ArtReview Asia Winter 2019 by ArtReview

Body Politics Eisa Jocson Pinaree Sanpitak Gudskul Singapore Biennale

GEORGES MATHIEU

HONG KONG

NOV 21 − DEC 21, 2019

SHANGHAI

MAR 13 − MAY 23, 2020

Georges Mathieu, Offrandes éperdues (detail), 1990. Oil on canvas. 116 x 89 cm | 45 11/16 x 35 1/16 in. Photographer: Pierre Antoine. © Georges Mathieu / ADAGP Paris & DACS London, 2019

D R I V I N G S E R I E S , 1970 –19 8 4 , 2 019, S I LV E R G E L AT I N P R I N T S , 6 3 PA R T S , 9 8 . 5 × 174 . 2 × 5 C M / 3 8 ¾ × 6 8 × 2 I N (F R A M E D) , © A N N I E L E I B OV I T Z , C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H A U S E R & W I R T H , P H O T O : G E N E V I E V E H A N S O N

Carol Bove: Ten Hours

David Zwirner

1 November–14 December 2019

5-6/F, H Queen’s 80 Queen’s Road Central Hong Kong

ArtReview Asia vol 7 no 4 Winter 2019

Blistering Barnacles On 29 January 1819, having completed a brief survey of the nearby Karimun islands, I immediately established that there was no Dutch presence on the island of Singapura. My masters were rather paranoid about that. And given that Johore also no longer had any control of the area, I befriended Temenggong Abdul Rahman and managed to concoct with him a rudimentary treaty granting exclusive trade rights to the Company with the nominal chiefs in the area and later with Hussein Shah too, who I’d recently offered to recognise as the rightful Sultan of Johore (in exchange for an annual fee). On 6 February 1819 we signed an agreement making the island, home to about 1,000 natives, a British settlement. This time we were paying ‘Sultan’ Hussein Shah a whopping 5,000 Spanish dollars a year, plus more to the Temenggong as well. But that’s the way it goes with the Orang Kaya Council. There was some vague promise about calling him ‘Your Highness’, but that’s… Argh sorry… ArtReview Asia’s past lives are catching up with it. These days it’s not even sure which birthday’s its own… But enough about ArtReview Asia, you’ll be wanting to know what’s going on in this issue, not what’s on its mind. Oh? What? Same thing… yeah, you’re right. Or are you? Isn’t that why other people’s names are on these articles? Who are any of us, really? Naturally all of those questions will be answered in this issue of ArtReview Asia, where, among other things, its contributors look at alternative structures, such as the Singapore Biennale and Jakarta’s Gudskul, which seek to pose alternatives to hierarchical organisations and progress-based development. Next up, it’s body politics and questions of identity, or how we identify ourselves or how others identify us, through the work of Manila-based cover artist Eisa Jocson (currently up for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in Shanghai) and Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak (whose work was recently on show in Singapore). Finally, writer and historian William Dalrymple introduces us to a forgotten chapter in India’s art history – forgotten in part because no one knew if it was Indian or British. But then again, who’s to say… What does one wear to a 200th birthday, btw? ArtReview Asia

Singapore

TU HONGTAO 屠宏濤 2 2 N OVE M BE R 2019 – 7 FE BRUA RY 2020 2019年11月22日 – 2020年2月7日

GROUND FLOOR, 2 ICE HOUSE STREET, CENTRAL , HONG KONG 香港中環雪廠街 2 號聖佐治大廈地舖 LEVYGORVY.COM +852 2613 9568 Tu Hongtao, Mountain Beyond Mountain, 2017. Oil on canvas, 909⁄16 × 70⅞ inches (230 × 180 cm). 屠宏濤，《山外山》，2007年作，油彩畫布，230 × 180 厘米 (909⁄16 × 70⅞ 英寸)。

Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 23

Patrick D. Flores Interview by Mark Rappolt 42

Points of View Annie Leibovitz 38

Art Featured

Eisa Jocson by Stephen Wilson 52

William Dalrymple Interview by Mark Rappolt 66

Gudskul by Annie Jael Kwon 60

Pinaree Sanpitak by Elaine Chiew 76

page 60 Floor map of the Gudskul Ekosistem

Art Reviewed

exhibitions 86

books 104

2019 Asian Art Biennial, by Adeline Chia Then, by Neha Kale Eavesdropping, by Seth Kim-Cohen Okayama Art Summit 2019, by Stuart Munro 16th Istanbul Biennial, by Ben Eastham Inhwan Oh, by Patrick J. Reed Mit Jai Inn, by Josephine V. Roque Korakrit Arunanondchai, by Ben Eastham Tang Jo-Hung, by Adeline Chia Liang Luscombe, by Rosemary Forde Li Binyuan, by Jing Jin Garden of Earthly Delights, by Emily McDermott

Gatherings: Political Writing on Art and Culture, by Marian Pastor Roces Grandma, I Want a Penis, by Dusadee Huntrakul Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization, by Justin Marozzi The Coast, by Sohrab Hura

page 88 Artworks by Chen Wenling installed in Then, 2019. Courtesy White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney

ps 110

These Elements of Me © Adam Pendleton. Courtesy of the Artist. Image: Andy Romer Photography.

Adam Pendleton These Elements of Me November 21, 2019 – January 25, 2020 Seoul @ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

Alfredo Alfredo Jaar Jaar

25 25 Years Years Later Later 14 14 November November - 18- 18 January January 2019 2019 2626 Cork Cork Street, Street, London London W1S W1S 3ND 3ND

The The Garden Garden of of Good Good and and Evil Evil From From 21 21 September September 2019 2019 Yorkshire Yorkshire Sculpture Sculpture Park Park

LONDON LONDON JOHANNESBURG JOHANNESBURG

WWW.GOODMAN-GALLERY.COM WWW.GOODMAN-GALLERY.COM

Alfredo Jaar. The Silence of Nduwayezu, 1997

CAPECAPE TOWN TOWN

GeorG Baselitz tiMe

Paris Pantin octoBer 2019 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; JanUarY 2020

Art Previewed

Rajas and the Mughals 21

Previewed As ArtReview Asia prepares to whirl around like a dervish through this season’s exhibitions in the hope of attaining some new aesthetic ecstasy, it remembers the words of the Sufi mystic Rumi: ‘On the seeker’s path, wise men and fools are one’. So go forth with an open mind, for the best art treads a very fine line between wisdom and foolishness. But listen to ArtReview Asia’s advice. It’s an exception to Rumi’s rule. But you already knew that. Over in Britain, self-described ‘private 1 ear’ Lawrence Abu Hamdan may be among the four artists nominated for this year’s Turner Prize (their work is on show at Turner Contemporary in Margate until 12 January and the winner is announced on 3 December, for those of you who continue to care about

such things despite what Rumi told you), but his largest exhibition to date is on show at SfeirSemler Gallery in Beirut. Featuring eight installations and titled Natq, an Arabic word that refers to a moment of utterance (which might also describe the basic impulse for creating a work of art in the first place), the exhibition offers an opportunity to encounter works by an artist who specialises in sensitising audiences to sounds they do not hear and languages they do not speak. Included among the works is Walled Unwalled (2018), a 20-minute video, recently on show at the Venice Biennale, that examines a series of legal cases that hinge on sounds transmitted through walls and other enclosing or isolating architectures, and that evolved from a 2016 investigation of the

Saydnaya prison in Syria. Other works explore cases linked to the Lebanese civil war and the application of new technologies to lie detection. On the one hand Abu Hamdan attempts to capture a poetics of everyday utterances (whether by people or by objects), on the other he attempts to apply it to a search for the concealed truths of real life. His works may be on show in a gallery, but their implications reach far beyond. Given the extent that works like Walled Unwalled operate to dissolve limits to speech (whether those limits are physical or otherwise), it’s either ironic or appropriate (depending on your point of view) that at the time of writing Sfeir-Semler is temporarily closed on account of protests triggered by the financial collapse of Lebanon, associated accusations

1 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Disputed Utterance (detail), 2019, 14 laser-cut diorama, c-prints mounted on cardboard with wooden cases, 7 texts printed on pvc plates, 7 × 10 × 6 cm (each). Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut & Hamburg

Winter 2019

of corruption and incompetence, and the more immediate trigger of a proposed tax on messaging service WhatsApp. From the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian 2 Gulf, where the first Sharjah Architecture Triennial is taking place in the emirate. Abu Hamdan will have made that journey too, with a new performance work (evolved from a videowork, on show in Beirut, that premiered at this year’s Sharjah (art) Biennial) that explores reincarnation (Rumi didn’t believe in that) as a medium for justice. Titled Rights of Future Generations and curated by Adrian Lahoud, the triennial seeks to locate the built environment as the product of social, cultural and economic forces. Consequently, and as Abu Hamdan’s contribution might have led you to understand,

this is more than a collection of architectural collectively produced by indigenous artists to models and engineering reports. So alongside support a successful native-title land claim. For explorations of themes that one might naturally more on that, see the collection of essays relating associate with the discipline of architecture, to the theme of the triennial published on such as housing, city morphologies, land rights, artreview.com. Sound art as evidence, painting climate change and climate justice, expect talks as evidence… there’s a theme developing here. and displays reflecting on ‘Afterlives’, ‘Radical Still, no time to dwell on that (for now). Kinship’, ‘Intergenerational Transmissions’ It’s a six-and-a-half-hour drive along the shores and ‘Devotional Practices’ (Rumi would like of the Persian Gulf to Doha, where Mathaf is that one). Other highlights include a new prohosting a retrospective exhibition by septuageject (on ‘The More-than-Human Anthropocene’) narian Nigeria-based, Ghana-born superstar by Feral Atlas and a new film commission by 3 El Anatsui. Titled Triumphant Scale, the exhibithe Propeller Group’s Tuan Andrew Nguyen. tion is curated by the late, great Okwui Enwezor The latter explores indigenous histories of the and Chika Okele-Agulu, and travels to Qatar Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia via from Haus der Kunst in Munich. As the title the story of the Ngurrara Canvas ii (1997, and also suggests, it focuses on the artist’s monumental on show at the triennial), a painting that was works as well as the artist’s belief ‘that artists

2 Tuan Andrew Nguyen, production still, 2019. Courtesy the artist; James Cohan, New York; and Sharjah Architecture Triennial

2 Ngurrara artists producing Ngurrara Canvas ii at Pirnini, May 1997. Photo: K. Dayman (Ngurrara Artists and Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency). Courtesy Sharjah Architecture Triennial

ArtReview Asia

3 El Anatsui, Focus, 2015, aluminium and copper wire, 284 × 304 cm. Photo: Jonathan Greet. Courtesy the artist and October Gallery, London

4 Ines Doujak, Ghostpopulations, 2019. Courtesy the artist and ntu cca Singapore

4 for Contemporary Art hosts The Posthuman City: are better off working with whatever their of exploiting anything for economic gain: ‘If you environment throws up’: in Anatsui’s case, Climates. Habitats. Environments. In a present want money more than anything,/you will be most famously bottlecaps, from which he has in which more than half the world’s human bought and sold./If you have a greed for food,/ produced a series of largescale works. ArtReview population lives in cities, with a consequent you will become a loaf of bread./This is a subtle Asia is not sure what to do with the cigarette contribution to the climate crisis and general truth./Whatever you love, you are.’), it features butts and coffee cups that litter its working environmental degradation, the exhibition 3d-printed models of termite architecture fused environment; it still waits for inspiration to explores alternative modes of living and sharing with mining architecture alongside a series of strike. Back in Doha, alongside the bottlecaps resources with Earth’s nonhuman species, via videoworks. Wise termites and fools? Definitely will be the artist’s less well known productions works by Pierre Huyghe, Hito Steyerl, Irene something like that. in wood, ceramics, drawing and printmaking Agrivina and Jae Rhim Lee, among others. Look Down the road at the National Gallery that marked his experiments in fusing the out also for Australian Nicholas Mangan’s Singapore, architecture, again filtered by art, is traditional with the contemporary. Termite Economies (2018). Based on an anecdote also on view (you’d think these institutions were If your appetite for an expanded field for 5 working in cahoots or something). Suddenly (as all the best things are) about The Commonarchitecture and urbanism (complete with a wealth Scientific and Industrial Research Turning Visible: Art & Architecture in Southeast dash of the ‘more-than-human’) was pricked by Organization researching termite behaviour Asia 1969–1989 promises to examine ‘developthe lineup in Sharjah, then you’ll be wanting to in the hope that one day termites might lead mentalism’ – the focus ‘on industrialisation and long-haul it to Singapore, where the ntu Centre miners to gold deposits (Rumi didn’t approve economic growth as state priorities for nation

Winter 2019

7 Mai Ueda’s tea ceremony for Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 2018 (the infinite dimension of smallness), first performed at National Gallery Singapore. Photo: Jordan Bonneau. Courtesy the artist and Traversées, Poitiers

5 Khoo Sui Hoe, Children of the Sun, 1965, oil on canvas, 230 × 230 cm. Courtesy National Gallery Singapore

6 Rasheed Araeen’s Shamiyaana, a restaurant and communal space in Stoke Newington, London, 2019. Courtesy the artist

building’ – in three Southeast Asian cities: Bangkok, Manila and Singapore. The exhibition does this via comparative studies of an influential art institution in each city: the Alpha Gallery in Singapore (set up by the architect Lim Chong Keat in 1971); Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila (a state organisation set up by President Ferdinand Marcos in 1969 to promote art and culture in the Philippines, now also a popular site for shooting pop videos); and Bangkok’s Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art (set up in 1974 by a mix of Thais and ex-pats and closed in 1988, a precursor to the troubled state-run Bangkok Art and Culture Centre). The focus of the show, which also includes 50 artworks alongside archives and new commissions and restaged works, is to examine

on very personal matters – who your neighbour how international art movements (mit-trained is, how you live, the noise you make, how you Lim is a fan of the Bauhaus, for example) were spit, or what language you use. We decide what transformed or adapted by contact with Southeast Asian (inasmuch as the region is represented is right. Never mind what the people think.’ by those three cities alone) vernacular and Wise people and fools, Mr Lee. folk traditions. Let’s hope it looks at what was Circling back to the subject of art and neglected or lost during the ‘developmentalist’ architecture for a moment, did you know that era as much as it highlights what was gained. Karachi-born, London-based conceptualist The former might well be summed up in a 6 Rasheed Araeen has opened a restaurant? statement by the late, longstanding Singapore Art-chitecture lovers will be making a beeline prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, published in to 8 Cazenove Road in Stoke Newington, 1987: ‘I am often accused of interfering in the London, to see the Magiciens de la Terre graduate’s private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had (ask your parents) Shamiyaana, a ‘communal I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. meeting place and artwork inspired by the And I say without the slightest remorse, that shamiana, a traditional Pakistani wedding tent’. we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made With the emphasis on conviviality, Araeen is economic progress, if we had not intervened intervening in very personal matters in a good

ArtReview Asia

way, you might say. Expect walls decked out will only further accentuate the flavours in the Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonhu, and Tiffany with the former institutional outcast’s (ask Thai artist’s cocktail of vernacular architectures, Chung, as notions of past, present and future are your parents again) Opus paintings (2014–) and ritual and tradition as they sit within a globalised woven into an ever tighter ball. Those connections are also explored in colourful furniture constructed along the lines world. Someone call up Sharjah! of Araeen’s signature geometries. ArtReview Asia Locating the past in the present is a process 9 Phantom Limb, a group exhibition at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. There it’s more specifically expects a complimentary slow-cooked ox heart that’s also in full flow at the 21st Century the reclamation of lost histories and the writing and vine vegetables for that plug. Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. Rirkrit Tiravanija is another artist who’s of history itself as a site of contest and confrontaTo celebrate the physical museum’s 15th annivernot afraid to put his art where his mouth is. His tion that’s the focus in an exhibition that aims sary and the collection’s 20th anniversary (time 7 Untitled 2018 (the infinite dimension of smallness), at demonstrating the ongoing ‘weaponization and space hardly ever line up), the exhibition a traditional Japanese teahouse (slightly Kaaba- 8 Where We Now Stand – In Order to Map the Future of heritage’. Works by Kader Attia, Rayyane esque) nestled within a labyrinth of bamboo Tabet, Théo Mercier, Forensic Architecture, seeks to reinterpret the works in the collection scaffolding, which spent most of last year perched Akram Zaatari and Jumana Manna will be used (all of them created since the turn of the millenon the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden at National nium) from the perspective of ‘today’s issues’. to explore an issue that’s particularly relevant Gallery Singapore, is now on view amid the Categories such as bio art, game theory, ecologto the Middle East. Expect plenty of references medieval surroundings of the Palais des ducs ical art and networked working will be explored to restitution advocates such as Bénédicte Savoy d’Aquitaine, Poitiers, France. Presumably that through works by Cao Fei, Yakushimaru Etsuko, as the show attempts to locate itself at the heart

8 Tiffany Chung, Funke: Hitachi no Kuni Fudoki – Hitachi Province, 2016. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York

9 Théo Mercier, Vénus à l’œuf iii, 2019. Photo: Erwan Fichou. Courtesy the artist and Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai

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10 Goggle-eyed Dogū, Final Jōmon Period (1000–300 bce), 29 × 20 × 10 cm. Photo: Yu Okuzono. Courtesy Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, Las Vegas

11 Nabuqi, A View Beyond Space No 5, 2015, stainless steel, varnish, 220 × 156 × 18 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

of current debates surrounding reconstruction, restoration and repatriation. If all that seems a bit dry and serious, you’ll be happy (but not surprised) to know that explorations of material culture are also all the rage in Las Vegas. And not just in the slots-andtables manner of which Rumi would doubtless disapprove. Located at the heart of the us’s mecca of gambling, the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art – ‘where great art goes on vacation’, according to Bellagio Hotel & Casino owners mgm Resorts – 10 hosts Material Existence: Japanese Art from Jōmon Period to Present, featuring works spanning ‘the most intact Goggle-eyed Dogū in existence’ (it’s only missing one leg) dating from the Final Jōmon period (1000–300 bce) through to works created earlier this year by PixCell-obsessed

(it’s a covering of glass beads and spheres ap12 ‘emerging’ artists from China (with works plied to found objects) sculptor and art-market created during the past four years) are linked darling Kohei Nawa. The exhibition (which by an interest in investigating the ‘rapidly transalso features Haniwa figures and Kofun-period forming landscape of contemporary culture, artefacts) will reveal how a people translated the including the impact of emergent technologies, world around them into objects that celebrate globalization, and urban sprawl’. That’s right, ritual, representation and fetishisation (sounds 11 A Composite Leviathan is back on theme. Works like an art fair to ArtReview Asia! Boom, boom). by He Wei, Jiu Jiu, Liu Dongxu, Liu Fujie, Nabuqi, But the onus here won’t be on anthropological Wu Di, Yang Jian (from whose sculpture, a wire or ethnographic interpretation; information frame covered in fragmentary lead reliefs of on the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art can be found beasts and humans, the exhibition borrows its title), Zeng Hong, Zhang Miao, Zhang Ruyi, under the ‘entertainment’ section of the casino’s Zhang Xinjun and Zhao Yang will probe both audience. At last, some fun! For once someone’s material and immaterial culture via video, thinking of the viewer. painting, sculpture and objects drawn from the But fun’s not the be-all-and-end-all of art. everyday. And introduce Brooklynites to what’s In fact, sometimes it’s not important at all. going down on the other side of the world. Over at Luhring Augustine’s Bushwick outpost,

ArtReview Asia

11 Zeng Hong, The People, 2016–17, acrylic on canvas, 120 × 160 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

11 Yang Jian, A Composite Leviathan, 2018, lead, rebar, wire, cement, polyurethane foam, 350 × 150 × 150 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; White Space, Beijing; and Luhring Augustine, New York

Winter 2019

14 Mathias Poledna, Imitation of Life, 2013, 35mm colour film with optical sound, 3 min, 35mm frame enlargement. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York; and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna

ArtReview Asia

Every week is art week somewhere, but not every week is art week in Shanghai. So you’ll be wanting to be there during the first week of 12 November, when the city’s twin art fairs, Art021 13 and West Bund Art & Design are on view. But the fun of the fairs is not the only draw: over at the Yuz Museum (a five-minute walk from West Bund) you’ll have a chance to see the first fruits of the private museum’s muchhyped, but slightly mysterious collaboration with Los Angeles County Museum of Art (lacma). (Donald Trump might not approve, but Sino-American collaboration remains all the rage in the world of art despite any puni14 tive tariffs.) In Production: Art and the Studio System is a group exhibition that draws largely on lacma’s collection to investigate the

intertwined histories of the visual arts and film. You’ll have guessed from the title that the point of crossing is configured around the film industry’s (for which read Hollywood’s) studio system (and its decline) and the various incarnations of the artist’s garret-cum-studio (through to contemporary ideas of networked and decentralised production). The focus, naturally, is on artists based in Southern California, among them Vienna-exile Mathias Poledna, who moved to the region in order to investigate the manufactured dreams and exploit the industries (animators, propmakers, etc) connected with that manufacturing, as his three-minute Disneyesque animation Imitation of Life (2013, on show here) demonstrates. What else will be on view is anyone’s

guess at this stage; precise details remain shrouded in secrecy. No such qualms surround Open Feast, a selection of new paintings and drawings by 15 Eddie Martinez on show at the Yuz’s clumsily titled Project Space of Art (no doubt the Chinese name sounds better). Martinez’s colourful neoexpressionist paintings often deploy unconventional materials such as gum and baby wipes, and appear to riff off now-conventional-but-atthe-time-unconventional artists from the past such as Karel Appel, Asger Jorn or Jean Dubuffet. The notion that this might be a kind of arthistory remix is further enhanced by the fact that there’s a touch of street art there too, in the chunky shapes, blocky outlines and use of spraypaint. Although with Banksys selling

