ArtReview Asia Spring 2025

Ayoung Kim

ArtReview Asia vol 13 no 1 Spring 2025

Around and around Ah… sorry… you’ve just caught ArtReview Asia correcting art history… Apparently, at least according to the sacks of fan mail ArtReview Asia is constantly having to recycle, many people think that means mutilating the bloated body of its sister title ArtReview and disposing of it in an ecofriendly way – perhaps turning it into a mushroom farm. Anna Tsing and all her artwork acolytes would like that – but that’s not the case. ArtReview Asia deplores violence. Of any kind. But you’re not here for advice on garbage disposal. At least ArtReview Asia has always assumed that. Maybe it’s wrong. And one day someone will go back through the archives and correct it. Using some biodegradable bin bags. Still, the actual point is that while ArtReview Asia does believe that we need to make space for other narratives and histories of art, it’s not so convinced that we need to toss out the old ones (the Western ones) in the process. Just as much as decolonising a space or institution doesn’t necessarily mean that you should erase the fact that it was once a colonial space. And to some extent always will be, even if that really means that it always will have been. It’s important to memorialise the bad stuff as well as the good, otherwise we are doomed to wander around repeating the same injustices again and again, on and on. Although perhaps it’s human nature to do that anyway. ArtReview Asia seems to recall an angry Buddhist telling it that a long time ago. Unless the Buddhist was talking about ArtReview Asia specifically. It can’t quite remember… perhaps that’s why it goes on and on, again and again, day after day…. Sorry. Right… where did ArtReview Asia leave that hacksaw… ArtReview Asia

Peace

5

Art Previewed

Diljit Dosanjh

by Deepa Bhasthi 12

Forest of Dreams

by Max Crosbie-Jones 15

Vietnam’s Art Scene

by Lorenza Pignatti 22

The Promised Land

by Sarah Jilani 18

Art Featured

Ayoung Kim

by Harry C.H. Choi 28

Let’s Try That Again

by Mark Rappolt 44

Pratchaya Phinthong

by Adeline Chia 36

Agnes Denes

by Amber Husain 50 Joydeb Roaja

by Munem Wasif 58

Ideals of the East

by Okakura Tenshin annotated by Yuwen Jiang and Mark Rappolt 63 Zamanbap art

by Tyler Coburn 70

page 28 Ayoung Kim, Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (still), 2017, single-channel video, 21 min. Courtesy the artist

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Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 78 dancing with all: The Ecology of Empathy,

by Mark Rappolt Boom Boom Bang: Play & Parody in 1990s k.l.,

by Ilaria Maria Sala In Absence, Presence, by Hung Duong Jong Oh, by Mark Pieterson Gaia Should Be Safe, by Yuwen Jiang The Utopia of Rules, by Adeline Chia Tuan Andrew Nguyen, by Sơ n Nguyễn Lê Vinh On Kawara, by Jennifer Teets 7th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival,

by Max Crosbie-Jones 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,

by Naomi Riddle 2024 Asian Art Biennial, by Zian Chen

Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa, reviewed by Anandi Mishra Strange Pictures, by Uketsu, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka,

by Srikar Raghavan, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi The National Gallery: Paintings, People, Portraits, edited by Anh Nguyen and Rebecca Marks, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Our City, That Year, by Geetanjali Shree, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Hokusai’s Method, edited by Kyoko Wada, reviewed by Mia Stern comic by bhanu pratap 102

page 80 Ismail Zain, Al Kesah, 1998, computer print, 28 × 20 cm.

Courtesy Muzium & Galeri Tuanku Fauziah, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Gelugor

8

Eight, 2003, oil on canvas, 129.5 × 129.5 cm, Private collection © Star of Hope Foundation, Vinalhaven, Maine. Image courtesy of The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative

Robert Indiana

The Shape of the World

Hong Kong pacegallery.com

Art Observed

Of flowers 11

Celebrity and pop culture is often nothing to do with a specific individual and everything to do with a certain phase in a country’s cultural history. This is perhaps most obviously evident in the meteoric rise of Panjabi singer, actor, producer and now global superstar Diljit Dosanjh. His recently concluded Dil-Luminati world tour, and the many controversies and criticism around it that filled the entertainment pages for much of 2024, offers a study of celebrityhood in divisive times.

Since his appearance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April 2023, where his declaration “Panjabi Aa Gaye Coachella Oye” (The Panjabis have arrived at Coachella) made him a viral sensation in India, followed by a string of high-profile media appearances including The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and collaborations with Ed Sheeran, Camilo, Sia and others, Dosanjh’s rise to superstardom has invited much scrutiny.

During the India leg of Dil-Luminati, nearly every show was bookended by protests and incessant trolling by Hindutva fundamentalist groups. The most serious charge against him was that he was a supporter of Khalistan (a movement demanding a separate state for the Sikh community) and therefore anti-national.

Dosanjh had donated money to and expressed support for the farmers protesting against three farm acts in 2020; pro-government media had relentlessly branded the farmers Khalistan supporters and anti-nationalists. Dosanjh’s best answer to his detractors came during his concert in the national capital, New Delhi, when he walked on stage with the country’s tricolour flag wrapped around his shoulders, declared his love and respect for all Indian languages and proceeded to sing Main Hoon Panjab (I am Panjab), each move reading like a political statement against the right wing’s agenda to dismiss the complexities of patriotism and regionalism and reduce

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Balancing Acts

As Diljit Dosanjh becomes a global superstar, Deepa Bhasthi wonders whether the Panjabi singer will still be able to say anything meaningful about where he comes from

Diljit Dosanjh in Arjun Patiala, 2019, dir Rohit Jugraj. © Viva Entertainment.

Courtesy Everett Collection

ArtReview Asia

them to their basest meaning – jingoism and separatism.

Yet, his tone-deaf comments on Kashmir during the Mumbai leg of the tour, just after his visit to Jammu & Kashmir – stating the region was fully under the control of the Indian Army, thereby insinuating that it was safe to visit – led to severe backlash from those who view India’s militarisation of the troubled state as an act of imperialism by an occupying power. That tickets to his concerts cost between Rs5000 and Rs60,000 (£45 – £550, approximately) during a cost-ofliving crisis and an ailing economy drew much flak, even though they sold out within minutes.

And then Dosanjh rang in the new year with a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a photo op that seemed to confuse people across the political spectrum.

To understand the balance that Dosanjh is attempting in his public appearances, one must look at the sociopolitical history of Panjabi music, indeed of the state itself. Panjabi music has been popular in clubs and at wedding parties across northern India for several decades, its fastpaced, foot-thumping beats fitting well with the pop culture mythology of the fun- and drinkloving Panjabi people. Although Panjabi folk songs and poetry have been incorporated into Hindi films for most of the twentieth century, it wasn’t until the 1990s Indie-pop boom that elements of Panjabi music became a staple in Hindi films, where it is often used for dance numbers or ‘item songs’, and gained popularity across the country. A lot of the lyrics written by the likes of Dosanjh celebrate the caste pride of the landowning Jutts, and evoke a supposed ideal past that, in reality, was feudal, patriarchal and violently casteist. For the diaspora, which forms a substantial market for this music, it fortifies their rose-tinted nostalgia for the simple rural village life back home. At the same time, the Panjabi hip-hop and gangster rap that has been trending for a while now depicts an aspirational

lifestyle filled with expensive fast cars, submissive women and much wealth. Both these stereotypes of the region help keep these songs in regular circulation among the youth.

The northwestern state of Panjab has been ravaged in the last eight decades, first

by Partition, when the state was distributed between India and Pakistan, then by religious militancy fuelled by the Khalistani movement, and now by the pressures of the Green Revolution in agriculture and its severe impact on both land use and economic and social relationships. With high rates of unemployment, class/caste divide, rampant drug abuse and migration (several of the illegal immigrants deported by the Trump government recently were from the state) adding to the toxic mix, these songs fill a void left by institutional politics that have failed to bring about any measure of positive change. Several musicians in Panjab have been assassinated for their political opinions, getting caught between gang warfare, as was the case with Sidhu Moose Wala, a popular rapper who was killed in 2022.

Dosanjh is prolific. Since the release of his first album, in 2003, he has gone on to make over a dozen studio albums and 40-something singles, acted in more than 30 Punjabi and Hindi films, toured extensively and been in multiple brand collaborations. He has also starred as the Dalit artist Amar Singh Chamkila (in a 2024 film by the same name), one of the most popular singers during the 1980s, who was allegedly assassinated by Sikh militants.

Arguably, while there may be artists better at their craft than Dosanjh, he can be credited for making Panjabi language and culture globally cool. Sporting turbans and traditional attire, while also in jackets and fancy shoes, and speaking mostly in Panjabi, his English heavily accented, he seems to epitomise a star who is at ease being both traditional and modern, standing for universal love and tolerance, rooted, yet unapologetic about showing off his private jet and immense wealth. For many fans who see him as one of the biggest voices of dissent against

majoritarianism and anti-farmer policies, his meeting with Modi is dismissible as a means to an end; the global validation of Panjabi-ness that he seems to facilitate is more important.

If one can rely on the hundreds of comments on his social media posts or sift through threads on Reddit, it seems like the applauders outnumber those who critique his actions, even though there are several ‘sellout’ and ‘unfollowing’ comments below his pictures. That music too is a business, inseparable from capitalism and therefore empty of conscience, comes up often, and that he is also a businessman having to look after his interests seems acceptable to fans who would rather debate how religious, or not, he is.

When Hindutva protests threatened to cancel Dosanjh’s show in Indore, he quoted from a poem by the city’s Urdu poet Rahat Indori, ‘Kisi Ke Baap Ka Hindustan Thodi Hai’ (Hindustan/ India is no one’s father’s property), reminding his detractors of India’s diversity and syncretic values. His later statements on Kashmir, though, alongside a starring role in the forthcoming Border 2 – a sequel to a war movie that, going

by Bollywood’s current love affair with hypernationalistic films, will likely be a high-octane glorification of violence and jingoism – seem like a volte-face. But businesspeople-artists have long since bent backward to appease the Hindutva right and its poster-boy prime minister. Those opposing majoritarianism are so desperate for a popular hero that when, instead, such artists fall short of our very high expectations to emerge as astute businesspeople, the damnation is quick and just as vicious as the Hindutva right’s response to a celeb’s public displays of liberalism.

Dosanjh, like other big names in the entertainment industry, might challenge what progovernment groups these days find permissible from public figures, quoting from some progressive poetry here, donating money to a populist movement there, but only just enough to cover the spectrum of his fan base, and certainly not enough to count as speaking any sort of truth to power. We should know by now that celebrities (not art and artists as a whole, it must be noted) are among the weakest links in the chain of dissent. To expect that Dosanjh, or those like him, will ever publicly stand firm is just confusing the forest for the trees.

Instagram posts by diljitdosanjh: 27 October 2024; 1 January 2025

Spring 2025

Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Kodagu

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ISLAMIC ARTS SECOND BIENNALE EDITION JANUARY 25 - MAY 25, 2025 Under the theme

LED BY ARTISTIC DIRECTORS

Julian Raby | Amin Jaffer | Abdul Rahman Azzam and Muhannad Shono as Curator of Contemporary Art

KNOW MORE

WESTERN HAJJ TERMINAL

King Abdulaziz International Airport، Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

“Maman is a spider and a mother, a nest and a prison. Yet for the first time, here in the jungle, the spider appears for what it is: a bug in the grass.” Stefano Rabolli Pansera, the debonair director of Thailand’s newest contemporary art attraction, Khao Yai Art Forest, is talking about the last work of this afternoon’s preview tour.

As he waxes lyrical about Louise Bourgeois’s iconic nine-metre-tall arachnid, I weave between its spindly bronze legs and drink in our surroundings: the newly seeded rice fields and rolling hills of a private plot of land located close to one of the country’s most popular weekend retreats, Khao Yai National Park (a roughly three-hour drive from Bangkok). Normally this sculpture looms menacingly outside museums or towers, but here it seems almost to be guarding the site, its maternal and territorial instincts kicking in.

Close encounters with Maman (1999–2002) are currently a cornerstone of what is being touted as a ‘transformative cultural destination in Thailand where contemporary art and nature exist in perfect harmony’. But while this work is on loan (from the Easton Foundation), other sculptures are permanent features of Khao Yai Art Forest’s 85 hectares. Francesco Arena’s god (2024) comprises two granite boulders, each with a flush-cut face. The letters ‘G’ and ‘D’ are apparently engraved on one face, and ‘O’ on the other, but, with both boulders elegantly stacked amid young trees, these letters are invisible – much like the titular subject.

Nearby, a gentle hillside that resembles Teletubbyland is enveloped in clouds of artificial mist as we walk up it. Harvesting atmospheric moisture using renewable energy, Fujiko Nakaya’s

Forest of Dreams

It’s fun to frolic amid art and nature in Thailand’s newly opened Khao Yai Art Forest, but Max Crosbie-Jones observes that it might yet take some time for this utopic enterprise to bloom

Khao Yai Fog Forest, Fog Landscape #48435 (2024) is ‘a form of Land Art 2.0’ according to its description, because it ‘reveals latent forces within nature itself’ rather than imposing forms onto it. But encountering mist as medium – feeling the cool droplets on my skin and momentarily losing my girlfriend – elicits childish play and wonder, not thoughts on the interplay of wind, temperature, humidity and pressure, nor the connotations for Land art practices at large.

Among the takeaways from my time at Khao Yai Art Forest, one of the most unambiguous is that today is the beginning of a long journey, not a grand opening. Its Thai-Korean founder, Marisa Chearavanont – a philanthropist and art patron married to the chairman of one of Thailand’s largest companies, cp Group – hopes to create something fluid, amorphous and evolving. And as with her one-year-old project in the Thai capital, Bangkok Kunsthalle – the disfigured former printing factory turned art space where exhibitions are guiding its floor-by-floor revival – this process is to be artist led. “We invite local or international artists to be inspired by this land and to create work that resonates with hope, nature and healing”, she says. “And to use all the mediums they can find here: water, soil, sun and wood.”

The most thoughtful response to this invitation thus far is a site-specific work consisting of ten ersatz Buddhist monuments – fragments of dome-shaped stupas – made from soil. Encountering its lichen-covered elements along a dirt track, secreted in corners of a sloping forest, Pilgrimage to Eternity (2024) strikes a chord with me. Thai artist Ubatsat has ceded its upkeep

Fujiko Nakaya, Khao Yai Fog Forest, Fog Landscape #48435, 2024.

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Spring 2025

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to the environment – and in so doing has channelled the erosion, neglect and ruin that afflicts many a sculpture park into a Buddhist-inflected talking point. How will nature receive this work? And what will Khao Yai Art Forest’s facilitation of this reception teach us about its rapport with nature?

Time will tell, of course, but as things stand, a conspicuous gap exists between its aspirational rhetoric and its physical manifestation. In interviews, Chearavanont tells a heartwarming story: recounts how the big old trees on this land were cut back by farmers during the 1970s, who then grew tapioca and corn for several decades before selling up; explains that her decision to buy and restore this tired land was the result of an epiphany she had during the covid-19 lockdowns, when forest strolls led to a newfound appreciation for nature. The healing it provided, and her desire to return the favour, is this project’s leitmotif. “Healing is the compass for our interventions”, Pansera explains over refreshments beside Richard Long’s Madrid Circle (1988): a perfect circle of slate slabs located on a plateau overlooking the recovering forest. Add to these arboreal reveries the artworks by internationally prominent artists, and the input of notable others (in December 2023, Haegue Yang, Ernesto Neto and Michael Elmgreen joined a ‘Forest Circle’ workshop to hash out potential models, for example), and you have a project seemingly precision-tooled to draw the admiring gaze and superlatives of art publications, newspapers and art fans – but by no means guaranteed to meet its own high-flown aims.

Exploring the site, and listening carefully, I sense that Khao Yai Art Forest’s fictional form is taking shape faster than its actual form – the perception created by all the articles, interviews

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top Elmgreen & Dragset, k-bar, 2024, mixed media, 395 × 610 × 760 cm.

Photo: Andrea Rossetti. above Francesco Arena, god, 2024, stones, 260 × 220 × 620 cm all images Courtesy the artists and Khao Yai Art, Nakhon Ratchasima

ArtReview Asia

and Instagram posts is not yet matched on the ground. And this leads me to draw comparisons with more unassuming yet proven models: the nearby Jim Thompson Farm’s long-standing Art on Farm season in December, for example, when its fields host works by local names. And to mull over recent history: northern Thailand’s dormant The Land Foundation, founded by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert in 1998, for instance. While not an overtly public-facing project (unlike Khao Yai Art Forest, which costs 500 baht, or £12, to visit), this working farm speckled with structures built by international artists and artists’ groups cultivated, during its lifespan, an image that distracted from its functional failures, the art historian Clare Veal argued in a 2014 paper, and ‘disintegrated into didactic assertions of the project’s excellence in and of itself’.

Given Chearavanont’s ties to the cp Group – an association that has led some to note the similarity between Nakaya’s fog landscape and the blight that is cornfield burning in Thailand (something the conglomerate is trying to curb among its contract farmers) – Khao Yai Art Forest’s efficacy and assertions of excellence are likely to be picked apart with relish, and in perpetuity, whatever unfolds. But while a question mark surrounds its selfstyled credentials as a ‘pioneering interdisciplinary institution’, one thing is already certain: it has a sense of humour.

As dusk falls, we squeeze into a suave drinking den, replete with six red leather stools, terrazzo flooring and an original Martin Kippenberger hanging by the entrance.

Cocktails and conversations flow, although the bonhomie here this evening masks a hyper-exclusive door policy: k-bar (2024) is open but once a month, so most visitors are only going to be able to press their faces up against the windows.

Upending expectations, this site-specific installation is, I read later, a new example of what its creators, Elmgreen & Dragset, call ‘denials’. But in the moment, it feels like confirmation of a truism: whenever the artworld declares its idealistic or utopian ambitions, its excesses and paradoxes are rarely far behind.

金 色

8-14.4.2025

GOLDEN JOURNEY Solo Exhibition by Marigpa

瑪 日 巴

之 旅

4/F Pao Galleries Hong Kong Arts Centre 2 Harbour Road Wan Chai, Hong Kong

THE ONENESS GALLERY

www.theonenessgallery.com

Partners

Colonialism is not a thing of the past, but has enduring afterlives.

In Oman, which was once subject to Portuguese then later British imperial influence, some of these persist because the legacies of colonialism continue to structure our unequal world more broadly.

British imperialism during the early to mid-twentieth century had a globally lasting effect on art and culture. A ‘denial of coevalness’, as cultural anthropologist Johannes Fabian described it in 1983, undergirded Britain’s self-appointed ‘burden’ of ‘bringing culture’ to its darker-hued subjects. Fabian identified how imperialism benefited from the erroneous claim that geographic distance from the West equals a regression in time. It served as a means of teaching people, both at home and abroad in African, Arab and Asian colonies and protectorates, what did and did not constitute ‘the present’; where ‘civilisation’ dwelt; and towards whose aesthetic tastes peoples of the Global South apparently, belatedly, marched.

The parameters for recognising what is contemporary art are still largely determined by wellresourced Western contemporary art institutions like New York’s moma, Paris’s Pompidou or London’s Tate museums, and in turn inform the major auction houses, biennials, university courses and art awards. Anish Kapoor’s Vantablack works (2016–), Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde animal works (1991– 2017), Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (2010), Marina Abramović’s performances (1973–), Ayşe Erkmen’s site-specific Kıpraşım Ripple (2017): these global artists and their diverse practices pose examples of works that have been recognised by major Western art institutions and curricula as, indisputably, ‘contemporary art’. I do not propose these artists perpetuate an imperialist understanding of art (Ai Weiwei’s Lisson Gallery show was cancelled in November 2023, for example, for his solidarity with Palestinians), but make an observation about the conceptual, largescale and resource-intensive works they have in common. While what constitutes ‘contemporary art’ can be an ongoing philosophical debate, concepts like the colonial ‘denial of coevalness’ show us that any temporally periodising word, such as ‘contemporary’, contains a spatial assumption within it. The characteristics of works

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The Promised Land

What counts as ‘contemporary art’ shows the unlearning still ahead of us, writes Sarah Jilani, as she considers what the phrase really means in Oman Kostis Grivakis, Untitled, 2023, collage, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

like the above, which are recognised as ‘contemporary art’ in the West, share some similarities: they usually cannot be physically touched, cannot be easily recreated, do not have a practical function, are usually monetised for private ownership, are credited to an individual’s imagination and aim for originality over communal familiarity. Are these universal attributes or values of the ‘now’? These characteristics may not necessarily reflect the aesthetic forms and creative priorities of several visual cultures in the Global South. This is not to say artists should be restricted in terms of inspiration, form and materials to their own roots; it is about freely asking ‘why’, rather than assuming any system of aesthetic valuation is neutral or ahistorical.

Omanis have not escaped the influence of this value system: the notion that art with decorative or cultural functions is somehow not really ‘contemporary art’, which must apparently be conceptual, largescale and resource intensive, persists here too, speaking to the Sultanate’s complicated imperial/colonial history. There is a distinct sense among many Omanis like Raya Al Maskari (who, like all artists I met, has a day job) that they are still taking ‘baby steps’ because ‘big conceptual artworks are difficult’ in terms of domestic sales and reception. At Oman’s Affordable Art Show, which was in its eighth edition in December 2024, participating artists lamented that local tastes and customs resonate with small decorative prints and objects, rather than largescale conceptual works such as site-specific installations or video art.

