ArtReview Asia Summer 2018 by ArtReview

Future Greats 10 stars for 2018

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菲利普·加斯頓

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ArtReview Asia vol 6 no 2 Summer 2018

Problems There’s an increasing tendency these days to look to art to identify, analyse and, at an extreme, propose solutions to all the world’s problems, whether of conflict, identity, inequality or the relationship between humans and the environment. The list is, of course, potentially endless. But whichever of those issues one desires to highlight, the primary question concerns what agency art, and by default artists, has when it comes to addressing it. For ArtReview Asia, one of the main interests in viewing and thinking about art lies in the potential of an artwork to propose and explore alterity: in that artists and artworks propose alternative ways of looking at the world and imagining our place within it. The ability to see a problem from another perspective can allow a greater understanding of the issues, and that understanding, in turn, allows for more considered methods of addressing the difficulties of living together and, more generally, living in harmony with the world. This issue marks the second iteration of ArtReview Asia’s Future Greats, in which invited artists, critics and curators draw attention to the work of (other) artists whose work offers a different approach to the world and new ways of thinking about it, but who, for reasons of youth or lack of exposure, have not yet gained the attention they deserve. In this respect, as much as the Summer edition of ArtReview Asia is about identifying people whose work will set new agendas for art over the coming year, it is also about exploring the variety of possible worlds those artists envision. On a fundamental level it’s an occasion for the magazine and its contributors to reflect on why we look at art at all. ArtReview Asia

Solutions

Prabhavathi Meppayil b/seven eighths June 8 – August 11, 2018

Potsdamer Strasse 81E D – 10785 Berlin www.estherschipper.com

CONDO SHANGHAI A collaborative exhibition by 24 galleries across 10 Shanghai spaces

上海 CONDO 24 家画廊联手合作, 横跨 10 个上海艺廊空间

7 July — 26 August 2018 Preview 7 July 2018

2018 年7月7日 — 8月26日预览 2018 年7月7日

www.condocomplex.org

Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 21 Points of View by Charu Nivedita, Prabda Yoon 33

Future Greats

selected by Micheal Do, Fi Churchman, Heman Chong, Venus Lau, Kitty Scott, Liu Wei, Poklong Anading, Aimee Lin, Zhang Peili, Mark Rappolt 40

page 28 Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra, Ex Nilalang (Balud, Dyesebel, Lolo ex Machina), 2015, single-channel video, 18 min 53 sec. Courtesy the artists (see apb Foundation Signature Art Prize)

Summer 2018

Art Reviewed

exhibitions 78

books 94

Lahore Biennale, by Shwetal A. Patel Sangeeta Sandrasegar, by Cleo Roberts Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin, by Li Bowen William Dalrymple, by Skye Arundhati Thomas Seung-taek Lee, by Louise Darblay Yu Honglei, by Martin Herbert Lai Lon Hin, by Hera Chan Sarah Lucas, by Tristen Harwood Chikako Yamashiro, by Fi Churchman Jitish Kallat, by Tausif Noor Gauri Gill, by Thea Ballard Lee Bul, by Ben Eastham One Hand Clapping, by Kang Kang

The Last Children of Tokyo, by Yoko Tawada Transforming Monkey: Adaptation & Representation of a Chinese Epic, by Hongmei Sun Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts, by Aruna D’Souza Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata Topology of Violence, by Byung-Chul Han Sabrina, by Nick Drnaso the strip 98 off the record 102

page 90 Gauri Gill, Untitled from the series Acts of Appearance, 2015–. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Nature Morte, New Delhi

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ZACH HARRIS SEOUL | JULY 12 − AUGUST 12 NEW YORK LOWER EAST SIDE

PARIS MARAIS

HONG KONG CENTRAL

SEOUL JONGNO-GU

TOKYO ROPPONGI

IVÁN ARGOTE

NI YOUYU

XU ZHEN®

DANIEL ARSHAM

JUNE 27 –AUGUST 17

JUNE 2 – JULY 28

MAY 24 – JULY 14

MAY 10 – JULY 8

MAY 23 – JUNE 30

ALOALO

ZACH HARRIS

PIETER VERMEERSCH

JUNE 27 –AUGUST 17

JUNE 2 – JULY 28

JULY 12 – AUGUST 12

JULY 11 – AUGUST 18

Zodiac Wave, 2017-2018. Carved wood, stained wood, linen, water-based paint, ink. 88.3 × 120 × 2.5 cm | 343/4 × 47 1/4 × 1 in

谷公館·十周年 10 th ANNIVERSARY 6.2- 8.26, 2018 OPENING：2018年6月2日 (六) 下午三時至六時

《Hero》2017 | Wei Jia 韦嘉 | 200 × 250 cm Acrylic on canvas 布面丙烯

Address: 4F-2, No. 21, Sec. 1, Dunhua South Road, Taipei | Tel: (886-2) 2577 5601 | E-mail: ku.gallery@msa.hinet.net | www.michaelkugallery.com

Art Previewed

Well, this happened in Indonesia 19

Previewed In Search of Southeast Asia through the M+ Collections M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong 22 June – 30 September (Re)Collect: The Making of Our Art Collection National Gallery Singapore Through 19 August Dismantling the Scaffold Tai Kwun Contemporary at Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Hong Kong Through 15 August Condo Shanghai Various venues, Shanghai 7 July – 26 August

Shared Residence Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City Ongoing

apb Foundation Signature Art Prize 2018 National Museum, Singapore Through 2 September

The 70s: Objects, Photographs and Documents Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City Through 2 July

Akram Zaatari mmca Seoul Through 19 August

Second Yinchuan Biennale moca Yinchuan Through 19 September Liverpool Biennial 2018 Various venues, Liverpool 14 July – 28 October Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2018 Various venues, Niigata Prefecture 29 July – 17 September

Fu Xiaotong Chambers Fine Art, New York Through 19 August Xu Bing ucca, Beijing 21 July – 18 October Prabhavathi Meppayil Esther Schipper, Berlin Through 11 August

Working Practices The Showroom, London Through 7 July

3 Koki Tanaka, Engaged Gesture, 2018, video documentation. Courtesy the artist and Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong

Summer 2018

Until its opening proper, exhibitions staged by Hong Kong’s not-quite-actually-existing megamuseum, M+ (construction of which is expected to be completed sometime in 2019, with the museum opening a year later, althoughweveheardsimilarpromisesbeforesoletsassumethatnoonesmakinganyfirmcommitments), take place in a pavilion in West Kowloon. Once M+ opens, its pavilion will ‘become a new space for artists, designers and organisations to stage independent small-scale exhibitions and events’, which tells you both how modest the pavilion is when compared to the Herzog & de Meurondesigned museum building and that someone at M+ seriously believes that something old can become something new. Of course, making old ideas seem new is one of the primary functions of the museum today. This month sees the opening of the seemingly permanently-

foetal institution’s first exhibition framed by a geographic focus. Nevertheless, as the title – 1 In Search of Southeast Asia – suggests, curators Pauline J. Yao and Shirley Surya (who represent M+’s departments of visual art, and design and architecture respectively) are operating on the principle that the map is not the territory. Presumably because this geography (traditionally those lands south of China and east of India) is as much an economic and political construction as is it is a cartographic one; and because identifying a subject and then losing (or in curatorspeak, ‘complicating’) it is also what people expect museums to do these days. Articulating this landscape of confusion will be works by artists such as Simryn Gill, Charles Lim, Maria Taniguchi and The Propeller Group, alongside the output of architecture stars of the distant past, such as Geoffrey Bawa, the recent

past, such as Ken Yeang, and the immediate present, such as Vo Trong Nghia Architects. Given that Southeast Asia, a term that developed (into whatever we do or don’t know it to mean now) around 50 years ago (partly through the establishment of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967), covers a range of radically dissimilar cultures and languages, but describes a region of similar climates, topographies and histories of colonial oppression, you might say that this exhibition marks a tentative step in figuring out how the museum might go on to develop narratives of inter- and pan-Asian discourse in the years to come. Down in Southeast Asia itself, National Gallery Singapore (ngs), which prides itself on having the world’s largest institutional collection of modern art from the region, is also working out where it is. Albeit by looking

1 Vo Trong Nghia Architects, presentation model, Wind and Water Bar (2006–08), Thu Dau Mot Town, Vietnam, c. 2006, bamboo. © the architects. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong

2 Chen Wen Hsi, Black Mountain, c. 1970s–1980s, ink and colour on paper, 119 × 97 cm. Courtesy National Gallery Singapore 1 Simryn Gill, Forest #16, 1996–98, gelatin silver print. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and M+, Hong Kong

ArtReview Asia

3 Nadim Abbas, Erkka Nissinen, Magdalen Wong, Credit Mort (still), 2018, two-channel video installation. Courtesy the artists

3 Bing Lee, Animal Farm, 2018, water-based latex paint. Courtesy the artist

2 at itself. (Re)collect: The Making of Our Art Collection examines the journey of collecting and acquiring (both through its own habits and those of the private individuals who have donated works to it) that made the museum, which opened in 2015, what it is today. But this is not simply a tale of how private passions ended up creating a public cultural life. (Although a more cynical writer might see in this show an advertisement for potential donors.) It’s more complicated than that. According to ngs director Eugene Tan, the exhibition offers the gallery an opportunity to continue its task of ‘questioning and re-imagining what constitutes Southeast Asia’. So, other than the fact that whatever Southeast Asia is, it will be at ngs (and here, the elision of the institution’s status as the national gallery for a single Southeast Asian country and the biggest institutional

collector of art from the region says something in the heritage part of the building, is finally about Singapore’s political ambitions), except about to open. Its appropriately named first 3 exhibition, Dismantling the Scaffold, will focus for the bit that’s in Hong Kong, we’re left with a geography that is again identified only to be on the work of the now closed local nonprofit lost. In temporal terms the display begins in Spring Workshop (whose former director the postwar period (‘when art took a backseat Christina Li curates), which during its five-year to nation-building’; btw, performance art was existence operated a series of residencies and effectively banned in Singapore from 1994 exhibitions mixing local and international to 2003) through to ngs’s contemporary collectalent such as Nadim Abbas, Big Tail Elephant, tions, among which look out for work by Rirkrit Leung Chi Wo and Sarah Wong, Marina Tiravanija, whose offerings also feature in the Abramović, Koki Tanaka and superflex. M+ show. At least there’s something everyone In the spirit of museums using their procan agree on. grammes to justify and identify their own Back in Hong Kong, the Tai Kwun Centre missions and agendas, one presumes that its for Heritage and the Arts, a us$485 million opening show will locate the expansive gallery development of the former Central Police spaces of Tai Kwun, which is a partnership Station designed, like M+, by Swiss architects between the Hong Kong Jockey Club and the Herzog & de Meuron, which was originally local government without a collection of its due to open in 2016 until a listed wall collapsed own, as a bridge between Hong Kong’s lowkey

Summer 2018

not-for-profit scene and the megainstitutions that are set to dominate the landscape in the future. Tellingly Tai Kwun will host part of M+’s ongoing talk series M+ Matters. Also carving out new territory is the gallery 4 exchange project Condo, which comes to Shanghai this summer. The concept is framed partly as a lower-cost alternative to the art-fair business model and partly as a way of fostering solidarity and collaboration among commercial art galleries. What that means is that this July nine commercial galleries in Shanghai will host exhibitions of work by artists represented by 12 commercial galleries from elsewhere. What about the… Oh, right: artists to look out for include cult American photographer Roe Ethridge and pioneering new-media artist Jennifer Steinkamp, who London’s Greengrassi

will show at J: Gallery. Finding the gallery Gallery at Don Gallery in Shanghai, Uri Aran palimpsest confusing? Just you wait. Alongside and Ryan Sullivan, presented by London’s Ethridge and Steinkamp, J: Gallery itself will Sadie Coles at Shanghart, and Simon Fujiwara, show work by Lyon-based Pu Yingwei (who who Berlin’s Esther Schipper shows at Edouard uses memory as his material), Malaysian sculptor Malingue Shanghai. Diving back down into Southeast Asia Haffendi Anuar (whose winning project for the (hey, after all that Berlin in Shanghai, London inaugural Battersea Power Station ‘Powerhouse in Shanghai, la in Shanghai business, it’s Commission’ went on show in London last year) and elegant multimedia conceptualist Tant starting to feel like a place again, isn’t it?), the Zhong, while alongside that, London’s Project Ateneo Art Gallery (part of the Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City) has an exchange Native Informant will show work by British painter Flo Brooks. The end product will 5 scheme of its own. Shared Residence is an either be the idea of a group show reconfigured ongoing project, devised by Philippine artist (and Future Greats selector for this issue) as a productive mashup of the three commercial programmes, or an art fair reduced to its most Poklong Anading, through which members miniature form. Condo Shanghai promises of the Ateneo community can borrow artworks a certain richness if nothing else. Look out also (donated to the project by their makers) to live for Yoshua Okón, presented by la’s Ghebaly with for up to two weeks. The project aims at

5 Annie Cabigting, 100 pieces (Tearing into Pieces After Roberto Chabet), 2013, oil on canvas, 50 × 50 cm. Courtesy the artist

4 Roe Ethridge, Louise with House, 2014, dye sublimation print on aluminium, 104 × 84 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Greengrassi, London

4 Jennifer Steinkamp, Still-Life, 2016, video installation. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy Acme, Los Angeles

ArtReview Asia

6 Roberto Chabet, Sky Horizons, 1973/2015, rubber, wood. Photo: Clefvan Pornela. Courtesy the Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City

6 Yola Johnson, Paper Press, 1973/2018, wood, wax paper. Photo: Clefvan Pornela. Courtesy the Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City

reformulating collecting as a social rather than kitchen, you could do a lot worse than check out personal behaviour pattern, and at relocating 6 the gallery’s current exhibition, The 70s: Objects, art as a part of quotidian living rather than Photographs and Documents, which traces the something to be looked at on special occasions. evolving experiments (largely in the fields of The scheme operates like a library, with fines for photography and installation – many of the last recreated for the show) of Filipino conceplate returns and borrowers taking responsibility for the conservation of the work while it is in tual artists during a period when they were their care. Sign up to one of Ateneo’s classes and at the cutting edge of a movement that led you might take home Anading’s Every water is to today’s institutional critique and politically an island (2013), a 51 sqcm video still, or similarly driven art (at a time when the Philippines was sized works by the likes of Ronald Ventura and under martial law). The period also provided some intriguing formal experiments: on show Annie Cabigting. It’s like Condo for the people. Or at least for the people studying or working here are Roberto Chabet’s stretched-rubber Sky at Ateneo. Let’s hope that Shared Residence spreads Horizons (1973/2015) and Yola Johnson’s Paper Press as widely and as rapidly as its commercial other. (1973/2018). Chabet was director of the Cultural In the meantime, while you’re signing Center of the Philippines (ccp), an institution yourself up for whatever Ateneo course it takes that was a cornerstone of Imelda Marcos’s to get that Charles Buenconsejo print into your cultural masterplan for the country and an