15 Eddie Martinez, Mandala in the Sky, 2019, acrylic paint and gesso on canvas, 503 cm (diameter). Courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor, London

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for millions now, perhaps that’s pretty convento the city’s art scene. The group exhibition 17 Advent: Inventing Landscape, Producing the tional too. The no-less-mysterious collaborative venEarth, curated by Xu Zhen® and featuring ture Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum more than 40 works by 32 Chinese and interProject, located in the David Chipperfieldnational artists, is its first contemporary art designed West Bund Art Museum, is also due to show. Work by the Lawrences Lek and Weiner, 16 open this November, with a show titled The Martin Creed, Michael Dean and Amalia Pica Shape of Things, featuring 100 works from the rub alongside contributions from Guan Xiao, Pompidou’s collection, curated by the ParisHe An, Ding Li and Zhao Yao in an exhibibased institution’s chief curator of new media, tion that seeks to confront the futures of the Marcella Lista. How, exactly, that is going to rural and the urban, and the impacts shape up is still a secret at the time of writing. of globalisation. So let’s get real. The Qianshao ContemOver at Prada Rong Zhai, Hangzhou18 based Li Qing’s Rear Windows, inspired by porary Art Center, located in an agricultural environment on Chongming Island in the the Alfred Hitchcock movie, looks back on the Yangtze River estuary in otherwise resolutely history of the Shanghai residential building urban Shanghai, is one of the newer additions built by the entrepreneur Rong Zongjing

in 1918 and restored by the fashion house in 2017. Li, many of whose works have deployed window frames in place of canvases, describes his approach to painting as being comparable to a computer programmer: he scripts games and challenges to which his audience responds. His ongoing Finding Differences series of diptychs (recent examples of which are on show here) invites audiences to look at real and invented memory in a twist on the traditional ‘spot the difference’ quiz format. One half of the diptych Wedding (There Are Six Differences in the Two Paintings) (2006), for example, presents a famous image of Charles and Diana on the balcony of Buckingham Palace following their wedding, accompanied by their adult children William and Harry,

16 Constantin Brâncus,i, La Muse endormie, 1910, polished bronze, 16 × 27 × 19 cm. © the estate of the artist / Centre Pompidou, mnam-cci / Adam Rzepka / Dist. rmn-gp

17 Michael Dean, LoLLoL (LoLLoL), 2018, mixed media, 203 × 98 × 70 cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai, Beijing & Singapore

ArtReview Asia

18 Li Qing, Wedding (There Are Six Differences in the Two Paintings), 2006, oil on canvas, diptych, 190 × 275cm (each). Courtesy the artist and Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai

20 Gao Yuan, Cloud of the Unknown, 2019, animated short film, colour, sound, no dialogue, 6 min 3 sec. Courtesy the artist and Capsule Shanghai

a putto borrowed from a Raphael painting His new sculptures, vaguely anthropomorphic, and distinctly People’s Republic-style stars on emergent forms, will be accompanied by his the red-velvet balcony drapes. A similar mix of first series of small-scale figurative paintings games and ghosts is promised at Rong Zhai, (rest assured, the influence of pixels is present). where the exhibition, conceived as a scripted Another Beijing-based artist, Gao Yuan, 20 experience, includes works that directly who also trained in animation, is actually respond to the building’s history (carpets showing a new animation, titled Cloud of the printed with the tile patterns of the building’s Unknown (2019), as well as a series of paintings original ballroom floor), new commissions used as backgrounds to the film, at Capsule and some of Li’s greatest hits. Shanghai. Often richly colourful and drawing It’s seven large sculptures (approximately inspiration from the history of painting and two metres high) that will dominate BeijingStudio Ghibli-esque anime, Gao’s animations are richly symbolic and often explore the 19 based Yu Honglei’s exhibition at Shanghai’s Antenna Space. Yu trained as an animator, uncertain states of being and consciousness. but works across a variety of media, deriving (Rumi would like that.) inspiration from both his own experiences and Talking of uncertain states, for the past the internet (yes, he’s been described as post–). 21 three years Chinese artist Fang Di has been

Winter 2019

working in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, a nation whose infrastructure is being developed by Chinese construction companies as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, which spans more than 70 countries worldwide. The artist’s first exhibition at Shanghai’s Vanguard Gallery, titled The Golden Bowl (the name of a ‘flying saucer’-shaped Chinese restaurant in Port Moresby, located opposite the chancellery in the ministerial district), will explore the country’s past and present and how it is affected by migrant and economic change. The film Minister (2019) looks at the story of how Australian immigrant Alexandre Tkatchenko became its first white government minister, while another film, The Magical of Pipes (2019), explores the

23 Anida Yoeu Ali, White Mother #1, Concourse and White Mother #5, Alert, 2014, digital inkjet print on archive paper, 113 × 75 cm. Courtesy Studio Revolt

role of pipes in the heritage and culture of the importantly, the periphery here is not only Bougainville people and the Malaita people explored in relation to geography and geoin the Solomon Islands. politics, but also in respect to subjecthood ‘Periphery’ is the subject of the 15th and identity. It includes 52 artists and groups 22 Biennale Jogja, which for the past five editions, from across the region, among them Muslimah including this year’s, has been focused on Collective and the excellent Sutthirat Supaparinya from Thailand, Nguyen Trinh Thi equator regions, primarily as they touch the Southeast Asian or asean regions. Curated by from Vietnam and, best of all, Vandy Rattana Jogja-based artist Akiq Abdul Wahid (who is from Cambodia. Not that ArtReview Asia has best known for works involving photography favourites: fools and wise people and all that. and as a member of the collective mes 56) Oh, and, errr… critical distance or something. and curator Arham Rahman, and BangkokAll of which leads a lot less seamlessly based curator Penwadee Nophaket Manont, than ArtReview Asia (or Rumi, for that matter) Biennale Jogja xv is titled Do We Live in the 23 would have liked to Shaping Geographies: Art / Same playground? (the capitalisation is Woman / Southeast Asia, an 11-woman show unexplained, but you’ll be used to the unat Singapore’s Gajah Gallery. Hanoi-based explained or mysterious by now). More Nguyen Trinh Thi is among them and will

ArtReview Asia

be showing the video Eleven Men (2016), which comprises found footage drawn from Vietnamese cinema. Alongside that, Tintin Wulia offers the two-channel video projection Dos Cachuchas (2018), which examines a dance first popularised during the 1830s by the Austrian ballerina Fanny Elssler, who had ‘translated’ it from an ‘exotic’ Spanish dance of supposedly Cuban origin. The dance was reconstructed by a dance-notation expert during the 1960s, which Bali-born Wulia, who trained as an architect, composer and artist, has then once more ‘translated’ into Balinese dance. Also on show will be work by Tabananborn (it’s also in Bali) I Gak Murniasih, one of Indonesia’s most extraordinary artists. Murni (as she was known) was the tenth child of a

farmer and moved on a government translocation programme to Sulawesi shortly after her birth. At the age of ten she became a domestic worker and worked additionally in her employers’ textile factory, eventually following them to Jakarta. Later she returned to Bali to work as a silversmith, where she fell in love and got married. Her husband, apparently because he wanted children, then took up with another woman, which, in 1993, led to Murni becoming the first Balinese woman to successfully sue for divorce. During this period she learned the traditional Pengosekan painting technique and became a domestic servant to the ex-pat Italian artist Edmondo Zanolini, who eventually became her partner. Murni’s paintings document the wild and

absurd aspects of her subconscious as well as graphic representations of feminism, identity, sex, violence and female sexuality. While some considered her work pornographic, Murni stated that they were attempts at healing herself, revealing in one instance that a work responded to being raped by her father. She died in 2006. ‘Murni’ translates as pure or unspoilt. Over in Beijing, and also exploring issues of gender and sexuality in her work, is one of Britain’s most influential living 24 artists, Sarah Lucas. This 30-year retrospective features more than 100 works and some provocative melons, cucumbers and fried eggs, alongside some definite evidence of a fetish for cigarettes. Oh, and a good deal

of humour as well. Down more than a few roads at the cafa Art Museum, fellow Brit 25 Anish Kapoor also has a major exhibition (so major, in fact, that it extends to the Imperial Ancestral Temple (‘the largest ancient palatial structure in the world’) on the edge of the Forbidden City. The focus is on recent monumental performative works, such as Symphony for a Beloved Sun (2013), a conveyor belt that carries and dumps blocks of red wax before a giant red disk, that highlight the artist’s interest in the entropic as it relates to the status of objects. Right, ArtReview Asia is off to negate its own existence (Rumi would approve of that). ‘Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself,’ as the great man used to say. Nirmala Devi

24 Sarah Lucas, Me (Bar Stool), 2015, plaster, cigarette, stool, 100 × 60 × 56 cm. © the artist. Courtesy British Council and Sadie Coles hq , London

23 I Gak Murniasih, Disaat itu aku sangat sakit, 150 × 50 cm. Courtesy Gajah Gallery, Singapore

Winter 2019

1 Lawrence Abu Hamdan Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut Through 4 January

9 Phantom Limb Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai 9 October – 15 February

18 Li Qing Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai 7 November – 19 January

2 Sharjah Architecture Triennial Various venues, Sharjah 9 November – 8 February

10 Material Existence: Japanese art from Jōmon period to present Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, Las Vegas 16 November – 26 April

19 Yu Honglei Antenna Space, Shanghai 6 November – 2 January

3 El Anatsui Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha Through 31 January 4 The Posthuman City: Climates. Habitats. Environments. ntu Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore 23 November – 23 February 5 Suddenly Turning Visible: Art & Architecture in Southeast Asia (1969–1989) National Gallery Singapore 19 November – 15 March 6 Rasheed Araeen 8 Cazenove Road, London Ongoing 7 Rirkrit Tiravanija: untitled 2018 (the infinite dimension of smallness) Palais des ducs d’Aquitaine, Poitiers Through 19 January 8 Where We Now Stand – In Order to Map the Future 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa Part 1: 14 September – 19 December Part 2: 12 October – 12 April

20 Gao Yuan Capsule Shanghai Through 25 December

11 A Composite Leviathan Luhring Augustine Bushwick, New York Through 21 December

21 Fang Di Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai 6 November – 6 January

12 Art021 Shanghai Exhibition Center 7–10 November

22 Biennale Jogja xv Various venues, Yogyakarta Through 30 November

13 West Bund Art & Design West Bund Art Center, Shanghai 7–10 November 14 In Production: Art and the Studio System Yuz Museum, Shanghai 7 November – 1 March

23 Shaping Geographies: Art / Woman / Southeast Asia Gajah Gallery, Singapore 24 November – 31 December

15 Eddie Martinez Yuz Project Space of Art, Shanghai 7 November – 12 January

24 Sarah Lucas Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing Through 16 February

16 The Shape of Things Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project, West Bund Art Museum, Shanghai 8 November – May 2021

25 Anish Kapoor cafa Art Museum, Beijing Through 1 January Imperial Ancestral Temple, Beijing 10 November – 28 December

17 Advent: Inventing Landscape, Producing the Earth Qianshao Contemporary Art Center, Shanghai Through 31 March

25 Anish Kapoor, Destierro, 2017, earth, pigment, mechanical digger, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Lisson Gallery, London, New York & Shanghai; and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins & Havana

ArtReview Asia

A Large and Extremely Rare Blue and White ‘Immortals’ Vase (detail) Qianlong Seal Mark and Period Estimate $200,000–300,000 Sold for $1,400,000 Important Chinese Art New York 11 September 2019

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I remember going to the Factory in 1976 and watching Andy Warhol work. I’d been there before, earlier in the 70s, photographing Joe Dallesandro and Holly Woodlawn, and then Paul Morrissey. Warhol was a fixture of New York. It was just shocking when he died, because he was everywhere. I don’t know how he did it, but he was out at everything. You felt that if he was at a place you were at, then you were at the right place. Warhol had things everywhere in the Factory – silkscreens all over the place, and tables of artwork – and things were always going on. I think Fran Lebowitz was there for Interview magazine, and [Warhol] was photographing the sisters from Grey Gardens [1975]. I was just a fly on the wall: there were people milling around doing all kinds of things, it was a pretty active place. He had a roll of paper hung up that he would take photographs against. It had a jagged edge and I just said, “Stand over here”. The shoot was easy. Warhol was always nice, always gracious, always wonderful. I hate to put it like this, but he was always giving you something. He would pose for you. He’s photogenic, with the hair, and he was always holding a tape recorder or camera or something. What’s nice about that picture is that it’s practically nothing. It’s just him. If there’s anything interesting about that photograph it’s how crudely it’s lit. It just looks like a hard strobe light. We went with this picture because it was a little off and a little weird. I liked the light. It’s very graphic. He’s straightforward and it’s a very simple presentation. I love the Astroturf and the torn paper. He’s pointing a camera back at me because that’s who he is. He recorded and took pictures all the time. As a photographer I like the strangeness and colour and simplicity. It was the beginning of my colour work, which at that point was pretty crude. I didn’t really know how to take colour pictures. I first used colour when I took photos of Marvin Gaye on a mountaintop at sunset for a Rolling Stone cover, and you couldn’t see him – I used natural light, not a strobe, and he just sort of blended into the background! It was a beautiful photograph but it was very subtle, and because it was printed on the Rolling Stone’s rag paper, everything sort of went muddy. That’s when I started to strobe things. I just threw up one light and aimed it towards the subject. I think all my work from the mid-1970s until I left Rolling Stone and started to work for Condé Nast in the early 80s had very crude colour: I had no idea how bright it was until we printed a book in 1983. I was over-lighting everything so that it would survive being printed in Rolling Stone.

Points of View i’m just a photographer Annie Leibovitz talks to Fi Churchman

Annie Leibovitz, Andy Warhol, New York City, 1976 © the artist

ArtReview Asia

Having gone to a fine art school in San Francisco and studied Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, I worked in that style. But by the mid- to late 70s I was starting to look at fashion magazines from Europe, at the works of Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, and other kinds of photography that started to inspire and enthuse me. Diane Arbus was also very important at that point for me. Doing the covers for Rolling Stone, I learned how to use the vertical format, but I’m not a big fan of vertical photographs. I think I can count mine on one hand. I always liked being a little further away, seeing the subjects of my portraits in their surroundings. It took me years to come in closer. When David Hockney did his photomontages [the series Joiners, early–mid-1980s] I became weak in the knees, because that is how you really

see. It’s hard to put what you see into a rectangle, whether vertical or horizontal, but with Hockney’s photomontages – a great study in perspective – you see to the left and the right. I just did a series for Google where I used two pictures to make a portrait. One picture was a little closer in – a typical portrait – and then I pulled away and photographed either an object or a landscape, something that meant something to that person. One photograph is not going to tell you everything about a person. We’re complicated. I chose to call myself a portrait photographer because labels were always being thrown on me. When I was at Rolling Stone I was a ‘rock-and-roll photographer’, at Vanity Fair I was a ‘celebrity photographer’. You know, I’m just a photographer. I realised I wasn’t really a journalist. I have a point of view and, while these photographs that I call portraits can be conceptual or illustrative, that keeps me on the straight and narrow. So I settled on this brand called ‘portraits’ because it had a lot of leeway. But I don’t think of myself that way now: I think of myself as a conceptual artist using photography. The photographs take on a different life as the years go by. At Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong, there are photos from 1970 to 1983 (up until I joined Condé Nast), selected from a very large show in Arles, at the Luma Foundation. That show allowed me to see myself as that obsessed

young photographer, living with a camera every single day. I always had my camera! I’m really proud of that period. I took a chance and went into this commercial world of magazines as a landscape in which to take photographs. The tension in my work is working for these places and trying to do good photography. In that period there were a lot of photographs that were not very good, and there were some that transcended it. Rolling Stone really didn’t have any idea either… so we grew together. The first time they gave me spreads – those pictures of Richard Nixon leaving the White House – was because Hunter Thompson never filed his piece on the resignation. He had a block. So they ran eight pages of my pictures instead. Rolling Stone became more interested in photography as things went on. I wanted with that show, and with the subsequent shows at Hauser & Wirth [a version of the Hong Kong exhibition was presented at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, this past winter], to overwhelm the viewer just by showing how much work was done. I was relentless. I try to assure young photographers now not to worry about it, that they’ll come out of it. As you get older, you kind of know what you’re doing, but it doesn’t mean your pictures are going to be better. You just know when you have it and when you don’t. The show at Hauser & Wirth is called Archive No. 1 because it’s not a retrospective or survey, it’s the first time I’ve gone back to that era. I’m still a working photographer, and I’m not ready to use ‘retrospective’. I’m getting close but I’m not there yet. This is a first look at those earlier works. I’m shooting with a 35mm camera, and you can see the process of moving from the ‘studies’ or ‘sketches’ of a young photographer, who’s looking all the time, to portrait work, which comes from observation. If I have a ‘trick’ to taking portraits now, it’s to not make it a long process. I’d rather come back. My best photographs are of family and friends, because they put up with me. I’m not going to get that from Nancy Pelosi. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but people are being very nice. They too want to get it done.

Annie Leibovitz, Richard Nixon leaving the White House, Washington, D.C., 1974. © the artist

Winter 2019

Work from Annie Leibovitz’s The Early Years, 1970–1983: Archive Project No. 1 is on view at Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong, 22 November – 8 February

The past, present and future of contemporary art Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t miss an issue

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Patrick D. Flores “There is a realisation that global tends to be quite ‘thin’, that artists need to revisit what it means to be in a locality in order to achieve some kind of density in their work” Interview by Mark Rappolt

Patrick D. Flores is artistic director of the Singapore Biennale 2019, which is scheduled to open across ten sites in the city this November. He is curator of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center of the University of the Philippines, in Quezon City, Manila, where he is also professor of art studies. In addition he is an adjunct curator at the National Gallery Singapore. 42

ArtReview Asia

artreview asia Maybe we should start with the title of your biennial – Every Step in the Right Direction. It comes from one of the most prominent female participants in the Sakdalista Uprising, but it seems to articulate a very positive viewpoint, even though you concede, in your curatorial statement, that the world right now is in a ‘troubled’ place. Why did you choose that? patrick d. flores First of all, I didn’t want a theme. I wanted a proposition and also an argument. So I thought of this line by Salud Algabre [1894–1979], a Filipina woman who took part in the revolt during the 1930s in the Philippines. The revolt was not successful in that it did not topple the government. But when she was asked by a historian in the 1960s what she did after the rebellion failed, Salud quickly corrected the historian, saying that no uprising fails, but that each one is a step in the right direction. ara Do you think the same thing is true of biennials – that every biennial is one step in the right direction? pf Well… basically yes. In the sense that every effort first wants to make sense of the world today and try to afford ways to make a difference. So the energy, even the desire, contributes to a step towards something different, I’m quite optimistic about that. ara Does that play out in your choice of artists? pf The optimism is for both the curatorial effort and the artistic effort. I believe that there

is a desire on the part of contemporary artists to build on previous attempts. ara You do include a few more historic positions within the biennial, such as Ray Albano’s [a Filipino painter, printmaker, photographer, filmmaker, critic, graphic designer, arts administrator, writer and poet born in 1947]. Does this mean that such work becomes a kind of starting point for it? pf The methodology comes from him, through Roots, Basics and Beginnings, the group exhibition that he curated in 1977 [at the Cultural Center of the Philippines where he was curator of the visual arts department and subsequently director]. At the time, he was trying to introduce the general public to contemporary art. And the general public, in his mind, needed to be initiated into how the contemporary works. So through those three words, ‘roots’, ‘basics’, ‘beginnings’, he was able to explain what’s happening in the world of contemporary art. Roots largely referred to ecology – where the work comes from – ‘basics’ had to do with predicting the future to materialise the form, and ‘beginnings’ pertained to the risks that the contemporary artist takes to put the work out there.

facing page Patrick D. Flores. Courtesy Singapore Art Museum above Lawrence Lek, 2065 (Singapore Centennial Edition) (still), 2019, multimedia site-specific installation. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2019

ara What kind of risks? pf Well, in the case of Albano, it might have been in the way in which the modern nation that was being generated behaved in relation to the local context in which the contemporary artist was situated, so there was some tension between that inheritance and also this adventure and desire to be distinct. It fell upon the artist to deal with this tension productively. ara Do you think that those kinds of tension – between being in a particular place and being in a particular time – have increased in the current globalised situation? pf Yes. I believe so. There is a realisation that global tends to be at some point quite ‘thin’. In the sense that artists need to revisit what it means to be in a locality in order to achieve some kind of density in their work, a density that enables them to survive the overdetermination of the global. This is not a naive reversal to localism, but a more complex understanding of what I call an extensive locality. ara The locality of Southeast Asia is quite diverse in itself. pf Yeah, that’s right. The biennale gives us the opportunity to go beyond Southeast Asia, but I believe, as an artistic director, that Southeast Asia still has to be sharply profiled as a geography. So we maintain the focus on

Southeast Asia, but try to extend into a wider context largely through the bodies of water surrounding it, which are the Pacific, the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. ara Obviously there are existing constructions of the regional identity, such as asean, whose activities extended to art exhibitions. Is this something you are trying to build upon or reframe? pf Yes. There is an effort on our part to distinguish the geopolitical construction of Southeast Asia (determined in the postwar era by forces like the French, Americans and British) from a more geopoetic reworking of the region. This is one of the steps in the right direction: to remap a region that has been so controlled by colonialism and Cold War geopolitics. ara Your programme also has an emphasis on maybe not having such a precious distinction between visual arts and the poetics of the world outside, in a way. It includes walks and festivals, for example. Are you making a case for the place of art being as much outside as inside the gallery or museum? pf The fact that the biennale is spread across 10 sites relieves it from the burden of a whitecube exhibition context and forces it to accept different contexts. It is challenging logistically, but curatorially it’s more interesting to be out there in the city than to be in one museum. So we are exploring the potential of this movement of people from place to place as a way of following through on this ‘every step in the right direction’ mindset. There is a festival

context in the mere texture you experience while walking around. Secondly we have the Coordinates Project section, which involves initiatives in Singapore that have invested in gathering people in their own way. So I’m working with a theatre group, the Projector (a cinematheque), Gelong (an alternative tour group), the Indian Heritage

“There is an effort on our part to distinguish the geopolitical construction of Southeast Asia from a more geopoetic reworking of the region. This is one of the steps in the right direction: to remap a region that has been so controlled by colonialism and Cold War geopolitics” Centre and the nus Museum, among others, which further widens the sphere of the biennale beyond the museum. Many of these spaces or organisations are working on performative projects, which further give the biennale a festival atmosphere. And thirdly there is the desire among the curators to include a project that can be activated during the biennale. So this could also be an entry point into the festival nature

Amanda Heng, Every Step Counts, 2019 (workshop documentation). Courtesy the artist and Denise Yap

ArtReview Asia

as well, and an interdisciplinary atmosphere. Imagine the biennale as a cross between a festival and a seminar. It’s like the Battambang Circus in Cambodia – a school in itself, but at the same time a lively performative event. ara It seems on the one hand that this perhaps connects to the more diverse roots of the arts in Southeast Asia, where theatre and performance have played a big role historically, and in precolonial times. And on the other hand it works in contrast to what the museums are doing in Singapore, where everything is being centralised around more Western-type models. pf You are right about that. In fact, I’d like to recover that ecology that somehow gets streamlined or shifted by situations like the museum complex or the museum industry. Not that the museums don’t try hard to also recover that impulse, but I think that the biennale is in a better position to create that atmosphere because it’s not so wedded or bound to the bureaucracy – being a temporary or transient moment that can produce a different curatorial intelligence from what is in the bureaucracy. So the biennale must be more strongly placed to let that ecology play out. ara It seems that some of the ways in which museums in the region are moving are related to academic distinctions between, say, anthropology, ethnology and art history, which might divorce things from the kind of general ecology you are talking about. pf Correct. That is largely a colonial legacy, this order of things or this taxonomy of objects.

