Shubigi Rao
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PÉLAGIE GBAGUIDI March 12 - April 30, 2022
ZENO X GALLERY ANTWERP
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HEIDI VOET 海蒂 • 芙欧特
MICHAEL LIN 林明弘
22.3-22.5.22
Heidi Voet - Come play a game with us/We have no one to trust/Imagine lost at sea/Imagine you see me 158 x 48 x 48cm, 2020 Michael Lin - Untitled 122 x 244cm/each, 2020
doublespeak
mother of the world Vault: BUSUI AJAW 布苏伊 • 阿贾
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ArtReview Asia vol 10 no 1 Spring 2022
Agency The world right now seems a dark place: pandemics still raging; wars still happening; inequality present everywhere. At times like these you’d be forgiven for thinking ‘what can art do?’ And there are not necessarily any easy answers to that question. You won’t find them here. What you will find is a process of working things out. From tales of the destruction yet persistence of cultures in the work of cover artist Shubigi Rao, to the poetry of revolutionary activists in the Philippines, to responses to the effects of modernisation and pollution in China’s lakes. Each situation is different in its specifics, different in its pressures and pressure points, but all the works featured here have, at their core, an insistence that we pay attention to what’s happening in the world, that however impotent we may feel, we mustn’t stop looking. Only from there, after all, can we start the messy business of doing. ArtReview Asia
Working things out
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01 – 30 April 2022
HONG KONG
9 Queen’s Road Central, Central, Hong Kong | T + 852 2810 1208 | hkg@operagallery.com | operagallery.com New York Miami Bal Harbour Aspen London Paris Monaco Geneva Dubai Beirut Hong Kong Singapore Seoul
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Art Previewed
Previews by Nirmala Devi 16
Suhanya Raffel interview by Mark Rappolt 36
Points of View Deepa Bhasthi, Mark Rappolt 30
Art Featured
Shubigi Rao by Adeline Chia 42
Michael Wang by Venus Lau 60
Legacy Russell interview by Clarity Haynes 50
Apichatpong Weerasethakul by Max Crosbie-Jones 66
Kerima Tariman by Marv Recinto 56
Hyun-Sook Song by Wenny Teo 74
page 16 Beatrice Marchi, When Katie Fox Met the Evil Turtle (still), 2021–22 (as seen in Role Play, Fondazione Prada, Milan). Courtesy the artist and Sandy Brown, Berlin
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Art Reviewed
exhibitions 82
books 98
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Memory Box, by Marv Recinto Where Jellyfish Come From, by Travis Jeppesen 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, by Naomi Riddle Ho Rui An, by Max Crosbie-Jones Yuan Keru, by Suchao Li One song is very much like another, and the boat is always from afar, by Leo Chen camp, by Andrew Russeth Charles Lim, by Adeline Chia Thailand Biennale, by Max Crosbie-Jones Kang Seung Lee, by Andy St. Louis
The City in Time: Contemporary Art & Urban Form in Vietnam & Cambodia, by Pamela N. Corey, reviewed by Max Crosbie-Jones Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yoko Tawada, reviewed by Thu-Huong Ha Shamans of the Blind Country, by Michael Oppitz, reviewed by Fi Churchman Bibliolepsy, by Gina Apostol, reviewed by Marv Recinto Peach Blossom Spring, by Melissa Fu, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Run and Hide, by Pankaj Mishra, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Diplomatic Gifts. A History in Fifty Presents, by Paul Brummell, reviewed by Oliver Basciano Leelee Chan’s Art Journey: Tokens From Time, edited by András Szántó, reviewed by Nirmala Devi aftertaste 102
page 84 Kimiyo Mishima, Box Orange 19, 2019, silkscreen and hand-painted on ceramic, 39 × 44 × 33 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and mem, Tokyo
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Spring 2022 Jac Leirner Us Horizon March 12 – April 14, 2022 David Claerbout Hemispheres April 28 – May 28, 2022
BAMA Busan April 8 – 10, 2022 Gallery Weekend Berlin April 29 – May 1, 2022 Taipei Dangdai – Art & Ideas May 20 – 22, 2022 Frieze New York May 20 – 22, 2022 Art Basel Hong Kong May 27 – 29, 2022 Gallery Weekend Beijing May 31 – June 5, 2022
Potsdamer Straße 81E D – 10785 Berlin www.estherschipper.com
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UGO RONDINONE
BURN SHINE FLY
SCUOLA GRANDE SAN GIOVANNI
EVANGELISTA DI VENEZIA
APRIL 20 – SEPTEMBER 17 206_ARA_UGO.indd 1
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Art Previewed
Samudaya 15
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6 Wong Ping, Crumbling Earwax (detail), 2022, three-channel video installation, 11:9 and 16:9, stereo sound, 10 min. Courtesy the artist and Times Art Center, Berlin
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Previewed 1 Kawanabe Kyōsai Royal Academy of Arts, London Through 19 June
6 Wong Ping Times Art Center, Berlin Through 26 June
13 William Kentridge Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong Through 29 May
2 Fujiko Nakaya Haus der Kunst, Munich 8 April – 31 July
7 Nguyen Thái Tuan Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City Through 23 April
14 Sun Xun Shanghart, Shanghai Through 26 April
3 Sunil Gupta Studio Voltaire, London Through 24 April
8 Present Continuous / Sekarang Seterusnya Museum macan, Jakarta Through 15 May
15 Zhang Ruyi ucca Beijing 30 April – 31 July
4 Cui Jie Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea Through 12 June
9 Wael Shawky M Leuven Through 28 August
5 Dinh Q. Lê Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris Through 20 November
10 Nazgol Ansarinia Green Art Gallery, Dubai Through 7 May
16 Ugo Rondinone Kukje Gallery, Busan and Seoul Through 15 May Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice 20 April – 17 November
11 Chim Pom Mori Art Museum, Tokyo Through 29 May
17 Venice Biennale 23 April – 27 November
12 Role Play Prada Aoyama, Tokyo Through 20 June
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It seems a bit perverse to come up with a list of exhibitions and argue that you really need to see them at a time when all you can see is war. Granted this may be more the case in some parts of the world than in others. And perhaps it’s also true that the world is paying more attention to a European war than it has done in the case of recent conflicts in, say, Asia or Africa. But still, as the war escalates (at the time of writing), you get the idea of where ArtReview Asia’s mind is drifting. Indeed, it’s at times like these that art, and talk of art, seems to drift, more so than at other times, towards a realm of unreality. And from that cue, ArtReview Asia’s mind is drifting towards the words of John Berger, the late writer
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and critic who was among the mainstays of ArtReview Asia’s sister magazine ArtReview during the early 1950s. On 28 August 1968 (by which time he’d graduated to penning essays in New Society), a week after the then Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact had invaded what was then Czechoslovakia, following a seven-month period of political liberalisation known as the Prague Spring, Berger wrote: ‘Freedom of expression was crucial to the late Czechoslovak situation [meaning the Prague Spring]. Not because such freedom has an absolute value in all circumstances, as hypocritically claimed by bourgeois social democracy; but because this freedom during the last four
Art021 at Shanghai Exhibition Center. Courtesy Art021, Shanghai
1 Kawanabe Kyōsai and 54 others, Calligraphy and Painting Party (Shogakai), c. May 1876 – spring 1878, hanging scroll, ink and light colour on paper, 132 × 66 cm. Courtesy Israel Goldman Collection, London
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months was the most direct means of reawakening the Czechoslovak people to a sense of their own political power.’ And perhaps what he’s getting at there is that at times when we feel powerless, freedom of expression, in whatever form, can serve to remind us of our own agency in the shaping of our social and political situation. Although that’s easier said than done when agency is precisely what a military occupation aims at depriving you of. And when the demand of those of us who still have a degree of agency is to look closely at what’s going on rather than to turn the other way and head through a gallery door. So with that in mind, ArtReview Asia offers these previews as an
1 Kawanabe Kyōsai, Hell Courtesan (Jigoku–dayū), Dancing Ikkyū and Skeletons, 1871–89, hanging scroll, ink, colour and gold on silk, 137 × 69 cm. Courtesy Israel Goldman Collection, London
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2 Fujiko Nakaya, Skyline, 1987. Photo: Bernard Baudin.Courtesy the artist
incentive rather than an enticement to view the exhibitions they describe as various expressions of freedom, of agency, of what Berger might have called art’s productive potential. Nevertheless, we’re going to start with monsters. This month sees the first uk exhibition of 1 work by Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–39) in almost three decades. The son of a samurai, Kyōsai was active during the end of the Shogunate era and the beginning of Japan’s period of modernisation; his formative experiences included finding a severed head in the Kanda River, while his work bridges formal traditions (ukiyo-e) and popular forms, featuring contemporary caricature alongside subjects drawn from folkloric, Noh and religious tales. Forget the
calm stereotypes of Hokusai; Kyōsai is wild style. seen works from the Israel Goldman Collection All of which led, in turn, to the occasional arrest, and should serve as a reminder of what is a series of ‘drunken paintings’ and live-painting possible when artists are bold. performances of works in the shunga (sexually The daughter of a physicist who created the 2 world’s first artificial snowflake, Fujiko Nakaya explicit) style. As well as the creation of what is best known as the creator of a series of ‘fog is often credited as the first manga magazine sculptures’. Although she herself resists the (Eshinbun Nipponchi, in 1874). One look at his Pictures of One Hundred Demons (1889), for example, idea that she has any control over her primary will make clear the extent of his influence on material: ‘I create a scene so that nature can contemporary artists ranging from Takashi express itself within. I am a sculptor of fog, Murakami to the late Hayao Miyazaki; but more but I do not attempt to shape it,’ she said on important in the current context is his determireceiving the 2018 Praemium Imperiale prize nation to reflect in his art the reality (or messy for sculpture. Nakaya instead credits Earth’s nature) of the world around him regardless of atmosphere for acting as a mould for work, the constraints of tradition and style. London’s which, on a grander level (depending on your Royal Academy features a selection of rarely point of view, of course), seeks to manifest a
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3 Sunil Gupta, Untitled ( from Songs of Deliverance), 2022. © the artist / All Rights Reserved, dacs 2022. Courtesy the artist; Hales Gallery, London & New York; Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto; and Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi
4 Cui Jie, Silver End Village, 2021, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the artist; Antenna Space, Shanghai; and Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea
dialogue between artmaking, nature and technology. This last is an extension of the work begun when the Japanese artist was a member of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), alongside colleagues such as Robert Rauschenberg and Julie Martin. The culmination of E.A.T.’s work together came at Expo ’70 in Osaka, where Nakaya designed a cloud of water vapour to cover the Pepsi Pavilion’s geodesic dome. While it’s for such forms (or nonforms) that Nakaya is best known today, she also played a key role in the development of video art in Japan, helping to organise some of the first exhibitions of video art in the country during the early 1970s, while also
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working on community-based videoworks and video sculptures, and opening one of its first video-art galleries in 1980. At Munich’s Haus der Kunst, however, it’s the fog sculptures that take centre stage with their constant dialogues between transparency and opacity, freedom and control. It’s freedom, of a different kind, that’s also 3 the fundamental subject of Sunil Gupta’s current exhibition at London’s Studio Voltaire. Since the 1960s, the India-born, London-based Canadian has spent much of his career responding to the injustices suffered by gay and migrant communities worldwide, from early street photography in New York (Christopher Street,
New York, 1976), through to explorations of the lives of gay Indian men (Exiles, 1986–87), mixed-race relationships (‘Pretended’ Family Relationships, 1988, which also responded to the uk government’s Clause 28, which forbade the promotion of homosexuality) and the New Pre-Raphaelites (2008), which was produced to support the fight to repeal Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which proscribed homosexuality and had stood since colonial times. His latest exhibition, Songs of Deliverance Part i and Part ii, is the product of a year spent in residence at two London hospitals – St Mary’s and Charing Cross – during which he invited lgbtqia+ people from the adult hiv Clinic and Gender
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Affirmation Surgery service to collaborate on with studies of a Worker’s New Village in and constructive path of history, the polarities a series of largescale photographic portraits Shanghai. Architecture, for her, is the product of migrant experience, and the relation of of history. On the one hand, her paintings of their lives. The works, which elaborate on people and objects to contexts located in time explore the ups and downs of historic visions Gupta’s longstanding interest in healthcare as and space. The Thread of Memory, on show at of Utopia; on the other hand, they seek to part of the queer experience (he is openly hiv Paris’s Musée de Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac unpick architecture as the product of social positive), are also on show in both hospitals. offers a survey of 20 works spanning 15 years and political imperatives. Shanghai-based painter Cui Jie is acclaimed of production. 4 Inspired by the memory of his aunt weaving 6 for collaged portraits that explore the erasures, Hong Kong artist Wong Ping tackles homogenisation and sense of constant flux that 5 mats, Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. the alienation of modern life (and particularly Lê developed a photoweaving technique (mixing come in the wake of the rapid urban developmodern life in Hong Kong) with a mixture strips cut from a variety of found photographs, ment of her homeland. Focal Point hosts her of humour and a sense of the absurd (he has previously compared his work, which generally mounted on fabric) that blends a variety of first institutional show outside China, which takes the form of video animation, to standup images and registers (archival, press, pop culsees her expand the discussion to incorporate comedy, arguing that humour makes his tural) into a new photographic whole. In this modernist factories and worker housing on the uk’s Essex coastline placed in dialogue work more digestible). At Berlin’s Times Art way, the artist replicates the deconstructive
5 Dinh Q. Lê, Splendor and Darkness #32, 2017. © and courtesy the artist and stpi, Singapore
6 Wong Ping, Crumbling Earwax (detail), 2022, three-channel video installation, 11:9 and 16:9, stereo sound, 10 min. Courtesy the artist and Times Art Center, Berlin
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Center he’s showcasing a new videowork and petitions has become my new hobby.” Which site-specific multimedia installation in a show might well summarise the state of activism in titled Earwax. The centre’s exterior is wallpageneral in the age of social-media. As a meditapered in a computer-generated self-portrait in tion on the introverted life experienced during the form of a Robinson-style projection that pandemic-inspired lockdowns, and the constant maps the artist’s face in tiny features, bookended bombardment of our own eardrums with more by giant ears. Inside, a further giant ear (this one or less meaningful messages, Wong leaves us sculptural, made out of metal, which the artist with a conundrum: whether (defensively) to describes as giving it ‘bell-like’ properties) has let the earwax build up or whether to carefully a series of table-tennis balls hurled at it (via the examine what caused it to accumulate in the ping-pong equivalent of a tennis-ball launcher), first place. 7 which then bounce off, having made it ring. On the face of it, the paintings of Nguyen In the basement video, the head speaks: “As an Thái Tuan offer a rather more dismal outlook activist, I began to get used to working from on life, featuring blacked-out bodies in decrepit, home,” it says robotically. “Signing all kinds of albeit rather baroque interiors, or people and
animals encountering even more ruined exterior architecture. The title of his latest show at Ho Chi Minh City’s Sàn Art (a space cofounded by Dinh Q. Lê), titled Waiting for the end of the wind, does little to lift the mood. Heritage, in the form of either architecture or objects, seems disconnected from the anonymous people in his work, leaving them feeling like Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, everymen and no men, passive and potentially ignorant, trapped in some sort of meaningless colonial (for such is the nature of the objects that populate his interiors) ritual. (Interior #12, 2018, for example, features a blacked-out body occupying one of a pair of ridiculously ornate thrones.) As a
8 Udeido Collective, The Koreri Transformation, 2021, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Museum macan, Jakarta
7 Nguyen Thái Tuan, Waiting for the end of wind, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City
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viewer, you seek to construct narratives that might lead Tuan’s characters out of their greyish daze (or at least construe a logic for their being there in the first place), to act in the empty space of the landscapes or occupy the lifeless blackedout corpses. And in that sense they trigger an engagement that is as much creative as it is bleak. Walking an altogether less lonely road 8 is Jakarta’s Museum macan, where Present Continuous / Sekarang Seterusnya is a collaborative project, initiated in response to the isolating effects of the covid-19 pandemic, and aiming at giving voice to artists and arts organisations from across Indonesia and the realities that
confront them. While the project incorporates talks, workshops and online discussion programmes, the central exhibition features four artists, two collectives and five curators from a geography that spans Banda Aceh, Bandung, Majalengka, Makassar and Jayapura. While community and the organisation of it forms a core theme, the exhibition as a whole tackles issues of indigenous politics, collective and historical memories, human relationships with sound and plants, and the potential of artist-led ‘creative industries’ to produce social and economic change. Quite some ground. It’s questions of social change engineered by modernisation in his native Egypt and the
Middle East, alongside questions of national, artistic and religious identity, that forms the 9 bedrock of Wael Shawky’s oeuvre, which is the subject of a major retrospective, titled Wet Culture, Dry Culture, at M Leuven in Belgium. The exhibition features key works including parts of The Cabaret Crusades trilogy (2010–14), an attempt to retell the history of the Crusades from an Arab perspective (channelling the work of Amin Maalouf) via the medium of puppet theatre. In the video Cave (2004), which typically for the artist mixes historical and contemporary culture, Shawky wanders around a supermarket reciting verses from Surah 18 of the Qu’ran, which concerns a group of youths
9 Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades iii: The Secrets of Karbala (still), 2015, hd film (colour, sound), English subtitles, 120 min. Courtesy M Leuven
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10 Nazgol Ansarinia, Connected Pools, 2020, blue plaster, 26 × 40 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai
11 Chim Pom, May, 2020, Tokyo (Hey-rasshai) – Drawing a Blueprint, 2020, cyanotype print, gelatin, canvas, iron frame, 176 × 352 × 5 cm. Courtesy Anomaly and Mujin-to Production, Tokyo
who retreat to a cave for 300 solar years in order to maintain their faith in the face of a kingdom that’s enforcing idolatry. “It’s about the idea that as a human anyone can be that isolated, living his or her entire world in a supermarket”, the artist told ArtReview back in 2016, unknowingly presaging many people’s lockdown experience. But perhaps that’s what makes Shawky’s work so persuasive – as much as it appears to be embedded in the specifics of particular cultural and geographic contexts, it also connects to wider human and social experience. Not to be missed. Tehran-born Nazgol Ansarinia’s work 10 spans a variety of media, but in the main traces the systems and networks that inform
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her daily life before expanding them to include larger social structures and ultimately aiming at locating a place for subjectivity in a globalised world. Her latest exhibition, Lakes Drying, Tides Rising, at Green Art Gallery in Dubai, focuses on water as an integral component of Iranian architecture, tracing the history of the shallow pools (howz) that once featured in private homes and gardens, both as a humidifier and a site of household activity, many of which are now dry, as a space of collective desire and sociability through a series of sculptures, videos and drawings. In the face of Tehran’s water and power shortages, Ansarinia refigures water as a site of nostalgia and a global resource
crisis, as well as a reflection of Earth’s changing ecosystem. Very much embedded in the contemporary 11 context is the Japanese collective Chim Pom, whose first major retrospective, Happy Spring, is on show at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Over the years, its often provocative work has tackled themes such as overconsumption, nuclear devastation, migration and border controls, and the influence of mass media with often outrageous social interventions that mix humour and critique. Build-Burger (2016/2018), a fast-food-style stack of square sections of the fourth, third and second floors (plus any attached fixtures and fittings) of Kabuki-cho Shopping Center Promotion Union Building
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in Tokyo, liberated shortly before the building was demolished, was a critique of Japan’s massconsumption (demolish and rebuild rather than renovate) of its cities. Meanwhile projects such as super rat (2006), Black of Death (2007/2013) and A Drunk Pandemic (2019–20) tackle social approaches to vermin and disease and the ways in which these last respond to and resist any attempt at control. Which, as it does, you might conclude is a portrait of Chim Pom itself. Over at Prada’s flagship Aoyama store, in Tokyo, the fashion company’s cultural 12 wing, Fondazione Prada, is staging Role Play, curated by Aperture magazine’s editor-in-chief,
Melissa Harris, and exploring the projection and adaptation of alternate identities, alter egos and multiple selves in contemporary culture. According to Harris, the theme relates to the embodiment of otherness, forms of activism or empathy, or a means of ‘manoeuvring through entrenched or polarised positions’. The works on show include photographic series by Juno Calypso and by Tomoko Sawada, an audiowork by Beatrice Marchi, a series of portraits by Haruka Sakaguchi and Griselda San Martin, and a two-channel video by Bogosi Sekhukhuni. You’ll have to visit it yourself to see the extent to which it’s about being who you really are or being who you
want to be. But perhaps that amounts to the same thing. But for now it’s back to the cave. William 13 Kentridge’s stop-motion animation Waiting for the Sibyl (2019) was originally created in response to an invitation from Rome Opera to make a companion piece to Alexander Calder’s Work in Progress (1968), which featured the American’s signature mobiles. As a means of exploring the themes of turning and motion, the South African artist took the image of the Cumaean Sibyl, a prophetess who lived in a cave near Naples and to whom people would come to ask questions of their fate. She, in turn, would write answers on oak leaves and place them on a pile
12 Juno Calypso, Die Now, Pay Later, 2018. Courtesy the artist and tj Boulting, London
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William Kentridge, Sibyl, 2020, single-channel hd film, 9 min 59 sec. © and courtesy the artist
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animé. There are besuited, humanoid pigs, outside the cave. But the wind would blow the across one spread) emerge from the dense type leaves around, leaving her supplicants uncertain cows, chickens and rams, orthodox churches, and dance across them. A therapeutic discourse as to whether they were gathering their own avatars of science, soldiers and machine gunners perhaps on the uncertainties of now. fates or someone else’s entirely. A metaphor, that lead you beyond time and space to, well, Over at Shanghart in Shanghai, it’s 14 Beijing-based Sun Xun’s animated feature according to the artist, for the uncertainty of someplace else. Although the place where all Magic of Atlas (2021) that forms the basis of his life. Kentridge’s video, on show as part of Weigh this is on show is currently under lockdown, exhibition, An Infinite Journey. The exhibition All Tears, a survey of recent work (spanning so you might want to check before you travel. focuses on Luocha, one of six countries that works on paper, sculpture and, of course, video) But you’re used to that these days anyhow. feature in the film, this one ruled by three at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, features the Back in the real world, well, Beijing, to be donkeys. The works (some made for the movie, 15 precise, Zhang Ruyi’s sculpture and installation turning pages of what looks to be a dictionary. some made since) take the form of coloured are on display at ucca Beijing. The ShanghaiAs they flip back and forth, blowing debris and woodblock reliefs detailing the characters and based artist takes the detritus of urban life animated figures, coloured geometric shapes scenography from the animation and combining and the architecture of private dwellings and and oak leaves (naturally), as well as cryptic traditional forms with elements inspired by recombines them in ways that focus on the typeset messages (‘I have brought news/I have Western comic-book iconography and Japanese psychological effects of city life. In Potted Plants forgotten the message’ say the texts imposed
14 Sun Xun, Magic of Atlas – The Magician Comes to Luocha (detail), 2020, coloured woodblock relief, crystal balls, 244 × 976 cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai, Beijing & Singapore
15 Zhang Ruyi, Matted Substance-2, 2020, concrete, rebar, gravel, 15 × 14 × 67 cm. Courtesy the artist