This begs the question: should artists expect their community to change their aesthetics according to their artists’ tastes? Or, put differently, who does an artist seek to serve with their art? The answer doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘their own community’, but if they believe their local context is somehow not yet at artistic maturity, then it is worth critically examining what influences them to think so, before assuming the society must catch up to the artist. Asking why artists feel the need to measure themselves against parameters that are not those of their own community does not equal circumscribing their artistic freedoms. It is about being constructively critical of potentially underlying assumptions that

some people have to play catch-up to tastes that may not be their own but those of the global art discourse du jour.

Omani decorative and culturally functional art may not have made much of a dent in that global art-discourse yet, but it is easy to see why it speaks to local tastes and buyers. It often conveys distinct senses of place related to the country’s complex history, often abstracting and playing with these. Its textile arts (especially women’s traditional clothing) feature motifs as diverse as Balochi, Sindhi, Zanzibari, Somali and Yemeni. At the aforementioned Affordable Art Show, works included paintings that reinterpreted Omani architectural shapes, such as the colourful doors found in its mountain villages (Safiya Al Bahlani); decorative sculptures made of found materials like fish bones from the country’s 3,165 kilometres of shoreline (Emerson Sumaoang, who makes works under the moniker Mhearts); and irreverent collages incorporating historic objects like the khanjar (dagger) alongside the kitsch symbol of a local 1990s childhood: a Chips Oman packet. None of these are largescale or site-specific installations, but they are evidently contemporary to the local context, where purchases of small works usually occur to support a favourite artist one knows personally, and private collecting for home display is not an established practice because the domestic sphere is barred to nonrelatives. Evidence of what photographer Ahmed Abdullah Al Busaidi’s told me is all around: “After all, our grandfathers and grandmothers are artists, in their making of clothing and handicrafts, in storytelling.”

But he too bookends this assertion, with the disclaimer that theirs is an art scene in its infancy. A system of valuation that assumes certain characteristics of contemporary art can make it difficult to shake the notion that certain places must eventually ‘catch up’ to others’ visual cultures.

It would not be hard for Oman to mimic the kind of works venerated in the Western

biennale and auction house, if it so wishes.

It has money and a tiny population, almost half of whom are under-18s; education in Western Art History can be rolled out, bursaries and materials provided.

But is that something to be wished for? The Raneen art festival that ran in November 2024, which used its space across restored traditional houses (a combination of mud and carved-wood doors) in the country’s old commerce hub of Muttrah to exhibit site-specific installations, serves as an example. Its centrepiece, a giant moon in a courtyard – a touring work by British artist Luke Jerram that has been presented more than 300 times in more than 30 countries – was striking, but seemed more of a cool photo op for a day out with the family than anything particularly related to what Omanis are making and buying. There is no need to aim for more of the same when it neither promises local artists a full-time livelihood, nor a connection to the everyday historic sources of their inspiration.

That art with decorative or cultural functions is somehow considered ‘baby steps’ taken towards full-blown ‘contemporary art’ rests on assumptions that we find, among other things, in notions inherited from colonialism – like what is and is not of the ‘now’. It evidently still influences psyches, artistic practices and cultural economies around the world. The Western contemporary art world is free to judge non-Western contemporary art as it wishes; the bigger problem occurs when its parameters are, consciously or unconsciously, internalised and reproduced by artists, curators and culture ministers in the Global South. Opportunities to revive and reinterpret local visual cultures and build upon a living aesthetic heritage are missed, and a promised land of contemporary art that is neither relevant nor indigenous to regional audiences is sought. Oman, with its emerging art market still reliant on local sales and tastes, may have a unique window of opportunity.

How might its art community attempt to step outside of the Western contemporary art paradigm? top Mhearts, Fort, 2023, found object assemblage. Courtesy the artist above Safiya, Building Block 4, 2024, iPad drawing, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy the artist

Spring 2025

Sarah Jilani is a lecturer in postcolonial literatures and world film at City, University of London

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www.para-site.art Facebook/Instagram @parasite.hk WeChat parasitehongkong 10B, Wing Wah Industrial Building 香港鰂魚涌英皇道677號榮華工業大廈10B室

OPENING 18 APRIL 2025 AT SAADIYAT CULTURAL DISTRICT ABU DHABI www.teamLabAbuDhabi.com

“To the outsider, the Vietnamese art scene might seem almost invisible,” notes artist and filmmaker Nguyê˜n Trinh Thi when we meet at Manzi Art Space and Café, a café in Hanoi with a small garden and an art gallery. The Vietnamese art scene seems to develop without support from public infrastructures for contemporary art – there are no public museums dedicated to contemporary art, few commercial galleries.

There were no public universities or academies offering contemporary art programmes until recently, when Pamela Nguyen Corey, a Vietnamese-American art historian specialising in Southeast Asian contemporary art, launched an Art & Media Studies programme at Fulbright University in Ho Chi Minh City. Despite all this, there’s no lack of creative output.

In recent decades, a collaborative network of artists and curators, driven by a diy spirit, has organised a broad range of exhibitions, workshops and festivals. These initiatives have succeeded thanks not only to the financial support of overseas cultural institutions such as the Goethe Institut and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, but also to political changes within the country’s transition to a global market-economy. The government, however, continues to impose a strict

Look Harder

You’re not going to find a lot if you look for Vietnam’s art scene via traditional Western markers, writes Lorenza Pignatti

left Nhà Sàn Collective, Gymnastic Field, 2012, (performance view featuring Kumpei Miyata at Japan Foundation, Hanoi, during Skylines With Flying People). Photo: Ta Minh Duc. Courtesy the artists right apd, Hanoi. Courtesy apd, Hanoi

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ArtReview Asia

framework of control over visual art and media outlets: all art exhibitions must apply for an official exhibition permit from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. A number of locally funded private foundations have been established with the intention of better serving the artistic community, among them Ho Chi Minh City’s Nguyen Art Foundation and, in Hanoi, The Outpost Art Organisation, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (vcca) and Center for Art Patronage and Development (apd).

Visitors to Documenta 15 in 2022 might recall the garden of migratory plants, installed at wh22 in Kassel, a project by Tuấn Mami, member of Nhà Sàn Collective. The collective grew out of Nhà Sàn Studio, founded in Hanoi in 1998 by a group of artists, including Nguyê˜n Ma.nh Ðứ c and Trần Lư ơ ng. The studio, which was based in Nguyê˜n’s family home, was Vietnam’s first independent artist-run space and was shut down by the communist government in 2011. Despite this, Nguyê˜n’s daughter, Nguyê˜n Phuong Linh, tells me, “The younger generation of Nhà Sàn Studio was able to organise the Skylines with Flying People festival in 2012, and a year later we formed Nhà Sàn Collective.”

At apd in Hanoi I meet Trần Lư ơ ng, but we don’t speak of the past. Instead his focus is on the institution’s current programme. “apd was founded to compensate for the lack of governmental support for contemporary art,” Trần tells me. “We focus on exchange, theory, practical activities and social development.” He continues, “This year we have organised five trips for young artists – including one to plant mangroves in the Mekong Delta and another in the mountains of Quang Nam Province – as well as Tầm Tã, our annual practical mentoring course for art and curating.”

The course is vital, given that Vietnamese art academies teach only traditional techniques, such as lacquering, silkscreen, sculpture and drawing. Even university libraries have very few publications on postwar art. ‘Open Studios’ is a banner name adopted for independent exhibitions to avoid government censorship, since the country’s Ministry of Culture vets all cultural content for both public events and publications.

top Ping Pong – Vietnam & Singapore Site-Specific Performance Art Project, Final Presentation, 2024 (performance view).

Courtesy apd, Hanoi

district, one of Hanoi’s most commercial, administrative and service-oriented areas.

Here the city skyline – notable for its high-rise headquarters of banks and other multinational corporations – testifies to the significant changes that have taken place in Vietnam since the Ðổ i economic reforms in 1986, which allowed the country to integrate with the global economy.

Less than half an hour away is The Outpost Art Organisation, the country’s first private contemporary art museum, founded by entrepreneur Ariel Pha.m. This elegant white cube with a café and a bookshop shows Pha.m’s art collection and group exhibitions. The 2024 exhibition The Curious Adventure of the Modules: A visual essay on Ðiềm Phùng Thi.’s system of signs reflected on the intergenerational relationships between Thi (1920–2002), one of the first Vietnamese modernist women sculptors, who lived and worked between France and Vietnam, and a new generation of artists like Hachul Lê. Ðổ , Ngô Ðình Bả o Châu, Ðỗ Thanh Lãng and Nguyê˜n Hữ u Hả i Duy, who created a video animation based on modules designed by Thi. Yet, despite the lack of funding, education and exhibition spaces, the Vietnamese contemporary art scene seems to be thriving.

“We are doing what we can to develop a sustainable ecosystem for the arts, even if we need more players in the game,” notes Quynh Pham, cofounder of commercial gallery Galerie Quynh in Ho Chi Minh City. Other contemporary commercial galleries in Hanoi include cuc Gallery, Gate Gate Gallery and Mo Art Space. “Curators and art critics should promote Vietnamese artists at an international level, to elevate them on the global stage and to help us write our own art history – something that, for far too long, has been written by outsiders,” Ðỗ Tư ờ ng Linh tells me. Her words offer a contrast to the more marketoriented, and increasingly conformist, approaches of Western artworlds.

“Participating in the Tầm Tã programme at apd taught me that contemporary art has the ability to trigger the cultural and political significance of a site, as well as to facilitate happenings and encounters,” Hanoi-based interdisciplinary researcher Bui Duy Thanh Mai is keen to point out at apd. It’s a statement that reflects on the independence and vitality driving the Vietnamese art scene.

above The Curious Adventure of the Modules: A visual essay on Ðiềm Phùng Thi.’s system of signs, 2024 (installation view).

Courtesy The Outpost Art Organisation, Hanoi

Lorenza Pignatti is a writer, curator and professor at the New Academy of Fine Arts (naba) in Milan

I visit the Lý Tru.̛c Sơ n solo show at vcca with independent curator and writer Ðỗ Tư ờ ng Linh. “The common perception of Vietnamese art from the outsiders is that it explores themes of propaganda, war, diaspora and political stances,” she tells me. “However, there are Vietnamese artists who explore complex themes including conceptualism, posthuman, ecology, ai. Against the backdrop of those challenges, artists are striving and creating spaces for themselves.” She continues: Hanoi DocLab and [its founder] Nguyê˜n Trinh Thi, for instance, were able to remain independent for years due to their partnership with the Goethe Institut. The contract between the Vietnamese government and the Goethe Institut stipulated that anything that happened within the walls of the institute was considered to be taking place on German territory, and therefore free from censorship. This is not unique to Vietnam. In countries like China, Thailand and Indonesia, contemporary museums funded by private collections – including Museum macan in Jakarta, maiiam Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai – are far more daring in terms of their programmes than government-run institutions. Over the past few decades, most of the funding for contemporary art in Vietnam has come from foreign institutions. The international biennial Saigon Open City 2006–08, curated by Gridthiya Gaweewong and Rirkrit Tiravanija, was funded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. This foreign investment has raised concerns within Vietnam, a communist country in which any overseas influence is viewed with suspicion.

The nonprofit vcca is located within the Vincom Mega Mall Royal City of Nam Từ Liêm

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Ayoung Kim The Korean artist is one of the hottest properties worldwide right now; here are some reasons why that’s the case

by Harry C.H. Choi

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It is tempting to read the success of Ayoung Kim’s work – which where Kim’s deft deployment of state-of-the-art digital tools was garnered her, among other accolades, the lg Guggenheim Award last scaled up even further to generate highly produced, increasingly month and the Asia Culture Center’s Future Prize the year prior – as seamless visuals. In a somewhat unexpected, if not disconnected, the latest case of technophilia in contemporary art. Delivery Dancer’s departure from the preceding work, the two characters are reunited in Arc: Inverse (2024), her labyrinthine mind’s most recent output, which the distant future in an imaginary land of Novaria, whose sprawling last autumn filled the cavernous space of the Asia Culture Center landscape Kim constructed by feeding game-engine visuals of the in Gwangju for the exhibition that accompanied the prize, offers scenery to a generative ai program. This computational collaborator one compelling reason for such a rationale. Built using ai, cgi and not only finessed the nooks and crannies of Novaria but also took on gaming technologies, the three-channel video installation traces editorial tasks, reassembling the footage and deploying it across the three screens in an ongoing compithe fictional story of two female delation of select sequences that livery drivers, Ernst Mo and En Storm By employing technology as a means (both anagrams of ‘monster’), first renders every viewing unique. What to realise her speculative narratives, introduced in the video Delivery some might perceive as an invasion Kim refuses neatly to circumscribe into that sacred territory of artistic Dancer’s Sphere (2022), which debuted in Kim’s solo show at Seoul’s Gallery authorship, increasingly considered and carve it out as an object of debate Hyundai. In that prequel, the lovethe last bastion of human agency hate narrative of the couriers (dubbed ‘delivery dancers’, insinuating in our automated world, seems to be, for Kim, an avenue through the inevitable post-Fordist merger of labour and leisure) unfolds in which to incorporate formal and conceptual potentials that are othera quasi-fictional Seoul, which Kim scrupulously crafts by merging wise unobtainable. actual footage of the city with computer-generated imagery to depict Yet within that stream of optimism, Kim’s use of technology is full a world in which, as the voiceover to the video has it, time and space of nuance. For one, the wryly dystopian settings of her latest projects can be “folded and snapped”. The protagonists use the capacity to are the direct result of the amplification of neoliberal forces accelerated breach spatiotemporal constraints in order to respond to “emergency by the digital revolution. While the increase in outsourcing practices calls” – a seemingly vain objective that is nevertheless uncomfortably and deregulatory policies has served to normalise temporary and partclose to the reality of a postpandemic city functioning on expedited time contracts in recent years, it was the development of consumer deliveries of every conceivable good from fried chicken to drying racks. service platforms such as Amazon and Uber that really ushered in the ‘gig economy’ era that is represented by Complemented by a videogame, Delivery above Ghost Dancers B, 2022 (installation view, Ernst Mo and En Storm. Perhaps this is why Dancer Simulation (2022), in which players could Many Worlds Over, 2025, Hamburger Bahnhof, Kim is prudent not to overstate, if not catenavigate the dancers’ version of Seoul, Delivery Berlin). Photo: Jacopo LaForgia. © and courtesy gorically embrace, the authorial capacities Dancer’s Sphere signalled that Kim’s universe the artist, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, and Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin of the latest scientific breakthroughs. She will continue to grow in various shapes and preceding pages Ayoung Kim. Photo: Silke Briel formats. And so it did in the latest instalment, has emphasised in numerous interviews that

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Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse, 2024 (installation view).

Courtesy National Asian Culture Center, Gwangju

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Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (still), 2022, single-channel video, 25 min. Courtesy the artist

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Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (still), 2024, three-channel video, colour, two-channel sound, lighting installation, random video playback and lighting synchronisation control program, sundial sculptures, graphic sheets and circular screens, approx 27 min, dimensions variable.

Courtesy National Asian Culture Center, Gwangju

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game engines and generative ai are, like Photoshop, tools to realise her vision, for they inevitably require human input to produce any semblance of thought. To read Kim’s work as a wholehearted embrace of, or validating stamp on, cutting-edge technology also risks fuelling techno-orientalist preconceptions about her Asian identity – an ongoing concern, ironically enough, as the generative ai program she used churned out biased images when prompted to produce virtual models of Asian women for Delivery Dancer’s Arc. To fully tease out the ways in which technology is configured in her practice, it helps to consider Kim’s wider artistic trajectory. Her earlier projects sought to reassemble existing narratives of varying scales into performances and installations in order to construct alternative, peripheral histories. The series Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You (2014–15), for example, reconstructs the layered accounts of the impact of petroleum on postwar Korea, mixing landmark events such as the 1970s energy crises alongside personal memories of Kim’s own father, who was dispatched to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as part of a migrant workforce that helped build those countries’ basic infrastructure during the 1980s. Here, too, the artist employed a rudimentary algorithm as a means to subvert manmade history, using it to fracture and randomise the corpus of original texts compiled during her research and pen a libretto that was juxtaposed with another bearing lyrics of her own making – all of which culminated in a live performance and a sound installation. But Kim’s predilection for the machinic has been more compellingly integrated into her practice since she ventured into the realm of speculative fiction. Her single-channel video Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (2017) is one such example: its protagonist, Petra Genetrix, is a sentient crystalline entity who is displaced to a different ‘rock platform’ due to an explosion in her hometown of Porosity Valley. What helped Kim render this plotline, though admittedly bare-bones and loose,

was computer-generated imagery, 3d-modelling technology and green-screen video. Even if its somewhat botched aesthetics does not quite translate as a visualisation of an advanced parallel universe – unlike, say, Black Mirror (2011–) or Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) – the video is convincing as it brings into relief the very mechanisms of production that would bring us closer to the future it depicts.

By employing technology as a means to realise her speculative narratives, Kim refuses neatly to circumscribe and carve it out as an object of debate. Her position seems to be rooted in the fact that it has become an ‘extension of man’ for many, just as the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted more than half a century ago.

Now, she suggests, the standard injunction of technological apparatuses as threat, which has been espoused by so many artists and thinkers alike even until recently, cannot be so easily defended. If artists in the vein of Hito Steyerl used art to tease out technology’s troubling potentials – from surveillance and warfare to the falsification of truth – Kim’s practice instead asks how its powers can be proactively harnessed to construct futures as we imagine them. In a world that is only becoming stranger than the most far-fetched novels and where fiction is becoming fact with greater rapidity, Kim’s ludic vision may already be congealing into a tangible something in one rickety corner of this earthly sphere. ara Ayoung Kim’s work is on view in Ayoung Kim: Many Worlds Over, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, through 20 July and in the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, through 27 April.

All three Delivery Dancer works will be on view in Ayoung Kim, moma ps1, New York, 6 November – 16 March Harry C.H. Choi is a PhD candidate in art history and film and media studies at Stanford University

Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell 3 (detail), 2015, six-channel sound installation, wall diagram and live voice performances. Courtesy the artist

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Pratchaya Phinthong

by Adeline Chia

Spoon, 2024 (installation view, No Patents on Ideas, Singapore Art Museum), melted lead and tin, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Singapore Art Museum

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In a world of slippery truths, the Thai artist’s radical experiments question received wisdoms about form and function

Spoon, 2024 (installation view, No Patents on Ideas, Singapore Art Museum), melted lead and tin, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Singapore Art Museum

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A defining formal feature of Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong’s exhi- show is one of chilly reticence. A refusal to do the things we tend bitions is austerity. Often a gallery will contain only a few objects, to expect art to do these days: to reveal everything. Instead, you with most of the contextual or even basic information outsourced encounter a series of beautiful but largely hermetic artworks whose to supporting literature, books or leaflets, rather than wall labels significance and relationships remain mostly inaccessible without or other didactics. This visual and conceptual minimalism is exem- the curator’s notes, or your own interpretative leap. Depending on plified in No Patents on Ideas, currently on show at the Singapore Art personal preference, you might find this approach either extremely Museum, where six artworks are installed in a darkened, cavernous seductive or aloof. gallery, the floor of which is designed to slope gently but noticeably Despite the open-ended nature of his works, Phinthong is against upwards from the entrance to the far wall. a kind of strenuous or overly forceful analysis and favours a more The brightest source of light is from a video screen positioned over- experiential process. In a short publicity video for the museum’s social head like a sunroof in a car, intermittently showing a blue sky with media pages, he says somewhat coyly that what he is most interested in a small fighter jet (Untitled (Singapore), achieving with this exhibition is “that 2014), or an animated video of flying you don’t think about things”. He wants The overall atmosphere is one banknotes (Undrift, 2024). Spotlit in a visitors to be “relaxed” and “in peace”. of chilly reticence. A refusal to do And when we meet at the museum, the tiny alcove on a wall is a tattered the things we tend to expect art artist tells me that his work is about diamond-shaped cloth about the size of your palm, accompanied by a piece creating a “flow” or “movement”, which to do these days: to reveal everything of shrapnel on the side. (The handout I interpret as a sense of transformative informs visitors that both are actual Second World War relics formerly possibility in people, objects and relationships. owned by a British pow, on loan from the Changi Chapel and Museum, This is certainly evident in one of my favourite works that’s part an institution that commemorates the prisoners of war and civil- of the show but not physically in it: Spoon (2024). It involves scattering ians interned in Singapore’s Changi prison camp during the Japanese a series of shiny metallic fragments that have been hammered into Occupation.) Further in and leaning against a wall is a thick, coarse thin discs and burnished to a mirrorlike finish around Singapore. brown mat (Sacrifice depth for breadth, 2023), which, it turns out, is The disks’ locations are a secret known only to the artist and to those actually an abandoned hornet’s nest that has since been flattened by who stumble across them. They are part of an ongoing collaboration with the residents of Ban Napia, a village in northeastern Laos that a papermaking artisan.

