ArtReview Asia Summer 2017 by ArtReview

Catalyst

Creation

FUTURE GREATS Upon the addition of a small amount of…

Short circuits Mineral

BREATH Extinction

DE-PIXELATION Sleep

MAKING Resistance Nameless ghosts Artists on the move

DARKNESS

KUNST AM BAU Play History

Daniel Arsham “Rose Quartz Teddy Bear (Large)”, 2017. Rose quartz, hydrostone. 99.1 × 81.3 × 76.2 cm / 39 × 32 × 30 in

N EW YOR K

PAR I S

H ON G KON G

S E OU L

TOKYO

13 0 O R C HAR D STR E ET

76 R U E D E TU R E N N E

50 C O N NAU G HT R OAD

5 PALPAN- G I L

P I R AM I D E B U I LD I N G

LOWE R EAST S I D E

MAR AI S

C E NTR AL

JONGNO-GU

6-6-9 R O P PO N G I, M I NATO -K U

IVÁN AR G OTE

ZACH HAR R I S

LE E S E U N G-J I O

DAN I E L AR S HAM

PI E R R E S OU LAG E S

“LA VE N GAN ZA D E L AM OR”

“PU R PLE CLOU D”

“N U CLE U S”

“CRYSTAL TOYS”

7 J U N E - 19 AU G UST

TH R O U G H 11 J U N E

TH R O U G H 29 J U LY

TH R O U G H 8 J U LY

XU Z H E N

CLAU D E R UTAU LT

“CIVI LI ZATI ON ITE RATI ON”

TH R O U G H 8 J U LY

TH R O U G H 29 J U LY

TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY AND ESTHER SCHIPPER CONGRATULATE TOMÁS SARACENO ON THE OPENING OF HIS SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE ASIA CULTURE CENTER, GWANGJU, KOREA

An artistic visualisation of the ﬂoat predictor: ﬂoat.aerocene.org

TOMÁS SARACENO OUR INTERPLANETARY BODIES JULY 15, 2017 – FEBRUARY 25, 2018

WANGECHI WA N GEC HI MUTU MUTU MAY 18—JULY 8, 2017 MAY 18—JULY 8, 2017 407 PEDDER BUILDING, 12 PEDDER STREET, HONG KONG | lehmannmaupin.com 407 PEDDER BUILDING, 12 PEDDER STREET, HONG KONG | lehmannmaupin.com

PILAR CORRIAS, GLADSTONE GALLERY, AND ESTHER SCHIPPER CONGRATULATE PHILIPPE PARRENO ON THE OPENING OF HIS SOLO EXHIBITION AT ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM PHILIPPE PARRENO SYNCHRONICITY JULY 8 – SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

ArtReview Asia vol 5 no 2 Summer 2017

When the trickle becomes a flood Welcome to this special edition of ArtReview Asia, which marks its first full presentation of Future Greats, an issue in which we explore the less obvious parts of art and look towards topics that will be shaping our attitudes and consciousness over the coming year. That’s not to say that every issue of this magazine isn’t special. (For more on that Future Greats business btw, see the introduction to the features section.) To be honest, each issue of ArtReview Asia is special, a kind of ongoing voyage of discovery in which the magazine finds out more about what artists are doing and thinking, and, with any luck, why they are doing and thinking it. And, in a funny way, with each new issue ArtReview Asia finds out a little bit more about itself. Hopefully some of that trickles through to you as well. But ArtReview Asia and its minions are kind of hoping that if our own collective voyages of discovery help us to locate ourselves in the world, then they might be of use to you as well. But no one ever said that this magazine doesn’t have an ego. And, as it presumes is the case with all of you, it’s trying to submerge its ego in the world around it, while causing the least damage possible. And, obviously, working out how not to drown. ArtReview Asia

Service

Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 19

Points of View by Hu Fang, Charu Nivedita, Kevin Jones 31

page 27 Fiona Foley, Pontificate on This (detail), 2016, aluminium, white patina, enamel paint, 66 pieces, 5 × 20 × 5 cm (each). Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Gallery, Brisbane (exhibited at the 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial)

Summer 2017

Future Greats

Future Greats by Anselm Franke, Ho Tzu Nyen, Jilly Ding Kit, Christina Li, Li Qi, Aimee Lin, Esther Lu, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Eko Nugroho, Mark Rappolt, Arin Rungjang, David Teh 40

Catalyst Creation by Rana Begum, Chim Pom, Simryn Gill, Thomas Hirschhorn, Geraldine Javier, Bharti Kher, Le Brothers, Liu Jianhua, Liu Wei, Yuko Mohri, Nguan, Nipan Oranniwesna, Park Chan-Kyong, Raqs Media Collective, Chiharu Shiota, Yutaka Sone, Kunié Sugiura, Melati Suryodarmo, Koki Tanaka, Maria Taniguchi, The Propeller Group, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Samson Young, Zhang Peili 55

page 62 Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian, O’The grand old lion, tied to the chain Surely from being chained, to you dishonor did not come, 2016. Photo: Maaziar Sadr. Courtesy the artists, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai

ArtReview

Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 80

Books 102

Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs, by Ming Lin Chen Yujun, by Fi Churchman Song Dong, by Julie Chun Teng Chao-Ming, by Guo Juan Jakkai Siributr, by Max Crosbie-Jones Kyotographie International Photography Festival, by Darryl Wee Lotus Land, by Aimee Lin Natee Utarit, by Tony Godfrey Native Revisions, by Adeline Chia Bahar Yürükoğlu, by Sarah Jilani Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, by Rahel Aima But We Cannot See Them: Tracing a UAE Art Community, 1988–2008, by Murtaza Vali Lala Rukh, by Rahel Aima Nalini Malani, by Sam Steverlynck Haegue Yang, by Aimee Lin Zhang Peili, by Mark LeBlanc Aki Sasamoto, by Xiaoyu Weng Bruce Yonemoto, by John Tain

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, by Yiyun Li Ghachar Ghochar, by Vivek Shanbhag Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art, edited by Jeffrey Say and Seng Yu Jin The Sad Part Was, by Prabda Yoon Desert of Pharan: Unofficial Histories Behind the Mass Expansion of Mecca, by Ahmed Mater Contemporary Art and Digital Culture, by Melissa Gronlund THE STRIP 106 A CURATOR WRITES 110

page 89 Hanne van der Woude, Brothers in the tub, Mas Malakoff, 2011. © the artist. Courtesy Shimadai Gallery, Kyoto (exhibited at the Kyotographie International Photography Festival)

ArtReview

AIKE-DELLARCO Arario Gallery BANK Beijing Art Now Gallery BLAIN|SOUTHERN Boers-Li Gallery Ben Brown Fine Arts Sadie Coles HQ Pilar Corrias Massimo De Carlo Gladstone Gallery Hanart TZ Gallery Hauser & Wirth Hive Center for Contemporary Art Ibid Gallery INK studio Kerlin Gallery David Kordansky Gallery Pearl Lam Galleries Lin & Lin Gallery Lisson Gallery Long March Space Magician Space Edouard Malingue Gallery Galerie Urs Meile Ota Fine Arts Pace Gallery Galerie Perrotin Platform China Contemporary Art Institute Postmasters Gallery Esther Schipper ShanghART Gallery Timothy Taylor TKG+ White Cube White Space Beijing Leo Xu Projects ZERO� David Zwirner

www.westbundshanghai.com

SARAH CHOO JING Art of the Rehearsal In the context of the 57th VENICE Biennale Personal Structures: Open Borders, Palazzo Bembo (European Culture Centre) 13 May - 26 November 2017 a-i-gallery.com

Supported by

Art Previewed

Shaved ice, red bean mash, sweet corn, black grass jelly, attap chee 29

Previewed Park Chan-kyong Kukje Gallery, Seoul through 2 July

15th Istanbul Biennial Various venues, Istanbul 16 September – 12 November

Dark Mofo Mona, Tasmania 8–21 June

Sutthirat Supaparinya and Yuan Keru Leo Gallery, Shanghai through 22 July

Self-Criticism Inside-Out Museum, Beijing through 17 September

Hiwa K KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2 June – 13 August

Ashish Avikunthak Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai 27 June – 22 July Raqib Shaw Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester 24 June – November Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now National Art Center and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 5 July – 23 October

Mercedes-Benz Art Scope 2015–17 Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo through 27 August 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial National Gallery of Australia, Canberra through 10 September

DEPARTURES: Intersecting Vietnamese Modern Art with R. Streitmatter-Tran De Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong through 8 July Oliver Payne and Keiichi Tanaami Hammer Projects, Los Angeles through 27 August Ryan Gander National Museum of Art, Osaka through 2 July Heman Chong and Renée Staal MCAD, Manila 29 June – 26 August Yokohama Triennale Various venues, Yokohama 4 August – 5 November Sapporo International Art Festival Various venues, Sapporo 6 August – 1 October

14 Ryan Gander, Yo-yo Criticism, 2014, commissioned Adidas Original trainers. Photo: Jack Hems. © and courtesy the artist

Summer 2017

Missed last year’s Taipei Biennial? Idiot! ArtReview Asia told you to see it (on these very pages – well, not these actual pages, the pages that were, roughly, in this position in the magazine back then, but don’t quote ArtReview Asia on that) and you didn’t. And now you’re a loser. But maybe you don’t have to be a total loser. One of the standout works in the biennial (which, incidentally, was a slow-burn affair: slightly baffling when you were in it, but better and better the more you thought about it from 1 a safe distance) was Park Chan-kyong’s justover-25-minute-long, three-channel blackand-white video, Citizen’s Forest (2016). That work is the centrepiece of 安寧 Farewell, Park’s current solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery in Seoul. The haunting work tackles themes of tradition and modernity, ritual and remembrance, historical memory and art history (Citizen’s Forest, which nods to traditional

scroll-mounted shan shui paintings, was partly inspired by Oh Yoon’s The Lemures, 1984, a panoramic sketch of a procession of victims of the Donghak Peasant Revolution, the Korean War and the Gwangju Uprising). Indeed, Park’s Small Art History 1–2 (2014/17), one of a number of other works on show here, specifically sets out to detourn traditional art history and the conventional view of the East by the West. Surprisingly, 安寧 Farewell is Park’s first solo show in his homeland in five years. Better-known as an art critic during the 1990s, he began to show art at the end of that decade and has slipped between a variety of media, genre and disciplines (sculpture and slide installations are also on show at Kukje) ever since. Park’s work is sometimes described as referencing an ‘Asian Gothic’ aesthetic (in 2011, he codirected the Golden Bear-winning horror

short Night Fishing, shot entirely using an Apple iPhone 4, with his brother Park Chan-wook), but a whole different kind of nightmare is about to descend on Mona, Tasmania. Held in June, 2 Dark Mofo is the Museum of New and Old Art’s (Mona’s) two-week festival, held to mark the Southern winter solstice. The event, a celebration of music and art, has been not without controversy since being established in 2013: over the years light installations have caused seizures, authorities have banned mass nude swims and local art students have risen up in protest after 74 panels, each emblazoned with the slogan ‘Your art is shit’, of Scot Cotterell’s Shitstorm (2016) were pasted onto the windows of their college. The swims have since been unbanned and this year the art of protest will be incorporated into the festival via a screening of Act & Punishment (2015), Evgeny Mitta’s documentary on Russian

1 Park Chan-kyong, Citizen’s Forest, 2016, three-channel video, b/w, ambisonic 3D sound, 26 min 6 sec. Courtesy Art Sonje Center and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

2 Dark Mofo’s Nude Solstice Swim, 2016. Photo: Mona/Rosie Hastie. Courtesy Mona, Tasmania

ArtReview Asia

3 Simon Leung, War After War (still), 2011, digital film, 90 min. Courtesy the artist

3 Han Lei, Bonsai Garden, 2014–17, photograph. Courtesy the artist

dissidents Pussy Riot. Among the other highviolence, Nazism and their aftermath. Despite the fact that Nitsch will not be using live animals lights are performances by German industrial in the work, locals are, to put it mildly, nervous. legends Einstürzende Neubauten and Scottish postpunk band Mogwai. This year’s controversy Perhaps more so since Mona’s owner, gambling doesn’t concern the banging and screaming millionaire David Walsh, sought to calm reserof ageing rockers, however, but rather the ageing vations concerning Nitsch’s imminent appearAustrian actionist Hermann Nitsch, whose 150. ance in Hobart by describing the Austrian Action, which Mofo rather casually describes as a ‘fat, demented sloth, a good bloke, and in my opinion, a great social artist using sordid as ‘a bloody, sacrificial ritual performed by the spectacle to make a point that no amount patriarch of Viennese Actionism, his devoted of Facebook frivolity will ever drive home’; disciples and an orchestra’, will entertain overeighteens-only for three hours on the afternoon Catherine Bailey, posting on local radio station of Saturday 17 June. A seventy-eight-year-old 983 ABC Hobart’s Facebook page replied, ‘Seems to me art is just a big fat wank these days’. Father Christmas from hell, Nitsch and his Presumably she was confused and that was Orgien Mysterien Theater have put on ritualistic in fact a moving tribute to the impact of the performances involving animal slaughter, late, great Vito Acconci on contemporary art. crucifixions and quasi-religious sacrifices since Over at Beijing’s Inside-Out Museum the artist first conceived of it during the 1950s 3 it’s Self-Criticism that’s on show. Premised – part of a quest to locate the human essence, on the notion that, thanks to the rise in terrorist and in response to the traumas of wartime

Summer 2017

actions, extremist politics, etc, we live in a permanent state of actual and psychological emergency, the exhibition brings together artists, curators and critics, acting in teams of ‘convenors’ and ‘respondents’, in order to explore the tradition of self-criticism as a concept in art, as well as its pros and cons in respect of the embattled world we live in today. It’s the self vs reality, if you like. The show, ‘convened’ by Carol Yinghua Lu, Luo Xiaoming and Su Wei, is divided into themes (such as ‘Border, Expedition, Inspection’ and ‘How much time is being wasted?’) and promises to concern itself with exploring the implications of these propositions rather than explaining the topics. And despite the fact that it’s accompanied by a dense and heavy rhetoric, its participants, including artists such as Rong Guang Rong, Simon Leung, Lee Kit and 2014 ArtReview Future Great Seung Woo Back, suggest

that the exhibition can be a forum for an open and vibrant discussion. Look out also for contributions by ArtReview Asia’s Edward Sanderson. Over in Mumbai, another class-of-2014 Future Great (yep, you’d better pay attention 4 to this issue), filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak (a pseudonym the artist took on when he began writing poetry in school), has a solo exhibition at Chatterjee & Lal. Continuing the theme of our time (or at least these previews), a backdrop of social and political turmoil provides the setting for the film Aapothkalin Trikalika (The Kali of Emergency, 2016), which promises to be a ‘metaphysical contemplation in times of perpetual emergencies’. Shot in colour and black-and-white, the hypnotic film features masked figures representing the goddess Kali and her avatars, alongside others of the Hindu pantheon, pulling rickshaws, standing in the midst of traffic and generally fusing secular

and religious, traditional and modern, as they at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester manifest amidst the chaos and confusion of will be accompanied by items from the collecthe modern world. Like much of Avikunthak’s tion ranging from a gold and pink brocaded work (he has been making films for two decades), Kashmiri shawl to a rare engraving by Italian the film is not immediately open to easy interRenaissance painter Andrea Mantegna. pretation, but, as he has said, his films ‘are Naturally the backdrop to the exhibition is provided by a new set of custom wallpaper not codes that have to be decoded or cracked’; designed by the artist himself. A reformatted rather they offer ‘a cinema of religiosity’, akin version of the exhibition will then travel to the experience of going to a temple. Following India’s partition, Avikunthak to the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh grew up in Kolkata, home to the famous (2–10 February 2018), the artist’s first solo show Kalighat Kali Temple and, incidentally, birthin South Asia. So no need to feel like a loser if you miss its Manchester incarnation. 5 place of painter Raqib Shaw, who was later It’s Southeast Asia that provides the subject raised in Kashmir before moving to London matter for the Mori Art Museum’s latest in 1998. Shaw’s epic, theatrical and often dizzyingly opulent works fuse the traditional 6 megashow. Sunshower: Contemporary Art from art of East and West, replete with references Southeast Asia 1980s to Now is timed to mark the 50th anniversary of ASEAN (Association to everything from Hieronymous Bosch and of Southeast Asian Nations) and is so big (‘one Shakespeare, to Kashmiri shawls and Persian miniatures. Fittingly then, his exhibition of the largest Southeast Asian contemporary

4 Ashish Avikunthak, Aapothkalin Trikalika (The Kali of Emergency) (still), 2016, video, colour, sound, 79 min. Courtesy the artist and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai

5 Raqib Shaw, After A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2017, wallpaper. Courtesy the artist and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

ArtReview Asia

7 One of the billboard posters created for the 15th Istanbul Biennial (this one for placement in Dublin), 2017. Courtesy IKSV, Istanbul

6 Lee Wen, Strange Fruit, 2003, c-print, 36 × 54 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

art exhibitions in history’) that it includes Ho Tzu Nyen and Arin Rungjang. Do that and 86 artists and artist groups, and will spread you’ll only have scratched the surface, of course. to Tokyo’s National Art Center as well. The title Dig further into the usual swamp of texts about diversity, identity formation and nationof the show references the phenomenon of rain falling from clear skies, something which we building and this promises to be, for good are assured (in the advance materials for the or bad, something of an unmissable show. exhibition) is a frequent occurrence in the You really will be a loser if you don’t take region, while the show itself promises to trace the time to check it out. ‘Home is approached as an indicator of diverse the recent (for which read postwar and postindeidentities and a vehicle for self-expression, and pendence) histories of one of the most culturally diverse regions in the world. Look out for the neighbourhood as a micro-universe exemplifying always-interesting work of the late Filipino some of the challenges we face in terms of co-existence today.’ No, that’s not one of the conceptual artist Roberto Chabet, who despite introductory texts to Sunshower. Rather, it’s being frequently cited as the ‘father of conceptual art’ in his country is rather less internationartist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset ally recognised than he should be; the extraordi- 7 talking about their upcoming 15th Istanbul narily poetic videoworks of Cambodia’s Vandy Biennial. So if all the stuff about regional idenRattana; and, naturally, the work of one of this tity you’ll have learned about in Tokyo has issue’s Future Greats, Singaporean Ho Rui An, warmed you up, you’ll want to make a beeline as well as that of Future Greats selectors to the Turkish capital in order to bring yourself

ArtReview Asia

to a boil. Titled A Good Neighbour, Elmgreen & Dragset’s biennial explicitly promises to ‘bear traces of having been curated by artists’, rather than by… errr… OK, let’s not go there, we’ll be back in 983 ABC Hobart territory before we know it… What does the thing about artists mean? Who knows? That’s why we go to exhibitions rather than reading about what they might be like and then ordering another takeaway or going off for a round of golf. Still, a clue perhaps came at the biennial’s launch, where instead of the usual blather, a series of performers articulated 40 questions about neighbourliness: is a good neighbour your friend on Facebook? Is a good neighbour a reminder of how things used to be? Is a good neighbour someone who would never complain? And so on… There’s absolutely no doubt, too, that the ideas about privacy, publicness, community, dialogue and identity that this exhibition

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promises to raise are some of the most pressing Fleeting Strangers (2017), which centres on and urgent in both Turkey and the rest of the four sci-fi stories focused on the subsuming world right now. Um… you don’t need to tell of individuals by the structures of science me what you’ll be if you miss this one, right? and technology. Visions of the present and Neighbourliness is also the (necessary) the future side-by-side, if you like. Iraqi-Kurdish artist Hiwa K is a winner. subtheme of Leo Gallery’s current exhibition 9 Not just because as he was getting into this 8 featuring the works of Sutthirat Supaparinya and Yuan Keru. Chiang Mai-based Supaparinya contemporary art business he studied flamenco (whose 2012 video installation My Grandpa’s Route with guitar master Paco Peña (music and sound remain important components in Has Been Forever Blocked, documenting a journey his artworks) but more particularly because down the Ping River, which was dammed in he was awarded the Schering Stiftung Art 1958, will be shown in Sunshower) is an artist who Award 2016 (now in his forties, he has been works in a variety of media, often to document based in Germany since the age of twenty-five). how industry has affected human and natural Better still, this self-proclaimed ‘extellectual’ landscapes. At Leo she will show two new video often casts the knowledge of everyday life works: Roundabout at km 0 and Unintentionally (not least the results of his own experiences Waiting (both 2017), works that focus on transof displacement and assimilation) against port and the problems inherent in the meeting received doctrines of the institutional of personal and larger social structures. These structures and systems that do so much themes are also present in Chinese Yuan Keru’s

to determine what we consider ‘art’, among other things. A Few Notes from an Extellectual, his contribution to e-flux’s 2015 Supercommunity project (http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/ authors/hiwa-k/) is an essential read. It begins with a story about his father’s attempts, at the end of the 1970s, to bring the family’s blackand-white TV into the colour era using various filters attached to the set and ends with a narrative about how he invited Tony Blair (also a student of Peña) to share a guitar lesson. Blair’s assistant wrote to decline on the grounds that he was too busy with the peace process in Israel. ‘But I hope he will accept when we ask him again, as I read that he resigned from the peace process negotiations,’ Hiwa K adds at the end. Because he (K not Blair) is a winner, the KW in Berlin (together with Schering Stiftung) are giving him a retrospective exhibition, titled Don’t Shrink

