ArtReview Asia Winter 2020 by ArtReview

As a result

Shen Xin

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朱利安·奥培

Julian Opie

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ArtReview Asia vol 8 no 4 Winter 2020

Now, now In some ways, with travel diminished and distancing an everpresent, the world right now can seem all too, or nothing but, immediate: immediate surroundings, immediate concerns with health and wellbeing, immediate Amazon deliveries. The world becomes something that’s immediately present on screen, and exhibitions to be seen only if they are immediately around the corner. So, for this issue, ArtReview Asia thought that we should all take a breath, step back, and look to bigger pictures. And not just the ones in its magazine. Although it hopes you’ll enjoy those too. Deepa Bhasthi looks at how the history of Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-century ruler of Mysore, and to some a national hero for his efforts to resist British colonialism, is being rewritten and erased to support the political ambitions of those ruling India in the present. We look at the work of Manila-born Pio Abad, and how it resists similar attempts to erase the sombre legacy and criminality of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos who ruled the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. As the past effects the present, so the present affects the past. As the sands shift it’s sometimes hard to know where you stand. Which is also why we look to the work of China-born Shen Xin and Australian-Chinese Lindy Lee, two artists whose work, in different ways, explores issues of home and statelessness, belonging and identity. Some of which issues also surface in a new commission from New Delhi-based Sohrab Hura, a churning, tumbling text and photographic project titled ‘The Coast’. But that’s not to say that we’re blinding ourselves to the immediate present (ArtReview Asia presumes you read it for the breadth and reach of its ‘vision’ after all). Sarah Forman looks to the new ways in which the Shanghai-based collective Slime Engine is reinventing exhibition formats, while Rahel Aima surveys the cybernetic, psychedelic work of Kerala-born filmmaker Mochu. And, naturally, for those of you who are able to get out and about, there’s an expanded previews section listing all the exhibitions, biennials and festivals you won’t want to miss, unless you have to, over the coming months. Exhibitions are being planned, they’re even opening as we speak. It’s a sign of optimism more than hope. ArtReview Asia

Choices

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Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 14

Points of View Charu Nivedita, Sarah Forman 28

Art Featured

Shen Xin by Mark Rappolt 38

Tipu Sultan by Deepa Bhasthi 60

Mochu by Rahel Aima 46

Pio Abad by Marv Recinto 66

The Coast by Sohrab Hura 52

Lindy Lee by Neha Kale 76

page 18 André Butzer, Light, Colour and Hope: nasaheim painting: #5, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 66 × 89 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin, Paris & London

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Art Reviewed

comment & exhibitions 86

books 96

An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season & Times Passes, by Adeline Chia Henry Shum, by Ysabelle Cheung Thao Nguyen Phan, by Fi Churchman Faris Heizer, by Adeline Chia Online Art Fairs â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Once more, with feeling, by Martin Herbert Sung Tieu, by Alex Quicho Nalini Malani, by Fi Churchman Berlin Biennale, by Mark Rappolt

The Glass Kingdom, by Lawrence Osborne, reviewed by Max Crosbie-Jones The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes, by Jill Richards, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud, by Kuniko Tsurita, reviewed by Fi Churchman Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss, reviewed by Neha Kale Azadi, by Arundhati Roy, reviewed by Mark Rappolt ps 102

page 89 Nalini Malani, Can You Hear Me?, 2020, animation chamber, nine-channel installation with 88 single-channel stop motion animations, sound. Photo: Ranabir Das. ÂŠ the artist

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集美·阿尔勒国际摄影季 297x220mm.pdf 1 2020/10/19 下午8:49

Jimei × Arles International Photo Festival

CMY

雷蒙德·考切提尔，《再见菲律宾》，雅克·罗齐尔，1960。图片由艺术家和Boogie Woogie Photography提供。 Raymond Cauchetier, Adieu Philippine, Jacques Rozier, 1960. Courtesy of the artist and Boogie Woogie Photography.

2020.11.27 – 2021.01.03

开幕周: 11.27–11.29 展览地点: 厦门市集美新城市民广场展览馆三影堂厦门摄影艺术中心

Opening Weekend: 11.27–11.29 Locations: Xiamen Jimei Citizen Square Exhibition Hall Three Shadows Xiamen Photography Art Centre

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Weibo

WeChat

www.threeshadows.cn/cn/jimei-arles/ www.facebook.com/threeshadows Instagram: @threeshadows_beijing 主办方 Organizers

特别协办 Special Co-organizers

机构合作 Institutional Partners

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Art Previewed

Of the beating 13

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13 Curatorial team of Don’t Follow the Wind on a site visit in Fukushima’s exclusion zone. Courtesy Don’t Follow the Wind

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Previewed 1 West Bund Art & Design West Bund Art Center, Shanghai 11–15 November

11 Zhang Hui Long March Space, Beijing December – February

22 Park Rehyun mmca Seoul Through 3 January

2 Art 021 Shanghai Exhibition Center 12–15 November

12 ai: Love and Artificial Intelligence Hyundai Motorstudio, Beijing Through 3 January

23 A Little After the Millennium Gallery Baton, Seoul Through 20 November

3 Yang Zhenzhong Rén Space, Shanghai Through 21 February

13 Microwave New Media Arts Festival Hong Kong City Hall Through 15 November

24 The Scar Busan Museum of Art Through 28 February

4 Yang Fudong Shanghart West Bund, Shanghai 8 November – 24 January

14 Rosson Crow Over The Influence, Hong Kong Through 21 November

25 Melissa Tan sam Mini Mobile Museum, Singapore Through 13 December

5 Alex Da Corte Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai 13 November – 24 January

15 Mika Rottenberg Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong Through 7 February

6 André Butzer Yuz Museum, Shanghai Through 10 January

16 Luc Tuymans David Zwirner, Hong Kong Through 19 December

7 Jing’An International Sculpture Project Shanghai Jing’An Sculpture Park Through 31 December

17 Re: Play Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Taipei Through 29 November

8 Julian Opie Lisson Gallery, Shanghai Through 27 February 9 Zhang Enli Power Station of Art, Shanghai Through 7 March 10 Zhao Gang Long March Space, Beijing Through 13 December

18 Taipei Biennale Taipei Fine Arts Museum 21 November – 14 March 19 Sawangwongse Yawnghwe tkg+, Taipei Through 21 November 20 Lai Chih-Sheng Alien Art Centre, Kaohsiung City Through 23 May

26 Norberto Roldan Silverlens Galleries, Manila Through 21 November 27 Maryam Hoseini Green Art Gallery, Dubai 21 November – 7 January 28 Zarina Bhimji Sharjah Art Foundation Through 10 April 29 ngv Triennial National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 19 December – 18 April 30 Western Front – Eastern Promises soas Brunei Gallery, London Through 12 December 31 Shimabuku Nouveau Musée National de Monaco 19 February – 13 June

21 Gwangju Biennale Various venues, Gwangju 26 February – 9 May

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‘Art Week’. There were times when it seemed Oh, and while we’re at it, given that travel as if ArtReview Asia wouldn’t be using that term corridors worldwide are opening and shutting for a while. Working out what exhibition is faster than its grandmother’s cat flap, ArtReview going to open, what’s being postponed and Asia has decided to organise its previews by what’s going to open only to close again has region. It’s nothing if not helpful, after all; been like reading a history of the Five Dynasties: and it always has your best interests at heart. Shanghai Art Week remains anchored ‘In the morning one General would be supreme, but by the evening another General would 1 around its twin art fairs: West Bund Art & Design boasts 48 galleries and art spaces, be in power.’ (Yeah, ArtReview Asia had time to read all 800 pages of its edition of Water Margin 2 while Art 021 has a whopping 104. And during lockdown. It was either that or watch two neither are they all the same across the two events (though there is some crossover), nor actors on Zoom pretending they were making are the participants exclusively local. After a tv show.) But back to the present. The idea of all the lockdowns, isolation and screentime an event lasting a whole week unless it’s online? that have rendered you unaccustomed to other Well, that’s bonkers. It’s been to Berlin (merely bodies and permanently crosseyed, you’ll a Gallery Weekend) and ‘Frieze Week’ in London probably need a lie-down after this visit (not much different from any other week); will – you might even want to talk to gallerists Shanghai Art Week be any more of a return over your phone at the beginning. That to ‘normal’, whatever that means these days? way you can always blame a bad connection Perhaps. There’s certainly a lot going on.

when you feel the need to run away. Best to ease yourself into the wild sociability of it all. After that you might want to head off somewhere that’s a little beyond the beaten track (or, if you’re coming from Art 021, the beaten six-lane highway). Located in a shikumenstyle townhouse in the old-town neighbourhood of Huang Pu, Rén Space has, since its founding in 2013, been one of Shanghai’s hidden gems. This month sees the launch of Exposure, a solo presentation of Shanghai resident 3 Yang Zhenzhong. (The thing about art weeks – or more properly, the underlying effects of art’s successful globalisation and marketisation – particularly those in Shanghai, is that it’s so often hard to find any work on show by the people who live and work in the place you’re visiting. So perhaps a benefit, if we can speak of such a thing, of the covid-19 era and the difficulties it presents for travel and the

3 Yang Zhenzhong, Exposure, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Rén Space, Shanghai

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Alex Da Corte, Rubber Pencil Devil (still), 2018. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London

shipping of goods, is that this trend – in which works by the same cabal of market-approved international artists appear to circulate continuously around the world, however far you go to try to escape them – might suffer something of a U-turn.) Perhaps it’s appropriate, then, that Yang’s new body of work, which exploits the latest robotic-carving technologies, takes as its starting point the endless possibilities for manufacture offered by new technologies. And then seeks to combine that with a discourse on how technological infinity may not be compatible with finiteness that characterises humanity. Contradictions, in the end, have often proved to be the prime material of an artist whose work has tackled themes such as death, the effects of industrial automation and the proliferation of (redundant) imagery in the digital sphere, and is often seen as one of the pioneering forces of new-media art in China.

Over at Shanghart’s West Bund outpost, exploration of the concept of ‘Huihua dianying’ (‘Painting as a film’), which includes an expanded 4 Yang Fudong, an artist whose imagery is rarely notion of what film is and can be (this show redundant, continues his exploration of China’s includes painting, photography and video visual history and the interconnectedness of installations), and toys with various notions past and present, tradition and innovation, in of narrative viewing and the ways in which art an exhibition titled Endless Peaks. Let’s take a connects with audiences via evocations and pause here: ArtReview Asia knows what you’re elaborations of the spiritual. thinking, and no, it’s not a show about covid-19 Of course, this is an art week, so Shanghai infection rates. Rather, the title refers to the is host to the work of a number of nonnative imagery of mountain peaks emerging from artists, the pick of them perhaps being American clouds that has proved an iconic and enduring standard in art, from ink paintings on. ( “I think 5 Alex Da Corte, whose work will fill the two main floors of Prada’s Rong Zhai space. On show that contemporary art is grounded in history; is a new exhibition version of the artist’s epic it is not a standalone project. Perhaps contem(two hours and 56 minutes) Rubber Pencil Devil porary art might not show its historic elements (2018), which was previously shown at both the on the surface, but it’s impossible to separate Venice Biennale and the Carnegie International it completely from the history of a community,” last year (which seems a much longer time ago). Yang told ArtReview Asia last year.) Although Set against the artist’s signature Day-Glo colour best known as a filmmaker (one of China’s best), sets, the work is a trawl through us popular (tv) Yang’s latest exhibition continues his ongoing

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Alex Da Corte, Rubber Pencil Devil (still), 2018. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London

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culture with a focus on both queerness and inclusiveness, and features the artist assuming the characters of the Pink Panther (painting a trellis pink), Sylvester the Cat and a rubberfaced devil toying erotically with an oversize rubber pencil, the whole laced with camp. Look out too for the artist’s camply seductive depiction of Mister Rogers, host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a preschool educational tv show (informed by the presenter’s collaboration with child psychologist Margaret McFarland) that ran for more than 30 years (1968–2001) and aired on what eventually became pbs (one of the sweaters he wore on the show is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, dc). Originally screened in a cartoonish, neon-outlined farmhouse, at Prada Rong Zhai the work has been reconfigured to screen on 20 multicoloured cubes. Like an art fair, then. But more fun!

For those of you wishing to continue in the colourful vein, you’ll want to proceed (back) towards West Bund, where California6 based German painter André Butzer’s first institutional solo show in China, Light, Colour and Hope, is ongoing. Friedrich Hölderlin meets Walt Disney in a show that fuses the histories of (German) painting and (American) popular culture, and attempts to collide the experiences of confronting the known and the unknown in a way the causes audiences to confront their inner selves. Although there’s a fair chance you’ll already have become very used to doing that by now. If that’s the case, Shanghai also offers some artistic encounters in outdoor space, among 7 them the sixth edition of the biennial Jing’An International Sculpture Project, which takes place in the Jing’An Sculpture Park, opposite a Buddhist temple (a replica of an ancient one

that was moved) and on the edge of the highend West Nanjing Road shopping district (around the corner from Art 021, if you’re still wandering the corridors of the Shanghai Exhibition Center). Among the works on show 8 is Julian Opie’s led installation Amelia 1, Julian, Yasmin (2019), a triptych of the British artist’s reduced figures, each socially distanced from the next (on separate supports), who are all seemingly trotting away from something. (Perhaps each other, given the times, but presumably not his first solo show at Lisson Gallery Shanghai, which includes seven new works, including three largescale portraits, three sculptures and a computer animation, or his new commission for Huarun Group’s Embankment Square in Pudong. There’s no running away from him, really.) Also on display at Jing’An Sculpture Park are works by fellow Lisson Gallery artists Richard Long and Pedro Reyes (Unite, 2019,

9 Zhang Enli, The Corner (1), 2008, oil on canvas, 220 × 180 cm. Courtesy the artist

8 Julian Opie, Amelia 1, Julian, Yasmin, 2019, led installation, 240 × 120 × 30 cm (each). © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, New York & Shanghai

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12 ai: Love and Artificial Intelligence, 2020 (installation view). Courtesy Hyundai Motorstudio, Beijing

which looks like a pair of electricity pylons high-fiving each other), as well as Pascale Mathine Tayou, Liang Shaoji (an oil-fume pipe in the shape of a conch shell) and Juan Garaizabal (a steely riff off motifs from traditional Chinese architecture). For those of you itching to get back to the local, the Power Station of Art plays host the largest survey exhibition to date by painter 10 9 Zhang Enli. A Room That Can Move is curated 11 by Hou Hanru and features more than 100 works spanning three decades of the Shanghaibased painter’s prolific career. From early works focusing on everyday life and everyday objects and the ways by which people survive in the city, through to the all-encompassing ‘Space Paintings’ (painted directly onto the surfaces of interior and exterior spaces), the exhibition promises to cover the full gamut of contemporary existence – from people in space to the space

within people. While also, naturally, showcasing the artist’s fluid yet precise painting style. The Chinese Eastern Railway, stretching west, south and east from Harbin, was the product of the ‘Sino-Russian Secret Treaty’ signed by the Qing Empire and Tsarist Russia in 1896 and came into service shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. Its route became the inspiration for a project by artists Zhao Gang (who has Manchurian roots) and Zhang Hui (who was raised in Harbin) that explores the history and culture of northeast China and launched in 2019. Each artist took a journey east and west respectively, before meeting in Harbin where they met other researchers to conduct a series of ‘walking meetings’ to discuss what they found. The end product is a pair of exhibitions, Chinese Eastern Railway: Zhao Gang, which opens at Beijing’s Long March Space in October and Chinese Eastern Railway: Zhang Hui, which opens

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at the same venue in December. Zhao first came to attention as the youngest member of the Stars Group (credited with being contemporary Chinese art’s first avant-garde artist groups) of the late 1970s and early 1980s, before leaving China for the next two decades to study in the us and Europe. He returned to Beijing in 2006, since when his paintings have increasingly turned towards examinations of his personal history and its relationship to the history of contemporary China. His show at Long March includes life paintings of the scenery at Hengdaohezi in Heilongjiang Province and 96 small paintings – with subjects spanning autobiography, art history, actual history, famous people and the interplay between Eastern and Western philosophy – that the artist executed in the wake of the current pandemic. As with Zhang Enli’s show in Shanghai, this promises to provide an important insight into

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13 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, The Whole Truth, 2012, mixed-media installation. Courtesy the artist

14 Rosson Crow, Smoke and Mirrors, 2020, acrylic, spraypaint, photo transfer and oil on canvas, 152 × 122 cm. Courtesy the artist and Over the Influence, Los Angeles & Hong Kong 13 Forensic Architecture and Praxis Films, Triple-Chaser (2020), hd video. Courtesy Forensic Architecture

the development of contemporary painting in China, and should whet the appetite for Zhang Hui’s exhibition to follow. 12 The multimedia exhibition ai: Love and Artificial Intelligence (at the Hyundai Motorstudio in Beijing) is the result of curator Chen Jiaying’s winning proposal on the theme of ‘sustaina13 bility’ to the 2019 Hyundai Blue Prize for emerging curators. Featuring the work of 13 international and Chinese artists (among them Aaajiao, Benjamin Berman & Miguel Perez, Jonas Lund, Stine Deja and Wang Yefeng), the exhibition seeks to tackle the tricky question of how human a world governed by big data and artificial intelligence can actually be through the theme of ‘intimacy’ (the title is a pun: Ài is the translation of ‘love’ in pinyin Mandarin). The exhibition is divided into two routes, with visitors’ journeys being defined by an initial choice to ‘swipe’ left or right; it includes simulations of online dating apps,

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devices programmed to capture attendees’ The Wind’s A Walk in Fukushima (2015–17) is ‘emotional states’, physical enactments of an immersive installation, viewed via headsets, likes and dislikes, and a general experience of that documents a series of artworks placed by algorithmic manipulation. Just like real life! members of the collective within the Fukushima For those of you who are truly into the Exclusion Zone (the artworks themselves are ‘shock’ of the new (media), you’ll want to head excluded by the bodies of former residents, and over to Hong Kong, where the Microwave New the artists and curators involved in the project, Media Arts Festival takes place at Hong Kong who stand in front of them wearing Hazmat City Hall. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s The Whole suits); Tao Ya-Lun’s vr work Wandering Ghost Truth (2012) is an audiowork that examines No. 5 (2020) offers a trip inside a massive surveilvoice analysis as a lie-detection method; lance radar system; and there’s more… but, yeah, Forensic Architecture’s Triple Chaser (2020) you get the picture. Real life again. Plus associexamines the ‘nonlethal’ munitions (and ated screenings through to 22 November. their links to human-rights abuses) manufacAfter all that you’ll be looking to have your tured by the Safariland Group (owned by anxieties confirmed with a visit to la-based 14 painter Rosson Crow’s first solo exhibition Warren Kanders, formally vice chair of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s board in the sar. ‘Darkness is present throughout of trustees until multiple objections to his even the most ebullient works such as the ‘nonlethal’ activities surfaced during the explosive still-lives which expose the gluttony 2019 Whitney Biennial, of which Forensic of consumer society and the seduction of overArchitecture was a part); Don’t Follow abundance,’ reads the press release for Smoke