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16 Ugo Rondinone, yellow red monk, 2020, painted bronze, 295 × 171 × 97 cm. Courtesy Studio Rondinone and Kukje Gallery, Seoul & Busan
(2016), for example, a potted cactus (of the type many people acquired during lockdowns) is attached to a wall made of a grid of bathroom tiles. On either side of the cactus are concrete models of residential tower blocks, bound to the plant by string. The whole brings interior into conversation with exterior, nature into conversation with the urban condition, and asks viewers to find the place between these four poles in an absurdist dance of alienation and connection: perhaps the truest reflection of contemporary urban life. On a similar note, but with very different 16 results, Ugo Rondinone describes his upcoming exhibition at the Scuola Grande San
Giovanni Evangelista in Venice as an exercise in coaxing ‘the sublime from the subliminal’. Burn shine fly derives its title from a book of poems by the New York-based Swiss artist’s late partner John Giorno titled you got to burn to shine (1994) and features ‘iconic’ works (although the precise nature of these works is under wraps at the time of writing, his best-known works, which generally combine humour and pathos, 17 include stacks of car-size boulders painted in various luminescent colours, electric rainbows, ghoulish oversize masks, and a series of rather creepy, collapsing, but equally vibrantly costumed clowns). Meanwhile, in Kukje Gallery’s Busan and Seoul spaces the artist is exhibiting a
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series of five works from his nuns + monks series (2020), a group of totemic sculptures that explore the embodiment of the physical and the mystical within the titular forms, and once again, the transformation of humble stones into something more than stones (while retaining, one hopes, a certain sense of humility). And with humility in mind, you’ll be off to explore the Venice Biennale, the international artworld’s first big semi-post-covid jamboree. There you’ll be able to decide for yourselves whether it’s all an expression, an invitation into the unreal or a useful meeting point for the exchange of views and viewpoints and useful propositions for a world to come. Nirmala Devi
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Malayalam filmmaker Don Palathara’s work acknowledges the banality of life. Days merge one into the other: everyone is hustling; chores rarely vary (or come to an end); even a major event – a death, a celebration, a vicious fight, that sort of thing – is merely a brief disruption to the routine. So while each of Palathara’s films revolves around one such big event, what he really documents is how most lives continue as normal throughout these situations. Albeit his male protagonists, constantly reeling under the pressure of having to perform their masculinity, face new levels of anguish in the trying circumstances presented in films such as Vith (Seed, 2017) and Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam (Joyful Mystery, 2021). Palathara is in his mid-thirties, and among his cohort of new Malayalam-language filmmakers (including Jeo Baby, Dileesh Pothan and Lijo Jose Pellissery, whose Jallikattu, 2019, was India’s official entry to the Oscars in 2021), his works stand apart, both in terms of their themes and their visual language. In his first release, Shavam (The Corpse, 2015), Palathara seems to have zeroed in on certain stylistic choices. Shot entirely in black and white, an aesthetic he would keep for his next two films, Shavam centres on the death of a prominent man and how the Syrian-Christian community to which he belongs comes together for his funeral. Palathara positions his audience as if flies on the wall, watching the funeral being organised: one of the attendees asks a visiting expat to try
Man Trouble
Don Palathara, the leading light of a new generation of Malayalam filmmakers, depicts the pressures that erupt in male violence in Kerala and leaves Deepa Bhasthi gasping for air
to find his daughter a job abroad; cricket scores are relayed to the funeral attendees; a group of men decide it is time for a quick drink in the backyard; the women have things to talk about. There is a hint that a mistress may be present. But nothing much ‘happens’. While the women have the luxury to weep and mourn, the men are expected to be manly, to be in control, to figure out logistics. If they do mourn, it can only be in private, away from the camera. Set in Kerala, whose verdant locales dominate Malayalam film visuals, Palathara’s black-andwhite frames strip away this aesthetic baggage, allowing the viewer to remain undistracted by prettiness. Moreover, his camera does not home in on faces; shots are, for the main, deep-focus. This manner of framing lends a universality to his films; the situations recorded could be happening anywhere, to anyone, even if his films centre on a particular community. He carries these stylistic choices into the superb Vith, in which a young man returns from an unnamed city to live with his father. As with Shavam, the story is set within the Syrian-Christian community. Soon the generation gap between father and son, both of whom are set in their ways and routines, begins to show. Many slow sequences that go on for several minutes – another constant in Palathara’s visual language – are dedicated to showing the father pray, prepare food for the cattle, cook his own dinner, eat in front of the tv and go about his day. Vith ends in an act of senseless
Shavam, 2015, 64 min, dir Don Palathara
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violence, which might or might not be a dream. But the pair’s game of one-upmanship has little bearing on the chores that need to be done. While all five of his films to date reflect on the routine nature of most human lives, his latest two stand out for their documenting of private emotions and the impact of the last two virus-laden years: Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam and Everything is Cinema (2021). Here is where he best defines a sense of claustrophobia, a quality subtly present in all his cinema. Although that reading might be inevitable when watching his films in a global pandemic. Santhoshathinte… is a one-shot film set entirely inside a car. Maria and Jithin, a young urban couple, are on their way to the hospital because Maria suspects she is pregnant. They are unmarried, live together – perhaps because the lockdown is in place – and are not really financially or socially ready to have a baby. The entire film is one extended fight between the two – Maria expecting Jithin to care more about the situation of an unwanted pregnancy, and Jithin both trying to say the right things and wanting to wait until the results come before worrying about what to do next. Male toxicity, sexual repression, premarital sex, sexual jealousy, wokeness, male anxiety – the film packs a punch in acknowledging all of these, via the conversation between the couple, the friends who call them and via a pretentious film director (voiced by Palathara) whom Maria, a journalist, interviews over the phone. Even as it handles
heavy topics, the film manages to be quite funny. Palathara’s aptitude for recognising human emotion is revealed in the equal space given to both characters’ points of view, making it impossible to fully side with either of them. And the fight gets nasty: old irrelevant things are dredged up, and you begin to understand this is a portrait of a long-term relationship. Neither party wants to be in the car having this fight, and there are many times when we, viewers and voyeurs, want to get out of the car too. Everything is Cinema could almost be a sequel, only now the fight is between a different couple. Here Chris (played by Palathara), a filmmaker, is stuck indoors in Kolkata with his actor wife, Anitha. He is in the city to make a “continuation” of Louis Malle’s 1969 film Calcutta, but a lockdown has been announced and he cannot shoot outdoors. So Chris takes to filming his wife, supposedly without her knowledge, going about her day, cooking, texting, taking selfies for social media, speaking to family, practising yoga, applying face packs, reading. All the while he expresses his disgust with her from behind the camera, recording their constant fighting without himself appearing in the frame. This is a couple whose marriage is at the tail end of its life; being forcibly stuck together is the last straw. The situation brings out the worst in Chris. He is pretentious, filming his wife through a toxic male gaze, but at the same time accusing her of pandering to the male gaze by using makeup, posting photos, etc. His behaviour inspires no sympathy, but one suspects Palathara’s idea was to show how Chris unravels when his plans fail, and his wife is but an easy target onto which to project his frustrations and anxieties. Palathara insists that his films are questions, not statements. The restricted, confined, localised worlds, self-contained communities and spaces in his films serve to acknowledge our routine, prosaic lives. At the same time, he uses the male figure to examine how deeply entrenched male toxicity is in everyday life. And to explore the ways in which the pressure of societal expectations can quickly turn men violent. But Palathara does not allow his men redemption; he merely questions the repressive nature of strictly gendered everyday lives. Everything is Cinema, 2021, 71 min, dir Don Palathara
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Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Kodagu
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Three quarters of the way through his celebrated fourteenth-century account of his travels around the world, the Maghrebi scholar Ibn Battuta takes a time out from his description of how he made his ‘escape’ from the service of the rather capricious Sultan of Delhi (who had sometimes been generous with the Moroccan, and at other times a bit scary) – first by giving away his possessions (slaves and all) and hiding out, away from society, as a disciple of a reclusive, ascetic and cibophobic imam, and then (because who wants to live like that for ever?) by getting himself appointed (by the quixotic sultan) to an embassy to China (a job that came with new slaves, new clothes and new horses), during the course of which he was kidnapped and robbed by bandits – to digress on the subject of India’s yogis. ‘The men of this sect do marvellous things,’ he enthuses. ‘One of them will spend months without eating or drinking, and many of them have holes dug for them under the earth which are then built in on top of them, leaving only space for the air to enter.’ He goes on to marvel at the fact that he once met a yogi who had spent 25 days sitting on top of a platform, at the fact that yogis can ‘see what is happening at a distance’ and that
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Return of the Yogi
An Indian prince, a European architect and an undead yogi – what can the centenary edition of a German Expressionist film tell us about our own times? Mark Rappolt asks The Indian Tomb, 1921, 243 min, dir Joe May
the most powerful yogis of all don’t just cheat death, they deal it too. They can simply look at a man and he’ll drop dead. Minus his heart. Meanwhile, a yogi who has renounced speech and food but manages to make coconuts materialise out of thin air is obviously a Muslim in disguise. Battuta can’t get enough of those guys (he’s a bit suspicious of the girls, however, claiming that they’re the ones who tend to specialise in the death dealing, heart-stealing business). Almost six centuries later, neither could novelist Thea von Harbou and her husband, and screenwriting collaborator, the celebrated director Fritz Lang. While von Harbou and Lang are best known for collaborating on the German Expressionist classic Metropolis (1927), which is based on the former’s novel, they met and began what was then an affair during an earlier cinematic adaptation of one of her works, The Indian Tomb (written in 1918). That adaptation ended up being the basis of a four-hour, two-part silent movie, directed by Joe May (once he had kicked Lang out of the director’s chair) and released in 1921. Having been largely forgotten until the latter part of the twentieth century, it is now rereleased in a centenary
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edition. And it begins with a yogi being dug out of his hole in the ground. With its cast of browned-up Germans and a Hindu iconography that seems to incorporate aspects of Buddhism and Islam, with costume that fuses aspects of the Near and Far East (it’s like the movie was shot inside the v&a or British Museum), with gargantuan yet strangely spartan temple sets, ceremonial elephants, man-eating tigers, erotic dances and the odd snake in a basket, you don’t need me to tell you that the film is ‘rich in exotic mysticism’ (as its distributors do). Of course, you might equally figure that as crude orientalism; or, if you’re inclined another way, as merely reflecting the European attitude and worldview of the times. Where the Indian prince digs up a yogi when he wants to know how to get something done, his European counterparts (we’ll come to the characters later) consult an engraving, or one of their friends’ libraries. When the European gets to India, he strides out on a clifftop looking across the valley in the manner of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1817); meanwhile the Indians live in a fog of temple incense and hookahs. But let’s not question von Harbou’s commitment to Indian studies: her marriage to Lang would later end shortly after he (himself a serial philanderer) caught her in bed with an Indian student 17 years her junior (she went
The Indian Tomb, 1921, 243 min, dir Joe May
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on to marry him in 1933, secretly, because the Nazi Party wasn’t into dark-skinned men). Still, you’ll be wanting to know about The Indian Tomb’s plot. By some sort of rule of the undead, the yogi is bound to serve the person who dug them up. In the case of this film that’s the Indian prince. In order to save himself some time and trouble, the prince makes the yogi magic himself over to somewhere that might be Germany or Britain in order to persuade (by trickery if necessary) the German or British architect Herbert Rowland to build a tomb for the prince’s one true love. Rowland himself has been fantasising about building a grander and more beautiful mausoleum than the Taj Mahal, an engraving of which he stares longingly at. He’s got a fiancée too. But she’s not important now. Professional desires come first. Rowland has to leave immediately to begin work on his dream job. This time the yogi and the architect travel by car and by yacht. Presumably because the yogi is using all his magic to make sure that the fiancée doesn’t reach, speak to or hear from Rowland before he has been willingly spirited away to India. It’s unclear why, other than to enforce the Faustian nature of the architect-prince bargain, such secrecy is necessary, but later it will be explained that Rowland needs to ditch his European attachments (fiancée included)
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in order that he might absorb ‘the blood and soul’ of India to make his tomb the most magnificent in the world. Which seems reasonable enough (although the architecture of the Indian sets featured in the film, somewhat Angkor Wat-like in detail and scale, would suggest that, when it came to magnificence, a local architect would have been a better bet). Rowland then finds out that the tomb is going to house a princess who’s alive rather than dead. Although she might be soon because the prince is determined to have his revenge on her for having an affair with an Englishman. The prince has a pit of tigers in case he needs to dispose of someone; the
Englishman likes disposing of tigers for sport. Rowland’s not sure what to do. Meanwhile his fiancée manages to track him down to the prince’s palace. She and Rowland are nevertheless kept apart. Prisoners at either ends of the palace. Rowland catches leprosy while looking for her and wandering into the prince’s leper colony-cum-torture chamber. Later, he’ll be cured by the yogi. Who, himself, will slowly morph from a ghoulish, zombielike henchman to an embodiment of the prince’s conscience. Before disappearing into thin air. The Englishman will be fed to the tigers. It won’t end well for the princess either. But I don’t want to spoil it for you.
Perhaps what comes across most strongly when watching The Indian Tomb is not the extent to which it is a product of its time, but the extent to which, as much as it’s the product of all places, it’s the product of all times – 1341 (that’s when Battuta was running away from the Sultan of Delhi and into the arms of the infidel bandits), 1818, 1921… And hey, let’s not leave ourselves out of all this, we’re the ones to whom this is being marketed as an exotic cultural treat. Even Lego’s token ‘Indian’ figure (the Eastern kind of Indian, not the one whose accessories include a tomahawk, a headdress and a squaw) comes with turban, a snake and a pipe.
The Indian Tomb, 1921, 243 min, dir Joe May
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Photograph taken at Kunstmuseum Basel
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Suhanya Raffel interviewed by Mark Rappolt
“The relationship between audience and institution is critical. I think a museum without an audience is like a person without a soul” 36
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The m+ Museum of Visual Culture, Hong Kong’s much-anticipated Herzog & de Meurondesigned museum of visual culture, finally opened its doors, after a series of well-documented delays, in November 2021. Its opening came just before the Special Administrative Region experienced a surge in covid-19 cases, and following a series of political changes. Nevertheless, with its extensive holdings, ambitions to promote a new, decentred narrative of art history and positioning of art within a much wider consideration of visual culture and its importance across the Asian continent, the institution promises to be an instrument of change, both in Hong Kong and across the wider region. ArtReview Asia caught up with Museum Director Suhanya Raffel to discuss the opening displays, the challenges the new museum faces, its wider ambitions and the ways in which it is seeking to change the concept of a museum in the twenty-first century. artreview asia Prior to the inauguration of the new building, m+ was, to some degree, a mobile institution. Did the experience of being nomadic inform the approach to the static institution?
be in the museum from home via the programmes being delivered online. Our digital work now includes a substantial online archive of the collection, which in itself comprises over 50,000 works. It’s a substantial founding collection across the disciplines of moving image, design and architecture, and visual art. But it’s not something that we can just digitise immediately – we have to make choices. We also have m+ Magazine, where art and education overlap online, which has been an important tool during the pandemic. We have online artist commissions. For example, we had an online exhibition of Hong Kong neon signs, and to add a physical dimension to that, the museum organised tours of Kowloon. Then we have the big digital facade on the museum itself, which is an led screen: our first commission for the facade is a digital artwork titled Touch For Luck, by Amsterdambased collective Studio Moniker, with which people can either interact via a smartphone or simply watch from the city.
“It was important to really be able to present to our public an idea of what visual culture means. ‘Visual’ and ‘culture’ are still very mysterious for many people, especially coming out of Hong Kong, which has such a muscular art market”
suhanya raffel While we’d been waiting for the m+ building to be built, we used the time to think about what a museum should be for our community in the twenty-first century. The mobile museum was very useful and critical in how we formed our thinking. M+ is more than a building, and prior to having a permanent museum site we roamed far and wide. We were unfettered in how we could think about delivering an exhibition programme, learning content or the digital platform. Once covid came, the digital platform proved to be a very solid foundation on which to build a lot more programmes. While we’re in the midst of a pandemic and even looking forward post-covid, digital work has become essential to the museum world now – and will continue to be. This has given rise to all kinds of unexpected positive outcomes, such as the sustainability aspect of museum work. Where major exhibitions required couriers and transportation, all of that has been put on hold, because we can show a lot of work virtually. It’s become accepted as good practice.
To add to this, everything we do is already in three languages. As soon as we make something available in Putonghua, especially on our channels into the Mainland, we have literally hundreds of thousands of people coming online. In the leadup to the opening, we had tens of thousands of audience members engaging with us through our online panel discussions, including the m+ Matters / Keynote: Understanding Museum Audiences in China and the Sigg Fellowship for Chinese Art Research 2020 public talk. Those now continue as part of our scholarship delivery.
ara Now that the physical museum has opened, how do the digital initiatives work in collaboration with the analogue experience, and how do some of the programmes you’ve developed digitally complement this?
ara Is that interest extended to expanding the type of things you collect? The Studio Moniker project uses an element of gaming technology, which is a medium of increased interest within China in particular, but across Asia in general.
sr It’s very clear that what we’re doing now is part of everyone’s everyday life, and it’s also a very critical learning tool. Even now that the museum is temporarily closed, we can
facing page Suhanya Raffel, museum director, m+ Museum of Visual Culture, Hong Kong. Photo: Lok Cheng
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sr Gaming is something we’re researching, but we’ve also collected, for example, all the emojis. The emojis are part of our opening display: one of the first examples of digital design that is now taken for granted in everyday life. When we did our first preview tours, we found that the younger audiences really connected with this particular display, while some of the visitors on our older generation tours couldn’t understand why we even had it there. But it is really good to explore visual culture and why design principles are critical in how we collect. ara In the physical space, you opened with six exhibitions, which have entries into various aspects of the collection and also present different narratives in connection with the histories the collections seek to trace. How were the works selected and what was the thinking behind the different experiences they offer? sr It was important to really be able to present to our public an idea of what visual culture means. Those two words, ‘visual’ and ‘culture’, are still very mysterious for many people, especially coming out of Hong Kong, which has such a muscular art market. Art is just one aspect of what we do in terms of visual culture. One of the exhibitions, Hong Kong: Here and Beyond, explores visual culture through the perspective of the city. It ranges from architecture, design, film culture, gaming, right through to formal ink-painting. The exhibition design is meant to reflect the experience of moving through Hong Kong – the spaces are tight, they’re intense, they’re through a maze of walls. The m+ Sigg Collection displays Chinese contemporary art from the 1970s to 2012, presenting a very significant avant-garde movement through a set of paintings, sculptures, installations and photographs. These form the parentheses between which the other four exhibitions then fit. Things, Spaces, Interactions focuses on design and architecture, while Individuals, Networks, Expressions includes international artists whose works take identities, histories and perspectives as key subjects. A single-work exhibition, of Antony Gormley’s Asian Field [2003], is located in the West Galleries, and in the Courtyard Galleries The Dream of the Museum unpacks what East–West means through the work of four artists, Marcel Duchamp, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and John Cage. We decided to structure those opening shows to give our audience different ways of thinking about conceptual art – through repositioning or decentring conventional narratives. ara You mentioned the international art holdings and that the museum goes far beyond just being about Asia. Is there a criteria for how you select these items?
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sr One example is Asian Field – Gormley’s last big fieldwork – which he executed in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Then there’s Duchamp’s work, which provided a very important toolbox for the avant-garde artists coming out of the Mainland, even if they might not actually have seen the work in person. A third example would be the Archigram archive. It’s the output of a British architecture studio that never built anything, but their presence at the Osaka Expo was critical and many of Hong Kong’s architects were trained by members of the collective. ara The museum aims to tell the history of art from an Asian perspective. What is an Asian perspective in this context? sr If we take Things, Spaces, Interactions, with its display of architecture and design, as an example here, there were three areas we wanted to explore: first we began with a room that is dedicated to Hong Kong’s output. Hong Kong is the lens through which we begin that journey. Then the exhibition expands to the broader Asia region, and from the middle of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century. There it really looks at identity through postcolonial realities; whether it’s India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Korea or China, you can see examples of what it means to build nationhood and identity through architecture. The third idea is manufacturing: the ‘Made in’ stamp and the products that came from and continue to come from this part of the world, and how these link to an international language of modernism. We have [Sri Lankan artist] Ena de Silva’s batiks [which reestablished the industry on the island], for example, together with Isamu Noguchi’s [mass-produced] lamps. Those three really physical expressions of living in this part of the world offer us ways of thinking and exploring an Asian context. ara When you talk about the Asian context, are you positioning m+ against the traditional narratives that prevail within Western twentieth-century collections such as those of moma, Pompidou and Tate? sr I don’t think it’s an opposition. But I think it would be fair to say there are other canons that need to be put on the table. Everybody understands that is now necessary. Singapore has been doing it in art. We just need to see it expanded across different disciplines now, so that it is a richer, more textured series of propositions working together. So it is not in opposition, but in addition to those existing narratives, adding to knowledge and scholarship. It’s about adding complexity to our thinking and giving the repressed or suppressed histories of the latetwentieth century and the twenty-first century oxygen to breathe.
