ArtReview Asia Autumn 2021 by ArtReview

We’ve come for your culture! Looting in Cambodia Film censorship in India Park Chan-wook on photography

Tony Cragg

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Georg Baselitz Hotel garni

October—November 2021 Seoul Fort Hill 122-1 Dokseodang-ro Hannam-dong

Thaddaeus Ropac London Paris Salzburg Seoul

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timesartcenter timesartcenterberlin

Más Allá, el Mar Canta

Beyond, the Sea Sings

www.timesartcenter.org/exhibitions/mas-alla-el-mar-canta

Artists Esvin Alarcón Lam, Sybil Atteck, Nicole Awai, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Andrea Chung, Christopher Cozier, Richard Fung, Colectivo Hapa, Mimian Hsu, Peng Zuqiang, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Humberto Vélez, David Zink Yi Curated by Pablo José Ramírez

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Address: Brunnenstrasse 9 10119 Berlin, Germany T. +49 (0) 30 2478 1038 timesartcenter.org

Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 12 – 7 pm

Supported by

Free admission

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Watch and Chill Streaming Art to Your Homes https://watchandchill.kr

Featuring Cha Jaemin, Cha Jiryang, Farming Architecture, Cao Fei, Tada Hengsupkul, Kim Heecheon, Koo Donghee, Cocoy Lumbao, Anson Mak, Oh Min, Mark Salvatus, Wantanee Siripattananuntakul, Chai Siris, Shireen Seno, Saroot Supasuthivech, Kawita Vatanajyankur, Wang Gongxin, Cici Wu, Yuan Goang-ming, Jiang Zhi

August 24 – October 24, 2021 MMCA, Seoul October 29 – December 5, 2021 MCAD, Manila December 10 – December 31, 2021 MAIIAM, Chiang Mai January 1 – February 28, 2022 M+, Hong Kong

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai M+, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong

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ArtReview Asia vol 9 no 2 Autumn 2021

Face off What do you do when your cultural heritage is under threat? Max CrosbieJones reviews a history of the looting (a flood) and restitution (a trickle) of cultural artefacts in Southeast Asia, and wonders how places like Thailand and Cambodia can move to stem the bleed of objets d’art and stolen antiquities across their borders. All the trinkets in ArtReview Asia’s cabinets are plastic. Promise. Still, none of you collectors will want to invite Max round for dinner until you’ve tidied up. Meanwhile, ArtReview Asia caught up with one of India’s leading documentary filmmakers, Anand Patwardhan, to review the future of the medium in the wake of the rise in proscriptive identity politics in academia, Western-centric markets in the film industry and ever tighter government censorship in India. And find out how he remains an optimist in spite of all that. Elsewhere our columnists examine the way in which even India’s weather cycles have been co-opted into its politics (yes, nothing is sacred) and how recently rediscovered comic-strip archives in Thailand reveal an alternative history of politics there. In the books section ArtReview Asia dives deep into leading Korean novelist and activist (a word Patwardhan doesn’t believe in… alongside ‘artist’) Hwang Sok-yong’s autobiography as he struggles to find the truths of his life, as a writer, a soldier, a priest, a husband, a North Korean, a South Korean, a father and a rebel. And on a lighter note, one of South Korea’s leading directors, Park Chan-wook, takes us through the interests and motivations behind his upcoming photography exhibition in Busan. And describes how you can see a face in everything. ArtReview Asia

Maybe later

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Liste Art Fair Basel 20–26 September Liste Art Fair Basel 2021 Liste Showtime Online, 15–30 September

New fair location Messe Basel, Hall 1.1 Maulbeerstrasse / corner Riehenring 113 4058 Basel

Liste Expedition Online, December onward liste.ch Liste

Liste Liste

25 Years Main Partner E. Gutzwiller & Cie, Banquiers, Basel 203_ARA_Liste.indd 203

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Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 18

Eugene Tan interviewed by Adeline Chia 42

Points of View Deepa Bhasthi, Taro Nettleton, Arun A.K., Andy St. Louis, Max Crosbie-Jones 28

Art Featured

Anand Patwardhan interviewed by Mark Rappolt 48

Face to Face artist project by Park Chan-wook 66

The Real Cultural Appropriation by Max Crosbie-Jones 58

Breaking the Waves by ArtReview 78

page 18 Wong Ping, Jungle of Desire (still), 2015, single-channel video, sound, colour, 6 min 50 sec. Courtesy the artist; Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong & Shanghai; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

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Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 84

Books 98

Liu Wei, by Fi Churchman Mé, by Thu-Huong Ha Planitia, by Andrew Russeth Recast: Recent Works by Anthony Chin & Green Zeng, by Adeline Chia Hetain Patel, by Mark Rappolt Yao Cong, by Paul Han Yukinori Yanagi, by Patrick J. Reed Simon Fujiwara, by Mark Rappolt

The Prisoner, by Hwang Sok-yong, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Don’t Call It Art! Contemporary Art in Vietnam 1993–1999, edited by Annette Bhagwati and Veronika Radulovic, reviewed by Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trâ`n Speak The Wind, by Hoda Afshar, reviewed by Neha Kale A Passage North, by Anuk Arudpragasam, reviewed by Mark Rappolt A Mosque in the Jungle, by Othman Wok, reviewed by Adeline Chia The Revenge of the Real, by Benjamin Bratton, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Night Bus, by Zuo Ma, reviewed by Fi Churchman AFTERTASTE 106

page 87 Sungermone, %k, 2021, sculpture, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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June Art Fair Media Partner

VI, VII, Oslo Althuis Hofland Fine Arts, Amsterdam Christian Andersen, Copenhagen Document, Chicago Fabian Lang, Zurich First Floor Gallery, Harare FORO.SPACE, Bogota Foxy Production, New York Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi Gaudel de Stampa, Paris Green Art Gallery, Dubai The Green Gallery, Milwaukee Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt Jean-Claude Maier, Frankfurt Jo van de Loo, Munich Kai Middendorff, Frankfurt

Kim?, Riga Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam Martos Gallery, New York Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles Meyer Kainer, Vienna Misako & Rosen, Tokyo Nathalie Karg, New York Parisa Kind, Frankfurt Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles Red Tracy, Copenhagen Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam Tomio Koyama, Tokyo XYZ collective, Tokyo june-art-fair.com @juneartfair

20.–2Messe 6.9.Basel 2021Hall 4.1

Entrance on Messeplatz

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Art Previewed

These ways of talking are not mine 17

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8 Heidi Lau, The Fountain, 2021, glazed ceramic, 91 × 58 × 58 cm. Photo: Nancy Paredes. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Brown Los Angeles

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Previewed 1 Subterranean – Taiwanese Art Collectives 1980–2000 The Cube Project Space, Taipei Through 9 October 2 creN/Ature TKG+ Projects, Taipei Through 18 September 3 Tintin and Hergé Power Station of Art, Shanghai Through 31 October 4 Yan Bing Shanghart, Shanghai Through 18 October 5 AI Delivered: The Abject Chronus Art Center, Shanghai Through 17 October 6 Kenny Scharf Almine Rech, Shanghai Through 9 October

7 Becoming Andy Warhol UCCA, Beijing Through 10 October

14 KURIKULAB: Moving Class Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media 18 September – 19 December

8 Liquid Ground Para Site, Hong Kong Through 14 November

15 Maia Cruz Palileo CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco Through 4 December

9 Sherrie Levine David Zwirner, Hong Kong Through 13 October 10 Yu Ji Surya and Jung Yeondoo MMCA Seoul Through 3 October 11 Koo Jiyoon Arario Gallery, Seoul Through 25 September

16 Wong Ping New Museum, New York Through 3 October 17 Ashfika Rahman Vitrine, Basel 19 September – 9 January 18 Ju Ting Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne Through 29 October

12 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Seoul Museum of Art Through 21 November 13 ERRATA: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai Through 1 November

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For those of us not in hospital or fleeing Afghanistan, it feels like we’ve all been living ‘underground’ these past few months, talking and thinking about all the changes we’re going to make and the revolutions to come when we get back aboveground. As things in some places tentatively approach some kind of normalcy, the question becomes one of how we might make those changes take effect. When it comes to the field of art, most of that talking and thinking has tended to circulate around changes to its structures and to its values, and about what ‘world’ it is that we use the term ‘artworld’ to designate, whether or not there’s any logic or factual basis to the projections of universality and monism that come with that term, and to what degree the ‘artworld’ has any connection to commonsense notions of the real world. It’s the first of all of these (the structures bit) that lies

1 at the heart of Subterranean – Taiwanese Art Collectives 1980–2000 (centred on Taipei and the first in a series of documentary and archival exhibitions that merge curatorial and artistic practice), which focuses on the development of Taiwanese art in the last two decades of the century just past, through the lens of the collective endeavours and ‘guerrilla activities’ that disrupted accepted mainstream practice. It’s aim? To sing the virtues of art from the underground, and, presumably, to bring it overground. To show how art allows a diverse range of people to make their voices heard. Although, that said, the curators state that they intend the show to stay away from any ‘epistemic conclusions’ and focus on the matter of reexamining and reorientating histories. Which might sound a little less fun. Or a little less ambitious, depending on your level of commitment to the revolution.

The first of the three chronological sections that make up the show focuses on collectives and spaces from the late 1980s, roughly coinciding with the lifting of martial law in Taiwan (and the symbolic end of the Cold War on a more global scale) and the country’s opening up. The second looks at the 1990s and what art collectives such as Ta-Da-Na Experimental Group, Bamboo Curtain Studio, Nomad Museum, Nation Oxygen and Abnormal Temple did with their newfound freedom. The third, spanning 2000–05, looks at these developments in the context of globalisation. While an additional section looks at two Taipei spaces, Sickly Sweet Café and Xi-Rang, and the ways in which they nurtured new forms of avantgarde practice. A friend has a theory that you can always tell which generation was in charge of culture (and behind that, wielding commercial and nascent political power) at any given

2 creN/Ature, 2021 (installation view, with work by Chung Chung-Yu, TKG+ Projects, Taipei)

1 Ta-Da-Na Experimental Group, Hamlet Machine, 1993, stage photo. Courtesy Yao Jui-Chung

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3 ‘The Adventures of Tintin in the Far East’, cover illustration by Fan Se Yen, for 8 November 1934 issue of Le Petit Vingtième, 52 × 52 cm. © Hergé-Moulinsart 2021

2 Niu Jun Qiang, Untitled-1, 2018, digital print, 30 × 20 cm.

time by noting which era’s music started appearing on ‘classic’ radio stations and by what of the past was being revived or recycled in the fashion, films and music of the present. (Right now that would be the generation coming of age during the 1990s.) And perhaps a show like Subterranean… is similarly evidence of the type of forward motion recognisable through the traces of its nostalgia. In a way, of course, it’s in the manipulating of just that dialectic that most cultural institutions now specialise. Still, it seems the right time to take a look back at how artists came together to achieve or deal with change. Assuming you’re engaged with change to come. Over at the TKG+ Project Space, issues of execution, organisation and display are supposed to be firmly in the background of 2 creN/Ature, a five-artist group show (featuring Lai Chih-Sheng, Niu Jun Qiang, Dino, Chung 3

Chung-Yu and Shan Chung-Chieh) that curator Wu Muching promises will be firmly about the act of creation and how it sits in the world. To keep the vibe intimate and personal, the artists include Wu’s best friend (Dino), his closest confidant (Lai), a participant from one of his previous shows (Niu), a TKG+ staff member (Chung) and an older schoolmate (Shan) working through a form of conversation about a more distant and universal question regarding what the very purpose of artmaking is. With a hint of the reduced circle of friends that lockdowns engender, and some of the uncertainty of those times too. Wu promises that his show ‘will not be transparent at first glance’. The point being that this is a positive rather than a negative quality. A heady mix of nostalgia and invention is also on show at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, where Tintin and Hergé showcases the art of the

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Belgian comic master (real name Georges Remi) and the development of his iconic character. Naturally the attention is focused on The Blue Lotus, generally thought of as Hergé’s first masterpiece and originally serialised in the weekly Belgian newspaper supplement Le Petit Vingtième between 1934 and 1935, and set in China during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, in 1931. While the Japanese are portrayed as buck-toothed brutes, Tintin’s guide, Chang, is based on Hergé’s friend the Chinese sculptor Zhang Chongren (then studying in Brussels), who gave the comic artist advice on creating the China of The Blue Lotus as well as lessons in Taoism and Chinese art and calligraphy. Chiang Kai-shek was so impressed by that depiction (and its positive influence on European perceptions of China) that he later invited Hergé to visit the place he’d imagined for real. Although given that,

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5 Lauren Lee McCarthy, LAUREN (detail), 2019–, performance. Photo: Zhong Han. Courtesy Chronus Art Center, Shanghai

4 Yan Bing, A Wild Plant, 2021, oil on canvas, 66 × 92 cm. Courtesy the artist and UCCA, Beijing

by that time (the late 1930s), Japan had bombed the country to smithereens and Europe was plunging into its own conflict, it’s understandable that he didn’t take the Nationalist leader up on the offer. Still, he’s here in spirit now, with an exhibition that examines his artistic influences (Hergé collected Jean Dubuffet, André Raynaud, Lucio Fontana and Andy Warhol, among others), as well as showcasing his drawings and photographs and other ephemera. Don’t expect a similar show to take place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, however, a country that the Belgian depicted in a 1931 collection as populated by a people who were backwards and lazy and in dire need of European civilising. Back in the real world, Chinese painter 4 Yan Bing first came to prominence during the late 2000s through works that mixed the raw materials of his homeland (among them earth,

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grains, pulses and animal hides), found objects (farm tools, for example), installations and figurative oil paintings in a manner that former UCCA director Jérôme Sans once compared to Italy’s Arte Povera. Yan Bing described it as a form or resistance to a world that was increasingly digitalised, abstracted and conceptualised, while at the same time being dominated by a philosophy of anthropocentrism. Or a return to simple truths and the notion of humans as comprising just one part of a living world. Such thinking has only grown in prominence in the decade since, so his latest exhibition, Suddenly Everything Became Clear, will be one to watch at Shanghart’s Shanghai HQ. Those of you who want to experience the flipside of that, however, will want to head to Shanghai’s Chronus Art Center, where 5 AI Delivered: The Abject corrals the work of nine artists and collectives alongside the theoretical

legacies of computer scientist Alan Turing, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, and art-theorist Hal Foster to explore the epistemological limits of artificial intelligence and to explore a world that’s saturated by it. Works by Sofian Audry and Istvan Kantor (aka Monty Cantsin), HE Zike, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Casey Reas and Jan St Werner, Devin Ronneberg and Kite, and Tonoptik investigate neural networks, machine learning, the nature of subjectivity and the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Or pretty much – again – the reduced world of lockdowns. A second chapter of AI Delivered launches in November. American artist Kenny Scharf emerged 6 as part of New York’s East Village art scene alongside Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. And unlike them he’s still alive, and best-known these days for paintings that

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straddle pop culture, street art and visions of a to escape the vibes of that New York scene, UCCA tripped-out future. The better-dressed among Beijing is hosting the largest retrospective of you may have caught his Autumn 2021 capsule 7 Warhol’s output in China to date. Becoming Andy collection for Dior, decked out with cartoon Warhol features 400 of the Pop master’s drawplaying cards and tessellated patterns – think ings, paintings, photographs and films, with blue and white china meets Islamic geometry a focus on hybridity and repetition and how the with grinning caricature kings thrown into the great one’s life and lifestyle became fused with mix. For the rest, the artist brings his latest 2D his art, complete with a replica of the famous red works to Shanghai with his first gallery show couch from his studio, The Factory, upon which in China at Almine Rech. The exhibition is titled you too can enthrone yourself, mimic the poses Earth and contains representations of friendlyof one of his superstar subjects and get very, very looking anthropomorphised animals and plants, busy on Instagram or WeChat. Fifteen seconds with a sort of curvy Edenic vibe. Seemingly – for that’s the price of progress – for everyone. innocent and fun-looking at first glance, the Talking of democracy, it’s over to Hong Kong new works conceal a hidden warning featuring 8 and Para Site for Liquid Ground, curated by Alvin Chinese characters for ‘plastic’, ‘petroleum’, Li and Junyang Feng from the not-for-profit’s ‘carbon dioxide emissions’, ‘global warming’, annual open call for exhibition proposals from ‘pollution’ and all the things we produce to fuck ‘emerging curators’ – whatever that means at up this planet. There’s no escaping abjection, a time when most of us are emerging, blinking, it seems. But for those of you who don’t want into the light. The ‘liquid ground’ of the title

refers to the land reclamation projects that are ongoing across East and Southeast Asia (and beyond), the dumping of sand and rock into the sea in order to expand coastal cities and their infrastructures. Works by Leelee Chan, Cui Jie, Future Host, Ho Rui An, Travis Jeppesen, Jessika Khazrik, Heidi Lau, Lee Kai Chung, Riar Rizaldi, The Centre for Land Affairs, Yi Xin Tong, Alice Wang, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Zheng Bo and Zheng Mahler will explore issues of extractionism, capitalism, the overarching mindset that nature is a force to be worked against and a blind ignorance of the consequences of impending climate catastrophe. Picking up, then, where Kenny Scharf left off. Lurking in the background of course is Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam’s 2018 Lantau Tomorrow Vision – a proposal to reclaim 1,700 hectares of land from the sea in order to turn Lantau Island into a new economic hub.

7 Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol and Chris Makos, 1982, facsimile of an original handcoloured photograph, 17 × 16 cm. © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

6 Kenny Scharf, Zhi (Solstice), 2021, oil, acrylic, spraypaint on linen with powder-coated aluminium frame, 183 × 152 cm. © the artist. Photo: Charles White/JW Pictures. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech

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On the subject of reclamation, American 9 conceptual artist Sherrie Levine makes her

wooden originals that were used in a range of rituals but are now rendered both unoriginal and ‘elevated’ to the status of works of art, Hong Kong debut at David Zwirner’s island echoing also the way that many modernist outpost, with an exhibition that showcases her artists treated non-Western artefacts in the use of appropriation to challenge the accepted ‘invention’ of their own art. As is the case with stereotype of the male modernist master and reclaimed land, nothing comes from nothing. to challenge received notions of authorship and authenticity, and with it, the interpretation On which note, DMZ Theatre is a project 10 by photographer Jung Yeondoo and director of images. On show will be examples of some of the artist’s seminal bodies of work, including Surya based on the 13 observatories located After Henri Matisse (1985, featuring a series of along the nonspace of the Korean demilitafaces, copied by Levine, in ink and graphite, rised zone. On show at the MMCA Seoul, from works by the Frenchman, and floating Jung’s photographs reconstruct the sites as a form of theatre and stage, in which the only on empty paper sheets) and Monochromes After actors on view are the audience that stares out Renoir Nudes (2016, which use a process of north across apparently innocent – and empty pixelation to consolidate the range of tones – green fields and trees. Alongside that are in this Frenchman’s paintings into a single, a series of installations and performances all-encompassing monotone). Also on show that are deployed to tell the history, folktales, will be Brazilian Ex Voto Figure: 1 (2019), part of personal accounts and myths relating to each a series of sculptures cast from non-Western

site and people’s experience of them. A way of filling what appears to be an empty space. Which of course might be seen as a more holistic view of the scars of Korea’s division than any purely physical view might provide. Although, as the work points out, the land in the DMZ has become a haven for plantand wildlife since humans kicked themselves out. The lesson here? Look but don’t touch. Those of you who don’t want to do either when it comes to nature (it’s called lockdown syndrome) will want to head over to Arario Gallery, where you can immerse yourselves 11 in Koo Jiyoon’s abstract paintings that seek to capture a psychological portrait of the Korean capital. Titled Tongue and Nail, the exhibition focuses on the soft and the hard: the soft bodies and emotions that lubricate and inhabit the city, and the buildings that grow and then get chopped down and replaced.