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and Mirrors at the Hong Kong branch of Over subterranean railroads between Mexicali and the Influence. Crow’s sweetly acidic palette Calexico via a plastic commodities market in is deployed to capture a series of interior and Yiwu, China, antimatter factories and Mongolian throat signing. As with much of her work, landscape scenes constructed out of layered you’re there but somewhere else at the same photo transfers, oil and spraypaint: strange time, implicated in systems of production that boudoirs, on fire; a beautiful garden lagoon, stretch around the world. trashed and burned; an opulent, high-end In some ways that’s true also of Luc restaurant interior with a view of a city that might be launching fireworks in celebration 16 Tuymans’s debut show at David Zwirner Hong Kong. Titled Good Luck, with the Belgian artist’s or be in flames in desperation. In short, a perhabitual mix of sincerity and irony, the show fect portrait of our times. comprises recent paintings and a new animated Which is why you’ll now need to head to 15 Tai Kwun and Mika Rottenberg’s sneeze, video, offering those of you who managed to see Zhang Enli and Zhao Gang’s displays a counterwhich features four works (Sneeze, 2012, point focus on developments in European NoNoseKnows, 2015, Cosmic Generator, 2019, painting from one of its brightest stars. Since and Spaghetti Blockchain, 2019) by the Argentinehe first came to prominence during the 1980s, Israeli artist. Collectively this surreal universe Tuymans has consistently explored how conof video installations features a series of largetemporary and historic imagery (much of it nosed men sneezing out a series of rabbits drawn from film, television and other popular 17 and steaks onto a table, women sneezing out media, as well as art-historical sources) can be plates of noodles, pearl factories in Mainland manipulated, obscured and repurposed, in a way China, Chinese ceramic dishes that lead into

that takes the so-called inadequacy of figurative painting as a strength when it comes to thinking about the functioning of the information age, and preconceptions about the ability of individuals to grasp ‘complete’ pictures, and the relative roles of objective and subjective perception. On show here are paintings that explore Delft pottery (and its capitalisation on European tastes for Ming dynasty ceramics), Berlin prisons, the evolution of Shenzhen, American cowboys, facial recognition and the videowork, which riffs off the work of Francisco de Goya. The exhibition, as a whole, Tuymans states, is ‘not unlike the times we are living in now’, which rather saves ArtReview Asia the bother. Tuymans is also fond of stating that painting is an ‘anachronism’, which for him seems to be part of the fun, but for us means a visit to Taipei, where the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab is staging Re: Play, a group exhibition focusing on live (as opposed to dead) art and explorations of the body’s role within society since the 1990s

15 Mika Rottenberg, Sneeze, 2012, single-channel video installation, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

17 River lin, Rehearsal of Dancing with Gutai Art Manifesto (1956), 2020, performance and installation. Courtesy Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Taipei

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16 Luc Tuymans, Outfit, 2019, oil on canvas, 202 × 101 cm. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris & Hong Kong

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– a time when, in the face of martial law in Taiwan, many artists were driven to explore the potential of the body as a medium. Archives, storytelling and reenactment are some of the themes explored, alongside Tuymans’s favourites: the manipulation of memory and the alienation of everyday life. Accordingly, Kao Jun-Honn restages his performance artworks that made their debut at the turn of the millennium, while artists including Lee Kit, Siren Eun Young Jung, Joyce Ho and Samson Young look at the ways in which performance can challenge ‘constructed ideologies’ (although if you ask ArtReview Asia, which, since you’re reading this, you are, all ideologies are constructed, even the ones that are deconstructed). Hey! It’s not just art weeks that are back 18 – there’s biennials too. This year’s Taipei Biennale is titled You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet (so true these days), features work

Talking of other planets, Sawangwongse by 58 participants, and is cocurated by influen- 19 Yawnghwe’s show at Taipei’s tkg+, titled tial French philosopher Bruno Latour and indeBurmese History X, takes the marginalisation pendent curator Martin Guinard, with Eva Lin and erasure of ethnic minorities in Myanmar curating the public programme. It begins from the proposition that ‘people around the world no as its subject. Based on research into family longer agree on what it means to live “on” Earth. and historical photographs as well as notes As we come closer to a series of tipping points, left by the artist’s father (and conversations we simultaneously witness a division between with other researchers, writers and human those who seem to have abandoned planet Earth, rights activists), the works take the form of those who try to make it more inhabitable, and painted reproductions of the archival photothose whose cosmology never fitted within the graphs aligned with abstract colour blocks ideals of the globalizing project in the first place.’ (some of which deconstruct the minority Shan Framed within the context of a planetarium flag, others of which reference the Burmese (of competing ‘other’ worlds), the artworks army, more generally adding the possibility on show, by Pierre Huyghe, milliøns, Su Yuof reference and abstraction and eradication Hsin, Marianne Morild, Cemelesai Takivalet to the whole). Consequently, as much as the and others, provide a response in the form of works reference erasure, they take that condiwomen with beehives for heads, torn landscapes, tion as a ground zero for reconstruction. explorations of the relationship of architecture After that a visit to the Alien Art Centre to the environment and, naturally, viruses. (formerly the Kaohsiung Kin-Ma Military

18 Pierre Huyghe, Exomind (Deep Water), 2017, concrete cast with wax hive and bee colony, 90 × 54 × 65 cm. Courtesy the artist; Taro Nasu, Tokyo; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and the Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine 19 Sawangwongse Yawnghwe , X03 (Independence Day), 2020, 200 × 300 cm, oil on linen. Courtesy the artist and tkg+, Taipei

20 Lai Chih-Sheng, Linger, 2020 (installation view at Alien Art Centre, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan). Courtesy the artist

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21 Ana María Millán, Happy People (still), 2020, animation. Courtesy the artist

21 Cecilia Vicuña, Camillo Torres, 1978, oil on cotton canvas, 139 × 119 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong & Seoul

22 Park Rehyun, Retrospection of Era, 1970–73, printing on paper. Courtesy mmca, Seoul

Hostel) in Kaohsiung City is going to feel on which visitors walk, while surveying a floor already announced are Korakrit Arunanondchai, natural. The venue is currently hosting Linger, filled with discarded materials abandoned by John Gerrard, Sonia Gomes, Lynn Hershman the exhibition installers. This is one show you Leeson, Liliane Lijn, Candice Lin, Angelo Plessas, 20 a solo exhibition by Taiwanese artist Lai don’t want to miss. Not that ArtReview Asia has Chih-Sheng. A member of 1990s conceptual Sahej Rahal, Cecilia Vicuña and Shen Xin. 22 favourites, but if it did, this would be it. art group National Oxygen, Lai would present Over at mmca Seoul, Park Rehyun: Triple Back to the biennial circuit and the delayed his work in disused structures on the fringe Interpreter celebrates the centenary of an artist zones of Taipei, often creating works that who spent much of her career being remem21 launch of this year’s Gwangju Biennale is interacted with their surroundings: bricks piled bered as ‘the wife of [fellow artist] Kim Ki-chang’. scheduled to take place this coming February. Having trained in Japanese painting during the up (Lai was formerly a professional bricklayer) Curated by Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala, occupation of Korea, Park went on, influenced to the ceiling. Consequently, his work is ideally Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning seeks to explore by her travels in South America and the us, to suited to this Cold War-era building. Working notions of the extended mind in the age of across mediums (but primarily in sculpture develop a more modern style in the form of ‘superintelligence’ and promises to delve into and installation), Lai’s work takes the form abstract paintings, tapestries and prints (in ‘healing technologies, indigenous life-worlds, matriarchal systems, animism, and anti-systemic of a playfully poetic minimalism, often conparticular being a pioneer of copperplate fronting the modes of display and presentation kinship’. (Subjects that proliferated also in the printing in Korea). She died suddenly of liver of art, and the labour that hides behind it: recent Berlin Biennale.) There will be planetary cancer in 1976. While the title comes from the No Ifs (2013) is a block of notepaper, spiral-bound imperialism too for those of you who are still in expression the artist used to describe herself on all of its four sides, while other works include the mood. The programme itself is split between when she translated travel guides from English an exhibition, a publishing programme and a sculptures that mirror their plinths or, in Border to Korean and then to sign language for her (2013), a ledge around an exhibition room, performance programme. Among participants hearing-impaired husband on their journeys

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25 Melissa Tan, The Dream from the Other Side, 2020, epoxy resin, concrete, industrial foam and paper. Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

in the West, at mmca it becomes a cypher for the artist’s output across three mediums. Works on show range from stylised scenes of daily life, to somewhat terrifying renderings of black cats, to more abstracted images of masks, fishbowls and seashells. The influence of the West is also present 23 in Gallery Baton’s group show A Little After the Millennium, which features the work of six artists from Europe and the us – Liam Gillick, Rebecca Warren, Markus Amm, Philippe Parreno, Anne Collier and Tobias Rehberger – and seeks to explore the question ‘Why does art exist?’, while simultaneously navigating a time frame that spans from fears about the ‘Millennium Bug’ (and the emergence to international renown of many of the artists on show) to panic about the current virus. Answers come in the form of Parreno’s purple speech-bubble balloons, Collier’s colour filtered, Lichtensteinesque comic-book

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26 Norberto Roldan, Fugitives from the Land of the Rising Sun / no. 10, 2018, assemblage with found objects, Japanese haiku and Japanese wooden box, 76 × 46 × 10 cm. Courtesy Silverlens Galleries, Manila

photographs and Rehberger’s porcelain birds, among other things. A lesson, one expects, in the deterritorialisation of categories and systems, and getting used to living with uncertainty. 24 At the Busan Museum of Art, The Scar gathers together work by Zhu Jinshi, Song Dong and Liu Wei, to examine the rapid changes wrought in China since the 1980s and its reflection in Chinese contemporary art. That trajectory is traced, in art historical terms, through three generations of artists (born in the 1950s, 60s and 70s respectively), with affinities to the Stars Group (Zhu), through the Apartment Art movement (Song) and the Post-Sense Sensibility Group (Liu), and in sociopolitical terms through responses for and against capitalism, democratisation, urbanisation and Westernisation, and the artists’ exploration of the ‘scars’ these developments left on Chinese culture.

Also seeking to trace the course of a nation’s 25 history is Singaporean artist Melissa Tan, whose The Dream from the Other Side, presented by the Singapore Art Museum (sam)’s Mini Mobile Museum. A collaboration with the National Library Board, the Mobile Museum showcases a selection of works from sam’s permanent collection in libraries across the city state (sam’s own premises are currently closed for renovation). Tan’s installation will be shown across three libraries (Woodlands, Jurong and Tampines regional libraries) and uses maps (beginning with the earliest topographical map of the city, drawn in 1958) and topographical sculptures (newly commissioned for the show) to document how these areas have been transformed by destruction and development. ‘The work invites audiences to observe these modifications as reflections of the constructive changes around us,’ says sam’s press release. Singapore has always been pretty adept at hiding its scars.

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Talking of dealing with scars, Norberto In nearby Sharjah, Black Pocket, at the Westwards, in Dubai, a new series of 27 paintings by Iranian artist Maryam Hoseini Roldan’s solo exhibition at Manila’s Sharjah Art Foundation, is a survey of works Silverlens Galleries, titled Ziggurat, features is on show at Green Art Gallery. Often presented by London-based Ugandan-Asian photographer works salvaged from Green Papaya Art Projects on shaped or overlapping panels, the works’ 28 Zarina Bhimji. Back in 2007, Bhimji was (where he stored the majority of his works), vibrant blues and warm pinks belie what can nominated for the Turner Prize for her photothe influential artist-run space that he cofoundbe unsettlingly surreal narratives. Crazy Fears graphs documenting the aftermath of Idi ed in 2000 and that was ravaged by fire in June (2020), for example, features a triple-breasted Amin’s expulsion of 60,000 Asians from Uganda of this year (it had been due to close in 2021). The woman lactating through straws into cocktail in 1972. The current exhibition centres around exhibition features 16 of his signature foundglasses, while a quartet of other bodies dance three filmworks, Out of Blue (2002), Yellow Patch object assemblages as well as three new works. up to grab them through holes in the table. (2011) and Jangbar (2015), and focuses on the Featuring globes, obsolete cameras, film reels, The many-breasted figure reappears in Trapped artist’s interest in neglected systems of knowlBut Together (2020), this time with a tiger-skinned trombones and Japanese fish boxes, among edge and how we understand ourselves in twin growing out of her neck and playing a other items, each assemblage is constructed in relation to time and place. series of holes in the main figure’s leg, as though In a different timezone and a different the form of a ziggurat, an allusion to the work she were some sort of woodwind instrument. place, the National Gallery of Victoria (ngv) of the ‘father’ of Philippine conceptual art, All that may seem extremely off in the hygienic is preparing to unleash the latest edition of Roberto Chabet. One new work features a slot age of covid-19, but this is a morphing, machine topped by lucky cats and laughing 29 the ngv Triennial. Featuring 86 works by over 100 artists, it promises a ‘visually arresting and haunting and genuinely intriguing series of Buddhas. The machine was intended to be a gift thought-provoking view of the world at this meditations on gender, identity and relationto his brother and sister-in-law, both of whom unique moment’. Don’t they all. But standing ships with other bodies. passed away after being infected with covid-19.

28 Zarina Bhimji, Memories Were Trapped Inside the Asphalt ( from ‘Love’), 1998–2003, Duratrans mounted on 6mm Diasec with foil, lightbox, mdf, led light panel sheet with dimmer, 130 × 170 × 12.5 cm (framed). © the artist / All Rights Reserved, dacs/Artimage

27 Maryam Hoseini, Crazy Fears, 2020, acrylic, ink and pencil on wood panel, 206 × 64 cm. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges. Courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai

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30 clc men at a dump of empty shell cases in France, photograph by W.J. Hawkings. Courtesy John de Lucy

29 Dhambit Mununggurr, Djirikitj-Wop!, 2019, synthetic polymer paint on Stringybark (Eucalyptus Sp.), 189 × 102 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Salon Indigenous Art Projects, Darwin 31 Shimabuku, Erect, 2011– (installation view, Reborn-Art Festival, 2017). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Air de Paris, Romainville

out from the crowd is a presentation of 15 largescale bark paintings and nine larrakitj (hollow poles) by Yolngu woman Dhambit Mununggurr, who was born into a family of celebrated artists and musicians (her father, the artist Mutitjpuy Mununggurr, has been an inspiration for many of her works), was hit by a truck in 2005 and was left wheelchair-bound, and then relearned to paint with her less-favoured left hand. Her work will be surrounded by those of crowd-pleasers including Jeff Koons, jr, Alicja Kwade, Cerith Wyn Evans, interior designer Faye Toogood, architect Kengo Kuma (who is collaborating with artist Geoffrey Nees to construct a walkway leading to a newly acquired painting by Lee Ufan), among (obviously) many others. 31 Returning to the theme of neglected knowledge, the Brunei Gallery at London’s 30 soas plays host to Western Front – Eastern Promises, a historical display charting the

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stories of the 140,000 Chinese men who travelled to Europe to assist the British and French armies during the First World War. The Chinese Labour Corps recruited from Chinese labourers (largely from Shangdong province) worked, under harsh conditions, poor housing and a general lack of food, behind the frontlines (to free British and French troops for frontline activities) and continued to serve after the war’s end in mine clearance, corpse retrieval and the filling in of trenches. The exhibition documents their story through archive photography, a documentary film by Peng Wenlan and a display of ‘trench art’ in the form of engravings (featuring Chinese iconography) made on shell casings. A more contemporary history forms the backdrop to Japanese artist Shimabuku’s solo exhibition at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Structured in the form of an epic poem telling the tale of his adventures as he

travelled the world, The 165-metre Mermaid and Other Stories uses the artist’s texts to take visitors on a journey through more than 20 installations, films, photographs and sculptures created over the past 28 years. Erect (2011–), for example, was initiated on Norihama Beach in the wake of the 2011 tsunami triggered by an earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku. Featuring sticks, stumps and branches embedded in the sand, it comes with the poetic instruction ‘Put things upright. Lift things lying on the ground. Stand the trees and rocks scattered on the beach vertically. Working in numbers, we will put numerous things upright. Pooling our energy, we will try to lift the large trees. And maybe we will lift something in our hearts too’, and appears in a new site-specific form in Monaco. At which point it’s time for ArtReview Asia to have a lie-down. Nirmala Devi

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YOU AND I DON’T LIVE ON THE SAME PLANET

Taipei Biennial 2020 台北雙年展

Planet Escape

Planet Security

t n

o c n

Al te Gr rnat av ive ity

Planet Terrestrial

贊助单位

Sponsor

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主力贊助

Lead Sponsor

www.tfam.museum 10461臺北市中山區中山北路三段181號 No.181, Sec. 3, Zhongshan N. Rd., Zhongshan Dist., Taipei City 10461, Taiwan.