9 Hiwa K, This Lemon tastes of Apple, 2011, video, 16:9, colour, sound, 13 min 26 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

8 Yuan Keru, Lost in Alpha City, No.1, 2017, photograph, 90 × 160 cm. Courtesy the artist and Leo Gallery, Shanghai

ArtReview Asia

12 departures: Intersecting Vietnamese Modern Art with R. Streitmatter-Tran, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy Richard Streitmatter-Tran and De Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong

10 Menja Stevenson, e/The Master’s Table (detail), 2015, monotypes, set of 12, 191 × 97 cm (each). Courtesy the artist

11 Jason Wing, Captain James Crook, 2013, bronze, 60 × 60 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Me to the Size of a Bullet, which will offer an opporGerard Vaughan of the exhibition. So, a show photographs, monotypes and ‘other objects’ about ‘them’ that seeks to demonstrate how they tunity to review this most intriguing of artist’s and Sato via photography. But the notion of a programme that advocates exchange revealing became ‘us’? With resistance too? Who wouldn’t rich and complex output of the past ten years, want to see that? Identity: it’s a complicated otherness is an intriguing prospect on its own. together with a major new production. Cultural exchange is being promoted by business. And hence, so often the subject of art. Speaking of alienation, the National Gallery another German giant over the coming months. 11 of Australia is currently hosting its 3rd National An alternative story of indigeneity is 10 This time it’s Mercedes-Benz, whose Art Scope Indigenous Art Triennial, titled Defying explored in Hong Kong’s De Sarthe Gallery, programme has been running since 1991 and Empire. The exhibition features 30 artists 12 with departures: Intersecting Vietnamese offers Japanese and German artists the opportu‘whose works’, the museum states, ‘mark Modern Art with R. Streitmatter-Tran. Richard the ongoing resistance, resilience and defiance nity to experience each other’s culture. By choice Streitmatter-Tran was born in Bien Hoa, but of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people rather than as a result of necessity. The results raised from an early age in the us. He returned against colonisation from first contact to of the past two years of exchanges, work by to Vietnam in 2003 to practice as an artist. In Taro Izumi, Menja Stevenson and Tokihiro Sato recognition through the 1967 Referendum many ways he is both an insider and an outsider, (the middle one, btw, is the German and based something that is reflected in this exhibition, and up until today’. The referendum referred to is one that granted Indigenous peoples in Stuttgart, which, incidentally, is the home which locates his work in the context of other of Mercedes), will be shown at the Hara Museum the right to be counted as Australian. ‘At the works from a century of Vietnamese modern of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. All three artists 50th anniversary of this watershed moment and contemporary art, and the flow of artists in Australian history, it is important to showcase produce their works via performative processes and ideas from East to West and the reverse. the significance of Indigenous art in defining that highlight the experience of alien cultures, In other words, this is an exhibition of historiIzumi via a video installation, Stevenson via our national cultural identity,’ said nga director cally significant Vietnamese art – by artists

Summer 2017

15 Donation to The Library of Unread Books, 2016–. Courtesy Heman Chong, Renée Staal and MCAD, Manila

13 Oliver Payne and Keiichi Tanaami, Untitled 16, 2017, ink, digital print sticker on paper, 46 × 38 cm. Courtesy the artists, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, and Nanzuka, Tokyo

such as Le Pho, Le Quang Tinh, Le Thi To these Payne (a fan of the older artist), for whom the aesthetics of gaming arcade culture have Luu, Luong Xuan Nhi, Mai Trung Thu, been a trope in recent works, has applied stickers Nguyen Gia Tri, Nguyen Hong Linh, Nguyen of explosions, spaceships, missiles and point Phan Chanh, To Ngoc Van, Trinh Van and scores from ‘bullet-hell’ (or shoot-em-up) arcade Vu Cao Dam – given new interpretations via games. (Tanaami’s childhood, btw, was puncturelationships with Streitmatter-Tran’s own work in a variety of media. Identity explored ated by wartime bombing raids on Tokyo and a diet of monster movies; in a way, you could in a radically different way. Thanks to his delirious paintings and colview these works as the coming together of real lages, which reflect aspects of Japanese culture and mediated experience.) The violently beautiful ranging from the religious and the monstrous results show both a sympathetic approach and a mutual recontextualisation of each artist’s work. 13 to the kawaii, eighty-year-old Keiichi Tanaami, is often referred to as one of the progenitors Another Brit immersing himself in(to) of Pop art in Japan. Not least by LA’s Hammer 14 Japanese culture is Ryan Gander, whose solo Museum, in whose project space he’s currently exhibition These Wings Aren’t for Flying, contain15 staging an exhibition of works produced ing almost 60 ‘important and new works’ in collaboration with London-born, LA-based (are the new works not important or are all Oliver Payne. The collaboration began with the important works new?), is on show at the a series of drawings by the Japanese artist National Museum of Art, Osaka. (They’ve got off of typically monstrous and gothic avatars. lightly btw: a previous exhibition that stopped

ArtReview Asia

at Tokyo’s Taro Nasu Gallery in 2011 was titled Ftt, Ft, Ftt, Ftt, Ffttt, Ftt, or somewhere between a modern representation of how a contemporary gesture came into being, an illustration of the physicality of an argument between Theo and Piet regarding the dynamic aspect of the diagonal line and attempting to produce a chroma-key set for a hundred cinematic scenes.) He’s a winner because he was recently appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (how quaint) for his services to contemporary art. Expect works in a variety of media supported by tales ranging from the tall to the short, plenty of humour and a serious investigation of the nature and purpose of art. Many of those tropes are also to be found in the work of Singaporean Heman Chong, a regular guest on these pages. The Library of Unread Books, a project run with chief librarian Renée Staal, consists of a collection of books, donated by owners who haven’t bothered to read them

(for one reason or another, but those reasons 16 are something that it’s nice to speculate about). On having donated a book, the owners of the unread material are granted lifetime membership of the library. It’s perverse: a club that guarantees you access to exactly what you rejected in order to join it – books. But more than that, it’s a marker of the wider role that books play in Chong’s life and work (in terms of the latter, a curated selection of secondhand books were available in the bookstores of recent solo shows at the South London Gallery and Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum; he has been painting book covers since 2010; and earlier this year he published Writing Cabin Fever, a project he orchestrated in which he and four other artists generated short stories after a 24-hour workshop; there’s more, but you’ve probably had enough by now). Not of ArtReview Asia’s previews, however! Only losers would give up now. So onwards

first instant ramen (‘that revolutionized eating we go. To the sixth edition of the Yokohama customs all over the world’) and founder of the Triennale, titled Islands, Constellations and Nissin Food Products company. ‘Here you will Galapagos, which, you’ll not be surprised to hear, gather the knowledge that inspires invention is about isolation and connectivity. That in a and discovery and find the creativity within world being fucked up by the forces of ‘conflict, you by seeing, touching, playing, eating, and refugees and immigration, and the emergence having fun,’ the noodle museum boasts – ideals of protectionism, xenophobia, and populism’. to which any art exhibition might also aspire. Look out for contributions by artworld heavyUp north, at the Sapporo International weights such as Ai Weiwei, Maurizio Cattelan, 17 Art Festival, they’re certainly thinking about Ragnar Kjartansson, Olafur Eliasson and Naoya what they’re all about. The theme for the second Hatakeyama; but the triennale is of interest too for its inclusion of underappreciated or less edition is What is an Art Festival? Identity politics? Let’s get right down to basics! The festival’s well known artists such as Alex Hartley, Shooshie director is composer, musician and former Sulaiman and Yoi Kawakubo. While you’re there, leader of experimental rock group Ground be sure not to miss the Ferry Terminal, designed Zero, Otomo Yoshihide, and the programme by Foreign Office Architects, and one of the architectural masterpieces of our time. And what promises an intriguing mix of sound and vision, with artists ranging from DJ Sniff to Yuko trip to Yokohama would be complete without Mohri. Let’s hope the director works out what a visit to the Cupnoodles Museum, a tribute he’s doing by the end of it all. Nirmala Devi to Momofuko Ando, inventor of the world’s

17 Otomo Yoshihide + Aoyama Yasutomo + Ito Takayuki, without records – mot ver., 2015 (installation view, MOT Art Museum, Tokyo, 2015). Photo: Maruo Ryuichi. Courtesy the artists

16 Christian Jankowski, Heavy Weight History, 2013. Photo: Szymon Rogynski. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London, Milan & New York

Summer 2017

Points of View

Now that I’ve reached a point at which I find life extremely confusing, a service that appears before me offering ‘self-knowledge’ is a temptation I have no way of resisting: all you have to do is face this computer screen, enter your date of birth and you can receive a comprehensive explanation of your personality, even your fate. As soon as you learn the mysteries of your destiny, you understand the direction of your actions and are no longer so depressed about your life. So why do I still hesitate? Why don’t I make the move and take my fate into my own hands? Before I learned about this service, I was wasting away at an actual night school. Here, there are schemers, seducers and businessmen who loudly sing the praises of friendship; there are show-offs, mischiefmakers, ass-kissers and opportunists; there are greedy types and go-with-the-flow types. And of course, there is also my circle of kind, meek friends, with the usual intrinsic amitiés and enmities among us. As for me, a congenital conspirator incapable of indifference, I perpetually affect the pose of raising a glass to everybody else. Now, at a place offering affordable fortunetelling, with splendid flowers packed in Ziploc bags and the skulls of martyrs stored in the freezer, everyone is too shy to bring up the reason we are assembled. Sounds of laughter rise and fall, drowning out our individual humiliations. Just a glance, the hint of a smile, the grazing of fingertips: temptation is like a video playing on a loop. An anthropoid skeleton hangs from the ceiling, and people flutter through the air, as if they are going to flesh out this empty set of bones. Tonight, beneath the piercing

Diviner (night school) by

Hu Fang

Summer 2017

LEDs, her beauty is thoroughly exposed, her senile expression forming an exciting contrast to her facelift-tightened skin. After a few words of conventional introduction, she quickly reveals all the secrets of my life to me. In that moment, I am fully hypnotised by emotion. We are already rushing towards the ultimate form of human evolution. There is an endless stream of latecomers, and the length of the evening unfolds without limits, concealing and delaying the course of education. This may explain why so many people and affairs are halted here, unable to move, leading to knowing smiles from the onlookers who gently bare their teeth, with no impediments or hang-ups, no desires or requests, as if they believe: those tempters will ultimately become innocents, and proceeding to the next step, this will become an inevitable sublimation. This is how things work in the present. This is also why this night school – the place offering affordable fortune-telling – needn’t worry about attracting students. If you repent tonight, then your graduation will undoubtedly come at daybreak. The cross-shaped medal will adorn your shoulder, even if you’re still unsure of whether or not you should pull the jewelled sword from the wall and charge towards the crowd. I don’t know if it’s providence: just when I am extremely confused about my life, a service appears before me that offers ‘self-knowledge’, allowing me to drop out of my actual night school, and return to the site of my temptation, return to the screen of fleshy pleasures. Alone, I wipe off the dusty screen, as if I am repeatedly dusting off a bronze statue of a border princess just emerged from the earth. Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Nieh

Do you believe in karma? Most Indians swear by it. Any slight scepticism of that theory could induce mass suicide and madness in the context of the actual quality of life here. For instance, last year, the chief minister of Bihar enforced the prohibition of alcohol in the state. The funny part of the act was that all adults of the family were held responsible for the consumption and possession of liquor at home, even if only one member of the family carried or consumed alcohol. Additionally the act stipulated that offenders were nonbailable. Another new provision said that upon finding utensils with a mix of sugar or jaggery with grapes on the premises, the police could assume that liquor-making was in progress, and anyone providing presumed offenders with logistical support, such as vehicles or containers, could also be detained. It was incumbent upon homeowners to inform police if their tenants drank. The law empowered the police to confiscate premises where liquor was consumed or stored. (The act was later repealed.) Wouldn’t everyone turn into a lunatic in this country if not for karma theory? When I lament what bad deeds must have taken place in my past life to result in being born as a Tamil writer – being a paedophile, for example – one of my writer friends shushes me, saying that this is the destiny of all writers in this world. No, he should be wrong; else how could Berhane Mariam Sahle Sellassie, who writes in the lesser-known Amharic language, become popular? Writing in Tamil is like singing amidst a world full of hearingimpaired people. I got riled up when an international literary magazine published Andal’s works from the seventh century in the Tamil literature section, whereas

Notes from Madras Why do most Indians believe in fate? Just take a look around, says Charu Nivedita

top and above Nochikuppam, a district near the author’s current home, in Chennai

ArtReview Asia

all other sections carried contemporary authors’ works. The NRI English professors who translated Andal’s poems still live in ancient Sangam literature, not au courant with their coevals. I’m one of those men who believes everything that happens to me is written in the order of things, karma. So whenever I see a temple, I prostrate and beg, “Give me a good translator!” My own state is worse in this milieu, as I incessantly write about how the Tamils confront sex, a subject that is anathema here. Couples sitting in beaches and parks are examined with knit brows both by public and police. Sometimes the latter have the audacity to ask a couple whether they are married; if not, there is a high probability that the couple will be made to visit the police station. Five-star hotels, too, check whether the couple is married before allowing them to have a room. It is in this environment that children are raped and killed. A twenty-fiveyear-old software engineer raped and immolated a six-year-old girl recently. His aim was not to kill her; he didn’t want a deponent for his crime. Thus, being a transgressive writer, the doors of reception never open for me in the heart of writers, or in a society that does not read literature. Well! My acumen, devoid of any inhibitions about sex, was a gift from the place where I was born and raised. The small town was populated by Muslims, Christians and Hindus within the radius of four kilometres. A custom that was considered taboo in one religion was not necessarily wrong in the other. If marriages between cousins were accepted

in one religion, it was a crime in another. The French territory of Pondicherry (now Puducherry), which was separated from our town by no more than a bridge, tolerated the consumption of alcohol when it was illegal in our locale. The impact of all these cultural differences filled my young mind with distrust. Our house was perched in the western corner of the town that was inhabited by the slums of the thombar caste, who were considered untouchable. The women cleared the human faeces from the dry latrines (simple pits without water) of the town. Excreta was removed using brooms, tin plates and baskets. Mud was spread on the stool for easy removal and was scooped, shoved into the basket via brooms. Readers might find reading this abhorrent, but manual scavenging still prevails in many villages. Many a time, when I accompanied these hapless scavengers, I would frightfully enquire about the blood spread on the waste. They would imperviously reply ‘piles’. If someone was ill with dysentery, then the women have a tough time cleaning. Men most often collected pig’s excreta, to dry and sell as a manure. My house was between the burial ground and cremation ground. Rainy season saw lots of deaths, and there were always bodies getting cremated. Back then, my nose was numbed by the malodours emanating from the cremation ground, which could concuss our entire area. Now it just serves as an organ for breathing. As youths, we knew only two jobs; smuggling or becoming a gangster. Gangster life enthralled me, as my two uncles were notorious gangsters in the area. I drank oxtail soup – not particularly the tail, the area of the tail that is attached to the body of the ox – daily, as instructed by my uncles, in order that I might have a robust and tough body. If caught by the rival gang or police, it would have the strength to bear the blows. But when one of my uncles fainted after being slashed with a weapon 30 times, I got scared, ditched the idea and fled from my town for a better life. My two-year life as a solitary waif once saw me going without food for three days. Lightheaded with famishment, lying down on the lawn of a park, I tried to eat the scutch grass that swayed near my mouth. The siddhars have said that eating scutch grass cuts down hunger for many hours. The smell of dog’s urine in the grass nauseated me, but there was nothing in my stomach or intestines to throw up. I heard a crunchy sound near me and excitedly looked over: a mangy dog was crunching dried shit hastily. Immediately I got into a bus and picked a pocket. It became a habit. One day I saw a couple making out behind a bush, and when they left I spotted a gold chain lying around; it provided food for me for many days.

above Nochikuppam all images Photo: Prabhu Kalidas

Summer 2017

I bought a blade and got onto a bus to do the job one morning, only to find that the blade packet was empty, and instantly I left that stunt and roamed with the gypsies for a few months. Soon after I befriended a gangster, who was the head of a team of contract killers. A few years back he called me and said that he runs an educational institution, and asked whether I could get him a villain role in a film as I now have a lot of friends in the film industry. I asked him why a true villain should act as one. Postscript: I still get nightmares of dry latrines and can’t avoid throwing up at times.

Every year, in February, the fledgling Saudi arts scene has its moment. Once upon a time in this austere kingdom, the Jeddah Art Week (JAW) reigned supreme on the local artworld throne. The 2013 brainchild of Art Jameel, a cultural foundation under the auspices of the Saudibased Abdul Latif Jameel group, JAW set about nurturing local artists and commandeering some noteworthy exhibitions, and ended up drawing attention to an overlooked pocket of Middle Eastern artistic output. But lo! In 2014 a royal rival appeared: 21,39 Jeddah Arts. Spearheaded by a band of self-described arts enthusiasts under the nonprofit banner of the Saudi Arts Council (chaired by the formidable Princess Jawaher Al-Saud), the hefty multimonth cavalcade of guest-curated shows, talks and workshops overtook the vanquished JAW, which vanished from the kingdom forever. While previous iterations of 21,39 have tried to give some sense of history to the development of Saudi arts – the inaugural Past is Prologue, in 2014; 2015’s Fast Forward; and last year’s Earth and Ever After – the current edition seems, oddly enough, to reengage with the ousted JAW’s initial remit of encouraging local talent. Ubiquitous artworld duo Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath took 16 emerging Saudi-based artists under their curatorial wings for the three-part show Safar. A layered Arabic word meaning travel or journey, with connotations of discovery and unveiling, Safar evokes a life of wandering and learning. And wander they did. Bardaouil and Fellrath took their charges on study trips to Gwangju and Berlin in the dialogue-laden year leading up to the reveal of the commissions. Somewhat expectedly, these practices are not at equal states of maturity. But the levelling touch seems to be the curators’ sense of narrative coherence and exhibition standards. Themes of dystopia, abandon and a fragile sense of temporality emerge in many of the Safar commissions, mostly installations unfolding across a segment of the show titled ‘The Mall’, a succession of rooms tucked away in the corner of a mall. Jeddah-based architect Nasser Al-Salem’s They Flaunt their Buildings (2017) is a stark, imposing cement brick monument, the top of which, when viewed in a ceilinghung mirror, reveals a cautionary saying on reckless prosperity. An architectural echo of Jeddah’s disintegrating historic downtown

Once upon a time in Jeddah… A royal trip leads back home, as told by Kevin Jones

top Abdullah Al-Othman, Suspended, 2017, site-specific installation. Photo: Mohammad Alfaraj. Courtesy the artist above Dana Awartani, I went away and forgot you. A while ago I remembered. I remembered I’d forgotten you. I was dreaming., 2017, video installation. Courtesy the artist and Athr Gallery, Jeddah

ArtReview Asia

comes from Zahra Al-Ghamdi’s The Labyrinth and Time (2017), a wall-bound, warrenlike sculptural work shaped from cotton, sand and water. Palestinian-Saudi artist Dana Awartani links the acts of creation and destruction in her mixed-media installation I went away and forgot you. A while ago I remembered. I remembered I’d forgotten you. I was dreaming. (2017). On the ground is a painstakingly reconstructed mosaic-tiled floor (based on a pattern from the dilapidated Al-Balad neighbourhood) made of hand-pigmented sand. A nearby video shows the artist sweeping the labour-intensive patterns into a forlorn heap – another critical gesture foregrounding the yearning to preserve, a desire shared by several of the young artists in Safar. Part two of the show, called ‘The Home’, takes us to Al-Balad itself, where Abdullah Al-Othman’s Suspended (2017) drives the act of preservation literally home. The artist has wrapped a nineteenth-century women’s shelter, Christo-like, in aluminium foil. The tensions in the work – history/industry, visibility/neglect, destruction/safeguarding – underpinned by the slow peeling away of the once regal building’s new skin, make it easily the most emblematic of this year’s 21,39. Further afield, in the King Abdullah Economic City, the exhibition’s third chapter, ‘The City’, stretches the Safar conceit a bit thin. Eight older videoworks by blockbuster artists, including Douglas Gordon’s well-known Play Dead, Real Time (2003) and Anri Sala’s 1395 Days without Red (2011), are separated from the intriguing, youthful work by an inexplicable gulf. But, after all, this is a royal kingdom; some fanfare is expected.