9 Sherrie Levine, Brazilian Ex Voto Figure: 1, 2019, cast bronze, 28 × 7 × 6 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

10 Jung Yeondoo, DMZ Theater–Dora Theater, 2021, c-print, 60 × 46 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Fusing structure and anarchy, the paintings offer a vision of constraint and anarchy, vertiginous views and curving tentacles of intense colour, geometric lines and furious, scribbled brushstrokes that look, at times, scratched on. Lockdown syndrome indeed. Fittingly – you might think, in the 12 wake of all that – the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (originally scheduled for 2020) is focused on the theme of escapism. Titled One Escape at a Time and directed by former Pompidou Centre and M+ curator Yung Ma, it attempts to cast escapism as a positive rather than a negative force. A force that can be deployed to explore alternative realities, uncover hidden or buried histories and confront issues of power and prejudice in society today. A critical mechanism, rather than a delinquent flight. The genuinely intriguing lineup of artists includes Bani

11 Koo Jiyoon, Senior, 2021, oil on linen, 291 × 218 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Arario Gallery, Seoul

Abidi, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, DIS, Eisa Jocson, Liu Chang, Tala Madani, Paul Pfeiffer and Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries, among many others. An equally intriguing list of artists (38 – ranging from Bruce Nauman to Sutthirat Supaparinya, alongside four archives) are contributing works to the rather more clunk13 ily titled ERRATA: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories at the MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai. The exhibition is the first in a series of four that will tour the partner institutions involved – Galeri Nasional Indonesia, MAIIAM, Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and Singapore Art Museum – from whose collections the works on show are derived. Curated by Gridthiya Gaweewong with Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Grace Samboh and June Yap, the first stage of the exhibition

focuses on the MAIIAM collection as a point of departure from which to engage with the other collections and to investigate ‘contested narratives, counter and alternate histories from the remnants of the crypto-colonial period to Cold War politics’. In the course of that it seeks to critique grand narratives of national art history and look at alternative perspectives and intimate histories that tell a different tale. Motivations that are broadly in line with those behind Taipei’s Subterranean… As ArtReview Asia said at the beginning, we’re entering a time in which taking stock moves into redefinition. That’s also the case at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, where Indonesian collective Serrum (the name derives from the Indonesian words for ‘share’ and ‘room’, and the collective is made up of artists and educators who, along with art collective ruangrupa, are involved with Jakarta’s

12 Kim Min, Yes We Cam (detail), 2012–16, photography and printed documents, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

13 Sutthirat Supaparinya, A Separation of Sand and Islands, 2018, two-channel video. Courtesy the artist

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15 Maia Cruz Palileo, Wind, Water, Stone, 2020, oil on canvas, 122 × 315 cm. Courtesy CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco

14 Serrum, Knowledge Market at the Asia Art Biennale, 2017. Courtesy National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts

16 Wong Ping, An Emo Nose (still), 2015, single-channel video, sound, colour, 4 min 23 sec. Courtesy the artist, Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong & Shanghai, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

Gudskul) are staging a trinity of communityof the points of art in the first place. Assuming building and educational events – KURIKULAB, you believe that art should have a point, rather Ideal School and Knowledge Market – as part of than being simply for its own sake. But that’s 14 an ‘exhibition’ titled KURIKULAB: Moving Class. prepandemic thinking. All three participatory events seek to rethink Over in San Francisco the recontextualmodels of education and the power of shared ising and rethinking continues in an exhibiknowledge. KURIKULAB (a fusion of the tion of paintings and sculptures by BrooklynIndonesian word for curriculum and the 15 based artist Maia Cruz Palileo, at the CCA English laboratory) looks at the physical Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art. Palileo’s structures of schools and the rules and systems work is influenced by the oral history of that govern what takes place inside them. her family’s migration to the US from the Ideal School looks at remodelling education Philippines and the colonial relationship from a learner’s perspective. While Knowledge between the two countries. It draws on Market looks at the egalitarian, one-on-one archival materials such as the watercolours exchange of ideas. The aim of it all? To of Damián Domingo, a nineteenth-century encourage diversity in the production and Chinese Filipino who is widely credited as circulation of knowledge, and to give a sense being the ‘father’ of Philippine painting (as of individual and collective agency to particiwell as making art, as an academic discipline, pants. Things that many would say were one more accessible to different races), and the

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Dean C. Worcester photographic archive (commissioned by the US government to document the improvements wrought by colonial rule in the Philippines). Palileo’s work assimilates and recontextualises these different perspectives, along with her family history, to pose questions relating to the construction of identity, history and notions of time in the form of often eerie, colourful, figurative paintings that fuse nature and culture, and assume the tropes of portraiture and history painting while confounding any clear sense of time and place. If that sounds complex, then you might 16 want to check out Hong Kong artist Wong Ping, whose blocky, homemade (Mario Bro's meets South Park) animations fill the New Museum’s Third Floor galleries and makes complex relations appear almost

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childishly simple. Titled Your Silent Neighbor, the exhibition presents a series of Wong’s surreal, humorous and biting portraits of life in Hong Kong, including Jungle of Desire (2015), the tale of a housewife-turned-sexworker, her policeman client and her voyeuristic husband, in which desire, power, fantasy and sex are broiled into one, and An Emo Nose (2015), an updated version of the Pinocchio story in which a butt-faced slob is gradually abandoned by a travel-hungry snout that is fed up with its owner’s negative energy. And no one needs any more of that right now. With a practice developed out of photo17 graphy, Dhaka-based Ashfika Rahman explores the complex social relations of her homeland, Bangladesh. Titled The typology of wounds, the mapping of healing, her debut show in Europe features photographic and textile

works, the latter produced in collaboration with some of the marginalised indigenous communities of the South Asian state. The Power Box series (2016–17) contains photographs documenting the battery-powered television sets in village communities in Chalan Bill, a wetland area with no electricity and access only to state-run television and, with it, government propaganda. Redeem (2020–) engages with the issues surrounding mass religious conversion of indigenous communities. On show here are the artist’s collaborations with Santal (an isolated indigenous people) and Dalit (casteless) communities, which take the form of photographic portraits and textiles works made up of the everyday fabric used in village life. On the one hand it’s literally the fabric of their existence, on the other it’s a

document recording their customs, culture and ways of being. Different ways of being are on show at Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne, where Beijing18 based Ju Ting presents new works in an exhibition titled When the Wind Comes. Pearl 061521 (2021) features coloured layers of acrylic paint on board, combed through to give an iridescent, wavelike effect, with hints of striated rocks and undulating seabeds. And yet, as artificial as it is natural. The sculpture Coral (2020–21) features a concrete breeze-block topped by a pile of fabric and thickly applied oozing pink, fleshy paint. Like Pearl 061521, it speaks to accumulation, transformation and striation at one and the same time. As well as Ju’s background in printmaking. Hidden depths, then, into which you’ll want to dive. Nirmala Devi

17 Ashfika Rahman, Files on the Disappeared VI, 2018, c-type print on photographic paper, gold thread and ink, 30 × 26 cm. Courtesy the artist and Vitrine, London & Basel

18 Ju Ting, Coral, 2020–21, acrylic, hollow brick, 35 × 55 × 43 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing & Lucerne

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Points of View

‘Rain, rain go away / Come again another day’ is a seventeenth-century rhyme still taught in Indian kindergartens to children beginning their education in English. One of many similar follies in a curriculum still suffering a lingering colonial hangover, the message in the ditty conveys the exact opposite of what the rains really mean to life in the subcontinent. Here, and in so much of the rest of Asia, we don’t quite relate to the Western world’s eager wait for every summer. Our countdown to a change in season anticipates, instead, the monsoon. It is the rain that invigorates us: it marks, after the brutal heat and humidity of tropical summer, the revival of life, perfumed by the terpenes in petrichor. The Indian monsoon, technically the Asian monsoon, is one of the largest, and the most complicated, weather systems in the world, affecting about half the global population before it finishes its annual journey across several climate zones. As a sentimental theme, the monsoon has reigned over creative efforts in India for centuries, and continues to inspire some of the best-known poetry, music, dance, drama and art that exists in the country today. Legend has it that the musician Tansen, one of nine ‘gems’ (or Navaratnas) in the court

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Extreme Season Giver of life and song, destroyer of politicians – the monsoon is all-powerful, writes Deepa Bhasthi

Chennai, 2008. Photo: McKay Savage / Flickr

of the Mughal emperor Akbar, could cause a downpour when he sang the Raag Malhar, his composition for rain. Miniature paintings in the Mughal, Rajasthani and Pahari styles all used weather to set the scene for sensuality, pleasures and other romantic interludes. Kings in the drier northwestern states of India would construct monsoon pavilions for their viewing pleasures. Older still, Kalidasa, among the greatest of Classical Sanskrit poets, in approximately the fifth century CE, wrote Ritusamharam, cantos paying homage to the six seasons of ancient India – summer, monsoon, autumn, onset of winter, winter and spring. Emotions during the monsoon evoked some of his best lines: The earth – covered with sprouting grass / gleaming like crushed emeralds, / and a new growth of plantain trees / with scarlet beetles upon them – / now does shine, like a lovely girl / in colourful jewels adorned (translated by A.N.D. Haksar in the book Ritusamharam – A Gathering of Seasons, 2018). Elsewhere, the monsoon winds opened flourishing trade routes between Arabia and Greece to Malabar’s ancient Muziris port, in more recent centuries bringing in what would become the East India Company, and with that the colonisation of India. For all the extreme

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romanticism associated with the rains, the season is volatile, given to extremities, both in terms of the natural forces it unleashes and in the way it is, even today, politicised by both state and central governments. The tropical summers in the country are invariably brutal, made worse every passing year by heatwaves, rising temperatures, water shortages and the sometimes violent conflicts that come with them. The heat builds up swiftly over April and May, and the tension between the dry months and the anticipation of relief is palpable to those of us who endure it each year. Save for an abundance of mangoes, there is little to savour during this time. Thus, when the first rains fall, they break over oppressively windless days, and often seem to express a satisfyingly large sigh of relief on behalf of the inhabitants of this by-now parched country. More importantly, the rains are singularly responsible for the quality and quantity of the following year’s harvest, matters crucial for an economy and social structure still heavily dependent on agriculture. The state of the rains in a particular year goes on to determine policy decisions, budget allotments for various sectors and the cost of everyday food in farmers markets. In a good year, the southwest monsoon (so named for the direction from which the

top Skymet Weather forecast, 2019, screenshot. Courtesy Skymet Weather above Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi holds an umbrella as he speaks to the media on the first day of the Monsoon Session of Parliament 2021 at the Parliament House. © and photo: Naveen Sharma / S OPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire

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rain winds blow) initially gathers around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands by late May and makes landfall in southern Kerala, its first port of call on the mainland, on 1 June. The official announcement of onset – following the convergence of several complicated predetermined conditions across weather stations – by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) is treated, perhaps rightly so, as a solemn event by the media. For the papers, this weather season is always frontpage news. Within days, the monsoon travels up the western coast and covers the whole of the country by late July or early August. It is hard to overstate just how much the monsoon affects every aspect of sociopolitical life in India. Nowhere else perhaps is there as much pressure on a natural phenomenon to perform well as there is on the monsoon in India. A deficit monsoon can overhaul the results of elections and send the Sensex into a freefall, while a normal or robust season is conveniently viewed as a mandate for a particular political party. For instance, the above normal monsoon in 2019, a month into the Narendra Modi-led rightwing government’s second term in power, helped boost his already popular image among farmers, the largest vote-bank in the country. It is little wonder, then, that the monsoon has long ceased to be a subject of prosaic conversation about weather in the country, and is used instead as a potent political tool. Weather reports released by IMD are – unofficially of course – under the strict control of various governments. Given that no political party in power wants a drought or famine on its record, less than satisfactory rains can be underreported, or the upward progress of the monsoon winds hastened to keep stock markets from crashing. While there is no overt censorship of data – yet – in the mainstream national media, it is in the regional media, over anecdotal exchanging of information and combing private documentation on

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Akbar and Tansen visit Swami Haridas in Vrindavan. Swami Haridas is to the right, playing the lute; Akbar is to the left, dressed as a common man; Tansen is in the middle, listening to Haridas. Painted by an unknown artist in Rajasthani miniature style, c. 1750. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

social-media accounts, that the true health of a year’s monsoon can be determined. Such politicking over the weather has hardly been harmless. For instance, less than true reports of good rains and dams filling up as per normal can, and in the past have, ignited water wars between Karnataka and the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu. The Cauvery water dispute is a complicated, century-old fight over sharing waters of the river of that name – the lifeline for farmers in both states – between the higher plateaued Karnataka, where the river originates, and the lower-lying regions of Tamil Nadu. As I write this, the latter is set to add a fresh layer to the ongoing tussle with plans to build a dam in Mekedatu, a village at the border of the two states. Tamil Nadu fears the dam would change the terms and conditions of the existing sharing agreement. Closer to my home, when delayed and deficit rains go unrecognised, as has often been the case in Kodagu, a district known for abundant, infuriatingly long monsoons, state budgets can be set to ignore crop failures, fair allocation of crop support and allowances for possible droughts. If and when such realities are shoved under proverbial carpets in more villages and districts across the country under the guise of political manoeuvring, we end up in a country that fails to acknowledge the woes of its biggest demographic. The monsoon remains replete in music – like in the iconic Ab Ke Sawan Aise Barse (“In this sawan month, the way the rains fall…”) by Hindustani vocalist Shubha Mudgal, a song that reiterates every romanticised notion of the first rains, poetry and literature. But as it gathers steam and speeds across the country, the rain habitually cause floods and destruction in many states. By the time the monsoon withdraws from the subcontinent, it is a mixed bag of the incidents it leaves behind – perhaps a good year for the farmer, a changed fate for the politician, some destruction, some succour.

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In 1966 (two years after the first Tokyo Games) Roland Barthes travelled to Japan. He later concluded, in Empire of Signs (1970): ‘The city I am talking about (Tokyo) offers this precious paradox: it does possess a centre, but this centre is empty’. He was referring to the Imperial Palace. This centre, he said, ‘is no more than an evaporated notion’. Barthes was wrong. Half a century and two emperors later, the Japanese media and public still hang on to the emperor’s every word. At the opening ceremony of this year’s Tokyo Olympics, Emperor Naruhito’s deviation from IOC protocol, to ‘commemorate’ the start of the Games in light of those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, was taken to be full of meaning. Behind the new Olympic Stadium, aerial shots used in the ceremony showed vast unlit patches of property – including the Akasaka Imperial Residence. Beyond the tempered imperial support, what I saw in Tokyo that night was a deflated opening ceremony – and a moment to demand change. Viewed via Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK, the ceremony appeared joyless, detached from reality and formally uninspired. Visually flaccid and overextended, it resembled Kinchan and Katori Shingo’s All Japan Costume Grand Prix, a TV programme showcasing short comic skits performed by costumed amateurs that aired annually from 1979 until earlier this year. Much of the ceremony’s intended symbolism was so poorly conveyed that NHK commentators had to resort to explaining every action and meaning (“It’s tap dancing!” followed by “The sounds are coming together to represent diversity!”). The clumsy attempts to inject excitement and assign meaning felt desperate. The absurdity of this year’s Summer Olympics had been growing for some time. Just days before the Games’ opening, the darling prince of 1990s Shibuya-kei pop Keigo Oyamada (widely known by his moniker Cornelius) resigned from his post as the official Games composer after old interviews resurfaced online in which he had boasted – at the height of his career – of viciously tormenting classmates with disabilities. In the spirit of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the organisers who hired Oyamada, either without researching his past or, more likely, having researched it and judged it inconsequential, took no

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Standing on ceremony The most recent Olympics cannot, and must not, hide its host’s flaws, writes Taro Nettleton

responsibility until the critical voices became impossible to ignore. How did we reach this point? Deaf to citizens’ and infectious disease specialists’ voices, a Human Centipede of capitalists and politicos with their hands dug deep into each other’s pockets composed this embarrassment of a spectacle. The stink was so bad that despite its own ties to the Liberal Democratic Party, automaker Toyota, the Games’ top sponsor, pulled its Olympics-related television commercials to avoid negative associations. What’s more, although the majority of people in Japan wanted the Games cancelled or postponed, they will end up contributing ¥900 billion (or more than half of the ¥1.6 trillion bill for hosting the Olympics) through their taxes. The 1964 Games, which introduced much of the architecture and infrastructure that became synonymous with postwar Tokyo, such as the freeway and the high-speed Shinkansen railway line, as well as Kenzo Tange’s National Gymnasium, was realised for a fraction of the cost. Kengo Kuma’s Olympic Stadium design is less memorable than Tange’s landmark, but this, one senses, is also by design. Safer to be innocuous, perhaps, following the controversy that erupted over the costs of realising Zaha Hadid’s original plans. The ample use of wood in its construction, as the opening ceremony’s

IOC president Thomas Bach and participants in the opening ceremony of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, July 2021. © IOC / Greg Martin

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NHK commentators repeatedly noted, is supposed to symbolise ‘Japaneseness’. As architectural critic Taro Igarashi has noted, there’s nothing essentially or exclusively Japanese about using lumber to build. Less remarked upon but obvious to all is the building’s resemblance to a giant ‘0’: unwittingly forecasting the Games’ failure. The symbolic weight was impossible to ignore no matter the angle shifts in the opening ceremony’s protracted aerial shots. Meanwhile, far northeast of the Akasaka Imperial Residence, 92 percent of the Exclusion Zone in Fukushima, from which 35,000 residents remain displaced, is still uninhabitable. The Olympic Games, past and present prime ministers Shinzo Abe and Yoshihide Suga promised, would be the ‘recovery Olympics’. Initially Abe insisted the Games would symbolise the containment of the Fukushima disaster, which he claimed to have ‘under control’. He did not. To add insult to injury, between 2017 and 2020 a mere ¥93.6 billion, the equivalent to less than 6 percent of the Olympic budget, was assigned to decontaminate the zone. Many residents of affected areas justly feel they were ignored and used to win the bid for the Games, which will only benefit a few in Tokyo. When the Fukushima narrative became too implausible to hold on to, Abe, and later Suga, suggested the Games would represent Japan’s triumph over COVID-19. Currently Japan is threatened with a fifth wave of COVID-19 infections, and just 26.3 percent of the population fully vaccinated. Finally, the Games had been sold as a celebration of the athletes who worked so hard to get here. During the opening ceremony, this was shown to unintentionally camp effect when frontline nurse and boxer Tsubata Arisa was featured melodramatically running in place, then on a treadmill, while two other athletes worked out on cycling and rowing machines, all socially distanced. I’m grateful for workers on the frontline, but even private access to exercise machines has been an impossible luxury to many regular folks during the pandemic. Support for the prime minister dropped below 30 percent before the Games. Despite dissenting opinions from residents and mass

Protesters outside Olympic Stadium, Tokyo, during the opening ceremony of the 2020 Summer Games, July 2021. © Reuters / Naoki Ogura

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media alike, he saw the Games, whatever else they might have been for, as the last chance to save his reputation and recover voter support after mishandling the pandemic. Understandably, there was little joy on the ground; I think most here saw the Games for what they were: a complete farce. The only bright image I saw in the weeks leading up to the Games was Nike’s ‘hijacking’, as local ad agencies refer to the commercial takeover of spaces such as buses and local subway lines. The incongruency of Nike’s smart, acid-popcoloured ads would seem fitting for a global corporation that has allegedly used supply chains linked to Uighur forced-labour, while also supporting Naomi Osaka, international hero and final torchbearer of the opening ceremony. The Japanese Olympic Committee also assigned the ceremony’s flagbearer position to another Black Japanese athlete, Rui Hachimura. It’s certainly a welcome start to dismantling the myth of Japanese homogeneity, but to avoid tokenism, a deep and difficult reckoning, rather than a one-time gesture, will be necessary. The creative director of the opening ceremony, Kentaro Kobayashi, was fired from his position a day before the event after a 1998 comic skit resurfaced in which he belittled the Holocaust. Four months earlier, Kobayashi’s predecessor, Sasaki Hiroshi, quit after making misogynist remarks about local comedian Naomi Watanabe. On the same day that Kobayashi was fired, The Asahi Shimbun reported that the Olympic Committee was considering rehiring ex-prime minister Yoshiro Mori, who had resigned from his position as the Tokyo Olympics president earlier this year over sexist comments. The endless controversies surrounding the Tokyo Games have made one thing clear: it’s time for change. Unity, which the Olympics promise, is impossible without equity and inclusion. The Tokyo Games’ official slogan is ‘United by Emotion’. But we must insist on being divided by intellect. If there is to be a legacy from this year’s Olympics, it will be one of failure and exposure. It’s up to us to turn this legacy into an opportunity for positive transformation.

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In 1998, the spark for the resurgence of an alternative to mainstream Hindi-language cinema (Bollywood) was ignited by the massive commercial and critical success of Ram Gopal Varma’s gangster drama Satya. Unlike the uber-rich backdrops of most Bollywood films, Satya tapped into the gritty underbelly of Mumbai, which until then had mostly found space in the films of Saeed Akhtar Mirza and Sudhir Mishra, icons of parallel, or new, cinema. Satya’s acceptance by mainstream audiences instilled hope in many budding writers, actors and directors who didn’t wish to tread the beaten path of conventional escapist cinema. One of the brightest talents to flourish post-Satya is its writer Anurag Kashyap, who has been championing novel and high-quality films ever since. With his directorial debut, Paanch (2003), Black Friday (2004), based on the Bombay bomb blasts of 1993, and the political drama Gulaal (2009), Kashyap has given Indian cinema some of its finest films. His Dev.D (2009) and Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) – an epic crime saga spanning several decades and generations – found a fan in Martin Scorsese. The 2000s also witnessed another exceptional filmmaker, Dibakar Banerjee, who made a mark with his uniquely entertaining films Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006), Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) and Love Sex Aur Dhoka (2010), which captured the quirks and varying hues of the North Indian middle class like never before. Music composer-director Vishal Bhardwaj took

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counter culture As shifting social values and non-Hindi films drive a new golden age in alternative Indian cinema, Arun A.K. looks warily to the censors

Hindi parallel cinema by storm with Maqbool (2003), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set in Mumbai’s criminal underworld. Vishal would later bridge the gap between the mainstream and parallel worlds by employing popular actors in his acclaimed ventures Omkara (2006) and Kaminey (2009). The financial success of these films encouraged major studios and A-listers to back smaller films with rich and innovative content. Arthouse films like Dhobi Ghat (2010), The Lunchbox (2013) and Masaan (2015) perhaps wouldn’t have been able to raise capital before the twenty-first century. In the previous century, films that strayed from mainstream narratives had to depend on the state-funded National Film Development Corporation (nfdc) for production and distribution. Meagre budgets enforced austerity in the production values of such offbeat films, which were stripped of the commercial tropes of popular cinema, including song-anddance sequences. Steeped in realism, they came to be bracketed by media and film scholars as parallel cinema, a category also called new cinema. Before parallel cinema snowballed into a wave across all Indian languages during the 1970s and 80s, the roots for its genesis were being put down in Bengali-language cinema by filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, who discarded the flamboyance of popular cinema to embrace simplicity inspired by Italian neorealism

top Maqbool (still), 2003, dir Vishal Bhardwaj above Satya (still), 1998, dir Ram Gopal Varma

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specifically, and European arthouse films in general. The Indian establishment (government) at the time was also in favour of producing quality films that could match the technical brilliance of international films while at the same time reflecting the social realities and cultural history of the country’s heartland. This support via NFDC led to the emergence of several talented filmmakers who were provided access to funds and a license to experiment with aesthetics, form and style in their work. Among these new auteurs were Mani Kaul, Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, Buddhadeb Dasgupta and Girish Kasaravalli. By the mid-1980s, parallel cinema’s flame had begun to flicker owing to the waning interest of producers, distributors and exhibitors in backing smaller films. One significant reason for this was that most of these films continued to mirror the problems of the dispossessed and marginalised, whereas the burgeoning middle-class cinemagoers were in search of stories that resonated with their aspirations and social realities. Additionally, the advent of television had lured many alternative filmmakers and ‘serious cinema’ actors with diverse content and substantial money.

above Dev.D (still), 2009, dir Anurag Kashyap

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During the 90s, there was a massive drop in the number of films produced by NFDC. However, stalwart directors persisted in making quality films without compromising on their ideals to represent unheard and often suppressed voices from the fringes of society. A few gifted filmmakers like Shaji N. Karun and Rituparno Ghosh also found their feet, and in doing so, helped keep arthouse sensibilities alive. Today, with the expansion of multiplex theatres across the country and the outburst of OTT platforms a few years ago, parallel cinema seems to have found a new stable home and many takers. Despite Hindi being the most widely spoken language in the country, it is the regional film industries that are spearheading the content revolution in Indian cinema. South Indian filmmakers like Vetrimaaran, Dileesh Pothan and Lijo Jose Pellissery have successfully managed to integrate their brand of realistic cinema into the mainstream. Malayalamlanguage actor Fahadh Faasil has become a national star by appearing in cult films of the past decade such as Maheshinte Prathikaaram (2016) – an atypical revenge tale that subverts the conventional notions of masculinity so often found in mainstream cinema – and Kumbalangi Nights (2019), in which Faasil’s character, Shammi, is the acme of perverse and pathological masculinity. The commercial success of such films that challenge cultural stereotypes, traditional ideas of gender roles and patriarchal attitudes is a testament to the evolving tastes of the masses. But for filmmakers who dare to experiment with content, the sociopolitical climate in India has become increasingly worrisome. A draft Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill 2021 empowers the central government to order recertification of an already certified film following receipt of complaints. The film fraternity has come together to protest a bill that would render them powerless against the state. In India, artists and especially filmmakers have always been pricked by censor authorities. Anurag Kashyap’s Paanch never got a theatrical release, as the Central Board of Film Certification objected to the film’s violence, the depiction of drug abuse and crass language. The Indian government this year has also imposed regulations to monitor and regulate OTT content more ‘closely’. With such clampdowns on freedoms of expression, independent filmmakers like Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, Sajin Baabu and Gurvinder Singh might have to rethink their content strategy in the years to come.