策展人：布魯諾·拉圖、馬汀·圭納 ; 公眾計畫策展人：林怡華

Critical Zone

Curators: Bruno Latour & Martin Guinard with Eva Lin (public programs)

Z Gaia

2020.11.21–2021.3.14 www.taipeibiennial.org

e Planet Globalization

你我不住在同一星球上

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Points of View

Ka. Naa. Subramanyam (1912–88), popularly known by his initials – Ka.Naa.Su. – was a Tamil writer who began his writing career, in both Tamil and English, even while he was undertaking his graduate studies. He went on to learn French, German, Spanish and Swedish languages, and was instrumental in translating writers like Knut Hamsun, André Gide and Pär Lagerkvist into Tamil. He moved among the highest echelons of global literature: he was close friends with writers like Raja Rao and Aldous Huxley; during a visit to Paris, when Ka.Naa.Su. was short of funds, he stayed with Albert Camus for a few months at the Frenchman’s insistence. By the time of his death, Ka.Naa.Su. had written about 25 novels in Tamil. Half of them remain unpublished. I have mentioned previously that in India the vast majority of writers cannot survive solely on earnings from his or her writing. While publishing in Englishlanguage periodicals (particularly after his move to New Delhi in 1965) did bring him some money, Ka.Naa.Su. did not have any supplemental income. Despite his renown, his existence was precarious. He was known to enquire daily of his wife if the mailman had arrived, as he waited for money order payments for his writing in Indian magazines and American literary journals. Friends of the writer recall how, during a stay in Chennai, Ka.Naa.Su., when he could not afford shoes, would walk barefoot to the American Library on even the most scorching of days. Born into an affluent family (his father was a high-level government official), Ka.Naa.Su., if he had wished, easily could have settled for a top position within the British colonial administration; or he could have simply written fiction in English alone, as had been his father’s wish. Like most Indian fathers, Ka.Naa.Su’s had

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notes from madras For Charu Nivedita, cinema’s false idols are a clear and present danger

encouraged his son to realise his own unfulfilled dreams, in this case to be a writer, more specifically a writer in the English language. Consequently he had introduced his son to world literature at a young age. During the 1930s, not many in Tamil Nadu welcomed the idea of conversing or writing in Tamil. The well-educated congressmen who participated in the freedom struggle delivered their speeches in English alone. Even today in Tamil Nadu people consider speaking in English a matter of social status, and there is, without doubt, a great irony in the fact that it is the state’s elite upper class that is the biggest culprit in accepting and propagating this ongoing subjugation. Rumour has it that during the Second World War, fearing Germany’s imminent capture of the state capital, Chennai, members

Mural painting of actress and politican J. Jayalalithaa, Chennai, 20 January 2017. Photo: Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images

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of the local ‘aristocracy’ even contemplated learning German. So much for so-called valour! At the beginning of his career Ka.Naa.Su. did write primarily in English, in accordance with his father’s wishes. But once he got the taste of contemporary Tamil literature, especially at a time when it was in its golden age (from the 1930s through to the 1950s), he began to split his output, writing fiction in Tamil, and literary criticism and other nonfiction in English. And breaking his father’s heart in the process. Novels, short stories, poems (written under the pseudonym Mayan) – the sheer quantity of his output is mind-boggling. I doubt that any Tamil writer has matched it. When Ka.Naa.Su. died, in 1988, his sonin-law could not find space for all the books he had collected over his lifetime. There were 55 quilt boxes (these boxes, around 90cm wide and 120cm high, were a regular feature of households in Delhi, where the weather can get cold) full of these books. Unable to find a place to store these boxes, Ka.Naa.Su’s son-inlaw handed them over to a publisher. One of the boxes contained the writer’s unpublished novels; another, all his published newspaper clippings. Thirty-two years have passed since Ka.Naa.Su’s death and still no one has read those unpublished novels. These days the Tamil literary world remembers him only as critic for his articles in magazines. It’s beyond ironic. Why is this? For me the answer is simple: Tamil cinema. Where cinema is a mere entertainment in most societies, in Tamil Nadu it is a religion. Its stars are demigods. This past September, when well-known playback singer (his songs are lip-synced by actors in popular movie musicals) S.P. Balasubramaniam (known as spb), who, for reasons of language (he sang in all four of the South Indian languages, although primarily in Tamil and Telugu), didn’t even understand many of the songs he sang, died after being treated for covid-19, the outpouring of grief (from India’s prime minister downwards) was staggering. But what more should one expect from a nation where, if their favourite star’s movie does not do well at the box office, so-called fans subject themselves to self-immolation? In 2011, following the overwhelming success of the party run by actress-turned-politician J. Jayalalithaa in local elections, one diehard fan (here that phrase has a literal meaning), a mother of two, cut out her tongue and offered it to the goddess at Veerapandi Gowri Mariamman Temple in Theni, in fulfilment of a vow to do so should her idol be granted victory. And yet how could I not vent about writers who mourned, cried and wrote moving, yet utterly over-the-top tributes to spb? ‘We have lost our soul; we have lost our…’ etc. Why,

I wondered, had the recent death of a legendary Hindustani musician, Pandit Jasraj (who, while he contributed to a few film soundtracks, was more active in the classical music world), not provoked the same outpouring of grief? Why had those writers never bothered to utter a word of condolence when brilliant literary figures like Na. Muthusamy and Sa. Kandasamy breathed their last? That was it. I had touched a live wire. Everyone – common folk and writers – forgot about mourning the death of the singer and diverted their anger towards me in print and on social media. The trash talk that followed was beyond imagination – most of them wishing me death. One individual got more specific and said that I should rot to death. If the opportunity had arisen I’ve no doubt that actual violence would have followed. My friend Abhilash Chandran, a Tamil writer and professor in English at Christ University, Bengaluru, recently wrote: ‘A couple of years ago, when I assigned a translation task, 32 students translated M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s book in Malayalam to English. Some Hindi students translated 25 short stories of Premchand. All these students chose the stories on their own for translation. But Tamil students did not even know a Tamil story to pick and translate. Unfortunately, they did not even know a pulp writer. I picked a couple of stories from contemporary literature and assigned it to them myself. While other students were quite prepared, Tamil students didn’t know anything beyond movies.’ ‘Cine-Gods’ still rule in Tamil Nadu. If I outlive them to give a send-off, there is no way I am going to keep my mouth shut. Even if it would be better to go to Maasai Mara National Reserve and spend time among the lions than to stay here and die a gruesome death.

Pandit Jasraj performing at Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya Bhopal in the ‘Poonam-35’ programme, 2015. Photo: Suyash Dwivedi

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Translated from the Tamil by Vidhya Subash Charu Nivedita is a Tamil writer based in Tamil Nadu

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covid-19 has instigated an onslaught of online initiatives that have saturated the digital artworld with fairs, exhibitions, social-media campaigns and educational programming, in an attempt to play catchup to a now overwhelmingly offline industry. While many institutions have scrambled to repackage their programming, others have taken this opportunity to build new models for exhibition-making and new means for connecting with audiences at a distance. Prior to the pandemic, in China, collector Michael Xufu Huang had been carving out physical spaces for ‘media’ arts through his affiliation with M Woods and his soon-to-open X Museum, but barring ongoing projects like Rhizome (a pioneering nonprofit dedicated to new media art), few endeavours have put forward serious efforts to cater to digital art hosted in its native environment – a void artists are, and have been, looking to fill. Shanghai-based artist collective Slime Engine, or 史莱姆引擎, has been utilising digital space since 2017 with different projects that manipulate the user’s understanding of physical space, possibility of place when it comes to exhibition-making and participatory expectations for art-seekers on and offline, in a practice that is ‘as flexible as “slime” and as inclusive as

future systems Collective slime engine is rewiring art networks on- and offline, writes Sarah Forman

a “search engine”’. Hosted in dystopian amalgamations of well-known cities, in oceanic abysses, on roller coasters and desert islands, their interactive shows assume gamelike features that stand in stark contrast to the traditional white-cube model adopted by many galleries and museums. Founded by four photography students – Li Hanwei, Liu Shuzhen, Fang Yang and Shan Liang – Slime Engine treats the internet not as a replacement for physical institutions, but as a platform with properties specific to digital and virtual media that would be nearly impossible to replicate in the ‘real world’. Although that’s not exactly how they see it. “We don’t think too much when designing exhibition spaces,” the collective tells me over an array of WeChat messages, Instagram dms and emails. “Many people might think we’re creating a space, but for us, these spatial forms have already been integrated into our vision.” Over the last two decades, China has become home to the world’s fastest-growing movieindustry. Coupled with that, lax copyright enforcement has seen scores of pirated Hollywood films flood streaming websites like Youku, making the twenty-somethingyear-old artists of Slime Engine part of an internationally minded generation growing

Slime Engine, Headlines, 2020, internet-hosted digital work, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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up with an intense exposure to special effects. “It wasn’t so much a space we created, but material we chose to use.” Their work has undeniably drawn from the cinematic canon, with dystopian landscapes and sterile futuristic-looking manufacturing or testing labs often featured. Immersive, unsettling and uncomfortably familiar, the flawless figures and facial features are just distant enough in likeness, but similar enough in content to imagine a Black Mirroresque narrative that could easily be our reality. It’s worth remembering that in 2018 international media cried wolf when the prc introduced its Zhima social-credit system, comparing it unequivocally to the third series’ episode ‘Nosedive’ and announcing the actualisation of creator Charlie Brooker’s vision in China. Despite the inclination to insert their work into a surveillance-state-fearing, nationalist, too-close-to-home critique of collective social behaviour and government intervention, these narratives sit barely adjacent to Slime Engine’s embodiment of a globally felt anxiety. Take their recent work Headlines (2020), shown at We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces in March,

Slime Engine, Headlines, 2020, internet-hosted digital work, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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as part of an open-call exhibition initiated by Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, Rhizome and the New Museum, New York. Comprising lifestyle articles, opinion editorials and news coverage, the text and moving-image work catalogues the various ways the ‘novel hookvirus’ is disrupting the global order. With quotes from ‘Chaos, director of the Institute of Interstellar Business at the University of International Business and Economics’ and other fictional figures (including government officials), the editorials expound on the positive economic effects of the pandemic and urge the public not to give in to political conspiracies: moving offline has caused an increase in productivity, with people on average working between 12 and 24 hours a day; ordering takeout and watching TikTok have become the most popular mobile activities; while the ‘us-initiated trade war with China’ gets a brief mention, so does the assassination of a top Nezarim military commander by the United Federation of Planets. The work parodies media and broadcasting institutions, overwhelming concerns about the financial side-effects of a deadly virus with feelgood content like ‘New century fat-reducing rave gymnastics’ where viewers can watch a five-minute video of an anime-style young woman in a very small bikini robotically perform fractured cardio in her living-roomturned-home-gym. Headlines simultaneously visualises shadows of what is, in a world that could be, through a reformatted newspaper that encourages user engagement and activity – all the while presenting us with characters that react but don’t respond. Slime Engine’s 2019 online/offline exhibition Ocean demands a different kind of user engagement, resembling a videogame more than any exhibition you’re likely to find in a museum or gallery. Although it is available for access on their website, I prefer the downloadable version of the program, which enables you to have the exhibition at hand without internet access, at anytime. Surely not what Nicolas Bourriaud had in mind when he coined the term ‘relational aesthetics’: the user has no direct

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top Shan Liang, Baby, 2019, included in Slime Engineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exhibition Territory, 2020, internet-hosted digital work, painting and 3d carving, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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above Yi-Chengtao, xxx Stands on the Ground, 2020, included in Slime Engineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exhibition Territory, 2020, internet-hosted digital work, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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contact with any art ‘object’, so to speak; instead the work’s interactivity and closeness are mediated through keyboards and mouse pads. The collective functions as the curator, while the individual members of Slime Engine exhibit their own works as participating artists in the 103-person group show. Upon loading, the program deposits you in the middle of an endless, virtual oceanic plane surrounded by artworks hovering just above the water. But the computer installation enables the viewer to move between the videos, digital sculptures and photographs via keyboard control, activating time-based works only when in close proximity to them. You get the sense that it exists both for you, and entirely independent of you. Without instructions, its navigation isn’t necessarily intuitive. You can stand in the middle of the works or direct your point of view so that you only see sky, marked by an accelerated version of solar time. When the light changes, so does the presentation of the works, some bearing reflective surfaces while others are matt. In some ways, it’s incredibly transparent: these effects highlight what in many exhibitions is fixed and controlled – light levels, pathways, proximity to art objects and access

top Nhozagri, Lotus Leaves Buddy In The Rain, 2019, included in Slime Engine’s exhibition Ocean, 2019, digital work, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist above Slime Engine, Ocean, 2019, digital exhibition, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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to information. For those not already primed to critique the white-cube model or imposed curatorial narratives, it lays bare what has been heavily institutionalised for decades: the exhibition emphasises the body in relation to the art, not by pretending to walk users through the works or present them with a ‘right’ way of viewing, but simply by creating an opportunity and environment to explore. “Ocean marked a shift for us, where since then, we’ve organised everything systematically,” Slime Engine tells me. “Every new project since then emphasises creative sustainability, and we are gradually establishing a community for young artists.” Their roster runs a wide and impressive gamut, with Ocean featuring artists like photographer Pixy Liao, musician and multidisciplinary artist 33emybw and internet artist ChillChill among the many, many others. Their collaborative efforts extend beyond the internet to projects with the Shanghai club all and group-oriented public works made with their representing

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gallery MadeIn. “We’ve found through organising these exhibitions that more and more public spaces have a demand for images and digital content, and that’s why bringing our creativity to commercial projects is a subject of interest for us.” Having recently shown a version of Ocean in Shanghai’s new Theatre X mall as part of the group show Wild Cinema (2020, copresented by the Art021 art fair’s sister organisation Immersive Art Gallery), the collective positioned itself between the uncommodifiable and the commercial – with neither Ocean nor any of the exhibiting works for sale through the project – further complicating existing artworld binaries tied to value and production. Their second series of Headlines took a similar form, and launched late September as part of a group show at Shanghai Plaza, a mall just a short jaunt from People’s Square. Running through the end of November, a large screen spanning three floors displays a reel of simulated newsroom interviews, product manufacturing lines and lottery balls falling in fields of digitised flowers. Shown alongside the works of Xu Zhen, Lu Pingyuan, individual member of the collective Shan Liang and many more, the work of Slime Engine is once again one of the only things in the mall money can’t buy.

top Slime Engine, Bysanz, Arc Monkey, Hu Rui, Simon Marlene, The Jurassic, 2018, internet-hosted digital work, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist above Slime Engine and Bysanz, 33emybw × Fang Yang, Three-Person Joint Project, 2018, internet-hosted digital work, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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Despite the radical consequences and opportunities for institutional critique that come with gamifying their exhibitions, Slime Engine doesn’t hold strong beliefs when it comes to the state of the artworld. “The artworld is already sufficient. We don’t think it’s short of anything,” they write. “We just felt the physical exhibitions people were doing were average.” Still, they’re optimistic about the increasing shift towards institutions infiltrating the digital, and what it means for how their practice and networks develop. “At the beginning of this year, some museums in China invited us to lecture internally about online exhibitioning, the advantages and disadvantages of online exhibitions increasing after the epidemic. We’re excited about it.” New technological infrastructure will enable them to implement projects they previously couldn’t, presenting opportunities for further growth and reach in a field that has long needed the change: the arts. What it means for their upcoming show Ocean 2 in November is unclear just yet, but it’s not a leap to conclude that their unintentional rewiring of art networks on- and offline will continue to be something we’re excited about. Sarah Forman is a writer based in London

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Art Featured

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Shen Xin Embracing the Unknown by Mark Rappolt

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Shen Xin’s latest work, a five-channel video installation titled Brine who died following a 24-day coma, the voice of the artist’s mother, the Lake (A New Body) (2020), is, in part, about attempts to construct a narra- works of Zhuangzi (who, during the fourth century bce, wrote one of tive, or multiple narratives, out of materials that are absent. Although the foundational texts of Daoism), research by French sinologists into I wonder whether the fact that we are talking about the work via the works of Zhuangzi, and meditations on the act of translation. Like Skype, between Minnesota (Shen) and London (me), as, on one level, most of Shen’s work, it embraces complexity and accepts lacunae. But two absent presences, is further conditioning me to think this way. when you see Commerce des Esprits, it appears, initially at least, as an I wonder if people in general are not conscious enough about how object of physical and sculptural simplicity: an approximately cuboid these forms of communication, with their substitute presencing, structure made up of four screens or planes, arranged such that each alter our perceptions of what is ‘really’ present. Or maybe that’s just plane appears to support the one next to it. Like a hastily constructed me. Which perhaps is a way of saying that I worry that I don’t worry room with text and imagery appearing on its outside walls. A sculpenough about how social distancing ture that appears to be talking to itself as and lockdowns might be affecting the much as it is talking to us. An animate, We’re engaged in a process of way in which we perceive reality. About conscious form. invention. Interpreting nothing, Brine Lake also centres on a script and whether or not they lower our standards translating nothing and acts of translation. The former is written for and expectations of ‘reality’, make us by the artist, and translated into Korean, immune to really thinking about what’s empathising with nothing present and what’s not. Not that this Japanese and Russian. It’s performed in wasn’t already happening before the current pandemic. Like many these languages by two female actors, always against that empty black other issues, the pandemic just seems to have brought it to the fore. set, with English subtitles. The narrative centres around two repre“As witnesses of new technologies, it is certain that we will sentatives of separate fictional companies who are visiting an iodine never remain unchanged,” says one of the protagonists in Brine Lake. recycling factory (we are not given details of its specific location) in Although she is, superficially at least, talking about technology in the order to set up some form of business relationship. One of the reprecontext of something else. sentatives speaks Korean and Japanese, the other Korean and Russian. On Skype we begin by discussing pandemic living conditions. I At times the second speaker struggles with the latter language. mention the new restrictions that have been imposed in London to effect These representatives are videoed, head-on, speaking to factory greater social distancing. Shen replies by saying that “we [in Minnesota] employees separately and, in one channel, together, but we only hear one side of the conversation and can only read one set of subtitles: live in cars, so we don’t come into contact with other people”. “My office in our company looks a lot like this room. Do you the voice and presence of the factory employees is absent, the subtilike it here?” asks another of Brine Lake’s protagonists at the begin- tles relating to their speech blacked out. Instead, the camera moves ning of what appears to be a business conversation. It comes across back and forth, and side to side, focusing on the representatives alone. as an icebreaker, an attempt to forge a personal connection. (A recur- There’s a suggestion of intimacy as the camera zooms in on faces, and ring theme in the work.) It’s empathetic but strategic in the osten- awkwardness as the camera, which we are led to presume stands in sible context of a business meeting. Although to the eyes of the viewer for the eyes of the absent factory staff, sways, as if those staff were there is no context to speak of. There is no ‘actual’ room onscreen. constantly shuffling around. Just a blank, empty set. Yet the setup works like that earlier icebreaker. We find ourselves starting Brine Lake is due to be completed The uncertainty that surrounds at the end of October, two weeks after who is talking to whom soon morphs to guess as to the absent content of the conversation, and slowly we begin to our conversation. So, in a way, it too is into an uncertainty as to what the stand in for a missing person, filling a an absent presence. I have seen extracts from each channel, singly, on a computer void that is made manifest in the form of conversation is really about screen, but not the five-channel whole, an emptiness in time (the time in which which is due to go on show as part of the Gwangju Biennale, now post- the unheard voice, with its censored subtitles, is speaking), space poned to 2021. So anything I have to say about the work as a whole is to (out of shot) and representation. We feel a certain responsibility. We some degree a projection, a type of fiction, an incomplete translation. want to give agency to the presence that has none. The voice that has Which, when it comes down to it, is how we talk about most experi- been censored. While, at the same time, in strictly logical terms, we’re ences of art. But I mention it here, in the case of Brine Lake, because engaged in a process of invention. Interpreting nothing, translating I’m particularly aware of it in the context of an artist, like Shen, in nothing and empathising with nothing to boot. whose work modes of display, as much as modes of representation, The factory employees, Shen suggests, are “ghosts”. And, as one watches Brine Lake, the uncertainty that now surrounds who is play a crucial role. The four-channel video installation Commerce des Esprits (2018), talking to whom soon morphs into an uncertainty as to what the for example, offers two channels of animated text (in English and conversation is really about. Discussions about iodine processing (for French respectively) and a Chinese voiceover, most industrial manufacture, brine is acidified, preceding pages Provocation of the Nightingale, 2018 alongside two channels of motion-capture video oxidised, filtered and purified – transformed (installation view, 2018 Triennial: from liquid to solid, to vapourised states), the (in which the body being captured is reduced to Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, New York) a vaguely skeletal combination of points and extraction and manipulation of something born Photo: Maris Hutchinson/epw Studio lines). On a narrative level it combines (more of the conditions of the land (iodine, as one of facing page Commerce des Esprits, 2018 (installation and less obviously) the memory of Shen’s father, the representatives puts it, derives from organic view, To Satiate, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2019)

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above and facing page Brine Lake (A New Body) (stills), 2020

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both images Warm Spell (stills), 2018, digital video, 34 min