September 8 - 10, 2017 Shanghai Exhibition Center 2017年9月8 - 10日上海展览中心

www.photofairs.org

专注于影像的国际艺术博览会

09.12 NOV 2017 GRAND PALAIS

FUTURE GREATS

in association with

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the first full issue of ArtReview Asia Future Greats. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Future Greats is an annual strand that has been running in ArtReview Asia’s sister magazine, ArtReview, for the past decade. It’s an attempt to look beneath the surface of the international artworld: not at artists you already know, but at those you might not – the artists who are setting new agendas and framing new references for the future, artists you will need to know about in the years to come. More broadly, it’s about some of the wider issues that art and society will be confronting in the immediate future. For each issue of Future Greats we ask a selection of 12 established artists, curators and critics to select (other) artists who they think are tackling new issues or pushing art in new directions: an insider’s guide, if you like, to things to come. It’s an attempt to escape, too, from the PR and marketing machines that drive so much of what becomes visible in art today. There are no restrictions on selections (neither concerning age nor background) other than that the artists work in the context of Asia (which, of course, is a very broad field) and that the selected artist is not so well known or exposed. The last, of course, is a subjective thing: someone whose work is well known in one region may be next-to-invisible in another. At ArtReview Asia, we believe that looking at the overlooked is one of the key responsibilities of an art magazine, but without the generous support of our partner, K11 Art Foundation, who are sponsoring the Future Greats project across both ArtReview Asia and ArtReview, we would not be able to devote so much space and time to exploring this. For several years, K11 Art Foundation has energetically supported the professional practices of promising and emerging young artists and curators from Greater China and helped to identify the wide range of viewpoints and genres that distinguish contemporary Chinese art. More importantly, it works tirelessly to connect all this to an international community of diverse interests and tastes. Which is a core concern of both ArtReview Asia and ArtReview. K11 Art Foundation and ArtReview Asia believe that art can serve a central and transformative function in helping us locate and change our place within societies of the world. And more importantly, that it is an essential generator of discussion and debate in what can seem an increasingly fractured world. We hope that the pages that follow will move that discussion into new territories over the coming year. ArtReview Asia

HSU CHIA-WEI

selected by Ho Tzu Nyen As Hsu collapses the fourth wall in his

TRANQUIL

PUPPETS, spirits, spies and GODS mix with cameramen, TECHNICIANS

videowork,

and editors

Hsu Chia-Wei, Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau, 2015, video, 13 min 45 sec. Produced by Le Fresnoy. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2017

Hsu Chia Wei’s video Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau (2015) opens with a border. He is in a recording studio, as he addresses a projected image shot of an empty sky, the sounds of a forest and the voice of a man who of the Hanuman puppet. Cut to a group of armed soldiers and masked plunges us into the middle of an account of a wartime retreat. Then a spectators, observing, in an unnatural stillness, the performance of puppet of Hanuman appears against the blue sky, music erupts and Hanuman and his masked entourage upon a foundation slab, on what the narrative shifts into the magical exploits of the monkey god. In is revealed to be the site of a former intelligence bureau in Huai Mo the same shot, the camera pulls back to reveal three masked puppet- Village in the border regions of Thailand and Myanmar, a place that is eers dancing in unison as they control the movements of Hanuman. woven out of a dreamlike web of identities and memories. Or perhaps it is Hanuman who pulls the strings, a spirit animating A sense of tranquillity permeates the unfolding of the work, this strange dancing body made out of three fused human bodies? which is a characteristic of Hsu’s works. In Hsu’s universe, spirits, Behind them sits a masked musical ensemble, executing a score as humans, machines (both mechanical and digital) coexist without they drive this dance forward. Or perhaps it is Hanuman who propels ruse, without irony, without judgement. Cameras, camera cranes, lighting equipment, microphones, screens often appear, as do his this music, inspiring it? We cut to an elderly man before a microphone: we have been film crew, in film shoots that are better understood as rituals rooted in a mode of thinking, working and being that listening to his stories. He is a former NationalHsu is based in Taipei. In 2016 he won the Gold Award makes possible the peaceful coexistence and ist intelligence officer who retreated first from for Documentary at the 49th WorldFest-Houston continuous negotiation of multiple modes Yunnan to Myanmar, before settling in Chiang International Film and Video Festival. His solo show Rai on the Golden Triangle at the Thai-Myanmar of being. at Liang Gallery, Taipei, opens 10 June.

Hsu Chia-Wei, Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau, 2015, video, 13 min 45 sec. Produced by Le Fresnoy. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

THAKOL KHAO SA-AD selected by David Teh

For over ten years, this

PAINTER and

woodworker has questioned what we mean

STRAIGHTNESS: how we determine that a surface is FLAT or a line is SMOOTH.

His dedication has led him to some surprisingly

PHILOSOPHICAL conclusions

Curators in Southeast Asia often joke about the ‘white cube’, that sculptural experiments, Thakol deconstructs the classical (Vitruvian) paradigmatic envelope of modern art exhibitions. The subject usually notion that the human form is the ‘measure’ of the world. Working comes up during a show’s installation as, on close inspection, corners from first principles with rare and carefully selected timbers, he reveal themselves to be not-quite-right angles, walls to be not quite builds from scratch the tools necessary to create perfectly straight straight or flat. It’s not a lament, but a shared acknowledgement edges by hand. These tools beget standard measures, rods traditionthat somehow forms in this part of the world are just not meant to ally based on the maker’s body that are fundamental to Thai joinery be rectilinear. and architecture. Thai artist Thakol Khao Sa-ad turns this idea on its head. For Are modern, metric systems any more ‘rational’ than our hands-on, over a decade, the quiet-spoken painter and woodworker has dedi- anthropometric ways of making things right? Thakol’s work is richly cated himself to straightness, with a rigour that’s as philosophical metaphorical amidst Asia’s incomplete modernities. Rigorous without as it is practical. In each cycle of his meticubeing austere, minimal yet somehow generous, Thakol Khao Sa-ad is based in Thailand. his creations reveal that our working notions of lous paintings, mass media images are isolated He has held solo exhibitions at Gallery VER and Cloud, form are not universal but contingent, mediated and broken down into grids of discrete colour, both Bangkok. His next exhibition is at Nova always rendered by hand and by eye. In a series of all the time by local habits and singular bodies. Contemporary, Bangkok, 15 June – 6 August.

Summer 2017

Thakol Khao Sa-ad, Multicolor 2, 2010, oil on canvas, 32 × 42 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

both images Thakol Khao Sa-ad, Hand Tools (details), 2014, wood, steel, dimensions variable. Photo: Tanatchai Bandasak. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2017

T. SHANAATHANAN

Selected by Mark Rappolt

PROCESSES that are open, INTIMATE and easy to decipher, the Sri Lankan artist deploys HUMAN TALES in order

Using archival

to come to terms with inhuman events

Already one of the more prominent and influential artists in his native elder daughter helps me in page making. I do not have sons who can Sri Lanka, Jaffna-born and -based Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan inherit my business’; whether that’s for natural or unnatural reasons produces art, often hung upon an archival framework, that is firmly is left unsaid. But while this is, without doubt, a record of the hardrooted in the specifics of the immediate and the personal – in this case ship (burials and missing children also feature in the accounts) and the lasting impact of Sri Lanka’s three-decade-long civil war – but suffering of war, it is superseded by its being a record of resilience and which nevertheless opens itself up to more universal concerns. And adaptability. It’s a resistance to passive victimhood, if you like. among other things he is also a cofounder, in 2014, of the Sri Lanka Shanaathanan’s best-known work to date is The Incomplete Thombu Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design (SLAAAD), (2011, commissioned by publisher Raking Leaves), a book that takes the form of a land registry (thombu in Tamil means a public register a unique entity on the island. A conflict? An artist? An archive? A ‘periphery’? What a cliché! Hold of lands, and, speaking of adaptation, although the word is unique yer horses; this ain’t like that. Shanaathanan excels at manifesting to Sri Lanka, it comes to the island with Greek origins via the complexity in apparently simple forms. His works remain relatively Portuguese and the Dutch). In it, Shanaathanan records 80 memories free of the Gordian knots of indecipherability and pretentiousness of the homes and houses that Tamil-speaking Sri Lankans, displaced that bind so many of the artworks produced as part of art’s current by the conflict, left behind. Each home is represented by a sketched archival obsession. Cabinet of Resistance 2 (2016), exhibited during the floorplan made by the interviewee; a cleaned-up version drawn by an recent Kochi-Muziris Biennale, is an old-fashioned piece of furniture architect (sometimes slightly, sometimes more noticeably different); housing a card index divided into 30 drawers. It’s so unassumingly these are interspersed with written statements recording the memoquaint that it’s easy to miss. The drawers contain simply-typed cards ries and histories that the interviewees associate with a sense of their that by and large detail the ways in which ordinary Tamils adapted over home (among them: the smell of flowers, recollections of family the years of conflict and suffering (the war ended in 2009). We learn members, a sense of anxiety or insecurity, lost horoscopes), illusabout recipes for traditional dishes being adapted due to a shortage trated by Shanaathanan’s own drawings. While the work is both a of potatoes (during an economic embargo on rebel-held territories contrast and reconciliation (in the accounting sense too) of what in the north of Sri Lanka), about converting petrol vehicles to run on people took with them and what they left behind, The Incomplete kerosene and about using saris to make sandThombu is also, as the artist confesses, a way by Shanaathanan is based in Jaffna. The first part of his bags. Under the entry for printing press in an which he can interrogate his own story and Cabinet of Resistance project is on view at the Asia Art Archive Library in Hong Kong. earlier version of the work is this: ‘although my his own experiences of the land.

ArtReview Asia

Scans from T. Shanaathanan’s book project The Incomplete Thombu, 2011, 320pp, 30 × 21 cm. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2017

LI JINGXIONG selected by Li Qi

RUINS, works that subtly speak of the BRUTALITY and TRAGEDY of our social reality. Can sculpture be a sort of DOCUMENTARY FICTION?

The artist is in the business of creating new

Li Jingxiong, The BAIYIN Project, 2016 (installation view, The New Normal: China, Art, and 2017, 2017). Courtesy UCCA, Beijing

ArtReview Asia

Li Jingxiong, Beast 54, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy White Space, Beijing

Li Jingxiong sets his course towards exploring a general social mech- and keyboards, creating installations and graphic works that are anism, or the lack of it, as an individual surviving and thinking in marked by both social media and physical violence. Meanwhile, China’s intense social reality. His works could be considered as a collec- he adapts extreme means such as violence, a mutated instrument tion of ruins, raided by the uncontrollable power of the Leviathan, putting a sudden end to social contradiction, to confront the counter and washed up by a flux of social evolution. The social incidents that extremeness in social reality as a mutual action to achieve systemserve as milestones for this rupture are composed and proliferated via atic balance. The artist brings out the brutality, tragedy and beauty social networks, a continuous series of documentary fictions based in the confrontation, and subjects it to scrutiny. The works express on the truth, with an ambiguous, rapid and fleeting nature. Li’s work concerns over the gambling ambitions of technological development, is a form of documentary fiction that captures questioning the sacrifice of tradition and sense Li is based in Shanghai. His solo show this changing terrain. Li employs various mateof social bonds for a nonnegotiable and unViolence On Demand will open at Gallery Exit rials, from steel and copper to computer screens democratic social progress. in Hong Kong in September.

Summer 2017

HO RUI AN

selected by Anselm Franke For this artist, Singapore exists as both a and

REAL

IMAGINARY location, one that for all its

shiny surfaces provides a cipher for late capitalism’s

MELTDOWN and COLLAPSE

How do we grasp the contemporary condition of meltdown and Information Awareness surveillance programme. Perhaps like no collapse, in which fictions seem to outperform what was once vaguely other polity in our age, Singapore is a networked city that monitors known as reality? It is a question many artists are grappling with. In its citizens and infrastructures to contain risk and predict the future. terms of formal solutions, some artists in recent years have experiThe horizon of the city’s streets, monitored in real time by mented with performative and speculative narratives, which often countless taxi drivers and their cameras, mutates into the temporal oscillate between documentation and fictionalisation. Such narra- horizon where the future meets the present. Singapore becomes tives expose that our place in the world and in history is always at Captain Kirk’s spaceship, scanning the horizon for the known and least as much about our physical location as it is about us being part the unknown, driven by ‘scenario planning’ techniques derived from of certain narratives that underpin traditional and popular culture, the mysticism-inspired California counterculture. The streams of and official ideologies. In this sense, Singapore, for Ho Rui An is both data in Singapore from real-time surveillance are thus interpreted a real and an imaginary location. However orderly and regulated it in never-ending storytelling sessions, Ho Rui An tells us, permaseems, it is also the prototypical avant-garde of the transmutations nently having to question how they make sense of the world. It is at of colonial modernity and capitalism. In his ongoing performance this point that the story has caught up with the storyteller. And this project DASH (2016–), Ho Rui An takes us on a breathtaking journey techno-enhanced frontier of Singaporean spaceship is screened by into the workings of Singapore. He starts from a horrific accident means of a whole bestiary of animal characters, such as black or red that was recorded by a dashboard camera in 2012 and went viral swans or elephants, each a shapeshifting metaphor for a future that on YouTube. Yet the ubiquitous dash camera is only the seemingly cannot be seen, reconciling a capitalism out of bounds with the idea quotidian departure point from which he takes us into the work- of control, real-time management and good governance. Ho Rui An, ings of the Risk Assessment and Horizon in DASH as well as in other works, announces Ho is an artist and writer based between London and Singapore. Scanning programme of Singapore, which is himself as one of the most able clinical diagHe recently completed a residency at NTU CCA, Singapore. a civic application of the US military’s Total His work is currently on view at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. nosticians of our deranged age.

ArtReview Asia

both images Ho Rui An, DASH, 2016 –, lecture and video installation with car seats and synchronised screens. Photo: Sam Cranstoun. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2017

EVELYN TAOCHENG WANG selected by Christina Li

Drawing on her background in traditional Chinese painting, the artist

WRYLY QUESTIONS

assumptions regarding her identity, burlesquing the

ROMANTIC and the MONSTROUS

Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Tracy and Yang was Kicking A Older Male client out, Because of He was Trying to Jerk Off on Towel, 2015, watercolour, pencil and acrylic on rice paper, 90 × 96 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

ArtReview Asia

Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Yang And Her Pakistani Boyfriend Were Communicating Via Google-Translate on Their Iphone Behind of A Curtain of My Bed-partition, 2015, watercolour, pencil and acrylic on rice paper, 98 × 105 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Sunny Was Doing Foot-massage Under A Wood Stair Decorated With Different Real and False Plants, 2015, watercolour, pencil and acrylic on rice paper, 98 × 105 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

Summer 2017

Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s mixed-media paintings are comprehenIn Wang’s series of ongoing paintings Massage near me (2015–), sive and wry studies of contemporary society and human behaviour. a selection of which were first exhibited during Manifesta 11 in 2016, Wang was trained in traditional Chinese painting and literature in she mines stories from her experience of working as a masseuse in a Nanjing before she moved to Europe for postgraduate studies at the Chinese massage parlour in Amsterdam for four months. Her narraStädelschule in Frankfurt and De Ateliers in Amsterdam, a city in tive paintings crisscross Chinese, Japanese and Western painting which she has been based since 2012. Her expansive practice, which traditions and depict her and her colleagues’ daily dealings with male crosses media, offers fragmented views of her external and internal customers. With idiosyncratic titles such as Tracy and Yang was Kicking A fantasies and realities from the estranged place of an outsider. In her Older Male client out, Because of He was Trying to Jerk Off on Towel (2015), the video series Reflection Paper (2013), made during her first two years in paintings portray monstrous male naked bodies in absurd scenes of the Netherlands, we are presented with a litany of callous imagery: attempted physical interaction with the reserved, clothed staff in a lush caged animals in zoos, and actions in which the artist cuts off the legs draped setting. By becoming a masseuse, a job that she has described as from newspaper images of footballers, and pierces gold-painted eggs “confronting people with their own identity” – customers and herself, with scissors. Over the top of these images, in her Chinese-accented in this case – Wang comes face-to-face with cultural clichés and the English, she disquietingly quotes Eileen Chang’s writings on roman- sexual fantasies regarding Chinese female immigrants. Daringly, she moves through charged and, at times, alien ticism and femininity, interspersed with Based in Amsterdam, Wang is currently showing at the artist’s own observations on class, taste, domains of intimacy, desire and gender in her Carlos/Ishikawa, London (through 17 June). Another exhibition personal quest to shape a new subject. gender and cultural upbringing. will open at Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam, in November.

Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Reflection Paper 2 (still), 2013, video. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

ArtReview Asia

Catalyst Creation

WHAT provokes, INSPIRES or sets new trajectories for ARTISTS? As well as

the 12 selected artists, each issue in the current cycle of Future Greats includes a manifestolike series of values, inputs and themes that a group of established INTERNATIONAL artists THINK WILL BE IMPORTANT, both to their work and to art in general, over the next 12 months (see the January/February issue of ArtReview’s ‘Memos for Now’ – and if you missed it, you can get a copy via artreview.com). For this issue, ArtReview Asia has asked another group of artists to consider what things, external to their work, might act as a CATALYST or MOTIVATION over the COMING YEAR; as you will see, these range from people, places, major exhibitions and new materials, to concepts and local or world events that reflect on specific contexts, geographies and personal motivations. These lists, MANIFESTOS for the present running through both ArtReview and ArtReview Asia, each of which operates in a distinct set of contexts and geographies, are an important part of the DIALOGUE between the two magazines. The artists’ responses are an index of some of the VITAL STIMULANTS that describe how the art of our time relates to the world around it, and as an INSIGHT into the issues that MOTIVATE art production today. ArtReview Asia

DE-PIXELATION I am concerned by today’s phenomena of ‘Facelessness’ and one of my missions will be to do ‘De-Pixelation’-work. I think that ‘pixelation’, or BLURRING, masking and furthermore CENSORSHIP or self-censorship, is a growing and insidious problematic, also in regard to the new social MEDIA. Obviously I don’t accept what has been pixelated in my place ‘to protect me’ and consequently don’t pixelate what is USUALLY CONCEALED and meant to be removed, frustrate, censor or make nonvisible. I can, I want and I need to use my own eyes as an act of emancipation – this is the detonator of ‘De-Pixelation’. I want to SHOW PIXELATION or blurring or MASKING in its abstract aesthetic and question: how can I redefine my idea of abstraction today? What interests me specifically about the AESTHETIC OF FACELESSNESS is its formal embodiment through pixelation. To clarify, I want to explain in nine points my INTEREST in pixelation and why I want to do ‘De-Pixelation’-work: 1.

DECISION: I am interested in pixelation because to pixelate, to BLUR or to mask

– or not – is always a matter of decision. Deciding what part, what area to pixelate, ADDING or REMOVING a pixel or choosing the size of the pixels is a decision. It’s a political decision. 2. AUTHORITY: I am interested in pixelation because it is important to understand that authority is always what MOTIVATES pixelation. Truth appears through pixels beyond concealment, non-information or COUNTER-INFORMATION. Today, more than ever, I need to see everything with my own eyes in our one world, and no one can tell me what my eyes should see or not. 3. ABSTRACTION: I am interested in pixelation because its logic leads to abstraction. To me, pixelation is a response – THROUGH FORM – to the question ‘How can abstraction be understood today?’ How can abstraction, through pixelation, ENGAGE me in today’s world, time and reality? Pixels in their abstraction build up a new form, opening towards a dynamic and DESIRE OF TRUTH. The political thinking is the BELIEF in truth – truth not as a verification of facts – truth as a form, a form as such, truth as an ASSERTION, truth as RESISTANCE, truth as abstraction.

The

FACELESSNESS: I am interested in pixelation because it stands for the time of facelessness that we see in TODAY’S WORLD. What interests me specifically

about this aesthetic of facelessness is its formal embodiment through pixelation. PUSHED TO THE EDGES: I am interested in pixelation because it pushes information from the centre to the edge of a picture. It obliges to look and search elsewhere, away from the CENTRAL FOCUS to find information or indications of what has been concealed. AESTHETICS: I am interested in pixelation because of its powerful aesthetic. The aesthetic power comes from the OPPOSITION between the BEAUTY of the pixelated part and the nonpixelated part, and from the nonsystematic logic of pixelation. THE WORST IS CENSORED: I am interested in pixelation because what is pixelated is considered as the worst. The worst is not shown, the worst is censored. Pixelation is used as a MORALISTIC arbitration between what to see and what is too IMPROPER to look at. Nothing is UNSHOWABLE. What cannot be shown is what has no form. HYPOCRISY: I am interested in pixelation because it reveals the hypocrisy of the one using it. I don’t accept pixelation in my place ‘to protect me’, when the one pixelating claims the opposite, and is in fact PROTECTING himself. AUTHENTICITY: I am interested in pixelation because pixelating has taken over the role of authenticity. Something pixelated always seems more authentic and is accepted as such. It therefore seems clear that pixels stand for authentication: authentication through AUTHORITY. thinking, the politics and the form of my work ‘DE-PIXELATION’ is the belief in abstraction, the belief in the aesthetic of pixelation and the belief in ‘De-Pixelation’.

THOMAS HIRSCHHORN

AGNES MARTIN Her life and art led me to rethink the function of art and the ROLE OF THE ARTIST, and to SEARCH FOR MEANING in today’s world of sound and fury.

LIU JIANHUA 57

PLAY To keep QUESTIONS in play: troubling, tinkering with, pushing, small things. Often in and through FRIENDSHIP: conversations about the possibility or impossibility of an idea, how to bend thoughts or materials or propositions, INTUITIVELY and COUNTERINTUITIVELY, with and against their will. Figuring out, doing – together and alone.

SIMRYN GILL

NAMELESS GHOSTS New definition of

PEOPLE (min-jung).

PARK CHAN-KYONG 5

BREATH People… they will want to BREATHE while they are alive, take off clothes when they feel hot, put them on when they feel cold, DRINK when they are thirsty and REST WHEN they are TIRED. And they will get antsy when they feel bored.