Summer 2018

incubator for many progressive art practices. However the association of Conceptualism with the Marcos dictatorship led to its relative neglect in art histories written in the post-Marcos era, which judged that conceptual art wilfully ignored the social realities of the times. In this respect, The 70s: Objects, Photographs and Document, curated by artist Ringo Bunoan, represents the latest step in the recent recuperation of the experimental art of the period and an opportunity to revisit the snakes-and-ladders relationship between ideology, politics and art. There are intriguing stories too: before Johnny Manahan (aka Mr M) became a successful talent scout and tv director (most notably for creating Ang tv – a talent show – during the early 1990s), he was one of the Philippines’ leading conceptual artists, producing a wide range of work that

was ahead of its time and deserves a lot more critical study. The current exhibition is the first in a series, Philippine Art by the Decade, so if you miss this one (which closes at the beginning of July), give yourself a kick, pick yourself up and don’t miss the next. Those of you who remain unconvinced by all the new models of art distribution, and prefer to see things in the big bestial form of a good old biennale, are in luck: June sees 7 the launch of the Second Yinchuan Biennale, directed by Marco Scotini and titled Starting from the Desert, Ecologies on the Edge. Located in northern China, this Muslim-influenced city is the site of multiple massacres, the death of Genghis Khan (in battle) and an irrigation system developed during the Han dynasty in the third century bce. The biennale takes place

at moca Yinchuan, which opened in 2015 and be ‘complicated’ by the biennale and, naturally, whose facade, designed by local practice waa, as an event of the moment, it will be unsparing is articulated in flowing strata intended to in its questioning of itself. Its curators are promreflect the rich geological history of the site ising, indeed, to explore ‘the limits of the exhi– a wetlands area on the edge of the desert. bition format, and thus to eventually produce It takes the social, historic and ecological a new eco-model of exhibiting’. particularities of the site forward through In contrast to all that, things sound relafour key binaries – ‘Nomadic Space and Rural tively calm in Liverpool, where the city’s art Space’; ‘Labor-in-Nature and Nature-in-Labor’; crowd and more particularly curators Kitty ‘The Voice and the Book’; and ‘Minorities and Scott (from the Art Gallery of Ontario and Multiplicity’ – and through the work of 90 Future Greats nominator for this issue) and artists. Among this multitude, names to look Sally Tallant (director of the Liverpool Biennial) out for include Congo’s Sammy Baloji, India’s 8 are gearing up for the 10th Liverpool Biennial, Nikhil Chopra, exiled Iraqi Hiwa K, Singapore’s titled, in another sign of the fad for lost geograHo Rui An, South Korea’s Kimsooja and phies, Beautiful world, where are you? That’s a line Vietnam’s Thao-Nguyen Phan, as well as Chinese liberated (and translated) from an eighteenthstalwarts Song Dong and Xu Bing. Of course, century poem by German heavyweight Friedrich relations between place, race and identity will Schiller, later popularised when it was set to

7 Zheng Bo, Weed Party, 2015 (installation view, Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai, 2015). Courtesy the artist

8 Annie Pootoogook, Man Abusing His Partner, 2002, coloured pencil and ink on paper, 51 × 66 cm. Courtesy Feheley Fine Arts, Toronto

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9 Ma Yansong / mad Architects, Light Cave, 2018. Photo: Osamu Nakamura. Courtesy the architect

9 Lee Bul, Doctor’s House, 2015, mixed-media installation, Kamou village. Photo: Gentaro Ishizuka. Courtesy the artist and the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, Niigata Prefecture

music by the Austrian Franz Schubert in 1819, a time of great European upheaval. And upheaval, European and other, is what connects the whole shebang back to Liverpool 2018, where 40 international artists will be plotting out the territory and, one presumes, attempting to answer the question. New York-based performance artist Ei Arakawa will produce a new led-‘painting’ derived from a suite of paintings featuring dancers by fellow exhibitor Silke Otto-Knapp; Ryan Gander is, in turn, collaborating with five schoolchildren from Liverpool’s Knotty Ash Primary School; Ari Benjamin Meyers will create a series of new musical compositions that will in turn become film portraits of some of Liverpool’s native musicians, while artist and theorist Joseph Grigely will present a selection of images from

his archive of newspaper images of musicians. Turner Prize-nominee Naeem Mohaiemen will take the focus on collaboration to new places by showing his three-channel video Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), which traces Cold War-era politics through the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Look out also for the work of the late Canadian Inuk artist Annie Pootoogook, whose drawings depicted the realities of everyday life in the community of Kinngait, and Reetu Sattar’s Harano Sur (Lost Tune) (2017–18), a performance work that muses on the place of the harmonium in past and current Bangladeshi culture. Started by director Fram Kitagawa back 9 in 2000, this year’s edition of the EchigoTsumari Art Triennale, titled Linking Nature and Men, continues its increasingly influential

Summer 2018

exploration of artmaking, community building, ecological living, a local–global dialogue and the productive connections between them all. Located in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture, EchigoTsumari has been subject to economic recession, natural disaster (the Chūetsu earthquake of 2007) and a general disconnect between rural and urban living. The festival itself features a mixture of site-specific commissions and more conventional exhibitions, and evolves out of the concept of satoyama, which describes a form of balanced coexistence between humans and nature. The festival features just over 50 artists, artist groups, chefs and architects, and new works by, among others, Teppei Kaneuji, Christian Boltanski (if you’re quick, you can also hit the last few days of his elegantly morbid retrospective exhibition, Storage Memory,

at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, which ends 8 July), Tadashi Kawamata and edition.nord, Lee Bul, Olaf Nicolai, Damián Ortega, and Ma Yansong/mad architects. If Echigo-Tsumari is about the responses to specific environmental and landscape conditions, then London’s Showroom is currently home to a displaced (although no less specific) context, namely the Clark House Initiative 10 in Mumbai. Working Practices is an exhibition featuring the dense output of residencies, exhibitions and communal living at the influential Indian nonprofit. From the bombastic videoworks of Julien Creuzet to mute audiocassettes and introspective pages (about female singers of the early 1980s and 90s) from the notebooks of Amina Ahmed, the exhibition is social in nature, featuring work in a variety of media

that comes together as a series of conversations rather than a linear passage from A to B (that might, say, tell the history of Clark House). Given the overwhelming sense that the Clark House mission resides in this sense of connection and inclusion, it seems fitting that almost all of the works included in this London showcase explore the ways in which the social, economic and political structures of societies at large are deployed to divide them. Themes of class, caste and blackness are brought to the fore, and naturally, given that this exhibition brings a slice of India to London, there’s also a particular focus on the living conditions of lower-caste Dalit communities. Ultimately, however, that such a range of artists, with a variety of national, ethnic and social backgrounds, have come together to share their

experiences of and observations about these issues gives the show a sense of optimism and makes it a lot more than ‘a bit of somewhere else safely and neatly served up over here’. I wonder if I could sell that slogan to Nando’s… Some people’s efforts do get rewarded, how11 ever, not least at the triennial apb Foundation Signature Art Prize, which offers sgd60,000 to the winning artist, with two Jurors’ Choice awards of sgd15,000 (plus a People’s Choice award of sgd10,000). Works by the 15 finalists are currently on show, among them some names with which attentive readers will already be familiar – Thao-Nguyen Phan (Yinchuan Biennale), Leung Chi Wo and Sarah Wong (Dismantling the Scaffold) and The Propeller Group (whose brilliant videowork The Living Need Light and the Dead Need Music, 2014, is part of M+’s Southeast Asian show) – and

10 Amina Ahmed, Pages from the Past (detail), 2017, notebooks. Courtesy the artist

11 Jitish Kallat, Infinite Episode (detail), 2016, dental plaster (set of 20 sculptures) and low plinth, 904 × 84 × 76 cm. Photo: B.Huet/Tutti. Courtesy the artist

11 The Propeller Group, ak-47 vs m-16, 2015, ballistic gel blocks, bullet fragments and video (set of 21), 43 × 18 × 18 cm (each block). Courtesy the artists and James Cohan Gallery, New York

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Ofﬁcial partner

12 Akram Zaatari, Against Photography, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and mmca Seoul

13 Fu Xiaotong, 243,000 Pinpricks, 2017, handmade paper, 116 × 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and Chambers Fine Art, Beijing

some others with whom it’s worth making 12 yourselves familiar – among these Chikako Yamashiro (whose three-channel video installation Mud Man, 2016, is on show), Jitish Kallat (his 20-part sculpture The Infinite Episode, 2016, features a series of dreaming animals), Shubigi Rao (represented here by an installation based around her 2016 book Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book. Vol I) and Au Sow-Yee (a meditation on the golden age of Sinophonic cinema during the 1950s and 60s in the form of an installation that blurs fact and fiction). If you were getting the impression that Southeast Asia was becoming painful to locate, then good luck with the far more nebulous Asia Pacific trading zone. There is the certainty, though, that the Signature Art Prize exhibition takes place in Singapore (at the National Museum) and that the winner will be announced at an awards ceremony on 29 June.

Akram Zaatari cofounded the Arab Image reassembling under different influences and Foundation (with Fouad Elkoury, Samer directives. A bit like Southeast Asia then. Mohdad and Walid Raad) in 1997. Dedicated Also fascinated by the material properties of art is Fu Xiaotong, whose artmaking to the collection, study and preservation of 13 revolves around the use of handmade Xuan the photographic object in the Arab world, the independent foundation has amassed over paper, which has a (very) long history of use as a support in traditional Chinese calligraphy 500,000 photographs (ranging from records and ink painting. But rather than using a of vernacular to professional practice) – a resource for the creation of a historical record brush, Fu pokes holes (over a million in some and artistic research. Against Photography, a travelcases) in the paper surface with needles (having ling show currently at the mmca Seoul, is built developed five distinctive techniques) to form textures and images, many of which relate to around the collection and traces the history of the kind of landscapes that would be recognisthe medium, the disappearance of the objects able to a traditional shan shui painter. The final it produced (partly in a digital age) and the uses works equally resemble textiles or spongiform to which photography is put in relation to issues masses, and resonate strongly with minimalist of storytelling, history and property. Zaatari cuts through the archive to produce what he calls and durational practices from twentieth‘emergences’ of photographs that establish the century Western art history. Try placing that archive as a morphing whole, assembling and on your map!

ArtReview Asia

Since his emergence as a member of the 14 Chinese avant-garde during the 1980s, Xu Bing has made himself a permanent fixture on the international art map. This summer Beijing’s ucca gives him a hometown retrospective that will include early works such as Book from the Sky (1987–91; a 604-page book printed with around 4,000 different, but equally meaningless pseudo-Chinese glyphs) through to his latest film, Dragonfly Eyes (2017). Xu’s play with language (particularly the logographic functions of Chinese characters), meaning and interpretation, which has developed in a number of works subsequent to Book from the Sky, has now evolved into an engagement with a new medium in Dragonfly Eyes, an 81-minute narrative film created out of 10,000 hours of video-surveillance footage (including car crashes, suicides and natural disasters) that

is at once a critique of our mediated, privacyfree world, our need to construct narratives to make sense of things and the kind of prurient interests that allow us to sit through hours of footage of other people living their lives (or ending them). To escape from that kind of gloom, why 15 not visit Prabhavathi Meppayil’s first solo exhibition at Esther Schipper in Berlin. Although its title, b/seven eighths, will certainly leave you wondering if she’s been spending too long discussing language with someone like Xu. Bangalore-based Meppayil, whose work came to international prominence following its inclusion in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 2013 Venice Biennale, titles her works (and exhibitions) in series according to a formula relating to their production and (one presumes) their relationship to other works. Those works them-

selves are often minimalist paintings and sculptures placed in conversation with traditional techniques of goldsmithery (the hereditary occupation of her ancestors): for example, painstakingly gessoed panels are stamped with a thinnam (used to make decorative patterns on bangles) in the case of se/hundred and five (2017) and se/hundred and eight and se/hundred and nine (both 2018). There is, of course, an intriguing dialogue with the work of Fu Xiaotong to be imagined here and, accordingly, with various traditions of minimalism and geometric abstraction. Although that might also be a case of making the territory too great and ignoring the primary relation to Indian traditions of labour and their social and economic transformation in the modern era. You wouldn’t want to take things too far, after all. There are curators who can do that. Nirmala Devi

Xu Bing, Dragonfly Eyes (still), 2017, video, 81 min. Courtesy the artist

15 Prabhavathi Meppayil, se/hundred and eight (detail), 2018, gesso panel stamped with thinnam, 46 × 46 × 4 cm. Photo: Manoj Sudhakaran. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Summer 2018

2018/19 Chikako Yamashiro 15 March – 28 April 2018

Chim↑Pom

18 May – 7 July 2018

Aki Sasamoto 19 July – 4 August 2018

Performance and book launch 18 July

Taro Izumi

6 September – 10 November 2018

Meiro Koizumi

22 November 2018 – 12 January 2019

Mari Katayama

24 January – 2 March 2019

47 Mortimer Street London W1W 8HJ

white-rainbow.art +44 207 637 1050 Aki Sasamoto, Sisyphus with the sheets ball, 2017. Ink-jet print, 68.5 x 52.9 cm. © Aki Sasamoto. Courtesy the artist and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo.

Contemporary art and architecture in the historical city of Bruges

The Bruges Triennial is a collaboration between Brugge Plus, Musea Brugge, Kenniscentrum vzw and Cultuurcentrum Brugge, commissioned by the City of Bruges

Life in India stinks in every way possible. The state of affairs post-Independence (1947) was bad, and it got worse during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (1975–77), but in light of the present situation, those times were mild. India today reminds me of Germany during the 1930s and 40s. In the name of religion, marginal communities are being denied their staple food, and in many North Indian states, vigilantes are going after cowherds, cattle traders and slaughterhouses; even consumers have been attacked and killed on the pretext of cow protection. It has reached the point where the North Indian population, but chiefly the Muslims and the Dalits, are frightened to consume beef. The meat has been banned in places thanks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindutva leanings, the Hindu nationalism that drives the ideology of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), whose leaders have declared that eating beef is ‘against the idea of India’. Yet the general public, unable to endure the corruption of the secular Congress party and the government-driven price hikes during its tenure, voted Modi and his party into power in 2014. While the critics of Modi had their Hindutva reservations about him, he had no qualms awarding the Padma Bhushan, India’s third highest civilian honor, to a Hindu monk. It was a moment when Hindutva came out of the closet and was worn as a badge of honour. This closely followed Modi’s appointment of Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk and rightwing Hindutva firebrand, as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. What do these actions communicate to Hindutva loyalists? Aditya was the mahant, or head priest, of a Hindu temple in Gorakhpur, as well as the founder of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, a youth militia implicated in communal violence. This is how they describe themselves: ‘A fierce cultural and social organization dedicated to Hindutva and nationalism’. As soon as Yogi Adityanath was ‘appointed’ chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, he ordered a crackdown on illegal meat-processing units. The authorities quickly took illegal units to mean mechanised units, and started going after them. This created a fear among minorities who were primarily involved in the meat trade. They are now moving away from their traditional profession because of these repressive policies. On top of this, Gujarat, Narendra Modi’s home state, has

Points of View

notes from madras Life in contemporary india is dangerous, fundamentalist and frequently recalls the darkest days of Europe’s recent past. Charu Nivedita sounds the alarm

Chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, arrives at Indian Parliament in New Delhi. Photo: Sonu Mehta. Courtesy Hindustan Times/Getty Images