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animal and plant debris on the ocean floor), and its eventual recycling puts it. Perhaps about Sakhalin island, then called Karafuto, where (following its use in things like the production of fluorochemicals, or Japanese forces invited and forced Korean labourers to move during as a component of x-ray media materials, for example) start to sound the 1930s and 40s in order to fill labour shortages. Russia invaded the like discussions about reincarnation: “death without decay”, as one island shortly before the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second of the participants puts it. Conversation continually slips from the World War, eventually repatriating the Japanese but leaving the nowimpersonal to the personal; discussions about companies working stateless Koreans stranded. Until the mid-1980s, when Japan offered together flicker between both individual and corporate backgrounds to repatriate what was by then several generations of ethnic Koreans. and intentions. Just as discussions about the origins of the foreign Only a small number returned to Korea. “Stateless people create fear,” machinery used in the factory morph into discussions about mother- one of the protagonists says. and fatherlands. At one point, iodine seems to be speaking for itself: In effect Brine Lake offers a form of role reversal, giving a voice to it’s too raw, hence its reliance on techthose who generally have none. It’s the We guess as to the absent content of the product of Shen’s ongoing research nology to refine it; its malleable properties make it submissive. And quickly into conditions of statelessness in East conversation, we begin to stand in for the discussion of technology becomes Asia. But without overtly locating that a missing person, filling a void that is within the context of conflict or, as a discussion about mechanisms of made manifest in the form of an empti- Shen puts it, “nationalist histories”. power and control. The censored part of the dialogue feels more sinister still. ness in time, space and representation “This embodiment of the unknown leaves you with something that’s up to Questions of how and in what language to communicate crop up; what’s comfortable and what’s not. “I think you to decide what it is,” Shen says. “Your relationship with it and you can understand what it means to convert something that is asso- how you participate, whether it’s about the environmental concerns, ciated with you by birth but is inherently foreign,” one of the char- or your relationship with the land or with people in general, or the idea of home and homeland – is something that I think about a lot acters states. Drip by drip, it becomes clear that the subject of iodine recycling during the pandemic.” Beyond the metaphors and translations, in conceals another topic of conversation. A conversation about state- Shen’s work that translates into a form that gives agency to actors and lessness and the history of Korea’s conflicts and colonisation over the viewers alike. ara past century. “About assimilation, recycling, revaluing, devaluing, relationships with former states and future homelands,” as Shen The Gwangju Biennale takes place from 26 February to 9 May

Warm Spell , 2018, video installation, 34 min. Photo: gr. Berlin. © Times Art Center Berlin all images Courtesy the artist

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The Epiphany Artist by Rahel Aima

Indian filmmaker Mochu messes with the eye and mind

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Cybernetic prostheses meet art history, cartoon physics and the acid- the better-known vanguardists of Indian modernism, the Bombay woozy ruins of 1960s counterculture in Mochu’s cinematic universe. Progressives, for its utter rejection of European masters in favour of The Indian artist’s output spans multiple media, but he is best under- local art movements and indigenous craft forms. Decades later, in 2015, stood as a writer with a movie camera. Text overflows his films like Mochu would make A Gathering at the Carnival Shop, about one of the artwater from an infinity pool, taking shape as accompanying essays and ists at Cholamandal. The film orbits the curious 1973 disappearance of lecture performances. Like the works of Soviet film-director Dziga enigmatic outsider artist K. Ramanujam – who, according to the film, Vertov, his videos eschew straightforward narrative exposition for a may have turned into a black dog or a hat – but is equally a portrait of kind of database cinema of accumulated fragments and a liberal use of place. It eschews documentary conventions for a conversational, explorspecial effects. And although nearly a century of technological develop- atory tone that lingers on archival images, artwork and Ramanujam’s ment separates them, both filmmakers evince an interest in modes of fellow artists, now old men, who reminisce at unedited length. perception and transhumanist utopianism. But whereas Vertov underThere is a sense throughout Mochu’s practice that art history unstood the camera lens as a second eye, in Mochu’s hands it becomes folds from topography. An early short video, Painted Diagram of a Future something groovier and weirder, tapping into transhistorical astral Voyage (Who Believes the Lens?) (2013), posits a speculative Indian landscape derived from aquatints produced by colonial painters Thomas planes to function more like a third one. Mochu was born in Kerala, grew up around India and is currently and William Daniells. Here, buildings are picked up, distorted as if they’ve taken a timespace-shearing based between Delhi and Istanbul. He is wary of the identitarian pitfalls lap around the galaxy – anamorphosis “There’s an ontological confusion that await non-Western artists, and is reframed as the distorted gaze of about things, and you don’t know whether Empire – to create a sci-fi alien landuses this childhood nickname over a thing is an object or a person” his legal one for the opacity it grants, scape that is as unmoored from reality explaining over email that “I like the as the Daniellses’ Orientalist fantalazy ambiguity it affords (gender, species, ethnicity, collective/indi- sies. Another short, Mercury (2016), similarly intervenes in an artvidual), nothing is clear in it.” He studied animation and communi- historical landscape through cut-and-paste, zinelike animation, this cation design at Delhi’s National Institute of Design during the early time the Mughal court painter Ustad Mansur’s miniatures featuring 2000s, a time when celluloid was being discontinued and the industry plants and animals. was moving towards nonlinear digital editing. Mochu arrived at More recently, Mochu has been thinking about the way in which experimental cinema via a process of elimination – “I wasn’t inter- freeports and financial speculation alter flows of linear time – art fuested in ads,” he explains over Skype – and never formally trained as tures, instead of art history – by locking down the future, much as an artist. Later stints at the now-defunct Sarai Institute, set up by Raqs an art museum safeguards the past. He is adapting a 2018 lectureMedia Collective in Delhi, and Ashkal Alwan’s Homeworks Program performance on the subject into a book, which will be copublished in Beirut further honed his interest in critical theory (Chris Kraus, by Reliable Copy and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Another lecture performance, Toy Volcano, whose presentation was postKodwo Eshun, Reza Negarestani, Jalal Toufic) and technology. Nevertheless, he grew up around art: his father was a painter, and poned by Lebanon’s 2019 October Revolution backing into the pandemic, considers the deep time of geology the family spent some time at the Cholamandal above A Gathering at the Carnival Shop (still), – and Anthropocenic change as special effects – Artists’ Village on the outskirts of Chennai. It was 2015, digital video, 35 min India’s largest artist colony and the birthplace of via Japanese manga, trypophobia and two bizarre, facing page Cool Memories of Remote Gods (stills), the Madras Movement of Art, which differs from thoroughly enjoyable tales. 2017, digital video, 14 min 48 sec

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Painted Diagram of a Future Voyage (Who Believes the Lens?) (still), 2013, digital animation, 5 min (loop)

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A Gathering at the Carnival Shop (still), 2015, digital video, 35 min

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above Toy Volcano (stills), 2019, digital video and lecture performance, 45 min

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Mochu’s early influences come from the Indian experimental “most of my works are dealing with technology rather than science: cinema tradition, and include Amit Dutta and Kamal Swaroop, both technical devices, some philosophy of technology, however badly of whom he credits with expanding his sense of what was possible as misunderstood that might be, and technoscientific imaginaries”. a student. As for Vertov, Mochu cites the Soviet filmmaker’s contem- He is perplexed to find little in the way of a native philosophy of poraries Georges Méliès, Segundo de Chomón and later Dadaist and technology in India beyond the kind of gurus-and-jugaad spiritualSurrealist collage films as stronger influences, as well as Chris Marker meets-technopreneurial schlock you might spot at airport bookand certain essay films from Orson Welles, David Blair and Jean-Luc shops the world over. He cites Yuk Hui’s recent work on China as Godard, which extend the Vertovian tradition and, “while sustaining an exemplary analogue here, and at one level his practice might be a documentary layer, also employ a heavy layer of trick imagery and understood as a journey to figure out what that might look like. effects”. He is also particularly drawn to science fiction, such as work The California Ideology may have lost its sheen as efforts are made by the Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and the Polish to hold Big Tech accountable for their misuse of consumer data Stanisław Lem, which he finds beautiful in their abstraction, noting and its lax monitoring of political ads and disinformation, but it is that the genre was widely available (in translation from Russian) in the alive and well in it hubs like Bangalore and ‘Cyberabad’, and in the children’s section of Marxist bookstores. “There’s an ontological ethos of the Indian Century. Mochu is currently working on a film confusion about things, and you don’t know whether a thing is an about Hindu fundamentalists and their successful takeup of ‘Dark Enlightenment’ (a neoreactionary object or a person. This kind of fundamovement founded by Nick Land mental confusion I think is very well “In India we’ve been peddling and and Curtis Yarvin) alt-right tactics to done in the Eastern European context selling spiritualism for centuries” more than in the American or French,” manipulate public sentiments. he says. This ontological confusion Of course, the exchange goes equally pervades Mochu’s practice, as in the example of Ramanujam, both ways. “In India we’ve been peddling and selling spiritualism for centuries,” the artist remarks. Cool Memories of Remote Gods (2017) the artist who became a black dog and/or a hat. It’s an interesting point: technological development tends to is a kaleidoscopic nocturnal trip, the kind where you’re not sure what be so bound up with narratives of the nation that a country’s sci-fi exactly you’ve ingested, dissecting the corpse of the 1960s hippie trail inevitably reflects its national mythologies even as it might be crit- to trace the linkages between its appropriations of suitably ancient ical of them. Consider the individualist, techno-utopian impulses of Indian mysticism and the development of the personal computer. American science fiction, for example, which does nothing so much Mochu was careful to emphasise spirituality over religion here, as recast Manifest Destiny for space exploration. In contrast, Mochu deciding not to film in Varanasi for this reason and instead choosing points to the existential dread that pervades Soviet novels as well the tiny-but-sacred (to both Hindus and Sikhs) remote desert city of as their particular literary devices created to circumvent the restric- Pushkar. Drugs, intimated via heavy manipulation, are compared tions imposed on those writing from behind the Iron Curtain. Given to personal technologies – or is it vice versa? – even as old posters, the unprecedented crackdowns on personal and press freedoms psychedelic paraphernalia and the generalised abjection of the happening in India today, from cutting broadcast media and jailing ageing hippie signal the movement’s bankruptcy. Commissioned for journalists who publish stories critical of the ruling party, to the the 2017 Sharjah Biennial, it was first shown in a darkened room in a ongoing epidemic of caste-based sexual violence, I wonder whether building shaped like a flying saucer; I didn’t quite have my own spirmore Indian artists might not find Soviet science fiction instructive. itual epiphany, but it was perfect. ara At the same time, Mochu is careful to describe all images his own work as technofiction, explaining that Rahel Aima is a critic based in New York Courtesy the artist

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The Coast by Sohrab Hura

Snap! went my neck before the rough sand ripped the skin off my back to the oldest person I had ever seen. The sun bounced blindingly off as I was dragged back onto the beach. I forced myself up, exhausted her brilliant white hair and her eyes were liquid yellow compared but bent on not to be undone by the throbbing pain that had now to the rest of her beautiful, dark leathery skin. Her bright red saree started to hammer at my spine. I cupped the last shreds of skin that almost camouflaged the vermillion that had rubbed off her smeared were still hanging off my waist and slapped them straight back into forehead. When I tried to push on ahead, she put her hand on my chest the bright red flesh that was by now all that was left of me. I wrapped beckoning me to wait a moment. With her other hand she offered me my old lungi around my torso to be able to hold everything together a beautiful string of jasmine that she slipped into the front pocket of and slowly wobbled back into the water to be among the other men. my office shirt and rested her palm back on my chest. We’ve been waiting The land behind me had been lit with a frenzied rage that streaked the long for you to arrive. Take off that mask, now will you? A body fell over to dark moonlit night with its embers. Processions of Nadaswaram and the side of a betel shop at the edge of the crowded lane leading to Urumi cutting and beating through the cold inward winds marked an a commotion. When I turned my head back again, the old lady and her incessant series of arrivals and departures on a day that had passed empathetic hand had disappeared. in paying obeisance to the descending gods. I had already gifted the The women beside me seem middle aged, like me, except every last toe on my right foot that I had saved especially for this occasion. time the water reaches their feet, they break out into a peal of laughter Others had gifted an eye, an ear or even a limb. Another man, a tongue. like a gaggle of girls sharing a secret at the back of a school bus. They In return the celestial beings had embodied us for that day and had echo the faint but rapturous squeals that each wave carries back to made us invincible and electric for that night of conquests. We had us with it. In a distance beautiful bodies burst out of the darkness in been preparing for this moment since we were young boys. The other the water. Women, children, the elderly. Each time we move forward men in the water beside me had now started to scream in anticipa- into the last of the dark, their fingertips touch each other’s in nervous tion. I started to feel the shifting sand beneath my feet and egged excitement as a wave flows past them. It is the sea that tickles in its on by the voices behind us we started to wade further into the deep, playfulness. You see, we have all lifted our saris so that we can feel shoulder first, to break that impending wall of water. Startled by an the currents all the way up to our thighs. Lost in my curiosity, before excited howl I had looked over my shoulder and found the remains of I realise it’s happening, the water swells before me and rolls me over a skeleton, that by now had had the flesh entirely washed off its bones, in its embrace. I gasp upwards for a breath and cough out the water bracing itself for its last clash with the waves. I felt the pull of currents that had filled up my lungs. I reach at the back of my head and notice swirl and grab on to my ankles as I listened to the rising growl of what that the jasmine has been stolen by the currents and the wig has come was lurking ahead. The men beside me had disappeared and as I stood undone. My wife had carefully fixed the flowers to my hair after alone looking up at the shadow swallowing me, I could swear I felt helping me to tie my sari and fix the blouse. She had folded away my shirt and trousers neatly into an old plastic bag to protect them from sweat run down my leg beneath the waters. Darkness. The water curls lovingly over my toes and kisses the back of my the sand. I turn around and catch her looking at me. She is sitting on ankles before quietly retreating back into the open body of the sea. the beach with the old plastic bag on her lap, her smile now illumiI can smell the salt in the air and listen to the foamy whiteness of sea nated by the first sliver of daybreak. Nearby, I hear the splashing of spray in a distance. I open my eyes and look down at my feet, cushioned footsteps in the shallows. I look up and find the oldest woman I’ve into the soft wet sand. Little crabs dart in and out of the sand during ever seen, her head thrown back in a chuckle. Her red saree drips a trail the interval before the water returns. Two other women have broken of vermillion behind her as she walks towards land. I watch the transaway from the crowd and have moved on to the wet sand beside me. lucent sky with dimming stars as I lay back afloat and wait for the next I can recognise those wafts of jasmine that they have tied delicately wave to carry me further away in its embrace. onto the back of their hair in strings. Earlier in the day while we were making our way through the crowd to visit Sohrab Hura is a photographer based in New Delhi. the temple, I had felt a hand rest on my shoulder. His latest exhibition, Spill, is on view at Experimenter, following pages The Coast (stills), 2020, film, It was a frail but empathetic hand and it belonged Kolkata, 7 November – 2 January 17 min 27 sec. Courtesy the artist

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Tiger Tiger, Burning… How rightwing politics are reshaping history in India today by Deepa Bhasthi

Tipu Sultan (1750–99), or the ‘Tiger What set Tipu Sultan apart from of Mysore’, could hardly be called the most of his contemporaries, however, was his quick recognition of most influential of Islamic rulers to the East India Company’s expanhave reigned over parts of India. The sionist ambitions and his determiMughal Empire (sixteenth to midnation to drive out the British from nineteenth century) controlled most the borders of the subcontinent. of the subcontinent; the Deccan Unlike in other royal courts, in Sultanates (sixteenth to late-seventeenth century) in the south left a far which ambassadors of the Company more influential and lasting impact were welcomed, no European was allowed into Mysore without an on the political landscape and sociocultural life in the country. Tipu’s invitation. For this, he was subjected rule over the Mysore region has had to a villain-making campaign by a lesser impression on culture in officers of the Company courts. what is now the state of Karnataka. More than 200 years after his death, Neither was Tipu among the most the remnants of his vilification ruthless rulers in history. His policy continue to dictate how his history of forcibly converting people to is perceived in India. Islam after defeating their king, desecrating places of worship as The extraordinary loot from the Siege of Seringapatam (presenta way of humbling the enemy and removing sources of power and day Srirangapatna, 130km from the state capital, Bengaluru) in 1799, identity were common political strategies practised by warring kings when Tipu was killed, is today enclosed in royal collections and of all faiths, across all India’s kingdoms and beyond. Tremendously museum displays across the British Isles. Tippoo’s Tiger, an organ wealthy as it was, Tipu’s kingdom was not the richest of his time either, in the shape of an almost lifesize wooden tiger mauling a European though in the few peaceful years between the many wars he fought, soldier that, semiautomated, produces sounds that mimic the he was well on his way to making Mysore the centre of a formidable dying man’s moans, occupies pride of place among the collections of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and empire. That he was a devout Muslim ruler of a above John Zoffany, Tipu Sultan age 30, 1780. remains one of its most famous exhibits. With mostly Hindu populace was again not unusual; Photo: David Pearson / Alamy Stock Photo museums beginning to acknowledge, however like other kings of his time, Tipu’s realpolitik facing page ‘Tippoo’s Tiger’, painted wooden was a necessity, rather than a personal kindness reluctantly, the colonial pasts of their collections semiautomaton, c. 1793, Mysore. towards his subjects. and the violent events that led to the objects Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum, London

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leaving colonised shores, it is timely too to examine how manufac- given free rein to loot the palace grounds. Apart from immense quanturing consent and an eighteenth-century pr smear campaign have tities of gold, precious books, weaponry and other treasures, the looting included Tipu’s throne, which by all accounts was so grand left Tipu’s legacy open for continued erasure in today’s India. Tipu’s father, Hyder Ali, was a professional soldier under the and large that it could only be shifted by breaking it into pieces. One Wodeyar kings of Mysore who rose up the ranks and became a ruler of several finials, encrusted with precious jewels and in the shape of during the 1760s. Fuelled by great ambition to expand his kingdom, a tiger’s head – Tipu’s favoured symbol of identity and power – and a and later with the motive to halt the progress of British forces in the jewelled huma bird that sat atop the canopy of the throne are amongst country, he would continue waging wars against the imperial army the treasures in the Royal Collection Trust today. and other kingdoms in the south for the rest of his life. In a relaWere Tipu and his father two of the greatest patriots who fought tively brief 17 years as king, what should be described as Under Hindutva-driven policies of rightwing Tipu would go on to seek allisome of the earliest wars for Ingovernments both at the centre and in the state of dian Independence, decades beances with Turkey and France, as well as reaching out to kings Karnataka, Tipu Sultan’s period has been subjected fore better-known wars against in the nearer vicinity. In fact, the British? A comic published to further erasure from history textbooks Napoleon’s ultimately disasby Amar Chitra Katha, one of trous campaign in Egypt was part of his larger project to reach India India’s most-read publishers of graphic novels, certainly thinks so. As and ally with Tipu against forces commanded by the future Duke of did a yearlong drama series called The Sword of Tipu Sultan that aired Wellington in order to weaken British expansionism. One can only on Indian state television in 1990–91. Or was Tipu another especially speculate on the progress of world history if such an attempt had ruthless bigot who needed to be removed to save the region from relicome to fruition. gious fascism? The reading of Tipu’s legacy today by political parties While the four Anglo-Mysore wars proved somewhat successful and in majoritarian public consciousness rarely veers towards a greyfor the British, what helped turn the tide was a campaign to portray ish middle-ground between these poles that accommodates the layerTipu as a bigot and a tyrant to subjects of the empire back home. ed and complex rule of this man. For nearly 30 years, Tipu’s supposed rule of Under the current Hindutva-driven poliabove John Absolon, The Finding of the Body of Tipu terror was at the forefront of public consciouscies of rightwing governments both at the Sultan at Seringapatam, 1840–60. ness via vivid and, more often than not, embelcentre and in the state of Karnataka, Tipu Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum, London lished reports from Mysore. When he finally Sultan’s period has been subjected to further facing page A page from Tipu Sultan: died in battle at the end of the eighteenth erasure from history textbooks. The day after a The Tiger of Mysore, 2011, century, soldiers led by General Harris were Bharatiya Janata Party-led government wrested published by Amar Chitra Katha