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ara We often think of canons as static and formal. Do you see the establishment of a canon as a generative process that exposes the things that aren’t in it, which in turn generates a new canon and repeats like that? sr I think it’s more fluid than that, in terms of how histories, aesthetic design, art history, are expressed, especially in the twenty-first century, where art and design practice can be many things. One is not only an ink painter, but also an online artist making nfts and a fashion designer. It’s unfettered. How does one make sense of those interlinked and integrated practices that are, in the end, visual culture in their fullest. The ‘+’ in m+ gives us the ability to explore those seams. ara You mentioned nfts. Do you have plans to collect? sr We don’t have a plan to collect per se, but we are certainly exploring that world and what it means and how one collects nfts. We have three collection councils that oversee new art, design and architecture, and international art. Both the new art council and the design and architecture council are looking at how we might bring that world into the museum. It’s so new, but one has to acknowledge that this part of the world just leaps into these new forms with gusto. It’s a big deal here, there’s a lot of energy around that. ara You’ve talked a bit about how museum culture is new in Hong Kong and its surrounds. How do you think your museum, and museum culture generally, can affect the broader culture of Hong Kong and of the region? sr I think it’s very important to say that cultural content is critical to great cities. All fabulous cities have amazing cultural capital built into them, and Hong Kong is a great city. Here it’s time that we formalised the museumend of cultural capital, because there’s a lot of cultural capital already here – we’re just adding to that ecology. Major institutions are often slow-release by nature, as opposed to the not-for-profit or artist-run spaces in a place like Hong Kong. That’s a good thing, because it takes time to develop scholarship and knowledge, and to share it and express it. I think to slow down and do things slowly is not a bad thing in a world that moves, these days, very fast. In Asia there is an enormous expansion of museums, a lot of private institutions as well, and we watch all of those spaces with great curiosity and look to make connections. I think it’s important to say that museum culture is a growing one, and clearly people are investing in it, but that, at the same time, this is relatively new in Asia, and as a result we can also explore how we establish these institutions in different ways. I think that is still quite experimental and ongoing. It’s exciting.
ara So what do you think a museum is? sr Fundamentally for me, a museum has to have a collection. I’m old-fashioned in that sense. Collections are an integral part of a museum, and that brings a whole range of other activities as a result, among them scholarship and knowledge. But museums are also social spaces, especially today. The relationship between audience and institution is also critical. I think a museum without an audience is like a person without a soul. So in many ways it’s also up to others to define what their M+ is, how they interact with us. ara There are schools of thought that would suggest that museums are places where objects go to die, where they are taken out of circulation – removed from the context of the world. How do you keep things fresh, particularly when you’ve got a collection the size of yours? sr I don’t think they die at all. I think they live so resoundingly, and in the end it’s because of audiences, it’s the eyes that come and touch those things all the time. One of the great affirmations of m+ opening was the number of people who came through the door. We have had over 380,000 people in the first two months of opening, and that’s extraordinary, because we are a closed city, these are only Hong Kongers. We’ve had to initiate a preregistration system to manage the intensity of that desire. It’s also the result of the last six years of very deep work, engaging with audiences here: working with communities and m+ Rover [school and community outreach programme] and going out into Hong Kong established a two-way street, and now the street is leading to the museum, if you like. That foundational work has been critical for me, I think that’s why we’ve been able to see that response coming from Hong Kongers. ara How do you ensure that this ‘two-way’ street does not simply become a popularity contest: a reflection of your audience’s desires? sr It’s not only about numbers; it’s about the intensity of the engagement. We don’t do an expanded label for every object, but there is a demand for that. People want to know about every single thing. I’ve never been in a situation where that’s been a repeated request. The challenge for us is how to accommodate it. Museums are unique places for people to slow down and reflect – there aren’t that many places that offer this. ara You mention labels, and it seems to me that museums often tread a very fine line between providing information and offering interpretations, which can then lead to telling people what to think. sr It’s always an ongoing question about what piece of information you’re going to
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privilege over all the other pieces of information. But a caption is really only the beginning of knowledge. There are many ways to enter into a work from there. We do talk about that, and we have a learning centre that is integral to the museum’s work in exploring that. If learning on the exhibition floor is understood through reading and listening, learning in the learning centre is through making and a much more dynamic programme that arcs across people’s lives and what they’re seeing more generally. Now with technology, you can dive deeper, and the museum website offers a lot of those other tools. ara Obviously both art history and history in general are contingent things that are always being rewritten, revised, completely reversed. Is that something that the museum needs to cover as well? sr I do think so, and I think every museum that has the work of living artists and makers has the advantage of being able to go back and talk to people. But you also realise that people have different opinions about an event or a time or a region or a movement. It is not one point of view, but many, and sometimes contested. ara How do you incorporate that contestation into the museum itself? sr It is sometimes by making that very explicit, by saying, “X looks at it like this, and Y has suggested this”, and then leaving it to the audience to decide whether they go deeper into that argument. ara You’ve talked before about how museums operate within the specific cultural, social and political frameworks of their home base, and in Hong Kong recently some of those frameworks have changed. How does the museum cope with those changes? Is it constantly adapting to them? sr Yes, we are always working with the reality of that situation. ara A lot of the work in the museum’s collection was created under very particular, sometimes stressful political, social and cultural frameworks. Is part of the job of the museum to explain the context around the work as well as to describe the work itself? sr The Sigg Collection comes up every time in relation to this. It’s a historical document, not just of 40 years of art history but also cultural and political history, and the social histories that sit around it. It’s absolutely part of the work that we do, and it is slow work, and it’s also about working carefully with the social reality of our cities here as they move and change and evolve. Sometimes it is very challenging, and we face those challenges every day that we’re open. On the floor, there’s no question that that happens. I’ll give you an example. We had a visit from a
family of three generations – a young child of about twelve, his mother and his grandmother, and they were looking at the photograph of Zhang Huan’s performance To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain [1995; which documents ten Beijing East Village artists lying naked on top o f each other in order to add a metre to Miaofeng Mountain]. The grandmother was vehemently upset by this image. “Is it odd”, she said, “why are they doing this? It’s ridiculous.” The child had read the label, had seen the documentary of making that work and just said, “No, no, no, you have to just let me explain that this work is about these people adding a metre to a mountain, and to do that, you have to take off your clothes. They weighed and measured themselves – the tallest, the heaviest at the bottom – and that’s how they did it.” By this time there was a crowd around the photograph listening to this young boy explaining the work but also completely willing to participate in the imagination of an artwork.
about choosing when we get on an airplane and why. It’s much easier to say less traffic for human beings, but let’s share the objects more generously and keep them up for longer and so on. We won’t make and break walls to make new exhibitions, you use existing configurations, and so on. It’s a really big change.
“It would be fair to say there are other canons that need to be put on the table. It’s about adding complexity to our thinking and giving the repressed or suppressed histories of the latetwentieth century and the twenty-first century oxygen to breathe”
ara We’ve talked about how m+ addresses the recent past and the present; how do you think it addresses the future?
Through a child’s eyes and words, the work then generated a fabulous wave of talking about making: about performance, about intention and absurdity, all of that together. I think that for me is absolutely what a museum is there to do. ara The ecological footprint of museums and cultural institutions is something of widespread concern at the moment. How are you addressing that? sr Sustainability is integrated into the work of the museum. We discuss it as part of exhibition programming, we discuss it as part of collection rotation, exhibitions that tour within the region (so that it’s always shared, more people get to see the results of that work) and longer exhibition periods, minimising international travel for people. It’s much easier to move objects than people. People will also travel less because there is a real attention to climate crisis and we do need to make those difficult decisions
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ara And yet one of the aims of m+ has been to encourage international audiences to visit Hong Kong, which in some ways runs counter to what we’ve just been talking about. sr Yes, but I think we are also talking about audiences within a train ride. One of the big things for Hong Kong is, once the borders open to the Greater Bay Area, there’s a population of 86 million people who are just a train-ride away. I think more and more that we would look towards regional audiences, coming through trains essentially, particularly given that the museum is built right next to the Hong Kong West Kowloon Station of the High Speed Rail.
sr The future is always a mutable thing. There are many pressures regarding the future, the first being how we keep running a sustainable base with covid still very present in the space, in Hong Kong, which means closures of the museum are regular. This is very challenging in relation to trying to think about what business-as-usual means. I think business-as-usual has to take into account the closure of the museum regularly. How do we make that then a sustainable reality for keeping the museum intact, which is a big challenge for all institutions around the world right now? Especially in relation to exhibition programming, and so on. Slowing things down is one way of doing that, and that feeds into the sustainability programming as well. Our next big exhibition is Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now (working title), which will open in November this year. She is such a critical person for this region, she has so much to say in relation to many decades of working across geographies. It’s a first in Greater China – a proper exhibition with depth. Kusama worked with poetry, with performance, with film, with publishing, as much as she did with painting and installation. And that embodies the ‘plus’ in m+ in every sense. This interview is part of a wider partnership with m+ exploring the museum’s collections and programmes. See artreview.com for artist interviews and highlights from the collection
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Art Featured
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What’s in a Book?
The Pelagic Tracts, 2018, giclée print of library books damaged by floods in Kerala, August 2018
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Violence, war, extinction, extraction, intolerance and all their opposites, according to Shubigi Rao, whose long-running project Pulp traces horror and hope in libraries and archives around the world. Next stop Singapore’s pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale by Adeline Chia
The Pelagic Tracts (still), 2018, single-channel digital hd video (colour, sound), 24 min 39 sec
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Complaint copy of P. M. Pasinetti, Venetian Red (1961), censored and retitled by the author as Amputations Bompiani in retaliation for the heavily edited edition of his novel published by Bompiani, Venice
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There’s a famous line from Heinrich Heine’s otherwise not particu- paper ‘maze’ that, the artist tells me, will mimic the feeling of being larly well known 1823 play Almansor: A Tragedy that goes, ‘Wherever “enveloped in the pages of a book”. The exact details are a closely they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings’. We all guarded secret until the launch, but Rao shares that the book will know what happened in Berlin 110 years later (the Jewish poet’s works include the usual bookish things – essays, interviews and artworks were particularly abhorred by the Nazis), and then even later, during – as well as offering an immersive experience. The main essay will the Second World War. Heine’s chilling observation – that cultural lay out an expanded conception of a library for tomorrow, which censorship inevitably leads to actual genocide – is more complex in includes the voices of the historically marginalised, such as women, reality, as the relationship between the different forms of violence can indigenous people and the genderqueer. Nontextual libraries, like be blurred and indistinct. But his line of thought has been genera- sound and oral-history archives, also feature. Meanwhile, the hourtive for Shubigi Rao. The India-born, Singapore-based artist has made long film Talking Leaves (2022) comprises polyvocal stories focused it her mission to trace a history of book burning, destruction and on cosmopolitan print communities in Singapore and Venice. She banishment, with the broader goal of exploring the cruelties human shares some raw footage featuring Singaporean scholar Faris Joraimi beings inflict on each other. speaking about batik, a textile treated with a wax-resistant dyeing Rao’s Pulp, initiated in 2013, is envisioned as a ten-year, multimedia technique. Like the many other disparate elements that have been folded into Pulp, this hand-crafted project (spanning film, photography “People say, ‘Books! So boring! Who material, made across the Malay world, and exhibitions to date), punctated by the publication of a new book every two cares?’ But there are these stories, and and replete with religious and cultural years. And the ground it covers goes I want to share them with everyone” histories, symbolism and idiosyncrabeyond bibliography; Rao treats any sies, can be seen as a form of text. repository of knowledge, not necessarily written, as a kind of library Rao’s passion for her subject is palpable, her conversation overor book. A wide range of threatened ‘archives’ are also considered: flowing with moving encounters and anecdotes. In Venice, she was from the intricate matrix of interspecies animal alarm calls to human particularly touched by Iveser (or the Venice Institute for the History brains. Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book appeared in 2016, of the Resistance and Contemporary Society), an organisation followed by Pulp ii: A Visual History of the Banned Book in 2018, which devoted to chronicling Second World War resistance in the Italian picked up the Singapore Literature Prize for creative nonfiction two city, including records of women’s wartime stories. “Everything has years later. Now, after something of an interruption to the routine, meaning,” she says. A rose garden had been planted to commemoPulp iii: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book will be launched as rate the Italian victims of Ravensbrück concentration camp for women; and a special tree planted for Armin Wegner, the only Singapore’s contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale. As a whole, Pulp documents both the history of book destruction German writer to openly denounce the treatment of Jews under Nazi and, conversely, the ways in which books have, in part or in whole, Germany. “People say, ‘Books! So boring! Who cares?’ But there are survived such attacks: the first a record of despair; the second evidence these stories,” and here her voice softens, “and I want to share them of hope. For the Singapore Pavilion, Rao will focus on the latter – the with everyone.” So, who does care? Those who don’t probably won’t courage and resistance represented by books (and their proxies) and change their minds anytime soon. It’s an issue I’ve been wrestling the people who write, read, make and save them. Sixteenth-century book by Petrarch, censored with in relation to Pulp itself: that it risks simply in four different ways, Venice preaching to the choir. Its audience is probably There will be three elements: a book; a film; and a
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book lovers, who don’t have to be convinced of the importance she tells me. She completed her diploma, ba and masters at Lasalle of books or the values they represent. Which isn’t to say that the College of the Arts and taught there for 11 years. other readerly rewards in Pulp are not rich or meaningful, not The misogyny she grew up with left a mark. For ten years or so least in the way in which the volumes allow the past to converse with she created works under the pseudonym S. Raoul, an imaginary senior male polymath to whom she pretended to be an assistant and the present. Containing numerous narratives of war and conflict, Rao’s books protegee. Under that moniker, she wrote pseudo-scientific papers have been published amid wave upon wave of threats to democracy and made art in a complex deferral of authorial authority. Among and freedom of expression, giving them a bleak but eternal currency. them were his studies of the deranging effects of art and discoveries Pulp ii came out in 2018 during the first year of Trump’s presidency, of immortal jellyfish. In her fictional biography, History’s Malcontents: alongside the rise of sectarianism and far-right movements around The Life and Times of S. Raoul (2013), Rao wrote: ‘His life could be better the world. The book contained a long section devoted to the destruc- seen as an argument for eccentricity and polymathic, indiscriminate tion and rebuilding of the Vijećnica library in multicultural Sarajevo, curiosity and endeavour (without regard to its perceived futility) which was bombed in 1992 by Serbian nationalists during the siege and most manifestly an argument against over-specialisation… of the city. In 2018, the reference to such brute terrorism read like An understated heretic, but a literary obscurantist, a man of the a timely reminder of what can happen when nationalist sentiment Enlightenment who behaved like a Romantic, a pedant sans sophand aggression go unchecked. istry who was frequently facetious’. In 2022… Well. Perhaps ‘reading’, in all its forms, really is This turns out to be a pretty accurate self-portrait. (In Pulp i she in decline... described herself as ‘an anachronistic child of the Enlightenment with There are bookish children, and there are bookish children of the squishy innards of an incurable Romantic’.) Pulp is less rococo in bookish parents with a fantastic library in which to lose oneself. style than History’s Malcontents, but it too channels Rao’s prodigious Born in Mumbai in 1975, Rao spent part of her childhood in intellect. Pulp i was an unapologetically erudite introduction to the Darjeeling and the jungle outskirts of Kaladhungi, then a village project, ranging from authoritative discussion of the democratising in the foothills of the Himalayas. Access to her parents’ beloved library, effects of the print revolution in Europe to deconstructing the catedescribed in Pulp i as composed of natural and political history, liter- gories of truth and falsehood in art. Guiding this is an unshakeably ature and travel, is one of her formative influences. But over time, earnest rhetoric, with nakedly declarative passages like, ‘The study of it suffered several losses (robbery, termites) before being torn apart literature should mean the study of the world. To remove it, or to offer during her parents’ divorce, when she was a teen. So, while her subse- it to only the privileged, is to deny access to a shared human archive of quent research in library destruction around the world is a testament a spectrum of histories, ideas, truths, conflicts and resolutions, contito a lifelong bibliomania, it also a way of processing personal loss. nuities, forms of beauty and expression, philosophies and yearnings.’ Rao’s knowledge – and her thirst for it – is apparent in any conTo an ear used to the more modestly pitched moral registers versation with her. She has said repeatedly in interviews that she of most contemporary art – where ambivalences are often seen as was constrained by misogyny in India. Her first degree, from Delhi productive spaces where viewers draw their own conclusions – such University, was in English Literature. In 2002 direct statements sound almost Victorian. That The Yellow Scarf (still), she moved with her partner to Singapore, where said, there are pleasures to Rao’s clear thinking two-channel digital hd video (colour, sound), “(she) felt human first and female second”, and cogency, especially when there is so much 20 min 24 sec
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Written in the Margins, 2017, documentation from Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2017
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Two Transects, 2021, dual photoprints, giclée prints on Hahnemühle Ultrasmooth Fine Art Photo Rag, 180 × 120 cm
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art writing that is limp, puffy or wilfully obscure. Her books, which Then it struck me: what Rao is doing with Pulp is building her own are filled with investigative journalism, intellectual curiosity and library of conscience – a multifarious archive of print-related texts, images and films that are linked to struggles towards justice and compassion, feel refreshing and strangely cleansing. Still, one might find more room for interpretation in the short freedom. This reangled my perspective and reconciled me to an aspect art films in the Pulp universe, where ideas are explored with greater of the project I found occasionally difficult: the lack of any coyness, poetic license and poignancy. The Pelagic Tracts (2018) is a fictionalised slipperiness or equivocation. But you don’t get moral indeterminacy account of a book discovered by S. Raoul – in this story, our friend is a in the Holocaust Museum. You get deep, dark sorrow – and also hope. British officer in colonial India – that maps the trade route of a group In Rao’s Venice showcase, an inspirational model that appears of imaginary book smugglers. Shot in Kochi and produced for the 2018 in the new film and book is Baynatna, an Arabic-language library Kochi-Muziris Biennale (after Venice, Rao will resume her role as the in Berlin that was started by a Syrian refugee. Beginning with a few artistic director of the postponed current edition of the Indian art donated books in a refugee shelter, Baynatna has grown to contain event, slated to open in December), the video features local librarians some 3,500 tomes (including German and English translations of Arab and writers playing the roles of the smugglers and their descendants texts) and is currently housed in Berlin’s Central and State Library. – and tackles how one might live in the wake of cultural destruction. Now a salon that hosts readings, music performances and workshops, In A Small Study of Silence (2021), Rao examines species extinction Baynatna has become a key gathering point for the Arabic-speaking in the human world and in nature, community and its allies. So far, Baynatna “It was our way of saying, I love you, seems to have settled permanently into with the ‘language’ of the forest being composed of interspecies alarm-calls its current location, but perhaps true I miss you, I wish we were made by animals to warn each other to its roots as an initiative by refugees, back in the woods together” of predators, a rich ecological lexicon it makes no assumptions about permaincreasingly endangered because of habitat loss. The elegiac mood is nence. Its furniture is modular and easily assembled or taken apart. sustained by shots of cemeteries, nighttime scenes of forests at the But if need be, everything can be packed up and moved to a new place. edge of human habitations and looped cycles of haunting birdcalls. Meaning ‘between us’ and serving the underserved, Baynatna Rao tells me that the different strains of birdsong were recorded makes a case for libraries being a sort of emergency van that provides by her family members, who are living on three separate continents, underrated humanitarian aid to devastated communities. Libraries and shared on a family group-chat as a form of private language of educate, console and dignify. Their destruction, as Pulp has so assidaffection despite physical separation: “It was our way of saying, I love uously chronicled, is to be mourned. But where they spring up, especially in the most unexpected yet needy of places, they make you, I miss you, I wish we were back in the woods together.” In Pulp ii there is a conversation with a librarian from Antwerp’s fragile stands against despair. Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library about the inherent inadequaBack to Heine: if you burn books, you will eventually burn cies of any cataloguing system. The library is named after the Belgian people. Rao’s work banks on the reverse logic – if you wrote books novelist and pioneer of the Flemish language (at a time when French was and built libraries, you could, potentially, falteringly, build up new dominant) Hendrik Conscience, and collects texts to do with Flemish forms of humanity. ara heritage. Conscience Library: this shortened form and the associations it conjurs reverberates through my mind. A library of conscience. I’ve Shubigi Rao’s Pulp iii: A Short Biography of the Banished Book is on view at the Singapore Pavilion in the Arsenale as part of the 59th heard of sites of conscience, which mark places and events of trauma, like Venice Biennale, 23 April – 27 November gulags and slave houses. But a library of conscience is something new.
A Small Study of Silence (still), 2021, single-channel digital hd video, (colour, 4-channel sound), 29 min 36 sec all images Courtesy Shubigi Rao
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Legacy Russell on the Subversive Power of Quilts Interviewed by Clarity Haynes
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The New Bend, curated by Legacy Russell and currently on view at Hauser & Wirth, New York, looks at the raced, classed and gendered traditions of quilting and textile through the work of 12 contemporary artists. Its title is an explicit reference and homage to the quilters of Gee’s Bend, a Black women’s cooperative set up on a former slave-owning plantation in Alabama and which, since the 1960s, has become known for its intergenerational quilting practices and striking, modernist compositions. Born out of a necessity to recycle scraps of fabric, the quilts have in recent years garnered institutional attention, including a major retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum in 2002, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. The show’s artists – Anthony Akinbola, Eddie R. Aparicio, Dawn Williams Boyd, Diedrick Brackens, Tuesday Smillie, Tomashi Jackson, Genesis Jerez, Basil Kincaid, Eric N. Mack, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Qualeasha Wood and Zadie Xa – respond to this artistic lineage in their work, reiterating the need to remake art historical canons. Russell is an artist, writer and the executive director at The Kitchen, New York. Her recent book – and artworld sensation – Glitch Feminism (2020) looked at the emancipatory potential of the digital space through the work of artists seeking to rewire systems of race, gender and sexuality, and the way identities are performed – Juliana Huxtable, Sondra Perry and Sin Wai Kin among them. Here Russell explains how a similar multifaceted approach informs The New Bend, tracing the legacy of this part of Black art history and interrogating the entanglement of the medium with class and gender, and subsequent distinctions between craft and art. artreview asia Can you describe your first engagement with the Gee’s Bend quilts and how it informed your subsequent relationship with the work and your thinking? legacy russell I don’t remember the exact moment that I first saw a Gee’s Bend quilt. I remember that we had some books, and a poster in the apartment that I grew up in. This was part of the visual vernacular of my being raised in a Black family and growing up in [New York City’s] East Village. It was probably not until I was in graduate school that I came into a greater awareness about how it could exist across visual culture. I think it’s really important to talk about this, because I learned about Gee’s Bend quilts inside of my family and domestic space, but it was not taught inside of the classroom space. Black thought, feminist thought and queer thought often come in through the lessons that we learn from our chosen families. I think that’s really part of the task and challenge to tackle here – the questions about what is and is not
standing inside different models of scholarship and academy, and how things are canonised and then brought into the world as part of a broader discourse. ara When you were studying art history, were you thinking, ‘I can’t believe that this is not part of what we’re learning about?’ I know that you love abstraction. lr Yes, and the histories of abstraction and modernism that are taught in Art History 101 are often dominated by a certain type of white cis-male benchmark. Then within the conceptual framework of abstraction, and incredible scholars like Édouard Glissant, abstraction and opacity come into intersection with each other. Those are really important discussions that I’ve felt deeply committed to as a curator, researcher
“These artists recognise that the process of production is always political, especially if you are coming from a historically oppressed, marginalised history. They are aware of themselves as producers and drivers of those technologies, and they think deeply about our relationship to labour through and beyond the artworld” and student of art history. Queer abstraction and Black abstraction have done important work to crack open and draw attention to some of the failures of pedagogy as tied to abstraction and modernism. It’s not an uncommon experience for students who have studied art history for years to not know about Gee’s Bend. The 12 artists in the show have different stories about how they have arrived at this knowledge. For some of them, this exhibition was one of those turning points. Awareness of Gee’s Bend, a network and community – especially a community of women who are doing collective, economic, cooperative, political work – can be so instructive to artists here and now. facing page Basil Kincaid, Four Eyes One Vision, 2021, mixed fabric, on wall, 264 × 152 × 3 cm
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ara The show illustrates that wonderfully. The Jacquard loom played a crucial role in the development of early computing technology. One of the artists in the show, Qualeasha Wood, uses a Jacquard loom to make work that expresses the way, among other things, digital and material experience can’t be separated. Are there any other examples from the show that illuminate the connections between textiles and the digital? lr Sadie Plant’s Zeros and Ones [1997] is an interesting text because it underscores the way that the history of computing and the history of weaving are deeply intertwined. There’s a great discussion about how the early computers were actual human beings. From the period of weaving as a technology, moving into what it is to embody computing – to literally be a computer. And who those people were, as labourers, often gendered labourers. When we think about where those things intersect with American capitalism, it expands into a discussion about the machine. We know that this is race, gender and class history – the bodies that have been indicated as machines inside of capitalism, and how that has been instrumentalised to advance certain goals economically and otherwise. Thinking about the history of the pixel, we can consider a pixel as a stitch. What Qualeasha’s work shows us is that there are these interwoven, complex machinations that live inside of these histories and the ways we can analyse them. The way that the digital intersects with our understanding of the material comes up as well in Tomashi Jackson’s work. Tomashi uses printing processes and the act of cutting to bring abstracted imagery into painterly form. We see it in Diedrick Brackens’s work as well; Diedrick is thinking deeply about the traditions of being a weaver. He often speaks with such care and vision about carrying on that history, really claiming it, like ‘I am a weaver’. Naming that as a category, taxonomy and designation. This is important because these classifications have been segregated from one another in art history. The idea of being a weaver or artisan lives separately from this idea of being an artist. To allow those traditions to live in the same space and time is an important political act. And it is deeply reparative inside of histories that have done real harm by forcing these categories to live separately without acknowledgement. It’s interesting too to think about Tuesday Smillie’s relationship to the banner, a material that indicates a message and can exist inside of a space of protest but also in a parade. It can be festive, but it’s also a material of refusal, a moving architecture that reveals and deletes, or redacts information.