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For more than a decade, the artworld’s love affair with Hong Kong has carried on without much thought of its rivals in the region. But the lustre of ‘Asia’s World City’ has begun to fade of late, with growing concerns over government censorship and tighter civic controls leading many in the artworld to consider other suitors. Emerging as the most eligible of the bunch is Seoul, which offers similar financial incentives as Hong Kong without any of the fraught political circumstances. Korea is already a pop-culture juggernaut that commands massive worldwide appeal, shaping global trends in music, fashion, food and beauty. With a robust arts infrastructure and thriving local creative community to boot, Seoul appears to be on the brink of a breakout as Asia’s newest (art)world city. “Seoul is cost-effective compared to Hong Kong and other international cities, not to mention its sophisticated and formidable international manpower,” notes veteran art-fair executive Mirim Lee, citing Korea’s established domestic art-market and federal tax exemptions as additional upsides to the city’s potential as a contemporary-art hub. Like Hong Kong, Korea does not impose VAT or import tax on the sale of artworks, cultivating a favourable business environment that has already enticed major Western galleries to set up shop in the capital: Emmanuel Perrotin, Pace and Lehmann Maupin have all opened spaces in Seoul within the past five years, consolidating their presence in the region after successful forays in Hong Kong during the early 2010s. For these globalised galleries, a decisive factor in choosing Seoul as a site of expansion was its growing number of qualified and experienced salespeople with roots in the local art scene. “Having a strong team is the key to success,” explains Lehmann Maupin senior director Emma Son. “It was really important for us to have the right people in place who can mediate between the Korean audience, the international artists that we work with and the gallery system in the US.” This year, a new crop of Western galleries have committed to launching ventures in Seoul

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Seoul power The Korean capital is poised for breakout as a contemporary-art hub, writes Andy St. Louis

Exterior view of Thaddaeus Ropac’s new gallery in Seoul’s Hannam-dong district

while eschewing Hong Kong as a territory for a permanent physical space altogether, including Berlin-based König Galerie and blue-chip powerhouse Thaddaeus Ropac. “We were about to sign on a space in Hong Kong,” says Kyu Jin Hwang, Asia director for Ropac, “but the protests started and COVID happened, and then Art Basel Hong Kong was cancelled. So we just stepped back and said, ‘Let’s see what happens’, and that’s when we started looking at Seoul very seriously.” Political and publichealth matters aside, Korea’s expanding collector base and evolving market dynamics offer promising prospects for domestic and international galleries alike. Jaeho Jung, director of Gallery2 in Seoul, recalls, “In the mid-2000s most of the newcomers entering the market were professional types – fund managers, lawyers, doctors. But now I see all sorts of people coming in who maybe take a more casual approach to collecting than the previous generation.” This crop of emerging collectors has infused the local market with a vitality and cashflow that bode well for the future of contemporary art in Seoul. In perhaps the most demonstrative sign of market confidence in the long-term viability of the city as a global art destination, Frieze art fair has cast its lot with Seoul, where it will launch its first fair in Asia in autumn 2022. Frieze Seoul joins the company’s slate of existing fairs in London, New York and Los Angeles, in what Frieze board director Victoria Siddall describes as a logical next step: “All of our fairs have been held in real art centres that are not only centres of the market but also places that are attractions in themselves. The more we looked at Asia, the more Seoul became the clear choice for us.” Having won the hearts and minds of the international artworld elite, Seoul is increasingly seen as more than just a hedge against the uncertainty of Hong Kong’s future; time will tell whether the Korean capital can live up to its forecast potential and precipitate a reorientation of the contemporary art market in Asia.

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Belgian comics scholar Nicolas Verstappen began sifting through Thai comics five years ago. Plenty of time, you would think, to discover if Thailand had a comics canon worthy of comparison to the totemic Anglo-American, French-Belgian and Japanese traditions. However, due to a lack of local knowledge and of archives predating the 1980s, the process proved slow going. Several years passed, during which he scoured markets, libraries, antiquarian bookstores and online groups without much luck, until, just before the scheduled completion of the book he was working on, published this month as The Art of Thai Comics, the breakthrough came. ‘My Tutankhamen’s tomb: more than a thousand comic strips, cut from 1930s newspapers and bound together, were found in boxes during the reordering of an attic,’ he writes with palpable relief. ‘There lay almost the complete comics production of Sawas Jutharop and Jamnong Rodari, with early works by Prayoon Chanyawongse and Tookkata.’ This anecdote bears repeating – without the rare examples of Thai comic strip misesen-scènes these freshly unearthed finds provided, The Art of Thai Comics wouldn’t be as expansive and richly drawn an achievement. Some of these names are barely remembered in the Kingdom, let alone celebrated outside it – an injustice this largeformat book, arranged chronologically into chapters on influential cartoonists, imprints and trends, and released in Thai and English editions, strives to correct. Drawing also upon interviews and national archives, Verstappen skilfully illuminates the chequered lives and turbulent social contexts of his subjects, both cartoonists and sketched characters alike. Take Sawas Jutharop, a Bangkok boy, born to a family of goldsmiths in 1911, who hit his creative stride just as Siam was transitioning from absolute to constitutional monarchy in 1932. His work is emblematic of how comic artists of the time, cowed by new press laws,

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Lineages

One man’s persistence has brought Thailand’s rich comics tradition to light. Now we need to connect its spirit of critique and independence to current times, writes Max Crosbie-Jones

from top © Family of Juk Biewsakul; © Heirs of Jamnong Rodari

turned their backs on satirical strips lampooning nobility and officials, and turned instead to long-form adaptations of Thai epic poems, albeit ones that often chimed with current events. Verstappen illustrates these biographical tidbits with fine examples of Sawas’s strips, from the serialised adventures of an investigative journalist in 1932’s Nak Suep Khao through to the early appearances of alter-ego Khun Muen, the Popeyeinspired prankster who appeared in his adaptions of classic chakchak wongwong folktales about princely heroes. Also emerging during the 1930s was the enigmatic Jamnong Rodari, described here as ‘the first Siamese cartoonist to bring naturalistic representation to the artform’. He was also, Verstappen adds, ‘the most consummate’ of the era, on account of his loosely pen-drawn and playfully anachronistic narratives rendered with ‘a remarkable sense of rhythm, composition and design in outstanding sequences – sometimes silent, expressionist or oneiric’. Such effusive praise

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is entirely warranted judging by the accompanying strips, among them a Harold Lloydstyle slapstick scene set in a then modern-day Bangkok, and a fey dreamscene, circa 1934, from vaudeville folktale Phraya Noi Chom Talad. Over 30 cartoonists and their creations are profiled in this assiduous manner, from titans such as midcentury masterof-shade Hem Vejakorn to lesser-knowns such as chronicler-of-theunderdog Triam Chachumporn, from dashing folk princes with Elvis pompadours to phi krasue (nocturnal female ghosts) trailing blood and viscera. On the way, Verstappen parses changing reading tastes (mass circulation one-baht comics, graphic novels, horror and sci-fi, the manga wave), disruptive shifts (wars, imports, trauma) and even the occasional melee between cartoonists and the ruling powers. In 1972 the leading political cartoonist of the day, Prayoon Chanyawongse, responds to military censorship by drawing his most famous character with his mouth sewn shut. In 1973 a group of students sow popular discontent by producing a widely popular comic pamphlet about animal poaching. In 1976 another political cartoonist, Chai Rachawat, has his series banned by a dictatorial new regime on the grounds that it contains messages to communist insurgents. And in 2021 antijunta satirical strips drawn by anonymous artists gain thousands, if not millions, of likes on social networks. If I have a bone to pick with The Art of Thai Comics, it’s this: while it broaches the moments when the Kingdom’s artists explored personal and at times boldly political themes, it neglects to meaningfully connect the dots between them, to explore their relationship with Thailand’s current vexed and vitriol-filled moment. This is ostensibly because Verstappen has opted to focus solely on printed materials and the period 1907–2007: a century that begins with the first known Thai multipanel comic and ends with the peak of the Thai independent comics scene. In doing so, he conveniently avoids having to give a newer, bona fide phenomenon worthy of sustained attention – online comics – more than a cursory mention. Given the clear lineage that online comics such as Kai Maew and

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from top © Prayoon Chanyawongse Foundation; © Family of Pimon ‘Tookkata’ Galassi all images Courtesy River Books

Jod 8riew – unfettered and cathartic expressions of political disenfranchisement and alienation – share with the pugnacious social commentary of Siam’s 1930s proto-comic strips, not to mention the angst-filled horror and gore titles of the late 1970s and early 1980s, this feels like a missed opportunity (or the makings of a followup, perhaps?). But to nitpick in this manner is to fling paper darts at a rippling giant: Verstappen has crafted a work of huge breadth, accessible scholarship and real sociohistorical importance. Blending erudite readings of drawing styles with careful dissections of narrative traditions, applying detective work and high-minded analysis to a popular medium often dismissed as coarse and lowbrow, he skilfully charts the myriad ways Thai cartoonists have, in that spirit of unconscious eclecticism often said to embody ‘Thainess’, artfully borrowed and synthesised local and foreign influences: Jataka tales, likay theatre, Javanese shadow puppets, Popeye’s bulging biceps, among untold others. With each new page, a different member of the Thai comic pantheon is boldly redrawn – many long lost due to the ravages of paper and memory – and another part of the unique social scaffolding on which they stand is uncovered. The Art of Thai Comics, by Nicolas Verstappen, is published by River Books

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Eugene Tan interviewed by Adeline Chia

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ArtReview Asia

17/08/2021 14:18

In early 2022 Singapore Art Museum (SAM) will open a new 300sqm outpost at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, an industrial, port-facing area in the south of Singapore that is also home to several art galleries. This will be a permanent space for the museum. The institution’s original buildings, in the civic district, have been closed since 2019 for a reported S$90-million refurbishment project whose end date keeps getting pushed back: first the reopening was supposed to be this year, then it got postponed to 2023 and now the official date is 2026. In conjunction with the Tanjong Pagar Distripark announcement, SAM also released its new strategic direction under Eugene Tan, who came onboard as director in 2019. He was the first to fill that position in three years. Of course, people might also know him as the director of National Gallery Singapore (NGS), which makes him one of the most powerful arts administrators not just in Singapore but in the region. Before that, he was the programme director (special projects) at the Singapore Economic Development Board and oversaw the development of the art gallery cluster Gillman Barracks. He also curated the Singapore Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) and the inaugural Singapore Biennale (2006). ArtReview Asia chats with him about his vision of a ‘disappearing’ museum for SAM, on how two museums with one director can really differ and whether Gillman Barracks can really succeed, given the exit of tenants such as Silverlens from the Philippines and Sullivan + Strumpf from Australia. Art Review Asia The opening at the Tanjong Pagar Distripark in early 2022 is exciting news. Will it be a permanent alternative venue to the original buildings at Bras Basah and Queen Street? Eugene Tan Setting up at Tanjong Pagar is part of SAM’s plan to be a ‘disappearing’ museum. We want the buildings at Bras Basah and Queen Street not to be thought of as the main SAM buildings, but to have art diffused as an experience and in multiple spaces in the city. This has come about because of an examination of what it means to be a contemporary art museum in our day and age. The experience of art is now everywhere in our daily lives and cannot be confined to museum spaces. There is now art being made everywhere, in forms that we are not recognising as art yet. They transcend all our existing categories, which are largely defined by neoliberal markets and the ways they commodify art. We foresee occupying Tanjong Pagar Distripark in the long term, even after the original SAM buildings are ready.

ARA Could you update us on the refurbishment going on at those buildings? The plan was quite extensive, with 30 percent more gallery space to be added. ET Because of the delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic and financial prudence, the project will now be delayed to 2026. A lot of [the renovation] will be focused on the preservation of the old St Joseph’s Institution and Catholic High School buildings. There will be changes to the plans that we have previously shared. ARA What is the relationship between NGS and SAM? Can they really be different with one director? ET A lot of the confusion between the two institutions came about because of the lack of understanding of the term ‘contemporary’. People ask, ‘If SAM is a contemporary art museum, then why is NGS also showing contemporary art?’ NGS focuses on the art histories of Singapore and Southeast Asia, which include the period that we define as the ‘contemporary’, the period

“When art highlights issues, it’s often seen as adding to divisions in society. But sometimes it is necessary to acknowledge that these are problems before we figure out what we can do” that came after modernism and postmodernism. SAM’s focus on the contemporary is related to the present – ‘contemporary’ is used as adjective – and revolves around how artists represent and express their experience of the world now. Of course, NGS works with contemporary artists in our festivals and programmes. At the same time, our focus [on art history] is very clear. ARA SAM’s new direction includes using art to drive ‘positive social change’. What sort of change are you looking at, and who gets to decide what’s ‘positive’? Do you think there are problems instrumentalising artworks in this manner? ET I don’t think this is about instrumentalising art. Apart from highlighting the divisions, issues and injustices in society today, art also provides a way forward. Art builds facing page Eugene Tan, director, Singapore Art Museum. Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

Autumn 2021

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a convivial connectivity with different communities, which is in itself a positive social change. It is inherent in art practice today to do this, so I wouldn’t say that we are instrumentalising art. ARA So you are open to art that is provocative, challenging? ET Yes, yes. You need to highlight a problem before you can think of how to resolve it. When art highlights issues, it’s often seen as adding to divisions in society. But sometimes it is necessary to acknowledge that these are problems before we figure out what we can do. ARA What issues do you hope the art that you commission can address? ET Decolonisation. Differences in ideology. The environment. And also what a lot of artists like to engage with: the neoliberal structures in which we live, that they blame for a lot of issues we face in society. ARA You wear two hats as director of NGS and SAM. Do you think that there is a lack of top arts administrators in Singapore and the region? What do you think can be done to address this issue? ET I’ve often wondered how this came about. It’s really about being at the wrong place at the wrong time. [laughs] But it was necessary for someone to define and distinguish the differences between the two institutions, which I would like to think has somewhat happened. [Succession] is something that I’ve been working on a lot at NGS and SAM. Our HR teams are very conscious that their roles are to create cultural leaders for Singapore. ARA In 2012 you led the launch of the Gillman Barracks art gallery cluster. Given the exit of several tenants over the years, do you think that the plan to seed an art district is more challenging than you had anticipated? ET Unfortunately I had to leave to join NGS soon after Gillman Barracks was launched, so I can’t really comment on how the cluster was managed. But I think the idea of clustering is still relevant, whether it happens organically or in a more structured manner. In Singapore, because land use is so controlled, structuring this district is the only way it could have happened. If you look around the world, there are also such clusters developing. I just came across two new ones, Komunuma in Paris and Lowenbraukunst in Zürich, which has been operating a bit longer. The idea of clustering has not lost its relevance. I hope to see [Gillman Barracks] come back again.

18/08/2021 16:02

ARA Unlike most countries in Southeast Asia, state funding for the arts in Singapore is a key contributor to the arts ecosystem. In your view, what are the pros and cons of this?

is an existing arts landscape and arts ecology in the region, of which NGS and SAM comprise. I’d like to think of them as nodes rather than a hub – connecting different artistic activities within the region as well as the international to Southeast Asia.

ET The obvious answer is that diversity of funding is healthier. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. The fact that our government is willing to invest so much into art is a sign that our public is more accepting of the role of artists, art institutions and museums in our country. Imagine if the government were to spend S$400m 20 years ago to build a new museum. I think there would have been more voices saying, ‘What a big waste of money’. Now, I’m sure if enough Singaporeans come out to say, ‘Don’t waste money on art’, the government will cut down our funding. It’s very simple. The fact that the public is still happy shows that they feel our art institutions are important.

ARA Southeast Asia is becoming more prominent on the global art scene (with Ruangrupa curating Documenta, for example). Is there something that holds together the art of this region?

ARA Is there an ongoing ambition to promote Singapore as the hub of art in Southeast Asia? Might the decentralisation envisaged for SAM be replicated on a more regional scale?

ET One of the distinguishing features of art in SEA is collectivism. There’s always been a certain sense of communalism and shared artistic production. Actually, I would say

ET I’ve always hated the word ‘hub’. ‘Hub’ presupposes that it pulls everything towards the centre. We have to recognise that there

Choy Ka Fai, CosmicWander: Expedition, 2021 (installation view, Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore). Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

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ARA Given the outsize resources and the extent of the scholarship invested into Southeast Asian art, Singapore does somewhat play a leadership role in the region… ET It’s about how we go about it. You talked about research and scholarship. In doing so, we often work with scholars and researchers in the region because we know we don’t hold all the knowledge, particularly about the different countries.

it goes beyond art practice to being a way of living in Southeast Asia, which is less focused on the individual ego but more the collective spirit. ARA Many museums across the West are talking about decolonising their collections and practices to acknowledge the role of empire in shaping their institutions. How is this project going at NGS? ET At NGS we’ve already started thinking about how our definitions of art and modernity have been framed by EuroAmerican definitions. We’ve been expanding our understanding and looking at how we can add marginalised practices to our art histories and collections. At SAM this is translated to taking note of practices we don’t acknowledge as art yet, but have a form of artistic expression in them. ARA At the preview of the latest NGS show, Something New Must Turn Up, you mentioned women artists as one of the gaps you want to address. ET Yes, we realised that unfortunately only slightly more than 10 percent of our collection at both NGS and SAM are by women artists. This is something we’re looking into, particularly for the collection of NGS. ara

ArtReview Asia

17/08/2021 14:19

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28/07/2021 11:21 03/08/2021 13:42

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劳瑞·普罗沃斯特

LARRY ACHIAMPONG

郑波

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ZHENG BO

17 JULY – 17 OCTOBER

阿德里亚诺·科斯塔

ADRIANO COSTA

艾萨·霍克森

EISA JOCSON

里彭·乔杜里与何子彦

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毛利悠子与大卫·霍维茨

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JAC LEIRNER

史莱姆引擎

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WOLFGANG TILLMANS

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12:53 03/08/2021 13:45

Art Featured

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Anand Patwardhan Interview by Mark Rappolt

Children at a 1979 screening of work by Anand Patwardhan

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Censored at home and lauded abroad, the Indian filmmaker talks about the limits of tolerance, eternal optimism and why he is not an ‘artist’

Bombay: Our City (still), 1985, dir Anand Patwardhan, 75 min

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Born in Mumbai, Anand Patwardhan is one of India’s leading documentary filmmakers. Over his five-decade-long career he has produced 17 feature-length films and numerous shorter works that broadly tackle issues of social and political injustice, the rise of nationalism and religious fundamentalism, and the iniquities of India’s caste system. While his work has been praised internationally – in the form of awards and festival appearances, as well screenings in art institutions such as MoMA and Tate Modern, and the inclusion of his work in visual art festivals such as Documenta 13 and the 2014 Gwangju Biennale – Patwardhan has spent much of his life fighting its censorship in the land of his birth. Bombay: Our City (1985) was only broadcast after a four-year court case, while Father, Son, and Holy War (1995) was screened on India’s national television network in 2006 after a decade-long legal battle and a Supreme Court order that it should be shown without cuts. War and Peace (2002) was originally refused certification unless a total of 21 cuts were made and was banned for a year while the director took the Indian government to court, eventually winning the right to screen it with no cuts at all. Among numerous other awards, it eventually won the National Film Award for Best Non-Feature Film in 2004. His first film, Kraanti Ki Tarangein/ Waves of Revolution (1974), documented the movement and protests against corruption and state oppression in the Indian state of Bihar. His most recent film, Vivek/Reason (2018), a four-hour investigation into the dismantling of India’s secular democracy and the violence that comes with it, has yet to receive a theatrical screening in India (a Hindi version

has made its way to YouTube, and it was part of a full retrospective of Patwardhan’s films that screened on the documentary platform OVID.tv earlier this year). The seventy-one-yearold talked to ArtReview Asia from his home in Mumbai about what keeps him going, his latest campaign against censorship, his hopes for the future of documentary filmmaking and why he doesn’t consider himself an artist. ArtReview AsiA Over the last month or so you’ve been campaigning against the Cinematograph (Draft) Amendment bill? Anand Patwardhan Yes, but not enough people are speaking out. Many mainstream filmmakers who make big-budget films don’t want to take risks, so toe the line no matter what happens. As you know, by law, every film produced in the country has first to be certified as being publicly viewable by the Central Board of Film Certification [CBFC]. I have fought and won many legal battles against the CBFC in the past, and in the end my films were certified without any cuts. The new proposed bill is crazy – it allows the present rightwing government to remove clearances that were granted under previous governments. All of my work is endangered. Clearly this kind of law, while it pretends to protect ‘public morality’ and ‘sensibility’, is aimed at the human-rightsoriented films we made, films which somehow got through the system in the past, some bruised and some intact. ARA Is that symptomatic of a more general contraction in the scope for free speech in India at the moment?