ArtReview Asia

increased the punishment for cow slaughter from seven years to life imprisonment. His counterpart in Chhattisgarh, Chief Minister Raman Singh, has said, ‘We will hang those who kill cows’. Statements made by leaders have been used as licence by their supporters to attack large numbers of Dalits and Muslims. When I visited Meerut, Moradabad and Rampur recently, I saw many Muslim-dominated villages whose residents’ primary occupation was cattle breeding. Fearing for their lives, they now rear buffalo instead of cows. During the Congress party’s most recent stretch in power (2004–14), the lives of the Indian people did not show any signs of improvement; the gulf between the rich and the poor only widened. Villagers started losing their livelihood and were forced to migrate to cities. Being uneducated, these villagers had no choice but to stay in slums, thus becoming a marginalised faction. Many of the farmers who chose to remain in their villages eventually committed suicide. Hence the desperation for change. But the bjp has brought no respite, only peril, and dethroning Modi in the next election will not wipe out these dangers. He and his supporters have poisoned the masses with hatred, and purging it will take a century, maybe two. The uniqueness of India is its multiplicity. Every state – every district, in fact – varies in its ways of worship. Each district has its own dialect. Before the British era, there was no such thing as the ‘Hindu religion’ in India. The genre of nationalism being propagated by Modi and his rightwing supporters is an attempt to unify the nation by feeding it the Hindutva ideology that prescribes one language, Hindi; one religion, Hinduism; one sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita; one dietary practice; and one culture. Anything at variation with the mainstream ideology should be aligned with it so as to conform. If not, the opposers will be destroyed. Today, fundamentalism is India’s greatest menace. With the standard of life continuing to deteriorate, the majority of the Indian populace is turning fundamentalist. It is felt that Muslims are bad for the country and should hence leave. It is also feared that Muslims will outnumber Hindus and thus bring about the extinction of Hinduism. Consider the Kathua incident. Kathua is a city located 85km from Jammu,

in the far north of India. Asifa Bano was eight years old. She went missing on 10 January this year and was killed on 14 January. Between her abduction and death, a gang comprising a Hindu temple custodian named Sanji Ram; Ram’s unnamed juvenile nephew; Ram’s son Vishal; Vishal’s friend Parvesh Kumar, alias Mannu; and special police officers Deepak Khajuria and Surender Kumar raped her repeatedly. Asifa was kept in the small temple where Ram worked. To ensure she was silent, they forced Asifa to take sedatives and drugged her with manar, a locally available variety of cannabis. On the nights of 13 and 14 January, the juvenile, Vishal and Mannu removed the victim from the temple for the purposes of killing her and disposing of her body. Unable to organise a car for transport, they returned her to the temple. Khajuria, the special police officer, wanted to rape her one last time before she was killed. Her body was found on 17 January in a forest. Asifa belonged to the Muslim Bakarwal community, and the aim of the kidnapping, the suspects told investigators, was to frighten and drive away the nomadic Gujjar and Bakarwal communities from the Hindu-majority area. Following these crimes, local head constable Tilak Raj and sub-inspector Anand Dutta were given Rs 5 lakh by Ram to destroy crucial evidence. Not only that, the accused were trained, by bjp lawyers, to throw investigators off the track. Further, the lawyers of the bjp hindered investigators from submitting their reports to the court, which forced them to go directly to the judge. We can also see to what extent this country has gone to the dogs when we consider that Deepika S. Rajawat, the lawyer fighting Asifa’s case, has said that her life was under threat. In her words, ‘I don’t know how long I will be alive. I can be raped, my modesty can be outraged, I can be killed, I can be damaged. I was threatened yesterday that “we will not forgive you”. I am going to tell the Supreme Court tomorrow that I am in danger.’ They also said to her, ‘You’re a Brahmin; the accused are also Brahmins. So, you must not fight for Muslims.’ Sanji Ram requested that Rajawat’s security be removed. At the same time, he said, ‘I did not commit this crime. I am fit to be Asifa’s grandfather.’ Two bjp ministers in Jammu and Kashmir participated in a rally to support the accused (later they were forced

to resign). A group calling itself Hindu Ekta Manch organised several such rallies in Jammu and Kathua. The national flag was carried by those participating in the rallies, a sign of fast-growing nationalism. It is now in vogue to hoist the national flag on tall masts. In Faridabad, bjp president Amit Shah unfurled the national flag at a height of 75m. During my visit to North India, I saw such huge national flags flying in every city. Even three months after the crime, Modi still had not issued a statement. Only when international media and the un registered their criticism did he make a speech, in which he claimed that Asifa was like his daughter. Turning to Tamil Nadu, where I reside, conditions are worse than those in other Indian states. Recently, an audio recording of one Professor Nirmala Devi, who was trying to lure her female students into prostituting themselves, was released. The words ‘sex work’ did not come up in the speech, but it was clear what she was

A silent vigil held demanding justice for Asifa Bano, April 2018. Photo: Tharaka Basnayaka. Courtesy NurPhoto/Getty Images

Summer 2018

on about. Although the students expressed their uninterest, she continued to try to persuade them: “If you provide favours to some of the big shots of Madurai Kamaraj University, you will get better marks and a lot of money. Give me your account numbers. Thus, you can come up in life. Think and give me a positive response.” She also said she knew “Governor Thatha”. When the thatha (‘grandfather’ in Tamil – though the full quote is interpreted by some as implying that Devi knows the governor intimately) was questioned, he denied knowing anything, but later got himself into a different soup. He gave a female reporter a light pat on the cheek during the press meet. When she broadcast this on her Facebook page, the governor tendered an apology to her, saying he was like her grandfather. Said governor is also the head of the investigating committee in the Nirmala Devi case. (Devi herself is currently being held without bail.) This is commonplace in India: the main accused can also be the head of the investigating committee. What is most dangerous is that even the educated masses are following a fundamentalist line of thought, as we have seen from the ‘Governor Thatha’ incident. An actor who is a member of the bjp posted a message he had received: ‘Why do you girls make such a fuss about the fact that the governor patted one of you? You all wound up in your positions only after sleeping with your superiors.’ The actor issued an apology following condemnation in the press. In a responsible civil society, who is giving these people the right to raise such obnoxious voices and be heard? In Roman Polanski’s movie The Pianist (2002), a young officer is walking down the road. An old Jew walks towards him, and though he steps aside for the young Nazi to pass, the latter summons him back and slaps him, asking why he did not salute. India in its current state reminds me of this particular movie scene. When Jawaharlal Nehru University student leader Kanhaiya Kumar used the word azadi – independence – in a speech, it was wilfully misrepresented as antinationalist by the Modi government, which booked him for sedition and sent him to prison (he was later cleared). Frightening, really. Charu Nivedita is a writer based in Chennai

Thailand has the reputation of a fun-loving country. Its people, so the stereotype goes, crave their daily dose of amusement, as indicated by the punning that permeates its written and spoken language, particularly in popular television and film comedies. But humour in Thailand is largely limited to ordinary citizens poking fun at each other; anything that needles those at the top is a risky proposition under the strong-arm rule of the current junta. Of our putsch-installed leaders, the current prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, is regarded as one of the funniest. But his is a bully’s sense of humour, trading on intimidation and abuse rather than on wit. He made international headlines in January when he plonked a lifesize cardboard cutout of himself in front of journalists because he wasn’t in the mood to be interviewed. Some local media outlets praised the antic as ‘clever’, but what kind of society celebrates a dictator who shirks his duties by insulting people’s intelligence? One so accustomed to submission that it is willing to go along with a prank at its own expense. The amount of public space a society allows for humour that lampoons its leaders is a measure of its freedom. The history of authoritarian regimes tells us that dictators do not appreciate satire. Since Thailand’s most recent coup, in 2014, no humour of this sort

peepholes in happyland political cartoons are testing the sense of humour of Thailand’s ruling junta, writes Prabda Yoon

Work from the Facebook page for the anonymously created political cartoon series Manee Mee Share

ArtReview Asia

is visible in the country’s mainstream media. Newspapers still run the political cartoons that, once upon a time, used to exert real influence, but these are the work of an older generation of cartoonists who employ such tired, repetitive gags that their targets are no longer ruffled by them. More importantly, they neither speak to the liberal spirit of the younger generations nor serve to unite people weary of the junta and its broken logic. But Facebook, which is widely used in Thailand (according to Statista, as of April 2018 the country has 52 million registered users, the eighth highest number in the world), has come to provide an alternative platform for political satire. Postcoup, two standout political-cartoon pages have emerged on Facebook and proved wildly popular, judging by the numbers of ‘followers’, ‘shares’ and references to them in various social contexts. Those two pages, both with anonymous creators, are Manee Mee Share and Kai Maew. Manee Mee Share put out work in earnest between 2014 and 2016. Its name requires some unpacking. Manee is the name of a pigtailed girl character in a classic series of elementaryschool textbooks, familiar to Thais who attended primary school between 1978 and 1994; ‘Share’ is a play on the way Thai people pronounce the English word ‘chair’; and ‘Mee’ is the Thai word for ‘have’. So the page’s name, in one sense, means ‘Manee has a chair’ (its English handle is @maneehaschair). The chair is an allusion to the 1976 Thammasat University massacre, in which the government used violence to suppress student protesters gathered at the university and the nearby Sanam Luang Square, leaving 46 dead. (The demonstrators were protesting the return of former dictator Thanom Kittikachorn, who had been driven into exile following an uprising three years earlier.) The far-right media at the time accused the students of lèse-majesté and, as a result, a considerable number of people said good riddance to the casualties. An American photographer from the Associated Press, Neal Ulevich, photographed a man with a metal chair raised above his head, ready to smash the corpse of a student hanging from a tree, a crowd looking on. The photograph became emblematic of that harrowing chapter in Thai history, a reminder of the impunity with which the far right inflicted violence that day. The reference to that chair in the name of Manee Mee Share connects the country’s current political problems with the forces that gave rise to the 1976 massacre. Evidently well-versed in political history, Manee Mee Share’s creator relies on more than just humour in his or her cartoons. Nobody knows why the page ceased activity

in 2016, but in a country described by the most recent ‘Freedom of the Press’ report as ‘aggressively’ enforcing defamation and lèse-majesté laws, having ‘banned criticism of its rule, and harassed, attacked, and shut down media outlets’ while arbitrarily detaining and arresting journalists, it’s not hard to see why the cartoonist might fear to continue. The creator of the newer Kai Maew (literally ‘Cat’s Eggs’, slang for ‘Cat’s Testicles’) on the other hand is, according to an anonymous interview with the news site Prachatai, someone with an art background, relatively apolitical until he or she could no longer sit through the injustice that manifests ever more clearly. Kai Maew first appeared on Facebook in 2016 and disappeared temporarily around January 2018, prompting its more than 400,000 fans to worry that the page had been shut down by the military and that the artist behind it might be in danger. But soon a page called ‘Kai Maew X’ (@cartooneggcatx), with the same creator, showed up in its place, and has already garnered over 200,000 followers. Kai Maew’s pen strokes are simple, one could say ‘rough’, whereas Manee Mee Share very closely replicates the style of the drawings in the original textbooks. Kai Maew’s illustrations have the more contemporary feel of Japanese manga or comic strips. The page also

uses characters that resemble people in the news: its main character is a man in military uniform with a Hitler moustache, obviously personifying a military dictator. Unlike Manee Mee Share, which adheres to a very specific style, Kai Maew has fewer aesthetic restrictions, so is able to adapt its illustration style to the punchline or material at hand. It has used wordless panels (most of Manee Mee Share’s jokes are verbal) and draws on pop culture, which has given it broader appeal. While Manee Mee Share’s core fanbase is the welleducated left, Kai Maew has followers of different political persuasions, and has managed to avoid being labelled as part of the ‘Down with the Monarchy’ machinery dreamed up by the far right for its witch hunt. Kai Maew has pulled all this off despite its association with Somsak Jeamteerasakul, the exiled academic much maligned by the conservative faction of society because of his vocal critique of the Thai monarchy (not only does he have a lookalike character, he also wrote a foreword for Kai Maew’s cartoon collection, published by Prachatai Press in March 2018). Even though Facebook has made pages like Manee Mee Share and Kai Maew possible, the fact that their creators are forced to hide behind anonymity and may have to go dark at any time demonstrates that, in Thailand, humour is not yet an effective weapon against dictatorship. It merely takes the edge off the frustration, letting us laugh, however wearily, at the decline of our freedom. If the status quo continues, especially if the election slated for the beginning of 2019 (and postponed since 2015) does not materialise, the cartoon pages on Facebook may no longer be able to bear the weight of people’s disgruntlement. Then it might be time for us to study the playbook of the Otpor! student group from Serbia, which, through its use of humour as a peaceful means of protest, played a pivotal role in ousting Slobodan Milošević in 2000. Srdja Popović, an Otpor! leader, wrote about the group’s tactics in his 2013 essay ‘Why Dictators Don’t Like Jokes’: ‘These acts move beyond mere pranks; they help corrode the very mortar that keeps most dictators in place: Fear’. In Thailand, fear still looms over the laughter elicited by cartoons like Kai Maew, and who knows if we have ever laughed freely and truly, given our long and nearly unbroken string of authoritarian regimes. Translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul

Work from the online cartoon series Kai Maew, also created anonymously

Summer 2018

Prabda Yoon is a Bangkok-based novelist, graphic designer, artist, filmmaker, magazine editor, screenwriter, translator and media personality

Future Greats in association with

And have you heard of a grave considered to be subversive? 39

I will say something briefly about ‘possible worlds’…

I argued against those

misuses of the concept

that regard possible worlds as

something like

distant planets, 40

ArtReview Asia

Introduction

Those of you who are familiar with ArtReview Asia’s annual Future Greats issue might be tempted to think that what’s to come is simply a list of artists in whom you should invest your time and/or your money, selected by people who will ensure that it’s worth your while to invest your time and/or your money in them. After all, that’s the way this art business generally works, right? Wrong. Or you’d be wrong when it comes to the Future Greats business, at least. As much as the exercise of asking a series of artists, curators and writers to select an artist who they think is producing interesting work does provide a list that might be used in the manner discussed, it also serves to document new ways of looking and thinking about art. As a motif for this, ArtReview Asia has leaned on the thoughts of the eminent philosopher of language Saul Kripke and a short passage from his book Naming and Necessity (1980), in which he describes how language, and more particularly the naming of things, might admit to contingency rather than a priori certainty, about how rather than issuing statements of fact to describe what’s around us, one might identify propositions and potentials in this world and in others instead. For ArtReview Asia, this more fluid idea of understanding what’s around us strikes to the core of its interest in the discussions that are generated by the exhibition of art. This year marks the second of ArtReview Asia’s ongoing partnership with K11 Art Foundation, an organisation that nurtures artistic talent within the Greater China region, promotes it to the world in general and exposes new audiences to art via its galleries throughout the region and, more particularly, its ‘art mall’ concept. The latter allows for exhibitions to take place in a retail environment. Not in the sense of the exhibition taking place in a commercial gallery; rather in the sense of the exhibition being staged within an environment other than the conventional white cube or museum. An environment that people who don’t visit museums on a regular basis find more comfortable to inhabit, and from which artworks might take their minds on a journey to somewhere else.

Summer 2018

Koji Ryui lives and works in Sydney. His work was recently on show at the 21st Biennale of Sydney, superposition: Engagement and Equilibrium, curated by Mami Kataoka. He is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

selected by Micheal Do

A-Un, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

ArtReview Asia

A-Un, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

In our one-click-away Instagram age, there is so much pleasure taining allusions to art history, the Bible, Greek mythology and the to be had when artists and artworks demand good old-fashioned workings of sculpture, sound and silence. By incorporating and connoisseurship from viewers – when artists trade the pretensions combining these connotations, Ryui situates these figures halfway of shock, awe and social-media likes for a quieter material presence. between the ethereal and the material: each seems to carry its own Koji Ryui excels in this category of engagement. Since relocating to pull of curiosity and imagination, beckoning us to lean closer as it Sydney, from his native Kyoto in 1992, Ryui has immersed himself whispers its stories and secrets. As you spend more time in Ryui’s in the study of Japanese ritual and world, these satisfyingly ambigculture, Shintoism and animism. In uous and open-ended associations Ryui experiments with the poetic potenthese belief systems, objects trantial of found objects, imbuing them with begin to catch like tinder, sparking a rush in your imagination. This is the scend their material properties and distinct personalities and possibilities defining feature of Ryui’s practice. are alive with lifeforce and spirits. In an age of digital distractions, he Drawing on these convictions, Ryui experiments with the poetic potential of found objects, imbuing reminds us of the need for a deeper and more spiritual kind of percepthem with distinct personalities and possibilities. tion – one in which the imagination is an essential tool for underRyui’s series A-Un (2016–17) features pairs of clay heads arranged standing the world around us. on found chocks. Conceived as binaries, each work comprises an open-mouth figure, A, and a closed-mouth consort, Un. Some of these Micheal Do is a curator and writer based in Sydney. He recently curated Soft Core, a travelling exhibition for Casula Powerhouse idol-like figures bear the dignity of Ancient Greek sculpture, while Arts Centre, Sydney, and Not Niwe, Not Nieuw, Not Neu for 4a others are burdened with Quasimodolike faces torn apart and crudely Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney remade. They are unique in finish, adornment and expression, con-

Summer 2018

Genevieve Chua is a Singapore-based painter, though currently in London. Her most recent solo exhibition was Vestiges and Halves (2017) at 71/2, Seoul. In 2011 she was selected for the bmw Young Asian Artist Series iii at the Singapore Tyler Print Workshop. She is represented by Silverlens, Manila

selected by Heman Chong

An underlying grid of squares in this painting forms a basis for the composition. Floating above this grid are several objects resembling short wursts: prinskorvar. And above them, five serpentines fall, like sauce, mustard, across the frame.

Edge Control #15, Soft Diplomacy (2017)

ArtReview Asia

Edge Control #3, Anti-Histamine Rapid Relief (2016)

A block of equal horizontal rectangles forming thin strips occupies almost half of this painting. You can almost hear a sneeze, or a splash, bless you, and immediately sense that spring has arrived. Ahchoo! Bless you.