There is aesthetic control in all of this: visual affinities, for Phinthong chanced upon during his travels, fabricated using melted example, in the slouched form of the mat rhyming with the shape of lead and tin from disarmed cluster bombs dropped by the us to destroy flying dollar bills in the video. Thematically, you could tease out some Communist supply lines during the Vietnam War. The villagers had conceptual threads from the ideas of aviation, airspace and military become accustomed to recycling such metals to create daily utensils occupation. But these are vague suggestions and tourist trinkets, but over the past few years, of connections rather than firmly articulated Phinthong commissioned local craftsmen Untitled (Singapore), 2014, digital image. to use the metal in the fabrication of various relationships. The overall atmosphere of the Courtesy the artist

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Undrift, 2024 (installation view, No Patents on Ideas, Singapore Art Museum), digital screensaver, projection screen composed of aluminium frame and ripstop nylon used for industrial kite-making.

Courtesy the artist and Singapore Art Museum

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top Allemansrätten, 2010 (installation view, Give More Than You Take, 2011, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo), wooden tower set up by Alessandro Rabottini. Photo: Jacopo Menzani. Courtesy the artist above Give More Than You Take, 2010–11 (production view). Courtesy the artist

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artworks. Spoon tackles how people of Laos are still psychically and the end of each day’s work to the curators at both institutions, who physically processing the ramifications of the Cold War, and furthers were then required to source the same weight in ‘useless’ objects from that process of metamorphosis by creating artworks out of those the museum’s surroundings. Later, in the exhibition, the curator leftover munitions, allowing them to acquire new owners and uses could arrange the objects in any way they liked in the gallery.

– wouldn’t it be nice if it became a practical object again, eg a mirror? – In Brétigny it was refuse such as junk wood, old electronic equipin a foreign land. Years ago, at The Sensing Salon’s ‘fake therapy’ instal- ment and cardboard boxes, piled up in a rectangular formation in lations, I drew random cards out of a deck with instructions on how the middle of the room; in Bergamo, fresh earth arranged in long to heal someone. I got ‘Enhance what is already happening’. It’s what trails along the base of walls. The work balances on a central equivSpoon is playing at. It is art not just as a form of active creative repur- alence – the weight of the fruit and the weight of the found objects. posing, but a gentler and humbler artistry, born out of close observa- The weight of 549kg becomes a crude and absolute measure; all other tion – and amplification – of already existing phenomena. metrics, such as quantity and quality of labour or the value of the A regular fixture on the international biennial circuit and collected objects, are irrelevant. The arbitrariness of Phinthong’s selfEuropean kunsthalles for the past two imposed ‘rule’ calls into question the decades, Phinthong creates photovery nature of value from a human There is a Buddhist sensibility in perspective. For his berry-picking graphs, sculptures, videos and instalhis work, where truths are experienced stint, Phinthong was paid in cash. lations which are usually presented and intuited rather than forcefully in a spare, succinct fashion. In recent Minus the cost of airplane tickets, acyears, his exposure in Asia has been commodation and middleman fees, explained or intellectualised catching up with his European reputwo months’ work earned him 2,513 tation. Last year he opened two solo exhibitions, Today will take care of Swedish krona (about £240). One of the resulting artworks from tomorrow, at Barakat Contemporary, a commercial art gallery in Seoul, this project, An Average Thai Berry Picker’s Income (2010), features the and No Patents on Ideas, at the Singapore Art Museum; this year, three sum of money arranged in a prim grid of notes and coins framed on more will follow: at scai The Bathhouse in Tokyo, Bangkok City City the wall.

Phinthong’s early work was more diffuse in form than his current Gallery and Para Site in Hong Kong.

While it might take on readily identifiable forms, the overall output, and the process of its creation more evident. After studying nature of Phinthong’s practice is harder to characterise, evolving fine art at Bangkok’s Silpakorn University, he completed his masters from a wide constellation of research topics and interventions that at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Upon graduation he made a twoemerge wherever his travels, residencies and interests take him. month journey by bus, boat and rail from Germany to Thailand, Among his diverse projects are Sleeping Sickness (2012), for which he passing through Poland, Belarus, China and Vietnam. His first exhiresearched a more environmentally friendly method of eradicating bition back home, Missing Objects (2005), featured items collected on tsetse flies that transmit the fatal sleeping sickness in sub-Saharan the trip, including photographs, empty cigarette packets and souveAfrica. At Documenta 13 he displayed a pair of dead tsetse flies, a fertile nirs for friends. A book, titled Summer Memories, published in 2008, female and a sterile male, on a white pedestal. Another is the exhibi- collects his writings made during that pilgrimage. tion One, is the number divided by, two (2021), an exploration of the provLater on, his works became more economical, even as his subject enance and authenticity of the ‘Broken Hill’ skull, a hominid skull matter diversified and touched on topics such as sustainability, polifound in Zambia and believed to be from a population that lived in tics and science. His compressive style can be highly poetic. In A Africa around 300,000 years ago. It remains in the collection of the proposal to set ch4*5.75h2o on fire (work in progress) (2013), he worked with Natural History Museum in London, and a replica is in the Lusaka a Russian and a Japanese scientist to isolate methane hydrate, a hardNational Museum. At London’s Chisenhale Gallery Phinthong to-mine ice compound that is billed as a potential alternative source exhibited the replica skull on loan of fossil energy. The work takes the from the Lusaka Museum, as well as form of a 16mm film, in which the In a world where shifting relationships another copy he bought online. He between things are the only real experience illuminated ice compound is set also invited Lusaka Museum’s guide against a dark background. It starts of everyday living, Phinthong likes Kamfwa Chishala to London, to tell to emit a weak glow, before blazvisitors about the journey of the ing into a mesmerising blue-orange to highlight the flow towards repair replica skull. flame and gradually extinguishing.

Despite the range of subjects and themes in his oeuvre, a recur- Besides showcasing the beauty of this ‘burning ice’ as a possible new ring theme is the idea of exchange – what art critic David Teh calls resource and the incandescent process of matter becoming energy, a ‘poetics of conversion and substitution’ – a process that ultimately the work also embodies a more general existential arc of finitude questions how we assign value to objects and people. Give More Than and expenditure.

You Take (2010–11) was produced during his residency at the Centre During the mid-2010s his work took a turn towards a form of d’Art Contemporain in Brétigny and supported by Galleria d’Arte social practice in which he used artworld resources to intervene in Moderna e Contemporanea Bergamo. Instead of staying in Paris, other types of economies, especially those involving invisible forms where the residency was situated, he used his production budget to of labour and unjust systems. Untitled (rice) (2014) shows an unpaid travel to Swedish Lapland to work alongside a group of Thai migrant government iou issued to a Thai farmer, a debt now honoured labourers who were employed as seasonal wild-berry pickers. Paid by by Phinthong using the production budget he received from the the kilo for his harvest, Phinthong reported the weight gathered at Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz. The work refers to a disastrous

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One, is the number divided by, two, 2021, oil on canvas, acrylic case, 44 × 36 cm (unframed).

Courtesy Barakat Contemporary, Seoul

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rice subsidy scheme implemented between 2011 and 2013 by former there is indeed a Buddhist sensibility in his work, in its gentle tracprime minister Yingluck Shinawatra that promised to buy rice from ing of karmic cause and effect, and his monastic displays, where Thai farmers at 50 percent higher than market price. Rice farmers truths are experienced and intuited rather than forcefully explained deposited their rice into the government’s reserves in exchange for a or intellectualised. debt note guaranteeing full payment within three months. When the At the heart of Buddhism is anicca, the doctrine of impermaglobal rice-market prices did not rise, the government was left with nence, where everything is shifting and changing all the time, and a stores full of overpriced grain, which were plundered by corrupt offi- firm foundation on which to rest any value, or even any kind of fixed cials or simply left to rot. Payment didn’t arrive, financially ruining identity, is an illusion. In this vision of a radically destabilised and the farmers and leading to their revolt. For Untitled (rice), Phinthong decentred world, or a form of process philosophy if you like, where bought back the voucher of a rice farmer who had participated in the shifting relationships between things are the only real experience of scheme. The original certificate is placed on a pedestal, the volume everyday living, Phinthong likes to highlight the flow towards repair. of which corresponds to the quantity of rice pledged.

In one videowork, Today will take care of tomorrow (2022), he took an In theory, one could say that Phinthong’s social-practice art high- infrared camera to a forested terrain in Laos that had been bombed lights the situation of a specific individual or segment of a marginal- during the war. The green-tinted handheld footage, in which it is ised community, and provokes his audience to consider larger, invis- hard to tell whether it is night or day, captures a verdant landscape ible flows of power, money and labour. A lingering discomfort I have bearing scars from previous aerial bombardments: trees with disfigwith this approach however is that his work isolates one instance ured trunks and shattered branches, as well as a Buddhist temple of a systemic injustice, but the root cause of the suffering remains with damaged walls, to which devotees have added extra wooden unaddressed. Not that a single artistic gesture could ever fix prob- beams as makeshift buttresses. Despite their trauma, the trees are lems such as macroeconomic mismanagement and corruption. But tall and majestic, and the temple, with the support of crutches, is the artwork instrumentalises the power asymmetry between the arts still standing; suggesting that the violence of the past can and has sector and a more disenfranchised demographic, in service of letting always been parried by the wider rehabilitative forces of nature and audiences reflect abstractly on wider and/or hidden patterns of social human resilience. The work’s title is a beautiful exhortation to let be, exploitation, which can come across as somewhat performative and and for things to follow their own course. Consistent with that attiglib. The work might bring one person in from the cold, but it also tude is the relaxed, diaristic format of the 40-minute film, which emphasises the glaring imbalance of privilege between the spheres makes it one of the most effusive of Phinthong’s typically compenof art and the rest of the world, and doesn’t get round to reflecting dious works, and all the more notable for its sense of surrender rather on that imbalance. than control. ara Rather than his works about exchange, I am a greater fan of his works about extension: those that broaden and prolong the Pratchaya Phinthong’s solo show No Patents on Ideas is on view at the Singapore Art Museum through 23 March. His exhialready rolling processes of renewal and transbition The Heat of the Empty Forward can be formation and take them to different places.

Today will take care of tomorrow (still), 2022, pp/mov 4 video, 40 min. Courtesy the artist Phinthong says he is “born a Buddhist”, and seen at scai The Bathhouse, Tokyo, through 26 April

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Half-Truths and Reconciliations The tenor of current cultural and critical exchanges among South Asian and Gulf countries points to the contortions required of those who would correct art history

by Mark Rappolt

It was all going along so nicely. Just a bunch of people from London confusing with franchises like the Guggenheim, as you’re never quite and Gulf-based American museums telling a rapt audience in sure if all they represent is an extended cultural colonialism controlled Colombo about how they were going to make South Asian art great from New York). Still, given the expectation of positive vibes, the again. Until someone in the crowd declared that the Gulf is where panel was rather taken aback when their interrogator suggested that South Asians “go to die”. And the talking stopped. The rather brutal you couldn’t do the correcting-art-history bit without addressing the premise formed the core of a ‘question’ posed by one attendee at a more general injustices inflicted upon the Global South and particupanel discussion taking place during last month’s kala arts festival. larly on those with darker skin who generally labour to construct the The attendee was responding to a curator from the Guggenheim Abu literal fabric of the institutions in which that correcting takes place.

Dhabi – a Frank Gehry-designed art behemoth whose pr bumf boldly (At least that was what might be inferred from his much shorter and promises a ‘new approach’ to museum making and ‘an experiment in more clumsy interjection.) Indeed, the panel’s moderator decided to inventive 21st-century museum design’ – who had presented a selec- end the discussion then and there. Which most likely confirmed the tion of past projects (broadly South Asian) on which he had worked questioner’s suspicions that any institutional engagement with South in his career prior to arriving at the Guggenheim. The point of all Asia didn’t have South Asia’s best interests at heart. That it was more this was that works by artists from South a balm for the conscience of the institution You become the situation that Asia are projected to feature prominently itself, which had played a role in perpetuyou are forced to inhabit: isn’t in the new Guggenheim’s opening displays ating the very cultural hegemony it was now (although when that opening is actually boasting about tearing apart. that what we learn when we taking place remains a little hazy). Which Perhaps these suspicions had been furlearn about colonial histories? you might expect, given the long relationther fuelled by recent films like Aadujeevitham: ship of trade and cultural exchange between the two regions, nowa- The Goat Life (2024; adapted from writer Benyamin’s horrifically days most visible in the billboards in Abu Dhabi featuring Bollywood powerful 2008 Malayalam novel, apparently based on a true story). stars plugging merch, and the brown bodies in the labour and service One of the highest-grossing Indian films of last year, it is an account of an Indian migrant worker who travels to Saudi Arabia following industries. But soon to be just as prominent within museum walls.

The curator’s narrative aimed to set up himself and the institution the promise of riches in the Gulf (offered by a series of dodgy-seeming as ‘correcting’ art history, reversing the erasure of the Global South brokers – generally friends of friends), but once he gets there is tricked from a history written in and by the Global North. It’s a narrative that into a form of contemporary slavery, spends his days tending beasts. gets deployed a lot these days when the general rhetoric surrounding He is treated as a beast, and comes to resemble those beasts. You culture and, well, everything else, revolves around victims and perpe- become the situation that you are forced to inhabit: isn’t that what we trators. Given the overall vibe of the kala festival (bigging up Sri learn when we learn about colonial histories? For the French philosLanka in particular, and South Asia more generally, via a series of exhi- opher Gaston Bachelard (who was less interested in colonialism), bitions in commercial and noncommercial spaces with panel discus- this relates to a primal instinct for self-preservation, and the way sions, drinks receptions and dinners), the panellists were clearly that people adapt themselves to assume the contorted forms of their expecting their audience to see all this as a good thing. Art history hiding places, their ‘nests’, as he has it. It is our natural instinct not to rewritten with South Asia at its heart. The centre stand out and make oneself a target: to remain of art moving a little bit east from its heartlands part of the flock. This is what the kala panellists Aadujeevitham: The Goat Life, 2024, dir Blessy in Europe and the us (although that bit’s a little had expected of their audience.

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Or perhaps the interrogator had been browsing the Gulf Labor you invest in building an innovative, future-facing structure in which Artist Coalition’s (now rather out-of-date) website. The group, to house the thing. That’s just the emperor’s new clothes. founded in 2011, had been advocating for improved working condiUntil pretty recently, Sri Lankans looking for a place to die didn’t tions for the migrant labourers who were building the Guggenheim actually have to travel that far, thanks to a civil war that officially and a number of other cultural institutions on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat lasted from 1983 to 2009 (but, some would say, started earlier) and Island. It was only part of a wider concern about labour conditions in culminated in what many people describe as the state-authorised the Gulf that has been spotlighted by Amnesty International, among genocide of Tamil peoples in the north of the country. You could others, and has spawned a number of affiliate protest organisations, see the lasting impact of the conflict during kala at an exhibition such as Occupy Museums. hosted by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (mmca) Sri Perhaps he was simply extending the dialogue that is begun Lanka titled Total Landscaping (12 September – 29 March; adjacent to, when one begins to talk about being more egalitarian (although not rather than part of, the festival itself). The mmca occupies a groundexactly democratic) about whose stories museums choose to tell. floor retail space in a city-centre shopping mall, a far cry from the Because once you set out on that path Guggenheim’s projected conglomerSome of the drawers were beginning there’s no sitting on the fence, you can’t ation of titanium bells and whistles. allow some stories in and keep others The exhibition unfolds in three acts (or to stick, either resisting opening out. More precisely, there is no ringthree exhibitions), and the second was or refusing to close.

It felt as if the fencing or setting limits: you can’t say on show when I was there, presenting object were somehow defying the ‘we’ll talk about these victims, but not the work of nine artists with a focus on those victims’. To do that is to lose your imperative to function as an artwork how a land is charted or mapped and moral authority, the one that you built how that affects our perception of it – up by telling those ‘other’ art histories in the first place, and become verbs like ‘to border’ and ‘to chart’ were printed on the wall along with instead the perpetrator of another injustice. Moral authority is all definitions as part of the exhibition labelling.

There were works such as Jasmine Nilani Joseph’s Unveiled Barriers curators, critics and other arty types seem to want to accrue these days. Although someone more perverse than I might argue that, these (2019), a series of delicate-but-precise pen-and-ink drawings in the days, leaving a few injustices uncorrected (whether by mistake or Pop style of a 1960s architecture illustration, which explored the sea design is a debate for another time) is precisely what keeps museums as both a source of connection and escape, and a form of barrier and prison (complete with turrets and fences). But the show was domigoing generation after generation.

Or perhaps, more generally, this episode (the question about the nated (physically and conceptually) by T. Shanaathanan’s Drawers of Gulf death zone) is a reminder that there are limits to art’s agency. In War Transactions (2019), a series of eight wooden cabinets in the form this case, it’s limited to fixing the flaws of history and the past biases of of pyramidal plan chests. Each labelled drawer of which contained a those who got to write it and control its dissemination, but is unable, document issued by the government, its insurgent Tamil counterpart in many ways, to address the problems of the present. However much or an ngo: resettlement forms, gold ‘donation’ forms (a form of tax

T. Shanaathanan, Drawers of War Transactions (detail), 2019 (installation view, Total Landscaping, 2024).

Courtesy mmca Sri Lanka, Colombo

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Sanod Maharjan, Letters to the forest spirits (detail), 2019–ongoing (installation view, Way of the Forest, 2024).

Photo: Ismail Noor. Courtesy 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi

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levied by the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which was fighting for an independent Tamil state in the north of Sri Lanka), cattle vouchers (for cows donated by ngos), emergency travel documents and so on. Each drawer contained one document and an index card featuring a drawing and a typed description of the document in question. Some of the drawers were beginning to stick, either resisting opening or refusing to close. It felt as if the object were somehow defying the imperative to function as an artwork. Or the imperative that every archive that enters a gallery should reveal itself, that the world should contain no secrets. Or maybe it just wasn’t built to last. To have too much attention.

The work was commissioned for the Sharjah Biennale 14 in 2019.

In the uae. And presumably, at that time, there would have been some nervousness about exhibiting a work that contained and preserved ‘official’ documents issued by an authority that was not the official government of Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka. (Just as there might be nervousness about exhibiting documents, say, issued by Hamas today.) But when I saw the work, I was thinking more about whether or not the drawers sticking was somehow connected to the difficulty of showing the objects they contained. A ‘sticky drawer syndrome’ that plagues institutions on a more general level. Which might well be another way of describing the interrogator’s complaint back at kala. Perhaps some drawers become sticky and some are designed to stick. While you didn’t want to force Shanaathanan’s drawers when they refused to open for fear of breaking them (that is, after all, how we are conditioned to behave in art institutions), you are nevertheless left feeling that the ones that didn’t cooperate were hiding something from you.

Even if you didn’t exactly put all your effort into looking for it.

Just a few months earlier I had been at the 421 Arts Campus in Abu Dhabi to see a travelling iteration of the eighth edition of the Colomboscope biennial (Unveiled Barriers had been commissioned for the sixth edition, for what it’s worth), titled Way of the Forest, which,

broadly speaking, recast forests as centres for healing. (Yes, the Gulf is definitely where a lot of South Asian art goes to be exhibited these days.) In the Sri Lankan capital, the previous January, the show had featured the work of more than 50 artists; there were works by 19 artists in the version that had travelled west to the Emirate. Some works on show were part of the original exhibition, which was to some degree remixed ‘to engage audiences in the United Arab Emirates’, with the new commissions added around it to a rhythm of keywords such as ‘Ecological’, ‘Extraction’, ‘Stewardship’, ‘Indigenous’, ‘Conservation’.

These were printed next to an introductory text on the opening wall, along with definitions. Much as the verbs would be in the Total Landscaping exhibition in Colombo. Although a cynic might say that this, at both institutions, is about channelling the buzzwords of our day before anything else. Perhaps it’s an alternate form of institutional nesting, to use Bachelard’s term.

In Abu Dhabi, there are more words and a different kind of nesting in Sanod Maharjan’s Letters to the forest spirits (2019–), a mix of letters written on a4 office-memo paper and letter-size paintings on canvas and board. The artist is from Tistung, near Kathmandu, which used to be a key trade route to Nepal but has now fallen into decline, with much of the local population leaving for the promise of a better life elsewhere. The paintings depict trees and clearings, forest scenes.

Their size is a little quirky – designed to be portable before being impressive – which gives them a feeling of immediacy and intimacy, particularly given that they are installed in a salon-style hang. But they are neither especially remarkable in stylistic terms, nor in terms of the particular scenes they represent. But the letters interspersed within them suggest that there is a lot more going on.

‘Beloved Devban,’ reads one (you might interpret Devban (in Hindi/Urdu) as something like ‘God’s forest’), ‘The second of oldest grandmother says that I lived because “Ajima” caught my hand.

She even dares to say that anybody living in Testu is immune to

Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Lotus Zone, 2015 (installation view, Total Landscaping, 2024).

Courtesy Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo, and mmca Sri Lanka, Colombo

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unfortunate accidents. Forest spirit Chunn lives here; two of the rivers and netlike sculptures representing mycorrhizal networks (the everysurround it and keep it here. It has been six months since I nearly lost thing-is-connected vibe), but ones that appeared to have been charred my life. Mother says that you saved me for the third time… Whenever or caught in an oil slick: a reference one presumes to both the human I got nauseous on the bus to Kathmandu, I used to look at you and and nonhuman casualties of the Sri Lankan civil war. comfort myself. Sometimes my mother weeps loudly in your memoFor all the vibe of interconnectedness, however, the discourse ries. I have heard stories of you, time and again and I feel you have about environmental degradation and protection appeared to be referring to something happening someplace far, far away from Abu Dhabi. always lived in me. I have always lived with you.’