AP There is little free speech now in India. Here and there people do speak out and the government cracks down and there are different levels of crackdown. People have been murdered, sometimes jailed, sometimes their work is prevented from reaching the public. Generally, the ways of reaching audiences are shrinking: both because of government actions but also due to the pandemic. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, I haven’t done any big public screenings. We’re now doing them on the internet, where you get a few hundred or at best a few thousand views at a time. ARA I guess an online audience is a different kind of audience. AP It’s people who can afford computers, who have electricity and all of that. It’s people watching one screen, usually alone and having no discussion with others. Half the fun of films like mine is the discussion after the screening. I’ve been doing this ever since I started making films on celluloid, before the digital age. We carried large 16mm projectors and screens and held discussions after. The advent of lighter video projectors made things easier – we did lots of screenings in working-class neighbourhoods, hoisting huge, sewn-up bedsheet screens on bamboo frames dug into the earth. ARA Is the topic of discussion and debate and how you can engender that something you’re already thinking about when you are making the films? AP I’m not consciously thinking about how people will respond to the films. I don’t want to oversimplify things so people will get what I’m

A 1978 screening of Anand Patwardhan’s Prisoner of Conscience (1978)

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saying. Perhaps I don’t worry about that because I’m not a super intellectual in the sense that I never use extreme theoretical language in my films anyway. Anyone with common sense can follow them. I make films assuming that audiences have at least the same intelligence as me. My experience with working-class audiences and even with the fairly young is that our films are very accessible. The discussions that follow have been an important learning experience for me. I don’t reduce complexity, but I do make different language versions for different regions of India. ARA What inspires you to embark on a film project? AP I’m never impatient to jump into making my next film. The process of screening films already made takes years. So there are often long gaps in between filmmaking. It’s not that I think about a project, write a proposal and wait for funding. Events in real life trigger a film. It’s only when I get pretty upset that I actually end up making the film, when I can’t avoid it anymore. I often don’t know that I’m actually making a film until I’m well into it. I have my own equipment and often shoot things of interest over a period of time. If that interest is sustained, slowly a film emerges from it. At other times no final film gets made and the footage remains as an archive, or bits and pieces get posted on YouTube or Facebook as a talking-point quickie. ARA What makes you upset? AP The last film I made before Reason [2018] was a film called Jai Bhim Comrade [2011],

a three-hour-plus film that took me 14 years to make. It was triggered by the suicide of a poet-musician Vilas Ghogre, who was a Dalit. Dalit literally means ‘the oppressed’. Historically Dalits were treated as ‘untouchables’ and are often still treated as such. Their greatest contemporary leader was Dr B.R. Ambedkar [1891–1956], who broke barriers against education to win doctorates from Columbia University and the London School of Economics before returning to India to fight for an egalitarian society. Dr. Ambedkar led the team that

“It’s only when I get pretty upset that I actually end up making the film, when I can’t avoid it anymore. I often don’t know that I’m actually making a film until I’m well into it” drafted India’s Constitution and became Independent India’s first Law Minister. Shortly before he passed away, in 1956, he, along with thousands of his followers, walked out of the Hindu religion that had enforced an oppressive caste system, to embrace Buddhism, a religion that did not believe in a caste. Vilas Ghogre was inspired by Dr. Ambedkar but had also become a Marxist. His song Who’s city is this? runs through my film on the homeless, Bombay: Our City [1985]. Twelve years later, in the Dalit colony of Ramabai Nagar, someone in the middle of the night placed a garland of

footwear on their statue of Dr. Ambedkar. When the residents of the colony woke up, they found their statue desecrated and came out on the street to protest. Within half an hour police arrived and shot into the demonstrators and into the colony, killing ten people on the spot. Vilas, who lived not far away, visited the colony and got so depressed that he hanged himself in his tiny room. On a board in the room he had written in chalk, ‘Long live Revolution’ and ‘Long live Ambedkarite unity’. Vilas was an Ambedkarite who had become a Marxist, yet before he died, he wore a blue bandana on his head (blue is the Ambedkarite colour) to reassert his Dalit identity rather than his Marxist identity. Jai Bhim Comrade, which began as a homage to Vilas, became an exploration of class and caste and how these interplay with each other, at times converging and at times diverging. I used to help produce audiocassettes by recording Vilas’s songs, which his group would then sell, so I had many of his songs on tape but had visuals of him singing just the one song filmed for Bombay: Our City. So I started filming other living poet-musicians who followed his tradition, and that’s where Jai Bhim Comrade [JBC] led me. Of course the film also followed court cases that began after the Ramabai killings, both against the police, and the police’s counter-cases against the people they had shot at. The trigger point for a film might be one thing, but a film doesn’t necessarily stay there, it takes off from there. The film that I made before JBC was War and Peace [2002], which was triggered by the nuclear tests that India

Anand Patwardhan (right) at a 1985 screening

Autumn 2021

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performed [in 1998], and then Pakistan did a few weeks later. For that I ended up filming for over four years in India, Pakistan, Japan and America. I was already shooting JBC from 1997 on, so the making of War and Peace overlapped till the latter got completed in 2002. Neither film had an official ‘budget’ and both were made with rudimentary equipment. More generally, over the last few decades I’ve made films about different aspects of religious fundamentalism. Especially the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. I was born a Hindu, and Hindus are the majority community in India who are increasingly being socialised into paranoia about a relatively tiny Muslim minority. Being from the majority community, I feel a sense of responsibility. ARA And a sense of guilt? AP It’s a feeling of anguish really. It’s so stupid that an over 80 percent majority starts to believe they’re insecure because they are brainwashed into fearing a 14 percent minority. I’m referring to Muslims here, but there is a bigger elephant in the room, which is the caste system that has oppressed Dalits and other ‘lower’ castes for thousands of years. Here I do have a feeling of guilt, because I belong to the so-called upper caste. I’m part of a privileged community that has benefited from the caste system. Benefited materially, yes, but intellectually the false pride of caste impoverishes all those who refuse to question their own privilege. ARA You work in the genre of documentary and I think that the common-sense definition of that

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would be that it has a stronger relationship to truth than a work of fiction. AP Mostly, yes, though there can be truthful fiction as there can be documentaries that promote falsehood. But at least the kind of documentaries I make don’t invent what is in front of the camera. I have very rarely reenacted events, and whenever I did, I signalled this as reenaction and not as documentary footage. With documentary, my creativity comes in the editing process and not so much in the filming process. My films usually take a long time to make. I shoot something, look at it for a long time and then know what else I need to shoot to complement that. The editing process also helps the filming process because it leads me in a direction. I’m not really self-conscious about my process. When we’ve gone out on a shoot and I come back home and start editing, I reduce my materials so that I don’t have to watch hundreds of hours. I reduce the material shot for that day or the last few days into a sequence, leaving out the stuff that’s not usable and keeping whatever I think may conceivably be useful. So I have lots of little pieces of the film that emerge over a period of time, and it’s like a jigsaw puzzle, which later on falls into place. I make the story much later, not at the beginning. When I’ve actually got a body of material, which I think is saying something, then I start to break it down into its elements and then juggle them around to see how best the story can be told. The narrative part of it, the parts Jai Bhim Comrade (still), 2011, dir Anand Patwardhan, 169 min

where you hear me or a narrator speaking or have intertitles doing the same job, are actually the moments where I wasn’t able to make the material speak for itself. ARA So would the perfect film then have no voiceover? AP Yes, probably. I have made some films without any voiceover at all. Bombay: Our City is one of them, but there are several where I didn’t need to say anything. The material spoke for itself and all I needed to do was to organise it, but there are also films which have historical content, which I can’t film and so there’s archival material, narration, animation, etc, to make the linkages. ARA Do you believe in an absolute truth? AP No, there’s never an absolute truth. By definition, everything is subjective, so the idea that I’m telling the truth is just my truth. Anybody who looks at a situation will tell their truth. They have to be true to themselves and that’s the only thing you can do, because you are by definition subjective. ARA Ideas of democracy have been present in most of your work. Is that something you feel increasingly pessimistic about in relation to India? AP It’s a cyclical process. Basically, I think that we’re obviously at a very low downturn, probably the darkest period since Independence, but it’s not going to stay that way, that is clear. You can already see things that are happening that are going to overturn the system as it is right now. I’m hoping that people will soon reach the end of their tolerance for rising fascism.

ArtReview Asia

20/08/2021 14:53

Bombay: Our City (still), 1985, dir Anand Patwardhan, 75 min

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Poster for A Time to Rise, 1981, dir Anand Patwardhan, 40 min. Poster designed by Katharine Guttkind and Patwardhan

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ARA Your films don’t shy away from tackling difficult situations, but do you think you are optimistic in the sense you just mentioned? AP I’m always optimistic. Not as a political choice, but because it’s a form of survival. If you’re not optimistic, then you commit suicide, either physically or mentally. ARA Are you optimistic of the future, then, of documentary cinema, given the obstacles that seem to be placed in your way? AP I think that while there are many great films made, I’m very perturbed by the way in which films are produced. I’ve been to so many film festivals, international film festivals that are very famous, which concentrate on marketing, concentrate on selling. The Sheffield International Documentary Festival [where Patwardhan won the Inspiration Award in 2013], for instance, even calls its most popular section ‘The Meet Market’ (pun obviously intended), where all the commissioning editors, sales agents and filmmakers gather. Amsterdam and other famous docufestivals do the same. Almost all festivals have this major focus on selling and buying, and so you have commissioning editors from a few Western, well-off countries that gather together in a small group, and then they basically vet the possible subjects and ways of filmmaking. Filmmakers play the game because the only way they can raise money is to prepare a five-minute piece that will attract the commissioning editor. What ends up happening is that people get what they already know. The presumed

consumer is an outsider, completely separated from the subjects of the films. I’m talking now mainly about films from India, or Africa, or films from any countries that were once described as ‘Third World’. They’re being made for and consumed by first-world countries because that’s where the money is. The first-world countries determine what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it. In the old days – I’m talking about 25, 30 years ago – when the system – the buying and selling – was not fully in place, there was emphasis on the individual film that got made by hook or by crook. The filmmakers somehow managed to produce a film, out of a grassroots need for that film to be made, and then the film got noticed and travelled around the world. But now it rarely happens that way. It happens in reverse. It happens that films first get commissioned, then get made. ARA When you talk about grassroots needs, are you talking about the needs from the point of view of an audience or for the truth that should be told? AP I’m talking about the need for certain issues to be highlighted and shown to the world in a language accessible to the subjects of the film. You don’t necessarily see in the world the films that are the most important to see. You see the films that are the best marketed. ARA So what makes an important film? AP Films that promote democracy and egalitarianism or fight hatred and climate change are just a few examples. I’m not saying these films are not being made, but they’re

being made not organically but in a mechanical, preconceived way. The gatekeepers think that anything else is too difficult for their audiences and they decide what their audiences want. My kind of filmmaking actually falls on its face, because I don’t work that way. My films cannot be easily slotted, because, for one, they don’t adhere to a fixed timeframe and formula. My last film was four hours long. It’s almost impossible to sell it to any television company in the world. Where it could have been easily slotted would have been places like Netflix and Amazon, who could easily have serialised it. But they’re afraid of the content. Afraid of being thrown out of India. It’s a lucrative market and anything strongly critical of the government or its ideology will cause them trouble. Even Mira Nair’s film A Suitable Boy [2020, a BBC TV production] got into trouble because it showed a romance between a Hindu and a Muslim. Netflix didn’t take it off, but there was a lot of noise made by the rightwing. Since then, apart from the new Cinematograph Act Amendment, the government also wants to control OTT platforms by saying that if enough people complain about a film, then the government can recall the permit to show the film. All they have to do is to mobilise a few RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an extreme Hindu nationalist organisation] people to write in complaints. Even YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have been made to play dog. ARA In some ways, you’re part of a network of activists who have been working for a long time in India to address issues that lie at the heart of the country’s

Reason (still), 2018, dir Anand Patwardhan, 95 min (part 1) and 123 min (part 2)

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societal divisions. And your filmmaking is suggestive of this activist approach in the sense that you turn up to a protest or you turn up to a meeting and record it. Without, as is often the case in films that are shown in the context of the artworld, it having been commissioned by a foundation or a museum, or being marketed for sale by a commercial art gallery. Yet your films have been shown in art festivals like the Gwangju Biennale [2014] and Documenta 13 [2012] and attract the interest of numerous curators in art institutions. Do you think these are two separate worlds? AP I don’t know much about the artworld. And I prefer the word citizen to the word activist. While sometimes I shoot in places where I already know the people well, at other times I haven’t spent a lot of time doing research with the community before I start filming. I often make friends as I go along. Get to know people, shoot over a period of time, that’s one way. In the case of Bombay: Our City we were trying to stop the demolition campaign that the city had launched against the homeless. For legal purposes, I was taking pictures for a lawyers group that was fighting the demolitions. Eventually, I started shooting on film, and then that became Bombay: Our City. There’s often a kind of activism that has begun before the film began. Even with the very first film that I made, Kraanti Ki Tarangein/Waves of Revolution, in 1974 [which documents the protests, marches and meetings related to the Bihar movement against corruption and state oppression, and is dedicated to ‘the revolutionary people of India’], I wasn’t there to make a film. I was there without a camera, but then on a particular day, when

a demonstration was planned, the people in the movement said I should take photographs to record the police violence. In the end I borrowed a Super-8 camera from a friend and then projected it onto a screen and refilmed this with a 16mm camera borrowed from a friend. ARA What makes an artist? AP I think that is important to discuss. What is art? Is an artist an artist because the artist says he or she is an artist? How do you decide that something is art and something is documentary and something is propaganda and

“For me, all those who are actually fighting against injustice are on the same side, and may our tribe increase till we rise to a crescendo” something is agitprop? All those labels have been thrown. For me, art is something that the artist does not decide. Art is something that is decided by posterity, art is something that happens because, over a long period of time, it remains relevant or gains in value. Something communicates across language, across geographies, across time. I’ve never called myself an artist because I don’t think anybody has the right to do that. For me, art is a byproduct of the work that you’re doing and it’s not something that you can selfconsciously create. Art happens in spite of you, not because of you.

ARA Is it pleasing to you when you’re invited to be part of art festivals? AP It’s pleasing in some ways, because for all these years, it didn’t happen and now, maybe accidentally, or because things that are considered political or ‘progressive’ are now entering the artworld in small ways, it is. But most of the time, what I see in the artworld is not politics, but the perfume of politics. It’s a very displaced kind of politics, where you see just a little touch of it, but don’t get into the depth or detail. ARA Yes, I was going to ask, do you think it’s any different from the Meet Market you were talking about earlier, with regard to documentary film festivals? AP One thing that I never have understood is what the economy of the artworld is? We’re talking not just about the moving image, but paintings, sculpture or whatever things people collect. Who collects it? Where does the economy come from? Obviously, it comes from the very well-to-do. What if my work enters that space? I don’t say no to it, but it doesn’t make me call myself an artist. It’s just that I’m glad that some people think that there’s importance in what is being said and that importance is not just the politics of what is being said, but even the way that it’s being said. I chose the documentary medium over a process of time, because I was interested in material I found in real life, and not in what I created myself. It’s not my creativity that I’m trying to draw attention to, it’s actually other people’s creativity and other people’s situations that I’m documenting, and juxtaposing so that

Prisoners of Conscience (still), 1978, dir Ananda Patwardhan, 45 min

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people will think about it. A documentary film is like photography that talks, as opposed to photographs that might rob the images of the people in it without giving them voice. When people speak, you are allowing a process of communication to take place between different sections of society. Every society is deeply stratified, and Indian society more so than most with the caste system and with the huge disparity between the rich and the poor. This act of just taking people’s voices from one section of society to another is not only a process of taking the voices of the dispossessed and showing them among the possessed, but also the other way around. We take the voices of people who have power and let people who don’t have power look at what they’re saying. It’s a process of cross-fertilisation. ARA But this can have its own problematics. As you said earlier, you yourself belong to an upper caste, and in the past you’ve been criticised, albeit by just one or two people, for making films about Dalits but not being a Dalit yourself. AP Thankfully the criticism has never come from people in the Dalit or working-class neighbourhoods where I’ve done hundreds of screenings after the films were made, and where they were wonderfully received. Indeed, the fact that I am ‘upper caste’ by birth was either never noticed or was never seen as a bad thing in itself. People were empowered by the fact that they were on the big screen and that their voice now had the potential of reaching out to many. The criticism you mention has come from a few academics influenced by postmodernism for

whom the very idea of class solidarity and the idea of building a rainbow alliance against injustice has been reduced to ‘What right does A or B have to say something unless they come from the exact same background?’ If that were the norm I would not be able to make films about patriarchy, about the homeless, about workers, about oppressed minorities or indeed about any injustice that I witnessed but did not experience personally. I would then be reduced to making films about my own navel. I’m not saying that there is absolutely no merit to such an argument. It’s true that if the only voices that could be heard were voices from the upper caste, and upper class talking about injustice to the poor and the powerless, that would be a serious problem, but that is not the case. I don’t see this as a competition. I think that thousands of people from all sections of society must speak out about injustice, and it’s beginning to happen as technology becomes accessible. For me, all those who are actually fighting against injustice are on the same side, and may our tribe increase till we rise to a crescendo. As someone born into privilege, I always felt a greater responsibility to speak up because privilege gave me some slight protection. A Dalit filmmaker might still get away because the present government is wooing the Dalit vote, but had a Muslim made In the Name of God/Ram Ke Naam [1992] or Reason it is unlikely he/she would be alive today. In fact, sections of the extreme-right Hindutva have killed even upper-caste Hindu opponents, as Reason highlighted. In 1948 Gandhi too was murdered by the Hindu upper-caste rightwing, so the

protection provided by one’s birth caste, while it exists, is not exactly bulletproof. I think that those who don’t see my films as acts of solidarity with the struggles that are taking place but choose to reduce them to acts of appropriation aren’t actually watching the films. They’re just watching me, and that too from a distance. If there were a critique of the film itself, I would take it seriously, but that has not happened, except from the rightwing, which of course attacks my films incessantly as ‘antiHindu’ or ‘anti-national’. I would appreciate and learn from any critique made by nonrightists who actually looked at how my films were made or what the films were saying. It’s just that, at this point in academic history, identity politics has become fashionable and allows some people to become mentally lazy and attribute everything to birth. But it is a double-edged weapon. Identity politics is most useful when oppressed people need to assert their identity to come together, but the moment it goes beyond that and everything is reduced to identity, then you lose out on the opportunity to build alliances. You lose out on the opportunity to build a viable movement that can annihilate caste or overthrow other systems of injustice. In fact, you end up perpetuating the injustice that is going on because you subdivide all resistance by caste, class and gender. ARA I presume that the worst thing that could happen to you is if everyone liked one of your films and agreed with everything in it. AP Yes, the worst thing that can happen is all praise, or all criticism, and no discussion. ara

War and Peace (still), 2002, dir Ananda Patwardhan, 135 min all images Courtesy Anand Patwardhan

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The Real Cultural Appropriation In Southeast Asia the antiquities trade is under closer scrutiny than ever before, but if the region is to keep hold of and preserve its heritage, there’s a long way further to go by Max Crosbie-Jones

During the early 1920s, the American poet and playwright Arthur Davison Ficke did some opportunistic plundering at the ruins of Angkor Wat. There, while rambling around the ‘finely proportioned and lofty pyramidal temple’ of Takeo, he had come across two dark, basalt sculptures: one of the Hindu deity Shiva ‘standing in a lordly attitude of repose’, the other his ‘delicately but powerfully moulded’ wife Parvati. Astounded at their beauty, he was suddenly overcome with a mixture of awe and acquisitiveness. Before he knew it, Parvati’s loose head – ‘severe and magnificent, noble and sensual, disdainful and exquisite’ – was in his possession. A sleepless night ensued. ‘My triumph, and the desire to look incessantly at that beautiful cold proud face, kept me awake,’ he wrote in his 1921 account for The North American Review. ‘For me, the might and majesty of Angkor was all concentrated in that head.’ Mostly, though, he felt vile for having committed ‘a terrible and irreparable injury’ to a sublime work of art, analogous in his mind with ‘the Winged Victory which now stands headless at the top of the great stairway of the Louvre’. Come dawn, Parvati was whole again. Ficke’s self-aggrandising anecdote puts a happy spin on a depressing trope: while many foreign admirers have purloined the stone, bronze or gold treasures of the Khmer empire, whose divine kings ruled over parts of modern-day Cambodia and Thailand between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, few have handed them back so quickly or enthusiastically. Two years later, an intrepid young André Malraux, the French author who went on to become a national icon and minister of cultural affairs, made it as far as the capital Phnom Penh before being caught with his ox-drawn caravan of booty: around 650kg of sculptures and bas-reliefs hacked from the Banteay Srei complex. A trial in Phnom Penh followed, but there was no prison sentence and never any contrition on Malraux’s part. In Angkor’s Temples in the Modern Era: War, Pride and Tourist Dollars (2021), John Burgess describes how pilfering was such an issue under French colonial rule, which ended in 1953, that signs beseeching visitors not to destroy or remove objects were erected; major sculptures were moved to depots for safe keeping; and, to disincentivise theft, genuine items deemed of no archaeological interest were put up for sale. And this is to say nothing of the ancient antiquities removed by their self-appointed custodians. Under the banner of patrimoine, or cultural heritage, many sculptures were hauled out of the jungle using rope pulleys and lowered onto rafts for transport to the museums of

