succumb to… Western doom and gloom’, and proposed that Russia would ‘eventually prevail’. By presenting these texts in translation for the first time now, Groys and e-flux may be advocating that we, too, hold out. As Svyatogor proposed, ‘He who has great goals before him, who is completely sure of himself, strong and absolutely firm in his resolve, ultimately emerges victorious.’ Perhaps there remains some cold comfort in Tsiolkovsky’s historical promise that ‘a future where happiness never ends’ is within man’s reach. He said that his ‘sermon is not even a daydream, but a strictly mathematical conclusion based on precise knowledge’, according to the logic of which ‘supreme forms of social organization have prevailed and will prevail in the universe’ because the goal of intelligence is to lead to ‘each atom’s eternal well-being’. If this is a reminder that there is always hope, then the promotion of such century-old ideas today is also a reminder of how desperate the situation on earth remains. Klara Kemp-Welch

Djinn City by Saad Z. Hossain Unnamed Press, $17.99/£10.99 (softcover) Indelbed, a lonely boy living uneventfully in a dilapidated mansion in Dhaka, has his world turned upside down when his alcoholic father, Kaikobad, falls into a coma. Soon the existence of a ‘djinndom’ is revealed to the boy. Djinn are immortal, haughty, boastful and genielike. They are everywhere, living in giant airstations, wintery castles or underwater. They roam the countryside, become winemakers or deal in big business and corruption. They have different forms: Golgoras, an aeronaut, has tusks

116

and a telescopic eye; Hazard is jackal-headed; Bahamut presents himself as a school of fish. Although they operate on a different plane to human beings (djinn can manipulate fields of energy that are invisible to the naked eye), they deal with the human world through mortal ‘emissaries’, an inherited title. Kaikobad is one such emissary, and when an old family feud resurfaces, the djinn call a ‘hunt’ for Indelbed. The novel switches between chapters that focus on the three main characters – Indelbed,

ArtReview Asia

his cousin Reza and Kaikobad – while mashing together concepts and characters from mythologies and religions around the world. Djinn City is full of unexpected twists, using language best described as coolly nonchalant and a storyline that turns from extreme violence to comedy to poetry and back again with alarming ease, while engaging head-on with ideologies such as eugenics, creationism and racial superiority. In this dark comedy, monsters (literal and metaphorical) roam among us. Fi Churchman

Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary by David Teh MIT Press, $32.95/£27.95 (hardcover) David Teh’s first book is a flawed yet singular achievement: a spirited attempt to free contemporary Thai art of its weighty modernistnationalist baggage, and to do so using a sociocultural – rather than art-historical – lens. Teh lived and worked in Bangkok during the mid-2000s, but grounds his edifying six-chapter tract in the mid-1990s, when a new breed of ‘orbital’ Thai artist – the likes of Navin Rawanchaikul, Rirkrit Tiravanija and the late Montien Boonma, among others – emerged onto the world stage. Unlike their predecessors, this bunch were uninterested in Modernism – the pliable Western style – and the aestheticisation of phony Thai-ness. They worked in nontraditional media and, above all, learned to grapple with a new set of supranational values and techniques. These ‘currencies’, as Teh calls them, have facilitated contemporary Thai art’s departure from ‘stale, institutionally sanctioned modernism’ and ‘lubricated its assimilation into art’s international system’. The book’s central claim is that ‘distance has itself become a veritable condition of professional possibility for contemporary [Thai] artists’ and that the most successful use this distance to their advantage. They adeptly ‘straddle those local and global contexts’ and are well aware of ‘what may be lost, and gained, in the process’. The success of their highly conceptual practice often hinges on ‘marked asymmetries of understanding’ and a ‘strategy of withdrawal’, as well as the accumulation of baramee, a Hindu-Buddhist form of charisma that hinges upon retreat from all political and art-institutional spheres. Impeccably researched, and often archly provocative, Teh’s treatise is a well-parsed

addition to the slim body of literature on a rich yet neglected subject. One must salute the unorthodox mission – giving us a new conceptual toolkit for thinking about Thai art and artists today – the deep enquiry that fuels it and the eloquent prose. That said, problems lurk within its disarmingly self-possessed 198 pages. Ploughing through Teh’s chapters – each dense with observations, anecdotes, digressions and elucidations of these currencies – one wonders if he confers Thai artists with too much agency. Are Thailand’s relational artists really ‘master arbitrageurs’ with well-hatched game plans? Or are they merely humans fumbling their way from one project to the next and whose ‘orbital status’ has more to do with a dearth of support at home than shrewd tactics? Also, Teh becomes fixated on scoring points, to the detriment of his analyses. So intent is he on thrusting the knife into Thailand’s peculiar brand of modernism, and any artist who dares champion or subvert it, that he neglects to mention the artist-run venues pivotal to the development of many global artists. After invoking Thailand’s ‘stratified and sectarian’ art scene, Teh also proves partisan in his reading of it. He devotes acres of space to his typically peripatetic or reclusive favourites (Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among others); and brusquely snubs the more rooted and metropolitan others (Manit Sriwanichpoom, Vasan Sitthiket, Sutee Kunavichayanont). Yet, ultimately we’re enlightened more than frustrated. Teh doesn’t just identify and outline the currencies that give his favourite Thai artists their moral and intellectual