Summer 2018

Edge Control #2, Slow Breeze Sliced in Half (2016)

ArtReview Asia

The titles of these paintings by Genevieve Chua are filled with references to things that happen in the real world. Perhaps they are happening in slow motion, or have a completely different sense of time. They slide along the surfaces of the paintings and fall off the edges and onto our minds. There is often a narrative underlying abstract paintings, and it’s often in the titles that these narratives are revealed.

Edge Control #17, Ozu Remastered (2017)

Edge Control #12, Throwback Thursday (2017)

Heman Chong is an artist and writer based in Singapore

Summer 2018

Shannon Te Ao lives and works in Wellington, New Zealand. He was awarded the Walters Prize in 2016 by Auckland Art Gallery, and his work has been included at the Edinburgh Art Festival (2017), the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), and the Biennale of Sydney (2014). my life as a tunnel is currently on show at Dowse Museum, Wellington, through 22 July

selected by Fi Churchman

my life as a tunnel (still), 2018, two-channel video, sound, 9 min 48 sec all images Courtesy the artist and Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington

With the sun aglow, I have my pensive moods, 2017, two-channel video, sound, 13 min 11 sec

Two people caress each other, clasping unhurriedly at one another’s rooted to the physical ancestral landscape. Te Ao’s preoccupation with hands, arms and torsos in a slow tangle that closes as a gentle dance: Te Reo (which translates literally as ‘the language’) manifests in his each man leans into and against the other, swaying along to a song works through Māori waiata (songs) and whakataukī (proverbs), one of sung in Te Reo Māori. That’s all that happens, and it’s mesmerising. the most compelling of which he has translated into English in With Shannon Te Ao’s body of work distils one of the reasons that I’m the sun aglow, first presented at the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2017 as drawn towards moving image: his videos physically slow you down. an installation. The song, written around 1846 by the daughter of The very medium itself demands an investment of time, and a good the then Ngāti Tūwharetoa chief, after she contracted leprosy from video can hypnotise you in place, and then move you according to a foreign lover, is narrated by a throaty, disembodied voice. But Te its own measure – causing time to slip by, and you, the viewer, into Ao’s videos don’t require any explanation and nor does he force it: another realm. The work described by simply setting one image against Each man leans into and against the other, is a two-channel video titled my life as another using two channels, the a tunnel (2018), based on a scene from artist encourages the tendrils of a swaying to a song sung in Te Reo Māori the American film director Charles narrative to unfold naturally, letting Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), in which the protagonist and his wife the viewer reach for meaning. With the sun aglow shows the Rangipo share a slow dance to Dinah Washington’s recording of This Bitter Earth Desert cut through with pylons and in the distance, dust billowing (1960). The version of the song in Te Ao’s video is translated into Māori. from a highway that just edges onto the Ngāti Tūwharetoa’s lands, my life as a tunnel is the latest iteration of a video project that also and scenes from a dairy farm built directly over tribal burial grounds includes With the sun aglow, I have my pensive moods (2017) and Untitled in the area; a second screen shows two women dancing together in a (malady) (2016). A descendant of the Ngāti Tūwharetoa, a Māori tribe field, holding each other and bathed in nautical twilight. In Te Ao’s based in the central region of North Island, Aotearoa, Te Ao works works, humans and landscapes, culture and nature, are connected by across moving image, performance and installation, weaving together empathy, tradition and a sense of home. indigenous historical narratives and biography in a cinematic style that is peaceful and melancholic, while charged with longing and Fi Churchman is editorial assistant at ArtReview Asia

Summer 2018

Cui Jie lives and works in Shanghai. Her most recent solo exhibitions include The Enormous Space, ocat Shenzhen (2018) and Latter, Former, Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin (2016). Cui will participate in the inaugural front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2018)

selected by Venus Lau

Crane’s House 1, 2014, oil on canvas, 150 × 110 cm

ArtReview Asia

Ground Invading Figure #27, 2014, oil on canvas, 40 × 60 cm

The built environment of Chinese cities can provoke confusion: on the montage techniques of Orson Welles as an inspiration for her pracsame block I encountered a golden-topped skyscraper adorned with tice of layering spaces onto a single, flat plane. blue windows in the style that dominated the Pearl River Delta during Some of the buildings in Cui’s architectural archive have been the 1990s, a former military warehouse from the Revolutionary era demolished, while many of the rest are facing demolition due to rapid reurbanisation. Although Cui paints ‘sinofuturist’ reconstructions of and a residential building embedded into a fake concrete mountain. Cui Jie is best known for paintings, combining architectural frag- existing structures, she is not preparing memento mori or documenments with dusty-pastel palettes, that build on her archival research tation. Instead she rearranges her experiences of spatial disorientainto the stylistically diverse Chinese architecture and public sculp- tion in Chinese urbanscapes and generates paintings from these ‘afterture of the period after the 1978 economic images’. A sense of physical disorientation is further represented by the lack of human figures reform, as well as her interest in the Modernism Cui’s practice is less the of Le Corbusier and the Japanese architectural painting of architecture than (until her shared exhibition with Lee Kit at ocat, movement known as Metabolism. Her pracShenzhen, this year) in her paintings. painting as architecture tice is less the painting of architecture than In Building of Cranes (2014), two towering painting as architecture: stacked, repeated birdlike structures based on a public sculpture and dissected images of cityscapes are complicated by Cui’s paint- in Dongguan are overlaid on a telecom building in Beijing. The builderly textures. For example, in the background of Zhao Wei Building ings are painted from different perspectives, while the cold grey back(2014), huoshaoyun (literally ‘fire clouds’, a term used to describe ground eradicates the vanishing point of the composition. In Cui’s orange-coloured clouds at sunset) are produced by painting meticu- paintings, all the elements are arranged in such a way that they can be lously along lines marked out in masking tape. Cui’s rethinking of read independently of the whole, both breaking away from each other spaces can be traced back to her earlier series Ground Invading Figures and combining to create new structures and alternative skylines. (2012–15), paintings of stock media images that accentuate the negative space between the human figures they contain. She also cites the Venus Lau is artistic director at K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai

Summer 2018

Zao Wei Building, 2014,oil on canvas, 200 × 190 cm all images Courtesy the artist and K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai

ArtReview Asia

like our own surroundings but

somehow existing in a different

dimension,

or that lead to spurious problems of

‘transworld identification’. Further, Summer 2018

Dale Harding lives and works in Brisbane. He has previously participated in Soon enough: art in action at Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2018), Documenta 14 (2017); 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016) and the National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2016). His work will feature in the Liverpool Biennial 2018

selected by Kitty Scott

above and on pages 56–57 Wall Composition in Reckitt’s Blue, 2017 (installation view, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane). Photo: Natasha Harth. Courtesy the artist, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

ArtReview Asia

Know them in correct judgment, 2017 (installation view, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Dale Harding makes wall paintings using stencils and various tested history of his homeland, profoundly informs his work. pigments made up of yellow-brown ochres and the laundry whitener Introducing a colour like Reckitt’s Blue into the vocabulary of a Reckitt’s Blue; in doing so he brings a very long past into view. Much long-practised form has precedents in aboriginal history, even as it of his inspiration comes from the rock paintings in the Carnarvon engages narratives of settler culture, government control and the Gorge of Australia’s Central Queensland, a place to which he has domestic servitude that arrived with it. With each gesture and move in his work, Harding takes care to a deep ancestral connection and learn and understand the protopart of an area that has seen nearly Introducing a colour like Reckitt’s Blue 20,000 years of indigenous occupacols that have surrounded the histointo the vocabulary of a long-practised tion. Where some might see these ries of his materials and methods – form has precedents in aboriginal history preserving these rooted pasts at the sites in the gorge as archaeological or same time that he seeks to underanthropological – as the product of a culture far distanced from the present – Harding’s work extends their stand them in a new way and bring the untold histories of his family forms and communicates a sense of their cultural continuum and the and his community into the future. continued relevance of their embedded histories. Harding was born in the coalmining town of Moranbah in Kitty Scott is cocurator of the Liverpool Biennial 2018 and the Carol and Queensland and is a descendant of the Bidjara, Ghungalu and Morton Rapp Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, at the Art Gallery Garingbal peoples of eastern Australia. That heritage, and the conof Ontario, Toronto

Summer 2018

ArtReview Asia

Summer 2018

Jiang Pengyi lives and works in Beijing. He was awarded the Aletti ArtVerona Prize for Photography in 2011 and nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2012. He has had a number of solo exhibitions at Shanghart and Blindspot Gallery (2010–17) and presented work at the Guangzhou Image Triennial in 2017

selected by Liu Wei When I first encountered the works in Jiang Penyi’s series Dark Addiction (2013), the perfection of their forms and meanings were, to me, something like a destruction, or a pause, communicating a sadness.

Dark Addiction 37H50’25”, 2013, c-print photograph mounted on aluminium composite panel, 178 × 300 cm

On photosensitive paper, the fireflies have left, with the light of their lives, a trace that is like the birth or death of the universe, lending the works a sense of eternity. In Dark Addiction, Jiang uses a cameraless technique to record the movement of light emitted by bioluminescent insects. His method of imagemaking combines technology and aesthetics to encapsulate the essence of light, time and life.

ArtReview Asia

The Suspended Moment No.4, 2013, photograph archival inkjet print mounted on aluminium panel, 150 × 119 cm

He developed this approach in The Suspended Moment (2013) and In Some Time (2015–), in which light is also the primary subject. In the former, he captures its refractions through cracked ice; in the latter, he creates abstract blurs of colour using light-reactive paper.

The Suspended Moment No.1, 2013, photograph archival inkjet print mounted on aluminium panel, 150 × 119 cm

Summer 2018

Hovering at the boundary between abstraction and figuration, Jiang’s photographs seek to make the ephemeral tangible.

Liu Wei is an artist based in Beijing

In Some Time No.4, 2016, archival inkjet print, 179 × 140 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

ArtReview Asia

if one wishes to avoid the

Weltangst and

philosophical confusions

that many philosophers have associated with the

‘worlds’ terminology, I recommended that

Summer 2018

Catherine Sarah Young has most recently exhibited work in the Manila Biennale (2018). With degrees in molecular biology and biotechnology as well as in the visual arts, Young travels, researches and speaks widely on projects relating to emergent technologies, sustainability, the environment and alternative futures, notably with her ongoing Apocalypse Project (apocalypse.cc)

selected by Poklong Anading

Climate Change Couture, 2013, c-print. Courtesy the artist and Matthias Berger, Singapore–eth Centre Future Cities Laboratory

ArtReview Asia

I was invited to be on a jury for a residency in France, she applied and impresses me. Works from her Climate Change Couture (2013) series, that’s where I first came across her name. She’s not so active in the part of The Apocalypse Project (2013–; an interdisciplinary platform local scene in Manila and more into producing works through resi- that seeks to reveal the humane face of climate change), for example, dencies outside the Philippines. Nevertheless, it was a real surprise draw on the disciplines of design and fashion to produce artworks that no one in the local scene knew her. I find her work very inter- in the form of wearable costumes that speak about what humans esting because there is a scientific base to it (she has collaborated with might have to do to adapt to climate change. I trust her knowledge. scientists, local communities, corporate entities and chefs), and it’s For me artmaking is more poetic, but I see the weight of knowlrare to see this. You have to study her work to really feel it, because it edge behind her work as giving it importance. More than that, she plays with things and mixes things has a delicate nature. She’s concerned For me artmaking is more poetic, but up. Her Sewer Soaperie series (2016) with the environment in a way that’s uses research into so-called fatbergs, not so close to my own concerns (even I see the weight of knowledge behind conducted in Manila and Medellín, though I’m doing some research on her work as giving it importance to trace the journeys of various sewage systems in various countries): she has a way of working that’s more accurate, more responsible. cooking oils, ending up in the saponification of various used cooking Sometimes I think I shouldn’t be part of the art scene: why are we oils and greases collected from sewers and open pipes in Manila making art rather than fixing society? The more art that is made, the (interestingly the saponification of used palm oil raised questions more it spreads and the more problematic it becomes: we talk about about how pure it was in the first place). She has a sharp mind and is a problem rather than addressing it. But Catherine uses art to bring very serious about what she does. extra perspectives to bear on environmental and social issues, which leads to a better understanding of the problems, and that’s what Poklong Anading is an artist based in the Philippines

The Sewer Soaperie, 2016, soap made from sewer grease. Photo: 1335Mabini. Courtesy Fundación Casa Tres Patios, Medellín

Summer 2018

Kim Heecheon lives and works in Seoul. His videowork was on view this spring and early summer in a solo exhibition at Doosan Gallery, New York. He has previously shown in Doosan Gallery, Seoul (2017), and was included in the Istanbul Biennial (2017) and Kunsthal Aarhus (2016)

selected by Aimee Lin

Lifting Barbells (still), 2015, single-channel hd video, 21 min

Soulseek/Pegging/Air-twerking (still), 2015, single-channel hd video, 21 min

ArtReview Asia

Mumbling in Hell, Tumbling down the Well (still), 2017, single-channel hd video, 25 min following pages home, 2017, installation view at Doosan Gallery, Seoul all images Courtesy the artist

It is not difficult for me, an outside observer of the Korean art scene, and often employ various types of literature, by juxtaposing texts or to distinguish Kim Heecheon’s works from those made by his peers, stories recorded in different formats including private letters, live a group sometimes informally referred to as Postinternet artists. broadcasting and interviews. Trained in architecture, Kim chose to work with moving image when Kim’s work engages in world-building (which includes a regularly he decided to become an artist. His videoworks often employ digital occurring alternative Seoul, as seen in his 2015 trilogy, Lifting Barbells, technologies – such as vr in Mumbling Soulseek/Pegging/Air-twerking and Wall in Hell, Tumbling down the Well (2017) or Kim’s work engages in world-building, Rally Drill), through which physical Face Swap in Sleigh Ride Chill (2016) – reality, digital facts (in the form of through which physical reality, and multiple narratives to depict the data or computer models) and human digital facts and human psychology living conditions of our time, as well as psychology interact with each other. In a similar way to artists like Harun contemporary ways of perceiving realinteract with each other Farocki and Hito Steyerl, Kim confers ity, approaching truth and dealing with personal emotion, all of which have been rapidly changed and formed to his audience a world where the future has collapsed into the present, and in which its inhabitants are unable to reconcile with by digital technologies. On first sight, Kim’s work is technology-centric and often domi- their new reality. nated by an architectural and urban-planning aesthetic. Yet upon further examination, one finds that his works are also rich in narratives Aimee Lin is editor of ArtReview Asia

Summer 2018

ArtReview Asia

Summer 2018

Jiang Zhuyun aka Ji Mu lives and works in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, where he teaches programming and audio theory at the School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art. Recent exhibitions include I Talk to the Wind (2017) at Hunsand Space, Beijing, and Perhaps (2015) at Ren Space, Shanghai

selected by Zhang Peili

I Talk to the Wind, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Hunsand Space, Beijing

I first met Jiang Zhuyun in 2004, during his first year at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He came into my office – I was head of the Media Art Department – and asked me to open a course on sound art. I was very impressed by this freshman, who was still completing the basic courses, and later on decided to start just such a course, by launching the Intermedia Art Department. I believe one of his best works was included in his 2017 solo exhibition I Talk to the Wind at the Hunsand Space, Beijing, for which he immersed an airplane’s black box in a water tank and informed visitors that a horse had been stabled in a neighbouring courtyard.