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power from a coalition government late last year, Karnataka’s chief governments such as Maharashtra and Rajasthan have begun to gloss minister, B.S. Yediyurappa, announced that chapters on Tipu would over, going so far as to wholly remove chapters on the Mughal Empire be removed from school history-textbooks. Following uproar from from textbooks in the past few years. historians and opposition parties, the decision has currently been Tipu has been variously called a tyrant, fanatic, jihadi, patriot, put on hold. The Indian National Congress, one of the oldest polit- hero, scholar, as valorous as his tiger. He was undoubtedly a complex ical parties in the country, functions under relatively progressive figure, but it is important to read Tipu as a ruler of his times, for and secular policies in comparison to the overtly right-leaning bjp modern ideas of ethics, policies and belief systems can never be that in recent years has pursued a hardline Hindutva agenda. In 2015 congruent with events from distant centuries. No doubt it makes a decision was taken by the state government of Karnataka, then led for sensational news in contemporary settings and evokes emotions by the Congress party, to celebrate Tipu Jayanti, the birthday of Tipu, that political parties have special uses for in furthering their sectarian on 10 November each year. The celebration was cancelled after the bjp agendas. The bigger question here is what do we lose when major took power in 2018. chunks of history are excluded or erased from pedagogy. Choosing Tipu Jayanti has been a contentious issue ever since: in the festi- to unteach major events in favour of promoting misleading versions val’s maiden year, there were widespread violent protests in the that are more palatable for the majority is an act of politicising districts of Kodagu, Dakshina Kannada (both in Karnataka) and parts the teaching of history. Just as leaving the uncomfortable bits in is of Kerala that led to three deaths. In his lifetime all three regions a political choice. had been invaded by Tipu and/or his father and were sites of much History is never linear, nor is it over. It continues to be written destruction and violence. In the coffee-growing district of Kodagu, and will always be a political tool. Traumatic as some lessons may be, the minority indigenous Kodavas allege that Tipu massacred around removing uncomfortable chapters – whether on Tipu, or glossing 60,000 men from the community during the 1780s when he briefly over the atrocities of the empire – from textbooks is only knee-jerk controlled the region. That there is no historical evidence for this tokenism, not a blueprint for acknowledging, understanding and supposed ethnic cleansing and that the overall population in the area perhaps even healing. (including all communities) would have been less than the claimed In a recent episode on erasures in us history textbooks, Britishdeath toll are dry facts that rarely matter in religious partisanship. American comedian and host of Last Week Tonight John Oliver’s Even a decade ago, though, Tipu Sultan was only sometimes in thoughts could well apply to the controversial case of Tipu Sultan: the public consciousness. But with India’s contemporary political “History taught well teaches us how to improve the world, but history sphere leaning further and further towards when taught poorly falsely claims that there Hindu Sena members protest against the Hindu right, Islamic rulers like Tipu have is nothing to improve”. ara celebrations of Tipu Jayanti in New Delhi, 2018. become awkward issues that no longer have a Photo: Qamar Sibtain / The India Today place in history. It is in this line that some state Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Bengaluru Group via Getty Images

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Acts of Indignation by Marv Recinto

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As the Philippine government continues to rehabilitate Ferdinand Marcosâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name, artist Pio Abad keeps the focus on the familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spectacular thefts and other crimes

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preceding pages Imelda as Maganda & Ferdinand as Malakas (detail), 2014â&#x20AC;&#x201C;16, black paint on digitally printed canvas and faux gold bamboo frame, framed inkjet print on Hahnemuhle pearl paper and video in white aluminium frame above Untitled (25 February 1986), 2011, framed inkjet print on HahnemĂźhle pearl paper

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In September 2020, under House Bill 7137, 197 legislators of the Philippine House of Representatives voted to declare 11 September President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Day in the dictator’s home province of Ilocos Norte. The decision came just weeks before the 48th anniversary of Martial Law, imposed on 23 September 1972, prompting many to wonder how Marcos’s reputation had managed to be rehabilitated to such an extent. After all, his autocratic leadership in the period 1965–86 was responsible for thousands of human rights violations – Amnesty International counts over 3,200 extrajudicial deaths, 34,000 cases of torture and 70,000 imprisoned Filipinos. Meanwhile, the Philippine Supreme Court estimates that the Marcos family pocketed $10 billion during their 21-year tenure, most of which now hides in foreign bank accounts and accumulated luxury goods. This recent legislation represents one of many events that continue to baffle both the local and international community, leading to debates as to why this late, corrupt dictator continues to be revered in the very country he tyrannised and mercilessly plundered for over two decades. It is within this landscape of unexplained wealth and indifference to the plight of the Philippine people that artist Pio Abad has set his ongoing project The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders (2014–). The title derives from the pseudonyms used by Marcos and his wife, Imelda, on their Swiss bank accounts, which Abad then fashions as a grandiose property title used to inflate an object’s significance. Throughout the work’s various iterations, the artist identifies the Marcos family’s former luxury and fine-art possessions and reproduces them, endowing these new objects with a hauntology. Born in Manila, Abad grew up in the final years of the Marcos era and its aftermath. His parents, both political activists during that time, were incarcerated for their critical dissent of the regime. Abad studied at the University of Philippines in Manila, then left the country in 2004 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in painting and printmaking at Glasgow

School of Art. He went on to study at London’s Royal Academy and has lived in the British capital ever since. His socially and politically charged artworks operate within a gamut of material and mediums – textiles, drawing, installation, photography – to awaken historical spectres of greed, neocolonialism and neoliberal negligence. In 1965 Marcos won his first presidential term with a populist campaign that touted him as a decorated Second World War hero. Imelda, a former beauty queen, also proved paramount to his bid with her charm and sharp political instincts. The pair would sing duets during political rallies, foreshadowing the performative and saccharine, conjugal dictatorship to come. During his first term, Marcos initiated and supported vast infrastructure projects funded by foreign investment, which made him popular enough to be the only Philippine president elected to a second term (critics would argue that vote-buying and electoral fraud were the real reasons for this success). However, towards the end of his second term, Marcos declared Martial Law, clutching on to power with the excuse of ‘reforming society’ after facilitating economically tumultuous years and rising critical voices. The Martial Law years were the Philippines’ darkest since independence, but the regime was eventually toppled by the peaceful 1986 People Power Revolution. With the Marcos family fleeing to Hawaii (their flight into exile organised by us president Ronald Reagan), protesters stormed Malacañang, the presidential palace, and discovered the ostentatious remnants of the family’s lifestyle. Indeed, the myth of Imelda’s 3,000 pairs of shoes made global headlines and strategically eclipsed the atrocities committed by the family, as well as a legacy that left the country economically reeling from a $26 billion debt and 44.2 percent poverty rate. With the family’s departure, the objects Imelda used to cultivate a notoriously opulent and garish image also seemed to disappear over time. So far, the Presidential Commission on Good Government (pcgg) – a taskforce designated to find and repatriate the

The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders, 2014– (installation view, 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, 2016)

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Marcoses’ missing wealth – has recovered what is estimated to be less century, despite Imelda winning a seat in the House of Representatives than 10 percent of all illicit assets. that year; in the reproductions, the Ferdinand and Imelda of the Abad’s parents were among the first activists to enter Malacañang. Martial Law years take on a new form. The artist says this project really began with a photograph his mother However, when President Rodrigo Duterte allowed Marcos’s body took of his father from that day, where he posed with an enormous, to be buried in Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery) of Manila mythologised portrait of Ferdinand Marcos painted by Evan Cosayco. in 2016, ending the family’s decades-long campaign, Abad decided to In this portrait, a ridiculously taut Marcos emerges from a split bamboo cover these reproductions with black paint, in a recorded, performain the middle of an idealised forest with a dove flying overhead. tive gesture at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, The partner portrait shows Imelda, donning a flowing white dress, where they were on view at the time. In a letter to the museum, Abad similarly blooming into the world. These romanticised portraits of writes: ‘I just know that this isn’t the time to be talking about the whimFerdinand and Imelda envision them sical fantasies of a dictatorship. It is Abad positions each new object, as the first Filipinos from mythology the time to confront the painful real– Malakas (the Strong One) and resurrected from verified historic reality, ities the Marcoses have continued to Maganda (the Beautiful One) – disseminflict on the Filipino people and what against the real articles and pushes them inated as propaganda to position the that means for the country and for the further into the Marcoses’ manufactured region. I would like to somehow implicouple as the parents of their envisioned Bagong Lipunan (New Society, cate these works in an act of indignanarrative of delusional grandeurs based on Lyndon Johnson’s Great tion.’ Marcos’s apparent acceptance by Society). Abad first saw these paintings at ten years old, but when he the Philippine government signifies historical revisionism wherein he visited the palace again in 2010, they had been removed and hidden is restored to the heroic status he desperately manufactured during his away. The best way to see these again, he decided, was to make his own lifetime. Abad notes in a lecture that this is the kind of “symbolic restito-scale reproductions, which he explains in a 2019 lecture is an “elab- tution that democracies have sought since their temporary defeat – as orate disavowal of violent political fantasies, laundered histories and if this burial was an act of justice for the family”. alternative facts”. Revival aside, Abad brings the images into contemThe first presentation of The Collection of Jane Ryan & William porary spaces, relying on the privilege of retrospection to endow them Saunders is composed of an unlimited number of postcards that feature with the isolated absurdity that only distance artworks Abad has identified as belonging to preceding pages Pio Abad and Frances the Marcoses. Typically, these are displayed on can afford. During the Marcos era, these propaWadsworth Jones, The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders (detail), 2019, 24 reconstructions two long plinths; viewers are encouraged to gandistic paintings spread a parental, authoriof pieces from the Hawaii Collection, modelled take away copies of the postcards as an altertative message. In 2010, 21 years after the patrifrom photographs taken by Christie’s, nate act of repatriation. By ‘redistributing’ arch’s death in 1989, the Marcoses did not wield 3d printed plastic, 15 brass stands and these artworks, Abad claims to ‘return the the same influence they had in the twentieth dry-transfer text.Photo: Matthew Booth

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collection to its rightful owners who unknowingly purchased the objects and property is purgatorial, with Abad’s artworks functioning works but never really enjoyed its visual benefits’. Instead of including as traces of what exists but remains missing. an art historical blurb about each painting on the back of the card, And perhaps this is what’s important in Abad’s project: he doesn’t Abad appropriates news articles that recount the object’s history. On find and revive the original, disappeared treasures; he creates new, the back of one postcard, of a 1805 work by Francisco de Goya, The spectral copies that endow an afterlife beyond the objects themselves, Marquesa of Santa Cruz as a Muse, Abad cites a 2015 Artnet article by Cait affording them a sort of freedom to be seen while their real, primary Munro: ‘The artwork somehow vanished from the Los Angeles County forms exist in ambiguity. Abad’s new objects function in a Proustian Museum of Art (lacma), apparently never to be seen again, until much act of remembrance that not only seeks to catalyse forgotten memoof the shoe queen’s property was seized by the Philippine government ries, but also grievances. These spectral works exist parallel and in 2014’. The painting continues to be missing according to missin- adversely to the Marcoses’ real ill-gotten gains and manufactured gart.ph, a nonexhaustive public list set up by the pcgg to increase the narrative. Abad positions each new object, resurrected from forensic profile of the restitution project. indexes in verified historic reality, against the real articles and pushes Succeeding versions of the project include reproductions of other them further into the Marcoses’ manufactured narrative of delusional artworks – sculptures, paintings and photographs – owned by the grandeurs and ‘edifice complex’ (a term coined by Filipino artist and Marcoses, while the most recent iteration of The Collection…, unveiled activist Behn Cervantes to describe Imelda’s rapid construction of at Honolulu Biennial, in 2019, is a collaboration between the artist institutions, touted to promote Philippine talent, but only fostering and his wife, fellow artist and jewellery designer Frances Wadsworth Western and Eurocentric standards in practice). Jones. When the Marcoses were exiled to Hawaii in 1986, they brought More personal to Abad is the family tradition: The Collection… with them over 35 pieces of luggage containing 413 pieces of jewellery, begins with his parents and collaborates with his wife. However, which were seized upon arrival and repatriated to the Philippines for Abad particularly reminisces upon the legacy left behind by his liquidation by the pcgg. Known as the Hawaii Collection, the jewellery mother, who has since died: “It’s her loss that has defined the work,” was consigned by the Philippine government to Christie’s for auction Abad said in his 2019 lecture, “since it wasn’t coincidental that in 2015, 30 years after its confiscation. However, in June 2016, President my mother died as the country that she sought to create fell into Duterte swiftly cancelled the sale, asserting that it could only proceed if pieces: an entire nation’s social cancer became her own” (José Rizal’s Imelda were allowed to bid. The collection has not been seen since. For 1887 novel, Noli Me Tángere, was translated into The Social Cancer in 1912). this phase, Wadsworth Jones adapted Christie’s With the Marcoses own familial legacy again 2d photography so that the jewellery could be gaining popularity and relying on generational above and facing page The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders (detail), 2014–, postcard 3d-printed in white plastic. These beautiful succession, the ghosts of the past cannot be reproductions of Old Master paintings sold bijoux are ghostly traces – allowing them to be forgotten. ara by Christie’s on behalf of the Philippine seen by the public (albeit in an alternate form) Commission on Good Government, for the first time in over 30 years. Their status as Marv Recinto is a writer based in London 98 sets, unlimited copies

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“It’s important that it’s beyond my reason” Australian-Chinese artist Lindy Lee negotiates heart, body, mind and biography in work that summons all of existence by Neha Kale

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preceding pages Birth and Death, 2003, inkjet print, ink, synthetic polymer paint on Chinese accordion book, dimensions variable. Photo: Anna Kucera. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist and mca Australia, Sydney above Untitled (After Jan Van Eyck), 1988, photocopy, synthetic polymer paint on Stonehenge paper mounted on foamcore, 15 parts, 146 Ă&#x2014; 184 cm (overall). Courtesy the artist

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The failure to belong to a culture is often framed as a personal short- to the shifting nature of the self, our connections with each other coming. But for Lindy Lee, the perspective of an outsider can lead and the cosmos. Those early works focused around images sourced to acts of artistic generation and open the door to truths you don’t from art-history textbooks. The artist photocopied portraits by Rembrandt and van Eyck and Botticelli and then used carbon and yet know. The Australian-Chinese artist grew up in Brisbane, Queensland, paint to partially obscure the sitters’ faces. Untitled (After Jan van Eyck) during the 1950s and 60s, before the end of the White Australia policy, (1985) and The Silence of Painters (1987) hint at this process of concealing the regime that restricted immigration from non-European coun- and revealing, evoking both the artist’s cultural distance from the tries for nearly seven decades. Although she once yearned to fit in, she Western canon and the way the aura of the originals survives appronow believes that embracing her otherness is a source of rich creative priation and repetition. power. “You know how it is in the schoolyard, when one has a face At the time, these works were read as fashionably postmodern. that is different,” says Lee, now in her sixties, a note of wistfulness in But for Lee they were personal. “The copy is the story of me and so her voice. “But if you have to grow up on the fringe of something, or many others,” she says. “In the old days [of photocopying technology] if you are straddling things, you are forced to understand worldviews carbon had to be fused onto the paper. I realised that the photocopies in different ways. It might be painful, but it is your gift.” had their own kind of beauty. It was this recognition that I was such Moon in a Dew Drop, the largest survey of the artist’s 35-year career, a bad copy of China. I was born in this country and just wanted to is about to open at the Museum belong – but I could never.” of Contemporary Art in Sydney. It In No Up, No Down the walls of a comes during a moment in which white room are adorned with indiAustralian institutions are grappling vidual ‘flung ink’ paintings in shades with the questions of representation of orange and indigo. In 1993 Lee and power that are driving the wider travelled to Beijing on an Asialink artworld. A survey exhibition from fellowship, intending to study tradian Australian woman of colour is still tional Chinese calligraphy. She didn’t an all-too-rare occasion. The show, connect with it, instead making paintings by pouring and spilling which features over 70 artworks from ink. The technique, embraced by the 1980s to the present, is a study in Ch’an Buddhists in China during the the depth and intricacy of the artist’s vision. Lee, who is widely considered Ming dynasty (1368–1644), saw monks one of Australia’s most important meditate before throwing the liquid on paper. The marks they made, the contemporary artists, has been exhibconsequence of chance rather than iting nationally and internationally for the past three decades, showing intention, were thought to reflect the everywhere from Japan and Malaysia true nature of the universe. to Canada and New Zealand. She No Up, No Down channels the energy arrived on the scene during the early of an explosion. The work’s dramatic 1980s, an era that saw Australia start scale and deceptively simple presentato publicly question its national idention spark a sense of introspection and expansion in the viewer. tity, galvanised by the 1988 bicentenary, the 200-year anniversary of the Lee’s ability to distil opposing elements into a visual language is arrival of British colonisers in Sydney. a hallmark of paintings like White She was among the first Australian contemporary artists to grapple with European art history, going Sacrament (1985), an appropriation of El Greco’s The Apostle St Andrew on to invent a visual imaginary that could articulate the complexi- (1610–14). A white cross bisects an image of Saint Andrew, resemties of diasporic experience. Lee, who taught at the Sydney College of bling a ghost trapped in canvas. The saint is rendered by the artist the Arts for over 20 years, influenced a generation of younger artists in encaustic, a combination of dark pigment and beeswax. The artist (including Jason Phu and Phuong Ngo) who have been emboldened attempts to find herself in the grand narratives of Western religion by her example in the process. but comes up lacking. The cross becoming a way to ‘cross out’, a sacred Lee, wearing hot-pink sneakers, her blunt fringe swept off her symbol turned visual disclaimer. Influenced by the ‘black paintings’ face, emanates excited energy. The artist is deep in work mode. Today, of Ad Reinhardt, a formative influence, it remains one of her more she tells me, flopping down on the floor to sit cross-legged, she’s powerful early works. installed No Up, No Down, I Am the Ten Thousand Things. In the Museum of Contemporary Art’s third-floor galleries a The installation was first shown at the Art Gallery of New South room is given over to a new commission, Moonlight Deities (2019–20), Wales in 1995. It marked a change in the artist’s line of inquiry, away a series of paper panels suspended from the ceiling. Perforated with circles of different sizes, they resemble cratered from the photocopied works on paper that were surfaces. The work is still in progress, she the result of her early investigations into idenUntitled (After Jan van Eyck), 1985. explains. You walk through it, encountering tity and towards the sprawling forms, often Courtesy the artist and Sullivan & Strumpf, made from liquid bronze and steel, that speak the way the moon’s ghostly pallor can render an Sydney & Singapore