Amanda Heng, Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Walk, 2018, public participatory performance presented at the m1 Singapore Fringe Festival. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2019

Rehearsal scenes from Sarah Kaneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 1998 play Cleansed, staged by Langgam Performance Troupe, Manila, 2019, props from which Gary-Ross Pastrana will present at Singapore Biennale. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

It can largely be traced to a colonial knowledge. It’s interesting that we are trying to free the objects from within the biennale at a time when Singapore is commemorating its bicentennial of the British occupation. So this is a way also to speak to the roots of modernity and the basics of representation in the museum.

consciously looking at artists who were speaking in artistic languages that were nonnormative. We also looked at artists who might not survive the global translation in terms of artworld speak. So we were looking at craft, for instance, or performance, or some kind of added mixing that is not easily assimilated.

ara That’s particularly interesting in a place that can celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence from Malaya and those structures four years ago and then also celebrate its colonial roots now.

ara You’re consciously resisting this smoothing out? Particularly when it comes to Southeast Asia?

pf Singapore has a distinct relationship with the colonial discourse that’s quite tied to the fantasy of modernisation and also of course towards status – it’s different from how, for instance, Filipinos or Indonesians would look at colonisation. So in a way, the quote from Salud Algabre, the woman who fought the Americans, becomes a voice of urgency in light of this reception of colonisation. ara Given the different and complex histories of colonisation across Southeast Asia, how different do you think the national attitudes across the region are? The differences of language of course play a role here. pf In terms of how language shaped the current wisdom, and the idea of Southeast Asia as whole, the diversity is exceptional. But of course, artwork has a way of smoothing out the rough edges of difference. It’s difficult to respond to this diversity in the context of the biennale, but the curators were quite

pf Yes, especially because the region requires that consciousness, especially in the methodology, so we were quite attentive to the ecology of the art where creative form emerges. So the context is a territorial imagination, a certain sensitivity to heterogeneity or idiosyncrasy in the production of material. But having said that, the region has also coproduced modernity. So this is not simply to isolate the idiosyncratic or ethnic, for instance, from a larger history. We look at various processes through which forms are produced. ara And do you think part of that is allowing the forms to be nondefinitive, so that they can be reinterpreted over time and in different contexts to avoid the kind of clear meanings that maybe nationalist forces or a national government might provide? pf Yes, it also comes from the geopoetic principal. As you release the region from geopolitics, so do we release it from this homogenisation of our artistic language through the exhibition system or the museum system.

And so this is a culture also emerging from the ecology of the region. The structure of the museum is formidable. It’s difficult to dissolve it or to break it down in parts, no? Places like the National Gallery Singapore are so strong. So we’re looking at ways to introduce both urgency and delicacy without me trying to produce this avant-garde institutional critique. Because I’m not going in that direction. I think that’s not what the ecology calls for. I mean, the position of Salud that every step in the right direction affects both agency and patience. So I’m also trying to recover that patience, that sustainable, day-to-day struggle with institutions, not just to attack them. Because it fails anyway. You don’t have to bash it. ara So, finally, who decides what the right direction is? I guess from what you’re saying, it seems like any direction would be the right direction. pf There is that sense, and I’m aware of a bit of a neoliberal interpretation of the line, in the sense that anything goes. But I explain to people that right direction makes sense only in the context of the step that one decides to take. And when one decides to take the step, one realises that other people are making other decisions with regard to the direction to take. So this initial methodology gives way to more difficult political work. The Singapore Biennale 2019 runs from 22 November to 22 March

Korakrit Arunanondchai, Together with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3–5 (still), 2016–18. Courtesy the artist and Bangkok City City Gallery; Clearing, New York & Brussels; and Carlos/Ishikawa, London

Winter 2019

Released 14 November artreview.com/power100

The definitive list of the people who have influenced and shaped the course of contemporary art over the past 12 months. Find out whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really in charge

GALLERIES 畫廊精萃: A2Z Art Gallery A2Z畫廊 Hong Kong, Paris Alisan Fine Arts 藝倡畫廊 Hong Kong Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie Basel ARARIO GALLERY 阿拉里奥畫廊 Shanghai, Seoul, Cheonan ASIA ART CENTER 亞洲藝術中心 Taipei, Beijing Axel Vervoordt Gallery 維伍德畫廊 Hong Kong, Antwerp AYE Gallery AYE畫廊 Beijing, Hong Kong Beijing Commune 北京公社 Beyond Gallery 非畫廊 Taipei CHAMBERS FINE ART 前波畫廊 Beijing, New York Chini Gallery 采泥藝術 Taipei David Zwirner 卓納畫廊 London, New York, Hong Kong Each Modern 亞紀畫廊 Taipei ESLITE GALLERY 誠品畫廊 Taipei Gagosian 高古軒 New York, London, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Paris, Rome, Athens, Geneva, Basel, Hong Kong Galerie du Monde 世界畫廊 Hong Kong Galerie Eva Presenhuber 伊娃・培森胡柏畫廊 Zurich, New York Galerie Ora-Ora 方由美術 Hong Kong Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London, Paris, Salzburg GALLERIA CONTINUA 常青畫廊 Beijing, San Gimignano, Les Moulins, Habana GALLERY TARGET Tokyo Gallery Yamaki Fine Art Kobe gb agency Paris Hanart TZ Gallery 漢雅軒 Hong Kong Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, Zurich, London, Los Angeles, New York, Somerset, St. Moritz, Gstaad Johyun Gallery 趙鉉畫廊 Busan Kaikai Kiki Gallery Tokyo, New York kamel mennour 卡邁勒・梅努赫畫廊 London KRINZINGER Vienna Kukje Gallery Kukje 畫廊 Seoul, Busan Lehmann Maupin 立木畫廊 Hong Kong, New York, Seoul Lévy Gorvy 厲為閣 New York, Zürich, Hong Kong, London Liang Gallery 尊彩藝術中心 Taipei Lin & Lin Gallery 大未來林舍畫廊 Taipei, Beijing Lisson Gallery 里森畫廊 London, New York, Shanghai Longmen Art Projects 龍門雅集 Hong Kong, Shanghai Malingue 馬凌畫廊 Hong Kong, Shanghai Massimo De Carlo MDC畫廊 Milan, London, Hong Kong Michael Ku Gallery 谷公館 Taipei Miles McEnery Gallery New York Mind Set Art Center

安卓藝術 Taipei MORI YU GALLERY Kyoto nca | nichido contemporary art 日動畫廊當代館 Tokyo, Taipei neugerriemschneider 纽格赫姆施耐德 Berlin NUKAGA GALLERY Tokyo, Osaka, London

ONE AND J. Gallery Seoul Ota Fine Arts 大田秀則畫廊 Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai Pace Gallery 佩斯畫廊 Hong Kong, New York, Palo Alto, London, Seoul, Geneva PATA GALLERY 八大畫廊

Shanghai, Taipei Perrotin 貝浩登 Paris, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai Project Fulfill Art Space 就在藝術空間 Taipei Richard Saltoun Gallery London Sabrina Amrani 薩尼畫廊 Madrid SCAI THE BATHHOUSE 洗澡堂畫廊 Tokyo Sean Kelly New York, Taipei SHIBUNKAKU 思文閣 Kyoto, Tokyo, Fukuoka Simon Lee Gallery Simon Lee 畫廊 London, Hong Kong, New York Soka Art 索卡藝術 Taipei, Beijing, Tainan Sprüth Magers 施布特-瑪格畫廊 Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Cologne, Hong Kong Sullivan + Strumpf 沙利文施特倫普夫 Sydney, Singapore Takeda Art Co. Tokyo Tang Contemporary Art 當代唐人藝術中心 Beijing, Hong Kong, Bangkok Tina Keng Gallery 耿畫廊 Taipei, Beijing TKG+ Taipei Tokyo Gallery+BTAP 東京畫廊+BTAP Beijing Tomio Koyama Gallery 小山登美夫畫廊 Tokyo Tso Gallery 別古藏藝術空間 Taipei Waddington Custot 沃丁頓庫斯托 London WAKO WORKS OF ART Tokyo White Cube 白立方 Hong Kong Whitestone Gallery 白石畫廊 Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, Karuizawa Yavuz Gallery Singapore, Sydney Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery Osaka SOLOS 個人展藝: 182ARTSPACE Tainan | intext Art Front Gallery Tokyo | Iku Harada Artinformal Gallery Makati, Mandaluyong | JC Jacinto BASTIAN 巴斯蒂安畫廊 London, Berlin | Dan Flavin Galerie Bhak 朴榮德畫廊 Seoul | Nam June PAIK galerie frank elbaz Paris, Dallas | Sheila Hicks GALLERY SIDE 2 Tokyo | Takeo Hanazawa HdM GALLERY HdM 畫廊 Beijing, London | Christopher Orr KALOS GALLERY 真善美畫廊 Taipei | Hsu Jui-Chien MASAHIRO MAKI GALLERY 正大牧畫廊 Tokyo, Paris | Koichiro Takagi Mind Set Art Center 安卓藝術 Taipei | Marina Cruz mother’s tankstation Dublin, London | Atsushi Kaga Sies + Höke Düsseldorf | Jonathan Meese Sokyo Gallery 現代美術艸居 Kyoto | Kimiyo Mishima STANDING PINE 立松 Nagoya | Pe Lang Wada Fine Arts | Y++ 和田美術| Y++ Tokyo | Tetsuya Ishida YIRI ARTS 伊日藝術計劃 Taipei | Hsiao Sheng-Chien Yuka Tsuruno Gallery Tokyo | Tomona Matsukawa YOUNG GALLERIES 新生畫廊計劃: albertz benda New York Double Square Gallery 双方藝廊 Taipei GALLERY VACANCY Shanghai KOSAKU KANECHIKA 金近幸作畫廊 Tokyo OVER THE INFLUENCE Hong Kong, Los Angeles Whistle 惠思 Seoul

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And English kings 51

Eisa Jocson Princess Studies, Macho Dance and Superwomen by Stephen Wilson

above Stainless Borders: Deconstructing Architectures of Control, 2010, performance.Photo: Angelo Vermeulen preceding pages Host, 2015, performance. Photo: Andreas Endermann

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Eisa Jocson’s fearless performances explore the politics of the gen- fits neatly with Jocson’s ‘princess studies’ and its focus on the body, dered body, the migration of labour, the cultural impacts of the ‘happi- new-adult fiction, fantasy production and labour migration. In a reness industry’ and the conditions of the Filipino diaspora. In Princess cent discussion with ArtReview Asia, Jocson explained how Disney Studies (2017) two Filipino performers – one female, one male – in serves as a useful case study for these issues: Filipino workers train for the fancy dress costumes of Disney’s Snow White (1937) move through years to gain qualifications as dancers so that they can be employed at a concrete space, performing synchronised movements and speaking themeparks including Hong Kong Disneyland. Happiness, at least in (mostly) in unison. Their words and actions phase into a repetition, its commodified form, is predicated on migrant labour and unequal resembling some kind of sinister rehearsal before, an hour or so into employment conditions. the performance, the princesses inhale deeply and shout: Trained in Manila in choreography and with a background in ballet, “What do you do when things go wrong?” Jocson used her own experience of entering (and winning) pole-dancing “I’m awfully sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you, but you don’t competitions to create her 2011 performance Death of the Pole Dancer, in know what I’ve been through. And all because I was afraid… I’m so which a discipline traditionally understood as being for the benefit of gendered voyeurs was transformed ashamed of the fuss I’ve made…” The audience is silent. Leaning Jocson continually acknowledges everyday into an act that questioned the politics of female expression and spectaagainst a wall at the back of the room, racism and the specifically Southeast torship. She subsequently committed I feel uneasy and defensive. This Asian context of postcolonial studies of herself to learning ‘macho dancing’ is less a performance of the typical Disney princess – inevitably rescued inequality within the migratory ethnoscape – a highly coded form of male erotic dancing – which she turned into the by the masculine hero – than about the social pressures to perform happiness. Indeed, Princess Studies is performance Macho Dancer (2013), another to challenge both fixed the first part of happyland (2017–), a series of performances whose gender positions and the power dynamics of watching and performing. title refers both to the slogan used by Disney for its themeparks (‘the The emotional and physical labour of the Overseas Filipino happiest place on earth’) and the name given to a densely populated Workers (ofws) employed in industries including erotic dancing slum in Manila. As such, it hints at the preoccupations with iden- resonate through Princess Studies. By collaborating with male actors tity, entertainment as labour and migration underpinning Jocson’s (including the Filipino performance artist Russ Ligtas), Jocson subverts highly politicised practice. the dominant fairytale narrative, playing on issues of both race and happyland has toured institutions and festivals across Asia and gender: in 2017 she worked closely with four professional dancers on Europe, including, in the summer of 2019, the Koppel Project Central the second part of happyland, entitled Your Highness, which applied in London, where it was presented in association with a group exhibi- avant-garde choreography to a study of Disney’s archetypal princess tion at soas featuring 11 artists working in the Philippines. Curators figures, including Ariel (from The Little Mermaid, 1989), Belle (Beauty Renan Laru-an, Merv Espina and Rafael Schacter proposed to ‘chart and the Beast, 1991) and Giselle (Enchanted, 2007). By linking the Western the historical and contemporary forces linking this archipelagic ideal of the princess to the work of Filipino migrants acting it out for chain with other key spheres of global power… by placing the theme money at themeparks, Jocson destabilises the fantasy of whiteness of belatedness as a principal concern’. that they are being asked to perform. Princess Studies This idea of ‘belatedness’ as shedding light upon dramatises these issues of Filipino identity in the Macho Dancer, 2013, performance. the power relations of the postcolonial Philippines ‘doubling’ of its performers. Photo: Giannina Ottiker

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both images Your Highness, 2017, performed by members ofÂ Ballet Philippines: Gia Gequinto, Stephanie Cabral, Maila Habagat, Alexis Piel, Carlo Padoga.Â Photo: Anja Beutler

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top Princess Studies, 2019, performance at the Koppel Project Central, London, as part of Motions of This Kind, Brunei Gallery, London, 45 min. Courtesy the artist and Brunei Gallery, London

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above Princess Parade, 2018, video documentation of performance, 26 min. Courtesy the artist and Brunei Gallery, London

Corponomy, 2019, four-channel hd video, colour and sound, performance, 18 min 4 sec (video editor Brandon Relucio, camera Kin Chui, sound composition for Host Marc Appart, technical coordination & support artfactory, production manager Yap Seok Hui)

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This is less about resisting the lure of foreign employment than expression and political protest, Jocson challenges the reduction of the about highlighting labour conditions for those working in the enter- migrant labourer’s body to the status of an object. tainment, services and arts sectors (the separation between which Jocson has recently moved into more experimental territory with the Jocson’s work also interrogates). According to a 2011 report by the creation of the all-female musical ensemble The Filipino Superwoman Asian Migrant Centre and the Philippine Overseas Employment Band (2019). Formed in Manila, and comprising Franchesca Casauay, Agency (poea), the Philippines is the second largest exporter of Bunny Cadag, Cath Go and Teresa Barrozo, the band was created in labour, with ‘ten percent of the population leaving the country to response to the phenomenon of the ‘Overseas Filipino Musician’ work in various parts of the globe’. With (ofm) who performs cover versions of Western A discipline traditionally this has come a rise in online counselling for songs on cruise boats and in clubs, bars and understood as being for hotels. Using sound to consider the vulneramembers of the diaspora experiencing homebility of this migrant labour and hybridised sickness, shame, loneliness or depression, the benefit of male voyeurs cultural identity, the band problematises the and so happyland is also a study of what was transformed into an happens when the fantasy of leaving home Philippine government’s description of ofws act that questioned the is not matched by the reality. This complex as Ang mga Bagong Bayani (‘our modern-day representation of the diaspora experience politics of female expression heroes’) in much the same way that Princess retells the story of a princess/artist/worker Studies challenged the princess fantasy. The and spectatorship for Filipinos abroad, and reconsiders the opeffect is to highlight the tension inherent in pressed ‘other’ of Western colonial histories in the context of a new the official celebration of these workers’ contributions to the national world of globalised labour. economy and the high personal and social cost of their displacement. Princess Studies uses a form of mimetic protest through which to In the Princess Studies and The Filipino Superwoman Band the body challenge cultural norms. The synchronicity and mimicry acted out – both individual and collective – plays out this tension. But instead by Jocson and her male collaborator in this work reminds us that the of reducing the complex power relations at play in a globalised world bodies of entertainers are at once replaceable (in the sense that they are of commodified entertainment, cultural exchange and transnational parts in a capitalist production) and unique (because they express an movements, these actions reproduce and remind us of the essentially individual subjectivity). While searching through the harsh realities fluid nature of desire, resistance and embodiment. ara of today’s entertainment industry, The Hugo Boss Art Asia Award 2019, Jocson continually acknowledges featuring Hao Jingban, Hsu Che-Yu, everyday racism and the specifically Eisa Jocson and Thao-Nguyên Phan, Southeast Asian context of postcolois on show at the Rockbund Art Museum, nial studies of inequality within the Shanghai, through 5 January migratory ethnoscape. Her practice continues to expose Western conceits of the entertainment industry in its Stephen Wilson curated Transpersonal, relations to migrant labour. By using instructions (2018) at the up Vargas the body as an instrument of artistic Museum, Manila

Poster for The Filipino Superwoman Band premiere at Sharjah Biennial 14, 2019 all images Courtesy the artist

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Gudskul

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An experimental art school in Jakarta is testing how cooperative work stacks up against supercurators and other top–down models for organising the artworld by Annie Jael Kwan

Driving south from busy central Jakarta I go in search of the Gudskul, a new educational platform with a pedagogical model that focuses on collective study and grassroots ecosystem-building, and is designed to provide an infrastructure for the contemporary art scene in Indonesia. As we leave the dusty, traffic-clogged business and tourist areas of the city, the journey’s flow eases and the streets narrow and quieten. Eventually we pull up at the gantry barrier to what looks like a parking lot, where a small row of food hawkers serve clusters of quietly chatting customers. The path opens onto a compound with a mix of architectural structures, not unlike the repurposed art warehouses of East London. Shipping containers double-stacked on the left have been modified with cutout windows and sections to accommodate preexisting trees, twisted metal staircases, posters and banners. Some are finished with rustic wood panelling and one even sports a winding bamboo curtain. Across the parking lot, on the right, stands a sprawling open-access double-storey structure, with smaller rooms and colourful alcoves within its recesses. There are clusters of liberally applied stickers featuring festival and music-label logos, such as cassette tapes, spray cans and slogans like ‘propagraphic movement’, ‘young and useless’ and the pointed ‘you are exploited every day so that the money you make can sustain the ongoing exploitation of your life’. A coffee shed with bright, colourful murals squats in the middle of it all. The entire site is the Gudskul Ekosistem, its many rooms and spaces shared among different entities and the working spaces for the projects they spearhead.