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France, where they remain to this day. Others were sold to foreign institutions in high-priced sales, or exchanged in return for museumquality objects from other countries. But while such cases hail from a time when Western imperial powers and their citizenry didn’t know better (or so the fading excuse goes), any last traces of Old World romanticism and derring-do have been dispelled by the Douglas Latchford case. Born in Bombay to English parents, this self-styled ‘adventurer scholar’ – who died in Bangkok, aged eighty-eight, in August 2020 – was, in recent years, accused of being the conduit in a major antiquities looting and smuggling network that flowed from Cambodia’s sylvan Khmer temples through rural Thailand and Bangkok, then on through the moneyed capillaries of the artworld. He is said to have done this as civil wars, rebel groups and genocidal Khmer Rouge-rule ravaged the country – and to have thrived on this conflict, not in spite of it. In the eyes of his critics, a veil of respectability and a veneer of scholarship allowed him to operate in plain sight. A successful businessman and bodybuilding impresario who made his fortune in pharmaceuticals and property, he had dual Thai-British citizenship and friends in high places. In Cambodia, he donated money and the occasional item to the national museum, and even accepted an award for his ‘unique contribution to scholarship and understanding of Khmer culture’. He also self-published three quasi-academic books, among them 2004’s Adoration and Glory, a lavish compendium of Khmer stone treasures ‘dedicated to the Khmer people’. Containing sumptuous images, essays and admiring testimonials from Cambodia’s culture and museum ministries, its high production values now stand accused of masking a calculated goal: to launder anonymous private collections (his, we can assume) of suspect origins. With many of the beguiling stone figures shorn of arms, legs or heads, it is also a glossy catalogue of the horrors meted out by looters. In the last decade of Latchford’s life, a few events caused the facade to crack. In 2012 a tenth-century Duryodhana statue broken at the ankles went up for auction at Sotheby’s, only to be withdrawn at Cambodia’s last-minute request. The subsequent legal case brought by the US government, which alleged it had been looted in 1972 from the Prasat Chen temple at Koh Ker – a remote tenth-century complex once studded with statuary – and then sold on by a Bangkok-based collector who knew it was stolen, led to its return in 2014. Four other fine Khmer statues also suspected to have flowed through Latchford’s network,

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Engraving from Louis Delaporte, Voyage au Cambodge: l’Architecture Khmer, 1880, depicting the transport, via Preah-Khan’s waters, of sculpture headed for France

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among them Bhima – a tenth-century sculpture featured in Adoration channel that was essentially fixed for several decades, in terms of its and Glory and identified as the twin of the Sotheby’s statue – were like- roles, the occupants of those roles and their trading relationships’. It wise repatriated to Cambodia in the same timeframe by the Norton comprised two networks: one running through northwest Cambodia Simon Museum, Pasadena, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and directed by local gangsters; the other through the north of the and a private collector. More restitutions followed. In effect, the game country, run by members of the Khmer Rouge. was up: a coterie of lawyers and researchers had begun to expose the Thought to have originated in around 1970, shortly after the start litany of half-baked provenances and subterfuge that served Latchford of Cambodia’s civil war, both channels are said to have funnelled and his transnational network of collaborators so well for so long. looted statues via oxcart, truck and even elephant into Eastern Upon his death, with a 2019 indictment by US authorities still unre- Thailand. Receiving them in Bangkok was a Janus-like figure with solved, his daughter appeared to concede as much when she volun- ‘one face looking into the illicit past of an artefact and one looking into tarily gifted his entire collection – over 100 pieces of Khmer sculpture, its public future where that dark past is concealed’, write Mackenzie architecture, gold and bronze – to the Cambodian people. ‘The collec- and Davis. No mere middleman, he or she performed a sanitising tion simply became a burden to me,’ she told The Art Newspaper this year. role while also being the broker-cum-ringmaster and, therefore, But while the artworld turned against Latchford, it barely humbled ‘the real looter’. Delving into the lucrative Bangkok-centred trade in him. In a 2008 interview with Apollo magazine, he ushered a journalist Khmer art, both fakes and originals, the reports also implicated the into his softly lit London Mayfair apartment, where he proceeded to customs authorities, whom they say had ‘no appetite’ for restricting show off his fastidiously accumulated assortment of fullsize Khmer the export of any country’s cultural heritage ‘other than their own deities lined up against the walls, some drenched in gold jewellery. Buddhist pieces’. ‘The collection is not overwhelming in size but the museum in Phnom If true, this is no small scandal, especially as those exposing it Penh agrees that the pieces are the best of their type,’ he said. By 2014, have hinted at menacing undercurrents. Writing in The Diplomat in however, he cut a more cagey, reticent figure. In The Stolen Warriors, August 2020, Davis, executive director at The Antiquities Coalition, in Wolfgang Luck’s 2014 documentary about the Sotheby’s case, he agreed Washington, DC, stated: ‘While investigating his [Latchford’s] network, to speak on camera, only with one precondition: do not film the right- I was told more than once to drop my inquiries. A Bangkok journalist, hand side of his Bangkok apartment – the side groaning with Khmer whom I tried to interest in the story, flatly refused, citing Latchford’s connections to the Thai military and treasures. He then denied ever owning the going assassination rate.’ But the the Duryodhana statue or being part Under the banner of patrimoine, big story here, bigger even perhaps of a smuggling network: ‘Their imagmany sculptures were hauled out of ination has gone wild… They’ve seen than the full magnitude of Latchford’s the jungle and lowered onto rafts too many Indiana Jones movies’. He also crimes, or the grubby question of who alluded to a secret video that proved sold what, to whom and when, is for transport to the museums of France his innocence. “However,” intimates where the remaining Khmer treasures the narrator, “he cannot allow it to be shown on TV. If he did, he says it are, and what is being done to prevent more such losses. would incriminate one of the leading Thai families as big-time smugAs the latest return – a sculpture of Hindu deity Skanda riding a glers. We have no way of verifying his claims.” peacock, voluntarily forfeited to US federal authorities by an unnamed While on the back foot in his twilight years, Latchford appeared owner in July – shows, unravelling Latchford’s ties with international unassailable in Thailand – the country in which he had lived for over dealers, auction houses, private collectors, galleries and museums is key. 60 years and that accommodated him and his collecting habits. It was But again, the Thailand connection is also germane: just as Cambodia in late-1960s Thailand that he began scouring Bangkok’s now defunct is welcoming home Latchford’s plunder, the country in which it ended ‘Thieves Market’ for the Khmer antiques trickling in from Cambodia. up or transited is pushing for the return of its own lost antiquities, It was in Thailand that he acquired his knowledge of Khmer antiq- some of Khmer origin. In tandem, the Thai government, which has uities, by travelling, along bumpy roads through the dry landscapes had a bilateral agreement with Cambodia concerning the trafficking of the northeast, to see and touch the eleventh- and twelfth-century and restitution of cultural property since 2000, has announced Khmer temple-city ruins of Phnom Rung, Muang Tam and Phimai. a belated plan to ratify the relevant international conventions. ‘It was an open-air encyclopedia,’ he told Apollo. Such recollections On a recent weekday morning, I went to see a temporary exhibition may seem innocuous, but of these trips over half a century ago, he also of two hand-carved sandstone lintels that disappeared in mysterious boasted casually of hunting down offsite sculptures. ‘I would show circumstances from two of Thailand’s Khmer temples, Buriram provlocal governors a picture of a sculpture and ask them if they’d seen ince’s Prasat Nong Hong and Sa Kaeo province’s Prasat Khao Lon, back anything like it,’ he recalled. One that he claims to have somehow in the 1960s, but were recently handed back by the Asian Art Museum ‘bought’ from a field in Thailand’s Surin province and brought to in San Francisco. Mounted on raised pedestals, these rough-hewn Bangkok was, he added nonchalantly, acquired by John D. Rockefeller eleventh-century architectural relics – one known to have been among and eventually ended up in the Asia Society in New York. the 7,700 Asian artworks and antiquities donated, starting in 1959, to An even more audacious Khmer statue trafficking ring – one with the Asian Art Museum by Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage, the Thailand as the laundering transit point – was later exposed in the other purchased by it in 1968 from a Paris dealer – are the current field research of Simon Mackenzie and Tess centrepieces at the Issara Winitchai Throne Hall, facing page Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, Davis. While Latchford is not named in their a richly decorated building originally used as a c. 725, copper alloy inlaid with silver two studies from 2014–15, their investigations in royal audience chamber but now forming part of and glass or obsidian, 142 × 57 cm. Cambodia and Thailand uncovered a ‘trafficking Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Bangkok’s National Museum complex.

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On display through September, their curlicued leaf motifs and are likely to include several highly prized bronze Bodhisattva statues weatherworn Hindu deities – Yama riding a buffalo, Indra kneeling from Prasat Hin Khao Plai Bat II, a tenth-century Khmer brick temple above a Kala face – appear out of place amid the gilded Rattanakosin- in Buriram province (The Met and the Norton Simon Museum are dynasty artistry and immaculately staged Theravada Buddhist among the museums in possession of the latter). symbology of the hall. But while slightly jarring, this display is a stark The extent of Latchford’s involvement in these cases, if he is involved reminder of how the story of the Khmer empire has been absorbed at all, is unknown (although my hunch is that the chances are high: on into Thai, as well as Cambodian, history. For much of the twentieth the British Museum website, for example, a ‘D A J Latchford’ is listed as century, the two countries were locked having donated two Khmer-era lintels in disputes over land and the Khmer and three Dvaravati boundary stones, Such was the pilfering under French all of Thai origin, between 1970 and ruins that stand on it, as borders estabcolonial rule that signs were erected 1975). What is clear, however, is that lished by the French were contested. beseeching visitors not to remove objects the Thai authorities want to keep a Throughout the key defining events – tighter lid on the export of all antiques Siam’s 1907 return to Cambodia of the province containing Angkor Wat (renamed Siem Reap, or ‘Defeat of and religious artefacts going forwards. The exhibition at the National Siam’), Angkor’s meteoric rise as a tourist destination, Cambodia’s Museum proudly chronicles the many steps – the years of rallying and 1962 international court victory against the Thais over the border- negotiation in close collaboration with the US government’s Homeland straddling Preah Vihear temple – those Khmer temple ruins still on Security Investigations team – that led to the repatriation of the lintels Thai soil (referred to typically as ‘Lopburi’ or ‘Lopburi-style’, in refer- (for its part, the Asian Art Museum claims that it had already planned ence to the ancient city of the same name) have steadily grown in reli- to return them, prior to receiving a US Department of Justice civil giopolitical significance. And not without some justification: a thread complaint last October). But after admitting that this complex bilateral of Khmer influence winds through Thailand’s national story. process was ‘tedious and resource intensive’, National Museum also Still, a striking divergence in nationalist rhetoric is clear. For says it must be avoided in the future through better prevention. ‘This many Cambodians, such returns expose raw, stinging wounds as well would not be too hard,’ the exhibition text states, ‘if all Thais are deeply as feelings of cultural pride. As the country’s minister of culture and conscious of their long and precious heritage and fiercely protect these fine arts, Phoeurng Sackona, told The New York Times upon hearing of artifacts so that they can be handed down to later generations.’ the Latchford donation: ‘These are not just rocks and While this might sound like hot air pandering to mud and metal. They are the very blood and sweat nationalist sensibilities, there is a more substanand earth of our very nation that was torn away.’ tial development that may prove, if followed In contrast, the return of two ‘Lopburi’ lintels to through with, more effective – not only in Thailand was, while also an international news preventing future losses of significant Thai story, framed in less emotive terms as a legal and antiquities, but also in helping Thailand to cast moral victory. off its longstanding reputation as the primary, Which is not to say that the Thai authorilegitimising conduit for the smuggling of ties take these matters lightly. During the sacred Cambodian sculpture and stonework. To date, ceremonial fanfare accompanying their lateThailand has not ratified the 1970 UNESCO May arrival, Tanongsak Hanwong, an archaeconvention on illicit trafficking, nor its complementary follow-up, the 1995 ologist on the government committee responsible for retrieving looted art from abroad, UNIDROIT convention. Together these said the case ‘sets an excellent example for two legislative instruments (while not the museums that still own Thai artifacts illeretroactive and therefore not applicable gally, because they know they will lose the case’. to the colonial era) provide the 141 signatories with a range of mechanisms of cooperHe also claimed many museums had already reached out ‘to begin the return process ation for preventing the illegal trafficking instead of going through the legal process’. of cultural property, or for making swift According to Prateep Phengtako, directorclaims for its return when it does happen. general of the Thai Culture Ministry’s Fine These mechanisms are more streamlined Arts Department, a total of 32 such requests are than the bilateral agreements countries fall underway in America, and similar cases in other back on when they haven’t signed. According to Etienne Clément, an interterritories are set to follow. “After these cases we will do the same in other countries in Europe, such national lawyer and former UNESCO offias England, Sweden, France and the Netherlands,” cial, this is not the first time Thailand has anhe told ArtReview.. As of today, the wish list includes nounced its intention to ratify the two conventions. However, the formal manner Dvaravati-era Buddha images and ornate Khmer architectural elements in which Thailand’s minister of such as lintels, pediments culture, Itthiphol Kunplome, and pillars. Although unannounced the latest plan confirmed, future requests on 29 June – during an

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above Prasat Ta Keo, Angkor, c. 1000. Photo: Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA facing page Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, c. 725, copper alloy inlaid with silver and glass or obsidian, 142 × 57 cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Engraving from Louis Delaporte, Voyage au Cambodge: l’Architecture Khmer, 1880, in which sculpture destined for France is loaded onto rafts on Preah-Khan’s waters

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online unesco Bangkok event marking the 1970 convention’s 50th without a second thought for provenance or the unethical, dangerous anniversary – suggests that the means and momentum are finally possibilities of the trade, and almost zero fear of repercussions. there. “To do it in the opening speech of a conference is very signifi- Meanwhile, with the trade in large relics generally stemmed, online sellers are now prioritising smaller, cheaper antiquities that are both cant,” said Clément. Thailand, it should be stressed, is not the only holdout in the easier to ship and easier to loot. This trend is particularly concerning region: across Southeast Asia (as well as the Pacific), the ratification rate given that, as Mackenzie told the unesco conference, ‘the amount of is among the lowest in the world – a fact many observers find strange archaeological damage or harm caused [by looting] isn’t necessarily given the many manifest threats to its rich cultural heritage. Source reflected in the value of the object stolen’. countries without strong international art markets, such as Cambodia The hope, however, is that greater collaboration across the region and Myanmar, were onboard early. But many destination countries in – from multistakeholder discourse to research and knowledge sharing the region have held off, either because they deem the convention low – will allow for greater preparedness and nimble action in the future. priority, or not of national interest, or too ‘statist’. Others, among them To name just one example, unesco Bangkok held a conference Thailand, have taken a more finicky, legalistic route – claiming that targeting collectors in 2019. Attendees were familiarised not just with they can’t ratify until they’ve first tweaked their domestic laws and legal issues and ethics, but also shown how to research provenances legislation. According to Clément, and check existing databases listing lost or vulnerable cultural the situation now in Southeast Asia It is more simple than ever to hawk stolen is similar to that in Western Europe antiquities thanks to technological advances, objects – something that ‘good faith during the 1990s, where it took purchasers’ are duty-bound to do, such as global express shipping, instanheavy lobbying before destination according to the unidroit convencountries like uk, France, Belgium, tion. It was held at River City, the taneous money transfers and social media riverside antiques mall once associGermany and Switzerland signed up. In his opinion, it is also illogical. “These instruments are consid- ated with the trade in fake and genuine Khmer antiquities, but now ered almost universal now, and very benign and balanced,” Clément working, alongside Thailand’s Fine Arts Department, to foster more explained. “If you look, a bona fide purchaser in a country of desti- responsible collecting habits. nation can even get compensation. It’s not a convention that goes all Given the exceptionalism that looters of Khmer treasure have displayed through history, such attempts to sensitise collectors may in the direction of the interests of the source country.” But conventions are only one part of this transnational jigsaw prove decisive. Latchford excused his predilection for exquisite stone puzzle – effective implementation of national policy is also key. Thai- and metal gods and goddesses by saying, as he told the Bangkok Post, land, for example, has had an act controlling the export of antiques ‘they would likely have been shot up for target practice by the Khmer since 1926, during the reign of King Rama VII. However, neither it, or Rouge.’ A believer in reincarnation, he also justified his activities the Act on Ancient Monuments, Antiques, Objects of Art and National by saying that everything he collected had once belonged to him in Museums that replaced it in 1961, or its 1992 amendment, were success- a former life. Likewise, Malraux claimed until his dying day that the ful at stemming the steady bleed of looted antiquities out of the country. statues he plucked from Banteay Srei were rightfully his. Even Ficke, Reversing this bleed, across the region as well as in Thailand, won’t who returned his beloved Parvati after just one night, only did so be easy. According to Davis, it is more simple than ever to hawk stolen grudgingly on aesthetic, rather than ethical, grounds. Although in his antiquities thanks to technological advances, such as global express case, he did at least qualify this admission with a statement that still shipping, instantaneous money transfers and social media, and ‘Asia resonates: ‘How easy it is to diminish the world’s beauty by more than and the Pacific are under particular attack’. New research by unesco, one has ever been able to add to it!’ ara for example, has shown that online platforms such as Etsy and eBay are fostering a new generation of reckless collectors of Southeast Asian The Prasat Nong Hong and Prasat Khao Lon lintels are on display at the National Museum Bangkok until 30 September artefacts. On these sites, awe and acquisitiveness are running riot

Sandstone lintel with Yama, deity of the underworld, 1000–80, from Prasat Nong Hong. Courtesy Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

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Park Chan-wook

Face 105, 2016, archival pigment print

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Face to Face

Face 205, 2017, archival pigment print

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Face 27, 2013, archival pigment print

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Face 16, 2013, archival pigment print

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Face 25, 2020, archival pigment print

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Best known for films such as Joint Security Area (2000), The Vengeance Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, 2002, Oldboy, 2003, Lady Vengeance, 2005) and The Handmaiden (2016), Park Chanwook is one of South Korea’s leading filmmakers. In addition, as PARKing CHANce, the director has cocreated a series of moving-image works with his brother, the artist and critic Park Chan-kyong. Among these is Decades Apart (2017), commissioned by the Fondation Cartier, which revisited the set of Joint Security Area as a crumbling ruin (and metaphor for the deterioration of North–South relations during the years since the original feature was released), while Night Fishing (2011) is a fantasy horror short film filmed entirely on the iPhone 4. Additionally Park has taken photographs of everyday scenes and some of his filmsets since his student days. His first solo exhibition as a photographer takes place at Kukje Gallery, Busan, this October. ArtReview Asia How did your interest in photography begin? Are you interested in the construction/ composition of the image or its contents? There seems to be a strong interest in the natural vs constructed or artificial/illusion in some of the works. Park Chan-wook To be perfectly frank, photography was the best alternative to art. I’ve always aspired to become an artist but realised in my teenage years that my younger brother was vastly better endowed with what it takes to become one – so I gave up. While I ended up in college as a philosophy major, I realised I still felt a certain pull towards the arts and joined the school’s photography club. When I first joined, the photography club was overwhelmingly photojournalistic, the leftwing sentiment of which befitted the group of young college students in the midst of a military dictatorship in South Korea. We would roam around taking pictures of rundown neighbourhoods in the city. While I wasn’t entirely dissatisfied with the process, I realised that my camera lens was progressively shifting towards landscapes and objects on the street instead of people. Subjects that are as mundane as ever, yet evoke a surrealistic experience just by the fact that they are placed in locations/situations that they don’t seem to belong to. In short, while I began photography with an interest in the ‘construction’ and ‘composition’ of the image, my pursuit of realism became synonymous with my exploration into the ‘contents’ of these images, an idea that constitutes the bedrock of my photographic oeuvre. ARA What makes a ‘good’ photograph? PC-w I see film as a medium that strives for complexity, while photography strives for simplicity. Of the two mediums, photography