The complete meaning of the letters remains opaque, but in their The uae doesn’t have any primary forests, so it’s understandable that mix of animal, mineral and vegetable, they contain a connected, the show would work differently here, and operate at a certain remove animist idea of ‘home’ within them, and convey the notion of the from the postindustrial port environment in which 421 is housed or ‘Chunn’ forest spirit as a sort of guardian of both the forest and the from the desert landscapes you might find out of town. And to what people who depend on it. Somehow it’s extent 421’s audience included the 150,000 The decision to end the discussion fitting that whatever Chunn is exists in Sri Lankan nationals currently employed the space between word and image in then and there most likely confirmed in the uae, the majority of whom work as this work. Neither one nor the other, like labourers or domestic workers, was hard the questioner’s suspicions that something designed to be lost in transto ascertain. Moreover, it’s hard to think of any institutional engagement with lation, unknowable outside its original Abu Dhabi being part of the Global South context. There’s a similar vibe going on or Global Majority – from which general South Asia didn’t have South Asia’s in Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova’s threegrouping most of the artists in this exhibibest interests at heart tion might be said to come and with which channel video Arslanbob (2023), filmed in a walnut forest in Kyrgyzstan. The walnut trees are said to release hallu- the Gulf in general, from Guggenheims to Sharjah Biennials, is seeking cinogenic gases, and the video has a dreamy, trippy feel as it moves to align – which in turn might suggest that those terms are much more between religion, mythology and more-than-human lifeforms. In fluid and contingent – cruel people would say meaningless – than short, this Abu Dhabi version of Colomboscope used ‘the forest’ as an we would like them to be. However much both may be du jour in the excuse to take you someplace else, but also framed ‘home’ as a place wild world of art right now. Whether you see that as a way of talking to leave and return to. As something that is both physical and more about what can’t so easily be articulated with reference to home turf, or than physical. Something that you can take with you. Not that every- whether that’s about pretending all your problems are someone else’s, thing was so hippy-trippy: Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah’s installa- is up to you, the visitor, to decide. That, in a way, was 421’s sticky drawer. tions Hidden Mycelium in a Wounded Land ii (2022–23) and Mycelium and Amidst Pakkiyarajah’s tangled nets, it isn’t entirely clear whether it’s the Charred Landscape (2022) offered up a soundscape of Udukku drum- the aftermath of war or the climate crisis that the artist is talking about. beats (invoking the goddess Pattini, who is associated with fertility Seen in the Gulf, the oil slick vibes came more to the fore. Perhaps it’s among Tamil communities in northern Sri Lanka and South India) not important. The end result – death – is just the same. ara

Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah, Hidden Mycelium in a Wounded Land II (detail), 2022–23 (installation view, Way of the Forest, 2024).

Photo: Ismail Noor. Courtesy 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi

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Rural Fantasy – A Confrontation Why do we sentimentalise Agnes Denes’s most famous artwork, and where has this led us?

by Amber Husain

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above Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – Aerial View, 1982. © the artist. Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York preceding pages Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – With New York Financial Center, 1982. © the artist. Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

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As my landlord ushered me out of the Southeast London flat in which of months, the site flourished as an uncanny, faux-bucolic foreground I had lived for the last half-decade, he mused that it was so much nicer to the World Trade Center, skyscrapers seemingly sprouting – if you in rural Dorset, the southwest England county where I was now about looked at them from the ‘park’ – from a field of wavy gold. Once the to live. This begged the question of why he had decided to move me crop was ripe and some appropriately disorienting photographs out and himself back into the flat, having himself previously been had captured it for good, the artist oversaw the harvesting of more ensconced in so much West Country niceness. Nitpicking, however, than 450kg of grain. The piece – the artist’s best known – was titled: would have been futile in the face of English law.

Wheatfield – A Confrontation.

The countryside, it is now my job to believe and explain to others, In the years since this artwork first confronted what Denes named is beautiful, wholesome and clean. It gave us hills and potatoes; ‘mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns’, it it gave us the villages we keep saying it takes to do things. The city, has often been reduced by commentators to a pastoral corrective to I was expected to conclude by the end of the week, was a hot, dirty the evils of urban technocracy. In 2019, when Denes had a largescale retrospective at The Shed in New York, a reviewer at The New York bucket of asbestos – the rude epicentre of environmental decay.

Off I drove then in an aged car, which I quickly discovered was Times spoke of ‘breeze-swept natural bounty’ rubbing up against the architecture of metropolitan greed. In 2022, trailing a slick of petrol from its butt. But no The work, after all, marking 40 years since the original planting, matter, I was off to live in glorious smug, evicted idyll. If my landlord wanted even a sliver of was not just wheat, or wheat The Guardian ran a feature in which columnist Katy Hessel described the work as a ‘rural idyll’ those green and pleasant vibes in London, he in an urban landscape in the infamous concrete jungle. Pointing to a would now have to fight it out with the local council. People, after all, had been fighting that fight for almost as photograph of the artist tending to her crop, Hessel evoked an ideal of long as I had lived in the area – shaking their fists at plans to build crusty femininity – stripy shirt, high-waisted jeans – to be contrasted council flats on nearby patches of earth, embellishing the latter with with the ‘stocky’ centres of patriarchal commerce hovering behind. titles such as ‘Peckham Green’. It was not that these protesters didn’t She lamented that it would now be impossible to pull a stunt like this care about urban poverty or its housing crises, just that they’d been in most cities around the world, where plopping vegetation in urban called to the ultimate confrontation – the war, as I believe they saw it, centres is supposedly at odds with the city’s capitalist ambitions. against ecocide itself.

This is curious, since Wheatfield – A Confrontation was reprised in I wonder if it is sentiments like these that, of late, have inspired London’s Dalston in 2009, as well as in Milan in 2015 and last year in such a revival of interest in the early ecological confrontations of the middle of Art Basel – the so-called nexus of the art market. There artist Agnes Denes, the woman who in 1982 planted a little under is nothing uncanny, unfamiliar or indeed confronting today in these a hectare of wheat on a slab of land in the Battery Park Landfill, kinds of soil-on-concrete studies. Honoring Wheatfield – A Confrontation Lower Manhattan. After 200 truckloads of soil had been spread (2024), installed on Basel’s Messeplatz, covered 1,000 sqm of concreteand furrowed by hand, planted with seeds and tended over a period lined plaza with hundreds of palettes of soil. Filled with seeds and

Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – With Agnes Denes Standing in the Field, 1982.

Photo: John McGrail. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

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Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – Volunteers Spreading Earth in the Field, 1982. © the artist. Courtesy Leslie + Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

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Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – the Harvest, 1982. © the artist. Courtesy Leslie + Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

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Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 1982/2009 (installation view in Dalston, London, as part of Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 1969–2009, 2009, Barbican Art Gallery, London). © Eliot Wyman. Courtesy Barbican Art Gallery, London

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green shoots, these moveable units of plant, designed to nod to an ‘iconic’ art piece, were of a piece with any number of the kind of urban ‘regenerative’ ventures that are now a hallmark of the contemporary capitalist cityscape.

Take, for instance, New York’s High Line, just a couple of miles up from where Denes’s Wheatfield once stood. Also constructed on a disused bit of land – in this case a section of elevated railway – this urban park is one of the most visited symbols in the world of what is now commonly described as ‘landscape urbanism’, a movement towards inserting ecologically robust planes of land to the urban environment, ideally boosting the aesthetic and economic value of that land in the process. The High Line’s success is measurable not only by its impact on human and environmental health and wellbeing, but also by visitor numbers, retail revenue and realestate prices.

Who does it serve to conceptualise ‘greenness’ in such literal terms, to measure ecology in plants? While the High Line may delight tourists and educate children both local and not, it has also contributed to the replacement of regular housing with luxury condos, sweeping low- and middle-income residents from its zone of postindustrial pleasure. This kind of stage-managed wilderness – a model for similar projects in cities the world over – may appeal to the green sensibility, but as urban social theorists Natalie Gulsrud and Henriette Steiner have pointed out, it rests on an ‘ecology’ that excludes from its calculus those kinds of people and nature deemed unhelpful to the aim of accumulation. Not even the countryside itself, with its readymade greens and warming community spirit, is immune to gentrification, favourite child of ‘eco’ developers and the multiple-property-owning class.

If Denes’s Wheatfield is in fact meaningful (her simply stated ambition for the project), we cannot sensibly seek this meaning in

its rural aesthetic alone. The work, after all, was not just wheat, or wheat in an urban landscape. It was wheat on a $4.5bn piece of real estate.

It was manufactured use where there had only been exchange; it was a tangible, edible product distributed to 28 cities, its seeds carried off and replanted in various parts of the globe.

If the work’s visual impact rode on dissonance, this was merely a call to attention; no more was it to be taken literally than the artist’s decision, in 1998, to flood the manicured gardens of the American Academy in Rome with a herd of sheep. The point of Sheep in the Image of Man was not to idolise sheep, which as the artist wrote ‘plung[e] headlong in this direction or that, without plan or perspective’, but rather to provoke reflection on the resonance sparked by such a weird and jarring encounter. In the case of Wheatfield, the point was not the feminine idyll set against a backdrop of manspreading metropolis, but rather the needs-based, redistributive impulse thrown into the midst of speculative gluttony – a gluttony of which Wall Street and its buildings were merely legible symbols. Wheatfield’s vision of ecology was more than one of greenness pasted on greed; it was one in which the welfare of the planet was tuned to that of its most dispossessed humans.

If Wheatfield were, in fact, an urban regenerative project and not, instead, a temporary work of art, we would do well to be less impressed by its theatrics of rural charm. Prime urban real estate, after all, does not want to be filled with wheat; it wants to be filled with libraries, schools and social housing. ara Agnes Denes’s sculpture The Living Pyramid (2015/25) is on view as part of Desert x 2025, Coachella Valley, 8 March – 11 May, where it is installed at Sunnylands Center & Gardens, Rancho Mirage, California Amber Husain is a writer currently based in Bridport, England

Honoring Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 2024 (installation view, Messeplatz, Basel). Photo: Sara Barth.

Courtesy Art Basel

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Joydeb Roaja

by Munem Wasif

How one of Bangladesh’s best-known Indigenous artists fuses politics, childhood memories and personal anecdotes to make powerful and provocative works 58

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In April 2014, I invited Joydeb Roaja, along with a few other artists, to In the work, Joydeb addresses how members of the younger generaperform at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka, where tion in the cht are caught in the conflict and tension between local artist Mahbubur Rahman, activist Taslima Akhter, I and a few other political parties and the brutal force of military presence. From childresearchers had cocurated a group exhibition titled 1134 Lives Not hood, they are unable to cultivate themselves or engage their perspecNumbers. The exhibition marked the first anniversary of the collapse tives through art, literature and other forms of education. According of the Rana Plaza, a building northwest of the Bangladesh capital to Joydeb, “The new generation always carries a heavy weapon on that housed five garment factories. More than a thousand workers their heads, which is destroying their tender sensibilities.” He has also lost their lives. performed with his daughter, balancing a cardboard tank on his head.

Joydeb was born in 1973 in a remote village in the Khagrachhari In the photographs of various iterations of the performance they Hill District, one of the three mountainous districts in the south- mostly appear to be strolling through the landscape, with the occaeast corner of Bangladesh. He belongs to the Tripura community and sional subtle smile crossing their faces as they wander along the currently lives in Chittagong in southeast Bangladesh, bordering seashore. At times their heads seem to be in confrontation with each India and Myanmar. Because of that, we did not meet often, but I had other. When discussing this series with me, he said that he first saw seen Joydeb perform here and there. He is one of the few artists from a military tank when he was in the ninth grade, and since then the the Chittagong Hill Tracts (cht) image has never left his mind. and the Indigenous community in I asked Joydeb whether the perforBangladesh more generally who has mance or the drawing came first. He gained visibility in the mainstream smiled and said, “I love doing these art scene, aside from artist Kanak performances because they don’t cost much. They are spontaneous – I can Chanpa Chakma. use my body to react to my time.”

My awareness of the politics Sometimes he sketches in relation to of the cht (where there have been performances (either before or after several conflicts in relation to land rights and autonomy), the oppresthey take place), producing works sion of Indigenous peoples by milithat later evolve into largescale drawtary forces and the reinforcement of ings. For me it was fascinating to Bengali nationalistic identity comes observe how fluidly Joydeb’s body through the work of photojournalmoves between performance and ink ist Shahidul Alam, anthropologist on paper. And how his drawings play Rahnuma Ahmed and writers Saydia with a politics of scale: the Pahari Gulrukh and Hana Shams Ahmed. figures are much larger than all the Shahidul worked on a project focused members of the armed forces. on Kalpana Chakma that lasted sevLike many young artists across eral years and resulted in three exhiSouth Asia, Joydeb initially strugbitions (2013–15), repeatedly asking gled to generate an income from the simple yet haunting question: his work. He recalls being in awe of where is Kalpana Chakma? Kalpana, Water is Innocent!, a 2004 exhibition a young leader of the Hill Women’s by the pioneering artist Dhali Al Federation who had been a vocal critMamoon, who was also a professor at Chittagong Art College. While ic of the Bangladesh army’s harassment of local Indigenous peoples, Joydeb admired the scale of the older was abducted at gunpoint from her artist’s installations (which depict how the construction of the Kaptai home by military personnel and civilian law-enforcement on 12 June Dam, to generate hydroelectric power 1996. Twenty-nine years later, she remains missing. for the larger Bangladeshi state, caused the flooding of local commuIt is in this context that Joydeb grew up: in the hostile environ- nities and the displacement of their inhabitants), he feared he would ment of the cht under military rule and the conflict with Bengali never be able to afford to make such elaborate work. Joydeb develsettlers, experiencing humiliation, fear and anger. The overarching oped his own practice within artist collectives such as Porapara Space portrayal of the region is often its scenic beauty – mountains, forests For Artists in Chittagong and Britto Arts Trust in Dhaka. However, and rivers. But Joydeb is one of the few artists who has broken that a pivotal moment came in 2009 when he attended a workshop with paradigm, bringing politics and personal anecdotes from his child- Japanese poet and performance artist Seiji Shimoda. From that point hood into his performances and drawings. on, Joydeb was drawn to performance art, realising that meaningful artistic expression does not require grand In his series Generation Wish Yielding Trees and Atomic Tree (2008–), Joydeb depicts mili- above Generation Wish Yielding Trees and Atomic Tree 1, no date, arrangements; instead, gestures, movements tary tanks embedded within Pahari figures and sonic experiments became his primary ink pen on paper, 76 × 56 cm (the Pahari are a minority group within the facing page Generation Wish Yielding Trees and Atomic Tree, 2009, materials. His body became an act of resistcht), surrounded by numerous armed men. ance, a daily form of expression within and performance. Courtesy the artist

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The Future of Indigenous Peoples #14, 2024, ink pen on paper, 152 × 115 cm

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The Future of Indigenous Peoples #9, 2024, ink on paper, 76 × 56 cm

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against an increasingly capital-driven art market. Recently, Joydeb built a studio in Rangamati, in the cht, on the same land where the house of the Chakma king (the Chakma people are the second largest ethnic group in the cht) was washed away due to the construction of the Kaptai Dam. He visits the studio on Thursday evenings, as his daughter’s school is closed on Fridays and Saturdays.

Joydeb and his friends grew up cultivating rice using jum (slashand-burn) farming. His figure drawings are filled with intricate details, reflecting the region’s textile-weaving and craft traditions.

These textures resemble veins, flowing through bodies and landscapes, representing generational experiences transmitted through practice and oral history. One recurring element in Joydeb’s work is his connection to childhood memories – cultivating, cooking, wandering down narrow creeks in the mountains and exploring the flora and fauna. I have often observed his images on Facebook, where he is captured cooking in the middle of a water source, trekking and performing spontaneously, sometimes with only nature as his audience.

On 25 November 2024, Joydeb wrote a Facebook status update: I have not drawn a picture since November of last year! I have been in the studio since the day before yesterday. I wake up at four o’clock every morning, but I still haven’t been able to draw anything. I spent two days thinking about what to draw, why to draw. But in these two days, I have been taking care of the garden, sweeping the studio, watering the trees. If the unemployed artist does not concentrate on his work, then it is difficult to survive.

Hope Mother Nature will give me some guidance. Waiting for that auspicious day.

Joydeb’s recent series The Future of Indigenous Peoples (2024) is on show as part of the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. It highlights how Indigenous bodies are constantly surrounded – by photographers, journalists, media spectators, surveillance drones and helicopters. And how these violent interventions disrupt traditional rituals and performances. Research indicates that the ratio of Bengalis to Paharis in the cht has reached nearly 1:1. Joydeb speculates that one day Paharis will become a rare, almost invisible species. He recalls in 1982, when he used to go to local markets, he would see 90 percent Paharis and 10 percent Bengalis from the flatlands.

As violent ethnographic research continues to categorise people into increasingly rigid identities, Joydeb’s drawings and performances resist these frameworks. His work presents a much more complex and layered understanding of the larger region – one that challenges colonial cartographic and ethnographic perspectives on who we are as Bangladeshis today. ara Work by Joydeb Roasha can be seen in the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, through 27 April Munem Wasif is a Dhaka-based artist working in photography and moving image. An exhibition of his work, Kromosho, is on view at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, Dhaka, 18 April – 29 May

A Prisoner’s Dream, 2023, performance.

Courtesy the artist all images but two Courtesy the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

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Eternal Returns 1a Ideals of the East In this new series, we republish (and annotate) key texts that have influenced art and the thinking around art

Okakura Kakuzō, also known as Okakura Tenshin, was a Japanese scholar and art critic operating during the second half of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, a time when large parts of Asia struggled under various manifestations of Western imperialism, while Japan was starting to export a brand of its own.

Okakura is primarily known today for the three books he wrote in English: Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904) and The Book of Tea: A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture, and the Simple Life (1906). The first two of these publications promoted early expressions of Pan-Asianism, albeit with Japan as the Asian nation par excellence (to the point that you might question whether or not Okakura really considered Japan a part of Asia at all, according to critics like Indian writer and theatre director Rustom Bharucha) and the defender of Asian culture (whether out of solidarity or a sense of ownership). Particularly after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), fought over the race to occupy Korea and northeastern China, which allowed Japan to promote itself as the only Asian nation to have defeated a Western colonial power and laid both China and Korea open to Japan’s imperial expansion. Okakura’s mission was, on the one hand, to defend traditional Japanese culture from encroaching Westernisation and, on the other (perhaps in support of the first), to promote Japanese and, more broadly speaking, Asian culture to aficionados in the West. As part of the last, he became Curator of the Department of Japanese and Chinese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (which had been Okakura’s primary

home since 1904), in 1910. So that he could literally sell Asian art to the West, or at least buy it for Westerners.

Okakura had studied in Europe and the us as part of an early placement with the Imperial Art Commission. On his return he founded and directed the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where he intended to breathe fresh life into traditional forms while resisting the slavish copying of Western aesthetics. The last was a battle he swiftly lost, so he resigned and founded the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Visual Arts Academy), where he adopted a more pragmatic approach to Western aesthetics and their ability to enhance traditional artforms. Okakura died of a heart attack in 1913, shortly after writing in a letter that ‘I have eaten things in various parts of the globe – too varied for the hereditary notions of my stomach and kidneys’ as a means of rationalising the ill health that dogged him in his final years. And as a way of blaming his Japanese body for letting down the internationalism of his mind.

While his own nationalist and imperialist beliefs remain intensely problematic (well, unless you agree with them), Okakura’s early attempts to insist on the value of Asian aesthetics and philosophy in the face of a Western narrative that presented its own values as more advanced, more contemporary and more powerful than anything else that might have been going on make him an intriguing thinker whose influence persists to this day. Moreover he was part of a diverse intellectual circle in which he counted everyone from Rabindranath Tagore to Isabella Stewart Gardner among his friends. The text that follows is the opening gambit in his best-known work on art, Ideals of the East.

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The Range of Ideals

by Okakura Tenshin Annotated by Yuwen Jiang and Mark Rappolt

Okakura Kakuzō (front left) and Isabella Stewart Gardner (front centre) with their friends on the Terrace at Red Roof, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1910, gelatin silver print. Photo: Thomas E. Marr and Son. Courtesy Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston / cc by-nc-nd 4.0

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Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life.

It’s interesting that Okakura’s Pan-Asianist argument starts with the introduction of a divide and that the divide is the Himalayas. The publication of the first edition of Ideals of the East, in 1903, took place just prior to the British expedition to Tibet (the Younghusband expedition, 1903–04), and at a time when archaeological expeditions into western China (by German, French, British, Russian and Japanese teams) were undertaken, resulting in a massive amount of knowledge being produced on Buddhist cave paintings (a lot of them subsequently cut out and removed). Okakura’s concern with Tibet seems to reflect an interest in keeping up to date with the state of expeditions. Which would prove useful later, when Okakura was engaged to collect Asian art for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Of course, Okakura’s idea of a united Asia serves only to promote Japan, the one place where, to his understanding, Asia appears united and the ‘thought inheritance’, whatever that is, takes on a material manifestation – he will argue that Japan took its religion from India and its language from China, thus uniting the South and the East. West Asia is less relevant to him generally. A mode of thought that persists to this day. Although the riches generated by oils and gas might be rapidly changing that perspective.