ZHANG PEILI

SHORT CIRCUITS To create short circuits,

NOT FEEDBACK LOOPS. SAMSON YOUNG 7

MAKING Make your truths and believe in them for a while, make spaces to hold them in and then MAKE ROOM for people to visit, then make some mistakes, make up your mind and then change it, make your life a project, make MAGIC and animate it, make your children CURIOUS and able to be alone, make the art and UNMAKE it, make a life force that is yours, make a language and speak it. Make good your 58

journey PEACEFULLY, make friends and fellow travellers your guides on the way. Know in the end that what you make is also nothing. Then START AGAIN.

BHARTI KHER 8

RESISTANCE BEING CONSCIOUS of the day-by-day’s present of the world we are living in; re-questioning the movement of time when HISTORY is behind and if the future

will remember; against any discriminations of race, culture and religion; fighting for EQUAL PAYMENT for performance artists, dancers, actors, stage workers, gallery workers and writers!

MELATI SURYODARMO

DARKNESS Because art is most imperative when we’re fumbling to

FIND THE LIGHT. NGUAN

NEXT DOOR SKY Next door we

CAN’T TOUCH but next door sky we can shear. YUTAKA SONE 11

KUNST AM BAU A big art and architecture project that I am not yet allowed to talk about, but that will be finished in 2018. I learn so many things from working on this project that will also help me in my future works. I had to find new durable materials, PLAN EVERY DETAIL in advance and work with structural engineers and architects. It is a high learning curve and I am very thankful for the experience.

CHIHARU SHIOTA

HISTORY It may repeat what has come before. And perhaps we can use it to predict what might come. History contains archives of people’s methodologies – look at SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, political actions and other forms of resistance. It shows us how much we tried, how much we failed: in short, both how STRONG and how weak we are. We could see history as an object. We don't need to learn from it but play around with it. THE PAST IS CONCRETE. Therefore we can use it.

KOKI TANAKA

NINFA The things fall fluffy, the symbol of elegance with weakness.

Or tattered and messy, even wrinkles are pleats, not time, but life itself folded in.

Or slick and smooth, the weather-beaten house is returning to mineral.

Or prototypeness, That not yet realised, but already there, in which rich errors stand by.

YUKO MOHRI 14

LIFE Japan’s declining birth-rate problem and SEXLESSNESS. Meeting with domestic art stars in other countries. The next great earthquake in Japan, which is said to happen within ten years. Drinking and talking about the ART MARKET after the end of CAPITALISM. Marriage hunting for C P members. Subtle changes in cities that are radioactively CONTAMINATED. Earth’s radio waves and data floating in the universe forever. The Tokyo Olympics. SUDDEN CHANGES in the city of Tokyo.

The next step in Ellie’s problem of being banned from the USA. TRUMP’S NEW BORDER-WALL plan. The daily life of a C P member who became a salaryman. The German federal election.

CHIM POM

DISPLACEMENT I’ve always been an

OUTSIDER but look at me again. I am not what I was. NIPAN ORANNIWESNA 16

MOTHERLAND Our past works have been focused much on political and social issues, and we want to have some CHANGE. It’s a multichannel video project. We are going to work with the beautiful landscapes of VIETNAM.

LE BROTHERS

CRYSTAL We’ve grown attached to crystals through an encounter with a radiant cerussite in the mineral museum in Beirut, and by wandering about the cave of giant crystals in the Naica valley, Mexico. These ENCOUNTERS with crystalline forms are SEEDING thought and work, and are suggesting shapes to live with and carry. To us, crystals are metaphors for dynamic TRANSFORMATION produced by the ENTWINING of collective self-organisation within plural micro-environments. Crystals always existed in space; they are now beginning to be deployed in time in order to realise NONEQUILIBRIUM states of substances. Crystals show us that form, structure and the way a shape embodies, modifies and COMMUNICATES information about itself, and how it carries or wears its own design, could become a POSSIBLE working method as to how a PLURALITY coalesces and traverses extraordinary paths. Crystals intrigue us with the POSSIBILITY that they could be alive in the way they form and rearrange themselves with a REGULARITY that sometimes feels like intention. At the same time, crystals have been known to encapsulate

LONG-EXTINCT life forms (which are now suddenly faced with the prospect of animation).

A CRYSTAL CAN BE a lighthouse, A TIME MACHINE and a hibernation pod. RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE 18

SLEEP I am always looking forward to this bridge to the other side, behind the eyes, in the DARKNESS, to the other cinema. DREAMING – it’s the only action that no one can control, not even ourselves.

APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL

NEW Not a state of FRESHNESS, but one that is meaningless. Like a 3D model at its initial state, before its skin is rendered. Or a product before its package is removed.

LIU WEI

COMMUNITY ALONE BUT NOT LONELY, focused but responsive, rooting and touching

other roots. To live with others as one would

LIVE WITH oneself. The art of living. GERALDINE JAVIER 21

MINERAL The most important catalyst for my creations for the coming 12 months. Essential, not examined or understood well. SCIENCE, ART, REAL, ETHEREAL… here and beyond…

KUNIÉ SUGIURA

EXTINCTION We all die. Can we fathom not existing any more? Can we imagine not existing any more as a species? We cause extinction. We OBSESS over technology, ECONOMIC EXPANSION, individual advancement, pleasure, politics, the self. How can we imagine the extinction of ourselves in the face of these evolutions? CAN WE IMAGINE THE EXTINCTION OF OURSELVES, our groups, our communities, our nations, our species to reimagine the way ‘our selves’ exist?

THE PROPELLER GROUP 23

SPACE Space to focus, space to escape, space to think, space to explore, space to breathe, space TO REFLECT, space to sleep, space to be mindful, space to build, space to expand, space TO LISTEN, space to connect, space TO CREATE.

RANA BEGUM 24

MACGUFFIN Within film or literature, a MacGuffin is a device used to HOLD the viewer’s ATTENTION despite not really having anything much to do with the rest of the story. In the best cases it’s mysterious, and a touch illogical, like Citizen Kane’s ‘Rosebud’. It’s outside or BEYOND THE PLOT, but it’s there in the foreground enabling the story. I imagine its effect is a kind of literary gestalt similar to staring at a fixed point in a hidden-image stereogram where the CHAOS of shapes and colours COALESCE into a dinosaur or some Jurassic fish before breaking down again. This I think points to its POSSIBILITIES for abstraction. Slightly more sinister is the MacGuffin as a diversion, the attention-sucking OBSTRUCTION to the real plot, something evinced really well by contemporary politics. I really came to understand its possibilities through Enrique Vila-Matas’s The Illogic of Kassel. As I was reading it I wanted the FRISSON of a Mr and Mrs MacGuffin to make me go places; in his case a Chinese eatery on the edge of a forest.

MARIA TANIGUCHI 63

RAMIN HAERIZADEH, ROKNI HAERIZADEH, HESAM RAHMANIAN selected by Esther Lu

CROSSDRESSING with sculpture and painting to blur the BOUNDARIES between life

Combining

and art, the three artists’ collaborative project materialises as

THEATRELIKE installations

and staged videos

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian, The Birthday Party, 2015–16, (installation view, ICA Boston, 2015). Photo: Juande Jarillo. Courtesy the artists, ICA Boston, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai, and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York

ArtReview Asia

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian, The Maids, 2012. Photo: Maaziar Sadr. Courtesy the artists, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai, and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York

Summer 2017

The mesmerising universe created in the collaborative work of Dubai- breaking the boundaries between installation, sculpture, performance based Iranian artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam and painting, as well as blurring the separation between life and art. Rahmanian (who also work independently of each other, with Rokni In their satiric compositions, familiar things yearn for unusual and nominated as an ArtReview Future Greats in 2014) is a generous and gener- innate values to project alternative possibilities for reality. ative one that accommodates and triggers senses of becoming in today’s Their works engage on a bodily level, and encourage an awaretroubled world. To unravel what seems to be a struggle with existing ness in an ambience corresponding to their own ways of living and power relations, their theatrelike installations and staged videos are working together in their combined home/studio. While gallery composed of unnameable characters animated by objects. Their perfor- spaces are appropriated as a continuation and expansion of their mances often come to propose a new ethics among beings, objects and life and practices, they take the question of representation to the environments in a surrealist manner that is both penetrating and next level: their critiques concerning the operations of the artworld, whimsical. By role-playing, crossdressing, and freely inserting freak- the perception of history and the media are not merely performative, but also take in the contests of their daily ish creatures and displays of their art collection, Ramin, Rokni and Hesam are based in Dubai. Recipients life. In the inspiring and persistent quest they the sensory world they produce is rich with referof the Han Nefkens Foundation/MACBA Award, they will have embarked upon to make art, everything ences to art history, commentaries on politics stage parallel exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona in and fresh reinterpretations of everyday objects, October, and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, in September. is inclusive, and everything can be more.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian, Liverpool Biennial, 2016 (installation view, Open Eye Gallery). Photo: Maaziar Sadr. Courtesy the artists, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai, and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York

ArtReview

STEFANUS ENDRY PRAGUSTA selected by Eko Nugroho

From action figures and animal toys to

TENTACLED

MUTANTS, Pragusta lures the viewer into his grotesque world

Stefanus Endry Pragusta, Ritus, 2015, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2017

Using found objects – from action figures and animal toys, to bells, antlers or megaphones. Pragusta’s drawings similarly detail dense machine parts and pieces from desk lamps – Yogyakartan artist scenes of tentacled, humanoid mutants strolling among makeStefanus Endry Pragusta creates installations that are mysterious, shift houses, an otherwordly reimagining of the experience of tricky and beautiful. These installations are populated with strange walking down a busy urban street. These playful characters make small creatures: his Passenger Noah Ark (2016) series is made up of up Pragusta’s troubling fairytale world, what he has referred to as a colourful sheep and ducks with elongated wire necks, cows with ‘steampunk surrealism’. In assembling these ragtag chimera, made gears and motors for heads, and woolly mammoths with tall, spindly up of leftover junk and discarded playthings, the artist creates his legs. Alongside this menagerie are the entities that make up the set own society in miniature, a group of mixed-up hybrids. What starts Tolak Bala (2017): short, light-brown-coloured beings, sheets covering out as odd, humorous or sometimes grotesque sets of figures becomes most of their enigmatic bodies, with human feet, or a proposal towards the uneasy coexistences of democPragusta lives and works in Yogyakarta. sometimes chair legs or deer’s hooves sticking out racy, a commentary on the kaleidoscope of Indonesian His studio is located in at the bottom. Some sprout long rabbit ears, others politics today and a new set of contemporary myths. Logandeng Playen Gunungkidul.

both images Stefanus Endry Pragusta, How Shio (details), 2015, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

ZHAO YANG

selected by Jilly Ding Kit Mesmerising

PAINTERLY FICTIONS are filled with

characters that seem to have been drawn from the artist’s personal reading of and

POETRY

MYTHOLOGY

Zhao Yang, Across Sea, 2016, oil and acrylic on canvas, 130 × 55 cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai & Singapore

Summer 2017

Zhao Yang was trained in Chinese figurative ink painting, but today landscape, yet the man has a pair of thick horn emanating from his artistic output juggles inspiration from the Chinese masters the top of his head. with Western painting traditions. The tension evident in his oil and Having worked as an illustrator for a children’s-book publishing acrylic paintings – most often depicting one or two obscured figures house in mainland China for over a decade, Zhao’s artistic vocabuin a washy-coloured landscape – is not just the result of the coupling lary evolves around the apparent interpretation of symbols and of a traditional aesthetic with a conceptual approach, but also stems metaphors – indeed these mesmerising fictional spaces and charfrom the subject matter itself. The 2016 painting Across the Sea, exhib- acters have seemingly fallen from the artist’s extensive reading of ited at the artist’s recent exhibition at the Kuandu Museum of Fine mythology, classics and poetry – yet the viewer is left free to provide Arts in Taipei, is typically enigmatic, for example. Two silhou- their own interpretation as to what is going on, who these people are etted figures are shown standing in a canoe rowing across dark blue or why they’ve been brought to the canvas. Throughout his work, waters to a mountain in the far distance (the canoe is a frequent motif Zhao constantly foregrounds his fascination with the complexities of human emotion, experience and history, in the artist’s work). Man Holding Stone (2015), Zhao is based in Beijing. He recently exhibited at Shanghart exhibited in the same show, is stranger still: Gallery, Shanghai; Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, TNUA, Taipei; all embedded in and expressed through the a burly male figure is shown in an abstracted simplest of painterly fashions. and Good Chance Space for Contemporary Art, Shenzhen.

Zhao Yang, Man Holding a Stone, 2015, oil and acrylic on canvas, 61 × 47 cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai & Singapore

Zhao Yang, The Night of Arc, 2015, oil and acrylic on canvas, 200 × 180 cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai & Singapore

ArtReview Asia

Zhao Yang, Spring, 2014, oil and acrylic on canvas, 200 × 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai & Singapore

Summer 2017

HAO JINGBAN

selected by Aimee Lin Film is a mode of

TIME TRAVEL for the artist,

a journey that permits close examination of the

MEDIUM and the opportunity to reflect on how artist and artwork COEXIST

Hao Jingban, Off Takes, 2016, HD single-channel video, 21 min 18 sec, edition of 5 + AP (English and Chinese subtitles). Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

ArtReview Asia

both images Hao Jingban, I Can’t Dance (stills), 2015, HD four-channel video, 34 min 2 sec, edition of 5 + AP. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

Influenced by Chris Marker and Harun Farocki, Hao Jingban sees were developed based on the artist’s reflection (mostly critically) on moving images as a means of reaching into history and travelling the previous piece – in Hao’s words, “adjusting the postures continufrom the present to the past, playing, along the way, with the distance ously”. After the first three works she made Off Takes (2016), using the and relationship between her subjects and herself. leftover footage she had produced and collected during the research In the four-part Beijing Ballroom (2012–16), her recently finished to reflect on her experiences with these images and the relationship research project on the ballroom-dance culture in Chinese socialist between images and the information and affection they carry. history since the 1950s, Hao employed various methods to produce Unlike other artists of her generation, who will more often claim images and build narratives. In Little Dance (2012), for example, she set themselves as visual or conceptual artists, Hao tends to position herself up a fictive scene to capture the otherwise-too-subtle-to discern phys- as a ‘film artist’. In my eyes, the subjectivity that appears in her videical and psychological atmosphere around a woman. In An Afternoon oworks, the one that has always been observing and self-observing, is Ball (2014) she documented a dance from beginning to end, letting the more like that of an author, an author who is always questioning her camera discover meaningful relationships between the dancers, the own writing. In her art she is always checking the legitimacy of the music, the lighting and other elements. In I Can’t Dance (2015) she shows camera, of the intrusion of her voice and of the relationships between the complexity and constructed nature of historical narratives by using all the components that compose the work. She takes time to search two kinds of histories: one preserved on videotape and the other told for this legitimacy, this process itself an important part of the end product. This has made her art a rich text to via first-person narration. Interestingly, there Hao is based in Beijing. She has recently been awarded the was no premade plan to these three chapters International Critics’ Prize at the 63rd International Short Film read, and perhaps will make her a great artist of Beijing Ballroom. The second and third piece in the future. Festival Oberhausen for her film Off Takes (2016).

Summer 2017

ORAWAN ARUNRAK

selected by Arin Rungjang What unconscious

ATTITUDES and PREJUDICES

does a language reveal? What cultural differences and simularities do

WORDS betray?

QR CODE of the sounds and archive, 2017

The artistic practice of Orawan Arunrak draws heavily on her personal express. The work Exit-Entrance (2016–17) takes the form of a combilife as a Buddhist and as a woman living in Thailand. It is also often nation of four languages used in a conversation between ten people: inspired by her travels through her home country as well as the rest of a Thai monk, a Thai nun, a Thai anthropologist, a Thai woman, Southeast Asia, as she is interested in cultural similarities and differ- a German woman, a German anthropologist, a Thai woman, a German ences between various local communities. Using a range of media, woman, a German anthropologist, a German man ordained in a Thai including drawings and video, she creates installations that are medi- temple in Berlin, a Vietnamese nun and a Vietnamese woman, all of tative yet thought-provoking. whom live in both Asia and Europe. The visual and sound elements Motivated to challenge the use of language and its linguistic of this four-language conversation are presented in the form of an installation of images displayed in a pattern on description of a person’s identity, Arunrak examArunrak is based in Bangkok. Following a yearlong ines the unconscious attitudes and prejudices the wall that is designed from the conversations residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, her work is in Thai, German, English and Vietnamese. that different languages and cultures inherently currently on view at the Berlin space, through 18 June.

ArtReview Asia

Orawan Arunrak, Exit – Entrance, 2016–17, in-progress image, 2017. Photo: Wolfgang Bellwingkle. Courtesy the artist

Orawan Arunrak, hand-drawn images printed as wallpaper, 2017, 150 × 340 cm. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2017

SHIMURAbros

selected by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa Should we think of

FILM as DREAMLIKE and

immaterial or sculptural and material? This brother-sister duo think that it can be both, and that’s the

MAGIC

There is an expression that the SHIMURAbros, the Berlin based of history’s first filmmakers, in which they project CT scans of a locosister/brother duo of Yuka and Kentaro, often use in our conversa- motive onto a series of 12 liquid crystal film screens so the advancing tions: “Film is the catalyst for our creations. Through film, we famil- mass of light can be observed from any angle – resulting not only iarise ourselves with the equilibrium between light and matter, in an unprecedented filmic experiment, but one where dimensions and through filming we convert light to a substance of that name”. are returned to film as it simultaneously disintegrates. The duo’s In a continuous oscillation between the material/sculptural and reference to films past leads one to inquire about the treatment of immaterial/dreamlike, the duo has developed a body of work during the object in contemporary practice and the sort of relationships the last decade that reconsiders imaging devices in the context of the artists develop with history: both as an evolving site for engaging with the past and for developing gestures/ history of filmmaking. For example the critiYuka Shimura and Kentaro Shimura are based ruptures in the present – images and spaces becally acclaimed work X-Ray Train (2007), which in Berlin and Tokyo. Their work was recently shown was inspired by the famous Arrival of a Train come entangled, a ‘creative geography’, to echo at CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore. at La Ciotat (1895) by the Lumière brothers, two Lev Kuleshov, ensues.

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SHIMURAbros, x-ray Train, 2007, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists

SHIMURAbros, Sekilala, 2006–8, three-channel video installation (three players infinitely create story from 26 sequences), super 16mm, sound, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists

Summer 2017

Statements: Martha Atienza 15 - 18 June 2017 Booth N17 Messeplatz, Basel, Switzerland

Wawi Navarroza Issay Rodriguez 6 May - 3 June 2017

Silverlens, Manila

2263 Don Chino Roces Ave Ext Makati City 1231, Philippines

Image: our islands 11°17’19.6”N 123°43’12.5”E (video still), Martha Atienza, 2016

www.silverlensgalleries.com info@silverlensgalleries.com

Art Reviewed

Gula Melaka syrup, three knotted pandan leaves, roasted peanuts, evaporated milk, durian ice-cream (optional) 79

Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs Para Site, Hong Kong 18 March – 11 June Para Site, one of Hong Kong’s oldest nonprofits, has evinced a sustained commitment to the East Asia region, often attempting a nuanced local–global dialogue and usually managing to skirt binaries with finesse. In signature fashion, Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs features artworks by both local and international artists spanning a wide date spectrum, alongside some objects – folkloric renderings, assembled propaganda pamphlets and other historical documents – that might otherwise be considered beyond the scope of artworks. Conceived as a ‘traveling and transforming exhibition based on several intertwined narratives found today in the realities, artistic and cultural production, and contemporary thought in the Asian sphere and beyond’, Soil and Stones… seeks to examine the various infractions and refractions that shifts in global capital have wrought on landscapes, both real and imagined. The exhibition unfolds as a series of case studies that sit neatly and obstinately within an essaylike framework. In addition to Para Site’s usual one-storey exhibition space, Soil and Stones… extends to a second floor and the building’s rooftop. The first of those three spaces is used to articulate the central thesis of the exhibition, namely that geopolitical transformations in East Asia have impacted traditional physical and mental geographies, and immediately confronts the viewer with works composed of materials that adhere to one’s expectations of what allusions to indigeneity and native land-use should look like. Jimmie Durham’s The Isle of Man (2016) appears as a totem with a sheep skull as its head, and Haegue Yang’s The Intermediate – Domestics of Double Eggy Swirls (2017) is an intricately crafted sphere that spirals inward on itself. Further

along, Meschac Gaba’s braided hairpiece sits like an unearthed ceremonial relic, with metal coins dangling from each plait. These works trouble any notions of untouched cultural regimes; instead they invoke something closer to the hybrid. A car mirror juts out of the side of Durham’s sculpture, while Yang’s organiclooking woven orb is in fact made from plastic straws. Gaba’s headpiece too is a wig composed of artificial hair. Video artist Li Ran’s Beyond Geography (2012) further problematises any antiquated colonial perspectives of otherness as the artist himself, only thinly disguised, poses as an anthropologist observing a group of exotic natives against a blue screen. Standing physically and aesthetically apart from the main exhibition, in the next room, ‘A Tale: The Land of Fish and Rice’, a case study curated by Qu Chang, serves as a proverbial footnote. A large shrine, complete with fake food offerings, sets the tone for an inquest into recent histories along the urban-rural fringe of the Pearl River Delta. Presented in various groupings, local artists’ works mingle with historic documents and YouTube videos that reference movements formed to resist private land-developers in Hong Kong’s New Territories over the past decade. The materials here are presented as tools for research. Their status, suspended between art object and artefact, however, renders the invitation somewhat disingenuous, assigning an overly factual status to the works. Hong Kong artist Lo Lai Lai’s Weather Girl – Halo Daisy (2016), however, evades the didacticism with a blithe and abstract video-tutorial on how to read the weather using Real Feel, a system that indicates what the temperature actually feels like on the body as opposed to abstract scientific measurements.