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can be understood intuitively and comprehended subjectively. However, akin to a great piece of poetry, a great photograph has the power to entice its viewer to take the time and closely examine every minute detail from one corner to the next, despite its seemingly uncomplicated subject matter and composition. It evokes a lasting afterimage in the viewer’s mind even after departing the exhibition or closing the last page of a photobook. The complexity of film generates multiple interpretations for a single piece, while the open simplicity of photography paves the way for multiple interpretations. ARA To what extent are your photographs a record of chance encounters? Are they different from the filmmaking process in that respect (more instinctive – without the full processes of research, scripts and storyboards) or is your approach to taking photographs the same as your approach to making films? PC-w To the fullest extent. And this is what completely sets my photography apart from my filmmaking practice. I’m a thorough and meticulous planner even among fellow film directors when it comes to preproduction – especially when taking this into consideration, the spontaneity of photography offers a catharsis that serves as a kind of antidote to my experiences in filmmaking. My photography is grounded in the unadulterated discoveries within our surroundings and the anticipation before making these discoveries – scenes that have neither been manipulated nor directed. This is quite the opposite to the fate of filmmaking, for which even the most seemingly raw scenes involve intricately artificial designs. ARA Your photographs are shown at the CGV in Yongsan. Did you always intend that they would be shown in public, or did your interest start as a private passion? I guess there is also a difference between the collective work of your filmmaking or your work with your brother in PARKing CHANce, and your work as a photographer – more personal/solitary? PC-w The school photography club, of which I was a part since my freshman year of college, had made sure we held group exhibitions that were open to the public. So, in retrospect, photography for me was not a ‘private passion’ from the start. A total of six photographs are shown on rotation every four months next to the entrance of the Park Chan-wook theatre at CGV Yongsan. I guess you can say that it’s a solo exhibition that will last for as long as the Park Chan-wook theatre stays. The title of that never-ending solo show is Pantheism. And photography is of course significant in that it is a wholly individual practice, unlike filmmaking, whether I’m by myself or in collaboration with my brother. It’s a given to work with tens and hundreds of crew members

whether you’re making a blockbuster or a short film. While I agree that there’s a certain pleasure of triumph in collective, collaborative achievement, there’s also a need to get a modicum of happiness out of a ‘personal/solitary’ practice like photography. ARA A number of the images seem to capture situations that might be described either as everyday or bizarre, depending on your point of view (the photographs of sun protectors on car windscreens, a mural of a tree next to an actual tree, a collection of closed parasols that look like a series of white capes). Are you interested in revealing what’s extraordinary about the ordinary in your photographs? Or perhaps it’s the other way around? PC-w That’s an accurate observation. I try to capture the unique beauty or eccentricity, or even the humour, that rests in a mundane subject at a certain instant. That certain instant surfaces under a particular ray of sunlight, or at a position I stand relative to the subject (so perspective), or the relationship between two subjects or between a subject and the location. ARA You shoot in both colour and black-and-white – what situations demand one rather than the other? PC-w Even though I do work with digital cameras, my black-and-white photographs are not created by converting files shot in colour into black and white. This means that the original intention was for the photograph to be rendered in black-and-white, and thereby shot with a Leica Monochrom. It’s a predetermined artistic decision. A black-and-white photograph doesn’t merely present an utter absence of colour – the importance of gradation substitutes that of colour, which is not a simplification. To work in black-and-white means giving up one form of complexity for another. ARA The show in Busan will be your first solo exhibition in a gallery (I’m told). What do you hope audiences will take away from it? And why did you choose, now, to present your work in this forum? On what basis did you select the images that are to be included in the show – according to a particular theme? PC-w As it is indeed my first solo exhibition, I selected images that are most representative of my photography work. The audience will encounter images that capture moments when objects and spaces all of a sudden are filled with vigour, as if coming to life. I propose that my audiences read their expressions and empathise with the sentiments. As the images speak, I propose that the audiences listen to what they have to say. ara Park Chan-wook’s exhibition Your Faces is on show at Kukje Gallery, Busan, from 1 October to 19 December

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Face 98, 2017, archival pigment print

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Face 113, 2014, archival pigment print

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Face 3, 2013, archival pigment print

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Face 76, 2014, archival pigment print

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above Face 78, 2013, archival pigment print all images Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul & Busan

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Breaking the Waves An exhibition curated by ArtReview and presented by k11 Art Foundation

Those of you who pay attention to the advertisements in magazines like this one (that would of course be all of you) will have noticed that ArtReview has curated an exhibition in Shanghai. Presented by the k11 Art Foundation at its Shanghai Chi k11 Art Space, the exhibition is an extension of the discussions and debates that take place across the pages of both ArtReview and ArtReview Asia. You should definitely check it out. Even if it is the curator saying that. As we begin to emerge from a time of solitude and isolation, Breaking the Waves focuses on discussion and dialogue as a cornerstone of contemporary art, highlighting the role of conversation and sociability in contemporary practice. Moreover, it explores the various ways in which art develops communication and connectivity at a time when both seem in short supply. The title refers to both persistence, and the endlessly repeating climax of waves breaking on a shore, and to the act of swimming against the tide, coming up for air. In the current moment it also seeks to convey optimism about the latent potentials for renewal as we slowly begin to reenter a world reshaped following covid-19 outbreaks. A celebration of art’s propensity for thinking differently and going against the grain, the exhibition seeks to speak to community, solidarity and the inspiring, sometimes challenging visions of new futures and new possibilities that art is uniquely placed to offer. The exhibition features the work of 14 artists and artist collectives from around the world – Larry Achiampong, Chim Pom, Ripon Chowdhury with Ho Tzu Nyen, Adriano Costa, Eisa Jocson, Michael Joo, Jac Leirner, Yuko Mohri and David Horvitz, Laure Prouvost,

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Slime Engine, Wolfgang Tillmans and Zheng Bo – and is arranged to highlight dialogue and mutual influence, by staging each work as a form of ‘conversation’. Balancing between the poles of work and play, the art on show tackles relationships between humans and nature, conditions of migration and mobility, exploitation and cooperation, the potentials of new technologies and the ways in which artists collaborate or enter into dialogue with the work of their peers, however separated they may be by chronology or geography. More than anything, however, it examines the many ways in which art allows us to view the world and locate ourselves within it through a fresh or alternative lens. Featuring a mixture of both static and interactive works, the exhibition treats the audience as ‘fellow travellers’ on a journey that is staged to highlight both the development of individual points of view and the operations of a shared vision or a collective social consciousness. Cumulatively it teases out the ways in which the personal becomes public and the ways in which art allows the individual to adopt the perspective of the other. The very basis around which equitable social dialogue is founded. Across generations and cultures, linking, contrasting and exploring new or renewed waves of creativity. But really, you’ll need to see it for yourselves. ara Breaking the Waves is on show at the Shanghai Chi k11 Art Space, until 17 October and will travel to Hong Kong in December. Supplementary videoworks are screening on artreview.com

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facing page Slime Engine, Ocean (still), 2019, interactive game, projection, controller, console, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

above Wolfgang Tillmans, young man Jeddah, b, 2012, unframed inkjet-print, clips. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York

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top David Horvitz & Yuko Mohri, A walk piano at solo dusk, 2021, installation comprising: David Horvitz, A Walk at Dusk (Washingtonia Robusta/Mexican fan palm), 2018, digital video (colour, sound), 11 min 35 sec, courtesy the artist and Chert Lüdde, Berlin; and Yuko Mohri, PIANO solo, 2021, sound installation, grand midi piano, video (colour, sound, 5 min), courtesy the artist

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above Larry Achiampong, Beyond the Substrata (still), 2020, 4K video (colour, sound), 18 min 39 sec. Commissioned by the London Borough of Waltham Forest. Courtesy the artist, LUX and Copperfield, London

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top ( foreground) Adriano Costa, Wish / Mourning Version, 2014–21, bricks, bubble gum, Marlboro cigarettes. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels & New York top (wall) Jac Leirner, Leveled White Line, 2018–21, six spirit levels, brads. Courtesy the artist

above Slime Engine, Ocean, 2019 (installation view). Courtesy the artist

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Liu Wei Nudità White Cube Bermondsey, London 9 July – 5 September If you were to walk into this exhibition armed only with the knowledge of its title, you might wonder where the nudes are. In fact, on the surface Nudità might even have been a title more appropriate for a revisiting of Liu Wei’s 2004 Landscape series, in which black-and-white photographs of naked bodies doubled over such that the torso folds into the legs (with the occasional roll of belly fat in the middle), with bare backsides pointing skywards, are collaged and layered together to recreate the Guilin mountain scenery that so inspired innumerable shanshui ink paintings: an image that has become synonymous with romantic visions of China’s landscape, but which in the series was the butt of a cynical joke. These days, though, Liu is exploring a less provocative type of cheek. Nudità is an austere continuation of recent works (some were shown at Shanghai’s Long Museum at the end of 2020) inspired by and named after philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s 2009 collection of essays on the subject of exposure and denuding in order to seek out ‘truth’. The works on show explore ideas of urbanisation, human-made infrastructure (social, political and physical) and the subsequent impact of the megalopolis on the relationships between people and environments. Of the largescale sculptures on display in London, Speculation (2021), located in a room of its own, is the most intriguing: what looks like a chunk of vertebra shed by some long-deceased giant houses large silver spherical and creamcoloured eggs in its hollows, suggesting some sort of fusion of old and new. The rear end of a lion protrudes from one edge of the structure, its head and front legs nowhere to be seen, as if the two forms were once again fused, or the rest of the lion, stuck seamlessly in a hole, is burrowing in search of nourishment into the bony structure

below. The whole seems to be at once open and impenetrable, loaded with the unknown potential of something unformed but ready to hatch. But the spark of curiosity is short-lived. In the largest of the gallery spaces, Allegory occupies the middle ground, partially surrounded by a wall of wire mesh (the kind used to protect the windscreens of antiriot vans): ten grey monoliths initially conjure concrete or granite memorials and tombs, but the shapes seem more familiar, quotidian. After a more recognisable greyscale version of a plastic road barrier is spotted, the others reveal themselves to be traffic blockades, bollards or some other kind of temporary urban architecture. What the installation offers in scale, though, it lacks in execution. Dotted among these structures are a cartoony tortoise, cat, hawk, pigeon, owl, a dog with milk-swollen mammary glands and a giant snake that looks as though it was rolled out of plasticine – all rendered in the same stone-colour material, smooth and ill-defined. Presumably there’s a message in this installation that speaks of the quick-paced construction of transport infrastructures, its impact on the ecosystems we share with other species, modes of control and, from an old memory of one of Aesop’s fables – about a hawk offering protection to a flock of pigeons, who then slaughters and eats the gullible birds – something about trusting those in positions of power who pose a threat. But the significance of the message is somewhat derailed by the question of whether these sculptures are intended to look like some urban version of essential forms or like poorly made theatre props, and the irony of bestowing temporary traffic barriers with the importance of permanent ‘monuments’ that are made out of fibreglass – a material that can neither decompose or be recycled. And while Dimension, which dominates the third gallery

space, is impressive in the sense that the abstract aluminium sculpture bends, curves and cradles in a seemingly continuous flow around solid ovoid and spherical shapes, two seams through the work that don’t quite line up somewhat ruin the illusion of movement, extinguishing any latent ideas about complementary forces and dualism. Not all is lost in Nudità, though. A series of abstract oil paintings that line the walls around Dimension, and lends its name to the exhibition, depict bloblike mounds that unfold before the eyes into twisted bodies, hands and disconnected limbs – a symptom, perhaps, of being confronted by the hard plasticky and metal edges of the sculptures, and their engendering of a search for softer, human shapes. Connected by a core palette of dusky blue, grey and black, the series begins with an outlier: Resurrection No.1 (2020), in which an enigmatic inky black circle foregrounds fields of green over which a thunderous rolling sky looms. A portion of the clouds settle into what looks like two hands clasping, setting the tone for Nudity No3 and No6, which could appear to present a vertical clustering of abstract grey naked bodies, piling up and twisting against a background of peach, green, indigo and turquoise, and two figures locked in a green, grey and lilac embrace respectively. Besides the similarity in abstract shapes forming the ‘figures’ and the aluminium sculpture that squats in the space between the paintings, it’s difficult to reconcile the relatively quiet Nudities with the rest of the bombastic exhibition. But then, perhaps, that’s to the paintings’ benefit, because amid the sculptures’ largeness and the uncompromising nature of the materials used, maybe the message is this: when the illusions and constructions of everyday life are stripped back, it’s the shared human form that’s laid bare. Fi Churchman

Speculation, 2021, aluminium, car paint, resin, fibreglass and stainless steel, 272 × 271 × 248 cm. Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong

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Nudity No3, 2021, oil on canvas, 220 × 180 cm. Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong

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mé Just a world SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo 6 July – 7 August In this new exhibition from Japanese collective 目 (mé), an unspoken contract between viewer and artist is made literal. Tangible, actually: you can take it home with you. In the gallery’s main space, set up to look like it’s under construction, visitors sidestep pieces of Life Scaper, an installation in which framed photos of mundane scenes wait to be hung, a laptop charger sits idly a few feet from a used iced-coffee cup, a woman behind a wall of hanging vests and pants busies herself with some ironing. Over her head, an easy-to-miss detail threatens to reveal all: a leaf dangling by a thread, kept in perpetual motion by a well-placed fan. Visitors are ushered behind some plastic sheeting for the pièce de résistance, a very familiar scene to anyone who’s lived in Japan:

across a wide desk, a woman in a suit reads out the details of a multipage contract. Would-be participants fill out pages of personal information, such as their office address, visual acuity and whether they tend to be surprised by loud noises. Signing this contract gives the members of 目, which means eye, permission to subtly insert themselves into your day; but whether or not the artists will actually follow you around, adding manufactured vignettes to your minutiae, is explicitly unclear. For the price of ¥500,000 plus tax, you ‘acquire the right’ to experience everyday life as scenes of art. The execution is a little clunky, but this performance-installation from the team of Haruka Kojin, Kenji Minamigawa and Hirofumi Masui is wryly amusing. The lone suspended

leaf, comically blunt in its complete lack of verisimilitude, may elicit a giggle, but it most succinctly sums up the work’s theme: the difference between what is real and what is fiction is a simple matter of framing – and both are basically equally silly. Put everyday life behind glass, or take a performance out of its box, and the world shifts slightly on its axis. This feeling came to a head a few days after I saw the exhibition, when a giant face appeared in the sky over Shibuya, its blank expression, stretched across a hot air balloon, terrorising passersby in Tokyo and on Twitter. It was a bit on-the-nose that it turned out to be a mé production. I hadn’t given my consent, yet the eyes of mé – the 目 of 目 – gazed anyway, watching me watch back. Thu-Huong Ha

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Planitia LAD, Seoul 6 July – 22 August One of the most intriguing art venues to arrive in Seoul this year also has one of the most memorable names I have ever come across: LAD, short for Love Alcohol Death. (Certainly all great things when done right.) Across two capacious, plant-filled floors, salads, coffee and, yes, drinks are on offer. DJs sometimes drop by to do sets. And there is toothsome art. In June the punchy, slyly lascivious painting of Changchang Yoo dotted the walls. Now its raw and dank basement is taken over by Planitia, a dark cyberpunk wonderland of a group exhibition. Like LAD, the participating artists are nimble multihyphenates, and most of their works get their own cosy rooms, so one has the sense that bizarre surprises await through every doorway. Eqeqpe, a jewellery line from Dasom Park, presents intricate, assemblagelike pieces on

tiny stands in a row of translucent cylinders, as if they were scientific specimens. (Vanguard fishing tackle also comes to mind.) One necklace, combining thin chains, a USB stick and damaged glasses, would look great adorning a sea pirate who is also into hacking. Sungermone (a pseudonym playing on the Korean words for ‘line’, ‘dot’ and ‘circle’) offers up %k (all works 2021), a tall white fabric sculpture of bulbous forms (picture a gargantuan blackberry) with one section covered in red silicone tongues. They flutter quickly, thanks to a nearby fan, which is quite a disturbing sight, like a giant, mysterious beast awaiting its prey. On a less menacing note, Goyoson has built a burbling fountain amid fantastically craggy white Styrofoam stalagmites that one could imagine small fairies enjoying.

The sense that strange techno-organic forms are slowly coming to life, growing and changing is amped up by a transfixing abstract videowork, planitia-2, by Pic (a joint project by Hyeonsu Jeon and Sangho Noh) – all liquid effects and swirling chrome storms – plus a spectral and alluring ambient soundtrack by the electronica singer CIFIKA (Cho Yousun). At once foreboding and ebullient, this is a rare sci-fi dystopia that also teems with fresh possibility. Visually, Planitia is an alien planet, but one that radiates a pungently of-themoment notion: to revel in continuous instability and flux and uncertainty. At a time when even a single unmasked tongue can elicit terror, why not festoon scores of them on a sculpture, splicing fear with absurd joy? Andrew Russeth

Goyoson, Sparkling marsh, 2021, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Andrew Russeth

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Recast: Recent Works by Anthony Chin and Green Zeng Starch, Singapore 19 June – 10 July Singaporean artists Green Zeng and Anthony Chin explore little-known or suppressed histories in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Zeng takes the more straightforward approach, in videoworks in which buried archival material on the city-state’s labour movement during the 1950s and 60s is reenacted by actors and nonactors. Chin’s work requires more decoding. His interest is in colonial legacies in the region, and his sculptural installations are made with a series of interventions that echo and invert material elements of the source histories. This process sometimes gets so convoluted that the resultant work bears little apparent relation to the original story. Although criticality comes in different forms in these two bodies of work – Zeng’s impersonal wrestling with the facts

versus Chin’s more elaborate and mysterious responses – what they have in common is the ability to represent and anatomise complex geopolitical and historical processes, which renders visible the ideological underpinnings of current realities. In pragmatic, commerce-oriented Singapore, labour strikes are rare (two in the last 35 years, to be exact). But before the nowdominant People’s Action Party (PAP) was first voted into power in 1959, work stoppages, sometimes politically motivated, were commonplace. Zeng revisits this tumultuous period with two works, Letters to the Press and Industrial Unrest (20 March 1962) (both 2021). The script for Zeng’s first video is based upon a selection of forum letters printed

in The Straits Times from 1953 to 1957, speaking for and against the strikes, and weighing in on the conduct of politicians, unionists and workers. Given the civic voraciousness of the letters, this work throws into stark relief today’s relatively subdued political citizenry. The deliberately flat affect of the performers’ recitation imbues the views with an even greater sense of distance. The second video features two young actors reenacting the transcript of a 1962 debate in Singapore’s Legislative Assembly (the precursor to Parliament) on the state of industrial relations in Singapore. Representing their parties were unionist S.T. Bani, who was from the leftwing Barisan Sosialis, and S. Rajaratnam of the PAP, who was one of the party’s founders. Bani spoke

Green Zeng, Letters to the Press (still), 2021, HD video, colour, sound, 19 min. Courtesy the artist

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for the striking workers and unions, and reminded the PAP that they were voted into power on the support of the labour movement. Rajaratnam dismissed the strikes as the machinations of “Little Lenins” and “Leninist tenderfoots” who cared less about the welfare of workers and more about inciting revolution. Bani concludes his speech by saying, “I have no doubt that at the end of it all, all this cry of Communism can only mean the graveyard of the PAP.” He couldn’t have been more wrong: less than a year after this debate, he would be arrested with other alleged Communist sympathisers and detained without trial under Operation Coldstore. The PAP has remained the ruling party since then. The debate is performed by young actors in formal clothing, looking more like office interns doing their darnedest to give a convincing presentation than sparring political adversaries. The juxtaposition of their amateurish demeanour and the high-stakes historical

content suggests, to me, a childish regression in contemporary politics, evoking the democratic recession in a country where the ruling party currently takes up 83 of 93 seats in Parliament. After Zeng’s relatively direct take on Singapore political history, we enter the more ambiguous territory of Chin’s enigmatic objects, whose material transformations are as complex as the geopolitical histories to which he is responding. American influence in the sporting life of the Philippines gets translated into a basketball trophy remade with a special base containing salt crystals from the sweat of basketball players from Manila (TROPHY – object, 2020). There is also a nod to the Japanese soldiers who invaded British Malaya during the Second World War and defected to fight for the Malayan Communist Party. Chin purchased a vintage Japanese ceremonial sword and then got a Malaysian blacksmith to melt it down into an ingot shape and forge that into another sword (Rinnan Steel Mill – INGOT, 2021).