It’s here that I am reunited with farid rakun, a member of the art collective ruangrupa, whom I met in London a year ago, when he visited our newly formed research network, Asia-Art-Activism. ruangrupa, or ‘ruru’ as it is affectionately called by its members, is one of the Gudskul partners. Since 2000 the collective has sustained groundbreaking projects such as ok Video, an experimental media festival that has taken place within Indonesia since 2003, and Karbon, a quarterly art journal founded in 2000 that provides a platform for visual art analysis and its relationship to the changing sociocultural contexts of Jakarta. Projects such as these filled a gap in the Indonesian art scene, whose main institutions (Jakarta Institute for the Arts and Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta) have traditionally focused on performing arts, painting and sculpture. Ruangrupa has more recently made international art headlines as a result of its appointment as artistic director of Documenta 15, set to take place in Kassel in 2022. Together with their business partners, the art-and-education collective Serrum (founded in 2006, the name derived from the Indonesian words for ‘share’ and ‘room’) and the printmaking collective Grafis Huru Hara (established in 2012), they manage the school. As Asia-Art-Activism’s focus is on the exchange of knowledge, my curiosity is piqued by the ambition and depth of their artistic and pedagogical ambition when it comes to transforming art education and the contemporary art sector in Indonesia. Although, more immediately, I’m waiting for the students of the Gudskul’s first graduating year, with whom I’m scheduled for a ‘crit’ session. As we wait, farid explains the layout of the Artist Collective Compound

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(acc), and how the Gudskul Ekosistem operates, with the different As a working protocol, the aim is to bring together more voices roles and functions of its partners. In 2018 ruangrupa moved to the without trying to either control or police them. Instead of an overnew site from the Gudang Sarinah warehouse in south Jakarta that arching theme, it is this model that will drive ruangrupa’s curatoit had occupied previously, and where it had staged a ‘practice run’ rial methodology for Documenta. Displacing the currently prevalent of sorts in developing a cultural ecosystem with other artist collec- role of the supercurator in the international artworld, the centrality tives. With the many names involved in the acc and overlapping of cooperative work will allow the exhibition to take on questions of roles in the Gudskul, it’s complicated to grasp, so farid draws me how collaboration and solidarity, and thinking about sustainability and the redistribution of resources, might impact other locales globa helpful floorplan. The left side is cheerfully named the ‘Gudside’: the container ally, and more particularly those outside the usual ‘art capitals’. The stacks are a series of rented studios occupied by artists and publishers, aim is to redress inequality: as Ade Darmawan, one of ruangrupa’s founders, acknowledges, “Activism is including the ruangrupa Documenta The aim is to redress inequality: as Ade team. On the right lies 700sqm of in our nature”. jointly purchased land, which used to jj Adibrata is one of Serrum’s team Darmawan, one of ruangrupa’s founders, and one of 11 subject coordinators hold an indoor futsal court, but is now acknowledges, “Activism is in our nature” at Gudskul. Coordinators take on the occupied by a large, double-storey open warehouse with exhibition galleries, a library, a shop and role that might in other places be designated ‘teacher’ – farid and workspaces neatly allocated among the different projects. Hence Darmawan are among them – and collectively they take more of a the ground floor is shared by the media art festivals Jakarta 32°c, ok mentoring and colearning approach with the students. Now jj rounds Video, the ruru and Serrum art galleries, Art Lab and ruru Kids, up the inaugural graduating class of 13 students that had undertaken as well as rux, the umbrella commercial arm that consists of ruru the Gudskul one-year intensive programme, and over the next few Radio (which manages karaoke and music festivals), ruru Shop for hours the students share their final-project portfolios in an informal merchandise, Serrum Arthandling and the offices of Studio Seni Grafis crit. The range of projects embraces multiple disciplines and formats: Huru Hara.These are run as businesses that achieve their own income. for example, an alternative publishing network that champions zines The Gudskul itself technically occupies the whole mezzanine level; in and other independent publications; a framework project that links practice, however, informal groups of people gather freely across the the artistic networks of smaller cities in Indonesia; an archive exhibition; a social kitchen; and a community play-space for mothers spaces, and all the equipment onsite is shared according to need. The Gudskul puts its money where its mouth is, with committed and children. The projects link the students’ personal interests with investment in its students. It runs one yearlong intensive pro- a concern for providing benefits to their associated communities gramme and 25 short courses. The short courses have become popular or their local cities. More importantly, these projects are more than with students, attracting almost 300 enrolments in its first year, with mere concepts – students have been encouraged to consider how to realise the projects in relation to a cost of 1.5 million rupiah per course. feasibility, partnerships and producThirteen students participated in tion. Indeed, quite a few were ready the inaugural one-year programme, which costs 15 million rupiah per to launch, perhaps after graduation. student. However, five students who I ask how the students are asare nominated by artist partners are sessed and if it might be possible for given a scholarship (fees waived), any of them to fail. The Gudskul team and others are enrolled on a ‘pay acknowledges that the criterion for what you can’ basis. Direct income assessment has been challenging to from the Gudskul could only cover conceive, but they are not interested approximately 30 percent of its costs; in the conventional markers of success the remaining 70 percent is suppleor failure. Instead, they are engaged mented by the commercial income with process, and whether the project earned by rux, Serrum and Grafis and training experience proves satisfying for the student after a year. If Huru Hara. not, they suggest, then perhaps it is This investment is committed The Gudskul lobby area and generous. Gudskul explains they who have failed the student. their shared concept of the lumbung, which is the name of both an The Gudskul pedagogy marries the artistic and production agricultural village tradition and the architectural structure of approaches espoused by ruangrupa: bridging its belief in collecthe barns in which farmers store the surplus from their harvests. tivity that extends to building ‘a collective of collectives’, and its focus Conventionally, such structures are two-storey, with the upper level on sustainability for legacy and long-term transformation in the (supported on stilts) used for storage and the ground level a shared Indonesian art scene. In an earlier conversation, farid had reminded common space, often used for village meetings and celebrations. me that the ‘euphoria of congregation’ is endemic to post-Suharto The lumbung is the village hearth that nurtures gathering communal Indonesia: under the reign of the military dictator (which ended bodies while safeguarding their survival and futures. In particular, with Suharto’s resignation in 1998), citizens were prohibited from ruangrupa describes the lumbung as central to their curatorial mode assembling in groups of more than five people without a governof working, and essential to their long-term artistic aspirations. ment permit. Consequently, the freedom to gather for discussion and

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top The Gudside container studios above Crit session with the Gudskul. Courtesy the Gudskul preceding pages Ipok Icon coffee shack at the Gudskul

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On the ruangrupa Documenta hq planning board

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celebration has become valued as both precious and innovative. On within ruangrupa and the Gudskul ecosystem. That said, farid maina more basic level, in a place in which the main art institutes remain tains that such an approach is more of a way of living and doing things recalcitrant when it comes to supporting experimental art disciplines than a dogmatic ideology, which in and of itself he would consider such as performance, video or socially engaged or conceptual work, a wrong focus for the collective’s energy. “Horizontality was praised so and where public funding for the arts is still very limited, pooling many times [in the artworld], and some practise collectivity to prove resources becomes necessary. “If you gang up with other people,” that, but that’s not our interest,” he says. Instead he is keen to point out that members continue to develop individual interests, and more as farid says, “you can access more.” It is difficult to pin down the exact number of people at any given importantly, ruangrupa and Gudskul operate with a core team and time at ruangrupa, with its loose roster including many who come and a mode of flexibility that allows for experimentation and change when go over the years, and maintain their individual practices outside at needed, and for members to come and go as necessary. the same time. The ruru Documenta team of nine is interdisciplinary: Outside the classroom, within the open section of the Gudskul Ade trained as a graphic designer before building, a long table has been elaboThe Gudskul operates with developing his own curatorial and rately laid out with food. As the ‘crit’ session ends, a ‘Cancerian Birthday artistic practice; farid trained as an archia mode of flexibility that allows Celebration’ begins. The students tect, and is now a lecturer and curator, for experimentation and change trot out, more visitors arrive and the and often an interlocutor with internawhen needed gathering party cheers the Gudskul tional arts institutions. In addition to Ade and farid, the team consists of Ajeng Nurul Aini, Daniella Fitria members, including Ade, who were born under that sign. With music Praptono, Indra Ameng, Iswanto Hartono, Julia Sarisetiati, Mirwan and feasting, the celebration carries on late into the evening. The Andan and Reza Afisina – all of whom bridge different disciplines and Gudskul building, with its open lower level, not only literally reseminterests across literature, research, journalism, music and individual bles the lumbung structure but is also the centre point of this artistic artistic practices. Ruru’s collective approach is deeply embedded in village, the space in which it congregates, converses and celebrates. If, the everyday routine of work, and here that means a shared process like a lumbung, the upper level holds surplus grain for shared future of decision-making, with a monthly ‘town hall’ meeting that involves survival, then ruangrupa and its partners are pouring it into these every person on the acc, from the artists to the security team and the students – the essential human resources for the long-term vitality cleaners. While ruru acknowledges that this approach is tedious and of the Indonesian art scene. ara ‘most inefficient’, they feel that it is necessary for the way in which it undermines the development of hierarchies and power structures Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher

above Cancerian Birthday Feast all images but one Photos: Annie Jael Kwan

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In Good Company Interview by Mark Rappolt

An exhibition casts new light on some of the Indian subcontinentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s forgotten artists

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This December, the Wallace Collection in London hosts Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, curated by the awardwinning historian, writer and broadcaster (and cofounder of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival) William Dalrymple. The exhibition, which roughly spans the years 1770 to 1840, is billed as the first in Britain dedicated to the Indian artists who were commissioned by British patrons associated with the East India Company, artists whose work (much of which was destined for export to Europe) has been generally grouped, by art historians and curators, under the umbrella term ‘Company Painting’ rather than credited to individuals. Moreover, the exhibition attempts to argue that these individuals deserve a place in the history of Indian art rather than being confined to a footnote in the history of colonialism. ArtReview Asia spoke to Dalrymple, whose most recent book, Anarchy, a history of the Indian subcontinent during the collapse of the Mughal imperial system (1739–1803), was published earlier this year. artreview asia Broadly speaking, it seems that you could characterise this exhibition as being about, on the one hand, switching the emphasis from patron to artist when it comes to discussions of ‘Company Painting’ and, on the other, talking about

this period of history in terms of collaboration rather than exploitation. william dalrymple Correct. The East India Company was very different in so many ways from the Raj. The two are often elided as if they’re one thing – the colonial period – but they‘re very different. The East India Company is far more extractive, far more about loot and plunder and profit, but it’s also a period of collaboration: the East India Company was working with Indian bankers as there were very few Brits in India – never more than 2,000 at any one time in Bengal, and the head office for 100 years in the history of the company only had 35 British employees. The money to pay for the mercenary regiments of sepoys, which grew to 200,000, twice the size of the British Army by 1799, largely came from Bengalis who invested in company bonds and from loans from Bengali bankers such as the Marwari Jagat Seths [the most powerful bankers in India during the first part of the eighteenth century – to the extent that they were known as ‘the bankers of the world’]. above Shaikh Zain al-Din, Brahminy Starling. © Minneapolis Institute of Art facing page Portrait of John Wombwell Smoking a Hookah. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Ligt, Paris

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One in three Brits was married to an Indian woman during this period. These kind of contacts – sexual, artistic, intellectual, philosophical – were in stark contrast with the Raj proper, which tried to dress up imperialism in terms of a civilisational mission: building railways and hospitals and universities, and pretending that it was there primarily for the sake of India, when it was totally separate and racist. The Civil Lines, where the whites would live [known at the time as White Towns], were quite different from where the Indians would live. There was the famous sign ‘No dogs or Indians on the mall’, whites-only clubs, all that sort of thing. What people forget is that the East India Company was around for 250 years while the Raj was only around for 90, just 1858 to 1947. So this show is about expressing the difference of this earlier extractive, but collaborative, period. ara Do you see it as sort of reconfiguring of Indian art history or British art history or somewhere between the two? wd It’s a period that has been ignored in both, because it doesn’t fit into either. It’s not British artists like Tilly Kettle or Johann Zoffany coming out of India and painting pictures that would sit easily in, say, the Freer

Gallery of Art [part of the Smithsonian Institution dedicated to Asian art in Washington, dc] or a Tate show on eighteenth-century art; but nor is it recognised anywhere as part of Indian art, because it was done so clearly for East India Company patronage, in quite a lot of cases with Western ornithological or botanical models being given to these artists. And yet these pictures showed work of astonishing quality.

wd Let’s not romanticise this. The East India Company was an executive multinational business that was there to make money and it didn’t see botanic gardens primarily for the edification of botanists and lovers of nature, Indian or British. It was so that it could find things to sell. Whether it was ginger, coffee, cocoa or opium. That’s why they were involved in this project. But you also have the fact that they got a bunch of enthusiastic

ara Do you think there’s a sense in which neither historians of British art history nor historians of Indian art history want to see this period this way, that it’s not convenient in terms of what happens after it?

“You’re beginning to see what will be the final consequences of colonialism, the destruction of indigenous Indian traditions, as patrons want something Westernised”

wd I don’t think it’s a deliberate ploy. I think this work is still pretty obscure. When [the curator and taxonomist] Henry Noltie went looking for botanical drawings in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew [in London], he found several hundred if not a thousand Claude Martin pictures sitting in the Kew archives, not only unpublished but not accessioned. That is, in a sense, the biggest discovery of the show: the sheer body of work sitting in Kew that was never noticed before. ara But isn’t that part of a colonial programme: to record the flora and fauna as part of an essay on ownership?

botanists, who were probably kept awake at night with the thrill of all this new stuff, out to do this. You have these competing motives. Very few of these pictures, if any, come out of the patronage of the East India Company with the capital eic: it’s individuals doing the commissioning. The Fraser Album [a collection of paintings documenting various aspects of Mughal life, made between 1815 and 1819, commissioned by a British Indian civil servant

above Bhawani Das, A Great Indian Fruit Bat. Courtesy Private Collection facing page Manu Lall, A pitcher plant. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

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from notable Mughal painters] is produced by William Fraser partly because his brother James wanted it, but also, I think, partly out of his own curiosity. He’s recording the names of villagers he’s working with and taxing: rather like a headmaster having images of all his pupils today. On the other hand, the images in Agra are really, I think, produced by Indian artists as tourist postcards. They realised that they could sell these things. Ditto the work of artists like Yellapah of Vellore and Shaikh Muhammad Amir of Karraya [active during the 1830s and 40s], who seem literally to be knocking on people’s doors and offering to paint their horses, dogs and servants. So they can make an album to send home or keep as souvenirs, back in the days before photography and postcards. ara Do you think that this is the beginning of a kind of modernity in Indian art, the beginning of a break with tradition? wd I think you’ve got to be a little bit careful about that because people are just recording what they’re seeing. ara But the way they’re recording it is changing slightly; it is, in a way, more scientific. wd No question. Someone like Claude Martin who was very much aware of being

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alive during the triumph of reason is studying scientific journals and so on, sitting in Lucknow. Three years after the Montgolfier brothers put their balloon up in the middle of Paris, he’s got one going up in Lucknow, based entirely on the descriptions in scientific journals that he’s having sent out from Paris. In the same way, while he’s employing Mughal artists in the tradition of Ustad Mansur [active 1590–1624] to paint these animals with incredible hyperrealism, he’s also training them to do cross-sections, which never would have occurred to a Mughal patron to want or need. ara Do you see it as the moment of change within Indian art, in those terms? wd It’s several things. At the beginning of the story, it’s a development in the Mughal tradition, for instance, in that you’ve got Mughal artists being asked to do something slightly different. I think in some of the earlier stuff from Lucknow you have the same miniature landscapes, these sorts of Lilliputian landscapes that you see in the background of Mughal work in this period. Then gradually it becomes more Europeanised, so you get white backgrounds and cross-sections. Then the artist Sita Ram [commissioned by Lord Hastings to illustrate a diary of his journey from Calcutta to the Punjab in 1814–15] is in a sense copying William Hodges and the artists of the [English] picturesque movement. And you’re beginning to see what will be the final consequences of colonialism, the destruction of indigenous Indian traditions, as patrons want something Westernised and Europeanlooking rather than something Indian and traditional. ara Do you think that having an Indian artist record these Anglo visions is a way of naturalising the Westernisation of Indian art? wd I think it’s more accidental than that. I think that they were very fine artists hanging around Calcutta who probably didn’t cost a great deal to employ. We think it was probably Hastings’s wife who somehow got hold of Sita Ram because Hastings’s diary doesn’t mention him at any point, yet he’s clearly going around in the same party. There isn’t much Sita Ram in the show because it’s a different aesthetic. We’ve chosen one particular look here: everything is on a white background, everything is hyperrealistic and incredibly detailed. You could have done a very different show with extremely colourful Thanjavur painting [a classical South Indian style, which originated in the Maratha Court, 1676–1855], which is also Company School,

or work coming out of Putna by an artist called Sewak Ram [c. 1770–1830], who, in the end, we didn’t show. This is by no means encyclopaedic. ara The word ‘beauty’ comes up a lot in your catalogue essay. wd Ultimately that’s why we’re having the show: these things are just stunningly good. They’re very, very beautiful and they’ve never been seen before in England. No one knows about them. It’s not often in art history that you get something of this quality that has never been shown before. There was one show in New York in 1978 [Room for Wonder: Indian Court Painting during the British Period, 1760–1880, organised by the American Federation of Arts] and there was a little one in Bombay last winter. But really this is kind of virgin territory. ara Also I guess it comes at a time when decolonisation is a big thing in relation to cultural artefacts.

“People are intrigued that these works predate photography, they are among the first pictures to record costume types, traditional forms of labour, forms of art and forms of craft. They show ways of living and ways of dressing which had been forgotten” wd Yes, and again this work occupies an awkward space in that debate. It’s not the really complicated stuff like the Benin Bronzes looted by European armies, about which a very good case can be made for their recovery. This doesn’t quite fit: it was always owned by Europeans and was never in Indian hands. It was patronage for artists who had, in many cases, fallen on hard times because the courts were being rolled up by the Company. And those that weren’t, such as the Mughals, were definitely finding things hard financially. ara In that context, this is not a story that a lot of institutions would be focusing on right now, in their rush to admit guilt for everything.

preceding pages Circle of Ghulam Ali Khan, Interior View of St James Church Delhi. Courtesy the Council of the National Army Museum, London facing page Manu Lall, A Clubmoss. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

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wd Well, I think that is a story that no one has focused on. On the Indian side, arguably the greatest-ever show of traditional Indian precolonial painting was put up by the art-historian B. N. Goswamy with his The Way of the Master: The Great Artists of India, 1100–1900 at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich in 2011, which then travelled to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in a slightly smaller form and with the title Wonder of the Age. That show was encyclopaedic about the major artists of India and very much went against the old colonial method of cataloguing artists according to place: the Kangra School or Delhi School or Jaipur School and so on. Instead, The Way of the Master was catalogued by the names of these forgotten individuals. It brought to light Nainsukh and the other great Indian artists whose names had been, until recently, forgotten. But, rather uncharacteristically, the show just had ‘Company Work’ at the end. There was one Ghulam Ali Khan from The Fraser Album and maybe one work from The Impey Album [commissioned by Mary Impey, beginning in 1770 and featuring 300 paintings by artists including Shaikh Zain al-Din, Bhawani Das and Ram Das]. This catalogue is an attempt to extend Goswami’s project into this period, which, to my eyes, is when some of the most gorgeous stuff is being produced. Also, stuff which gets the highest price in the saleroom. ara Would you like to show this in India as well? wd I’d be delighted to show it in India. There’s huge interest. People are intrigued that these works predate photography, they are among the first pictures to record costume types, traditional forms of labour, forms of art and forms of craft. They show ways of living and ways of dressing which had been forgotten. The catalogue follows the Goswami model, in a sense, in that we’re trying to establish biographies, names and identities for these artists, as the title suggests: Forgotten Masters. ara I wonder if you can compare this late-eighteenth-century, early-nineteenth-century period, this in-between phase of art being Indian yet international, to what’s happening with contemporary art in India? wd One of the tragedies of colonial history in India is the degree to which it finished so many currents of Indian art, culture and civilisation. Not completely, because there was a lot of India that remained uncolonised: one quarter of India was still ruled by princely states. Cultural patronage continued, so you’d get ballads and poets and court artists and so on, and while some of those courts ended

up copying Western modes of architecture and preferred photography to miniature painting, for example, many didn’t. So you have traditions which survive to this day, coming out of those courts and those ateliers. The Indian contemporary artist is looking very much over its shoulder at Damien Hirst and whoever the contemporary masters are that provide inspiration. There are some who will give it an Indian idiom like Subodh Gupta with his pots. Or Bharti Kher with her bindis. But there’s no sense in which Bharti or Subodh’s work is actually flowing out of traditional Indian painting. There’s a radical break and that break is colonialism. Which is different, incidentally, to what’s happened in Pakistan, where the Lahore School of Art is growing traditional painting. Suddenly you can draw a real contrast there between the more contemporary-feeling work being done in India with the more traditionally based work by artists ranging from Shahzia Sikander to all the other alumni of the Lahore Art School. ara Why do you think that is? wd I’m not sure. I’m intrigued. I think that the teaching at Lahore Art School happened to rely on a couple of amazing teachers during the 1950s and 60s who valued the traditional

styles and the traditional forms of Mughal and Sikh art, and these traditions are still living. I get the impression that in Delhi, which is a more profoundly colonised place, there was just a complete break and that Sita Ram was the beginning of the end, seeing the way forward as painting in the Western style, not the traditional style.