facing page, top Li Ran, Beyond Geography, 2012, video installation, HD video, sound, colour, 23 min 9 sec. Courtesy the artist and Kadist, Paris & San Francisco

On the lower floor, the exhibition trails into the hallway with Hong Kong artist Ocean Leung’s untitled found object: the threadbare remains of a local pro-Beijing banner. Inside the second room are further ruminations on the struggles Asian countries have faced in anti- and postcolonial struggles, as well as their attempts to generate their own countermythologies from such spectres. Curator Yoonwoo Lee’s case study ‘The Phantom Modern’ traces the ways in which the ghosts of imperialism have worked their way into the contemporary imaginary with an assortment of propaganda materials alongside videoworks by contemporary artists who seek their own reflections in these mirages. A consequence, perhaps, of the exhibition’s broad-strokes narrative (designating analogous movements sweeping the Asian region) is that the exhibition itself tends to feel broad, making the plot hard to follow. The attempts to grapple with different intersecting and diverging currents resulting from ideological change are a good start, but the essay format comprising various supporting sections curated by different curators reifies a hierarchical structure where certain forms of vernacular knowledge-making become mere footnotes. Neatly delineated case studies convey an empiricism that removes the fissions and fractures that such momentous changes in geopolitical landscapes bring. In reality, such splits are neither smooth nor rational. Nevertheless, Soil and Stones… has made important inroads in a city that is often lacking a more robust archival and pan-Asian discourse. The hope is that others can continue the process of writing and revision where it has left off. Ming Lin

facing page, bottom Jimmie Durham, The Isle of Man, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

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Summer 2017

Chen Yujun The River Never Remembers Arario Gallery, Shanghai 25 February – 31 March The House Cannot Forget Bank, Shanghai 25 February – 16 April As one’s eyes adjust to the darkened space of Arario’s ground floor gallery, in which a collection of 12 mixed-media ink paintings are displayed on the walls, the compositions gradually reveal themselves to be representing sections of water. The dim environment makes it hard, at first, to distinguish immediate differences in the works of Chen Yujun’s monochrome series Mulan River No.1 (2013); the subject of the river, acting as a guiding current, gives the impression of a series that flows seamlessly. Yet on closer inspection, the divergences in their textural quality emerge from the gloom: some depict calm, eddying waters, while other works capture the coursing river, its tumbling turbulence creating a maelstrom of what looks like debris and driftwood. Stylistically, the series recalls the traditional shan shui aesthetic, though the elementally balanced world of Chinese landscape painting is disrupted here in an interpretation that plunges the viewer into threatening waters, resulting in a collection that is both culturally unheimlich and strangely mesmerising. On the uppermost floor, a new site-specific installation titled Origin of Food (2017) features an assemblage of objects inside a three-dimensional oblong panel, on the back of which is a blackand-gold painting of an uprooted tree. The objects, including variously sized stones, carved wood and crockery, are carefully arranged in the manner of food offerings one might find at a shrine. The gold that clings to the branches and leaves of the tree gradually fades towards the base of the trunk. And although superficially dazzling, the exposed roots, which have been left plain black, as well as the seeming value bestowed upon simple lumps of rock, allude to a curious regression towards a more primitive ‘origin’. The sense of a lost civilisation is emphasised in Rite (2014), an ink drawing of a rickety pavilion formed of four stunted tree

trunks, and in Wooden House No. 20130608 (2013), a huge painting of a tree supporting what looks like an unstable shacklike structure while creatures sit casually on the lower branches, undisturbed in the absence of humans. In these works, nature is an ongoing force, and man a mote in the lifetime of a river. To enter the second part of the exhibition, The House Cannot Forget, at Bank, one has to pass under a simple paifang of two plain wooden pillars set atop brick bases. Before they became purely ornamental, such archways were traditionally used to divide different administrative districts in cities, marking the passage between and welcoming visitors into designated zones. Here, the visitor, by walking across the threshold of the arch from his Temporary Constructions series (2013–) becomes complicit in marking out the space as one that is inhabited, but also one that has defined social customs. The room appears to be some kind of reconstruction, laid with recycled wooden floorboards (of different colours, paint chipped and faded) and one corner wallpapered with newspaper cuttings from those local to Putian (Chen’s hometown), each piece curling up from the bottom. A chair, an empty chest and a painting of a single shoe hung on another wall indicate that this is a domestic space, but an abandoned one. A longan tree trunk squats conspicuously on the floor, which along with the series’ title reminds us that the materials with which we make our homes are borrowed from the land. The exhibition opened three days before Lunar New Year and continues through the spring season. This makes it easy to read the coming together and subsequent geographic dispersal of family members during the festival into Chen’s work. The obligatory annual family portrait of Four Seasons No. 1221 (2013) and the mountain of shoes left by the front door of the family home, portrayed here as a painting

facing page, top Mulan River No.1, 2013 (detail), 12 mixed media ink paintings on paper, 110 × 200 × 6 cm (each). Courtesy the artist and Arario Gallery, Shanghai

of jumbled footwear in Ours No.3 (2016), signal the gathering of people, just as Banquet No.1 (2016) reminds one of the carnage left at the end of a huge family meal – fish heads, bits of skin and bone strewn across the table ready to be wrapped up in a plastic bag-cum-tablecloth. The numerous iterations of collagepaintings of windows, also part of Temporary Constructions, gathered here might allude to each family member’s individuality, each window frame a different style, each view unique, and together they may form the windows of one household. The cumulative nature of these human traces magnify the feeling of having just wandered through someone’s house, attempting to find in the things left behind some sense of their personalities. But using family dynamics to read the exhibition renders Chen’s work somewhat one-dimensional. Far more poignant are the wider relationships reflected here: the various ways in which we try to confine and manipulate nature, whether we shape it into houses or shan shui paintings, make sense of it through spirituality or attempt to align ourselves with specific familial (and by extension social) constructs. Ultimately, these ideas come together in a recent sculpture from Temporary Constructions – this time a dilapidated houselike structure hoisted into the air by a thick rope tethered to a large piece of driftwood (recalling those buffeted in Mulan River No. 1). This sudden macroperspective of the family home, dangling precariously, exposes the fragility and temporariness of the worlds we attempt to build around ourselves. The driftwood, bearing the weight of the house, reminds us of our inevitable return to the earth and offers comfort from a rather wider perspective. Regardless of how we attempt to frame or shape it, nature will run its course. Fi Churchman

facing page, bottom The River Never Remembers, The House Cannot Forget (installation view), 2017. Photo: Wang Wenlong. Courtesy Bank, Shanghai

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Summer 2017

Song Dong I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai 21 January – 4 June According to a Confucian proverb, knowledge of the mandate of heaven is attained by the time a person reaches the age of fifty. With wit and insight, Song Dong defies this precept and the fiction that wisdom comes with age. Curated by Liu Yingjiu and Xu Tiantian, Song’s most extensive survey to date in China is organised and unified by a verse the artist has composed using seven characters that encapsulate the philosophy of his past 50 years: jing (mirrors), ying (shadow), yan (word), jue (revelation), li (experience), wo (self) and ming (illumination). It is fitting that Mirror Hall (2016–17), with its blinding glow, is the point of entry to the exhibition. Mirror, water, reflection and distortions are central themes in Song’s oeuvre. Reflecting light bounces off the shiny plastic panels encased within countless old wooden window frames adorning every centimetre of the walls and ceiling of the museum foyer. Mirror images on these surfaces that appear sharply focused up-close become distorted with each retreating step. In The Use of Uselessness: Bottle Rack Big Brother (2016), brightly lit alcohol bottles that

once held Western whisky and potent Chinese baijiu are strapped as surveillance cameras on the steel prongs of a massive downturned Duchampian bottle rack, resembling a giant chandelier. Any footage these ‘monitors’ may capture will be of multiple nondescript forms, like a vision seen through an inebriated haze. The notion of refraction and distortion continues on the second floor. Mining the Internet, Song located the most abundant and iconic portraits of ten famous and infamous personalities, including Martin Luther King Jr, Marilyn Monroe, Lei Feng and Park Chung-hee, among others, immortalising them in Abnormal Death (2014–16). While each of the presented persons incurred fame during his or her lifetime, the visages blur in and out of focus through a continual rippling effect to highlight the ambiguous circumstances of demises that sealed their legendary status in death. Song Dong’s exploration with refraction is not restricted to images, but extends to time and space. The Rockbund Art Museum is sited on the former premises of the North China Branch of

I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

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the Royal Asiatic Society building, where a large collection of natural and botanical specimens was once housed. The looming wooden structure Wisdom of the Poor: Song Dong’s Para-Pavilion (2011) is Song’s creation of a museum within a museum, taking up the vast space of the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries. Jingdezhen-produced porcelain sculptures of local vegetable-market staples such as broccoli, ginger, mushrooms and garlic; alongside them ducks, hens, crabs, butterflies and even an instant noodle bowl are meticulously displayed in legless and upturned curio cabinets to provoke postcolonial musings. The sixth and uppermost gallery breaks into a full crescendo with At Fifty, I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven (2016–17), where 15 porcelain dolls enact Song’s signature performances and process-based works. The retinue of replicas modelled after Song’s childhood keepsake marks the finale of the exhibition as an embodiment of a forward rather than a backward glance at the possibilities that his prodigious and expansive artistic career has in store. For Song Dong, heaven’s mandate is yet to come. Julie Chun

Teng Chao-Ming After All These Years Cube Project Space, Taipei 29 April – 2 July You walk into a dimly lit room and hear a man’s voice from above your head: “I do everything in my power to enter someone’s mind, to become that person.” As the voiceover unfolds, you learn that the narrator, this ‘I’ who threatens to expropriate others’ identities (not in a threatening tone, though) and who’s clearly OK or even complacent about ‘his’ own parasitic state of existence as a song (composed by Teng Yu-hsien) called Rainy Night Flowers. First released by Columbia Records in Taiwan in 1934, the melancholic Taiwanese-language pop song, composed during Japan’s occupation, was revised by the Imperial Japanese Army to promote war. To date there are nine versions of lyrics, in Taiwanese, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, pointing to very different sentiments and historical backgrounds. The song has been banned and revived so many times over the course of its history that it is associated with Taiwanese identity in a way no other cultural product can emulate – it is a symbol of Taiwanese solidarity, as well as a wound that marks the island’s painful history as the ‘Orphan of Asia’, manipulated, exploited and abused. Here in the show, however, Teng Chao-Ming has composed a narrative that betrays the conventional understanding of the history of Rainy Night Flowers and, by extension, the

interpretation of Taiwanese identity. Rather than lamenting the tragic experience, the voiceover tells a story of how ‘he’ decided at some point to reverse the situation by accepting his own vulnerability and to turn his lack of subjectivity into an advantage to survive the difficult times or prosper: “It never concerns me… whether I should be ‘me’… I just focus on looking for… the next occasion that I can sustain myself. I relish the moment when people scream my name, or flourish my avatars… turning my existence into a distributed system in the world.” Unlike many artists who work with archives, Teng chooses to reverse the traditional hierarchy by positioning the song as a discursive subject (using a man’s voice can also be read as an indicator) rather than a mere object of research – there are no ‘authentic’ archives or documents in the show that support the ‘sincerity’ of the first-person, psychoanalytic narrative, and the absence of the familiar melody as well as all versions of lyrics only reinforces this change of mindset. In fact, each detail of the show seems to correspond to the concept of ‘reversal’, or at least an attempt to switch the point of view. For instance, the major part of the installation consists of over 100 mirrors placed on six steel shelves scattered across the space, each mirror with one name printed on it: that of each of the

singers, writers and politicians from Taiwan, Japan or mainland China who once played a role in the song’s life story, including the artist himself. As you look into the mirror, you’ll see a certain name appear across your face, as if the mirror assigns you with an identity, rather than you recognising your own reflected subjectivity. Theoretically speaking, the mirror serves as a perfect metaphor for the act of identification, but as a visual expression, these mirrors seem a little too ‘eager’ to make a statement and thereby lose artistic subtlety. Moreover, the arrangement of these mirrors seems more random than organised, blocking any sense of the artist’s reading of the specific histories. But still, the artist’s reconstruction of Rainy Night Flowers’ identity as a distributed, networked one offers an opportunity to rethink the representation of local politics. And the artist’s experiment with creating alternative understandings of the concept of identity reminds me of what David Joselit proposes in a manifesto at the end of his book Feedback: Television Against Democracy, after (2007) when analysing art and art history’s potential to function as political science: ‘LOSE YOUR IDENTITY… Use icons opportunistically, and share them with like-minded people. Make an avatar!’ Guo Juan

After All These Years, 2017, UV prints on 119 mirrors (as of 2017 and growing in numbers), stainless steel shelves, digital inkjet prints, carpets, voiceover, 14 min 20 sec (loop). Courtesy the artist and Cube Project Space, Taipei

Summer 2017

Jakkai Siributr Displaced Bangkok Art & Culture Centre 1 April – 13 May Uniting two new installations with an acclaimed old one, Thai textile artist Jakkai Siributr’s latest exhibition begins with an open, if unspoken, invitation to dress up. Three clothing racks lined with military camo jackets and a table piled with white Muslim-Malay skullcaps, or songkoks, greet the viewer. You approach Changing Room (2017) gingerly and find something amiss: while the jackets are mostly embroidered with happy, faux-naïf scenes of life in Thailand’s Muslim insurgency-stricken deep south, the linings of the skullcaps crudely depict the region’s all-too-quotidian horrors. There are embroideries of armed separatists holding up Malaysian flags, of shot-up cars and of bloodied soldiers, among other violent images. Yet most visitors appear OK with all this carnage – they duly slip into character and proceed to check themselves out in the full-length mirror provided, take selfies or pose for photographs. Contrasting the blindly sanguine hopes of a stalled, militaryled peace process with the jittery day-to-day existence of civilians there, this high-stakes work walks a fine line between pricking our conscience and infantalising us. Moving on, the tonal dissonance between the three works is as striking as the sociopolitical commentaries woven into each one. Brash and intuitively relatable, Changing Room uses public roleplay to address, caustically and rather cynically, the Thai Buddhist majority’s disconnect with the internecine religious and ethnic conflicts in the country’s southern border provinces. By contrast, the installation next

to it, 78 (2014), is cut from more dignified cloth. First shown at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2014, it’s a disquietingly stoic tribute to the victims of one of the most diabolical examples of statesanctioned heavy-handedness in living memory: the Tak Bai incident of October 2004. The outside of this mysterious, 3.5m-high black fabric cube, which is modelled loosely on the Kaaba, the sacred cube at the heart of Mecca, is embellished with brass-coiled embroidery and stylised Thai script. Inside, the sepulchral feeling heightens. Disturb its meditative air of funereal sanctity by peeling back the curtain and entering its metal scaffold frame and you find 78 white kurta tunics laid out neatly on tightly stacked bamboo bunks – one for each of the male Muslim protesters who died from suffocation after being arrested in the southern Thai province of Narathiwat, bound and stacked onto trucks by the military. Unsurprisingly, people talk in whispers in here, if at all. Curated by Iola Lenzi, the show’s triumvirate of tactile work is completed by The Outlaw’s Flag (2017), a display of 21 imagined flags coarsely embroidered with seeds and beads. These were gathered by Jakkai during a 2015 research trip to Sittwe, the city in Myanmar’s Rakhine state from which many Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority, have fled persecution at the hands of the country’s Buddhist majority, escaping on boats only to find that their travails – statelessness, poverty, exploitation – have only just begun. Made by Jakkai and his three helpers, the flags hang askew on wood rails and blend

emblems and symbols lifted from the flags of Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia and Thailand – the four countries embroiled in this ongoing refugee crisis. Meanwhile, sombre documentary footage of the main points on the Rohingya’s journey, including Sittwe, plays on two video screens beside them. Using hand stitching, appliqué and other domestic craft techniques, Jakkai has to date keenly and ironically unpicked parochial themes pertaining to his homeland, including its entrenched customs and the crass commercialisation of Theravada Buddhism, one of the three pillars of Thai society. But Displaced, which is the result of months of ethnographic research, is the first solo show to find him, a practising Buddhist, exploring the fate of people who sit just outside the field of experience of most metropolitan Thais, including its ruling military junta and Jakkai himself. Given the global surge of ethnocentrism, all I can say is that it feels right for now. Veering jarringly and provocatively between moments of pathos, empathy and unsettling Instagramfriendly entertainment, this is, despite the Buddhist–Muslim lens, a taut and timely show about a universal theme: the other and how we perceive them. In this way, the Displaced of the title refers not just to those uprooted by the social and political frictions of our age, but also the feelings of more privileged viewers as we set about questioning our engagement – or lack of – with the wider issues raised. Max Crosbie-Jones

Changing Room (detail), 2017, performative clothing installation, embroidery on Thai military uniforms and on Thai Muslim headgear kapiyoh, mirror. Courtesy the artist

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Kyotographie International Photography Festival Various venues, Kyoto 15 April – 14 May Founded by Kyoto-based artist couple Yusuke Nakanishi and Lucille Reyboz, Kyotographie is an annual photography festival now in its fifth year that unfolds across multiple venues, including a number of unconventional spaces repurposed as exhibition venues, throughout Japan’s former capital. Tackling this year’s theme of ‘Love’ in a stunningly apt conjunction with his chosen setting, veteran Japanese lensman Nobuyoshi Araki presents a series of photographs called A Desktop Love (2016), displayed in custom-made wooden frames and stands perched at a slight incline on the tatami-matted floor of Ryosokuin, a smaller building within Kenninji, the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto. These still lifes, composed using toys, potted plants and other miscellaneous objects artfully arranged on a desk in his home, foregrounds Araki’s longstanding obsessions with the themes of eros, transience and memento mori, set against the austerely appointed interior of the temple building, as well as the view of the spartan rock and moss garden outside. On the other hand, Hong Kong artist Yan Kallen’s Between the Light and Darkness (2017) suggests that it is sometimes the outsider undertaking a project meant as a tribute to Kyoto’s culture who is able to draw out

its most subtle nuances. Mumeisha Yoshida House, a classic Kyoto machiya townhouse residence belonging to Kojiro Yoshida, a retired kimono-fabric distributor who was also the director of Kyoto’s famed Gion Matsuri summer festival, serves as an atmospheric setting for Yan’s work, which was based on a four-month residency spent getting to know some of Kyoto’s most respected artisans, whose fields of expertise range from tea-ceremony kettles to sacred Shinto mirrors, tatami mats and traditional wooden joinery. Carefully printed on handmade Japanese paper in fine monochrome gradations of black and white, Yan’s photos of everyday tools and paper- and lacquer-making processes are an eloquent homage to a disappearing way of life in a staunch stronghold of Japanese craft traditions, made even more elegiac by being displayed in this dusky abode made of wood and paper. Where most contemporary photography emphasises the play of light, Yan’s project is not so much illuminated by natural light as tempered by a myriad of shadows. Similarly unconventional but strikingly apt is the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition, drawn from the collection of the architect Peter Marino, which is on display at Kondaya Genbei, a fabric merchant specialising in kimono sashes (obi). First presented at the Chanel Nexus Hall

in Tokyo’s Ginza district, this reconfiguration of the exhibition, made of some 90 works, is staged in a subtly crafted, pristine white substructure of truncated walls that give one the impression of flitting through a futuristic time-capsule suspended within the dark wooden beams and ochre-coloured plaster walls of this machiya house. As one ventures deeper into the elongated space of the house, one has the impression of burrowing ever deeper into Mapplethorpe’s complex iconography, starting with the innocuous still lifes of flowers and plants, and gradually edging towards the more risqué contours of his nude male models. In one sense, the evolution of Kyotographie is the tale of how the founders gradually won the trust and respect of the local community in a city that is not particularly known for its openness to outsiders (Reyboz is French-born but grew up in Mali, while Nakanishi, although Japanese, is not from Kyoto). While the city is already an important centre of the traditional and performing arts, recent years have seen an uptick in the number of truly internationally oriented art events, such as the recently founded Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture (2015), that are converging to make Kyoto a vital centre and counterpoint to the art scene in the capital. Darryl Wee