I’ll be honest: digesting these artworks takes work. Given the interpretative effort required, the most satisfying work is Air Doa Selamat (2020), a block of ice shaped like a rock and exhibited in a freezer. The work refers to the construction of the Causeway, a bridge connecting Malaysia and Singapore built in 1924 by the British to ease traffic congestion. Chin takes a rock from the Causeway and makes a mould of it. Next, rainwater from the quarry in which this rock was mined is poured into this mould and frozen. To be exhibited, the ice block needs round-the-clock refrigeration. Water is a touchy topic between Singapore and Malaysia, with the two countries periodically squabbling over the price of raw water piped from Malaysia into Singapore. This frosty little nugget in the shape of a blasted piece of rock, requiring artificially maintained conditions, is a fitting stand-in for the precarious state of bilateral relations on this issue. Adeline Chia

Anthony Chin, Air Doa Selamat, 2020, water from Pulau Ubin quarry, ice moulded from Causeway granite rock, display freezer, 50 × 50 × 77 cm (freezer), 20 × 10 × 15 cm (ice). Courtesy the artist

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Hetain Patel Trinity John Hansard Gallery, Southampton 3 August – 30 October Mixing the production values of mainstream Hollywood movies with actors drawn from marginalised communities in Britain and a deep, deep love of martial-arts films, Trinity gathers a trilogy of films by Bolton-born Hetain Patel in a setting that gives something of the feel of a multiplex cinema experience. Aided by the John Hansard Gallery’s architecture (a contemporary purpose-built arts complex with a glazed corner facade, to which it relocated in 2018) and its location next to the shops, bars and restaurants of Southampton’s city centre. Oh, and an artist-designed giftshop – part exhibit, part marketplace – in the show. In the two-channel installation The Jump (2015), Patel, clothed in a very convincing homemade Spider-Man costume, performs one of the character’s signature crouching leaps, filmed in ultra-slow motion. One channel features Spider-Man leaping through a foggy night sky, just like in the movies; the other, screened on the reverse of the first, locates the same scene in Patel’s grandmother’s Bolton living-room, where a sofa serves as

the springboard and an ornate carpet as a landing pad, while 17 members of the artist’s family, dressed in decorated saris, kurtas and other types of Indian formal wear, and somewhat crushedintothespace,witnesstheact.Posedasifwaiting to join the collection of family photographs that decorate the matriarch’s walls. The whole has the feel of schoolboy fantasy meets reality, while conjuring notions of costume and identity (some of those clothed in the Indian formalwear are white), escapism, transformation and appropriation. And the potential to leave all that behind when you don a suit and a mask. But just for a moment, however slowed down and suspended that moment might be. The second film in the trilogy, Don’t Look at the Finger (2015), is at once more expansive and exotic. The title derives from one of Bruce Lee’s catchphrases in Enter the Dragon (1973) and the action centres on a balletic fight scene choreographed Hong Kong-style with a touch of contemporary dance, a fusion broadly identifiable with movies such as The Matrix (1999) that borrow from the genres. While the action may

derive from East Asia, the video’s two main protagonists are Black and dressed in brightly coloured, luxurious robes influenced by West Africa. Asian moves and African aesthetics. A man and a woman, the actors seem to be engaged in what may be a ceremony that’s part of a formal or arranged marriage, witnessed by similarly dressed attendants. The action plays out in a choreographed fight in which the pair seem to be feeling each other out and testing who has the upper hand in the union’s power dynamics. A battle of the sexes. All of it conducted without dialogue and purely through the actions of the body and the hands. It’s not just the bodies that perform but the clothes that cover them; after each ‘round’, the attendants adjust the costumes so that they take on a different pattern and shape. You might see the whole as an attempt to place the Black body centre stage in a blockbuster-style production, or as an attempt to test the hybrid cultural references and aesthetics that are so much a part of real life in the urban West and in the often unreal and unrepresentative world of the

The Jump (still), 2015, two-channel video installation, 6 min 32 sec. Courtesy John Hansard Gallery, Southampton

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mainstream cinema that those urbanites consume. Although this is notably an aesthetic, and a blend, that has since been replicated to some degree in an actual blockbuster: Marvel Studio’s Black Panther (2018). And presumably for many people seeing Patel’s work for the first time, that connection is going to appear to be the other way around. Perhaps there’s a satisfaction in getting there first; perhaps there’s a satisfaction in the fact that Patel’s motivations are not commercial (Don’t Look at the Finger was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella with Manchester Art Gallery and QUAD, and supported by the Jerwood Choreographic Research Fund). But then there’s the shop. A statement by the artist displayed at its entrance includes the line: ‘In the world where we – as marginalised people – are typically given the soap drama, EastEnders [a long-running UK soap opera, set in London’s ‘gritty’, working-class East End] treatment, rather than the big movie Batman treatment, we have to create our own’. Accordingly, Patel’s giftshop includes a range of clothing (unisex bomber jackets and shirts – you can buy them online), boxed action figures of characters from the three films (prototypes of products to come) and posters, postcards and tote bags (available from the museum shop). A mix, then, of revolution and capitalism; art and

commerce. A critique of sorts, but representative of a desire to join the object of that critique as well. If the first two works seem not far removed from documentary records of dance performances, the final film in the trilogy, a new work, Trinity (2021), represents an evolution of sorts. Featuring a more extended plot, verbal (a mix of Gujarati and English) as well as nonverbal dialogue and multiple locations and character relationships, the video centres on a young British Indian woman (played by Vidya Patel, a dancer and performer trained in the classical Kathak dance form) and her encounters with a motor mechanic (played by deaf dancer and performer Raffie Julien) and her mother, who we learn at the beginning of the film was told that the souls of their ancestors lie sleeping in women’s bodies. The work riffs off the two younger women, with the mother, her home filled with avatars of Hindu deities (the opening shot lingers on a garlanded image of Saraswati), attempting to organise an arranged marriage for her daughter as she supervises and critiques the latter’s Kathak dance practice. The daughter’s bedroom is decorated with Transformer-style toys, and it is within this space that she constructs a superhero costume of her own. She has rage. Taken out at one point on a car that nearly runs her off the road, which she keys and steals.

From there she meets the deaf mechanic, with whom she struggles to communicate. Eventually the pair fight, in the manner of the performers in Don’t Look at the Finger, gradually reaching some form of understanding through a seemingly universal language combining sign language, Tai Chi and other martial-arts moves, as their bodies flickeringly shapeshift through the multiethnic, variously sexed bodies of what we presume are their ancestors or representative of some of the cultural forms they appropriate. To a greater extent than its predecessors, Trinity rises above its slick choreography and seductive aesthetics – in part because of the evident trouble, conflict and frustration in the main character’s soul as she attempts to find a place in the multiple realities she inhabits. Yet at the same time you could see it as little more than an expanded and complexified form of the cultural confrontation of The Jump, and the exploration of body language in Don’t Look at the Finger. While the trilogy certainly moves, develops, is perfectly sumptuous in the production, performance and staging of each individual film, and makes a point about the nature of tradition, access to representation and the hybrid reality of urban cultural landscapes, it’s not so clear that it actually goes anywhere. Mark Rappolt

Trinity (still), 2012, video, 23 mins. Courtesy John Hansard Gallery, Southampton

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Yao Cong Flies beyond the Clouds Capsule, Shanghai 17 July – 28 August This is Yao Cong’s second solo exhibition, five years after the first. If his earlier work explored the body, queer identity and intimacy, this show suggests a break – as if something drastic has happened during this interval, both politically and mentally, on a personal and global scale. For here, Yao abandons intimacy and individual identity and steps into the wild. And while the blazing, dry and dusty wild of his works can’t be duplicated in the gallery, yellow vinyl sheets applied to the windows create something of an immersive vibe. The photography series Gold Words (2020), comprises eight shots (spread through the gallery spaces) depicting a mysterious, seem ingly naked figure, their prone body covered with a white sheet, at various locations in an unspecified desert or scrubland. On the cloth, which at times (Gold Words #7) appears like a winding sheet that wraps the body, is an embroidered gold sentence that reads, ‘AN ARTIST WHO IS NOT BASED IN THE GOOD PLACE IS NO ARTIST’, the words presumably riffing off Mladen Stilinovic’s 1994 banner ‘An artist who cannot speak English is no artist’, which referenced the hegemonic use of English in the artworld, here extended to encompass geography too. Given that Yao’s work eschews any signifiers of a specific place, let alone what might be good and what might be bad, the work begins to resemble something more akin to a scene from a TV crime show, in which an unidentified corpse is found on a long-dried riverbed (Gold Words #4) after an ‘incident’, the body hastily covered to hide the graphic details

from passersby (and TV viewers). Yao’s statement raises further questions. Certainly our tendency to look for signs of or associations – like the one just made – with death have become more commonplace since 2020. Still, to pursue the analogy to the crime scene further, the work itself offers little in the way of clues as to what’s going on in this empty land. Is the work then intended as a prophecy or a fable? Linked to the current climate crisis and the political ones that allow it to develop? Or linked to the mental state of the artist themselves? Staring at the luxuriously embroidered golden letters quickly becomes an eerie experience. The Square Reserve (2020–21) works almost like a response mechanism to a greater trauma. In this ten-channel video, ten different people are shot dancing in the middle of nowhere on a square of fake lawn while listening to their favourite music and drinking beer until they can’t dance anymore. While the actions of these characters might feel normal on a Fridaynight in a crowded club, when Yao removes any sense of context, their actions seem both self-destructive and absurd. As the alcohol takes its toll on the participants, they come more to evoke the lonely and isolated inhabitants of old-fashioned asylums. As one of the videos draws to an end, a woman leaves the frame and then yells the artist’s name (he’s not visible on set) in a panic, before mumbling inaudibly. A semifictional setup transformed into a fully realistic offscreen breakdown. All the videos vary in lengths, so each climax comes at a different time. When ten of them are juxtaposed, the

ensuing chaos resembles a collective bacchanal. A feast and a tragedy, not in Ancient Greek style, but rather in a form of postapocalyptic hysteria. Or perhaps that’s just the lingering effects of the pandemic talking. In a separate room, the video installation Count (2020) comes with rocks installed on the floor as seating. The yellow-lit room echoes a scene in the video: a woman sitting on a chair in a rocky desert and fiddling her fingers, as if counting imaginary cash. The closeup shots show a twitching performance, like a spasm, or a method practised in Yi Ching to predict the future by counting the knuckles. Seemingly fixated on her nonexistent money, the elegantly dressed woman seems detached from reality and oblivious to her surroundings. Endlessly counting while lacking for herself any sense of past, present or future. There’s a sense in which Yao’s journey, as depicted in these works, appears both masochis tic and purposeless. And yet each work evinces a certain sense of commitment and resolve. A journey into the wild. Certainly there is a nod to the ‘retreats’ to which (largely privileged) people resort in order to ‘find’ themselves through isolation or through experiencing something extreme. And indeed there is a sense in which these works perform to cathartic or therapeutic effect. But the experience of seeing them in a gallery, as something that already exists as an interruption to daily realities, makes them feel more like trailers, or rehearsals for something else. A parable perhaps, designed to prepare us for some unnameable future to come. Paul Han

Flies beyond the Clouds, 2021 (installation views)

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top Gold Words, 2020, archival inkjet print, 47 × 70 cm. above The Square Reserve (still), 2020–21, 10-channel video, 15 min all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Capsule, Shanghai

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Yukinori Yanagi Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 17 July – 14 August ‘Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.’ So begins Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. And so begins, albeit in radically different form, this exhibition at Blum & Poe, where Yukinori Yanagi’s assembly of oblong electrical signage Article 9 (1994) spells out the titular provision in red neon. (The article’s second and final part reads: ‘In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.’) The glowing Japanese characters bathe the gallery’s foyer in crimson reminiscent of the Rising Sun Flag. The same light reaches a nearby archival photograph of Emperor Hirohito and US General Douglas MacArthur standing side by side just after Japan’s surrender in the Second World War, the latter man towering

over the former. On that image, the red light evokes a metaphorical sun setting on an empire. Three versions of Article 9 overlay the photograph: one in the original English, ordered (allegedly) by MacArthur and implemented during the Allied Occupation of Japan after the war; one in Japanese, translated and modified from the American draft and used in Japan’s Constitution (and by Yanagi); and one retranslated to English from the official Japanese edit. This Rosetta stone begs the question of what it means for one nation to constitute the agency of another, in peacetime and in battle, with a social contract established in a language foreign to the people whom it affects and implemented by the imprecise conversions of translation. How might those conditions create an unstable ideal upon which to rebuild a national identity? Configured like I-beams after an earthquake, Yanagi’s Article 9 shows the chaotic result of such a construction – such a construct – having faltered.

Structures in various states of distress, be it critical or physical, appear throughout the exhibition. In another room, a large photograph belonging to the multipart Nagato 70 · I, Nagato Blue – (propeller), Nagato Instruction (2020) depicts a portion of the only Japanese battleship not destroyed during the war. The ship’s surrounding environment is nonetheless the ocean floor, for it became a practice target during Operation Crossroads, the American nuclear tests that vaporised part of Bikini Atoll in 1946. Inverted under the Pacific, the vessel explicates the disorder hypothesised by Article 9, and in that explication, it redoubles Yanagi’s critique of Japanese–US power dynamics during the latter twentieth century, casting the United States, the nuclear power, as aggressor par excellence. The work’s other components – a 70:1 replica of the ship-as-toy, cast in iron, along with its constituent parts held in a frame mimicking hobby model sprue – illustrate the disconnect

Article 9 (detail), 1994, neon, plastic box, print on transparency sheet and acrylic frame, installed dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

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between nostalgic military fantasies and the realities of war, thus scrutinising the pervasiveness of Japan’s past imperialist ambitions to the level of material culture within, say, the family unit, where toys courier ideologies to impressionable generations. Of war’s realities, perhaps the most significant is the formation of national borders, atrocities notwithstanding, that come to be acknowledged, despite their irregular cartographic profiles, by colourful, straight-edged swatches: flags. Two hundred existing national flag designs, rendered in sand, feature in The World Flag Ant Farm 2020 (2020), a massive wall grid of plastic boxes neighbouring Nagato. While ants march through plastic tubes that connect each box and excavate the sand-flags held therein, video monitors displaying closeup footage of ant behaviour punctuate the array, adding a didactic element to a clever work. The tunnels the ants produce undo the rectilinearity by which conventional flag designs abide, and through their labour they reincorporate the meandering line of the border, in concert with boundary-crossing migratory paths, which the channels also suggest, into our awareness of how

the globe is divided and to whom its parcels are fairly or unfairly distributed, shared or cared for. Whereas collective passage in World Flag illustrates the permeability of notional and actual statehood, the movement of a single ant, tracked with a grease pencil by Yanagi, graphs the impermeability of state-sanctioned carcerality in three drawings together titled Wandering Position – Alcatraz (1997). That island penitentiary was Yanagi’s studio for the trio, and he derived their scales from the surface dimensions of a cell. Rails, cut to the height and length of a cell’s walls, delimited the field within which the artist tailed the ant and thereby inscribed its path on paper. As the tiny creature sought an exit, Yanagi’s marks condensed along the edges, like scratches accumulated on a prison wall evidencing so many life sentences. Scratches made in boredom and fury, searching for a chalky imperfection, which might crumble and prove the citadel not so invincible. Scratches made by split fingers or, if resourceful, pieces of contraband bottles: artefacts from the outside. Artefacts of, for example, America, whose continental profile, covered in bits of glass found

on Alcatraz, hovers opposite Wandering Position. With trademark coolness, Yanagi calls this one Broken Glass on Map (1996), and in its crazing, one sees a cracked ideal. That an artwork made in the mid-nineties, during the thick of the US culture wars, can seem as current an assessment of a nation – a structure – in various states of distress 25 years later, speaks to the prescience of an artist commanding profound social insight. It is because of Yanagi’s cognisance, still active as made evident by its manifestation in recent projects, that this exhibition makes perfect sense in 2021, a year when so little else does. And it is as if, from his base in Onomichi, Japan, he operates a processing hub for fielding all the raw information about humanitarian crises and political turmoil that undergird and inform his work. Some might argue that the exhibition, with its take on social politics arising from postwar diplomacy, is dated, but that would be to ignore the patterns of history repeating itself – the rise in ultranationalism, the building global nuclear tension – and it would be to deny the fact that a quarter century passed is not so very long an interval. Patrick J. Reed

Broken Glass on Map (detail), 1996, America Atlas map and broken glass on plywood, 276 × 366 × 9 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

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Simon Fujiwara Who the Baer Fondazione Prada, Milan 29 April – 27 September Who the Baer is a cartoon character dreamed up by Simon Fujiwara during the pandemicinduced lockdown year of 2020. Although there’s obviously a fair degree of conscious appropriation involved in that dreaming-up. Appropriately, then, the majority of the works on show take the form of mixed-media collage (from conventional combinations of paper to structures incorporating moving image and kinetic sculptures) and explore a certain aspect of what a trained psychologist might term ‘dream-reality confusion’ (the dream is contaminated by the real, unless it’s the other way around). The exhibition takes the form of a structured journey presenting Who’s invention and is shaped by a sequence of works, many of which are decorated by more-or-less-absurd surveystyle ticked boxes, org charts and detourned political and marketing slogans, that playfully suggest who Who, as someone born in 2020, might be or can become. It’s a warped take on a ‘choose your own identity’ adventure, if you like. The works on show are housed in a vaguely mazelike cardboard architecture whose outer limits trace the silhouette of the bear in question. Although only the truly architecturally minded would have any chance of recognising this while wandering through them, the forms nevertheless give viewers the feeling that, despite their individual titles, we are dealing with some sort of an indivisible gesamtkunstwerke (or are trapped in a larger-than-life, ursine model of the boardgame ‘Operation’). Which, depending on your outlook on such things, might be a common-sense or a naive notion of how we expect identity to function. The journey begins with A True Account of Who the Baer (all works 2021), a structure that looks at first glance like a giant Disney fairytale book (of the type that opens Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937), whose open pages are cut through to reveal a collagist’s worktable (littered with pens, scissors, notebooks, glue and a cutting mat), as if to emphasise that all ‘truths’ here are constructed. ‘Out of what?’, then, is the question with which we begin. An image of Who themself appears in the collage, seated, dressed only in a pair of blue jeans, reading what we might take to be a self-help book, titled Becoming

Who?, and appearing at once Pooh-like and reminiscent of the bear costume deployed by Swiss artists Fischli/Weiss in videos from the early 1980s in which, channelling an artworld version of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, they too dreamed up schemes to categorise the world and its absurdities. And in case there was any doubt about the artificial nature of the world on display, the account proceeds with a series of collages purporting to detail Who’s invention through the diktats of a branding exercise (titled Branding Who and offering ‘three design traits your brand character must have’ – ‘instantly rings a bell’, ‘inspires trust’, ‘drives engagement’ – the play on ‘your character’ running throughout the show). And yet while all this might suggest that Fujiwara’s character is built on clear design principles, structure and planning, it is playfully undermined by Who’s subsequent unfolding as a symptom of our unstable present, the baer taking its place in a world that is as full of befuddlement as it is of potential. The various artworks that follow explore themes of gender, sexuality, race and historic and inherited identity, all of them presented, thanks to the conceit of creating a character, as choices to be made (by Who or their creator) rather than the product of necessary truths. Who’s in the Mirror? is a cartoonish Sleeping Beauty-type mirror decorated with a selection of pronouns. Adam Who? and Eve Who? feature art-historical representations of the biblical characters collaged over with gendered jean types from fashion magazines or catalogues and drawn sketches of Who in muscular or serpentine form. There’s the vague sense that both male and female forms trace the outline of a Google image search. A feeling that lingers as the exhibition proceeds. Later collages reference Elon Musk and Grimes’s decision to raise their child genderneutral, while Skolstreijk for Who?, a cartoonish sculpture of a ship lurching over what may be polar waves or an iceberg, with a flattened polar bear flopping over its prow and a placard displaying the slogan of the title raised midships, references… well, you know. Elsewhere stop-motion animations chronical Who travelling the world to find themself (with all the

facing page, top Who the Baer, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan

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hippyishness that might imply). Turning to ancient monuments, we trawl through Easter Island-style sculptures of heads (sporting cartoon-bear ears) and Ancient Egyptian-style mummies clutching toy bears to their bony chests (titled Who’s in Egypt?, the pun evoking debates about both restitution and cultural appropriation as well as the ethics of the display of human remains). A vanity table with a Chinese lantern looks like it was abandoned by whichever one of Fischli/Wiess was wearing the panda costume (a version of which hangs to the side of Fujiwara’s lifesize tableau), its surface littered with news stories about China’s pandas. Who is inserted into Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907–08); Who’s Baerlines (New Rules for Liquids) is part of a series of works that examine travel and transportation (from the point of view, largely, of branding); Whope is a detourned version (bearlike) of Shepard Fairey’s iconic image of Barack Obama. Who is reflected or projected in everything. Like a desperate narcissist, or lost child searching for home. You can’t help but be reminded, of course, that it is by apparent reflection of a similar kind that many of the algorithms that govern our digital and analogue lives work. There’s a trace here of Guy Debord’s examinations of the dominance of mediated existence, of lives lived through marketing and images, and of a world in which, as he puts it in his 1967 tract The Society of the Spectacle, ‘All that was once directly lived has become mere representation’, tracing what he viewed as society’s steady descent from being, to having, to appearing. That last phase is where Who, and by proxy Fujiwara, starts. In this world the construction of new images from old ones (true to theme, and for what it’s worth, Prada notes that the entire physical installation is recyclable) is all there is. But whether that’s a good or a bad thing, a constraint or a liberation, is something about which both the character and their creator evince a degree of ambivalence. Despite the fact that one of the implications of Who the Baer is that art shares DNA with marketing, advertising and sloganeering to the point at which they become indistinguishable as separate species. We’re back to the drawing board at which we began. Or never really left. Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom A True Account of Who the Baer, 2021, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan

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Books

The Prisoner by Hwang Sok-Yong, translated by Anton Hur and Sora Kim Russell Verso, £30 (hardcover) ‘My mistake was to assume that people would understand the truth from facts alone. But it turns out that facts are treacherous things that can be twisted to distort the truth.’ That’s Hwang Sok-Yong reflecting on the events – an (officially) unsanctioned trip to North Korea in 1989 – that would eventually lead, following a four-year voluntary exile, to his spending five years in a South Korean prison during the mid1990s. For a celebrated novelist and prominent activist, who spent the 1970s launching cultural activist groups and penning declarations and manifestos for various democracy movements, it’s a statement that seems both oddly naive and hard to swallow. Hwang is now seventy-eight; The Prisoner, originally published in two volumes in Korean in 2017, is a memoir chronicling his life and work. His truth. Although it is his life experiences that fuel the majority of his fiction too. It lends them another kind of truth, or authenticity. Hwang is best known for Jang Gilsan, an epic bandit saga (concealing a critique of South Korea’s dictatorship) that was serialised in a national newspaper between 1974 and 1984; Mr Han’s Chronicle (1970) is about a family separated by the Korean War (Hwang’s parents migrated from Pyongyang – which Hwang refers to as ‘home’ from the start of his memoir – to Seoul, under the pretence of travelling for a picnic, shortly before its onset, leaving their extended family behind), The Shadow of Arms (1985) is based on his experiences of the Vietnam War, while The Guest (2002), about a massacre in North Korea wrongly attributed to the Americans, is partly drawn from the same (Hwang credits his experiences as a conscripted soldier in Vietnam with revealing to him the ‘true meaning’ of the Korean War). Hwang’s life is remarkably rich, governed by the legacies and actualities of Japanese colonialism (he was born under Japanese rule in Manchuria and moved to Pyongyang when he was two), civil war, national division, the Vietnam War, cultural and social activism, Korea’s popular