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ordinary night ethereal. Lunar bodies have long symbolised the cycle A sympathetic immigration officer allowed Phillip’s family to join of hours and days, and the work that references the Buddhist philoso- him. His wife, Lily, who had been battling the rise of Communism in pher Dogen immerses the viewer in moving shadows. Here, the artist mainland China (where, to survive, she was trading gold on the black invokes temporality as fleeting and unknowable, even as it shapes market), arrived with their two young sons in 1953. our daily lives. Lee, born a year later, started drawing in childhood. “You are On a far wall hangs Under the Shadowless Tree (2020), a swathe of speaking with this accent and feel this yearning for recognition, for indigo blue striated with drippings of black beeswax, as radiant and belonging, but it is just not there,” she says. “Drawing allowed me to inscrutable as the horizon. Wonder may not be fashionable. But it’s figure out how I was connected to the world and how the world was central to Lee’s project as an artist. connected to me.” “The mind only knows what the mind knows, but if you [use] In 1975 she attended teachers’ college in Brisbane, before moving the entirety of who you are, the heart, to London later in the decade to study the mind and the body together, there’s a at the Chelsea School of Art. “I was “I am never going to be Chinese totality you are thinking with,” she says. thrilled to be accepted [to the school], and I’m never going to be white, For Lee, trusting her intuition rather but I was struggling,” she says. “Australia am I? But I have these affinities than relying exclusively on her intelwas where I was born but it was also the lect is about pushing beyond a version of place of my greatest discomfort, so I had with strands of philosophy” selfhood rooted in binaries and categoto return to understand my psyche.” ries. Her work owes its imaginative force to its willingness to move On her return she worked on the photocopy works. But she beyond the strictures of Enlightenment thinking, finding new visual found Zen Buddhism (which had been repressed in China during the modes to voice old ways of being. “It’s important that it’s beyond my Cultural Revolution) in 1993, after a period of study and meditation. reason,” she says. Zen Buddhism gave the artist the gift of a new praxis, one that was Lee’s grandfather moved from China to Australia for work during less interested in the limited language of identity and more in the the early 1900s. As he grew older, he gave up his place in the country infinite mysteries of existence. to Phillip, Lee’s father. (During the White Australia policy, which was “In Zen, it isn’t ‘who are you’ but ‘what is it that exists in this established in 1901, a nonwhite worker could bring a family member moment,’” she explains. “This is such a different question.” Presented only if they gave up their own place and moved out of the country.) with this new way of thinking, Lee became interested in a vision of

Unnameable, 2017, mirror polished bronze. Courtesy the artist; Sullivan & Strumpf, Sydney & Singapore; and uap, Sydney

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No Up, No Down, I Am the Ten Thousand Things, 1995/2020, photocopy, synthetic polymer paint, ink on Stonehenge paper, dimensions variable. Photo: Anna Kucera. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist; Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; and mca Australia, Sydney

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Secret World of a Starlight Ember, 2020, stainless steel. Photo: Ken Leanfore. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist; Sullivan & Strumpf, Sydney & Singapore; uap and mca Australia, Sydney

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selfhood as unknowable as the universe, moving beyond her investigations into cultural identity. No Up, No Down spoke to this understanding of self as part of a constellation of cosmic forces. “[I’d] realised that the boundaries of self are not limited by the boundaries of your skin,” she says. Then, during the early 2000s, the artist’s nephew was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. He died 18 months later. Lee made one of the most profound works of her career – an installation that featured 100 Chinese accordion books (a form that had originated during the Tang dynasty [618–907] in China, primarily for use in recording Buddhist scripture). In a way, the artist was also reconnecting with spiritual traditions that were threatened during the Cultural Revolution, to be reimagined and preserved beyond the country. The work, Birth and Death (2003), contains red-and-black portraits of her family reaching back five generations. “I wanted to give Ben, posthumously, his place in the history of our family,” she says. “There are five images of each individual during different stages of their life, so [it shows] the passage of time.” It reflects universality and individuality, the interconnected nature of history, present and future. Lee tells me that the gift of not belonging has helped her move towards artistic freedom. “I am never going to be Chinese and I’m never going to be white, am I?” says Lee, who is working towards a solo show at her Sydney gallery, Sullivan & Strumpf, in February. In May she will take part in a group exhibition at the 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art – she

became a member of the space, which champions Asian-Australian artists, not long after it was founded in 1996. “But I have these affinities with strands of philosophy.” Five years ago, Lee swapped her house in inner Sydney for the Byron Bay hinterland, home to starlit skies and subtropical rainforest. Materiality has always mattered to Lee, but her recent work is elemental, an attempt to reach a point of transcendence. She makes works such as Seeds of a new moon (2019) by flinging molten bronze onto the floor of a foundry. The glimmering droplets symbolise pieces of the cosmos. They capture the paradox of sameness and difference, pointing to the patterns of the universe that we are part of despite our individual lives and identities. The Life of Stars (2018), which stands in the forecourt of the Art Gallery of South Australia, is a six-metre-tall sculpture that plays with the connection between interior and exterior realities. Its surface, pocked with holes that radiate pinpricks of light, recreates the galaxy in miniature. “It invokes the breadth and depth of everything that has existed right now and exists in the future,” she says quietly. “None of us can exist except the other [also] exists. We are connected and that is the most important thing [to] understand.” ara Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, through 28 February Neha Kale is a writer and editor based in Sydney

Moonlight Deities, 2019–20, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Anna Kucera. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Sullivan & Strumpf, Sydney & Singapore; Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; and mca Australia, Sydney

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New launch date New agendas New list Everything you need to know about a year that taught us how powerless we really are The 2020 Power 100 Online and in print this December

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Art Reviewed

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An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season Time Passes National Gallery Singapore 4 September – 21 February Five brown women have taken over National Gallery Singapore (ngs). In front of a Raden Saleh painting of animals escaping from a forest fire, they recite excerpts from Frank Swettenham’s The Real Malay (1899), one of the foundational colonial British texts responsible for the myth of the ‘lazy Malay’. (Typical excerpt: ‘The leading characteristics of the Malay of every class is a disinclination to work’.) The women perform a slow exorcism of this racial malevolence. They pray, sing, ride barefoot on the escalators. They perform in front of paintings of Malay people. The performance ends with the actors speaking about declaiming the land, unfencing the beaches and freeing the seas – an allusion to the stateless seafaring people who were native to this land. This videowork, Sekali Lagi! (‘Once Again!’), by transgender Malay artist nor, is part of the group show An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season. Its earnest explorations of racial identity form one of the exhibition’s thrusts: the questioning of structures of power and privilege. As exhibitions in ngs go, this is edgy stuff. The institution showcases modern Southeast Asian art, but is less keen on cultural activism, shyly acknowledging the presence of empire in art history but never actually passing judgment. No such restraint in Sekali Lagi! Scolding, at times smacking of an amateur drama troupe’s efforts, it’s not the most nuanced work. But it at least attempts to start a timely conversation about decolonising the museum, as well as the issue of race, which remains sensitive under Singapore’s state-managed image of harmonious, multiethnic society. An Exercise…, curated by Syaheedah Iskandar, is one of two guest shows hosted by ngs during the covid-19 pandemic to show solidarity with the local art scene (and fill the programming gap from the cancelled Matisse/Picasso and Nam June Paik blockbusters). The other, which we’ll come to shortly, is Time Passes, curated by Samantha Yap for Singapore Art Museum, which is currently under renovation. Both exhibitions reflect on the public health crisis – how to get

through it, and what must change for the better – and feature young artists in their twenties and thirties. An Exercise is more stridently issue-led, inviting us, according to exhibition materials, to imagine new ways of building ‘a more humane future’. Racial justice, of course, plays a ‘corrective’ role in this project – eight out of the ten artists included are from ethnic minorities in majority-Chinese Singapore – as do our relationships to nonhuman species, technology and capitalism. There are 3d-modelled bodies rendered with data-moshing techniques to reimagine brownness (Priyageetha Dia, Long Live the New Flesh; all works but one, 2020), music made with plants by translating their biodata into sound (Tini Aliman, Pokoknya: Organic Cancellation) and a critique of unbridled consumerism via a collage of 1990s advertisements (Clara Lim, 3 ghz). Because this is a ‘woke’ exhibition held in a relatively conservative space, the curatorial intention is commendable. Unfortunately, the artworks do not work as hard as their captions, which namecheck a host of trendy artworld concepts like techno-animism and interspecies communication in conscientious self-narration and -justification. The art just sort of shows up, engaging dutifully with the urgencies described, but thinly, as exposition. Syaheedah says in the curatorial statement that many of the works are ‘local articulations that mirror the many undercurrents the world is grappling with in light of this pandemic’. The flipside is that they also feel like diluted or undercooked versions of art seen elsewhere. This could be due to the quick production timeline: an exhibition put together relatively quickly, showcasing new art, might not be the place for artists to deliver their best work. Meanwhile, Time Passes, as its title suggests, is the more languid show. It is inspired by the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), where ten years were encapsulated in that one phrase. During this timebending pandemic, where time seems to have come to a standstill, the protofeminist idea

facing page, top Khairullah Rahim, Rendezvous (detail), 2020, mixed-media installation. Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

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of artmaking as an act of care – towards things, oneself and others – is a recurring theme. So you have a fictional reiki healing centre (Divaagar, Render Tender); an artist documenting her removal of snails from harm’s way (Yeyoon Avis Ann, Passage Moist Beings) and flowers placed at sites of hostile architecture, such as dividers on benches to prevent the homeless from lying down (Diana Rahim, Interventions). More compelling are the artworks that make strenuous efforts of forming new worlds out of the pieces of this broken one. In his Frame(works) (2019) series of sculptures, Victor Paul Brang Tun takes apart an old rattan chair and creates new things out of it. The dismantled legs are turned into curved minimalist pipelike forms, then framed on the wall; the webbing from its seat is transformed into a small basket; and some of the cane gets bent into U-shapes and stuck back into drilled holes in a branch, forming some kind of new plant with handles. The economy with which these pieces have been recomposed, compared to the wastefulness of so much artmaking, is graceful and touching. Another type of reassembly takes place in Khairullah Rahim’s installation Rendezvous, a fabulous, impossible aquarium. In it are showerheads joined into a crown, plastic plants and silvery rhinestones studded on leaves and twigs. With remarkable compression, this aquascape exudes a powerful nighttime, subcultural energy: the shower roses suggest the public bathroom – that classic gay cruising spot – and the bedazzlement evokes ‘stoning’, where drag queens stick rhinestones on everything to stand out. Not to mention that ‘fish tank’ is slang for a type of brothel that displays women in glass cases. Seriousness is the default mode during the covid-19 era, and both exhibitions are generally weighed down by this sense of necessary propriety. In this sense Rahim’s Rendezvous is a breath of fresh air. Made up of coded objects, it celebrates something easily forgotten in the pandemic: pleasure. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Ila, There can be no touching here, 2020, fabric and single-channel projection. Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

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Henry Shum Vortices Empty Gallery, Hong Kong 26 September – 21 November The typical Annunciation scene heralds the springtime conception of the Messiah; not so in Henry Shum’s 2020 rendition. This is something more ambiguous. The Virgin Mother, falling back to the floor, is painted in rusted, muddy ochres; the face of the archangel Gabriel – who is perched on a tree like a bird – is blurred and inscrutable. Around them, patches of cyan and mysterious rhizomic shapes seep into the image. The 12 paintings in Shum’s Vortices, his debut solo show at Empty Gallery, contort the conventional genres of portraiture, landscape and religious imagery, upbraiding the fixed traditions that surround them. For example, the two figures in Woman and Child (all works 2020) immediately evoke the kind of tropes found in the maternal portraiture of classical Madonna and Child paintings, but on the evidence of the title, it is unclear whether the female is even the baby’s mother; similarly, the pastoral vista of Memory of a Landscape

seems generic until you begin to puzzle over its orientation, the algae puddles at the top of the canvas confusing clouds with water. These subversions are connected to the artist’s treatment of oil paint, which he dilutes into thin washes that evoke the lambent, abstracted ink paintings of the postwar New Ink Movement in Hong Kong, in particular the works of Lui Shou-Kwan. Yet even these references to certain influences are deliberately muddled. The giant mythologised creature carrying two figures in Ancient of Days (Descending Elephant Fish) is ostensibly a reference to similar spiritual imagery from the Qing dynasty, yet it is mounted within a recessed physical archway next to Annunciation, making both paintings appear more like sequential images in a faded church fresco. Here, Shum equalises European and Asian art history canons, essentially dismantling the constructed notion of one’s importance over the other.

In these canvases, we also see hints at more subconscious terrain. Shum’s figures are translucent and embryonic, their presence ambiguous among trees, mountains and lakes. As in a dream, we wonder how we arrived at certain scenes: in Revolution of Night we witness one figure holding another around the neck, unclear whether they are escaping danger or whether a crime is being perpetrated. This sense of dream logic is further embedded through architectural elements: two archways in a cloisterlike passage, newly constructed for the show, lead only to dead-end walls, and several of the paintings feature similar archways or brick partitions, complicating the viewer’s perception of place in the exhibition. Are we looking into our own psyche, or out into the world? Shum seems to suggest spiritual communion between ourselves and the cosmos in the portallike corridors and in the glowing orbs hidden across multiple canvases, which appear like celestial moons or earthbound eyes. Ysabelle Cheung

Revolution of Night, 2020, oil on canvas, 181 × 121 × 6 cm. Courtesy the artist and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

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Thao Nguyen Phan Becoming Alluvium Chisenhale Gallery, London 26 September – 6 December Stretching around 4,350km from the Tibetan Plateau to its delta in Southern Vietnam, and running through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, the Mekong River has the world’s second highest aquatically biodiverse system (after the Amazon). In Vietnam, the river, known as Song Cuu Long (Nine Dragon River), provides an abundance of freshwater for the country’s fisheries and aquaculture, one of its biggest industries alongside rice agriculture, while the nutrientrich silt carried down through the myriad waterways fosters the fertile landscape. It’s from this river, often described as the lifeblood of the region, that Ho Chi Minh-based artist Thao Nguyen Phan’s latest (and ongoing) project, Becoming Alluvium (2019–), springs. Comprising a 16-minute video, from which this exhibition borrows its title, a series of lacquerworks and silk paintings (Perpetual Brightness, 2019) and Phan’s most recent lacquerwork, Delta (2020), the project plays with fact and fiction in order to question the sources from which we receive our information, against the backdrop of human and ecological threats facing the river

– the latter described by Phan, in an accompanying monograph, Monsoon Melody (2019), as ‘the river of Buddhism’, for its regional connections to Tibetan, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. The single-channel video Becoming Alluvium (2019) plays out in three rounds of reincarnation, told through footage of the river and its verdant banks, archival illustrations and prints, and animated ink paintings. The story starts with two brothers who drown – the elder reincarnates into the Irrawaddy Dolphin, the younger into a water hyacinth. In subsequent reincarnations they return as a writer, a ferryman, a rat and finally a princess, who upon becoming aware of her vanity and greed, evaporates into the river. Perpetual Brightness is an installation of six dark-green lacquered frames (made in collaboration with artist Truong Cong Tung, using plantand soil-based materials) stacked in rows of three. The back of the frames together depict the Mekong river branching into its estuary at the delta in silver leaf, while the front serves as a support for the latest instalment of Phan’s brightly coloured watercolour paintings on silk. A procession of insects carry instruments;

a group of spritelike young people shower mangrove roots with water using irrigation equipment; and crops grow from the bodies of naked figures before a looming dam. The lower panels form a triptych depicting a dead Irrawaddy Dolphin (a species that the industrialisation of the waterway has now rendered critically endangered), its head held in the arms of a boy in mourning while a halo of small children pour wine onto its carcass. Drawing both video and painted narratives from a combination of local folklore, Buddhist customs, the 2018 collapse of Laos Saddle Dam D and the ensuing flood that killed many and displaced thousands, as well as the literature of Marguerite Duras and Italo Calvino, to tell the story of the river’s continued generational destruction, Phan paints an evocative and visually beautiful if depressing picture: it’s not hard to make the connection between the rapidly growing hydroelectricity industry and the slow strangling of the Mekong. The question is, when lessons are never learned, at what point is there nothing left to reincarnate? Fi Churchman

Perpetual Brightness (detail) 2019, watercolour on silk, Vietnamese lacquer on wood (pigment, lacquer, eggshell and silver leaf). Courtesy the artist and Chisenhale Gallery, London

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Faris Heizer Shoe Shufflers Coda Culture, Singapore 19 September – 3 October Daily life is a nightmare in Faris Heizer’s first solo exhibition. In these paintings, everyday routines such as taking the train, having dinner and using a public toilet become scenes of Dostoevskian torment. Bodies are dysmorphic, spouting multiple limbs and heads, or merging into each other. The backgrounds, janglingly delineated or crazily tiled, are one churning headache. (Or anxiety dream. There are a lot of toilets and people caught with their pants down.) In the covid-19 era, where everyone’s trying desperately to look on the bright side, the Singaporean artist provides a dose of good, clean misery. The recurring motif in the ten acrylicon-canvas paintings, all dated this year, is the figure of the salaryman. Dressed in suits or white long-sleeved shirts, he is a figure of loathing and fascination. In a horde, these white-collar workers are portrayed as a Hydralike mass. Morning Rush (all works 2020) shows a ‘bouquet’ of commuters at a turnstile, squeezed at the bottom, bodies and limbs indistinguishable from one another, heads

fanning out. As individual specimens, they are trainwrecks. Job Hunting’s white-collar guy is thickset and balding, puffing away on a cigarette, rushing somewhere. Pantless. Under his black blazer is a pair of boxer shorts. This exhibition would leave a nasty taste – ie boho artist sneering at boring nine-to-fivers – if there wasn’t some degree of empathy. And Faris can relate. His suffering is writ large in sludgy works that express a range of negative emotional conditions, from minor unease to full-on hysteria. His paintings are, in the symbolic and expressionist traditions, coloured by his interiority: think bleak grey-brown palette, brutalist handling of bodies as melty lumps, fractured surfaces and so on. In this world, forced socialisation is a form of torture. In Compulsory Dinner, wavy lines reminiscent of noxious fumes divide the crowd into silos. Small Talk features two men conversing with their pants around their ankles. Forget toilet reading; this is toilet conversation. Better, Faris’s misanthropy has range: it can go into more operatic registers. Take the shrill zigzag

background in Monkey Business, where the proverbial beast with two backs seems literally made by the colliding bodies of two men. They are watched over by another guy whose presence is known only by his shoes and trousers, both brown. What the salaryman represents is open to interpretation. The soul crushed by corporate capitalism? Humiliated by the superego? The master-slave relationship also translates into situations of malevolent sexuality. Take the man in a gimp mask, either getting a cigarette held to his lips or having it stubbed out on the face (Punching Bag). This is a breakout exhibition of a new talent in Singaporean painting. Before this exhibition, Faris, a recent graduate from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, had a couple of small works turn up in group shows. They were mostly murky tableaux of fantastical scenes and with a generalised angst. With his current subject, he has found something specific to say, and he brings his technical flair to bear on it. He has opened a rich vein. Adeline Chia