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ara I was thinking about motion, too, about banners and flags and how some of the works in the show hang from the ceiling, and others invite movement around them in space and a looking into or through. Others lean or hang on the wall. Why is the motion of the viewer through the space important? lr Typically in a group exhibition there are considerations about how each work can hold its own space, but I felt excited about bringing these different artists into dialogue with each other, and about how the curatorial framework could be less sterile and rigid. It was important to me that it not be displayed heavily on top of the work, but rather that the works themselves dictate how the framework should perform. I was committed to this idea of what it means to splice and to stitch and to abstract an image, but also to create a new image by doing some of that remixing, and having the visual experience of the exhibition space allow for different sight lines to go literally through the work. To have opportunities where you can look through works into other works and begin to see the relationship between artists, and between media and materials. Speaking as a curator, I’m situated in the continuous intersection of art and technology, but I’m also deeply invested in performance, and the performance of objects. I think that objects are not objects; they are proxies for so many other things, and they’re always living and moving and dynamic in that way. For that reason, the exhibition becomes about movement and movement research, encouraging people to look through and look up, look down and walk around. Actually, those are opportunities to come into a deeper awareness of our separation between body and machine. The relationship between a history of objecthood and a history of performance and movement. ara In thinking about the artists and their different involvement with Gee’s Bend quilts, I saw that Diedrick Brackens is on the board of the Souls Grown Deep organisation. Eric N. Mack’s Proposition: for wet Gee’s Bend Quilts to replace the American flag – Permanently was in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. And I think at least one of the artists in the show made work in homage to Gee’s Bend quilts specifically
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for the show. Could you talk more about the meaning of the quilts to the artists and their work? lr Eric N. Mack, Tomashi Jackson, Basil Kincaid and Dawn Williams Boyd are artists who have been very pronounced about Gee’s Bend quilters being their ancestors. These are artists that are drawing on them in a direct familial kinship; they feel that very deeply. Other artists like Zadie Xa, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Anthony Akinbola, Eddie R. Aparicio and Genesis Jerez are in conversation with Gee’s Bend, in that there is an intersection with their work and also a departure from it. Zadie Xa is Korean Canadian and is based in the uk. She creates work that often brings together a lineage of a feminist Korean history, exploring the language of a kind of feminist
shamanism in Korean tradition. She is bringing together some of those traditions alongside a direct citation and celebration of Gee’s Bend. As you enter the gallery, you see one side of these amazing banners that are a more traditional approach to pointing to what the Gee’s Bend quilting practice looks like, and on the other side, her own life experience and tradition is in direct dialogue. These are things that the artists in very different ways are thinking about, and they are also bringing their own traditions, from inside their own diasporas. This is an integral part of how this can all be organic and keep living. Zadie Xa, Ancestor Work: Re-remember / Black Water Tiger, 2022, acrylic on machine-sewn and handstitched linen, denim and hemlock wood, 165 × 175 cm
ara The Freedom Quilting Bee was formed by Gee’s Bend quilters at the height of the civil rights movement and played a big role in the development of that community. Tuesday Smillie is one of the artists in the show who makes work that references protest banners and queer pride celebrations. The theme of resistance and social justice is really strong in this show – is there a politics to quilting? lr The question of politics stands inside of every one of the works that are in the room. For example, Dawn Williams Boyd is fearless and courageous in the ways she is taking a very traditional approach to techniques that have been handed down across generations and applying them in an entirely new way by bringing in a conversation that engages American media and broadcast. These are really tender moments. Diedrick Brackens’s work often engages head-on with the ongoing hiv and aids crisis, shedding light on how Black and Latinx people are disproportionately impacted by these histories as they intersect with the social and cultural impact of processes such as gentrification. Having the exhibition sited in Chelsea, the apex of so many important histories and the enduring contributions of people of colour and queer people over time, makes that all the more resonant and urgent. These artists are thinking about the ways that those different traditions and histories come into clashing conversation. They recognise that the process of production is always political, especially if you are coming from a historically oppressed, marginalised history. They are courageous, because they hold that space. Through their work and their machinic production, they are aware of themselves as producers and drivers of those technologies, and they think deeply about our relationship to labour through and beyond the artworld. ara That’s an important aspect of this exhibition that goes all the way back through the history of the Gee’s Bend quilts. I’m thinking, too, about the intimacy of the quilts. You have described the show as ‘a love letter to the women of Gee’s Bend’. There’s a feeling here of reaching back through time and honouring the past and present of ancestors and lineages. I also thought
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Qualeasha Wood, Ctrl+Alt+Del, 2021, cotton Jacquard weave, glass beads, 213 × 158 × 1 cm
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Eddie R. Aparicio, Holbein En Crenshaw (Washington Blvd. and Crenshaw Blvd., la, ca), 2018, mixed media, 351 × 381 × 13 cm
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of the aids Memorial Quilt, and I’m moved by the ways that quilts can address loss and underscore ideas of family and relationships. lr That’s another big question, remembering the exact moment where I learned about the aids Quilt as a collective action. That was also something that came in my homeschooling, as in pedagogy at home. Also because I went to Quaker school; it was something that’s a big part of thinking about questions of social justice and civil rights. It’s a really sobering and necessary line to draw, when we think about these different models of collective work, cooperative work but also asking for a certain type of reparations. In many of these histories there is so much that has been taken. Within the context of the unfolding histories of civil rights, social justice inside of the United States, as much as there are victories that have been earned and hard-foughtfor, they also continue to just be deeply eroded. We’re in a situation now where it’s less than 48 hours since the Supreme Court reinstated racial gerrymandering in Alabama, which is where the Gee’s Bend quilters began. It’s important to talk about the fact that these things are inextricably intertwined, that this is a living history and not a romantic, purely aesthetic history. Something I think is dangerous is the idea that material can be studied purely as its form, rather than its context. It’s important to talk about how slippery that can be and to see the ways that artists take things back and reapply them. And hopefully give us some new proposals about what the world should look like. ara Yes. There is a tendency to romanticise the quilts, which is often noticeable in how they’ve been written about. lr I think it’s also really interesting that quilts are a material that is domestic and associated with a certain leisure or comfort. Part of what I think is amazing and instructive about Gee’s Bend quilts is that these are family trees. These are maps. These are archival documents. It’s important for us to not look at them as materials that should be fetishised and consumed through the lens of a static leisure. Rather, they need to
be vivified and animated, always. That feels urgent to keep centre in this conversation. ara You’ve spoken about the importance of not only including these quilts as essential to the story of modernism and abstraction but of restructuring the way we think about the canon and art history. Recently the Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim brought up similar questions. But there’s this tendency to just say, ‘Well, let’s insert this person, or let’s insert this practice’. I think what you’re talking about is very different from that. Can you say more about how this exhibition can function as a turning point for how we think about contemporary art and art history? lr It would be remiss to not point to another exhibition that is doing a different type of
ara I do think now is a time when this kind of change is really taking place. You see it with Black Lives Matter and monuments coming down. Recently a monumental Simone Leigh sculpture took the place of a Robert E. Lee statue in New Orleans. It’s a time of openness, and rethinking – with the #MeToo movement as well.
quilting that I also have been involved in: Kahlil Robert Irving’s solo show that is on view at moma. Thelma Golden and I worked together on that show, and one of the conversations that I kept going back to with Kahlil was this idea of where art and craft have been segregated. We are necessarily tasked in this next chapter to do better work to interrogate why that is. These are not passive decisions. The history of museums and many institutional sites is rising out of a history of class Diedrick Brackens, survival is a shrine, not the small space near the limit of life, 2021, cotton and acrylic yarn 234 × 249 cm
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and gender and racial sciences. These are deeply volatile sites that are having to do restorative work, to navigate the fact that they have been complicit with a certain systemic failure of care in how they have been built and founded. Kahlil’s exhibition is one of many steps, of many different artists across generations who are doing some of that work to restructure, reshape and refocus our view. I think it’s an exciting moment because of the fact that this exhibition does not exist in isolation, but in the same place and time as many things that are asking questions about how to do this work better and also how to ask the public, ask audiences, ask next generations to come into a different level of responsibility, stewardship and caring for this next chapter of art history. That is really what my great hope is.
lr And in terms of how we conceive of art and artists, quilting can be instructive because it breaks apart the entire idea of what an artist is supposed to be. This romantic, problematic idea of mastery, of a genius isolated in the studio, as opposed to opening up a collective model that requires dialogue and discourse and exchange, and contribution that comes from many different points. Feminism teaches that, Black history teaches that, Indigenous history teaches that, queer history teaches that. This exhibition is looking towards that future, and hopefully it’s an opportunity to build and accelerate towards it. Because certainly the arts will not survive if the traditions that have been established from previous chapters of art history are the only ones that are recognised. We have to do some work of reimagining. The New Bend is on view at Hauser & Wirth, New York, through 2 April Clarity Haynes is an artist and writer based in New York
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Kerima Tariman Amid the ongoing orgy of extrajudicial killing in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines, one resistance fighter nevertheless understood the revolutionary potential of art by Marv Recinto
Kerima Tariman, 2013. Photo: Kiri Dalena
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Rodrigo Duterte’s tenure as president of the Philippines is finally coming to an end, and on 9 May the country will elect a new leader. (Many on the left hope it will be the current vice president, Leni Robredo.) Duterte’s term has infamously facilitated the extrajudicial killings of almost 30,000 individuals, according to Rappler, whose founder and ceo, Maria Ressa, is among Duterte’s staunchest critics and the first Filipino recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. (Duterte has admitted to killing at least three men personally.) While the Philippine artistic community has mourned these casualties and continuously called for justice, the death of revolutionary poet Kerima Lorena Tariman, on 20 August 2021, stunned it. Tariman perished following an armed altercation with the 79th Infantry Battalion at the Hacienda Raymunda in Silay City, Negros, alongside her comrade Joery Dato-on Cocuba. Tariman was both a respected writer and leading cadre of the Bagong Hukbong Bayan (New People’s Army, or npa), the (state-designated terrorist) military wing of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (Communist Party of the Philippines, or cpp). The Philippine state describes Tariman as a ‘notorious terrorist’, but sympathetic others on the left have dedicated numerous artworks, murals and discussions to the martyred writer. Tariman was an accomplished revolutionary poet whose last anthology, Pag-aaral sa Oras: Mga Lumang Tula Tenggol sa Bago (Reflections on Time: Old Poems About the New), was lauded by cnn Philippines as one of the top books of 2017. In her foreword she writes of how many of these poems are decades old, ‘pero sa kabilang banda, bago pa rin’ (but on the other hand, new still) – reflecting on the stasis and retrenchment of the present sociopolitical crisis that has made verse from the 1990s and 2000s endure into the present. Tariman maintained a communist critical praxis against imperial, feudal and bureaucratic-capitalist forces that have sustained inequality within the country. She wrote consistently in Philippine dialects – Tagalog, Ilocano, Visayan and more – in an anti-imperial act recognising the effect of the English language on the country’s psyche. Indeed, local dialects are generally the preferred mode of communication for most Filipinos despite English and Filipino holding joint status as the official languages of the Philippines. The prominence of English is a trace of America’s imperial control from 1898 until 1946, and its enduring reach. Tariman writes in deep, formal Filipino, embracing the repetitious cadence of syllables and rhymes. The English translations of Tariman’s poetry presented here are my own: literal and unofficial. Duterte’s ascent into office in 2016 ruptured the somewhat liberaldemocratic era inaugurated in 1986 with the ejection of dictator Ferdinand Emmanuel E. Marcos. Duterte’s vulgar and sexist everyman persona endeared him to many in the Philippines, reflecting growing frustration with class inequalities resulting from the oligarchic families who have retained the majority of political, economic and cultural power. However, his crimes against humanity have garnered widespread criticism: the International Criminal Court is currently investigating the drug war that has claimed the lives of almost 8,000 mostly urban poor people, while his authoritarian regime has killed over 400 peasant activists in the countryside. As the covid-19 pandemic raged on, he imposed censorship through the 2020 Anti-Terror Law, which has branded dissenters as terrorists and enabled their incarceration. Many have drawn parallels between Duterte and Marcos (whose 21-year tenure, according to Amnesty International, counts over 107,200 killed, tortured or incarcerated victims).
In spite of what many might have celebrated as an end to Duterte’s era, a new nightmare has arisen in the joint bid by children of Marcos and Duterte for the country’s most powerful political seats: Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ R. Marcos Jr and Sara Z. Duterte have joined forces as running mates for the presidency and vice presidency respectively. (In the Philippines, the president and vicepresident run independent of one another but may form such alliances, allowing different political parties to hold the top two seats, as is the present case.) The two have promised to sustain the current president’s legacy. The publication of Pag-aaral… in 2017 reflects Tariman’s acknowledgement of the country’s sustained history of struggle against Spanish colonialism, American imperialism and the corrupt governments of the twentieth century to today; its unfortunate timelessness is due to historical crisis sustaining, repeating and revising itself. Just a year into Duterte’s presidency, the revolutionary poet likely recognised that the patterns of extreme state and social unrest heralded by the president might initiate widespread revolution. However, while the peaceful edsa i (1986) and edsa ii (2001) revolutions ejected kleptocrats Marcos and Joseph Estrada (1998–2001), they installed inheritors Cory Aquino (1986–92) and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2001–10), who continued to perpetuate the bourgeois, dynastic politics that sustained inequality. The sanctified Cory Aquino, known as the ‘mother of democracy’, was an aristocratic housewife from the wealthy and powerful Cojuangco clan, unqualified to lead but who accepted the responsibility when her husband, Ninoy Aquino – Marcos’s political rival – was assassinated in 1983 (their son Noynoy would serve as president from 2010 to 2016). The Aquinos, despite their opposition to Marcos and sympathy for the Philippine people, were nonetheless part of the wealthy ruling class. Arroyo – daughter of former president Diosdado P. Macapagal Sr (1961–65) and vice president to Estrada – assumed the presidency following Estrada’s impeachment but was later charged with electoral sabotage for her 2004 election victory and plunder (which ally Duterte’s Supreme Court dismissed in 2016). The decades of nepotism demonstrate that these figureheads’ interests have always been in retaining their privileged status. What Tariman believed in and called for was a complete revolution of the proletariat and agrarian workers to initiate a new system led by the masses. The decades of exploitation are reflected in the timelessness of Tariman’s poems. In the collection’s title poem, ‘Pag-Aaral sa Oras’ (Reflections of Time, 2003), she writes: Pinag-aaralan ko ang oras Kung paano ito lumilipas … Pinag-aaralan ko Ang segundo at taon Ang pagkakataon at padron. … Matagalang digmang bayan Ay gaano katagal? Ito ba’y usapin ng bilis o bagal? … Ang tanong palagi Ay kailan magwawagi?
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I studied time How it passes … I studied The seconds and years The opportunities and patterns … The protracted people’s war Is how long? Is it a matter of how quick or how slow? … The question is always When will we win?
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The ‘protracted war’ extends beyond any party, person or changing moment, such as the 2022 presidential elections. Tariman and the npa have devoted decades to overthrowing the systems they believe have failed the Philippine people. This has made the npa the longest ongoing communist insurgency in the world. The repetition in ‘Pag-aaral sa Oras’ is not about the singular instances of corruption, rather the prolonged revolution against the continuing systems of oppression; her poetry makes clear it is not a matter of if but when. The altercation that cost Tariman her life is just one in an ongoing clash between the npa and the Philippine military. The npa, founded in 1969, bases its tenets in Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology; their founding ‘Basic Rules of the New People’s Army’ read, ‘It is the revolutionary army of the broad masses of the Filipino people against us imperialism, the comprador big bourgeoisie, the landlord class and the bureaucrat capitalists’. The communist army assumes a Maoist approach to agrarian revolution and protracted war to ‘seize and consolidate political power’, since 64 percent of the population during the Marcos era lived in rural areas. In 2020 half still live in the countryside, making guerrilla warfare the preferred method of revolution among Philippine communists, rather than a Leninistindustrial approach. The Philippines, United States and European Union have designated the groups terrorist organisations, but mounting frustration and animosity for Duterte and his government have renewed interest in a communist revolt. For obvious reasons, the size of the cpp and npa’s memberships are unknown, but their growing numbers have forced the president – a former member of the cpp’s youth organisation Kabataang Makabayan (Nationalist Youth) – to initiate peace talks, though these have recently been called off. In a 2021 government address focused on countering communism, Duterte said: ‘I’ve told the military and the police that if they find themselves in an armed encounter with the communist rebels, kill them’.
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Through poetry, Tariman demonstrated the ideological reasons for joining the resistance movement. She writes explicitly of Karl Marx in ‘Aralin sa Ekonomyang Pampulitika’ (A Lesson in Political Economy, 2001), excerpted here: Nang matuklasan ng isang Aleman Ang labis na halag Ay nakalkula na rin Ang lahat-lahat na.
When a German discovered The surplus value He also calculated Everything.
Halaga ng tao Halaga ng lupa Halaga ng tula Halaga ng digma
The value of people The value of land The value of poems The value of war
Kung sa loob pa lamang Ng tatlong minutong trabaho Ay nalikha na ng manggagawa Ang buong araw niyang sweldo, Ang tantos ng pagsasamantala Ay ilang porsyento? Ay, ang labis na halaga – O pagpapahalaga – Sa superganansya’t supertubo! … Bakit ba napakahalaga Ng paghahangad ng labis? Kung ang labis-labis, Ang katumbas ay krisis
If within Three minutes of work The worker has already produced their wage for the day The rate of abuse Is what percent? The cost is high – Or excessive – Of the superprofit! … Why is it so important To want excessively? If this excessiveness, Results in crisis?
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Tariman introduces Marx’s concept of surplus value by highlighting the discrepancy between labour and wages to the reader and raising the question: if the worker makes their entire earnings within the first three minutes of work, where does the rest of it go? She explains that with this notion Marx inadvertently also identified the value of material, or the exploitation and reduced worth of the people, land, poems and war that form the product in the pursuit of profit. Within the next lines, the repetition of ‘value’ further enforces the mutually diminished worth of the means of production relative to the capital itself; however, the line ‘the value of war’ is open-ended: does it refer to the wars that resulted in colonial and imperial subjugation by first Spain and then America? Or does it refer to the guerrilla war waged by the rebels, fighting to augment their value? The following stanza contextualises the peasants’ labour, that any work beyond the three minutes is the surplus value belonging to the ruling classes. Tariman lastly questions whether this greed is worth the exploitation of the masses. For decades, Tariman lived in the rural areas of the country, immersing herself in the plight of those who constitute the majority of the population. In 2000, after an incomplete stint at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, where she pursued Philippine Studies and was the managing editor of the campus paper Philippine Collegian, the poet was arrested in Ilagan, Isabela, for alleged illegal possession of firearms. At the time, Tariman was undergoing an education programme with the npa in Cagayan, where she hoped to understand the peasant struggle better. Her arrest and detention were ‘an indispensable lesson on the reality of class struggle’, she said of the experience in a 2012 interview with Sarah Raymundo. The same year of her arrest, Tariman penned the following passage of ‘Malapyudalismo’ (Semifeudalism): malapyudalismo. pinagdikit-dikit na titik na sumusuyod sa ulo ito’y palaisipang kaydaling matanto: tumatanghod sa taltalon tulad ng multong tuliro, gumagapang sa mga gapas at sa nabaling araro. pinagdikit-dikit na titik, na kurok sa sikmura sa tuwing sasapit ang apit. masakit na likod kagat ng lamok iyak ng bata maganit na tuhod murang sigarilyo mahal na abono inutang na kwarta takot sa panginoon – sumada ito ng sanlakasang talinghaga sa salaysay ng Mannalon sa Pulang mandirigma.
semifeudalism. letters glued together that squeeze your head this is a puzzle that’s easy to figure out: looking at the farms like a confused ghost, creeping towards the cotton and the broken plough. letters glued together, that make my stomach growl whenever the harvest comes. painful back mosquito bite crying child tough knees cheap cigarettes expensive fertilizer borrowed money fear of god – all these result in a powerful parable the story of the Peasants of the Red warrior.
Tariman’s blunt poetry refuses to hide behind metaphors, relying instead on reality’s details to express the circumstances of the agrarian population. This narrative device is used in witness literature to archive the historical testimonies of these largely obscured accounts. In ‘Malapyudalismo’ the poet narrates the thoughts preoccupying the peasantry as they go about their daily lives – like the sensory marks of mosquito bites or bodily pains – alongside the omnipresent dread of debt. Tariman explains how the mounting minutiae culminate in the conditions for revolution – ‘the story of the Peasants / the Red warrior’. In the 2012 interview Tariman speaks of the honesty about one’s political commitments in art, saying that ‘when one creates art without being apologetic about its political implications, one is actually being quite ethical’. As a communist leader, Tariman practised her ideology and perished defending her commitment to overthrowing imperialism, feudalism, capitalism and the bourgeoisie – systems the poet claims have created the conditions for the Philippine class struggle. In a trigger-happy country that defines dissenters as terrorist, to associate with communism is to risk red-tagging; even in this writing, I’ve omitted other sympathetic artists’ names for their safety. Admittedly, political theories of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism resonate with the liberal left and have done since the Marcos era; but this lethal administration has failed to demonstrate any boundaries in its attacks. With another potentially treacherous regime on the horizon, safety may take precedence over defiance of censorship. However, even those who don’t claim to be communists can learn something from Tariman’s relentless pursuit for equality – to look beyond the immediate presidential elections and question the long-term system as it stands. In her absence, her legacy endures in the empathetic and sincere literature she leaves behind. Tariman has encouraging words for comrades in a more recent poem, ‘Hukbo ng Maralita’ (Army of the Poor, 2017): Paano nga ba kasama Ang pabayaan ang nakaraan? Kalimutan ang ginhawa At pagkamakasarili, Panghawakan ang kalagayan Na kinakaharap, Upang mapagtibay Ang prinsipyadong pagsasamahan? Umbante nang walang pag-aalinlangan, Daakil kahit kung minsan, Naririyan ang kabiguan, Sa atin naman ang tagumpay Sa huling paglalaban.
Marv Recinto is a writer based in London
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How, comrade Do we let go of the past? Forget the peace And one’s self, Hold on to the promise Of the future, To strengthen Our shared principles? Move forward without hesitation, Because sometimes, Failure is there, Victory is ours, At the last fight.