Summer 2017

Lotus Land Asia Culture Center (ACC), Gwangju 28 April – 4 August Collecting work by more than 30 artists and artist groups in their twenties and thirties, Lotus Land is the inaugural edition of what is projected to be an annual exhibition showcasing the visual culture of a younger generation of Koreans. At the opening, the space has a party atmosphere – huge emojis continuously run across screens hung from the ceiling, and a DJ is playing electronic dance music so loud that one can hardly hear the videoworks in the show. But there is something for everyone at an event such as this: some contemporary dance; a drag performer vogueing in a costume made by Halominium (a designer whose work is in the show); and, of course, endless DJing. The exhibition space, effectively a pile of around 25 boxlike rooms, was originally designed to house artist studios. In Lotus Land, each of these houses a single artist’s work; the result is an ‘open studio’ experience. Clearly one of the major curatorial concerns is to decentralise the position of visual art in the institution’s programme and to enrich it with graphic design, fashion, film, dance, crafts, publishing, tattooing and LGBT activism. This decentralisation also works in a geographical sense, as the show tries to introduce artists

who are from or based in all parts of Korea, rather than merely focusing on those from the cosmopolitan Seoul region, the ‘centre’ of the country’s cultural scene. Compared with what one might expect to see at a state-run institution, what you encounter at Lotus Land is vigorous, organic and lively – both in terms of the works and people who produce them. Goeun Choi’s installation Material Pool (2015–16) is a painterly composition of a set of greyish-coloured panels – normally used in air-conditioning systems – in a threedimensional space, the result demonstrating a purely materialist sensibility. Hannah Woo’s video and mixed-media installation A Grabbing Object (2017) is like a tiny solo exhibition, offering an adventure starring symbolic objects from daily life. Sim Eunjung’s video Red Sculpture (2014) starts a humorous conversation with public ideology when the artist mimics its material medium – public sculpture – with her own body. Minjung Song’s DOUBLE DEEP HOT SUGAR – the Romance of Story (2017) provides a perfect example of what we might call the SNS (social network services) generation’s way of working: video clips quickly shot by cellphone or collected from YouTube, flooded with avatars,

tags, stickers, emojis and Internet memes, narrated in a kawaii voiceover and accompanied by an electronic-music soundtrack. First made by the artist as a commercial for Serious Hunger, a progressive brand of handmade dessert, it is a typical post-Internet moving-image work that says a lot about the SNS generation’s linguistic and visual vocabularies. Almost all largescale group exhibitions of work by young artists like to catch, investigate or propose new trends. For one thing, tags like ‘post-Internet’ and ‘post-identity’ are quickly consumed and become outdated. On the surface, this show could have been called ‘the art of the SNS generation’ or something similar. However, while SNS might well play an important role in the work of many of the exhibitors here, others – for example those by the independent filmmakers and publishers, the tattooist and the LGBT activists – make it hard for Lotus Land to be categorised under a simple term. In a sense, this chaotic, vigorous show is more like a compilation, offering a collective portrait of the people who are producing and consuming visual culture in contemporary Korea without sacrificing their individual completeness and particularity. Aimee Lin

Minjung Song, DOUBLE DEEP HOT SUGAR – the Romance of Story – ver.2 (still), 2017, video, colour, sound. Courtesy the artist and ACC, Gwangju

ArtReview Asia

Natee Utarit Optimism Is Ridiculous: The Altarpieces Ayala Museum, Manila 18 February – 9 April Over the course of four years, Thai painter Natee Utarit has painted 12 large ‘altarpieces’: diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs (the latter comprising up to seven separate panels). In their forms, these pieces are inspired by Renaissance Christian altarpieces, but their content is more eclectic, filled with Buddhist imagery and samplings of modern and contemporary art references (among them Warhol’s Brillo Box, 1964), as well as random bits of taxidermy. It would be boorish not to be impressed by his persistence and commitment to making these highly detailed and considered works. But what exactly do they mean and what is their relationship to Christian altarpieces? Although trained in classical Western painting, Utarit is Thai and a practising Buddhist. Both the imagery in and layout of his altarpieces are very different from any Renaissance painting. While a Renaissance altarpiece would traditionally have at its centre a clear focus for devotion – an image of Christ crucified, the Madonna and child or a saint – Utarit’s compositions are far more complicated, puzzles rather than icons. There is no simple, reverent viewing: in one painting a Madonna and child do appear, but our view of them is impeded by yellow tapes emblazoned with ‘Police Line Do Not Cross’. While a Renaissance artist would have shared a coherent iconography with the congregation of the church, Utarit mixes quotes from Joseph Beuys or Haim Steinbach with motifs from Old Master paintings and Buddhist imagery. It is unlikely anyone will spot most of these symbols and references.

How many would recognise that a red turban on a skeleton in one painting is derived from the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, or that the ermines (stoats who have white fur in the winter) are emblematic of the peerage, or purity? It is uncertain what these postmodern incongruities add up to, for the conjunctions are indeed jarring: the naked Eve next to Duchamp’s bicycle wheel; a giraffe’s skeleton next to a naked woman, a badger and a man playing an organ. It all starts to feel as though one were in a storage room where taxidermied animals and skeletons are surrounded by bric-a-brac. Models come in and pose in costumes as though for a fashion show or a charade. A charade that is presumably intended to show the hubris of Western colonialism and materialism. In one painting white men in costumes like those worn by Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) survey a map of Southeast Asia, presumably to divide it up into colonies. But the paintings are too complicated, too personal and arcane to sustain any such direct or consistent message. In a lecture he talked of how, as he made the paintings, spiderwebs of references and associations grew. All this may be fun for those collectors who own them to tease out the references and speculate what they mean, but the ordinary gallerygoer is likely to be impressed by the skills without having much sense of what they are about. For example, in the centre of Nescientia (2014; Latin for ‘unknowing’) is the Buddha – or rather an anatomical model topped with a Buddha head. His pose is that which traditionally depicts

the moment of enlightenment. To the left is the Apollo Belvedere, an epitome of classical Greek art and beauty, to the right is an ornate crucifix with a sculpture of a cardinal beside it. Below the Buddha and the crucifix are common people imploring or praying. Are we meant to see the three epitomes as equivalent, or Buddha as the superior? Or is everything undercut anyway by the presence of an auctioneer’s paddle? To the left a Thai man looks back at us, understandably puzzled. Are they good paintings? Ambitious certainly and impeccably crafted, though the flawless surface makes the figures look strangely motionless and posed. While Utarit makes much use of photographs and computer modelling, he paints in a very traditional way: first in grisaille, then adding colour. In his lecture he also talked of how as he worked on them his admiration for the original Renaissance painters grew. So the paintings seek to work in a paradoxical way, as simultaneously a critique of Western culture and an homage to Renaissance painters. Also, they want to promote a Buddhist sense of inner calmness. In one painting (The Silent Gateway, 2016) the clutter and figures are absented, and all we see are three very precisely painted aisles with stone columns receding into the darkness. Against the complexity and clutter of the other paintings, it is like a cool glass of water. If the other 11 offer a complicated but curiously dispassionate view of a troubled world, this offers some degree of calm or release. Tony Godfrey

When Adam Delved and Eve Span, Who Was Then the Gentleman?, 2014, oil on canvas, seven panels, 230 × 735 cm (overall). Photo: Krisada Suvichakonpong. Courtesy the artist and Richard Koh Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur

Summer 2017

Native Revisions Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Lasalle College of the Arts, 11 February – 12 April It is one thing to plan what flattering photo will be used at your own funeral, but another altogether to stage that funeral preemptively and then photograph the event. But that is precisely what a man from Kerala did in artist Anup Mathew Thomas’s gloriously inauspicious Staging at Nedumbarakkadu (2012), which is a photograph of a photograph. The original picture shows a man lying in an open coffin with two mourners sitting next to him. The accompanying text informs that this isn’t an actual funeral service but a full-dress rehearsal that occurred three years before the actual event. Featuring a garlanded casket, lit candles and his wife and father as extras, this arresting image not only investigates the ceremonial theatrics of death rites, but also the agency of the subject in controlling the nature and image of his memorialisation. The power of art to ‘fix’ certain events and influence public memory is a recurring theme in Native Revisions, a group show of four Asian photographers – Thomas (India), Tomoko Yoneda (Japan), Chua Chye Teck (Singapore) and Noh Suntag (South Korea). The exhibition seeks, according to curator Melanie Pocock, to ‘reflect on the dynamics of return and its influence on our perception of places’. Although she wants to explore the artists’ ‘personal stakes in places’, some works remain stubbornly impersonal and blandly documentarian in character. These include Chua’s fetching but boring black-and-white photographs of tangled vines representing Singapore’s last forested frontiers (Beyond wilderness, 2014–16) and Thomas’s other

photojournalistic works, such as that depicting the funeral of a bishop from a Syrian Christian church in Kerala (Scene from a wake, 2016). The exhibition is at its strongest when it moves away from an earnest but airless exploration of how photography can capture hidden histories of various locales, and becomes more self-reflexive. This is when the artists grapple with the medium’s limitations – its subjectivity, its indexicality – even as they exploit them for their own purposes. Formally assured while being fully aware of their own constraints, the most compelling pictures draw the viewer in while initiating her into their own inadequacy. Although the original subject matter of each photograph may risk erasure, something else slyer, more slippery and compelling takes its place. One of the concepts Native Revisions explores is memorialisation, a process to which images are key. If Staging at Nedumbarakkadu highlights how memorialisation can be performative, Yoneda’s work expands on this idea. In The 70th 6 August, Hiroshima (2015), she is preoccupied less with the object of memorialisation and more with the act of memorialisation. Her wide-angle shot shows the annual peace service to commemorate the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima during the Second World War, a stately occasion with large white tents for spectators. But hers is a blurry image – the edges of the tents are furred, the two people in the centre aisle are translucent and ghostly. This fuzziness is the result of Yoneda’s superimposition of three negatives of the ceremony. The hazy, layered effect recalls

facing page, top Tomoko Yoneda, The 70th 6 August, Hiroshima, 2015, c-print, 76 × 96 cm. Courtesy the artist and Shugo Arts, Tokyo

a neuroscientific fact about how people form memories – by remembering the last memory and not the source event – and one can imagine this image imprinted on the collective consciousness 70 times over but getting no closer to the original trauma. And of the actual 6 August 1945, the photograph maintains an ambiguous silence. Another creative framing of historical conflict can be seen in Noh’s monochrome series The strAnge ball (2004–7), in which a mysterious white sphere lurks in the background of several rural landscapes. The photographs were taken in the village of Daechuri in southwest Korea, where local farmers were fighting eviction by the South Korean government because the US wanted to extend its military base in the area. First trained as a news reporter before becoming an artist, Noh told The Korean Times in 2015 that he ‘was attracted to the wicked side of pictures’. This wickedness – or a certain impish amorality – can be seen in the ambiguous recurring motif of the white ball in what could have been straightforwardly political pictures. Actually a waterproof enclosure for radar equipment owned by the US, the ball appears over and over, whether as a tiny orb in the distance behind weeping farmers, or glimpsed between tree branches like a moon. Is it a UFO? A surveilling eyeball? A cystic representation of American influence? Shapeshifting and hard to pin down, this ball could well stand in for the complex presence of the photographer himself, as a persistent but shadowy sort of witness with unknowable aims. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Noh Suntag, The strAnge ball (detail), 2004–7, six digital prints, 54 × 81 cm (each). Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

Summer 2017

Bahar Yürükoğlu Maybe I’d like to be like you Art Sümer, Istanbul 10 March – 22 April If a gesture of reconciliation is too little, too late, can it still salvage something? Could the attempt itself be the start of a different dialogue, at least – one that reforges a relationship, without expecting forgiveness? Turkish-American artist Bahar Yürükoğlu seems to suggest so: her latest solo exhibition tentatively explores a yearning for a new relationship with the natural world. In it, she captures her own attempt at initiating a human–nature dialogue, the photographic evidence of which feels both intimate enough to be an act of personal penitence and conceptual enough to communicate a universal need. A hand shyly grasps the stem of a plant for a cross-species handshake in Untitled (2016), while in another untitled work, from 2017, sharply manicured fingers reach for an equally spindly flower, the two mirroring each other in longing and deadliness. Ranging from installation to photography to video, Yürükoğlu’s works are more typically marked by Technicolor gradients, presenting geometric shapes of manmade material inserted into natural landscapes and site-specific installations reminiscent of light-refracting glaciers. This time, fresh from a residency in Antarctica (her second trip there), Yürükoğlu bookends six photographs that utilise her familiar visual vocabulary with the two aforementioned, more naturalistic photographs on one end, and one fully computergenerated, jarring image on the other. Several of Yürükoğlu’s prints here look at first glance like manipulated photos: they

include a triangle, as in Inversion (2016), and multicoloured lines, as in A Drawing (2016), transposed on otherwise unremarkable photos of a bare forest covered in greying snow. But these enigmas are actually physical objects, placed in the forest and then photographed; the works check us in our instinctive assumption that their visual out-of-placeness is evidence of digital interference. Such insistence on working with the limits of the physical world also seems to highlight what fellow dwellers of Yürükoğlu’s home cities – Washington, DC, Boston, New York and Istanbul – and many others have likely ceased to see when looking at nature. A sense of wonder, for one – stoked, tellingly, through a harmonious amalgam of the manmade and the natural. In documenting her modest but original intervention, Yürükoğlu’s photographs quietly urge us to attempt our own similar reconnections, reminding of that hidden sublime only to be found through and within the natural world. Transfixion (2016), in which a woman basks in refracted multicoloured sunlight, and Subversion (2016), in which a magenta filter and prismatic lens-flare transform an image of a bare forest by way of a colourful aura, more explicitly illustrate this psychological bond. Should we choose to alleviate that bond’s severing through technology – instead of the challenging but authentic work of reconciliation with the real thing – the outcome, captured

Subversion, 2016, archival pigment, 80 × 120 cm. Courtesy the artist and Art Sümer, Istanbul

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in New Composition (2017), says it all: it features a clip-art skull and potted palm tree, floating before a neon gradient – its artificial hues an eyesore after the subtlety of Transfixion’s natural rainbow; its vector graphics underwhelmingly flat after the perspectival depth of Inversion’s real forest. This small solo show feels promising, but sketchlike in scope and content; in comparison to the artist’s 2016 exhibition Flow Through – which included a site-specific Plexiglas installation, Arctic soundscapes and video – these nine prints, varying from A4 to A0, come across as interim offerings. Given this sparseness, getting the curatorial basics right is a necessity. The Karaköy neighbourhood suffers from frequent construction, so the drab natural light inside Art Sümer is the price for the privacy its frosted glass facade affords; despite this, little attention seems to have been paid to the individual lighting of each work, even though the visual impact of and audience engagement with dark, glossy prints like The Forest Party (2016) depends upon a thoughtful consideration of its reflective properties. Nonetheless, Maybe I’d like to be like you compactly and pensively suggests the kind of vulnerable, honest self-questioning on our part that must necessarily preclude any reconciliation in the human–nature relationship. This holds a conceptual and topical weight that begs for the expansive executions of the artist’s past shows. Sarah Jilani

Hera Büyüktaşçıyan Write injuries on sand and kindness on marble Green Art Gallery, Dubai 13 March – 6 May There’s a funny, lukewarm stillness to this show, like looking at your feet in a fast-cooling bath. It’s hushed without feeling sacralised, and tepid in an earnest kind of way: a small, shy smile of a show that beguiles even as it frustrates. But when you approach the kinetic sculpture Chanting if I live, Forgetting it I die (2017), a centipede of stained marble and weathered wood, something shifts. Sensing your presence, the tergitelike marble slabs begin to wave at random: slowly, and with some drag, like an underwater anemone. The sculpture begins to breathe. And all of the surrounding works seem to sigh in relieved accord, as if they hadn’t realised they had been holding their breaths. Büyüktaşçıyan often seems as comfortable in the diverse roles of oral historian and hydraulic engineer as that of artist, with a poetic approach that excavates the history of a site as a starting point. Her works come to function as receptacles that coax repressed narratives – traumas, tales, such as the Armenian Genocide and Istanbul Pogrom, of violent erasure, or simply the stories

that time forgot – back into the present to flow like the water that is so central to her practice. In her first Dubai solo exhibition, the artist extends her preoccupation with aquatic infrastructure to consider marbleworking, as well as the labour camps not far away. The invisible, uncited labour of workers buttresses the exhibition, most winningly in The Relic (2016), a pair of cast bronze hands extended in supplication over a series of neat marble mosaics on wood. Deeply stamped squares on each finger suggest a transubstantiation of flesh into marble, as if the tiles have been cut from the worker’s hands. One of the strongest works in the show, it pays quiet homage to all those whose identities have been eroded over centuries of building, be it the grand marbled monuments depicted elsewhere in the show or Dubai’s nearby skyscrapers. On a nearby wall, titled A Discovery of 36 Wells (2016), a suite of pencil and watercolour drawings depict workers’ homes in Dubai. The buildings have been upended and placed on their sides to become broken cisterns

and leaky aqueducts. But the liquid that pools below these structures is a pinkish red, suggesting a diluted admixture of water and blood. Less successful is Everflowing Pool of Nectar (2017), a large installation of chevroned paper scrolls that dominates the gallery space. Within the patterning are images of the fountains and waterways found in Mughal pleasure gardens, scenes of recognisably Byzantine men at work, perhaps a comment on the transnational character of labour. In his multivolume treatise on architecture, the Roman engineer Vitruvius wrote that marble is not alike in all countries. Except here it is. There’s a flattening subsumption of memory to material, which seems to rehearse the same effacement that the artist seeks to counter. And perhaps it wouldn’t matter in a place where the embedded memory of the site worked, as it does so elegantly in her other works, to suffuse and animate the show. But in Dubai, the water table has long been extinguished and the riverbed remains dry. Rahel Aima

The Discovery of 36 Wells (detail), 2016, pencil and watercolour on paper, set of ten, 27 × 35 cm (each). Courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai

Summer 2017

But We Cannot See Them: Tracing a UAE Art Community, 1988–2008 NYUAD Art Gallery, Abu Dhabi 2 March – 2 September A mythical narrative of the development of contemporary art in the UAE has emerged over the last decade. It focuses on a small group of male artists who gathered around Hassan Sharif (who passed away last year), first as students and then as peers, in the years following his return from art school in London in 1984. This group, which came to be known as ‘the five’, included his younger brother Hussain Sharif, Mohammed Kazem, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim and Abdullah Al Saadi. Shunned by the mainstream for their arch conceptualism, they continued to work in relative obscurity for over two decades, until they finally gained recognition during the late 2000s, as a growing arts infrastructure brought the international artworld to the UAE. History, however, is always richer and more complicated than myth, and while Sharif’s singular importance and influence is undeniable, much else about this time has been or is being forgotten. But We Cannot See Them… revisits this period, bolstering key artworks and archival material with oral histories that begin to recoup the lost texture of the recent past. These interviews (shown as videos in the entry gallery) recount a heady time, when information and resources were limited but generously shared, ideas and texts were actively translated, discussed and debated, and visual artists formed a loose creative community with likeminded peers in other disciplines – most

notably poets and writers such as Nujoom Alghanem, Khalid Albudoor and Ahmed Rashid Thani, a Sharif-like figure in literary circles – which helped sustain their avant-garde practices in the face of outright rejection by the establishment. They reveal that ‘the five’ was an external designation, and reintroduce two forgotten key members – Dutch painter Jos Clevers and Indian sculptor Vivek Vilasini – into the narrative. In the exhibition, each artist occupies enough space to reveal their distinct approach, while thoughtful juxtapositions bring their shared sensibilities into view. A selection of Sharif’s signature ‘objects’, nondescript sculptures made up of cheap consumer goods and discarded cardboard sheets, is followed by Ibrahim’s experiments in different media, from early abstract paintings and a papiermâché sculpture, to Lines (1992), pages filled with short vertical lines in India ink of varying heights, widths and opacities that seem to mark the passage of time. Though Sharif and Ibrahim sometimes deployed similar forms – piles of smaller units, repeated lines – their juxtaposition demonstrates the latter’s abiding interest in the symbolic potential of mark and form. Similarly, the tangled copper tubes of Sharif’s Gingko (2008) riffs nicely with the energetic scribbles in Clevers’s expressionistic paintings, while Vilasini’s Brides of Seven Climes (1996/2008), seven pots enmeshed in

a serpentine net of coir rope, introduce an overt iconography missing from the work of the others. Many of these artists engaged with their changing environments by collecting material traces of it, as objects or in images. Hussain Sharif’s seminal Installation (1995) staged a dramatic encounter between urban development and consumer culture, as an orderly grid of small concrete cubes is gradually inundated by urban detritus. Al Saadi’s I am In Japan (Iwakura Handscroll) (1995–6), an accordion book of drawings of rural vistas, reveals the influence of his Japanese sojourn, the subject and format then adapted after his return to represent the local surroundings in Mountain Tops, February 3–4 (1999). Rounding out the exhibition are Kazem and his student Ebtisam Abdulaziz, the only female member of the group, who shared a dry, analytical, almost scientific approach not entirely devoid of play. With the imminent opening of major museums in the Emirati capital, and as canons are established and art histories written, this unruly art community risks being retrospectively tamed to fit neat nationalist and disciplinary narratives. Though preliminary, through careful historical research this exhibition, and the oral histories supporting it, retrieve the interdisciplinary and multicultural, or as the curators put it, ‘kaleidoscopic’ ethos of this formative period. Murtaza Vali

Hussain Sharif, Installation, 1995, cement, found objects, 600 × 170 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Salwa Zeidan Gallery, Abu Dhabi

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Vivek Vilasini, Brides of Seven Climes, 1996/2008, painted fibreglass jars, cotton, coir, 91 × 91 × 640 cm. Courtesy 1x1 Gallery, Dubai