Punching bag, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 76 × 101 cm. Courtesy the artist and Coda Culture, Singapore

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Online art fairs – once more, with feeling

‘Some scientists,’ Frank Zappa used to say in interviews, ‘claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen.’ In a similar spirit, we might say that the foundational material of the contemporary artworld is average art. Toss a brick in a gallery district and you’ll hit some – work by young practitioners that, however long you linger and poke at it, scans as competent but says nothing new, work by big names on autopilot, etc – and, in terms of response, it delivers the worst the artworld has to offer: a sort of null, why-did-I-bother flatlining. Some days, after touring a bunch of such exhibits, you might long for not even a good show but a fucking atrocious one, just to feel something. Emerging from such a debacle not long ago, I facetiously asked my wife if she’d enjoyed it. Do I have tomatoes on my eyes, she said. (Derision is idiomatic.) Anyway, at this point I’d like to thank the Frieze Art Fair, which I saw this week via my laptop screen, for multiple complexly structured parcels of affect. Admittedly, as I nosed through online viewing rooms, there were numerous or perhaps innumerable works that in themselves didn’t quicken the pulse a jot, just like the real thing: galleries sallying forth their big names, or works on paper by their big names, the whole experience enlivened mainly by the visibility of the prices and the absence of any sense of rush on the viewer’s part. There was a ‘like’ button to smash below each artwork; I preferred not to. What the fair and the paraphernalia around it managed to achieve remotely, though – and this admittedly is the perspective of someone who missed the irl satellite and piggybacking events in London – was an ambient melancholy intermingled, on occasion, with bathos. At one point I received an email invite to an ‘online book signing’, at which it was promised I’d have a brief window of time to interact with the artist. Skipped that. On the fair site, meanwhile, viewers were encouraged

to type their name into digital guestbooks to let the galleries know they’d clicked on the pages. (Probably, given the inestimable leakiness of the internet, the exhibitors have other if more laborious ways of finding out.) I appreciate the inventiveness of these substitutes for intimacy – necessity being the mother of invention – without quite being used, yet, to feeling

somewhat sorry for galleries or fair directors. The work on show, meanwhile, tended towards sublime detachment from current events, either because their effects aren’t showing up in artistic practice yet or because it would spook and depress those famously skittish beasts, collectors. (At least one exhibition I saw recently in Berlin was, according to the artist, scrubbed clean of aspects that might recall the pandemic.)

Onscreen, flat room after flat room of a parallel dimension, often with the same expensive chair in the righthand corner and lots of Average Art alongside it, began to evince a strange, dissociative feeling. I zoned out, and found myself mindlessly toggling between two images of a Tobias Rehberger neon that reads

top Jan Weissenbruch in Frieze Viewing Room, 2020, screenshot. Fair use above Dan Mitchell in Frieze Viewing Room, 2020, screenshot. Fair use

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‘Without Love’ (£20–50k), one in a lighted space and the other in darkness. Maestro of the light switch, that was me. I clicked my way towards the Focus section, where as expected there were some younger names to take note of, but then made the mistake of opening an online interview – also on the site – with Kim Jones, artistic director for Dior Menswear and Fendi womenswear and couture, who had been invited to pick his favourite works from the fair and say a few words about them. Thanks to Kim, I now know that Howard Hodgkin’s work is ‘all about colour’, that Bill Viola is ‘very inspiring’, that a particular John Chamberlain sculpture is ‘unusual, exciting’ and that the interviewee is on first-name terms with the artists he likes. Reading this felt not unlike watching a car slide sideways down a distant hillside, or perhaps like eavesdropping on conversations in the Frieze vip bar, back in the day. As for the talks, I’m glad the discourse is being furthered but haven’t gotten around to them yet, having a backlog of podcasts to listen to. What was absent from the digital fair experience was, of course, the tiring aspect of tromping round booths; when your feet don’t hurt and your irritability level is relatedly lower, you’re more open to the spectacle accumulating, click by click: technology-enabled survival on the part of galleries and fair franchises with added art-fashion crossovers alchemising stupidity. What was especially good was that I could see it from Berlin without a mask on, and absorb plenty of information pertaining to the infrastructure of contemporary art: if not quite fair-asgesamtkunstwerk, this was an artefact of a moment in deep flux, in which even middling art was tangibly wreathed in a larger mood, if hardly saved by it. At Frieze London in bygone days, that mood might have been perky, nervy, champagne-fuelled excitement – now it’s ominousness, diminishment and even nostalgia, both short- and long-term. But at least, even through the screen, you could feel it. Martin Herbert

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Sung Tieu What is your |x|? Emalin, London 19 September – 7 November Visitors to Sung Tieu’s What is your |x|? enter a false room nested inside the bare gallery, where the floor is plushly carpeted, fluorescent lights blinding white. At either side, eight prison doors, bolted immovably onto interior walls, lead the eye in towards the room’s gleaming centre. A great steel wheel mounted on the room’s far face and, according to the exhibition notes, weighing over half a tonne, encloses a mirror laser-engraved with Tieu’s astrological birth chart; a surrounding relief of interlocking gears mimics a vault’s locking mechanism. Already, there’s an overture of entrapment, but the experience is playful, not oppressive. Viewers glimpse themselves decussated by a map of Tieu’s planetary aspects, appearing suddenly among the circumstances of her birth. Tieu’s past exhibitions saw her pepper carceral installations with family memorabilia, subtly

asserting her authorship across tightly-focused geopolitical analysis. In What is your |x|? political allegory is dialled down so that the dual presence of artist and audience are free to intermingle. The title belies an interrogation of ‘the self’; in mathematical translation, what is your ‘absolute value’? The steel doors, facing one another, could be seen as a hall of clouded mirrors where infinity is yet foreclosed. Closer inspection reveals texts printed on the opaque glass of the doors’ useless peepholes; written with the help of an astrologer in the directive second person, the short paragraphs offer archetypes – the Depressive, the Narcissistic – that beg for personal identification. ‘Your motto is “only those who perform deserve love”,’ reads one. ‘You are constantly bedevilled by self-doubt’, reads another. The doors feel linked to Tieu’s past series Exposure to Havana Syndrome (2020), in which

prison mirrors were laser-engraved with mri scans of the artist’s brain under the influence of a sonic weapon, allegedly deployed against us diplomats in Cuba. Materially twinned, both works offer a tension between comprehension and opacity. The scans render Tieu’s brain in intricate detail, but are illegible to casual observers; the astrological forecasts are interpretable by all but their generality impedes deep understanding. What may seem like a departure from the affective qualities of state violence actually entrenches Tieu’s pet themes: the felicitous construction of subjecthood, the workings of top-down systems that shape our fates. By taking as her subject the fashionable vagaries of self-reflection and self-deception, Tieu presents our desire for complete recognition – for the formation of an ‘absolute self’– as the trap that it is. Alex Quicho

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Nalini Malani Can You Hear Me? Whitechapel Gallery, London 23 September – 6 June “Feel better,” commands a female voice accompanying an animation of a black-and-white scraggily-drawn person. Blue and red lines loop around and eventually obscure the figure, who collapses face-first under the words ‘I am exhausted!’ “No matter,” says the voice. “Try it again.” The figure gets up. Indian multimedia artist Nalini Malani’s latest animated drawings (shown in one room, a nine-channel installation projected across all four brick walls to create what the artist calls an ‘animation chamber’) consist of multiple scratchy figures, faces and scenarios collaged together with quotes from writers, educators and historic figures including Milan Kundera, Veena Das, Martin Luther King, Jr, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett and more. The 88 animations overlap, tumble over and encroach

on one another in a cacophony of images and accompanying soundtracks. Each brief sequence loops a handful of times, and words appear and disappear so fast it’s easy to miss a beat. There are grim faces, angry eyes and anguished gestures; two figures reach out towards nothing while the words ‘Waiting for Godot’ flicker beside them; a woman’s disembodied head lies on its side, eyes closed; a man gouges at another figure’s eye sockets; in a fraction of a second a silhouette of a person raises a club and blood splatters (except you can’t quite tell if what you saw is really what you saw); as another person drags themselves along their stomach, a sheet of sign-language instructions appears in the background asking the titular question ‘Can you hear me?’; and while words like ‘Endgame’, ‘Watch Out!’ and ‘I miss you’ are spelled out, other words are spoken aloud:

Have you not had enough? Of what? Of this stink. Malani began creating these diarylike animations (in what she calls a series of notebooks, though they are all drawn using an iPad) in 2017, and combined here they speak to themes that have long motivated her, such as violence and power surrounding sociopolitical issues in India including gender, class and race, as well the current threat of covid-19 (‘Stay Safe’ in red cursive script accompanies an animation of a girl jumping a rope) and the ongoing environmental crisis. The space crackles with emotion and energy. It’s what I imagine standing inside a mind to be like: watching synapses blossom into thoughts, images and meanings. And the harder you try to grasp at them, the faster they flicker out of focus. Fi Churchman

Feminine Masculine (still), 6 October 2018, single-channel stop motion animation, sound. Courtesy the artist

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11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art The Crack Begins Within Various venues, Berlin 5 September – 1 November Zehra Doğan’s graphic novel Xêzên Dizî (The Hidden Drawings, 2018–20) was written, in Kurmancî Kurdish, while the artist, activist and award-winning journalist was a political prisoner in Turkey’s Amed prison. She ended up there having been sentenced in 2017 to two years, nine months and 22 days for ‘terrorist propaganda’ after having shared a painting depicting the destruction of Nusaybin in southeast Turkey on social media. Her story is a reminder of the real risks involved in telling some truths and a signal of the conjunction of activism and journalism (or research) that underpins and perhaps even defines much of the art on show in this latest edition of the Berlin Biennale. Drawing its title from the work of Egyptian (now Canada-based) poet Iman Mersal (and in particular her work revolving around the theme of motherhood), The Crack Begins Within gathers participants who largely identify with the Global South and is styled as an ‘epilogue’ to the yearlong process of workshops, projects and exhibitions curated by an intergenerational group of curators, comprising María Berrios, Renata Cervetto, Lisette Lagnado and Agustín Pérez Rubio, who are from or connected to South America. But while this styling might

emphasise a process that came before (and that many visitors might not have witnessed other than via the archives collected at ExRotaprint, a former printworks in one of the poorest and most migrant-heavy districts of the city that is now used as one of the biennial’s four venues), the exhibition functions as a discrete entity in its own right. In a sense, shaping the biennial as a progress rather than an event emphasises that many of the themes around which the exhibition revolves – the ongoing postcolonial struggle, religious and political repression, environmental abuse, the struggle for lgbtq+ rights, the dethronement of patriarchal, categorical and power structures in general – are both live and have been present for some time. Despite their current high profile (or, more honestly, at this point fashionability) within the rarefied circles of arts institutions in recent times. Doğan’s graphic novel intertwines the history of the Kurdish struggle, details of prison life, the stories of fellow inmates and the author’s own experiences, both in and prior to jail. Illustrated with images of protests, shootings, torture, demon vultures and crushed rabbits, it was created on the blank backs of letters she received from

a friend that were subsequently smuggled out again. The 103 pages that comprise the work are presented side by side at Kunst Werke (another of the venues) in a large vitrine, accompanied by a 17-page booklet of translations. It’s indicative of the kind of attention asked for in this 76-artist, collective and group edition of the Berlin Biennale. (But hey, despite what optimists tell you, we’re still in a pandemic period of slow time, right?) ‘In prison, the most difficult day is the first one,’ Doğan writes. ‘You feel totally disorientated. But, communal life solves this problem.’ While the experience of wandering around the biennial is by no means comparable, it’s nevertheless both comforting and ironic, given that you walk around this show masked, distanced from other potentially diseased bodies and carrying a personal set of headphones with disposable covers (to listen to the numerous videoworks on show), that so much of it concerns forms of solidarity. You feel atomised, isolated, at times bewildered, but are constantly reassured that so does everyone else. Mostly in far more extreme ways. And yes, there is something unavoidably kinky and voyeuristic about being one of the masked and to some degree anonymised visitors examining previously concealed histories

Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), Four Months, Four Million Light Years, 2020 (installation view, 11th Berlin Biennale, kw Institute for Contemporary Art). Photo: Silke Briel. Courtesy the artist

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or the opening up of complex identities: we are visitors who avoid other bodies watching other bodies opening up. Sara Sejin Chang’s video installation Four Months, Four Million Light Years (2020) describes a shamanic healing ritual in the context of the artist’s forced adoption (born in Busan, she grew up in The Netherlands) in the aftermath of the Korean War and the colonial attitudes that enabled it. Barcelona-based collective El Palomar’s delirious (and strangely erotic) two-channel video Schreber is a Woman (2020) deconstructs notions of binary identities by riffing off episodes from the memoirs (which also inspired Sigmund Freud) of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, who, describing experiences including feeling like a woman, was confined to a mental asylum in Saxony in 1894. A series of complex, extraordinary works on paper by Brenda V. Fajardo fuse tarot cards, prophetic divinations, the plight and strength of Filipino women, and scenes and texts in Tagalog decrying the corruption that continues (after multiple colonisations) to dominate life in the Philippines, seemingly in conversation with the work of Doğan and offering something of a bridge between that and the by-turns surreal and fantastic paintings of Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona. At the Gropius Bau, the most white-boxey and institutionally formal of the biennial venues, the display takes on a more indexical flow. It opens with Sandra Gamarra Heshiki’s

The Museum of Ostracism (2018), trompe-l’oeil paintings of anthropomorphic pre-Inca and Inca ceramics that have landed in various Spanish museums through commerce or plunder. Their ‘captions’ come in the form of pejorative terms for the indigenous peoples of South America that the artist has scrawled on the paintings’ backs. The work is a little obvious, a little clunky, but sets the tone for a display that seeks to undermine and complexify the relationship of collections and the structures that house them to the more-or-less basic but constantly shifting (or plain shifty) stories they seek to embody, propagate and tell. By contrast, Mapa Teatro (a Colombian duo of visual and performing artists) present a more complex ethnofiction in the form of an immersive installation (comprising scenography and video) that revolves around the story of a 1969 expedition (in the year of the Apollo 12 moon landing) – comprising a trader, a fur trafficker and a gold digger – and its encounter with a voluntarily isolated indigenous community, and its aftermath (only the gold digger survived, going on to create forgeries of pre-Columbian statues out of industrial debris). The biennial’s overall strategy of echoing continues in the photographs of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (No anitquário eu negociei o tempo, 2018), in which she poses bare-chested in a series of faked African masks found in an antiques shop (the work also echoes The Black Mamba’s Land of the

Breasted Woman, 2020, an hour-plus-long video at kw that revolves around a ‘breast tax’ in colonial India). Peppered among such works are a selection of archives, including paintings by psychiatric patients from the Museu de Arte Osório Cesar, Franco da Rocha in Brazil, and works from the reconstructed Chilean Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, originally assembled from donations by artists from around the world as an act of solidarity with the Chilean people, which was confiscated by the military then rebuilt by the museum’s founders, who were by then political refugees following the military coup of 1973 (and introduced by a video, in French, featuring writer Julio Cortázar). While there’s a developing sense, as you walk though, of the potential of alternative arts institutions, built, as the Museo de la Solidaridad was, by the people for the people (on the premise that all art is political), there’s also a sense in which the process by which the voiceless are given a voice and the silenced speak loudly suggests a formula for biennials and similarly largescale art events that becomes both cyclical (potentially cynical) and self-sustaining: foregrounding the marginalised and excluded in one biennial leaves others marginalised and excluded for the next. Cracks, after all, tend to breed further cracks. For now, however, this edition of the Berlin Biennale feels like essential viewing and one of its most rich, intriguing iterations to date. Mark Rappolt

Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (mssa) (installation view, 11th Berlin Biennale, Gropius Bau). Photo: Mathias Völzke

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Books The Glass Kingdom by Lawrence Osborne Hogarth, £16.99 (hardcover) In the opening pages of Bangkok-based British author Lawrence Osborne’s new novel, a gauche young American named Sarah Mullins appears modestly content. There are moments when she feels guilty for having swindled her New York employer, a famous author, out of a large sum of cash, but her attention is focused on the immediate future, namely fine-tuning her temporary new life in Bangkok. This grifter’s plan is simply to talk to as few people as possible, to ‘turn herself into a living ghost in one of the few places where a solitary white woman would be little noticed, sexually or otherwise’. But Sarah is also a repressed social butterfly eager to flutter. One morning she heads down to the communal pool of The Kingdom, the luxurious apartment complex she has chosen for its ‘air of decaying grandeur’ and proximity to the ‘paraphernalia of the hipster age’. There, while doing idle laps, she meets a dazzling luk khrueng (Eurasian) girl named Mali, who sips from a thermos of gin and tonic and slinks about like Bette Davis. ‘I can tell you’re a little shy,’ Mali says. ‘But don’t be. Come hang out with us – we’ll bring you out of your shell, I promise.’ And just like that the shell shrinks. Suddenly no longer fixated on ‘mere repetitions calculated to pass the time’, Sarah embarks on a social life with Mali and two female expatriates who live in the building: gets drunk, smokes joints, visits day spas and chi-chi restaurants, says too much. Soon this light entertainment is causing her to ‘list deliciously to one side, a loss of gravity that induced new feelings, which at first simply corresponded to what she thought was happiness’. Wrought out of taut, elemental prose, The Glass Kingdom has a lot to say about both indulgent Westerners far from home – ‘They think history is over and no longer affects them’, remarks one of Sarah’s new friends – and the class divide that cleaves Thai society. Within the mandalalike hierarchy of The Kingdom, the Thai-Chinese owner and minted residents lord it over the nosy, all-seeing staff. But most hostility is reserved for the listless foreigners, ‘the water-boatman insects skimming across the surface of a pool whose extent