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In the Balance
Object 4 (preparatory study), from the series Artifacts (Yixing clay), 2022, digital image
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Michael Wang’s artworks delineate cultural and ecological interconnections on a planetary scale by Venus Lau
Vessel 7 (preparatory study), from the series Artifacts (Yixing clay), 2022, digital image
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Taihu Crab (preparatory study), 2022, digital image
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American artist Michael Wang is an expert when it comes to exploring beloved collectibles of ancient Chinese intelligentsia (literati) and cultural ecosystems at global scales. Albeit his starting point is usually staples of Chinese horticulture. They were categorised as changwu something smaller, something local, something that becomes a ‘pres- (‘superfluous objects’) in literati culture; ‘useless’, ‘excessive’ things, sure point’. In World Trade (2017), an installation in which minimalist just like paintings, calligraphic texts and other cultural objects flat steel sculptures are juxtaposed with prints of newspaper pages, created for pleasure, they represent a sublime ‘unstained’ by function for example, he traces the flow of steel removed from the site of the as a necessity of survival. However, the concept of ‘utility’ is always former World Trade Center following 9/11 as it is recycled through to relative in human history. A Taihu rock’s ‘allure’ lies in its folds and Chinese and Malaysian metal markets: steel from a defunct architec- the perforated forms created by the untended design of nature. The ture reincarnated in found cold-rolled steel sheets that might equally stones did not feed ancient Chinese intellectuals, as did rice, but be minimalist sculptures. The smooth, metallic surfaces that shone they were manifestations of scholars’ worship for tiangong (‘heavwith cold light, invisibly etched with the material memory of the en’s craftsmanship’), beauty singlehandedly created by the invishistorical tragedy, were further intertwined with the narratives of ible hand of nature as it manifested its otherwise invisible cultural art history following their display (as artworks) in Wang’s 2017 solo capital. Even today, the boundary between ‘useless’ and ‘useful’ with regard to Lake Tai is unclear: for example, on the one hand the algae exhibition at Foxy Production, New York. It’s Lake Tai, one of China’s Five Lakes (and the third largest, that blooms as a result of eutrophication contaminates drinking providing a habitat for more than a hundred types of freshwater fish), water in the area; on the other, it has spawned new technologies that is the ‘pressure point’ generating Wang’s project at Rong Zhai and economies, among them industrial filtration systems for algae (‘Rong’s residence’) – the 1918 mansion that hosts the Fondazione removal, that might help create cleaner futures. Wang purchased a Prada’s Shanghai art exhibitions. bulk amount of the lake’s biomass The project is Wang’s second dive from companies specialised in such into aquaculture in the Yangtze business, and from the lake’s River region (in which Shanghai is ‘useless’ and ‘unwanted’ bio-broth located): two years ago, Wang parthere emerge the simulacra of entiticipated in the Shanghai Biennale, cing aquatic delicacies and precious Bodies of Water, showing monocollectable stones. chrome paintings from the Terroir Taihu rocks are a token for love series (2015–) that were coloured or fetishism towards uncontrolwith crushed bedrock taken from lable nonhuman forces, or a dynamism that transcends human time seven cities along the Yangtze Basin. scales. Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi Presenting a geological palette that (772–846 ce), filled with admirawas much broader than the usual tion for the rocks, described them earth tone-spectrum one might as examples of ‘compressed Chaos’. assume was present, the works He also regarded the rocks as a offered a rich alluvial horizon of work of condensation: thousands ecological histories. of mountains and ridges, caves and Shanghai’s ‘mother rivers’, the gullies, time and space, are formed Huangpu and Suzhou Creek, are into solid mineral masses. When connected to Lake Tai, and bridge the complex hydrologies of the contemplating such an object, Yangtze Basin and the East China Sea. The liquid lineages do not ‘thousands of miles of scenery can be seen in an instant,’ he ventured. stop here. Apart from the water veins, the exhibition venue is Suzhou Creek (Piles) (2022) is a group of Chinese fir-shaped sculptures connected to Lake Tai by human bloodlines: Rong Zongjing (1873– that speak to the histories of vibrant manufacturing activities in the 1938), a successful businessman, the ‘flour king’ in old Shanghai, was early nineteenth century and the lush vegetation of ancient times on the former owner of Rong Zhai. His brother, Rong Desheng, also a the riverbanks of Suzhou Creek. The work itself takes the format of renowned private entrepreneur, bought a plum garden near Lake a sparse artificial woodland made of concrete and rebar from demolTai in Wuxi, the hometown of Rong’s family. Rong Desheng’s son ished factories along the river. The trees gave Suzhou Creek its old Rong Yiren, the fifth vice president of People’s Republic of China, name – Songjiang, ‘the pine river’ – and the sculptures are like the ectodonated most of the garden to the nation, turning a space for private plasm of the riverbank’s ancient afforestation and of the now-vanished contemplation of floral scenery over to the public. industrial agglomeration (including Rong Zongjing’s flour mills). Wang’s Taihu (2022) – its title a transliteration of Lake Tai – is a group Artifacts (Yixing clay) (2022) replicates flotsam, especially those related to of largescale ‘scholar stones’ and lifesize hairy-crab sculptures made petrochemical industries, such as tyres and paint cans found in Lake of biowaste derived from the lake. This biomass – algae, invasive Tai, in Yixing clay and tremolite jade. Both materials, sourced from plants, crab shells (from which chitin is extracted) from tourists’ the Lake Tai Basin, have a long history of human use: the former has feasts – is then transformed into bioplastic, and moulded into sculp- been base material for teaware since the Song dynasty (960–1279 ce), tural objects based on 3D scans of actual scholar rocks and hairy crabs. while tremolite jade was widely utilised in ritual objects during the Taihu rocks are porous limestone, shaped by Neolithic Liangzhu culture (3300–2300 bce) that Chitin Stone (preparatory study), from the series the rapid undercurrents of Lake Tai. They were had settlements distributed around Lake Tai. Taihu (Stones), 2022, digital image
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Vessel 1 (preparatory study), from the series Artifacts (Yixing clay), 2022, digital image
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The ‘replicas’ within Artifacts include an item of tyre-shaped Shanghai’s long-gone marsh, creating a wormhole connecting different Yingxing stoneware resonating with the shape of a bi – a jade disc ecological times, suturing tissues of disconsonant narrative layers. used for heaven-worshipping in Liangzhu culture – and plastic Although the Anthropocene is still a disputed reality, the heated bottles and paint cans made of the same material. The artist mentions debate around it in itself serves to remind people of the impact in conversation that these objects are “footnotes” to the project: small of human activities on the Earth’s surface. Wang once stated that and deliberately inconspicuous. But these replicas of the petrochem- ‘Lake Tai is a cyborg’: the waterbody needs to be ‘dialysed’ by indusical castoffs also speak to the long chapters of the nondegradable trial filtration systems on a regular basis to exist; the lake can no longer substances haunting a future that stretches far beyond us. self-purify. The lake is a hybrid, like everything else. Wang’s project Spectres of the lake’s drainage zones are summoned in Rong does not seek to draw conclusions about or offer solutions to the polluZhai’s back yard. Tatarian aster, cursed tion in the region (although he does The stones were manifestations of buttercup and common weed from use a variety of sustainable materials beauty created by the invisible hand in the exhibition). Instead, the worldly Shanghai’s lost wetland system are grown in a sunken pond behind the mansion of nature as it manifested its otherwise systems presented in Wang’s work are the product of conflicting dynamics (Shanghai Swamp, 2022). As we discuss the invisible cultural capital and narratives stitched together: the work, the artist states that it is a “phantom glimpse” of the city’s swampy past (now “fossilised” in the archaeo- ‘useless’ blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) that has caused annual logical gaze of the Natural History Museum in Shanghai). This is not biodisasters in Taihu Lake since the 1990s was also behind the Great the first time that apparitions of vanished ecologies have appeared in Oxygenation Event, which took place around two billion years ago Wang’s projects. In the exhibition Extinct in the Wild (2017; shown at the and featured a surge in atmospheric oxygen, enabling us to live with Fondazione Prada’s premises in Milan), glass and metal greenhouses other creatures under an oxygenised ‘roof’; plants and animals considare inhabited by species critically endangered or extinct in the wild but ered ‘extinct’ (in the wild) are ubiquitous in greenbelts and pet shops. ubiquitous in the human world, such as axolotls that are bred as pets They are at once nowhere and everywhere. ara and lab animals. It’s a contradiction that is, bizarrely, driven by both economic and preservational motivations. The glassy, ‘in vitro’ enviLake Tai is on view at Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai, from 30 March to 29 May ronment in that project is repeated in Shanghai Swamp, which restages
Extinct in the Wild, 2017 (installation view, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2017). Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. all images Courtesy the artist
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Bumps in the Night Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest works crackle and thud with a new belligerence. What is this most sensitive of artists picking up beneath the placid surfaces of his homeland? by Max Crosbie-Jones
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In the simplest of terms, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s tenth feature Last October Weerasethakul claimed to be experiencing a similar film is about being alert. Not thinking about the world around you state of heightened lucidity in his homeland. The stance voiced so much as feeling it sharply, being keenly and indiscriminately publicly in 2015 – no more moviemaking in Thailand due to state present, after an awakening of some kind. At least, that’s my inter- censorship and the military-proxy government – had not changed, pretation after seeing Memoria (2021) in Bangkok, amid a flurry of but his outlook had softened. “I don’t know about feature films here, but in terms of short films and different kind of expression, Weerasethakul gallery shows. A brief synopsis: Tilda Swinton’s Jessica, a Scottish flower-seller I feel very motivated,” he told me. What had activated him was a Thai visiting her sister in Bogotá, Colombia, is woken by a loud, jolting explosion: the youth-led protest movement that shook the estabbang. Initially she blames early morning construction work, but lishment in 2020 and 2021 with its strident and satire-inflected calls when it returns with equal intensity, she realises the sound is inte- for far-reaching reforms that would, if enacted, stretch to the gilded rior… hers alone. At a meeting with a sound engineer she tries to pinnacle of society. Meanwhile, working in Colombia – a country recreate it in the forensic manner of a sketch artist: “It’s like a rumble that shares a ‘heavy history’ of cyclical political strife and asymmetric from the core of the earth,” she says as he tweaks a dial on his mixing Communist war – had reminded him that Thailand is not unique, desk. Later this search leads her into the that flawed democracies are commonStreaked throughout, like blood mountains, where her anguish in the place and utopias nowhere. “So you just flecked across a smashed face, need to focus on the beauty and grateface of this strange presentiment – a sign of madness? A gift of sublime truth? A lines of Weerasethakul poetry implied fulness of everyday life,” he concluded before calling himself out. “It sounds cosmic roar reverberating through deep that society had tuned out time? – turns to fascination. She becomes very cliché.” so keyed into the sonic boom that, in a hypnotic scene towards the He was right to call himself out. But the fruits of Weerasethakul leaning anew into his local environment have hardly felt maudlin. film’s final act, she leans sideways by a stream to get closer to it. As is customary for the mild-mannered Thai auteur, Memoria – a In fact, A Minor History – the two-part exhibition at Bangkok’s 100 Husserlian pilgrimage that draws its enigmatic plotline from his own Tonson Foundation resulting from his roadtrip around the country’s experience of ‘exploding head syndrome’ (a bona fide sleep disorder) – northeast, Isaan, between pandemic lockdowns – surely ranks among abounds with metaphysical resonances and metempsychotic sugges- the most abrasive and forthright chapters of his celebrated trenchtion. There is an all-pervading yet unsettled sense that Jessica has, work: his dogged negotiation of Thailand’s psychogeography. as she handles prehistoric skulls, talks to lost souls who remember Part one of A Minor History was a Weerasethakul gallery show everything and is barraged by the sound over dinner, stumbled upon through and through – an immersive audiovisual experience – albeit a portal into Colombia’s past lives, or somehow slipped between one notable for its heralding a new collaboration with a pugnacious bodies. But when I watch Memoria, Weerasethakul’s first foreign- poet-activist, and its invocation of an extremely ‘heavy’ news story: the made film, in late February, Jessica’s awareness and interconnected- discovery of two murdered Thai anti-establishment dissidents in the ness in that moment when she leans into the earth also felt important Mekong River in December 2018. In the foyer, pictures of Asia’s third – like a clear through-line to his recent work back on Thai terra firma. longest river were displayed upside down, while footage captured on
A Minor History, Part ii: Beautiful Things, 2022 (installation view, 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok). Courtesy the artist
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his roadtrip formed the basis of a three-channel video installation in the main gallery. Scrolling slowly upwards on a double-sided vertical screen in the centre were elegiac shots of nocturnal Isaan: the moonlit Mekong, a neon wheel turning at a temple fair, a woman silhouetted against bedroom curtains, a microphone in a radio studio. This screen partially obscured two larger opposing screens further back, upon which flashed static shots of a crumbling cinema in the region’s Kalasin province. Orientating us was not the image, however, but sound. A loud thud – resembling the sound of something or someone being struck with a blunt object – was followed by the flapping of startled pigeons. And then a deep male voice began to speak. “Its stomach was turbulent because it had swallowed a drifting corpse,” he began. “It couldn’t digest the body because the corpse was full of concrete. A dead body was stashed in a concrete mould, bundled up in ropes, metal chains and wires.” Young Isaan rebel poet Mek Krung Fah was narrating a tale of the northeast’s mythical naga serpent. And it was struggling, coughing up legs, arms, feet, a cock, organs, as a man and woman strolling along the Mekong looked on with a mixture of fascination and horror. Towards the end of the 17-minute piece, imagery and storytelling gave way to three channels of running white-on-black text. As it scrolled right to left in large Thai and English font, and to the sound of slowly grinding metal, these snippets of prose drawn from Weerasethakul’s diaries and roadtrip interviews evoked the stream of consciousness besetting a scattered nervous system – or an insomniac, perhaps, as they lie blinking in the dark. Snippets of fraught conversations flashed forth: “My dad said if you weren’t my daughter, I would have shot you”. During opening week, Weerasethakul stressed that this impressionistic piece was, on one level, an elegiac farewell to saak (remnants, carcasses) or bygone expressions – spiritual, ecological, architectural, artistic, textual – in the region where he grew up. The pulpy
backdrop of a royal throne hall on the back wall, in which pillars frame a red carpet, is the kind used by mor lam theatre troupes. The playful dramatic style, wherein the narrator gamely voices all characters, belongs to obsolete old-school radio dramas and cinema dubbing. The images of the cinema evoke his childhood memories of being enthralled by 16mm Thai dramas and Steven Spielberg spectacles. And the footage of the Mekong is a continuation of his decadelong interest in documenting its changes, particularly in light of the Chinese dams now upstream. Yet the main loss A Minor History chronicled was the disappearance of minor characters, the real-life erasure of antimonarchist activists who, having had their hands bound and bodies stuffed with concrete by kidnappers who remain at large, are now no more than ghosts “vanished into the void”. But who, the exhibition hinted, also possessed a seismic potential that could, potentially, cause the world to shift. “Was it playing?” asks a high-pitched Mek Krung Fah near the end, performing the role of the woman as she expresses concern about the naga’s condition. “No, it was dying,” replies the man. The potent symbolism of this image was only compounded by concurrent interviews, in which Weerasethakul compared Thailand’s current regime to a floundering animal in its death throes, wreaking havoc all around it. Then, in early October, 100 Tonson Foundation temporarily gave itself over to a work that, to paraphrase one of A Minor History, Part I’s ironic self-reflexive moments, felt like another ‘tiny ant-sized story’. Commissioned by the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, Silence (2021) commemorated an even rawer festering Thai wound: the 6 October 1976 massacre, when 40 leftist students at the capital’s Thammasat University were killed by rightwing paramilitaries and bystanders. In this iteration of the minimal 21-minute installation, which screened for five days to mark the event’s 45th anniversary, images of bloodied corpses, frozen in grimaces of pain, faced off with clips of mass distraction, from Bangkokers at leisure, to Payut
preceding pages Beautiful Things (Liberty), 2022, giclée print, 159 × 106 cm. Courtesy the artist above, and following pages Memoria (still), 2021, feature film. © Kick the Machine Films, Burning, Anna Sanders Films, Match Factory Productions, zdf / Arte and Piano
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Ngaokrachang’s cartoons, to footage from the nationalist epic The King of the White Elephant (1940). And streaked throughout, like blood flecked across a smashed face, were lines of Weerasethakul’s poetry that implied society at large had tuned out, been decapacitated by sweet, lulling dreams in which ‘speeches sound like music’, gunshots like ‘mysterious fireworks’ and curse words like chords (‘Asshole: C Minor 6’). ‘National Sleep Week’, he calls it. For anyone familiar with Weerasethakul’s work – a practice known for its placid realist-mystical veneer, multivalence and subliminal politics – it was as if a planet had eclipsed the sun, thrown his obstruse world into hard-edged darkness. Pain, regret and anger scorched everything. This impression was only reinforced by the implacable live-performance element of A Minor History. During Galleries Night weekend in late November, crowds headed up to 100 Tonson Foundation’s roof to watch Mek Krung Fah give a poetry recital that did not mince words. In ten years, if you are still alive Let me offer you shame and disgust! That today you pretended not to hear The voices of your slaughtered countrymen As quatrains of this fiery nature rang out in Thai over a speaker system, Teerawat ‘Ka-Ge’ Mulvilai – a performance artist and founder of the city’s B-Floor theatre troupe – ambled around a swimming pool on the floor below. Midriff bared, and donning a white mask, he slowly laid English printouts of Mek Krung Fah’s Unsubjected Verses (2021) around the edge. A few weeks later, Weerasethakul’s video documentation of this performance showed up in yet another exhibition, A Trace of Thunder, at Maielie gallery in Khon Kaen, the city in Isaan where he grew up, the son of doctors. While it is joined by photographs that further his fascination with light in all its forms, the show’s key element is text. In the role of art director, Weerasethakul has turned excerpts of Mek Krung Fah’s ire-filled words into concrete poetry. They run down
a hanging banner in oversize Thai font and, in a room where two chairs sit on wooden pallets flanked by led spotlights, loop across the floors and ceiling in unbroken bolts. Here, amid his own injunctions to ‘stop crawling’ and ‘fight for the truth’ – some of them so subversive that the Thai words were deliberately misspelled to avoid authoritarian rebuke – Mek Krung Fah has been staging his counterreaction radio show. (Topics discussed include, among other hot-button topics, the government’s widely contested plan to tighten regulations for ngos.) The implication of this broadcast-room installation is clear: the rousing oratory and critical debate of Mek Krung Fah and his ilk wield an electricity that can give us a transformative jolt. Like a trace of thunder coursing through the walls and floors of a building. Or as the lightbox images of digitally rendered explosions on the far wall imply (Mr Electrico (For Ray Bradbury), 2014), a neural explosion in the recesses of the brain. Over the last decade or so, Weerasethakul, now fifty-one, has often employed nonprofessional actors as discreet vessels for the nation’s psyche. In a body of work in which violence feels barely suppressed – from shorts such as Fireworks (Archive) (2014) and Vapour (2015) through to his last Thailand-set feature, Cemetery of Splendour (2015) – their presence conjures a state of mind under Thailand’s political conditions, or gestures towards collective scars. This cluster of exhibitions, however, possesses a markedly more instructive and belligerent tone than these more elusive precursors. And not simply because that’s what happens when you team up with sympatico Thai performers, poets and artists with starkly different working methods and modes of expression. One senses that Weerasethakul believes the situation calls for it. Which is not to say that his powers of abstraction and subtraction, nor his ability to imbue matters of politics and history with an intoxicating sense of mystery and ambiguity, have been diminished. Part two of A Minor History, titled Beautiful Things, is a case in point: at once subtle and searing, uplifting and destructive, minimal and expansive.
Performance by poet Mek Krung Fah at A Minor History, Part i, 2022, 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok
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The six photographic works lining the walls – again based on images taken on his roadtrip – are palimpsests representing the confusion, torpor and amnesia of local Thai reality. In one image, text floating over a river landscape seems to announce a movie doublebill: Mekong Murder Mystery vs Dreams and Delusions. Others superimpose Weerasethakul’s own photographs of Bangkok’s recent street protests over shots of peri-urban decay, or rooms where light spills from windows onto unmade beds (windows are another Weerasethakul leitmotif). Meanwhile, the inclusion of two works by young male artists from Chiang Mai strike a more sanguine tone. Suggestively obscuring the regal mor lam theatre backdrop on the back wall is Natanon Senjit’s painting Break Out of the Loop of National Conflict into Peaceful Nature: a faux-naif paradisical landscape in which members of Thailand’s pro-democracy protest movement and their allies appear defiant, if slightly cutesy. And making a guest appearance in 100 Tonson Foundation’s office-cum-annex is someone unexpected, even for Weerasethakul’s spectrally attuned body of work: a sacred lotus flower deity with four eyes, two phalluses and a bulbous head dotted with mirrored glass. According to curator Manuporn Luengaram, this sinuous red sculpture – an icon by the artist Methagod representing the resilience of the lotus flower – stands as a reminder of ‘the perpetual resurrection of Thailand’s youth movements despite being time and time again suppressed.’ And then there’s the ominous video component. While part one of A Minor History deployed a thud sound to evoke collective memories – much in the same way that Memoria does with its cinema-rattling bang – part two’s single-channel screen creeps along silently. Travelling slowly up the jet-black vertical screen is oversize Thai text, a trail of free-associative thought bubbles drifting into the ether. Punctuated by large spheres resembling fullstops, these flecks of distilled memory touch on, among other things, the meth trade (‘Soldiers distribute meth | Sell and resell | up the hills to Tais’), the temple murals of nineteenth-century painter Khrua In-Khong (‘Khrua In-Khong | utilised
the skyline | and vanishing point | filling in shadows and darkness along the tree trunks’) and the teachings of the late Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (‘I prefer looking | at nature | more than | looking at any picture | in any museum’). Some of these diaristic snippets clearly allude to throwaway thoughts or wider social truths; others appear to gesture towards formal qualities of the exhibition. Krua In-Khong, for example, was an innovator who introduced perspective, shadow and shade to the flat Thai temple mural. Similarly, the images presented here toy with our field of vision and vanishing points to get us ‘closer to reality’ – a reality full of distortions. But the most illustrative allusion, for me at least, is the veiled reference to the zen wisdom of Krishnamurti, whose meditation teachings and interior journey Weerasethakul has been pondering of late. And who tried to approach everything, from perceptions to consciousness, from conflicts to mountains, with a uniform and deeply perfected sense of quotidian wonder. Channelling Weerasethakul’s sensitivity to every plane of existence, the components of A Minor History have sought to find a similar measure of beauty – and egalitarian zen spirit – in the simple act of being keenly and indiscriminately present at a pivotal moment in Thai history. A moment when the loud rumbles of dissent have been stilled, when some protest leaders are facing charges of sedition and when a political awakening that made headlines around the world is being methodically relegated to ‘tiny ant-sized story’ status. For him, appreciating the fullness of this forest, being alert in the presence of murder mysteries, unfettered thoughts and those who dare speak truth to power, is no mere one-off gesture of solidarity or resistance. As he puts it, “It’s about surviving here, what it takes and recording memories.” ara A Trace of Thunder continues at Maielie, Khon Kaen, until 4 April; and A Minor History, Part ii: Beautiful Things is on view at 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok, until 10 April
A Trace of Thunder, 2022 (installation view, Maielie, Khon Kaen)
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Lingering with Objects In paintings so measured that you can count their brushstrokes, it is as though Hyun-Sook Song slows time itself by Wenny Teo
In his most recent book, Undinge (Nonobjects, 2021), the South Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote of how the accelerated flow of immaterial digital information – the nonobjects – that constantly swill around us has grossly distorted our experience of time, memory and labour, resulting in burnout, ennui and the atomisation of social relations. One of the only means we have of reclaiming some semblance of agency (and sanity), he suggests, is by slowing things down and ‘lingering with objects’. As he put it in a recent interview with ArtReview, ‘The same chair and the same table, in their sameness, lend the fickle human life some stability and continuity.’ This idea of objects as ‘resting places for life’ is interesting to consider when looking at the enigmatic paintings of another German South Korean émigré, the artist Hyun-Sook Song. Song’s first solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, is a terse display of seven largescale canvases executed between 2009 and 2021. All of the works feature the organic, sinewy form of what appears to be a wooden post or branch, articulated in varying shades of burnt umber, set against a neutral backdrop. In some of the paintings, this nondescript object is veiled by gossamer washes of paint, as if curtained by translucent strips of fabric. In others, it is tightly bandaged, or else seemingly held in place by narrow swathes of white pigment that extend beyond the pictorial frame, accentuating the tensions between abstraction and figuration, support and surface. The titles of these paintings provide no clues as to their elusive symbolism. Instead, Song’s works are typically named after the surprisingly limited number of brushstrokes required to complete each piece, orienting our attention towards the gestural, material and durational processes of their making. We can’t help but be momentarily exercised by the task – or is it a game? – that Song sets us, as we attempt to parse out each quantifiable stroke of the brush from the painting’s illusory totality. But perhaps because Song never completely abandons figuration in favour of abstraction,
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we still find ourselves circling back to lingering questions of iconography. What do these objects signify, and what exactly is being represented here? The details of Song’s artistic trajectory and personal geography are useful to consider in this regard, and already quite well known – in part due to a recent biography written by her partner, the artist Jochen Hiltmann. Song was born in 1952 in the remote agrarian farming village in the Chŏlla province of South Korea. Unusually for a woman of her generation and background, she attended high school in Gwangju, and emigrated to West Germany at the age of twenty to work as an auxiliary nurse. In the mid-1970s she was diagnosed with a serious lung disease that forced her to leave her job, which led her to enrol at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. There she began experimenting with egg tempera on canvas, combining a medium that is commonly associated with Western medieval art with an East Asian calligraphic immediacy and brevity of form. Throughout this period, Song struggled with the estrangement that is so characteristic of migrant experience – a sense of dislocation exacerbated by the turbulent political events back home. As the artist recalled in our email exchange, “When I saw the images of the Gwangju uprising on German tv, it was traumatic. It was difficult to get information back then because the regime banned all communication. I was horribly worried. I remember that I took a little radio to art school in Hamburg every day, so as not to miss any news. The event caused me a lot of sadness and anger. There was a sense of helplessness, since I was so far away.” Song soon became an active member of the Korean diasporic community, providing aid for exiled South Korean dissidents in Germany with the help of German artists and activists. Prior to that, Song had also been involved in the Koreanische Frauengruppe (Korean Women’s Group), fighting for equal rights for her fellow Korean nurses in Germany. While some of her early work bears some resemblance to Minjung art, and can be said to reflect her political leanings, one would be
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Brushstrokes Diagram, 2021, tempera on canvas, 150 × 200 cm
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8 Brushstrokes, 2021, tempera on canvas, 170 × 120 cm
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5 Brushstrokes over Tiger, 2009, tempera on canvas, 100 × 80 cm
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above 3 Brushstrokes, 2019, tempera on canvas, 160 × 250 cm facing page 12 Brushstrokes, 2021, tempera on canvas, 160 × 200 cm
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I couldn’t help but notice that several of the paintings in the exhihard-pressed to find any indication of these concerns in the paintings for which she is now best known. But as Song clarified: “Artistic bition were created during the peculiar space–time of lockdown, practice in my view is a political act in itself. It is not my way or a period of sustained social estrangement and idleness that has only intention to use art or painting as a tool to promote political views served to heighten our reliance on the immaterial panoply of ‘nonobor activism. But I consider myself a very political person. My polit- jects’, and one that according to Byung-Chul Han has left us more ical awareness happened to me, I did not have much of a choice… exhausted and dispirited than ever before. Due to the lung disease my emotions are certainly expressed in my practice and in my that first forced Song to leave her job as a nurse and take up painting, works, as my emotions continue to be a driving force for my works Song was categorised as particularly vulnerable to covid-19. As she today.” In other words, to use an oft-quoted feminist adage, the put it, “My recent illness and the pandemic made me reflect on life and personal is political. death. As with many others, I feel the impact of social isolation from Indeed, despite having lived in Germany for the past 50 years, friends and family. As my emotional state is connected to my practice, Song continues to paint objects remembered from her childhood. I am certain it does influence my work. How exactly, I cannot say.” The wooden posts, earthenware pots and delicate strips of fabric In this way we might think of this ‘lingering with objects’ as that sparsely occupy her canvases, as Song phrased it, are “inscribed a drawn-out practice of remembrance; one that prompts us to take with meanings” that are not only particular our time with each of her works, and contem“Artistic practice in my view is a plate the inextricable connections between to herself and her family, but to the “entire village community” in which she was born political act in itself… My political the work of memory and the work of art. and raised; vestiges of a slower way of life awareness happened to me, I did I was reminded here of the South Korean and work before the advent of electricity, author Han Kang’s collection of essays in not have much of a choice” industrial production and modern commuThe White Book (2016), a Proustian account of nication technologies. ordinary white items – such as the moon, rice, blank paper, a lace On one level, Song’s paintings can be seen to embody a sense curtain, a shroud – that triggered ineffable associations in the author, of profound nostalgia, or rather a homesickness, for a place and bringing to the surface long-submerged childhood memories of grief time that no longer really exists, and for people who are no longer and loss. For Han, and perhaps for Song too, the act of giving form to with us. Often when she is in her studio, Song recalls the craft and these resonant objects in themselves has a transformative, and even practice of her mother and grandmother, who, alongside the many curative, potential: like ‘a white ointment applied to a swelling, like duties of working on the farm, were also in charge of the produc- gauze laid over a wound’. ara tion and colouring of silk, hemp, linen and cotton, and the making of cloth for daily use and festive occasions. By refabricating these Paintings by Hyun-Sook Song are on view at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, textiles in white tempera, it is almost as if Song is performatively through 26 March continuing this matrilineal form of labour across space and time, through the medium of paint. The act of painting itself is a painsWenny Teo is an art historian and curator. She is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, taking process – indeed Song sometimes spends months producing University of London a single work.