In doing so, he created a mysterious connection between the black box and the alleged horse because the former, when placed under water, generates a signal that, although imperceptible for humans, can still be detected by certain animals, including horses. The power of Jiang’s art comes from his inner anxiety, the unvarnished simplicity of his work, his independence and his control of technology. Zhang Peili is an artist and a pioneer of video art in China. He is the founder of the Media Art Department at China Academy of Art, Hangzhou

ArtReview Asia

‘possible state (or history) of the world’, or

‘counterfactual situation’

might be better. One should even

remind oneself that the ‘worlds’ terminology

can often be replaced by

modal talk — ‘It is possible that…’,

Summer 2018

Tant Zhong is a Shanghai-based artist, primarily working in the field of sculpture, who trained in China and London. Her most recent solo show took place at J:Gallery, Shanghai, in 2017

selected by Mark Rappolt

The Princess and the Pea, 2016, high-density sponge, parchment paper, dimensions variable

You walk into the gallery. There’s a thin piece of paper lying on the called Walking Balloon (2013), and like most of Tant Zhong’s output, it floor. Your first thought is that this is another example of the kind is simple, elegant, somewhat comic, perhaps even absurd, and with of conceptual work that gives art a bad name. Then you notice that the faint whiff of a classroom physics demonstration. it’s not really lying on the floor, but that its corners are curving away But what the Shanghai-based artist really explores are the basic from it. As if the thing is trying to fly off. At this point, you notice that elements of sculpture: those made visible in the form of material each of the corners of the sheet is tied expression (the paper and rubber balAs you move to approach the to a gas-filled balloon (of the simple loons of Walking Balloon, the Slinkytype that might decorate a chillike coils – and punning title – of sheet it takes on an animate form dren’s party, rather than something The Endless Spring, 2017, the wooden and dances across the floor that might support intercontinental boards, rubber balls, copper tubes travel) bobbing around near the ceiling. As you move to approach and steel brackets of Materials Group – Part 2, 2015); and the invisible the sheet it takes on an animate form and dances across the floor. The forces of gravity and buoyancy. Sometimes simple is best. And simple last, of course, is the effect of the air your body displaces as it moves in mixed with elements of whimsy and humour (The Princess and the Pea, space. So, while all the attention appeared to be on the sheet of paper 2016; Riverbed, 2017) is better still. and its balloon supports, it stops short of asserting its own presence in the end, and rather serves to remind you of your own. The work is Mark Rappolt is editor-in-chief of ArtReview Asia

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The Endless Spring, 2017, spring, 640 × 10 × 120 cm

Summer 2018

Recycle, 2017, pvc, rubber, dimensions variable

ArtReview Asia

Stranded, 2017, concrete, sandbag, spring, 330 × 60 × 70 cm all images Courtesy the artist and J:Gallery, Shanghai

Summer 2018

‫آرت العين‬ AL AIN CONVENTION CENTRE AL AIN, ABU DHABI UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

ANOTHER WAY OF TELLING

英国新摄影 2018.9.19-11.18

‘ Just because you are small it doesn’t mean you can’t be powerful. ’ Financial Times 2/10/87

Work Stations, 1987-88

ANNA FOX

安娜·福克斯

‘ I know of a Beautiful Marriage She likes his Money. He likes her Beauty and is happy to have a beautiful item in the house. If I had such a marriage I would shoot myself. ’ Belgravia No.5, 1979-81

KAREN KNORR 凯伦·诺尔

翱栋 Organizer

鷄斗 Sponsor

赋波边瘪 Partner

浪病臀熟 Media Support

5. 5. – 12. 8. 2018 Su-Mei Tse Nested 5. 5. – 23. 9. 2018 On the Road 10 years of CARAVAN – Series of Exhibitions of Young Art

5. 5. – 11. 11. 2018 Pictures for Everyone Prints and Multiples by Thomas Huber 1980 – 2018 *Aargauer Kunsthaus Aargauerplatz CH–5001 Aarau Tue – Sun 10 am – 5 pm Thur 10 am – 8 pm www.aargauerkunsthaus.ch

Art Reviewed

This happened in Singapore 77

Lahore Biennale 01 Various venues, Lahore 18–31 March Initiated by a group of artists, academics and cultural producers in 2014, the Lahore Biennale aimed, according to its first artistic director, the artist Rashid Rana, to ‘speak to’ 10 or 11 million people, taking art beyond the realm of institutional frameworks and structures and into public spaces while bravely ‘questioning the notion of art’ in a country ravaged by security threats and years of economic and political volatility. It was also supposed to be the first such art event in the history of Pakistan. All this led Rana on a regional and global tour that spanned New York’s moma, London’s Tate Modern, Art Dubai and various other artworld hotspots. Then, unexpectedly, in September 2017, just two months before it was due to launch, Rana (together with the Lahore Biennale Foundation) announced that he would no longer be involved with the biennial and issued a statement that his ideas for the ‘concept and methodology of the exhibition’ were his ‘intellectual property’ and would ‘not be used for the upcoming event’. As the Lahore Biennale was postponed, a separate biennial opened in Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, in November, taking the title of Pakistan’s first periodic art exhibition. Plunged into stasis, an expectant artworld audience speculated about whether the Lahore Biennale would take place at all. After a period of silence and a great deal of intrigue and speculation, a new opening date of March 2018 was announced, though without a single named ‘artistic director’ or evincible ‘curatorial theme’. Instead there was a new curatorial team of Qudsia Rahim, Mariah Lookman and Zarmina Rafi – later joined by Iftikhar Dadi, Aziz Sohail and Amna Suheyl (who programmed performances, lectures, workshops and symposia), hastily weaving together multiple exhibitions in historic and modern venues throughout the walled and historic city districts. It seemed that despite the last-minute setback, the organising committee was going ahead and everyone would just have to wait and see the outcomes. With very little information being made available

in the days leading up to the opening weekend, it was only upon arrival that one discovered that the first Lahore Biennale included 56 artists and collectives incorporating a range of prominent and emerging voices from Asia and Europe, though it was not immediately clear what these disparate practitioners brought to the biennial as a whole. Works by camp, Bani Abidi, Amar Kanwar, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Shirin Neshat and Naeem Mohaiemen, stalwarts of the international biennial circuit, added little to any discernible narrative arc or precise curatorial focus, rather more an auspicious display by practitioners. The official launch was a sombre and reflective moment for a city reeling from years of cultural deterioration and policy disarray. Politicians, artists and local grandees spoke of how the new biennial would put Lahore on the ‘global art map’ and do much to revive its once thriving cultural scene. While the expectation that there might be any delivery on Rana’s original pronouncements seemed ridiculous given the short preparation time offered to the new team, one could palpably sense that this was the beginning of something positive for the city, its people and their art scene. Among the exhibitions, Lookman’s sensitively curated Invitation to Action, featuring work by artists including Ayesha Sultana, Lala Rukh, Rasel Chowdhury, Minam Apang, Muhanned Cader and Ayesha Jatoi, stood out. The exhibition argued for a degree of opaqueness ‘as a strategy of resistance against a straightforward reading of histories, cultures, and politics’, affirming Lookman’s interests in the links between politics and languages of abstraction in modern and contemporary art from South Asia. The works were elegantly displayed in Mubarak Haveli, a restored Mughal-era compound built around several courtyards and rooms, and the site itself was evidence of how art is starting to break out of traditional gallery spaces and attempting to reach into people’s lives. Perhaps over time these kinds of projects will lead to larger and

facing page, bottom Muhanned Cader, Lost Horizon, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Haseebullah Zafar. Courtesy the artist and lbo1, Lahore

facing page, top Ayesha Jatoi, The Beloved has left, 2018, mounted wall text Photo: Usman Saqib Zuberi. Courtesy the artist and lbo1, Lahore

more engaged audiences and greater local interest, essential for this fledgling and worthwhile initiative to succeed in the long term. The Academic Forum – a series of public lectures, panel discussions and workshops that brought together curators, scholars, artists and writers from the region – adds the requisite discursive and pedagogic component that is redolent at these types of events. Led by Cornell University’s Iftikhar Dadi, the forums were successful in gathering local practitioners and audiences to explore a wide range of topics that included workshops on critical writing, curatorial practice, contemporary mediascapes and art and climate change. Though not directly tied into any distinct themes in connection to the exhibition, the gatherings, held at the Alhamra Art Centre, provided a much-needed platform for public discussion in a country where restrictions on freedom of speech and religious sensitivities generally stifle rigorous and open public debates. Amar Kanwar spoke eloquently and passionately about his research ethics and filmmaking practice, a rarity for any Indian artist in Pakistan today. The possibility of greater artistic and cultural ties between India and Pakistan through the biennial provided hope that such discursive domains and platforms could have a lasting and transformative impact on two nuclearised and perennially warring nations. Pakistan’s most socially liberal and cosmopolitan city, Lahore has always exerted a powerful cultural influence over the region and is a major centre of the publishing and film industries, as well as the site of Lahore College of Fine Arts (nca), whose alumni include international stars Rana, Shahzia Sikander and Imran Qureshi. This history was a key driver in the establishment of the Lahore Biennale, raising questions about how the legacy of the city’s diverse and rich cultural past can be manifested in the biennial and how future curators and artists may engage with it, beyond just placing artworks in historic venues. Shwetal A. Patel

ArtReview Asia

Summer 2018

Sangeeta Sandrasegar It’s Like That Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 23 March – 28 April Fifty-three sheets of white paper, slightly larger than a4 and arrayed in landscape format, form a continuous horizontal line around three walls of the gallery. Each page is fixed to the wall by pins through transparent plastic tabs attached to its top corners. Arranged to meet the eye, they flutter under brash strip lighting and sway away from the wall as one passes. The blank pages seem, at first glance, waiting to be filled. On closer inspection, one notices delicate needlepoint piercings through the leaves of paper that reveal themselves to be spindly words and sentences. They are diary entries, with each page corresponding to a calendar week. Copied by hand from Sangeeta Sandrasegar’s 2017 diary, they mix daily minutiae with quotes and comments: ‘Drank and smoke [sic] too much’, reads Saturday 2 December; on the following Monday, a quote from French poet Paul Valéry, ‘Form is costly’.

Read clockwise around the room, the diary pages narrate the artist’s responsibilities, anxieties and routines through the course of the year. Each spread follows the same logic: the lefthand side of the page, divided into the days of the week, contains the artist’s engagements, while the righthand side is occupied with to-do lists, quotes from the artist’s reading and stream-of-consciousness: ‘rather than a gmail – email invite?’, ‘Fix something the fuck up!!’ The pages document the stages of Sandrasegar’s artistic process, revealing how she allocates her time as well as her emotional and intellectual preoccupations. Autobiography mixes with the artist’s practice: some sections suggest an artist struggling to stave off depressive tendencies by adhering to a routine, while others describe the creation of an artwork and include snippets of self-critique: ‘more layers memory depth melancholy’.

As with her figurative paper cutouts (such as Untitled from Theatre of the Oppressed, 2007–08), Sandrasegar uses holes to suggest transience and impermanence. Her experiences are reduced to a pattern of small voids that serve as negative copies of the original entries, replacing ink with absence. The laborious process of writing in this manner – itself a performative gesture – highlights the tension between the passing of time and the attempt to fix a life in words. The lightness of the work’s form is balanced by the gravitas of the quotes and commentaries. Taken from the Roland Barthes reader How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (2013), a quote about Greek etymologies resonates most with Sandrasegar’s play on original and copy: ‘The [source] Greek word pinpoints a concept that serves simultaneously as an origin, an image and defamiliarises’. In attempting to chart the life of an artist, It’s Like That combines performance, text and installation. Cleo Roberts

It’s Like That, 2018 (installation view, Gertrude Contemporary). Photo: Christo Crocker. Courtesy Murray White Room, Melbourne

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Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin Lv Hua Dai (Green Space) Salt Projects, Beijing 15 March – 2 June Following a performative lecture in Shenzhen at the closing forum of the group exhibition The Ecstasy of Time: Reframing the Medium of Knowing, Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin’s debut solo show in China also began with a performance. On both occasions, the artist started with these questions: “What is Lv Hua Dai (Green Space)? Is it a part of nature or a part of civilisation? What is the relationship between those who live in an urban environment, and the Lv Hua Dai found in the cities? Whose property is this Lv Hua Dai?” What struck me about the performance was the artist’s insistence on using the Chinese term for the ‘green space’ you find in cities. It seemed to propose major differences between the Chinese reality and that of the rest of the world, but in the performance and the artworks on show, these differences remained on the level of allusion. Instead of emphasising geographical specifics, the artist framed the issue as a global one, and spoke at length about the history and development of Lv Hua Dai since the beginning of the twenty-first century, making references

to environmental philosopher Steven Vogel’s Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy After the End of Nature (2015) and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989), among others. The aesthetics and ideological connotations of this urban infrastructure were described and commented upon in detail: the artist pointed out in both performances that pseudo-natural Lv Hua Dai is not made for the citizens of the urban space in which it is found, in that the forms it takes are – like many spectacles staged in the Anthropocene – often geared to satellite views, or at least a view from above. This inhuman perspective is, she suggests, only available to the privileged middle-class. The numerous gadgets and objects the artist created for the Beijing exhibition invite audience interaction, making them fellow performers in the passionate, almost heroic monologue staged by the artist. These range from daggerlike handheld objects combining plants with concrete cones (Lv Hua Dai (cone 1&2), 2018) – which the artist swung in her hands while delivering her

rhythmic speech – to wheeled platforms covered with plastic grass. Together they suggest ways in which the pseudo-natural can come forward and approach us. Indeed, the sizeable crowd gathered for the opening performance was excited by this double process – of the pseudonatural becoming apparatus, and themselves becoming active subjects – to the point that one audience member damaged a trolley. For those who have witnessed the two performances, in Shenzhen and in Beijing, it is interesting to see the potential of a wellresearched, scholarly yet amusing project being developed in a short period of time. For those who only get to see the opening performance in polluted Beijing, it could be considered to touch upon a topic that is at once old and urgent. One wonders if the Green Belt – another translation of the term Lv Hua Dai – could be examined against the context of the Chinese government’s Silk Road Economic Belt initiative, that is, the latest grand narrative about the future. Li Bowen

Lv Hua Dai (still), 2018, video projection, 7 min 22 sec, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Salt Projects, Beijing

Summer 2018

William Dalrymple The Historian’s Eye Akara Art, Mumbai 13 April – 3 May The Historian’s Eye consists of black-and-white photographs taken by writer and historian William Dalrymple using his mobile phone, edited through the Snapseed app and then printed in archival pigment. The images are not unlike those on Dalrymple’s Instagram account: the contrast is turned all the way up, and everything is kept stormy and dark. The photographs were taken between 2015 and 2017 while Dalrymple was researching his forthcoming book The Anarchy, for which he has travelled through India and Pakistan. He visited pleasure grounds, battlefields, old Mughal havelis, palaces, forts, mosques, Sufi shrines, temples, old colonial townhouses and barrack blocks. The wall text is explicit about the use of a Samsung Edge phone, the purchase of which ‘led to the rediscovery’ of Dalrymple’s ‘first love’ – photography. The text also notes that the photographs are intended to ‘trigger fictitious memories of an older, different, more elegant world’. Dalrymple indulges some family history to occasion this more elegant world: Immersing the Goddess, Durga Puja at Prinsep Ghat, Calcutta (all works undated) shows an effigy of the goddess Durga being taken into the waters at Prinsep Ghat, which is named after Dalrymple’s great-uncle James Prinsep, whose Wikipedia entry describes him as an ‘orientalist and antiquary’, ‘best remembered for deciphering the Kharosthi and Brahmi scripts of ancient India’. Dalrymple, for most of his career, has continued this tradition of ‘deciphering’. His particular interest is the Mughal Empire, which is the subject of most of his research and several books, and for which he has travelled extensively. To put it bluntly, Dalrymple’s whiteness, colonial affiliations and Oxbridge roots have offered him

unfettered access to the subcontinent, so much so that in 2013, he was invited to the White House to advise an AfPak (Afghanistan– Pakistan) strategy team. He is also founder of the Jaipur Literature Festival, a yearly affair that continues, with each iteration, to tighten its links to India’s current rightwing Hindutva leadership, and which marshals the borders of the Indian literary scene. There is no doubt that Dalrymple is an influential man, and part of the lure of his photographs is that they provide a glimpse into his physical proximity to a history that most of us in the subcontinent would find difficult to reach, as travel between the divided nations has never been easy. Some of Dalrymple’s photographs take us to Gilgit, a Pakistan-administered territory that has often come into dispute over India’s claim to it (in 1947, its maharaja had signed an instrument of accession joining India against the wishes of the population, leading to a mutiny and eventual accession to Pakistan); to Chitral, a town nestled in the Hindu Kush mountains, a favourite among the Pakistani elite; and to Abbottabad, where us Navy Seals led the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in his family compound and hideout. Dalrymple befriended truck painters near the Pakistani Military Academy in Abbottabad, and photographed the group portrait The Truck Painters of Abbottabad, Pakistan. Of the photographs in the series, it is the portraits that work best, formally, as there is a cinematic quality to the light that admits to their fiction, and to the fictionalising predilection of their maker. Dalrymple likened himself to French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in a recent interview with The Sunday Guardian: ‘If Cartier-

facing page The truck painters of Abbotabad, Pakistan, archival pigment print, 67 × 49 cm. Courtesy Akara Art, Mumbai