Summer 2017

Lala Rukh Sagar Grey Noise, Dubai 13 March – 13 May Sagar is a quiet, painfully lovely show in which nothing much seems to happen. Despite a studio practice spanning over five decades, the Pakistani artist has, until recently, been known more for her pedagogy and committed feminist activism. Taking as its title the Hindi word for ‘sea’, Rukh’s first Dubai solo works as a confluence – perhaps even a sangam – of these multiple sides of her practice with a collection of watery vistas: coastlines, rivers, reefs, seascapes. Smoky cerulean walls give the gallery vestibule a moody, atmospheric feel. The show opens with a mixed-media drawing on photographic paper, River in an Ocean 4 (1992). Rukh’s technique involves using photographic developer to expose ink and graphite; aided by judicious lighting, her method seems to illuminate the work from within. The video Gadani.2001.07.00–19.00 (2001), flickers on a boxy CRT monitor angled on the floor beside the drawing. As is the case with the photographs that comprise the bulk of the show, the title indicates the location, and sometimes time in which the footage was captured: here,

a Pakistani beach. In these photographs, the sun sets over coppery waters in Goa, and casts the Burmese Irrawaddy river in something like Pantone’s 2016 colours of rose quartz and serenity, while the tide breaks over keloid scarlike rocks on Sri Lanka’s Beruwala beach, and a Nepalese lake curiously suggests shimmery crinkle chiffon. The images, taken between 1992 and 2005 during her travels around the subcontinent, are exhibited here – and in some cases, developed – for the first time. Less generously, the show carries a whiff of a direct-to-video style of release: an exhibition that seems cajoled out of an artist’s archive, conscious primarily of its futurehistorical importance. Rukh is considered a pioneer of South Asian minimalism, and a large untitled (2003) drawing showcases her characteristic economy of form. Her line work is so spare, so subtle that it suggests a blank sheet of paper, and only upon coming much closer do her marks begin to materialise as a wavy horizon. The two drawings make no reference to a specific

Beruwela x, 1993, c-print on aluminium, 20 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Grey Noise, Dubai

ArtReview Asia

geography or aqueous terrain but rather document the political timbres of their time: the buoyant sense of possibility following the 1988 death of Pakistani dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and the ebbing of optimism in the tumultuous decade that followed. The main gallery is painted the palest blue, and the overall effect is restive, even soothing. It would be easy to read this show as a meditation on time and transience or something equally – tryingly – universalised. Yet ‘it is not good for water to be so still that way,’ as Langston Hughes wrote in his poem Sea Calm (1926) and, indeed, there’s something deeply unnerving in the quietude of a placid sea, in the comfortable inertia of complacence. The show is by no means taut, but doesn’t quite suggest a beach holiday either. Rather, it feels like a testament to the slow, patient generosity of movement building. The kind that goes unannounced and unacknowledged, but is all the more crucial for that fact. And if that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep struggling and fighting and building. Rahel Aima

Nalini Malani Transgressions Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 18 March – 18 June In 1951 the Dutch artist Karel Appel was commissioned to make a three-dimensional painting in the Stedelijk Museum’s former restaurant, which, since the renovation of the museum in 2014, functions as an extra gallery space. He covered the walls and ceiling with a lively scene of a blooming garden, replete with colourful animals and playing children, and executed it in his characteristic CoBrA style. There is not much left of that postwar optimism and exuberance in Migration (1991–2017), the response Nalini Malani has formulated to Appel’s work as an introduction to her solo show at the Stedelijk. Her palette, in contrast to that of the Dutchman, is sombre, reduced to black charcoal. No joyful scenes here, but a constellation of gloomy elements – including an army helicopter, two dreary faces staring at the spectator and a kneeling man holding a broken globe – interconnected through a series of lines. What Malani presents us with is not only an intro, but a foreboding of a dystopian new world order. The doom and gloom, however, is of a temporary nature, as the mural will be erased during a so-called erasure performance at the end of the exhibition, a practice the artist has applied on other occasions during her five-decade career. Such is the case with City of Desires (1992), Malani’s first site-specific wall-drawing installation, which was on view for only 15 days in Mumbai’s Chemould Gallery and is brought back to life here via a video

recording of the performance. Through a variety of chalk drawings, she refers, among other things, to the growing influence of rightwing Hindu nationalists, a recurring preoccupation in her work that has – unfortunately – become even more urgent since current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took power in 2014. Rising nationalism, tensions between India and Pakistan, globalisation and migration, the oppression of women – all these ‘local’ themes are elevated to an allegorical and more universal level, and tackled in a visually abundant style, for which Malani picks a variety of media to suit her message and also often reintroduces and reworks elements from earlier pieces. In Search of Vanished Blood (2012) is a six-channel video/ shadow play she produced for Documenta 13, presented here as a single-channel video. In this version – which combines video, animation, text and sound in a manner both emotional and experimental – Malani uses, as she often does, a strong female character from Greek mythology, in this case Cassandra, to give voice to the voiceless, a gang-raped Indian woman. A series of blood-red prints, in which one can recognise chopped-up body parts, expresses the violence that is suggested in In Search of Vanished Blood, while the work also recurs in book format – a medium Malani introduced out of a desire to elaborate her subject beyond a single print – presented alongside others in a vitrine. The print series I am the Angel of Despair (2015) is equally

based on the video, but in a more literal way, by extracting film. Film stills extracted from the video are superimposed with war iconography – a skull, fleeing women – painted in watercolour. The combination of different media, resulting in new, hybrid genres, reaches its culmination in Transgressions (2001), part of the Stedelijk’s permanent collection and the magnum opus around which the entire exhibition is built up. This ‘video/shadow play’ is an immersive environment comprising four transparent, rotating cylinders, painted from the inside in the Kalighat style, which was considered the first modern style used to comment on contemporary issues. The cylinders depict various scenes, such as two figures (representing India and Pakistan) boxing, the goddess Kali holding the decapitated heads of English colonisers in its many arms, and a Western hunter on an elephant. Their cast shadows create a hypnotising play across the gallery walls, which are bathed in various hues, accompanied by ambient soundscapes and superimposed video projections. In a true postcolonial spirit, century-old legends and contemporary, Western-style consumer references about golf courses and mobile phone operators come together in a unique mix. This is Malani at her best, and the exhibition as a whole, despite its modest size, functions as a convincing overview of her practice. Sam Steverlynck

Transgressions, 2001, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy the artist and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Summer 2017

Haegue Yang Ornament and Abstraction Kurimanzutto, Mexico City 1 April – 6 May Haegue Yang’s first solo exhibition in Mexico reveals the artist’s fervent intention to present a full view of her various practices. It includes her iconic Venetian blinds installation, The Intermediate sculpture series (2015–) and graphic wall pieces. When you walk around or through her largescale blinds installation Sol LeWitt Upside Down – K123456, Expanded 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored (2015), you encounter perfumes coming from aroma diffusers, which will remind you of the artist’s frequent use of air and smell in her earlier works. Surprisingly, given the variety of visual features in these works, there is little conflict in seeing them placed together in one space. As stated in the title, the exhibition highlights ornament and abstraction, two seemingly conflicting directions in Yang’s practice. But the show is not so much a juxtaposition of these two interests as a survey of the dialectic relationship between them. From a modernist point of view, ornament, or decoration, was a premodern inclination, criticised and abandoned by those who believed in progress, as can be seen in architect Adolf Loos’s 1908 essay ‘Ornament and Crime’. A result of this

is that abstraction replaced ornament and became the ‘correct’ direction in art and design during the twentieth century. Yang, who has always been interested in traditional materials, figures and craftsmanship, must have seen the fusion of folk elements, symbolism and ornaments with modern art in Mexican murals from that time (even in the service of a radical socialist ideology, as was the case in Diego Rivera’s mural work), which then inspired her critical thinking on the stigmatisation of ornament. At a deeper level, the logic behind the stigmatisation of ornament is ethnology, a sociocultural science whose mission at its birth was to classify humans and their civilisations through a Eurocentric point of view and therefore was once used as a theoretical source to the colonist ideology. Ironically, in the modernist time, those who held this view of progress never really abandoned decoration, not even Loos, who used expensive materials such as marble or brass to create a sort of luxury decoration in his architecture, one made of geometrical and mechanic abstraction. With this in mind, it becomes evident that the material and cultural references used

in Yang’s work, for example the (cheap) synthetic materials and saekdong (traditional Korean clothing) in the Intermediate series, are meant to challenge the modernist aesthetic and moral principles, and perhaps ultimately to aim at the logic behind the stigmatisation of ornament. More than restoring the meaning of ‘ornament’, Yang is exploring the possibilities of embracing it in contemporary visual art. Her recent wallpaper pieces, for example Big-eyed Tongue-tied Mountains Beneath Solar and Lunar Orbs – Trustworthy #315 and Pregnant Mountains – Trustworthy #316 (both 2017), incorporate symbolist ornament into geometrical and graphic abstraction to create landscapes that are reminiscent of Mexican mural art, perhaps especially Juan O’Gorman’s Central Library facade at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. If the form and meaning of modernity depend on when and where we stand, these works derive their form and meaning from an artist standing on Mexican land and travelling through history via research. In my eyes, they are the most charming pieces in the show. Aimee Lin

Ornament and Abstraction, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Omar Luis Olguín. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

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Zhang Peili Record. Repeat. The Art Institute of Chicago 31 March – 9 July China’s Cultural Revolution had an immeasurable impact on the world today, regardless of where one lives. It has shaped international politics and trade, and continues to transform our understanding of what forms a nation-state. As one of China’s seminal avant-garde video artists, Zhang Peili’s work speaks to this recent past and emphasises its relevance for today, and Record. Repeat. is the first exhibition of the artist’s early videoworks at a US institution. The exhibition focuses on three of those: Actor’s Lines (2002), Last Words (2002) and Happiness (2006) are structural reedits of appropriated scenes from seminal films of the Chinese Cultural Revolution era. The oldest, Actor’s Lines, is composed of minor gestures and phrases cut from a scene between a military officer and a young soldier in the 1964 film Sentries Under Neon Lights. As each fragment of a conversation repeats, or as we watch simple gesticulations looped several times, the film’s original narrative shatters. Brought into

focus instead are the dynamics of power inherent in even the most nuanced body language. Like Actor’s Lines, Last Words has a similar effect. In the work, Peili draws from several films of the same military genre. A clip of the death scene of each film’s hero is slowed, and once the figure has perished is immediately followed by the next similar scene. The work is short, less than six minutes in total, but the steady repetition makes apparent the phoniness and overwrought quality of each performance, laying bare the shared generic quality of these films. Peili’s approach is crystallised in Happiness, a two-channel work that places alongside each other scenes from another canonical film, In the Shipyard (1975). On one screen are modified and elongated scenes of the film’s protagonist delivering fervent speeches, and on the other, simple clips of extras from the film clapping inexhaustibly and endlessly. The interplay between the screens brings their content to the level of absurdity, making

a farce of the performativity inherent in propaganda and politics. With such charged content, self-evidently pertinent to our current global climate, made by one of China’s leading video artists, one might hope that the museum would have provided a larger, more visible site for such an exhibition. Tucked away into a single blackbox room, the potential impact of the works is limited. The audience that specifically comes to see this exhibition is marginalised, and the exhibition’s outreach is reduced. And ultimately, there’s the feeling that an opportunity to introduce an American audience to significant, seldom-seen work has been was lost. Perhaps the curatorial approach has its own conceptual conceit, as it mimics how much of the cultural transition undergone in China during the last 30 years has gone unseen, though not unfelt, by the many viewers who might have seen Peili’s Record. Repeat. Marc LeBlanc

Document on Hypiene No. 3, 1991, single-channel video, colour, silent, 24 min 45 sec (loop). Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago

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Aki Sasamoto Yield Point The Kitchen, New York 6 April – 13 May A video projection shows a small strip of plastic inserted into a tensile testing machine. The plastic is stretched, slowly, until it snaps apart. The viewing experience of Trash Bag Tensile Test (2017) is interrupted from time to time by a series of sharp breaking sounds coming from the opposite end of the gallery. Spreading horizontally to cover another entire wall, the video Flex Test – Steel, Tensile Test – Steel/Brass (2017) is a close-up of a row of metallic sticks. They rupture one by one to generate an uncomfortably loud noise, but the detail of what force caused them to break isn’t visible on screen. The larger-than-human scale of the images in both videos creates a strange sense of awe, and the otherwise familiar materials acquire an alien quality. As reflected in the title of the show, these two videos document materials reaching their ‘yield points’, an engineering term that refers to the level of stress beyond which a material begins to deform plastically. Yet, Yield Point is not about mechanics or engineering. For Sasamoto, it is a metaphor through which to launch an exploration of ideas concerning the ‘elasticity’ of human existence: a philosophical reflection both

on a micro level (the everyday life of individuals) and on a macro level (the environment we inhabit). What constitutes the precarious zone around a breaking point? How to determine the limit before things reach a catastrophic end? The adjacent gallery is filled by a large installation of various found objects and materials: trashcans of different sizes and designs, a couple of green dumpsters sitting on tracks on the ground, and unused blue and black trash-bags flattened onto all four walls of the gallery to create an abstract composition. The arrangement seems at first unimpressive until it is fully engaged and activated by the artist’s performance, of which there are eight during the run of the show. At that point, designed lighting turns the gallery into a theatrical space. Sasamoto appears in a jumpsuit and begins to interact with the various objects and props. Hidden details slowly reveal themselves. A suspended string of orange LED lights, for example, emerges when two dumpsters are pushed apart, eerily slicing through the darkened space. The trash bags in the trashcans randomly inflate and deflate as if they were able to breath and communicate.

As Sasamoto bounces around, throwing an apple to the ground or jumping on a trampoline hidden within the other dumpster, she recounts the tale of a janitor. With a thick marker-pen in hand, she draws charts and diagrams to speculate on ideas of resilience in life: “if you have less elasticity in life, you are easily bored. But if you have more elasticity in life, you may get lost in wandering” It is not difficult to associate Sasamoto’s portrayal of a janitor and her engagement with trash bags, dumpsters, plastic and degradable materials with issues of waste management and climate change. Since the 1970s, the concept of ‘resilience’ has become a goal of urban planners, ecologists and policy makers. With the increasing environment stress, the concept of resilience points to a system that can absorb shock and continue functioning. It is intriguing to interpret the tensile test in Sasamoto’s videos as a metaphor for the pressure human activities are putting on the planet. But if the planet is no longer understood as something that exists independently of human society, where is the breaking point for our environment? Xiaoyu Weng

Trash Bag Tensile Test, 2017, single-channel video, sound, 18 min 46 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Broadway 1602 Uptown & Harlem, New York

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Bruce Yonemoto The First Karaoke: Enka! Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC), Los Angeles 26 February – 2 April As a musical genre, enka originally sprung up in Meiji-period Japan as a way to circumvent censorship of dissent by setting political speech to music; in the postwar years however it has mainly come to be known as a medium for sentimental ballads. For this exhibition, Los Angeles-based Bruce Yonemoto has worked with a range of artists from both sides of the Pacific to reimagine the potential of this plaintive form. For the original installation of ENKA! (2015-), as part of An Asia Survey, Yonemoto’s 2015 exhibition at the Hong-Gah Museum in Taipei, he worked with Taipei-based artists Yin-Ju Chen, James T. Hong, Huang Dawang and Teng Chao-Ming to rewrite the lyrics to Mother, Please Take Care of Yourself (1960). Each artist revisited this well-known Taiwanese pop melody, updating the lyrics to reflect current issues, whether they be tensions between China and Taiwan or the plight of protesters. For the present exhibition, Yonemoto took the opportunity to supplement that work with

a new song, written by fellow artist Koki Tanaka (who recently moved back to Japan from Los Angeles) and adapted from the 1960s hit Karajishi Botan, popularised by the movie star Takakura Ken. The original takes its title from the Guardian Lion and Peony motif tattoo commonly associated with yakuza, with the words outlining the thoughts of a gangster reflecting, stoically, on his life. Tanaka’s take, while maintaining the refrain of the title, turns the song into a commentary on Japanese and US relations, explicitly calling out, for example, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s contact with President Donald Trump. Although the audio tracks hew to the (geo) political, the image of the singers themselves tells a somewhat different story. The videos are shot simply, with each person set against a different coloured backdrop, with the camera mostly close up, but zooming in and out at various points. As the title of the exhibition suggests, the performances by Betty Apple,

Taro Hattori, Ray Hsu, Kaz Oshiro, Yu ChengTa and Huang Dawang himself (most of the lyricists did not sing their own songs) bring out in spades the kind of emoting familiar to anyone who has been to a karaoke bar. There is a delight in seeing how each singer comes to inhabit their song, adding their own style. Huang, for instance, engages in a kind of Keatonesque physical comedy that is a signature of his, while Yu chooses an altogether more Buddhalike route. This point is especially clear with Oshiro and Hattori, who offer up renditions of Tanaka’s lyrics so campily different from one another as to almost be unrecognisable as the same song. To watch these videos in Mandarin, Taiwanese and Japanese in the cavernous space of the JACCC, a few weeks after the inauguration of Trump, is to be reminded of how the political can also be very personal. And, as the wall of vintage 78-rpm records installed on a sidewall make clear, there is a lot more where that came from. John Tain

The First Karaoke: ENKA!, 2017 (installation view, JACCC, Los Angeles). Photo: Wei Tarn Wilton Yeh. Courtesy the artist

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Books

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Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li Penguin, £14.99 (hardover) Sharp, methodical character-sketches drive the melancholic stories and novels of Yiyun Li. The most wrenching of these derive their power not from well-oiled plots or any authorial grandstanding on contemporary China – where she was born and raised, and the setting for much of her fiction – but from dispassionate plumbing of her characters’ interior lives. What happens, then, when the self-effacing California-based author turns the spotlight on herself? Her latest book, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, is a memoir of sorts, a loose collection of essays written while Li suffered from depression. In and out of hospital, she sought refuge in the letters and biographies of an array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including William Trevor, Katherine Mansfield and Ivan Turgenev. In one essay, Li expresses discomfort with the frequent use of the pronoun ‘I’ in the

English language (‘What does this I matter to you when it means so little to myself?’). Dear Friend… makes numerous feints as a memoir, cutting from personal anecdotes to more abstract musings on literature, making extensive reference to the lives and words of those other writers. Li’s insistence on talking more about these authors than herself can be tedious; at times, the parallels between her and them are vague, and the narrative bogged down by overwrought, pseudo-philosophical insights. (‘Reading [Marianne] Moore… required a willfulness that matched hers. Not understanding, I could intrude only by continuing to read – a rebellion.’) At least one essay, however, goes right to the heart of what makes Li so compelling as a person and a writer. ‘To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture’ addresses her decision to write exclusively in her second language, English,

following her move to the United States; she has never written in Chinese and refuses to allow her work to be translated into her native language. To those who have interpreted this as a political statement, Li offers a thoughtful, penetrating riposte, as well as a shimmering and sensitive account of the process of losing one language and gaining another. Various strands of this collection come together in this one essay: her troubled relationship with her tyrannical, self-absorbed mother; her fashioning of English into a private language that keeps both feelings and the past at one remove; the enormity and pervasiveness of the collective memory and public space in China. Her invocation of how English has entered her dreams and crept into her memories is particularly moving, making this essay alone worth the price of this otherwise piecemeal collection. Clarissa Oon

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag Faber & Faber, £10 (hardcover) While Vivek Shanbhag is an established writer in his native India and well known to readers of Kannada (the South Indian language from which the current volume is translated), this is the first of his works to be published in English outside of his home country. And based on the evidence here, we’ve got some catching up to do: the author has written eight works of fiction and two plays. Ghachar Ghochar (originally published in 2013) is a novella about a family in Bangalore whose circumstances are rapidly and dramatically changed when the narrator’s father loses his job, his uncle founds a successful spice business and the family transitions from working to middle class. The consequent separation of labour from value affects them not only in terms of the way they interact with the material world – their home and the objects around them – but also in terms of the internal and external social relations of the family group. ‘Our relationship with the things we accumulated became casual,’ the unnamed

narrator confesses. At the same time the family’s relationship with other people becomes anything but that. While he and four members of his extended family (mother, father, sister, uncle, later joined by the narrator’s wife) once shared the imposed intimacy of a four-room house, they now share an even more claustrophobic, self-imposed intimacy designed to protect the family’s newfound status and wealth. ‘What can I say of myself that is only about me and not tied up with the others?’ the narrator says plaintively midway through the narrative. Every day he escapes his token job at the spice company to a favourite coffee shop in order to be by himself, or listen to the mystic advice of his favourite waiter, while reflecting on a ‘gentler, more leisurely time’. While the novella is of value as an account of the impacts of a quarter century of economic liberalism on Indian society, it is even more stunning as a work of art and for the economy of words with which the author (and his

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translator) tells his tale. Much of the action takes place between the lines, very much present, but ultimately unsaid. The title’s nonsense words, which supposedly describe a situation of irretrievable entanglement, are introduced to the plot by the narrator’s doomed wife, as an indicator of intimacy. But they end up standing for the family’s social and moral confusion as they move (literally, in the sense of from the most modest of homes to a larger one) from a space in which every object and every person has their place, assigned to them by the traditions and economics of daily life, into a realm of supposedly open possibility but actual constriction and emptiness. It’s a remarkable book: in only 118 riveting pages, Shanbhag (son-in-law and sometime translator of the late, great Kannada writer U.R. Ananthamurthy, of whose 1965 masterpiece, Samskara, this might be considered a displacement and updating) announces himself as one of the most astute and compelling voices on the world’s literary stage. Nirmala Devi