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uprisings of the 1960s and 1980s, the effect of the Gwangju Uprising and its lethal repression in catalysing his activism, his campaigning for a united Korea, exile, prostitutes, marriages, divorces, estranged children, sometimes brutal prison-time, alongside literary celebrity in his homeland and, to a lesser degree, abroad. It is something of a soap opera in and of itself. As well as offering a lens through which to experience the complexity of modern Korean history. Indeed, of his own work, Hwang writes that he felt ‘compelled to craft a deliberately Korean narrative that would depict reality from our point of view’. That in the context of living through a time when the Korean narrative was dictated by colonial powers (principally Japan and the US), military dictators and stubborn ideologies. But while the title of this work clearly references the various prisons of the mind and body within which Hwang (and by implication Korea – there’s not a little ego on display here) was incarcerated, what really drives this narrative is Hwang’s struggle to grasp the slippery essence of truth. Assuming there is such a thing. Recalling his deployment with the Republic of Korea Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, where, working alongside US forces, his tasks included cleaning up the remains of various massacres, Hwang confesses that he did not think, at the time, that young Viet Cong ‘were Asian like me’. ‘I did not feel pity for them. All they [the corpses of dead guerrillas] were to me were strangely shaped objects’. Only later did he come to realise that the derogatory term ‘gook’ derived from Korean (Hanguk for Korea or miguk for America). And that an undercurrent of the Vietnam War involved a fellow Asian nation’s resistance to the imposition of foreign ideologies and neocolonial rule. While there are periods of his life when his campaigning and organising cultural movements led to a pause in Hwang’s career as a writer, the end goal of The Prisoner is,

to a degree, to articulate Hwang’s fundamental belief that art and life should be one. A break, he claims, from the traditional notion of the ascetic classical scholar who removes themselves from society in order to achieve a clarity of vision. Yet even by his own account, his engagement with everyday reality throughout his life was somewhat patchy. As a youth, he did decide ‘to leave the secular world’ and become a Buddhist monk. He achieves a certain clarity of vision during the course of his 18 hunger strikes while imprisoned (the memoir as a whole is structured in alternating chapters recalling his often-brutal life in prison and his personal biography). And there are wives and children from whom he was estranged or absent – at one point he describes telling his third wife that he wanted her to earn money so he could do the, by implication, important work of joining the labour movement. He left and returned to his patiently supportive mother’s home with little explanation or notice when he felt like it, stole from her and missed the chance to see her in the runup to her death. On the one hand it’s notable that women are the principal collateral damage of his campaigns for democracy and social justice; on the other hand, it’s instructive to hear him describe the way in which a full commitment to art or activism and to life is a struggle in itself. Although there’s a suspicion throughout that Hwang’s admission of his ‘bad’ qualities functions strategically to push the idea that what he writes is the truth, rather than functioning as a genuine expression of guilt or regret. Nevertheless, all of this (and a very good translation of the original Korean) contributes towards a fascinating account of a life lived for art and campaigns for freedom and justice. Of an individual artist’s attempt to be a useful part of society, and the conflicts and contradictions present therein. And while Hwang is at the stage of looking at that in a narrative of the past, his concerns remain just as active and urgent in the world today. Mark Rappolt

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Don’t Call It Art! Contemporary Art in Vietnam 1993–1999 Edited by Annette Bhagwati and Veronika Radulovic Kerber Verlag, €50 (hardcover)

Such is the influence of Veronika Radulovic, a German artist who lived in Vietnam during the 1990s and early 00s, that most anyone familiar with contemporary Vietnamese art will have heard of or been to visit the trove of archives under her care in Berlin. Now Radulovic, together with veteran curator Annette Bhagwati, has published an important work of Vietnamese art history focused on the four artists she considers representative of the 1990s: Truong Tân, Nguyen Minh Thành, Nguyen Quang Huy and Nguyen Van Cuong. Four contextual essays by Radulovic and other contributors are followed by individual sections on each artist, and some 1,387 docu ments: photographs of artworks, images of exhibitions and performances, vernissage invitations, installation sketches, art criticism from home and abroad, excerpts from exhi bition essays, as well as candid pictures taken in a tiny Hanoi apartment at 54A Hàng Chuoi, where Radulovic used to hang out with this quartet. The pictures hint at the private life and intimate creative atmosphere between Radulovic, a foreign white woman, and the artists, Vietnamese and male, that at times suggests an air of overfamiliarity. The works from the seven-year period indicated in the book’s subtitle were created as if in the blink of an eye, predominantly as ink and watercolour

drawings or paintings on dó paper, or as performances in the artists’ homes and outdoor spaces. They painted shapes and words every where, spilling out of canvases, scattered on walls and fridges, as though expressing their frustrations in any way they knew how. Nguyen Van Cuong’s paperworks highlighted the objectification of women in a newly consumerist economy. The large watercolour paintings on paper by Nguyen Quang Huy create characters that are both human and Buddha, lost in a spiral, like a life undergoing rapid transformation. In 1993, as part of an exchange programme between Vietnam and Germany, Radulovic took an intensive course on lacquer at the Hanoi University of Fine Art; she soon received contracts to lecture in art history at the univer sity, which extended her stay, as well as her involvement in the local art community, until 2005. The book’s publication coincides with the 35th anniversary of the Đoi Moi reforms, introduced in 1986 during the 6th National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam. These reforms marked the beginning of Vietnam’s transition to a market economy; the influx of foreign information and visitors, alongside an increased number of underground spaces, created a wave of alternative – both in subject and style – artistic and cultural

production. But to frame it like this would seem to go against art-historian Pamela Corey’s argument (in an essay collected here) that Vietnamese artists are viewed through the lens of Vietnamese politics before anything else. What’s clear is that artists of this era wanted to break free from the essentialism and representation of grand narratives that arose from either collectivism or the expectations of Western discourse, even if those grand narratives play a part in the artists’ journey to discover their sense of ‘self’. The self as pioneer, who longs to manifest an uninhibited subject that bounces, teases, jokes and bares its arse at life and society. The self that wants to paint humans as long as they bear the artist’s own face, as in the paintings of Nguyen Minh Thành. Or in the video Diplomat-Group in Berlin (1999), in which Huy, Thành and Tân are shown conversing in a living room. As the title suggests, the trio behave excessively properly, like naive young govern mental officers adjusting their mannerisms to suit a Western space or adhering to an idea of Vietnam cooked up by the West. All this for a work created as a replacement for another Truong Tân video, which had been pulled from the Gap Viet Nam exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin for its explicit gay sex. Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần Translated from the Vietnamese by Thái Hà

Speak The Wind by Hoda Afshar Mack Books, £35 (softcover)

Is there anything quite like the wind for portending disaster? European sailors arrived in Australia via the Roaring Forties, a westblowing precursor to the colonial havoc they later wrought. In Egypt, there’s the Khamsin, an intense southerly synonymous with sand storms, while Iran’s south coast is in thrall to zār: a malevolent breeze that possesses and sickens those in its path, calling for a shaman to appease it through a ritual ceremony. In 2015 the Tehran-born, Melbourne-based photographer Hoda Afshar started documenting this last practice in the Strait of Hormuz. The passage, home to the islands Qeshm, Hormuz and Hengām, provides the setting for Afshar’s new photobook, Speak The Wind. Zār is said to remake people and places; Speak The Wind provides a chronology of these airborne

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currents via three sections of black-and-white photographs set between colour images of landscapes and portraiture. In two of the sections, strange peaks jut out of the desert, whipped into humanlike forms through centuries of erosion. Alongside these images, statements and drawings voice the wind’s strange power: ‘Something was moving under my skin’, says an unknown victim. In another poignant sequence, a figure, cloaked in a white cloth, undergoes an exorcism; they crouch, shift to the left and press their head to the ground. Historically, photography has been used as a tool for imperial extraction. But Afshar – who’s long positioned her work against Western modes of seeing – isn’t interested in using her medium to explain an obscure custom or to create an objective record. Her images are moody and

mysterious, and lovingly composed into strata that fuse together peoples, their culture and the landscapes that surround them. In the book’s accompanying essay, the Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig addresses the layered history of the region’s inhabitants, referring to the African slaves brought to the Strait of Hormuz by Muslim traders. The soil of Hormuz Island (the strait’s largest) is known for its high levels of iron oxide, and in an arresting image near the end of the book, where the sea appears to wash up blood, human and geological histories merge in the reader’s mind. The wind may foreshadow disaster. But for Afshar, it can also sweep away our surface perceptions. When it blows, it can help us see buried stories, envision forces that may be hidden from sight. Neha Kale

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A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam Granta, £14.99 (hardcover)

Anuk Arudpragasam’s award-winning debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), explored characters who were in the thick of conflict, being bombed by the Sri Lankan army while eking out an existence of sorts in a Tamil refugee camp during the latter stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009), a conflict staged between a Buddhist Sinhalese majority in the south and a Hindu Tamil minority in the north. (Arunpra gasam is Tamil.) It ended in victory for the Sri Lankan army and the genocidal wipeout of their Tamil opponents and numerous Tamil civilians besides. This, his second novel, explores characters who struggle to survive in the wake or on the edges of that trauma. Arudpragasam’s writing style – long, multiclause sentences – is overwhelming at first. Initially, at least, you find yourself waiting anxiously for a full stop and the chance to come up for air. As the detail and qualification of a statement accumulates, the experience is a bit like watching Charles and Ray Eames’s film Powers of Ten (1968), a portrait of the universe that zooms out from planet Earth and then back in to a quark. But once you get into the rhythm, it’s easy, perhaps even pleasant, to let yourself be swept away. Just as Krishnan, the central protagonist of A Passage North, seems to be caught up in a drift through life and postconflict Sri Lanka. Haunted by a girlfriend, Anjum, who left him to commit to activism. By a war he’s experienced at one remove – largely through

gruesome blogposts and online images, the posts of expatriate Tamils who haunt the internet and spend ‘their free time trying to convince themselves that their pasts on this island had really taken place’, who campaign to have informal Hindu temple sites named on Google Maps in order to maintain their connections to a land in which their culture and heritage is being slowly erased. As to the Tamils who remain, ‘memory became far harder to maintain when all the clues to that memory that an environment contained were systematically removed’. In a sense, Krishnan, who has, for a period of time, been studying in India, is trapped between these two poles, absent and present, and with something of a guilty-survivor syndrome. Albeit of an experience he never actually had to survive. Which only seems to have enhance those feelings of guilt. The passage in question is a train trip from the Sri Lankan capital in the south to the Tamil heartlands in the northeast, to attend the funeral (whose rituals he will not completely recognise or understand) of Rani, until recently Krishnan’s ailing grandmother’s carer, whose accidental death Krishnan regards as suspicious (perhaps unsurprisingly given his internet-browsing habits) and a potential cue for his grandmother’s own demise. The chance to investigate provides an opportunity to assert his own agency and, in a way, to connect with the suffering of his people, where working for an NGO in the north or

pursuing his love affair while studying for a PhD in India did not. ‘It was funny how similar desire was to loss…’, the author writes, ‘how desire too, like bereavement, could cut through the fabric of ordinary life, causing the routines and rhythms that had governed your existence so totally as to seem unquestionable to quietly lose the hard glint of necessity.’ Ultimately, A Passage North is a lengthy, expansive meditation on how we deal with finitude and death. Or don’t. Krishnan’s grandmother is in denial about her increasing physical and mental decrepitude (for someone still relatively young, the author’s description of the process and feelings of ageing is both convincing and moving); Rani, who was employed following a chance meeting with Krishnan in hospital, couldn’t get over the death of her two sons in the war. Along the way there are plenty of diversions about racism and queer politics in India, the creeping influence of China in Sri Lanka and a somewhat unexpected meditation on the similarities between a pair of female Black Tigers (a wing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam that specialised in suicide missions) captured in a (real-life) documentary film and a collection of Buddhist poetry produced by nuns. At times Arudpragasam’s river of words seems to flow everywhere. Yet his story’s precision, vibrancy and genuine insight into the nature of loss in our times makes it an essential read. Mark Rappolt

A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok Edited by Ng Yi-Sheng Epigram Books, S$18.90 (paperback) When Gen Xers in Singapore and Malaysia see the name ‘Othman Wok’, the image that springs to mind is a pair of creepy oversize eyes peeking out from behind some houses – the cover of Othman’s 1991 bestseller, Macabre Tales of Singapore and Malaysia in the 50’s (proud owner here) – rather than ‘pioneering politician’. But that he was, being Singapore’s first minister for social affairs, among other appointments. During the 1950s Othman was a reporter who wrote weekly tales for a Malay newspaper and magazine, which made him a household name. When his political career took off, the writing stopped. It wasn’t until the 1980s that his stories started appearing again.

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During the 1990s and 2000s, his works were translated into English and made available to a wider public, with several anthologies aimed at the regional pulp horror-fiction market. Of them, this new collection is probably the most literary-minded. The stories, drawn from the 1950s and 1980s, range from punchy page-turners about a pair of severed feet that hop off a mortician’s table to more involved adventures featuring avenging Dayak warrior-corpses whose tombs were disturbed – cheerful entertainment turned out by a storyteller with a knack for the singular chilling image. Some lodge in the mind for years. (I’m looking at you, shivering, wet visitor to ‘The

Old House’.) The tales paint a vivid picture of 1950s and 60s Singapore, when modernity collided with older spiritual beliefs. In ‘The Golden Lantern’, the shaman Pawang Kassim curses three brothers for destroying his business in talismans and charms. The folksy settings of kampungs, plantations and trishaws will also strike a more generally nostalgic note. As for the brisk, functional style, I’d put it down to the realities of working to deadline. The anthology’s editor, Ng Yi-Sheng, writes that Othman did not have the respect of the Malay literati during the 1950s, so ‘it is sweetly ironic that these stories have stood the test of time’ Adeline Chia

ArtReview Asia

20/08/2021 14:43

The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World by Benjamin Bratton Verso, £10.99 / $19.95 (hardcover)

The ‘real’ here is the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Revenge’ is a provocative term, and while theorist Benjamin Bratton doesn’t assign consciousness and agency to a dumb virus, the appearance of this one, in its unthinking indifference towards human life, is seen as a kick in the teeth for a Western political and philosophical culture obsessed, as he sees it, with a narcissistic, hyperindividuated view of the ‘sovereign subject’, which wilfully refuses to acknowledge the complex entanglement of human and nonhuman systems. The Revenge of the Real sees the pandemic as a catalyst towards Bratton’s technocratic vision of ‘a model of governance based on planetary-scale technological rationalism’. Bratton’s targets are all those who reject this ‘realism’ – the deluded libertarian individualism of rightwing populists, but also the supposedly more radical philosophicalpolitical tradition of ‘negative biopolitics’. ‘The pandemic has made it easier to see oneself more as a node in a biopolitical network… than as an autonomous individual’, Bratton argues, and so the virus becomes the vindication of a project of reinterpreting the self, in which – in common with much contemporary posthumanist theorising – ‘the conception of oneself becomes less an interiority… and more a medium through which the physical world signifies itself’. This new ‘disenchanted’, ‘materialist realism’

is a view of humanity’s place in the world that demands we see ourselves as things among other things; objects more than subjects, though however still capable – through the technological capture of an objective view of planetary systems – of becoming a planetary society ‘able to deliberately compose itself with compassion and reason’. ‘Collective human intelligence as the collaboration of such creatures working in concert’ can only be realised through what Bratton terms the ‘sensing layer’, a vast, real-time aggregate of data-collecting about reality, coupled to a deeply technocratic taste for ‘competent governance’. The result, though, is a strangely matter-of-fact and supercilious authoritarianism. On the issue of governance and power, Bratton will have no more silly talk from old poststructuralists, with their negative biopolitics that equates ‘control’ with ‘oppression’. ‘Waves of Boomers, myself included, grew up in a world in which the bad establishment was (supposedly) hierarchical and rationalist and, therefore, individualism and autonomy and spontaneous irrationality were (suppos edly) a position of resistance’, he writes. He concludes, like a chastened fan who got carried away by his idols, that our ‘morgues are full because of the… individualist irrationality of the status quo’. For Bratton, in the negative biopolitics of commentators such as Agamben,

‘resistance against the state and its power… takes precedence, perhaps even over prevent able deaths’. But for all his mouthing of the platitudes of ‘care’ and compassion, what underpins his fondness for a top-down, rationalist recasting of society as a planetary control system is an oddly disembodied indifference to what human beings and society are for, and a disdain for the meaning that humans give to their lives. The dislocated antihumanism of Bratton’s outlook is profound, since it only sees human society as a system to be managed, rather than as the interplay of human subjectivity with its social and material reality, and, more fundamentally, humanity’s deliberation of the purpose and meaning of its own existence; that is, everything more than just existing. So while Bratton expends energy in trashing Agamben, he has nothing to offer in response to Agamben’s fundamental observation, early in the pandemic, that ‘our society no longer believes in anything but bare life’. While Bratton insists that the pandemic is a ‘matter of life and death’, the preservation of life has, for many ‘progressive’ thinkers like him, become the fetishistic substitute for a twentyfirst-century culture in which any sense of the meaning of living, and the purpose of human society, has completely drained away. J.J. Charlesworth

Night Bus by Zuo Ma, translated by Orion Martin Drawn & Quarterly, CA$39.95 / US$34.95 (softcover) In this debut collection, Chinese comic artist Zuo Ma takes us on a deep dive into the inky depths of his subconscious. Eleven tales drawn between 2009 and 2013, which broadly cover national issues of rural urbanisation, the economic migration of young people towards cities and environmental pollution, but which are told through the personal accounts of an aspiring comic artist named Xiao Jun, are an exercise in magical realism. Characters and motifs blend throughout (Xiao Jun and his acquaintances, beetles, his family members and their pet dog Niu Niu), just as tendrils from one tale find their way into the next: for instance, a mysterious figure in ‘Walking Alone’ reappears much later,

in ‘Iwana Bouzu’ (a retelling of a Japanese myth about a giant trout) and in ‘A Story of Fireworks’ (about a village’s ban on lighting rockets on New Year’s Eve). That the collection is often disorienting, slipping between reality and dream states, is made particularly moving by Ma’s central story, ‘Night Bus’. Upon returning to the family home, Xiao Jun is confronted by his grand mother’s advanced Alzheimer’s disease. He draws her as a young woman with huge round glasses, beginning the story in colour as she searches for the titular bus. A parallel narrative blends throughout, in which Xiao Jun and his little brother join her on a similar journey;

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but while, having reached her destination, the young woman wanders observantly, often alone, through an unfamiliar realm populated by fantastical and monstrous creatures, Xiao Jun and his brother try desperately to untangle and understand this strange world in which teachers turn into angry axolotls, children turn into fish, UFOs make a base in their village and giant elephants move around with houses on their backs. The night bus is a tender tribute to Ma’s own grandmother, a metaphor for the neurological disease and the ways in which reality, the imaginary and memory can be equally lucid, and a journey that is ultimately taken alone. Fi Churchman

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ArtReview Asia

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Art credit

Text credits

on the cover Engraving from Louis Delaporte, Voyage au Cambodge: l’Architecture Khmer, 1880

Words on the spine and on pages 17, 47 and 83 are by Benyamin, Jasmine Days (2018), translated by Shahnaz Habib

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Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節 jung-chau jit) falls on the 15th day of the 8th month in the lunisolar calendar, to coincide with the Harvest Moon. This year the festival arrives on 21 September, which we celebrate by eating Mooncakes (月餅 yuht beng). The Harvest Moon is a particularly bright full moon that rises shortly after sunset, which, before electricity, would allow farmers to gather their crops for a little while longer under the moonlit sky. Mooncakes are traditionally filled with lotus seed paste, red bean paste or mung bean paste, and contain a whole salted duck egg yolk, which symbolises the moon (though there are various types of the cake that are made without these). Here are some with black sesame filling. The Mid-Autumn Festival finds its roots in the custom of giving thanks and praying to the old cosmic gods of Chinese folklore, dating back to the Shang

Aftertaste

Mid-Autumn Mooncakes by Fi Churchman

Dynasty (1600–1046BCE), and in particular to Taijam Noengnoeng (the Lunar Empress, or Great Yin Mother), who was thought to grant wishes and heal sick children. But the folktale of the moon goddess Seuhng Ngo (Chang’e in Mandarin), which was popularised during the Tang dynasty, has become the primary story connected to moon worship during the Mid-Autumn Festival. There are variations of the tale, including versions that tell of Seuhng Ngo’s curiosity and greed, or of her selflessness in the face of her tyrannical husband. The kinder story goes like this: the Earth was once blighted by ten suns. Seuhng Ngo’s husband Hou Yi was a skilled archer in the Imperial Guard and shot down nine of the suns to save the scorched land. As a reward, he was given an elixir of immortality, which he hid away. One day, Seuhng Ngo discovered that his apprentice planned to find and steal Hou Yi’s elixir for himself. To stop him, Seuhng Ngo consumed the immortality potion, which caused her to float up into the sky. Rather than ascend fully, Seuhng Ngo managed to stop herself at the moon so she could remain as close as possible to Hou Yi, and keep watch over him. Upon finding out that his wife could no longer return, Hou Yi would place Seuhng Ngo’s favourite fruits and pastries outside as a tribute to her. Another story relating to mooncakes is that these pastries allowed secret messages to be smuggled between Ming revolutionaries during the Yuan dynasty, which resulted in the overthrow of Mongolian rulers. These messages were hidden either inside or on the surface patterns of the mooncakes. In 2019 Hong Kong family-run bakery Wah Yee Tang (華爾登麵包餅店) and the larger chain Taipan kicked up a storm when they began to sell mooncakes stamped with protest messages. These included phrases like ‘Hongkonger’ (香港人), ‘add oil’ (加油) and ‘be water’ (如水) – the last inspired by Bruce Lee, and which came to describe the fluid, flexible and unpredictable methods employed by HK protesters. Ingredients Sugar syrup Lye water Peanut oil Plain flour Black sesame Caster sugar Butter Glutinous rice flour Salted egg yolks Egg yolk

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Photograph taken at Messe Basel

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