Dunhuang cave mural of Avalokiteshvara, worshipping bodhisattvas and mendicants, early Tang Dynasty (618–907 ce).

Public domain

Down to the days of the Mohammedan conquest went, by the ancient highways of the sea, the intrepid mariners of the Bengal coast, founding their colonies in Ceylon, Java, and Sumatra, leaving Aryan blood to mingle with that of the sea-board races of Burmah and Siam, and binding Cathay and India fast in mutual intercourse.

Cultural exchange is, for Okakura, inextricably connected to conquest and power. So in some ways it’s not really exchange at all: just taking, or imposing.

The long systolic centuries – in which India, crippled in her power to give, shrank back upon herself, and China, self-absorbed in recovery from the shock of Mongol tyranny, lost her intellectual hospitality – succeeded the epoch of Mahmoud of Ghazni, in the eleventh century. But the old energy of communication lived yet in the great moving sea of the Tartar hordes, whose waves recoiled from the long walls of the North, to break upon and overrun the Punjab. The Hunas, the Sakas, and the Gettaes, grim ancestors of the Rajputs, had been the forerunners of that great Mongol outburst which, under Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, spread over the Celestial soil, to deluge it with Bengali Tantrikism1, and flooded the Indian peninsula, to tinge its Mussulmân Imperialism with Mongolian polity and art.

Here history for Okakura is a bit like the monsoon. Or, to get culturally specific (and not do what Okakura so often does), like Hokusai’s celebrated representation of The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831).

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For if Asia be one, it is also true that the Asiatic races form a single mighty web.

Even if he managed to separate out the strands of that web in the previous paragraph.

‘Tartar Prince’, published in Joachim Bouvet, L’estat présent de la Chine, 1697. Here ‘Tartar’ refers to the northeastAsian Manchus who ruled China’s last dynasty.

Public domain

We forget, in an age of classification, that types are after all but shining points of distinctness in an ocean of approximations, false gods deliberately set up to be worshipped, for the sake of mental convenience, but having no more ultimate or mutually exclusive validity than the separate existence of two interchangeable sciences. If the history of Delhi represents the Tartar’s imposition of himself upon a Mohammedan world, it must also be remembered that the story of Baghdad and her great Saracenic culture is equally significant of the power of Semitic peoples to demonstrate Chinese, as well as Persian, civilisation and art, in face of the Frankish nations of the Mediterranean coast. Arab chivalry, Persian poetry, Chinese ethics, and Indian thought, all speak of a single ancient Asiatic peace, in which there grew up a common life, bearing in different regions different characteristic blossoms, but nowhere capable of a hard and fast dividing-line. Islam itself may be described as Confucianism on horseback, sword in hand. For it is quite possible to distinguish, in the hoary communism of the Yellow Valley, traces of a purely pastoral element, such as we see abstracted and self-realised in the Mussulmân races.

In this paragraph, Okakura appears to be arguing for Asia’s cause (against the Frankish nations), but here using a colonial language (and after all, he wrote this text in English, for people who spoke that language, rather than for members of any of the Asian nations he is writing about). Tartar in European languages, for example, may refer to any culture ranging from Turkey to northern Asia; Islam at this point has also spread from northern Africa to Southeast Asia. Other than a Japanese Orientalism at play, it’s also worth thinking about how Okakura can appear to be saying something about solidarity while actually pushing an imperialist agenda.

Or, to turn again to Eastern Asia from the West, Buddhism – that great ocean of idealism, in which merge all the river-systems of Eastern Asiatic thought – is not coloured only with the pure water of the Ganges, for the Tartaric nations that joined it made their genius also tributary, bringing new symbolism, new organisation, new powers of devotion, to add to the treasures of the Faith.

It has been, however, the great privilege of Japan to realise this unity-incomplexity with a special clearness. The Indo-Tartaric blood of this race was in itself a heritage which qualified it to imbibe from the two sources, and so mirror the whole of Asiatic consciousness. The unique blessing of unbroken sovereignty, the proud self-reliance of an unconquered race, and the insular isolation which protected ancestral ideas and instincts at the cost of expansion, made Japan the real repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and culture.

Again it comes down to power and strength. And Japan, at that time, sees itself as the only country in Asia untouched by colonialism – which is debatable, since the Meiji Restoration that allowed it to quickly Westernise was spurred on by an unequal treaty signed with the us.

Dynastic upheavals, the inroads of Tartar horsemen, the carnage and devastation of infuriated mobs – all these things, sweeping over her again and again, have left to China no landmarks, save her literature and her ruins, to recall the glory of the Tâng emperors or the refinement of Sung society.

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Amida Buddha at Byōdō-in, Kyoto, woodcarving by Jōchō, 1053. Published in Japanese Temples and their Treasures, 1910.

Public domain

The grandeur of Asoka – ideal type of Asiatic monarchs, whose edicts dictated terms to the sovereigns of Antioch and Alexandria – is almost forgotten among the crumbling stones of Bharhut and Buddha Gaya.

In fact, it took a colonial power (that of Britain) to ‘rediscover’ them, after they were (presumably) erased by more traditionally Hindu regimes. But the grandeur of Ashoka would be something on which an independent India would eventually be founded, with the wheel of dharma, which draws directly from one of the capitals of a pillar erected by the Buddhist Mauryan emperor, becoming an essential component of the national flag. Given India’s current Hindu nationalist turn, you might take that as an example of how the Okakura ‘way’ continues to flourish today.

Yōshū Chikanobu, A Contest of Elegant Ladies among the Cherry Blossoms, 1887, triptych of woodblock prints, 37 × 74 cm.

Public domain

The jewelled court of Vikramaditya is but a lost dream, which even the poetry of Kalidasa fails to evoke. The sublime attainments of Indian art, almost effaced as they have been by the rough-handedness of the Hunas, the fanatical iconoclasm of the Mussulmân, and the unconscious vandalism of mercenary Europe, leave us to seek only a past glory in the mouldy walls of Ajanta, the tortured sculptures of Ellora, the silent protests of rock-cut Orissa, and finally in the domestic utensils of the present day, where beauty clings sadly to religion in the midst of an exquisite home-life.

It is in Japan alone that the historic wealth of Asiatic culture can be consecutively studied through its treasured specimens. The Imperial collection, the Shinto temples, and the opened dolmens, reveal the subtle curves of Hâng workmanship 2.

The temples of Nara are rich in representations of Tâng culture, and of that Indian art, then in its splendour, which so much influenced the creations of this classic period – natural heirlooms of a nation which has preserved the music, pronunciation, ceremony, and costumes, not to speak of the religious rites and philosophy, of so remarkable an age, intact.

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The treasure-stores of the daimyos, again, abound in works of art and manuscripts belonging to the Sung and Mongol dynasties, and as in China itself the former were lost during the Mongol conquest, and the latter in the age of the reactionary Ming, this fact animates some Chinese scholars of the present day to seek in Japan the fountain-head of their own ancient knowledge.

Just as Buddhist monks from outside India once had to restore the religion and its teachings to India. But this is also reminiscent of how Renaissance-era Europeans retrieved knowledge of Graeco-Roman culture preserved in the Islamic world. But instead of celebrating a world in which culture is constantly exchanged and remade, Okakura again seems to insist that there is such a thing as an originary national knowledge.

Thus Japan is a museum of Asiatic civilisation; and yet more than a museum, because the singular genius of the race leads it to dwell on all phases of the ideals of the past, in that spirit of living Advaitism which welcomes the new without losing the old.

Okakura, of course, is about to go and work in a museum. So here he seems to be saying that he’s qualified for the job because he has always lived in one, and that all Japanese are essentially curators. It’s also interesting that Okakura frames authority/superiority as something founded on eclecticism rather than authenticity, valuing diversity over originality. Reading between the lines of his agenda, one can also see how such a value can be weaponised to serve imperial needs – not just Japan’s at that time, but think about the usa today. Advaitism is a reference to the oneness of existence, but it is evidence of Okakura’s habit of dressing his ideas in the clothing of Asian mysticism (he also wandered around Boston in traditional Japanese dress). Which may relate to the fashions of the times (the dressing up of ideas, not the dressing up of Okakura’s person).

Ogata Gekkō, In the Noh theatre, from the series The manners and customs of women, 1891, woodblock print on paper, 33 × 22 cm. Public domain

The Shinto still adheres to his pre-Buddhistic rites of ancestor-worship; and the Buddhists themselves cling to each various school of religious development which has come in its natural order to enrich the soil.

The Yamato poetry 3, and Bugaku music 4, which reflect the Tâng ideal under the régime of the Fujiwara aristocracy, are a source of inspiration and delight to the present day, like the sombre Zennism and No-dances, which were the product of Sung illumination. It is this tenacity that keeps Japan true to the Asiatic soul even while it raises her to the rank of a modern power: The history of Japanese art becomes thus the history of Asiatic ideals – the beach where each successive wave of Eastern thought has left its sand-ripple as it beat against the national consciousness. Yet I linger with dismay on the threshold of an attempt to make an intelligible summary of those art-ideals. For art, like the diamond net of Indra, reflects the whole chain in every link.

Again, Okakura attempts to mellow his imperialist train of thought by chucking in a Pan-Asian reference. It’s amazing that people fell for this. Or perhaps not. His audiences in London and New York were a bunch of fellow imperialists, after all.

It exists at no period in any final mould. It is always a growth, defying the dissecting knife of the chronologist. To discourse on a particular phase of its development means to deal with infinite causes and effects throughout its past and

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Japanese Tantric Mandala, showing text in Chinese and Sanskrit with Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Eight Patriarchs of the Shingon Sect, c.1200–1399.

Public domain

present. Art with us, as elsewhere, is the expression of the highest and noblest of our national culture, so that, in order to understand it, we must pass in review the various phases of Confucian philosophy; the different ideals which the Buddhist mind has from time to time revealed; those mighty political cycles which have one after another unfurled the banner of nationality; the reflection in patriotic thought of the lights of poetry and the shadows of heroic characters; and the echoes, alike of the wailing of a multitude, and of the mad-seeming merriment of the laughter of a race.

Any history of Japanese art-ideals is, then, almost an impossibility, as long as the western world remains so unaware of the varied environment and interrelated social phenomena into which that art is set, as it were a jewel. Definition is limitation.

Here perhaps Okakura finally makes an important point.

The beauty of a cloud or a flower lies in its unconscious unfolding of itself, and the silent eloquence of the masterpieces of each epoch must tell their story better than any epitome of necessary half-truths. My poor attempts are merely an indication, not a narrative.

Notes [Okakura’s]

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Bengali Tantrikism. The Tantras are works written for the most part in Northern Bengal after the thirteenth century. Their subjects consist, very largely, of psychic phenomena and kindred matters, but they include some of the noblest flights of pure Hinduism. Their chief purpose seems to have been the formulation of a religion which could reach and redeem the lowest of the low.

Hâng Workmanship / Tâng Culture / Sung and Mongol Dynasties. A brief abstract of the periods of Chinese history might run as follows: The Shu Dynasty (1122 to 221 bc).

This was the culmination of the process of early Chinese consolidation preceded by the dynasties of Kha and In. The capitals of these powers, though already situated in the valley of the Yellow River, were not yet advanced so far east as the present centre. They were placed westward of the Dokwan Pass, where the river makes a right angle in striking the plains, at that point where it was later to be touched by the Great Wall.

The Shin Dynasty (221 to 202 bc).

The tendency of this power to suppress communism brought about its downfall.

The brevity of its duration, coupled with its importance, is only paralleled in modern times by the Empire of the first Napoleon.

The Hàng Dynasty (202 bc to 220 ad).

This empire was created by a popular rising.

The headman of a village became Emperor of China. But the whole trend and development of the Hângs grew to be imperialistic.

The Three Kingdoms (220 to 268 ad).

A territorial division.

The Six Dynasties (268 to 618 ad).

The Three Kingdoms were now consolidated under a single native dynasty, which had lasted about two centuries, when an influx of Hunnish and Mongolian tribes of the northern border drove them to take refuge in the valley of the Yang-tse. The scene of Chinese succession and culture is thus shifted at this period to the South, while the North becomes the means of the introduction of Buddhism and the establishment of Taoism.

The Tâng Dynasty (618 to 907 ad).

This dynasty was the result of the reconsolidation of China under the great genius of Taiso.

The capital of the Tângs was on the HoangHo, where the northern and the southern sovereignties were amalgamated. This combination was finally broken up by the feudalistic kingdoms, known as the Five Dynasties, which lasted, however, only half a century.

The Sung Dynasty (960 to 1280 ad).

The centre of rule was now again transferred to the Yang-tse. In this era, under the name of Soju or Sung scholasticism, is developed the movement which we have designated in the text as Neo-Confucianism.

The Gen or Mongol Dynasty (1280 to 1368 ad).

This was a Mongolian tribe which, under Kublai Khan, overpowered the Chinese dynasty and established itself near Pekin. The Gen introduced Llamaism or Thibetan Tantrikism.

The Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1662 ad).

This was due to a popular uprising against the Mongol tyranny. It had its centre of power at Nankin, on the Yangtse-Kiang: but it maintained a second capital, from the time of its third emperor, at Pekin.

The Manchu Dynasty (1662 to the present day).

This was another Tartar tribe who took advantage of the division of power between the emperor and the army to establish themselves at Pekin. Having put down the rebellion of the generals, they could not again be dislodged. Their lack of complete identification with the nation has been the weakness of this house, and rebellions against their power have arisen always on the Yang-tse.

3 Yamato Poetry. The word Yamato is used here as a synonym for Ama, the primitive stock of the Japanese. It is also the name of a province in Japan.

4 Bugaku Music. This means dance music – from bu, to dance, and gaku, music, or to play.

This bugaku music in Japan was developed in the Nara-Heian period, under the influence of the Chinese culture of the Six Dynasties.

It was formed of combined elements of Indian and old Hâng music. It is played by a hereditary caste of musicians called Reijiu, who are attached to the Imperial court, and to grand monasteries and Shinto temples, like Kusaga, Kamo, and Tennoji. It is to be heard on great occasions of festivity and ceremonial.

Okakura Tenshin, ‘The Range of Ideals’, the first chapter of the second edition of Ideals of the East, published in 1904 by E.P. Dutton & Co, New York

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Zamanbap art Wordplay, tradition and politics swirl around a collective of performers attempting to define ‘contemporary art’ in Kyrgyzstan

by Tyler Coburn

Chingiz Aidarov lives at 19 Zapadnaya Street in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. To get to the multidisciplinary artist’s home, one must pass through two gates and follow a wall that Bishkek Feminist Initiatives (its previous occupant) stencilled with antipatriarchal graphics and slogans. In a large garden to the left, pear and apricot trees grow among metal sculptures he has made that blend Western and Kyrgyz references, like the one of Futurama’s Zoidberg wearing a kalpak. The mudroom of the house doubles as a shop selling artwork by Aidarov and friends. Beyond it is a room with his paintings of quotidian and pop-cultural figures, another where he sleeps and a kitchen decorated with a single wallpaper strip of pink orchids.

Aidarov’s friends found this home for him in autumn 2022 after a stroke paralysed the right half of his body and impeded his ability to speak. Though Bishkek rents were rising sharply due to the influx of Russians skirting the war – a trend common across much of the former Soviet world – the landlady gave them a deal which ensured that, with sufficient crowdfunding, he could live there for the foreseeable future.

It was in this house that the collective Zamanbap art came into being. Owing to Aidarov’s limited mobility, some of his collaborators from Art Group 705, a ‘nomadic theatre’ founded in Bishkek in 2005, traded their modes of performing in public space for those scaled to the intimacy of the home. Zamanbap art takes cues from Jerzy Grotowski’s poor theatre and Ramis Ryskulov’s tricksterish approach to poetry and art, creating gamelike scenarios, member Marat Raiymkulov told me in January, where “you can’t draw a line between sitting, being together and making a performance”. Since its inception, Zamanbap art has grown to include Salkyn Adysheva, Aizuura Bakalova, Azat Idrisov, Emirlan Jakshybaev, Mirbek Kadraliev, Aibek Mailybashov and Malika Umarova, among others.

Zamanbap is Kyrgyz for ‘contemporary’, and the word carries multiple meanings for the collective. Given the traditional conceptions of art practice that still predominate in the country, calling itself ‘contemporary art’ is a humorous yet sobering attempt to expand the field. The choice of language also has significance in that many members are fluent in Russian and speak broken Kyrgyz. They share a desire, Umarova reflects, to “build Kyrgyz anew”. As Aidarov began

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speech therapy, it felt timely to speak both languages in their work, embracing the mistakes and possibilities of a hybrid tongue.

Winter Theatre (2024), so named for the season when it was shot, exemplifies the collective’s domestic antics. The video unfolds as a nine-episode comedy partly inspired by caca (2023), a ‘social sciencefiction novel’ written pseudonymously by Bishkek curator and editor Gamal Bokonbayev. caca (an acronym for Central Asian Contemporary Art) is at once a zip through planetary systems and a dissection of trends in the regional culture, ever subject to the influence of Western art markets, foundations and other institutions. In the episode ‘Maestro’, the charismatic Raiymkulov plays a reporter covering a ‘kitchen exhibition’ where Bakalova, banana-cum-microphone in hand, is singing operatic runs. “Everything here is art,” the reporter exclaims, “and we will even witness how I become an artist.” Taking the banana from Bakalova, he remakes Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019) and arguably improves upon it, adding a jammy fingerprint to the tape lest his authorship be in doubt. The episode ‘Where is the Fee?’ shows a “capitalist” haranguing two drunk beggars (played

by Raiymkulov, Aidarov and a mask on a broomstick, respectively) about the “need to work!” Moments later, he crouches next to them, desperate to sell his goods. “Life is like this,” he moans – or at least, life under the prevailing economic order. Anyone can be cut down to size.

Differentiating all of these characters are cardboard and paper masks drawn in Raiymkulov’s irreverent style and informed by Aidarov’s past ‘invasions’. (Aidarov enacted Akayev apologises to the people in 2016 at Osh Bazaar, one of the busiest markets in the country.

Wearing a mask of Kyrgyzstan’s disgraced first president’s face, he begged for forgiveness from anyone who would listen.) The ease with which a mask can be raised and lowered, Raiymkulov observes, lends to “the immediacy and improvisation” of Zamanbap art’s approach. It also has a social dimension. When I visited 19 Zapadnaya Street with Raiymkulov and Umarova last May, we turned leaves into masks and posed for one of Aidarov’s many Instagram stories.

Wearing masks with others can foster a sense of camaraderie and collective possibility. In fashioning a mask, one must cut (even modestly) into the fabric of reality.

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Winter Theatre (stills), 2024, hd video, colour, sound, nine episodes

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Uncle Fantomas, 2024 (performance view, Chingiz Aidarov’s studio, organised by mesto d theatre, Bishkek)

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Uncle Fantomas, 2024 (performance view, Chingiz Aidarov’s studio, organised by mesto d theatre, Bishkek)

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Uncle Fantomas, 2024 (performance view, Chingiz Aidarov’s studio, organised by mesto d theatre, Bishkek)

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Throughout Zamanbap art’s relatively short existence, Aidarov’s hypermasculine Kyrgyz man. By way of demonstration, Jakshybaev home has been both the site for performance and a performer unto swaggered around the garden and ‘cut’ the necks of two metal sculpitself, shifting between genres as readily as members of the col- tures of Ridley Scott’s aliens as if they were livestock .

Upon entering the house, Raiymkulov displayed a number of lective. The video Albarsty Classic (2024) turns the space into a haunted house, as seen through the eyes of a nurse who lived there Aidarov’s paintings and shared excerpts from his diaries, which during Aidarov’s first months of rehabilitation. Providing the were dramatised outside the windows by masked figures and cardvoiceover for the work, she describes how an albarsty (a mytholog- board speech bubbles. One scene made reference to a period in 2011 ical figure said to paralyse and even choke a sleeper) would visit the when Aidarov awaited deportation from Moscow. (En route to Marina house regularly and sometimes bring its entire family along. In Abramović’s The Artist is Present at the Garage Museum of Contempothe collective’s dramatisation, which diverges from her account, rary Art, he was arrested by police, as his documents had expired.) a woman arrives at dusk to the seemingly empty house only to Instead of Abramović, Aidarov met several fellow deportees, includlearn of its numerous otherworldly occupants. Some receive con- ing one who was given vague assurances by jail administration that ventional horror-movie treatment, working as a food server would allow Zamanbap art takes cues from Jerzy as when a cardboard fly attacks the him to remain in Russia. A later Grotowski’s poor theatre and Ramis scene, based on Aidarov’s storyboard woman to the sound of shrill synths, and the albarsty studies her in a pov Ryskuylov’s tricksterish approach to poetry for an unrealised animated film, showed his exchange with a man in shot. But when the family gathers and art. One member says, “you can’t Bishkek (both played by cardboard to watch television, the vibe is positively banal. Even the woman looks draw a line between sitting, being together kalpak-wearing Zoidbergs). The man on with a neutral expression! In our asked for money, but Aidarov had and making a performance” conversation, Raiymkulov suggested none to give, so he imagined setting that the “albarsty is also a mask: we don’t know what’s behind the fire to the Bishkek White House – just as people did in the 2010 revolumask, but what’s interesting is how we interpret the mask”. A threat- tion to force the resignation of corrupt president Kurmanbek Bakiyev. ening force, seen through another interpretive lens, may be someExtending the ‘kitchen exhibition’ of Winter Theatre, Uncle thing we can or must learn to live with.