“William Fraser valued Indian artists for their skills – that’s why he was employing them; he wasn’t trying to get them to relearn how to paint a leaf or how to paint a house” Everything that followed in the next hundred years under all these colonial art schools only confirmed that cultural break. By the time that Valentine Prinsep is touring India in the above Family of Ghulam Ali Khan, Six Recruits. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc facing page Shaikh Zain Ud-Din, Sarus Crane. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

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1880s he was already saying that he could find no one in Delhi producing good traditional local art. He said that the quality of the work that he’d seen from before the 1850s was so fine, but that today they were only making copies of them for tourists. The traditions had died. The reason was colonialism, the massacres of 1857 and the end of that whole world. To my mind, the very worst thing that colonialism did was killing off the culture of this country. I think you can draw a very strong distinction between what John Lockwood Kipling [1837–1911, an English art teacher and museum curator who spent most of his career in British India] was encouraging his pupils to do in the 1880s, and what William Fraser was encouraging his artists to do. Fraser valued them for their skills – that’s why he was employing them; he wasn’t trying to get them to relearn how to paint a leaf or how to paint a house. He wanted them because he valued what they were doing. I think everyone who’s worked on this exhibition sees this – with the possible exception of Sita Ram – as Indian art, not colonial art. ara Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company is on show at The Wallace Collection, London, 4 December – 19 April

Winter 2019

Pinaree Sanpitak by Elaine Chiew

Red Alert! My Body My Space i, 2018–19, acrylic, pencil, textile, paper on canvas, 250 × 250 cm. Courtesy the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

Oscillating between the sublime and the tongue-in-cheek, the Thai artist’s work brings a female consciousness to previously male-dominated worlds

Breast Talks 4, 2018, uv archival print and screenprint on gampi paper, embedded in stpi handmade mulberry paper, 119 × 120 × 5 cm (framed). © and courtesy the artist and stpi, Singapore

Breast Talks 2, 2018, gold leaf, etching on gampi paper embedded in stpi handmade mulberry paper. ÂŠ and courtesy the artist and stpi, Singapore

top Two Breasts 3, 2018, screenprint on paper, 83 × 118 × 5 cm (framed) above Breast Vessel iii – 3, 2018, hardground etching on gampi paper, collaged on paper both images © and courtesy the artist and stpi, Singapore

Bodily Space i, 2017–19, textile, paper, acrylic on canvas, 260 × 150 cm (diptych). Courtesy the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

Pinaree Sanpitak’s preoccupation with the female breast underpins a fragmented and the whole. They resonate as the subversive interposibody of work that is graceful, tranquil and almost otherworldly, incor- tion of a personal female consciousness within institutionalised reliporating but also transcending the limitations of the female breast gious realms. Because ‘breast’ is an inherently gendered vernacular, and its connotations of fertility and the sexual. Sanpitak’s description Sanpitak’s distancing of her work from her moniker as the ‘breast ‘breast stupa’ was coined in connection with a similarly titled work artist’ in interviews may come across as coy, particularly given that shown in Fukuoka, Japan, in 2001, the term conflating two concepts: she has also previously stated that the birth of her son in 1993 and one, the female breast; and two, a Buddhist site of veneration that is the breastfeeding that followed served as points of inspiration for her also a signifier for the overwhelmingly male monkhood in Thailand predominant motif. Rather than promoting a sense of ambivalence (where Sanpitak is from). For more than two decades, the artist has however, her visual expression resists such convenient limitation; explored these two motifs in works that deploy a variety of materials – one comes away from a viewing of her works with a rich sense of being from saa fibre to glass, stainless steel enveloped in spirituality, nurturance Sanpitak’s works resonate as the to Thai textiles – and span an equally and beauty, informed about female subversive interposition of a personal subjectivities but also the workings diverse array of media – etchings, paintings, collages, weavings, sculpof the body, both private and public. female consciousness within Two solo shows in Singapore this tures, installations, performance and institutionalised religious realms collaborations in the culinary arts, to autumn, at the partially state-funded name just a few. This versatility with materials and forms has come to stpi – Creative Workshop & Gallery and at commercial gallery Yavuz, define her practice. provide an opportunity to reconsider Sanpitak’s oeuvre. The artist Breast Stupas (2000–01), shown at Fukuoka’s Seinan Gakuin Uni- describes herself as fundamentally a ‘painter by nature’, and her exhiversity Library, comprised 37 largescale silk hangings that revealed bitions frequently feature her paintings amid large installations. She an unthreaded elongated breast shape on each panel as the audi- returns to this medium full force in her show at Yavuz (which consists ence walked through the installation. The work triggered compar- solely of paintings with collaged elements). Her show at stpi features isons with sculptor Eva Hesse’s 1968 Contingent, and indeed, like all new works on paper, showcasing a prolific output that has optiHesse, Sanpitak deploys the idiom of repetition and a minimalist mised stpi’s unique print- and papermaking capabilities, which an aesthetic. However, unlike Hesse’s oeuvre, Sanpitak’s works – in artist residency there is intended to facilitate. their exploration of a metaphoric relationship between the stupa In 1999 Sanpitak participated in another printmaking workshop, and the intimate, sensual, curved shape of the breast crowned by a with Northern Editions in Darwin, Australia, which she credited for nipple – oscillate between the sublime and the tongue-in-cheek, the spurring her further explorations into different media and forms.

Anything Can Break (detail), 2011, mixed media, dimensions variable. © the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York

Winter 2019

forms. One of her best-known works, which has spawned different juxtaposing new work with old work, underlining the importance of versions, is Breast Stupa Topiary (2013). These three-metre-high breast- dialogue and spiritual interconnectedness to her practice. stupa sculptures are made with stainless steel (the work was first exHer stpi artist residency also yielded innovative results. Sanpitak hibited as an outdoor installation at Museum voor Moderne Kunst sourced dried ebony fruit from Thailand, which was ground up and Arnhem, The Netherlands). In 2018 a version of the work was shown mixed with indigo into liquid paper pulp to yield black paint. In at the Jim Thompson Farm in Thailand, functioning there as trellises one stunning work, Black Dreams i (2019), shown at Yavuz, she paints for vegetal growth, thereby shifting their meaning from confinement over collaged-on origami shapes, textile and jute squares, producing to an Edenic idea of regeneration. For her ongoing Breast Stupa Cookery intense gradations of black that reveal a metallic sheen and textured project (2005–) she invites chefs to use her cast-aluminium or ceramic depth. At stpi, she also experimented for the first time on linen paper breast-stupa moulds as they see fit, and the results have been inven- and collaborated on a process of embedding collaged shapes onto tive. At a staging of the cookery project in Plymouth, New Zealand, in paper and then painting over with paper pulp. The resulting paint2011, two participating Maori chefs produced potato yeast bread and ings looked like seamless canvases with texture and layers rather than other dishes that included berry juice to connote the menstrual flow discernible glued-on collages. This embedding process produced an of women. The project has at times catered to between 200 and 300 eye-catching work in Breast Talks 4 (2018), where a previously made people, hosting audiences in Thailand, Spain, China, France, Japan uv archival print of breast shapes collaged onto the canvas resembles and the us, harnessing the idea of a food gathering as sustenance glutinous Thai desserts wrapped in lotus leaf. through a forum for sharing and exchange. The centrepiece of the stpi show, The Walls (2018–19), is a largescale New versions of both Breast Stupa Topiary and Breast Stupa Cookery mazelike installation comprising 100 square paper sheets (all made are being shown at this year’s Setouchi Triennale, which takes place as part of a collaborative process between Sanpitak and stpi during on the islands within the Seto Inland Sea, Japan. In the former, her 2018 residency), harking back to Breast Stupas. An initial version which Sanpitak has retitled The Black and The Red House, sited in the debuted at the Encounters section of Art Basel Hong Kong in March. back garden of an abandoned house on Honjima Island, the artist Hung from the ceiling, these sheets were patterned with layered and remade her breast stupa structures with yakisugi charred wood collaged-on geometric forms of various sizes and types. Sometimes (yakisugi is a traditional Japanese method of preserving wood – char- these showed signs of peeling or stress marks that had resulted from the various drying processes underring its surface to make it more These three-metre-high, stainless-steel durable through carbonisation) as gone by the materials, all of which added to the feelings of tactility and homage to the cultural and historical breast-stupa sculptures function as depth that were the most interestelements of the site. In another room trellises for vegetal growth, thereby shifting aspects of this massive installaof the house, set up as a café with ing their meaning from confinement tion. Moreover, an earth-tone colour red pillows, Sanpitak invited Chef scheme evoked the idea of ‘skin’, and Ramses Yanagida to serve his version to an Edenic idea of regeneration the paper sheets had a porosity and of Breast Stupa Cookery – curry, Thai tea and Thai custard. Elsewhere around the island, residents have fragility that presented a subtle tension with the depersonalised abbeen serving their versions of Thai food, developed in a Thai cookery straction of the geometric shapes. Despite the installation’s wow workshop Sanpitak and a Thai chef conducted there in May. Key to factor, the cramped feeling and the meanings gleaned from a walkunderstanding Sanpitak’s practice is that each new work is part of through – the breach of the public by the private, and the inescapwhat she calls a ‘continuously evolving’ process of ‘ideations from able association of bodies and ‘walls’ to the current political climate – previous works’; new works may strike divergent symbolic pathways, feel tendentious and simplistic, and the ironic note struck against the titles of both the work and the show, which seemed too literal, but a dialogue with her past works continues. The more playful and participatory aspects of her work feel especially given its scale and spotlight. restrained at her stpi and Yavuz shows, but Sanpitak’s paintings Her collagraphed and screenprinted works in bold red, such as compensate with their exuberant, compulsive iterations of the frag- Breast Works Red Alert! 4 (2018), shown as a group in a separate section mented breast shape. Past works such as 120 vessels (2000–01) have of stpi, and her work entitled Red Alert! My Body My Space I (2018–19) analogised the inverted breast stupa shape to alms-bowls. Using repeat Yavuz, are striking, perhaps signalling a departure from her usual tition as lexicon, 120 vessels featured row upon row of upturned, wide- subdued colour scheme. Sanpitak has stated that her choice of the rimmed bowls, rendered in candlewax and charcoal on paper, drawing colour red was to evoke a sense of ‘danger and urgency’ concerning upon the Buddhist concept of accreting inner merit through outward women’s issues, a reflection of current political pressure-points. But gestures of compassion and alms-giving. Sanpitak’s preoccupation rather than a conceptual depth, contemplation of her works in both with the breast motif calls to mind Yayoi Kusama’s obsession with dots, shows confers an aesthetic joy, brought about by the way in which but unlike Kusama (to whom she has also been compared), Sanpitak’s they revel in the minute variations and interplay of line, shape, size, obsession has less to do with a state of mind and more an engage- colour, juxtaposition, texture and method, all of which make maniment with ritual. At stpi, her paintings showcase an extension of the fest the malleability and multiplicity of the breast form. ara breast and breast-stupa to other biomorphic shapes, such as clouds, seeded pods, aquatic bodies and homologous body parts, ideations she Pinaree Sanpitak, Bodily Space: Confessed and Concealed is on show at Yavuz Gallery, Singapore, through 17 November has previously incorporated into her works or of which she has been cognisant. Works in the Breast Talks (2018–19) series show a medley of Elaine Chiew is a writer and visual arts researcher based in Singapore these shapes, collaged and arranged cheek by jowl on the same canvas,

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Breast Stupa Topiary, 2013, stainless steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York

Winter 2019

Photograph taken at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)

Participating Galleries Galleries # 303 Gallery 47 Canal A A Gentil Carioca Miguel Abreu Acquavella Altman Siegel Applicat-Prazan Alfonso Artiaco B Guido W. Baudach elba benítez Ruth Benzacar Bergamin & Gomide Berggruen Fondation Beyeler Blum & Poe Peter Blum Boers-Li Marianne Boesky Tanya Bonakdar Bortolami Luciana Brito Gavin Brown Buchholz C Canada Cardi Casa Triângulo David Castillo Ceysson & Bénétière Cheim & Read Clearing James Cohan Sadie Coles HQ Continua Paula Cooper Corbett vs. Dempsey Pilar Corrias Chantal Crousel D DAN DC Moore Massimo De Carlo Di Donna

E Andrew Edlin frank elbaz Essex Street F Konrad Fischer Foksal Fortes D‘Aloia & Gabriel Peter Freeman Stephen Friedman G Gaga Gagosian Galerie 1900-2000 Gladstone Gmurzynska Elvira González Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Bärbel Grässlin Richard Gray Garth Greenan Greene Naftali Karsten Greve Cristina Guerra Kavi Gupta H Hammer Hanart TZ Hauser & Wirth Max Hetzler High Art Hirschl & Adler Rhona Hoffman Edwynn Houk Xavier Hufkens hunt kastner I Ingleby Taka Ishii J Alison Jacques rodolphe janssen Catriona Jeffries Annely Juda K Kalfayan Casey Kaplan

Karma Kasmin kaufmann repetto Kayne Griffin Corcoran Sean Kelly Kerlin Anton Kern Kewenig Peter Kilchmann Tina Kim Kohn David Kordansky Andrew Kreps Krinzinger Kukje kurimanzutto

N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Nagel Draxler Edward Tyler Nahem Helly Nahmad Francis M. Naumann Leandro Navarro neugerriemschneider Franco Noero David Nolan Nordenhake

L Labor Landau Simon Lee Lehmann Maupin Tanya Leighton Lelong Leme Lévy Gorvy Lisson Luhring Augustine

P P.P.O.W Pace Pace/MacGill Parra & Romero Franklin Parrasch Peres Projects Perrotin Petzel Plan B Gregor Podnar Eva Presenhuber Proyectos Monclova

M Magazzino Mai 36 Maisterravalbuena Jorge Mara - La Ruche Matthew Marks Marlborough Mary-Anne Martin Philip Martin Jaqueline Martins Barbara Mathes Mazzoleni Miles McEnery Greta Meert Anthony Meier Menconi + Schoelkopf Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Victoria Miro Mitchell-Innes & Nash Mnuchin Modern Art The Modern Institute mor charpentier

O Nathalie Obadia OMR

R Ratio 3 Almine Rech Regen Projects Revolver Roberts Projects Nara Roesler Tyler Rollins Thaddaeus Ropac Michael Rosenfeld Lia Rumma S Salon 94 SCAI The Bathhouse Esther Schipper Thomas Schulte Marc Selwyn Jack Shainman Sicardi Ayers Bacino Sies + Höke Sikkema Jenkins Jessica Silverman

Simões de Assis Skarstedt Fredric Snitzer Société Sperone Westwater Sprüth Magers Nils Stærk Christian Stein Stevenson Luisa Strina T Templon Thomas Tilton Tornabuoni Travesía Cuatro V Van de Weghe Van Doren Waxter Vedovi Vermelho Vielmetter W Waddington Custot Nicolai Wallner Wentrup Michael Werner White Cube Z Zeno X David Zwirner Nova Antenna Space Barro blank Carlos/Ishikawa Central Fine Chapter NY Company Anat Ebgi Thomas Erben James Fuentes Ghebaly Mariane Ibrahim Isla Flotante JTT David Lewis Josh Lilley Linn Lühn Edouard Malingue moniquemeloche Morán Morán Nanzuka

Jérôme Poggi ROH Projects Anita Schwartz Tiwani Contemporary Positions Sabrina Amrani Christian Andersen Bendana-Pinel Maria Bernheim Callicoon Commonwealth and Council Cooper Cole Document Agustina Ferreyra M+B Madragoa Magician Space Project Native Informant Marilia Razuk Edition Cristea Roberts Crown Point Gemini G.E.L. Carolina Nitsch Pace Prints Paragon Polígrafa Susan Sheehan STPI Two Palms ULAE Survey 10 Chancery Lane acb Almeida Nicelle Beauchene Tibor de Nagy espaivisor Eric Firestone Hackett Mill Hales Pippy Houldsworth Instituto de visión Mitterrand Parker Louis Stern Venus Over Manhattan waldengallery

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Waste of time 85

2019 Asian Art Biennial: The Strangers from beyond the Mountain and the Sea National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung City 5 October – 9 February A common feng shui feature, a spinning ball on top of a water fountain, is said to circulate positive energy around a room. A strange version has been commissioned for this biennial, made with materials sourced from Zomia, a highland region in Southeast Asia that has, because of its remoteness, historically existed outside the control of any government. In Taichung, the fountain structure is constructed out of jadeite mined from the conflict-ridden Kachin state on the border between Myanmar and China, and the ‘water’ that flows around this is methamphetamine-laced urine from Thai drug users. Meth is another Zomia product: according to a report published by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group earlier this year, the jungle labs of Myanmar’s Shan state cook most of the word’s crystal meth. Comprising dodgy substances harvested from lawless areas and recombined into unusual harmonies, this work (Friction Current: Magic Mountain, 2019, by artist duo Jiandyin) could serve as the centrepiece of the show. Artist-curators Hsu Chia-Wei, from Taiwan, and Ho Tzu Nyen, from Singapore, ask: ‘How to rethink the unfinished project of Asian decolonisation?’ Their answers? Get high. Consult the I Ching. Ponder a rock. Featuring 30 artists and collectives, and celebrating new, funky orthodoxies forged from often esoteric and proudly shady sources, this is an elegantly conceived boutique biennial guided by a central geographical schema. According to the curators, the mountain in the exhibition’s title refers to Zomia, and the sea refers to the Sulu Sea, a body of water around Malaysia’s Sabah state and the Philippines. It is also a notorious hotspot for piracy, robbery and kidnapping. The hope is that these untamed frontier lands and porous borders can inspire an adventurous, open-ended state of mind, and prompt us to embrace an ongoing process of transformation and becoming. On a literal level, the geographical trope throws up materials derived from places with fuzzy boundaries. There are stones from the area around the Teesta River that crosses the

slippery border between India and Bangladesh (Shilpa Gupta, Song of the Ground, 2017), and eerie inspection videos of underwater internet cables running beneath the no-man’s -land of the high seas (Charles Lim, Alpha 3.9: silent clap of the status quo, 2016). More poetically, but less frequently in the show, there are works that move away from rational frameworks into other forms of knowledge, such as Tcheu Siong’s dreams of guardian spirits of the highland Hmong people, depicted in embroidered cloth panels (Three Hmong Protectors 3, 2018). Despite the occasional mystic, this is, for the most part, a heavily intellectual show. Most of its pleasures are slow and long, involving complex, research-heavy investigations into historical figures and moments, which are sometimes deathly dry, sometimes luminous and surprising, but always require patient attendance. A good example of this is the 40-minute video Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018), in which Liu Chuang takes viewers on a journey through, among other things, dams in Asia, bitcoin mines that sprang up near the hydroelectric plants, ethnic minorities in Zomia and sci-fi movie characters apparently inspired by them. Or you could ponder any one of four Lee Ufan works. The Mono-ha granddaddy is a bit of a surprise addition, but it is the logical conclusion to the curators’ radical impulse to decentralise. In an ideal world where nowhere is the centre, everywhere is the centre. The uncompromising stillness of Lee’s compositions, which is in fact a dynamic tension between the artwork, viewer and her surroundings, creates these special sites. Henry David Thoreau wrote that ‘in Wildness is the preservation of the world’ (Walden, 1854). There are wild places on the map, and also wild places within human experience. The best works in the exhibition honour the multitudinous unknowability of the world. They re-endear us to the world by taking us to its darkest, or least endearing places. Nationalism, fanaticism and the sublime meet in Park Chan-kyong’s extraordinary

facing page, top Jiandyin (Jiradej Meemalai and Pornpilai Meemalai), Friction Current: Magic Mountain, 2019, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists

two-channel video installation Kyoto School (2017). The work coalesces around the Kegon Falls in Japan, the Kyoto School philosophers and kamikaze pilots. Kegon Falls was a popular spot for youth suicides in the early twentieth century and also an image favoured by the Kyoto School, an influential movement of the twentieth century that integrated Western thought with Eastern ideals of nothingness. Some of its members were pro-war. Displayed on one screen are quotations from ‘The Standpoint of World History and Japan’, a 1941 roundtable of scholars from the Kyoto School on the cusp of Japan’s entry into the Second World War. From this account, you get an idea of what has been projected on Kegon Falls as a symbol – the sublime, the absolute, noble sacrifice, the spirit of Japan and world history, and so on. The other screen features excerpts from the diaries of the kamikaze pilots. Faced with their impending martyrdom, these soldiers, often university students steeped in Western literature and philosophy, wrote passionately about thinkers and writers such as Friedrich Schiller and Émile Zola. In contrast to their elders, the youths reached out to the world, and did not attempt to conquer it. ‘I found in Thomas Mann, my painful longing for death since my boyhood.’ Desperate times begot poetry. ‘My time is crying. My watch is laughing.’ Sometimes there was grim acceptance. ‘Tomorrow / I shall plunge into a group of enemy aircraft carriers. / If you perform a memorial service, the date should be April 10.’ The ultranationalism of one generation contrasted with the cosmopolitanism of the next; abstracted notions of sacrifice juxtaposed with those actually doing the dying – those two worlds converge on Kegon Falls, a place of beauty and death. Park has no commentary. A slideshow plays views of the majestic falls, a long view of its silvery sheets and a closeup of the rocks below. And of course, the eternal crashing water. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Shilpa Gupta, Song of the Ground, 2017, mechanical installation with borderland river stones, 79 × 22 × 18 cm. Photo: Tom Callemin. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins & Havana