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Image: Drawing Studio of the University Course for Drawing Teachers, Faculty of Engineering, University of Indonesia, Bandung (now Faculty of Fine Arts and Design, Bandung Institute of Technology), 1950. Photographer Unknown. Collection Tropenmuseum/National Museum of World Cultures, Amsterdam (object no. TM-10002363). Made available via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Art schools of asia public symposium 2022 Asia Art Archive is pleased to announce a public symposium that will take place June 2022 to mark the conclusion of Art Schools of Asia, an online seminar that started in October 2021. Co-organised with a cohort of eighteen emerging scholars from around the world, the symposium will feature their research on art pedagogy, and also discussions with renowned scholars to reflect on methodological and comparative frameworks for thinking about the history of art schools, from the perspective of the complex artistic, social, and political histories across Asia. Please check AAA’s website for more details. This project is made possible with the generous support of the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative.
Asia Art Archive 11/F Hollywood Centre 233 Hollywood Road Sheung Wan, Hong Kong T. +852 2844 1112 E. info@aaa.org.hk
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To loves past and present Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Memory Box An intergenerational family of immigrant Lebanese women – daughter Alex, mother Maia and grandmother Teta – gather in Montreal to celebrate Christmas. The season of goodwill is interrupted, however, when Maia receives an unexpected box sent on behalf of a long-lost, and recently deceased, friend, Liza. Its contents – which include Maia’s personal notebooks, photographs, cassette tapes and other ephemera written by her to Liza, who had moved to Paris during the 1980s – and Liza’s death not only interrupt the festivities, but also fracture the peace that the family had found in Canada after fleeing Beirut and the Lebanese Civil War. The box tears through Maia’s memories, releasing everything she has suppressed over the past 30 years. And Maia’s refusal to share these materials, both with her daughter and the viewer, forces Alex to explore them in secret. This is Memory Box (2021), a film directed by artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige that activates the senses to fully immerse the viewer in Maia’s world. As Alex’s hands rifle through pages of Maia’s archives, so too do ours. As she plays the cassette tapes recorded by the younger Maia, her voice lures us into the present of her past. Even the scratch’n’sniff sticker of a strawberry set in the corner of one of her pages points to a small but notable detail of youth that augments the viewer’s immersion. There is a tangible electricity in knowing these materials have actually time-travelled from the past – the film’s opening credits inform the viewer that this story is adapted from, and features, Hadjithomas’s own ephemera from 1982 to 1988 (with added flourishes for the film, of course); and that Joreige’s own archive of photographs from the war is also integrated into the film. What we are witnessing is
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a blend of real and imagined narratives. An intersection that Hadjithomas and Joreige further explore by physically manipulating the film as medium to mirror the plot’s distress: for example at a turning point in the film, Maia’s boyfriend Raja shoots a rifle to the top left of the screen in celebration of a football match, and in this corner of the frame the film itself begins to melt. Afterwards the pair are kissing in a car
while shells explode in the background. The sky above them begins to deteriorate as the physical film melts again – indicating the moments when Maia is reminded of an omnipresent conflict that she has, for some time, been able to ignore. both Memory Box, 2021, dirs Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. © Haut et Court, Abbout Productions, Micro Scope
Secrets pervade the film. Teta keeps Liza’s death from her daughter, and even attempts to hide the package from her; Maia keeps her past from Alex; Alex conceals her discovery of these notebooks. As for the viewer, we’re left wondering about what happened to whoever became Alex’s father and about who an unnamed man ‘introduced’ at the beginning of the film might be. Hadjithomas and Joreige’s preoccupation with latency or things that are left unsaid, as well as the cuts or conditions in which what is hidden can manifest, result in lacerations between the women that reveal these recollections of the war and free their familial ghosts (Maia’s brother and father were killed in the war) – the first being the box’s arrival. Maia’s initial notebook entries include the usual adolescent musings about friends and love, but these are the moments that give the film – and Maia – levity and energy to persevere through the sufferings (among my favourites are the scenes where Maia and her friends dance carefreely to music from the 1980s). While Hadjithomas and Joreige described the project as a love letter to Lebanon, film and photography at the uk premiere, Memory Box feels more like a dedication to relationships and the solaces they can bring. Like many teenagers, young Maia turns to her friends (among them Liza) more than her parents, while Alex tells her friends that she knows nothing about Maia. Although Hadjithomas and Joreige’s artistic practice tends to critically engage in latent Lebanese histories through archival materials and photography, typically provoking a dominant sense of gravity, Memory Box surprised me with its bright and unexpected vivacity, despite the more serious moments of war, conflict and loss. Marv Recinto
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Where Jellyfish Come From Antenna Space, Shanghai 8 January – 20 March Evolutionary biologists believe that jellyfish preceded the human race and, given their survival of every mass extinction, that they will likely outlive our species as well. As such, they are widely studied as harbingers of evolution and climate change, warriors of the Anthropocene in all its tragic dimensions. This exhibition – taking its inspiration from a fairytale sequence of the animated series Bee and PuppyCat (2013–) that imagines the jellyfish’s origin as the result of a fateful parting between a princess and an octopus, who is bequeathed with a gift of her hair after he helps her find her way home – elevates this incessantly nomadic creature to be its central mascot in positing a playful, queer ecology through the work of three artists. The titular creature appears in a peachcoloured wall mural by Ad Minoliti that snakes
its way through the space, a swirling symphony of balls and spherical line. The princess manifests in the acrylic paintings of Liu Yin as a dejected version of Disney’s Snow White, perhaps most moving in Snow White Far Away From Home (2021), which finds our heroine looking forlorn as she gazes out over a seascape, the irises of her eyes turned copper by the sunset; an image of Edenic loss: you can never go home again. The spider – perhaps the jellyfish’s nearest land-based equivalent – dominates a rear corner of the gallery space in the form of a massive pink inflatable by Li Shuang. Though the clear referent here is Louise Bourgeois’s infamous sculpture Mother (1999), Li advised the gallery that the sculpture should only be partially inflated, so that the spider appears hunched over.
All three artists share a cartoonish emo aesthetic that is ultimately more convincing than the overall exhibition concept, for the three approaches are really exercises in self-portraiture via the mechanism of fantasy. This became immediately clear to those who attended the opening, which included a performance by Li that featured more than a dozen performers dressed in one of her classic punkish outfits – pleated Catholic schoolgirl skirt, My Chemical Romance sweatshirt, dark sunglasses, crimson lipstick – some of whom read personal letters in private to friends in attendance that the artist has been estranged from since the onslaught of the virus as a covid-19 refugee stuck in Europe. One floating princess – or at least her avatar – finally made her way home. Travis Jeppesen
Li Shuang, s.o.a, 2020, inflatable, 480 × 130 × 230 cm. Courtesy the artist
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10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (apt10) Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 4 December – 25 April apt10 brings together 69 projects by artists and collectives from more than 30 countries. In celebrating art practices across what is referred to in Australia as the Asia Pacific region, apt10 avoids not only the inwardness that might come with a national show (such as Sydney’s biennial The National: New Australian Art), but also the lofty ambitions of a global survey (as is the case for many a biennale). Indeed, it is apt10’s regional focus that gives the exhibition its vibrancy – it allows for an expansive and specific investigation into the diverse forms of artmaking across the Asia Pacific. While this triennial does not shy away from our era of polycrises, it also considers the potential of an imagined collective future. apt10’s lead curators are listed as Tarun Nagesh, Reuben Keehan and Ruth McDougall, but this is a deeply collaborative exhibition. Indeed, apt10 draws on the knowledge of multiple ‘interlocutors’, partner institutions and researchers, while also aiming to showcase a variety of community-led projects. It is this level of care and attention – and also the generosity in the sharing of cultural knowledge – that adds depth to what is often described as Brisbane’s ‘blockbuster’ cultural event. Such a framework means that apt10 has several exhibitions-within-exhibitions, many of which have a specific focus on First Nation perspectives. Between the Earth and Sky (curated by Etan Pavavalung and Manray Hsu) considers the land, ecology and cosmology in the work of eight Taiwanese indigenous artists, while the Yolngu/Macassan Project (curated by Abdi Karya and Diane Moon) explores the historic connections between the Yolngu of northeast
Arnhem Land and the Macassans of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The risk in adopting a more dispersed mode of curating for such a substantial exhibition is that it could appear too disparate and unwieldy. But here the opposite is true. Much of this has to do with the way the triennial doesn’t compress a vast array of artmaking practices – which stem from so many regional locales – into a single overarching theme. Instead, apt10 revels in a kind of heteroglossia: multiple dialogues, preoccupations and cross-cultural resonances occur simultaneously, and because of this, thematic crosscurrents can surface of their own accord. To take one example: a preoccupation with water recurs again and again, whether via Salote Tawale’s 13.5m-long raft in No Locations (2021), Alia Farid’s five oversize receptacles for In Lieu of What Was (2019) or Kaili Chun’s expansive installation Uwē ka lani, Ola ka honua (When the heavens weep, the earth lives) (2021). In these works, among others, water is configured as supply channel, mode of escape, migration route, commodity or spiritual connector. Many of the works across apt10 explore the region’s histories, its colonial and imperialist incursions and occupations, and the future threats of ecological collapse. But the exhibition also celebrates artmaking as a vehicle for remembrance, ritual, renewal and joy. In this way, apt10 looks both forward and back: there is Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett’s two-channel videowork Garuda Berkepala Naga (The Dragonheaded Garuda) (2021), which uses the mythological figure of the Garuda as a locus for investigating Jakarta’s coastal shores, or Bani Abidi’s sound installation, a tribute via
song to the one million Indian soldiers who served in the First World War. Alongside Abidi’s soundscape, a selection of letters from soldiers are housed in lightboxes, with each typed a4 page glowing like a beacon. (One soldier, Ser Gul, writing home in 1915: ‘I have no need of anything, but I have a great longing for a flute to play. What can I do? I have no flute.’) Then there is Subash Thebe Limbu’s standout ningwasum (2020–21) – a futurist videowork that sees two members of the Yakthung (Limbu) community of Eastern Nepal timetravelling through space. Challenging Western narratives of ‘progress’ and ‘development’, ningwasum envisions a speculative future in which an indigenous nation combines its knowledge, culture and ethics with time-shifting technological discoveries. apt10’s commitment to futurist possibilities is no mean feat, given that the triennial takes place at a time of heightened geopolitical tension. The usa is pivoting towards its ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’, Australia has signed up to the controversial aukus deal, China’s Belt and Road Initiative continues to expand, and the new quad alliance between Australia, the us, India and Japan proffers itself as a regional counterweight. But the artists and collectives that make up apt10 are both attuned to, and disparaging of, the ways in which nation-states continue to co-opt this region as a ‘sphere of influence’. Indeed, part of apt10’s strength lies in its refusal to accept the construct of the nation-state – as opposed to indigenous sovereignty – as the dominant paradigm. As Thebe Limbu’s narrator says in ningwasum: “It’s a shame you can’t see through your silly little flag.” Naomi Riddle
3am, Graduated Uneducated, 2021, photograph on paper. Courtesy the artists
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Lee Paje, The stories that weren’t told, 2019, oil on copper mounted on wood, 244 × 300 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Tin-aw Arts Management Ltd
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Ho Rui An The Economy Enters the People Bangkok CityCity, Bangkok 6 January – 20 February In 1995 a Chinese delegation was dispatched to survey Singapore’s media apparatus. During the weeklong study trip – one of many such bilateral exchanges since the late 1970s – a team led by the Communist Party’s then head of propaganda, Deng Liqun, was shepherded from public broadcasters to news centres, cinemas to bookstores. The mission? Gleaning lessons from the politically stable city-state about regulating a nascent internet and better controlling society. Singapore-based artist Ho Rui An’s latest installation offers us a seat at a table just like the one these technocrats sat at on this trip. Bangkok CityCity’s large gallery is now a clinical conference room, replete with a book trolley lined with Chinese books on Singaporean economics and
two semicircles of grey modular desks. Bisecting them is a huge led screen displaying archival images and footage, while a recording of Ho’s recent live lecture-performance plays on six desktop monitors. The implication of this mock high-level meeting is that we are somehow active stakeholders in the story being told. But watching Ho ruminate, in impeccably enunciated tones, for 83 minutes, our seat at the table feels increasingly like an ironic gesture: technocrats – not we, the people – call the shots in his discursive account of Singapore’s role in China’s turn towards authoritarian capitalism. Central to the narrative are official photographs of this trip, particularly one in which the
attendees sit at a “large, mostly empty table that stands at the centre of the room”. For him, this scene evokes “an overwhelming sense of lack” – absent are the people they represent. During the post-Tiananmen period, he explains, the Communist Party was striving to reshape an unruly public “into the rational, self-possessed individuals required by the market economy. And to do so, the people must first be moved from the scene, leaving us with an emptiness, a void”. Boasting the ingratiatingly smooth tone and slick production values of a motivational ted talk, Ho’s lecture traverses themes he has explored elsewhere, including neoliberal capitalism’s fixation on speed and spectacle, and the organisational paradoxes of China’s “socialist market economy”.
The Economy Enters the People, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Bangkok CityCity, Bangkok
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But iconographic storytelling, economic and journalistic analyses, archival footage and digital animations are here used – alongside Ho’s deadpan rhetorical style and witty turns of phrase – to unpack the geopolitical dialectic that exists between Singapore and China, or whimsically illustrate the political concepts and progress buttressing them. At one point he deconstructs a photo from 1959 showing Singapore’s first cabinet seated in front of City Hall, all clean white smiles, shirts and slacks. Ho speculates (with irony?) that their gleaming, ghostly presence embodies the city-state’s vaunted anticorruption drive, and then he segues into a discussion of the spate of corruption-themed mid-1990s Chinese films with the word ‘black’ in the title. At another point he draws our attention to a picture of President Trump sitting awkwardly, legs akimbo, at a storied table used at the recent North Korea–United States summit in Singapore.
“Was he somehow being rejected by the table symbolising the rule of law?” he quips. Later he pinpoints four types of Chinese film centred on the factory: from films of “workers leaving” or “never leaving” factory gates, to “workers never arriving at” or “protesting outside” the factory. Displayed in split-screen diptychs and drawn from sources as disparate as the Lumière Brothers, Chinese propaganda films and surveillance cameras, these movingimage montages power a circuitous account of late capitalism that ends with ‘the worker’ being displaced by ‘the people’ in recent capitalist critiques. Movements like Occupy Wall Street have, by calling themselves the 99%, “acquired a visibility that the Chinese worker would never attain”. In Singapore, meanwhile, such protests “made up exactly 0% of the population”. In terms of his own politics, Ho tends to keep his cards close to his chest. He avoids value judgements, dispassionately presents historical
facts and confidently triangulates opposing perspectives and ideologies. Yet both this exhibition’s seating arrangements (sit at the top half of the table and you see everything; sit at the lower half and you are essentially persona non grata, only archive photos arranged on the otherwise bare desk visible) and its speculative visual metaphors speak volumes. The most striking example of the latter takes place at Singapore’s National Gallery in the present day. The place is empty, the people “too busy working”. Equally striking to Ho, however, is the glut of paintings of the revolutionary masses of the last century: workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, artists, shopkeepers, industrialists. For him, this interplay of absence and presence shows in no uncertain terms that “the time for dreaming is past” – the Singaporean economy, in having pacified as well as entered the people, has won. Max Crosbie-Jones
The Economy Enters the People (still), 2021, video. Courtesy the artist and Bangkok CityCity, Bangkok
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Yuan Keru Traces of the Afterimage Spurs Gallery, Beijing 18 December – 16 January Yuan Keru’s latest exhibition exudes a heavy sense of melancholy. Featuring two new videoworks, it traces the experiences and impact of disability, illness and trauma. Guest of the Mist 2037 (2020–21; shown on the gallery’s ground floor) draws on two literary sources – celebrated Portuguese author José Saramago’ s novel Blindness (1995) and Bi Feiyu’s awardwinning Massage (2008, a tale about blind masseurs), while the video installation Eternity and Transience (2021; shown on the first floor) draws on the artist’s own family history with Hepatitis b (hbv). In both Yuan expresses her concern about the state of individuals affected by diseases by mixing the real and the fictional. In Guest of the Mist 2037, set in a world long after an epidemic of blindness (as imagined in Blindness), the artist reveals the lives of a blind community living inside a dilapidated hospital through the eyes of an unnamed main character who has survived with her eyes intact and is searching for the caretaker who looked after
her during the epidemic years. Acted by ten blind people from different professions, the film throws us into an encounter with the folded reality of the disabled, many of whom are living in isolation while finding their own ways to come to terms with their disabilities. Scenes from the film are further presented via photography and installation, by which an immersive experience is created in a way that enhances the sense of reality. Images of the film, greyish in colour, slowly moving with the music, are subtly rendered, pushing forward the idea that it is through blindness that we see anew. On the upper floor, Eternity and Transience, a three-channel video, explores understated issues relating to hbv through three archetypes played by three actors – a mother who passed on the infection to her child, an eighteenyear-old girl (based upon the artist’s younger self recounting how she lost her father to the disease) and an unemployed jobseeker.
The videowork is accompanied by a novella, Cottage, Island, and Dragon Well Lane, by Wu Qihua in collaboration with Zhang Xianzhu (the first person in China to file an hbv antidiscrimination case), which narrates fragments of a female carrier’s life during the late 1990s and early 2000s, while partially reflecting a labour history of China at the time, and in particular the social and political injustices one might face when infected with hbv. As a thorough investigation into the disease’s impacts on social relations, the work succeeds in connecting physical diseases with social maladies, and in making the invisible visible. The show not only demonstrates Yuan’s artistic skill, but also reveals her ambitious intention to probe the subject of disability in contemporary China – a subject that is often neglected by the government and in art. Without seeking to propose solutions to any of these issues, the exhibition raises important questions that otherwise might never have been asked. Suchao Li
Guest of the Mist 2037 (still), 2020–21, single-channel 4k video (colour, sound), 24 min 38 sec. Courtesy the artist and Spurs Gallery, Beijing
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One song is very much like another, and the boat is always from afar Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou 4 December – 30 January The Indonesian folk song Bengawan Solo, written in 1940, is one of the most familiar Southeast Asian songs of that era. While the original lyrics (written in Bahasa and addressing colonialism and immigration) might not be universally accessible, the melody is, given the song’s translation into multiple languages, many versions of which appear in Asian films of the last few decades. In Sound Route: Bengawan Solo (2016–21), artists Wu Chi-Yu, Shen Sum-Sum and Musquiqui Chihying select extracts from versions of the song spanning three decades and crossing Japan, Hong Kong and Indonesia to create a sound installation (a form of radio drama) and accompanying film. Setting up the song as a shared experience that crosses time and space, the work has a central place in this group exhibition, featuring work by 18 artists (some working collaboratively) and curated by Nikita Yingqian Cai, which brings the complexity of geopolitics and migratory movement to a space between the diasporic imagination and lived diasporic experience.