Fantomas made the entirety of 19 Zapadnaya Street a living archive Uncle Fantomas (2024) marked the latest transformation of 19 and museum, where Aidarov’s finished and unmade works, as well Zapadnaya Street. For this live event, a collaboration with Grace as his written anecdotes and ruminations, could take a turn on Rogerson and Jasmin Schädler for theatre-club mesto d’s site- Zamanbap art’s capacious stage. His life and practice were the specific festival Place–Action, Raiymkulov guided audience members atmosphere of the event, and the artist himself – still in the midst through the two gates, along the wall, into the garden and finally of rehabilitation – was also very much present. Aidarov, pumping the house – often stopping to perform chapters of Aidarov’s biog- a fist to Raiymkulov’s rap. Aidarov, sharing knowing looks with his raphy. The cutout heads propped above the second gate, for example, old friend. Aidarov, opening the second gate to confront the spectres voiced racist statements made by Aidarov’s landlords when he lived of landlords past and welcome us into his home. ara in Moscow from 2016 to 2021 as a migrant worker. In the period between his return to Bishkek and his stroke the following year, Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer and teacher based in New York he created paintings and drawings that satirised a certain type of Interpretation from Kyrgyz and Russian provided by Malika Umarova

Albarsty Classic (still), 2024, hd video, colour, sound all images Courtesy the artists

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Art is boundless

Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre March 28–30, 2025

Miao Ying, Technomancy at Polarized Rift (detail), 2023. Courtesy of Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder and Kiang Malingue

powering the world of art

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dancing with all: The Ecology of Empathy 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa 2 November – 16 March There’s a moment, midway through this exhibition, when you’re looking at a video of a male eight-eyed Maratus jumping spider, so colourful it looks like it was designed by an artist, performing a dance designed to attract a mate.

Against a stark white backdrop, it makes it seem that it is always and already in a gallery, like a work of art, a performance piece. You’re standing on a plate that conveys the vibrations triggered by the creature’s throbbing abdomen. In real life you’d never feel it because the spider is around 4mm big. The whole thing is designed to attract the female spider – who appears on a second screen, egging the male on. The work, On the Origins of Art i–ii (2016), is credited to Sydney-based Colombian Maria

Fernanda Cardoso. Not the spider (which is also native to Australia). But it sets up a tension between what’s ‘real’ and what’s artifice, or where one stops and the other begins, that is productively toyed with throughout this group exhibition featuring works by over 20 artists or groups from around the world, which incorporates works that deploy organic materials, digital tools, re- and upcycling projects, traditional ink techniques, fabric works and scientific collaborations.

Aki Inomata’s How to Carve a Sculpture (2018–) is a collection of wooden beams offered to beavers living in five zoos that were subsequently gnawed into shapes that resemble Giacometti- or Enkū-style sculptures. The

Maria Fernanda Cardoso, On the Origins of Art i–ii, 2016. © and courtesy the artist

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beams were then copied and enlarged to human scale (by humans). The final display is a mix of human and beaver versions.

Each one of the latter is labelled with the species of beaver that carved it, their name, zoo and the date of the work.

Adrián Villar Rojas’s colossal sculpture The End of the Imagination i (2022) looks like some dirty, industrial winged demon, reminiscent of the protagonist of Richard Stanley’s cult horror-film Hardware (1990), a military robot that self-assembles out of junk. Villar Rojas’s version is assembled by humans, machines and an ai that (using a virtual rendition of the sculpture) simulates the effects of time on social and environmental

situations over thousands of years, out of concrete, soil, bits of glass, automobile parts and recycled plastics. The idea seems to be that the software has guided the ultimate form that this collection of materials has taken. That it has evolved as much as it has been made (and in that sense is animate).

It generally has the look of something emerging, unbidden, from a landfill site.

Above it, on the ceiling, is an enlarged reproduction of Piero della Francesca’s painting Madonna del Parto (1450–75), which was, presumably, another inspiration for the work: it’s unclear if the sculpture is what the pregnant virgin has given birth to; whether we’re supposed to be looking at two radically different ideals of beauty; or if we’re collectively looking at an evolution of aesthetic ideals. But in terms of the show itself, it expands the discussion of nonhuman intelligence and the related

ones about authorship (and the idea that any ‘authorship’ can be individual in an absolute sense), as well as the notion that any idea can be ‘new’ or not influenced conceptually or materially by that which came before (the nothing-comes-from-nothing argument).

While forcefully framing such discussions within the rubric of ecological Armageddon.

It’s fitting then, for all those reasons, that some of the works on show come as much from the world of science as they do from that of art. pnat, an independent company associated with the University of Florence working in the field of collaborations between artificial and natural environments, has a micro-greenhouse full tropical plants that acts as an air purification system (Fabbrica dell’Aria, 2023), presumably being developed for use in domestic dwellings.

Just as it is fitting that there is space (a room, in fact) for paintings and drawings

by Indigenous peoples from the Amazon, the Pacific Northwest and Africa that reflects the necessary interlinkage of human and nonhuman ecosystems in any holistic view of what it takes to create and sustain life.

Though this does leave you wondering why the focus has to be on Indigenous art from overseas, rather than on some of the Indigenous philosophies (say, of the Ainu people) of Japan, where various types of shamanism (akin to that captured in the work of Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami, which features here, for example) and similarly holistic outlooks on the world play an equally important role. Then again you could argue that what the internationalism of this exhibition demonstrates is the fact that climate change and ecological destruction represent a planetwide emergency. And any response needs to be interspecies and interdisciplinary in scope. Mark Rappolt

pnat, Fabbrica dell’Aria, 2023.

Photo: Takumi Ota

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Boom Boom Bang: Play & Parody in 1990s k.l.

Ilham Gallery, Kuala Lumpur 13 October – 9 March Few words can characterise Malaysia’s roaring 1990s better than the onomatopoeic ‘boom’ and ‘bang’. It was a decade of moneymaking, of investing and expanding. The nation’s capital housed the tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Towers, and Malaysia was swiftly transformed into an industrialised country. But such enthusiasm, along with the spending spree, was halted in its tracks by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which started a chain of events that led to the establishment of the opposition Reformasi political movement (which demanded the resignation of the then prime minister, as well as for more general social equality and justice). It was a time in which an extremely fertile urban counterculture movement was born.

This group exhibition, on show in Kuala Lumpur’s central business district, features 20 artists and collectives who were working at the time, and includes sculptures, installations, textile works, paintings, prints, videos and archival materials such as music tapes and zines from the decade. A 1998 documentary about artists and writers living in Kuala Lumpur during the late 1990s, by Berlin-based filmmakers Zakiah Omar and Hanno Baethe, from which Boom Boom Bang takes its name, plays in a screening room within the exhibition. The film features performing artists and writers who reflect candidly about the money-first approach of the era (“What if we don’t care about becoming rich?” asks one of the interviewees). The film, rarely viewable, is reason enough to visit the exhibition, but there is plenty on display that brings us back to what the country was going through during those fast-paced years, and highlights the irony and inventiveness of those who begged to differ from a government narrative that promoted industrialisation above everything else.

The exhibition opens with a red-carpeted corridor where one is greeted by the installation Pasti Boleh / Sure Can One (1997), by Liew

Kung Yu, which pokes fun at governmental ambitions to become one of the ‘Asian Tigers’ (as the ‘miracle economies’ of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan were described from the 1960s to the 90s). Five encased sculptures collage together photography and bright plastics to create gaudy, angular maquettes that superimpose elements of some of the most iconic development projects of the time, from the Petronas Towers and golf courses to the Kuala Lumpur Tower (completed in 1994), which the artist decomposes to the point of near-abstraction.

The plexiglass boxes, wrapped up in fancy ribbons like improbably kitsch presents, line both sides of a red carpet leading to a larger sculpture. This flattened figure looks like a mechanical monster in high heels, holding a replica of the Petronas Towers in its right hand. Its body is a collage of countless small parts of plastic scraps, toys and pictures of national and international logos and symbols of consumer culture, from McDonald’s to Mickey Mouse, all ringed in garish multicoloured lights – pointing to the cultural displacement felt as the country was flooded with globalised commodities and corporate signs.

Also on show are some remarkable early printworks by Yee I-Lann, from her series Apathy (1997). Having returned to Malaysia after studying in Australia and Europe, she was learning to navigate Kuala Lumpur just as it was undergoing dramatic political upheavals. These four large varnish-coated paper prints are superimpositions of disjointed words and images that transmit a sense of disillusionment and doubt. ‘If somehow someone managed t o clear the sm g, I may possib ly be booted (as a first born, a dusty thinker, a v ictim of hire purc hase and t elemarketing) into a motivated sense of responsibility and get off my couch,’ reads Boot, the letters appearing over a transparency of an enlarged combat boot.

facing page, top Zakiah Omar & Hanna Baethe, Boom Boom Bang (still), 1998, single-channel video, 53 min.

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As the exhibition’s subtitle implies, play and parody were useful modes of response for many artists working in Malaysia during this decade, epitomised by a number of hilarious videos made by the performance ensemble Instant Café Theatre Company.

Those that feature actor, director, writer and activist Jo Kukathas, known for her theatrical impersonations, remain very powerful to this day, thanks to her sharp comedic abilities.

There are videos of her character the imaginary Judge Mental Singh Gall: a fierce satire of the trial of then deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, who had been accused by the prime minister of sodomy (outlawed in the country) and taken to prison. In YBeeee (2013), Kukathas plays a fictional government figure who is at the same time the minister of misinformation and the minister of breaking records.

The comparison with today is not always flattering; although Malaysia allows peaceful demonstrations, human-rights groups regularly denounce the ways in which the officials treat organisers and allow details relating to their identity to be shared. Throughout the time of the Reformasi movement, activists and artists were emboldened by the wide popular support they enjoyed, which ushered in a period of relatively open artistic expression.

What the exhibition makes clear is that work with such sharp mocking of those in power might not be possible to produce, or be so direct, now. Among the most interesting artefacts on show are a collection of zines that were produced during the movement, photos and recordings from underground concerts, and printed documents from the Artis Pro Activ group, whose acronym plays on the Malay word apa, which means ‘what’. Their symbol, a black question mark on a yellow circle surrounded by a black frame, is still occasionally seen at pro-democracy demonstrations.

Ilaria Maria Sala

facing page, bottom Yee I-Lann, Gun from the series Apathy, 1997/2024, inkjet on glossy paper, 109 × 109 cm.

Courtesy the artist

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In Absence, Presence Nguyen Art Foundation, Ho Chi Minh City September – January Nguyê˜n Thuý Hă`ng’s The Warriors (2011–15) comprises a series of statues, each of which is wrapped in either muslin or paper, huddled together on the ground or hung upside down from the ceiling. Their forms evoke oversize humans but could equally refer to giant birds or bats. Often used as a shroud in funerary rites in Vietnam, the muslin here is not pristine but wrinkled, like mature skin. These sculptures are meant to deteriorate with time. The exhibition handout tells visitors that the work commemorates the experience of the artist’s family, who were forced to flee to Thailand during the 1930s during the Franco-Vietnam War, and, more widely, people who have been displaced or exiled.

Nguyê˜n is one of four female artists whose work is on show in this exhibition, which showcases both emerging and more established artists whose sensory investigations of material encourage audiences to engage with their own emotions. Born between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, these artists work in sculpture,

painting and video. The works are split across Nguyen Art Foundation’s two exhibition spaces, which are housed at different locations of the emasi international school. At the Nam Long site, Nguyê˜n’s work can be found alongside ceramic sculptures by Linh San, who also grapples with personal loss through objects that resemble stacked, folded, rolled or crumpled a4 sheets of paper (nights, 2022).

Scattered across the dimly lit room on low pedestals, these works require viewers to bend down to observe them more intimately.

The fragility of the forms speak of the effort and tenderness it took to create them.

Over at the school’s Van Phuc campus, material experimentations take a dreamier, lighter turn. Oanh Phi Phi updates the traditional medium of Vietnamese lacquer in Palimpsest (2011–), an ongoing series for which she paints lacquer resin onto glass plates and then inserts the plates into self-made magic lanterns attached to standing poles. The resulting images, which range from colour

Linh San, Embracement #1: This wrist, that wrist, 2022 (installation view, In Absence, Presence, 2024).

Courtesy Nguyen Art Foundation, Ho Chi Minh City

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wheels to abstract shapes, are projected onto a screen; as they overlap, they turn into impressionistic washes of colour. Typical perceptions about the dark and rich material are altered: lacquer here takes on an ethereal quality.

In the same space, Lêna Bùi’s multimedia installations create a mysterious, oneiric world. There are handwoven wool carpets depicting human chakra maps (Cosmos no.1 & 2, both 2021) and double-layered watercolouron-silk paintings of semiabstract shapes that recall entangled roots or water ripples (Tidal no.7, 2024). As viewers contemplate these forms while walking barefoot (as per the artist’s instruction), a mix of cosmic sounds from the video Light (2024), such as solar flare frequencies and Earth whistlers, take them deeper into Bùi’s magical world. This is an exhibition that not only highlights diverse material choices and visual inspirations, but also reveals how intimate, immersive experiences can activate a range of emotional states, from pathos to dreaminess. Hung Duong

Jong Oh Goosewing Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, Los Angeles 5 January – 8 February Jong Oh’s solo exhibition Goosewing is a presentation of ten intimately sized sculptures rendered in the artist’s signature style: fine lines and pared-down volumes that manage to be conspicuously precise without appearing rigid. Oh’s work, made of everyday materials such as wood, fishing wire, string and marbles, calls to mind that of the avant-garde modernist movement Mono-ha, whose members in Japan and Korea explored the properties of such everyday materials during the 1960s.

Yet, while the conceptual gestures of Mono-ha were grand and voluminous in scale, Oh’s spatial orchestration is softer, more contemplative and less raw. He seems to relish the sort of lyrical manipulation of space that elevates the lowkey, underappreciated line to an esteemed leitmotif.

Here, Oh’s delicate sculptures shift between visibility and camouflage. There are three acrylic-pipe-and-led sculptures titled Light Drawing (all works 2024), but they hang from above and are relatively out of sight.

These fixtures can be mistaken for standard and parabolic shaped fluorescent tubes, emitting a rather clinical luminescence unceremoniously absorbed by the existing lighting system of the gallery. Meanwhile, three roughly a4-paper-size Folding Drawing works, consisting of white-painted wood panels in varying shapes ornamented by articulated wire and placed against the crisp white walls of the gallery, create a relieflike optical effect that engages the architecture and viewer in a kind of scintillating, almost choreographed, shadow play. The architecture of these ‘drawings’ is laid bare while being cunningly elusive, standing both at odds and in sync with the rest of Los Angeles, a city that operates under the auspices of sensorial cacophony and impermanence.

Oh’s constellation of sculptures does not overwhelm. Even in their strict concern with topology, the works feel simultaneously unremarkable and poetic. While the materials are rudimentary – as admitted in the press release –

the artist somehow manages to capture an expressive poise in the works that begs one to look beyond facile sensation. Despite or even due to Oh’s reduction of sculpture to its essentials (volume and form) without much, if any, radical preamble, the objects come across as self-contained, yet assimilable to grander minimalist narratives. At times, Oh veers too close to conventional ornamentation for his own good. And that’s perhaps because works like Line Sculpture (marble with bead) #1, composed of angular dark-brown wood, wire, bead and marble, do not sufficiently respond to the (im)possibilities of minimalism as a genre.

One might extend the grace of reading Oh’s standard material treatment vis-à-vis a conceptual artist’s interest in seriality, though even this affordance hangs in delicate balance against the works’ flat affect. Given this, the tensions in Oh’s pieces function kind of like an improperly resolved chord progression that makes a listener, however misguided, yearn for more. Mark Pieterson

Light Drawing #8, 2024, acrylic pipe, led light, electrical wire, monofilament, 37 × 19 × 1 cm.

Courtesy Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, Los Angele

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Gaia Should Be Safe maca Art Center, Beijing 3 November – 23 February To Mao Zedong – a revolutionary leader known for his love of swimming – the Yangtze River was ‘the best natural swimming pool’.

In 1956, when he went to inspect the construction of the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, among the first things he did was swim the width of the Yangtze, thrice, totalling a distance of over 28 km. This demonstration of physical prowess apparently melds with his pride in China’s long-awaited industrial accomplishment in a line from his poem ‘Prelude to the Water Melody: Swimming’ (1956), written shortly after the feat: ‘The mountain goddess should be safe (under the industrial work) / (she) will marvel at a world so changed’.

The verse inspires the Chinese title of Gaia Should Be Safe, the finale to maca Art Center’s exhibition trilogy Who Owns Nature. (The first two, Multispecies Clouds in 2022–23, and the Primo Levi-inspired Elemental Constellations

in 2023–24, negotiated the topic through nature’s biosphere and chemistry respectively.)

Gathering the work of 11 artists, this iteration looks at the surface of Earth and how it is being terraformed to become our habitat. The show’s English title references the Greek goddess of Earth and attempts to tap into a buzzword of today’s international art scene, which frequently quotes James Lovelock’s Gaia theory to posit the Earth as responsive and sentient, rather than passive and compliant.

Much of the show itself deals with how the movement of economic and technological progress leaves material residues. Consisting of sculptures, found items and archival materials, Femke Herregraven’s installation Malleable Regress (2016) centres on four slabs of old rubber, the kind used in the early twentieth century to insulate the British Empire’s undersea telegraph network. (Today, that

Sonia Levy, Creatures of the Lines (still), 2024, single-channel 4k video, colour, stereo sound, 17 min 14 sec. Courtesy the artist

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network still forms the basis of high-frequency trading lines that shape the locations of financial centres.) Bearing the inscription tjipetir, the name of a West Java plantation where they were produced, these ‘mysterious’ slabs beached on the uk’s and Europe’s Atlantic coastlines and were found by baffled local mudlarks. Their strangeness to European eyes contrasts with a series of archival photographs on the wall, showing Java workers in rubber woods or factories, in tropical lands that were exploited and made invisible.

Elsewhere, Sonia Levy’s video Creatures of the Lines (2024) shows underwater scenes of British canals alongside views of industrial loading docks. As cranes lift cargoes, underwater we see plastic waste layered on the riverbed and hear the sound of water and the clamour of metal; molluscs cling to concrete blocks and seaweed grows through shopping carts.

It’s a disconcerting vision of the other side of the landscape we created and buried out of sight. Despite the scattered geological spread of the works on view, taken sequentially they thread together a dialogue in which Empire, materials and ecological repercussions are all tied in the same web of cause and effect.

Other work takes a historical approach and reveals how the terraforming of lands often served political ends. Jonas Staal’s Empire’s Island (2023) is a four-part video essay that traces how the landscape has changed on Ascension Island. A volcanic island populated by less than 30 kinds of plant and no land mammals, to its European settlers it was terra nullius par excellence. To Staal, its landscape was shaped to perpetuate domination – first by Great Britain, then the United States – which altered its ecology, then turned it into a telegraph transit station (part of the same network protected by Herregraven’s rubber slabs) and a base for global surveillance. It’s a reality that continues, Staal suggests, as Elon Musk’s SpaceX Mars-colonisation project looks to monopolise land and its future on a more

pervasive scale, modelling itself closely after Ascension’s history. As I write about the work in February, it doesn’t take much to also think of us President Donald Trump’s eagerness to make Gaza part of a real estate deal.

Given the Mao-referencing title, you might expect the show to steer closer to China’s own landscaping projects – not least its history of industrialisation, obsession with building railroads or the various ‘Great Green Walls’ now built to combat desertification and sandstorms – yet only one work on view explicitly references a Chinese project. Zhuang Hui’s Longitude 109.88 Latitude 31.09 (1995–2008) focuses on the Three Gorges Dam, whose construction, starting in the 1990s, led to the relocation of over a million people from areas that would be submerged by the rising waters. Included is a series of photographs and videos documenting the sites before and after the dam.

In each of the videos, a stable camera looks over the mountainous landscape, postconstruction, which appears inscrutably reticent, as if more unbothered by such human intervention than acquiescent – it’s an almost literal

response to Mao’s verses, while making us question ‘who’ the land actually is outside of its geological coordinates – after which the work is titled – or the industrialising purposes it serves. But like many works that deal with China’s sociopolitical pasts or present, all this is presented in an equivocal tone that might equally be one of criticism or glorification.

Despite its ecological undertone and avoidance of local politics, Gaia Should Be Safe gestures towards the forces responsible for transforming our contemporary landscape – how lands are conscripted to sustain domination and profits – and where we stand in these changes. This last idea is evoked in the magically simplistic metaphor of Julius von Bismarck’s video Talking to Thunder (2017) just outside the entrance to the show. Filmed in a jungle village in Venezuela, a country known for its frequent thunderstorms, the video records Bismarck firing copper coils into the sky, to which the sky responds with streaks of lightning. Formidable and sublime, its catastrophic force verges on being tamed.

Or is it vice versa? Yuwen Jiang

Julius von Bismarck, Talking to Thunder, 2017, single-channel video, colour, sound, 20 min 55 sec.