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Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art Edited by Jeffrey Say and Seng Yu Jin Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, SG$45 (softcover) Selected from academic journals, exhibition catalogues and art magazines published between 1972 and 2012, the 33 essays and articles collected here offer a stylistically diverse commentary on Singapore’s contemporary art scene. Yet that diversity is not reflected by the chronology represented in the collection, which includes only two texts from the 1970s and none from the 80s. No reason is offered. Perhaps it can be inferred from the editors’ note that there is a ‘significant body of writing’ in Chinese that they have not been able to include. The editors’ omission of that historical context is interesting in light of their focus on the paucity of art discourse in Singapore. They lament the ‘lack of multiple voices and perspectives on the same subject or theme’. That lack is a consequence of absences – chiefly of sustained platforms in the form of art journals and scholarly publications, but perhaps most glaringly of art-history courses in Singaporean university curricula. Indeed, considering the substantial resources currently being poured into the National Gallery Singapore and other performance-driven art infrastructures, and the comparatively few resources being directed towards nurturing art education and discourse, the publication of this collection might be considered timely What is art discourse? The question troubles the editors enough to include a hairsplitting

contention in their introduction: ‘This anthology brings together art writing that indicates an emergent art discourse that has yet to coalesce into a robust, rigorous and critical discourse. Writing becomes discourse when texts make references to critically engage with other texts.’ Yet one cannot help but see that the book’s very contribution to artistic discourse resides in the heteroglossia – singular utterances around a common interest – it makes evident. There is discursive density, just in a different form. Their selection criteria focuses on three areas: ‘the proliferation of exhibition spaces and other art infrastructure’, ‘negotiations between the state and the field of cultural production’ and ‘the social, cultural and political conditions of the production of art theories, histories and practices in Singapore’. While the state is mentioned in the second characteristic, it is really a dominant presence in all three. Singapore’s government has been dominated by the People’s Action Party and its ideology of economic survival and gains-driven pragmatism since it came to power in 1959. It isn’t hard to picture Singapore as an artwork-in-progress, given the ruling party’s propensity to go back constantly and vigilantly to the drawing board in attempts to make Singapore better. What possibilities remain for artists (the ones who are actually making art) within a superstructure

in which the state is Master Artist? That’s a question addressed by many of the essays. The density of such discourse can be seen in the different perspectives on the same subject, whether it is the banning of certain types of art (the 1990s ban on performance art and forum theatre is robustly protested in a number of essays, the late playwright Kuo Pao Kun’s fiery response among them), censorship (see Alfian Sa’at’s witty essay ‘A Censorship Manifesto’) or social conditioning through architecture (see CJ W-L Wee’s acerbic essay on kitsch). And it is to the editors’ credit that those scattered texts are now easily accessible. The decentring of the state from art discourse happens most convincingly in the essays by artists, however, such as Chua Ek Kay’s text on the development of Chinese ink painting, which highlights the distinguishing features of different generations of painters, those who see it as a continuation of Chinese ink history and those who use it as a noncontextual medium; and Ho Tzu Nyen’s exploration of artmaking in a postcolonial and multicultural context. These begin as explorations of form and medium, opening up into reflections on how art is a way of thinking through Singaporeans’ negotiations with histories, place and the pluralities of the postcolonial self. Yeo Wei Wei

The Sad Part Was by Prabda Yoon Tilted/Axis Press, £8.99 (softcover) ‘The sheet of paper fell, so I bent down and picked it up.’ That’s ‘Pen in Parenthesis’, the first of the 12 stories (many of which were previously collected in the author’s award-winning 2002 collection, Kwam Na Ja Pen) that make up Thai writer Prabda Yoon’s first translated collection. Well, it’s the entire one-sentence story except for the 20-odd pages of narrative that occur in parenthesis between the two clauses. That bit in between incorporates a car crash, dead parents, a home cinema club, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 5 and Symphony No 41, four years spent ‘doing art’ – ‘you don’t have to think deep. You have to have a “concept”’ – a successful career in advertising, an unsuccessful attempt to please a grandparent and a childhood Star Wars obsession. While Yoon’s opening gambit includes an attempt to make conceptual art a figure of fun

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– ‘inability to find a concept could be a concept… I couldn’t even define the word “concept”… borrowing could be counted as a concept’ – writerly concepts are what define the rest of the collection, much of which also subtly teases out a mournful sense of urban alienation in rapidly modernising Bangkok. A couple having an affair attempt to come to terms with their guilt because, incidentally, a man was killed by a falling N and O from a Canon sign outside their apartment as they made love (their affair is otherwise guiltless); a man falls in love with a woman because of the length of the spaces between her written sentences; a woman saves up to take her snow-obsessed mentally handicapped son to see the real thing in Alaska, only to appreciate something she already knew; unsuccessful attempts are made to draw the attention of the authorities to the

ArtReview Asia

disappearance of a she-vampire in the coastal resort of Pattaya; farangs (foreigners) pop up all over the place. There’s also a fair dose of self-deprecating postmodern humour (notably in the almost irritatingly self-knowing ‘Marut by the Sea’, in which the titular character spends 12 pages attacking the author’s smugness and cleverness until he manages to overcome the character’s resistance, and write the words that locate him by the sea). Translator Mui Poopoksakul notes that much of the author’s craft lies in his manipulation of the Thai language and grammar (for example, spaces between words are not generally used, allowing for multiple meanings); I’m not able to comment on that, but the traces of Yoon’s skill that Poopoksakul has retained in the English suggest that this author is one to watch. Mark Rappolt

Desert of Pharan: Unofficial Histories Behind the Mass Expansion of Mecca by Ahmed Mater Lars Müller Publishers, €60 (softcover) One of the most visited religious cities in the world, Mecca is also one of the most exclusive: it is strictly forbidden for non-Muslims to enter the city. The familiar images of the excessively illuminated Great Mosque apart, Mecca is largely unseen. Ahmed Mater’s comprehensive account of Mecca past and present manages to bypass the symbolic city and offer critical insight into Mecca’s current destruction and expansion, a fantastical concrete rebuild that has come at the cost of its historic and fragile architectural heritage. The culmination of a ten-year project, the book features over 600 photographs, as well as writings (the book’s editor, Catherine David, makes a guest appearance in this regard) and interviews with specialists and civic planners who have sought to preserve the city’s architectural heritage. The Saudi state’s sponsorship of Wahabi’ist ultraconservative Islam, however, has resulted in the gradual marginalisation of these efforts. Mater’s approach does not follow a strict protocol as such, but rather is organic – an approach Mater likens to a psychogeography – travelling to Mecca numerous times from Jeddah (Mater’s hometown). We see Mater becoming familiar with Mecca’s complex and heavily surveilled environment, earning the trust of, and access to, a diverse range of social groups, from Meccan nobility to Mecca’s migrant Burmese community, and producing an independent and holistic document and history of Meccan sociopolitical life. Wahabi’ist doctrine advocates the purging of widespread practices such as the veneration

of saints and the marking of their sites of burial. The result: a gradual destruction of an original Mecca, which has incidentally made room for an expansive and lucrative religious tourism. Over 400 buildings, some dating back to Islam’s earliest history, have been destroyed. In their place stand luxury hotels, shops and restaurants. Shot just in sight of the Kaaba, at its periphery, Mater’s photographs capture this historical erasure – such as the demolition of surviving parts of the Grand Mosque’s Ottoman colonnade – in progress. While in the Quran, Mecca is the epicentre of Islam – and the axis of the world signified by Adam’s building of the Kaaba, its destruction during the Flood and restoration by Abraham and Ishmael – Mater also acknowledges its other heritage, not least in the title of this book, which evokes the area’s Hebrew name: the Desert of Pharan. Mecca is one of the earliest examples of a cosmopolitan city, and the confluence of generations of diverse nationalities who had settled or sought refuge. Mater’s project documents a contemporary Mecca, a new global city also populated by immigrant labour, businessmen and its annual gathering of pilgrims. And the new buildings under construction frame an ever relatively diminishing Kaaba. Mater’s selection of photographs demonstrates an awareness of the ways in which visual representation can define a collective history. While circumventing the juxtaposition of the before and after photograph, where typically the event itself is uncaptured, Mater has

managed to map a counter-narrative that is mindful of what is happening behind the scenes of this massive urban transformation, and showcasing its relational complexity. In one instance – an image that evokes the dramatic symbolism of the iconic photograph Lunch atop a Skyscraper (1932) – Mater captures immigrant worker Jibreel (fittingly, the Quranic name for the angel Gabriel) flying across the Meccan skyline, strapped to a golden crescent being craned into position atop the clock tower of Abraj Al-Bait, the fourth tallest free-standing structure in the world (it towers above the Great Mosque, and penetrates every vista of the city’s skyline). Mater’s photographic treatment of the city is compassionate to those who maintain an emotional stake in Mecca’s present and future, as well as addressing the dissonance experienced by the many who inhabit the city. The work demonstrates an awareness of the physical and psychological contention with Mecca’s intersection of Islamic culture and the inevitable forces of globalisation. Mater thus testifies to the experiential and interior experience of the pilgrimage, presenting an often-overlooked portrait that pays tribute to the social evolution of the city’s inhabitants. Mater’s account of Mecca is accessible, and does well to avoid cliché, instead offering a critical insight that traverses beyond the official, pristine and impenetrable controlled image of Mecca, capturing the emergence of a new, sky-high concrete city. Nadia Quadmani

Contemporary Art and Digital Culture by Melissa Gronlund Routledge, £24.99 (softcover) This dense textbook – which one can better imagine on a college library shelf than as lovingly thumbed bedside reading – is an attempt to comprehensively chart the history of so-called post-Internet art, a label Gronlund uses throughout to cover art made from the mid-2000s onwards that displays a certain aesthetic (the authors lists many motifs, not least ‘green-screen technology… stock photography and the imitation of corporate platforms’); ‘work accomplished online, as well as facets borrowed from the internet’; art with ‘a keen interest in banality and the norm and in the accumulation and curation of information as material’.

Gronlund studiously stitches together myriad tangents: tracing the lineage back to the cybernetic philosophies of the 1970s and invoking figures such as Donna Haraway and the theorist’s ideas on the ‘posthuman’; looking to net.art as an antecedent to post-Internet art (though Gronlund points out that ‘net.art is primarily concerned with the internet as medium, post-internet art could be more accurately described as an exploration of digitality’). On contemporary practice she writes on the reproducible status of the image (citing both Hito Steyerl and the influence of the Pictures Generation); the connection

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between post-Internet art and the move to object-oriented ontology; together with the effect the Internet has had on identity. Throughout she invokes artists who can be thought of as having genuinely changed the narrative of recent art-history (notably Steyerl, Ed Atkins, Mark Leckey and Paul Chan), but she has also unduly – given the relative lack of maturity in their work – elevated others from the footnotes. That said, this is a good, rigorous study of a particular mode in recent artmaking, though it will be more interesting to see if the book retains its relevance for long. Oliver Basciano

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For more on Ken Niimura, see overleaf

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Contributors

Charu Nivedita

Future Greats 2017 Nominators

is an exile in his own country with an invisible ban on his writings in the Tamil milieu, despite being widely translated into Malayalam in nearby Kerala. Since his writings are transgressive in nature, he is branded as a pornographic writer and disliked by many. He was born and raised in a slum until the age of eighteen, worked in the government services and survived as a pickpocket and catamite for a few years. His novel Zero Degree was long-listed for the 2013 edition of the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature and included in 50 Writers, 50 Books – The Best of Indian Fiction, published by Harper Collins. Morgue Keeper, his selected short stories, is available on Kindle. His next novel, Marginal Man, is out this year. This issue includes the latest of his ‘Notes from Madras’.

Anselm Franke is head of the department of visual art and film at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Ho Tzu Nyen makes films, installations and theatrical performances, often in relation to historical and philosophical texts and artefacts; Jilly Ding Kit is a curator at K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong and Shanghai; Christina Li is the curator at large at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong; Li Qi is senior curator at Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Shanghai; Esther Lu is a curator and writer based in Taipei and currently the director of Taipei Contemporary Art Center; Shabbir Hussain Mustafa is a curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore, specialising in art from Singapore and Southeast Asia; Eko Nugroho is an artist based in Yogyakarta whose work focuses on modern life in urban areas; Arin Rungjang is an artist based in Thailand; David Teh is a curator and researcher based in Singapore, and the author of Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary.

Darryl Wee is an independent art adviser and founder of Tokyo Tomo, an art and culture concierge service that helps visitors navigate the Japanese capital. He was previously head of Asia for Blouin Artinfo, and his writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum.com and The Japan Times. In this issue he reviews the Kyotographie International Photography Festival.

Advisory Board Defne Ayas, Richard Chang, Anselm Franke, Claire Hsu, Pi Li, Eugene Tan, Koki Tanaka, Wenny Teo, Philip Tinari, Chang Tsong-zung Contributing Writers Rahel Aima, Julie Chun, Max Crosbie-Jones, Nirmala Devi, Jilly Ding Kit, Anselm Franke, Gallery Girl, Tony Godfrey, Paul Gravett, Guo Juan, Ho Tzu Nyen, Hu Fang, Sarah Jilani, Kevin Jones, Marc LeBlanc, Christina Li, Li Qi, Ming Lin, Esther Lu, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Charu Nivedita, Eko Nugroho, Clarissa Oon, Nadia Quadmani, Arin Rungjang, Sam Steverlynck, John Tain, David Teh, Murtaza Vali, Darryl Wee, Xiaoyu Weng Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Ken Niimura

Rahel Aima is a writer based in Dubai and New York. She is a contributing editor at The New Inquiry and a founding editor of The State. This month she reviews solo shows by Hera Büyüktaşçıyan and Lala Rukh.

Ken Niimura (preceding pages)

Ken Niimura was born José María Ken Niimura del Barrio to a Japanese father and Spanish mother. His birthplace was Madrid, but since then Niimura has also called Brussels, Paris and Montreal home, as well as, for the last six years, Tokyo. It was landing the prestigious gold medal in the fifth International Manga Awards in 2011, organised by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that brought his comics art to the attention of manga publishers. His winning work was the powerfully emotional American graphic novel I Kill Giants, written by Joe Kelly and published by Image Comics starting in 2008. Its protagonist is the teenage misfit Barbara Thorson, a feisty individualist with big glasses, an elevated IQ , bunny ears and a mission. Though misunderstood and besieged in fifth grade, she is ready to stand up to her school’s principal and psychologist, the bullies and, most importantly, the giants. These giants are not fantasies, and their return is imminent. The worst of them is coming for her mother, or so it seems… Manga is not an easy industry to break into. Two typical routes are to enter publisher’s

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competitions or train for years as a sensei’s assistant. Luckily, Niimura’s acclaim for illustrating I Kill Giants and its Japanese translation helped him circumvent all this. Also he had help, as he recalls: “In Spain, five or six years ago, I met one of my manga idols, Matsumoto Taiyo [famed for Ping Pong, 1996–7, Go-Go Monster, 2000, and Sunny, 2010–15, among others] and he appreciated my work. Thanks to him I was introduced to the publisher of the monthly anthology comic Ikki. They liked what I do, and I became part of their family.” For one year, he landed a monthly commission to prepublish online a series of short stories, complete and bittersweet, under the title Henshin, or ‘transformation’. Working with one of Ikki’s rigorous editors, he sharpened his writing skills while also drawing his own stories, resulting in his transformation into a confident solo mangaka, or comics author. Not that this made him immune to deadline pressure, as his new Strip for ArtReview Asia reveals. Another keen admirer of I Kill Giants is Hollywood director Chris Columbus, who in his

ArtReview Asia

foreword for the 2014 edition hailed Niimura’s drawings as ‘visually arresting, tough and at times, whimsical… a unique fantastical vision’. He has gone on to executive-produce a live-action film adaptation of I Kill Giants, written by Joe Kelly and due out later this year. Niimura has taken advantage of the financial and creative freedom this has afforded by spending two years nurturing his most ambitious long-form project yet: Umami. This project, which grows out of Niimura’s youthful passion for fantasy books and role-playing games – “the usual nerd life of the late 90s” – questions the genre’s conventions. Instead of brave heroes armed with swords and magic, Umami’s leads are the quirky female pairing of the king’s new stick-to-the-recipe chef and an improvisational village cook. Can they save the day armed only with culinary panache? The opening episode, available on the pay-what-youwant, multilingual webcomic platform Panel Syndicate, brims with zest and invention, enough to convince you that ‘the pan is mightier than the sword’. Paul Gravett

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Catalyst Creation

FUTURE GREATS Upon the addition of a small amount of…

Short circuits Mineral

MAKING

BREATH

Sleep

Resistance Nameless ghosts

Artists on the move

KUNST AM BAU

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Extinction

DE-PIXELATION

DARKNESS

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on the cover design by John Morgan studio

The words on the spine and on pages 17 and 79 come from the opening verse of chapter 2 of The Dhammapada (Penguin, 1973), translated from the Pali by Juan Mascaró

on pages 102 and 110 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Summer 2017

109

Off the Record The others are late. I put more water on the coals and allow the sauna to fill with steam. To bide the time, I think about those Western gallerists I’ve used my powers of persuasion on in the past few months. Lisa Cooley. Vilma Gold. Andrea Rosen. All broken… My pleasant reverie ends as the others finally enter the sauna. The chaps from Beijing Commune are in high spirits, the representative from Yamamoto Gendai looks serious and the Gajah guy is plain angry. “Why the fuck have you dragged us to the VIVAMAYR health retreat here on the shores of Lake Altaussee in Austria en route to Art Basel? I don’t need nasal reflexology!” says the burly yet still handsome Gajah guy. “Patience, my dear man. We’re here because it’s a safe space to talk, unless of course you are wearing a wire. Drop your towels.” I don’t reveal the real reason for our visit. I have heard my nemesis Ivan Kurator had been undergoing water shiatsu at the retreat before inexplicably disappearing. I want to find him. I have plans for him. There’s muttering and complaining as the white towels are shed. There are no wires, no obvious traitors since we got rid of our supposed friend from Nature Morte. I continue, “Last year we met in a sports bar in Bangkok to work out how we would quietly take over Western galleries and institutions. How we would asset-strip them in order to take over the artworld by stealth in the face of repeated rejections from stubbornly Eurocentric bastions such as Art Basel. I myself have been combining my work as the new head honcho of Kenny Ho Gallery while quietly working on the likes of Andrea Rosen…” “Was it you who did it? Didn’t she close in order to be ‘fearlessly open’, according to her moving artworld letter?” pipes up the Hong Kong White Cube staffer. “Not you again! You’re not Asian!” I reply. “But nor are you…” Before he can finish his sentence, the team from Kaikai Kiki bundles him out the door of the sauna. “My towel!” he yells, but they slam the door. I fix the rest of them with a stern look through the steam. “Just to clear things up, I’m Asian enough. Remember this: Emmanuel, Edouard and myself are all Asian enough. But Jay preferred Hong Kong when Chris Patten was governor and local chicks liked white stick. He’s not one of us.” “I’ve infiltrated Acquavella Galleries!” says a handsome artist liaison from Hakgojae Gallery. “There are so many of them! William, Alexandra, Nicholas, Alexander. It’s been pretty easy to pretend to be their long-lost cousin Wayne.” The other gallerists clap appreciatively. The quiet, distinguished chap from Hanart TZ pipes up. “I killed Max Hetzler.” “Christ…” I splutter. “When I said ‘will no one rid me of this troublesome priest’ I meant Bernard Jacobson. Not Max! Why is it always the good ones?” With this news I realise things are moving quickly. “Right, there’s no time left to peel this onion! Grab a shower, everyone, and let’s meet on the driveway in 30 minutes. We can accelerate this!” After a quick turnaround I meet the crew in front of VIVAMAYR’s ski-lodge type buildings. I am wearing a Guo Pei dress that makes me

110

look like a ghostly Marie Antoinette, but it’s not my head that’s going to be chopped off. “Right, take these!” I hand out a bunch of fake Art Basel exhibitor passes. “We’re going to stroll into the opening of Art Unlimited and take out Gianni Jetzer!” A small fleet of Marutis with BMW and Art Basel logos painted in unconvincing fashion on their sides waits for us. “But why Gianni?” shouts a sales director from Hakgojae. “This is a man who showed Jordan Wolfson at the Swiss Institute. This is a man who doesn’t respect geography! Remember what Aimé Césaire said: ‘My dear, let us lean on geographical veins!’ And also there is a ring of steel around Spiegler. Jetzer is the puppy we can punch!” Six hours and forty minutes later the cars scream onto Messeplatz. We march into Unlimited. “Where’s Jetzer?” yells the venerable gentleman from Hanart. I realise that I have forgotten my basic research and have only a dim memory of what Jetzer looks like. “Erm, look for a Swiss guy with a V-neck jumper and a ponderous European accent talking about ‘ze great artvorks!’” I yell. We look around. We are surrounded by Swiss men wearing V-neck jumpers talking about ze great artvorks ponderously. The crew move one way, then the other, then spin around, surrounded by men who could plausibly be the Jetzer. It is like The Matrix when suddenly there are lots of Agent Smiths. “Back off! Back off!” I yell. “Get back to VIVAMAYR! Let’s regroup over a group abdominal massage!” We beat a retreat. The Marutis whisk us back to the safety of the health resort. I think of Césaire again: ‘A man screaming is not a dancing bear. Life is not a spectacle.’ I look at my trusty crew lying back and enjoying penetrating abdominal massages and know that we will return leaner and stronger. Gallery Girl

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