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Winter 2019

Then White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney 11 September – 26 January Here are rows of schoolchildren, dressed identically in yellow polo shirts and red Young Pioneer neckerchiefs. They raise their arms above their heads and over their chests, moving in unison as if their bodies are attached to invisible strings. A girl in a ponytail flashes a toothy smile at the camera. She hitches up her shorts, a small movement, but big enough to create a glitch in the collective formation. She falls out of sync with her classmates, and in a second the spell is broken. The Times Are Summoning, a 2007 videowork by Chinese artist Meiya Lin, occupies a darkened chamber on the first floor of Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery. The work, which is based on the compulsory calisthenics lessons the artist endured as a schoolgirl growing up in Xiamen, unfolds to a dark-yet-jaunty soundtrack: cheery percussion punctuated by barked instructions. It’s hard to come up with a better sonic metaphor for the gallery’s much-anticipated tenthanniversary exhibition, Then. The show brings together over 60 artworks from the collection of Judith Neilson, the Zimbabwe-born founder of White Rabbit Gallery and a philanthropist who first started visiting artists’ studios in China during the 1990s, alongside Wang Zhiyuan, the Chinese artist who introduced her to the country’s explosive art scene. Then focuses on defining works from the gallery’s exhibitions

programme, showcasing the depth and complexity of a country that’s all too easily flattened and exoticised in the Australian imagination, a mission that White Rabbit, one of Australia’s rare privately funded museums, has undertaken since its inception. Then is also a cultural document of the ways in which China’s dizzying trajectory of globalisation and urbanisation is reshaping and rupturing the country’s social fabric. This surreal new reality is best seen through the artists who – via audacity, artistry and sheer inventiveness – are responding to these shifts in radical and playful ways. Over the last 35 years, nearly 500 million people have moved to Chinese megacities from rural areas. These migrants often eke out precarious livings as labourers or vendors on the fringes of cities that glitter with wealth, like Shanghai and Beijing. A narrow corridor that leads to The Times Are Summoning plays host to Chinese Offspring (2005), Zhang Dali’s elegy for the undocumented workers who have enabled China’s newfound prosperity. Twenty lifesize bodies made of resin, their backs branded with their village of origin, hang upside down from the ceiling. Their ankles are bound like animals awaiting slaughter, their identities as interchangeable as the Uber Eats workers who crisscross the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. These are the bodies of the gig economy, where,

Then, 2019 (installation view). Courtesy White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney

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trapped in a new kind of wage slavery, people are reduced to meat. Of course, women have always understood objectification. But throughout art history, Chinese women – like many women across South Asia, Africa and the Pacific – have been fetishised and infantilised, forever deemed objects of consumption by the West. On the second floor of the gallery, photographer Han Lei’s Pan Jinlian Who Performs as a Rabbit Girl (2008) recasts Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) as a middle-aged Chinese woman in fishnet socks and bunny ears. She looks squarely at the viewer, chin up, the subject of her own fantasies. If that image subverts the erotics of looking and longing, Wang Zhiyuan’s Object of Desire (2008) casts romantic want as a consumerist impulse. His enormous fibreglass sculpture of neon-pink underpants hum to the voice of Zhou Xuan, an iconic singer who lived in 1930s Shanghai. As China’s economic imperatives become increasingly bound up in Australia’s future, the work – strange yet strikingly familiar – feels less like an exotic artefact than a recovered memory. Its blinking neon lights evoke a sense of shared cultural nostalgia that also winks at the countries’ intertwined destinies. But here, Xuan’s plaintive love songs are rendered as cheap and disposable as garish lingerie, the relics of a world that commodifies all that is human in us. Neha Kale

Eavesdropping City Gallery Wellington 17 August – 17 November I had always taken Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) to be little more than a psychological thriller set in the world of surveillance. But then I read media theorist Thomas Levin’s analysis of the film’s final scene. Surveillance expert Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman, searches for a bug in his own apartment. He rips the wallpaper from the walls and tears up the floorboards. The scene is shot from an angle that places the camera outside the apartment – above the ceiling and beyond the walls – a position that is, in Levin’s words, ‘epistemologically unavailable’ to Caul. ‘Surveillance’, Levin writes, ‘has become the condition of narration itself.’ Eavesdropping, curated by Joel Stern and James Parker at City Gallery Wellington, assembles thirteen works by eight contemporary artists and collectives exploring the act of eavesdropping and the positions the act establishes. The show also intervenes in the relationship between eavesdropper and eavesdropped, drawing attention to, and problematising, the epistemological distance between listeners (or devices) and the listenedto (most of us, most of the time). A number of the works engage in a kind of ‘forensic’ listening. In Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s audio installation Saydnaya (The Missing 19db) (2016), former prisoners at Bashar al-Assad’s notorious detention centre near Damascus detail the conditions of their detention. Blindfolded,

they gleaned understandings of their surroundings largely through sound. We hear the interviews, conducted in collaboration with Amnesty International, of prisoners detained at Saydnaya before and after the Arab Spring in 2011, whose testimonies aid Abu Hamdan in identifying a significant decrease in environmental volume (to an estimated at 19 decibels). Silence was enforced as uprisings spread across the region, and any prisoner who spoke was now violently punished, or killed. Abu Hamdan’s video Rubber-Coated Steel (2016), meanwhile, uses real sonic evidence and a fictional judicial framing to demonstrate that Israeli soldiers who shot and killed two Palestinian teenagers in 2014 had attempted to disguise the sound of live ammunition as rubber bullets. The tip in this case comes from Palestinian protesters who are attuned to sonic characteristics of gunfire – direction, calibre, steel vs rubber bullets – to which even forensics experts are deaf. Played through headphones, Susan Schuppli’s The Missing 18 ½ Minutes (2018) offers a recording of the eponymous duration of redacted tape from Richard Nixon’s extensive archive of audio surveillance. Ironically, the very absence of the voices speaks eloquently of Nixon’s crimes. A collaboration between the Manus Recording Project Collective, which comprises six prisoners at Australia’s Manus Regional Processing Centre, and three artists

outside the refugee detention centre is realised as 84 ten-minute audio recordings (totalling 14 hours) that play consecutively in a black box space. Recorded at different points during the day, they provide a fragmented portrait of the immigrants’ lives in detention: talking, singing, listening to recorded music, cooking. A kind of double eavesdropping emerges. The audience listens in – to life in detention under a neoliberal and racist regime – while the detainees listen out – on the wider world, via the snatches of music on the radio, news bulletins or sports commentaries. The distance that Levin identifies in The Conversation is transposed, in Eavesdropping, to a set of geopolitical spaces: identity positions, tribalisms, governments and the governed. Eavesdropping becomes a description of our position as subjects-cum-objects in a world where everything is overheard, recorded and algorithmically filtered. Sound is so often epistemologically unavailable: signals arriving from distant times and places. It’s also vulnerable to capture by distant listeners. Out of sight may be out of mind, but in our wired world it’s never out of earshot. The works gathered in Eavesdropping insist that the epistemological distance that separates listener from listenedto is always also an ethical distance. Contrary to common appeals to the political ‘voice’, power in the Age of Alexa may reside more meaningfully in the ear. Seth Kim-Cohen

Susan Schuppli, The Missing 18½ Minutes (detail), 2018, sound installation and archival images. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2019

Okayama Art Summit 2019: if the snake Various venues, Okayama 27 September – 24 November Almost every art festival in Japan is tasked with revivifying the local landscape, but the second edition of the triennial Okayama Art Summit, curated by French artist Pierre Huyghe and titled if the snake, aims at replacing the historic geography of old Okayama with links to the spaces of fiction and technology. At the opening, Huyghe spoke softly of wanting to augment visitors’ experiences and have them feel like witnesses not spectators, connected and transformed by the works they encounter. Among the works by 17 artists and collectives, Mika Tajima’s New Humans (2019) at the Tenjinyama Cultural Plaza embodies the vague identities of social media. A black ferrofluid pool installed in the floor morphs into a waving grid as viewers wander past, catching their reflection in the patterns shaped by data gathered from online profiles. This magnetic primordial soup, like other installations in the exhibition, is constantly generating new forms. Rather than draw you into the exhibition, promising enlightenment, if the snake challenges your reasons for being there in the first place. The digital voice of Huyghe’s animated fictional character Annlee drifts through the Hayashibara Museum of Art from the short video Two Minutes Out of Time (2000), spelling out this challenge in no uncertain terms: “I’m haunted by your imagination, and that’s what I want from you. See, I’m not here for your amusement. You are here for mine!” Also featuring a fictional female protagonist, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni’s mixedmedia installation The Form of Not (Infantia), The Unmanned, Season 3 (2019), located at the

former Uchisange elementary school, imagines this figure from the future through an arrangement of found objects that tell the story of her origin. The narrative is also delivered by the looping video The Everted Capital (1971–4936) (2019), which is edited in real time using artificial intelligence. The work employs machine learning to generate a deepfake clip of Richard Nixon lip-synced to a Japanese woman’s voice. The timeline of the installation’s narrative, which jumps back and forth between historical events and a world that does not yet exist, presents an uncanny collision of past, present and future. Elsewhere on the same site, Pamela Rosenkranz’s Skin Pool (Oromom) (2019) fills the outdoor swimming pool with pink dye and thickener. Over it looms a giant led screen showing John Gerrard’s self-perpetuating computer simulation and sci-fi cinema mashup X. laevis (Spacelab) (2017), which also uses machine learning technology to depict a frog suspended in zero gravity. Etienne Chambaud’s bronze plinth Calculus (2019) recreates Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1903) minus the figure, and surrounds it with a sand dune. Beyond the treeline, Rosenkranz’s robotic snake Healer (Waters) (2019) independently navigates its surroundings using sensory technology developed for search-and-rescue apparatus. It is, for the time being, confined to the school’s sumo dohyō ring. In the nearby gymnasium, Fernando Ortega’s Untitled (Fly Electrocutor) (2003) causes lights inside to briefly black out each time a fly strikes the device hanging from the ceiling.

It is surprising how rarely this happens given the heat and humidity, but when it does, the effect is profound. Such use of serendipity, weather and drama recalls The Play, the elusive Japanese collective who, during the 1970s and 80s, waited endlessly on lightning to charge their own work. Carefully arranged on the floor below Ortega’s fly zapper, Tarek Atoui’s Bitter Beats and Wild Synths / the wave (2019) produces a synchronised wall of sound from nine separate instruments made by musicians from around the world. Each consists of stone, bone, a mixture of electronics and percussion; their combined sound slowly building until the largest piece – Horns of Putin (2014–19) – blows and calls every instrument to order. Back in the Hayashibara Museum of Art, Tino Sehgal’s performance Ann Lee (2019) casts a real Japanese girl as the digital Annlee from Two Minutes Out of Time (2000). The performer drifts into the space before describing the shock of seeing another young girl in a painting that remains nameless. The intensity swells when suddenly she breaks the fourth wall and asks the small assembled crowd to name their favourite artwork: spiked by fear, embarrassment and surprise, few of us respond. if the snake is less interested in ‘being’ and more preoccupied with ‘becoming’, and so Huyghe engineers a fiction that confuses the space between the work of art and the city where it occurs. When artworks are able to self-generate, do humans become obsolete by their own design? Stare into the abyss of Tajima’s New Humans and the abyss will stare back. Stuart Munro

Mika Tajima, New Humans, 2019, installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Ola Rindal. Courtesy the artist and Taro Nasu, Tokyo

ArtReview Asia

Okoyama Art Summit: if the snake, 2019 (intallation view, Uchisange elementary school). Photo: Ola Rindal

Winter 2019

16th Istanbul Biennial The Seventh Continent Various venues, Istanbul 14 September – 10 November You might think that the curator of a major international exhibition would shy away from comparisons with Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), in which a European rubber baron works a cast of indigenous labourers to death in order to realise his dream of an opera house in the Amazon. Particularly when the exhibition takes for its subject the ecological catastrophe set in motion by the exploitation of natural resources and proposes that we should look beyond the systems of knowledge enshrined in canonical Western art. So eyebrows were raised when Nicolas Bourriaud, speaking at the opening of the 16th Istanbul Biennial, chose a film famous for the catalogue of disasters that dogged its shoot as analogy for his experience of putting the show together. Beyond its focus on capitalism’s impact on the environment (the titular ‘seventh continent’ describes the vast island of discarded plastic floating around in the Pacific), the biennial’s most obvious parallel to a story about hauling a steamship over a mountain is the last-minute relocation of more than 40 projects from a site in the Istanbul Shipyards that was found to be riddled with asbestos. The replacement is a waterfront warehouse in the final stages of its transformation into the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture, a maze of steel walkways and purposefully sterile spaces in the institutional style. The impacts of this chaotic resettlement are not immediately apparent, as visitors are welcomed into the exhibition by Dora Budor’s minimalist installation of three standing glass chambers clouded by different shades of prettily coloured fog. Closer inspection of the interior of Origin iii (Snow Storm) (2019) reveals small geysers that intermittently puff out tinted dust particles

into its sealed atmosphere, the eruptions of which are determined (according to a wall text) by noise from neighbouring construction works. The work successfully dramatises ideas that the visitor might expect to become motifs of an exhibition addressed to art in the Anthropocene: the aestheticisation of climate change (the colours allude to the skies painted by J.M.W. Turner, their dramatic hues later attributed to atmospheric pollution); the transgression of boundaries separating art from the world, which is to say nature from culture; the partial surrender of authorship to environmental factors beyond the artist’s control. And yet this promising start, indebted in formal and conceptual terms to the ever-more influential work of Pierre Huyghe, is not followed up. Moving through the building, the visitor encounters different ways of encoding a disorderly world in art – among them Agnieszka Kurant’s Conversions (2019), an lcd screenpainting that likewise outsources its compositional intelligence and calls to mind (although it suffers by the comparison) Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment (1965) – but the overwhelming impression is of branching paths that soon peter out. Reorganising the show to fit a different architecture at such short notice is bound to upset any curatorial scheme, but the intellectual framework for the exhibition is so broadly defined (‘a relational anthropology,’ says Bourriaud, ‘which endeavours to account for all of the existing modes of thought or life’) as to be unaccountable. There is little sense of the coordination of ideas into a coherent proposition, even a ‘relational’ one, though interesting themes emerge in isolation. Take for an example the patchwork monster at the centre of Eva

facing page, top Agnieszka Kurant, Conversions #1, 2019, liquid crystal ink on copper plate, Peltier elements, Arduino, custom programming, transistors, 125 × 94 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

Kot’átková’s Machine for Restoring Empathy (2019), a room-size installation and functioning sewing workshop, which could be read as suggesting that recycling unsettles the fixed identities on which a consumerist society depends. Which is to say that if you can get used to the idea that materials can serve different purposes – can be rehabilitated and reincorporated into new things – then you are less likely to see the world as a collection of discrete objects, organisms and people with a finite shelf-life, like all those single-use bottles clogging up the ocean. The transfer of materials and energies is also a subject of Jonathas De Andrade’s O Peixe (2016), which films Amazonian fishermen at their work. Each of these vignettes concludes with a barechested man clutching a fish to his chest, seeming to comfort the animal through its passage into the next life (and, one presumes, his belly). The impulse to well up over this interspecies empathy is tempered by the lurking suspicion that the artist is playing with the liberal pieties of his audience, but the film suggests a way of life that does not privilege the individual human subject even as it parodies the artworld’s tendency to fetishise anything resembling ‘authentic indigeneity’. Elsewhere, the inclusion of artists such as Suzanne Husky – whose New Age-y film Earth Cycle Trance (or Tree Cycle) (2019) follows a witch, priestess and sacred earth activist named Starhawk – feels like a gesture towards non-Enlightenment traditions of thought to which the show as a whole does not subscribe. Indeed, it can be argued that the anthropocentrism rejected by Husky finds its highest expression in the designation of our geological era as the Anthropocene, a word sprinkled liberally through the exhibition literature.

facing page, bottom Dora Budor, Origin iii (Snow Storm), 2019, custom environmental chamber, organic and synthetic pigments, diatomaceous earth, fx dust, felt, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle Basel

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Winter 2019

ArtReview Asia

The transdisciplinary Feral Atlas Collective draws attention – through case studies into the environmental effects of major infrastructural projects – to some of the controversies surrounding the artworld’s latest pet term. A three-part installation of videos, poems and reports demonstrates how the notion that humanity has unilaterally shaped the biosphere implies the possibility of control over it, and how misleading is the assumption that humans could ever be the guardians (and by extension masters) of nature. That delusion was contradicted at the dawn of the Industrial Era by the Romantic experience of the natural world, a state which Deniz Aktaş’s monumental drawings (such as Independent Variable, 2018) flips on its head. A vast heap of tyres suggests something like an artificial sublime in which nature, in an inversion of the landscapes of Turner or Caspar David Friedrich, is overwhelmed by humanity. Yet talk of undermining the division of nature and culture led me to expect an exhibition that did more in its staging to upset conventions of inside and outside, for all that individual works by Suzanne Treister and Korakrit Arunanondchai challenge the separations of self and other. It is perhaps revealing that the symbol chosen for ecological crisis is a distant ‘seventh continent’ – which most of us will never glimpse – rather than the credit card of plastic that each of us now ingests every week, with who knows what consequences. An exception to the lingering feeling that the art was on the whole too thoroughly insulated from the world, tucked away safely in institutional spaces, was provided by Hale Tenger’s Appearance (2019), the pick of several works stationed on Büyükada Island in the Sea of Marmara. Set in the grounds of a handsomely ruined palace, this sound installation featuring

a poem by the artist was complemented by mirrored obsidian sculptures dotted around a scruffy garden. I can’t speak for the poem, but the artist’s provision of a space in which to reflect on the creative potential of overgrowth, decay and nonintervention was welcome. There has recently been a tendency in the artworld, apparent in the sf craze of recent years, to confuse alternative ways of thinking with the creation of fictional realities. Visitors to the Pera Museum, the biennial’s third and final venue, will have an abundance of time to reflect on this false equivalence. Again the presentation starts promisingly: a large part of the third floor is occupied by a display of artefacts from the Llhuroscian civilisation dreamed up by Norman Daly and preserved in devotional objects that closely resemble mid-twentieth-century hand tools (such as the Icon of Shoor-noo from the Temple of Phallus at Draikum, a wood clamp dated to the civilisation’s ‘middle period’), alongside similarly droll assemblages, catalogue entries, poems and quasi-archaic marble carvings. The appeal of the fantasy world created by Daly, who was from 1942 to 1999 a teacher at Cornell University, is that it does not seem designed to carry any allegorical weight beyond its own witty and entirely consistent internal logic. The consequence is that it’s possible, counterintuitively, to invest it with all kinds of speculative significances that seem pertinent to the biennial’s theme: it is revealing of the human compulsion to build worlds; plays on the relationship between the status of an object and its framing narrative; and pokes fun at the conventions of anthropology and the designation of nonWestern cultural products as artefacts rather than art. By comparison, the dystopian island society imagined by Charles Avery’s superficially similar The Islanders (2004–) feels more like

facing page, top Hale Tenger, Appearance, 2019, black obsidian mirrors, iron, epoxy resin, paint, water, audio-spotlight speaker, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Galeri Nev, Istanbul

a vehicle through which to deliver a message. As one walks through the museum’s three floors, an apparently endless series of works (including Paul Sietsema’s trompe l’oeil films and the paintings of Piotr Uklański) seem designed to lure viewers into misreading the presented information, only to then ‘surprise’ them with the unexpected news that knowledge is fallible and history is fabricated. My frustration at being so repeatedly beaten over the head was exacerbated by reacquaintance (in a curated exhibition at Arter, not part of the biennial) with Jonas Mekas’s short film Reminiszenzen aus Deutschland (Recollections of Germany, 1971/1993, edited 2012). This account of the Lithuanian filmmaker’s wartime incarceration in German labour camps offered a reminder of how it is possible formally to communicate the ways in which history is constructed – through montage, stills and voiceover, in Mekas’s case – while at the same time contributing to the memorialisation of an event that must not be forgotten. I was left with the question of what it means – in a city where artists and journalists who draw attention to inconvenient historical truths risk imprisonment – for this exhibition to focus instead on alternative realities or, as they have elsewhere been called, facts. It’s hard to escape the feeling that a comparable suspicion of authority (whether scientific or historical) underpins denial of the climate disaster that the biennial affects to protest, and beyond that to speculate on precisely how much carbon and plastic was produced in the process of making it. This isn’t to take a position on ethical issues that aren’t easily resolved, but rather to propose that a biennial that recognises the ‘end of the separation between nature and culture’ could foreground its own implication in the complex problems it identifies. Ben Eastham

facing page, bottom Norman Daly, Civilization of Llhuros (detail), 1972, artefacts, sounds, texts, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist’s estate