Courtesy the artist and Alexander Levy, Berlin

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The Utopia of Rules 72-13, Singapore 17–26 January Anyone who has ever dealt with banks, phone companies or government agencies can understand the unique circle of hell that is bureaucracy. According to the late anarchist thinker David Graeber, we now live in an ‘age of total bureaucratisation’, where labyrinthine systems have colonised modern life, stifled our imaginations and paralysed leftist politics, whose leaders cannot imagine a way to upend governments without putting in place another Kafkaesque nightmare. Graeber’s polemical 2015 book, The Utopia of Rules, provides the title for this engaging group exhibition that is loosely about how complex systems of management and hierarchical layers of control structure our daily lives; and how, within these constraints, individuals can nevertheless negotiate pockets of freedom for themselves.

Does bureaucracy have an aesthetic or a feeling? The show provides answers, some more obvious than others. The colour most associated with bureaucracy is grey, of course, as seen in Josh Kline’s installation of cardboard boxes filled with office paraphernalia such as ballpoint pens, tape dispensers, Nescafé sachets, over which grey paint is drizzled (Box s1 – s9, all 2008/25).

The installation paints a dreary but unsuprising vision of stale and airless office culture. Meanwhile, a sense of concealment and obfuscation associated with patronage is highlighted in Li Yong Xiang’s Parallel Support & Possess it in a Sleeve (2023), a folding screen with four painted panels, each depicting the long, flowing sleeves of togaclad figures. Their identities are ambiguous, because their faces are cropped out of the composition, but by their elaborate dress they appear to be figures of authority (a sense reinforced by the words ‘support’ and ‘possess’ in the title, which evoke a form of control or sponsorshiplike

backing). The figures also perform coded hand gestures – pointing fingers, extended palms – that vary in every panel, creating an atmosphere of power and secrecy.

A phenomenology of bureaucracy is suggested in Joaen’s cartoonish batik painting Overwhelmed – coping (2020), which at first glance has little to do with orderly systems. But it captures a feeling of barely contained desperation and anxiety. There is a sort of circuit in the work formed by a naked woman and a long snaking water hose, one end of which is spraying liquid into her mouth. The other end of the hose leads to a funnel, above which the woman is holding a bird in her hand. (The anti-risk adage ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’ comes to mind.) Outside of this hose-womanbird circuit, in the background are coffins and a flaming, disembodied head with deranged eyes. Soul-killing and terrible as this system is, it seems it still provides safety and staves off death and madness.

One of the exhibition’s propositions is that art is an exceptional space in which we can escape all-pervasive control from the administrative clutches of some regime, whether neoliberalism, the corporate economy or authoritarian governments (pick your favourite poison). Notably, art is a space for political views that might be dangerous to espouse on other platforms. In Wang Tuo’s three-channel video The Second Interrogation (2023), an artist and a government censor sent to monitor artists conduct a conversation about censorship, the revolutionary potential of art and the role of the artist in an authoritarian state, the artist taking on the role of interrogator. The work, which would have been impossible to show in China, has been shown in Hong Kong and Singapore before this exhibition.

Josh Kline, Box s1 – s9, 2008/25 (installation view).

Photo: Clarence Aw. Courtesy the artist

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Some artworks appropriate ‘official’ documents to create new and unpredictable affects.

Charles Lim’s videowork Alpha 3.9: Silent Clap of the Status Quo (2016) shows edited footage of a deep-sea communications cable laid outside Singapore, in which the camera pans slowly over the seemingly endless structure as it traverses the ocean floor. Filmed by the company that had laid the cable, as evidence of their completed work, the video was obtained by Lim through private connections. What is an impersonal business record is now recontextualised as a strange, chilling document of the invisible infrastructure on which our digital society is built, and the effect of the slow, bland perusal of this thick, secret vein that connects the world is akin to the slow reveal of a monster’s body in a horror flick.

In his book, Graeber outlines the difference between play and games. Games are rule-bound activities that require us to problem-solve; play is ‘open-ended creativity’. He concludes that ‘what ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is a fear of play’. But can you play within a bureaucracy? The show celebrates a type of modest freedom that can be found in negotiating rules and regulations innovatively, or by hacking the system. In Tisya Wong’s installation do {} while () (2025), a robot vacuum-cleaner spreads black charcoal dust around a square pen, creating beautiful and hypnotic patterns of swirls and lines. The artist reprogrammed the robot, disabling the hoovering function but not the movement of the revolving side brushes, which create and erase patterns continuously.

While this is not exactly spontaneous free play, given the mechanical and banal task that the machine is locked into, it has been allowed to misbehave, so that within the drudgery there is space for beauty. Adeline Chia

Tisya Wong, do {} while () (detail), 2025, Roomba, charcoal powder, paper, dimensions variable.

Photo: Clarence Aw. Courtesy the artist

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Tuan Andrew Nguyen Fight or Flight or Float or Fall Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City 24 December – 8 March To enter this exhibition, one must first pass through Pierced (all works 2024) – a single installation that features a series of painted bamboo curtains. Hung together, the strips of beaded bamboo nodes, coloured in a gradient of blues, form a shimmering surface that appears to oscillate between opacity and transparency.

As you push your way through, they clack, signalling and surrendering to your movement.

This work serves as an apt introduction to an exhibition that interrogates how material memory, etched on salvaged war remnants (including artillery shells and repurposed metal), both accumulates and disintegrates over time as the materials wear, erode and are continuously reshaped into new forms. Pierced is one of a series of works that use bamboo curtains as canvases for painting, including Bang, Frontier, Tear, Touch and Twirl. Four of these works are mounted against two walls, while Twirl – a cylindrical curtain – is suspended midair. Hanging from the ceiling, it spins in a precisely timed, ceaseless, motor-driven rhythm.

Some curtains part symmetrically like conventional drapes, cleaving an image down the middle, while others are drawn aside unevenly, distorting figures and landscapes into fragmented recollections. In Frontier, three layers of bamboo curtains simultaneously conceal and reveal one another, displaying superimposed portraits of astronauts: the Soviet Union’s Yuri

Gagarin, who became the first human in space in 1961; Alan Shepard, the first American to follow; and Pha. m Tuân, the first Vietnamese and Asian in space, in 1980. The layering of these figures collapses the historical timeline of space exploration and the intellectual space of opposing political ideologies. At the same time, it reminds us of the phrase the ‘bamboo curtain’, a term once used to define the political divide between communist countries in East and Southeast Asia – such as China, North Korea and North Vietnam – and the capitalist states of the rest of the region. The remaining works in this series, by the same token, are presented in varying formats, each offering a fractured portrayal of historical figures and spectacles: nuclear detonations, drawn from both actual historical events and imagination; fleeting visions of wildlife and ecological ruin; portraits of the invisible hands that forge history.

Artillery shells and old weapons provide the materials for the rest of the works on show.

The items were excavated from Quả ng Tri., the most heavily bombed region in the country during the Vietnam War and one that still contains its highest concentration of unexploded ordnance. Nguyen reconfigures these historical materials into various delicate hanging mobiles, echoing the informal networks of scavenging and recycling that sustain communities in the aftermath of war. A series of

Pierced (detail), 2024, bamboo, enamel paint, metal wire, steel, wood, 196 × 363 × 183 cm.

Courtesy the artist

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sculptures, Hover, Bird In Space and Time, crafted

by Nguyen and his collaborators from pounded brass and artillery shells, feature large, stylised dragonflies suspended by the tips of their heads on a totemic structure, as if oscillating between poised stillness and imminent takeoff.

In the same vein, in the hanging mobiles 57mm #4 – Untitled and 57mm #1 – Untitled, 57mm artillery shell-casings are transformed into percussive instruments. Scarred and weathered by time, the patina of oxidation reflects a form of resistance against historical erasure. As history lingers in these repurposed relics, these instruments not only memorialise but also create countermemories within these discarded vestiges of war. When gently struck with a wooden mallet, these sculptures emit low, gonglike tones – resonant yet restrained, lingering briefly before fading into the surrounding space. Unlike the deafening blasts of war that once defined these materials, their sound is now recalibrated, carrying a placid, meditative quality. The reverberation remains clear, yet it is now softened, as if the oxidised brass is fatigued by its own history, offering a sound that is disarmed, almost hesitant – neither fully present nor entirely absent. The echoes of gunfire from the past – once dividing nations and redrawing maps – are now tamed, reincarnated – into something through which to contemplate, heal and reconcile. Sơ n Nguyễn Lê Vinh

On Kawara Early Works David Zwirner, Paris 23 November – 25 January Early Works, an exhibition of four figurative paintings by On Kawara dating from 1955–56, is a surprise given these works’ relative underexposure, their stark difference from the Japanese artist’s better-known practice and their outright strangeness. Irregularly shaped canvases that woozily bend and distort the classical rectangle, they are strikingly expressive in contrast to the sombre conceptual ‘date paintings’ that Kawara began a decade later (another exhibition, Date Paintings, is simultaneously on display at David Zwirner’s London gallery and co-organised by the artist’s One Million Years Foundation). Early Works details a period relatively undocumented in the artist’s life; little would one guess that they were executed by a twentysomething On Kawara in Tokyo. In a thick-lined, cartoonish, almost illustrative style, the canvases allude to psychological trauma and disorder, capsuling the zeitgeist of postwar Japan. They offer a portal to a world that Kawara would soon leave behind – during the late 1950s, he moved first to Mexico and later New York – and they’ve rarely been shown, much less studied. Given that Kawara actively oversaw the dissemination of his work while alive, one is left to speculate

if he himself blocked the showing of his early works until after his death.

In Early Works, Kawara’s wonky supports work in the service of apparent content, delivering a claustrophobic, hemming effect, reinforced by his use of tilted planes and eerie, mysterious subjects. Hard to interpret at first, Flood (1955) – inspired, documentation asserts, by the Kyushu flood of June 1953 – suggests a collapsing darkgreen thatched roof, swarmed by ants and replete with blue-black crisscrossing twiglike forms. Invertebrates also dominate Golden Home (1956), climbing the legs and feet of a goldenhued table and stool on which sits a pile of gift-wrapped packages, and squirming over an overturned, fallen pot. Both canvases use dense patterning combined with perspectival disorientation to harness a sense of invasion and malaise.

Kawara would go on to make nearly 3,000 ‘date paintings’, each attesting to moments in history and the inexorable passage of time.

These concerns seem preempted by these early works, which share a sense of oblique signalling as well as a painting’s ability to convey hidden information. Untitled (1956) shows bloodred

and pink segmented worms inching across a table dressed in a pristine white tablecloth, attacking two plates devoid of food. Almost a still life, the composition is structured by the worms’ writhing forms, counterbalanced by the black abyss at the painting’s left edge.

Absentees (1956), meanwhile, features another unruly, teeming crowd: figures rioting in a jail cell. The appearance of their strong arms and fists, emerging from a mass of red shirts, through the grey textured walls and barred openings, screams rage in a raw gesture of nonconformity.

Though Kawara was reluctant to apply political meanings to his work, these artworks feel like social protest. And, indeed, in 1956 he stated, “I did not share the nostalgia that middleaged cohorts had for the past. Instead, I was filled with a desperate desire to tear things apart.” True to that intent, these dreamlike Early Works translate the strange and ominous effects of history and temporal change into something immediately palpable: a trait that would carry over, in a far more elusive and less expressive manner, to Kawara’s signature works.

Jennifer Teets

Untitled, 1956, acrylic on canvas, 101 × 131 × 3 cm. © One Million Years Foundation.

Courtesy One Million Years Foundation and David Zwirner, Paris

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7th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival Nowhere Somewhere One Bangkok Forum 25 January – 2 February In February 1999, the avant-garde American filmmaker Bruce Baillie sent a letter encouraging a promising film graduate named Apichatpong Weerasethakul to persevere.

‘We must steer the young Asian film/video artists away from the commercial gloss, the superficial images, attitudes, aspirations,’ he wrote. Then, in December that same year, an op-ed suggesting this battle was being lost appeared in the catalogue for the 2nd Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (which included a retrospective of Baillie’s work). ‘The point is that only a few students know the importance of experimental films,’ Panu Aree, a Thai film producer and lecturer, lamented.

Found in an archive arranged on freestanding scaffolding located in a corner of a foyer (that also contains a merchandise market and bookstore), Baillie’s call to arms and Aree’s

pessimism struck me, on day one of the 7th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (beff7), as small reminders of what Weerasethakul and his fellow Art Institute of Chicago alumni, curator Gridthiya Gaweewong, were reacting against and trying to achieve when they cofounded beff in 1997.

The nine schedule-packed days of beff7 that ensued were maximalist proof of how far things have come. With installations, workshops and live performances conceived by Thai filmmakers buttressing the screening of over 120 films, this edition (the first after a 13-year hiatus) felt less like an attempt to proselytise for aesthetic revolt within the cosmopolitan Thai context (as early editions did through the curating of esoteric European and American canons) than it did a collective display of might. Or to appropriate this edition’s tagline,

Nottapon Boonprakob, Echoes of the Beating Drums, 2025 (performance view).

Photo: Napat Unnanan. Courtesy beff7, Bangkok

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a celebration of a film scene’s figurative journey from ‘nowhere to somewhere’ – a journey that has now led beff to the coalface of expanded cinema, beyond the formal confines of the camera’s frame.

During documentary-maker Nottapon Boonprakob’s performance piece Echoes of the Beating Drum (2025), for example, an audience gathered in one of beff7’s three theatres and watched themselves being observed by cctv cameras while a live conversation, ongoing behind them, unfolded between Boonprakob and Maitree Chamroensuksakul, a member of Thailand’s Lahu hill tribe minority. This mediated point of view framed the discussion cum memorialisation of the life of Lahu activist Chaiyaphum Pasae, who was shot dead at a military checkpoint in 2017 (after which the cctv footage capturing the killing went

missing), prompting viewers to question the real version of events. beff7’s spectrum of audiovisual experimentation and theatrical scenography also stretched into the realm of vr, thanks to the sold-out Bangkok debut of Weerasethakul’s A Conversation with the Sun (2022). Inside the event hall hosting it, the experience – sweeping us through the bowels of a cave, triggering an atavistic fear of deep time and impermanence – entailed walking in a room alongside other participants, that ended, after headsets had been removed, with everyone lying down in front of footage of people slumbering. The implication being that the phenomenological intensity of the experience would lead us to follow suit.

Back in the screening theatres, programmes pulling in film and video art practices from many directions – some selected by curators involved in past beffs, including David Teh, May Adadol Ingawanij and George Clark – were joined by those who sought to historicise experimental film’s evolution in Thailand.

One highlight in this regard was the Thai Film

Archive’s retrospective of female filmmaker Sasithorn Ariyavicha, whose 70-minute Birth of the Seanéma (2004) – a majestic procession of silent black-and-white imagery centred on a mythic city – still lingers in the memory.

Another programme, ‘Memorialising beff’, comprising films from early editions selected

by Weerasethakul and Gaweewong, gave a sense of the transnational cinephilia their studies in the us sparked.

The challenges of the country’s sociopolitical conditions and film industry came up in one talk. But struggle was a mere subplot: a sense of kinship and mutual appreciation shone through in the conversations and collaborations.

For me, this atmosphere of community cohesion, of a big family coming together, reached a visceral level. Nearby the talk space was an open-plan twilight zone where three screens stood amid tie-dyed cushions and islands of scaffolding, some fitted with beds and amber lights that slowly rose and fell above them.

A couple of one-off events were staged in this cavelike space (including on the opening

night, when archive images played as Tilda Swinton briefly reprised her womanpretending-to-nap live performance in one of the beds, then awoke for a conversation with Weerasethakul). But for the remainder of beff7, cosmorama (2025) – a suite of five new moving-image commissions curated by Mary Pansanga – looped on the three screens as people explored, lounged or dozed. This installation was, on one level, an immersive showcase of emerging, mostly Thai talent.

But with the score for Weerasethakul’s A Conversation… (composed by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto) bleeding into this space, gifting a soundtrack of twinkling and buzzing atmospheres to the short films, cosmorama also felt like a spatialisation of a sphere of influence, or spiritual bloodline, that stretches back to the late 1990s. The lifeforce of Thailand’s arthouse lodestar is still seeping into the collective subconscious, still steering young artists away from the commercial gloss, still encouraging them to dream, and dream big.

Max Crosbie-Jones

cosmorama, 2025 (installation view).

Photo: Harit Srikhao.

Courtesy beff7, Bangkok

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11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 30 November – 27 April Asia Pacific Triennial (apt) is a capacious and labyrinthine exhibition, encompassing 500 artworks by 70 artists and collectives. Now in its 11th iteration, the exhibition’s greatest strength is its continued avoidance of an overarching theme or premise. Or to put it another way, the region – broadly described in the exhibition publication as the ‘interwoven cultural landscapes of Australia, Asia and the Pacific’ – is the theme: its geography, histories, politics and crises, and the breadth and vibrancy of its art practices. And although apt is spearheaded by Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art’s Asia and Pacific Art team, the triennial also draws on an extensive network of curators, advisers and interlocutors from across the region, allowing the way the area is being framed and defined to feel more collaborative and dispersed.

As with previous editions, First Nations perspectives, and the significance of communal modes of making to these communities, is a key anchoring point. Kuku Yalanji/Kalkadoon artist Kim Ah Sam’s ten hanging sculptures from the series Woven identity: ‘it’s not only me’ (2024) speak to the hills, tracks, rivers and ecology of Kalkadoon Country (Mount Isa region, Queensland) and the arteries and veins of the human body. Each sculpture’s central conic shape alludes to the termite mounds found in this region, around which Kim has woven an array of whirling patterns in natural and dyed raffia and twine, from teal and navyblue to orange and pink. Fringed with the dusky-brown feathers of an emu, the pieces also reference the traditional emu footprints of Battle Mountain (boundary markers painted or carved into trees and rocks), a place now memorialised as an 1884 massacre site. Kim’s abstract shapes are the result of her open-ended approach to weaving – beginning with no preconceived form – and it’s through this embodied and intuitive act of making that she is able to reconnect with Country.

For the women of Tu’anuku village in Vava‘u, the practice of weaving is linked to their role as custodians of Tonga’s largest freshwater

ecosystem. Here, the Lepamahanga Women’s Group, led by ‘Aunofo Havea Funaki, the first Tongan woman to become a licensed sea-captain, present a mammoth, wall-hung woven ceremonial mat titled Fala Kuta e Toa Ko Tavakefai‘ana (2024). Constructed out of fresh-water kuta reeds, the mat cascades down the gallery wall and extends into the middle of the space. Such largescale constructions are often made to honour the village’s relationship to Tonga’s royal family, and this piece includes a woven pattern referencing the tavake, a chiefly bird and symbol of the Fīnau ‘Ulukālala lineage – a dynasty that ruled Vava‘u from the early 1700s to 1960 and still has a direct connection to the country’s monarchy. As with Kim’s sculptures, the physical process of making is as significant as the completion and display of the piece: bringing together neighbours and friends within the community, the collective practice of weaving offers a crucial meeting point for the sharing of local stories and knowledge.

The recurring focus on materials is a reminder of how form and method are inextricably linked to meaning-making and storytelling. Sri Lankan artist Hema Shironi’s Erasing Flag (2019), for example, is a set of six versions of the country’s flag constructed out of stitched paper. Made a decade after the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983–2009), each iteration of the paper flag, whose colour represents the nation’s different cultures, becomes increasingly worn and disintegrated, so that in the final piece only the skeletal red thread remains – the quiet means of repair outlasting a symbol of nationalism so easily weaponised.

With Bombay Tilts Down (2022), Mumbaibased group camp repurposes surveillance technology to create a form of landscape cinema. This hypnotic seven-channel installation, co-commissioned by Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Nam June Paik Art Center, was filmed with a remote-controlled cctv camera fixed to the 35th floor of a building in South Central Mumbai, and accompanied by two alternating soundtracks filled with sirens,

facing page, top awa (Artists for Waiapu Action), He Uru Mānuka, He Uru Kānuka, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy the artists

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clanging percussion and the words of poets and balladeers. Six of the screens begin with a distant viewpoint of the sea, before gradually zooming in on the Parel and Worli neighbourhoods, fast-developing working-class areas of Mumbai. The camera tilts down, descending past apartment balconies to gardens, shelters and street corners, lingering on steel structures, blue tarpaulins or a glimpse of an animal walking across a roof. The additional seventh screen turns on and off in the corner of the room, displaying lyrics from the soundtrack.

What might seem like single-take shots are revealed to be complex mashups of multiple timelapses; at ground level, groups of people make eye contact with the camera, aware of its presence. Bombay Tilts Down is not only a narrative of the city, recording Mumbai’s evolving metropolis and its inhabitants, but also a sophisticated commentary on social status and authority, wealth and structural hierarchies, and how networks of power are built into the stratified architectural layers of the urban landscape.

It’s this sense of the local – how each artistic project is embedded in the context of its making, whether that be the community it belongs to, or the customary practices, ecology or social and political concerns that surround it – that gives apt11 its depth and immediacy.