ArtReview Asia

Bresson were alive today, I feel he would definitely be using a cellphone camera. It allows for that sensation of being the hunter, walking on tiptoe through the forest, camouflaged. It is, in a sense, guerrilla photography.’ This is an uncomfortable premise, and there is something about the photographs that makes them difficult to trust. The contrast is too overblown, and the light inconsistent and confusing to the eye. But this is not the issue here. The photographs have been enlarged beyond what their pixels can hold, and each appears grainy: a poor print. Neither is this the issue. These are the most interesting details of the photographs – they speak to their medium and introduce a conversation about how we bring expectations about what an image should look like into the white cube. But this is not a conversation Dalrymple is seen to have; in fact, there is no critical inflection to the show. Instead, the work is intentionally nostalgic and wistful, offering little nuance. Landscapes are made inanimate and abject, and public spaces (such as mosques, forts and temples), which are otherwise bursting with people and traffic, are rendered darkly dystopian, and often cleared of any living presence. Most alarming of all is the assumption, expressed in a number of comments in the visitor’s book, that these photographs were taken in an ‘undivided India’, erasing the show’s regional reach and asserting the dominance of the Indian nation state over its neighbours. This perhaps speaks to the audience’s entitlement: many Indians rarely check their privileged position in the subcontinent. And, as the show betrays, rarely does Dalrymple. Skye Arundhati Thomas

Summer 2018

Lee Seung-taek White Cube Mason’s Yard, London 25 May – 30 June For all the breadth and audacity of his output, Lee Seung-taek is surprisingly little-known, in Europe as in his native Korea. Perhaps because his experimental and independent approach meant his work evolved on the fringes of the established movements in postwar Korean art, and consequently was written out of its history; perhaps because he didn’t follow the artistic trends coming out of the West. Whatever the reason, this survey of work from the late 1950s to today – Lee’s first in the uk – offers an overdue introduction to his complex, playful and striking oeuvre. The first of two rooms focuses on Lee’s smallscale stone sculptures and three-dimensional works on canvas from the 1970s, 1980s and 2010s, all tied together – literally and figuratively – with rope. In Godret Stone (1958), little carved rocks are suspended by hemp strings from a horizontal plank of wood. On the floor, the deep lines etched into three larger stone sculptures (all Untitled, 1978–80) suggest that they too had previously been hung by a coarse rope wrapped

around their centre. On the wall, a framed sheet of paper is covered with plaster: a carved relief creates the illusion of a silky fabric being pulled downwards from a horizon line at its centre, creating an opening from which a thin rope sticks out like a tongue. Where Mono-ha artists (the minimal aesthetics of which resonate with the work here) sought to reveal the ‘essence’ of things, Lee’s subversion of the materials’ expected behaviours seems instead to question their essential reality. He creates a realm in which stones are light and malleable, in which a flat sheet of paper or canvas reveals a hidden depth. Simultaneously, with all its erotic and violent connotations, the bondage of Lee’s materials reveals their sensuous and primal qualities, both constraining and freeing them from their forms. In stark contrast to the opening room’s muted display, the vast lower ground floor gallery presents a colourful selection of Lee’s largescale installations from the 1960s, recreated by the artist for the exhibition. These towering

sculptures are installed as three groups, evoking props in an imaginary landscape or sets at an eccentric themepark. Made from brightly coloured vinyl (omnipresent in modern Korea) stretched on steel frames, they conjure schematic trees or totems in some cases (Untitled, 1967/2018), human figures in others (Untitled, 1967/2018). Another group (Untitled, 1963/2018), from the artist’s Oji series, named after traditional Korean earthenware jars, stands out with its earthy tones and curvilinear aesthetics, evoking something between cartoonish poplar trees and the tips of giant paintbrushes poking out of the ground. Near the exit, a series of drawings picture these installations in natural landscapes, set directly on the grass. Nature, Lee’s favourite field of experimentation, was where he furthered his interrogations into the (im)materiality of things by harnessing wind, smoke and fire as media. One can only hope that this spectacular body of work will soon be granted the same, belated recognition. Louise Darblay

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Yu Honglei Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin 25 April – 23 June A frequent sight on social media is a user making a public request, often facetiously, for an emoji that doesn’t yet exist. The seven bumpy, bronzecoloured sculptures, raised up on cubic orange plinths, in the opening room of Yu Honglei’s exhibition are an approximate reversal of that process: they look like speculative ideograms for feelings we don’t have names for, substitutes for strings of text. One is a cartoonish heart with a zigzag mouth, a single portholelike eye, and one of its upper curves capped with a truncated twist of rope from which, on a wire, hangs a row of red peppers crafted from paper. (Also, if it helps, the rope is hollowed out and there’s a pile of yellow seeds sitting in it.) Another sculpture looks like a confused, mouthless egg. Others vaguely recall jellyfish and warthogs and fish. But I write this just to have something to say: you look at these sculptures, which are pointedly untitled – previously Yu has used deliberately unconnected titles, here he’s given up on language altogether – and words don’t really adhere. The condition, the confusion, is purely visual. That, seemingly, is what the Mongolianborn, Beijing-based, mid-thirties Yu wants. His art exaggeratedly reflects a digitally driven

culture based on circulating and recombined images, one in which looking rather than reading is paramount. These seven sculptures, in sequential rows, have the quality of embodied memes: a form progressively, vertiginously morphing; their bronzy appearance harks back to traditional sculpture, but these works have one foot firmly in the disembodied. In the midst of them – literally inhabiting their space – is a grey-and-black totem pole of sorts, made up of a vertical stack of silvery alien heads, again mouthless and separated by black hairbands, a step along the evolutionary chain perhaps. A figure, in this economy, might as well be all brain and eyes. There’s a similar totem in the next room, but this time a stern, jug-eared male head on a stack of orange funnel-shaped forms. That same head, gifted with various expressions, repeats on a sequence of eight silvery slabs on the floor: again the body is gone, and the heads appear in variegated trances. Maybe they’ve been watching the colour-reversed video that the totem stands in front of, in which a brief shot of someone throwing what looks like a round of dough onto the floor

– where it lands with an audible splat that becomes a rhythm cast across the whole show – is intercut occasionally by a shot of a wild boar. This is evidently meant to summarise online browsing: falling into a suspended, hypnotised state while encountering, and accepting, regular disjunction. So yes, Yu is as Postinternet as they come, if anyone’s still using that phrase. He’s also sly: the logic of mutation and mantralike repetition in his sculptural output happens to fit neatly with the collector-driven market dictates for variations on a theme. But his work does what he desires. I walked through this show and for much of it I didn’t have a thought. Rather, there was a flattened sense of something alienated and alienating morphing slowly, and occasionally rapidly, in front of me, my brain half deactivated and thickened-feeling, eyes very open, demeanour faintly reptilian. Later I tried to put into words – those archaic things – what that feeling made me think of. I thought for a moment of myself, sitting anywhere, smartphone in hand, scrolling dazedly through Twitter. Rather more, though, I thought of myself in a few years’ time. Martin Herbert

#7, 2018, brass, stainless steel, iron wire, paper, millet rice, 103 × 52 × 52 cm. Photo: def_image. Courtesy the artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, and Antenna Space, Shanghai

Summer 2018

Lai Lon Hin Gritty Eye Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong 23 May – 31 June Mr Chan (2018) pretends not to see me, while appearing to see right through me. Staring me straight between the brows, Lai Lon Hin’s photographic portrait of a lifesize cardboard cutout, issued by the Hong Kong government as part of a recent campaign against smoking, is authoritative and uncanny. Hin’s second solo exhibition at Blindspot Gallery is a clear departure from his first, held in 2010, which showed images of Hong Kong architecture saturated with colour and taken with an slr. Taken on a less conspicuous cameraphone (an iPhone or, in a few cases, an older lg model), without any filter and only the occasional postproduction crop, many of the photographs in Gritty Eye capture their subjects unawares, zooming in on the moments when a stranger makes a private face in the public realm. In Cantonese, the exhibition title translates to ‘sty’ – that painful little lump that can form

on your eyelid’s frill, a little pink, a little like a zit. It also describes the proverbial pinprick to one’s eye when viewing something off-putting. The 36 works in this exhibition are primarily arranged in miniseries. For example, Fingers Grazing (2017) is paired with Preparations Before Travel (2018). The first shows two hands grazing the tops of plastic flowers implanted along the moving walkway connecting the Central and Hong Kong subway stations; the second is a found image showing Filipina domestic workers in training. The affinity between this duo lies in the sensation of another kind of real, made possible by an aesthetic that lays bare its artificial construction to capture the condition of the object. Many of the works in the exhibition have a doubling effect. Airy Bangs (2018) shows two women wearing red lipstick with eyes halfclosed; Backed by Brilliance (2018) is a portrait of person standing in front of a lightbox

Linda, 2018, screensaver program, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

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shown in the gallery as an image on a lightbox; an image of two hands almost clasped together has been printed onto a flat sheet curtain that splits down the middle to allow entry into the final chamber of the show. Linda (2018) is presented as a screensaver program: the woman’s face adorning a passport-photo booth in Guangzhou is shown in closeup, and boings from one edge of the screen to another. Usually soothing, this particular screensaver was made discomfiting by the perfect symmetry of Linda’s face, which is made up of half a face mirrored down the middle. The truth-value derived from looking does not always increase with more context, and Hin’s works are focused on the condition of the moment. In today’s media environment, in which everyone produces images at all times, Hin’s work is less concerned with voyeurism than with capturing people and things off-guard. Hera Chan

Sarah Lucas Dame Zero Kurimanzutto, Mexico City 17 March – 3 May A crumpled car wreck – the vehicle’s body mangled and engine spewing forth – occupies the centre of Kurimanzutto. Sarah Lucas has decorated the panels of epitaph blah blah (all works 2018) with cigarettes, which like the wreck are a reminder of consumption and mortality. They are placed end-to-end, in such a way that the patterns created by their orange filters and white papers recalls the Huichol beadwork that adorns calaveras (the replica skulls, often placed on altars during the Day of the Dead). Cigarettes, and implicitly the act of smoking them, are a motif in Lucas’s oeuvre and in this exhibition. While her work often draws on and subverts smoking’s historic relation to hegemonic masculinity, in the high altitude and ozone levels of Mexico City the relations between smoking, death, respiration and air quality become more pronounced. co-yo-te-cojo

(lame coyote), the title of which makes reference to the ‘coyotes’ (as they are colloquially termed) who smuggle people across the Mexico–us border, is a replica pre-Hispanic sculpture carved from cantera (volcanic stone) and covered with cigarettes. This and the similarly canine hijos de la chingada, which is plastered with feathers, share a semblance of syncretism, co-opting an indigenous artefact and shrouding it with cigarettes, a symbol of global capitalism. The provocatively titled hijos de la chingada, a phrase Octavio Paz turns over in ‘The Sons of La Malinche’, the fourth part of The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), means, among other things, ‘son of a bitch’. Paz’s essay is known for its complex (if problematic) analysis of la Chingada, the mythical suffering mother of Mexican peoples for whom ‘passivity is abject: she does not resist violence, but is an inert heap of bones, blood and dust’. Lucas’s sculpture,

while attempting to satirise the characterisation of la Chingada, doesn’t escape the gendered violence of its title. red sky, a photographic series of seven self-portraits, is subtler. Each is set to a red background, with Lucas, wearing a colourful striped sweater, semiobscured by chiffonlike plumes of cigarette smoke. The smoke clouds, red background and white, blue, green and grey stripes of the sweater allude to Gerardo ‘Dr. Atl’ Murillo’s painting Red Volcano (c. 1921–23), which uses a similar composition to depict a smouldering Mexican volcano. The reference expresses a desire to incorporate symbols from a foreign culture that can be made personally meaningful. In all, Lucas’s deployment of distinctly Mexican objects and phrases seems like a glib restatement of her work for a Mexican context, rather than sustained engagement with the local conditions. Tristen Harwood

Dame Zero, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Omar Luis Olguín. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

Summer 2018

Chikako Yamashiro Shapeshifter White Rainbow, London 15 March – 28 April The sight of Chikako Yamashiro floating faceup among a bed of seaweed, her eyes half-closed, made me think of the uminchu and haenyeo. These women from Okinawa, Japan, and Jeju, South Korea, practice a dying art, freediving for shellfish and seaweed. In both places their trade has been threatened by the industrialisation and militarisation of the region. Activist organisations such as Save Jeju Now – formed to protest the opening of South Korea’s newest naval base in the fishing village of Gangjeong in 2016 – and Henoko Blue – canoeists who have staged sea sit-ins outside a us naval base on the east coast of Okinawa – have united in their attempts to protect local heritage, trades and marine life from these threats. Yamashiro’s photographs – part of a series called Seaweed Woman (2008) depicting the artist adrift in the sea – accompanies a video shot from a first-person perspective, projected onto a screen hanging in the middle of the gallery, which recreates the experience of diving underwater and surfacing for air in the harbour of Henoko. The sound of rhythmic breathing and gentle laps of water fill the space and so, by emulating the way that Yamashiro uses her own body to occupy threatened sites, implicates the visitor in sea-swimming and in protest against the endangerment of the natural environment. In Okinawa Tourist (2004), comprising of three videos showing on separate television screens,

the artist critiques the tendency to gloss over the island’s traumatic history and present-day tensions. In one of the videos, I like Okinawa Sweet, the artist leans languidly, in sweltering heat, against the chainlink fence of a us military base, devouring one ice cream after another as sweat and sweet cream drip down her face and hands; in Trip to Japan she shouts false ‘facts’ about Okinawa; in Graveyard Eisa, men in rolled-up suit trousers and white shirts, with cotton bags over their heads, perform a traditional dance inside a cemetery. In each of these short performances, Yamashiro conflates a tourist promo aesthetic with acerbic commentary on her homeland: the best known brand of ice cream in Okinawa is Blue Seal, created by the us military for soldiers stationed on the island; the tourist industry favours invented narratives over more difficult histories; do the men in office-wear represent Japanese officials, wilfully blind to the us’s creeping occupation? The most compelling work in the show is her most recent, a single-channel version of Mud Man (2017), a previous iteration of which won Yamashiro the 2017 Asian Art Award. Set in Jeju and Okinawa, both popular honeymoon ‘hotspots’ and both sites of atrocities during and after the Second World War, the film is accompanied by flowing diegetic sound and a chorus of whispering, more audible speech and beatboxing. The

film’s catalyst takes the form of mud lumps that, falling from the sky, awaken a group of people slumbering in a field. The mud whispers to them and their faces become anguished as they realise the dead speak to them from the earth; they slip onto another plane, where they witness the brutality of ground warfare, at once an act of mythologising and revealing shared and inherited memories. Yamashiro employs landscape, as much as the human body, to confront contemporary issues and historical traumas: from the muddy fields like those in which thousands of people were massacred during the 1948 communist uprising in Jeju, to the present-day militarised seaside town of Gangjeong, the land- and seascape becomes the body of the people. The film, spoken in Japanese and Korean, does not use subtitles. And it is flawless. Its refusal to make the spoken parts understood by anyone who does not speak either language only lends it greater force – as if to say, you can’t understand? Then you can watch. At the close of the film, sounds of warfare are slowly replaced by a rapid cadence of clapping hands, the drumming so intense it feels like the pace of your blood picks up the rhythm. In Mud Man, the elements of sea and land, body and spirit, the people and politics are perfectly combined. It is hard to forget. Fi Churchman

Mud man (still), 2017, hd video, single-channel version, 25 min 30 sec. © the artist. Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo

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Jitish Kallat Decimal Point Sperone Westwater, New York 26 April – 16 June Jitish Kallat is concerned with the ‘natural’ as it pertains to human interventions in urban landscapes (as in Chlorophyll Park, 2010) and the limits of science (as evidenced by his astronomyinspired curatorial direction for the 2014 KochiMuziris Biennale, Whorled Explorations). At Sperone Westwater, the Mumbai-based artist considers the epistemic limits of scientific study, sprinkling his experiments with a dash of the sublime. Situated near the gallery’s entrance, Covariance (Sacred Geometry) (2017–18) is a lumpy, craggy mass resembling an asteroid sculpted from yellowish dental plaster; The Infinite Episode 2 (2016) is a series of slumbering animals realised in the same material. At once inorganic and organic, celestial and terrestrial, they give the impression of having descended from the heavens. In the upstairs gallery, Kallat’s works attempt a balance between methodology

and chance. Wind Study (Hilbert Curve) (2017) is a series of works in which the artist has plotted lines in adhesive on paper according to the principles of German mathematician David Hilbert, and then set these lines aflame. The burn marks left on the paper are determined by the direction of the wind, creating what the artist has termed ‘transcripts derived by eavesdropping on the silent conversation between wind and fire’. These drawings are numinous and pleasingly complex: the eye follows dense areas marked by shadowlike patterns complemented by clear patches of white paper. For Rain Study (the hour of the day of the month of the season) (2017), Kallat held out sheets of paper under the rain for a duration determined by his own ‘breath cycles’, then overlaid these drawings with pigment. The resultant images, evoking night skies seen through telescopes, are undermined

by scribblings of figures and times that recall a laboratory notebook. Kallat’s pursuit of the elemental evinces his faith in universal gestures, yet his practice sometimes recalls the Rube Goldberg machines that use absurdly complex processes to produce simple results, or in the artist’s case obscurantist propositions for their own sake. In the series Sightings (2017–18), for instance, the artist arranges 16 panels of lenticular prints – lurid neon blues, yellows, greens and oranges – in grids. In the context of the galactic themes of the exhibition, these images at first suggest exploding stars or distant galaxies, but closer inspection reveals them to be closeup details of fruit, chromatically inverted. These photographs, like the exhibition of which they are a part, tantalise with the prospect of a higher plane but never quite get off the ground. Tausif Noor

Rain Study (the hour of the day of the month of the season), 2017, graphite, acrylic epoxy on Arches paper, 51 × 41 cm. Photo: Robert Vinas Jr. Courtesy the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York

Summer 2018

Gauri Gill Acts of Appearance moma ps1, New York 15 April – 3 September Once a year the Adivasi residents of Jawhar district in Maharashtra, near India’s west coast, don intricate papier-mâché masks for a ritual Bahoda procession called Bahora. Those masks – created by local craftspeople and brought out only for the occasion – depict mythological imagery, both Hindu and of local tribes. After encountering Bahora and these masks through friends, the Delhi-based photographer Gauri Gill reached out to a pair of craftsmen brothers in Jawhar, ultimately initiating a collaboration with a group of some 20 people there that encompassed mask-making as well as plotting, sitting and performing for her camera. The fruits of that collaboration became Gill’s series Acts of Appearance, works from which are shown at ps1 alongside selections from other recent series by the artist. The images that comprise Acts of Appearance (2015–, all works untitled) depict quotidian scenes from within the rural community: work, education, socialising. In these scenes, each participant wears one of the masks Gill has commissioned, its content

drawn from facets of its wearer’s life. Many are versions of what one assumes the wearer’s face might look like, frozen in singular (though complexly rendered) expressions. Others depict animals – a cobra, an elephant – and some, most whimsically, technology: a smiling face on the screen of a mobile phone, a television ‘playing’ an image of a car driving down a city street. Collectively enacting some mythology of the everyday, the staging of the photographs hovers in a casually dreamlike space. As evidenced by older works included in this selection, Gill has an eye for intersecting patterns occurring naturally within landscapes (take, in one image from Acts of Appearance, the forest-hued windowpane pattern of a boy’s shirt against the teardropshaped green leaves of the tree he sits in). There is a purposeful stillness about the images’ composition, and Gill’s subjects glow in rich afternoon light; moments take on an emotional charge (two male friends in bird masks holding hands, a woman in a snake mask reclining seductively). This is tempered by a persistent

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humour, particularly located in exaggerated human expressions, whether it’s the frozen groan of an older woman receiving medical attention from an elephant-masked doctor or the impish grin on the mask of a young man playing cards. By existing between realms – or, perhaps, establishing a realm of their own – these images and their subjects open out to an expanse of feeling: a sense of almost surreal possibility in what the everyday can contain. Though some forms of portrait-based image-making might lead viewers to believe they have come to know a subject, here the masks serve to emphasise their wearers’ interiority, something that belongs to them and cannot necessarily be made visible. At the same time, these are not lonely or inward-looking images: a sociality persists, between those photographed but also, crucially, between Gill and her collaborators. Those relationships – heightened, fictionalised or half-obscured by a mask – become the story being told. Thea Ballard

Lee Bul Crashing Hayward Gallery, London 1 June – 19 August Feminist science-fiction has long played on the idea that women are liberated when humans are confronted with other intelligences. Gender – not to mention ethnicity and class – is constructed differently when the field of relations encompasses monsters, cyborgs, artificial intelligences and animals. The coalitions between those minorities that are a feature of the genre entail remodelled social formations and alternative modes of communication – hybrid languages and new codes of behaviour – that challenge the dominant (meaning white, patriarchal, monolithic) culture. Neologism, hybridity and untranslatability are in these speculative futures symptoms of progress. It’s appropriate, then, that the Latin phrase ‘Civitas Solis’ – spelled out in English and Korean by lightbulbs planted into the mirrored floor of Lee Bul’s eponymous 2014 installation – should remain illegible to visitors entering London’s Hayward Gallery. Refracted by the cracked ground on which they are written, and obscured by the tendrils of a monstrous tree sprouting up from the edge of the stage, the characters more closely resemble a constellation of stars – repository of arcane or esoteric knowledge – than a decipherable sentence. In applying the title of Tommaso Campanella’s sixteenth-century utopia to a vision that embraces fragmentation and incoherence – what Luce Irigaray called the ‘disconcerting

of language and logic’ – Civitas Solis ii introduces a body of work that has over the course of 30 years circled back to the problem of communication and the construction of truth. The installation is watched over by a host of bodies suspended by wires from the gallery ceiling. Gleaming white Cyborgs (1998) hang alongside the freakish costumes in which Lee delivered her early performances. The former conjure the idealised female bodies enshrined in Greek statuary (and the modern European assumption that their whiteness denoted perfection rather than deterioration), hypersexualised manga characters and a near-future in which the body is inseparable from machine. A naked human figure dangles amidst these fantastic creatures and – echoing Michelangelo’s eviscerated self-portrait in the Last Judgment (1537–41) – strikes an opening note of anxiety about what it might mean to occupy a body in a posthuman world. Reimagining society requires a radical reconfiguration of self, and so the three poised, severed, silicone hands of Alibi (1994) – while playing on orientalised ideals of the female Asian body – might also suggest the disarticulated body as one expression of a broader aesthetic of incompleteness. This recombinatory approach also informs the utopian architectures of Sternabau No. 2 (2007) and After Bruno Taut (Devotion to Drift) (2013), which combine

Modernism and mysticism in a transformative vision of the future. These sprawling model superstructures – inspired by a socialist German Jewish architect who fled Nazism for Japan – offer further examples of how hybrid identities might inform the configuration of new societies. The achronological installation of Crashing – which across five rooms intermingles video documentation of Lee’s early, provocative performances in a country in slow transition from dictatorship to democracy, nightmarish biomorphic sculpture indebted to Louise Bourgeois and more spectacular recent installations – is appropriate to a practice in which the unsettled past continually irrupts into the present (and future). The political implications are most explicit in Thaw (Takaki Masao) (2007), which depicts a lifesize Park Chung-hee trapped inside a block of ice resembling an uncut diamond. If the ex-president’s cryogenically preserved grin implies that his 1979 assassination heralded only a brief interregnum, then he was – if we take a dynastic view of history – vindicated by the ascent of his daughter to the South Korean presidency in 2013. That she too is now imprisoned after conviction for corruption, albeit in a more conventional institution, only reinforces the sense that Lee’s speculative fictions represent the most effective means of critiquing a rigged reality. Ben Eastham

Civitas Solis ii, 2014 (installation view, mmca Hyundai Motor Series 2014: Lee Bul). © the artist. Photo: Jeon Byung-cheol. Courtesy the artist and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul

Summer 2018

One Hand Clapping Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 4 May – 21 October

Forget luxury communism. Sure, there’s not much work for humans in the fully automated warehouses depicted in Cao Fei’s video and multimedia installation Asia One (2018) – included in this survey of artists exploring the impacts of technology and globalisation on our understanding of the future – compared to the labourintensive factory in the same artist’s Whose Utopia (2006). But instead of leisurely idyll, Asia One presents a near-future in which the regime of work has been replaced by a totalised dystopia of control, surveillance, isolation and ennui. Incorporating choreographic sequences from the 1960s revolutionary opera On the Docks and dazzling 3d models of logistical operations, there’s plenty in Asia One to indulge fetishists of China’s socialist past or hyperdeveloped future. Past and present conditions of labour – be it Great Leap Forward-style optimism about constructing socialist modernity, or networked capitalist consumption and circulation – are the backdrop to a romance between two workers, the promise of human connection suspended between fantasy and reality. The installation features workers’ uniforms, corporate ephemera and interviews with real employees at the Chinese ecommerce giant Jingdong, suggesting lives enmeshed in exploitation, alienation and marketing ideologies. The play of Sino-futurism and Sinopessimism in Cao Fei’s ode to logistics anchors the five newly commissioned works in One Hand Clapping. Each considers new horizons for our technocratic-capitalist present, of which ‘China’ appears to be a pioneer. The resulting works reflect artistic strategies that navigate a host of concepts and realities of ‘China’ – often entertained as a place of alternative modernity and accelerationist fantasy, as evinced in the show’s title design, which combines classic serif type with a pixel font reminiscent of 8-bit Nintendo handles. Hong Kong artist Wong Ping’s animated video installation Dear, can I give you a hand? (2018) tells the exploits of a sex-starved widower

belonging to a surplus population of megalopolitan seniors. With the aesthetics of an early videogame and a colourful geometry that recalls the Memphis movement, the visual storytelling oscillates between the cute and the lewd, naughty and absurd, perversion and repression. The artist’s Cantonese voiceover delivers deadpan, graphic depictions of lust, male impotence and the morbidity of hypercommodified urban life. In this world, sex is stripped of reproductive function and becomes a never-consummated loop of sensory stimulation and response; death, denoting a state of nonproductivity, is relegated to the virtual sphere. In a society racing into a future already identifiable as reality, vhs tapes and prosthetic teeth – like the plastic wind-up denture toys scattered behind the screen – are rendered relics of the present. What about objects that can only be simulated? Samson Young’s sound installation for Possible Music #1 ( feat. ness & Shane Aspergren) (2018) consists of a set of ‘impossible instruments’ – in this case, classical Western instruments blown up to a size unplayable by humans. A programmed composition travels through two rows of fake flower-adorned speakers on the floor, while conceptual drawings and hefty, 3d-printed reeds and mouthpieces in washedout primary colours are mounted on the walls. We only know the instruments are ‘impossible’ because we’ve been informed by the wall text, creating an ambiguity between knowing and unknowing. This process is further destabilised by political ciphers that defy immediate legibility, like a military-style call schedule, and the surprise appearance of a dragon in a nearby video, breathing fire into a colossal trumpet in the colonial-era Hong Kong Stadium. Li Yilin’s site-specific three-part installation Monad (2018) pairs two videos of staged interventions in the museum’s space – by a human body and a basketball – with a short vr, in which the viewer assumes the place of a ball set in dizzying motion by nba player Jeremy Lin. In the first intervention, the artist ascends Frank Lloyd

facing page, top Cao Fei, Asia One, 2018 (detail), multichannel colour video installation with sound, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Wright’s spiral ramp in a slow, sideways roll. The action is unsettling to watch, punctuated as it is by the thunderous bangs of a basketball hitting the floor of the concourse having fallen through its open central space from the height of the Guggenheim’s dome. Guangzhou-based painter Duan Jianyu’s Spring River in the Flower Moon Night 1 (2017), named after a classic Tang poem, is one of seven paintings hung salon-style facing Wong Ping’s retro-futurist urban allegory. In these, parodies of myth, folklore and rural life are represented in colour-drenched mystical landscapes populated with traditional motifs like the moon, the rabbit and goddesses, as well as anthropomorphic carrots, hairy monsters and deformed humans of her own invention. The composition contains but does not reconcile these figures, which seem to belong to different times and places, fantastic yet condemned to earthly exile. Rough brushwork and unstable perspectives show an affinity with ‘bad painting’ – a faux-naïf fiction that transcends the sum of its elements by breaking down conventions of genre, style and reference. Beneath the paintings lie a bunch of picnicking carrot sculptures and a pair of your auntie’s mass-produced embroidered shoes, with colourful threads embedded in their rubber soles, beside an aa battery and a mini sewing kit. This reenchantment of kitsch is neither atavistic nor nostalgic, but suggests that the spirituality of ‘rural’ taste is radically contemporary. One Hand Clapping makes it evident that the ‘time lapse’ between Chinese and Western modernity, addressed by the Guggenheim’s Art and China After 1989: The Theater of the World last fall, has become moot. We can no longer talk of Chinese contemporary art catching up with the rest of the world, nor of art’s powerbrokers finally adjusting to China’s time. A question lingers: how much can art, the smartest planetary currency of our time according to Hito Steyerl, force open what Mark Fisher has called the ‘slow cancellation of the future’? Kang Kang

facing page, bottom Wong Ping, Dear, can I give you a hand? (detail), 2018, animated led colour video installation with sound, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

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Summer 2018

Books The Last Children of Tokyo by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani Portobello Books, £9.99 (softcover) At more than one hundred years of age, Yoshiro is struggling to care for his young great-grandson Mumei in Yoko Tawada’s vision of a near-future Japan. A writer by profession, Yoshiro finds it increasingly difficult to publish in a country where English is banned and any connection to the rest of the world strictly prohibited. Language itself has become a difficult territory to navigate, with words like ‘mutation’ replaced by euphemisms like ‘environmental adaptation’. Likewise, ‘healthy’ is no longer used to describe children, since this is no longer feasible, as evinced by an anxious Yoshiro during Mumei’s checkup at the paediatrician: ‘You’re trying to find out how far cellular destruction has gone, aren’t you?’ Frail but bright-eyed and curious, Mumei, whose mother – Yoshiro’s granddaughterin-law, ‘a woman as beautiful as a crane’ – died following childbirth, and whose father is an addict in hiding, is of a generation born with a variety of physical abnormalities. The legacy of an unspoken disaster, though nuclear fallout is hinted at, the young protagonist has soft teeth and a long thin neck, can barely dress himself and suffers terrible pain when eating.