Migrant labourers and postcolonial communities are embedded in most of the artworks on show. In her three-channel videowork Kidung / Lament (2019), AustralianBalinese artist Leyla Stevens highlights the ongoing trauma that resulted from the Indonesian genocide of 1965–66 by focusing on a lament chanted by poet Cok Sawitri; Frantz Fanon appears as the symbol of otherness in Samson Young’s To Fanon (2016), two series of 13 mixed-media works in which marks, gestures, collaged materials and traces of hand-written manuscripts covering his own musical compositions critique the European domination of classical or formal music; in David Zink Yi’s three-channel video installation De adentro y afuera (From Within and Without) (2002), a closeup of Latino musician’s bodies performing clave and salsa rhythms poses questions about the global perception and popularity of AfroCaribbean music set against the history of colonisation and isolation (particularly in Cuba) that it embodies. Meanwhile, the ambiguous gestures and extraverbal intimacy of queer
bodies documented in keep in touch (part 1) (2020–21), by Peng Zuqiang, are the basis for examining how marginalised queer and nonwhite bodies make themselves visible and audible in a world in which they are generally suppressed or ignored; while Liu Sheng’s painting series Xi San (2019) explores the transformation of native farmers into factory workers into labourers in the gig economy of the present in a landscape (Panyu Nanpu Island in Guangzhou) that has similarly been transformed from waterfront, to reclaimed farmland, to factories and an urban renewal project (the Xi San Village of the title). The exhibition as a whole provides an archipelagic and horizontal perspective to reframe marginal or diasporic existence, tackling psychic as well as physical displacement. Importantly, by creating a fluid time–space situation, it allows the experiences and emotions contained within it to be both relatable and interchangeable. Moreover, it frames belonging as an endless pursuit, much like a boat that never makes land. Leo Li Chen
Liu Sheng, Xi San 14, 2019, watercolour on paper, 54 × 38 cm. Courtesy the artist and Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou
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camp After Media Promises Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin 25 November – 27 February While being interviewed for American television in 1982, Nam June Paik offered a characteristically unconventional idea: if you make “a big television set, tv can become very profound”, and “you can stop and think”, he said, as one of his installations glowed behind him. That intriguing notion may or may not have been sincere, but it came to mind while viewing the video centrepiece of this exhilarating show, presented by the Mumbai-based media group camp as a result of winning the 2020 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize. In its central work, footage from some two dozen of camp’s multifarious projects – endeavours that tend to unite technologies with disparate collaborators, to examine metropolises, trade, corruption
and surveillance with a gimlet eye – are projected onto eight gargantuan screens set at slight angles, like panels of a folding screen. The production is largescale and yet intimate, inviting you to imagine a better world, where citizens hijack digital tools to play, connect and hold power to account. A dash of the early internet’s optimism is present. camp, founded by Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran and Sanjay Bhangar in 2007 (but now comprising seven members), billed this audiovisual feast as a ‘moving panorama’, reconceiving that nineteenth-century-landscapepainting format as a twenty-first-century platform for surveying the expanse of their diffuse practice, which ranges from videoworks
to software development. In snippets of Khirkeeyaan (2006) women in Delhi speak to each other via closed-circuit cameras, microphones and televisions set up by camp: monitoring equipment being used to communicate. Another video details the basic workings of Pad.ma, an online program for archiving and annotating videos. And in one more, titled Capital Circus (2008), people who signed legal releases wander in and around a shopping centre in Manchester, England, on a rainy day, their movements tracked by 206 cctv eyes commandeered by the group. It is a sly explication of a Big Brother state that looks comically prescient now that many
After Media Promises, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Roh Kyung. Courtesy Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin
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unthinkingly carry tracking devices with them at all times. The works come one after another, and the pace is so fast, with so much action on the screens, that it is often not quite possible to keep up with brief texts that explicate the footage. (Luckily, a dedicated microsite for the show provides this background information.) Regardless, what unfolds is an intricate vision of contemporary working life in an era of high capitalism, assembled through lucid images: cargo containers being moved at a Guangzhou port, boats at sea, a presentation about real estate during an event hosted by camp on the rooftop of their Mumbai workspace. One mesmerising chapter was shot last year via a cctv camera installed on the 35th floor of a building in that city. It pans around the area, taking in soaring highrises, crowded makeshift structures and a sprawl of green grass, where a man talks on a cellphone, perhaps
(given the context) directing flows of capital or even the movement of container ships. (A rollicking protest song by the late activist Vilas Ghogre and the group Avahan Natya Manch accompanies the deadpan images. “What sort of rule is this?” it goes at one point. “This is the rule of liars!”) As the panorama rolls along, two signature camp moves become apparent. One is to initiate (or isolate) a situation and then watch, very closely, as things transpire, an approach marrying John Cagean indeterminacy with an ethical commitment to bear witness. Another is to crack open some old tool for new uses, and see how people perceive their surroundings afresh as a result. For the art centre, camp loaded about 175 videos of Paik into Pad.ma, potentially aiding future research and uncorking little-known gems (like the Paik quotation above). They also affixed a camera to a building in a fast-developing
area of Seoul, and set it to shift its gaze repeatedly over one choreographed hour. (The feed is broadcast online and in a gallery in the museum.) Twenty-four times a day, it alights on the same spots: N Seoul Tower, a patch of graffiti, tall apartment buildings, a vacant lot, a security camera. Depending on the hour, you might catch people buzzing about on the street, a magpie landing in a tree or a garbage pickup underway. It just keeps coming. It’s delirious, a tangle of sights that journalists, historians and city planners could spend lifetimes investigating. It seems to ask: how can we improve a city? And before that, how well can we actually even know it? One night, tuning in from my own apartment, about three kilometres away from that camera, static suddenly engulfed my screen. It was hard to make out anything. Then I glanced outside. It had started to snow. Andrew Russeth
After Media Promises, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Roh Kyung. Courtesy Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin
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Charles Lim Yi Yong Staggered Observations of a Coast Singapore Tyler Print Institute (stpi), Singapore 17 December – 6 February To make the prints in this show, artist and former Olympic sailor Charles Lim brought his keen knowledge of wind, cloud and water. Two series capture his observations while sailing around the east coast anchorage of Singapore. Surprisingly intimate and resembling journal sketches – though of course the printmaking process is much more arduous – these works seem to have been done for the sole pleasure of recording the moods of the sea. The black-and-white collagraphs of cloud formations are filled with drama, often evoking cosmic scenes of comets blazing through the darkness of space; while the blue etchings of sky and sea are clean and sweet, featuring dreamy washes of blue in varying degrees of paleness. Working with paper seems to have loosened something in this mariner artist. Perhaps due to the material experimentations needed to make these works, they feel remarkably personal and vulnerable – which aren’t words typically applied to the highly controlled conceptual environments of his work. Technically, Staggered Observations of a Coast is part of Lim’s ambitious multipart project sea state (2005–), in which he examines Singapore’s relationship to the sea through media such as photography, videos and archival materials. But this instalment, which has various types of paper works made during his residency at stpi, is refreshingly different in tone from the earlier chapters. Lim’s work typically has a clenched, cerebral cast that invites contemplation rather than emotional connection. Among sea state’s recurring themes is Singapore’s voracious land reclamation, which Lim has been documenting in austerely beautiful and often geometrically composed forms. One of his older works, seastate 2 (2008, 2015), for example, recorded the disappearance of an island called Pulau
Sajahat, or ‘Evil Island’, through an installation of ‘before’ and ‘after’ archival maps and the recreation of a lost buoy in that vicinity. These bear witness to the largely invisible machinations of Singapore’s land growth. But despite their subversive sense of countersurveillance, the experience of these works is a portentous chill – a frozen horror at Singapore’s relentless terraforming of the sea. Which is why Staggered Observations of a Coast comes as such a breath of fresh air. It has a sense of openness and lightness, allowing autobiography, satire and a more embodied understanding of Lim’s enduring themes to seep in. It offers a broader range of responses, which in their variety intimate richer and freer forms of resistance. Faced with, say, the stark reality of the barren terrain of the newly reclaimed badlands, what could one do? Party, of course. The video seastate: a lonely concert for what was there (2012) features a man rocking out atop a pile of sand, playing air guitar on a fog machine, equal parts defiance and despair. One could also draw up a wish-fulfilment map of what one might hope for Singapore and the region. In seastate 8: the grid, whatever wherever whenever (2014–21) a reprint of nautical gridded map of Singapore is cut up into little squares and spread out over a wall. A main chunk, the ‘original’ island, is clustered together. The rest, depicting the frilled edges of Singapore’s coastline and waters, are scattered like dandelion seeds in the wind. The two parts embody a view that Lim has of the ‘nation-state’, the landlocked area of centralised control, and what he calls the ‘sea state’, the fluctuating liminal space of not-sea, not-land. The drifting pieces, which are rearranged depending on the exhibition venue, form a loose, changeable archipelago
that allows for movement and recombinations. I see it as fantasy cartography, posing the possibilities of more flexible and decentralised spheres of control. Embracing a range of forms, occasionally funny and whimsical, this show is a humanising take on Lim’s usual material, emphasised by glimpses into the artist’s personal history. For the first time, he has included in his show works by another artist, photographer Lim Kwong Lim (no relation to Lim), a key figure of the local salon and art photography scene since the 1970s. Three of his earlier documentary photographs are shown here, and they feature Charles Lim’s grandfather during the 1960s, gathering seashells from the beach to make lime. In an artist’s talk, Lim revealed that his grandfather had died before the artist was born, and the family did not have any images of him. So it was a surprise when Lim stumbled upon these images and recognised his grandfather because of the striking resemblance to his own father. The pictures were taken at a seaside village called Mata Ikan, where Lim spent his childhood and which was demolished during the 1980s for redevelopment. What these photographs reveal is an ancestral connection to the sea that illuminates Lim’s practice in a different way. For one, the prints he made record views of the waters just beyond his old family home. Suddenly they also seem poignant with loss. As admirably dogged Lim’s relentless investigation of Singapore’s territorial expansion into the sea has been, what had been missing was the perspective of the human being who lived and breathed that salty air; who had been displaced and is still reckoning with a way to tell that tale. In Staggered Observations of a Coast, it was good to finally meet him. Adeline Chia
facing page, top Zone of Convergence 19, 2021, collagraph on paper, 31 × 43 cm. © and courtesy the artist and stpi, Singapore facing page, bottom seastate 9 : Pulau Satuasviewdamartekongmarinajurongcovebranibaratchangilautekongsajahatsenanghantupunggolsebaraokeastsamalunbukomsento, 2021, laser-cut stpi handmade paper, 45 × 65 × 1 cm. © and courtesy the artist and stpi, Singapore
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Thailand Biennale Butterflies Frolicking on the Mud: Engendering Sensible Capital Various venues, Korat province 18 December – 31 March When the second edition of the Thailand Biennale – an itinerant, government-funded affair – packs up and moves on, a handful of permanent works will remain in Korat, the car-thronged provincial capital of the host province of the same name. Brazilian collective Assume Vivid Astro Focus has given the local skate park a makeover inspired by Rio de Janeiro’s beach boardwalk patterns. The ramps on which the city’s baggy-jeaned teens descend at dusk now resemble a mid-1960s Tropicália album cover (Perimetrava Nail Salon, 2021). Nearby, along the road-ringed promenade that leads to the cherished monument of war hero Thao Suranari, Sandra Cinto has contributed The Wishes Boulevard (2021): a 170m walkway of blue ceramic tiles upon which the naive drawings and hopes of Korat’s youth appear. And not far away, Krit Ngamsom has gifted the city with a mildly horrifying metallic statue of a crouching, crown-donning Korat cat: a native blue-grey, short-haired breed considered auspicious in local folklore (Queen Cat, 2021). For artistic director Yuko Hasegawa, such works comprise a legacy that the public will be completing for years to come as part of an elongated continuum. But which continuum? As one explores the city, it quickly becomes
clear that Hasegawa is not the only puppet master yanking the strings of this bureaucratically compromised event. Her Thailand Biennale – with its Butterflies Frolicking on the Mud: Engendering Sensible Capital title and lineup of 53 artists from 25 countries – aspires to nurture artistic engagements with Korat’s natural, social and institutional capital. It seeks to foster ‘social common capital’ – a phrase borrowed from Japanese economist Hirofumi Uzawa – that enriches lives in both material and spiritual terms, and with a fecundity not unlike the local butterflies that have, apparently, recently resurged. Built into her edition’s collaborative nature and broad, umbrellalike theme is a desire to tap Korat’s potential audiences and encourage their participation. But while for her curatorial team this open-endedness needs, well, curating, the government departments wielding ultimate power seem to have a more rudderless event in mind: a jamboreelike free-for-all bloated with cloying displays of civic largesse. Mangling the Thailand Biennale’s messaging – and cluttering its social media feeds – is a heap of collateral events, from kids dance-offs to desultory local craft, sculpture and painting showcases. Seemingly tossed in the pot to beef up the
municipal government’s ‘Art City’ pretensions and give box-ticking civil servants fleeting moments of self-affirmation, these events have obscured Hasegawa’s capacious yet controlled vision, to the extent that few locals on the ground seem aware it even exists.There are clusters where curating wins out. In a corner of the city’s Rajamangala University of Technology campus, the art department building hosts the biggest node: 22 artworks in a range of media. Despite the lack of sitespecificity and the glut of video and loan works, together they have a cumulative effect: the section evokes a hive mind or mainframe furiously processing a host of contemporary issues, from the fate of mineral ecologies to environmentalism to posthuman futures. On the ground floor, Elias Sime’s sculptural abstract canvases made of reclaimed circuit boards and computer keys are in dialogue with Yanyun Chen’s video installation of fake and real flowers – a lyrical response to Singapore’s fake-onlinenews bill, with a mesmeric charcoal aesthetic (False Truths, 2021). The teaching rooms upstairs, meanwhile, house a robust selection of videoworks – from Chilean collective Atacama Desert Foundation’s fun, millennia-spanning cartoon travelogue focused on ancient geoglyphs
Bianco Bondi, The Antechambre (Thai Crane), 2021, site-specific installation, salt, furniture, flowers, dimensions variable. Courtesy Supernormal Studio
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in the Andean desert (The Past Present in the Future. The Atacama Lines, 2021), to Herwig Scherabon’s two-channel installation digitally reconfiguring 3d scans, sound recordings and drone footage of the Canary Islands (Not Really Now Not Anymore, 2021). Meanwhile, looking somewhat incongruous in the corridor is Shuttle Stories (2021), a hanging display of reimagined ikat silk textiles resulting from one of several collaborations between contemporary brands (in this case, Chiang Mai textile studio Slowstitch) and local weavers. The far more affecting site, though, is Phimai National Museum: a repository of ancient Khmer relics, located 60km from Korat city, near the town of Phimai’s tumbledown ruins. Here nine works attempt to converse with the Hindu-Khmer gods and goddesses who stare out sullenly from weatherworn stone lintels and statuary. Some do so reverentially. Nature’s Breath: Arokhayasala (1995) is a corbel arch-like floor installation comprised of five leaning columns of rusty steel boxes, each infused with fragrant herbs. Resembling a rib cage, replete with metal lungs that dangle from the centre, this fragile piece by late Thai master Montien Boonma – created a year after his wife’s death from breast cancer – is the visceral outcome of his research into Khmer architecture and Arokayasala (infirmaries). Nearby, a stone singha (guardian lion) looks on, as if protecting one of its own. Meanwhile, Japanese architect Tsuyoshi Tane has convened a séance of sorts in the
storage shed outside (Memories in Light, 2021). Ringed by thick black curtains, shrouded in darkness, the normally open-air shed comes alive with the chanting of Buddhist sutras and moving lamps that rise and fall, ebb and flow. Lozenges of warm light move through the space, then give way to darkness. Together, these immersive elements attempt to reanimate the gods, beasts and apsaras carved on the stone artefacts on display – and evoke the passing of centuries by simulating the sun’s diurnal motions. When not sequestered within intimate venues, however, things regularly come unstuck. One example: the official website places Olafur Eliasson’s contribution at Phimai Historical Park, but only after trawling the ruins does it become clear that More-than-human songs (2021) is actually a sonic intervention broadcast twice a day over the town’s public address system. Others: a work at the city’s Wat Phayap temple is missing for an unexplained reason, and Sim Isan (2021) – a mural-lined trapezoid edifice, by Alongkorn Lauwatthana and Homesawan Umansap, that shelters a tree – is so hard to find in the local park that I only stumble on it by accident, after retreating to a coffeeshop and spotting it on the horizon. If the essence of Hasegawa’s biennials lies, as she wrote recently for Pass Journal, ‘in the space between things and people, and between people and works of art’, then that space here is repeatedly obstructed by issues of scale, access, communication, manpower or execution.
Moreover, as you flit from zoos to museums, find yourself face-to-face with saccharine frescoes of local biodiversity, lifesize elephant puppets or giant Korat cats, it becomes clear that the Thailand Biennale’s ‘material and spiritual’ enrichment precludes any serious reflection on the northeast now, or its modern history. This is hardly surprising given Hasegawa’s self-professed politeness in foreign lands, or the intentions of the real puppet master, the Ministry of Culture’s Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, but is impossible to ignore in light of the rise of rebel arts activism and events in Isaan – developments that invite, or incite, serious reflection. The careful facilitating of amiable collaborations with handpicked local practitioners, from weaving communities to university departments; the insistent focus on ‘bountiful environments and ecologies’ over and above humanity or human stories; the gravitation towards Thai floral designers, architects and craftspeople, not the country’s glut of socially engaged contemporary artists: for Hasegawa, these are the defining markers of a ‘sensible’ attempt to stimulate, and build a lasting legacy, within a complex region. Fortunately for the government, however, these markers are also entirely consistent with presenting a highly centralised (if higgledy-piggledy) picture of provincial diversity – and with keeping civil society and sociopolitics, local realities even, at a safe distance. Max Crosbie-Jones
Alongkorn Lauwatthana and Homesawan Umansap, Sim Isan, 2021, mural painting, dimensions variable. Courtesy Thailand Biennale
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Kang Seung Lee Briefly Gorgeous Gallery Hyundai, Seoul 17 November – 31 December Visibility is central to the multidisciplinary art practice of Kang Seung Lee, who sensitively and insistently foregrounds queer stories that have been marginalised in mainstream historical discourse. Working primarily in drawing – as well as embroidery, installation, video and collage – Lee adopts a documentary approach by preserving and perpetuating the labours of queer artists and activists such as David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, Peter Hujar, Alvin Baltrop and Derek Jarman, all of whom refused to accept the dismissal of their struggles by dominant heteronormative cultural narratives. Such figures loom large in Lee’s oeuvre, which engages dialectics of presence and absence to promote a more acute awareness
of minoritarian perspectives amid the conservative milieux that have long sought to render them invisible. In Briefly Gorgeous, Lee invokes the individual stories of choreographer Goh Choo San and photographer Tseng Kwong Chi, queer artists of Asian descent who succumbed to aids-related illnesses while living in New York during the 1980s and 90s, respectively. Lee meticulously recreates photographic portraits of these protagonists using graphite on paper before erasing each image’s central figure, leaving behind a ghostly, liminal presence devoid of any distinguishing details. In Lee’s drawings of Goh, only the choreographer’s hands are discernible, while the rest of his body
is reduced to shimmering wisps of vapour; the same treatment applies to drawings of Tseng, which are based on the photographer’s acclaimed performative self-portrait series East Meets West (1979–89). Before his untimely death in 1990, Tseng also amassed a prolific photographic archive documenting New York’s downtown art scene, from which Lee procured a 1980 Polaroid photo of Shawn McQuate, then a nineteen-year-old dancer and regular at the legendary Club 57 in Manhattan’s East Village. It is an image of a barefoot teenager posing in profile, wearing a black jacket accented with voluminous white tulle that envelops his slender shoulders, and confidently gazing directly at the viewer with
Untitled (Shawn McQuate 3), 2021, graphite on paper, 48 × 33 cm. Courtesy the artist
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a look of fierce vivacity and youthful invincibility. Today, Tseng’s photo reads as a celebration of what it was to be young and gay in the halcyon days before the aids pandemic ravaged the queer community, eventually claiming the lives of nearly everyone from McQuate’s Club 57 cohort. On the gallery’s exterior, Lee enlarges two drawings of McQuate to create a largescale vinyl-banner diptych (Banner Project, 2021): one image faithfully recreates Tseng’s photo, but in the second image McQuate’s legs and face have been erased so that his body seems to be disappearing. Within the gallery, an original Xeroxed print of Tseng’s Polaroid (Untitled, 1980) is paired with a short singlechannel video (Untitled (Shawn McQuate), 2021) that replaces the lithe figure from the photo with the sixty-year-old McQuate of the present. In this brief performance, he attempts to hold the same pose while wearing a reproduced version of the jacket from some four decades
years prior. It’s a feat of considerable effort for McQuate, who suffers from hiv-related blindness; while his body may be physically present, the visible world around him has already dissolved into oblivion, a cruel irony underscored by Lee’s drawing methodology. Prevailing themes of absence and loss in Briefly Gorgeous are reified in a minimal installation that transforms the gallery’s basement into a lonely nightclub. Scattered around the perimeter of Lee’s imagined gay club are several pieces by contemporary Korean artist Haneyl Choi, whose works visualise the complexities of queer code-switching in Korea’s conservative social milieu. For this exhibition, Choi contributes sculptures of disembodied limbs – an arm covered in multiple rainbow tattoos with an led microphone clutched in its hand; or a leg with men’s underwear wrapped around its ankle and a black, puppy-dog bdsm mask perched atop its thigh – that resonate with
the bodily erasure characteristic of Lee’s drawings. These bodies, too, are in the process of disappearing. Their symbolism as the last remaining patrons surrounding an empty dancefloor is haunting in its layered references to Tseng, Goh and the countless others lost to the aids pandemic. And yet the music keeps on playing. The soundtrack to Briefly Gorgeous, which blasts from speakers in the basement and echoes throughout Gallery Hyundai’s various exhibition spaces, was compiled by eight queer Korean artists whom Lee invited to create playlists for the occasion. By asserting control over the music selection, they forge a sense of agency that claims the club as a space of empowerment in an act of solidarity with previous generations of queer creatives and activists, ensuring that their stories are honoured and remembered for the brilliant beauty of their protagonists simply living their truth, against all odds. Andy St. Louis
Untitled (Shawn McQuate) (still), 2021, single-channel hd video (colour, silent), 2 min 24 sec. Courtesy the artist
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Books The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia by Pamela N. Corey University of Washington Press, $65 (hardcover) During the early 2010s, a cracked and decaying modernist apartment complex in downtown Phnom Penh became the unlikely locus of an ascendent art scene. For several years, the occupants of the Cambodian capital’s White Building lived alongside Sa Sa Art Projects, a nonprofit art space founded by the all-male artist collective Stiev Selapak. At its bidding, and often with the tenants’ involvement, Sa Sa staged debates, acts of resistance and artistic and archival projects in the dark, dank rooms of this rot-stained remnant of postcolonial Cambodia’s short-lived New Khmer Architecture movement. Arguably the most searing project was Khvay Samnang’s Human Nature (2011): a series depicting residents, their faces concealed behind papier-mâché masks, posing in peeling abodes alongside a few belongings. For art-historian Pamela N. Corey, the power of Samnang’s images lies partly in the subjects’ agency, how they appear to ‘speak to their photographer and shape their mode of representation’ – this in a land in which ‘impoverished Cambodians too often have been the subject of touristic spectatorship’. Grounded in years of fieldwork, The City in Time unpacks practices of this socially engaged nature from Vietnam and Cambodia by linking them with the rapid urbanisation underway in Ho Chi Minh and Phnom Penh respectively. Given the mutual distrust and animus between these neighbouring states, this framing might