This isn’t a zeitgeisty move in response to so-called identity politics, or the recent turn towards historical revisionism, but a multidecade endeavour: the desire, since apt’s inception in 1993, to wrest the conversation around contemporary art away from dominant Euro-American perspectives. (This remains a necessary move for settler-colonial Australia, given its history of looking to Western art ‘centres’ for guidance on what kinds of artistic practice should be deemed valuable or avantgarde or current.) apt11’s audience is instead plunged into an exhibition that represents a region that is multiple, heterogenous and polyvocal – one that allows for points of connection, while still appreciating and affirming difference. Naomi Riddle

facing page, bottom Brett Graham, Grande Folly Egmont, 2020 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist

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2024 Asian Art Biennial How to Hold Your Breath National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung 16 November – 2 March How to Hold Your Breath is curated by a team of five, led by Taiwanese curator Fang Yen Hsiang, and comprising Paris-based Anne Davidian, Filipino artist and researcher Merv Espina, Singapore-based Haeju Kim and Istanbul- and Paris-based Asli Seven. It forgoes overelaborate framing, choosing instead to introduce the work of 35 artists with sparse cues: the text in the handout references the longest voluntarilyheld breath, nods to a yoga breath-control technique used to achieve altered states of mind and cites the 1986 pop song Take My Breath Away.

One of the more compelling ideas within this remit is that holding one’s breath can be viewed as an act of both survival and resistance – as seen in Pak Sheung Chuen’s Breathing in a House (2006), located just inside the exhibition’s entrance. This six-minute video quietly documents the artist’s Kafkaesque attempt to fill

a tiny rented room with clear plastic bags inflated by his own breath. Meditating on the subtle moment between his inhales and exhales, and the absurdity of watching these breaths materialise in space, the work points to an existential struggle and serves as a more direct visual substitute for the curatorial introduction.

What later becomes apparent is that Pak’s work also behaves as the metaphorical deep breath visitors need to take before plunging into the ideologically dense and research-heavy works that follow.

Punctuating the exhibition are two artistcurated sections: the first, a presentation by Berlin- and Beruit-based Marwa Arsanios and South Taiwanese community-research collective Kuanntian Studio, features Arsanios’s series of wall-hung illustrations Resilient Seeds (2016), a visual inquiry into the ways in which plants

Nathalie Muchamad, Breadfruit, Mutiny and Planetarity, 2024 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and ntmofa, Taichung

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and animals survive in increasingly polluted environments in Beirut; alongside this, a wall pasted with printed documents chronicles local environmental events, in front of which a round table is installed and used by Kuanntian Studio to host forums and discussions with the aim of sharing local perspectives on global environmental issues. In the same gallery space visitors find Nathalie Muchamad’s Breadfruit, Mutiny and Planetarity (2024), which features handcrafted fabric banners affixed to freestanding wooden frames that explore the history and exploitation of the titular crop, linking Taiwan to Polynesia through Western colonial trade routes; meanwhile Noor Abed’s A Night We Held Between (2024), the third in a trilogy of films, featuring figures performing rituals in the Palestinian landscape accompanied by a soundtrack of the popular ballad Song for

the Fighters, plays nearby. The overall effect of the works in this section is one of communal solidarity, offering a reflection on how traditional knowledges might provide forms of resistance and resilience in an increasingly precarious world.

The second artist-curated section, conceived by us-based Armenian Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, explores alternative technofutures through the looming lens of ai via a series of academic books on display, which sets the context for her adjacent video, One Who Looks at the Cup (2024). Made in collaboration with film director and artist Atlas Acopian and musician and composer Lara Sarkissian, the work documents Hakopian’s machine learning algorithm trained on Armenian traditions of reading fortunes in coffee grounds. In this section, other high-tech conundrums abound: Yehwan Song’s (Whose) World (How) Wide Web (2024), a video installation made of screens attached to a cardboard structure forming a kind of theatre, features a giant Korean computer keyboard and browser windows

that shift between Korean and English language settings. The work hints at how the internet is an English-dominated environment and alludes to its colonisation of the digital realm. And in Cetus Kuo Chin-Yun’s nearly 90-minute video Because Watching Pacifies (2024), visitors are confronted with the history of two military dependents’ villages (set up by the Kuomintang for surveillance purposes). One is located in a mountainous region of Taiwan, and the other in the northern Thai borderlands. The story is narrated by a local Akha woman from the latter’s highlands, whose sister and neighbours were conscripted by Kuomintang guerrillas during the 1950s. Looking at how borders of modern nation-states are drawn and made impassable, the film finds its most compelling element in exploring the less-examined link between racial capitalism in Taiwan and Cold War displacement: throughout the video the Akha woman is increasingly concerned that her missing sister may have been caught up in an illegal Southeast Asian migrant workforce located in Taiwan’s mountains.

Just when you’re about to conclude that the thematic focus remains elusive, the closing section of the exhibition wraps up its theme in a more concrete way, evoking the sensations of breathing – and breath-holding – as a somatically releasing experience: Trư ơ ng Quế Chi and Nguyê˜n Phư ơ ng Linh’s kinetic installation Sourceless Waters: White. Shadows (2024) features a vibrating platform filled with over 70 basketballs, atop which a large sheet of white cloth rises and falls in a breathlike rhythm, the movements evoking a feeling that’s at once soothing and agitative. Saodat Ismailova’s three-channel video builds on her ongoing research into a walnut forest in Kyrgyzstan – which emits a high quantity of carbon dioxide capable of inducing hallucination (Arslanbob, 2024–). Here, sharing the same hallucinogenic air becomes an alternative way of dreaming and coexisting, gently guiding visitors out of the cerebrally dense works that make up the majority of the exhibition and firmly back into their bodies – just in time to take another gulp of air.

Zian Chen

Trư ơ ng Quế Chi & Nguyê˜n Phư ơ ng Linh, Sourceless Waters: White. Shadows, 2024 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and ntmofa, Taichung

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Books Hunchback

by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton Penguin, £10.99 (softcover) Early on in this novella, its central protagonist, Shaka, reflects on the day that divided her life into a ‘before and after’: ‘For twenty-nine years now, I have been residing in Nirvana. Ever since the day that my underdeveloped muscles had prevented my heart and lungs from maintaining a normal level of oxygen saturation, and I’d grown faint and passed out by the classroom window in my second year of middle school.

That makes it almost thirty years since I stopped walking outside, the soles of my shoes scraping along the pavement.’ Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka is confined to a care home outside Tokyo. She is now in her forties and moves around using a Yamaha wheelchair and a portable ventilator. Her mind, though, is always working overtime: she wants to write, have sex, have babies, decide not to have babies, make the best use of the money entrusted to her by her wealthy, now deceased, parents. And somewhere in the midst of all this lies the mind-body duality that is central to what will transpire.

Shaka writes erotic fiction on various internet portals and tweets on the subject of her physical limitations, sex and her social surroundings. She often keeps these savage, searingly funny tweets on hold, letting their bite recede,

in order to reevaluate their essence before deciding on whether or not to send them out into the world (anonymously). Her drafted tweets are deeply sad but also funny observations about her own life: ‘In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute,’ she writes.

On a day when her regular female caretaker is on leave, Shaka has to rely on Tanaka, a young male caretaker, in order to take a shower. During their limited exchange, Tanaka reveals that he has read all her tweets and even quotes one, verbatim, back to her. Not only does this shock Shaka but also opens an opportunity for her to engage with Tanaka beyond the superficial.

Shaka is intelligent, erudite and strongly opinionated, and Hunchback is a fierce, modernday novel that demands to be read and reread.

She criticises the publishing industry’s apathy towards people with disabilities. ‘Holding in both hands an open book three or four centimetres in thickness took a greater toll on my back than any other activity,’ she says. ‘Being able to see; being able to hold a book; being able to turn its pages; being able to maintain a reading posture; being able to go to a bookshop to buy a book – I loathed the exclusionary machismo of book culture that demanded

that its participants meet these five criteria of able-bodiedness.’ The book is equally filled with feminist ideas around reproductive rights, and the duties of the rich. Writing about the simple physical conveniences denied to someone with her condition, Shaka says: ‘I stopped being able to walk before they introduced automated ticket barriers, so I’ve only ever used the kind with a guy punching holes in your ticket.’ This shows the many ways in which the world around her has moved on while she cannot.

A sense of humour is evident throughout, even if it is hidden between the banal everyday descriptions of the care home in which Shaka lives and spends the majority of her days, or when making more serious points about the control of one’s own body and reproductive rights: ‘My ultimate dream’, Shaka tells us, ‘is to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman.’ Hunchback is visceral, catatonically funny and immensely effective.

Moreover, reading it made me think again about the world around me: the bookstores I shop at, the museums I visit, the film festivals I attend, and I think about how accessible they really are and about everything I take for granted.

Anandi Mishra

Strange Pictures

by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion Pushkin Vertigo, £14.99 (softcover) ‘You can find anything on the internet these days,’ says one character in Strange Pictures. It’s the unintended motto of this enjoyable, clumsy whodunnit, populated by Wikipedia-educated crime experts and computer-chair psychologists.

The shifting cast includes a student who is a member of his university’s paranormal club, a nursery teacher and a young newspaper administrator who aspires to be an investigative journalist. Each comes across a series of seemingly innocent drawings in which they find evidence of abuse and murder. The chapters at first appear unrelated but increasingly circle around a young boy and his relationship with the woman he calls ‘Mama’. What follows is a tutorial in amateur crime solving, as each narrator talks through

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their insights and hunches. Most pages are given over to the pictures, closeups of certain details in them, as well as needlessly explanatory graphs and diagrams.

Uketsu is a masked Japanese YouTuber who posts surreal, skewed parodies of explainer and unboxing videos, usually showcasing bizarre fictional products like toys made out of human teeth or fingernails. One 2020 post, about floorplans that suggested a house built for murder, led to a manga series and three bestselling novels, two of which – Strange Pictures will be followed by Strange Houses – are published in English this year. Given the sly, creepy tone of Uketsu’s videos, it’s possible that Strange Picture’s bumbling, overexplanatory narrators

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and clunky coincidences are really a send-up of both the mystery genre and online conspiracy nuts. But the book seems keen to validate the keyboard brigade: the one ‘expert’, actually trained in psychology, gets it all wrong; it’s the amateur sleuths, armed only with the internet and nothing better to do than poke around in other people’s lives, who solve the case.

The bigger culprit behind this mystery is the internet itself. Not just in how it shapes the structure of the book – the novel reading with the staccato rhythm and blithe condescension of how-to blogs – but also in the easy voyeurism and dubious expertise, hinting at how the internet makes nosey hack detectives of us all.

Chris Fite-Wassilak

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Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka

by Srikar Raghavan Context, Rs 899 (hardcover) As one of the most diverse states in India, Karnataka boasts linguistic and geographic variety, a long history of sociopolitical movements that struggle at the grassroots level and a progressive social history that birthed, to give the best-known example, the anti-caste Bhakti movement. However, within India’s present cultural and political narrative, my home state seems to hide in the wings. Save for industry news from the country’s it capital Bengaluru (also capital of the state), and electoral drama, most recently evidenced by its overwhelming rejection of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindutva politics in the 2023 state elections, it’s not often that news about Karnataka travels to the national level. Therefore, any book that aims to investigate Karnataka’s cultural present is of particular interest, especially because of the dearth of such works in English. However, Srikar Raghavan’s debut is far from being the ‘genrebending work of narrative non-fiction’ it claims to be. Disappointingly clumsy, lacking nuance and depth in its arguments, it is a haphazard collection of the top dozen issues that have affected life in Karnataka during the last century.

The title of the book comes from an eponymous boyhood game: a person with a ball in their hand hurls it at another person who tries to dodge it, and whoever ends up catching the ball then hurls it at someone else, and so on.

Raghavan connects this, rather unconvincingly, to Karnataka’s sociopolitical sphere, a world of opposites and contradictions, and into this weaves an account of growing up in a privileged,

upper-caste family and grappling with his political self in college. He blends literary history and reportage with interviews and personality sketches for the purpose of ‘thematic diversity rather than comprehensive detail’.

This profusion of themes begins with a long chapter on Marga versus Desi, categories in Indian art and aesthetics that, to put it very simplistically, distinguish between classical and folk, or the canonical and the regional.

Raghavan’s analyses of this debate goes from introducing the work of literary scholars like D.R. Nagaraj and M.M. Kalburgi to a baffling comparison of the films of Kannada language actor Dr. Rajkumar, considered a cultural icon, with those of Upendra, a contemporary actordirector whose works have been both critically acclaimed and panned for their unusual visual language. The following chapters look into the rise and fall of socialism in Karnataka, literary movements like the dalit-bandaya during the 1970s, conservation activism in the state’s Western Ghats, trade-union politics, a Marxist library in the city of Mysuru, communal issues in the town of Chikmagalur and in the novels of S.L. Bhyrappa, one of the most popular writers in the language with a rightwing political view, and the Naxal movement.

It is no doubt an interesting set of ideas, and Raghavan has clearly accumulated a vast bibliography and many interviews. But very early on in the book it feels like his research gets in the way; instead of aiding a deeper understanding of the topic he is writing about, it all

becomes either a list of who he has read, or a series of opinions he has borrowed from his interviewees rather than forming his own. While Raghavan seems somewhat more confident in chapters that foreground literature, there too his various takes lack any real personal engagement or an understanding of the Kannada language and Karnataka beyond the rarefied world of urban city centres. It becomes increasingly hard to take the author seriously when, for instance, he likens the writer Kumbara Veerabhadrappa (popularly called KumVee) to the Humvee. Or when he attends a talk by the leading playwright H.S. Shivaprakash speaking about the continued relevance of Kuvempu (who is to Kannada what Shakespeare is to English) and dismisses the former’s opinions as sentimentality brought on by old age, writing, ‘… the grand old man of Kannada theatre reminiscing about other older (and therefore grander) men’, without seeming to understand the contemporality of Kuvempu’s works. Or when he insists on calling the coastal Karnataka district ‘South Canara’ (a colonial term and regional demarcation that included parts that are now in Kerala) instead of Dakshina Kannada, the name of the present district with slightly different geographical boundaries.

Such questionable choices make it impossible to root for what had the potential to be an important scholarly work. Instead this is an account of predominantly male, mostly upper-caste contributions to Kannada literature, rather than a holistic understanding of the state and the many worlds it contains. Deepa Bhasthi

The National Gallery: Paintings, People, Portraits Edited by Anh Nguyen and Rebecca Marks Taschen, £175 (hardcover) There’s something both unsettling and appropriate about this massive, lavish tome published to mark the bicentenary of one of the great arks (the one beached in London) of ‘the Western European tradition’ of painting. The fact that it has the size and heft of a tombstone (it’s impossible to read without the support of a piece of furniture) might be appropriate given the recent death of the idea that a singular Western art history is all the art history there is, and yet those same qualities, of size and heft, speak equally to the continued dominance of that idea.

Here the gallery is figured (in the book’s preface) as ‘a guardian of human creativity, a beacon

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of inspiration and a sanctuary of beauty’, as if no other ideologies might frame the images of ‘the world’ it presents. Eighteen of a total of 581 pages later, we’re confronted with a double-page photograph on which a gallery sponsor’s name features as prominently as any of the paintings on its walls. That’s not to deny that the book is peppered with art historical essays that do make some attempt to contextualise what’s on show, but even that takes second place to a series of paragraphs by ‘Ambassadors’ offering short soundbites (next to their own full-page photographic portraits) on works they find memorable. The former include the gallery director,

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the chairman of its board of trustees, the architect overseeing the gallery’s refurbishment, prominent living British artists such as Rachel Whiteread and Chris Ofili, tastemakers such as Edward Enninful, actors such as Damian Lewis, as well as art dealers, collectors and fashionable darlings of the contemporary market such as Flora Yukhnovich. Plus two ordinary folk: a headteacher and a student. The book begins by stating that the National Gallery was founded on the idea of democratising art that was previously ‘inaccessible to all but a privileged few’.

That’s an ideal that this book, given its retail price, can hardly be said to match. Nirmala Devi

Our City, That Year

by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell Tilted Axis, £15.99 (softcover) Hanif is married to Shruti. Hanif is Muslim, Shruti is Hindu, as their names suggest. But this book is in part about how people cease to be human beings and become their religions.

Or, as the author puts it, ‘symbols of one agenda or another’. ‘Sometimes it was we who turned ourselves into Hindus and Muslims’, the narrator writes. ‘Sometimes it was you.’

Hanif and Shruti live in an unnamed Indian city that, during the course of this tale, is experiencing escalating tensions between followers of the two religions. The threat of violence looms large as the story, which is inspired by the real-life events, symptomatic of the nation’s rising Hindu nationalism, that led to the destruction of the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, in 1992, unfolds.

Hanif and Shruti rent an apartment from Dadu, who lives beneath them with Sharad, his son. Sharad is also Hanif’s colleague and best friend. Their relationship will be tested as the tale unfolds.

Hanif and Sharad are academics; Shruti is a writer. We are told at the beginning of the book that they, like most intellectuals, pride themselves on the clarity with which they see the world around them and the clarity with which they communicate that. But that they are now struggling to write anything because, in the current circumstance of populist

identitarian politics, words have become ‘utterly useless… empty like government slogans’.

It’s never clear if that’s because the bonds between words and meanings are too loose or too rigid. Indeed, much of the novel turns on the different ways in which the possessive pronoun of the title might be interpreted: ‘Children used to play hide and seek,’ we are told early on, ‘and now they play Hindus and Muslims.’ Does that ‘our’ split similarly? Or does it reference the trio at the centre of the tale? The mass of the city’s inhabitants at large? Or whichever group with which we, as readers, most identify? Does it mean them but not us? It’s testament to her skill as a novelist (and Daisy Rockwell’s skill as a translator) that Geetanjali Shree never quite lets us identify with any of those groups, leaving us, like her characters, guessing about questions of identity and belonging.

Given the central characters’ apparent inability to string a written sentence together, the anonymous narrator of this book claims simply to be doing us all a favour and copying down ‘fragments’ of their conversations, ‘whatever caught my eye’. This last, of course, means that the novel is fragmentary, picking up in the middle of conversations and dropping out before they end. Like a recording that’s been censored.

While at the same time allowing the novel to claim a certain honesty as a result of the fact that

Shree’s conceit means that the narrator cannot be omniscient and everything they write must, notionally, have been publicly performed.

Although that gets shattered when the narrator revokes the previous entry of a cat into a scene, as that would necessitate terminating a birdsong that’s going on in the background. And, the narrator confesses, they like birdsong too much to do that. All of which leaves us uncertain as to whether or not we can trust the narrator’s words any more than anyone else’s. And puts us in a situation that is, once again, closer to that experienced by the novel’s central characters.

Everything is under siege. At one point the narrator wonders how one could find a language for screaming. Then whether or not a story can really be ‘made’ from words alone. Then whether or not it’s possible to have a new idea rather than merely repeating things one has heard before.

Although that’s what they claimed to be doing as a faithful narrator in the first place.

Our City, That Year is not an easy read. But it is an essential one. For the ways in which it demonstrates how easily the world can be manipulated and interpreted, by politicians as much as authors, so as to be read in ways that run contra to reality. And for the ways in which it asks us, in the face of this, to speak out. As Shree warns us, you can’t just sit there shocked, silent and open mouthed. Mark Rappolt

Hokusai’s Method Edited by Kyoko Wada, translated by Lis-Britt Dalkarl

Hokusai’s Method lures you in with the promise of learning to paint directly from the long-dead master himself. Here, Hokusai is presented not as the author of The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831) and other icons of art history, but as a teacher who published numerous edehon (drawing manuals), 15 of which form the core of this publication. The thick volume opens with an extract from the afterword of one of Hokusai’s last manuals, All About Painting in Colour… Part I (1848).

Transposed into the introduction of Hokusai’s Method, it forms a list of promises that remain largely unfulfilled: ‘this newly published book contains instructions for painting… it also explains how to depict… you will learn how to portray… the book is in a small format to make it affordable’.

Thames & Hudson, £35 (hardcover)

A more fitting introduction is perhaps the title page. A selection of the artist’s illustrations, among which the Thames & Hudson logo is cheekily camouflaged, are rearranged with the allure of a sheet of temporary tattoos. As in the rest of the book, you are invited to flip through the pictures and pick one out to draw for yourself. Though the 15 edehon have been organised to provide a course that moves from ‘beginner’ to ‘advanced’, none of the artist’s explanatory texts that have been reproduced are translated. Instead, each manual is prefaced with a brief introduction by the editor, and the drawings are left to speak for themselves.

Consequently, Hokusai’s ‘method’ dangles just out of our (non-Japanese speakers at whom the volume is targeted) reach.

Spring 2025

But not all is lost in translation. The imagebased techniques are more successfully conveyed, notably, in the instruction manuals made for children: make a circle, then another circle, connect it with a line, and you’ll have a fish, a bat, dancing figures. These endearing shows of pedagogy illustrate the book’s central thesis of Hokusai-as-teacher. Indeed, the editor’s texts provide useful contextual nuggets that reveal that the artist had over 200 disciples and was enormously influential during his lifetime. However, these insights are so lean that they are nearly invisible among the more than 400 pages of drawings.

If the book is frustratingly sparing with its knowledge, it justifies its £35 price point by presenting as an art object that will delight collectors of nice things. Mia Stern

99

Photo: Lewis Ronald

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on the cover and on pages 28–29 Ayoung Kim, photographed by Silke Briel in Berlin, January 2025

Words on the spine and on pages 11, 27 and 77 are in reference to ‘those who cannot convey learning’, from Tiruvalluvar, The Tirrukural, translated by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma, 2022

Spring 2025

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