Winter 2019

Inhwan Oh My Own Blind Spots Commonwealth and Council & Baik Art, Los Angeles 21 September – 2 November A masturbatory moment is literally and symbolically a moment stolen for oneself, staged within what one might call a private exclusion zone, adjacent to the daily grind and away from the prying eyes of those who enforce social control. The political implications of this pilfered time – borrowed but never returned, and snagged for myriad reasons – are Inhwan Oh’s focus in this exhibition. Jointly presented by Los Angeles galleries Commonwealth and Council and Baik Art, the exhibition is a two-for-one affair. In both galleries, cctv cameras loom, monitors glow and stripes of pink tape ladder up walls and across ceilings in broad, irregular shapes. The dominant tape designs are a work titled Reciprocal Viewing System (2017), and despite a sense of play suggested by the cotton-candy hue, the work is an exercise in paranoid selfawareness. The pink areas are where the cameras cannot see (blindspots created by the galleries’ architectures); the live-feed monitors show where they do. One monitor in each gallery displays video footage of the gallery in which it is installed. The surrounding pink is not visible on the screen, and viewers respond to this curiosity by teetering back and forth along the boundary between the surveilled and the unseen, between the pink and the plain, watching themselves

slip in and out of sight. Another monitor displays footage from the gallery across town. An occasional figure or bemused face floating across the screen is a reminder that a second camera installed above is always transmitting from one to the other sister venue, and that there is also here. The lesson: never get too comfortable. Reciprocal Viewing System is a model for demonstrating, in the controlled environment of an art gallery, the psychological and behavioural effects of surveillance in pro-panoptic societies, and it addresses Oh’s insistence that, to quote his website, the ‘cultural blindspot is not an ideological conception, but a reality of the ordinary life’. Interviews conducted in another videowork, My Blind Spot – Interview (2014–15), drive this point home. Discharged South Korean soldiers recall the haunts in which they found provisional escape from their demanding military lifestyle and where they also, of course, masturbated. Situation rooms, command posts, closets and rooftops were but a few of their ‘perfect spots’. One interviewee portrays the hunt for private spaces as though it were a thrilling game, hinting that the clandestine pursuit was itself often erotic. His sentiments parallel those expressed by gay men to whom cruising for sex is as much about exploring secretive forests,

bathhouses or public toilets as it is about the encounters that their explorations yield. Within cultures where views on sex, in particular homosexuality, are conservative – like they are in Korea – and where gender and sexuality are factors in discrimination – like they are in most places – blindspots such as cruising locales are quintessential sites of pleasure and resistance. Thus, My Blind Spot – Interview celebrates finding ways to subvert the authoritarian gaze that are compatible with, if not explicitly linked to, queer sexual politics, and it offers an example wherein blindspots (to paraphrase Judith Butler) make lives liveable. The most striking aspect of My Blind Spot – Interview is the attention granted the descriptions of the soldiers’ pathways to their hideouts. That each man recalls the route in perfect detail is evidence that their blindspots were crucial to their wellbeing. Oh returns to these descriptions in other works such as On My Way to Blind Spots – Los Angeles (2019), a video playing from a monitor mounted to the ceiling of Commonwealth and Council, in which he follows the soldiers’ spoken directions while walking through an entirely different urban context. In so doing, he broadens the cultural specificity of his project and indicates, obliquely but with confidence, that blindspots can be found anywhere, at any time. Patrick J. Reed

My Own Blind Spots, 2019 (installation view, Baik Art, Los Angeles). Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, and Baik Art, Los Angeles

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Mit Jai Inn Actants Silverlens Gallery, Manila 21 September – 19 October Mit Jai Inn’s first solo show in the Philippines (his work was included in a group show, also at Silverlens, last year) sees the Chiang Maibased artist continuing his experiments with the painted canvas as movable object via three new bodies of work. In Actants, movement and transformation play out in tandem. These vivid, striped, unframed, open-ended paintings play with the experience of space and scale by encouraging the audience to move around them and, in some cases, to touch and change them. Making good use of the gallery’s high ceilings, Screens (2019) is a group of enormous chalky white and colourful canvases cut into strips like banners and displayed at various widths and lengths. The works, hung from the ceiling, surround the viewer – who can pass under and around them, to a canvas at the far side of the room, which extends off the wall and along the floor to form an L-shape. That these works are painted on both sides – meaning there is no back or front, no right side from which

to view them – completes the experience of being engulfed. In another room, a series of three wide beltlike strips of canvas hang from the wall, their ends placed side by side, forming a half loop or a twisted, colourful necklace (Loops, 2019). Each loop is further split into strips, with each of those painted with a combination of two or three textured shades that make looking at the work similar to figuring out the interconnecting blocks of a Rubik’s Cube. Dream Works (1999/2019) comprises tiles of frayed and slit canvas mounted on the wall into a grid so that they appear to form a larger work. Previous works from the same series are also present, showing how a canvas tile with slits might be folded in myriad ways. The artist uses oil paint, linseed oil and a palette knife to make his work layered and stiff enough to hold its form without a stretcher, yet pliable enough to take on another shape. In another series, titled Scrolls (2019), rolled canvas works are displayed on their edges like

unravelling spirals. The insides of the scroll are painted in colourful vertical stripes, while the outsides are predominantly white with neon streaks of colour on a textured surface similar to rocky soil or tree bark. The same flow of movement and displacement can be seen in the two Patch Works (2019, one with thick, sandwiched ribbons of canvas and the other interspersed with blank spaces). In both wallmounted works, loose strips are woven and tied together, or left casually unspooling on the floor, alluding to cultures that use ribbons as markers for blessings and celebrations. In narrative terms, ‘actant’ refers to the archetypal and binary roles that structure stories – hero and villain, for example; something demonstrated by Mit, not only through the tension created by his woven, cut and frayed canvas strips, but also through the artist’s trespassing of the restrictions and boundaries of what a painting, sculpture and audience could and should be. Josephine V. Roque

Actants, 2019 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Silverlens Gallery, Manila

Winter 2019

Korakrit Arunanondchai Secession, Vienna 13 September – 10 November The stairwell linking the Secession’s foyer to the gallery showing Korakrit Arunanondchai’s videowork has been frescoed with long-stemmed green leaves and branches that curve up and over the walls and ceiling. The effect, for visitors still shaking off the Viennese drizzle, is to infuse this sterile connecting space with a resuscitating warmth and wildness. Onto this trompe l’oeil trellis (which chimes with the gilded foliage on the building’s famous dome) are hung several small unframed paintings executed in a naive style. They include portraits of the artist’s grandmother at rest and a winged figure whose slicked-back hair and green body paint suggest Arunanondchai’s occasional collaborator, the similarly attired performance artist Boychild. Both the portraits and the mural in which they are entwined incorporate dried flowers. It seems apt that an artist so preoccupied with linking cultures, spaces and states of mind should use an interstitial space to join his life with art. The desire to integrate also drives the Bangkok-born, New York-based artist’s together with history in a room filled with people with funny names (2012–), screened in the darkened upstairs gallery. This regularly updated record of the artist’s life – realised through episodic narratives that fictionalise his experience, incorporating cameos from friends and family members

– combines sincerity and irony, spiritualism and scepticism. I enter during the third of five episodes in this ‘living archive’, presented here as a looping series on a single large screen. The artist’s surrogate is dousing himself in paint before pressing his bare torso onto a strip of denim, a routine inspired by the young woman who became a sensation after doing the same on 2012’s Thailand’s Got Talent. It prompts the question of whether this figure – who seems in some respects to embody an archetype of the heroic male painter now out of fashion, in others to subvert the related hierarchies of male/female and subject/object – is to be taken seriously. The answer, here and throughout the other short videos in this evolving archive, might be yes and no. The narrative shuttles between different registers and contexts: invocations of an omniscient being (or machine) called Chantri are juxtaposed with documentary footage of the artist’s ailing grandmother; fictional interludes featuring the artist’s twin brother interleaved with recordings of a startling performance by Boychild. By turns funny and moving, pseudy and irreverent, the effect is to disarm critical expectations. That together with history is engaging, affective and eminently likeable makes the

Korakrit Arunanondchai, 2019 (installation view, Secession, Vienna). Photo: Sophie Thun. Courtesy the artist; Clearing, New York; and Carlos/Ishikawa, London

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watcher more inclined to accommodate the sometimes-sophomoric speculations delivered in voiceover. The exhibition literature, for instance, informs the audience that denim serves here to symbolise how materials and ideas move across borders; but that serge de Nîmes was named for a specific place might also reveal how meanings are lost in translation. That contradictions are symptoms of binary thinking – and that Arunanondchai is frequently cited as challenging such separations – doesn’t make them go away. Instead their framing within a narrative means that the viewer is willing to dwell on them: to use these points of friction or irresolution, as happens in every philosophical and scientific tradition, as catalysts for creative thought. Ultimately, together with history is less a coherent philosophical programme than a revealing document of a young artist’s evolution. This is to its credit. The work’s spirit of openness prompts the idea that we might be advised to interpret the world and other people generously, to look for and share connections, and to act always in good faith, even if that faith must partially be blind. Which is to say that, in an age of complexity, anger and division, the thread that binds us is compassion. Sounds sensible to me. Ben Eastham

Tang Jo-Hung Old Man. Fairy. and a Bit of Everything Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei 17 August – 10 November A few years ago, suffering a loss of hearing and having exhausted all conventional treatments, Taiwanese artist Tang Jo-Hung consulted mediums to treat his condition. The experience subsequently inspired a series of paintings called Fairy, for which he won the First Prize at the Taipei Arts Awards in 2016. The paintings are pastiches of religious imagery, combining human subjects and a private symbology: a naked Jesus in boots, a priestess with fat lips blowing smoke and a Chinese deitylike figure riding a giant fish. While not easily read, the paintings’ immediacy – fearless brushstrokes and seductive hues – suggests the urgent transcription of divine visions. But things are not quite as they seem. The fish-riding immortal, for example, has the knot of a necktie peeking out from under the collar of his magisterial robes. A costumed medium? A salaryman attaining sainthood? In his introduction to the exhibition, Tang says he doesn’t believe in the spirits and gods of religion or folklore. ‘They only exist in a world where I fantasise that I believe

in gods and I am occasionally devout.’ That might explain the enigmatic quality in these works: half-exalting, half-satirical. His Fairy series, as well as 41 other paintings, mostly from the past five years, are included in this survey. Tang’s style is predominantly influenced by Western modernisms, Edvard Munchesque Continental expressionism and the gestural vigour of Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning. He also owes a debt to Pablo Picasso (Tang completed his art studies in Spain), in the fractured Cubist surfaces that blend portrait and landscape (White Old Guy. Star. Countless Mountains, 2019). Blue and Rose Period harlequins are recast into new archetypes, such as a man-child in a pointy hat being piggybacked by an older man (Set off. Go Down a Hill. The Elderly Piggybacks the Youth, 2019). His subjects, meanwhile, draw from a variety of references: everyday life (The Goddess in Downward-Facing Dog is Looking in the Mirror at Herself, 2019), theatre (Holding up the Hat While Running in a Stage Play, 2018) and some commingling of the

two (Waiter on Roller Skates, 2018). There’s also Napoleon blowing a trumpet (Napoleon Must Win, 2019) and Faust with three arms (Fausto, 2019). Most of the scenes are staged in a timeless nowhereland of the artist’s imagination; not all of them are immediately intelligible. Others are generic portraits of Westernised human figures, rootless, which could have come from anywhere. The work is more compelling when it draws explicitly from personal experience, such as the Old Man series – a midlife crisis described on canvas – which, the artist says, was the result of him hitting forty-five. A caustic sensibility informs Seek Divine Guidance (2019), which reflects on the search for magical cures. A slender, elongated man kneels in front of a little vase emitting smoke, gazing at a tendril of mist with salacious wonder. His body is thin and hungry, and his neck cranes forward like a turtle. During seances, Tang seems to say, the spirit being consulted may not be the most frightening creature in the room. The desperado is. Adeline Chia

The Goddess in Downward-Facing Dog is Looking in the Mirror at Herself, 2019, oil on Masonite, 150 × 220 cm. Courtesy the artist

Winter 2019

Liang Luscombe Sweaty Scales Sutton Gallery, Melbourne 7 September – 5 October Installed against a canary-yellow wall, a comedy of manners plays out onscreen in Liang Luscombe Sweaty Scales (2019). Exploring the impact of racial and gendered stereotypes found in film, television and advertising media, this playfully structured narrative video features two central female characters who navigate their individual identity and sexuality through a quagmire of pop culture imagery that fetishises and typecasts Asian women. The result is an interrogation of the Western, male gaze from a contemporary, intersectional perspective. With critique delivered through observational humour and conversation, Luscombe places fresh characters against a familiar backdrop of pop culture genres such as the rom-com and web series. The highly stylised 30-minute video focuses on the social scene and self-conscious musings of young creative characters in an unnamed us city. Scripted scenes portray a thirtieth birthday party, dinner dates, seduction and sexual fantasy, building a loose narrative of romance between Oliver (Caucasian-American) and Lisa (AsianAmerican), who have been introduced by mutual friend Julie (also Asian-American). The scenes take place against a brightly coloured backdrop of makeshift props and sets, and are intercut

with shots of a narrator (the artist) speaking directly to camera. “Oliver would often get quite sweaty when he would dance at parties…,” says the narrator. This becomes an ongoing and unflattering visual gag, as the pair go on a date (to a Chinese restaurant) and Lisa gets concerned about how much Oliver seems to be sweating. When Lisa tries to talk about her career, as creative director of an advertising firm, Oliver swiftly turns the conversation to his sexual fantasies involving an elaborate ‘dragon lady’ costume. The sweating becomes more profuse as this conversation, and Oliver’s initially low-level creepiness, escalate (hence the title, Sweaty Scales). Intercut with the action are photographs of iconic imagery of Asian women, including 1930s film star Anna May Wong, an originator of the dragon-lady stereotype – a typically Chinese femme-fatale, portrayed as an enigmatic or deceitful seductress. A scene from the 1960 film The World of Suzie Wong is also included. Set in Hong Kong, it stars William Holden as Robert, an American architect/artist, and Nancy Kwang as Mei Ling (a prostitute who poses as a virgin and becomes Robert’s model). The appropriated film clip cuts to a re-creation with Lisa and Oliver in costume playing the

Sweaty Scales (still), 2019, hd digital video, 29 min 26 sec. Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

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roles of Mei Ling and Robert as they meet on the Star Ferry. Cinema has a long history of whitewashing and yellowface, which sadly continues. For all the buzz around Asian-American stories and actors taking the lead in Hollywood productions – Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Always Be My Maybe (2019), The Farewell (2019) – it has not been long since a pale and blonde Emma Stone was cast as a mixed-race Chinese-Hawaiian character in Aloha (2015). Luscombe has highlighted yellowface in a previous videowork, She inches glass to break (2018), which refers to Mickey Rooney’s clownish Japanese character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), a performance often overlooked in appraisals of the film and Rooney’s career. In a reversal of the cinematic gaze, the male character is reduced to a trope rather than a rounded character: Oliver is a Woody Allenesque skinny guy with glasses whose confidence is wildly out of balance with his talent and social grace. In sex scenes the actor is replaced with a puppet, delivering a literally wooden performance. Glimpses of the puppeteer on camera further undermine the artifice of constructed narratives and performed identities that, in this comic pastiche, Luscombe so effectively critiques. Rosemary Forde

Li Binyuan Breaking Point Rén Space, Shanghai 19 September – 26 October “He has a fan club,” someone told me when I saw Li Binyuan’s face printed on a T-shirt. Six years ago, Sohu news site nicknamed Li ‘the young streaker’ following a performance in which the ‘naked’ young man was ‘running or cycling… just to release his stress’. I was impressed by what I read of this young man, still a student of sculpture at cafa, Beijing, who sounded so full of energy even if he hadn’t yet found the best means of expressing it (Li added ‘stress release’ to his Wikipedia entry). At this solo show, the artist tests the limits of his physical energy by combining his training in sculpture with his performance works. Rén Space is housed in a three-storey 1930s building that has been restored in the traditional Shanghainese style. Crossing its delicate garden on the way in, I suddenly heard a blast from Natural History (2019), a video recording

of a performance by the artist at a disused factory in Tianjin. A screen on the wall shows the artist packing explosives under metal boxes filled with concrete, and then, having set a timer to detonate them, narrowly making his escape. He repeats the act as if it were a religious ritual. Beside the video lie several sculptures, their forms reproducing the exploded debris, representing the eruptive power of the moment and at the same time freezing it in the gallery space. Three more works on the first floor of the gallery develop this tension. In the performance Justice (2011) – shown here as a video – Li extends his arm, holding a burning firework towards the sky, frozen like a living sculpture. In Room (2019) Li ignites a strip of flammable material running across the floor and up opposite walls of a bare room with two open windows. He stands straddling this burning line, keeping

calm as if looking at a still life. In Divergent Paths (2012) the artist sits in a swivel chair at a fork in a road, forcing passing cars to stop by throwing firecrackers as he twists around. In this work as in others, Li questions the context of art in the world by situating himself at the centre of his own small universes. Li’s repetitive processes deprive every action, no matter whether it is dangerous or boring, of its conventional meaning. Rumor (2019), on the top floor, demonstrates his relationship to sculpture while reiterating that repetition is key to the artist’s narrative. In this sculptural installation, 600 giant golden arrows pierce ceramic human tongues, pinning them to the wall all around the room. The implication, perhaps, is that language fails an artist who is looking to find the body’s breaking points. Jing Jin

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Garden of Earthly Delights Gropius Bau, Berlin 26 July – 1 December I first visited Garden of Earthly Delights with my mother, a professional gardener. She identified the potted plants in Rashid Johnson’s Antoine’s Organ (2016) – a largescale installation made of a black metal structure also hosting four videos playing on small screens, soft shea-butter sculptures of abstract shapes and faceless busts, and various books important to African-American race relations and discourse (W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, Richard Wright’s Native Son, 1940, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, 2015, among others). Shortly thereafter she stood in awe in front of what appeared to be Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (which turned out to be a replica made by the School of Bosch around 50 years later, during the mid-sixteenth century) and sat down gleefully on a woven cushion to participate in Zheng Bo’s Fern as Method (2019), which provides visitors with a piece of paper, pencil and clipboard to draw one of the 22 ferns growing in the room. Her fascination with and knowledge of the life surrounding us was impressive, but it remained unclear to me whether the larger interwoven themes addressed by each of these works made an impression – maybe because of her vested interest in plants and gardens themselves, but also perhaps in part due to structural flaws. The vast majority of the 22 artists and collectives in this sprawling exhibition, curated by the institution’s director, Stephanie Rosenthal, receive their own room, and each can supposedly be located within one (or two) of five thematic areas: ‘Pairidaeza, Paradise, Utopia, Dystopia’, ‘Anthropocene, Chthulucene’, ‘Urban Gardening’, ‘Garden as a System / Structure of Thought’, and ‘Colonialism, Migration, Botany’. Johnson’s installation is slotted into the fifth, the show’s titular work into the first and third, and Zheng’s into the second and fifth. Among his

living, drawable ferns are four screens playing Pteridophilia 1–4 (2016–19), which show naked men sensually interacting with ferns in a forest; they moan and pant while devouring thick stems, or lick and caress leaves. On a wall hangs Survival Manual II (Hand-Copied 1945 “Taiwan’s Wild Edible Plants”) (2016), a series of drawings that identify plants normally deemed ‘weeds’ as useful and edible. This collection of works uses plants to form a utopian vision of the human relationship with the natural world, reframing our anthropocentric perspectives to ones that treat plants as living beings worthy of respect. Elsewhere, Pipilotti Rist’s hypnotic installation Homo Sapiens Sapiens (2005) and Heather Phillipson’s built environment Mesocosmic Indoor Overture (2019) continue this thread. Rist’s kaleidoscopic, colour-saturated film – projected onto an oval screen suspended from the ceiling to be viewed by lying on the ground among a serpentine array of pillows – depicts two nude women as they explore the artist’s Garden of Eden. In this wonderland, no sin is committed; the two Eves are one with nature, no hierarchical status is in play, no temptations nor male figures stand in their way. Meanwhile, Phillipson’s immersive installation is composed of tree trunks supporting speakers disguised as birdhouses, screens and mulch – complete with the stench of manure – carpeting the floor. In three videos, humanoid eyes appear on bright yellow plants that gaze at the fourth, glitched video. In it, fragmented worms compost biodegradable material and excrete humus where seeds can germinate; in this posthuman era, a new kind of life is born, with a mechanic voice in the background reminding visitors that this is a digital scene in a mesocosm of a world in which we, human beings, do not exist. While other inclusions, such as Tacita Dean’s 28-minute film Michael Hamburger (2007) and

facing page, top Heather Phillipson, Mesocosmic Indoor Overture (detail), 2019, multichannel video installation, dimensions variable. © the artist

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Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), pick up Johnson’s themes of colonialism, migration and (botanic) displacement, only one work in the exhibition explicitly broaches the topic of urban gardening – and it comes as a shock to the system. Remnants of Victory Gardens, a largescale urban agriculture project carried out in San Francisco from 2007 to 2009 by the organisation Futurefarmers, are presented like a bland scientific archive: photos and explanatory captions sit in a vitrine underneath two large photographs of an action in front of City Hall. In an adjacent room, Lungiswa Gqunta’s Lawn I (2019) – an array of broken glass CocaCola bottles fixed on a platform – speaks to the defences surrounding gardens in cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town (literally ‘urban gardens’) as a commentary on South Africa’s race relations: gardens are typically owned by white inhabitants and the broken glass barriers enact violence against the black citizens who dare enter the zones from which they are barred. Specific works also supposedly fit within ‘Garden as a System / Structure of Thought’, but it’s easy to argue that every artwork in this exhibition proposes a way to see the world anew, a way to restructure our relationship to nature, an alternative to the status quo. Such thematic groupings serve to give the viewer a broad understanding of the subject at hand, but they are also so vast that the definitions, as well as their allegories and overlaps, quickly become muddled, at times even tangential. Instead of the show presenting a maze of forking paths, some of which lead to dead ends, I left wondering: why not focus on two or three central paths lined with benches that allow the visitor to not only stop and smell the flowers along the way, but to stop, sit and also consider the entire garden from within? Emily McDermott