strike some readers as problematic, yet it is couched carefully and cogently. Both countries have, she argues, long experienced a ‘double marginalization within art historical fields’: they are neither central within the historical canon of Asian art ‘nor given equal treatment in studies of modern and contemporary art in Asia or even Southeast Asia’. Moreoever the two cities in question share an ‘architectural feeling’ that stems from ‘traces of colonialism and the affinities of their international modernisms’, as well as the ramifications of urban transformations being ‘structured by neoliberal, postsocialist conditions’. Ultimately, though, this city-focused account sets out to contrast artistic practices embedded within urban space and form, not size up places or scenes that share an intimate geography. The two chapters on Ho Chi Minh include close readings of Ngô Ðình Trúc’s text-andphoto series Idle Talk (2005) and Tran Anh Hùng’s Cyclo (1995), an unnerving portrait of a 1990s Vietnam in transition after the Ðoi Moi economic reforms. The few Vietnamese artists who have sought to ‘mediate the urban image as a means of alerting the viewer to the registers of control both visibly and invisibly exerted by the state’, such as The Propeller Group, are also discussed at length. Scholastic in tone yet brisk and engaging, these tightly focused surveys reveal another alignment between the two cities, namely a lack of ‘overt acts of mark-making or unmediated
radical actions in public space’. In Ho Chi Minh, the reasons why studio- or gallery-bound practices prevail over public art range from the hegemony of ‘high art’, to commercial considerations, to fears of reprimand by the ‘cultural police’, and even worries that publicly engaged art will somehow be equated with the city’s glut of state-sponsored monuments and sculptures. In Phnom Penh, meanwhile, the members of Stiev Selapak have been documenting ‘spaces of imminent urban renewal’ using the ‘lens and the body’, and for more strategic reasons. Their often covert, photography-based approaches are bound up with the state-sanctioned land-grabs stemming from frenzied real-estate development, and the often aesthetically driven public protests that sprang up against them. It is in surveying these small but enduring acts of place-making and reclamation that her book’s goals, as well as its title’s allusion to the temporality of urban environments, feel most spirited and salutary: here the artist shaped by Phnom Penh can be seen playfully attempting to shape its future. For Corey, this trend, born of its forced evictions and rapid dispossessions, reflects nothing less than an urgent archival impulse. In a land where historical records are scant and modernist architecture from Cambodia’s so-called Golden Age is in danger of being forgotten, one role such practices perform is as aide-mémoires for the urban imagination. Max Crosbie-Jones
Leelee Chan’s Art Journey: Tokens From Time Edited by András Szántó Hatje Cantz Verlag, £30 (softcover)
This is an account of Hong Kong sculptor Leelee Chan’s bmw Art Journey. She describes her work as an ‘archaeology of the urban environment’ and it privileges the handmade and the found objects (old and new) and debris around her home, and, according to Chan, reflects the influence of growing up near the major international circulation hub that is Hong Kong’s container ports. The Art Journey is a prize awarded to artists exhibiting at Art Basel’s Hong Kong and Miami editions that enables them to produce a body of
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work or project based around travelling (not only by car) ‘almost anywhere in the world’. Chan is the recipient of the 2020 Hong Kong Award, which, in view of how that year unfolded might seem like something of a poison chalice. Indeed, in part, the book is a story about someone who circulated (from the summer of 2020 to the summer of 2021) at a time when human beings largely did not. Her reason for doing this was to explore eight materials – obsidian, copper, silver, iron, marble, mosaic, concrete and mycelium –
in terms of their extraction and exploitation in order to reconsider, via encounters with a range of people involved in the past and future use of these materials – from artists and craftspeople to scientists and researchers – the way in which her practice participates in these processes. And how that might be improved in terms of its ethical and environmental impacts. It’s a project that seeks to expand the understanding of sculpture beyond the aesthetics of the finished artwork itself. Nirmala Devi
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Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani New Directions, $16.95 (softcover) ‘Are you sure? I always thought it was Finnish,’ says Knut, one of the narrators of Yoko Tawada’s sweet and lopsided novel, Scattered All Over the Earth. Hiruko, the novel’s central character, has obviously heard this before. ‘sushi not finnish,’ she replies without missing a beat. Newly translated into English, Scattered All Over the Earth is the first instalment in an expected trilogy (the first two books have already been published in Japanese) in which the nation once known as Japan has apparently ceased to exist. Tawada’s characters, guided by memory and hearsay, can only speculate about the realities suggested by its lingering, ghostly culture. In their world, China has stopped exporting, and English-speaking immigrants to Europe fear deportation to the us, which is now in need of a larger work force. The novel’s alternating narrators come from Denmark, Germany, Greenland, India and that unnamable ‘land of sushi’. Hiruko left home to study abroad in Sweden, but a few months before she was meant to return, ‘her country disappeared’. Her memory of her culture and language fading, she speaks in her own made-up, pan-Scandinavian language. Hiruko finds a willing ally in Knut, a fellow logophile, who volunteers to help her find other Japanese speakers. They are joined, now and again, by the other characters (Akash, Tenzo/
Nanook, Nora, Susanoo), as they follow one another across Northern Europe in search of truth, romance and umami. The universe Tawada has created feels incongruous: it’s at once borderless and carefree, and at the same time feels heavily regulated and policed. The characters turn up in Oslo and the South of France at the drop of a hat, fuelled by a carefree Euro-trip vibe: a crush is reason enough to join strangers on a transcontinental quest, and the world seems to run on a logic of serendipity. Yet the world outside Europe is impossibly far away and walled off, and the lack of access to information about Japan suggests some larger plot to erase it from global memory. It’s odd, for example, that despite the existence of the internet and smartphones, Hiruko doesn’t use them to contact other people stranded outside Japan. But one line provides a hint: one of the narrators works in a sushi restaurant, and though he isn’t Japanese, his customers pepper him with questions about the religion and other ‘realities’ of Japan they’ve constructed out of guesswork; researching Buddhism online, he finds that the web pages disappear not long after he checks them. The lore surrounding Japan is at times mundane: ‘I had heard something once about people sleeping standing up in crowded trains – wasn’t that in the land of sushi?’ Or more oblique:
‘I once heard about a garden somewhere on the other side of the globe where flowing water is expressed entirely in stone without a drop of moisture’. Hiruko recalls that in her culture ‘sexual hormones had died out’. The line comes as part of some amusing commentary on Hiruko’s hypercharged encounters with European men, but considering Japan’s very real declining-population crisis, it’s also an unsettling clue. Tawada has lived in Germany, away from her birth country, for nearly 40 years, and writes both in Japanese and German. Here she paints a moving depiction of an immigrant’s anxiety and the fear of permanent displacement. If the plot is driven by a central mystery – what exactly happened to Japan? – the novel’s central question is: what happens to a language and its speakers without a home? In Copenhagen a sushi restaurant is run by a guy from China trained in Paris, who employs someone from Vietnam and a nonspecific Asian American. ‘When the original no longer exists,’ says the chef, ‘there’s nothing you can do except look for the best copy.’ It’s a hopeful idea – that the legacy of a culture could be carried on without its direct descendants. But ultimately the novel seems to disagree: without the original, what’s left is only a patchwork of simulacra, stereotype and conjecture. Thu-Huong Ha
Shamans of the Blind Country: A Picture Book from the Himalaya by Michael Oppitz
During the late 1970s, German ethnographer Michael Oppitz visited the Northern Magar people of Nepal. As a subgroup of the Magar people (who make up seven percent of the country’s population), the Northern Magar lead a seminomadic lifestyle in the foothills of the Dhaulagiri Massif, speak Kham (rather than Nepali) and practise shamanism (instead of Hinduism or Buddhism). The rituals, customs and mythologies surrounding their animist healing practices inspired Oppitz to direct the four-hour documentary Shamans of the Blind Country (1980) in the village of Taka and release a corresponding photobook of the same title comprising black-and-white photographic and written documentation – now published for the first time in an expanded Englishlanguage edition.
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Galerie Buchholz, €30 (softcover)
Via Oppitz’s lens, we follow village shaman Master Bal Bahādur as he is called to treat the sick and ailing, performing rituals to summon malicious spirits and offering gifts in return for good health. Alongside images of these practices are photos of women weaving and tending cauldrons, shepherds herding, children playing and couples laughing. Opposite each is a page of text that Oppitz, in his detailed accompanying essay, carefully distinguishes as ‘exposition’ rather than ‘explanation’. (Oppitz’s painstaking analysis of his methodology is an unnecessary academic hangover in this context, but a later essay offers a useful insight into Northern Magar culture and value systems.) The Northern Magar rely on an oral tradition of passing stories to following generations; creation myths, folklore and legends of
supernatural beings are chanted or sung during healing rituals and festivals. Woven into Oppitz’s observations of Bal Bahādur’s daily rounds are translations of those stories: the creation of the first shaman and his pact with the nine witch sisters (the main culprits for ill health and bad fortune, who demand a blood sacrifice as payment for allowing the shaman to cure the sick) accompanied by an image of two decapitated sheep heads, for example; or how dangerous spirits come to be, as in the story of Kubirām, a boy who, neglected by his stepmother, turns into a vengeful bird-child, presented alongside a photo of a group of men huddled under a fishnet used for protection against murderous spirits. Oppitz’s associative words and images capture a culture in which myth, magic and the everyday merge. Fi Churchman
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Bibliolepsy by Gina Apostol Soho Press, $26 (hardcover)
Gina Apostol is a phenomenon in Philippine literature, a field dominated by the machismo of writers who generally adhere to a set formula; as an immigrant to the us, she is an important voice for the Filipino diaspora (and I personally would have benefitted from reading someone like her when growing up). So, naturally, I wanted to like Bibliolepsy; but its protagonist prevented me from doing so. At least initially. Originally published in 1997, the book won the Philippine National Book Award the following year. This new us edition includes minor revisions, although Apostol expresses in her author’s note a desire to have done more. Apostol began working on Bibliolepsy in 1983 – the year Ninoy Aquino, Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s political rival, was assassinated, and three years before Marcos’s own ousting. Prima ‘Primi’ Peregrino, an orphaned mestiza bibliophile and cynic, narrates her childhood and early adulthood as a university student during the Marcos era. It is she who suffers from the titular disease – a fictional malady, which the author describes as ‘a mawkishness derived from habitual aloneness and congenital desire’. Its manifestations include ‘a quickening between the thighs and in the points of breast, a broad arching V, when addressed by writers, books, bibliographies, dictionaries, xerox machines,
a sympathy for typists of manuscripts’. A bibliolept is turned on by books and their effects: Primi is particularly drawn to male poets because she feels they are inferior to her; they are merely objectified means to satisfy her lust for literature. In other respects she is unattracted to men. Set against the traditional Philippine feminine ideal (personified by the celibate, humble and selfless María Clara, whom celebrated writer José Rizal immortalised in his 1887 revolutionary novel Noli Me Tángere), this sexual frankness and confidence makes her a feminist antihero. Indeed, Primi refers to herself as a ‘mockery of María Clara’. Primi has instead inserted herself into a community of writers full of theory-toting machismo. When confronted with the new reality of female leaders – such as Ana, Primi’s older ‘sort of witch’ sister, who is an icon of the edsa Revolution, in which Marcos was swept from power, and Corazon Aquino, the country’s first female president – Primi’s exboyfriend (who writes ‘linear, hard punching stories about over-achieving nihilists’) expresses the fragility of the homogeneous, patriarchal literary tradition: ‘How will my fiction ever be able to withstand this – if our country is taken over by a revolution of Makati matronas,’ he complains. Yet Primi’s self-assuredness and belief in the superiority of her intelligence and passion, verging on narcissism – as far as she
is concerned, she shares her self-created and self-diagnosed bibliolepsy with literary giants like Kafka, Dostoevsky and Joyce – can make her unlikeable. During the nation’s moments of change, she expresses her disdain at the prospect of disappearing into the country’s larger story: walking on the edsa highway, which has become the site of the People Power Revolution protests, Primi muses, ‘It’s not easy to live within a novel. One wishes to tear out from the inevitability of the plot to rehearse the uniqueness of one’s own voice’. How, while witnessing the potential liberation of 60 million people from dictatorial oppression, can Primi be so preoccupied with herself? And yet Apostol manages to reframe the very reason I dislike Primi – her overwhelming narcissism – as a confidence that disrupts literary tradition and female expectation, concepts I would usually laud on their own. In short, this book forces me to question my own prejudice. Have I internalised the very structures Apostol has sought to dismantle? I realise this after Primi boldly declares the location of the edsa Revolution as ‘just a street’; a statement about a highway I grew up revering, and upon which my parents protested, that agitates me, yet challenges me to reevaluate these long-held attitudes. And it is in this defiance of hegemonic normativity that Bibliolepsy has won me over. Marv Recinto
Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu Wildfire Books, £16.99 (hardcover) On the face of it, Melissa Fu’s debut novel follows three generations of the Dao family between 1938 and 2005 as they collectively (and rather circuitously) journey from China’s Hunan Province through to New York, and from prosperity to migrant and then refugee status to multicultural citizens of a globalised world – all of which states are variously problematic. Many of the histories it engages with along the way – from the devastating destruction of the Second Sino-Japanese War and then China’s Civil War through the White Terror in Taiwan, to the legacies of McCarthyism and Tiananmen Square 1989 – have been widely covered in fiction and nonfiction in recent years, producing, at times, the sense that it is more
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than literally treading old (but nevertheless painful) ground. Where the novel truly comes to life, however, is when it reaches the near present, with characters burdened by a sense of belonging to places that no longer exist, connected to people whose languages they no longer speak. Indeed its primary theme, which builds through the family’s constant shedding (in turns by compulsion and choice) of one life for the next, is one that speaks to the status of immigrant and refugee communities everywhere: how much of the person you are today is the product of the people and cultures that came before? Or as the author puts it, what do you do when your logic of survival means that ‘facing any one way means turning your back on another’?
It’s appropriate – as each character’s past in turn attains the status of legend – that the book draws its title and most of its more poetic thematics from a fifth-century fable by Tao Yuanming, in which a fisherman stumbles across a utopia hidden behind a forest of peach trees and a rocky grotto (the title, Tao Hua Yuan, has since become a standard term for utopia) that you can leave but never return to. And that it’s the tale’s various retellings that form a thread connecting one generation to the next. One way of looking at all this is that nothing ever changes; the other is that life is a process of coming to terms with constant change. Whichever path you chose, Fu offers an emotional yet elegant ride. Nirmala Devi
ArtReview Asia
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Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra Hutchinson Heinmann, £16.99 (hardcover) Pankaj Mishra’s second novel comes 20 years after his first. During that time, he has become, through a series of non-fiction essays and books, one of the most prescient and surgical deconstructors of the causes and lasting (and largely negative) effects of Western liberalism and imperialism, and the impact of both on his native India and more broadly the Global South. Though there are, of course, those who are vehemently opposed to his analyses. To a degree, Mishra’s return to fiction allows him more scope to explore, from a standpoint that is marginally less judgmental than his non-fiction work, both perspectives: broadly that of the victims and of the executioners in a world shaped by modernisation and globalism. And angry, displaced, disaffected and often toxic masculinity. The novel centres around the lives of three men from poor backgrounds – Arun, Vivendra and Aseem – who meet as roommates at the Indian Institute of Technology (iit) in Delhi during the early 1980s and immediately endure a horrifying all-male sexual initiation into the world of elite study, organised by their seniors and ordered in terms of their victim’s place in the caste system (marked by their surnames). From there the trio embark on their respective processes of reinvention (or, as Aseem, channelling the author V.S. Naipaul, whose work haunts this book throughout, puts it,
‘trampling the past’): the ultimate promise of a new, modern India. Aseem goes on to become an author and media celebrity with an appetite for rampant sex (with pretty young women), and for attacking India’s elites while wanting, nevertheless, to join their social circles; Vivendra, the lowest caste of the three, a Wall Street billionaire with a taste for blonde prostitutes, blowjobs and insider trading; while Arun, who already received a caste upgrade thanks to his father arranging for a school report that exchanged his son’s surname for one designating a position at the top of the caste tree, retreats to the foothills of the Himalayas, to translate unpopular Hindi books into less popular English books and look after his ailing mother. Arun, moreover, is the novel’s narrator, addressing his tale to a dramatically abandoned (and younger) girlfriend, Alia, as a form of aggravated rationale for his actions and for those of his friends. If the early parts of the novel focus on inequality, class and caste, the latter parts of it, in which Alia (who comes from a background of wealth) is present, introduce the themes of globalisation, diaspora and a generation born with a more fluid and contingent sense of social and national identity. For Arun, coming from a past in which the rules were clear, it’s a comfortable but uneasy encounter with
a present in which there are no rules. For Alia and her friends, travel and social media are a means of instantly switching one reality for another. Their focus is on changing the world rather than changing themselves: ‘social media forces everyone to become an operator… We all have to learn how to blend aggressive selfpromotion with sincere activism’. Even Arun’s abusive father, whose own reinvention has involved abandoning his family to start a new one, is at this last: spewing much ‘liked’ posts on Facebook demanding the deportation of Sonia Gandhi ‘back to the Vatican’ while hymning praises to India’s current Hindu nationalist leader Narendra Modi. ‘He imagines himself, like so many lately bewitched by the internet,’ Arun muses, ‘to be robustly participating in, not just passively living through great events. Perhaps this was another one of history’s cruel tricks: to forge dreams of agency and self-empowerment, of making history, among people who it has irrevocably unmade.’ Arun, via another form of retreat, ultimately chooses to unmake himself. Run and Hide is a clinical, riveting, at times excruciating, examination of the forces that shape society today; of the unrealities we create and the unrealities that are imposed upon us. And whether or not there is any true sense of ‘we’ anymore. It doesn’t end well for anyone. Mark Rappolt
Diplomatic Gifts: A History in Fifty Presents Book by Paul Brummell Hurst, £25 (hardcover) This fun compendium traces the history of diplomatic gifts, from the ivory statues the Pharaoh Akhenaten sent and received to neighbouring kingdoms in the fourteenth century bce, to landmarks including the Statue of Liberty (an 1884 gift from the people of France to America). As the British ambassador to Latvia, the latest in a long career of Foreign Office appointments, Paul Brummell knows about diplomacy and the subtle political cues gift-giving can render. Evaluating whether a present is a true expression of friendship, a power play or a downright bribe is part of the job, and in his introduction Brummell delves into various anthropological studies that have helped him decide. One 1920s report for
example observed that the people of the Trobriand Islands engaged in a complex system of present swapping in which the same gifts, a necklace and a bracelet, would be regifted constantly, presumably to ensure no one ever felt short-changed. Art and antiques have often been diplomatic gifts, but given the pitfalls of an artwork being read wrongly, the more anodyne the better. Nonetheless David Cameron’s present of a painting by little-known street artist Ben Eine to Barack Obama in 2014 seems a national embarrassment given he received an Ed Ruscha in return. Animals provide superior publicity, with China’s ‘panda diplomacy’ being the most obvious example. Following a ceremony in
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1972 for the political elite, in which an orangutan named Miyo pulled a string to reveal a banner welcoming two new pandas gifted by China (Kang Kang and Lan Lan), 20,000 members of the Japanese public queued to meet the black-eyed pair. Yet beasts present practical problems: while arrangements were being made to get a baby camel gifted by Timbuktu to François Hollande in 2013 to France, the animal was temporarily entrusted to a local family for safekeeping. Except, through some misunderstanding, they cooked it in a tagine. Indeed, the term ‘white elephant’ derives from the receipt of beasts from monarchs in Southeast Asia that were, and as gifts with strings attached continue to be, a burden hidden in an honour. Oliver Basciano
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on the cover Shubigi Rao, photographed by Alfonse Chiu
Spring 2022
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You could say that such is the mythology of Guinness that a pint of the stout is to the Irish what steak frites is to the French. Or at least, that latter example was one that Roland Barthes wrote about in his 1957 collection of essays, Mythologies: ‘Being part of the nation, [steak frites] follows the index of patriotic values: it helps them to rise in wartime, it is the very flesh of the French soldier…’ (the rest of the book is about trying to decode the mythologies that are used to naturalise political and cultural ideologies). The Guinness mythology is due in part to memorable branding. At more than 250 years old, Guinness has spent the last century honing the aura surrounding its stout via its advertising campaigns, from its first tagline ‘Guinness is good for you’ (1929) to those iconic 1930s posters designed by John Gilroy depicting a feckless zookeeper trying to reclaim his precious pint from a collection of animals, to its awardwinning television adverts, some of which turned the 119.5-second pour-time to its advantage. Take ‘Surfer’. It opens with a black-andwhite closeup of a man’s face, brow furrowed; he’s looking up at something ominousseeming. His eyes quiver, then blink. “He waits,” a male voiceover says, “It’s what he does. And I’ll tell you what…” The scene cuts to a group of surfers on a beach who grab their longboards and gallop into the sea. “Tick followed tock followed tick followed tock followed tick…” As the surfers disappear behind the crest of a huge swell, a bass riff looms out of the silence, and an aerial view captures the four of them, tiny, paddling out towards a big wave. A really big wave. Which they catch, and as they ride (“Ahab says, ‘I don’t care who you are, here’s to your dream’”), giant white horses rise out of the water, seafoam turning into solid muscle. “The old sailors return to the bar, ‘Here’s to you, Ahab!’, and the fat drummer hit the beat with all his heart…” One by one the surfers wipe out, tumble through the horses’ legs, vanish into the froth beneath trampling hooves. But one surfer, he bares his teeth in a snarl, stays low against his board, and gets barrelled in the curl of the wave. A horse crashes over, wild-eyed. And the surfer emerges. “…Here’s to waiting.” That 1999 advert, directed by Jonathan Glazer and inspired by Polynesian surfers’ ability to read the ocean, Walter Crane’s 1892 painting Neptune’s Horses and Herman Melville’s fanatical Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (1851) (this last seeming an odd accompaniment, since Ahab is all revenge and bad vibes, and Guinness ain’t about that), brings together a trifecta of potent mythmaking ingredients.
Aftertaste
On the Gargle by Fi Churchman
I could probably tell you that watching ‘Surfer’ had an immediate and profound effect on my drink of choice. That in that moment, hypnotised by the anticipation of ‘the wait’, the romance and danger of the ocean as Polynesian surfer Rusty K skims through the tube of that really big wave, and Leftfield’s heartbeat-in-thehead soundtrack spliced from their 1999 song Phat Planet, I turned for a pint of the ‘Black Stuff’; watched the downward surge of bubbles like it was liquid sorcery; then had a slo-mo tastebud revelation from that first buttery sip on the tip of the tongue to the tang of the liquid as it slips down to the bitter-buds at the back where the flavour of roasted barley blooms; and never looked back. But I was eight. And tbh, didn’t even register the surfers (or the beer for that matter). Rather, I was just really amazed by these giant white horses crashing out of the waves, and so obsessed with them that I tried to draw them for
months afterwards. And then for years after, I was conjuring those giant white horses during long, boring car journeys, watching them gallop alongside the road. I still see them sometimes, even now, the imagery stuck fast. Back to that steak-frites-flesh thing: it brought up weird old memories of my nan insisting Guinness is “in the blood”, and then later learning that people really were given a free pint of Guinness for donating blood in Ireland (to ‘replenish’ lost iron). And then only while writing this, thinking about how she, an immigrant to the uk, might have said that sort of thing because she felt closer to home with a Guinness in hand, the same way a lot of people who are part of a diaspora feel connected to their ethnicities via familiar foods and drink. And the way in which the ‘patriotic value’ of Guinness is so habituated within the Irish psyche that its drinking has become synonymous with St Patrick’s Day; and as such, has done some denaturalising of its own by turning a Christian festival devoted to its patron saint into a (mostly) secular holiday that’s celebrated around the world. Maybe those giant white horses did have the desired advertising effect on me, or maybe it was just that the stout was as normalised a beverage in our household as tea and coffee, but if there was ever a cultural ideology to buy in to, sign me up! Because Guinness, after all, is good for you. Sláinte.
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