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and nature they would never understand’. Clearly out of her depth, Sarah and her habits are soon being viewed with suspicion, and her dirty laundry traded ‘on the open marketplace of gossip’ by Goi, a cleaner who has spotted the suitcase stuffed full of plastic-wrapped dollars in the spare-room closet. As the point of view jumps and events take dark turns, some of the choices that Sarah and the book’s other shifty characters make seem irrational, be it tasting a slab of meat in a stranger’s fridge or forgetting to wash a bloodied nightgown. Yet what slowly unfolds is arguably not a noir thriller or human drama, but a cinematic evocation of the brutal vicissitudes of fate, set against a spectral depiction of a Thai uprising. Early on, Sarah notices a nearby university campus where the students are lying among the trees ‘as if by a collective trance’. Over time, these innocuous protests grow and begin to unsettle The Kingdom’s ‘dusty certainties’, the staff becoming ‘perceptively less respectful, more knowing’. Meanwhile, an intricate murder mystery plot, inspired by Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955), is less an isolated event than one of several ripples of cause and effect nudging Sarah inexorably towards her destiny. As in many of Osborne’s previous novels, the world he masterfully depicts – in this case, a Bangkok where an irrational yet intoxicating mix of Buddhism and animism holds sway alongside laissez-faire economics – is soon closing in, eroding his characters’ sense of autonomy through attrition. Before long, an atmosphere of menace that borders on the supernatural shrouds everything. ‘What kept her up was the way the building appeared to be awake on its own terms,’ writes Osborne. ‘There were little stirrings coming from the building’s interior. Footfalls, the whir of the service elevator, moths beating against the landing lights as they died voluntarily. Together they formed a vitality greater than themselves.’ Animals seem especially attuned to the brooding malevolence that builds and builds. Giant bats dip and wheel around the towers as storms roll in, feral dogs swarm in fluid packs around the ruins of nearby tobacco

warehouses, birds sit morosely on cables ‘as if waiting for someone to make a mistake’. About midway, The Kingdom – ‘a refuge, a prison, a fantasy, and a luxury living machine all at once’ – begins to experience blackouts, its nervous system convulsing as if the spirits and ghosts that live nearby, in trees, shrines and vacant apartments, have conspired to wreak havoc. At one point, the walls ooze ‘with a curious dampness’. The comparisons to Graham Greene, often levelled on account of Osborne’s nomadic lifestyle and maladjusted white protagonists, seem manifestly glib here. The plot, commentary and atmospherics in this bleak novel are more indebted to Korean and Japanese cinema, particularly Bong Joon-ho’s Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) and maybe even Hideo Nakata’s rain-drenched gothic apartment fable Dark Water (2002). The dystopian silhouette of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise also looms large – as well as power cuts, dogs end up wandering the decaying corridors, and there are flowing descriptions of sordidly lavish communal gardens, replete with patios ‘filled with Chinese lions and plaster Germanic milkmaids with wide-brimmed bonnets pinned onto walls of plastic ivy’. But while Ballard’s technodisaster satire was written back when tower blocks were replacing terraced streets across London, Osborne’s novel – his first set in Bangkok, where he has lived since 2012 – is of its own postmodern time and place: part dreadful karmic parable, part metaphor for Thailand’s sickly social hierarchy. A vertical panopticon run on filthy lucre, exploitation and sociopathic self-interest, The Kingdom’s four towers are a simulacrum of one of the most unequal countries on earth. Residents are surveilled, often by each other. Power and money are gained by observing, then amorally acting upon the secrets uncovered. Vases of yellow flowers in the lobby attest to the owner’s royalist leanings while the porous corridors are ‘conduits of lightning-fast gossip’. Ancestors dwell alongside the living. Renting an apartment in this fragile edifice just as cracks are beginning to show, chaos inching in, Sarah barely stands a chance. Max Crosbie-Jones

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Having and Being Had by Eula Biss Riverhead Books, $26 / £14.99 (hardcover) Eula Biss didn’t see the point of owning property until she bought a house herself. The American essayist, lauded for her genre-crossing nonfiction books Notes from No Man’s Land (2009) and On Immunity (2014), has long valued money in terms of the time it afforded her to write, she writes here. That is, until she secured a university job, along with a raise that brought her salary to $73,000. It pushed Biss and her husband, John, also an artist, into a new pay bracket – one that could accommodate a mortgage on a brick bungalow with a view of the lake in Evanston, Chicago, a historically AfricanAmerican neighbourhood. She describes the lure of becoming a landowner near the start of her searching, occasionally frustrating collection of short essays on how money shapes and winnows our trajectories. ‘I wanted to paint the kitchen Moir Gold and I wanted to plant a garden in the backyard,’ she writes. ‘I wanted to make something mine. What I wanted, more than anything was the illusion of permanence the house provided. The solid foundation, the bricks that wouldn’t blow away, the sense of security. That was a fantasy, I knew, but it felt real.’ This postpandemic moment has fast exposed permanence and security as latecapitalist delusions. Biss, who draws on the ideas of David Graeber, the late American

anthropologist who famously proposed that most white-collar jobs were meaningless, concedes that owning a house also means being owned by it. John strips wallpaper off their living room. Biss prunes roses she doesn’t like. ‘The house is just passing through my hands,’ she writes. ‘It’s not a purchase, it’s husbandry.’ Yet the house is also an asset that grows in value. It accustoms the couple and their young son to a new world of middle-class comforts. Biss, paraphrasing Marx, points out that the middle class, comprising business owners and professionals with the means to make investments, is dangerous because their loyalty is divided between the workers they depend on and the capitalist dreams to which they aspire. Having and Being Had is at its best when it reveals the anatomy of this split allegiance. In clear prose, free of rhetorical flourishes, she explores the thrall of middle-class desires. She’s drawn to a brand of white paint that costs $110 a gallon and magically appears more luminous than its cheaper counterparts. These desires become purchases, which become class signifiers that feel increasingly indispensable. Biss buys a piano, the domain of nineteenthcentury housewives who were expected to model ‘genteel idleness’. Biss also exposes the lie of middle-class morality, revealing its relationship to invisible labour and servitude. In Victorian England,

she writes, landowning women liked to go ‘slumming’, visiting the poor and making them scrub their linens. In the essay One’s Own, she reveals that Virginia Woolf underpaid her chef, Nellie Boxall, and fired her several years after publishing A Room of One’s Own (1929). Biss isn’t immune to this irony. After giving birth, she pays a young woman, who goes by the job title ‘mother’s helper’, only eight dollars an hour to do chores while she holds the baby. Biss is fearless when it comes to excavating the terms of her own complicity, laying bare its ethical and moral dimensions. When Biss and John move into their bungalow, the American big-box chain Walmart pays them $8,000 to create an imaginary interior for a commercial aimed at the African-American demographic that can no longer afford their neighbourhood. ‘John tells all this to his friend Dan, who says, I think that’s the definition of white privilege,’ Biss writes. Here, Biss’s stylish nonstyle works to obfuscate, not illuminate. To anyone who doesn’t share the writer’s class and race, this is a self-evident truth that borrows the force of a revelation. Having and Being Had thinks deeply about the systems we take for granted, but these teachable moments can dilute the strength of its project. After all, investigating our class delusions and renouncing them altogether are two different things. Neha Kale

Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu Head of Zeus, £18.99 (hardcover) The human story only really has two endings (if you ignore the one about living happily ever after). In one, everybody dies. In the other, the universe ends. Cixin Liu’s science fiction is stoic in that way, since these are the inexorable endpoints of his take on humanity’s relationship to science, technology and the cosmos. Hold Up the Sky collects the first English translations of 11 short stories mostly written during the 2000s, and it affirms Liu as the nerdish, physics-, cosmology- and engineeringobsessed writer who has won many fans among those fond of the ‘hard sf’ genre. Whether it’s the exact way a star collapses after having a black hole shot into it, or the detail of how to contain an underground coal-seam fire with liquid cement, or how much matter it takes

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to store every permutation of Classical Chinese poetry in atomic-scale computer memory, Liu is dazzlingly plausible. But that plausibility is only the armature for stories that aspire to the philosophical grandeur of writers like Isaac Asimov (one of Liu’s heroes). Here, human lives are tiny in the face of cosmic space and time. Liu’s stories often start out in present-day China – a dying provincial school teacher teaches his students Newton’s laws, not realising that his charges will be taken as proof of earthly civilisation, saving the planet from world-culling extraterrestrials; an anticorruption official discovers that a superstring computer can make all history (and all crimes) transparent – and in one sense, his science fiction is Chinese in its outlook, though not

because of its local particularities. Ironically, it’s because it’s now China that still espouses such an (old-fashioned) view of human progress that Liu’s work reads as contemporary and as classic (that’s to say ‘Western’) space opera. Compared to, say, the ecologism of Ursula K. Le Guin or the futurised cultural relativism of Iain M. Banks, Liu’s universe is very un-Western in its optimism about humanity’s identity and future among the stars. And in the face of final futility, it’s art that gives meaning to things – the three most whimsical stories here are of alien entities who come to Earth to play music, or sculpt, or write poetry – even if, occasionally, this results in disaster and the death of millions. This is only fiction, after all. J. J. Charlesworth

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The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes by Jill Richards

‘The washerwoman Josephine Marchais seemed dirty and withered, though still angry looking, “like a fury.”’ Likening a pétroleuse – women who were put on trial for alleged incendiary activities during the Paris Commune in 1871 – to a fury, the author Léonce Dupont employs physiognomy to pass swift judgment on the five women he encounters at one of the trials in his book La Commune et Ses Auxiliaires Devant la Justice. That women who fight for their rights are stereotyped as manhating, ugly, hysterical, even unnatural is hardly of recent imagination, as Jill Richards’s study reveals. She uses a wide range of archives to chart the history of modernist women’s struggles for various rights – seeing each movement as both events in themselves and in contact with each other. During the course of this, her book steers away from the specific demands made by each of the selected movements to examine acts of resistance as an extended practice in the day-by-day experiences of the women who were part of these movements. At first Richards’s selection of archives seems unconventional: she mines bildungsroman literature, schedules and minutes of meetings, little magazines, public petitions, sex manuals, birth-control pamphlets, paintings, photographs, plays, tables of contents and suchlike, all produced by women to chart ‘the lived experiences of female citizenship as a practice

Columbia University Press, $105 / £88 (hardcover), $35 / £27 (softcover)

and process’. She consults arrest records and prison sentences to record names and stories of women who were part of various movements. In doing so, Richards brings to attention the quotidian nature of politics instead of seeing it as an occasional activity the women indulged in. The first of three parts in the book examines the afterlives of women incendiaries through the act of naming names employed in Ina Césaire’s intimate 1992 play, Fire’s Daughters. The chief character, Rosanie Soleil, is a historical figure, though the story of the play is not a historical drama. The prologue sees the character of the mother doing housework while an offstage voice delivers in monologue the names of the women who participated in Martinique’s Southern Insurrection. Their names, ages, professions, places of birth and domiciles are recited, acknowledging their acts, placing them in history. In chapter two of this first part, in what Richards calls the ‘long middle’ of the militant suffragette movement, she reads the everyday lives of the women and the process of the campaigns themselves. Part two looks at the history of reproductive rights across the Atlantic, via the role little magazines like The Women Rebel (1914) and The Birth Control Review (1917–40) played in the pro-choice movement. Hannah Höch’s art and Mathilda (Til) Brugman’s short story ‘Department Store of Love’ (1931–33) are used to thread the

connections between Dadaism and queer feminism movements from the 1920s onward. Man Ray’s 1922 portrait of Marquise Casati and the works of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore are among the archives that Richards examines for a history of Surrealism’s preoccupation with the female form as a set of identity characteristics and the treatment of queer resistance. In the final part of the book, the form of committee meetings as faulty but foundational to the development of institutional human rights is analysed through the reports and editorials in Paulette Nardal’s journal Woman in the City (1945–51). The sense of this being a history of the present is hard to ignore. The rights pertaining to citizenship, reproduction, sexuality and suffrage might have been secured through long struggles, but several have become newly vulnerable in the present. Richards clarifies, towards the end, that the book is not meant to be an instruction manual, but admits that the layers she was investigating in The Fury Archives were motivated by the politics of the present. That strategies such as the occupation of public spaces as an act of protest, strikes to try to accelerate governmental action or the naming of names as an act of acknowledgement and remembrance remain familiar and continue to be employed make many of the decades-old archives seem eerily contemporary. Deepa Bhasthi

The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud by Kuniko Tsurita, translated by Ryan Holmberg Drawn & Quarterly, $29.85 (softcover) For women, navigating the publishing scene of the counterculture during the 1960s was notoriously difficult. Rife with sexism and macho attitudes – despite the liberal and progressive ideas male editors and publishers professed to have – the publications produced by the underground often only made space for women in administrative capacities. In Japan, underground manga publications ran much the same way – at least so it seems in the essay that accompanies The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud, a long-awaited celebration of popular alternative manga magazine Garo’s (1964–2002) lone regular female comic artist, Kuniko Tsurita. Kuniko’s contributions – she was the first woman (at the age of eighteen) to publish comics in the magazine, in 1965 –

have been an underrecognised part of the canon of Japan’s comic artists more widely, something that comics historian Ryan Holmberg and editor and manga researcher Mitsuhiro Asakawa endeavour to rectify in their afterword on her life and work. Eighteen of Kuniko’s comics are collected here, published between 1966 and 1980, with themes largely reflecting on Japan’s youth in existential crisis via bleak but humorous stories in black-and-white drawings that shift in style (from simple straightforward lines to more detailed images), while retaining a visual language through severe use of high contrast. Read from right to left in the traditional Japanese style, the words spoken in the comics are translated here officially for the first time by Holmberg.

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Despite the wide range of topics related to Japan’s youth culture, sexuality, society and politics that appear in this collection, it is the stories that tell of the societal challenges facing women that bind it together: in ‘Woman’ (1966) the prehistoric female protagonist is beaten and rejected by an ex-lover, becomes a single mother and is ostracised by her community; ‘The Tragedy of Princess Rokunomiya’ (1967) reflects on arbitrary beauty standards; a female figure in ‘My Wife Is an Acrobat’ (1974) literally performs nakedly – apart from high heels – in front of a man. Offering far more than a glimpse into Kuniko’s professional career, The Sky is Blue… reflects on her satirical subversion of social and cultural ideals of femininity in an industry dominated by men. Fi Churchman

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We often recall that when we made ourselves Empress of India – after that shocking business of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, and we were on their side, by the way – it was in the belief that the state ‘should breathe feelings of generosity, benevolence and religious toleration’ (we, Albert and ourself, came up with that one). As far as we can see on YouTube, you don’t even understand what any of those words mean; and before you start, we’re not making fun of your collective breathing difficulties. We guaranteed the poor people of that nation their religious freedom and rescued them from the brutalising, moneygrabbing, capitalist hideousness of the East India Company. You know, up here in the clouds, as we enjoy our regular Friday tea with Jesus (such beautiful feet), Prince Albert (yes, that ‘we’) always brings up the fact that we (the other ‘we’) were the original Occupy movement. We laugh, of course. We were much more generous, hygienic, well liked and organised than that rabble. But Jesus always says that Albert’s got a point, and who’s going to argue with Him? Now we read on Twitter that Hindoos are killing Muslims, trishuls are flying and the place is a bloody mess. After all the effort we put into sorting it out! And you people say empires are a bad thing! Unless they are run by that Jeffrey Bezos fellow (wonderful eyebrows), in which case you’re a bit ‘on the fence’, as people say. Of course we pity you, at times we even shed a tear, but it’s very hard for us to fathom. We’ll tell you something else that’s hard to fathom: the whole business of the British Museum thinking about regifting that head we gave them. A horrid business, if you’ll pardon our French. We were always of the opinion, as we believe most people are, that the British Museum ‘thinking’ about doing anything was far, far removed from the idea that it might do anything about it. But then we hear, on Radio 4 no less, that it went and put the head of Sir Hans Sloane – its founder – in a ‘secure cabinet’ on nonprominent display, with a note of some sort explaining that he was ‘a collector and a slave owner’ and that his work should be seen in ‘the exploitative context of the British Empire’. As we’ve already established, our Empire was about bringing an end to exploitation. If atrocities had been committed by people of Sloane’s generation, everyone’s lives were improved by people in ours. Ask Jesus, for goodness’ sake! I heard the museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer (frightful beard), prancing around the ‘media circuit’ and proclaiming to all and sundry that “we have pushed him off the pedestal” (as if he has any right to call himself a we), and then announcing that “we must not hide anything”. As if pushing poor Sir Hans off the pedestal, locking him in a cupboard and surrounding

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Postscript

In an ongoing series by the great colonialists, Queen Victoria has some advice for museums

him with inaccurate footnotes was anything other than hiding him! It’s a small comfort to us to know that at nearly two-and-a-half metres in height, the head we gave the museum is rather too large for cupboards. It’s what we’re told the locals (from Rapa Nui, apparently the last place on Earth to be settled by humans) call a moai, and this one is supposedly named Hoa Hakananai’a. I remember the last director of the British Museum, Mr MacGregor (what a jaw), putting the great lump’s history like this: ‘He came to London in 1869 and he’s been one of the most admired inhabitants of the British Museum ever since’. He – the natives believe that it is

inhabited by a spirit – came to London because the Royal Navy brought him here. So that they could give it to ourselves. And we in turn gave it to the museum. It says so on a notice beside the head. A notice of gratitude in honour of our generosity. We were noted for our generosity, btw. We remember to this day the look on Duleep Singh’s handsome (for a native) little face (he had the most incredible dark eyes and shiny white teeth) when we allowed him to wear the Koh-i-Noor diamond again. He had given it to us when he was eleven, as part of the treaty of Lahore. He said he loved us and that he was glad that we had it now. He used to be a Maharaja and we made him the Black Prince of Perthshire – not officially, of course – which we think is a step up in the world. To think that people say we kidnapped him, when our people took the poor child to London in order to civilise him and save him from his Sikhish ways! We have to confess, though, the truth is that while the front of the head, the aforementioned big one, is rather charming-looking (majestic nose), the carvings on the back include an episode revealing a rather nasty fascination with female genitalia, which was obviously inappropriate for Buckingham Palace. Although we might have got away with it in Balmoral, since anything goes up north. The navy (the crew of hms Topaze, managed by the charming Commodore Richard Ashmore Powell – he had a pair of wonderful legs) found the head halfburied in a hut, which I guess is the Rapa Nui equivalent of Fischer’s cupboard. We gave it to the museum so that it could travel from obscurity to light. And there it has sat, alongside other items associated with us: the admissions ticket to Hamilton’s Museum (it was a brass object, like a coin, it had our head on it, like a coin), a nineteenth-century bookmark (our head, again), some Canadian, Straits Settlements, Cypriot, Hong Kong and Indian money (worthless, but our head, naturally) – it was all about money with these museums, even in my day – all of it bringing joy and wonder to the good people of Britain for more than a century. And now, despite the fact that it was us who brought Hoa Hakananai’a out of the closet, we hear that the Rapa Nui people consider our good sailors to have ‘stolen’ him and are asking that he be given back! And worse! That the British Museum is ‘talking’ to them, and considering a ‘loan’! As if it were one of those video stores that young people used to hang out in during the 1980s while libraries went to seed. What utter ingrates! Let them see it, we say, perhaps even let them fondle it, as we did with Duleep Singh. But never let them think it might be anything other than ours.

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