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Books Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization by Justin Marozzi Allen Lane, £25 (hardcover) The English journalist and historian Justin Marozzi frames this epic study as a corrective to current perceptions of the Arab world, both within it and without it: ‘the only thing we’re leading the world in is terrorism’ says an ‘embarrassed’ Tunisian friend quoted in the preface. Marozzi’s antidote is to examine the pinnacles of Islamic culture from the founding of Islam in the seventh century through to the oil-rich Gulf states of the twenty-first. Those pinnacles, he suggests, happen in cities (taking a cue from the Latin root of the word ‘civilisation’ and, implicitly, humanity’s current urban position). His 15 are delivered chronologically at a rate of roughly one per century: Mecca, Damascus, Baghdad (which in 1100 had a population 40 times bigger than London or Paris and about which Marozzi has previously published a monograph), Córdoba, Jerusalem, Cairo, Fez, Samarkand, Constantinople, Kabul, Isfahan, Tripoli, Beirut, Dubai and Doha. It’s the opposite in some ways of T.E. Lawrence’s romantic, ascetic pronouncements about the faith of the desert being impossible in towns. The contemporary is contrasted with the past – we encounter Baghdad amid the sound of gunfire, police sirens and Black Hawk

helicopters, and then travel back to the ninth century Abbasid city of libraries, hammams and water-powered clocks. By the end of the journey such histories begin to reverse as we enter present-day Doha, a city of high-end hotels, Rolls-Royces and luxury falcon hospitals, where 200 years ago what was then known as Bidaa comprised a fortified house, two guns, two huts and a building with a flagstaff. Arguably Marozzi never quite comes to terms with how Doha and before it Dubai and their postcolonial presents connect to Islam’s imperial pasts. In the middle are prophets, doctors, slave traders, pleasure seekers, warriors, mass murderers, scholars and merchants; Jews, Christians and Muslims briefly living in some kind of harmony in cities conquered by the Islamic sword; and, of course, in the fifteenth century, Timur’s horde rampaging across the world and leaving towers of severed heads outside a rebellious Damascus (not to mention mutilating women and massacring children) and Isfahan. Massacres crop up with rhythmic regularity from the time of the Prophet through to the mid-twentieth century; often the detailed accounting of wealth, wisdom, beauty (artistic, architectural and urbanistic) and corpses overwhelms the

complexities of any sociopolitical account. There is a sense in which Marozzi’s detailed narratives fall into a kind of cycle, however different the geography he describes: commit a massacre, become a tolerant master, watch your city rise, watch your successors become decadent, watch your city fall. Repeat. Whether this is the result of history or the author’s own fixations is something for the reader to decide. There are times when it’s the literary equivalent to watching a dishwasher cycle. And beyond its description of all that Islam gave to the world, this book’s programmatic design is to situate Islam’s highs at times when its civilisation was tolerant of others and of various interpretations of its own faith; its lows when it was not. Lessons perhaps that inform the chaotic region as it stands today. One misses, as the author concedes, citing his reliance on personal experience, an account that incorporates Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, or Pakistan. Nevertheless, Islamic Empires provides an extremely valuable overview of how Islamic civilisation rose, on multiple occasions, to greatness, how it declined and the beginnings of the ways in which it might be possible to see it rise again today. Nirmala Devi

The Coast: Twelve Parallel Short Stories by Sohrab Hura Self-published (Ugly Dog), inr 3000 / $80 (hardcover) A pair of lovers, a parrot, a bloodstained blade, a blind dog, rats fighting, people fighting, people laughing, crying, praying, holding each other, hurting one another. Each of these nighttime scenes – a few of many – is duplicated in Delhi-based photographer Sohrab Hura’s photobook and punctuated by sharp shadows or steeped in high-contrast darkness that bleeds in from the edges of the photographs. The Coast seethes with an underlying violence. Sometimes it explodes from the page (in one photo a man, pinning another down, is about to smash his victim’s head with a brick), but most often the series carries an impending sense of threat that lies just beneath the surface of the photographs, lurking behind a pattern

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of associated imagery that invites the reader to construct the book’s narrative. The Coast, produced by Hura along India’s shoreline, is accompanied by a surreal one-page story. ‘The Lost Head and The Bird’, named after a short film the photographer made in 2017, tells of a pitiful woman whose head was stolen by a jealous ex-lover and whose pet bird has escaped its cage. (There are more than a few references to the Hindu deity Ganesha in the photographs, too, but that the woman in the story is still missing her head – and functions with a ‘borrowed’ ear – suggests an inability to evaluate her own situation.) The illusion of brutality – composed by the reader’s initial interpretation of the photo series and

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related text – is ruptured by 11 additional versions of the text that are published at the end of the book. Each iteration is edited with subtle changes that alter the reader’s perception of the protagonist, throwing doubt onto how the photo series is understood. Perhaps the photo series (and story) is a parable for our contemporary sociopolitical climate, in which, say, myths are used as evidence for the superiority of one sect over another: in blurring fact and fiction, Hura throws light onto the way meanings can be manipulated by carefully sequenced pieces of information. The lesson? Remember that the way in which facts are interpreted is contingent on how they are framed. Fi Churchman

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Gathering: Political Writing on Art and Culture by Marian Pastor Roces De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde / ArtAsiaPacific Foundation, php 2,300/$77 (hardcover)

It is almost impossible now to think of the Philippines in any way that might be independent of its current political strife. Even the attempt to do so screams naivety. Marian Pastor Roces is one art critic who has always asserted, since the dictatorial era of Ferdinand Marcos, that art and life at large are inseparable. Roces’s complex and relevant writing extends beyond the Culture (big C) of what many might assume is an insulated artworld. She has shaped the way the Philippines thinks about art and consequently enjoys cult status in the circles of Filipino art-criticism. Gathering: Political Writing on Art and Culture is Roces’s first collection of essays, comprising 43 texts that document her career in critical writing in the Philippines. Significantly, this book is also the inaugural publication of a recent initiative by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, to produce monographic collections of the work of contemporary Filipino artists and writers. Gathering procures its title from a 1991 collaborative exhibition-text written with curator and critic Beth Jackson in which Roces reflects upon the show’s wider sociopolitical themes, which, she maintains, pervade the discursive art milieu. Appropriately, this anthology assembles a series of writings that reflect a multiplicity of critically rigorous and often provocative interventions into Philippine art and its byproducts. Roces organises these essays chronologically to contextualise their historical relevance. She begins with ‘Old Photographs, Recuerdos Tristes’, a 1974 essay defining photographs not as mimetic representations but objects based

on the subject’s way of seeing. Here she establishes that Filipinos have inherited their colonisers’ derogatory mindset of themselves, which in turn sets the tone for her persistent ‘emancipatory agenda’. With each text thereafter, Roces fiercely identifies various ideological hauntings from the past and criticises their complacent effects as part of her relentless desire for a better world. She lambastes art institutions such as the museum and the biennial in essays like ‘The ccp Art and Power Pas de Deux’ (1984) and ‘Nation, Comparison, and the Spectre of Art’ (2017) for their largely self-congratulatory and contradictory practice. In the former, Roces recognises that ‘outside is where most Filipinos have stayed’, whereas the Marcoses attempted to highlight Filipino artistic talent. Roces even turns her attention to otherwise sanctified figures like José Rizal and Roberto Chabet to condemn their unquestioning reception, declaring that Chabet’s ‘elusion permitted fascism’ and that he ‘lived inside that arcana; and did not and perhaps could not in truth respond to the political gravitas of Conceptual Art’. Roces also critiques overly formalised and inaccessible artistic rhetoric in texts like ‘Words’ (1994), yet her voice feels esoteric at times, with frequent markings of gratuitous poetic prose. In her otherwise very engaging essay ‘The Absence’ (2014), for example, Roces heavily embellishes, spending too much time on inflated theatrics that muddle her salient analysis of the lofty solipsism of the announcement of the Philippines’s presence at the 2015 Venice Biennale (which came after an absence

of 50 years). She likens the exhibition to a boxing match – perhaps subtly poking fun at the Filipino boxer-turned-politician Manny Pacquiao – ‘Dodging punches, ducking criticism, this Artful Dodger does get by without analytic brio. Slithering through the international art melees on the power of improv and lightning moves, s/he only cultivates the throw-away line, the quick jab, and deadpan attitude…’ The overzealous nature of her writing, however, is likely deliberate: ‘The point is not to be “objective”’, she writes in ‘Luna and Hidalgo: Vexed Modernity’ (2002). ‘On the contrary, anything short of a committed thesis on the part of any commentator is probably criminal in a country like the Philippines, so locked in deadly double-speak.’ With each sentence, Roces elicits rousing revolutionary sentiments in the reader that are particularly relevant to the country’s current troubled times. In Gathering’s very last essay, ‘Conceptual Art, Authoritarianism, 1970s, Asia’ (2018), the author includes a very brief epilogue, in which she begins: ‘Authoritarianism is on my mind because it is where I live, today’. She reminds the reader of the Philippines’s current political crisis that makes the timely publication of Gathering all the more relevant. Across Roces’s 40-plus years in criticism, her relentless commitment to change – whether in art, culture or politics – is exhilarating. Gathering refreshingly transcends any insipid ‘art for art’s sake’ arguments. Instead, art is the locus from which Roces vocalises the difficult opinions others are afraid to say. Society might be all the better for it should it decide to listen. Marv Recinto

Grandma, I Want a Penis by Dusadee Huntrakul Bangkok City City Gallery, thb 500 (hardcover) This charming tale is based on the true story of Thai artist Dusadee Huntrakul’s wife, Pat. As a child with two brothers who played ‘pee pee fencing’, she badgered her grandmother to buy her a penis from the market ‘to attach to [her] vagina’. Her grandma would tell her that the penis stall was closed or that her purchase had been left in a rickshaw. Eventually her brothers stopped their game and Pat forgot her request. ‘Thirty-six years later, in front of the Bull Rock Cave in Brno, Czech Republic, I get a call,’ the narrator, presumably Pat, continues. ‘A last

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call from grandma before she dies.’ Pat’s husband sees her grandma’s ghost that night. ‘She comes from the balcony and out through the front door.’ And nine months later… The resultant family made this book. It would be both easy and boring to slap a Freudian reading on this. The narrative, coauthored by the couple and having the simple, irresistible lines of a perfect dinner-party anecdote, is matched by playful pencil illustrations drawn by the couple, their one-year-old son, Prinn, and a friend’s five-year-old boy, Max. It isn’t

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always possible to tell the precise authorship, but there are the obvious kiddie dicks, and the more elegant, faux-naive drawings of biomorphic figures with assorted genitalia done by an adult hand. All in all, it manages to be both a credible children’s book and an artist book. It is published on the occasion of They Talk, an exhibition of Huntrakul’s recent ceramic sculptures at Bangkok City City Gallery. If you missed the show, this is a perfect stockingstuffer for your artworld friends – and their kids. Adeline Chia

In Print A roundup of new and recent publications in art, propaganda and moon architecture Most artists, even the most ardently political or outspoken, are unlikely to have a petrol bomb thrown at their studio. But then most artists don’t lead a country or make their work in the seat of its government. Edi Rama’s artmaking predates his political career as mayor of Tirana from 2000 to 2011 and then, from 2013, as prime minister of Albania. The bomb came earlier this year from opposition supporters protesting government corruption, but Rama’s day job proves more than just a dramatic hook to his drawing and sculpture, as his new monograph, Work (Hatje Cantz, €29), proves. With a nod to biomorphic surrealism, colourful watercolours are joined by abstract sketches frequently doodled during meetings, often over working documents: records, perhaps, of the subconscious that sit uneasily alongside the official minutes. Rama’s work as an artist certainly gains him positive media attention (well, it counts in his favour in ArtReview, at least), which by Jonas Staal’s reckoning means mission accomplished. The Dutch artist’s Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (mit Press, $29.95/£22.50) dislodges any belief that this kind of art is only to be found in obviously totalitarian regimes. ‘The very idea that one could stand outside of propaganda, recognize it, and as such resist it, merely because one lives in a democracy, is itself the product of propaganda,’ Staal writes. This is an engrossing overview from an artist whose projects include the New World Summit, a ‘parliament’ in which blacklisted organisations including the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and the Kurdish Women’s Movement are given space for discussion. Along the way we encounter figures such as Phil Strub, an ‘entertainment liaison’ at the us Department of Defense since 1989 whose credits include the tv series 24 (2001–14) and the Transformers franchise (2007–), and Vladimir Surkov, a theatre director and adviser to Russia’s President Putin. The economic precarity of socially engaged art is the subject of Leigh Claire La Berge’s Wages Against Artwork (Duke University Press, $26.95), an analysis of alternative economic systems set up by artists (with an odd digression into the use of animals and children as fee-free performers). Among them is Renzo Martens’s provocation, in his 2008 film Enjoy Poverty, that the poor of Congo should benefit from their destitution by selling their own images of it rather than giving away this ‘resource’ free to Western photographers. This led ArtReview, not unnaturally, to a more critical evaluation of a new photobook by Ivor Prickett, End of the Caliphate (Steidl, €45),

in which the New York Times photojournalist documents his time on the ground in Iraq and Syria as the isis regime crumbled. His images remain incredibly powerful, showing a society, but crucially not a people, in desolation. Voyaging Out by Carolyn Trant (Thames & Hudson, £24.95, pictured below) fills the gaps in a British art history written by men (as we are on the topic of not being paid enough and operating outside the dominant order) by profiling women in the artworld, stretching from the fight for suffrage and the ‘noisy feminists’ of surrealism to artists such as Sheila Fell who refused to be defined by gender. What would they have made of a new compendium titled, in have-cakeand-eat-it fashion, Great Women Artists (Phaidon, £39.95)? Standard coffee-table fare, it provides big images and small blurbs for 500 artists across a broad generational and geographical range, from Tomma Abts to Fahrelnissa Zeid. Also included are Liliane Lijn and Ana Mendieta. For a much more in-depth study of their work, alongside that of Javier Téllez, Gego and Aubrey Williams, among others, turn to The Crossing of Innumerable Paths (Ridinghouse, £25/$30), a new collection of essays by Guy Brett. The driving force behind the groundbreaking Signals gallery and magazine during the early 1960s, the British curator has long been a champion of artists from Africa and, particularly, Latin America. Brett was ahead of the curve. Today, ‘a Eurocentric view in a major international art event or exhibition… would be, if not a downright embarrassment, then certainly a point of consternation and critique’, writes curator Simon Sheikh in Curating after the Global: Roadmaps for the Present (mit Press, $39.95/£30.00), a new reader tackling the pitfalls of the globalised artworld. Yet, given this necessary internationalism, how does art stop itself from being sucked into the homogenising systems of global capital? Not a new question (in his book, Brett argues for an ‘individuality in collectivity’), but one made urgent as disorientated and uprooted communities turn to strongmen offering to restore ‘the lure of the local’ (as Lucy Lippard, who is quoted by Sheikh, had it). Among those offering a route out of this conundrum is Hajnalka Somogyi of Budapest’s grassroots off-Biennale, the first of which was staged without any state or corporate funding. The

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curator notes wryly that ‘self-exploitation never felt so good’. A celebration of the local is behind Paris and Santiago (both Dostoyevsky Wannabe Cities, £4.50 and £10.90), anthologies of stories edited by Andrew Hodgson and Jessica Sequeira respectively. They are the latest in a so-far 22strong list of works related to particular cities and gathered through open submissions. ‘What is a city?’ asks Sequeira in her introduction. ‘It is built up of desire, horror, dream, tranquillity, memory, domesticity, grit…’ If this imprint seeks to map the literature of a place (and a place in literature), then a new series of foldout maps from a Romania-based group of architecture enthusiasts provide expert introductions to a city’s Soviet-era built environment. The latest, Socialist Modernist Architecture in Chişinău (Bureau for Art and Urban Research, €20.20), follows an earlier guide to Bucharest. On its next visit to Moldova, ArtReview looks forward to checking into the once-grand Hotel Cosmos, with its ‘expressive’ facade, even if ‘today it no longer functions at full capacity nor answers the requirements of a comfortable stay’. If you think the Cosmos’s ‘dire state, in urgent need of repairs’ doesn’t sound particularly hospitable (lightweights, where’s your sense of adventure?), it might still be more relaxing than a trip into the actual cosmos. If a journey into space appeals to you, however, make sure to pack Architecture Guide: Moon (dom publishers, €38) by Berlin-based ‘3d artist, Roboticist, illustrator, neighborhood painter, outer space expert’ Paul Meuser, which charts every human-designed object to have landed by the Sea of Tranquillity in the last 60 years. Cosmic. Oliver Basciano

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Photo credits

Text credits

on the cover Eisa Jocson, Host, 2015, performance. Photo: Andreas Endermann. Courtesy the artist

Words on the spine and on pages 21, 51 and 85 are from Abdullah Hussein, The Weary Generations, 1999 (published as Udas Naslein, 1963, in the original Urdu), p. 324

on page 105 photography by Luke Walker

Winter 2019

109

…talking of the Company, my knowledge of the Malay language as well as my wit and ability endeared me to Lord Minto, then GovernorGeneral of India. He in turn sent me to Malacca. Did I mention I was born on a ship? It was called Ann. Like my mother. Although she spelled it Anne. And, oddly, my second wife’s maiden name was Hull, so the nautical theme has haunted me throughout my life, both before and after I got into the island-buying business. Did I forget to tell you that I was heavily involved in the conquest of Java from the French and Dutch military during the Napoleonic Wars? Wasn’t always bashing the natives.

Although there were some other people living there too, but they couldn’t agree which language to speak. So how could you deal with them? You didn’t. In any case I was so heavily involved that I wrote the (entire) history of the place (beginning in 1510 when the Portuguese arrived) afterwards so that everyone would remember how involved I was. Once you own the history of a place, you see, you own the place. Although you could just buy it. Then the history is irrelevant. As long as you know who you are. In any case, I digress. You people loved my book so much that you reprinted it in 2010! Over 190 years after I popped my clogs, no less. Now that’s leaving your mark, my friend. Although those clowns at Wikipedia feel the need to keep emphasising that it’s a ‘non-fiction’ book in their links. As if anyone might be confused. The cheek of it! I, sir, am a gentleman and a scholar! Anyway, there was this Irish fellow – a soldier – rather improbably called Otto (rootless, absolutely rootless until he met me), who

110

Post Script

Knowing Me, Knowing Me

Bust of Stamford Raffles at Raffles Hotel, Singapore. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / yeowatzup

ArtReview Asia

was my ‘man Friday’, if you like. He entered my orbit on Prince of Wales Island (I think you people call it Penang) in 1806, and by 1811, when I as de facto and de jure (you defeat a people, you own their language) Lieutenant Governor of Java (before the bloody Dutch got their hands on it again), he was sort of hanging around on a near permanent basis. At some point I even recall making him my acting second assistant. Anyway, the Irishman used to accompany my (second) wife Sophia (the one with the nautical connections) as an escort while I was away making history. Making history as both subject and object, alpha and omega, in case that wasn’t clear. Did I tell you that there’s still a statue of me in Singapore? Even after all this time, all these people, all these languages… Anyway, my wife and the Irishman: it was fortunate in the end that they got on so well, because after my much mourned death, the Irishman… Otho, I think it was, on reflection, rather improbably named after the Roman emperor, if my history still serves me well. Lasted three months I think. The emperor, not Otho the Irishman. Chubby little fellow (the emperor again). Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, fortunate about the wife and the Irishman. Because when I was dead he was able to help Sophia finish my biography, which was published in 1830. You see, unlike him, she hadn’t been with me all the time over the past 20 years. He’d been there all the time except, obviously, the time that he was escorting Sophia… Anyway, would you believe it, the Irishman went on to publish his own biography or journals or suchlike. But needless to say his journals were published over a century after his death (surprised they were still knocking around at all, really), and only then because they related to me. And when they did appear, the orientalist and colonial administrator R. O. Winstedt (his middle name was also Olaf, would you believe?), who, incidentally, in 1928, became the first President of Raffles College Singapore (it’s named after me, in case that wasn’t obvious), chastised the fool who had massaged Odo’s lumpen prose into publishable text for having ‘gone out of his way to suggest that Raffles [me] may have heard of Singapore not from Malay, but from European sources’. Poppycock! I’m as Malay as the next Singaporean! Anyway, as I say, Olaf took him (Marks, I think his name was – the Irishman’s editor) to task: Raffles [me] owned four manuscripts of the ‘Malay Annals’, he says by way of refutation. And so I did. Olaf (the headmaster of my school, not the Irishman) only really screws up by suggesting that the Marks chap should learn some lessons from his (Oleg’s) 1935 History of Malaya rather than my definitive History of Java. The impudence! As if they were the same place… ara

克里斯多夫·勒·布伦双联作 Christopher Le Brun Diptychs