authority – he also spends much ink looking for their ancient precedents. Occasionally these brave attempts to historicise Thai contemporary practice, to valorise it by ‘venturing back beyond bourgeois cultural nationalism and its institution of modern visual art’, fall flat. (When Teh earnestly equates the experimental solitude and otherness of forest monks with Thailand’s relational vanguard, or posits that the region’s anarchist, hill-roaming prenationals are ‘the truest ancestors of the ambivalent, preternational contemporary artist’, it is hard to keep a straight face). At other moments, the grounding of his currencies in the premodern is, if not entirely revelatory, persuasive. For example, Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon (2001) and Arin Rungjang’s cerebral explorations of distance and longing are linked back to nirat, an ancient form of indigenous poetry. (For Teh, ‘even the apparently straightforward, scalar concept of distance turns out to have an inflection quite peculiar to Siamese modernity.’) The book also benefits from an ambivalent tone rarely found in Thai discourse. Arriving at a time when simply sharing a Facebook post can find you being threatened with a lengthy jail term by the Thai authorities, Teh’s mordant, heterogeneous critiques fill a conspicuous lack. And while his currencies sometimes stray into the realm of orientalist mythmaking, he is arguably at his acerbic best when eviscerating the quasi-feudalistic tools wielded and perpetuated by Thai officialdom: a royally anointed sufficiency, economy, philosophy, the instrumentalising forces of state and monarchy, and the prevalent monocultural stereotypes of kwampenthai (Thai-ness). Max Crosbie-Jones

Singapore by Nguan Maybe Hotel, SG$70 (hardcover) Nguan’s Singapore is a lifeless place in which people nevertheless manage to carve out lives. At least that’s the impression given in the latest photobook by one of the city-state’s most subtle and ardent chroniclers. Singapore builds on his previous publication How Loneliness Goes (2013, which focused on the individual in the city) by expanding to document the architecture, infrastructure, furniture, plantlife and people in a metropolis famously remarkable for its stability and just as famously unremarkable in its ability

to offer excitement. It’s precisely this, however, that allows Nguan to do what he does best: to use the eerily soothing, warm, natural equatorial light to bring out the colourful but resolutely neutral pastels that define the city. The results have the suspicious banality and creepy, artificial joyfulness of a Jeff Koons artwork. In Singapore, Gay World is a restaurant (albeit with one customer). Repeated portraits of stacks of meticulously colour-sorted garden chairs (commonly used in Singapore’s outdoor restaurants and cafés) announce an expec-

Spring 2018

tation that crowds will be present even if they are currently absent. A series of images featuring mops, buckets and brooms speaks of a desire to erase any human trace from the Barbie-coloured architecture. And yet those traces persist – in the way people hang out their washing (a vest fluttering on a coathanger hooked around a garage padlock) or the places in which they choose to nap (a children’s slide becomes a surrogate hammock) – like the plants that force their way through Singapore’s manicured pavements. Nirmala Devi

117

118

119

Sat nav for contemporary art

ArtReview Asia – a driving force since 2013 artreview.com/subscribe 120

ArtReview Asia

Editorial

Publishing

Advertising

Production & Circulation

Editor-in-Chief Mark Rappolt

Commercial Director Niru Ratnam niruratnam@artreview.com

Asia Fan Ni fanni@artreview.com

Associate Publisher Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com

Associate Publisher (Asia) Fan Ni fanni@artreview.com

UK, Ireland and Australasia Christabel Stewart christabelstewart@artreview.com

Production Managers Alex Wheelhouse Rob King production@artreview.com

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

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

Editorial Assistant Fi Churchman

Benelux, France, Southern Europe and Latin America Moky May mokymay@artreview.com Northern and Eastern Europe Francesca von Zedtwitz-Arnim francesca@artreview.com North America and Africa Debbie Hotz debbiehotz@artreview.com Fashion and Luxury Natalia Gandurina nataliagandurina@artreview.com

Design

Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam.ican@btinternet.com Subscriptions To subscribe online, visit artreview.com/subscribe ArtReview Subscriptions Warners Group Publications The Maltings, West Street Bourne, Lincolnshire PE10 9PH T 44 (0)1778 392038 E art.review@warnersgroup.co.uk

Art Direction John Morgan studio

ArtReview Ltd

Designers Pedro Cid Proença Isabel Duarte

ArtReview Asia is published by ArtReview Ltd 1 Honduras Street London EC1Y oTH T 44 (0)20 7490 8138

office@artreview.com

Chairman Dennis Hotz

Advisory Board

Managing Director Debbie Hotz

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

ArtReview is printed by The Westdale Press Ltd. Reprographics by PHMEDIA. Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview (ISSN No: 1745-9303, uSpS No: 021-034) is published monthly except in the months of February, July and August by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London EC1Y OTH, England, United Kingdom. The US annual subscription price is $64. Airfreight and mailing in the USA by Worldnet Shipping Inc, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, NY 11434, USA. Periodicals postage paid at Jamaica NY 11431. US Postmaster: Send address changes to ArtReview, Worldnet Shipping Inc, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, NY 11434, USa

Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover Wolfgang Tillmans, Self-portrait Kammerspiele München, 2016

Words on the spine and on pages 27, 63 and 93 come from S.G. Daniel’s First Steps in Tamil (1922)

on pages 115, 120 and 122 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Spring 2018

121

Off the Record I march briskly into the Exhibitors Office at Art Basel Hong Kong and to the front of the queue of gallerists. “Twenty-three exhibitor passes, please, for Galerie Kenny H’o,” I say. “We have many, many technicians.” I wink knowingly at the unsmiling operative behind the desk. She stares at her laptop screen without looking up. I tap my Balenciaga Triple S trainers to indicate that there is no time to lose. “I’m afraid that Galerie Kenny H’o is not in this year’s edition of Art Basel Hong Kong,” she finally replies. “What?” I shout in consternation. “We are one of Hong Kong’s most venerable galleries! Here, give me the list.” I grab her laptop and scan through the names. “I mean, Gerhardsen Gerner? gb agency? Galerie Nathalie Obadia? We’re a proper native gallery! We’ve been here since Chris Patten burst into tears and sang Rule, Britannia whilst being driven away in a padded van. You can’t throw me out!” A tall, dapper Swiss man appears out of nowhere. “René! Where have you been all my life?” I say to him and bestow a lingering kiss three times upon his lips. “My name is not René,” he replies. “And that thing you just did, that’s not Swiss protocol.” I correct myself by giving him a lingering kiss on his left shoe. He seems unmoved. “Well then who are you if you’re not called René?” “I’m the new boss. You don’t need to know my name. More importantly, last year your stand was entirely composed of works that you had bought a few weeks beforehand from Art Fair Philippines, marked up by 600 percent. I’m afraid this is not acceptable. You received a letter in the post.” “Post? So Western!” I sneer at him. “I only communicate in WeChat stickers. Did you send me a sticker?” He looks confused. “No sticker, no rejection. Now let me in.” I dodge left but he moves quickly to stop me, almost making me trip over the Yoshiki Hanzawa dress-scarf-cape I’m wearing for install day. “Look,” I say, adopting a more conciliatory tone, “yes, I did buy all of that work from Art Fair Philippines, but you have to understand that gallery representation is a Western construct. All that hierarchy! All that bondage! All that “your ass is mine now, artist-boy”! It’s so backward and colonial. Here in Asia, we do things differently. Buy, sell, buy, sell. As they say on the mainland, ‘a closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood’”. With an elegant tai-chi single-whip move I grab his crotch. “Open your wood to me!”

122

Five minutes later I pick myself up off Harbour Road’s pavement. I know it’s vital that I meet the collectors coming to the fair, but my dreams of a triumphant return to Art Basel Hong Kong by Galerie Kenny H’o are over. I get out my Xiaomi Mi7 and dial a couple of numbers. The following evening I am ensconced in my new ‘booth’. Or rather behind the bar at Potato Head, where I have secured a temporary job as a mixologist. Who needs a booth to get to these collectors? I have spent a couple of hours thumbing through Ryan Chetiyawardana’s Good Things to Drink with Mr Lyan and Friends and reckon it can’t be that hard. Guests start arriving for whatever blue-chip gallery has rented the place for the evening and I show off my skills by chopping up lines of the pink salt that are a key ingredient of the famous Paloma cocktail. I also discreetly place my iPad filled with badly taken shots of installations and booths at Art Fair Philippines. “Paloma for you, mister? Old Fashioned? Manhattan? Or perhaps a whole collection of established documentary photographers including Jes Aznar, Nana Buxani, RJ Fernandez and, erm, lots of other photographers! Yours for a cool HK$1 million or £500,000 if sterling’s your thing.”

The elderly but clearly loaded gentleman I put this to looks confused. “But the conversion rate…” I know I’ve got him. I fill the cocktail shaker almost to the top with tequila, chuck in a frisson of grapefruit juice, squeeze a couple of limes and, using my credit card, flick a line of salt into the mix. “These works have never been seen together aside from the four brief days when this rare photo was taken,” I say whilst shaking vigorously. I zoom in and out very quickly on the iPad before hitting the Tinder app to confuse the bugger. I pour the drink into a glass, from which he takes a loud slurp. He looks very happy. I am just about to slip him my premade invoice for a booth of Philippine’s finest documentary photography, none of which I actually technically own yet, as well as one Paloma-plusservice charge, when I see a tall Swiss man angrily striding to me flanked by security guards. René: so bloody efficient. Gallery Girl

ArtReview Asia