He is more than once described as having the characteristics of a bird: ‘The boy threw back his shoulders, puffed out his chest and stuck out both his arms like a bird spreading its wings’, he chirps his words and gives a ‘high-pitched cry that sounded like a crane’. The soil has been poisoned, animals (save ‘rental dogs’, cats and ‘secretly kept rabbits’) have become extinct, and unlike their spritely elders, children are no longer expected to live very long. There are easy links to be made between the issues facing today’s Japan and the world Tawada has built. They include an ageing population, Yoshiro’s concerns about the nationalist ideals promoted by his government, which reflect those voiced by critics of Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, and the appeal of urban life to a younger generation that has, here, been turned on its head so that a rural lifestyle has become more desirable than exposure to the ‘multiple health hazards’ of Tokyo. Yet there is, amidst the hardship, hope. On the brink of societal collapse, a secretive organisation selects children to become emissaries to other countries, recalling the kentoshi (the Japanese title of this novella)

missions of pre-isolationist Japan, which then served to enable the exchange of knowledge and culture with China and Korea. In Tawada’s world they seek a cure for a disease that cannot be diagnosed. But there is also a more nuanced message of hope in the symbol of the bird, recognised in Japan as the figure a human spirit takes upon death: while the body of Mumei’s mother lies in the morgue, it begins to transform, her face elongating into a beak, feet becoming claws and shoulders ‘sprouting feathers’. Will Mumei, following ‘environmental adaptation’, ultimately take the same form? Tawada’s novella raises the question of what happens in a world that has lost its faith in technology and in which, at the same time, the environmental impact of humans has transformed the planet beyond the adaptive evolutionary capacities of any one species. Here is a convincing world-narrative that weaves together the beliefs of ancient Shintoism and contemporary politics, where transmutation between animals has become the norm. In Japan, the crane, representing longevity and happiness, is believed to live for a thousand years. Fi Churchman

Transforming Monkey: Adaptation & Representation of a Chinese Epic by Hongmei Sun University of Washington Press, $30/£19.50 (softcover) Some time ago I was asked by an artist much older than myself to write an essay for a catalogue about his work. After it had been published, he wrote to me saying that while he had very much enjoyed reading it, he didn’t think that it reflected his own ideas about his work. I wrote back to him pointing out that he was old enough to be my grandfather and that (leaving aside the different perspectives of maker and viewer) the respective social, political and other experiences we brought to the work would necessarily result in some differences in the way we saw it, however much we might agree on the work’s fundamental formal characteristics and mechanics. He never wrote back, but the point is this: the discourse

around works of art is something that can change and evolve over time. Even if the works themselves never physically do so. us-based academic Hongmei Sun’s study of the thousand-year evolution of the story of Sun Wukong traces exactly this phenomenon (albeit on a much grander scale). It takes as its subject the ways in which the tale of the Monkey King (the best-known version of which is Wu Cheng’en’s sixteenth-century, 100-chapter text Journey to the West) shaped, and has been shaped by, the evolving culture of China and beyond. Briefly summarised, the tale (which has older roots than Wu Cheng’en) describes how Monkey challenges the established order of the gods;

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is punished by the Buddha; then finds redemption and enlightenment protecting the monk Tripitaka on his journey to bring scriptures from India to China. What Sun adds to this is a commentary on how, over the years, Monkey, the shapeshifting trickster, has been reinvented in successive texts, plays, animations, movies, comics and performances: if Journey to the West is a tale of metamorphoses, it has itself metamorphosed over time. Sun then seeks to investigate what that tells us about the nature of folktales (or popular artworks) themselves and about the authors and audiences who keep them animated: the perfect gift, then, for one elderly artist. Mark Rappolt

Summer 2018

Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts by Aruna D’Souza Badlands Unlimited $19.99 (hardcover) Despite the general reflexivity of many popular styles of critique, the implications and intonations of whiteness remain too rarely confronted in contemporary art, not least by white people. Puzzlement and indignation met the assertions, made by many black artists, that the painting Open Casket (2016) – by white artist Dana Schutz, depicting the body of murdered black teenager Emmett Till – was racist, and should be removed from the 2017 Whitney Biennial, let alone, as Hannah Black’s widely circulated letter recommended, that it should be destroyed. Free speech, a universal human right, was affirmed in defence of the painting’s existence, yet artistic freedom was troublingly equated with the inviolability of the museumised commodity, and the voices protesting at the Whitney and on social media, who questioned the capitalist erotics of cultural relativism and appropriation, and underlined the ‘conceptual impossibility’, in Aria Dean’s words, of nonblack identification with the work’s subject matter, were refuted. In short, antagonism was blanketed by a ‘white victim’ response, forestalling conversations about institutionalised antiblackness, the carceral continuum, whiteness’s foundations as a legal fiction and technology of settler colonialism or other social issues framing the painting’s production. Aruna D’Souza’s new book contextualises this controversy and its response, examining the ways in which the artworld’s liberal racism is not just repetitive, but cyclical. In reverse chronology it recalls two earlier New York exhibitions that

were protested for antiblackness: white artist Donald Newman’s 1979 presentation at Artists Space, shamelessly titled The N***** Drawings, and the Metropolitan Museum’s 1969 Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, which included no black artists. Notably, as per the Schutz storm, white commentators shirked complicity: Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens and Roberta Smith, among others, defended an ethos of ‘artistic freedom above all’ at Artists Space. Allon Schoener, curator of Harlem on My Mind, alleged to understand the importance of black artists exhibiting at the Met, but shrugged that ‘I didn’t see that as my responsibility’. The book’s neologistic title refers not simply to the racialised access barriers that define participation in contemporary art but, crucially, to the whitewashing of discussions on race in the artworld, whereby actors gymnastically redefine the terms of the debate, conveniently disentangling themselves. The horizon of transformative change is rendered crudely fluid, while art history repeats itself. Whitewalling breaks from this, constituting a study of allyship – the difficult process of unlearning, reevaluating and forfeiting privilege in order to challenge structural oppression – through annotation and archival fidelity. The book emerged from its author’s participation in the social-media discussions that generated much analysis of Schutz’s painting. Dispersed, and quickly buried by the accumulative logic of the medium, these remain the property of

the platforms on which they were published, yet are critical groundwork for any dissenting student of aesthetics. Social media dramatically outpaces, and outpunches, older formats thanks to its deviance from editorial and grammatical conventions, yet is vulnerable to genealogical link rot. Through compendial citation, and with her polyphonic analysis bolstered by artworks by Parker Bright and Pastiche Lumumba, two important participants in the protests, D’Souza has gathered kindling for future fires. As D’Souza affirms, there is no neutrality regarding racism. Yet too little writing on art takes up, and complicates, antiracist work – Badlands Unlimited’s Paul Chan claims Whitewalling is the sole book on art and race published this trade season in the us. Demanding historical accountability while celebrating the pathbreaking direct action of groups like the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and artists including Benny Andrews, Janet Henry and Howardena Pindell, Whitewalling sets a generative precedent. Yet, though progressive, and knifelike in its critical revisionism, the book is about the failure of effective solidarity. The Whitney protests didn’t just demand the removal of a painting from a museum, but the suspension of conditions that precede the painting – and, by extension, the book, this review and my writing of it. Criticism and allyship are finite modes. A more prefigurative politics is clamoured for, one that disassembles the stage while reappraising the acts. Harry Burke

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori Portobello Books, £12.99 (softcover) That people are weird, and the ‘normal’ ones weirdest of all, is obvious to Keiko Furukura, as it has been to fictional antiheroes from Holden Caulfield to Donnie Darko. Yet unlike those archetypes of adolescent male angst, the protagonist of Sayaka Murata’s Englishlanguage debut is a thirty-six-year-old woman ensconced in a dead-end job, living alone in the Tokyo suburbs without prospect of promotion or romantic fulfilment. The twist to a story that we are conditioned to expect will be tragic – a single woman in her mid-thirties is liable to be treated as an object of pity – is that Keiko is happy, or at least as close to conventional happiness as is possible for someone whose

inability to empathise leads her to say of her friends’ children (and here I sympathise) that ‘they were all just an animal called a baby and looked much the same’. Keiko finds meaning instead in the rhythms of the convenience store in which she works and a sense of belonging in its fixed corporate hierarchies. And so neat asides on the integrity of selfhood and classical models of society are slipped into the story of her failure to ‘fit in’ despite halfhearted attempts to secure a life partner and amusingly blank anthropological observations (‘I find the shape of people’s eyes particularly interesting when they’re being condescending’). But the novel is most satisfy-

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ing as a satire on the genre of ‘chick lit’ – young woman in a big city endures professional and romantic mishaps yet ultimately, with the help of a screwball best friend, secures the man who makes her life worth living – and the misogynistic societal norms that it reinforces. For all its charm, it remains faintly depressing that this critique of the path marked out for citizens of capitalist societies should be mediated through a character whose inability to relate to others would ordinarily be diagnosed as a developmental disorder. Because ‘normal’ people often think that the prevailing obsession with career, mortgage, marriage and childbirth is weird, too. Ben Eastham

Topology of Violence by Byung-Chul Han The mit Press, £14.99/$19.95 (softcover) Capitalism is making us mentally ill because we’ve all accepted its new message – that our freedom can be found in our constant selfrealisation, which turns out to be our neverending self-exploitation. That’s the driving message of Byung-Chul Han’s newly translated extended essay (it’s 130 pages long), but its bleak diagnosis of late-modern capitalist society only seems to have been confirmed in the years following the publication of the original German version in 2011. Through his restless, polemical revisiting of continental theory from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben, the Korean-born German philosopher makes the sweeping argument that the nature of violence, power, social control and human subjectivity itself, has been transformed in recent decades: from what he defines as the old ‘obedience society’ to the new and more pernicious ‘achievement society’. For Han, violence in capitalist society has shifted from externalised violence – the violence of state punishment bearing down on individuals in order to regulate and discipline them (Foucault’s critique of ‘biopower’) – to an invisible, internalised violence, in which human beings ‘do violence to themselves’. Lacking the internalised ‘other’, the inner policeman of the Freudian superego of twentieth-century man (Han thinks psychoanalysis was of its time), the twenty-first-century subject is in perpetual conflict with itself, demanding ever higher performance and greater gratification in

a culture that insists on the value of unbridled subjective freedom – what Han calls the ‘achievement-subject’. This leads principally to narcissism and depression, the defining psychological ailments of millennial society: ‘burnout’, says Han, ‘is the pathological consequence of voluntary self-exploitation.’ It’s a familiar narrative: philosophically and politically, its roots are in that postDeleuzian theorising that pretends that human consciousness is so shaped by the process of capitalism that it cannot escape it, even if it wanted to try. Han’s main update to that dystopian intellectual view – even though he appears to take issue with Deleuze, Foucault and others – is to insist that there can be no ‘outside’, no internal social division that could provide the negative counter to the relentless ‘positivization’ of the achievement society. Of course, Han’s pessimism with regard to the helplessness of the achievement-subject could (just about) be read as a call to resist. There are many points here that resonate with the anxieties of 2018; his pithy observations that social media is ‘dominated by hypertrophied selves’, who narcissistically ‘twitter for attention’, or that ‘Google and social networks like Facebook are also digital panopticons for secret services’, anticipate current misgivings over digital culture’s negative effects on isolated subjects. The trouble is that since Han has bought into to the idea that subjects are entirely produced by their social context, it leaves him in a place where

there are no subjects with sufficient autonomy to act politically. Painting himself into his logical corner, he concludes that there’s actually no one in power, no one doing the exploiting; ‘systematic violence… affects all members of a social system indiscriminately, making them victims and therefore requiring no antagonism between the classes, no hierarchical relationship between those above and those below for its development’. In other words, the rich aren’t to blame, they’re as caught up in the system as you are! ‘The subject who wields power is neither a power-holding person nor the ruling class but rather the system itself,’ is Han’s wacky conclusion. But it’s also one that has become increasingly current, notably in the recent fascination with accelerationism as it has in much radical environmentalist thinking. Blaming ‘the system’ is, and always was, a philosophical and political evasion. Since he can’t see his human subject as anything other than the spinning cogs of capital, his only solution is to withdraw and separate, rather than intervene. But it turns out Han’s view of us is tediously misanthropic; though he berates anyone arguing for resistance as ‘tilting at windmills’, in his last lines he grumbles that the subjects of the achievement society are ‘impossible to kill’. ‘Their lives are like those of the undead. They are too alive to die and too dead to live.’ With no sense that people can actively change their circumstances, all that’s left is to demean the human ghost in the machine… J.J. Charlesworth

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso Granta, £16.99 (hardcover) As a portrait of contemporary America, it doesn’t get much grimmer or more vérité than Sabrina, a 200-page graphic novel about grieving: both the vivid, scalding sort and the kind that accrues around a lifetime of disappointment. Anger and depression are here too. A sense of powerlessness. Sabrina herself is gone, however – last sighted a block from home one evening – but her absence propels a handful of storylines. The quiet hero is Calvin, a ‘boundary technician’ working nightshifts behind computer screens in a military complex in Colorado. Calvin’s wife and child have moved to Florida, though Calvin plans to attempt a reunion once he’s discharged; in the meantime he lives in an unfurnished

rental, does a bit of gaming and has little contact with people outside of work and fast-food settings. It is into this unpromising environment that Sabrina’s boyfriend, Teddy, a childhood friend of Calvin’s, now nearly catatonic with loss, arrives in the aftermath of her disappearance. And then the news gets much, much worse: a video of Sabrina’s slaying surfaces online, and like exceedingly horrific stories from recent American history – Sandy Hook comes to mind – enters into a ‘post-truth’ vortex, where a reasonable-sounding demagogue promotes the whole thing as a ‘false flag’ event: a tragedy staged by the us government to strip citizens of their rights. Chicago-based Nick Drnaso’s

Summer 2018

drawings compound an overwhelming sense of doom, capturing alienating characteristics of contemporary life – the isolation of the automobile, the tract housing and strip malls, online culture, meaningless work – and spreading it through sombre washes and a gloomy half-light across the panels of his story. With anomie as a baseline, and the catastrophe of Sabrina laid over the top, the ability of those most directly affected by the murder to carry on renders them heroic. Drnaso’s quiet, insistent focus on this group, and his ability to stir our profound empathy for the lives they are living, against the backdrop of a world gone mad, elevates this story to the level of literature. David Terrien

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on the cover A rubbing of the Souzhou Planisphere, engraved on a stone stela in 1247. Courtesy History of Chinese Science and Culture Foundation, London

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on pages 95 and 100 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

Summer 2018

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Off the Record Basel, schmasel. I don’t even pretend to go this year. It’s not so much the lack of Asian participation. I just can’t take the Swiss any more, with their clean streets, efficient trams and intellectually exacting sculptural works. “No to the cantons and yes to the wantons!” I tell every collector who asks why I am not gracing the Three Kings this year in my Dior take on a cheongsam. But also I am not fussed about missing collectors, for this summer sees the first edition of Condo Shanghai, and having instructed my trusty assistant Lorenzo to do the necessary paperwork, I am looking forward to allowing a foreign gallery a small corner while I dig out the crap from my stockroom and whack it on the walls. Apparently this isn’t strictly in the spirit of Condo, but Céline, Prada and Dior do not come cheap. I am pleased with my plan. No shipping costs, a confused foreign gallery terrified of Shanghai and willing to share their mailing list in return for an outing to the Sichuan Citizen for a Basil Drop. I saunter out of my office into the gallery and admire the painting that Lorenzo has hung. I don’t recognise it, but it is surprisingly strong given that he must have just found it in a dusty corner. “Good work!” I say. “Actually, I can’t remember asking you to hang this or indeed what it is. But it is a very strong work.” “Condo,” Lorenzo replies.

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“Erm, yes, it will look great for Condo, but that’s still a couple of weeks off. Still, no harm sticking it up early. When are the Westerners turning up?” “Condo?” he says again, pointing at the painting. I look at the painting again. “That’s a George Condo, isn’t it, Lorenzo?” He nods enthusiastically. Twenty minutes later I can hear Lorenzo’s screams from the storage cupboard starting to fade as he presumably gets used to the inevitability that I am not going to release him from being strapped to a Subodh Gupta pan installation that I inadvertently acquired after a night on the tiles drinking whisky with the great man. I turn my attention to the matter at hand. Sure, we now have a George Condo on consignment from some random secondary gallery, but my gallery isn’t actually in Condo thanks to Lorenzo’s misunderstanding of my instructions. This is a disaster. No Basel, no Condo equals no Céline in these crucial summer months. Suddenly I have an idea. “Lorenzo,” I bark, opening the store cupboard, “fetch me all the random artworks we’ve borrowed and never shipped back.” “There are quite a few of those,” he remarks, unnecessarily I think. “Exactly. Now is their time!” A couple of hours later we have various paintings and sculptures scattered around the back of the gallery. “So, Lorenzo, now we are in Condo.” He looks dubious. “But what about the guest gallery?” “We are hosting David Risley, Freymond-Guth and Lisa Cooley. Just hang all this work up in the backroom and do some stickers for those gallerists. Any font will do. No one will remember. And anyway, alas, our guest gallerists can’t be here for visa reasons.” “Ah, that’s sad for them,” says Lorenzo as he dutifully starts hanging. Having hauled his considerable bulk up the ladder, he pauses and turns around. “Hold on, aren’t all those galleries closed? Didn’t each send out a plaintive email about how the art market was awful and they had been eaten alive by terrible commercial pressures while trying to make a good, honest living?” “Yes, yes,” I reply. “But memories are short, Lorenzo. After all, you used to be a fair director, a magazine publisher and God knows what else. Now get up there. No one remembers a thing in this world. Do you remember Giti Nourbakhsch’s valedictory YouTube dance when she was rejected from Basel and closed shop?” Lorenzo shakes his head. “Exactly. This is a new world, Lorenzo! A happy condominium of collective dealers doing nice things that look beyond the art-fair model to collaboration and nurturing. And we’re part of it-ish!” Gallery Girl

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